This column is for an adult audience. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the ElectricStory.com staff. If you think Steven Spielberg is a great director, weep at Julia Roberts movies, and have a low tolerance for dark humor, controversy, and language written to a post-secondary-school audience, brace yourself for a moral challenge. You can read some versions of these essays in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but you will find them here first.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Gladiator Style
eXcreMENt
Space Republicans
Bless the Child (If he's Jesus' Son; otherwise, throw the little creep in a dumpster)
Nurse Betty
Almost… But No Cigar
Confessions of a Crap Watcher
More Biting Commentary...
Multiplexitosis
One from Column A
Fresh Meat for the Hollywood Shuffle
AI-yai-yai-yai-yai!
AIeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Crime Scenes
Dinosaurs, Apes, and the End of Days
The Ghost and Ms. Kidman
Assassins
2 U Won't H8
Terror in Sugar Dumpling Town
"Dark, Darker, Darko"
Spacey Sickness
The Trouble with Harry
Vanilla Guys
One Film to Rule Them All
War! Huh! What Is It Good For?
French Kicks
Bright Light City Gonna Knock Me Out
Yin, Yang, and Yuck
The Timex Machine
Panic in the Year Zero-Two
Dude, Where’s My Serape?
Picking Apart a Peck of Peter Parkers
Sleepless in Someplace in Alaska
The Dirty Yellow Snow Where the Inuits Go
Signing Off
Mork Goes Manson
Slaves, tumblers, noble warriors, barbarian hordes, rotten-to-the-core boy emperor who's sprung for his sister, bread and circuses, betrayal and treachery…
Sounds like a bad Star Trek episode, right? Well, not quite... though the script for what promises to be the first megahit movie of the year, Gladiator, has much in common quality-wise with some of the lesser adventures of the Starship Enterprise. Director Ridley Scott does not boldly go where no man has gone before, but rather treads roads traveled by many a Hollywood hack, creating a hybrid of Ben Hur and Spartacus, arguably the two most successful films of the Roman-epic sub-genre. Russell Crowe plays the Roman general Maximus, but Badassicus would be a more appropriate name for this guy, because not only is he a man's man, a general's general, beloved of his soldiers, his emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris), and the faithful German shepherd who follows him into battle, he is also a matchless warrior, a buffed-out, sword-twirling, shield-bashing stone-cold slayer capable of chopping half a dozen Goths into Caesar salad without breaking a sweat. Think Bruce Lee in cool armor, Steven Seagal without the pigtail, Conan with a brain.
As the movie begins, Max is engaged in subduing the last serious threat to the Empire in Germania, and after a whole mess of limb-severing, gore-spattering heroics, he is given one more assignment to complete before he can return home to his family—he is to become the heir of Marcus Aurelius and oversee the ceding of power to the Senate and the restoration of the Roman republic.
But the emperor's son Commodus (I can't improve on this name) feels just a little left out, maybe a little vulnerable, and before Marcus Aurelius can implement his order, the son kills the father, ascends to the throne, and sends Max off to be executed. He fails, however, to reckon with the general's skillz. Max offs his executioners in a ten-second flurry of stabbing and slicing, then rides south toward his estate, where he discovers that his wife and son have been crucified. In a curiously unfocused scene, a slave caravan happens past the estate and stumbles upon Max passed out beside the graves he has dug for his family.
He wakes to find himself en route to the Roman Province of Zuccabar (huh?). There he is sold to Proximo (the late Oliver Reed), the owner of a gladiatorial school who back in his day earned freedom by dint of his prowess in the Coliseum. Under Proximo's tutelage, Max becomes a gladiator supreme, given to dispatching eight opponents with the bored élan of Shaquille O'Neal competing in a kid's hoops tournament. Eventually he is sent to Rome to participate in the six-month-long festival of blood sport that Commodus has ordained in order to take the minds of the citizenry off poverty and plague. In the space of a few weeks Max—laying waste to tigers, charioteers, and pretty much anything that moves—becomes a hero to the Roman mob, more popular than the emperor. When Commodus discovers his identity, the stage is set for a thoroughly implausible sequence of events that leads to Max gaining his vengeance and restoring the republic.
Though saddled by dialogue that is frequently embarrassing ("When I give the signal, unleash hell") and a plot fraught with illogic, Russell Crowe carries this ton of cold lasagna on his back and makes it, for the most part, watchable by virtue of his remarkable screen presence.
With the exception of Oliver Reed, the rest of the cast is not up to his standard. Especially awful is Joaquin Phoenix, whose whiny-teen-psycho take on Commodus would have been more suitable to Scream IV—it may well be that even today the late lamented River could out-act his younger brother. Connie Neilson is adequate as Commodus' sister/love interest, but the role is underwritten and she spends much of the time looking either grave or tearful. Ultimately, however, it's Ridley Scott who is responsible for the failure of Gladiator to transcend its genre. His best films, Alien and Bladerunner, rely on claustrophobic environments for their wonderfully achieved atmospheres and have tight, almost minimalist plots. Here he is confronted by a complex story that takes place on a variety of wide stages, and his artistic sensibility is not equal to the task. He seems unsure. His usual accuracy in fitting atmosphere to material falters, and he appears to be reaching for some new technique to deal with unfamiliar problems, referencing the flashy MTV style of Michael Bay and others of the new and far less accomplished action directors.
The fight scenes, though generally energetic, suffer from far too many close-ups and quick cuts, and one rarely gets a sense of the dynamic tapestry of violence. Despite forty years of evolution in stunt work and special effects, not one of this film's set pieces comes near to rivaling the chariot race in Ben Hur, and Scott's virtual Rome, contrived by means of CGI effects, looks more like an outtake from The Phantom Menace than a believable representation of an ancient empire. Further, the story is intercut by a recurring dream sequence emblematic of Max's desire to return home that might have been somewhat effective had it not been accompanied by a score of New Agey Celtic warbling over a synthesized background.
Yet at the same time there is the sense that Scott has sacrificed too much in the interests of action and atmosphere. The story often seems like a device designed to string together the fight scenes. Unlike the long and carefully crafted scenes at the gladiator school in Spartacus, which served to create tension and succeeded in making us care for even the minor characters in the slave army, in Gladiator this material is given short shrift. Max's comrades-in-arms are distinguishable merely by their size and skin color, and their fates, whether happy or sad, have minimal emotional impact. None of the relationships in the film are provided more than a simplistic treatment. A particular liability to the plot is the lack of attention given the Senate's opposition to Commodus, a conflict rife with dramatic possibility; as it stands, the power of the Senate comes across as a minor impediment to Commodus' apparent desire to turn Rome into a bloody version of Spring Break.
Thanks to its many flaws, Gladiator is in the end a vacuous and barely serviceable film, nothing more, and its most important legacy is likely to be that it establishes Russell Crowe as a major star, lending box office credibility to his obvious talent. Let's hope that in the future he chooses projects that will allow that talent to show itself to better effect.
We have reached a point in the American journey where it is plain to see that the millennium was the approximate moment when both the idea and reality of populist art became extinct, when the intellectual environment of the culture sank beneath a level necessary to sustain the life of the public mind, when an evolution—a mutation, if you will—in the efficiency of marketing made the entire concept of product irrelevant. This should not come as news except to those who will not understand it, those whom the marketers have lobotomized or those who were of diminished capacity to begin with. There is no going back from this moment. The consumerist religion whose roots found purchase in the previous century, whose first unwitting prophets are the unheralded shapers of our present, has sounded its evangel and like a great wave has washed over every shore, immersing all but a few unreceptive souls in the dayglo colors and unsubtle music of its innocuous paradise vision. We sit side by side in darkened temples and worship visual displays of litany that are as childlike in their formulae as stories told in bible schools. We are ensnared in glittering webs woven of merchandise streams and celebrity. The world is afflicted by plague, famine, genocide, instability of every sort, and our next president will be a mannequin programmed to utter a carefully scripted sermon of platitudes and assurances. Our only hope is that intelligent machines will come to save us. We are surrounded by idiots. That these fundamental observations should be expressed in a review of a film apparently targeted at a junior-high-and-younger audience may strike some as irrelevant snobbery—why focus even the most trivial of existential lenses upon a project that aspires to neither artistic nor intellectual credential? It's a comic book, for Christ's sake!, one might say. Chew your Milk Duds and shut the hell up! Yet as I sat in the theater watching Bryan Singer's latest film, X-Men, listening to the audience chuckle over the inane dialog, exclaiming at the second-rate special effects, such was the nature of my thoughts, and it occurred to me that not only was the film an exemplar of cultural decline, but a parable that might be interpreted as an illumination of our essential dilemma.
In the "not-so-distant future," when the incidence of human mutation is on the increase, producing men and women with uncanny powers of mind and body, the mutants have separated into two opposing groups, one led by the telepathic Professor X (Patrick Stewart), the other by Magneto (Ian McKellen). X runs a school for young mutants, one of whom bears a startling resemblance to the celebrated student Harry Potter. He is determined to mainstream mutants, to bring them into human society, despite the fact that humanity fears and loathes them. Magneto, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who can control electromagnetic fields, has darker designs. Into this circumstance comes a newly awakened teenage mutant named Rogue (Ana Paquin), whose ability to drain the life force and personalities of others proves an allure to Magneto—he wants to let her drain a portion of his electromagnetic power, then use her as a battery to energize a machine that will—he believes—change all normal humans into mutants. Aligned with Magneto are the shapeshifter Mystique (latex-clad supermodel Rebecca Romjin-Stamos); a mesomorphic lionman, Sabretooth (wrestler Tyler Mane); and Toad (Ray Park), whose rather pornographic powers include a whiplike tongue and the capacity to give slimy, suffocating facials. On the side of goodness and niceness are Storm (Halle Berry), who controls the weather, redirecting lightning, snow, hail, and—I suppose—the humidity in order to confound her enemies; telepathic and telekinetic Jean Grey (Famke Janssen), who functions as a healer; and Cyclops (James Marsden), who has to wear Raybans or else his optic blasts will incinerate whatever he sees. Standing with them, but not truly part of the team, is Wolverine, a mutant surgically altered by the mysterious hooded figures who haunt his dreams; he is invulnerable to injury and sprouts a nasty set of adamantine claws in times of stress.
After the first twenty minutes or so, X-Men slumps into a predictable sequence of action scenes mixed in with campy dialogue and mutant soap opera, much of this aimed at promoting the film's simplistic message (Just because people are different doesn't mean they're bad), as the X-Men battle not only Magneto and his minions, but also a right-wing Senator (Bruce Davison) intent upon Hitlerizing the situation and forcing mutants to register with the government. All this has been done before with far more deftness and style, yet just as I was on the verge of losing interest, I came to notice a more significant message embedded in the film's subtext.
Our culture generally perceives the upper-class English accent to be an indicator of erudition, intellect, refined sensibility, and I found it curious that both Professor X and Magneto spoke with this accent, that in the X-Men universe these qualities were associated with both good and evil. But soon I realized that Professor X and Magneto were only superficially representative of good and evil. Magneto's intention to supersize human potential might well be seen as a desire to elevate, to improve, to brighten the senses—the same goals attributed to great art, to any profound intellectual endeavor.
On the other hand, Professor X maintains a purely reactionary stance and voices no positive goals; his sole intention is to thwart Magneto and maintain the status quo. He is, in effect, a kind of intellectual quisling. This infant metaphor can be extended when one examines the opposing mutant teams. Cyclops, with his fratboy looks and glibness; Jean Grey, the all-American mom, the sexy nurturer; Storm, the white-haired, light-skinned black woman who expresses almost no personality and is used, rather slavishly, as a weapon—they are all conservative emblems, symbols frequently employed (whether cynically or sincerely) to denote the forces of restrictiveness, to make the state of restriction seem cozy and attractive. Magneto's team, however, seems emblematic of the messiness of art, the risk of intellectual experiment: the unhouse-trained Toad with his quick, vicious tongue, itself a symbol of verbal acuity; Sabretooth, the untamed natural man, his uncontrollable violences contrasting with those of the leash-trained Storm; and Mystique, the image of sexual danger, embodying the ephemeral, the mercurial, the transforming power of the mind. And of course these two groups are contending for the heart and mind of Wolverine, the proptypical blue-collar guy, conflicted, angry, confused, soulful, manipulated by mysterious forces beyond his control—the man with whom the audience most identifies. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the Orwellian message stated in the opening paragraph of this review was buried in the script of X-Men, that some capybara-skin-booted, Hugo-Boss-clad producer had this much clever self-consciousness? Or had Brian Singer, years removed from his one good film (The Usual Suspects), teetering on the precipice of hackdom, decided to incorporate a hidden statement, a final subversive bleat, before toppling into the abyss of the once-promising? Whatever the case, the more closely I examined the film, the more certain I became that the message was there. The metaphor was consistent on every level. For instance, the X-Men's stealth vertijet, the high-tech machinery that enhanced the Professor's telepathic skill, the precise geometries of lightning and snow and so forth generated by Storm's and Cyclops' surgical laser strikes, redolent of our military adventure in Kuwait—these were the nifty, sterile weapons of Ronald Reagan's wetdream American Paradise that helped bring about the New World Order, whereas Magneto's foaming, chaotic tide of electromagnetic plasma might be taken as the ultimate expression of unbridled creativity. I wondered—no, I suspected—that if I were to go back for a second viewing of any of the summer's apparently unending string of unaccomplished movies, Gone in 60 Seconds, The Patriot, Shaft, and etc., I might find a similar message embedded in each.
The film raced toward conclusion, the X-Men triumphed in a battle fought atop the Statue of Liberty—that matronly French insult to the Land of the Free that we've adopted as irrefutable proof of our long-fled compassion—and Magneto was locked away in a prison of white plastic where there was no metal that would enable him to use his power. (Are we not all so locked away from the wild desires of our natures by the plastic bonds of culture, kept separate from the necessary metal of our individual potencies?) With visions of a sequel dancing in their heads, the audience began filing out. The majority of them were considerably older than junior-high age, and most were unsmiling, gaping—they had been filled and dulled by what they'd consumed, and were now headed home to practice other varieties of consumption. And I saw that this was good. It certainly made my job easier. I'd planned to analyze the acting, the direction, the writing, to discuss X-Men in context of more artistically successful comic book treatments, movies such as The Crow, The Matrix, Batman, and to cite the film's few interesting moments, most of which occurred at the mutant school, an environment Singer would have been smart to mine further. But I realized now that these things were of no consequence—indeed, they did not really exist the way they once had. Actors had morphed into fashion statements, directors mutated into crafts-morons, and scriptwriters…well, soon there would be no scriptwriters, only directors with a beautiful dream and a Scriptomatic Story Program for their PCs (if you want a preview of this reality, check out The Phantom Menace). Quality was no longer an issue, or more precisely, the old critical standards had been abolished, and an entirely new range of judgments was required. Thus in the interests of the new cinematic order, I have decided to review all future Hollywood films as though they were fast food. X-Men, I believe, is best looked at in terms of pizza.
The film is not a top-of-the-line pie, not the well-seasoned, cheesy, crisp-crusted food item you might find at Pagliacci's in Seattle or Patty's in Brooklyn. Yet neither is it the slimy cardboard with orange sauce you buy by the slice on the streets of Newark. It's a step up from the average Domino's offering, spicier and with mushrooms that do not appear to have been lying on a countertop for most of the day. However, the toppings are sliced wafer-thin, the crust is on the doughy side, and the sauce contains far too much oregano. Pizza Hut, I think. Nothing out of the ordinary. A medium mushroom and pepperoni. It won't come back on you, you will likely not be exposed to E. coli or any infectious diseases, but you probably won't want to hang on to the leftovers. If you need a nosh, hey, go for it. If not, you might just as well wait for Paul Verhoeven's upcoming Hollow Man, which, I'm told, promises to be a Pizza One large bacon and pineapple with extra cheese.
Having recently listened to George W. Bush woodle-ing the nation from Philadelphia, my ears ringing with resounding generalities and guaranteed pre-broken promises, I asked myself, what fine cinematic product could be a more perfect complement to that feast of Gerber's Baby Food philosophy than Clint Eastwood's latest film, Space Cowboys? And thus it was, my fellow Americans, that I found myself standing outside the Galaxy Cinema shortly before noon on Friday last, purely convinced that this paen to the "Greatest Generation" and the geriatric institution of NASA would give glorious embodiment to the GOP's professed desire to Renew America's Promise and thereby make us all better stronger wiser richer and morally straight by ridding the free world of the Democratic Satan who had for so long perverted our children, shamed our god, and levied a multitude of oppressive taxes upon our freedom-loving oil and tobacco billionaires. Joining me by the entrance to the Galaxy on this sunny pre-apocalyptic day were a babble of senior citizens, a sprightly bunch judging by their stylish activewear. They clearly had been buoyed by Boy George's vow to eliminate the Death Tax and not even the threat of contention, offered by a spry seventy-something ex-damsel in pink slacks and matching blouse, could disturb their mood.
—Where's the line?, asked Mrs. Pink, and when informed there was no official line per se, the ticket booth not yet having opened, she replied with a significant degree of querulousness and outrage that she wished there was a line.
Immediately upon her comment, as is the tradition in our great land, a genial discussion began amongst those gathered concerning the rightness and efficacy of lines, the effects of their absence, the inabilty of the young to form proper ones, and—a dissenting voice—the virtues of milling about. All the while, several gentlemen were engaged in maneuvering their womenfolks into appropriate positions so that the semblance of a line—not, sadly, a formally sanctioned line such as might have been hoped for—was created. Once this had been achieved, the discourse continued. Many facets of the topic were touched upon, notably an elaboration of various lines previously stood in by members of the group, lines remarkable for their length, their unmoving-ness, their historical import, et al. Though not a participant in the conversation, I was ensnared by the threads of talk and soon became numb and disoriented, as if afflicted by a nerve-deadening, conscious-altering venom. By the time I took my seat I had experienced several out-of-the-body moments, which was an apt physical condition for someone about to witness a film that, I assumed, took place for the most part in a gravityless environment.
If I may here inject a critical note—had I been the director of Space Cowboys, telling the story of four aged astronauts, a team of pre-NASA pioneers called upon to make an emergency shuttle flight to a Russian communications satellite that is about to fall from orbit, I would have quickly transported them out into the void and created a claustrophic setting in which to examine the problems of age, the erosion and redefinition of friendships, and, as the men battled their own limitations, their unforgiving surroundings, secret enemies, I would have gradually and suspensefully revealed an unexpected evil force that threatened to overwhelm them. Mr. Eastwood, however, chose to spend the first hour or so of his film on Planet Earth, detailing in an unengrossing by-the-numbers style the origins of the team in the 1950s, their Magnificent Seven-like recruitment some forty years later, their training, etc., etc., and this stretch of time was made to seem interminable by the constant insertion of lame age jokes into the process. My attention drifted, and my thoughts returned to the speech…not the stump speech with which the man from Midlands has regaled crowds all over our Fabulous Fifty, bellowing out his simplistic yet eccentric slogans ("We got philosophy…" being my personal favorite). No, my brother and sister patriots, I am talking about The Speech, the Oration, the Mighty Verbal Sword with which George the Second slashed away the jowly, liverspotted, squint-eyed, sneering demon mask that has for so long obscured the shining, almost completely white face of the Compassionate Conservative, a creature without an ounce of greed in its heart or a mean bone in its body. I studied the words that the president-to-be's revivalist passion had burned into my brain, trying to interpret the strange parables encysted within the corpus of the text, particularly fascinated by the story regarding a young prison inmate whom His Bushness had counseled back in Texas. I must admit to thinking that had I been the aforementioned inmate, confronted by a man who signs execution orders with the profligacy of Pete Rose signing autographs at a baseball card show, I would have been less than comforted by his interest in me. But to indulge in such negativity would have been barely a step removed from engaging in the politics of personal destruction, and so I pressed on with my analysis, believing that this apparent irony must be an indicator of a deeper, cleverly embedded truth. And perhaps, I thought, Mr. Eastwood had employed a similar technique in Space Cowboys. Perhaps the fact that he eliminated suspense by giving away the ending of his movie early on—I mean, when one sees a Russian general participating in classified Pentagon briefings, exchanging meaningful glances with the head of NASA, it takes no consequential intuitive leap to deduce that the Russian satellite about to fall from orbit is carrying a nuclear payload of some sort… But as I was saying, perhaps this and other anti-dramatic disclosures constituted a directorial sleight-of-hand that allowed the development of a subtler brand of suspense imperceptible to audiences but important in some revolutionary and as yet unfathomable way. It's possible that just as the new George Bush's too-obvious shallowness has proven itself a symptom of compassionate spirituality, Space Cowboys' patent lack of subtlety and paucity of tension were achieved by a delicately nuanced mastery of expression designed to produce effects that we will not fully comprehend for weeks or even years (rather like the eventual onset of a recession triggered by a massive, ill-considered tax cut). This theory may also shed light upon Eastwood's refusal to develop his astronaut characters, offering stereotypes instead: a toothless womanizer (Donald Sutherland); a goofy Baptist preacher named Tank (James Garner); an assholic Top Gun type named Hawk (Tommy Lee Jones), and Frank the Alpha Male (Clint his own self). And it might further call for a re-examination of the ludicrous premise that underlies the film—i.e., that of all the people in the entire world, only these four doddering American pilots are qualified to troubleshoot an outmoded technology pirated from NASA by the Russians and maintained by them in an orbital satellite ever since.
Yeah…right.
Something else must be going on, something less expressed than emblematized by the clumsy linkages of the plot, something that would justify and allow for a reinterpretation of what seems a superfluity of the vacuous, the superficial, and the absurd.
Once again I feel compelled to inject a critical note. Someone less attuned than I to the secret mechanisms of Space Cowboys might suggest that Eastwood has herein attempted to make two movies in one, the first a comedy and the other a thriller, and has managed instead to make only two half-movies, neither of them especially successful. They might further suggest that the thriller half, being overly compressed, skips a number of logical steps, replacing them with a welter of pseudo-scientific jargon intended to persuade the viewer that one of our heroes ultimately must strap himself to a turbinelike section of the satellite encircled by armed nuclear missiles and blast off moonwards, thereby simultaneously achieving his life's ambition and a noble end (which one of them will make the supreme sacrifice is never in doubt, since the astronaut in question has been conveniently diagnosed with a fatal illness). On the surface it would seem that these hypothetical judgments are correct, but I discovered that the boredom inspired by the lapses in Eastwood's storytelling induced me to focus the larger part of my attention upon the satellite itself, which bears the name IKON, a scary-looking-and-acting relic of the evil empire brought low by the forces of Reaganomics, still magically alive, its steel body infused with a scrap of cold Soviet villainy. It spins and rotates with martial precision, extruding radar arrays and missile bays and all manner of sinister objects, reminiscent of those children's toys that mutate from innocent robotic figures into insectile rocket launchers, and as I meditated upon this ikon of our fabled victory over Communism, I was sequentially induced to contemplate once again the current of renewal abroad in the land.
(I should tell you at this point that sitting in the theater, I felt as if The Movie and The Speech were resonating with one another, sandwiching me with harmonious vibrations, causing my mind to shift back and forth between the two, not competing for my attention so much as energizing me, imbuing my thoughts with increasing momentum and spin. But I digress…)
The previous night, while basking in the afterglow of St. George's gospel spell, I had tuned my radio to a call-in show and listened as the American people responded, engaging in yet another of our grand traditions—eschewing individual opinions and parroting comments they have heard spoken by television pundits. I was enthralled to hear one man say in doltish Homer-Simpsonesque tones, "I really like Bush 'cause he's not negative." At that precise moment this characterization of W, who studied dirty tricks under the infamous Lee Atwater and himself is rumored to employ a legendary dirty tricks operator known by the code name of Turdblossom…well, it struck me as incongruous to say the least. But the following afternoon, watching the space cowboys rope in their satellite, that anonymous caller's touching, childike offering of allegiance to a concept as elegantly sophisticated as the non-negative, with its oblique implication of cinematic relevance, suddenly made sense to me in terms both of the movie and the idiot wind blowing out of Philly. My God, it was all so simple!
If I could explain to you the illumination I then experienced, my fellow Americanauts, believe me, I would. But because the principle of absolute non-negativity that I touched—or, perhaps, that touched me—was simplicity itself; I'm afraid that explanation would fractionate it and thus act to obscure. I do, however, believe this principle can be experienced by others, that watching a videotape of the George-a-roo's big moment followed closely by a viewing of Space Cowboys will result in a "white light" experience similar to that cited as the central element of the world's great religions, the contact with a being so immensely itself, it is truly—like the Republican Party—all-inclusive. And once this contact has been made, everything dark will become bright, the aesthetic puzzle posed by the poignant ineptitudes of Eastwood's film will open to you like lotus blossoms, and you will be able to perceive that for all his obvious mental impairment, the man described by Ronald Reagan Jr. (who should know something about the subject) as the least qualified person ever to seek the Presidency, the George-ous One, The Non-Negative Candidate himself, is nearly Christlike in his simplicity (I say "nearly" only because of my cautious nature, not trying to deny that my heart has been filled by His Message of Hope) and that he will in the near future, I dare say, crown our 'hood with brotherhood from sea to shining sea…whatever the hell that means. My American friends, my precious family of ideologically pure patriot saints, usurers, good buddies, ladies bimbos religious devotees, priests nuns out-of-work lounge singers, violent children homeless schizos migrant workers, disgusting yuppies, just plain folks extraordinary talents, rappers trappers bitch slappers and drug addicted overweight race haters, I am so blissfully persuaded of the blessings conveyed by this magic cocktail of film and oratory, I am delighted to offer you a videotape containing both a reproduction of The Speech and an uncut bootleg of Space Cowboys including full frontal shots of both Tommie Lee and Donald Sutherland. The cost of this tape is not, as you might expect, $39.99. Nor is it a ridiculously cheap $29.99. Nope, I am making a one-time offer of both products for a mere $19.99. That's right, folks! For only 19 dollars and 99 centavos, you can experience the light of the burning Bush, the satori of space flight, decryptify the hidden meaning of any movie mystery, and inoculate yourself permanently against the examined life. But you must act now! Just dial 1-800-GET HELP or 1-800-SHOOTME. If you call within the next half-hour I will also include a collector's-edition troll doll of Dick Cheney in full-on grimace, complete with a plastic replica of the War Room, where you can pose Dick with his finger on the button. And just because you're you and you and you, I will throw in an autographed copy of Dirty Harry's Geriatric Hunks, the hottest calendar of the new millennium. But you Must. Act. Now.
Well, I have a business to run, and I'd best get back to it. But before I join my fellow Americans, none of whom—to the best of my recollection—have ever seen me snort coke or womanize or commit any misdeed that might sully the sanctity of marriage or put a frown on Miss Liberty's face…before I join them in their relentless quest for equal justice and human rights, I have one final comment. I noticed yesterday that in their review of Space Cowboys, the New York Times proclaimed it to be the best movie of the summer. I was initially nonplussed by this seemingly unwarranted hyperbole, but then, casting my mind back to films like The Patriot, The Nutty Professor II, Gladiator, Battlefield Earth, Gone in 60 Seconds, and the like, I realized that the Times was damning with faint praise, and I said, Hey, why the hell not? Space Cowboys certainly wasn't any worse than most of the schlock I'd seen, and the blue-haired, electrolysis-loving set appeared happy as they exited the theater, formed into single file and marched smartly off to their appointed parking slots. Indeed, as Mrs. Pink tottered giddily heavenwards, I heard her say in an oddly uninflected voice, "That sure was some movie," a statement that might someday serve as her exit line from the theater of life and with whose generic character and neutral level of affirmation I cannot help but concur.
Editorial Note: [Aside to the attorney in the wings: "Do we have to?…"] Alas, the merchandise offer was made in the spirit of parody, and is not genuine. As far as we know.
Living in California benefits anyone inclined to review films, because the Golden State's concession counters offer specially treated candy designed to lower the critic's IQ to a level appropriate to the film he or she has chosen to see. Thus it was when I purchased a pack of Junior Mints prior to exposing myself to the cinematic potentials of Bless the Child, I did so with the idea of lowering my analytic capacity to that of a mildly retarded person for whom English was a second language. Junior Mints are always my candy of choice whenever confronted with the task of writing about a film incorporating Satanic material, and since Bless the Child was directed by the uninspired Chuck Russell (Eraser, The Mask) and starred Kim Basinger, one of the worst actresses ever to win an Academy Award, a list headed by the late Barbra Streisand (I know, I know—some say she still lives), I set about to consume the entire box.
The patriarch of modern devil movies, The Exorcist, while more than a little overrated, stands nonetheless as a monumental achievement when compared to its skanky grandchildren, films such as Stigmata, End of Days, et al. These films, populated by good-buddy priests, wealthy Satanists, wise nuns, secret Vatican assault groups and think tanks, are uniformly predictable and fraught with logical flaws. Their protagonists are often driven by a need for redemption, and their villains by a lust for transcendence—in sum, their contemplation of the religious impulse and the mysteries that surround it is entirely simplistic. On the face of things, this is not necessarily bad. Formula movies—B-movies—are a Hollywood staple. Indeed, with multiple screenwriters on almost every project (thirty-six of them, it's rumored, worked on the execrable Mission to Mars), an industry aesthetic funded by a marketing sensibility, and the sublimation of character and "story" to special effects and high-concept (an idea best explained by the punch line to an old joke: She's the Pope, he's a chimp—they're cops)... With all this in mind, it seems apparent that the modern studio is no longer geared to the making of good movies, but rather to the making of good B-movies. Even going by these standards, few films treating of the Satanic can be said to have achieved any marked degree of competency, let alone B-movie greatness, and fewer yet have made money domestically, though when dumped into the markets of Latin America and Roman Catholic Europe, they generally earn out. It seems odd that such is the case—one would think that the dark and richly complicated imagery of the Church would provide no end of inspiration; but then perhaps the very richness and complexity of the imagery overwhelms the instincts of those associated with these films, imposing upon directors and scripters a sense of creative inadequacy, and thus they neglect the underpinnings needed to construct an entertaining variant of the Oldest Story, the battle between Good and Evil. Or perhaps they fail to understand that Good and Evil are no longer compelling in and of themselves, at least not to contemporary moviegoers, who appear now to require more human and faintly comical expressions of the Ancient Struggle—testimony to this is the fact that of all recent devil flicks, only The Devil's Advocate, which establishes the Big Red Guy as a lawyer, has made a consequential dent domestically.
Be this as it may, the Junior Mints had worked their magic, and with dulled senses and lowered expectations, I was purely ready for some fly-eyed grunge demons to get their drooling, froggy-tongued, baby-liver-scarfing selves scragged by a basketball-playing priest and his hot nun sidekick, with maybe a couple of excellent spew scenes and impalements tossed in for good measure. You see, I love a good devil movie. I was raised Roman Catholic in the South, and despite the fact that most of the priests I'd known were nondescript, lumpish guys who droned out the Mass with all the animation of an Amtrak agent announcing departures, I had always half-believed the Church-sponsored myth that concealed beneath those bulbous robes was the keen-eyed essence of Christ the Killer ready to 187 any punk-ass demon who messed with his boys. There's nothing short of my Aunt Paula's spoonbread that brings back the easy satisfactions of childhood more poignantly than the sight of a backwards-collar-wearing Godboy filing his crucifix down to a point, then jamming it into the thorax of some red-eyed, hairy-pawed Beelzebubba, who thereupon lets out an Ozzy Osborne screech and disintegrates into a swarm of locusts.
The movie started off cool. The Star of Yakob was in the sky, signifying that somebody really together was coming to the planet just like Baby Jesus did, and when Maggie Conroy's scag-shooting sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) shows up out of nowhere and abandons her nine-day-old daughter, Cody (Holliston Coleman), on Maggie's Manhattan apartment floor, it didn't take me long to cop to the fact that Cody was one of God's Chosen, especially when after a few years she goes to making plates spin and lighting hundreds of candles on a altar beneath the Madonna with just the power of her mind and stuff—though Maggie doesn't get it; she thinks Cody's autistic and puts her in a special nun school. Then there's this Eric Stark dude (Rufus Sewell), an ex–child TV star who dresses in black couturier clothing and runs a New Age organization that fronts for the spawn of Hell. Christina Ricci's character—I can't remember her name, but whatever, she ends up getting decapitated in the subway, which was way cool—she tells Maggie that Stark is full-on evil and he wants to turn Cody away from the Good and make her his minion. Then Maggie gets a concussion trying to stop Christina's character from losing her head and begins seeing devils flying around everywhere (they look like the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz). And then Stark shows up married to Maggie's sister and they kidnap Cody, and that was all pretty cool, too…but along about this point I started realizing that the whole thing was seriously messed up. I mean, what was this religion Stark was head of? It had been around since the 16th Century, but it didn't even have a name, and that was weird. And how come all Stark's people are murdering kids born on December 16, 1993? What's the big deal with that specific date? Nobody explained it. Why're all the fakey computer-generated rats swarming around? And why's it that anytime Maggie and Cody are in trouble, except for when she gets kidnapped, some angel looking like a character on that old TV show "Thirty Something" pops up and rescues them? (Note to the scriptwriter: Dude, I hate to tell you, man, but having these angels doing that kinda kills the possibility of suspense, okay…?)
The Junior Mints were wearing off. This had never happened before, but Bless the Child was so corrosively awful, it was eroding the pharmacological effects of the candy. It was big B, Triple A, double D Bad. The Battlefield Earth of devil flicks. None of the characters had an arc. Kim Basinger started out a sad divorcee, and in the end she was happier, I guess, because she had Jimmy Smits in her life—he played the basically irrelevant role of FBI agent John Travis—but she went through no significant transformation, no redemptive process, except for when she died and Cody brought her back to life.
That was another thing. Anytime anything died or came near death, you could be fairly certain Cody or a passing angel would bring it back to life. Gunshot victims, cancer patients, potted plants, pigeons with broken necks. If one accepts the logic of the movie, it's a wonder morticians do any business at all with Cody around. And though Basinger displayed an abundance of misty-eyed pluck and Agent Travis put some bullets into Stark, the agency that played the most crucial part in whupping the Big Red Guy and his crew of yucky sub-demons was (I swear this is true) a group of nuns who engage in a marathon stint of team prayer. As the movie kabanged sputter sputter cough kerchunked to its unnatural end, I sucked up fragments from the bottom of the Junior Mints box, hoped for a flashback, and thought about the future of devil movies. I'd seen a list of upcoming Satanic projects and they all looked like losers, though an as-yet-untitled effort involving a Vatican expedition to the Antarctic that returns with a body frozen in a chunk of ice, who turns out to be You Know Who, had a certain pulpish appeal. Probably the best movie I'd seen recently dealing with the struggle of good versus evil was Jesus' Son, based on Denis Johnson's remarkable short-story collection. The title refers not to any possible offspring of the Son of Man, but to a line from the Velvet Underground song, "Heroin": "…when I'm rushin' on my run, I feel just like Jesus' son…" The film contains no overtly positive reference to the Roman Catholic pantheon; in fact, it seems to regard religion as delusional; yet for all that, it's a classic redemptive tale, following the meandering path of a 70s nobody known only as Fuckhead (Billy Crudup), who finds love and drug addiction with Michelle (Samantha Morton) in a drab midwestern town. Fuckhead and Michelle have good souls, but their mutual habit overwhelms their relationship. After Michelle leaves with an older man for Mexico, Fuckhead sinks to the bottom of his little pond, surviving by means of odd jobs; when he learns that Michelle has surfaced solo in Seattle, he hitchhikes west to join her and they reunite. But smack, once again, uglies up their love scene. One night after a violent argument, Fuckhead returns to their hotel and finds Michelle passed out on the bed. He crawls in beside her, gives her a kiss, and falls asleep. In the morning he discovers a note left by Michelle, which says that she has taken some pills—if he still loves her, he should wake her up. By the time he reads it, of course, Michelle is dead.
Seattle offers even greater depths to which Fuckhead can sink, and, broken-spirited, sink into them he does. Eventually he finds redemption working in a home for people suffering from catastrophic physical impairments, and in a curious trans-voyeuristic bonding with an Amish woman, whom he hears singing inside her house each afternoon as he walks home from work. Fuckhead and the Amish woman never speak. His longing appears to be the sole element of their connection—she never acknowledges his presence until one night when Fuckhead is peeping through her window, she comes to stand with her back to him, trying to block him from her husband's view—while she stands there, Fuckhead reaches up and touches her hair. That simple touch completes the process of redemption, a process composed not of pyrotechnic shocks and grandiose violences and hyper-dramatic plot twists, but of minor tragedies, the sort of unimportant stories that would perhaps warrant an one-inch mention in your local newspaper. Some are fatal, some bloody and absurd, and some are conjunctions of circumstance and an utterly implausible force that seems to have arranged things into an dreamlike order that can be sensed yet not articulated. It is less a plot than a mosaic of incidents that comes to nothing until a man's fingers brush a woman's hair, and then you see the entirety of a life, as though that touch had been a magician's gesture, and you understand the inter-relationship of these incidents: a highway accident; a man stripping the copper tubing from his house to sell for the heroin that will kill him that very night, while out the window he can see his nude ex-wife parasailing along the river; a mid-afternoon party in a run-down farmhouse that leads to lust and murder; a horrific episode of domestic violence that takes an unexpected comic turn. The only nod to the officially religious occurs when—in a delirium—Fuckhead follows a lowlife wearing a fake snakeskin jacket to a laundromat and watches the tattoo of a Sacred Heart on his chest come to hallucinatory life. Yet the feeling you get from watching the film is that you have witnessed a spiritual transformation.
Jesus' Son is, of course, scarcely formulaic, not a B-movie. It is a very good movie, and Crudup's note-perfect incarnation of Fuckhead is assisted by sharp and sometimes brilliant performances by, among others, Will Patton, Holly Hunter, Jack Black, Denis Leary, and Dennis Hopper. Black (High Fidelity), one of the best young character actors around, is especially notable for his imaginative take on Georgie, a pill-popping hospital orderly. The score, a mix of 70s rock classics and incidental music composed by Joe Henry, both energizes and embodies the visuals, and the voiceover, consisting of excerpts from Johnson's spare, poetic prose, does something few voiceovers achieve—it accompanies the film like music and never overexplains.
But the real star of the movie is Cuthrell's screenplay, which remains true to the spirit of Johnson's book and succeeds in conveying what Johnson wanted us to know—that trivial moments of irresolution and intemperance define our selves, and delicate shifts of the world around us align with those moments to contrive our fates, and that merely by persevering we can achieve at least a form of transcendence. It may well be that on some cosmic stage Good and Evil, God and the Devil, are enacting a violent play and our actions are merely glints reflected from their battle glow. But it's more relevant to our times to focus on those brief flashes of being instead of the great identities we suppose have caused them, to seek deliverance from the minutiae of the illusions we inhabit and not from their imagined source. It might be interesting to see a movie that approached the specific ideas of the Satanic and the Divine from this sort of perspective, one that by virtue of the ensuing narrative would inspire, perhaps, a new appreciation of the Oldest Story or contrive a secular metaphysics that led back on some relatively untraveled road to the creatures of myths and the mysteries. Jesus’ Son does not quite do this—not self-consciously, at any rate—but it does enough to conjure the possibility, and for now that will have to do.
These days when I see a movie I enjoy, I check myself to discover whether or not I'm overreacting, because in the context of the average studio stinker, a merely passable effort may be mistaken for the exemplary. However, in this instance I'm fairly certain my judgment is in order. Nurse Betty is a modern take on a Frank Capra film, the sort of good-hearted fantasy involving an ordinary soul trapped in extraordinary circumstances that Hollywood used to make with some frequency before they discovered that explosions and snappy tag lines were easier to fabricate than good scripts and strong stories. Though the trappings of the film—hit men, drug deals, a brutal murder, the cult of celebrity—are thoroughly contemporary, the main character, Betty (Rene Zellweger), appears to have stepped out of a more innocent time. Indeed, the majority of the other characters treat her with that head-tilted-to-the-side fondness usually reserved for house pets who have done something so spectacularly cute, it causes them to seem almost human; when they speak of her, they do so with mild wonderment, as if recognizing that she is a savant whose genius is sweetness, whose uncomplaining perseverance is a mark of closeness to God and, one suspects, a symptom of slightly diminished capacity.
By day, Betty works at a small-town Kansas coffee shop, spreading sunshine to her customers, a group that includes Roy (Crispin Glover), a geeky reporter for the local paper who writes about "the history of the bake sale," and a buffoonish yet affable sheriff (Pruitt Taylor Vance). Nights, she spends alone, watching tapes of her favorite soap opera, obsessing over handsome TV doctor David Ravell/actor George McCord (Greg Kinnear), while her neglectful husband, Del (Aaron Eckhardt), a used-car dealer with dreams of being a player, boinks his secretary and dabbles in illicit drug deals. When Del attempts to steal a shipment of drugs from some organized crime people in Kansas City, he's visited by two hit men, Charlie (Morgan Freeman) and Wesley (Chris Rock). The ensuing interrogation and execution are so bloody that Betty, watching through a crack in the door, is traumatized and retreats into the world of her soap, believing that she was once a surgical nurse at the fictive Loma Vista hospital, where she became the fiancée of Dr. David Revell. The murder proves to be the twister that carries this 21st-century Dorothy away from Kansas. Taking one of Del's cars—the very one, it turns out, in which the missing drugs are hidden—Betty sets out for Oz (LA) to find her lost love. In the meantime, Wesley and Charlie crisscross the Midwest, hunting for Betty, and Charlie, staring incessantly at photographs of the brave little widow, develops an obsession for her that becomes so delusional, at one point he shares a passionate kiss with an imaginary, prom-dress-clad Betty on the edge of the Grand Canyon.
Once in LA, immune to and mostly unaware of the violence surrounding her, Betty is assisted in her search for David by Rosa, a beautiful boyfriend-impaired paralegal who takes her in after Betty saves her brother by performing an emergency tracheotomy. Eventually she encounters David—or rather George McCord—at an awards show. George, a poster boy for the self-absorbed (scarcely a reach for Kinnear), assumes that she is an actress auditioning for a role. He marvels at the quality of her work, at the tenacity she exhibits by remaining in character, and this leads to her being offered a part on the show, an experience that snaps the bonds of delusion and brings her back to the real world.
But nothing in Nurse Betty can be said to be real.
John C. Richard's excellent script has constructed a soap opera within a soap opera. The characters in LA and back in Kansas are acted upon by soap opera-ish events. Betty's affliction is a variation on the classic soap opera trope—amnesia—and the pure-hearted, plucky heroine who endures in the face of constant tribulation is the central element of every afternoon story. Considering that all this is masterminded by director Neil LaBute, whose previous films (The Company of Men and Your Friends and Neighbors) were both dark and misogynistic, it's clear that we are being offered black comedy, a film that is a parody of itself, one that mildly celebrates yet at the same time excoriates the form, much in the way of Norman Lear's TV soap parody Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. However, in this instance LaBute's intent is overpowered by Rene Zellweger's astonishing performance. A generation or two ago, the role of Betty would almost certainly have been played by Doris Day, the actress who most embodied sexy innocence and pluckiness during the 50s and early 60s. Zellweger is Doris Day on Ecstasy, emitting a powerful vibe of goofy loveable cute, a love ray that turns hit men into philosophers and life-and-death problems into bunny troubles. She bumbles along through the perilous constructions of the plot like a puppy blithely negotiating a rush-hour freeway, and when she mists up and purses her pouty lips in bewilderment, you want to pick her up, take her home, give her a lollypop, and tuck a comforter under her chin. By movie's end, even a hardened cynic who adheres to the belief that a person's dreams will either become perverted or destroy them is briefly persuaded that one's fondest wish will come true if one only perseveres.
The ending, which brings Betty, Roy, the sheriff, Rosa, Wesley, and Charlie together in a psychodramatic mix of blood and physical comedy, is the weakest point of the movie. It's not that the violence is inappropriate, it just doesn't seem to register, its effects muted by Zellweger's blissed-out high beam of a performance. Far too many loose ends are tied up. Justice for the hit men, Roy and Tia hook up, the sheriff proves himself more than a buffoon, George McCord gets his comeuppance, and a last-minute, insufficiently foreshadowed revelation designed to make us relate more sympathetically to Wesley that comes across as messy and inessential. And the epilogue, wherein Betty, financially secure due to her acting stint on the soap, is seen happily touring Rome prior to entering nursing school—it's a bit confusing. We celebrate with her as she walks up the steps of a fountain, swinging her handbag, scattering pigeons to flight, but then we recognize that her triumph over fate may be a continuation of her delusion and has been achieved at mortal cost…well, this is probably the sort of emotional dissonance that Labute was trying for throughout. It surfaces far too late.
These are minor flaws, however. Nurse Betty succeeds, as few recent pictures have, in being both intelligent and funny, and if it fails to promote Rene Zellweger to the star status she deserves, then it will at least be notable as the only movie (the only one I can recall, at any rate) in which Crispin Glover winds up with a girl.
"I got a fortune in my veins,
policeman's askin' for my name,
his flashlight's drivin' me insane…
It glitters!
He says, 'Hey, man, what you been
takin','
I say, 'Nothin', I'm just fakin','
He says, 'Son, you're mistaken…'
I say, 'Gimme a break, huh!
"'See, I ain't holdin' nothin', man,
'cept my baby by the hand,
and we jus' hangin' with the band,
Hey, all we wanna do is…
"'SEE ROCK CITY
"'(Oh, yeah! I wanna…)
"'SEE ROCK CITY
"'SEE ROCK CITY
"'(Aw, it's so damn pretty!)
"'Before I grow too old to stroll…'"
The lyrics quoted above state with some economy my view—and that of most musicians I know—of rock and roll during the 70s. Cameron Crowe's take on the same subject, as expressed in his new film, Almost Famous, is somewhat different. Where I saw dope, massive stupidity, women used as drains, psychotic drummers, deviant businessmen, corporate coke whores, suicides, broken lives, and brain damage on a generational scale, Crowe apparently saw a more benign landscape, a happy playland populated by sensitive guitar heroes and intelligent, compassionate teenage groupies—a place where there was minor marijuana use but no powders or injectable potions (unless one counts an overdose on Quaaludes which is played for laughs); where the music was everything and dreams could come true.
The idea behind the film is this: William Miller (Patrick Fugit, an actor who has mastered two whole expressions: a cute smile and an even cuter look of puppydog bewilderment) is a fifteen-year-old fledgling rock journalist who lands an assignment for Rolling Stone and goes on the road with hot new guitar band Stillwater—said tour forms the backdrop for a coming-of-age story based on the true-life experiences of director Crowe (Say Anything, Jerry McGuire). While on the road, William develops a crush on Penny Lane (Kate Hudson), a groupie who—she claims—is not really a groupie but a "band-aid," a term implying a more elevated status; she, in turn, is infatuated with Stillwater's resident guitar god, Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup). William, too, is infatuated with Russell, albeit in a fanboy sort of way, and this loose triangle, along with the band's internal strife, provides what passes for a dynamic.
Through William's widened, worshipful eyes we are shown (ostensibly) backstage life at big-time rock venues, the secrets of the tour bus, an overdose, band squabbles, the infamous Riot House (International Hyatt House), LA's home-away-from-home to Zeppelin, Bowie, and the entire rock pantheon. None of this, as presented, has more than a superficial connection with how things actually were during the 70s. Crowe is not after gritty, he's after warm and fuzzy, and he delivers those qualities in pillowy buffets of sentiment backed up by a soundtrack heavy on the Elton John/Cat Stevens/ Simon and Garfunkel spectrum of soft rock, music poorly suited to the milieu he's purporting to capture, but perfect for the squishy feel-good story he's delivering. When Russell Hammond trades Penny to the Brit band Humble Pie for $50 and a case of beer, he gets all misty-looking—you know he feels awful about the deal, and he'd pull back from it if it wouldn't make him seem like a wimp. And Penny, that plucky sixteen-year-old groupie with the consoling patience of a kindergarten teacher, a boy-toy whose sweetness and purity remain unsullied despite the degradation attendant upon her way of life (it's not really that degrading, according to Crowe)…well, she's a wee bit sad, but she understands. There is minor band dust-up but no sign anywhere of the egos bloated to the point of disease such as have always dominated the landscape of rock and roll. And in the end everyone gets their wish, just like in a fairytale. Russell grows a little, writes his story, and loses his virginity; Penny goes to live in Morocco; and Russell winds up on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Penny is the most problematic figure in the film for me, though none of the characters have the ring of authenticity, not even the cutely bewildered William (except for the scene in which Crowe, in imitation of his rock heroes, sees fit to pad William's briefs so that it appears he's wearing a diaper beneath them). True, a number of groupies emerged from groupiedom more-or-less whole and went on to have successful lives; but I daresay not one of them was as wise and composed and balanced during their teenage years as is Penny. As untouched by the slime through which they had belly-crawled.
There's a song about one particular groupie that includes the following lyrics:
"…she come up to me, open wide,
she said, 'Baby, you're sick, let's get acquainted.
I got a gun between my breasts
that y'oughta see.
If you can get it out without shootin' me,
then I'll be yours for tonight,'
she sang between her teeth.
'But please don't attack me
'less you gotta…'"
The agitated neuroticism of these few lines expresses the quintessential psychology of the groupie, the desire to master those who master them, the use of sex to achieve equal footing with the musician, the contending strains of violence and passivity. There's none of that in Penny. She's just a nice teenage girl with the savoir-faire of Hilary Clinton and the soulfulness of a Renaissance saint who really likes music.
It's not necessary, of course, that a film accurately portray reality for it to be judged successful as an entertainment. Rock and roll may not lend itself to prettification, but hey, if a film such as "Life Is Beautiful" can treat whimsically of the Holocaust, why not a fairytale set in a rock milieu? And if, as advertised, Cameron Crowe has fashioned a rock and roll fairytale, then it should be critiqued as such…given that it satisfies the requirements of the genre.
But does it?
All fairytales, however sugary their surface, have at their heart some poignant truth. So far as I can tell, all Crowe's movie has to say is that 70s rock and roll was fun, the people involved in it were basically goodhearted, and like that. Hours of close analysis have revealed no cautionary subtext, no leitmotif, no "message" of any sort. Therefore we must conclude that the movie is not a fairytale except as regards its glossing over of reality.
Is it, then, a comedy?
If so, it's not that funny. Which is surprising, given that Crowe has proved himself a consistent writer of clever dialogue. Sentiment, I suppose, clotted his wit in this instance. But there have been several films released during the last two years, most notably Still Crazy and Sugartown, that reference similar materials and are immeasurably funnier than Almost Famous.
The more I pondered this film, the more perplexed I became concerning Crowe's choices, especially the toned-down-to-a-whisper sexuality and drug use. He could have told the same story far more effectively and humorously by keeping in some of the sleaze, so as to contrast the sweetness of his characters—he didn't have to wallow in it, merely add a dash or two of bitters to give his fairytale cast a context that would have caused their actions to seem moral choices formed amidst an infectious immorality. Perhaps, I thought, Crowe was responding to the dictates of commercialism. Saccharine sells in the good ol' US of A, and no one ever lost a buck by giving the public what they want. But then another possibility occurred. A couple of years ago Hollywood began to get the message from Washington, D.C., that if they didn't clean up their act, something might have to be done by way of monitoring the industry. At this point the studios greenlighted a bunch of "positive message" projects and ordered a large number of previously greenlighted scripts to be rewritten and given an uplifting gloss. Among the first of these movies to go into distribution is the forthcoming Kevin Spacey-Helen Hunt-Hayley Joel Osment vehicle, Pay It Forward, a piece of heartstring-tugging dreck so cloying it would choke a garbage disposal, a minty-fresh mouthwash of a movie that will cause all the bought-and-paid-for, blurb-giving critics to gargle in unison, a synthetic tearjerker that will start ducts flowing in every quarter of the land, a glutinous wad of glup that twenty years from now will be remembered only by archivists.
(Thanks, Tipper. You too, Mrs. Cheney. I can't hardly wait for the heartwarming tsunami of triumph-of-the-human-spirit bullshit that will soon wash away whatever vestiges of creativity remain in the Hollywood brainpan.)
It might be, I told myself, that Crowe's movie was a victim of the same ludicrous and no doubt fleeting attempt at moral renewal that spawned Pay it Forward. Certainly, although Almost Famous will do big box office and earn several Oscar nominations (director, script, supporting actor), a similar fate awaits it.
Whatever the reason for its shortcomings, Almost Famous is in sum almost insubstantial, an exercise in flavorlessness, a veneer without noticeable underpinning, and wastes solid performances by Frances McDormand as William's eccentric mom Elaine, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as the rock critic Lester Bangs. In a recent TV interview, Cameron Crowe has remarked that he intended the film to be a poem to the people he met when he was fifteen.
Oh…okay. It's a poem.
Unfortunately for us all, it's a Rod McKuen poem.
Shortly before watching a video of The Sixth Day, based on a short story by the late Philip K. Dick, I attempted to contact the author's spirit by means of a ouija board. To my surprise, I succeeded. The planchette went swooping and darting across the board, moving so rapidly I had difficulty in recording its message.
Dick described the afterlife as "boring as a Kansas bus station," an area where souls waited for rebirth, most of them indulging in "obsessive regret and confusion." To kill time he had become a detective of sorts, specializing in investigating the deaths of those individuals who were troubled by and/or unclear as to the manner of their passing. The case he was currently looking at involved a woman murdered by... Well, I'll let him tell it in his own words (the capitals and punctuation are mine):
"TDEs. Trans-dimensional essences. Denizens of the meta-universe capable of drifting from plane to plane. They're mentioned in a fragment certain authorities attributed to Lucius Appuleus... I doubt they're right, I think it's considerably older than that. Whatever... the author describes TDEs as conglomerate beings, migratory soul villages, individual spirits who've bonded together in order to survive a cosmic disaster, perhaps the death of a universe, and in doing so have become corrupted, evil. They're invisible to most higher life forms." A Pause. "Ever watched a dog closely? They'll be sleeping or resting, and then they'll suddenly lift their head and appear to be tracking something through the air. Something you can't see. Chances are they've spotted a TDE. Once I was sitting next to a friend-of-mine's dog, and I let my eyes drift to the place he was staring at and I saw one. Just a glimpse, a split-second. It was round and flat, about the size of a dinner plate. Pale brown... almost a beige. Looked like a cross between a jellyfish and a big apple fritter." Another pause. "Of course I was seriously fucked-up at the time."
Dick asked what was happening back home. After giving the question due consideration, I briefed him on the Information Revolution, giving emphasis to the creation of the news channels, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and so forth, and the subsequent evolution of the television journalist from reporter to an interface through which the events of history were filtered, and the emergent punditocracy whose neatly packaged opinions were bleated out non-stop until they produced a litany of responses from the viewers that echoed these opinions with sheeplike unanimity. This, along with the tsunami of Internet data and rumor and hallucination that washed over the public mind, served only to prove that it was at least as easy to obscure the truth, the actual workings of the world, by drowning people in facts as it was to do so by depriving them of same.
The planchette wrote, "The Veil of Maya."
"Thicker than ever," I replied
I was about to break contact and start the video, when Dick suggested that he wouldn't mind checking it out himself. I asked how this would be possible, and he instructed me to prop the ouija board on a chair facing the television.
"I can see through the O," he told me.
So, with this curious presence resting on my Barcalounger, I settled back to watch the movie.
Terrible things have been happening to dead science fiction writers in Hollywood, but none have suffered so badly as Philip K. Dick—if that is not absolutely true now, it soon will be, for it's impossible to find a Dick story or novel that is not currently under option. Bladerunner, for all its atmospheric and visual bravura, and despite several interesting supporting performances, reduced the source novel (a meditation on the first of Dick's major themes: What exactly defines a human being?) into an exercise in style and fully introduced us to Harrison Ford's leaden period. Total Recall, apart from a few moments that spoke to Dick's other major theme, the nature of reality, fell prey to director Paul Verhoeven's compulsive need to lampoon the violence of his adopted country and became merely another Schwarzenegger vehicle. Screamers took Dick's tale of machine-created humans (sympathetic creatures with authentic personalities, perhaps even souls) used as bombs and poozled it into Grade Z slumgullion flavored with the remnants of lead actor Peter Weller's career. And there looks to be worse in the offing. Imagine, if you will, the gag-inducing sentiment and trollish comic excesses that the hideous Roberto Benigni will bring to "The Short, Happy Life of the Brown Oxford," a story about a scientist who invents a machine that brings inanimate objects to life ("Hey! My shoe... It's a'talkin'! It'a wants an Odoreater!") And then we have Minority Report, a story concerning pre-cog crime fighters who detect murders before they occur, a notion that—word has it—Steven Spielberg has transformed into yet another timecop movie, this one starring America's frat boy, the engagingly talentless Tom Cruise. Toss in Imposters, Dick's account of a human scientist hunted by aliens, one of whom has usurped his place, a film that several A-list scriptwriters tried unsuccessfully to doctor and since has been yanked from distribution, and you will gather that Dick's immediate cinematic future is to consist of megablasts of brightly hued, hack-writer-generated meadow muffin, augmented by great glorioso dollops of Flatulaphonic sound, aimed at an undiscerning popcorn-feeding subspecies that can be found grazing the multiplexes with its young, living proof that Dick's first major theme still has relevance in contemporary society.
The sad thing about these movies, past, present, and future, is that they have lifted the external trappings of Dick's work, the settings and plots and quasi-scientific premises, yet contain (or promise to contain) little of its soul, none of the caustic black humor and enlightened-loser sensibility that inform the majority of his characters. The one film that manages this to any marked degree is Barjo, a French film loosely based on Dick's novel Confessions of a Crap Artist. Barjo is a borderline dysfunctional thirtyish man convinced that the world is coming to an end, an innocent whacko who nourishes himself by sniffing a plastic bag full of milk bottle caps as though they were oxygen. He spends much of his days cataloguing on tape and in notebooks the behavior of his beautiful, perversely unhappy, and equally erratic sister Fan-Fan. She is married to the prosperous owner of an aluminum factory, Charles, and amorously pursues Gwen and Michael, a young couple who live nearby. Her motives in this extramarital chase are less the product of desire than they are the natural outgrowth of a frustration at her own pointless existence and, subsequently, the instrument of a kind of psychological terrorism—she seems determined to drive Charles crazy, and Charles, a classic tight-ass who becomes enraged whenever Fan-fan asks him to pick up feminine hygiene products at the drugstore, eventually suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized. While in the hospital, Charles is visited by Barjo,who reads him sections of his file on Fan-Fan, complete with dialog samples, that testify to her infidelity. In his spare time, Barjo communes with a group of fellow nutballs who share his conviction about the impending apocalypse—they hold séances during which they attempt to communicate with the Superior Beings in their UFOs. Though clearly deluded, if not deranged, Barjo's friends and their preoccupations, their observances, are given credence by director Jerome Boivin, and this is faithful to Dick's contention that the mad focus upon things ignored by the sane and thus they may see more clearly—albeit infrequently—the secret orderings of the world.
I'm not sure that Barjo comes to much in the end. It's scarcely more than a slice of demented life, topped off by a climactic scene in which Charles returns home intending to kill Fan-Fan and instead slaughters the family pets—horse, dog, ducks, sheep, and so on—before succumbing to a second heart attack. Yet it serves to convey the quirky specificity and spirit of Dick's obsessions. His various paranoias, his belief in the general insanity of our species (in particular, the madness between men and women), the absurd configuration of even the most commonplace events, in themselves shadows of a vastly absurd but eminently vital divinity... all of Dick's tropes and archetypes are here fleshed out, and though there is not much of a framework to support them, they suffice on their own to create a fascinating ninety minutes. If the director of some future action movie based on Dick material would incorporate Barjo's weird humanity and soulfulness, we might have a pop-culture masterpiece on our hands. As things stand, what we do have is the new Schwarzenegger flick.
It's not that The Sixth Day is a bad movie... well, actually it is, but that's almost a given, considering the Schwarzenegger factor, and the real question one anticipates that viewing it will answer is whether it's a good bad movie, whether it's (A) the kind of junkfood entertainment that will persuade you to sit uncomplaining for a couple of hours, your mind disengaged and your eyes lit by dopey on-screen explosions, or (B) the sort of godawful mess that causes lovers of camp to switch on the VCR, toke up, and laugh sneeringly at, say, Geena Davis' ludicrous inappropriateness in the role of the pirate queen of Cutthroat Island, or any recent film featuring Kevin Costner.
There is no doubt that Day rates a 10 on the Doltometer, being rife with fisticuffs, gunplay, chase scenes, and blow-up, and there are a number of outstanding unintentionally comic moments, notably Arnold's variant pronunciations of the name of his dog, Oliver ("Ah-lee-vur," "Ohl-vur," etc.), and the poignant moment when our hero's clone gazes wistfully into the camera and intones with Frankensteinesque stiffness, "Ahm I really human? Do I have a so-wul?" But sad to say, this is no Predator, no Terminator, films whose rawness and lack of pretension contrived to breed actual suspense. Day is a completely cynical example of moviemaking by the numbers, following a wearisome rhythm of chase explosion chase, chase chase bloodydeath, kick two three turn, kick two three turn, that goes a little something like this...
In the near future ("Sooner than you think" cautions an introductory line of text—intending, I suppose, to evoke a shudder of dread from all us doomed terwilligers), genetic rebop has become such an everyday deal that a thriving business is done in cloning housepets. Human cloning, however, is illegal. Doing research into the subject is forbidden, carrying a forty-year prison term. But multi-billionaire yuppie scum Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) views the matter differently. He has coerced a scientist, Dr. Graham Weir (Robert Duvall), into cloning humans on a massive scale, allowing him to replace his security forces and even the star quarterback of his pro football team whenever they are killed or seriously injured (which is often, leading one to ask that if Drucker is such a poor judge of muscle, how in the hell did he become such a dominant captain of industry?). Drucker charters a heli-jet service to take him into the mountains for snowboarding and is there assassinated by a member of a fanatic anti-cloning organization. His pilot is also killed, and once Drucker's clone is brought to life—the work of a few hours—he orders the pilot cloned in order to cover up the incident. Trouble is, the place of the scheduled pilot, Adam Gibson (Schwarzenegger), has been taken by his partner (Michael Rappaport), and the wrong man is cloned, thus giving us a brace of mesomorphic Adam Gibsons: you'd think that somewhere along the line somebody might have noticed a slight discrepancy in size and shape between the men, but hey, logic has taken a two-hour holiday, and if you're going to start quibbling about this kind of thing, you won't make it through the first fifteen minutes.
And so begins the hunting, the chasing, the skull-busting, the bleeding, the exploding, eventually culminating in Drucker's downfall and the revelation that the point-of-view character is Adam Gibson's clone, and the man he thought was a clone is the real Adam Gibson, something that has been made obvious early on, the scriptwriters apparently being unable to distinguish between foreshadowing an event and telegraphing it. There are a few decent bits. Rodney Rowland is appropriately sullen and seedy as a bungling Drucker minion who keeps getting killed; Duvall, albeit underused, lends a touch of class; and Goldwyn is nastily self-absorbed and extremely hateable, though it would be nice if the apt but overdone practice of costuming villains in designer garb popular amongst Hollywood players—black shirts and slacks bearing fabulous Italian labels—would be put to rest.
Director Roger Spottiswoode has done entertaining action films before, and it's hard to tell if he just didn't care about this one, or if he was simply incapable of overcoming the handicaps presented by the script and the woeful performance of his leading man—whatever, Day has none of the amphetamine pacing that fueled his Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. There is, in fact, a tedious sameness and comical ineptitude to the violence, both in context of the genre and the film itself—sparking laser guns (straight out of Japanese trash sci-fi), neck breaking, screaming stunt falls. Considering the Schwarzeneggerian budget of the film, you'd expect at least one nifty variation on the theme of mayhem, but the best Spottiswoode can muster is a heli-jet blade chopping with the gore implied, not shown, this due to Le Gran Arnold's pompous and much publicized intent to make movies that won't cause American kiddies to wax murderous and sally forth to dice and slice innocent high school jocks with their own personal heli-jet blades. (Thanks, Big Guy. Perhaps a dose of good ol' Austrian morality, the same that inspired much of recent European history, will stave off our cultural decline.) In Schwarzenegger's best action work, he has played an implacable, unstoppable force, and on two occasions (Twins and Kindergarten Cop), he has been somewhat effective at light comedy. His attempts at portraying your average family/working man 250 lb. muscle freak behemoth, such as his role in Total Recall, have been considerably less successful. Day establishes, if ever there was a doubt, that Arnold has the emotive ability of string cheese. His take on normal guyness is absolutely gruesome—the ferocious leer he displays after blowing out the candles on his birthday cake during a surprise party would give the Blair Witch the willies. But more significantly, he does not seem quite so unstoppable. Past fifty now, not long removed from heart surgery, he has the seamed, fatigued look of an old rhino forced to make a final charge. Given this, it's going to take Vincent Price's old make-up man to get Arnold ready for his part in the next Terminator movie, unless they're planning to call it T-3: The Rusting. Okay... So. The villain dies, earth is saved (from what, it's unclear), Arnold and his clone become pals, then Mr. Olympia's cell brother heads off happily to a life of his own in South America—this is where the "Do I have a so-wul?" line comes in, the one simplistic Dickian note in two solid hours of was-that-fun-or-what brain sludge. I addressed the ouija board and asked Dick what he had thought. The planchette remained still. Doubtless he'd lost interest and returned to his gnostic investigations. I couldn't much blame him. Somewhat deflated, I returned to my own less elaborate investigations, to wit, the discerning of hidden messages, because you see I'm convinced that no matter how artless they may appear, these twelfth-of-a-day-long bright projections of flicker-flicker in our eyes are beaming the master's words, the mind-deadening syllables of light that coerce us into the acceptance of some unpleasant state of affairs. Even a merde-fest like the one just witnessed.
Day's message is both rudimentary and deceptive. Although on the surface the film appears to be saying that life is a sacred matter, cloning is wrong, there are things men are not meant to know blah blah blah, the happy survival of the Schwarzenclone caused me to realize that the actual message was another volley in the class war, stating an imperative of the near future: Cloning Is Wrong for You. "You" meaning everyone but the privileged and those they favor. Call me paranoid, but I have long been convinced that the power-mad little humbugs who rule the dummyverse are preparing us for the "sooner than you think" day when a trillion proles live out their mayfly spans in a dreary lower depth of slave-making drugs, on-the-fritz neon, hallucinatory marketing zones, soul-killing entertainments, and deadly pollution, while the wealthy, sustained by enzymes looted from Third World babies and backed up by a dozen or so spare bodies each, enjoy an ersatz immortality during which all human progress will come to a screeching halt except for subtle refinements in style, a world in which pampered, genetically enhanced dogs will learn to read but most humans will not, and university degrees will be offered in the disciplines of fashion sense and mockery.
The end credits rolled, and a characterless rock song blasted from the screen, designed to orchestrate a march of the zombies out of the theaters and into the night—though sitting in my living room, I felt the call of the music and went shuffling forth, seeking nourishment of a sort I could not name. I wandered for a while but soon found myself passing through the doors of a club whose decor was a mixture of film noir and high tech, a digital hell pulsing with dance noise, populated by guylike bug creatures with creepy tattoos and living flesh modules with little-girl breasts and big girl eyes, both displaying an excess of hair dye and lots of significant piercings. Speech was a communal howl, the bathroom door opened onto a hotly lit sidereal reality, and the bartender posed a cryptic shadow against what an unwitting soul might take for an illuminated mirror but was in truth an illusion cast by a malefic device of unguessable origin. None of this seemed in the least familiar. I ordered bourbon and ice at the bar. In the fraudulent mirror I saw eye contracts being made, hulking refugees from the lava moon disguised as bouncers, waitress vampires, packages of pure poison being passed from hand to hand. I began to suspect that Day had transmitted a more profound and transforming message than the one I had parsed, seeding me with a virulent paranoia, or perhaps that an accumulation of such movies had overloaded my program, shorted out my mental baffles, allowing me to see that the cautionary future was upon us. More likely, I thought, contact with Dick's disembodied relic had quickened me, established a resonance between our realities, because it was evident to me now that his spirit was moving through the land. We were living on the cusp of the teeming, malodorous time and place he had perceived from the vantage point of 1968. In the organ-harvesting, growing-criminal-underclass moment, in the Pandora's-box-opening, just barely pre-genetic-revolution Now. Dickworld. And it sucked every bit as much as he told us it would. On my right an attractively sleazy, bewigged woman wearing a few ounces of mascara, nine rings, and a funeral dress lit a cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke, an action that simultaneously destroyed a galaxy hidden in a dust mote suspended in the air above her and signaled her availability.
To my left a sour-smelling, ragged shadow, its face obscured by dreadlocks, all except a glaring, jaundiced eye, reached out an obsidian talon to lift a silver droplet of something from the scarred wood of the countertop, then touched it to its lips and gave out with a glutinous hiss. I stared down into my drink, ice melting in a brown sea, and shivered. This was serious. I would have to write faster, I would have to get it all out, warn everyone. Black flowers bloomed in the creases on my forehead; the red wine in the bewigged woman's glass bubbled like a hot spring. A Great Inversion was at hand, and people needed to know this, they needed to know a good many things, including the one thing they all thought they knew but never truly accepted. There was no time to waste. At any moment a Terminator might appear.
Ever think how it would be if things sounded in life as they do in the movies?
A dog barking would sound like Godzilla with a toothache. Handguns would use amplifiers, not silencers, and folks like Brittany Spears and N'Sync would have to be summarily executed.
But not even Dolby Digital Reality could prepare you for the sonic excesses of Dracula 2000. When this Dracula hisses, it's like somebody released the air brake on an 18-wheeler. When he farts, it's like a rip in the space-time continuum (though breaking wind would have been fitting in context, the count doesn't actually do so in the film. I'm extrapolating here). If magnificently inappropriate noise were a criteria of filmic excellence, Dracula 2000 would be the greatest vampire movie of all time, and not a bad video game, a babe-rich environment designed for 11-year-olds whose notion of female perfection is the thought of Jeri Ryan dressed in Underalls.
Hmm...
Of course you know going in that any movie with a date attached to the title is going to be product. We're probably going to see lots more of this. Like for instance:
HAMLET 2012
The Man in Black Is Back...
... this time he's strapped...
Loathsome as this may sound, it would nonetheless be preferable to Ethan Hawke's recent ninety-minute version of the play, a project that only serves to cement young Hawke's position as Hollywood's resident arts idiot.
The reason for these digressions is that I have little to say about Dracula 2000 apart from, "I went to see it and I am ashamed." But a few words about the story would, I suppose, not be out of place. Years ago the original vampire hunter Van Helsing (Christopher Plummer) bagged the evil count and for some dumbass reason locked him away in a vault that occupies the basement of a London book store now belonging to his great grand-something (also Christopher Plummer). Burglars come ("What you reckon's in that coffin, Alf?") and free the Bitemeister, who then goes off to search for Van Helsing's daughter... .
Okay. That's enough.
You have to feel for Christopher Plummer. The guy must have serious tax problems.
Responsible for the direction is one Patrick Lussier, who—judging by his breast fixation and gaudy post-rock style—comes from the spawning ground of MTV, which previously has given us such auteurs as Tardem Singh (The Cell), Antoine Fuqua (Replacement Killers), and Michael Bay (Con Air, The Rock, Pearl Harbor).
A list to conjure with.
I was once accosted in a bar by a drunken pre-med student who proceeded to tell me the truth about vampires. He'd figured it all out. I don't recall a great deal of what he said—I'm not terribly interested in the metabolisms of fictional creatures (personal note to my stalker: Stay calm. I believe in your vampire). But I do remember him saying that given the fact vampires spend half their time in a vegetative state, half in an accelerated condition that affords them inhuman strength and inspires the fiercest of appetites, their digestive processes would likely be a gross parody of the human, producing incredibly vile liquefied wastes and ghastly breath. He went on to extend this chain of logic ad nauseum, but I had already gotten his point: the undead are a skanky bunch. The original cinematic vampire, Nosferatu, conformed to the pre-med student's model, but Bela Lugosi's poetic Valentino-esque take on Count Dracula—elegant pomaded blood junkie in white tie and tails—was a complete departure. These seminal images have developed over the years into two sharply divergent filmic strains, the latter incarnated by Anne Rice's tortured decadents, the former by the seedy Darwinism of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, with its lowlife vampire "family" living like murderous cockroaches in the contemporary Southwest.
Like most things—like the economy, our chances for survival as a species, and Madonna's bustline—Hollywood vampire flicks have suffered a decline. In recent years, only Blade with its comic-book smarts and high-octane pacing made a respectable entry. One would have to look back to the aforementioned Near Dark to find a classic of the genre; and before that we would have to return to the 60s and George Romero's horrifyingly mundane Martin, which treats of a teenage vampire without fangs forced to chloroform and then cut open his victims. Francis Ford Coppola's attempt to revive the gothic form, Bram Stoker's Dracula, would have benefited had Mr. Coppola understood that at least half of the Nineteenth Century did not look as if it were set dressed by Rembrandt, and that a gothic atmosphere is best achieved by understated dramatics and a subdued, even crepuscular palette. John Carpenter's Vampires... Faugh! A total waste of Thomas Ian Griffith. Interview with a Vampire? Two words—Tom Cruise. Then we have the also-rans: Vampire's Kiss with Anne Parillard; A Vampire in Brooklyn with Eddie Murphy; Modern Vampires (Caspar Van Dien on a blood rampage); Children of the Night, in which redneck vampire Karen Black in all her voluptuous decay is kept chained in the attic by her husband and whines, "Gettin' little tired of eating leeches!" I'm certain I'm overlooking loads of gory trash, but who cares. The Future? More of the same. Though I must admit to having some nostalgia-driven interest in The Omega Man remake (despite Arnold's Schwarzenpresence), and I'm intrigued by the forthcoming Teething, which supposes a vampire baby born to normal parents.
At least day care will be no problem.
Last year while I was taking part in a discussion about Blair Witch 2 on a web chat (I had an hour free, okay?), Shadow of a Vampire was mentioned as a film some hoped might bring new vitality to the genre, and I looked forward to seeing it. I eventually watched the movie in the company of a friend, and afterward she turned to me and said, "Boring shitty pretentious." Well, I simply could not agree. To be considered truly pretentious, a film director must overindulge his vision and sense of style; since Shadow's director M. Elias Erige is sadly lacking these qualities, I think it more accurate to say that his film aspires to pretension. "Boring" and "shitty," I'm all right with. I note that Shadow was awarded the Bronze Horse at the Stockholm Film Festival, which is impressive on the face of it; but I have sufficient respect for audiences in Sweden to make me wonder if this isn't some sort of booby prize.
Technically, the film is a mess. The cutting verges on the professional, some of the worst I've seen, and the cinematography... It's as if Erige tried in the main to limit himself to techniques available in the 1920s. If that's the case, then maybe I'm wrong about the pretension thing (I believe an analysis of the film would reveal this is not the case, yet the camera work has such a static character, the result is the same as if it were). It's hard to recall a movie with this much art-house juice that was so ineptly crafted. It's equally hard to recall a script with so much wasted dramatic potential. The focus of all this incompetence is the shooting of F. W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu, and that choice of focus was a serious mistake.
Gods and Monsters worked because the emphasis was not on Frankenstein but on the man who directed the film. Moviemaking involves a good bit of tedium, and instead of ranging peaks and valleys of tension and release, Erige's story kerflop kerflops along just like the film in Murnau's rickety camera. Most of the mayhem occurs off-camera, a strategy both inoffensive and ineffectual.
The best thing about "Shadow" is its premise that Max Shreck, the lead in Nosferatu, was an actual vampire. Great start. But Erige does nothing with it. His approach to narration is that of a man who tells a successful joke at a party and then spends the next 90 minutes explaining why it was funny. Characters are stated, not developed. Most of the cast are there to carry spears or be eaten. Of Murnau (John Malkovich) we know only that he is arrogant, a sexual omnivore, and shoots dope. Of Shreck (Willem Dafoe) we know even less—he's a vampire who has a prior relationship with Murnau. Shreck should have been the focus of the film, its real subject. When he peers intently at the grainy black and white raw footage of a sunrise, we want to understand everything he is feeling; but Erige's interests apparently lay elsewhere, and Shreck remains for the most part unexploited. unexplored, and unexplained.
Willem Dafoe is a terrific actor with excellent range, and I have no quarrel with him receiving awards; but if truth be told, this is not an awards-caliber performance. He does an accent, he makes Mandarin gestures, he mugs. The make-up, which is outstanding, does the rest. Had Gilbert and Sullivan done a vampire operetta, Dafoe's Shreck would be right at home. As for Malkovich, one of the finest actors of his generation, this is not a shining moment. His accent wanders, and his devotion to the role seems shaky—which is understandable, since it appears to be designed solely as a commentary on the megalomania of all directors, another joke that grows tiresome. The upshot of this woeful mismatch of talent and material is that I had more fun hating Dracula 2000 than I did staring dully as Shadow of a Vampire bellywhomped and went splat.
It's conceivable that another great vampire film may yet be made. I'd like to see one that eschewed the rococo and did without door closings that sound like guillotines and footsteps like the Tread o' Doom, and concentrated on the dark animal aspects of a solitary monster, showing us his biological requirements and some of the small moments of his life. A figure not altogether deromanticized. Defrocked of his cool cape or shades or whatever, but not—not entirely, at least—of his human sensibilities. A character who must change as he lives. Generally speaking, though, vampires may be a played-out proposition. They've done a prolonged term as the romantic emblem of our fears concerning the afterlife, and the new millennium offers replacement terrors more relevant to the contemporary nightmare. However, vampires may retain value as satiric devices. A corporate vampire would be fun, humorous in its implicit redundancy. A vampire on Ecstasy would be a trip, and Vampire on Ecstasy isn't a bad title. Then there's my own vampire script, which has the working title Dark Pretender. Or maybe The Pretender would be classier. (I know there was a TV show with a similar name, but that's so over!).
Here's how it goes.
A powerful vampire runs for president and wins by turning a plurality of voters. The nation thrives. Private negotiations with world leaders, they're a snap now. Just one little bite and those ol' trade agreements get signed tout suite. Economy's rosy, world peace is starting to happen, and there's a bright golden haze on the meadow.
So the Pres knocks off an intern now and again...
What the hey!
But-then-it's-discovered-the-Pres-is-really-evil-with-a-plan-to-pardon-the-hellspawn-and-release-them-from-exile.
And what if that plan succeeds?
Wellsir, along comes another vampire president out of the great Southwest, and he's got a new vision for America. Aided by his loyal minions in Florida, he'll take care of them hellspawns. Imagine this digital poster. The White House superimposed over a bone-white full moon. Then the whole thing washes red. Very sexy. This could get green-lighted. No lie. It's got enough sizzle to attract a major star, and is sufficiently generic to please the bean counters. And it's got an important message, too. One that speaks to the heart of all our problems, and makes plain the only thing we know for certain about real vampires: They rule.
A wintry day in Portland, and I betook myself to the local multiplex to pass a few hours in my search for cinematic perfection. The lobby was, as usual, fairly empty, populated by a smattering of pimply Caucasian youths in black trousers and starched shirts who stared vacantly at bubbling vats of orange and purple liquid, while visions of personal high Quake scores danced in their heads. It took the little lady at the concession counter three tries to get my change right—my feeling was that the Education President had his work cut out for him. As I passed doorway after doorway surmounted by signs announcing the film playing within, I felt a curious pull from each of the doors, as if the product within were exerting a kind of gravity designed to drag in the braindead. Thank God, I was immune.
My viewing choice that day was Enemy at the Gates, a film by Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose) that focused on the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bleakest and bloodiest chapters of World War II. The battle was in actuality a war within a war and was fought mostly in the ruins of that city for 180 days, serving to blunt the German advance into Russia. Annaud's script seeks to lay credit for the Russian victory at the feet of one Vassili Zaitzev (Jude Law), a shepherd from the Urals whose skill as a sniper demoralizes the German officer cadre. Despite this simplistic thesis, the scenario provides the ground upon which a top-notch thriller might have been mounted. Unfortunately, this potential remains unrealized.
Enemy begins promisingly enough with Zaitzev's entry into the battle, arriving on a troop train, and then, packed into a rickety-looking boat with other fresh recruits, crossing the Volga into the smoke and fury of Stalingrad, all rendered in horrific, smoldering, corpse-ridden detail by Annaud's camera. Many of Zaitzev's fellows panic at the sight of the burning city and dive into the river, whereupon they are shot by Russian officers; but the little shepherd boy, trained by his grandfather as a marksman, remains calm. Even when forced by superiors to enter the battle without a weapon, he proceeds with determination, and eventually, after snatching up a rifle belonging to a fallen comrade, he succeeds in potting half-a-dozen Germans hidden in a ruined building. This attracts the interest of Commander Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a Soviet public relations officer, who in turn brings him to the attention of Nikita Kruschev (an underused Bob Hoskins). Kruschev and Danilov need to manufacture heroes in order to lift the spirits of Stalingrad's defenders, and they turn Zaitzev into a 40s version of a media darling. As young Vassili picks off German officers by the dozens, his picture comes to be featured in newspapers throughout the country and he begins to receive fan mail. His notoriety irritates the Nazi general staff, and they decide to dispatch the taciturn and grizzled Major Koenig (Ed Harris), head of the German sniper school, to kill him. A film that focuses on a duel between two master snipers has by necessity a structural kinship with submarine movies. In each, two skilled operatives, invisible to one another, must study their opponent's habits and seek to outthink rather than outfight him. During the film's first hour, Annaud does a more than credible job of establishing the requisite oppressive atmosphere and tension. We are shown the ultra-cautious day-to-day activities of the sniper teams and learn tidbits of lore regarding their deadly trade—for instance, in winter snipers customarily fill their mouths with snow so as not to give away their positions with puffs of frozen breath. Once Koenig enters the fray, it becomes clear that he is by far the better man of the two duelists. As members of Zaitzev's team are one-by-one slaughtered by Koenig's Annie Oakley-class marksmanship, it would appear that the Soviet hero is doomed. This further elevates the tension. How will our boy survive? Annaud's answer to this question, sad to say, is the movie's undoing. At the beginning of the second hour, he decides to elevate what has thus far been a mild mutual attraction between Zaitzev and Tania Chernova (Rachel Weiss) into a grand passion, then tosses in a Tania-infatuated Danilov to form a triangle, thus dissipating all the tension he has so painstakingly achieved.
The romance between Tania and Vassili proceeds at what seems a rather leisurely pace, when one considers that each day the defenders of Stalingrad woke to the knowledge that they well might not live to see another morning. According to diaries and various other sources, on any given night during the battle, male and female soldiers, goaded by the fevers of war and desperation, commonly had sex in the aisles of the crowded barracks. Tania and Vassili do, indeed, have sex in the barracks, but they manage this surreptitiously, while others sleep around them, and though this semi-clandestine act does serve to communicate a degree of desperation, it scarcely matches the animalistic level of fear displayed by their brothers-and-sisters-in-arms. To keep Koenig occupied while Vassili and Tania flirt and finally consummate, Annaud inserts a frail sub-plot concerning a wee Russian shoeshine boy, a pale, soulful tyke who pals up with the deadly major and is so transparently a spy, one begins to suspect that Koenig's inability to perceive the fact and his minimalist speech patterns are both the result of drug abuse. By the time these two threads have become fully realized, I was no longer much involved in the film. I could see exactly how the ending would develop. Danilov, tormented by the green-eyed monster, would betray Zaitzev, and thus inadvertently expose Tania to death or dishonor, or perhaps cause her to lose the expensive cosmetics that had throughout kept her looking like the poster girl for the Stalingrad War-obics Fitness Video. In the meantime, Koenig would at last tumble to the shoeshine boy's perfidy and whack him in some gruesome manner, thereby justifying his bloody fate. And ultimately, overborne by guilt at his treachery, Danilov would sacrifice himself in some ludicrous fashion that would allow Zaitzev to triumph, love to reign supreme, and the Hollywood Gods to smirk at having transformed Stalingrad into a date movie.
Why watch any more of this crud was my feeling. After tossing my empty box of Goobers at the screen, I hied myself out into the lobby of the multiplex and zipped up my jacket, preparing to brave the cold and the rain; but just then my eye was caught by the alluring title Exit Wounds suspended in brightly lit letters above a nearby door. It cast a winking sugary light that spoke to my soul in a most peculiar way: Mmmm, I thought with a sort of doltish delectation. Steven Seagal. Maybe, I told myself, a bit of the old ultraviolence would cleanse the palette. I slipped into the theater just in time to see Sgt. Orrin Bird (Seagal) save the Vice-President of the United States by throwing him off a bridge into a river. Cool. This exactly reflected my feelings concerning all vice-presidents—don't hurt 'em, but drop 'em off something every once in a while to keep them alert so they can perform as vital partners with the President in our democratic process... Yes, indeedy! But after the initial opening blast of hurt and boom boom, I grew deflated. Leathery, bloated, with more creases circling his neck than an ancient redwood trunk has rings, Seagal looked like a man who would be more comfortable doing an AARP commercial than kicking some giant Asiatic guy through a glass wall. His martial artistry was now the creation of careful editing—I imagined him on the set, having his foot jacked up to eye level, with an RN holding a cortisone injection hovering just off-camera. Some of the dialog, taken from the source novel by John Westerberg, was funny, even trenchant, but watching Seagal's arthritic aikido was simply too depressing, and eventually I wandered out into the lobby again, only to be attracted by yet another sign. More than attracted. I was bedazzled, pumped full of daft anticipation and tongue-lolling eagerness. What was happening to me? The name of the film on the sign was Heartbreakers. Mmm. Sigourney Weaver.
Alas, this story of mother-and-daughter con artists (mom marries 'em, daughter seduces 'em, mom divorces 'em and gets a humongus settlement) soon suffered a myocardial infarction caused by inept timing and a lame script.
Once again I hit the lobby and struggled toward the exit, only to be seduced by Traffic, which proved to have all the dramatic verve of an ABC Afterschool Special. The British miniseries that provided the source material was a zillion times better. Once free of Traffic's puny spell, I fell prey to the call of Hannibal. Ridley Scott's Florence is even prettier than his Rome, and judging by his recent personal appearances, Sir Anthony Hopkins' Lecter is hardly a leap from the humorless dead-eyed thespian who showed up at the Oscars as a presenter. There followed The Mexican (an Oscar for Julia, and nothing for Brad? Whass up with that? He's every bit the actor she is. Maybe even better. Time, I say, to give the Academy a pants-down spanking!). Then it was off to Oh Brother Where Art Thou? (the Coen Brothers join the long line of Yankees who have sought to write with humorous condescension about the South and as a consequence wound up looking like dorks). Then Chocolat ("Let's make a witling faux-French farce about chocolate and sex and we'll pull in all the cretins who think Ms. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Lite, Isabella Allende, is a real writer"). And finally, Finding Forrester (invaluable life lesson to be had from this one. Take Sean Connery to an empty baseball park, then—later—have him stand behind you and yell, "Pound the keys!" Literary greatness will be yours).
I staggered out into the lobby, having watched segments of half-a-billion dollars' worth of mind-fogging, dimwitted, uniformly loathsome product, my mind afire with questions such as how come Sigourney Weaver's breasts keep migrating north?, and whatever happened to Gus Van Sant? Can Catherine Zeta-Jones out-act a bag of kitty litter?, and why would you hire Ed Harris for a movie, give him about seven lines, and then have him spend most of his screen time sitting around wearing a half-smile and a Nazi uniform, looking as if he had just smoked a blunt? And this to every theater that runs the message featuring the little girl from The Bicentennial Man as a gruff-voiced cowboy who warns us not to smoke or talk... Don't you realize that by continuing to show this unbelievably annoying commercial for proper theater behavior, you're setting up the kid as the target for a million stalkers? I was trembling, nauseated. My heart was doing poly-rhythms. I doubted that my depleted physical resources could stand another spirit-blighting hit of Hollywood gunge. A man's kindly bespectacled face appeared in my field of vision and a hand grasped my arm and helped me to my feet—I hadn't realized that I had fallen.
The man took my pulse, asked me to open my mouth, and after a cursory examination, said, "MPT."
"Huh?" I said.
"Multiplexitois," he replied. "Caused by overexposure to cinematic mediocrity. Causes something of a lemming syndrome in the victim. Compels him to watch movie after movie until all tolerance and critical acumen are stripped away." He gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "Don't worry. It's rarely fatal. However, if I were you, I'd get out of here. A really bad movie could be dangerous for you." He handed me a card good for two free Kurosawa videos. "Take two and call me in the morning," he said. "You should be fine." Thank God, I thought as he walked away, that there was nothing left to see.
But I was wrong.
As I headed for the exit, my eye fell to a sign above a theater tucked away in the corner of the multiplex, a door opening into a darkness thicker and deeper than any I had that afternoon engaged. I tried to hold myself back, but I was being sucked in as surely as I might had I drawn too near a collapsed star. I understood this was a darkness from which I might never emerge, and I called out to the teenaged staff, some of whom were pretending to sweep up, others gaping at the blinking lights of the digital posters. Only a few, perhaps those who had some primitive command of English, even looked my way. One—an asthenic youth with the words NIHIL spelled out by pimples on his pasty brow—opened his lipless mouth to expose snaggly yellow fangs and laughed. None of the rest showed any sign of response. I was a goner. I could think of nothing apart from bad movies and the terrible actors who populated them. I had a disorienting vision of Michael Douglas clenching his jaw muscle, a movement by which he expresses the entire range of his emotions, and I wondered if, apart from citizens of the planet Metron, anyone really had a last name such as Zeta. As I passed beneath the sign, I looked up and caught a last glimpse of the words that would contrive my critical epitaph and conveyed the quintessential horror toward which I was being dragged: Dude, Where's My Car?
Before Star Wars there was Hidden Fortress, a film by Akira Kurosawa that provided the source material for George Lucas's epic fanboy treat. Thus it's only fair that an Asian epic of sorts, the best pure entertainment in recent years, cops a few Lucasoid licks on its way to becoming a girl-power version of the trilogy. Perhaps it's sheer coincidence that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon revolves about the story of a beautiful princess Jen (Ziyi Zhang) manipulated by a Darth Vaderesque female, Jade Fox (Pei Pei Chang); in love with Lo, a rascally outlaw (Chen Chang); tutored by Jedi-like soul warrior Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat); and given Yoda love by Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). True, a great many fantasies contain variations on these elements. But there are a number of clues, such as a bar scene with a distinctly Star Wars-ish feel, that lead me to believe this is no coincidence. Similarities aside, however, Dragon stands in relation to Lucas' work as man does to the amoeba. Whereas Star Wars was all teenage whizbang gosharootie, Dragon manages to jam the essence of the original trilogy (minus, thankfully, any reference to club-wielding teddy bears) into slightly less than two hours, and replaces Lucas' juvenile humor with soulfulness and martial artistry taken to the level of ballet. It was director Ang Lee's (The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil) stated intention to create an homage to the B-quality Chinese sword fantasies he watched as a child, films whose cultural niche was similar to that of our 1940s and '50s westerns. This tradition, previously dominated by pictures laden with cheap effects that effected a burlesque of Chinese opera, has undergone a renaissance in recent years with the production of such films as Storm Riders and A Man Called Hero, big budget Hong Kong releases with special effects that rival those of The Matrix and featuring Ekin Chang and Aaron Kwok, a pair of young actors verging on superstar status in the world of Asian cinema. Riders tells the story of the emperor of the "Martial Arts World" (veteran Japanese heavy Sonny Chiba), the greatest swordsman of his time, who kills two great warriors and raises their sons as his own. The sons (Kwok and Chang) have a falling out over the affections of the emperor's daughter, but unite in the end to defeat the evil emperor. The story is a marvel of complexity, tracking—in addition to the main thread—the fates of such characters as an oracular monk who pals around with a god disguised as a monkey, and a villager who cuts off his sword arm so it can replace the missing arm of one of the heroes. The magical duels, of which there are many, put to shame anything along these lines done to date by Hollywood—of special note is the final conflict, which takes place in the "Sword Grave," a plot of malignant earth in which the emperor plants the living swords of his numerous victims.
Hero marks a stylistic evolution of the genre, utilizing a non-linear narrative that cuts back and forth between China and America during the mid- and late 19th Century. The storyline of the movie is so complex, it would take a separate review to do it justice; but put succinctly, it is a generational saga involving father-and-son warriors and the resolution in America of enmities that began years before in China, treating of the exploitation of Chinese immigrants both by Americans and by their own people. The set pieces include an attack by magical shadows on the streets of Manhattan, a performance of traditional Chinese dance that masks the rescue of oppressed railroad workers, and a tremendous duel with magic and swords that takes place atop the Statue of Liberty. Until Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon happened along, this film established the high-water mark for the Chinese version of high fantasy.
Both the aforementioned films are plotted hyperkinetically, with lots of twists and turns and subplots, and characters who often are not what they originally appear to be. Dragon, relatively speaking, eschews complexity of this sort and uses two love stories to ground the action of the movie. One of these threads involves the unconsummated love between Li Mu Bai and Shu Lien, both of whom have rejected their personal desires in order to follow the path of duty and honor. The second thread treats of the volatile relationship between the bratty, rebellious Princess Jen and the outlaw Lo. This simplicity of story, so at variance with the convoluted structures of traditional sword flicks, may be the factor that has caused many Asians to dismiss the film as being aimed at a white audience.
(Of course, if one accepts this assumption as true, it would logically follow that George Lucas' target audience for Star Wars was the Far East.)
Another element that separates Dragon from its cousins is its loving attention to setting —not since Lawrence of Arabia have the story and landscape of a film heavy on action been so thoroughly intertwined (indeed, during Dragon's wonderful desert sequences, Oscar-winning cinematographer Peter Pau incorporates a number of visual quotes from David Lean's masterpiece); however, in Dragon there is a great variety of landscape, and setting is used to reflect the characters' moods rather than, as is the case in Lawrence, to frame them. Then, too, there is the character of Princess Jen—she seems more contemporary riot girrl than Ching Dynasty princess, willing to rebel against her life of privilege in order to seek personal freedom. But what ultimately elevates Dragon to the status of a masterpiece of its genre are the stunning fight sequences, most achieved not through wire work, as is customary in Hong Kong and in American films like The Matrix, but with the deft usage of CGI graphics. The initial sequence in which Shu Lien chases the thief who has stolen the magical Jade Sword over the rooftops is likely go down as one the signature moments in the history of the cinema. It is the theft of the Jade Sword by a masked thief that ignites the plot, uniting Li Mu Bai—whose sword it is—and Shu Lien in a hunt for the culprit, who turns out to be Princess Jen. The princess is being manipulated by the wizardly Jade Fox, who craves the sword for herself and is an old enemy of Li Mu Bai, having killed his teacher in the martial arts. Shu Lien strives to lead Jen onto the path of virtue, but following a duel between the two and a flashback sequence that reprises the inception of the love affair between the princess and the outlaw, Jen runs away. The pursuit of the princess and Jade Fox's attempts to shape events so as bring down her old enemy, Li Mu Bai, comprise the remainder of the plot, but at the heart of the movie is the somber resolution of the relationship between Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai, and its effect on Jen, who, when she finally comes to sober maturity by film's end, is then faced with a choice between love and a life of royal duty. In most sword flicks, the acting is generally (to be kind) broad, but the actors in Dragon, manage to raise the bar. Chow Yun Fat's screen presence is, as always, possessed of enormous gravitas and Michelle Yeoh, the real star of the film, turns in an astonishingly subtle performance as Li Mu Bai's forlorn love and Jen's mentor. That Julia Roberts, an actress whose talents are best suited to commercials touting aids for vaginal dryness, should win an Oscar while Yeoh is left off the short list is a monumental idiocy of which only the Academy is capable. The mixture of rage, grief (over the death of Li Mu Bai), and compassion that Yeoh wordlessly conveys in her brief confrontation with Jen toward the end of the movie is stunning. I have read a few critiques that describe her acting in Dragon as flat, but that, simply put, is ridiculous. The large part of her emotionality is externalized, announced by her actions, her gestures, and that is quite a difficult trick to pull off. For my mind, Yeoh's take on Shu Lien is the most completely realized action performance I've seen for a couple of decades.
Looking back over the list of Hollywood's entries in the field of high fantasy films, a list that inspires shuddery flashbacks to such experiences such as Ladyhawke, Willow, Dragonheart, Conan The Barbarian, Legend, The Sword and the Sorcerer, and Dungeons and Dragons (wherein the formerly redoubtable Jeremy Irons takes what may wind up being an irredeemable step into cinematic irrelevance), it's hard to come up with even one movie that belongs in the same league with those covered by this review, not to mention others that spring to mind: Heroic Trio (also featuring Michelle Yeoh); Wang Kar Wai's existentialist revision of the genre, Ashes of Time; Tsui Hark's Chinese Ghost Story; and Zu, Warriors of Moon Mountain, to name but a few. Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves is a borderline qualifier. And if we extend the parameters of the genre a bit so as to include films like Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, then we might add a few contenders; but otherwise the view is bleak. Perhaps the release of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings will overcome this lack, but it is nonetheless curious that, given their technical and acting resources, and the wealth of source material available, the studios have failed the genre to such a resounding degree. It may be that American filmmakers have no great feel for a tradition that does not mirror their own country's traditions. This said, one wonders why no one has yet tried to make a film from Steven King's Dark Tower series (a chronicle that first saw light in F&SF), which retells The Song of Roland from the standpoint of a mythical gunslinger, a purely American ikon.
It's inevitable that Dragon, what with its financial success, will spawn imitations... and then again, maybe not. If the strikes threatened by the Writers and Screen Actors Guilds go forward, the studios will be unable to obey their cretinous instincts for quite some time, and instead of having to watch shabby imitations, we will be afflicted with shelf-sitting films that the tasteless arbiters of Hollywood culture decided were not good enough to distribute. Given the average quality of product in release, this prospect borders on the obscene. Some of these films (most horribly and imminently notable, the racing movie Driven starring Sly Stallone) are already coming off the shelves, and God only knows what gems of high fantasy have been gathering dust in studio archives. Could we be in store for another giddy romp with that cheesy crescent-moon-headed devil guy in Legend 2? Will Daughter of Ladyhawke lay an enormous egg (I like Drew Barrymore for the part—she could pass for Rutger Hauer's outside child)? Might Schwarzenegger return as Conan the Right Wing Intellectual? Will Kull kum again?
Far better to stay at home and rewatch Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or any one of a number of other good Asian fantasy flicks than to risk the soul-death brought on by viewing one too many rotten displays of celluloid witch-mages, overgrown iguanas, and urping trolls who resemble Ernest Borgnine emerging from a mud bath. But whether or not the strikes occur, until some consciousness-changing event influences the tendencies of American high fantasy films, the marquee of any theater showing such woeful efforts as we have become accustomed to should not bother listing the title of the movie, but spell out instead the cliché that has been stated explicitly or implicitly in so many less than magnificent literary fantasies: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.
Ah, summer! Baseball, ice cream vendors, girls in bikinis, kids splashing and laughing in the spray from a fire hydrant. A joyful time for muggers, for all manner of violent criminals and their helpless prey. A time for the singing of National Anthems and the joining of parades, for crowning beauty queens and vandalizing junior highs closed until the fall. Time for the good drugs to hit the streets on urban corners everywhere, and for wrinkling one's nose in disgust, jumping to one's feet and shouting, What's that smell?
Oh, right...
A time for summer movies.
Time for the high-priced mediocrities we have deified to put in their seasonal appearances. Time for Travolta and Pitt and Cruise to rev up those trademark vacuous grins. Time, too, for soon-to-be legendary has-beens Stallone and Willis and Schwarzenegger (and won't he be swell in the role of the maddened bastard warrior child of Norman Schwarzkopf in Desert Storm Trooper?). Time for Robert de Niro's annual mailed-in where's-my-check performance. Time for Anthony Hopkins to do the same. Time for Matt Damon to prove anew that he is an even more inept actor than the spectacularly bad Matthew McConaughey. Time for Julia Roberts... and don't you think now that she's supplanted Streisand as the worst actress ever to win an Oscar, it's time for her to direct herself in some truly important vehicle, like QVC: The Movie? Time for the latest in a long, long line of Jennifer Love Hewitts to milk a minor league career out of breathing deeply. Time for exploitative violence to inspire the imaginations of twisted high schoolers, and for some hundred-million-dollar wad of glup to insinuate itself into the American consciousness and activate the national drool reflex.
But while we await the tidal wave of fecal matter that spews forth annually from the myriad orifices of Studio City, a festival of art like none other, this year's list headed up by AI, a retelling of the Pinocchio story helmed by button-pushing hackmeister supreme Steven Spielberg that promises to generate sufficient gooey sentiment to send anyone with the intelligence of a mud weevil scrambling for an airsick bag... Before we get to all that, there are a number of independent films in current release that deserve our attention. Perhaps the most interesting of these is Memento, a genre-bending exercise in noir that marks the debut of British writer-director Christopher Nolan. Memento tells the story of Leonard Shelby, an insurance investigator played with sinewy intensity by Australian actor Guy Pearce, who made a big impression as the straight-arrow detective in L.A. Confidential opposite Russell Crowe. Leonard, injured in the attack by person or persons unknown that led to his wife's rape and murder, can no longer form new memories. He recalls the details of his life up to the night of the murder, but if he talks to someone for more than a few minutes, he runs the risk of forgetting who that person is and what they are discussing. As he goes about the daunting task of solving his wife's murder, Leonard is forced to shore up his faulty memory by taking Polaroids of the people he meets, writing himself notes, and tattooing information essential to the investigation on his chest and arms. On top of all this quirkiness, Nolan spins his narrative backwards, opening the film with its emotional climax (or is it?) and ending at the beginning of the story, a process that creates a surprising and truly sinister intellectual climax.
As Leonard careens through lowlife L.A., searching for a man with the initials J.G., he is befriended (or is he manipulated?) by a self-proclaimed small-time hustler, Teddy, the part done to a turn by stellar character actor Joe Pantoliano, now on view as Ralphie in The Sopranos, and by Natalie the sexy and devious barmaid (Carrie Ann Moss of The Matrix). Because of his afflicted memory, Leonard is easy to take advantage of—for example, the manager of the motel where he is staying is renting him two rooms at the same time, neither of which Leonard recalls—and this allows Nolan to leaven the dark materials of the film with a necessary seasoning of humor, placing emphasis on the fact that everyone Leonard encounters, even old acquaintances, he is in essence meeting for the first time, and thus is forced to explain his condition over and over again to the same people.
The artfulness of Nolan's narration cannot be overstated. We are led Polaroid by Polaroid, misconception by misconception, backward through what appears to be Leonard's nightmare. But little in this film is what it appears, and we are forced, along with Leonard, not only to figure out the answers he is seeking but also to separate the important questions from the infinity of questions that comprises his day-to-day life. If this film had been made by a big studio, it's quite likely that all the essential information concerning the plot would have been frontloaded, because the studio heads consistently obey Barnum's dictum that no one ever lost a buck by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. A case in point, The Truman Show, a script that was considered brilliant but unmakeable for years. Andrew Nicol's original script, which took place in an edgy futuristic fake Manhattan, did not clue the audience in from the outset on Truman's situation, but made them work it out for themselves. When it was finally sold for several million dollars, the first thing that was done was a rewrite designed to frontload all the information that some studio airhead figured would be just too doggone hard for those salt-of-the-earth types in Kansas, in Buffalo and Dubuque and Lincoln, to scry out on their own. Yet although it had no studio backing, Memento has as of this date the highest per-theater average earnings of any film in current release. And the reason for this is that instead of pandering to the audience, it challenges them; it gives them something to think about rather than stuffing them full of starchy treats and inducing a two-hour coma. Another debut film of remarkable quality is the Mexican entry for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch), which interweaves three stories concerning three pairs of men and women (one hesitates to call them couples) living in Mexico City with their assorted dogs (animal lovers be warned—though no dogs were harmed during the making of this film, lots and lots of dogs look very much as if they were harmed). Director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's nonlinear style of narration has caused some to declare him the Mexican Tarantino, but that is damning with faint praise. Any similarity between Perros and Pulp Fictionis purely structural, for Inarritu is a realist. His characters are fully developed people with tooth decay, marital problems, and desperate needs, and not, say, cartoonish hit men who speak in word-balloon dialogue given a gloss of reality by healthy dollops of profanity.
The first arc, "Octavio and Susana," tells of a young man (Gael Garcia Bernal) living in the barrio, who has a crush on his sister-in-law Susana—she's married to his abusive brother Ramiro. In order to earn money with which to win her, Octavio enters the lower depths of the dogfighting world, utilizing the ferocious family pet to good advantage. Meanwhile, in "Daniel and Valeria," a successful editor dumps his wife and family to live in a new apartment with a neurotic supermodel and her lap dog. When the dog vanishes into a rat-infested hole in the floor of the apartment and refuses to come out, the story descends into the darkest of dark comedies. In "El Chivo and Maru," one of Mexico's most respected actors, Emilio Echevarría inhabits the role of El Chivo, an ex-revolutionary/ex-con turned hitman who wanders the streets of Mexico City in the guise of a homeless person, pushing a cart full of junk, and lives in a rundown house along with several dogs. He is haunted by the memory of the family he abandoned, especially by that of his daughter whom he has not seen since she was two. When he receives a commission to assassinate a philandering businessman, he seizes this opportunity both to redefine his life and to make a gesture of reconciliation with his daughter.
At two and half hours, the movie checks in a bit long for my tastes—I thought a few minutes could have been chopped out of the second story—and Inarritu's use of symbols is a touch hamfisted at times; but these are quibbles, and all three threads ultimately are united in what must be countenanced an epic vision of contemporary Mexico, the characters brought together by a single violent event on the city's streets. One remarkable thing about this unity is the stylistic disparity utilized by Inarritu to narrate the three stories—during "Octavio and Susana," his camera work has the sure-handed agitation of a Dogma filmmaker such as Lars Von Trier, whereas in "Daniel and Valeria," he opts for a considerably more static viewpoint. Despite this, the seams are barely noticeable, and this speaks not only to Inarritu's technical virtuosity, but to his skill at intermingling his themes so that the viewer's mind accommodates the shifting camera styles with little or no difficulty.
Two other debut films that are unlikely to be be showing up at your local multiplex, but are worth seeking out wherever they are playing, are Eduard Valli's Himalaya and Australian Anthony Dominick's Chopper. Valli, a world-renowned photographer who has lived for the last two decades in the Dolpo region of Tibet, has created a Nepalese version of an old Howard Hawks western, focusing on a cattle drive (make that a yak drive) during which a young herdsman challenges the authority of the chief herdsman. The simplicity and innocence of the story are lent a powerful universality by the breathtaking mountains that give the film its name. Valli's camera caresses the landscape and lovingly establishes the majesty of this seemingly timeless place and causes one to understand why the Himalayas have been considered gods by those who live in their shadows. If after seeing this film you do not leave the theater at least contemplating a trip to Nepal and Tibet, then you must have been sitting in the back row with your head in a glue-impregnated paper sack. Valli's record of the great sweep of hills and valleys and peaks of the region has more in common with music, with the glories of Handel and Bach, than it does with any cinematic analogue. Put simply, this is a beautiful and emotionally satisfying film such as has not been made by an American director for nearly half a century.
Chopper relates the true (purportedly) story of Mark "Chopper" Read, Australia's most notorious modern-day criminal, who claims to have murdered fifteen people (maybe) and has gone on to become one of that country's biggest best-selling authors. Dominick for the most part steers clear of flashy camera work; he is wise enough to stand back and let his star, comedian Eric Bana, do most of the the heavy lifting. Bana's performance as Read, starting out as a wild Tasmanian lad and ending as a tattooed, earless maniac, is by turns scary, funny, and—strangely enough—somewhat sympathetic. It's hard to imagine there will be a better performance on film this year, and while Dominick's understated direction is not as pyrotechnic as those of Inarritu and Nolan, it's evident that he has made some wonderful choices throughout and is largely responsible for getting this superb performance out of Bana.
Of the four directors mentioned herein, two have already signed Hollywood contracts, and it's likely that Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu will soon follow suit. Only Eduard Valli is liable to remain unsigned, as he appears content with his life in Tibet. What this means is there's an excellent chance that Memento, Amores Perros, and Chopper will be, respectively, the last interesting films made by Nolan, Innaritu, and Dominick. Hollywood studios have a long and unfortunate history of gobbling up young talented directors and either transforming them into hacks or tying them up with unmakeable projects in order to keep them from signing with anyone else. Darren Aronovsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) has been attached to Batman Beyond. James Mangold, director of the acclaimed indie flick Heavy, has since directed two massive turkeys, Copland and Girl, Interrupted. Nick Gomez (from Laws of Gravity to Drowning Mona), Gus Van Sant (Drugstore Cowboy to Finding Forester), Gregorio Nava (El Norte to Selena), Mary Herron (I Shot Andy Warhol to American Psycho), Jocelyn Morehouse and P.J. Hogan (Proof to My Best Friend's Wedding), Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors to Mulholland Falls), Vincent Ward (The Navigator to What Dreams May Come), Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock to Green Card), Peter Jackson (Heavenly Creatures to The Frighteners and a string of movies considered too horrible for release)... The list of those who have been willingly sucked into the maw of the Hollywood machine and drained of their talent verges on the endless. The entire notion of the indie film has been co-opted. Now most young directors consider their fledgling work to be a job application, a ticket to the big time. Rarely these days does a good indie director make more than one worthwhile movie before being drafted into the soul-less ranks of the spielbergers and the zemeckiis.
Perhaps it's human nature to go for the loot no matter the sacrifice; nonetheless it's sad to see the not-so-ancient but honorable tradition of the outlaw filmmaker become no more than a farm system for the most venal and brain-dead edifice of American industry. Soon the drunken tides of summer will blow chunks over the multiplexes, disgorging a stew of unappetizing green sobber in which float wads of Travoltaesque blandness and other uncured slabs of American ham, enough video-game violence and wiseass dialog and CGI monsters to satisfy a billion morons... So come on! Dip yourself a bowlful, drunk deep and get stupified. But if you're in the mood for something different, check out the four films mentioned herein, and you might just get a clue as to what movies might have been.
Word has it that prior to its general release, Steven Spielberg premiered his new mega-glop wad of saccharine and special effects, AI, for an audience of MIT students and professors, many of them involved with machine intelligence. Apparently Spielberg's ego remains unsatisfied by the adulation of the dull-eyed millions who munch and gape their way through his sentimental epics, and thus he requires the validation of those whom the movie's subject matter most concerns. So it was that in a highly publicized noble gesture, he donated prints of his slavery-era film, Amistad, to California high schools with student populations dominated by Afro-Americans, perhaps feeling that these young folks might derive poignant insights from his deep, heartfelt understanding of negritude, rather than—as was the case—causing them to go "Huh?," slip on their headphones, and get real with a joint by Tupac or Notorious B.I.G. According to reliable sources, the reaction of the machine-intelligence people was even less kind, ranging from scathing comments on the film's implausibility to outright derisive laughter.
Poor Steve. Nobody knows the trouble he's seen.
Denied a Best Director nomination for The Color Purple, in which he turned Alice Walker's delicate novel of poor blacks in the South into a cloying load of zippety-doodah featuring the godawful acting debut of Oprah Winfrey; shunned by the youth of South Central; and now his latest spielburger must suffer the slings and arrows of the pocket-protector set.
AI, inspired by Brian Aldiss' vignette "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," began its cinematic life as a project of the late Stanley Kubrick, who decided—against Aldiss' advice—to transform the story of an artificially intelligent child unloved by its mum into a retelling of "Pinocchio." In the hands of a great filmmaker, especially one of Kubrick's cold, meticulous sensibility, the movie might have avoided the excess of sentimentality inherent in the idea; but when Spielberg—who never met a button he failed to push—inherited the project and then rewrote the script, it was pre-ordained that the spirit of cutesy-poo would be invoked to the max, and some big-eyed waif like a Keane child come to life would be chosen to embody The Machine Who Wants To Be A Real Boy, and that at some point said big-eyed waif would be depicted staring with "Aw, goshes!" awe up into white Jesuslight, and everybody in the theater would be either sobbing or spewing stomach acid and liquefied popcorn into the aisles.
Pray to be among the latter. To weep during a film by St. Spielberg, to surrender to the entirely unsubtle manipulations of the most crassly commercial, hanky-drenching, family values-humping faux-auteur in the history of the universe... Well, it's just not a good sign.
Apart from a smattering of cuddly robots and computers with sexy voices, machines generally have been cloaked with menace by Hollywood, perceived as agents of chaos or evil. Exemplary of this are the horny computer of the Demon Seed that impregnated Julie Christie; the sinister computer of The Forbin Project that sought to become humanity's master; the unforgettable Hal of Kubrick's 2001; etc., etc., these etceteras inclusive of a small army of movies and TV shows concerning computer-run buildings that attempt to kill their tenants. There has been at least one previous film that treated of a machine intelligence who had the urge to be—or rather, harbored delusions of being—a real boy, this the uninspired D.A.R.Y.L. But neither one bad film, nor even several, should detract from the scope and dramatic simplicity of the basic concept.
Choosing big stories with broad appeal has always been a Spielberg strength, and early in his career, it appeared that this along with his technical imagination might produce that rarest of breeds, a commercial director capable of making films of a certain quality. But somewhere along the way, Spielberg's artistic instincts went soft, his epic sensibility betrayed him, and he began to make films in which easy sentiment was penciled in for honest, earned emotion. Commercially speaking, this was a canny decision, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with making commercial movies. There's a place for all of them... even Adam Sandler films. My guilty pleasures include a number of calorie-less comedies and ultraviolent actioners. But Spielberg's movies have achieved such a potent level of commerciality, he now bestrides the world of the studios like a vast, rather goatlike colossus, having become both figurehead and the leading exponent of a machine that churns out tasty-looking, brain-deadening garbage masquerading as art and funnels it down the throats of a burgeoning race of Homer Simpsons who—having been nourished on such sewage—have predictably grown increasingly brain-dead and eager for more donuts. Why Spielberg threw away his abilities as an artist and evolved into the pope of professional pandering, the titan of tear-jerking, the Mister Please-Please-Please-the-Lowest-Common-Denominator Himself, I have no idea. Some will tell you it was due to the fit of pique he suffered after Close Encounters was shunned by the Academy. Shamed and reviled, unloved, he wandered the streets of lower Hollywood for days, preaching the gospel to whoever would listen, targeted by brickbats and the laughter of whores, until at last, despairing, he stood on a sewer grating with rank steam rising up around him, muttered a Kabalistic spell, and was subsumed into the lower orders of the Damned. Now I don't altogether buy into this story—I've also heard it was his mother's cousin, Max, who advised Stevie to forget all that dreck about quality and go for the loot. But whatever the case, a close examination of his recent films testifies that some degrading influence is at work. I submit as evidence the regrettable Amistad, being Steven's filmic assertion that slavery was very likely immoral, and containing one of the worst casting decisions in the history of cinema, that of signing to the role of a Pre-Revolutionary lawyer Matthew MacConaughey, an actor who may one day be known as the Matt Damon of the late 90s; Saving Private Ryan, which is basically an episode of the old TV show Combat with an okay Grand Guignol beginning and a mawkish framing device, and features the Mister Potato Head of contemporary thespians, Tom Hanks; the ludicrously over-hyped Schindler's List, which should be on no one's list of decent Holocaust movies, a Grade C picture with Grade A cinematography, another mawkish framing device, and little sad kiddies staring up into light, a film to which we owe an eternal debt of hatred for giving us yet another half-baked British ham whose acting is all accent and wan looks, the loathsome and completely one-dimensional Ralph Fiennes, who stands to become the incessantly dewy-eyed cinematic successor to the unrelentingly dewy-eyed Omar Sharif...
I started this review well prior to the release of AI, even before watching any trailers for the film (in one of which, I should add, Hayley Joel does that staring-up-into-white-light thing), and I will finish it three weeks before the release date, because I do not believe it's necessary to see it (though at some point, after loading up on happy pills, I will doubtless drag myself off to the multiplex for a matinee, if for no other reason than to test my endurance). I can tell you right now that the money will be on the screen as regards the production values, and that between that every highly paid critical pimp that ever there was will be screeching "Oscar, Oscar!" for the waiflike Hayley Joel Osment (The Sixth Sense), and that the film will be lauded for its many virtues by the clones of Joel Siegel, and that none of this will have any meaning whatsoever, because AI will have all the illuminative value of a neon suppository. As far as entertainment value goes... well, picture a waffle made of styrofoam inundated in a gallon of heavy syrup.
If I am wrong, I will retract these unkind words.
But that's a serious long shot.
One clue to the film's quality is the idiotic tag line attached to all promos:
HIS LOVE IS REAL
BUT HE IS NOT
Hmmm, I thought on first seeing this, Spielberg may be offering an ontological argument here, i.e., God is dead, but his legacy lives in us as love, blah blah blah... But upon further deliberation I have decided that, No, alas, it's not even that swift—Steve was being literal. Which presents a problem, Like, okay... I get he means that Haley Joel's character is a machine, thus unreal (I personally think that machines ARE real; however, Stevie had a bad experience with a mechanical shark and may still be in denial). But how the hell is his love real? Because his program is uploaded from a human mind, and thus real? How real is that? Having not seen the film, I'm left to ponder, for all the sense the copy makes, it might as well read:
HIS CRUD IS TEAL
SO'S HIS SNOT
Tag lines aside, what this film is about, really, is not whether Haley Joel the cute machine lad is or ever will be a genuwine boy. Naw, it's about combining the right mix of mushy strings with a sad wittle pookie guy and a harsh cold unfriendly world and then just when you think it's all so mean and nothin's fair... Whammo! A bullshit transcendent ending and a soaring theme that will send a kazillion or so tear-stained hairless monkeys streaming toward the exits believing they have thought something, when actually all that has happened is that they have paid eight-to-twelve bucks to take another foreign object up the yin-yang.
It may seem that I'm being too hard on America's most talented billionaire, and maybe I am. I'm sure that Steve's love is real, equally sure that he is not, and that he's a prince of a guy with a Cinemascope-sized heart who doubtless spoonfeeds his children the same vitaminless pap he feeds the world. So fucking what? He's no less a schlockmeister for all that, and to anyone with a living brain who believes the radical notion that entertainment should not be absent of intelligence and should have at its core a soul, a passion, and not a happy face painted on a balloon, and that stories can be told in which the noble and the inspiring are expressed honestly, vigorously, in terms of the common measure of the human spirit, without resorting to the Welch Men's Chorus humming a glorioso passage in the background to cue our tears... To anyone who feels this way, Spielberg must be considered the high priest of Moloch or whatever god it is that has risen from the ashes of literature and art to inundate civilization with its vomitus. Every cretinoid producer and director in Hollywood who worships at the Mel Gibson Memorial Blockbuster Temple of Explosive Faith has a statue of Spielberg on his or her mantle and each night sacrifices a virgin cockroach in hopes that someday they may become a demiurge like Him. In other words, He (along with His chief minions, Robert Zemeckis, the perpetrator of Forrest Gump, and Chris Columbus, the artiste behind Mrs. Doubtfire and The Bicentennial Man) is spawning others like himself. I know I'm only talking about a lousy film director guy, an ordinary guy named Steven, but seriously, folks, if you care about maintaining literacy or having your grandkids grow up in a society where books can be found outside museums, or even if you merely want to take up rational thought as a hobby, for all intents and purposes, His name might just as well be Legion.
At the end of AI, Steven Spielberg’s filmic molestation of the Pinocchio story, after the credits have rolled, there is a final black frame on which the words “For Stanley Kubrick” are imprinted. If this exercise in manipulative ineptitude is to be viewed as a tribute to Kubrick, we must then consider every beer fart ever loosed to be a tribute to the Big Bang. True, Spielberg does incorporate elements of Kubrick’s original script, and these are nice to look at. But they stand out like islands in a river of pink ooze, and serve merely to point up the overall impotence of the piece.
The most astonishing thing about AI is how uninvolving it is. Spielberg’s work generally achieves a level of competence that enlists tearful reactions even from those who have no sympathy for what he is trying to do. But AI’s characters are so crudely drawn, so ploddingly stated, it is impossible to identify with them, despite Spielberg’s thoroughly unsubtle use of somber light and misted eyes and a multitude of other tricks designed to pluck at our heartstrings. The situation of the film is this: Martin (Jake Thomas), the only son of Monica and Henry Swinton (Frances O’Connor and Sam Robards), has been afflicted with an incurable disease and is now in cryo-sleep awaiting a cure that may never come. To ameliorate Monica’s despondency, Henry brings home a robot child, David (Hayley Joel Osment), who is the first robot ever programmed to love, the creation of Professor Alan Hobby (William Hurt). Monica is at first horrified, but gradually comes to love David. However, when a miracle cure is found for Martin’s affliction and he returns home, he becomes jealous of David and through lies and subterfuge manages to convince Henry that David is dangerous and must be returned to the manufacturer, where he will be destroyed. Monica, unable to bring herself to kill her ersatz son, drops David off in the woods along with his teddy bear, a Supertoy capable of movement, speech, and a wisdom more soulful and profound than that of any human being (or robot, for that matter) in the movie. David almost immediately is captured by the agents of a Flesh Fair—an entertainment spectacle in which robots are destroyed in a variety of colorful ways all in the name of human supremacy. After a thoroughly unlikely escape, off David goes in the company of another escapee, Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), a love robot who has been framed for murder by the husband of one of the women he services.
To this point, Spielberg has been rather ineffectually aping Kubrick’s cold style of cinematography, but once Joe and David get together, we’re in another movie, a very familiar one—it’s The Wizard of Oz, with Joe playing Tin Man to David’s Dorothy, as they and the teddy bear search for the Blue Fairy who—according to the Pinocchio text David has read—will make him a real boy. Their journey leads them to Rouge City, a future Las Vegas which seems somewhat less futuristic in design than its 21st Century counterpart. There David consults Dr. Know, a cartoonish hologram that represents a data bank, and is told that he must journey “to the end of the world where the lions weep.” He and Joe steal a police jetcopter and off they go to a nearly submerged Manhattan (the ice caps have melted and the stone lions in Fun City do, indeed, weep), where David learns that the information he gained from Dr. Know was planted by his creator, Professor Hobby, in order to lure him back (why they didn’t simply retrieve him themselves is not quite clear). Depressed on learning from Professor Hobby that there is no Blue Fairy, David throws himself into the sea and winds up in the submerged ruins of Coney Island. He is rescued by Joe, who is subsequently captured by the police and whisked away to his judgment. David thereupon takes the copter and, with Teddy in the passenger seat, goes back down underwater and eventually finds a statue of the Blue Fairy. Shortly after he comes upon the statue, David and Teddy are trapped when a submerged steel structure collapses, pinning the copter.
If Spielberg had chosen to end the movie at this point, with David staring gloomily at his eidolon, his dream of real boyhood forever unattainable and his hoped-for miracle maker a few feet away, I would be inclined to rate AI as just another lame sci-fi movie with wonderful special effects (courtesy of Stan Winston). But in his wisdom, our boy Steve has tacked on a thirty-four-minute-long ending involving the freezing-over of the entire planet in 2000 years, the extinction of humanity, a visitation of saintly elongated aliens who love love love our music and our art (Sheesh!), resurrection for David and his moms, and a denouement whose maudlin excess is so execrable that it nearly blinds one to its underlying message, which appears to be a resounding endorsement of child suicide. “Lame” does not apply here. Nor does bad, shitty, unpalatable, disgusting, excremental, or any other deprecating word or term of which I can think. AI demands an entire new vocabulary of vilification to adequately sum up its primal lousiness. One wonders how even cheerleader-type review services such as Sixty Second Previews could lap up this puddle of Technicolor barf and spit forth a nugget of praise. One has to wonder even more what could possibly have induced relatively credible critics in national publications to lavish praise upon it. Perhaps the studio arranged for happy dust to be slipped into their popcorn.
Or something.
Over the next months we will have two further offerings from Le Gran Steve to consider, two more tasteless pasteurizations of the human experience. Steve’s take on Harry Potter will be out before Christmas—the mind quails when presented with the prospect of the rampant cuteness that will eventuate from this union of giants. And following that, the Stevenator will perform yet another cinematic autopsy on the life’s work of Philip K. Dick and thereafter spread some thin pink residue of the man’s creativity over a two-hour-long flimsy contrived of explosions and the nonpareil acting talent of Tom Cruise, who—now that he has slipped the surly bonds of Nicole Kidman—is free to bob for apples anywhere he chooses along Gender Boulevard. With the release of these two future classics, Spielberg’s name will take its place (if it hasn’t already done) not with those of the great American directors—Welles, Huston, and so on—but rather alongside names such as Velveeta, McDonald’s, Jello, Swansons, and all the other great purveyors of bland processed cheapness, products designed to fill a void, to (perhaps) sustain life though certainly not to enrich it.
As horrible as it is, when you look at AI in context with the other summer movies that have thus far flickered across American screens, it seems only slightly substandard. Take Pearl Harbor, wherein Michael Bay transforms geopolitical tragedy into a video game and a love story involving the indescribably affectless Ben Affleck; or Swordfish, John Travolta’s latest step downward from his career peak; or any number of other instantly forgettable films with eight- and nine-figure budgets. I have long resisted the temptation to hop on board the bandwagon of those who seek to impose restraints on Hollywood, because I believe that the things targeted by these folks—excessive violence and too-explicit sex—are minor symptoms of the real disease. The corporate recognition that packaging is everything, that the multi-billion-eyed beast of the consumer will buy anything if they are told to do so with sufficient persuasiveness and repetitiveness... this recognition and its manifestation in every form of entertainment has come to hang cloudlike over the culture and threatens never to leave, but to grow denser, darker, until it succeeds in bringing about an intellectual nuclear winter. There seems to be no contrary force that will dispel it short of an extinction event.
Violence and sex have always been the subject of art, and even of good movies. Polanksi’s Chinatown, for instance. If this film were remade today, Chinatown 2001 would feature a detective who, unlike Jack Nicholson’s character Jake Gittes, would not be in any way ambivalent about his career or his goals and instead of using his wits would be busting down walls and breaking bones and engaging in car chases with Schwarzeneggerian abandon in his pursuit of a villain who would sit like the head of Spectre behind a wall of pony-tailed assassins armed with Uzis, and project a far-less-menacing figure than did John Huston’s perverted old man. He, the detective, would engage in hot monkey love with the Faye Dunaway character and have an amusing sidekick (Tom Arnold? Rob Schneider?). The ending, of course, would have to go. Can’t have the bad guys win, nosir! That might strike the groundings as being too negative, it might make them uneasy and thus they wouldn’t consume as many packets of Goobers as otherwise they might. Naturally we would have to change the title, throw out all those less-than-politically-correct references to Chinatown and the Chinese. And who the hell would care about a film concerning a battle over water rights? Naw, what we need is something sexy. Nuclear triggers. Stolen plutonium. A magical computer chip. There you go. We’ll call it Silicon Jake, attach Matt Damon and Sarah Michelle Gellar (“in her first dramatic role”), and funnel it down the throats of enough clots of flesh to bring in a thirty-million-buck opening. If you doubt the accuracy of this presumption, I refer you to the remakes of Get Carter starring Sly Stallone and Point Blank, which was turned into Payback starring Mel Gibson. Both originals were excellent gangster films with interesting leads played respectively by Michael Caine and Lee Marvin. The leads in the remakes were modeled after Schwarzeneg-ger’s Terminator character, unfaceted, single-minded men who ate steel and crapped bullets and shtupped a few blondes along the way. The process is one of simplification, of erasing every least deviation from the formulaic, and—to put it bluntly—that process is killing our minds, reducing us from being an actual audience to organs that require frequent pyrotechnic doses of crude visual stimuli. Though Spielberg is not entirely responsible for this state of affairs, it will nonetheless determine the shape of his legacy.
When at life’s end Steven Spielberg looks back upon his days of nature, I’m quite certain he will be pleased with what he has wrought. He will see no admirable films but a long line of bloated highly colored visions before which billions of ex-people have genuflected and that they have celebrated with uncounted trillions of wasted breaths. He will see shelves of trophies bestowed in the name of artistic achievement but given in the hyperbolic spirit of financial success. And he will very likely see a world in which functional literacy is defined by whether or not one can read the big print on a Kellog’s box. He will then smile and allow the technicians who surround his bed to assist him into a cryogenic unit where he will gaze up yearningly into white light for a moment before he begins to sleep away the centuries. Thousands of years hence he will wake to find himself surrounded by saintly elongated aliens who love love love our art and music, and who think his work is the acme of human achievement (like most aliens we have known, they are not terribly bright). But rebirth and the adulation of these godlike beings will not be sufficient for little Steven. His heart’s wish will not have been granted, and in order to pursue that wish, he will escape the aliens’ loving confine and journey to the ends of the earth, prone to the vicissitudes of a harsh unfeeling world. He will be accompanied by an amusing sidekick, perhaps a little animatronic buddy. Together they will steal an ancient jetcopter and sink beneath the waters of a submerged LA and search the drowned city until at last they will happen upon the ruins of a film museum. They will explore the ruins and eventually reach the display for which they have been searching. But just as they reach it, a steel structure will collapse, pinning the copter, and so Stevie will sit there for a long, long time, a period that will seem every bit as unending as those final thirty-four minutes of AI, staring out at the pantheon of great men, at statues of Kurosawa and Huston and da Sica and Welles and all the rest, his dream of being a real director just out of reach, forever unattainable. This is, at least, my fond hope.
Every once in a while Hollywood screws up and a decent movie gets made. How can this happen?, you might ask. Surely a system controlled by bean counters, panderers, two-legged flies, australopithecines, and lawyers so devoid of humanity they haven't taken a leak in years must be incapable of producing even a marginally decent film.
Well, I'll tell you how.
Suppose you're an actor who has the ability to take a character part and do it so well that your performance will add a significant quality to whatever steaming heap of Hollywaste you participate in, enough to cause said heap to grow feet and walk into the theaters with a swagger and earn sufficient good critical mentions to put it in line for the bonus bucks that attend an Oscar nomination. Let's further suppose that you've made enough money and don't care about Oscars and Golden Globes and other such bowling trophies, and have directed a couple of movies and really are only concerned with doing interesting work.
Let's suppose you're Sean Penn.
Had almost anyone else but Penn brought a project based on an old Friedrich Durrenmatt novel to a major studio, they would've been laughed off the lot. But when Penn did exactly this, the studio's response was to say, Yeah, sure thing, Sean. We'll do your movie... if, that is, you sign on to appear in a few of the wads of used Kitty Litter we're preparing to funnel down the throats of the crud-addicted audience we've developed over the past couple of decades. What did Penn do? He said, Okay, and then, instead of turning out your typical half-baked vanity project, he went and snagged Jack Nicholson for the lead, put together a strong supporting cast featuring Sam Shepard, Aaron Eckhardt, and Robin Penn-Wright, then induced actors such as Benicio del Toro, Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave, Tom Noonan, and Harry Dean Stanton, and Mickey Rourke to do small roles, and turned out a little thing called The Pledge, which happens to be the best movie released by a major studio in many years.
When The Pledge made its all-too-brief circuit of American moviehouses earlier this year, it went almost unnoticed and was dismissed by the majority of the toadying critical establishment as being dreary and too depressing. Too depressing? What depresses me and a growing segment of the movie-going audience is the soul-less techno-gunk upon which these punch-and-eberts lavish their slavish approbation. Most of us would give up our popcorn for a year if we could regularly watch high-quality studio films, however depressing their materials. As for "dreary," well, The Pledge is anything but dreary.
Jack Nicholson was once among the best film actors in the world. After he played the Joker in Batman, however, he entered a period during which he mailed in his performances, letting his smile and sly personal style take the place of craft. But as the retired police lieutenant, Jerry Black, Nicholson does his best work since the 1980s. Though he is an Academy favorite, though his portrayal of the troubled Jerry Black is infinitely more award-worthy than his tic-filled monochromatic Oscar-grabbing role in As Good As It Gets, he will almost certainly be neglected come next year's awards season because The Pledge is not an "important film", i.e., it didn't make any money. Of course the reason that it made no money is due less to audience dissatisfaction than it is to the fact that the studio gave it an advertising budget of about $5.99 ("We said we'd let you make it, Sean—we didn't say we'd support it"); but such subtleties are bound to be lost on folks who regularly hand out their accolade to mannequins like Julia Roberts.
The film begins on the day of Black's retirement, an event he has been dreading. During his retirement party, the mutilation and murder of a young girl is reported and Black attaches himself to the investigative team assigned to the case. When he learns that no one has yet informed the dead girl's parents, he volunteers for the job, and the mother persuades him to promise that he will find the murderer. Shortly thereafter, a mentally challenged Native American, Toby Wadenah (del Toro), is taken into custody and Detective Stan Krolak (Eckhardt) coerces him not only into confessing but also into believing he actually committed the crime. When Wadenah kills himself, the case is marked closed. But Black knows there is something wrong with the confession, and instead of going gracefully into retirement, he begins his own investigation and soon arrives at the conclusion that a serial killer is operating in the area, preying upon small blond girls in red dresses. Recognizing that the killer is operating within a triangular region of the state map (we are somewhere in the west—Colorado, it appears), Black buys a rundown roadside store/gas station at the heart of the triangle and moves in, hopeful that the killer, who drives a black car, will stop by for a fill-up. Along the way he befriends Lori (Penn-Wright), a barmaid with a young blond daughter who is being abused by her boyfriend. Lori and Black become lovers, and the three become a family. But Black is so obsessed with keeping his promise, he begins to use Lori's daughter as bait, placing a swing set out front of the building where she can be seen at play by every passing car. Eventually the bait attracts its intended prey, and when this happens, Black, who has been in mental decline, begins a downward spiral.
The narrative suppleness of the film is what sets it apart from the usual Hollywood fare. We are led to believe that what we are watching is only another serial killer movie, but as the film progresses we begin to understand that it is most of all a beautifully achieved character study detailing Black's deterioration into alcoholic dementia. The murders, so centrally posed at the film's beginning, prove to be merely the skeleton that supports the story of Black's disintegration, and the shift of focus is done so skillfully, with such economic use of dialogue and camera, it never jars, never pushes us out of the story. Only at the end do we realize what we have watched. The script by Jerry Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski never sounds a false note. The cinematography and Penn's direction are deft and atmospheric and—most pertinently—do not obtrude as they layer in the material pertaining to Black's accumulating mental difficulties. Penn has previously made two movies, The Indian Runner, a dark and effective piece based on the Bruce Springsteen song "State Trooper," and The Crossing Guard, an equally dark but far less effective film in which Penn's creative debt to John Cassavetes shows too clearly. But with this picture he establishes himself as a director of such quality that he will very likely have to get his future funding in foreign lands.
The Pledge is the sort of police/detective/crime movie that Hollywood used to turn out with a fair degree of regularity 20, 30 years ago (small films such as Remember My Name and Straight Time), but that stands in relation to the industry's current product as does man to the lower invertebrates. Those films, like The Pledge, valued story and character above all else, as did the noir films that preceded them. Today, though every studio hack will swear to you that those same values remain paramount, it should be evident to even the casual observer that story and character have been relegated to the same storage facility where the powerbrokers of Hollywood keep Style and Integrity, and as a result of this, the crime film has devolved into a glut of formulaic action pictures in which endomorphic Terminator types wreak havoc in the name of all that's good and true, and into equally formulaic films such as Morgan Freeman's Alex Cross pictures. Once in a while, something like David Fincher's Seven tries to capture lightning in a bottle, but "tries" is the operative word here. In other countries, however, the crime film is still a going concern. Great Britain, for example, has an unrivalled tradition of superior crime movies, starting with Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, and peaking, perhaps, with the two movies that made Bob Hoskins a star, Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday. Britain's latest entry in the genre, Jonathan Glazer's Sexy Beast, may not be quite up to its predecessors, but it is nonetheless a quality picture and features the new Bob Hoskins, Ray Winstone.
Winstone has only been seen in a handful of movies this side of the Atlantic, most prominently Tim Roth's somber tale of incest, The War Zone. His spectacular range is best observed in Gary Oldman's flawed but watchable, Nil By Mouth, in which he plays a violently abusive husband. He is, like Hoskins, everyman. Paunchy and unprepossessing, baggy-eyed and a bit long in the tooth to be considered a movie star. Of course, Winstone is scarcely a movie star—he is an actor, and despite the fact that Ben Kingsley has drawn most of the film's good press for his powerful albeit one-note performance, Sexy Beast is Ray Winstone's movie start to finish.
Gal (Winstone) is a retired mid-level British criminal living in mid-level luxury in a Spanish villa with his wife, whom he loves deeply, and palling around fellow retired criminal Aitch and his wife, Jackie. One morning as he stands beside his swimming pool, a boulder comes crashing down from the hill above the villa, nearly decapitating him and smashing into the pool, causing damage to the tiled bottom. Later that same day, Gal is almost incinerated by his barbecue. Director Jonathan Glazer shows us these events as signs of an impending disaster—that disaster soon manifests in the form of Don Logan (Kingsley), an amphetamine rush of a man who wants Gal to return with him to London to participate in a bank robbery engineered by Teddy Bass (Ian McShane). Logan's reputation is so fearsome that just the mention of his name casts a pall over the moods of the four expatriates, and when he arrives at the villa, their anxiety turns to outright fear. Gal rejects Logan's offer, but Logan refuses to accept this. He continues to harangue his host, to threaten him with the mere possibility of his rage. But after a tense evening redolent of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, during which Logan dredges up (among other unsavory bits) the porn-star past of Gal's wife, he leaves for the airport. Once on the plane, however, Logan's rage and frustration with Gal boil over. He causes a scene that results in his removal from the plane and soon he is on his way back to the villa. The resulting violent confrontation concludes with Gal going off to London to do the job and Logan disappearing. Teddy Bass suspects Gal of being responsible for the disappearance, but Gal claims to know nothing, and the robbery, which targets a bank vault containing a billion-pound treasure, goes forward.
Sexy Beast is a film that treats of evil. Logan's expression of that primal quality is potent enough, but he is a mere precursor to the evil incarnated by Bass, a king of the criminal class and a brutal, conscienceless man who—in his development of the robbery scheme—becomes the lover of the bank president, played by a suitably decadent James Fox. Bass knows that Gal has done something with Logan, and the suspense of the movie is sustained by our expectation that his vengeance is imminent, and that once the robbery is done, Gal will be done for. Whereas Logan is the fist of evil, Bass is its corrupted soul. In the role of Bass, McShane's leathery features seem to have acquired the cold rigor of a basilisk, and he is capable of achieving with a single stare a menace more frightening than that Logan creates by means of all his fulminance and profane temper.
Gal is an essentially good soul whose criminality testifies to the primacy of nurture over nature. He has always been a man who could do what was necessary to live, but now he doubts himself—he's been away from the game too long, and he does not know whether he can successfully resist Logan, and when events dictate that he must participate in the robbery, he is not certain that he can maintain his poise in light of what has happened to Logan. What brings him through is his goodness as it manifests in his love for his wife. The remarkable thing about this is that most of it is not stated in the script, but is externalized by Winstone, externalized so effectively that by expression and gesture alone he manages to convey the complex depth of what appears on the surface to be a rather simple man. Kingsley's performance as Logan, though less complex by script necessity, is nonetheless notable for its molten intensity and is the sort of performance that, despite Beast's low profile, might well earn him a Supporting Actor nomination from the Academy—he has, after all, won before. Seeing him in Beast makes you wonder why we haven't seen Kingsley in more substantial roles. Chances are, Hollywood has no idea what to do with him, other than to slot him into projects like Species. For those enamored of Hollywood product, well, then you have a plethora of putrid treats available. Swordish, a film without any perceptible virtue that marks another downward step on John Travolta's career path, following hard upon last summer's Ed Woodesque Battlefield Earth. Then there is The Score, a bloated waste of Brando, DeNiro, and Edward Norton, three actors in search of a script. But if you enjoy good crime movies, instead of blowing your eight to twelve bucks on raw sewage such as this, you would be far better served to check out Sexy Beast or to seek out The Pledge at your local Blockbuster. I promise that you will not be disappointed.
These are the end times. The days when humanity will be visited by the stupefactions of the Beast, when the dregs of wisdom will be drained, when fools will deliver sermons to the masses, and yea verily, man and animal will feed from the same trough.
Proof of this is playing at your local multiplex.
This proof is best exemplified by the fact that two of the most inane, ineptly crafted, and relentlessly imbecilic movies of all time are currently playing to packed houses. I'm speaking of Jurassic Park III and Planet of the Apes.
To call a work of the imagination "an entertainment" once implied a work of light content, designed to please rather than to challenge the mind and eye. Nowadays it is necessary to redefine the term to mean an appeasement, something on the order of a handful of dried corn tossed into a sty filled with hungry swine. By this construction alone, it is conceivable to consider the two films I have mentioned as entertainments, for while they do not fill or sustain, they seem to promise that real sustenance is or may once have been possible. But they do not, in any marked way, entertain.
Briefly described, Jurassic Park III is a broken promise. The first two films in the franchise were machines that generated scene after scene of dinosaurs menacing and/or eating people, and so it was with this expectation that three friends and I attended a matinee, being in a mood to see our fellow man rendered into T-Rex Chow. Much to our dismay, there was very little people-eating in evidence and even less menace. What Park offers is a warm-and-fuzzy, family-values dinosaur movie in which everyone of any import survives, its focus being the reuniting of a divorced husband and wife come to the island to search for their son who disappeared while hang-gliding along its shore. This central promise is not the only one the movie breaks. Along the way director Joe Johnston (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) violates most of the important rules of screen narrative. For instance, at the outset of the film, the mercenaries who accompany husband and wife (William Macy and Tea Leoni) to the island are shown disintegrating a medium-sized plane with a massive gun. The camera lingers loving over gun and explosion, and this leads us to suspect that we will later see said gun used on a dinosaur or fifty. But no. The gun just kind of goes away. We are, I believe, supposed to identify with Macy and Leoni in their search for functionality and wedded bliss, and to help us in this, Macy delivers the following lines: "Do you remember that time when we went fishing? I miss that!" Wow. That's certainly more than enough information from which to extrapolate an entire rich history of loving interactions twixt Tea and William—and it has to be enough, because that's virtually all the information we get on the subject. This makes it rather difficult to care what happens to Macy, Leoni, and their spawn—in fact, their survival, although a foregone conclusion, comes as a disappointment.
The key to the salvation of those on the island proves to be a satellite phone, which was in the possession a mercenary who early on became a human Happy Meal, victim of a "superpredator," a dinosaur even bigger and badder than T-Rex (though if we are to accept the film's depiction of this creature, it was also something of a world-class bungler, and not all that fast for a superpredator). Improbably, the survivors hear the phone ringing inside the dinosaur at great distances and eventually find it in a steaming pile of superpredator feces. Though the feces contains human bones that have been scoured and abraded by the dinosaur's digestive acids, the cell phone is still shiny, bright, and functional, with just enough juice left for one call. Sam Neill, who wanders through the film like a man in search of a retirement bonus, calls Laura Dern, his girlfriend from the first movie of the franchise. We are not shown how Ms. Dern responds to the call, but judging by the result of her actions—battleships, landing craft, choppers, Marines at battalion strength—she must have gone straight to the top and uttered those magic words, "George! A paleontologist is in trouble." But before this happens, in a moment that illuminates the movie's cretinous G-rated heart, humans and velociraptors come damn close to sharing a group hug. The only things worth watching in this almost substanceless ninety minutes are the pteranodons. They are penned up in an enormous birdcage that encloses a valley. Who are the villains who built the cage? Who grew the pteranodons? Who evolved the superpredator? Though the characters speculate upon this and other related subjects, Joe Johnston will never tell. To fill us in on what is going on would have ruined his streak of amateurish screw-ups. The pteranodons are nice eye candy, but are they a real menace? When one rips up Sam Neill's assistant, jumping all over him with sufficient apparent force to flatten a HumVee, the assistant survives. Either pteranodons are wimps, or else those paleontologists are seriously tough little mothers.
Following this experience, my friends and I decided we needed to see something to wash out the bad taste, and so we went to see Jet Li's new feature, Kiss of the Dragon, which by contrast had the depth and craft of Citizen Kane. I assumed that I had seen the worst movie of the summer in Park. But I had not reckoned on Planet of the Apes.
I don't know for certain, but I assume if you're reading this that you have the mental capacity sufficient to perform simple tasks such as closing a door, making change for a dollar, opening an umbrella. Should this be the case, then you are way too smart for this movie. It's not necessary when reviewing Apes to consider matters like technique or craft or thematic scope. To utilize those critical lenses one would be as immaterial as an oenophile judging the body and nose of a glass of grape KoolAid. It is informed by a brand of humor so stale and unengaging as to make you wonder whether it might have been an ape who wrote the screenplay ("Can't we all just get along?" whines a slaver orangutan), and Tim Burton's direction is so desultory, you have the idea that every once in a while somebody knocked on his trailer to wake him and said, "Hey, man. Better tell 'em to do something. They're just standing around out there."
To comprehend the stupidity of the film, you only need consider the plot, which begins thusly: Markie Mark, aka Mark Wahlberg, works on a deep-space station dedicated to scientific research. For some unstated and patently absurd reason, the personnel of the station are engaged in a research that demands they send monkeys out in little spaceships. When Markie Mark's favorite chimp, Pericles, is lost in an electromagnetic storm, he steals a spaceship and follows him, only to become lost in the same storm. Markie Mark's ship goes through some sort of wormhole or time warp, and he winds up crashing on the Planet of the Apes. There, along with a group of fur-clad humans (Fur clothes? It must be cold in that there rain forest!) that includes Kris Kristofferson and babe du planet Estella Warren, he immediately is captured by ape slavers. They are taken to an ape city, a ludicrous piece of set design that looks like a hippie dream of the Middle Ages, and there Markie, Kris, and Estella are sold to Helena Bonham Chimp. She is a highly moral chimp, into human rights, and is mightily desired by General Thade (Tim Roth), an evil chimp who wants to sniff her all over. Markie Mark leads an escape, aided by Helena Bonham Chimp. Kristofferson—given little to do other than to appear grizzled—is killed in the escape, and if you ask me, he looks rather grateful to Michael Clarke Duncan Gorilla for providing him with a way out of this mess. The rest go searching for a rescue party that Markie Mark's handy-dandy pocket locater has detected as being situated in a desert area sacred to all apes, where long ago the God Ape Simos appeared and to which one day, according to prophecy, He will return. Along the way, no characters are developed, and Markie Mark, sullen and reasonably apelike himself, proves immune to the charms of Estella, who appears to be the beneficiary of an ancient cache of Maybelline products that she has refused to share with others of her almost uniformly drab and haggard sisterhood. When they reach the location from which the signal received by Markie Mark's locater has been sent, they discover that the people aboard the research station were every bit as dumb as Markie Mark—they have followed him into the electromagnetic storm, went through the time warp, and crashed countless centuries ago, and were killed by their own mutated monkeys. They are met at the wreckage by a force of raggedy humans who, though Markie Mark has only been on the planet a couple or three days, have heard that he is challenging the rule of the apes—this knowledge, one assumes, having been transmitted by some form of primitive Internet, because there is certainly no other way they might have learned it. There then ensues a battle between humans and a pursuing force led by Tim Roth Chimp and Michael Clarke Duncan Gorilla. Throughout the movie, it has been demonstrated that apes are far stronger than humans, but when it comes to the final battle, the humans stand right in with them and pretty much give tit for tat. As for Markie Mark, he may possess all the acting ability of a day-old loogey, but the boy can take a punch. Knock him fifteen, twenty feet in the air, he doesn't even bruise. And the apes, well, they're pretty tough themselves. When the rockets of the wrecked station ignite, blowing the bulk of the monkey army hundreds of feet high, they get the wind knocked out of them and seem a little woozy, but they hop right up and go to kicking human butt. Then comes the Deus Ex Machina denouement, which stops the battle and causes the apes to understand that everything they have been taught is a lie foisted upon them by General Thade and his dad (Charleton Heston in the role he was born to play, that of a dying monkey) and, in a matter of a minute or two, persuades them to give up their religion and their traditions and crave only peace with the lovable humans whom moments before they had been trying to scrag.
But that's not all, folks.
We still have that superduper surprise ending to look forward to, a secret to which—because of its incredible wonderfulness—only a few people were privy prior to the film's release. It is, in fact, the ending of Boullé's novel, which was more-or-less used in one of the original's sequels (Escape from The Planet of the Apes). And it is, of course, utterly telegraphed. In the theater where I watched the movie, when Markie Mark crashlands near the Lincoln Memorial and stares up in shock at the statue inside (before we get to see it), even tiny dog-faced children with their mouths full of Milk Duds and Nut Buddies were going, "I bet it's an ape! I bet it's an ape!" Still and all, it very well may have zapped those individuals in the audience who were operating without the benefit of pre-frontal lobes.
After viewing this excrescence, a few questions occurred to me. Was that hushed stillness following the ending a silent memorial tribute to the artistic demise of Tim Burton? Can Markie Mark be persuaded to reform New Kids on the Block? Is there anyone left in Hollywood who can score in double figures on the Stanford-Binet test? This picture is the sort of disquieting, talentless blare of incompetence that makes one yearn for the dominion of apes, at least in Hollywood. It would be a distinct upgrade. And if there are any super-intelligent apes out there ambitious to climb higher on the food chain, they must be greatly heartened by this latest sign of human devolution.
It's difficult to understand what the makers of Apes had in mind. Most of the allegorical content of the Pierre Boullé novel that provided a flimsy but necessary skeleton for the first movie has been excised, and what remains is a loosely connected sequence of ineptly achieved action scenes larded with the aforementioned stale humor and some inane philosophizing by Helena Bonham Chimp. What was the movie about? Markie Mark's ridiculous journey? Perhaps the orangutan slaver's bleated quote stated the theme. But Planet of the Apes is mostly about the prevailing notion among players in Hollywood that they don't have to work anymore to squeeze nickels out of our butts. We can put out any goddamn thing we want, they tell themselves. Any shabbily constructed, horribly acted, shamelessly unoriginal piece of crap with a screenplay written by a borderline illiterate with a substance abuse problem. And if we hype it with a trailer full of MTV quick cuts, heavy metal gibberish, and Dolby Digital emotions, the dweebs out there in Putzburgh will be hopping up and down with glee. The two films reviewed herein perfectly embody the contempt for audience that informs this notion.
I assumed that most critics would detest this film, and indeed, most have. But the big guns appear to have fallen into line with the Hollywood machine. Let us examine the reactions of some of these worthies.
"A surprise ending that I loved."
—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Obviously there's some sort of problem with Roger. He probably did love the ending... but then he seems to love everything. He loved Sara Michelle Gellar's magic crab movie. It would not surprise me in the least if he considers American Pie 2 a work of towering genius.
"A crackling good movie. A wild ride, ravishing and evocative."
—Jane Horowitz, Washington Post
Crackling? Okay, that could be explained by heavy popcorn consumption in the region of Ms. Horowitz' theater seat. Wild ride? That's a bit tougher to explain. Perhaps she used the word in the sense of "undisciplined." But "ravishing and evocative"? I suppose I did feel ravished, though I might have said "assaulted" or "raped." But the only thing Apes evoked for me was the feeling of having been struck in the face by a fresh cowpie.
"A fleet, fun action movie."
—Jeff Giles, Newsweek
No, Jeff. Sorry. By comparison to Apes, How to Make an American Quilt was "a fleet, fun action movie." The audience with whom I watched the film seemed to be having about the same amount of fun as that they would have derived from a lecture on drunk driving.
"It shows a sparkling guile."
—Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times
My God! Elvis! Say it ain't so! You used to be one of us, man!
" '... an amazing display of imagination with a surprise-punch ending that outdoes the original."
—Bob Graham, San Francisco Chronicle
I think Bob may have been sharing Roger's popcorn.
What's going on here? Could there be a plague of some sort that affects only the reviewers of the largest major metropolitan newspapers, causing them to suffer pre-Alzheimer's symptoms? Seriously... think about it. I repeat: What's going on here? There must be an answer.
I suppose if I were sufficiently motivated, if I were speaking to a large enough audience to warrant such motivation, I might come up with an equally positive review funded by my honest reactions. During the showing of Apes, there were a number of times I slid forward in my seat, preparing to walk out of the theater. But I sank back, benumbed by the idiot splendor of an eight- or nine-figure budget being flushed down the toidy, and eventually, being moved by the film to contemplate the decay of civilization, the end of life as we know it, I fell into a state of despair. So, in case anyone out there is interested—I mean, interested to the point of contacting my agent—here's my pull-quote for Planet of the Apes:
"An edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. Mind-numbing splendor. I wept."
Trust me on this.
Some years back I was approached by a TV producer who offered to pay me what then seemed decent money to come up with some story ideas for a hit cop series. He said they were tired of doing stories centering on coke dealers and wanted to take the show in a new direction. I spent a couple of afternoons working up a number of non-drug-oriented plots, all of which the man said he loved. He paid me and gushed about how eager he was to get the ideas into script. Then he went out and shot twenty-two shows about coke dealers for the new season.
Akin to this is the Hollywood tradition of bringing in foreign directors to create a fresh look for an old idea or a sequel. What generally happens in this circumstance is that the director is hamstrung with a horrible script, valiantly tries to give the project a fresh take, and is thwarted at every turn by the producers who hired him. Their attitude, you see, has changed. They now are concerned that this interloper will screw up their cash cow and often once the film has been finished, the producers—most of whom are blessed with the creative sensibilities of a rutabaga—will re-edit the picture themselves, confident that their commercial genius will compensate for a lack of talent and craftsmanship. Recent Hollywood history is strewn with mutant horrors engendered by such unholy unions. For instance, Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors) went over the regrettable Mulholland Falls; Jean Genet (Delicatessen) got screen credit but should not be blamed for the franchise-killing Alien 4; Jocelyn Moorehouse (Proof) wound up muffled by How to Make an American Quilt; P.J. Hogan went from the vitality of Muriel's Wedding to the malaise of My Best Friend's Wedding; Ruy Barreto (Doña Flor and Her Two Husbands) was defeated by One Tough Cop, starring Steven Baldwin; John Woo, Ringo Lam, and Tsui Hark, the creator of Chinese Ghost Story, were all saddled with awful pictures featuring the Muscles from Brussels, Jean Claude Van Damme... To avoid adding their names to what has become a long and woeful list, some European directors who want to achieve an American success have begun staying at home and shooting their movies in English, hoping that this way they will preserve their artistic integrity. But there is a further pitfall they fail to take into account—distributors frequently elect to recut foreign films themselves, sometimes for no other reason than the film is a bit long for their tastes, and they have been known on occasion to make their cuts by simply removing a reel. According to reliable sources, it is into this pit that Alberto Amenábar's The Others appears to have fallen.
Ghost stories have had a minor cinematic renaissance in the United States since the runaway success of The Sixth Sense, and probably will continue to do so because of the subsequent good box-office performance of Robert Zemeckis' What Lies Beneath, which—though it ranks several notches above Ghost Dad—barely caused a quiver in the needle on my Mediocre-Meter. It is a trend that does not promise great movies—Hollywood will milk it dry by process of repetition and imitation, until the trend will dissipate in a flurry of horrid remakes. One imagines the puerile terrors of a Jennifer Love Hewitt version of The Ghost and Mrs. Muir or two hours passed under the insipid spell of Matt Damon's Harvey. But even if the substance of one film resonates with that of another, it is worth our notice when a talented director chooses to take on such a project.
Alejandro Amenábar burst onto the scene with the outstanding Spanish SF thriller Open Your Eyes, one of the best science fiction films in recent years (granted, this is not saying very much, but Eyes is well worth a viewing, and far preferable, I would imagine, to the Hollywood remake coming this fall, Vanilla Sky, which stars the ineluctable Tom Cruise). The source material for his current film is Henry James' novella of psychological ambiguity and—perhaps—ghosts, "The Turn of the Screw," which Jack Clayton turned into an excellent picture back in the 60s: The Innocents, starring Deborah Kerr. In The Others, Amenábar eschews ambiguity and steps away from the source material, attempting to make what is essentially a variant version of The Sixth Sense. Shortly after the end of World War II, Grace (Nicole Kidman), a young wife whose husband (Christopher Eccleston) is presumed dead, missing in action, is kept busy raising her two children in a lonely fogbound house on the Isle of Jersey. The children, Nicholas and Anne, have—we are told—an allergy to light that requires the windows be curtained during the day. The manor's servants have apparently fled, and as the film opens, their replacements—the housekeeper and nanny, Mrs. Mills (Fionnula Flanagan); her mute assistant, Lydia; and Mr. Tuttle, the gardener—begin their term of employment. It soon becomes clear that there is something sinister about the new servants, and further, that something sinister is occupying the house. Ghosts... at least so we are led to believe. Grace is initially resistant to the idea of ghosts but Anne claims to have seen them and creates a drawing of the family she believes is haunting the manor: mom, dad, son, and granny. But as the thumpings, slammed doors, mysterious footsteps, midnight piano recitals, and various other disturbing occurrences multiply, Grace becomes a believer. Terrified, she undertakes a trip to town to seek counsel from a priest, but before she can get very far from the house, she spies her husband emerging from the fog—he is apparently just now returning from the war and is traumatized by his experiences. This causes Grace to put her concerns aside and to return with her husband to the manor. But her happiness is short-lived, for following a brief and unsettling reunion, the husband wanders off again, saying that he must return to the front.
By this point in the film, it is obvious that the new servants are somehow involved with all the supernatural doings, and what is really going on should be apparent to everyone, especially if you have seen The Sixth Sense. Thus when the ending arrives, it falls rather flat. This is not to say that the movie is an absolute failure. Amenábar is a talented director and the film contains a number of genuine frights, establishes an unnerving depth of suspense, and is potently atmospheric. His framing of Kidman is especially notable. For much of the film, the camera appears to be sculpting her out of the gloom and shadow, lighting her porcelain features so that at times her face has the aspect of a cameo emerging from dark water, drawing to our attention her delicate and agitated facial gestures, flared nostrils, lip quivers, nervous tremors, and so forth, literally painting a portrait in time of a woman who is tightly wound, close to madness, and who—so her daughter claims—has had a psychotic episode in the recent past. Kidman's features are not so expressive as those of some other actresses (Emily Watson being the current heavyweight champion in this regard), and she does not offer the magnitude of talent that Deborah Kerr brought to the central role in The Innocents. Nonetheless, her relative woodenness works to the film's advantage, being apropos to Grace's type, a fragile upper-class British wife, and if Kidman does not exactly light up the screen, she photographs beautifully and is sufficiently skilled to be convincing.
Ultimately, perhaps because we have watched The Sixth Sense and therefore pick up on the clues more readily than otherwise we might, The Others does not surprise us. But as I've suggested, there may be more pertinent reasons for the film's flatness than what might seem on first glance to be poor directorial choices. The film contains a number of cuts that do not look to be the work of a professional. Sudden jumps and shifts of scene that are scarcely commensurate with Amenábar's technical facility and eye. There are also several logical flaws and unexplained events that seem equally un-Amenábarlike. His previous movies have been logically tight, smoothly edited, and it's difficult to believe that he would mutilate his own film to the extent demonstrated by the print I watched. Since The Others checks in at about two hours, and since certain distributors have a reputation (deserved or not, one can only surmise) for hacking up films in order to fit them into two-hour slots, thereby enabling more shows per day, which translates into more money... given all that, it's not inconceivable that we in the United States haven't seen the entirety of Amenábar's film. This would explain a great deal, including why what is little more than a cameo appearance by Christopher Eccleston, one of Britain's most accomplished actors, merits second-listing in the credits. The missing material may well have provided emotional information or story details that would have made the ending feel less truncated and more satisfying, but we won't know that for certain until the Spanish version of the film is released on DVD and video.
That this sort of butchery has been done previously and frequently should not be in question. For instance, I am convinced that Stanley's Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut, widely trumpeted to be Kubrick's final edit, was mucked with by an idiot wearing moonglasses and listening to Brittany Spears on a Walkman. Anyone who has paid close attention to Kubrick's other films knows he would never have made such clumsy scene cuts as are evidenced by the print that was circulated in theaters. Had Kubrick lived to oversee its release, Eyes Wide Shut would surely not have been a great picture, but it would have been internally consistent—all Kubrick's scripts were models of internal consistency. Whoever it was that hacked up Eyes Wide Shut may be in question, but I could easily come up with a list of films edited by distributors with no regard for quality that would be far longer than this column. What astonishes me is not that the practice goes unnoticed by the public, but rather that it has been ignored by and so given the tacit blessing of the critical press. It would seem that these tastemakers, who know what is happening, might feel compelled if not by conscience, then by professional ethics, to report on the practice, which must be at odds with—if not completely contrary to—at least some minor consumer regulation. But no. Musty concerns such as journalistic integrity and an artist's right to determine the presentation of his or her intellectual property do not, apparently, serve them.
I have seen The Others reviewed as being derivative of The Sixth Sense, but while there are similarities between the two movies, I find this dismissal myopic and simplistic. Amenábar is a director with his own peculiar intelligence and style. I seriously doubt he set out to ape The Sixth Sense. It is obvious that he did not intend a big surprise ending—he offers so many clues to the mystery, it's evident that he wanted the audience in on the secret by the movie's mid-point so they could observe what he was really trying to do. I believe the film mutts have been re-edited by an incompetent who wanted to cut the running time and to shape the picture so it more closely resembled The Sixth Sense: this would be perfectly in keeping with the exercise of "commercial instincts." There are solid indicators that Amenábar intended to make a film that would illuminate the process by which a ghost might be created, and to do so he needed to paint a character study of a ghost; and he decided that the best way to achieve both ends would be to depict a ghost who comes to a gradual recognition of her condition. The sad thing is that, very likely, most of his audience will never know whether or not he succeeded.
Someone is aiming a video camera from ground level up toward a man in a blue shirt, who appears to be having a conversation with someone off-camera. Above him looms the south tower of the World Trade Center. As we watch, what appears to be a large jet plane rendered in shadow comes into view against a cloudless sky and appears to vanish into the side of the tower. An instant later the fireball erupts and the man who is talking turns his head, almost casually, toward the explosion...
Reality, we realize now, resembles a bad special effect.
We have been insulated from much painful reality here in the United States, but now we know for certain sure what the rest of the world has known, that terrorism is not so beautifully lit and designed as might be depicted in some blast of digital sound and Mega-color with a nine figure budget. It is considerably less splendid, much grittier, much simpler, and the heroes do not always survive.
It was the aforementioned video sequence that to a great degree determined my choice of movie the other day. I had no real desire to see any movie, but then again, I needed to remove myself from the vicinity of my TV, from endless replays of the terrorist Super Bowl and the orgy of anchorman and -woman repetition. I decided that I wanted to see something depressing. Comedy, I believed, would fall flat, and action-adventure... well, I'd had a sufficiency of explosions. Perhaps, I thought, a truly depressing film, an engrossing film, would turn my attention away from the tragic circumstances of our lives and briefly dispel the pall of depression that had enveloped me. So it was that I attended a matinee showing of Barbet Schroeder's new foreign-language film, Our Lady of the Assassins. This experiment proved only partially successful, but I am here to report, for whatever reason you may choose to see it, that Assassins is a very good movie, indeed.
Adapted from the semi-autobiographical novel by Fernando Vallejo, Assassins is set in Medellin, Colombia, eight years after the death of Pablo Escobar, the notorious king of the Medellin cartel, a place where successful cocaine shipments to the United States are celebrated with prodigious fireworks displays. Governed by the remnant structure of Escobar's empire, the city is in a state of near-anarchy, a free-fire zone in which children are schooled from an early age in the usage of violence, thereby establishing a terrifying class of youthful street kids to whom killing has become an incidental event, merely an element of the passionless play of violence and death that comprises their milieu. Young men casually murder whoever commits the mildest of slights as they move through this landscape, leaving the bodies untended on the streets and sidewalks. And then they, too, are murdered by rival gang members or family enemies.
Into this most desolate of environments comes Fernando (German Jaramillio), a writer of middle years who has wearied of life and the corruption of the world to the extent that he has returned to die (purportedly) in the city where he once lived as a child. He walks through the streets day and night, offering comment on the ragged lives he observes, contemplating—we are given to believe—his imminent mortality. Along the way he falls in love with a handsome young gangbanger, Alexis (Anderson Ballesteros), one of the violent criminals who flow in an endless stream about him, and they become a couple oddly right for one another—this death-seeking intellectual and the death-dealing boy/man who barely seems to notice the shadow of dread mortality that hovers about him. The two men are pure contraries. Fernando is erudite, a sophisticate who enjoys opera and the classics, and delights in wordplay. Alexis, on the other hand, is a creature who lives only to satisfy his most immediate needs, and is committed to violence, shooting anyone who even appears to be at cross-purposes with him. The soundtrack of his existence is aggressive, characterless rock and roll, a music that sometimes serves him as a chaotic lullaby, provoking dreams of bigger and better guns. As the two wander the city, Alexis' path of incessant slaughter, gunshots and screams orchestrated into a harsh rhythm, becomes a kind of chorus counterpointing Fernando's bleak and often darkly humorous commentaries.
I must admit that I found the constant violence of Assassins almost soothing, its debased human-ness far more wholesome than the violence of the shadowy plane aimed at the World Trade Center, and so in this sense, the film did the job I hoped it would, immersing me in a world whose problems were more graspable and visceral than those evolving from the world of organized terrorism. I have no idea how I might have viewed the movie under ordinary circumstances—perhaps it would have numbed me, which is the effect that murder comes to have ultimately on Fernando. Yet while it did take me out of myself, all during the film I had an apprehension that I was in sitting a dark bubble beyond which a terrible brightness ruled, and I could not avoid the tendency to add my own commentaries to those of Fernando—less insightful, perhaps, but no less bleak, grounded in a gallows humor of the kind that often acts to protect me from feelings I would rather not confront, provoked in this instance by the odious preenings of various on-camera news reporters as they struck their poses in front of the gargantuan wreckage of the twin towers and the ghastly smoke of five thousand souls, arranged their faces into a telegenic gloom and served up tales of woe and treacly anecdotes, all designed, I suppose, to persuade us of the sensitivity of their affiliated network, and further having, I assume, some more pertinent manipulative intent. Could these professional mourners in their pancake make-up not for one moment stop?, I wondered. Stop their pontificating, their pitiful and irrelevant speculations, their unending statistical noise, their mini-series type ATTACK ON AMERICA graphics and quickly whipped-up theme music for the horror they seemed to be selling us like a brand of patent medicine. Could not they not cease attempting to orchestrate grief into a mourn-by-numbers craft kit, and offer some more dignified programming... maybe even a touch now and again of silence? Could they not allow us to find our own path through the city of grief, to provide our own commentaries, to decide for ourselves how we should feel? Did these overpaid haircuts not understand that their mawkish blather was the most godawful of distractions and irreverences, every bit as nasty and graceless in their own right as the oft-shown footage of several people on the West Bank celebrating the mass death of innocent Americans? I further recall thinking that whatever good might come from the events in New York; Arlington, and Pennsylvania (I imagine that the chief product of this disaster will be war and death) would be essentially trivial, as in the case of the lifting of Arnold Schwarzenegger's certain-to-be-horrid anti-terrorist flick, Collateral Damage, from the fall schedule, though it might be worth the price of admission simply to listen to Arnold attempt to pronounce the title. I decided that the most profound effect upon popular culture would likely be a diminution of the audience for reality television and a deluge of patriotically hued knock-off novels concerned with defending the Land of the Free from sinister plots, something that appears to be in the nature of an afterthought for this and previous Presidential administrations. If, as has been reported, the terrorist attack was causing Hollywood to rethink the content of their films, well, that would be nice, too; but if this is the case, I fear it will be only a phase, a temporary pull-back from the tried-and-true formula of the virtueless action pictures that have become the staple of every movie summer. These bursts of cynicism on my part did not last for long. The movie was powerful enough to reel me back in and involve me again in the vivid progression of Fernando and Alexis through the hellish gutterlands of Medellin.
Barbet Schroeder, who spent his youth in Colombia and has had personal experience of its terrors, brings a powerful intimacy and grittiness to the film, a work far superior to his English-language films, even the much ballyhooed Reversal of Fortune. In Assassins, he has surpassed the artistry of his early films and created a wonderfully paced and explosive picture (explosive both in terms of its action and its strangely moral heart). Filmed in digital video that is so well-suited for rendering the grimy, blood-stained thoroughfares of Medellin, you can almost smell the brimstone, and utilizing actual street kids as actors, the movie becomes a harrowing document of life on the fringes of the pre-apocalypse, and yet succeeds in conveying through its bloody imagery and the intelligence of its screenplay (also by Fernando Vallejo) a sense of beauty and humanity. Jaramillo's astonishing performance and Vallejo's script slowly reveal rather than state the true character of Fernando, and as the film pounds toward its conclusion, we realize we have been led to understand that though Fernando outwardly derides and belittles all those he observes, he is at heart a deeply romantic soul who is stricken by everything he sees. This sort of complexity is the hallmark of the film. Nothing is truly as it appears, perhaps not even death.
It is films like Our Lady of the Assassins that, dismaying and violent though they may be, remind us of what is possible of art in that frequently abused medium. It may not be a timeless movie, but it is a very wise one, one that exposes by example the complexity underlying every human event, the infinite knot of circumstance and time at the heart of every tragedy, instead of glossing over complexity with the simple colors of melodrama as do Hollywood and the network news. I wish I had seen the movie at a time when I was not emotionally corrupted, more oriented to the usual stance of a critic; but having the experience of it I did provided me with a few hours of distance from the moment I inhabit, and for that I remain grateful.
When I returned home, images of the film still playing in my head, I found that Paula Zahn, who had obviously had some touch-up work done on her blond hairdo, and wearing a pained look that put me in mind of a whiney schoolteacher complaining to her principal that she didn't understand the new textbook, was opining for the umpteenth time (upon each occasion utilizing the same constipated expression and affected delivery) that the destruction of the World Trade center, the devastation at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, together comprised the greatest man-made disaster in our history... as if this mattered, as if it were important that we keep track of the rankings, as if this made the death of five thousand people even more significant. She was responded to by a yea-saying cohort who soberly agreed with her pronouncement and even went so far as to suggest that it might rival in loss of life the Galveston hurricane at the turn of the 20th century, which had resulted in over six thousand deaths.
Wow.
A record.
Paula gave a shake of her head—it was just too much for her to absorb—and then, adopting a subtle variant of her beleaguered expression, she announced that they would be right back. For a time I stared blankly out the window, watching a Serbian Muslim woman who lives nearby hurry across the deserted parking lot, and then, as the theme music for ATTACK ON AMERICA sounded once again, and the signature collage of images, of collapsing towers and weeping women and firemen covered in gypsum dust, began to flicker across the screen, accompanied by sound bites of the President proclaiming his resolve toward vengeance—soul-stirring as all this was, I switched off the set and went to call my son in Brooklyn. He had been scheduled to be married in Greenwich Village on September 15th, and of course the wedding had been postponed. I needed to see how he was doing. When he answered he was standing on his balcony, looking out toward the plume of smoke rising from lower Manhattan. We engaged in a somewhat muted conversation, both of us fatigued in our own way, spiritually unfocused. I told him about the movie I had seen, expressed a number of my reactions to it, inclusive of my dissatisfaction with Ms. Zahn and her equally banal colleagues, and thereafter we discussed rescheduling my cancelled trip to New York. After awhile he told me to hold on for a second, he had to go back inside his apartment. The wind had shifted, he said, and he wanted to avoid the smell of burning metal.
The summer, thank God, is over. Gone are the amazingly simplistic, detonation-laden excesses with which the ambulatory bean bags who rule the Filmoverse have sought to lobotomize us, and though we can expect more idiocy in the form of "high quality" Hollywood product as year's end draws nigh, counter-programming, dammed up and reduced to a trickle by the impacted ordure resulting from the passage of the dinosaurlike creations that have been galumphing through the multiplexes, will once again flow freely, and we will see a number of pictures that actually are of high quality or—at least—of not so low a quality that they resist rational analysis. I am delighted to say that two such films will be considered herein.
The Deep End is essentially a remake of a 1949 film noir classic, The Reckless Moment, directed by Max Ophuls and starring Joan Bennet and James Mason. Directors Scott McGeehee and David Siegel (Suture) set their updating in Lake Tahoe and cast Tilda Swinton (Orlando) in the Bennet role, a choice that reflects well on their instincts, for it is Swinton's performance that is the most memorable element of the picture.
As End opens, Margaret Hall (Swinton) is seen entering a Reno gay meatmarket called The Deep End, where she asks Darby Reese (Josh Lucas), a smarmy lad who verges upon being a sexual predator, to keep away from her son, Beau (Jonathan Tucker), a talented young trumpet player just out of high school. Darby's reaction is to say, Sure, if you pay me. Margaret returns to her home on the lake and tells Beau what has happened, but he refuses to believe her. That same night, however, when Darby drives out to Tahoe and meets with Beau in the Hall family's boathouse, Darby admits that he asked Margaret for money. The two men fight, but Beau breaks away and runs back to the house. Unbeknownst to Beau, Darby leaves the boathouse and leans on the pier railing to catch his breath. A rotten board gives way and he falls to his death, his chest punctured by an anchor lying on the shingle below.
The following morning, Margaret finds Darby's corpse and, fearing that Beau may have killed him, she drags the body into a launch, transports it to a distant part of the lake, and, after weighting it with the anchor, dumps it over the side. Later, when she realizes that Darby's Corvette is parked out front, she is forced to dive down to the body and retrieve his keys so she can drive it back to Reno and abandon it there. Thinking that she has covered up Beau's crime, she goes back to caring for her three children and their grandfather Jack (Peter Donat)—her husband, a naval officer, is at sea on maneuvers, and Margaret is, to all intents and purposes, a single mom. All, it seems, is under control. But after the body is discovered by a fisherman, Margaret receives a visit from Alek Spera (Goran Visnjic), a personable expatriate conman who knows that Darby visited Tahoe on the night he died. He brings with him a video tape and insists that she watch it—it shows Beau and Darby having sex. Alek tells Margaret he and his partner, Nagle (Raymond J. Barry), want fifty thousand dollars by the next afternoon or he will give the video to the local police. Margaret spends all that day and the next trying to raise the money, but she cannot—new lines of credit, a mortgage, loans... everything she tries requires her husband as a co-signatory, and he is unreachable. The hour appointed for her payoff meeting with Alek passes, and he drives back to Tahoe to confront her. But upon his arrival he finds her trying ineffectually to give CPR to Jack, who has had a heart attack. Alek helps her save the old man and in the process begins to become attracted not only to Margaret but to the cleanness of her life by contrast to his own. If it were not for his rapacious partner, Alek might well pull back from the blackmail scheme, but he knows that if he does, Nagle will do far worse to the family than extort money. When someone is arrested for Darby's murder, he goes back to Margaret and informs her that he has tried to put an end to the blackmail scheme, but Nagle will not desist—he is demanding the money. Alek tells her that he himself will not take a share, but she will have to raise 25K for Nagle. Margaret, who knows that the man arrested is innocent, manages to get twelve thousand by pawning her jewelry, but this is not sufficient to satisfy Nagle—he comes after her, and this sets into motion a violent climax in which both men come to grief.
The idea of evil corrupted by good is perhaps the most interesting of the traditional noir- themes. It is exemplified in this instance by a criminal with an honorable heart persuaded to rash and life-endangering action by an honest woman who, despite the purity of her intent, becomes for him a kind of femme fatale. Usually such films are seen mostly from the man's point of view, but End relies almost entirely on Margaret as the narrative character, and this imbalance weakens the structure of the picture. We want to know more about Alek's confusion, his sense of exposure in coming out from the secure shadows of his criminal life to engage this woman who lives in the clear light of day. The directors attempt to convey the dissonance between Alek's world and that of Margaret by never shooting him in strong sunlight, while shooting Margaret often in light so bright that she seems less a person than an expression of that light given human form; but this technique, albeit effective, does not illuminate everything we need to know, and we find ourselves demanding more information about Alek than is provided. In The Reckless Moment, James Mason and Joan Bennet burn up the screen with an electric intensity in order to convey this unlikely relationship. In End, both Swinton and Visnjic take a more understated approach to basically the same roles, and while this seems appropriate to the milieu in which the story is set, the script is not quite fleshed out enough to support the approach—the moviegoer has to work a tad too hard in order to accept so subtly stated a connection. (There is another script problem—the idea that Swinton, who lives in a beautiful house on the shores of Lake Tahoe, cannot come up with 25k simply does not wash.) Yet at the same time, the performances of the two leads are the main strength of the movie.
With her finely cut features and redhead paleness, Swinton conveys grace under pressure better than any actress since another great redhead, Deborah Kerr. As she goes about getting rid of Darby's body and car, her courage when confronted with this terrifying business is projected with a marvelous precision of facial gesture, as is the fear of her son's homosexuality that she experiences on seeing Beau just after having watched the video tape of him and Darby. She seems lit up by every nuance of feeling, to register the slightest changes in emotional temperature, and it is fascinating to watch the interplay between Margaret and Alek, a man who is beginning to understand that he is trapped on a course that leads to the deepest of ends and cannot find it in himself to pull back in order to save his life. As it stands, the film may wind up generating an Oscar nomination for Swinton, but had it included two or three more minutes illustrating her involvement with Visnjic, especially if McGeehee and Siegel had provided another significant scene revealing more of Alek's attitudes, we might have had a modern classic on our hands.
Which brings us to our second film.
Let's pretend that in the beginning was the Word, and the earth was without form, and along came God Who made us in His image and all that good junk, and He was so well pleased, He took a nap on the seventh day, and on the eighth, well, maybe He had a date to go bowling or another construction job somewhere, so off He went and left every glorious and beautiful thing He had made to devolve until the whole of Creation eventually came to resemble a seedy portion of LA in the early 21st Century... this would seem to be the underlying premise of Ghost World, the first non-documentary film by Terry Zwigoff (Crumb), based on the underground comic by Daniel Clowes, who co-authored the screenplay with Zwigoff. From the movie's opening sequence, when the camera pans across the face of a rundown apartment building, sampling the occupants within—a fat man eating alone, a family zombified in front of the TV, their failing energies at one with the ghostly flickering of the tube—we understand that we are about to watch a story that concerns people who exist beneath the world's radar, who like most of us are not the stuff of Hollywood films, not supercriminals or heroes or alien invaders or beautiful teenage victims or perky girls to whom nothing really bad ever happens, but rather are sadly ordinary in our defining characteristics, living lives of quiet desperation and deriving pleasure from middling joys that are often imperceptible to anyone except ourselves. It is not a subject that much appeals to the studios. I recall a friend of mine, an accomplished author, telling me how when he was shopping his Pulitzer-nominated novel in Hollywood, he met with a producer who, having read the book, engaged him in the following conversation:
Producer: This book's about a plumber, right?
Friend (confused): Right... .
Producer (agitated): It's about a plumber who goes to Miami and ends up rescuing a bunch of (here he uses the plural of the N word), right?
Friend (put-off): Yeah, I guess you could say that.
Producer (leaning forward, aggressive): Why should I care?
The proper answer to the producer's question, which my friend was too aggravated to supply, is: because it's a good story, you stupid creep. The problem is that most folks in Hollywood wouldn't know a good story if it bit them on the wallet. To them, a good story dovetails with the idea of "high concept" and almost necessarily involves stuff like alien viruses and massive explosions and identity switches and ridiculous plot twists that they believe will make a movie special, distinguishing it by an infinitesimal degree from the last movie they believed was special, something starring a tabloid figure with a script by some forlorn simian who never once during the process had an original thought, and which had a thirty-million-dollar opening, dropped 53% in its second week, didn't cover its investment domestically but is doing huge business on DVD in Japan, Italy, and Indonesia, all clearly discernible signs of specialness.
Plumbers need not apply.
There are no plumbers featured in Ghost World, but the characters involved most likely have had dealings with one, something that cannot be said for the characters in the vast majority of studio movies (unless said plumber happens to handle freelance wetwork for the CIA on the side), and the story they contrive by means of their interactions is a very good story, indeed, albeit a diffusely stated one. Primarily, it is a coming-of-age piece centering about Enid (Thora Birch), an attractive, slightly overweight young woman who has just graduated high school and, instead of going to college, is planning to move into an apartment with her best friend Rebecca (Scarlett Johanson). Together, the two girls form a unit, a two-woman hit team of disaffected social critics who spice the boredom of their lives by disparaging and tormenting their acquaintances, often to the point of playing cruel tricks upon them. Their reason for moving in together is basically so that they can continue their team-trashing of the urban nightmare, but as the post-graduation summer wears on, it becomes evident that Enid has grown dissatisfied with this prospect (though she hasn't yet recognized the fact). She begins to cast her nets wider, searching for the eidolon that all of us are searching for: something more.
While sitting around one day, ridiculing the personal ads in a newspaper, the girls run across an ad in which a lonely man attempts to contact a blond woman he has met on the airport shuttle, and sensing the presence of a true loser, they call the man and leave a message on his answering machine, pretending to be the blond in question and arranging a rendezvous at a Fifties-themed diner named Wowsville.
Enter Steve Buscemi.
No one plays the stereoptypical loser better than Buscemi, but the wonderful thing about Ghost World is that the screenwriting is so deft in its specificity, it allows Buscemi's character, Seymour, to dissolve the limits of stereotype. (Indeed, thanks to the intelligence of Clowes and Zwigoff, many of the potential stereotypes whom Enid engages on her odyssey of self-discovery manage this feat.) When Seymour shows up at Wowsville and unhappily drinks a milkshake while waiting, checking his watch many times, Enid and Rebecca lampoon him mercilessly, with Enid doing a caricature in her cartoonist's journal that depicts him weeping and thinking, Nobody Loves Me. But when Seymour leaves and is nearly killed in a traffic mishap, Enid insists that they follow him home, and soon thereafter, intrigued by him, she attends a weekly garage sale at which Seymour sells used blues records. It turns out that his passion is a superb collection of old 78s. Enid buys a record from him, a compilation of old blues cuts, and becomes entranced by a Robert Johnson song. This consolidates her interest in Seymour, and they become friends... so much so that Enid takes it upon herself to find a woman for Seymour, who hasn't had a date in four years. The new friendship frays her relationship with Rebecca, and the two girls begin drifting apart.
Eventually the blond woman whom Seymour had sought to meet surfaces, and the two initiate an affair that changes Seymour and undercuts his friendship with Enid. Pushed away from Seymour, unable to reconnect entirely with Rebecca, horrified by the woman her profoundly confused father—with whom she lives—is considering as a potential wife, Enid travels farther afield in her search for a meaningful relationship. Along the way she encounters, among others, Roberta, a feminist art teacher played in her customary broadly charming style by Illeana Douglas, and Norman (Dwight Stephenson Jr.), an old man who appears to sit 24-7 on a bench at a not-in-service bus stop, neatly dressed in a dark suit and tie, waiting for a bus that may never come. When Enid tries to persuade him that his waiting is in vain, he tells her that the bus will be along soon and when it does he will be leaving town.
Much of the conversation in Ghost World, the lion's share of it taking place between Seymour and Enid, is concerned with the nature of being a loser—"loser" utilized as a label that denotes someone who has no significant resource that will permit them to transcend their hapless condition. Each of the characters comes ultimately to terms with their condition in various ways. Some, like Seymour, learn to accept it with grace; others continue their useless defeated struggle. The exceptions to this rule of acceptance are Norman, who eventually leaves town on the bus that finally arrives, and Enid, who later catches a bus from the same bench, but likely to a destination different from Norman's—it is given us to suspect that the metaphor of leaving town means death in Norman's case, and that Enid may be bound for greater things. This is all redolent of the tendentious and frequently one-dimensional materials that inform underground comics, but in Zwigoff's hands the material comes of age, transcends its condition, and leaves town in the same direction that Enid takes. Zwigoff's film succeeds in being at once cynically funny, gently mystical, and, most significantly, human in its portrayal of ordinary process and the small graces that let us survive amid the poisons of our soul-smothering culture. Assisting in Zwigoff's enterprise, Thora Birch gives a surprisingly depthy reading of the artist-as-a-young-rebellious-misanthrope who might easily be mistaken for something less than deep, and Buscemi, in his best part since Trees Lounge, responds with a performance that eschews the sad, baggy-eyed mugging which lesser directors have encouraged him to rely upon, and invests Seymour with strength and a sweet dignity. Scarlett Johansson is also noteworthy in her take on a young woman who is too intelligent to be popular, too pretty to be anti-social in the way she aspires to be, and neither pretty nor intelligent enough to escape her limited expectations. The smaller parts are all fleshed out nicely by a cast that includes Bob Balaban (Enid's dad) and Teri Garr (dad's girfriend).
It's possible, I suppose, to dismiss Ghost World as being merely a good entertainment, and perhaps that's all it is; yet it is so unobtrusively appealing and seductive a film that it resonates with the viewer and causes you to think about the characters long after watching it, to wonder about their futures. This seems a sign that perhaps it deserves a higher rating, that it may be a film whose surface lightness succeeds in magnifying a greater landscape than it appears to display. Whatever its future status, be it minor classic or interesting cultural artifact, it certainly deserves consideration as one of the best American movies of the year and provides a welcome relief from a summer rife with monstrously bloated, uninvolving, and almost unendurable feature films, many with budgets large enough to fund several new landfills, a purpose for which the money might have been better spent. And with this in mind, this most horrid of all movie summers, I'd like to conclude with a little prayer.
Thank You, Whoever You Are, for permitting me to survive my two hours on the Planet of the Apes—though I cannot thank You for letting Markie Mark live to act again. Thank You also for letting me retain some semblance of mental acuity after watching Travolta with a soul patch hump his way through the unspeakably horrible and spiritually debasing Swordfish; thank You for giving me the strength to avoid both Pearl Harbor and Tomb Raider; thank You for drastically limiting the box office take of the abomination known as America's Sweethearts (ditto, The Mexican); thank You for causing AIto be made so I could add another to my Most Hated Moves Ever list; thank You for inspiring Catherine Zeta Jones and Michael Douglas to produce a child, but please, in Thy mercy, do not allow said child to find work as an actor; thank You for no Tom Cruise films this summer; thank You for giving me the foresight to have on hand an airsick bag before viewing Ghosts of Mars, a chunk of guano that surely marks finis to the career of John Carpenter, once the best B-movie director in the world; thank you for killing off the Jurassic Park franchise; thank You for no Kevin Costner and Arnold Schwarzenegger films, too; thank You for Roger Ebert and Joel Siegel and Peter Travers and all the rest of the professional cheerleading squad who make every dissenter look good; thank You for offering us at least the hope of a writers and actors strike; thank You for getting me through Saving Silverman without lashing out at the feeb who came over with a friend of mine to watch my screener and laughed at every lame joke; thank You for having someone outbid me on Ebay for the Tom Hanks Castaway soccer ball, thereby effectively preventing me from being prosecuted for sending it stuffed with roadkill to his home...
I have but one favor to ask of You. If what I've heard from industry people is true, that next summer's movies are going to be even worse, would You mind maybe doing that little thing you did with Sodom to the major studios? I would really appreciate it and I promise never to ask for anything else again in my whole life.
Lastly, thank You for Ghost World.
I feel much better now.
For those of us who did not have an especially happy childhood, Stephen King's habitual depiction of children as magical creatures (a trope he shares with another mega-Steven—Spielberg) whose innocence and courage are capable of overcoming supernatural monsters and dysfunctional parents alike has grown more than a little tiresome. If we are to believe King, should Planet Earth suffer an alien invasion or a plague of demons, all we need do is muster a group of pure-in-heart pre-pubescent buddies and turn them loose on the bogeymen, who will surely be daunted, quelled, and shamed into non-being by the clear flame of bravery displayed by these diminutive heroes. King might do well to acquaint himself with the horrific fates of children who are faced with serious threats—the odds are his analysis would conclude that when children are confronted with mortal danger, for the most part they die. Still and all, it is a pleasant-enough fantasy to indulge in, and the latest film based on King's work, Hearts In Atlantis, is superior to many previous such cinematic translations. This is not to say that it is worth watching, but it is not entirely without virtue.
Cheap sentiment is yet another trope embraced by the two Stevens who bestride the world of popular culture, and Hearts is awash with teary moments cued by maudlin strings that encourage us to let down our cynical shields and surrender to the sweetness of the Über-nostalgia conjured up by the film. The story is framed by the return of Robert Garfield (David Morse) to his hometown to attend the funeral of his childhood pal, Sully. There he learns that another friend of his youth, his first love, Carol Gerber (Mika Boorem) has also died, and this causes him to immerse himself in the hour-and-a-half-long flashback to the early1960s that forms the bulk of the movie. The younger Garfield, known as Bobby (Anton Yelchin), is essentially an orphan, his father having died and his mother Elizabeth (Hope Davis) having chosen to cope with the death by more or less abandoning her child and turning her attention to the pursuit of a career in real estate, a course that inspires her to such cruelties as spending money on a career-assisting wardrobe that might have bought her son his long-coveted bike. Into this less-than-joyous circumstance comes a boarder, Ted Brautigan (Anthony Hopkins) who is fleeing from people he refers to as "low men." This term, it turns out, refers to the FBI. Brautigan is a psychic whose ability allows to him to know everything about whomever he touches—he has been recruited or shanghaied (it is not made clear which) by J. Edgar Hoover to help fight the war on Communism, and he has managed to escape his evil masters and lives his life on the run throughout America. He enlists Bobby to read the paper to him and keep on the lookout for the "low men," thus becoming a father figure to the child and arousing both Elizabeth's suspicion and jealousy. He befriends Bobby's friends, in particular Carol, and saves them from the local bully by threatening to reveal that the bully, prone to using terms like "faggot" and "queer," is himself a closet homosexual. On occasion he lapses into fugues during which he senses from afar the imminent arrival of his pursuers. Unfortunately, these fugues are scarcely distinguishable from the remainder of Sir Anthony's somnolent performance. Once a fine actor, he has for several years been mailing in performances that more kindly critics than I have described as "understated," relying on his voice and presence alone. Perhaps these efforts have been commensurate with the quality of the projects he has chosen to grace. But they are projects that, for whatever reason, he has chosen, and as I watched him emote, his patrician features gone vague in a bout of far-seeing, I had the notion that he was not tracking the movements of FBI ferrets but was rather reciting a mantra in which the words "Where's my check?" figured prominently. The one noteworthy performance in Hearts is that of Hope Davis. She succeeds in creating a sharply etched portrait of a woman who, in walling herself off from grief and the world of trouble that has resulted from her husband's death, has also walled herself off from everything that might sustain her. Otherwise, the children are suitably appealing, David Morse is suitably grizzled and soulful, etc. etc... .
The virtue I described Hearts as not being entirely devoid of is chiefly due to the work of William Goldman. Somehow Goldman, an excellent writer in several forms, has managed to cobble two sections of King's meandering ten-hanky salute to the Sixties into a fairly engaging script. There are a few off-key passages—a scene in which Brautigan speaks elegiacally to Bobby of Hall-of-Fame NFL fullback Bronco Nagurski ("The old man kept crawling... he scored for us!") contains enough unrefined sugar to cause a kindergarten class to run amok. But overall, Goldman has crafted these weepy materials with far more cleverness than they perhaps deserve, and had the picture adhered more closely to the dark suggestions of the script, Hearts might have given the world something more than yet another reason for Roger Ebert to shake like a bowlful of jelly and chortle "I loved this movie!" to his neutered elf of a co-conspirator in bad taste, What's-his-name.
But then Goldman likely had not reckoned on Scott Hicks, a director apparently in the thrall of the two Stevens. In his hands, the seedy little New England town that serves as the setting for the story becomes a kingdom of childhood possibility, full of quaint desirable objects and secret hideaways and sinister adults, where every shaft of sun creates a mystical dazzle and the music of American innocence—mid-Fifties rock n' roll—plays non-stop on all the radios, as if in those days oldies stations existed. Which, of course, they did not. Like his mentors, Hicks attempts to wring a maximum of tears from a minimum of earned emotionality, and he is, to a great degree, successful in this. As I sat in the darkened theater, scribbling on my notepad, writing down words such as "crap" and "hogwash" and "Gaah!", the druggy mixture of sad-eyed kiddies and treacly post-Mantovani symphonic goop and Sir Anthony's mossy, slumbering presence triggered a chemical reaction that, indeed, brought tears to my eyes, and there were moments when, despite my profound disinterest in most of the characters, I set aside my fantasy that the film would degenerate into a horrific surrealism and I would see Sir Anthony dismembered mid-fugue by a rogue elephant, while Bobby, demented by loneliness, ran wild through that little sugar dumpling of a town, slaughtering his enemies with Carol Gerber's bloody shinbone, and instead, possessed by a sort of repulsively generic nostalgia for all those things we have lost, those shining moments from which we failed to snatch a proper measure of joy, or, alack! from which we snatched too much, and now gleam dully like fireflies stored away in a bottle, their dying energies making a dim and woeful light... Instead, I found myself hoping that Bobby would someday get his longed-for Schwinn Black Phantom and ride ride ride through days golden and many (as is implied he shall at movie's end) until, of course, he collides with the grinning tooth-covered bus of circumstance and is rendered into kibble-sized bits.
Blame for what is wrong with Hearts in Atlantis must ultimately be laid at the feet of Stephen King. For many years King has been far more a sentimentalist than a horror writer; and now, in a time when real horror has been visited upon us in all its gruesome anonymity and grindstone banality, his giant spiders and freakish clowns and wicked man-shaped devils are more comforting than frightening—they seem assurances (false ones) that evil comes wrapped in an otherworldly gloss that will make it readily distinguishable and therefore avoidable. His once-fresh technique of Americanizing the horror novel by a kind of overwrought product placement, laying in incessant references to McDonald's and popular kitchen cleaners and sinus cures and et al, has these days a period feel similar to that you might obtain from coming across a futuristic science fiction story set in 1985. Reading a King novel has become an act of self-consolation, like eating ice cream when depressed. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Whether we have a jones for S'mores or reruns of Gilligan's Island, we need our comforts, and King's lapse into dreary sentimentality doubtless synchs with some similar national lapse, a consensus desire to be told a spooky fairy tale that will make the bad man who lives inside all our heads go away. But the fact remains that King's fictions have devolved from pulpy monuments into bland palliatives, and this perhaps speaks to a creative dotage, conjuring an image of the author sitting alone in his gloomy study, fondling a rusty metal top and muttering the word "Rats" or somesuch, and smiling foolishly. I say this as someone who has enjoyed several of King's books, but lately I have all but given up hope for a return to the form displayed in The Shining and Christine, in both of which he countered sentiment with considerable menace and interesting sociological observance.
Of all the ghastly sugars yielded by Hearts In Atlantis, the most unpalatable is the ending in which Elizabeth Garfield, motivated now wholly by jealousy, turns in Brautigan to the FBI, and is almost immediately forgiven by her son, despite the fact that Brautigan has become his father, his mentor, his great friend. This led me to a new and divergent consideration of Bobby's character. Could his relative lack of anguish over Brautigan's fate be attributed to some pathology? I realized that it was possible to view Bobby as a sociopath, that through a scene-by-scene analysis, a case could be made for his having manipulated the entire scenario so as to acquire the money for his bike (he winds up with money that Brautigan has made by means of a sporting wager to fund an escape), and that now, once again the object of his mother's love, his transportation problem solved, and that smelly old dude upstairs out of the way, he sits in his room as satisfied as a spider with a fresh-caught fly. This interpretation adds a gloating air to the final frames in which a smiling Bobby Schwinn's off into an eternal childhood autumn. I suppose, however, it is unlikely that Scott Hicks is sufficiently clever or subversive a manipulator to have intended this, and that this subtle portrait of a child monster was only accidentally achieved.
If you are in the mood for a film about childhood (among other things) and the remarkable resilience of children that earns its emotionality, I recommend that you rent the outstanding Brazilian film Central Station. If, on the other hand, you're a little blue and want to feel good about feeling bad, then I imagine you could do worse than Hearts in Atlantis. As a makeshift anti-depressant, it is, I should think, every bit the equal of a dozen Oreos or a pint of Rocky Road.
The way I see it, an unheralded film named Donnie Darko is hands-down the best science fiction movie in quite a few years.
Granted, this verges on damning with faint praise, but actually it's quite a good picture and deserves a much wider audience than it has received.
Darko was not blessed with a massive budget, and features neither spaceships nor ethnically stereotyped aliens nor a comic-book plot nor actors in ape makeup, as have the recent top grossers in the genre; but it does possess qualities its rivals lack, i.e., a good script, a complicated and compelling story, and excellent acting. Admittedly, these qualities do not normally translate into box-office clout, and the genre's focus being what it is, the Best Film Hugo and Best Script Nebula will doubtless be awarded to some marketer's wet dream of an FX-laden movie featuring an elf or two thousand. But my personal awards, which I believe are no more meaningless than those others, go to Richard Kelly, Darko's first-time director and scriptwriter.
Like the word "irony," which is habitually and wrongly used to characterize mere coincidence, the nature and meaning of the term "black comedy" is often misapprehended. Thus it is that American Beauty, perhaps the most self-congratulatory film in the history of the motion picture, a pompous art-statement made by folks who wouldn't recognize art if it stuck its tongue down their throat, has been labeled a black comedy, whereas it is in actuality a tired and pretentious social satire that launches a labored attack on the wages of consumerism (a blatant hypocrisy, considering its origin at Dreamworks) and concludes with a voiceover narrated by a dead man telling us how he wouldn't change a thing about his life, which included alienation from his wife, the contempt of his children, a joyless job, a self-destructive infatuation with a cheerleader, and his subsequent murder at the hands of a deranged homophobe/homosexual. The imperatives of black comedy demand a less deluded resolution and permit no such sappy epiphanies. By any definition, however, Donnie Darko is a black comedy, albeit a most unconventional one that juxtaposes concerns with mental problems, troubled teenagers, families, the 80s, time travel, and the institutions of self-help, high school, and psychiatry, and somehow manages to juggle all this material and achieve an allusive beauty. And unlike most black comedies, Darko is hilariously funny.
The title character, played by Jake Gyllenhaal (Homer Hickham in October Sky), is a bright suburban teenager currently on medication and undergoing therapy for undefined psychological problems that manifest in sleepwalking and the occasional act of arson. He also receives visits from an imaginary (or perhaps not so imaginary) friend named Frank who wears the dirt-smeared costume of a heavy-metal Easter Bunny with pupilless eyes, ferocious teeth, and antlerlike ears. One night after being summoned from his dreams by Frank, Donnie sleepwalks, and Frank tells him that he has traveled back from the future to warn him that the world will end in slightly more than twenty-eight days. After sleeping until morning on a golf course, Donnie returns home to find that a jet engine has fallen out of the sky (yet no plane reports one missing) and crashed into his bedroom—Frank has, in effect, saved his life. From this point on, Frank returns every so often to remind Donnie that time is running out and instructs him to commit a number of increasingly violent crimes that appear to be unrelated, but eventually are seen to be elements of a larger and more mysterious event. Donnie soon begins to observe strange distortions in reality. For one, he sees transparent liquid entities that emerge from the chests of his friends and family and precede them as they move through their days, almost as if these creatures were leading their human hosts along predestined paths. How Donnie interprets these phenomena and learns what he must do in order to spare the people he loves (a new girlfriend, parents, et al) from mortal danger and a more punishing variety of grief than they otherwise might suffer forms the basis of the plot.
Of the smallish tradition of American black comedies that have utilized a high school setting—Heathers, Rushmore, Election, The Faculty (I insist it's a comedy), none has done so more effectively than Darko. Donnie's school, Middlesex, is lorded over by a grotesque bronze mascot, half-man, half-bulldog, known as the Mongrel, and this bizarre piece of statuary informs the character of the school, a place where self-help guru Jim Cunningham (a perfectly cast Patrick Swayze) is regaled by half the faculty, reviled by the other half, and whose student body has the paranoid cohesion of patients on a mental ward. Donnie constantly gets himself in trouble by challenging the school's short-sighted authority figures, but finds a sympathetic ear in the person of an English teacher played nicely by Drew Barrymore, who also served as the film's executive producer (God bless you, Ms. Barrymore! I take back every nasty thing I ever said about you, except for the stuff about Charlie's Angels) and a physics teacher who nourishes Donnie's interest in time travel by giving him a book on the subject written by a former Middlesex faculty member—she has since devolved into a creepy old neighborhood lady known by the kids as Grandma Death.
The most astonishing thing about Darko is its level of ambition and the degree to which it succeeds in doing what it seeks to accomplish. Not only is it a black comedy, it is also an effective period piece—the story unfolds against the backdrop of the Bush-Dukakis election—and a poignant family drama. Generally films that attempt this much, especially first films, wind up being complete messes; the problem of creating characters that are at the same time real and funny usually proves too much to overcome. But while some of Darko's characters are wrought with broad strokes, the accuracy of Kelly's dialog inspirits other of his creations to stand and breathe with authentic power. I've seen the movie twice now, and I'm still not quite certain how Kelly manages to pull his complex materials together. But pull them together he does, and in a manner that is both startling and intensely moving. Gyllenhaal, by turns menacing, vulnerable, and funny, brilliantly assists his director in conveying the emotional substance of the film, and the remainder of the cast—notably Katherine Ross as Donnie's psychiatrist, and Mary MacDonald and Alex Greenwald as his well-intentioned but bewildered parents—complements his performance. If Darko had been better distributed and given a sufficient advertising budget, I'm convinced that Gyllenhaal would have a chance for an Oscar nomination.
Those who have read this column may have concluded that I have no affection for the tropes of traditional science fiction, but this is not the case. I would love to see a science fictional Lawrence of Arabia, an epic space opera replete with explosions and aliens and so forth, and that also is gifted with vital characters and a story that aspires to do more than update a fairy tale or repackage a western. But given the state of the industry, I'm not so sure such a film is possible. Having endured almost every genre movie released this year, from the putrescence that was Mission to Mars, through the faux-Kubrickian puffery of AI, to Planet of the Apes, a laughably incompetent film that Tim Burton appears to have assembled from spare parts fallen out of Charleton Heston's brain, it's become apparent that there is a formula at work here: the bigger the budget, the dumber the movie. Perhaps this process has some economic validity, though the box-office performance of such films as I have mentioned—one-week-wonders all—seems to imply that there is plenty of room for refinement. Give a director eight or nine figures to play with, and you are flat guaranteed a mediocre-at-best product with a great look and way-cool FX and the intellectual content of a Saturday morning cartoon. Much of this is due to the fact that studio heads, paranoid about their massive investments, cannot stop tinkering, and assign writer after writer to perform serial hack jobs on what once may have been decent scripts, the idea being that this employment of multiple incompetents will transform the script into something accessible to the lowest common denominator, thus making it appeal to a wider audience. Indie films, once the refuge of the auteur, have become little more than a farm system for Hollywood. Films by new directors such as Kelly are essentially job applications. The odds are good that Darko will not be merely Kelly's first film, but his only good film, and like his immediate predecessors Daniel Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream), now assigned to Batman Beyond, and Chris Moran (Memento), currently filming a remake of the Danish film Insomnia starring the gag-and-shudder pairing of mugger Robin Williams and shouter Al Pacino, and like dozens of others before them, he will be gobbled up by the studios and assigned to a project that pays him a seven-figure director's fee and has no chance whatsoever of being worth mule spit.
Is there a remedy for this?
In a better world, where punishment and reward were fairly apportioned out by Hollywood, a director like Martin Scorsese, say, would be called into the office after producing several losers in a row and told, "Marty, we're sending you down to the minors. Let's see what you can do with a five-million-dollar budget. Reacquaint yourself with story values, and then maybe we'll bring you back up."
Or let's suppose that Hollywood was run like the NBA, with a rookie salary cap. Every new director brought into the system, instead of one moment being in charge of a film he made on credit cards, faith, and cheap take-out, and the next moment driving down the highway in a 100-million-dollar star vehicle, so intimidated by the experience that he permits himself to be dictated to by Armani-clad bozos whose idea of a good time is sitting around a table talking concept with twelve guys named "Hey, you!"—instead of that, if they were moved along slowly, given a few smallish vehicles to prove their worth before handing them the keys to the stretch limo, if Hollywood were run like any ordinary business, then we might actually get to see a big-budget science fiction movie that's aimed at an audience who have stopped measuring their rate of growth with marks on a doorframe.
But that day will likely never come.
Hollywood, stoned on the fumes of ego and power, perceives a different reality than most of us and operates with a lurid dysfunctionality that, though horribly inefficient, manages to survive in a celebrity-driven environment. Should that environment change, however, a thousand blackly clad lizards will scurry from the studio lots, squeaking that the sky is falling, seeking to avoid being crushed by the fall of the fabulous edifice that protected them from the killing light of truth and beauty, and the laws of Karma.
The Sky Is Falling.
A disaster flick starring every lame-o actor whose career expired in this industry ELE.
Now that would be a dumb big-budget movie I'd like to see.
For now, those who yearn for adult science fiction films are stuck with little pictures like Donnie Darko and Aronofsky's Pi. It's not such a bad place to be stuck, really. There's a considerable joy to be had in discovering such films, in wandering into a theater and watching something completely unexpected on the screen, something that hasn't been denatured, castrated, and covered in a thin candy shell.
At any rate, it'll have to do until something better happens along.
In 1986, an Argentinian film by director Elisseo Subiela, Man Facing Southeast, related the disquieting and creepily ambiguous story of a mental patient whose conviction that he was an alien being thwarted his doctor's every attempt to cure him. Some years later a novel heavily indebted to the film, but nowhere near as interesting, achieved a modest success, and now, in a horrid example of circularity, Hollywood has turned that novel into a movie that effects a hybrid of a watered-down Starman and a lame-ass, preachy, warm-and-fuzzy, politically correct take on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The question the film asks us to contemplate is whether the putative space traveler, Prot (Kevin Spacey), is what he claims to be or if he is merely an enlightened lunatic. But after thirty or forty minutes of listening to Prot's bland pronouncements on the human condition, his self-help-slogan approach to the problems of families, personal growth, and the virtues of accepting those who are different from us, we really don't care, because either alien or nutboy, he's a complete bore. Far from being a strange and incomprehensible creature, apart from a propensity for eating unpeeled bananas, Prot is basically Mr. Family Values, and during the film, one yearns for his keepers to make sport of him, perhaps dose him with a psychotropic agent that would permit his true alien-ness to surface.
Every so often—and, given the tenor of current events, likely more often in the immediate future—the studios feel compelled to make clear to us all that they are on the side of purity and niceness and all things decent, and thus turn out a spate of films whose wholesome, simplistic message is pounded into the audience's brain frame after frame until even the most malignant soul in the theater is prone to a reflex acceptance of such good-for-you homilies as Hate Is Wrong and Love Is All You Need. Nothing can be more loathsome, more disgusting in its hypocrisy, than this product of moral tumescence on the part of the bean-counting millipedes who scuttle through the Hollywood halls of power—as proof, I offer two recent examples of statement pictures: the wretchedly sentimental Pleasantville and another Spacey vehicle, the insufferably gooey Pay It Forward.
Now we have K-Pax.
Prot appears to arrive from the planet K-Pax on a beam of light that deposits him in a train station, where—after telling various and sundry about his homeworld—he is hauled off by the police and institutionalized. In my town, the police have no time for such piddly concerns; an actual cop would probably have shooed him away from his cruiser and driven off in search of something else to do. After proving resistant to all forms of medication, Prot is transferred to the Psychiatric Institute of Manhattan, put under the care of the unrelentingly benign and earnest Dr. Powell (Jeff Bridges), and placed in a ward populated by a collection of the cutest, most lovable whackos who ever suckled on a thorazine drip. Should you happen to face commitment, PIM is definitely the place you want to be sent. It is the Hotel Pierre of asylums, with lively decor and kindly nurses and doctors with plenty of time to focus on individual patients. Instead of the bored, undertrained, and often abusive cretins that usually serve as orderlies in such facilities, we are presented with burly, bearded angels possessed of even temperaments and given to gently persuading a veritable Mouseketeers Club of perky psychotics not to injure themselves. Prot fits right in. Not only does he become King of the Ward, Most Popular, and Most Likely to Thrive After a Lobotomy, but all the patients wind up competing in an essay contest to see who amongst them deserves to return with Prot to his home planet—he can take only one of them, and wouldn't you know, it is a homeless black woman who ultimately earns the accolade (her essay simply, tear-jerkingly states "I have no home"). Then, too, Prot's tedious advice to the patients proves far more effective in treating their specific maladies than any of the strategies put forward by Dr. Powell and his colleagues.
In the face of such poignant wisdom, Powell becomes fascinated with Prot. The man is, after all, a brilliant astronomer, conversant in a Vulcanesque alien language, and speaks with authentic pride and wistfulness of K-Pax, a planet where there are no laws, no marriage, and no pleasurable sexual intercourse
—however, the yort blossoms, according to the Prot-ster, smell lovely in a gentle breeze, and I suppose that makes up for a lack of quality sex. While a degree of humor is evoked in Prot's being interviewed by his cinematic predecessor (Bridges played the title role in Starman), their many exchanges have all the dramatic tension of a dental floss demonstration. But then a film whose emotional climax occurs at a family barbecue, where Powell has brought Prot in order to help him connect with people (though benign and earnest, the doc is really not such a great therapist), is obviously unconcerned with matters such as tension, conflict, et al. Whatever it was that director Iain Softely (Hackers,Backbeat) was trying to achieve is a far more compelling mystery than Prot's actual nature. By making Prot such a competent, self-assured, blissed-out fellow, he eliminates most of the disturbing potentials of the situation, those things that might have generated a degree of suspense, and what remains is a steaming pile of treacly human (or inhuman) goodness without a skeleton to lend it shape. We are expected to buy into Dr. Powell's conviction that Prot, who has announced that he will return to K-Pax within a month, is preparing to hurt himself or others. But Powell is portrayed as so gentle, well-meaning, and ineffectual a wuss, we know he would wax fretful over a kitty with a tummy ache—how can we take his conviction seriously? And we know further, because Softley has convinced us of this, that nothing truly bad can happen in his movie. The audience, in essence, is in the same situation as the patients at PIM—sitting in their comfy chairs, mouths slack and open, ready for another happy pill. In order to prevent myself from going on the nod, I found it necessary to stab myself in the thigh muscle with a pen knife every few minutes, a painful process, but one preferable to a docile acceptance of the program that the old Softley softly sought to imprint on my soaked-in-saccharine sensorium (sorry for the sibilance, but since seeing this sack of cinematic sofa-stuffing, I've developed a psychosomatic hiss).
Spacey's deadpan delivery, which served him reasonably well in films like LA Confidential and The Usual Suspects, simply does not work here. The role of Prot would have been better served by a more dynamic reading, and all Spacey's wry mannerisms achieve is to enhance the character's dreariness. Despite owning two Oscars (the last for the execrable American Beauty, perhaps the most self-congratulatory film is the history of the motion picture), Spacey is an actor who, albeit technically clever, has shown relatively little range. But it is not Spacey's movie to ruin—the script has already done that for him. Trite, clichéd, button-pushing—the only word that can encapsulate such a wad of insipid garbage is Spielbergian. Perhaps the most annoying facet of the script is the doting fondness for the human race displayed by a purportedly superior being, the tradition of movie and television visitors from afar who just cannot get enough of our effervescent culture, our sublime music and art, our piquant personalities, our flowers, our trees, etc. etc.—it leads one to suspect that the remainder of the galaxy must be butt-ugly. For my part, it's difficult to imagine that an otherworldly tourist taking a tour of the planet would be other than horrified at the conditions existing in most areas of the globe—war, famine, pestilence, unrelenting poverty, pollution... unless, of course, he happens to alight in the pleasant environment provided by the Psychiatric Institute of Manhattan. I suppose this tradition most reflects a lack of imagination on the part of various writers, and also the puerile notion extant in Hollywood that we will feel better about ourselves if every so often some fictive superman pronounces us beautiful. Nonetheless, though it is only slightly less clichéd, it would be a welcome change to watch a movie in which an alien tourist lands in a modern American city and is so nauseated by what meets his eye that he immediately ralphs all over a bright-eyed, curly-headed child.
Toward the latter portion of the movie, my wounded thigh aching, giddy from loss of blood, I found myself wondering whether or not I had paid my cable bill, had I defrosted the chicken I planned to cook for dinner, and why the name K-Pax, which—appropriately—had the sound of an over-the-counter calmative. Pax was, of course, obviously intended to conjure an image of a peaceful world, but K brought to mind Franz Kafka's anti-hero. Could it be that a subversive subtext was embedded in this apparently flimsy sugar-rush of a film? Were we being presented with the possibility that Prot's predicament was perplexing even to himself? Could Prot refer to "protean"? Perhaps his porridgelike personality and repulsiveness had a pertinent plot purpose and reflected a post-Sysiphean pitfall into which he been plunged... . Usually these little exercises serve to entertain me during the worst of films, but K-Pax was so mind-fogging I could not sustain this one, and—like the rest of the audience—finally succumbed and drifted with the Muzak-like soundtrack toward a rosy narcotized oblivion.
Afterward, as I limped through the parking lot, I was approached by an unremarkable-looking fellow in soiled work clothes who informed me that his name was Poot and that he hailed from the planet Q-Paz, where "the kempen blossoms jiggle pleasantly during the season of the purple moon." Quickly, before he could say more, I assaulted him, knocking him unconscious. I then stuffed him into my trunk and drove to a secluded place, where I have him now, lashed to an ancient oak. He continues to babble about the joys of Q-Paz and how he dotes upon our delightful human ways, our gift for poetry, our boundless kindness and vitality. I have not yet decided what to do with him. Perhaps I will give him a voice in the matter and have him write an essay. But of one thing I can assure you:
You will be spared his pointless story.
Editor's Note: This article is for adults. We're not out to sucker-punch anyone, so here's your warning: Lucius Shepard makes light of Harry Potter and uses rough language. The views of Mr. Shepard do not necessarily reflect the views of ES or anyone affiliated with the corporation. We've made these points elsewhere, but the letters expressing nothing more than outrage suggest they need repeating. If you wish to debate the review, please do so in our SFF.net newsgroup, where I will cordially welcome you.
Bob Kruger, ElectricStory.com
First of all, as he is portrayed in the movie, if that little marshmallow-hued choirboy Harry Potter went to a real school, he'd spend most of the seventh grade digging his underwear out of his butt crack and drying off his head after being given a swirlie. Even at Hogwarts School for Wizards, which is not exactly South Bronx High, it's likely he'd get punked out. The rougher lads would make sport of his tiny wand and generally torment him until, after years of relentless abuse, miserable, embittered, and borderline psychotic, Harry would break into his uncle's gun collection one fine morning and head off to school with a big smile on his face and a pocketful of hollowpoints and a crazy little song whining in his brain like the buzzing of an LSD-maddened fly.
Scratch one apprentice wizard.
But that, alas, is not the subject of the film, Harry Potter and the Booger of Fire, or whatever that puerile mess of hey-nonny-nonny I just saw was called.
For those of you who have been living inside the biosphere the past few years, Harry Potter is a winsome little scut with a brave soul and an ever-so-clever mind in whom a talent for the Great Art has been perceived, so off he goes to Wizard Junior High where he meets a clutch of equally precocious pals, and together they participate in classes run by quaint curmudgeons with vast powers and have oodles of fun and adventures you wouldn't believe unless you were sufficiently diminished to buy into this chump as entertainment and not the acidic brain-eating alien drool/opiate of the masses it truly is.
What's your problem, man?, someone will surely say.
It's not supposed to wreck your soul. It's a charming whimsy, a veritable banana split of special FX and sense of wonder, a film for children of all ages.
The trouble with that term, "children of all ages," is that it's misapplied—it should be used only in the pejorative. The trouble with the world is, in fact, that it is populated not by adults but by children of all ages, and ruled by schoolyard bullies. Despite the primacy of the juvenile in matters political, it's my feeling that the preferences of children of any age, much as they may gladden our hearts, should not be made into a cultural standard, especially any standard that relates to the entertainment industry. Children, after all, can happily entertain themselves by tossing a ball against a wall for hours on end—this scarcely seems to qualify them as arbiters of taste.
The reason kids say those delightfully barmy things they do is because they're essentially idiots, their brains aren't wired yet. If you think your Boopsy is cute when she spews her spaghetti onto the table and arranges the mess with her grubby fingers and then points and says of the incomprehensible shape she has created, "Noodlebug!" or some other inanity, why is it any less charming when Cletus Mapes, a 47-year-old schizophrenic who's been institutionalized most of his adult life, smears excrement on the wall, steps back, lifts his arms in exultation and screams, "Yama Yama Bonk," over and over until he's given an injection? I mean, there's not much effective difference between unfinished wiring and defective wiring.
(Let me dial back a second, so as to avoid some of the hate mail. I'm a dad myself and I like kids fine. I'm glad they have movies they can relate to—I simply wish there were a few more I could relate to. But with the average reading ability of the American public hovering around fifth grade level, the chances of that are slim.)
The trouble with Harry Potter and the Gauntlet of Phlegm is that while it pleases the little snogginses, it represents corporate synergy at its most loathsome: We're talking about an AOL/Time-Warner product accompanied by AOL/Time-Warner websites and links, AOL/Time-Warner action figures, lunch boxes, pencil sets, toy wands, pyjamas, card games, magic sets, watches, ad infinitum, all designed to extract as much money as possible from you, you, and especially you. The movie is a soul-less replica of the novel, and the novel... well, every ten or fifteen years someone hits the lottery and comes up with a fad that's perfect for the synergistic process. Tolkien, Dungeons and Dragons, Magicards. Harry Potter. JK Rowling seems like a nice lady, and it's nice she's getting her reward in the here-and-now. But let's face it, as works of fantasy, the Potter books are (to Rowling-ize the critical terminology) medium-grade gristlebore rife with worn-out muggletropes and nary a whittlesap of originality, deriving their Libertarian political sub-text from Ayn Rand, lifting bits from—among others—Tolkien, T.H. White, C.S. Lewis, Superman, and the first of the series having an ending that bears an astonishing resemblance to a Dungeons and Dragons adventure called Ghost Tower of Inverness. They are the Same Old Story we have been hearing since long before Bilbo was a pup: the saga of the Chosen One, the little lost prince with a Destiny, the innocent brought forth from anonymity to duel with the Dark Lord, who in this instance is named Voldemort (a Saxonization of Wallmart, perhaps?). They do not challenge, illuminate, or enthrall anyone above the mental age of 12. And it is these very qualities, the purity of their mediocrity, their consummate average-ness, their utter lack of originality, that are the underlying reason for their massive popularity and comprise their chief virtue as regards the culture-engulfing purposes of the marketing machine.
A passel of academics, desperate for a moment's recognition of their own average-ness and mediocrity, have taken it upon themselves to analyze the appeal of Harry Potter. One of these poor souls has opined that it is the orphan motif that causes children of all ages to slurp the books up as though they were chocolate-flavored gruel—they speak to the universal feeling of separateness, blah, blah, blah. Another testifies that Harry's girl pal Hermione's passionate defense of oppressed elves reflects Rowling's social activism and distaste for Thatcherism. This sort of analysis, however, is no more useful than it would be were it applied to a package of Jello, for the quintessential allure of both the Potter franchise and a bowlful of strawberry gelatin is their bland goodness, their unsubtle flavor, their palliative simplicity, their debased commonality.
In opposition to this statement, I have been sternly told that the Potter books will be read fifty years from now, and this will prove they are more worthwhile than I have declared. To which I respond: I'm not sure they will be read fifty years from now, nor am I sure that in fifty years any readers will be left alive. But if the books do continue to be read in 2051, this will not, to my mind, prove anything more salient than would be proven by the fact that a package of Jello stored in a cabinet for fifty years remains edible.
It has been argued that whatever their quality, the Potter books provide our children with a healthy role model.
Really?
If I were one of those aforementioned academics and seeking to cling by my fingertips to the Harry Potter bullet train, I might essay an analysis of Harry Potter in terms of the British class system. Harry's aunt and uncle, who take him in after his parents' death, are distinctly bourgeoisie—despite having money, their prospects are limited working-class prospects. Although they provide Harry with food and shelter, they're portrayed as spiritually and mentally stunted, and—since they refuse to share their wealth with him—mean-spirited. Harry is presented as woefully put-upon by this circumstance, left sad and alone and without resource; yet being possessed of an incredible legacy and unmatched magical powers, he is essentially a child of privilege who truly does not need their money. Putting up with a doltish cousin and penurious foster parents for a few years scarcely seems the Cinderella-ish plight Rowling intends it to appear, considering the Oxford of wizard schools is waiting to bring Harry into the fold. Harry's teachers at Hogwarts—clearly representative of the upper classes—are depicted as bungling and stupid. And Dumbledore, the headmaster of the school, addled yet capable at times of mystical illumination, surely represents the royals, or more precisely, he mirrors the attitude of the educated middle class toward the royals, one informed by derision, resentment, and a kind of reluctant awe. Thus it seems that Harry, who springs from that sub-class, the same from which Rowling herself sprung, could afford a certain disdain for everyone not of his own smallish circle. While he questions and defies authority (an admirable trait indeed), his defiance strikes me as less an act of reasonable rebellion than an assertion of entitlement. He, like many of his sub-class, might be considered an aristocrat without perfect pedigree, more worthy of the estate than those of the blood, yet kept from his proper station by an accident of birth.
Not the role model I'd want for my kids.
It has come to my attention that the Internet abounds with stories of how the Potter books have affected lives and brought children back to reading. Harry Potter Cured My Dyslexia, How Harry Potter Persuaded My Ralphie to Toss His Gameboy, and so forth.
Cool.
But just what will these newly literate souls read?
If AOL/Time-Warner has its way, the Potter industry will—as did the Tolkien industry—spawn infinite imitations, a glut of wizardly books and films that are easy to produce as Twinkies and have a built-in audience of junk-food junkies who cannot get enough of these starchy treats.
I have heard it put forward that thanks to Rowling's exhaustive research, the Potter books are treasure troves of ancient lore, and reading them will lead children to explore mythology and other related topics. Uh-huh. Suggesting that some little deviant will be inspired to study biology by jamming a firecracker up a cat's butt makes every bit as much sense. It could happen, but the chances are slight. Forget all the analysis, all the testimony that Harry Potter can heal the sick and make the blind see. What the Potter franchise offers is escapism pure and simple, and there's nothing wrong with that. We need our escapes. Whatever does it for you—-video games, vanilla ice cream, hacky sack, pornography, Harry Potter—it's a good thing if it keeps you sane. There is no need to justify them, or to claim they have magical powers. They comfort, they insulate, they reassure. The trouble I have with such products is that I fear they will soon narrow our choices to such a degree, it will be nearly impossible to find any alternative to the escapist.
An economist of my acquaintance has chided me for promoting this idea. It is her belief that anything that increases the number of readers and/or moviegoers will ultimately increase the audience for all manner of books and films, and thus every form of the literary and cinematic arts will find its niche and thrive. Though this notion is funded by some logic, I feel my economist friend underestimates the power generated by the overarching corporate culture of the New World Order, the pervasive potentials of its mechanisms. Books and movies compete for our time, and that competition is in process of being overwhelmingly won by the AOL/Time-Warners of the world.
As a small evidence in support of my thesis, on the same weekend I saw Harry Potter and the Bubble of Sputum, I went to see The River, a movie in its first American release by the brilliant and virtually unknown Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang. While Harry was showing on six zillion screens across America, featured on the cover of every magazine, the only hint of The River playing in town was an ad in the newspaper about the same size as a classified notice of a rummage sale. In order to view it, I had to travel into the hinterlands of Portland, to a tiny repertory house reeking of cat piss, where I sat with seven other people and watched the unreeling of a work of art. Ming-Liang's film tells a story concerning a dysfunctional family in Taipei and gradually reveals not the secret of some specious magical artifact, but the far more intricate and mysterious secrets at the heart of life... and does so by means of a thoroughly original and purely cinematic style of narration. It is a disquieting film and was never intended to achieve the type of mass audience that Harry Potter has received. But seven people? On a weekend night in a large American city?
Some niche.
Perhaps in the long view, the fact that high art may be reduced to nearly outlaw status will be invigorating—art tends to flourish under such conditions. But never before has it been faced by such a mighty enemy, one whose repressive techniques are so insidiously effective.
Having reached the end of this column, I see that I have neglected to review Harry Potter and the Briquette of Doom. Oh, well. It's been reviewed sufficiently. The gist of the matter is, had AOL/Time-Warner wanted to make a great movie, they would have handed the project to someone who would vividly magnify the book, someone like Terry Gilliam, say. But their sole interest lay in protecting the franchise, in guaranteeing that it would be accessible to all children of all ages; they did not want to risk that a real director might offend some small portion of the consumer universe, and thus they passed it into the care of Chris Columbus, a cheese cutter of a director, who has produced a tidily shrink-wrapped, pre-sliced, homogenized product fit for mass consumption, but lacking even a glimmer of inspiration. What's to review?
Instead, I'd rather share with you a dream I had the other night in which I watched the last Harry Potter sequel (number thirty-something) entitled Harry Potter and the Question of Suicide. Harry, now fiftyish and a failure, having been stripped of his magical powers and dismissed from his position as headmaster at Hogwarts due to certain shameful behavior that has been hushed up for the good of the school, lives in a seedy London slum with his wife, Hermione, who has changed her name to Willow Bitch and runs an escort service specializing in elvish girls. Their child, Harry Jr., a gifted wizard himself, runs with a gang and squanders his talents on the perverse and the trivial. Bitter and despairing, his dreams in tatters, Harry Senior is about to hurl himself into the Thames when he spies a wizened figure balanced on the opposite railing, apparently preparing to do the same. It is Voldemort, his long-since-vanquished enemy who, shorn of his powers, has spent the past 40 years as a cost accountant in Chelsea (one of his clients is Hermione, whom he has been boinking on the side). Shocked at having seen their nemesis in such pitiful straits, the two ex-wizards gravitate toward one another and eventually, their old enmity dissolved, wind up in a pub, where they indulge in doleful reminiscence and drink themselves into literal oblivion—while urinating behind the pub, in a moment of albumen-fueled transcendence attended only by the red-eyed, black-feathered mutant offspring of Harry's pet snowy owl, good and evil, now both eroded into shades of dolorous gray, merge in a splash of bilious light and become Voldepotter, a new Dark Lord of even greater potency than he who preceded him.
And who will save us from this terrible enemy?
Why none other than Harry Potter Jr., of course. Unmindful that dear old dad has become the dominant half of this syncretic ultra-villain, he abandons his profligate ways, enjoins Hermione to marshal her elvish lovelies into a virtuous force of full-breasted Amazon witches, and marches off toward an ultimate Oedipal confrontation with Voldepotter.
Critical reaction to the film has been unvaryingly positive:
"... effects a miraculous revitalization of the Potter legacy... " —The New York/London Times
"... while this hybridization of the two great franchises of the late 20th Century, Star Wars and Harry Potter, may seem on the surface to lack the stamp of originality, such profound unoriginality contrives in this instance a masterstroke that transcends its banal sources to create an uncompromising work of art, offering not only a stunning visual and emotional experience, but also a view of the architectural imperatives of the new creativity... ." —George Wibberly, Ph.D, Dean of the Harvard School of Harry Potter Studies
"I wet my pants... " —Roger Ebert
"Yama Yama Bonk!" —Cletus Mapes of NPR
Editorial Re: "The Trouble with Harry" Review
Lucius Shepard's Harry Potter review has inspired a veritable "You Guys Are Heartless Jerks" essay contest, greatly facilitated, I believe, by a link from a Harry Potter fan site. I'll make sure Mr. Shepard gets the feedback. Some of it was pretty good. One collaboration by a team of young ladies explored the apt similarity between the names "Lucius" and "Lucifer." I might give that one the prize but we've probably got more entries on the way.
As amusing as some of this is, I have to apologize. I posted a warning on the front page but not on the review itself until the howls of anguish started rolling in. I've been told by some that it's unnecessary to warn kids away from the essay, but I disagree. Not only does it have content inappropriate for them, it attacks their icon at a level they can't be expected to respond to (the ones who did, even to say simply that we're bastards, deserve credit). The fault isn't with Lucius. He criticized how Harry Potter has become an adult phenomenon; he was addressing adults. And though I may not agree with him, it's consistent with our mission to publish good writing even if it's controversial.
For those who need reassurance, Lucius does not have the last word on Harry Potter, and many adults who are not idiots like him very much, as a couple of our essay contestants pointed out. Several members of the ES staff, including myself, get along with Harry just fine. I wouldn't say that Harry has challenged, illuminated, or enthralled me yet, but I don't think that means I've passed any IQ test. I've read two of the books and liked them enough that I'll keep going.
And don't worry about Harry himself. In addition to having magical powers, he's well on his way to being a billionaire, and with that kind of money you can drag a film critic up from Hades and have him kiss your butt.
Bob Kruger, Publisher
To rail against Tom Cruise the actor (a petty crime I admit to indulging in) is rather like protesting the existence of pudding. He's ubiquitous, not in the least nourishing, but essentially harmless—so what's the point? As a dress-up doll, Cruise is fine. See Tom the Master Spy in shades and black leather. See Tom the dread vampire Lestat in what appears to be Adam Ant's cast-off wardrobe. See Tom the Crippled Vet in camo jacket and jeans (wheelchair accessory not included). Put him a romantic comedy and he'll be serviceably shallow, but cast him in an actual dramatic role and you're likely going to wind up with something on the order of his Little Lost Boy take on the mid-life crisis in Eyes Wide Shut.
When I learned that Cruise's production company had bought the rights to Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar's outstanding science fiction thriller Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos), my reaction was one of dismay. The protagonist of Amenábar's film is a pitifully self-involved, narcissistic twenty-something, a fact crucial to the denouement of the plot. I did not believe Cruise would allow himself to play such an unsympathetic character (few Hollywood stars will), and this caused me to suspect that the remake would involve said protagonist in some sort of heart-warming redemptive transformation, thereby neutering the sinister perversity of the original. When I further learned that the director of the remake, Vanilla Sky, was to be Cameron Crowe, who had heretofore specialized in making romantic comedies and whose previous film, Almost Famous, unforgivably sanitized early 70s rock and roll, transforming that milieu into a kind of summer camp experience, populating it with wise, compassionate groupies and sensitive guitarists who smoked the occasional doobie but never touched the hard stuff... well, this pairing of the Vanilla Ice of the acting world with the Vanilla Fudge of directors promised a bland mediocrity of surpassing vanilla-ness.
Hollywood remakes of foreign films rarely succeed in creating even a competent version of their source materials. The 90s were rife with unspeakably bad examples of this artistic malpractice, mostly remakes of French pictures, a surprising percentage of these rendered hors du Hollywood by the presence of either Robin Williams or Martin Short, surely our two most Gallic actors. A few examples? La Femme Nikita, a movie driven by its style and the sensual appeal of Anne Parillaud was morphed into the thoroughly unstylish Point of No Return, featuring the marginally appealing Bridget Fonda. The classic thriller Les Diaboliques, a showcase for the great Simone Signoret, became a forgettable Sharon Stone vehicle Diabolique. The Dutch suspenser The Vanishing, one of the most harrowing films in recent memory, was given a ludicrous happy ending and a Jeff Bridges villain who seemed inspired by heavy dose of Quaaludes. La Chevre, a brisk little comedy, devolved into Pure Luck, one of Martin Short's many undistinguished flops. La Cage aux Folles lost all its glitzy panache when passed into the hands of Robin Williams and Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. The elegant period piece, Le Retour du Martin Guerre, was recast with a gray-haired marionette (Richard Gere) and reduced to the soporific Sommersby. The classic romantic comedy Cousin, Cousine was reincarnated as Cousins, starring the immortal Ted Danson, and the sterling British mini-series, Traffik, was compressed into a civics lecture (Traffic) that played like an ABC After-School Special.
All this said, Vanilla Sky exceeded my expectations by not providing an easy redemptive out to its protagonist, and although it failed to equal Open Your Eyes, it was not without its pleasures. For one, Oscar-winning cinematographer John Toll (The Thin Red Line) has shot the film beautifully, infusing every frame with a glowing artificiality that is entirely appropriate to the subject matter. Cameron Diaz turns in a wickedly edgy performance as an obsessed femme fatale that should earn her a shot at more substantial roles in the future, and there are some excellent performances in smaller roles, notably by Noah Taylor and Tilda Swinton. Most significantly, the picture is faithful to the densely plotted, intricately non-linear structure of the original—a number of scenes are reconstructed shot by shot, the dialogue being rendered in almost literal translation.
Cruise plays David Aames, a callow, wealthy Manhattan media prince who, as he puts it, is "living the dream," is up to his dimples in power, and has a penchant for using beautiful women, one of whom, Julia (Diaz), has developed an unhealthy attraction for him. But when his best friend Brian (Jason Lee) brings a date to David's birthday bash, love (or is it only lust elevated to a gothic intensity?) rocks David's world. The date, Sofia (Penelope Cruz, essentially reprising her part in the original movie), is a dancer—she's even prettier than David, much more soulful, and he just has to get next to her. In his pursuit of Sofia, he neglects Julie, who grows increasingly disturbed and finally wreaks a terrible vengeance by driving herself and David off an embankment, killing herself and disfiguring him. For long months thereafter, agonized, ashamed of his horribly scarred face, grieving his lost beauty, David imprisons himself in his home, all while a hostile takeover threatens his publishing empire.
Yet all is not quite as it appears.
As the narrative jumps back and forth, we learn that David is being refreshed as to the details of his life by a psychiatrist (Kurt Russell), who visits him in a prison where he has been incarcerated for murder; he tries to persuade David to confront what he has done. But what exactly has he done? Can we be sure who he has killed? Or that he has killed anyone at all? Is the psychiatrist simply another element of the conspiracy that David claims has been mounted against him? The more we are told about what David thinks has happened, the less certain the truth of his situation becomes. Is he insane? Is he, as he believes himself to be, scarred, or—as the psychiatrist insists—have his scars been healed? Is there an actual conspiracy to drive him mad? Who is the little man who keeps popping up and trying to explain things to him? The answers to these questions comprise the substance of the twisty plot, of the puzzle that David must solve in order to ferret out the real nature and extent of his dilemma.
While Crowe strives to do justice to this dark puzzle at the heart of the story, he seems at times uncertain in his handling of the thriller genre. His cleverly rewritten dialogue, though apt in its evocation of David's shallowness, is too sprightly and slogan-ish by half to articulate the trauma and confusion that come to beset him. Cruise also tries hard, but his often histrionic reading of David is ultimately unconvincing. Spending most of the movie hidden behind a mask (or, as the script calls it, an "aesthetic-regeneration shield"), unable to use his best acting weapon, that trademark boyish charm and jauntiness, he simply does not have the imaginative or physical resources to convey what Eduardo Noriega managed to bring across in the same role in Open Your Eyes—the shell-shocked, spasmodic awakening and Catholic terror of a man who becomes aware of his failings too late to change his fate, who deserves what has befallen him and yet somehow manages to enlist our interest and, to a degree, our sympathy, because we perceive in him our own failings, our own shallowness.
It would be easy to dismiss Vanilla Sky as being a flawed yet sincerely crafted remake of a somewhat less flawed and far more depthy Spanish thriller, a textbook example of what happens to an intelligent, low-budget film when it is elephantized by a Hollywood process that specializes in technical embellishment and glib polish, thereby creating a movie that is more pretentious than artistically successful, one marred by the unsteadiness of its direction and the inadequacy of its leads (Cruz is an attractive but not a skilled actress, and her purported off-screen relationship with Cruise does not translate into any noteworthy chemistry). That much it certainly is. But something else is going on here, for it becomes apparent that Sky was for Cruise his most personal project to date. Early in the film, the superficiality of David's existence, his breezy charm and masculine potency, the perfect dream of his life—this is all painted with such brio, we have an apprehension that it may well be Cruise's movie star life that is being depicted. Later on, when David is deformed and tormented by inner demons, we are given ample reason to believe that this turn of events may reflect Cruise's view of himself. Ever since 1994, when he played Lestat in Interview with a Vampire, he has shown a tendency to take on roles that disguise his good looks in one way or another. In several other of these films—the two Missions Impossible, Eyes Wide Shut—he has also worn masks. Sky seems the summing up of this trend. It might be said that Cruise is merely attempting to stretch as an actor, but this stretch has maintained such a consistent character in its evolution over the past eight years, it's difficult to believe that he is not, for whatever reason, offering us a pathological confession, a wormy vision of the self-doubt and self-loathing that attend celebrity. The suspicion that such is the case lends Sky a profound creepiness that serves to outstrip the Dickian paranoia of Open Your Eyes, achieving its effect not in the way of a good artwork but rather as might a peek into a private psychiatric file, and this makes the experience of watching it a fascinating if not an aesthetically satisfying one.
The convulsed post-modernity of the idea that a celebrity would find a project that speaks to him so deeply as to motivate him to use it as a lens through which he reveals his private demons to the extent that Cruise appears to do—that in itself might be a fit subject for an even more convulsed and post-modern film. The concept of celebrity has come to emblematize our age, and for all its artistic shortcomings, Vanilla Sky stands as an odd memorial to and a relic of the fin de siecle culture that produced it. It speaks to our bizarre absorption with Great Identities who rise from our midst, archetypal schmucks whose public posturing and incessant foibles, drug rehabs, religious conversions, shoplifting busts, marriages, divorces, sexual peccadilloes and et al, come to represent and perhaps to validate the dread muddle and insignificance of our own inglorious existences, providing us with an ersatz connection to the transcendent, the divine—all the divinity, at any rate, that we are capable of embracing. Perhaps Sky marks a passage from one time to another; perhaps Cruise, consciously or unconsciously anticipating an imminent revolution in digital film and an end to the age of celebrity, has attempted to contrive an Ozymandias-like monument to himself that will cast a shadow beyond the end of the studio system and movie stars and the media priesthood who so devoutly report on and prophesy their movements. This being the circumstance, then Sky is undoubtedly a more important film than its original and might be worth your attention, if only as a curiosity. It's not terrible (not by the standard of remakes, anyway), and at the very least you have to give Tom Cruise credit for the overarching purity of his egomania, for turning self-love into something of a fabulist artifact. But if it's a good movie you're interested in, a literate and suspenseful psychological thriller that has passion at the core of its ultraclever construction, then I would advise you to skip the vanilla and check out the richer, more human flavor of Open Your Eyes.
If J.R.R. Tolkien were to pop back into the world and see what he has wrought, the teeming hordes of witch-mages and pointy-eared folk and the penny-a-dozen Dark Lords that throng the unsavory underbelly of the publishing world, all straight out of the Elves R' Us cut-out catalogue, their derivative adventures puffing out thinly repetitive plots into plump, garishly bedragoned paperbacks whose weight far exceeds the value of the words they contain, then I am dead certain that the old Oxford don would shake his head ruefully, gather eight companions to himself and journey through hosts of bulbous, blackhead-studded geeks and shriveled potterites and the evil marketers who rule them, until at last, bloody and haggard, his company in disarray, he reached Mount Doom, where he would heave the original manuscript of The Lord of the Rings into the destroying fires, thereby ending the age of Infinite Crap. Tolkien is, of course, not to blame for Terry Brooks, Terry Goodkind, or any of the semi-literate drudges not named Terry who have either ripped him off or tried to dress their undernourished imaginations in cloaks of his design. The Ring books were a labor of scholarly playfulness, a meditation—it seems—on European history, testifying to the end of Old World passions and a cultural loss of innocence, and Tolkien could have had no idea that they would spawn such a glut of talentless imitators, and that they in turn would fund the loathsome industry of the fantasy trilogy, an enterprise rank and gross in nature that preys upon the cultivated idiocy of the consumer mentality, delivering paperweight-sized chunks of savory yet substanceless waste to an audience they have trained to thrive on garbage. It's a shame that Tolkien's work has not produced more of a printed legacy, for despite his often annoying obsessions (endless dinner parties, songs, and so forth), his trilogy stands as a landmark work in genre fiction; but at least it appears that now, thanks to Peter Jackson, a worthwhile cinematic legacy may be his.
To anyone who has ever tussled with the problem of how to skeletonize a five-hundred-page novel into a hundred-and-twenty-page screenplay, it should be apparent that Jackson has made the best movie it was possible to make when confronted with a work of such scope and containing so many characters; and it should be apparent to every reader that in doing so he has been absolutely faithful to the spirit of Tolkien's intent. Everyone who has read the books will have their quibbles—the Balrog was not quite right, say, or the troll wasn't how I imagined it—but this is to be expected. My main difficulty with the film was that the backstories of the characters, that of Strider in particular, were given such short shrift (according to those in the know, Jackson takes care of this problem in the second and third parts of the trilogy). But these quibbles aside, the story of Frodo the hobbit and the Fellowship, their quest to carry the One Ring into Mordor and there destroy it, along with the power of the Dark Lord, has been crafted with loving attention to detail into the most visually spectacular movie in the history of the genre. The set pieces of the book are rendered wonderfully well, with Jackson taking CGI effects to the next plane, and the settings, the peaceful hobbit village, Rivendell, Lothlorien, the mines of Moria, Isengard, and all the rest are every bit as splendid as our imaginations have painted them to be. Indeed, the sequence of scenes in Moria surely must be ranked among the most effective long action sequences in cinematic history.
If Fellowship were merely visually satisfying, it might be counted a success, but it is accomplished on every level. Good movies begin with the good choices made by producers, and New Line's decision to give a relatively unknown director from New Zealand 270 million dollars to shoot three films at once deserves our applause and perhaps will teach a lesson to Dreamworks, who, wanting to take no risks, handed the Harry Potter franchise over to a maintenance man of a director, Chris Columbus, and achieved a predictably uninspired result. Jackson had previously made a cult comedy/horror movie, Dead Alive; an animated feature, Meet the Feebles; an acclaimed yet thoroughly uncommercial picture, Heavenly Creatures, that dealt with a murder committed by two disturbed teenaged girls; and a forgettable Robert Zemeckis-produced Michael J. Fox vehicle, The Frighteners. Hardly the resume to inflame the enthusiasm of the bean counters. But in each of these films, Jackson demonstrated a prodigious visual imagination, and in Creatures, the movie that gave Kate Winslet her start, he showed his cleverness in handling actors.
Though it is marvelously well-cast (if there were an Oscar for casting, the office responsible for this cast could start clearing shelf space now), Fellowship is not an actor's movie, but Jackson has the wisdom to avoid drowning his players in the action, and makes certain they have enough room to establish their characters—he cannot give them a great deal of room, because there is so much story to get through; but he has made certain that the characters of all the Fellowship are there on screen, though it will take the three movies to present them each in full. Frodo, played with appropriate soulfulness by Elijah Wood, gets the lion's share of the screen time. A chunkily earnest Sean Astin does the dutiful, dog-loyal Sam Gamgee to a turn. Grizzled Ian McKellen as Gandalf and a majestically hirsute Christopher Lee as Saruman convince us that wizards must have behaved just this way. John Rhys Davis, who has done woeful duty in any number of horrid genre projects, finally is given a quality part as Gimli the Dwarf, and Sean Bean's Boromir is touchingly, pridefully human. Even the most flimsily realized of the company, Legolas the Elf (Orlando Bloom), is sufficiently defined through the action sequences, especially in his quicksilver bow-and-arrow work, though it will be helpful to see, as has been promised, the fleshing out of his relationship with Gimili in The Two Towers. But Viggo Mortensen is the actor likely to benefit most from the movie. Casting Mortensen in the role of Strider, the lean, scraggly, somewhat suspect heir-in-exile to the throne of Gondor, instead of going for a more bankable leading man, was a stroke of genius. Mortensen, one of Hollywood's best kept secrets, is not only physically perfect for the part, but has the skill and presence to develop a complex character without employing much in the way of dialogue. Prior to Fellowship, his most substantial role was that of the miscreant brother in Sean Penn's The Indian Runner, which was based on a Bruce Springsteen song, "State Trooper." Following this he took featured roles in a few B pictures, the excellent actioner, American Yakuza, among them. It was clear that he had ability, but the studios did not seem to know what to do with him, and since then he has been cast chiefly as a heavy in pictures such as A Perfect Murder and The Prophecy, wherein he played Satan. As Strider, Mortensen projects immense depth and presence, deftly externalizing his performance, and I think the studios may now recognize that looking a little seedy and dangerous is not such a bad thing for a leading man, and that the role will have a similar effect on Mortensen's career as the role of Han Solo had on Harrison Ford's.
But in the end this is Peter Jackson's movie, his opportunity to shine, and he delivers the best genre flick since Kubrick's 2001, and one of the best action movies ever. Star Wars? Forget it. Lucas' fanboy orgy was purely kindergarten stuff, finger-painting by contrast to the artfulness and power of Fellowship, and sinks lower in my estimation with each abysmally juvenile sequel. Jackson claims to have read Lord of the Rings dozens of times, and this shows not only in his faithfulness to the books, but in the touches he has added, which seem entirely of a piece with the products of Tolkien's imagination. The caverns beneath Isengard, for example, wherein he depicts the births of an army of Orcs from pods, lending the creatures an insectile aspect that expands Tolkien's original intent. And that is the salient difference between Columbus' dreary management of the Potter franchise and Jackson's painstaking direction of Fellowship. To Columbus it was a gig, to Jackson it was a love affair upon which he focused his own imagination, caring enough about the books not only to recreate them, but to expand and illuminate the text. Every scene in the movie resonates with his affection for the materials and his desire to infuse it with something of himself. The magical duel between Saruman and Gandalf; Gandalf's fireworks; the banshee wails and relentlessness of the Nazgul; the immense crumbling stairs of Moria; the hellish terrain of Isengard; the image of the warrior Sauron that opens the film amidst a battle that must have realized the wet dreams of Tolkien freaks everywhere; the Escher-on-Ecstasy atmosphere of Lothlorien; etc., etc. All these instances reflect both Tolkien and Jackson, the imprints of their sensibilities blending perfectly.
My fear after seeing the movie, after recognizing how well it would do, was that a spew of fantasy crap would soon be voided from the orifices of the Hollywood beast, and that we would be forced to confront the awful specter of hastily achieved film versions of such immortal classics as The Sword of Shanara and remakes such as Dragonheart 3. But now I think—at least I hope—that Fellowship may have raised the bar too high, that having seen the real thing, the audience will find that sitting through another lame-ass fake has all the appeal and odorous stimulation of being pissed on by the family dog. It may be that we will see abominations like The Sword of Shanara on film, but if we do, while they may prove as noxious as the novels that bred them, it's my feeling that they will at least be well mounted. Perhaps this confidence is misplaced. It's possible that Hollywood will misapprehend what has been done with Fellowship and start cranking out sausage for the mass market, not comprehending that the mass palate has now been given a taste for filet mignon. But with the second and third sections of the Ring trilogy due out in the next two years, it's probable that shoddy imitations will not generate much in the way of consumer response. Not, at least, until the memory of the Jackson trilogy has faded, and that most assuredly will not be for a very long time.
It's rather difficult to get a handle on what Ridley Scott intended with his latest film, Black Hawk Down. Obviously it's a picture that treats of war, but effective war films are grounded in a point of view; they have some ax to grind or a message to deliver, whereas Black Hawk eschews this notion in favor of what passes for an almost neutral documentary approach. It's as if Scott had in mind to show the modern soldier in action. Period. Characters are so minimally sketched, they become more-or-less interchangeable in the heat of action. This likely was an artistic choice on Scott's part—it seems he wants us to consider the soldiers as one face, a hero-type, instead of as individuals, and to this end he has cast actors who, with the exception of Tom Sizemore, are not immediately recognizable and whose identities are disguised by grime and fatigues and military haircuts. Occasionally the action stops and certain of the characters are provided the opportunity to express themselves, but these expressions are so uniformly tedious and clumsy, they serve only to blur further our understanding of these men. For the most part the men come across as brave yet arrogant, ignorant, and callously dismissive of the famine-and-disease-afflicted Somalis, whom they call "the skinnies." Perhaps this is the face of the modern soldier, but when these soldiers die, often horribly, it's hard to feel anything other than the most generic brand of sympathy.
The underlying purpose of the military operation that comprises the basic materials of the film, an operation that resulted in the deaths of eighteen elite soldiers, seventy-three wounded, and the shooting down of two Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu during this nation's dismal adventure in Somalia in the early 1990s, is glossed over, and we are unable, from what the film gives us, to make a full determination as to whether it was strictly a foolhardy exercise engendered by political pressures, or simply an ill-considered gamble. Nor are we afforded any real intelligence concerning the proximate cause of the disaster, the fall from the helicopter of a green eighteen-year-old soldier just arrived in Mogadishu that delayed the proceedings and allowed enemy forces to gather. Was his inclusion in the operation a mistake, and if so, then whose mistake was it? And what was the upshot of the operation, which was designed to kidnap several high-ranking aides to the warlord who controlled much of Mogadishu at the time, Muhammad Farrah Aideed? We learn from a written summary at the film's end that Aideed died several years after the fact, but the operation's futility—if, indeed, it was entirely futile—is not made clear. There is, in fact, almost no hint of moral stance or thematic dimension. No mention of the slaughter of Pakistani peacekeeping troops and the targeting of American soldiers that provoked the deployment of the Rangers who headed up the operation. No mention of the American helicopter bombardment of a house in Mogadishu immediately prior to the operation that influenced anti-Aideed elements of the Somali populace to join with him in a fury of anti-American aggression. No clue that it was Aideed's intent to shoot down an American helicopter and thus trap the American soldiers as they sought to rescue their brothers-in-arms. And not even a hint as to the skill and ferocity of the Somali militias, the morian, whom Aideed fueled with kat, a cocaine-like drug that caused them to be fearless. All facts whose inclusion would have added to the audience's understanding and involvement in the film.
As was definitely not the case with Scott's previous film, the ludicrously over-praised Gladiator, wherein battle and gladiatorial scenes were achieved using a superfluity of quick cuts and far too few establishing shots, Black Hawk's action sequences are well-managed, thanks due mainly—one would think—to the editor, Pietro Scalia. This is a good thing, because the movie is essentially one long action sequence. But as happens in many of Scott's films, his visual sensibility tends to overwhelm both characters and substance. In this instance, though he succeeds in evoking the ruin and decay of Mogadishu, he does so in such a lush, artfully framed manner, utilizing colored filters to the max, that the dying city is lent a surreal beauty it does not in actuality possess. Mogadishu (most of Somalia, for that matter), sun-bleached and treeless, has all the visual allure of a dead rattlesnake in a microwave oven. It's as if we're being asked to consider the unrelenting bloodshed and violence from the distancing perspective of a fashion photographer who has stumbled onto a news story and is blissfully shooting it while under the influence of mescaline. Although it is not essential that a film's setting be literally rendered in order to assist its story, in a film as stripped-down as Black Hawk, as devoid of story and character, this prettification of Somalia strikes me as illegitimate, as misleading and obfuscating as cosmetics on a corpse. It would have been far more effective if Scott had from time to time let the skeleton of the country show through in all its inglorious and unsightly rawness.
For comparison's sake, we might look to Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line, arguably the greatest of all American war movies, which also had a large ensemble cast and dealt with a single military operation (albeit one of much larger scope) and contained gruesome violence. Malick's film was beautifully shot, but instead of prettying the battlefield, it juxtaposed the horror of battle with natural beauty, a contrast that accentuated both. Though it, too, stressed the universal dolor of men under fire and the insane acts of courage to which they are prone, it also succeeded in manifesting their individuality by means of a brilliantly orchestrated voiceover that carried the inner voices of the soldiers, both American and Japanese, living and dead, and by a number of exquisitely written and wonderfully crafted performances. Nick Nolte's ambitious colonel, Sean Penn's cynical sergeant, Elias Kotea's soulful captain, and Jim Caviezel's mystical mountain man—these among others are the pins upon which the fabric of the battle is stretched, both sustaining the tapestry and investing it with moral weight and human value. Of all the performances in Black Hawk, the only one that commands much attention is that of Eric Bana as an enigmatic Delta Force operative who seems to thrive on war. Bana, an Australian comic who made his debut in Anthony Dominick's outstanding Chopper, is an actor to watch, and we will next be watching him as Doctor Bruce Banner in Ang Lee's The Hulk. But his is the single individualistic note sounded in a chorus of desert-camo anonymity, and does little more than point up the facelessness of the other actors.
Still and all, compared to Scott's recent films, Black Hawk is a distinct step forward, yet it falls short of his early successes, Alien, Blade Runner, and The Duelists, all of which possessed strong story values that supported his atmospheric visuals. Though Black Hawk engages our eyes, our senses, it fails to engage our minds and emotions, and thus, ultimately, it becomes as futile an exercise as the military operation it seeks to depict.
Based on an old French legend, the Beast of Gauvedon, Simon Bifi's The Brotherhood of the Wolf is pretty much your basic werewolf/intrigue-at-the-court-of-Louis XV/chopsocky movie, a blending of genres that, though substantially cheesy and entirely unrealistic, nonetheless provides two-and-a-half hours of terrific entertainment. Narrated as a memoir by an elderly aristocrat, Thomas d'Apcher, on the eve of the French Revolution, the film tells of a naturalist, Guy de Fronzac (Samuel Le Bihan), sent as an emissary from the court to investigate the slaughter of hundreds of peasants by a mysterious animal agency. He is accompanied by Mani (Mark Dacascos), an Iroquois warrior-shaman who saved Fronsac's life while he was in America and, oddly enough, is the master of a martial art that greatly resembles kung fu. (Indeed, large numbers of the populace, peasants and nobility alike, appear to have mastered this same art, a fact that sheds some new light upon our knowledge of 18th-century European combat techniques.) Upon their arrival at the castle of the Comte de Morangias, where they will be quartered, Fronsac finds himself at odds with the count's son, Jean-Francois (Victor Cassel), a great hunter who has lost an arm to a lion in Africa, and falls in love with the count's lovely daughter, Marianne (Emilie Duquenne), and thence into bed with Sylvie (Monica Bellucci), a high-class prostitute who ultimately proves to be considerably more than what she seems. Mani and Fronsac, together with the young Thomas d'Apcher, set about hunting the mysterious and murderous beast, and subsequently become involved in the political fog that swirls around the bloody events at the film's center.
At this point the plot thickens. And what a plot it is!
A Papist rebellion against the crown; Vatican spies; mysterious gypsy girls; decadent aristocrats; creatively grotesque taxidermy; radically politicized curates; a book about the Beast that is itself an element of a conspiracy; love, treachery, incest, mayhem, etc.—a complexity of story and richness of device worthy of Victor Hugo, all carried along by terrific set pieces (including a hunt that results in the killing of hundreds of wolves), exceptional art direction and set decoration, exceptional fight choreography by Phillip Kwok, digital effects courtesy of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and the lush cleverness of Dan Laustsen's camera work. Laustsen's fluid transitions alone are worth the price of admission, the most notable being a sequence in which the body of a naked woman morphs into a foggy morning landscape. To say more about the story would be to spoil some of the film's surprises. Suffice it to say that there are a number of surprises, and though the astute may anticipate a few of them, it's unlikely that anyone will foresee the shape of the events that they are designed to illuminate.
Although his role is rather poorly defined by the script, not sufficiently foreshadowed, Victor Cassel, last seen in the policier The Crimson Rivers, makes quite an impression as Jean-Francois Morangias, a man whose mutilated body houses an equally mutilated spirit. His duel with Fronsac, armed with a peculiar whip-sword, is a highlight, and while his twisted demeanor leaves no doubt early on that he is if not THE villain then at least a friend to the dark side, the specific character of his villainy may come as a surprise. In the lead role, Samuel le Bihan comes across as a brawnier Robert Redford, and Jeremie Renier as the young Thomas d'Apcher is suitably wide-eyed and earnest. And then there is the Beast itself, not at all what one expects, but a wonderfully gothic invention that poses a contrary metaphor for the dementia-in-the-disguise-of-reason espoused by the humans who have molded it to their purposes.
Despite its multiplicity of cross-genre components, Brotherhood is most of all an action picture, and though he is sixth-billed, the real star of the film is Mark Dacascos. Perhaps best known in this country for his portrayal of The Crow on television, Dacascos has compiled a solid resume of good B-pictures both here and abroad, films such as Crying Freeman (based on the Japanese manga of the same name), the Hong Kong action hit China Strike Force, and Drive. As a martial artist, he has few peers in the acting profession, and his acting ability is superior to that of most action heroes. He has proven himself capable of playing a wide range of nationalities—Russians, Asiatics, Latinos—and appears conversant with not only kung fu, but also capoeira, ju jitsu, and several forms of karate. Given Hollywood's lust for attractive new faces, it is a mystery to me why he has remained more or less unknown. The role of Mani is written as a stereotype—the classic second to the hero, a strong, silent defender of the good—but Dacascos brings to it dignity, a measure of wit, and immense physical energy and acrobatic grace. Like the best of the Hong Kong action stars, Chow Yun Fat and Maggie Cheung, he is able to externalize the personality of his character in combat, and as he proceeds through the film, whacking out a variety of kung-fu-fightin' mesdames and monsieurs, providing psychotropic medications to the uninitiated and healing the injured, we gain a clearer sense of who Mani is than we do of any other character in the film. His final battle with the Beast and the men who nourish it is a showcase for Dacascos' athleticism and flexibility, time-capsule stuff for action fans.
It would be ridiculous to point out the logical deficits of a film that is so fiercely, joyously illogical and that demands of its audience such a profound suspension of disbelief—the salient point is that it succeeds in this regard due to the vigor and panache with which it has been mounted. The picture's thematic focus could have done with some sharpening, the pacing in its quieter moments might have been improved, and the resolution is somewhat overly cluttered. At one point a dramatically presented hunter sent from the court is simply left out of the remainder of the film. Nevertheless, Brotherhood is of such quality that had it been an English-language movie distributed by one of the studios, folks would be lining up at the multiplexes, and we might be talking about a nine-figure gross. Because it is sub-titled, it will never achieve the blockbuster status here in the States that it did in France. But as an action picture, a pure entertainment, given Hollywood's proven lack of imagination in creating equally weightless and far less enthralling films, it's going to be hard act to follow in 2002.
Can anybody tell me why the mean lady from The Weakest Link was sitting in with the Nevada Boxing Commission on January 29th? Her hair wasn't as red as it appears on network TV, but I could have sworn it was her. Sure looked to me like she was dying to get all gussied up in black vinyl and give Mike Tyson a pants-down spanking.
Maybe what Iron Mike needs is a little Victorian discipline.
Who knows? A couple of weeks on a short leash trailing behind Mistress Ayoub or Agwe or whatever the mean lady's name was, might be the most effective training he ever had. Maybe French-kissing her high-heel sneaker every night before curling up at the foot of her bed would put him in touch with his feminine side.
Scary thought, that.
Frankly I don't care if I ever see Mike Tyson fight again, because he's become a bore, but the exercise in sanctimony performed by that august body, the Nevada Boxing Commission, was much more of an atrocity than Tyson's quasi-rumble with Lennox Lewis and friends before the press in New York City. There was Dr. Flip Homansky, ring doctor to the stars, doing his Sensitive Nineties Guy impression and evoking memories of Nancy Reagan by saying with a look of pale regret writ large upon his face, "It was just time that someone said. No."
Gosh, Flip.
That statement's right up there in its simple-minded perspective with, "Can't we all just get along?"
(I think Wink Martindale with a fake goatee should play you in the movie.)
Then there was Bailey, the new guy on the commission, with his brow-furrowed ultra-sincerity and that I-really-want-to-understand-you-Mike spiel—the man's apparently watched way too many Richard Dreyfus flicks.
Tyson himself, appearing old and tired (make that very old and very tired), overweight and sad, promised solemnly to be a good boy and never do it again. "It" being anything that the Weakest Link lady might disapprove of, which—judging by her clenched demeanor—probably included the thinking of impure thoughts.
And his droning gray eminence of a lawyer doing that logically-evasive-yet-somehow-forthcoming lawyer thing we've all come to loathe and love courtesy of LA Law, Law and Order, The Practice, and the Clinton administration... that was sweet, huh? Even his suit looked like it had died of boredom.
It was, in sum, a lounge act from hell, far less entertaining than the usual lame dance number featuring bare-chested gay guys armed with teensy whips chasing around half-naked hookers pretending to be ponies to some marshmallow disco tune, while a seventy-year-old Jewish comedian wearing a sombrero tells sixty-year-old fart jokes.
But no doubt it played in Peoria.
And this, the applause emanating subsequently from the heartland, helps to convince me that the commission's vote to deny Mike Tyson a boxing license in the state of Nevada—more pertinently, in the suddenly family-oriented enchanted kingdom of Las Vegas—was in essence a marketing decision.
Since the tragedy of last September 11, our country's self-image has been transformed from a brawling, confusing menage a 300 million into a red, white, and blue poster for noble enterprise and enduring freedom, with pre-pretzel George W. playing the fife, head wrapped in a bloody bandage, and ol' Enron-loving Dick Cheney waving a tattered battle flag, leading a parade of soldiers, paperboys, waitresses, factory workers, farmers, et al, black and brown and white together, all with shining countenances and all fervently committed to spreading the gospel of the American Dream to the ends of the earth. Even junkies and armed robbers, poltroons and deviants of every stamp, are now given to sporting flag pins and pasting anti-Osama stickers on their bumpers. But while the war on terrorism is a commitment worthy of our passion, the fallout from the war effort is strictly commercial. Patriotism is once again box office. Morality sells. Simple values are in vogue. No matter what your belief as to how deep a hold these values and passions have on the American public, it's plain that profit-taking and exploitation are, as always, also in vogue. Thus it is my fervent and deeply held belief that the Nevada Boxing Commission, after receiving counsel from various and sundry millionaires with vested interests in the outcome of their deliberations, recognized that the quick hit of 200 million that would be generated by Tyson vs. Lewis was small potatoes by contrast to the long-term gains that might be accrued by consolidating Las Vegas' image as oasis of family fun, and that this, not any semblance of a moral consideration, informed their decision. And it was apparent from watching the commission in action that this decision had been made long before their ludicrous dog-and-pony show.
Perhaps they acted with some reluctance. Two hundred million in hand is a great temptation. But they did so realizing that they could not afford to swim against the tide of generic media-sponsored virtue that is washing shore-to-shore, and were therefore forced to have faith that this tide will continue to run long enough for their judgment to show a profit. Given the public's short attention span, it's unlikely that their faith will be rewarded.
Though the four members of the commission who voted against the issuance of a license to Tyson have assured us that their decision was based not upon the dust-up with Lewis in New York, but upon their concerns over Tyson's pattern of behavior during the past year, this is patently false. Nary a whisper of said concern was heard prior to the press conference. Everyone knew a license would be issued. But after the press conference, once the media had freshly demonized Tyson, portraying him as a creature of darkness, yet another insane adherent of Islam, the members of the commission were on the tube night and day, expressing their angst over the vast moral dilemma with which they had been confronted.
And now, out there in the hinterlands, solid middle-of-the-road citizens are saying to themselves, Y'know, now they kicked that no-good expletive deleted outa the place, maybe it's time I took granny and the kids to Las Vegas for some good ol' All-American Keno and craps.
At least such is the commission's hope.
There is no doubt that to a great degree Mike Tyson brought all this down on himself, that he enabled the commission's hypocrisy by his continued malfeasance. Surely he and his advisors understood the tenor of the times; surely they understood that Tyson's image was such that even the slightest misstep would create a media furor and cause him to be cast in the worst possible light. If, as has been suggested, the display of testosterone by Tyson, Lewis, his bodyguards, hairdresser, dogwalker and best friend Pete at the press conference was a staged event, Tyson's advisors should have kept its dire potentials in mind and never have bought into it, knowing the volatility of the circumstance. I have no personal knowledge of Tyson, and as stated, I don't care if I ever see him fight again, because his shtick has become tiresome and he's no longer much of a fighter. (Then neither do I care if I ever see Lennox Lewis or any other of the current crop of heavyweights fight again, for more-or-less the same reasons.) Whether he is man or man-beast is beyond my capacity to determine—I am not so prescient or well-grounded in the study of psychology as are, it would seem, those journalists who assess the measure of his soul on a daily basis. Obviously Tyson has problems, but many athletes have had disturbing histories and, rightly or wrongly, have been granted leniency under the law and the absolution of the media. But Tyson has never warranted this tender treatment. He is the Bad Man from the Streets and, as such, plays into the stereotypes that fund a reflexive judgment on the part of the fools who command the bully pulpits along press row.
It's quite possible that Tyson is a terminal asshole who is dangerous to himself and others, but that fact, if true, should not occlude the ultimately more salient fact that those who sit in judgment upon him, be they members of the Nevada Boxing Commission or gentlemen of the press or ravers on call-in shows, are for the most part motivated to damn him not because he is who he is, but because they are who they are. Whether they are purely cynical in their stance or are giving voice to a morality they glean from television and have learned to parrot, or be they the so-called opinion-makers who preach only what they believe their audience can accept, only what they want to hear, Tyson has become for them all a kind of pornography. They can't wait for him to fuel their arousal, to provoke an incident that will allow them to vent their crypto-sexual outrage. He is the target of a national focus that longs for him to perpetrate a final tragic act, a murder or a self-immolation of some sort, and being at the center of this million-eyed stare, perhaps he will be prompted to satisfy that longing. For it is clear that whatever the extent of his personal darkness, the nature of his culpability, the quality of his rage and duplicity, he is tormented by this focus, challenged and even goaded by it. Perhaps one day soon he will provide us with the profound yet fleeting gratification of seeing his celebrity displayed post-mortem in all its bloody and broken hubris on the cover of a dozen tabloids. The demon whom we have exhorted and exalted, whom we have licensed to play out his creaturely life before our eyes, now brought low not by his actions alone, but also by the radiation of our distaste for this charmed and charmless icon that we have partially created out of our need for demons, for figures that have the power to eat our sin, to absorb our own darkness and shape it into a form that we feel comfortable in condemning.
What the Nevada Boxing Commission did on January 29th is, in the end, irrelevant. The fight will or will not take place. Tyson will likely die horribly or diminish into a pitiable state. September 11th will fade into history and be remembered on national occasions with speeches and shows of grief, both actual and contrived. And scarcely anyone will be left to wonder why the mean lady from The Weakest Link sat in on the licensing hearing. But the commission's actions are valuable in one regard. Irrelevant and fundamentally meaningless though they are, their very insignificance, the smallness of their scope, succeeded in sharpening the general focus to such a degree, it had the effect of a flash bulb going off, allowing us to take a snapshot of the culture that mostly illuminates not the state of Mike Tyson's soul, but the state of the national consciousness, spots and all. In the image of the tired, declined athlete, the aging bad-boy monster surrounded by his bland mouthpieces and wishing for his Zoloft; in the serial blah blah blah of the commissioners; in the prurient glee of the media; in the shabbiness of the entire business; anyone who wanted to look closely enough could see the operations of the forces that employ us to their ends, the reactive nature of our morality, the deprived condition of our spirits, the randomness of our days. For that alone, even in its hypocrisy and sanctimony, the commission and that bright light city whose imperatives they serve should be congratulated. The sport of boxing can hold its head high—it has joined the great parade and now can proudly go oompah, oompah, oompah with all the rest of the Uncle-Sam-come-latelys. And the image cultivated by the resort, the idea promoted that it is home to larger-than-life figures in their decline remains intact. Gone are Elvis and Frank, but hey, Iron Mike lives on in the desert.
For a while, anyway.
Viva Las Vegas.
I saw a movie last weekend that was actually about something. You can figure that means it was a foreign movie, because most Hollywood pictures aren't about anything... or rather they're about who's in them. While they may serve the purposes of some tissue-thin theme or simplistic plotline or piddly stream of pop culture, essentially they're concerned with celebrity, with Brad Pitt's golden incompetence or Julia Roberts' 37 or 38 gleaming caps. However, the movie I saw last weekend, an Australian picture entitled Lantana, directed by Ray Lawrence, took the radical stance of being chiefly concerned with telling an interesting story and developing characters with complicated human depths.
The word "lantana" refers to a type of tropical bush, one that has a bad smell and is a thicket unto itself, a labyrinth of densely interwoven branches and leaves—this bush contrives a metaphor for the materials of the film. Ostensibly a thriller involving the disappearance and possible murder of a psychiatrist, Dr. Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), its true focus is upon four troubled marriages and the intricate ways in which they become entangled with one another. Detective Leon Zat (Anthony Lapaglia), who investigates Dr. Somers' disappearance, is married to Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), a patient of the psychiatrist, and is having an affair with Jane O'May (Rachael Blake), whom he and Sonja meet at a Latin dance class. Jane lives next door to Paula (Danielle Farinacci) and Nik Daniels (Vince Colosimo), who eventually becomes a suspect, as does Somers' husband, John Knox (Geoffrey Rush). The Zat marriage has gone stale, and Sonja herself is tempted toward an affair; the O'Mays, already separated, are having difficulty withdrawing from each other; the Daniels are imperiled by the suspicion that Nik may have perpetrated a sex crime. John and Valerie are the most troubled of all. Their young daughter Eleanor was murdered several years before, and they have not recovered from the shocks of that loss. They are alienated one from the other, and their alienation is exacerbated by the fact that Valerie has written a best-selling book about the murder, an act that John finds morally dubious. To further disturb the waters, Valerie comes to suspect that a manipulative homosexual patient, Patrick Phelan (Peter Phelps), is having an affair with John, and she begins to crumble under these pressures.
As Zat initiates his investigation of Valerie's disappearance, at one point forced to interview his mistress, who has evidence suggesting that Nik Daniels may be guilty, director Lawrence uses the investigation as a lens with which to examine the four marriages, and they in turn reflect back upon the mystery. This structural complexity, the braiding of the threads of the crime with the threads of the deteriorating marriages, is accomplished so skillfully, we come to feel that whatever has happened to Valerie is a product less of actual villainy than a consequence arising from the confusions of love gone wrong, and we understand that every one of these characters is imperiled, that they live—as do all who love—in constant danger of harm as a result of their own passionate failures.
Lawrence's masterful conception of structure effects a redefinition of the thriller genre, but it could not have succeeded unless it were brilliantly written by Andre Powell and brilliantly acted by the ensemble cast. That Lapaglia, giving a time-capsule performance, was not short-listed for the Oscar is a travesty, especially in light of Roberto Benini's embarrassing Oscar-winning delirium several years back. Lapaglia's Zat is a man so benumbd by the tedious and horrifying exigencies of his work, he can no longer feel his life except when he is in pain. Thus, driven to feel, he seeks pain out. The cop with psychological troubles and a suffering marriage is a stock character in American television and films, but never before has it been put on screen with anything approaching this level of verisimilitude. Whether weeping in his police cruiser, experiencing chest pains while making monkey love to Jane O'May, or interrogating Valerie's husband in conversations that alert him to his own moral dilemmas, Zat is so precisely realized and carefully nuanced, we understand the nature of his pain before he himself does. At film's end we are amazed that such a stolid, unremarkable person with such ordinary foibles and obsessions could be so fascinating in his meandering, haphazard path back and forth between the poles of rectitude and dissolution.
Lapaglia's is not the only terrific performance. Kerry Armstrong's Sonja, panicked by the unraveling of her marriage, seeking something in herself that will explain things, is note-perfect, as is Rachael Blake's Jane, a woman adrift, attempting by her casual affairs to concoct an antidote to her quintessential boredom. I cannot recall an American movie that contained four women's roles this quietly and subtly defined. Indeed, each of the characters, both male and female, is handled with such clever particularity, one has the sense that if any of them had been made central to the film, they would have held our attention to the same degree that Zat does. They stay with you, these people. They occur to you in the midst of an argument with your significant other, they float through your mind as you wait for sleep. They seem to be.
There is nothing particularly Australian about Lantana. As a matter of fact, it seems very like an American movie, the kind of movie an American director might make if given the leeway to go for quality. Perhaps this is in part due to the presence of Lapaglia and Hershey, who are known as American actors (though Lapaglia was actually born Down Under). But more pertinently, Lantana deals with a niche within a culture that feels American, with circumstances that are redolent of American life. I find it shameful that such a film has not been made here. Then again, Australian directors are renowned for making excellent American films, including perhaps the most purely American picture of the last quarter century, Bruce Beresford's Tender Mercies. Maybe American directors should start trying to make Australian films. Maybe that would help. But probably not. If that were the way of things, then we would only see more sequels to Crocodile Dundee.
Okay.
Take a break.
Recalibrate.
From the world in which movies are made for adults, we travel far, far away across time and space and a galaxy of crushed Pepsi cups and popcorn bags to a world in which there are almost no adults.
The Multiplex.
Several days after seeing Lantana, I was possessed by such a profound fit of self-loathing, I took myself to the multiplex and picked out the two cruelest punishments available. The first of these, Rollerball, was so hideous, so debasing to the viewer, I'm inclined to address it mainly by means of metaphor.
For example...
If Cheese Whiz was categorized as a food group, Rollerball might be considered a good movie.
If the birth of the universe were a pistol from whose barrel a flag bearing the word BANG writ large was ejected, Rollerball might generally be perceived to be the result of a creative act.
If the human head had a chewy caramel center, Rollerball would be a thought in that head.
If the moon was a whitehead...
Hopefully, you get the idea.
On the other hand, but for the presence of that now-avuncular ex-studmuffin Richard Gere and a truly lame third act, The Mothman Prophecies might have risen to the level of entertainment.
Can anyone explain to me how Richard Gere continues to get work? Without Julia Roberts to carry him, his movies don't draw flies. Look at some of his recent films. Intersection, Red Square, Autumn in New York—Jesus! Autumn in New York. Now there stands a timeless cinematic achievement. I've spent many an hour trying to imagine the meeting at which this bowser was pitched.
Studio Guy: Let's hear what you've got.
Mr. Pitch: Okay, I'm talking about a May-September romance. Only here's the twist. May is dying, she's got an incurable disease...
Studio Guy: Nothing too gross, okay?
Mr. Pitch: Naw, man! We'll give her some kinda cool cancer that leaves her beautiful. Anyway, she's dying and September doesn't know it. All the way through we're doing age jokes. Like how he's going to be pushing up daisies before she gets her first laughline, but...
Studio Guy: Yeah, yeah... I see it. Irony.
Mr. Pitch: Exactly! Like rain on your wedding day!
Studio Guy: Right!
At this point my imagination fails me. I simply cannot envision the process that would lead to millions of dollars being committed to such a project, so we'll skip over that part.
Studio Guy: Who do you like for September?
Mister Pitch: I'm thinking, y'know, maybe... Richard Gere?
Studio Guy: Well, I'm not too sure. I mean...
Mister Pitch: And for May, I'm thinking Winona Ryder.
Studio Guy: Yeah, she might work. But listen, if we go with her, keep an eye on your personal stuff around the set. Watches, jewelry... like that. She's attracted to bright objects.
Day-Glo motorsickle X-games in your face Rebecca goes topless while the bad guys go boom...
Sorry.
Little Rollerball flashback there.
For about two-thirds of its running time, Mothman manages to sustain a nice level of creepiness. Director Mark Pellington uses his camera to stylishly spooky effect as he tells the story of Washington Post reporter John Klein (Gere) and his involvement with the peculiar events occurring in Pleasant Point, West Virginia. The story begins with Klein returning to Washington in the company of his wife Mary after a house-hunting expedition. When Mary, who is driving, sees something red-eyed and terrifying directly in front of them, a terrible face rushing at her, a face that Klein himself fails to see, she swerves the car off the road and crashes into a tree. Hospitalized after the accident, Mary is diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer. Before she dies, she fills a notebook with sketches of a strange, menacing figure, part man, part winged creature. Two years later, the still broken-hearted Klein is on his way to do an interview when his car breaks down on a lonely West Virginia highway—this curious in that Klein has set out driving toward Richmond and has no memory of how he ended up going in the opposite direction. He walks to a nearby house and asks to use the phone, but the owner of the house, Gordon Smallwood (Will Patton), assaults him and holds him prisoner at gunpoint while his wife calls the police. He claims that Klein has appeared at his home on each of the two nights previous, at the same exact time, and he's just a little tense.
Enter attractive police sergeant Connie Parker (Laura Linney). Sergeant Connie escorts Richard back to town and so begins a weird kind of not-quite-romance that helps sink the rest of the movie. I'm not sure what they had in mind for this relationship. Connie and Klein certainly act (perhaps the wrong word choice) like they care for one another, but they seem to have no reason to do so. No connection, either emotional or pragmatic, is ever established between them. It's as if they suffered a simultaneous attack of overweening niceness. Clearly significant cuts have been made in the portion of the film dealing with their interaction—maybe they cut the make-out scenes, not wanting to inflict America with close-ups of the wrinkly Gere posterior. Whatever, there's no sense of any real dynamic left between the pair, and the sweetly platonic, faux-adult gooeyness that results acts to blur the edges of the crackling atmosphere that Pellington has achieved. Distanced by this effect, the audience starts to think about what they're seeing.
In the case of a Hollywood movie, this is rarely a good thing.
The day after they first meet and fall in like, Connie takes to helping Klein investigate all the bizarre occurrences that the townsfolk have been experiencing. Connie's been aware of these occurrences for some time, but felt that making them public would just upset the locals and distract them from their whittling, their banjo-playing, their huffing of gasoline fumes, from all their simple passions. While this does not speak well of Connie's sense of duty, it's comprehensible on a human level. Hey, she's paid to haul in drunks, not deal with some ten-foot-tall winged mo'fo with glowing red eyes. Now, however, she's suddenly interested in getting to the bottom of the situation. (Why? Beats me. Sympathy for the poor widower? A sudden hobbyist's interest in Mothmen? The chance to win a color TV? Foolish to speculate.) Turns out that a goodly percentage of the citizenry of Point Pleasant have had Mothman sightings. Pellington shows us certain of these events in flashback by means of Mothman cam, which illuminates close-ups with a burning light that those observed neither see nor feel (a nice effect, yet it doesn't come to much since we never actually see the Mothinator). Once Klein starts looking into the mystery, his phone goes to ringing at odd hours and strange buzzy voices announce themselves to him. Gordon Smallwood, not the most stable of souls, begins accurately to predict the death tolls of major disasters—this causes Klein to realize that his wife was subject to similar precognitive experiences after her accident. Gordon also claims to be in a contact with someone named Idrin Cole, who may himself be the Mothster or is perhaps one of the Mothster's close personal associates. Soon thereafter Gordon dies of exposure after lying outside all night in his undershirt, and Klein, tormented by Idrin's buzzy-voiced telephonic hints that his wife may be, if not alive, then not entirely dead, travels to Chicago to seek help from a notable investigator of unexplained phenomena—he has written a book about a similar set of incidents and in doing so made scary contact with one of the Mothman's fellows. He wants no part of Klein's problem, but tells him that the Mothmaniac is one of a species of damned souls whose hellbound perspective allows them to see into the future and who delight in luring people to their death.
At this juncture, sad to say, weighted down by the Connie-Klein mess and the woeful incompetence of a leading man whose most believable expression is one of stunned befuddlement, Pellington's spooky soufflé collapses, and the ending, though appropriately cataclysmic, feels somewhat flat. But there's enough here to make you suspect that, freed of Gere and armed with a better script, Pellington could be a director to watch.
Mothman might be worth your while as a video on a slow night, but Rollerball... Listen. If struck by the urge to pay seven to ten bucks to see this steaming pile of technicolor upchuck, two hours devoid of characters, coherence, style, intellect, et al, control that urge. Tell yourself that sticking a July 4th sparkler in your retina would be a whole lot less painful and way more illuminating. When you feel that you've passed the crisis point, have them undo the restraints and seek to do something that actually may improve your life more than would performing a two-hour-long lobotomy procedure on yourself.
Like draining your fish tank, or reading up on the history of sewer construction in Latvia.
Or maybe even watching Lantana.
It was with some trepidation that I, Herbert George Wells, set forth once again into the future, this time in order to view a motion picture based upon my novel The Time Machine and directed by my great-grandson Simon. I had, during a previous visit, viewed Mr. George Pal's spirited but trashy attempt at filming my little book, and there was a correspondence between the two productions that gave me pause—the casting of an Australian actor in the lead. I had found Mr. Pal's choice for the role, Rod Taylor, to have the emotive capacity of mutton, and I feared that this new Australian incarnation, Guy Pearce, would also prove unequal to my conception of the character. Why this insistence on a colonial? I wondered. Why not an Englishman to play an Englishman (or an American, for it turns out that the Time Traveller has been recast as a resident of New York City)? It seems one should expect this much regard for one's work from a relation, no matter how distant and devoid of traditional values he may be.
I prefer to use the time machine for serious business, but I must confess that on my several journeys to the late 20th and early 21st centuries, I have developed a fondness for the motion picture, especially for those films treating of time travel. This is not to say that I have thought many worthwhile. Of them all, only Time After Time, whose conceit was to detail one of my earliest temporal expeditions, featuring the excellent Malcolm McDowell, possessed the least verisimilitude and charm; though even this film roused in me no little revulsion with its insistence that my dear friend, the late Dr. ____, a gentle, inquiring soul, was none other than Jack the Ripper. Time and Again was, I suppose, a harmless enough love story, poignant in an overly sugared fashion, but its lack of scientific rigour was dismaying. As for the rest, my God!, the idea of a simple tale told well appears to have eluded those who dictate the policies that command the industry responsible for these gaudy idiocies. Still, I cannot deny a certain admiration for the technical aspects of such films. Judging by the size of the explosions they generate, a studio such as DreamWorks might well be capable, should they effect a journey back to the 19th century, of conquering a considerable portion of the globe.
In relating my experience of my great-grandson's film, I must first state that I understand this century's expectations of its entertainments are not those of my own. Every age demands certain elements designed to appease the public mind, just as in the Elizabethan era the Bard himself was induced to leaven his masterpieces with low comedy so as to delight the groundlings; and thus I assumed what I was about to see would not be a faithful rendering of my book, but rather a different work entirely, one infused with the spirit of the thing. I did not expect, however, the amalgam of illogic and hyper-kinetic foolishness with which my eye was met. Even for those who have read my book, it will be necessary to recount the plot of the motion picture, for it differs widely from that of my quiet story.
Andrew Hardegen (Pearce) is a college professor whose attention is given over to two interests: the nature of time and the romantic pursuit of a young woman, Emma (Sienna Guillory). When Emma is killed by a thief in Central Park, Hardegen becomes obsessed with building a time machine so he can travel into the past and prevent her death. After four years of maniacal work, he succeeds in his objective, returns to the moment when he met Emma in the park, and steers her away from the place, only to have her killed by a runaway hansom cab. At this juncture Hardegen decides that the past is unalterable. Having been in love on several occasions, most notably with the director's great-grandmother, I insist that obsession should be made of sterner stuff. Had I been in Hardegen's shoes, I would have tried in the service of love to alter the past at least a few more times; in fact, I likely would have exhausted myself in the process (it occurs to me that such an exhaustive process, Hardegen attempting again to again to save Emma, ludicrous though it might appear, would have made a more compelling film than the one I saw). But Hardegen, obeying a hastily conceived logic, determines that it would be best to travel into the future in hopes of finding a solution to the problem. During a stopover in the 21st Century, he discovers that the moon has been destroyed by subsurface excavation and debris is pelting down upon New York City. In his haste to escape emergency workers who want to take him to a place of safety, he is rendered unconscious as he throws himself into the time machine and inadvertently sends it forward into the distant future.
My great-grandson's redefinition of the lotus-eating Eloi and the feral subterranean-dwelling Morlocks, those two strains into which I imagined the human race might diverge by the year 802,007, does not reflect my intention that they emblematize the class struggle between the poor and the wealthy. Stripped of symbolic weight, lacking the gravity of social speculation, this division now strikes me as somewhat arbitrary. Beyond that, the Eloi are scarcely the childlike, docile creatures I imagined. On the contrary, they are exceptionally athletic and well-muscled, in aspect rather like a thriving tribe of South Sea Islanders. Further they are skilled with primitive weapons and have constructed an aesthetically spectacular village that clings to the cliffsides of a gorge, protected from the elements by shell-like canopies. That my great-grandson's conception of the Eloi differs from my own does not of itself perturb me, but the Morlocks... there is another story. Though for the most part appropriately bestial, they are led by an uber-Morlock portrayed by Jeremy Irons who, done up as an albino with an augmented spinal cord protruding from his skin, has now added an inglorious footnote to a generally illustrious career. It is this addition to my story that utterly derailed the reasonable progress of the film. When Hardegen invades the Morlocks' underground complex to rescue Mara (Samantha Mumba), the lovely Eloi woman who befriended him and who has since been captured, Irons informs him that the Morlocks live beneath the ground because they cannot endure the light of the sun (this flying in the face of the fact that Morlock hunting parties routinely go out during the day to kill and enslave the Eloi). He goes on to say that he can control the thoughts of both Eloi and Morlocks alike, and that while the majority of the Eloi are eaten by their captors, women such as the beauteous Mara are utilized for breeding purposes. Upon hearing this, I wondered why—if the uber-Morlock possessed such powers—he simply did not summon the Elou to their fate rather than sending his minions to hunt them down. Did they need the exercise? Just for fun? I also wondered where were the Morlock women? Could my great-grandson be so degraded in his intellect as to conceive of a sub-species without females? Was this ridiculous conclusion the narrative justification for the kidnapping of comely Eloi women? It must be so, for otherwise a Morlock would probably not consider such women attractive... unless some Morlock advertising agency had so distorted these poor monsters' sense of self-esteem that their notion of beauty disincluded their own kind.
Even greater gaps of logic were at hand. After engaging in an absurd fight with the uber-Morlock, during which Irons hangs half-in, half-out of the bubble of force enclosing the time machine as it accelerates into the future, a circumstance that would likely have substantially impeded its operation, Hardegen travels to an age in which the Morlocks have gained absolute dominance. As if they had not already done so. There he decides that while he cannot change the past, he can change the future. This judgment, made while in the future concerning the past, meets no rational standard with which I am familiar. I would hazard to guess that from whichever direction one approaches it, time is either unalterable or it is not. Nevertheless, Hardegen returns to rescue Mara from the caverns, leaving behind the time machine—which he has set to explode—and they escape into the surrounding hills. This hitherto unhinted-at explosive capacity is a wondrous thing, for not only does the machine produce a considerable pyrotechnic display, but—as if it had a mind of its own—the explosion manages with surgical precision to annihilate the Morlock caverns without spreading destruction to any other precinct.
Every work of the imagination, my own not excepted, is afflicted with logical imperfections. It is the job of the craftsman to direct the reader's or the viewer's attention away from these flaws by dint of his skill at narration. One of the tools that can effect such a sleight-of-hand is pacing, and if The Time Machine had been well paced, its logical gaffes might not have seemed so glaring. But under my great-grandson's aimless direction, the story does not build so much as it drearily accumulates. Nor does the acting distract from the film's relentless stupidity. Though Mr. Pearce has previously turned in admirable performances in L.A. Confidential and Memento, I must now infer that these performances were extracted from him by talented directors, an asset with which he was not blessed while making The Time Machine. Rather than acting, he appears to be doing a series of impressions, all of them inept. His evocation of a man in love is particularly grotesque—bug-eyed, gaping, as if the emotion were no more than a kind of inflamed earnestness. Special effects, too, tend to gloss over logical errors, but Machine's special effects were of uneven quality. Rumour has it that following a number of unenthusiastically received test screenings, 20 million dollars worth of extra effects were added at the last moment—as a result they are not up to the standard set by various other recent films.
As I stood in the lobby afterward, observing the streams of children exiting the theatre, idly wondering which of them might—should my scenario of the future come to pass—become the ancestors of Eloi and which might produce Morlocks, I grew irate at this perversion of my work. Not only had one of my descendants savaged my book, but he had created a work of such joyless and debased intelligence, it might well add some crucial bit of momentum to the flow of history and assist in the creation of a world like that I had envisioned, one in which the human mind has been rendered useless for anything except the most rudimentary of gratifications. Thus it was I determined that on my return to the past I will not seek to consummate my relationship with Simon Wells' great-grandmother. Though my feelings for the woman remain strong, the attraction has been dimmed by my recent experience, and the loss of her affections is not too great a sacrifice if I can expunge this excrescence from the record of history. Should the fabric of time prove resistant to alteration, I will refuse to submit so easily to that rule as did Andrew Hardegen. And if I should fail, well, perhaps the record of my failure will work some small benefit. But then it may be too late for action. Intellects cool and vast may already be watching us from afar, preparing to strike so as to prevent my great-grandson from ransacking the remainder of my legacy. Even Martians, I believe, would prefer an ultimate anonymity to enduring the puerile re-imagining that he might visit upon them.
This is less a movie review than a review of an attitude toward filmmaking espoused by the American motion picture industry (at least by that portion of it responsible for the kind of movies most expressive of said attitude); thus, in order to place this attitude in context, it might be helpful to take a look at the current state of the industry. The entire scheme of taking profits from movies has changed over the past decade or so. Where movies were once designed to play for long runs, generating repeat business and word-of-mouth advertising, the product is now turned out with an eye toward quick marketing strikes, the idea being to hype the film as effectively as possible, score big in the first two weeks, then rely upon good video and DVD sales. This strategy has been dictated, of course, by the decline in the quality of studio films. Very few studio pictures have demonstrated consistent drawing power over the period of a long run—the producers have come to hope for an opening in the 20 million-plus range and to expect a fifty to sixty percent drop-off in the second week. But instead of seeing the peril in such a strategy and changing their ways, the studios have ratified it and now place a greater emphasis upon marketing a film than they do upon crafting it. As a result, six of the eight largest theater chains have filed for bankruptcy, this because the studios take the lion's share of profits for the first two weeks of a run, while the theaters make all their money from concessions and only become partners in profits from tickets sold after the second week. Having belatedly become aware of the foolishness of this type of partnership, the theater owners have recently demanded a share of the opening profits, and this is one of the perils facing the industry.
There are quite a few other serious threats to the dominance of the studios, notably the increasing diversity of entertainment choices and the fact that in the very near future, certain slight advances in technology will enable anyone with a credit card to walk around carrying a movie studio on their back. A further threat is that of napsterization. The studios have demonstrated no sign that they are inclined to set up a distribution system to blunt the effects of downloading movies off the Net, and the losses that will be incurred by the movie business along these lines is going to make what happened to the music business seem minor by comparison. Yet another threat is overproduction. Last year, some thirty-odd feature films were released during the summer season; approximately a third of these films made money. This year, nearly half again as many films will compete during the summer, and it's likely that less than a third of them will make money. The fact that Star Wars: Attack of the Clones is due to open on over 8,000 screens will undoubtedly hurt some films that might otherwise have realized a profit. Films such as Star Wars and Stuart Little have built-in audiences, but the rest are jostling for good positions, and most will be shoved off the raft into an ocean of red ink. Talk to Hollywood people about this ludicrous wastage or any of the aforementioned problems, mention some alternate strategies, and it's like saying to someone, "Do you know that you're bleeding heavily from the neck?", and having them reply, "Yeah, I know," then digging a hole in their wrist. They know it's happening, they're terrified, yet they seem determined to keep going on their lemming-like rush toward the cliff's edge. No studios are currently in dire straits, but this is to some extent illusory. Disney, for instance, would be in danger of imminent collapse if the parent company were not so vast as to be able to swallow the losses endured by its filmmaking division.
Over the past week I have seen three studio movies, an experience I would liken to dining sequentially in three restaurants in a strip mall, businesses that serve up the same basic food substance with the same nutritional value and blandly varying artificial flavorings. A case in point: The Panic Room, David Fincher's (Seven, Fight Club) attempted thriller. Meg Altman (Jodie Foster) is newly divorced, embittered despite being blessed with a settlement that enables her to buy a Manhattan home that must run to the low eight figures, and the parent of a diabetic pubescent daughter, Sarah (Kristen Stewart). That is all we know about her. The house she buys contains a safe room (panic room) with steel walls, a self-contained ventilation system, video monitors that allow her to see every room in the house, a telephone (not yet hooked up), various supplies, and—unbeknownst to Meg—a floor safe holding millions in bearer bonds left there by the previous owner. On their first night in the house, Sarah and Meg are terrorized by three thieves who are looking for the bonds, led by Junior (Jared Leto), one of the heirs of the former owner, who does not want to share the bonds with the other beneficiaries of his will. Along with Junior is Burnham (Forrest Whittaker), an expert in security systems, and Raoul (a well-disguised Dwight Yoakum), a dangerous thug whom Junior has invited along without Burnham's knowledge. Sarah and Meg seek refuge in the panic room, and for the next ninety minutes or so we watch as the thieves try to extricate them and—eventually—become trapped in the room themselves along with Sarah, while Meg, who during the film turns into McGyver, tries to save her daughter. There are some nifty twists and turns to the script, and Fancher's camera is suitably atmospheric, but it all goes down without involving the audience overly much.
There are several reasons for this. For one, we know so little about Meg and Sarah that—although a helpless mom-daughter combo is a natural for generating audience empathy—we're simply not all that concerned by their plight. Watching Panic Room is rather like watching a news story from a distant country with an orchestral score—we take notice, go, "Hmmm... wow. Too bad!" and cast about for something more compelling. In most thrillers, we understand that the hero/heroine will win through. It is the art of the director and cast to make us lose sight of this. This simply doesn't happen in The Panic Room. Though the script (by David Koepp) has its moments, it is weakened by terrible spots of illogic and a number of missed opportunities. We are informed early on that Meg is claustrophobic, but once locked in the panic room, Sarah tells her that she'd better keep it together. And by God, rather than heightening the suspense by having Meg deal with her affliction, Koepp has Meg kick claustrophobia as easily as Liz Taylor might shake off an aspirin habit. Further, as the security expert, Burnham, searches for a way into the panic room, Meg counters him by being able to see everything he does via the video monitoring system. Near the end of the movie, when Meg has the thieves trapped in the room, she sledgehammers the cameras so they won't know what she's doing. This causes Raoul to opine, "Gee, we should have thought of that." Judging by my own reaction and the scattered shouts of "Duh!" from those around me, many of us had thought of it—as would, surely, a security expert such as Burnham.
With the slightest bit of imagination, a dash of care, a smidgen more information about the characters, this might have been an exciting movie. It would have taken such little effort to make the slight changes necessary to improve the product by at least fifty percent, it's difficult to fathom why someone somewhere along the line between principal photography and post-production didn't offer a relevant suggestion or two. One gets the idea that nobody cared enough to bother, that the consensus view was that what they had was good enough to grab a quick buck. And lo, they were right. Panic Room did, indeed, open as the number-one movie in America, bringing in a fast thirty million dollars on its first weekend, only to suffer a substantial second-week drop-off and be replaced at the top of the box-office charts by High Crimes.
Which happens to be the next movie I watched.
Crimes is a trashy military thriller, kind of a needless homage to another awful recent film concerning military injustice, The General's Daughter. It is rife with malefic senior officers and twisted governmental machinations, and features Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd. Judd, who demonstrated her considerable acting talent in the indie feature Ruby in Paradise, has—since achieving celebrity status—taken a series of eminently forgettable roles, the majority of them women endangered and/or betrayed by men. Here she's betrayed by her husband, who has a secret past that involves a massacre in El Salvador and is being set up years later to take the fall. Being a top-notch lawyer, Judd sets out to defend him, but unfamiliar with the Military Code, she requires a second chair with JAG experience—naturally she turns to a grizzled old discredited alcoholic. Of course she knows (as do we) that the alcoholic's really Morgan Freeman, the ultimately hip gray eminence, who's bound to snatch victory from defeat, etc., etc. We may not be able to predict every twist and turn of plot in the film, but we surely can predict their nature and when they're going to happen. The only reasons to watch this movie are 1) you get paid a decent wage to do so, or 2) your alternative pastime is a visit to the proctologist. Either way, of course, you're taking it up the wazoo, but the movie does cost a bit less.
Following Crimes, I attended Death to Smoochy, a so-called black comedy directed by Danny DeVito, in which Robin Williams, freed of the gooey humanistic roles he has been choosing of late (Jakob Liar, Patch Adams, The Bicentennial Man), proves that even given free rein, his manic humor isn't what it was during his doper days. Without the miracle of modern chemistry, Williams' schtik is about as funny as listening to some old doofus with trembling hands telling you his life story over fifteen cups of coffee at a 12-Step meeting. Edward Norton, who lately seems intent on having us forget his excellent performances in Primal Fear and American History X, co-stars. Frankly, I'd rather not discuss this movie—it's enough of an embarrassment to admit that I actually saw it. My review? Sucked a lot. Any further discussion would be as useless as critiquing Cheez Whiz.
Despite the fact that these films are of different genres, they share with Panic Room a certain lackluster, desultory character, the feeling of comfortable predictability, like a Wendy's Fish Sandwich or a Taco Bell burrito. They do not especially nourish, titillate, or appease, they simply fill a void in a way that neither distinctly satisfies nor dissatisfies. In their attempt to be sufficiently bland so as to please everyone, they please no one—or rather they please only those who do not comprehend that something more palatable is possible. Their emotional charge is essentially neutral, contained within a narrow spectrum. They have no style, just the cinematic equivalent of flavor beads, and they are responsible for cultivating a mass aesthetic that demands only more, not better. Yet even given these base criteria, they are simply not doing the job. Gradually, inexorably, with the steady diminution of quality displayed by such films and the increased diversity of choices available to an entertainment-seeking public, the American audience is splintering into a multiplicity of niches, and though there will always be room for the "event picture," if Hollywood does not recognize that it is time for them once again to make films that explore the medium, that challenge, that appeal to certain niches, that—in a few instances, anyway—reinvigorate the concepts of story and character, then some mighty big heads are soon going to come rolling down Wilshire Boulevard toward the La Brea Tar Pits to join their fellow fossils in sticky black oblivion. As I glance ahead to the summer, I find myself scanning a horribly long list of mediocrities and bloated melodramas, films that begin with some sort of high concept premise and then, those in control apparently feeling that the cool premise is enough to hold an audience, play out in the most predictable and uninspired fashion. Films like Bad Company (Chris Rock, Anthony Hopkins), Changing Lanes (Ben Affleck, Samuel L. Jackson), the aptly titled Murder by Numbers (Sandra Bullock), The Bourne Identity (Matt Damon), Unfaithful (Richard Gere), and dozens of other creaky, formulaic underpowered vehicles without a glint of originality in their design. Trying to differentiate amongst them is like trying to identify cars on the freeway from a mile off. Or, to continue the food metaphor, like trying to decide amongst brands of potato chips. Hollywood's betting that you can't eat just one, but I'm here to tell you (and I admit I usually chump out and say when I spot a new ad, "Hey, that might be pretty good!"), if you eat one, you've eaten 'em all.
When the so-called "major critics," the TV shills and the columnists from the big dailies, chime in with favorable reviews of a film so abysmal that dogs howl when they hear the theme music (take, for example, Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes), it's logical to assume that the fix is in, that at the very least dinner at Lutece or first-class airline tickets to the premiere are involved. However, when these same ladies and germs wax exuberant about a foreign film with a less-than-magnificent budget, even a cynic like myself dares to wonder if it might not actually be worth seeing. And so it was that, swayed by Elvis Mitchell's glowing review in the New York Times (among others), I hustled down to the local art house to watch a matinee showing of Y Tu Mamá También, a Mexican picture billed as an intelligent coming-of-age sex comedy. Had I known that director Alfonso Cuarón was also the man chiefly responsible for Great Expectations, that lamentable recasting of the Dickens novel featuring Ethan Hawke and Gywneth Paltrow, I would not have been so eager for the experience; but unaware of this, it was with distinct eagerness that I welcomed the dimming of the theater lights. A few minutes in, however, I began to have some misgivings. But I told myself that Mamá must be a slow starter. Extremely slow, as it turned out. Fifteen minutes later I was having difficulty focusing on the screen. After half an hour I found myself checking the time, trying to determine how much more torture I would have to endure, and I had reached the inescapable conclusion that by contrast to Y Tu Mamá También, the works of the Farrelly Brothers were products of sublime genius. Whereas the Farrellys place the acts of farting, masturbation, sex, and urination in crudely humorous contexts, Cuarón presents these acts seeming to assume that they are innately funny, and that by displaying them to us, he is being cleverly risqué. Or existentially honest... or something. But all he succeeds in doing is to bore us. Though the audience tittered nervously at every gaseous and fluid discharge, perhaps expecting something funny was on the horizon and trying to go with the thought, not once was there a genuine outburst of laughter.
As to the story, Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael Garcia Bernal) are, respectively, a wealthy kid just graduated from high school and his middle-class friend, also a recent graduate. Like many American kids of similar age (there is more than a touch of American cultural imperialism in the film), they indulge in drugs, are obsessed with sex (which they partake of in the most desultory possible manner), and consider themselves superior to everyone—with the possible exception of their girlfriends, both of whom are heading off on a European vacation as the picture opens. At a posh party in Mexico City attended by the Mexican president, the boys hit on Luisa (Maribel Verdu), a beautiful woman some ten years their senior who is currently married to Tenoch's cousin, and try to persuade her to take a road trip with them to a beach, a beautiful beach named Boca del Cielo (Heaven's Mouth), which they have invented on the spot. Luisa, occupied with other concerns, blows them off, but a day or two later, after Tenoch's cousin confesses to her that he has had an affair, she changes her mind and away the three of them go, south toward Oaxaca and thence to the Pacific coast.
Every now and then, interspersing the bouts of unsatisfying sex and inane conversations that serve both to point up the boys' callowness and to give evidence that Luisa, despite her relative age and experience, is not much brighter, her brain filled with banal New Age-ish sentiments ("Life is like surf—you must give yourself to it.") every now and then the soundtrack switches off and is replaced by a portentous voiceover that fills us in on the background of the characters and the country through which they are passing. At one point, as they drive along an unprepossessing stretch of road, the narration informs us that had they come this way five years previously, they would have seen an overturned burning truck, dead chickens everywhere, and a woman kneeling at the side of the road, weeping inconsolably. This is, I assume, intended to contrast the harshness of life with the boys' insipid frivolity, but the effect is more that of a non sequitur, especially when one considers that the same might be said of almost any stretch of road in Mexico. A while later, after the three travelers have found a suitable beach, pigs escaped from a nearby farm foul their camp, and the voice of the narrator intones that not long afterward a number of these pigs were slaughtered and several people were afflicted with trichinosis from eating their flesh. The tendentiousness of this announcement provides—unintentionally, I'm afraid—one of the few truly amusing moments in the movie.
When she is not prattling on about nothing or seducing one or another of the boys, Luisa is shown weeping. It seems Cuarón is asking us to believe that some trauma, something more than an affair, has driven her away from home and into the clumsy erotic clutches of Tenoch and Julio. Okay. Perhaps this, then, explains why a beautiful woman—even one as dimwitted as Luisa—would spend more than ten seconds in the company of these toadboys. Nah! It just doesn't wash. And when, ultimately, we learn the specific reason for her sadness, her presence on the trip becomes even less plausible. Plausibility goes out the window altogether during the climactic scene in which Luisa and the two boys pitch a drunk in a shanty restaurant on the beach. The boys not only confess that they have slept with each other's girlfriends on numerous occasions, but Julio reveals that he has slept with Tenoch's mother, a statement to which Tenoch responds with giddy laughter. (Having lived in Mexico and known a Tenoch or two, it's impossible to accept that—no matter his level of inebriation, whether or not he believed this assertion—he would have reacted with such mildness, especially considering the fact that he is acutely aware that Julio's station in life is beneath his own.) Upon repairing to their room, Julio, Luisa, and Tenoch engage in a ménage à trois that culminates in a homosexual encounter between the boys. Given their previous homoerotic involvement (masturbating side-by-side on diving boards and so on), this does not seem entirely beyond the realm of possibility, but given the emotional setting, it plays falsely.
Implausibility aside, what Cuarón has wrought here is not, as advertised, American Pie with a social conscience, but more an unfunny take on Dude, Where's My Car with a heaping helping of hollow pretension. There is no coming-of-age arc whatsoever—at film's end the two boys are every bit as clueless as they were at the beginning; all that has changed is they are no longer friends, which, if one takes into account the class distinctions inherent in the relationship, perhaps they never were. Undistinguished camerawork, lame dialogue, and confusedly stated characters... Whatever it was that caused reviewers to praise Mamá's artfulness and lucid narration flat eludes me. I can only assume that it had nothing to do with a viewing of the movie.
If it's good Mexican cinema you're interested in, check out a DVD of Amores Perros or Arturo Ripstein's disturbing Deep Crimson. And if you're looking for a decent comedy, you might want to give Scotland, PA a try.
This way-underpublicized little movie is a retelling of MacBeth set in the 1970s in a small, scuzzy Pennsylvania town, where the local tanning salon is named "When a Tan Loves a Woman." The action centers upon a fast-food restaurant known as Duncan's. Joe McBeth (James Le Gros) is the assistant manager of the place; his wife Pat (Maura Tierney) works there as a waitress. Despite being the mainstay of the restaurant, Joe is taken for granted by Duncan (James Rebhorn). When passed over for promotion in favor of Duncan's son Malcolm (Tom Guiry), Joe lets his wife convince him to try a hostile takeover. Pat and Joe attempt to coerce Duncan after closing one night, and the owner accidentally goes headfirst into a deep-fryer. After buying the restaurant at a gift price from Malcolm, who wants nothing to do with his late father's business, Pat and Joe transform the place into a kind of proto-McDonald's with a drive-through window and a roving French-fry truck. They prosper, but Pat grows increasingly obsessive concerning a grease burn she received when Duncan's head splatted into the bubbling fryer, and Joe turns to drink. Enter Ernie MacDuff (Christopher Walken), a vegetarian police lieutenant, and the McBeths' life begins to unravel.
Instead of three witches, three hippies (most notably, a hilarious Andy Dick) happen by now and again to give Joe oracular counsel. Birnham Wood is the site of boozy deer hunts. The story translates with such facility into a comedy, one begins to wonder about Shakespeare's original intent for the play. Director Billy Morisette keeps things moving at a nice pace, and LeGros, Tierney, and Walken—giving his usual charmingly twitchy reading—more than do justice to the script. Tierney, best known for her work on television (ER and Talk Radio), is especially good. She provides the majority of the movie's energy, pulling off a performance that not only is extremely funny, but also manages to expand our understanding of Lady MacBeth, adding what seems a crucial neurotic slant to our conception of the character. Hopefully, Tierney, who appears later this summer in a major film with Al Pacino, Hillary Swank, and Robin Williams, Insomnia, will be getting more work in the movies, because she has a lot more to offer as an actress than her television appearances have allowed her to display.
I intended to end this review right here, but I'm so bewildered as to why critics have lavished praise upon Y Tu Mamá También... I need to resolve this question somehow.
Could it be Payola?
I don't think so. There's not enough money behind the film to warrant such an expenditure.
I'm stumped.
So, in hopes of satisfying myself on the matter, I'm extending an invitation to one and all to help me out. Whoever submits the most creative explanation for the entirely undeserved approbation extended to Y Tu Mamá También will win a magnificent prize.
Well, actually, not that magnificent. A signed copy of a limited edition of my novel Colonel Rutherford's Colt, with a cover by J.K. Potter, which will appear later this year.
Send your entries to ElectricStory. Employees of Nabisco and General Foods are not eligible. Otherwise there's only one rule: That I may be wrong in my assessment of the movie is not an acceptable explanation.
In the midst of viewing Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man I became concerned that I’d misplaced a Safeway coupon guaranteeing fifty cents off on a Healthy Choice dinner, but after a thorough search I found it crumpled in my shirt pocket and glanced up in time to catch another shot of Spidey (Tobey Maguire) swinging off through digital Manhattan. This might indicate that I was uninvolved with the film, and I admit such is the case; but then unless you are—for whatever reason—still given to thumb-sucking Spider-Man is not a movie that requires concentrated attention, since the large majority of its audience are familiar with the story and familiar also with its brand of visual pyrotechnics, its generic style of narration, and, indeed, with its every particular. One does not attend such a movie with any greater expectations than that one will see what one anticipates seeing. The entertainment industry, publishing included, has retooled itself so as to provide us with an infinite feast of comfort food, and Hollywood, its most conservative arm, has decided that by churning out remakes, rehashes, and franchise properties, they expose themselves to less financial risk than were they to offer their audience even a feeble intellectual challenge. Dozens of comic books are currently in development. Wonder Woman, Aquaman, the Fantastic Four, Superman, Batman, Daredevil (starring Ben Affleck—can anyone explain why this guy has a career?), Iron Man, and others more obscure, projects that range from the intriguing—Ang Lee’s The Hulk, featuring the fine Australian actor Eric Bana—to the off-putting—Hellblazer, with Nicolas Cage slated to portray the cool, cynical anti-hero John Constantine, a casting choice that’s rather like trying to pass off a pound of pork sausage as filet of sole.
Thanks to this policy of intellectual debasement, genre film fails to reflect the rich potentials embodied by the science fiction field. Despite occasional Great Leaps Forward like Kubrick’s 2001, the status quo is God. So it is that franchises like Star Wars and The Matrix (both, in essence, comic books) will continue, as will the strip-mining of Philip K. Dick’s legacy, the extraction of his basic ideas and the tossing aside of the unique sensibility that made his work valuable. The latest of these pictures, Spielberg’s Minority Report with Tom Cruise, appears to transform a clever albeit minor Dick story into a higher tech version of Logan’s Run. Inimical space travelers will proliferate—Predator types and big-eyed Roswellian grays a la James Cameron’s upcoming Brother Termite—and so will creepy space relics and disasters precipitated by extraterrestrial sources. We’ll have the odd low-budget film that strays from these parameters, but basically that’s what lies in the filmic future, even though the actual future promises to be so much more complex.
With the development of computer graphic imaging, all that prevents the studios from tackling stories previously deemed unfilmable, like Ringworld and Rendezvous with Rama, are their greed and stupidity, qualities that, however docile the audience, will eventually sabotage their marketing tactics. There are some terrific properties languishing in development, but it’s probably a blessing that many of these—an example, Tom Hanks as Gulliver Foyle in The Stars My Destination—die aborning. It may be that Bester’s story could not be sufficiently dumbed down to make its filming feasible. The dumbing down of character and story, you see, has become a requisite for most green-lighted projects. It’s been brought to my attention that a major selling point written into a treatment for a film based on a Disneyworld ride, Pirates of the Caribbean, was the assurance that the picture would contain no subplots and no depth of characterization. Thus it is that we are doomed to endure at least another decade of George Lucas’ dotage, Stephen Spielberg’s crass, simplistic humanism, Cameron’s megalomania, Ridley Scott’s opulent vacancy, and the like. But the day is coming when a kid with a credit card will be able to walk around carrying a movie studio on his back, and when that day arrives, it’s probable that some of the great science fiction stories will be filmed imaginatively and lovingly by young men and women outside the system. Perhaps then we will see a movie version of, among various possibilities, Neuromancer. I suspect the idea of filming Gibson’s book is low priority for whoever owns the rights. After all, they might say, the high concept trappings of the book have been done to death in dozens of films, most of them trashy. That whole Cyberpunk thing... it’s so last millennium! They don’t get that what makes Gibson’s book compelling is the storytelling, the dark energy that illuminates his setting. But given the advent of new technology, I’m certain someone will get it, and they will make the movie and it will be markedly more successful than any of the imitations that have already been mounted before the cameras.
Think about the stories the studios are capable of telling nowadays. At the top of my list would be Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. Then Disch’s Camp Concentration; Stephenson’s Snow Crash; Effinger’s When Gravity Fails; Aldiss’ Helliconia Spring; Zelazny’s Lords of Light; Bear’s Blood Music; Wolfe’s Shadow of the Torturer; Simmons’ Hyperion. Anyone reading this could in a few minutes generate an entirely different list that would be every bit as worthwhile. Of course when you think about whom the studios might cast in these movies—Afflecks and Cruises ad nauseum—perhaps it’s better to wait for that kid carrying the studio on his or her back.
In the meantime, we have George Clooney remaking Solaris, Mel Gibson staring aghast at a crop circle, and the endless Sequel-O-Rama.
As an exemplar of the contemporary genre film, Spider-Man is not so bad. In fact, the first hour is quite entertaining, detailing the origin of Peter Parker’s arachnoid powers via mutant spider bite, his difficulty in coming to terms with said powers, his unspoken love for the girl next door, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), and the simultaneous evolution (by means of self-testing performance-enhancement drugs) of industrialist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) into the Green Goblin. Sam Raimi, who reached his creative peak during his Evil Dead period, does an outstanding job with the action sequences, handling the acrobatic ineptitude of the Webcrawler’s first swings through Manhattan with a sure-handed comedic touch. Especially effective is the scene during which Parker, clad in a shabby prototype of his costume, challenges a professional wrestler (Randy Savage) in order to win money to buy a car with which he can impress Mary Jane. Tobey Maguire’s greatest asset as an actor is his ability to project internalized discomfort, and though he seems incapable of much more than this, that quality alone suits him for the lead. Dafoe, in full-on scenery-chewing mode, cackles and grimaces with persuasive élan and invests the gradual change of Osborn into the Goblin with more subtlety than might be expected, and Dunst, a better actress than her role deserves, portrays a damsel in nearly constant distress with appropriate sweetness and vulnerability.
The second hour, however, is less successful. As often happens in the comic book, Parker’s sad-sack emotional stammering grows tiresome and the predictability of the plot—the Goblin discovering Spidey’s identity, his kidnapping of Mary Jane to draw Parker into his clutches, and the final battle between them—overwhelms the film’s energy. Growing disaffected, I found myself hoping for Spider-Man to encounter Spiderwoman, that we might witness Peter Parker plucked apart by purple pincers, his legs chewed off, eggs laid in his flesh. On a more practical level, things would have been improved had tabloid editor Jonah Jameson (a perfectly cast J.K. Simmons), for whom Parker works as a free-lancer, been more than an afterthought in the movie. In the source material Jameson provides Spider-Man with comic grounding for his frustration that contrasts well with his woman trouble and the unending stream of super villains. The addition of a couple more scenes featuring Jameson might have blunted the drippy effect of Maguire’s wet-eyed stare.
The problem with Spider-Man is more-or-less the same that afflicted the Harry Potter movie: it was given into the hands of a caretaker director, a man who would take no risks, whose intent was to transfer the source materials onto the screen instead of translating them. A superhero who shares our insecurities is an attractive idea, yet though Spider-Man becomes braver, faster, stronger, famous, a veritable icon, though he does gain a moral purchase, his personality essentially remains that of a teenage nerd. This illogical continuity of character may suffice in a commercial comic book, but the more vital process of a film—even one based on a comic—demands something deeper. A spot of creepiness would have served the film well. It stands to reason that Parker might develop an obsession with arachnids, and it would have added a layer to have him communing with his loathsome genetic kin on a cobwebbed rooftop. In both the comic book and the movie, Parker experiences bitterness, but it’s always an ineffectual, petulant bitterness, not the more volatile and dangerous emotion of a young man. Giving Spider-Man some potentially destructive issues might juice him up a notch. There is, for instance, his iffy relationship with the public, many of whom consider him a villain. His reaction to this is also petulant, but I would think that sooner or later this might mature into a seriously mean-spirited attitude. A few touches of the sort would have generated a more pronounced character arc and thus increased dramatic tension... and perhaps Raimi has this in mind for the sequels; but come 2006, I bet we’ll find Parker still mooning over Dunst, as he does at the end of this movie. Or else they’ll live happily ever after, displaying nary a trace of the emotional damage attendant upon such a prolonged separation.
Somewhere along the line—and this is true of both writing and film—the notion of what is artful and what is entertaining became separated. Gradually writers and directors considered by the critics at the top of their field came to be viewed as limited in their appeal, and writers and directors who had been viewed (be it rightly or wrongly) as journeymen came to be seen as populists. Storytellers. As if Gene Wolfe, for example, were not a storyteller. Back in the 30s and 40s, men like Hemingway and Orson Welles had great commercial success; but it’s tough these days to point to a critic’s darling who is also the author of a best-seller or the director of a blockbuster movie. Whatever the cause of this separation, be it the evolving science of marketing alone or in tandem with a decline in educational standards and reading levels, the reaction of most Hollywood directors has been to dumb it down, and as a result we’re being force-fed a diet of increasingly simplified stories. Franchises, comic books, remakes. I’ve heard it said that Spider-Man is the best superhero movie yet, and maybe it is. I don’t know. Myself, I have a fondness for Donner’s Superman, but making judgments about this type of film is basically a case of which do you like better, chocolate or strawberry? For my part, I had a good time. As all the chubby TV reviewers will tell you in their shilly little voices, it’s a freaking thrill ride, a roller-coaster experience. Like Pirates of the Caribbean, it’s fun for the whole family, a simple, splashy passage without depth or subplot. And that’s cool. Nothing wrong with fun. But I wish once in a while they’d serve it up with a side of truth and beauty, because it’s my feeling that fun is not merely—as the folks at MGM, Fox, and Dreamworks would have you believe—something vacuous, bright, and feel-goodish, something that goes good with Raisinettes and a Coke, something even an idiot can understand.
If you’re a habitual reader of reviews, you’re likely going to read several claiming that Insomnia is that rarest of cinematic creatures, a remake better than the original. Whether or not you agree with this may depend upon your definition of the word “better.” For my part, right up until the last fifteen minutes, I was convinced that director Christopher Nolan had managed to pull off a feat I previously thought impossible, i.e., doing a remake of a quality foreign film that, although not as accomplished as the original, was at least a credible rendering of the materials. But during that final fifteen minutes he succeeds in turning an eccentric, compelling piece of noir into mere melodrama. Given that Nolan’s previous films (Following and Memento) were extremely inventive in structure and design, it seems quite possible that the stock ending of his new movie was forced upon him by producers who did not believe that the audience would be capable of handling ambiguity. Which seems a bit odd, because Insomnia is a movie about ambiguity, and for the preceding hour and forty-three minutes, the audience has been drenched in it.
Los Angeles detectives Will Dormer (Al Pacino), a legendary crime solver, a luminary in the police firmament, and his partner Hap (Martin Donovan) are sent to the Alaskan wilderness town of Nightmute to investigate the brutal beating death of a young woman whose body was washed and cleaned by the murderer in order to destroy every last scintilla of physical evidence. The assignment serves also to get the pair out of LA, where both are being harassed by an Internal Affairs investigation of their past cases. Indeed, Hap has already decided to make a deal with IA, one that will imperil Dormer’s career, and this creates serious tension between the two men.
It’s summer in Alaska, the sun is almost always above the horizon, and Dormer finds himself unable to sleep, his judgment and his general mental state decaying. Nevertheless, he sets a trap to lure the murderer back to the fishing cabin where the victim’s body was found. The plan succeeds, but the murderer becomes aware that the police are watching him and flees into the fog. During the ensuing pursuit over rocky ground, Dormer becomes disoriented and inadvertently shoots and kills Hap. Or is the shooting inadvertent? Hap, dying, accuses him of murder and Dormer himself is confused as to what has happened. Local detective Ellie Burr (Hillary Swank), a novice on the job who hero-worships Dormer to the point that one half-expects her to jump and lick his face, or to begin humping his leg, is assigned to investigate Hap’s death. At the same time the murderer, a mystery novelist named Walter Finch (Robin Williams), begins calling Dormer on the phone, commiserating with him about his insomnia, telling him that he witnessed Hap’s death and is willing to work with Dormer to cover up both their crimes. As Dormer’s sleeplessness continues, leaving him prone to flashbacks of memory and hallucinatory breaks, his poor judgments escalate, and he joins, albeit reluctantly, in common purpose with Finch.
The atmospheric Norwegian thriller that serves as Nolan’s model, also entitled Insomnia, is scene-by-scene almost the same movie for most of its duration. However, there are a number of telling differences between the two. In the Norwegian film the lead detective (Stellan Skarsgard) is a man spiritually crippled by the exigencies of his work and existentially at sea. He has no clear-cut career-oriented motivation for murder as does Will Dormer, and if he did intentionally kill his partner, it was done out of some perverse and momentary impulse. In the Norwegian version, the female detective assigned to the shooting has some admiration for the lead detective, but is in her own right a competent and dedicated public servant. No hint of hero worship here. These distinctions point up the difficulty Hollywood has with telling an honest story. In the view of your average and even not-so-average Hollywood producer, nothing ordinary or small can be considered interesting, and subtle human motivations are deemed too subtle for mass consumption. Their detective has to be a superstar detective, and his motivation for murder has to be—for purposes of generating audience sympathy—the hounding of a good, brave, accomplished man by the weasels of Internal Affairs. Another such difference is brought forth when Dormer begins to defend himself against possible prosecution for murder. He has found a gun—dropped by the murderer—out on the rocky lakeshore where his partner met his fate. He takes the gun, shoots a bullet into a dead dog, and replaces the bullet that was removed from his partner’s body with this one. The lead detective in the Norwegian version kills the dog, then removes the bullet, and is far more actively involved in setting up an evidentiary circumstance that will allow him to go unpunished. He is a willing participant along with Finch in the cover-up, every bit as responsible for it, and is no less a manipulator. It is a law of the Hollywood process that while one’s protagonist may be troubled, he cannot be a killer of dogs or a man whose ethical compass is other than momentarily out of whack. The American audience, it is felt, simply will not accept a protagonist who, like most of us, is wandering in a moral fog.
Another distinction between the two films is the setting. The Norwegian film utilizes the bleak Arctic tundra, suitable to the bleak materials of the story, whereas the American version offers the lushness of the Alaskan wilderness, waterfalls sluicing down into green gorges, dramatic mountains, gorgeous rocky bays. Once again a Hollywood law—nothing interesting can occur in a place that is not visually spectacular. The majestic setting takes an edge off the grimness of the story, serving to muddy the fact that the citizens of the town, Nightmute, are many of them people who according to the script have hidden themselves away and are running from their pasts. As is Dormer. Though this idea is given lip service in dialog in the American version, it does not resonate with the postcard ambiance and brooding yet glorioso score that accompanies tracking shots of glaciers and foaming rivers, et al. Nor does it synch with the reality of such summer places, towns who derive ninety-eight percent of their income during the summer and whose citizenry, their pockets bulging with tourist loot, spend the winters happily traveling in sunny climes. (Where, by the way, are the tourists in this town? At the height of the tourist season, the place as filmed is almost empty, yet supports what appears to be a luxurious four-star lodge along with other nifty-looking tourist facilities.)
Once a more-than-competent actor, Pacino has devolved over the last fifteen years into a yeller and a scenery-chewer, a caricature of his former self. Praise should be given to Nolan for reigning him in, but a restrained performance is not necessarily a great one, and though Pacino is limited herein to a handful of yells, his customary repertoire of eye-rollings and grunts and dolorous sighs is on full display, and to no good effect. He does not come off at all well by contrast to Stellan Skarsgard’s quietly contained and mostly externalized performance in the same role. Robin Williams as Finch is appropriately creepy, but then I find him creepy in every part he has ever attempted—a peculiarly androgynous figure with a namby-pamby voice that at times sounds as if he were speaking through a pair of cotton briefs stretched across his face. The most effective performances in the film are those given by Swank and by Maura Tierney (Scotland, PA) as a hotelkeeper, both in rather thankless and truncated roles. Swank’s metamorphosis from a cute puppy with a bow around her neck to a thoroughly engaged professional troubled by the growing suspicion that her hero has feet of clay is especially notable.
All this said, for most of its length Insomnia is well worth watching due to the cleverness and talent of its director. Nolan manages to overcome the handicaps with which he has been burdened—Pacino, a dumbed-down script by Hillary Seitz, and doubtless the incessant looking-over-his-shoulder presence of his producers—and keeps us involved by means of outstanding camera work and the brilliantly achieved intercutting of Pacino’s hallucinations and other such flashy maneuvers. Hopefully, as he gains more power—which is, after all, the only meaningful coin in Hollywood—he’ll be able to get rid of the production snoops and make movies in his maturity that fulfill the promise of his youth. For an hour and forty-three minutes, he almost pulls it off. Despite my caveats, there is a lot to like here.
Then comes the ending.
The resolution of the Norwegian film is deft and ambiguous and speaks to the randomness of fate and the awful fragility of the human condition. It is as gray as the fog in which the event that stands central to its plot takes place, and thus is in keeping with the ofttimes murkily focused and unsettling resolutions of crises in our own lives. But realism of this sort is not deemed suitable for mass consumption by the lawgivers of the Hollywood film. Hollywood prefers to clobber us with theme and meaning, and so Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia concludes with a steeped-in-Family-Values, all-loose-ends-secured ending in which every evil is punished, redemption is gained by those who require it, truth and justice are served, and a moral lesson is taught, and whaddya know, this is achieved by means of a full-on blood-spattering shoot-out.
Yippee!
Watching it, I thought of Death of a Salesman culminating with Willy Loman dying in a kung-fu battle royale, of The Grapes of Wrath climaxing with an army of machete-wielding Okies charging the White House, of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal remade with heavy special FX and a script by Stephen King, of Hamlet closing with a food fight.
That’s how clumsy and inappropriate it seemed.
If you’re going to take in a thriller this summer, Insomnia is probably your best bet. But which Insomnia? If you like fifty-million-dollar budgets, terrific production values, and a director whose technique is the cinematic equivalent of early Eddie Van Halen, then go for the theatrical release. But if you’re after an experience that will nourish and disturb you, and leave you thinking and not saying—as I did after my exposure to the American version—“Aw, Christ... no!,” then you’d be well advised to check out the original. My advice is to see them both. For anyone interested in film, these two movies provide a clear lens through which to focus upon the distinctions between world cinema and our own homegrown, amped-up, and often silly attempts to imitate it.
The definition of “epic” that best applies to genre film is this: a complex story about simple characters that plays out over a span of many years. Certainly this definition applies well enough to the most well-known genre epics—Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and 2001: A Space Odyssey—as well as to an epic in the making, The Matrix. The personalities of Kubrick’s scientists and astronauts are as bland and superficial as the corporate milieu they inhabit. Whatever behavioral subtleties Frodo and his pals might embody is obscured by the shadow of a Dark Menace, a situation that of necessity acts to simplify their responses. Ditto the Cyberchrist Neo and his rebel buds. And as for the characters born of what might be labeled George Lucas’s emeritus period, “simple” must be considered something of a euphemism. It is a convention with much of genre work in any medium that plot should be elevated above all other creative concerns, and the old dictum “plot is the resolution of character” should be discarded in favor of a lowbrow aesthetic that essentially demands character be reduced to the bare minimum so as not to interfere with the good stuff. As evidence of this, not so long ago I was shown a script treatment for a project currently in production, and one of the major selling points was the following: “This movie will contain no subplots and have no depth of characterization.” At any rate, for whatever reason, complicated creations like those portrayed in epic mainstream films, characters like T. E. Lawrence and Zhivago and Bobby Corleone, don’t appear to survive the genre cut.
Until recently, that is.
Based on a thousand-year-old Inuit folktale concerning a hunter who escapes three assassins by fleeing naked across the Arctic ice, Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner, the first full-length feature produced, written, and directed by Inuits, is a simple story involving complex characters and though at one hundred and seventy-two minutes it may be too leisurely to play big in Omaha, it seems the kind of movie for which cinema might have been invented, offering a Shakespearean tale of greed, jealousy, and power, while at the same time providing a unique documentation of a strangely harmonious First Millennium culture that has remained virtually unknown to everyone except a handful of academics. Winner of the Canera D’0r at Cannes, six Genies (the Canadian Oscars), and numerous other festival awards, Runner deserves every ounce of the praise it has received—not since Lawrence of Arabia has a film achieved such a unity of visual poetry (gritty and glorious) and sound and narrative. The screaming of the wind, the scrape of a sled’s runners, the crunching of a hunter’s tread, these crisp, bright noises perfectly complement the ice fields, snowy wastes, and tundra, all drenched in clear white Arctic light, delivering images of a dangerous and ferociously beautiful natural world that both frame and imbue with mythic potency the actions of the men and women whose passionate confusions and constant struggle to survive provide the film’s kinetic energy. From the opening image of a hunter out on the ice surrounded by his whimpering dogs, all reacting to an off-camera terror, Atanarjuat is world-class storytelling, unhurried yet never slow, drawing the viewer in, immersing him in a culture that seems incomprehensible at first, utterly disconnected from our own, and then gradually revealing its mysteries to be merely familiar human ones that have been reinvigorated by means of this astonishing perspective.
The situation is this: An isolated clan of nomadic Inuits in a place called Igloolik (a town, by the way, that has been continuously inhabited for over four thousand years) is visited by an evil sorcerer, who afflicts them with a curse that will ensure terrible bitterness and conflict. When the clan leader, Kumaglak, is murdered, the new chief, Sauri, endlessly humiliates his old rival, Tulimaq, forcing him and his family to survive on charity. But after the passage of twenty years, things take a turn. Tulimaq’s sons, Amaqjuaq, the Strong One, and Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (Natar Ungalaaq), become the clan’s best hunters and their skill breeds jealously in the heart of Oki, Sauri’s son. When Atanarjuat defeats Oki in a head-punching duel, thus winning Atuat (Sylvia Ivalu), Oki’s intended, for his bride, the stage is set for vengeance and murder.
Urged on by his father and his perfidious, manipulative, Lady MacBeth-like sister Puja, a role marvelously realized by Lucy Tulugarjuk, Oki and two friends plot to murder the brothers and ambush them while they sleep, killing Amaqjuaq by spearing him through a collapsed tent. Atanarjuat, however, makes a miraculous escape and so begins the film’s dramatic centerpiece, perhaps the most poignantly tense and beautifully paced chase sequence ever filmed, consisting not of explosions, pyrotechnic car crashes, derailments, fusillades of bullets, or flaming bodies, but of a naked man desperately running across the ice beneath the midnight sun, pursued by three hunters with spears. His feet torn and bleeding, half-frozen, Atanarjuat is hidden by a family living out on the ice, a family—we come to realize—of spirits who counsel him, supply magical assistance, and redirect his desire for blood onto a spiritual path, allowing him to plan and eventually to return to Igloolik, where he reclaims his family, carries out his own considerably more just brand of vengeance, and with the help of the spirit family, confronts the evil sorcerer.
To an audience accustomed to the grossly spectacular and traditional stupidities of genre film, to filmgoers concerned with whether Gandalf’s dialogue played backwards constitutes Peter Jackson’s erotic paean to Beelzebub or Madonna, Atanarjuat may not appear to qualify as a fantasy, because it engages its genre elements so casually, so off-handedly. Characters do not sit one another down and explain everything that is going on, as happens in so many genre pictures. Watching this film, you are plunged immediately and without explanation into the midst of a world of sputtering seal-fat lamps and raw-meat feasts, of eerily lit igloos and grieving ceremonies and women with feline tattoos, a world in which sorcerers, magic, spirits, and reincarnation are taken for granted (Atuat is, for example, commonly believed to be the reincarnation of her own great-grandmother, and for this reason is called “Little Mother” by her grandmother). In a way, Atanarjuat is—in all its stunning and often grungy ethnographic detail—the antithesis of the ethnographic. Rather than offering analysis, the movie seems to rub itself against your skin, causing you to experience the Inuit culture rather than to gain an analytic comprehension of it, to have an almost physical appreciation for the hardship and peril that the nomads faced on a daily basis.
Every once in a while a movie happens along that seems to reconnect state of the art of filmmaking with the original excitement that came into the world with the birth of a truly modern art form, reminding us of the variety of purposes to which the agency of film can be harnessed. Despite its juvenile sensibility, Star Wars was such a film. Lost in the gibbering let’s-all-get-dressed-up-like-Darth Vader enthusiasm that helped transform the franchise into the cinematic equivalent of Juicyfruit was a genuine amazement over the recognition of a new filmic range that was waiting to be explored (naturally ,Hollywood chose to exploit rather than to explore it). Though its story was derivative, cribbed from a Kurosawa period piece, the way the story was clothed, the new environments that were created in order to tell it, effected an expansion of film’s basic vocabulary, both in terms of the technical and the imaginative. Atanarjuat will be seen by far fewer people and its influence on popular culture will doubtless be negligible. It’s just not easy to imagine folks attending FastRunnerCons, buying Puja dolls, or rubbing their bodies with walrus grease, donning caribou skin parkas, and heading down to the multiplex for a midnight show where they parrot the Inuktitut dialogue en masse. But I think it may also be such a groundbreaking film, one that will have a greater influence on the art of filmmaking than Star Wars has had. Shot in Betacam digital video, enlarging the potentials of that medium, it succeeds in capturing a different reality with far more efficacy than Lucas achieved in creating his pixelated galactic empire, and in doing so it not only suggests an entire new realm of cinematic targets, but—by its wedding of the homemade and the epic—will very likely indicate to young filmmakers working outside the system that they need not limit themselves to unambitious comedies and coming-of-age stories, thus changing the face of contemporary cinema. It’s interesting to note that Lucas’ continuation of his Star Wars saga, The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, movies that have been little more than ghastly ads for action figures and video games, were also shot in digital video. A case, it would appear, of The King Is Dead Long Live the King.
Atanarjuat is by no means a perfect film. The 35-millimeter transfer is substandard, ten or fifteen minutes of cuts might have streamlined the movie to good effect, and the confusion of the opening scene will be off-putting to some viewers. Flawed or not, however, it must be considered a masterpiece. In terms of storytelling technique alone, the way Kunuk orchestrates his emotional scenes to arise from shots that evoke the constant labor essential to the survival of the nomads, women scraping fat from skin or pounding meat, men icing their sled runners, and so on... these frames create an utterly original narrative flavor. Except for the lead, Ungalaaq, the actors are all non-professional, yet their performances are without apparent artifice, unforced, and I do not mean this in the documentary sense—though these characters are recognizable in their ordinary humanity, we never feel that they are less than larger-than-life or that their story is other than vastly significant. There has been a spate of recent films utilizing non-professional actors, most notably Eduard Valli’s Himalaya, but none have risen to this high level of competency. The script by Paul Apak Angilirq, who died during the production, skillfully blends the dramatic with the feeling of oral history, and the cinematography, as mentioned, is superb. But it is as a genre film that Atanarjuat makes its bones as a masterwork, demonstrating that the true power of fantasy is not to provide escape from the oppressiveness of reality—a drug, a goodnight kiss, or a decent meal can do that equally as well—-but instead to amplify the real and allow us to perceive the magical-seeming underpinnings of our lives, to remind us of the miraculous nature of our existence and the infinite possibility that encloses us. In this, in its crossbreeding of cinema verite with magical realism, in its luminous depiction of human striving taken to the level of myth, Atanarjuat succeeds majestically, enduringly, and like no other movie before it.
In Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, the dying words spoken by the evil Kurtz are, "The horror! The horror!" Cesar Vallejo, the brilliant Peruvian poet, ends one of his most powerful poems, "The Starving Man's Rack," with the words, "This is horror." Though the two authors are referring respectively to a spiritual bottomland and abject poverty, both are talking about essentially the same thing: the inescapable. That is the basic element of effective horror, be it fiction or film--the thing we cannot elude, no matter how desperately we try. The inevitable. The irresistible. Monster, disaster, occult shadow. Andromeda Strain or Bubba with a chainsaw. Whatever the horror evoked may be, it must have the aura of inescapability in order to be frightening, thus making it all the more gratifying when an escape succeeds.
It's unclear from listening to M. Night Shyamalan talk about his latest film, Signs, whether he intended to make a horror movie--he stresses the film's purported theme, faith and the nature of human spirituality. Whatever his intention, Signs has been advertised as a horror movie ("Don't See It Alone"); it indulges in the conventions of the genre (sudden shocks, fleeting glimpses, ominous camera angles, et al); and it borrows its set-up and core structure from one of the most famous of all horror movies, George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. In both Dead and Signs a group of people are trapped--hopelessly, it appears--inside a Pennsylvania farmhouse, while outside, evil creatures are attempting to break in and kill them, creatures whose incidence is not localized but part of a worldwide crisis. The salient difference between the films is that the zombies of "Dead"--though brain-dead--succeed in killing almost everyone in the house; whereas in Signs, though capable of crossing interstellar space in a massive fleet that parks itself above over 400 cities and of creating enormous crop circles on every continent to guide their pilots, the aliens are incapable of breaking into a root cellar. They simply cannot solve the problem presented by an ax wedged beneath a doorknob.
Inescapable?
I think not.
In addition, the sole alien who manages a confrontation with the beleaguered family is beaten into submission with a baseball bat wielded by Joaquin Phoenix, cast here as former minor leaguer, Morgan Hess, the brother of Father Graham Hess (Mel Gibson). The bat slots nicely into Shyamalan's thematic structure yet scarcely qualifies as the weapon of choice when one is trying to dispatch a technologically advanced being who, along with his fellows, is harvesting humans for--apparently--food. Nor does it strike me as plausible that such creatures might successfully be locked in a pantry, or that Iranian peasants would be the ones who discover that aliens dissolve in water, as if their flesh were constituted of freeze-dried soup. And it's downright stupid to think that a baby monitor would be able to tune in communications from alien ships.
Despite these and various other humungous logical gaffes, there are a few things to praise about Signs. The idea of portraying an alien invasion by focusing on one small corner of it makes a nice change from such overblown cosmic scopefests as Independence Day. The editing is excellent, as is the cinematography. The acting . . . well, forget the acting. Mel Gibson used to be an ordinarily inept actor who looked good to women from the rear; now he's become a terrible actor who is starting to acquire (both front and rear, I suppose) the baffled, wrinkled countenance of an incontinent bloodhound. But it is as a horror movie that Signs must ultimately be judged, and as such it flunks every test.
Once Shyamalan isolates Father Hess, his brother, and two cute 'n spunky kids in the cellar, we expect to see alien incursion after alien incursion, walls giving way, weird ooze seeping up through the concrete, mechanical probes, each menace more chilling than the last, fended off by extremes of human ingenuity and valor. All we get is a rattled door, the sound of glass breaking upstairs, footsteps, and alien fingers groping through a ventilation grate. You may not fall asleep, but neither will you jump out of your skin. The characters, however, do fall asleep, taking long naps during the assault on their home--this dissuades us from any notion that their straits are dire. The director tosses in a potentially fatal asthma attack in an effort to raise the stakes, but that speaks poorly of his imagination. Signs is the third Hollywood film this year, the second this summer, in which a child in the throes of a severe asthma attack inspires a parent to make a risky move in order to fetch medication. In a Stephen King novel the child would die--that's how you raise the stakes; but Shyamalan has not learned or has chosen ignore this lesson. Rather than seeking to generate more tension, he dissipates it by incorporating into his climactic scene one of a series of flashbacks that explains how Father Hess lost his faith (the death of his wife in a freakish auto accident being the inciting event), a reverie that also provides him with the clue that helps save his family, thus causing him--surprise! surprise!--to regain his faith. The New Age prattle served up by the good reverend is sugary and glutinous enough to stop Deepak Chopra's heart, and whenever the pace slows to permit a character to preach the script's everything-happens-for-a-reason claptrap, energy dribbles from the film.
After a promising beginning, Shyamalan's last two pictures demonstrate that either his talent is in decline or that unsatisfied with millions, he has decided to pursue the billions available to those who pander to the basest of cultural imperatives. In an age when politics and the movie industry--indeed, every marketable portion of society--have been joined in grotesque alchemical wedlock, who knows what heights he may achieve, what worlds he may conquer. One day the word Shyamalan may be branded on all our foreheads. It is for certain, judging by the predictability, the simplistic morality, the heavy-handed manipulation of Signs, that he's at least on his way to fulfilling the prediction recently made of him, to wit, that he will be the new Spielberg.
(Here a brief prayer may be in order.)
In the good ol' USA the horror genre keeps lurching along with the same-old same-old. Creature features, dumb devil movies, sentimental ghost stories, and teenage freak-outs, the majority of these films being of a quality suitable for evisceration on Mystery Science Theater. Jeepers Creepers, The House on Haunted Hill, and 13 Ghosts (a William Castle remake! Who'd a'thunk it?) celebrate the enduring Hollywood axiom that one can never get enough of attractive boys and girls lusting after each other and getting variously eaten, torn apart, and scared out of their thongs. End of Days, Lost Souls, and the unbelievably dimwitted Bless the Child, whose protagonists are saved in part due to a marathon prayerfest performed by a group of nuns, perpetrate the Catholic comic-book version of the struggle 'twixt good an evil: Balrog-like demons; ultra-suave guys who dress in black and start fires by snapping their fingers; Vatican hit squads; exorcists by the gaggle. And then there is the woeful legacy left by the single outstanding American ghost story of the past few years, Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense: whipped dogs like What Lies Beneath and Dragonfly, in which, slowed by glacial box office temperatures, Kevin Costner shows signs of sinking from public view into his own personal La Brea Tar Pit. There seems scant hope of anything vital happening in the immediate future. A remake of the excellent Japanese horror movie, Ring, is due out soon, but since it is directed by Gore Verbinski, the man responsible for The Mexican (the worst picture in the careers of both Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts . . . which is a hell of a statement), and stars a cast of unknowns, usually signaling an ensemble of hunks and hunkettes who once did a guest shot on Dawson's Creek or Felicity, one cannot be optimistic. So the horrorhead who is searching for quality must look elsewhere for gratification, and the direction that appears to offer the best chance for this is Far East.
The Asian horror movie reached its popular peak with Ring, a complex ghost story involving a psychic ghost and a cursed videotape containing disturbing imagery that visits a terrifying death upon whoever watches it exactly seven days after the viewing. Ring broke box-office records in Asia, generating a good sequel (Ring II) and a pretty fair prequel (Ring Zero). In the wake of this trilogy has come a flurry of horror films, some of the gross-out variety, like the zombie movie Versus and its more stylish genre sister Junk. But there have been a good many films produced in Asia during the last decade, particularly in Thailand, Japan, and Korea, that have strived for originality. One of the most intriguing is Uzumaki, which is currently making the rounds of film festivals and is likely to receive a general release sometime in near future.
Uzumaki means "vortex." In context of the film, vortex refers to every type of spiral form. As the story begins, the schoolgirl heroine, Eriko, comes upon her best friend's father engrossed in videotaping a snail--he has, according to her friend, Fhi Fhan, become obsessed with the spiral in all its incarnations. Over the space of some several weeks everyone in the small rural town where Eriko lives either is possessed by this obsession or becomes victim to a product of it. The most popular girl in Eriko's school begins to wear her hair teased into ornate spirals; another classmate falls to his death down the shaft of a spiral staircase; Eriko's father, a potter, turns a spiral pot for Fhi Fhan's father and falls prey to the obsession. Before too long, as Eriko and Fhi Fhan attempt to unravel the cause of all this, the consequences of the obsession grow still more bizarre. Fhi Fhan's father mutilates himself and contrives an anatomical spiral of his innards before giving up the ghost; crematory smoke forms an enormous sky-filling spiral at the center of which the faces of a newly dead husband and wife are seen; a reporter covering the story drives into a tunnel that proves to be the mouth of an endless spiral; two of Eriko's classmates are transformed into giant snails with spiral shells and take to crawling up and down the side of the high school. Fhi Fhan himself eventually twists himself into a living pretzel. Finally only Eriko is left.
Uzumaki's director, Akihiro Higuchinsky, a Ukranian-born Japanese hitherfore unknown to me, blends these materials into a unique black comedy, a cross between H.P. Lovecraft, Heathers, and French surrealism, without eschewing the staples of the horror genre--shocks, creepiness, tension, and, of course, the inescapable . . .
It occurs to me that I have both underestimated the fearful potentials of Signs--and been far too strict in my definition of the inescapable. I mean, short of death and taxes what can be more Orwellianly, inescapably dread than a system that ingests a talented artist, grinds him around, and excretes a purveyor of a product so slickly packaged, it causes the public to salivate uncontrollably at the prospect of having their brains oiled with bland toxicity and massaged to the consistency of Play-Doh.
"The horror! The horror!"
M. Night Shyamalan knows all about it.
And if Mister Kurtz were alive today, he might not need to stray so far from home to find his spiritual bottomland.
When was the last time Robin Williams was funny? Probably sometime during the 1980s, back when his coke-fueled manic post-modern take on Jonathan Winters made yuppies everywhere laugh and laugh. But in the 90s, when America became—publicly at least—a little more drug intolerant, like many of his peers, Robin cleaned up his act and wasn't funny anymore. When he tries to do his old shtick these days, it's kind of embarrassing, like watching grandpaw after too much punch misbehaving at your eighteenth birthday party. Well, Robin's no fool. He recognized what was going on, becoming-culturally-outmoded-wise, and by choosing to act in films like the egregiously mawkish Dead Poets Society, the egregiously mawkish Good Will Hunting, the unbelievably egregiously mawkish Patch Adams, and others, he redefined himself, turning from a crazy woo-woo guy onto a buffoonish moral icon, a sentimental, politically correct cartoon. Now, his hair going gray, in his last three films he's shifted career gears again and is trying to carve out a niche as a character specializing in serial deviants.
And now (drum roll) he's funny again!
I mean, I can't think of anything much funnier than teensy, stout ol' Robin Williams coming after me with mean things on his mind, though I have to admit he does possess a genuine creepiness. (This was true even when he was intentionally funny; as with all comics, it's the dark side that generates the humor.) But RW's is not a truly menacing creepiness; it's a feeble, crotchety creepiness. It's almost an old-lady creepiness, as if he's been unable to escape his Mrs. Doubtfire role. For my part it's difficult to feel terror when confronted by someone with the facial aspect and general physicality of a Jewish grandmother, but I can suspend my disbelief for a couple of hours and imagine, as RW's latest film, One Hour Photo, suggests, that there are some of us who might find him terrifying.
Seymour Parrish (Williams) is the manager of a photo shop located in a SavMart, a Wallmart-like sterile temple of consumerism. He lives alone and friendless in a spotless apartment, keeps a gerbil for a pet, eats in a characterless mall restaurant, and displays a compulsive and proprietary air toward the photo shop, sporting his uniform vest as if it were an emblem of office, an attitude that brings him into conflict with the store manager, Bill Owens (Gary Cole, here playing a naturalistic version of the evil corporate toad he first portrayed in Office Space), who constantly reminds him that his true position is faceless underling, not entrepreneur. Over the years, Seymour has become a fixture at the shop and has come to know the names and faces and even the addresses of his regular customers. Being family-less, he uses them to provide himself with an ersatz family life.
Occasionally he makes extra prints of their photographs and frames them for his own use. He is especially fascinated by a young upscale family, the Yorkins, Will (Michael Varten) and Nina (Connie Nielsen) and their son Jakob (Dylan Smith). They are, to his eyes, perfect. He wants to be an uncle to Jakob and daydreams of being a favorite relative, one who lives in their home. He has devoted an entire wall of his apartment to a photo gallery that spans the history of the Yorkin's marriage from its early days to Jakob's ninth birthday. Whatever the pressures that have squeezed Seymour's life into this horrid, flavorless simplicity, they are beginning to leak out. Afflicted with bloody nightmares, he spaces out at work, and his obsession with the Yorkins drives him to hunt them up in places other than the mall—he attempts to befriend Jakob; he manages to bump into Nina at a restaurant and pretends to be reading the same Deepak Chopra book as she; he takes to parking in front of their house and his fantasies of family inclusion deepen. The hit fits the shan when Seymour is given notice by Bill Owens (the cause being his discovery that Seymour has been making hundreds of extra prints) and then develops a roll of film brought in by Will's mistress Maya Burson (Erin Daniels) that gives evidence of their relationship. His image of family perfection shattered, Seymour hunts the adulterers down at a hotel and, with hunting knife and camera, exacts a curious revenge that is in itself an acting-out of the childhood events formative in the development of his stunted and twisted personality.
Mark Romanek's direction is unimaginative, but his imaginative devices—most notably his Kubrickian evocation of the SavMart's white sterility, an image system by which he conveys the idea that Seymour continues to place himself in sterile boxes in hopes of containing the pressures within him—are both heavy-handed and derivative. The balances of the film are off and there are many other elements contributing to this. For one, an intermittent and entirely unnecessary voiceover by Williams that attempts to mislead the audience into thinking that they are watching a more typical serialist plot than in fact they are. For another, a misleading framing device that to anyone conversant with Hollywood process will give away the ending. The soundtrack is a mixed blessing, at times effectively allowing the pastel silence of Seymour's artificial world to become our silence, but at other times laying on the dramatic menace far too thickly. Romanek's storytelling is admirably economic—he shows us the troubled marriage with a few broad but efficiently managed strokes and does not give us too much information concerning Seymour's troubled past. But perhaps he should have given us none at all and spent more time on building suspense. The tension attendant upon Seymour's disintegration seems underplayed in light of what we are being led to expect. One rule that applies to all forms of storytelling is that if you are going to tempt your audience with red herrings, you need to be consistent in the manner you employ them; otherwise your deceptions will be perceived as a dishonesty and not—as you hoped—a clever trick. We already know more than we need to know about broken creatures like Seymour. One Hour Photo does not illuminate us further on the subject. It would have been more intriguing, more artful, to watch him break completely and have the reason why left to our imaginations. This might have permitted a more intricate view of the family, who—though they are put forward as typical, as people with whom we are familiar—are nonetheless intrinsically of greater interest than Seymour, who is merely broken.
As to the acting, the supporting cast performs more than serviceably—Gary Cole may come to regret his proficiency in this kind of role after his tenth repetition of it and Connie Nielsen is thoroughly convincing in her alternation between serenity and quiet desperation. This, however, is RW's picture and his Seymour seems well crafted, appropriately clenched and yearning. I say "seems" because through no fault of RW's I have a permanent expectation that he will begin speaking in a helium voice or imitate a parrot. But disassociating myself from that expectation, I have to give him a B. His performance is hindered by the fact that someone—Romanek, I assume—had him dye his close-cropped hair a golden blond for the part, asking us to wonder if Seymour on his way from abused child to tormented obsessive passed through a Dennis Rodman phase, or that he belongs to a gay bowling league, or...whatever. Gray is the color of Seymour's story, and gray hair would have been more fitting. At the same time, while the rigorous blandness of the character as presented by RW is in keeping with the self-restraint we are told that Seymour must exert, a hint or two more of coloration would have been welcome.
The most annoying element of One Hour Photo is its simplistic family values moral, which is so thickly lacquered over the surface of the film, its gloss deflects our view. It dictates that the wages of neglect committed by any father must be judged reflexively, that a womanizer and an abuser are no different in the eyes of God, and we are asked to perceive Seymour as—in a way—sympathetic. This last-struck tone of the film makes the whole piece ring hollow, as does the implication that Will Yorkin deserved his fate, that he was lucky it wasn't worse. By doing this, Romanek directs us away from what we should consider, from what his pretentious use, both skillfully and less so, of the camera promised to show us, something hiding beneath the deceptively simple surface of the world, something more compelling than the obvious fact that there are lurkers in our depths who may find us tempting. As a result, you feel at the end of One Hour Photo that you have watched an interesting failure, a not-screamingly bad movie (for which you are deeply, truly grateful), one you won't be thinking about very much and may mention to your friends, but if you do, you certainly won't spend the time in doing so that I have herein done.