Starfucker Friday: My Favorite Coppola

The other day I saw The Darjeeling Limited, the charming new Wes Anderson movie about three brothers on a train ride through India. On the Anderson spectrum, it falls somewhere between The Royal Tenenbaums (one of the my favorite movies ever) and Rushmore (decent but wicked overrated). Anjelica Huston, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman are all great actors with great noses, and Owen Wilson and his nose are way less annoying than usual.

Also, in the short that starts the movie off, you get to see Natalie Portman’s ass, which is nice–plumper than I would have guessed, which I like. (If only she’d been willing to show it in Closer… Not that Mike Nichols would have known what to do with it, since he didn’t even get hot slutty doctor Clive Owen’s shirt off until the last scene. The stupid man.)

Another thing about The Darjeeling Express is that the Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman are both kinda cute. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was totally ready to stab my eyes out if I saw another Brody/Erminothingy Zegna ad, and he still gets the award for most disturbingly ugly use of abs on a magazine cover ever. But the dark glasses make him look a little bit French and mysterious. I won’t incorporate him into any of my fantasies anytime soon, but it’s definitely worth noting that he’s not a complete troll.

(looking uncomfortable and not hunky in a magazine.)

Jason Schwartzman is definitely the cutest brother in the movie, though, with his Lee Hazlewood hair and moustache. Generally, when I think of the littlest Coppola, I tend to forget about movies he’s in that I actually like (I Heart Huckabees, or Marie Antoinette, say) and just remember how creepy and awful he was in Spun, the movie stupid Jonas Akerlund made where absolutely everybody was creepy and awful. I used to work in a bar that showed that movie pretty regularly, so I’ve seen it a lot with the sound off and hated every minute of it, every single time.

(no idea.)

But thinking about cute Jason Schwartzman in a movie co-written by his older, far uglier cousin Roman gives me flashbacks to a time when I was totally smitten with another member of that family. (And no, not Sofia, although she does look pretty good and not whoppingly homely in a gymnast outfit.)

Flash back, if you will, to 1994. I, humble pubescent cinemaphile, have just rented Red Rock West, the gloomy and generally awesome thriller where four people in the desert basically try to kill one another over and over for two hours or so. The exciting part comes fairly early in the movie, when Nicolas Cage and Lara Flynn Boyle are about to do it. She starts unzipping his pants. And what should pop out? A big whopping Italian-American boner!? On screen!? On the TV screen in my bedroom?!?! Oh my God!!!

(Red Rock West, the movie that started it all.)

Boy, was I a big excited thirteen-year old spooge fountain that night.

I was so excited that it wasn’t until I rented the movie again a few years later and realized that they don’t actually show Mr Cage’s pee-pee. I thought maybe I had watched an unrated version from before Blockbuster came to my town and started censoring everything, but I can’t find any evidence that multiple cuts of the movie exist, and no amount of googling “Nicolas Cage Penis Red Rock West Hot Sexy Naked OMG” is turning anything up. (Speaking of lame google search results, check this out.)

Regardless. It gave me a whopping Italian-American boner of my own every time I saw him after that, no matter what movie it was. So much so that I overlooked his weirdly unnatural triangle of chest hair in Valley Girl. (But come on–chest hair! In a teen comedy! Hot!) I was totally turned on by his evil tonguey sleazebag character in Face/Off. I thought he was hot in a wifebeater playing opposite Cher’s 1987 hairdo in Moonstruck. I even kind of thought he was hot in Wild At Heart, Raising Arizona, and It Could Happen To You, which are some of the least sexy movies ever made. Not to mention when he played the suicidal but hot drunk in Leaving Las Vegas.

(who knew?) 

It lasted years, although I’m over my crush now. He’s been in too many dumb movies for me to get over. Plus, you know, he’s really goofy and not actually very attractive. I haven’t seen (and frankly hope to never see) National Treasure, the Wicker Man remake, or World Trade Center. I do kind of want to see the Darren Aronofsky movie where he plays a pro wrestler (more on the WWF circa 1989 another Friday), but that won’t be out until 2009 so I have plenty of time to come to grips* with seeing him shirtless in spandex briefs. I wonder if it’ll be worth the wait…

*heh, heh.

(ps–Thanks, Cagefactor, for helping my Friday pass so quickly.