OBSERVATIONS ON FILMMAKERS

Observations of filmmakers: Do you ever get the feeling that in the U.S., more screenwriters are terrified of offending Blake Snyder than they are of writing something that means something to them and is unique and original?

OBSERVATIONS OF A SCRIPT READER

My next column about observations I’ve had while reading scripts for contests this year will be short and can be summed up by the cliché: where are the police when you need them. So many times I read screenplays where people are threatened, abducted, attacked, mugged, robbed, see something going on, stumble over a dead body, wake up next to a dead body (fill in the blank here), etc. and they don’t call the police, not because they don’t have a reason not to, but because if they did, the plot wouldn’t work out the way the author needs it to.  You really need to have a very strong and convincing reason for people not to contact the authorities for it to get past a reader the vast majority of time (we read a lot of screenplays and the more we run across scripts with this sort of plot turn, the more likely we’re going to recommend one that doesn’t have that plot turn).   

Connected to this are scripts where bad guys are killing people, causing mass destruction, having wild chase scenes and shoot outs, and the police never show up, even late, or take the remotest interest.  Again, you have to have a very good reason for this. 

When questioned why a writer does this, they often will say that “it’s just the genre”.  Remember this very carefully: if you say that you are doing something based solely on genre expectations, nine times out of ten, that is code for cliché and lack of imagination.  Add to this that more often than naught, it shows one doesn’t have a good grasp of the genre.  And if a character is doing something based on genre expectation, that means that the character is doing something because he knows he’s a character in a screenplay.

OBSERVATIONS ON FILMMAKERS

Do you ever get the feeling that in the U.S., independent film means a cheaper way of making a movie, but in other countries it means an artist has something passionate he wants to say?

THE BOURNE LEGACY

Does anyone really remember the plots of the three earlier Bourne films?  I mean, really remember them?  I remember Jason Bourne being a product of some special program, but what exactly it was and how it worked and who it involved…I haven’t a clue and I don’t think most other people I know do either (they were like The Big Sleep, but without the double entendres).  No, when it comes down to it, I think one can safely say that when it came to the plots, they were something about something with people doing something about something else.  But it didn’t matter.  That’s not why we enjoyed the films.  Probably because if we did, we probably would have found the basic ideas somewhat ludicrous and hard to take seriously. 

I’m not sure Tony Gilroy, the director and co-writer (with Dan Gilroy) of The Bourne Legacy (as well as the writer of the earlier Bourne films), agrees.  He seems to really take this somewhat over the top, conspiracy theory plot very seriously.  He’s not satisfied for it to be something about something, he wants it to be SOMETHING about SOMETHING.  And I’m not sure that is working to his advantage here.

In the previous two films, there are a few things I remember that made me love them.  The first is Paul Greengrass’ herky jerky approach to the directing, giving it a hand held documentary feel to it.  He kept things moving and the tension revved up to the nth degree.  I also remember that the plot was made up of a series of scenes in which the character of Bourne came up with the wildest Rube Goldberg schemes to achieve his goals, often jaw droppingly brilliant in their execution.  Finally, there was the cast of Matt Damon, Albert Finney, Joan Allen, Julia Stiles, David Strathairn, Paddy Considine, Scott Glenn, among others. 

When it comes to The Bourne Legacy, I feel that the movie falls a bit short in every category mentioned above.  Tony Gilroy’s direction is a bit sluggish at times.  It feels as if he’s often focusing on the least interesting aspect of the story—the dialog and plot.  It’s not that there aren’t some good lines here and there (one about a gun shooting down a drone and Jeremy Renner as the Bourne stand in Aaron Cross upset that Rachel Weisz, as virologist Marta Shearing doesn’t even know his name). 

And it’s not that there aren’t some exciting scenes.  Though I have to say that the person who deserves the kudos here is the locations manager or whoever found that incredible three story house in the middle of nowhere; a huge lab in the Philippines; as well as that neighborhood in Manilla where the final chase scene takes place.  It’s only in these scenes that Gilroy seems to get any sort of rhythm going (the showdown in that house that has as much character development as anyone else in the film is definitely one of the high points of the film).  At other times, like the long drawn out scenes with the government operatives (headed by Ed Norton) talking to each other and explaining everything and a scene of mass murder at a lab that goes on for far, far, far longer than is justified by how much it contributes to the story, the forward momentum tends to stall.

And the story just has problems getting going.  It takes forever for it to start (there are a long series of scenes at the beginning with Renner that are never that clearly explained or justified and don’t seem to go anywhere).  And there is nothing in the individual scenes that come close to the cleverness of the earlier movies.  In fact, the whole thing sort of feels like Mission Impossible the movie as opposed to Mission Impossible the TV series.  It’s just one chase and action scene (which are the most exciting parts of the film) followed by one long, somewhat bland dialog scene, followed by a chase and action scene., followed by…well, you get the idea.  However, I have to give it props for that one thing that Weisz does at the climax which is almost worth the price of admission alone.

When it comes to the acting, no one gives a bad performance and Weisz becomes more and more interesting as the story moves along.  Ed Norton plays a dislikeable character so dislikeably, he’s often difficult to watch (which is a compliment, I think).  However, it’s Stacy Keach, as the head of the CIA, that probably comes across the strongest here; he seems the most relaxed in his role, not straining to get his character across.  But whereas I was heavily impressed by the cast of the earlier films and what they did, for some reason, this time round in watching Norton, Renner and Weisz, all I could think of was, “what are these fine actors doing in this film?”

All in all, if you like exciting action scenes that really get your motor going, you might like this movie more than I did.  I doubt anybody thinks it comes up to the previous entries in the series, but there is that thing that Weisz does at the climax that is almost worth the price of admission alone.

KILLER JOE

In many ways, there may not be much to criticize in the new movie Killer Joe, directed by William Friedkin from a screenplay adapted by Tracy Letts based on her play.  It’s not boring and it really keeps the tension revved up.  It’s very skillfully made and certainly one could make the argument that it definitely works on its own terms.  But it just didn’t go there for me.  I admired the craftsmanship that went into it, but it just never quite made it.  There are many reasons for this, but I think my main issue is that it does what it does, but that’s all that it does.  It never really rises above what it is, but what ultimately disappointed me is that it seemed more than satisfied not to; it felt more than happy to be exploitive while pretending to be much more than that. 

The story is about a bunch of “white trash” working class semi-degenerates, the vice is nice, but incest is best kind.  They’re all stereotypes, though I have to say that they are probably some of the best written stereotypes I have ever seen on the screen.  Letts and Friedkin may be more than happy never to dig deeper than skin, but it must be said that what they find on the surface is quite entertaining.  These characters all join forces to hire Killer Joe, a psychopathic Dallas police detective who moonlights as a hired killer (the union ain’t what it use to be, I guess), to kill someone for their insurance policy.  Since they don’t have Joe’s payment up front, Letts decides to have them pay Joe by borrowing the basic plot of Tennessee Williams’ play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (and the movie adapted from it, Babydoll)—he’ll defer payment as long as he can screw Dottie, the child like youngest offspring of the family.  And what happens as a result is the best laid plans of mice and men, etc., etc. 

One way you can tell that a movie is interested in little more than giving the audience what they want and nothing else is the way nudity is used: the only full frontal is by the women; not the men.  The only reason one does this is not to create a realistic and downbeat background to the action, but to sell tickets.  The only male nudity is of Matthew McConaughey’s rear end (not his front, but his rear)—again, one only show’s McConaughey’s ass to sell tickets (which is understandable, since it is a great ass).  It’s the Roger Corman approach to filmmaking and it’s certainly hard to argue against something that works.  

The plot is a whirlwind of film noir double and triple crosses and is very clever with some surprises I didn’t see coming.  It’s probably the best part of the screenplay.  The individual scenes have their moments, but they also tend to be over long here and there, drawn out in ways that often work well on stage where the pleasure is not just the drama but the performances of the actors (like an aria in a opera); on film, these same sorts of scenes can overstay their welcome at times.  And there’s one that’s a real howler that has to be seen to be believed involving a chicken leg used in a way that I think probably stopped KFC from paying a product placement fee (I kept thinking of Oscar Wilde’s comment on Charles Dickens’ book The Old Curiosity Shop, “one would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”).  There is also an odd tete a tete between Joe and Chris Smith, the character who started the whole ball rolling, that takes place at Six Flags on an off day—a scene whose topic and purpose is repeated in the immediate one that follows it (redundant much?).   And don’t get me started on the unnecessarily ambiguous ending.

The cast is filled out by a host of excellent performances: Thomas Hayden Church, Gena Gershon, Emile Hirsh and Juno Temple.  They all attack the rolls as if they were doing Shakespeare (or at least Jacobean tragedy) and you’ve got to give them that.  For me, Church gave the best performance, but everyone had their moments and for McConaughey, this may be the best thing he’ll ever do.  

Don’t get me wrong.  I know I’ve had a lot of fun letting this movie have it, but to be fair, the audience I was with, as well as the friend who accompanied me, seemed to really get into it.  So I can’t say you’ll be disappointed if you go see it.  But for me, it was the sort of film you see if you can’t see The Killer Inside Me, a far superior movie also about a psychopathic lawman, a film I will not soon forget in a way that I probably will for Killer Joe.

Dark Horse

In the movie Precious, a story about a black, overweight, pregnant teenager who is HIV positive, Precious tells her teacher that no one loves her.  Her teacher responds that people do love her and Precious, for whom this statement almost seems for worse than anything else that has happened to her, replies, “Please don’t lie to me.”  I thought of that scene with I saw the new Todd Solondz film, Dark Horse.  Dark Horse is about Abe (Jordan Gelber), a 35 year old underachiever with anger management issues (often in connection with his being homophobic) who lives at home with his parents, an overprotective mother (Mia Farrow) and a disapproving father for whom he barely works (an hysterical Christopher Walken, who just has to stare with those bug eyes of his to get laughs).   Abe’s only hope for a romantic future is manic depressive Miranda (Selma Blair) who is unrepentantly honest about telling Abe how unappealing he is to her. 

In other words, Abe is a loser.  He has no real future.  He has no hope.  He does not have the capability of changing or taking control of his life.  He is both a victim and his own worst enemy.  And in dramatizing this quagmire of a life, Solondz gives Abe only one piece of dignity: Solondz doesn’t lie.  Abe is a failure, a misfit, a person who has no reason for existence (as one of the characters tells him—“no one needs you”).  And there is simply nothing to be done.  And from Solondz’ point of view, that’s just the way life is sometimes.  For some people, there is just nothing to be done except accept the reality of it. 

Dark Horse is not an easy movie to watch, but I found it fascinating in many ways.  I should say that I am not the biggest Solondz fan.  I find that most of the time all he does is ridicule people, putting them in the most humiliating situations he can, encouraging us to do the one thing he criticizes the world for: laugh at them.  Perhaps the difference this time is that by having one central character, rather than an ensemble, Solondz was forced to go beyond his usual S&M approach to characterization and give a more expansive view of his subject.  

Solondz’ main way of digging deeper into Abe is by using fantasy sequences where he interacts with variations of the supporting cast.  In this way, Abe careens between defending his actions, sometimes convincingly, and brutally facing up to his culpability in the way his life has turned out (the quote above, “no one needs you”, may be have been said by his father’s secretary, who in reality is the only one who truly cares about Abe, but here she is just a projection of how Abe sees himself). 

Gelber is a rolly polly Teddy bear of an oversized oompa loompa.  He’s good and the sheer energy of his performance really helps carry things along.  At the same time, he is also perhaps just a tad too cartoonish, as if he hasn’t quite caught on to the acting style that is necessary to really help create this off kilter Solondz world.  The supporting actors (Farrow, Walken and Blair) are better able to navigate this tricky style, fully investing in Solondz’s universe while still keeping it all very real, nightmarishly so at times.  

The story is just one step after another toward Abe hitting rock bottom.  Normally, when that happens, there’s no place to go but up.  But not here.  No, here it all ends tragically in more than one way.  People are saddened at first by Abe’s departure, but it’s not long before everyone’s life returns to normal proving Abe and Solondz right: no one needed him.  Many writers and directors would have softened it all and given Abe a chance.  But that would have been the unkindest cut of all, because it wouldn’t have been true.  In the end, all Solondz can really do is give Abe the dignity of being honest about it.

SIGHT AND SOUND PICKS VERTIGO OVER CITIZEN KANE

My theory is that Citizen Kane has always been recognized as an important film and a technical achievement (for its time), but always lacked a human connection for people. Now that a new, younger generation of critics have come up, they still appreciate the technical achievement of Kane and its importance, but Vertigo is something that they have a more visceral and immediate emotional connection. I know Vertigo doesn't work for a lot of people, but for me, it is Hitchcock's greatest film, an incredible exploration of the dark forces that drive us, a riveting dissection of how sex and obsession can take over our lives, disguised as a suspense film. My big issue is The Searchers. I understand it's importance, but I can't get past the racism and the cruel humor toward Native Americans the movie shows at times (and a lackluster supporting cast).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/sight-and-sound-2012-vertigo-citizen-kane_n_1729685.html