Something Else: Star Wars Episode Two

In Something Else, we propose alternate plotlines for notoriously underwhelming films.

Star Wars Episode II: The Fall of the Old Republic

The galaxy stands on the brink of crisis. Following the Senate’s abolition of slavery, star systems and whole sectors along the Mid-Rim and Outer Rim threaten to secede from the Galactic Republic, ending a thousand years of peace and harmony. Supplied and armed by the corporations of the Corporate Sector Authority, these Separatist worlds threaten to undermine the entire Republic economy and throw the starlanes into chaos.

With much of the Republic military blockading Separatist worlds, it falls upon the Jedi to enforce the Abolition Decree. Meanwhile young Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker has returned to his home planet of Tatooine. There, with the help of the antislavery militia known as Freedom’s Sons, Skywalker and Master Obi-Wan Kenobi move to liberate the notorious Dune Sea slave camp from the vicious Tusken Raiders…

The second chapter begins with a nighttime battle between Freedom’s Sons soldiers and the Tusken Raiders. Anakin (Hayden Christensen) and Obi-Wan (Ewan McGregor) lead the charge towards a slave camp holding slaves of many different species. Anakin fights with a savage ferocity, literally cutting a swath through the Raiders, until he pulls the camp’s gates open with the Force.

After the battle, he tells a young Nikto boy that the Republic represents the freedom to be the hero you want to be. As he talks, Major Carlist Rieekan (William Russ) approaches and informs him, “The Tuskens have fled into the Jundland Wastes, General. They’re finished.” Obi-Wan hears, too, and tells Anakin they’re wanted back on Coruscant.

At the Jedi Temple, Council members Mace Windu, Qui-Gon Jinn, and Yoda debate the continued use of Jedi Knights to enforce the Decree. Jinn and Windu believe the Jedi should have become involved in abolition long ago, while Yoda and Senate liaison Cos Palpatine (Ian McDiarmond) take the other side.  “Wrong slavery may be,” Yoda asserts, “But political enforcers the Jedi are not.”

When Skywalker and Kenobi interrupt, Jinn explains they are needed to intercept a Corporate Sector Authority shipment of Shroud starfighters in the Corellia system. “The ships are powered by midichlorians,” Windu explains. “Each one could take out a Republic cruiser by itself.” A hologram shows that the Shroud fighters resemble TIE Interceptors. “We can’t risk alerting the Separatists with a show of force,” Windu tells them. “Do not let the CSA deliver the fighters.”

As the two Jedi embark for the Corellian system, they see a legion of clone troopers drilling in a city plaza. “Artificial men fighting for freedom,” Skywalker observes. “It defies reason.”

“We need their numbers to fight the Corporate Sector’s droid armies,” Kenobi reflects. “If indeed war comes.” 

“War is coming, Master,” Skywalker says. “I have foreseen it in my dreams.”

On Corellia, the two Jedi find the Shroud fighters in a deserted arena, guarded by Separatist activist Dooku (Gary Oldman) and his henchman, Darth Maul (Ray Park). A CSA protocol droid is just completing the sale. “Dooku,” Obi-Wan exclaims. “The first Jedi expelled from our Order in over a thousand years.”

Several droids bring a hooded prisoner into the arena. Dooku pulls back the hood, revealing Padme Amidala (Nathalie Portman). “Kill her,” Dooku says. Maul steps forward, igniting his dual-blade lightsaber. Anakin jumps into the arena, blocking Maul’s swing and saving Amidala’s life. Kenobi follows, engaging Dooku in a fierce lightsaber duel. Anakin easily dispatches Maul, but Dooku wounds Kenobi and flees in a Shroud. The other fighters launch and follow Dooku.

Amidala explains she’s come to Corellia with Alderaan senator Bail Organa (Hugh Jackman) to investigate smuggling in the Galactic Core. At her hotel room high over Coronet City, the Senator arrives and thanks Anakin for his rescue. “I’d be lost without her,” Organa says, much to Anakin’s resentment. “We both owe you our lives.”

Back on Coruscant, Palpatine and Jinn watch as the Republic Senate votes to prevent seccession with military force if necessary. “This is the end of liberty,” Jinn says. “This is the death of the Old Republic.” Palpatine seems unaffected. “We live in extreme times,” he says.

On Corellia, a Rodian mercenary named Nariq tells Anakin’s group that the missing starfighters were taken into the vast network of underground catacombs known as the Selonian Tunnels. “Some of those tunnels cut straight through the planet,” he says. “Dooku could get away and no one would know where.”

Venturing into the tunnels, the group is ambushed by Dooku, who brags that the fighters will rendezvous with a CSA carrier and march on Coruscant. “The Republic that lasted a thousand years will be conquered in a day,” he tells them. As he speaks the Shrouds launch. Anakin catches up to the last one, hurling its pilot to the ground and flying after the other fighters.

A long dogfight in the tunnels ends with Anakin exiting Corellia through the planet’s south pole, heading towards the CSA carrier. He flies along the prow of the ship and launches its midichlorian payload directly at the bridge. The resulting explosion almost consumes him, but he pilots free of the blast. Meanwhile Kenobi fights Dooku again, but Dooku falls through a weakened floor plate and disappears.

Later, the group meets up on Organa’s personal starship, where they learn the Separatists have declared war on the Republic. “Your vision was correct,” Obi-Wan tells Anakin. “I take no joy in that, Master,” Anakin replies, fuming at the familiarity Organa shares with Padme. As the ship approaches Coruscant they see the Republic armada, an endless line of Venator-class Star Destroyers, eclipsing the planet in its shadow.

 -Michael Kabel

Review: 88 Minutes

At this point, Pacino’s just running from a Thalberg Award

The tawdry thriller has become a cottage industry for slumming movie stars looking either for a quick buck or a way to keep their profile public in between worthier projects. The films don’t try very hard, but then no one seeking them out is looking for quality, either. Some films are steak, but sometimes a greasy cheeseburger is more appetizing.

88 Minutes is overcooked genre trash, though good looking genre trash thanks to an overqualified supporting cast. And of course there’s Pacino, The Big Hooah, seemingly hell-bent on edging out Robert DeNiro in the great Prestige Erosion Race of the 00’s. Still, the total isn’t the sum of its parts.

The story is just window dressing for the plot. Pacino plays forensic psychiatrist (apparently such a thing exists) Jack Gramm, a teacher and therapist in the kind of gloomy, rain-polished Seattle you’ve regularly seen in films and TV since Se7en. Eleven years ago, Gramm’s testimony helped to convict serial killer Jon Forster (Neil McDonough, who’d look scary reading the phone book). But now with hours left before the execution, someone’s  committing lurid sex murders identical to Forster’s method, casting doubt on his guilt and Gramm’s credibility. Worse, someone is calling Gramm and taunting him with his own murder, just minutes away (Guess how many).

So Gramm has to prevent his own murder while assuring the guilt of the serial killer he put away with the help of his students. Just to keep things simple, the students all fit archetypal psychological tropes: there’s the assistant with a crush (Alicia Witt), the rebellious student with Oedipal resentment (Benjamin McKenzie), and the eerily calm star pupil (Leelee Sobieski.) Also along for the ride are Gramm’s faithful secretary (Amy Brenneman) and his FBI colleague (William Forsythe).

Under director Jon Avnet’s control the script doesn’t come together enough to create anything really cohesive. Even despite the genre clichés and the familiarity of Pacino’s late-career screen persona (he’s middle-aged, he’s horny, he loves to party) the whole film seems to go several directions at once without settling on a mounting arc of suspense. There are flashbacks, and talky scenes of exposition, and even the hoariest of plot contrivances, the backstory delivered via radio news report -what the smartasses of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 used to call K-PLOT.

Avnet and screenwriter Gary Scott Thompson pile on the details until just getting from one set piece to another feels like plot movement. But it’s not movement so much as a lot of running around and talking on cell phones. One strange but kinky twist follows another, Pacino runs around, and then the cycle repeats. The intention is to create something head-spinning for the audience, but Avnet’s lack of focus keeps that vertigo from ever really hitting its boiling point. “Do you know how absurd that sounds?” asks Forsythe, after Gramm explains all the plot contortions and superfluous turns of events. Well, yes, by the halfway point the audience can’t help but notice.

Oddly, thanks to the cast this is never as tedious as it sounds, and in 1998 the actresses alone would have represented a white-hot task force of upcoming stars. Witt especially gives her character more depth than the script probably allowed, and Sobieski exploits her icy beauty to provoke growing if ambient suspicion. And while Forsythe’s (Things To Do In Denver While You’re Dead, American Me) mere presence used to pedigree a B-movie, he’s not given enough to do here except stand around and glower.

With a lesser star than Pacino, 88 Minutes would likely have gone straight to DVD. In fact that’s the case in Europe, while the film has languished here in the States for more than a year. It’s not fair to the film to say the audience deserves more. After years of regular appearances by similar schlock from the sex thriller ghetto, anyone who doesn’t know what to expect shouldn’t complain if their diminished expectations aren’t met.

- Michael Kabel

DVD: Cloverfield

Spoiler: It’s Got a Monster!

It’s a sad fact that with so many films and television series produced each year, the same storylines get recycled again and again. Sometimes, though, filmmakers will synthesize multiple successful premises into something that not only survives on its own merit, but also begs the question, “Why didn’t anyone think of this sooner?”

Cloverfield is equal parts Godzilla, The Blair Witch Project and Aliens, with some Miracle Mile and H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos thrown in for good measure. A giant, seemingly invincible monster crawls from the Atlantic Ocean and ransacks New York. The real story, though, is the struggle of a group of hip twentysomethings to rescue their injured friend and escape before the military “drops the hammer” and annihilates Manhattan. Shot entirely in first person perspective, the action is chronicled by alternately rotating characters via a handheld video camera. It’s a clever concept that transplants the viewer into the action alongside the protagonists, heightening the audience’s suspense to an intensely personal level. 

Besides the tension of the protagonists’ escape, there’s enough terror-inducing elements to unsettle any viewer.  However, with a minimum of gore and profanity (it’s rated PG-13!), the sometimes-horrific events never feel gratuitous or self-indulgent. 

While the suspense is clearly the film’s driving force, it’s the ancillary events surrounding the attack that establish Cloverfield as an ultimately moving drama. At the film’s core is a love story between two longtime friends (Michael Stahl-David and Odette Yustman) that highlights the selflessness of the human spirit in times of catastrophe; yet the filmmakers also wisely depict the inherent greed that unfortunately contrasts with such selflessness in extreme situations. 

Make no mistake though, the film has its flaws.  Screenwriter Drew Goddard is not above cheating to further the plot; one brief sequence rapidly steers our heroes through four different locales strung together by impossible coincidence. More distracting is the tendency to deviate from the action at opportune moments only to abruptly resume at a new plot point.  I personally have no desire to sit through a Warhol-esque documentary of people climbing stairs for an hour, and including such minutiae would naturally interrupt the flow of tension. Still, the decision to ignore moments of little narrative consequence inevitably intrudes upon the otherwise airtight verisimilitude of the storyline proper. It’s a tricky balance that director Matt Reeves never completely pulls off.

As the film’s first twenty minutes take place in exactly the kind of beautiful-people fantasyland popularized by The WB, it’s no surprise that the film already looks dated three months after its release. The tedious exposition fails to establish the individual characters as anything more than stock characters: the lovers, the alpha male, the loudmouth, the bitch, et cetera, et cetera. And with very limited opportunities for internal conflict, it’s impossible to evaluate the acting abilities of the film’s glamorous cast members. They mainly need to look scared – but they do this well. 

Cloverfield might be a singularly unique example of a film in which character development actually should take a back seat to plot: if one becomes too emotionally invested in the characters, it’s possible that the visceral and compelling effect of embedding the audience into the action would diminish. While Reeves manages to effectively create a virtual tour through a disaster film, I couldn’t help wonder if the film’s bleak conclusion would have greater resonance if the characters were fleshed out a little more.

Nevertheless, Cloverfield remains a positively enthralling experience. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, to be sure; but then, you probably haven’t seen it quite like this, or quite this well done.

 - Steve Kabel

Something Else: Star Wars Episode One

In Something Else, we propose alternate plotlines for notoriously underwhelming films. We start our series, perhaps appropriately, with the Star Wars prequels.

Star Wars Episode One: The Balance of the Force

Star Wars Episode 1: The Balance of the Force opens on Tatooine, where an aged and worn Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) tends a small field.  He sees a fiery escape pod falling to the planet’s surface. Sensing destiny, he goes inside his simple hut and begins a video journal detailing the events that led him to his exile on Tatooine, introducing a flashback to the Jedi Academy.  

As the top student at the academy, Obi-Wan is cocky and brash. Jedi Master Yoda and Jedi Knight Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) observe Obi-Wan’s reckless behavior, fearing it will lead to the Dark Side of the Force, especially since Obi-Wan’s mentor is Jedi Knight Cos Palpatine (Ian McDiarmond), who Yoda and Qui-Gon both suspect of conducting disturbing experiments with the Force. Yoda and Qui-Gon decide that Obi-Wan must travel to the Dagobah system to finish his training and confront the Dark Side in that planet’s “Domain of Evil.”

Before Obi-Wan departs, he seeks advice from Palpatine, who is also the political representative for the Jedi in the Republic Senate. Palpatine confirms what everyone at the academy has been whispering about Obi-Wan: that he is the “Chosen One” who will bring balance to the Force. He suggests that to travel to the Dagobah system, Obi-Wan should have a non-Jedi guide to accompany him. Palpatine assigns his top political assistant, Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) to the mission.  When Obi-Wan sees Padme, he immediately falls in love despite his Jedi training in emotional restraint.

When Padme and Obi-Wan arrive at Dagobah, Obi-Wan ventures into the “Domain of Evil” and almost succumbs to the Dark Side.  His love for Padme saves him and he barely escapes with his life. While Padme nurses him back to health, Obi-Wan has a vision of the “true” Chosen One: someone on Tatooine named Anakin Skywalker. Before leaving Dagobah, Obi-Wan and Padme stumble upon a remote outpost of Gungan marauders mining a dangerous energy source called Miti-chlorian. If harnessed correctly, its power “could shatter planets.”  They defeat the smugglers and travel to Tatooine to find the Chosen One.

When they arrive, Obi-Wan and Padme encounter Durkin Solo (Sam Shepard), a famous and dangerous intergalactic smuggler, who informs them that an unknown organization is stock piling massive amounts of Miti-chlorian.  Durkin is himself planning on traveling to Alderaan to deliver a large shipment. A native of Alderaan, Padme convinces Durkin to let her and Obi-Wan join his pirate crew.  

As they outrun the Republic starships that patrol the planet as a police force, Obi-Wan discovers that the pilot of Durkin’s ship is a young Tatooine slave nicknamed Magi (Hayden Christensen), who demonstrates remarkable skill similar to the Force. According to Durkin, Magi is the best pilot in the galaxy: they have outrun or outmaneuvered every Republic patrol ship that has tried to capture him. Impressed, Padme is immediately attracted to Magi. 

Obi-Wan decides to test Magi’s abilities in the Force and discovers an amazing Force-sensitivity, and that Magi’s real name is indeed Anakin Skywalker. Obi-Wan believes the young man is the Chosen One of his vision, and tries to convince Anakin – “the name my mother gave me, before she was killed” – to give up the pirate life and become a Jedi Knight. Anakin refuses, because Durkin and his gang are the only family he’s ever known.  Anakin explains his family of Tattooine settlers was massacred by Tuskin Raiders when he was a little boy.

Upon arriving at Alderaan, Obi-Wan, Padme, Anakin, and Durkin find themselves in the middle of war between the people of Alderaan and the savage Gungun marauders. Padme pleads with Obi-Wan to summon the Jedi to support her people. Jedi Knights and Masters from throughout the sector respond at once, causing a massive battle. Anakin saves Padme from near death and realizes that he is attracted to her as well. He tries to convince her to run away with him, but she refuses. During the battle, Durkin tries to smuggle the Miti-chlorian out of Alderaan, but gets shot down by the Republic flotilla. Enraged, Anakin vows revenge, which Padme inadvertently overhears. 

When the battle is over, the people of Alderaan are victorious. Obi-Wan introduces Anakin to the Jedi Council as the true Chosen One, but Yoda and Qui-Gon reject the claim. Obi-Wan decides to remain on Alderaan and train young Skywalker in the ways of the Force, and Palpatine agrees to assist Obi-Wan whenever he can. Padme agrees to stay with them as well, and help Anakin understand that the Republic, and the Jedi, fight for good. 

- Court Ogilvie

Coming next week: Star Wars Episode 2: The Fall of the Old Republic

Review: Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Sexy, Daring Cast Lifts Film Above A Problem-Filled Script

How many screenplays do you imagine are based on the screenwriter’s ex-girlfriend and their breakup? Or at least, how many are about how the screenwriter got through the pain of separation (besides turning it into a script)? Probably more than a few, though it’s hard to imagine many of them are funnier or nervier than Forgetting Sarah Marshall. While the film is not perfect, and indeed many of its problems come from star Jason Segel’s screenplay, it’s more often than not a smart, sharp piece of entertainment and another tentpole attraction for the Apatow Comedy Dynasty.

The film’s heavy publicity has made a plot summary almost unnecessary, so I’ll keep this one brief. Segel’s Peter Bretter is a frustrated musician – “kind of a dark, gothic Neil Diamond” – who lives in a state of suspended slacker bliss by scoring the music and sound effects for a cheesy CSI-like television series that stars his long-time girlfriend, the Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) of the title. Then she dumps him for pompous British rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) in a scene that’s going to give parents’ watchdog groups about two weeks worth of subject material. Devastated, Bretter flees to Hawaii, only to find Marshall and Snow staying at the same resort. While alternately stalking and avoiding the shallow Marshall and the lusty Snow, Bretter finds time to fall in love with hotel desk clerk Rachel Jansen (Mila Kunis).

As a compelling travelogue for Hawaii and a star making turn for Kunis, the film works beautifully, and the major characters are given plenty of spacious scenes to develop their roles. And like Apatow’s other films, there are no good guys and bad guys in the romantic entanglements: everybody’s got faults. Bretter is the film’s nice guy hero, but Bell’s arguments for deserting him are uncomfortably valid, if a little nasty nonetheless. Basically, they’re the good reasons lots of otherwise-nice men get dumped, and that Bretter is dumped for the richer, hipper, and sexier Snow is every jilted man-child’s worst fear personified.

Like Apatow’s The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, the romantic tension is built around a coming of age story for the male lead. Basically, a great love is waiting in Jansen once Bretter gets his shit together. If by the third act she’s just slightly hyper-realistic – as much life-giving force as individual in her own right – that’s only a function of the script’s descent into quite a few romantic comedy clichés (If only real life had montage sequences, we’d all get so much more done.) Thankfully there’s enough relaxed chemistry between Kunis and Segel to gloss over their hastily-conducted reconciliation.

The script has other problems, too. Flabby with misfiring jokes throughout and with almost no structure in its second act, it’s hampered by too many characters and probably too many digressions besides. Jonah Hill and Bill Hader never quite earn their presences as a resort waiter and Bretter’s stepbrother. The congenitally underrated Paul Rudd commands more screentime as a spaced-out surfing instructor but never gets it. This surplus of performers isn’t an issue except much of that flawed second act feels as if Segel is just wandering the resort grounds, meeting entertaining people. That’s nice enough, but it doesn’t move the film forward or develop its four principal characters.

And oh yeah, there’s a lot of sex and nudity, including some eye-popping Kama Sutra positions enjoyed by Marshall and Snow (without going into detail, it’s a good thing Bell is so petite.) Segel’s much-publicized full frontal nudity is glaring and poignant in its first use. Its second use feels trite and forced.

Still, credit director Nicholas Stoller for trusting his performers to carry scenes, and the film is funny exactly because its talented cast is game to try different things – if the subsequent gags don’t always connect, there are enough of them that the hits outnumber the misses. Like Knocked Up, it’s tempting to overvalue the film exactly for its nerve. But Forgetting Sarah Marshall’s potential is only rewarding when it fulfills itself. That’s partly why, when the clichés arrive in force, it’s like watching a nice guy lose his nerve while trying to ask out a pretty girl. You know he (like the film) deserves what he wants; you just wish he’d get out of his own way and get on with it.

- Michael Kabel

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DVD: Lars And The Real Girl

Lazy Direction Deflates Character Study Into Fluffy Hipster Romcom

Director Craig Gillespie’s Lars and the Real Girl is a study of the toll that mental illness can exact upon a person, a subject usually neglected in contemporary cinema. Though anxious to foster sympathy, the film ends up trivializing its dark subject matter by veering into the realm of cute, oversimplified fantasy.

The film’s titular Lars (Ryan Gosling) suffers from intense shyness: uncomfortable around other people and terrified of physical contact. To stifle his loneliness, he purchases a “real doll,” an incredibly lifelike, anatomically correct mannequin (read: sex toy) that he names Bianca. His relationship with the doll is completely innocent and nonsexual, but he nevertheless invents a personal history for it and routinely speaks to it as if it were an actual person. So when his family doctor (Patricia Clarkson) abandons conventional psychology and instructs Lars’ friends and family to indulge him in his delusions, they accept the doll as one of the gang. But as he becomes increasingly unable to monopolize Bianca’s use, Lars grows ever more possessive and resentful of the “life” that it has without him. Of course he eventually gets better, and cue the crowd-pleasing happy ending.

The premise certainly carries the potential for relevance, with its contrast of a seductively impossible ideal versus confronting riskier chances for genuine happiness. Martin Scorsese brilliantly examined a similar conceit in his dark masterpiece The King of Comedy. But dark waters scare the kids, and Gillespie chickens out with trendier fare. The angst is sugar-coated in twee for its audience: fuzzy vintage sweaters, whimsically rugged faces and quaint Rockwellian settings abound. Sure, the intentionally cute and precious trappings make the potentially unsettling subject matter more palatable, but they also distract from Lars’ pain – the heart of the matter. So to remind the viewer of the hero’s distress, Gillespie employs clumsily facile camerawork: shaky, handheld cameras are used when Lars is onscreen, but stationary cameras capture the action when he isn’t. Lars is unstable everyone! Because the camera says so! Do you get it? Do you?

Nancy Oliver’s script provides amateurishly little insight into the cause of Lars’ delusions, doling out occasional crumbs about his mother’s untimely death during childbirth and his anxiety about his sister-in-law’s pregnancy. Millions of unfortunate people grow up without a mother, but there’s no explanation for the extraordinary degree of Lars’s trauma or the outlandish results it compels. Once Bianca arrives, suspension of disbelief goes out the window – nobody makes fun of him for walking around town with a sex toy? The local minister allows it into his church service? And what healthcare provider in the world would admit a sex doll into an emergency room? 

Even worse, the dialogue smacks of boilerplate made-for-Lifetime drivel, hitting its nadir when Lars’s sister-in-law (Emily Mortimer) explains the town’s collective decision to serve as an enabler: “All these people love you! We do it for you!”

Despite the glaring scriptural shortcomings, the film could still be salvaged if Gillepsie made the audience care about Lars as a character. Regrettably, Gosling’s synthetic performance consists of a string of overly-rehearsed tics and tells incapable of eliciting anything beyond an occasional bemused grin. It’s a plastic performance for a plastic film. On the bright side Clarkson, quite possibly the most underrated actress around right now, brings much needed gravitas, while Mortimer exudes frustrated compassion as Lars’s pregnant sister-in-law. Kelli Garner is adorable as a goofball co-worker inexplicably smitten with Lars.  Oddly the most compelling and genuine scenes occur between Lars and his guilt-stricken older brother Gus (Paul Schneider, in a radical departure from his creepy turn in The Assassination of Jesse James).

By no means the first film to focus on an unsound protagonist, Lars and the Real Girl lacks the palpable tension and desperation of Paul Thomas Anderson’s similar Punch Drunk Love, and doesn’t remotely approach the hopeless anguish of Scorsese’s The Aviator.  Admittedly, mental illness is a tough sell, but to cloak such an uncomfortable subject with illusions of universal warmth and acceptance is baldly irresponsible. Rather than take the opportunity to seriously and sensitively foster dialogue, Gillespie exploits a condition by creating a feel-good romcom for the Sundance set.

- Steve Kabel

Sequels That Never Were, Part Two

The Last Running Man: Running Man 2

In Sequels That Never Were, we present sequels to films that, with a little more box office performance, might’ve spawned an additional chapter.

 Synopsis: Two months after the anti-Cadre resistance movement “cancelled” Damian Killian’s Running Man television show, network executives scramble to save their vanishing blood thirsty audience. The brilliant and charming Cameron Rude (Regis Philbin) offers to revive the show with The Last Running Man: instead of stalkers stalking convicts, the convicts stalk convicts.  Loving the idea, the network builds a three-mile wide prison in North Dakota called the Rockhammer. Twenty-four hours a day, audiences can watch convict battle convict until the last running man is left standing.  All Rude needs now is a star attraction.

Roger Stevenson (Dwayne Johnson, aka “the Rock”) is the network’s worst nightmare.   A former Green Beret now turned Hispanic attorney, he files a four hundred million dollar lawsuit against the network for the sixty illegal immigrants who died building the Rockhammer. African American presidential hopeful Allabem Douglas (Mykelti Williamson) takes up Stevenson’s cause and agrees to help him win the lawsuit.

Two days before the premiere, the network threatens to pull the plug on The Last Running Man. Rude hires East Craven (Jake Weber) to assassinate Allabem and frame Stevenson for the crime. While Allabem is enjoying a tasty prostitute, Craven snipes him from the adjacent office building. Stevenson is tried and convicted within twenty-four hours. 

Act Two: Stevenson is thrown into the prison with twenty-five other convicted felons.  Immediately a giant brawl ensues and Stevenson sees several convicts carting off a screaming woman. Stevenson fights his way to her and with a little Green Beret action saves Sunshine Sarah Mack (Marissa Ribisi) from a grizzly fate. 

Ratings are through the roof. Rude is just ecstatic about his success until Craven hands him a photograph showing Sunshine in Allabem’s office the night he was assassinated.  Rude orders Craven into the prison as a special “late night addition.” 

Stevenson and Sarah run into an abandoned Animaniacs theme park to hide from the battling prisoners. Watching from the command center, Rude decides to use the second season’s special features a little early. Fun house lights halt the convict free-for-all and attract everyone to the fun house. As Stevenson and Sarah make their way through Dot’s mirror maze, Yakko springs out of nowhere threatening to slice Stevenson a new nose hole. 

Dodging poisonous gases from exploding balloons, Sarah runs into her abusive ex-husband, who was serving a ten to twenty for making snuff films. Using a cotton candy machine in a very inventive way, Sarah’s ex-husband becomes the first causality of The Last Running Man. Meanwhile, outside the Rockhammer, thousands of Hispanic immigrants protest Stevenson’s incarceration. Rude orders security to clear the area, but there’s too many of them.

Act Three opens with Craven killing three convicts on his way towards Stevenson and Sarah. At a beat-up concrete factory, Sarah tells Stevenson he’s innocent and she can prove it. Determined to escape Rockhammer, Stevenson suggests they use the river nearby. Just as they are about to leave, Craven arrives. Stevenson and Craven duke it out from which Craven’s gets trapped in quick drying sidewalk. “Time to walk over this dude,” Stevenson says. 

Outside, the Hispanic protestors break into Rockhammer, releasing the sole surviving prisoner and Stevenson and Sarah. Rude is convicted of assassinating Allabem and sentenced to live inside Rockhammer prison for the second season of The Last Running Man.

Filmmakers: Richard Linklater postponed filming SubUrbia to film the sequel to Stephen’s King’s original script treatment. Using WWE wrestler “the Rock”, Dwayne Johnson’s first film went off without a hitch. Writers Alan Sharp (Rob Roy, Damnation Alley) and Peter S. Seaman (Doc Hollywood, Who Framed Roger Rabbit) relied on the Schwartzenegger model of keeping the dialogue simple and Dwayne’s shirt off. 

Release Date & Box Office: The Last Running Man was released on July 4^th, 1996, hoping to compete with Independence Day, Phenomenon, and Harriet the Spy.  Yet box office success proved elusive, and It finished its second week behind Kazaam. It’s currently available in most Wal-Mart bargain bins.   

 - Court Ogilvie

Review: Street Kings

Ellroy for beginners

There’s a scene early in Street Kings that sort of explains the whole film. Invading the home of several drug dealers, vice cop Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) shoots one of the crooks without warning. To cover his tracks he plants a pistol in the dead man’s hand, even firing two shots into a doorframe to make the execution appear as if in self-defense. It’s a chilling, audacious moment that prepares the viewer both for the moral vacuum to follow and Ludlow’s questionable tactics.

Except it’s also lifted verbatim from L.A. Confidential, a film based on a James Ellroy novel. In fact Ellroy contributed the story and enjoys scripting credit on Kings, so if the cribbing isn’t thievery it’s at the least ethically ambiguous – which is the kind of nebulous distinction that the author’s books are all about anyway. Still, the film is big, loud, dumb fun and a guilty pleasure for noir fans and especially those who like their action films soaked in urban grime.

Ellroy’s stories are always labyrinthine, even for ardent fans, and Street Kings is hard not to see as a kind of primer into the dark places of the author’s views on law, morality, and the corrupting influence of authority. Ludlow is the star player of a special Vice Squad unit and the protégé of its commander (played with manically oily charm by Forest Wittaker). Nevertheless, he’s under suspicion as his former partner is about to inform on him to the department’s Internal Affairs division. As Ludlow approaches the ex-partner to beat him into shutting up, two gangbangers mercilessly gun the ex-partner down, leaving Ludlow as the only witness.

The double-crosses, shadowy revelations, and changing loyalties that follow as Ludlow attempts to do right by the deceased’s widow are classic Ellroy. In fact, the whole film demands the viewer’s attention to keep up with shifting motivations and murky allegiances. No one is who they seem (how could they be?) and no one is above or below the law -the police most of all. If plot twists often seen conventional, the plot itself quickly doubles back and reveals another layer of character that twists the story even further.

In a film about the erosion and redemption of moral character it’s the characters themselves who have to carry the weight of the story. Reeves busts his ass to bring both menace and pathos to Ludlow, and for the most part he succeeds with backup from a superb ensemble cast. Besides Wittaker’s scene-stealing performance, Hugh Laurie is convincing as the Internal Affairs chief who’s just slightly trustworthier than Ludlow’s fellow Vice detectives. Rappers Common and The Game convincingly play their street thug parts, while My Big Fat Greek Himbo John Corbett makes an uncredited and chameleon-like appearance as one of Ludlow’s teammates. But the supreme stunt casting must be using former real-life LAPD chief Daryl Gates to play the film’s police commissioner. Only Chris Evans fails to make an impression, as the homicide detective first investigating then assisting Ludlow’s rogue activities.

Director David Ayer’s films (Training Day, Harsh Times) have always had Ellroy’s world as their muse, and his adaptation of Ellroy’s original treatment for Dark Blue is arguably his most accomplished work to date. It helps that he shares Ellroy’s fascination with Los Angeles and a sense of the city as the primordial source of human corruption. If his editing and pacing were only a little tighter, he’d make a perfect choice to bring the author’s other novels (such as perennial Development Hell prisoner White Jazz) to the screen. As it is, he sometimes loses his narrative focus while attempting to stage armchair-gripping shootouts or sun and neon-soaked tenements. The ending, too, feels like the conclusion to a TV pilot.

But these are minor complaints for what’s supposed to be a minor pleasure. The film entertained the hell out of the opening-night crowd at the screening I attended, with frequent applause from beginning to end. You could expect a lot less from a cop melodrama with no major stars. And if Street Kings is a gateway to other Ellroy works finding their way to film (like American Tabloid or the superb The Big Nowhere) it more than deserves its B-movie crown.

-Michael Kabel

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DVD: There Will Be Blood

There will not be character development. Or subtext. Or thematic resonance. Or…

When we started this blog last month I made a point of mentioning There Will Be Blood as an example of how so much modern film criticism has become bandwagon-driven and ill-considered besides. So with its somewhat hurried release to DVD this week the time seems right to explain what we’re thinking.

As I said then, the film is not a bad movie, but it is not a good one, either. In fact much of it screams “journeyman effort.” Director P.T. Anderson has made four films before this, one very good (Boogie Nights), two good (Magnolia and Sidney), and one intriguing misfire (Punch Drunk Love). If nothing else, his films have always been ambitious, and perhaps his greatest fault is a grasp that outdistances his talented reach.

This film is masterfully visualized and expertly shot, so that almost every frame is meticulously composed. The craftsmanship is not at issue: the problem is that the story does not add up to anything coherent while the characters’ motivations remain maddeningly opaque. The audience understands that star Daniel Day-Lewis’ (Gangs of New York) Daniel Plainview is a conflicted individual with an Ayn Randian drive towards wealth and power. But the reasons are left ambivalent: worse, his antagonism for Paul Dano’s clay-footed preacher Eli Sunday is never fleshed-out besides an impatience with Sunday’s meddling. In crafting the images, Anderson forgot to fill them with ideas, so the end result is a shell – a lovely shell, but like the Grecian urn all the running around on its surface is ultimately pointless.

In attempting to make an American epic that explores the uneasy relationship between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of money, Anderson might have addressed why Protestant Christianity, particularly its twin lures of salvation and eventual afterlife, played a vital part of frontier society. Briefly, the thought of a Heaven to come made the grinding poverty and hardship tolerable.

Yet There Will Be Blood almost visibly cringes anytime a hint of complexity bubbles to its rugged surface. Especially in our own time, when religion is an actively divisive force in much of American culture and politics, such an examination might help the film transcend its limitations. But such ideas are difficult to translate into pretty images. Worse, they’re hard to act very loud about (more on that in a second.) Religion itself is instead reduced to a shallow conceit of the selfish, a clumsy flimflammery ideal for the venal and foolish. Such generalizations are expedient, but they’re not accurate nor are they intelligent. They’re also not fair.

It’s very likely Anderson didn’t mean to be so dogmatic, that he was instead interested in adapting a work and creating a film worthy of its esteemed influences, which include the works of Terrence Malick, George Stevens, and of course John Huston. But to confuse the intention with achievement is to endorse style over substance, and to confuse mimicry with competence. As a filmmaker, he’s lip-syncing. And speaking of the triumph of style over depth…

Day-Lewis does not inhabit Plalnview so much as he swallows the character whole, and his celebrated decision to “channel” Huston leaves little room for actually giving dimension to his fretting and strutting around. When you start with larger than life, there’s little room to build from there, and he goes loud rather than deep. Besides which, the choice of Huston as role model for this kind of character is sort of obvious. 

Day-Lewis is not a bad actor, but like Anthony Hopkins or even Richard Burton he’s not above giving a lazy performance, either. With this and his similar damn-the-torpedoes turn in Gangs of New York (another hysterically overrated film), a pattern’s emerging of overacting disguised as intensity, a self-insistence that would seem megalomaniacal if it wasn’t soft-pedaled and enabled by the endorsement of too many film critics. Well, enough is enough. Day-Lewis’ acting has become much like the heavy metal played at air shows and truck and tractor pulls. Egregiously loud, and compelling enough within the confines of its setting, but of little substance when considered in any other context. Unfortunately, like Hopkins his prestige seems to rise the shallower his acting becomes.

Probably in an awards season less starved for quality material There Will Be Blood would have been disregarded as an earnest misstep. Maybe not. Several months after its theatrical release, however, it’s time to call the publicity department’s bluff and see through the hype. It is a mediocre film by a good director who, now that the rancorous praise has subsided, might yet learn from his mistakes.

- Michael Kabel

DVD Review: Goya’s Ghosts

Forman’s sleep of reason produces wretched excess.

No one makes a bloated, leaden biopic quite like Milos Forman.  In Goya’s Ghosts, the director of Amadeus, The People vs. Larry Flynt and Man on the Moon delivers yet another triumph of excess over sincerity and insight.

 Set in the Spanish Inquisition of the late Eighteenth Century, the film centers around the legendary painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgaard). When several of Goya’s uniquely horrific etchings catch the attention of Chief Inquisitor Lorenzo (Javier Bardem), church agents imprison and torture one of Goya’s models, Inés (Natalie Portman). When Lorenzo seduces the terrified young woman, he is disgraced and must flee for his life to France. Fifteen years later, Inés is freed and seeks Goya’s help in tracking down her child Alicia (Portman again) that was taken from her while she wasted away in prison.

It’s difficult to imagine a more self-indulgent picture. The production design is opulent, to say the least, but it’s also indicative of the patent artificiality that encompasses every aspect of the film. The hyper-exaggerated costumes and make-up are downright cartoony: in a ridiculously oversized wig, Skarsgaard bears a remarkable resemblance to Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor; Portman’s Inés emerges from her fifteen year prison sentence resembling nothing so much an offensive caricature of Southern American women. 

Scenes set in affluent surroundings are overflowing with props and set pieces, while more common locales are sparse and bare. Forman could have deliberately chosen to depict this disparity in order to highlight the era’s unequal distribution of wealth. Yet there’s a noticeable lack of weathering throughout the film – even in the prison scenes – that is made all the more conspicuous by a pervasive and glazy soft lighting. It’s as if in his rush to preserve authenticity, Forman shot the movie exclusively in historical landmarks and was terrified of getting anything dirty. The result is an unnatural atmosphere that feels like the world’s most expensive museum tableau, alternately austere and garish but utterly devoid of texture. 

So it’s no surprise the stilted and overly affected performances can’t breathe.  Forman spaces the actors distantly apart from one another and lingers on pauses between lines. The actors consequently appear to be performing in a vacuum, acting without reacting to each other. This disjointed flow of dialogue is then exacerbated by inconsistent accents and pronunciation, not to mention intrusive bursts of baroque music.  Bardem’s performance stands out, if only because his hollow baritone amounts to an unintentional impression of Kermit the Frog.

 This all could be mere window dressing if the script (co-written by Forman and Jean-Claude Carriére) was any good. But it’s not. Almost all moments of character revelation are truncated by sweepingly dramatic plot thrusts. The conclusion to Inés’s character arc is particularly contrived, while Alicia’s final fate is both preposterous and insulting to viewer’s intelligence. Indeed, the script is blatantly misogynistic – women are depicted as helpless idiots or (literal) prostitutes, waiting for a big strapping man to come rescue them. Equally frustrating is the total lack of insight into Goya’s psyche.  The film begins and ends with some of the artist’s more disturbing images, but provides no explanation for why he felt compelled to create such work before the presumably traumatic events of the story. 

Goya’s Ghosts is a perfect example of a film so obsessed with its own pedigree and with its aspirations of being “artistic” that it loses all sense of truth.  It’s unfortunate that very few other films have depicted the Inquisition, but it’s perhaps appropriate that Forman’s overwrought and senseless exercise in vanity will be associated with such a senseless and bleak period in human history.

- Steve Kabel