Planet Utah

Hollywood--far, far stupider than even I had imagined

Eddie Murphy's newest movie, "A Thousand Words," is currently earning a 0% fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes (that means zero favorable reviews--not one), and is on course to earn $4 million this weekend, which is roughly the value of the loose change rolling around the floor of Carlos Slim's third-favorite Porsche. In other words, critically and commercially, this movie is a massive failure.

Let me tell you about another massive critical and commercial failure--a movie called "Meet Dave." When it was released in 2008, it earned a 19% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It cost $60 million to make, and who knows how much more to market. At the domestic box office, it grossed $5 million in its first weekend. By the end of its domestic run, it had earned only $11 million.

In the movie industry, "Meet Dave" is sometimes mentioned in the same breath as "Cutthroat Island," "Battlefield Earth," "Ishtar," and other legendary movie disasters.

So, who directed "Meet Dave"? A guy named Brian Robbins. And who starred in "Meet Dave"? Eddie Murphy.

Who directed "A Thousand Words"? The same Brian Robbins. And who stars in "A Thousand Words"? The same Eddie Murphy.

***

Okay, seriously, Hollywood, what the fuck? No, really, seriously--what the fucking fuck, huh?

"The King's Speech"

Better late than never, right? I wrote the review below for an arts/entertainment Web site. (It won't be published. It was more of a proposal/audition.) Thought I'd share it with you, too:

I saw “The King’s Speech” very late in its theatrical run. In truth, I was dreading the experience the way I used to dread those weepy Merchant-Ivory costume dramas. Sitting through the latter always reminded me of the hard slog through the Sunday New York Times. I knew  it was good for me. I knew it was something that cultured, well-educated people were expected to do. But I never really enjoyed it.

For months, I felt the same way about “The King’s Speech.” Having finally seen it, though, I’m sorry I waited so long.

By now you know the story: At a dangerous moment in European history, a reluctant monarch must conquer his speech impediment or risk losing the confidence of his subjects. What you may not know is how well told the story is.

I speak from personal experience. For 20 years of my life—from, roughly, age 14 to age 34—I had a terrible, crippling fear of public speaking. I don’t mean “butterflies in the stomach,” sweaty palms, and a shaky voice. I mean hyperventilation, blackouts, an overwhelming sense of doom, bodily tremors, a physical inability to force words out of my mouth, a feeling of lost physical and mental control—in short, full-scale panic.

When you fear public speaking in this way, occasions on which you are requested, or required, to speak are utterly withering. Colin Firth captures that feeling expertly in “The King’s Speech.”

When he is forced to the microphone, he gets a dead look in his eyes, as if he is being marched to the gallows. He swallows uncontrollably, uncomfortably, and his face grows slack. He responds to well-wishers flatly, if at all; he knows that their hopes for a good showing will only add to his humiliation. He does not panic, because he is not permitted to: He is a dignified, buttoned-down Englishman, and a royal one at that. But the pitiable look on his face tells you that he would give virtually anything to be anywhere else doing anything but this.

Firth captures all of this in small ways, primarily through subtle changes in voice, expression, and body language. It is a quiet performance (apart from occasional, and surprising, flashes of temper), befitting a quiet character. But it’s no less powerful for its lack of showy actor’s tricks and tics.

Though Colin Firth anchors the film, Guy Pearce deserves special notice for his role as King Edward VIII.

I’ve always liked Pearce, and have wanted him to do well on screen (as corny as that may sound). But I’ve often sensed that he was trying too hard as an actor: undergoing assorted physical transformations, attempting to hide his leading man looks by appearing greasy and unshaven, affecting a mincing speaking style, or struggling mightily, and not always successfully, to shed his Australian accent.

In “The King’s Speech,” though, Pearce looks like the well-fed movie star that he is, and speaks in a more or less conventional style—albeit with a modest English accent. Even so, he conveys perfectly the selfish, immature, sometimes cruel behavior of a man who is not fit to be king, and whose choices ultimately force him from the throne. It’s a surprisingly modest performance, and it works well.

So does most everything else about “The King’s Speech.” It’s an entertaining, inspiring story, but one that’s told in a way that doesn’t make a shameful play for tears or cheers, and that ties things up with a bow that isn’t too perfect or pretty.

Toldja so

In a post that I can't find, but that I'm sure I wrote--unless I just dreamed I wrote it--I predicted that the movie about the Valerie Plame affair ("Fair Game") would bear as much relation to actual historical events as, say, "Inglourious Basterds" did.

Well, in case you missed it, the Washington Post--not Human Events, but the Washington Post--wrote an editorial--not a movie review, but an editorial (are you noticing the rare and probably ill-advised quadruple em-dash in this sentence?)--debunking all of the nonsense in the movie.

The only thing that will make this story better is when it's reported that garlic pretzel concessions during the debut weekend of the new "Chronicles of Narnia" movie topped the worldwide box office gross for "Fair Game."

Paranormal Activity 2

I finally got around to seeing this tonight. Very good--more aggressive about going after the scares than the first movie, and more effective at getting them. 

By and large, the movie dealt with the "put down the camera and help me" problem in two creative ways: (1) by having a lot of the footage captured by closed-circuit security cameras (which, you may recall, I suggested after seeing Paranormal Activity...so where's my check?); and (2) by having characters NEED the camera because it has night vision. So, when things start going bump in the night, and characters either can't find the lights or can't turn them on because the demons have cut the power, the camera becomes essential.*

Biggest disappointment in the movie: not getting to see Micah's murder all over again. WOW is he annoying.

Hat tip to: the movie demons. They have an exquisite sense of pacing and suspense. They know from the very beginning what they want. (You'll know, too, within 45 minutes or so of the house lights going down.) There's no reason they can't just take it. But they're not about instant gratification. They ratchet up the scares, slowly turning a posh suburban home into a haunted house, upping the ante every couple of nights, and only THEN, finally, after weeks of doing the sweaty, in-the-trenches, blue-collar work that usually goes unnoticed--only then do they go after the prize. 

This movie will make it harder for me to: marry Gretchen Mol. Why? Because her husband directed it. So, now he's richer, and famouser, and more successful than ever. Here they are together. She doesn't look like she's thinking about me.

"We only had one idea, but it was a great one": makers of The Blair Witch Project. Seriously, how many movies has "Blair Witch" influenced, and how many more will it influence? It's the Citizen Kane of real-time/faux documentary-style popcorn flicks.

*This was undoubtedly true in the first flick, too, which featured lots of shot-at-night sequences. In this one, though, the screenwriters go out of their way to tell the audience: (1) "The camera they're using has night vision; it can see in the dark, even when the characters can't"; and (2) "The demons keep killing the power; when they do that, it's really handy to have a night-vision camera."

Merry Christmas!

Christmas isn't really a big deal for me, so I decided to stay in Austin and keep my head down. I did, however, manage to get out last night and see "Up in the Air."

It's a good movie. It's a grown-up movie, too, that isn't dour or political. It's just a movie about life, what's important, what's not, relationships, getting older, etc. It has a lot of laughs, or at least chuckles, and very little artifice. It even has some surprises. I thought I knew the formula for this movie when I went in, but it ended up not following the script I had sketched out in my head.

So, it's probably worth your time. It won't make you say "Wow," and probably won't make you think, either, but it's well done, and has a lot to say to men (and women, too, but mostly men) who either live or fantasize about a life free from the responsibilities of a house, a spouse, children, etc.

Now, three random notes about actors in the movie:

First, George Clooney, while still preposterously handsome, is beginning to show the wear and tear befitting a man his age. I know, I know...it's probably because he gained, or lost, 25 pounds for this role or something like that. Maybe out in Hollywood, in his real life, he's still got the skin of a 30-year-old. But in this movie he looks a lot closer to 50 than to 30.

Second, still on Clooney, it's nice to see him play something/someone a little different. This is only half a normal Clooney character: charming, funny, in control, self-assured. I'll let you discover the other half for yourself.

Third, if you know what you're looking for, and if you care, you will see one of the two murderous teenagers from "Heavenly Creatures"--and I'm not talking about Kate Winslett.

Spoiler-free thoughts on "Avatar"

Okay, here they come, in no particular order:

-- While I wouldn't call this a great movie, it's a great movie-going experience.

-- If you were a bartender and wanted to know how to make a pitcher of "Avatar," here's what I'd tell you: Mix equal parts "Matrix," "Jurassic Park," "Dances with Wolves," and "Total Recall"; serve in 3-D glasses. Seriously, this movie will probably remind you strongly of all four of those movies. (One thing that should tell you: The story here has been told before.)

-- As for the 3-D, the real innovation is that the action doesn't look like a 3-D movie. It looks the way life looks, which is not the way normal movies look. Normal movies look flat. This movie has depth, perspective, and texture, so that it just plain looks real. (So real, in fact, that at one point I reflexively tried to swat away a bug that appeared to be in my face...but that was really on the screen. No joke. I was embarrassed, but it was dark so no one saw me blushing.)

-- What man in Hollywood writes stronger female characters than James Cameron?

-- Another thought about Cameron: He's obviously got superhuman imagination, drive, and ambition.

-- During the course of this movie, a few adjectives spontaneously popped into my head: "gorgeous," "amazing," and "spectacular," among others.

-- It's fun to watch this movie and see echoes of the entire Cameron oeuvre. "Titanic" and "Aliens" in particular came to mind.

-- Giovanni Ribisi is to "Avatar" as Paul Reiser was to "Aliens." (Paul Reiser was in "Aliens"? Yeah, in retrospect, it was actually a brilliant piece of stunt-casting. Looking at the rest of Reiser's career, you'd hardly think him capable of pulling off the evil corporate weasel in "Aliens" if you hadn't seen it with your own eyes.)

-- Michelle Rodriguez is the sexiest tough chick on the planet, except for maybe Gina Carano. (I know there are some haters out there, and I've never been a big Michelle Rodriguez fan myself, but she's got something going on in this movie.)

-- Shocker: another Hollywood movie in which both the military and corporations are depicted as evil.

The problem(s) with "Paranormal Activity"

I caught this film last night at a midnight show (which was packed to the rafters, to my surprise). Notwithstanding all of the buzz, it's only a so-so movie.

In order to work well, any hand-held/shaky-cam/documentary-style movie has to address these four issues:

1. Hey, you: Why don't you drop the camera and get your ass out of there? (Or at least fight the monster that's trying to eat your friend, rather than film the monster trying to eat your friend.)
   
2. When confronted with a scary problem, most people will try to solve it. That doesn't make for an interesting movie.
3. When the camera's turned on all of the time, you catch a lot of details of people's day-to-day life, which can be really tedious.
4. It's very hard to end one of these movies. The climax of a typical movie comes when one of the main characters does something critical to the plot, or has something done to him/her. But when that character is also responsible for filming the action...well, you see the problem: "Now I'm going to film myself slipping a banana peel under the Cloverfield monster's paw..."

"Paranormal Activity" didn't deal with any of these issues very well.

First issue: the movie blew a great opportunity. All it had to do was have the main characters set up stationary cameras around their (haunted) house, allowing them to catch the action in whatever room it might occur. With the advent of cheap Web cams, there's really no excuse for NOT doing this. But they don't. Instead, they track the comings and goings of their resident demon with a single digital video camera. Most of the time, the camera is mounted on a tripod in their bedroom, which is where most of the haunting occurs, so it does catch a lot of the demonic action. But when the action takes place elsewhere, the male lead must (completely implausibly) first grab the camera, and then go protect his beloved from the demon.

Second issue: The movie explains that it won't do the couple any good to leave their house because it's not really the house that's haunted. It's the girl. In other words, the demon will pursue her wherever she goes.

Okay, fine. But wouldn't you want to be in an open space somewhere so that at least you can run when the demon comes? In your house, it's so easy to get trapped in a corner, in a closet, behind a door, wherever. Or maybe you rent out a conference room, put a cot in the middle for the girl to sleep on, and encircle her with tough-guy priests bearing holy water. Maybe you take up residence inside a church. Maybe you go to one of the Benelux countries and hope that the demon doesn't carry a passport.

The one thing you do NOT do is stay in the house, where the demon obviously feels comfortable escalating things. As noted, though, if you try to solve the problem rather than just filming it, you're left with a much less interesting movie.

Third issue: If the nights were tough for the characters in this movie, the days were tough for the audience. The days were full of tedious arguments, plan-making, plot exposition, crying, and mundane conversations. That's what you get when the camera is on all the time.

Fourth issue: Let me just say that the gold standard here is "The Blair Witch Project." There, the movie ends with the camera operator walking into a trap that has been set by the Blair witch. You don't have to see what's happening to the operator to understand it, because the movie gave the witch's modus operandi within the first 20 minutes. So, as Heather (who is running the camera in "Blair Witch" at the end) films the final scene, the viewer thinks, "Oh no...this is the set-up they talked about earlier in the movie." And then--clunk--the camera goes black. Chilling.

"Paranormal Activity" doesn't end with the same shivers. That's all I'll say.

The invention of being able to refrain from saying whatever you're thinking

The headline above indicates the first thing you need to know about "The Invention of Lying." About 90 percent of the laughs in the movie depend on people blurting out whatever they're thinking--which is not really the same thing as being unable to lie. The other 10 percent of laughs do depend on people being unable to lie, even when self-interest or common courtesy would dictate not telling the truth.

The second thing you need to know is that only about half of the movie is a comedy. The other half is a pretty somber reflection on what life would be like in a world in which people always tell the truth, even when the truth is painful and sad.

The third thing you need to know is that the movie violates its own set-up, early and often. If you're paying attention at all, you'll notice within about 10 minutes that people refrain from saying whatever they happen to be thinking...even though they're not supposed to be able to do that. If you pay a little more attention, you'll notice two different characters saying things that aren't true in order to ease the awkwardness of a situation--again, something they're not supposed to be able to do. And you'll see one character make, and another accept, flatly contradictory assertions, even though flatly contradictory assertions are supposed to be an impossibility in this world.

Now, for all of you thinking, "It's just a movie!", remember my standard: I will play by any rules a movie lays down, as long as the movie plays by those rules, too. If the set-up for a movie is that in the future, the space program will be run exclusively by Hasidic Jewish armadillos, no problem. You won't hear me say, "Don't be ridiculous. Armadillos can't understand the concept of religion, let alone monotheism. They can't grow those curly sideburns, either. And there's just no way they could run the space program. For one thing, they don't have an adequate grounding in physics." You'll hear me say, "Devout mini-dinosaurs at NASA? I'm in!"

In other words, confronted with a preposterous set-up, I'm totally prepared to say, "It's just a movie. Might be fun."

But if at a crucial plot point, without explanation, there's a tortoise running part of the space program, or a Quaker armadillo running part of the space program, yeah, I'm going to have a problem with that. I'm going to say, "The whole set-up for the film was that the space program was being run by Hasidic armadillos. You can't change that in mid-film without explaining it."

But that's what happens in "The Invention of Lying." I'm not sure if Ricky Gervais didn't realize this or just didn't care, but it made the movie a lot less funny than it could have been.

Footnote: I didn't read any reviews of this movie before I saw it, but I read a bunch after. Can you guess the one hacky thing that almost all of the reviewers did? They very self-consciously used phrases such as, "To tell the truth" and "To be honest," as in, "To tell the truth, I enjoyed this movie more than I expected."

Hysterical. Next thing you know, someone will call Arnold Schwarzenegger "Ahnuld," or maybe even "the Governator." (Oh, and by the way, if I don't post for a while, don't worry: "All be bock!")

Who cheats on Jennifer Connelly?

In the last two Jennifer Connelly movies I saw, her movie husband cheated on her.

Really? I mean, REALLY? You're gonna do better than Jennifer Connelly?

If you're a moviemaker and you ask me to believe that life as we know it is a mere computer program invented by machines and broadcast directly to the human brain, while human bodies serve as batteries to power the aforementioned machines--until, that is, humans are liberated by a messiah with Christ-like powers, who leads them in an epic war against the technologically superior but philosophically handicapped machines, well, all of that I'm going to buy into. But a guy cheating on Jennifer Connelly? No way.

Footnote: In truth, guys will cheat on anybody, though you'd be throwing away a LOT when it comes to Jennifer Connelly. Perhaps because of that, she's played dull and somewhat shrewish characters in the couple of movies to which I referred above. I mean, if she were laid back and fun AND gorgeous, it just wouldn't be believable that a guy would cheat on her.

That got me thinking, though...she hasn't showed much range in her choice of roles over the past decade or so. I wonder if she just doesn't have range.

By way of contrast, think about the guy who plays Don Draper on "Mad Men." In that show, he's your classic alpha male, master of the universe sort, though in the Gary Cooper strong/silent way, not in the Donald Trump self-promotional way. The same guy, though, has had a recent story arc on "30 Rock," in which, despite being very handsome, and despite playing an M.D., he is actually kind of a hapless beta male. He's believable in both roles, too.

I'm not sure JC has that kind of range. Even so, I still wouldn't cheat on her.

Hey, Clive Owen: Stephen Dorff called; he wants his career back

Now that "The International" has become the latest in a series of Clive Owen disappointments, I wonder if he's regretting taking himself out of the running for James Bond...

Footnote: What, you ask, is up with the Stephen Dorff reference? In 1992, he won the "Male Star of Tomorrow" award from the National Association of Theater Owners. More than 15 years later, we're still waiting for tomorrow. Sure, Stephen Dorff remains a working actor, but so does Matthew Modine. Dorff's last four theatrical releases were "Felon," "The Passage," "Botched," and ".45." I literally could not tell you a single thing about any of those movies. I'd never even heard of them until I checked IMDB tonight.

If Clive Owen isn't careful, he's going to end up following the same career trajectory. You can only make unsuccessful movies for so long before you get bumped down to the B-list, then the C-list, and then find yourself in Dorffville, population three: Stephen Dorff, Matthew Modine, and you.

Anklenote: Edward Norton seems pretty eager to push that number up to four, notwithstanding the mild success of "The Hulk," which most likely succeeded because it had a built-in audience of comic book geeks and action movie fans, not because Edward Norton was in it.