Day 118: A Dangerous Method

"I think Freud's obsession with sex probably has a great deal to do with the fact that he never gets any."

David Cronenberg, no matter which genre he works in, always brings an interesting perspective to it. I would say that his remake of The Fly is one of the essential science fiction films of all time, and certainly outdoes the original in all respects. Naked Lunch is probably the closest anyone will ever get to putting Burroughs on screen in a way that honors his work (even though Nelson Muntz can think of at least two things wrong with that title). And his most recent film, Eastern Promises, put an interesting twist on everyone's favorite genre, European gangster crime dramas with male frontal nudity.

With last year's A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg turns his focus to the fathers of psychoanalysis & awesome facial hair, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) & Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). Working from a screenplay by the severely underused Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons), Cronenberg manages to button down one of the most buttoned-up eras in history, Victorian Germany. An hysterical woman, Sabina (Keira Knightley), is brought to Burgholzli Clinic in Zurich where Jung begins to work with her to discover if she really is in the throes of hysteria, or if there's something more to it than that. He begins talking to her about what can only be described as her deviant sexual behavior. She tells stories of being turned on by her father beating her, and how much it excited her. So yeah, she's got some issues.

Two years later, Jung travels to Vienna with his wife to meet Freud, who is introduced doing what else but smoking a cigar. The two get into some deep discussions about this and that, but Freud clearly wants to know what Jung's been up to with his Russian patient he's heard so much about. It's never outright said, but Freud certainly implies that his being Jewish gives him a much more keen insight into the human condition than Jung's own reflective religion. I find this interesting, particularly considering that Jung was one of the very few psychologists who believed that our spiritual life had a direct result on our happiness.

The film comes to life a bit when Freud sends a fellow psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), to stay at Jung's clinic. Otto is the first one to plant the seeds that Jung needs to be laying some pipe in his patients, namely Sabina, in order to really understand what's going on in there. The interplay between Cassel & Fassbender is the much more interesting dynamic in the film for me, probably because they're both actors interested in relishing every word of dialogue and they use their scenes to one-up one another and their back-and-forth is fantastic. The scenes between Freud & Jung are severely lacking in this kind of fire. It also doesn't help matters that Viggo is wearing a ridiculously distracting fake nose.

The film spends a lot of time nailing the details of the era, and it's never short of gorgeous to look at, but the performances are so dry, they make the Sahara look downright humid. While I've never watched a single episode of Downton Abbey, I imagine it to be a lot like this, people in fancy costumes, talking a lot of nonsense, and all the meaning is in the subtext. And I also imagine them saying "what, what" a lot at the end of sentences.

So, what's A Dangerous Method all about? What is this method, and what makes it so dangerous? I don't know, really. Banging your patients might be a start. Considering that Gross went on to become an anarchist is probably a good indication that Jung shouldn't have listened to him in the first place. Obviously Jung wanted to get up in Sabina, and Otto's rationalization gives him license to give in to these desires, but it doesn't gain him much more understanding of her inner life.

Maybe I missed something. I always feel like Cronenberg is fifteen steps ahead of his audience, and by the time we catch up, he's on to his next film. Or the film after that even. I'm still not even sure I get what the fuck eXistenz was about, and that was like six films ago. Either way, I always look forward to his next film (especially his next, Cosmopolis, based on the novel by Don DeLillo) and I guess more than anything else, that's an indication of what a great filmmaker he actually is.

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Day 117: The Lorax

"You do know that you're talking in rhyme, don't you?"

Any issues I have with this film can sort of be summed up by that quote. It's trying to be meta and clever and self-aware when it just doesn't need to be. The official title of this film is Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, but I seriously doubt, after watching the film, that such claims of authorship are necessary. This is not Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. This is Hollywood Motion Picture Studio's The Lorax. I am glad in a way that I waited a full 24 hours before writing this review, because if I had written it immediately after leaving the theater, I would have completely and totally trashed it. In retrospect, the power of the story is such that even the weak nonsense & filler they put around it can't totally diminish its message.

The main addition to Dr. Seuss' original tale is taking the nameless visitor to the Once-ler's home and giving him a name, Ted, and an entire society that's been built in the aftermath of the events of the book. Ted (Zac Efron) lives in Thneedville, an artificial utopia where citizens pay for clean air, have trees made of fiberglass and lightbulbs, and live in blissful ignorance of anything that may be going on outside of its walls. The town is run by a tycoon named Mr. O'Hare* (Rob Riggle) who, we're told through backstory, came to power after The Once-ler's business ran dry. O'Hare controls the clean air & takes serious umbrage with anyone who wants to know what's going on in the world outside of Thneedville.

Ted's in love with a girl named Audrey (Taylor Swift, cue eye roll) who wants nothing more than to see a real tree. She paints pictures of trees in her backyard, and Ted makes it his mission to get her a real tree. A conversation with his grandmother (Betty White) leads Ted on a quest to find The Once-ler (Ed Helms) and find out exactly what happened to all the trees. The film more or less unfolds like the book after this, with lots of unnecessary filler, as The Once-ler tells his tale of his quest to make money, and how his destruction of the forest ran him afoul of a mythical creature named The Lorax (Danny DeVito, in the one stroke of casting genius) who "speaks for the trees." The last part of the film, after The Once-ler gives Ted the last Truffula seed, unfolds like an action-packed race against time, as Ted and Audrey try to plant the seed before O'Hare can foil their plan.

Alright, so let's talk about what works. There's no destroying the environmental message of Dr. Seuss' book (though lord knows these filmmakers try), and I think that if nothing else, kids will take that with them into the world after the film is over. As I said before DeVito is brilliant as The Lorax, beyond the fact that I'm an unabashed admirer, mainly from his work on It's Always Sunny... but he nails the gruff sounding Lorax I've had in my head for thirty-some years. And... that's about it.

So what doesn't work? Everything else. Padding a thirty page picture book to feature length is always a dangerous proposition. Of the four Dr. Seuss adaptations thus far, I think only 2008's Horton Hears a Who added anything worthwhile to the book, and even then it was still a ton of filler. That film also had Jim Carrey, Steve Carell, Carol Burnett, Amy Poehler, Will Arnett, and lots of other insanely talented comedians in its voice cast. This film has Betty White & Rob Riggle, both of whom I like, and neither of whom are given nothing much to do.

Ed Helms is not an actor I'm particularly fond of, even in films I liked such as Cedar Rapids. Here, he is woefully miscast. He doesn't have an ounce of menace to his voice, and tries to infuse The Once-ler with humanity, which is the last thing in the world The Once-ler needs. This is also something I should fault the writers for, I suppose. The Once-ler ends up being a victim of circumstance in this film, instead of a merciless industrialist that would make Ayn Rand get all moist in her dead panties. They paint him as a decent guy who gets caught up in industry, instead of a guy with a plan that runs completely counter to being a good steward of nature.

That's an issue. A big one in my book, and one I can't quite get past. His song that he sings as he starts making money off selling Thneeds is so heavy-handed, it may as well have been written by someone from Fox News trying to imitate what a song written by an evil-environmentalist would sound like. And why do we need to take at least an eighth of the book and shove it into a montage? The book is short enough as is, and the animals leaving the forest is relegated to a montage. It's a fairly significant portion of the book because it shows The Lorax coming to the Once-ler at several points to let him know what he's doing to the environment, and hoping that he'll stop, but here, they just cram it all into a not-very-catchy tune.

The songs are pretty lame too, by the way. Coming off a year that gave us The Muppets & Winnie The Pooh, which had magical songs that moved the story along in addition to being awesome, the four or five musical numbers in this film felt shoehorned in to cater to a cast full of singers like Efron & Swift. It's just more filler in a film that didn't need anymore. I really wanted to like this film, I was downright excited to go see it, but that excitement faded pretty quickly. My daughters liked it, but I was just severely disappointed with the whole thing. I think it could have been so much better than it was, and it just felt lazy to me.

Kids don't need to be spoon-fed or pandered to, and that's what this film did. Dr. Seuss was able to clearly and concisely get his point across through metaphor & whimsy. This film felt the need to spell everything out. I would love for Pixar to do a Seuss adaptation because I think they might get it right, but honestly, his books are pretty much perfect just the way they are. They didn't need singing & dancing & heavy-handed nonsense to get their point across. I don't know necessarily where the filmmakers who made The Lorax went wrong, but I think it started when they thought that they needed to add anything to this story to make it good. The animation is gorgeous, but sometimes, that's just not enough.

*Brad Bird should pursue serious legal action against the creators of this character's design as he is a blatant rip-off of Edna Mole from The Incredibles. For cereal.

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Site News

Hey faithful readers...

I have recently accepted a position as a film reviewer on the website populationgo.com. I have a two week trial period that I'll be going through starting tomorrow, so I may not be posting on a daily basis anymore. I know that kind of defeats the whole purpose of my blog, but while this was certainly not the expected outcome of keeping this blog, I'd be lying if I didn't say that this blog would lead to something bigger. I'll be posting any reviews I write here as well, and I'll also be contributing news items & top fives, so ultimately I'll be keeping pretty busy.
I cannot tell you how much your loyal readership has meant to me, and I encourage you to follow me over to populationgo. It's a cool site, and while the major crux of their site is currently anime and otaku, I'm hoping to help them elevate their film content and make them a go-to destination like /film.
This may all blow up and fall apart as well, so there's a possibility I'll be back to normal before long. I just wanted to give you all a heads up. Tomorrow will be my final consecutive review here on this site for The Lorax which we're going to see today. Beyond that, I know that my next review will be Mirror, Mirror on Friday. So who knows where all this will lead, but I look forward to what the future brings and thank you again for all of your support. It truly has meant the world to me.

~Steve

Day 116: Carnage

"We'll worry about the victims after we have the shareholder's meeting."

Roman Polanski is one of the only directors that people have an opinion of beyond the films he makes. Some people won't even watch his movies, not because of any of his films' content, but because he was convicted of a crime a long time ago, and fled America rather than face his punishment. The story behind all of that is long and involved and has been covered at great length elsewhere. I bring it up only to indicate how hypocritical people can be. In general, humans like to take the moral high ground on issues where they don't know all the details. It reminds me of John Adams' attack on John Dickinson in 1776 when he accuses him of "hang(ing) to the rear on every issue, so that if the rest of us should go under, you'll still remain afloat." I've said this before and I'll say it again, films should be judged solely on their content, not on the details of the private lives of those involved in its making (unless that has some direct effect on the film's success or failure).

Of late, Polanski hasn't been the kind of director to set the box office on fire, but his latest film, Carnage, was met with indifference when it was released late last year, and I find that unfortunate. As a film, it reminds me a lot of Doubt, as it's based on a play with no easy answers that provides its viewers with a wonderful jumping off point for conversation. Based on God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, the film tells the story of two couples brought together by an incident that occurred between their 11 year-old sons on the school playground. Alan (Christoph Waltz) & Nancy's (Kate Winslet) son hit Penelope (Jodie Foster) and Michael's (John C. Reilly) son with a stick, knocking out two of his teeth. The former have come to home of the latter to meet and discuss the incident, ostensibly in the hopes of getting the boys together to do the same.

The fact that these are two sets of people that run in very different circles is immediately evident. Alan & Nancy seem to belong to an elite upper class conservative society while Penelope & Michael are very much the picture of buttoned-down upper middle class liberals. It's also very clear, almost immediately, that Penelope & Michael are putting on airs. Nancy seems to be understanding of the situation, and while clearly annoyed with having to even have this meeting in the first place, she seems to be making the best of it all. Alan could care less. He's an attorney, and is constantly fielding phone calls from various people he works with, as they are dealing with the fallout from a popular blood pressure medication's side effects.

At first, the meeting is civil but awkward, and an air of discontent hangs over the entire thing. The events unfold, more or less, in one room and in real time. There's a few trips into the hallway, as well as the bathroom & kitchen, but these people are trapped in a dead-end argument with both sides shifting power. As revelations are made and facts are lorded over their respective heads, Michael & Penelope soon become prisoners in their own house. It's an interesting dynamic that shifts quite a bit over the course of the films' very short, 80 minute running time, and they cover myriad topics from animal cruelty to art to African social constructs. It sounds a whole lot more pretentious than it actually is, and maybe it's my background in theatre that allows me to overlook the way the characters draw straight lines from their kids' conflict to the conflicts of feudal warlords in Africa, but it never felt out of the ordinary to me.

The performances are fantastic from all four leads. I've heard of stage productions wherein all four actors learn the entire show and then switch roles from performance to performance, and while at first that seemed insane to me, after seeing it, it makes more sense because these people all run the gamut and there's no defined physical limitations to any one of their characters. Obviously, being a film, the casting is much more rigid, as I could never see any of these actors playing the other's part, but they all master their character's arcs.

Waltz is an actor that we haven't seen enough of yet, if only because everything he does is phenomenal. His Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds deserves its place in the lexicon of great screen villains, and here he shows how good he can be when he plays things subtly. Winslet is one of my favorite actresses, and she has the most difficult role as her facade is so built up at the beginning that she inevitably has the biggest plunge, and she handles it extremely well, as to be expected. Foster is an actress who is so great, it makes me sad when I see her in a film that I don't see her more in films, but here, she plays a woman of slow-burning intensity better than I think anyone else could have. Reilly is a master actor, and no one can move as deftly between films like this and broad comedy like Step Brothers and Walk Hard. He's perfectly cast here as a guy dressed up by his wife to be something he very clearly is not.

The film is very funny, and has a lot of laugh out loud moments, but it is very clearly rooted in comedy of discomfort. A lot of the laughs come out of the sheer unease the audience feels with having to be trapped with these two couples. It's an area that Polanski hasn't worked in much, but I feel he does a good job opening up the world of the play enough to not make it feel too stagy.

Ultimately I think it's not as successful an adaptation as Doubt was, but it is a lovely companion piece (and you could squeeze them both in in under three hours).

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Day 115: The French Connection

"You stuck a shiv in my partner, you know what that means? It means all winter I gotta listen to him gripe about his bowling scores."

The importance of The French Connection in cinema history cannot be overstated. Quite simply, it gave birth to the gritty cop movie that has been done to death in the ensuing decades, and every single time, the imitators have paled by comparison. Prior to 1971, the cops in action movies looked like Steve McQueen & Paul Newman. After 1971, they started to look like character actors, such as Gene Hackman & Roy Scheider. Prior to 1971, action movies were shot very classically. After 1971, they all adopted the handheld, documentary style aesthetic employed by director William Friedkin and cinematographer Owen Roizman.

Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Hackman) & Buddy Russo (Scheider) are detectives running a narcotics beat. They fit the model of two guys who never stop working. Early in the film, they leave work and go to a bar to unwind, and when they get there, they notice a table full of people throwing money around like there's no tomorrow. They decide, just for fun, to tail the man guy, Sal Boca (Tony LoBianco), and they end up stumbling into the middle of a potentially huge drug deal taking place with some Frenchmen, headed by Alain Charnier (Fernando Rey), or as Doyle & Russo dub him, Frog One.

Doyle & Russo fall into the rabbit hole, and begin tailing anyone and everyone they think may be involved. Their exuberance gets the best of them, and they often end up paying the price for it. Their police chief trusts them, but knows that the guys they're dealing with a clever criminals, and that no matter how much info Doyle & Russo come across, they're always dangerously one step behind.

What was so groundbreaking about The French Connection was its interest in the procedural side of things. Nowadays, with shows like Law & Order all over the airwaves, 24 hours a day, these stories are run of the mill, but in the early 70s, a cop film usually had an inciting incident, a little bit of investigating, and then the busting of the perps. The French Connection gave rise to the notion that people might be interested in more than "just the facts" that Joe Friday was concerned with. This was detective work, lots of stakeouts, information gathering, shaking down informants, all that stuff the suits in Hollywood figured nobody was interested in.

For his fourth feature, William Friedkin decided to fall back on his early work in documentaries to establish the look of the film. He would rehearse his actors without the crew present, so that when shooting began, the cameramen would be scrambling to follow the action. Friedkin is a director known for his, and I'll put this generously, unconventional techniques, particularly when working with actors.

He apparently was constantly pushing Hackman to go darker with this role, and it paid off great dividends as both men won Oscars for their work (along with the film, the screenplay & the editing).
The film's total lack of closure is frustrating for a lot of people, but I've come to accept it over time. There are no easy answers and no tidy resolution you could possibly give this story. And whatever you do, please don't seek answers to closure in the god-awful sequel directed by John Frankenheimer, a man I have no issue with saying never directed a good movie.

The iconic car chase is arguably the film's highlight (though I prefer Doyle tailing Frog One through the streets and subway station). What's so revolutionary about the car chase is not just its relentlessness, but that fact that there's no score in that scene. There's no music whatsoever. As the chase continues on foot, climaxing in the famous shooting at the top of the stairs, there's music, but the entirety of the car chase is music-free, and that's just another pioneering moment in a film full of them.

On an interesting side note, and I'll close with this, the film was first released on blu-ray in late 2008, and Friedkin decided to play with the film a bit for this release. What he did, claiming it was the way he had always intended the film to look, is he desaturated all the color in the film, and essentially bringing it down to black and white, and then subtly layered in color, mostly blue and orange, giving the film an odd tint. Owen Roizman was apparently furious with this decision, and there is now a Best Buy exclusive blu-ray of the film that was released a few weeks ago. I picked it up tonight, and I'm happy to report that the film looks better than ever. Friedkin & Roizman both approved of this new transfer, and while I'm not getting rid of my old blu-ray as it's a cool conversation piece, if you don't yet own the film, pick up this new transfer. It looks amazing.

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Day 114: Birdemic: Shock and Terror

"I hear a mountain lion, I've gotta get back to my house and you'd better get back to your car."

This is going to sound way more racist than I intend it to, and I promise I don't mean this comment insensitively, it's merely the only way I know how to get this point across. Birdemic: Shock and Terror could only have been written by a foreigner living in America. It has a lot of very American sounding dialogue and concepts, but they're all off, and end up looking and sounding ridiculous. For example, the main character, Rod (Alan Bagh), is a high-powered salesman and/or software designer depending upon which is more convenient for the particular scene, and in one particular scene, he's closing a deal of some sort, telling his friend afterwords that he just scored a big deal for "a million dollars." Even. It's like, the elements are in place for something that sounds remotely like a real deal made in real life, but instead, it ends up sounding ridiculous because he says that the deal was done for a million dollars.

Birdemic is full of shit like this, but make no mistake, it is one of the absolute best bad movies you could ever hope to see. It's rampant incompetence makes other bad movies seem like stylistic masterpieces. This film almost makes The Room seem like a triumph of form over content. The fact that for almost a full hour of the film's running time there is no indication, beyond the title, that there will be killer birds in this film, is a pretty good indicator of the quality of film you're dealing with.

The movie opens with the most interminable driving sequence this side of Manos: Hands of Fate, and then lazily stumbles into what it assumes is an American meet-cute between the two leads, the aforementioned high rolling businessman/software designer Rod, and a model about to get the biggest break of her life, Nathalie (Whitney Moore). The fact that these two are completely and totally devoid of anything even resembling a personality makes them a match made in heaven. Before I get too far ahead of myself, can we talk about the font used for the opening titles for a second? It was like Helvetica or Courier New, it was so pedestrian and comically oversized, it was an instant indicator of the quality of the film to follow. It also uses the phrase: Additional Casts to introduce the supporting cast. It's another one of those adorable foreign touches I was talking about earlier.

So anyway, the two leads set out on the path to romance, but luckily for them, the path is paved with their dream jobs as well. After posing for some pictures in a strip mall photography place by the name of "Dream Models," she gets a call letting her know that she's going to be on the cover of Victoria's Secret. There's no irony in this film, it doesn't have time for such contrivances, so they're pretty sincere about this plot development. Is it wrong that I'm getting hung up on this sort of minutiae in a movie about exploding killer birds? I don't think so, I'm trying to set the scene for the overall incompetence on display. American concepts, foreign sensibilities.

Make no mistake, this isn't just a badly written movie. It's startlingly bad on all fronts. The acting is atrocious, the directing is clumsy (there are at least five establishing shots before every scene), the writing is tin-eared, the audio mix is terrible (dialogue, ambient noise and room tone seem to be single tracked, if anyone even bothered with the latter two) and the visual effects are so primitive, they are laughable.

There's nothing good to be said about any single element of this film, but as many of you know, I am a bad movie connoisseur, so when all of these disparate elements combine, it makes for a wonderful viewing experience. Also, scenes and sub-plots come and go with reckless abandon, it's ridiculous. Consider for a moment all the nonsense herein: the solar panel salesman, the guy at the bar singing a song about "hanging out," the hippie in the woods who lives in a tree, the gas station owner who's jacking up his prices due to bird attacks. There's some really great stuff here, and I'm laughing just thinking about it.

Director James Nguyen has pulled off a coup here that only a few directors have been able to pull off before: Ed Wood, Uwe Boll, Tommy Wiseau among them. He's made a genuine piece of shit that has found a second life as a cult classic. I would hate to think that he set out to make a good movie, but once the birds start attacking, the talk of global warming, tree hugging, & the Iraq war make me think that he was setting out to make something that would get people thinking about the world in a different way. Characters throw out theories about the birds attacking with a commitment to their lines not seen since the advent of after-school specials. For example, the main characters go on a double date to see An Inconvenient Truth early on, again, without even a hint of irony.

I would love to think that Nguyen is a genius, and has mastered the art of making a thoroughly competent incompetent movie, but there's no way that's the case. Films like Black Dynamite & Hobo with a Shotgun are definitely of this ilk, but I think that Nguyen, like Tommy Wiseau before him, is trying to make the best of a bad situation. I heartily recommend that you watch Birdemic. You can find our liveblog of it archived here. I can tell you that we had a blast, and I can only hope that you will too. Share your favorite moments below (Rod eating a donut off a plate at his house, for example), and let's all have a good laugh together. That's what movies like this are all about.

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Day 113: The Producers (1968)

"'Gregor Sampsa awoke one morning to discover that he had been transformed into a giant cockroach.' Nah, it's too good..."

I can't believe I'm nearly a third of the way through my year of movies and I haven't watched a single Mel Brooks movie. Well, I have remedied that, my friends, starting at the best place possible, the beginning of his directing career. While The Producers is now best remembered as a musical, it's origins as a film are vastly more interesting.

The story goes that the film was languishing on a shelf because producer Joseph Levine didn't want to release a film entitled "Springtime for Hitler." While filming I Love You, Alice B. Toklas in New York, Peter Sellers was having a private screening party for some friends, when he stumbled upon the film, ran it for his friends, and loved it. He called Levine, and demanded that he release the film, as it was destined to be a smash hit, and Levine eventually conceded, changing the title to The Producers. The film would go on to earn Brooks his first and only Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, and effectively launched Gene Wilder's film career. I don't know if this is true or not, but as we learned from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

Zero Mostel plays Max Bialystock, a low-rent Broadway producer, who's current life sees him scamming horny old ladies for money by having sex with them. He hires a mild-mannered accountant by the name of Leo Bloom (Wilder) to audit his finances, and Bloom discovers that through some "creative accounting," a producer could conceivably make more money off of a flop than he could off of a hit show. His hare-brained scheme involves over-selling the number of shares in a particular show, promising 10 & 20 percent ownership of the show to dozens of investors, but only if the show was a sure-fire flop, with no hope at all of turning a profit. This way, everyone involved, except the producers who would have pocketed the extra cash, can write off the investment and move on with their lives.

Bialystock & Bloom set out to find the perfect script, finally settling on a script entitled "Springtime for Hitler: A Gay Romp with Adolf & Eva through Berchtesgaden" by a young Nazi playwright named Franz Liebkind (Kenneth Mars, in the role Dustin Hoffman had to turn down to do The Graduate). It has all the makings of the sure-fire flop they were looking for, but just to be sure, they need to find a director who's bat-shit crazy, and will ensure that the show will tank. That's when they turn to cross-dressing director Roger DeBris (Christopher Hewitt, best known to people of my generation as Mr. Belvedere) and his assistant Carmen Ghia (Andreas Voutsinas).

Max & Leo are over the moon as they see their plan taking shape beautifully. DeBris, dissatisfied with nearly everyone he sees for the role of Adolf, settles on Lorenzo St. DuBois, or LSD for short (Dick Shawn), a crazy, drugged out space cadet. This is the biggest change that was made to the musical, apart from beefing up the role of their secretary Ulla (Lee Meredith). Her "Bialystock and Bloom" kills me every time.

As you have probably figured out by now, the plan does not go the way they had hoped, and LSD's antics as Hitler endear him to an audience that is, at first, mortified by the production. The famous intermission scene has been copied a hundred ways from Sunday, including by Brooks and his late wife Anne Bancroft on the brilliant fourth season finale of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."One of the constants that I've noticed as I've gone back and re-watched a ton of films that have been parodied or aped over the years, is how good, concise and perfect that first execution tends to be. It's so streamlined in this film, that any attempt to copy it over the years has only added unnecessary complications to the formula.

The Producers is not Brooks' best film, but it is absolutely one of the classic film comedies of all time. Zero Mostel is a force to be reckoned with on-screen. His theatrics only enhance how grand his character is, and he can almost never go "too big" with anything he does. Wilder is every ounce his equal in the opposite direction. When he freaks out over his blue blankie, it's incredible. They are a fantastic pair on screen, and if you haven't seen their re-teaming in the film version of Ionesco's The Rhinocerous, I can't recommend that enough either.

The supporting cast is fantastic as well, with Hewitt and Mars stealing the show. Brooks would work with Mars many times after this, most notably in Young Frankenstein, but he shows his comedic chops here, and they're both fantastic. It's a shame that most people only know this film through the musical, because while the musical is great, it's got a ton of filler, and for me anyway, the LSD subplot works better than the one they used in the musical (and please don't even get me started on the film version of the musical).

If you've never seen The Producers, now is the time to do it, and if it's been a while, it's time to revisit it. Like a fine wine, it only gets better with age, and honestly, you think you know better than Peter Sellers? He knew enough to recognize brilliance when he saw it. What, do you think you're funnier than Peter Sellers? Didn't think so.

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Day 112: Kingpin

"Roy, what do you think about new beginnings?"
"What is that, the feminine hygiene spray?"

There is no movie on earth that I quote more often or laugh just thinking about, than The Farrelly Brothers' 1996 comedy masterpiece Kingpin. Yes, masterpiece. I can't think of any movie that packs as many laughs into 113 minutes as this one does, and virtually every single joke works. I would wager to say there's only two jokes in the whole film that don't work, but we'll get to that later. In the summer of 96, there was no movie that I wanted to see more than Kingpin. The ad campaign was brilliant, referring to Bill Murray as "Big, Bad Bill Murray" certainly didn't hurt.

I was primed and ready to go, and went to see it the day it opened, and laughed my ass off. The problem was, there were like a dozen people in the theater. The movie bombed, and faded quickly into obscurity (though I did manage to see two more times in the theater, having to drive almost an hour to see it the third time). Over time though, I've come to find out that in some circles, Kingpin is rightly revered and regarded as the masterpiece that it is. If I think someone's cool enough to hang, I may throw out a Munsoned reference, to see if they get it, and if so, they can hang.

In 1979, the bowling world was introduced to a hot, new talent from Ocelot, Iowa by the name of Roy Munson (Woody Harrelson). After winning the Odor Eaters Championship over bowling legend Ernie "Big Ern" McCracken (Murray), Roy seems to be on a "gravy train with biscuit wheels." His fortunes fade when he teams up with McCracken to earn some supplemental income by hustling at shady bowling alleys. After one incident goes wrong, Munson loses his hand to some thugs, and we jump ahead 17 years to 1996.

Munson is now a hook-handed loser, languishing just outside of Amish country in Pennsylvania, selling supplies to bowling alleys, his glory days long since over. At one of these bowling alleys, he comes across a young Amish gentleman named Ishmael (Randy Quaid) who he thinks has as much natural talent as anyone he's ever come across. He decides to turn his fortunes around, and manage Ish, taking him to the National Championships in Reno, where the winner takes home one million dollars.

Of course, persuading an Amish guy to travel across the country with him is going to take some work, so Roy poses as an Amish man passing through Ish's community to help egg him on. When it's revealed that the farm needs half a million dollars to keep the bank from foreclosing on them, Ish agrees to join Roy on his voyage to redemption. Along the way, they meet up with Claudia (Vanessa Angel) who becomes a third partner in their venture after a hustle Roy tries to pull on her boyfriend goes wrong.

So, it's a buddy comedy, a road trip movie, a love triangle, a redemption tale and a bowling movie, all rolled into one. Tell me where else you get that kind of value for your money?

One of the things that I love about the film is that there's a lot of really mean spirited humor, all of which ends up coming back around on the aggressor. It's sort of a precursor to shows like "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," where the characters are generally unlikable, but you're endeared to them because they always end up being the victims of their own mean-spiritedness. The film is also never better than when it attempts to be serious. It's never too far from your mind that you're watching a movie about bowling, so the scenes when they try to bring it down to earth and make things serious become that much funnier as a result.

The performances are all phenomenal. Harrelson has been better in other movies, but this is him at the top of his game. His performance is totally devoid of vanity, and he goes for broke like few other actors could or would. Randy Quaid has become something of a tabloid pariah of late, but he's hysterically funny in this film, playing up his character's naivete to comedic heights. There's a ton of great comedic actors in smaller roles like Lin Shaye as Roy's landlord, Willie Garson as the thief Roy hires to rob her & Chris Elliot as a "Robert Redford in Indecent Proposal-"esque gambler in Reno. I'll let that sink in so you realize the comedic value in it.

This brings me to Bill Murray, who is sublime. I think this is his second best performance ever (Rushmore being his best) and no one can play such an irredeemable character and still make him lovable like Murray. Apparently they had written this role for Jim Carrey, and Murray took the role on condition that he could re-write and improvise the entire character, and thank goodness they had the foresight to let him go hog wild. He has many of the best lines in a film filled with great lines. You can relive many of these line at this site which I spent a good deal of time at this morning. That Unified Fund commercial kills me every time.

So what are the two jokes that don't work for me? It's funny because they're often cited as people's favorite moments in the movie when I talk to people. First is the cow-milking scene. I didn't find it funny the first time I saw the movie, and I still don't. I sort of admire what they were going for, more than I think it's funny. The other joke is Ishmael shitting in the urinal. Again, I'm glad they were taking bold risks, but I just don't find it funny.

It's sad to me that The Farrelly Brothers' next film is the one that skyrocketed them to fame, as I find There's Something About Mary mediocre at best. It's nowhere near as clever or inspired as Kingpin, and the cast is nowhere near as good (Sorry Matt Dillon, you're no Bill Murray). But that's the way it goes, I guess. I don't think, as I used to, that Kingpin will one day be universally recognized as their best film, but to those that know enough to know best, it truly is their best film, and that's undeniable.

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Day 111: The Howling

"Honey, you were raised in LA. The wildest thing you ever heard was Wolfman Jack."

Joe Dante got his start, like many other directors, working for Roger Corman. He even gives his old mentor a cameo in his first non-Corman financed film, 1981's The Howling. Seeing as how I was only two at the time, I don't quite remember why everyone had such a hard-on for werewolf movies in 1981. An American Werewolf in London, Wolfen & this film were all released in that calendar year. And at least these were all movies that featured good old-fashioned killer werewolves, not the shirtless emo douchebag variety currently littering movie screens.

Much like An American Werewolf in London, The Howling is a nice mixture of cutting edge makeup effects (for the time), genuine scary moments and both have tongue firmly planted in cheek. Joe Dante is a pretty big horror/sci-fi film geek. He works with legends of the B-movie genre like Kevin McCarthy & Dick Miller, and he's smart enough to know that there's an exhilaration to horror films like this when they're done correctly, and balancing them with comedy is the absolute right thing to do. While ultimately I think this film is not quite as good as American Werewolf, there's a lot to admire about it.

Karen White (Dee Wallace) is a television news anchor who has been receiving mysterious phone calls from a man that police suspect is a serial murderer. Using her as bait, they send her to meet with the mysterious Eddie (Robert Picardo), and a police officer shoots Eddie moments before he is about to attack Karen. Traumatized by the whole experience, and on the recommendation of famous psychiatrist Dr. George Waggner (Patrick Macnee, again Dante casts his movies well), Karen and her husband Bill (Christopher Stone, Wallace's real-life husband) travel to a remote campground called "The Colony" to relax and drop out of society for a while.

Things are not what they seem however, as the people living at The Colony are not like normal human beings. And of course they aren't, it wouldn't be much a horror movie if she went out to the woods and got over the whole ordeal. Some members of The Colony include the great character actors Noble Willingham & Slim Pickens. Anytime Slim Pickens shows up in a movie, you know you're in for a treat. I only wish Harvey Korman was around to play off him, as I still find them to be one of the most sublime pairings in cinema history.

It's not long before, back in the city, Eddie's body turns up missing and something begins to smell fishy to the detectives working on the case, played by Belinda Balaski, another Dante fixture, and Dennis Dugan, who would go on to have a lucrative career directing shitty Adam Sandler movies like Jack and Jill. Back at The Colony, Karen's husband is acting strange, and as she soon finds out, he has been turned into a werewolf, which most, if not all, members of The Colony are. All hell breaks loose and the special makeup effects start coming out in full force.

Overall it's a pretty good flick. It's not great, and like I said, considering it came out in the same year as American Werewolf, the similarities are striking, but its ultimately not as good. For starters, Rob Bottin did the special effects, and while he's good, he's no Rick Baker, so the transformation sequences, while cool, pale in comparison to the ones Baker did for John Landis. The ending is a sharp commentary on television news culture, but again, Network pretty much covered that ground five years earlier, so what else is there to say, really?

Of course now, having had at least five sequels made, it's easy to forget how good the original was, and all things considered, it's pretty good. It's not Dante's best work (that would be Explorers) or even my personal favorite (that would be Innerspace), but it's a solid movie from a solid director, and it helped to kick start the werewolf craze of the 80s, so there's that. If you're looking for something that's not too scary, but also sharp enough to know how ridiculous the entire premise of werewolves can be, you could do a lot worse than The Howling. If you have a choice though, I would recommend An American Werewolf in London.

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Day 110: John Carter

"John Carter of Earth? John Carter of Mars... sounds much better."

Okay, let's start right away with the title. It sounds like the worst movie Denzel Washington never made. He was a rogue cop, who didn't play by the rules. They tried to reign him in, they gave him a new partner, and what that new partner never bargained for... was John Carter. Directed by Tony Scott. Script by Ehren Kruger. So yeah, seriously, fuck that title. Even adding "Of Mars" to it would not have been an improvement. The sheer number of times people say John Carter in the film made me think Tennessee Williams was somehow behind this whole thing.

I'm not going to pretend that I know much about the source material. I know that the books by Edgar Rice Burroughs have a pretty rabid fan base, and that the story that he created over a century ago has been mined for countless science fiction novels & films over the years that the original now looks like a pale imitator. My friend Mark reviewed the film over on his blog, and I'm linking to his review right here so you can read more about the backstory, and get another man's opinion on this film, because our opinions of it differ greatly.

I found this film to be a miserable failure. For all of the money that was spent bringing this world to life, populating it with competent actors seemed to have been the furthest thing from the minds of its creators. Let's start with our eponymous hero, played by Taylor Kitsch, a man so thoroughly lacking anything resembling charisma, it made me think that even Josh Hartnett would have been a marked improvement. He's like all the worst aspects of Hartnett & James Franco when they're at their naval-gazing worst. I remember when The Matrix came out, and I couldn't figure out why on earth they cast Keanu Reeves in it, but once I saw that they needed someone who could easily play confused by all the strange new rules of a strange new world, he immediately became the perfect choice.

This is a similar situation. John Carter is a bad-ass on Earth, but once he's transported to Mars, he just picks up his bad-ass ways after about five minutes of acclimating to the new atmosphere. He never seems genuinely confused or frightened by anything. I know he's a bad-ass, but even the biggest bad-ass has to, at the very least, have a period of adjustment that extends beyond a handful of minutes.

Was this a directorial choice or an actor choice? It doesn't really matter because the blame for that lay firmly at the feet of director Andrew Stanton. If that wasn't what he wanted, he could have done something about it. Kitsch has all the charisma of a cardboard box, and he is most famous for playing a high school quarterback on television as recently as eighteen months ago, so I just don't buy him as a guy with any sort of backstory on a scale with the one they presented. Also, dude was way too cut for a man living in the 19th Century. Where was this guy getting his pump on? He looks like he strolled out of a Gold's Gym, not a Confederate prison.

Then there's Lynn Collins as Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars who becomes Carter's reason for standing up and fighting back. She's hot, that's undeniable, but that's about it. She suffers from Carrie Fisher syndrome, not knowing which accent sounds best, so she tries out a few. She's also so bronzed it's distracting. I am worried for her skin twenty years from now, and these are not things I should be thinking about while watching a sweeping epic. I guess that just goes to show what I felt about the film overall; I was so distracted by the amount of bronzer the female lead is wearing that it was all I can think about when she was onscreen.

There's some decent actors in smaller roles like Ciaran Hinds & Mark Strong, both of whom I like as actors, but neither of whom did anything for me here. Dominic West reprises his role from 300 in case you really liked his character in that movie, you get to spend another two hours with him here. While we don't get to see them, we get to hear Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church & Samantha Morton, all respectable actors playing cgi Tharks. Serkis must have been busy being in every other mo-cap movie ever made to have turned up.

I have been very vocal with my criticism of the marketing campaign for this movie. It was shit. And if this article is to be believed, the blame for it may not be totally on the shoulders of Disney's marketing people. I hope it's not true, as I am a fan of Stanton's work with Pixar, and would hate to think he's that short-sighted, but it wouldn't surprise me. I know that most of the reviews, particularly the negative ones, have dwelled entirely too long on the film's budget, so I don't want to re-hash any of that lest I be branded for being blind to the film's virtues. The film utilizes its budget well, and you can definitely see every cent of the budget up on screen (unlike films like Superman Returns that were unfairly saddled with carrying additional budget for all the times the film was attempted and didn't happen).

At the end of the day, I refuse to believe that this is the best possible version of this story that could have been filmed. One of the things that people fail to realize when criticizing a film for having broadly drawn, one-dimensional villains is that villains of that sort make it so much easier to become involved in the spectacle of it all. I'm not saying that one-dimensional villains should be par for the course, but when you look at the villains in Harry Potter, Avatar, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, etc. it makes it so much easier to get caught up in the story because you don't have to spend time figuring out their motivations.

The motivations of the, no less than, four different sets of villains John Carter battles throughout this entire film, are unclear at best and not even present at worst. There were so many bad guys, I had no idea why I should be rooting for John Carter. Why not root for one of the other bad guy factions? I'm supposed to root for him just because he's in love with some bronzed up hussy that multiple people want to kill? Sorry, that doesn't work for me.

Overall, I guess I could see where people might enjoy this, but it just didn't do it for me. Maybe I'm a cold-hearted cynical bastard, but in reality, I think this film had far too many problems to be accessible to anyone but die hard fans of the source material. And if I'm grading a film on those merits, this one is an unmitigated failure.

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