Wednesday, April 11, 2012
"If we can just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here."
"It's just a satire on the way people behave in the movie studios. There was such a fuss started about it. People started saying, 'Oh people are afraid you are going to do this and do this.' So the more afraid they got, the more ideas they gave me. Looking back on this whole picture, it's a pretty tame satire. It's no big indictment. Things are much, much worse than this picture seems to say." — Robert Altman on the DVD commentary for The Player
By Edward Copeland
To begin a post on the 20th anniversary of Robert Altman's film The Player by showing the clip of his fabled eight-minute, one-take opening and then waxing rhapsodic about all manners of ingenuity in that shot puts me at risk of sounding like Fred Ward's character in that sequence, railing about how everything in movies these days is "cut cut cut cut" and teaching Jimmy the bike messenger (Paul Hewitt) about Orson Welles' famous tracking shot that started Touch of Evil (Unlike Ward's studio security head Walter Stuckel though, I would recognize Absolute Beginners when Jimmy brings it up). Despite any negative connotation I may endure for choosing the most obvious part of Altman's 1992 film to launch my tribute to The Player, I stand by my decision and commence my piece discussing those eight glorious minutes, not only because the work that went into creating that sequence still amazes me two decades later, but because that bite-size morsel of cinematic art serves as a microcosm of the entire film. As Altman himself said in a video interview on the DVD, "The film actually is like a snail — it kind of turns in on itself and becomes itself." When Francis Ford Coppola held a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival to tout Apocalypse Now, he famously declared, "My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." You could say that Altman's film isn't about Hollywood either — it is Hollywood — and who truly can determine on which battleground more blood has been shed. Watching The Player now, you discover (as you find in many Altman films) that wily director had been operating on several planes at the same time during filming and, as funny and dead-on as its humor may be, The Player doesn't exist exclusively as a satire. An audience's boisterous laughter distracts a viewer from noticing Altman's use of some directorial sleight-of-hand. When the humor subsides, a surprised viewer realizes that the film now plumbs much darker depths. That Altman successfully coordinated all these disparate instruments into the orchestral composition we know as The Player remains miraculous. Now, about that opening shot…
Assuming anyone reading this watched the clip or has seen The Player, the actual preparations that Altman, his crew and the actors involved in the sequence took required planning — lots of meticulous planning. Often, you hear people mistakenly
refer to this eight-minute take as a tracking shot when that isn't the case. A camera didn't run on rails as Akira Kurosawa did for The Woodcutter's long walk in Rashomon and isn't exactly equivalent to the move Martin Scorsese loves to do as in Raging Bull and Goodfellas, to name just two of his. Even a casual observer, seeing how the camera moves in those eight minutes, would realize that laying down tracks for all those angles and positions without any being caught on film by the camera as it switched heights and directions would be damn near impossible. No crews could remove or replace tracks that fast. On the DVD commentary track, Altman explains the steps he went through to achieve the scene. The director actually built a scale model of the studio set along with a scale-size crane that allowed him to see where he would be able to travel and reach and where he couldn't go. Using the model, he visualized roughly how the crane would circulate based on which characters and cameo players should appear in what order. "I had to set up the movie studio
and I wanted to set up the characters that we were going to be dealing with and I wanted to get the audience's attention," Altman said. The director went to the real set with the real crane and choreographed the take. While he knew who would be in the scene, Altman hadn't the slightest idea what words would emanate from their mouths as everyone with a speaking part in the opening improvised his or her dialogue. The amount of time on a single reel of film determined the take's total length, so they had to plan how much time to spend at each spot. Altman said everyone rehearsed for a day while the actual filming took half a day, employing 11 microphones and a mere 15 takes. For such a complicated undertaking, while it required intricate preparations, they managed to lock it down rather quickly. It's far from the only time The Player displays a self-reflexive moment — that happens in the film's first image as a hand enters the frame with a clapboard (and if that's an honest clapboard, it means take 10 ended up being used in the film) as you hear offscreen voices asking for quiet on the set, marking the scene and, finally, calling, "Action" so the film can begin — and similar instances occur all the way to its final frame. For his part, Altman emphasized the show in his showpiece. "It's a very conceited thing — this shot with no cuts in it.…It draws attention to it. It's showing off.…It got attention to the picture," he admits. 
What Altman set out to do in that scene — the setting-up-the-characters-and-the-studio part, not the garnering-attention-for-the-film part — he accomplished quite efficiently. We begin with the woman who, truth-be-told, keeps the studio running through who knows how many regimes, the studio president's executive secretary Claire (Dina Merrill) telling the studio president's receptionist Sandy (Leah Ayres) the proper things to say about the boss's whereabouts; we hear the first mention of a name of a rival that will haunt our protagonist, Larry Levy; Speaking of our protagonist, he arrives. One of the top executives, Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) pulls on to the lot in his Range Rover and we get an immediate sense of his importance as he gets a movie pitch from real-life writer-director Adam Simon before he's even closed the vehicle's door. Griffin tells Simon to talk to his assistant, Bonnie Sherow; next we see Walter and Jimmy have their tracking shot discussion and pass Griffin's office window where he gets updates from his secretary Jan (Angela Hall) and receives his first official pitch from Buck Henry and we get our first reference to a possible part for Julia Roberts; Adam Simon reappears and we meet Bonnie (Cynthia Stevenson) who begs him to slow down and write it down for her. A shriek is heard and they run over to find that a man driving a golf cart has run over Jimmy on his bicycle, scattering a huge pile of mail. On top of one stack, a postcard with drawings of old movie stars and the words YOUR [SIC] HOLLYWOOD IS DEAD; a young man (Randall Batinkoff) in a sports car pulls up to a young blonde sitting on the hood of a car and purposely mistakes her as Rebecca De Mornay in an attempt to pick her up; a low level exec (Jeremy Piven) sucks up to a group of Japanese visitors touring the studio; studio president Joel Levison (Brion James) arrives, driving to the door of his office and asking Sandy
to park his car for him; three other executives talk about the bank that owns much of the studio "putting the screws" to them and sending the owner's son out from Boston. They talk about how it happens at all studios every few years and rumors that Griffin may be replaced by someone else, maybe even Larry Levy; Griffin hears his second pitch of the day; Director Alan Rudolph asks Jimmy where Griffin's office is and Jimmy tells him and also mistakes him as Martin Scorsese. Rudolph goes in the door as Jan comes out and collects Griffin's mail from Jimmy; Walter now bends Buck Henry's ear, this time going on about Hitchcock's Rope while continuing to gripe about all those cuts. Henry brings up Bernardo Bertolucci's great tracking shot to Debra Winger in The Sheltering Sky. Walter, of course, hasn't seen it; Bonnie chastises her assistant Whitney Gersh (Gina Gershon) for having coffee with Alan Rudolph; Rudolph sees Griffin and gives him his final pitch of the opening scene as well as the film's first mention of Bruce Willis. Mill receives his mail, including that postcard which reads on the other side, "I HATE YOUR GUTS ASSHOLE!" Rudolph hasn't stopped pitching about his cynical political thriller comedy that's "got heart in the right spot" but he gets the last line of that bravura opening, "Of course someone dies in the end. They always do in thrillers." Beyond the technical virtuosity displayed in that opening
take, what an efficient introduction of most of the important characters and plot strands for the film. The single take goes beyond being a clever filmmaking stunt and prepares a viewer for most of what will be coming. If they didn't know what a movie pitch was, now they do. The film establishes the basic hierarchy of the studio's power structure. We know that shaky financial times embroil the studio and that its top development executive, Griffin Mill, could lose his job over it, perhaps to an executive who works elsewhere named Larry Levy. We've learned that someone representing the bank that owns most of the studio will be arriving to look things over. Griffin also has to contend with someone sending him threatening postcards. The movie even has laid the groundwork for the joke that leads to the final punchline. More ominously, as Rudolph says in the context of his movie idea, "Of course someone dies in the end. They always do in thrillers" as Griffin stares out the window after receiving his hate mail, the first scene of The Player doesn't end on a satirical note, but a suspenseful one, indicating the thriller blood flowing through its celluloid veins. Rudolph's description of the movie he wants to make inspires laughter, but it comes damn close to describing The Player as well: a cynical political thriller with its heart in the right spot, only its office politics and while the film does have heart in the right spot, the right spots occur only in isolated moments and not in the film overall.One final paragraph related to the opening, since it affords me the opportunity to share an anecdote from my days long past as a pseudo-professional film critic as well as illustrates that some of the funniest dialogue that just screams satire — well, as animated Springfield mob boss Fat Tony (voiced by Joe Mantegna) once said on The Simpsons, "It's funny 'cause it's true." Altman says in his commentary that the performers improvised all the dialogue in that sequence, including creating their own movie pitches. It shouldn't be surprising then that Buck Henry delivers the funniest one with his idea for a sequel to The Graduate. The other two pitches speak the ridiculous language that most assume has to be exaggerated. In Griffin's second meeting, he listens to writer-directors Patricia Resnick (on left in photo), and
Joan Tewksbury try to sell an idea about a television actress who takes a trip to Africa where a local tribe begins to worship her as an idol. "Kind of like The Gods Must Be Crazy, only instead of a Coke bottle, you have a television actress," Griffin says when he finally catches on to their concept. "It's like Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman," Resnick sums up. When Alan Rudolph spells out the basics of his story concerning a senator who develops the power to see what's inside a person's mind, his pithy summation of the film describes it as "Ghost meets The Manchurian Candidate." On Jan. 31, 1992, less than four months before The Player opened, another film finally made it to movie theaters. Originally scheduled as one of its studio's big year-end releases, the studio punted it to the January dumping ground because even they recognized how bad it was. If you review films outside of major markets, studios either contract local agencies to handle publicity and press relations or use regional offices, if they have one in close proximity. (At least, they did this once upon a time. Now, smaller markets get frozen out, if their newspapers haven't axed their film critics first.) In late summer 991, this studio's regional rep drove up to give me and my paper's other reviewer a preview of the studio's fall and winter releases. As he flipped through large photos featuring images from the films, he came to Shining Through starring Melanie Griffith and Michael Douglas. After a brief synopsis, the man described Shining Through in a way that forced me to summon every ounce of strength in my 21-year-old body not to burst into tears of laughter. "It's like Working Girl goes to war," he said with a straight face. Yes Virginia, movie folk do talk this way.
"As a screenwriter, one gets used to sitting in the backseat on a film. One reason the writer is usually banned from the set by directors is so the writer's screams aren't heard on the soundtrack when they listen to all the changes being made," said Michael Tolkin, who wrote the screenplay for The Player, on the DVD commentary. Tolkin wasn't just writing the script for The Player, he was adapting it from his own novel and serving as one of the film's producers as well. Neither Altman nor Tolkin mention a Tolkin ban from The Player set on the DVD (in fact, he appears late in the movie with his brother Stephen as screenwriting siblings trying to make a deal). I guess Michael Mann kicking David Milch off the Luck set wasn't that unusual, but they both held executive producer titles, so how did that work? Oh well — horses under the tarp. While Hollywood at large goes beneath the microscope in The Player, how the film industry treats writers garners the bulk of the feature's focus — somewhat ironic given how often
Altman allows improvisation or creates scenes on the fly. (I just noticed how easily I slip into present tense when I write about what Altman "does." He died more than five years ago, but when you watch his best films again, the man seems so vibrant, vital and alive.) In the sidebar I posted Tuesday called Untold Stories of Robert Altman's The Player or Who the Hell is Thereza Ellis?, I covered many details of this, especially concerning the great scene at the Pasadena police station between the police (Whoopi Goldberg, Lyle Lovett and Susan Emshwiller) and Griffin that Altman acknowledges the actors worked out on their own and that Goldberg should be credited as the scene's writer and director. Despite the fact that Griffin keeps getting threatening notes from a pissed-off screenwriter whose calls he didn't return, his reputation has earned the label of "the writer's executive" in Hollywood. Though Griffin ends up physically killing a screenwriter, the rival executive, Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) plays the role of the man who would kill them all symbolically if he could. One fateful night, Griffin drives to Pasadena looking for screenwriter David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio), the man he believes to be behind the threats. Mill learns he's gone to a movie theater to see The Bicycle Thief from his girlfriend June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), who Griffin shares an odd and
voyeuristic phone call where he watches her through her windows while talking on his unbelievably large 1990s-era cell phone. He asks why she didn't go with David, but June doesn't go to movies. "Why?" Mill truly wants to know. "Life's too short," she answers. Griffin tries to calm Kahane after he locates him, dangling the possibility of deals and apologizing for not calling him back. Kahane won't allow Griffin's belated asskissing — June told Griffin on the phone his nickname for him was The Dead Man. Since Griffin found Kahane at the movie theater, he deduces June told Mill where he went. "Talk to the Ice Queen? You'd like her Mill — she's a lot like you — all heart," Kahane says before walking out on Griffin. Mill gives up and heads toward his Range Rover when Kahane, pissing in a corner, calls to him and taunts him about Larry Levy, who he has heard will make meaningful films again, and the impending loss of Griffin's job. His paranoia drives Griffin to follow Kahane to his parking lot in an attempt to get him not to tell anyone at the studio they spoke and to stop the postcards. "I don't write postcards! I write scripts!" Kahane yells when Griffin grabs his car door and Kahane shoves him, sending him sailing over a railing onto a loading ramp. Kahane checks to see if Griffin is OK, but Mill snaps and starts bashing Kahane's head into the cement, holding it beneath the water until the bubbles stop, quietly sneering, "Keep it to yourself! Keep it to yourself!" As Griffin snaps back into focus, realizing what he did and trying to fake a robbery, dialogue from the next scene, which takes place the following morning, bleeds into the murder cleanup. "Who wrote the new ending to Fatal Attraction?" Larry Levy asks. "The audience did," he responds to his own question.
Levy's conversation turn out to come from his first meeting as a newly hired executive at the studio. It hasn't quite started as Levison waits in his office and Griffin hasn't shown up on the lot. Claire tells Levison that with or without Griffin, they should begin and he agrees, telling Walter, whom we've learned by now runs the studio's security department to "keep our noses clean, Walter." Levy complains to everyone about the high fees paid to writers and how they should make pictures the people want not the type writers want to give them when Griffin shows up. Levy asks everyone when was the last time they paid to see a movie. "Last night. The Bicycle Thief," Griffin replies. "It's an art movie. It doesn't count. We're talking movie movies," Levy says dismissively. As an exercise, Levy passes a newspaper to different executives and tells them to pick a story. Steve Reeves (Jeremy Piven) reads, "Immigrants protest budget cuts in literacy program." "Human spirit overcoming human adversity. Sounds like Horatio Alger in the barrio. Put Jimmy Smits in it and you've got a sexy Stand and Deliver," Levy smiles. It goes on for a while, but a headline that says “Man Found Dead in Theater Parking Lot” distracts Griffin. When
they capture his attention, he focuses enough to zing Levy back at least. "I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we can just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here," Mill suggests sardonically. The frightening thing to me comes from the possibility that with the state of digital effects now, getting rid of the actors could be highly plausible. After the meeting, when Griffin returns to his office where Walter confronts him about David Kahane, he receives a fax with bad news. "SURPRISE!" it reads. Kahane wasn't
the screenwriter sending him the postcards. At another time, Griffin again shows himself to be a bit of a writer's defender when he sends Bonnie to New York to look at the new Tom Wolfe novel and discern if it could be a movie. If it does, he tells her to offer $1 million, which makes Levy choke over the price. "It's Tom Wolfe," Griffin says, as if that's the only explanation needed. There's a catch that comes with Griffin's "writer's executive" reputation. The script still must fall within the proper parameters. He isn't a risk taker. When he becomes involved with June, she asks him what he needs to make a good movie and he rattles off a list of attributes. "Suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity, sex, happy endings. Mostly happy endings," he tells her. Damn if Altman — the maverick, the Hollywood outsider — doesn't manage to include every single one of those elements in The Player. "When people ask me, 'How much did Altman change the script into the movie?' I would honestly say if anyone betrayed me, it was me. As the screenwriter, I betrayed the novel much more than the director," Tolkin admits on the DVD. Altman also offers some words on his reputation as an outsider.and the kind of movies that I can make and like to make and make are not the type of films they know how to distribute.
So basically, we aren't in the same business. There's no point in calling me to make a pair of gloves for you when I make shoes."
Labels: 90s, Altman, Buck Henry, Coppola, Debra Winger, Fiction, Hitchcock, Julia Roberts, Kurosawa, Luck, M. Douglas, Michael Mann, Milch, Movie Tributes, Scorsese, The Simpsons, Tim Robbins, Welles, Willis
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012
You’re written in her book…
By Kevin J. Olson
Basic Instinct is one of those movies that deserve to be rediscovered. That may sound strange for a film that made more than $300 million worldwide upon its release, but there’s a lot more to the film than just the sex, the violence and the controversy that surrounded the film upon its initial release. Like all of Verhoeven’s films — with the exception of maybe Hollow Man — there’s something deeper, something more worthy of deconstruction lurking beneath the film’s familiar template. Verhoeven likes working within genre films so that he can distract one set of viewers with the sex and the ultra-violence that has become synonymous with his name, yet he also likes to use that familiar structure so that he can explicate deeper themes and tropes through his unique lens. Make no mistake: Verhoeven — despite his Dutch masterpiece The 4th Man — does not make art films. Sure, his films have a depth to them that may sneak up on people, but he flaunts his mainstream styling, and, for all intents and purposes, the man is an action filmmaker. However, in 1992, Verhoeven wanted to do something different with Basic Instinct and mine the familiar territory of the Hitchcockian thriller and the character type of the femme fatale.
Joe Eszterhas’ sleazy neo-noir script is perfectly suited for the subversively wry Dutch director. Eszterhas was famous for his ‘80s scripts Flashdance and Jagged Edge (which I really like), and wrote Basic Instinct prompting a bidding war at the time. It was around the late ‘80s when the film’s producers were hoping to get it made with a mainstream actress in the lead. When major stars such as Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathleen Turner, Kim Basinger and Meg Ryan turned down the role, Verhoeven and the producers gave the role to the relatively unknown Sharon Stone (who had a small role in Verhoeven’s own Total Recall). Her performance as Catherine Tramell would go on to define her career and be one of the most iconic and memorable female performances of the ‘90s.
The film’s basic plot structure comes right out of Hitchcock with its twisting narrative and male protagonist who always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and who just can’t seem to avoid trouble. Michael Douglas was perfectly cast as the barely-hanging-on detective Nick Curran. Curran investigates the murder of a rock star who died via multiple stab wounds from an ice pick. One of the suspects is the women who matches a description of the suspect and was the last person to see the rock star alive. Crime author Catherine Tramell (Sharon Stone) wrote a novel titled Basic Instinct in which a character dies in the exact same way (white scarf stuffed in their mouth and killed by ice pick). Curran learns that she’s writing a new book about a cop and soon finds that she uses him, and others, for her material as dangerous real-life situations play out.
Curran serves as the prototypical noir protagonist who enjoys getting a little dirty and gets a little too drawn into the seedy underworld he’s investigating. I love the way that the film sets up the viewer with Nick’s past about being a little trigger happy and a little coked-up while accidentally shooting some tourists while undercover; it’s a nice bit of foreshadowing for the film’s ending which some feel unnecessarily removed the ambiguity surrounding the identity of the icepick killer; however, I like the little bit of punctuation at the end because it makes that final decision Nick makes have more impact. It leaves the viewer with a little bit of a sour taste in their mouth just like those old, hard-boiled noirs used to do. Also, you can’t tell me that Hitch didn’t have a wry smile on his face when he filmed some of his endings in similar vein that left the viewer in a state of, “what the hell was that?”
One thing that makes the film so memorable — and one of my top five choices whenever I get in a Verhoeven-y mood — is the energy the auteur brings to the film. Verhoeven and his d.p. Jan de Bont (who would later go on to make a name for himself in ‘90s action films with the tremendous Speed), are more than up to the task in making Basic Instinct a beautiful and efficient neo-noir that has the right look
and sound; it’s part polished Hitchcock (the style and the music) and part hard-boiled noir (the character types and the language/content). Sure, kinky sex and graphic violence fill the narrative, but many movies like Basic Instinct consist solely of overkill with no sense of vitality or variety (Eszterhas’ own Jade, for example). Quite honestly, there isn’t even that much action in the film, but that energy and style that Verhoeven brings to the dialogue and the characters — driven by Stone’s performance — makes the film feel like wall-to-wall action. Just as he did with the science-fiction subgenre in RoboCop, the Middle Ages action film in Flesh + Blood, the exploitation subgenre in Showgirls, the pro-war propaganda film in Starship Troopers and the WWII drama in Black Book Verhoeven brings unmitigated verve and élan to these overly familiar premises. Even though Basic Instinct doesn't approach the best of Verhoeven’s films, just look at the way he frames Stone in that interrogation scene, the way he shoots bird’s eye as his characters run toward crashing waves on the beach with the overdramatic music in the background, or the fun he wrings from the obligatory car chase. And maybe that’s the word I’m looking for, “fun.” Verhoeven’s zeal often translates into a fun movie experience where you often find yourself laughing unexpectedly because you know the filmmakers aren’t taking themselves too seriously (RoboCop exemplifies this in its purposeful absurdity and seems Dada-esque in its satirical take on a violent dystopian future). Starship Troopers may be one of the most misunderstood of all of Verhoeven’s works because of its subtle satire — something definitely lacking in Basic Instinct. While I don’t see signs of satirism in Basic Instinct as Verhoeven approaches many of his other genre films, I do think that he’s using the overblown and melodramatic (much like he did to great effect in 2006’s Black Book) to sneak in the things he really wants to say underneath that all-too-familiar veneer of sex and violence. One only needs to look to Eszterhas’ other psychosexual thriller of the ‘90s, the aforementioned Jade, to see that these kinds of films aren’t always filmed with the kind of intensity Verhoeven brings to this script. William Friedkin helmed that Eszterhas script, and produced a complete and utter mess; an ugly film that wasted the talents of its leading actress and lacked any of the drama or Hitchcockian qualities found in Basic Instinct. That’s the impact of Verhoeven.
I think now that people can see Basic Instinct in a light removed from its controversy surrounding its portrayal of homosexual relationships (the film was protested so passionately that the filmmakers had to have extra security on hand during filming) and it being just “that movie where Sharon Stone shows Michael Douglas and Newman from Seinfeld her crotch,” they’ll see one of the best modern examples of the femme fatale archetype. Catherine is a character type that Verhoeven has studied before (Christine from The 4th Man kind of acts as a precursor to Basic Instinct), and it’s one of the most memorable characters of any of his films. Stone plays Catherine with such an icy confidence — she’s the perfect femme fatale: she’s confident sexually and ambiguously dangerous throughout the film’s mystery so that you know with certainty she’s the killer…but then again, you’re not really sure. It’s a fine balancing act by Stone who, after this film, wouldn’t really have another performance this juicy (although I thought she was pretty good in Scorsese’s Casino). I love the way in which she completely manipulates Douglas’ character throughout the entire film. Those who think that Stone’s performance, and her character, functions solely as a sex-crazed character couldn’t be more wrong. Sex may indeed be the most valuable weapon in Catherine’s arsenal, and she knows that she must use it in order to maneuver Nick, but it’s not because she’s extremely beautiful, it’s because Verhoeven understands that for the traditional male, there’s nothing scarier than a blatantly promiscuous woman, confident about sex and her sexual prowess. The femme fatale archetype hinges on flipping the preconceived notions about power and sex, and, often, how those two usually connect. No better modern femme fatale has been put on celluloid than Sharon Stone’s portrayal of Catherine Tramell (Kathleen Turner’s Matty Walker from Body Heat ranks up there, too).
Just look at the film’s most famous (or infamous) scene. Catherine being interrogated by a group of male police officers and people from the office of the district attorney — a kind of verbal gangbang as Verhoeven’s camera goes in and out of focus on the men throwing their
rapid-fire questions at her. Catherine maintains total control of the situation, despite the bravado and machismo of the cops tuned up for full effect. Of course, the scene lives in infamy for Stone flashing her panty-less crotch at the officers as she crosses her legs. The scene's importance though stems from Catherine letting these people understand that not only does she feel comfortable showing them that she doesn’t wear underwear, but also that she can wield her control over the room by messing with their minds as well by flipping roles and interrogating Nick about his attempt to quit smoking (which, just like all of his other attempts to stunt his vices, go by the wayside by film’s end). This brings those in the room to wonder if the two know each other from a previous encounter, and it shows that Catherine, on the surface, can manipulate men with her sexuality, but she’s just as keen to mess with their heads. In other words: she’ll fuck you, but she’ll fuck your mind, too, and each will be equally as fun for her. The way Stone plays that scene proves crucial to its success — she doesn’t allow Catherine to be an object, rare in movies such as this and Hollywood in general, yet she allows Catherine’s sexuality to take control of the room as she flippantly disregards the no smoking rule — she performs it masterfully, and it’s a shame that more remember the scene for her uncrossing her legs than her acting and Verhoeven's underlying commentary that follows. It’s interesting to compare Basic Instinct and the character of Catherine with another Michael Douglas film of the ‘90s, Disclosure. In that film, Demi Moore attempts to seduce Michael Douglas and then wrongfully accuse him of sexual harassment in order to ruin his life. It’s all very tame and banal because you don't believe Moore as a femme fatale. She lacks the assurance as an actress that Stone gives Catherine, and because of that, we don’t buy Douglas’ plight; the whole thing just feels lifeless, as if it’s going through the motions. Basic Instinct, on the other hand, is the opposite. Not because Douglas’ character has more definition than in Disclosure, but because we buy why Nick would follow Catherine down into that world of rough sex and violence. Moore brings the sex and tries to play scary…attempts to equal what a male would do in that performance. Stone’s performance, though, does the opposite. As I mentioned earlier, sex happens to be the best weapon in Catherine’s arsenal, and that makes her scary because she cannot be contained, controlled or manipulated like most women in thrillers such as these. Disclosure tries to invert this trope as Basic Instinct does but it comes off so artificially because the movie takes itself too seriously.
What I love about Catherine is that she lacks anything subversive about her character; she’s as blatant an archetype for a femme fatale as you’ll get. From the minute Douglas and his partner meet her, they understand they’re dealing with a woman who controls everything. The film's script makes her sexy and smart, sure, but that’s not the scariest thing about Catherine as a femme fatale — that would be her awareness of her ability to control others. She knows she can control Nick with her sexuality, and more importantly, she knows she can manipulate Nick because he’s willing to let her. Nick can't help himself around her, yet he feels as if he always controls his faculties. When he has a bit of rough sex with his on-again-off-again girlfriend (Jeanne Tripplehorn), it’s eerie and offsetting because it seems as if Catherine’s influence already has penetrated Nick’s daily life; he has succumbed to her power. It isn’t long after this scene that Nick begins his obsession with Catherine. The power games between the male and female leads — those kinds of gender war-type films popular in ‘90s dramas — lacked teeth in Disclosure; however, with Basic Instinct, thanks to Verhoeven’s direction and Stone’s performance, there’s an electricity to it that keeps the film’s over-the-top and headlong momentum rolling.
Paul Verhoeven could be as misunderstood an auteur in mainstream Hollywood system as exists. I admire the fact that Verhoeven goes all-in regarding his films; he just lays it all out there — realism be damned. He reminds me of my favorite Italian horror filmmakers that prove that style can be substance. I mean, sure, the film contains awkward moments of haughty aesthetic, but I like that about Verhoeven. He reminds me of Ken Russell a little bit in that regard: here’s a filmmaker who, if you’re willing to go along for the ride, does have something to say in his films; it’s there lurking beneath the surface of all of that ultra-violence and gratuitous sex and nudity. Twenty years later, people can take a fresh look at Basic Instinct as a film without all the outside distractions. Here’s a film where Verhoeven inverts the experience of the typical theatergoing male. The sex can't be labeled pornographic by any means (a male-dominated exercise, no doubt), but it’s explicit in its portrayal of sex, which I think scares some people more (and probably explains why the idiots in the MPAA initially gave the film an NC-17) in the audience it’s a film where the sex is primarily controlled, orchestrated and because the female lead dominates it. I think that’s Verhoeven being deliciously subversive, and I really admire that about Basic Instinct.
In Roger Ebert’s 1992 review, he wrote, "The film is like a crossword puzzle. It keeps your interest until you solve it, by the ending. Then it's just a worthless scrap with the spaces filled in." Narratively speaking, the same could be said for a number of Hitchcock films; It’s the style that keeps us coming back to those, and it’s the style, as well as the subtext, that keeps me coming back to Verhoeven’s film. I
think it’s incredibly shortsighted of Ebert to see the film in this light considering it’s so heavily indebted to Hitchcock, whose films, for the most part, played exactly as he describes above. Verhoeven always has had an uncanny knack for capturing the particular milieu of whatever genre he’s tackling. Even though he’s over-the-top, he never comes right out and admits his purpose. Perhaps that’s why so many people have trouble with him: he’s so good at it that you think what you’re getting is just another genre film competently crafted and nothing more. I think maybe that’s why people have a hard time looking beyond the general silliness of something such as Starship Troopers or the sex and violence in Basic Instinct as films that are saying something beyond their gruff narratives and ultra-violent surfaces. I also think that the knock on Basic Instinct — and Verhoeven in general — derives from over-the-top tendencies that allow the film to get lost by the end. It results in a well-made, but not great, experience. For me, I love the way Verhoeven goes storming into his narratives, and Basic Instinct (even though it’s “lesser” Verhoeven), 20 years later, still stands as one of his most loopy, over-the-top and slyly fun rides. Tweet
Labels: 90s, Demi, Ebert, Hitchcock, K. Turner, M. Douglas, Meg Ryan, Movie Tributes, Pfeiffer, Scorsese, Seinfeld, Sharon Stone
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Saturday, February 12, 2011
From the Vault: War of the Roses
Sometimes a movie can be so unblinking in its vision that it enthralls and shocks a viewer when it fails to renege on its premise. Thank goodness that War of the Roses maintains its dark tone until the bitter end.
War of the Roses reunites Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito from Romancing the Stone and Jewel of the Nile, but this film is not a sequel to those two films in any way. Unlike those light comic romps, Roses looks at divorce with a dark comic edge that's constantly teetering on the edge of horror.
Douglas and Turner play Oliver and Barbara Rose, a couple who have spent several happy years together until things start to fall apart. No affairs or addictions cause the friction, just a slow grinding of personalities that have grown incompatible.
The film rejects a dramatic or tragic take on the situation, opting for a moody vein as the spouses, once in love, become warring enemies. What's astounding about the movie is that it doesn't take sides: neither character comes off as a hero or a villain. Neither can shoulder the bulk of the blame for the rupture as both prove equally petty once the legal proceedings begin.
DeVito's character Gavin D'Amato, Oliver's lawyer friend, narrates the story, presenting it as a cautionary tale to a prospective client. One would think DeVito playing a lawyer would assure another take on his patented slimeball character, but Gavin's lawyer actually has ethics.
Douglas plays his role for more comic effect, taking delight in the games, still believing that Turner still loves him. On the other hand, Turner attacks her role with a vengeance. She begins as a sweet, slightly ignorant wife and transforms into a bitter vixen determined to hang on to the house she feels responsible for building and decorating.
The house becomes the focal point of the fight and its intricate design helps move the film along by providing fascinating backgrounds for the scenes. DeVito also directed the movie, adapted from Warren Adler's novel. DeVito cut his feature film teeth on Throw Momma From the Train, a reputed black comedy. Whereas Momma copped out on its premise and proved ultimately harmless, Roses never flinches.
DeVito, more assured in his direction this time around, augments the brutal story with unusual angles and a surrealistic look. At times, it is incomprehensible that the couple can treat each other any worse but they do and with each step the film takes into the dark side, the better it gets. Toward the end, one awaits the film to pull back or a light surprise, but it doesn't happen.
The film's weakest parts come early with the frequent cutting back to DeVito in his office, telling the story. However, this device ends up being necessary and helps strengthen the surprise of its ending.
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Labels: 80s, DeVito, K. Turner, M. Douglas
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Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Permission to be an asshole
By Edward Copeland
I'm not going to pretend that I've always had the best viewer-actor relationship with Michael Douglas despite his current illness. In fact, for most of his films, he plain got on my nerves, but that all turned around when he gave a truly great performance in Wonder Boys. I'd heard similar talk about his work in Solitary Man and I finally got the chance to see it. While it's nowhere close to his work in Wonder Boys, he is good in a film that almost plays as a justification for his life both on and off screen.
Written by Brian Koppelman who co-directed the film with David Levien, Douglas stars as Ben Kalmen, a man so successful with his chain of car dealerships that it's earned him riches and magazine cover stories. As the film opens, a trip to the doctor suggests that perhaps he has some cardiac problems and Kalmen needs more tests.
Time passes and when we meet Ben again, he's divorced from his wife Nancy (Susan Sarandon) and he's barely avoided jail after perpetrating a fraud through his dealerships that ended up wiping them all out as well as most of his cash and turned him into a nonstop lothario despite his relationship with Jordan, a successful divorcee (Mary Louise Parker) with a cynical college-bound daughter named Allyson (Imogen Poots), who seems to be a Ben in gestation only with female organs.
Though neither particularly wants to do it, an under-the-weather Jordan insists that Ben take Allyson on a trip to his college alma mater where he's donated so much money that the library bears his name and where he might be able to pull strings with the dean. The two reluctantly go together and it ends up making Ben's capacity for self-destruction even worse.
While Solitary Man is often funny and Douglas does well as man who acts as if he's wiser and a better tutor than he really is, especially to a student he meets at the college (Jesse Eisenberg), the film doesn't quite make the leap to greatness. The film plays more as a slight short story and when it gets to its denouement when he comes clean with his ex-wife about what prompted the things he did, it seems anti-climactic since the film's first scene pretty much gives that game away.
It's hard not to read autobiographical aspects of Douglas' own life in Ben character given that Ben's insatiable lust does correspond to Douglas' past trip to rehab for sex addiction (There's an addiction to have. Are they the same 12 steps?) With all of the jerks that Douglas has played in his career, characters that did put me off him as an actor for the most part until Wonder Boys, I wonder if he saw this role as a bit of a mea culpa for his life if not his career. The difference for me between those earlier roles and these more recent ones is that they come off as unlikable jerks in the films, who get what's coming to them. While Ben might be as big as a jerk as some of the others, he does have a charisma that makes you like him anyway and to feel sympathy for him.
All the supporting cast members perform well including Sarandon, Jenna Fischer as Ben's daughter and Danny DeVito as one of Ben's few remaining friends who explains perfectly how he avoids the temptation of the young co-eds in a great speech about his long marriage to his college sweetheart and Parker as the vengeful girlfriend.
Still, the two standouts are Douglas and Poots, playing opposite sides of a similar coin. Douglas' Ben may have rationalized all the bad decisions he's made, but Poots' Allyson really has no such excuse. Perhaps she was just born that way.
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Labels: 10s, DeVito, M. Douglas, Susan Sarandon
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Friday, November 05, 2010
Jill Clayburgh (1944-2010)
In the mid-1970s, Jill Clayburgh turned in great screen performance after great screen performance earning consecutive Oscar nominations for An Unmarried Woman and Starting Over in 1978 and 1979, then she seemed to vanish from the scene. In recent years, she had begun to reappear again in smaller roles, and I always hoped for a comeback as she always has been one of my favorites. Unfortunately, the cause for her disappearance appears to have been her health, particularly a form of chronic leukemia which has taken the actress's life at the age of 66.
She made her Broadway and film debuts practically in the same time period. In 1968, she hit the stage in the play The Sudden & Accidental Re-Education of Horse Johnson, which ran a mere five performances. That same year she had a brief part on a TV series called N.Y.P.D. before making her film debut in 1969's The Wedding Party directed by Brian De Palma and featuring Robert De Niro. That same year, she began a two-year run on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow.
She departed the soap for a starring role in the Broadway musical The Rothschilds which starred Hal Linden and with music by the Fiddler on the Roof team of lyricist Sheldon Harnick and composer Jerry Bock, who died just earlier this week. She also was an original cast member of the musical Pippin and Tom Stoppard's play Jumpers. Her last Broadway appearance was in a 2006 revival of Barefoot in the Park.
In 1972, she appeared in the film adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Portnoy's Complaint. She appeared in various roles of episodic television before starring opposite Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in 1976's Silver Streak. She stuck to comedy again the next year in Semi-Tough with Burt Reynolds and Kris Kristofferson.
In 1978, she got one of her strongest roles and her first Oscar nomination as a sudden divorcee in Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman, the part which may be the best she ever put on screen, perfectly blending the shock, humor and pathos of a woman whose husband leaves her and is forced to re-enter the dating world.
In 1979, she co-starred with Burt Reynolds again in another comedy-drama concerning divorce, Starting Over, which brought her a second consecutive Oscar nomination. That same year, she starred in Bernardo Bertolucci's controversial Luna as a decidedly nontraditional mother and opera star and recent widow with an extremely close relationship with her teenage son.
In 1980, she had to choose between boyfriend Charles Grodin and her new stepmother's son (Michael Douglas) in It's My Turn. In 1981, she starred opposite Walter Matthau as the first woman Supreme Court justice in First Monday in October, ironically the same year the U.S. got its first woman Supreme Court justice. In 1982, she played a woman addicted to prescription medication in I'm Dancing As Fast As I Can.
After that, her screen and television appearances became less frequent, though she did have a particularly good guest shot on an episode of Law & Order as a divorce attorney in 1998 and a recurring role on Ally McBeal as Ally's mom. She received an Emmy nomination for a guest appearance on Nip/Tuck. She was a regular on Dirty Sexy Money.
Clayburgh was one of the many talents wasted in the film Running with Scissors. She will be seen later this month in Edward Zwick's Love and Other Drugs starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Another film featuring Clayburgh, Bridesmaids, directed by Paul Feig and starring Rose Byrne and Jon Hamm is due next year.
She is survived by her husband, the playwright David Rabe, and their daughter, the actress Lily Rabe.
RIP Ms. Clayburgh.
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Labels: Awards, Burt Reynolds, De Niro, De Palma, Grodin, J. Gyllenhaal, Law and Order, M. Douglas, Matthau, Mazursky, Musicals, Obituary, Oscars, Roth, Stoppard, Television, Theater, Zwick
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Monday, September 27, 2010
Oliver Stone's Other Favorite Lizard King Returns
By J.D.
It has been more than 20 years since Wall Street (1987) was released in theaters and, at the time, it was blamed for cashing in on the stock market crash that wiped out more than a few people’s fortunes. The financial landscape has changed radically since then and so, in many ways, has Oliver Stone’s career. In the 1980s and early 1990s, he was on an unbelievable roll, cranking out controversial, headline-grabbing films such as Platoon (1986), JFK (1991) and Natural Born Killers (1994). And then he made Nixon (1995), arguably his most ambitious and complex (both stylistically and content-wise) film to date — critics were divided and audiences failed to show up.
Stone continued to plug along gamely but after his longtime director of photography Robert Richardson left after the neo-noir oddity U-Turn (1997), the director lost his most important creative collaborator. Any Given Sunday (1999) was an energetic if not flawed expose of professional American football and well, let’s just say that the 2000s have not been kind to him (see Alexander, World Trade Center and W.) With the release of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), there’s a glimmer of hope that this new project might be a return to form for the auteur. He’s never done a sequel before but with how radically the financial world has changed since 9/11 it is an intriguing prospect to see what a character such as Gordon Gekko would be doing now. With recent scandals such as Enron and the Dow Jones meltdown in 2008, a Wall Street sequel is very timely.
It’s 2001 and Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) has been released from prison. There’s no one to pick him up and instead he’s handed a check for $1,800 and a train ticket. Seven years later, he’s peddling a book, Is Greed Good? and trying to get back into the game. Meanwhile, Jacob “Jake” Moore (Shia LaBeouf) is a young and ambitious proprietary trader working Keller Zabel. This whiz kid is trying to develop an alternative energy project. Stone immerses us in the trading floor and boy, does it look different than it did back in 1987. The technology, obviously, is vastly different but the frenetic energy is still the same. Jake is living with and engaged to a beautiful young woman named Winnie (Carey Mulligan) who is an Internet journalist working for a liberal-minded Web site. Oh yeah, her estranged father just happens to be Gekko, much to her chagrin.
When Jake's investment firm's stock takes a major hit, his distraught and disillusioned mentor Lewis Zabel (Frank Langella) is pushed out of the company by ruthless hedge fund manager Bretton James (Josh Brolin). Devastated and humiliated, Zabel takes his own life. Jake goes to see Gekko speak and is impressed by what the man has to say. Maybe he’s found a new mentor. Afterward, Jake meets Gekko and tells him about his plans to marry Winnie. They strike a deal: Jake will help Gekko reconcile with his daughter and in return Gekko will help Jake exact some payback on James, the man who sent Zabel over the edge.
With Gekko’s help, Jake does some digging and spreads a few rumors that cause Churchill Schwartz, the company that James works for, to take a notable hit. Impressed by what he did, James hires Jake because after all, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Jake naturally accepts as it brings him in close proximity to James so that he can ultimately bring him down. And like that, it’s on with Jake and James going after each other with Gekko as the wild card, begging the question, what is his stake in all this?
Shia LaBeouf, an actor known for mindless blockbusters (Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and generic thrillers (Disturbia and Eagle Eye), finally shows some actual acting chops in his first legitimate dramatic role that has him up against heavyweights like Michael Douglas, Josh Brolin and Frank Langella — guys that can really act. Being in their company forces LaBeouf to raise his game and he holds his own. This time around, it is LaBeouf who is the idealistic young man swimming with the sharks and in danger of being seduced by lots of money.
It is great to see Michael Douglas back in his most famous role and he slips back into it effortlessly. Gekko is as cagey as ever and like Jake we’re never quite sure what his true intentions are but one thing’s for sure, he’s not to be underestimated. And Douglas does a nice job hinting at the dangerous Gekko that lurks under his smiling façade. He has more than a few tricks up his sleeve and with all the cunning of an exceptional card player.
Josh Brolin plays a smug, cigar-smoking shark with no heart. He’s a grinning, deliciously evil bad guy. Carey Mulligan doesn’t have much to do but does a fine job with what she has to work with, especially a scene where Winnie and Gekko finally have it out over how his dirty financial dealings destroyed their family. One of the weak spots of the original Wall Street was Bud Fox’s relationship with his love interest and Stone tries not to make the same mistake with this film by casting a stronger actress with Mulligan and by placing a bigger emphasis on the relationship between Jake and Winnie. However, the film stalls when the focus shifts to them when we really should be tracking Jake plotting revenge on James.
The screenplay throws all kinds of financial jargon at the audience but it is all really window-dressing because all that matters is what it all means and Stone makes sure that we understand the bottom line. The dialogue still has some of the crackle and pop of the original film, especially in a good scene where Gekko and James spar verbally. If there is any glaring flaw in this film it is the overuse of David Byrne songs to the point of distraction. Each cue puts too fine a point on the scene with lyrics that spell out exactly what we are watching. Not to mention the songs are milquetoast drivel robbing the film of its fast-moving momentum at times.
Stone does a good job of keeping things visually interesting but the cinematography lacks the energy and that special something that Robert Richardson brought to the first film. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is easily the best film Stone’s done since Any Given Sunday. Of course, that’s not saying much but at least it feels like the kind of film that Stone used to make back in his prime. There is a confidence that comes with being back on familiar turf that Stone displays with this film. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps is just the kind of film that he needs to reinvigorate his career and remind us why we regarded his films so highly in the first place.
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Labels: 10s, Carey Mulligan, Josh Brolin, M. Douglas, Oliver Stone
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Saturday, August 29, 2009
From the Vault: Falling Down
While Falling Down had potential as both an anguished middle-class cry and as a portrait of the makings of a madman, it fails on both counts and ends up being a slow, predictable outing.
Michael Douglas stars as a laid-off defense worker who snaps while in a Los Angeles traffic jam and begins to make the long walk to his daughter's house for her birthday.
On his way, Douglas embarks on an After Hours-type journey through a kaleidoscope of urban situations ranging from consumer disputes to life-threatening situations.
Falling Down also offers the parallel — and even more predictable — element of Robert Duvall as an L.A. detective on his last day of retirement. He could have easily become like Douglas' character, but he played by the rules and suffered through the system.
Though Duvall's performs well as always, his scenes tend to bog down the film instead of illuminating its themes, especially when he gets frequent phone calls from his unstable wife (Tuesday Weld).
Joel Schumacher's typically sluggish direction doesn't help matters since the script seems uncertain what direction to take the story. When Douglas' character pointedly asks, "I'm the bad guy?", you have to believe it's because he's received as many mixed signals from the screenplay as the audience.
Douglas does give one of his more assured performances, but he still shows his tendency toward self-consciousness. The film tries too hard at times to make him sympathetic, especially in an inexplicable scene involving his ex-wife (Barbara Hershey) and the police in which the movie seems to be saying he's only perceived as dangerous because Hershey thinks he is.
Frederic Forrest gives the film's best performance in a brief bit as a neo-Nazi store owner who believes he's found a kindred spirit and fellow merchant of hate in Douglas.
What Falling Down represents most is a missed opportunity. If the script had been more sharply written and the film directed with more verve, Douglas' character might have been a Howard Beale for the '90s. Instead, he's just a dull madman who gets what he deserves.
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Labels: 90s, Barbara Hershey, Duvall, M. Douglas
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Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Karl Malden (1912-2009)
In the flood of recent celebrity passings, one would wish that TV would grant an appropriate amount of time to noting the career of Oscar winner Karl Malden, who died today at 97. Certainly he's been in the public eye a lot longer than others. He may not have set records like others did, but I guess your death only deserves real notice if you managed to become tabloid fodder in your lifetime first. Malden didn't have that foresight. He just did his job and did it damn well, working up until the year 2000 and making public appearances well past that.
Malden made his Broadway debut in 1937 in the original production of Golden Boy. While his film career began in 1940, he continued to appear on Broadway until 1957, including the original productions of Key Largo, All My Sons, The Desperate Hours and, of course, A Streetcar Named Desire. Amazingly, he never earned a Tony nomination.
His first notable film came with 1947's Kiss of Death. Though occasionally he got to show a darker side, he usually was the on the side of right such as the police commander in Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends. In 1951, he got to repeat his Broadway role as Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire and was given the Oscar for his performance.
He worked with Hitchcock in 1953's I Confess! In 1954, he reunited with director Elia Kazan and co-star Marlon Brando playing Father Barry and earning a second Oscar nomination in On the Waterfront. Kazan and Tennessee Williams brought out his darker side in 1956 when he played the oddly overprotective husband in Baby Doll.
Brando brought him along when he directed his Western One-Eyed Jacks. He played the no-nonsense warden in Birdman of Alcatraz the same year he was part of the all-star cast of How the West was Won. That same year, he even went musical, playing Herbie in the film version of Gypsy.
He usually dealt the cards in Norman Jewison's The Cincinnati Kid. While George C. Scott steamrolled over the screen as Patton, Malden was at his side as Gen. Omar Bradley.
As the 1970s came in, Malden found most of his work on television (aside from disaster flicks such as Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Meteor). He had a successful run as Detective Lt. Mike Stone, originally opposite Michael Douglas, on The Streets of San Francisco, which earned him four consecutive Emmy nominations.
One of my favorite TV roles of Malden's was one which won him an Emmy as the father in-law in the miniseries Fatal Vision, who at first defends his son-in-law in the murders of his daughter and grandchildren before coming to believe him guilty.
Of course, for many his most famous role will come from a TV commercial as American Express pitchman in the 1970s with the famous tagline, "Don't leave home without it."
His last screen appearance, appropriate given the large numbers of roles where he played members of the clergy, was as a minister on The West Wing in 2000. He also served once as the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
He did achieve one record that few ever accomplish: He was married to the same woman for 70 years. RIP Mr. Malden.
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Labels: Awards, Brando, George C. Scott, Hitchcock, Jewison, Kazan, M. Douglas, Malden, Obituary, Preminger, Television, Tennessee Williams, Theater
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Monday, June 15, 2009
“There’s no reason to shoot at me! I’m a dentist!”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.“Comedy is subjective,” goes the old saw — and what this basically says in a nutshell that something humorous enough to make soda pop come out of my nose might very well leave you stone-faced in the bargain. Take me and my sister Kat … I consider myself a connoisseur of film comedy, enjoying the antics of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Fields and practically everyone else from the golden age of mirthmaking. Kat will have none of that, preferring the modern-day antics of comic actors like Will Ferrell or Steve Carell — both of whom leave me completely pokerfaced.
On this date 30 years ago, a feature film was released by Warner Bros. that provides the exception to my and my sibling’s “rules of comedy” — in fact, to this day I’ve yet to come across any individual who has something bad to say about it. That movie is The In-Laws (1979), an early example of the “buddy” film starring Alan Arkin as a mild-mannered Manhattan dentist who, upon meeting prospective in-law Peter Falk (who claims to work for the CIA), finds his world completely turned topsy-turvy when he’s helplessly enmeshed in Falk’s outlandish scheme to rob the U.S. Treasury while in the service of a Latin American dictator (Richard Libertini) with a Senor Wences fetish.
Dr. Sheldon Kornpett (Arkin) invites the parents (Falk, Arlene Golonka) of his soon-to-be son-in-law (Michael Lembeck) over for an introductory party days before the wedding, and when “businessman” Vince Ricardo regales his audience with peculiar tales of his days in Guatemala (“They have tsetse flies down there the size of eagles,” he claims), Sheldon is suspicious that Vince may be a few sandwiches shy of a picnic (he tells his wife played by Nancy Dussault that he would have read about the giant flies in National Geographic). When Vince stops by Sheldon’s practice and asks him for a favor (removing the contents from a safe in a nearby office) the dentist good-naturedly agrees to help him out…and finds himself on the receiving end of assassin’s bullets and a series of incredible adventures that lead to a hysterical climax in which he and Vince face a dictator’s firing squad (“We have no blindfolds, Senor — we are a poor country!”).
The first element in The In-Laws that is ultimately responsible for its incredible comedy payoff is the falling-down funny script by writer Andrew Bergman (one of several scribes who worked on the classic screenplay of Blazing Saddles), who was asked by the Warners studio to create a film in the same vein as an earlier Alan Arkin film (one in which he co-starred with James Caan as a pair of unconventional cops), Freebie and the Bean (1974). It soon became obvious that Bergman’s concept for the new film didn’t completely jibe with Warners’ original Freebie follow-up idea but Bergman delivered such a masterpiece of understated comedy that it really made no difference. The In-Laws’ script is that rare piece of material that triumphs over the other flaws in the film (the lackluster direction by Arthur Hiller, for starters), frequently coming across as improvised and off-the-cuff.
Part of that off-the-cuff improvisation can be attributed to the participation of Alan Arkin (one of the original members of Chicago’s Second City troupe), one of the cinema’s finest character actors and an individual with an amazing performing range that includes comedic roles (The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming, Little Murders) and dramatic turns (Wait Until Dark, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter) as well. But his co-star Falk is no slouch in the funny bone department, either; though known to audiences primarily as the eccentric TV detective Columbo, Peter also demonstrated a fine pair of comedic chops in films such as Murder by Death and The Cheap Detective. Watching both these actors play off one another is a thing of beauty, with Arkin’s sardonic Sheldon the perfect foil to the slightly egomaniacal Vince (“I’m such a great driver…it’s incomprehensible that they took my license away”).
Everyone who’s watched The In-Laws at least one time has a favorite bit or scene: some of the highlights include Falk’s instructions to Arkin on how to avoid being shot at (“Serpentine, Shel, serpentine!”) — which is made all the funnier when Arkin’s character runs back to his original starting point and then takes Falk’s advice as if he were going for a second take; Arkin’s hysteria at discovering someone has done irreversible customizing on his vehicle (“I have flames on my car!”); and the bit in the chartered airplane where flight attendant James Hong gives Arkin the customary pre-flight instructions…entirely in Chinese. As for myself, I still get a hearty chuckle when Arkin announces he was down in the hotel lobby looking for Mexican porn (“El Hustlero”) and sister Kat and I have been known to make ourselves sick with laughter when we reconstruct the scene where Falk, at the wheel of the car, is describing a delicious Mexican dish (“They serve it with a large orange juice…grande”) and then interrupts himself with “Oh, Jesus…PIGS!” as he’s forced to stomp the brakes to avoid a procession of swine crossing the road.
Writer Andrew Bergman tried to collect lightning in a bottle a second time when he wrote the screenplay (as Warren Bogle) for Big Trouble (1985), a comedy that re-teamed Arkin and Falk in what would turn out to be a disappointing reunion (even the fact that the movie had a better director in Falk’s old compadre John Cassavetes couldn’t save it). He would, however, bring his quirky writing style to two successful comedies that followed in the wake of In-Laws’ success: The Freshman (1990) and Honeymoon in Vegas (1992). Bergman also received screen credit in the 2003 remake of In-Laws, a loose adaptation from the bigger-is-funnier school of comedy (have we learned nothing from 1941?) that recast Albert Brooks and Michael Douglas in the Arkin and Falk roles and served as little less than a reminder how much better the first film was and that, 30 years since it was introduced to the big screen, it still manages to find appreciative audiences…particularly those who are watching it for the very first time.
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Labels: 70s, Albert Brooks, Caan, Cassavetes, Chaplin, Falk, Fields, Keaton, M. Douglas, Marx Brothers, Movie Tributes
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Thursday, December 04, 2008
Paul Benedict (1938-2008)
Paul Benedict, the British (EDITOR'S NOTE: This was my mistake, a rather common one, corrected in the comments) actor who has died at the age of 70, probably always will be best known as Harry Bentley, the U.N. diplomat who became neighbor to the Jeffersons once they moved on up.
However, Benedict's long career spanned TV, stage and screen. I was fortunate enough to see him play the hotel night clerk opposite Al Pacino in the 1996 Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's one-act play Hughie.
Still, for me at least, I think my favorite performance of Benedict's was that Professor Fleeber, Matthew Broderick's pompous NYU film professor starstruck by Marlon Brando's Don Corleone doppleganger in The Freshman.
RIP Mr. Benedict.
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Labels: Brando, M. Douglas, Matthew Broderick, O'Neill, Obituary, Pacino, Television, Theater
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Tuesday, March 04, 2008
From the Vault: Disclosure
When people ask about Disclosure and I tell them the climax involves a virtual reality file room, they look puzzled and inevitably say, "You're kidding." If only I were making this up.
Even worse, that climactic twist merely serves as the coup de grace of the countless unintentionally comic moments of this extremely silly adaptation of the Michael Crichton best seller about sexual harassment.
In the tradition of his work in Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Falling Down, Michael Douglas stars as yet another persecuted heel, only this time his characters acts even more like an irresponsible twit than usual.
Douglas plays Tom Sanders, an executive at DigiCom, a Seattle high-tech computer firm who finds that an ex-girlfriend, Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) has been given the promotion he feels he deserves. On her first day on the job, Meredith invites Tom to her office for an after-hours drink and brain-storming session.
Once there, Tom realizes Meredith isn't interested in his mind but wants to engage in some carnal nostalgia. At first, Tom seems powerless to resist, despite his happy marriage to a lawyer (Caroline Goodall) and two children. After repeated shouts of "No," Tom gets away and Meredith vows corporate vengeance.
When Tom learns Meredith has lied to their boss (played by an entertaining Donald Sutherland) and claims that Tom came on to her, Tom forces her hand by filing a sexual harassment suit of his own.
The rest of the film revolves around the legal and corporate maneuvering between both sides, all of which takes place in the space of a single work week. Thanks to Barry Levinson's draggy pacing, it seems more like an eternity.
The few moments of wit in Paul Attanasio's script and provided by the supporting players make this would-be topical exercise watchable, but too often the dialogue drifts into platitudes. It's a disappointment from the screenwriter who gave us the sharp and witty Quiz Show.
When Tom muses to his wife that he fears becoming another "ghost with a resume," you realize that lines that might work as prose sink like a stone when they come out of the mouth of an actor like Douglas.
In fact, Douglas ends up being the film's biggest negative. His intrinsic unlikability as an actor makes Tom a shrill buffoon. Despite the fact that Tom's right, you still want to see him kicked around a bit.
Moore does OK by her part, bringing the necessary mix of vivaciousness and venom to Meredith, but she's as much a cartoon as Douglas' character. Their names should be Tom and Jerry instead of Tom and Meredith.
No moment makes more clear how wrong this movie goes than the virtual reality sequence. Leaving aside the fact that a virtual reality file room defeats the purpose of having a database at your fingertips and makes the information age more cumbersome not less, the sequence evokes laughs by its ridiculous setup.
Tom breaks into the hotel room of the CEO of a company planning to merge with DigiCom, where the virtual file room prototype has been assembled for the corporate bigwig to play with. As Tom nervously searches for the papers he needs, Meredith logs on at the office and becomes represented by Demi Moore's head on a Lawnmower Man-type graphic body. It looks even sillier than it sounds.
Sexual harassment could be a fascinating topic for a movie, but Disclosure is not that film. At times it looks as if it might take a detour into satire or suspense, but both avenues prove to be dead ends.
In the end, the virtual reality subplot seems an apt metaphor for this misfire. Occasionally you get the sensation of being in on the action but when you remove the goggles, you find yourself back in the real world.
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Even worse, that climactic twist merely serves as the coup de grace of the countless unintentionally comic moments of this extremely silly adaptation of the Michael Crichton best seller about sexual harassment.
In the tradition of his work in Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Falling Down, Michael Douglas stars as yet another persecuted heel, only this time his characters acts even more like an irresponsible twit than usual.
Douglas plays Tom Sanders, an executive at DigiCom, a Seattle high-tech computer firm who finds that an ex-girlfriend, Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore) has been given the promotion he feels he deserves. On her first day on the job, Meredith invites Tom to her office for an after-hours drink and brain-storming session.
Once there, Tom realizes Meredith isn't interested in his mind but wants to engage in some carnal nostalgia. At first, Tom seems powerless to resist, despite his happy marriage to a lawyer (Caroline Goodall) and two children. After repeated shouts of "No," Tom gets away and Meredith vows corporate vengeance.
When Tom learns Meredith has lied to their boss (played by an entertaining Donald Sutherland) and claims that Tom came on to her, Tom forces her hand by filing a sexual harassment suit of his own.
The rest of the film revolves around the legal and corporate maneuvering between both sides, all of which takes place in the space of a single work week. Thanks to Barry Levinson's draggy pacing, it seems more like an eternity.
The few moments of wit in Paul Attanasio's script and provided by the supporting players make this would-be topical exercise watchable, but too often the dialogue drifts into platitudes. It's a disappointment from the screenwriter who gave us the sharp and witty Quiz Show.
When Tom muses to his wife that he fears becoming another "ghost with a resume," you realize that lines that might work as prose sink like a stone when they come out of the mouth of an actor like Douglas.
In fact, Douglas ends up being the film's biggest negative. His intrinsic unlikability as an actor makes Tom a shrill buffoon. Despite the fact that Tom's right, you still want to see him kicked around a bit.
Moore does OK by her part, bringing the necessary mix of vivaciousness and venom to Meredith, but she's as much a cartoon as Douglas' character. Their names should be Tom and Jerry instead of Tom and Meredith.
No moment makes more clear how wrong this movie goes than the virtual reality sequence. Leaving aside the fact that a virtual reality file room defeats the purpose of having a database at your fingertips and makes the information age more cumbersome not less, the sequence evokes laughs by its ridiculous setup.
Tom breaks into the hotel room of the CEO of a company planning to merge with DigiCom, where the virtual file room prototype has been assembled for the corporate bigwig to play with. As Tom nervously searches for the papers he needs, Meredith logs on at the office and becomes represented by Demi Moore's head on a Lawnmower Man-type graphic body. It looks even sillier than it sounds.
Sexual harassment could be a fascinating topic for a movie, but Disclosure is not that film. At times it looks as if it might take a detour into satire or suspense, but both avenues prove to be dead ends.
In the end, the virtual reality subplot seems an apt metaphor for this misfire. Occasionally you get the sensation of being in on the action but when you remove the goggles, you find yourself back in the real world.
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Labels: 90s, B. Levinson, D. Sutherland, M. Douglas
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Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Nails on a chalkboard
Everybody has them, whether they admit it or not: Actors and actresses whose mere presence set your teeth on edge because something about them, whether logical or illogical, whether you think they just suck or whether there is something more intangible. (NOTE: I just included the above photo of Robert Shaw from Jaws to illustrate the title, not to reflect an opinion of him, whom I like a great deal). Of course, they often spark fierce debates as proponents of one actress duel with her opponents and vice versa, so I figured the time was ripe to discuss this in more depth. Yes, I am going to bash on Danny Huston some more. You've been warned.
Since Huston currently occupies the top spot among actors who set my teeth on edge because I don't think he can act. At his best, he's a nonentity who doesn't
harm a movie much, at his worse (think John Sayles' Silver City), he can destroy an entire film. Silver City might not have worked with anyone in Huston's role, but he certainly didn't help. His scenes in Birth, an embarrassing excuse of a movie to begin with, are even more cringe-inducing. When he goes after the kid, his acting is so atrocious, it reminded me of those worst Kevin Costner moments when his limited ability to express emotion catapults you out of any movie he's in. I know people who are convinced that I'm wrong about Huston, so I decided I'd start sleuthing the only way I could think of, namely perusing critics' comments on his work. To my surprise, no matter what film or what critic I looked up, most of the time, Huston barely gets any mention, negative or positive, beyond a sentence telling the role he plays in the film in question. It seems to back up my theory: He's so uncharismatic that he leaves no impression at all most of the time. Not many people say he's bad because most people suffer amnesia when it comes to remembering he was even in any given movie to begin with. It was a bit of disappointment: I wanted to find some nice slams but not much is written about him at all except in reviews of The Proposition, which I admittedly gave up on before he even showed up.Speaking of Kevin Costner, he's a more unusual case. When he first came to my attention in The Untouchables, I thought he was bland and milquetoast but the
film itself was so much fun and everyone else made up for his weaknesses, that I didn't think about him much. Though admittedly, Wagstaff and I used to have a running gag about that hysterical Sean Connery death scene where Costner's Eliot Ness keeps asking the poor dying man what he wants, picking up item after item off the apartment floor. Then Costner did some really smart things. First, he got cast in Bull Durham. My argument has always been that you could take just about anyone off the street, give them Ron Shelton's lines to read, and they'd probably come off as well as Costner did, but at least he did summon charisma and again surrounded himself with great actors such as Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins. He followed this strategy again the next year with Field of Dreams, where the strong script and great cast covered up his lack of acting prowess. Then, however, Costner got careless. Revenge was the first sign. Despite his Oscars for Dances With Wolves, it was clear to me how bad he was in it. Imagine an actor with talent playing that part. Did anyone really believe he was suicidal in the film's opening sequences? Then came the horrors of Robin Hood and his first in repeated bad attempts to do other accents. The spell was broken and I couldn't not see how bad he was, even in movies I might otherwise like such as Oliver Stone's JFK, with another bad accent and really laughable "reaction" shots. Watch him when he learns Robert Kennedy has been killed and try not to giggle. Then, as if he hadn't inflicted enough damage on his career, came Waterworld and The Postman. (One of my favorite all-time Simpsons gags: the DVD commentary for The Postman which consisted of Costner on a split screen just repeatedly saying, "I'm sorry.")I imagine someday if there is some kind of reference source that explains the origin of the phrase "nails on a chalkboard," the photo that accompanies it will be
one of Lori Petty. Unlike Huston (or Costner), I've never found anyone who defends this freak who can make any movie she's in unbearable. Even the watchable A League of Their Own was undermined by her casting as Geena Davis' sister. She's so annoying in it, who has any sympathy for her complaints? In fact, more likely they are hoping a drunken Tom Hanks will go out and bash her head in with a baseball bat so she shuts up. He may think that there's not supposed to be crying in baseball, but there really shouldn't be acting this bad in movies about baseball either. For that matter, movies about killer whales, Army comedies, comic hostage situations in car dealerships and anything else Petty has appeared in. The last time I saw her she was ruining a short commercial for horse racing in the Tri-State area. I haven't checked, did she destroy pari-mutuel betting as we know it from people afraid she'd be at the track?
Picking on Shore is almost too easy, but when I actually found online a photo of the movie scene that scarred me for life from Bio-Dome with Stephen Baldwin chewing off Shore's toenails, I knew he must be included. Besides, he co-starred with the aforementioned Lori Petty in In the Army Now, so it seemed a natural segue. Of course, why kick a freak when he's down? I know why: Because I can. There was a time when people inexplicably enjoyed this moron who managed to make buddy into a five-syllable word. Of course, his time mercifully passed and other savvier film killers such as Adam Sandler sprang to prominence (and as bad as Sandler is when he does one of his patented annoying characters such as in The Waterboy or Little Nicky, he's even more insufferable when he tries to turn "serious" in things such as Punch Drunk Love or Spanglish. Thankfully, I think he may be subsiding as well. At least I can hope so.
In an appearance on one of the Oscar broadcasts in the 1980s, Liberace said, "I've done my part for movies — I've stopped making them." Thankfully, Kate Capshaw
has pretty much done that as well. Hell, if you're married to Steven Spielberg and can't act your way out of — well, anything — why keep working and making the rest of us suffer? She ruined Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (though I can't prove that it would have worked with an actress playing her role either), although I admit I would have liked it better if Mola Ram had pulled her heart out when she was on the sacrificial altar. Capshaw gave an impressive list of awful performances in movies that were sometimes even worse such as Spacecamp, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys and Black Rain. Still, my favorite Capshaw story always will be her work on the late soap opera Edge of Night. She was hired to play a character who only had six months to live — but she was so awful they fired her almost immediately because they couldn't handle her stinking up the screen for even that short a period of time. Stay at home Kate. Even your husband has been wise enough not to cast you in any of his movies since you snared him away from Amy Irving on Temple of Doom.
Now, there is hope for some of these performers who grate on me (well, maybe not for Lori Petty) and Douglas is evidence of that. As Josh R wrote in an earlier post Is Michael Douglas a male chauvinist pig?, for most of his acting career, I just found Douglas to be intrinsically unlikable in just about anything he made. No matter whether his character was the "victim" or not, I found myself rooting against him in
movies such as Falling Down, Disclosure and Fatal Attraction. He even teamed with another acting demon on this list, Kate Capshaw, in Black Rain, where he played a horrendous American cop in Japan. When his partner Andy Garcia got killed, I lamented in my review that the wrong officer got killed since that meant Douglas would stick around. The only time I found that my resistance to him worked was in War of the Roses, where it helped that he was a bastard. However, Douglas managed to turn me around with his great portrayal of Grady Tripp in the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys. Not only did Douglas give his best performance, I went from periodically railing against his Oscar win for best actor for Wall Street to railing against his snub for Wonder Boys. So, there is hope for getting off my shitlist.
Another example of someone who won me over is Kim Cattrall. She was just awful in films ranging from Big Trouble in Little China to Bonfire of the Vanities. She even sucked in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, where she was assigned the task of playing a Vulcan, who presumably should show no emotions and she couldn't even pull that off. In fact, for a long time I even offered a theory that any actor with the initials K.C. must suck (Kevin Costner, Kirk Cameron, Kate Capshaw, Kim Cattrall. Only Keith Carradine seemed to be a possible exception, unless you saw him in The Ties That Bind). Then came HBO's Sex and the
City and Cattrall's role of Samantha. My dislike of Cattrall made me avoid the show for a long time for fear that I couldn't possibly like it with her in it. However, I eventually caught up and she proved me wrong. Perhaps it was a case of the perfect merging of an actress and a role, but Cattrall was great as Samantha. Now, I haven't seen her in anything since Sex and the City (I missed that Britney Spears movie. Damn!) Maybe Cattrall will revert to being on my list of actors who grate on me, but for now I'll give her the benefit of the doubt because as Samantha she was damn good.Tweet
Labels: Chabon, Connery, Costner, Geena Davis, Hanks, HBO, K. Carradine, M. Douglas, Oliver Stone, Sayles, Spielberg, Susan Sarandon, The Simpsons, Tim Robbins
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