Tuesday, October 01, 2013
From the Vault: Natural Born Killers
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I originally wrote this review (with some additions for this event) upon Natural Born Killers' original 1994 release. I'm re-posting it for The Oliver Stone Blogathon concluding Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
Forget The Doors. This film from the ever-controversial and increasingly dull (in all senses of the word) director marks the most extreme example yet of Stone spanking the monkey perpetually perched on his back. Quentin Tarantino* originally wrote the screenplay for Natural Born Killers, but Stone and co-conspirators David Veloz and Richard Rutowski butchered Tarantino's script to the point that he's now credited only with its story.
The film contains two halves: The first hour deals with a murder spree that companions Mickey and Mallory (Woody Harrelson, Juliette Lewis) undertake; the second chronicles the duo's incarceration and a live TV interview with Mickey by the host (Robert Downey Jr.) of a fictional tabloid TV series. The problems with Natural Born Killers accumulate at such a rapid pace that a thorough dissection of the film could end up as a thesis instead of a review. Stone, using what I assume must be either black magic, hypnotism or extortion, still manages to keep many film writers in his thrall to the point that they can't admit what a botch he's produced with Natural Born Killers. It's not that Stone can't be effective. He even made the silliness in the three-hour plus JFK entertaining despite the absurd claim that Kennedy was killed in order to stop the president from preventing the Vietnam War and, by extension, the need for Oliver Stone's film career. Stone's point-of-view concerning Natural Born Killers doesn't register anywhere near the realm of coherence.
The real subject — and I'm merely guessing — of Stone's awful opus aims at media obsession with sensationalism, certainly as timely as ever in the age of Tonya and Lorena, O.J. and the Menendez brothers. The number of usually reliable film fans who praise Natural Born Killers as original and fresh when no original idea resides in its empty little head amazes me. As usual, Stone proves as subtle as an 8.0 earthquake and twice as shaky (Exhibit A: See film still above). All the movie's points have been made before and better, from films dating back at least to 1967's Bonnie and Clyde, 1976's Network and even through the looking glass to 1931's The Front Page, which itself has been remade three times, the greatest being 1940's His Girl Friday
Stone also experiments more with film styles, alternating as he did in JFK between color, black and white, 16 millimeter, Super 8, video and even adds animation akin to graphic novels. Unlike JFK, these switches serve
no purpose other than to distract the audience. He also trots out other weird devices such as treating scenes with Mallory's monster of a father (Rodney Dangerfield) as if they exist in a TV sitcom, complete with laugh track and bleeped profanity — except for some reason some cuss words get bleeped and others don't. Of course, he can't resist tossing in some mystical Native Americans, just for good measure. It's hard to fault the performers (except for Tommy Lee Jones' inexplicable decision to play a prison warden as if he's imitating Reginald Van Gleason) since saving this mess would have been impossible for the greatest of actors, but at least Downey's wry performance injects some much-needed levity into this often tedious film. Downey appears to be the only actor aware that he's — in theory — signed on to the satire Stone believes he's making, but it's never a good idea to place a satire in the hands of someone without a sense of humor. In the end, it's ironic that Natural Born Killers stars former Cheers regular Harrelson since a paraphrase of a question Frasier once asked Cliff on that show immediately sprang to my mind while watching this mess: "Hello in there, Oliver. Tell me, what color is the sky in your world?"
*BLOGGER'S NOTE: Shortly after seeing Natural Born Killers, I had the opportunity to interview Quentin Tarantino who was promoting Pulp Fiction. He shared his thoughts about how Stone changed his screenplay.
"Actually, to give the devil his due, he was very cool when I said I wanted to take my name off the screenplay. He facilitated that to happen. He could have caused a big problem, but he didn't. When it comes to Natural Born Killers, more or less the final word on it is that it has nothing to do with me. One of the reasons I wanted just a story credit was I wanted that to get across. If you like the movie, it's Oliver. If you don't like the movie, it's Oliver."
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Labels: 90s, Harrelson, Oliver Stone, Robert Downey Jr., Tarantino, Tommy Lee Jones
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Monday, September 16, 2013
From the Vault: JFK
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I'm re-posting this review, originally written when JFK opened in 1991, as part of The Oliver Stone Blogathon occurring through Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
Seldom has reviewing a film proved as problematic as Oliver Stone's JFK. So much has been written about what is — and isn't — accurate in this film that I went in desperately trying to view solely on a cinematic basis, ignoring the fact that it concerns that fateful November day in Dallas in 1963. That sort of objectivity ends up being impossible because JFK demands evaluation and analysis and obliterates any chance of passive viewing with its strange hybrid of thriller, murder mystery and documentary.
Kevin Costner plays the lead in Stone's story as New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who launched a full-fledged investigation into the conspiracy he believed left both John F. Kennedy and the country mortally wounded. "Fundamentally, people are suckers for the truth," Donald Sutherland's Deep Throat-type character tells Garrison at one point in the film. While it remains to be seen whether Stone's version contains more truth than the preposterous idea that Lee Harvey Oswald (played well by Gary Oldman, part of the film's gargantuan, excellent ensemble) acted alone, fascination with the assassination keeps this three-hour film compulsively watchable.
Problems plague the film other than the ones that spark so much debate. Despite allegations that the film comes off as homophobic (I see why that charge has been leveled) or exists as nothing more than propaganda (could be), it fares fairly well. Stone keeps the pace speeding along most of the time except for a middle section that lags. His editing and jump-cuts that mix real footage, re-creations and original material triumph, especially in the film's very good opening segments. The movie stumbles the most when it presents scenes of Garrison's domestic life with his wife Liz (a thankless task given to the usually reliable Sissy Spacek, saddled with dialogue along the lines of "I think you care more about John Kennedy than your own family!") It also doesn't help that Garrison's son (played by Stone's own 7-year-old son Sean) never ages though the film covers more than half a decade.
Other demerits include John Williams' score, which nearly overpowers important scenes such as Sutherland's magnetic spinning of key elements of the "conspiracy" so that it makes sense as he's sharing it, and, it should really go without saying, Costner himself. While he manages to be fairly consistent with his Southern accent, he still can't emote effectively. He's a star, not an actor. Much of the popular opinion about the real Garrison refers to him either as someone seeking publicity or a crackpot. Regardless, Costner can't convey his obsession or possibly unstable nature. In his overrated Dances With Wolves, his lack of acting skills presented a similar problem. Both JFK and Dances would have been better served if they'd cast a performer capable of portraying people losing control. Lt. Dunbar tries to commit suicide and then asks to be placed on the frontier, but Costner couldn't pull off that conflict any more convincingly than he pulls off Garrison's drive for the truth.
Thankfully, able supporting performers abound to pick up the slack, even if they appear for a single scene. Actors deserving particular praise include Ed Asner, Kevin Bacon, John Candy, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Joe Pesci, Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones, who gives a good performance despite the possible perception of his character as an offensive stereotype. Structurally, the film weakens in its final act by climaxing with Garrison's prosecution of Clay Shaw (Jones). While this conclusion comes naturally to a film focused on Garrison, it seems anticlimactic to the film's real subject — dealing with the demons of the past. Stone's obsession with the Vietnam era equals Garrison's with Kennedy's murder. Methods separate Garrison's obsession from Stone's. Stone uses cinema as his rosary to drag the audience kicking and screaming into his personal confessional. With JFK, that's not altogether inappropriate. Even people born since the assassination grew up with the myths and the facts of Nov. 22, 1963, as part of their lives, though for most of the younger of us, Jim Garrison and his actual prosecution of Clay Shaw was something few of us knew about until Stone's movie.
Growing up though with the history of the Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations ingrained in our brains shortened our attention span of shock when John Lennon, Reagan and Pope John Paul II encountered bullets in a period of just a few months. The explosion of the space shuttle Challenger seemed to affect us for only an hour or two instead of the lifelong effect JFK's assassination had on an earlier generation.
Personally, I don't know if I buy the revamped Garrison theory that Stone offers. I don't see how anyone can believe Oswald acted alone or all the shots came from behind — watching the Zapruder film enlarged on the big screen makes the "back and to the left" motion of Kennedy's head unmistakable. However, Stone can't quite pull off the idea that the reason Kennedy was killed was so the Vietnam War could happen.
In that respect, JFK plays like a murder trial where only the prosecution presents its case. I'm certainly no apologist for Oliver Stone and I think most of his films grow weaker on subsequent viewings. Indeed, his tendency to pass off fabrication as fact can be troubling when most viewers can't tell the difference. Reservations aside, JFK holds one's attention firmly and deserves a look.
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Labels: 90s, Costner, D. Sutherland, John Williams, Kevin Bacon, Lemmon, Matthau, Oldman, Oliver Stone, Pesci, Spacek, Tommy Lee Jones
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Sunday, September 15, 2013
From the Vault: The Doors
BLOGGER'S NOTE: I'm re-posting this review, originally written when The Doors opened in 1991, as part of The Oliver Stone Blogathon occurring today through Oct. 6 at Seetimaar — Diary of a Movie Lover
Then lack of character development proves to be the major problem with this film. Near the beginning of the film, a 5-year-old Morrison vacations with his family in 1949 when they see the aftermath of a car wreck involving Navajos. The movie refers to the incident time and time again, apparently to explain why Morrison sets out on a path to self-destruction.
Alex Cox produced a much-better illustration of drugs sucking the life out of a talented individual in his 1986 film Sid & Nancy. Stone makes no secret of his admiration of Morrison, which makes me wonder how The Doors would have turned out if made by someone who didn't like Morrison since the resulting film comes off as spending 2 hours and 15 minutes with a truly repellent individual.
Val Kilmer does look and, in the live performance scenes, sound like Morrison, and his performance can't be faulted. Morrison comes off as a zonked-out prick and, since Stone worships him, you have to think that's an accurate portrayal. Then again, who's to say? The film creates a Morrison without any depth. It doesn't play him as a tortured artist or, in many ways, even a human being. He's just a doomed curiosity trapped in an extremely long music video — film as a hallucinogen, if you will.
The other members of The Doors may as well be cardboard cutouts for as much time and energy the film spends exploring them as individuals. Poor Kyle MacLachlan, trapped in a blond wig as Ray Manzarek, gets little more to do that sit at the keyboards, look concerned and occasionally defend Morrison in a DeForest Kelley-as-Dr. McCoy tone with lines such as, "Dammit, Jim's an artist."
The result comes off as even more despairing for the characters of Robby Krieger and John Densmore (Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon), the other two members of the band. I don't know where Morrison and Manzarek met them. One scene, Ray suggests to Jim that they form a band. In the next, suddenly Krieger and Densmore complete the foursome.
Stone again finds himself trapped in the era of his obsession, namely the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, and, while the look rings true thanks to brilliant and stunning cinematography by Robert Richardson, the stilted dialogue borders on laughable, making me wonder if secret giggles lurk beneath the lines. On the plus side, Stone makes no assertions connecting the band to U.S. presence in Vietnam.
In many ways, the film reminds me of Tron, Disney's 1982 film about life inside a video game. That film looked great, but at its core offered nothing more than good graphics. The Doors stimulates visually, but doesn't engage the mind at all. In the end, it becomes nothing more than a meaningless assault on the senses about people who made good rock and roll between the sex and the drugs.
Stone, usually reliably opinionated, seems to lack a point of view here. He's neither defending Morrison nor chastising him. More importantly, the film lacks what much of Stone's work lacks — structure. When you go back and look at much of his body of work, Platoon, Wall Street and Born on the Fourth of July all fail to hold up on subsequent viewings, usually because of a lack of structure. Talk Radio remains the Stone film that holds up best because of its built-in structure of the radio broadcast. In The Doors, except for occasional reminders of the year, structure does not exist, just a drifting, mind-altering montage of events leading up to the inevitable discovery of Morrison in the bathtub. The most glaring example comes in a scene with Meg Ryan as Pamela, Morrison's "ornament." Jim finds Pam shooting heroin with another man and. in a rage, frightens her into a closet where he locks her in before setting the door ablaze. That's it. We hear no more about it. Twenty minutes later, Pam shows up at a recording studio. In the film's context, it's unclear that it's even the same time period as when he lit the fire and nothing explains her escape.
There are moments of fun, such as Crispin Glover's cameo as Andy Warhol and Stone's own brief ironic appearance as Morrison's UCLA film professor accusing Jim of being pretentious.
The Doors produced great music, but this film doesn't attempt to look behind the talent. Instead, it just shows an unpleasant man marching to his own beat on the way to his doom.
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Labels: 90s, Blog-a-thons, Kyle MacLachlan, Meg Ryan, Oliver Stone, Val Kilmer
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Different ways of playing 'Cards'
BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post contains spoilers for the three segment British miniseries House of Cards from the 1990s starring Ian Richardson and this year's 13-episode U.S. version made for Netflix, produced by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. If you plan to watch either version and haven't yet, read no further.
By Edward Copeland
After giving people time to watch the American version of House of Cards and with its availability on DVD and Blu-ray for those without access to Netflix Instant, I thought enough time had transpired to discuss both the new version as well as the original BBC miniseries, whose first part premiered in 1990. Prior to watching the David Fincher-produced D.C.-set House of Cards with Kevin Spacey playing the wily lead, I felt I needed to see the British version to see how well the differences translated. (Obviously, Britain's parliamentary system of government works quite differently from our legislative branch — which, in its current state, doesn't work at all, but House of Cards exists in the land of make-believe. I lacked either the time or the energy given personal matters to attempt to read the novel by Michael Dobbs that spawned the BBC miniseries.)
Though the new version pads out its story to 13 roughly one-hour episodes while the first of the three British House of Cards miniseries told mostly the same story in four episodes of approximately the same length, the U.S. take does hit many of the same plot points except when it comes to the ending, but the makers of the U.S. House of Cards envision it as a continuing series. (I needn't have watched the second and third BBC miniseries, To Play the King and The Final Cut, since the stories in those sequels aren't covered in the first season of the U.S. House of Cards.) Both versions of the political chicanery, whether set here or across the pond, offer solid entertainment and mostly solid performances, though the U.S. House of Cards wins out in terms of production values. Unfortunately, when it comes to the battle of FUs (Francis Urquhart in the U.K., Francis Underwood in the U.S.), the late Ian Richardson wins hands down. Spacey proves capable as usual for the most part, but he burdens himself with an off-and-on Southern drawl that's wholly unnecessary and, at times, a major distraction. When Richardson's Urquhart speaks to the viewer in his well-mannered, upper-crust tone, it always works. When Spacey's Underwood attempts to pull it off while simultaneously putting on a generic son of the South voice for his South Carolina representative, at times it comes off as too cutesy by half.
Despite the differences in forms of government, both House of Cards begin with essentially the same kernel of a motivation for our two Francises. In the 1990 BBC version, Urquhart has served faithfully as an MP of the Conservative Party, functioning as their Chief Whip under Margaret Thatcher's reign as prime minister. In its fictionalized view of history, Thatcher's loss of support has led to her resignation and while the Conservatives look bound to keep a weakened majority hold of the British government, Urquhart expects
the new prime minister, Hal Collinridge (David Lyon, whose death at 72 was announced today), to appoint him to a long-sought Cabinet position and remove him from his duties as whip. Instead, with the slimmer majority, Collinridge decides not to shake up the Cabinet and an angry Urquhart starts maneuvering many people to get his revenge and build his own rise to power. In the 2013 U.S. take on the tale, Underwood long has held the title of Democratic Whip in the House, now the Majority Whip as a new Democratic president (not Barack Obama), Garrett Walker (Michael Gill), takes office. but Walker reneges on a promise to pick Underwood as his secretary of state. This begins Underwood's convoluted maneuvering. One problem that separates the two versions comes down to logic. You see why Urquhart longs to become the prime minister himself, but if you know U.S. history, it seems downright silly for Underwood to leap through all the hoops and commit all the deeds he does just to end up as vice president. When George H.W. Bush won the presidency, he was the first sitting vice president to manage the victory in his own right since Martin Van Buren. Unless Underwood plans to kill off Walker in a subsequent season of the U.S. House of Cards, why does he see that as a plausible path to the Oval Office?
What delineates our two Francises (the U.S. version only uses the FU joke once as its expected, vulgar stand-in by some of Underwood's opponents while the BBC call Urquhart FU frequently and affectionately by both friends and foes to his face without a hit of a double meaning) most distinctly comes from the difference in the way Spacey acts the words by Beau Willmon and his writing staff and Richardson's delivery of Andrew Davies' dialogue. Almost everyone appears to be on to what Frank Underwood conspires to do at all times, even if his machinations win in the end since Spacey doesn't take much of an effort to hide his moves from those he attempts to manipulate. In contrast, it takes some time for people to catch on to the lengths that Francis Urquhart will go to to accomplish his means thanks to Richardson's performance, which he keeps close to his vest. Both versions rely on the conceit that the Francises speak in asides to the television viewer about what they think and plan, only Spacey talks to audiences in the same basic tone as most of the other characters. Richardson confides to us, letting us in on secrets that others aren't aware of and it makes his performance much richer and, given the late actor's training, provides Francis Urquhart with an almost Shakespearean air. Urquhart picks off opponents with a variety of means and accomplishes most of this without leaving any fingerprints. The game plan in the U.S. House of Cards differs slightly as no list of vice presidential contenders stand in Underwood's way, but they do match in terms of subject matter. Urquhart must sink health and education ministers while those two issues become legislative hurdles that play a part in Underwood's climb.
Both House of Cards include two main women in the lives of their protagonists: their wives and young reporters who become the pols' lovers as well as their tool to help advance their plots. The idea of the female journalist follows fairly closely in both versions (except where they end up in the first installment and the level of their naïveté). In the BBC, the young reporter Mattie Storin (Susannah Harker) takes a long time (too long for her sake) to catch on to Urquhart's true nature and their illicit romance takes on a somewhat twisted father figure complex where the young Mattie tends to call the much older Francis "Daddy" during their dalliances. In the U.S. version, the young woman journalist Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara) contains a much more ambitious nature and she uses Underwood as much as he uses her. Both Mattie and Zoe do make colleagues jealous with their scoops and end up booted from their newspapers, only the U.S. version updates for technological changes and makes Zoe's success come via instant blog posts and finds her gaining new employment with an online political publication. Probably due to the way Mattie is written, Harker comes off as a weaker actress than Mara, who has a more fully developed character. The bigger difference presents itself in the portrayal
of the political wives. Elizabeth Urquhart (Diane Fletcher) truly serves as her husband's partner-in-crime. She knows of his affair with Mattie (and other women in the later installments) but approves wholeheartedly because she knows that letting him have his extracurricular activity with Mattie only serves the couple's ultimate goal and doesn't pose a threat to her position. Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) begins that way early in the U.S. House of Cards, but as the series develops she exhibits jealousy. showing up at Zoe's apartment, interfering with part of Underwood's legislative agenda and even leaving D.C. to renew an affair with a former lover, a famous photographer (Ben Daniels). Presumably, the part required beefing up in order to get someone of Wright's caliber to agree to accept it in the first place. Claire also gets her own sideline with story strands involving the charitable foundation that she runs whereas Elizabeth Urquhart basically serves as Francis' adornment at party and sounding board at home but little else.Both versions equip our FUs with henchmen named Stamper to help him carry out the more unseemly parts of his schemes, though the portrayals as well as the job titles come off quite differently in each country. In England, Urquhart's underling, Tim Stamper, comes across as quite a weasel in the hands of actor Colin
Jeavons. Tim Stamper functions as the Assistant Whip for the Conservatives in the House of Commons until Urquhart succeeds at ascending to the position of prime minister and Stamper moves up to Chief Whip. Later, unhappily, Urquhart moves him to the post party chairman. The British Stamper not only gets his hands dirty with delight, he also overflows with ambition himself and it costs him in the end (part of which may have been necessitated by Jeavons' decision to retire from acting after completing the second installment, To Play the King). The American Stamper gets a new first name — Doug — and does show signs of conscience even while he performs Underwood's errands. Doug Stamper serves as the House Majority Whip's chief of staff and holds no elected position. Michael Kelly, who most people will recognize him from many roles on television and in film, doesn't get down and dirty with the same glee that Jeavons does, but Kelly creates a different persona and plays him well. Odds are, depending how many seasons House of Cards continues, Doug Stamper either will turn on his boss or become a liability to him.
The one area besides production design where the U.S. House of Cards bests the British original comes from the actor who portrays Underwood's actual victim and how the U.S. version fleshes out his character in the first place. Before I began this piece, I issued a spoiler warning, but the U.S. House of Cards doesn't make it a secret that Underwood's deviousness takes a lethal turn, thanks to some of its promotional posters, and the very first sequence of the series gives viewers that impression by showing Underwood putting an injured dog out of its misery with his bare hands but making it clear that he isn't doing it to be merciful. In the British take, even though the first installment only consists of four 1-hour installments, it doesn't
let the audience know that Urquhart's manipulations include murder. In the BBC version, the first life that Urquhart literally takes with his own hand belongs to Roger O'Neill (Miles Anderson), the P.R. consultant for the Conservative Party whom Urquhart gets to use his girlfriend, Penny Guy (Alphonsia Emmanuel), to seduce Foreign Secretary Patrick Woolton (Malcolm Tierney), one of Urquhart's competitors for the prime minister post. Unfortunately, O'Neill loves Penny as much as he loves cocaine and when she dumps him when she realizes O'Neill used her, O'Neill becomes a wild card that Urquhart can't trust. To make sure nothing comes out that damages FU's plan and reveals his role in the Woolton revelation, Urquhart spikes O'Neill's coke supply with rat poison, assuring Mattie who figures out he did it that he was just putting O'Neill out of his misery.
Overall, the American ensemble beats the British one. Granted, the U.S. version provides nine extra hours to fill with juicy parts for actors to the BBC's mere four, so the original lacks the room to develop many characters in depth so it's easy to see how Ian Richardson steals the show. Kevin Spacey, in addition to his aforementioned accent problem, shares time with a lot of great performers in parts large and small. On top of those mentioned already, Sebastian Arcelus, Reg E. Cathey, Kathleen Chalfant, Nathan Darrow, Sandrine Holt, Boris McGiver, Larry Pine, Al Sapienza, Constance Zimmer and Gerald McRaney all put in appearances. We also get three actors familiar to Treme fans in parts of various scope: Mahershala Ali, Lance E. Nichols and Dan Ziskie. The M.V.P. of the entire cast though turns out to be Corey Stoll, so great as Hemingway in
Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, as the U.S. equivalent of Roger O'Neill. Instead of a P.R. guy, Stoll plays Pennsylvania Rep. Peter Russo, a divorced father of two with a penchant for drugs, booze and sex, despite his deep feelings for and relationship with his chief of staff Christina Gallagher (Kristen Connolly). For those who only know Stoll from Midnight in Paris, he'll be unrecognizable. In the short number of episodes though, he takes Russo through the largest journey of any character in the series, battling to sobriety and attempting to believe in himself, unaware of his status as a pawn in Underwood's game (both Underwoods, actually), until it's too late. Stoll makes Russo the only character that the audience develops any sympathy for at all. Though Russo behaves badly, his mistakes all flow from his personal weaknesses. He doesn't do things maliciously the way that Underwood and other characters do. When he commits wrongs, it's because he can't control himself. Underwood always stays in control, even if unexpected events force him to improvise. You feel bad for Russo when he can't
stand up for himself and acts against his own interests and those of his constituents, just to be Underwood's toady and pay him back for covering up an incident when he got caught drunk with a prostitute. You get a sense of where this comes from a in a couple of brief scenes involving Russo and his hospitalized mother (a great Phyllis Somerville) that gives you insight into Russo and makes you feel sorry for the man at the same time it provides some wickedly dark humor. When he begins to turn himself around, you develop a rooting interest for him to succeed (even though having seen the U.K. version first, I figured what fate awaited Russo, though the U.S. changes the manner of his inevitable death at Underwood's hands slightly differently). Though the U.S. House of Cards contains a lot of great acting, no one comes close to turning in a performance as wonderful as Stoll's and no character gets as much development and detail as Rep. Peter Russo.Since the British House of Cards only ran four hours, it had a sole director, Paul Seed, and writer, Andrew Davies. Davies and Seed returned to the same roles on the second installment, To Play the King, but Seed's directing work consists almost entirely of British television. Davies wrote the third and final part, The Final Cut, but Mike Vardy took over helming duties. Similarly, his directing work stayed restricted to British TV. Davies' writing extends to film including the screenplays for Circle of Friends, Emma, The Tailor of Panama, Bridget Jones's Diary, the 2008 feature of Brideshead Revisited and the 2011 version of The Three Musketeers directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.
While Beau Willmon had a hand in writing most of the U.S. episodes, he also had a staff of writers who either contributed or turned in their own episodes. On the directing side, Fincher started the series off by directing the first two episodes while James Foley directed the most at 4 episodes and Allen Coulter, Carl Franklin, Charles McDougall and Joel Schumacher helmed two each.
In the final assessment, the U.S. House of Cards moves fairly well except at times when it feels as if it stuffed itself with too many character and plot strands and an episode set at Underwood's reunion at The Citadel that, while OK, feels and plays like filler. The U.K. House of Cards comes off as far more efficient, even if most of the characters aside from Richardson's Urquhart prove far less compelling. In the second and third parts, they do at least give him actual adversaries, which make things slightly more interesting, but in the end all the British House of Cards episodes always belong to the great Richardson and his rich and delicious
performance. One really bizarre viewing experience for me came from the miniseries — which aired in 1990, 1995 and 1996 — incorporating Margaret Thatcher's fictional death. She died in the miniseries as I watched it before she died in real life earlier this year. Part of the subtext is that Francis Urquhart wants to break Thatcher's record for serving as prime minister longer in the post-WW2 era. One other thing that makes the British version slightly better than the American take is that the first installment ends with a great cliffhanger mystery that plays out over the course of the next two parts. The new House of Cards leaves us with reporters hot on Underwood's trail about Russo's "suicide," but it doesn't come off nearly as intriguing as the British version. I'm also curious where the U.S. version goes next. It obviously can't follow the storyline of the British To Play the King since we don't have a constitutional monarch and a newly sworn in Vice President Underwood wouldn't run into conflict with a recently crowned king. Presumably, that tension will present itself with his new boss, President Walker. It's a shame that Ian Richardson isn't with us anymore and that the third British House of Cards installment resolved the Francis Urquhart character. It might have been fun to see U.S. President Francis Underwood face off against British Prime Minister Francis Urquhart. I'd probably root for Urquhart, if only because he doesn't have that corny and awful Southern accent.Tweet
Labels: 10s, 90s, Books, Fiction, Fincher, Hemingway, Netflix, Robin Wright, Shakespeare, Spacey, Television, Treme, Woody
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Friday, June 08, 2012
The Larry Sanders Show Season 3 Ep. 11: Larry Loses a Friend
By Edward Copeland
This episode doesn't belong on the top shelf of episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, but even its weakest installments outshine some of the strongest episodes of what the commercial networks passed off as comedies in the two decades since Sanders debuted. We've passed the midpoint of the 17-episode order the series had for its third season, a more difficult burden than HBO demands of any of its shows now, which merely produce 10-13 installments at most a season. This outing, written by John Riggi (who also played Mike Patterson, one of Sanders staff writers who got canned earlier this season in the "Headwriter" episode), begins with Beverly (Penny Johnson) admiring a large bouquet of flowers on Darlene's desk — flowers that don't seem to please Darlene (Linda Doucett), especially because of the diamond bracelet that came with it. Beverly guesses the jewelry must be worth at least $2,000. The entire package arrived courtesy of one of the guests on Larry's show that night, Jon Lovitz. Darlene wishes Lovitz would stop. He does this every time he's on the show.
Beverly expresses shock when Darlene reveals this, inquiring if Lovitz gives her a new piece of jewelry every time. Darlene shakes her head no and explains that at first, he just sent flowers. The next time, the flowers came with a Dottie West CD. Then accompanying the bouquet were Hummel figurines. The last time he appeared on the show, Darlene received flowers and a pasta maker, Now, Lovitz has upped the ante to a diamond bracelet. As Beverly remains transfixed by the bracelet and Darlene sits looking glum, Hank steps out of his office and reminds Darlene to double-check with Artie that they're still on for the Dodger game that night — then Hank notices the flowers and asks who sent them. Before anyone answers, he reads the card aloud, "Looking forward to seeing you again. As always, Jon." the always self-centered Kingsley smiles. "You see, I think it's courageous for one man to send flowers to another man," Hank tells the women before taking the bouquet and announcing that he's going to put them in a place of prominence in his office — perhaps on the air conditioner. As Hank returns to his office, Beverly cracks up but laughs continue to evade Darlene.
DARLENE: What am I gonna do?
BEVERLY: Oh, about Jon? Well, just ask Paula to book him two more times.
DARLENE: What good will that do?
BEVERLY: None, but by then you'll have flowers and a Miata.
Jon Lovitz sits in the back of a limo in the studio's parking lot. He asks his chauffeur (Mark Roberts) if he should just go up to the show's offices, but the driver tells him that they're sending someone down to escort him up. The driver asks Lovitz how many times he's done Larry's show. "I think like, thirteen. Fourteen if you count when I got bumped for Desert Storm. Fucking Saddam Hussein," Lovitz gripes. "You must like Larry a lot. Is that why you do it so often?" the driver inquires. "Yeah. I mean I like Larry a lot, but, you know, he's got this beautiful…" Lovitz self-censors as the chauffeur turns around. Lovitz questions whether he can use the limo's phone. The driver tells Lovitz he can and asks if he'd prefer that he raise the partition. "Well, let me ask you a question. Did you see City Slickers 2?" "No," the driver admits. "Well, then put it up," Lovitz says, making the motion of the partition rising with his hands.
Beverly shows the bracelet to Paula while the two of them and Darlene hover around the kitchenette. "What's the big deal? It's a bracelet," Paula says, this time with Janeane Garofalo in her season of many hair colors sporting a reddish-brown shade. "You're just mad because all your bracelets are made out of shoe laces," Beverly responds dismissively. "I gave you one," Paula declares with a combination of hurt and anger. Beverly, realizing her etiquette faux pas, tries to repair the damage. "I know and I liked it. I'm sorry," Beverly apologizes as Paula stomps off. "I did. It was different." Beverly returns to worshipping the "gorgeous" bracelet and asks Darlene if she'd care if she wore it for the rest of the day, then gave it back. Darlene tells her to keep it and walks off. Beverly pursues, asking her why she doesn't just stop it by going out with Lovitz — he's funny and nice. Darlene informs Beverly that she refuses to date anyone in the business anymore. "No comics, no actors, no magicians," she proclaims. Hank emerges from his office again. "Darlene — Artie — ballgame," he intones. Before Darlene can answer, the phone rings and she answers, "Hank Kingsley's office. Can you hold one minute?" and then drops the receiver as if it were on fire and runs off. It does set up for our first candidate for Hank Kingsley Line of the Night, delivered by the inimitable Jeffrey Tambor. Hank picks up the phone and awkwardly says, "Hello." Of course, it's Lovitz on the other end. Hank thanks him for sending the flowers, telling Lovitz, "I'm just nutty about irises."
Another aspect of The Larry Sanders Show (aside from Tambor's brilliant creation of Hank Kingsley) is that even the weaker episodes always get juice by pairing any combination of Rip Torn's Artie with Garry Shandling's Larry or Tambor's Hank (or Hank and Larry or a rollicking triple threat of putting all three together in a scene) to spin comic gold no matter the subject matter. In this episode, the first time we see Artie and Larry, they appear in a short, but fun duet, though Torn really owns the scene, as Artie uses a distracted Larry to his advantage to get out of the ballgame with Hank. It begins with the producer and the talk show host seated across from each other in Larry's office where Arthur teases Larry about what he just pulled out of his pocket and is shaking in front of his face while humming.
LARRY: (Stopping what he's doing.) What are those?
ARTIE: These are tickets to the Dodger game tonight. (Artie stands and walks to the other side of the desk next to Larry as
he continues to talk) Hank and I have an evening out together once a year. Just the two of us. Tonight is that night.
LARRY: (continuing to look at things on his desk) Great. That'll be nice.
ARTIE: Yeah. These tickets are right behind the home plate. Nine innings of me listening to Hank whine about his marriage bullshit.
LARRY: (Looking up with a mischievous grin) Oh, you stay for the whole game, huh?
ARTIE: (Dangling the tickets in front of him, practically in Larry's face) Don't you want to go?
LARRY: Huh? Well, I don't even have tickets. I'm not going.
ARTIE: (Sarcastically faking disappointment) Oh, I hate to part with them. Hank will be so disappointed. Why don't you take Jon Lovitz? (Artie gets all those lines out so fast you barely notice he's already sprinted to the office door to escape) Took you a long time to figure out what I was getting at, didn't it? Have a big lunch, today?"
LARRY: Yeah. (Artie leaves, closing door behind him. Artie's intentions finally dawn on Larry.) Oh. He doesn't want to go with Hank.
Darlene confides to Hank about Lovitz's continued gift giving. "I have to admit I found the flowers and gifts cute at first," Kingsley says. "I'm still getting a lot of use out of that pasta machine because there's nothing better than fresh pasta, but you're right. You're right. It's obviously — it's gone too far." Hank promises Darlene he'll take Lovitz aside and talk to him. "Oh, you're so sweet," Darlene tells Hank, giving him a big hug. "I am. I am sweet," Hank concurs.
We do receive the treat of the corollary scene to Artie tricking Larry into taking his Dodger tickets. Now, he must sell the idea that it wasn't his idea to Hank. He enters the makeup room where he encounters one of that night's guests, Jarina Venvenich (Elsa Raven), "the bird lady," who carries two feathered friends on her arm that Artie greets as Scooter and Pepper. "Where's Poncho?" Artie asks. "He's no longer with us," she answers on a heavy accent. Artie inquires as to Poncho's fate, suggesting some possibilities in Jarina's native tongue. "He was eaten by our neighbor's Rottweiler," Jarina informs him before she exits. Hank sits in the makeup chair getting prepped by Bruno. He complains that no one told him that the birds would be on the show or he would have taken his allergy pills. Artie insists he told Darlene early that morning.
HANK: Oh well. I don't care if my face swells up like a pumpkin. We're not going to miss that game tonight. (Notices Artie's expression.) Oh goddammit.
ARTIE: Bad news, buddy. Larry wanted to go to the game. He heard I had tickets —
HANK: You gave him our tickets?
ARTIE: Gave him? He took them. He's the fucking boss. My hands were tied.
HANK: He's a fucking baby.
ARTIE: (coughs to indicate Bruno's presence) Well, all I'll say is he's very complicated.
HANK: One night out and Mr. Big Man thinks he can take anything —
ARTIE: I hear you, but next year is right around the corner, buddy
HANK: It's not about the game. I just wanted to have some special time with you —
ARTIE: (wiping something on Hank's face) What's the matter, sugar? Is the marriage that bad?
HANK: (Shakes head no) It's the fucking birds.
ARTIE: You're telling me. I've been married five times. They were all the fucking birds. (Artie leaves)
HANK: No, that — (to Bruno) You knew what I meant, didn't you?
Larry meets Jon Lovitz after he gets off the elevator on the show's floor, but Lovitz definitely has his mind elsewhere. Larry invites him to see the Dodgers after the show and Lovitz says it sounds great, but doesn't act as if he really heard what Larry offered. Sanders tells Lovitz he'll walk him to his dressing room, but Lovitz declines, saying he wants to say hi to someone first. Larry walks off confused and Lovitz enters the office area of the show, making a beeline for Darlene's desk. He leans over her desk and quietly speaks her name. "Hi," Darlene responds unemotionally while continuing to type. "You look beautiful today — as usual," he tells her in the same quiet voice that, frankly, borders on the creepy. "Thank you," she replies almost as quietly as he's speaking. He asks if she got the flowers he sent her and looks around for them. (Lovitz should realize Hank intercepted them since he thanked him for them on the phone.) He also asks about that "little gift," which Darlene also confirms she received but she runs into trouble when Lovitz wants to see the bracelet. In a phrase you don't hear often around the Larry Sanders office, Darlene is saved by the Hank, who appears and asks her to call makeup, "and tell them to come and remove my tissues." Kingsley rolls his eyes and Lovitz steps back and folds his arms, looking miffed. Darlene offers to handle the
task but Hank won't let her, insisting she get Bruno because, "It's a union thing." Darlene exits and Hank moves in, calling Lovitz "Jonny" and beginning with his trademark "Hey now." "Welcome back Mister (pause) Funny, Mister Movie Star," Hank lays it on. "You forgot Mister Hunk," Lovitz adds. "I was getting to that," Hank says. Then Hank gets serious, asking if they can talk. He tells Lovitz that he's heard that he has a thing for Darlene and wants to know if it's true. Lovitz's expression almost turns ashen, but then he brightens up and admits it, saying how terrific he thinks she is. Hank agrees that Darlene is fabulous. "I think she's really starting to warm up to me," Lovitz declares. "A piece of advice — don't go there," Hank warns. "Just don't waste your time because, frankly, she's not available." Lovitz assures
Kingsley that he checked first and knows she isn't dating anyone currently. Hank looks stuck — obviously his Plan A just went up in flames — so he asks Lovitz to come speak to him in a more private area. "See, I don't even know if this is my place to say," Hank tells Jon as he closes the door to the conference room. "See, the way that you want to go. This lady — she doesn't go that way," Hank lies to a stone-faced Lovitz. Lovitz makes him spell it out. Kingsley stumbles but finally gets out the words, "She prefers women." "Oh that's bullshit!" Lovitz snaps, Hank stands by the lesbian story, but Lovitz doesn't believe him, naturally wondering why she wouldn't have said anything to him after all this time. Hank tries to make the case that a person's sexual preference can be a very private thing, but Lovitz still isn't buying his story. Hank abandons ships and tells Lovitz he has to go, but Lovitz chases him back to his office. "Hank, is she seeing a woman now?" he asks. After some more fumbling, Kingsley finally says, "Yes. Yes, she is" before closing his office door and hiding inside. 
Perhaps saying "Saved by the Hank" might have been premature. The situation can't be improving now that we see Phil (Wallace Langham), once briefly a Darlene dating partner, wandering toward the kitchenette where Darlene prepares a snack. After the standard pleasantries, Phil opens with "So, you're a lesbian." Darlene doesn't know what he's talking about. "It kind of makes sense. A lot of stuff that we went through makes sense now. I only wish you could've told me yourself instead of me having to hear it from Paula," Phil tells a thoroughly confused Darlene. "Paula told you I was a lesbian?" she asks him. "Oh and I think Larry's gonna be really pissed when he finds out you've been seeing Beverly," Phil adds. It didn't take long for that fake story to spread and metastasize. Backstage, Hank stands
sipping a cup of water after taking something off a tray a man holds when Darlene comes barreling down the hall toward him, leading him away. "What? Easy? Spilling! Spilling!" Hank says as Darlene keeps herding Hank to another location. "That's how you get Jon Lovitz to leave me alone — by telling everyone that I'm a lesbian!" she yells at him. "I didn't tell everyone. Jon asked Paula to confirm what I told him. You know how she is with gossip. She's like a terrier after a rat," Hank says in his defense. "Hank, how could you do this?" Darlene demands to know. "Now Darlene, I didn't know you had a thing against gay people. Frankly, I'm a little offended to find this out," Hank responds as only Kingsley could. "Hank, you lied," Darlene tells him. "I didn't — now come on — like you've never been with a woman?" Hank asks, digging that hole for himself deeper and deeper. "Like you've never been with a man?" Darlene fires back. Kingsley seems to get the point and says, "Fucking tabloids."
Lovitz and Larry are joking around in Larry's office while Larry has a snack when Jon brings up the subject of Darlene. Sanders brings up that she posed for Playboy, referring back to the Season 2 episode "Broadcast Nudes." "Did you see it?" Lovitz asks. "No," Larry lies. Jon then brings up that Hank told him that Darlene is a lesbian but that he thinks he's "full of shit" giving Larry his own moment of pause, since he and Darlene also had their brief fling earlier this season in the "Office Romance" episode. "Listen, if she's not, can you do me a favor? Can you force her to go out with me?" Lovitz asks Larry. "Force her to go out with you. You want me to force her to go out with you," Larry repeats, doing well to hide the fact that he can't believe what he's hearing. "It's your show, isn't it? She has to do what you say, right?" Lovitz says. "That would be called sexual harassment," Larry tells him quite rightly. "Oh, come on. 'Blow me' — that's sexual harassment," Lovitz replies. He asks Sanders to be a pal and just do him this one favor. Larry stands and tells Lovitz he can't. "I have to go talk to the bird lady." As he's leaving, Lovitz persists. "What people do with their own time is their own business. I don't meddle," Larry declares as he leaves Lovitz alone in his office. "So she is a lesbian?" Jon yells at the closed door.
The next sequence stands out as being slightly different from the norm for The Larry Sanders Show. There's a quick scene with Lovitz in the makeup chair while Paula does the pre-interview and he begins telling her an anecdote from the making of City Slickers 2. A quick cut takes us to Larry's office where Paula finishes the story, sharing it with Larry who rejects it and says to instruct Lovitz to go with the tuxedo rental story instead. Paula doesn't know what Sanders is referring to, but he swears Jon will know "He tells it every goddamn time we go shopping. It's hilarious," Larry replies in a pissed-off tone. Another quick cut finds Paula in Jon's dressing room listening as Lovitz finishes relaying the tux rental story without an ounce of enthusiasm. "It's not funny," Lovitz says. "It's not funny, but it's cute that you and Larry shop together, I guess," Paula comments, caught in the deterioration of these two men's friendship and still trying to perform her job. "It's adorable. I just love spending hours watching him try on hundreds of pairs of pants," Lovitz complains. He then imitates Larry and asks, "Does my ass look fat in these pants?" Lovitz laughs and seems to return to normal. "He's a nice guy but sometimes he's just wrong." He asks Paula to tell Larry to keep the movie story as well. Paula promises that she will and Lovitz says he'll owe her one.
After Paula leaves, Darlene knocks on the door. Lovitz gets giddy at the sight of her, but she has just come to set him straight about the rumor that she is a lesbian. It isn't true, she tells him. He says he knew and then asks where they'll be going after the show. Darlene asks him to sit down. She tells him that the reason she can't go out with him is because he works in show business and she's been hurt too many times. Lovitz collapses back on the couch. "Fine. I'm so tired of this, you know. Yeah, why would you want to go out with someone who's famous and rich and handsome and can give you the life you always dreamed of and can make you laugh all the time? Yeah, pass," Lovitz whines. Darlene apologizes and leaves as Beverly enters carrying a mug of cocoa that Lovitz requested. He spots the bracelet on her wrist. "Where'd you get that?" he asks. "Darlene gave it to me," Beverly replies, then corrects herself, saying she's just borrowing it until tonight since the two of them are going to a women's meeting together. Lovitz starts moaning as if he's going to puke. "Uh. It's true," Lovitz groans as he rushes out of the dressing room. Beverly runs down the hall shouting Paula's name.
Larry stands bent over in the dressing room with his pants around his knees when Paula bursts in. "Hey, knock, why don't you?" Larry says, pulling up his pants. "Why are you putting your shoes on before you pull your pants up?" she asks. "I always do. Superstitious. Thank God you weren't in here a few minutes ago when I was painting my balls," he tells her. "Lovitz walked," Paula informs the host. He immediately blames her, wanting to know what she said to him. She said she didn't say anything. She just told him that Larry wanted him to do the tux story and Lovitz didn't want to do it, then he bolted. "What a child. He's a fucking child," Larry complains. He also catches a glimpse of himself in the full-length mirror. "God, my ass looks fat in these pants!"
Larry, Darlene, Paula and Beverly have assembled in Larry's office, but Artie has resumed control of the ship. "Cut the horseshit, Adam. Your client walked off our show. Now what are you going to do about it, huh? If you can't control your own people, you should be out of the business," Artie shouts into the phone. "Give my regards to the darling Jamie. Bye-bye." Larry wants to know what Adam said. "He said Lovitz will not be back and he's very upset," Artie reports. Larry asks what Lovitz has to be upset about, just because he wouldn't let him tell the City Slickers 2 story. Paula suggests three segments with the bird lady and then Carl Sagan. "Unless Mister Sagan comes out and shits a string of pearls, we have no show," Artie proclaims. Larry's phone rings and it's Jon Lovitz. He apologizes for Paula about the movie story and tells him that "just between us, she has an eating disorder." Larry doesn't hear a response from Jon on the other end. Darlene asks to speak with him. Larry insists that Lovitz got mad about the movie anecdote. Darlene tells him he hurt his feelings by not going out with him. Beverly takes the blame because he saw her wearing the bracelet. Larry still wants it to be his fault. "Are you telling me that you've never been upset when you were romantically spurned?" Artie asks Larry. "Not like this," Larry claims. "Emma Samms," Artie says. Larry says Artie promised he'd never bring that up and it wasn't that big a deal. "You turned on her alarm system," Artie continues. "You did not read the police report," Larry insists. "I'm quoted quite liberally in it," Artie replies. Larry tells Jon that Darlene wants to talk to him. It turns out he's in the limo in the parking lot so Darlene heads down.
Darlene tells him how impressed she was that he walked off the show for her. It proves that he's not like the other industry guys. The camera pans and Larry also sits in the limo. He hands Jon the tickets to the Dodgers game and suggests he take Darlene to it after the show because he has another problem to deal with. "You can guarantee she's not a lesbian," Lovitz asks. Larry does, then Hank speaks up. He's there as well. "Jon, guys and nothing but guys. That's our Darlene in a nutshell," Kingsley swears. "Uh, I can vouch for it too. We went out briefly," Phil tells him, having somehow made it to the limo and sitting between Hank and Artie. "I think she's just swell but we've got a fucking show to do, so let's move it," Artie suggests. Everyone exits the limo except for Artie, Hank and Larry. Hank begins to tell a story about his wife and Artie tells him to shut up and he'll take him to dinner. "This whole thing just doesn't make sense. Can you imagine Darlene with another woman?" Larry asks. The three men all drift off into dreamy thoughts.
While the episode has its moments, it seems undercooked. They drag Beverly into the rumor but you never see her going ballistic on anyone and you expect a payoff with the bird lady that never comes. Torn, Tambor and Shandling turn in great work as always, but it almost seems as if their roles. particularly Torn's, were limited this week. While Sanders certainly can be self-absorbed, it becomes a little hard to swallow that he still thinks that Lovitz got upset over him not wanting him to tell the story about the incident on the City Slickers 2 set when he stormed out on Lovitz when he tried to get him to force Darlene to date him. Thankfully, the season soon will pick up in a big way.
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Labels: 90s, HBO, Larry Sanders, Rip Torn, Shandling, Tambor, TV Recap
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Friday, April 13, 2012
Pragmatic anarchy
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When we met Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), he already carried a heavy load of burdens. Rumors swirled that his financially struggling studio would replace him soon, a hot executive at Fox named Larry Levy seemed to be "in his face" all the time and a screenwriter whose calls he never returned kept sending him threatening postcards. Oh, how Griffin longs for those good old days. Now, Pasadena police suspect he killed screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) — which he did, Levy (Peter Gallagher) has landed at Mill's studio and, perhaps most distressing of all his plights, it turns out that Kahane wasn't the writer threatening him — and those continue. Only one bright spot shines in the dark hole that Griffin dug himself into and she happens to be the intriguing June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), girlfriend to the late David Kahane. Trying to date her would look improper so soon after David's death and it wouldn't be a nice thing for Griffin to do to his girlfriend and executive assistant Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson), the film's most decent character. My return visit to the Hollywood of Robert Altman's The Player clarified to me the pivotal roles the two women, particularly June, serve in making The Player much more than just a satire or even a thriller.
I never read Michael Tolkin's original novel The Player, but I did read his sequel The Return of The Player. While on the DVD commentary, Tolkin ultimately blamed himself for what changed in the movie from his novel, much of his tone on the disc tasted bitter, including frequent references to how he never wanted the novel turned into a film in the first place (something that sounds particularly odd given that he wrote and produced the movie as well as created and wrote a pilot for a proposed TV series version that never aired). Though Tolkin's name appears alone as the credited screenwriter, based on the sequel novel and what Robert Altman
said on the DVD, I have to believe that the director sparked the transformation of the novel's June into the June of the film. Based on The Return of The Player, June isn't a cypher of a character who says she comes from Iceland (though when asked by Griffin at a later time if she really hails from there, she responds, "Did I say that?") Altman said that he wanted June to be like an alien, almost to the point that you could believe she exists only in Griffin's imagination. I don't think Altman meant anyone to take that literally — June Gudmunsdottir definitely exists — but she does function as the only person in the film who doesn't speak Hollywood. She and Griffin both may communicate in English, but they speak entirely different languages and that's part of the attraction. June paints and creates other types of art, but when Griffin asks where she shows her work, she tells him she doesn't. For a man who greenlights movies for production so they eventually can be seen, this makes no sense to him. He inquires why June doesn't try to display her works in a gallery and she explains that it's because she never finishes them. The reason for their renewed contact after one phone call comes courtesy of David Kahane's funeral, which Griffin feels compelled to attend. When the graveside services end, June approaches him, recognizing immediately that he doesn't look like the other mourners, all writers. When Griffin explains who he is and that they spoke the night of Kahane's death, June remembers, adding, "You're the only person I know here." Griffin offers the standard funeral apology and tells June that David "was a real talent." She looks surprised. "You think so? I always suspected he was uniquely untalented," June declares, free of emotion before begging Griffin to drive her home because she can't deal with what's expected of her from the others. These people.I don't like it here. They're all expecting me to grieve and mourn. I can't talk to them. David's gone and I'm somewhere else already," she tells Griffin, who seems to be showing more genuine regret about Kahane's death than the slain writer's girlfriend.
Cynicism seeps from the pores of all the characters in The Player to some degree, though most would call it a pragmatic and realistic attitude spawned by the industry in which they work. Bonnie Sherow and Griffin Mill speak the same language — that's why they work (and play) well together. Admittedly, Griffin keeps his guard up, even with Bonnie. As they relax in his hot tube one night where she reads him part of a horribly lurid script, Griffin tries to talk to her about the threats he's received, but he phrases it in the form of a movie pitch, making the victim someone who works in advertising. He wants her opinion on how many months of these threats it would take before the sender should be considered dangerous. Thinking he's actually discussing a pitch someone gave him, she responds sourly, "Does he have to be in advertising?" Bonnie can be tough on her assistant Whitney (Gina Gershon) and likewise Griffin can point out when Bonnie makes a social faux pas ("Never bring up script changes at a party"), but, at least at the beginning, nothing comes off as mean-spirited. She also displays a wit as cutting as anyone when the opportunity presents itself. When Larry Levy conducts his exercise in picking newspaper stories to show he can envision movies without needing a writer, Bonnie latches on to the headline, "Further bond losses push Dow down." Before Levy responds, she quickly adds, "I see Connery as Bond." Bonnie's unambiguous sense of right and wrong and her streak of moral clarity distiguish her from the rest of her universe. It almost goes without saying that some sort of doom awaits her.
Altman always had a great eye for casting, even if he did tend to return to his unofficial repertory company time and again, but hiring Cynthia Stevenson to play Bonnie might have been the best choice since, of the performers in The Player's major roles, she was the least-known to most. I had followed her for some time, first noticing her on a very short-lived, quirky and one-of-a-kind show called My Talk Show which was an unusual sitcom where she played a young woman who hosted a Wisconsin talk show from her living room mostly with friends and neighbors as guests, often while she did other things, though celebrities wandered through town sometimes such as William Shatner and, to my joyous surprise, there's a YouTube clip. Altman said that he came close to hiring Julianne Moore for the role of Bonnie, but decided she was "too glamorous" and he wanted someone who didn't look like an actress. He'd seen Stevenson on an episode of Cheers (She appeared twice in the later seasons as Norm's secretary who suffered from extremely low self-esteem.) When Altman informed Stevenson that the role required her to take off her top for the hot tub scene, the actress couldn't believe it. "Why me? No one has ever asked me to take my top off?" Altman said she asked him. "That's the reason," he responded. As he explained, that afforded him another chance to upset expectations and Hollywood conventions. "You never see Greta Scacchi nude," he pointed out. He wanted to use Stevenson's nudity to comment on the beauty in all types of female nudity, not just the usual kind you see in movies, as well as the state of Bonnie and Griffin's relationship.
While Bonnie, like Alan Rudolph's movie pitch, has heart in the right spot, the question of whether a cardiac organ beats within June's chest remains unresolved, despite Kahane telling Griffin sarcastically that Mill and June both were "all heart." The late screenwriter's nicknames for his girlfriend and the movie executive though seem to be honest assessments: June's the Ice Queen, Griffin's The Dead Man. Bonnie gave Griffin a tenuous hold on humanity and, ironically, his killing of Kahane actually brought Mill to life. "Although the novel was very much about Hollywood, I also was really writing about guilt," Tolkin said on the DVD. June's manner, tone shows stays at a constant level no matter what has happened, almost like a flatline on a heart
monitor. When Griffin takes her home after David's burial, she immediately starts working on the art she never finishes or sells. She asks Mill why he met with Kahane that night and Griffin tells her that he planned to share an idea he'd thought of that would improve his script. When she says, "the Japan story," Griffin fears he'll be caught, so he gets vague, suggesting that it needed an "up" ending before asking June what she thought of the ending. "I never read it. I don't like reading," she admits. This woman intrigues Griffin further. She doesn't go to movies/ She doesn't like reading. "Do you like books?" he inquires. "I like words and letters, but I'm not crazy about complete sentences," she tells him. June then asks Griffin to place his face behind this shower curtain so she can photograph it. She plans to put him in one of her paintings, one of an Icelandic hero. "He's a thief and he's made of fire. You might not like that," June says. Griffin asks her why. She figures that given his job, he couldn't see thieves as heroes. "I don't know about that. We have a long tradition of gangsters in movies," Griffin informs her with a smile. The exchange that follows illuminates Griffin's thoughts clearly, but makes June more mysterious.JUNE: Yes, but they always have to suffer for their crimes, don't they?
GRIFFIN: We should pay for our crimes, shouldn't we?
JUNE: I think knowing you've committed a crime is suffering enough. If you don't suffer, maybe it wasn't a crime after all. Anyway — what difference does it make? It has nothing to do with how things really are.
GRIFFIN: Do you really believe that?
JUNE: I don't know what I believe, Mr. Mill. It's just what I feel.
GRIFFIN: You know what you are, June whatever-your-name-is? A pragmatic anarchist.
JUNE: Is that what I am? I never was sure.
Of course, if Griffin succeeds at juggling his women and getting away with murder, he still must contend with the matter of the shaky hold on his job and the stalking screenwriter who lurks somewhere, probably with a fair idea of why David Kahane got killed in a movie
theater parking lot and who did it. (The film never spells out explicitly the identity of the real stalker, though Altman did on the commentary track of the old Criterion laserdisc edition of The Player. I wrote about it in my sidebar Untold Stories of Robert Altman's The Player or Who the Hell is Thereza Ellis? if you haven't read that and would like to know.) While looking at dailies at the studio, he gets a message from a Joe Gillis telling him to meet him at the patio bar of the St. James Club that night alone. Griffin actually has to ask the others in the screening room if they've heard of a Joe Gillis and studio president Levison (Brion James) informs him that Gillis is the name of the character William Holden played in Sunset Blvd. "You know, the screenwriter who gets killed by the movie star." Mill tries to laugh it off, saying the guy called before claiming to be Charles Foster Kane. When he goes to the hotel that night, he runs into the two most over=the-top characters in the film — writer-director Tom Oakley (Richard E. Grant) and Andy Civella (Dean Stockwell). If the movie they corner Griffin into listening to a pitch for weren't so pivotal to one of the biggest laughs in movie history, they might a bit too annoying. Griffin does his best to get rid of them, but he relents and Tom takes over.TOM: We open outside the largest penitentiary in California. It's night. It's raining. A limousine comes through the gate past demonstrators holding a candlelight vigil. The candles under the umbrellas glow like Japanese lanterns.GRIFFIN: That's nice. I haven't seen that before.
TOM: A lone demonstrator, a black woman, steps in front of the limousine. The lights illuminate her like a spirit. Her eyes fix upon those of the sole passenger. The moment is devastating between them.
GRIFFIN: He's the D.A. She's the mother of the person being executed.
ANDY: You're good! I told you he's good.
TOM: The D.A. believes in the death penalty and the execution is a hard case — black and definitely guilty. The greatest democracy in the world, and 42 percent of people on death row are black. Poor, disadvantaged black. He swears the next person he sees to die will be smart, rich and white. Cut from the D.A. To an up-market suburban neighborhood. A couple have a fight. He leaves in a fit, gets in a car. It's the same rainy night. The car spins out and goes into a ravine. The body is swept away. When the police examine the car, they find the brakes have been tampered with. It's murder, and the D.A. decides to go for the big one. He's going to put the wife in the gas chamber. but the D.A. falls in love with the wife.
GRIFFIN: Of course.
TOM: But he puts her in the gas chamber anyway. Then he finds that the husband is alive. That he faked his death. The D.A. breaks into the prison, runs down death row -- but he gets there too late. The gas pellets have been dropped. She's dead. I tell you, there's not a dry eye in the house.
GRIFFIN: She's dead?
TOM: She's dead because that's the reality. The innocent die.
GRIFFIN: Who's the D.A.?
TOM: No stars on this project. We're going out on a limb on this one. This story is too fucking important to risk being overwhelmed by personality. We don't want people coming with any preconceived notions. We want them to see a district attorney.
ANDY: (whispering) Bruce Willis.
TOM: Not Bruce Willis or Kevin Costner. This is an innocent woman fighting for her life.
ANDY: (whiapering) Julia Roberts.
Griffin tells Tom his pitch had more than 25 words. "But it was brilliant. What's the verdict?" Andy asks. Griffin doesn't betray his thoughts one way or the other when a waiter comes by with a postcard he says a man left for him at the front desk. It reads, "I TOLD YOU TO COME ALONE!" Mill gets up, telling Tom and Andy that the person he was waiting to meet isn't coming. Andy pushes again for an answer about a deal and Mill admits it's an intriguing idea and suggests they call him at the studio the next day. Griffin returns to his Range Rover and finds a note on his steering wheel suggesting he look beneath his raincoat, which covers something on the passenger seat's floor. He lifts the coat and finds a metal box that reads, "DO NOT OPEN TIL XMAS." He flips it open anyway and discovers a live, hissing rattlesnake inside. Scared shitless, he drives erratically until he gets to the side of the road, gets an umbrella from the back of the vehicle and beats the snake to death while cursing the mystery writer. In his rage, paranoia and vulnerability, Griffin drives to June's.
The Player remains one of Tim Robbins' best performances and the scene where he arrives disheveled in the middle of the night at June's gives him his finest in the movie. It also provides the most solid evidence of the multiple layers the movie functions on. Altman may have called The Player at one point in his commentary possibly the "most contrived" film he ever made (which, quite frankly, I can't imagine a more ludicrous statement coming from the great filmmaker who had films such as Beyond Therapy, Quintet and Ready to Wear in his filmography), but Robbins gets to a deep core of emotional truth here. His brush with death via snake prompts him to try to confess to June, but it's as if she knows intuitively and doesn't want him to confirm it. He admits that she was all he could think about when he saw the snake and thought it would kill him. "Are you making love to me?" she asks. He says he supposes that he is; he knows he wants to make love to her. "It's too soon. It's so strange how things happen. David was here, then he left. You arrived. Maybe it's just the timing, but I feel like I
would go anywhere with you if you asked, but we mustn't hurry things. We can't hurry things any more than we can stop them," June tells him. Most of the many times I've watched The Player before, it seemed clear to me that Griffin pursued June. This time, it looked more to me as if she was pulling him into her web. Both the DVD and the dear departed laserdisc contain the same deleted scene that I found to be a rarity among deleted scenes. Most of the time, you view them and you see exactly why the scissors snipped them out of the final cut. One of The Player's cut scenes I've always thought to be an exception and I hadn't thought of it in awhile. When Griffin and June finally start dating, they go on a trip to the Two Bunch Palms resort. The film abounds with posters and references to noir and crime movies as it is, why not plant the idea that June could be a most unusual type of femme fatale? Immediately before they leave on the trip and Bonnie learns he's embarking with another woman, Altman shoots a close-up of a movie poster for M. At the resort, Griffin gets greeted as Mr. M. and his reserved seat at dinner has a card with the same shortened name and courtesy title. They stay in the cabin Al Capone used when he visited California. June leaves her purse open on a dresser and Griffin notices that she's packing a gun. She tells him that
Kahane got it for her and, in fact, had it in his satchel the night he got killed. She wondered why David wasn't able to use it. The cut scene set at the resort cast an entirely new aura of mystery about her character. One masterful scene set kept in the film captures the consummation of Griffin and June's relationship. Not only did Altman not use nudity, he filmed their lovenaking entirely from the neck up, but it never gets the notice it deserves when it's competing with eight-minute single takes and 60 celebrity cameos. Regardless, you definitely see with certainty that as the movie progresses and Griffin spends more time with June and less with Bonnie, he becomes a more soulless creature. If June isn't a femme fatale or an alien as Altman suggested, she's some kind of vampire, and on the ethical scale of the film, June doesn't even seem to register, floating above it in an amoral cloud as Bonnie stays on the moral side and Griffin weighs down the immoral one further and further. In the DVD video interview, Altman admits that the scene was the very last one to be taken out and, if he was making The Player when they did that interview, he would probably have kept it in. The tightrope that Altman walked while juggling the various styles and genres in The Player without ending up with a complete mess boggles the mind.
The final subversion of expectations comes with Griffin's ultimate victory on all levels. First, he tricks Levy into selling Levison on producing Tom and Andy's no-stars-woman dies movie (titled Habeas Corpus). Levy sound leery at first, especially about having no name actors playing the leads, but Mill tells him that Levison made his reputation on two hits with nobodies and his motto used to be, "No stars, just talent." Afterward, he confides to his secretary Jan that he just set Levy up with a dog of a script with no second act and a downbeat ending, but Levison will do it because he's hot to make a movie with him and when they both fall on their faces, he'll sweep in and save the day. Poor Bonnie though has been seeing through Griffin for a while.
"Why are you bullshitting me? You never used to bullshit me," she tells him at one point. The Pasadena police appear to be closing in on him, having found a witness, so Griffin faces a lineup. However, the lady with fairly poor eyesight ends up picking the police detective played by Lyle Lovett. "That's him! I swear on my mother's grave," the woman declares. Detective Avery asks the woman if she can be personal and then inquires, "Where the fuck is your mother buried?" As Griffin walks out of the courthouse a free man, his defense attorney states the obvious of how that witness really made his case by picking that cop out of the lineup. A title card appears telling us it's one year later and we see several stars, obviously playing parts before the witness room of a gas chamber. We realize that we're seeing the ending moments of Habeas Corpus. The camera moves down the hall of the execution unit and we see that, yes, Julia Roberts indeed is playing the part of the condemned wife. She's led off to the gas chamber, strapped in and fumes start to rise when suddenly a guard yells into a phone, "WHAT?!" A man comes running down the hallway. Understandably, it's Bruce Willis. He grabs a shotgun, blows out the glass of the gas chamber runs in and whisks Julia to safety. "What took you so long?" she asks. "Traffic was a bitch," he replies. THE END.
Many movies have made me laugh in my lifetime, but few offer moments so funny that just thinking about them — even months later — can cause convulsions of chuckling. Off the top of my head, I recall two. One comes from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut when the Army
general tries to show his plan to his troops, but Windows 98 keeps crashing so he orders men to bring Bill Gates to him. "You told us that Windows 98 would be faster, and more efficient with better access to the Internet!" the general yells at Gates. "It is faster! Over five million — " That's all Gates gets to say before the general blows his head off to the cheers of his troops. I didn't hear the cheers. The theater audience and I were too busy laughing and applauding. Habeas Corpus in The Player takes the prize for the other moment. When I first saw this film in a screening and I saw Julia Roberts, I started to laugh, but then when Bruce Willis barrels in and grabs the shotgun, I literally was on the floor. I had to watch
the movie two or three times until I could concentrate on what took place after the moment. It pushed me into that heavy a fit of hysterical laughter. Eventually, I did see what happened as Bonnie turned to Tom Oakley in the screening room, asking him how he could have sold out. "What about truth? What about reality? she asks the writer-director. What about the way the old ending tested in Canoga Park? Everybody hated it. We reshot it, now everybody loves it. That’s reality," Tom tells her. Bonnie stands her ground, insisting that it didn't have to end this way. Larry Levy shakes his head, tells her it's a hit and that's why they work there before firing her. Bonnie promises to go over his head. As she marches toward the president's office, breaking a heel on the way, Claire
tries to stop her. She begs to see him. "I'm not just me. I'm also the job." Claire informs her, before feeling sorry and going in where Walter and retrieves basketballs that Griffin shoots from his spot in the president's chair. Claire tells him that Bonnie wants to see him. "Did Levy fire her?" he asks. "Looks that way," she replies. Griffin declares he can't talk to her now and gets up to head home. On the way out the door, Jan informs him that Levy is on the phone for him. He tells her to wait a few minutes then transfer it to the car. Bonnie tries
to get Griffin’s attention. "Bonnie, don't worry. I know you'll kind on your feet," Mill tells her as he gets in his car. He takes the Levy call and it's a pitch from a writer, but not just any writer, one who used to sell postcards. He describes a story about a movie executive who is being threatened by a screenwriter so he kills him, only he kills the wrong guy. The twist: He gets away with it. He ends up married to the dead writer's girlfriend and it's a happy ending. Mill asks Levy to get off the line so he can talk to the writer alone. "Can you guarantee that ending?" Griffin asks. "If the price is right, you got it," the writer replies. Griffin tells him that if it's guaranteed, it's a deal and inquires about the title. "The Player," the writer answers. "The Player. I like that," Griffin says as he pulls into his driveway where a very pregnant June waits. "What took you so long?" June asks. "Traffic was a bitch," Griffin replies as he puts his arm around her and leads her into the house. Altman and Tolkin's funhouse mirror has turned back around on itself again for its final, perfect closing moment. What started in flat-out satire, ends in irony with plenty of suspense, truth and reality managing to sneak into the picture along the way. Altman couldn't live forever, but don't we deserve someone close to his daring and talent? (First one to mention Paul Thomas Anderson gets spit on.) I fear a large part of my interest in new movies somehow died the moment he did.
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Labels: 90s, Altman, Books, Connery, Dean Stockwell, Fiction, Holden, Julianne Moore, Movie Tributes, Shatner, South Park, Television, Tim Robbins
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