Me, Myself, and Samuel L. Jackson (7/4/00)
____________
Chow Yun-Fat, on the set of
The Replacement Killers, describing a day’s action: “I shot five hundred fifty six rounds, with two guns...Next morning I could not hold my chopsticks [laughing]...my hands were too shaky... .” And some people bitch about carpal tunnel syndrome.
Mike Nichols has announced his intention to remake the classic Alec Guinness comedy
Kind Hearts And Coronets, with Robin Williams in the lead. Surely this is a good idea. However, Nichols [presumably by adding Will Smith to the equation] intends to modify the theme of the original: “That was fundamentally about class struggle,” he says. “The new one will be about race.” Surely this is a bad idea. “My movie will also end differently,” he adds helpfully. Why not simply remake
Beverly Hills Cop instead?
On our current playlist:
Felicia’s Journey. [Atom Egoyan, 1999. From a novel by William Trevor.]
Sweet but no longer unspoiled Irish lass Felicia [Elaine Cassidy] hops a boat to Great Britain, in the naive hope that she can track down the dashing but irresponsible charmer who knocked her up and then went over the water to seek his fortune. Her darling Johnny eludes her, but her cause is adopted by the avuncular Bob Hoskins — by day purveyor of cafeteria cuisine to industry, by night sole inhabitant of an enormous mansion bequeathed him by his deceased mother [Arsinée Khanjian] — the auteur and star of a series of gourmet-cooking films which Hoskins screens as he prepares his lonely evening meals. Alas, the cook’s benign exterior masks inner turmoil, and it becomes apparent that the series of young female hitch-hikers featured in another segment of his video collection aren’t alive any longer either; complications ensue. — Egoyan continues to develop his theme of the life in video after death [a cinematic theme which, curiously enough, antedated cinema itself: cf. in particular the remarkable novel of Villiers de L’Isle Adam,
L’Eve Future], but this effort falls somewhat short of the standard of
Exotica and
The Sweet Hereafter.
The Emperor And The Assassin. [Chen Kaige, 1999.]
In the third century B.C., after centuries of civil war, provincial ruler Li Xuejian is inspired by his ancestors to unite the Seven Kingdoms by conquest and become king of all under heaven; casting about for pretexts to go to war with each of his rivals separately and sequentially, his consort Gong Li proposes to him the curious plan that she return to her homeland and persuade the court to send an assassin back to try to kill him, thus providing casus belli. Sure enough, the scheme works like a charm, right up to the point at which she tracks down World’s Greatest Assassin Zhang Fengyi, who turns out to be a severely conflicted hitman [tormented, flashbacks reveal, by essentially the same pangs of conscience that incapacitated Gene Wilder in
Blazing Saddles] who refuses the mission. While this strand of the plot is stalled, back home the wouldbe emperor is beset by palace intrigues and vexed by unusually acute questions of parentage and identity; in the course of resolving these with summary executions and a bloody campaign or two against the rival kingdoms his personality runs a fastforward from Thomas Jefferson to Ivan the Terrible. [The theme of the collapse of idealism into savagery lies close to the heart of Chen Kaige, who has written a memoir of his turbulent youth in the Red Guards.] Word of these excesses reaches Gong and Zhang, who have in the meantime fallen for one another; they decide that whacking his highness might be a good idea for real; providing occasion for the grand Chinese finale, which here as generally involves providing an excuse for the hero to die gloriously opposing insurmountable odds. [The siege of the Alamo would translate very well into Chinese.] — Pageantry, swordplay, phenomenal battle scenes, amazing photography [the cinematographer, Fei Zhao, has since been hired away by Woody Allen], astonishing detail in costume and production design, and really great hair; an epic drama of Shakespearean dimensions. Check this out.
Caracara. [Graeme Clifford, 1999; written by Craig Smith.]
Naive ornithologist Natasha Henstridge opens the door of her New York apartment to a couple of FBI agents who need her balcony for a surveillance job; it would be far too simple if they were what they claim to be, and, in fact, no sooner has their supervisor Psycho Terrorist Johnathon Schaech made an appearance than it becomes clear that the real intent of this merry crew is to whack Nelson Mandela [Nelson Mandela? who next? Alexander Dubcek? Willy Wonka?] with a bazooka. The embodiment of pluck, Ms. Henstridge thwarts the plan of the would-be assassins and escapes their clutches, but complications multiply forthwith, and bystanders drop like flies as Schaech attempts energetically to make good on his reputation as a man who never leaves a witness behind him. By the time we arrive at the final shootout at a diplomatic reception we’ve long since lost track who hired the guys who hired the guys who hired the guys who hired Jackal Lite; but we are permitted the satisfaction of seeing the girl [for once] nailing the bad guy all by herself. — With Lauren Hutton as the protagonist’s alcoholic former-Sixties-radical mother, and an exotic South American hawk on Ms. Henstridge’s leash. Remind me to take up falconry.
Daughter Of Horror. [John Parker, 1955.]
A precursor of Scorsese’s
Bringing Out The Dead: A deranged young woman [Adrienne Barrett, though I would have preferred Barbara Steele] wanders at night through an atmospheric urban jungle populated by unshaven alcoholic guys battering slatternly women whose slips [so totally Fifties] keep falling off their shoulders, cackling dwarves peddling newspapers with lurid headlines, hopped-up musicians playing beebop in smoky cellars, leering, staggering drunks, and shadows which seem to possess their own personalities [this wasn’t always a joke]; picked up by a beefy character [he looks a sort of brutalized Orson Welles] in a limousine, she takes offense at his table manners and tosses him out of a window. — But is this live, or is it Memorex? and what about this vision in the graveyard? — Every guy needs a shave and smokes a cheap cigar, every wall is stained and splattered, every street is a deadend alley [the American translation of the Prague of legend?], every light is flickering neon, and every horn is a saxophone. — All this without a scrap of dialogue; occasional narration [sheesh] by Ed McMahon.
RKO 281. [Benjamin Ross, 1999; written by John Logan.]
Boy Wonder Orson Welles [Liev Schreiber] comes to Hollywood to make a movie; at a loss for a story, he follows his buddy washedup alcoholic screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz [John Malkovich] to a dinner party at the palatial mansion of famed evil news baron James Cromwell/William Randolph Hearst [“It’s the place God would have built, if he’d had the money,” says Malkovich of San Simeon], and the rest, as they used to say in the portentous narration of those opening newsreels, is history. — With innumerable cinematographic quotes, of course, from
Citizen Kane itself, and a wealth of anecdotal detail which may even be accurate: to the best of my knowledge, e.g., Welles actually did learn the use of the camera by sitting down with Gregg Toland in a screening room and watching
Stagecoach forty times in succession; and everyone has heard the story about the original meaning of “Rosebud”. — The denouement suggests the mutual annihilation of particle and antiparticle, and leaves no doubt about the future shape of the career of the unfortunate auteur: having held Hearst’s dinner party spellbound with a description of a bullfight, Welles is quizzed by an unamused host as to his name and his business; identifying the filmmaker-to-be, he sniffs with satisfaction. “In Hollywood,” says Hearst, “the bull and the matador are both slaughtered.” — No shit.
Gone In Sixty Seconds. [Dominic Sena, 2000; written by Scott Rosenberg (after an original by Toby Halicki).]
When daring but judgmentally-challenged little brother Giovanni Ribisi bungles a heist and incurs the wrath of a psychopathic ganglord, World’s Greatest Car Thief Nicolas Cage must reluctantly return from a bucolic retirement and purloin fifty very flashy exotic cars in twentyfour hours.
Or, something like that. Actually he starts out with the best part of a week to accomplish the task, but since the premise provides the screenwriter with no action to fill the interval between the setup [presumably the first act] and the chase [presumably the third], the intervening chasm is bridged by the assembly of a merry band of carthieves [this time including Robert Duvall and Will Patton but regrettably not Steve Buscemi and Owen Wilson] and the fabrication of some fairly feeble excuses for not stealing anything until the last minute.
But at last the chase commences, and Cage outwits several factions among the bad guys and the Keystone Cops, swipes the cars, reunites his family, reconciles with his estranged girlfriend [the estimable Angelina Jolie], overcomes the jinx of the Shelby GT 350 Mustang [referred to internally as “Eleanor” or “the Unicorn”], and, in an improbable finale, hurtles across Los Angeles at the speed of light to [no surprise] a shootout in a warehouse.
As always in a Jerry Bruckheimer production, the producer is the real auteur, and the choppy editing of the development, the dumb jokes [herein, fun with dogshit], the endearing eccentricities of the characters [cf., e.g., Buscemi’s two tours of duty as a lovable child molestor], the heavily-filtered look of the daylight exteriors [really annoying once you have come to expect it], etc., etc., are identical to
Armageddon,
Con Air,
The Rock,
Bad Boys,
Top Gun, etc., etc., etc.; and, alas, the trademark Third Act Whammy must always be measured against the daunting standard of that fabulous plane crash on the Vegas Strip.
Thus on the one hand this opus provides a valuable counterexample to the conventional wisdom about the necessity of a three-act structure: the thefts belonged in the third act, certainly, but it should have been the third act out of five; every really memorable action picture [e.g.
Ronin] has more than one chase. On the other hand it is refreshing [particularly for an inhabitant of the Peoples’ Republic of Boulder] to see the police depicted not in the style of contemporary neofascist mythology as genetic recombinants of Sherlock Holmes and Hercules but as the Mack Sennett rejects they actually are.
In sum: fast cars and at least one beautiful woman; what more could you want?
American Movie. [Chris Smith and Sarah Price, 1999.]
Intrepid documentarians Smith and Price venture into the uncharted suburbs of Wisconsin to investigate the phenomenon of wouldbe horror auteur Mark Borchardt, a thirtysomething former wonderboy high school dropout who is, in the immortal words of Gene Wilder, going crazy in Milwaukee: a man with the soul of an artist trapped in the body of a member of the lower classes, dunned by a horde of creditors, buoyed up only by the strength of his own ambition, he supports himself marginally by sweeping floors and delivering newspapers [hypocrite auteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!] while scheming to write, fund, produce, photograph, and direct
Northwestern, an essay in imitation of his hero George Romero. In this project he is assisted by an eccentric assortment of wannabes recruited from the ranks of his fellow trailer trash, most notably his best friend Mike Schank — a guitar player with a vacuous smile whose personality seems to have been erased by the chronic use of beer and weed — and his doddering old uncle, a Bathless Groggins figure who, toothless, mumbling, and unshaven, responds with a curious mixture of fond affection and incoherent irritation to Borchardt’s repeated requests for venture capital.
Gradually, of course [compare
Fargo] it begins to dawn upon you that these people are not at all the witless yokels they appear to be — that Borchardt and Schank are, actually, very talented, that the drooling uncle squatting in a heap of his own trash in the trailer park has a quarter million in the bank, that this crew of Ed Wood wannabes might actually be capable of making a decent feature; were it not so incredibly difficult to make a movie by yourself. — At one point Borchardt and one of his actors shoot and reshoot a violent struggle on a kitchen floor which is meant to climax when the actor’s head is shoved through a cabinet door. But the door refuses to break, and the obviously painful scene must be repeatedly reshot. — It is the daunting implication that this is the life of the independent auteur: ramming your head into a wall again and again, until you break it down or they carry you out.
Lacking money, Borchardt gives up his principal project temporarily, backtracks, and attempts instead to complete an earlier short feature called
Coven, which he describes in a typical rambling rant: “It’s a thirty-five minute direct-to-market thriller film shot in sixteen-millimeter black and white reversal...It’s an alcoholic, man, compelled to go to a group meeting by his one and only friend...but they’re not that helpful, the group, you know...you know the group thing? [His friend Mike responds, ‘Ah, yeah’] ...so that’s what we’re doing the film on...last night, man, I was so drunk I was calling Morocco, man, trying to get to the Hotel Hilton at Tangiers in Casablanca...man...is that what you want to do with your life, suck down peppermint schnapps and call Morocco at two in the morning?”
In this subproject, at least, he does succeed; and the DVD includes the completed film, which is, mirabile dictu, vivid and frightening: beautifully composed and animated by that insight of Hitchcock passed down via Romero, that gore is a lot scarier without color, that the darkest nightmares are in black and white.
But what I carry away from this, finally, is one of the great images of the documentary cinema: Borchardt parked in his battered sedan at the county airport in the dead of winter, sitting in an unheated vehicle making amendments to his script; the soul of the artist, superior to circumstance. — Perhaps talent is irrelevant after all; mere epiphenomenon, the product of an act of will. — Character is destiny, says Heraclitus.
The Bare Wench Project. [Jim Wynorski, 1999.]
Sorority sisters Julie K. Smith, Nikki Fritz, Antonia Dorian, and Lorissa McComas launch an expedition into the Enchanted Forest to shoot a documentary about legendary witch Julie Strain, with predictable results: they get lost, they hear weird noises in the night, they find heaps of erotic accessories stacked outside their tents in the morning, and their clothes keep falling off; all this leading up to the punchline, Ms. Smith’s tearful apology to all and sundry in big wideangle underlit closeup — shot from beltlevel up the naked length of her monumental torso, so that her tits really do look bigger than her [bewatchcapped] head. As dumb gags go [and the relentless march of progress entails that sendups of the Blair Witch can only get dumber] this isn’t bad. — Nor are the girls; mostly. But for those of us who scoff at the idea that a project like this might require anything resembling directorial skill, Wynorski makes sure the outtakes indicate just how many repetitions are necessary to get Ms. Dorian to remember a single line of dialogue. The man has the patience of a saint.
Peking Opera Blues. [aka Do Ma Daa. Tsui Hark, 1986.]
In the China of the Nineteen-Twenties, a couple of guys and a couple of girls play hide and seek with a bag of jewels and a mysterious document detailing a secret political agreement back and forth between the palace of a morally-challenged warlord and the showtents of a travelling troupe of players; amid shootouts, punchouts, sellouts, and song-and-dance routines, love blossoms and a relapse into civil war is confounded. Energetic and hilarious.
Gothic. [Ken Russell, 1986; written by Stephen Volk.]
In 1816, the Shelleys [Julian Sands and Natasha Richardson] pay a visit to Lord Byron [Gabriel Byrne] at his villa on the shores of Lake Geneva; they all go on a laudanum bender and scare the shit out of one another with the most famous hallucinations of modern times. — It was after first seeing this that I decided Ken Russell could do no wrong; nor have I ever changed my mind.
Small Time Crooks. [Woody Allen, 2000.]
A gang of bumblers set out to tunnel into a bank vault, and, in the process of failing miserably, make their fortunes anyway; their accidental success creates more problems than it solves. — A caper movie which turns into a comedy of class displacement. Not
Manhattan, but it doesn’t suck either.
The Man Who Fell To Earth [again]:
Wittgenstein, letter to Engelmann [1/2/21]: “I am one of those cases which perhaps are not all that rare today: I had a task, did not do it, and now the failure is wrecking my life. I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on earth, and now I am gradually fading out. My life has really become meaningless and so it consists only of futile episodes... Be glad of it, if you do not understand what I am writing here.” — This should have been the epigraph.
Later.
____________Far from Kansas (6/7/00)
