New buddy comedy features the late Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes.
As good Memphis residents we’d be wrong not to plug the upcoming comedy Soul Men, which features the final screen appearance of lifelong Memphian Isaac Hayes. Bernie Mac, who also passed away within hours of Hayes last August, stars with Samuel L. Jackson in the bawdy road/buddy comedy. Frankly, the film might have a hard time overcoming the eerily-timed deaths (a wildfire of “Is Soul Men cursed?” articles ran over the Internet last summer) even if its plot and character beats didn’t look so rigidly formulaic. But Mac and Hayes were both gifted entertainers, and Jackson is riding an artistic resurgance the last two years or so, so we’re hoping the film offers a swan song worthy of its tragic significance.
Mac and Jackson play Floyd and Louis, long-since faded soul backup singers – sounding vaguely like Sam & Dave by way of Rufus Thomas – recruited to play a memorial tribute to their recently-deceased band leader (John Legend). They travel cross country to Harlem’s Apollo Theatre, each hoping to grab the sizeable performance fee for their own needs. True to the form of such comedies, they reconnect despite the ensuing years of acrimony and even bond with Floyd’s teenage daughter (Sharon Leal).
You can imagine how things work out, but all things notwithstanding this was never meant as a revelatory film. Still, the shadow of poignancy is likely to fall long and deep. One report suggests director Malcolm D. Lee (Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins) redited and softened the film’s tone out of respect for its late co-stars. Posthumously released comedies are seldom successful; by way of example, the two films released after John Candy’s 1994 death withered in the reality of his passing. But again, Soul Men’s comfortable familiarity might offer a way to avoid that pitfall. We’re also willing to believe Mac’s mountainous screen presence might tower over the reality of his demise. Similarly, Hayes appears as himself, and we’re hoping at least part of the film-climaxing “big show” has the big man doing his thing.
A modern classic gets a brand-new DVD presentation with some unusual special features.
It’s hard to imagine a film as audacious as 1997′s L.A. Confidential getting made quite the same way in this current, dreary age of big-costume period “masterpieces” and overcooked melodrama. Using a cast of then-largely unknown stars buffeted by an ensemble of respected character actors (some believed perhaps past their prime) and helmed by a journeyman director, the film arrived in American cinemas something like the bullet from a new kind of gun. “Here,” it seemed to say, “this is how you’re supposed to be making movies.” Unafraid of an unhappy ending or to kill off central characters without warning or pathos, it set the bar Hollywood Sign-high for ensemble crime cinema. Small wonder it hasn’t quite been equalled since. Last month a new DVD package arrived in stores to remind us of that unfortunate truth.
Based on James Ellroy’s labyrinthine novel (itself the centerpiece of his sprawling L.A. Quartet saga), the movie follows three LAPD detectives on their separate though intertwined journeys through the city’s sordid, blithely amoral underworld. Vice cop and television technical advisor Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) looks out for himself until his complicity in a murder awakens his conscience. Neophyte detective and rising LAPD star Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) receives praise for apprehending a gang of murdering thieves but realizes his success is only skin deep. And tortured, self-loathing department muscleman Bud White (Russell Crowe) investigates the death of his corrupt partner while falling in love with Veronica Lake-lookalike prostitute Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger, in an Oscar-winning performance.)
Hounding each detective’s steps is deceptively benevolent Captain Dudley Smith (James Cromwell). Also lurking around the stories’ edges are tabloid magazine publisher Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito) and gentleman pimp Pierce Patchett (David Straithairn). The plot elements converge and then double back on themselves, leading in new directions that only hint at darker, more violent events to come. Director Curtis Hanson (The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) and co-screenwriter Brian Helgeland (Mystic River) worked hard to streamline Ellroy’s novel, and crafted a work that manages to surprise with its revelations in ways that seem inevitable in retrospect.
The ensemble of perfectly-cast actors fueled the film’s sense of newness and vitality. Kevin Spacey and Russell Crowe were still three years away from making, respectively, their breakthrough films American Beauty and Gladiator. Australian actor Guy Pearce was most famous for his turn as a flamboyant drag queen in the import indie The Adventures ofPriscilla, Queen of the Desert. But each actor invests their role with an individual melancholy that distinguishes them from the city and the lurid events surrounding them. Though Crowe has morphed in the intervening decade into something of a caricature of smug masculinity, as White he’s pure bridled fury bottling up childlike confusion. Spacey puts Vincennes through an arc of regret tempered by hesitation, while Pearce’s Exley undergoes a violent coming of age driven by nascent integrity.
That the movie uses such characters to make a point about the city of Los Angeles itself – that the film has an actual theme- only brings its willful bravado full circle. “Come to Los Angeles,” Hudgens giggles at the film’s beginning. “It’s paradise on Earth. That’s what they tell you, anyway.” The rest of the narrative shows how that celebrated image – itself a reflection of mid-century American hubris - was bought with the lives of men and women both good and evil. And it’s ultimately a movie about how America wants to see itself now, with everyone on the cusp of fame and all dirty secrets kept hidden from the sunshine of unjustified optimism.
The new two-disc DVD edition offers a fresh making-of featurette as well as short documentaries both retrospective and contemporaneous to the film’s production. Hanson’s “photo pitch” featurette and an interactive Los Angeles map have also been brought over from the original DVD package. A third, bonus disc includes a six-song soundtrack “sampler” that Johnny Mercer and the Pied Piper’s performance of the “Accentuate the Positive” swinger used so memorably in the film’s whirlwind opening montage.
This new edition also contains the 1999 pilot for a planned L.A. Confidential TV series. That effort, created for HBO and then shopped to Fox, attempts to fuse several modern television drama tropes (steamy poolside sex, tawdry serial killings, wealthy family gossip) onto a continuity more closely resembling that of the book than the film. Kiefer Sutherland is miscast as the oily, haunted Vincennes, and Josh Thompson’s (Swingtown) laconic screen presence is misused as White. Not really a self-contained introduction to a series so much as a reinterpretation of elements both immediately familiar yet distractingly askew, the pilot is a weird, uneven effort hampered by a structure that jumps all over the place. Pilots are by nature rough around the edges, but the feeling here is almost fanfilm-ish.
Sadly, the film version of L.A. Confidential may have to sustain Ellroy fans for some time to come. Brian DePalma’s terrible adaptation of The Black Dahlia was justifiably dead on arrival in 2006, and Joe Carnahan’s (Narc) production of White Jazz appears consigned to Development Hell. The Big Nowhere, the second book in the cycle, is likely one of those notorious “unfilmable” novels that are sometimes discussed but never attempted. Maybe those two latter films will eventually come to pass – here’s hoping. In the meantime, L.A. Confidential is both a watershed event for the neo-noir genre and a modern American classic all on its glittering own.
Yikes! 100 Posts! And we’ve only been at this since last March. Credit our three-times a week update schedule. But it’s still fun. Actually, it’s more fun now that our traffic numbers are rising and we’re getting more feedback.
When we got to the 50-post mark we ran down a list of ten things we’d learned from the experience up to that date. They’re still true, but there are a few other new things we picked up since.
Fitzgerald actually wrote several fantasy stories as a way to make some quick cash.
1. We’re more certain of our mission statement now than we were seven months ago, in no small part because lately the fall season’s ad campaigns are staring once again to piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining champagne. The three big prestige pictures this year, from what we can tell, are Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, David Fincer’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and future Bravo Network staple Australia, directed by Baz Luhrmann.
Of the three, we’re least leary of Benjamin Button, mostly because Fincher’s coming off his masterful Zodiac and Pitt is actually often at his best when playing more restrained, downbeat roles. We just hope the “I do de-clay-yah!” New Orleans grotesques aren’t as pervasive in the film as in the trailer.
9. Social networking tools like Digg and Twitter are great, and we welcome traffic from them, but there’s no substitute for good word of mouth. We’re getting less bitch mail than we used to, too, so we must be doing something right or anyway better than we were before. That being said, we wish there were more comments coming across our threshold.
The Man
8. Google works in mysterious ways. When we ran a pic of actor Skeet Ulrich on our 50th milestone post, the image somehow topped Google’s search rankings. So far we’ve had more than 300 visitors looking for that one pic. To Mr. Ulrich’s fans, especially those coming over from Capturing Skeet.com, welcome and thank you. To Skeet himself, we probably owe you a steak dinner or something.
7. Our most popular post is still the “Six Forgotten Sci-Fi Films of the 1970s” retrospective from last May. It’s also the one that’s provoked the most griping, so if you check it out remember that one fan’s “forgotten” film is another fan’s cherished memory.
6. We don’t know if anyone else is laughing at our picture captions, but we’re cracking ourselves up. Editor Michael Kabel grew up reading Creem magazine, and it’s just too much fun paying some homage to that late, lamented mag by following their brilliant example here.
5. One post we wish got more traffic showcased a gorgeous montage of Homicide: Life On The Street images set to Coldplay’s “Don’t Panic.” Really, it’s a profoundly haunting couple of minutes. Here it is again:
Thanks again to easilyjaded2 for creating it.
Hello, I'm Shia LaBouef. I'm an actor.
4. Our worst review remains Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, but Eagle Eye only narrowly missed taking that dubious distinction for itself. And in either film’s case, their appalling failure had nothing necessarily to do with mutual participant Shia LaBouef. It’s the films themselves that are godawful, virtually from the ground up.
3. Our posts are getting longer, but there’s more to be said about most films than will fit into a 500- or 600-word essay. Maybe the single greatest advantage of the Internet over print, to quote Walt Disney out of context, is the “blessing of space.” Now, that’s no excuse not to be succinct. But in reviewing some films and analyzing others it’s important to attempt comprehensiveness. Failing that, we’ll try to be funny if not smart.
Running down a dream: The Flash
2. We’ve tried several different types of features, from hypothetical sequels to rewriting underwhelming blockbusters to armchair casting films we know are getting made but don’t trust Hollywood to make the right personnel decisions. Our rewrites of the Star Wars prequels have been the most popular, though we’re not kidding ourselves that poeple are looking for info about the actual films. The post about how to make The Flash movie is a sentimental favorite.
1. Now that the blog’s growing bigger, it’s probably time for some big people clothes. Specifically, we’re looking for someone to create our new header. If you’ve got the design skills and think you can help, please contact us at the email shown back up and to the right there.
To wrap things up, and by way of crossing our fingers for the next 100 posts, the clip below is the famous “cuckoo clock” segment from The Third Man, starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.
Wednesday we’ll have a review of the new DVD edition of L.A. Confidential. Thanks again for reading.
So if you’re older than fouteen consider seeing these new releases.
But did they learn anything?
High School Musical 3 opens this weekend, so as you read this the cineplexes are likely jammed with teens and tweeners all agiggle about the latest installment of the franchise based on a Disney Channel telefilm about singing and dancing. You know, ten years from now the HSM saga is going to be a cultural punchline, like the Frankie & Annette films of the 60s or Vanilla Ice from the early 90s. And because we couldn’t care less about such hokum, the following four films offer something for those of us past puberty who enjoy going to the movies.
Synecdoche, New York: Mad screenwriting genius Charlie Kaufman’s latest indie whirl-a-gig involves a regional theatre director (born again good actor Philip Seymour Hoffman) staging a play about “everything” inside a giant New York City warehouse. He builds a massive replica of the city, and in time becomes drawn into the play’s events. Early reviews claim the film is Kaufman at his most… Kaufman, really, and even he describes it as “creepy.” Hope Davis, Tom Noonan, Catherine Keener, and Jennifer Jason Leigh also star. Limited release.
Passengers: A grief counselor (Anne Hathaway) working with survivors of a plane crash finds her patients beginning to disappear under mysterious circumstances, while the best looking one (Patrick Wilson) has apparently developed supernatural powers. Director Rodrigo Garcia knows his way around intelligent but creepy stories after helming episodes of both Six Feet Under and Carnivale. The ensemble supporting cast is as good as they come: David Morse, Andre Braugher, Clea DuVall, and Dianne Wiest. Limited release.
Pride and Glory: NYPD cop Ray Tierney (Edward Norton, wearing the goatee he sports whenever the audience needs to see he’s “hard”) investigates the murders of four fellow officers – an investigation that may implicate his fellow policeman brother-in-law (Colin Farrell). Jon Voight plays the dad and Noah Emmerich (Beautiful Girls), the go-to guy for sidekick performances, plays Norton’s brother. Joe Carnahan (Narc) co-wrote the screenplay. Wide release.
Changeling: Based on a true story, in 1928 a Los Angeles phone operator (Angelina Jolie) loses her son to kidnappers. Months later, she’s told the child has surfaced but discovers the boy isn’t her own. Yet none of the male authorities involved in the case believes her. Director Clint Eastwood’s films are never accused of being too subtle, so Jolie’s acting-to-the-rafters style may settle in nicely alongside fellow Actor(!) John Malkovich. On the plus side, we’ll watch Amy Ryan (The Wire, Gone Baby Gone) in just about anything. Comics and Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote the script. Limited release; opens nationwide October 31.
Monday we’ll publish our 100th post! Come back and see what we’ve learned since we reached our 50th post. (Hint: be nice to Skeet Ulrich.) Have a good weekend.
A bunch of funny people, Stifler in a comedy you might have seen before.
Fans of The State, Stella, and Wet Hot American Summer will be glad or maybe a little worried to realize the new buddy comedy Role Models is co-written and directed by David Wain. Though it’s hard to tell from the really generic trailer below, the new film might skewer the “children helping man-children become men” genre just as Wet Hot American Summer did for summer camp movies of the early 1980s. Or it might be a straighforward formula exercise. Given the sometimes uneven humor of those previous efforts, as well as their flair for subtlety, it might even be hard to tell one way or the other.
Actually, it’s only for the talent and cred of its creators and stars that we’re giving it the benefit of a doubt. The plot itself is straight-up Sandlerian on its surface: Danny (Paul Rudd, who also co-wrote) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) are energy drink pitchman who, through a series of circumstances, wind up obliged to perform a month of community service at a Big Brothers/Big Sisters-like mentoring program or face a month in prison. Danny is the straightlaced one, Wheeler the hard-partying jackass. Danny wants to marry his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks, now officially the It Girl of 2008) and to get the program over with as soon as possible. He’s assigned a bookish teen (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, the McLovin’ kid from Superbad) who needs help branching out from his role-playing, fantasy-obsessed life. Wheeler gets a black kid (Bobb’e J. Thompson) who doesn’t like white people but likes to punch him. Bonding and hilarity presumably ensue.
Also appearing are State veterans Kerri Kenney-Silver (Reno 911), Joe Lo Truglio and Ken Marino (another co-writer) along with Jane Lynch (the store manager in The 40 Year Old Virgin) and Stella veteran A.D. Miles. So the film could well be a crowd pleaser if it plays the genre conventions straight-faced or a cult hit if it takes the subversive route. Most people either get The State, Reno 911, and Stella or they don’t, so the happy middle ground looks pretty narrow. The film opens nationwide November 7.
Oliver Stone’s biopic can’t manage to stay a course.
In our preview of Oliver Stone’s W. last week I talked a lot about how the director’s well-known political leanings might get in the way of establishing a keen satire of the George W. Bush administration. It’s with mixed emotions that I can say I misoverestimated. W. succeeds as a film only narrowly, its development continually hampered by shifting tones and an oft-sagging pace. Worse, in trying to determine which events of the president’s life to depict, Stone settles on what feels like a sampling of parts that never quite gel into a coherently articulated point, so that the film winds up more mix disc than album, more memory album than narrative.
W. begins, in what is probably intended as a symbolic prelude, with the young George’s (Josh Brolin) hazing into a Yale fraternity. Despite immersion in freezing water and severe intoxication, he’s able to remember an astounding number of his would-be frat brothers’ names. It’s a perfunctory scene, though it manages to establish Bush’s talent for winning over dubious audiences with great alacrity and charm. When shortly thereafter his then-Congressman father (James Cromwell) is compelled to bail “Junior” out of a New Jersey prison, it sets in motion the film’s key narrative struggle between Bush’s freewheeling character and his barely-understood ache for his father’s approval. Stone uses that tug of war as a touchstone to show the passing of time, matching W’s misadventures in business and public office with the elder Bush’s political rise and fall.
Corridors of power: Bush (Brolin) leads his staff
The bulk of the rest of the film, also told in flashback and flash-forward structure, details the events leading up to the American invasion of Iraq. Bush works with but seems often content to take at face value the advice and research of Defense Scretary Donald Rumsfeld (Scott Glenn) and his Deputy Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris), Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfus), successive Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice (Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newtwon), and CIA chief John Tenet (Bruce McGill). Bush plays the role of manager to their appraisals and ends each meeting with a coach-like “good meeting” followed by a moment of prayer. Always in the background, like a true-life Grima Wormtongue, lurks adviser Karl Rove (Toby Jones), dispensing advice with false humility and fawning praise.
Meet the parents: Burstyn, Cromwell
In the film (though no doubt the actual circumstances were more complicated) Bush finds religion following a cardiac arrest while jogging. He gives up his heavy drinking in favor of a purpose driven life under the guidance of Reverend Earle Hudd (Stacey Keach), a pastor Stone portrays in cherubic backlighting and affectionate soft-focus. Faith thereafter guides the cinematic Bush’s decisions, most notably his 1999 “call” to run for President; but darker drives compel him even more, especially the need for his father’s approval but also to compensate for the elder Bush’s 1991 decision to pull out of Iraq without deposing Saddam Hussein. Stone never offers a solution or theory explaining what effect two such diverse compulsions might have on the leader of the free world. In time – and at 131 minutes, the time is somehow long though not long enough – that lack of tension hollows out what might serve as the film’s center.
"You're the girl for me": Brolin, Banks
If its performances weren’t so good, the film itself would be much less. Brolin inhabits Bush admirably, finding sympathy in his privileged life. Dreyfus’ Cheney is both arrogant and reptilian, while Cromwell brings perhaps undeserved stature to George H.W. Bush. Wright gives Powell a surprising vulnerability , whom Stanley Weiser’s script uses as the sole and diminishing voice of reason in the buildup to the Iraqi invasion. Unfortunately Thandie Newton’s turn as Rice is more impersonation than performance, and Jones (Notorious) seems to have not yet rinsed all the Truman Capote out of his acting technique. Elizabeth Banks isn’t given enough to do as First Lady Laura Bush, though she makes the most of her time in giving Laura the gravitas and affection that anchor her often-impulsive husband to Earth.
Water bored: Bush (Brolin) at Yale
“The absence of evidence,” Rumsfeld exclaims in a crucial scene, “is not evidence of absence.” Such wisdom ironically thumbnails the film’s fatal flaw. Stone leaves out much of what’s made Bush’s presidency now officially the least popular in seventy years, including among other self-destructing moments the Hurricane Katrina debacle and the infamous My Pet Goat photo op the morning of September 11. Why the film avoids such moments is left unclear. Would their inclusion impair the tightrope objectivity Stone seems determined to put forward? Obviously detailing all the events and calamities of Bush’s monumentally controversial administration would require a series of films. But the omission of 9/11 and Katrina comes across as careening around cornerstone events. By way of comparison, would a biography of Franklin Roosevelt omit Pearl Harbor, or the Great Depression? Could a biography of Lincoln ignore the Emancipation Proclamation?
Stone rose to the top tier of American directors in the 1980s following a trio of very good films (Salvador, Platoon, Wall Street) that were ferocious in their attempts to spur public discourse of historically significant events. His track record since has been spotty, though no less ambitious. Platoon, his best film, benefited from historical perspective, and maybe that distance is what’s missing here. Or maybe not. Though missing the heavy-handed pathos of 1995′s Nixon, W. stills fails to make a compelling case either for sympathy or damnation. Better films than this will likely be made of America’s least popular president. It’s probably just going to take a while for them to arrive.
Not every comic-to-screen leap was a blockbuster success.
Following the colossal successes of The Dark Knight Returns and Iron Man this past summer, there’s a bit of a gold rush to get comic book adaptations finished and into theatres. This week a lot of the buzz was about casting: Don Cheadle will replace Terrence Howard in the Iron Man sequel, while rumors circulated that Warner Brothers wants Ryan Gosling (Lars and The Real Girl) to lead the upcoming Green Lantern movie and Brandon Routh to play Superman again when and if that film takes flight. Beyond casting announcements, the venerable Internet Movie Database shows film adaptations of Thor, The Flash, The Metal Men, Captain America and others in various stages of development. The Hugh Jackman-led X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens next May, and the Punisher: War Zone sequel arrives this December.
This image has nothing to do with the article. Its just too strange not to share.
Yet, for every attempt that hit its box office or audience reception target, there are probably three adaptations that tanked, fell victim to small budgets, or just couldn’t garner public interest. The following list is only a sampling of the projects that took their place in the “also ran” category. We’re sure a few are sentimental favorites to forigiving fans of their respective inspirations. (We like The Flash TV series.) Some aren’t bad, considering their limited resources, and some had unrealized potential. And one or two are terrible. But they’re all from comic books, for better or worse.
Sable (TV series) Premiered November 1987; lasted seven episodes. Based on the First Comics series by longtime Green Arrow writer-artist Mike Grell, Sable followed the exploits of freelance mercenary Jon Sable (Lewis Van Bergen) who worked days as an author of children’s books. Rene Russo, very early in her career, played his girlfriend Eden Kendall. The clip below shows its noirish promise, even if the show’s “alpha dog adventurer helps client of the week” conceit seems kinda passe now.
Steel (Movie) Released August 15, 1997; total U.S. box office: $1.7 million. In his own DC Comics series and in the Justice League comics and cartoon, Steel is a brilliant engineer and inventor who dedicates himself to defending good after Superman saves his life. So what better “actor” to convey such intellectual and moral strength than human marketing technique Shaquille O’Neal? Judd Nelson played the bad guy, while Richard Roundtree (Shaft) appeared as Uncle Joe. Though admittedly the film carried a modest $16 million budget, “Shaq Steel” still looks as if he swallowed an electromagnet and walked through a junkyard.
Dr. Strange (TV movie) Premiered September 6, 1978. Clad in a snaredrum-tight Disco perm and piles of gold jewelry, New York psychiatrist Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) trains to be Earth’s new “Sorcerer Supreme” and rescue a young woman from the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter). Intended as the pilot to a television series that never happened, it featured Marvel Comics’ honcho Stan Lee as a consultant.
Supergirl (Movie) Released November 21, 1984; total U.S. Box Office: $15 million. For years the poster child for misbegotten comic adaptations, Supergirl was rushed into production after the success of the first two Superman films but struggled for distribution after Superman III flopped. Nevertheless, expanded versions released on DVD have clarified its choppily-edited story and somewhat repaired its reputation. Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, and Faye Dunaway overweigh the supporting cast, while underused 80s actress Helen Slater (Ruthless People) makes her debut as super-cousin Kara Zor-El.
Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV Movie) Premiered May 26, 1998. A decade before Samuel L. Jackson’s cameo in Iron Man, David Hasellhoff starred in this low budget TV movie about Marvel Comics’ Man from U.N.C.L.E. riff Nick Fury. The superspy and his former love Valentine Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) take on rival organization HYDRA for possession of a deadly virus. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer wrote the scrpt. The Hoff plays the hyper-macho Fury as… The Hoff with an eyepatch. Watch how S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying headquarters looks like a basement steam room somewhere. (actual video begins about 23 seconds into clip.)
The Flash (TV Series) Premiered September 20, 1990; lasted 21 episodes. CBS brought the Scarlet Speedster to the small screen apparently motivated by the runaway success of Batman the year before. A TV movie pilot got the family-friendly series off and running, but constant schedule shifts and pre-emptions for Gulf War news coverage kept it from building an audience. Still, The Flash’s (John Wesley Shipp) costume has aged well, as have the special effects. The script quality suffered as the season wore on, however, though fan favorite guests stars like Mark Hamill, Tim Thomerson and Jeffrey Combs frequently livened things up. The series is even collected in a no-frills DVD package.
Captain America (TV movie) Premiered January 19, 1979. An attempt to update the character for the Evil Kenievel/motorcycle years of the 70s, this adaptation featured the original Captain America’s son trying to stop terrorists from detonating a hydrogen bomb on Phoenix, Arizona. There’s almost nothing about the clip below that doesn’t feel dated, especially the ersatz Cap’s costume and the long, loving takes of motorcycle stunts. A sequel TV movie, released just eleven months later, offered a comparatively more comics-accurate uniform and included Christopher Lee as its villain.
Monday we’ll have our review of Oliver Stone’s W. Have a super weekend.
Oliver Stone’s satire of the George W. Bush administration arrives this Friday, with current headlines potentially giving the film a big marketing boost. Bush’s disapproval ratings are now the highest of any U.S. president in seven decades, while the ongoing financial crisis looks set to dominate his final hundred days in office. As the next election looms a little over three weeks away, the time seems right for a cathartic skewering of the last eight years. Hopefully Stone, who’s never hesitated to vault giddily over the top of anything, delivers a film that’s edgy and biting enough to do those embattled years justice.
But from the witty trailer to the spot-on casting and costuming of the principal players, it appears that mission was accomplished. Time was, even just a few years ago, such an attempt to satirize the kingly Bush White House would’ve been met with indifference at best and hostility at worst (Anyone remember Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s That’s My Bush?). Times change, however, and the satirizing of the nation’s most controversial president could wind up something like the All The President’s Men of its time. Some will love it simply for attacking the president; others will hate it for the same reason. Stone has always wanted his films to stir public debate, so in that sense at least he’ll get his wish.
George Walker, Texas Ranger: Brolin
The film reportedly follows Dubya from his college days through his 2000 presidential “election” and into the days of the Second Iraq War. Stone has wisely - and deliberately, we’re sure – stacked its cast with both veteran and up and coming actors to create an ensemble that well reflects back on star Josh Brolin. (We imagine Brolin, finally reaping long-coming acclaim after powerful performances in No Country for Old Men and American Gangster, knows something about the shadows cast by famous fathers.) Surrounding him are Richard Dreyfuss as Vice President Dick Cheney, Toby Jones (Infamous) as “Bush’s Brain” Karl Rove, and Thandie Newton (The Pursuit of Happyness) as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. James Cromwell (L.A. Confidential) and Ellen Burstyn play George H.W. and Barbara Bush. Elizabeth Banks (The 40 Year Old Virgin) plays first lady Laura Bush.
Satires, especially political ones, rise and fall on the strength of their tone and the self-discipline of their voice. The most effective political satires – Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate, for example, or Tim Robbins’ Bob Roberts – exploit the absurdities of their subject matter while remaining firmly detached from intrusive commentary. Politics being an inherently illogical set of events anyway, the comedy derives from watching the improbable assume great importance. Given the right set of events, it’s sufficient to just “tell it like it is,” making the film a straight talk express that explains a series of events in a couple of hours. But keeping that detachment is the difference between satire and polemic, the distance between Wag The Dog and Bulworth. And therein lies the jeopardy of W.: “detachment” and “objectivity” are terms seldom applied to Stone’s approach, and his well-known left-leaning politics could sink the whole endeavor if allowed to overwhelm the events depicted.
And what events they were. John F. Kennedy was fond of quoting the Chinese admonition “may you in live in interesting times.” America leaves the Bush years all but exhausted from so much that commanded our interest, with both current presidential candidates promising above all else to enact substantive change. Such cries may not resonate all the way to the Executive Branch, however, and if they do they may not be heard anyway. ”History we don’t know,” Bush told Bob Woodward in 2004. “History we’ll all be dead.” Or maybe not. If film is a means of interpreting the times we live in, W. might constitute an early return from history.
David Fincher’s 2007 true crime saga is an overlooked masterpiece.
Released in March of last year to warm but not rave critical reviews and a tepid box office reception, David Fincher’s Zodiac nevertheless offers possibly the most precisely-executed police procedural of the decade. It’s a haunting film not just about catching the bad guy or punishing the evil but is instead a character-rooted, deeply emotional tale of crime and the human cost of crime on both the victim and those who pursue the wrongdoer. That it’s meticulously based on a harrowing true series of events only makes its narrative and its broad ensemble of fine performances all the more resonant. For film noir fans, crime movie enthusiasts, or just those who enjoy good period pieces, it’s simply umissable cinema.
Beginning in 1968 and lasting through the Seventies, San Francisco and its surrounding environs were terrorized by a serial killer who typically preyed on couples alone in deserted areas, committing savage attacks that included elaborate costuming and even hastily-scrawled messages left at the scene. The killer, who called himself “The Zodiac” in postcards and letters mailed to local newspapers, taunted authorities with elaborate coded messages he defied experts to decypher. Though investigators from several police and sheriff’s departments spent years running down thousands of clues, ultimately his identity was never conclusively proven, passing into the realm of legend and endless debate. To this day confessions and leads continue to appear, so much so that the San Francisco Police Department has reopened the investigation.
Downey Jr., Gyllenhaal co-star as investigators Avery, Graysmith
Fincher’s film moves according to a delicately balanced tone, and in creating the Bay Area at the end of the 60s he emphasizes the dark edges of a region for whom the Summer of Love was already dead and gone. The marvelous set piece that opens the film moves at a deliberate pace that both establishes the terrible nature of Zodiac’s crimes and explains why the hunt for his capture would reach such desperate lengths in the months to come. This first attack, as with the later depictions, are not shown as sexy, stylized, or maudlin. They are swift and brutal, leaving the audience not scared or titillated but instead serve to provoke a moral response: repulsion, dismay, horror.
Yet the sequence is just prelude for the main segment of the narrative, which depicts the long and tortured investigation that suffered setback after maddening setback. When the Zodiac’s coded messages arrive at the San FranciscoChronicle, they attract the attention of star reporter Robert Avery (Robert Downey, Jr.) and cartoonist Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal). Graysmith, a former Eagle Scout and amateur cryptographer, finds himself both fascinated and repelled by the Zodiac killings, while the self-destructive Avery sees a momentous story.
Edwards, Ruffalo as Inspectors Armstrong, Toschi
Meanwhile Zodiac strikes again and again, including an unforgettable daylight attack on the shores of a tranquil lake in which he appears as a hooded executioner, binding and viciously stabbing a young couple. Weeks later, the murder of a San Francisco taxi driver is assigned to SFPD Inspectors David Tosci and William Armstrong (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards, both excellent). The two are dedicated, intelligent, methodical. (Toschi was an inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry character and the visual model for Steve McQueen’s portrayal of Bullitt.) Together with police officials from neighboring areas (played with muted reserve by Elias Koteas, Donal Logue, and others), the two detectives slowly begin amassing a library of circumstantial evidence yet always come just short of discovering the one, case-breaking clue. Zodiac, it seems, was smart enough to strike in areas of overlapping or poorly-defined police jurisdiction, so coordination and communication lags – the attacks occur just as the fax machine was becoming available - slow their respective efforts.
This is the Zodiac speaking: Lynch as suspect Arthur Leigh Allen
They come closest when interviewing refinery worker Arthur Leigh Allen, a lumbering hulk of a man who appears helpful but subtly taunts the inspectors by flaunting a Zodiac wristwatch and boots that match treadmarks taken from an early attack. Actor John Carroll Lynch (Fargo, Waking The Dead) is brilliantly economical in depicting Leigh – whom the real-life Graysmith and detectives believe was Zodiac – as an unassuming but inwardly arrogant figure with just enough edginess to be the sociopathic murderer. “I’m not the Zodiac, and if I were I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” Leigh tells the detectives with glacial calm. A search of his squalid house trailer reveals nothing, compelling the inspectors away from the man they feel certain is the killer.
Ultimately, however, the pursuit of the case fell on Graysmith’s shoulders alone, despite repeated discouragement from colleagues, his bosses at the Chronicle, Avery, and later his loving but frustrated wife (Chloe Sevigny). Graysmith wrote the two books that serve as the film’s inspiration, and Fincher narrows the camera time given to each investigator until only Graysmith remains, often chasing dubious leads. A final set piece, set in the creaking basement of an informant’s house, twists the oldest of suspense movie tropes by using it for a visual metaphor for Graysmith’s obsessive search. Despite a ruined marriage, suffering career, and estranged children, his motivation is explained in the simplest terms. “I want to look him in the eyes, and I want to know,” Graysmith explains late in the film. It’s a sentiment extended by implication to all the investigators who bend or break procedure to help his search.
The Code Breakers: Downey, Jr., Gyllenhaal
James Vanderbilt’s script connects the various set pieces together with dialogue-driven scenes that establish the characters while serving to display the slow procession of time. A leap of several years is shown by the time-lapsed construction of the Transamerica Pyramid building, a San Francisco landmark. True to real events, characters drop out of the investigation, get reassigned, or meet with career setback or other difficulty. When at the end of the film Allen remains free, guilty in the minds of those consumed by his pursuit but not by any official court, the resolution feels oddly fitting given their lonely efforts.
I am Paul Avery: Downey, Jr.
In a movie about human frailty and cruelty, the actors have to carry the drama, and the marvel of Zodiac is not the superb cast itself but rather how many of them capably perform when cast diametrically against type. There’s no reason to think frequent indie and romantic comedy star Ruffalo would work as the man who inspired Steve McQueen’s most memorable role, yet Ruffalo owns the part. As noted above, Lynch is a revelation as the benignly terrifying Allen. Gyllenhaal reportedly struggled with his part during shooting, but the vulnerability he brings to Graysmith gives the viewer an emotional focal point. Finally, Downey, Jr. is pitch-perfect as the debauched, imploding Avery, evoking alternate but equal amounts of sympathy and frustration from the viewer. If you thought his performance as Iron Man’s Tony Stark was clever and multifaceted, he’s even better here.
There’s a sense throughout that Fincher guided his actors but did not control them, so that each naturalistic performance becomes a part of the greater whole. That understated approach, the discipline to get out of the film’s way, allows Zodiac to tell a sprawling, complex story without getting bogged down in ”hey look at me” stylization. Like Quiz Show, or Serpico, the story is allowed to speak for itself and make a deeper point than mere directorial style. In that way, it’s a film that leaves you thinking not just about the events presented – and they’ll stay in your mind for some time – but about the very potential of film itself to relate human events.
DiCaprio, Winslet reunite for Sam Mendes’ adaptation of a classic American novel. Fans of the book should be worried already.
For movie fans that also read literature, adaptations of favorite books are frequently like a Christmas morning where plenty of eagerly-awaited gifts either don’t work or arrive in the wrong size. Hollywood takes its liberties, for the sake of economy or artistic will, and details and nuance inevitably get changed or removed; sometimes worse, parts are miscast. It’s been suggested that movies can never live up to their source material because books are, to some degree, movies that screen within the reader’s mind. How could anything live up to the reader’s own perceptions?
But there are also adaptations whose advance word fills the source material’s fans with cold, suspicious dread, because of the director or the stars or a combination of same. Sam Mendes’ Christmas release Revolutionary Road is such a film and I am such a fan. While I’d be the first to support any of author Richard Yates’ works brought to screen, from the looks of this film’s first trailer his anguished, haunting 1961 debut novel has been ground up into middlebrow melodrama for the Hollywood Oscar trip.
Yates’ stories frequently take place within the business worlds of New York – especially public relations and advertising – and the surrounding suburbs. His characters are restless, resentful, and longing for something deeper than what mid-20th Century American consumerism promises but never provides. Revolutionary Road, his most potent articulation of this theme, relates the demise and fall of Frank and April Wheeler, a young married couple who dream of escaping their white-collar life in the Connecticut suburbs for something more liberated in Europe. April wants to be an actress; Frank just wants out of his button-down workaday routine. But they are unable to escape both the trappings of their surroundings – the children, the social drinking, the lure of adultery – and their seething disappointment in one another.
Mad about you: DiCaprio, Winslet
If that sounds like a certain Emmy-winning cable drama, Yates’ work was essentially Mad Men’s early progenitor, and Paramount has already wisely previewed the film during that show. But when watching the trailer consider how much of the book’s – and MadMen’s – themes are leadenly shouted to the rooftops or used for close-up Oscar clip-friendly vignettes and you’ll get an idea of what I’m afraid Mendes is up to. Beginning with American Beauty, his direction tends toward having actors emote – to ACT! - rather than inhabit their characters or to assist him in constructing scenes that build a whole film. Yates intended the Wheelers’ story to be an American tragedy, the last puttering out of the American spirit first generated by its revolution (hence the title). The trailer shows DiCaprio and Winslet acting their hearts out and handsomely inhabiting the so-chic-right-now mid-Century setting but doesn’t show much of what the story’s about.
All dressed up: DiCaprio
Mendes’ films are also not above sanitizing their subject material. 2002′s Road To Perdition, based on Max Allan Collins’ superb graphic novel, sacrificed character depth and ethnic identity in favor of standard action movie tropes. The graphic novel’s protagonist was a devoutly Catholic mob hit man in the Midwest; the film removed his faith, changed the locale, added an antagonist, and even altered the main characters’ family name in order to seem less Irish. (Star Tom Hanks won an Oscar playing a homosexual. Were Mendes and the film’s other creators worried American audiences wouldn’t accept him as Irish?) If such topics as heritage and Catholicism are too risque, who knows what will become of Revolutionary Road’s climax, in which (Spoiler Alert) April dies after attempting to give herself an abortion. Yates was the first to scoff at even the idea of a happy ending; at best his resolutions were bittersweet. Will Mendes be willing to leave his lovely co-stars miserable at story’s end? Even AmericanBeauty’s Lester Burnham was left feeling content, despite his own violent murder.
Oscar buzz reportedly already surrounds the film, and as a purely intuitive reaction it seems the type to garner praise from the mainstream critical press as well as fawning word of mouth from moviegoers. As with all films, fans should hope for the best but prepare for the worst – the worst in this case being a lowered-volume adulteration of Yates’ bleak but searing vision, something merely Hollywood wrung from a legacy of great American fiction. Revolutionary Road opens December 26th nationwide.
Screaming Blue Reviews is currentlty on hiatus, and will return February 1, 2012. The opinions expressed are our own, though we welcome your feedback and comments.
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As good Memphis residents we’d be wrong not to plug the upcoming comedy Soul Men, which features the final screen appearance of lifelong Memphian Isaac Hayes. Bernie Mac, who also passed away within hours of Hayes last August, stars with Samuel L. Jackson in the bawdy road/buddy comedy. Frankly, the film might have a hard time overcoming the eerily-timed deaths (a wildfire of “Is Soul Men cursed?” articles ran over the Internet last summer) even if its plot and character beats didn’t look so rigidly formulaic. But Mac and Hayes were both gifted entertainers, and Jackson is riding an artistic resurgance the last two years or so, so we’re hoping the film offers a swan song worthy of its tragic significance.
You can imagine how things work out, but all things notwithstanding this was never meant as a revelatory film. Still, the shadow of poignancy is likely to fall long and deep. One report suggests director Malcolm D. Lee (Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins) redited and softened the film’s tone out of respect for its late co-stars. Posthumously released comedies are seldom successful; by way of example, the two films released after John Candy’s 1994 death withered in the reality of his passing. But again, Soul Men’s comfortable familiarity might offer a way to avoid that pitfall. We’re also willing to believe Mac’s mountainous screen presence might tower over the reality of his demise. Similarly, Hayes appears as himself, and we’re hoping at least part of the film-climaxing “big show” has the big man doing his thing.
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