Ralph Macchio Tagged Articles at Cinematical

While it wasn't so fun to get "Smoke on the Water" playing on repeat in my brain after our EIC Erik Davis sent me the idea for this double feature, it's been great to reminisce about two films from the early '90s that dealt with fish out of water themes -- My Cousin Vinny and Doc Hollywood. One is an Oscar winner, and the other is a fluffy comedy, but both perfectly embody that moment in time -- the beginning of a new decade and the next step for some of the biggest names of the 1980's. On the one hand, you have Ralph Macchio, and on the other, the unbeatable Michael J. Fox. One might be up for murder while the other gets to save lives, but in both cases, they're guys who prefer the city, but get ensnared in small town life.

Keep that popcorn in the cupboard, pick up some fish and chips, and enjoy!


My Cousin Vinny



On the one hand, you've got the story. Two "youts" -- Billy Gambini (Ralph Macchio) and Stan Rothenstein (Mitchell Whitfield) are traveling through Alabama when they forget to pay for a can of tuna. They leave the store and soon find themselves in jail and awaiting trial when the store clerk is shot and killed. One can never underestimate the power of familial connections, and Billy's cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci) comes to save the day -- a fish in a very unfamiliar pond. He looks to be just a spastic Brooklynite with a saucy girlfriend (Marisa Tomei). However, first impressions aren't all they're cracked up to be, and it turns out that Vinny is just what the two guys need to break free.

On the other hand, you have the cast. It's just plain great. You've got Pesci, who rocks as Vinny, Tomei, who won an Oscar for her performance, and Macchio, who shows that there's more to him than his time as a karate kid. But that's just the first layer. There's greats like Austin Pendleton and Bruce McGill, but best of all -- Fred Gwynne, in his last performance, plays Judge Chamberlain Haller. Really, what else do you need?

Mona Lisa Vito in her god-awful, super-tight, floral body suit talks about what she's nervous about.

Vinny plans to go hunting, and Mona Lisa mourns the future slain dear.

The Judge feels mocked.

Owls aren't safe when Vinny is around.

I guess it's more than 20 years old -- so, The Karate Kid can be remade fair and square. All of us who have fond memories of Mr. Miyagi and fond hatred of William Zabka can just forget it. Honestly, I don't know why anybody is even writing about that old movie anymore. It's dated, it's cheesy, it's done. Move on. To the redo, that is. According to IGN, Sony is set to revamp it's "classic" with help from Will Smith, who will produce through his company, Overbook Entertainment. Jerry Weintraub, who produced the original, is also reportedly on board for this one. As for the star? That will be little Jaden Smith, Will's 9-year-old son and co-star in The Pursuit of Happyness. I guess this time Daniel will really be needing his mom to drive him on that date.

Okay, so I am somewhat joking above with all the fairness talk and implications that The Karate Kid is overrated. But I still anticipate a lot of protest, so I figured I'd kick off with a bit of the Devil's Advocate. Seriously, though, I do think there's no problem with this idea. Keep in mind they already pretty much did this once. It was called The Next Karate Kid. Oh, but it had Mr. Miyagi in it, you may whine, and he can't return for another installment, because he's no longer with us. Well, there are some who think the real Miyagi wasn't even in The Next Karate Kid, so there's that. So, here's how it goes in my mind: Jaden is not Daniel, there's nobody named Johnny (well, maybe Zabka could have a kid and he could be Johnny, Jr.) and Miyagi is replaced by a relative -- did he have a nephew in KKII? I don't remember. Who cares, let's make one up. Since this thing is currently out to writers, I hope they read this and take my idea. It's an obvious enough one that I won't sue. I swear.

After fighting for his life in an Asian death pit, The Karate Kid, Part III deliberately lowers the stakes of the franchise and has Daniel LaRusso returning home to Receda, to be confronted by ... well, John Kreese again. Sort of. Kreese is still not over being humiliated by LaRusso at the All Valley, which actually makes sense when you consider that in Karate Kid time, the lapse between the first film and third film is only a few weeks. Having been financially ruined by the sudden departure of his Cobra Kai students, Kreese now reaches out to a man who may be the most ridiculous villain in the history of movies, corporate eco-terrorist and Cobra Kai financier Terry Silver, played by Thomas Ian Griffith. A despondent Kreese shows up on the doorstep of Silver's enormous mansion, and is welcomed with open arms. As they are talking, Silver's manservant interrupts with some routine papers. "Ten years ago nuclear was the preferred waste, you could dump it anywhere," Silver nostalgically sighs as he signs. "Now everybody's a detective!"

Because of some Vietnam debt he owes Kreese, Silver agrees to put his entire criminal empire on hold so that he can make enacting Kreese's revenge his only business -- he actually tells his secretary "for the next few weeks, my business is strictly revenge," which causes no reaction in her whatsoever. He puts Kreese on a plane to Tahiti and then sets about putting into action an elaborate two-part plan. The first part involves hiring a vicious karate champion named Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan) to come to Receda and harass LaRusso into competing in the next All Valley tournament. For the second part, Silver will insert himself into LaRusso's life as a false Miyagi. The idea is that Daniel will become reliant on his teaching methods instead of Miyagi's, and Silver will be able to poison the champion's pure heart by teaching him dirty Cobra Kai tricks. By the time the tournament rolls around, LaRusso will be so screwed up in the head and poorly prepared that Barnes will cream him, and Kreese's revenge against this 17 year-old kid will be complete. Awesome.

Yesterday we covered the first film in the quartet, and today we're revisiting The Karate Kid: Part II, undoubtedly the best of the lot. It has the best fight choreography, the best dialogue, James Crabe's best camera work and a good villain. It's also the ballsiest film in the series, and not just because it attempts the risky maneuver of transplanting the Daniel LaRusso story to a foreign culture which the audience could have easily not identified with, but also because it successfully takes what's essentially been a story about mall karate and upgrades it into a martial arts film with death stakes. Surprisingly, what many fans appreciate most about Part II is its prologue, taken from material shot for the first film. Immediately following Daniel's win, the victory parade makes its way out to parking lot only to find Kreese in a non-celebratory mood. In fact, we see him break Johnny's second-place trophy into pieces, a moment that's incredibly irksome. Within moments, Miyagi is more or less saving Johnny's life and leaving Kreese in an embarrassed, bloody-fisted heap.

Elisabeth Shue's non-involvement in the sequel is quickly dealt with -- a prom break-up -- then a letter arrives summoning Miyagi to Okinawa, and Daniel decides to follow. The movie gets through all this rote exposition as fast as it can, and we're soon in Okinawa, where an entire soap opera has been frozen in amber for forty-five years, waiting for the return of Miyagi. The woman he loved, but left to come to America, still loves him. The rival who wanted to fight Miyagi to the death over that woman shows up as soon as Miyagi and Daniel arrive and reissues the challenge. Called Sato (Danny Kamekona), he's now a rich guy who is raping the entire village, but he wears cool tinted sunglasses. Sato has a nephew, Chozen (Yuji Okumoto) who cheats local farmers with some kind of scam involving phoney-baloney weights. LaRusso accidentally uncovers it one day by breaking one of the fake weights in half like a cookie, earning himself an eternal enemy in Chozen. Now that everyone hates everyone, the games can begin.

The original run of The Karate Kid series coincided perfectly with my own middle school-aged dalliance with karate, which is probably why the series has an outsized place in my memory to this day. I didn't last long in karate -- green belt, I think, whatever that means -- but I liked the idea of karate, which was better represented on the big screen than in the nerf-chucks I had to make do with, or by my pot-bellied, Bob Guccione Jr. look-alike karate teacher. For me, the word karate will always be synonymous with John G. Avildsen's lightning-in-a-bottle film about a dumb Jersey kid who moved out to California in the mid-80s, just as it was having trouble reintroducing a large population of unstable Vietnam vets back into the workplace. In downtown L.A., Martin Riggs was taking out his sniper's remorse and dead-wife issues on the entire homicide division of the LAPD, while over in the Reseda neighborhood, the war was still going on inside the Cobra Kai dojo, run by a sadist who probably invented the ear necklace.

The character of John "this is a karate dojo, not a knitting class" Kreese was said to be a burden for actor Martin Kove. He apparently had a real problem playing a guy who corrupts a bunch of kids, teaching them the "way of the fist" and generally preparing them for what could seemingly only be a life of organized criminality. We're not talking about poor kids off the street, remember -- we find out late in the film that Johnny (William Zabka), LaRusso's chief rival, is actually country-club rich -- we're talking about young men who are going to take their Cobra Kai misteachings with them into higher education and then the upper crust of the workforce, causing us who knows what kind of damage. The much-maligned third film in the series will take a stab at exploring this angle -- what exactly the Cobra Kai financiers were trying to franchise -- but not to any satisfying degree. For our purposes, the Cobra Kai dojo is the equivalent of a biker bar that our hero innocently wanders into and asks for a Capri Sun.

About half of Beer League takes place in small, confined spaces like bar corners, bedrooms and diner booths. The other half takes place on a softball diamond. The weird thing about this is that there's absolutely no attempt at laughs during the softball scenes. Man hits ball. Cut to ball being chipped to third base. Cut to man running to the bag. This happens over and over, sans-hijinks, as if the audience cares about the stakes in a slow-pitch softball tournament. It becomes obvious that first-time director Frank Sebastiano, a former Saturday Night Live writer, didn't have the foggiest notion of how to do anything with a camera except maybe rent it, so he simply conceded that the softball half of his movie would be comedy-free. Not that the other half is exactly comedy, either. It's more of a hit-and-miss attempt at expanding the brand of 'Jersey lowlife' shtick beyond what's already been mined by Kevin Smith movies and The Sopranos. So in other words, if you live within a three-mile radius of my apartment, you're in the Beer League demographic.