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.
Sneakers
1992. Directed by Phil Alden Robinson.
One of only four films by Robinson. He waited 10 years to do his next one, The Sum of All Fears.
THE SHOT: Robert Redford, et alia, must steal and re-steal a thingamajig that could change the course of blah de blah.
TONE: Polished, smooth, thrill-seeking entertainment.
Brisk, witty, professional direction, a terrific, utterly original script that wrings tension from phone calls, car rides, flocks of ducks, computer terminals and Scrabble tiles. A brilliant hook, a compelling villain (complete with Li’l Villain Shark Tank [tm]), a great cast (Sidney Freaking Poitier! Dan Ackroyd, acting! David Strathairn Before Anyone Knew Who He Was! Stephen Tobolowsky In The Second Greatest Role of His Career!). River Phoenix is strangely underused, and Ben Kingsley has been given a bizarre accent (must be all that time spent in prison), but otherwise, superlative entertainment.
And a great capper for Redford’s career, almost a final-exam kind of picture. Draws together themes and elements from his whole career, from The Hot Rock and The Candidate, through The Sting, Three Days of the Condor and All the President’s Men. There’s even the WASP guilt of Quiz Show thrown in for good measure.
James Earl Jones, voice of Verizon, gets to introduce himself by saying “We spoke on the phone.”
NITS (AND, SPOILER ALERT):
1. We find out, at the end of Act II, that Ben Kingsley is the guy who hired Redford to steal the whatsit. Why? I guess he knew that Redford was capable of finding and stealing it, but why didn’t he just hire his goons to go capture and torture the mathemetician? And didn’t he suspect that Redford would know what it was, and try to keep it for himself?
2. Who does Ben work for? When we meet him, he says he works for the Mafia. Then later, we find out that his office is withing the offices of a toy company. It is also explained that the toy company is a front (you know, the “mechanical dog skeleton art” in the lobby would have tipped me off that this was no ordinary toy company). But Stephen Tobolowsky really does design toys. So apparently there is some actual toy design going on at the toy company. So, is the toy company a Mafia front? And if they’re really making toys, how is it a front? Or, is the toy company simply Ben’s business (he describes the Mafia as his “day job”), the thing he does while he’s planning to take over the world?
DOES CRIMEPAY? I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.
pestilence update
Now that House Finches are coming to my bird feeder, I find the enormous, capybara-like squirrel who comes and sits in the middle of the seed to feed less cute. Especially when I can hear the finches yelling at him to get out.
Today I went out and, instead of merely shooing him away, I snuck up on him, then waved my arms and made a big noise. Well, he exploded out of the feeder, then charged halfway up a tree. But then he stopped, turned and started barking at me. It sounded like an apoplectic Donald Duck. It so amused me that I stood there for a good ten minutes trying to replicate the sound myself, and the two of us stood in my yard, carrying on what must have been an obscene conversation in Squirrel.