Raising Cain
When this movie came out, it seemed pretty silly. Now it seems pretty great. Funny, weird, effective, creepy, weird.
Incredible first-act curtain, a dream within a dream within a dream. Or is it? And which parts?
Visual motif: Time. And by time I mean clocks. And by clocks I mean clock hands. And by clock hands I mean long pointy things.
With Snake Eyes, shares a fear of drowning, head-butting and impalement. Lots of impalement.
Tiny knives.
Wonderful long take where Frances Sternhagen explains things as she and two detectives walk through some offices, down a hall, into an elevator, out into another hall, down some stairs, through a lobby and into a morgue. That’s how you do exposition.
Lithgow, who is varying degrees of silly thought most of the movie, is actually pretty convincing as the old Norweigian guy.
“Jesus, stop, you’re going to kill somebody with that sundial!”
Snake Eyes
Sometimes one has to make a conceptual leap in order to enjoy a filmmaker’s work. I didn’t enjoy Barry Lyndon for years, until I noticed that Kubrick was copying certain compositions directly from paintings from the era he was depicting. Once I understood that he was making a movie, a 20th-century art form, of a story from the 18th century, using the images and rhythms that people of that time would have understood, the movie suddenly became hugely interesting, sweeping and involving on the level of The Shining or Clockwork Orange, and is now one of my favorite Kubrick films.
In the case of Snake Eyes, I find that once I give up the notion that I’m watching a movie about human beings, with any connection to logic, it similarly becomes quite enjoyable. I don’t mean that as a snarky comment. It’s just that if you’re expecting a conventional thriller on the level of, say, The Bourne Identity (a movie I love), you’re bound to be disappointed. You wouldn’t expect a conventional gangster picture from Godard or a conventional noir from Truffaut, yet when DePalma plays with genre even a little bit people sigh and roll their eyes.
Pure DePalma, the movie is about a handful of suspenseful situations that DePalma can use to weave his magic spell of dread, bitterness and cynicism. It begins with a stunning, 12-minute take that follows Nicolas Cage around the main set. Not just a show-offy trick (like, say, the impressive 5-minute take at the beginning of Bonfire of the Vanities), the take offers an encapsulation of the entire narrative, the moment that we’re going to spend the rest of the movie scrutinizing from different points of view, some authentic and some not. Hugely skillful in his manipulation of our sensibilities, DePalma puts key events at the edge of the frame or even out of frame (hey Paramount, this DVD is the crappiest transfer I’ve seen since 1941), things that only make sense when we see them again from another point of view.
There are two long expository scenes, one where Nicolas Cage literally stops the movie in the middle of a hair’s-breadth chase scene to say “Let’s sit down and talk for a second,” and the other where The Bond Villain Explains The Whole Conspiracy To The Protagonist At Gunpoint, and you can sense DePalma unhappy with having to include these scenes at all. He knows he has to or else the movie won’t make any sense, but he shoots them in completely straightforward ways, this from a director who otherwise doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “straightforward.” It’s like he’s saying “okay, fine, you need this scene? Fine. You sit and watch the two actors explain the story, I’m going out back for a smoke.”
My favorite credit crawl, second only to Seven.
While the ending hinges on an absurd confluence of coincidental events, I give DePalma credit for not making the ending as happy as he could have. It’s also worth noting that the conspiracy theory that the movie hinges on, which seemed silly and baroquely implausible to me ten years ago now sounds sober, well-reasoned and straightforward by today’s political standards.
I would very much like to see DePalma go whole hog and make an entire movie in one take, like Hitchcock tried in Rope, but with a story on this scale. Snake Eyes practically plays out in real time anyway, I don’t know why he didn’t try it here.
BONUS WEIRDNESS: Nicolas Cage plays a character named Rick Santorum, and there is a Richard Santorum thanked in the end credits. Likewise, Gary Sinise plays a character named Kevin Dunne, and there is a scene where he is interviewed by another actor whose real name is Kevin Dunn.
Anything Else
Alas, our “title joke” thread provides an apt segue into this movie.
1. Would you like to see a great Woody Allen movie?
2. Isn’t there Anything Else?
Could be Woody Allen’s lowest point. It would be easy to point to Jason Biggs’s stiff, forced, lifeless performance, but I don’t think it’s his fault. Because the movie is full of stiff, forced, lifeless performances. Actors as diverse in talent as Christina Ricci, Danny De Vito, Jimmy Fallon and Allen himself all give performances pitched at the same level of stiff, forced lifelessness.
Problem seems to be that Allen’s directoral instincts and rhythms seem simply off somehow. Scenes that should play nimbly and spontaneous come off as stagy and hollow, actors waiting for their cues instead of humans having a conversation.
And then there’s the script, anacronistic and off-tone. Young people in their 20s, in 2003, kvetch about their therapy and hotel-room prices, talk about their love of Billie Holliday 78s and Edna Millay, make their living writing for nightclub acts and excitedly jump in a cab to go see Diana Krall.
Scenes are over-explained, stale jokes are flogged, wordy lines fall flat and lie still.
Woody does get the best scenes when he goes into his cranky, paranoid old man routine, and he gets one point for using a Moby song in a nightclub scene, an actual up-to-date, current piece of music in a movie set in present day.
New contest
Idea for a sketch, which I never developed. Memory jogged by the Memento joke from a few days ago. How long can we keep it going?
All ideas will become my personal property.
1. What did you think of Hamlet?
2. I can’t make up my mind.
1. Would you like to read Bartleby the Scrivener?
2. I would prefer not to.
1. Did you read Waiting for Godot?
2. My copy hasn’t shown up yet.
1. When are you going to get back to reading Poe?
2. Nevermore.
1. When are you going to finish King Lear?
2. Never, never, never, never, never.
1. Do you want to read The Merchant of Venice?
2. Can I borrow your copy?
1. You should read Othello, it’s really good.
2. What proof do I have of that?
UPDATE: Excellent work everybody! Keep going!
Bandits
Take Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Keep the romantic triangle and the light, reflexive tone, take out the violence and the historic and mythic context. Set it in contemporary America. Take out Redford and replace him with Woody Allen, give it a happy ending, boffo comedy.
What do you mean, Woody Allen’s too old?
The Italian Job
2003. Directed by F. Gary Gray.
THE SHOT: Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch steal and re-steal a whole bunch of gold.
TONE: Slick, professional, consummately executed, two thrilling heist sequences and a better script than I remember it being.
It does a much better job of being a remake than, say, Welcome to Collinwood. Instead of being a remake of the original, it borrows a couple of key concepts from the original and is otherwise is a completely different movie with its own visual scheme, character dynamics and philosophy. And it certainly stands on its own as a picture.
And yet there’s something a little dispassionate, a little impersonal about this movie. The cast is an amazing one, everyone in it has done extraordinary work elsewhere, but for whatever reason I don’t get wrapped up in their stories.
DOES CRIME PAY? (SPOILER WARNING) An excellent example of what we’ve been talking about. They “get the gold” on page 10, and it’s unclear whose it is. So that’s okay, because who cares? It’s found money. But then, Ed Norton steals it, and he’s hateful (his moustache tells us so), so it’s perfectly okay for Mark to steal it from Ed. In the original there’s the Mafia, who intrude on the job and become a force to be reckoned with; the remake, the Urkrainian mob intrudes and Mark makes nice with them and gives them a cut. Everything very polite. And the villain is even given a comic sendoff.
Wag the Dog
An example of what great actors, well-directed, can do with a first-class Mamet script. His dialogue, which so often sounds hollow, brittle and soulless, even when he directs it himself (especially so), here sounds spontaneous, startling, razor-sharp and jaw-droppingly funny. De Niro and Hoffman are shockingly alive and present, and all the ensemble scenes crackle with intensity and humor.
The world the script describes, which was goosed with the reality of the Lewinsky/Kosovo thing back when it came out, hasn’t aged a bit and, if anything, has become less of a satire.
The script takes a sharp left in the third act, as many of Mamet’s scripts do, going all the way back to The Verdict, but the impact of the movie is still undeniable.
THESE HEIST PICTURES
Any ideas why the gang is rarely allowed to get the loot? Only in Ocean’s 11 (and 12), The Sting, Sneakers and The Hot Rock is there actually the giddy pleasure of actually getting away with the crime.
The reason it works in these movies is because the gang is stealing something from someone we hate. Whether it’s Robert Shaw or Andy Garcia or Moses Gunn or Ben Kingsley, right up to the brand new Inside Man with Christopher Plummer, it must be a single man and he must be utterly hateable. The rule seems to be, if the gang just stealing from some institution or some country or some bank or something, the gang must ultimately lose in the end. Why is that? Why can’t someone just rob a bank and get away with it? Doesn’t that happen in real life? Why must the criminals be punished, in movies of all shades and tones, stretching back 50 years now? We keep wanting them to get away with it, why don’t the movies let them?
Yes, yes, I know that the money in the bank ultimately belongs to everybody, and you can’t support a crime against a society, but so what? We’re not talking about real life, we’re talking about movies. Can anyone think of a movie where they get away with the loot, and the only villains are the police who are trying to stop them?
Topkapi
1964. Directed by Jules Dassin.
Dassin, of course, directed the taut, grim classic Rififi. This is not that.
THE SHOT: Maximilian Schell et alia plot to steal an emerald-encrusted dagger from a museum in Istanbul.
TONE: Amused, playful, smug.
Like many artifacts from the 1960s, what was once carefree, daring and liberated now seems curdled, bloated and dull. Melina Mercouri is meant to be sexy, coqettish and exotic, but comes off as haggard, embalmed and iguana-like. Peter Ustinov is a bumbling idiot who — excuse me, Peter Ustinov plays a bumbling idiot who unwittingly becomes a key member of the crew. His performance is cutesy, busy and condescending; naturally, he won an Oscar for it (as a friend of mine once remarked, the Oscar is awarded for most acting). Maximilian Schell comes off as a bizarre mix of Daniel Day Lewis, Ben Stiller and Ralph Fiennes.
The movie starts quite slowly. Nothing happens for fifty whole paint-drying minutes, as the cast romps and poses in exotic locations.
PLEASANT SURPRISE: The heist, which, like the one in Rififi nine years earlier, is played in real time and near-total silence, is still gripping and enveloping cinema 40 years later.
DOES CRIME PAY? Oh, so close. But this movie is too cute for its own good to let our heroes suffer long.
NB: Currently being remade as a sequel to The Thomas Crown Affair. I can’t wait. That’s not sarcasm.
Ordinary Decent Criminal
2000. Directed by Thaddeus O’Sullivan.
THE SHOT: Master thief Kevin Spacey may have bitten off more than he can chew when he steals a priceless Caravaggio from an art gallery. Can he outwit the police, the IRA and his own traitorous henchmen to become Ireland’s Best-Loved Thief?
TONE: Glib, knockabout 00s UK crime drama. Guy Ritchie without the flamboyance (not necessarily a criticism). Very much Butch Cassidy in spirit, complete with Entire Police Force Surrounding Our Protagonist ending.
Keyser Sose, it turns out, is a perfectly nice guy who just wants to be well-liked. Much Irish Pride on display. Funny gangsters. It’s all a big game, even when men are shot in the face, in shocking detail.
SPECIAL FEATURES: Kevin Spacey and Linda Fiorentino, two of our finest actors, play Irish. The rest of the cast are all actually Irish. These things happen. The first commercially-released film I’ve ever seen the devoted an actual close-up to a man’s penis. A dead man’s penis (same guy as the shot-off face). Take that, Tarantino!
DOES CRIME PAY? Depends what you want out of life, I guess.