The first case is Kurt Russell: the star in one of his best movies, who in the aftermath gets to take ownership of making it so good; a respectful disagreement holds that Russell (transcribed 'Caruso') is the reason it got made and finished but Kilmer is the reason we remember it.
Both cases are called great and it is a tough one; those who did not win are George Cosmatos and Kevin Jarr (as transcribed), though Cosmatos's son Panos Cosmatos is called a great director for this year's Mandy with Nicolas Cage, which is wild.
The closing view: Kurt Russell wins it spiritually for keeping it alive, but Val Kilmer wins the movie as the best one in it; if you know the whole backstory Russell wins, if you are just watching the movie it is Kilmer, and that framing is agreed to.
"I never saw a rich man that didn't have a guilty conscience. I already have a guilty conscience. I might as well have the money too"; "I don't think I'll let you arrest us today, B-Han"; "Make no mistake. It's not revenge. she's after. It's the Reckoning"; "Johnny, I apologize. I forgot you were there. You may go now"; "I'm your Huckleberry"
Nominated: 'I never saw a rich man that didn't have a guilty conscience. I already have a guilty conscience. I might as well have the money too'; the way Kurt Russell tells the sheriff he does not think he will let him arrest them today (the sheriff's name is garbled in the transcript); and 'Make no mistake. It's not revenge. she's after. It's the Reckoning' (as transcribed), which one host applied to a colleague after Grantland was blown away.
Kilmer's exchange when asked what he is doing this for, answering that Wyatt is his friend, and to 'I got lots of friends' replying 'I don't' as he looks away, is loved; virtually every Kilmer line is good, including 'Johnny, I apologize. I forgot you were there. You may go now', the 'daisy' line (garbled in the transcript) and 'I'm your Huckleberry'.
Maddie's drug-overdose death is thrown in by the narrator with no payoff; no great poker scene despite the Oriental; faro is never explained; odd edits make the day unclear; the unexplained killing spree after Doc kills Johnny Ringo; the unnecessary Robert Mitchum narration; the Billy Zane and Dana Delaney characters are hard to understand
Maddie dying of a drug overdose is thrown in for no reason: she could have had a happy ending, or died in the middle so the heavily invested addiction plot paid off, rather than the narrator announcing it; one reading is that it exists to forgive Wyatt for running off with Dana Delaney, making him a widower anyway, and the real problem is that her character does not need to be in the movie.
Josephine, whom Wyatt ended up with, reportedly spent the rest of their life together trying to bury that part of his past, inserting herself into the Wyatt Earp story where Maddie had been.
It is upsetting that there is no awesome poker scene despite the Oriental, beyond the early game where a man gets stabbed; a heated Wyatt Earp, Powers Booth and Kilmer poker game would have been a better choice than the twelve-minute theater scene, and 1880s poker is what one host wants to watch.
Faro (transcribed 'Farrow'), the game the Earps actually came to make money on, a weird French game casinos no longer offer, is never explained in a film that over-explains everything; Kilmer's line that he does not play games of chance is noted, though he plays plenty of poker, which may be a natural game.
Weird edits make it night twice and unclear whether it is the same day, attributed to Cosmatos just trying to get the thing out; one host's only nitpick is how the others assessed Dana Wheeler Nicholson's performance.
The biggest problem: after Doc kills Johnny Ringo, an amazing scene, there is a lot of killing nobody understands, presumably hunting down Ike, the last third turning into a lynch mob like the end of Cobra where the heroes kill everybody; it all leads to Doc succumbing to TB, Wyatt's final sit-down with him and the happily-ever-after with Josephine, but that third-act interlude is strange.
Earlier asides: the Billy Zane and Dana Delaney characters are not totally understood, and Robert Mitchum's narrator is called completely unnecessary, the cliche of how a Western gets told.
Kurt Russell first, with the reminder that the question is the highest point of his career, not the favorite: one case is The Thing in 1982, after Escape from New York and with Silkwood, Swing Shift and Big Trouble in Little China coming; a no is cast because Escape from New York was only later a cult hit, raising whether apex is judged at the time or on reflection.
Reading about Tombstone makes it sound like Russell was able to finance the movie coming off Backdraft, a relatively big hit he starred in, likened to LeBron in the 2018 Finals; a controversial case is made for Tango and Cash, when after the well-liked Tequila Sunrise with Michelle Pfeiffer a hit with Stallone, an absolutely ridiculous movie only those two could pull off, left him looking like an A plus list star.
Tango and Cash was not a huge hit, costing $55 million and making $66 million, though $55 million in 1988 is like $160 million today, and it is not that good; the counter is that it opened up Backdraft and his ability to finance Tombstone; the actual answer may be that there was no apex at all, a range of rolling hills, which is what is cool about his career.
Russell was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Silkwood, which is why his Apex Mountain is around The Thing in 1982 or 1983, when Escape from New York was becoming a cult movie. — Sean Fennessey
Whether Russell was ever Oscar-nominated is disputed, Miracle floated and rejected, until the Silkwood nomination is recalled; the host who forgot it concedes, a 180 the others tease.
Russell could have had a different career as a serious dramatic actor rather than leaning into the masculine hero; he and Harrison Ford are cut from the same cloth, smart throwbacks to Paul Newman charisma, but Ford got two franchises while Russell alternates three good films and three bad; he is also just a good-looking dude, at his most handsome here, a man who should be on a poster.
Val Kilmer: a no, with Top Gun imagined as his apex, since coming out of it people saw him neck and neck with the star, though another calls that the star's movie and goes Heat, where as De Niro's wingman in the biggest mid-90s movie he is the next wave; his pre-Batman run is traced through True Romance, Tombstone, The Real McCoy, Thunderheart and The Doors.
1987 right after Top Gun is floated, when Willow was hopefully going to be his Han Solo and did not work out; one host's personal apex for him is The Doors, where he was out of control, and a Doors rewatchable is wanted, though JFK would have to come first among the Oliver Stone movies.
Jason Priestley is a thousand-percent yes: 90210 was never bigger, he is in a movie with Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer and has a couple of heat-check scenes, the steepest mountain of all time, very high with a precipitous drop on either side; a caution that a later show (transcribed 'Natuna') was big for three and a half years does not change the view that this literally was his Apex Mountain and his first dabbling in movies.
Dana Delaney's apex has to be China Beach, which was probably already gone by this point, so she is not a yes; nobody else is proposed except George Cosmatos as ghost director, already covered, with the joke of a Ringer video secretly directed by someone else.
The late Bill Paxton: this is not a Mount Rushmore Paxton performance next to Aliens, Near Dark, One False Move, Weird Science, True Lies and Twister, though it may be his sweetest spot while figuring out how to be Bill Paxton; in Aliens Sigourney Weaver is the hero but Paxton and Biehn would in any other world have been the stars, and One False Move is incredible though arguably Billy Bob's movie too.
Twister was Hollywood's first concerted effort to make Paxton a major star, marketed with Helen Hunt and Philip Seymour Hoffman as people who were going to be stars rather than actual stars; the shift from needing a movie star to needing a tornado, meteor or alien invasion is traced to Speed, where Keanu was the guy and Sandra Bullock turned out to be one of the biggest stars of the next twenty years.
Paxton is one of the all-time great number two or three guys: here he sets picks and makes a couple of corner threes, telling Wyatt he is the one, spits a lot, works the scorer's-table handshakes at the start, and gets the 'hey' when Doc responds to Wyatt's description of his new wife with 'pure as the driven snow'.
All the mustaches were real; Val Kilmer practiced his quick draw and gave Doc a Southern aristocrat accent; 'I'll be damned' really were Doc Holliday's last words; the real Johnny Ringo was not killed by Doc Holliday; Cosmatos claimed Stephen Lang was drunk for most of the filming; the Latin exchange translated
All the mustaches in the movie were real; Val Kilmer practiced his quick-draw speed for a long time and gave the character a Southern aristocrat accent.
'I'll be damned' really were the final words of Doc Holliday, and historians debate to this day why he said it.
One theory offered: a gunman who always expected to die with his boots on looked at his feet, saw he had no boots on, and said it because he was dying without them, not just of tuberculosis; we will never know.
In real life Johnny Ringo did not die at the hands of Doc Holliday; it was a suicide, which prompts a joke that he started dating Lady Gaga and her career took off, finally cracking a smile from Craig.
Cosmatos did claim Stephen Lang was drunk for most of the filming; the Latin exchange is translated line by line, Doc's 'in wine there is truth', Ringo's 'do what you do', Doc's 'let Apelia the Jew believe, not I' (as transcribed), Ringo's 'youth is the teacher of fools' and Doc's 'rest in peace', judged more fun in Latin and a terrible conversation, to be quoted at that night's Ringer holiday party.
Three candidates: Stephen Lang; Michael Biehn, who may not be in it enough and so might qualify; and Billy Bob Thornton, who gets the most out of about four scenes; Lang, reportedly hammered for the entire movie, is so out of control that every time you see him you think what a piece of work and want him shot, and a second host makes Lang his vote too.
Lang is in only a handful of scenes so he qualifies; the film was good at identifying people who would become famous, Lang being basically the star of Avatar.
If Biehn is in the category it is Biehn: rewatching, he is a great villain, and the scene where he and Val Kilmer trade Latin for thirty seconds, ending with him winning 500 bucks on one hand, is played as a clip; but Biehn is ruled not to qualify because he is in too much of the movie, so it is Stephen Lang.
Earlier asides: Val Kilmer is called the heat-check guy of every movie he is in, and Billy Bob Thornton's card-table grumbling is called a good heat check.
The mustaches, all real and magnificent: an hour and a half in, one host wonders why nobody wears hats and mustaches now and says producer Craig should have one right now; another cannot grow one, Kurt Russell can grow incredible facial hair, and a Christmas challenge is set to grow a Tombstone mustache or goatee for the fans.
Powers Booth and Val Kilmer actually have a soul patch with a mustache rather than goatees; the challenged host is in, even though a mustache makes him look like a dirtbag cop from 1974, which is when the challenger feels most like his friend, like being friends with Gene Hackman.
The crazy loaded cast, already discussed, and Dana Delaney, whose good career felt like it could have been better; a China Beach fan likens her to Carla Gugino, first said as 'Carlo Gugino' and mocked as a Fellini actor and the Godfather toll-booth gunman, as a why-aren't-you-a-bigger-star actress, asking why Demi Moore was so much bigger.
Delaney had a bigger career than Gugino, whom everyone loves, but should have been an A list star; this was the one time a big movie made her the female lead, Exit to Eden being the joke about where it went wrong, and she remains one host's second-favorite actress in the film.
The 1880s Wild Wild West world-building: liquor, brothels, gambling, hats and mustaches; the Godfather tone Russell talked about shows in Wyatt moving in, taking over the faro game (transcribed 'Pharaoh') at the Oriental and winning the deeds to mines, a man who stands for law and order screwing people out of things because fame left the Earps with nothing to show for it.
The film is called the bridge from John Ford Westerns to Deadwood, one of the first Westerns full of people cursing each other out and then shooting somebody in the head; the blood in the Bill Paxton scene and Sam Elliott being told he will never use his arm again were new and intense for a Western.
The closing credits, four solid minutes of the cast walking in their outfits for no reason like a Vanity Fair photo shoot, are unintentionally funny but cool, compared to a Countdown segment one host once shot with Jalen.
That era of Val Kilmer, all the way through Heat, is savored like old Fab Five tapes from Michigan: it did not totally work out, but if you could bottle this there was something special, and he really should have been a bigger star.
Why the film is special: you can watch the other actors recognize what Kilmer is doing and change their performances to elevate his, making themselves more buttoned-down and austere, solid American oak, while he is free jazz, a coughing, sweating, feverish, green Byron or Shelley figure; the Kansas Earps versus Georgia Doc contrast is credited, with colleague Amanda Dobbins invoked as the poetic Georgian, and tuberculosis explaining the rest.
Kurt Russell's Wyatt is looking for a wife who gets him and stokes his soul, but the real partner is Holliday, from the first 'how the hell are you' line; the friendship is the love story at the center of the movie, an amazing portrayal of it.
Revisiting the 1993 Best Supporting Actor field (Tommy Lee Jones, DiCaprio, Ralph Fiennes, Malkovich, Pete Postlewaite), it is amazing Kilmer was not nominated, though the category was stacked; Malkovich is good in In the Line of Fire but not as memorable, and with the wished-for five-year Oscar delay Kilmer gets nominated.
The film was a modest hit that took on a new life: one host is not sure he saw it in theaters despite seeing everything then, another definitely did over Christmas break when movies were the only thing to do, and another watched it maybe 25 times in a friend's basement because it was always on TV.
The tuberculosis vaccine has aged best, in the sense that the film shows how much having tuberculosis sucked: Doc turns green, coughs blood, is insulted as a 'lunger' by everyone, and keeps smoking and drinking whiskey around the clock until the doctor orders no more whiskey, cigarettes, sex or gambling.
Joanna Pacula, whose name nobody can pronounce, is the last pick: she was around for a while as a why-not-bigger actress and then just never made it, her credits being Marked for Death (transcribed 'Mark for Death') with Steven Seagal, Tombstone and My Giant; while her credits are looked up, Kilmer's 'I have not even begun to defile myself' is performed, his accent likened to Yosemite Sam reading Oscar Wilde, ridiculous but perfect.
Asked again later, Billy Bob Thornton is one host's answer; another sticks with the mustaches.
