You're going to thank me.

I am herewith posting for your benefit, the only 19 or 20 minutes of Skidoo (1968) that are worth seeing.  That said, they are extremely worth seeing.  They are simply buried inside a cinematic tomb that rivals anything old Cheops cranked out.

The backstory. Old-fashioned but still-skillful producer-director Otto Preminger decides to make a film about the scourge of the nation, LSD.  But, being an honest man, he tries it.  And he decides it is NOT the scourge of the nation.  But he's committed to make this movie with a large bunch of mismatched middle-aged and even elderly movie stars which is both for and against LSD.

I have to back-pedal even farther.  When I was growing up, Preminger was a star-director name nearly on a par with Alfred Hitchcock.  He made big pictures about big issues and he plastered his name and face all over them.  And he was not unjustified.  His films got big audiences and made big money.  And his technique, which he had been developing since the mid-1940s was extremely well-suited to the wide-screen epics of the 1960s.  Specifically, he preferred long, complex master shots, sometimes reframing the action with camera movement rather than recutting.  Paradoxically for such a control freak, this procedure gives power to the actors, who control the tempo and feel of the scene.  He counteracted that tendency by calling for extensively repeated takes, wearing the actors down.  (Also paradoxically, Preminger was an actor, and in films such as Wilder's Stalag 17, a good actor.)

His career breaks into distinct phases, beginning with the romantic noirs of the 40s, most famously Laura, and my personal favorite, Where The Sidewalk Ends.  The next phase began with The Moon Is Blue a standard-issue sexless sex comedy from a Broadway boulevard play.  But the heroine referred to herself as a "virgin" and the words "pregnant" and "mistress" were bandied about, causing pearls to be clutched across the country.  The film went out without an MPAA seal, made a pot of money from disappointed filmgoers who expected something sexy and turned Otto onto the controversy racket.

The last phase begins roughly around the time of Exodus in 1960, when controversy transmogrifies into international all-star epic.  Thus follows Advice and Consent, Hurry Sundown and The Cardinal.

Back to LSD.  Otto changes his mind and decides to make a pro-hippie movie.  Or at least a movie that suggests that these crazy kids might be worth listening to.  The first clue is in this unconventional opening in which husband Jackie Gleason and wife Carol Channing (bizarre couple, yes, I know) fight over the remote control, a fight seen from the TV viewer's POV.  (Note the inclusion of Preminger's own In Harm's Way in the onscreen melange.)  [Apologies in advance for any ads inserted by Daily Motion.]



Fairly early on, for reasons not worth delving into, Jackie gets his consciousness raised via an acid trip.  So far, so good, except that the sequence bears no resemblance to any acid trip taken by any known person.  It is fun, but fun like those goofy early 1930s movies packed with random non-sequiturs in the place of actual jokes.




Far better than seeing Groucho's head in place of a lightbulb is the acid trip experienced by veteran character actor Fred Clark, which is not only accompanied by a charming Harry Nillson song, but features some of the wackiest dancing and carrying-on by Clark as a prison guard who has unknowingly dropped LSD.   Clark was usually seen as grouchy bank officials turning down nice people for loans or mean neighbors who won't give the kids their football back and rarely had the opportunity to clown this way. The song in question begins at the 3:00 minute mark in this clip.



Finally, we have the last nine minutes or so of the film.  This includes the rather catchy title song, accompanying an incomprehensible sequence in which Carol Channing and her daughter's hippy friends occupy gangster Groucho Marx's yacht, while Groucho turns on and becomes a Buddhist.  I include this clip principally for the final few minutes in which Harry Nillson sings the credits.  All of them.  Right down to the wardrobe mistress and the production accountant.  That's freakier than Gleason's acid trip.




Make no mistake.  By no means is Skidoo a good film.  But it is an instructive bad film, and one with some moments of inspiration of enchantment.  Personally, I would never have thought Otto had it in him.

Kicking history when it's down

It is difficult, observing the rules I have set for this blog (and which I often traduce), to limit myself to observations regarding Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011) and not to make judgments or to make silly jokes with the title, which, in my opinion, is just ASKING for it.

Everybody has to stop taking for granted how great Spielberg is with kids.  From the evidence of this movie, it's not easy, and this is from Stephen Daldry, director of Billy Elliott.  It's not just that the child character is irritating as conceived by the writer, he's irritating in practice.  No wonder his mother lets him roam around the city without supervision.  Anything to get him out of the house.

Second, making Max von Sydow a mute character just means you're too lazy to come up with a reason why this man has a funny accent.  Von Sydow has a beautiful and expressive voice.  There are a million better non-verbal actors than he.  I guess everyone was just thrilled with the novelty of von Sydow not speaking in English or in Swedish, and thought they were some jam-dandy acting.  He's not bad, but as a student of silent film, I've seen a lot better.

Third, dressing up an empty shaggy dog story with a great national tragedy does not give it significance -- it reduces its significance.  Having the boy's father die in the Twin Towers adds utterly nothing to the story; the only thing that matters is that he is dead.  The oblique visual suggestion that he died plummeting from the building just adds a forsting of grotesquerie onto a big Bad Taste Cake.

I recognize that this is a very weak blog entry, but I literally had trouble keeping my eyes on the screen and resisting the desire to look away and do something else.  A movie that is almost successful, though not quite, can sharpen one's powers of observation.  Something this wide of the mark seems to dull the senses.  Sorry.

Down in the depths on the 90th floor

No va.  The movie, not the car.

I'm serious:  Tower Heist (2011) should be taught in film school.  It has the worst, clumsiest, most textbook-awful exposition in many, many years.  I mean, there is actually a scene in which the loveable old doorman tells Ben Stiller he is about to retire and he is shore lookin' forward to that there pension, you bet and by golly.  And the guy rased the subject -- it didn't flow out of any previous dialogue or dramatic situation.  It was if he thought, "Oh, crap, I forgot to drop that exposition into this scene.  I better get it in here now."  There are a dozen examples of information dropped like steaming cups of boiling lead over a film that is not very light on its feet to begin with.

Does Eddie Murphy care about anything anymore?  He's not even good at being Eddie Murphy anymore, even as a supporting guest star.  Producers, you can save a lot of money and hire Jay Pharoah to be Eddie Murphy.  Add to that Alan Alda's sweaty incompetence as a villain, and you have an filmgoing experience that resembles going to see a friend in a community theater production and concentrating with all your mind to find things you can mentioned you liked about it.

About Mr. Alda -- we refer to our great movie villains as "the man/woman you love to hate."  The greats -- Basil Rathbone, Alan Rickman, Kevin Spacey, Cruella DeVille all relish their badness, revel in it.  They are unrepentant and unapologetic.  Alda constantly looks sorry for being so mean, and one expects him to follow his wickedest lines with, "I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that.  I've been so stressed lately.  How can I make that up to you?"  It's just not in his enjoyable but fairly narrow range as an actor.  He can be a narcissistic shit, but he just doesn't have that psychic mustache he can twirl.

I'm sure the producers congratulated themselves on not making Gaborey Sidibe the subject of any fat jokes, instead making her a super-competent safe cracker.  Except that she then embarks on a "hilarious" liaison with Eddie Murphy.  Why do I know it's supposed to be "hilarious."  Because she's fat.  And fat people wanting and getting sex is always unquestionably funny, right?   It's not like they're regular people or anything.

It is left to Matthew Broderick, who has evidently graduated from quirky if adenoidal young leading man to burned-out and/or grumpy adenoidal middle-aged man, but there is no doubt that he is still as deft with a wisecrack as he was on Broadway in Brighton Beach Memoirs back during the Reagan administration.  He should be glad to have been moved from starter to reliever, because he is a natural clean-up man.

Look, if the picture comes on TV on a Friday when you have nothing to do and the alternative is to go around to your wife's sister and choke down her bone-dry carrot cake, watch this movie.  Come to think of it, you still could read a book.  Maybe a book about screenwriting, which the people who made Tower Heist have clearly never done.

No doubt, not reasonable

There is no point in addressing the aesthetic qualities of Beyond A Reasonable Doubt (2009). It has none. The only question is, how does such a thing happen? How does a film based on a prior film by the master Fritz Lang, starring Michael Douglas and written and directed by the solid journeyman Peter Hyams devolve into an utterly meretricious piece of tripe?

My guess is that the project begins with Ted Hartley, an ambitious entrepreneur who has acquired remake rights to a number of RKO properties. This always seemed to me a sensible idea for a business. We all know that remakes of recognized classics is pointless, and only likely to expose the perpetrators to ridicule and scorn. But there are tons of movies out there that are good, or almost good, and only need some slight change to have moved up into a higher class of film. How many movies have we seen that are going along well and then crashed and burned in the last half-hour, the last ten minutes, or even the last minute? It's not uncommon.

So making a new twisty thriller based on the somewhat implausible premise of a journalist placing himself in jeopardy of prosecution in order to prove that a corrupt prosecutor is using fabricated evidence is not a hopeless idea. But clearly he had trouble interesting young A-list talent in developing this idea, and it fetched up at the door of Peter Hyams, writer-director of Outland (a disguised remake of High Noon), The Star Chamber (starring Michael Douglas), The Presidio and 2010, a workaday sequel to the epic 2001. So although Mr. Hyams is not perhaps a startling or original artist, he has a decent track record with building borrowed ideas and well-known stars.

Here is probably where things began to break down. The modern audience will not stand for the simple complication that the plan will not work. That is obvious from the start. It's an idiotic idea--the film virtually admits it--and there is no chance it will work as planned. Here's the rule -- the plan only works if they don't reveal it to the audience. The corollary is, of course, if they tell the audience the plan, it will go wrong.

So some additional twist is required. And I will give you the spoiler, because you really shouldn't waste your time watching this movie. The journalist is actually guilty. Not only does it make the whole premise of the story ridiculous, not to mention tasteless, it makes the audience feel like a cluck to have sat through a story about a criminal who engineers his own prosecution.

There is already a very good film about an innocent man who engineers his own prosecution, called The Man In The Glass Booth, based on the play by Robert Shaw. But he doesn't want to foil his prosecutors, he wants to have someone publicly admit and be publicly punished for the genocide of the Jews. He willingly sacrifices himself to redeem humanity.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt doesn't redeem anyone. Amber Tamblyn does a decent job, and one supposes that she wanted to be seen playing a young professional woman who is capable of an adult romance, in order to break her out of the teen ghetto she was in because of her starring role on Joan of Arcadia. Jesse Matcalfe was probably happy to get a lead more demanding than the "sexy lawn boy" on Desperate Housewives. Orlando Jones does a nice job of straight acting as an honest cop, so that makes sense. But who was blackmailing Michael Douglas? Was he that hard up for work? Or needed to get out of the house? His role is not only cardboard-thin, completely unrewarding and extremely similar to a number of sneering, big-shot, scenery-chewing performances he's done before. And it was doubtless his "yes" that got the film a green light. So he is to blame in more ways than one.

Some failed films probably looked pretty good on paper and fail in the execution. This story and script must have been DOA, and yet it went ahead. With all the children going hungry and diseases to be cured, people spent time and money to actually make the film. That's a mystery.

Faux noir

Film noir, once an interesting mode of film analysis, has become such a potent marketing tool that desperate home video distributors are willing to slap the name onto any black-and-white film that has any character or activity which is slightly more hard-hitting than a Shirley Temple film. In the case of Bad For Each Other (1953), not only is there no sense of doom, no guilt, no sense of the world overcoming the protagonist, there is not even a crime of any kind. Don't let the title fool you: there is really nothing to recommend this film for any purposes, especially entertainment, except for the presence of the borderline sinister Lizabeth Scott, who managed to project the aura of a girl who was born to a good family but promptly got into bad--maybe even kinky--stuff. That's all kept pretty well offstage in this attempt at a Warners-style soap opera, directed by Warners journeyman Irving Rapper.

Two Of A Kind (1951) comes a bit closer to noir, given that there's a half-hearted attempt at a con, and that the head con is the weak-chinned and sort-of greasy Alexander Knox. (Yes, I know he's famous for playing Woodrow Wilson, but he was sort of a greasy prig himself, disguised as an upright college professor.) The con itself, like most long cons, has disappeared into the mists of time. Long cons require a fundamental lack of knowledge on the part of the mark, and it is hard to keep the marks in this state of extreme ignorance nowadays. Specifically, the cons try to pass off seedy, sweaty and burly Edmond O'Brien as the son they lost when he was a three-year old boy. (It's hard to imagine Edmond O'Brien was ever three years old. Could he have been that sweaty then?) The point is, one simple DNA test would end this con quick. As it is, they can't pull it off, even then sweaty Edmond has allowed the tip of his pinky to be hacked off to further the plot.

But honestly, the men are of no real interest in this movie, at least not in comparison with the good girl-bad girl dichotomy set up, as seen in the illustration above. The good girl is Terry Moore, who evidently learned from bad girl Lizabeth Scott, and switched over to being a bad girl later in the decade, especially in a sweater (very bad!).

But Lizabeth Scott is the whole show here. At first she seemed like a road company Lauren Bacall, all husky voice and sassy attitude. But where Bacall is insolent, Scott has the inherent superiority of just being better and smarter than her men, which makes her free to exhibit a sparkle and enthusiasm not available to the sullen sultry Bacall persona. Bacall had Howard Hawks to guide and shape her, but Scott had no such mentor. She had been discovered by producer Hal Wallis and followed him through Warners and Paramount, both home to heavy-breathing melodrama before she fetched up at Columbia, which really lacked a house style, taking what it could from the occasional A-list talent that went slumming in Gower Gulch. But Wallis was not a star-maker, but a star-finder and exploiter. Among his contractees were Kirk Douglas, Shirley MacLaine, Elvis Presley and Martin and Lewis. The filmographies of the latter stars should indicate that Hal Wallis mostly gave up on quality when he left Warners.

Oddly, though Bacall was a cool and a noir dame, she was never a femme fatale. She might think you were kind of a jerk, but she would never destroy you. Scott, on the other hand, might be completely head-over-heels about you, but she'd sell you out in a second. That splendid balance of enthusiasm about men and about money made a lot of her films and roles seem more interesting than they really were.

And you gotta like a gal whose big break in show business was understudying and appearing as Sabina in The Skin Of Our Teeth. It is said that at 81 she could still recite her first speech in the play from memory. I believe it. It's a really good speech.*
_____________________________
* Oh, oh, oh! Six o’clock and the master not home yet. Pray God nothing serious has happened to him crossing the Hudson River. If anything happened to him, we would certainly be inconsolable and have to move into a less desirable district.

The fact is I don’t know what’ll become of us. Here it is the middle of August and the coldest day of the year. It’s simply freezing; the dogs are sticking to the sidewalks. Can anybody explain that?

But I’m not surprised. The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me. Every night this same anxiety as to whether the master will get home safely: whether he’ll bring home anything to eat. In the midst of life we are in the midst of death, a truer word was never said. ...

My advice to you is not to inquire into why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate; that’s my philosophy. Don’t forget that we got through the Depression by the skin of our teeth! One more tight squeeze like this and where will we be?

Two stars in search of a movie

There should be a law. Comedians who can write should not perform in scripts they could write better themselves. This applies especially to Tina Fey and Steve Martin, who write good comedy scripts. (This does not apply to Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler who do not write good comedy scripts. They should always perform in movies written by their betters. Which would include a group of 9th graders from the East Wadsworth Memorial Middle School.)

It is really hard to understand how two such funny people as Steve Carell and Tina Fey could fail to detect the sloppy, lazy haphazard and unfunny contours of the script of Date Night (2010). Yes, the premise is good, but the covered the premise in about 15 seconds in the trailer (most of the rest of the trailer was dull).

Examples: Steve Carell has taken the reservation of another couple. On the way to the table, Tina Fey has such funny lines as "Oh no, you really shouldn't do this." I realize his may not be an exact quote, but surely somebody could have written a joke to cover the action while they are seated. Or else just cut.

Steve and Tina are being threatened by the baddies. Steve tells them the thing they are after (let's call it the McGuffin) is in the Central Park boathouse. Central Park was a great idea for the movie because...well, I really don't know why. They fool around in the boathouse for a while, then Steve and Tina escape. So why Central Park, which has never been more boring and pointless on film. Then Steve and Tina are running around holding the boat over their heads and they bang into a tree and they drop the boat. Wow! What a comedy feast! I mean, really...is that the best physical schtick they could come up with?

It's set up that Steve Carell never remembers to close drawers. This pays off brilliantly in the climax when...well, actually it never pays off. It is completely pointless.

Steve bashes the car he's driving into a taxi, so their bumpers are stuck together. Then both drivers push on the accelerator. Shot of wheels spinning. Shot of drivers shouting. Shot of wheels spinning. Shot of drivers shouting. Shot of wheels spinning. Shot of drivers shouting...does wheel-spinning seem especially appropriate here? Just as we're wondering whether they'll go one way or the other--they go one way. No surprise, no variation, just push, push back, push, push back and then one guy wins.

Then there's Mark Wahlberg who's a mysterious guy involved in international black ops who helps out Steve and Tina, except that in a surprising twist...oops, forgot to create a surprise twist.

Then, at the end, the villains are frozen when the unarmed Tina begins to count to three, which always works with her toddlers. It works with these evil and vicious villains because...because somebody thought it would be funny, even if it makes no sense for the characters and the situation.

See, on top of an ill-thought-out comedy-free script (I mean, seriously, Mila Kunis is the funniest person in the movie, which is sad), then they hired Shawn Levy to direct. Mr. Levy has directed a terrible remake-in-name-only of Cheaper By The Dozen, a terrible remake-in-name-only of The Pink Panther and the very-amusing-to-9-year-olds Night In The Museum movies. The man does not know about set-up and payoff, he doesn't know how to build and fill moments, he has no concept of pace, of characterization, of using character to drive story nor does he have any gift for imaginative physical comedy. This guy thinks that people running into things and falling down is funny. (So did my kids when they were 3.)

A smart producer would have recognized that the shape of Date Night is essentially that of an action comedy and, as was done with Beverly Hills Cop 2, hired an action director to keep the picture moving, devise twists and surprises and relied on his stars and their writers to keep the quips and comedy business floating on the surface of an action-film structure. The story itself is not inherently funny--Hitchcock based half his career on mistaken-identity suspense films. So the story and the situation will not deliver the funny. That's going to require some work by talented people. And there is one slight little problem.

Shawn Levy has ABSOLUTELY NO TALENT WHATSOEVER. If someone is scheduling and intervention and we can somehow convince Mr. Levy that he is in the wrong line of work and perhaps he could do something better with his life, count me in. I will do anything to hasten his retirement from filmmaking.

That said, Carell and Fey have a nice team chemistry, and I would enjoy seeing them appear together in an actual movie--not necessarily as husband-and-wife or romantic partners, but comedy partners, which is where they meet well. I don't have much hope. Coming in 2012: Date Night 2--This time it's even more incompetent.

Passion is better with talent and hard work

Moon (2009) was overlooked here in the States, but it won Best Film at the British Independent Film Awards. This may have been for the feat of creating a convincing sci-fi film for what is reportedly less than the equivalent of $5 million US. And that is with 400 special effects shots, including substantial CGI, much of which is undetectable (I cannot say the same for the lunar surface model shots, which are substandard). Those CGI shots are essential for the central premise of the story, and they are greatly aided by the fine work of Sam Rockwell. (That premise is hinted at by the illustration I selected.)

While for many people the takeaway of Moon seems to be that you can do good science fiction on a low budget, they are missing the point. Science fiction has always been about the present. I'm not much worried about what my life would be like if I was mining helium on the moon. But I am concerned about what my work life takes away from me, and that is especially true if I work for a large, faceless, multinational corporation. They have no compunction about taking from us everything that makes us ourselves. And that is the dilemma of Sam Bell, the protagonist of this film. He has become a pale photocopy of himself, his integrity literally collapsing. I mean, literally. There is a loneliness, a melancholy to this film which reminds me of the feeling I got from a number of bad jobs I've had--just wondering when the day or the job itself will be over and when I'll be able to spend my time with decent, worthwhile human beings again.

I should add that the film ends with a small, but poetically right and satisfying triumph, so the melancholy does not linger to the end, and a ray of hope is offered.

Obviously, a film like this is a passion project, as was the super-lowbudget indie Moonlight Serenade (2009), but here is the proof that passion is not enough. This film mirrors my personal experience in ultra lowbudget film: the project was premised on a genre of music--that music was well represented and well-produced, and everything surrounding it was either amateurish or shabby. (This may explain why the film has been on the shelf since being shot in 2006.) Amy Adams sings better than I thought, and her co-star Alec Newman is acceptable, although given his complete lack of box office appeal, I wonder they didn't go to New York and select from any one of dozens of handsome young men who sing far better and may even have been able to do their own piano playing.

It's not a terrible idea to bring together two young lovers over a common love of the Great American Songbook. (That may be my own bias, as I fell in love with that repertoire in my college years, and it is a passion my wife shares.) But you still need a story. And the one here is thin, thin, thin. Burned-out Wall Street yuppie maintains his sanity playing the Old Tunes, meets up with aspiring singer who needs accompanist--brief fight--final reconciliation. And that's literally all there is. Oh, the wonderful Harriet Harris seems to want to be Alec Newman's mother instead of his assistant (and how insulting is it that a bright, hardworking mature woman like Harris has to be assistant to a fledgling).

Speaking of thin, the sets appear to be made of cardboard and the impression is compounded by the DP's penchant for hyper-short lenses on very cheap video, yielding a distorted and smeared image.

The music, on the other hand, is virtually over-produced and plentiful, although, unfortunately, not continuous, else it would have drowned the super-pedestrian dialogue. (This is the kind of movie that, after the hero plays very well, has to have a scene where his friend the professional musician tells him he played very well. Nothing else happens in this scene--nothing.) The voices are rendered in a hyper-artificial echo, which is jarring in the scenes taking place in ordinary environments, such as apartments and sidewalks. They did take the risk of including non-diagetic songs, that is, songs that are not taking place in the real world, but in the fanciful universe of musicals in which people sing anywhere, anytime.

That incidentally, is the only explanation for Harriet Harris's participation, as she gets to sing "Lover Man, Where Can You Be?" while roaming around the cheap office set (which looks as though it might be an actual cheap office). I did not check the chapter stops on the DVD, but I would recommend simply jumping from song to song and skipping everything else. It's not like you have to see the entire film because you're interested in the writer-director's future. He has none.

What were they thinking? I mean really, what?

When you set out to make a thing (and I use the word "thing" advisedly) like Four Christmases (2008), how does the thinking go? Do you start out with, "Well, I'm going to tell the studio I'm making a cheesy slapstick holiday movie like Lampoon Vacation or Home Alone but then I'll slip some relationship stuff in when they're not looking." And then do you get about 19 days into the schedule and realize you'll have no time for the relationship stuff, so you just skip it?

Or do you start with the nice relationship stuff and the evil studio (and in this case, it's New Line, and they ARE evil) makes you shoot a bunch of crap about falling off the roof while installing the satellite dish and 9-year-olds streaking and (wait for it--god, this is so-o-o-o-o funny) babies emitting fake projectile vomiting. Who the heck is this supposed to amuse?

Or is it unfair to blame any of the filmmakers for what they wound up with because, no matter what the script said, Vince Vaughn wouldn't shut up with his endless irritating unfunny adlibbing? (And how come Reese Witherspoon has to be reed-thin, while Vince Vaughn goes on getting fatter and fatter? Is he going to start auditioning for those Orson Welles parts?)