Why didn't HAYWIRE make Gina Carrano a star?

Fassbender on his back, but this isn't from Shame.

Steven Soderbergh is probably the most prolific major feature director working today, which has its good and bad points.  Because he is very talented, many of the films he makes will  be very good, or at least will repay the viewer's time.  But because he makes so many films, some of them will have to be sub-par.  And because Soderbergh is willing to experiment, when he swings and misses, he misses hard.

So on the one hand, you have Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brokovich, King of the Hill and Ocean's Eleven.  But you also have Full Frontal, The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble, Solaris and Ocean's Twelve.  And then there's the interesting middle- range films, including The Good German, Che, The Informant! and Contagion -- all films worth seeing, but not going to be in anyone's pantheon.

I suppose Haywire (2011) belongs in that middle class.  It is not without merit, but it clearly doesn't succeed on its own terms, which were to make Gina Carrano, a very successful mixed martial artist, into a movie star.  It was not a feckless task.  Carrano is exciting to watch in a fight, with real flair and personality.  Soderbergh engaged his Limey collaborator, Lem Dobbs to come up with a snappy hard-boiled spy script.  He got actor pals Ewan MacGregor, Michael Fassbender and Channing Tatum (now starring in Soderbergh's Magic Mike) to agree to be beaten up by a girl on screen.  And Michael Douglas agreed to drop in the way he seems to do these days.  I don't know what else he's got going on, but ol' Mikey's acting appearances all seem to be drive-bys these days.  (Antonio Banderas turns out to be the bad guy, but the film ends just before Gina gets to beat him up.)

So why is Haywire a misfire?  A few possible reasons, plus one essential reason which makes enumerating the others unnecessary.

First, the stakes involved are neither big enough or small enough.  Today in 2012, after almost a century of spies in the movies, there are really only two ways to go with spy stories.  One must threaten the entire existence of the world, a la Bond, or you go the way of LeCarre or a film like The Matador and center it around the existential crisis of the spy.  But Haywire merely documents a routine surveillance and security assignment, coupled with the familiar story of the spy who is framed and must clear himself (see the Bourne films).  So the story itself is unlikely to engage us.

Second, the fights, which are to a film like this what songs and dances are to a musical are not shot or edited well (although they seem to be well staged).  Somebody has to tell Mr. Soderbergh that the experiment is over, that he need not continue to be his own cinematographer, and that he needs to be recommence engaging more talented photographers than himself and thus benefit from their expertise, experience and taste.  He is not a bad cinematographer, but he is not inspired, and some inspiration would be useful here.  Several different tactics are attempted -- long, single take fights, quick, cutty fights, fights shot objectively, fights shot first-person, but none of them are well assisted by the shooting and cutting, and one can't help wish that a Jackie Chan or other expert had been brought in to give the action the impact it should have had.

Third, having robbed Ms. Carrano of her strong suit, that is, her ability to make an impression through her fighting skills, Mr. Soderbergh failed to give her the support she needed to achieve the projection of personality necessary to be a movie star.  Stars come in all varieties, from the most loveable to the creepiest, but the one thing they all have is the ability to virtually emerge through the motion picture screen itself.  When they are doing nothing but listening, they still draw attention and focus and we always feel their characters in their scene.  When Ms. Carrano is not talking or walking or fighting or doing something or other, she virtually disappears.  She is very attractive, but somehow she never suggests that a man would change the course of his life to be with her.

It's hard to describe an absence, but we all know that stars have something in the eye, or just behind the eye.  Some kind of light that regular mortals, like Gina Carrano, simply don't have.  I wish her well, and expect her to be prominent and successful in her own sphere, but Haywire suggests that film is not the place for her.

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.

Words words words

The late Woody Allen, the one who wrote and directed Take the Money and Run, Annie Hall and Bullets over Broadway once had as fine an ear for idiomatic American comic dialogue as any of this contemporaries from Sid Caesar University such as Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, etc., etc. Sadly, this enjoyable filmmaker died and someone calling himself Woody Allen is making all-star tax-shelter movies in Europe without scripts, style or indeed any idea for a movie.

Last year this imposter turned out something called You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010) which ostensibly poses the question: Can you predict the future? The answer is no. Any questions?

There is the usual Allen mix of scads of miscast stars (Antonio Banderas plays someone named Greg. Can you imagine Antonio being Greg? Or indeed any Spanish man named Greg?) an old man justifying his romance with an inappropriately younger woman, a failed artist or two, some pointless adulteries, a half-baked criminal act, the fear of discovery of which will drive much of the film, and as has been the case for the last 10 years, a foreign location to make his international investors happy, and because Manhattan is kind of sick of him tying up the streets for his snooze fests.

But his films are not bad for all the usual reasons that films are bad, such as there was no reason to make them or the filmmaker is inept. Neither is true here. Woody Allen has simply stopped writing scripts. He writes down ideas for scripts, with detailed notes of what the lines should be, but seems to have forgotten to write actual dialogue that could be spoken by actors who are trying to create the illusion of a character.

Starting about 10 years ago (that was the year of Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen's uncontested rock-bottom worst movie), instead of writing lines, his characters speak their unconscious intentions, what actors and directors call the subtext of a scene. "I have decided to leave you because you remind me of my lost youth and the impossibility of retrieving my lost youth." "Well, then, I have become an alcoholic due to your emotional abuse and neglect, and am sinking ever further into a morass of self-pity." "Don't blame your terrible decline on me; I am in search of that moving principle that once guided my entire existence." "I'll blame what I like you, because I am the embittered representative of a generation who was lost and lied to."

Mind you, this is not actual dialogue from an Allen film. There's no way I could remember such dreck, and nobody quotes this crap on line. You can't find a Woody Allen quote online any more recent than 1995, the year of Mighty Aphrodite, his last really good movie. But New York feels obligated to support Allen year after year, like making a contribution to the Planetarium. You don't go anymore, but you'd hate to see it gone.

It's not unusual for comedy writers to lose their touch, especially with dialogue. It happened to Billy Wilder and to Blake Edwards. My hypothesis is that once they become Hollywood celebrities, they don't encounter actual humans talking anymore. As William Goldman wrote, "In time they write plays about their agents." And in Woody Allen's case, he profoundly hates being around other human beings, which many might consider a disqualification for writing about them. It's not that he'll be mobbed as a celebrity -- if the portrait of him in Wild Man Blues is to be trusted*, this guy would rather lock himself in a closet with a TV so he can watch the Knicks than do anything, including write and direct movies.

And it shows. And believe, anyone who can still devote any brain cells to following the Knicks... he's done.

(Yes, I know he has a hit in the theaters currently, something about imagining he's in Paris with Hemingway. But from what I hear, it's as stilted as ever--he's just come up with a story that justifies the stiltedness.)
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* And why should it be? Allen seems to have agreed to participate in it just to reassure everyone that it's OK to marry your stepdaughter.

Isolated man

We all know people who can't survive a week or two without getting into a relationship. With Up In The Air last year and now The American (2010), George Clooney seems predisposed to portray men who can't get into any relationship, and are not sure if they want to. Aside from the sexless Western heroes of the 1930s and 1940s, I can't think of a leading man who spends more time avoiding getting entangled with women than the purportedly sexy Clooney. Director Anton Corbijn is best known for his still photos of celebrities, and perhaps it was his intention to simply capitalize on his strengths, because The American often feels more like a slideshow than a movie.

The one-man movie is well-established, perhaps even a mini-genre. There is even a book entitled Cinema of Loneliness. In the last decade we've had I Am Legend, Cast Away, 127 Hours, One Hour Photo and A Single Man. Going back we have Taxi Driver, Blast of Silence and countless Westerns and detective movies. That's not counting all the movies in which only one person in the world, perhaps a child or other outcast, befriends the protagonist.

In the case of The American, Clooney's character goes through the motions of a romance as if he knew it was doomed, and proceeds to (presumably unwittingly) engineer his own destruction. But even if he knew what was coming, it's hard to argue he would do any differently. Like his character in Up In The Air, this man seems to have forgotten to have a life, and to have something--anything, really that he wants to do. It's hard to believe that he wants to get out of his current life and get away, because we're never convinced of his passion of whatever it is he wants to get to. It's an interesting literary idea, but it's a tough pull for cinema, because the central character seems to be without passion of any kind.

A similar issue dogs the cult classic Seconds (1966) directed by John Frankenheimer as an existential horror film. Arthur Hamilton, who has himself transformed into the handsome Tony Wilson (played by Rock Hudson) is isolated from everyone, including himself.



He is given the identity of an artist without the talent, the passion or the network of influences, teachers, friends, supporters and other persons that most artists need to sustain them. The man starts the story empty and simply inventing an identity for him as an artist (especially an artist who is already successful and has a fancy Malibu home) is a recipe for disaster. This scene illustrates the disaster unfolding, and contains some of Rock Hudson's best work, not that Hudson has a large body of great work. But he seems to respond to this idea of being placed into a hollowed-out shell of a person that he is expected to fill out and respond to it.

Note also the splendid wide-angle hand-held photography of James Wong Howe, who is most celebrated these days for the icy brilliance of his work on Sweet Smell of Success -- both impressive credits for a man in his 60s who had begun as a cameraman in the silent era.

Jack Nicholson's character, Jonathan, in Carnal Knowledge (1971) thinks he wants someone around, preferably someone with female genitalia, but his contempt for other people and especially for other people, which never changes throughout his life, dooms him to a life of solitude. His idea of a relationship seems to be merely a complex form of masturbation. Here he is describing his ideal woman as an inventory of physical attributes. He barely seems human himself:



(Note: The language in this clip may be NSFW or for school.)

As I revisit films of the 70s, films that were first released in my high school and college days that were highly influential on me, my generation and the next generation of filmmakers, so many of them are no longer as shocking and transgressive as they seemed at first. But although Carnal Knowledge shocked many for its graphic language and simulated sex, I don't recall people being as appalled with Jonathan's sociopathology as they should have been and as I am now. The character has the cruelty of a Neil LaBute script, made doubly cruel by the fact that almost no one in the film expresses the horror we feel for this monster, with the exception of Carol Kane in the penultimate slide-show sequence. His only "punishment" for 25 or 30 years of appalling behavior are some transitory bouts of impotence, which might be exactly what he needs to take a time out from his satyrism and get a clear-eyed view of himself. Jonathan is isolated by his own doing, and likely to forever remain so.

Bodies in motion

My first exposure to film theory (a sorry excuse for an academic discipline if you ask me) was Theory of Film published in 1960 by Siegfried Kracauer, who was a philosopher, not a film scholar. (I'm not sure film scholars existed in 1960, other than self-proclaimed ones.) Being my first framework for analyzing movies, rather than just taking them in with a dull, open-mouthed stare as I did in younger days (I've learned to close my mouth), I've never really shaken the spectre of Kracauer.

One of his shibboleths was the camera's affinity for actual events. Actual events, be they disasters or dancing, were fundamental to cinema, and the place they part from dramatic theater. (Of course there is vaudeville and circus, where some performers demonstrate actual physical skills, such as juggling, trapeze and animal training, and those things do turn up in the movies.) To that end, film which documents high levels of physical skill feel inherently more cinematic. Perhaps that's why swimmer Esther Williams and skater Sonja Henie could become film stars, without any discernible acting talent. They could do real actual things, and even if you criticized their acting, their clothes or their hair, you couldn't take their real skills away from them.

Which perhaps explains the preponderance of ballet movies, given ballet's minuscule place in our cultural landscape. It's hard to make a ballet movie without a real ballet dancer, who can really do it. (The Turning Point cuts itself off at the knee in my opinion, because they put in real ballet star Baryshnikov, who performs a great solo from "The Prodigal Son" in which he could school Michael Jordan about staying airborne for huge amounts of time. Then the film moves to Anne Bancroft and Leslie Browne and tries to convince you that they are great ballet stars, and frankly that dog won't hunt.) There is always going to be a grounding in reality no matter how crazy a ballet movie gets (and they get pretty crazy). The camera just likes recording that sort of extreme level of skill.

For present day films such as Black Swan (2010), it is now possible to past movie star heads onto great ballet bodies, and although that means we are tinkering with reality, we still have the reality of the dancing that was done, regardless of the head involved or not involved. And it gives director Aronofsky the opportunity to make a film whose meanings and ideas will be expressed in almost exclusively visual terms. Yes, there is dialogue--the modern film audience is not prepared for a dialogue-free film, but this film would be completely comprehensible if about six title cards were substituted for all of the talking. We can hear Nina's mother haranguing her, but her face and movement convey all this is necessary, not to mention the bedroom full of little girl things (which Nina tellingly tries to discard and destroy partway through the movie). Sure, the choreographer tells Nina she must express herself sexually, but I think the scene of him groping her and forcing a kiss on her is far more communicative and expressive. Honestly, if they had had CGI in 1924, Lillian Gish could have done a fine job with this film.

Black Swan is hypnotic and mesmerizing just the way great silent film can be, and great care has been taken not to break the spell. Case in point, we need to see Nina travel from her home to the theater. We see her walking from the back. There follows what is technically a jump cut from city street to stage door area, but since the camera's relationship to Nina remains the same, both in direction of movement and relative size of her image, the transition is virtually seamless -- and suddenly we have gone from home to work without thinking about it. The seamless and unemphatic use of Nina's doppelganger visions follow a simple pattern. The effect is that the warp and woof of the fabric Nina's mind gradually develops a pretty drastic warp, but incrementally throughout the brief period of the story.

I honestly cannot understand why anyone in 2010 or 2011 would find this movie confusing. Aronofsky states what he is about from the very first scene. (I believe most people miss or forget first scenes when they are not part of the narrative continuity that follows immediately. How often have you seen a film which, in its final sequence, harkens back to the first sequence and you hear all around you, people saying, "Oh," clearly having forgotten that first scene and never giving any thought to where it might be headed. Maybe everyone's still digging around in their popcorn bags at that point.) We see a ballet dancer on a bare, empty stage. No set, no context, just dancer and light. The camera is steady and, if not fixed, moving with great smoothness and slickness. Then the perspective changes. The camera is handheld, wobbly and jittery. (As I saw it I was trying to recall if I had EVER seen a ballet sequence shot handheld. Do any of you recall one? Please leave a comment, if so.) The black bird appears, menacing and cruel. The ballerina has become prey. And after some brief, suggestively violent montage, the dream--or nightmare--ends and the film proper begins. But we have been warned -- do not rely on what you see. Do not rely on it to be stable or predictable, and do not rely on it to represent objective reality. "Wake up, folks," says Aronofsky, "you're going to be messed with." And yet many writers on this film profess surprise at being messed with. SPOILER ALERT - The film is not obscure at all, presenting a straightforward, if subjective account of a person undergoing a psychotic break. My wife suggests that the principal character is probably schizophrenic and she points out that she is exactly the right age for such symptoms to appear. Nothing difficult to figure out here.

Second, I cannot understand the complaint that the film is "overdone" that it is "too much." By the same token Phantom of the Opera and Dracula are kinda overwrought, too. Because we are really dealing with a psychological horror film and "over the top" goes with the territory. If someone is shocked because Nina's imagined quills sprout and she turns into a full-fledged black swan in the course of the dance, I cannot imagine what film they thought they were watching. It's a cinch they've never seen Polanski's Repulsion, which I was reminded of when the first rash appeared on Nina's back and which an interview with the screenwriters confirmed was an inspirational source for Black Swan. (And why is Black Swan excessive but the typical Quentin Tarantino bloodbath is "inspired cinema." How is depicting the inner imaginings of a diseased mind more unrealistic and overstated than balletic shoot-out that supposedly represents some sort of objective reality. I think film critics need to learn more about how guns and gun wounds work before they decide what's realistic and not.)

Another surprising revelation from hearing the screenwriters speak is to learn in what detail the film was scripted even before Aronofsky's involvement, and even once he took over the project. It is odd that Arnofsky did not earn a writing credit for his work with the final scriptwriter, because the work of screenwriter and director appear to be seamlessly fused. The direction is burnt into the script and the script scarcely exists independent of its direction. There is no film apart from its visual embodiment (which is as it should be, but is rarely true). I only wish Griffith and Hitchcock could see this film. I don't know if they'd like it, but I'd hope they'd recognize how it is a culmination of what they began.

Jackie Chan doesn't even need CGI to become the physical embodiment of film (in fact, his films which employed CGI are unquestionably his worst work). Many viewers assessing the Coen Brothers' True Grit have tried to make too much of their idea that John Wayne is a "real movie star" whereas Jeff Bridges is not. This is nonsense. John Wayne was simply around so long that it is hard to imagine him as anything but John Wayne, whereas Jeff Bridges is a more protean artist. Over time, people took him for a symbol of what he had portrayed on screen. Wayne was not a hero (other than the personal heroism of battling with cancer, a heroism demonstrated by millions every day); he never served in the armed forces, and was in fact an avid draft-dodger, which is why his career was in good shape in 1945, when many of his former competitors -- James Stewart, Clark Gable, who had gone to fight had to struggle to re-establish themselves. Dick Cavett recently revealed that Wayne was very familiar with the work of ultra-sophisticated and gay theater artist Noel Coward. When Cavett told Woody Allen this, Allen replied, “It reminds you that he’s an actor, not a cowboy.” But he was an actor who made a lot of movies, and a lot in which he played characters with many shared traits.

But while Jackie Chan is a pretty good actor (and a pretty good singer, too) he is far more than that. I would argue that, along with Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton and Fred Astaire, he is a metastar (NOT a megastar), whose physical gift and qualities embody the very idea of motion pictures. They do not need characters, situations or settings. Like the traveling actor who only needs a few planks and an audience, a metastar like Jackie Chan need only step before the camera for cinema to take place.

A modest proof of this can be seen in the remake of The Karate Kid (2010), which Jackie shares with Jaden Smith, who could be a metastar in the making. It cannot really be called a good film. (The very fact that it was entrusted to a director whose credits include Cody Banks and Pink Panther 2 suggests that the people in charge were doing their best to prevent a good film being made.) It inherits the cheesy and illogical series of story events from the original film (which itself was directed by John Avildsen, Master of Cheap Schlock, whose previous film was the excruciating and manipulative Rocky, beloved of gullible rubes everywhere.) Unmotivated and relentless bullying, an unexplained tournament lacking any sort of rules of entry, a popular and respected martial arts teacher driven by sadism, not to mention getting a 12-year-old into peak physical condition in two months, none of this troubles the kind of lazy, sloppy filmmakers who engineer stuff like this. Well, what do you expect from people who use the title Karate Kid to make a film about learning kung fu?

Luckily, they were not in charge of the real training and fighting sequences, and Jackie was. From developing an analog to the famous "wax on, wax off" trope (and check out the special features on the DVD to see how beautifully Jackie does this), to Jackie's opening six-on-one battle, to the very palpable accomplishments of young Mr. Smith in the fighting sequences, due in great part to training under Jackie's direction, Jackie Chan lifts a piece of run-of-the-mill commercial product into a demonstration of the power of capturing human movement on film. That is why he is larger and more important than any film he is in, and why he may never be in a great film. To do so, he would have to be able to put himself at the service of a great filmmaker, to subordinate himself to ideas and visions, and serve a narrative greater than his simple triumph over opposition. It's not Jackie's fault, but I'm not sure that it's possible. Jackie Chan is a great folk artist, and he is best left to continue working on the same film with the same elements over and over, endlessly fiddling with details, like a great naive painter who keeps working on the same still life, or a blues artist working over the same three chords and six melody notes, ringing endless changes from a few small objects and an immense human soul.