Word: hoppers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...thought I'd be dead before I was 30. Turning 40 stunned me. Fifty is a major miracle, and I think I may even make 70." So say other men who have just rounded the half-century mark, but Dennis Hopper is neither joking nor exaggerating. He is telling the sober truth. For a man whose name was once synonymous with drugs and booze to have survived to the age of 50 -- and have the audacity even to contemplate trying for the standard threescore and ten -- is no minor accomplishment. It is a megamiracle worthy of a Hollywood movie...
...precise, nine Hollywood movies, the number he has appeared in over the past two years, making him one of the busiest actors in a town that twice blackballed him. "When you're hot you're hot," says his friend Jack Nicholson, whom Hopper helped convert from a featured player to a star with their 1969 film Easy Rider. "As an actor Dennis stands out because of his edge, his sincerity, the honesty he conveys. But Dennis also paints. He takes pictures. He's got an extremely fine eye for life. He's a great appreciator with a great vision...
...just found a human ear in a field. He takes it to the Lumberton police and carries out a personal investigation that leads him to Sandy Williams, the chief's daughter (Laura Dern), Dorothy Vallens, a masochistic torch singer (Isabella Rossellini) and Frank Booth, a perverted drug dealer (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey discovers that Vallens' son and husband have been kidnapped by Booth, and his effort to intervene opens realms of violence and sexuality he never knew possible...
...sips Heineken like a runner-up Homecoming Queen and proclaims with detached conviction, "It's a strange world." Isabella Rossellini is all lips and eyes as the tortured chanteuse. "Hit me, hit me," that S&M cliche, has resonance and poignancy in the context of her performance. Dennis Hopper is to-the-core nasty as the vile drug-killer; he was better in Apocalypse, Now, but it's hard to imagine any actor carrying this role off as well, or with more energy. Brad Dourif, babbling Billy Bibbit of Cuckoo's Nest fame, has a cameo, looking like John Cougar...
...corpse is bound and bowed like a Kienholz sculpture; the climactic gun battle takes just a few shorthand strokes. The acting styles collide fiercely too. MacLachlan and Dern have an innocents-in-hell sweetness; Stockwell does a preening Percy Dovetonsils number; Rossellini is a madwoman with all stops out; Hopper tops her, with maybe the vilest sadistic creep in movie history...