The Screengrab : the untouchables

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990, Brian De Palma)

Paul Clark — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the prestige projects of the 1990 awards season, few had more potential than The Bonfire of the Vanities. To begin with, it was based on Tom Wolfe’s first fiction book, which had been widely read in serialized form in Rolling Stone before becoming a bestseller upon its publication as a novel. The director was Brian De Palma, who made his reputation with a series of kinky, Hitchcock-inspired thrillers during the seventies before branching out into more mainstream fare such as Scarface, The Untouchables and Casualties of War. With a wildly popular novel and an A-list director, Warner Bros. had visions of Oscars dancing in their heads, and they consequently filled the cast with big names, from recent Oscar nominees Tom Hanks, Melanie Griffith, and Morgan Freeman to newly anointed action superstar Bruce Willis, and backed them with plenty of first-rate character actors.

Ideally, The Bonfire of the Vanities should have been one of the biggest movie events of 1990. But then, if it had been, I would be writing about it in my Yesterday’s Hits column instead of When Good Directors Go Bad. As it stands, the big-screen adaptation remains one of the most notorious fiascos in Hollywood history, earning back a mere $15 million of its then-extravagant $50 million budget, and receiving mostly savage reviews. As a De Palma fan of long standing- I’m the guy who liked The Black Dahlia, after all- I’d like to say that the film was merely misunderstood, but even I have to admit that it’s a failure.

Part of the problem is the casting of the principal roles, from the top on down. If you were casting the role of an ambitious commodities trader and self-anointed “Master of the Universe”, whose name would come to mind? Michael Douglas? Tom Cruise, perhaps? But after Warner Bros. deemed the character too unsympathetic on the page, they decided to cast Tom Hanks in the role, which is sort of like casting Jimmy Stewart as Gordon Gekko. Also problematic was the casting of Willis. The character of journalist Peter Fallow was written as a dissolute Brit (the role was originally offered to John Cleese), but Willis ended up being cast for marquee value, and gave one of his laziest performances, smirking his way through the role and pissing off most of the people involved with the production with his ego.

Worst of all is Griffith. During the eighties, Griffith’s dumb-blonde persona proved to be surprisingly adaptable to a number of filmmakers’ visions, from the tart-with-a-heart of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild to the streetwise porn star of De Palma’s own Body Double. However, the role of Maria Ruskin was far beyond her limited talent. On the page, Maria may be the trickiest character in the novel, a wily manipulator whose ditzy façade hides a pitch-black heart. But Griffith can only manage the ditzy part, so when the character begins to reveal her shameless nature after Sherman’s life begins to go down the tubes we never believe it. The two halves of her personality- sexy and cunning- never mesh convincingly, so rather than lacing her manipulations with an erotic charge, her dark side makes the sexy stuff creepy, which surely wasn’t what the film was aiming for.

But while the casting issues might have been out of De Palma’s hands, he’s far from blameless. Admittedly, Wolfe’s novel is something of a tough nut to crack, simultaneously a cross-section of New York City life, a morality tale, and a savage takedown of the craven greed and ambition that fueled the eighties. However, it fails on all three counts. Much of its power as a snapshot of the Big Apple’s social strata is lost because its characters are sketchy and one-dimensional, a problem that might have been partially alleviated by spot-on casting, but not entirely. Likewise, the film places its morality tale aspects on the back burner for most of its running time, only to have judge/voice of reason Morgan Freeman bust out an extended monologue about decency in the film’s final five minutes, at which point it comes off as a tacked-on moral rather than a natural outgrowth of the story.

This leaves only the exposé aspect of the story. In nearly 700 pages, Wolfe was able to lay bare the motivations of nearly all of the major players in the story, from Sherman, Maria and Peter, to the lawyers, politicians and community leaders who opportunistically seized upon his case for their own personal gain. Without the time to do this onscreen, De Palma instead focuses on the circus (political and media-driven) that ensues. But while a more assured comic filmmaker might have been able to spin even an abbreviated Bonfire into a bitter little pill (imagine what an Ace in the Hole-era Billy Wilder might have done with this material), De Palma brings almost nothing to the material aside from the liberal use of unflattering wide-angle close-ups to underline the grotesqueness of the characters. Sure, there are a handful of cool camera tricks- especially the nearly five-minute-long opening Steadican shot- but for the most part they don’t really work in the context of the story, and mostly just call attention to themselves. I hate to use a criticism that De Palma’s detractors are wont to levy at him, but in this case, they’re right.

In the end, the biggest failing of The Bonfire of the Vanities is one of tone. The scathing satire of the original novel was replaced by a more hamfisted style that was both broad and shrill. A few of the jabs hit (I love how Andre Gregory’s poet is introduced: “he’s on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. He has AIDS.”), but most of the time they whiff. Scenes like the one where Maria’s cuckold husband (Alan King) suddenly dies in mid-conversation or the famous “crumbs” monologue by Sherman’s wife might have worked on the page, but they flounder and die onscreen, the former because it’s not inherently funny to see a minor character kick the bucket, the latter because Kim Cattrall plays the character as such a high-strung harpy that it’s hard to focus on anything she says.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Ebert was right when he wrote that The Bonfire of the Vanities might be enjoyable to those who are unfamiliar with the book. But I wouldn’t bet on it. De Palma and the studio took a powerful and lacerating story and adapted it in the most pedestrian way possible, and replaced the prickly citizens of Wolfe’s New York City with characters who are both cartoonish and, worse, uninteresting. If anything good came out of my watching Bonfire again, it’s that I’ve been inspired to re-read the book, to immerse myself in Wolfe’s language and marvel at the world he created. By now, it’s become a cliché that people are generally better off reading the book, but in this case that’s the only way to go.

DVD Digest for May 20, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: a crush of Blu-Rays from Paramount overwhelms the new crop of regular DVD releases, which is good news for you Blu-Ray fans, not so much for the rest of us. Time to trade up, I guess…

In the middle of the Format Wars of 2008, Paramount’s home video division made the decision to switch their loyalty to HD-DVD, thereby stopping all production on upcoming Blu-Ray releases and pulling current ones from the market. But now that HD-DVD has gone all Betamax on us, Paramount has decided to dump all of their previously-released Blu-Rays back into stores, along with some new releases. Check out this list of new Paramount Blu-Rays, in alphabetical order: Aeon Flux, Babel, Bee Movie, Black Snake Moan, Blades of Glory, Coming to America, Disturbia, Dreamgirls, Face/Off (Special Edition), Flags of Our Fathers, Four Brothers, Mission: Impossible III, Next, Shooter, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Sleepy Hollow, Trading Places, The Untouchables, The Warriors, We Were Soldiers, and World Trade Center. I’m sure most of you can find at least a handful of titles in there that strike your fancy. And if not, you’ll just have to content yourself in the fact that Criterion Blu-Rays are only five months away.

Meanwhile, in non-Blu-Ray news, this week brings the release of the latest in George A. Romero’s Dead saga, Diary of the Dead (Weinstein), Nicolas Cage in National Treasure: Book of Secrets (Buena Vista, available in single-disc, double-disc, and Blu-Ray), the Happy Madison production Strange Wilderness (Paramount), and the anime epic Vexille (FUNimation Entertainment).

A handful of classics hit the market this week as well, my favorite being The Muppet Show Season 3 (Buena Vista), a season that included such memorable guests as Danny Kaye, Gilda Radner, Sylvester Stallone, Alice Cooper, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and Harry Belafonte. Also of note is James Stewart: The Western Collection (Universal), featuring new DVD editions of Destry Rides Again, Winchester ’73, Bend of the River, The Far Country, The Night Passage, and The Rare Breed. And MGM releases three comedies from their vaults- If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium, The Night They Raided Minsky’s, and What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?- no doubt to use their long-ass titles in an attempt to piggyback on the inevitable boffo box-office of this weekend’s similarly verbosely-titled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Finally, a handful of non-Paramount Blu-Rays hit stores this week: Anger Management and V for Vendetta. So that's cool, I guess.

The 12 Greatest Movies Based on TV Shows, Part I

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975)

For a movie that’s made so many people laugh for over 30 years, the people who made Monty Python and the Holy Grail didn’t have a very good time. The first big-screen effort from arguably the greatest sketch comedy group of all time was plagued with problems: they were frequently denied access to filming locations they thought they’d secured; Graham Chapman, playing the part of King Arthur, was plagued with psychological and physical problems as a result of his recovery from alcoholism; the entire production was plagued with budgetary problems and probably wouldn’t even have been made if members of Pink Floyd (huge fans of the Monty Python’s Flying Circus TV show) hadn’t have stepped in and pumped money into the film; the troupe was working on an incredibly strict filming deadline and nerves were frayed to the breaking point trying to get the production in on time; and much of the filming was done in locations that left the cast and crew cold, wet, and miserable much of the time, when they weren’t almost dying from falling off of a cliff. And in the end, what did they have to show for it? Nothing more than the purest distillation possible of their absurdist, kitchen-sink comic sensibilities. Decades of abuse at the hands of geeks who didn’t know when to leave well enough alone still haven’t managed to sink Monty Python and the Holy Grail or its hard-earned reputation as one of the funniest movies ever made. And if filming it was fraught with peril, that just means that it had even more in common with the original TV show: Monty Python’s Flying Circus faced censorship battles, ratings problems, drug and alcohol abuse from a cast who were often at each other’s throats, a network that completely failed to understand the show and scheduled it in the most ham-handed way possible, and, of course, a miniscule budget and a ruthless production timeline. So it’s no surprise that Holy Grail so effectively captures the postmodern comic brilliance of Flying Circus; they’d all been there before.

THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

For all the hype that went into the release of the big-screen version of Our Favorite Family, you’d think something exceptionally earth-shaking was going to happen. But really, what was the big deal? It wasn’t the revival of a beloved but long-lost franchise; The Simpsons is still on the air and is likely to remain so until the apocalypse. It didn’t promise any major changes in continuity, since The Simpsons doesn’t have any. (They did kill off at least one supporting character, but it’s not like the entire future of the series hinged on the actions of Dr. Nick Riviera.) And with the exception of a hilarious “goddamn” from Marge and a brief glimpse at Bart’s hand-drawn doodle, it didn’t even take much advantage of the creative free space of a theatrical release. All it did was deliver, essentially, a triple-length episode of The Simpsons. But that’s pretty much what the show’s fans wanted, and the producers, writers and directors gave them an extremely high-quality triple-length episode for their money. The animation is terrific, and one of the few ways in which the filmmakers do take advantage of the big screen is in a gorgeous color palate and some cinematic storytelling that uses up every inch of the space allotted. The writing is top-notch, with tons of funny lines and despite a bit of a sag near the end, it’s one of the tightest comedies in recent memory; while the show’s latter seasons aren’t as dismal as some embittered fans would have you believe, measured against the product on TV, The Simpsons Movie is a lot funnier, more controlled, and better at what people value in the show. The gimmicky guest stars are (literally) disposed of early on, leaving Albert Brooks – a veteran of the series who’s provided some of its most memorable moments – to nearly steal the show from then on. Sure, it’s just a long episode of the show, but that’s good enough for me.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN (1982)

The 1979 Star Trek--The Motion Picture was many years' worth of stops and starts in coming, and remains a very expensive project that no one involved with looks back on proudly. But despite its being regarded as a disappointment, it did make enough money that Paramount decided to burn off whatever good will remained among fans of the TV series by making a much less pricey sequel for the summer trade. It was actually the sequel that rejuvenated interest in the property and launched the long-running movie franchise. The writer-director Nicholas Meyer, who had previously demonstrated a flair for playing with other people's characters in his Sherlock Holmes novel and screenplay The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was brought in late and given a short window in which to prepare a shooting script, and managed to do it by cobbling together the best elements of the many already-discarded attempts by other writers—including the idea of a sequel to the old TV episode "Space Seed" with Ricardo Montalban reprising his role as the regal, megalomaniac villain Khan. He also had the masterstroke of supplying Leonard Nimoy with a gorgeous death scene as Mr. Spock, which was reportedly a key factor in persuading Nimoy to go back on his vow to never put his ears back on after the first movie. The results were greeted with rapturous gratitude by long-time fans and non-Trekkers alike despite attempts to sabotage the release by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, whose displeasure with something that someone wanted to do with his baby was almost infallible proof that it must be a step in the right direction.

SOUTH PARK: BIGGER, LONGER & UNCUT (1999)

Most "movies" spun off from still-current, ongoing TV series are just stretched-out TV episodes, sometimes with pricier special effects or guest stars. (The last straw may have been the over-hyped 1998 X-Files movie, which tarted up a subpar script from the series' "conspiracy" with a fireball explosion, a Martin Landau cameo, and the threat of the two leads kissing, then ended with a series-impacting plot twist designed to make those smart enough to have stayed at home feel left out when the fall TV season began.) The South Park movie, a genuine act of pop outrage with its mock-Disney-cartoon-musical score (written by series creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker and composer Marc Shaiman, who later brought Hairspray to Broadway) and its Colorforms-meets-Photoshop images of Saddam Hussein and a weirdly sympathetic Satan getting it on, is the rare example of someone bringing their hot, pre-sold property to the big screen and seeing it as a reason to step up their game. At a time when movies are getting smaller and smaller and moving more and more to TV and computer screens and even cell phones, Parker and Stone felt an old-fashioned obligation to enlarge their vision for the theater version. What's more, their discovery of just how much they could do with their little freak hit informed and improved the subsequent seasons of the TV version, now on its twelfth season and going strong. In fact, it was with the movie that South Park made its real transition from giggly fad to one of the cornerstones of our civilization.

MIAMI VICE (2006)

The '80s TV show co-created by Michael Mann and Anthony Yerkovich was very much a product of its time, so much so that Manhunter, the 1986 movie that Mann made while the show was still on the air, looks a lot more like the movie called Miami Vice that he made twenty years later. The movie doesn't have the high-contrast visual scheme or the pastel threads or the distracting celebrity cameos of the series; it does have the tropical setting and some character names in common with the series, but what it mainly has is the hopeless-romantic atmosphere and the coiled-spring bursts of action that the show reached for in its proudest moments, executed by a gifted director who had had a couple of decades to work on his moves. The movie, which required significant rewriting to satisfy the whims of one of its stars, Jamie Foxx, has been released in a "director's cut" DVD version, and neither it nor the theatrical release can be said to be free of lulls or to consistently make a world of sense. But when it's at its most intoxicating--especially when Gong Li points her sad headlights at the camera as the cinematographer Dion Beebe is adjusting the light on the horizon just so while God, looking over his shoulder, takes notes--it can get you higher than all the coke in Colombia.

- Leonard Pierce, Phil Nugent

READ PART II

Trailer Review: The Spirit

Paul Clark — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

With all the comic book movies coming out in the next few months you'd think it would be too early to start looking ahead to 2009's offerings. However, you would be wrong. Not being a reader of comics, I can't attest to how closely Frank Miller captures the style of Will Eisner's original vision. However, it does look like Miller, in his first solo directorial effort, is working in a similar style to his own Sin City. But what really sticks out is how relatively lighthearted (especially from a visual standpoint) this teaser feels compared to Sin City. Also, maybe it's just the DePalma fanboy in me talking, but I love the use of Ennio Morricone's theme from The Untouchables here, complementing its retro-stylish sense of fun. The film's still a long way off- there's sure to be at least one full-length trailer to spotlight the movie's hot female supporting cast (Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Paz Vega et al)- but I'm certainly curious now.

No, But I've Read the Movie: THE BLACK DAHLIA

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:30:00 GMT

Although much more commercially successful, the "L.A. Quartet" novels by the disturbed but fascinating noir novelist James Ellroy — consisting of The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential and White Jazz — didn't represent the great artistic leap forward that his "Underworld U.S.A." trilogy (American Tabloid, The Cold Six Thousand and the upcoming Blood's a Rover) did. The latter books were the ones that really lifted Ellroy from skilled genre specialist to ambitious and near-brilliant American novelist, representing both his own development as a writer and his desire to see the noir novel shed its genre restrictions and take its place amongst great literature. Even if one argues that White Jazz is the real transition — and many people have, convincingly — The Black Dahlia is a rough piece of work, somewhat formless and definitely formulaic in a way that his later books would avoid. While it features many of the same themes of sexual obsession and moral ambiguity that would mark his later work, it remained somewhat inextricably bound in the bad parts of pulp and the tendency to police-prodedural tropes. That said, the "L.A. Quartet" books are far more straightforward narratives, with less emphasis on the black depths of psychology and more to carry the narrative than chopped-up internal monologues. No one has yet attempted to film any of the "Underworld U.S.A.", but if it ever happens, the results will likely be a less successful film than L.A. Confidential; the qualities that make it a lesser novel — overemphasis on plot, weaker internal monologue, and a grounding in the archetypical qualities of film noir — are the same ones that made it a better film. The Black Dahlia, for all its faults, is an eminently more filmable book than The Cold Six Thousand. Or so you might have thought until Brian De Palma showed up in 2006 and proved you wrong, wrong, wrong by burping out this mishandled disaster of an adaptation. WHAT IT HAD: Good intentions, and not much else. It's not as if De Palma doesn't know how to handle film noir — he's proven on many occasions that he's adept at the genre, and had illustrated his affinity as recently as his previous movie (2002's underrated Femme Fatale). Even though he wasn't able to hold his post-modernist trickster tendencies in check, The Black Dahlia could have worked as simultaneous tribute to and subversion of classic noir, the only possible way to read the way it came out that makes any sense, if he'd assembled a better cast, better script, and. . . well, different director. Mark Isham provides some nice, moody music for the soundtrack, and, as one might expect from the man who brought you The Untouchables, it's a gorgeous-looking film with some great Vilmos Szigmond cinematography.

WHAT IT LACKED: Where to begin? A coherent vision, a decent script, a solid creative interpretation of the source material, a consistent point of view, and most of all, a cast worthy of the material. Screenwriter Josh Friedman had worked on the script for years, but it's still a mess, and clearly not to his strengths, which lie mostly in sci-fi genre work. It had originally been optioned to David Fincher, who, given De Palma's clear boredom and frustration with the project, may have been a much better choice to tackle the project. And the cast is pretty much an absolute disaster: Josh Hartnett completely lacks either charisma or weight, Scarlett Johansson is in way over her head, Aaron Eckhart is a non-entity, Hilary Swank looks like she should be in a completely different movie, and Mia Kirshner isn't even remotely up to the task of playing the title role, especially given that it's much expanded from the novel.

DID IT SUCCEED?: No way. Brian De Palma is already one of the most divisive directors around, with legions of haters for every dozen fans he's picked up over the years, but even his staunchest defenders — I'm one — couldn't get behind The Black Dahlia. The critical consensus on the release of the long-awaited film was that it was a megaton bomb, and for once, the accepted wisdom is pretty much right on the money. A good movie could have been made from James Ellroy's novel, but this sure as hell isn't it. The novel is a formative effort from Ellroy, and while L.A. Confidential is still superior to the movie, so too is The Black Dahlia for entirely different reasons. With White Jazz slated to hit the big screen next year directed by Joe Carnahan — who most recently brought us the abysmal Smokin' Aces — Ellroy's luck with film adaptations of his work will likely continue circling the drain.