Spartan
Purchased for $3.99 at Second Spin, Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica. This price made even the clerk do a double-take.
Mamet’s smoothest, most sophisticated piece of film direction, this one feels more like a “real movie” than any of his others.
Val Kilmer is swell in the lead, William H. Macy is fine as the guy smoking the cigarette, but Ed O’Neill is a revelation as the authority guy in the big suit.
When this movie came out, some snorted with derision at the political stance of the picture, which includes the observation that the president would rather kill innocent people and sell his own daughter into slavery than risk losing an election. At this point of our national nightmare, that kind of news item would be noted on page A17.
The photography is silky smooth and seductive, and the production design is the best of Mamet’s films. You get the idea that he’s really starting to get the hang of this art form.
SPOILER ALERT:
There are a number of plot contrivances that do not detract from the overall pleasure of the experience. They are:
1. The Girl has a logo, a little emoticon [ %-) ] (so, Mr. “I only write on a portable Smith-Corona in a cabin heated with a wood fire” Mamet is familiar with the computer, after all!). This emoticon (or “device”) becomes a key plot point, as it shows up in the windows of both places where the girl is held against her will.
Derek Luke (Val’s Little Pal #1) “sees the sign” in the window and thus we know that the girl is not dead. Okay then, good enough.
But wait! Derek also found her earring at the house, so why did we need the sign?
My question: why did the girl put her logo in the window of her captor’s house? The only thing I can think of is that she was hoping that the Delta Force guys would see it and thus know that she’s in the house, without her captors knowing.
But why would she know that the Delta Force guys are coming? And if she knows they’re coming, why would she need to put the sign in the window? What would it matter? And then she does it at the second place in Dubai too, even though she knows by now that no one is coming after her. Why?
2. The Shootout At the Airport. At the end of the movie, Val Kilmer finds that he’s been followed by Bill Macy and his team of commandos. Bill and his team are there to kill Val and the girl, to protect the president.
There’s a shootout in a hangar, and much posing with guns and ducking in shadows.
Why are there no people working in the airport? It seems like you can have a shootout any old place these days.
But wait, there’s more.
During the shootout, a plane happens along. Who is it? Why, it’s a SWEDISH NEWS TEAM, led by a tall, gorgeous blond of course. Aren’t they all? And they capture the whole shootout on tape and eventually get The Girl onto the plane and out of the country. They save the day.
Why was there no Swedish News Team around when someone backed out of their driveway and rammed my car? It came down to my word against his, and he didn’t have any insurance. I sure could’ve used a Swedish News Team that day.
Why is a Swedish News Team in Dubai that day anyway? What Swedish News Team is so well-funded that they’re sending private jets to Dubai with an anchor and a camera crew? You would think a stringer in a hotel would be enough for the Swedes, but no, apparently there is an unquenchable thirst in Sweden for news from the United Arab Emirates, and their hugely well-funded News Teams jet from country to country, scouring the streets for any tidbit of news they can find.
SWEDISH CAMERAMAN: Where are we going?
ANCHOR: Today we are in Dubai, tomorrow Oman.
SC: What’s happening there?
A: Doesn’t matter. We’ve GOTTA GET THAT NEWS.
SC: Is that the thing?
A: That is the thing.
SC: Well ain’t that a kick in the head.
A: It is indeed.
I guess, because they’re Swedish, they’re guaranteed to be neutral on the subject of the president’s daughter.
Speaking of which, because they’re Swedish, they also get their plane off the ground on time, even when there are ARMED COMMANDOS HAVING A SHOOTOUT IN THE HANGAR NEXT TO THEM. This goes back to the “why are there no people working at the airport?” question. The last time I was on a plane and a shootout broke out among a bunch of commandos on the runway next to my plane, we were delayed quite a long time, let me tell you. But I guess these things happen every day in airports in Dubai.
PILOT: Excuse me, tower, but there is a shootout going on in hangar one-niner.
TOWER: Understood, proceed with takeoff.
PILOT: Um — shouldn’t you, um, “do something” about it?
TOWER: This is Dubai, chief, we don’t bother with that stuff.
PILOT: Oh my God! The guy from “Fargo” just got his throat cut! Shouldn’t you call somebody or something?
TOWER: It’s probably some American inter-agency struggle going on. Rogue agent, kidnapped president’s daughter, not our concern. Let ’em sort it out.
PILOT: Roger.
3. There’s a Female Unit Member, who is Val’s Little Pal #2 (since Pal #1 gets his head blown off at the end of Act II). FUM has a drink with Val, and Val tells her what he’s going to do.
Then he goes to Dubai, seemingly by himself, and meets up with an English guy, who becomes his Little Pal #3. (Hint: Don’t become one of Val’s Little Pals. They all get shot dead, dead, dead. So much for Leave No Man Behind.)
Anyway, so there’s the airport, Val has The Girl, Bill Macy shows up, shootout, bang bang bang, Val’s hit, Faceless Commando is killed, and bang-zoom, here comes FUM, out of the shadows, to escort The Girl to the plane (before getting shot in the back by Macy).
How did FUM get there? It seems that she was there with Macy. But why would she be with him? She was with Val at the top of the act. Did Val give her the assignment of “Stick with Macy, just in case he tails me to Dubai and tries to cut us off at the airport and kill us both?” Why would he do that?
In Heist, Gene Hackman’s character (“Bob” or “Joe” or whichever man-man name he was given this time around) always has a back-up plan. It’s part of his credo. Is FUM being with Macy Val’s backup plan?
But no, she couldn’t be, because Val’s surprised when he finds the Tracking Device (capitals intentional) in his Special Knife That We Had a Whole Scene About. So Val DIDN’T think that Macy was going to follow him to Dubai. Why then would he have FUM be with him?
Or was her mission to merely be there in the airport hangar when Val showed up with The Girl? If so, where was she at the top of the act, when he flew in on the airplane and did the thing with the shipping container?
I understand that if you have not seen the movie, the above will make no sense to you. But hey, these nits ain’t gonna pick themselves.
Heist
David Mamet is one of my favorite writers of all time. Only Samuel Beckett takes up more space on my bookshelf.
As a playwright, he’s the best America has living.
As an essayist, he is without parallel.
As a novelist, he is provocative, innovative and occasionally opaque.
As a screenwriter, he has brought us many sterling entertainments, including The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Verdict, The Untouchables, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Edge, Wag the Dog and Ronin.
Certainly, a writing career for anyone to envy, especially me.
It’s Mamet the director who presents a different kettle of fish.
House of Games, strangely, is still his most satisfying movie. The weird dialogue, the stilted Mamettian acting, all of it is of a piece, it doesn’t seem like it’s poorly done, it seems like a stylistic choice, and the script is very strong.
But every now and then Mamet the director lets Mamet the screenwriter get away with some lazy writing.
In Heist, the characters speak some of the cheesiest “tough guy” lines ever written. It’s all “Is dat th’ thing?” and “You’re burnt! You got old!” and “Walk away” and “Aren’t you as cute as a Chinese baby?” He puts an old black-and-while WB logo at the front of the movie, as if to indicate that he’s taking us back to the WB gangster movies of the 30s, but it doesn’t stick this time as a stylistic choice, it just feels false and clumsy. And not even uber-Mameteer Ricky Jay can get away with a line like: “My motherfucker is so cool, when he sleeps, sheep count HIM.” Come to think of it, I don’t even know what that means.
Maybe it’s because House of Games seems to take place in a kind of hermetically sealed Mamettian fantasy world, but Heist seems to take place in something like our real world, so it seems weird that the actors are all talking like some post-modern 40s tough-guy gangsters.
After seeing The Spanish Prisoner (his second-best movie) I joked to myself that one day, Mamet would write a screenplay that consisted entirely of aphorisms. Heist seems to come close to that.
CHARACTER 1: Waste not, want not.
CHARACTER 2: In’t dat th’ thing.
1: It is.
2: As it was in the beginning.
1: A stitch in time —
2: — is a penny earned.
1: In’t it?
2: We would say that it is.
1: And beauty is but skin deep.
2: Except when it is not.
1: Is dat th’ thing?
2: Dat is th’ thing.
1: Hold ’em or fold ’em, everybody leaves the game.
And so forth.
The script has a number of good ideas in it and plenty of dazzling lines, my favorite of which is “Everybody needs money, that’s why it’s called money,” another non-sequiter which nevertheless resonates.
Mamet the film director sometimes seems to have a certain amount of disdain for the medium he’s directing in. He will occasionally use very old-fashioned, obvious, far-fetched, nonsensical or downright silly plot points, as if to say “Well, the important thing is the drama, whatever gets us from Point A to Point B is good enough. It’s just a movie, after all.”
Hollywood Ending
Well, they can’t all be classics.
I can’t think of anyone who likes all of Woody Allen’s movies, but most of the time, even with the lopsided ones, I can find something going on in it that makes it worthwhile.
Hollywood Ending is one of the very few where, despite the sincere efforts of everyone involved, it doesn’t click.
Most of the cast is great, but there are a few key performances that just fall flat, sound off-key. Some of the writing is really sharp, really clever, but again, in a couple of key places, I have to look at it and go Huh? This is the guy who wrote Hannah and Her Sisters?
Scenes sometimes go on too long, and a few times actors even flub their lines. It’s hard to believe that the man who has somtimes re-shot entire movies decided to use some of the takes he has here.
But like I say, they can’t all be classics.
But it does remind me of how many great films Woody Allen has made. In fact, I would have to say that, of all living American directors, he has a higher percentage of great films than anyone else. Like roughly a third.
I would say, in chronological order, they are:
Sleeper
Love and Death
Annie Hall
Manhattan
Stardust Memories
A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Zelig
Broadway Danny Rose
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Hannah and Her Sisters
Radio Days
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Husbands and Wives
Manhattan Murder Mystery
Bullets Over Broadway
Deconstructing Harry
Sweet and Lowdown
Match Point
Wow! That’s 18 great movies! And that’s not counting movies he didn’t direct, like Play it Again, Sam and (cough) Antz!
Then there are movies that kind of skate by on charm (Bananas), fine pictures with debilitating flaws (Mighty Aphrodite), and misfired experiments (Shadows and Fog).
Mostly, these later comedies (Celebrity, Small Time Crooks, Hollywood Ending, Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Anything Else) seem like scripts that he shot in order to keep working. Which is fine. Mostly they maintain the high level of technical excellence that we’re used to (Celebrity, for instance, is one of the most beautifully shot of all his movies), but every now and then there will be some scene or bit of business or performance by a major star and I’ll say “What’s up with that?”
There are a number of scenes in Hollywood Ending that really fizz and pop, but then there are bizarre lapses (like the last-minute inclusion of a long-lost son) that seem really lazy and perfunctory.
Luckily, as we can see with Match Point, his gift has not entirely lost him.
Beckett Smackdown
The New York Times has published a piece on the 100th birthday of Samuel Beckett. In the piece, they solicit comments from a number of playwrights about Beckett’s influence on their works.
One of the playwrights contributing to the piece is Will Eno, who nearly won the Pulitzer last year for his somewhat Beckettian monologue Thom Pain (based on nothing), which vaulted to legendary status with the help of Mr. James Urbaniak’s volcanic performance.
Indeed, the Times referred to Mr. Eno as “a Samuel Beckett for the Jon Stewart generation.”
Will Eno is a wonderful writer deserving of all the success that he’s had. But I just want to point out that I was influenced by Beckett when Mr. Eno was in short pants. I yield to no man in my being influenced by Beckett, and yet somehow the New York Times never got around to asking me about it. That might have something to do with me not having a play run off-Broadway for fourteen years (and unsuccessfully at that), but I prefer to see it as blatant favoritism. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion that payoffs were made.
I can hear the discussions at the Theater desk:
EDITOR: So who are you gonna ask about the Beckett piece?
WRITER: Oh, the usual suspects. Mamet, Vogel, Durang, Guare, Eno.
EDITOR: What about that guy who co-wrote Antz? Isn’t he a playwright?
WRITER: Chris Weitz?
EDITOR: No, the other one.
WRITER: Paul Weitz?
EDITOR: No, the OTHER one.
WRITER: Oh, you mean that Alcott guy?
EDITOR: Yeah, didn’t he used to write plays with a heavy Beckettian influence?
WRITER: Yeah, but I didn’t get a check from him.
EDITOR: Understood.
Here are some indications of the depth and breadth of Beckett’s influence on me and my work:
1. I have read everything that Beckett has written, usually more than once, and own at least one copy of each work, in English and in French (or whichever language the piece was originally written in).
2. I have a picture of myself standing in front of Beckett’s house in Paris, as well as pictures of the front door of Les Editions du Minuit, his publishers (the door reads, in French, Please Enter, Do Not Ring).
3. I have seen productions of all of Beckett’s plays, some of them many times, including many weird, distaff productions of prose works adapted awkwardly to the stage.
4. I own a copy of the Beckett On Film DVD set (my favorite is Anthony Mingella’s film of Play).
5. I have a little metal bust of Samuel Beckett on top of my computer monitor. It features Beckett’s head on top of an open book. I got it on Ebay.
6. I have three cats, named Didi, Gogo and Lucky.
7. My son’s name is Samuel Alcott.
Your move, Mr. Eno.
Tomie
There are five of these creepy, nasty little J-horror films: Tomie, Tomie: Replay, Tomie: Reborn (I know, I know) Tomie: Another Face and Tomie: Forbidden Fruit.
Tomie (pronounced Toe-mee-ayy) is a beautiful teenage girl. She seduces every man she meets and drives them crazy, makes them hurt each other, their friends and their families. Eventually their guilt and horror get the better of them, and they turn their anger toward Tomie, and they kill her in some brutal way. Methods include decapitation, dismemberment, incineration, freezing, impalement, drowning and falls from great height.
But Tomie, it turns out, is not an ordinary teenage girl. She is, apparently, some kind of ancient demon who takes the shape of a teenage girl. She has, apparently, come into our world many times over the past millenia or so, wrecked a whole bunch of people’s lives, been destroyed, and come back, again and again and again.
So, you kill Tomie because she’s ruining your life, and a few days later Tomie shows up to ruin your life all over again. Only this time she’s really mad.
Maybe she goes after your friends or family first. And you can’t very well say “Hey! You’re not supposed to be walking around, I dismembered you in the bathtub and bury you in the woods!” Because that would tend to cast a shadow of suspicion upon you. So you kind of have to take it and go crazy as she dismantles your life and drives you to suicide.
My favorite of the series is Tomie: Replay, where she emerges from the belly of a girl in the opening credits (don’t ask me), grows to maturity in a fish tank in the basement of a hospital, and goes on to ruin the lives of some hospital administrators.
There are always a couple of great set pieces in each movie. Tomie can spring back to life from even a speck of blood, so even if you’ve incinerated her body, if a speck of her blood got on your rug while you were cutting her up, she can grow back from that. Oh my gosh it gets icky.
In Tomie: Forbidden Fruit, there’s an ugly-duckling schoolgirl whom Tomie befriends, and when the girl’s father kills Tomie with a meat cleaver, cuts her up and dumps her in the river, the girl goes to find Tomie’s head and carries it around in a gym bag while it grows little stumpy limbs again. There’s a priceless scene where the girl is pushing Tomie’s severed head around in a baby carriage and runs into a fussy matron, who bends over to coo at what she thinks is a baby, and is instead confronted with the severed head of a teenage girl, who says something like “Could you stop staring? It’s very annoying,” upon which the woman screams and runs away.
Good fun for the whole family.
Tomie: Reborn is directed by Takashi Shimizu, who later went on to direct Ju-on and its American remake, The Grudge.
Madagascar, Small Time Crooks, Schindler’s List
Boy, now that’s a marquee!
Sometimes all a movie has to be is funny, and the first two movies on this short list are funny (Schindler has its moments too, but let’s not push it). I wouldn’t confuse either Madagascar or Small Time Crooks with high art, but Madagascar is a scream. I watched it for the third or fourth time this evening (that’s how it is when you’ve got kids) and my four-year-old and we both laughed our heads off. You know a movie has got something on the ball when both the four-year-old and the forty-four-year-old are laughing at the same gags.
It has almost no plot, and for once it’s a relief. These CGI pictures are so expensive, they usually end up over-plotted and airtight, not a moment wasted. As James Urbaniak once said about Robert Redford’s Quiz Show, “You could bounce a quarter off that movie.” And as much as I like the Pixar movies (I’ve seen all of them at least 50 times), they are slick, polished and calculated compared to Madagascar, which has a loose, flexible, what-the-hell quality about it. Maybe because it’s only 75 minutes long, 60 of which passes without the semblance of a plot. It feels like a much older comedy, something like Horsefeathers perhaps, with an accent on situation and character instead of plot, which, considering its budget and construction, is a miracle. I mean, think of it. Here’s a movie that had to cost over $100 million and was developed over something like a decade, and at some point someone in charge (probably Jeffrey Katzenberg) said “You know what? The hell with plot and ‘lessons’ and heart-tugging emotion. People get that all the time from family films. Let’s just make this the funniest thing we can, let it breathe a little. Can we do that?”
And then it works, and goes on to make a billion dollars (I’m guessing).
Small Time Crooks I haven’t seen since it came out, but, like a lot of Woody Allen’s slighter movies, it holds up well over time. I would put it slightly below Manhattan Murder Mystery or Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy in terms of pure enjoyment.
Woody Allen gets lauded all the time for his writing and direction, but no one ever seems to notice what a great actor he is. And you could say “Yeah, but he’s always Woody Allen,” but so what? Cary Grant was always Cary Grant, no one ever complained about it. The detail, spontaneity and rhythm of his performances is consistently astonishing to me. How he gets the performances he does from his other cast members is another question. I’ve heard from a number of actors that he is ridiculously incommunicative as a director, but he somehow he manages to get career-best performances from people. In the case of Small Time Crooks, there’s Elaine May, who I’ve never seen work as an actor before, and she is amazing here. Yes, okay, everyone’s playing stupid, but she takes it to a whole different level. With Michael Rappaport for instance, we can see that we’re seeing a smart guy play a stupid guy, but Elaine May is completely opaque, your jaw drops when she says the things she does. I’ve actually met people who are as stupid as her character here, and that’s how they are. Not just garden-variety stupid people, I mean people where you really don’t know how they get through the day, you’re worried they’re going to forget to breathe or something.
Although the DVD transfer is only okay, the photography by Zhou Fei is typically luminescent.
And I bring up Schindler’s List only to point out that it also features the guy painting the name on the glass door again. So there you are, Hudsucker, Seven and Schindler, the basis to your next “stump the film geek” quiz.
Jurassic Park
If I ever teach a class in screenwriting, I will assign Jurassic Park for the day we discuss “Theme.”
A studio executive once said to me “Well, Jurassic Park is all well and good, but you know, in the end it’s not really about character.” And I nodded sagely as if I understood what she said and thought “No, it’s about dinosaurs.”
All of Spielberg’s films are strong on Theme, but usually there’s a lot more plot and character and incident and shape to them, so we don’t think about it so much. A lot of that is pared back to minimal levels in Jurassic Park, leaving Theme and Action to dominate.
Luckily, both Theme and Action in Jurassic Park are done pretty darn freaking well.
What is the Theme of Jurassic Park? Well, it’s not a secret. The Theme of Jurassic Park is Nature Vs. Technology (for those of you playing along, the theme of Lost World is Hunters Vs. Gatherers).
Every scene, almost every beat of every scene, practically every line of dialogue hits this theme over and over again. Sam Neill touches a computer screen and it flickers. “What’d I do?” he exclaims. “You touched it,” says Laura Dern. It plays as a spontaneous exchange but it’s subtly reinforcing the theme.
Every time someone or something tries to contain life, life breaks through and, more likely than not, goes on a rampage, with much blood and gnashing of teeth. Other times, life is cornered and killed (or nearly) with technology, as when the little boy is caught on the electric fence and zapped within an inch of his life.
On the way to the park, the helicopter plunges straight down into a canyon, and we spend about a minute watching the actors jostle and buckle their seatbelts. Why is the scene there? It contains no dinosaurs and no real suspense. No, the scene is there for one moment, when Sam Neill can’t find his seat belt buckle and has to figure out a way to strap himself in. Life, as Jeff Goldblum notes later, finds a way.
Soon afterward, the gang are locked into an amusement park ride, and respond by breaking the ride and going off on their own. Sam Neill gets out of a moving car as Jeff Goldblum notes, shocked, “Who could have predicted that?”
Even tiny little things, like when Samuel L. Jackson sits down at Wayne Knight’s desk and says “Ugh! Look at this workstation!” as he brushes a week’s worth of candy wrappers and soda cans to the floor. Wayne Knight may be a computer genius, but he’s also still a big fat slob and he will pollute his environment. (of course, the same scene features a not-so-subtle closeup of a photo of Oppenheimer, who knew a thing or two about the hazards of harnessing nature.) And while Jackson is trying to make sense of Knight’s desk, Knight is off in his Jeep (technology), being overwhelmed by a thunderstorm (nature), wiping the fog (nature) off his glasses (technology), with his hi-tech dinosaur-egg (nature) smuggling maguffin (technology) in his pocket.
See? And every scene is like that. When the gang first arrives on Jurassic Park, a shiny new Jeep pulls up with a big shiny dinosaur logo on the side. At the end, a similar Jeep pulls up to the visitor’s center, but now the logo is splattered with mud. Nature has won this battle.
Of course, the dinosaurs themselves are products of hugely sophisticated technology themselves, and the movie is a triumph of technology on its own level too.
And I have silverfish in my screening room.
Punch Drunk Love
I avoided Adam Sandler movies for a long time. Whatever it was about him, I didn’t get it.
I originally approached PT Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love with great apprehension. Anderson got career-best performances from movie-stars Burt Reynolds and Tom Cruise as well as an army of character actors, but the thought of him making a movie with Adam Sandler, I have to say, filled me with something like dread.
Well, he’s simply extraordinary in this picture, honestly, one of the great lead performances of our time. If you’ve never seen it, you owe it to yourself. Rarely have I left a movie theater feeling as alive as I did after seeing this movie.
Amazingly, Sandler pulls it off opposite none other than brainiacs Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman. His performance is full of detail, nuance and exquisitely observed detail. His performance is so unclassifiable that I initially felt baffled by it. It sounds like stunt-casting but it turns out to be something more like a miracle. Even though his character is as shy and closed-off as possible, he practically quivers with electricity.
Strangely enough, this movie fits right next to my Jim Carrey trilogy. In his own way, Sandler’s character is also a man-child who needs supernatural force to move on with his life. In his case, it’s a magic piano that shows up at the beginning of the movie, delivered immediately after an SUV spectacularly overturns in front of his office (I could practically hear Anderson say to his DP “Please tell me we got that.”)
The phone call between Sandler and Hoffman is one of the great real-life conversations ever filmed. Neither can believe that the other has the balls to say the things he’s saying, but neither one wants to hang up, lest the other get the better of him. The call escalates to such baroque levels of anger and disbelief, and yet feels completely real. I myself have had similar phone calls with the personnel of Verizon, Dish TV, Chase bank and Toyota Santa Monica, so I’ve had plenty of recent experience to compare it to.
But that’s another story.
The Mask, Liar Liar, Bruce Almighty
Jim Carrey’s three best (and most Jim-Carrey-esque) movies.
In all three he plays an overgrown man-child who needs to grow up a little and requires a supernatural force to do so.
The makeup in The Mask is extraordinary, as are the special effects, especially when contrasted with those of Batman, made only five years earlier. Carrey’s green mask-head look, with enormous teeth and outsized features works with his face much better than Jack Nicholson’s Joker makeup, which, although shocking and disturbing, restricts the movement of one of the most expressive faces in film history. When Carrey moves in his makeup, it seems like nothing more than a slight exaggeration of what Carrey is already capable of. And the way that the live-action elements blend into the CGI looks completely believable. Of course, the subject matter is cartoons, so the CGI doesn’t have to look realistic, but the transitional moments are seamless and delightful.
The script, shall we say, favors the moment over long-term coherance, but whatever puts Carrey into the next situation is what we want to see.
Cameron Diaz is extraordinary in the picture, and, except for the dog, is really the only one who’s able to keep up with Carrey. It’s a shame they haven’t done anything else together.
Liar Liar is the most purely heartfelt of the three, and the best acted. Everyone from Amanda Donohoe to Swoosie Kurtz to Maura Tierney (who I desperately adore) to Jennifer Tilly are all on the same page. It’s not exactly “the world as we know it” in terms of logical cause and effect, but it’s a comedy and we’ll buy it, again, because we want to see Carrey placed into the next situation.
Astonishingly, it’s only 82 minutes long, including the out-takes under the credits. I remember something about the action-climax ending being a very late addition to the movie, and it’s definitely the moment least likely to happen in real life, and I’d be curious to know what the original ending was.
Bruce Almighty brings to mind Groundhog Day, which is, of course, one of the greatest screenplays ever shot. Both Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and Carrey in Bruce Almighty self-involved jerks who hate their surroundings and are given a blessing/curse they must deal with and in the process grow souls. Both Murray and Carrey even play TV soft-news guys. Of the two scripts, Groundhog Day works better for me because the curse is unique, the story development completely unpredictable (despite predictability being, essentially, the nature of the curse). In contrast, the script for Bruce Almighty, while very funny scene by scene, seems to take on too much (kind of like its protagonist) and feels like it short-changes its potential. Both movies are about spirituality, but the spirituality in Groundhog Day is presented organically, is heartfelt and deeply moving, whereas the spirituality in Bruce Almighty feels scattershot and forced in comparison.
Jennifer Aniston and Steve Carell hold their own against Carrey, and he has a dog again in this picture, but it’s no Jack Russell terrier.
Beetlejuice, Batman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
WARNING: Massive spoilers.
I rented these three movies to study their approaches to production design, but ended up watching them for a completely different reason.
All three are, of course, Tim Burton movies. And all Tim Burton movies are about a collision between the “real world” and an irrational individual, whether that individual is Edward Scissorhands, Jack Skellington or Tim Roth’s character in Planet of the Apes.
I started with Charlie then worked my way backwards, for no particular reason.
I had no trouble recognizing Willy Wonka as the typical Tim Burton protagonist, the artist who cannot live alongside society. He builds himself a world of his imagination, shuts out the “real world” and eventually loses himself inside his creation. He is saved by the intervention of a child who shares his passion and reconnects him with society, but on their own terms. At the end of Charlie, pointedly, Charlie’s family and their house has been moved inside the chocolate factory. Willy Wonka has not, after all, rejoined society; rather, he has brought a family into his own demented reality.
Charlie is, of course, most handsomely designed, but then I wonder. The design of Batman was, in 1989, such an all-encompassing, overwhelming shock that it pushed aside a number of narrative problems that the movie has. I wonder if, fifteen years from now, Charlie will look like Batman looks today.
Because Batman looks, well, it doesn’t bad, but it does look really dated and really, really cheap.
Ridley Scott mentions that he had it rain all the time in Blade Runner to disguise the fact that all his streets were backlot constructions. Tim Burton didn’t take his thinking that far, or else he wanted to emphasize his sets’ artificiality, because boy they look artificial. What in 1989 seemed like a design triumph now looks cramped, overstuffed, cheap and fake. The extensive miniature work looks obvious, mismatched and awkward, Jack Nicholson’s makeup looks crude and unforgiving.
By the standards of today’s superhero movies, the plot makes very little sense. The Joker has no plan, he just tries a bunch of stuff. Batman almost kills him, so he decides to poison Gotham City. He falls passionately in love with Vicki Vale for no particular reason, then destroys some art, then stages a parade, where he plans to gas thousands.
Beloved characters with fifty years of history behind them, like Jim Gordon and Harvey Dent, are turned into stock Hollywood types with no affinity for the originals, while ciphers like Alexander Knox and Vicki Vale and Bob the Goon are given major screen time. (I have never read an issue of Batman with any of these characters in them.) By the standards of something like X-Men or Batman Begins or Spider-Man or Sin City, there is very little respect for the source material at all.
But as a Tim Burton movie, Batman works reasonably well. The design is extensive, but doesn’t look particularly Burtonesque by today’s standards. Batman looks nothing like Corpse Bride or Sleepy Hollow or even Batman Returns.
So I watched Batman feeling a little disappointed, but then I watched Beetlejuice and it all fell into place.
Beetlejuice, aside from being the comedy version of The Others, is, amazingly, almost the same movie as Batman. The title character is, essentially, the exact same character as The Joker, with the same sense of humor, the same unbridled lust and even a similar makeup job. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis have to rid their house of Beetlejuice just as Batman has to rid Gotham City of The Joker. Burton even cast Michael Keaton in both films, and it’s as if Batman and the Joker are really just two sides of the same personality. Bruce Wayne is also Batman, and is also the Joker. Bruce Wayne can’t deal with society and so becomes Batman, but his anger and self-loathing surfaces as the Joker and his nonsensical destruction.
There! If that’s not dimestore Freudianism, I don’t know what is. Excuse me, I’m going to go smoke a cigar while driving a train through a tunnel now.
Beetlejuice and the Joker (and, I realize now) Willy Wonka are all irrational creatures. (There’s at least one of these characters in every Tim Burton movie, but these are the three I watched today.)
Joker’s plans may be scattershot but Beetlejuice’s makes no sense whatsoever. Beetlejuice wants to get out of some kind of purgatory (represented by Alec Baldwin’s tabletop town model). It is explained that he can only get out if you say his name three times. Then it turns out he’s able to get out anyway. Then it’s revealed that he can only get out if he marries a living person, so he decides to force marriage upon Winona Ryder. Similarly, love seems almost beside the point to Batman/Joker’s plans, and positively repellant to Willy Wonka.
These movies are all about the irrational. When people ask Willy Wonka about his absurd creations, he responds as if he doesn’t quite understand them himself, as if he’s as amazed as you are at their existence (either that or he responds as if they are the most rational things in the world and you are an idiot for questioning him). Wonka’s creations (in Burton’s movie anyway, it’s been a while since I read the book) don’t make any sense, they simply are. As Charlie says in the movie (I’m paraphrasing) “It doesn’t have to make sense, that’s why it’s candy.”