Dominick “Fatso” DiNapoli is not so fat – played with more pathos than bathos by a pre-Cannonball Run Dom DeLuise, he is not obese like his cousin Sal. When Sal and Fatso were alter boys together during Mass, Sal would secretly pass Fatso chocolates. Sal dies at 39, slain by gluttony. Anne Bancroft, who meagerly wrote and directed the movie, plays Fatso’s shrill cousin, wailing over the coffin and warning Fatso that he is next for the grave. Fatso mourns Sal in the only terms he knows. Fatso’s meditation on death is delightfully meaningful but the movie is wounded by its blaring overhead lighting like an office bathroom, and lack of any charm or hint of dynamism in its attempt at a Cassavettes-like cavalier vibe, only cringingly ineffective.

Fatso has a knack for the art of topping a slice of Italian bread with marinara. He cries over Sal while stirring and salting the tomato sauce. He is not a vile eater but a constant eater. He is proud of the delicacy with which he prepares his pathological food. Whereas Fatso is patient and genial, walking to work in the old Italian West Village and greeting neighbors on the street on the way to DiNapoli’s Card Store, his family and friends are stressed and overworked and unhappy Italiano stereotypes, and pick on Fatso more than look after his welfare. After dabbling with Dr. Schwartzman, a diet quack on East 65th Street, Fatso finds the girl of his dreams, a shy little blonde pumpkin. In the end he’s still fat.

Watching it for the gazillionth time, still a pure gut-bust. High-art British masterwork screwball plotting the cross-eyed Reagan/Thatcher 1980s. Otto is a man whose mind has mixed up the whole of Western civilization, and acts it every scene (as in the ravaging inability to say “I’m sorry,” and his knockabout act mimicry of foreign languages), and Jamie Lee the bravura sweetheart vamp, finding cues as would thespianess Miriam Hopkins.

Lovelorn lesbo con-lady romp, giddy with parlor room mob noir mechanics, zazzy dialogue, hammy acting and slick late-90s special effects.  Equal parts Brian DePalma & butch scrivener Pat Califia.  When Joey Pants is about to chop Gina Gershon’s fingers off, it has already been proven what special techniques those fingers have performed. . . down Jennifer Tilly’s starved honeypot. . .  and Joey Pants artfully whacked in a symbolic pool of whitewash jizz. . .

In the summer of 2008, a video store in Hell’s Kitchen was having a VHS sale, 3 tapes for $10.  Not the best deal for a near-fossilized modal of entertainment, but still your author participated during lunch break in between lecturing atop bus tours of Manhattan Island.

Frequent visitations were made to Video Cafe, where the premises hark way back to the hoary likes of Palmer Video & Joe’s Video on Bloomfield Avenue in Verona, New Jersey, where as a lad your author first engaged the aesthetics of the VCR – the goofy staff, the chintzy wire racks, the bizarro consciousness-insinuating early box art, the chemic fragrance of outdated plastic packaging, the random sounds of whatever movie screened that hour from the monitors perched off the ceiling: maybe Stallone, maybe a stray disciple of the Brat Pack, maybe French, maybe the Resident Evil film.

The sale at Video Cafe was limited to drama, comedy and horror, which your author was not apprised of until after making picks from the classics and foreign section.  Stalker and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? had to be put back on the shelf.

And so a memoir of watching that stack of movies bought. . . .

Mickey Rourke portrays a small-time New Orleans bank robber blessed with a saint’s soul but disavowed by the congenital facial deformity of a warlock – even surpassing as an iconograph that which the actor in “real life” would later wreak both surgically and pugilistically upon his own countenance. The ironic “Johnny Handsome” is double-crossed on a bank job and ends up in prison, where an ambitious pointdexter surgeon (Forest Whitaker) attempts to perform radical Face-Off-esque treatment to restore Johnny with a humanable face – which turns out to be that of Mickey Rourke post-9½ Weeks. Johnny then returns to society, and though his face reforms his soul does not: he fails at innocent romance and takes revenge on those who betrayed him – scuzzbag maestro Lance Henrickson and marvelous pulp-bitch Ellen Barkin. Morgan Freeman plays a dapper folksy Bayou-cosmopolite detective, the one character who knows that Johnny ain’t really so Handsome. Walter Hill draws his metaphysics from the French but his colors from brute American precedents. And where to begin placing Johnny Handsome in the current hagiography of Mickey in The Wrestler? Johnny shows a man bounding back his new face into the old universe; Randy The Ram seizes an old face in an old place and causes it to transmogrify.