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.”
The Man Who Wasn’t There
Continuing in a Coen mode.
Not much to say about this movie. It is simply the Coen’s most heartfelt, most straightforward, least ironic, most elegant, most gorgeous movie. Another terrific script, approaching the noir genre from the simplest, most ordinary point of view possible, finding a lyrical, poetic, absurd, tragic story about a man whose ambition is to stop cutting hair and go into dry cleaning. Billy Bob Thorton’s greatest performance in a long line of great performances, everyone’s work here is subtle, humanist and deeply felt. I have no great discoveries to announce or witty remarks to make about this one.
Now, if only the Kaminoans were in it.
Wait, maybe they ARE.
UPDATE: This movie has the most accomplished actors in the smallest parts. John Michael Higgins shows up for one scene as a doctor, Christopher McDonald shows up as a tarmacadam salesman, and most incredibly, Brooke Smith is wordless and unrecognizable as a sobbing prisoner in the women’s prison.
Man, and Scarlett Johansen is great in this too.
The Hudsucker Proxy
To follow Seven, another movie that features a guy scraping a name off a glass door.
Perhaps Mr. Urbaniak can supply a list of other movies featuring this character and Film Forum could devote a festival to him. “The Guy Scraping The Name Off The Glass Door Fest.”
Some Coen Bros movies you like right away, some disappoint you at first, some irritate the hell out of you. But all of them have enough going on in them to warrant more than one viewing.
Intolerable Cruelty, for instance, I found slight and superficial at first. Now I love it, watched it twice in one week not long ago.
The Big Lebowski I found a definite disappointment after Fargo. Now it’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
The Hudsucker Proxy, for a long time, I found to be cold, dense and impenetrable. Starting with the title, which virtually implores an audience to stay away. Richly detailed and beautifully mounted as it is, with a career-best performance from the brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh, I still found the movie soulless and mechanical, which mystified me because I had read the script before seeing the movie, and the script was one of the best I’d ever read, overflowing with warmth, wit, great characters and sharply observed detail.
Now, I still feel like that script is still in there somewhere, but, like every other Coen Bros movie, there’s something else there that I didn’t see before.
The Coen Bros have an interesting problem. They want to tell relatively conventional stories, genre pictures even, but their approach is so unusual that it sometimes blinds the audience to their true purpose. They often will take small character beats or incidental props and blow them up to monumental importance, confusing us as to what is important in the movie.
For instance, in Intolerable Cruelty there is so much weight given to George Clooney’s teeth that one gets distracted from his character, a rather stock Hollywood type, an aging boy who needs to grow a soul. We see this character so often in Hollywood pictures (Jim Carrey in Liar, Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, Tim Allen in almost anything), of course you need a fresh take on him, but only the Coen Bros would say “what if he’s obsessed with his teeth?” (In O Brother it’s Clooney again, but this time it’s his hair.) The accents in Fargo, the rug in Lebowski, the mosquito (and the wallpaper) in Barton Fink, the hat in Millar’s Crossing, etc.
The point is, the hair and the teeth and The Dude’s rug and all that stuff is beside the point. The first time one watches a Coen Bros movie, a lot of time it seems to be a pointless comedy about people acting really weird. But it’s like they point their camera like a magnifying glass at some tiny detail in order to get a new take on an old idea.
And this philosophy extends to their whole directoral stance, and in Hudsucker threatens to capsize the whole ship. The production design, the dense, sparkling dialogue, scenes operating on many different levels at once, the complex montages and camera moves, the elaborate physical gags, and especially the hyper-intellectualized performance by Tim Robbins, all conspire to make a movie so rich on a scene-by-scene level that it’s sometimes hard to even take it all in, much less be warmed by the simple human comedy that lies at the center of the script.
But it’s in there.
Maybe for some people the idea of watching a movie you don’t like over and over until it reveals itself sounds like a chore, but for some reason that’s not the case with the Coen Bros. I can’t think of a movie of theirs I never want to see again.
On another Coen-related topic, oftentimes their slightest movies, on a second or third viewing, take on deep, even profound philosophical, religious or socialogical overtones. Obviously the ideas are in the script, but they never, ever talk about them in interviews. They always talk as if they are making the silliest, most superficial movies in the world. I wonder what, if anything, they tell their actors. I can’t believe that someone like Tim Robbins or Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges is willing to just hit their mark and do what the Coens tell them to. Or maybe they do, maybe when one works with the Coens one is happy to know that the directors know what they’re doing, and not think too much. Although I can’t think of a performance in a Coen Bros movie that looks effortless.
Anyone out there have any Coen stories?
Seven
Sorry, I just can’t call it Se7en, even though that is apparently its actual title.
I worked long and hard to put the ’90s behind me, I’m not going back there now.
First, let me say that this has one of the greatest title sequences of all time (by R/Greenberg, I believe). I think you have to go back to Return of the Pink Panther to find a better one.
The script, by Andrew Kevin Walker, could have been shot in a flashy, superficial manner to match its sensational subject matter, but David Fincher (and his great DP, Darius Khonji) shoot the hell out of this thing, giving grace, subtlety and gravitas to what might have otherwise been a standard-issue thriller.
The conceit of the plot, which imagines a killer of superhuman cruelty and deviousness, sometimes distracts one from the wonderful character work by all the cast. These stock characters (the world-weary detective on the verge of retirement, his hothead new partner, their blustering superior, the guy guy scraping the name off the office door, so forth) are re-imagined and given new life by Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, R. Lee Ermey and the rest. Their interplay is terrific, they make these guys seem real somehow.
As an added bonus, this is, to my knowledge, the only movie to feature Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box.
Another excellent transfer of a most handsomely shot movie. And a triumph of production design by Arthur Max.
And, for those playing along at the “Voucher Ankles” site, there is, of course, a “Merchant of Venice” tie-in in Seven. A lawyer is forced to cut off, yes, a pound of flesh. He (of course) dies from his self-inflicted wounds, and the killer leaves a (completely bogus) quote from “Merchant” at the crime scene. Imagine my dismay when, in 1995, having written and directed my own adaptation of Merchant, hearing Morgan Freeman (himself a great Shakespearean actor) recite this bit of invented poesy and then intone “Merchant of Venice.”
Come to think of it, I’d love to see Freeman play Antonio some time. Now there’s some subtext.
Return of the Jedi
Some observations:
1. The Empire is back. With a new, formidable weapon. A weapon so powerful that it will finally crush the rebellion and make the Empire the reigning power for a thousand years.
This new weapon is —
THE DEATH STAR.
And THIS time — it’s UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
NOTHING will penetrate the defenses of this awesome, under-construction weapon.
Except, perhaps, a fleet of rebel fighters.
2. Jabba the Hutt: why doesn’t he wipe his chin? It’s disgusting.
I mean, apparently he NEVER wipes it. Because the spittle on his chin is in multiple layears, and it’s caked dry. He’s a wealthy slug, he’s got dozens of employees, flunkies and hangers-on. Why isn’t it someone’s job to wipe his chin? If it’s spilling down onto his chest, obviously it’s a chronic problem.
I understand he doesn’t need clothes, that’s fine. He’s a slug, he would find them constricting. And I understand that constant secretion of mucus comes part-and-parcel with being a giant slug. But then why would he allow it to dry and cake on his non-slimy skin? For that matter, why would a giant slug choose to live on a desert planet? Why doesn’t the giant slug do a property swap with Yoda? Jabba would have done very well on Dagobah and Yoda could have added years to his life in the dry heat of Tatooine. But no, the giant slug lives on a desert planet in a palace filled with stairs and narrow hallways far too small to accommodate his bulk. No wonder he spends all his time in his lair, he’s outgrown his hallway. How unhappy he must be.
3. How exactly does Leia manage to strangle a giant slug to death? He has a trachea? Lungs? Why not just dump a vat of salt onto him?
4. My favorite moment in the movie: Lando Calrissian enters Jabba’s lair and adjusts his mask. His eyes are already plainly visible, so obviously he can see, but he adjusts his mask, apparently so that his mustache can see.
5. There’s a scene between Vader and Sidious that goes something like this:
VADER: Those rebels that landed on Endor? My son is among them.
SIDIOUS: Really? How do you know?
VADER: I’ve felt his presence.
SIDIOUS: Really? That’s weird, I haven’t, and I’m ten times more psychic than you are. Oh well, what do you want to do about it?
VADER: Let me go find him.
SIDIOUS: No, I’ve got a better I idea. You stay put and let him come to you.
VADER: You think he’ll do that?
SIDIOUS: Yes. I have forseen it.
Now, I know ROTJ is a sitting duck, and I love these movies as much as anyone, but Huh? Sidious didn’t know Luke was there, but he has already forseen what Luke would do after he got there?
My guess is that there was another half-page of dialogue that got cut.
VADER: You — what — what do you mean?
SIDIOUS: I have FORSEEN it.
VADER: But — a minute ago —
SIDIOUS: Young Skywalker will seek you out and together we will DESTROY him.
VADER: But —
SIDIOUS: I have SPOKEN.
VADER: Well — okay —
SIDIOUS: You doubt my word?
VADER: I — well, your excellency, look, I know you’re the boss and all, but — I just, I gotta say, sometimes I think you’re just fucking with my head.
6. Now, as you all know, in the DVD edition os ROTJ, at the end of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) Darth Vader dies and Luke pries off his helmet, and there’s kindly old Humpty Du — er, Anakin Skywalker, and he and Luke have a moving little scene. Then, later, the teddy bears set Darth Vader’s body on fire and Luke looks over and hey, there’s Alec Guiness and — and — Hayden Christensen.
This isn’t a complaint against Mr. Christensen. He’s proven himself to be an actor of depth and range elsewhere and I’d work with him in a heartbeat. What I don’t understand is, how on earth does Old Anakin Skywalker suddenly get turned into Young Anakin Skywalker for the end of ROTJ? Oh, I suppose one could say that Hayden is the image of Anakin before he turned into Darth Vader, but, but, but —
Okay, I know I shouldn’t even spend my time worrying about this. But one day soon, I’ll be showing these movies I love to my children. And I will be the first to say that I prefer the DVD editions to the versions shown in theaters back in the day. I don’t miss the clunky special effects, the added sequences don’t bother me (well, one of them does) and the transfers are all jaw-droppingly beautiful.
But listen. When I show these movies to my kids, I will, obviously, show them Star Wars (that is, ANH) first. Not because it was the first one made, but because if a child is going to connect to these movies, they’re going to connect to the swift, involving, swashbuckling Episode 4, not the clunky, dense, confusing Episode 1. Besides which, it’s going to be a long time before they’re old enough to watch Revenge of the Sith.
So they’ll watch ANH, then they’ll watch TESB, then they’ll watch ROTJ, and at the end of ROTJ, right when they’re supposed to be learning what this whole thing all means, they’re going to see a funeral for Darth Vader, and Luke looking over and seeing ghosts of Good Old Obi-Wan Kenobi, who turns and smiles at — some guy with long hair. Oh, I get it, everything’s okay because Obi-Wan’s not really dead and in the afterlife he’s reunited with, with some guy with long hair. Who is that? We’ve never seen him before. What was wrong with the scene before? Why does Obi-Wan get to come back as himself, but Anakin only appears as his young self? Why doesn’t Ewan McGregor appear next to Hayden Christensen? Why does Obi-Wan get stuck spending eternity as a seventy-year-old, but Anakin is eighteen forever?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Quite a step up from The Money Pit, Roger Rabbit is a masterpiece of theme.
It asks one question: what if toons existed in our world? And every scene revolves around this question, with expertly rendered results.
This is what I expect from an eighties Spielberg production: a fountain of imagination and a generosity of spirit that makes other movies seem dull and uninpired in comparison.
The plot, no one here need be reminded, is a direct lift from Chinatown. But look what happens when you change one plot point. Take out the San Fernando Valley, put in Toontown, and you’ve got a whole different movie.
The special effects, while of their time, are so intricately interwoven with the live action you have no trouble believing any of it. And yet somehow, somehow they don’t call attention to themselves. The real-life props are chosen to be perfectly ordinary, keeping the tension between toon and real constant, so that when we get to Toontown (surely one of the most surreal and disorienting sequences in film history) the difference is completely jarring.
Walking the line is Christopher Lloyd, always and still one of the great actors of our day.
And just think! Bob Hoskins used to be a movie star!
Studio Executive: We need a million-dollar peg to hang this movie on. Get me Bob Hoskins!
D-Girl: But boss! He’s a gold-plated movie star! And he’ll only work with Joanna Cassidy!
SE: Do whatever it takes, but GET ME HOSKINS!
And you know, I went looking for this in the Family section of my local video store, and it wasn’t there. I wondered why. And my goodness, how adult this movie is! Toons swear like sailors, meet violent deaths, smoke and drink and have sex.
And then I remembered: the cartoons that Spielberg and Zemeckis are saluting were not always intended for a juvenile audience, they were simply popular entertainments. And when this movie came out, there was no Cartoon Network, these things weren’t being broadcast 24 hours a day, there was barely even a home-video market. The movie was intended to prod the memories of an audience old enough to remember seeing those characters on a movie screen.
And my goodness, when the wall at the end of the picture comes down (oops, spoiler alert) and all those characters come spilling out, it’s almost too much for an animation fan to take.
Can anyone imagine any filmmaker today, even someone with the power of Spielberg, managing to get all those characters into one movie together? The liscensing battles alone would cripple the production, now that all of those characters are worth millions to the studios that own them.
If Mr. R. Sikoryak is out there, can you tell me why Mel Blanc is credited for the voice of Tweety Bird, Bugs Bunny, etc, but someone else is credited for Yosemite Sam?
The Money Pit
Yes, it’s Richard Benjamin’s 1986 comedy, starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long.
And look at this supporting cast: Josh Mostel, Joe Mantegna, Philip Bosco, Maureen Stapleton, Yakov Smirnoff, Mary Louise Wilson, Mike Starr (much younger and lighter), Jake Steinfeld (before he became known only as “Body By Jake”), Frankie Faison and, somewhere in there, invisible, Michael Jeter (that’s Mr. Noodles’ brother Mr. Noodles, for those of you who are preschoolers).
But most strikingly, Alexander Godunov as Tom Hanks’s romantic foil.
Yes, Tom Hanks and Alexander Godunov fight over Shelley Long. Now that’s ’80s.
Alexander Godunov: star of the Bolshoi, when he retired he came to Hollywood and, like his friend Barishnakov, decided, what the heck, to become a movie star. Why not?
He had a near-wordless part in Peter Weir’s Witness as, yes, Harrison Ford’s romantic foil. Alexander Godunov and Harrison Ford fight over Kelly McGillis. If only they knew.
For The Money Pit, Godunov decided “Well, I’ve proven that my image actually registers on film. Why not try comedy?” And you know, he really gets it. He really understands that comedy means bugging your eyes and exaggerating your line readings.
Or maybe he was directed to do those things. Because that’s what everyone in the movie does. Only problem is that Godunov does it while also trying to wrap fizzy lingo-centric comedy lines around his thick Russian accent.
What’s the problem? Russians are funny people. Why can’t they have him say things a Russian might say?
He made one more Hollywood movie, 1988’s classic Die Hard, where he menaces Bruce Willis, back to almost wordlessness.
By 1995, he was dead from acute alcohol syndrome.
A lot of things don’t work in this movie. There’s some over-produced physical comedy of the 1941 variety, which kind of comes out of nowhere. There’s some real comedy about the hazards that beset any couple trying to fix up an old house, which promises development but ends up toothless, and then, in act III, a romantic storm kind of whips up out of nowhere. Scene by scene the movie is perfectly enjoyable. Put all together, it doesn’t really add up.
The screenplay is from David Giler, who earlier wrote the searing, violent Walter Hill picture Southern Comfort and later wrote James Cameron’s Aliens.
Well, that’s the life of the screenwriter.
This souffle was shot by none other than Gordon Willis, certainly the greatest DP of his generation. That might explain the occasional artsiness of the compositions. Willis worked lighter than this (his work on Woody Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is some of the best of his career), but it doesn’t come to much this time around.
Attack of the Clones
For no particular reason, I threw on Attack of the Clones tonight.
Unsurprisingly, the best transfer to DVD of any movie I’ve seen, with the exception of, perhaps, Finding Nemo (which was, of course, created entirely on computers and not in need of transfer in the traditional sense.
For Clones, the same joys and disappointments as before. You could name them as well as I could.
But I found myself thinking about the tall, skinny aliens from the Camino system (Caminans?). They have a whole planet, covered in water and dotted with clone factories. “Cloners, these people are” says the crusty cook from the ’50s diner to Obi-Wan.
Well, I’ve never heard of a whole planet’s population identified by their profession, and it stuck out weird. Really, is the entire population of Camino involved in the production of clones? Are there no truck drivers, no bricklayers, no doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers on Camino, except those connected to the cloning industry?
It’s sort of like someone saying “Los Angeles, filmmakers those people are.” I mean sure, LA is a company town, but I often go weeks on end without running into a single filmmaker. I meet housewives and grocery clerks and doctors and accountants and locksmiths and librarians and swim coaches and short-order cooks and all kinds of things. But no, apparently on Camino all they do is make clones.
But wait: in all the Camino scenes, we meet a grand total of — well, let’s see — two Caminans (Caminists? Camisoles?). One is a female greeter of some sort and the other is identified as the Prime Minister. Now, Prime Minister implies that there are quite a few Caminans running around, but where are they? And where are their belongings? The rooms we enter into are completely uncluttered and sparkling clean. No piles of magazines or half-eaten doughnuts sitting around. I know that we never get inside the living quarters of a genuine Caminan, but they must eat and sleep somewhere, something. They have clothes, which they must keep somewhere, but what do they eat? Fish? Plankton? Where do they go to the bathroom? And where are they all?
Who built those factories? It must have been contract work from another planet, because the only things the Caminans do is clone. Cloners, those people are.
And then it struck me: maybe the female greeter and the Prime Minister are the only two Caminans on the planet. Maybe that’s all there are, and all the cloning and clone-training is done by machines.
But wait — if there are only two Caminans on the planet, why is one Prime Minister?
And suddenly the whole movie turned into some sick charade. There are two creatures on a planet, and they’re surrounded by these artificial people that they make, and there are so many of them that they start to think that they are actually the leaders of some great society, instead of just a couple of cloners running an automated factory. And in the extremity of their isolation and loneliness, they start to refer to each other as Prime Minister and, who knows, Vice-Prime-Minister or something.
Maybe they trade off from week to week, calling each other Prime Minister.
They’re smart, that’s for sure. They built those factories and they figured out how to clone hundreds of thousands of clones, so they must be pretty sharp. But no one visits, no one “drops by,” even the Jedi who ordered the clones never stopped back to check their progress. Little do they know their planet has been erased from the Archives on Coruscant.
I can imagine the two of them sitting around wondering what happened to tourism on Camino.
MALE CAMINAN: “We put up the billboards, we sent out the emails, how come no one comes to rainy, water-covered, windswept clone-factory-town Camino?”
FEMALE CAMINAN: “People just aren’t interested in cloning any more. Hey, can I be queen next week?”