Private Conversation

It is, right now, at this moment, eleven o’clock at night, Friday, December 14, 2001 to be exact, the day that Vanilla Sky opened, and I have just returned from the Highland 10 cineplex after the 7:55 screening. I am sitting at my desk, which - right now - is a card table, not that it matters.

I am writing my review of Vanilla Sky now, with the full knowledge that my review of Monsters, Inc. is only three-quarters finished and my review of The Heist is still inchoate. (I can’t get past Rebecca Pidgeon and her Joan Jett hairdo, although I am sure that I will eventually.) If I did things in any logical, ordinary way I would knock out those reviews first before even trying - even attempting a Vanilla Sky review. Get them out of the way, clear out the old mental passages.

Instead, I am listening to some Aimee Mann music on the Winamp and working on Vanilla Sky. I worry that I won’t do the other reviews justice as a result; heck, I shouldn’t even have seen the movie in the first place. And I worry that this review is turning into a vain, self-indulgent stream-of-consciousness review instead of being the tight, well-reasoned review that the movie deserves. I am thinking - it is about 11:15 now - that I really ought not to try to finish this review now.

I am not sure that I will be able to sleep tonight if I don’t, though.

Tom Cruise is having trouble sleeping, too. Cruise here is one of those classic Tom Cruise characters - Charley Babbit, Danny Kaffee, Frank T.J. Mackey, Jerry Maguire - who are self-confident, good-looking, and who have the world on a string were it not for their one little flaw that humbles them and leads them to a deeper understanding of life. This particular character - David Aames is his name, as if it matters - is a scion of a famous publishing family, Steve Forbes with charisma. He has wealth, power, a perfectly non-threatening relationship with Cameron Diaz, and exactly the sort of blue-black classic Ford Mustang I would drive if I had the wherewithal. And then, at a star-studded party at his swank New York apartment to celebrate his thirty-third birthday and the sublime wonderfulness of being Tom Cruise, he meets Penelope Cruz, and they engage in some playful-yet-meaningful Cameron Crowe dialogue and fall madly in love.

All of this would be good, the kind of good, loving relationship between two beautiful, talented rich people that makes the rest of us so… envious, and asking why we, too, can’t experience something similar in our own lives. Except that Cruise, like Hamlet, cannot count himself the King of Infinite Space because of his bad dreams. The dreams are enormously vivid and strange; if Cruise’s romantic dialogue is scripted by the expert hand of Cameron Crowe, his dreams are equally illuminated by Crowe’s talent as a cinematographer. Just that, in fact, his dreams have that cinematic quality that says this is real, this is true even when all of reason and fact say that what one sees can’t exist, doesn’t exist, isn’t real. And unlike the most cinematic of dreams, they don’t fade away in the morning sunshine; don’t lose their brilliance in the early morning routine of cornflakes and razor blades and toothpaste and missing socks and NPR Morning Edition and the dreary drive to the office. They keep their resonance, to the point where they intrude on to the margins of what is real. Cruise tells us that he’s “living the dream”, but what happens when the dream lives you?

Aimee Mann again on the Winamp:

It’s not what you thought
When you first began it
You got what you want
You can hardly stand it though
By now you know
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
It’s not going to stop
‘Till you wise up

And that, in good conscience, is all I can tell you.

Well, not quite. I can tell you, first of all, that the trailers give too much away, not that they don’t usually. I can tell you that Cameron Diaz has the same sweet smile that she had in Charlie’s Angels but that it now looks vixenish instead of kittenish, if you know what I mean and I think you do. I can tell you that New York looks splendid in its autumnal glory. I can tell you that there are probably one too many celebrity cameos and that some of the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and that there are a couple of scenes that are shot in a gimmicky way. I can tell you that Cameron Crowe knows about as much about pop music as John Cusack did in High Fidelity, but that he uses his knowledge for good instead of evil. I can tell you that you may find unexpected humor in the scene where the profoundly short Cruise has his mug-shot taken, and some unintentional poignancy in a closing Manhattan panorama.

However, any additional discussion of the movie - its themes, its sense of reality, its philosophical underpinnings, what it says about happiness and love and experience and suffering - does a disservice to the reader. Vanilla Sky is not about what’s on the screen, although what is there is excellent. It’s not about the soundtrack, although it’s more than worthwhile. It’s not about the dialogue, although I imagine that some of the better lines (”My life is about to change in a zillion different ways”) will percolate into the romantic language the way that “You had me at hello” did. It’s not about the acting, although Tom Terrific is reliably good in his signature part, and the rest of the cast is absorbing if unspectacular.

Vanilla Sky is not about any of these things. It is instead about the conversation, about the process of going to the movies with a friend or a lover or a family member and walking out of the theater and going to a bar or a diner or a taco stand and talking about the movie, sharing impressions, and bouncing ideas off each other about What It All Means. That’s your private conversation to have, and I wouldn’t dare intrude.

Vanilla Sky and the inevitable ensuing conversations are worth your time and trouble, and may even be worth a sleepless night or two. Not for me, though. It is now 12:21 AM, Saturday morning, December 15, 2001, and I am going to convert what I’ve written into HTML and post it on my website and see if anyone reads it or not. Then I’m going to sleep, and if I dream any strangely vivid dreams I will keep them to myself.

I Don’t Like It, But I Guess Things Happen That Way

The biggest disappointment about Walk The Line has, oddly, little to do with Joaquin Phoenix. It is that the movie seems composed of scenes from different movies, all of which could have been better than what we get. Could you make a movie about Johnny Cash’s hardscrabble childhood in Arkansas, growing up with a doomed brother, a hard-drinking father and a hymnal? Sure you could, and I’d buy a ticket. Could you make a movie about young Johnny Cash in the Air Force in Germany, drinking beer, writing songs, and learning to be a man? Probably easy enough, I think. Could you make a movie about Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis tearing up the South on a Sun Records tour? Oh, yeah, especially if you gave equal time to all the principals. Could you make a movie that was just a recreation of the Johnny Cash concert at Folsom Prison? It would be a stretch, but I’d be there, sure enough.

Walk The Line is all of these movies, at least for a few minutes, but you can’t help but think that you might rather spend time in some of those other movies instead. It is an incredibly well-made and evocative film, showing the details of its period with remarkable fidelity. Musical director T Bone Burnett has done an admirable job of making the music sound as authentic as possible, even given the obvious limitations of the Hollywood talent he was given to work with. At least in places, Walk The Line is an attractive, memorable picture, but it never manages to coalesce.

In fact, there’s just one moment — one historical turning point — where Walk The Line comes into its own and becomes the movie that it wants to be. It’s that magical moment when John Cash from Arkansas and the Air Force becomes Johnny Cash, recording artist, right in the recording studio of Sun Records in Memphis — when he’s goaded into it by Sam Phillips (Dallas Roberts). It’s a scene that works because of Phoenix’s essential awkwardness and lack of charisma. He starts the scene out fumbling with a tired old gospel song, and then trots out “Folsom Prison Blues”, painfully at first, and then with greater assurance and authority, to where it’s recognizable at the end.

Everything else in Walk The Line has been building up to that moment, and the rest of the movie ought to be a build-up to another moment, where that young Johnny Cash becomes the Man in Black, where he gains full control over his powers and becomes an instrument to spread truth, goodness, and redemption across the land. But that never quite happens. Although the movie leads us through tours and pills and discord of every type, with Burnett’s mimicry of Cash’s music running through every other scene, it never quite crystallizes, never quite grows out of that awkwardness.

This is mostly Joaquin Phoenix’s fault.

I don’t like Joaquin Phoenix. I am on record for that. I have never liked any role of his that he’s ever played, except as the Everyman firefighter in Ladder 49. In that part, he was a clumsy but heroic goofus, and the part fit him splendidly in a way that Johnny Cash’s black jacket can’t. When he’s on stage, Phoenix is all herky-jerky, with angles and elbows everywhere. I kept thinking that Phoenix looked a lot like Vincent D’Onofrio, in Men in Black, in those scenes where he had a giant cockroach living inside his body. Walk The Line may be making the point that Cash wasn’t yet comfortable in his own skin in the Sixties, and if that’s what it’s trying to do, then it achieves that, at least by accident.

Of course, Phoenix can’t sing like Cash. It’s hard to think that anyone could, even though Cash was really no virtuoso. That Phoenix even approximates it is a minor miracle, and the resulting sound is… well… not horrible. (Although I did listen to a clip of the soundtrack on XM 27, the movie soundtrack channel, and it was simply awful, with Cash’s gravelly baritone reduced to a confused mutter.) Reese Witherspoon isn’t much better, really, but she did learn how to play the autoharp, which is more than Phoenix did. (Rich Lowry pointed this out on NRO’s blog the other day; Phoenix never moves his left hand to play different notes.)

Having said all that, Walk The Line is a solid flick, much better than last year’s very similar Ray. It’s certainly worth seeing, especially for those people who have no idea who Johnny Cash was and why he was so important. (By this I mean the people who choose playlist for country radio stations, really, you people should be ashamed of yourselves.) As bad as Phoenix was for this part, he wasn’t terrible, and there could have been a lot worse choices out there. (You have no idea how painful it was to write that.) And I would rather much have a good Johnny Cash movie be made than have the perfect Johnny Cash movie never be made.

So I am not telling anybody not to see Walk The Line, and since I live in New Jersey, amongst Yankees, I am going to talk about it in a positive way. People should see the film, and learn, and maybe go out on iTunes and buy some songs. But I wish that some things were different. I wish there was more time to explore some of the side roads in the movie, like Johnny’s relationships with Elvis, and Dylan, and the Highwaymen. (There’s an all-too-brief scene of Cash and Waylon Jennings sharing a tiny apartment in Nashville, for example.) I wish there was more time to explore the Carter Family and explain their role in creating modern country music. I wish Walk The Line didn’t quite gloss over the role that Cash’s Christianity played in his recovery, and in his decision to play at Folsom Prison. And I wish that the whole movie wasn’t quite as slick and Hollywood as it is.

But given the moviemaking world that we live in, could Walk The Line be better? I don’t know. I can’t say.

I don’t like it, but I guess things happen that way.

Dirty Tricks

The premise of Wag the Dog is so simple that it’s adequately explained by the commercials. With 11 days to go until the election, the President (who we never see) calls in political dirty-tricks artist Robert DeNiro to distract attention from a burgeoning sex scandal. DeNiro enlists Hollywood producer Dustin Hoffman to produce a “pageant”, a phony war against Albania, fought on the blue screens of Hollywood and the recording studios of Nashville, with Woody Harrelson as the reluctant, psychotic hero. And if there wasn’t anything more to the movie than this, it would be a second-rate heist comedy at best, enlivened by great actors — like Sneakers Goes to Washington. (A heist comedy? Yup. DeNiro and Hoffman are “stealing” the election, so to speak, and the movie is more about how they do it — and the fun they have doing it — than anything else.)

Wag the Dog succeeds because it’s based one great truth: The American people are stupid. OK, maybe it’s not “love thy neighbor as thyself” or even “two plus two makes four”, but a truth nonetheless. (Any average person who thinks that they’re really smart about the two things this movie satirizes — moviemaking and the political process — is invited, nay, challenged, to spend a week either watching a movie actually being made or 48 hours straight watching C-SPAN when the House is in session.) And because we’re so utterly, predictably stupid, Hollywood knows that a certain percentage of us will go see Hard Rain or Magoo, Washington knows that we won’t notice a few million dollars spent here and there on porno art grants and cigar subsidies — and DeNiro’s character knows that American geography skills are so weak that we won’t be able to locate Albania on the map.

The beauty of Wag the Dog is that it isn’t a light, meaningless comedy about politics (like Speechless, the Michael Keaton - Geena Davis picture) or from the level of light-hearted politcal satire to near-greatness. Nor is it a hard-edged cynical look at the manner in which a morally-deprived, ethically challenged baby-boomer connives his sleazy way into the White House (like Primary Colors — and yes, I am a little disappointed in the way the last two elections turned out, thanks for asking). Instead, David Mamet’s script strikes that delicate balance between comedy and cynicism needed for satire. It does this by keeping us in a fantasy world where most of the schemers’ schemes come off beautifully, and fail only in entertaining and humorous fashion.

DeNiro is playing a variation on his Al Capone character from The Untouchables, without any of the violent rages. It’s all: “What do I love? What is it that brings me joy? Baseball,” minus the savage bloody beating with the bat. He threatens a lot of people, mind you, but he’s doing it in a very nice, polite way. It’s a very mellow, restrained performance, which fits in with the air of gamesmanship in the script. Hoffman, on the other hand, is giddy, exuberant and joyous. This kind of thing is what his character lives for, and he’s so excited that he can’t even shut up. Even on the edge of disaster, he’s bright-eyed (behind oddly tinted sunglasses) and positive. Insiders note that he’s basing his character on some powerful-but-anonymous producer — which may or may not be true, but Hoffman still exudes the kind of lets-put-on-a-show electricity that you figure a producer needs to have.

The best part and the most frustrating part of Wag the Dog is in the supporting cast. The characters are so well drawn and so well acted that we want to see more of them, listen to them talk in that wised-up Mamet dialogue, get to know them better — which we don’t. Anne Heche, is dead-bang-on in her portrayal of a political press aide — cool and composed on the outside, panicked and frenzied on the outside. Denis Leary (one of my favorite actors — see The Ref) is the “Fad King”, who handles the profitable “back-end” — T-shirt tie ins and shoe contracts and other creative, innovative ways to separate a fool from his money. They could make a whole movie, just about the Fad King, and I’d go see it. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard handle the musical end of things fabulously, from the upbeat gospel chorus theme song, to the weepy country waltz, to the hilarious “Ballad of the Green Berets” parody. Woody Harrelson has a brief, but memorable part as the overmedicated “hero” of the Albanian conflict. Craig T. Nelson, as the opposition candidate, and the ever-reliable William H. Macy, as a wacky CIA agent, are given surprisingly short shrift. (One of my small gripes is that we never see what the spin doctors on the other side are doing.)

Wag the Dog is a funny movie about serious problems: the trivialization of American politics, the role of the press in dumbing down the issues, the impact of Hollywood in creating campaign commercials, the reduction of all things political to soundbites and sidebars — the list goes on. We can solve most of these problems by taking a greater role in our national life and educating ourselves as voters and citizens. Wag the Dog reminds us of what can happen if we don’t.

Someone Had Blundered

We Were Soldiers is a horrible movie, and I mean that in three different ways.

First, We Were Soldiers is horrible in the general sort of way that a certain sort of movie is horrible on occasion. We Were Soldiers has all sorts of appalling elements that are cause for fear and dread. Like the famously awful Pearl Harbor, it has a deathly awful Randall Wallace screenplay, laden with syrupy and cloying dialogue. (And like Pearl Harbor, we’re treated to the revolting spectacle of the Ridiculously Phony Southern Accent, this time by Mel Gibson.) It presents a counterfeit and idealized view of Army life in the 1960’s, whitewashing everything from the fences to the racial attitudes. It features Greg Kinnear in a role where he is called on to be something more than smug. It is piled high and deep with enough sentiment and tears and patriotism to run sixteen Congressional campaigns and still have enough left over for an AT&T commercial. It is so sickly sweet in places that you almost want to stay for the closing credits so you can watch for the inevitable appearance of the Hallmark logo.

Second, We Were Soldiers is horrible in a very specific sense having to do with war in general and Vietnam in particular. We Were Soldiers is the story of one of the earliest large-scale battles of Vietnam involving American units (as distinguished from “combat advisors” and the like). It is the story of a small number of American “air cavalry” troops, ferried into combat by helicopter into the middle of a North Vietnamese army division, a little at a time. It shows how Mel Gibson’s troopers come under fire almost immediately against a numerically superior force, and how they must fight their way out against waves of near-suicidal enemy infantry. It is the story of the Vietnam War writ small, with all the waste, futility, and horror of that war presented intact. It graphically portrays the valor and courage of the American fighting man in Vietnam, and how that valor and courage was squandered for no good reason at all due to incompetent leadership and a faulty sense of mission - and that, in its way, is more horrible than any Greg Kinnear performance or Randall Wallace screenplay there ever was.

The battle featured in We Were Soldiers takes place in an area of the Central Highlands called the “Valley of Death”, in a way that may or may not echo the Charge of the Light Brigade:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

The comparison isn’t exactly quite fair; American leadership in Vietnam wasn’t quite so lacking as British leadership in the Crimean War, and the result of the battle portrayed in We Were Soldiers was a hard-fought American victory. Still, anyone with any kind of knowledge of how the Vietnam War turned out (probably, unfortunately, excluding a significant proportion of the movie’s target teenage-boy audience), anyone who knows how the war is going to end for the Americans, can’t help but feel saddened and mortified watching the movie.

The battlefield scenes are by far the best part of the movie, outshining anything else on the screen. Randall Wallace proved in Pearl Harbor that he’s absolutely incapable of handling any sort of human interaction other than battle, but he writes and directs the battle scenes with a sure hand. (Unlike Pearl Harbor, We Were Soldiers doesn’t stint on the blood and gore, there’s no gauze covering the lens when the camera looks at burn victims.) The talented cast of Mel Gibson, Sam Elliott and Barry Pepper (excluding the untalented cast of Greg Kinnear and Chris Klein), does a great job of portraying the anxiety and stress of combat. The battle of Landing Zone X-Ray is comprehensible and vivid, and the portrayal of combat is worthy of comparison with Saving Private Ryan and a shade behind Black Hawk Down.

The excellence of the battlefield scenes almost makes We Were Soldiers a movie worth seeing. However, We Were Soldiers suffers from a terminal lack of honesty and authenticity concerning its main character, Mel Gibson’s Lt. Colonel Hal Moore. It’s reasonable in a Hollywood epic featuring a major star for the script to whitewash some of the details about that star’s character. (This will hereinafter be known as the “John Forbes Nash Rule”, after the hero of A Beautiful Mind.)

But We Were Soldiers is not so much a whitewash as it is a complete paint job. The movie is based on Moore’s book, and predictably shows him in the best possible light. We see Moore poring over military textbooks describing other similar massacres, supposedly learning how to avoid mistakes that he makes anyway. We see him expressing remorse and sorrow over the losses in battle, but never fully accepting responsibility for any mistakes he might have made. Although We Were Soldiers is bipartisan - presenting some scenes from the enemy point of view - it is not objective; it presents Moore the way he wanted to be portrayed instead of in a way that’s authentic and interesting. We Were Soldiers is a well-told battle movie that is filled with both cinematic and historic blunders; it would make fewer of the former if it would acknowledge some of the latter.

Little Voices

I heard the women’s voices even before Mel Gibson did. It was the scene where Mel is standing before the mirror, wearing only a towel, and drunkenly trying out different products which his ad agency is considering marketing to women. And as Mel started applying the mascara, I heard a voice.

“He looks old.”

And it would happen again. It was the scene where Mel is taking his daughter to a ritzy shop on the Magnificent Mile so that she can buy her prom dress, and she tries on all sorts of different outfits. And the third or fourth time that she came out of the dressing room, I heard another voice.

“That is one ugly dress.”

As it turns out, I hadn’t developed any special mystical mind-reading power; it was just that there was a gaggle of teenage girls sitting behind me, adding in a running commentary of the movie. (And if you find a DVD with that feature, buy something else, like Apollo 13.) I did try to turn around in my seat and glare at them, but this particular theater had high-backed seats; I couldn’t even see them clearly.

I hate it when people talk in movie theaters; but these girls didn’t ruin What Women Want for me. They couldn’t have; What Women Want came pre-wrecked, already mangled by a wretched script, monumentally poor casting, and a cheesy, superficial attitude towards women. What Women Want would like to be a smart comedy of errors, would like to be a poignant family drama, would like to be a slick and urbane romance. It ends up being nothing more than a confused, muddled mess, with storylines and ideas going every which way, blowing around like litter caught in a fierce Chicago wind.

We start with the premise, which is that Mel Gibson somehow acquires the ability to hear the secret thoughts of women. It’s one of those ideas that sounds good on the drawing board, but doesn’t work that well when translated to the big screen. Also, not everyone’s going to buy it. I was trying to explain the movie to a female friend with a high-powered logical mind, who asked, “Why does he just hear the thoughts of women?”

“Oh, come now,” says I. “You were expecting logic and reason from Hollywood?”

“Well, no, but still…”

“It supposedly had to do with the fact that he was wearing pantyhose when he got an electrical shock.”

“Well, then, could he hear the thoughts of gay men?”

I didn’t have a good answer for that.

What Women Want might have worked, actually, if it had been a smaller, independent movie, with lower expectations and less lofty goals. Its failure is not totally due to the presence of Mel Gibson, but he is principally responsible. The movie might have worked better with an unknown actor at the helm, with someone who might not radiate the sex appeal that Mel does. What Women Want presents Mel as someone who already knows What Women Want, or at least has a pretty good idea. Even before he gets that electric shock, he’s already established an enviable track record of getting women to do what he wants them to do. It would seem — to me, anyway — that it would be a little more fun to give the power to read women’s thoughts to someone who is a little more confused and bewildered by women than Mel seems to be.

That casting error is compounded by another one. The two women in Mel’s life are played by Helen Hunt and Marisa Tomei, both of whom have made their careers by playing smart, forthright women. Think, for example, of the direct way that Hunt seduces Richard Gere in Dr. T and the Women, or the way that she speaks her mind to Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets. Most notably, think of Tomei’s Oscar-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny, where she defined forthright and direct. It’s never too terribly hard to tell what’s on either of their minds. What Mel is hearing isn’t so far removed from what they’re saying that it makes a difference. Half the time, the secret thoughts of the women characters aren’t really that much of a secret. Casting an actress with a little more of an air of mystery about her — Claire Forlani comes to mind, as she so often does — would have made What Women Want a subtler, better movie.

Worse, What Women Want cheats, shamefully, in three specific ways. First, the movie goes to the trouble of getting Lauren Holly to play Mel’s ex-wife, and then completely ignores her, to the point that we never hear what she really thinks about Mel. Second, the movie does a similar disservice to Mel’s secretaries, Delta Burke and Valerie Perrine; it either assumes that they don’t have any thoughts or that Mel can’t hear them. (And, for some reason, the movie gives Delta Burke a horrendous New York accent; why not hire Fran Drescher and have done with it? It couldn’t have made things any worse.)

Thirdly, the movie cheats by throwing in a character who works as a messenger at Mel’s ad agency who is experiencing depression and having suicidal thoughts; this is done primarily to give Mel the opportunity to rescue her, just as though she was a toddler who had fallen down a well or something. It’s a graceless note in a graceless movie; memorable only because the messenger’s apartment is decorated with some large, wooden dominoes, and I want some.

It was right after this scene that I heard the teenagers start talking again behind me. “This movie is dragging”, they said, and I couldn’t help but agree with them. What Women Want is a miserable, unfunny movie with a long, drawn-out ending that ends up betraying a premise with a lot of potential and a fair performance from Mel Gibson. If you hear little voices from behind you telling you not to bother with this one; make sure you listen to them.

Painless Fun

Ask the average person to name a movie about dentists, and he’ll almost certainly cite Marathon Man, in which a completely over-the-top Laurence Olivier plays a fiendish Nazi who uses macabre dental techniques to extract information from bug-eyed Dustin Hoffman.

– Joe Queenan, Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler

There are no coincidences, of course. Everything happens for a reason. (Or at least that’s what I’ll tell Paul Thomas Anderson if he ever asks me why the Academy didn’t give Magnolia more nominations than just Tom Cruise.) So, when I bought the Queenan book the week before last, it was meant that I would find his seminal piece on the history of the portrayal of the dental profession in film, and use it to make a point about The Whole Nine Yards, a movie about a Montreal dentist (Matthew Perry) who discovers that his neighbor is a recently-paroled Chicago mobster (Bruce Willis).

Queenan reviewed the entire canon of dentists on film, from Erich von Stroeheim’s 1925 movie Greed (about a dentist whose life is destroyed by a miserly wife) to Steve Martin’s sadistic Orvin Scrivello from the Rick Moranis version of Little Shop of Horrors (my favorite movie musical, which to this day has me singing, occasionally: You’ll be a dennntist… you’ll have a habit for causing great pain!). Queenan’s thesis is that Hollywood can only see dentists as the “object of derision, ridicule, and contempt, not to mention revulsion and fear.” Movie dentists, according to Queenan, are generally dangerous sadists like Olivier and Martin, or incompetent bunglers with low self-esteem like Bob Hope in The Paleface or Don Knotts in The Shakiest Gun in the West.

Perry plays the latter sort of dentist. Oh, he’s competent enough with a drill (minus one funny scene where his shaky, nervous hand terrifies a patient) but he’s bungled the rest of his life and he knows it. An early scene shows him chased out of his house by his sneering, condescending wife and mother-in-law; Perry attempts to drive to work but can’t get out of the driveway because his impotent rage keeps him pounding the steering wheel with his hands and head.

We find out more: Perry is an American forced to relocate to Canada because of bad gambling debts incurred by his late father-in-law, a suicide victim. (Perry is forced to explain this to Willis, while insisting that he himself is not a suicide threat. “Statistics don’t lie,” says Willis.) Perry is trapped: he can’t escape his wife or his debts or his job or Canada itself. When mobster Willis moves next door, however, a tantalizing escape route opens. Perry’s wife offers him a divorce if he will rat out Willis to the Chicago mob for a finder’s fee. Most of the rest of the plot involves Perry running into — sometimes literally — various mob types, from Michael Clarke Duncan’s giant soft-spoken contract killer to Kevin Pollak’s twitchy Romanian crime lord to Willis’s knockout wife, played by the sweet-faced Natasha Henstridge.

With this kind of plot, and with Willis constantly mugging for the cameras, The Whole Nine Yards could easily have been a disaster of Hudson Hawk-like proportions. That it is not is largely due to Perry’s good work. Perry’s character here is not fundamentally different from his character in Friends, however, this part depends much more on slapstick and reaction shots than it does on clever one-liners or sarcastic comments. (e.g. “Could this movie review BE any longer?”) Perry fully grasps the low-self esteem of the cinematic dentist and sticks to self-deprecating comedy.

Perry is ably assisted in the comedy department by Sweet Amanda Peet, who plays his ditzy assistant. Peete’s character has the silliest moment in the movie when she turns out to be a wannabe contract killer herself. “I’m still a virgin,” she explains to Willis. “I haven’t killed anybody yet.” Peet (think young Geena Davis) is just super in this movie, with a disarming wit and a (again, literally) distracting figure.

The problem with The Whole Nine Yards (other than the interminable length of time the movie takes to wrap up the plot points) is that the comedy itself is so forgettable. The movie is a likable piece of fluff, no more, no less. If you remember this three months from now, it will only be to wonder if that was Michael Duncan Clarke or Ving Rhames who played the black dude. The only thing that threatens to be memorable is that The Whole Nine Yards, for once, doesn’t disguise that it was shot up in Canada on the cheap. (Canadian cities are frequently disguised as American cities in low-budget productions with varying degrees of success — the snow-capped Rockies in the background of Jackie Chan’s Rumble in the Bronx spring to mind.) It’s nice to see our neighbors to the north get a little credit where credit is due, and The Whole Nine Yards reciprocates by limiting the Canada jokes to some tame sniping about Canadians putting mayonnaise on burgers.

However, this leaves one big question unanswered: why isn’t the movie called The Whole 8.2 Meters?

Just asking.

Holiday Turkey

The James Bond movies are sometimes described as formulaic, but that’s not quite right. A formula is more exact, more scientific. You mix so many cubic centimeters of one substance with so many milliliters of another substance and you get the same number of joules or watts or whatever-it-is every time. Bond movies are a lot more like recipes. You have the same ingredients every time, but if the ingredients are stale or you have too much of one thing and not enough of another, whatever it is you’re cooking doesn’t taste right.

Here, in The World is Not Enough, most of the ingredients are there for a successful Bond movie. In fact, you can almost run them down in a checklist — Roger Ebert did exactly that in his Chicago Sun-Times review, in fact. We’ve got Brosnan as the best Bond of the decade, the redoubtable Dame Judith Dench as M, the new Iron Lady of the United Kingdom, and the winsome Samantha Bond as Moneypenny in the front office. John Cleese joins Q (Desmond Llewellyn) in the gadget shop (although the bad guys have the best gadget, a helicopter chain saw thingy that can even deal with the titanium armor on Bond’s BMW). The clever product placements are still around (including a Visa card that gets Bond everywhere he wants to be). The sultry Sophie Marceau, whose only fault is that she is not Elizabeth Hurley, steams up the screen quite nicely as the Bond Girl. The chase scenes are here, too, but they’re nothing special. An imaginative race inside an oil pipeline is the best of them.

Only one ingredient is missing from the Bond recipe here, and it’s arguably the most important. The Bond villain is, at least in my cookbook, the key spice that makes the recipe work. Without a compelling bad guy to be Bond’s foil, the movie doesn’t work as well. Take away the bad guy, and 007 might just as well spend the movie doing paperwork.

The bad guy in The World is Not Enough is a schmuck. His name is Renard, (Robert Carlyle) and he has a bullet in his brain. Apparently, the bullet is destroying the part of his brain that makes him feel pain. One wonders, though, if the bullet also hit the part of his brain that makes him interesting. Sure, he can hold hot rocks in his hand, and he has a cool scar, but he’s got no charisma, and takes no joy in his evil work. Most Bond villains are over-the-top, but Renard is about a hundred feet under the top and sinking fast. He’s supposed to be a nihilistic terrorist, which should be interesting, but he’s so blah and dull that he might as well be a crazed accountant. (Brad Pitt’s character from Fight Club would be a welcome relief in this part.)

A better bad guy would have added to the movie immensely by counterbalancing some of the more ridiculous aspects of the movie — that is, the plot. The plot is dreadful — not interesting enough to be fun, just complicated enough to give you a headache. And the complications aren’t there for any good reason. Like the nonsense about the Trade Federation at the start of the new Star Wars movie, the plot is just there to stitch the action sequences together.

It is arguable that the victory of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and the West in the Cold War deprived James Bond movies of good plots. I think it runs deeper than that, though. The world today is still a scary place, even without the Soviets. But the scariness comes from many different parts of the world, most of which we’re not familiar with. (The World is Not Enough spends a lot of time in the former Soviet republics of Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan — and manages, somehow, to make believe that Baku is the Russian Riviera, complete with casinos and fancy villas.) And the geopolitical scariness is of a different order — cyberterrorism and biological warfare and the like — that the Bonds of this world are ill-equipped to deal with. It ought not to be that much of a stretch to come up with some plausible way to blow up the world, but the writers here can’t figure it out.

The other flaws in the movie show up as well. Denise Richards is not given much to do as the second Bond Girl, and despite her supposed status as a rocket scientist (insert joke here), she’s just given master-of-the-obvious lines like “The ship is flooding!” (She’s given one line of Russian — which I could actually follow, meaning that her character has the same bad accent and poor grasp of Russian that I do.) Bond is given a shoulder injury that only manifests itself when he is in the clutches of the bad guys. Robbie Coltrane, who would have made a fine replacement of Q, is only marginally effective as Bond’s ally in the Russian Mafia. The opening chase scene is dull and overlong — so much so that the credits seem out of place, almost as if Monty Python were doing the editing.

Anyone who has ever tried to replicate their grandmother’s stuffing for Thanksgiving will sympathize with The World is Not Enough: a good recipe gone wrong. This holiday season, James Bond has served up a turkey.

1962 All Over Again

If anyone is keeping track of these things, the James Bond movie franchise is almost forty years old. The first flick in the series, Dr. No, was released in Britain in October 1962, and its release was delayed in this country because of the Cuban Missile Crisis. You could look it up.

Think about 1962 for a minute. Think of everything that was around then that is better now. Computers are better. Dentistry is better. Television is better — or at any rate, there’s more of it. Dr Pepper is about the same, although Coke now comes in that good new vanilla flavor. All sorts of things are better than they were in 1962, with the possible exceptions of the New York Mets, Ursula Andress, and popular music. So why aren’t action movies any better?

XXX is a big, dumb summer action flick that can’t think of anything better to do than mimic old James Bond movies. Of course, since this is a big, dumb summer movie, you need a big, dumb character in the James Bond role. Enter Vin Diesel, who has turned in some promising work in a series of B-movies and is now on the path to the big time. Diesel plays his character, Xander Cage, as a refugee from the X-Games, proficient in skateboarding and dirtbiking and PlayStation and what-have-you. True to form, Diesel balances this attention to the physical by turning off his higher brain functions; it’s rare that we see him speak in anything other than catchphrases. “You’re in the Xander Zone,” is the one we hear most frequently.

To give Xander Cage his credit, he is very physically adept, able to jump from plummeting cars and snowboard down steep mountains. He even upgrades the image of Steve McQueen in The Great Escape — that’s 1963, for those of you who are paying attention — by driving his dirtbike sideways through a barbed-wire fence. XXX is filled with all manner of unlikely stunts like this, and (along with Eastern European hookers in thong bikinis) these stunts are the main source of eye candy in the film.

XXX is this summer’s shallow action movie; its one strength is that it is a quantum leap better than last summer’s uber-wretched Tomb Raider. There isn’t anything about it that shows any grand design other than blowing stuff up and jumping off things. The only hint of gravitas is provided by Samuel L. Jackson, who is criminally wasted as an official at the NSA (No Such Agency) who is Diesel’s manager and who kicks his butt every twenty minutes to keep the narrative going. It’s not silly enough to be fun, either, the only approach that XXX has to irony is that the villain is building a submarine in his basement. In Prague. Which is landlocked. (XXX is counting on that segment of the teenage male demographic that failed geography class, apparently.)

There will be those of you that want critics to give XXX a break that it doesn’t deserve and hasn’t earned. “It’s a popcorn movie,” you say. Or, better yet, “It’s just a roller coaster ride.”

Think about this for a minute. Isn’t popcorn better now than it was in 1962? Isn’t the technology better? Isn’t it tastier? Isn’t the butter flavoring less greasy? (As expensive as movie popcorn is, you’d hope that, anyway.) Roller coasters are definitely better than they were in 1962, aren’t they? Did they have those backwards and sideways and upside-down roller coasters in 1962? Of course they didn’t.

Society has come a long way in 40 years. Our action movies have not kept up. We should demand better. We should demand that action movies keep up with the times. We should demand better scripts, better acting, and better characters. We should demand something else than James Bond retreads (and sequels), and recycled movies from television shows like I Spy (1965), Star Trek (1966), and Mission Impossible (1966). Our action movie sensibility has been frozen like Austin Powers. The worst thing about XXX is that it does nothing to move forward.

To paraphrase the man who was President when Dr. No was released: Let the word go forth from this time and place, to Hollywood and Hong Kong alike, that the torch must be passed to a new generation of action heroes — created in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our action-movie heritage -— and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of the basic human right to a first-class summer movie schedule to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Cry Freedom

There’s a scene, late in Amistad, where lawyer Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) is trying to explain the American legal system to his West African client, Cinque (Djimon Hounsou). Cinque, having never heard of the appeals process, is enraged when Baldwin tries to explain that the Supreme Court will now have to decide whether Cinque and his fellow African refugees will go free or be executed for revolting against their captors. Baldwin explains that Cinque is “almost” free, which prompts Cinque to scream, “Almost!” again and again in rage and frustration. (At least that’s what I think he’s saying, as almost all of Cinque’s lines are in the Mende dialect.)

Amistad is a well-made, exceptionally well-acted, and skillfully directed film about a great historical story, but it’s a victim of its own quality. Amistad is a good movie, an Oscar contender, even, but with its pedigree, with its starpower, with the resonance of its story, you would expect this to be a great movie. And it’s almost a great movie. While that word — almost — is not as frustrating for you and me at the movies as it is for Cinque and his pirate crew, it’s frustrating enough.

Amistad is at its most powerful in depicting the voyage of Cinque to America. After a brutal kidnapping from his village, and harrowing and murderous journey from West Africa on the a Portuguese slaver, Cinque manages to break free of his chains on the slave deck of the Spanish ship La Amistad, kill his oppressors, and attempt to steer the ship back to Africa. The action sequences are powerful and deeply disturbing, evoking all the horror and pity of slavery. Unfortunately, the real meat of the movie takes place ashore, in a series of courtrooms and legal maneuvers. It’s sort of like Perry Mason meets Roots.

Now, don’t get me wrong, here. I’m a lawyer. I love this kind of stuff. And for me, anyway, it’s a bonus to see Matthew McConaughey in the courtroom again after his performance as Jake Brigance in A Time to Kill. But there is just so much courtroom wrangling and arguing and cross-examination that it detracts from what the movie is really about. Even the resolute Cinque, who disrupts one trial by shouting, “Give us free!”, over and over again, is reduced by the end of the movie to quizzing lawyers Baldwin and former President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) about jurisdictional questions. And by the climax of the movie, a quirky, overlong speech by Adams, we’re all as tired of the legal process as Cinque is. (It’s a measure of the screenplay’s awareness of the legal process that former Justice Harry Blackmun was tapped to play the part of the Chief Justice.)

The problem with Amistad is that it tries to do too much and leaves too much left undone. Amistad spends, for example, a lot of time on historical political intrigue. While pertinent to the legal back-and-forth, it isn’t very interesting, and wastes the talents of fine actors David Paymer, Anna Paquin, and Nigel Hawthorne — not to mention that America’s Finest Actor, Morgan Freeman, is given a surprisingly slim role as a Boston abolitionist working towards Cinque’s freedom. There’s also a surprising amount of time spent on John Quincy Adams and his supposed struggle with the memory of his father, President John Adams — which doesn’t quite ring true. (John Quincy Adams, while a mediocre President, was one of America’s most accomplished diplomats, possibly America’s greatest Secretary of State, and served ably in the House of Representatives after his term in the White House.)

Amistad is at its best when Djimon Hounsou is on screen. McConaughey’s character calls Cinque “the greatest man living in chains”, and Hounsou’s indomitable Cinque exudes greatness and dignity, even in chains. In a world all too quick to write him off as a savage, Cinque gives us an example of courage, humility, strength, and resolve. Hounsou plays his role brilliantly, especially considering that we don’t know what the heck he’s saying most of the time. (Amistad is stingy with subtitles for some reason.) But we always know what Cinque is feeling and thinking, thanks to Hounsou’s expressive performance. Amistad’s chief failure is that it takes the focus of the movie off of Cinque and on the legal and political issues.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in relating the story of his arrest in The Gulag Archipelago, asked why, exactly, the Russian people never rose up and fought the KGB agents that came to arrest them in the middle of the night. He sadly concluded that “we didn’t love freedom enough.” Amistad, by telling the story of one man’s fight against slavery, reminds all of us that freedom is precious, worth fighting for, worth dying for. It is a noble effort by a great director to deliver a powerful message. However, just as Cinque’s efforts at freedom were hampered and delayed by legal and political maneuverings, Amistad is hampered in telling its tale by the memory of those same maneuvers.

A good movie, yes, and almost a great movie.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

The first draft of this review spent about three paragraphs talking about the set design of K-19, and how wonderful and realistic it looked, and the detail of the instruments and the furnishings. Then, naturally enough, I checked the invaluable Internet Movie Database, and it turns out that my praise for the set designers was badly misplaced; the movie was actually shot aboard a military-surplus Juliet-class Russian nuclear submarine. So much for my infinite store of knowledge about moviemaking.

Let us then give credit where credit is due. Here, it goes to the cinematographers and the camera crew, working in damp and horribly cramped conditions, who have turned out a movie that looks first-rate if it does nothing else. K-19 looks absolutely stunning and realistically claustrophobic. Everything about it — or almost everything — bespeaks authenticity and care. The exception, of course, is Harrison Ford’s painfully bad Russian accent, which threatens to scuttle the whole movie, and almost does.

Ford here plays the captain of the K-19, the first Soviet ballistic missile submarine, launched in 1961 to counter the threat of the American Polaris missile subs. The submarine is poorly designed, built by drunken, incompetent, and corrupt shipbuilders, and is missing all sorts of important gear. A critical system malfunctions in the presence of a high-ranking Soviet Admiral during a drill in drydock in Murmansk. Ford is brought in to serve as the sub’s captain, replacing Liam Neeson. However, the good-natured Neeson is the only one who knows all the things wrong with the boat, so he stays on as the executive officer, and focus for the crew’s discontent. After another series of disasters, K-19 finally leaves drydock in Murmansk, heading for the Arctic Ocean and a missile test.

This leads to some conflict between Ford and Neeson, but none of it is very interesting. The conflict is more metaphorical than anything else. The doomed K-19 itself is meant to be a metaphor for the Soviet Union. Ford, in turn, is a metaphorical representative for the Brezhnevian wing of the Communist Party, narrow and inflexible, plodding and unimaginitive, and deeply dim-witted. Although he initially questions the sanity of the orders he recieves, he is constitutionally unable to break them, and has to work hard to sell the crew on his abilities and his common sense in the face of such nonsense. The problem is that Ford — who is all cut out for heroism — has little idea about how to play this kind of character. He retreats into a gruff, insular shell, complete with a woeful accent, and is not much of a factor in events.

Neeson is representative of the Khrushchev/Gorbachev liberal viewpoint; he is essentially a poster boy for glasnost twenty-five years early. This makes him terribly cynical and world-weary, but a little compassionate and kind, at least in the abstract. But he can’t take the focus off Ford for one second. Even though Ford does not do an incredibly good acting job here, and even though his accent is bad enough for me to comment on it in four separate paragraphs, Neeson cannot upstage him. Ford’s iconic presence is too great for that. And at a critical moment in the movie, Neeson heads for his cabin, sulking, and we hardly ever see him again, and don’t miss him.

Fortunately, both the ship and the movie are saved by the heroism of the mostly anonymous supporting cast. The pivotal scenes in K-19 involve a welding job on an ailing nuclear reactor that must be completed under hazardous conditions. K-19 does a wonderful job of mixing courage and cowardice here, easily equal to a similar scene in Saving Private Ryan. However, just as any good fortune that the submarine K-19 experienced was wiped out by misfortune, so is the good fortune of K-19 the movie wiped out by a confused, overly drawn-out ending and a ludicrous conflict between Ford and his crew that seems to have been put in purely for swank.

K-19 is a perfectly respectable submarine flick, one that manages to be exciting and visually compelling and interesting almost despite itself. It is good enough that one wonders how good it might have been if two changes could be made. If the action were presented in Russian with subtitles instead of weirdly-accented English, it would be much more realistic. If the role of the captain were played by someone other than Harrison Ford, it would place the focus of the movie in its proper place. Of course, making either or both of these changes would — in the mind of any right-thinking studio greedhead — reduce K-19 to an arthouse picture, so the whole thing is an impossibility.

Rather than focusing on K-19’s shortcomings, let us rather recognize the good, well-accented acting that does take place, and the good work of everyone involved on the technical and visual side of things, and the elements of the screenplay and the acting that really do work, when given the chance. Let us give credit where credit is due.