The Screengrab : when good directors go bad

When Good Directors Go Bad: A Life Less Ordinary (1997, Danny Boyle)

Paul Clark — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since its premiere on the fall festival circuit, Danny Boyle’s new film Slumdog Millionaire has ridden a wave of ecstatic buzz, one which many believe the film will ride to numerous Oscar nominations. With his crowd-pleasing arthouse hit, it seems that Boyle has finally arrived for real in Hollywood, a full dozen years after his breakthrough films, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. However, it wasn’t supposed to take this long. In the wake of Trainspotting’s international success, Boyle was tapped by Fox to bring his directorial sensibility to America with his subsequent project A Life Less Ordinary, which paired Boyle’s favored leading man Ewan McGregor with hot Hollywood starlet Cameron Diaz. Life was the director’s take on the romantic comedy, and Boyle’s goal was to infuse the warm fuzzy genre with a liberal amount of mid-nineties post-Tarantino edge while simultaneously indulging the audience’s romantic urges.

Under the right circumstances, A Life Less Ordinary might have been a zeitgeist-ready hit, particularly at the twentysomethings at whom it was aimed. However, it wasn’t to be. What’s more, the disappointing box office returns for the film were, for once, a reflection of its quality. It’s not uncommon for a filmmaker to blame his intended audience for not “getting” the movie when it flops, but if the movie in question isn’t very good, the filmmaker doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on.

Part of the problem was that the convoluted storyline, in which so much business is happening at once that very little actually makes an impact. The setup: God, disturbed by the lack of love in the world, begins dispatching angels to Earth to bring people together. Two of the angels, O’Reilly (Holly Hunter) and Jackson (Delroy Lindo) are assigned to the case of Robert (McGregor), a down-and-out wannabe writer, and Celine (Diaz), a bitchy heiress. And how do they meet, you ask? Why, when Robert storms into Celine’s father’s (Ian Holm) office and somehow ends up kidnapping her. How else were they supposed to meet? From there, it’s off to the races, as Robert finds himself an inept kidnapper, Celine decides to help him in order to get a cut of the ransom for herself, and the heavenly duo (masquerading as bounty hunters) relentlessly pursue the mismatched couple. With all this going on, it’s a wonder they ever find time to fall in love, then out of love, then finally back in love again, precisely on cue.

But then, most romantic comedies depend on contrivances, just as long as we’re rooting for the romantic leads to turn out OK. However, in order for this to happen we’d actually have to care about them, and these two hardly seem to be worth the effort it takes to bring them together. McGregor is fairly likable as Robert, a pretty nice guy who is easily overwhelmed and somewhat over-eager to apologize for himself. However, Diaz is another matter entirely. On the page, Celine is a tricky character- a rich girl who lets herself be kidnapped in order to escape her life. But while the role might have worked if Diaz had made her a somewhat daffy thrill seeker, instead she plays Celine as a harpy and a nag for most of the movie, until the plot suddenly demands that she fall in love with Robert. As the movie progresses, we’re rooting for Robert all right- rooting for him to get as far away from her as possible.

With a romantic vacuum at its center, the story becomes little more than a parade of quirky characters and situations, flailing about onscreen in search of a reason to exist. Where to begin? There’s a dentist (Stanley Tucci) who Celine shoots in the frontal lobe while playing William Tell, only to return to work mere days later. There’s also the crazy backwoodsman (Maury Chaykin) who encounters Robert and Celine shortly after the kidnapping, and his even crazier friend who barks instead of speaking. And then there’s the ever-dogged O’Reilly and Jackson forever in pursuit, with O’Reilly brandishing a machine gun and hanging off the hood of Robert and Celine’s car- not at the same time, of course. How is all this supposed to make the central duo fall in love? Your guess is as good as mine.

Late in the film, after their funds have been depleted, Robert and Celine decide to rob a bank. When Celine holds up a teller, she asks to make a withdrawal, to which Robert responds, “I thought we agreed there’d be no clichés.” Boyle and writer John Hodge seemed to have used this line as their philosophy when making A Life Less Ordinary. However, it’s not enough to avoid clichés- one must replace them with other, more interesting ideas, and this is the failure of the film. A Life Less Ordinary is a film that tries to liven up its genre, but it never manages to do so, primarily because it fails to be romantic or funny. When Robert and Celine end up together, it feels not so much like a logical conclusion to this story as a cue for the lights to go up and the credits to roll. I suppose A Life Less Ordinary isn’t exactly ordinary, but it’s pretty lifeless.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Waterloo (1970, Sergei Bondarchuk)

Paul Clark — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Of all the great cinematic epics, none is bigger than Sergei Bondarchuk's War and Peace. Simply put, everything about the film is massive- its budget (upwards of $100 million in 1960s dollars), its production schedule (nearly five years), its cast (tens of thousands of Red Army soldiers were used as extras in the battle sequences), even its running time of nearly eight hours. Yet War and Peace would merely be a footnote in movie history if its largesse was its only notable quality. Reviews of the day praised it not only for its epic scope and impeccable production values but also for its emotional sensitivity and human drama. Even today, War and Peace remains a masterpiece of its kind, and the rare adaptation of a great novel that does justice to its classic source material. For this not insignificant miracle, credit should be given not only to the Soviet film industry but also to Bondarchuk's sure-footed direction.

After the international acclaim for War and Peace, Bondarchuk decided to make a film about The Battle of Waterloo. For most filmmakers, this would have seemed a hugely ambitious project, but compared to War and Peace, a seemingly modest one for Bondarchuk. In order to bring the project to the screen, Bondarchuk received financial backing from Italian super-producer Dino De Laurentiis, and together they enlisted several well-known actors, led by Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as the Duke of Wellington. In addition, the film's $25 million budget afforded Bondarchuk the chance to re-create the battle on the same scale as the wartime sequences in War and Peace. But despite these factors, Waterloo was a disappointment both with critics and with audiences, garnering mostly middling reviews and making back less than one-fifth of its original budget, and sending its once-hot director back to the USSR for the rest of his career.

After Waterloo flopped big-time at the box office, De Laurentiis chalked its failure up to the lack of big-money stars in the cast. But while it's tempting to wonder what sort of Napoleon could be played by De Laurentiis' first choice Richard Burton, I'd say that Steiger did just fine with the role. This is especially true in the character's more grandiose moments- Steiger was always a magnificent ham, and Napoleon gave him a chance to cut loose in some entertaining ways that livened up the film. And for his part, Plummer did a capable job as the arrogant upper-class general Wellington.

Likewise, I'd say the battle sequences are as spectacular as advertised. As in War and Peace, the sight of thousands upon thousands of actual humans on the battlefield is still impressive, and still impossible to duplicate with CGI. In order for the sheer magnitude to achieve its intended effect, Bondarchuk films most of the battle in long shots, the better to comprehend the narrative of the battle itself. I also liked Bondarchuk's use of "God's eye" shots at several times in the battle, especially when the English Army forms itself into tight squares to fight off the advancing French cavalry. Had Bondarchuk tried to make a tactics-heavy recreation of the battle a la Cy Endfield's Zulu, Waterloo might have been a classic.

As it stands, the film is a missed opportunity, primarily because he and screenwriter H.A.L. Craig simply can't find a way to successfully integrate his principal characters into the battle. One of the triumphs of War and Peace was that Bondarchuk made us care about the people who were fighting the battle. But rather than exploring the lives of some of the soldiers in any kind of depth, Bondarchuk concentrates his narrative on Wellington and Napoleon and the differences in their approaches to war. This contrast is fairly interesting early on, but once the battle begins the tactic stops working. After all, it's hard to care about two men who essentially stand back and watch as thousands of men march to their deaths.

Today, any notoriety Waterloo may have comes mostly from the rumor that its disappointing box office performance led to production being shut down on Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon. But whether or not this is the case, the bile this idea summons up in some cinephiles is somewhat unfair. After all, hugely expensive epics were on their way out, and besides, Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange instead, so it's not like his career took much of a hit. Taken on its own terms, Waterloo ultimately doesn't work, but there are dazzling sequences that demonstrate what a gifted filmmaker Bondarchuk was, and it's a shame that more of his work isn't available in the U.S. I guess seeing him “go bad” on such a grand scale has made me want to see him make good again.

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.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Great Expectations (1998, Alfonso Cuaron)

Paul Clark — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Since making his feature debut with 1991’s Solo con tu pareja, Alfonso Cuaron has become one of the world’s most acclaimed and distinctive filmmakers. That he has managed to do this is a credit not only to his talent but also his versatility. With a scant six features under his belt, he has managed to makes films both large and small, both light and dark, and in both English and Spanish. His breakthrough film A Little Princess is a lovely and underseen family film, and his instinctive feel for family-friendly entertainment helped him immeasurably on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, seen by many as the best big-screen Potter adventure to date. In between, he’s also managed to transcend the teenage sex film into transcendent cinema in Y Tu Mama Tambien, and crafted one of the most unique dystopian visions of the cinema in Children of Men.

But in the evaluation of Cuaron’s career to date, one film has gotten lost in the shuffle- 1998’s Great Expectations. A loose, lushly-mounted update of Charles Dickens’ classic novel, the film was released in 1998 in the dog days of February, in the wake of the Titanic juggernaut. Reviews were middling, and audience response was unenthusiastic. In the eyes of many Hollywood insiders, the project that should have been a stepping stone to Cuaron’s future as a big-name Hollywood filmmaker became a stumbling block that sent him tumbling back to Mexico to make his subsequent film. But while there’s no denying that the perception of Great Expectations didn’t help Cuaron’s career, the real question is here more simple- is the movie any good?

Having watched the film recently, I would maintain that it is, and certainly better than its reputation would suggest. That said, it’s hardly perfect. A number of critics took the film to task for being insufficiently faithful to Dickens, and certainly, Great Expectations didn’t benefit from being one of a rash of loose “re-imaginings” of classic novels that were in vogue during the mid- to late-nineties. But I found that the contemporary trappings suited the original story pretty well. More distracting was the way the screenplay, written by Mitch Glazer, pared down Dickens’ story to focus almost entirely on the relationship between Pip (now named Finn and played by Ethan Hawke) and Estella (Gwyneth Paltrow). In doing so, Glazer sketches over much of what makes the book really interesting, that story of a man who is carried along by destiny from one fascinating situation to another guided by two benefactors, one known to him (Miss Havisham), the other unseen. As a result, Great Expectations lacks much of the narrative interest that the novel had.

But if Cuaron’s film largely fails as Dickens, there’s plenty of other aspects to the film to enjoy. The majority of Dickens adaptations for film and television have emphasized the squalor and hardscrabble lifestyle of the period in which he wrote, but Cuaron’s style infuses the story with liberal amounts of magic realism, and the two are a surprisingly good fit. It helps that the film is set in two locations in the U.S. that are best suited for magic realism- the Gulf Coast of Florida (with its swamps and vegetation and distinctly Hispanic influence) and New York City. Look at the decaying manse of the film’s Miss Havisham character, here called Ms. Dinsmoor and played by Anne Bancroft. The home itself is based on the Alhambra in Spain, but everything is falling apart and overgrown, and the wedding party, still set out after three decades, is made all the more eerie by the Spanish moss that’s hanging from the trees. And the film’s version of New York is a city full of mysterious settings and endless possibilities, and Cuaron and regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki make good use of the weather to reflect the tone of the film, with the sun shining warmly when Finn is content, and rain pouring or leaves falling when his emotional state has become tumultuous.

Likewise, the film is ideally cast to suit Cuaron’s style. At first glance, Ethan Hawke seems too lightweight to work in the lead role, and certainly to intone the wholly gratuitous narration. But consider that Dickens’ main characters usually tended to be observers through whom the reader could experience the adventures of the story, so in this way the casting makes perfect sense. Gwyneth Paltrow makes a perfectly fine Estella, pulling off both the coldness that results from her upbringing by Ms. Dinsmoor and the sadness that she’s ill-equipped to love Finn because of this. Anne Bancroft, always a marvelous ham, digs into the role of Ms. Dinsmoor with plenty of relish, and no small amount of wit (listen to her response when young Finn asks about her cat). Chris Cooper is affecting as Finn’s Uncle Joe, who for the boy only to be cast aside when Finn became a famous artist. And Robert DeNiro gives perhaps his last great performance in the small role of the prisoner Joe (Magwitch in the book), successfully playing the frightening prisoner early on, only to turn up again years later as a shadowy, eccentric figure in the hero’s life.

On balance, Great Expectations is fairly flawed but ultimately a worthwhile film. As narrative, it’s sometimes less than compelling, and it certainly isn’t successful as an adaptation. But it’s so visually enchanting and full of vivid supporting characters that it hardly matters. The film’s failings are those of the script and of the studio who tried to make the film more palatable to mainstream sensibilities (which explains the narration), while the stuff that works is almost entirely Cuaron’s. Despite its reputation, Great Expectations is an interesting entry on Cuaron’s filmography, and one that bears a second look in light of his more recent work. I suspect time will be kind to it.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997, Clint Eastwood)

Paul Clark — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Forty years ago, the idea that Rowdy Yates from TV’s Rawhide would turn out to be a talented director would have seemed ridiculous. Yet it came to pass, with Clint Eastwood proving to be one of Hollywood’s most celebrated filmmakers. In addition, he’s also one of its most prolific, churning out an average of one film almost every year over the past decade. But in spite of making such well-regarded films as Unforgiven, Mystic River, and Million Dollar Baby, the truth is that when a filmmaker works at such a rate, there are bound to be some clunkers in the bunch. Surely enough, Eastwood had his share of mediocre or even subpar films throughout his career, even in the fertile period of the nineties. In the case of movies like True Crime and Blood Work, the middling quality of the films wasn’t too big a deal, as they were disposable adaptations of forgettable airport novels.

Then there was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A far cry from the likes of Absolute Power, Midnight was based on an honest-to-goodness acclaimed work of literature. John Berendt’s book, based on an actual Savannah, GA murder case, was a publishing phenomenon, residing on the New York Times bestseller list a full four years. For the first time since his Academy Award-winning Unforgiven, Eastwood was making an honest-to-goodness prestige project, and he devoted all his attention to directing the film, handing over the acting duties to the likes of Kevin Spacey and John Cusack. Anticipation was high, especially among fans of the novel who were curious to see how Eastwood would translate it to the screen.

Trouble is, like many really good books, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil doesn’t exactly lend itself to being adapted. While most good adaptations are inspired by books with strong, tight stories, much of the appeal of Berendt’s book is anecdotal, with plenty of fascinating characters orbiting around the story’s center, the trial of Jim Williams. Unfortunately, Eastwood is generally at his best when working with a relatively straightforward plot, and consequently, his attempts to mix the court case with the incidental dramas in Savannah just don’t quite work. It doesn’t help that Eastwood never really allows Savannah to become a natural element of the story like it ought to be. Watching his more successful adaptation of Mystic River, it’s hard to imagine the story taking place anywhere else, but I almost never got that vibe from Midnight, in which the city feels more like a backdrop than an actual setting.

Part of the problem is that Eastwood shies away from one of the book’s most important themes- the hypocrisy of Savannah’s upper-class when confronted by Williams’ homosexuality. Berendt’s novel addresses the almost tangible sense of abandonment that Williams felt when his “friends” refused to testify on his behalf once word of his sexual predilections came to light. But while it’s mentioned in passing in the film, Eastwood makes far too little of which should be a central issue. Without this undercurrent, the trial loses most of its energy, becoming little more than a mediocre courtroom drama with a few mild twists.

Also disappointing is the film’s treatment of the friendship between protagonist John Kelso, a Berendt surrogate played by John Cusack, and the story’s most famous supporting player, The Lady Chablis, who plays herself. In both the book and the film, the two characters- one a straitlaced northerner, the other a local transsexual- get to know each other as the story progresses, and while it’s pretty clear that nothing sexual ever transpires between them, there’s a tantalizing ambiguity about Chablis’ feelings toward Kelso. Sadly, Eastwood and screenwriter John Lee Hancock seem skittish about the possibility that audience members might think their hero is gay, so they concoct him a love interest who wasn't in the book, played by Eastwood’s daughter Alison. The romantic subplot is a complete waste of time, never advancing the story or working in any other way other than to reassure the audience that John Kelso is all about the ladies.

That said, both Cusack and The Lady Chablis are actually quite good in the movie. Cusack plays his usual charming, brainy type, but then, the story needs a levelheaded character in the middle of the eccentric locals. And The Lady Chablis is pretty priceless, especially when she’s playing off Cusack- I can’t imagine a more established actor playing the role even half as convincingly, no doubt because she’d already been playing the role for years even before the book, let alone the movie. And most of the rest of the cast is also fine- Spacey is courtly but subtly menacing in one of finest performances, and Jack Thompson has fun as Spacey’s defense attorney, a local hero (he’s the owner of the University of Georgia’s mascot “Uga”) who’s surprisingly neither a blowhard nor an over-the-top rube. The weak links are Alison Eastwood (who to her credit has almost nothing to do) and Jude Law as the murder victim, who when we see him in flashbacks is too mannered by half.

More than most filmmakers working today, Eastwood works in the classic tradition, allowing the film’s story to dictate his directorial decisions. Unfortunately, it never feels like he got a handle on the story. The courtroom scenes have no momentum, there’s too much gratuitous material involving Alison Eastwood’s character, and the local color just doesn’t work like it does on the page. After all, it’s one thing to imagine a guy walking a nonexistent dog or tethering flies to his clothing, and another entirely to actually see them. And late in the game, Eastwood abandons his low-key and realistic style to inject some magical realism into the film, but the moment doesn’t work because it feels so out of place with his style.

In the end, one gets the sense that Eastwood’s brand of filmmaking just didn’t mesh with Berendt’s story. Perhaps someone like Robert Altman could have pulled it off, given his gifts with ensemble casts and Southern settings, or even the documentarian Ross McElwee, chronicler of the Deep South in films like Sherman’s March and Bright Leaves. I might have suggested Errol Morris, considering his ability to portray eccentrics without condescending to them, but then, Morris' previous fiction feature didn’t turn out so well, did it?

When Good Directors Go Bad: Cruising (1980, William Friedkin)

Paul Clark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Usually, when I watch a potential When Good Directors Go Bad title, I’m pretty sure of how I feel about it. Generally, it’ll be a movie I already know that I dislike, or one that I’ve heard enough negative things about that I’m almost positive I’ll join the chorus of naysayers. Occasionally, I’ve tried to defend movies which are much better than their reputations would suggest. But I don’t think I’ve ever been so conflicted about my feelings about a selection than I was with William Friedkin’s Cruising.

Let’s get this out of the way- as straight-up narrative, Cruising is pretty terrible. Plotlines are introduced and abandoned, the central mystery doesn’t really work, and there’s a final “twist” that’s borderline incoherent. Yet for all it faults, Cruising is too haunting and strange a piece of work to be dismissed lightly. It made me scratch my head and occasionally pissed me off, but I was never bored.

Much of the narrative muddiness can be doubt be attributed to the film’s provocative nature. Released in 1980, Cruising tells the story of a murderer who’s prowling New York City’s gay S&M underworld. It was the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era, when homosexuality had become more visible in society yet was still misunderstood and frowned upon by most Americans. Naturally, Cruising aroused quite a bit of controversy from both sides. The increasingly-vocal gay rights groups protested the film for its portrayal of homosexuals as being scary, violent psychopaths. Meanwhile, United Artists was looking to make a commercial thriller, so many of the more risqué elements of the film were left on the cutting room floor.

Friedkin has stated that his original cut of Cruising was 140 minutes long, which means that nearly one-fourth of the movie had been shorn away by the time the 102-minute final cut hit theatres. And boy, do the seams show. There’s at least one major subplot- involving a pair of crooked cops who strong-arm a drag queen into performing sexual favors- that the film does absolutely nothing with. Likewise, the film presents a sympathetic homosexual friend for undercover officer Steve Burns (Al Pacino), only to forget about him for a long stretch of time until he turns up dead.

Faring even worse is the character trajectory of Burns himself. After being sent undercover to investigate the killings due to his resemblance to a number of the victims, Pacino is purported to be changed greatly by his experience in the gay underworld. Unfortunately, the film has to come right out and tell us this, having Pacino tell his girlfriend (Karen Allen) that “what I’m doing is affecting me.” Really? It seems to me like he isn’t really touched by most of what he sees. It doesn’t help that the film shies away from the more graphic details of Burns’ experiences inside a club called The Ramrod. Does he ever actually have sex with any of the other men, or does he simply walk into the clubs, look around, and leave? The film doesn’t seem to know.

Some of the blame can no doubt be placed on United Artists and the MPAA for demanding such liberal re-cutting of the film. Yet Friedkin is not altogether blameless. Looking back at Friedkin’s Oscar-winning The French Connection, one can find another cop character- Popeye Doyle- who gets far too caught up in his work. But while Friedkin had Popeye define himself almost entirely through his work, Cruising gives Burns a personal life to make him more three-dimensional. However, the scenes we see both of Burns’ personal life and his undercover work are unrevealing, and so he remains largely an enigma. Popeye Doyle was similarly enigmatic, but while we liked him we weren’t meant to care about him. By contrast, we’re meant to get caught up in Burns’ psychological journey, so the fact that we don’t should be construed as a failure on the film’s part. What’s unfortunate is that Pacino gives a fine, surprisingly low-key performance in the role that might distinguished a better film.

In addition, the gay rights protestors did have a point when they spoke out against Cruising. While Friedkin’s portrayal of the S&M underworld is certainly not meant to be a definitive statement about all homosexuals, the character of the killer is nonetheless pretty troubling. The killer is eventually revealed to be a musical theatre student whose father made him feel guilty about his homosexuality, and who takes his guilt out on the denizens on the men he picks up in clubs. After he seduces them, he stabs them repeatedly with a knife while telling them, “you made me do that.” Unfortunately, the killer-queen stereotype was one that wouldn’t go away, as evidenced by the character of Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs. To say nothing of the film’s ending, which seems to be saying that Burns’ experiences have turned him into a killer himself. If this is the case, then it’s both laughable and highly troubling.

Yet while Cruising has a multitude of problems, I found myself fascinated by it, and not in a train-wreck sort of way. For one thing, the film’s portrayal of its seamy underworld is still bold by Hollywood standards. In a time before the PC police patrolled every big-studio release and homosexuals became dependable romantic-comedy sidekicks and prestige-picture martyrs, it’s bracing to see a major motion picture that actually allows its homosexual characters to be sexual beings. Although Burns is ostensibly all about the ladies, Friedkin doesn’t shy away from the details of the sex lives of the other denizens of The Ramrod (how’s THAT for un-PC?). There’s a tangible allure to the danger this world presents to those who inhabit it, yet when you consider that the very real danger of AIDS still hadn’t announced itself, these scenes feel almost poignant. Also, it’s hard to believe Friedkin got away with a shot in which a character lubes up his entire forearm, but there you go.

On top of it all, the movie’s just too damn weird to dismiss, and it’s easy to see why Cruising has amassed a sizable cult since its original release. What can one say about a movie that pauses for Powers Boothe to describe the meanings of the various bandanas that are worn by the cruising men, to say nothing of a police interrogation that’s abruptly interrupted by a hulking black man wearing only a cowboy hat and a jockstrap? On balance, I suppose Cruising does indeed qualify as a case of Friedkin “going bad,” another step in the downward spiral that torpedoed the career of the once-hot director of The French Connection and The Exorcist. But damn if it’s not fascinating.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Road Home (1999, Zhang Yimou)

Paul Clark — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:00:00 GMT

At the beginning of last month’s Olympic Games, the world was abuzz over the overwhelming spectacle of the Opening Ceremony. The ceremony was reportedly mounted at a cost of $300 million, with tens of thousands of dancers, singers, and other Chinese people employed to create them. But while the director of the Opening Ceremony was unknown to most of the world, he was a name well-known to lovers of world cinema- Zhang Yimou. For more than two decades, Zhang has been one of the leading lights of Chinese cinema, having directed such critically-acclaimed titles as Ju Dou, To Live, Shanghai Triad, Hero, and House of Flying Daggers.

If one looks at Zhang’s career to date, one notices that his work can be divided into three basic categories. Zhang originally made his reputation primarily with films that were critical of (and banned by) the Communist government. His most recent, and most expensive, movies have been martial arts epics, heavy on eye-popping imagery and relatively light on political subtext. But interspersed within these movies have been more modest films, generally neo-realist in nature, that focus largely on working-class or rural characters. Of these, The Road Home is probably the best-known in the United States. Made in 1999, it was held back from American release until 2001 to capitalize on the newfound popularity of its leading lady, Zhang Ziyi, who had just appeared in the breakthrough hit Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good movie.

The Road Home is meant to be the heartrending story of a man learning about the courtship between mother and his recently-deceased father. Alas, Zhang Yimou and novelist-screenwriter Shi Bao make a colossal miscalculation by telling the story from the mother’s point of view rather than the father’s. When we see the father in extended flashbacks, Luo is a young teacher who has just arrived in a small rural community. Luo’s journey has been long and complicated, and will become more so when he is ordered back to the city for questioning (the movie is set at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution). Along the way, he falls in love with the young and beautiful Di (Zhang Ziyi), and she with him. So smitten is he with her that he eventually escapes his captors in the city to teach school and be with her for one more day, before the authorities separate them again for two more years.

Sounds like a pretty interesting movie, don’t you think? Had only The Road Home told Luo’s story, it might have been. However, the story focuses on Di, whose life is, shall we say, much less eventful than Luo’s. So instead of witnessing his narratively-compelling struggles, Zhang’s camera follows Di as she chases after him, running over hill and dale and hill again to get a glimpse of the man she loves. And that’s not all- when he is forced to return to the city, Di tries to chase him down to give him her specially-made mushroom dumplings. On the day he’s supposed to return, she stands solemnly in a snowstorm awaiting his arrival, and even after she’s taken ill she sneaks out again into the harsh winter.

What makes this approach so misguided is that, by all rights, Luo should be the central player in the story. The film’s framing device finds Luo and Di’s son returning to the town for his father’s funeral, and the now-elderly Di insisting that the townspeople observe the old tradition of bringing Luo’s body home on foot, despite (a) his body being kept half a day’s walk away, (b) the low number of able-bodied men available to carry the casket, and (c) the fact that it’s the middle of winter. That’s a lot of effort to insist that others subject themselves to for your benefit, especially when you yourself don’t have to bear any of the weight. I can imagine this story working if we got some idea of how wonderful and important Luo was not only to Di but to the town as a whole. Unfortunately, we’ve got to take it all on faith, since the story was too concerned with Di’s boring-ass pursuit of Luo to actually take time to show us how awesome he was. So awesome, it seems that not only does Luo’s son have no problem rounding up people (strangers, no less) to bear the casket half a day in the snow, but they actually refuse to take any money to perform this service. Wait, what?

Occasionally, bits of interesting cinema will peek through, briefly illuminating our minds before we get mired in maudlin crap again. Most notable is a scene in which a pottery repairman mends a broken clay pot without the use of glue, which is pretty damned impressive if you ask me. And of course the movie looks great- but then, with Zhang Yimou photographing the Chinese countryside, how could it not be? But in the end, The Road Home is an irritating little nothing of a movie, in which the writer and director avoid the compelling story that’s right before their eyes to give the audience scene after scene of Zhang Ziyi running around. Seriously, there must be fifteen minutes’ worth of her running in this movie, which runs less than ninety minutes total. So watching Zhang Ziyi run around for minutes on end is your idea of awesome cinema, then maybe The Road Home will be your speed. But if I want a good Zhang Yimou movie, I’ll take Raise the Red Lantern, thank you very much.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Insomnia (2002, Christopher Nolan)

Paul Clark — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:00:00 GMT

One of the biggest dangers faced by an up-and-coming filmmaker is the burden of high expectations. If one is talented (and lucky) enough to make a movie that strikes a chord with critics and/or audiences, it can be tricky deciding what direction your career should take, now that people are anticipating your next move. This was the problem that Christopher Nolan faced after the release of his 2000 film, Memento, which not only bowled over the critics but also became the indie sleeper of 2001, accumulating deafening word-of-mouth during its protracted run in America’s arthouses before reaching an even wider audience on DVD. Memento made a dent in a public consciousness, people were curious about what was next for the newly anointed wunderkind who directed it.

Naturally, there was some head-scratching when it was announced that Nolan’s follow-up would be a remake of the 1997 Norwegian crime drama Insomnia. It was only natural to assume that the director of a buzz magnet like Memento would want to go Hollywood, but many people wondered what could have motivated him to helm a star-studded remake of an acclaimed foreign film, a career move that’s traditionally assumed on roughly the level of directing a Martin Lawrence vehicle. Was Nolan selling out, or did he have a legitimately interesting twist on the original material?

When I first saw Nolan’s Insomnia in 2002, I thought the former. Much of this had to do with the memories of Erik Skjoldbjærg’s original being fresh in my mind. Consequently, I had a hard time resisting the urge to compare the two films, and Nolan’s take was invariably found wanting. I mostly resented his need to soften the story, making its protagonist less of a prick and more of a showboat, a change that reflected the switch from Stellan Skarsgård to Al Pacino in the lead role. Likewise, there were a number of other narrative switcheroos that just didn’t sit well with me. I was hardly alone in this respect- Insomnia received mostly lukewarm reviews and opened to middling box office. Even the positive notices for the film seemed mostly respectful rather than enthusiastic, as if the critics were let down by the film’s inability to live up to the Memento’s high standard.

Six years later, in the wake of the resounding success of Nolan’s The Dark Knight, I felt compelled to re-visit Insomnia. I suppose I wanted to see whether my initial perceptions of it were skewed by my personal biases (pro-Memento, pro-Skjoldbjærg, anti-remake). Is it as subpar as I’d remembered? In a word, no. Insomnia isn’t a great film, but it’s a perfectly serviceable police procedural with some interesting elements, a movie that somewhat better than its middling rep would indicate.

This isn’t to say that it doesn’t have problems. The most glaring is Robin Williams’ performance as the killer who bedevils Al Pacino’s Det. Dormer (a too-obvious choice of names, by the way). Granted, it’s a tricky role to play- a man who has been sent around the bend by the killing he’s committed and now must manipulate the law officer who’s pursuing him in order to stay alive. Yet Williams never manages to make the character convincing. Instead, he gives a very actorly performance, with plenty of tortured facial acting plus a calm voice designed to tell us how unnaturally levelheaded the character is, but he never makes him work as a living, breathing person instead of an actor playing a role.

However, getting some distance from the original version of Insomnia has allowed me to better appreciate Al Pacino’s performance in the remake. Whereas Skarsgård performance in the original movie was a study in submerged conflict, Pacino’s has a much more physical take on the character’s troubles. In Nolan’s film, Dormer is facing problems from all sides- the case he’s working on, the Internal Affairs investigation that could very well ruin his career, his inability to sleep, and his guilt for accidentally killing his partner. By the time Williams comes calling to blackmail him with knowledge of the partner’s murder, Pacino is already in over his head, and the new complication just makes it even worse for him. It’s a surprisingly complex turn, and probably the last big-screen Pacino performance I’ve really enjoyed.

In addition, Nolan does a pretty good job at exploiting the stylistic possibilities of the story, particularly the never-setting sun of the film’s Alaskan setting. Most obviously, there’s the oppressiveness of the sunlight streaming into Dormer’s room as he tries (and fails) to sleep, but I also liked the way Nolan’s direction reflected Dormer’s shifting psychological state as the film progressed. The longer the character goes without sleep, the less he is in control of his senses, and Nolan makes the lights brighter and the sounds more invasive. There are also a number of effective moments in which Dormer visits the town in the middle of the night, the streets completely empty except for him. And a foot chase across dozens logs that are rapidly floating downstream is pretty damned exciting.

Don’t get me wrong- Insomnia is still a “minor” film in Nolan’s career. But watching it for the second time, it feels like a transitional effort for its director. It may have lacked the freshness and novelty of Memento, but I’d say that was good for Nolan in the long run, allowing him to make a movie that wasn’t simply founded upon a clever twist. In addition, it demonstrated to Hollywood that his sensibility- cool, clinical, philosophical- was compatible with a big-budget film. In addition, the film’s questioning of the morality of the crime drama anticipates Nolan’s work in The Dark Knight. Insomnia might not be of the caliber of Nolan’s other films, but it’s still a fairly solid film from a major filmmaker, and considering how good his subsequent work has been (especially The Prestige, my favorite film of 2006), that’s good enough for me.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Death Becomes Her (1992, Robert Zemeckis)

Paul Clark — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Robert Zemeckis has been one of Hollywood’s most bankable filmmakers for nearly three decades. A former protégé of Steven Spielberg, Zemeckis began his career making broad comedies before a move to big-budget fare demonstrated his flair for cutting-edge special effects. Yet in his best work, Zemeckis is able to seamlessly integrate the demands of ambitious effects with involving storylines that have surprising emotional pull. For example, in his 1985 film Back to the Future, Zemeckis took a science fiction comedy about a teenager traveling back in time to his parents’ high school years and turned it into the story of the boy trying to make things right with his family.

Following the runaway box office success of Back to the Future, Zemeckis rose to the ranks of Hollywood’s A-list directors, and with the release of his even more ambitious Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he became Hollywood’s go-to director for effects-heavy blockbusters infused with plenty of humor and heart. At this point in his career Zemeckis could more or less write his own ticket, so after expanding on the Back to the Future saga with two sequels, he decided to film a script written by Martin Donovan, an up-and-coming filmmaker who had recently released a cultish science fiction film entitled Apartment Zero. Donovan’s screenplay provided ample opportunities to indulge the darker side of his sense of humor, which had largely gone unused since 1980’s Used Cars, as well as giving him a chance to experiment with the body-morphing effects for the first time. The project was entitled Death Becomes Her.

Having read some of the Death Becomes Her screenplay, it’s easy for me to see how Zemeckis might have been attracted to it. Like Back to the Future, Roger Rabbit, and even Back to the Future Part III, Death Becomes Her combines two seemingly incompatible elements- in this case, a Grand Guignol-style story of two lifelong rivals and a darkly comic morality tale about the allure of youth and beauty. But while the screenplay had potential, much of that potential was lost on the way to the screen, and the finished product really doesn’t work very well. The movie’s not very funny and pretty shrill, but there are a number of other issues as well.

One big problem is the casting. In conceiving the ageless divas at the center of the story, Donovan no doubt took a cue from the legendary rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Unfortunately, actresses who can fill those shoes are few and far between, not just talent-wise, but also because their reputations as world-class pills preceded them. By contrast, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn are merely actresses playing a role. Streep, quintessential actress that she is, comes closer to pulling it off, but whereas audiences never had a problem believing Davis or Crawford as divas (probably because they were), with Streep it merely feels like a performance. For her part, Hawn is never quite convincing as a worthy opponent for Streep- even in her more sinister moments, she comes off as too much of a lightweight. And Bruce Willis, as the ineffectual surgeon-turned-mortician who comes between then, is given next to nothing to do, and never fills in the blank spot where his character should be.

As for the Oscar-winning visual effects, they’re still pretty impressive, but they don’t have the same kind of magic as, say, the groundbreaking effects in Roger Rabbit. Whereas Zemeckis managed to use the effects of Roger Rabbit to create a convincing world which humans and cartoons convincingly inhabited together, he never successfully integrates his effects into the story here. The giveaway is the lack of camera movement in the big effects scenes. Usually, Zemeckis likes to keep his camera in motion, but whenever the special effects kick in, Death Becomes Her literally stops dead in its tracks. The result is a movie in which story takes a backseat to the demands of CGI, a trap that Zemeckis’ previous work managed to successfully avoid.

But in the end Death Becomes Her’s biggest problem may simply be its lack of nerve. Rather than embracing the twisted possibilities of its storyline, the movie wimps out in the final reel by becoming a morality tale about the necessity of living life to the fullest. I’m guessing some of this was the result of studio mandates (a PG-13 rating, the rewrites from Universal’s in-house scribe David Koepp) in order to preserve their no doubt sizable investment in the film. However, Zemeckis has always been more at home with Americana than in the realm of the macabre. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Terry Gilliam or a young Peter Jackson might have done with the material. But while Death Becomes Her holds some interest both as a wellspring of the body-morphing effects that are still used today and as an early incarnation of Meryl Streep’s recent metamorphosis from leading lady into character actress, on its own merits it just isn’t very good.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Of the marquee filmmakers currently working in Hollywood, Tim Burton’s style is one of the most recognizable. A former animator turned filmmaker, Burton imbues his best films with a look inspired by old-school horror films and classic cartoons, while reflecting a deep affection for outsiders. While Burton’s first two features, Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice, won the director a cult following, it wasn’t until his third that he applied his style to a blockbuster. With 1989’s Batman, Burton demonstrated that he could apply his Gothic visuals to a big-budget franchise in a way that translated into box-office gold.

Aside from the sequel Batman Returns, Burton’s 1990s output didn’t meet with the same fiscal success, but he nonetheless became a fan favorite, and despite the public’s habitual hostility to sequels, there was a lot of anticipation toward 2001’s Burton-directed “re-imagining” of the science-fiction classic Planet of the Apes. However, much of this excitement dissipated upon the film’s release. Aside from a few supporting performances and the state-of-the-art makeup work by Rick Baker, the general consensus was that the movie was a bloated mess. Worst of all, Burton fans saw the movie as strictly a paycheck job, a cash-grab blockbuster from the director they loved. Watching the movie recently, I found it somewhat more interesting than I did on its original release, but it’s still not very good.

One of the problems is that the ape characters are far more interesting than the humans. A great deal of attention is lavished on the apes, not only in terms of the makeup, but also characterization-wise. Each ape is given a distinct and easily-defined personality, be it the ambitious General Thade (Tim Roth), the slimy “human cargo” dealer Limbo (Paul Giamatti), or the human-rights crusader Ari (Helena Bonham Carter). They’re not especially complex, but they’re fun to watch. By contrast, from square-jawed hero Capt. Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) on down, the human characters are bland and unmemorable.

For a while, it feels like the film is attempting something subversive, by placing the audience’s sympathies with the apes to make them ponder their treatment of “lesser” species. However, it eventually becomes clear that Burton is painting the humans as the “outsider” characters. This might have worked had the movie given us any reason to care about the human characters, but it never does, aside from the fact that the audience will be almost invariably comprised of humans rather than apes. As a result, the film is at cross-purposes- the humans are meant to be the good guys, but the apes are far more entertaining.

Most compelling of all is Ari, who ends up torn between her nature as a chimpanzee and her desire to help humans receive “separate but equal” treatment. At one point, the film sets up a quasi-love triangle between Ari, Davidson, and loincloth-clad human Daena (Estella Warren)- a development that becomes all the more fascinating since Ari is far more appealing than Daena, ape status notwithstanding. Unfortunately, the film shies away from the possibilities of inter-species romance, and after Ari’s advances are thwarted, she attempts to appeal to Thade, who casts her out once and for all. Because she is forcefully banished from the apes, Ari’s character loses quite a bit of thematic interest that she might have kept had she freely chosen to take the humans’ side.

Most surprisingly, Planet of the Apes was Burton’s most visually uninspired film to date. Despite the inventive makeup and creative set design from longtime Burton associate Rick Heinrichs, the images in the film are largely forgettable. Part of the problem was the relatively flat studio lighting, which gave audiences ample opportunity to savor Baker’s and Heinrichs’ work but which bore little resemblance to the trademark “Burton look” of films like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow. Certain shots bear the Burton stamp, but for the most part the film could just as easily have been made by an anonymous studio director instead of one of the Hollywood’s most inimitable stylists.

Then there’s the ending. Burton’s Planet of the Apes took a lot of flack at the time for its finale, which confused many audience members while annoying others. Upon further review, I sort of like it, not least for how it appropriates the ending of Pierre Boulle’s original novel. However, it couldn’t possibly live up to the final scene in the original film, which was audacious in both its simplicity and its allegorical implications. By comparison, the “new” ending came off as a case of the filmmakers trying too hard to outdo the classic version. In a way, this is reflective of the whole film- despite the best efforts of the filmmakers to outshine the original Planet of the Apes, the inspiration just isn’t there.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT

By the late 1960s, old-fashioned epics had fallen on hard times. With the counterculture movement in full swing, fewer young moviegoers were interested in large-scale entertainments, with sweeping vistas and larger-than-life filmmaking. However, Hollywood has always been a little slow to catch up with popular tastes, and this led to a string of big-budget flops, as the roadshow musicals and bloated period pictures failed to rope in audiences who went wild for The Graduate and Easy Rider. But if anyone could still make an old-school epic under these circumstances, it was David Lean, coming off the award-winning blockbusters Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter wasn’t remotely up to the standard of the director’s best work.

From the beginning, Ryan’s Daughter had problems. The filmmakers took a suspiciously long time to cast the film, with name actors like Marlon Brando and Peter O’Toole turning down the role of the British Maj. Doryan before up-and-comer Christopher Jones was cast. But things got far worse once production began. Lean was a notorious perfectionist, often taking hours to set up a single shot, which angered several of the film’s stars, with Leo McKern commenting, “I don’t like to be paid 500 pounds a week for sitting down and playing Scrabble.” And Jones’ acting talent- or, more appropriately, the lack thereof- caused friction between him and both Lean and leading lady Sarah Miles.

Of course, stories like this are nothing new in show business. Moreover, had the movie turned out well none of this would have mattered. Unfortunately, Ryan’s Daughter was a flop with critics and audiences, to the point that Lean didn’t direct another film for more than a decade. The film is a lumbering bore, without so much as an interesting character to hold the audience’s interest. Naturally, this being a Lean movie, Ryan’s Daughter is often gorgeous to look at, but that’s hardly enough to tide the audience over for upwards of three hours.

In fact, I’d say the visuals are part of the problem, or more accurately, that Lean cares more for the pictoral beauty of the film than he does for the people who inhabit it. Now, I realize that this criticism has also been levied at several films of another notorious perfectionist, Stanley Kubrick. The difference is that if you look at films such as 2001 and Barry Lyndon, you’ll see that Kubrick’s style demands a degree of distance from the characters, and the visuals are a large part of this. By contrast, Lean means to tell a human story in Ryan’s Daughter, and this distance only hinders his ability to do so.

Consider the early scene in which Rosy Ryan (played by Miles) sees her former teacher Charles Shaughnessy (Mitchum) after he comes home from a conference in Britain. As Rosy has long felt love for Charles- the man she will eventually marry, mind you- you’d think it might be good to see her reaction to his arrival. However, Lean’s staging of the event is so clumsy that he forgets to show us. One minute, Rosy is alone at the shoreline, then suddenly Lean cuts to an extreme long shot as Charles walks into the frame, so that they’re hardly more than specks on the beach moving toward each other. It’s only after they come together and begin talking that he cuts to their conversation. I wish I could say this was atypical of Lean’s style in Ryan’s Daughter, but this isn’t the case. Time and again, Lean’s characters are upstaged by the landscapes that surround them.

Then again, perhaps extreme long shots would’ve been the best way to deal with Christopher Jones, so that the audience couldn’t have seen how untalented and inexpressive an actor he was. Of course, this was hardly the first time a director was faced with the challenge of a difficult leading man, but Lean never figures out how to successfully work around this. Initially, the film gives most of Jones’ dialogue to a subordinate, but once he embarks on his affair with Rosy this becomes impossible, so Lean resorts to swelling music, longing glances from Miles, and cutaways to nature. But worst of all are the scenes in which Maj. Doryan flashes back to the battlefield- Jones screws up his face and flails around, but never convinces us that there’s anything underneath the surface. Jones’ performance is so inept that our antipathy toward him extends to the character itself, and by extension to Rosy, who by forsaking Robert Mitchum for this clown looks less like an impetuous youth than a horny little fool.

Speaking of fools, if Christopher Jones’ performance is inept, John Mills’ is downright embarrassing. Mills plays Michael, a local oaf who sadly has nobody to grapple with, in what surely has to be one of the most ignominious performances ever to net an Oscar. But even if Mills’ hammy turn isn’t completely Lean’s fault, the way the character is used has to be, as Michael functions as a comic mirror to the events of the story, eavesdropping on the lovers and following them around at pivotal moments. It’s a cheesy touch on the part of Lean and frequent screenwriter Robert Bolt, one that they should have known better than to include.

All of this isn’t to say that Ryan’s Daughter doesn’t have good points. For one thing, Miles’s and Mitchum’s performances would distinguish a film that told this story on a more intimate level (especially Mitchum’s). However, Lean’s style here is so unnecessarily grandiose that we lose sight of any reason why we should care about them or anything else we see onscreen. By the time the film actually justifies the magnitude of its scope, it’s far too late. There’s a spectacular sequence in which the townspeople aid a band of IRA fighters in bringing weapons ashore in the middle of a storm. But impressive though it is, all I could think of was how difficult it must have been to film. And that’s just about the last thing one should be thinking about during a scene like this.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Goya's Ghosts (2006, Milos Forman)

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Note: Two weeks ago, I promised that I would be posting my latest Reviews By Request column this afternoon. However, due to circumstances that can best be summed up by the expression “Netflix issues”, I wasn’t able to obtain a copy of the requested film, Three on a Meathook, in time to view and review it. Apologies to requester “Cameron” and all fans of Reviews by Request. With luck, the review should run next Friday afternoon at the usual time.

Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to attend a talk given by director Milos Forman at Columbus’ Wexner Center for the Arts. The talk followed a screening of Forman’s first American film, Taking Off, and as Forman addressed the crowd, I marveled at how much his personality was reflected in his films. As he spoke, I sensed kindness, generosity of spirit, and a tendency to be amused by the possibilities of life. These qualities come through clearly in his best films, most particularly Taking Off, which has equal empathy for both sides of the generation gap, and Amadeus, which makes Mozart human-sized while giving his “murderer” Salieri a fair shake. However, none of these traits are apparent when one watches Forman’s most recent film, Goya’s Ghosts, an uncharacteristically dour and lifeless film from a filmmaker to whom one wouldn’t normally apply such terms.

From the 1980s onward, Forman has specialized in giving period pieces and biopics a unique flavor that’s a far cry from the extreme reverence afforded most titles in the genre. Look at the way he transformed the potentially tawdry story of Hustler founder Larry Flynt into a seriocomic tale of a most unlikely spokesperson for freedom of speech. Or look at Valmont, a perfectly fine take on Les Liaisons Dangereuses that feels almost humanistic, and which suffered greatly in comparison to Stephen Frears’ earlier version of the material. Forman’s work has always been distinguished by its unconventional point of view, and it was tantalizing to imagine what he would make of the life of Francisco Goya.

It helped that, like Mozart, Larry Flynt, and Andy Kaufman, Goya had a unique life worth recounting in cinematic form. Goya rose to prominence as a painter to Spain’s ruling class, eventually rising to the rank of First Court Painter to King Charles IV. As he grew older, his work became darker and more sinister, a development that coincided with the onset of deafness and a subsequent physical and mental breakdown. After Napoleon’s army invaded Spain, Goya’s work depicted the savagery of war and the internal conflicts of his homeland, especially in his series called Black Paintings and a group of prints referred to as Disasters. But no matter who was in power, Goya’s had an antiauthoritarian streak, something that’s just as apparent in his surprisingly unflattering portraits of the royal family as it is in his macabre portrayals of the wars that consumed his homeland. It was this combination of genius and mischievousness that made Goya an ideal subject for a Milos Forman film.

Unfortunately, there are very few traces of this Goya in Goya’s Ghosts. Oh, Forman’s version of Goya (played by Stellan Skarsgård) has the occasional tendency to defy authority. However, Forman and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière don’t really bother to examine Goya as a person. In a highly unfortunate miscalculation by the filmmakers, Goya’s Ghosts focuses less on its title character than on his relationship with two fictional characters- the opportunistic Inquisitor Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem) and a merchant’s daughter and model named Ines (Natalie Portman, with a bizarre accent). The film is so concerned with this plot that it finds little time for the artist himself, to say nothing of his art.

One big problem is that Forman and Carrière barrel through their story like a rampaging bull, trampling all over anything that might potentially make the film, or the people in it, interesting. Consider an early scene in which Goya unveils his latest portrait of the Queen. As Goya proudly shows off his new work, the royals are somewhat less than impressed by the portrayal of Her Majesty as a frail, unattractive old woman, but Goya himself seems fairly amused by what he’s done. Finally- the Goya we came to see! However, after the King (played by Randy Quaid- yes, really) calls Goya to his chamber, he doesn’t even have time to dress him down before a messenger comes bearing news that the French Revolution has killed the King’s cousin, the French King Louis XVI. Then Forman cuts to a black screen bearing the words, “15 Years Later.” What happened in the mean time? Does Forman even care?

Another question I kept asking myself was “what is this movie about?” Clearly, it’s not about Goya. Perhaps Forman and Carrière saw the primary theme of the movie as the human costs of chaotic times. Ines spends fifteen years as the prisoner of the Inquisition, and during that time is impregnated by Brother Lorenzo, who sends the child to an orphanage. After the Inquisition turns on him, Lorenzo reveals himself not to be the true believer he makes himself out to be, but an opportunist who’s quick to join the winning team. It’s a theme that should be close to Forman’s heart, as someone who escaped Czechoslovakia just as the Iron Curtain slammed shut, but if he saw any of himself in the film’s story, I’ll be damned if I can find any evidence of it. In the end, Forman is less concerned with having any kind of stake in the story than with unnecessarily dramatic plot developments like when he reveals that Napoleon’s special counsel in Spain is no other than… Brother Lorenzo! Dun-dun-dunnnnnnnnnn!!!

Adrift in the middle of it all is Goya himself, an almost incidental player in a story that should have been his. As he and his interpreter searched all over for Ines’ long-lost daughter, all I could think of was about what he should have been doing instead. After Napoleon comes to Spain, we barely see Goya holding a brush, even though in actuality this was a prolific period for him. And did you know that Goya was married for almost forty years? You wouldn’t know it from watching Goya’s Ghosts. It’s a shame, because Stellan Skarsgård is quite good as Goya, and it’s easy to imagine him shining in a film that actually took the time to explore the man’s life. I don’t normally try to contrast the film I see to the one I wish I was watching, but Goya’s Ghosts is so dreary and uninspiring- and such a missed opportunity to boot- that I could think of little else.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Frighteners (1996, Peter Jackson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Today, Peter Jackson is best known to most audiences as one of Hollywood’s big-ticker filmmakers, the New Zealand visionary who was responsible for bringing Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings to the big screen in rousing, ambitious fashion. But in 1996, he was still trying to make his way in Hollywood, with a handful of low-budget genre movies and the critically-acclaimed Heavenly Creatures to his name. He came to America in the hope of eventually making a big-budget remake of King Kong, a dream project of his since he first decided to become a filmmaker. But first, he had to make a name for himself in the American film industry, which he hoped to do with a horror movie/comedy like the ones that made his reputation in his native land. That movie was The Frighteners.

Trouble is, most critics weren’t on to Jackson’s game yet. Jackson’s early films such as Meet the Feebles, Bad Taste and Dead Alive had yet to make much headway with American moviegoers, so critics’ only point of comparison was Jackson’s relatively restrained true crime drama Heavenly Creatures. Those who wanted more of the same were sorely disappointed, and found Jackson’s latest film a loud, obnoxious bore. Roger Ebert’s review of the film was typical of this reaction, as he wrote: “One of the more excruciating experiences for any movie lover is to sit through a movie filled with frenetic nonstop action, in which, however, nothing of interest happens. The Frighteners is a film like that… Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.”

But while those who were in the know were more receptive to the charms of The Frighteners- Mike D’Angelo wrote, “At last, a big-budget summer movie that actually delivers on its promise of entertaining escapist entertainment, without insulting the audience's intelligence in the process”- the film never really caught on even after the Lord of the Rings trilogy propelled Jackson to mainstream fame. And that’s a shame, because while The Frighteners doesn’t reach the frenzied heights of Jackson’s best work in the horror genre, it’s still a blast, especially if you’re a fan of his early films.

For one thing, to dismiss the film as Ebert does as merely being empty, frenetic action is to overlook the infectious strain of sick humor that runs through the film. Look at the character of Judge (played by John Astin), a ghost who’s been dead so long his body is literally falling to pieces. At least once, we see Judge’s jawbone fall to the floor, only to be snatched up by a spectral dog. But that doesn’t stop Judge from forging on with his life, even bursting into a museum exhibition to satisfy his sexual longing with a mummy. After doing the nasty so that his alive, ghost-wrangling pal Frank Bannister (Michael J. Fox) can see him- even though nobody else can- the satiated Judge turns to Frank and sighs, “I like it when they lie still like that.” How many big-studio summer movies would even attempt a joke like that? Very few, I’d wager.

And it’s this refusal to make nice that makes The Frighteners so much fun. Sure, Jackson had executive producer Robert Zemeckis (fresh off Forrest Gump) in his corner, but it’s still surprising how much of Jackson’s sensibility made it into the film intact. One of my favorite elements of the movie is the gleefully unhinged supporting work by Jeffrey Combs as Dammers, a very odd FBI agent. From Dammers’ initial entrance, Combs’ live-wire performance takes the film to a new and more exciting level. It’s the sort of performance most directors would discourage, citing the old saw that, when acting onscreen, “less is more.” But Combs’ work is so inspired and hilarious that it works magnificently in spite of flying in the face of conventional wisdom. Watch him in the scene where he interrogates Frank, as Combs chews up and spits out line after memorable line (my favorite: “What did *he* do? Piss on your Hush Puppies?”). Eventually, it’s all Fox can do with simply sit there and bury his head in his hands, as if to ask the audience, “what? Are you really still watching me?”

Best of all is the climactic sequence of the movie, in which Frank and his love interest Lucy (Trini Alvarado) are chased through an abandoned mental hospital by a deranged Dee Wallace Stone and her ghostly lover, an executed serial killer played by Jake Busey. On one level, it’s exciting to see Jackson’s talent firing on all cylinders, as he effortlessly cuts between past and present, with Frank seeing the murders that took place decades ago even as he is pursued by those very same killers today. But even in the midst of impressive wall-to-wall effects (provided of course by Jackson’s own Weta Digital), the film’s wicked sense of humor remains intact. If you don’t crack a smile when Wallace Stone picks up a pickaxe and declares, “I’m in the mood for a little vivisection,” then chances are you have no soul.

Through some miracle, the disastrous box-office and critical showing of The Frighteners didn’t completely torpedo Jackson’s career in America, and while it took a few years, Jackson even convinced New Line to pony up the dough for his massive Lord of the Rings trilogy. And the rest, as they say, is history. But as much as I love Jackson’s recent films, I do miss him making movies like The Frighteners, and every nod he makes to that side of his sensibility fills me with ghoulish glee. Until Jackson can use his clout to make another movie that fully recaptures that old feeling, there’ll always be The Frighteners, an underappreciated title on his filmography that definitely warrants a second look.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Hulk (2003, Ang Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In recent years, as “sequel” and “remake” have become dirty words in the minds of moviegoers, Hollywood studios have scrambled to come up with new, less offensive alternatives. How many blockbusters based on previously-adapted properties have been tagged with descriptions like “re-invention”? Yet even by these standards, the efforts made by Universal and Marvel Studios to distance their new, more “crowd-pleasing” version of The Incredible Hulk (“You’re going to like him when he’s angry!”) from Ang Lee’s 2003 film Hulk have been particularly aggressive. And for good reason, as Lee’s take on the classic comic left most viewers disappointed or even pissed off. Does Hulk deserve its reputation? Not really. But just because it’s not that bad doesn’t mean it’s all that good either.

In the early part of his career, Ang Lee was known primarily for his modestly-budgeted films which deftly mixed domestic drama with light comedy. Titles like Eat Drink Man Woman and The Wedding Banquet helped to make the NYU grad’s reputation in the States even before he began making movies here, and Sense and Sensibility and The Ice Storm only served to further this reputation. But while 1999’s Ride With the Devil was widely considered Lee’s first disappointment, he quickly recovered by returning to the Far East to make Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the critically-acclaimed martial arts epic that brought Lee the best reviews of his career to date and his first Oscar, as well as record-breaking U.S. box-office for an Asian film. It was Crouching Tiger that caught the attention of Universal Studios, who were looking for a fresh voice to bring Hulk to the screen.

But while Lee was an inspired choice for a comic book movie, I really don’t think he was the right one for Hulk. Lee is a gifted filmmaker, but he’s never had a strong, easily recognizable visual style, instead preferring to let his story determine the look of his films. But although other Lee films have benefited from this versatility- the chilly, sterile images of The Ice Storm bear little resemblance to the sweeping vistas of Crouching Tiger, but both are ideal for their respective films- Lee never finds the right look for Hulk. Although it’s not for lack of trying- attempting to accentuate the story’s comic book origins, Lee subjects the audience to a barrage of split-screens and snazzy wipes. Unfortunately, instead of creating any sort of kinetic excitement, the tricked-up style is merely distracting and, in the end, tiresome.

As for the individual shots themselves, Lee’s framing is rarely dynamic enough to make the images pop the way they should. All too often, shots are murky when they should be crisp. This is especially true of the film’s night scenes, which look dank and under-lit. Even worse, Lee insisted on shooting many of the film’s big action sequences at night. But whether this was an artistic decision on Lee’s part or a trick by the effects team to cover for some occasionally dodgy CGI, these sequences are often incomprehensible. This is especially true of the final battle between Hulk and his father- in a scene that serves not only as the action climax of the film but also the resolution of the lifelong conflict between father and son, the last thing you want is for the audience to wonder what the hell is going on.

In addition to the film’s stylistic shortcomings, the storytelling in Hulk leaves something to be desired. Part of the problem is that as far as comic book heroes go, Hulk is a strange case. Rather than being a hero who uses his powers for positive ends, Hulk is unleashed aggression personified- a man who has been cursed by fate and the sins of his father to expand and beat the crap out of anything in his way whenever he gets angry. The premise plays closer to tragedy than traditional comic book action, and to his credit, Lee takes the dramatic stuff seriously, rather than treating it simply as exposition and padding between the action scenes. However, the film’s broad-strokes-only storytelling and one-dimensional characters are less than compelling. Too much time and energy are expended on unlocking the mysteries of Bruce Banner’s past, a torturous bit of “dollar-book Freud” (thank you, Orson Welles) that stops the film dead in its tracks and makes the film less tragic than dour. Not helping matters is Eric Bana’s colorless performance as Banner. Bana came to the attention of Hollywood with his live-wire performance in Chopper, but he displays none of that volatility here. Shouldn’t someone as deeply troubled as Bruce Banner show some evidence of inner life?

Hulk is a strange creature, a film that attempted to be a stylish, kickass summer movie with a solid dramatic foundation but ended up satisfying almost no one. I admire certain aspects of the movie, like the way Lee counterpoints the restrained work by his leads with the unhinged mugshot-era performance by Nick Nolte, or Lee’s occasional use of quietness (a rare quality among most comic-book movies). But at the end of the day, the movie just doesn’t work. Yet I appreciate Lee’s efforts to make an honest-to-goodness art film out of a superhero movie. Hulk isn’t a success, but it’s more thought-provoking than most of the forgettable fare that has characterized the genre for years. It’s no Spider-Man, but I’ll take it over the likes of Fantastic Four- or The Incredible Hulk, for that matter.

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Elizabethtown (2005, Cameron Crowe)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: For various reasons too boring to get into here, I was unable to secure a playable copy of the DVD for this week’s Reviews by Request in time to write a post. I’ll be running Jason Alley’s requested review of The New Kids next Friday at the regularly scheduled time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Of all the paths to success taken by Hollywood’s major filmmakers, Cameron Crowe’s is one of the most interesting. Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous recounts the story of the teenage Crowe’s stint as a reporter for Rolling Stone, and after his time with the magazine he went undercover as a high school student in order to pen the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. As a writer-director, he carved out a niche for his warm, humanistic films, which tend to make liberal use of impeccably-chosen rock’n’roll soundtracks. After the success of Almost Famous, Crowe decided to try something new, making the mindbending thriller Vanilla Sky. However, many critics and audience members were unamused, and although the film did well at the box office (largely due to the presence of Tom Cruise), it’s currently remembered as an interesting failure. After this strange trip outside his comfort zone, Elizabethtown was supposed to be a return for Crowe to the kind of movie he made better than anyone.

But then, a funny thing happened- the return to glory never happened. At its premiere in Toronto, Elizabethtown received buzz that was middling at best, hostile at worst. Crowe’s film- which made the festival circuit in a rough cut- was later shorn of twenty minutes, with the film’s original ending jettisoned completely. But the damage had already been done, as Elizabethtown, no matter what form it’s in, still hasn’t recovered from that initial drubbing. If Vanilla Sky was a strange experiment on Crowe’s part to branch out to a new format, Elizabethtown was treated as one too many trips to the same creative well. Suddenly, the style that had audiences had loved in Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous wasn’t working anymore.

Yet I’m here not to bury Elizabethtown but to praise it. The film is far from perfect, but it’s hard to hate a movie that’s as unabashedly sincere as this one. Elizabethtown is a big shaggy dog of a movie, one that stumbles around and makes too much noise but which it’s not impossible not to love at least a little. It’s not remotely one of Crowe’s better films, but it’s much better than its reputation would suggest.

Admittedly, it took me more than one viewing of the film to come around to this realization. After one viewing of Elizabethtown, I wrote that the film displayed “all of Crowe’s worst tendencies as a writer-director- up-with-people soliloquies, an overreliance on classic rock to bear the story’s emotional load- with almost none of his previous works’ better qualities.” Yet while I still see the elements I objected to the first time around, I don’t object to them nearly as much now. Is it a case of lowered expectations? Perhaps. I wanted another film of the caliber of Almost Famous, and Elizabethtown didn’t deliver in that respect. But I think there's more to it than that.

One of my biggest objections the first time around was to what I termed Crowe’s “relentless humanism”- his need to inject joy and life-affirming sentiment into practically every corner of the story. On top of that, little details kept eating at me- the fact that a major American company wouldn’t have a contingency plan that would prevent them from taking a bath on a billion-dollar campaign, or that a woman with a job and a life would somehow find time to map out a days-long journey (complete with annotated maps and corresponding mix CDs) for a man she’d met only days before. Actually, the entire character of Claire (played by Kirsten Dunst) seemed pretty far-fetched to me, a Crowe fantasy girl much like Almost Famous’ Penny Lane, only bearing next to no relation to the real world.

Yet after further review it’s pretty clear that Crowe wasn’t striving for realism with Elizabethtown. True, there are no mythical beasties or far-flung settings to clue the audience in to the fact that liberal suspension of disbelief will be required, but I believe Crowe intends the film not as a naturalistic representation of the world, but as an emotional odyssey through his own sensibility. Crowe leads his protagonist Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) on a journey from the brink of death back into life, spurred on by the memory of his father and the dogged persistence of Claire. And if Claire isn’t particularly convincing as a fleshed-out character, she’s such an effective catalyst that she works in the context of this story.

And along the journey, Crowe supplies a number of lovely scenes that make the occasional rough patch that much easier to take. Listen to the human cacophony that buzzes around the home of Drew’s Aunt Dora (played by the Food Network’s Paula Deen)- a flurry of activity that stands in sharp rebuke to Drew’s solitary lifestyle. Observe the perfect little scene that takes place between Drew and his slacker cousin Jessie (Paul Schneider, giving the film’s best supporting performance), culminating in the line, “yeah, I don’t know my dad very well either.” And even Crowe’s omnipresent soundtrack works surprisingly well, especially during Drew’s climactic road trip. If some of the music choices feel too on-the-nose, that’s pretty much the point, and if you don’t like Elton John’s “My Father’s Gun,” then there’s really no hope left for you.

As I said before, Elizabethtown has a number of problems. For example, Bloom’s performance is inconsistent- though he does have some nice moments- and Crowe really should have toned down some of the voiceover narration and dialogue (“the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened”- I mean, really?). Yet the more cynical films I see, the more I’m inclined to forgive a filmmaker like Crowe who clearly pours his heart into a film. In Elizabethtown’s final voiceover, Drew quotes a slogan of the British Air Force: “those who risk, win.” Crowe takes some big chances in Elizabethtown, and even if they don’t all pay off, the film has won me over. In two tries, yes, but better late than never.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Rising Sun (1993, Philip Kaufman)

Paul Clark — Fri, 23 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Normally, I try not to get hung up on whether a movie is commercial. While it’s undeniable that films that are intended for a large audience have to satisfy a different set of expectations than those that aren’t, I generally do my best to consider the movie based on how well it succeeds in doing what it sets out to do. However, it’s undeniable that some filmmakers have sensibilities that are well-suited to commercial filmmaking, and others who don’t. Some of our best filmmakers (like Martin Scorsese) are even able to move back and forth between big-budget filmmaking and more personal work. Others have a harder time with it. One director who falls into the latter category is Philip Kaufman, and nowhere is this more apparent than his 1993 film Rising Sun.

Rising Sun was based on a novel by Michael Crichton, whose work was experiencing a surge in popularity in the early nineties. Crichton’s novel combined the ever-popular murder mystery genre with the then-current topic of Japanese encroachment on the American business market. Rising Sun wasn’t one of Crichton’s best novels, but there was potential there for an interesting film, and the choice of Kaufman to direct was inspired. Kaufman had been working for almost three decades, directing eccentric twists on popular genre films like 1972’s The Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid and the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But his best-known work came in the 1980s, with his rich adaptations of tricky works of literature including The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Henry & June.

It’s clear from Kaufman’s pedigree that Fox was looking for a classy, A-list adaptation of Crichton’s bestseller. However, I’m not sure classy was the way to go with Rising Sun. This is a story that incorporates such elements as boardroom intrigue, high-tech surveillance, the Japanese “shadow world” of Los Angeles, and a woman who gets off on being asphyxiated. Yet Kaufman directs the film like it’s high drama. The result is lifeless and inert. And if there’s one thing you don’t want in a movie where a character eats sushi off a woman’s bare breasts (with a nipple/sake chaser), it’s inertia.

But if Rising Sun is a washout as a guilty-pleasure entertainment, it’s just as uncompelling as an exposé of Japanese culture. When it was first published, Crichton’s novel drew fire from Japanese-American groups for its portrayal of their business culture as being ruthless and conniving. But even when I saw the film back in 1993, most of the more shocking details seemed pretty quaint. Granted, some of the more supposedly anti-Asian elements were toned down for the movie, but no matter which form it took, Rising Sun had surprisingly little insight into Japanese culture that hadn’t been expressed in a more interesting way elsewhere.

Which leaves us only with the murder mystery, which offers few surprises. Early in the film, Sean Connery’s wise Capt. John Connor tells Wesley Snipes’ Lt. Web Smith, “When something seems too good to be true, then it’s not true.” Not particularly sage advice, but apparently advice that was heeded by Kaufman, Crichton, and co-screenwriter Michael Backes. Why else would they waste almost an hour setting up an obvious decoy villain? Once it becomes clear that the film is content to cycle through every twist and turn we expect from it- the fake villain, the heroes getting thrown off the case, the ugly revelations about their pasts, the emergence of the real villain, and so on- all that’s left is counting down the minutes between “surprise” revelations. And at 129 minutes, that’s a lot of counting.

Kaufman has always had a knack for casting, and in 1993, a movie top-lined by Connery and Snipes still qualified as an A-list production. For his part, Snipes is pretty solid in the film. I’ve long believed Snipes to be undervalued as an actor, due first to his career long being mired in forgettable action fare, then more recently because of his legal problems. Web Smith isn’t a great part- certainly not as flashy as his supporting role in Mo’ Better Blues- but he does all he can with a character who’s essentially playing straight man to Connery. I especially like his slow burn moments, when he tries desperately to maintain his cool in the middle of confounding and/or ridiculous circumstances. Crichton objected to Fox’s casting of Snipes in a role that was written as white man, but I think that it works here, giving the film a complicated yet sympathetic lead in a way that grounds the story.

Connery, on the other hand, is content to coast through the film, propelled largely by his own presence. Crichton famously wrote the role of John Connor especially the Scots legend, but both the character and the performance are something of a dud. Connery’s role consists primarily of being right all the time and deigning to offer advice to those less enlightened than he. Unfortunately, this arrogance extends to the performance itself, with Connery (who also executive-produced) putting forth no more effort than necessary to earn his pay.

What’s more, Kaufman and Crichton take every opportunity they can to underline exactly how wise Connor is, most notably by pitting him against vulgar anti-Japanese Lt. Graham (Harvey Keitel), who refers to the Japanese as “nips” and decries their presence in this country. Unfortunately for the film, Keitel’s live-wire performance upstages Connery’s self-important one, with Keitel getting almost all of the best lines (my favorite being his declining of an offer of sushi: “no thanks. If I get a craving for mercury, I’ll eat a thermometer”).

When I look at Kaufman’s filmography, I can’t help but marvel at some of the novels he’s adapted for the screen. After all, here’s a guy who has successfully adapted some near-unadaptable material, including books by Tom Wolfe and Milan Kundera. Who would have thought it would be Michael Crichton who would defeat him? But just because Crichton’s books seemingly adapt themselves doesn’t mean that Kaufman was the right director for the job. As a director who specialized in literate fare, scenes like the one in which Wesley Snipes is attacked in the middle of a raid by an irate nude woman just aren’t in his wheelhouse. Unfortunately, Rising Sun was the beginning of a downturn in Kaufman’s career, leading first to the respectfully yet hardly enthusiastically-received Quills seven years later, then another misguided commercial project, Twisted, in 2004. Hopefully, one of his announced upcoming projects- perhaps his proposed Nicholas Ray film Interrupted- will get him back on track.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Wes Anderson)

Paul Clark — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Wes Anderson is something of a polarizing figure among cinephiles. For every one who believes he’s a gifted filmmaker with an irresistible comic sensibility, there’s another who finds his work too self-satisfied. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground, and Anderson seems to be fine with this, as his style has become quirkier and more eccentric with each film he makes. For years I’ve been in the pro-Anderson camp, and I’ve often found myself defending movies like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou against those who found them insufferable. But when I first saw The Darjeeling Limited, I had to admit that the naysayers had a point.

Still, at the time I was reluctant to write off Darjeeling as a failed effort on Anderson’s part. Yes, I didn’t respond very well to it, I wondered if my reaction was based on my disappointment at the film being somewhat less than totally awesome. I decided to give the film a little distance and revisit it after it was released on DVD, so that I might be able to approach it with some perspective. And so I watched it again this past weekend, and this second viewing mostly confirmed my initial misgivings. The Darjeeling Limited isn’t a total botch, but it’s definitely the least of Anderson’s films, and the one in which the limitations of his style really come through most clearly.

One of the most common objections that’s raised to Anderson’s work has to do with his visual style, in which he situates his characters in storybook-style tableaux. In Anderson’s films, there’s always some curious knick knack or peripheral detail at the corner of the frame. But while in previous films, all of these sly little jokes added up to create convincing and original environments for the characters- remember the underwear painting in Eli Cash’s house?- here they just become oppressive. Anderson and production designer Mark Friedberg let their imaginations run wild in creating a colorful version of India, but the small bits of design business don’t really add up to anything, so instead of creating a delightful world for the film, the style instead becomes oppressive, like it’s been art-directed to death.

Of course, some of this problem might have been alleviated had the world created by Anderson been populated by vivid characters, but sadly, it’s not. Darjeeling focuses on the travels of the Whitman brothers- played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman- as they venture across India in an attempt to reconnect with each other and have a shared spiritual experience. However, none of the characters is drawn with very much depth, with each being defined primarily by his quirks. Faring worst is Schwartzman as little brother Jack. Jack is meant to be a sensitive writer who is still reeling from the disillusion of a longstanding relationship (part of which we see in the film’s companion piece Hotel Chevalier), but I never felt a thing for the guy. Part of the problem is Schwartzman’s performance- perfect as he was for Rushmore, he’s not a very expressive actor, certainly not soulful enough to pull off a character who should by rights be an emotional linchpin for the film.

All of Anderson’s recent films are in some way or other about family, whether the bond is one of blood or, more commonly, a surrogate family arrangement. The Darjeeling Limited is no exception, but what it lacks is a character who stands outside the family unit, grounding the more whimsical and dysfunctional aspects of the family unit. Frankly, Darjeeling needs a character like this, because without it the story becomes a parade of quirkiness. Even Adrien Brody’s Peter, who appears most likely to become the pragmatist of the group, ends up getting caught on the wavelength of the other characters.

But perhaps most annoying is how on-the-nose certain elements of the film are. Anderson has always had a tendency to use symbolism in his work- like the shark that represents death in The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou- but never have the symbols clanged so loudly as they do in The Darjeeling Limited. For example, as if Owen Wilson’s bandaged head doesn’t make it clear enough that he’s been psychologically scarred, Anderson includes a scene in which Wilson removes his bandages in front of his brothers, looks at his scars, and says, “I guess I’ve still got some healing to do.” The train itself is pretty clearly meant to symbolize life, which Anderson makes explicit in an admittedly pretty neat scene in which various supporting characters are shown living their own lives in individual train cars. But the most egregious use of symbolism gone haywire is the use of the Whitmans’ dead father’s custom-made monogrammed baggage, which they carry along with them. The film’s climactic scene finds the boys chasing down a departing train and finally having to leave behind their baggage in order to catch it. Needless to say, the thundering obviousness of the scene is sort of insulting.

All of this is not to say that The Darjeeling Limited is without any merit whatsoever. Anderson is too talented a director to make a worthless, uninteresting film, and Darjeeling contains its share of delights. For one thing, its opening scene is brilliant, so much so that the rest of the film is all the more disappointing in comparison. In addition, the film has another of Anderson’s characteristically wonderful soundtracks, this one packed full of music from films directed by James Ivory and Satyajit Ray. However, these delights are modest compared to the film’s many faults. Hell, I haven’t even gotten around to mentioning the parallel scenes in which Wilson is taken to task for ordering dinner for his brothers, and the one where the boys’ long-lost mother (Anjelica Huston) does exactly the same thing. Hardly subtle, and sadly, all too typical of Anderson’s approach here.

Most filmmakers have a comfort zone as far as style and material are concerned, and many of the films I’ve written about so far in this series have failed because their directors have stepped too far out of this comfort zone. But The Darjeeling Limited is exactly the opposite- everything about the film resides so squarely in Anderson’s wheelhouse that it practically feels like an inside joke. I still believe Anderson is a gifted filmmaker, but if he wants to grow as an artist he needs to find new wrinkles for his style, because if The Darjeeling Limited is any indication, diminishing returns have begun to set in, which if you’re an artist is the last thing you want to happen.

When Good Directors Go Bad: For Love of the Game (1999, Sam Raimi)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of his career, Sam Raimi has been a hero to genre lovers everywhere. It was his debut feature The Evil Dead that first brought Raimi to the attention of gorehounds, and his subsequent films further endeared him to his fans. With their outrageous camera movements, “splat-stick” comic violence, and the larger-than-life presence of Bruce Campbell, the Evil Dead trilogy gained Raimi a rabid cult following. However, he soon found himself confined in the horror genre. At first, he attempted to transfer his trademark style to other genres- crime story, comic book movie, Western- with varying degrees of success.

Finally, with 1998’s A Simple Plan, Raimi decided to keep his more gonzo impulses in check, and in doing so created his first “mature” work, and his most critically-acclaimed film to date. Having finally tasted mainstream acceptance, Raimi craved more, and decided to make a real stab at Hollywood respectability with his next project, an adaptation of Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game. After all, what’s more mainstream than a baseball movie starring Kevin Costner? Unfortunately for Raimi, For Love of the Game turned out to be his worst- and not coincidentally, his least Raimi-esque- film to date.

For about half its running time, the film is a decent, fairly entertaining baseball movie. Its hero, Billy Chapel (played by Costner), is a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher who suddenly finds himself throwing a perfect game in what may be the last start of his career. It’s been said that a perfect game is both the rarest and the most boring achievement in baseball, but Raimi keeps us involved by concentrating on Chapel- not only his actions and dialogue but also the thoughts that occur to him while he’s on the mound. It’s a neat touch whenever Chapel tunes out the hostile Yankee Stadium crowd with the mantra, “clear the mechanism.” By the time the game reaches its last few innings, we can more or less predict what the outcome will be, but Raimi has nonetheless done a pretty good job getting us to root for Chapel to finish the perfect game.

However, For Love of the Game isn’t content simply to be a baseball movie, and almost none of the scenes that take place off the baseball field are any good. Faring worst is the movie’s principal non-baseball storyline, which traces the trajectory of a relationship between Chapel and New York single mother Jane, played by Kelly Preston. Despite taking up nearly half the movie, the relationship between the two is ill-defined. As a result, there’s a highlight-reel to the storyline, amounting to little more than a series of flirtations, breakups, reconciliations, as well as a whole lot of grief from Jane.

A big part of the problem in these scenes is Preston’s performance. Preston, never a particularly good actress, is out of her element as a leading lady. Clearly overmatched and nervous opposite Costner (who’s pretty good here), she gives an overly fussy performance that seesaws constantly between the two notes she knows how to play- beaming and neurotic. Consequently, Jane comes off more as a pill than as the complicated, conflicted adult she’s meant to be.

It would be one thing if the film realized or even acknowledged what a prickly character Jane is, but instead it paints her as the foundation in Billy’s emotional life. Throughout his perfect game, Billy flashes back to his life with Jane- who just left him that morning- and it’s clear that we’re meant to care about whether these two lovers end up together in the end. Instead, all I wanted to do was to keep watching the game. After all, everyone falls in love sooner or later, but only seventeen major league pitchers have ever pitched a perfect game. Talk about burying the lead.

After For Love of the Game met with a critical drubbing and large-scale audience indifference, Raimi decided it was time to re-examine his career path again. First he rebounded with the flawed but interesting Southern Gothic thriller The Gift, after which he made his most popular films to date, the Spider-Man trilogy. With the Spider-Man films, Raimi finally found mainstream success without sacrificing any of his inimitable style, which helped all three of the Spidey films become the highest-grossing superhero movies ever made. And all of them- yes, even the third one- were better than For Love of the Game.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Year of the Horse (1997, Jim Jarmusch)

Paul Clark — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

For almost three decades now, Jim Jarmusch has been one of the heroes of American independent cinema. The deadpan humor and multicultural vibe of his best works have influenced directors worldwide, and his maverick sensibility has practically defined the term “independent filmmaker.” While this sensibility hasn’t endeared him to the Hollywood bigwigs (his insistence that he retain the rights to the negatives of all his films would be a dealbreaker for most studios) it’s made him something of a hero to followers of indie-film, because he’s a director who gets away with making whatever he damn pleases.

Jarmusch’s 1995 masterpiece Dead Man marked his first collaboration with legendary rocker Neil Young, of whom Jarmusch was a longtime fan. Young’s mindbending score was divisive- Roger Ebert famously likened the sound to Young dropping his guitar over and over- but the film cemented a friendship between the two artists. So for his next film Jarmusch decided to go on the road with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, with the goal of making the concert film Year of the Horse. It was Jarmusch’s first documentary.

A few weeks ago I spotlighted in this column The Dark Wind, the sole fiction feature from master documentarian Errol Morris. For Jarmusch, Year of the Horse is no less misbegotten. Now, I don’t begrudge filmmakers- least of all gifted, independent-minded ones like Jarmusch- their attempts to break out of their filmmaking comfort zones. However, with Year of the Horse, Jarmusch shows almost no affinity for the documentary form.

In its opening credits, Year of the Horse proclaims that it was “proudly made in Super-8,” and the film is suffused with a lo-fi aesthetic that’s similar to most of Young’s best work. However, in such films as Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Dead Man, Jarmusch’s style is tight and deliberate, with little room for the kinds of accidents that one normally finds in a documentary of this sort. As a result, the film feels less like a charmingly hardscrabble Young work than a sloppy, amateurish mess.

Part of the problem is the music in the film. While I prefer Young’s rootsy albums like Harvest to his Crazy Horse work, the songs in the film are pretty solid. However, their concert performances have a tendency to drag on (and on and on), with lots of onstage improvisation between Young and his bandmates. While jamming can make for a great concert experience, it’s tough to make it interesting to those who aren’t actually in attendance, and Jarmusch never figures out how to make it work. Rather than focusing on the audience’s reaction to the music or really zeroing in on the musical chemistry between the band, Jarmusch too often cuts away from the concert to often random and usually uncompelling images.

Some of these images are merely distracting, as when Jarmusch intercuts footage of clouds or a passing train into the songs. But others are downright puzzling, as when the film cuts away from an onstage performance of “Fuckin’ Up” to show some decades-old footage of Crazy Horse bassist Billy Talbot shoplifting and getting arrested, a hamfisted attempt on Jarmusch’s part to turn the song into a music video, another form he isn’t particularly good at. Either way, the cutaways don’t help. Whereas Jarmusch seems to intend them to add interest to the stage performance, they merely serve to remind us of how the song is dragging on well past its logical end (one number finishes with the band playing the same chord nearly two dozen times). The only time the cutaways actually serve their intended purpose is when Jarmusch juxtaposes the 1996 concert performance of “Like a Hurricane” with footage of the same song taken from their 1986 tour. In this footage, in which Young already looks haggard, Jarmusch comes closest to illustrating the idea of how long Neil Young and Crazy Horse have been in the game.

At several times during the (mostly superfluous) band interviews in Year of the Horse, Crazy Horse guitarist Frank “Pancho” Sampedro remarks that Jarmusch will never be able to compress three decades of Crazy Horse history into a documentary. However, based on the evidence on display in the film, two hours seems far too long. I’m sure there were plenty of vivid experiences in the history of the band, but few of them appear to have been “proudly filmed on Super-8.” Seeing as how the most memorable thing that happens offstage in Year of the Horse is a floral centerpiece catching on fire, perhaps Jarmusch would have been better off sticking to the music itself.

But as I said, he’s always marched to his own drummer, and fortunately for his fans his next film was 1999’s fascinating Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, that wonderful one-of-a-kind combination of aging wiseguys and Hagakure-reading lone gunmen. In other words, definitely a step in the right direction. Jarmusch’s next film, The Limits of Control, is currently on track for a 2009 premiere.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Dark Wind (1991, Errol Morris)

Paul Clark — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

If there's one thing I've discovered while writing this column, it's that When Good Directors Go Bad™, they usually do so in ways that are strangely compelling. While some of the films they make are merely small missteps and others are unmitigated disasters, generally the films will show enough of the director's style to be of interest as part of the filmmaker's oeuvre as a whole. Yet occasionally, a great director will make a film that just sort of recedes into the background of his career, insignificant even as a footnote to an important career. The Dark Wind, Errol Morris' sole fiction feature to date, is such a film.

The Dark Wind, based on a novel by Tony Hillerman, tells the story of Officer Jim Chee (Lou Diamond Phillips), a young Navajo working as a policeman on his reservation. Most of the time, he's assigned to relatively small duties, like staking out a road that's sometimes traveled by bootleggers, or keeping watch over a disputed well. But when Chee witnesses a mysterious plane crash while keeping watch one night, he stumbles onto the biggest case of his young career, involving murder, drug trafficking, dirty feds, and longstanding tribal disputes between the Navajo and Hopi. With help from Hopi deputy "Cowboy" Dashee (Gary Farmer), Chee tries to get to the bottom of the mystery.

The film's storyline is a pretty basic murder mystery, which aside from the Native American elements could describe thousands of movies. So what drew Morris to Hillerman's novel? When he was asked this question by an interviewer, Morris replied, "I did this for the same reason that everybody does everything in Hollywood: vanity and greed." Morris had had no small amount of difficulty in making his previous films — it supposedly took over two years for him to round up all of the relevant interview subjects to appear in The Thin Blue Line, for example — and no doubt an easy money project looked mighty appealing to him after that.

Trouble is, nobody involved with the film seems to be trying very hard, least of all the director. Morris, who has created some of the most visually arresting documentaries ever made, shows little facility at shooting a fiction film. The Dark Wind is flat and affectless, not in a rigorous way like a Robert Bresson film, but in a way that feels lazy and slapdash. The result is a movie with no style, no momentum, and above all no suspense. Strange, that the director who had turned a real-life case into an honest-to-goodness suspense documentary with The Thin Blue Line can't do the same with a fictional murder mystery.

The listlessness extends to the film's performances. At the time, Lou Diamond Phillips was at the tale end of his brief flirtation with Hollywood leading man status, and he gives such a recessive and uncharismatic performance in The Dark Wind it's easy to see why he didn't become a big star. Most of the supporting performances are forgettable, ranging from mediocre, like Fred Ward as the Lieutenant in charge of Chee, to the downright awful, notably Guy Boyd as sleazy federal agent Johnson. The one exception is the ever-watchable Gary Farmer, who plays his role with a casual charm that's sorely missing from the proceedings.

Of course, some of the blame for the film's failure should be laid at the feet of executive producer Robert Redford. Supposedly Morris had such a difficult time working with Redford that he left the project before it was completed. Some of the film's flaws can probably be chalked up to Redford's involvement, such as its ambling pacing. Other problems were mostly likely an attempt on Redford's part to salvage the project. I hope for Morris' sake that the awful voiceover was Redford's idea.

Yet I'm afraid the lion's share of blame must be given to Morris, who was simply never a good fit for the material. There are occasional touches that feel of a piece with the rest of his work — for example, a former carny who seems to be there for local color purposes until the Law of Economy of Characters kicks in. Mostly though, The Dark Wind comes off as a for-hire job, not unlike Morris' commercials for Miller High Life, but with less of a personal stamp. As Frank Zappa once said, Morris was "only in it for the money," and after a while even that ceased to be enough.

Fortunately, Morris soon made a return to the documentaries that have always been his forte. The next year, he collaborated with none other than Stephen Hawking on the film version of A Brief History of Time. This kicked off a fruitful period for Morris, in which he made his celebrated documentaries Fast, Cheap and out of Control (1997), Mr. Death (1999), and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War. His latest film, Standard Operating Procedure, premiered to Morris' usual enthusiastic reviews at this year's Berlinale.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Texasville (1990, Peter Bogdanovich)

Paul Clark — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There's a general rule of thumb that any sequel worth making is generally made within four or five years of the original film. Naturally, there are exceptions to this rule, but they're few and far between. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, anyone? It's best for sequel makers to strike while the iron is hot, not merely from a business point of view, but also to build on the goodwill of the original. Yet the cinematic landscape is littered with sequels that arrived well past their franchise's expiration date. For every Before Sunset, there's a dozen Oliver's Storys, standing on the dusty highway of cinema history, angrily shaking a tire iron at the pop-culture bus as it passes them by.

1990 brought us three notable examples of this phenomenon, all follow-ups to canonical classics of 1970s Hollywood cinema. The most famous of the bunch was, of course, The Godfather, Part III, an admittedly unnecessary film that's still mostly better than its rep. Then there's The Two Jakes, the Jack Nicholson-directed sequel to Chinatown that's a mess but boasts a fine Harvey Keitel performance. The worst of the lot is easily Peter Bogdanovich's Texasville.

Some of you might not remember this, but Peter Bogdanovich was once known primarily as a fine filmmaker, rather than for playing Dr. Melfi's shrink on The Sopranos or as the boring dude who keeps turning up on DVD commentaries. But in his salad days as a filmmaker, he made a number of excellent films, with his 1971 film The Last Picture Show enduring as a honest-to-goodness masterpiece. But after his career cooled off — a cooling due in no small part to 1975's disastrous At Long Last Love — Bogdanovich had much more trouble getting films made, so he finally decided to make a Last Picture Show sequel, adapting the second Anarene novel by Larry McMurtry and reuniting the lion's share of the original cast.

Some sequels exist to build on and deepen the story of the originals, while others are more about catching up with characters we've gotten to know and love some years down the line. In theory, Texasville should fall into the latter category, but this can be a tricky thing to pull off, especially in a setting like Anarene where everyone knows each other and not a whole lot changes over the years. So instead of exploring how many of these old relationships have played out since the last film, Bogdanovich tightens his focus to Duane Jackson (played in both films by Jeff Bridges), the former football captain who now primarily exists to be picked on by his wife, children, and life in general.

Part of the problem with Texasville, and a major reason why it can't even come within spitting distance of The Last Picture Show, is because Bogdanovich is no longer the young tyro he was in the seventies. That's apparent from the film's opening shot, where we see the Texas landscape in lifelike color, whereas Last Picture Show was in beautiful black and white. But the new color scheme is the least of Texasville's issues. The original film was a realistic fifties-era slice of life about a town so small that there was little to do but go to the movies and fool around as each day brought you a little closer to death. It was a world so desolate that the movie theatre ended up closing.

Texasville is also founded upon the same conception of the town, but it's hard to reconcile the two worlds. The original film's roads and houses were almost always empty, but the more modern version of Anarene is a flurry of activity. Yes, the characters still screw around, but it's played almost as a joke rather than the sad reality we saw in the original film. It's as though Bogdanovich no longer had the nerve to play the story as tragedy anymore, so he settled instead on farce.

Making Duane the central character in the film was probably a mistake as well, although I suppose it's as much McMurtry's fault as anyone's. But regardless of who's to blame, Duane wasn't a character we especially cared about in The Last Picture Show, and while Bridges is a fine actor, even he can't distract us from the fact that we're too busy wondering what happened to the more interesting folks. Honestly, did McMurtry and Bogdanovich really think audiences had waited nineteen years to find out what would happen if Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) came back into his life? Or that he now has a son who can't keep it in his pants, just like his daddy was back in high school?

Texasville is almost perverse in the way it avoids rekindling the old feelings that were originally summoned up by The Last Picture Show. Consider the original film's protagonist Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), who's now relegated to a supporting part in the story. Aside from the dearly departed Sam the Lion (played in the original by Ben Johnson), the heart of The Last Picture Show was Sonny's relationship with Ruth Popper, played in both films by Cloris Leachman.

Yet Texasville gives the two almost no screen time together. The film practically forgets Sonny altogether at several points, returning to him every so often to show him getting steadily crazier, as when he visits the abandoned (after thirty years!) Royal Theatre to "watch movies in the sky.” Even when Sonny moves in with Ruth after a nervous breakdown, we never see them together as we did in the first film. Does Bogdanovich even care? Surely he could have found some tender moments between Sonny and Ruth had he not devoted so much time to, say, an awful scene in which Sonny's troublemaking twins spearhead a mass egging of the town's centennial festivities.

While Texasville isn't the all-time worst sequel to a great film, it may be the most disheartening. To see Bogdanovich so colossally misjudge what made The Last Picture Show so great makes me wonder whether he ever knew in the first place. In a way, the fate of the Royal Theatre sums up the difference between these two movies. In the original film, it played a central role in the town, and brought joy and goodwill into the lives of its residents. In Texasville, it's a ruin, an eyesore, a pale shadow of what it once was, and you pretty much have to be crazy to go there.

When Good Directors Go Bad: She Hate Me (2004, Spike Lee)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In addition to being one of America’s most celebrated directors, Spike Lee is one of its most productive, with more than two dozen feature films, documentaries, and television films to his credit along with innumerable shorts, commercials and music videos. Unfortunately, sometimes this productivity has led to a decrease in consistency. Lee has made a number of masterpieces in his career, but he’s also made his share of stinkers, the most notorious of which was 2004’s She Hate Me.

Now, if there’s one word that would never be used to describe Spike Lee, it’s timid. After all, he’s the man who in only his second feature made a campus musical about skin color (School Daze), who made a racially-motivated riot the climactic sequence of Do the Right Thing, and who made the first Hollywood film to actually address 9/11 (25th Hour). In addition, Lee has always been driven by current events. In the words of another Lee, the late Arthur, “the news today will be the movies of tomorrow,” and with She Hate Me, Spike Lee addressed many hot topics of the day- same-sex parenting, Enron, corrupt pharmaceuticals companies, the stereotype of the sexually-powerful black man, the then-recently-disbanded XFL, and the declining state of African-American families.

Sounds like a lot, right? The trouble is that Lee doesn’t quite know how to deal with it all. As a result, She Hate Me is all over the map, not only story-wise, but tonally as well. In one scene, the film’s protagonist, Jack (Anthony Mackie), might be having a heartfelt conversation about values with his father or his best friend. In the next, the film will become an outrageous sex comedy in which Jack beds down the entire starting five of a woman’s basketball team, powered only by Viagra and Red Bull. For long portions of the film, Lee seems to almost forget about the insider-trading scandal in which his former boss has implicated him. The film has no real direction or momentum, so it devolves into one damn thing after another, and by the time Jack has been called before a Senate subcommittee, we’ve long since thrown up our hands.

Another problem is that the comedic moments don’t work. There’s nothing inherently funny about the film’s edgiest and most infamous plot strand- Jack’s side job as a hired stud paid to impregnate rich lesbians (including characters played by Kerry Washington and Monica Bellucci, among others) at $10,000 a pop. So it falls to Lee to make these scenes work, and he’s not up to the task. Looking back at Lee’s career, I can’t help but notice that many of his worst-reviewed films (She Hate Me, Girl 6, the better-than-its-rep Bamboozled) are comedies. That seems a little strange, considering how wonderful She’s Gotta Have It is, and how funny his non-comedy films can be- remember the old guys on the corner in Do the Right Thing or Denzel Washington’s unconventional detective in Inside Man?

So why does Lee have such a problem with outright comedy? In She Hate Me, it just feels like he’s trying too hard. It’s not enough that Jack sleeps with five lesbians in one night- Lee goes overboard to make these scenes as outrageous as possible, crafting quick-cutting montages of Jack’s conquests, turning the women into overpowering stereotypes who call him “bitch boy” (among other things), and then showing Jack and his “magic wand dick” giving them all massive screaming orgasms in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be lesbians. If that’s not enough, Lee includes several animated sequences in which a sea of sperm (all bearing Jack’s face) race toward a waiting egg. It all gets to be too much after a while.

In the end, what’s the point that Lee is trying to make? I think Lee’s message is a simple one, and not a new one for him- “do the right thing.” Trouble is, it takes roughly 2 ¼ hours (!) to get to that point, by which time we’ve long since gotten lost amid all the zany sex antics and the whistleblowing scandal and the wacked-out digressions in the plot (John Turturro riffing on Don Corleone, anyone?). As sprawling and ambitious as Lee’s best films can be, they always maintain a clear focus, but that focus escaped him in She Hate Me, and this as much as anything else is what sinks it. Yet, as bad as it is, it’s certainly never boring. Given the ill-fitting parts of the story, it’s hard to imagine it working at all, but most filmmakers would have tried to rein it in and play it with a straight face. Lee goes in the opposite direction, and while it still doesn’t work, I’ll have a hard time forgetting it. Whether that’s a good thing, I’ll leave for you to decide.

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Brothers Grimm (2005, Terry Gilliam)

Paul Clark — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Terry Gilliam is as widely known for his production troubles as he is for the quality of his films. Gilliam has had to contend with studio interference on nearly all his recent films, and has weathered such troubles as litigation over screenplay credit on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a literal pain-in-the-ass star who shut down production on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and the death of leading man Heath Ledger while shooting his latest project, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. It’s gotten to the point where it’s a shock when a Gilliam project runs smoothly.

After finally abandoning Don Quixote, Gilliam needed a new project, and around the same time, Bob and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax were looking for a fantasy franchise to cash in on the recent success of Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Of course, the eternal troublemaker Gilliam and the famously meddling Weinsteins were hardly an ideal match, but I’d guess that Gilliam was so frustrated with not making films that he took The Brothers Grimm so that he could keep working.

However, from the beginning there were problems. Both Gilliam and leading man Matt Damon wanted Oscar nominee Samantha Morton for the film’s female lead, but the Weinsteins vetoed her, allegedly because she wasn’t deemed attractive enough. Let me repeat that: she wasn’t good-looking enough for these guys. Another point of contention was a prosthetic nose that Gilliam wanted Damon to wear in the film, but which was nixed by the studio. And the troubles continued throughout production (regular Gilliam cinematographer Nicola Pecorini was fired mid-filming) and even post-production (the film’s most expensive effects sequence was cut from the film after the effects were nearly finished). Gilliam and the studio differed so greatly over the film’s final cut — surprising, I realize — that Gilliam placed the editing on hold for six months and shot his subsequent film, Tideland, in the interim.

But though The Brothers Grimm clearly suffered from studio meddling, Gilliam is hardly blameless. The screenplay is mediocre at best, cribbing the main storyline of The Frighteners — a charlatan exploiting people’s superstitions for personal gain suddenly comes up against a genuine supernatural threat. Into this formula, Gilliam, screenwriting collaborator Tony Grisoni, and Miramax house scribe Ehren Kruger shoehorn as many references to Grimm fairy tales as they can, most of which practically club you over the head with their obviousness.

Perhaps sensing how thin the material was, Gilliam tries to compensate with his direction, which is brimful with such familiar Gilliam tropes as swooping camera shots, wide-angle lenses, and all manner of extreme tilts. Likewise, he directs his supporting players to go wayyyyyyyyy over the top instead of giving them three-dimensional characters. Most embarrassing is Peter Stormare as the bumbling Cavaldi, giving less a performance than a failed parody of commedia dell’arte-style acting. At one point, Cavaldi says of the German tongue, “every word is like an execution,” but the line would more aptly be applied to his performance.

Amidst the chaos, there are elements of The Brothers Grimm that work. Chiefly among them is the performance by Heath Ledger as the nebbishy Jakob Grimm, who actually believes in the stories that he and his brother are exploiting. Ledger makes the most of what he’s given to create a funny, surprisingly touching character who gives the film what little heart it contains. In 2005, Ledger was beginning to really demonstrate his range, and based on the evidence here we might have expected some richly comic performances in his future. Damon is solid as well in a more conventional role, but it’s Ledger who steals the show.

There are also a handful of magical moments in which Gilliam transcends the screenplay and lets his imagination run wild. Most effective is a scene in which a puddle of mud takes a human form to abduct a child, and it’s such a creepy image that not even a line pointing out that the mud-man is meant to be the Gingerbread Man can ruin it. I also like a macabre moment in which a girl is swallowed whole by a possessed horse, which Gilliam shows almost completely in shadow. And there’s a priceless bit involving a kitten, one of the few times in the film when Gilliam’s twisted sense of humor shines through.

After sticking it on the shelf for months, the Weinsteins released The Brothers Grimm in late summer 2005, as one of roughly a dozen films they dumped in theatres just prior to relinquishing Miramax to Disney. Leading up to the film’s release, the Weinsteins allegedly placed a gag order on Gilliam forbidding him to say anything against the film for fear that he’d try to sabotage its box-office chances. But Gilliam had mostly moved on, as Tideland would make its world premiere less than a month later. Tideland received many negative reviews, but love it or hate it, it’s unmistakably a Gilliam film, which is more than I can say about The Brothers Grimm.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 (2000, Joe Berlinger)

Paul Clark — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The box-office success of The Blair Witch Project made a sequel inevitable. However, despite the ongoing profitability of horror franchises, most sequels to classic genre films suck. Hoping to avoid falling into this trap, the bigwigs at Artisan Entertainment made an inspired choice for the sequel’s director: Joe Berlinger, an acclaimed documentarian who co-directed with Bruce Sinofsky the excellent Brother’s Keeper (1992) and the Paradise Lost films (1996 and 2000). Surely he would turn an admittedly unnecessary and money-grubbing sequel in an interesting direction, right?

Sadly, it wasn't to be. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 is not simply another in a seemingly endless line of lousy horror sequels. Tt’s practically unwatchable, easily the worst film I've watched yet for this series, which is no mean feat when you consider I've already reviewed The Serpent's Egg. The fact that I’ve had to see it twice in my life should dispel any illusions you might have that a critic’s work is glamorous.

Book of Shadows mostly ditches the faux-documentary style of the original film in favor of more conventional direction, but it still begins promisingly enough, as a take on the Blair Witch phenomenon as seen through the eyes of four Blair Witch enthusiasts visiting the film’s locations and the would-be tour guide who leads them on their journey. But after that interesting setup, the movie goes wrong. So, so very wrong.

Berlinger complained at the time of the film’s release that Artisan took the film from him, shot some new scenes, and re-cut it in order to make it more commercial. So it’s entirely possible that he’s not entirely to blame for the film’s overwhelming awfulness. To give him the benefit of the doubt, I’d guess that he probably had little say about the film’s gratuitous use of “boo!” moments, such as the brief flashbacks to the killings at the center of the story.

However, the problems with the film run far deeper than a handful of gratuitous scare tactics. For one thing, there’s the misguided use of the old unreliable narrator trick. It’s bad enough that the protagonists of Book of Shadows all conveniently black out just before they go on their killing spree and only discover their misdeeds after they’ve discovered the video footage. But the movie can’t even decide whether video is reliable- first we’re meant to buy that the killings (and drugs’n’booze filled Wiccan orgy beforehand) happened like we see on the tapes, but then the circumstances of Tristan’s death are differ between what we’re show in the film and the video footage of the incident. Or did the Blair Witch manipulate the footage? Oooooooooh, scary!

In addition, Berlinger should bear most of the blame for the amateur hour performances by most of the cast. It's difficult to say which of the principals is most embarrassing: Jeffrey Donovan as the ex-mental patient tour guide with his repertoire of roughly three Crazy Faces, Stephen Barker Turner and Tristen Skyler as the world’s blandest couple (no mean feat in their histrionic later scenes), and late-period Woody Allen supporting player Erica Leerhsen as the foxy Wiccan whose primary qualification for the role appears to be her willingness to disrobe. Of the principal cast, only Kim Director as the requisite Goth emerges with her dignity relatively intact, largely by virtue of playing the most grounded character. And the less said about lawman Lanny Flaherty, whose jaw-dropping performance is too broad to pass inspection in a barn-door factory, the better.

But what takes Book of Shadows from the simply awful to the truly reprehensible is the way it exploits the case of the West Memphis Three, the subject of Berlinger’s Paradise Lost films. In those films, Berlinger and Sinofsky documented the case of a group of young men who were convicted of the killings of three young children largely (in the film’s view) due to their affinity for black clothing and heavy metal music and their curiosity about witchcraft. Watching that film, one could see the sympathy the filmmakers had with these outsiders. By contrast, Book of Shadows paints its outsiders as a bunch of black-wearin’, metal-listenin’, witchcraft-lovin' crazies who are but a beer and a toke away from going a killing spree. In doing so, it essentially buys into the same anti-outsider hysteria that convicted the West Memphis Three. Near the end of Book of Shadows, as the survivors are being led into the police station, we overhear a newscaster who says the line, “sadly, as has happened so many times in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence.” Really, Berlinger- you ought to know better.

In an uncharacteristic display of good taste- or perhaps because they were simply sick of all things Blair Witch- the moviegoing public roundly rejected Book of Shadows. The film scared up barely 20% of the original’s domestic gross, thus causing a proposed prequel to be directed by original Blair Witch filmmakers Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick to be mothballed. Berlinger, no doubt smarting from his less-than-amiable flirtation with studio filmmaking, high-tailed it back to the land of documentaries, directing 2004’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and an episode of the mammoth History Channel miniseries Ten Days That Unexpectedly Changed America. And Artisan Entertainment, once riding high on the success of The Blair Witch Project, struggled for a few more years before being sold to Lionsgate in 2003.

Links to previous When Good Directors Go Bad columns can be found here.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Ishtar (1987, Elaine May)

Paul Clark — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

I don’t have a set method for choosing the subjects of my When Good Directors Go Bad columns. Occasionally, I’ll try to spotlight a director who recently released a new film, and once I even used an acclaimed filmmaker’s death as an excuse to re-examine his most notorious work (sorry, Michelangelo). But most of the time I’ll just write up whatever I can get my hands on in time. However, when I wrote a piece on Mike Nichols a few weeks ago, I knew there was only one logical follow-up: his former onstage partner Elaine May. And Elaine May meant one thing: Ishtar.

Elaine May was one of the great unheralded filmmaking talents of the 1970s. While guys like Scorsese, Coppola and Spielberg were turning Hollywood upside down, May carved out a fascinating niche for herself. All three of her 1970s films — A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, and Mikey and Nicky — were characterized by May’s probing curiosity about the male psyche and her ramshackle directing style. But if May appeared slapdash behind the camera, she was a perfectionist in the editing room, and both A New Leaf and Mikey and Nicky were taken out of her hands at various points in post-production.

Ishtar was May’s first effort behind the camera in a decade, and it seemed a strange project for her, considering her previous work. Gone was the misanthropic view of relationships found in A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid, and the caustic portrait of friendship in Mikey and Nicky. Instead, the film’s protagonists are a pair of chummy, not-too-bright aspiring singer-songwriters, Rogers (Warren Beatty) and Clarke (Dustin Hoffman). They’re lousy, but they’re endlessly enthusiastic about their work ("Shit, man," says Clarke to Rogers when they’re hammering out a new song, "when you’re on you’re on!"), and this attitude extends to their friendship.

Ishtar has amassed a cult following over the years, and watching the film’s opening half hour it’s easy to see why. When Rogers and Clarke sing songs like "(I’m Leaving Some) Love in My Will" before dumbfounded audiences, the movie is pretty priceless. The wonderfully awful songs were penned by Paul Williams (assisted by May and Hoffman), and Hoffman and Beatty are wonderful playing against type, with Hoffman as the would-be lothario and Beatty as a romantic sadsack. Had May simply made a film about these two guys trying to make a name for themselves as musicians, composing songs and performing, it might have been a comedy classic.

Alas, the movie isn’t called Rogers and Clarke. It’s called Ishtar, and before long the film drops its heroes off in the titular (fake) North African country, and drops most of the laughs with it. As the film progresses, Rogers and Clarke become pawns in a civil war involving a CIA agent (Charles Grodin), a band of revolutionaries led by sexy Isabelle Adjani, and an ancient map. Oh, and a blind camel.

Much of the film’s then-notorious $55-million price tag went to the scenes in North Africa, but almost nothing about these scenes works. I can’t decide if May simply miscalculated her strengths as a filmmaker, or if she decided sometime during production that her heart really wasn’t in the civil-war material but figured she might as well grit her teeth and finish anyway. Either way, it’s a little heartbreaking how far astray Ishtar has gone by the time Beatty, Hoffman, and Adjani are firing machine guns at a pair of CIA helicopters in the desert. If there’s any truth to the belief that a big budget is the enemy of comedy, then Ishtar is Exhibit A.

Most of the filmmakers I’ve spotlighted in this series have rebounded from their films to recapture their reputations, or at least to continue having productive careers. But Ishtar effectively torpedoed May’s career as a director — due both to its budget overruns and to May’s unwillingness to make nice with Hollywood — and she’s worked exclusively as a screenwriter and occasional actress since. It’s a shame, since I for one would love to see May direct another film. At a time when even "edgy" comedies like Juno are essentially warm and fuzzy, we need her prickly comedic sensibility more than ever.

When Good Directors Go Bad: Regarding Henry (1991, Mike Nichols)

Paul Clark — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

In the past four decades, the career of Mike Nichols has gone through its share of ups and downs. Nichols made his name as a director with a number of popular, acclaimed films, but he also has several inexplicable films to answer for. I might have spotlighted 2000’s awful What Planet Are You From? had Nathan Rabin not done so already. But Regarding Henry is a more than acceptable alternative, with the bonus of demonstrating the worst tendencies of Nichols’ later films.

Nichols has long been one of Hollywood’s go-to filmmakers for classy star vehicles, particularly “dramedies” geared to adults like Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge, and Primary Colors. But much of Nichols’ enduring critical rep still rests on his seminal early classics Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and (my favorite) Carnal Knowledge. Without these films, Nichols would be little more than a slightly more upscale version of Lasse Hallstrom.

In short, Regarding Henry is a pandering comfort blanket of a movie that’s smothering instead of cozy. It’s also a textbook White-Collar Guilt movie, in which an affluent protagonist (in this case, a lawyer played by Harrison Ford) suffers a tragedy (here, a shooting that causes memory loss) that forces him into a crisis of conscience that makes him a better person. Movies like this invariably divide people into two categories- morally-compromised rich people, and salt-of-the-earth poor people. This dichotomy feels like a cynical attempt on Hollywood’s part to flatter the less financially successful viewers while allowing the more privileged to vicariously experience the hero’s awakening before speeding home in their BMWs.

Regarding Henry, based on the first produced screenplay by Jeffrey (later J.J.) Abrams, contains no surprises on this front. In fact, the film is so intent on concentrating on the psychological stuff that it skates right through the physical healing process. Once Henry learns to walk and talk (his first word is “Ritz,” the significance of which feels like a bad joke) again, he’s soon ready to go home. After he arrives back in his expensive apartment, everything happens as it should- his once-rocky marriage is quickly mended, he becomes a better father, all that. Heck, the movie begins with Henry successfully smooth-talking a jury in defense of a hospital that’s being sued by a dying old man. If you can’t see where that subplot is going, then congratulations, because you’ve finally seen your first movie! Too bad it’s this one. And let’s not get started on the film’s simplistic view of minorities, especially Bill Nunn’s ever-cheerful Magical Black Man caregiver.

After his shooting, Henry’s memory loss causes him to regress to a state of childlike naïveté. But while Ford is about the 500th actor one would cast to play childlike, the movie itself does a bang-up job of regressing to a grade-school mindset. Regarding Henry is a movie in which the hero’s problems are solved by getting a puppy, moving to a new house, quitting his job, and pulling his daughter out of her exclusive boarding school. Sure, the money won’t hold out forever, but you don’t think about those things when you’re young, do you? The way Regarding Henry paints it, it’s a wonder more rich people haven’t tried to put themselves through the profound spiritual experience of getting shot in the head.

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When Good Directors Go Bad: 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992, Ridley Scott)

Peter Smith — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:00:00 GMT

The setup: To celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World, Paramount Pictures needed a filmmaker who could be counted upon to create a handsome and commercial film about the great man and his momentous voyage. Who better than Ridley Scott, a dependable stylist best known for Alien and Blade Runner, and whose faltering career had been revived the prior year with the critical and audience favorite Thelma and Louise?

What went wrong: Scott, for all his directing skill, has always been a journeyman, making films from material originated by others. Because of this, the screenplays are usually the keys to his films' success. While no one would deny that Columbus' story lends itself well to cinema, the 1492 script (credited to Roselyne Bosch) simply isn't very good, and Scott was unfortunately unable to cover that up with style.

One problem was the film's conception of Columbus himself. The real-life Columbus was a forward-thinking man, but he was also highly ambitious, and the film glosses over this aspect of his personality. Instead of a portrait of a man driven by his nature to seek greatness, 1492 gives us Columbus, the passionate idealist, selflessly dreaming of the future. The film's star, Gerard Depardieu, could have given us a fierce, larger-than-life Columbus, but he's largely called upon to play twinkly-eyed in the early scenes and disillusioned in the later ones.

Additionally, even with a two-and-a-half-hour running time, 1492 feels rushed. One never really feels the strain of the long ocean voyages — after the first one, Scott does away with them altogether. Likewise, character development is largely dictated through tonsorial choices — whereas Columbus shares the shaggy look of the men he commands, the bad guys invariably sport eccentric, intricate beards and hairdos. The most surprising thing about the violent, sneeringly-entitled nobleman Moxica (played by Michael Wincott) is that he doesn't have a mustache to twirl along with his Slayer-worthy flowing black hair. And Sigourney Weaver, playing Queen Isabella, has so little to work with that she mostly looks lost.

Finally, a lot of the film is hard to take seriously. Consider the scene in which a fist fight breaks out in a monastery; or the hurricane sequence, during which Columbus' native translator runs away after admonishing him, "You never learned my language;" or practically every scene involving Moxica or the sinister judge Bobadilla (Mark Margolis). 1492 tried to be the definitive Columbus movie, but the best it could manage was to be the best Columbus movie of 1992, and since the competition was Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, that's nothing to write home about.

The fallout: 1492: Conquest of Paradise failed with critics and bombed at the box office, and Scott floundered for the rest of the decade before he came roaring back with 2000's Best Picture Oscar-winner Gladiator. His most recent film, American Gangster, is currently in theatres.

— Paul Clark

When Good Directors Go Bad?: The Hudsucker Proxy

Peter Smith — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

The setup: After making a name for themselves with a series of unique and relatively small-scale crime stories (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, and Miller's Crossing), Joel Coen and his producer-cowriter brother Ethan won the Palme d'Or at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival with their Hollywood-themed comedy Barton Fink. Their next film saw them collaborating with super-producer Joel Silver and working with a budget of upwards of $25 million back when that still meant something in Hollywood.

What went wrong: The popular rap against the Coens is that their films are stylish but soulless, which is definitely applicable to Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance. Leigh comes off as affected even in realistic roles, and playing girl reporter Amy Archer, she doesn't so much play a role as ape Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. The mannerisms overwhelm the role, which makes sense when she's putting on a tough front for the boys, but once that front begins to fall, the character is meant to be the film's emotional center, and I wasn't feeling it. Compare Cate Blanchett's Hepburn to what Leigh's doing here and you'll see the difference between a fully-realized character and an explosion at the tic factory.

Fortunately, Leigh's misguided performance is hardly fatal, as there's a whole lot of other elements to love about The Hudsucker Proxy. Leigh aside, the performances are spot-on, beginning with Tim Robbins in the title role. As the naïve sap turned into Hudsucker Industries' puppet president, Robbins gives a comic performance that would have fight right into a Preston Sturges film, and his gangly physical presence and good-natured cluelessness recall Sturges' favorite leading man Eddie Bracken. Even Robbins' character name — Norville Barnes — could have been a Bracken character.

As usual in a Coen film, the film's supporting cast is dynamite, especially Paul Newman as the calculating vice president, forever answering questions with a gruff "sure-sure," and Jim True as the chatty, duplicitous elevator operator Buzz. Plus there's the famous stylized Coen dialogue, which might get distracting if it weren't so damned clever.

But the most notable aspect of The Hudsucker Proxy is the world the world the Coens have lovingly created, an Art Deco nightmare version of fifties New York. Norville's experiences in the mailroom wouldn't be out of place in Brazil, while the top-level offices and boardrooms owe a debt to Ayn Rand. Dennis Gassner's visionary production design, coupled with cinematography by the great Roger Deakins and a score by Coen stalwart Carter Burwell that makes liberal use of Aram Khachaturyan's "Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia," make The Hudsucker Proxy the most visually stunning of the Coen brothers' films. It's not perfect, but it's a lot of fun.

The fallout: Clueless how to market the film, Warner Brothers dumped Hudsucker into a handful of theatres to middling reviews, although the film has its share of defenders today. The Coens left Hollywood to make the more modestly-budgeted Fargo, which won back their previous critical supporters and then some. Their latest film, No Country for Old Men, opened earlier this month to ecstatic reviews. — Paul Clark

When Good Directors Go Bad: The Wicker Man (2006, Neil LaBute)

Peter Smith — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 17:00:00 GMT

The setup: Horror-movie remakes are a dime a dozen, but one of the most potentially interesting director-project pairings was Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man, which found the always-provocative writer-director taking a stab at the horror genre.

What went wrong?: LaBute often gets taken to task for his misogyny, especially in films like In the Company of Men and The Shape of Things. I’ve always found the accusations a little reductive, but it’s hard to argue against them in regards to The Wicker Man. The story basically boils down to this: there’s a beehive-inspired community where women rule and men serve them silently, and the hero (Nicolas Cage) gets manipulated by the women into becoming a human sacrifice. The community's leader, Sister Summersisle, tells Cage's Edward Malus (pronounced "Male-us" — get it?) that "men have their uses. . . for procreation." Clearly, LaBute is trying to say something about men’s fears of female power, though it’s all so ridiculous that it’s hard to say what that may be.

Not that Malus is an especially sympathetic hero. In the 1973 original, the protagonist is a staunch Christian who faces off against equally zealous pagans. Here, LaBute drops the dichotomy, instead countering the crazy beehive people with one of Cage’s most spectacularly unhinged characters. While he’s initially unsure whether he wants to visit the island, Malus becomes a sexist autocrat upon his arrival, barging into residences and schools and waving his police badge around, proclaiming the women to be "freaks" while being himself a less-than-exemplary representative for "normal" society.

Cage may be the closest thing Hollywood has nowadays to a late-period Brando, inspired when the material is good and equally inexplicable when it fails him. Here he goes so far over the top that the movie becomes a seemingly endless string of "bad laughs," and by the climax we’re practically rooting for the character to get his comeuppance. I somehow doubt that was LaBute’s goal.

The result is a film that feels schizophrenic. It contains plenty of shock tactics and nightmare imagery to appeal to the horror crowd, but ends up coming off as a bizarre — if mostly unintentional — comedy. The original was no great shakes as a horror movie either, but it played its story fairly straight. But by the time Cage starts running around in a bear suit at a human sacrifice ritual, where it’s revealed that virtually every female character in the film was in on the conspiracy (those women — they’ll take you down if they have a chance!), it’s long since become impossible to take The Wicker Man seriously. It’s entertaining to watch, but that doesn’t make it good.

The fallout: The Wicker Man is an abject failure as a horror film, but Cage’s performance has garnered a cult following, judging by all the YouTube videos inspired by the movie. LaBute’s next film, Lakeview Terrace, is scheduled for release next year, and while it appears to be in LaBute’s tradition of films that ask difficult questions, I doubt any of them will be quite so compelling as "How'd it get burned? HOW’D IT GET BURNED???"

— Paul Clark

When Good Directors Go Bad: Dreamcatcher (2003, Lawrence Kasdan)

Peter Smith — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:00:00 GMT

The setup: After writing the screenplays for The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lawrence Kasdan made his directorial debut with the acclaimed neo-noir Body Heat. He’s worked in numerous genres, but is best known for ensemble dramas like Grand Canyon, The Accidental Tourist, and 1983’s baby boomer favorite The Big Chill. So it seemed a bit odd for him to take on a Stephen King novel.

What went wrong?: A far cry from the relatively straightforward thrillers that made King’s reputation, Dreamcatcher is an ambitious, uneasy mix of story elements — lifelong friendships, disgusting monsters, mysterious powers, and military power gone mad. It begins as a downbeat drama about four childhood buddies, now grown up, dealing with the strange talents bestowed on them in childhood by a fifth, mentally-challenged boy called Duddits. The setup holds such promise that it’s disheartening how far astray the rest of the film goes.

One problem is how sketchy the protagonists are, distinguished mostly by a single character trait. Thomas Jane’s Henry is suicidal, Timothy Olyphant’s Pete has an uncanny ability to find things, and Jason Lee’s Beaver has an unfortunate compulsion to chew on a toothpick, which ends up getting him killed. The most fleshed-out of the four is Jonesy, played by Damian Lewis, who consequently gets the most interesting character trait — the "memory warehouse," a vast storeroom in his mind. This serves him well when the alien has taken over his body and he has to barricade himself in his mind with the information the alien is searching for.

And let’s talk about those aliens, or as the movie calls them, "shit weasels." It’s bad enough that they’re so disgusting that their every appearance distracts from the story. But add to that the barely hidden gay-panic subtext — they’re giant, toothy phallic objects who crawl up people’s asses, and the marble-mouthed Duddits pronounces their leader name as "Mr. Gay" — and they become the most odious monsters I’ve seen in a movie in ages.

But wait, there’s more (oh, how there’s more). There’s the risible military subplot, which could have been jettisoned with little discernible difference. There’s also flatulence as a plot point, turning an allegedly serious film into the fartingest Hollywood movie since Blazing Saddles. And finally, there’s the grown-up Duddits (Donnie Wahlberg), who confronts "Mr. Gay" with a rallying cry of "Scooby-Dooby-Doo, we got some work to do now," before morphing into an alien and stomping the anally-intruding baddie. Dreamcatcher is the work of talented movie veterans — along with Kasdan and King, there’s screenwriter William Goldman. Didn’t it occur to anyone that this story just wouldn’t work onscreen?

The fallout: Dreamcatcher got dumped by Warner Brothers in late March, functioning primarily as a launching pad for the Animatrix short Final Flight of the Osiris. Predictably, the film flopped. Kasdan’s next project is the Tom Hanks vehicle The Risk Pool, which I’m guessing will not contain a scene in which the hero uses a handgun as a telephone. At least, I hope not. — Paul Clark

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