{"id":34206,"date":"2025-08-19T10:31:04","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T15:31:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=34206"},"modified":"2025-08-18T10:31:31","modified_gmt":"2025-08-18T15:31:31","slug":"movie-report-the-big-easy-1986","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/19\/movie-report-the-big-easy-1986\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Report: <i>The Big Easy<\/i> (1986)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/thebigeasydvd.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">Since I just watched <em><a href=\"\" target=\"_new\">Innerspace<\/a><\/em> with Dennis Quaid, since this film was also atop the video cabinets (since I just bought it <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/05\/05\/good-book-hunting-saturday-may-3-2025-friends-of-the-springfield-greene-county-library-book-sale\/\" target=\"_new\">at the Friends of the Springfield-Christian County Library Book Sale in May<\/a>), I thought I would watch it to properly be on a Dennis Quaid kick.<\/p>\n<p>The film is a thriller set in New Orleans.  Quaid plays a police officer lightly on the take&#8211;they all are&#8211;who starts looking into the death of a mafia heavy that was probably to be a message to his mob.  Ellen Barkin plays an assistant district attorney who is assigned to look into it as well&#8211;but she&#8217;s really looking into police corruption.  They become lovers (hot and spicy for the 1980s scenes follow), but when Quaid&#8217;s Remy McSwain is caught in a bribery stakeout, they fall out (and she prosecutes him).  He engineers getting the charges dropped, and she challenges him to reflect on whether he&#8217;s even a good guy any more&#8211;so he leaves the &#8220;Widows and Orphans&#8221; group of police sharing in bribes.<\/p>\n<p>As McSwain continues to investigate the &#8220;gang war,&#8221; he finds that police officers might be involved in several, or all, of the deaths, which leads him to confront his captain&#8211;the man who plans to marry McSwain&#8217;s widowed mother.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a slow burn film, not as kinetic as you get in the 21st century, and the final climax is rather tame by comparison as well.  But it&#8217;s a good film, although everyone plays it with a pronounced Cajun accent which, in at least my personal post-<em>The Waterboy<\/em>, seems funny.  Although I might end sentences for some time with <em><a href=\"https:\/\/morrisardoin.com\/2019\/06\/14\/its-cher-not-sha-yall\/\" target=\"_new\">cher<\/a><\/em> for a while.  Given I am still coming out of my personal post-<em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/06\/book-report-shogun-by-1975-1980\/\" target=\"_new\">Sh\u014dgun<\/a><\/em> period, my sentences are likely to end with <em>Karma, neh, cher?<\/em> which will lead to people with whom I speak to beg me to return to my native <em>ainna?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>So, I thought I would next watch <em>Bull Durham<\/em> to continue on my Quaid-kick, but, c&#8217;mon, man, a moment&#8217;s reflection made me realize that was Kevin Costner, not Dennis Quaid.  Then I thought, boy, they are of different eras, <em>neh, cher<\/em>?  Dennis Quaid, whose most noteworthy films come from the 1980s, kinda hams it up.  I associate Kevin Costner, who had a string of successes in the late 1980s, more with the 1990s.  And he&#8217;s so damned earnest in his roles.  I suppose if I could turn this into a term paper were I still in college, but you&#8217;ll have to just live with my thesis and contemplate it on your own if you&#8217;re so inclined.<\/p>\n<p>Also, it led to a little tension at Nogglestead.  She said Dennis Quaid was in her favorite <em>Saturday Night Live<\/em> skit, Mustang Calhoun, from 1990.  I said, no, that was Randy Quaid.<\/p>\n<p>In my defense, and in the post-<em>Independence Day<\/em> world where Randy Quaid played a pilot, you tell me:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/7ezxeoRAQZA?si=0xAfZiURFZ4rWmjY\" title=\"YouTube video player\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>That is Dennis, who is Randy&#8217;s younger brother.<\/p>\n<p>So maybe my Dennis Quaid kick is over.  Which is a shame.  He&#8217;s fun to watch.  In a way Kevin Costner is not.  In a 1980s way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since I just watched Innerspace with Dennis Quaid, since this film was also atop the video cabinets (since I just bought it at the Friends of the Springfield-Christian County Library Book Sale in May), I thought I would watch it to properly be on a Dennis Quaid kick. The film is a thriller set in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34206"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34207,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34206\/revisions\/34207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}