Sunday, July 24, 2011

 

A Good Scream


By Damian Arlyn
Brian De Palma is one my favorite directors. Very few other filmmakers (with the possible exception of Dario Argento) are able to fashion products of such sinister, surreal beauty filled with such colorful, hallucinatory imagery and captured by such gracefully balletic camerawork. De Palma's films create a reality that is uniquely theirs. The environments, characters and events depicted in them might resemble our own, but there is always something missing; some subtle, intangible quality that prevents them from sharing our own existence and instead ensnares them in the realm of dreams (which often prove to be nightmares). The places — be they famously celebrated or exceedingly ordinary — seem strangely distant, the characters are more like projections of people rather than flesh-and-blood human beings and the events that transpire always seem like impeccably choreographed and flawlessly executed dance routines rather than the messy, chaotic incidents to which we are so accustomed. De Palma's stories do not take place in the real world. They take place in a world of breath and shadow, where everything appears just slightly out of reach. Many have criticized his work for these characteristics, but I revel in it. De Palma's films are pure cinema and one of his most archetypal creations (not only because it IS cinema but because it is ABOUT cinema) is the exquisite paranoid suspense-thriller Blow Out, which celebrates its 30th anniversary today.

It is far too dismissive of Blow Out to call it an homage to Antonioni's similarly-themed (and similarly-titled) Blow-Up or a tribute to that master of suspense Alfred Hitchcock (of whom De Palma is often accused not only of imitating but of blatantly ripping off). It's also too easy to attribute the film's inspiration to other paranoid-conspiracy films from that era (such as Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation or Alan J. Pakula's Parallax View) as well as various references to the JFK assassination, Watergate scandal and Chappaquiddick. Yes, those influences are clearly there but Blow Out uses these sources as a springboard from which it can launch into its own distinct, visionary manifestation of the director's own fears, passions and prejudices. A perfect example of this is the film's first five minutes. Blow Out opens with an extended hand-held shot of a psychotic killer stalking the scantily clad members of a typical horror movie sorority. As ominous heavy breathing (and quintessentially cheesy, dated "scary" music) pounds away on the soundtrack, the murderer pulls back a shower curtain to reveal a beautiful young girl who looks into the camera and screams…very badly. A sudden cut reveals John Travolta sitting in a screening room laughing as he lights a cigarette and remarks "God, that scream is terrible." Thus we discover, in a very entertaining manner, that the movie we've been watching is actually a movie within a movie. What was perceived as reality is, in fact, a lie. It is the first in a series of deceptions that the film will throw at us. Furthermore, by shooting the entire opening sequence in POV, De Palma cleverly implicates the audience in an act of voyeurism, another major subject of the film (and many of his films). Finally, Jack's first line of dialogue, in which he derisively comments on the scream in the picture he's watching, carries special significance as it will parallel his last line of dialogue in the film. The credits haven't started and already the movie has introduced several of its major themes.

It is also our initial introduction to the film's main character, the sympathetic but complex Jack Terry (played by John Travolta in one if his best performances). Jack is depicted as a very competent soundman who, because of a guilty conscience, has wasted his skills on a series of low-budget exploitation films since a mistake of his cost an undercover police officer his life several years earlier. Jack may be courageous and heroic in his attempts do good and see justice happen, but his cynical distrust of the state and his borderline obsessive desire to see truth come out causes him to make some serious errors in judgment. It was a brilliant decision on De Palma's part to make Jack a filmmaking technician because not only does it serve a storytelling purpose (namely, providing him with a plausible reason to witness and record the car accident of which he has the expertise to recognize as an assassination), but it provides De Palma an opportunity to engage in some artful meta-cinema. More than perhaps any other of De Palma's protagonists, Jack seems to embody the cinematic alter-ego of the director himself.

Joining Travolta is an impressive array of actors, many of whom would become De Palma regulars. The lovely Nancy Allen plays Sally, the call girl who was in the car with the governor when it went off the road. Despite the fact that she was married to De Palma at the time and had already acted in two of his previous films, her casting was actually a recommendation by John Travolta (who had worked with her and liked her in De Palma's Carrie). Though her character is hopelessly — almost unbelievably — naive, Allen plays her with such an endearing sweetness that her eventual fate is heartbreakingly tragic. As the film's primary villain — a ruthless, sociopathic killer named Burke — John Lithgow (Obsession, Raising Cain) is frighteningly menacing and leaves a strong, lasting impression on the viewer. In fact, Lithgow tells a funny story of how a woman from the apartment building he was living in at the time the movie came out saw him getting out of an elevator one night and immediately turned white as a sheet. Finally, Dennis Franz — who also appeared in The Fury and Dressed to Kill — has a small but amusing role as a sleazy, cowardly photographer who works with the Sally character to blackmail unfaithful husbands.

De Palma films are usually technically flawless and Blow Out is no exception, but in this particular effort the style does not, as it has a tendency to do sometimes, overshadow the content. It only elevates it. The cinematography by the great Vilmos Zsigmond is stunning. The visual flourishes that are used (360's, split-diopters, overheard shots, low-angles shots, split-screens, slow-mo, etc.) positively captivated me when I first saw it. Though I would later learn that these were common tricks employed by De Palma, to this day they never fail to excite me when I see them in a movie. Also, the score by frequent De Palma-collobrator Pino Donaggio is quite evocative. The theme Donaggio wrote for Jack and Sally's relationship is a memorably haunting, sweet and sad piece of music. In fact, Quentin Tarantino (an admitted fan of the film and De Palma in general) used it briefly in a scene in Death Proof.

When it was released in 1981 Blow Out received generally positive reviews. Some critics (including Roger Ebert and the always-supportive-of-De Palma Pauline Kael) even wrote some enthusiastic ones. However, the film failed to perform at the box office. Fortunately, over the years Blow Out has gained far more respect and appreciation. It was even recently added to the immortal Criterion Collection. Personally speaking, I love Blow Out and always have. I consider it to be Brian De Palma's most perfect film. I had never seen a De Palma movie at the time I first watched it as a teenager, so I not only found its story engaging, suspenseful and moving but I was absolutely entranced by its style. What I also didn't appreciate at the time was how the visual language of a film could not only be used to tell a story imaginatively, but actually communicate specific ideas/concepts to the audience. I remember getting a book from the library shortly thereafter on the films of Brian De Palma and reading in the chapter on Blow Out about one specific shot where the characters Jack and Sally are standing in the foreground conversing while two train station marques are positioned in the background directly over their heads. On each marquee a destination is written: "Crusader" is behind Jack and "Wall Street" is behind Sally. The book was proposing that these destinations each represented the characters' personalities and function within the story. That idea just blew my mind. It revealed a whole new realm of possibilities to me in the art of film analysis and criticism. I became far more aware of what I was actually seeing on screen whenever I watched a movie from that point on. Blow Out was a seminal work in my development as a cinephile. Along with a handful of other films (including Star Wars and Schindler's List), Blow Out opened my eyes to the incredible potential of cinema.

It also has a really good scream.

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Monday, April 04, 2011

 

This story is laid in a Mythical Kingdom


By Edward Copeland
Those words grace a title card before the credits for the 1931 version of The Front Page, literally set against the turning pages of a newspaper begin. The first screen version of the hit Broadway comedy (produced by Howard Hughes) about Chicago newspapermen covering an impending hanging written by former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur turns 80 years old today. It would go on to be revived three times on Broadway and remade three times on film, in one case accomplishing the rarest of things. The 1931 version remains a very good film and, typically, remakes of good movies fall flat on their ass but its first remake, 1940's His Girl Friday, actually improved on it. The same could not be said for the two later remakes, one of which was even directed by Billy Wilder. We may speak of the other films later, but today we salute the first film incarnation with Adolphe Menjou as Walter Burns and Pat O'Brien as Hildy Johnson.

Since His Girl Friday is one of my favorite films of all time, the story of The Front Page plays quite familiarly to me and since I've the seen the original several times as well (though not recently), I decided to focus on different aspects upon my return trip for this 80th anniversary piece. First, for those who might know the story only through His Girl Friday or aren't acquainted with the story at all, a brief plot summary. The main conflict concerns Walter Burns, editor of The Morning Post, a Chicago tabloid, who doesn't want to lose his ace reporter Hildy Johnson, who is planning to leave the state and start a new life after getting married. It's set against the backdrop of the impending execution of a particularly controversial convicted killer that has been politicized by the town's mayor and sheriff who face re-election and the governor, who belongs to the opposite party. The key difference, and what really made His Girl Friday work even better, is that they made Hildy a woman and Walter's ex-wife. In the original, Hildy is a man and as great and funny as The Front Page is, something strange lurks in the idea that a newspaper editor would be so possessive of his reporter that he'd want to thwart his marriage and his exit to another state and a better job just to keep his hooks in him. It isn't just Hildy that the Walter of The Front Page acts this way about either. The boys in the criminal courts newsroom mention the time another reporter tried to leave the Post and Walter tricked him into a fight so he'd get arrested and thrown in jail on assault and battery charges and only Walter could bail him out provided he returned to his job.

Synopsis out of the way, what stood out the most to me this time about The Front Page was how exceptional Lewis Milestone's direction was. In the very first year of the Oscars, they had for the first and last time the category of best comedy direction and the prize went to Lewis Milestone for Two Arabian Knights, a silent which, despite its title, actually was set during World War I. To show how diverse he could be, he won best director again two years later for another WWI tale, that year's best picture, All Quiet on the Western Front. The following year, he received his third and final best director nomination for The Front Page and a quite deserved nomination it was. The fast-paced, overlapping dialogue that everyone tends to credit as an invention of Howard Hawks in His Girl Friday really can be found nine years earlier in Milestone's The Front Page, albeit not executed by as interesting actors as in His Girl Friday. In fact, I think the inability to match that pacing doomed Wilder's 1974 remake and was just one of the many reasons that the 1988 remake Switching Channels starring Burt Reynolds and Kathleen Turner resulted in such a disaster. That isn't Milestone's only contribution though. As he showed in Western Front, he also happened to be one of cinema's early visual masters. When it gets to the point in the story when condemned man Earl Williams (George E. Stone) escapes and the reporters in the criminal courts press room clear out, Milestone combines a wonderful montage of their editors back at their newspapers calling for them as he keeps cutting back to a continuous pan of the unmanned phones in the press room. One of my other favorite shots comes later in the film when Hildy and Walter (O'Brien, Menjou) try to keep everyone out because they are hiding Earl in the press room and Hildy's fiancee Peggy (Mary Brian) shows up to see why Hildy hasn't made it to the train station. Peggy argues with Hildy who tries to flee her walking backward, still clutching his typewriter, while they circle Burns who is giving orders over the phone at the same time he interjects his own comments in Hildy and Peggy's dispute.

This Front Page also existed in that glorious pre-Code era where it could get away with lots of things films just a handful of years later wouldn't be able to do. It opens with gallows humor — literally. We open with a closeup of a large sack of flour whose slogan reads "SUNSHINE FLOUR INSURES DOMESTIC HAPPINESS." The camera pulls back to show that it's being used to test the rope that will be used to hang Earl Williams the following morning. As it's released and the bag of flour drops through the platform, one man tells another to make certain that the rope works well enough this time. "Last time the guy bounced up and down like he was on a rubber band." The man insists he allowed for the proper weight, but the guy below says the last condemned inmate added weight like they all usually do by stuffing himself during his last meal and "The sheriff wants his neck to snap this time." The noise below disturbs the men of the press who can see and hear the scene a few stories above from the criminal courts press room. One thing that does set The Front Page apart from its remakes, even His Girl Friday, is that the other reporters are more distinctive as characters. Not that they have their own stories, but they stand out more as individuals, especially with standout character actors such as Edward Everett Horton, Frank McHugh, Slim Summerville and others filling the roles.

In another pre-Code touch, the character of Mollie Malloy, the woman abused by the members of the press by having befriended Williams, actually refers to herself as a streetwalker where I don't remember any of the other movie versions coming out and calling her a prostitute. I know they didn't in His Girl Friday and it's been a long time since I've seen the Wilder version with the horribly miscast Carol Burnett. Switching Channels is such a wretched piece of filmmaking that I only saw that once and checking IMDb, every character's name was changed and I don't recall a Mollie Malloy equivalent anyway since they tried to update it by setting it in the world of cable news. One other thing I always find interesting is the slight physical resemblance between Stone as Earl Williams here and John Qualen as Earl in His Girl Friday, though the characters are quite different otherwise. In the 1931 Front Page, Mae Clarke played Mollie and, as in the two other versions in which her character appears, she does take the dive out the window as a distraction, so it makes the grapefruit Clarke took to the face from James Cagney the same year in The Public Enemy not seem as bad. While the reporters' portrayal comes off as callous and cruel in His Girl Friday and even Wilder's 1974 version, they prove to be even harsher and more heartless in the original. As Mollie tells them at one point, "If you were worth breaking my fingernail on, I'd tear your faces off." In the very first scene of the film, we see the reporter McCue (Frank McHugh) calling a peeping tom victim on the phone and harassing her while the other newsmen in the room shout lewd remarks. She finally hangs up on him when he asks if she played Lady Godiva once for charity. The films, to say the least, do not offer the most noble or shining examples of The Fourth Estate. Even the ostensible hero of the piece, Hildy Johnson, who actually seems to be a good reporter who strives to get the facts right while the other reporters have no qualms about making up stories as trivial as what Williams will be having for his last meal, isn't above chicanery to get what he needs. Granted, it's a story from the days of yellow journalism, but one has to wonder if more truth managed to sneak out then than now when so many government reporters seem to be little more than stenographers.

The most famous supporting actor playing one of the reporters is the incomparable Edward Everett Horton and, as in many of his films such as the countless Astaire-Rogers musicals in which he took part, he's the standout here as Roy V. Bensinger, a germ-obsessed, prissy writer who isn't quite as nasty as the rest and who owns that rolltop desk that proves so pivotal in the plot (and holds his rhyming dictionary as well). We first meet Bensinger when he returns from a trip to the "death house" where Earl Williams awaits his execution and the conditions drive Bensinger batty, saying they are so awful they need to be reported to health authorities. "It's amazing these prisoners live long enough to be killed," he tells the other reporters. Of course, he becomes a victim of Walter Burns' scheming later when he and Hildy have hidden an escaped Earl Williams within his rolltop desk and need to sneak it out of the building, so Burns hires Bensinger to get him out of the building while telling his man Duffy to look over his work, tell him it stinks and stick him somewhere else. It's one of the things Walter does that makes Hildy want to get as far away from him as possible, though Burns argues than it will teach Bensinger for leaving his newspaper without giving notice.

What I'd also forgotten and that sets the 1931 Front Page apart from later versions stems from a racial undercurrent in the storyline. Now, no African-American characters appear in the film (though one slur term for them is used) but Earl Williams has been painted by the corrupt mayor and sheriff (James Gordon, Clarence H. Wilson) as a communist who took part in a demonstration and killed an African-American police officer as part of their plan to woo the black vote for re-election the week following Williams' execution. Of course, it's mostly lies, printed by the always willing-to-run-anything press. The truth comes out when a few hours before his execution, the sheriff is forced to make Williams meet with another psychologist, one Professor Englehoffer (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who suggests re-creating the crime so the sheriff hands Earl his gun and William promptly shoots the professor in the gut and escapes.

As Earl ends up being hidden by Hildy (with Mollie helping at first and eventually Burns), he tells his story. He was a man who had been fired from his job after 14 years and was at wit's end. He declares, "I'm not a Bolshevik, I'm an anarchist." Earl also begs for people to let him die. He wants to go back and await the hangman's noose, but there are too many people with too many agendas to let that happen. "Better to die for a cause than the way most people die — for no reason." Hildy's problem is that as much as he hates Burns and the job he does, he is addicted to the job and every time a new development falls into his lap, he can't stop himself from calling it in to Walter and trying to write it up so they can scoop everyone, even if it results in alienating fiancee Peggy further and even watching as Burns has his crooked henchman Diamond Louie (Maurice Black) abduct Hildy's future mother-in-law (Effie Esler).

Hildy tries his best to escape Walter's net, which starts out with Burns offering cash to anyone who can find Hildy, who at the time is obtaining his marriage license with Peggy. Hildy dreams of moving to New York where he has a job lined up with an ad agency for $150 a week. Peggy's bright enough to know that he's too addicted to the news game to give it up easily, no matter how hard Hildy tries to convince her. "Ever climbed out of the sewer and smelled the cool, fresh air? You are the cool, fresh air," Hildy tells her. When Peggy does bust in on the newsroom in that one scene and Hildy tries to explain that it's a big story, she does sort of put him in his place with a line of dialogue that seems particularly timely even today. "It's always a big story, the biggest story in the world and the next day you can't remember what it was about," she tells him. It reminds me of when we were transfixed as the Iranian people took to the streets protesting their stolen election and fraudulent dictatorship only to have it instantly vanish from view the moment Michael Jackson dropped dead and sucked all the air out of the news for a week or more. O'Brien does fine as Hildy, but it's Menjou's Burns who steals the show. It earned him an Oscar nomination, though as good as Menjou is, he's no Cary Grant. The Front Page itself also earned a best picture nomination. The only one of the five nominees from 1930-31 I haven't seen is East Lynne, but of the four I have, The Front Page wins by a mile and the fact that Cimarron won best picture at all is ridiculous. If not The Front Page, Skippy or Trader Horn deserved it before that dusty Western.

As The Front Page ends, Menjou's Burns even manages to charm Peggy and convince her that he's not all bad. As a wedding gift, he gives Hildy his golden pocketwatch engraved, "To the finest newspaperman I've ever known Walter Burns" and tells him he can scratch his name out and put in his if he likes. They drop the sound, so you can't hear the last word of the final punchline, which Walter Matthau at least got to deliver in Billy Wilder's version, when Burns calls Duffy and tells him to radio ahead to the train's first stop and give the sheriff Hildy's description and have him arrested. "The son of a bitch stole my watch."

His Girl Friday remains my favorite, but this 80-year-old version of a play which premiered in 1928 is pretty damn good as well. I've never seen The Front Page staged in its play form, but it would have been fun to see either of its last two Broadway revivals since the 1986 revival's Walter Burns was John Lithgow and, even more intriguing, the very successful 1969 revival starred Robert Ryan as its Walter Burns. When is that time machine getting built for me already?


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Friday, October 08, 2010

 

A '60s film search for a serial killer


By Edward Copeland
We've become so accustomed to movies about the hunts for serial killers, both real and imagined, that it's a bit unusual to see one that dates back to 1968. Granted, I would never have put The Boston Strangler into the Netflix queue if it hadn't been for the recent passing of Tony Curtis, but it was interesting to watch the film because it's more of a detached crime procedural than some of the serial killer romps that have come around in the past couple of decades. It also was surprising to find that as much as it's sold as a Curtis vehicle, we don't even meet him until the film is half over and the ostensible lead (if there really is a lead) is Henry Fonda.

Coming so soon after I caught up with Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, which in turn reminded me of David Fincher's great Zodiac and an aborted attempt at watching The Red Riding Trilogy, it proved especially interesting to watch a film that was one of the forerunners of the low-tech large-scale murder investigation movies. (If anyone thinks I should have given Red Riding more of a chance instead of bailing out after watching much of part one, read Craig's great review at The Man from Porlock who did sit through all three and came to the conclusion I already was starting to form.)

Based on Gerold Frank's book about the string of slayings that terrorized the Boston area in the early 1960s, The Boston Strangler was adapted by Edward Anhalt (Oscar winner for Becket — talk about range) and directed by Richard Fleischer, whose filmography stretched all over the map from the solid thriller The Narrow Margin (1952) to Doctor Dolittle, perhaps the worst best picture nominee in history. His directing career stretched from 1943 to 1989 and included the good (Fantastic Voyage), the bad (Conan the Destroyer) and the ugly (The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond). I'll let you decide where to place Soylent Green.

Thankfully, The Boston Strangler belongs on the list of Fleischer's better efforts and it takes some kind of director who can switch gears from the tomfoolery of Doctor Dolittle to the darkness of this story the very next year. He does go a little overboard with the use of split screen and multiple images projected at once. The technique can be very effective and works quite well at times here, but Fleischer uses it so much that it kind of wears out it welcome.

The Boston Strangler contains an amazing number of familiar names and faces in roles large and small in roles of cops, suspects and victims. Look at this list of performers in minor parts: Hurd Hatfield (the third time he's appeared in a movie I've written about this week), Jeff Corey, Sally Kellerman, William "Blacula" Marshall, George Furth, William Hickey, James Brolin, Dana Elcar, Carole Shelley, David Lewis and Alex Rocco.

As in Zodiac, part of the problem for investigators comes from the murders crossing jurisdictional lines, meaning different departments have different pieces of the puzzle so Massachusetts Attorney General Edward Brooke (Marshall), who would later go on to become the state's first African-American U.S. senator, taps one of his lawyers John Bottomly (Fonda) to head up a task force to collect all the investigations under one umbrella. Bottomly has no interest in the job since he has no law enforcement experience — he'd rather keep working on eminent domain issues — but Brooke basically orders him, despite the fact that the state really doesn't have funds to provide him for his investigation.

Even before Fonda enters the picture, we get the grunt work of various detectives trying to get a handle on what kind of maniac has descended on their city, leading to possible suspects and many dead ends. Two of the detectives who stand out the most are played by George Kennedy, fresh off his Oscar win for supporting actor for Cool Hand Luke, and Murray Hamilton, the year after playing the cuckolded Mr. Robinson in The Graduate and one of the rare times I can recall Hamilton being a good guy (this was the Amity mayor in Jaws, after all). By now, it's a staple for homicide detectives to have a streak of dark humor running through their veins, and Hamilton actually gets some of those best lines, welcome because the tale needs levity to lessen the darkness.

At one point, Bottomly even consults a psychic who amazingly describes the scene of a murder and the contents of a letter they received from a seemingly troubled man named Eugene O' Rourke. They believe they have their man and go to question him and, while he's not the strangler, he does need psychological help. More importantly, he's played by William Hickey and having never discovered the man until his wonderful Oscar-nominated turn as Don Corrado Prizzi in John Huston's Prizzi's Honor, it's always great to find Hickey in another film, especially when he gets as meaty a scene as he does here.

When the film hits the hour mark, we suddenly meet Albert DeSalvo (Curtis) and see things from his point of view briefly through the last of his 13 murders. For fans of the TV series Dexter, his introduction will seem awfully similar to the fourth season scene when Dexter follows John Lithgow's character home and discovers that he's not the loner that he presumed but a family man. In fact, the scenes mirror each other so closely, I can't help but believe that the writers on Dexter had this movie in mind for that plot twist.

DeSalvo's capture and identification happens because of a series of mistakes by him and a happy accident on the part of Bottomly and Detective DiNatale (Kennedy). Because of DeSalvo's seeming inability to understand charges against him (which are unrelated to the murders), he's sent to a mental hospital. The remainder of the film mostly consists of Bottomly questioning DeSalvo, who they believe suffers from a split personality, to see if they can find the part of him that committed the crimes. When we first see DeSalvo in the room where he will be questioned, it is a blank room with just a table and a one-way window where people can watch him. He's dressed in all white and again it's hard not to believe that there's not some inspiration found in The Silence of the Lambs. Many of the obituaries for Curtis said that he was disappointed that he didn't get the Oscar for this and some even called it his best work and while he's very good in a part unlike any other he played, I still think his best is Sweet Smell of Success, followed by Some Like It Hot.

As it is, The Boston Strangler works best now as a time capsule item. It seems to have wanted to make larger points about helping people with mental problems earlier, but it almost seems tacked on as a justification.

As a footnote, I discovered an interesting thing as I searched IMDb for the name of the actor who portrayed the psychic. I'd forgotten the character's name and though I was fairly certain which actor it was, I didn't want to make a mistake. I thought perhaps if I perused the external reviews, I might stumble upon the answer but though I didn't, I did discover in reviews written at the time of release, one by Roger Ebert, the other by Renata Adler at The New York Times, that The Boston Strangler was viewed as quite exploitative at the time. Ebert thought it was a good film, but questioned if it should have been made and was disturbed by the reaction of two young girls and its promotional materials while Adler found the movie absolutely repugnant.

Is my generation (and those coming up behind) really so jaded that we view something such as The Boston Strangler as tame? Is there some truth to the idea that mass media has hardened our hearts and minds to the point that we're harder to shock? It's sort of a running gang between me and a friend whenever some talking head declares "the loss of our innocence," how many times does that make that we've lost it now?

A key scene of the movie takes place on the day of JFK's funeral. When I was growing up, we knew about all of the upheaval of the 1960s: the assassinations of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King as well as Vietnam. When John Lennon was murdered and Reagan and Pope John Paul II were shot and Sadat assassinated in an 11-month time period, they didn't hold the same trauma because we all knew of the ones before we were born and while they were awful events, it almost seemed like business as usual in our dangerous world. It really took horrific events such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing to capture our attention and leave scars, because those catastrophes were beyond our imaginations.

On the other hand, should people be protected from the horrors of the world to the point that when they grow up and learn of them, the shock could prove too much to bear? The girls laughing that Ebert saw would disturb me too: Not feeling or having empathy is a bad thing, but not being able to deal with the fact that bad things happen isn't right either. Movies can be exploitative but, in the end, it's just a movie. It's the so-called news when it's exploitative that disturbs me more.


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Friday, September 03, 2010

 

Trying to build a better killer


The following post will contain spoilers for the first four seasons of the series Dexter, so if you haven't seen it and plan to some day, best not to read any further.

By Edward Copeland
When I was a kid, I could truly call myself a child of television. The day each year when TV Guide's Fall Preview would arrive in the mailbox felt like Christmas as I'd anxiously plan which shows I'd be watching each night of the week, hoping there'd be no conflicts, something that was remedied once my family won a Sony Betamax in a $3 raffle in third grade.

As time went on, that changed and I watched less and less. Today, I watch very few shows and it takes great coaxing or some sort of inspiration to get me to sample new ones and when I do, it is often late in a series' run. So, if it weren't for Netflix's instant viewing program, I probably would never have found myself sampling Showtime's Dexter. What I found even more surprising is that rare series that actually has produced seasons that exceeded the previous ones in quality in its four aired seasons.

The only other three series I can think of that pulled off the continued climb in quality is AMC's Breaking Bad (which, after all, had a short first season and only two additional full seasons so far) and The Wire (which admittedly dropped off slightly in its fifth and final season, thanks to HBO only giving it a 10-episode order) and Deadwood, which had its plug pulled prematurely after three seasons so we'll never know if David Milch's complete vision would have kept ascending. It's also very important to note that while Dexter is good and getting better, it doesn't come close to approaching any of those three series in greatness.

Once I decided to try Netflix's instant program, which I would use on my laptop, I decided I wanted to try something short instead of a feature length film. I noticed that the first two seasons of Dexter were both available, so I started with those since they'd be quick to watch when I was between discs. While I thought the first season was fine, I found it awfully predictable, spotting who the Ice Truck Killer was the first moment the actor appeared and figuring out his connection to Dexter as well. It also made it fairly obvious how things would play out.

Still, Michael C. Hall was good enough, as was the rest of the cast, that it encouraged me to continue on to Season 2. (I have to admit that it took me well into the first season to figure out that Julie Benz, the actress playing Dexter's girlfriend Rita, was the same actress who played the vampire Darla on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

I'm glad I continued because Season 2 was a marked improvement over the first season, telling a story where there really wasn't a villain but it was more a tale of police blood splatter expert Dexter Morgan trying to keep secret his moonlighting as a vigilante serial killer, something made much more complicated by the stalking of homicide detective Sgt. James Doakes (Erik King), a hothead who seems to be the only person in the police department who notices something odd about Dexter, and the arrival of FBI Special Agent Frank Lundy (Keith Carradine) who specializes in serial killers and arrives in Miami when Dexter's favorite body disposal spot gets accidentally discovered.

Though Season 2's quality rose greatly over Season 1, it still suffered in the predictability department, especially with the introduction of the unstable Brit Lila Tourney (Jaime Murray) whom Dexter meets when he's forced to lie that he has a drug addiction to cover his tracks and she becomes his sponsor and mistress. It then becomes pretty easy to see how things will play out since Dexter's code would prevent him from ever killing Doakes, who is an innocent, even if he's a threat, you know that Lila will end up doing it and Dexter will take her out.

It's also in this season where the character of Rita really started to get on my nerves. Dexter basically chose to date the single mother of two to try to give his life a semblance of normalcy to give further cover to his serial killer hobby. However, I really began to wish he'd picked someone less annoying.

With Lila, Season 2 started to make even clearer the series' main theme: Dexter's desire to find someone who understands who he is and why he is the way he is, the way his late adopted father (James Remar) did as he spotted his traits early and instructed Dexter on the code, realizing his adopted son would be a killer but trying to build him into one who would only harm those who deserved it because they'd taken the lives of the innocent. There were hints of that with his surprise brother (Christian Camargo) in Season 1 who played a teasing little game with him as the Ice Truck Killer until it got out of hand and he started dating Dexter's cop sister Debra (Jennifer Carpenter).

Season 3 spelled this theme out in the clearest way possible and did so with stories that weren't easy to predict and did come complete with red herrings, thanks to the season long special guest star Jimmy Smits as powerful and popular District Attorney Miguel Prado, who ends up becoming Dexter's best friend.

That would seem unlikely at the season's outset as Dexter, out to rid the world of a killer who escaped the justice system, accidentally killed Prado's brother who happened to be in the hideout where Dexter expected to find the bad guy and attacked Dexter with a knife, giving Dexter no choice but to defend himself.

Eventually, Dexter does find his original target, but Miguel happens to be stalking the man as well and catches Dexter after the deed. Instead of turning him in, Miguel is grateful and wants to join Dexter as part of a vigilante team. Dexter believes he's finally found a true kindred spirit, especially as he's learned unsettling things about his adoptive father over the years. Unfortunately, he also comes to realize that Miguel's code is broader than his: He'll let innocent people go to jail and murder attorneys he feels are getting the guilty off. Obviously, a conflict is coming.

However, because Miguel is such a public figure and has information on Dexter, he's not as easy to dispatch as Dexter's other kills. There's also another serial killer terrorizing Miami, seeking money from the original bad guy, unaware that he's dead. To further toss confusion into the season's mix, Debra gets a new homicide detective partner Quinn (Desmond Harrington) who may or may not be a crooked cop. Dexter's domestic life gets complicated as well as Rita finds herself pregnant and she and Dexter plan to wed. The entire season does a good job at keeping you guessing as to how things will be resolved.

The fourth season though puts the previous three to shame, thanks in no small part to season-long guest star John Lithgow as a serial killer (he just won an Emmy for the role) and the return of Carradine's Frank Lundy.

Lundy, retired from the FBI, has returned to Miami because he believes that a serial killer he could never get the bureau to believe existed has started a new cycle there and he'd like the help of both Morgans — Dexter, the splatter expert, and Debra, the homicide detective and his former lover — to catch his great white whale.

Meanwhile, Debra's squad busies itself working on a spree killer that has earned the name The Honeymoon Killer because he kills and robs couples, which leads to them fending off (and in the case of Quinn, unsuccessfully) a persistent newspaper crime reporter Christine Hill (Courtney Hill) who wants to keep breaking details of the various investigations.

The fourth season proves to be the best by far at springing surprises on the audience and also the best in developing Dexter's character and giving Hall a truly worthy acting sparring partner in Lithgow. For so long now, Lithgow has been associated with comedy that people forget he can be a particularly good villain, from the relatively harmless kind in Footloose to the ruthless in Brian De Palma's Blow Out or the over-the-top in De Palma's Raising Cain or the awful Cliffhanger.

Dexter really gives Hall a chance to grow as a character in a way Six Feet Under never did, since that series basically resolved his character's arc in its first season (hell, it resolved everyone's) and the show just got worse after that as it kept tossing pointless character changes to perpetuate the show. The only character who stayed consistent in that series was Frances Conroy's Ruth. I digress.

In a way though, Dexter is a cheat. It's not truly a show about a serial killer because all of his victims deserve it, so it's really just a particularly twisted variation on Charles Bronson's Death Wish vigilante. However, twice now Dexter has slipped up and accidentally killed innocent people, so that has to weigh on him at some point.

Furthermore, in the surprise fourth season ending, his cat-and-mouse game with Lithgow's character (as he delayed killing him, hoping to learn how to balance family life and murder) resulted in the murder of Rita. How Dexter will cope with his activities and being a working single father of three creates new problems, though I must admit it was a relief to see Rita gone. Every time she called Dex on his cell phone during season four I'd think to myself, "Not Rita again. Leave him alone. He's got work to do."

One thing that doesn't bode well for the fifth season continuing the trend of getting better each year (and I won't know for a long time since I don't have Showtime and season 5 begins Sept. 26) is the addition to the cast of the one-note actress Julia Stiles. I'm not sure who her character will be, but she's never appealed to me in anything so odds are she won't help the series.


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Monday, August 10, 2009

 

No matter where you go, it's 25 years old today


By Edward Copeland
There's no set formula for concocting a successful cult classic. Many a film has flopped when its specific aim was to be some sort of underground or small-level phenomenon. When it hits though, as The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension did 25 years ago, it seems as if it were all part of the plan. I can't even remember what excited my friends and I to the theater to for this film on opening weekend or to get into its unique groove, but after re-visiting it for this piece, I found we were mere pikers in the Banzai obsession which grew to be more elaborate than I ever knew. Much of this new knowledge came from the DVD I rented which was released in 2001 and was loaded with extras but, alas, is no longer in print. The commentary track by director W.D. Richter also includes the "real Reno," one of Buckaroo Banzai's faithful team played in the film by Pepe Serna. The commentary track alternates between real tales of the making of the film such as arguments with David Begelman over how many times Banzai could be shown wearing red spectacles in the film to Richter talking about how he didn't realize until he was filming that the story and characters were "true" and giving insights into "real" events before and after the movie takes place and how some violence was "toned down" from the truth to avoid an R rating.

NOW, THAT'S A MULTITASKER

Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) is a neurosurgeon. He also plays with a band in unannounced concerts on the side. He's also a scientist interested in all sorts of fields related to physics and a noted adventurer, frequently saving the world with the help of Team Banzai and the Banzai Institute for Biomedical Engineering and Strategic Information. He even gets help from his own sort of militia called Blue Blaze Irregulars, trained civilians who are called upon in a pinch like Army Reserves. Buckaroo has even inspired his own series of comic book adventures. His scientific interests are an inherited one from his Japanese father and American mother (played in a deleted scene by Jamie Lee Curtis). As the film opens, after finishing some surgery, Banzai is ready to test his Jetcar and its oscillation overthruster to see whether it can pass through the solid matter of a mountain, enter the 8th Dimension and emerge from the other side unscathed. According to the commentary, he takes only three items with him: the overthruster, a turkey sandwich and Einstein's brain. (An interesting sidenote: Part of the equipment inside Buckaroo's Jetcar resembles the flux capacitor that will be the key to time travel in the following year's Back to the Future.) It's an experiment that killed his parents (perhaps due to sabotage by the evil and mysterious Hanoi Xan) and even earlier in an attempt gone wrong by Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow) who was possessed by nasty aliens from Planet 10 who reside in that dimension and brought many of those aliens back to Earth with him back in 1938. Banzai's experiment succeeds and he returns unharmed and with evidence of a the simultaneous plane of existence within our own. The crazed Dr. Lizardo sees news of Buckaroo's success from his place in a mental hospital and thinks it's time for him to gather his forces and return to Planet 10 where he is known as Lord John Whorfin. The other bad aliens (known as Red Lectroids, but who look like humans without a key formula) who were released during Lizardo's 1938 experiment created and operate Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems, a major U.S. defense contractor. Did you follow all that?

THE DEUCE YOU SAY

Of course, "truth" or fiction, describing Earl Mac Rauch's screenplay proves to be somewhat of a pointless exercise and that's what makes Buckaroo Banzai such a fun ride, though admittedly an acquired taste, for viewers such as myself. It's a deadpan action movie, a Zen adventure, a feature-length nonsequitur. It's one long MacGuffin with a helluva cast to boot. Dialogue has taken on a life of its own such as the immortal "No matter where you go, there you are" or the seemingly pointless "Where is that watermelon from" followed by the reply "I'll tell you later." The members of Team Banzai come with unique names and even snazzier costumes such as new recruit Dr. Sidney Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum), rechristened New Jersey, who wears the cowboy costume of his grandfather, a silent film star. New Jersey uncovers a key piece of the film's puzzle when he realizes that all the Red Lectroids working at Yoyodyne appeared in Grover's Mills, N.J., on Nov. 1, 1938. Meaning, that Orson Welles' fabled War of the Worlds radio broadcast on Halloween 1938 wasn't a hoax at all but Welles was brainwashed into saying the alien invasion was one. Among the aliens at Yoyodyne waiting for Whorfin's return are John Bigboote (pronounced BigbooTAY) and John O'Connor (played by Christopher Lloyd, right, and Vincent Schiavelli, left). I feel as if I'm spending far too much time trying to describe the plot of Buckaroo Banzai instead of making a case for why it deserves a tribute, but it's such a unique hodgepodge, it almost defies praise as much as it's difficult to describe what it's about. It is what it is. “Nobody is nobody," Buckaroo says at one point. "Everybody has something to offer.” That certainly is the case with this movie, which really is a miracle for being made at all. Its origin could have gone two ways: As a feature or as an idea for a weekly TV show, but Rauch's script grew so long, the film won out and it actually got financed somehow. The film comes loaded with its own mythology, which is even expanded on the DVD, which even included spoilers for later chapters that were never filmed or told. For example, Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin), the depressed woman Buckaroo rescues in the film who turns out to be the long-lost twin sister of Banzai's murdered wife Peggy will be slain two years later by his archenemy Hanoi Xan.

LAUGH-A WHILE YOU CAN, MONKEY BOY

One thing I think I'm failing to emphasize about Buckaroo Banzai is what a funny film it is, even though its humor is no more conventional than its action or its plot. Even the score by Michael Boddicker, which at times comes off sounding like an electronic whistle, seems to be composed for laughs. Every line Lithgow utters in his crazed pseudo-Italian madman guise comes firing at the audience as if it came from a maching gun loaded with gags. "Sealed with a curse as sharp as a knife. Doomed is your soul and damned is your life," Lizardo spits. Everyone gets in on the act though, as the confused and suicidal Penny Priddy confesses to Buckaroo, "You're like Jerry Lewis, you give me hope to carry on, then you leave me in the lurch while you strap on your six-guns." There are even sight gags as when the president, afraid that a possible war will be triggered with the Soviets by the Black Lectroids of Planet 10 (the good ones) if the Red Lectroids aren't stopped, whips out the Declaration of War — The Short Form. There is even more fun to be found on the out-of-print DVD which includes an extra where subtitles from Team Banzai member Pinky Carruthers gives you astounding facts about Buckaroo's life and the institute. Did you know that Banzai's mobile unit runs on hydrogen and the institute gets many requests from SUV owners who contact the institute to see if they can turn their vehicle into more environmentally friendly modes of transportation? Of course, the movie ultimately ends on a sad note because it had a teaser for the next chapter, a chapter we've never seen and now, 25 years later, it seems unlikely that we ever will. Still, on the off chance that this really was a true story, I think we best be training as Blue Blaze Irregulars since the DVD reports there still may be Red Lectroids out there and Lizardo/Whorfin may have survived that explosion. Even if that's not true, the evil Hanoi Xan remains at large. Try to rent the DVD and acquaint yourself with the backstory.


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Sunday, November 23, 2008

 

It's not a chick flick, but it is a damn good movie


By Edward Copeland
Before I begin expounding in earnest about why I love Terms of Endearment (which turns 25 today) so much, I'd like to talk about an old bugaboo of mine that I haven't spoken of at length on these virtual pages: There is no such thing as a chick flick. There are merely good movies, bad movies and those in between and Terms of Endearment is a very good movie and if you disagree as astronaut Garrett Breedlove so memorably says, "You need a lot of drinks." Not to break the ice, but to kill the bug you have up your ass.

Let's get this chick flick nonsense out of the way quickly so we can get on to the movie. I've enumerated my points against the phrase.

1. It assumes only women will like the movie

It's insulting to say something that has subject matter about women (which nine times out of 10 are written by men) will not be understood or appreciated by men if the movie is a good one. The corollary also is true as there is no such thing as a "guy movie." I've known plenty of women who have loved Die Hard as much as men.

2. The label is too often used to excuse bad movies

If a male critic reviews a movie (let's say Beaches) and says it's bad, some will try to dismiss the criticism because "it's a chick flick" as if that makes it some sort of special needs child that needs its own grading scale. No. Terms of Endearment succeeds as a great movie. Beaches just sucks in a supremely mediocre way (and I'm being kind in only calling it that).

3. It is insulting to women.

In much the same way, it assumes a "chick flick" won't appeal to any man, it assumes that all women have the same tastes. All movie opinions are subjective. I'm sure there are women who don't like Terms or Beaches or countless others saddled with that label. There's nothing wrong with them but there is something wrong with people who want to pigeonhole every member of an entire gender into one way of thinking on a subject.

Meanwhile, on to more important matters, namely the film writing and directing debut of James L. Brooks. His mark on television itself was fairly impressive: producing and writing on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi among others and later going on to executive produce The Simpsons. Very few people win three Oscars for the same movie, so Brooks' achievement with his adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel Terms of Endearment proves quite an impressive film directing debut. His second writing-directing effort, Broadcast News, would turn out even better though Oscar failed to smile on it. Brooks' big-screen efforts since have ranged from middling (As Good As It Gets) to downright awful (Spanglish). Though Terms has a reputation as one of the great tearjerkers — and don't get me wrong, unless you are made of stone, tears will be shed — its essence is more that of a comedy. Brooks builds to the tonal shift quite stealthily, adding the elements of dysfunction in the marriage of Emma and Flap Horton (the too-seldom-seen Debra Winger and the underappreciated Jeff Daniels) but using the comic courtship of Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) and Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson) as a counterbalance to keep it light. Brooks admits in the DVD commentary that in many ways he felt he had to do it that way so he could use the word cancer to cause a spit take late in the film. He does and it works. Perhaps Brooks' greatest feat was his invention of Breedlove, who didn't exist in McMurtry's novel, where Aurora was pursued by a vast array of suitors, a little bit of which remains in the film, but Nicholson's Oscar-winning astronaut is one of the many ingredients that lifts the movie into the stratosphere. (It's interesting that two of the best films of 1983 involved astronauts, the fictional one here and the real ones in The Right Stuff.)

In fact, Brooks' achievement would have been impossible without the cast he assembled. Some find MacLaine's Oscar-winning turn too shrill and over-the-top, but Aurora Greenway is shrill and over-the-top and, to me at least, it was the performance of MacLaine's career. Her only serious competition that year was in the very same movie and in an ideal world, she and Debra Winger would have tied because every time I watch Terms of Endearment, Winger's performance impresses me more than the last time. Watching her again, parts of Emma reminded me of a friend I loved dearly and still miss and whose birthday would have been tomorrow. Whether it's expressing pure joy or pure anger, she never strikes a false note. Bob Newhart has a reputation for doing the greatest comic telephone call routines ever. I'd make the case that Winger is the greatest telephone scene actress ever, making every one of the numerous calls between Aurora and Emma seem real and punctuating them with wit and pathos. While those three principals snagged Oscar nominations (and two won), John Lithgow also grabbed a nomination for his small but sweet role as an Iowa banker who has an affair with Emma. Jeff Daniels as Emma's disappointing husband Flap didn't earn as much attention as he should have, something that seems to have plagued Daniels to this day. Will he ever earn an Oscar nomination for anything?

The smaller roles largely were cast with local Houston-area actors and wise selections were made such as Lisa Hart Carroll as Patsy and Betty R. King as Rosie. They didn't reprise their roles in the sequel, The Evening Star, which holds the distinction of being the worst sequel ever made to an Oscar-winning best picture. Actually, I've never seen The Sting II, where Jackie Gleason and Mac Davis took over the Newman and Redford roles, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt that it can't be worse than The Evening Star. I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than sit through The Evening Star again. Terms of Endearment, however, always will hold a place in my heart.


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Wednesday, April 02, 2008

 

From the Vault: Cliffhanger


Money can't buy everything. It can purchase Sylvester Stallone's services or it can acquire a good screenplay. Stallone stars in Cliffhanger, so guess what the movie lacks.

Stallone plays Gabe Walker, an employee of the Rocky Mountain Rescue Team. They scale the rugged terrain to aid hikers and climbers when nature gets the better of them. At the film's outset, Walker comes to the aid of his co-worker Tucker (Michael Rooker), who has scaled a tall peak with his inexperienced girlfriend.

Of course, don't stop to think logically. It has no value in a film like Cliffhanger so don't even bother asking yourself how a woman with no climbing skills got that high up the mountain in the first place. In fact, implausibilities stack up to a height that might rival Mount Everest.

Needless to say, it comes as no surprise when the rescue goes awry, the woman plunges to her death and Stallone blames himself. Given the film's formula nature, the script, the genre and Stallone, you know that he'll leave the mountain, wracked with guilt, only to return in a situation that requires him to conquer his fears.

Except that's not quite what happens — Walker shows no qualms about returning to the mountain (aside from when it's convenient for the plot) and Tucker's animosity only comes to the surface in a single scene before they again band together to fight the film's personification of evil. The evil in this case turns out to be a band of (surprise again) international thieves led by John Lithgow, who appears as bored being in this film as the audience is watching it. He looks as if he could steal the film at any time, but why on earth would he want to?

With the help of a crooked Treasury agent (Rex Linn), Lithgow and his gang have attempted to hijack a shipment of government cash, only the theft gets bungled the three suitcases full of greenbacks plummet to the mountain range, followed by the plane itself. Having no tracking skills of their own or climbing equipment, the crooks trick the Rescue Team into helping them find the money and put in place the film's interminable cat-and-mouse chase between Stallone and the bad guys.

Along the way, the usual elements rear their ugly heads: lame quips at inappropriate moments, slow motion yells, explosions and poetically justified deaths. Directed by Renny Harlin, who somehow gained a reputation as a good action director though he's only made three bad movies (Die Hard 2, Nightmare on Elm Street IV and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane), the film does manage some nice set pieces, particularly the hijacking sequence. Aside from those few touches, even the action leaves much to be desired. When they get around to the requisite mano-a-mano between Stallone and Lithgow, the stunt looks neat but it plays out so predictably — down to when the bite occurs and how Lithgow dies — it just induces yawns.

It puzzles me why they even tried to add emotional weight to this film because the filmmakers discard it as soon as they've finished wheeling out a couple of poorly written melodramatic scenes. The characters — and I use that term loosely — are so poorly developed that only ones who seem well drawn are two twentysomething thrill seekers in a brief cameo. If the producers had brains or daring — and this film shows no evidence that they possess either — they might have tried to re-create the trailer for Cliffhanger as the film.

Dump the dialogue entirely and just present a nonstop chain of action sequences set to classical music. The result would be the same, the film would be mercifully shorter and we wouldn't be forced to listen to Stallone's anguished battle cries.


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Monday, November 19, 2007

 

Oscar's rules for GLBT characters

By Edward Copeland
This post was for the Queer Blog-a-Thon hosted at Queering the Apprentice, which apparently no longer exists. Be warned: the words below will contain spoilers for a lot of films, too many to mention, so don't read it and whine later.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has been fairly generous in the past 20 or so years in nominating (and sometimes rewarding) actors and actresses who play gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters on screen. However, this does come with a price. Not to their careers, but in deciding whether or not the role gets nominated in the first place.

There seems to be only two types of gay roles that get deemed worthy of Oscar recognition: ones that are comicly broad or one where the gay character in question either ends up dead or alone. Look at just a couple of highly praised roles that got snubbed come Oscar time. Everyone thought Dennis Quaid was a lock for a nomination with his tortured married gay man in the 1950s in Far From Heaven, but he didn't make the cut. In the end of the film, his character has accepted his sexuality and found a boyfriend: no nomination for him.

Rupert Everett was a lot of fun as Julia Roberts' best gay friend in My Best Friend's Wedding, but his character was out, proud and presumably in a relationship. Strike him from your nominating ballot.

Now, here come the spoilers, as I look at all the performers who did get nominated or won an Oscar for playing a gay character. I'm only counting characters that are explicitly gay, not implied ones such as Clifton Webb in Laura For sake of simplicity, I'm going chronologically.

Peter Finch in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971)

The first openly gay character that I can find with a nomination set one of the patterns: He's alone at the end.

Al Pacino and Chris Sarandon in Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Sarandon's character of Leon is already institutionalized (and wants nothing to do with Sonny) when we meet him. Sonny (Pacino) ends up alone and in prison.

James Coco in Only When I Laugh (1981)

The first instance (post Dog Day Afternoon) of Oscar nominating an openly gay character was for Coco's broad comic turn in this lesser Neil Simon outing.

John Lithgow in The World According to Garp
Robert Preston in Victor, Victoria (both 1982)

Preston's great turn definitely belongs more in the broad comic category, though he might also be an exception since he is allowed to have a boyfriend by film's end. Lithgow, as the NFL player turned transsexual in Garp, might be an exception. He's alive at the end, but his role is mostly played for laughs and the film never provides him with a significant other.

Cher in Silkwood (1983)

Another possible exception, though the film makes it unclear if she's alone at the end, though she certainly looks guilt-stricken over possible involvement in her friend Karen's death.

William Hurt in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985)

Ding ding ding. We have a winner. While the movie was certainly a drama, Hurt does a lot of histrionic flouncing AND he ends up dead in the end, even after his straight cellmate (Raul Julia) gives him a mercy fuck.

Bruce Davison in Longtime Companion (1990)

It was five years before another gay character earned a nomination and Davison's character got the double whammy. First, he has to watch his lover die of AIDS, leaving him alone, and then he dies as well (and not even on screen).

Tommy Lee Jones in JFK (1991)

Here's another example of a broad performance in a drama and while Jones' character lives in the end, it is complicated by the fact that he is portrayed as a villain (and with some over-the-top gay orgy scenes that only Oliver Stone could dream up). In contrast, Joe Pesci playing the less showy gay character who does get killed, didn't earn Academy notice.

Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game (1992)

First, Dil's lover gets killed during an IRA kidnapping and then when he/she falls for his captor, Fergus (Stephen Rea) gets sent to prison and Dil waits patiently, even though Fergus shows no intention of abandoning his heterosexuality.

Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993)

Gay and dead takes home the prize again, though at least Hanks' portrayal wasn't a broad one, even if Denzel Washington gave the better lead role in the film.

Greg Kinnear in As Good As It Gets (1997)

I don't think Kinnear's character had a significant other by film's end, but I do remember he took a bad beating.

Ian McKellen in Gods and Monsters (1998)

Here is an openly gay actor nominated for portraying a true-life openly gay director. Alas, James Whale dies in the end (as he did in real life) but the real travesty was that McKellen (and Nick Nolte and Edward Norton) lost to Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful).

Kathy Bates in Primary Colors (1998)

Bates was great as a take-no-prisoners political operative working on the campaign of a Bill Clinton-like candidate. Alas, her lesbian character had principles and ended up firing a gun into her head.

Hilary Swank in Boys Don't Cry (1999)

Swank won the first of her two Oscars for lead actress by playing the gender-confused Brandon Teena. It also was the first of two times that Swank made it to the winner's circle by getting beaten to death.

Javier Bardem in Before Night Falls (2000)

Based on a real person, Bardem's character has to fight problems in Cuba before getting to N.Y. for one of the longest death scenes (from AIDS) I've ever seen.

Ed Harris in The Hours (2002)

The same year that the Academy snubbed Dennis Quaid for his fine work in Far From Heaven, they nominated this awful performance by the usually fine Harris as an artist dying of AIDS.

Nicole Kidman in The Hours (2002)

If Virginia Woolf hadn't walked herself into the river, this nomination and win probably would have never happened.

Julianne Moore in The Hours (2002)

In a way, her character here is similar to the one Quaid plays in Moore's other 2002 film. She's married, but unable to accept her sexuality. By the film's end, she appears to be alone, so she gets a pass while Quaid got snubbed. It may also explain one of the rare occasions where Meryl Streep didn't get an Oscar nomination since her lesbian character in The Hours had a lover in the end and doesn't die.

Charlize Theron in Monster (2003)

Another win based on a true story. Theron took the executed lesbian serial killer right up to the winner's circle.

Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005)

This may be the true exception to the rule. Based on a real life character, the story didn't follow Truman Capote to his death and he did have a longtime companion. The closest this comes is denying him his crush on the executed killer.

Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain (2005)

Two nominated performances of gay character, so the Academy got to take one of each: Gyllenhaal's character ends up dead, Ledger's ends up alone.

Felicity Huffman in Transamerica (2005)

I'm not sure where to place this performance of an in-process transsexual. She doesn't die in the end.


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Tuesday, December 20, 2005

 

From the Vault: Shrek


With a wicked spirit of fun and more cultural references than a year's worth of Dennis Miller Live, Shrek proves a delightful antidote to the increasingly formulaic world of the animated feature.

Aside from Toy Story and Toy Story 2, animated movies for the entire family have decline in the years since Aladdin. The films themselves look great, but the stories and music leave a lot to be desired (RIP Howard Ashman).

Mike Myers brings life and a Scottish brogue to the title character, a bitter ogre trying to get by alone in his swamp when evil despot Lord Farquaad (John Lithgow) exiles all fairy tale creatures there. Suddenly, Shrek finds his life turned upside down, especially by a talking donkey, aptly named Donkey and voiced by Eddie Murphy, who gets to have a lot more fun with his voice role here than he did in the lackluster Mulan.

In order to restore order to his world, Shrek makes a deal with Farquaad to rescue the fair Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) so Farquaad can make her his bride. Like the Toy Story films, Shrek uses the latest in computer animation techniques and they are even more impressive here, with realistic facial expressions that make for an amazing look.

In many ways, Shrek may entertain adults more than children since grown-ups will get a bigger kick out of the skewering of fable conventions and the nods to other cultural signposts.

It's no accident that this DreamWorks production gives a lot of gentle ribbing to the Walt Disney factory, even to the point that Farquaad slightly resembles its chairman, Michael Eisner. The music choices are fun as well and, if nothing else, Shrek will likely be remembered as the first animated film to use a song by Leonard Cohen.

For those worried that Shrek may be all cynicism and no heart, there even is the tried-and-true message of not judging a book by its cover. Thankfully, the sentimentality doesn't last long enough to risk sugar overload.


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From the Vault: Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson


ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED MAY 21, 2001

Five years after the book came to DreamWorks, four years after development began and 2 1/2 years after the start of production, the computer-animated feature Shrek finally his theaters.
No wonder co-director Andrew Adamson says directing an animated feature is like making a live-action one, only in slow-motion.
"Whereas on a live-action set, you get all your actors and gaffers and the camera crew and everyone shows up on the set on the same day and you shoot a scene, in an animated movie you might record one of the actors one day, another actor a couple months later. So what took a day on a live-action set ended up being spread out over a year. Many of the same tasks, just separated and slowed down."

Shrek, based on the children's book by William Steig, tells the story of an angry ogre who finds his solitary life disrupted when evil Lord Farquaad banishes all "fairy tale creatures" out of his kingdom and into Shrek's swamp. Hoping to get rid of the squatters, Shrek makes a deal with Farquaad to rescue Princess Fiona so Farquaad can marry her.

Like the Toy Story movies, Shrek is an example of state-of-the-art computer animation. Using tools called "shapers," Shrek advances the art by creating characters that can express dialogue and emotion through a complex facial animation system developed by PDI/DreamWorks. To achieve the expressive looks, the system applies layers of bone, muscle, fat, etc., that can be manipulated separately. The technique also allows for more realistic depiction of clothing and environment. Having co-directors, in this case Adamson and Vicky Jenson, helped move the process along faster.
JENSON: "What we tend to do with an animated feature is kind of break the movie down into separate scenes or sequences and kind of tackle those one at a time in story. What we did was kind of divide up those sequences, kind of like trading cards."

That approach also gave Adamson and Jenson someone who could help out if either hit a bump in the road.
JENSON: "We were both very involved with each other's sequences. If one of us ran into a creative block in editorial ... then we were there for each other."

Perhaps the biggest problem the production encountered was the death of Chris Farley, who had recorded some dialogue as the title character before he died. Farley's former Saturday Night Live co-star Mike Myers stepped in and the film had to start over, almost from scratch. Because of the conflicting schedules of the voice talents, Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz, John Lithgow and others sometimes would record their work up to a year apart.

Both directors laud their cast's willingness to record many versions of their lines to allow for more options in editing. Fortunately for the filmmakers, improvisation is second nature for Myers and Murphy, which made the film's gentle ribbing of fairy tale conventions all the more fun.
JENSON: "It really is, at best, a gentle homage. We've all grown up with fairy tales and we've all grown up with theme parks. I think the kind of things we're poking fun at have become pretty universal.

Adamson is working on an animated adaptation of British author Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad trilogy about gnomes. Jenson's plans are more personal.
"I'm just rehearsing lush, tropical locations where a weary director and her husband can go and relax for a while."


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