I spent a week at my mom's house, during which time I watched something like a dozen movies. Her TV is set up in a way where huge boxes of glare shine into the center of the screen, making actual enjoyment fairly difficult. As such I mostly tried to watch movies I was vaguely curious about seeing, but suspected I wouldn't like.
In an effort to speed along this blog process and catch up to something close to where I should be with my movie reviews, I've decided to give these dozen movies short shrift and stick them all together in one hastily written post.
The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona & Sidney Salkow, 1964)
By default the best adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. None of the three are good, but this one is, I suppose, the least bad. If I'm being honest I sort of hate Vincent Price's theatrical acting in this. I am not familiar enough with his work to know if this is his typical style of acting, or if too long pauses and over-emphasis on the dramatic words of a sentence are simply his forte. In any case, it gave everything a feeling of Masterpiece Theatre, which the grimy desperation of the character needs anything but. The Omega Man must've got the part where the main character becomes a martyr, rather than realizing he's the monster, from this movie. Kinda defeats the whole point of the book.
The Box (Richard Kelly, 2009)
Lately I've fallen in love with describing certain movies as "cinema wallpaper." It seems a short and easy way of stating that they feel a whole lot like watching nothing. There are things happening on screen, but none of them seem to add up to an experience that is like watching a whole movie. The Box is certainly like that, and, sadly, that's enough to make it Richard Kelly's best movie (based on Donnie Darko and the 20 minutes I was able to get through of Southland Tales). Again, like in DD, he uses period detail without much point -- the film takes place in the '70s, but it could just as well be now (and, for a lot of it, now would make more sense). But, again, I guess nothing beats the low-hanging fruit of Donnie Darko's attempts at '80s satire. It's pretty difficult to even understand why or how this was made.
Swordfish (Dominic Sena, 2001)
Uses that Matrix rotating camera trick to much greater effect than was ever used in the Matrix. Gave the feeling that, despite the awfulness of Travolta's opening monologue, I might actually be about to watch an interesting movie. Unfortunately it turns out the opening sequence is one of those Begin at the End hooks, and the ensuing flashback to Hugh Jackman as a paroled hacker (quite easily the buffest man to ever be jailed for spending 16 hours a day sitting behind a computer) being enticed back into the life is dull nonsense -- though, at least, breezy, hastily paced nonsense. I didn't hate it, even if all the potential was eventually wasted, and the movie can never decide whether it wants to be a big, outlandish cartoon of an action movie or a gritty, violent down-to-earth action movie with Jackman as a plausible moral center, trapped in a world of chaos and violence.
Man on Fire (Tony Scott, 2004)
Honestly, I was completely surprised how much I enjoyed this. My general feeling towards Tony Scott is that, despite certain critical opinions, he is in fact even worse than Ridley. This, however, is the most I've enjoyed a movie by either of the two brothers, which I guess puts Tony back in the lead even if Ridley never made a movie I hated as much as True Romance. It is mean and bleak and gross, and wearing its "gritty" Denzel broken down Man of Action heart on its sleeve does it no real favors, but its ultra high contrast music video cinematography is so gorgeous I could watch nearly anything happening to it and be enthralled. Perhaps it speaks to my sense of aesthetic (and how bad it is), but I just plain love looking at this movie and if I could make a movie that looked just like it I would be pleased as punch. Dakota Fanning is pretty good, too.
The Manchurian Candidate (Jonathan Demme, 2004)
At first looks and feels like a bad attempt to revive '70s paranoia-style filmmaking, with weird deep fisheye cameras and strange zooms. This visual style eventually stopped bothering me, though it never completely gelled with the rest of the movie. Despite these stylistic problems, and Meryl Streep's boring Meryl Streep performance, Demme's attempt to make a big budget movie also be somewhat politically subversive ends up giving it enough oomph to push it into a pretty decent movie. The way it mirrors the hypnotic suggestion of its characters with the rhetoric of television punditry and political speeches to suggest that our entire political system is a broken down mess of mass hypnosis and it doesn't really matter which party you support, as long as everyone is talking the same way about the same things is a pretty unusual (if a mite obvious) outlook for a Hollywood political thriller, even if Demme eventually becomes trapped in offering the audience an easy happy(-ish) ending escape.
Freejack (Geoff Murphy, 1992)
Actually starts like an interesting movie, possibly. Though that is only because I misinterpreted the opening sequence to think it was about something completely different. The opening intercuts Emilio Estevez in a bright, sunny, idyllic, Best Day of My Life scene with a dark Mick Jagger-led post-apocalypse wasteland. The implication at the time, to me, was that Estevez was jacked into some kind of virtual reality world where he relived the positive aspects of his life as an escape from the reality that he was seriously injured or something along those lines. You could go interesting places with a concept like that. Instead it's about how in the future you can snatch people's bodies just before their death and, if you have enough money, transfer your personality into them to live forever -- like some kind of reverse on the Bradbury story Sound of Thunder. Estevez escapes and the movie proceeds from there in a series of poorly executed chase sequences until it eventually ends.
X2: X-Men United (Bryan Singer, 2003)
Still too long, just as I remembered, but otherwise an efficient slice of superhero action movie. Singer is, with little doubt, one of our best living action directors and this movie goes far to demonstrate just what is dull and lacking about the sleepwalking action sequences in Matthew Vaughn's newest X-Men movie. The tension, the sense of place and motion, in the opening action sequence alone would probably make it one of the best American action scenes of the last decade or so. It moves with a steady, pure kinesis that is almost unseen in action movies lately. I also have to admit I appreciate the mutants as metaphor for the struggle for gay rights, and the goofy fun Singer has with it ("have you ever tried... NOT being a mutant" asks a fretful mother) a lot more than I like it as a metaphor for black civil rights ala the new one. Guess I should finally get around to watching Valkyrie and see if it has some glimmers of awesome in and around how awful I expect to find some of it.
X-Men: Last Stand (Brett Ratner, 2006)
Actually not as awful as I remembered. Kelsey Grammar is a terrible choice for Beast (come on, it's fuckin' Frasier, how did anyone think this wasn't ridiculous), and it mostly skates along without any ideas about anything -- it doesn't, for instance, even attempt to grapple with the idea that despite Magneto hating Nazis he basically wants to be a mutant Hitler. But it does skate along briskly and with a kind of gleeful abandon. No doubt working with the knowledge that this was gonna be the last real X-Men movie, Ratner and screenwriters spare no opportunity to kill off as many main characters as they possibly can. And while this is, in itself, not anything like an inherently good thing, I can find a small amount of pleasure in it compared to the usual way of handling super teams in movies. Cover it with an ecstatic layer of sentimental cheese and you have a movie that, while not at all something good, is at least a joyful and unbridled show of passable mediocrity.
Jurassic Park III (Joe Johnston, 2001)
I guess this would be kind of the opposite end of a similar sequel spectrum. This is even more unapologetically schlocky than Last Stand, yet it works far less well. The biggest issue is that Joe Johnston is so obviously beholden to Spielberg's work that what he ends up with is merely sticky, oozing Velveeta Spielberg. An indiscernible mess of could-be Spielberg, yet everything about it looks, feels, tastes and smells wrong. Even the music is weird, having been able to successfully license the Jurassic Park theme song -- but not John Williams himself. So we alternate between big, uproarious moments with the (actually pretty annoying) theme, then seque into some not at all good faux-Williams music for the next part. Then the movie will do something completely inexplicable, like try to reprise that first Jurassic Park moment, when you've spent 20 minutes talking about dinosaurs and getting hints of dinosaurs, then you get the big BAM moment when there's a dinosaur... only they do it 3/4ths of the way into this movie, which has already been filled with dinosaurs since the beginning. Why are you trying to replicate (almost exactly) the big majestic moment at a completely ill-fitting time when everyone is trying to run away and not get eaten? While I can understand not liking The Lost World, or probably honestly any of the Jurassic Park movies, do not trust anyone who claims this is better than the second one.
Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
So after all that fake Spielberg I decided to watch a real one, albeit not even close to one of his best. In many ways this is the most conflicted of his movies that I've seen, constantly battling itself between his impulse for humanistic gravity about the future, where America/humanity appeared to be heading in a post-Patriot Act world of security and paranoia -- and a bunch of awful jokes like Tom Cruise chasing his eyeballs down a ramp and Peter Stormare as a doctor blowing snot everywhere. This is definitely Spielberg at his most weirdly unrestrained, apparently literally throwing every idea he can think of into the movie whether good, bad, offensive, childish, interesting or dull. Just a whole big kitchen sink of a movie which, somewhat unfortunately, also happens to have some of the most interesting sci-fi world building that exists in a recent movie -- blending utopic and dystopic ideas into a world that seems like a plausible reality in 20-30 years (Xbox Kinect already offers the ability to control TV menus by moving your hands, and, from what I hear, cars that drive themselves are in a constant state of testing).
The X-Files: I Want To Believe (Chris Carter, 2008)
A ridiculous exercise in combining what would be, even by its standards, a pretty bland episode of the show with a seemingly endless string of kowtowing fanbase appeasement. Mulder and Scully are finally together and doing it as they get roped back into working for the government for One Last Job. Xzibit co-stars as the only black guy, who also happens to be surly, dislikeable and useless. Even late in the movie, when it appears his time for redemption has come, as Scully angrily calls out his masculinity ("if you can't do it, find me someone with the balls who will") instead is just an excuse to bring back Skinner for a worthless cameo and Xzibit never appears in the movie again. Also attempts to mirror the killer with an at first extraneous seeming medical case Scully is working on, where a boy is probably dying from a rare brain disease and an experimental and highly painful treatment has only a very small chance of saving him. The killer, meanwhile, is kidnapping people and sawing them up with the hope of curing his husband's cancer. The question, eventually, appears to be: How far is too far to save someone you love? But then the end completely ignores this connection, as Scully powers on with the treatment. Mercifully, we never find out whether it works, but it still seems completely at odds with what the rest was trying to suggest. Easily the worst movie of the trip, despite Duchovny's charming attempts to rescue it with every scene he's in. (Gillian Anderson is also completely awful, it is little wonder her career has stagnated without the show)
Mission: Impossible III (J.J. Abrams, 2006)
Watched this both because I had not seen it since the theatre, and as a primer for my anticipation of seeing Super 8 when I arrived in Atlanta. That it turned out to be much better than that movie was a surprise, although it is still nothing worth writing home about. The bit of stunt casting that put Phillip Seymour Hoffman in the villain's chair likely won Abrams much of the movie's critical respect, but to me he does nothing but exude a pale, mealy-mouthed narcissist's idea of quiet, direct menace. He's so obviously caught up in trying to be scary without being overtly scary that it ruptures the entire movie's existence. The whole fiasco is a case of Actors Gone wild, as Cruise pulls out all the stops in appearing as Tom Cruise-y as possible at all times, while Billy Crudup tips his hat too early by being oily and shooting furtive glances. The rest of the movie is the usual Abrams celebration of gender roles, with Cruise as the jaded spy who falls in love with a girl because of her innocence and naivete (creepy), then must rescue her when his life, and his mistakes, ensare her. A few of the espionage aspects seem interesting at first, though eventually end in cliche (one particularly elaborate sequence's finale comes down to spilling a drink on someone and then ambushing them in the bathroom). Here's hoping Brad Bird's first foray into live-action can breathe some life into this tired franchise (but, sadly, who's really holding their breath?), as who doesn't love the idea of spies doing cool spy stuff?
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Friday, July 1, 2011
Cobra (George Pan Cosmatos, 1986)
Cobra is so vile and complete an embodiment of '70s-'80s fascist vigilante romanticism that it could almost be a parody of these ideals, if not for its complete straight face -- excepting macho-cynical one-liners, of course. A gang of psychotic cultists spouting apocalyptic nihilism are taking over the town and it's up to one cop in a vintage sedan to stop them. His superiors don't understand his brand of no-nonsense, get results, shoot the bad guys police work. A material witness who is also a pretty lady needs his protection and he'll stop at nothing to give it to her. One of the bureaucrats always standing in Cobra's way is secretly working with the cult. Hits every cliche plot nail on the head and lacks both the gorgeously scummy look Don Siegel brought to Dirty Harry, as well as that movie's occasional acknowledgement of/ambivalence towards the titular character's gross methods/outlooks. If this were possible to be taken seriously by anyone, this movie would have made me very angry. Instead, it was just annoyingly icky -- like the sheen of sweat from a muggy summer day spent doing nothing much but writing about terrible movies (hint: today).
Hot Tub Time Machine (Steve Pink, 2010)
A telling cultural placeholder -- a fitting affirmation of just how far we haven't come since the '80s. Manages to mix the homophobia, misogyny and racism of yesteryear with all the new ways we've discovered to oppress people in the two decades since. I'd say Craig Robinson ought to be ashamed of himself, but he has already proven himself a man without shame.
The film's premise is, actually, not without potential. Sad sack middle-aged guys trying to relive their glory days accidentally get time-warped back to them. If the film had gone from there to become an indictment of the vanity and privelege of male mid-life crises, as well as an attempt to slap in the face the entire idea of rose-tinted nostalgia for the '80s and all the awful things about that decade, all while embodying the tone and feel of an '80s comedy (the one thing the actual movie does get kinda right), well, that actually sounds like a movie I'd want to see -- a lot. The movie has a banquet of satirical subject matter to work with, and all it ends up with is some jokes about neon and slack-jawed Red Scare jokes that were likely tired before the '80s had ended.
And the actual plot involves none of this premise. Instead, it is the exact opposite. It is about how, hey, now that we're old and we see all those mistakes we made, wouldn't it be great if we could go back to our young, hot, virile bodies, but with the life experience we have now? We would rule EVERYTHING. So it becomes an extended, unfunny exercise in male wish fulfillment. John Cusack, in the present, is reeling from a recent divorce in which his Bitch Ex-Wife(TM) took everything and left him a shallow husk of a man. The solution, in the past, is to meet a "quirky" girl with almost no personality and get her to fall in love with you despite the fact that you are exhibiting personality traits in life with both A) a mopey, recently dumped creep ex-boyfriend and B) a legitimately mentally ill person who believes he is from the future. There is literally no way a young, successful writer for a music magazine would ever be interested in him. Craig Robinson, in the present, is an emasculated cukold too much in love with his wife to confront her about his knowledge of her affair. The solution, in the past, is to call his 9-year-old wife-to-be on the phone and scream obscenities at her until she cries. This move proves so emotionally scarring, that when he returns to the future she would never dream of cheating on him (though, of course, she doesn't know it was him). The entire movie is like this. Men behave in such disgusting, self-serving, completely inhuman ways and are then rewarded. We are supposed to buy into their ending as being a happy one, because, I guess, that the only thing really wrong with the world is that men don't have enough control over it.
The film's premise is, actually, not without potential. Sad sack middle-aged guys trying to relive their glory days accidentally get time-warped back to them. If the film had gone from there to become an indictment of the vanity and privelege of male mid-life crises, as well as an attempt to slap in the face the entire idea of rose-tinted nostalgia for the '80s and all the awful things about that decade, all while embodying the tone and feel of an '80s comedy (the one thing the actual movie does get kinda right), well, that actually sounds like a movie I'd want to see -- a lot. The movie has a banquet of satirical subject matter to work with, and all it ends up with is some jokes about neon and slack-jawed Red Scare jokes that were likely tired before the '80s had ended.
And the actual plot involves none of this premise. Instead, it is the exact opposite. It is about how, hey, now that we're old and we see all those mistakes we made, wouldn't it be great if we could go back to our young, hot, virile bodies, but with the life experience we have now? We would rule EVERYTHING. So it becomes an extended, unfunny exercise in male wish fulfillment. John Cusack, in the present, is reeling from a recent divorce in which his Bitch Ex-Wife(TM) took everything and left him a shallow husk of a man. The solution, in the past, is to meet a "quirky" girl with almost no personality and get her to fall in love with you despite the fact that you are exhibiting personality traits in life with both A) a mopey, recently dumped creep ex-boyfriend and B) a legitimately mentally ill person who believes he is from the future. There is literally no way a young, successful writer for a music magazine would ever be interested in him. Craig Robinson, in the present, is an emasculated cukold too much in love with his wife to confront her about his knowledge of her affair. The solution, in the past, is to call his 9-year-old wife-to-be on the phone and scream obscenities at her until she cries. This move proves so emotionally scarring, that when he returns to the future she would never dream of cheating on him (though, of course, she doesn't know it was him). The entire movie is like this. Men behave in such disgusting, self-serving, completely inhuman ways and are then rewarded. We are supposed to buy into their ending as being a happy one, because, I guess, that the only thing really wrong with the world is that men don't have enough control over it.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2011)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is, basically, nonsense. A labored attempt to cross several millenia of generations by introducing the oldest known visual arts to the latest in 3D technology. It's an intriguing idea, but it fails on so many counts that even what is intermittently interesting about it is swallowed up in memory by everything that is botched. The most damning, maybe, is that 3D does not look at all like how we actually perceive the world. An art history professor I discussed the film with said that she did appreciate the 3D in some ways, having looked at quite a number of normal photographs of the art work. I hadn't seen any 2D versions to compare it to, but the strangeness of 3D actually worked against my enjoyment of the pieces -- like the new technology was battling the old art and winning in a big, big way. The most interesting moments, for me, were shots of the caves and surrounding landscape without the paintings in them. The ability of 3D filmmaking to transform something real and palpable into a disorienting, surreal version of itself is the only possibility of 3D that seems honestly worth exploring to this writer. To turn real life into a bizarre theme park ride.
Late in the film Herzog travels to an indoor replication of a tropical jungle to further pontificate on the oldness of alligators and their perceptions of things. From nearly any kind of standpoint it, it's a self-consciously silly aside that, like much of the rest of the film, seems to be Herzog playing up his wacky German persona. Whether this Troy McClure-esque act is a cynical money-grab, playing on America's fondness for goofy foreign caricatures or Herzog actually beginning to buy into his own mythology is difficult to discern. In any event, there's a shot that travels through some leafy palms and opens up into the aquarium that felt so much like the realization of all those goofy early '90s Virtual Reality promises of the future that it made me wish his next project would be a 3D Aguirre revisited trek into the Amazon. Preferably without his voice anywhere near it.
The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a strange mixture of a talking head documentary in which no one seems to be saying the things Herzog wants them to, so he badgers them into answering questions in a weird way, or the pictures of the 3D images. This is where my interest in the movie will veer into the purely subjective and possibly ignorant. I don't really care about the paintings at all. Some were interesting, some less so, but as an artifact of pre-history I was unable to glean any compelling story from their existence. And, as a relative novice in the field of painting, their composition did not strike me in the way it seemed to pound many of my contemporaries. I am a man trapped in the modern(ist) world, and much of my interest in art lies only with its ability to comment on itself and a world I recognize. Without a historical context to attach it to (something that, obviously, can never exist), I find it difficult to feel anything but indifferent about most of it. This is my own personal failing, and something I cannot necessarily hold against the film.
But everything else, especially Herzog's own juvenile and obnoxious pontification on nature and the world are things that, at least from my perspective, are real problems that dampen a once-in-almost-anyone's-lifetime experience. Herzog seems to be fighting a company's desire to turn the film into a more normal, everyday Discovery Channel-esque movie, but this fight makes the film so much more annoying than something along those lines would be. To make matters worse, his narration is mixed so high in the soundtrack that its booming insistence makes his platitudes all the more groan-worthy, given their Voice of God status. In all honesty, I wanted to be much more specific in this section of the review, but two months after the screening I'm having quite a lot of trouble remembering any specific lines. It has all achieved a droning hum of Herzog's accented lisp saying "nature" over and over.
Late in the film Herzog travels to an indoor replication of a tropical jungle to further pontificate on the oldness of alligators and their perceptions of things. From nearly any kind of standpoint it, it's a self-consciously silly aside that, like much of the rest of the film, seems to be Herzog playing up his wacky German persona. Whether this Troy McClure-esque act is a cynical money-grab, playing on America's fondness for goofy foreign caricatures or Herzog actually beginning to buy into his own mythology is difficult to discern. In any event, there's a shot that travels through some leafy palms and opens up into the aquarium that felt so much like the realization of all those goofy early '90s Virtual Reality promises of the future that it made me wish his next project would be a 3D Aguirre revisited trek into the Amazon. Preferably without his voice anywhere near it.
The rest of the film, unfortunately, is a strange mixture of a talking head documentary in which no one seems to be saying the things Herzog wants them to, so he badgers them into answering questions in a weird way, or the pictures of the 3D images. This is where my interest in the movie will veer into the purely subjective and possibly ignorant. I don't really care about the paintings at all. Some were interesting, some less so, but as an artifact of pre-history I was unable to glean any compelling story from their existence. And, as a relative novice in the field of painting, their composition did not strike me in the way it seemed to pound many of my contemporaries. I am a man trapped in the modern(ist) world, and much of my interest in art lies only with its ability to comment on itself and a world I recognize. Without a historical context to attach it to (something that, obviously, can never exist), I find it difficult to feel anything but indifferent about most of it. This is my own personal failing, and something I cannot necessarily hold against the film.
But everything else, especially Herzog's own juvenile and obnoxious pontification on nature and the world are things that, at least from my perspective, are real problems that dampen a once-in-almost-anyone's-lifetime experience. Herzog seems to be fighting a company's desire to turn the film into a more normal, everyday Discovery Channel-esque movie, but this fight makes the film so much more annoying than something along those lines would be. To make matters worse, his narration is mixed so high in the soundtrack that its booming insistence makes his platitudes all the more groan-worthy, given their Voice of God status. In all honesty, I wanted to be much more specific in this section of the review, but two months after the screening I'm having quite a lot of trouble remembering any specific lines. It has all achieved a droning hum of Herzog's accented lisp saying "nature" over and over.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Showgirls (Paul Verhoeven, 1995)
Paul Verhoeven's 1995 film, Showgirls, was critically and commercially decimated upon its release – reviled for its campy acting and dialogue and almost universally declared one of the worst films of all time. As years passed, and no doubt partially inspired by famous Cahiers du Cinema critic Jacques Rivette's claim that Showgirls was “one of the great American films of the last few years,” (Bonnaud) other critics started to acknowledge that, perhaps, they had overlooked the film. Australian critic Adrian Martin even admitted “I learnt the lesson that Showgirls knew more than I did.” (Martin) It is with very little shame that I admit the same was true of me, upon my first viewing. Despite my fondness for other Verhoeven films, especially Robocop, I was unprepared to accept the level to which Verhoeven would mix sincerity and irony into an ambivalent postmodernist stew of indulgence and critique. I, as so many other viewers did, took the film at its very face value – I called it “fantastically directed kitsch” – and laughed callously at star Elizabeth Berkeley's flailing gesticulations and Gina Gershon's hollow, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't Texas accent. What I didn't realize was that I was becoming the exact thing that Showgirls was satirizing – an opportunistic viewer, gazing at the characters depicted on screen and, in my gaze, robbing them of their humanity.
Following mammoth box office successes with Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992), Paul Verhoeven seemed set for a long, successful career in Hollywood. Working with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, and given the greenlight by backing studio MGM to explore the recently minted NC-17 rating (designed to replace the older X rating, which in the public's eye had become synonymous with pornography) in a big budgeted drama about Las Vegas show life. The resulting film, Showgirls, grossed only 28 million dollars domestically, compared to its 45 million dollar budget (Box Office Mojo). It won a then-record seven prizes at the Annual Golden Raspberry Awards (Scheers vii), including Worst Director and Worst Picture. Eventually its more campy aspects would be embraced in the home video market, earning it 100 million in home video sales and making it one of MGM's top 20 best-selling videos (MGM.com).
While some would argue that its campiness is unintentional – that Verhoeven believed he was making a serious film and accidentally made something hilarious – I would say the truth is much more ambivalent. Showgirls is both kitschy and serious. What other way could there be to depict Las Vegas, a city so cartoonishly surreal and yet so celebrated as a pinnacle of modern American capitalism? The artifice of the performances and dialogue, which are almost all consistent in tone, are an extension of Vegas' existence as a city of smoke and mirrors. Verhoeven claimed his interest is in realism, but he bends the idea that the words “realism” and “realistic” are necessarily interchangeable. Showgirls is not realistic, but to Verhoeven's mind it is realism. What he depicts is an honest summation of his feelings about humanity, especially as it relates to America. As Rivette puts it, “it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy.” (Bonnaud) This is especially apparent in scenes between Elizabeth Berkeley and Gina Gershon. Despite their outwardly obvious and sometimes baffling dialogue (bonding over a childhood love of dog food), they eye each other with a shared sense of distrust tinged with hints of malevolence. Berkeley, especially, uses a form of stripped down acting in which she and the character fuse into one indistinguishable person. Over the course of the film she, just as her character Nomi Malone does, “learns” how to act. Early on she is full of wild fire, throwing herself into every emotion with reckless, occasionally ludicrous, abandon. But after Nomi's ascension to star of the show Goddess, she transforms into a replica of Gershon's Crystal Connors – eyes twinkling with deceit and lustful power.
By choosing a story about strippers, and using a rating intended for Adults Only, Verhoeven is able to extend the metaphor in many different directions. It is a film critiquing the world of cinema, and the unrealistic power fantasies it creates. It is a film critiquing the world of Hollywood, and it's role as a town – like Vegas – that feeds off new life, before eventually spitting it out, chewed and broken. Especially as it pertains to young, hopeful performers. And, of course, it is a critique of the real place, Las Vegas, and the world of strip clubs, prostitution and the sometimes blurry line between the two. In every instance there is a huge gulf between the promised fantasy and the lived reality. This, I suppose, is true even of gambling itself. Gambling, in its own way, is a microcosm of the ways in which rich people offer a hint of The American Dream to the working class, encouraging people to say “what if I win?” and ignore at what cost their small winnings came from.
This is the format with which Verhoeven uses a postmodernist lens to examine the history of the Hollywood musical. Behind the scenes films such as 42nd Street (1933), All About Eve (1950), and A Star is Born (1937, 1954) (Henderson) are the fodder with which Verhoeven assails musicals, and, by extension, film itself, as a morally bankrupt dream factory that has helped create a world like Las Vegas. But, at the same time, Verhoeven is aware of the hypocrisy inherent in this kind of message. He doesn't shy away from an understanding and sympathy with the audience's desire for fantasy. In Total Recall, he was delighted at the audience's relief when main character Doug Quaid, forced to confront whether or not he has been living a dream, decides it isn't a dream and shoots the target of his confusion. The audience wanted to believe so badly that, even though it was a movie, what they were witnessing was real within the context of the movie, that Arnold shooting a man is a cause for celebration and relief from anxiety (Scheers 223). Thus Showgirls is structured to take maximum advantage of the audience's desire for internal consistency and genre formula. Viewers want to root for the main character and root against the bad guy, so Verhoeven pushes hard to make both of those things difficult to do. Malone's dissolution from naïve girl from out of town to cocaine-snorting opportunist stretches the boundaries of audience willingness to sympathize. This combines with Nomi's eventual attempt to reclaim her lost sense of self and fight back, literally “kicking the shit” out of Andrew Carver for the rape of her best friend, being both a fulfillment of audience desire and a cold nod to the reality that a small measure of revenge doesn't balance the world's order. All it does is invite Nomi back into living the fantasy, dooming her to repeat all the decisions she's made. This gives the film a frightening sense of despair, using a mirror effect of the sign post to Vegas in the film's opening shots to the sign post to Los Angeles in the ending, to imply a fatalistic circle of entrapment. The poor and disenfranchised, particularly women, will be locked into roles at the mercy of men for the rest of their lives.
Men are central to much of the concerns of Showgirls and their odious, completely self-serving, behavior throughout the film is evidence of a strong leaning towards feminist theory on Verhoeven's part. Once again toying with notions of film literacy and archetypes, he sets up three familiar “meet-cute” scenarios. The first occurs in the film's first scene, when a drifter in a brown duster picks up Nomi hitchhiking. In a typical film romance, this could be the beginning of a relationship. He's even kind of a jerk – prime material for the “opposites attract” formula Hollywood has been pumping for years in their romantic comedies. By the end of the road trip they are getting along and he even offers to help her get a job at the Riviera, where his uncle is floor manager. He gives her $10 for the slot machine and says he'll be right back. This scenario ends, of course, with him making off with all her worldly possessions and disappearing for almost the entire film. This pattern of men swooping in to Nomi's rescue, only to selfishly backstab her at the earliest convenience, is played out two more times in the film – first with a bartender/dancer James, and then again with creative director of the Stardust Hotel, Zack. Each of these again toy with the audience's expectation for wish fulfillment. Each man appears nice, and would be plausible as the film's romantic interest, but their disregard for her well-being proves a one-way street. The women in the film can only screw over each other and have no real power over the other men, especially the rich ones like Zack. After nearly two hours of being at the mercy of her male handlers, Nomi's small exploitation movie-esque revenge fantasy against pop star Andrew Carver feels hollow and useless. Quite plainly, in a world in which women are prized for their beauty and a man can walk up to a girl down on her luck at the slot machines and ask “Lost all your money? Wanna make some more?” there is almost nothing one can do to escape the institutional oppression that movies help socialize us towards. Even when men mean well, they cannot escape the base nature of their feelings, as when Verhoeven gives pretty much everyone the middle finger by capping a clichéd, heartwarming reunion between Nomi and her previous bosses, Al and Henrietta with Al telling Nomi “Must be weird not having anybody come on you.”
This fatalistic attitude is at the crux of Verhoeven's arguments throughout his career. There's a sense of bleak inevitability to his films, as he acknowledges their existence as representations of people rather than as real human beings – caught as they are in the machinations of a script already written. And then he uses this idea to paint broad strokes about our own nature as people, and the ways in which we seek to serve ourselves at the cost of others. This level of moralizing might be off-putting in the hands of a less skilled director, but Verhoeven cloaks his moral stance in such a pointed satirical gaze that it never comes off as casual nihilism. Instead it elevates Showgirls, and much of the rest of his oeuvre including more recent films like Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000), into an apparently perpetual state of relevance as America marches forward every year with new versions of the same old fantasies to force feed its increasingly class divided youths.
Following mammoth box office successes with Robocop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Basic Instinct (1992), Paul Verhoeven seemed set for a long, successful career in Hollywood. Working with Basic Instinct screenwriter Joe Eszterhas, and given the greenlight by backing studio MGM to explore the recently minted NC-17 rating (designed to replace the older X rating, which in the public's eye had become synonymous with pornography) in a big budgeted drama about Las Vegas show life. The resulting film, Showgirls, grossed only 28 million dollars domestically, compared to its 45 million dollar budget (Box Office Mojo). It won a then-record seven prizes at the Annual Golden Raspberry Awards (Scheers vii), including Worst Director and Worst Picture. Eventually its more campy aspects would be embraced in the home video market, earning it 100 million in home video sales and making it one of MGM's top 20 best-selling videos (MGM.com).
While some would argue that its campiness is unintentional – that Verhoeven believed he was making a serious film and accidentally made something hilarious – I would say the truth is much more ambivalent. Showgirls is both kitschy and serious. What other way could there be to depict Las Vegas, a city so cartoonishly surreal and yet so celebrated as a pinnacle of modern American capitalism? The artifice of the performances and dialogue, which are almost all consistent in tone, are an extension of Vegas' existence as a city of smoke and mirrors. Verhoeven claimed his interest is in realism, but he bends the idea that the words “realism” and “realistic” are necessarily interchangeable. Showgirls is not realistic, but to Verhoeven's mind it is realism. What he depicts is an honest summation of his feelings about humanity, especially as it relates to America. As Rivette puts it, “it's about surviving in a world populated by assholes, and that's his philosophy.” (Bonnaud) This is especially apparent in scenes between Elizabeth Berkeley and Gina Gershon. Despite their outwardly obvious and sometimes baffling dialogue (bonding over a childhood love of dog food), they eye each other with a shared sense of distrust tinged with hints of malevolence. Berkeley, especially, uses a form of stripped down acting in which she and the character fuse into one indistinguishable person. Over the course of the film she, just as her character Nomi Malone does, “learns” how to act. Early on she is full of wild fire, throwing herself into every emotion with reckless, occasionally ludicrous, abandon. But after Nomi's ascension to star of the show Goddess, she transforms into a replica of Gershon's Crystal Connors – eyes twinkling with deceit and lustful power.
By choosing a story about strippers, and using a rating intended for Adults Only, Verhoeven is able to extend the metaphor in many different directions. It is a film critiquing the world of cinema, and the unrealistic power fantasies it creates. It is a film critiquing the world of Hollywood, and it's role as a town – like Vegas – that feeds off new life, before eventually spitting it out, chewed and broken. Especially as it pertains to young, hopeful performers. And, of course, it is a critique of the real place, Las Vegas, and the world of strip clubs, prostitution and the sometimes blurry line between the two. In every instance there is a huge gulf between the promised fantasy and the lived reality. This, I suppose, is true even of gambling itself. Gambling, in its own way, is a microcosm of the ways in which rich people offer a hint of The American Dream to the working class, encouraging people to say “what if I win?” and ignore at what cost their small winnings came from.
This is the format with which Verhoeven uses a postmodernist lens to examine the history of the Hollywood musical. Behind the scenes films such as 42nd Street (1933), All About Eve (1950), and A Star is Born (1937, 1954) (Henderson) are the fodder with which Verhoeven assails musicals, and, by extension, film itself, as a morally bankrupt dream factory that has helped create a world like Las Vegas. But, at the same time, Verhoeven is aware of the hypocrisy inherent in this kind of message. He doesn't shy away from an understanding and sympathy with the audience's desire for fantasy. In Total Recall, he was delighted at the audience's relief when main character Doug Quaid, forced to confront whether or not he has been living a dream, decides it isn't a dream and shoots the target of his confusion. The audience wanted to believe so badly that, even though it was a movie, what they were witnessing was real within the context of the movie, that Arnold shooting a man is a cause for celebration and relief from anxiety (Scheers 223). Thus Showgirls is structured to take maximum advantage of the audience's desire for internal consistency and genre formula. Viewers want to root for the main character and root against the bad guy, so Verhoeven pushes hard to make both of those things difficult to do. Malone's dissolution from naïve girl from out of town to cocaine-snorting opportunist stretches the boundaries of audience willingness to sympathize. This combines with Nomi's eventual attempt to reclaim her lost sense of self and fight back, literally “kicking the shit” out of Andrew Carver for the rape of her best friend, being both a fulfillment of audience desire and a cold nod to the reality that a small measure of revenge doesn't balance the world's order. All it does is invite Nomi back into living the fantasy, dooming her to repeat all the decisions she's made. This gives the film a frightening sense of despair, using a mirror effect of the sign post to Vegas in the film's opening shots to the sign post to Los Angeles in the ending, to imply a fatalistic circle of entrapment. The poor and disenfranchised, particularly women, will be locked into roles at the mercy of men for the rest of their lives.
Men are central to much of the concerns of Showgirls and their odious, completely self-serving, behavior throughout the film is evidence of a strong leaning towards feminist theory on Verhoeven's part. Once again toying with notions of film literacy and archetypes, he sets up three familiar “meet-cute” scenarios. The first occurs in the film's first scene, when a drifter in a brown duster picks up Nomi hitchhiking. In a typical film romance, this could be the beginning of a relationship. He's even kind of a jerk – prime material for the “opposites attract” formula Hollywood has been pumping for years in their romantic comedies. By the end of the road trip they are getting along and he even offers to help her get a job at the Riviera, where his uncle is floor manager. He gives her $10 for the slot machine and says he'll be right back. This scenario ends, of course, with him making off with all her worldly possessions and disappearing for almost the entire film. This pattern of men swooping in to Nomi's rescue, only to selfishly backstab her at the earliest convenience, is played out two more times in the film – first with a bartender/dancer James, and then again with creative director of the Stardust Hotel, Zack. Each of these again toy with the audience's expectation for wish fulfillment. Each man appears nice, and would be plausible as the film's romantic interest, but their disregard for her well-being proves a one-way street. The women in the film can only screw over each other and have no real power over the other men, especially the rich ones like Zack. After nearly two hours of being at the mercy of her male handlers, Nomi's small exploitation movie-esque revenge fantasy against pop star Andrew Carver feels hollow and useless. Quite plainly, in a world in which women are prized for their beauty and a man can walk up to a girl down on her luck at the slot machines and ask “Lost all your money? Wanna make some more?” there is almost nothing one can do to escape the institutional oppression that movies help socialize us towards. Even when men mean well, they cannot escape the base nature of their feelings, as when Verhoeven gives pretty much everyone the middle finger by capping a clichéd, heartwarming reunion between Nomi and her previous bosses, Al and Henrietta with Al telling Nomi “Must be weird not having anybody come on you.”
This fatalistic attitude is at the crux of Verhoeven's arguments throughout his career. There's a sense of bleak inevitability to his films, as he acknowledges their existence as representations of people rather than as real human beings – caught as they are in the machinations of a script already written. And then he uses this idea to paint broad strokes about our own nature as people, and the ways in which we seek to serve ourselves at the cost of others. This level of moralizing might be off-putting in the hands of a less skilled director, but Verhoeven cloaks his moral stance in such a pointed satirical gaze that it never comes off as casual nihilism. Instead it elevates Showgirls, and much of the rest of his oeuvre including more recent films like Starship Troopers (1997) and Hollow Man (2000), into an apparently perpetual state of relevance as America marches forward every year with new versions of the same old fantasies to force feed its increasingly class divided youths.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Dellamorte, Dellamore (Michele Soavi, 1994)
A little less than a month later, and the addition of alcohol those 25 days ago when I watched it, and I barely remember anything about this movie, other than I hated it a lot. I seem to remember Rupert Everett as a kind of forlorn cemetery caretaker, pining for a love of his own. Enter an actress who plays multiple characters and, I think, screws him over as each of them? I remember it basically being a movie about how women are the worst and they always ruin guys' lives. It also was not funny at all, except in that trying too hard way that lots of horror "comedies" seem to do. Also had a very film school overachiever look to it, with lots of pseudo-artsy shots that exist mostly for their own sake, rather than what they contribute to or comment on the actions/ideas/themes onscreen. I actually honestly have difficulty understanding the film's appeal as a cult favorite. What does it offer that, well, almost anything can't offer better? This is the worst review I've written in a while. I should've written it right away, as I have nowhere to go with it now. It also has lots of mean-spirited, malicious jokes directed at Everett's assistant, an embodiment of the slow-witted Igor trope.
Time Regained (Raoul Ruiz, 1999)
Rosenbaum, an ardent Ruiz champion, once described him as one of cinema's "more literary" directors. Perhaps he worded it differently. Maybe he said "most" instead of "more" or simply described him as a literary director. The idea intrigued me, as I have taken steps towards moving away from an idea of a pure cinema -- that the camera's placement and the cutting from one shot to the next is the idea to be held above all others. That a film must first succeed at that before other ideas, themes, explorations should be warranted. It's a little bit of a silly idea. I still like it, especially as it pertains to action films. But it is reductive, when movies are capable of so much beyond those two things. So I went into Time Regained without knowing anything about it, save the idea Rosenbaum planted in my head, and that it would star Catherine Deneuve.
A little over an hour later I walked out, with probably another hour and change left to go. Perhaps if I'd done a little more research, and discovered that it was based on Marcel Proust's most famous novel, the enormous tome Remembrance of Things Past, I might have been more adequately prepared for the movie, its setting, characters and the way it moved through time. I had scarcely heard of the book before I saw the movie, and I continue to be mostly unaware of it save its title and notoriety. But it still might've given me something to hold onto, to help wade through the dense forest of faces, many mustachioed men that I could not tell from one another. A flowing and ebbing tide of names and people, unsure who was supposed to be who or when was supposed to be when. As it was, I had no basis for entry into this film and I could not reasonably justify watching more, as all I felt was a strange bored frustration, unable to access what I was being shown and just feeling sad and alienated. I am partially willing to admit that the fault is my own, or, at least, the movie is not for me. In a way, it's kind of wonderful and admirable that Ruiz was able to make a pretty well-budgeted adaptation of a French novel that is, quite probably, only for the people who have read it.
But, having said that, what little I could access cinematically told me that I needed access to anything else to get something out of it. The cinema, as one might expect from a director labeled "literary," was a mostly dull series of stiff shots broken up by mostly silly surrealist touches. And I mean silly as in ridiculous, rather than whimsical. Mostly they have a touch of whimsy, but are too clumsily handled to come off as charming. A prime example would be a scene in which a young Marcel enters a room. Across the room is an older man, and between them the floor is scattered with men's hats, like a landmine. It's a strong image, that perhaps suggests the impending war and likens it to adulthood. But then Marcel begins to make his way through the hat field by walking rigidly towards a hat, pausing, and then hopping over it in an exceptionally mannered fashion. This pushes it too far, trying to achieve a dreamlike state that is, I would guess, unlike dreams almost anybody has. It is too arch, too self-conscious and robs it of whatever power it had before. The similarly shifting furniture, gliding back and forth across the floor, is more contrivance than cute. Though a sequence in which a man appears to rise up off a ballroom floor seamlessly is nice, and unexpected. I guess this suggests that Ruiz through all his ideas at the cinematic canvas, hoping that some would work well enough to offset the ones that didn't. For Rosenbaum, and maybe others, they did. For me, not as much.
I haven't given the film a rating, being that I feel uncomfortable assigning it a negative number simply because I walked out of it. I wasn't prepared to give it a decent shot. And, even if I had been, it is in all likelihood a movie that is not for me, given that the chances of me reading a 4300 page book ever in my lifetime, no matter how good it is, are completely unlikely.
A little over an hour later I walked out, with probably another hour and change left to go. Perhaps if I'd done a little more research, and discovered that it was based on Marcel Proust's most famous novel, the enormous tome Remembrance of Things Past, I might have been more adequately prepared for the movie, its setting, characters and the way it moved through time. I had scarcely heard of the book before I saw the movie, and I continue to be mostly unaware of it save its title and notoriety. But it still might've given me something to hold onto, to help wade through the dense forest of faces, many mustachioed men that I could not tell from one another. A flowing and ebbing tide of names and people, unsure who was supposed to be who or when was supposed to be when. As it was, I had no basis for entry into this film and I could not reasonably justify watching more, as all I felt was a strange bored frustration, unable to access what I was being shown and just feeling sad and alienated. I am partially willing to admit that the fault is my own, or, at least, the movie is not for me. In a way, it's kind of wonderful and admirable that Ruiz was able to make a pretty well-budgeted adaptation of a French novel that is, quite probably, only for the people who have read it.
But, having said that, what little I could access cinematically told me that I needed access to anything else to get something out of it. The cinema, as one might expect from a director labeled "literary," was a mostly dull series of stiff shots broken up by mostly silly surrealist touches. And I mean silly as in ridiculous, rather than whimsical. Mostly they have a touch of whimsy, but are too clumsily handled to come off as charming. A prime example would be a scene in which a young Marcel enters a room. Across the room is an older man, and between them the floor is scattered with men's hats, like a landmine. It's a strong image, that perhaps suggests the impending war and likens it to adulthood. But then Marcel begins to make his way through the hat field by walking rigidly towards a hat, pausing, and then hopping over it in an exceptionally mannered fashion. This pushes it too far, trying to achieve a dreamlike state that is, I would guess, unlike dreams almost anybody has. It is too arch, too self-conscious and robs it of whatever power it had before. The similarly shifting furniture, gliding back and forth across the floor, is more contrivance than cute. Though a sequence in which a man appears to rise up off a ballroom floor seamlessly is nice, and unexpected. I guess this suggests that Ruiz through all his ideas at the cinematic canvas, hoping that some would work well enough to offset the ones that didn't. For Rosenbaum, and maybe others, they did. For me, not as much.
I haven't given the film a rating, being that I feel uncomfortable assigning it a negative number simply because I walked out of it. I wasn't prepared to give it a decent shot. And, even if I had been, it is in all likelihood a movie that is not for me, given that the chances of me reading a 4300 page book ever in my lifetime, no matter how good it is, are completely unlikely.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)