Rian Johnson's Looper takes great pains to head off any in-depth discussion of the paradoxes and metaphysical nightmares associated with time travel narratives. This is true even when the protagonist, the hired killer Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) has a conversation with his 30-years-older self (Bruce Willis). "We'll be here all day, making diagrams with straws," Old Joe says to Young Joe by way of warning. After a while, Looper largely lets its genre trappings fall to the wayside, leaving behind its references to over-mined sci-fi classics and newer hits. "The movies you're copying are copying other movies," Young Joe's boss, Abe (Jeff Daniels), says of the young man's wardrobe, but it could also be seen as a chiding the director takes to heart for his film.
Take time travel out of the scenario, though, and even the denser, more classically sci-fi first act of the film could still run under the same circular title. Young Joe's life moves in endless repetitions. As a hired gun employed by future mobsters looking to dispose of their enemies in the past (where bodies are harder to track, especially if they technically do not exist), Joe's life follows a set pattern. Be at the right place on-time, blast the target when it suddenly appears, collect his money and go party. Joe saves most of his money for the early retirement people in his line of work receive, but as Johnson's montage of Joe's routine speeds up under the influence of the cleaner's drug use and dispassion, it becomes evident that retirement may prove more debilitating for him than his profession. Not that he will get to find out, however, when his final target, himself, manages to overpower his younger self and threatens to create a whole new timeline. Imagine how weird this would be if the director didn't try so hard to avoid time talk.
Incorporating many elements of Wes Anderson's previous films, Moonrise Kingdom might be seen, even approvingly, as the director going through the motions. It has the childhood focus of Rushmore, the dollhouse intricacy of The Royal Tenenbaums, the paradoxical criminal innocence of Bottle Rocket, the outdoor adventurousness of The Darjeeling Limited, even the documentarian angle of The Life Aquatic. To be sure, Anderson's latest instantly betrays its maker, the camera tracking and panning through an ornate, rigidly compartmentalized island home and its aloof, eerily formal child inhabitants. Set on the fictional New England island of New Penzance, this house and its surrounding locale suggest one of the director's most arch removes from the world around him, a self-contained universe of stunted genius and vague but overwhelming regret.
But these same shots also display a rough quality not even evident in the director's first film. Shot on 16mm, Moonrise Kingdom's thick grain serves two main purposes. First, it aesthetically matches the film's retro 1965 setting, casting Anderson's usual world of bright, sunny yellows in dimmer, fossilizing amber and making the buildings, which look like a model village from a contemporary train set built 1:1 scale, seem lived in and worn. Second, it adds a primal, visceral edge wholly foreign to Anderson's canon, a reflection of the emotional immediacy he attains with the movie's tale of young love in open opposition to the calcified bitterness that defines so many of Anderson's frustrated, self-imprisoning characters.
Brian De Palma may be perennially mistreated by a Hollywood that doesn't fully understand where he's coming from, yet I don't know of many directors who have been given so many chances to lose his backers' money. By this stage in his own career, John Carpenter had been all but finished by an industry tiring of his diminishing returns, but De Palma was on just on the cusp of being a validated mainstream filmmaker despite his box office receipts: he'd been given a glamorous gangster picture and a moralizing war film, both of which he infused with his own film-school geekdom even as he demonstrated an ability to play by Hollywood's rules. Having established himself as the '70s film-school leftover best-suited to the decade he'd already mocked with Scarface and Body Double, he finally had his chance to climb to the top.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is the apex of the director's late-'80s rise to prominence within the industry, and damn near the nadir of his career. To be clear, it is not as awful as legend would have you believe, or at least, it isn't to me as I've yet to read Tom Wolfe's source novel. I have actually come across some people who not only defend this film but say they prefer it to the book. If that is true, Wolfe's novel must be a real piece of shit. For even without the knowledge of the book's full contents, De Palma's fiasco feels so incomplete and haphazard it's a wonder the director only realized the problems in retrospect.
Die Hard is the Rio Bravo of the 1980s, a reflection of both its taut structure and execution as well as the sorry intellectual backslide in the three decades between the two films. It's big and loud and exceptionally stupid, which is precisely what it's striving to be. In fact, the writers sabotage the film's potential political subtext almost instantly, revealing the terrorists who seize the gaudy, modern Nakatomi Plaza spouting radical rhetoric to be nothing more than a pose for a group of avaricious thieves.
The film does, however, put forward a gentle class subtext: its hero, John McClane (Bruce Willis), announces his working class roots when he steps off a plane -- an experience in and of itself he clearly knows little of -- and finds a limo waiting to take him to his wife, manned by a young, hip black kid too young and too laid-back for his job. The boy, Argyle, admits he's never driven a limo before, and McClane helpfully responds, "That's OK, I've never ridden in one." He sits in the front passenger seat and chats with Argyle, who chats and plays rap tapes that convey how clueless the two of them are with these luxurious new digs. McClane, a New York cop, didn't follow his wife to her lucrative new job in Los Angeles, and Argyle is savvy enough with his own kind to figure out that McClane hoped the offer would fall through and she might return to New York (the inference being his frustration at not being the primary breadwinner).
Director John McTiernan does not let us ponder these questions for long, however. He spends less than 20 minutes establishing John, his wife Holly (who has reverted to using her maiden name), the conflict between the two and the potential romantic and class rival of Harry Ellis (Hart Bochner). At around the 17-minute mark, McTiernan locks the doors, both on the towering business building and on the metaphorical cinema doors the audience might have walked out of, and proceeds to unleash hell. Narrative, character, subtext (ha) all take a backseat to the pure rush of the action.
Die Hard has everything: explosions, gunfights, no-nonsense black partners to offset the rash, loose-cannon white cop, a vault heist and a British actor playing a German villain. Most importantly, it gives audiences an action hero with whom they'd like to have a beer. John McClane sports a wife beater, a bad haircut and, due to the shock of the robbers' break-in, no shoes. Were we not already informed that he was a police officer, we might assume he was on his way to L.A. to appear on some tawdry daytime television show that airs the results of paternity tests to trash of all colors and creeds. But McClane is quick, with a dry wit and a certain composure under pressure that could never be called "grace" but is more likely to keep him alive. Unlike the invincible Nietzschian superheroes played by Schwarzenegger and Stallone, Willis' McClane looks like he takes every hit we see him receive: by the end of the film, he's such a bloody, shrapnel-riddled mess he inspires more fear through his ability to somehow stay on his feet as those other '80s protagonists did by emerging unscathed.
Those of my generation, those who grew up with the bald, flexing Willis, may not appreciate how funny Bruce Willis can be if given the right material -- his recent, dead-eyed plodding through Cop Out clearly does not represent the right material. He hit fame with Moonlighting, and he brings his deadpan delivery to this role. Try not to laugh when McClane narrowly escapes from heavy machine gun fire and nearly falls down an abysmal elevator shaft before finally pulling himself into a ventilation shaft, sarcastically sighing, "Come to the coast! We'll get together, have a few laughs!" That sense of fatalism and "it figures" attitude gives McClane an edge and a humanity where future Bruce Willis action protagonists (including the sequel iterations of McClane) give us only supermen.
Hell, Die Hard bursts at the seams with amusing gags and lines, most of them split between Willis' Joe Six-Pack sarcasm and Alan Rickman's unique approach to line delivery. He lets words ooze from his lips reluctantly, as if simultaneously sneering at the lines he's deigned to speak and unwilling to part with them. As British comedian John Sessions noted in his stellar impersonation of Rickman, the actor's lower lip almost never moves. His Hans Gruber provides a nice foil for McClane as the erudite, well-dressed vision of pure greed. He and his cohorts are (mostly) German, yes, but these cats are less Baader-Meinhof than Karl Lagerfeld. He breaks into an office building that inexplicably holds nearly a billion dollars in bearer bonds and assorted trinkets -- including a suit of samurai armor, presumably because Japanese businessmen always have one on hand, right? -- in order to increase his own profits: in this case, the rich eat themselves. On the ground outside the plaza, McClane finds a kindred spirit in Sgt. Al Powell (Reginald VelJohnson), the cop who investigates the place on a call from the trapped NY officer. They both deal with the staggering incompetence of both the head of the LAPD (played magnificently by Paul Gleason) and the FBI agents (both named Johnson; "No relation," says one, ignoring the hint of their different skin colors) sent to relieve Chief Robinson. If Die Hard has a political message to impart, it's that those with the authority don't know jack about shit, and they will always hamper the efforts of the subordinates who actually do know how to get things done.
But that is all secondary to the insurmountable pull of both McClane and the ingenious staging of Nakatomi Plaza. Like Rio Bravo and Precinct 13, the tower is at once spacious and claustrophobic, with the dimensions of the building further shrunk by the clever restriction of action to the top floors. The action rarely returns to the same room, though some look alike, yet the open, mostly unfinished rooms offer nowhere to run and only fleeting places in which to hide. The action constricts further as McClane escapes into the "guts" of the building, surrounded by pipes and shafts as he shoots at other men with guns (just in case the gender tension at the start of the film wasn't obvious enough). Somehow, this large/small building can withstand the sort of pressure normally spread out over entire cities, as the series of explosions that rock Nakatomi Plaza can rival the effects of the most epic war movies. If you want to see "stuff blowed up real good," as Roger Ebert always puts it, you'll find no better venue than Die Hard.
In fact, I find myself groaning now when I see the fleeting attempts to give this story any weight. The rapport between McClane and Powell is surprisingly heartfelt, all the more impressive given their constant physical separation. But the insertion of a scene meant to openly and unmistakably unite them, a dull, plodding cliché concerning Powell's accidental shooting of a minor, saps some of the effortless chemistry Willis and VelJohnson share. Holly becomes something of a Hawksian female as the film progresses, proving to be as sharp as her husband and as capable of facing down Hans, but she's still underutilized and exists mainly to affirm masculinity in the final moments through her reconciliation with her husband. But the film's gender and social politics are warped, and I would venture to say that I'm drawing them through my own reaching, not through any intended themes set by the writers or McTiernan. Its swipes at incompetent authority figures and the egotistical drive of the press are funny but simplified and lazy; it accepts those in charge and those tasked with delivering information as the sinister enemies of the Common Man, which predicts the current climate of social hysteria among some circles in Real America more than it reflects Reagan's era.
In another film these would be critical flaws, but Die Hard attains a certain timelessness precisely through its desperate attempt to play into no social message other than the glorification of the one man army, and even that is subverted through the amount of abuse piled on its hero. Its attention lies squarely on the framing and pacing of the action, which doesn't so much slow burn as burst into a cataclysm like napalm and rage until there is no more forest left to burn. The film embodies the sort of stupidity that only someone very clever could conceive, and when it ends with bearer bonds drifting down like snow as Vaughn Monroe sings "Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" it's hard to call Die Hard anything but the best action film ever made.
One could glean the whole of Cop Out from its opening moments. Detectives Jimmy Munroe (Bruce Willis) and Paul Hodges (Tracy Morgan) sit behind a two-way mirror, sizing up a suspect in the interrogation room and arguing over who gets to go in and play bad cop. Paul convinces his partner to allow him to use his favorite technique: homage (or, "homm-idge," as the case may be). So, Paul bursts into the next room and lets off some of Tracy Morgan's irrepressible energy and runs through a few choice references before the camera cuts in-between Paul referencing not only cop classics like Heat but The Color Purple and Schindler's List and Jimmy standing behind the mirror telling the audience what those references are.
Yep, there's Cop Out in a nutshell: one giant "homm-idge" that too frequently sucks the air out of its laughs by explaining the joke. This creates a dissonance in the film, between the jokes that slyly conform to and play with the rampant cliché of the buddy cop genre and the excruciatingly telegraphed gags that call attention to themselves like an overeager child trying to win the approval of its parents. As such, some bits that might have been subtler digs at genre tropes become muddled and suspicious. When Paul informs us at the start that he and Jimmy, clearly set up to be odd-couple partners, have worked together for nine years, do we accept this as a play on the usual genre setup -- of the grizzled career cop and the gonzo slice of loony justice -- or does this reflect a weakness on the writers' part, as Morgan and Willis act as if they'd just met and only display any sense of camaraderie when the plot calls for it?
Ergo, much of Cop Out drifts in the ether between clever and stupid, never locating that fine balance between the two alluded to in This is Spinal Tap. Like any good movie cops, Paul and Jimmy neglect their home lives. Paul suspects his wife (Rashida Jones) of cheating on him with the neighbor, while Jimmy has to contend with a bitter ex-wife and her smug, rich new hubby (Jason Lee, sadly confined to two brief scenes).
When the detectives botch a drug sting, Jimmy and Paul have to, you guessed it, turn in their badges and guns for a month-long suspension, just as Jimmy's daughter (Michelle Trachtenberg) hits up daddy for $48K to pay for her dream wedding (in this economy? Jesus Christ, use that kind of money to put a down payment on a house). Unwilling to face the shame of letting the stepfather pay what would surely cost Jimmy nearly a full year's salary, Jimmy attempts to hock a rare baseball card worth upwards of $80,000, but nothing's ever easy, is it?
At this stage, Cop Out goes off the rails, with Jimmy losing his baseball card in a robbery, only to track it to a baseball-loving drug dealer and leader of a Mexican gang -- wouldn't a Hispanic gang in New York more likely be Puerto Rican? -- named Po'Boy (Guillermo Diaz) for reasons that go unexplained. Po'Boy agrees to return the detective's card if he and Paul can locate the dealer's stolen Mercedes. This setup undermines the entire film: yes, it's a comedy, but how does a premise involving a suspended cop taking on a job that a drug dealer could easily accomplish with his crew in order to retrieve a baseball card to sell it to pay for a wedding allow for easy access to the clichés of the buddy cop film? Yes, one expects a certain amount of exaggeration for the sake of parody, but something like Hot Fuzz, certainly the king of the cop parody films, at least ensures that every stretch comments in some way on a facet of the genre. All we see here is a plan that makes no sense either for the cops or the crook; indeed, the insanity of Po'Boy's decision is compounded later when Jimmy and Paul discover a person in the car's trunk.
Cop Out marks the first time that director Kevin Smith has shot someone else's script, an important landmark in his career yet also the root of the film's issues. Smith has taken flak from the start of his career over his visual style (or lack thereof), and admittedly Clerks is the only film that could cost $27,000 and make you wonder where all the money went. But I've always found his visuals perfectly suited to his scripts which, barring Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (previous his weakest films), center the film's action on a precise lack of action, focusing instead on the rhythm of Smith's penned speech.
Writers Robb and Mark Cullen clearly draw inspiration from Smith's older films, as most of Cop Out plays out as conversations between our two heroes. Yet the rhythm of Smith's own work eludes them: Star Wars references abound, as do scatological, vulgar rants -- an overlong, embellished tear by Morgan on a dump he took disgusts before it eventually just bores -- but the Cullens' writing lacks context, believability and direction. This is a film that features a vulgar, brazen black child who sasses the authorities. This is a film that actually features not one, but two bits involving the old "stop repeating me" back-and-forth between two grown adults (brought on by a dopey thief trained in the ways of parkour, played by Sean William Scott). Smith clearly allowed the actors to improvise as well, an aspect he's typically curtailed and doesn't yet know how to marshal (the weakest moments of the surprisingly rewarding Zack & Miri Make a Porno involved a laissez-faire attitude to Seth Rogen and co. riffing).
Which brings out Smith's uneasy marriage to the material. I've come across a few reviews of Cop Out that cite its bloated running length as but the latest example of the director's self-indulgence, a charge I find strange. While I might have cut a few minutes out of Dogma -- or really just the stuff involving the poop monster -- I find Smith to be a keen comic editor. Anyone who owns a DVD of Smith's work knows how stringently he adheres to the maxim of "Brevity is the soul of wit," as a number of bits any other director would have left in the finished product get the cut for the sake of flow and emotional connection to the story. Perhaps Kevin felt guilty cutting down someone else's material, all too aware of the pain of slicing out beloved bits and abandoned threads from his own scripts, but the film's near-two-hour running time outlasts the narrative by a good 20 minutes, and the long stretches of inactivity and weak material undercut the film every time it appears to build momentum.
But this all sounds so harsh. I find myself somewhat flabbergasted at the vitriolic reception afforded the movie. Cop Out's greatest sin is its fleeting impression, the feeling that you've seen all this before even when that's supposed to be the feeling this parody film wants to impart. A number of bits do hit the mark, separated as they are by the patches of limp genre send-up. Kevin Pollak and Adam Brody are terrific (and the only aspect of the film that consistently pokes fun at clichés, apart from Harold Faltermeyer supplying a suitably vintage synth score) as the rival detective team always hassling Paul and Jimmy, while Willis clearly understood that his role called for him to be Bruce Willis, and by God he Bruce Willises the hell out this thing. But, as 30 Rock fans could have guessed, Tracy Morgan walks away with the film. Morgan always manages to somehow look simultaneously like a massive, lumbering beast and a big, loveable kid, and he channels that appearance into his acting. I laughed hard when the police captain tells Paul that someone filmed him physically abusing a teenager and "commandeering" his bike and placed it on YouTube, and Paul giddily responds, "THE YouTube?!" I was particularly enthused to see Morgan cry, as few actors working today know how to wring more laughs from tears than Tracy Morgan.
Yet Cop Out doesn't succeed, moving listlessly from plot point to plot point even as it fancies itself a film about the chats that occur between those points, and it is unquestionably the weakest picture in Smith's canon. Still, it represents an interesting development in the career of a filmmaker no one would have pegged as a hired gun, and if Cop Out helps Smith secure the capital for his proposed passion projects -- the hockey picture Hit Somebody and the relentlessly teasing Red State, a horror film with a captivating premise made all the more appealing by its rejection from studios for fear of unmarketability -- then the disappointment of this meandering off-genre production will seem be fleeting.
Upon the release of Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, Pauline Kael dubbed it "the first American film that is a fascist piece of art." One could certainly argue to what extent Peckinpah celebrates the violence in that film (or any of his others, for that matter), but Kael's supremely backhanded compliment -- her overall review was actually positive -- tumbles around the back of my head whenever I sit down with one of my favorite lazy day movies: Robert Rodriguez's Sin City.
More than Grindhouse, on which Rodriguez of course worked, Sin City embraces and celebrates kitsch, its bawdy, ham-fisted B-noir revival as marvelously warped and questionably moral as it was on the pages of Frank Miller's scattershot miniseries. Collecting the finest of Miller's collection for a series of ghastly vignettes, Sin City plays to the strengths of both its visionaries and emphasizes the ties that bind them: campy ultraviolence, stilted dialogue and DIY technical sizzle.
Indeed, Sin City ranks as one of the more innovative uses of computer animation in film, nearly flawless in its creation of the noir-iest noir world ever made. It's filled with Gothic arches, high ceilings, creepy dives, bright lights, dark shadows and so much more. Its crisp, high-definition back-and-white photography adds to the atmosphere, and the occasional flash of color across the screen -- be it red blood, a Yellow Bastard or the irresistible azure eyes of Alexis Bledel -- only burns the images further into our heads. Rodriguez so respects Miller's work that, apart from giving the author a co-director credit (something, judging from the commentary, he richly deserved), he transplants the look of the comics almost exactly from page to screen. Now, of course, we've all seen Zack Snyder move this aesthetic choice up to and too far beyond its limits, first celebrating some of Miller's basest instincts with 300 then utterly missing the point of Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen. Here, however, the minds of the two creative forces meet in harmony, and luckily the material is thick enough that not much rides on capturing both the aesthetic and the moral.
That's not to say that Sin City lacks for cleverness, even outright satire, however. Quite the opposite: Sin City paints a portrait of a city that makes Gotham look like Boca Raton. It's so governed by corruption, deception and the wild abandon that comes with a short life expectancy that the entire place seeps and oozes, putrid water running down chipped bricks as if the buildings themselves bleed from the violence within and around them. Denizens stand mere feet from deplorable acts of violence and react as if watching a card trick they've already seen.
It's a crazy world, and, naturally, crazy characters inhabit it. John Hartigan (Bruce Willis), the only clean cop on the force, rides near the beginning to top the son of a vile senator from raping and murdering a tween, along the way dispatching his corrupt partner and a pair of comically faux-erudite thugs who pop up occasionally to run through thesauri in a desperate attempt to outpace their stupidity. He finally catches up to "Junior" (Nick Stahl) and takes away his weapons -- "both of them," he says before shooting the rapist in a sensitive area, beginning a recurring motif that speaks either to Miller's deep fear of emasculation or his sly subversion of his own material's machismo (I'm on the fence) -- before that pesky partner returns and lulls Hartigan into a coma with the unstoppable flatness of Michael Madsen's speech.
Rodriguez then cuts to the story of Marv, indisputably the most interesting segment of the film and the true sign of Mickey Rourke's relevancy three years before The Wrestler. As he did with Randy the Ram, Rourke imbues Marv with the broken-down world-weariness he gained through hard living. Sporting thick prosthetic makeup that potentially improves Rourke's battered face, the actor plays a character so ugly he could never even buy a woman, a tank made of muscles and blood who never allowed his rejection to color his attitude toward women; though he speaks in typically sexist '50s gab -- using words like "dame" -- and discusses his unwillingness to harm women in broadly patriarchal tones, he doesn't foist his sexual frustration on those who deny them and reserves his ire for anyone he spots roughing up a lady. He's like an athlete, saving it all for the game, if the game involved ripping people apart with bare hands.
The seediest elements of the city awaken the sleeping giant when they murder the first woman to ever make love to him. "Goldie," Marv grumbles reverentially, her flaxen hair lighting up around her head like the angel Marv believes she is. But the next morning he finds her dead beside him with cops on the way to arrest him for her murder, and if we can infer that Marv was angry before he experienced happiness in his life, we can scarcely fathom just how pissed off he is when some unseen force snatches that away from him. Rourke has never been more vicious on-screen, plowing through thugs on his way to the top and ripping information out of those who might know where to find the next rung, always in manners both comical and terrifying. Only Rourke could pull off the role, molding a killing machine around a core of pathos and sympathy, and even if rooting for him means supporting a fascist juggernaut, I can't help but look into that fearsome mug and hope he "wins."
Near the end of the film, Rodriguez returns to Hartigan's story, the director's nonlinear structure appropriate for Miller's synchronous tales. Senator Roark visits Hartigan in the hospital and plots revenge for ending his son's reproductive capacity, and the entire digital world collapses. The city disappears, replaced by a cramped jail cell set against infinite black, the high contrast of the white bars instantly conveying the complete isolation Hartigan finds himself in for being a true hero in a town that has suffered for so long it no longer recognizes them. Upon his release, he finds the girl he saved, Nancy Callahan (Jessica Alba), only for Junior to return, now a sickly, fluorescent yellow thanks to experimental procedures meant to regrow his "weapon." While Marv was driven by revenge, Hartigan's motivation is keeping Nancy alive, a motivation that proves no less powerful. Hartigan doesn't connect the way Marv does, the difference between the two characters mirroring the differing emotional resonance of, say, Mickey Rourke and Bruce "Yippie-Ki-Yay" Willis, but I daresay Willis appears to be having a blast as the grizzled veteran cop and that enthusiasm makes him appealing where his performance leaves me cold.
Ladies finally get to join in on the fun, though, with the final major arc, The Big Fat Kill. Centered on a man, Dwight (Clive Owen), the arc is nevertheless propelled by the women: first by Dwight's girlfriend Shellie (Brittany Murphy at her most spit-fiery), then by his ex-, Gail (Rosario Dawson), leader of the city's sector of prostitutes and, eventually, by a traitorous young hooker who makes some incredible poor decisions in a panic (Bledel). A deliciously macabre sense of humor pervades the film, but where the other two chief segments balanced out the camp with serious (but never self-serious) plots, The Big Fat Kill takes the highway to cartooniness and waves middle fingers every time it passes an exit that might lead to some semblance of sanity. The prostitutes all have extensive gun training and a number are skilled martial artists; the dubious fascism receives its clearest representation in the form of throwing stars shaped as swastikas; Irish mercenaries stage an ambush at a tar pit; and a showdown between whores and the mob for the fate of Old Town. It's goddamn chaos, basically.
Its centerpiece, guest-directed by Quentin Tarantino, involves Dwight disposing of the bodies of Jack (Benicio del Toro) -- Shellie's abusive ex- and a dirty cop who brings about his doom when he threatens to kill a hooker in Old Town -- and his cohorts. With Jackie Boy's mutilated corpse in the passenger seat because the trunk couldn't hold any more flesh, Dwight's ride to the tar pits morphs into an extended homage to Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, in which Dwight holds a hallucinatory conversation with Jackie. The use of color in the sequence only adds to the oneiric quality, the gentle wave of headlights and police sirens on flesh washing over the faces of the two characters and clashing beautifully with the monochrome.
Deceptively impressive in the scripting of these loopy characters is the way Miller gently links the stories through the people. Hartigan, like Marv, places the woman in his life on a pedestal, but he succeeded in protecting her where Marv failed to save Goldie (Jaime King); both King and Alba have the most rigid parts in the film, made worse by their inability to bring anything to the role. Yet they work, as they're placed on such high pedestals that you can't get a close enough look to let the flaws distract. The two actresses find counterpoints in the far more dynamic performances of Murphy (whose character works the same bar as Alba's Nancy) and Dawson (also one of the Old Town prostitutes along with Goldie). Dwight's fever dream conversation with Jackie recalls Marv's occasional, somber mentions of the pills he takes and the "distractions" that come when he misses a dose. These threads give dimensionality to a film that adamantly wishes to remain a 2-D comic strip, and they complement the numerous digs at church and state and the way the two still collude and still harshly punish people for rules that simply do not apply to them.
Following the bittersweet ending of Hartigan's story, Sin City closes with a bookend of the brief opening segment involving a hitman known as "The Salesman" (Josh Hartnett). He tracks down a character to deliver a richly deserved comeuppance and, despite the wooden nature of Hartnett in general as well as the kooky nature of the film, delivers perhaps the best summary of the endless allure of this two-hour hyperviolent escapist fantasy. "Turn the right corner in Sin City, and you can find anything," he drawls, "...Anything."
Brett Simon's Assassination of a High School President wants to be many things -- a straight film noir, a tongue-in-cheek spoof of same, a commentary on the seedy underworld of youth and an examination of high school politics. Unfortunately for Simon and writers Tim Calpin and Kevin Jakubowski, the television program Veronica Mars already did all of this with infinitely more finesse, charm and wit. Indeed, the specter of Mars is all over this picture, from its alternately popular/shunned protagonist to its hip quotation of classic noir tropes and dialogue. Where this film seeks to capture that lightning-in-a-bottle balance of styles and themes of the show's first two seasons, however, it can only shoulder up to Veronica Mars' third season: it rambles, it lacks much bite and you can figure out everything several steps before the main characters.
Reece Thompson plays Bobby Funke (pronounced "funk," though no one says it properly), a wannabe journalist who fancies himself the best writer on his school's paper despite never finishing a single article. He pines for the editor, Clara, though his romantic loyalties apparently extend only so far as the person he believes might go for him. Clara, likely fed up with Bobby staring at her legs all the time, gives him a puff piece to see if he can finally see an article to completion.
Sent to cover the Student Government Association, Bobby finds himself with a real story on his hands when the beloved SGA president Paul Moore, a star athlete who has already mastered the fine art of referring to himself in the third person, is injured at a basketball game. That same night, someone steals the SATs from Principal Kirkpatrick's (Bruce Willis) office. Coincidence? Not on your life, sport. Bobby, constantly professing his love for Woodward and Bernstein, attempts to solve the crime in order to secure a spot in Northwestern University's summer program. He finds circumstantial evidence linking Moore and the theft, and he takes the story to press without definitive proof. Suddenly, he's the most respected and feared kid at St. Donovan's.
Up until this point, Assassination played out like an above-average comic noir, its facile breakdown of high school and too-hip dialogue notwithstanding. Naturally, no mystery is ever solved by the halfway mark, so Bobby discovers that everything might not have been so cut-and-dry as he thought, and he needs to find the whole truth before Northwestern finds out and retracts their invitation. Compounding his need to clear Moore's name is Bobby's new relationship with Paul's ex-, Francesca (Mischa Barton), the most popular and beautiful girl in the school.
Here the various comic exaggerations boil over into outright farce, even as the writers ratchet up the drama, creating an uneasy dichotomy between moods. Some aspects of this magnified comedy greatly amused me: a literal beer garden of kegs outside a frathouse, a Fincher-esque detention hall with flickering lights and inexplicably damp brick walls, a mysterious fact-checker from Northwestern who can magically ring whatever phone Bobby happens to be standing near in order to keep up the pressure on this applicant to prove his story. But nearly all of the actors fumble with the stylized dialogue; hell, most of them couldn't even convince me they were remotely high school age. Worst of all is Barton, though that might be true only because she's given more dialogue than the completely two-dimensional background characters: she makes the increasingly popular choice to play her character without an ounce of emotion. When did actors get together and decide that the best way to play teenagers was lifeless? Maybe I'm just naïve but I don't think we were all on Adderall.
Assassination runs out of steam long before it actually comes to a halt, and to fill the gap it stretches the mystery out beyond the breaking point. Every clue Bobby receives leads in one glaringly obvious direction, but suddenly a heretofore unseen character or motive presents itself to offer a possible outcome. We must also suffer through the school turning once again on Bobby, returning him to his place at the bottom and indeed digging a hole under the ladder to lower him further. Nearly all of the dialogue concerned with Bobby's social status, really, borders on the groanworthy: when a rival writer plants a story that Bobby framed Moore to gain fame, Clara gives the perfunctory "I thought you wanted more than popularity" speech that is wholly without context to any of the film's action. Also, why is it that Bobby's story is (justifiably) torn apart by fact-checkers and other students while Tad's is accepted without a doubt?
The only reason I ended up remotely enjoying myself was the strength of Thompson and Willis' performances. Willis, very much in "Bruce Willis" mode, plays Kirkpatrick as a deranged Desert Storm veteran, a man who cares more about whether Bobby has gum in his mouth than the conspiracy Funke slowly uncovers. It's a cheap strategy, but there's no denying he steals all of his scenes simply by being loud and bizarre. But it's young Thompson who proves most interesting, and he stands to break out with the picture. With an identifiable voice (Wikipedia tells me he did voiceover work as a teen) and as a Veronica Mars substitute he impressively holds his own with a natural screen presence. As much as I wanted the movie to end, I found myself equally wishing I could follow this character a while longer. It's not enough to save the movie, but hey, every little bit helps.
I remember a commercial from some old VHS from a kid's movie that advertised a movie called North. It gave away no real specifics, only showing a lad leaving his house and embarking on some sort of journey. All of this was easily conveyed through the visuals, but there was also an announcer who reminded me that this boy, named North, was leaving home and yes, going on a journey. I was always curious about the film, but my undeveloped child brain only processed, "North? That's a dumb name for a person to have." For once, curiosity never got the better of me, but I never forgot that oddball little trailer, perhaps the first one I ever saw that didn't tell me what I really needed to know about the movie.
Then, about a year and a half ago, I saw the name again. Already a film nut by that time, I was always looking for something else to sink my teeth into. One day I was idly sifting through old Siskel and Ebert reviews, and I stumbled across the one for North. Recalling that damn trailer I for some reason never purged from my memory, I thought, "Why not?" Here's what I saw:
Jesus Christ. I'd seen these two tag-team to take down some crap before, but never with this kind of bile. They didn't even look like they were having fun slamming it -- if you slapped some blue paint on their faces, they could have been extras in Braveheart. Naturally, this outpouring of white-hot loathing led me to Ebert's review (why Gene Siskel's reviews have not been archived and released online is a mystery and a tragedy, especially to us younger cinephiles), and it's even better. After tearing into it for the entire review, he ends with this now-immortal passage: "I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it."
And this is Roger Ebert we're talking about. Not Anthony Lane, not Ray Carney. Roger Ebert. I want to say "And this is the guy who named Crash as the finest film of the year!" but I fear it would be taken the wrong way; I do not mean to play that tired game of "How could he give this a positive/negative review he panned/praised Movie Y!" Rather, it proves Ebert's outlook on film: he is, in his own inimitable-yet-influential way, the biggest fan of film currently working as a critic. He's the man who will find something to praise in even the blandest of movies, to the point that he sometimes even gives them positive write-ups. As much as the more snobbish of filmgoers might regard his penchant for handing out too many three- and four-star reviews (as if it makes perfect sense to allot a set number of positive reviews one will give for the year), he's the Everyman of critics who just so happens to know so much about writing that he never hits you over the head with his talent.
Ebert gave the film zero stars. Let's stop for a moment and consider this, and to see what other films he's awarded with that rareüber-pan. Three films which come to mind immediately are Caligula, Chaos and I Spit on Your Grave. That means that Roger Ebert, being of sound mind and body, placed North, a children's fantasy film, on roughly the same level as three films that all feature graphic and exploitative rape scenes. At this point my schadenfreude senses were tingling so strongly I knew I had to watch it.
Sadly, though perhaps not without good reason, the film never made it to DVD. Unwilling to comb the Internet to buy a VHS copy of a movie I only wanted to see out of pure cynicism, I checked various streaming sites, to no avail. Dejected, I contemplated the experience that might have been, and even made up my own story. I knew the basics, but not any plot details, so I came up with stuff that might potentially earn the everlasting ire of one of the most affable critics to ever retain his credibility in the face of overwhelming optimism. Most of it involved racism. Well, I was surfing YouTube Friday when, to my delight, the Recommended tab led me to North.
North concerns its titular hero, an 11-year-old with good grades, good manners and a boatload of extracurricular activities. He's the kind of child any parent would love to have, but his own parents, played by Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus -- and if that wasn't a ploy to capitalize on Seinfeld, I'll buy a hat just so I can eat it -- are too self-absorbed to notice. The father is a pants inspector, and I never quite caught what the mom did because I was still so caught up on the dad's occupation. Let me just say this, if you like pants jokes, stop reading this right now and go to YouTube. Nay, track down a hard copy, because you'll be so overjoyed you're going to want to hug this. Mr. North's Dad not only has rants about pants, he's got tirades in store for the young executive who got the position based on nepotism.
The film opens with this rant, and North's mom joins in about the whatever-her-job-was-that-wasn't-quite-as-outrageous-as-pants-inspector and North, fed up with it all, has a panic attack. In the very first scene. We don't see this family interact, we don't learn anything about these characters, he just has a panic attack. And I know that Elijah Wood was a child at the time, but it's a miracle his career lasted long enough for him to even audition for The Lord of the Rings, much less win the lead. He might as well have just screamed "I AM HAVING A PANIC ATTACK!" instead of collapsing and yelling.
The episode inspires North to seek legal emancipation from his parents, in the hopes that he might find a pair who would give him the love he so richly deserves. He's aided in his endeavors by the 6th grade "journalist" Winchell, played by Matthew McCurley in a performance that is sure to make you utterly capable of striking a child. In fairness, the writing does nobody any favors, but everything about him is subtly enraging. He not only prints the story, which, despite being the paper of an elementary school, somehow finds itself on the doorstep of every house in town. Winchell sets North up with a slimy lawyer (Jon Lovitz) whom -- in the only moment of the film that even came close to eliciting a laugh -- we meet literally chasing an ambulance.
North takes his parents, who have slipped into a coma-like state from the shock of all of this, to court, presided over by a judge played by Alan Arkin. He tries, and terribly, terribly fails, to channel Groucho Marx, and the line "The defense rests" is, as the Nostalgia Critic rightly noted, one of the worst one-liners in movie history. He awards North emancipation, under the caveat that he must find a new pair of adoptive parents or reconcile with his biological ones by midnight on Labor Day; otherwise, he will be placed in an orphanage.
With North's "credentials" on full display, offers come flooding in, and soon the boy is off is search of love. If you thought these first 15 minutes were arduous, just wait. As it turns out, my imagined story, full of racism and inappropriate humor, hit shockingly close to the mark. The prospective parents are meant to symbolize some aspect of American society, but it resorts to such cheap stereotypes and such jarring adult humor that there isn't a laugh to be had.
First you've got your big Texan family (Dan Aykroyd and Reba McEntire), who naturally represent rampant greed, but the joke is old when you first see them, sitting pretty in their 100-ft-long stretch limo. They want the biggest and best of everything, so they set about fattening up North, and even have a big ol ' song about fattening him up. They make light of the death of their biological son -- who of course was massive-- in a stampede, calling it "a mighty big loss." For some reason, they wear the sort of cowboy outfits that 3-year-olds dress as for Halloween.
And it only gets worse from there. Reiner clearly wanted to make a fantasy epic, but for some reason was unwilling to take the story outside of America. So he travels to Hawaii and Alaska in the hopes that people will buy them as faraway lands and not States of the Union. Governor and Mrs. Ho do at least acknowledge that Hawaii is a state, but he makes it out to be an exotic place of wonder nonetheless. Mrs. Ho speaks with a grating Asian accent, and Mr. Ho disturbingly informs his prospective son that "There is only one barren area on all of our islands. Unfortunately, it's Mrs. Ho." Then he unveils his real reason for adopting the wunderkind: so he can turn North into a poster boy for the state to increase tourism, because if there's one thing Hawaii doesn't have, it's a booming tourist industry. His solution is to plaster North's face on billboards featuring a cheeky octopus pulling down the boy's pants to expose his...well, cheeks. North is understandably horrified, but he just can't manage to get a laugh no matter how many times he rages over "his most private of crevices."
The racism builds to a fever pitch in Alaska where they spray Kathy Bates with orange tan and pass her off as an Eskimo (notice the proper term "Inuit" isn't used). I can overlook the fact that all the houses are made of ice, and even the idea that the extended daylight of summer somehow means that they can't process time. But when they send grandpa (Abe Vigoda) out on an ice floe to die with dignity. I nearly broke my laptop. That practice was never common even at its zenith hundreds of years ago, and they certainly weren't doing this in the mid-goddamned-'90s.
Are they serious? This is a film for children. As much as I detest the constant condescension from everyone but Pixar when it comes to films geared towards younger audiences, I do know that they aren't misunderstood geniuses. While they don't mistake fiction for reality as much as some politicians might say, how many kids would look at the stereotypes depicted on-screen and simply accept them?
Guiding North through his travels is a guardian angel of sorts, played by Bruce Willis. Clearly stuck in his post-Hudson Hawk, pre-Pulp Fiction era (thank God that bailed him out in the same year as this), Willis phones it in and relies on his various costumes -- ranging from an Easter bunny to a product-pushing FedEx man -- to spout some half-formed philosophy about family and life and terrible puns ("North? Always been one of my favorite directions."). He also does the voiceover narration, which is the only aspect of the film that even manages to be unintentionally funny: it makes Harrison Ford's rushed, emotionless delivery in the theatrical cut of Blade Runner sound like a track that combines Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones and Orson Welles. It's hysterically bad.
Ultimately, North realizes that his family wasn't so bad, and even when he finds nice people he feels as if he doesn't belong -- yep, this adoption parable concludes with the epiphany that you won't fit in with anyone but your real parents. But in his absence, all the other children used North's example to essentially terrify their parents into submission. Winchell, with the help of the lawyer, has established himself as one of the most powerful people in the world, and he knows that a reconciliation between North and his parents will end his power trip. So he tries to have North killed.
After 80 minutes of insufferable failed gags and cheerful racism, I thought it couldn't get any worse. Then I got to the end. If for any reason you've read this far and still feel like seeing it for yourself, if only to see if it's really that bad (don't), then leave now. After all that lead-up, all that hare-brained philosophy, we reach the end and...
It was all a dream.
I give up. I realize I've done nothing but describe the plot this whole time. It's because I watched this two days ago and I'm still in shock. I slept on this, and my hatred of North hasn't lessened one iota. How could anyone have approved this? What did Rob Reiner see in this? Rob Reiner! He was one of the most dependable filmmakers of the '80s. When Harry Met Sally. The Princess Bride. Stand By Me. This is friggin' Spinal Tap. He might not have been the greatest and most visually impressive director, but he had the Midas touch when it came to quality scripts.
What's saddest about this film is that clearly these people thought they were making the next great fantasy epic. But it's hard to be The Wizard of Oz when you travel to completely real, not-that-exotic locations and try to make them out to be mystical wonderlands. At one point Governor Ho mentions how people don't treat Hawaii like a part of America, but Alan Zweibel's script and the ridiculous set and costume designs of both Alaska and Hawaii clearly alienate them from the continental U.S.
I genuinely feel sorry for the cast and crew. The kids no doubt thought they were a part of something huge, and Reiner and Zweibel seemed sure that this was going to be yet another hit. But nothing works. The physical humor and sight gags range from dopey to offensive (including a bit involving a Hasidic Jew at the pants factory), and it's downright vulgar at times. Throwing in some truly adult material is nothing new to kid's fare: classics ranging from Rocko's Modern Life to Ren & Stimpy to Pixar features all inject gags that most under 16 couldn't get, but it's just outright terrible here (the 'barren' line, for example).
The actors fare no better. Arkin is just awful, and Willis might as well have been waving his paycheck at us when he was on-screen. McCurley should be used as Exhibit A for all those who detest children in film: he's grating, mugging, shrill and desperately unlikable, even beyond the point that, as the villain, you're not supposed to like him. I actually wonder if the film originally had no villain -- and it certainly suffers for having one, because all of the scenes with Winchell the lawyer Belt break the already-shambolic flow -- but they rewrote the part when they got too far into shooting to recast and discovered just how terrible the kid was. I know this is awfully mean, but McCurley -- who got his start, like most children, in commercials -- never got any substantial work in the industry after this, and it makes make oddly glad. Wood fares the best out of anyone, which is good, I suppose, as he's the lead, but even then he really only looks decent compared to everyone else.
After sitting through this thing, I must agree with Ebert. I hated every second of this film, in the way that I detest torture porn and whatever offensive, insane commercial for Jesus that Kirk Cameron is working on this week. I'm not the kind of person to really go after child actors -- despite my general antipathy regarding their performances -- but I suddenly understood how some grown people could be so vicious to these kids. This movie is worse than such legendary pieces of trash as The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate, because at least they lapse into unintentional comedy. This film is shooting to be funny, and therefore when it fails, it fails big. I don't even know why I watched the whole thing. Had I been old enough in '94 to see a film by myself and know how to process it, I would have unquestionably left and asked for a refund, something I've never done. While time has eroded some of its legend to show the beating heart underneath that really wanted this to be great, North remains one of the worst films I have ever seen, and I actively urge you never to watch it.
Every so often a film comes along that manages to cram every criteria of a genre into bloated whole, but even rarer are the ones that do so and manage to be utterly surprising. Perhaps the best example of this is Tony Scott's buddy-cop extravaganza The Last Boy Scout. Even though it tackles the range of buddy clichés in a way that is in no way subversive, the off-the-wall mash-up of explosions and bad puns keep you rooted in your seat.
The film opens with a moment of stunning violence, and not the kind that pumps up an audience. A star quarterback gets a call telling him he better win, so he takes some PCP and takes to the field, only to shoot members of the other team and finally himself. Not exactly a thrilling start.
We then meet our hero. Bruce Willis, channeling all of that Die Hard everyman charm, plays Joe Hallenback, a drunken louse of a man who seems at his wit's end. The most ironic aspect of the film, Willis uses Joe as a commentary for the fallout of Willis' then recent flop Hudson Hawk; Joe used to be at the top of his game, but now sleeps in his clothes and walks around unshaven and unkempt. His wife sleeps with his best friend, which sends the personal stories of the characters into a tailspin at the start.
Then the cars start exploding. If you take only one thing away from this film, it's to never drive a car, because all of them are rigged with C-4. Every last one. No wonder the American auto industry failed; they're installing bombs in their vehicles. The first kills Joe's friend before they can remotely work out their problems, and somehow launches Joe into a plot involving sports corruption.
Along the way, Joe meets Jimmy Dix, a disgraced ex-footballer whose meteoric rise was cut short by gambling and drug charges. Dix is played by Damon Wayans, who surprisingly downplays his clownish side and actually plays straight man to Willis' Joe. As with just about all buddy cop films in which one of the buddies is not an officer, we get little reason as to why the cop would put a civilian into constant jeopardy.
From what I can gather of the scattershot and utterly unbelievable plot, the Los Angeles football team manager, Marcone (Noble Willingham), is bribing a corrupt senator to legalize sports gambling to rejuvenate the sagging NFL. Jimmy somehow got involved with all this because his girlfriend found out and tried to blackmail Marcone into getting Jimmy back on the field. It sounds simple, but the mind wanders when the 8th car explodes for no reason.
When you think about it, this is Tony Scott and Shane Black's attempt to make the 80s American version of James Bond. Joe seems like a normal bloke, but early on in the film we learn not only that he was a Secret Service agent but that he saved the President's life. I'm really struggling to think of something that's made me laugh harder. Joe has no gadgets, but otherwise he operates just like Bond: apart from them both being agents at some point, Joe also speaks in terrible puns and must foil a ridiculous plan. He fights wave after wave of killers who get him in the crosshairs only to start spouting monologues, giving Joe the time to outwit them.
It all culminates in a supremely over-the-top showdown in a stadium in the middle of a game. The place is packed with fans, who cheer at the battle instead of fleeing like sensible people. But this is not a sensible movie, and it's only fitting that this grab-bag of explosions and pieced-together plot would end to the roar of an approving mob. In that sense Scott and Black show a keen self-awareness; though they do not subvert any of their clichés and use only the slightest hints of irony, they know how ridiculous the film is.
Unfortunately, I could not lose myself into this OTT spectacle because of its rampant and shocking misogyny. I'm not one to place women on a pedestal away from harm (because any fool could tell you that relegating women to the sidelines was the problem for decades), but treating every. single. woman in the film as something to be used and discarded crosses a number of personal boundaries. Even Joe's young daughter gets led around the place at gunpoint for most of the film. It doesn't serve the plot and seems there only to get laughs out of the macho target audience.
Therefore, I cannot really recommend the film as a classic. However, I can't fully pan the film because it's extremely well-made and doesn't take itself seriously. Willis' lines, though corny as all get-out, are frequently funny, and the action scenes make up for their more street-level scope with a gloriously over-the-top plot behind them. Sure, there's only one or two big shootouts, but even the small stuff seems significant when cars blow up all over the place. So how do I rate it? I did enjoy the film quite a lot despite its sexism, and though I never want to see it again for that reason, I'm sure people could glean at least some entertainment out of the film. So I guess I sit in the middle of the film, too pretentious and (I'm sure some will say) P.C. to lose myself fully, but thrill-seeking enough to not hate it for its darker depictions.
