THE BEGUILED Marks a Return To Form

(Don’t do it, Ryan.)

(I’m not joking. It’s hacky. It’s corny to the point that you trying to couch it by first writing a cute couple of lines acknowledging what you’re about to do is also hacky. It might actually be worse.)

(Sigh….)

Webster’s Dictionary defines “beguile” as “to deceive by wiles”, “to lead by deception", quite literally “hoodwink”. It follows, then, that to be beguiled means to be hoodwinked, to be deceived by false appearance.

THE BEGUILED, then, is a movie title that gives you a sense of the entire story before a frame has run through the projector (I’m not sure film really works like that, anymore, but…you get the imagery). Sofia Coppola’s sixth film, which both reunites her with a couple of her former leads AND allows her to collaborate with two modern powerhouses for the first time, deals directly with what happens when a deceiver enters a space of isolation through cowardly means and begins to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting.

It’s also a period piece, a suspense tale set in the American South smack dab in the middle of the Civil War, a time when pretty much everybody walked around with a significant amount of tension, distrust, and anxiety at all times. One could also make the argument that Coppola is dabbling in allegorical story-telling; many of the images and blocking in this movie seems drenched in double-meanings (there’s a lot of tilling of soil, much pruning of branches).

More than anything else, though, THE BEGUILED marks both a relieving return to form for Coppola after a confusing mini-disaster in THE BLING RING, while still representing something different altogether from her. Even if it doesn’t always work 100% of the time, it all at least hangs together. This is a victory in and of itself.

THE BEGUILED (2017)

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Colin Farrell, Elle Fanning, Angourie Rice

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Coppola

Released: June 23, 2017

Length: 97 minutes

Based off a 1966 Thomas P. Cullinan novel of the same name, and previously made as a 1971 Don Siegel movie starring Clint Eastwood, THE BEGUILED tells the story of a sparsely populated Virginian girls’ school in 1864, ran by Martha Farnsworth (Kidman) and staffed by just one other adult, Edwina Morrow (Dunst). As Edwina teaches the five students French, the Civil War rages ever on in the background.

One fateful morning, one of Edwina’s young students, Amy (Oona Laurence), makes an odd discovery while picking mushrooms: a wounded Union deserter, Corporal John McBurney (Farrell). After some debate whether to turn or take him in, Martha allows McBurney inside the school in order to rest and recuperate. This decision ultimately comes at a cost, as McBurney starts slowly and methodically seducing each of the girls, as he shows a talent for showing only the parts of himself he thinks the woman in front of him needs to see (psychologically speaking, not physically. It’s not that kind of movie).

His charm turns to violence as he gets busted sleeping with teenage Alicia (Fanning) by Edwina, whom he had previously declared his love to. Edwina responds by pushing him down a flight of stairs, which wounds his leg to the point of amputation (whether this amputation is truly medically necessary, or merely an act of revenge is a deliberately unanswered point of contention). He’s furious, the women are trapped, and the story shifts to one about how one removes the wolf from the hen house.

In many ways, THE BEGUILED almost plays like a Best Of Sofia Coppola movie, with elements of her past films all mixed together to create something new. There’s Kirsten Dunst! There’s Elle Fanning! There’s that palpable PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK aesthetic and tension at play again! Oh, is that the French language I hear?

And yet, many pillars and tenets of what a typical Sofia Coppola movie looks like is almost entirely absent here. No longing, colorful, fast-paced looks at wealth here. In fact, THE BEGUILED is almost entirely shrouded in darkness in its key moments (a decision that I have mixed feelings about, more on that in a second!). Even though it clocks in at her typical 90 or so minutes, its pace is quite intentionally slow and methodical.

Yet many of her themes remain. Loneliness. The want for freedom. The repression of desire. And perhaps no single character best exemplifies those classic Coppola themes than Edwina, the schoolteacher. All of the girls at the school develop feelings of some sort for McBurney, but Edwina is the one who most obviously falls in love with him. She’s a woman who’s lost in her current role, with no real future ahead of her. War surrounds her. She’s just a schoolteacher, and that’s all she’ll ever be. Then comes this handsome, somewhat dangerous Corporal. Even though it’s clear he’s writing her a check he has no intention of cashing, a large part of her wants to believe it. She has to; it’s her only chance at another kind of life.

This isn’t my original observation, and I do not remember exactly where I first saw it, but it’s worth aggregating it anyway; THE BEGUILED completes the Sofia Coppola Trilogy of Movies Where Kirsten Dunst Plays A Character Who’s Trapped In A Social System With No Easy Way Out Of It (the first two, of course, being THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and MARIE ANTOINETTE). Here, it might be that archetype at its most heartbreaking. She wants so badly, maybe more than any of the other women at the school, to believe McBurney and his seductions. Even to the very end, as McBurney’s deadly dinner begins, it’s not clear to us as an audience if she’s going to actually eat the poison mushrooms and die alongside him (whether she does or not, I’ll leave for you to experience).

It shouldn’t be surprising that Coppola keeps going back to Dunst for these kind of roles. She’s good at them. Dunst is really, really skilled at communicating heartbreak and desire non-verbally and always has been (she’s a big reason those Raimi SPIDER-MAN movies have the emotional punch that they do), which makes her a valuable tool in Coppola’s workbox. We’ve actually reached the end of their collaborations, at least as of this writing (Dunst isn’t in ON THE ROCKS or the upcoming PRISCILLA). One has to imagine there’s more to come on that front. One day.

Another pleasant standout is our sole male lead, Colin Farrell.

Farrell is a guy whose presence has been interesting to grow up around. I distinctly remember that period in the 2000’s where it felt like he was everywhere. As a young man, he had a knack for picking the exact right, fun project (MINORITY REPORT, MIAMI VICE, IN BRUGES) except for when he didn’t (PHONE BOOTH and DAREDEVIL to pick just a couple). He also had a very distinct bad boy reputation, and was at the center of one of the only entertaining and interesting moments in Jay Leno’s TONIGHT SHOW tenure (naturally, it never aired). And now, here he is at the age of 41 (at least at the time THE BEGUILED was released), and all of a sudden a different kind of guy has emerged. Farrell is now a man who connotes danger without living it, a man with that great combination of handsome and seasoned.

All of that to say that, as far as the only main male role in the entire film, Colin Farrell is the exact right fucking choice in 2017 for Corporal McBurney, a man who has to be both many things to many people AND ultimately a man only interested in himself. It’s a tough role to play, but Farrell is maybe one of the only leading men in his current age bracket that could pull it off. It requires a guy who can be charming in an understated way; McBurney is never a “light up the room the second he enters it” kind of man. He’s more of a “slowly nestle his way into your soul” kind of man. Yet, he also needs to be able to provide that believable rage when pushed and cornered. Near the end, McBurney starts dipping into horror movie villain territory, ranting and raving and carrying on while our core women leads are locked in a room, waiting for the tempest to pass.

You basically need to both believe him when he’s charming AND when he’s insane. With age on his side, Farrell’s the guy. We’re lucky to have him.

———

On the matter of how the movie is shot and its relationship with literal darkness, I can’t decide if it’s an exercise of form over function. Yes, it makes a lot of sense that the movie would be only lightly lit. The symbolism of the house being covered in shadow once McBurney enters it (as well as the follow-through in thought of key exterior shots being shot through the leaves of a tree) is clear and easy to track. And, of course, the dinner scenes lit only by candlelight evokes a technique mastered by Stanley Kubrick 40 years prior.

On the other hand….well, the movie is hard to see! I know it sounds stupid, but that matters! To be perfectly honest, THE BEGUILED is on Netflix as I write this, and it’s how I screened it for myself. I was ready to blame my visual issues on a touched-up streaming upload or something, so I was somewhat relieved to hear that one of the top Google results for “THE BEGUILED” is “Why is THE BEGUILED filmed so dark?”. For a movie that rests a lot of its storytelling on quiet moments, glances, and facial expressions…bust out a couple more candles, that’s all I’m saying.

(Note: this could be all the result of some setting on my screen that I’m overlooking. Let me know if you had this issue when you watched it, too.)

———

Something I’ve been avoiding mentioning this entire article, minus a brief mention near its beginning, is the 1971 version of this same story which, again, starred Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page in the Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman roles, respectively. Normally, whenever there’s a prior version of a movie I’m reviewing, I have no problem comparing them directly. For instance, 1991’s CAPE FEAR is a direct remake of the 60’s original; therefore, it seems fair to be able to view them side-by-side and judge them accordingly.

Here, though, up until the very last minute, I hadn’t even watched Siegel’s version of the Cullinan novel because Coppola isn’t technically remaking his movie. She’s just taking another crack at the same source material. So it didn’t seem fair to compare them. Yet….curiosity got the better of me and I ultimately fit in an opportunity to sneak in a viewing (one of the big reasons this article is coming out a day late).

And…well, I liked it better.

It’s not an overwhelming victory or anything, and it doesn’t necessarily invalidate Coppola’s vision; a lot of the differences between the two simply come down to style choices. The story remains largely the same. However, there are some notable departures that Coppola takes that gives one pause (although I think they’re slightly defendable).

The first thing to point out is that there’s a female slave character, Millie, in the 1971 BEGUILED that Coppola excised completely from the 2017 version. This doesn’t exactly help her beat the allegations that she tells stories from a strictly white (and privileged) perspective, something that has plagued her since the LOST IN TRANSLATION controversy. On one hand, it’s a shame; Mae Mercer brings a lot of humanity to the role (she actually gets one my favorite lines and moments in the whole thing; “You better like it with a died black woman. Because, that's the only way you'll get it from this one”), and I think bringing race in as a component adds even more dis-ease to the story, especially considering it’s a Civl War tale set in the South (with its villain a coward Union soldier). On the other, I think it’s reasonable to assume Coppola simply didn’t think she had anything to provide to the race angle and thought better to avoid it altogether (and considering the tense implications of Millie’s presence in the story, something that could have gone even worse for Coppola if she had bungled it).

All things being equal, it would be nice if Sofia Coppola had some deep insight to provide in regards to race. But she doesn’t. If she did, she would have done so by now. Thus, it doesn’t seem like the scathing indictment people think it is to continue to point out that “she only tells stories about white people!”. I think she knows. Frankly, it’s part of her style at this point. Anyone continuing to watch her movies looking for that kind of insight, when there are twenty-plus other directors that can, feels like torturing yourself on purpose. It’s what it is.

The second, and bigger in my opinion, is that the 2017 BEGUILED frames the story from the perspective of the women. This wouldn’t seem to be a huge deal; after all, there’s only one man in the whole movie (more or less). The thing is, though, that I think Corporal McBurney might be the most compelling character in the whole thing (save for arguably Edwina). Yes, the women are the ones who are changed from the experience, so it would make sense to put the dramatic focus on them. But, when you have such a bizarre and dark central character provided to you, sometimes you gotta roll with it. Focusing on McBurney and his headspace is a large reason why Siegel’s version has such an offbeat and unforgettable vibe (well, that and the incest subplot….it sort of makes sense in context….you should just watch it.) Coppola’s version lacks a punch by comparison.

(Also, it doesn’t do the 2017 version any favors that Geraldine Page blows Nicole Kidman out of the water in terms of performances. I hadn’t brought up the Coppola version’s biggest star yet up for a reason, and it’s because Kidman made no impression on me whatsoever. Considering she used to be one of the most compelling leading women we had, this was rattling for me.)

AND YET. Unlike THE BLING RING, THE BEGUILED has ideas and a point of view and a palpable artistic vision. This was a relief to me, because Sofia Coppola obviously means something to me. I wouldn’t have dedicated my summer to her movies and inspirations if she didn’t! It sucked to see her take such an artless turn seemingly out of nowhere. If nothing else, THE BEGUILED at least showed me that she hadn’t lost it.

But, you know….you should watch both versions. Just because.

THE BLING RING Goes In Circles

The 2000’s were a terrible time.

I’m allowed to say that. I was there.

Demographically (and calendar…ically) speaking, my adolescent years ran from 1998 to about 2009 or so. With a birth year of 1988, I didn’t experience the 1980’s in any meaningful way, and most of the 1990’s are actually kind of a blur; I don’t think I really processed things in front of me as “oh, a new TV show/cartoon/movie/song” until 1997, 98 or so. Thus, the 2000’s were the first decade I got to consciously experience from beginning to end.

It was a bad time.

To be clear, I didn’t necessarily have a bad time; my adolescent and teenage years had the ups and downs you might expect, but the average day was probably no worse or better than yours. I went through the same peaks (realizing there are a few things I’m actually really good at! Developing a close-knit friend group!) and valleys (realizing there are many more things I’m not good at! The realization that there was more darkness in my family than anyone let on!) that most kids go through.

It was just….all the stuff around us. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what was so awful about the detritus that was the Aughts. The things that come to mind aren’t exactly unique to that time; parasitic celebrity gossip wasn’t new in 2000, loud and obnoxious blockbusters meant to be consumed and forgotten were in their third decade at that point, an weird shifts in popular music taste** just kind of comes with being alive.

* That was part of it too, we never landed on a satisfying, rhythmic name for the decade.

** Although, man, if you weren’t there for that moment when boy bands were out and nu-metal was in, seemingly overnight, you missed out. It was hilarious, like someone hit a switch or something.

However, it did kind of all feel vaguely like maybe we were in the beginning of the end. Cheap reality television exploded, first off the backs of solid network hits like SURVIVOR and THE AMAZING RACE, then accelerated by cheapie celebrity fodder like THE OSBOURNES and THE SIMPLE LIFE, before practically mandated after a late-decade writers’ strike that ground the only decent programming out there to a halt. Media outlets like TMZ added a really sadistic and snarky streak to the gossip rags, encouraging us to giggle and roll our eyes at the deteriorating health of public figures like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Amy Winehouse (semi-related note: most stand-up comedy in the 00’s was godawful, too). And, although I personally believe them to be pretty great in their own ways, the 2008 summer releases of IRON MAN and THE DARK KNIGHT are more or less responsible for the current collapse of the superhero movie genre, and maybe all of Hollywood.

Oh yeah, and 9/11. That sucked, too.

So, when I learned that a filmmaker that I really liked, and one that always managed to have something to say about her favorite subjects (the ennui and isolation of upscale life being a big one), made a film based off one of the last “celebrity culture” news events of the decade, I got excited. Sofia Coppola making a movie about the Bling Ring felt like a match made in heaven.

So, of course it sucked. Why wouldn’t it? Everything else about the 2000’s did.

THE BLING RING (2013)

Starring: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, Katie Chang, Taissa Farmiga, Leslie Mann

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: June 14, 2013

Length: 90 minutes

“THE BLING RING? More like Bore Ring!” - my wife

Yeah, look, I’m just going to get straight to the point. I didn’t like THE BLING RING much, if at all. It was a shocking crash following the high of Sofia Coppola’s previous film, SOMEWHERE, a movie I just about loved due to her instincts as a director guided her to an unbroken series of good decisions. Here, the complete opposite occurred, and I’m left to try to figure out what happened.

For those not in the know, THE BLING RING is a movie based off a real event (specifically, it’s based off a 2010 Vanity Fair article), where a group of seven Calabasas teens who started just kinda walking into the mansions of nearby celebrities when they weren’t home and taking off with some of their outfits (one of the teens referred to it as “going shopping”). They were all mostly fashion, reality television and social media obsessed. In fact, one of them, Alexis Neiers, was in the middle of shooting a reality show pilot for E! when the arrests were made (that show, Pretty Wild, ended up airing in 2010 and lasted nine episodes).

In the actual movie, the names have been changed, presumably to make it more of a fictionalized account. Nick Prugo becomes Marc Hall (Broussard), the repressed outsider and de-facto audience surrogate (and perhaps the only character in the entire movie Coppola actually empathizes with, more on that in a bit). Rachel Lee becomes Rebecca Ahn (Chang), the ringleader. Neiers becomes Nicki Moore (Watson), perhaps the most ready for fame of them all. Tess Taylor and Courtney Ames become Sam Moore (Farmiga) and Chloe Tainer (Julien), who…well, I don’t really know. The movie is largely uninterested. Together, they decide to start breaking into the mansions of the biggest celebrities the 2000’s could allow. Audrina Patridge. Megan Fox. Orlando Bloom. And, of course, Paris Hilton.

It’s not the worst source for a movie premise ever (especially since I’m writing this in a week where a trailer just dropped for a movie based off a fucking Twitter thread from a Buzzfeed employee), and it presents several opportunities. For one, it sets the stage for a unique take on a standard crime/heist film. For another, the idea of glitz and glamour glossing over a sadder reality is right up Coppola’s alley. Heck, it even provides avenues to explore a lot of sneakily-fascinating themes, the most prominent being the fact that, for as racialized and class-based the depiction of crime has traditionally been in media, it was ultimately fellow rich kids that brazenly robbed the affluent this time around.

It doesn’t even really matter that the ending is a forgone conclusion; the mere fact that we even know about this story at all implies they get caught. That’s okay! Not every story needs to be full of twists and turns. Heck, many crime films deal with this. As long as the characters are somewhat compelling (even if (especially if!) we don’t like them), watching the noose tighten around the necks of amateur criminals can be thrilling!

Funnily enough, the moment I accepted that THE BLING RING probably wasn’t going to suddenly make a comeback was when we inevitably reached the scene where the members of the ring are systematically arrested. Theoretically, in a crime story such as this, when you reach the moment justice catches up to our criminal protagonists, you want to feel one of two emotions:

1. Catharsis - these unlikable burglars are finally getting what’s coming to them and you can’t wait to see them squirm under the pressure;

2. Sympathy - you somehow feel for these admittedly shallow, privileged teens who were too bored and stupid to realize they were about to ruin their lives

What you don’t want to feel is what I felt, which is nothing. I felt roughly equivalent to the way I would had I merely skimmed to the Arrest and Aftermath section of the Bling Ring’s Wikipedia entry. And I realized the whole movie up to that point had felt like that, like I might have been better off just reading the Vanity Fair article and calling it a day.

This was…really shocking to me. And disappointing in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Because Sofia Coppola has spent seemingly her entire career dodging accusations of making boring movies with nothing to say about the lives of the rich people she depicts. I’ve always found this to be a really reactionary and frankly surface-level take, one borne of a willful refusal to sit down and engage with her material. Even her worst movie up to this point in her career (MARIE ANTOINETTE) absolutely has something to say about its titular subject. Whether or not you agree with her take on the famous French queen, she found an angle that she was intrigued about, and executed on it. It’s not my favorite, but it isn’t boring, and it isn’t about nothing.

So it went previously with LOST IN TRANSLATION and afterwards with SOMEWHERE, two movies about actors implied to be of means that aren’t all that likable on the page, but manage to break your hearts by the end. Hell, even THE VIRGIN SUICIDES found a way to depict frightened religious parents with a large degree of empathy and understanding, where a lesser movie would have made them the clear and obvious villains. Making the inherently vacuous kind of compelling (Midwestern suburbs, rich performers, the French aristocracy) has long been Coppola’s superpower. Tackling mid-00’s little Hollywood Hills shits should not have been that big of an issue.

But with THE BLING RING? What else can I say? She finally made the kind of Sofia Coppola movie everyone thought she had been making all along.

———

THE BLING RING has good moments and items of merits here and there. I really liked Leslie Mann as Nicki’s “The Secret” spouting stage mom, who’s written with just the right amount of blank-faced vacuousness to set the stage for a larger theme to the film (did these kids ever really have a chance?) that never comes. Emma Watson is an obvious highlight in the cast, although I was expecting something more transcendent from the way everyone was carrying on about her (I can only surmise that in 2013, people still associated her with Hermione Granger, and were amazed that she could play a completely different type of role, i.e. what an actor does).

The closest the movie gets to evoking an emotion is a scene where Sam finds a gun in Megan Fox’s house and starts waving it around wantonly in Marc’s face. Despite his protestations, she never seems to practice any common sense with the stolen weapon, and a weird tension emerges. There’s no music playing underneath any of this, and given what we know about this found friend group, it sure doesn’t seem like Sam’s coming to her senses anytime soon. Although nothing ultimately ends up happening, I genuinely feared for him here.

Finally, there’s a grim theme that the movie is practically begging for its creator to explore, that of the toxic parasocial relationship people have with fame. The central conceit of rich suburbia feeling entitled to just walk into a celebrity’s mansion and start taking off with stuff is so palpable and so relatable (this entitlement, more than COVID-19, is what derailed the possibility of any future secret album sessions for Taylor Swift fans, I reckon), you kind of can’t believe it doesn’t get addressed much here. It almost feels like a point the movie makes accidentally.

That’s….kind of it as far as positives go! It’s not offensively bad or anything, and I’ve definitely seen much worse. But there’s no insight, not even any active parody. Coppola acknowledges the artificial celebrity trappings that surrounded us in the late-00’s; there are frequent cuts to red carpet photos of Lindsay Lohan and Lauren Conrad and the like. But….so what? Yes, it existed. Now what? So it goes with the final reveal that Nicki is attempting to trade in her notoriety for clout, plugging her website in a tell-all interview. But this is hardly an original thought or insight; much better movies have been riffing on that them for decades. For the most part, THE BLING RING just sits there, content to be a flat and superficial film.

And I can already hear it now: “might this be the point? To reflect the flat and superficial nature of these teens?” And…possibly! This might have absolutely have been exactly the texture Coppola was after. But if that’s the case….well, the movie doesn’t really commit to this, either. Because satirical superficiality can still sing and pop off the screen; Amy Heckerling did it masterfully almost thirty years ago. But here….our core group of teenagers definitely don’t have a lot going on between their ears (outside of maybe Marc), but that’s as far as the satire goes, at least as far as I can tell.

If Coppola’s plan was to make a movie with nothing behind it, as a method of establishing character, it was a bad plan.

———

It dawned on me what the core difference was about THE BLING RING compared to the Sofia Coppola movies that came before. Whether she’s aware of it or not, I don’t get the sense she likes any of her central characters (again, outside of Marc). Yes, you can make the argument that they’re not meant to be likable, and that’s fair. Some of the greatest motion art features unlikable people at their core (hell, AMC gained a second life off the backs of two of them, Walter White and Don Draper). But in both of those cases, Vince Gilligan and Matthew Weiner found their creations fascinating, even when they were being awful. They, and their crack team of writers, liked exploring these guys.

The problem here is that I don’t get the sense that Coppola really cracked what could have been interesting about The Bling Ring themselves. I genuinely think she thought she could, or she certainly wouldn’t have spent two years of her life making it. But at the end of it all, it wasn’t there.

Ultimately, it turned out Coppola just kinda had nothing to say in regards to late 2000’s pop culture, which is a shame, because it was actually a pretty dark time. And maybe diving into the production of a movie set at that time in 2011 was too soon. But you figure if anyone was custom built to come up with something insightful about a very strange era in American culture, you’d figure Sofia Coppola would be the one.

And yet, she found nothing. It provided nothing for her, and she reflected it back in kind. And in a way, doesn’t that make it the ultimate 2000’s movie?

Getting Lost in the Middle of SOMEWHERE

People often ask me, “why do you primarily focus on chronological filmography reviews on your blog?”

(All right, nobody’s ever asked me that. About the only question anybody ever asks me in regards to the blog is, “why do you keep trying to get me to read one of those SANTA CLAUSE articles?”. But just for the sake of storytelling technique, let’s just pretend I get this question a lot. Theater of the mind and all that.)

Okay, so people often ask me, “why do you primarily focus on chronological filmography reviews on your blog?” And the simple answer is that I enjoy the simple thrill I get of charting growth from even the medium’s most established filmmakers. It can even provide context to movies that are already pretty well-regarded; something like Fellini’s JULIET OF THE SPIRITS is a monumental work on its own, but when taken within the full context of LA STRADA, NIGHTS OF CABIRIA, as well as his relationship with the star of all three, Giulietta Masina, it becomes a masterpiece of almost jaw-dropping audacity.

It’s just fun to see creators grow. When you go through a director’s filmography from start to finish, you start discovering things both big and small. What they did to get their first hit. What they do when their budget gets increased (or taken away)*. But, more than anything, you start notice the things they learn from their bigger successes or failures and start carrying with them going into some of their smaller films.

(*I think a lot of this is why the BLANK CHECK podcast, a show with more or less this exact premise, has been such a runaway success the past half-decade or so.)

So it goes with SOMEWHERE, a Sofia Coppola film that you don’t hear a ton about for whatever reason. It came out in 2010, which I wouldn’t really call a banner year for American film. Not that it’s the ultimate arbiter of quality, but the Best Picture nominees that year included THE KING’S SPEECH, THE FIGHTER, BLACK SWAN, and 127 HOURS, four well-received movies that I bet you hadn’t thought about once in the past ten years.

Yet it felt like SOMEWHERE just kind of came and went. I’m not even sure I remember hearing about it at all, and I was still firmly in my "keep tabs on this kind of stuff” era (my beloved Entertainment Weekly at my side most of the time. It certainly seems to be a faded memory in Coppola’s fairly scant filmography. THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, LOST IN TRANSLATION and MARIE ANTOINETTE all still loom large after all these years. But SOMEWHERE kind of went nowhere.

And it’s a shame because it’s terrific, and certainly belongs in the same echelon as her first three. More to the point, SOMEWHERE is the exact type of movie that ends up shining like a jewel when watched in the context of what a given filmmaker had done before.

In isolation, it’s a small character-driven odyssey in the desert of Hollywood. On the backs of the movies mentioned above, however? Sofia Coppola’s growth as a filmmaker from the end of the 90’s to the beginning of the Roarin’ 10’s is fully on display here, and it’s a wonder to behold.

Let’s dig into why.

SOMEWHERE (2010)

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Starring: Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning, Chris Pontius

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: December 22, 2010

Length: 98 minutes

Johnny Marco (Dorff) is a rising Hollywood actor crashing indefinitely at the Chateau Marmont, healing from an unexplained wrist injury. Passing the time between publicity obligations, he invites strippers over to his room, has casual sex with younger women, and kinda just hangs out with his childhood friend Sammy (Pontius). His marriage is long over, and he’s not exactly making a ton of new friends in his chosen industry; his most recent costar (played by a micro-cameoing Michelle Monaghan) fucking hates him after a failed night together.

Johnny is just nowhere.

In between all of these passionless activities, he does his perfunctory divorced-dad duties for his eleven-year old daughter Cleo (Fanning), He takes her to her ice-skating lesson, he drives her to things when her mom isn’t able to, he’s technically there. But it’s just one more checked box for him and nothing more. It’s not out of malice (he doesn’t seem to resent Cleo in any way), it’s just…it’s one more thing that fails to bring Johnny any meaningful happiness.

The “meat” of the movie is when Cleo gets dropped off at his door when her mom decides she needs a break. This coincides with a European leg of his promo tour for his new movie. Johnny has to make the most of this unexpected family time before Cleo goes off to summer camp. So….can he?

Admittedly, this all sounds a little dull written out. A movie about a burned-out actor who now has to connect with his precocious daughter, and maybe along the way he learns something. It all sounds like well-worn material at best, twee and annoying at worst.

Of course, the game gets played on the court, not on paper. Because the above forms the basis of one of Coppola’s more thrilling and underrated works, in no small part because it feels like she’s returning to what made her early movies work so well. Although I will never begrudge a director going in a completely different direction between films*, SOMEWHERE does feel like the natural successor to LOST IN TRANSLATION.

(* In some ways, her “return to form” for her fourth feature made me respect and appreciate just a half-inch more the expansion of her style palette in MARIE ANTOINETTE.)

The parallels between the two films are numerous; they are both about burned-out actors at a crossroads (although I would classify Bob Harris as more aloof and lost, while Johnny is truly a Fucking Loser when we first meet him), both feature leads living long term in a hotel, both leads find themselves desperately trying to connect with a younger girl (in SOMEWHERE’s case, it’s Johnny’s own daughter), and both films drip with ennui. Oh, and in their own ways, they’re about the mundanity and borderline humiliating nature of professional acting.

What struck me about SOMEWHERE is that it truly felt like Coppola showing us how sharp the knives in her tool belt really are. She’s come a long way in just four films, especially considering her debut (THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) was plenty strong already. She’s never been a director afraid to show off a little style, to say the least; both VIRGIN SUICIDES and MARIE ANTOINETTE told its stories with some visual heft. Here, though, she goes for a more austere style. It was the correct and perfect choice.

As a result, SOMEWHERE has a palpable confidence to it. Here, Coppola has visual storytelling down to a science, to the point where anyone claiming this movie is “boring” (and, oh goodness, are they out there) is almost actively trying not to pay attention. Coppola tells you the entire story of Johnny, the way he’s passively cruel to the people around him, the ways in which his supposed success in an impossible industry has only exacerbated his depressive state, the way he can’t ever seem to take the obvious steps to get out of his own way.

The best part is that Coppola communicates all of this in really simple ways.

Take something like the two scenes that bookend SOMEWHERE, which both boil down to Johnny just kind of driving around. The opening scene: Johnny driving in long, slow, drawn-out circles in the middle of nowhere. The ending scene, after he really and truly does forge a connection and genuine bond with Cleo: Johnny driving in a straight line on a road to…well, we don’t really know. It’s to somewhere (cue that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing the screen meme). All we know is that it’s away from the hotel he’s been wasting away at. It’s in a direction, and maybe that’s enough.

It’s not a reinvention of the wheel by any means. It’s super simple, almost to an absurd degree. It’s Film 101. And yet, it’s also crystal-clear storytelling to a degree you almost never see in the twenty-first century. Without a syllable of dialogue (hell, in the opening scene, you don’t even get a good look at Stephen Dorff), you get exactly what’s up when we start, as well as the significance of where we end.

The whole movie plays off with this kind of simple confidence. Early on, we’re treated to an extended shot of a somewhat awkward and monotonous pole dance (to the tune of Foo Fighters’ “My Hero”) going on in Johnny’s hotel room. It’s, um, technically sound and it’s certainly synchronized, but Coppola’s refusal to really cut away from it, like she’s Chantal Akerman all of a sudden, serves to remove the luridness from it all. Instead, it feels vaguely sad. We don’t get anything resembling titillation, and neither does Johnny.

Then there’s the scene of Johnny getting his head sculpted for a special effect on his next film. He’s called in by the special effects team of his latest movie to sit in a chair for several hours as they cover his entire head in plaster in order to make a mold of his face for some sort of practical effect. His eyes, his ears, his mouth and, eventually, his nose (sans two little holes for his nostrils).

And then, as they wait for the mold to dry, the makeup team just kinda….leaves. The camera zooms in slowly as we wait for something to happen. The only soundtrack is the sound of Johnny breathing as deeply as he can, given the circumstances. A lone phone ringing breaks the silence, confirming that everyone has moved on for the moment.

Again, super simple in that perfect “why didn’t I think of that?” way. There are few better ways to establish building tension than with a slooowww, silent close-up; it’s done so effectively that out of context, it genuinely seems like something from a horror movie. But it helps to both further Johnny’s story along (this is what his life has been reduced to, sitting alone, unable to connect, at risk of being molded over and forgotten) as well as serve as metaphor for the suffocating effects of Hollywood*.

(*It’s also a reminder that many of your favorite actors have had to go through this ridiculous process, and for a lot longer than Johnny does here. Jim Carrey had to sit in the makeup chair for 8 hours to do the fucking Grinch movie, in case you’re wondering why he’s been off the rails seemingly ever since.)

Just through the nature of the film’s content, we’ve talked about actors in this article already. So let’s pivot to talking about the three people we spend the most time with in SOMEWHERE.

Stephen Dorff is an actor I don’t really think about all that often, which is admittedly kind of an asshole way to open up a paragraph meant to praise him. What I mean by it, however, is that was able to take me by complete surprise here. His big claim to fame is probably as the villain in 1998’s BLADE, or maybe more recently from the third season of TRUE DETECTIVE. But he seems to have mostly made his trade by appearing in genre fare. Coppola picked him for this role basically both due to his supposed bad-boy exterior and the sweet, almost shy interior, both of which would be great tools for this particular movie.

Mission totally accomplished there. You buy him so completely as this guy who’s completely burned out and in need of a change that’s he incapable of providing to himself. Dorff just becomes Johnny, one of the finest compliments you can give to a performance. For whatever reason, I keep reflecting back on the moment where he’s kind of stumbling through an awkward press conference, where he seems incapable of providing a satisfying answer to even the most softball question. It’s one of those “can’t see the acting” moments.

Elle Fanning, famously the younger sister to Dakota, holds her own as Cleo and portrays a strength and maturity beyond her years in her scenes with Dorff. Coppola allegedly screened PAPER MOON for Dorff, presumably as a reference point for him as to Johnny and Cleo’s dynamic. However, it feels for all the world like Fanning absorbed that Bogdanovich classic too, because she portrays her end of that dynamic better than could be expected for a performer of her age, More likely, this is another testament to Coppola’s maturing directing skills, a sign of her ability to pull exactly what she needed from her actors.

Out of fucking nowhere, Chris Pontius of JACKASS fame does a great job with a supporting role as Johnny’s friend Sammy. The ease in which Sammy relates to Cleo, is able to play and connect with her…Sammy is the guy Johnny could be if…well, if he weren’t Johnny. Pontius’ normal dude energy is actually what was needed here, and he provides a heartbreaking counterpoint to our lead.

———

It’s beyond weird, and vaguely condescending, to say you’re proud of an artist whom you have no personal connection to. But, damnit, I’m hard pressed to come up with another word for it. Especially for filmmakers with somewhat limited filmographies (she averages about a movie every four years; her upcoming PRISCILLA is only her seventh since THE VIRGIN SUICIDES came out in 1999), it’s so easy to lose the thread. And, to be honest, there’s still three left to go in this series, and they’re not well-loved classics. There’s still time to misplace that thread, Sofia!

But, at this point in her filmography, it feels like she’s only gaining strength. It’s really exciting to find a new favorite from someone who already provided me one of my favorite movies. If you haven’t checked out SOMEWHERE, consider doing so. It might be one of your new favorites as well.

Sofia Coppola and The (Possible) Reclamation of MARIE ANTOINETTE

MARIE ANTOINETTE has had a really fascinating lifecycle of discourse.

The movie, I mean. Not the person.

Well, maybe the person, too.

Anyway.

I remember pretty acutely that Sofia Coppola’s third feature and follow-up to LOST IN TRANSLATION, the film that won her a screenwriting Oscar, was fairly polarizing at the time of its release. The written record seems to back this memory up; it currently has a 57% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (not that the famous aggregator site has ever been a real reflection on a movie’s true qualities), and a review of some Wikipedia snippets confirm some critics at the time really loved it, while others….really didn’t.

General audiences didn’t seem particularly high on it either. Its CinemaScore landed right in the middle, at a C*. It made its $40 million budget back, but just barely: it made $60 million worldwide, which admittedly isn’t exactly nothing. Still, LOST IN TRANSLATION made $118 million worldwide off a $4 million budget, so MARIE ANTOINETTE’s relative failure must have given producers pause.

*Although, again, a CinemaScore is really only a measure of how much fun a given average audience just had, period. Consider that EYES WIDE SHUT received a D- CinemaScore, BOOGIE NIGHTS a C, while Michael Bay’s PEARL HARBOR received an A. Simply put, who gives a shit about CinemaScore?

Is any of this fair? Maybe, maybe not. All I can tell you is that, for as obsessed with LOST IN TRANSLATION I was as a lad (and, boy howdy was I), I was a little disappointed by her choice in direction for her next film. Marie Antoinette was not a historical figure I was all that interested in (I was admittedly an uncurious teenager in many ways), and the prominent usage of modern music in the trailers made me hesitate. It all felt…surface level somehow. Immature. To that end, I didn’t even see it, something that would have seemed unfathomable to me in 2004 or so.

It didn’t help that I had friends at the time who also rolled their eyes every time the movie came up in conversation. People definitely had feelings about it, although the sands of time prevent me from recalling exactly what they were, or why they were felt. But the facts were, nobody I knew really wanted to see it, I certainly wasn’t going to see it by myself, and I barely wanted to buy a ticket in the first place. So that was that.

And yet! Here in 2023, I have now seen MARIE ANTOINETTE. Furthermore, a quick scan through Letterboxd (which, because I actively use it, is in fact a completely objective way of deciding a movie’s value and worth) shows that there are many, many, many people out there who quite adore this Kirsten Dunst historical vehicle! My rushed math suggests the aggregate rating for MARIE ANTOINETTE amongst my friends is an easy four stars out of five. A reclamation appears to be at hand.

So, now having finally seen it for the first time, over sixteen years from its release, what did I think? Well, I liked it way, way, way more than I would have ever expected. Yet, it’s the first Sofia Coppola movie out of her first four (a de-facto spoiler for next week’s article, I guess) that I didn’t exactly love. This means I now have to use this space to figure out precisely why.

So…let’s find out!

MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006)

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Rose Byrne, Judy Davis, Rip Torn

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: October 20, 2006

Length: 123 minutes

MARIE ANTOINETTE tells the story of…well, Marie Antoinette (Dunst), an Austrian teenager who, in 1770, becomes betrothed to the Dauphin of France (Schwartzman) in an attempt to form an alliance between the two countries. As most of you are aware, Antoinette will become the future Queen of France. As history will turn out, she will also become the final one, as the French Revolution continues to foment in the background of her rule before finally consuming the country and the monarchy by the 1780’s.

Coppola’s film, based off Antonia Fraser’s biography MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE JOURNEY, frames Antoinette as somewhat of a tragic figure, a young girl who gets married into a life of luxury and power essentially against her will, then gets swept up in the excesses afforded a woman of her stature before getting executed by the masses at the ripe old age of 37.

Whether this is a fair depiction of Antoinette is up for debate, to say the least (and probably depends on the individual). For what it’s worth, it’s probably not a discussion I’d be able to have with much clarity, given that I’m not as studied on her as a figure as many others. What I could purport to know about her are items that basically come down to legend, with the “let them eat cake” quote looming largest.

It’s easily the most well-known thing about Marie Antoinette’s short but infamous life, the ultimate “too wealthy elitist leader who is completely out of touch with the common man”, a response to the information that the peasants had run out of bread.

Naturally, she almost certainly didn’t actually say it.

The primary evidence against the claim is the fact that the quote was coined in 1765 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his autobiography CONFESSIONS, when Antoinette was only nine years old and hadn’t yet left her native Austria. Even in that context, it’s hard to tell whether Rousseau’s tale that spurned the phrase was itself truthful (he attributed the “let them eat cake” to simply an unnamed “great princess”). It’s equally unclear how exactly the quote got attached to Antoinette in the first place. But, in the decades after her reign, it certainly felt like something she could have said. So if pro-revolutionaries recognized the symbolic power of the phrase implied as such, what’s the harm?

Thus an entire legacy is altered permanently in culture.

So, I ask: if the “let them eat cake” quote turned out to not be anything I can attribute to her, what else do we think we “know” about Marie Antoinette?

This is the same question that MARIE ANTOINETTE has on its mind as well, and it’s probably the best prism with which to view Coppola’s film here, although it’s also what I think ultimately ruffled some feathers. The movie’s distinctive feature is its committal to depicting Marie Antoinette not necessarily as an out-of-touch member of the ruling class, but as an outsider trying her best. This runs somewhat counter to our popular understanding of her and, thus, has the vague cadence of someone stirring the pot*.

(* It should be noted that the 2001 biography Coppola’s script is technically based off of, Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: The Journey is also known for being a quite balanced and sympathetic account of her life, although it should also be noted that I have not read it.)

MARIE ANTOINETTE would seem to be an even more controversial watch in 2023, when “eat the rich” sentiment is, not unreasonably, at an all-time high. What is one to think now of a giant shopping scene set to “I Want Candy”? Couple all of that with the friendly reminder that this is a film birthed from a director who happens to be the child of one of the most well-regarded filmmakers of all time, a woman who for all intents and purposes was born on third base. Simply put, one may ask: why would I care about a rich, privileged woman’s sympathies for another rich, privileged woman?

So I get the instant hostility.

AND YET. I think it’s this marriage of creator and subject matter that gives MARIE ANTOINETTE its…something. Because what the movie seems to be about, more than class, more than French history, is about celebrity and what it means to be swept up in it, accept it, embrace it, then ultimately get destroyed by it.

A major aspect of the film are how concerned people are about Marie needing to be doing things “correctly”. She needs to act a certain way in public. Her marriage needs to be of a certain passion. She’s taking too long to provide the Dauphin a heir (her mother writes her letters on how to help things along in that regard). She’s inappropriately giving the cold shoulder to the current king’s mistress (Asia Argento). She needs to be comfortable in power, but shouldn’t enjoy it (In the film’s less subtle moments, Marie hears all the gossip directed at her as she walks through the halls of the Palace of Versailles). On and on it goes.

Her marriage is amiable, not unfulfilling. Her only role is to be by her side and be “perfect”. The only thing that allows her any sort of joy is partying and buying beautiful clothes. So, naturally, she gets advised by her own damn brother, The Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (Danny Huston), not to do that stuff anymore. Her lavish lifestyle coincides with a major financial crisis in France, which puts her in the crosshairs of the public. She eventually sires a son, the thing everyone wanted her to do, and settles down into a family role, but it’s too late. Louis XVI’s perceived indecisions and foppish leadership has doomed him, her and the monarchy as a whole.

Her public decides they’re done with her, and they kill her. They have their reasons, but then, everybody does.

If you separate Marie Antoinette from the context of European politics and put in a more modern context of a public figure, this all sounds familiar, right?

This is more or less how we expect our most notable personalities (usually performers and entertainers, although not always!) to conduct themselves. Women are either too fat or too skinny. Men are either total assholes or they’re little smol beans that must be protected. We demand unfettered access to their personal lives, only to turn around and mock them for being “sloppy”. And lest you ever feel bad for celebrities…well, that’s what the money’s for, right?

This is an intentional line Coppola is drawing, at least it seems to me. And I think that’s why MARIE ANTOINETTE is worth checking out at least once to see how it hits you.

And, I get it. How do you feel bad for the powerful, either onscreen or off? But I think Coppola is maybe one of the few who can find a path towards possibly getting someone to. Considering her entire formative years and beyond must have been populated with figures exactly like this, the influential, famous and beautiful who nevertheless have feelings, desires and anxieties…it doesn’t exactly surprise me that Coppola found this aspect of Antoinette completely compelling.

Kirsten Dunst is a good fit for Marie Antoinette in this regard, and it’s fun to see how much she’s grown, both as an individual and as a performer, since we last saw her in 1999’s THE VIRGIN SUICIDES. Between those two films, Dunst’s career had skyrocketed thanks to her costarring role as Mary Jane Watson in the first two Sam Raimi SPIDER-MAN films. She had also gained cool cult-film cred with 2000’s BRING IT ON and 2004’s ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND.

But I think it’s easy to forget how skilled a performer Dunst can really be. It helps that she’s able to pull off the glamour you imagine Antoinette to be associated with; she doesn’t exactly look like her, but she does feel like her, and maybe that’s all the difference. But, she plays the somewhat contradictory emotion of this somewhat lost and naive soul well. Every scene of her and Louis XVI trying to connect, trying to make something out of this arrangement they’ve been thrown into…it’s bittersweet and kind of heartbreaking. Crucially, when the movie reaches its inevitable conclusion, your heart sinks more than a little bit. I think this wouldn’t be the case if Dunst weren’t so compelling in the role, which makes her perhaps the most important piece of this film’s foundation.

We haven’t talked about him much, but by the way, Jason Schwartzman is phenomenal as Louis-Auguste, the Dauphin of France. In a bit of perhaps-unintentional meta-comedy, he’s a legacy hire, likely cast for his familial connection to Coppola (they’re cousins). But that would only be an issue if he weren’t as good in the role as he is. He fully realizes the Dauphin as a character, a boy given a man’s position that he is completely not ready for. As far as all that hand-wringing from the royal court that Marie cannot provide the country an heir? Yeah, turns out that’s more on the Dauphin than people want to admit.

Despite the lack of solid evidence that Louis XVI was in fact gay, it’s a rumor that has dogged him even to this day (possibly as a during-his-time explanation as to why they had such trouble consummating). The movie seems to at least flirt with this as a possibility, although it’s just as likely that Louis XVI was too young, too indecisive, too introverted, too unattracted to his assigned wife (he would have made an incredible Redditor).

Schwartzman plays this ambiguity perfectly. Whether or not he was a latent homosexual, or whether he was just a sweet weirdo under pressure, all that matters is that he’s a recipe for disaster, a heavily introverted leader who does as much to sour the people against the monarchy as Marie ever did. And, look, if you’re going for that kind of guy, there’s no reason to look further than Jason Schwartzman.

———

Interestingly, the aspect of the movie’s production that I thought for sure would drive me crazy was easily my favorite part about it, that being its modern soundtrack. I often find that using modern music or production aspects to gussy up an old story or period piece is a corny crutch that implies a distrust of a given audience’s interest in the very story it’s invested itself in.

Here, though, Coppola’s ear for the perfect “needle drop” comes through. Take the infamous use of The Strokes’ “What Ever Happened”; for whatever reason, more than any other song on the soundtrack, this gets singled out as something egregious. My first counterpoint is that the song rocks, so who cares. My second and more productive counterpoint, though, is that the song happens to sonically match the emotion of the moment in the film perfectly.

As a reminder, the song arrives as Marie is giddily arriving back from the beginnings of her affair with Axel von Fersten (a mid-twenties Jamie Dornan!). She’s running as quickly as her uptight, high-end outfit can allow. She finally crashes onto her canopy bed, and just kinda….stares into space. She’s a teenager in love, maybe for the first time. Tell me “What Ever Happened” doesn’t sound like how that feels.

(Also, I think “What Ever Happened”, a song whose exact meaning appears to be somewhat open to debate, sure seems like it has the trappings of celebrity on its mind. It doesn’t seem to mach this moment lyrically, but it does seem to align with the deeper themes of MARIE ANTOINETTE as a whole.)

The soundtrack to MARIE ANTOINETTE goes on like this. There’s an inherent emotional truth to the songs being used, and that’s why it works. It’s not cheesy novelty (this isn’t peasants screaming”WE WILL ROCK YOU” at a jousting match in A KNIGHT’S TALE) or an incongruous attempt to force the text to support an invalid interpretation (everyone calling their guns swords in ROMEO + JULIET). It’s a way to paint the feeling of a given scene with whatever sound is deemed necessary. Using modern and semi-modern rock as the sonic palette is a conscious choice, but it’s also one with a purpose.

If nothing else, it’s a choice that gets us that coronation scene where The Cure’s “Plainsong” begins blaring, as the future of France (and its two new in-over-their-heads rulers) has changed forever. A top Sofia Coppola musical moment if there ever was one.

———

Dang, Ryan, it sure sounds like you liked it! Well, and I did. But, as I indicated at the top, I didn’t quite love it.

The issue for me is…the movie doesn’t quite have a secondary gear beyond its unique interpretation. I think I enjoyed this idea of who Marie Antoinette might have been like, but I’m not sure it inspired any desire to dig further into the subject, if even just to fact-check the movie.

Now, I try to be really careful not to judge a piece of art for what it isn’t. Thus, I want to make sure I’m not railing on MARIE ANTOINETTE for not being a full-fledged biography or historical document. It’s not trying to be. Its aim is to be a moody and dreamy character piece. In fact, her stated desire for the film was, allegedly, thus:

It is not a lesson of history. It is an interpretation documented, but carried by my desire for covering the subject differently.

In that sense, it’s 100% mission accomplished. And it created a good movie (refer back to everything we just talked about)!

However, I can’t help but think about a movie that Coppola had mentioned as an influence for MARIE ANTOINETTE: Ken Russell’s 1975 ode to Franz Liszt LISZTOMANIA.

There are superficial similarities between the two films. Their principal subjects are famous “celebrities” of their time (and I had little to no historical knowledge of either). They are both anarchic historical biopics in their own way, with equal concern for emotional accuracy as opposed to historical accuracy and, of course, they’re both infused with a modern sensibility. And both films have evoked extremely strong reactions, both positive and negative.

But, of course, they are deeply different films at the end of the day. Russell goes full fucking Ken Russell on LISZTOMANIA (if you haven’t seen it, you must), while MARIE ANTOINETTE is a much gentler type of movie. And there isn’t anything wrong with that. But, maybe just out of its sheer audacity, LISZTOMANIA immediately triggered a strong response from me the second it was over: “I guess I need to bone up on Franz fucking Liszt”.

Alternatively, I guess MARIE ANTOINETTE the movie, as interesting and maybe as underrated as it was, didn’t really get me that excited to learn any more about Marie Antoinette the woman. Further, I don’t know that I was left with much more to chew on when it was over than the notion of “maybe popular history has misunderstood her”. Paradoxically, some solid prior knowledge of this time in world history would almost certainly be a boon to the experience, since the movie’s primary directive is to riff off that knowledge.

Basically, if I had done some studying beforehand, I might genuinely have loved MARIE ANTOINETTE. Further, there’s a very real chance that with some studying, this could become a movie I love on a re-watch. I just don’t know that I’m going to do that solely because I liked it.

Sorry, Sofia. On this one, it’s not you, it’s me.

On the other hand, I think of something Marie says to her first-born child, a daughter instead of the anticipated son, in a moment of quietness about midway through the film. Marie says to Marie Therese, simply:

“You are not what was desired, but that makes you no less dear to me.”

Yeah.

LOST IN TRANSLATION and The Power of Connection

One of the hardest questions for me to answer is “what’s your favorite movie?”

Responding to any variation of the “what’s your favorite ___?” inquiry is a daunting task, mostly because…well, nobody ever seems prepared to receive the almost infinite number of possible responses. There are always hidden right and wrong answers, but even the right answer can often be deemed wrong. For instance, say you asked someone “who’s your favorite musical artist?”, and they answered with “The Beatles”. It would be a technically appropriate answer (maybe even The Answer), but it would feel somewhat unsatisfying, right? Deep down, it feels a little too easy or something, doesn’t it? On the other hand, say they responded with a sincere “Imagine Dragons!”. You wouldn’t be able to hide your instantaneous eye roll, begging the question as to why you even asked in the first place if you were going to throw attitude at an “incorrect” answer.

It’s a piece of common communication that often breaks down before it even begins.

Because what we’re really looking for is something interesting, an answer that provides a little insight into the inner workings of the person being asked. You’re kinda hoping the question “who’s your favorite musical artist?” gets responded to with something like “King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard”. So the natural anxiety, at least for me, is the feeling that I have to come up with something cool when asked about my very favorite things.

Thus, when people ask “what’s your favorite movie?”, I’ll mention a range of candidates and maybe spit out one or two titles that mean something dear to me, both in terms of its content as well as its significance in a certain time of my life.

But when it comes to “Favorite Movie”, I stay away from defining it altogether. I have too much trouble communicating it.

Anyway, LOST IN TRANSLATION is my favorite movie.

Or at least it has been. Maybe it still is! All I can tell you is that it’s one of the very few movies that still conjures up the exact feelings I had the first time I ever saw it.

It was November of 2003, I was fifteen years old and my mom and I were knocking out movies that were starting to get awards buzz. It’s a process that caused me to see quite a few films that I enjoyed (ADAPTATION, SIDEWAYS) and many that ended up going in one ear and out the other (RIP to SEABISCUIT and MILLION DOLLAR BABY). LOST IN TRANSLATION was quickly becoming an indie darling that particular year, so we headed down to the Tower Theatre, one of the only two theaters in town that really played stuff like this. I didn’t walk into the theater with any preconceived notions. I mean, I liked Bill Murray from all the stuff a fifteen-year old boy would have seen him in (GHOSTBUSTERS, GROUNDHOG DAY), but I didn’t know Scarlett Johannson and I certainly didn’t know Sofia Coppola.

Oooh, boy, did that change.

I had never really seen a movie that…not spoke to me, exactly, but allowed me so totally to enter its dreamlike haze. Part of it was the soundtrack, part of it were the characters’ knacks for expressing entire lifetimes of thought without actually saying anything, part of it was just its specific color palette. I had never seen a movie that had so completely absorbed me. I’m not certain I’ve ever seen another.

And, man, for years afterwards, I just would not shut up about this movie, so attached I had become to its dreamy melancholy. If someone else mentioned it at school, I desperately wanted to slide into the conversation (and often did, much to their chagrin). I lamented THE RETURN OF THE KING’s historic Oscar sweep that year, if only because it came at the cost of mostly freezing out LOST IN TRANSLATION (at least in my mind; Coppola did walk away with a Best Original Screenplay trophy). The second it got released on home media, I chronicled my pursuits of finding a DVD that was specifically in widescreen on my LiveJournal. There are people I went to high school with who will text me to this day whenever the movie comes up in the course of their natural lives. To them, I say, thanks for bearing with me.

It may surprise you, then, to hear that I really didn’t revisit LOST IN TRANSLATION once I graduated high school. The thing of it is, once you reach your college years and beyond, you begin the process of slowly reappraising and revisiting things you used to enjoy. You dig up old episodes of your favorite cartoons. You pop on all the albums that shaped you. You fire up the movies that formed your tastes. And you often start noticing…hmmm, a lot of stuff I used to like was actually pretty bad! Turns out there’s no accounting for taste when you’re a toddler, and who the fuck knows what goes through your mind when you’re a teenager.

Because of this, I hesitated for well over a decade to revisit LOST IN TRANSLATION, because I just didn’t want to face the possibility that the reason it stirred me so was simply because I was a dumbass.

So there it sat. Until this week.

No, just kidding. I revisited it a couple of years ago first. Fuck, it would have been a way better story if I hadn’t, though, huh?

In February 2020 (yes, there really was a brief period of that year that vaguely resembled real life), the very same Tower Theatre that I had originally seen LOST IN TRANSLATION was doing a promotional event. Dubbed The Director’s Cup, it was a sort of March Madness bracket where eight different directors’ filmographies would be competing head-to-head against each other. Two movies would square off and be ran as a double feature over a weekend. You at home would get to vote for which director gets to move forward. So on and so on. They…uh….never got a chance to finish it.

Anyway, as a result, LOST IN TRANSLATION was playing in town to represent Sofia Coppola’s ouevre. Nervous as I was, I finally got to take my wife to see it how I saw it. This was it, the movie I had often talked about but never worked up the courage to actually pop in. In front of my spouse, no less, I was about to find out if my taste held up or not. And….

It held up. Of course it did. If anything, LOST IN TRANSLATION took on even more meaning now that I was an adult (we’ll get into it).

Now, it also revealed itself to be a movie with its own unique flaws, and we’ll talk about them as we get there. But it turns out there’s something universal about the feeling of disconnect, of being profoundly alone, and forging unexpected bonds in the middle of nowhere.

LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003)

Starring: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johannson, Fumihiro Hayashi, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: September 12, 2003

Length: 102 minutes

Bob Harris (Murray) is an American actor, one who has likely left his prime, who has arrived in Japan to shoot a series of Suntory Whiskey ads. He’s immediately and hopelessly out of his element; his translator has a habit of broadly summarizing the meticulous instructions being thrown at him, the hotel shower is much too small to accommodate him, and he can’t really adjust to the jet lag. His extensive travel is also clearly putting a strain on his marriage; his wife still needs him to pick out carpet samples, and she faxes him messages that come in the middle of the night.

Bob is a man who, in this particular moment, belongs nowhere.

Charlotte (Johansson) also happens to be staying in Tokyo, in the very same hotel in fact, as her rock photographer husband John (Ribisi) tours along with the band he’s currently working with. He’s sweet and well-intentioned, but neglectful in the way that only young career-oriented men can be. He’s always got somewhere to be so, most days, Charlotte’s left to wander the city alone. She’s far too young to be this disillusioned about her marriage and future, but here she is.

As any star-crossed people must, their paths soon intersect. Bob and Charlotte run into each other at the hotel bar, and they quickly spark up a friendship (or something deeper?) as it soon becomes clear that they are the only two people in the entire city, maybe the world, that they can actually communicate with.

What follows is what some people have uncharitably referred to as “nothing”. The body of the film is a series of events detailing the remainder of Bob and Charlotte’s stay in Tokyo. They spend a night on the town with some of Charlotte’s friends, as they hop from bar to karaoke bar. Bob reluctantly extends his trip for a few days in order to honor a booking on Japan’s version of “The Tonight Show”. Charlotte seeks something resembling spiritual awakening. They take a trip to the emergency room. Most of all, they both sit up at night and just…talk.

Again, not exactly what one would call the A to B to C method of screenwriting. But dismissing all of this as boring, as a not-insignificant amount of people seemed to do at the time, is an unfortunate way to dismiss what I would consider to be a very exciting and rousing film.

It’s through these vignettes that we learn so much about our two principals. More to the point, we learn just as much about them through their actions as we do through what they say. The stark differences in their demeanors when they’re together compared to when they’re apart. The way Bob’s malaise turns into joie de vivre. The way Charlotte suddenly seems able to articulate what she normally can’t even define to herself. That’s the movie in a nutshell.

Not to say that their words aren’t important. It struck me watching it this time around that Bob and Charlotte are both people who, despite them being at completely different points in their lives, find themselves in the same marital crossroad. They seem disillusioned, unsure of how they got here with their partner. It’s even interesting how their respective marriages kind of mirror each other; Bob is clearly the aloof partner in his marriage, similar to John in Charlotte’s.

All of this to say that this set-up leads to one of the more devastating exchanges in the whole film. During one of their middle-of-the-night talks, Charlotte bluntly asks Bob, “Does it get easier?” His reply: “No.”

He corrects himself, saying “yes, it gets easier”. But it’s too late.

This feeling of relief and honesty that Bob and Charlotte share with each other hits so nicely, not only because of the two astounding performances at the center of the narrative, but because Coppola so fully dramatizes their previous isolation within the first two minutes of screen time. Consider the first time we meet our central leads.

We can start with Bob, who is hazily sitting in the back of a taxi cab on the way from the hotel to the airport. He’s barely awake, and completely disoriented. The lights from the various billboards whiz by. Suddenly, as Death in Vegas’ “Girls” plays in the background, he sees it. One of his Suntory ads. The first thing he recognizes in this vast city he’s found himself in, and it’s a picture of himself, surrounding by Japanese type.

On the other hand, consider the first time we meet Charlotte. No, not the scene of her looking out the hotel window. It’s the famous first shot, a quietly framed shot of her rear end. It’s interesting to track people’s reaction to an opening like shot this, a desexualized picture of a private part. The first instinct I think anyone might have would be to giggle. However, the second is to get…a little uncomfortable, right? We’re used to shots of female body parts being depicted as sexual (consider that if the context were exactly the same, but with Bill Murray’s rear end, we’d likely know what to make of it more). But, in this instance? A female butt just…existing, as the opening credits roll?

So we just sit, slightly uncomfortable.

We’ve entered the characters’ headspace and it’s been thirty seconds.

———

The world of cinema has many examples of two unconnected people forging intense bonds due to random chance. BRIEF ENCOUNTER is probably the most famous, thanks to the heartbreaking performances of Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard, but also due to David Lean’s deceptively simple and efficient direction and the eloquent, Noel Coward inspired screenplay. It’s also not hard to make a connection between LOST IN TRANSLATION and Wong Kar-Wai’s international hit IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, a similarly lush and devastatingly understated film about two accidentally connected people whose feelings cannot be fulfilled, released just three years earlier. Lest anyone think that movie wasn’t firmly in Sofia Coppola’s mind when she was putting LOST IN TRANSLATION together, consider that it appeared on her most recent Sight and Sound ballot.

However, there’s a key difference between the connections between Laura/Alec and Mrs. Chan/Mr. Chow compared to Bob and Charlotte. Bob and Charlotte is the one relationship out of those three that doesn’t feel explicitly romantic, or at the very least fueled by sexual desire.

The exact nature of Bob and Charlotte’s relationship is absolutely open to interpretation (it’s part of the beauty of Coppola’s creation) but to me, I’ve always read it as non-sexual, yet wildly intimate. Over the brief time that they share space with each other, these otherwise unrelated and unconnected people are almost quite literally soulmates.

Yeah, sex does enter the equation, in a roundabout way. A running joke about a lounge singer who warbles in the background throughout many of the scenes at the bar resolves with Bob sleeping with her. It comes to a head when Charlotte catches him with company the next morning. And, sure, it all makes things awkward for Charlotte (Johansson’s choice of expressing bemusement rather than shock in this moment has always fascinated me). However, it never feels like a matter of jealousy, at least not to me. It’s more like a bubble bursting, a reminder that this….whatever it is…has an inherent end date.

It can’t just be the Bob and Charlotte show forever.

This “soulmate” character dynamic is key for a couple of reasons. The primary one is that it assures that the significant and blatantly obvious age gap between the two leads never feels lecherous; for all the subsequent criticism levied against the film, I’ve never heard anybody ever accuse it of being “gross”. The second reason is that this difference is what ultimately gives this movie its power. It’s what gives it its universality.

Despite everything, humans are inherently social creatures. Even introverts (of which I consider myself one) can only isolate for so long before a desire to communicate arises; it’s why the Internet can be both a wonderful and dangerous place. I think there’s something more beautiful, then, about Bob and Charlotte’s respective yearning is just for someone to finally get them, rather than a desire to get into bed. Just my two cents.

———

Coppola has stated she drew much of her inspiration regarding Bob and Charlotte’s dynamics off of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s chemistry in THE BIG SLEEP. I found this sort of surprising at first, as those are humongous shoes to fill, and I wouldn’t exactly say it’s a one-to-one translation. However, viewed through this prism, I see what Coppola is going for. There’s an comfortable rhythm to Bogart and Bacall’s dialogue and interactions, maybe the best real-life couple to ever do it (there’s a reason THE BIG SLEEP instantly jumps up a few notches whenever the two are on screen).

Murray and Johansson are absolutely no Bogart and Bacall (who in the history of cinema ever was?), but that easygoing nature is totally there, and I think it helps fuel the storytelling so well. Again, when you think about the major theme of “communication”, it’s a good instinct to have our two leads be so at ease with each other after a few days (and maybe a lifetime) of not really being understood, either by others or by themselves. Why not draw inspiration from the most communicative screen couple in film history?

For their part, both Murray and Johansson are fucking revelatory here, perhaps the crowning achievement in two equally successful filmographies (in completely different directions). Though it’s pigeonholed her at times, Johansson’s power has long been her old soul, her ability to project lifetimes of experience beyond her years. Although she isn’t often doing much at all throughout the film, her world-weariness is so apparent from the jump. To that end, consider Scarlett is actually playing OLDER in this (Charlotte is supposed to be 22, Scarlett was 17 at the time of filming). Not everything she’s made between then and now has been brilliant, but there’s a reason why, unlike many of her costars, she’s unlikely to have suffered much from spending a decade in the Marvel machine.

On the other hand, the most jarring thing about Bill Murray’s portrayal of Bob Harris is how un-chatty his depiction of the character is. It’s so against type; Murray had made his career playing smarmy wise-asses on SNL before perfecting the formula in things like GHOSTBUSTERS, WHAT ABOUT BOB? and GROUNDHOG DAY. He’s mostly known now, I suspect, for kinda being an Internet meme, one of those guys who’s famous for being eccentric, although I suspect that’s a mostly self-promoted persona (and one that has its damages; we’ll get there).

Point being, his performance here seems to be this real turning point for him. It came off his career-pivoting work in Wes Anderson’s early stuff like RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS. Those were supporting roles; here, he’s front and center. Intense melancholy hangs on him just as well as detached sarcasm ever did. The relative lack of a full screenplay (the final document was apparently only 75 pages) also allowed for Murray to do what he does best: improvise and give little wisecracks. The “Roger Moore” photoshoot scene is one of those little “can’t see the acting” moments that are so rare in film, and it’s because of Murray.

I still think he was robbed of the Best Actor Oscar that year (as far as who did win that year? My only comment about Sean Penn in MYSTIC RIVER is that oftentimes acting awards interpret Best Acting as most acting).

———

It’d be disingenuous to talk about LOST IN TRANSLATION without diving its most common criticism, that of its “otherism” and “Orientalism” of Japanese people. However you may feel about it, it’s hard to deny that a large chunk of the movie hinges on the differences between our two leads and the people that surround them. In fact, Coppola wrings a lot of comedy out of it; an early shot of Bob towering over everybody in an elevator gives you an idea of what we’re talking about.

To be clear, this is not “woke mind virus” trying to re-evaluate a decades-old piece of work; charges of uncomfortable racism has dogged the movie since the week it came out. I distinctly remember people on internet forums banging this drum very early on in the movie’s run (including one person who ran a website called Lost In Racism, a name so hilariously blunt that I’ve never forgotten it). And in an era of heightened scrutiny and hate towards Asian-American communities, LOST IN TRANSLATION can admittedly be an uncomfortable watch at times. A not-insignificant amount of Bob and Charlotte’s banter revolve around the way Japanese people speak English. There’s a joke at a restaurant where every picture of the different specials are exactly the same. There’s at least two more “L and R” jokes than you probably remember.

Here’s the thing, though. Outside of a few instances that I’ll get into in a minute, I don’t know that the joke is often specifically on the people of Tokyo. In that elevator shot mentioned above, the interpretation “the movie thinks it’s funny that Japanese people are short” feels like a disingenuous read, at least to me. If anything, the joke is that Bob is different. He’s already a man out of place, and now he barely has anywhere to hide. We laugh due to his discomfort. At least I do (I’m not interested in altering art for the sake of accommodating for those who are laughing because “lol, Japanese are short"!” Fuck you. Stop watching movies.)

One of the bigger themes of the movie is an inability to communicate. Hell, the title is an obvious giveaway. Viewing the film through that frame, sequences like the commercial shoot become clearer in intent. The commercial director rapidly firing off long and eloquent acting notes to Bob, only for his translator to boil them down to a vaguer “more intensity”…it’s a good bit! And the scene isn’t trying to illustrate how crazy these Japanese people are, it’s driving home Bob’s isolation, how there isn’t one single person in his world at this moment that is able to talk to him, or for him to talk back to. Without these scenes, Charlotte and Bob’s stories intertwining wouldn’t have half the impact. The intent isn’t to offend, it’s to dramatize.

Now, that all being said….

Back in 2020, sitting there watching it in an actual theater, the only scene that truly landed with a thud was the “lip my stocking” sequence with the female sex worker. For context: an early scene shows a madam coming up to Bob’s room and giving him instructions that he doesn’t understand, including a command to rip her stocking. You can probably do the racist math from there.

It’s not that it doesn’t fit the movie, per se; it’s another example of a communication breakdown between Bob and a person in his space. The issue is that the joke of the scene truly does seem to be on her, the Japanese woman whose behavior is so crazy and weird, despite her being on her own home turf. To that end, this was the scene where you could sort of feel the 2020 theater audience get a little tense (for comparison, the scene received hearty laughter when I saw it back in 2003. Make of any of this what you will).

Everything else, though? Bob and Charlotte poking fun at everyone’s poor English? It sort of made sense to me within the confines of the characters’ situations at hand. To be clear, the characters making the occasional “L’s and R’s” jokes isn’t, like, great behavior or anything (and you could strongly argue it was irresponsible of Coppola to include such dialogue in the first place), and if people in real life were called out on this sort of thing, they’d hopefully feel pretty embarrassed. And the movie doesn’t really provide comeuppance or consequence for any of it, although I’d also argue it’s not obligated to, either, depiction not equaling endorsement and all that.

On the other hand….two outsiders talking shit to each other about their unfamiliar surrounds feels realistic to me. We all do it, even if it’s an uncomfortable thing to admit. I find it highly believable that two white Americans basically stranded in Tokyo with nobody else to talk to would begin rolling their eyes and saying, “why does everyone here talk funny?”. It’s not nice, but it’s a defense mechanism. It’s what people do.

Oh, and I guess another thing to address is the Bill Murray of it all. I grew up with Murray as a presence for as long as I can remember. He’s a guy who made his career off of being funny in front of a camera, but built his legacy off of cultivating eccentric stories about himself, some of which can sometimes sound a little too good to be true. There’s also a large chance that he’s just a genuine asshole; Geena Davis and Lucy Liu have both recently opened up about how poorly they got along with him on their respective sets, and he managed to get Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut scuttled by getting a sexual harassment complaint made against him. In isolation, one can rationalize any one of those things as “Bill being Bill” and retroactive judgment being made against him. On the other hand, it’s possible he’s just always been a dick and has successfully gotten us to look at it as just “funny troll” behavior. You’ll have to be the judge, but I felt like it should be mentioned regardless.

———

Back to what makes this movie such a treat.

First of all, we’ve talked a lot about Murray and Johansson, but there are other actors who shine in this. Fumihiro Hayashi almost walks away with the whole midsection of the film as “Charlie Brown”, a friend of Charlotte’s who adds some gleeful anarchic danger to their nights on the town (in a instance of life possibly imitating art, Hayashi is a friend of Coppola’s in real life). Giovanni Ribisi is perfectly cast as Charlotte’s aloof and flighty husband.

And, my favorite of all: Anna Faris makes a couple of brief, but important, appearances as Kelly, an American actress also in Toyko on a press junket. Her depiction of that superficially nice, yet completely vacuous celebrity is so perfectly realized that it’s been long rumored to be a spiteful caricature of Cameron Diaz, which has never really been confirmed or denied (I don’t really see it, FWIW).

I also think LOST IN TRANSLATION perfectly captures the hazy romance of travel, including the weird sensation of posting up in a hotel for days at a time (in some ways, it’s even stranger when it’s a nice place). I especially have always loved how the movie takes the time to show all aspects of Tokyo, both the big urban hubs and its smaller, more serene spiritual side, all without ever feeling like a corporate travelogue.

Finally, as will become a recurring theme in this series, I simply cannot wrap this up without talking about the soundtrack. I wouldn’t say LOST IN TRANSLATION has a score, per se. Every piece of music within it is a pre-existing song, although there are a handful of Kevin Shields songs that were written specifically for the film. But every track is chosen so thoughtfully in building the atmosphere and vibe (people have described the sound as “dreampop”; couldn’t have said it better myself). It’s a big reason why the movie made such an impression on me in the first place; the scene of everybody singing 80’s hits in the karaoke room was responsible for putting me on a New Wave kick for a while in my 20’s.

And when the final song in the final scene starts, as the opening riff to Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” begins to play as our two leads separate, likely never to meet again…twenty years on, and I still get chills. And if you don’t, I don’t want to know you.

No, I’m kidding. It’s not that serious. I really love that moment, though.

———

This is silly, but I think about Bob and Charlotte a lot. I wonder how their respective marriages turned out, if Charlotte realized just how much goddamn life is ahead of her, and that she doesn’t need to play mistress to her husband’s occupation. I wonder how, or if, Bob navigates his starkly obvious midlife crisis. If he patches things up with his wife. If the whiskey ads were lucrative enough to have been worth it. Hell, I wonder if, in the advent of social media, Bob or Charlotte started chatting again or even braved figuring out a time and place to meet again after all these years.

It’s a movie I desperately wish could be given a follow-up, a BEFORE SUNSET-esque check-in on these two fascinating people. Yet I know that the very reason LOST IN TRANSLATION has any power at all is that it is an unresolved note. It’s a film that famously preserves its most cathartic moment (Bob’s final words to Charlotte) from its audience; Bob’s final words to Charlotte are whispered and rendered inaudible to us, a bold moment of dignity. They don’t know what happens next. And neither do we.

It’s a movie that gives you exactly as much as you need while leaving you wanting more.

I don’t think there’s a greater compliment I could pay a movie than that.

Reflection and Repression: THE VIRGIN SUICIDES

This summer, I’m doing a deep dive into Sofia Coppola’s filmography, mostly because….I’ve always meant to! We start, as always, at the beginning….

———

“You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.”

It’s awful being a kid.

It’s an easy thing to forget once you become an adult, when your soul becomes leaden with life’s curses, and you begin to feel the undertow of the boundless sea of nostalgia pull you in. As bleak as it starts to feel once you pass the legal voting age, though, adulthood at least comes with its own certain freedoms. The freedom, for instance, to crack open a beer (or two). The freedom to drive out to the middle of nowhere if the mood strikes. The freedom to hang out with pretty much whoever you want. Sure, those things can all have consequences attached to them, but there’s typically nobody in your way of doing much of anything.

As a kid? Your freedoms depend mostly on the mercies of the guardians surrounding you. You’re too young for beer; you’d be lucky if you’re allowed to even drink a sugary soda every once in awhile. Your ability to travel hangs on the ability and desire of a parent to give you a ride, there and back. And god help you if one of your friends (or…gulp…boyfriend) fails to merit your mom or dad’s approval. And this is all assuming your parents are anything resembling normal. Your already impossibly small world can become almost unbearably tiny if you’re dealt an especially bad parental hand.

How you deal with the restriction of freedom inherent to your adolescence and teenage years can make or break you. One option is to just sort of accept the ennui and decide to start doing things to amuse yourself, like writing crappy stories in a composition notebook, which can lead you down the path of eventually writing articles about Scorsese’s THE IRISHMAN and Lembeck’s THE SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE within weeks of each other during a pandemic (just as an example).

Or…you can rebel. And there are lots of ways to reclaim your freedom. You can lie to your parent’s faces just because. You can thumb your nose at their religion or beliefs. You can secretly call or text that boy they disapprove of.

Or, in the most extreme of cases…you can opt out of it all entirely.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES (1999)

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett, Kathleen Turner, James Woods

Directed by: Sofia Coppola

Written by: Sofia Coppola

Released: May 19, 1999 at the Cannes Film Festival, general release April 21, 2000

Length: 97 minutes

Based on the 1993 Jeffrey Eugenides novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES takes us back to 1975 Michigan to tell the story of the Lisbon family through the perspective of a group of neighborhood boys, reflecting back on their youth as grown men in the present. Seemingly living comfortably in a Grosse Pointe suburb, the Lisbons consist of the mother Sara (Turner), the father Ronald (Woods) and five daughters: Lux (Dunst), Mary (A.J. Cook), Cecilia (Hanna R. Hall), Therese (Leslie Hayman), and Bonnie (Chelse Swain). One summer day, Cecilia attempts suicide by slitting her wrists in a bathtub. From there, the movie tracks the Lisbons’ reactions and behavior to this unexpected turn, as well as the boys in the neighborhood that become oddly fascinated with these mysterious girls.

Initially, nobody really knows what to make of Cecilia’s attempt on her own life. Even the well-meaning child psychologist, Dr. Horniker (a role that gives us a wonderful and unexpected Danny De Vito cameo) chalks it up to a cry for help, and suggests increasing her socialization. In response, Mrs. Lisbon instead tightens the reins she has on her daughters, increasing their curfew. After a very forced, very sterile, and very supervised “party” with a couple of neighborhood boys, Cecilia excuses herself and leaps off the balcony onto the metal fencing below.

We follow as Lux begins a secret love affair with one of the hottest boys in school, Trip Fontaine (Hartnett). Their romance burns brightly before being inevitably extinguished in a cruelly arbitrary manner, and curfew becomes tighter and tighter for the Lisbon children. The daughters are pulled out of school and are essentially on house arrest. In response, Lux sneaks onto the roof at night to have random hookups with strange boys. From there, the movie chugs along towards the ending indicated by its title.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is about…well, it’s about a lot of things. It’s partly a story of feminine interiority. It’s also partly a story about the struggle for identity and autonomy in an inherently restrictive environment. Most interestingly, though, it’s also a story mostly told through the eyes of a group of boys. As mentioned, the film is narrated by one of the neighborhood kids (voiced by Giovanni Ribisi), now a grown man, reflecting back on this time of his life where he and his friends were obsessed with the Lisbon sisters, due mostly to the fact that they were so completely…unknowable. They’re not really allowed to go out much, they don’t really socialize….they’re essentially blank slates for others to project their dreams onto. Although we never see the boys as men in the present (although we do see a grown-up Trip, more on that in a minute), their perspective ultimately serves as audience surrogate, our window into the story’s central family.

This would seem, at first glance, to be counter-intuitive. A story about women told from the perspective of men? Phooey! However, I think this extra layer of narrative removal achieves the effect of keeping the girls further away from us. For instance, the only way the boys ever really get any insight into any of the sisters is through Cecilia’s journal after she passes. Even then, they’re only left to imagine what their documented experiences might have looked like, or how those experiences may have played out. Other than that, they really only have their assumptions and gut feelings. And so do we. When it comes to the Lisbon sisters, we know about as much about them as the boys do, which adds to the film’s mysterious and dreamlike haze.

THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is also a story that Coppola almost didn’t get to tell at all. Before pivoting to filmmaking, it felt like she was best known for most of the 1990’s as the scapegoat for why THE GODFATHER PART III fell short of its astronomical expectations. By the time she was given a copy of Eugenides’ book in 1998 (by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore), she was technically too late to turn it into a film, as a studio had already greenlit a production. However, she just wasn’t able to shake how the book had made her feel, specifically citing it as the reason she decided to finally enter the family business:

I really didn't know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done.

So, she wrote her own script anyway, mostly as a private project for herself. As fortune would have it, the original production subsequently fell through, and she was able to pitch her script to the production company that owned the rights to the book. She made a strong enough impression that she was hired on to be both the writer and the director.

The cast was assembled fairly quickly. Turner, who had previously worked with Coppola on 1986’s PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED, was allegedly the first to sign on. Woods was next, having been impressed both with the script and with the young director. After a extensive search for the right fit for Lux Lisbon, Coppola eventually went with her gut and selected 16-year old Dunst, who was transitioning from a child star to someone on the cusp of adulthood. Hartnett won the role of Trip Fontaine by seemingly embodying that mix of swagger and unbridled youth that Coppola saw in the character.

In the same quote above, Coppola went on to explain exactly what she saw so clearly about the story:

I immediately saw the central story as being about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.

With that in mind (especially that part about the “extraordinary power of the unfathomable”), it immediately becomes clear when watching THE VIRGIN SUICIDES what film influenced Coppola most directly in the crafting of her debut feature: Peter Weir’s 1975 mystery magnum opus PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK.

If you’ve never seen it, HANGING ROCK is ostensibly about a group of Australian girls at the turn of the century that mysteriously disappear during a picnic at…uh…Hanging Rock, an intriguing (and apparently very real) rock formation. But it’s a movie that’s also about…well, it’s also about a lot of other things. It’s about trying to seek understanding of events that will never be clear. It’s about trying to understand the motivations of people that are ultimately unknowable. It’s about the way nature can compel us to do all sorts of things that defy logic and reason. It’s about…look, you should just watch it, it’s great.

As you might be able to surmise, there are lots of similarities between HANGING ROCK and VIRGIN SUICIDES, to the point where it would make for a fascinating double feature. Besides the obvious parallel of a story (adapted from a novel) regarding a group of girls and their seemingly inexplicable removal from this life, it also features a boy trying (and failing) to understand the girls he admires from afar. Hell, even the costumes in Weir’s film seem to have parallels in Coppola’s; the Lisbon daughters’ unfortunate set of prom dresses bears a very close resemblance to the Appleyard school uniforms.

Another key similarity between the two films is this sense of extreme feeling being intentionally buried beneath the surface, just waiting for enough heat to cause an explosion. Yes, they deal with different types of feelings (in HANGING ROCK, it’s existential and indefinable dread; in VIRGIN SUICIDES, it’s the relief of human passion), but in both cases, the narrative is driven by this urgent sense that something bad is going to happen sans the resolution of this imperceptible note.

To be clear, they are ultimately very different movies, both in tone and in texture; THE VIRGIN SUICIDES feels like a foggy dream you keep trying to hold onto, while PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK feels more like a vivd nightmare you can never shake again. But seeing this kind of connective tissue is exciting nonetheless! And it’s thrilling to be able to see a very young Sofia Coppola consume an international masterwork and learn all the right lessons from it.

———

One of the most striking things about THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is how understated everything driving the narrative is. It’s a story that’s driven by behavior and feeling, which can sometimes get interpreted as '“boring” (an opinion that also gets levied against Coppola’s follow-up feature, LOST IN TRANSLATION). And it’s true, VIRGIN SUICIDES perhaps doesn’t precisely have that A-B-C structure that we normally look to in stories. Yes, there’s a lot of scenes that consist of things happening, but if a viewer isn’t able to connect with the film on an emotional level, it might not be clear what exactly Coppola is trying to say.

But the beating heart of a dramatic story is so definitely there, and being able to lock in on the emotions most of these characters want to express here is what makes for a thrilling watch. Zeroing in specifically on that feeling of longing and repressed desire is the key to unlocking what THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is all about. When you do, you can see two simultaneous and intertwined ideas within the film emerge: the suffocating effect of “normal suburbia” on youth, and the foggy effects of nostalgic memory.

We experience the first idea through what we get to see of the Lisbon sisters and the way at least two of them react to their parents’ fierce clinging to what they can control, out of a complete and paralyzing fear of the uncertain. Cecilia chooses to opt out entirely, successfully committing suicide early on. Lux tries to find feeling and take control in other ways, both through her passionate fling with Trip, then later through random trysts on the roof. In both cases, it’s a call and response to the panicked restriction of control, motivated by the Lisbon parents’ misguided attempts to keep things “normal” and mitigate risks against that normalcy. Ultimately, this push and pull between the parents and the sisters ends up being a race to the bottom.

We experience the second through the narrative framing of the movie. It’s important to reiterate that the narration is reflective, someone in the present trying to recall events of the past, making the entire movie a flashback of sorts. When taking the events of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES in totality, it becomes clear that this is also the story of a grown man trying to sort through maybe the craziest thing he’s ever experienced, desperately searching for an answer to the inexplicable events of his past, trying to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical.

In both threads, the idea of repressed passions keep coming up to the surface. Let’s go back to the boys reading Cecilia’s diary entries. It’s fascinating just how vivid their imaginations become when envisioning those diary pages playing out, and the visual language of the movie changes in kind. The moments that take place in their mind’s eyes are all shot like scenes from a particularly relaxed music video; dreamy shots of unicorns, silhouettes of the sisters superimposed against a normal blue sky (I’d also argue this is the visual influence of HANGING ROCK seeping through again). It’s all a stark contrast to the more washed-out world of 70’s suburbia the movie normally resides in.

Coppola directs all of this with a surprising amount of control and confidence. She does a wonderful job with a difficult assignment: making the invisible visible. To be blunt, subtle filmmaking is really fucking hard. To some degree, more “kinetic” directors have an easier job. Not that action movies are easy (compare the level of craft in an average Mission: Impossible to the endless parade of bullshit Netflix has been crapping out, lest one think action filmmaking is a lesser art form), but the story is usually there in front of you. Motivations are explicitly stated. The twists and turns in a given scene can be seen through a pair of fists. In something like VIRGIN SUICIDES, all those emotions need to be invisible, yet still deeply felt.

All this to say that this makes Coppola’s debut feature an astounding achievement. I’d stop short of saying it’s a perfect film. I have quibbles: I don’t think the boys themselves are all that memorable, unfortunately. Also, the toxic gas leak at the debutante ball near the end of the film is on-the-nose in a way almost nothing else in VIRGIN SUICIDES is. Even still, there are all these little touches throughout the film that inform the story without drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Like the tree in the front lawn that’s dead from the roots, an early symbolic sign that something is deeply wrong in the foundation of the Lisbon home. Or the sad insistence within the community that Cecilia’s suicide was actually just an unfortunate accident; they always knew those metal fences were dangerous!

A less dire example that also comes to mind is the reveal that Lux has written Trip’s name on her underwear are shot and crafted to align with this “under the surface” nature; we see the relevant part of her underwear via a superimposed iris over her prom dress. Like every emotion felt by every kid in this movie, it’s only there if you know where to look.

———

Even know you’re clued into them ahead of time just by reading the title, the suicides that bookend the film still come as somewhat shocking surprises on a first watch. On a second go, however, when you can really take in the behaviors on display, and the undercurrent of unexpressed (and unfulfilled) desire that infuses every primary character….it becomes clear that for these sisters, there’s truly no other way but out.

Given all of this, the unexpressed pain our main characters feel, and their ultimate fates, it’d be easy to paint the Lisbon parents as abusive monsters. But that’s the beautiful things about THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, at least as a screenplay: it’s really, really careful not to dramatize them that way. As presented here, they’re not actively abusive, not really. Not in the way we normally see abuse depicted in film. Instead, they’re presented as terrified. The Lisbons are 70’s-era religious, scared and confused. They’re overprotective to the point of genuinely repressing their children’s feelings, which creates an ouroboros of action-reaction (the Lisbon sisters desire even further rebellion and social interaction as it becomes further and further restricted, and that desire leads to further restriction….and on and it goes).

Kathleen Turner plays all of this with stark realism. In lesser hands, Mrs. Lisbon could have been a caricature of a religious head of household (and to be clear, she is The Head of This Household), an unfeeling zealot that craves complete dominance over her progeny. But, in Turner’s hands, she manages to be weirdly sympathetic, even as you desperately want to shake her and make her realize the damage she’s doing.

The biggest surprise, though: despite currently spending his twilight years being a complete ghoul, James Woods is….quite good! It helps that the character is wildly well-written, another understated Lisbon parent who has no idea how to even function, let alone do right by his daughters. Again, he isn’t a mean, abusive villain. He’s a total dork, a high-school science teacher, all white shirt and earth tones. What help can he really lend to his five daughters dealing with the pain of being a teenager? What counter-balance can he possibly provide to his scared-out-her-mind wife? So he doesn’t. It’s a realistic (and under-discussed) scenario, that of the man who applies for the job of father, only to turn out to only be just okay at it once he gets it.

Of the five actresses that play the Lisbon daughters, easily the one with the most to do is Kirsten Dunst. Although she’d already starred in major hits like JUMANJI and SMALL SOLDIERS, with future hits like BRING IT ON and SPIDER-MAN right around the corner, this still manages to feel like a career-making performance. Effortlessly sexy (but, crucially, only mysteriously so), she serves as good of a gauge as to the headspace of the Lisbon daughters as a collective as anyone else. When Trip makes the boneheaded decision to abandon her after having sex on the football field the night of homecoming, your heart sinks. It’s not just because we know what this is going to portend, but because Dunst embodies Lux’s heartbreak and shame so perfectly.

Hartnett is also dynamite as Trip, the perfect embodiment of the 70’s high school heartthrob. He and Dunst are just perfect together, and their chemistry is insane. There’s a very simple scene in a movie theatre where the two touch hands for the first time; you almost can’t breathe during it, a consequence of a film repressing its passions until two characters can’t help it anymore. When they finally begin to make out in his car, as the needle drops on Heart’s “Crazy on You”*…you can’t help but get swept up.

*(Shout out to the soundtrack, by the way. Coppola was careful not to overload it with a bunch of music from the period in order to preserve a little timelessness, but the few tracks that she does opt to use hit like gangbusters; sorry, James Gunn, but Sofia got to 10cc a decade and a half before you. But the actual film score by Air? Beautiful. “Playground Love”, the defacto theme of the film? Just great. It’s sometimes silly to break down loving a movie to something this reductive, but….a movie with a cool soundtrack makes me feel cool for watching it. In this sense, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES is an A+.)

However, I’ve always been most intrigued by the somewhat-incongruous flash-forward to an adult Trip (Michael Pare), who appears to be in detox treatment and deeply, deeply regretful for taking off on Lux all those years ago. In no other scenario in the film’s 97 minutes do we ever leave the confines of mid-70’s Michigan. So to all of a sudden be in 1999 for a minute or two in the middle of the film feels like Sofia intentionally drawing our eye.

It’s a diversion that the book takes as well, and I think it’s a way for both mediums to illustrate how the inexplicable casual cruelness that only teenage boys can truly exhibit tends to come back to haunt them as adults. It’s heavily implied in the film that his addictions as an adult stem from the guilt of leaving Lux at the football field. Now she’s dead, taken by her own hand, and all he’s left with are the feelings he felt and the inexplicable dick move that he probably couldn’t even justify in the moment, much less twenty-five years later.

As to why we get specific insight into Trip and not our narrator or any of his friends? I chalk that up to Trip no longer being an outsider. He got to tango with at least one Lisbon. He knew Lux, at least a little. So we get to know Trip. At least a little.

More to the point, adult Trip shows us directly the devastating power of memory. Trip is left with only his recollections as a young buck, when the world was rife with opportunity, when you could put basically anything into your body with minimal consequence. Now, as he sits with regret, he has only memories.

In the end, that’s all the Lisbon sisters are to our boys: the physical representation of a time gone by, never to return. A time where the world seemed like a dream, where even the unique horrors of childhood felt a little magical, detached from reality. That’s the nature and power of nostalgia (and THE VIRGIN SUICIDES): it can make you even miss the ghosts.

BABY J Births a New Era for John Mulaney

“Don’t believe the persona.”

It’s a brief comment made early and quickly thrown away, a phrase not particularly positioned as a punchline in John Mulaney’s new standup special Baby J, which started streaming on Netflix April 25th. All the same, it serves as the mission statement of his set, and perhaps this entire phase of the comedian’s career.

It’s been a long road for the Chicago-born standup Mulaney to reach this moment in time. Just a couple of years ago, it wasn’t all that clear that another special was even in the cards. So it goes when a comedian enters rehab and proceeds to both dismantle and rebuild his life and entire stage presence in the process. When an artist loses their persona, who the hell knows what comes next?

———

A lot of stand-up comedy depends on artifice (or, to put it less cynically, just some good ol’ fashioned magic). I don’t mean to shatter any illusions, but…many of the great stories your favorite comedians tell aren’t precisely true. They’re either greatly exaggerated in the details, stolen experiences from friends or family, or even just flat-out made up. But deep down, you kind of knew that, right? What are the odds that all these funny people have something hilarious and odd happen to them every time they leave the house? As Mark Twain may or may not have once said, “never let the truth get in the way of a good story”. Developing a joke, a funny story….it’s all work. And it’s work that’s done in the name of creating a persona that any audience on a random Tuesday can immediately identify with.

Personas are a really, really hard thing to develop in comedy, and an even harder thing to shake once you have it. All of the greats have a “character” that they’re playing, even if it’s only lightly enhanced for the stage. Norm MacDonald played the gleeful anarchist, Jerry Seinfeld the exasperated observer. Anthony Jeselnik embodies the amoral rogue, Sarah Silverman the sweet shock artist. But if you ever had the fortune to meet these people in real life, odds are you’d be amazed to learn just how little of their actual selves they’re revealing to their audience (okay, except for maybe Norm).

The persona extends to comedians you probably don’t even think are all that funny, maybe even more so! You understand intellectually that Larry the Cable Guy probably isn’t actually hooking up Spectrum boxes during the day. Hell, his name isn’t even Larry, it’s Dan Whitney. What part about this dude isn’t a lie? Yet he’s one of the biggest jokesters of all time. Note that I’m not signing off on him being objectively funny per se, but he has an astronomically large audience that’s into the idea of him. The mere fact that we all know who he is puts him, in terms of “success” head and shoulders above just about everyone who’s ever tried to pick up a mic and make people laugh. He worked out a character, fine-tuned it, and popularized it. His persona works.

But consider this: Larry is now trapped. I don’t really get the sense he’s looking to make a pivot at this point, but if he tried to…if he went back to just being Dan Whitney in public…well, it’d be a potential leap off a cliff for him, yeah? Who knows if his fanbase, who likes him specifically for what he’s selling, would go with him on that? He’d be a fool to try.

Let’s take this one step further: what if there was some sort of public scandal that went directly against the core of that persona? Say TMZ ran an article next week revealing that Larry the Cable Guy cut the cord back in 2019 and, in fact, is rumored to not even own a TV (note: I’m assuming most of his comedy is about telecommunications). Well, he’d be kind of fucked, wouldn’t he?

This is more or less the abyss John Mulaney was staring down as the pandemic surged.

———

For those who weren’t previously aware, it’s hard to describe how ubiquitous John Mulaney was/is among even the most casual comedy fans on the internet. GIFS and images of him were/are everywhere. Phrases, quips and punchlines from his many specials were/are so commonplace on message boards and social media sites that there’s an entire subreddit dedicated to unexpected uses of his material.

And, look, you couldn’t say the dude didn’t earn it. He worked his ass off to get to where he was. And his resume isn’t contained to just his four stand-up specials and countless talk show appearances. After being forged in the burning kiln that is the Saturday Night Live writers’ room, he turned out to also be an insanely prolific creator, finding himself working on projects as diverse as Documentary Now!, his own fucking Broadway show, and even a network sitcom*. He’s even in the Marvel universe, as the venerable Spider-Ham in Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse.

*A sitcom that, by the way, I desperately wished had worked. In a time when network TV was beginning its full-throated death rattle, Mulaney at least had the sincere desire in its style and aesthetic to return to a time when the network sitcom was king. The cast was a good balance of up and comers like Nasim Pedrad and Seaton Smith, alongside old pros like Elliot Gould and Martin Short. He even opened and closed each episode with a little stand-up act, a-la Seinfeld. Alas, it just wasn’t that funny and was never going to be granted the time it needed to find its comedic voice. Whatareya gonna do?

On a personal level, my wife and I have been fans of his comedy for probably over a decade at this point. We’ve had the opportunity and great fortune to see him live at least five times, in rooms as small as the local Punch Line club (where he mentioned that in the years between his gigs at this club, a timespan that included innumerable worldwide changes, the Nordstrom Rack next door had remained exactly the same), and as odd and huge as the Golden 1 Center (aka that place you all saw the Kings take the Warriors to seven last month, light the beam). In fact, we even got to see him work out his material that eventually became this special (back when the set was called From Scratch, a title I admittedly liked a little better).

One of my most treasured live show memories is Mulaney coming out and immediately unleashing his J.J. Bittenbinder material on an unsuspecting San Francisco crowd. Well, actually, the first thing he did was start profusely mocking the four prominently vacant seats right in the middle of the front row. From there, though, he launched into his whole bit about school assemblies, leading to his full breakdown of “Street Smarts!” by the aforementioned Bittenbinder, an insane former Chicago cop and, as it turns out, a very real guy. It probably isn’t literally what happened during this bit, but it sure felt like I laughed for ten minutes straight.

On stage, his comedy persona, at least before 2021 or so, was generally one of a boyish charmer with a briskly-alluded-to dark past. The combination of his old-school showman presentation (the suit and tie, the pseudo-50’s-newsboy quality to his voice) belies a not-so-clean lifestyle under the surface. As he describes it, college was a rough time for him(“I lived like a goddamn Ninja Turtle. I didn’t drink water the entire time”), and his continuing struggle with his Catholic upbringing provided a never-ending source of tension as a child. In the comedy present, however? A lot of jokes about his mother and father. A lot of stories about his wife, their dog and the happy, childfree existence they share. There was this intentional dichotomy between where he once was and where he now is. As he puts it:

I used to drink and then I drank too much and I had to stop. That surprises a lot of audiences because I don't look like someone who used to do anything. I look like I was just sitting in a room in a chair eating saltines for, like, 28 years and then I walked right out here.

Regardless of whether or not jokes about his married life truly made up the plurality of his routine or not, he pretty quickly earned the moniker of a “wife guy”, mostly because, when he did talk about his wife, they were stories about when he was the dope. For instance, his famous screed about the horrors of Delta Airlines opens with an admission that he doesn’t stand up for himself without her help. Yes, another famous punchline about her involves her being a bitch that he loves very much, but I think any normal person would look at that as the inversion of expectation that it is, and not Mulaney the comedian literally communicating with us that he genuinely thinks his wife is a bitch (seems like it would go without saying once you listen to, but I’ve seen people use this as evidence against him)

And, putting everything else aside, I think he’d still develop a fiercely loyal and clingy fanbase because…I mean…look at him. He’s jumping around the stage, making movie and Broadway musical references, he’s up there describing himself as a little courthouse mannequin. How could you not wanna put him in your pocket? Thus, his internet fanbase doomed him in the category of a “smol bean”, a room that ultimately only ever has one exit.

———

Now, as mentioned, John Mulaney has never precisely been dishonest about his vices and past struggles. As alluded to above, he’s had entire sections of his past material talking about the usage of cocaine, pills and alcohol. Still, like every other fan in 2021, I didn’t quite know what to make of the news that Mulaney had checked into rehab, completed rehab, divorced his wife, gotten together with Olivia Munn, and made a pregnancy announcement, all in what felt like rapid succession.

Despite all of my intellectual capacity to understand that, of course, there are no celebrities that we truly know (we all barely have friends and family members about which we can make that claim), it all felt at odds with what was presented to me. My immediate first thought, insomuch that they mattered at all, was how I was ever going to be able to listen to the aforementioned material about his wife again. How could he do that to a woman he made such a part of his persona, as if somehow I could possibly be the one betrayed in this scenario. My second thought was that none of this felt like the behavior of a man successfully in recovery, as if somehow I was the one that could be victimized by his addictions here. My third thought was that I desperately wanted to be able to laugh at his stuff going forward, as if I all of a sudden don’t possess free will.

All very dramatic feelings for a guy I didn’t know in real life. And I wasn’t even particularly as pot-committed to him compared to some of his biggest fans! Even though it was none of anybody’s business, really, Mulaney’s relapse and subsequent rehab constituted a genuine pubic image crisis. It got even worse when people started going down the rabbit hole of “figuring out the timeline” of when he got together with Munn compared to when he officially split with his wife. It was rough to see one of my favorite comedians become grist for the gossip mill and Deuxmoi crowd.

By the way, if you’re waiting for this to eventually morph a piece about the parasocial relationships we tend to develop with celebrities*, it isn’t going to happen, I’m afraid. There are a million articles all about it that are frankly better-written and more comprehensive than anything I can provide. What this is sort of settling into, though, is me wrestling with my feelings about John Mulaney as an entertainer and celebrity going into From Scratch, then again going into Baby J.

*(By the way, I sort of rue the day the internet discovered the word “parasocial”; that word can go right in the trash, alongside the words “MacGuffin” and “problematic”.)

When the time came to buy tickets for one of his shows again, it became clear that Mulaney’s persona crumbling down didn’t ultimately turn me away. Yes, the, um, character flaws that had been revealed as a result of all the drama weren’t great or anything, and served as a stark reminder to never worship a celebrity for any reason (it’s just better off that way for everybody). I want him to be well. But I ultimately landed on this thought: the fact that this kind of public fallout contradicted some of the vibes of his material wasn’t ultimately enough to push me away as a fan.

As a counter-example, there’s a reason I found it easy to drop Louis CK like a hot sack of doggie doo-doo once the long-rumored allegations of making women watch him beat off were confirmed. It’s mostly because his material conveyed the idea of a lazy man who wants to just sit and be gross and masturbate. Well, clearly that’s just a persona; anyone who has made two TV shows, several stand-up specials and countless amounts of money can’t be lazy. In fact, Louis CK might be one of the most motivated entertainers of the past fifty years. But when the rest of it turned out to be him telling us who he is? Like, that one part of his act wasn’t really a joke? It’s difficult to return to it*.

(*Although return to it, I eventually did. Out of curiosity, I fired up Louis’ comedy for the first time in years, just to see if the recent Grammy winner Sincerely was anything. I admit to laughing here and there, but I was also kind of stunned at how….sophomoric and shock-humory it all was? Like, “raping dead grandmothers” kind of stuff. I had held Louis in esteem as one of the more brave and intelligent comedians of his time. Was his shit always like this? Or is this just what he’s been reduced to at this point? To his credit, he does eventually Talk About It, but it’s only towards the end, brief, and frankly only sort of insightful. On the same day, I gave a listen to Jen Kirkman’s OK, Gen-X which also has “Louis C.K. is a creeper” material, and was five times as interesting. So. There you go.)

But for Mulaney?

There are those out there for whom things just aren’t ever going to be the same, or even recoverable. I have friends who just aren’t that into John Mulaney anymore, so palpable was the hurt he specifically inflicted on his now-ex wife. I suspect they’re extrapolating their own personal pain onto this public situation, but…that’s kind of understandable, right? That’s the issue with knowing, or loving, an addict (or even just a narcissist). You don’t tend to forget the hurt that is inherent to someone callously abandoning someone they love*, even if it’s a situation not your own.

(*Again, I must say, allegedly. Who the fuck really knows what their life was like together. At a certain point, trying to specifically justify and ground your gut instincts on these kinds of things requires you to make assumptions and run with them. Probably best not to unless/until someone writes a tell-all.)

———

This is why, I think, Baby J was the right type of material at the right time for John Mulaney. Outside of a couple of bits at the very beginning, the entire 80 minutes is dedicated to Talking About It (well, at least the rehab part of it; his current partner goes completely unnamed, which is probably for the best). Mulaney doesn’t swerve from the conversation at all; if anything, it’s kind of amazing how all-consuming the rehab talk really is, a few brief tangents here and there aside.

What’s most remarkable about the special is how willing he is to paint (or reveal) himself throughout the special as kind of an unpleasant dick. There are several stories told in Baby J that aren’t particularly flattering for him, including a harrowing tale of him buying an expensive watch in order to pawn it for drug money. He describes trying to turn his friends against his interventionist, as if maybe he could convince them she needed to go to rehab instead. He describes his frustration that nobody at his rehab facility seemed to know who he was. And, as he reminds us, these are the stories he’s willing to share.

If you’re a longtime fan, you can feel something being different post-rehab, even if you’re not really looking for it. Even though his signature style of delivery is still intact, he no longer comes off as an easy guy to be around, which is directly at odds with the classy imp persona that he had previously enjoyed. Watching this material both live and on Netflix, the aforementioned five minutes straight of laughter never quite materialized for me. BUT, I was strangely riveted in a way none of his other stuff has kept me. Stories about himself finding a quack doctor operating out of a New York apartment building who’s willing to give me Klonopin he didn’t need, a seeming minute by minute breakdown of his intervention….we’re a looooong way from J.J. Bittenbinder.

However, all of the above is actually why I think John Mulaney is going to be able to recover from his fall, even if his persona is never going to quite be the same again; he doesn’t provide a lot of excuses, if any at all. Instead, almost every joke in Baby J is directed at himself. He’s the butt of pretty much every punchline and that’s why it works. Even a joke about how the kids like Bo Burnham more than him now doesn’t seem so much a complaint as it does an admission of how the plates have shifted since 2020. Being able to wring an hour and a half of comedy by being able to nail down precisely what was funny about objectively the darkest time of his adult life…it’s impressive. Regardless of everything, The Kid’s Still Got It.

Compare this, again, to Louis CK’s first round of material after his exile, where he essentially blamed the kids. On the other hand, Mulaney’s ability to darkly laugh at himself may be what sets him free from his self-described “likability prison”. The “out of context Mulaney” Tumblr accounts or “every Tony winning musical as a John Mulaney quote” Twitter threads or whatever the fuck were good and fun and all, and it undoubtedly got him to the hyper-celebrity status he enjoys now. The persona has worked. It was a really fucking funny one. But now that it’s essentially been extinguished, a new and evolved one can now take its place.

The man turned 40 last year, which is usually an age that comes with introspection. And who knows how inward his first special as a quadragenarian would have focused in an alternate universe where his sobriety and marriage had stayed intact. But this is the universe we currently inhabit, and it’s imperative we make the most of the experiences we have. It’s hard to argue that Mulaney hasn’t done just that, especially *again* when you consider how poorly some of his contemporaries have done post-cancellation*.

*If you can even consider Mulaney as ever properly cancelled (or if anybody outside of a select few ever have, but…different conversation). Yes, his fans were pissed for a while, and some aren’t going to return. But the longest he was ever “gone” from the stage was his rehab stint during a global pandemic. Sorry, it bugs me that he occasionally gets hit with this tag.

Baby J proves Mulaney not only still has the chops, but he may be an even stronger comedic voice that we’d thought, even if the “internet’s precious little boy” aspect of his career is gone for now, and possibly forever. Mulaney has a gift for introspection, for zeroing in on an experience and nailing down what’s funny about it, for developing his act. And he’s spent the last year and a half using his weapons on himself. As a result, he’s capable of rattling off lines such as “when I’m alone, I realize I’m with the guy who tried to kill me”.

Despite losing a substantive part of his onstage self, something even more interesting may have emerged. A slightly slower, slightly older and slightly wiser Mulaney has been a good look so far. And besides, if the previous quicker version was a result of cocaine, what use is it anymore?

Wholesale change, even positive ones like sobriety, is fucking terrifying. It’s even more terrifying when you’re a public figure. I don’t know for a fact, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people like Mulaney sometimes resist cleaning themselves up out of fear that they may lose their creative self. It’d be understandable if what if I’m not funny anymore crosses their mind, even as they’re saving their own lives. If we presume that to be true, Baby J might be the best thing to ever happen to John Mulaney.

We Are The Story: Robert Altman Walks in NASHVILLE

As there must always be in every subculture across the Internet, there’s an ongoing discussion currently being held amongst the denizens of Film Twitter. This time around, it’s about the necessity of sex scenes in movies. I promise this is going somewhere.

Like many, I’ve been burned many a time by a sex scene popping up out of nowhere, usually when a parent or relative has just walked into the room (thanks, THE TERMINATOR!). And no doubt, there are many, many, many films and indeed entire genres that have sex scenes that exist only to (at best) titillate or (at worst) leer at a unsavory circumstance. However, I will mention that determining that kind of intent usually requires at least a little context, both onscreen and off, as well as some prior knowledge into the director’s prior work.

This is why a sincerely-held blanket “get rid of ‘em” philosophy gives me pause. Some are needed, some aren’t. And even if it’s not needed, I often think, who cares? Are jokes in film needed? Shouldn’t the characters stop being silly and just get to the point? But people joke in real life, so it becomes a movie thing. So it goes with sex.

As near as I can tell, a lot of the pushback on characters fucking is coming from intense old man voice Gen Z-ers on TikTok (Enjoy being blamed for everything for awhile, kiddos! We millennials had our turn). To some degree, then, this “discourse” can simply be chalked up to a lot of young people working out their feelings towards art, maybe for the first time, all against the backdrop of an increasingly complicated world. They’re just doing it on a never-ending public forum, something that a lot of us are extremely fortunate didn’t exist when we were in our teens and early twenties (a lot of my dog shit opinions are gone, nothing but so much internet dust now).

I also think the slow development over the past two decades of blockbusters becoming sexless, almost asexual, has pushed this topic to its boiling point. The FAST AND FURIOUS franchise serves as an almost too-perfect litmus test. Consider Dom and Letty, the defacto “main relationship” of the entire series (if you don’t count Tej and Roman), a couple that goes from grinding on each other in the first movie, 2001’s THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, to barely touching by F9: THE FURIOUS SAGA. Whether this is a development of people being able to get their kicks and thrills for free from other media, or a consequence of film franchises now mostly being so many action figures being smashed together, I couldn’t quite tell you.

However (I’m arriving at “the point”!), others have identified a less obvious, but more consequential, source of sex scenes being considered by some as “unnecessary” to the plot of a given movie. It’s this: in a world where everything is “content”, anything that doesn’t move that “content” forward is thus anathema to enjoyment. In other words, the plot is now the thing. You can see this in action within, say, the MCU fan circles, where the multimedia franchise’s quickly-atrophying critical and popular acclaim over the past couple of years is getting explained away as the recent movies simply just “not moving the plot forward yet” (ignoring the fact that a few of them since AVENGERS: ENDGAME have just plain not been good movies).

This theory makes the most sense, at least to me. This mindset, if sincerely held by a significant amount of film fans (and in a world where exaggerating complaints to generate outrage, who knows if there’s truly a majority at play here), is a shame! On the one hand, yes, stories are what we ultimately go to the movies for. But stories come in so many forms, and can be told in so many different styles. A binary system of determining whether a story is “being moved forward” or not shields you from a bunch of different storytelling possibilities.

Case in point (see? “The point”! We’re here!), the story of 1975’s NASHVILLE is wide in scope and breadth, yet it’s told via tiny scenes that seems disconnected until they’re not. And often, the disconnect is sort of the point, too. Most scenes in it are explicitly not “moving the story forward” in a macro sense, yet when it’s all taken as a singular piece, not a single thread of the tapestry turns out to be out of place.

It’s an ambitious film, and one that is regularly considered Robert Altman’s magnum opus. Without having seen the entirety of his filmography, I’m still willing to go along with that, if only because of its wild confidence. There are so many characters and so many overlapping developments and movements that you’d expect it to collapse under its own weight, were it not for Altman’s light touch and almost audacious assurance.

More than anything, NASHVILLE shows that stories can be told any number of ways and be just as impactful in its totality than almost any film being made in the modern market. And that makes it worth a watch no matter who you are.

NASHVILLE (1975)

Directed by: Robert Altman

Starring: too many to count

Written by: Joan Tewkesbury

Released: June 11, 1975

Length: 160 minutes

What is NASHVILLE about? Well, there’s a short answer, and there’s a long answer.

In short, the film provides a snapshot (or maybe a panorama) of the beating heart of the titular city’s music industry, at least as it stood in the mid-seventies. A bevy of singer/songwriters and producers, some well-established, some who are aspiring, and some who have had better days, descend upon the Tennessee town in advance of an upcoming concert/fundraiser for Hal Walker, a rousing underdog Presidential candidate for the fictional Replacement Party (a candidate we hear a lot from but, tellingly, never actually see).

In long, though, it’s almost impossible to really illustrate what it’s “about” at first watch-through. The sheer scope of everything you see, of the criss-crossing storylines, of the absolute volume of characters at work here, and the way many of them disappear from the film juuuuust long enough to make you think maybe they’re not coming back, just in time for them to get a showcase scene….it’s probably best to just take it in the first time.

Oh, and NASHVILLE is also a de-facto musical, and one of significant heft. By someone else’s count, there’s about an hour’s worth of music (about a third of the film’s runtime), but it truly feels like a constant throughout. Infamously, many of the key songs (including the Oscar-winning “I’m Easy”) were written by the actors who sang them, something that apparently rubbed actual contemporary Nashville musicians the wrong way at the time. A fascinating New York Times article details the community’s reactions to the movie’s premiere in the real-life Nashville. There weren’t any riots or anything, but honest-to-god country superstars like Loretta Lynn seemed a little riled that actual country music artists weren’t used to develop the music.

Most of the time, I’d be on their side; a lot of the creative work (and the expertise to be found among it) has slowly been slid onto the plate of the onscreen performer, to the point that it seems most people assume everything is now improvised on set (seriously, fire up an episode of the OFFICE LADIES podcast sometime; 85% of the questions they get are some variation of “was [insert line or moment] improvised????”)

But, here’s the thing. I actually didn’t know the actors mostly wrote the music going in, and was a little shocked to learn it as a fact. It just all sounded like mostly legitimate country and bluegrass to my untrained ear. So, my sincere props, y’all! The New York Times article talks about how many of the lyrics were met by the country insiders in the audience with smirking recognition, perhaps indicating a level of parody at play here that mostly flew over my head. I just thought the music was actually good!

Another reason country stars, and thus Nashville proper, didn’t warm up to the film right away was this uneasy sense that they were being made fun of. After all, what is there to make of these exaggerated characters representing your home turf? Rumors also swirled that some of the major characters were one-to-one stand-ins for major current country stars which is, uhhhh somewhat true, actually; for instance, Barbara Jean is based on the aforementioned Lynn, Tom Frank (Keith Carradine) is based on Kris Kristofferson. Some characters were merely composites; Connie White (Karen Black) is a mix of Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton and Lynn Anderson, while Haven Hamilton (Henry Gibson) is a cross between Porter Wagoner, Roy Acuff and Hank Snow.

Naturally, Altman had always resisted this literal interpretation. To hear it from him, NASHVILLE is, if anything, a movie about Hollywood. This narrative framework was just set in Nashville mainly because of his growing affinity for the area. Although the film was mostly improvised on set, the standard modus operandi for Altman by this point, Joan Tewkesbury had provided the road map, filling up a diary of her notes, experiences and observations. Some of them made it directly from her pages to his film, most notably the freeway pile-up that begins crashing the characters together.

But the actual tapestry of NASHVILLE? The ecosystem of country music and the eccentrics that it attracts, all amidst this feeling of unseen, intangible hope, could just as easily be applied to the film scene in California. Or the theater scene in New York. Or a million other subcultures in this strange, bizarre, wonderful world we live in. Anyone who’s found a community through passion can recognize the archetypes at play; the fallen star, the up-and-comer, the knowing cad, the overzealous fan, the service man who wants to climb the ladder.

More to the point, NASHVILLE is so clearly about the American experience, both in broad and specific terms. It is both intensely of its time, yet unbelievably timeless. Hell, many of the key creatives behind this might be shocked (or appalled) at how relevant it all still is.

NASHVILLE is very much captured in 1975, in particular when considering how much shit had gone down in America the previous fifteen or so years. JFK, MLK, Malcolm X and RFK’s assassinations had all been in the past twelve years (something that is so clearly on this movie’s mind; more on that in a second), and the Watergate scandal earlier in the 70’s had done much to erode what was left of the population’s confidence in its government after the prolonged war in Vietnam.

A strong desire for change was in the air, although if NASHVILLE is to be taken at face value, there was skepticism that it was really going to be possible, at least not without a fight. As mentioned, Hal Walker, the reason the story of the movie is even happening, the speaker of many amazing and rousing platitudes….dramatically speaking, he’s a ghost. We never see him, his words just sort of float through the atmosphere. Everyone gathers for the mere possibility of change, even if we don’t know what it looks like.

A lot of NASHVILLE’s thesis statement can be gleaned from its pretty glorious opening scene, two songs being sung in completely different styles, recorded in completely different contexts, and sung by people of completely different races. One half of the scene is Hamilton attempting to record a very straight-laced and traditional Bicentennial song, a literally-titled “200 Years” (written by Hamlin and Richard Baskin). Its chorus refrains, proudly if a little naively “we must be doing something right to last 200 years!” It’s rousing, if staid to its core.

The other half, in another room within the same recording studio, is Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) and the all-black Jubilee Singers (from Fisk University, at the very least based off a very real choral group, although I couldn’t confirm if they were appearing as themselves here) laying down a rousing gospel track. As the piano joyously pounds, Linnea struggles to be heard over the voluminous sound behind her, asking over and over if we believe in Jesus.

Two completely different and unique styles, borne from diametrically opposed lived experiences and perspectives, living right next door to each other. That’s Nashville. That’s America.

******

It’s difficult to figure out exactly who to best highlight amongst NASHVILLE’s cast. There are so many moving pieces within its ensemble cast that you could probably watch the movie ten times and have a new favorite every single time. However, I’ll highlight a couple that took me by surprise.

Like many comedians from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, I was primarily familiar with Lily Tomlin from her hosting stints on Saturday Night Live, although most people at the time probably knew her from ROWAN AND MARTIN’S LAUGH-IN. Folks nowadays likely know her from stuff like GRACE AND FRANKIE, a comedienne from previous generations that thankfully appears to be accepted and loved by younger generations (also known as the Catherine O’Hara Club). I hadn’t really ever seen her do a non-comedic role, however, although I had little doubt she’d be great.

She comes through! I think what really surprised me and made her stand out is that Linnea is so normal compared to both everyone else in the dang movie as well as every other character I’ve seen Tomlin play. She’s heartbreaking in her simplicity and nobility, a gospel singer that takes care of her two blind daughters, all the while being left unsatisfied by her husband (more on him in a second!). When she gets the chance to sleep with Tom, she can’t resist.

Linnea could be a really difficult character to sell to an audience, but Altman or somebody must have known that we were going to love her because she’s Lily Tomlin. They were right. One of the most unforgettable and memorable moments of NASHVILLE’s entire 160 minutes is her staring silently at Tom singing her “I’m Easy”. Maybe she knows she’s making a mistake, maybe not. All she knows is she’s doing something for her. She does all of us without a single written line of dialogue. I’m convinced she’s why the song won an Oscar.

If there’s a main backbone to the film, it’s probably the story of Barbara Jean’s recovery from a nervous breakdown. Ronee Blakely plays half of her scenes laid up in a wheelchair, but I found her entire arc pretty engaging, if only because it reminded me so much of how celebrities, especially women, tend to get squeezed from all ends until they collapse, sometimes emotionally and sometimes literally. Every aspect of her arc here happens publicly; her return, her collapse, her heartbreaking failed performance at Opryland (a scene so beautifully acted by Blakely, by the way, that I felt like I was watching a concert doc, not a narrative film), her violent death.

About the only thing she gets to do in private is recuperate. Even then, she gets to watch from her wheelchair as more glamorous performers take her now vacant slots, and she gets to observe her well-meaning manager/husband Barnett dismiss her anxieties as the beginnings of another nervous break. She never catches a break once in the film, but that’s how it goes for female celebrities throughout the past, present and future. We feel for them only when they’re finally at rest.

Barbara Baxley, star of both stage and screen, provided one of the other most memorable moments of the movie for me as Lady Pearl, the wife of Haven Hamilton. Midway through NASHVILLE, she gives this speech to Opal, a British reporter and our de-facto audience surrogate. Within this monologue, she talks about the reach John F. Kennedy Jr. had on areas of the country not previously thought possible, his subsequent assassination and. In doing so, she verbalizes and dramatizes the deep national tension at the time (and was still very much lingering in 1975) that NASHVILLE taps into so well:

And then comes Bobby. Oh, I worked for him […] he was a beautiful man. He was not much like John, you know. He was more puny-like. But all the time I was workin' for him, I was just so scared - inside, you know, just scared.

It’s here that the film starts to contextualize its ending. More on that in a second.

Finally, was there some sort of presidential order signed that mandated Ned Beatty appear in every single great American 70’s movie? This marks his third appearance on this blog in just under a year (including NETWORK and MIKEY AND NICKY). And, no surprise, he’s fucking great. You’re never going to believe it, but he plays an unsavory lush in this, although it’s notable that he never really does anything unsavory. He’s just not there for this saint of a woman he’s lucky enough to share a roof with. I’m a little shocked that Beatty only worked with Altman one more time (1999’s COOKIE’S FORTUNE). He’s a natural for the expository nature of his film set.

I could go on and on and on about every single character, and a real legitimate breakdown of this movie would almost have to in order to really dive into every nuance. You’d have to because these characters are the story. They are the plot, and the plot is them. Their human decisions affect the decisions of others. Or they don’t. Maybe their stories are purely internal. But that’s the story of humanity.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the ending, and why it’s so powerful in the midst of a world where just stepping outside can feel fraught with peril, where scanning the news invites you into a nightmarish hall of mirrors. In NASHVILLE’s final scene, as we finally reach the Hal Walker fundraiser, Barbara Jean gets assassinated on stage by a quiet, seething fan (a moment that seems eerily prophetic in the aftermath of Christina Grimmie’s 2017 murder, resulting in a world where stars like Taylor Swift have to walk around with what is essentially human Fix-a-Flat), and her limp body is immediately (albeit slowly) taken off the stage.

Amidst the shock, however, the indomitable human spirit endures. A new star takes the stage, and Hamilton urges the crowd to not give up, chillingly stating “we’re not Dallas!”. The entire crowd takes up in song.

It’s both ghoulish, bizarre yet simply moving. It’s America.

Although there is an uncharitable interpretation to be made of these final moments (a prediction of our current “the show must go on” culture that has essentially rotted our brains), I took it as perversely positive. For everything that this fucking country has had happen to it (and, of course, what it’s unleashed on others, both within and beyond its borders), we have a knack for moving forward anyway. Concerts endure. Sporting events endure. Beyond all reason, we still find political candidates to rally behind. We just kind of keep going.

Just, you know, try not to get too much blood on you while you do it.

*******

Not that it ultimately really matters, but Altman seemed to find his juice at the Academy Awards again after the success of M*A*S*H had thus far eluded him in the early to mid 70’s. NASHVILLE was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. It lost both of those, although it must be said that this particular Oscar race was incredibly stacked. Its competition for Best Picture:

• ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST (eventually won)

• BARRY LYNDON

• JAWS

• DOG DAY AFTERNOON

Altman’s competition for Best Director:

• Milos Forman (CUCKOO’S NEST, and eventual winner)

• Federico Fellini (AMARCORD)

• Stanley Kubrick (BARRY LYNDON)

• Sidney Lumet (DOG DAY AFTERNOON)

What are ya gonna do? Altman had to settle for it being considered his magnum opus almost immediately, and probably his most enduring and popular film, besides maybe something like the aforementioned M*A*S*H*. Oh, and it still holds the record for most Golden Globe nominations for a single film, even all these years later. Not bad!

This brings me back to the “discourse” at the beginning of this article. By the same metric of “not ostensibly plot related = wasted calories” that leads to the very existence of sex scenes being questioned, NASHVILLE fails any possible equation you could run it through. Yet, do you want to live in a world where a movie like it could possibly be considered bad storytelling by any measurement?

Almost fifty years later, NASHVILLE remains an astounding achievement, both in scope and scale. It manages to reflect how stories can come from anywhere and everywhere. They surround us, both small and large. They are us. And there’s no “right way” to tell them. Let movies indulge! Let them take their time! Let them take you down oddball paths! The best ones have a way of enduring even when they’re weird.

That’s America.

3 WOMEN, 1 BLOG: Altman Goes To Dreamland

As a general rule, I like to go into the movies I review in this space as cold as I possibly can. I try not to look up analyses or reviews ahead of time, and I definitely don’t peruse any plot details. Sometimes it’s just not possible with something that has completely permeated popular culture to the point that references are simply unavoidable (say, something like GOODFELLAS or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE). Sometimes, it just doesn’t matter; what difference does the element of surprise make when you’re breaking down fucking JAWS 3-D? But in general, I only allow myself basic story setups and cast lists for review. This theoretically gives me two advantages:

1) the movie is given the opportunity to unroll on its own terms, without any sort of behind-the-scenes drama or famous inspirations behind it attempting to inform me what it should be;

2) it gives me the chance to experience movies that have been around for twenty, thirty, almost fifty years in the way that audiences at the time might have. I want it to feel like picking up a newspaper, browsing the entertainment section for showtimes (yes, this used to exist) and exclaiming “Hey, it’s a new Altman! I like him! Let’s check it out” before heading down to the theater and just….seeing what happens.

Well, this week, this process really put me in a pickle. 3 WOMEN got on my radar essentially off of a recommendation (thanks, Tony!). I had vaguely heard of it, I was aware of who starred in it. But that’s it. So far, Advantage #2 was coming through in spades.

However, as you probably are already aware, Altman’s 1977 impressionist classic is not an easy movie to just go ahead and unpack the first time around, unless you happen to have a degree from Johns Hopkins or something. Let me tell you, living in a time where every other film is booked as having “psychological thriller” elements, 3 WOMEN is one of the true “psychological” films I really can think of.

More to the point, it really, really is a film where some prior research into Altman’s intent and inspiration would have been handy. Because it’s palpably different from Altman’s most famous works, so unbelievably so that, even as I struggled to grapple with the film in the days after watching it, the thought crossed my mind that Altman might really be the best American director of his generation, so deep is his versatility.

For anybody hoping to see a man stumble through a psych class term paper, you’ve come to the right place. 3 WOMEN!

3 WOMEN (1977)

Starring: Sissy Spacek, Shelly Duvall, Janice Rule

Directed by: Robert Altman

Written by: Altman

Released: April 3, 1977

Length: 124 minutes

The story: timid and wide-eyed Pinky Rose (Spacek) starts her first day at a geriatric “health spa” located in a middle-of-nowhere California dust bowl town and immediately becomes infatuated with her gabby, effortlessly cool coworker Millie Lammoreaux (Duvall). When Millie’s roommate moves out of their room at the Purple Sage Apartments, Pinky immediately snags the opening. The two spend their time hanging out at the Dodge City saloon, owned by ex-stunt double Edgar Hart (Robert Fortier) and his mute painter wife Willie (Rule). As Pinky’s infatuation grows, her personality begins to resemble that of Millie’s. Subsequently, Millie seems to regress the further the film goes on.

The movie obviously goes on from there, but to continue would technically be to….well, not ruin the movie entirely (it’s not a film that can really be ruined by reading the plot synopsis); it’s just…well, it’s hard to describe in words exactly what the movie is fully about. Put it this way: it’s one thing to read the story of 3 WOMEN, it’s quite another to experience it. It’s both loosely plotted and intensely fixated on character dynamics, both subtle and quite bold, at once emotional and cerebral.

3 WOMEN is surreal in the sense that every moment feels both disconnected from the ones before and after it, yet it all feels completely intertwined as a piece. In that sense, the filmography that came to mind while watching this was David Lynch’s, and I became convinced 3 WOMEN was a major influence on the future TWIN PEAKS creator’s work. However, I really couldn’t find any evidence to corroborate that, and I was reminded that Lynch is sort of infamous for not watching that many other movies, so who knows.

Still, it’s hard not think about MULHOLLAND DRIVE, a movie with very similar themes and a somewhat analogous setup (two women meet by chance, and find their identities becoming intertwined), as well as a movie that saw Lynch go up directly against Altman’s GOSFORD PARK in the 2001 Best Director Oscar race (they would both lose to Ron Howard for A BEAUTIFUL MIND. Hollywood!). I’m also aware that there are strong comparisons to be made to Bergman’s PERSONA (in fact, it was a direct influence for Altman), and I feel caught a little flat-footed that I haven’t seen it. Another argument for my ongoing film literacy!

To that end, something else that made 3 WOMEN such a difficult movie for me to go into cold was that my still only cursory knowledge of Altman’s major works did nothing to prepare myself for it. There’s nothing in M*A*S*H, MCCABE AND MRS. MILLER, CALIFORNIA SPLIT or THE LONG GOODBYE to indicate the man was capable of something so impressionistic (although subsequent research suggests something like BREWSTER MCCLOUD might have clued me in; can anybody confirm?). Sure, it’s rooted in that improvisational looseness that had long since become Altman’s trademark (more on that in a second), and his impeccable knack for casting actors who would wind up legends of their time is on full display. But it’s such a departure of what I’ve seen so far, it kind of threw me for a loop.

If you haven’t caught on yet, I feel completely unequipped to really unpack 3 WOMEN, at least not on just one watch. The first screening seems to be meant solely to just take it all in. It feels like it practically demands at least a couple of subsequent re-viewings to start taking in details and themes. For instance, I definitely know what feelings Pinky’s bad dream and the pool murals evoked in me (in both cases, an intense dissettlement); I just couldn’t tell you what they precisely mean.

To be clear, this isn’t the same thing as the complaint I levied against Kubrick’s THE SHINING, which I’ve always found so vague in intent as to be almost meaningless (an opinion that I sense I am increasingly alone in holding). No, here Altman is being very specific, I’m just missing what some of the details are supposed to indicate. In this case, Bobby, it’s me, not you.

For what it’s worth, Altman has claimed the inspiration for 3 WOMEN came to him in his sleep in the form of an anxiety dream that developed while his wife was laid up in the hospital. Specifically, he dreamt that he was shooting a movie about stolen identities in the desert that starred…Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek. He woke up in the middle of his dream, started writing notes down on a pad, then went back to his strangely prophetic dreamscape.

Post-dream, Altman collaborated with screenwriter Patricia Resnick (who would go on to work on, among other things, 9 TO 5 and the final season of Mad Men) to develop a treatment for this project, which wound up being about fifty pages. Resnick, by the way, would go on to collaborate with Altman many times after this, starting with 1978’s A WEDDING. That screenplay was largely skirted in favor of in-the-moment improvisations, allowing Duvall in particular to have a lot of agency in developing Millie’s character on the set. his was just as well: Altman didn’t intend to really have a screenplay at all, which tracks with what the movie truly felt like, and what made it sing.

Because 3 WOMEN isn’t so much a movie about words as it is about characters, behavior and images. The power of the film comes down to establishing firmly and quickly the differences between Pinky and Millie, then slowly watching as their personalities begin to intertwine, then shift back. Right off the bat, we can palpably feel the differences between our two leads. Where Millie is chatty and outgoing (even as, it turns out, she isn’t as beloved by her peers as she wants to believe), Pinky is intense, eager and interior. Much of the power of the film is seeing the two change as they continue to interact, almost as if they’re being brought together by some cosmic (or dream) force.

What might stand out amidst all of the above is that, hmmmm, I only really count two women there. Well, the third woman is the aforementioned mute wife Willie, and it’s here that I admit to being a little stymied. Her big contribution to the film are the creation of the aforementioned murals at the bottom of the pool at Dodge City. Plot-wise, she suffers a stillborn birth and is probably complicit with the other two women in the murder of Edgar.

So, yeah, someone smarter than me may need to jump in here and give a dissertation on Willie. If I had to make a guess (and since you’ve been nice enough to read this, I think I at least owe you a blind stab), I’ve taken Willie’s stillness, in every unfortunate sense of the word, to be the sort of axis against which Willie and Pinky shift up, then down again, throughout the course of the film. I also feel like it isn’t coincidence that all three women essentially have the same name; Millie and Willie are separated by just one letter that are basically identical. As well, it’s revealed that Pinky’s birth name is Mildred, or Millie.

Now, there are much, much, much deeper analyses of 3 WOMEN out there that views the movie through the prism of dream theory, and the way that people in a dream are able to kind of shift characters within that dreamscape. To that end, the common interpretation is that the three women represent the shifting psyche, personalities and lifetimes within one woman (the infatuated child, the liberated young woman, and the older mother). It all sounds right to me, although I certainly don’t have the credentials to really dig into any that.

But, the thing is, even if you didn’t give a whiff about any of the psychoanalysis of it all, the damn thing works kinda just on the surface level of “creepy roommate” movie. Spacek plays her wide-eyed obsession so well! It’s certainly not necessarily a subtle performance (you know almost immediately there’s something off about her), but it’s also not overplayed, a mighty difficult balance to strike. Spacek is a performer that I actually haven’t seen in as many things as I had thought, yet her biggest hits loom so large that it feels like I’ve grown up with her anyway. Here, Spacek plays Pinky’s obsession straight instead of going for overtly creepy. She also plays Pinky’s lack of clear identity perfectly. You even feel a twinge of weird sympathy for her as she appears to freak out on the couple that claim to be her parents after her suicide attempt (the movie takes turns).

I’ve alluded in the past to how I’m mostly on the outside looking in in regards to the allure that Shelly Duvall has held on people over the last few generations. I’m not a hater or anything, I’ve just observed that people genuinely adore her to a somewhat intense degree. I don’t know if it’s just that I never grew up with Faerie Tale Theatre as a kid (I am making an assumption this is where most people were introduced to her), paired with the aforementioned lack of strong affinity for THE SHINING. That all said, 3 WOMEN is easily the most I’ve ever liked her. Crucially, you buy her playing “both personalities”, as Millie and Pinky start to swap dispositions and demeanors. She actually might be the biggest reason why the movie works as well as it does.

As for that third woman, crazy thing about Janice Rule: a few years before this movie’s release, the already wildly accomplished actress started studying psychoanalysis, using her fellow acting colleagues as her patients in 1973 (a veritable cornucopia of research opportunities there). She eventually earned her PhD in 1983, and practiced all the way to her death in 2003.

Two other things I wanted to mention: outside of a brief detour into the lyrical content of “Suicide is Painless”, I haven’t talked much about the scores of the Altman movies I’ve already reviewed (an especially egregious error when considered how important the different version of the title tunes are to THE LONG GOODBYE). Something in the opening seconds of 3 WOMEN that struck me immediately, however, was the dichotomy between the setting of the opening scene and the music that accompanies it.

Visually, we are plunged into a senior rehab facility (or “nursing home”, if you want to get pejorative), and it’s the type of facility you’d expect it to look like. It’s sterile, and moderately depressing, but otherwise non-descript. Yet, the Gerald Busby-composed music is quietly tense and sinister, almost like a warning. It sets up how the whole movie feels at times; everything seems recognizable, but you just keep waiting for it all to take a turn (and boy, does it ever).

One last little thing I loved about 3 WOMEN: it is a superb 70’s food movie. Tuna melts, pigs in a blanket, chocolate pudding tarts, something called “penthouse chicken”….although we don’t see much of these 70’s dinner party staples (well, except the tuna melts), the mere threat of them permeates seemingly the entire runtime. Whether this is all part of the dreamscape, or just a quirky little happenstance, it greatly delighted me. I would attend your dinner party, Millie!

In the end, film is a visual medium. More to the point, it’s an art form meant to use images as a vessel for emotion. Thus, even without a PHD in psychology in hand, 3 WOMEN was still able to make me feel strong emotions, even if they were sometimes clouded in confusion. It’s certainly unlike quite anything I’ve seen up to this point, and is possibly the movie that has screamed “revisit me!” the loudest.

M*A*S*H is Still a Banger

Some movies get burrowed into your brain at such a young age that you’re no longer able to truly view it with fresh eyes, so ubiquitous is its presence in your soul during your formative years. Amazingly, Robert Altman’s 1970 breakthrough feature is one of those for me.

With hindsight, M*A*S*H seems like a very odd choice for one of those things, doesn’t it? This hyper-specific, context-demanding, ultra-black comedy about the Korean War (that’s really about the Vietnam War)? First-class entertainment for a middle-schooler in the early 2000’s.

Well, I have my mother to thank for that. Genuinely.

My mom, a woman who made the decision to flip her career, go back to school and ultimately enter healthcare at more or less the same age I am now, has had a lifelong knack for zeroing in on media set in hospitals of all kinds. Well before he became a fame-chasing hack, she was aware of Dr. Oz back when he was a world-class heart surgeon thanks to a book she owned that incidentally featured him. I recall a DR. KILDARE movie sitting on the shelf. Her favorite television programs of all time include China Beach, ER, and M*A*S*H, both the television program and the movie that spawned it.

As I recall, she had tracked the movie down on VHS sometime in the late-90’s, during a time when video cassettes were starting to wind down as the dominant form of physical media. A couple of years later, M*A*S*H was finally released on DVD, chock full of special features and director’s commentaries and it was game on from there. And she watched it quite a bit. And when you’re a kid…well, you kind of just absorb what’s on the screen.

As a result, M*A*S*H has taken on a life of its own inside my head, even after not having gone near it in probably ten years. Just to give you one specific example, I’ve been doing Donald Sutherland’s little three-toned whistle to myself for decades, usually without even realizing I’m doing it. For another example, I realized on this most recent re-watch that I still have a clear memory of every single song that plays over the P.A. system (“Tokyo shoe shine boy….”).

I was surprised how much of it I had held onto after all this time, although it won’t be a shock that the movie made much more of an impact on me now that I’m fully an adult. Though even at the time, I had a strong sense that this was different than a lot of films I had seen, as it turns out, a cynical condemnation of the Vietnam War isn’t something a twelve-year-old can fully appreciate.

But I can now. Although more than a few of its elements are rough around the edges fifty years later, the audacity of Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H still shines through. In fact, considering how toothless current Hollywood satire can be, much of it has aged even better.

M*A*S*H (1970)

Starring: Donald Sutherland, Elliot Gould, Tom Skerritt, Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman

Directed by: Robert Altman

Written by: Ring Lardner Jr.

Length: 116 minutes

Released: January 25, 1970

One doesn’t summarize M*A*S*H so much as just provide its basic outline: Surgeons Hawkeye Pierce (Sutherland) and “Duke” Forrest (Skerritt) arrives in South Korea and drive to the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital via stolen military jeep. As they make it to their new station, we are introduced to many of the other people already stationed there: commanding officer Henry Blake (Roger Bowen) and his assistant “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff!), dentist Walter “The Painless Pole” Waldowski (John Shuck), man of the cloth Father Mulcahy (a very young Rene Auberjonois) and antagonistic fellow surgeon Frank Burns (Duvall), to name just a few. Two crucial late arrivals include colorful chest cracker “Trapper John” (Gould) and new head nurse Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Kellerman).

What happens in M*A*S*H? Well, the real answer is that, against this backdrop, Pierce, Duke and Trapper John mostly just kind of fuck around. They, like many men who got roped into an overseas war with a nebulous and unclear purpose, they spend their down time in Korea pulling pranks, harassing and sleeping with the few women there (including Jo Ann Pflug), and just…I dunno, playing golf?

That’s during downtime. When, it’s…uh…uptime, wounded and dying soldiers are brought in from the battlefield via helicopter and it’s time to get to work. Intercut through all the buffoonery are tactful-but-bloody scenes in the actual surgery room (or tent), where our characters now have to rely on their extensive training to make split-second decisions in order to patch up our armed forces.

Anarchy is the name of the game for M*A*S*H, both in terms of the characters’ attitudes to the cold chaos and injustice surrounding them, and in terms of how the film is structured. It isn’t traditionally plotted, with an A-B-C format. Instead, it kind of lopes along, moving from vignette to vignette until it abruptly concludes. This refusal of traditional format subsequently makes it a difficult movie to peg down completely.

It’s tempting to categorize M*A*S*H as a war movie or, perhaps more accurately, an anti-war movie. And this isn’t wrong. M*A*S*H is anti-war in the sense that the movie is more or less physically absent of war, as least as it’s usually presented in a Hollywood “war” film. None of our primary characters see combat, and they’re not really soldiers in the traditional sense. There is a major battle sequence to wrap up the film: a climactic football game shot like a war zone, complete with men getting hurt and collapsing to the ground.

However, bloody conflict is felt in other ways. As mentioned above, the members of the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital are ultimately left responsible for the consequences of combat, saddled with the job of closing up the holes blown into the chests of men in a war being fought right in their backyards.

So, yes, it is anti-war, just not in the way we’re accustomed to. Compare M*A*S*H to something like Stanley Kubrick’s PATHS OF GLORY, an absolutely brilliant anti-war film where the injustice of war and how soldiers are expected to act against their own innate humanity is laid bare. However, we also know where Kubrick stands in regards to its message. To be infuriated, left with feelings of helplessness and desperation as these young men are led to their deaths at the hands of their own country for the crime of being scared…this is how Kubrick screams into the void. Through stark photography. Through Kirk Douglas’ masterful and steady performance.

But, M*A*S*H….doesn’t really leave you with any of that. Nobody gives a rousing monologue (in order to do that, they’d have to stop worrying if their erectile dysfunction makes them gay first), nobody verbally expresses their frustration or anxieties, nobody gnashes their teeth at their evil generals. The closest we get to something like that is the sequence in Japan, where they blackmail an annoying hospital commander by staging photos of him in bed with a hooker.

Otherwise, all of that interiority is expressed by the fucking around, the pranking, the harassment. For as strong leaders as Duke, Trapper and Hawkeye are when shit starts going down, they don’t really conduct themselves as noble defenders of liberty. In one of the biggest signs that opinion on American interventionism had taken a turn, their behavior is more akin to that of rowdy frat boys.

In this sense, maybe it’s best to describe MASH as an anti-Hollywood war film. Compared to more rah-rah films of the time (such as the movie that eventually beat it out for Best Picture, PATTON), Altman’s M*A*S*H may as well have been transported from a different planet. It’s an intentional, full-throated attack on what had come before; it’s no accident that many of the P.A. announcements throughout the film are advertisements for similar war films from around the time of the Korean War, their summaries and casts read with the same kind of nervous deadpan as one would when announcing the opening of a new latrine.

Now, given the description of individual scenes and moments above, it won’t shock you to hear that not everything about M*A*S*H has aged perfectly. It’s pretty blunt about gender and ethnic relations, the kind of movie whose soundtrack indicates the scene has changed to Japan by the banging of a gong. One of the only black characters with lines carries the nickname “Spearchucker”, with no apparent intended irony (in-universe, it’s because he used to throw javelins in high school, but come on). Strong women exist to be taken down a peg, to take the stick out of their ass.

Again, when put in context, the brazenness is the point and, to be honest, one of the most realistic things about M*A*S*H. Given the absence of anything else to do except patch up pawns in a pointless war, our characters blow off steam by being assholes. Funny assholes, but assholes nonetheless. Intense as it may be, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that many related to this disillusionment in 1970 America.

Still, not all of it is handled with perfect grace. Maybe its most disappointing failure is in the depiction of Hot Lips Houlihan. Maybe the confusion as to the goal of this character as writ is aggravated by the fact that she’s played by Sally Kellerman, someone I’ve always found a little annoying (fire up a couple of her musical numbers from LOST HORIZON sometime if you disagree), putting her at a disadvantage in my heart and mind. But I think M*A*S*H the film fails her in the end.

It’s not so much that the horned-up, frustrated men surrounding her decide to take her down a peg simply for the crime of being a strong-willed woman in a war zone (again, this mostly reads as sadly realistic); it’s the fact that she becomes dumber and dumber as the movie goes on. During the infamous “shower scene” (where the curtains get pulled down, revealing her in her entirety to the entire squad) and her subsequent explosion at Blake, we both feel her exasperation, her frustration at the insanity that surrounds her (and we darkly laugh at Blake barely giving a shit, such is the male military machine).

From there? We never see that strong “head nurse” character again. By the time we get to that climactic football sequence, she’s a “blithering idiot” head cheerleader. Now, writing this all out, this sounds like an intentional shift, a consequence of being worn down by the hyper-masculine gears of war. But if that’s the case (and it may be!), it needed to be more apparent, at least for me. As it stands, her enthusiastically misunderstanding even the basic fundamentals of football as a sport feels like it’s meant to be genuinely funny. This may be a misread on my part.

Thankfully, the movie is bursting at the seams with iconic performances regardless. Donald Sutherland’s turn as Hawkeye has gotten swallowed up whole when Alan Alda’s version became essentially the only one in the public consciousness now. But he’s terrific here, playing him as a laid back observer of humanity. Once again, young Elliot Gould was a force to be reckoned with, and it’s no accident that the movie goes into another gear once Trapper John enters the fray. He’s anarchy personified, and he’s perfect.

As for Tom Skerritt, did anybody have a better knack for being in the most popular movies of all time? This, ALIEN, TOP GUN, STEEL MAGNOLIAS….though Duke may be the lesser of the three leads (and the only one not to be carried over to the TV show), he brings a nice cool-guy energy to perfectly balance out Sutherland and Gould.

Whether M*A*S*H is Altman’s best work is highly debatable. However, it might be the most indicative of his directorial trademarks, and a good early rubric for what to expect from his films going forward. All of that iconic overlapping, improvisational speech is in full force here, and it’s hard to imagine the film being any other way. What better way to effectively communicate the chaos under a MASH unit tent than everybody talking over each other?

(It should be noted the overlapping speech is also used for comedic effect, usually through Gary Burghoff’s Radar, who remains a half-second ahead of Major Burns’ orders.)

Of course, maybe the biggest ding to M*A*S*H ‘s legacy is the subsequent legacy of its spinoff project….uh… M*A*S*H, the CBS sitcom that ran for eleven years and cranked out a finale that to this day remains the single most watched episode of television in American history. For as much of a smash as MASH was in 1970, by the 80’s, the definitive versions of these characters had been cemented into the country’s consciousness.

I will say that the basic idea of M*A*S*H actually translates pretty well to episodic television (the movie is more or less structured like a bunch of episodes smashed together), but it’s always amused me how much Robert Altman hated and resented the TV show. He admitted as much in an out-of-nowhere moment on, of all things, a DVD commentary track. Whether or not he’s off-base, I’ll leave up to you. However, I always respect people who wake up extra early to be the best hater they can be.

Okay, one other thought re: the television series. We all know its theme, that somewhere-between-jaunty-and-somber instrumental melody line to “Suicide is Painless”. It’s classic, maybe the single most recognizable sitcom theme of its day. Re-watching the movie, however, made me remember that we get the full song and lyrics not once, but TWICE (once during the opening credits, and one at Painless’ “funeral”). And, folks, I was reminded that “Suicide is Painless” is one of the most nihilistic songs ever written.

The game of life is hard to play
I'm gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I'll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

Suicide is painless
It brings on many changes
And I can take or leave it
If I please

The sword of time will pierce our skins
It doesn't hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin

Woof. It’s very funny to me that this has managed to become a thirty-second jingle that everyone instantly recognizes from reruns. There’s a reason they left the lyrics off the opening TV credits.

All in all, M *A*S*H’s legacy was immediately secured, earning five Academy Award nominations, although it won only Best Adapted Screenplay. Fifty years on, I think it deserves more shine than it does now, eclipsed by a long-running sitcom and later, better work from its director. It’s an American satire so anarchic that it seems almost unbelievable it got made at the time, much less now.

Isn’t that worth a look?

THE LONG GOODBYE Reveals the Folly of Caring

The pantheon of 70’s New Hollywood pioneers is vast. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Peter Bogdanovich, Elaine May, yes even you, George Lucas…these are just the names I’m coming up with off the top of my head (and that’s just limiting the list to directors; if we opened this up to writers/cinematographers/producers….oh boy). However, none were quite as hugely influential yet somehow a little under-appreciated as Robert Altman.

For everything he was famous for (his ability to work in seemingly any type of genre; his naturalistic, improvisational style of dialogue; his knack for running counter to every American film style of his time) perhaps Altman’s most impressive trait was his consistency in output. Despite his relative late start (although he had done a ton of television work, he didn’t make his first movie until the age of 32, and his first major one wasn’t for ten years after), he managed to remain insanely prolific, basically releasing a movie a year all the way up until his death in 2006. It should be mentioned that he did it without much in the way of accolades from his industry; although he was nominated for a handful of Oscars over the course of his thirty-year career, he never won one, save for an honorary award after his passing.

Through it all, he remains a formative influence on several generations of working filmmakers and budding cinema aficionados. Yet, I really had only seen a couple of his thirty-five (!) movies, and most of those had only come in the last year or so. Well, no longer! Although a full career retrospective was a little intimidating (that would essentially be my entire year), I did want to take the next few weeks to be able to dig into this first decade of work.

First out of the gate is a subversive noir riff that seemed to be under-appreciated at the time of its release. Luckily, it’s gained a significant amount of clout (clout amount) in recent weeks, with its star doing the rounds here in California for its fiftieth anniversary. And it just so happens to be a film I’ve been wanting to knock off my list for a long time…

THE LONG GOODBYE (1973)

Directed by: Robert Altman

Starring: Elliot Gould, Sterling Hayden, Nina van Pallandt, Jim Bouton

Written by: Leigh Brackett

Released: March 7, 1973

Length: 113 minutes

Like all detective stories, the plot of THE LONG GOODBYE is deceptively simple. After accepting an offer to drive his friend Terry Lennox (Bouton) across the border, private eye Phillip Marlowe (Gould) finds out from local authorities that Terry has been accused of killing his wife. Three days later, it gets reported that Terry has committed suicide. Marlowe doesn’t believe any of it. Thus, he plunges into sunny 70’s Hollywood to unravel the truth of the fate of his friend.

I should mention off the top that Phillip Marlowe is a character I admittedly don’t have a long history with, so this isn’t going to focus too much on comparing the various versions of the character that have appeared on both page and screen, the most famous by far likely being Humphrey Bogart’s turn in 1946’s THE BIG SLEEP.

Suffice it to say, however, that when most people imagine Phillip Marlowe, it’s difficult to shake that aforementioned classic “film noir” portrayal. A handsome, if sensitive and world-weary, gumshoe who may be wearing a tan trench coat or a pinstripe suit, tersely throwing out hard-boiled dialogue and navigating a tight, taut mystery, all the while effectively moving his way towards the truth.

That’s not the kind of character Robert Altman was interested in exploring in his film adaptation of the 1953 Marlowe novel, Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. So….what did he want to do?

Right out of the gate, there are signifiers that THE LONG GOODBYE wasn’t going to be a companion piece to THE BIG SLEEP. For one, it’s set in the “modern day”, i.e. the 1970’s. For two, our lead is Elliot Gould, a man whose presence doesn’t exactly scream out Classic Hollywood.

The opening sequence of THE LONG GOODBYE serves as good a statement of purpose for the whole film as anything else. Put yourself in the shoes of the audience back in 1973 for a second. Outside of 1969’s MARLOWE (starring James Garner as the titular detective), there hadn’t been a big-screen adaptation of a Marlowe novel in over twenty-five years. And now here’s one by the guy who did M*A*S*H! Cool. So, how is this pioneer of this new era in Hollywood going to establish his vision of one of the most famous movie detectives of all time?

Well, over the first ten minutes of the movie, Phillip Marlowe’s main conflict is that he has to go the store and buy food for his cat.

It’s a bold, if inauspicious, introduction to one of the more famous detectives in Western fiction. But it’s hard to imagine any other way to kick this particular version of this particular character off. What better way to put a stamp on your modern version of a beloved gumshoe than by providing us essentially a short film of him just kind of walking around?

The beautiful functionality of pretty much all Altman films I’ve had the opportunity to see is that they are all entire islands unto themselves. War-torn Korea (that’s really a reflection of war-torn Vietnam). Snowy Washington at the turn of the 20th century. The music industry in 70’s Nashville. Popeye Village. Each of his films present entire and complete worlds that we are afforded only a precious few curated hours to spend within.

So it goes with THE LONG GOODBYE. This time, we get a deceptively cynical view of “modern” Hollywood. Not the “dream factory”, but rather the city itself. The movie sometimes looks pretty, but in an empty way.

In the middle of it all is this anachronism of a man, a dime-store lead of a detective novel dropped into a city in transition. It’s clear right away that he doesn’t quite belong where he is, and it’s not entirely clear how he got here in the first place. Notably, he’s the only character who smokes.

It’s why the opening reel of THE LONG GOODBYE is such a thrilling watch. Although it is loping and sprawling (and not unbroken, it should be stated; intercut through his quest to feed the damn cat is the arrival of Terry Lennox, kicking off the plot proper), it reveals a lot of character details about our lead detective. He lives alone, although his neighbors all seem familiar with him. He’s notably no stranger to being up in the middle of the night. He’s a cat person (fittingly, he’s revealed later on to have a real aversion to dogs, and vice versa). His cat has a preference in his dinner food, and it just happens to be the kind Marlowe doesn’t have. He’s cordial to the people around him, but he’s ultimately in his own Marlowe-world.

Sure, Marlowe may not have a ton of social skills, or have a woman in his life (I found it perfectly in character that he lives across from an apartment full of topless college girls, and he never makes anything resembling a pass at them), or appear to think about maybe stocking up on Courry brand cat food.

But he does appear to care that his friend has died under circumstances that don’t seem to add up. This is enough to set him apart from pretty much every person he comes across.

This brings us to one of the peculiar quirks of THE LONG GOODBYE’s “detective mystery” format. In this instance, our lead detective appears to be the only character to have any interest in solving the central mystery. Everyone else he meets along the way to solving the Terry’s murder seems to be in the midst of their own distinct incidental plot line. Marty Augustine just wants his money. Roger Wade just wants to keep maintain his explosive alcoholism by hiding away at a celebrity detox facility for days at a time. Dr. Verringer just wants his money. Eileen Wade turns out to just want to maintain her affair. The Mexican authorities just want their money.

On and on it goes. THE LONG GOODBYE is structured much like a video game fetch quest, except the game never threatens to progress and nothing is gained. It’s not an accident that many of Marlowe’s very best lines are delivered while talking to himself.

This all sounds like a recipe for a very frustrating watch (after all, why watch a mystery story where nobody wants to solve the mystery?), but it’s actually part of the movie’s true power. Although Gould plays him as a man whose emotions are kept inside, Marlowe eventually erupts at the revelation of the police knowing “who did it” and just hadn’t bothered to tell him. In this moment, all the false starts and sidetracks make his righteous indignation all the more cathartic.

Marlowe is more or less punished for caring, maybe the least cool thing you can possibly do in this part of California. This gets reinforced when (SPOILERS!) he finally tracks down his former friend, alive and well in a Mexican villa. Roger explains it all: he’s killed his wife and is probably going to get away with it because he’s legally dead. Marlowe offers another theory:

“Nobody cares but me.”

“Well, that’s you, Marlowe. You’ll never learn, you’re a born loser.”

“Yeah, I even lost my cat.”

In the films’ closing seconds, as he puts a plug into Terry’s chest, and as he walks away from the whole mess (walking right by Eileen driving by in a car), Marlowe appears to be a man unburdened. Whether this portends a happy or ominous future is up to the individual.

I couldn’t let this article pass by without gabbing about Gould. He’s somebody that I hadn’t really taken much stock of until recently. He’s not somebody whose movies I’ve taken a deep dive into, although there were two that were on a lot in the house in my formative years. One is a previous Altman collaboration that I’m going to defer discussion of for now (more to come!), and the other is the first Steven Soderbergh OCEAN’S ELEVEN movie, where his trademark delivery and voice provide some of its very best moments (“I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place, and I’ll never forget it…”)

But where it really hit me about my emotional connection to Gould was his appearance last year on Saturday Night Live, during John Mulaney’s go at a Five-Timers sketch. Because where I really got to see his full range of talents on display was during his many, many hosting stints during the first few years of SNL. He holds together the famous Godfather Therapy sketch. He was the dastardly network suit in the Last Voyage of Star Trek sketch. And, just so you all are aware, he was doing the “tap-dancing during the monologue” thing decades before Walken started doing it.

Compare all of that goof-around-ery with the very poised, nuanced and interior performance he gives here, and one has to wonder if Gould arrived at the precise wrong time in Hollywood. After Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice in 1969, it appeared that his superstar window had closed by 1973. How someone who seemed so of his time yet distinctly old-fashioned could be ever-so-slightly displaced in the industry is curious. On the other hand, it allowed to do quirkier work like this, and he remains beloved now, so I guess it all worked out.

There’s another old star in THE LONG GOODBYE that I would be sad not to highlight. Sterling Hayden is in a good chunk of this, and he’s phenomenal as always. I’ve always been in love with his singular energy and presence, and I’ve had difficulty expressing exactly why. Maybe it’s because he gives the type of performances that only come from “normal people” that get plucked into Hollywood basically by accident (I remain convinced a lot of what made him unique would have been beaten out of him in an acting school). He’s a little stiff, and in some of his earlier films, he sometimes looks a bit uncomfortable in front of the camera. But he draws you in like almost no other actor I’ve ever seen, past or present.

Same deal here. Maybe it’s his very specific voice timbre, a skill he puts on glorious full-throated display as the incorrigible Roger Wade. Maybe it’s his ability to make bad men heartbreaking, his vulnerability incongruous with his old-school handsome looks. Maybe it’s because his name is Sterling. For whatever reason, I’m always excited when he turns up in a film.

Leigh Brackett is credited with the screenplay for THE LONG GOODBYE, although given Altman’s improvisatory, overlapping nature that appears to be on display throughout here. Brackett’s hire seems like a “bridging the gap” moment; Brackett made her name early in life writing mystery novels very much in the vein of Raymond Chandler. She then pivoted to writing science fiction screenplays; her last work before passing away was an early draft of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (I’d like to think she’s a big unheralded reason why the quality of dialogue takes a dramatic step up between Episodes IV and V).

But her most famous work is undoubtedly the script to….1946’s THE BIG SLEEP! It’s difficult to tell exactly what her specific contributions were, nor how much of it was kept once the cameras started rolling. But I feel relatively certain that she was likely a guiding force in maintaining Phillip Marlowe’s anachronistic feel. The smoking, the outfit, the loneliness, the hard-boiled asides to himself: this all feels indicative of what an noir detective should feel like.

THE LONG GOODBYE was not exactly universally beloved upon its initial release. The reframing of the Phillip Marlow character was (and remains) atypical, and I don’t get the impression everybody cottoned to the concept of making him a sunny loser. Elliot Gould was also in a unique place in his career, where his particular presence and talents precluded him from quite becoming the A-list star that he seemed to be becoming earlier in the late-60’s.

In the other hand, Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert (the only two film critics that ever mattered anyway) got it immediately. Ebert described this version of Marlowe as “thrust into a story were everybody else knows their roles; he wanders clueless and complaining, and then suddenly understands exactly what he must do”. As for Kael, she put it thusly:

Gould’s Marlowe is a man who is had by everybody — a male pushover, reminiscent of Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity. He’s Marlowe as Miss Lonely- hearts. Yet this softhearted honest loser is so logical a modernization, so right, that when you think about Marlowe afterward you can’t imagine any other way of playing him now that wouldn’t be just fatuous.

Thus is the power inherent to a Gould-Altman team-up. Needless to say, I loved THE LONG GOODBYE. And it made me curious to revisit one of the only other Altman movies I had seen. Hell, I practically grew up with it…

Next week: we’re off to Korea!

A Very (Shane) Black Christmas: and an IRON MAN 3 New Year!

People don’t really like feeling like a movie is messing with them.

The last five years has blessed (cursed) all of us with near-constant STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI arguments, even for people don’t give two shits about the now-sort-of-floundering space franchise. There are lots and lots of reasons why that particular blockbuster was so divisive that it still feels like people can’t shut the fuck up about it, but one of the most telling insights into why it rubbed people the wrong way actually came from a Film Crit Hulk treatise on the movie’s many unheralded virtues:

I was having a conversation with one of my local bartenders I love. We’ve had a lot of lovely, spirited bar arguments. Sports. Movies. You name it. And it’s always been fun and inclusive. But The Last Jedi is the first time I have ever seen him incensed. He kept yelling at us and talking about all the things that were so “stupid” about the film, and then proclaiming that the director “clearly doesn’t understand the tone of Star Wars!” He made this point particularly about the sense of humor in the opening Poe scene. It didn’t matter that I pointed out the tone was no different from Han’s off-the-cuff joke, “everything’s fine here… how are you?” as well as a litany of other moments. He finally just yelled, “I felt like the film was making fun of me!”

This sentiment of “that movie was making fun of me!” was expressed by others at the time. Cheo Hodari Coker, the show runner behind the Netflix LUKE CAGE series, went off at length in a Twitter thread (that I naturally can no longer find) about how the moment where THE LAST JEDI resolves THE FORCE AWAKENS' “cliffhanger” by having Luke toss his lightsaber off said cliff made him feel mocked for caring about that moment in the first place.

Now, I would argue that there’s no other way for that moment to resolve (imagine if THE LAST JEDI opened with Luke grabbing his lightsaber, telling Rey “let’s go”, and then wreaking havoc on the First Order, with the whole thing wrapping up in ten minutes; what a great movie!!!!), but Coker isn’t a stupid man, nor is he coming from a place of bad faith. He’s a smart and insightful creative and Star Wars fan who wanted to like Episode 8. And he didn’t. It’s worth paying attention to.

He didn’t like the feeling of being messed with. Nor did Film Crit Hulk’s bartender friend. Nor did many of the smart people I know who also didn’t like THE LAST JEDI very much. It’s what it is.

Of course, blockbuster sequels being spear-headed by filmmakers with a unique sensibility that immediately piss off half the audience by screwing with the format is nothing new. In the wake of the unprecedented blockbuster success of THE AVENGERS, it was time for Marvel Studios to begin its next phase of solo films to build up to the next team-up. First on deck: a third IRON MAN solo movie. After an extremely well-liked first installment in 2008, and a major step down in quality in 2010 with IRON MAN 2, Marvel needed to take a big swing to energize the franchise that started it all. And star/executive producer/mega-string-puller Robert Downey Jr. knew just the guy.

Enter Shane Black.

IRON MAN 3

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall, Ben Kingsley

Directed by: Shane Black

Written by: Black, Drew Pearce

Released: May 3, 2013

Length: 131 minutes

A year after the events of The Battle of New York, Tony Stark (Downey Jr.) is in a bad place. It turns out he never really recovered from his trip into space at the end of THE AVENGERS, nor from his confirmation that aliens exist and they want to kill us. He’s easily triggered into panic attacks, he’s mindlessly building iron suits in his basement and, most of all, he’s freaking Pepper Potts (Paltrow) out.

He’s picked a bad time to have PTSD, though, because there’s a new global threat out there, and his name is The Mandarin (Kingsley). He has the ability to hijack all U.S. television stations at any time to broadcast his taunting, disturbing messages; he also appears to have the ability to wreak havoc at will, setting off bombs and striking terror into the hearts of every American.

On top of everything else, a ghost from Stark’s playboy past appears to be returning to haunt him. Back in 1999, during a New Year’s Eve party in Switzerland, Stark blows off Aldrich Killian (Pearce), the awkward and disabled creator of the fledgling Advanced Idea Mechanics company, in order to make time with geneticist Maya Hansen (Hall), whose work on a project named Extremis may have unlocked the key to tissue regeneration. Now in 2013, Killian, who looks healthy, youthful and revitalized, returns to Stark Industries with an offer. AIM has taken off and he’s now trying head-hunt Pepper Potts to come work for him. Meanwhile, Hansen returns to Stark to inform him she works for AIM now, which means Killian has his hands on Extremis.

Jon Favreau (who also continues to play Happy Hogan both in this and in the MCU at large) was the original architect of the IRON MAN franchise, having directed the first two installment. However, Favreau tapped out of helming a third film by December 2010, opting instead to direct the never-completed MAGIC KINGDOM movie (no tears for Favreau, he’s clearly landed on his feet). Although he remained an executive producer on THE AVENGERS, IRON MAN 3 was going to need a new captain at the head of the ship.

Not long after Favreau’s departure, Downey Jr. hopped on the phone to contact the man who helped revitalize his career nearly ten years before. By February 2011, Shane Black was in final negotiations to direct and write the third IRON MAN movie. By March, Black was the director and co-writer on the script with Drew Pearce, who would go on to co-write FAST AND FURIOUS PRESENTS: HOBBES & SHAW and would do the story for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION. A roller coaster of a career, indeed.

IRON MAN 3 found itself in an interesting slot in the MCU at that time. It not only had to follow up the ensemble success of THE AVENGERS, it also had to recover from the disappointment that was IRON MAN 2, a film that both collapsed under its own world-building weight (the movie just stops halfway through to re-introduce Nick Fury and Agent Coulson) and cast doubt that Marvel Studios was going to be able to handle its own ambitions.

But the Tony Stark threequel is largely a success! It’s a movie with things on its mind, even if it does have to remember its ultimate four-quadrant obligations at the end of the day. The whole thing with Rhodey’s War Machine (Cheadle) being re-skinned into a red-white-and-blue Iron Patriot in order to do overseas merc work for the U.S. government is an outrageously potent metaphor coming from a cinematic universe that would have to play ball with the Air Force a little over five years later.

It’s also maybe one of the only features in the MCU that portrays a character actually dealing with all the shit he’s seen? There are little nods here and there throughout the franchise to residual trauma; the feeling of loss hangs over ENDGAME, Thor gets a moment in INFINITY WAR to process everything that’s he’s faced, there’s WANDAVISION on the TV side of things. But here, Tony Stark’s ultimate arc is “getting over PTSD”, and it takes him until the end of the movie to really achieve that. It’s to IRON MAN 3’s credit that it takes Stark’s emotional fragility at face value. One of the worst things about modern franchise filmmaking is that the stories so often boil down to being power fantasies, the desire to see our heroes kick ass and be reassured about how cool it is that they’re kicking ass and how cool YOU are for watching them kick ass. Here, Tony Stark gets talked down from a panic attack by a kid he’s just met. It’s profoundly uncool. It’s great.

Shane Black and Drew Pearce also understands that Tony Stark is infinitely more interesting than Iron Man. It’s no mistake that the strongest stretch of the film by far is its middle section where Stark is alone and stranded in the middle of snowy Tennessee with said strange kid, completely stripped of his suit. He’s back to having to use his substantial wits and smarts to get himself back to the West Coast and save the day. It’s something that kind of got lost previously in IRON MAN 2, which felt like all suits, all the time. Seeing Stark become more of a detective is a blast, and it feels like a running back of the dynamic Downey Jr. got to play in KISS KISS BANG BANG.

Also, the Christmas aspect you’ve come to expect from a Shane Black movie is in full force, and ramps up a notch once the movie moves from Malibu to snowy Tennessee. Actually, IRON MAN 3 is one of the rare blockbusters that makes New Year’s Eve a crucial plot point; as mentioned above, the turning of the clock from 1999 to 2000 is sort of the beginning of the end for Stark here. We also get a fun Christmas track near the start of the movie, a remix of “Jingle Bells” by Joe Williams. It can't hold a candle to THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT’s X-Mas factor but it ranks high, especially since Marvel hadn’t really taken much advantage of seasonal moods up until really recently.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that IRON MAN 3 is an oasis of musical identity in a franchise that has famously been accused of lacking it. Specifically, it features absolutely the grooviest end-credits music in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, a fitting Brian Tyler track that sums up the mood and swerve of the movie as much as anything else. Why, yes, I can dig it!

Of course, IRON MAN 3 isn’t perfect. At 130 minutes, it’s a long movie that feels longer; whether that’s a result of Black being given a higher budget and ramping up the spectacle and CGI in response, or just a symptom of the bloated franchise threequel is debatable (it’s likely a mix of both). There’s also some weird moments that only make sense if you keep up with Marvel’s corporate machinations; you’d be forgiven for not knowing that the only reason the movie introduces us to Wang Xuequi’s Dr. Wu in the first scene, only to never see him again until the closing seconds, is to serve an alternate Chinese cut of the film where Dr. Wu pimps out milk drinks and local industrial companies.

Then there’s the most famous thing about the movie, the moment that endures in conversation after a decade, a moment that to some degree the MCU is still trying to deal with.

That would be the Mandarin twist.

Specifically, it’s the revelation that the big, scary, bin Laden-esque Mandarin character is, in reality, a drunk, loser actor named Trevor Slattery, nothing more than a puppet for the REAL bad guys operating in the shadows. It’s notable the wild swing Kingsley takes in his performance here, going from cool and calculated in the beginning, to a broad, burping, nearly cross-eyed cartoon character by the end.

Needless to say, many people were pissed. To get an idea of the general sentiment, check out the Honest Trailer for IRON MAN 3 sometime. It wasn’t a universal opinion, but it seemed to me that even people who liked the movie seemed to hate that moment (my 2013 memories are a little fuzzy, but as I recall, the group I saw it with was split right down the middle on it).

The reason I hear most often to explain the distaste for this decision is that it wiped out a major villain from the comics and replaced him with both a cartoonish asshole and a bland, unsatisfying corporate baddie. However, I have to wonder if it just goes back to the idea of not wanting to feel messed with. Here I am, really enjoying this modern update to a somewhat problematic comic arch-nemesis, and then the rug gets pulled from under me. How is that fair?

With about ten years of reflection, I can concede that the Mandarin twist falls short of something like THE LAST JEDI’s anti-twist regarding Rey’s parentage, a move that built carefully towards the film’s greater point about the Force being accessible to everybody, even a wayward orphan girl on the outskirts of the universe. Here, The Mandarin being a drug-addicted dork actor named Trevor is admittedly just a rug-pull for the sake of a rug-pull. “You thought he was this, but he’s actually this! Got you!” It also puts the film, and the MCU at large, in a hole it can’t quite get out of. As a result of this twist, there’s no longer a real compelling villain at the middle of it all (Killian ultimately doesn’t really fill the gap). It also took a major Marvel villain off the board, and the studio bought the twist back almost immediately with the ALL HAIL THE KING short before casting Tony Leung as the real Mandarin in SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS.

But, at the same time, the fact that Marvel allowed Black to do the rug-pull anyway showed a willingness of the studio to hand over the keys to a filmmaker to let him do his thing he was theoretically hired for. And that might be the most miraculous thing about IRON MAN 3: it’s most definitely a Shane Black film. It’s set during Christmas, it pairs our lead with an unlikely partner (at least for part of the film, and it’s naturally the best stretch), and it plays on your expectations of an action film with many moments of subversion built and baked into the script; it’s no surprise that the biggest laugh of the movie comes from a henchman suddenly pleading for his release, stating “I hate working here, they’re so weird”.

Another kinda beautiful thing about Black’s creation here: there’s not a whole lot of world-building for future MCU installments. It seems utterly impossible for a mega-franchise that can often feel like homework nowadays, but outside of maaaaybe a little tease towards Pepper becoming Rescue like five years later (bet you forgot that happened in ENDGAME) and Slattery’s big return in SHANG-CHI, there aren’t a whole lot of threads here that contribute to The Big Marvel Story. It’s a stand-alone swan song for Tony Stark as a solo lead.

If anything, IRON MAN 3 concludes by closing a door future movies would have to reopen. It ends with Tony Stark finally getting the shrapnel in his heart removed, and his arc reactor thrown into the ocean. Despite the final line of the movie being “I am Iron Man”, the heavy implication is that Stark is retiring the persona, his soul being finally freed of the ghosts of his past and the burdens of his present.

Of course, it will come as no surprise to see Iron Man zip-zap-zopping away in the air the next time we see him, in the opening minutes of AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON. The Big Marvel Story At Work! I tease, but it does take some of the punch out of a movie’s bold storytelling choice when the next guy has to undo or completely ignore them (another parallel to be drawn here to STAR WARS’ final two chapters).

Still, IRON MAN 3 takes its place next to CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER, THE AVENGERS, THOR: RAGNAROK, BLACK PANTHER and the two GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY films as the list of Marvel Cinematic Universe films that feel completely and truly informed by the man behind the camera (note: this doesn’t mean these are the only good ones, nor is it necessarily slander against the ones not listed, please no fights going into the new year).

It was also enough of a success to bring Black back to his rightful place as the oddball writer of Hollywood. 2016’s THE NICE GUYS and 2018’s THE PREDATOR would follow; one was quite beloved, the other…wasn’t, but completely missing sometimes is the consequence of taking big swings.

The MCU has changed a lot since 2013, some for good (the makeup of their on and offscreen talent has finally diversified; they admittedly nailed the landing with ENDGAME) and some for bad (the fact that Scorsese has to take a meeting with Iger like some sort of mafioso every time he lodges a valid complaint about the MCU; the CGI is starting to look really rushed, a consequence of their actively hostile business practices). As the portfolio of lead heroes kept expanding (and Downey Jr.s’ price tag kept rising), we never did get another movie with Tony Stark as the lead. You sometimes wonder what would have happened if we had gotten an IRON MAN 4 with a returning Shane Black at the helm.

Then again, you take a look at something like THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER and you start to recognize that sometimes lightning in a bottle is just that.

Maybe messing with everybody once was enough.

KISS KISS, BANG BANG: A Very (Shane) Black Christmas!

One of the more exhaustively discussed recent trends in the film industry is the sudden rise and complete dominance that Marvel Studios, The Walt Disney Company, and superhero movies at large have on the current market. There are little pieces of data to suggest that the stranglehold may be loosening a bit (Phase 4 of the MCU has been notable more for its quantity than its quality), but the fact remains at this point in time that any sort of discussion of modern moviemaking must filter through the Avengers Academy first.

To that end, even the remaining industry titans of an older time are somehow linked more to capes and cowls than their actual body of work these days. The names “Martin Scorsese” and “Quentin Tarantino” can barely be discussed without their semi-recent comments about the MCU essentially not being their thing being analyzed, re-analyzed, then analyzed again for good measure.

Now, I’m not honestly and truly not here to re-litigate any of that conversation again, outside of mentioning that, in the pursuit of defending Earth’s Mightiest Heroes from detractors, it feels like people have started backing themselves into a position of profound un-curiosity? Take the rollout of the 2022 Sight & Sound list, as well as the reveal of individual director’s ballots, I’ve noticed there’s been a lot of eye-rolling about certain directors making “pretentious” picks. This would be a somewhat understandable criticism (cinema can be great without being esoteric), except the picks being referred to is shit like CASABLANCA or CHINATOWN, movies that were mainstream releases at the time and remain entirely accessible and straight-forward to this day. Are we just considering any movies made before we were born as “pretentious”?

No, I’m not here to get back into that exhausting topic. What I’m more interested in this week is “how did we get here?” I don’t mean, “what business practices and legislation got us to this point of Disney essentially having a populist monopoly on art?”. Those kinds of articles are always bleak treatises and ultimately left to those better suited to write them.

No, what I’m interested in is “what creative actions got us to this point in time?” What SUCCESSES led to the glut of superhero cinema??

The answer, of course, can be traced back to the summer of 2012, when THE AVENGERS proved that a shared universe can pay off big-time. Marvel Studios’ big risk yielded major dividends, both creatively and financially, as the star-studded ensemble proved their ability to play well together and its at-the-time major get in the director’s and writer’s chair gulp Joss Whedon proved his ability to allow everybody a moment to shine. The team-up film went on to make $200 million in its opening weekend, and was the highest-grossing movie in America (without adjusting for inflation, of course!) for about three years. The “shared continuity” era had begun in earnest.

But, of course, the groundwork for the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe had been put down years before then. The real start to all of this, then, was 2008’s IRON MAN, the summer blockbuster that officially marked the return to the limelight of troubled star Robert Downey Jr., in one of the more perfect and satisfying weldings of star and role of the 21st century. Silver-tongued, flawed, but ultimately endowed with the capacity for empathy, it’s arguable that this performance was the single most important factor in the MCU’s rise to popularity in the eyes of the general public, as well as in Kevin Feige being able to set up the general Marvel “formula”: zippy one-liner style humor performed by the most likable actors on the planet.

Except, even then, Downey Jr.’s comeback role wasn’t just given to him as an act of good faith. For major reclamation projects such as his (and people forget just how bad things were for RDJ at the turn of the new century), a smaller production has to stick its neck out and assume the potential risk first. Maybe, perhaps, a quirky project written and directed by a guy who was himself looking to pull himself from the Hollywood outs.

What I’m saying is that Shane Black’s 2005 directorial debut KISS KISS, BANG BANG is the reason you feel like movies are bad now. Merry Christmas!

KISS KISS BANG BANG (2005)

Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Michelle Monaghan, Val Kilmer, Corbin Bernsen

Directed by: Shane Black

Written by: Shane Black

Released: October 21, 2005

Length: 103 minutes

Like most twisty mystery movies, the plot of KISS KISS BANG BANG is difficult to expound upon without giving away many of its surprises. The brass tacks: Harry Lockhart (Downey Jr.) is a wanna-be petty burglar whose latest job has just gone horribly wrong, leaving his partner dead in the streets. Searching for a place to hide from the cops, he barges into an audition room, where Hollywood casting director Dabney Shaw (the always great Larry Miller) is holding tryouts for a new picture. Thinking Harry is their next actor, they hand him sides and start running lines with him. He begins to show panic and remorse for the destruction he’s just run away from. The room loves his improvised energy, and he gets flown out to LA for a screen test.

Once he reaches the West Coast, Harry runs into his childhood crush, Harmony Lane (Monaghan), at a party. As the movie he’s auditioning for is a hardboiled detective thriller, Harry gets teamed up with “Gay” Perry (Kilmer), an actual L.A. detective, in order to give him some real-life experience and training. Their case? Staking out the cabin of actor Harlan Dexter, who has just settled a lawsuit filed by his daughter over the inheritance of his wife. What they find at his cabin sets off a chain of events that lead to Harry, Perry and Harmon(err)y running all around L.A. to solve a deadly mystery.

KISS KISS BANG BANG is narrated by Harry himself, and his verbal exposition is extremely self-aware. Harry is oftentimes a stumbling narrator, looping back around to events and details he forgot to mention, or jokingly skipping over certain parts of the story in order to come back to them at another time. More to the point, Harry seems to be fully aware that he's in a movie; he seems to be at peace with the fact that he exists as words on a page, here to tell a story. He’s also a world-class smart-ass, getting defensive and snarky when he trips himself up in his own story (he at one point goads us on after a fuck-up by saying “I don’t see another goddamn narrator, so pipe down”).

Now, much of what I just described is going to be anathema to a good time at the movies for some. Meta cuteness paired with writery smart-aleck one-liners isn’t going to sit well with everybody (a good litmus test as to your enjoyment of KISS KISS BANG BANG to gauge your immediate reaction to the line “don’t quit your gay job”). But if you DO like these kind of playful, self-aware films, it’s hard to think of one from the 21st century as effortless as this one. It definitely helps that Downey Jr. is uniquely suited for the kind of loopy, almost hostile narration that Black employs throughout his script.

Robert Downey Jr. is maybe one of the most effortlessly sarcastic onscreen presences in Hollywood right now, and has been for some time. Humor has been a major tool for him both on and off the screen, and his ability to laugh at the mess that was this point in his life is probably his greatest weapon against relapse that he possesses. His true gift in front of a camera, however, is his ability to be likable no matter how abrasive his character may be. He always finds the humanity in cads. It’s why an entire multi-film franchise was able to be built off of his Tony Stark performance. His performance in KISS KISS BANG BANG is no different, and it’s hard to oversell just how important it was for the second half of his career for him that he nailed this.

IRON MAN was his comeback in the eyes of the public. KISS KISS BANG BANG, however, was his comeback in the eyes of Hollywood executives.

Ironically, like all monumental decisions, the one made to cast RDJ as the lead here was made almost arbitrarily. Yes, prior to his run-ins with the law and his struggles with addiction, Downey Jr. had already transcended his status as a nepotism product, and was already well-established as a performer capable of anchoring a complete movie. However, in 2005, the major reason he was chosen as the lead of KISS KISS BANG BANG was that he was cheap, and would fit right into the film’s $15 million budget. He only got into the audition room at all due to him finding out about the project from his then-girlfriend Susan Levin, then leveraging his relationship with producer Joel Silver. He read well, and the rest was history.

KISS KISS BANG BANG was a redemption project for its writer and director as well. As mentioned in last week’s article, the relative failure of THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT effectively iced Shane Black’s career for almost a decade. The crack in his armor seemed to open up the floodgates to critics, perhaps eager to finally execute the Machismo Action Genre that had engulfed Hollywood in the 80’s and 90’s. Burned out and formally rejected by the Academy, Black wouldn’t return to the action genre until the next century. The script began its life as something more resembling a rom-com, and was being guided by James L. Brooks. Somewhere along the way, it morphed into more of an action romp with little tweaks and twists, a sign that Black was returning to his roots.

The biggest subversion was the addition of “Gay” Perry. Even in 2005, it was rare to really see a gay character in a film being played without affectation, let alone as a real action heavy of a movie (hell, it still is). Yes, there are many barbs about his sexuality thrown his way, but none of them really rise higher than the level of “male peers cracking on each other”. There’s no real loss of agency or respect towards Perry. If anything, others’ discomfort with his very existence tends to play to his advantage; one henchman’s refusal to search him thoroughly leads to one of the movie’s most memorable jokes.

So there’s a little bit of a risk involved with this project, to say the least. You have a writer and director whose last film was over a decade ago that happened to be a flop (although as it was posited in last week’s article, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT might have been a victim of CUTTHROAT ISLAND’s historic failure), you have a star who was only allowed back into movies at all because fucking Mel Gibson paid the insurance on him for 2003’s THE SINGING DETECTIVE, and a major gay role front and center. Although a summer blockbuster it was not, the stakes were still unusually high for a slick mystery riff.

And it was all worth it. It’s true that didn’t exactly set the box office on fire, although it did basically break even. But with a movie like this, you’re mostly concerned if it still has any juice at all. You worry if a decade-long hiatus would have sapped Black’s unique sense of fun, rhythm, and function. Maybe he’s lost it, maybe the rust would show. But, nope, it’s like he never left. If anything, the only noticeable difference between this and his previous film THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is the reduction in budget and, more specifically, scale. No more large explosions or stunt-work on this one; instead, KISS KISS BANG BANG is forced to be more of a wry, sarcastic character-based murder mystery. The focus is more on the dialogue and the ways the personalities of our core three characters propel things than it is on spectacle. Most of the violence is meant to be surprising, maybe even a little funny.

Actually, the whole movie is funny in ways you don’t always expect. Like pretty much all of Black’s previous films, KISS KISS BANG BANG plays with the conventions and tropes of action flicks by playing on your expectations, then twisting them. You know you’ve seen scenes of characters getting saved from a bullet by something significant in their breast pocket, and KISS KISS BANG BANG knows you have too. So it provides you a scene like that….then pulls the rug out from under you. The entirety of the movie kind of plays like that, and it runs the risk of feeling exhausting if it didn’t feel so light on its feet.

It draws some career-best performances from its principals. Besides setting Downey back on track, Kilmer is also great as the “Murtaugh” to RDJ’s “Riggs”. Kilmer is one of those guys who said “yes” to too many projects over his career, which dilutes his good performances, but at his best, he has a understated quality about him that makes him “cool” in the best way. And Michelle Monaghan (one year before she would become a recurring MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE player), is terrific as Melody, a role that might have lost some agency if played by a less captivating performer. At once bitterly sarcastic and wildly vulnerable, she’s the perfect counterpoint to RDJ’s antics.

It’s tempting to call KISS KISS BANG BANG a spin on a noir, but I don’t know how noir-ish it really is, at least in a cinematic sense. Its bigger influence appears to be the dime-store detective novella. The script was based off of a 1941 Brett Halliday novel, BODIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM. As well, there’s a fictional Raymond Chandler-esque writer who , although more or less unseen in the actual movie, has a body of work that serves as the catalyst for most of the plot’s beginning actions. Most fun of all, as a final nod to Chandler, KISS KISS BANG BANG is split into chapters with pulpy titles that just so happen to correlate to various Chandler novels.

Now, I must admit that the Christmassy-ness of KISS KISS BANG BANG is a little lacking in comparison to Black’s prior film THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT. For one, we’re back in Los Angeles, a profoundly un-Christmassy town (sorry, everybody). Winter permeates the whole thing, and there are little nods throughout to indicate which season this tale is set in; Monaghan wears a particularly infamous seasonal outfit. But you just can’t have the kind of snowy goodness that you want from a true holiday movie (this may be the single greatest argument against DIE HARD being a Christmas movie, a conclusion I remain unconvinced of).

On the other hand, perhaps an L.A. Christmas is more in the Shane Black tradition anyway. I think about an answer he once gave to the “why Christmas, anyway?” question he probably gets quite often:

I […] think that Christmas is just a thing of beauty, especially as it applies to places like Los Angeles, where it's not so obvious, and you have to dig for it, like little nuggets. One night, on Christmas Eve, I walked past a Mexican lunch wagon serving tacos, and I saw this little string, and on it was a little broken plastic figurine, with a light bulb inside it, of the Virgin Mary. And I thought, that's just a little hidden piece of magic. You know, all around the city are little slices, little icons of Christmas, that are as effective and beautiful in and of themselves as any 40-foot Christmas tree on the lawn of the White House.

And that’s what KISS KISS BANG BANG is to me: a little hidden piece of magic inside the beginning of the history of the most successful film franchise in the history of the medium (not adjusted for inflation, of course). And of course, both Black and Downey Jr. would be rewarded for their good work here.

About eight years later, Downey Jr. was firmly in the middle of the most incredible career renaissance in recent modern history. IRON MAN and THE AVENGERS were lucrative successes, and it was time to start making another round of Marvel movies. It was here that RDJ found a way to repay the favor Black did for him earlier in the decade. Because as it happened, IRON MAN 3 was the first Marvel sequel that suddenly found itself in need of a director…

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT: A (Shane) Black Christmas Continues

Jennifer Lawrence recently got into trouble with the Twitterati due to a quote from her Actors on Actors video with Viola Davis for Variety in which she allegedly claimed that prior to THE HUNGER GAMES, “nobody had ever put a woman in the lead of an action movie” before. People were quick to point out that this is a literally untrue statement, citing such past female action icons as Ellen Ripley, Leia Organa and Sarah Conner (although it should be said that everybody seemingly mentioning the same three characters over and over isn’t the “epic clap back” as people are intending it to be).

In context, this dubious quote from Lawrence seemed more like a misspeak than anything else, with her intent being more in regards to studios’ heavy reluctance to trust in the box office power of a female-driven action film than some sort of unearned claim to history; she cited nerves in the moment to her bungled quote, although it really did little to change Lawrence’s current location in the Internet-build-up-then-tear-down cycle.

Regardless of what she did or didn’t mean to say or not say, even if Katniss Everdeen isn’t the literal first female action hero, it’s undeniable that studios are often still so unwilling to move forward with these kinds of films (even though people seem to like them and can list them off at the drop of a hat!). More to the point, they seem to so often undercut them when it comes time to market them. It’s a shame, too, because there’s lots of fun examples of the kind of female-led action film that quite frankly should be way more normalized than they are.

Once again, enter Shane Black.

Black’s career had been going swimmingly since the box office success of LETHAL WEAPON. Since then, he penned the story for 1989’s LETHAL WEAPON 2 and the scripts for 1987’s MONSTER SQUAD, 1991’S THE LAST BOY SCOUT, and 1993’s LAST ACTION HERO. Yep, even by 1993, the macho blockbuster was already entering its “ironic meta-parody” era.

Then came 1996’s THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT, the kind of movie that you would think audiences would have been starved for at the time. In a decade and a half dominated by greased-up muscle guys like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sylvester Stallone, here comes an action movie starring….Geena Davis! It’s the perfect type of genre subversion, the kind of thing that makes you turn your head at the poster going, “Huh? Thelma’s packing heat again?”

As it turns out, audiences really didn’t care, at least not as much as many of the film’s stakeholders were hoping for. The movie kinda came and went after about a month. There are lots of reasons as to why (a big one being that Geena Davis was currently one of the faces of one of the biggest Hollywood flops of all time; more on that later!), but the movie’s relative failure had some pretty significant consequences for the trajectory of the action genre at large.

For instance: if you take a look at Black’s filmography after 1996, you’ll notice almost a decade goes by before he made another film. This is because THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT was considered a major shortcoming by his standards. After that, a confluence of culture shifts and bad timing kept him on hiatus well into the 2000’s, until a new confluence of culture shifts and good timing brought him back to the top.

That’s all a story for another time. For now, does THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT deserve its sort-of-bomb status? Not on your life. If anything, I think more people would be surprised how fun it is if they gave it a shot.

I think you would be, too. Let’s get into it.

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT (1996)

Starring: Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson, Brian Cox, Craig Bierko, David Morse

Directed by: Renny Harlin

Written by: Shane Black

Released: October 11, 1996

Length: 121 minutes

In many regards, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is a movie that works best if you know as little as possible about it going in, so if you haven’t watched it, you may want to consider knocking it out before reading this. Or don’t! It’s Christmas time, who am I to tell you what to do?

The starting conceit: Samantha Caine (Davis) is an ordinary housewife that has been living in a nondescript town in the Upper Midwest with her daughter and a long-term boyfriend for the past eight years. What was she doing before then? Well, she doesn’t know. The first memory she can recall is being found pregnant on a New Jersey beach. That’s it; anything before then is completely gone. She’s tried to get some insight via a series of private detectives, but to no avail. Maybe the newest one, Mitch Henessey (Jackson), will have more luck.

One night, near Christmas, Samantha gets into a car accident and suffers a concussion. When she comes to, she discovers she suddenly has a ton of skill with a knife, both cutting and throwing.

As it happens, it turns out Samantha Caine used to be “Charly”, a highly trained, platinum blonde CIA assassin who went missing eight years ago. From there, it’s up to Samantha/Charly and Henessey to determine why she disappeared in the first place, as well as what the people who are now after her are up to. By the way, what the hell is “Project Honeymoon”?

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is a movie with excess on its mind, although it should be noted that the explosions and wild knife stuff is paired with an extremely functional screenplay that only gives you as much information as you need at any given point, and a plot that all hangs together, but can either be tuned in or out of as you please. At its core, the two leads have a dynamic not unlike the one between Murtaugh and Riggs in LETHAL WEAPON, but with some significant subversions, which we’ll talk about in a second. The movie is comfortable, but also keeps you on your toes. It also threatens to collapse at any moment.

The reason that it doesn’t is because of Geena Davis.

Davis’ career had already been marked by an ability to play any type of role, appearing in such diverse genres of films as TOOTSIE, THE FLY, BEETLEJUICE, THELMA & LOUISE and A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN, the latter two juicing her early 90’s career peak. The pivot to action star, though, was a relatively new thing for her, fueled a little by her recent marriage to director Renny Harlin.

I genuinely don’t know if THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT would have worked without her grounding it (at least, as much as it allows itself to be grounded). Yes, you definitely buy her way more than you think you will as the CIA assassin. But without you COMPLETELY buying her as a beleaguered housewife in the movie’s opening act, this whole thing might have been dead on arrival. As it happens, Davis gives you both, infusing this jacked up action hero with a palpable maternal sense. The end result is a genuine cult classic.

Another thing that makes THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT so much fun (and sneakily subversive) is its complete swap of the traditional gender dynamic. In this film, Samuel L. Jackson and Geena Davis are more or less “buddy cops”, which is sort of fun considering they’re not really cops, and they’re not really buddies, at least not at the start. But, as it goes along, you start noticing that Henessey is the damsel-in-distress here, the character that gets proposed to be bait for the bad guys, the one that needs to be rescued by the macho action hero. Davis, on the other hand, is constantly the one “in charge”, the “man with a gun”. She’s even given the action-hero physique; take a look at her arms in the surprisingly harrowing torture sequence where she’s tied to the water wheel; she looks jacked.

Looked through this prism, then, it’s no wonder it’s so exciting whenever Charly gets to take over, leaving Samantha the housewife (and all that she represents) in the dust.

THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is also a surprisingly prescient movie. “Project Honeymoon”, the bad guys’ big bad evil master plan, turns out to be a plot to conduct a false flag operation, with the idea to detonate a chemical bomb at Niagara Falls and blame it on Islamic terrorism. If you think that particular storyline sounds far-fetched, run it by your weird cousin at Christmas later this week and see what he thinks.

Finally, it’s also littered with people you like from other things. The always great Brian Cox (aka the guy from that HBO show I haven’t watched yet) is in a key role as Nathan Waldman, the man who trained Charly to be the efficient killer she once was. David Morse appears in a small but crucial part as a former mark. After some thinking, I even realized I recognized Samantha’s daughter, Caitlin. She’s played by Yvonne Zima, who I knew as Rachel Greene’s daughter on the first half of ER. A killer lineup!

The only thing really holding THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT back from true greatness is that it feels a little long. It’s SO excessive and adrenaline-fueled that you’re totally wiped by the end. The 80’s/90’s action blow-’em-up blockbuster was starting to show its limitations just a bit in the middle of the 1990’s (which undoubtedly left it open to criticism from folks waiting for their chance to strike).

“But, Ryan, what about the Christmas factor???” So glad you asked. If anything, THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT is even more Christmassy than LETHAL WEAPON. No longer set in the warm valley of Los Angeles, Black sets this one in the snowy land of Honesdale, Pennsylvania (the fictional home of Schrute Beets, don’tcha know). The inciting incident is a giant small-town Christmas parade. Add a plethora of string lights and some diagetic holiday music, and you’ve got maybe the Christmassy-est non-Christmas movie of the entire goddamn 1990’s.

And yet, as mentioned, the movie was considered something of a failure at the time, making it to only third in the box office on opening weekend. THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT only managed about $33 mill in the United States and about $62 mill internationally for a combined total of $95, compared against its budget of…$65 mill. Yeah, it surprised me to learn that, for all the hand-wringing, the thing actually made money. It just wasn’t nearly enough as everybody was hoping.

Why was this? Well, there a few unique mitigating factors, perhaps none bigger than the fact that THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT was the second Renny Harlin-Geena Davis collaboration in about a year. The first was released the previous Christmas, a little movie called…..CUTTHROAT ISLAND, listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest box-office bomb of all time. Bad time to get back on the horse.

Some, including Harlin himself, also put blame on the bad marketing, which I can’t speak a lot to: the trailer seems pretty straight-forward. There’s also something to be said to the fact that audiences and the media were starting to grow weary of “macho Hollywood”; the tide was starting to turn against guys like Black, who were perceived to be overpaid relative to the quality of his output. This was personified by a strange hit-piece from Variety’s Peter Bart after the script was sold in 1994. He sounded pretty pissed! People were hungry for a change, at least in the media.

However, Shane Black posits that it perhaps THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT might have been more successful had the gender roles been more traditional:

It might have made more money, they told me, but it had to be a woman. The lead had to be female.'

In the end, it’s probably a mix of all of the above. The fact is that it’s been proven to be enormously difficult to generate a fully original female-led action flick that is profitable enough for the studio that financed it (again, it should be noted that THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT made money, just not enough; it’s worth considering if the standard would have been so high if Sam Jackson had been in the lead).

For what it’s worth, Jackson himself has looked back on it pretty fondly, going so far to say that it was his favorite movie of his to re-watch. Given he makes 400 movies a year, that’s quite the praise. I’m surprised he didn’t say FARCE OF THE PENGUINS, but no matter.

Regardless, the damage was done. As mentioned, Black essentially went on a decade-long hiatus after this, becoming more well-known for his extravagant parties than FOR writing anything at all. Was it the fallout of the tide starting to turn on him (it should be noted that 1993’s LAST ACTION HERO wasn’t exactly a box office success, either)? Was it the end result of many bad production experiences with studios over the prior decade? Was it just another period of low productivity from a man known for such bouts of writer’s block? Probably a mix of it all.

It also marked a steady decline in Davis’ film output; the only role she played after this until 2009 was as Stuart Little’s mom in the STUART LITTLE trilogy (actually, it’s worse than that, she was voice only in the direct-to-DVD STUART LITTLE 3: CALL OF THE WILD). To be fair, she began to focus on TV after the turn of the century, headlining her own self-titled sitcom, as well as playing the president in 2006’s COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF. But, you know, both those shows ran for a combined 40 episodes. Not great.

It’s hard not to read between the lines. Her pivot into the male world didn’t do as good as we decided it should, you’re now on the wrong side of 35…..see ya later.

It’s why I find it hard to muster up a lot of hatred for Jennifer Lawrence’s words earlier this month. Yes, she completely misspoke, but we’ve forgiven all kinds of gaffes from public figures before, at least from ones we’re not angling to tear down in that moment. The underlying intent and sentiment behind what she was trying (and failing) to express in the Variety video couldn’t be clearer once you really break it down.

It’s still damn near impossible to come up with more than a handful of female action characters that exist as wholly original creations, and not part of some previously existing intellectual property. It’s why it;s crucial we appreciate the ones we do have, even if they were considered underwhelming at the time.

This Christmas, consider taking a trip to Honesdale, Pennsylvania, won’t you?

LETHAL WEAPON: A Very (Shane) Black Christmas!

A CHRISTMAS STORY. IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE. HOME ALONE. NATIONAL LAMPOON’S CHRISTMAS VACATION. WHITE CHRISTMAS.

The “official” Christmas film canon is somewhat brief, if nevertheless solid. It’s become a lucrative and expansive genre in recent years, thanks to The Hallmark Channel’s infamous churning out of approximately two billion Christmas movies a week, a business practice so hacky that making jokes about it has actually become hacky.

I think the reason the Official Christmas Movie Nice List has become so hallowed is because there doesn’t seem to be that many of them. Halloween provides so many opportunities for watch-list customization due to the fact that horror and suspense thrillers are their own year-round genre. Anything can be watched in the month of October if it passes the “spooky season” vibe check. GET OUT? Halloween movie. THE SHINING? Halloween movie. SUSPIRIA? Halloween movie. HALLOWEEN? Fourth of July movie. Just kidding. Halloween movie.

Christmas, though? Generally speaking, a Christmas movie has to at the very least have one scene that is set on the actual holiday in question. At least one door has to have a wreath or something on it. However, for most people, it seems, Christmas has to be the defining theme of the film for it to count as a “Christmas movie”. It has to be the reason any of these characters are even talking to each other. People all have their own defining lines, but generally, what constitutes a Christmas movie is limited for most.

And that’s a shame for me! One of my great cinematic joys are movies that simply use Christmas as a window dressing for the rest of its story. Christmas as a dramatic vessel, if you will. The “non-Christmas Christmas” movie. It’s an easy way to expand the field of holiday movies and include some of the best, sweetest and most fun films ever made.

And nobody in Hollywood does the “non-Christmas Christmas movie” better than Shane Black. One of the big action screenwriters to come out of the 80’s/90’s blockbuster-issance, Black stood ahead of his peers by having a palpable, almost satiric sense of humor. Where others like Joe Eszterhas made his millions with bullets and greased-up breasts (both male and female), Black wrote his scripts almost like a meta-novel; within his LETHAL WEAPON screenplay, he once described a drug lord’s mansion as “the kind of house I’ll buy if this movie is a huge hit”.

And he loves Christmas! It’s become a staple of A Shane Black Joint to be arbitrarily set during the holidays. Hell, his scripts and movies didn’t even need to be released particularly near December 25th. They can come out in March, May, whenever. Characters are still wearing Santa hats, no matter what.

To honor the strange career arc of this blessedly goofy guy, this month has been declared A Very (Shane) Black Christmas! And there’s no better place to start than the movie that really put “Black the Screenwriter” on the map, the script that featured that aforementioned mansion.

Let’s roll the calendar back to 1987 and revisit LETHAL WEAPON, starring Danny Glover and…..

….uh-oh.

Is it too late for me to ch—-

LETHAL WEAPON

Starring: Mel Gibson, Danny Glover, Gary Busey, Tom Atkins, Darlene Love

Directed by: Richard Donner

Written by: Shane Black

Length: 112 minutes

Released: March 6, 1987

The story of LETHAL WEAPON will ring familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a buddy-cop movie: on the day of his fiftieth birthday, exhausted cop Sergeant Roger Murtaugh (Glover) gets teamed up with Sergeant Martin Riggs (Gibson), a narcotics detective who has recently become dangerous and suicidal due to the recent death of his wife. Murtaugh has been tasked to team with him and determine if he’s faking it or not.

Along the way, Murtaugh has been contacted by an old friend, Michael Hunsaker (Atkins), whose daughter has apparently committed suicide. However, an autopsy shows that she was in reality fatally injected with poisoned drugs, indicating the possibility of murder. As Riggs and Murtaugh follow the trail of evidence, and the involvement of Riggs’ former Special Forces team seems almost certain, the two cops must find a way to bridge their differences and bring justice to the Hunsaker family. Can they do it? What do you think?

The “buddy cop” film genre could theoretically be traced all the way back to Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film STRAY DOG, although the sub-genre really got going in the 80’s with 48 HRS, the BEVERLY HILLS COP trilogy and RUNNING SCARED (you know, the one with the classic duo of Gregory Hines and….Billy Crystal). The genre thrived in the 1990’s and beyond, with movies like the RUSH HOUR trilogy, LAST ACTION HERO, MEN IN BLACK and 21/22 JUMP STREET simultaneously poking some amount of fun at the genre’s trappings while also conforming to its beats (Roger Ebert once referred to these types of flicks as “Wunza” movies….”one’s a (blank), one’s a (blank)”)

The appeal of the “two diametrically opposed guys having to work together” is obvious for storytellers: the conflict is up-front, easy to dramatize and is satisfying for audiences, even if the more in-tune members know where these types of movies are going. Nobody really minds a formula, as long as it works. All a screenwriter or director really needs to do (besides really study WHY these movies work) is contribute their own personal stamp on the formula, and it’s possible you could have hit on your hands.

Enter Shane Black.

Although it wasn’t his very first script (that honor goes to SHADOW COMPANY, a movie you most definitely haven’t seen because it was never made), Black started his career hitting the ground running anyway, striking it big with just his second spec-script (essentially, a script not written as a request from a studio) that would become LETHAL WEAPON. After selling it for a quarter of a million in 1986, Black zipped away to Mexico to appear on camera in 1987’s PREDATOR. All the while, production began on LETHAL WEAPON.

The diametric difference between LETHAL WEAPON’s two central characters come from the amount of energy they carry: Murtaugh is wiped, Riggs is wired. From there, the “personal stamp” that Black provided that would set LETHAL WEAPON’s script apart from others of its ilk is its twisted sense of humor. Riggs is a very funny character at its baseline; how else to describe a guy whose plan to rescue a suicidal man from a rooftop is to handcuff himself to him and tell him they’ll jump together? But the pain Riggs carries inside of him comes from a very real place: as a result of intense loss. The fine line the movie’s main dynamic straddles between playing this situation for pathos (one of our first scenes with Riggs alone shows him nearly blowing his brains out, tears streaming down his face) and for laughs (the central “comedic beat” of the LETHAL WEAPON franchise is Riggs doing something insane and Murtaugh just kind of rolling his eyes) is commendable, even kind of gutsy.

It should be noted that the movie’s offbeat sense of humor wasn’t actually entirely the doing of Black. Director Richard Donner (years removed from the SUPERMAN drama; you should check out my podcast’s episode on that little movie for more) found the original script just a tad too dark and asked writer Jeffrey Boam to add some levity to the proceedings. Lesson learned for Black? Let’s hold onto that for now and track it going forward.

The duo of Mel Gibson and Danny Glover was put together fairly quickly after the duo dazzled Donner with a reading; they were both signed to a deal by the spring of 1986. Gary Busey was picked up for the film during a fallow period in his career (in the 80’s, this was unusual for Mr. Busey), having to audition for a role for the first time in years.

To round out the major cast, John Carpenter favorite (and star of HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH) Tom Atkins was cast as Michael Hunsaker, the father of the woman who commits suicide in the film’s ope ing sequence. Finally, long-standing R&B legend Darlene Love was selected to play Trish, Murtaugh’s wife. For whatever reason, the four LETHAL WEAPON movies constitute the vast majority of Love’s filmography. The only other two movies she appeared in as somebody other than herself was in 2019’s HOLIDAY RUSH and in 2020’s THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES 2. So there you go.

As a movie, LETHAL WEAPON holds up about as much as you might expect, although it’s difficult to completely detach it from its most obvious Christmas action movie* competition, DIE HARD, which came out about a year later. That Bruce Willis vehicle has sort of taken that very specific crown and has never really looked back, its status no doubt bolstered by having its first sequel ALSO set during Christmas.

* Look. everybody, I don’t want to re-litigate the most annoying piece of holiday discourse since that one year everyone was obsessed with figuring out whether “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” was written in support of sexual assault or not, but DIE HARD is obviously a Christmas movie. Or it isn’t! Who cares! Eye of the beholder! I’d rather stick a gun in my mouth Riggs-style than ever get into an actual argument with somebody about this.

Essentially, LETHAL WEAPON suffers from not being DIE HARD, maybe the best action movie ever made. Oh, well! It’s still a good time (if edgier than you remember), with Gibson’s high-wire “loose cannon” act playing well against the straight-faced, beleaguered Glover. At the end of the day, it’s about those two, and you never get tired of watching them, the real signifier of success for what essentially amounts to another entry in the buddy cop genre.

And let’s not forget the real reason for the season. The Christmas of it all! Even though Christmas doesn’t really factor into the plot, the trappings of the holidays are everywhere. The damn opening scene (where a topless female jumps out of the window of a high-rise, plummeting to her death) is scored to the tune of “Jingle Bell Rock”. One of its most somber “we’re gonna get her back” moments takes place in a living room, with Riggs and Murtaugh framed by a family Christmas tree.

So, does anything hold LETHAL WEAPON back? Well, there’s that guy in the middle of it all.

I’m afraid we have to talk a little bit about Mel Gibson.

Here’s the funny thing about “cancel culture” (a phrase I sorely wish had never entered the cultural lexicon, if only to avoid having to hear people twice my age complain about it, please also see “woke”): who exactly is “cancelled” is eventually up to the individual. For instance, despite having apologized and technically (TECHNICALLY) not having committed a crime, I personally haven’t been able to return to Louis C.K.’s work, despite him being one of my very favorite comedians even as recently as five years ago. Yet, after a brief respite, he’s still out there winning Grammys and selling out shows. He’s cancelled to me, but not for many of ye.

On the other hand, despite wishing he had made better choices, and still sort of waiting for another shoe to drop, I’ve been able to still enjoy John Mulaney’s new material just fine. Not everybody agrees with me on that, deciding the way he’s decided to deal with his addiction has ruined the “harmless man-boy” facade. The facade is really important when you’re a celebrity! Once it’s gone, people don’t always come back, even if you’ve owned up and moved on.

So it goes for Mel Gibson and, boy, lemme tell ya, when I started putting this all together, I knew this would be a delicate conversation. But, I didn’t anticipate his particular….uh, anti-Semitism to become in vogue with so many other celebrities now in 2022. Seeing a certain rapper/mogul/masked man completely melt down has made me reflect quite a bit and really think about how much I want to let Gibson off the hook even now.

The thing is, when people think of “Mel Gibson controversy”, most people remember his 2006 DUI meltdown that led directly to his anti-Semitic outburst, as well as his 2010 leaked voicemail viciously berating his ex-girlfriend by using maybe the one word you really cannot use. But trouble for Gibson started all the way back in 1991 with an interview with Spanish paper El Pais, where he made some, er, colorful statements about homosexuals.

I bring this stuff up not to moralize or condemn (after all, the El Pais interview is over thirty years ago now), but to give context as to why some people aren’t so comfortable enjoying Gibson’s movies anymore, and probably never will again. It’s true that essentially every public transgression in his life can be traced back to alcoholism and he’s admitted as much. But stuff like an A-list star dropping the N-word (yes, it was from a voicemail that we absolutely should never have heard, but the fact that he was willing to say it when he thought nobody was listening is revealing), or a devout and open Catholic going off on Jewish people in a drunken rant (he’s characterized it since as an attempt at “suicide by cop” which….eh) remains startling for many people. Being straight about your addiction can only extend so much grace.

What burns me is that, despite everything, Gibson really did earn his A-list status in his day. It’s not really deniable. Earlier this year, my wife and I watched SIGNS for the first time in maybe twenty years. It’s definitely the first one of M. Night Shyamalan’s major films that showed just the teensiest cracks in his facade, what with the kind of dunderheaded water twist (although I’ve also always hated how Joaquin Phoenix’s character needed to be told the words “swing away” in order to be motivated to pick up a baseball bat and start beating the shit out of an alien….never mind).

But! I was struck at the kind of performance Gibson was giving as Graham Hess, a reverend whose faith has been fundamentally shaken by the gruesome death of his wife (recurring theme for Gibson characters?). It’s a quiet performance, punctuated with awkward, momentary bursts of emotion. It’s mostly all internal, under the surface. It’s damn near perfect.

Compare that with the wild-card energy of LETHAL WEAPON’s Martin Riggs, who is just as comfortable pointing a gun at his own head as he is pointing it at a perp. There couldn’t be two different people than Hess and Riggs, and they both were embodied by the same man.

All of that is what makes him so frustrating to talk about now. You almost wish he was a little more inept as a leading man; it would make it easier to write him off completely. But you can’t! Not entirely. Gibson, at his peak (and even a little after), was undeniably watchable. At least to me.

I also hesitate to hand-wave reconciling his act with his actions away with that “good artists do bad things, get over it” credo, because that’s usually just code for “I’m not giving this particular person up, and I don’t want to be made to feel bad for it”. Again, everybody’s line is different, and it’s fruitless to argue with people about where their personal line ought to be placed. As we’ve observed over the past couple of years, anti-Semitic rants and N-word usage in fits of rage are hard lines for many. Telling those many to get over probably isn’t going to be a long conversation.

Unfortunately, we’ve all had to come to grips with SOME favorite celebrity having their illicit pasts come to light in the For myself, I find it easier to deal with good art from bad people (as I happen to define it; I can’t work off of somebody else’s barometer and neither should you) if the art happens to exist in a time where nobody knew it yet (or at least nobody in the public). It’s not the most perfect test in the world; how does one adjust for changing in social mores (there’s a reason the El Pais wasn’t a deal-breaker in the early 90’s in the way it almost certainly would be now)? What if that previous art has the air of an offender hiding in plain sight (the aforementioned Louis C.K., even….W**** A****)? Your mileage may vary.

Somewhat conveniently for me, LETHAL WEAPON passes that smell test, having comfortably been released in 1987. You may not agree. That’s okay.

At the end of the day, when it comes to celebrities who publicly, spectacularly show their ass, we all have our own guiding principles and dividing lines as to whether not you can ever really enjoy them or not.

It’s a little like how we decide what a Christmas movie is or not.

Sam Raimi Goes Full Looney Tunes with ARMY OF DARKNESS

I’ve given variations on my spiel regarding the difficult reality of sequels; they’re hard, they’re frequently borne out of financial goals rather than creative, and they invite so many opportunities for failure that it’s frankly shocking that Hollywood has essentially kept itself alive in the 21st century through the practice.

What I haven’t had a chance to talk about much (outside of, oddly enough, THE SANTA CLAUSE 3) is the threequel. Third installments in a series usually exist for one of two reasons:

a) the second installment did box office and/or critical numbers beyond anybody’s wild dreams, and studios are trying to ride the wave;

b) the second installment didn’t quite live up to the original, and the studio wants to give it one more try to wring some money out of its would-be intellectual property before giving up the ghost.

In the case of this week’s subject, we’re firmly in A territory. EVIL DEAD II managed to almost double its $3.5 million budget, bringing in around $6 million at the box office. However, much like the gap between 1 and 2, Raimi didn’t roll into EVIL DEAD 3 right away, knocking out DARKMAN in 1990 first. The success of that Liam Neeson superhero vehicle is what allowed Raimi to leverage his newly penned deal with Universal Pictures to unleash what might be considered (in some circles, at least) his most popular film.

Yes, ARMY OF DARKNESS, a movie with a great name and an unforgettable pseudo-old-school aesthetic, with a truly goofy, go-for-broke lead performance in the middle of it all. It’s possible that this movie represented a truly foundational moment in the lives of many modern cinephiles. Naturally, I had never seen it. However, Halloween Night seemed like as good a time as any to check out a movie where a guy with a chainsaw arm takes on an army of stop-motion skeletons.

Let’s wind down EVIL DEAD Month with ARMY OF DARKNESS!

ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Embeth Davidtz

Written by: Raimi, Ivan Raimi

Released: February 19, 1993

Length: 81 minutes

The plot of ARMY OF DARKNESS is pretty simple: Ash is still recovering from the events of both THE EVIL DEAD and EVIL DEAD 2, which naturally concluded with him being sucked back into time, stranding him in the 1300’s. Believed to be a rival prince’s spy and stripped of his chainsaw arm, he’s immediately rounded up and led to “the pit”, which leads to the funny visual of his stump shoved into one of the holes of a yoke. Inside “the pit” is a Deadite, which Ash disposes of easily with his sawed-off shotgun. It’s this same shotgun (my apologies, boomstick) that he uses essentially to conquer everybody, with the support and aid of a Wise Man (played by Ian Abercrombie, which warmed this old Seinfeld fan’s heart) who believes Ash to be the prophesied Man From the Sky.

From there, he’s tasked with the retrieval of the Necronomicon and must speak the sacred words that will send him back to his own time (“Klaatu Varata Nicto”, a homage to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL). Ash half-asses the phrase, and instead unwittingly unleashes the titular Army of Darkness, led by an evil version of himself (it’s a long story). Ash must now fortify all defenses for one final stand-off. In between, there are many, many, MANY shenanigans.

First of all, the on-screen title indicates the movie’s true title is BRUCE CAMPBELL VS. ARMY OF DARKNESS, which is rad. Just one or two syllables too many. People should call this movie BRUCE CAMPBELL VS. ARMY OF DARKNESS.

Second, I was awestruck at how quickly this movie goes down. It’s listed at 81 minutes, but the credits start rolling at 76, which means you feel it wrapping things up at around an hour and nine minutes. It’s SHORT, efficient to the point of near-austerity. It’s all A-plot, with a half-attempt at a romantic “arc” that almost feels like self-parody.

Part of this is due to the fact that the movie was whacked down in order to achieve a PG-13 rating, which explains a lot. Also, despite mega-producer Dino de Laurentiis putting up much of the initial money to get EVIL DEAD III made, Universal Studios ended up taking over in post-production. The original ending, where Ash takes too much of the potion that eventually sends him home, waking up in a post-apocalyptic England, was deemed too bleak. A new ending was created, where Ash returns to his time, bringing Deadites with him.

(Also, side-bar: there are apparently four different versions of this movie; the theatrical cut that I watched, a 96 minute director’s cut, an 88-minute international cut, and another 88-minute US TV version. Does shit like this give anybody else immense anxiety? It all feels like a nasty trap meant to fool me into watching the “wrong” version of something, as well as condemn me into having long conversations with somebody trying to recommend me the version that’s the most “real”. It’s why I’ve never been able to fully engage with BLADE RUNNER, which by my count has 300 different cuts. No thanks!)

Third, there’s a lot to love with ARMY OF DARKNESS. Yes, it leans all the way into the goofiness this time around, with many scenes feeling like the result of some sort of fever dream (did I make up the existence of a sequence of four little Ashes splitting up to torment the real Ash?). Yes, as a result, its sense of humor is much broader than even EVIL DEAD II, with moments of actual slapstick and sections of the film that genuinely operate on Looney Tunes logic. Thus, it’s not going to be for everybody (it wasn’t universally warmly received at the time of its release).

But there’s something admirable and respectable about a third installment of a franchise that decides to pivot away from the balance of elements that made the previous ones work in order to see if something entirely new can be created. It helps that EVIL DEAD is not a multi-million dollar franchise (just a remarkably profitable one), so the stakes aren’t quite as high as they would be for, say, THE MATRIX or STAR WARS. But it takes genuine creative nerve to intentionally alter the formula to see what else can be created.

As a result, ARMY OF DARKNESS stands apart from its two predecessors in terms of its comedic tone and cartoony inspiration. But it also feels like the movie has its own distinct fanbase, separate from the bigger EVIL DEAD fandom. As mentioned last week, some of the movie’s advocates speak about it like it’s a stand-alone movie instead of a second sequel to a film that had come out a decade prior. It’s notable that it isn’t called EVIL DEAD III. ARMY OF DARKNESS is dang near an island unto itself.

Where I sometimes struggled with ARMY OF DARKNESS was with its characterization of Ash this time around. To be clear, one of the great virtues of the EVIL DEAD trilogy as a whole is that all three movies are more or less stand-alone takes on the same basic idea (dashing hero takes on evil special-effect monsters in bloody fashion). In that sense, it’s fun to track Campbell broadening up his performance to match the material being put before him. And the wisecracking hero archetype actually fits him quite well. It helps that, outside of having movie star good looks, he kind of looks like a normal guy. He’s not particularly muscle-bound like similar actors who took on these types of roles earlier in the 1980’s. You buy him just as much as a sales associate at a Walmart knock-off as you do heroically chainsawing bonies.

It’s just…I dunno, some of these one-liners are awfully broad. “You ain’t leadin’ but two things right now, jack and shit! And Jack just left town!” feels like something someone would come up with at a an improv class, met with brutal silence. Also, it feels like a longer sentence than anything he’s ever said in either EVIL DEAD I or II. It’s especially jarring considering that in in-universe time, something like five seconds have elapsed from the end of PART 2 to the beginning of PART 3. Not sure why he’s so cocky all of a sudden.

It all makes Ash just a little too cool, for seemingly no reason than “we haven’t tried this angle with him yet”. In a vacuum, this is fine: the EVIL DEAD series is all about its audacity, and it says something about me that this seemed like the most audacious move yet. It just all made me glad there’s no real EVIL DEAD 4, lest Ash start becoming an actual animated character running around like the Tasmanian Devil.

It also often crosses over from the camp notes of EVIL DEAD 2 straight into legitimate hamminess. The scene where Ash runs through the three Necronomicon books feels like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, complete with enormous animated reactions as he gets his hand bitten and his face sucked in by the magical books. As always, it’s ever audacious, but it’s a major jump from where we were with EVIL DEAD 2.

(Okay, I did genuinely like Ash’s “welcome to the 21st century” line, made all the funnier given that the movie was made firmly in the 20th.)

I think part of what I’m having a visceral reaction to with Ash’s comedy act is what this movie so clearly wrought in the young and teenage boys that consumed this movie like so much Mountain Dew. I didn’t know it at the time, but I grew up with a lot of people in the periphery who were clearly trying to copy this version of Ash, the smart-ass action hero who also mugs for the camera. Imagine, if you will, the seven year old version of Campbell’s performance here. These were the same kids whose senses of humor were triggered into existence the first time they saw ACE VENTURA: PET DETECTIVE. There’s nothing wrong with any of this on the face of it! But they were EXHAUSTING kids to be around. I say this as someone who actively tried to be like Bugs Bunny for the entirety of the first act of my life. Little Ashes were rough, even for me.

Back to the good! Easily the stars of this show are those skeletons that make up the titular Army of Darkness. It’s all so intentionally an homage to stuff like JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS and THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD, it’s a nice natural extension of where Raimi drew his influences from as a young man, AND they look so good. If this was the sole reason for this movie existing, it would have been worth it.

Sam Raimi’s legitimate talent as a director (and director of traffic) comes into play during this “final sequence”. He has a great sense for spacing and, for lack of a better term, what’s going to look cool. Production notes indicate that the fight choreography was particularly hellish, given that…you know…most of the fights he’s in are with people who aren’t there. He had to rely on a numbering system in order to keep everything straight. Raimi chose the audience over his actor in this regard, almost gleefully upping the ante and difficulty for every sequence. “Make him go through torture!” he allegedly stated.

It paid off. Campbell fighting off fully realized stop-motion skeletons with a sword on the steps of a castle goes as far to make Ash Williams the cool-yet-rubberfaced hero they were going for as a mountain of quips do. This battle scene, and its many mini-arcs and abundance of bits, are absolutely the highlight of ARMY OF DARKNESS. Also, maybe the biggest belly laugh I’ve had in a long time came from this sequence, and it’s where Evil Ash gets launched into the sky by a catapult before exploding like a firework for no apparent reason. Perhaps this says something about me more than ARMY OF DARKNESS. But there it is.

As far as the finale, set in the S-Mart that Ash otherwise works in? It’s fine, and feels in line with Ash as the cool action hero guy, although it seems to take on an almost satirical tone by the time they reach the movie’s final seconds. It’s big, it’s brash, Campbell completes his legacy as a dashing goofball (BRISCOE COUNTY JR. is right around the corner!), and it helps tie in the little glimpse of pre-EVIL DEAD Ash we get right at the beginning.

But I can’t help but think that the “alternate” ending fits the overall vibe of the EVIL DEAD franchise as a whole. Ash is nothing if not kind of a dummy barreling his way through a bizarre situation (another reason why his cool guy act is a little off-putting here), and the idea of him accidentally sleeping too much and ending up in the post-apocalyptic world is intriguing and totally in character with where Ash theoretically should be.

Looking back, I think what I respect the most about ARMY OF DARKNESS is its go-for-broke nature, as if everybody involved was imbued with the understanding that they weren’t going to be able to keep getting away with it forever, so they decided to cram in everything they ever wanted to do with the first two and then dared anybody to complain about it. In a world now where blockbuster movies keep teasing better movies ahead (as long as you keep showing up), it’s really, really satisfying to see an imaginative action-fantasy-horror flick that refuses to leave anything on the table.

If just for that reason alone, ARMY OF DARKNESS was pretty groovy.

EVIL DEAD II And the Art of Doubling Down

The balance of risk versus reward is a wildly volatile one to even out when it comes to doing a sequel.

Creating a successful artistic follow-up requires the ability to fully and fairly evaluate the work you are trying to follow up on, and then determine possible ways to improve upon it. The task becomes exponentially harder when the work you’re evaluating is your own. It requires an incredible amount of honesty and vulnerability, assuming you’re actually in the position to be able to call a plurality of the shots on the follow-up project at all.

What things really worked the first time around? What things did you wish you had possessed the knowledge or experience to do? What did you want to avoid? Most of all, how can you provide your audience what they want without just redoing the same things you did the first time?

As discussed last week, THE EVIL DEAD was a perfectly functional, gnarly little stand-alone feature all on its own that managed to stand out mostly for its willing audacity to be gross and off-putting, but through the prism of a cartoon. Sam Raimi was able to make a name for himself off that independent feature, and then moved on from the property for about half a decade. He promptly got to work on his next feature, CRIMEWAVE, which he wrote with another up-and-coming pair, the Coen brothers. The movie ultimately didn’t go the way he wanted, a result of an overly ambitious tone and constant interference from a demanding studio. CRIMEWAVE has since fallen into relative obscurity.

However, it seemed to have strengthened the bond between Raimi and his previous leading man, Bruce Campbell, who was barred from being the lead of this film after being forced to screen-test for the part. As the hands of fate would have it, this shared lack of artistic catharsis brought the two back together with the property that worked so well for them the first time: THE EVIL DEAD. Raimi decided to make good on an offer that producer Irvin Shapiro had made upon the first installment’s release, and got to work on a sequel treatment. The road to EVIL DEAD II had officially been paved.

Here’s the thing about the original EVIL DEAD: the surprise of it all had already been established. Although it would constitute an understandable route, it wouldn’t truly be enough to just throw red goop all over the camera and the actors again and call it a day. There would need to be new surprises in store.

So where to go from here?

From my observation, EVIL DEAD 2 is kind of known as “the good one” amongst the film aficionados in my friend circles. ARMY OF DARKNESS is probably the most well-known of the three, possibly because its name is extremely metal, as well as because it sounds like a stand-alone film (it seems like many people may have initially seen it not knowing it was the third installment to a franchise). But the middle entry of the original EVIL DEAD trilogy, pound for pound,seems to have the most praise heaped on it. Therefore, I had a lot of expectations for this thing going into it.

I’m happy to report it lived up to the hype! It’s a clear improvement over the already pretty good original, and it does it with a particular secret sauce: it infuses the bloody horror with a legitimate comedic sensibility that was already sitting around the fringes of the original.

In short, it trades in some of its blood in exchange for belly laughs. And it rocks!

EVIL DEAD 2 (1987)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Sarah Berry, Dan Hicks, Kassie Wesley

Written by: Raimi, Scott Spiegel

Released: March 13, 1987

Length: 84 minutes

To kick things off, it should be noted that I have an affinity for movie trilogies where the main character winds up dealing with three films worth of inciting actions, character arcs and denouments over an insanely compressed timeline. For instance, everything that happens to Marty McFly in the BACK TO THE FUTURE trilogy appears to take place over the span of like four nights or something (that’s an estimation; please don’t make me research this). No more significant time jumps between movies in your trilogies, people! Just let your characters go through the worst weekend ever!

Here, EVIL DEAD and EVIL DEAD 2 seems to take place over no more than two nights, constituting quite the weekend for Ash Williams (Campbell). To my immense surprise, given how the first movie ended, EVIL DEAD 2 picks up immediately where the first one leaves off. Well, maybe not exactly. In one of the little quirks that define this series, the opening five or so minutes is actually more of a streamlined remake/recap of the original film (the reason for this apparently being that Raimi and co didn’t have the rights to the first movie, eliminating the possibility of just using old footage to serve as a recap. Ah, the biz!).

In EVIL DEAD 2’s retelling of the original events at the cabin in the woods, it jettisons pretty much every character from the narrative except Ash and his girlfriend Linda (here played by Denise Bixler). But otherwise, it’s all there; the getaway to a cabin in the woods, the playing of the audio cassette, the evil forces, the decapitation of Linda and, of course, that infamous and chilling moment (and tracking shot!) at the end where Ash seemingly gets possessed himself.

It’s at this moment that EVIL DEAD 2 truly begins. It’s also at this moment that it begins to separate itself from the original by striking an immediately different tone. It turns out that Ash isn’t getting possessed per se, so much as merely being thrown through the forest by the evil demon spirits that roam the cabin.

I knew EVIL DEAD 2 was going to be different when Ash starts zooming past the trees, his body spinning around the camera like a member of the Looney Tunes.

To be clear, the movie doesn’t skimp out of the bloody carnage that the original had; there are at least two moments that rival Johnny Depp’s death in the first NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET for “most outlandish use of Red Dye 40”. But there’s this gleeful sense of humor that cuts through the guts of it all that I think makes this follow-up more palatable to the average person than the first one.

Part of that off-beat sense of fun comes from the movie’s use of stop-motion animation. Stop-motion and EVIL DEAD are almost as synonymous in the popular consciousness as Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell, but I had completely forgotten that it was an aspect of these until the first one appeared. That first one, of course, is the resurrected corpse of Linda, which promptly starts dancing around like she lives in Halloweentown. It’s a whiplash-inducing moment coming off of EVIL DEAD 1. In that first film, the possessed start looking really decomposed and gushy, and they emit loud, nasty noises. Here, they look like clay people and they start dancing. We’re in different territory here!

Another stark difference: that opening third of the movie! For a significant amount of time, I thought that EVIL DEAD 2 was going to be a Bruce Campbell one man show. The film is short enough, all of the material is strong enough and, most importantly, Bruce Campbell is game enough that it probably could have worked if they had decided to commit to the direction of “Ash vs. Demons”. It’s unlike anything I had ever seen before, and I envy those who got to see it for the first time in its proper setting (i.e. a teenager renting it blind, going over to their friend’s house, and then just popping it in, joint in hand).

Of course, the movie does eventually kick into another gear. They slowly work in an initially adjacent plot line, as we watch Annie (Berry) make her way to the cabin, which turns out to have been previously occupied by her father, archeologist Raymond Knowby, the source of the voice on the inciting audio cassette. In tow is her research partner, Ed Getley (Richard Domeier) and two others they pick up along the way: repairman Jake (Dan Hicks) and girlfriend Bobby Joe (Wesley).

Once the foursome join Ash, the movie starts resembling the first one in structure. In fact, it nearly threatens to repeat the infamous “tree scene”, although it rounds off its own edges before it gets too rough (a sign of Raimi’s budding maturity at the time?). But, otherwise, it plays out in a way you might expect. Background is provided on the ancient spirits, characters are picked off one by one, blood is sprayed everywhere, and Chekov’s Chainsaw eventually gets to pay off in a glorious way.

So yeah, EVIL DEAD 2 is a supremely satisfying watch, presuming you’re into this kind of thing at all (I’m guessing you haven’t read this far if you aren’t). Like its predecessor, it’s a tight, efficient little thing, clocking in at just about 85 minutes or so. There’s a nice escalation in scale with the monsters; the “final boss” is particularly cool looking and seemed to evoke some of the gnarlier effects in John Carpenter’s THE THING.

Best of all, EVIL DEAD 2 led me to a mini-revelation. This is because it allowed me to finally, truly understand the Bruce Campbell thing.

It took me until EVIL DEAD 2 to really “get” Campbell’s appeal. I never disliked him, but people seem to REALLY love him, and most of the roles I had actually seen him in were playing off of that initial appeal and reputation. And, look, I like that people like stuff. But for a long while, I worried that he was just this cultural inside joke that I had failed to get the context for (I had to be there).

And here he is, covered in blood, eyes bugged out, practically bouncing off the walls of this cabin, yelling and screaming at claymation creatures and cutting off his own damn possessed arm (I FINALLY get why his cameo in DOCTOR STRANGE 2 was so joyful to so many). It’s an over-the-top segment, and it’s played and presented in an equally over-the-top way. But it’s also weirdly justified internally. If we presume the action in EVIL DEAD 2 to be really happening (which can sometimes be a good barometer to judge subsequent performances), how else would you act if you were Ash?

Watching actors just kind of “go for it” can sometimes be an uncomfortable experience; to pull a few examples from this here blog, I’ve never really warmed to Jack Nicholson’s performance in THE SHINING, and I thought Robert DeNiro was completely out of control in the 1991 CAPE FEAR remake. But Campbell never really feels not in control in EVIL DEAD 2. His off-the-wall performance fits the situation, establishes the tone that Raimi is trying to go for and, most importantly, makes for a totally unique movie-going experience.

It also helps that this aspect of Ash subsides as new characters are introduced. He doesn’t convert to a one-liner-spewing action hero by the end, but he does get these weird lines that feel like entire moments. For instance, there’s nothing to him saying, “groovy” on the page, but in the context of the film, it’s practically applause-worthy (it helps that “groovy” has kind of burrowed its way into film culture as a result of this movie).

On a final note, I even loved the ending, which might read to audiences of today as blatant sequel fodder, and I’m well aware that is where ARMY OF DARKNESS picks up. But in the context of just EVIL DEAD 2, it’s the movie’s final dark joke. The almost thrown away setup of “The Man in The Sky” that we get halfway through pays off so beautifully by the man being (surprise!) Ash himself, now thrown back into the 1300’s, that it frankly would have worked just as perfectly if these were the last frames of the EVIL DEAD franchise.

But, as we know now, this aren’t the last frames of this particular IP. It would take another half-a-decade but Ash Williams’ cinematic story would be extended one more time. Speaking of the 1300’s…

Coming Halloween night: ARMY OF DARKNESS!

THE EVIL DEAD And the Absolute Audacity

Sam Raimi did what seems impossible this year.

He managed to make an MCU movie that seemed to take a chance on a choice.

I should tell you up top that I say this from a place of love. I’m certainly no Marvel hater; I’ve been there from the beginning! But even I have to acknowledge that so often, Marvel Studios is more comfortable hitting doubles or bunts every at-bat, rather than risking the chance of a strike-out on a home run swing. Call it the curse of the “formula”, which necessitates a “not great, not terrible, just enjoyable” feel to many of their offerings in order to move the overarching story along.

But, with DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS? The MCU made a choice, one that seemed to make some of their biggest fans genuinely upset.

The reason for this is that they went for the Scarlet Witch heel-turn and didn’t actively try to buy it back the way they’re often tempted to in order to keep their heroes….well, heroic. Wanda’s hands don’t remain clean; she literally murders people. Critically, she makes these choices of her own volition as opposed to being manipulated by an outside force; even if you could argue she’s influenced by dastardly tome the Darkhold, she seeks this book out herself. Even when she “comes to her senses”, it’s basically too late. Her current status is unknown.

This all admittedly sounds fairly toothless compared to stand-alone adult features, but kicking the stan culture hornet’s nest the way DOCTOR STRANGE 2 does constitutes genuine creative courage for this type of fare. There are countless people online who have made Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch character a part of their personality, a core piece of their identity. And now she’s a murderer. And best of all, assuming you have a Disney Plus subscription, it’s a heel turn perfectly justified by the storyline that came before it. It was kind of thrilling! (I’m sort of pro-anything that shakes people’s weird melding of their actual selves into fictional characters, but I will quickly digress.)

I’m largely tempted to lay much of DOCTOR STRANGE 2’s successes on Sam Raimi being at the helm for this one. Although nobody would ever confuse it for an independent feature, there are enough of his unique flourishes that it seemed like Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel Studios creative staff were comfortable letting his personality shine through.

As we know, it didn’t necessarily have to turn out this way. Many directors with a certain aesthetic and vision have entered the Marvel machine only to get chewed up and spit back out. Edgar Wright never did get to make his ANT-MAN movie. Chloe Zhao’s ETERNALS definitely has its fans and defenders, but landed with a wet thump for most people. Who the hell knows what happened with Alan Taylor’s THOR: THE DARK WORLD. Heck, Raimi only got the DOCTOR STRANGE gig due to a falling out between Marvel and the original returning director Scott Derrickson.

Happily, though, Raimi managed to make the dang thing a Raimi film! Stuff like Wanda killing beloved Marvel characters making cameos (which felt like meta-commentary to me), and a finale involving a walking Strange zombie corpse just feels like something a director-for-hire wouldn’t have thought to put in their superhero sequel. Seeing him manage to thread the needle between corporate demand and artistic demand was strangely nostalgic to me.

This is because, of course, my introduction to Raimi was his previous superhero productions, the original SPIDER-MAN trilogy.

Admittedly, those movies have some tangible details that haven’t aged super well; the special effects actually get worse as the series went on, SPIDER-MAN 3 just doesn’t really work at its core, some of the pop music that got attached to the series are more hilarious post-9/11 artifacts than lasting treasures.

But, dammit, the movies at their core work. Yes, they were primarily an enormous success financially; I still remember the movie making $100 million on its opening weekend back in May of 2002, which felt like a phenomenal amount of money at the time (not that box office money means anything anymore in the age of streaming). But they were also successful creatively, at least most of the time. The movies understood that the key to a great Spider-Man story is to put his alter ego Peter Parker through the ringer at every and any opportunity; even when he wins, he loses. The stories don’t need to be Batman-style dark, they just need to be enacted with a certain sense of irony.

Superpowers have to be a burden for Peter, never more so than when he tries to lift it from his shoulders.

This principle, by the way, is one that the MCU Spider-Man films, as charming and whiz-bang as they generally are, have by and large shied away from. Tom Holland is great, and I’ve enjoyed all three of his stand-alone features, but making him essentially the trust-fund kid of Tony Stark for most of the trilogy has never felt quite right, regardless of where the character stands now. Sorry.

Reflecting on these movies made me realize that Sam Raimi has been a surprisingly constant presence in my life. It also made me realize that this October would be the perfect time to double back and check out the Raimi trilogy that FIRST put him on the map, the EVIL DEAD trilogy.

For those somehow unfamiliar, THE EVIL DEAD is a series of movies that has, against all reason, mange to maintain itself past the 90’s and into the 21st century, with legacy sequels/remakes and television extensions.

I don’t recall if I’ve elucidated on this or not in the past, but I’m a relative latecomer to horror, and especially to GOREY horror. My mom had a definitive aversion to movies that were particularly violent when I was growing up, so something like THE EVIL DEAD would…uh, not have been on the menu. I don’t really blame her or anything; violence is a constant in life that one would be wise to not expose their children to too early (we have the rest of their lives to deal with it, ya know?)

One of the (only) benefits of being an adult, though, is that I can generally watch whatever I want, up to and including a trilogy of super-bloody horror movies.

So here I go! Forty-plus years later, here’s me catching myself up on a series of midnight features that I hadn’t seen before. Let’s see if Raimi can put a smile on my face again!

THE EVIL DEAD (1981)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bruce Campbell, Ellen Sandweiss, Richard DeManincor, Betsy Baker, Theresa Tilly

Written by: Raimi

Released: October 15, 1981

Length: 85 minutes

Most people know the plot of the original EVIL DEAD, and if you don’t, it’s absurdly simple: four college students drive out to the woods of Tennessee to a cabin to enjoy a weekend of debauchery, only to start becoming possessed by ancient demons after a discovery of an audio cassette unleashes an ancient curse. Our fivesome: Ash Williams (Campbell), his girlfriend Linda (Baker), his sister Cheryl (Sandweiss), their friend Scotty (DeManincor) and his girlfriend Shelly (Tilly).

This super-simple, almost austere starting plot was a seemingly popular one in the early 80’s; for instance, the original FRIDAY THE 13TH is a series of teenagers staying at a cursed summer camp and getting picked off one by one. That’s it! The appeal of this particular set-up is obvious. A) It’s a ridiculously cheap premise to make a movie off of; ya just gotta find a cabin and a few young people willing to be covered in red goo, and B) it’s an easy situation for a potential audience member to imagine themselves in the middle of. Haven’t we ALL gone to a location that’s a little too off the beaten path just because it somehow sounded like a good idea at the time? No? Hmmm.

Their first night at the cabin, Cheryl finds that her hand has been possessed by some mysterious force; because it’s a movie, she makes the curious decision to keep this to herself. The evening turns from bad to worse as a trapdoor pops open all by itself during dinner. Because it’s a movie, they all head downstairs rather than close the door. Down below, they find a skin-covered Book of the Dead and a cassette tape filled with incantations. A play-through of the tape unleashes the souls of evil demons and spirits, although this is initially unknown to our cast of characters.

Inevitably, Cheryl becomes fully possessed (the manner of which we’ll discuss in a second). From there, it’s a game of Last Man/Woman Standing, as our characters either die or become possessed themselves. I hate to spoil a forty-year movie, but it should come as no surprise to anybody even vaguely paying attention to pop culture that Bruce’s Ash is the sole survivor, although THE EVIL DEAD’s final seconds put into question how much he really survived at all.

Look, for as much as there’s all this implied mythology at EVIL DEAD’s core, what with the presence of all these demons, a Sumerian curse, and an evil Darkhold-esque tome at the center of everything, the point of the movie is the blood and the gore. And there’s a LOT of it.

“Blood and guts”- type horror isn’t my natural go-to, mostly because there tends to be a nihilism behind those types of features that burns me out more than anything else, especially when there’s an attempt to make it “realistic” (oh lord, like all we need is more realism in our violence nowadays). But sometimes, movies apply such an ungrounded logic to their gore that it actually goes all the way back around to being kind of appealing? For instance, KILL BILL VOL. 1 is SO violent that it doesn’t actually register as something happening to an actual human (which might be its own form of nihilism, but that’s a whole other conversation). At that point, you’re kind of just watching a cartoon.

And THE EVIL DEAD is such an absolutely audacious cartoon. And I think that’s its great appeal. I mean, people eventually start bleeding white and yellow goop out of their wounds. How can you really consume the images you’re seeing as hardcore grindhouse fare at that point? Just sit back and enjoy the mess. If you can, try to figure out how much cornstarch must have given its life in order to bring us this insane tale.

There’s such a relentless, over-the-top, low fidelity nature to its gore that all you can really do at a certain point is laugh; when all the various corpses started arbitrarily exploding at the end, there was nothing else for me to do but start cackling.

The movie isn’t without its frustrations: the point of the original EVIL DEAD movie is the spectacle of the special effects and the brazen audacity behind them. As a result, I don’t know how compelling I found our cast of characters as actual human characters beyond being vessels for said special effects. Bruce Campbell stood out as the obvious cream of the crop to me, but it’s impossible to tell at this point if this is a result of his inherent stardom (nobody looks quite as accessibly handsome as young Bruce Campbell) or the mere fact that his name is synonymous with Sam Raimi and EVIL DEAD now. He might have just stood out because I knew he was going to be the last man standing.

Then there’s the movie’s biggest moment of infamy, the aforementioned moment of possession for Cheryl. I haven’t figured out how exactly to tackle the, um, tree rape scene. On the one hand, it kind of comes out of absolutely nowhere, it’s uncomfortable, and even Sam Raimi himself has expressed regret about including it in the first place, blaming it on a too-young mind. However, If I could mount a defense of it, I’d argue it somehow feels less exploitative than other scenes of its ilk due to the fact that it’s not particularly titillating or erotic. For whatever reason, it might have hit much differently for me if the offender were another human (or at least a human-esque being), as opposed to an obviously fake tree made up of practical effects. I ultimately could have done without it, but I somehow felt less embarrassed for Ellen Sandweiss than if it were more rooted in reality. YMMV.

Still….as mentioned, an early star role for then-unknown Campbell, some genuine moments of terrifying tension (the scene where everyone is playing cards before everything hits the fan seems to take a page from the famous ALIEN playbook), some insane character design….it’s no surprise to me at all that this movie hit big with certain audiences. Especially in the very early eighties, where the blockbuster era was firmly solidifying itself within Hollywood and America at large, here came this tiny, goofy movie with an almost alienating amount of blood bloody, a film almost built to be enjoyed but not mass-produced. And now Campbell’s playing Ash on the Starz Plus app or whatever. Life is strange.

That all said, I had a good time with THE EVIL DEAD, although it does feel like the best way to maximize your viewing experience is to screen this movie as either a midnight movie at a second-run movie theatre, or with a scratchy lo-fi VHS copy that you’ve popped into your VCR during a sleepover. The vibe is just so gloriously micro-budget at its core and its heart that it basically demands to be watched on a bad, beaten-up print. I couldn’t imagine this one getting the Criterion 4K experience.

Perhaps the real legacy of the first EVIL DEAD movie is that it was the fulcrum for an enormous franchise: five official movies, five video game adaptations, a cable television series, a bunch of comic books, and a full-fledged musical! And it all stemmed from a college kid screwing around in the woods with his friends. It’s proof positive that lasting art can come from almost anywhere. All you really need, besides a couple of grand in your pocket, a little luck, and the youthful stupidity not to know that you can’t, is the wherewithal to finish your project.

And I think that’s legitimately inspiring.

CRUEL JAWS Charts Wild Waters

(Okay, so this intro is to be read/sung to the tune of Taylor Swift’s 2019 magnum opus Cruel Summer. CRUEL JAWS, Cruel Summer….you see how it’s funny. Why didn’t I go with the more popular and widely known 1983 Bananarama song, also called Cruel Summer? Well, because I hadn’t thought of it until three-quarters of the way through, and I’m now pot committed.

Anyway….to be sung to the tune of Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer)

Spielberg made JAWS in ‘75

You know that we loved him

Bad, bad films, followed up more than twice

You know that we hate them

Bruno Mattei made it okay

William Snyder, that was his assumed name

Movie’s really bad, a good time was had

I thought JAWS was dead, now I want more

And it's gold, this shitty movie

It's old, the footage it’s got

And it's ooh, whoa, oh

It's CRUEL JAAAAWS

It's cool, that's what they told us

No rules in JAWS franchise heaven

But ooh, whoa oh

It's CRUEL JAAAAWS

With you

CRUEL JAWS (1995)

Directed by: Bruno Mattei (under the name of William Snyder)

Starring: Richard Dew, David Luther, George Barnes Jr, Scott Silveria

Written by: Robert Feen, Linda Morrison, Mattei

Released: September 26, 1995

Length: 96 minutes

What is CRUEL JAWS? Well, what isn’t CRUEL JAWS?

In a way, it’s yet another follow-up to the 1975 original JAWS movie, or least kind of a remake, in the sense that a major public event in danger of being cancelled sits at the middle of everything. It seems pretty clear from the several violent shark attacks that an annual regatta should be cancelled. Alas, there’s a greedy public official that insists it must go on for REASONS! That feels enough like the JAWS we know and love, right? I mean, there’s even JAWS footage in CRUEL JAWS. What more do you need? Heck, CRUEL JAWS was even marketed as JAWS 5 in some markets.

Well, the problem is that CRUEL JAWS is in no way affiliated with the Universal film franchise, nor does it follow any of the Brody family members we’ve seen in the first four movies. Its only real connection, besides the vague outline mentioned above, is the shark and the fact that they put the word JAWS in the title. It’s barely a movie, if you start really considering what a movie might be “defined” as. Does it matter if, like, a third of your film is footage of other movies entirely?

What CRUEL JAWS really is, then, is an early version of one of those Asylum movies that are meant to trick the most uncritical among the world’s population, the off-brand bagged cereal version of Hollywood blockbusters. They’re the people behind such beloved classics as TRANSMORPHERS, SNAKES ON A TRAIN, THE DA VINCI TREASURE, AVENGERS GRIMM: TIME WARS, THE FAST AND THE FIERCE….these are just the ones I felt like looking up. They’re un-lovingly dubbed “mockbusters”, mostly meant to give actors like C. Thomas Howell something to do with the intent of people at home not looking too closely at what they’re clicking on with their Amazon Prime account.

Anyway, that’s what CRUEL JAWS is. It’s more or less a shitty photocopy of the 1975 original, although it often goes above and beyond the call of duty. The movie splices in footage from the other four JAWS movies, as well as lifting the majority of its final act from another Italian sharksploitation movie, 1989’s DEEP BLOOD. Again, they even had the nerve to straight up advertise this in some markets as JAWS 5, something that was almost certainly illegal.

The “unofficial sequel” to another, more popular movie is a long-standing cinematic tradition that’s still alive and well to this day. All it really takes to get into the game is a good understanding of your country’s copyright laws, as well as knowledge of who, if anybody, owns the rights to your preferred intellectual property. Just staying in Italy, the undisputed kings of this particular art form, there’s at least 30 unofficial sequels to 1967’s DJANGO, and countless unofficial follow-ups to George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD. There are also waaaay more unofficial TERMINATOR follow-ups than you might be aware of. Here in the United States, within the past ten years, we’ve had unofficial follow-ups to such heavy-hitting movies as EASY RIDER and RAGING BULL.

Thus comes CRUEL JAWS, one amongst many in the “sharksploitation” genre (started by JAWS, reignited with stuff like DEEP BLUE SEA, and forever bolstered by the endless SHARKNADO series). There are many crappy shark movies, but only one brave enough to basically just call itself JAWS. However, it’s insane enough that fans have embraced it as a sort-of “fifth Beatle” of JAWS movies anyway.

The plot of CRUEL JAWS insomuch as it matters: in Hampton Bay, Florida, rich landlord Samuel Lewis (Barnes. Jr) is set to foreclose on the aquarium/theme park owned by Dag Soerensen (Dew). Despite the fact that there never appears to be any guests coming to this place in any of the scenes set at this property, this comes as a total shock to Dag, who has a little wheelchair-bound daughter to take care of, Suzy (Kristen Urso).

At the same time, a bunch of dumb guys are scuba diving in the middle of the sea to find the remains of an old military ship, the Cleveland, in the hopes of finding and selling top secret Navy documents. Alas, they all get attacked and eaten by a tiger shark.

It is against this backdrop that we get our classic JAWS situation: there’s a big Regatta coming up. Do we cancel due to the tiger shark out there that literally killed three people, or do we just kinda shrug and pretend we didn’t hear anything about it? What about little Suzy? The answer to this question determines who will be our heroes and who will be our villains.

From there, the Regatta goes on to be a spectacular and bloody mess, the local mafia gets involved, it’s revealed that Cruel Jaws is the result of some government experiment (oh, spoilers, I guess), the shark takes out an entire helicopter, and Suzy almost gets her very own MAC AND ME moment.

Okay, sounds pretty bad, right? So, what is there to recommend with CRUEL JAWS? Well, for starters, Richard Dew looks exactly like Hulk Hogan, which helps almost any film. The movie is also sort of watchable in its low budget badness, the kind of movie Mystery Science Theatre 3000 might have gotten around to in its original incarnation if it had existed for another couple of years. It contains probably four or five of the worst performances I’ve ever seen in a movie, even at the low standards something like CRUEL JAWS inherently implies. Whether this is enticing in any way, I leave up to you, but it speaks to the brazen “who gives a fuck” nature to the whole enterprise. Finally, as mentioned, much of its key action is spliced in from other movies. Don’t worry, though, you definitely can tell exactly what is “new” footage and what is shitty, grainy stolen footage.

Then, of course, there’s the CRUEL JAWS theme. It’s a wild little tune, a melody that is pretty clearly just a bunch of film score snippets stapled together and played over and over. I had read about it ahead of time, so I knew it was coming, and yet, nothing really prepares you for the Star Wars theme to start playing in the middle of a completely unrelated movie, does it? It still came as a total surprise to me. Isn’t this illegal? Can’t Lucasfilm shut this entire production down in a second and end the careers of everybody involved? CRUEL JAWS don’t care, baby! They have a scene that needs scoring, STAR WARS is a beloved movie….just give the people what they want!

(Also, the rest of the theme sounded so familiar to me, especially its opening, epic salvo. I don’t believe for a second that a single note of it was written specifically for this movie. Does anybody know where else Mattei pulled from in order to create this masterpiece?)

I think it’s all these factors (plus, so many more, but at what point am I ruining the potential mystifying fun that is CRUEL JAWS for you?) that make this “mockbuster” so fun, and why it’s actually sort of truly the defacto JAWS 5, or at least an essential part of the franchise for the dedicated. You just don’t see stuff like this quite so often. There are an infinite number of unbelievably amateur movies made every year/month/day. There are also a seemingly infinite number of mind-numbing IP extensions made every summer. You just don’t expect to see those two subgenres merge like this, in a way that feels against the law. Why is the STAR WARS theme playing? Why is that the line reading they kept in the final cut? Why did Mattei pick William Snyder as his nom-de-plume and not his more-common much cooler alias Vincent Dawn? Why is every character seemingly obsessed with ripping people’s balls off? The only man who can answer these questions died for our sins about 2,000 years ago and thus has done enough for us already.

By the way, don’t let the above make you think CRUEL JAWS is the forgotten THE ROOM or BIRDEMIC or anything. It often drags or, more accurately, just sits there and frustrates. It stacks plot elements on top of each other in desperate search of something that sticks. I would argue, though, that this is all part of the CRUEL JAWS experience. At the end of the day, it shouldn’t be all that satisfying, because that would imply that the movie had an end goal to entertain anybody. Say what you want about Tommy Wiseau, but that guy at least wants you to have a good time. Bruno Mattei is just here for the cash-in; any pleasure derived from his work is purely coincidental.

In a sense, CRUEL JAWS is the perfect logical end to our deep dive into this seminal shark franchise. After all, there is no movie that could better position itself as the complete photo negative of the original JAWS. Consider everything that movie did so well; its innate sense of emotion and tension, its focus on humanity and character over special effects, the production’s ability to improvise out of adversity, a trio of the best damn performances of its decade, one of the most efficient and precise uses of musical score maybe ever, and most of all, how not one single second, nay, not one single frame is wasted or superfluous.

Now consider CRUEL JAWS, and how it’s the complete opposite of every single one of those categories.

How could it not bring everything full circle?

JAWS: THE REVENGE Winds Up A Noble Failure

We’ve talked a lot about sequels in this space before. We’ve also talked about the art of the remake. BUT, up to this point, we haven’t really had the opportunity to discuss the art of the “sequel remake”.

Simply put, it’s an attempt to wash away a sequel that either didn’t catch on or massively painted a once-thriving series into a corner. I’m not sure if there’s really an official name for it, but it’s a concept that feels at its core to be uniquely modern, a trend that’s come around in the past ten years or so. My go-to example for this is the TERMINATOR franchise (a set of movies that I am definitely planning on giving the full month-long tribute to one of these days). Ever since T2: JUDGMENT DAY took the world by storm in 1991, Hollywood has been desperately trying to come up with a decent follow-up that people might actually like even half as much. They initially tried with 2003’s TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES and the subsequent TERMINATOR: SALVATION in 2009. These sequels got subsequently ignored in 2015 with the arrival of the sort-of-remake-with-an-awful-title TERMINATOR GENISYS. THEN, there was one last attempt to start a T2 sequel with TERMINATOR: DARK FATE, a movie less than three years old that I still had to look up on Google to get the name right (unbelievably, it looks like Linda Hamilton was available!).

A modern Hollywood mess, right? In actuality, however, this sort of franchise surgery has been happening to movies since at least the 1980’s. Take a look at the HALLOWEEN franchise sometime. The original HALLOWEEN 3 was a completely stand-alone film that HALLOWEEN 4 infamously ignored. 1998’s HALLOWEEN: H20 ignored all except the first two HALLOWEEN films. The most recent David Gordon Green films have junked all but the original. There’s now, by my count, at least four distinct timelines in the HALLOWEEN series. Spooky stuff!

It’s a move that has been made in several famous franchises. A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, SUPERMAN, HIGHLANDER, THE EXORCIST….the list goes on and on. And as far as moves to make in order to keep extending a cash cow, it’s not the worst in the world! It typically (though not always) serves as a rare admission of guilt from studios, an acknowledgment that a series has gone awry. It’s okay to try to start over! Really! More movie franchises ought to think about it!

So it goes with JAWS. Because as it turns out, I wasn’t the only one who thought JAWS 3-D was the franchise demeaning itself. It turned out Universal Studios agreed, and the next sequel actively ignored everything the third movie set up (or destroyed).

Of course, if any of the above have taught us, just because directors and studios make the correct determination that a sequel was lousy, there’s no actual guarantee that the second attempt is going to be any better.

With that said, let’s break down JAWS: THE REVENGE!

JAWS: THE REVENGE

Directed by: Joseph Sargent

Starring: Lorraine Gary, Michael Caine, Lance Guest, Mario van Peebles

Written by: Michael de Guzman

Length: 90 minutes

Released: July 17, 1987

JAWS: THE REVENGE continues the story of the Brodys, this time focusing primarily on Ellen (Gary), who is recently widowed; we learn later that Martin Brody has died from a heart attack, induced from lingering stress as a result of the events of the first two JAWSes, which feels like an unsatisfying, if realistic, end to the character. Ellen is left desperate for connection from others. She still lives in Amity, nearby to her younger son, Sean (Mitchell Anderson), who now works as a police deputy. As Christmas approaches, Sean is brutally killed by a great white shark while he’s clearing out a log from an outskirt buoy (y’know, police deputy work). Ellen becomes convinced that this shark is seeking revenge. It’s an absolutely ludicrous idea that starts gaining some weight to it when she heads to the Bahamas to be with her older son, Michael, and continues to be harassed by the same great white shark.

This time around, the Brody kids are recast completely from JAWS 3-D. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of Michael’s SeaWorld past at all. This is because, as far as JAWS: THE REVENGE is concerned, JAWS 3-D never happened. JAWS: THE REVENGE, it turns out, is a direct sequel to JAWS 2. As a matter of fact, an early press release dubbed this the third installment of “the remarkable JAWS trilogy”. And, look, it’s a decent decision, considering how poorly JAWS 3-D turned out. Rather than trying to build off of poor foundation, better to just repour, you know?

Anyhow, as the movie progresses, we’re introduced to Hoagie (Caine), a small prop-plane pilot who ends up wooing Ellen and bringing her out of her grief-stricken shell. We’re also introduced to Michael’s wife Carla (Karen Young) and his little girl Thea (Judith Barsi). Together with Michael’s co-worker and close friend Jake (Mario Van Peebles), they will have to find a way to destroy the shark that has somehow figured out how to travel from the Eastern United States to the Bahamas just to kill three humans it’s never met.

JAWS: THE REVENGE was given the green light during a particularly hard financial time for Universal. CEO Sidney Sheinberg was looking for something that could make a quick profit, and decided to move ahead with another installment of JAWS (it should be mentioned that JAWS 3-D was a success at the box office). The intention was to:

1) center the movie around a human story again

2) add a mystical element to the shark

3) make it quickly

These three points essentially explain everything about what makes JAWS: THE REVENGE, um, special . To that third point, the movie was green lit in September 1986 for a July 1987 release. The principal script was written in five weeks (with no actual shooting script by the time production began). The actual shoot lasted 38 days. Any actual decision making would have to be made on the fly, with no time for analysis as to how any of this was going to work.

This time, it would be Lorraine Gary’s turn to answer the call to action and star in a JAWS sequel (which is certainly not motivated by the fact that Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss refused, or by the fact that she was married to Sheinberg). After a long career in television, she made the transition to feature films. JAWS, JAWS 2, and JAWS: THE REVENGE would end up being her biggest claims to fame. In fact, JAWS: THE REVENGE represented her return to acting after having retired following her appearance in Spielberg’s WWII comedy 1941. It would be her final acting credit, as she retired for good after this. It might seem strange, but after killing a shark, what else is there to do?

I didn’t recognize him, but Michael is played this time around by Lance Guest, who most people will know as THE LAST STARFIGHTER (although some horror fans will remember him as Jimmy from HALLOWEEN II). I actually thought he was pretty good here, and does a better job at playing an adult Michael than a coked-up Dennis Quaid did in the last movie.

It’s the 1980’s, so we’re fully in the era of “Michael Caine classing up a piece of garbage” era that persists to this day. As mentioned, his character is named Hoagie, for whatever reason. It’s not a name that feels particularly British, or even Bahamian. But Caine adds gravitas to a man who really only exists as a counterpoint to Ellen, a representation of another chance at love. Whenever he’s onscreen, you’re having at least 5% more fun. He’s also the source of my favorite quote by an actor that nobody else ever seems to think is funny:

“I have never seen [JAWS 4], but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built and it is terrific.”

Mario Van Peebles was still a few years away from NEW JACK CITY, although he had been working consistently in the 80’s, both on screen and the stage. Jake is basically the “best friend” role. But, Van Peebles brings just enough to it that it never quite feels like the stock role that it is, and Mario is rocking a wild Bahamian accent the entire time, so that’s something. Plus, his presence was enough to warrant a cameo from his father, Melvin. So, that’s also something!

Finally, there’s Judith Barsi, who most people will know as the child actor who voiced Anne-Marie from ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN and, most famously, Ducky from THE LAND BEFORE TIME. She’s also notable for having a horrendous monster for a father who would eventually…well, you can look up the awful story yourself, because I hesitate to keep linking her short life to him too closely. I’ve never been able to square away the fact that her legacy has mostly become the awful adult she had to live with. Instead, I’d like to focus on the fact that, with those above two movies, she made such a big impression on a certain generation, essentially through voiceover, in such a short time.

Here’s the thing; I didn’t hate JAWS: THE REVENGE. It at least attempts to be a real movie. Lorraine Gary is trying her damnedest! Michael Caine, running at 15% power, puts in probably the fourth-best performance in a JAWS movie. If you squint your eyes, you can even see them try to work a “shark-as-physical-representation-of-grief” metaphor. Also, the seemingly arbitrary Christmas/New Year’s setting sort of hints at a theme of reflection and renewal. Plus, it’s cool to see a tropical-themed Christmas movie, especially when it’s a deep sequel to a franchise. Unlike JAWS 3-D, JAWS 4 is trying and for that, I’m willing to give it a couple of points.

(Also, you should know I’m a sucker for surprise Christmas movies. It’s a cheap trick that is meant to work only on fools, but it works for me almost every time. I absolutely want to be that person that suggests, “how about JAWS: THE REVENGE"??” when the holidays come around. You better pray I never end up the owner of a local movie theatre.)

The primary issue with JAWS: THE REVENGE is that there’s no real skill to anything, possibly due to the speed in which it was thrown together. For example, it never bothers to really explain how in the world the shark could follow them from Amity to the Bahamas, or even why the shark is doing anything it’s doing, outside of the titular vague “revenge”. It’s not even clear if it’s supposed to be the original shark, or maybe the shark from JAWS 2 come back to life, or just a cousin or uncle or something. Also, how would the shark know it was Martin Brody specifically that killed him? Did the original shark’s family finally swing by the Amity beach a few days after JAWS 1 in desperate search of a body or something?

For another example, towards the end of the movie, Ellen starts having memories of past movie events (Sean dying at the beginning of JAWS 4, Martin saying “smile, you son of a bitch!” at the end of JAWS), which is fine, except she wasn’t present for any of them. For all these reasons, it’s why the grief and guilt metaphor doesn’t really hold water (har har). Since she’s been offscreen for most of the serious events of the JAWS franchise, having her be traumatized by them doesn’t feel like anything. We can imagine how it might feel by putting ourselves in her shoes, but JAWS 4 is trying to put this all in the text retroactively because it was never really dramatized in the first place.

In a trashier movie, none of this would actually be a problem. It might have even added some goofy fun to a loopy film. But, once again, I’m left to wonder if this JAWS sequel would have benefited from picking a lane and hitting the gas, rather than drifting in between two tracks. Because the trash elements in JAWS: THE REVENGE are much more fun than the trash elements in JAWS 3. And the sincere “trying to make a movie” elements work better than JAWS 2. But putting them together just kind of gives you a queasy feeling. The sincerity also causes you to ask questions (like all of the questions posed above) that you wouldn’t have if the movie just went for full schlock.

Also…..the shark still looks bad! You see it kind of a lot! And it always looks bad! I’m left flabbergasted why three whole production staffs never bothered to learn the lesson Spielberg taught himself back in 1975; it takes some cleverness, but you save tons of money and make your movie twice as better if we don’t see the shitty shark! Is this just an incessant need to be “different” or not wanting to copy the original? Think of the other overqualified character actors you could have snagged for this with the money saved to give Michael Caine a lunch partner?

JAWS: THE REVENGE would wind up being the last American production of a JAWS movie. I remain amazed (and grateful) that nobody has, to date, tried to reboot the series or give it the “legacy sequel” treatment. It’s easy to envision a trailer showing another family (with one of the kids being played by one of the STRANGER THINGS cast members) moving into the old Brody house and realizing there’s….something in the water……cue slow single-note piano version of the JAWS “bum bum” theme. Thankfully, it hasn’t happened yet. YET.

However, I’m not ready to leave JAWS just yet. Next week, we arrive at the real reason I decided to do this summer series. Because, here’s the thing, I’ve never seen CRUEL JAWS and I’ve always looked for a reason to cross it off my list.

So. Next week. CRUEL JAWS!