The Movie Zombie

IT RISES!!! THE MOVIE ZOMBIE'S TOP 10 FILMS OF 2011

2012-01-06T17:29:00.000-08:00

Hide your children, send the old folks to the root cellar, and lock up your antique copies of Cahiers du Cinema, because the Movie Zombie is once again prowling the multiplexes, art-houses and second-run dumps of America in search of movies with heart, movies with soul, movies with guts, and movies with BRAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIINNNNNSSSSSS! And he's happy to report that in 2011, he saw quite a few pictures that possessed all of those attributes and then some. The Zombie had a busy year. He signed a contract with Michael Wiese Productions to complete the manuscript for a how-to book on screenwriting that he co-authored with the late great writer / director Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Total Recall); the revision is due in a few weeks' time, and with luck, the book will be on bookstore shelves nationwide before the year is out. He also wrote an essay for a forthcoming book on the films of Martin Scorsese, to be published by Arizona State University Press (publication date pending). His own screenplays have been busily making the rounds to various production companies great and small-in-size-only throughout the film industry. And, of course, he met a beautiful Zombette and set up tomb-keeping with her. But somehow, in the midst of all that, he managed to take in a by-no- means comprehensive, but still healthy helping of what Hollywood and the cinematic world at large had to offer in the last year, and below, for your enjoyment, is his (or should I say my) list of the ten best films of 2011.

An always necessary caveat about this list. As I am not a full-time film critic and my viewing habits are therefore restricted to what I can afford to take in at the theaters (and what I manage to see at the industry screenings, festivals and Q & As I do manage to make it to), there are always a number of fairly major releases that I do not get a chance to check out during the course of any given year. If you don't see a critically acclaimed major film on this list, there is every chance that I just haven't yet caught up with the picture (Hugo and The Artist are two well-reviewed films that I have not yet received the opportunity to see). And of course, there's also the chance that I saw the film in question and just wasn't as bowled over by it as everyone else seemed to be; the major example of that this year is probably the Cold War spy thriller Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which was admittedly well-acted and atmospheric, and which I might have liked quite well...had I been able to figure out anything that was happening on the screen. Even with these oversights, I've compiled what I feel is a nice lineup of what was best at the theaters this year.

But what's that old saying about the wheat and the chaff? Well, luckily, the chaff, for this viewer at least, wasn't nearly as thick on the ground as it was last year, when I was able to provide a complete Bottom Five list of the worst the movies had to offer. This year, I only feel the need to warn you away from one truly disastrous picture...and it pains me, because it's a film from the mind of some folks whose previous works I have, for the most part, greatly admired.

I am speaking of David Gordon Green's virtually laugh-free medieval fantasy-stoner comedy Your Highness. The usually reliably hilarious Danny McBride (who also co-wrote the "screenplay" with longtime collaborator Ben Best) and the often-impressive James Franco (who can at least write this off as his latest performance-art goof) headline a stultifying production in which the mere fact that men in chain mail are using the word "fuck" is meant to be inherently hilarious. And if you don't think it is, I'm sorry to say that none of the "jokes" in this film are going to make you laugh. Natalie Portman appears in one of the worst career moves ever for a just-Oscar-anointed actress, and the ever-more-popular Zooey Deschanel contributes some attractive cleavage and basically nothing else. Green's transformation from a creator of potent low-budget kitchen-sink dramas into a slacker-comedy helmsman is one of the more unusual career-evolution stories of recent years, but this attractively filmed but pointless waste of time can only count as a de-evolution. Maybe it's time for Green and his North Carolina Arts pals to put down the hash pipe and pick up a better screenplay than this.

Aaah...now that that unpleasantness is out of our system, let's get to the good stuff. Here are the Movie Zombie's top ten films of 2011...

10. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN

The final film I saw theatrically in 2011 was also one of the year's best. For my money, Steven Spielberg's full-throttle adaptation of the legendary European adventure graphic novel series by Herge was the director's most purely entertaining picture since Jurassic Park. Spielberg, in partnership with producer Peter Jackson, took two of the most maligned technical gimmicks of recent big-budget blockbuster cinema, motion-capture performance technology and 3D, and through sheer force of skill, served up the best usage yet of both technologies that I've seen. Rather can exploiting 3D's hackier qualities by just constantly throwing stuff at his camera, Spielberg instead uses a restlessly moving image to marvelous effect, milking 3D's capacity to create illusions of depth for all its worth. The motion-capture is handled with equal shrewdness. Spielberg's mo-cap avatars are not aiming for creepily human-but-not realism, but instead to give Herge's fanciful original character designs flesh and weight, and the results, as with the almost-identical detectives Thompson and Thomson, are delightful to behold. (The work of the actors in bringing these characters to life is uniformly strong, with the stand-out, not surprisingly, being motion capture's main man, Andy Serkis, as the drunkenly heroic Captain Haddock.) Of course, it doesn't hurt that this is a classic old-school adventure flick in the Indiana Jones vein. Some critics have accused this picture of being merely a framework for a near-relentless series of kinetic set pieces. But they seem to have forgotten that Spielberg is better at kinetic set pieces than maybe any filmmaker who's ever lived, and here he serves up some doozies, from an exhilarating downhill chase in a flooding North African village to a climactic swordfight with towering construction cranes in place of cutlasses. The result was an exhilarating return to form for Spielberg the blockbuster maestro, and a reminder of why I fell in love with the movies in the first place.

9. SHAME

Steve McQueen's near-impressionistic depiction of a few harrowing days in the life of a New York City sex addict was the year's most provocative film, and not just for sexual content that earned it an honestly justified NC-17 (in the strictest sense of the rating's definition, this film is in no way meant for children). But it's not the libido the film arouses. It's the mind. This is a picture that stirs thought and deep conversation, even argument; the Zombette and I are still in disagreement about the strange nature of the central character's relationship with his troubled, reckless younger sister. But we both agree that this film is piercing in its insights into the compulsive mind, as we watch a man on a classic addict's path, pursuing pleasure with an intensity that naturally results in nothing for him but pain. McQueen's brooding long takes, with numerous scenes running five minutes and beyond without a single edit, draw out the film's tension to almost unbearable levels, replicating the feeling of a life lived as a series of barely endurable interludes between orgasms. (Kudos to cinematographer Sean Bobbitt and production designer Judy Becker, who create an ice-cold, Zen-minimalist New York that mirrors the bone-deep emotional deadness of the protagonist.) Carey Mulligan nails the bruised little girl within the would-be bohemian seductress, but this film would die without the right actor in the lead, and Michael Fassbender gives an Oscar-worthy performance. This is a man whose soul and mind have become unwitting slaves to his erotic compulsions, and Fassbender makes us feel his anguish with every weighted stare, every clipped word, and yes, every orgasm. No director asked more of his leading man this year than McQueen did of Fassbender. And no leading man delivered more, more brilliantly.

8. MARGIN CALL

Many films did great things in 2011, but only J.C. Chandor's debut feature as writer and director managed the impossible. Somehow, this film, chronicling a beleaguered Big Apple investment firm's murder-suicide pact with the unwitting American economy, actually gave a sympathetic human face to the monstrous media boogeymen we've come to know as "the 1%". Chandor structures his film like a thriller, as a rocket scientist turned investment guru (Zachary Quinto, who also co-produced) uncovers a financial discrepancy that threatens to bring down their entire firm...unless they're willing to peddle their soon-to-be-worthless stock to people likely to be ruined by the purchases. As the boardroom machinations that set this Machiavellian plan into motion unfold, you'll be amazed how much tension Chandor manages to wring out of men in suits and ties speaking to each other in measured tones in sterile, coolly lit boardrooms. Chandor's fiercely intelligent, scalpel-sharp screenplay avoids weighing the viewer down with facts and figures, instead telling you just enough about the calculations involved to allow you to understand the firm's gambit...and why it's corrupt. I learned a lot about how high finance works, absorbed some interesting details about the world in which these fatcats operate (because of the heavy number-crunching involved, many investment big shots apparently come from engineering backgrounds), and saw these people, who I'm used to seeing only in news footage as they're escorted from deposition rooms by lawyers, as individuals with hopes, fears and about-to-be-dashed dreams. Among an across-the-board solid cast including Penn Badgley, Demi Moore, and Stanley Tucci, the standouts are Jeremy Irons as a CEO who almost seems to believe what he's shoveling; Kevin Spacey as an office manager who knows what he's shoveling, too, and is becoming sickened by the decades of stench; and especially Paul Bettany as the office hotshot, a living, breathing embodiment of high-finance hustle...with all the buried insecurity and fear that implies.

7. MONEYBALL

Like Margin Call, this is also a movie basically about statistics, but instead of making them silent assassins, Bennett Miller's adaptation of Michael Lewis's best-selling 2003 book transforms them into redeemers of men. Brad Pitt, in an incandescent performance that makes the most of his megastar qualities, plays Billy Beane, a failed former baseball protege and general manager of the cellar-dwelling Oakland A's, who rattles the cage of the game's establishment when he throws out the decades-old rules of scouting and recruiting players, basing his new draft choices and signings on statistical calculations provided by an egghead economics whiz (Jonah Hill, in an easygoing, enjoyable performance). The A's are about to become the laughingstocks of baseball for reasons entirely besides their playing...and then, somehow, Billy's system begins to generate wins. This is mainstream Hollywood filmmaking at its best: smart, savvy about its milieu, full of genuine, good-spirited humor (Billy's meetings with his scouts, played by a group of old troupers so authentic I wouldn't be surprised to learn that most of them are real-life scouts), and at its best, heartwarming in unexpected ways. Billy Beane's story, as specific as it is to its time and world, is one that many of us can relate to, and the film is a beautifully observed portrait of a once-promising overachiever, hard past his sell-by date, looking, for just one time in his life, to be the long shot that actually wins big.

6. DRIVE

My feelings about Nicolas Winding Refn's ultra-stylish, diamond-hard crime thriller are more mixed than they are for any other film on this list. At moments, Refn's artsy directorial pretensions threaten to swamp the picture entirely, and my jury is still out on Ryan Gosling, who could be a chameleonic genius of an actor, or just a half-smiling handsome face, a puzzle without a solution. But when this film is on, its propulsive energy and brutal power thrill like nothing else I saw on the big screen this year. The result is arguably the finest film noir since L.A. Confidential. The plot here is nothing remarkable; the usual sort of deal about men on the criminal fringe, the women they love, and the money they cheat and kill each other for. What makes the film special is Refn's eye for detail, his feel for place and mood, and his one-of-a-kind handling of the standard-issue set pieces of the American crime picture. Newton Thomas Sigel's cinematography glimmers with sensuality and menace, the shadowy locations in and around downtown L.A. recall classic noir atmosphere at its darkest, and it's all set to a moody, throbbing electronic score by the always-underrated Cliff Martinez. Refn's showpiece sequences, from an exhilarating opening getaway drive (shot entirely from inside the car) to a shocking head-stomping in a garage elevator, always come at the action from angles and attitudes that you'll never expect. Some viewers were entirely put off by the intensity of this film's surprisingly brutal violence (one friend of mine told me, "I have no idea how anyone can consider that art"), but if you can get on board with this film's wavelength, there's scarcely a wilder ride to be found. Among the cast, special mention must go to Albert Brooks, who, brilliantly cast against type as an underworld boss who's a deft hand with a razor, gives the year's best performance by a supporting actor.

5. ANONYMOUS

You know who probably wrote William Shakespeare's plays? William Shakespeare. You know who made me not mind having that assumption debunked for two hours? Director Roland Emmerich, screenwriter John Orloff, and the marvelously talented cast and technical artisans behind the year's most unexpected, and unexpectedly absorbing, big-studio release. Orloff's witty and literate screenplay, a dramatization of a widely circulated theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author of the plays attributed to Shakespeare (the largely self-educated son of an illiterate glovemaker), may be ultimately untrustworthy as history, but that doesn't stop the film from drawing you in with its tantalizing combination of costume drama and conspiracy thriller. Rhys Ifans leads a exceptional cast as De Vere, a man whose patrician demeanor and high breeding mask the turbulent artistic soul within; it's Ifans's performance that ultimately lend the film surprising pathos, as he anatomizes a man trapped by the circumstances of his birth into granting the stewardship of his heart and mind's most glorious flights to another man. (I could fault the film's portrayal of Shakespeare as a libidinous near-alcoholic, but you can't knock Rafe Spall's bawdy embodiment of the role.) Emmerich's direction is the best he's done yet, and he's ably abetted by a top-notch technical team. You would hear no complaints from this Zombie if the film garnered Academy Awards for costume designer Lisy Christl, the talented art direction team led by production designer Sebastian T. Krawinkel, and especially director of photography Anna Foerster, whose burnished-yet-sumptuous images deserve to make her the first woman ever to win a Best Cinematography Oscar.

4. THE TRIP

I have described the year's funniest comedy to friends as "northern English Sideways", and though it doesn't quite match that film's near-peerless combination of laughter and pathos, Michael Winterbottom's richly witty autumnal picaresque (edited to feature-film length from a six-hour BBC miniseries) is nevertheless a memorable creation in its own right. Steve Coogan, playing a self-absorbed-yet-arrogant British actor named "Steve Coogan", takes an eating tour of England's hilly, chilly north country, which he'll review for a popular magazine. Along for the ride is his friend "Rob Brydon", a charming-but-sometimes-insufferable comedian-impressionist played by comedian-impressionist Rob Brydon. As the men drive, drink and eat their way through the byways of upper Britannia, the film sneaks in plenty of sly commentary about the insecurity of the middle-aged male, the ever-fickle celebrity self-image, and the evolution of Michael Caine's voice through years of films, cigars and whiskey. These latter scenes, with Coogan and Brydon impersonating fellow actors from Schwarzenegger to Woody Allen, have made the rounds as popular out-of-context YouTube clips, but the film really deserves to be savored as a whole (and I'd like to check out the entire BBC series some time as well). Winterbottom's smooth, unobtrusive direction skillfully serves the performances of the actors, who, largely improvising, make the year's most outstanding onscreen duo. Brydon's impressions and non-sequiters garner huge laughs, and Coogan, in his inimitable way, wrings self-stinging sympathy from even the archest dialogue.

3. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER

I have a reputation amongst my friends, particularly those with fanboy inclinations, for being someone who hates "fun movies", as if the fact that I occasionally pay to see foreign films and documentaries on the big screen means I'm allergic to popcorn flicks. Honestly, the problem is that, at the end of the day, most blockbuster Hollywood product just doesn't do it for me. And then there was Captain America, a film I spent the second half of the year almost gratefully deploying whenever my friends hit me with their baseless "he hates fun" complaints. Because I defy you to find a more fun filmgoing experience from 2011 than Joe Johnston's rousing, colorful big-screen rendering of Marvel Comics' star-spangled super-soldier. Beautifully visualized and excitingly scored by Alan Silvestri (who also co-wrote the hilarious, USO-show-spoofing musical number "Star-Spangled Man" with Stephen Schwartz), this film brings the origin and adventures of the man with the high-flying shield to life with wit, speed, exhilarating action sequences, and a surprisingly sympathetic and likable lead in Chris Evans, who garnered much-deserved praise for making his hero all-American earnest without pushing the character's gumption into self-parody. The film is beautifully cast all around, with strong work from Tommy Lee Jones (as a gruff general whose every utterance had me laughing), Stanley Tucci (as the scientist whose special formula gives life to a superhero), and especially Hugo Weaving, who, buried under heavy prosthetics as the villainous Red Skull, gave us the year's most memorably hissable bad guy. Johnston, who won an Academy Award for his visual-effects work on Raiders of the Lost Ark, is a classic popcorn filmmaker in the Spielberg tradition (he was the man behind 2010's sorely underrated update of The Wolfman), and he delivers a film that looks great, moves like a rocket, and effortlessly, endlessly entertains. The Avengers, coming out this year, has its work cut out for it as far as I'm concerned, because from where I'm sitting, there's not likely to be any Avenger quite like The First Avenger.

2. SOURCE CODE

Duncan Jones's time-and-mind-bending sci-fi thriller was far and away the year's best genre film. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a career military man who finds himself roped, against his will, into a bizarre experiment. A bomb has blown up a commuter train outside Chicago, and government scientists have managed to isolate the "source code", the eight-minute pattern of final memories stored in the brain of one of the train's dead passengers. Now, Gyllenhaal's psyche is being zapped back into the last eight minutes of a dead man's life, where he must use this all-too-brief timespan to track down and stop a terrorist, all while falling in love with the late passenger's sweetheart (played charmingly by Michelle Monaghan)...who just may be among the dead herself. Ben Ripley's strikingly complex and elegantly rendered script uses the mission's eight-minutes-only duration to whipsaw us between past and present, all the while stirring up provocative meditations on the nature of time, identity, and the limits of duty above and beyond the call. Jones's direction brilliantly teases out the story's raft of revelations and twists, keeping us always guessing and staying skillfully always just a step or two ahead of us. This is really Jones and Ripley's show, but the film nevertheless boasts a well-judged and likable lead performance by Gyllenhaal and nice supporting turns by Monaghan, the always-strong Vera Farmiga (as Gyllenhaal's mission commander) and Jeffrey Wright, suitably officious and subtly menacing as the scientist behind the source-code experiment. High praise as well to composer Chris Bacon's thunderous score and the dazzling editing work of Paul Hirsch. Normally I hate it when films blatantly set up a sequel. But when Ripley and Jones left the door open for one here, I was ready to walk right through it to find out where (and into who) Gyllenhaal was going next.

1. MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

In my 101 Favorite Screenplays review of the 1973 comedy classic Sleeper, I crowned Woody Allen as my favorite screenwriter. At the end of the day, and looking over the entire span of his career, he's probably my favorite filmmaker, period. Thus, not surprisingly, the last few years have been tough ones for me, as I've seen Allen put forth films problematic (Hollywood Ending), forgettable (Cassandra's Dream), and just plain old at-the-end-of-the-day not that good (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). And so, it gives me great pleasure to declare Allen's utterly charming comic fantasy, in which a sad-sack screenwriter (Owen Wilson) takes a magical journey back to the Lost Generation's City of Lights, the best film of 2011. Allen combines the love-letter-to-a-city romanticism of his 1979 masterpiece Manhattan with the reality-bending fantasy-fulfillment plot of 1985's The Purple Rose of Cairo to create a shimmering love story tinged with humor, yearning, and honest, lived-in regret. Allen has marshaled a typically sensational cast to bring this delicate enchantment to life. Wilson invests his lovestruck struggling artist with pathos and wit while never once resorting to simply aping his director's mannerisms as so many other Allen leading men have done. Marion Cotillard, as Wilson's out-of-the-past love interest, is enigmatic and heartwarming in about equal measure; the fact that she's one of the world's most beautiful women is just icing on the cake. They're ably supported by Corey Stoll as a hilariously blustery Ernest Hemingway, Kathy Bates as a subtly commanding Gertrude Stein, and Adrien Brody, who, if they gave out Best Supporting Actor Oscars for just one scene, would win it in a walk for his showstopping cameo as Salvador Dali. Darius Khondji's cinematography and Anne Seibel's art direction make Paris look better than it ever has onscreen, and the soundtrack is Allen's customary melange of elegant classical and period jazz, with the soprano sax of the great Sidney Bechet raising and lowering the curtain in inimitable fashion. This being Woody Allen, the ending this film serves up is bittersweet, never forgetting that we, after all, live in the real world. But it was bliss visiting Allen's fantasy Paris. And when it was all over, I just couldn't stop smiling.

THE DVD ZOMBIE: IT SEES "SHALLOW HAL"!

2011-11-08T19:04:00.000-08:00

As I discussed in my 101 Favorite Screenplays review of The Matrix, every few years, a particular film will come along and will temporarily change the nature of its genre by providing a general stylistic or visual template to which the majority of other films in its genre aspire. In 1998, following the surprise success of their hysterically hilarious doofuses-on-the-road comedy Dumb & Dumber (and the well-reviewed but less lucrative bowling comedy Kingpin), writer-directors Peter and Bobby Farrelly scored their biggest success with There's Something About Mary, a film that opened to decent but unexceptional box-office returns in July of that year and, through word of mouth and strong repeat business, pulled off the rare task of rising, after several weeks of increasing admissions, to the number-one spot at the box office by Labor Day. The film's blend of gross, broadly sexual and flat-out politically incorrect humor (including extensive jokes at the expense of mentally challenged kids and a man with polio), combined with a surprisingly sincere, sometimes even sentimental romantic plot, proved a potent mix, and for the next six years or so, the vast majority of American studio comedies went for a similar combination of heart tugging and crotch bashing. Thus were we treated to such memorable-though-we've-tried-to-forget sights as Chris Klein with his arm wedged up a cow's anus (in Say It Isn't So) and the venerable David Odgen Stiers inadvertently dining on another man's amputated testicle (in Tomcats). None of these films managed to score with the public the way that Mary had, and in 2005, Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which married romance and crude sex comedy in a different, more improvisational and effortlessly sincere fashion, came along to change the face of American film comedy yet again.

Smack in the midst of Mary's reign as the paradigmatic big-budget studio comedy, the Farrelly brothers released Shallow Hal (2001), a film that is not as aggressively crude as the Farrellys' previous works, but that likewise attempts to marry its un-P.C. comedy with a sweet, even overtly sentimental story. I was not the huge Mary fan that many people are, perhaps because I came kind of late to the party, after the word of mouth had already built for the film a reputation as a not-to-be-believed taboo-smasher. In some ways, there was almost no way for the film to live up to the hype by the time I saw it, and with the exception of a few especially unexpected jokes, I found it to be a bit of a disappointment. So it didn't come as a surprise to me that I liked Shallow Hal more than Mary. Its ambitions with regard to its comic moments are far more modest, but it's therefore a more relaxed and easily likable picture...that is, if you're a person who can tolerate Jack Black in full-on, wiggly-eyebrowed Tasmanian Devil flower.

Shallow Hal was Black's first mainstream leading role, and it's a part that plays strongly to his natural gifts for ostentatious sleaziness and aggressive insincerity. Black portrays Hal Larson, who in a flashback that opens the film, is told as a boy by his dying father the secret to a happy life: "hot young tail". Encouraged by his old man to never settle for an average-looking woman, and indeed instructed that looks are the only factor in determining a potential mate, Hal has spent his entire adult life pursuing young hotties with all the gentle romanticism of a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon. It doesn't seem to bother him that most of these women are spectacularly out of his doughy league, and it doesn't help that his wingman is the equally average-looking, even-more-shallow Mauricio (Jason Alexander), who dismisses perfectly attractive women for the most trivial of "crimes" (one woman he dumps because the second toe on her feet is longer than her big toe). Hal seems destined for a life of tilting at a bevy of big-breasted windmills, until one day at the office, he gets stuck in an elevator with positive-thinking guru Tony Robbins (playing himself), who, hearing Hal's reductive view of women, confers on him an unusual blessing. From now on, he tells Hal, you'll only see the inner beauty of the women you see. Shortly after this, Hal meets and falls hard for Rosemary (Gwyneth Paltrow), the shy, humanitarian daughter of his Irish businessman boss (Joe Viterelli, affecting a thick Lucky Charms accent). Hal can scarcely believe his luck. After all, what sort of thin, beautiful woman ever has a personality like Rosemary's? Unless she's not thin and beautiful. Unless she's a 300-pound whopper who Hal can only see, thanks to Tony Robbins, as the goddess she is on the inside.

This is admittedly a charming concept for a comedy, and while the Farrellys, along with their co-writer Sean Moynihan, don't push the conceit to its manic comic limits, they nevertheless draw some decent laughs from the material. It's nice that the film is not simply a relentless parade of fat jokes at Rosemary's expense. She has a few chairs collapse under her, and she does nearly drain the water from a public swimming pool with her diving-board cannonball, but the joke here is really the opportunity to see the slim, attractive Paltrow presented as if she's a clumsy oaf (for much of the film, we see Rosemary as Hal sees her, as thin and radiant, a perception reinforced by cinematographer Russell Carpenter frequently shooting Paltrow with sunlight streaming through her blonde hair). Paltrow had never had a chance to do much comedy before this, and certainly not slapstick, but she rises to the occasion with some of her most enjoyable work in any film. Smartly, she soft-pedals Rosemary's clumsiness, choosing instead to emphasize her embarrassment at the fact that, oh dear, she's broken another chair. She also nails the self-deprecating manner of a person who's spent her whole life believing she's unattractive; her halting style of speech, soft, tentative voice, and reluctance to make eye contact all help to reinforce the illusion that what we're seeing here is really a woman whom society has branded as ugly and fat...an illusion later solidified, sort of, by Tony Gardner's makeup effects, which are decent enough for a film of this type but don't hold a candle to Rick Baker's work turning Eddie Murphy into the 400-pound title character of The Nutty Professor.

Jack Black is admittedly an acquired comic taste that I can't unreservedly say I've fully acquired. I've enjoyed him in certain pictures (even King Kong, a film for which he received some undue criticism), but I've never seen him completely disappear into a role or a story. I understand that such chameleonic abilities are not the reason one casts Jack Black in a comedy, but it would be nice if he'd stop winking at his own arch cleverness more often, because when he commits to a character or a moment, he can be very enjoyable. Black is at his best here in the quiet moments, when he's wooing the insecure Rosemary with compliments and attention, and when he stands up to Rosemary's father, defending her after he accuses Hal of only dating her to further his own career, his anger and hurt feel genuine and earned. Black has also made something of a side career of onscreen romances with unlikely counterparts; his pairing with Kate Winslet in The Holiday has many loyal followers, and likewise here, his chemistry with Paltrow is unexpectedly effective. It's not a masterful piece of comic acting, to be sure, but one can see here why Black has been able to sustain a career as a comic leading man.

Jason Alexander has some terrific moments as the chauvinistic Mauricio, a would-be Lothario with lacquered-on hair whose confidence with women is only matched by his obliviousness to how repulsive he is to them (he has a great early moment when he shushes a disgusted woman in a nightclub and assures her, "You had me at 'get lost'"), and who carries a shameful secret that provides the Farrellys with their most characteristically disgusting visual joke. Also surprisingly good, believe it or not, is Tony Robbins, who plays himself with a warmth and natural ease that makes one believe that, despite his unusual stature and voice, he could have been a strong and unconventional actor himself, had he chosen to do so.

All of these qualities make one both root for Shallow Hal and wish the final product were better than it is. Still, for all its virtues, Hal is not the Farrellys' best work. Though I appreciate that the screenplay does not attempt to explain how Robbins works his magic on Hal, the writers also neglect to address some of the particulars of Hal's condition that might be worth contemplating. Why, when Hal hugs Rosemary, does he not feel that he's hugging a 300-pound woman? What happens when they have sex? And how come his inner-beauty vision seems selective? Some women, like Rosemary and a trio of grotesques he dances with at a nightclub, blossom into their true, soulfully beautiful selves in his sight, while others, like his on-again-off-again crush neighbor Jill (Susan Ward), remain unchanged. Are we to believe that Jill is the same inside as out? A bigger problem from a comic standpoint is the Farrellys' insistence on stacking the deck too strongly in Rosemary's favor. It's apparently not enough that Rosemary is funny, charming and realistic about her self and her goals. She also has to volunteer at a pediatric burn unit playing with scarred children, and be a former Peace Corps volunteer who makes third-act plans to go help suffering earthquake victims in the South Pacific. You know, I'm perfectly capable of liking and rooting for someone just because they're nice; they don't have to be set up as the type of person you'd be a jerk not to like.

This portrayal of Rosemary as a too-good-to-be-true uber-altruist reflects a tendency in some of the later Farrelly films, one that seems to attempt to counteract potential accusations of political incorrectness that dogged them in the wake of Dumb & Dumber and Mary. One senses this tendency as well in their frequent casting of mentally and physically disabled actors in key roles. In the Siamese-twin comedy Stuck on You, Ray "Rocket" Valliere, born with Down's Syndrome, plays a buddy of the main characters, and here, Hal and Mauricio find an unlikely romantic rival in Walt (Rene Kirby), a dot-com millionaire who doesn't let his severe spina bifida (he walks on his hands) get in the way of his love of life and beautiful women. I have no problem with individuals with such conditions being cast in any film, but it the Farrellys' intention had been to show these folks as "just like us", it might have been more beneficial to allow them some wrinkles, some idiosyncracies, to be jerks and sexists and flat-out assholes like Mauricio. Instead, Walt, like Rosemary, is near-saintly, beloved by everyone he meets, and even volunteers his own time at the hospital. Granted, the Farrellys did come in for a lot of flack for their jokes about "cripples" and "retards" in There's Something About Mary, but comedy is nearly inherently predicated on stereotype and political incorrectness. And in that respect, what's funnier? A man with spina bifida who, hey gang, is just swell!, or Matt Dillon (in Mary) spiking a football on a special-needs kid's back with a brusque "Hah! Exceptional, my ass"? I think the answer to that question is brutally obvious, and the Farrellys would have done well to remember it when writing Shallow Hal.

Still, despite these issues, Shallow Hal remains one of the Farrelly brothers' better films. It can't hold a candle to Dumb & Dumber, but coming in second to the funniest film I've ever seen in a theater is scarcely something to be ashamed of. I watched this one with my girlfriend, who laughed at all the right spots and even cried a little at one or two points. For my part, I didn't shed any tears, but I can appreciate her reactions, and since I laughed a lot myself, I think we can call this one a successful date-night choice. If you give it a shot, you and your significant other might agree...no matter what you both happen to weigh.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #67

2011-09-29T18:53:00.000-07:00

THE NUTTY PROFESSOR (1996)

The Writers

David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk; based on the motion picture written by Jerry Lewis and Bill Richmond

Why It's Here

I have never been one of those moviegoers who believes that remakes of classic films are an inherently bad thing. If it's okay for the BBC to favor audiences with a new presentation of a well-worn Austen or Dickens text every few years, what's so fundamentally awful about refashioning a great cinematic work with contemporary actors and updated special-effects technology? And let's be frank here. It's not like some of these films that are being remade couldn't stand a little improvement (I'm looking at you, Friday the 13th...). I do believe, however, that most people's knee-jerk objection to the present-day glut of "re-imaginings" is not a fundamental belief in the invalidity of such a concept, but rather that said re-imaginings are seldom re-imagined at all. Many contemporary remakes, rather than taking their source material's fundamental concepts and reworking them to suit the vision of a particular director, screenwriter or even actor, seem content simply to re-create memorable moments, lines or shots from the original film without adding anything new to the equation. Thus, we get stuck with contrivances like the final scene of Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes re-do, which recycles the monkeyfied-national-monument finale of the original Apes picture with no regard to its lack of logic within the framework of the remake's plot. Some people say this notion reached its dubious apotheosis with Gus Van Sant's 1998 shot-for-shot remake of Hitchcock's Psycho, but one has to at least give Van Sant credit for attempting a bold, if perhaps ill-advised, cinematic examination of the true nature of filmmaking genius (and kudos as well to Universal Studios for having the guts to let him spend $25 million of their money on such an experiment). Still, I feel that the best cinematic remakes are those which have truly re-imagined their source material, channeling the original film's narrative through a strong and distinctive filmmaking sensibility. David Cronenberg re-invented the hokey '50s science-fiction chestnut The Fly as both a gruesome essay on the wages of disease and a surprisingly potent love story, while John Carpenter's The Thing used modern special-effects technology to transform the original film's plant-man hybrid into a shape-shifting beast of terrifying versatility.

Even with all these possibilities, however, the notion of remaking a comedy seems dubious at best. After all, a comic story setup can only earn laughs of surprise once, and recycling jokes seems to be as clear a case of the law of diminishing returns as one could find. But it's not impossible to cleverly re-imagine a comedy, as David Sheffield, Barry W. Blaustein, Tom Shadyac and Steve Oedekerk prove with their 1996 re-invention of Jerry Lewis's most revered film, the 1963 Jekyll-and-Hyde riff The Nutty Professor. The 1996 version, which co-writer Shadyac also directed with supreme energy and a lightning-fast pace, takes the original film's source concept, in which a nerdy, lovesick college professor uses a chemical potion to transform himself into a "cool" but obnoxious alter ego, and takes it in directions intriguingly different from the Lewis film (which the comic also directed and co-wrote with Bill Richmond). The result is a film, I think, both narratively stronger and funnier than the original. The Nutty Professor, in fact, ranks high on my list of the laugh-out-loud funniest comedies produced in Hollywood in the last twenty years.

One of the major changes the Nutty Professor writers enacted can be gathered simply from looking at the film's poster. Realizing that it would be awfully been-there-done-that to simply have their lead actor, Eddie Murphy (in a career-best performance that won him a National Society of Film Critics best actor award), play yet another bespectacled nebbish, the writers decided to play up both the difference between the two personalities and the film's comic potential by making their nutty professor, Sherman Klump, a 400-pound behemoth of a man. Sherman is not nearly as garden-variety nerdy in his personality particulars as the original's Julius Kelp; he lacks Kelp's ridiculous bowl haircut, buck teeth and slightly crossed eyes, and his voice, unlike Kelp's nasal whine, has a pleasantly dignified, slightly Southern-inflected tone. But you whip 250 extra pounds on this professor, and the comic catastrophes virtually take care of themselves. The film opens with a chaotic carnival of destruction as hundreds of research hamsters escape from their lab cages and cavort through the campus of the college where Sherman teaches. We later discover, of course, that Sherman caused the rodent exodus when his prodigious rear end accidentally tripped the lever holding their cages closed. And so it goes throughout the film's first act, as we are invited to laugh as Sherman struggles to wedge himself into a chair in the dean's office, knocks over a jar of candy on his desk with his belly (he claims that he did this on purpose, as it "makes the table more festive, and the children, of course, they enjoy it"), and sings a Teddy Pendergrass bedroom anthem to a TV dinner revolving in his microwave.

In these early scenes, the film admittedly seems to be scoring some easy chuckles off of a fat man's troubles with a normal-sized world, but Sherman soon wins our sympathies through several smartly conceived moments and characters. First of all, the writers show how disrespectfully people treat Sherman just because of his weight; his students can't help but laugh when his trailing gut wipes away a long equation he's writing on the blackboard, and his own boss, the odious Dean Richmond (Larry Miller), calls him a "fat tub of goo" to his face. We also see the mixed dietary messages Sherman has gotten on the home front during a side-splitting scene in which Sherman joins his equally plus-sized parents, grandmother, brother Ernie and nephew Ernie Jr. for dinner. The entire family, with the exception of little Ernie Jr. (played by Jamal Mixon in a wordless but very funny performance), is played by Murphy in various Oscar-winning makeup disguises, and he joins forces with the writers to create a hilarious gallery of wholly distinctive comic characters. Papa Klump is a fat-and-proud sort who assures Sherman that "you could sew up your stomach and your asshole, and you're always gonna be fat", while Ernie Sr. tells Sherman he just needs to work out like him, that his own considerable bulk is "all muscle". Grandma, meanwhile, is slightly dotty but still with-it enough to recount her family with tales of talk show host Mike Douglas making her "moist" and about giving her dates "hot lovely relations" as a youngster. And this is all before the farting starts (and it's a testament to this film's comic command that the farts, which rarely work for me as a comic device, set me laughing every time I see this film). The one island of what passes for sanity in Sherman's family is Mama Klump, who dotes on her sons as a good mother should, gives as good as she gets against the vulgar Papa Klump and his constant "breaking gas", and assures Sherman that if he believes in himself, he can do anything. Sherman's ass may take after his dad's, but he gets all his sweet-souled spirit from Mama, and their post-dinner conversation is surprisingly touching.

So, too, is the following scene, where Sherman goes to the apartment of Carla Purdy (Jada Pinkett), a pretty young chemistry instructor with whom he has become smitten. He has been afraid to ask her out for fear of being laughed at, and when she confronts him about his wishes to request a date from her, his downcast eyes and almost ashamed mumblings have us pulling hard for him. This scene is not played for laughs. We share in his exhilaration when Carla accepts his proposition...and the scene is set for one of the most effective scenes in the film, one in which Sherman is treated with a cruelty to which the original film's Professor Kelp, for all the indignities he suffers, is never subjected. Sherman takes Carla to a popular nightclub called the Scream, where she is starting to be won over by Sherman's expertise and sweet simplicity, when onto the stage bounds Reggie Warrington (a memorably grating Dave Chappelle), a pitch-perfect send-up of hack stand-up comedians who alternates stupefyingly unimaginative scripted material ("Women be shoppin', baby!") with easy insults about his audience's appearance. Naturally, he has a field day with Sherman's girth, riddling him with yo-mama jokes, and we get an uneasy chuckle out of a few of those...but then Reggie spots Carla, and the laughs quickly dry up as Reggie lays into her for being on a date with Sherman ("Who is suckin' whose titties over here?"). The writers have set up our sympathies enough for Sherman that the scene, without spilling over into sappiness, has a surprising emotional charge (when we first saw this film in its original theatrical release, this moment actually moved my then-girlfriend to tears).

Therefore, we completely understand Sherman's motives when he downs a heretofore-experimental serum that shrinks his waistline, pumps up his testosterone levels, and transforms him into Buddy Love (the only role Murphy plays looking more or less like himself), who is every nightmarish alpha-male cliche brought to preening, egotistical life. At first, we share in Buddy's ecstasy as he purchases an all-spandex wardrobe and downs piles of hamburgers, all the while gushing about how great it is to "feel thin". Even when he meets Carla for the first time, he tempers his somewhat too-aggressive come-ons and sly jabs at his alter ego (telling her about Sherman's reaction to the Scream fiasco, he says it "tore his chunky ass up"), there's something appealing about him. The writers may not have intended this, but Buddy Love is a sly commentary on the ways in which society is ever predisposed to judge people on their appearance; we want so much to like Buddy because...well, look at how handsome he is, and what good shape he's in! A guy that looks that great has to be great! Right?

Wrong. It's upon the return visit to the Scream, at which Buddy exacts revenge on Reggie Warrington with a long string of insults, mostly about the comic's horselike teeth and ridiculous "shit-locks" hairdo, that Buddy's macho posturing crosses the line from amusing into obnoxious. It's there in his embarrassingly forced begging for Carla's clemency when he shows up late for their date, in his caustic cautionary note to a valet ("Every scratch in my car is a scratch in your ass"), and in his forced laughter at Reggie's really-not-that-funny act. When the confrontation finally comes to blows, it seems an inevitable outgrowth of Buddy's testosterone-drenched personality. Here the film reaches its major narrative hiccup (one which the writers admittedly inherited from Lewis and Richmond's original script). Why doesn't Carla simply run in the other direction when faced with the full gale-force awfulness of Buddy Love? The film pays some lip service to the notion that Carla can sense the true, decent Sherman buried inside the hideous Buddy, but it mostly serves to diminish our opinion of Carla, who seems willing to overlook an awful lot for the sake of being with a handsome, athletic guy. Of course, one could say that about a lot of men and women in the actual world, too, so in the process of harming the audience's opinion of their female lead, The Nutty Professor's writers nevertheless manage to strengthen their film's satirical underpinnings.

Of course, to Carla's credit, the bloom soon wears off the Buddy Love rose for her, too, as the writers unveil their film's other major deviation from the plot of the original Professor film. In Lewis's version, neither Kelp nor Buddy professed much awareness of the other's activities, and even when they did, they never attempted to actively interfere with the plans of the other. Not so with Sherman Klump, who finds in Buddy Love something the original film was sorely missing: an honest-to-God antagonist. Buddy, whose testosterone levels keep dangerously increasing the longer he stays in control of Sherman's body, soon grows weary of sharing a being with a chubby, sweet-souled sad sack, and he begins scheming (with the scientific expertise his other personality has bequeathed to him) of a way to eliminate Sherman for good. He attempts to destroy him professionally by taking complete credit for Sherman's "miracle" formula at a meeting with Dean Richmond and Harlan Hartley (James Coburn), a wealthy alumnus who plans to donate heftily to the college's science program; the meeting goes so well that the dean fires Sherman on the spot and gives his job to...Buddy Love. Buddy also sabotages Sherman's romantic ambitions by forsaking Carla for three bimbos he picks up at a hotel and then throwing a raucous party (at Sherman's apartment, natch) so that, when Carla comes by the next morning to apologize to Sherman about Buddy's undercutting him with Hartley, she finds the three bimbos in his bed and assumes that Sherman and Buddy are "sharing girls now". Finally, Buddy recalculates the formula into a super-formula that will allow him, if he drinks enough, to take over Sherman's body for good. He plans to dose himself with the formula at the school's alumni dinner, proving his mettle to the deep-pocketed Hartley and killing off his nutty professor-ness forever. I have commented in other reviews on this site about the way in which the lack of a strong antagonist frequently hurts the narrative drive of comedies. The Nutty Professor has no such problems. It's a rarity, a big-budget Hollywood comedy with genuine stakes for the characters, and with, in Buddy Love, a comic antagonist to rank with the greatest in cinema history. It all culminates in a brawling, effects-laden showdown at the alumni dinner, with Sherman's body morphing back and forth between his own self and Buddy's as they battle it out for control. Usually, heavy special-effects sequences kill the laughs in a comedy, but by the time The Nutty Professor reaches this boisterous climax, we've invested so much in Sherman Klump's welfare that the laughs stay big and the tension remains high.

The Nutty Professor admittedly wraps up its proceedings with the expected speech about believing in yourself and staying true to what you are, but somehow the message doesn't seem as hackneyed here as it does in other comedies...perhaps because the writers, through Buddy Love, have so memorably laid bare the horrors of the alternative. Indeed, in less skilled hands, the remake of The Nutty Professor could have ended up just like Buddy Love: a slicker and better-looking version of the original model, but crasser, louder and not nearly as lovable. Crass and loud it is, for sure, but thanks to the skilled screenwriting work of Sheffield, Blaustein, Shadyac and Oedekerk (not to mention Eddie Murphy's memorable panoply of comic characters), the film is funnier, faster and more emotionally engaging than its predecessor. It's a Professor that could teach a lot to any filmmaker attempting to tackle a remake of a well-loved original. Its lesson: Do it different and do it better, or don't do it at all.

THE ZOMBIE SPEAKS AGAIN! OR, WHAT THE UNDEAD DO ON THEIR SUMMER VACATION

2011-09-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies...

It has been a busy summer for the Movie Zombie. In addition to finding a new grave to call his own (complete with a sexy Zombette to keep his desiccated flesh warm and pliable), the Zombie has both completed a new screenplay and is in the process of finalizing a deal for co-authorship of a book on screenwriting to be hitting bookstores (we hope) sometime next year. More on this later...but for now, you're probably wondering what the Zombie saw and liked (or disliked) over the summer. Well, look no further! Here for your listening enjoyment is a special two-part episode of the Geek Pilgrims podcast in which the Zombie joins show hosts David Eppley and Mike Roe, along with special guest Ken Moreno, to discuss the cinematic summer that was. Enjoy, and rest assured, more written reviews are headed down the pike real soon...

http://geekpilgrims.com/post/10504037557/geek-pilgrims-episode-5-1-summer-movie-wrapup-pt

http://geekpilgrims.com/post/10504158965/geek-pilgrims-episode-5-2-summer-movie-wrapup-pt

THE DVD ZOMBIE: IT SEES "WHO'S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR"

2011-05-31T19:57:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, the universe serves up someone who, in whatever field has been chosen for them, is a natural. Babe Ruth. Louis Armstrong. Mozart. After seeing his debut feature, Who's That Knocking At My Door, one is tempted to add Martin Scorsese to this illustrious list. He is now long firmly established in the canon of the great American filmmakers, but many of Scorsese's strengths, his skill for marrying music with striking, often unexpected imagery, his gift for naturalistic dialogue, his strong eye for authentic moments of urban ethnography, are in evidence in this maiden effort. However, Scorsese's weaknesses are also on rather ample display here as well, and their presence makes for a fascinating, the-more-things-change look at the first flowering of an American cinematic giant.

Who's That Knocking began life as a graduate film production during Scorsese's tenure at NYU film school in the mid-'60s (NYU film professor Haig Manoogian, who was the instructor for the first film course Scorsese ever took, is credited as a co-producer on this film; the filmmaker's 1980 masterpiece Raging Bull was later dedicated to Manoogian), and it was shot over the course of several years and went through numerous iterations as short films and truncated features under varying titles before finally emerging as this 90-minute feature in 1967. Not surprisingly, considering this extended gestation, not to mention the film's origins as a student project and its low budget (ultimately an estimated $75,000), the picture is rough around the edges in a classic first-indie-film tradition. Some of the sound work is quite harsh; an early barroom scene, in particular, could have greatly benefited from some overdubbing, as shuffling feet and the room's ambient tone bury many of the lines. Also, it's fairly easy to tell scenes shot early from those lensed later in the production by gauging the changing length of star Harvey Keitel's hair. Nevertheless, what is most remarkable about Who's That Knocking At My Door is how thoroughly engaged Scorsese is, even at this nascent point in his career, with the stylistic tropes and thematic concerns he will adopt as his own. Unlike many filmmakers' first works, and much more so than his subsequent feature, 1972's Roger Corman-produced exploitation Bonnie and Clyde rip-off Boxcar Bertha, Who's That Knocking has no trouble fitting comfortably on the shelf with Scorsese's extended body of work, representing the filmmaker's first crack at issues that would preoccupy him for a celebrated forty-year-and-counting career.

Who's That Knocking is the story, such as it is, of J.R. (Keitel), a rough-and-tumble Little Italy street tough who whiles away his days drinking, fighting, and causing trouble with his buddies, a road-company version of the petty hoodlums who would populate Scorsese's later gangland classics. It seems like a life destined to go around in relentlessly unfulfilling circles, until J.R. meets a Girl (Zina Bethune) on the Staten Island Ferry and slowly eases into a relationship. He's falling in love, but he's troubled by his own reluctance to sleep with her...and even more so by her subsequent admission that she is not a virgin (she tells him that her past partner forced himself on her, but he struggles to believe that it's true). It's the classic madonna-whore complex; if J.R. accepts The Girl as she is, he marks himself as willing to stoop to being with just a "broad", one of those runaround girls from the neighborhood, and maybe no better than the prostitutes that J.R. himself frequents, in classic hypocritical male fashion. Will J.R. do the right thing, or will he succumb to the pressures of his milieu and the guilt-riddled Catholic culture in which he was brought up?

Basically, if Mean Streets and Raging Bull had a baby, and that baby was somehow older than both of those films, it would be Who's That Knocking At My Door. It's an amalgam of the former film's slice-of-life depiction of inarticulate Noo Yawk petty thugs and the later epic's chronicle of a man undone by jealous sexual fantasies about the woman he loves. Granted, Scorsese has grown by leaps and bounds since this initial foray into feature filmmaking, and Who's That Knocking is marked by this fact throughout its running time. His examination here of the life and crimes of petty hoods has nowhere near the verisimilitude of Mean Streets (or, for that matter, of GoodFellas or Casino). The Scorsesean bursts of sudden violence are fairly choppily choreographed, a few of the locations feel like obvious sets, and Scorsese's dialogue, from his own screenplay, has the later films' inarticulate, frequently circular cadence without their exhilarating profanity and gutter wit. Likewise, the street guys that surround J.R. here are manques compared to the explosive, larger-than-life personalities that would fill Scorsese's later work. The only characteristic the much put-upon Sally Gaga (Michael Scala) shares with his cinematic descendants is an amusing nickname (the emphasis is hard on the second syllable; he's "GaGA", not "GAga"), and the loudmouth troublemaker Joey (Lennard Kuras) has all the bluster and noise of Joe Pesci's tinpot martinets with none of the fire and nuance. Likewise, the examination of a relationship-destroying inability to accept a lover's past is handled here with nowhere near the subtlety and grace with which the same subject is addressed in Raging Bull. In that film, we knew Jake LaMotta suspected his wife of infidelity when he imagined her drifting towards other men in slow motion; here, J.R. expresses his lack of faith in The Girl's virtue by flat-out calling her a whore. (Worthy of note is the sketchy nature of the film's female characters; The Girl doesn't even have a name, and the only other prominent women are the prostitutes J.R. frequents, who have no lines, Gaga's hysterical and also nameless date (Wendy Russell) at a party-cum-brawl, and the nameless Italian mother, played by the much-beloved Catherine Scorsese, who makes a meat pie for some random children in the opening scene.) This lead-pipe-to-the-head lack of thematic subtlety reminds one both of Scorsese's European influences (Ingmar Bergman, for all the symbolism of his imagery, was also one for the thematically on-the-nose dialogue) and his simple naivete as a first-time filmmaker.

Nevertheless, given that this is a first-time feature, Scorsese's command of his medium here is remarkable, as is his already crystal-clear artistic vision. Who's That Knocking At My Door is full of performances, images and scenes that are undoubtedly Scorsesean in their style and thematic intent. J.R., significantly, does not woo The Girl with shows of strength or flagrant displays of wealth, but the way a young Scorsese himself might have, by engaging her in a conversation about westerns sparked by a photo of John Wayne in a magazine she's reading. (In a foreshadowing of one of Scorsese's own future films, J.R. name-checks Wayne's Searchers co-star Jeffrey Hunter and mentions that he played Christ in Nicholas Ray's King of Kings.) Movies also plant the seeds of the end of J.R.'s romance, as a discussion of Angie Dickinson's status as a "broad" versus a "lady" following a screening of Rio Bravo takes on added weight when J.R., arguing with The Girl about her sexual past, asks her if she's "that kind of broad". The film also features an unusual but thematically significant scene in which J.R., Joey and another pal drive to a small town outside the city and go hiking in the hills, only to spend their time at the summit bitching about what a foolish enterprise this is. You can take the boys out of the city, Scorsese suggests, but you can't take the city out of them, a fact that becomes painfully true when J.R. can only interpret The Girl's past through his ignorant "urban" perspective. The film also includes moments of telling ethnographic filmmaking, as in the opening meat-pie-making scene, and bits of typically blatant Scorsese symbolism, as when J.R., after forsaking The Girl, kisses the feet of a tiny crucifix only to come away with bloodied lips.

Most Scorsesean of all is the film's usage of music montage. Despite the wealth of quotable dialogue throughout his filmography, Scorsese himself often seems most comfortable as a filmmaker working with pure sound and image, and in Who's That Knocking, he indulges that tendency so frequently that at times the film almost plays like an urban tone poem set to music. Many key sequences are conducted with no dialogue at all, and the picture is remarkable as an early independent film for the rich variety of its pop soundtrack. The film's opening credits are set to a montage of a street fight cut to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels' exhilarating "C.C. Rider", perhaps the first example of Scorsese setting a scene of urban violence to an incongruously upbeat music track. J.R. courts The Girl amidst the New York rooftops to the Bell Notes's "I've Had It". A party scene erupts in playful though still threatening slow-motion violence to the strains of Ray Baretto's "El Watusi". The Doors' hallucinatory "The End", used to such striking effect in Apocalypse Now, here makes an earlier appearance as accompaniment to J.R.'s dalliances with prostitutes. And, most memorably, as J.R. confesses his sins and prays for forgiveness after losing The Girl to his own ignorance, a montage of agonized Christ statues and downcast Mother Marys is set, almost blasphemously, to the Genies' soaring doo-wop rendition of the title song. Scorsese has always been among the most imaginative utilizers of source music in contemporary cinema, and Who's That Knocking shows that he possessed that gift for scoring his films right from the jump.

The film is also significant in forging several relationships that were to serve Scorsese well throughout his career. Keitel, who gives a sometimes uneven but nevertheless persuasive performance here, went on to a prominent, Oscar-nominated career that included appearances in four more Scorsese films, most notably Mean Streets (playing a character very similar to J.R.) and Taxi Driver (as the pimp imprisoning Jodie Foster's underage prostitute). Scorsese's assistant director, Mardik Martin, went on to receive co-writing credit on the director's New York, New York and Raging Bull. Co-cinematographer Michael Wadleigh would subsequently direct the groundbreaking documentary Woodstock, on which Scorsese would serve as an editor. Also an editor on that film was the woman who cut Who's That Knocking, and with whom Scorsese has had arguably his richest collaborative relationship: Thelma Schoonmaker, who has edited every feature Scorsese has made since Raging Bull, and who has taken home three Academy Awards for her trouble (for Bull, The Aviator and The Departed).

Oftentimes, a filmmaker's first work is more notable simply for being their first than for any artistic merits it may possess in its own right. I don't know a whole lot of people who are lining up these days to watch Steven Spielberg's 1968 debut feature Amblin', and Robert Altman kicked off his celebrated career with the trashy 1957 exploitation thriller The Delinquents. Of course, a few filmmakers do hit a home run their first time out of the gate. I am one of the rare people who thinks Quentin Tarantino has never topped Reservoir Dogs, and Kevin Smith has yet to duplicate what he achieved in 1994's Clerks with nothing but twenty-seven grand and a brilliant script. Who's That Knocking At My Door, however, falls on neither side of this equation. It is certainly not a film to rank with Scorsese's best, but neither is it a negligible footnote to an otherwise significant career. It is a rough and patchy but nevertheless engaging work, and an endearing snapshot of the earliest cinematic attempt to come to terms with the themes and issues that would spark one of the most celebrated careers in contemporary film. Few would argue that Scorsese hits this one entirely out of the park. But it definitely got him well into the game.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #68

2011-05-31T17:32:00.001-07:00

OFFICE SPACE (1999)

The Writer

Mike Judge; based on his "Milton" animated shorts

Why It's Here

It is hard to remember, considering the fervent following it has developed over the years, but Office Space was not a financial success upon its original release. Hell, it's almost hard to recall that it even received a release, as most of its fans, present company included, first encountered the film on DVD well after its non-event of a theatrical run, during which the film just barely recouped a budget of only $10 million. Several factors may have accounted for the film's initially indifferent public reception. Fox's ad campaign for the picture was admittedly uninspired, with a hackneyed poster featuring an anonymous figure covered in Post-It Notes, commercials that were not exactly chock-full of memorable, sock-'em-home comedy highlights, and a tagline ("Work sucks") that any mongoloid on a street corner probably could have come up with. The film was also somewhat lacking in star power, the only marquee presence provided by Jennifer Aniston, who audiences at that point could have been forgiven for writing off as just "Rachel from Friends", which was then still in the midst of its ten-season run. But films with even less going for them than Office Space have been much bigger hits...and other, just-as-worthwhile films that received an equally lukewarm theatrical reception have not gone on to receive the passionate fan base that has accumulated around this dry, un-flashy, sometimes flat-out bleak workplace satire. What is it about Office Space that has kept audiences seeking it out on DVD and cable TV airings when many more comedies of its era have fallen through the cracks of cinematic limbo?

Two words: Mike Judge. Best known as the mind and voice behind MTV's megahit mid-'90s animated series Beavis and Butt-Head and the long-running working-class Fox sitcom King of the Hill, Judge made his live-action writing / directing debut with Office Space (he also, under the pseudonym "William King", portrays Aniston's corporate-stooge restaurant-manager boss). The film's screenplay, inspired by a series of hand-drawn shorts that appeared on MTV's animation omnibus Liquid Television (the show also gave birth to both Beavis and Butt-Head and Aeon Flux, the anime-style future-female ass-kicker that inspired a megaflop Charlize Theron film), reminds audiences of a fact that was often neglected by narrow-minded viewers who blasted Beavis and Butt-Head as glorifications of adolescent rage and stupidity. Judge is a satirist, and quite honestly, a frequently brutal one. Beavis and Butt-Head, far from being celebrated by Judge for their mindless metalhead ways, were shown as exactly what they were: ignorant, violent children destined to grow up into ignorant, violent adults (I recall a flash-forward to them as fat, toothless slobs, still sitting on the same couch, recalling their greatest triumph in life...spying on some naked people from a clump of bushes at a nudist colony), and even King of the Hill, which was comparatively mild in its approach, nevertheless needled Hank Hill and his buddies at every turn for their love-America-first, ask-questions-never philosophy. Office Space is never as savage in its satire as B & B or as Judge's subsequent feature, the scathing, barely released, now fellow cult favorite Idiocracy, which portrays the world of the future, the world we're gleefully marching towards, as one of almost fascistic corporatism, id-driven excess, and society-strangling stupidity. No, all Office Space does is tell us that the jobs that we put so much of our sweat, our spirits, our lives into? Yeah. They're killing us by inches, and short of supernatural or divine intervention, we're powerless to save ourselves. Put like that, it's little wonder that people didn't queue up after a hard week at the office to watch a movie about just how hard that week could be...even if it was a comedy.

Office Space's "hero", for lack of a better word, is Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston, in a beautifully droll, deadpan performance), a dead-eyed drone for the monstrous Initech Corporation, one of those brutalist cubicle farms where rows of people work very hard for indifferent pay doing jobs that make no logical sense. It's telling that, while Peter has a definite role at his office (he is, in a slightly dated but still reasonable plot detail, assisting with updating bank software for the Y2K changeover), it's nevertheless kept entirely vague exactly what it is that Initech does. Do they manufacture anything? Sell anything? Who the hell knows? What companies like this do, Judge seems to suggest, is simply provide people with income, nothing less, and quite certainly nothing more. Peter's life is a meaningless farrago of soul-deadening dreariness punctuated by brief moments of intense impotent rage, mostly directed at his bosses, who insist on telling him over and over about the most meaningless infractions. In one of the film's first scenes, Peter is approached by no less than three supervisors who scold him about his failure to put a particular cover sheet on a particular report; these three people, we later learn, are among the eight bosses that currently make Peter's life a miserable experience. His personal life is no more glorious, consisting mostly of sneaking out of the office to steal coffee breaks and commiserate with software techies Samir (Ajay Naidu) and Michael Bolton (the marvelously defeated David Herman), whose name is in and of itself a form of cosmic punishment; he spends a frustratingly large portion of his work day explaining to people that it is merely a coincidence that he shares a name with "that no-talent ass clown". Peter also pines for Joanna (Aniston), a waitress at a T.G.I. Friday's-ish chain restaurant, even though he's dating the imperious Anne (Alexandra Wentworth), who he and, disconcertingly, everyone else he knows suspect is cheating on him. Finally, after being asked to come in on the weekend by Bill Lumbergh (the transcendently unctuous Gary Cole), a weaselly, faux-buddyish VP with a coffee mug permanently welded to his hand, Peter decides to go see an "occupational hypnotherapist". He's hoping the guy can "maybe just kind of zonk me out so I don't realize that I'm at work", but the doctor (Micheal McShane) instead promises to implant a subconscious hypnotic sense of complete apathy about Peter's job or its consequences upon his life. It works like a charm...but the big-boned doc drops dead of a heart attack before he can snap Peter out of it. Peter Gibbons is a new man. A man who couldn't give less of a shit about his job if you put a loaded gun to his head.

The new Peter's workplace rebellion is a harmless but still crowd-pleasing rendition of what we'd do if we stopped caring about work. He blows off his weekend overtime, and it's no more shirt and tie for him. Jeans and sneakers all the way. He goes fishing during office hours, guts the fish at his desk (in a nice throwaway gag, he dumps the discarded guts on a stack of those oh-so-important report cover sheets), uses an electric drill to remove a metal doorknob that persistently shocks him, and knocks down the wall of his cubicle to allow him a window view... that looks out, admittedly, to a not-that-impressive access road. But it's better than particleboard. And not surprisingly, in a reflection of good old-fashioned American failing upwards, Peter's benign neglect of responsibility is rewarded with a promotion from the Bobs (John C. McGinley and Paul Willson), two "consultants" hired to weed out unnecessary "human resources". Unfortunately, two of those useless cogs are Michael and Samir, and when Peter finds out that his friends, the two best software people at Initech, are being cast aside, his rebellion shifts from prankish to blatantly criminal, as they install a software virus allowing them to steal fractions of leftover, usually rounded-off pennies from bank transactions (Michael cribs this idea from Superman III, which he calls an "underrated movie, actually"). It's a petty, victimless crime that will net them a never-missed few hundred thousand over the course of a few years...or over a weekend, when Peter discovers that the virus has stolen over three hundred grand in two days. Suddenly, Peter again cares very much about his job...or at least about the fact that it just might send him to a "federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison".

Like most of the comedies previously featured on this countdown, Office Space is not on this list because of its plot. The script's structure is admittedly pretty unpolished. Peter's hypnosis is merely a convenient excuse for his rebellious behavior; the doctor is barely mentioned again once he drops dead, and there is no effort made to de-hypnotize Peter and turn him back into a "functioning" soulless drudge. Likewise, the penny-stealing scam, for something that takes up such a strong percentage of the film's back half, is not really adequately built up to early on; Michael has a throwaway line about being able to program a virus that could rob Initech blind, but until Peter gets the idea out of the blue, it never seems like the film is building to some kind of scam like this. The plot thus proceeds in fits and starts, a symptom perhaps of Judge's previous extensive experience with short-form episodic material. He also struggles a bit with handling exposition, finally throwing up his hands and bringing in Drew (Greg Pitts), a fellow office hack who shows up out of nowhere more than halfway through the film and who exists solely to provide exposition about a car accident that befalls sad-sack customer service rep Tom Smykowski (Richard Riehle) and about Joanna's past romantic exploits, which throws the one monkey wrench into her otherwise smooth-as-silk relationship with Peter. Drew is admittedly funny, mostly thanks to Pitts's portrayal of him as the office's designated frat douche, but even the other characters seem to recognize his superfluous nature; when he suddenly appears in his first scene, Peter's reaction is an almost surprised "Oh, hi, Drew..."

But the devil here is in the details, and Office Space is a worthy rival to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's masterful Britcom The Office in its dead-on dissection of the manner in which the simple act of having a job in America seems designed to grind you down into a fine dust. Judge realizes that one of the keys to effective satire is to overplay the absurdity just enough for us to recognize what it says about the naked ridiculousness of our own everyday lives. It's all there in Judge's script. The infuriating mundanity of "inspirational" corporate slogans and signage (one of Peter's first acts of rebellion is to tear down an office-spanning banner that reads "Is This Good for the Company?"). The way bosses abuse their employees by couching unfair work demands in the form of a request for a personal favor (Lumbergh is fond of telling his employees that if they could just do this or that annoying, frustrating, pointless action, "that would be greeeeaaaaat"). The way the little nothingnesses of everyday office life, accumulated over time, induce near-psychotic levels of irritation (witness Peter's reaction to his co-worker's incessant chirping of "Corporate accounts payable, Nina speaking...just a moment..."). And, of course, the way in which the mechanics of life in the corporate world turn us into petty, grasping, territorial beasts, a fact embodied brilliantly by Milton Waddams (Stephen Root), a pockmarked, poorly dressed schlub whose entire life has been boiled down to a numb-from-the-neck-up quest to defend his right to listen to the radio while he's collating (naturally and hilariously, he's listening to a droning news broadcast about a sinking battleship...much like Initech itself), his right to a piece of office-party birthday cake, and of course, his beloved red Swingline stapler. Peter, Michael and Samir are not immune to this sort of pettiness, either. On the software guys' last day, they drive out to a field and take their revenge on their greatest office nemesis: a malfunctioning fax machine that they brutalize with a baseball bat and (in the case of a hysterical Michael) their bare fists, a slo-motion sequence hilariously scored to the Geto Boys's viciously profane gangsta-rap "Still".

It's not just the flora, but the fauna of modern American office life that Judge gets brilliantly right in Office Space. Each of the film's characters represents a different, familiar attitude about the world of work. Peter is the classic bright young man made bad, the kind of guy who you could imagine had all the hope in the world when he got out of college, and who has, through years of work, seen his idealism die the death of a thousand Xerox-machine paper cuts. He morosely tells the hypnotist that every day since he has started working at Initech has been worse than the day before. "That means," he concludes, "that every time you see me, it's on the worst day of my life." One can see how that sort of feeling would make Peter blow his job up into the embodiment of evil, "everything that is soulless and wrong", and how even the simple act of playing Tetris in front of Lumbergh comes to seem like a major victory to him. Samir, on the other hand, is the just-happy-to-be-employed guy; when Peter laments about what it would mean if they were still at Initech when they were fifty years old, Samir responds, "It would be nice to have that kind of job security," and when presented with the hypothetical "what would you do with a million dollars" question, all he can offer up are sensible investment opportunities. (Judge nicely avoids making Samir a raft of Indian software guy cliches, although his co-workers do have a tremendous lot of trouble with his last name.) Smykowski is your garden-variety office Chicken Little, who sees every little change sent down from the top of the corporate ladder as a direct attack on his employment status. He is so beholden to his corporate paymasters that he attempts suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning (he is only saved by the sudden arrival of his wife...only to back out of his garage and be smashed into immediately by an oncoming drunk driver). On the other side of the coin is Lumbergh, who has been assimilated by the corporate hive-mind and who seems to have no identity outside of a job that is basically meaningless (after all, like most higher-ups, we never see Lumbergh doing anything but walking around with his mug). For all the humanity he projects, it might as well be poisoned Kool-Aid he's incessantly sipping from that mug. And, of course, there's the perkolators, the office "rays of sunshine" who seem to exist merely to give their co-workers someone to agree to hate. Initech has the bubbly secretary who tells a complaining Peter that it "sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays", and Joanna is plagued by Brian (Todd Duffey), an insanely upbeat fellow restaurant server whose excessive "flair" (funny buttons on his uniform suspenders) are an endless thorn in her side. The only person in Office Space who seems to have a healthy relationship with his job is, significantly, the only person who seems to do real work for a living. Peter's neighbor, itinerant construction worker Lawrence (Diedrich Bader), is admittedly a stereotype, a blue-collar schlub with a mustache and mullet who lives for beer and fishing, and who would use his hypothetical million dollars to pay two women to have sex with him at the same time. Nevertheless, he doesn't sweat his job when he's not on the job, he gets to leave for the day with something to actually show for his labor, and if someone where he works said you were having a case of the Mondays, he'd be on the receiving end of an ass-kicking. Lawrence seems to have a lot figured out, but it can't be an accident that he seems so much like a grown-up Butt-Head. These, Judge seems to be suggesting, are our only options: constant, pointless, unwinnable war against the corporate machine; total immersion in the Borg-like life of an office drone; or blissful, bad-haircut ignorance. Put like that, it's no wonder that Office Space failed to find an audience initially. It's a comedy, yes, but an often grim and harshly realistic one.

But sometimes we laugh that we may not cry, and one of the things that makes Office Space a comedy that people (including myself) return to again and again, like a life-raft against the madness is that it's just nice to know that we're not alone, that someone gets it, that someone sees the way we live now and realizes that it's wrong, disspiriting, inhuman. As I've previously mentioned, I do not write this blog for a living, nor do I make any kind of living in the literary or entertainment fields. I have worked for a major corporation for over a decade now, I have done my time in a cubicle, and I have personally gone through every peak and trough of the emotional roller coaster that Peter Gibbons rides in the course of this film. When he fantasizes about coming into work one day and just laying waste with a machine gun, I can relate 100 percent (as recently as last week, I joked that my last day at my job, should it ever come and oh please let it, will probably result in someone having to shout at me, "Stop hitting him, he's already dead!"). I too have taken those "mental health days", where you wake up, look at the clock and just realize that, healthy or no, work just can not happen today. I've spent plenty of time on the job spacing out, plenty of days where I only put in "about fifteen minutes of real, actual work". So I, like many people, can entirely relate to where Peter's coming from, and I appreciate Office Space as an accurate and incisive depiction of modern American corporate misery. But I also know that Office Space is over in ninety minutes, and I'm still staring down the barrel of this job for who knows how long. And I don't know about you, but if I saw a guy like Peter, blowing off work, not giving a damn, and being kicked upstairs into management for his trouble? He might very well be the guy I was turning my machine gun on. We often look at suffering movie characters and say, "There, but for the grace of God, goes I." Office Space just might have failed in its original release, and might have found its small but fervent cult, because this film's protagonist could look at its viewers and say the exact same thing.

THE ZOMBIE RISES EARLY: IT SEES "IN A BETTER WORLD"!

2011-03-14T07:23:00.001-07:00

In a Better World is the kind of film that awards gold is made of. Tackling such heady subjects as love, revenge and the limits of one's obligation to be a "good person", director Susanne Bier has produced an intense, not-overly-melodramatic picture that won the best foreign language film award at last month's Oscars.

Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is a Swedish-born physician who serves as head surgeon at an African refugee camp. Though his hands heal strangers, he is not nearly as attentive to the wounds in his own life. He is virtually divorced from wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm) and is a loving though largely absent father to pre-teen Elias (Markus Rygaard), whose braces and gentle nature make him the target of school bullies. Elias forms a bond with Christian (William Johnk Nielsen), who has recently lost his mother to cancer. This has crushed the boy into a tightly wound knot of anger and resentment toward his father Claus (Ulrich Thomsen). The boys’ connection deepens after Elias covers for Christian, who has threatened a schoolmate with a knife, and their desire to gain control over the forces controlling their world soon has potentially tragic consequences.

Bier, working from a story co-conceived with screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen, layers the film with intriguing meditations on the justifications that drive people to vengeance. Anton is slapped by the father of a boy who fights with the doctor’s younger son, and though he means his turn-the-other-cheek ways to signify strength to the children, it does nothing but make him look like another person unwilling to fight back against the pain life brings his way. Anton later has his non-vengeful side tested when he is forced to provide care for the African warlord responsible for the brutal injuries he regularly treats. Meanwhile, Christian is not only angry at his father for not saving his mother, but also for the attraction he feels between Claus and Marianne. Bier and Jensen are smart enough to always make the plot emerge naturally from the characters' feelings, and the result is a genuinely unpredictable picture that generates suspense right to the end.

Bier’s cast is up to the challenges of this material. Persbrandt conveys both Anton’s decency and confusion in the face of cruelty, and Dyrholm burns with an energy both maternal and fiercely sensual. Films foregrounding children are always risky, but Bier is fortunate to have two genuine talents anchoring these pivotal roles. Rygaard’s open face and quizzical eyes draw us effortlessly into Elias’s predicament, and Nielsen’s dead-eyed portrayal of Christian makes us want to simultaneously call the cops on this boy and somehow ease his burdens.

Last month’s Oscar win will likely give In a Better World a much larger audience than it would otherwise have received. But even if the curious filmmaker is only drawn to this film by its award pedigree, at least this means they will see it, and thus not deprive themselves of a suspenseful and genuinely emotionally engaging experience.

P.S. If you're wondering why this review is a lot, LOT shorter than what I usually write, it was originally penned for another website whose name shall remain nameless, and who need to get their act together in terms of their article submission system. Back to our usual, book-chapter-long reviews next time.

"In a Better World" opens in New York and Los Angeles on April 1.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #69

2011-03-08T15:09:00.000-08:00

SLEEPER (1973)

The Writers

Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman

Why It's Here

In my previous review for this series, when I called When Harry Met Sally... "the best Woody Allen movie Woody Allen never made", Sleeper was not the kind of film to which I was referring. For so long now, Allen has been enshrined in the public imagination as primarily a maker of literate, witty and sophisticated comedies of upper-class New York manners that it is often easy to forget that he began his career making entirely different kinds of comic films. Allen started out as a newspaper gag writer before graduating to the writers' room of the fabled early-TV sketch comedy Your Show of Shows, where he shared the air with such fellow comic luminaries as Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. It is Brooks's anarchic, anything-for-a-laugh spirit that most heavily influences Allen's earliest films, slapdash, uneven funhouse rides so crammed with gags it's nearly impossible to pick all of them up on a first viewing. Indeed, Allen's early work, as much as Brooks's, can be seen as the direct antecedent to the genre-parody scattergun style later perfected by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team in Airplane!, Top Secret, and The Naked Gun. Still, even within these madcap affairs, one can detect the seeds of the more serious-minded and probing filmmaker Allen was to become, as the films address such philosophically fraught subjects as the nature of the criminal mind (Take the Money and Run), the genuine value of political commitment (Bananas), the maddening mystery of the mating dance (Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex), and the way in which media can manipulate images to create emotional affect (all of the above). For my money, the most successful melding of the "early, funny" Allen with the highly regarded serious artiste to come was in Allen's fourth feature as director, 1973's Sleeper, a screwloose dystopian sci-fi satire that mixes hysterical slapstick set pieces with some surprisingly cogent, even despairing sociopolitical observations. It thus becomes one of the few films in the Allen filmography with potentially equivalent appeal to both his earliest fans and the cinephiles who were to embrace him in later decades.

Sleeper was not Allen's first collaborative effort as a screenwriter (Take the Money and Run and Bananas were co-written by Allen schoolmate Mickey Rose), but it marked his first shared credit with Marshall Brickman, with whom Allen would go on to write two of his most critically acclaimed features, 1977 Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay Oscar winner Annie Hall and 1979's Manhattan, for which they were likewise Oscar-nominated. (Allen reunited with Brickman for 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, an enjoyable but slight spin on the Thin Man formula.) One does not want to wholly credit Brickman for the advance Sleeper represents in Allen's screenwriting, but the film was easily his most narratively cohesive effort up to that point, with the surrealist sight gags and slapstick emerging not from the random lunacy of Allen's comic whims, but from the tension created when a contemporary 1970s man smashes up against the bizarre technology and dystopian craziness of a futuristic, post-fascist society. It's the closest any Allen film thus far had come to creating a coherent world with rules and physical logic, and this willingness to set aside the anything-for-laughs aesthetic of his previous works marks Sleeper as a quantum leap forward for Allen as a cinematic storyteller.

The story that Allen and Brickman have in fact chosen to tell in Sleeper will not be an unfamiliar one to fans of alternate-future science fiction scenarios. Allen plays Miles Monroe, a health-food restauranteur and amateur jazz clarinetist who is dethawed from a cryogenic capsule after 200 years in stasis (he was frozen after complications ensued during treatment for a minor peptic ulcer). The year is 2173, and the world has become the kind of utopia-as-dystopia we've seen in everything from Francois Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 to the Sylvester Stallone shoot-'em-up Demolition Man. White-cloaked citizens drift through their lives in a haze of pampering gadgetry, coddling servant robots, and hacky Jeff Koons-style pop culture, all the while being monitored and controlled by secret police acting under orders from a distant, all-powerful "Leader". Miles's release from cryogenic sleep itself constitutes a crime by the doctors who free him, as Miles is an "alien" with no I.D. numbers, voice-prints or brain scans. In fact, these doctors have released Miles in hopes that he can infiltrate the government, with help from a guerrilla subversive moment, and thwart "the Aries Project", a plan to reconstitute the Leader, who clings to life as the result of a rebel bombing attack. On the run from the secret police, Miles joins forces with Luna (Keaton, being directed by Allen for the first time), a poet oblivious to the evils of her society, to penetrate the government and stop Aries Day from taking place.

Doesn't sound like a lot of laughs, does it? Did I mention that one of the domestic-pampering devices is a sexual-release machine known as the Orgasmatron? Or that the only part of the Leader still alive after the bombing is his nose? Sleeper's plot could easily have provided the raw materials for a straightforward, rather derivative genre exercise, but Allen and Brickman take all the narrative and stylistic cliches of the genre and turn them just a half-twist into the ridiculous. It's genre parody at its most basic, and its finest, with all the insane gags and set pieces coming off doubly funny because the film doesn't look, on its surface, like a comedy, with the costumes and sets perfectly recreating the styles of more serious genre works (Sleeper's impressive production design, by Dale Hennessy, subscribes to the white-on-white sci-fi aesthetic popular in films of the era, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to THX-1138).

Miles is a classic out-of-time sci-fi nowhere man, but he's also a Woody Allen hero, and thus responds to his predicament like we would expect him to...that is, like Woody Allen. Upon finding out he's been thawed out two hundred years in the future, he first faints dead away before verbalizing laments that are almost psychotically beside-the-point: "I knew it was too good to be true! I parked right near the hospital!" Miles would be the first to identify himself as a fundamentally apolitical person and not the best choice for a futuristic suicide mission; he was such a weakling as a kid, he was "beaten up by Quakers". But he's also a natural-born anti-authoritarian, which we see in an early scene where, when asked to identify inscrutable artifacts of the "past", he replies with smart-ass descriptions (my favorite: given a photo of Norman Mailer, he mentions that the author "donated his ego to the Harvard Medical School"). So, when the futuristic shit hits the fan and Miles goes on the run, he proves himself surprising adept at outwitting and duping the secret police, displaying a physical ingenuity and wit the equal of the heroes of the beloved silent comedies to which Sleeper also pays homage. (It's no accident that, when disguised as a serving robot, Miles, with his white-powdered face and ubiquitous black horn-rims, is the spitting image of silent-clown legend Harold Lloyd.) Still, even in the face of a futuristic police state, Miles never loses his essential Allen-ness. He's brutally unsentimental about his past, long-dead life; when Luna says she can't believe he's been without sex for two hundred years, he quips, "Two hundred and four if you count my marriage." He never ceases in his preoccupation with the oldest indulgence known to man; upon first encountering the serving robots, all he wants to know is whether there are girl robots ("The possibilities are limitless"), and, even when he's captured late in the film and brainwashed into a perfect society drone, he still risks punishment by having illicit sex with a blonde with "great tomatoes" who works in his office. He also expresses Allen's usual ambivalence about religion (it's interesting that the Jewish Miles is seen confessing his affair with his co-worker to a Catholic confession computer, complete with cross on top that spins when you've been absolved) and politics, as well as his distaste for the more vapid and self-consciously "arty" aspects of popular culture. When Allen and Brickman want to slam Luna's future-world poetry as shallow and devoid of meaning, they have one of her friends compare it favorably to that of then-popular poet Rod McKuen, and part of Miles's mental restructuring following his capture is his participation in a recreation of the Miss America pageant (Miles, acting as "Miss Montana", breathlessly intones that he would use his crown to bring world peace to all people, "be it black, be they white, be it colored, be it whatever"). Still, Miles, like many of Allen's characters, is capable of surprising bouts of wistful romanticism, as when, almost ready to jump out a window of the government's main "function complex" on a rope, he stops to ask Luna if she really loves Erno (John Beck), the strapping leader of the underground with whom Luna has an affair during Miles's brainwashed absence. It was in Sleeper, as much as any of Allen's earliest films, that the Allen comic persona, wry and intellectually above-it-all, but deeply romantic and to-the-core wounded by life, was codified into a coherent shape, divorced from its earlier, get-the-laugh-above-all-else form.

Sleeper is also the first film in which Allen's character is paired with a heroine who gives as good as she gets. At first, Luna is a distastefully entitled walking symbol of every bad impulse the police state has indulged in its citizenry. When we first see her, she's encased in a purifying facial mask that renders her grotesque as she mumbles her plans to "put some rose oil on my fingertips" as if contemplating matters of great import. She seems to host a party almost every other night, at which her guests discuss nonsense and pleasure themselves with "the Orb", a kind of futuristic drug that knocks Miles, passing it around to the guests while posing as a serving robot, for a serious loop. She's too serious about her ridiculous poetry, while treating sex as a bizarre amalgam of party game and spectator sport, declaring to one of her party guests, "We should have had sex, but there weren't enough people." And this from a college girl who got her degree in "cosmetic sexual technique and poetry", not to mention her Ph.D. in oral sex (Miles jokes, "They make you take any Spanish with that?"). And she's more than happy to maintain the status quo; upon hearing about a friend who got mixed up with the underground guerrillas and had his brain restructured by the government, she laments, "We have so many wonderful things...Why does there even have to be an underground?" Allen and Brickman pack all the worst qualities of the Me Decade's terminal narcissism and unquestioning acceptance of governmental authority into Luna's early scenes, so it's honestly gratifying to see her evolve during her misadventures with Miles. At first she's skeptical of his cynical accusations of governmental malfeasance, but she gets a rude awakening when she tries to tip the secret police off to Miles's presence and their first instinct is to try to zap her; after all, she's been "contaminated by the alien". When Miles is eventually captured, Luna escapes and finds her way to the underground, where she undergoes a complete transformation into a black-clad revolutionary whose socialistic leanings extend to the bedroom; when Miles confronts her about her dalliance with Erno, she proudly declares, "My love is free to give to all the Bolshevik brothers and sisters" (Miles counters eloquently: "Tramp"). Though Luna's character personae break down into a literal black-and-white difference, this simplistic duality is nevertheless leagues ahead of the often woefully inconsistent characterizations given to the women in Allen's earlier films. Here, Allen and Brickman give us a woman who's strong, funny, and who goes toe to toe with Allen in every scene without getting swept off the screen by his character's typically peculiar anti-charisma.

In addition to its strongly rendered science-fiction satire and well-delineated characters, Sleeper is quite simply one of the funniest movies Allen has ever written. He and Brickman provide great one-liners throughout the picture (when asked what it's like being dead for two centuries, Miles replies, "Like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills"), and the film is, like many Brooksian comedies of the era, almost exhilaratingly willing to trade in stereotypes for humorous effect. When Miles and Luna, on the run from the secret police, hide briefly at the home of two ludicrously effeminate homosexuals, it stands to reason that they have an equally fey serving robot who minces out of the bedroom bitching about the mess in his electronic voice. And where does a futuristic citizen buy his clothing? Why, from Jewish tailor robots, of course, whose big-nosed metal-wire faces rotate incessantly as they kvetch at one another. The film also serves as a terrific reminder of how satisfying a well-conceived slapstick gag can be, as the film is crammed with set pieces that effectively pay tribute to, and at times even match the inventiveness of, the silent clowns of the past. The brilliance of Sleeper's slapstick is that it springboards entirely from its futuristic setting, as Allen and Brickman use the plethora of potential futuristic technologies Miles encounters as a springboard for a seemingly never-ending series of hilarious images. Miles, attempting to escape the secret police, grabs a jetpack that activates and flies off into the stratosphere with no one wearing it (he resorts to a pack with a ridiculous propeller, and is forced to flap his arms to achieve maximum loft). Posing as the robot butler, he tries to make instant pudding and conjures a blob-like creature that he battles with a broom. When he tries to shave in an electronic bathroom mirror, it becomes a futuristic homage to the mirror gag in Duck Soup, with Miles's reflection playing tricks on him before the mirror starts to pick up reflections from other houses. Miles flies again with a "hydrovac suit", an inflatable space jumper that turns Miles into something resembling a bundle of flying gray garlic bulbs. Sleeper also includes what I think is the greatest banana-peel gag of all time, as Miles, stealing gigantic fruit and vegetables from a futuristic farm, tries to flee the farmer only to find himself and his pursuer both slipping on the gargantuan peel from the banana he's swiping. These gags and more, emerging completely organically from the film's sci-fi setting, are as well-conceived and executed as the best of Chaplin, Keaton, and Jackie Chan. Most people don't think of slapstick as something that is written, but the bits in this film are a testament to Allen and Brickman's abilities to think in terms of what will look funny on camera.

Even though it takes place in the future, Sleeper, like all of Allen's best films, is not without something to say about life as it is lived today. By giving us an allegedly utopian future society that is nevertheless plagued with the same deceitful and power-hungry politicians and generally apathetic, culturally narcotized citizenry as in 1973 (and today), Allen and Brickman suggest that corruption, rather than simply overtaking the system as the result of duplicitous individuals, is itself inherent to the nature of politics. Miles as much as says so in Sleeper's final scene, when Luna, exalting about the success of Erno's plan to destroy the Aries Project (victory is achieved, in Looney Tunes fashion, when Miles throws the Leader's nose under an oncoming steamroller), is quickly brought down to earth by her more cynical companion: "Don't you get it? In five months we'll be stealing Erno's nose...Political systems don't work. It doesn't matter who's up there. They're all terrible." One might wish to forgive Allen's harsh words in light of the film's release in the midst of the second, to-be-uncompleted Nixon administration, but it's been almost forty years since Sleeper hit theaters, and does the present state of the political union seem less like this film's dystopia to you, or more? Sleeper was willing to advance a notion that only just then was beginning to creep into the public consciousness, that of politics as a perpetual bullshit machine full of liars, thieves and hoodlums worthy of being constantly distrusted, if not deposed outright. The film is equally cynical, in its own way, about the possibility of true romantic happiness. We know that Miles's marriage was an unhappy one (his wife accused him of being a pervert "because I drank our waterbed"), but was it really so much so that he expresses no remorse upon learning that his ex-wife has been dead nearly two hundred years? Even sex, which usually seems to get the desired results for Allen's characters at its most basic physical level at least, has been reduced in Sleeper's world to a literally mechanical function, with the Orgasmatron so overtaking sexual responsibility that all future women are frigid, all men impotent...except, Luna remarks, for the ones whose ancestors are Italian. (In its weird way, Sleeper, presenting a world where straightforward sexual interaction has been negated by machines, may have foreshadowed internet porn.) And in the universe of Sleeper, not only are male-female relationships frustrating, they're hopelessly so: "It's been proven by science." Luna explains that future scientists have discovered a chemical in men and women's brains that make it "so that we all get on each other's nerves sooner or later." Like the suggestion of politics as a gambit for fools and devils, Sleeper's view of the life of the romantic mind is an uncommonly bleak one for a comedy to take, and would serve as the bellwether for a series of future comedies in which Allen, Brickman, and other collaborators would take on equally heady subjects. Sleeper ends on a slightly rosier note than many of these later films, with Miles and Luna sharing a warm-hearted kiss, but the final line before that, delivered by Miles, takes us out on a dark, almost Sartrean note of despair. Luna, defining Miles as being someone with no faith in science, political systems or God, asks him what he does believe in. His reply: "Sex and death. Two things that come once in my lifetime. But at least after death, you're not nauseous."

So, this knockabout slapstick farce ends with an affirmation that there are only two things of value in the world: one that makes you physically sick, and death. Shakespeare didn't usually end his comedies on this note. But Shakespeare is Shakespeare, Allen is Allen, and Sleeper is a signal text in the evolution of Allen from a baggy-pants jokester to a maker of serious philosophical cinematic statements. The fact that Allen has managed to couch said statements within some of the funniest films ever made in America is a testament to a worldview and a style, as director, actor and of course screenwriter, that is quintessentially Jewish, quintessentially American...that can only be described, at the end of the day, as "Allenesque". Not many screenwriters get their own adjective, but with his and Brickman's work on Sleeper and others, Allen has earned it.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (BOLDFACE INDICATES A WIN): Best Dramatic Presentation, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; Writers Guild of America Award, Best Original Comedy Screenplay

IT'S THE FIRST ANNUAL ZOMBOSCARS!

2011-02-25T10:34:00.001-08:00

In two days' time, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will be, for the eighty-third time, giving out small, bald golden men to the filmmakers and performers responsible for what they feel are the year's signal achievements in the art of moviemaking. Most critics have already weighed in for the year with their predictions for the Academy's choices, and I felt like it was finally time for the Zombie to be heard as well. But what I'm doing here today is not a list of predictions (you know, Colin Firth yadda yadda, Aaron Sorkin yadda), but rather a compilation of what this year's nominees and winners list would have looked like if only one rotten-skinned but sharp-minded cinephile was casting a ballot. These are my personal picks for the outstanding cinematic achievements of 2010, and if I had been choosing the nominees, this is the list that would have gone out to the Academy voters this month. Here now, for your enjoyment, is the list of nominees and winners for the First Annual ZOMBOSCARS.

First, a few ground rules:

* You will notice here several nominations for The Secret In Their Eyes, which you may recall as 2009's Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film. This film did not play in American theaters until 2010, and was thus eligible for inclusion for this year's Zomboscar nominations, a statute that will stand going forward with this award.

* Toy Story 3 is a Best Picture nominee, but is not included on my list of the year's best animated features. I have decided that for the Zomboscars, since documentaries, foreign films and animated features each have their own category, they will be considered ineligible for those categories should I choose to nominate them for the Best Picture prize. And I think the Oscars should do this too.

* You will notice some of the Oscar categories (such as Best Documentary Short Subject) are not included on the Zomboscars nominees list, and that some categories, such as Best Original Song, may not have the same number of nominees as found on the Oscars. Simply put, if a category is not here, that means I did not see any films of that type in the last year, and if there's a smaller-than-usual number of nominees, this means I only saw a limited number of potential candidates for that prize.

* Jean-Francois Richet's Mesrine saga was a two-part film that made my top-ten list for 2010. Therefore, you can expect to see it as a nominee. However, several actors and production personnel were only involved in the first of these two films, Mesrine: Killer Instinct. If Killer Instinct is listed as the nominated film, the nominee was only involved with that part of the saga. If the title of the second film, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1, is listed, consider this a nomination for both films (unless otherwise specified).

* Winners in each category are indicated in boldface. And you don't have to wait till the end of the night for the big one here...

BEST PICTURE

Another Year
Black Swan
The Expendables
The King's Speech
Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
Morning Glory
Neil Young Trunk Show
The Secret In Their Eyes
Toy Story 3
True Grit

BEST ACTOR

Jeff Bridges, True Grit
Vincent Cassel, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
Colin Firth, The King's Speech
James Franco, Howl
Mark Wahlberg, The Other Guys

BEST ACTRESS

Annette Bening, The Kids Are All Right
Lesley Manville, Another Year
Rachel McAdams, Morning Glory
Natalie Portman, Black Swan
Hailee Steinfeld, True Grit

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Harrison Ford, Morning Glory
Guillermo Francella, The Secret In Their Eyes
Ben Mendelsohn, Animal Kingdom
Mark Ruffalo, The Kids Are All Right
Geoffrey Rush, The King's Speech

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Chavia Boudraa, Outside the Law
Cecile de France, Mesrine: Killer Instinct
Minnie Driver, Barney's Version
Amanda Peet, Please Give
Soledad Villamil, The Secret In Their Eyes

BEST DIRECTOR

Darren Aronofsky, Black Swan
Rachid Bouchareb, Outside the Law
Juan Jose Campanella, The Secret In Their Eyes
Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit
Jean-Francois Richet, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Lisa Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg, The Kids Are All Right
Mike Leigh, Another Year
Adam McKay and Chris Henchy, The Other Guys
Aline Brosh McKenna, Morning Glory
David Seidler, The King's Speech

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Michael Arndt, Toy Story 3
Juan Jose Campanella and Eduardo Sacheri, The Secret In Their Eyes
Joel and Ethan Coen, True Grit
Jean-Francois Richet and Abdel Raouf Dafri, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
Nicholas Stoller, Get Him To the Greek

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Atticus Ross, The Book of Eli
Aaron Zigman, The Company Men
Marco Beltrami and Mastodon, Jonah Hex
Randy Newman, Toy Story 3
Danny Elfman, The Wolfman

BEST ORIGINAL SONG

"African Child" from Get Him to the Greek
"Chanson L'Illusioniste" from The Illusionist
"Comin' Up" from Get Him to the Greek

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Matthew Libatique, Black Swan
Don Burgess, The Book of Eli
Christophe Beaucarne, Outside the Law
Roger Deakins, True Grit
Shelly Johnson, The Wolfman

BEST FILM EDITING

Jon Harris, 127 Hours
Andrew Weisblum, Black Swan
Ken Blackwell and Paul Harb, The Expendables
Herve Schneid, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
Glenn Allen, Neil Young Trunk Show

BEST ART DIRECTION

The Book of Eli
The King's Speech
Outside the Law
Shutter Island
True Grit

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Get Him To The Greek
The King's Speech
Outside the Law
Shutter Island
True Grit

BEST MAKEUP

Black Swan
Jonah Hex
The Wolfman

BEST SOUND EDITING

Black Swan
Daybreakers
Jonah Hex
Legion
The Wolfman

BEST SOUND MIXING

The Expendables
Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
Neil Young Trunk Show
Outside the Law
The Wolfman

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Daybreakers
Iron Man 2
The Red Baron

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

The Illusionist
A Town Called Panic

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM

Day & Night

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

The Art of the Steal
Best Worst Movie
Great Directors

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Outside the Law

THE MOVIE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS : #70

2011-02-16T20:34:00.000-08:00

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... (1989)

The Writer

Nora Ephron

Why It's Here

When Harry Met Sally... is the best Woody Allen movie Woody Allen never made. Though the cinematic poet laureate of neurotic twentieth-century New York was not involved in any aspect of its production, it would be hard to deny that Harry might not exist, or at the very least would look and feel drastically different than it does, without the template provided by Allen's chronicles of witty, sophisticated upper-class New Yorkers plagued by the age-old conundrums of love, romance and marriage. The rich, autumnal Manhattan settings and the score of classic old popular standards are trademark Allen touches, as are the plain white titles on stark black background that opens the film. Even the brief, unrelated-to-the-story segments of elderly couples, seated on a drawing-room sofa as they relate to the camera their stories of how they met and fell in love, are a classically Allenesque cinematic device. However, for all its similarities to Allen's work, When Harry Met Sally... is notable for being demonstrably more audience-friendly than the average Allen film. Allen makes his pictures with complete autonomy, entirely outside of the studio system, a fact made manifest by the films' sometimes almost brutally esoteric cultural references and frequently ambiguous or flat-out unhappy endings. It's not uncommon for an Allen protagonist to wind up his or her romantic misadventure alone, bereft, and just as confused about the state of their heart as they were when the film began. When Harry Met Sally..., conversely, was a major studio production, and as such it presents an almost domesticated take on Woody Allen, the auteur's style brightened up for mainstream audience appeal. Allen's characters attend grand opera and read Proust and Dostoevsky; the protagonists of Harry... read Stephen King novels and watch Casablanca on TV. And though their trek through the murky waters of modern romance is just as treacherous as that of any Allen hero or heroine, it comes as no surprise to us when Harry and Sally realize, in the final reel, that they were meant for each other after all. (And if any of you contacts me to complain that I spoiled the film's ending, I congratulate you on somehow having gotten this far in your life without ever having seen a mainstream American romantic comedy.) But all of this apples-and-oranges comparison, however, is deeply unfair to the film we're here to discuss today, for if all When Harry Met Sally... accomplished was a comprehensive ripping-off of another filmmaker's style, it would not be on this list. But Harry finds itself here thanks to a screenplay, by the celebrated novelist and filmmaker Nora Ephron (with strong inspiration from the actual romantic lives of the film's director, Rob Reiner, producer Andrew Scheinman, and leading man Billy Crystal), that is laugh-out-loud funny, warm without excessive sentimentality, and quite perceptive about the ways men and women think about and discuss love and romance.

The film's first act chronicles the initial encounters of our romantic couple, Harry Burns (Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), who first meet in 1977 while sharing a ride from Chicago to New York for college. They're hooked up on this trip by Sally's friend, who's dating Harry, and instantly it's like oil and water. Sally is a persnickety fussbudget who has already calculated their individual drive-time into hourly and mileage-based calculations, and who orders a meal in a restaurant like she's planning a major military campaign (Harry later tells her that "I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich"). Harry, meanwhile, seems content to just munch away on his grapes in the passenger seat and sloppily spew seeds out the window (never mind, of course, that the window's not actually rolled down). Eventually, though, they get to some real conversation, and they quickly discern certain essential philosophical differences. Sally identifies herself as basically a happy person, while Harry is one of those self-styled "dark" characters who always reads the last page of any new book first, so he will know how it ends in case he dies before he finishes reading. Soon, and as it is with college kids perhaps almost inevitably, the subject moves on to sex. When Sally overreacts to Harry's innocent "empirical" observation that she is "a very attractive person", Harry advances his pet theory about how men and women can never be friends, claiming that it is impossible for men to maintain platonic relations with any women he finds attractive, because he will always be thinking of sex with her. And it does no good to only be friends with unattractive women, because, Harry asserts, "you pretty much want to nail them, too." Not surprisingly, this sits poorly with the uptight Sally, and they part ways in New York, presumably never to set eyes on one another again. In this opening sequence, Ephron has clearly positioned her two principal characters as seemingly intractable opposites, an essential prerequisite of virtually all successful romantic comedies, as well as posed the central question that will inform the remainder of her narrative: can men and women really be "just friends", or will love and sex always gum up the works? Despite all the heavy expositional and thematic work this opening sequence performs, it never feels as if it's simply shoveling essential plot and character details at us. As is the case with much of the film's best dialogue, we simply seem to be eavesdropping on two people having a casual, though unusually clever and funny, conversation, the kind of chat we could imagine engaging in with our own friends and loved ones.

Sally and Harry unexpectedly come together again five years later, when they find themselves sharing a flight. Interestingly, although Sally remembers her miserable experience with Harry on first sight of him, she can barely recall the name of her "best" friend whom he was dating in '77, a subtle truism about how it's sometimes the people who impact our lives most negatively who make the strongest impression. (In Sally's defense, when pressed about her later, Harry can barely remember the girlfriend's name, either; for the record, it's Amanda, and she's played by Michelle Nicastro). Harry and Sally end up sharing a seating arrangement and discuss their current places in life. Harry's working in political consulting, while Sally...well, I find that no matter how hard I think about it, I can't remember what Sally does for a living, because, in another stylistic element borrowed from Woody Allen, we never really see our principal characters here at work, knowing only that they have prestigious enough jobs to provide them with gorgeous apartments and ample opportunities for picturesque leisure activities. Sally is involved with Joe (Steven Ford), an old college chum of Harry's who told Sally he loved her for the first time just before putting her on the plane, while Harry is engaged to "Helen Hilson, she's a lawyer, she's keeping her name." And while this engagement seems to have brought out a new optimism in Harry, he opines that he's glad to be getting hitched partly because he's tired of "the whole life-of-a-single-guy thing", and he again spins horrific theories about male and female interaction and how simple friendship is an impossibility when even the hint of sexual interest might taint the air. (In what is, for my money, the funniest line in the film, Sally responds to Harry's pronouncements with, "You know, Harry, it's amazing. You look like a normal person, and actually you're the angel of death.") As Harry and Sally again part ways, with Harry's warped perceptions of relationships again shooting the possibility of their being friends in the foot, we may begin to wonder if the entire film is going to be a series of these chance encounters, and whether or not Ephron is building to something substantial here, any kind of a real story.

We then jump forward another five years, and Ephron's script at last settles into the meat of its narrative. Sally is now prospering in New York, but all is not perfect in her precise little world. She and Joe have just called it quits, though she swears to her best friend, window designer and perennial "other woman" Marie (Carrie Fisher), that she's absolutely fine with being single again. On the other side of town, Harry's not doing so well, as he relates to his buddy, magazine writer Jess (Bruno Kirby), the horrible story of how he found out his wife was leaving him when the movers showed up at their apartment to get her stuff. (In a funny bit of business, this scene takes place at a New York Giants game, with Harry and Jess doing the wave in the midst of their miserable conversation; on the DVD commentary, Reiner claims this gag was taken from an actual wave-inflected conversation in his own past.) Harry and Sally again meet by chance, this time at a bookstore, but something's different. They're both wounded now, vulnerable, and finally a little uncertain as to whether or not they really have all the answers about life and love. They have lunch together, and they decide to embark on a grand experiment: they're going to be friends.

Aside from the chance meetings of the main characters, perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Ephron's screenplay in relation to other contemporary romantic comedies is the lack of contrivance keeping the principal couple apart. Many of the romcoms that followed in Harry's wake, unable or unwilling to do the heavy character spadework Ephron's script traffics in, are forced to invent ever-more-ridiculous narrative devices to keep the films' otherwise perfectly matched couples apart (the nadir of this contrivance is perhaps found in 2006's Failure to Launch, in which professional floozy Sarah Jessica Parker falls for layabout Matthew McConaughey after being hired by his desperate parents to seduce him into moving out of their house). Ephron's screenplay is smart and mature enough to realize that oftentimes it's not anything situational that keeps potential lovers apart, but merely seemingly incompatible aspects of their own personalities. Thus it is with Harry and Sally, as they embark on a delicate but authentic platonic friendship. Sally at first abstains from the dating scene, all the while insisting she's just fine, while Harry embarks on a series of irritating dates that customarily culminate in enthusiastic but emotionally unsatisfying sex (he claims at one point to have made a woman meow in bed...but only tells this story as an example of how he can tell Sally anything and she's not put out by it). Meanwhile, hints are everywhere that these two are meant for each other, if only they could get over their own hang-ups and neuroses. Harry reacts with uncharacteristic surprise when he finds out that Sally is going out on an actual date, and when they attempt a mutual fix-up, Harry with Marie and Sally with Jess, the only sparks that fly are instead between Marie and Jess, who practically knock their supposed dates to the ground as they race to share a cab at the end of the night. The two end up moving in together and marrying, and hosting game nights where Sally snarks about the youth of Harry's date while Harry goofs on the seemingly perfectly normal fellow Sally's brought along. In classic romantic comedy fashion, Harry and Sally are denying the obvious, to each other if not to themselves. After all, it's hard to explain away the smitten look on Harry's face when he dances with Sally at a New Year's celebration near the midpoint of the film. Hell, I've felt some of those kinds of sparks dancing with platonic female friends myself.

The second act climaxes, quite literally, with a climax, as Harry and Sally finally wind up in bed together. Harry, himself tense and irritable ever since running into his ex-wife with the man she left him for (to add insult to injury, she comes across Harry while he and Sally are singing "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" with a karaoke machine at Sharper Image), gets a distraught late-night call from Sally, who's sobbing hysterically after having found out that Joe is marrying a paralegal in his office. Though Sally never wavered from her initial stance that she was fine with the breakup, Ephron clearly illustrates otherwise during Harry and Sally's initial friendship lunch, in which Sally enumerates her desire for adventure, excitement and spontaneity, followed by domesticity and familial bliss, both promises that Joe was unwilling to make. Now, she confronts the hard truth: "He always said he didn't want to be married," she wails. "Turns out he just didn't want to be married to me." She blames herself for the breakup, which is a typical gambit of most dumped people, and when Harry assures her that she's the bee's knees, his warm friendly kiss eventually deepens into a night of consummated passion. Then, much to Sally's disgust, the Harry of old re-emerges as he bolts from her apartment as soon as he can develop a reasonable excuse to go.

But is the old Harry really back? It certainly doesn't seem like it at Jess and Marie's wedding, when all Harry wants to do is talk about what happened between the two of them. Ephron perfectly nails the awkwardness of this kind of conversation, as Harry is reduced to comparing their situation to a tangled metaphorical scenario in which a dog stands in for Sally, before finally suggesting that he slept with her out of pity, which earns him a hearty "fuck you" and a slap in the face. He may be out of Sally's sight, but he's nevertheless not out of her mind, and the situation eventually culminates in another New Year's Eve celebration, with Harry wandering the lonely New York streets while Sally suffers through a miserable date at a party with Marie and Jess. Then, it hits Harry as if like a bolt from the blue, and unable to get a cab, he runs across town (more shades of Allen and his race through New York at the climax of Manhattan) to the hotel hosting the party and finally says it: "I've been doing a lot of thinking, and the thing is, I love you." After having not seen him for weeks, Sally's response is reasonable: "How do your respect me to respond to this?" And under the circumstances, and given all that's preceded it, so is Harry's: "How about you love me too?" They share their first kiss as real lovers, and they wonder about the meaning of "Auld Lang Syne", which Sally, eyes full of blissful tears, finally determines is simply about "old friends". It's not easy to pull off an ending like this, which could just as easily have played for schmaltz, in a way that seems both not overly sentimental and honestly earned, but Ephron's script pulls it off, and the final scene, with Harry and Sally sitting on that drawing-room sofa talking about their wedding, and the lovely cake with chocolate sauce "on the side", reminds us that two seemingly incompatible people don't always have to give up who they are to find true happiness together.

So what exactly is it about When Harry Met Sally... that has allowed it to endure as a modern-day romantic comedy classic when so many films with perhaps more interesting plots are not nearly as fondly remembered? Of course, star chemistry doesn't hurt the film one bit (Crystal and Ryan are a genuinely engaging pair of would-be lovers), but the lion's share of the credit has to go to Ephron's dialogue, which is sharp, on point, and full of pithy observations. It's smart about both the overarching themes of life and love (Sally confronts Harry about his romantic dalliances by claiming that he's sleeping with these women "like you're out for revenge or something") and about the little peculiarities that makes people people (like Harry miming "the white man's overbite" when he talks about taking women out dancing). It's unflinching in its depiction of the delusions people will allow themselves when they're hopelessly in love, as when Marie constantly seems shocked that her married lover is seemingly never going to leave his wife, a reality that everyone else in Marie's life resigned themselves to ages ago. Ephron spices the film with hilarious little anecdotes that seem so crazy that you can only imagine they must have come from someone's real life; my favorite is Sally's college-age breakup with a boy who got incurably jealous about her "days-of-the-week underpants" when they couldn't find the "Sunday" pair (the boyfriend didn't believe Sally's explanation that "they don't make Sunday...because of God"). Harry is allowed a few stand-out jokes that seem almost like they could have come from Crystal's own stand-up act, as when he talks about the convenience of taking a woman to an Ethiopian restaurant: "I didn't even know they had food in Ethiopia. This'll be easy. I'll order two plates of nothing and we can leave." Ephron is intelligent enough to make the film consistently funny without ever pushing the jokes and humorous scenarios into the realm of sitcom absurdity; even a brief interlude in which Sally, now bereft of Harry's companionship, struggles to get a Christmas tree home by herself plays like a commentary on Sally's loneliness rather than a bravura slapstick set piece. Indeed, the film is so rooted in the bedrock realism of the characters' interactions that even its most famous set piece, Sally's faked orgasm at Katz's Deli, plays less like a show-off scene for Meg Ryan and more like Sally putting the arrogant, sexually over-confident Harry in his place. (For an example of how to do a scene like this badly, look at the ghastly "I Say a Little Prayer" scene in My Best Friend's Wedding...then watch the wonderful "All I Want" dinner scene in this year's Best Picture-nominated The Kids Are All Right so you can feel clean again.) What makes When Harry Met Sally... a successful romantic comedy is what most of today's romcoms have forgotten about. In a great romantic comedy, it's the romance, and therefore the characters, that should be the attraction. You can put as many contrived roadblocks, meddling best friends, and chaotic final-reel chases to the altar in these films as you like, but if the core couple can't relate to one another in an affecting and believable way, we are going to feel nothing when they finally share that big kiss in the last shot. Ephron understood this fact intimately, and in When Harry Met Sally..., she crafted a romcom that is all about the interaction, and is all the funnier and more affecting for it.

When Harry Met Sally... was an enormous hit upon its initial release, and it has remained a benchmark for the romantic comedy genre. Its most famous line, "I'll have what she's having" (spoken in response to Sally's deli orgasm by none other than the director's mother, Estelle Reiner), was voted no. 33 on the American Film Institute's list of the all-time greatest movie lines, and it also served as the title for Daniel Kimmel's 2008 book on the making of the all-time classic romantic comedies. The film also turned Meg Ryan into America's early-90s sweetheart, the queen of the romantic comedy genre (though oddly enough, since this film, she and Billy Crystal have not worked together again). But the film's enormous success has also been referenced by critics when discussing the subsequent romantic-comedy boom and its increasing reliance on ridiculously contrived narrative devices and stock pop soundtracks in place of honest character interaction. A.O. Scott, on an early-2010 edition of At the Movies, named When Harry Met Sally... as his pick for most overrated film of the 1980s, precisely because of its negative influence on the currently floundering romantic comedy genre. This accusation seems to me a trifle unfair. After all, like with the spate of horrible space operas that followed in the wake of Star Wars's blockbuster box office, the success of When Harry Met Sally... can only really be held responsible for the large number of romantic comedies that followed it. Their torturously contrived screenplays and lack of emotional affect cannot be blamed on Nora Ephron's work. After all, if the glut of '90s romantic comedies had followed her lead, they might have ended up, like her, with a script that is still in print in book form today, a script that is basically a master class on contemporary romantic comedy screenwriting. We shouldn't blame the master for the sins of the students.

And, for that matter, we shouldn't blame Woody Allen, either.

AWARD NOMINATIONS (BOLDFACE INDICATES A WIN): Academy Award, Best Original Screenplay; BAFTA Award, Best Original Screenplay; Golden Globe, Best Screenplay; Writers Guild of America Award, Best Original Screenplay

The Zombie SPEAKS!!!!!!

2011-02-07T23:13:00.000-08:00

The life of a zombie is an often hectic and unpredictable one, but it fortunately does not prevent me from taking an hour out of my undead existence to liven up a friend's podcast. To tide you over until my next review (coming soon, I promise!), here's my appearance on my good friend Brandon Easton's podcast, "Writing for Rookies", recorded earlier today. Thanks to Brandon for having me as a guest, and my apologies to this year's Oscar-nominated screenwriters for more or less cursing at you.

http://writingforrookies.podcastpeople.com/posts/41802

IT RISES!: THE ZOMBIE RETURNS WITH HIS 2010 YEAR IN REVIEW

2011-01-03T16:04:00.000-08:00

You probably thought you were safe. You probably believed that you were at long last again living in a world where you could go to the local cineplex and art-house theater, where you could Netflix and Redbox to your heart's content, without fear of encountering a slavering, undead thing with an unslakable hunger for cinematic flesh. Well, my cinephiliac lovely, you were wrong. The Movie Zombie has risen after an unexpected period of slumber. And what's that he's dragging behind him, squirming and vibrant and still full of delicious, stimulating life? Why, it's his top ten films of 2010!

Last year was an interesting one for films. I saw more films theatrically than I did the previous year, and paid for fewer of them than ever before. I saw free films as a volunteer at the Creative Screenwriting Q&A screening series, as an invited guest critic of Sony Pictures Classics (received my first press credential this year), and as a volunteer of the American Cinematheque. Consequently, of the (actually) eleven films that comprise this year-end best list, I only paid for admission to about half of them, which more or less conforms to the total average for my film-viewing year. I understand that in some ways, this makes me a less-than-representative American moviegoer, as most of my film viewing does not follow the same buy-a-ticket-and-a-popcorn-on-Friday-night pattern as that of many of my potential readers. This, however, is made up for by the fact that in many ways, my film viewing of the last year doesn't even represent my tastes and interests as a filmgoer. The thing about seeing a lot of free movies is that you often don't get to choose what movies you see, and as a consequence of both this fact and the fact that I still, as yet, do not write these reviews professionally, my top ten list is filled with a number of films that, had I been forced to pay admission for them, I probably wouldn't have seen at all. Likewise, there are a number of major, critically acclaimed films that, since I either didn't get comped or wasn't able to attend the comped screenings I was invited to, I didn't see, most notably Inception (planning to see this once it hits Redbox) and The Social Network (I had prior plans the night that Creative Screenwriting showed this).

However, this makes it sound as if I was stuck spending the year watching a bunch of movies that didn't interest me or that I didn't respond to, but the fact of the matter is, of the films I did manage to check out in 2010, a great number of them spoke to me in very real and urgent ways, and have forged a strong place in my heart and mind. I didn't really find any sort of thematic linkage between the eleven titles that comprise my "top ten list" the way I did last year, but for the most part, I found that the films that most moved and excited me in the last year were those that penetrated most deeply into my own interests and conceptions of the world, the ones that addressed me directly as a person, rather than those that just engaged me as a general filmgoer. It was a year when the best films sat me down, bought me a cup of coffee, and said, "Let me tell you a little something about yourself."

But for a change of pace, I'm going to start this year with the films that only told me that they sucked. For the first time ever, the Movie Zombie presents his FIVE WORST FILMS OF 2010...

5. THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE: FIRST SEQUENCE. Tom Six's one-of-a-kind-and-thank-God-for-that horror picture is easily the most technically competent film on this list, and it's not here because it's ineffective as a horror piece. This is a movie that sets out to shock, disgust and disturb, and for roughly ninety minutes, it just does that. But I can't think of a 2010 release that I got less out of watching than this movie. When it was all over, I just felt depressed, and all I could think of was, "Why did I just spend the last ninety minutes of my life doing that? Almost anything else would have been more productive." You'll think the same thing too if you see it, so I would just suggest reading a good book and saving yourself the heartache.

4. A WOMAN, A GUN AND A NOODLE SHOP. Continuing the theme of largely pointless viewing experiences, master Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou felt the need to take the Coen brothers' seminal first feature Blood Simple and transmute the setting to the 19th-century Chinese desert, while adding nothing to the mix but several over-the-top comic performances that generated no laughs whatsoever. Watching a great filmmaker try and fail to emulate the unique style of another filmmaker was a dispiriting experience.

3. CLASH OF THE TITANS. The worst blockbuster of 2010 was a two-hour movie that felt roughly three and a half hours long, populated almost entirely by characters I either disliked or didn't care about. I feel like kind of a jerk publishing this on the same day that Clash co-star Pete Postlethwaite passed away, but you'll see that even in my original review, I acknowledged him as one of the few bright spots in an otherwise disastrous film.

2. LITTLE FOCKERS. Watching this film at the historic Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood was akin to going to La Scala in Milan only to have Callas proceed to take a two-hour dump on stage. A cast of usually talented stars (and Jessica Alba) preside over a stultifying mess with no story and maybe one gag that provoked even a chortle from me. You could practically see Ben Stiller mentally calculating what he was going to spend his paycheck on during his scenes; I have seldom seen a major star look more bored in one of his own pictures.

1. COP OUT. Somebody has to say this, and it might as well be me. Tracy Morgan is not funny. And he proves it by being the single worst element of the worst film of 2010. Of course, it doesn't help that he is stuck in a chemistry-free pairing with a phoning-it-in Bruce Willis; they're supposed to be nine-year police partners, and it feels like they just met on the set that morning. Kevin Smith directs someone else's screenplay for the first time, and proves what we always knew: that his main gift as a director is his ability to bring his own words to life. I paid a buck for this out of a Redbox machine, and when it was over, I wanted my money back.

There. Now that we've gotten that unpleasantness out of our system...we proudly present the Movie Zombie's top 10+ films of 2010...

10. THE KING'S SPEECH. For the second year in a row, British director Tom Hooper presides over one of the year's best films, the witty and surprisingly moving story of King George VI's unlikely ascension to the English throne and how he managed to lead his nation forcefully into World War II...with a little help from a working-class Australian actor / speech therapist who helped him with his persistent stammer. The picture breathes with authentic period atmosphere and detail, and Hooper gives David Seidler's clever and intelligent script the requisite emotional force without ever allowing it to slip completely into rank sentimentality. The relationship between speech therapist Lionel Logue and the unlikely client he would always refer to as "Bertie" is one of the year's most moving, a study in two men, separated by birth, class and nationality, learning, in a very proper and stiff-upper-lipped fashion, to love each other. The picture boasts one of the year's best ensemble casts, including Guy Pearce as George's priggish predecessor, Helena Bonham Carter as the strong-but-caring Queen, and Colin Firth, who, following his triumphant turn in last year's A Single Man, here gives us a complex and completely human king in a performance that is also a technical triumph (his stammer is never forced and always convincing). But the acting honors here go to Geoffrey Rush, who, in his warmth, wit, and unalloyed Aussie charm as Logue, is my pick for the year's best supporting actor.

9. NEIL YOUNG TRUNK SHOW. My favorite documentary film of 2010 was also the only concert film I saw all year, Jonathan Demme's visually exciting and sonically glorious filmed record of two Neil Young concerts performed in 2007 as part of Young's Chrome Dreams II tour. This is not a film to see if you're interested in Young's offstage life; only about three minutes of this 82-minute picture do not take place mid-performance (highlight of the backstage material: a doctor treats Young for a broken fingernail). This film is all about music, blistering, beautifully recorded rock and roll music, and Young, as he leads his talented band through a performance of beloved classics and seldom-heard rarities, reminds the viewer why he is one of rock's most gifted songwriters and most celebrated guitarists. The original shows were divided between acoustic and electric sets, but Demme here mixes up the playlist so that an acoustic gem like "Sad Movies" will immediately give way to a roaring electric rendering of a classic like "Cinnamon Girl". Throughout, Young's singing is strong and expressive, and his thunderous work on the guitar is pure rock and roll bliss. This picture only played theaters in Los Angeles for a week, and is not yet available on DVD. Those of us who saw it, myself included, no doubt consider ourselves the lucky ones.

8. MORNING GLORY. My favorite comedy of the year was a sparkling throwback to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s, not in terms of emulating screwball conventions, but more in the simple fact of its existence as a slyly witty, character-driven comedy written with grown-ups firmly in mind. Rachel McAdams, in a performance that I think would be getting Oscar-nomination talk if the film had been more widely seen, shines as a fresh-faced TV producer who takes on more than she bargained for when she signs on to executive produce a failing Today-style morning show. The film primarily focuses on McAdams's relationship with venerable nightly-news anchor Harrison Ford (perfectly cast and dryly hilarious), who's basically blackmailed into doing this show and provides a symphonic rendering of bruised dignity and barely concealed disgust at the state of his career. Writer Aline Brosh McKenna smartly steers the script away from a May-December romance between these two, instead focusing on the realities of the news-versus-entertainment war in the internet era. The result is a surprisingly trenchant commentary on contemporary television news, while still managing to deliver the strongest laughs of any motion picture this year. Roger Michell's smooth direction reminds us, as did the underrated Julia Roberts-Hugh Grant vehicle Notting Hill, that he is one of the very best at getting the most out of a smartly written comedy script.

7. MESRINE: KILLER INSTINCT and MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY #1. I find that the older I get, the less patience I have for the romanticization of the criminal lifestyle. For every thief and killer who is indeed a misunderstood metaphor for his times, there are probably a dozen amoral brutes who figured that crime would be the easy way to achieve their desires. This fact, however, doesn't mean that I can't be just as fascinated as anyone by an intelligent exploration of the criminal mind, and Jean-Francois Richet's fact-based two-part examination of the life and crimes of French bank robber Jacques Mesrine was the year's most potent piece of crime cinema. Richet and his co-writer, Abdel Raouf Dafri (adapting Mesrine's own memoirs), give us a criminal warped by his experiences as an executioner during France's postwar occupation of Algeria, who turned to crime for an easy buck and found the life much easier to get into than to escape. From its portrayal of the curious sexual allure of the amoral (Mesrine is rarely without female companionship) to its illustration of Mesrine's need to couch his seemingly motiveless crimes in the terms of a political revolutionary, Richet's examination of the criminal life is consistently complex and absorbing. The films are also filled with subtle and exquisitely realized period detail, some of the year's most thrilling action set pieces, and a clutch of standout performances, including Gerard Depardieu as Mesrine's first underworld boss, Cecile de France as a tragic Bonnie to Mesrine's implacable Clyde, and especially the great Vincent Cassel, who, in investing Mesrine with equal parts revolutionary zeal, wounded humanity and sheer, rough brutality, gives us the year's best performance by a lead actor.

6. THE EXPENDABLES. Try as one might to deny it, no film of 2010 flat-out delivered the goods like Sylvester Stallone's explosive, power-packed paramilitary action epic. Stallone pays homage to the golden era of '80s action cinema by basically acting as if this era never really ended; in essence, he made the best action film of 2010 by making the best action film of 1987. An all-star cast of action greats past (Stallone, Dolph Lundgren), present (Jason Statham, Jet Li), and potentially future (Terry Crews, Randy Couture) hurl the audience through a whirlwind-pace gauntlet of shootouts, car chases, bone-crunching brawls, and one sequence that must hold a record for most number of explosions per second in cinema history (at one point, I actually said to myself, "How could things still be exploding? They've already blown everything up twice!"). I of course understand that to some viewers, what I've just described must sound like the tenth circle of cinematic hell, and I am by no means defending The Expendables as a work of art. Unless, that is, you were raised on '80s action cinema and consider the efficient delivery of violent thrills to be an art form in and of itself. I was, I do, and I thus consider The Expendables to be an exemplary specimen of its genre. It's the one film of the year about which I can most unironically say that they don't make 'em like this anymore.

5. TRUE GRIT. The only 2010 release that I saw twice on the big screen, Joel and Ethan Coen's extremely entertaining and unusually touching Western is in many ways their most conventional motion picture (indicated by the fact that it is, as of this writing, on track to be their all-time highest-grossing release), but it's also a Coen film through and through, in its spot-on period detail, breathtaking and unusual imagery (cinematographer Roger Deakins deserves a long-overdue Oscar for his work here), idiosyncratic dialogue, and larger-than-life but still recognizably real characters. Jeff Bridges is a roaring, Falstaffian Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon matches him laugh for laugh as a Texas Ranger with an ego as big as his home state, and Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper are engagingly pathetic villains. The standout here, though, as you are no doubt already aware, is newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, whose gumption, no-nonsense strength, and veiled but ever-present humanity rank as one of the year's finest screen creations. My viewing companion was reminded of a young Judy Garland, and I am inclined to agree. The film is also surprisingly timely in its examination of the dangers of a life given over to selfishness (Cogburn and Brolin's Tom Chaney are men whose self-centered ways have led to drastically different but equally lamentable consequences) and quite moving in its portrayal of an unconventional trio of heroes. It's a movie about an old, fat, drunken buffoon, a pompous, arrogant young buffoon, and a forbidding, aged-before-her-time spinster-in-training. They are all these things for sure, yes...but they are also unapologetically and undeniably heroes, Coen brothers style.

4. ANOTHER YEAR. Mike Leigh is a filmmaker whose method of developing his screenplays improvisationally, with heavy collaboration from his actors, I have always admired more in theory than in practice. However, with Another Year, Leigh knocked it out of the park with a gently funny and emotionally resonant portrait of the desperate lives revolving around an almost disgustingly perfect middle-aged English married couple (played by Leigh veterans Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen). As their friends and extended family struggle with financial setbacks, the death of a loved one, and the frightening uncertainty of life as an aging single person, Broadbent and Sheen maintain their sunny dispositions and genially romantic natures...so much so that one eventually begins to wonder if their presence in their friends' lives is really less a blessing than it is an affront. It's the kind of film that gets you thinking about notions like that, mainly because Leigh and his brilliant cast wisely give us enough information to understand the relationships without telling us everything. We're always guessing, always trying to figure out exactly what these people mean to each other, how they feel about one another, the ways in which they've hurt one another. And in Lesley Manville's portrayal of a hard-drinking, desperately romantic co-worker of Sheen's, Leigh gives us one of the cinema's definitive portrayals of laughing-through-tears gentility and encroaching depression, complete with a final shot that frankly gave me chills. It's this performance, as much as anything else about it, that earns this film a place on my list, and I believe that Manville's name will be amongst those announced at the Oscar nomination broadcast on the 25th of this month.

3. THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES. By the time I saw Juan Jose Campanella's emotionally overwhelming Argentinian romantic thriller, it had already received the Academy Award for best foreign language film of 2009. It didn't play theaters in the States, however, until 2010, which allows me to include it on this year's list. Campanella's film is that rarest of things, a cross-genre picture that is an equally exceptional example of both of its chosen genres. Thriller fans will be exhilarated by this tale of a Buenos Aires-based police inspector (Ricardo Darin, whose world-weary performance reminded me of the best late-period Pacino) on the trail of a rapist-murderer whose connections, as they say, may go all the way to the top. The film is even more satisfying, however, as a romance, as Darin grapples with his ever-growing feelings for a mature, worldly-wise beauty (the striking Soledad Villamil) whose superior cultural and professional position, not to mention her own marriage, keep her forever just out of his reach...no matter that her feelings for him are just as strong. Campanella directs his screenplay (co-written by Eduardo Sacheri, who also wrote the novel that was the basis for this film) with intelligence and strong thriller instincts; a sprawling tracking shot of a soccer-stadium footchase was one of the year's most talked-about technical achievements. But he never lets generic obligations get in the way of the fact that this is, at its core, a film about a love that is real and strong, and can never be. Some films are the right films for their moment. They hit you where you live in ways that break down all your critical faculties. And at the exact moment at which I saw it, no film would have spoken to me more urgently or honestly than this one. I wonder, if I saw it again, if it would resonate with me in the same ways. My fears that it wouldn't are why I have only seen it one time...but my memories of it are strong enough that it still finds a home high in this countdown. Kudos, as well, to beloved Argentinian comic Guillermo Francella, who gives one of the year's funniest and most poignant supporting performances as Darin's alcoholic partner.

2. BLACK SWAN. Darren Aronofsky's swirling, operatic Grand Guignol of a ballet picture is, at its core, a very simple story about a young ballet dancer (Natalie Portman) who gets the role of a lifetime...and who, slowly but surely, lets it drive her out of her mind. This is one of the cinema's definitive portrayals of the extremes to which human beings can be pushed by the artistic impulse and the desire for perfection, as we see the tolls, both physical (a scene in which Portman treats a cracked toenail on her brutalized feet is cringe-inducing) and psychological, that the drive to express can take on the artist. It's commonplace in our culture to dismiss artistic greatness as something "natural", but Aronofsky's film is a reminder that, at its core, great art is hard, tough, damaging work. It can't be just coincidence, can it, that so many great artists go insane? This film, brilliantly directed from a strong, unusual script by Andres Heinz, Mark Heyman and John McLaughlin, will help you understand why. Aronofsky's drection is almost punishingly intense, and the film is one of the year's signal achievements in sheer filmmaking virtuosity, with beautifully gritty production design, exhilaratingly fleet-footed hand-held cinematography by Matthew Libatique, and a score by Clint Mansell that deftly weds electronica sounds with the sweeping romanticism of Tchaikofsky's Swan Lake. There are memorable supporting performances by Barbara Hershey (as the ballerina's creepy-cloying stage mother) and Vincent Cassel (again brilliant as the psychologically manipulative director of the ballet company). But this is Portman's show all the way, and she steps up with a dark, clawing, harrowing performance that ranks as the year's best, male or female, lead or supporting.

1. TOY STORY 3. To answer your main question first...no, I didn't cry at the end of Toy Story 3. But that doesn't mean I wasn't just as moved as everyone at this story of toys facing the ultimate nightmare for a plaything: their owner growing too old for play. This third installment of Pixar's seminal computer-animated trilogy packs just as many laughs as its two predecessors (two simple words that will likely get a laugh out of you right now: Spanish Buzz), as Woody, Buzz and the gang find themselves, with their beloved Andy going off to college, donated to a day-care center. This toy's fantasy, of a world where the children that love you never are around long enough to outgrow you, turns out to be a virtual concentration camp run by a broken-legged teddy bear whose own accidental abandonment by his owner has turned him into a monster. Kudos to Ned Beatty for a voice performance equally avuncular and menacing, and to director Lee Unkrich and writer Michael Arndt for creating the year's most complex and tragic villain. This film vibrates with the sheer joy of great filmmakers working at the peak of their powers. The voice cast all turns in exemplary work (special notice should be given to Michael Keaton, who scores huge laughs as an almost hopelessly metrosexual Ken doll), Randy Newman's score is his best of the trilogy, and the animation is full of dazzling set pieces without sacrificing the beautiful, colorful simplicity that made the original film so endearing. At its core, though, what is most wonderful about Toy Story 3 is what is so painful for its characters: the idea of saying good-bye to old friends. I was only seventeen when the original Toy Story was released (I saw it three times in its original theatrical run, and consider it one of my very favorite films), and it occurred to me as I was watching this that I have known Woody, Buzz and Andy's coterie of toys for almost half my life now. And I also realized, as I watched Andy say good-bye to them, that I was saying good-bye too. I think my comment to Arndt at the Q&A screening I attended says it as well as all of these words here do. "Thank you," I told him, "for letting me visit my old friends again."

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #71

2010-10-25T19:16:00.001-07:00

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)

The Writer

David Mamet

Why It's Here

I first saw The Untouchables shortly after its initial release on videocassette. I was ten years old at the time, and for reasons I cannot readily recall, it was the first film I ever saw about which I remember being aware that the screenwriter was someone who was considered a big deal. That writer was David Mamet, a native Chicagoan who got his start as the playwright behind such revered works as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (adapted for the screen in 1986 as About Last Night...) and 1984's Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross, itself later turned into a feature film scripted by Mamet himself. The playwright moved into screenwriting starting with 1979's TV movie A Life in the Theater, and he scored his first major cinematic success with Sidney Lumet's 1982 adaptation of Barry Reed's novel The Verdict, for which Mamet received his first Academy Award nomination. By the time The Untouchables hit theater screens five years later, Mamet had moved into directing himself; his feature debut House of Games, from his own original screenplay, was released the same year as The Untouchables (directed by Brian De Palma). None of this, however, was knowledge that I possessed upon my first viewing of The Untouchables. So why did I know this guy was a major-league player? Well, maybe because he could, in fact, write a script like The Untouchables. Tough, hard-edged, and graced with the profane street poetry that is the writer's better-or-worse trademark, Mamet's screenplay served as an exceptional introduction to his oeuvre and still, I think, ranks among his finest screen accomplishments.

It's no secret that I watch a lot of gangster movies, and The Untouchables is unusual in the genre in that it pits our rooting interest squarely on the side of the law. Most gangland sagas present us with cops who are minor players at best, and they are customarily portrayed as either woefully ineffectual (as with the majority of the lawmen sprinkled sparsely throughout GoodFellas) or deep in the pockets of the very men they are sworn to bring to justice (none perhaps as memorably as Sterling Hayden's snaky cop McCluskey in The Godfather). Indeed, Mamet kicks off The Untouchables by dropping us quite literally in the lap of the mob, as Al Capone (an enjoyable piece of self-parody by Robert DeNiro) holds court from his private barber's chair, declaring himself to be merely a simple businessman while across town, enforcers in Capone's employ bomb a general store that refuses to carry their liquor, killing an innocent little girl in the process. Like many film gangsters, the Capone of The Untouchables is presented as well-dressed, witty and possessing a certain sleazy charm, but unlike with other crime pictures from Casino to the De Palma-directed Scarface, there is never one moment in which we are encouraged to sympathize with these gangsters or wish to emulate them. These men, if one can even call them that, are motivated solely by greed or, as in the case of Capone's chief enforcer, the white-suited, dead-eyed Frank Nitti (Billy Drago, as one of the most hateful of all screen villains), by simple, naked bloodlust. Indeed, Mamet's villains here are so loathsome that they run the risk of shading over into caricature, especially daring in that they are largely based on real-life individuals. But Mamet, perhaps wisely, takes his villains so far over the top in their hatefulness in order to let us know that this is not going to be your typical gangster movie that places the audience on the side of the black hats. These are not villains you love to hate. You just hate them, and from the very first scenes, you're looking for someone to bring them down.

That unlikely avenger arrives in the person of Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner in a career-best performance that helped, along with the same year's No Way Out, to turn him into a major star. Like the earlier listed gangster classic Bonnie and Clyde, this film is a "print the legend" work that takes considerable liberties with the historical record, and while some of these changes are made to make the material more dramatic and "movie-friendly" (the real-life Nitti was a mousy accountant-like figure, a businessman rather than a killer, who took his own life instead of meeting the spectacular end Mamet fashions for him here), some are made to bolster Mamet's thematic points, and such is the case with his portrayal of Ness. One of the most iconic of American lawmen, Ness was in real life a native of Chicago, but Mamet here presents him as an outsider recently transferred to the city by the U.S. Treasury Department to lead a special task force assigned to take down Al Capone and bring an end to bloodshed on the streets of the Windy City. This alteration of the historical record is necessary in order for Mamet to provide Ness with the character arc that drives the narrative, in which the greenhorn, by-the-book law enforcer learns to do things "the Chicago way". Ness's first raid, on a warehouse alleged to be stockpiling a shipment of Canadian whiskey, is a disaster; busting the door down with a bulldozer and a phalanx of uniformed cops, Ness finds nothing but crates of Japanese parasols, the whole catastrophe captured on film by a nosy news photographer. Ness is humiliated before he's gotten started, but even here he reveals himself to be a man eager to learn from his mistakes (when Chicago cops tape the newspaper's disparaging headline about the raid to Ness's office door, he tacks it up on his bulletin board as a reminder that he's not infallible).

Learning of the deep-seated corruption and institutional apathy that allows Capone to operate, Ness enlists the aid of Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, in an Academy Award-winning performance), a gruff but dutiful Irish beat cop who assists Ness in picking additional operatives for his special anti-crime crusade. Reasoning that any longtime Chicago cops will be too tainted by corruption to be useful, the men recruit "George Stone", nee Guiseppe Petri (Andy Garcia), a crackshot cadet from the Academy who's chosen the law as his ticket out of the city's rough, gang-controlled south side. The team is rounded out by Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), a bespectacled accountant from the Washington bureau who has hit on the insane notion of going after Capone for his years-long failure to pay his federal income taxes. Try a stone killer for tax evasion? Even Ness thinks it's nuts, but with the bullets flying and Capone about to smuggle his bookkeeper (Jack Kehoe) out of Chicago, Ness has to ask himself the question Malone poses to him time and again: "What are you prepared to do?"

This issue, the lengths to which an otherwise upright and virtuous man will go to see justice done, is at the heart of The Untouchables, and throughout the film, Ness grapples with the implications of Malone's challenge. From the start, Ness presents himself as squarely on the side of law and order; when asked by a reporter about his own feelings on Prohibition, Ness responds merely by asserting that "it is the law of the land", and when Malone first puts the hard question to him following his initial failure, Ness states without hesitation that he will do "everything within the law" to get Capone. Malone's scoffing response to Ness makes the message clear: that ain't gonna fly in Chicago. "If you open the ball on these men, Mr. Ness," Malone assures him, "you must be prepared to go all the way, 'cause they won't give up the fight until one of you is dead." Malone, a textbook Campbellian mentor figure, schools his young charge in the ways of the city (when asked about how Capone was tipped off about Ness's planned warehouse raid, Malone simply responds, "Welcome to Chicago") and lets him know that the battle they've joined is an elemental eye-for-an-eye struggle in which they must be prepared to be as uncompromising as the forces arrayed against them. In a famous speech that likely won Connery his Oscar, Malone outlines for Ness "the Chicago way" of dealing with Capone: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." The bloodshed at first comes hard for Ness. During a shootout at the Canadian border with Capone-backed smugglers, Ness shotguns a gangster who wouldn't freeze when told to, then screams at him in frustration ("Didn't you hear what I said? What are you, deaf?") and throws his weapon to the ground. But at every turn, Capone proves himself willing to go a little further, push Ness a little harder. Bribery doesn't work, so the crime lord resorts to sending Nitti around with a covert threat against Ness's family, then finally dispatches the gunsel to the police station disguised as a uniformed officer to gun down Wallace as he escorts a Capone flunky set to testify against his boss. Upon Wallace's death, Ness, in his most reckless display of bravado, marches into Capone's hotel headquarters and challenges the gangster to a one-on-one fistfight right there; he's dragged out by Malone as Capone taunts him in classic Mamet style ("You got nothing! Nothing! You don't got a thing, and if you were a man, you'd have done it by now!").

Ness finally learns his lesson in the hardest way imaginable as Malone, in one of the most wrenching death scenes in crime cinema, is tommy-gunned to death by Nitti while Capone, at the zenith of his loathsomeness, sits crying at a performance of I Pagliacci. When Ness arrives at his fallen friend's side, the barely-alive Malone has both the schedule for the escaping bookkeeper's soon-to-depart train and one final question for Ness. It is, of course, "What are you prepared to do?" And now, at last, Ness is prepared to do anything. For the first time, in the train station, Ness shoots first against Capone's goons, and he's willing to put an innocent woman and her baby right in harm's way to bring down his men. (During the shootout, the baby's carriage clatters down the station's grand staircase in an homage to Battleship Potemkin that admittedly feels much more like De Palma than Mamet.) Finally, during Capone's tax evasion trial, Ness uncovers a piece of evidence directly linking Nitti to Malone's death and, after a run-and-gun shootout over the courthouse roof, the unrepentant gunsel gloats about his hand in the old cop's killing ("I said your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig"). But Nitti doesn't know that the straight-arrow Ness is now a changed man...which he proves by hurling Nitti off the roof to his death. And Ness doesn't feel a single pang of remorse. As he tells the judge in his chambers, "I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right." In recent years, Mamet, a self-confessed "recovering liberal", has embraced a newfound conservatism unfashionable within the theatrical circles in which he operates, but the seeds of this sort of philosophy were already present in The Untouchables, a film released in the waning years of the Reagan era that falls perfectly in line with the by-any-means-necessary law-and-order ethos of those times. Ness learns that the only way to stop a killer is to kill them yourself, and that when Malone told him he was taking a "blood oath", they weren't just fancy figurative words. He was writing that oath in real blood that turned out, tragically, to be his own.

This is not to say, of course, that The Untouchables presents a system that is above reproach in its attitude towards governance and law enforcement, and he fully recognizes in the film's Chicago a deep-seated institutional corruption that allows men like Capone (or later white-collar criminals like Bernard Madoff and Kenneth Lay) to thrive. Malone is the mouthpiece for much of Mamet's disgust with the system's inherent dishonesty; the old cop describes his hometown as a place that "stinks like a whorehouse at low tide", and himself as "the one good cop in the bad town". Indeed, Malone helps Ness lead the charge against Capone largely out of his own sense of indignation at the criminality amongst his beat-walking brethren that he's been forced to swallow for decades, a hypocrisy so thick and nauseating that he's willing at this late stage in his life to throw his own colleagues under the bus just to get the stink of their shame out of his uniform (it's telling that Ness and Malone forge their bond while kneeling in a church, with Malone fingering his medallion of St. Jude...patron saint of lost causes). In an electrifying scene, Malone confronts one of his oldest friends on the force, the grizzled police chief Mike Dorsett (a nice, understated turn by Richard Bradford), about his complicity in Capone's crimes. Mike, who we've earlier seen both joking with fellow cops about Ness's failed warehouse bust and letting Nitti walk out of the police station right under his nose after killing Wallace (although he's nicely hypocritical enough to cross himself as he sees the killer escaping), blasts Malone for his willingness to turn his back on his own past, but Malone wants no part of it. He says he's sick of being sick over the things he's seen in his years as a cop, and flat-out tells Mike that if he doesn't give him the information he needs to get Capone, "I'm gonna rat you out for all the shit that I know you've done in your life! I'm gonna turn you over!" Fortunately, Mamet is a smart enough writer, and true enough to his period, not to turn Malone into a simple stick figure of righteous vengeance. He is a man with his own failings, such as his unrepentant anti-Italian racism; he blasts Stone, upon finding out he's an Italian, as "a lying member of a no-good race", and he throws around "wop" and "dago" with a frequency that is jarring in a contemporary film, but undeniably honest to the era in which the film is set (it almost makes one wonder if Malone's sensibilities would have been so offended if an Irish gang was taking over the city streets). It is also notable, as well, that we see Malone, shortly before his murder, sneaking a drink from a bottle he keeps hidden in his stove. Two of the Untouchables, Malone and Wallace, take a drink during the course of the film. Neither of them makes it to the final reel alive. Hypocrisy is thriving in the Chicago of The Untouchables, but if you'll kill to keep others from taking a drink, you'd better be prepared to bleed if you take one yourself.

The Untouchables is by no means a perfect screenplay. While Mamet's reasons for rendering his gangsters as vicious near-caricatures is understandable, one expects a little more dimension from villains in this day and age, and rendering Capone and his cohorts with more complexity might have made the battle even more compelling. Likewise, Mamet's script struggles, as his work often does, with its portrayal of its female characters. The only substantial role for a woman is that of Ness's wife Catherine (Patricia Clarkson), who basically serves to unreservedly support her husband and to show up out of nowhere at one point with a newborn baby; her role is so insubstantial that even though she's clearly identified in the dialogue as "Catherine", she's listed in the credits simply as "Ness's Wife" (which is even stranger when you consider that Ness's real wife at the time was named Edna; it makes you wonder why Mamet even bothered to make the name change). Likewise, Capone, who was both a doting husband and a patron of prostitutes, one of whom gave him the syphilis that ultimately killed him, here might as well be a celibate monk; I don't recall seeing a woman anywhere even near his presence during the course of the film. Arguably the most important female presence in the film is provided by the mother (played by Colleen Bade) of the little girl killed in the general store bombing; her tearful entreaty to Ness following his warehouse-raid gaffe is presented as one of the key spurs that keeps him from throwing in the towel. Important as this character is, though, she's only in the one scene, and The Untouchables is a prime example of a "movie for guys who like movies".

Even with these failings, The Untouchables still might have made this list simply on the strength of Mamet's dialogue. This was my first encounter with Mamet's four-letter fireworks, and he doesn't disappoint, delivering a script rife with memorable lines, dramatic speeches and that particular rhythmic cadence that can only be called "Mametian". Each character brings the linguistic goods in his own manner, from Ness's upright, almost formalistic speaking style (he has a great moment when he tells a bribe-bearing alderman, played by longtime Chicago improvisation master Del Close, to tell his "master" that "we must agree to disagree") to Malone's hard-nosed, Irish-inflected delivery (in a perfectly Irish-Catholic putdown, he assures a criminal he'll be "hangin' higher than Haman" if he doesn't cooperate) to Capone, who is the film's great speechmaker. Indeed, much of DeNiro's performance here consists of monologues, usually delivered for a crowd of sycophantic reporters whose presence reminds us that Capone was one of our country's first nationally renowned celebrity crooks. Here is Mamet utterly in his element, and he gives Capone's speeches a rough, sarcastic wit inflected always with the tough streets on which the man made his name. He's witty enough to quip about his chosen profession ("On a boat, it's bootlegging. On Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality.") and curiously poetic even in rage, as when confronted with hollow protestations from his men following a successful Ness raid, he blurts, "What am I, alone in this world? Did I ask you what you're trying to do? Did I ask you what you're trying to do?" But Mamet knows that all of his colorful language threatens to make Capone too likable, so his most memorable moment is a silent one, in which he uses a baseball bat to bash in the skull of a lieutenant who has failed him. (By the way, this is another moment in which Mamet deviates from the historical record; it was actually two men that Capone grand-slammed into the grave.) Mamet, as much as any writer alive, has a dialogue style so distinctive that you can identify a film as his even with the picture turned off, and The Untouchables is a prime example of that style in full f-word-filled flower.

I have seen numerous Mamet pictures since The Untouchables, but it still ranks high on my personal list of his best pieces of screenwriting. It's a film that has had a tremendous influence on my own judgment of screenplays, my expectations from a quality crime picture, and my own screenwriting work (my own recently completed script has been compared by several of its first readers to Mamet, and to The Untouchables in particular). It turns out that my early, near-inexplicable assessment of David Mamet was correct. He is a big deal. After all...he's the guy who wrote The Untouchables.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: Writers Guild of America Award, Best Adapted Screenplay

THE ZOMBIE RISES EARLY: IT SEES "OUTSIDE THE LAW (HORS-LA-LOI)"!

2010-10-14T20:33:00.001-07:00

The French-Algerian conflicts of the mid-20th century obviously left deep scars on the national psyches of both countries involved, and filmmakers are still grappling with these wounds in the same way that many American films of the last few decades have attempted to come to grips with the traumatic aftershocks of the Vietnam War. Jean-Francois Richet's recent two-part biopic of legendary French bank robber Jacques Mesrine suggested that its subject was forever damaged by his time as a de facto executioner during his Algerian military service, a mental rupture reflected both in his casually violent criminal acts and in his willingness to cloak such amorality in the trappings of a freedom fighter. On the other side of the battle line is Rachid Bouchareb's Outside the Law (Hors-La-Loi). This grand-scale saga of three brothers caught up in the postwar resistance is Algeria's official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film category at next year's Academy Awards. In its ambition and emotional breadth, Bouchareb's film strives for comparison with such epics of nationalist struggle as Gandhi and Lawrence of Arabia, and despite a few missteps, the film largely succeeds in its presentation of a nation's battle for freedom as the story of a single family.

That family is cast to the winds in a prologue set in 1925, when an Algerian land baron, acting under orders from French gendarmerie, evicts a family who have spent centuries working the soil that is cruelly wrested from beneath them. The family finds themselves in the city of Setif, where in 1945, they and several of their relatives are swept up in the infamous May 8, 1945 massacre, in which French soldiers opened fire on a group of Algerian citizens marching for independence from their colonial masters (this event occurred, in one of history's great ironies, on V-E Day, when all of Europe, Occupied France included, was freed from the yoke of the Nazi party). The youngest brother, Said (Jamel Debbouze), at first wants no part of politics; he's a slick operator who's forced into a life of petty crime when the family is driven after the massacre into a slum outside Paris. Soon, he finds himself prospering as a club owner and boxing promoter, and though he's struggling to buy his way out of the shantytown, his hopes at first are for nothing more than that. But the middle brother, the fiery Abdelkader (Sami Bouajila), was radicalized by his time in prison following the Setif massacre, and upon his release, he immediately joins the French-soil Algerian resistance, first by attempting to organize the workers at local factories, then by turning into an underground soldier, killing police, French soldiers, even fellow Algerians who refuse to get on the resistance train. Caught between the two is the oldest brother, Messaoud (Roschdy Zem), a veteran of the French colonial wars in Vietnam who carries the scars of battle on his face and in his soul. He at first wants no part of the killing, but is soon blazing away at police with a pistol in both hands, all the while lamenting to the boys' long-suffering mother (Chafia Boudraa) that "all I know is death". Gunning for the brothers is Colonel Faivre (Bernard Blancan), a French secret-police operative and former POW-camp associate of Messaoud's who is given the blessing of the French government to fight the Algerians' terrorism with guerrilla tactics of his own.

In many respects, Outside the Law is quite similar to last year's elegant Danish historical thriller Flame & Citron. Both films foreground the psychic toll political resistance takes on those who participate, and both feature spectacularly staged scenes of violence on the streets of major European cities, working as action thrillers as much as they do as historical drama. Outside the Law, however, is far more ambitious than the Danish film, which focused on the drama within the hearts of the film's two heroes more than their political motivations. After all, when you're fighting Nazis like Flame and Citron were, it's much easier to present your political drama in black-and-white terms. Outside the Law paints on a much broader canvas, both chronologically (the film's narrative spans from 1925 all the way to the Algerians' eventual liberation from French control in 1962) and emotionally, as the brothers grapple at all times with the contradictions and compromises inherent in their chosen paths. Said, while a proud Algerian who covertly funds his brothers' revolutionary activities, cannot resist the decadent pull of Western hedonism; he alone among the brothers smokes and drinks, and he almost seems willing to throw the cause to the dogs if it means he can't promote his prize boxer in an upcoming title bout (no matter to him that the pug, a fellow Algerian native, will be fighting under the French flag, a betrayal that infuriates his brothers). Abdelkader, whose life seems given over to nothing but the freedom of his people, finds himself conflicted when he is romantically drawn to Helene (Sabrina Seyvesou), an Anglo-French sympathizer who secretly traffics money for the resistance. Messaoud, who perhaps unwisely starts a family in the midst of the chaos surrounding him, uses that wife and child as an ever-more-desperate crutch propping up his increasingly bloody struggle. Even the antagonist is not free from conflict, as Colonel Faivre, a former Free French fighter himself, carries on against the Algerians even though he fully acknowledges that the French cause he kills for is doomed to failure.

Bouchareb's screenplay, co-written with Olivier Lorelle, is almost novelistic in the density of its characters' conflicts and motivations, and at times the dramatic interplay is so multi-faceted it threatens to become overwhelming. Indeed, some of the film's plot threads are almost by necessity insufficiently developed; both Abdelkader and Messaoud's romances, for example, seem motivated more by plot concerns than by any real passion from the men for these women. This narrative over-generosity may also account for some of the film's pacing issues. The picture runs 138 minutes, not an unheard-of length for a period picture of such thematic ambition, but considering the film's wealth of action sequences and tense thriller moments, you feel every minute of that near two-and-a-half-hour runtime. This is not to say that the film makes the viewer restless, nor that it is filled with unnecessary scenes. In fact, the deliberate pacing probably has as much to do with the film's steady, brooding tone as much as with any issues with the filmmaking itself.

That filmmaking, in fact, is extremely impressive, with Outside the Law boasting production values the equal of any major Hollywood release this year. Christophe Beaucarne's cinematography is a sumptuous mixture of noirish shadows and fleet-footed action painting, and effortlessly authentic period atmosphere is provided by art director Yan Arlaud and costume designers Stephane Rollot and Edith Vesperini. Armand Amar contributes an emotionally powerful and expertly utilized score, all the more remarkable when one considers that he's up against sound design that has every gun blast and explosion (and there are a lot of them) shaking the theater. Bouchareb's action choreography is leagues ahead of the puree-editing style common in contemporary Hollywood thrillers. His major set pieces, such as a bold winter-night raid on a French police station and a climactic shootout with Faivre's secret police, are shot with maximum crispness and edited for perfect clarity, while never undercutting the fear and fury of those encounters. So skillful is the director's presentation of these scenes, in fact, that the film at all times runs the risk of turning into an exploitation picture utilizing real historical tragedy for cheap thrills (it's notable that Bouchareb has cited both the French-made resistance thriller Army of Shadows and American crime epic The Godfather as influences on this film). The fact that the film never makes this mistake is a testament both to Bouchareb's skill as a filmmaker and to the irreproachable import of his subject matter.

Bouchareb is just as gifted with actors as with action, and Outside the Law features several performances that rank among the year's very best. Debbouze has an effortless little-tough-guy swagger that reminded me of Edward G. Robinson, and Zem's haunted eyes and hulking presence perfectly fit his walking-wounded character. Bouajila, his penetrating eyes framed by spectacles well-suited to the film's most forward-looking character, strongly conveys both Abdelkader's fiery conviction and the strain such passion has taken on his spirit. Blancan is a suitably stoic nemesis for the brothers, and Boudraa, as this tragic family's matriarch, has an onscreen presence I will never forget. Whether bellowing "God will curse you!" at the gendarmerie who evict her family, slumping wordlessly to the floor after the arrest of her son following the Setif massacre, or clutching a bag of soil from their homeland to her chest as she lies stricken with tuberculosis, the actress simply and powerfully embodies the battered but indomitable will of both her character's family and the Algerian people. Performances in international films like Outside the Law are rarely given serious attention during awards season, but I hope that the actors in this film are an exception to that unwritten rule; Bouajila and Boudraa in particular are worthy of serious consideration for their work here.

They say that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, but it often seems as if all the remembrance in the world cannot stem our species's seemingly fanatical drive to eradicate anyone who doesn't talk like us, look like us, or pray to the same God that we do. Nevertheless, Outside the Law recreates a moment in time that many in this country likely know little about, but that reverberates daily throughout the lives of those whose families, countries, and worldviews were touched by it. It's a serious-minded yet always entertaining piece of cinema that reminds us that you don't have to present a historical event like a page from a history book to get your point across...and if you do, make sure it's a book, like this film, that's colorful, well-written, and aimed with equal force at the head, heart and gut.

Outside the Law (Hors-La-Loi) opens in New York City on November 3, in Los Angeles on November 10, and expands wider throughout the country starting on November 19.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #72

2010-08-19T14:35:00.000-07:00

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971)

The Writer

Stanley Kubrick; based on the novel by Anthony Burgess

Why It's Here

With A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick becomes the first screenwriter to make a second appearance on the Zombie's screenplay countdown. Like his earlier listed title, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick's Orange is a sci-fi-tinged, philosophically ambitious tale of possible futures inspired by the work of a great English-language author...but in many ways, that's where the similarities between the two films end. 2001 is a grand-scale epic, featuring staggering set design and groundbreaking visual effects. By comparison, A Clockwork Orange was relatively low-budget (Kubrick shot the film in less than a year, an unprecedentedly short time for the notoriously perfectionist director), shot almost entirely on locations and featuring, as arguably its most ambitious special effect, a not-all-that-realistic back-screen projection shot of young hoodlums out for a joyride. Also, the characters of 2001 are so bloodless and robotic that the audience's strongest emotional response is to the death throes of a computer being shut down, while A Clockwork Orange foregrounds the most exuberant and lively character in all of Kubrick's work, a dapper chap named Alex (Malcolm McDowell, in a Golden Globe-nominated performance) who favors a walking stick, bowler hat, and false eyelashes. Of course, Alex's other interests are rape, robbery, stealing cars and cash, joining his similarly attired fellow "droogs" for a brutal dust-up with a rival gang...oh, and Beethoven. "Lovely, lovely Ludwig Van." A Clockwork Orange is one of the screen's definitive portraits of sociopathology, as well as a trenchant examination of the cost to society when the "cure" for such deviance becomes as potentially damaging, to both the individual mind and to the public, as the behavior itself.

Kubrick's first act plunges us with virtually no setup into Alex's nightly routine. We see he and his buddies getting crocked on drugged milk at a local bar, beating up a harmless old drunken hobo (Paul Farrell), and interrupting a rival gang's rape of a young girl in an old theater for a bloody rumble. Then, they head out to the country in a stolen sports car for "a little of the old 'surprise visit'"...the surprise part being their assault and violent rape of the wife (Adrienne Corri) of a middle-aged writer of subversive, anti-government literature (Patrick Magee), Alex all the while favoring his victim with his lusty rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" (the use of this song was apparently an improvisation on the part of McDowell, who, when asked to provide a song for the scene, could only recall the lyrics to that one). Much of this action is narrated by Alex in a curious hybrid language, invented by the novel's author, Anthony Burgess, and loaded with futuristic slang. The rival gang's would-be rape victim is a "devotchka", and he threatens to kick his enemy gangsters in the "yarbles" ("If you have any yarbles!"). In interviews, Kubrick expressed concerns that the large number of invented futuristic words in the dialogue might turn off the film's potential audience, but he is wise to always use these unfamiliar expressions in a context that makes them perfectly understandable and readily recalled when they appear again. So right off the bat, Kubrick clubs us over the head with a protagonist who speaks an uncommon tongue, engaged in behavior that is abhorrent at best. To make matters worse, he is clearly the character onscreen with whom we are meant to identify; he narrates the film (frequently confiding in us, chummily, as "your friend and humble narrator"), is the leader of the gang, and is clearly the focal point of every scene he's in. However, Kubrick is smart enough to give Alex, amidst this first-act chaos, one shining focal point of humanity. Back at the milk bar after their evening of crime, Alex is pleased to find a female patron favoring her friends with a vocal rendition of Beethoven's exultant "Ode to Joy", from the fourth movement of his ninth symphony. Alex, you see, has a weakness for the classics (as does the film itself; like 2001, A Clockwork Orange is scored with the likes of Beethoven, Rossini, and Elgar), so much so that when his fellow droog, the thick-skulled Dim (Warren Clarke), blows a razzberry at the singer, Alex clouts him across the knees with his cane before raising his milk glass to the singer as a toast. Outlaw critic Vern, in his book Seagalogy (a book-length analysis, believe it or not, of the films of Steven Seagal), discusses his "theory of badass juxtaposition", in which a tough-guy character is paradoxically made tougher by the inclusion of a sensitive character trait or unexpected artistic proclivity. This idea, however, did not originate with Vern or Seagal, and Alex's love of Beethoven is a textbook application of the concept. Granted, Alex mainly enjoys Beethoven because it fills his mind with images of perversity and murder, but at least he's connecting with true artistic genius and beauty, however dubiously. Nevertheless, Kubrick, in the first act of A Clockwork Orange, throws down the gauntlet, hard. He seems to be almost challenging his audience not to run from this hooligan, to stick around and see what he's got in store for Alex. So confident is Kubrick's writing, and so demonically self-assured McDowell's performance, that we're hurled, helplessly, along for the ride.

When Alex returns home following his evening of debauchery, we see the first indications that all is not well in Alex's universe, and that his criminality may be merely a symptom of a larger systemic problem. He lives with his parents in a horrible, brutalist office block, the lobby and courtyard choked with garbage and befouled with obscene graffiti (nothing in the film indicates that all this waste and blasphemy is Alex's doing alone). His parents are clinically detached drones who pay Alex the most cursory attention imaginable before heading off to work, ominously, at "the factory"...literal cogs in a horrific machine whose true depths Kubrick will plumb later in the film. Alex is visited by a truant officer, Mr. Deltoid (Aubrey Morris), who, with his sniveling manner and clutching hands, seems less interested in molding Alex's character than in getting his fingers into the boy's BVDs. The only potential authority figures in Alex's life are thus revealed as ineffectual, seized with heinous ulterior motives, or absent altogether (we hear that Alex is truant, but we never see him in school). We've seen Alex's life of rebellion. Now we know what he's rebelling against. But in the world of A Clockwork Orange, there is dishonor even among thieves, as Alex is presented by Dim and fellow droog Georgie (James Marcus) with the opportunity for a "man-sized crast", a potentially lucrative robbery score against the owner of a health farm who lives on the sprawling grounds alone with her cats. In the process of ripping off the place, Alex attacks and accidentally kills the cat lady (Miriam Karlin), and when the police arrive, Dim and Georgie shatter a milk bottle across Alex's face and leave him to face the jackals alone. It's a classic example of the evildoer being hoisted by his own petard...but that's just the beginning of the injustices that will be heaped on Alex in the remainder of the film.

In prison, Alex is presented by the chaplain (Godfrey Quigley) with the opportunity to cut his sentence substantially by participating in an experimental criminal cure: the Ludovico treatment. This process, a form of extreme aversion therapy, sees a straitjacketed Alex getting his eyes pinned open while he is forced to watch films of rape, murder, torture and other atrocities. The process seems to work well for a time, with Alex at first enthusiastically "viddying" these "horrorshow" images but soon finding himself physically sickened by the never-ending onslaught of brutality and darkness. Then, on the final day of treatment, a film of concentration-camp footage is accompanied by Alex's beloved Ludwig Van, the very same Ode to Joy he saluted in the milk bar. The result is that not only is Alex now made nauseous to the point of paralysis by the notion of committing the evil acts he used to relish, but he is also prostrated with illness by the sound of the one pure, beautiful thing that had managed to penetrate his damaged mind (in a great ironic use of language, Alex declares scoring Hitler's crimes with Beethoven to be "a sin", as if nothing else he had witnessed on all these films would be considered such). The treatment's originator, Dr. Brodsky (Carl Duering), declares it to be a side effect completely beyond their control ("Here's the punishment element, perhaps," he muses), but it is, interestingly, the same chaplain who suggested Alex for the experiment who fully grasps its darker implications. Not only has Alex senselessly been deprived of the one decent joy of his existence, but he has not even truly been rehabilitated, as all of his anti-violence impulses are completely devoid of free will; he has "ceased to be a creature capable of moral choice," and acts merely on instinctual aversion to the physical discomfort his condition now causes. In politics, as opposed to religion, however, the end clearly justifies the means, as the government minister (Anthony Sharp) who supervises the experiment declares it a success: "We are not concerned with motives, with the higher ethics. We are concerned only with cutting down crime...Reclamation! Joy before the angels of God! The point is that it works!" Alex has been molded into the fascist's dream, a docile puppet afraid to do anything that smacks of true consciousness. A mechanized organic mass. A clockwork orange.

Alex is released from prison, and the third act reveals the potential horrors of a life robbed of free will. The victimizer has become the consummate victim, unable to strike any blow in his own defense, no matter how justified. He doubles up in anguish after threatening to take a punch at the lodger (Clive Francis) who has usurped his room at his parents' house, and he is unable to raise a hand to defend himself when the tramp he once attacked sets upon him with a gang of fellow indigents. He is rescued, or so he thinks, by two policemen...Georgie and Dim, and the presence of Alex's once-gleeful accomplices in uniform reminds us again of the ends-justify-the-means philosophy of fascist thinking. They too beat up Alex, nearly drowning him in a horse trough, and the only place he can turn to for succor is a country house...the same house, it turns out, where Alex raped the writer's wife to death before his incarceration. The writer, now in a wheelchair and accompanied everywhere by a hulking bodyguard, at first recognizes Alex only as the victim of the oppressive government's awful "crime cure", and plans to exploit him as a symbol of the abominations of the system he has dedicated his life to destroying. But Alex exposes his true identity by belting out "Singin' In the Rain" while soaking in a bath, and the writer, now perfectly willing to exploit the unfortunate side effects of his hated Ludovico treatment for his own ends, locks the young criminal in an attic room and tortures him by blasting Beethoven's Ninth through the walls. Desperate to free himself, Alex leaps from a high window and winds up in traction. And the hypocrisy just gets deeper and deeper, as Alex's parents appear at his bedside with contrite faces and offers to take him back in. Meanwhile, the minister who damaged Alex's psyche and cast him out helpless into the world comes to the boy with a proposal for them to join forces, Alex as a political symbol of the goodness of the government. But little does the minister know that Alex's recent "tortures of the damned" have brought him back to his old self. We see glimmers of this when Alex, performing a free-association exercise with a psychiatrist (Pauline Taylor), begins utilizing his old slang, and his regression becomes full-blown when the minister presents him with a gift from the government: a huge stereo playing Beethoven. As Alex's face warps into a twisted leer, his mind fills with his beloved old images of "the old 'in-out, in-out'", and the voice-over narration informs us, "I was cured, all right." Cue "Singin' in the Rain". Heh heh heh.

Some might knock the structural convenience of the rehabilitated Alex encountering primarily people whom he had somehow wronged upon his release, but the presence of these characters is necessary to allow Kubrick to illustrate the deep systemic hypocrisy that infects the society of A Clockwork Orange from the government on down. The system is willing to decimate the mind of an uncooperative hoodlum like Alex, but is content to coddle the like-minded behavior of Georgie and Dim, as long as they play ball. Likewise, the government-hating "subversive" writer is perfectly willing to embrace the government's dubious methods when it suits his own personal ends. Hypocrisy at the highest levels is a social reality hard to ignore in this day and age, and Kubrick's screenplay masterfully anatomizes it as a deep-rooted problem far from the power of individuals to influence. This does not, however, get him entirely off the hook for the darker implications of his film's philosophy. Indeed, it is hard for me to think of a film that more effectively argues a philosophical position with which I find it difficult to agree. Granted, free will is the greatest gift mankind possesses. It is what keeps us from all being trapped into lockstep, socially circumscribed boxes, what allows us to be free and to dream our dreams. It allows me to write these film critiques, and it allows you to read them, and to disagree with my points if you choose to. But what do you do when an individual's choices are all morally suspect, if not flat-out evil? True, Alex may be the product of a negligent system that has left him with few options or outlets for his better self. But that does not change the fact that no one put the club in his hand or the drugged milk into his bloodstream. He has chosen a life of rape, pillage and murder, a life that actively harms others who only want to be left alone, a life that he has taken to, it must never be forgotten, with outright joy. Even his interaction with his beloved Ludwig Van stirs in him only thoughts of further horrors to inflict. Certainly a young man of this type cannot be permitted to simply do whatever he pleases, regardless of the consequences to his fellow man or his own soul. But if we privilege the free will of one person over that of another, aren't we playing God? Isn't every soul a valuable and precious one, even a soul as twisted and violent as Alex's? One thing you can always say about Kubrick is that he never makes it easy on his audience, and A Clockwork Orange is inarguably his most troubling and complex philosophical statement.

Of course, a film laden with such provocative thematic material and imagery is bound to cause controversy, and A Clockwork Orange caused more than most. Kubrick and his family received death threats following the release of the film, and after several copycat crimes (including the 1973 gang rape of a young girl by men crooning "Singin' In the Rain"), the filmmaker himself withdrew the picture from circulation in his adopted UK homeland. Many, admittedly, have taken precisely the wrong message from A Clockwork Orange, viewing it, like many erroneously view Brian DePalma's Scarface, as an apologia for and glorification of criminality. In both cases, however, those acolytes fail to recognize the terrible punishments inflicted upon the film's criminal protagonists. Of course, the condemnation is more explicit for Scarface's Tony Montana, who winds up floating face-down in a swimming pool, riddled with bullets, while Alex finds himself with a cushy government job and the renewed freedom to indulge his every evil impulse. A Clockwork Orange is unquestionably more ambivalent in its vision of criminality... which would explain why it, and not Scarface, found itself listed as one of Premiere Magazine's "25 Most Dangerous Films of All Time". That fact, along with the film's still-relevant messages about the morality of extreme law-and-order countermeasures and the place of torture in the toolbox of a "civilized" government, have made Orange a picture that people still debate today, nearly forty years after its original release.

By positioning A Clockwork Orange as a complex philosophical treatise, I fear I have perhaps discounted the other reason the film has lasted for so long: it's more fun than any other Kubrick picture. While McDowell's high-kicking performance at times undercuts the message of Kubrick's screenplay (it's hard to buy Alex as totally rehabilitated when McDowell's every word drips with oily insincerity), it nevertheless works in concert with the writing and direction to achieve the impossible by making this monster watchable for 137 minutes. Not only watchable, but likable, as every other character in the film is a dimwit, a pervert, a hypocrite, or a fellow thug without even Alex's saving grace of charm and sly wit. No other Kubrick film, even Dr. Strangelove, delivers more consistent, albeit extremely perverse, laughs, whether Alex is kicking stomachs in time to "Singin' in the Rain" or enjoying his Beethoven under the watchful eyes of a plaster statue of four kick-dancing naked Christs. (This is to say nothing of a fast-motion orgy scene, set to a rollicking rendition of the "William Tell Overture", that is, in my opinion, the funniest thing Kubrick ever put on film.) As tremendous as 2001: A Space Odyssey may be, it's a film I can only watch on special occasions, when I'm in a meditative, thoughtful mood and I need a film to complement that. By contrast, I could watch A Clockwork Orange again right now, and have a high old time doing it. It is arguably Kubrick's greatest single piece of entertainment, and the fact that I believe this makes me do exactly what Kubrick wanted me to do when I watched the film in the first place. It makes me think, long and hard, about myself.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: Academy Award, Best Adapted Screenplay; BAFTA Award, Best Screenplay; Writers Guild of America Award, Best Adapted Drama Screenplay

FRESH FROM THE GRAVE: IT SEES "THE EXPENDABLES"!

2010-08-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

A recent mini-trend in Hollywood cinema has been the resurrection of the "men on a mission" film, that brawny sub-class of the action genre in which a team of tough guys, each with their own macho-destructo specialty, join forces to defeat the evil dictator, save the indigenous people, rescue the damsel in distress, etc. Last spring's The Losers updated this genre with a winking pop-comics sensibility, and June gave us The A-Team, an over-the-top redo of a hairy-chested '80s TV classic. Now comes the biggest, burliest, and most explosive of the bunch, Sylvester Stallone's The Expendables, and what sets this picture apart from those others is that, true to its maker's sensibility, it doesn't have an ironic bone in its pumped-up, heavily muscled body. Rather than using its hyperbolic gun battles, bone-crushing fights and testosterone-drenched cast as a cheeky goof on action films, Stallone has chosen to do what, in these postmodern days, counts as an act of true filmmaking heroism. He gives it to us straight. Stallone's film is not commenting on '80s action cinema, on old-school machismo, indeed even on his own career. Instead, he is celebrating all three by serving up the biggest, grandest action spectacle he can muster. The Expendables is a film that, with virtually no tweaking, could very easily have been released at the height of Stallone's mid-'80s career. And as a child of the '80s who was weaned on the collected works of Stallone, Schwarzenegger, and their vein-popping brethren, I can say without hesitation that The Expendables was the most fun I've had in a theater all year, and the best pure action film I've seen in a long time.

Stallone, who in addition to directing the film co-wrote the screenplay with Doom's David Callaham, stars as Barney Ross, grizzled leader of a band of multi-talented guns for hire. These brothers in arms are bonded by their complementary combat skills and the age-old credo of teamwork, but after some bad craziness during a raid on a Somalian pirate ship, it's clear that the old gang is feeling the weight of their lives of violence. When Ross is approached by the mysterious, agency-connected Mr. Church (Bruce Willis in a crowd-pleasing cameo) about a new job checking out the troubles on an island down in the Caribbean, he's reluctant. But once he and his right-hand man, the knife-throwing Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), visit the island, which is being crushed under the iron fist of a psychotic Noriega-style dictator (David Zayas), it's not too long before the Expendables are ready to strap on the guns and bring the pain. Of course, it doesn't hurt that Ross forges a connection with the dictator's daughter (Giselle Itie), a beautiful firebrand sworn to bring down her father...or that the reputation of America itself is on the line, as the general's in cahoots with a rogue CIA operative (Eric Roberts) who's using the new regime to back his own covert cocaine empire.

Plotwise, The Expendables is '80s-action textbook, providing a suitable framework for violent set pieces that's neither too simplistic for a feature nor too convoluted to slow down the fireworks. Some critics have blasted the film's story as threadbare, but really, who goes to a Stallone picture for plot? If you queue up for a film like The Expendables, you're there for star power and action, and on both counts, Stallone delivers. For months prior to its release, the film made headlines as a sort of summit of action stars past, present and future. Speculative buzz built around planned cameos by action superstars, some accurate (Willis), some misinformation (despite the talk, Steven Seagal is nowhere to be found, and though Jean-Claude Van Damme was offered a role, he declined). Still, even with a few names missing, The Expendables is a veritable who's who of action beefcake. In classic men-on-a-mission style, each member of the team is given his own quirks and combat specialties, and the characters are embodied by the cast with all the presence and strength that has made them genre luminaries.

Stallone, of course, is the anchor, his rugged stoicism providing the strong center every great action team needs. Of course, it doesn't hurt that, at 64 years of age, he's still in damned impressive shape, steroids or no, and he handles himself in the action scenes with aplomb (in one great moment, he changes pistol magazines in the blink of an eye). Some have seen Stallone's pairing with Statham here as a sort of passing of the action-hero torch, and while a better case might be made for others being the true current mantle-bearers of the genre (truth be told, in their sly wit, Statham's action performances have always reminded me more of Willis than Stallone), the two of them make an excellent on-screen team, Statham's football-hooligan gruffness sparking nicely off Stallone's more mature authority. Statham is also given a nice showcase action moment, an apropos-of-nothing scene in which he takes on an entire basketball game in hand-to-hand combat. Also along for the ride is mammoth Scandinavian Dolph Lundgren, who memorably battled Stallone as the hulking Russian Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. Here, he's a drugged-out, wild-card Expendable who sells his team out to Roberts's villain, and it is great fun seeing this near-cartoonish behemoth plying his trade on the big screen again. UFC world champion Randy Couture, who I had never seen in anything prior to this, has a few funny moments as Toll Road, who counters his combat prowess with extreme neuroses (he's always trying to talk the other members of the team into going to therapy sessions with him), and Terry Crews, who handles both action and comedy with impressive ease, is a beautifully snarly presence as Hale Caesar, the team's resident ordnance expert. Of the main cast, perhaps only Jet Li is somewhat short-changed. The screenplay makes a few attempts to give him some interesting wrinkles, as when it turns out his constant demands for more money are largely due to his diminutive stature (he feels he deserves a bigger share of their scores because when they're running, it's harder for him to cover the ground), and he does deliver impressively in his few displays of high-kicking martial arts prowess, but somehow he, alone among the cast, seems a little lost amidst the cacophony of mayhem.

Of course, a great action film needs a great villain, and fortunately, The Expendables boasts several. By now, Eric Roberts can play these sorts of duplicitous company men in his sleep...but that doesn't mean he does so, and here he relishes his character's violent ways and sharp dialogue (in the film's best line, he dismisses the antagonistic relationship between the general and his daughter as "bad Shakespeare"). Zayas is surprisingly commanding as the general, proving himself in the end to be more than Roberts's pawn. Former WWE superstar Steve Austin is impressively menacing as the CIA spook's henchman, and, in arguably the film's best bit of "hey, it's that guy!" casting, direct-to-video kickboxing legend Gary Daniels turns up as another of Roberts's thugs. Naturally, in a cinematic pissing contest like The Expendables, the ladies of the cast are bound to get short-changed, and while Itie brings true conviction to her role, her character is nothing more than a device to get the boys back into action. Angel's Charisma Carpenter is even more extraneous to the plot, her checkered relationship with Statham serving mainly to set up that basketball-court smackdown. Also more or less inessential to the story, but absolutely crucial to the film's theme and overall effect, is Mickey Rourke. A fellow relic of the '80s who has experienced a Stallone-like late-career resurgence, Rourke portrays Tool, a former Expendable who now runs the tattoo parlor that serves as the team's de facto headquarters. Rourke commands the screen in his few scenes with effortless movie-star panache, and his big showcase, a teary-eyed monologue in which he recalls his personal experiences of the horrors of war, serve to fill in the backstory for pretty much the entire Expendables team with a minimum of fuss. Rourke reminds us of the serious psychological cost for men who do violence for a living, something that has often been a buried sub-theme of Stallone's films, and the actor's contributions help to keep The Expendables from being just a mindless action-fest.

But when it's time for that action, holy smokes. The Expendables boasts some of the toughest and most furious set pieces I've seen in a movie in years. An opening shootout on the Somali pirate freighter left my ears ringing, and that was just the tip of the iceberg. The film features a spectacular aerial escape in which Statham lays waste with machine guns to an island dockside, a car-chase crunchfest with Stallone behind the wheel of a vintage pickup and Li raining bullets from the flatbed, and, in one of the most literally explosive climactic battles of all time, a raid on the Caribbean general's hideout that must set a record for sheer number of explosions per minute of screen time. Every character gets their moment in the action spotlight, and the actors all step up admirably. In addition to Statham's basketball-battle showcase, Li has a well-staged beatdown that pits him, cleverly, against the gargantuan Lundgren. Couture, inevitably, goes toe to to toe with Austin in a skirmish that shows why they call it ultimate fighting. Crews, in a moment that got some of the biggest cheers I heard in a theater all year, saves his boys' bacon with liberal application of lead from the loudest goddamn gun I've ever heard. And of course, it comes down to a three-way Mexican standoff between Stallone's gun, Statham's blade, and Roberts's ego.

As a product of '70s and '80s action cinema, Stallone understands the basic pleasures of the genre, and while the film does boast some dubiously realistic computer-generated blood sprays, The Expendables is, for the most part, a salute to old-school classic action. The film is packed with crushing hand-to-hand combat, beautifully performed by a phalanx of skilled stuntmen. There's no wire fu here, no CGI stunts, just men bashing men while the crowd goes wild. Call me a meathead, but I personally am a sucker for a good old-fashioned well-staged shootout, and The Expendables's finale serves up one of the best I've seen in a while, a symphony of blazing gunfire that literally shook the seats. Some have complained about a possible excess of shaky-cam close-ups during the film's combat and fights, and while there are perhaps more jittery hand-held shots that I normally like here, the action is so crisply lit by cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball and so skillfully edited by Ken Blackwell and Paul Harb that the film never descends into sheer incoherence in the manner of last fall's near-unwatchable Ninja Assassin. Also deserving of major kudos are composer Brian Tyler, who provides a stirring and muscular action score, and the film's talented team of sound designers, who made me feel the crack of every punch and the bang of every bullet in arguably the loudest film I've ever seen in a theater.

Stallone is seldom given the credit he deserves as a filmmaker with truly strong populist instincts. That gift failed him for a time in the '90s, when his straightforward, might-makes-right cinematic philosophy was unable to properly adapt to the Age of Irony, but when Stallone is firing on all cylinders, there are few filmmakers in Hollywood who can so deftly tap into an audience's most basic cinematic desires and just flat-out deliver. He did it in the Rocky pictures, which started out as feel-good paeans to American can-do spirit in a post-Vietnam era when the country sorely needed a boost, and he did it again with the Rambo films, allowing Americans to vicariously resolve the Vietnam conflict. It should come as no surprise, then, that in another traumatic age in which Americans again find themselves wondering who they are and what it all means, Stallone has come back to the forefront as a maker of films that revisit those themes in a darker, more mature way. 2006's Rocky Balboa was an examination of an American hero's sad, lonely twilight, and 2008's Rambo was a raw, ugly look at the true mental cost of war. While The Expendables is not freighted with nearly that kind of thematic baggage, it nevertheless serves as a reclamation of pride in America's warrior spirit, while still acknowledging, in the character of the corrupt CIA agent, that in many ways, the war truly begins at home. But all of this is secondary to the fact that at his best, Stallone can flat-out please a crowd like nobody's business. As a director, he knows exactly what his audience has come to see and he delivers, from the brawny star-power performances to the explosive action, not to mention a showstopping cameo by the Governator, his first onscreen appearance in six years. (When Willis asks Stallone what Schwarzenegger's problem is, Stallone's answer got the biggest cheer in the movie.) There seemed to be a bit of skepticism within the industry about whether Stallone's film would connect with today's videogame-raised action crowd. But the crowds did come, giving The Expendables a $35 million opening weekend, the biggest of Stallone's career. If you build it, they will come. And Stallone has built the best pure entertainment of 2010.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #73

2010-08-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

MALCOLM X (1992)

The Writers

Spike Lee and Arnold Perl; based on the book The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley

Why It's Here

The merits of Spike Lee's landmark 1992 biopic Malcolm X were in many ways swallowed up by the tumultuous circumstances surrounding its production. Decades in development, the film was originally slated to be directed by Norman Jewison, a long-standing member of Hollywood's liberal elite whose directorial credits include such black-themed films as 1984's A Soldier's Story (co-starring Denzel Washington, who would subsequently play Malcolm in this film and go on to receive an Oscar nomination, under Jewison's direction, for 1999's The Hurricane) and In the Heat of the Night, which received the Academy Award as 1967's Best Picture. Upon hearing of Jewison's involvement, Lee, at that time America's most prominent black filmmaker and a provocateur par excellence, began making press statements suggesting that only a black man could properly present Malcolm's story onscreen. Jewison was eventually convinced of this and stepped down from the project, but the controversy didn't end there. Lee overran his $28 million budget (the highest ever given to a black-directed film at that time, but admittedly minuscule for a project of this ambition) and contributed most of his own salary to the production, but the powers at Warner Bros. nevertheless shut down post-production, and it wasn't until Lee solicited contributions from prominent black cultural figures such as Oprah Winfrey and Bill Cosby that he was able to regain control of his embattled project. Then, to cap off the media frenzy, Lee suggested that young African-Americans should cut school on the day of Malcolm X's release to attend a screening, claiming they would learn more from his film than they would in a day of studies (interestingly, no one who criticized Lee's statement bothered to ever suggest that the filmmaker might have been right). All of this hullabaloo more or less overwhelmed the film itself. Malcolm X grossed a modest $48 million, enough to recoup its budget but hardly qualifying it as a hit, and it only received two Academy Awards nominations, for Washington and for Ruth E. Carter's evocative period costumes. What was lost amidst all of this is the simple fact that Malcolm X is one of the finest biopics ever produced in America, and a large reason for the film's creative success is its screenplay, a virtual textbook on how to transfer a great man's life to the silver screen.

Malcolm X was looked upon as potential fodder for a film virtually from the moment of his assassination in 1965. Producer Marvin Worth acquired the rights to Malcolm's life story in 1967, and five years later released an Oscar-winning documentary feature named, like Lee's film, after its subject. Over the years, Worth also commissioned several screenplays for narrative features, and when Lee came on board as director, he was granted access to all of Worth's commissioned scripts. Lee particularly responded to two of these, one written by Arnold Perl (also a credited writer on Worth's documentary) and one by the great African-American novelist James Baldwin. Lee synthesized elements of these two screenplays into his own draft, eventually credited to Lee and Perl; Baldwin had requested that his name be left off of any film produced from his work. As is the case with many such screenplays, it is difficult to discern precisely whose narrative voice predominates within the finished film (though since Lee is also the film's director, co-producer and co-star, it's hard not to assume his vision would be primary), but what is undeniable is that the film itself tells Malcolm's story with a richness of detail and comprehensive sweep rare in biographical cinema.

Biopics have been traditionally hamstrung by the fact that most individuals' lives neither fall into a traditional three-act cinematic structure nor are small enough in scope that they can be reasonably contained within a feature-length motion picture. In Malcolm X, however, the writers found a man whose life, amazingly, more or less corresponded to the standard three-act Hollywood format. Also, Malcolm's tragically abbreviated lifespan (he was only 39 when he was gunned down at New York's Audubon Ballroom) allowed the writers to cover the entire sweep of Malcolm's years in a way almost unheard of in biographical film. Even a three-hour-plus biopic like Gandhi must often omit details and excise entire portions of their subjects' lives (when that film begins, Gandhi is already a prosperous Indian lawyer at work in South Africa), but Malcolm X is able to cover the complete spectrum of its subject time on this earth in its 201-minute running time. This is indeed not a short film, but this sort of running time for an epic-scale Hollywood biopic is practically par for the course, and Malcolm X uses that running time far more skillfully than most films of its type.

Malcolm X does not start at the very beginning of Malcolm's life, but instead at a point when it might as well have been over before it even really got started in the first place. When we first meet Malcolm Little, he's a Boston street tough getting his very first "conk", a hair-straightening treatment involving the application of a painful mixture of potatoes, water and lye. From this very first image, the writers deftly illustrate the pain inflicted on black Americans by white society, and the self-loathing that results and that causes otherwise sensible people to inflict even more pain on themselves just to attempt to assimilate into a culture that will never truly accept them anyway (Malcolm, upon seeing the results of his conk, declares, "Looks white, don't it?"). Throughout the film's first hour, which chronicles Malcolm's early career as a petty criminal in Boston and later New York City, the screenplay frequently reminds us just what Malcolm, and indeed all of black America, was up against in the first half of the twentieth century. We see razor-sharp images of Malcolm's childhood, which plays like a chronicle of indignity at the hands of white society. Klansmen burn down Malcolm's childhood home as revenge against the black-self-love preaching of his father, Earl Little (Tommy Hollis); Earl is later killed by these same men, his head bashed in with a hammer and run over by a streetcar in what the courts rule, ridiculously, to be an act of suicide. Throughout Malcolm's boyhood, he encounters "well-meaning" white people who nevertheless cause him harm. After the Littles' life insurance company denies payments to Malcolm's mother (Lonette McKee), the family is split up and Malcolm sent to a boys' home. While in school, he excels in his classes and even gets elected class president, but when he expresses ambitions to be a lawyer, his teacher, a prime practitioner of "the soft bigotry of low expectations", tells him, bluntly, that the law is no realistic career goal for "a nigger"(yes, the teacher actually says this word to the boy), and that he should consider looking into finding work as a manual laborer. Everything in Malcolm's boyhood was calculated to deliver one message: you are inferior. Even his own mother married a dark-skinned black man out of hatred for her own light complexion; her mother was impregnated after being raped by a white man, which might have also accounted for Malcolm's own light eyes and red hair.

The young Malcolm seems more than willing to meet society's low expectations of him. He runs numbers for West Indian Archie (Delroy Lindo), a dapper criminal who Malcolm declares might have been "a mathematical genius" had he lived in a country that would have given him a chance. He does some time as a Pullman porter, where his shuck-and-jiving belies his secret fantasies of smashing his condescending customers' faces with the food he serves them. He courts a decent, church-loving girl (Theresa Randle), but finds himself pulling away from her when her chastity, indeed perhaps her very goodness, proves too much for him. He finds a woman much more his style in Sophia (Kate Vernon), a decadent white woman with a taste for "colored stud". Malcolm declares in the narration that white women were often looked upon as the black man's prize, and that taking one away from the white man was a singular triumph...but Malcolm's relationship with Sophia seems to only fuel his conflicted feelings about his own identity and self-worth, exemplified in a tremendous scene where Malcolm makes Sophia kiss his feet and feed him breakfast, all the while asking when she's going to "wake up and holler rape". Back in Boston after a planned double-cross of Archie goes sour, Malcolm has been reduced to "animal" status; he's strung out on drugs and reduced to fencing burgled goods to make ends meet. His assimilationist drive comes full circle when, after the plumbing is turned off in their apartment, he's forced to wash off his burning conk treatment with toilet water...and it's with his head in this toilet that the cops find him and take him in for burglary, and for the unspoken but even worse "crime" of sleeping with white women.

Malcolm X's second act begins in prison, where the young hood is introduced to a new way of thinking by Baines (Albert Hall), a fiery-eyed convict who is a composite of several men Malcolm knew while in custody. Malcolm is taught the ways of the Nation of Islam and of its mystical but politically shrewd leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman, Jr.). He denounces liquor, drugs, pork and white women, and he begins to educate himself about the true depth of the indignities heaped upon his people by white America. In a striking scene illustrating Malcolm's newly emerging racial consciousness, he confronts the prison chaplain (Christopher Plummer) about the true race of Jesus Christ. By the time Malcolm emerges from prison and joins the Nation as a full-fledged Black Muslim, the formerly self-loathing small-time "boy" has been rebranded as an upright, morally unimpeachable man full of pride, self-respect...and hatred for the white "devils" who made him what he once was. Much of Malcolm X's middle hour is given over to scenes of Malcolm speechifying, winning converts, and spreading the message of Elijah Muhammad, "the black man's truth", to his brethren. Many of these speeches, such as Malcolm's TV-broadcast discourse on the difference between the "house Negro" and the "field Negro", and his famous exhortation from the entrance of Harlem's Apollo Theater, are taken from real speeches given by Malcolm X, a sensible move on the writers' part, as the main action of the second act is the transformation of Malcolm the man into Malcolm the icon, a figure who belonged as much to the public as to the Nation of Islam itself. The Nation has given Malcolm the strength to stand up to any injustice, whoever it comes from; in a powerful sequence, Malcolm leads a march of Black Muslims to secure medical care for a friend beaten up by white police (witnessing this demonstration, the white police chief, played by Peter Boyle, declares, "That's too much power for one man to have"). This is not to say, however, that Malcolm has completely neglected his own happiness. During this period of his life, he meets and marries Betty Shabazz (Angela Bassett) and builds a family with her. But his work for the Nation always comes first, and eventually causes tension in the marriage, when Betty begins to wonder why their home, car and clothing are so modest while Elijah Muhammad and "Brother Baines" live in comparative luxury.

Throughout the film's second hour, the writers give us glimpses of where Malcolm's old running buddies ended up, illustrating the corrosive effects of white social oppression from which Malcolm has extricated himself. Malcolm's church-loving girlfriend Laura has become a prostitute, servicing white johns in back alleys. Others have wound up dead or insane, and West Indian Archie, once so cool and well put-together, is a stroke victim living in squalor and babbling on about the importance of his "rep". Only Shorty (Lee), Malcolm's former partner in crime, seems relatively unscathed...but he's unchanged also, asking the now lily-pure Malcolm to join him for some cocaine and declaring that he could never be a Muslim because "I love pigs' feet and white women too much." Still, even Elijah Muhammad is eventually revealed to be not as untouched by social temptations as he seems, as Malcolm discovers that his spiritual father has sired several bastard children with young Muslim women who have since been ostracized from the church community. His confrontation with Baines about this lights an anti-Malcolm spark within the Nation, and it reaches conflagration status when he makes perhaps his most incendiary public statement, declaring that the assassination of John F. Kennedy was "justice", a prime example of the white man's "chickens coming home to roost". He is publicly silenced by Elijah Muhammad for ninety days, and he takes the opportunity for the pilgrimage to Mecca that begins Malcolm X's final act.

While in Mecca, Malcolm prays, marches and dines with white Muslims from all nations, and when he returns to the States, he formally breaks from the Nation of Islam to form his own church which will work in concert with any organizations willing to help the cause of black equality...even white ones. This public denouncement of the Nation of Islam's political philosophy is an explicit reversal of Malcolm's earlier stance on white involvement in the cause (in an earlier scene on a college campus, Malcolm is stopped by a white student who asks him what she can do to help his mission; "Nothing," he flatly declares, and walks by the clearly hurt girl with barely a glance in her direction), and it plants the seeds that eventually lead to Malcolm's death. While the film does not specifically state who gave the orders for Malcolm's execution, the identity of the killers as Muslims is never disputed; a scene of the assassins preparing their weapons ends with one declaring the traditional Muslim peace blessing "a salaam a lakum", and though the shooters' names are not given in the screenplay, they are named in the film's closing titles. (It is alleged that the film's original screenplay explicitly fingered the Nation's current leader, Louis Farrakhan, as one of the assassination conspirators, but that Lee, under threat from Farrakhan himself, removed all such references.) There is also some suggestion that the Nation of Islam may not have been working alone, as the CIA is clearly depicted as having their eye on Malcolm. He is followed everywhere in Mecca by two white men who film his every step, and when he moves to a hotel room in New York following the firebombing of his home, his room is bugged, his phone conversations recorded. In the final major sequence, following Malcolm en route to his date with destiny at the Audubon, it is strongly suggested that Malcolm more or less knew what was coming, and may even have welcomed it. After all, Jesus Christ has had more influence as a martyr than he ever did in life. Malcolm seems to understand this fact...regardless of what color Jesus may have been.

While the screenplay for Malcolm X is remarkably comprehensive in its scope and vision, there are several issues it stirs that are short-changed or under-addressed by the writing. Malcolm X has been frequently paired in the public imagination with Dr. Martin Luther King, the Southern civil rights leader who was seen as a more conciliatory, non-violent alternative to Malcolm's northern, urban "by any means necessary"philosophy. While we glimpse Dr. King in several newsreel clips following Malcolm's death, King is not really a character in the film; he and Malcolm share no scenes together, and we never really find out what Malcolm thought of his southern counterpart, or vice versa. Likewise, Malcolm X is notably callow on a subject of continued controversy within Islam: the faith's formal position on the role of women. It is wise that Malcolm turned away from his earlier view of women as primarily sexual objects for his gratification, but during his years with the Nation, he nevertheless seems to subscribe to the faith's overall positioning of women as an inferior subspecies. He sees no problem with the faith-proscribed modest dress and head veils women are required to wear, and when he speaks in public about male-female relations, it's usually with the man positioned as the caretaker of the nurturing, home-guarding woman. And even though he is married to a strong, educated woman who seems to share a somewhat equal partnership with him, there is no doubt who is the master of their home; in the most pointed moment of their most heated argument, Malcolm momentarily reverts to his forceful street persona when she shuts her down with a shouted "Woman, don't you raise your voice in my house!" All of this is perfectly encapsulated by a shot at one of Malcolm's speeches, where we see a banner declaring that the men of the Nation must protect their greatest gift from Allah, "Our Black Women". Seated behind this banner is a phalanx of applauding black womanhood, beautiful, exalted...and isolated, far from any potential influence. It is a slight failing that the film does not address this subject in greater detail, but really, the fault in this case more likely lies with the philosophy rather than the filmmaking.

One might wonder what possible relevance a film like Malcolm X could have to someone like me, or indeed to any non-African-American viewer. But all of the greatest stories have elements that make them universal, and for all its in-depth detail about the struggles of black Americans, Malcolm X is, as much as anything else, an inspirational story about man's capacity for self-reinvention. Malcolm Little is a man who should have, by any logical measure, lived a Hobbesian life, nasty, brutish and short, winding up like the crippled West Indian Archie at best, moldering in a criminal's shallow grave at worst. While there was plenty of nastiness and brutality in Malcolm's life, and though it was undeniably short, things didn't turn out the way white America, or fate, had planned for Malcolm. Through sheer self-will, education and strength, Malcolm built himself back up into a paragon of self-love, confidence and assertion, and became one of the most influential figures of the American twentieth century, of any race. Malcolm took on the "X" as a "last name" to remind himself that his identity had been taken from him by the slave masters who bought and sold his family, but by the end of the film, he has enough self-knowledge to provide himself with a new Muslim name, El-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz. Malcolm has reclaimed himself, and he's done it under his own power, his lesson a vivid one and well-illustrated in the final scene of the film by a group of black schoolchildren, American and African, rising from their classroom seats and proudly declaring "I am Malcolm X!" For anyone struggling with their sense of self or self-worth, Malcolm X is an invaluable illustration of what one person with willpower can truly achieve, and it should be required viewing for any screenwriter who wants to learn how a film can truly bring a man's life to life.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: USC Scripter Award (nomination shared with book authors Malcolm X and Alex Haley)

FRESH FROM THE GRAVE: IT SEES "DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS"!

2010-07-29T15:17:00.000-07:00

Comedy is perhaps the most delicate of storytelling balancing acts. Most comedy, for better or worse, is based on cruelty. We are just as often laughing at someone as we are with them, and for decades all forms of comic media have poked fun at people for qualities of birth or circumstance entirely beyond their control, traded in stereotype and caricature, and made mirthful sport of every manner of misfortune imaginable, from homelessness and war to terrorism and death itself. But the basic reaction to a comedy is laughter, a joyful action, and if your material pushes the despairing undercurrents of its subject matter too far into the forefront, you run the risk of people losing the fundamental ability to laugh at it. So the comic writer, actor and filmmaker must always worry how far to push their work into that red zone. Do you want your audience to be laughing because it's funny, or because it's likable? Jay Roach's Dinner For Schmucks is a textbook example of this conflict, presenting a situation rife for devastatingly cruel comedy that finds itself frequently hamstrung by its simultaneous desire to make us care about, even love, its characters. Laughter gets in a few jabs here and there, but it's sentiment that wins the ultimate war here, and the result is a film that's never as funny or as sharp as its material promises.

A remake of Francis Veber's successful French comedy The Dinner Game, Schmucks stars Paul Rudd as Tim, an up-and-comer at a financial management company. Tim's head over heels for Julie (Stephanie Szostak), a charming art curator who, despite her love for Tim, nevertheless fends off his frequent marriage proposals. He needs a more stable situation in his professional life, she insists, before she'll be Mrs. Tim. It's a real pickle, but then opportunity knocks for Tim in the form of an invitation to a special dinner party hosted once a month by his caddish boss (Bruce Greenwood). At these dinners, each invitee is responsible for bringing a second guest...namely, the biggest idiot they can find. It's a glorious evening of behind-the-back malice, and at the end of the night, the king idiot of the dinner gets a trophy without ever once knowing that the entire thing is a travesty, and he's the goat. Despite Tim's generally sympathetic personality, he realizes that this dinner might be his one shot to get himself a leg up both at his job and with Julie. And it also doesn't hurt that one of his boss's guests will be a Swiss millionaire (David Walliams) looking for investment opportunities and dimwits to mock. Fortunately, for Tim, he literally runs into a prime potential guest when he crashes his car into Barry Speck (Steve Carell), a four-eyed, windbreakered doofus with a passion for small-rodent taxidermy (he crafts dead mice into striking tableaux he calls "mousterpieces"). Tim strikes up a friendship with this cretin, and it's up to him to get Barry to the dinner without incurring the wrath of Julie, who knows about the purpose of the dinner and thoroughly disapproves, or Barry himself. What he doesn't count on is Barry's destructive nature, as the simple fellow proceeds to wreck Tim's apartment, not to mention his job and potentially his relationship. It all culminates at the titular dinner, a cavalcade of freaks including a ventriloquist with his dummy "wife" and a medium who can only channels the spirit of dead animals. Also at the dinner: the odious Therman (Zach Galifianakis), a would-be mesmerist who also happens to be the man who stole Barry's wife. At this point, if I told you the party culminates with a huge fire and an escaping vulture, you wouldn't be shocked in the slightest.

You would not have been able to spin two separate films out of Dinner for Schmucks's premise if it wasn't inherently ripe with comic possibilities, and Roach and his screenwriters, David Guion and Michael Handelman, have not erred in their choice of source material. The main issue here is one of tone, as Roach seems unwilling to push the humor into the truly transgressive places it could very naturally go. In the past, Roach has shown himself to be unafraid of making his characters the butt of the joke. He gleefully turned Mike Myers into a grotesque in the Austin Powers films, and even the comparatively more sedate Meet the Parents largely traded in jokes that made Ben Stiller the fool. Here, however, with a premise that is entirely about mean laughs at the expense of others, Roach soft-pedals the nastiness, and the result is a somewhat flavorless stew with harsh but delicious spices just out of reach.

The film begins with a quite lovely sequence showcasing one of Barry's "mousterpieces". This tranquil scene of gamboling, picnicking, quite deceased mice, scored to the Beatles' wistful "Fool on the Hill", had me expecting something really special. But I didn't realize at the time that this sequence wasn't meant to be ironic. Roach and his writers genuinely sympathize with Barry. They're rooting for him, and by placing themselves firmly on the side of the character who's supposed to elicit the film's biggest laughs, they neuter the picture's comic potential at its source. Barry, really, is more of an innocent than an idiot, more naive than nimrod. He's a little clumsy, and makes some bad decisions, but there are none of the moments of transcendant stupidity that were found in a comedy like Dumb & Dumber, which was utterly willing to make its feeble-minded characters truly thicker than bricks (and nevertheless masterfully danced the dance of making those characters both funny and likable). Try as I might, I found it extremely hard to laugh at Barry and regard him as an idiot simply because his wife has left him for another man. Granted, Therman is indeed a five-alarm moron, with his hard-staring mind-control techniques and ridiculous master-hypnotist cape...but that's not Barry's fault in any way. It just means his wife has bad taste in men. Even the oddest thing about Barry, his dead-mouse art, is more charming and quirky than idiotic. Barry's actually quite gifted as a taxidermic craftsman, and those pieces of his would probably wind willing homes in many art collector's galleries. This man, in short, is hardly an epic idiot. The film likes him just fine, though, and so Roach and the writers refuse to make Barry into the authentically dense, weird, creepy idiot they nevertheless want the characters to believe him to be. This keeps the very core of their comic idea tethered on a short leash, and it never really manages to break free and take flight.

It's not, however, that Dinner For Schmucks is without characters who push the boundaries of freakishness. In addition to Therman, there's also the hideous Darla (Lucy Punch), a lunatic stalker-type who is inadvertently brought back into Tim's life when Barry mistakes her for Julie on the phone. Julie likewise has another potential suitor, this one a pretentious Cindy Sherman-style photographic artist named Kieran (Jemaine Clement) whose work consists of erotically ridiculous animal-costumed graphics and who insists that crazy, random sex with many partners is an essential part of his process, because of course it is, right? Galifianakis and Clement admittedly make the most of their roles. The former is right now unparalleled at creating creepily intense comic characters (I insist to anyone who'll listen that he should have been a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominee for The Hangover), and with this performance and the little-seen Gentlemen Broncos, Clement is emerging as cinema's go-to self-absorbed creative-arts buffoon. The script also gifts him with the funniest dialogue exchange in the film, an absurd bit of business about his stint living with a family of goats. As Darla, Punch labors mightily to create a "wacky" misfit character, but she's trying way too hard, and the effort shows in scenes that add nothing to the narrative and don't even generate real laughs. The conceit of the character is a smart one, but Punch's strident performance kills any chance it might have had of working. Truth be told, though, both this character and Clement's are ill-served by the material, anyway, being essentially isolated from the central story and with bits that seem almost like self-contained sketches within the main film. Since they're the biggest clowns in this circus, after all, why aren't they at the dinner with Barry and Therman? If it was an idiot he was looking for, there's much better people in the world of this film that Tim could have hit with his car.

Dinner for Schmucks mostly veers between scenes that seem set up for big laughs but don't push for them, and sequences that cram "comedy" down our throats and fail to make us laugh. An early board meeting, in which Rudd presents goofy lamps made from disarmed World War II rockets, could have been an excellent showcase for Rudd's gift for good-natured comic smarm, but it's not approached from any interesting angles, and the scene fails to garner more than a cursory chuckle at how silly the lamps look. Conversely, a lunch scene in which Tim is forced to gladhand the Swiss investor with help from both Barry and Darla, who's posing as Julie, could have been a manic farcical set piece, but once the main situation is established, the laughs do not arrive, despite Punch straining so hard for them that she practically sprays her co-stars with sweat. The climactic dinner, which climaxes with Carell and Galifianakis locked in absurd hypnotic combat, could have been a bravura comic sequence, but the brakes are put on the laughter during Barry's mousterpiece presentation. These are beautiful little creations. Why are we supposed to laugh at them, and at the talented artisan who created them?

The performances, inevitably in such an uneven film, are a mixed bag. Rudd can be as charming and funny as anyone in movies today. But here he seems constrained by the material's split personality; anyone who enjoyed his manic self-delusion in Anchorman knows that Rudd would be more than capable of the comic flights this film seems reluctant to take. It also doesn't help that, as with Barry, the film seems determined to make Tim a likable guy...death to laughs when you're dealing with a character who's basically throwing another human being under the bus for personal and financial gain. Carell does score a few laughs here and there, but he's given much more inspired idiot material each week on The Office. It's also an interesting comment on the importance of proper direction to actors' chemistry that Rudd and Carell, so dynamic together in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, here fail to spark off of each other in truly interesting ways. Szostak is a pleasingly outside-the-box choice for a role like this with her kicky pixie haircut and sexy accent, and she manages to make Julie a sweetheart despite the fact that she's holding Tim's feet to the romantic fire. Greenwood does everything that he can with the douchebag boss, but Walliams is too restrained by half as the Swiss magnate. This is a character who could have been the film's most inspired creation, a piece of nouveau-riche Eurotrash with a penchant for mocking his betters, but Walliams never musters the cruelty necessary to make the character zing (perhaps Clement taking this role would have been a better fit; Kieran really adds nothing to the main story, anyway). Also disappointing is the cast of dinner guests, none of whom get enough screen time to really make the impression they deserve. The whole film is building up to this dinner, after all; why give the assembled idiots such short narrative shrift? The casting of Jeff Dunham, a real-life superstar ventriloquist, as the man with the wooden "wife" is a sign of the film's middle-of-the-road ambitions. A more daring film might have picked an edgier comic talent and cranked this character up to eleven. Instead...hey, Jeff Dunham's a ventriloquist! Let's cast him as the ventriloquist!

I grant you that making a successful mainstream comedy is no easy task. But I believe that Dinner for Schmucks should not have even been a mainstream comedy. This material, with its basic plot rooted in poking fun at the less fortunate, was crying out for treatment as a rough, caustic, perhaps indie comedy, the kind of film that strafes the establishment with satire and takes no prisoners. What we've gotten instead is a safe, slight, unremarkable Hollywood comedy that should please audiences looking for a few easy laughs, but won't win Rudd or Carell many new converts to their cause. I know that most of this smacks of me reviewing the movie that I wish had been made instead of the movie that was made, but you know what? The movie that was made was a comedy. And it didn't make me laugh nearly enough.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #74

2010-07-26T07:41:00.001-07:00

BEETLEJUICE (1988)

The Writers

Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren; story by McDowell and Larry Wilson

Why It's Here

Film scholars tend to underestimate the importance of screenwriting to the success of Tim Burton's early directorial career. Given his wildly creative visual imagination and penchant for the macabre, it was natural for the cinematic establishment to credit Burton almost exclusively with the qualities of his first feature films, but the director himself has acknowledged that he was fortunate enough, his first few times out, to be working with top-quality scripts. On the DVD commentary track for his first feature, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton takes numerous opportunities to praise the work of the film's screenwriting team, and though Burton's second film, the lunatic supernatural comedy Beetlejuice, provides an even grander showcase for the filmmaker's flights of imagistic fantasy, much of the credit here must go to the writing as well. Burton certainly brings a lot to the table as the director of Beetlejuice, but it doesn't hurt that he had found, in the work of screenwriters Michael McDowell and the late Warren Skaaren (from a story by McDowell and Beetlejuice co-producer Larry Wilson), an absolutely perfect showcase for his visual style and thematic interests. The resultant collaboration is a film that, as much as any artistic work I can recall, spearheaded the acceptance of the morbid, the macabre, and pitch-black death-obsessed humor into the American mainstream. Such humor was always there, but on the fringes and usually nurtured by obsessive, insular coteries of fans (Monty Python's Flying Circus, for example, frequently showcased death and bloody mayhem in their sketches). Beetlejuice struck a different chord in people, and somehow managed to be accepted by the average moviegoer with true warmth and affection. How many other films about cockroach-eating pervert ghosts can you think of that inspired a Saturday morning cartoon series? I truly believe that without Beetlejuice, there would be no Marilyn Manson, no Hot Topic, perhaps even no Twilight. It's a film that turned America into a culture of virtual necrophiliacs. It helps, of course, that the film itself is a marvelous entertainment, consistently funny, inventively thought out, and in several of its narrative implications and relationships, surprisingly thoughtful and even touching.

In its first ten minutes, Beetlejuice gives the appearance of being a much different kind of comedy. The Maitlands are a young married couple living in the lush green hamlet of Winter River, Connecticut. Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) share a beautiful country house high on a hill, where Adam putters over a scale model of the town while Barbara fends off the overtures of her friend Jane (Annie McEnroe), a real-estate broker who is constantly trying to sell the house out from under them. These early scenes establish a gentle, bucolic tone, with Adam and Barbara playfully pulling each other down onto the couch for kisses and Adam, when he runs into town to get some supplies from his hardware store, wishing a friendly hello to Bill the barber (Hugo Stanger), who rambles on about a young hippie who came to his shop for a haircut ("He's got hair down to his goddamn shoulders...") without noticing that Adam has already come and gone. It almost feels like we're watching a film adaptation of one of Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" monologues. The town is too pretty, Adam and Barbara almost sickeningly perfect.

Then, the Maitland's two-week staycation is tragically interrupted when their car crashes off the Winter River Bridge. They arrive home to find that things are not right. They have no reflection in the house's mirrors. Not remembering how they got home, Adam steps off the house's front porch to find himself in a swirling interstellar space menaced by a gigantic sandworm. And then there's the book they find on their coffee table: Handbook for the Recently Deceased (published, of course, by "Handbook for the Recently Deceased Press"), which outlines, in excessively vague and complex fashion, all the rules and regulations of being ghosts...which is just what Adam and Barbara have become, condemned to haunt their earthly home for the next 125 years. Despite the fact that Barbara can't properly clean anything with the vacuum cleaner stuck in a garage they can't get to, spending a century-plus in their beautiful home might not be the worst fate imaginable. But then Jane sells the house to the Deetzes, a horrible family of misfits from the Big Apple. Charles (Jeffrey Jones) is a real-estate broker, recovering from a recent nervous collapse, who has come to the country to get away from it all...but his shrew of a second wife, trendoid sculptor Delia (a boisterous performance by Catherine O'Hara) insists on bringing the city with her in the form of her grotesque sculpted work, which looks like discarded props from Eraserhead, and by inviting her smirky interior designer friend Otho (Glenn Shadix) to join her in completely redoing the house the Maitlands loved so much. Only Lydia (Winona Ryder), Charles's emo-style, amateur-photographer daughter from his previous marriage, seems marginally acceptable. She likes the house (and hates Delia) as much as the Maitlands do. Plus, it turns out that she, alone among the new residents, can see and communicate with the ghosts. (She explains it thus: "Live people often ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.") Lydia develops a strong bond with Adam and Barbara, who have no children of their own, but the Deetzes's destruction of their home and way of life becomes too much to bear...and it becomes worse when the whole family gets wind of the ghosts and Charles hatches a plan to turn the entire town into a supernaturally themed amusement park. Desperate, and against the advice of their spiritual case worker, Juno (a wonderfully dry Sylvia Sidney), the Maitlands call on outside help from a freelance "bio-exorcist" who claims to be able to "exterminate" the living from haunted houses, and who happens to be hiding out, in miniaturized form, inside Adam's model. That would be the titular ghoul, Betelgeuse, a rowdy, sleazy, spike-haired huckster of a creature, played by Michael Keaton in a performance that (along with his work in the same year's Clean and Sober) won him the National Society of Film Critics' Best Actor award. But Betelgeuse has his own dastardly schemes, and he uses the Maitlands and Lydia as dupes in a plot to escape from the underworld and back into the land of the living, where he can really do some serious damage.

As you can perhaps tell from the description above, Beetlejuice has an unusually strong narrative structure for a comedy. The writers have worked out a genuinely compelling dilemma for the ghost couple to grapple with, and they introduce a smart narrative wrinkle in the form of Lydia, who sympathizes entirely with their predicament (to the point of making plans to kill herself and join them on the other side) and causes them to question their entire drive to get the Deetzes out of the house. Likewise, the overarching conflict of the story, with the small-town, just-folks Maitlands against the monstrous hipsters from the big city, was expertly suited to the film's end-of-the-Reagan-years release date, when the staunchly American midwestern values espoused by Reagan were in combat with the greed-driven, poisonously self-centered yuppie philosophy that the era likewise spawned. (It also makes the film an interesting time capsule, as we now live in an era where big-city dwellers are more commonly painted as bulwarks of sanity and intelligence against the tide of perceived middle-American ignorance and intolerance.) The film's characters are admittedly broadly drawn, but within their individual parameters, they act believably and with consistent logic. When Adam and Barbara first attempt to "haunt" the Maitlands, their methods, which consist of throwing sheets with eyeholes over their heads and moaning like remote-control Halloween toys, strike one as exactly what a naive young pair of ghosts would do to scare someone. Then, when they finally figure out their haunting style, they do not hit the Deetzes with demons and danger the way Betelgeuse later does, but instead possess the family and their dining companions and throw them into a raucous dance number set to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O" (Adam is a big fan of calypso music, a nice quirky character touch). The characters all have perfect little moments like this, from Charles chirping a sotto voce "birdies" as he flips through an Audubon book to the relentlessly self-dramatizing Lydia composing a suicide note and changing "I am alone" to the much more anguished-sounding "I am utterly alone". Otho, a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type, makes constant references to a seemingly endless string of bizarre and short-lived jobs; it is in fact his past stint as a paranormal researcher that finally brings the family in direct contact with the ghosts in a seance gone horribly wrong. Of the main characters, only Delia remains essentially a caricature, but since she and Betelgeuse (more on him later) are, for lack of a better word, the film's villains, the writers can get away with making her a little more shallow. Poorly developed villains are more or less standard in most comedies; if you make your villain too strong, after all, you run the risk of making the threat too dire and overwhelming the humor entirely.

Beetlejuice's writers very wisely avoid doing this by limiting the onscreen time of their titular monster. Many audiences may have been surprised, upon first seeing the film, to find that Betelgeuse is only onscreen, in the entire 92-minute picture, for about twenty minutes total. Save for one fleeting appearance where we don't see his face, and a hilarious used-car-style commercial beamed to Adam and Barbara's TV (where the cowboy-hatted Betelgeuse promises "a FREE demon possession with every exorcism"), the bio-exorcist is not in the first half of the film at all. But he is spoken of several times by other characters, always with fear and disgust (Juno warns the Maitlands not to even say his name...for reasons that become clear later, as it's saying his name three times that calls him into conscious being), and this slow buildup to the character's true narrative emergence makes the audience giddy with anticipation. Because of all this, the writers know that they are going to have make every second of Betelgeuse's time on the screen count, and when the character finally bursts forth from his grave, he definitely does not disappoint. He cuts a genuinely horrific appearance with his wild mane of hair, rotten teeth, dark-ringed eyes and face flecked with patches of filth and moss. He grossly forces himself on Barbara, spits loudly into his own jacket (telling Adam, "I'll save that guy for later"), feasts on insects, and praises himself ostentatiously as "the ghost with the most". He also has moments of goofy, unexpected drollery, as when Adam asks him his bio-exorcism qualifications and he coolly rattles off a resume including stints at Julliard and the Harvard Business School. Betelgeuse is like some nightmare combination of lecherous pimp, carnival barker, sleazy game-show host, and the worst stand-up comic you've ever seen (after one particularly explosive stunt, Betelgeuse declares, "That is why I won't do two shows a night anymore, babe."). He functions almost like a trickster figure in ancient myth, the pitch and tone of his humor so radically discursive from everything around him that he seems, as "wild man" characters in comedies so seldom truly do, like a genuinely disruptive force in the film's universe, an effect he would likely not have been able to achieve had he been front-and-center from the beginning. One does not want to discount the contribution of Michael Keaton, who here gives one of the most spectacularly unhinged comic performances in film history, but as they say and as is the case here, if it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage.

It is of course the world of Beetlejuice, as much as the film's characters and story, that make it soar, and the writers have set their tale in an inspired and utterly unique vision of the afterlife. The netherworld of Beetlejuice is like the most awful bureaucratic experience of your life, magnified tenfold. It starts with the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, which is actually full of useful information, but all delivered in a cryptic or sometimes completely inscrutable fashion (in a slightly dated but still effective joke, a frustrated Adam declares that the book "reads like stereo instructions"). Adam and Barbara find themselves at one point in a dingy, uncomfortable otherworld waiting room, surrounded by beings who bear the marks of the manner in which they died. There's a charred-to-the-bones ghoul who apparently went up while smoking in bed (trouper that he is, he's still puffing away), a man in a food-spattered bib with a lodged chicken bone bulging in his throat, even an unlucky magician's assistant whose severed torso sits on a sofa next to her legs. Exorcised spirits and demons are banished to the hellish Lost Souls Room, described as "death for the dead", and if that wasn't bad enough, even the "life" of a ghost is a seemingly endless welter of rules and regulations. Adam and Barbara can only have three meetings with Juno over the course of their 125-year stint in the house, and when they can't figure out how to properly scare the Deetzes, the case worker directs them to the dreaded Handbook's "intermediate interface chapter on haunting". Though Adam mentions at one point that the Handbook doesn't mention heaven or hell, if this afterlife world's heavy emphasis on bureaucratic frustration is any indication, then the Maitlands are definitely in hell. And they seemed like such a nice young couple. Maybe they cheated on their taxes or something.

As the description of the waiting room denizens above makes clear, Beetlejuice was also radical for a mainstream '80s comedy (keep in mind, this film was not an indie cult item, but a major studio release...and a box-office hit at that) in its detached, almost blase manner of joking about the most horrific subjects imaginable. Being burned or choked to death, being sawed in half, getting your throat slit...these are not inherently hilarious occurrences, but Beetlejuice is endlessly willing to exploit these kinds of images for laughs, as when smoke from Juno's cigarette pours through the deep gash in her throat, or when the receptionist in the waiting room jokes about her "little accident" while holding up her slit wrists. An intercom in the waiting room announces the arrival of "Flight 409", a reference to a famous unsolved airline crash from the fifties, and obituary pages in the Afterlife newspaper are much different than ours, inviting readers to "Please Welcome The Maitlands" (this is how Betelgeuse finds out about them; he regards the obituaries as the paper's "business section"). It's almost hard to remember how unusual it was, in 1988, to see this sort of pitch-black stuff in a big-budget studio comedy, and Beetlejuice is often insufficiently valued for its role in bringing truly transgressive humor into the mainstream.

This is not to say, however, that Beetlejuice is blithely unaware of the serious implications of death, and in the relationship between Barbara and Lydia, there are allusions to the true gravity of the end of life. In an early scene, Jane makes a callous comment to Barbara that such a big house really would be better suited to someone with a family. Barbara's sad expression and Jane's abrupt apology make it clear that the Maitlands' childless status is not by choice. Naturally, their early death will prevent them from ever knowing the joys of parenthood, but the nesting instinct is strong enough in Barbara that even in death, she feels maternally drawn toward Lydia. The girl is likewise receptive to Barbara's attentions. Her relationship with her stepmother Delia is almost entirely antagonistic, and though what happened to Lydia's mother is never discussed, her all-black wardrobe and morose personality lead us to believe that Charles is not a divorcee, but a widower. Lydia thus sees the replacement of her mother with Delia not just as a betrayal, but a desecration of her real mother's memory, leading to her feelings of solitude and desire for death, perhaps out of an unspoken (by the film) desire to rejoin her mother on the other side. (The fact that the film doesn't take this narrative step when Lydia learns of a real afterlife, and that it indeed doesn't definitively identify Lydia's mother as deceased, is probably mostly due to the genre; a comedy, even one as death-drenched as this, would have a hard time pulling laughs from such a predicament.) The film builds some surprising pathos out of the relationship between this sad young girl and her ghost mother, a bond made somehow more fragile and precious by the unbreakable membrane of death separating them. Even Betelgeuse, the netherworld's number one party animal, realizes that death is no ultimately no laughing matter. His plot to use the Maitlands to escape from the afterlife indicates that he wants "out, for good", and in the film's most intriguingly philosophical moment, when a miserable Lydia tells him that she wants to be dead too, his only answer is an utterly baffled "Why?" Beetlejuice is certainly no deep treatise on death and dying, but if one bothers to look, it is not nearly as flippant on the subject as its constant macabre jokes might initially indicate.

Like the previously reviewed Happy Gilmore, and indeed like many comedies, Beetlejuice has its uneven moments. A number of narrative incidents and aspects of the film's netherworld go unexplained (we never find out, for example, how Barbara tames the sandworm that saves them from Betelgeuse in the film's climax), and the picture suffers from a frequent cinematic narrative problem in that the characters react almost too serenely to something overwhelmingly incredible. After all, if confronted by the true existence of the afterlife, my first response would not be to build a theme park on top of it. Of course, I am not a character in a cinematic comedy, and as film comedies go, Beetlejuice is a great one. The picture cemented Tim Burton in the public imagination as a master of macabre subject matter and imagery, an image he has cultivated and grown into a lucrative career with films like Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, and The Nightmare Before Christmas...all pictures that bear the influence of Beetlejuice's visual tropes and narrative implications. Tim Burton is a visionary, no question about that. But he might never have gotten by without a little help from his screenwriting friends.

Personal Note: There has only been one occasion in my life so far when I have gotten to hold an Oscar...and it was an Oscar won for this film, by makeup artist Robert Short, who shared the 1988 Best Makeup award with Ve Neill and Steve LaPorte for their work on Beetlejuice. When you see what they did to the face of the actually quite handsome Michael Keaton, you'll understand why they won.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Award, Best Writing

THE DVD ZOMBIE: IT WATCHES "THE ROOKIE"!

2010-07-19T18:27:00.001-07:00

In a number of ways, Clint Eastwood's 1990 buddy-cop action thriller The Rookie represents the end of an era. From even his earliest days behind the camera, Eastwood always harbored ambitions to be something greater than a purveyor of mindless action spectacle and violence. But despite a filmography that encompassed everything from the elegiac Depression-era drama Honkytonk Man to the moody jazz biopic Bird, the general public and much of the critical establishment still chose to regard Eastwood as a manufacturer of junky action pictures for the Saturday-matinee crowd. The fact that many of these action thrillers were enormous commercial successes simply muddied the waters even further; after all, something so across-the-boards popular couldn't possibly have serious artistic merit, right? Then, in 1992, Eastwood released Unforgiven, a grim, serious-minded western from a script (by David Webb Peoples) that Eastwood had purchased almost a decade before and sat on, waiting to reach the age when he could invest its cold-blooded recovering-killer protagonist with the appropriate gravity. Not only was the film a box-office hit, but it also scored with the critics, who finally saw in Eastwood's work the sober intentions and aesthetic consideration that a stalwart few had detected all along. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, including two for Eastwood as the film's director and producer (he also received his first-ever nomination for Best Actor for Unforgiven), and from that moment forth, even when delivering straight genre films like 1999's crusading-newsman tale True Crime, there was no escaping the fact that this was a film by ACADEMY AWARD WINNER CLINT EASTWOOD, and attention would be paid.

As Unforgiven's immediate predecessor in Eastwood's catalog, The Rookie thus represents the final product of an era when the filmmaker was taken less than seriously, if not outright dismissed...and truth be told, the film is one that Eastwood himself likely regarded as more or less disposable. It is generally believed that Eastwood made The Rookie, a thoroughly unoriginal but blatantly commercial action picture, in exchange for the studio greenlighting and financing the same year's White Hunter, Black Heart, an ambitious tale of artistic and savage hubris inspired by John Huston's adventures during the filming of The African Queen. Though critically praised, White Hunter was the latest in a string of financial underperformers for the filmmaker, and The Rookie hit theaters at a time when the box-office drawing power of Eastwood, who turned 60 the year of the film's release, was falling under question for the first time in his career. For this reason, perhaps, the grizzled action veteran was here paired with a hot young co-star, Charlie Sheen, who has arguably more screen-time than Eastwood and who carries the brunt of the film's most furious action on his shoulders.

That action kicks off when tough-talking, cigar-chomping LAPD auto-theft detective Nick Pulovski (Eastwood) finds himself in need of a partner after his right hand is killed during a high-speed chase of an East L.A. band of car thieves. His supervisor assigns him to work with David Ackerman (Sheen), a stoic son of wealthy social-climbing parents who joined the force to combat the overpowering guilt he feels over his brother's death, the result of a childhood accident Ackerman believes he caused. The old dog has no desire to teach this kid any tricks, new or otherwise, but soon they find themselves in the thick of an all-out crime war when they target the chop-shop ring led by Strom (Raul Julia), the German-born mastermind who's been lifting autos all over the city and who, not incidentally, killed Pulovski's partner.

As you can probably tell from the description above, the film's screenplay, by Boaz Yakin and Scott Spiegel, is straight off the shelf, Action Storytelling 101. There is virtually nothing you expect to see in a film like this that Yakin and Spiegel neglected to shoehorn into their scenario. A furious commanding officer (Pepe Serna) takes Pulovski off the chop-shop case because, with his dead partner and all, it's now "too personal". Pulovski and Ackerman have a face-off scene where they trade insults and nearly come to blows...but it's balanced out with a scene of male bonding, this time over cigars and motorcycles (Pulovski is a former race driver, Ackerman an engineering student who effortlessly fixes the older cop's ailing bike). A brawl in a bar lit all in piercing red, a scene where the two cops confront the wealthy criminal at a country club, a confrontation in which Ackerman tells his father "you were never there for me"...hell, there's even a moment where Ackerman, facing his police review board, is accused of murdering his brother and grows increasingly furious until he awakens, drenched in sweat. Because you see, it was all a dream! With all this and more, there are moments where The Rookie plays like an ad for a clearance sale at Crazy Clint's Cliche Warehouse.

Eastwood the director here finds himself in the unenviable position of having to play catch-up to a genre he virtually helped to invent. For years, action cinema had followed his lead, with every quick-gun cop a Dirty Harry wannabe and every hard-riding cowboy a pseudo-Man with No Name. But in the 1980s, a new breed of action thriller, exemplified by producer Joel Silver's high-tech, funny-but-furious Die Hard and Lethal Weapon pictures, turned the genre up to 11, and in The Rookie, the story of a young cop trying to impress a more experienced mentor, we find the mentor, Eastwood, ironically trying to outdo his action-film pupils. And it cannot be said that The Rookie does not deliver when it comes to high-flying, literally quite explosive action. The film's opening chase sequence, with Pulovski in high-speed pursuit of an auto-transport truck, becomes an epic smash-up when the criminals start shedding cars in an effort to slow the old cop down. Pulovski and Ackerman escape from a wired-to-blow warehouse by driving through a window about five stories up; the resultant explosion hurls the car onto a neighboring roof and through a skylight, with the two cops battered but alive. ("Engineered," Pulovski quips, "like no other car.") The final chase sequence, in which the cops pursue Strom and his machine-gun-wielding mistress Liesl (Sonia Braga) through a busy airport, features an impressive sequence in which Pulovski and Ackerman outgun an oncoming private plane that collides mid-runway with a jumbo jet. These sequences, in a film released seven months before James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day forever changed the way filmmakers would handle fx-driven action scenes, represent a pleasant reminder of the glory days when good old-fashioned stunt work gave the action thriller its zing. (At the time of its release, The Rookie was seen as an omen of the declining importance of story in action thrillers, as the film famously utilized twice as many stuntpeople as actors.) Eastwood's films had delivered plenty of spectacular action and stunts over the years, but nothing quite as hyperbolic as this; in fact, some critics, when confronted with the film's neverending welter of narrative cliches and over-the-top mayhem, chose to read The Rookie as some sort of poker-faced parody of action thrillers.

Whatever its tone, The Rookie reminds us why films like Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are looked upon as benchmarks of their genre while this one is largely seen as a failure. For no matter how big the explosion, how vast the army of stuntmen, how wild the array of action moments, if you don't care about the characters, the movie won't work. When John McClane jumps off the roof of the Nakitomi Tower in Die Hard, it's thrilling not because it's a guy cheating death. It's because it's John McClane cheating death, because we've come to know him and care about him and fear for his life. None of the characters in The Rookie inspire this kind of passion in the viewer, and the actors do what they can to little avail. Julia and Braga are colorless villains with an ill-defined scheme and none of the delight in their own evil that the greatest movie heavies often possess. Much was made at the time of the film's release about the relatively ridiculous fact that Julia and Braga, both actors of Latino descent, are here playing Germans, but the nationality of the characters makes no difference, and something tells me that if Jurgen Prochnow and Hannah Schygulla had been playing these roles, the results wouldn't have been much better. Braga comes off better than Julia, if only because it was still something of a novelty, in 1990, to see a woman mowing down cops with a machine gun and dishing it out as hard as the men in an action picture. She also figures prominently in the film's most notorious scene, in which she has her way with Pulovski while he's bound to a chair; some cited the moment as a provocative role reversal within the frequently misogynistic action genre, while most simply decried it as arguably the most tasteless scene of Eastwood's career.

Lara Flynn Boyle brings nothing to the party as Ackerman's worried girlfriend; she exists primarily to offer him moral support and to be menaced by Julia's henchman while Ackerman races home on a motorcycle to rescue her. Tom Skerritt makes little impression as Ackerman's father, and Sheen is surprisingly colorless as the fresh rookie cop. He is not exceptionally impressive in the action scenes, and he handles the dramatic moments, well, with the same stoic generic intensity he always has utilized in his non-comedic roles. The summer following The Rookie's release, Sheen starred in Hot Shots!, a Top Gun spoof in which his steely-eyed style proved to be a brilliant send-up of itself, and after which it was virtually impossible to take him seriously in films like The Rookie again. Not surprisingly, it's Eastwood who sparks the most interest on the screen, the actor bringing nearly 30 years of experience to an underwritten character and making him compelling through sheer charisma and goodwill alone. He makes everything he can out of Pulovski's seemingly relentless string of one-liners (he has one genuinely funny scene where he regales a TV reporter, and her live audience, with a brusque string of expletives), he makes the character's stereotype of a cop's hard life seem somehow lived-in, and even in his sixth decade, he handles himself in the action scenes with aplomb (though I caught myself trying to spot the stunt double in a scene where Pulovski pulls a slick contortionist's move to free himself from a handcuffed prone position). This film most likely represents the last time Clint Eastwood will ever play the wisecracking, shoot-first avenger, and it's pleasant to watch even if he's just going through the motions.

Fortunately, Eastwood's technical crew are not just phoning it in here, and The Rookie looks as good as virtually any action picture of the era. Cinematographer Jack N. Green gives the film a dark-hued, noir-style atmosphere that's honestly classier than the material deserves, and editor Joel Cox cuts the action scenes for maximum intensity and velocity (two years later, he would take home one of Unforgiven's Oscars). The star of the film is arguably stunt coordinator Buddy van Horn, who had directed several of Eastwood's earlier pictures and who here, working with a larger cast than Eastwood himself, spearheads easily the film's most memorable moments. I have often had mixed feelings about the usage of music in Eastwood's films, and the jazzy score provided here by Eastwood's longtime collaborator Lennie Niehaus is no exception. While Niehaus's compositions are enjoyable on their own, they are often integrated haphazardly into the action, and the film's principal theme, a brassy sax-and-trumpet-driven number that blares over the opening credits, sounds like something you'd hear on a '70s cop show, not in a feature film from the last decade of the century. It gives the film an ersatz, dated feel that the cliches surrounding that music do nothing to dispel.

While it didn't exactly set the box office on fire, The Rookie was a moderate success, mostly with audiences who suspected that this was perhaps as close as they were ever going to get to seeing a sixth Dirty Harry picture. Eastwood would have to wait one more picture before he received his unqualified and perhaps overdue critical laurels. In the meantime, The Rookie was greeted with some of the harshest reviews Eastwood has ever received. Many still regard it as a low point in the filmmaker's career, and longtime Eastwood compadre (and official biographer) Richard Schickel has gone on record and called it "the nadir" of his friend's creative output. Presenting as it does one of the last gasps of a particularly entertaining brand of action picture, The Rookie is a hard film to hate. But it's a nearly impossible film to get excited about, and unless you're a die-hard Eastwood fan, you're better off, well, just watching Die Hard.

NOTE: Follow these links for the Zombie's take on Clint Eastwood's Changeling and Invictus.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #75

2010-05-08T13:16:00.001-07:00

MILLER'S CROSSING (1990)

The Writers

Joel and Ethan Coen

Why It's Here

For many reasons, 1990 will always be "my favorite year" as a moviegoer. This was the year when, at the tender age of twelve, I went from being a kid passively absorbed in an entertainment to an aspiring screenwriter and filmmaker, studying cinema to better learn what would be my future craft and the raison d'etre of my life. This was the year I saw Sam Raimi's Darkman, the film I have always credited with solidifying my interest in pursuing motion picture production as a profession. It was the year I first saw, in its initial theatrical run, the film I have often declared to be my all-time favorite (I will keep its identity mum for now, but it will be coming up later in this countdown). It was the year my parents, sensing that my interest in movies was much deeper than that of just a fun-seeking kid, began allowing me to regularly attend R-rated movies (that year alone, I saw Total Recall, Misery, and Die Hard 2, among others). It was also the year I purchased my first issues of Entertainment Weekly and Premiere, and in the latter was a feature called "Shot By Shot", in which a single sequence of an upcoming movie was broken down and analyzed in minute detail. In this issue of Premiere, the sequence under the microscope was one in which a nighttime home invasion by tommy-gun-toting mobsters is thwarted by a pistol-packing gang boss, the whole blood-drenched ballet set to the soaring strains of an Irish tenor singing "Danny Boy". The film was Miller's Crossing, and the article was the first time I ever saw the names "Joel and Ethan Coen". As for many moviegoers, it would not be the last. For me, Miller's Crossing remains a personal, perhaps sentimental, favorite within the Coen brothers' filmography, and as a burgeoning screenwriter, the film's screenplay, written as always by the brothers, was a revelatory and instructive one.

The time: Prohibition. The place: an unnamed eastern American city. The town's unelected but undisputed ruler is Leo O'Bannion (Albert Finney), an old-school Irish crime boss who presides over the rackets with a strong assist from Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne), his soft-spoken, poker-faced counselor, with whom he shares a close but no-nonsense relationship. Leo's the man to see if you need something, and what Johnny Caspar (Jon Polito), head of the rival Italian mob, needs is a "license to kill bookies"...in particular Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), the giggly, shifty-eyed "skell" who Caspar suspects of selling information on the mafioso's fixed boxing matches. Against Tom's advice, Leo refuses Caspar's request to take out Bernie because, unbeknownst to the portly Italian hood, the Irishman is intimately involved with Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), Bernie's tough-talking but surprisingly loyal sister. Tom thinks Leo's a chump for sticking his neck out just to keep a dame happy...but he's also not ready to cut and run on him, which he proves by refusing Caspar's offer to pay his considerable gambling debts in exchange for Bernie. Leo's stubbornness sparks an attempt on his life, and with the crime lord ready to go to the mattresses over the woman he plans to ask to be his wife, Tom drops his bombshell on his boss. He and Verna have been sleeping together behind Leo's back. Betrayed by his own right hand, Leo throws Tom out of his organization, and the cold-blooded criminal throws his lot in with Caspar. But if Tom was so willing to cross the lines, why did he sell himself out in an attempt to save Leo? Why has Bernie, who Caspar has ordered Tom to kill to prove his loyalty, come back to town after Tom let him skip? And why does Tom let him go anyway, considering he's the one who told Caspar where Bernie was hiding in the first place? Whose side is Tom on here?

The plot of Miller's Crossing is complicated enough to sustain a novel, much less a two-hour film (the story is, in fact heavily inspired by Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, although the author receives no onscreen credit). I haven't even mentioned Eddie the Dane (J.E. Freeman, in one of the cinema's great evil-henchman performance), Caspar's right-hand man, who suspects Tom of double-dealing from the start, or Mink Larouie (Steve Buscemi, who walks off with his single scene), the sniveling bookie who is the third corner of a romantic triangle, stepping out with Bernie behind the Dane's back. Or Lazarre, Tom's own mysterious bookie, who provides the major engine for Tom's troubles without making a single onscreen appearance. When showing Miller's Crossing to friends for the first time, I usually advise them to use the restroom before it begins, so they don't have to leave during the screening and risk losing track of a major plot point. It's rare these days that a film's screenplay rewards even cursory attention, whereas Miller's Crossing, like most of the Coens' best work, is blessed with a richness of narrative so dense that I must confess that it took me about four or five viewings before I had the intricacies of the double- and triple-crosses completely nailed down. And truth be told, in the film's third act, when Tom is turning the final screws to put the dastardly Caspar and the turncoat Bernie face to face, I sometimes lose track, in the midst of the fast-paced patter, of who's conning whom, how and why. Still, it is a testament to the Coens' writing that this narrative tangle excites, rather than frustrates, the viewer. I've been watching this movie on a fairly regular basis for almost twenty years now, and when it gets thick, I get more involved, not less. I want to know, to understand. I care, and that's what separates Miller's Crossing from your run-of-the-mill over-plotted crime picture.

The Coen brothers' characters, likewise, possess a depth and psychological fascination that rewards repeated viewings. Not surprisingly for a film about deception and betrayal, none of these characters is completely what they seem to be, and the film, as much as anything, is about the masks people wear in order to get what they want or to be who they wish. Since Miller's Crossing takes place in an era when homosexuality was "the love that dare not speak its name", it took me a few viewings of the film (and a little growing up; I was, after all, only twelve the first time I saw it) to realize that Mink, Bernie and the Dane were mixed up in a love triangle. It's easier to figure out Bernie's proclivities. It's there in his fastidious style of dress, his delicate hand gestures, the way Verna defends him to Tom when he cracks wise: "Sneer at him like everybody else. Just because he's different...people think he's scum." The Dane, on the other hand, is arguably the least stereotypical gay man in movie history, a steely-eyed, cold-blooded killer whose love for Mink, a poorly kept secret, eventually proves to be his undoing when Tom convinces Caspar that it's the two of them, not Bernie, who sold out his fix. After all, the Dane doesn't seem like the double-crossing type...but "there's always that wild card where love is involved." Caspar himself is an interesting creation, a cheap patent-leather thug who fancies himself a philosopher king, with highfalutin pronouncements about the importance of "character" and "ethics". But his veneer of intellect is paper-thin, for this tinpot dictator is extremely paranoid about his place in the social order; he constantly bellows about getting the "high-hat" from those he believes hold him in contempt, and he angrily resorts to throwing the crooked mayor out of his own office in a hilariously pathetic display of power. (Many contemporary reviews called Miller's Crossing a timely film, and I think much of that up-to-the-minuteness is due to the characterization of Caspar, who in his pretensions to deep thought, essential criminality, and tenuous grip on his own precarious position, is much reminiscent of present-day politicians of all parties.) Verna is likewise something of an enigma, a tough, headstrong woman who is nonetheless willing to put her own love and happiness at risk, and to essentially whore herself out to Leo, for the sake of a brother who seems to feel no such filial ties to her (Bernie describes her to Tom as "a sick twist"). Then, when all the scores have been settled and Bernie is beyond Leo's protection or redemption, Leo announces that he and Verna will indeed be wed...and that she invited him down the aisle. This despite the fact that, in her last encounter with Tom, her willingness to put a bullet in his heart seems as much inspired by her wounded feelings for him as by any lingering feelings of loyalty to her double-crossing brother.

Tom is the central character of Miller's Crossing, the straw who stirs the Coens' intricate narrative drink, and as such he possesses the most labyrinthine psychological depths of any of these characters. The Coen brothers' critics frequently accuse them of being technically proficient but cold-blooded filmmakers, content to produce arch genre pastiches peopled with unfeelings automatons spouting precision-tooled dialogue. Upon first glance, Tom seems to be brutally emblematic of the potential truth of this accusation. As played by Byrne, he's an icy individual indeed, with a flat, thickly accented voice and heavily hooded eyes that betray no hint of emotion or soul. If there's one personality trait that emerges most prominently in the Coens' characterization of Tom, it's a deep-rooted masochistic streak. Though he's involved with Verna, he only uses terms of endearment when he's being sarcastic with her (as when, after she calls him a rumhead, he declares with a sneer, "And I love you, angel"), and when she asks him what he told Leo about her, he declares, nastily, "I told him you were a tramp and he should dump you." Tom seems to know that he's doing something wrong by stepping out with his boss's best girl, and he therefore refuses to let himself enjoy it. (It's telling that the Coens neglect to show us the actual sex, lest we start to think any of this is fun or pleasurable for Tom.) Tom's masochism is also present in his almost sociopathically inept gambling, piling debts on top of debts when he knows what's in store for him if he can't pay. He also, for the protagonist of a crime thriller, takes a colossal amount of physical punishment without putting up much of a fight. He gets beaten up by Leo, by the Dane, by Lazarre's goons. He gets punched in the face by Verna and by Leo's lieutenant Terry (Lanny Flaherty), and kicked in the jaw by Bernie and by Caspar's diminutive goon Tic-Tac (Al Mancini). He even lets a fat woman in Leo's club wallop him to the floor with her purse without putting up a fight. Why doesn't he block their blows? Why such a willingness to suffer?

I think it's because Tom, by taking Leo's girlfriend to bed, has betrayed the only honest man in the world of Miller's Crossing. Leo may be a criminal, but he's a straight-shooting one, and he proves it in both his dialogue and his actions. When Tom tries to convince him to sell out Bernie for the sake of their organization, Leo tells him, flat-out, "Can't do it, Tom. Can't do it." After all, he's in love with Verna. Bernie is her brother. That makes him a friend, and "you do anything to help your friends, just like you do anything to kick your enemies." No fear, no concern for what the decision will mean to his business or potentially his life. Just friends and the sacrifices you make for them. This is the man to whom Tom owes his livelihood. This is the man whom he has betrayed. And it thus turns out that Caspar, in the film's opening scene, was right. Miller's Crossing is talking about friendship, character and ethics. By performing an unethical act that reveals deep flaws in his own character, Tom has sold out the truest friendship of his life. He seeks punishment for this crime, for certain, and he finds it in the constant physical abuse he takes throughout the course of the story. But more than justice, he wants redemption, and he thus sacrifices his relationship with Verna and puts his own life at risk, from Caspar, Bernie and others, in order to restore Leo to his rightful place as king of the city, with Verna at his side, his chastened but perversely loyal queen.

This quest to regain himself may explain Tom's dream, which is visualized in the film's title sequence and which he recounts to Verna later in the story. In the dream, Tom's hat blows off during a walk in the woods. Verna speculates that "you chased it, you ran and ran. But by the time you caught up to it, it wasn't a hat anymore. It had changed into something else. Something wonderful." Tom shoots this notion down: "Nah. It stayed a hat. And I didn't chase it." A hat like the one Tom wears is emblematic of manhood, male identity, and when it blows off, it's as if Tom's subconscious is acknowledging that only someone less than a man would betray a friend the way Tom has. It's telling that Tom doesn't chase the hat in his dream. For even though the very last shot of the film is of Tom, in the woods, putting his hat back on, he knows in his heart that the truth of himself that he has lost by betraying Leo can never truly be recovered, which is also likely why he refuses Leo's end-of-film offer to come work for him again. Of course, none of this is overtly spelled out in the narrative. The Coen brothers are filmmakers who seem to revel in the potential unreadability of their films, who refuse to explain the often metaphorically loaded images of their cinema (the DVD of Miller's Crossing, like those of most of the Coens' films, features no filmmaker commentary track). But in their unwillingness to bludgeon us with their themes, the Coen brothers taught me that often, subtlety and interpretive richness can be the key to truly great drama, that with art, often it's what we bring to it, rather than what it tells us, that can bring a creative work to its fullest expression.

All of this makes Miller's Crossing sound like a dry philosophical exercise, when the film is also a cracking example of genre storytelling, with bold, violent set pieces, memorable minor supporting players (the sycophantic police chief O'Doole, nicely portrayed by Thomas Toner, is a particular favorite), and most of all, thrilling, near-acrobatic dialogue. The Coens are perhaps unique among contemporary screenwriters in their ability to fully flesh out the feeling and reality of a world using just their dialogue. This is not to say that their films are not also supremely accomplished on a visual level, but they rank among the very few screenwriters in present-day cinema (you could also say this, I think, about Woody Allen and maybe David Mamet) whose films you could recognize as theirs with the images turned off, so potent and idiosycratic is the flavor of their written speech. From start to finish, Miller's Crossing is full of memorably baroque lines and speeches, dusted with one-of-a-kind period slang that may be authentic or just pulled from the Coens' fertile minds. Characters find out what's up by asking "what's the rumpus?" Women are "twists", criminals are "yeggs", and Caspar frets endlessly about getting the "high-hat" from his betters. Each character has phrases and concepts that pop up over and over in their dialogue, in a manner reminiscent of the way we all re-use certain pet phrases in our own speech. The Dane always digs at Tom by calling him "smart guy", Caspar mentions ethics numerous times during the course of the drama, and Bernie, begging Tom for his life in the woods out at the titular crossing, repeats endlessly, almost to the point of absurdity, "I'm praying to you! Look in your heart!" (These words are nicely called back in the final confrontation, when Bernie, now revealed as a duplicitous slime, asks the gun-wielding Tom to again look in his heart, only to be told, "What heart?" before he gets a bullet between his eyes.) The Coens even find fresh ways for their characters to say things we've heard before, as when Tic-Tac instructs Tom on how to properly kill a man: "You gotta remember to put one in his brain. Your first shot puts him down, then you put one in his brain. Then you're dead. Then we go home." And this line is likewise beautifully recalled when Caspar, ready to kill the "treasonous" Dane, reminds Tom that it's "somethin' I try to teach all my boys." Screenwriting 101 always tells you that you should keep dialogue to a minimum, never tell when you can show. But when you tell as brilliantly as the Coens do, why should the characters keep it quiet? Of course, they also understand the value of letting action do the talking, whether it's an explosive confrontation like that between Leo and Caspar's gunmen at his house, or a simple look, like the sad, longing one Tom sends at Leo as the old man, his mentor, walks out of his life for good.

Miller's Crossing is maybe the first film I ever remember seriously thinking about as a piece of writing. Even at the age of twelve, I could sense that this film, with its complex but gripping narrative, psychologically probing examination of character, and endlessly distinctive dialogue, was not your everyday crime thriller, that the film, and the men who wrote it, were something special. Time has certainly proven the latter point correct; the Coens now have two screenwriting Oscars, for both original and adapted screenplay, to their credit. (Mild spoiler alert: It won't be the last appearance their work makes on this countdown, either.) And the film? In preparation for writing this review, I watched it again, almost twenty years after seeing it for the first time. And as the credits began to roll and Carter Burwell's stirring theme swelled up on the soundtrack, I boiled this review down to four words, said to myself. "What a great movie." I look forward to another twenty years, at least, of watching Miller's Crossing. Maybe by then, I will have all of its mysteries finally solved.

THE SHAMELESSLY SELF-PROMOTIONAL ZOMBIE

2010-05-07T11:25:00.000-07:00

Over the last several months, it has occurred to me that I have become a valued resource for my creative friends, many of whom come to me for advice, counsel and notes on their screenplay, book and short film projects. It has been this way ever since my days in graduate school, where I would often find myself with a small stack of screenplays on my desk, drafts from friends and classmates who put tremendous stock in my opinion of their works-in-progress. That stack has continued to be a fixture of my life, and I've watched it grow over the years to include manuscripts from co-workers, treatments, and all manner of creative material. One day several weeks ago, I had a very pleasant lunch with a co-worker, during which I gave her notes on her book manuscript. At the conclusion of the meal, extremely pleased with my insights, she told me that I should seriously consider offering my consulting services professionally. At first I just nodded, more or less dismissing the idea, but as the week passed, and as I looked at the substantial pile of to-be-read drafts and manuscripts on my shelf, I finally realized something...why the hell not? And thus, CDT Literary Consultations* was born.

CDT is my new consulting business, where I offer in-depth insight and analysis of your screenplay, treatment, television spec, or book manuscript. This is NOT a proofreading service, nor is it a service to grandfather your material into the hands of agents, producers, or other industry players. Simply put, we are there for when you need a second opinion, for when you have nagging questions about your material that you can't answer on your own, for when you can almost, but not quite, feel the brass ring of a successfully completed draft...I will help you grab that ring and keep it firmly in hand.

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I offer a 24-hour turnaround read time on treatments, a 48-hour turnaround time on screenplays and television scripts, and a one-week turnaround on book manuscripts (times contingent upon length of manuscript and current CDT workload). Payments can be made in cash, by check, or through PayPal upon completion of CDT's services.

And what do I bring to the table that should make you consider CDT Literary Consultations as a viable development option for your property? I am an award-winning screenwriter, essayist and critic. I received my MFA in screenwriting from Chapman University in Orange, CA (class of 2002), where I wrote my thesis project under the tutelage of the late Leonard Schrader, an Oscar nominee for his screenplay for Kiss of the Spider Woman. My screenplays have won prizes at the Worldfest-Houston International Film and Video Festival, and have been honored by Screenplay Festival and by the Dolphin Bay, Hollywood 27 Productions, Igottascript.com, and Empire screenplay competitions. My screenplay Blade of the King has been optioned by From the Flames Productions, and their "concept film" treatment of the script won second prize in the trailer competition at the 2006 Indie Gathering Film Festival and was nominated for Best Action Sequence at the 2006 Long Beach Action on Film Festival. My script John Henry, a Screenplay Festival honoree, was optioned by Black Bay Entertainment, with Michael Clarke Duncan, an Oscar nominee for The Green Mile, attached to play the title role, and this script is currently being read by DreamWorks Animation. My horse-racing comedy Sir Barton was featured at Working Pictures' Drama Garage Reading Series in Hollywood, and Pills & Cocaine, a dark comedy set in the world of stand-up, was likewise showcased at the Sunday Night Live reading series in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. During my time in Pittsburgh, I also worked as a screenwriting instructor for the Lifelong Learning program at the Community College of Allegheny County. I am a client of the Frank Elliott Shapiro Talent Agency of Sherman Oaks, CA, and I also worked with the late writer / director Dan O'Bannon as an editor and film analyst for his (hopefully) forthcoming how-to screenwriting book. Combine this with all the reviews and criticism I have compiled for this site, and hopefully you will come away with the knowledge that, not to put too fine a point on it, I know my stuff.

If you are interested in learning more about my services or in scheduling a consultation, call CDT at 412-513-9397 or email at cdt_consult@hotmail.com.

And since we're self-promoting today, I wanted to remind you all that by visiting this website, you are also supporting your friendly neighborhood zombie. Our site is connected to Google AdSense, who provide the advertisements you see on the top right-hand side of the page when you log on. By visiting my site and by (especially) clicking on and visiting the advertisements for our sponsors, you are allowing the Zombie to continue seeing new films for which he can provide the criticism and commentary that you have come to enjoy and expect.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled criticism...

* People have been asking me since the start of this endeavor...why CDT? Well, I was thinking that since I really know screenwriting and scripts, and that I am now offering my consulting services...well, sometimes I guess those who CAN do teach. Can Do Teach...CDT Literary Consultations.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #76

2010-04-30T15:14:00.000-07:00

SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN (1952)

The Writers

Adolph Green and Betty Comden; song lyrics by Arthur Freed, Comden and Green

Why It’s Here

Casual fans of cinema are likely not aware that “Singin’ in the Rain”, the title track to what is widely regarded as the greatest movie musical of all time, was not composed for the film that bears its name; the song originally appeared in an early talkie musical, Hollywood Revue of 1929. In fact, with the exception of “Make ‘Em Laugh” and “Moses Supposes”, none of the songs in Singin’ in the Rain were originally written for the film. At the height of the classic studio system, Metro Goldwyn-Mayer was known for producing the most lavish and popular musical pictures in Hollywood, and the production unit responsible for the majority of these eye-popping spectacles was presided over by producer Arthur Freed, who in his former show-business life was a noted lyricist whose most frequent collaborator was composer Nacio Herb Brown. In 1952, Freed decided that MGM’s next major musical production would be a showcase for the extensive backlog of songs he had composed with Brown in the first decade of sound cinema, a catalog to which MGM now owned the rights. So he presented the screenwriters assigned to the production, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with a package of songs and essentially told them, “Build a story around this.” Under those circumstances, one would be hard pressed to expect Comden and Green to deliver even a story that simply made a great deal of sense, much less a cinematic musical masterpiece. But somehow, the screenplay that Comden and Green “slapped together” as nothing but an ostensible framework for their boss’s songs emerged as a benchmark of the studio system’s golden age, and the only live-action musical to find a place on the Movie Zombie’s screenplay countdown.

Taking their cue from the provenance of the film’s songbook, and inspired by the back-to-the-talkies career histories of many of those involved in the production, Comden and Green fashioned a story about the early days of Hollywood sound cinema, and the often brutal growing pains the industry suffered as it converted over to talkies. Perhaps due to the fact that the film’s plot, by necessity, had to exist independently of the lyrical content of its songs, Singin’ in the Rain is one of the rare musicals with a story rich and interesting enough to have potentially supported a film on its own, without utilizing a musical treatment. It is also, and not frequently enough given credit for being, one of the greatest movies about movie-making ever made, an honest but affectionate send-up of virtually every aspect of Hollywood as it was in the early days of the studio system. Comden and Green were themselves old show business troupers, and were able to draw on a deep well of passed-down anecdotes and personal experiences to create a narrative full of hilarious incidents made even funnier by their having been borrowed from real life.

Singin’ begins in 1927, the last year of silent cinema’s reign, at the premiere of The Royal Rascal, the latest production from Monumental Pictures. Outside Graumann’s Chinese Theater, the movie’s star, Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), gives a self-serving interview about his early showbiz career that serves as both a sly dig at the studio-manufactured images of Hollywood stars (virtually everything Don tells us about his background is contradicted by the accompanying flashback images) and a deft parody of Citizen Kane’s immortal “News on the March” newsreel scene. Don’s on top of the world, the brightest star in the Hollywood sky, but his rough early days as a vaudeville song-and-dance man, stunt performer, and “mood music” on-set accompanist (a job that Arthur Freed himself once held) have led him to have doubts about his true value as an actor, doubts that are exacerbated after a chance encounter with Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), an aspiring “serious” actress who calls Don’s movie work “a lot of dumb show”. Things get even worse at the premiere party, where Monumental’s studio chief, R.F. Simpson (a great, gruff performance by Millard Mitchell), shows an experimental sound-film reel and announces that Warner Bros. is making an actual sound feature, The Jazz Singer. Nobody expects much from this “talking-picture” gadget, until The Jazz Singer is a smash hit and a panicked Monumental decides that its entire production apparatus will be switching over to sound, including Don’s upcoming period-swashbuckler epic, The Dueling Cavalier. Comden and Green deftly anatomize the countless troubles that went into the studios’ conversion to sound with an uproarious collection of mishaps, most of which were drawn from actual stories from the early days of the talkies. The actors are forced to speak into awkwardly hidden microphones, with sound fading in and out every time they turn their heads. The premiere screening of The Dueling Cavalier is sabotaged when the soundtrack gets out of sync, causing the damsel in distress’s cries for help to seemingly come out of the mouth of the dastardly villain and vice versa. And of course, there’s the problem of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen, a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominee for this hilarious performance), Don’s leading lady. A rock-stupid nincompoop who believes the studio-planted fan-magazine articles about her and Don being in love, Lina’s got a voice like a klaxon horn, and it completely clashes with her onscreen image as an elegant romantic heroine. This disjunction between image and voice sadly did bring an end to the careers of a number of flourishing silent-era stars (most notably John Gilbert, Greta Garbo’s favorite leading man), but here the situation is played for laughs, and we don’t feel a shred of sympathy for Lina anyway, even though she is easily the film’s funniest character and gets what is, for my money, the picture’s best line when she bellows, in the midst of an egotistical rant, that “I make more money that Calvin Coolidge put together!”

Comden and Green devise a solution to The Dueling Cavalier’s woes that is clever and consistent with the technology of filmmaking. After the picture’s catastrophic premiere, Don figures that his career is over, that he will be a laughingstock and will wind up grinding it out in vaudeville houses again. But then he realizes that he has a secret weapon up his sleeve: Kathy Selden. Turns out that Kathy, far from being the lofty aspiring “Ethel Barrymore” she claimed, was actually a lowly studio contract player (who supplements her income by jumping out of cakes as part of a Hollywood-party chorus line)…not to mention one of Don’s biggest fans. They meet on the studio lot and fall in love, and, with the help of Don’s longtime collaborator, composer Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor, in a Golden Globe-winning performance), come up with the clever notion of transforming The Dueling Cavalier into The DANCING Cavalier, a showcase for Don’s natural song-and-dance abilities. R.F. is skeptical at first. After all, Don may be a talented hoofer and singer, but Lina still talks like a shrieking buzzard, and who can imagine how she sings? Kathy, willing to sacrifice her own career’s forward momentum to help the man she loves, agrees to serve as Lina’s voice, dubbing over both her spoken dialogue and singing without any onscreen credit. (Ironically, the actual “voice” of Kathy performing the romantic ballad “Would You?” was dubbed by singer Betty Noyes, while the speaking voice dubbed in for the shrill, screechy Lina was not Debbie Reynolds, but Jean Hagen herself, speaking in her real, quite pleasant voice.) The picture is saved, but Don and the studio are not out of the woods yet. Lina gets wind of the dubbing subterfuge, and also discovers the studio’s plan to use Kathy’s work on Cavalier as the springboard for a big star push, all the while relegating the pain-in-the-ass Lina to the background. Given the already colossally bad blood between her and Kathy (the chorus girl smacked Lina in the face with a wad of cake at R.F.’s party…though to be fair, Kathy was aiming the cake at Don), Lina threatens to sue Monumental Pictures and make sure that Kathy never works in Hollywood again. It all comes down to the premiere of The Dancing Cavalier, where Lina’s insistence on finally speaking for herself brings her own curtain down, and Don puts his own ego aside to give credit to the real star of his new picture…and of his heart.

This story would be complex enough for a 103-minute picture that didn’t have to include a bunch of songs with only a tangential relation to the plot. Indeed, it’s worth noting that while the songs never actively interfere with Comden and Green’s telling of their story, there are very few moments where the songs seem necessary to the narrative. Most of the numbers are there as diversions, such as the chorus’s performance of “All I Do Is Dream of You” at R.F.’s party, or as showcases for the talents of particular performers, such as O’Connor’s legendary “Make ‘Em Laugh” number, which is so energetic and ebulliently performed that one is willing to overlook the fact that it has nothing at all to do with the rest of the film. Singin’s love ballads, “You Were Meant for Me” (memorably performed by Don and Kathy on a soundstage he carefully arranges for maximum movie-romantic impact) and “You Are My Lucky Star”, are beautiful but not specific to the characters or the story, and the sprawling “Broadway Melody Ballet” sequence, while it provides the always welcome opportunity to gaze upon the glorious Cyd Charisse, practically brings the momentum of the film’s finale to a screeching halt. Still, given the limitations under which Comden and Green were writing this picture, it’s impressive that the songs blend into the story as well as they do, and that even in the most extremely detached-from-the-story cases, they never seem to be simply shoehorned into the film for their own sake. Indeed, most of these songs today are remembered more for their inclusion in Singin’ in the Rain than for their previous life in movies or as songs in their own right. And of course, it would be hard to imagine this film having the same impact without the title number, performed by an in-love-and-loving-it Don in the midst of a torrential downpour on a Hollywood street. The image of Gene Kelly hanging from a lamppost, umbrella in hand, as rain and love wash over him, is one of the most iconic in Hollywood cinema…one made all the more arresting when you know that workhorse Kelly, who also co-directed Singin’ and choreographed the musical numbers, was battling a 103-degree fever when this sequence was shot.

It would be unfair to Freed and Brown’s memorable compositions to say that Singin’ works in spite of the presence of the songs, but Comden and Green’s screenplay leaves much to enjoy besides the musical numbers, something that cannot often be said about even the best cinematic musicals. (Would you want to watch The Sound of Music without the sound of music in it?) Unlike the usually cut-and-dried star-crossed lovers of many musicals, Singin’ actually presents a central romantic couple who are each facing their own interesting dilemma. Their romance, which would, in a lesser musical, most likely take the entire picture to resolve, here is worked out relatively simply, with one heartfelt conversation and musical performance, and this frees up Don and Kathy to engage in much more intriguing personal struggles, albeit now with each other’s assistance and support. Don’s aforementioned issue with his perceived lack of value as an actor is compounded by the studio’s attempts to make him into something he’s not, elocution lessons and all, and the disastrous Dueling Cavalier premiere seems to reinforce his worst beliefs about himself, until Kathy helps him realize that by being what the studio wants him to be, he’s not being true to his own gifts as a performer. Don’s not a dueling cavalier, but a dancing one, and he doesn’t figure that out without Kathy’s help. Likewise, Kathy learns that pretensions to art are all well and good, but if you’ve got a gift like Don has, there’s no reason to be ashamed of sharing it with the world…and she turns out to be quite the natural song-and-dance entertainer herself. Most musicals present us with mismatched lovers in conflict who often don’t resolve their differences until the final reel. Granted, this approach can have its merits (Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made several great pictures trading on just this sort of conflict), but it also deprives us of the pleasures of watching the romantic couple as partners, you-and-me-against-the-world style. Singin’ makes Don and Kathy a true couple, united in goal and deed, and it’s a refreshing dynamic to drive a musical comedy forward.

It also helps that Comden and Green have filled Don and Kathy’s world with memorable supporting characters. R.F. Simpson is a marvelously dry boss, alternately tough and fatherly, and he leaves the apoplectic heavy lifting to Roscoe Dexter (Douglas Fowley), the studio’s star director, whose splenetic blustering and incredulous rage at the technological gewgaws he is now forced to contend with never fail to make me laugh out loud. Many of the film’s supporting players are veiled caricatures of legendary silent-era stars. Rita Moreno, in one of her earliest roles, plays Zelda Zanders, a bubbly flapper type based on Clara Bow, while Judy Landon cuts a hilariously imperious figure as Olga Mara, a moody European vamp in the Theda Bara mold. Kathleen Freeman also scores a few big laughs as the elocution teacher assigned the thankless task of teaching Lina Lamont to speak like a lady (“Rrrrrrround tones, rrrrrrrround tones!”). While most of these characters have limited screen time, they all create the sensation of Don and Kathy’s romance playing out in an authentic, fully populated world, while adding to the film’s mode of tough but warm showbiz satire. Lina Lamont is the film’s comic crown jewel, and Comden and Green create a bitch for the ages, a character who alternately fawns all over her leading man (every time he tells her they don’t really have a romance, she obliviously coos, “Ohh, Donny, you don’t mean that”), rages at her boss, and spits venom and rancor at everyone who gets in her way. It’s not until you step back and really look through the comic euphoria created by Hagen’s performance that you realize that Lina is a truly awful person, one of the most loathsome villains in the musical genre, and her comeuppance is thus not just narratively logical, but richly deserved and ever-so-satisfying. Oddly enough, the closest thing the film has to a screenwriting weakness is the character of Cosmo Brown. The role is memorably played by O’Connor, an enthusiastic and energetic performer who holds his own with Kelly in their dual numbers (the early “Fit as a Fiddle [And Ready for Love]”, performed by Cosmo and Don during their vaudeville days, is a highlight) and who shines in his “Make ‘Em Laugh” showcase, dancing wildly with a stuffed dummy and actually backflipping off the walls. He also has a lot of funny and memorable lines, as when he thinks the studio’s conversion to sound will cost him his job as a mood-music accompanist; he laments, “At last I can start starving and write that symphony,” until R.F. informs him he’ll instead be the head of the studio’s new music department, to which he replies, “At last I can stop starving and write that symphony.” Indeed, the film’s entertainment value would be distinctly diminished without Cosmo’s presence…but I still can’t figure out exactly what he’s adding to the story. He gives Don a buddy, sure, but he’s got Kathy, so it’s not like he’s lonely. And he does help the lovers devise their dubbing-over-Lina scheme…but it could just as easily have been R.F. or Roscoe who thought up the idea. Even his performance of “Make ‘Em Laugh” doesn’t add to the narrative. Granted, I wouldn’t cast Donald O’Connor in a big musical comedy and not give him a big musical comedy number, but really the only reason it’s even in there is so O’Connor has a big number. Don’s not primarily a comic actor, after all, so the number doesn’t even really make story sense…funny, considering it is one of the only two numbers that was written just for this film.

Still, in criticizing Singin’ in the Rain’s storytelling, I feel like someone booing a second-grade Christmas pageant. Sure, it’s not perfect (which is why it’s #76 on my countdown and not #1), but if someone gave me a pile of unrelated songs and told me to build a story around them, I’d be lucky to come up with Moulin Rouge!, much less the greatest Hollywood musical ever made. Besides which, if you’re going to go out of your way to find fault with something that has given so much joy and good cheer to people for almost sixty years now, you might want to look into another line of work, because maybe happiness isn’t really your thing. Betty Comden and Adolph Green took on a ridiculous, seemingly impossible storytelling task and succeeded beyond what should have been anyone’s reasonable expectations. You can walk out of any number of musicals humming the songs, but it’s sometimes a chore to remember the plots of even the most tuneful musicals. Singin’ in the Rain has great songs, memorable characters, quotable dialogue, and even, wonder of wonders, a terrific story. It’s more than a great musical. It’s even more than a great comedy. Singin’ in the Rain is a great movie. Period.

AWARDS WON: Writers Guild of America Award, Best American Musical Screenplay

THE ZOMBIE DOES HOLLYWOOD: IT ATTENDS "THE LOSERS" Q&A SCREENING WITH SYLVAIN WHITE!

2010-04-26T19:06:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, even a Zombie needs a little fun in his life, and at those times, a good scummy action flick is just what the doctor ordered. That's exactly what Sylvain White's The Losers delivers: a good disreputable Saturday-night entertainment. The last few years have seen a dearth of classic old-school action pictures gracing our multiplexes. Most films in this genre have lately chosen to concentrate on bloated special-effects sequences at the expense of the down-and-dirty pleasures of fights, explosions and hyperbolic gunplay, and even the best recent action pictures, films like The Dark Knight and Casino Royale, are so weighted with thematic heft and "importance" that fun can at times seem to be a distant memory while watching them. No such problems with The Losers. This is a back-to-basics thrill ride, with plenty of stunts and derring-do to keep the pulse racing and just enough comedy to make the film engaging without detracting from the seriousness of the action itself. The original DC / Vertigo comic book series that was the source material for The Losers (written by Andy Diggle and illustrated by Jock) was dedicated to writer / director Shane Black, who, with his screenplays for such pictures as Lethal Weapon and The Last Boy Scout, was one of the architects of the classic late-'80s / early-'90s style of blood-and-yuks action thriller. This new film, co-produced by action maestro Joel Silver (Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, The Matrix), is in the tradition of these iconic bash-'em-ups, serving both as a loving tribute to a classic mode of genre filmmaking and as an injection of fresh new blood into an endangered genre.

The Losers starts out on a grim note that honestly didn't prepare me for the fun to come. In the jungles of South America, a covert CIA unit led by the gruff, stubble-faced Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) find their mission to take out a drug trafficker's jungle lair compromised by the untimely arrival of a busload of schoolchildren. The soldiers manage to get the kids out before the hideout is vaporized, but then their escape helicopter is blasted from the sky by friendly rocket fire, not only killing the innocent children, who the soldiers have placed on board in their stead, but revealing this mission's secret second purpose: take out Clay and his unit. Believed to be dead, and reeling with guilt over the deaths of a few dozen innocent children, Clay and his men go off the grid, hiding out in Bolivia while trying to figure out their next move. Hope for revenge comes four months later, in the enticing form of Aisha (Zoe Saldana), a mysteriously connected woman warrior who wants Clay and his men to return to the states and take out Max (Jason Patric), their former CIA boss, who is up to his neck in dirty dealings and who tried to take out the Losers to keep them from exposing his corrupt ways. Back in the states, Clay's unit must track down Max before he can detonate an illegally acquired super-weapon in the Port of Los Angeles, precipitating an international crisis that will lead to all-out war in the Middle East...and all the money and political power Max and his minions can scrounge. But if there's one thing the Losers know, it's that a world-in-the-balance mission like this is never even that easy, and the unit is forced to contend with divided loyalties, personal pressures, their own sense of betrayal by the government that gave them their purpose, and Clay's growing attraction to the not-who-she-seems Aisha.

Pretty standard-issue stuff, story-wise, but writers Peter Berg and James Vanderbilt fill what could have been a rote explosion-delivery device with unexpected wit. As is usually the case in these men-on-a-mission stories, each member of the Losers has their own quirks, personal vendettas and action styles to bring to the table. Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) is a soft-spoken sniper who has a way with the ladies and a leather cowboy hat you won't touch if you know what's good for you. Jensen (Chris Evans), the tech ops engineer, is like Mission: Impossible's Ethan Hunt run through the Play-Doh Fun Factory, with a goofy one-liner for every occasion and an unexpected devotion to his eight-year-old niece's pee-wee soccer team (go Petunias!). Pooch (Columbus Short), the group's transportation specialist, has the most intense need to reclaim his life, as he frets throughout the action over his wife, who is carrying his child and believes the baby's father dead. Roque (Idris Elba), the Losers' demolitions expert, provides a strong head for Clay to butt up against, while Clay himself is struggling with his loss of identity in the wake of the violent termination of his commander's status. Each of these characters provides an engaging ingredient to the action, and their distinctive styles of combat and speech prove to be a frothy and engagingly fun entertainment mix. Berg and Vanderbilt provide a few memorable action set pieces, including a spectacular armored car heist in Miami (made doubly impressive by the fact that it's the actual armored car that's being stolen...by air, no less) and a so-crazy-you-have-to-laugh plane-and-motorcycle game of chicken that ends, as one would expect, rather explosively. The writers also ably keep the laughs coming, with most of the comic relief being provided by Evans, particularly in a hilarious sequence in which he invades an office building posing as a bike messenger / tech support nerd to download encrypted files stolen from Max. This sequence, featuring Evans taking out security guards with his "telekinetic" gun-hands and memorably set to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", is arguably the high point of the film and provides ample evidence that, Captain America or no, someone needs to give Evans a great comedy role, and stat.

Director White, whose major previous feature credit was the critically reviled but profitable dance picture Stomp the Yard (also co-starring Columbus Short), proves himself to be a surprisingly dab hand at action direction. His gun battles, chases and fight sequences are staged with pleasing visual clarity and a minimum of shaky hand-held camera work, and he appreciates the efforts of his stuntpeople and special effects team enough to not throw away their work with ill-chosen shots or excessively frenetic cutting. He also finds a harder-than-it-looks balance for the film's action and humor, never allowing one to entirely overwhelm the other and thus throw the entire tone of the film out of whack. David Checel's editing is whitter-quick without sacrificing visual coherence, which seems to be a dying art in most contemporary action cinema (for the most egregious recent example, see the utterly impossible-to-follow visual hash of Ninja Assassin's action scenes), and the cinematography by Scott Kevan, who also shot Stomp the Yard, strikes just the right note between gritty authenticity and comic-book-colorful broadness.

Still, in a team-driven action picture like this, if the cast doesn't work, neither will the movie, and The Losers is blessed with an ensemble of performers who spark off each other in endlessly interesting ways. In a nice contrast to the aforementioned Evans, who provides consistent laughs amidst the mayhem, Jaenada is a classic strong-but-silent action movie badass, preferring to let his molten stare and hot lead do most of the talking for him. Short, meanwhile, provides the vulnerable human face of the Losers, his very real worry over his expectant wife reminding us that these men are men, not just wind-up action automatons. Elba, in some ways, has the most thankless role of the main cast, serving mainly to provide a natural bulwark against Clay's authority, but the actor is so commanding a presence that he gives weight to what could have been a less-than-distinctive character. Morgan, whose portrayal of The Comedian was one of the best elements of last spring's Watchmen, provides this '80s-throwback action flick with a rough, burly, unconventionally handsome anchor that recalls some of Bruce Willis's better early action work. (I also, for whatever reason, really appreciated that this action hero conducts his business in a suit...albeit sans tie, for that perfect rakish touch.) Saldana, one of the hottest young actresses around right now thanks to her impressive motion-capture performance in Avatar, has been singled out by some critics as an unconvincing action heroine, but to my eyes, she more than holds her own, wielding a rocket launcher with panache and going toe-to-toe with Morgan in a brutal dust-up in a burning South American hotel suite. She and Morgan also match, uh, other appendages in a steamy bedroom scene; here, and indeed throughout the picture, White and Kevan never let us forget that the film's female lead is arguably the most beautiful and sexiest woman in movies today. Patric plays the dastardly Max as a surprisingly screwloose spook, politically pragmatic to the point of lunacy, sort of like Dick Cheney meets Blofeld, and he joins Evans in providing the picture with most of its laughs. Still, Berg and Vanderbilt's presentation of a figure of almost cartoonish evil took some of the edge off the Losers' mission, as I never really took Max or his threat seriously. If there's one thing Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker taught us, it's that a comic-book villain doesn't have to feel, well, like something out of a comic book. (I much preferred the no-frills tough-guy henchmanry of Holt McCallany as Max's no. 1 muscle.)

Still, even without a villain for the books, The Losers delivers just what it promises, a slick, well-produced 98 minutes of sexy, funny action escapism, a picture with the kind of easygoing approach to entertainment that elephantine FX monsters like Clash of the Titans would do well to study. In less than two months, Twentieth Century Fox releases The A-Team, a would-be summer franchise picture with a similar wronged-soldiers-get-revenge premise but with all the big-budget, effects-heavy baggage that this Warner Bros. spring release avoids. Time will tell if the box office numbers for The A-Team surpass those of The Losers (and honestly, given the latter film's opening weekend grosses, that will probably not be too difficult), but from an artistic and entertainment standpoint, I would say that Fox has some catching up to do. If it's a great, goofy, light-as-a-feather time at the movies you're after this weekend, you really can't lose with The Losers.

The screening of this film that I attended, at the Landmark Theater in Westwood, CA, was presented by Film Independent and featured a post-film Q&A with director Sylvain White. The Parisian-born White spoke about his pursuit of the Losers assignment as a means to provide a different flavor to his resume after helming Stomp the Yard and numerous notable music videos. He addressed the film's casting as an opportunity to provide fresh faces for this sort of ensemble-driven action spectacle; he enthused about the work of his two-time collaborator Short and expressed his film's good fortune in nabbing Saldana before last year's Star Trek / Avatar twofer made her one of the major actresses in contemporary genre film. White shared some entertaining insights about various aspects of the production. "Don't Stop Believin'" was chosen as Jensen's office-invasion tune over another version of the same scene scored with a Whitesnake song, and the director expressed his admiration for his technical crew's ability to pull off the hotel-fight fire in just one take. The low-key, mellow White seems like a surprising person to find at the helm of a stylish action blowout like this, but after his work on The Losers, my hope is that we'll see more exciting entertainments from this filmmaker in the future. With just the right script and a talented crew behind him, I think that White has it in him to create an action picture to stand alongside all those great films of the '80s that The Losers honors and celebrates.

THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #77

2010-04-10T14:52:00.001-07:00

THE MATRIX (1999)

The Writers

Andy and Larry Wachowski

Why It’s Here

Every few years, it seems, a film will emerge in a particular genre that more or less changes the fundamental nature of that genre for a brief time. After the success of There’s Something About Mary in 1998, virtually every comedy released attempted to replicate its unique blend of sentiment and gross-out shock humor…until 2005, when The 40-Year-Old Virgin made a splash and changed the face of movie comedy again. In the horror genre, every major release for the last six years has been following the grimly moralistic, harshly violent framework established by 2004’s sleeper hit Saw (which itself spawned a franchise that recently saw the release of its sixth installment). And 1999 saw the release of The Matrix, a philosophically ambitious science-fiction action spectacle written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski, former comic-book writers with only two prior screenplay credits, 1995’s abysmal Sylvester Stallone thriller Assassins (co-written with Brian Helgeland) and 1996’s critically praised but only modestly successful Bound (which they also directed). Neither of these films would lead one to suspect a game-changing success from The Matrix, but that’s just what the Wachowskis delivered. The film was a major box-office hit, won four Academy Awards, and inspired two sequels, the direct-to-DVD animated omnibus The Animatrix, and parodies of its groundbreaking special effects in everything from Shrek to Kung Pow: Enter the Fist. What’s more, for several years after its release, virtually every Hollywood action film attempted to recreate aspects of what made The Matrix such a one-of-a-kind genre experience. One can see the influence of the film’s labyrinthine internal mythology in the Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies, and it soon became commonplace to find action stars from Jet Li to Jason Statham to Steven Seagal suspended in hard-hitting midair in imitation of The Matrix’s “wire-fu” fight scenes. Still, as impressive and influential as the film’s action style has remained in the decade since its release, I believe the reasons for the continued effectiveness of The Matrix as a cinematic entertainment are much more fundamental than matters of fight choreography or special effects. For when you strip away all the astonishing computer-generated imagery, all the wires and leather trenchcoats and bullets, what remains underneath is a story brilliantly original in its details but as classical in its construction as any great film from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Indeed, for a picture as probing in its thematic underpinnings as this, it nevertheless cannot be denied that the philosophies most influential to The Matrix’s narrative are those of Syd Field and Joseph Campbell.

The Matrix breaks down easily into Field’s much-debated three-act narrative structure, each act separated by an easily discernible “plot point” that kicks the story in a new direction. In fact, the Wachowskis’ screenplay is more obviously divided in its act structure than many films in that each act, in essence, exists within an entirely different genre. The film’s first act, while it does include intimations of the film’s overarching sci-fi framework, functions more or less as a mystery. In a green-tinged noir-style cityscape, black-suited agents led by the icily implacable Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) are pursuing a band of rebel computer hackers bent on undermining the authorities of the city for reasons which are, early in the going, left intriguingly oblique. Soon, one of the rebels, the poker-faced, high-kicking warrior Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) has reached out to a fellow cyber-criminal, who was born Thomas Anderson but is known throughout the techno-geek community as Neo (Keanu Reeves), with an offer to answer a question that has haunted his restless sleep for years, a question that he doesn’t even understand, much less know answer to: “What is The Matrix?” Neo at first refuses Trinity’s offer of the truth, but he changes his tune after a tense interrogation by Agent Smith and the horrifying implantation of a cybernetic tracking bug. Trinity leads Neo to an abandoned building, where he is introduced to Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne), a hulking but placid guru figure who offers Neo the opportunity to discover the true nature of the world he’s taken for granted all his life. In an elegant visualization of the choice placed before Neo, Morpheus offers him two pills. “You take the blue pill…the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland. And I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Up until this point, the film has featured the generic trappings of both science fiction (the cyber-bug implanted in Neo’s stomach by the agents) and action (Trinity’s spectacular escape from the agents that kicks off the film), but in the main, the Wachowskis have led us into a fantastically compelling mystery plot, with the ambiguous nature of the agents and the unexplained, seemingly superhuman abilities of Morpheus’s rebels combining to create a sense of intrigue so intense that by the time Neo is faced with his choice, we’re ready to grab that red pill and force it down his throat ourselves.

Fortunately for us, Neo needs no such coercion. He takes the red pill, gets sucked through a mirror Alice in Wonderland-style…and wakes up in the real world, where he’s a literal pod person, a hairless, wired-up husk of a human floating in amniotic gunk in a machine-tooled incubation chamber. He’s loosed from his connection to the pod by a horrifying red-eyed octopus-like robot and dumped down a waste chute, where he’s rescued by the Nebuchadnezzar, a hovercraft with Morpheus and Trinity among its crew. Morpheus welcomes him to “the real world”, and us to The Matrix’s second act, where the film kicks into full-on science fiction mode. Morpheus explains that the world that Neo knew was actually The Matrix, an elaborate computerized pacification program designed by the sentient machines that defeated humankind in an all-out war nearly two hundred years before. The world is a bombed-out shell of its former self, where humans are harvested in fields by the machines and live their entire lives wired in pods, their bodies producing energy to fuel the machines while their minds are controlled and tamed by the Matrix, which provides them all with identities and the psychic sensation of actual lives…all to keep them producing energy and away from the notion of rebellion against the machines. (In another clever visualization of their story’s philosophical concept, the Wachowskis have Morpheus brandish a Duracell battery to illustrate what the machines and The Matrix have reduced mankind to; this also explains the rebels’ earlier reference to the still-Matrixed Neo as “copper-top”.) Morpheus and his crew are humans who have escaped from the Matrix’s clutches and are planning a revolt against the machines, to be led from the city of Zion, the last human stronghold of this machine-controlled world. Neo has been freed because observations of his psychic activity while within the Matrix have led Morpheus to believe that he is “The One”, the super-powered cyber-messiah who will ultimately defeat the machines and lead mankind to its salvation. The bulk of The Matrix’s second act, which is basically a long sequence of complex-but-elegant exposition, consists of Morpheus teaching Neo the ways of The Matrix, how its “reality” as a computerized construct enables the humans who provide its sustaining energy to manipulate it to suit their needs, creating clothing and weapons and gifting them with superhuman, gravity-defying abilities of combat. The agents are revealed to be control programs within the main construct, implanted by the machines to keep order and battle the insurgents when they re-insert themselves into The Matrix; the agents thus possess the ability to be anywhere at all times, as The Matrix can morph any “citizen” into an agent as need be. Neo is trained in a myriad of fighting styles, learns that he can leap superhuman distances within The Matrix, and that his heightened reflexes now grant him the ability even to dodge point-blank-fired bullets (which he demonstrates in the film’s celebrated “bullet-time” FX sequence). He also pays a visit to the Oracle (Gloria Foster), a kindly old woman who lives within The Matrix, training other gifted cyber-warriors who may or may not be The One. Here, he encounters a young boy who has figured out how to bend spoons with his mind, simply by realizing the fundamental truth of mastering The Matrix: “There is no spoon.” The Wachowskis also reveal here that if you are wounded or killed while jacked into The Matrix, the same fate befalls your real-world self…a threat which becomes very real when Nebuchadnezzar crewman Cypher (Joe Pantoliano) turns traitor and sells Morpheus out to the agents, with the understanding that he’ll be jacked back into the “ignorance is bliss” world of The Matrix once the rebels are defeated. (One thing that’s amusing about The Matrix is the charming lack of subtlety in the character’s names; just as Neo is an anagram of “One”, it should come as no shock to us that the human who wants to be turned back into a docile Matrix slave is named “Cypher”.)

Morpheus’s capture by the agents brings down the curtain on the sci-fi-heavy second act of The Matrix. The Wachowskis have now laid out all the rules of the film’s world and given us a glimpse of the spectacular powers that Neo will have at his disposal…powers that come into big-time play in the third act, when the rebels launch a rescue attempt and the film turns into a full-blown action flick, an eventuality in light of the film’s being produced by Joel Silver, the action thriller wizard who gave the world Die Hard and the Lethal Weapon series. As the Nebuchadnezzar crew battle an encroaching attack by the machines’ cybernetic “sentinels”, Neo and Trinity jack into the Matrix to lead a full-scale attack on a high-rise office building where the agents are torturing Morpheus. Neo performs a death-defying bullet-dodging ballet in the building’s lobby, and we reflect on how satisfying an action sequence can be both when it is given adequate narrative buildup and when the characters’ superhuman abilities are given solid logical underpinnings within the story. This ultimately leads to a spectacular smackdown between Neo and Agent Smith in an abandoned subway station, and it is indeed in this third act that Agent Smith truly blossoms into a formidable character, one of the most memorable villains in science fiction cinema. It falls to Smith to serve as the mouthpiece for the machines’ disdain for the beings that created them and ultimately became their slaves, and his language is that of every fascistic oppressor since time began, verbally reducing his detested adversary into something subhuman and utterly beneath his contempt. He refuses to call Neo anything except “Mr. Anderson”, essentially referring to him only by his “slave name”, and in a great speech while torturing Morpheus, he explains his view of humans as a “virus”, the “cancer of this planet”, and that the machines are nothing more than “the cure”. Hitler couldn’t have put it better himself. Up until this final showdown, we have had our doubts that Neo can pull off the heroic acts we expect of him; after all, the Oracle has told him to his face that Morpheus’s assumptions were wrong, that he is not “The One” after all. But as Neo’s human body quakes and convulses with the force of Agent Smith’s inner-Matrix pummeling, Trinity reveals to him that he has to be The One…because the Oracle told her that The One would be the man with whom she would fall in love. The Oracle was wrong. And in a great reveal, we see the world for the first time as Neo, as The One, sees it. He can now see “into” The Matrix, revealing this amazing computer-generated world as nothing but a series of scrolling green computerized numbers. It’s nothing but a program. And as long as one human can see The Matrix for what it truly is, the hope of mankind can never be shattered. Morpheus is saved, the sentinels are defeated before they can destroy the Nebuchadnezzar, and though the film ends with The Matrix still reigning over most of mankind, Neo is out there, and ready to lead mankind to its ultimate destiny: “I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see…A world without rules or controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.” Thomas Anderson is dead. There is now only Neo, and in the film’s triumphant final shot, he soars like Superman, like Jesus Christ, up into the skies of the computerized world he has mastered.

In addition to serving as a textbook example of Syd Field’s three-act screenplay structure, the film is also a perfect point-for-point iteration of The Hero’s Journey, the “monomyth” that has served since time immemorial as the basis for tales of mythological heroes and which was definitively delineated in Joseph Campbell’s seminal 1949 book The Hero With a Thousand Faces. George Lucas has explicitly acknowledged his debt to Campbell’s work in his creation of the Star Wars mythos (a truth I touched upon in my review of The Empire Strikes Back), and though the Wachowskis have not likewise credited Campbell’s theories with providing the backbone for The Matrix, the signposts of The Hero’s Journey are inescapably embedded in their story. Neo is a classic Campbellian Hero, a naïf who exists in a world free of conflict and strife, until he is called to action by a Herald figure, in this case Trinity, who comes to him in a techno club and first poses to him the question that will drive the further action of the story. As is customary in The Hero’s Journey, Neo at first refuses the call to action, preferring his simple, static (but at its core unsatisfying) life. He changes his tune, however, when his interrogation and bugging by the agents forces him into the conflict against his will. Soon, he meets Morpheus, the Obi Wan-like Mentor figure who teaches him the ways of The Matrix and prepares him for his role in the coming conflict. There is also what Campbell calls “The Journey to the Inmost Cave”, in which the Hero must enter a place on his own to obtain some special object or insight that will ultimately spell success on his quest. Here, it’s the apartment of the Oracle, where he gains his essential knowledge not from the Oracle, but from the young boy who tells him, “There is no spoon.” Neo’s path to heroic conquest is bedeviled by Campbell’s Shapeshifters, trickster characters who exist in malleable forms, potentially heroic one moment, evil the next. Neo here is facing Shapeshifters both figurative (Cypher, who turns traitor) and literal (Agent Smith, who can be anywhere and anyone within The Matrix). Finally, Neo “defeats the dragon” when he learns to see the true nature of The Matrix and beats Agent Smith in combat, and he “returns with the treasure” of his newfound vision of the world, his now-superhuman inner-Matrix abilities…and the heart of Trinity, his true, tangible real-world prize. I have seen The Matrix several times now, but this viewing was the first in which its fidelity to Campbell’s monomyth occurred to me. That is a testament to the Wachowskis’ skillful usage of The Hero’s Journey formula; it’s done so deftly that unless we’re looking for it, we don’t notice the formula at all.

The Matrix was popular with many of its fans not just for its spectacular action set pieces and filmmaking innovations, but for the probing ahead-of-its-time questions its narrative posed. One of the bestselling books of recent years has been The Secret, in which a formula is posited whereby average people can use the power of their minds to manipulate the universe into granting them the money, success, love and good things they want or feel they deserve. This notion of the universe as a malleable construct, easily controllable by strong-willed humanity, is already a key component of the narrative of The Matrix, in which Neo has to learn how to manipulate The Matrix in order to affect the liberation of mankind. The film poses fundamental queries about the nature of reality, queries even more urgent than ever in a world of “reality” television, 24-hour-a-day cyber-stimulation, and titanic advances in the fields of image manipulation and graphic sophistication. (Some of these same questions about the nature of reality were posed, with equal skill, by #89 on this countdown.) The machines that have overtaken the world in The Matrix are essentially an advanced evolution of the nuclear machines that hung the ever-present threat of annihilation over mankind’s heads throughout the Cold War era, and the film also grapples with age-old notions of theology, the idea of a messiah figure sent by unseen forces to rescue mankind from its own misdeeds and lead them into a new promised land…a new Zion, as it were. Granted, The Matrix is not a film that is particularly groundbreaking in its philosophy or especially sophisticated in its interrogatory approach, but in a Hollywood genre picture, it’s rare to find such questions even being asked, and I think it was this thematic ambition, as much as anything else, that endeared the film to its cultishly devoted fans. Indeed, balancing this kind of philosophical probity within a still-satisfying genre action spectacle is not an easy task, a fact the Wachowskis themselves proved with 2003’s financially profitable but dramatically unsuccessful sequels, The Matrix Reloaded (which overwhelmed its action with near-impenetrable philosophical theorizing) and The Matrix Revolutions (which did just the reverse, burying its thematic complexities beneath sound, fury and special effects overload).

The failings of the trilogy as a whole, however, do not diminish the achievement of The Matrix as a supremely intelligent and exciting piece of science-fiction storytelling. The summer of 2008 saw the release of The Dark Knight, the film that I believe will unseat The Matrix as the signal text for the next generation of action blockbusters. That said, in its combination of stirring action set-pieces with thematic and philosophical ambition, The Dark Knight itself owes no small debt to The Matrix…and not just because the heroes of both films dress in black.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Award, Best Writing; Las Vegas Film Critics Society Award, Best Screenplay; Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Award, Best Script

FRESH FROM THE GRAVE: IT SEES "CLASH OF THE TITANS"

2010-04-05T07:34:00.001-07:00

In its ongoing effort to prove its understanding of the psychology of red-state America, Hollywood's major Easter-weekend release this year is a story of the hate-hate relationship between humans and a pack of petty, vindictive pagan gods. Of course, the story of Jesus Christ, and indeed the benchmark tales behind many of the world's religions, owes much to the myths of classical antiquity, as do our great secular myths, also known as "the movies". Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides...the poets and playwrights of ancient Greece taught us much of what we still know about the creation of character, the establishment of conflict, indeed the very act of dramatic storytelling itself. There's a reason modern-day screenwriters are still encouraged to read Aristotle's Poetics: for the most part, this stuff still works. Unfortunately, the makers of Clash of the Titans seem to have forgotten most of those lessons, because if there's one thing this movie doesn't know how to do (and there is more than one, but we'll get to that), it's telling a dramatically compelling story.

As in many of the classic Greek dramatic tales, Clash of the Titans gets rolling when the gods get angry, and as is also usually the case, mankind is the cause of their grief. It seems that the gods' immortality depends on the continued prayers of the mortals; their love is the only thing allowing the gods to continue their dominion over all of creation. Mankind, however, has grown weary of the gods' jealous, callous, and seemingly wantonly cruel behavior, and after centuries of being abused with famines, plagues, and the generally baseless cruelty that makes up what we call "life", the citizens of the Greek city-state of Argos have declared open war on the gods, kicking things off by sending a huge statue of thunder god Zeus, ruler of Mount Olympus, into the sea. This notion, that the only thing that gives our various gods power over us is our faith in them, is actually a heady one for an early-spring action bash, so it is naturally not dealt with in any sort of dramatically or intellectually engaging way. Instead, we're essentially given a re-working of the basic situation of the Book of Job. Hades (Ralph Fiennes), despised ruler of the underworld, comes to his brother Zeus (Liam Neeson) with a proposition. Since the people will no longer pray to the gods of their own volition, they must be forced to pledge their fealty, and terror and imminent destruction seems to be the only way to do it (all of this, of course, plays to Hades's advantage, as he, unlike all the other gods, draws his strength from mankind's fear rather than their love). Having taken this page from Dick Cheney's playbook, Hades visits Argos and declares that in ten days, he will unleash his mightiest weapon, the deadly sea beast known as the Kraken, unless the Argosian princess Andromeda (Alexa Davalos) is sacrificed for the salvation of all. But the people of Argos have a champion in their midst. Perseus (Sam Worthington) is a fisherman whose boat and family were destroyed by Hades in the aftermath of the statue's destruction, and he wants nothing more than to destroy the indestructible king of the underworld, so he sets off with a band of Argosian warriors to find a means to defeat the Kraken. But Perseus's greatest war is with his own nature. It turns out that he is a demigod, the result of a tryst between a human woman and Zeus, who disguised himself as a gods-hating king (Jason Flemyng) and stole into the queen's bedchamber. Forsaken by Zeus, Perseus sees himself as a man only, and at first refuses to draw on his godlike powers of combat and special weapons in his quest. But it's not too long before he's swinging around a magical sword and galloping through the air atop the mighty winged Pegasus en route to his showdown with the Kraken.

I worry that the paragraph above makes this film sound much more compelling than it actually is, and indeed, it's hard not to describe it in a manner that makes it sound interesting, since the building blocks of the story (conflicted heroes, magical weapons, seemingly insurmountable foes) are those of all great drama throughout all of history. It's a pity, then, that screenwriters Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi (working from Beverley Cross's script for the 1981 Clash, a film I have not seen) are not able to combine these can't-miss pieces into a dramatically satisfying whole. Perseus and his band of not-very-merry men trek across burning Middle Eastern wastes, where they battle Perseus's now hideously mutated human stepfather, whose spattered blood morphs into fierce, gigantic scorpions. They encounter a grotesque trio of blind Stygian witches, the Fates of old, who give them crucial information about how to defeat the Kraken. Perseus takes on the snake-headed Medusa, who turns men to stone with her gaze...and who just may be able to do the same to a Kraken. And I just didn't care.

There are few moviegoing experiences more unsatisfying than a film full of characters you just don't give a damn about, and that's pretty much all I was given to work with by Clash of the Titans. Perseus is a singularly uninspiring hero, whose declarations that Zeus is not his real father and that he is not a god grow boring after the first dozen or so times he makes them. The gods themselves are tremendously unsympathetic, willing to torture and kill humans to prove just how much those humans should love them (this is admittedly a problem with the philosophy undergirding most of the world's major religions, so I can't really blame the Clash writers for that). Plus, there's barely enough of them in the film for us to even get to know them. Zeus and Hades are the only gods with even a hint of character development; Zeus's son Apollo (Luke Evans) has maybe two lines, and sea king Poseidon (the great Danny Huston), who is Zeus and Hades's other brother and should thus by rights be a major player here, has only one line of dialogue. The citizens of Argos are a largely undifferentiated mass, rushing about shrieking at the latest assault hurled down at them by the gods. Few of Perseus's band fail to make an impression, from the pair of hunters brought in as ostensible comic relief (at least I assume that's why they were there, though they didn't make me laugh once) to Draco, the grizzled veteran warrior who teaches Perseus how to wield a sword and carry himself like a man. Draco is played by Mads Mikkelsen, so soulful and haunting in last year's Flame and Citron; here, his entire head seems weighed down by his beard, and he barely lifts his chin far enough off his chest to clearly recite his dialogue.

Not that we're burning to hear that dialogue anyway. Three screenwriters working in tandem have managed to give us a script without a single memorable line, not even anything memorably awful. Everything these characters say is either blatantly expository or woefully repetitious, which means half the time they're just giving us information, and the other half, they're giving us the same information again. The result of this is that the major action set pieces, when they come, carry virtually no dramatic weight, and exist purely as showcases for stunt work and special effects. This wouldn't be a problem if the f/x themselves weren't so varied in quality. The Kraken is a reasonably impressive creation, all tentacles and turtle-headed aggression, and I applaud director Louis Leterrier's decision to never show the entire creature in one shot; the bits and pieces that we do see gives the impression of a creature of almost immeasurable size and menace. The desert battle with the scorpions, however, is marred by poor compositing, so much so that it almost never looks as if the monsters and their human combatants are really in the same shots. The Medusa effects are competently rendered but are just not that compelling, while the Pegasus, thankfully, manages to be both visually convincing and powerful, probably because it's likewise used sparingly. The most impressive visual effect in the film is the Stygian witches, and this is largely because they are not a CGI effects creation, but rather a trio of lumpy, misshapen, sperm-whale-foreheaded gray things brought to live entirely with prosthetic makeup effects. Their loathsome menace is thus rendered tactile, a genuine threat to our heroes, and they serve as perhaps the film's best homage to Ray Harryhausen, the stop-motion genius who provided the creatures for the original 1981 Clash.

Leterrier is a filmmaker who I have thus far defended as a throwback to the great old-school action directors, a man with the kind of skill and finesse to elevate a pulpy B-movie martial-arts thriller (the underrated Jet Li actioner Unleashed) or to render a comic-book mash-up with the kind of hokey gravitas it demands (the equally undervalued Ed Norton-starring Incredible Hulk). Here, however, Leterrier takes his first serious misstep. His set pieces are reasonably coherent, never splintering into the kind of cut-cut-cut visual diarrhea that has marred so many recent action flicks, but the dramatic material is woefully inert, and his crew's technical contributions vary in quality. Ramin Djawadi provides a rah-rah action score that works during the picture but that I am now hard pressed to remember, and Martin Laing's production design is both sumptuous and just cheesy enough to make you smile (especially the Argosian royal court, which from the thoroughly unoriginal looks of it, the king and queen are timesharing with every other ancient Greek movie ever made). Cinematographer Peter Menzies Jr.'s work, shadowy and handsome but always clear and crisp, is the one technical contribution of which I have little criticism, though Lindy Hemming's memorable costumes are strong as well. I wish I could say the same about the work of editors David Freeman and Vincent Tabaillon. One thing that made me happy about Clash before I saw it was that the film clocked in at a relatively conservative 118 minutes; after almost a decade of mostly plotless films that still commanded a 2 1/2 hour-plus running time, it was nice to find an action epic that knew its place and took up no more time than necessary. But Freeman and Tabaillon cut the picture with such a lack of urgency and drive that the two-hour Clash still feels like a three-hour butt-number.

You will notice that I have not yet discussed the performances in Clash of the Titans. My parents told me if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all, but my Zombian duties force my hand. It's been a while since I've seen a major Hollywood film full of such distinctly colorless performances, and it's therefore fitting that the proceedings are anchored by Sam Worthington, who may be the least charismatic leading man to emerge on the scene in quite a few years. This is his third major action spectacle in the last year, after Terminator: Salvation and Avatar, and I am firmly convinced that he is only getting these roles because he lacks the sufficient onscreen presence to overshadow the tens of millions of dollars' worth of f/x that are the films' real raison d'etre. One thinks of what Perseus might have been with someone like Russell Crowe or Clive Owen, or even a proper B-movie action hunk like Jason Statham, in the role, and you just get depressed by what you're left with. Liam Neeson barks and glowers as Zeus, and he's engaging enough, but it's because Neeson is a great actor, not because it's a great role or a great performance. Fiennes brings a poignant Richard III quality to his villainy as Hades, and it's to his credit that he doesn't just channel Lord Voldemort here, but gives the ruler of the underworld his own insidious M.O. and insinuating style. Davalos makes next to no impression as the sacrificial lamb, and Gemma Arterton (Quantum of Solace), as fellow demigod Io, is so bland and unmemorable that we're now seven paragraphs into this review and this is the first time I've even felt the need to mention her. The best performance in the film is easily Pete Postlethwaite as Perseus's adoptive fisherman father, whose world-weary presence and matter-of-fact delivery nicely conveys the true plight of innocents in the hands of angry gods. Too bad he gets wiped out by special effects about ten minutes into the picture.

I am generally all for the idea of revisiting classic literature and mythology with the power of modern CGI effects technology; I think it's time that we finally get these great stories onscreen with all the visual panache and invention they deserve (I will give a big wet kiss to whatever filmmaker can give us a good, big-budget version of 1001 Arabian Nights). But knowing how to tell a great story is not a recent development. It predates cinema itself by thousands of years, and indeed the people of Argos would have been familiar with the techniques of effective drama. And thus, my guess is that if Perseus and his bunch had taken a look at Clash of the Titans, they would have been ready to throw Leterrier and his writers to the Kraken...like they should have done with Andromeda at the beginning of the movie. It would have saved me and many, many weekend moviegoers three hours (or was it only two?) of major boredom.

Note: I opted to attend a 2-D screening of this picture, as many of my fellow critics pointed out that the film, shot in standard 2-D format, was hastily converted to 3-D after the success of Avatar. It's a decision I do not at all regret. The film looks perfectly adequate in 2-D, contains no show-offy in-your-face shots that would demand 3-D treatment, and (most important of all given the quality of the film) I saved myself five bucks to boot.