Deep Water Review: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Meets an SNL Sketch

 

This film presents an askew world that can be so jarring, it comes back to being unintentionally humorous before settling into a tense plot. If I didn’t know it came from two masterminds of the psychological thriller genre who knew what they were doing — the source material by novelist Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Talented Mr Ripley) and Adrian Lyne as director (Fatal Attraction)---I would describe this as an extremely bizarre cross between the 2009 Saturday Night Live sketch “I Have Sex with Your Wife” and the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in which an older couple (George and Martha, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton) unleash a 90-minute burst of raw, sociopathic marital dysfunction on an unassuming young couple they’ve invited to dinner.

The key players are Vic (Ben Affleck), a lower-middle-aged entrepreneur who’s now a member of the idle rich after retiring off a technological invention. His wife, Melinda, (Ana de Armas) is a gorgeous firecracker with a voracious sexual appetite who seems to get off on having affairs right under her husband’s nose.

It’s initially kind of vague whether seeing her wife gallivant with other men in such close proximity is something he welcomes as a kink or just tolerates it, but yikes! These two need therapy before things get all murdery and out of hand.

Or maybe, things have already gotten that far? Vic even admits it out loud to one of Melinda’s lovers.

On the surface, little about this film makes sense. Why do all three of Melinda’s on-screen lovers seem so blase about violating Vic and Melinda’s marriage after coming face-to-face with Vic? They all consistently seem to feel little guilt and have little concern for their own safety at this transgression. What is up with Vic and snails? If it’s an open secret that Vic killed someone in what appears to be a tight-knit neighborhood, why isn’t he a social pariah?

This is up there with Darren Aronofsky and David Lynch in terms of mind-f***ery, but here’s the thing:

There’s a great internal consistency to this world that demands admiration. These two might be less memorable than George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that’s partially because George and Martha were the king and queen of mood whiplash.

Instead, Melinda is always a suburban temptress and Vic is always a mysterious cauldron of dark impulses.

If you feel like this film doesn’t feel right, it’s not supposed to. It’s a skewed universe where these people are too insane to exist but they do resemble certain aspects of an unhealthy marriage pushed to extremes. And to the degree that anything still doesn’t match up, it’s certainly discussion-provoking.

X-Men First Class: Random Thoughts

How an Oscar for Tom Cruise Could Have Changed it All

This post is going to be a very quick rundown of my delayed viewing. Spelling, syntax, and fully-formed paragraphs sentences will be thrown out the window today, folks.
-Kevin Bacon & Oliver Platt both had their first roles in a high-profile Oscar caliber movie in years with Frost/Nixon. Same casting director? Bacon as the main villain is just odd. Except for Sleepers, I’ve never seen him as super-villain material. Perhaps unknown actors work best in super villain parts. For example, most Bond films have this with the last four films-World is Not Enough (Referring to the guy who played Renard, not Marceaneau of course), Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace-going this route.

-I think this is the first time Magneto and Mystique were shown kissing and it was the only kiss in the movie (it’s possible that Xavier/McTaggert kiss was her imagination). Was it ever explicitly stated that Mystique and Magneto were lovers in the other trilogy? Magneto was played by the most openly gay actor in Hollywood (pretty much every interview with Ian McKellen 2000-2006 made reference to his being gay and an activist about it) which always made it a tough sell that McKellen's version of Magneto was heterosexual and equally as attracted to Mystique (that's a whole other tangent). The scene in X3 where Mystique morphs back into a human and Magneto leaves her seems to show that it was unrequieted love. It's consistent in both parts.

-Speaking of homoerotic, Erik and Charles were pretty close, weren't they? Especially when Mageneto held Xavier in his arms. Even so, I was never entirely sold on the strength of their friendship. We were told about it, sure, but not shown it as much.

-Why do James McAvoy's characters have such a high libido? It's hard to take him seriously as an innocent doctor in a bad situation in Last King of Scotland when he's shown seducing or trying to seduce every woman in sight (sorry for going off on a tangent again). Same here, did he have to try to hit on Moira. I can see him hitting on the first coed in the bar, but it just makes him look a little more like a free-spirited adolescent with ulterior motives with McTaggert than a very mature leader. It didn't sound right either time he said "Groovy" (although that's unrelated to his libido). It was a tough balance to strike, however and I think they did reasonably well

-Interlacing the X-Men with history was really a nice touch. I might have been a little more pleased with Casino Royale if it was grounded in a concrete point in history.

-There were some continuity problems like Magneto and Erik being shown to later be recruiting Jean and Erik could walk. Some people say that the film wasn't trying to be consistent with X3 but just X1 and X2. BS. X3 was signed off on by Singer and it has X-Men in the title. That's picking and choosing too much. However, it does strike me as pretty blaring that Cyclops, Jean and Storm being his first class of recruits is ignored here. Couldn't Cyclops have been used instead of Havlock?

-Biggest plot hole: Shaw was just foolish at the beginning. Why would he expect Erik to want to learn with him and have a lot of fun together with him when he shot his mother. Sure, it boosts his bad guy credentials to cold-bloodedly shoot his mother and a more maniacal villain might do just that, but surely an intelligent man such as Shaw could see he's creating his biggest enemy. I guess we later learn that Shaw is also a mutant and might not have feared Magneto's powers very much but I feel like they only made Shaw a mutant just to explain away plot holes.

-These scripts have gotta be pretty hard to write in a way that builds up action and tension when you have so many dues-ex-machinas at your hands. Xavier can freeze anyone's thoughts and make them do whatever he wants. Should it come with an Achilles Heel of some sort? Perhaps, if Xavier controls the minds of more than one person, for example, he gets drained? Even Havok could have taken out all the missles if he took off his suit and just fired in every direction. For this reason, it was entertaining to see the scene where Azazel just kills the entire staff at that CIA facility, because realistically it would be no contest.

-Why did Charles and Xavier have to become enemies so fast at the end? That felt like a false moment. It felt like the scriptwriters were just looking to check the last box on circumstances that needed to be in place for X-Men 1 to make sense. I would have much rather seen signs of tension than a formal split. Besides, Charles is sort of in a lot of pain as he's just been shot. Why didn't he focus

-Banshee, as I understand it, is Scottish. Definitely would have made his character far more interesting and would have been true to the comic books which had a worldly feel to it with so many foreign team members.

-There were a couple of PAINFUL exposition scenes in there. The six new recruits showing off their powers was not only a scene inserted solely for the purpose of efficiently introducing the characters to the audience (why not just have a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-style opening credits scene) but it was belabored and sophomoric. By showing off their powers and cheering, these guys felt more like middle schoolers at a slumber party than people hired by the CIA. The previous intros to Banshee and girl Angel were far more impactful and if they expanded Darwin's previous intro in the cab to show his powers (or better yet, had Magneto and Xavier meeting him in a swimming pool rather than a cab) and revealed Havok's powers later, you could have cut the whole scene out.

-This is especially disappointing because the X-Men film series has been highlighted by great character introductions: Seeing Sabretooth pop up on the side of the road, learning Wolverine's a mutant by seeing him draw out a blade when a guy wants to beat him up, Jean Grey casually picking up surgical tools with her mind when she's operating on Wolverine, etc.

Film Review: Johnny Belinda

Hey Guys, I have watched a lot of movies recently (nothing new, just older stuff) and in a burst of inspiration, I got back into my film reviewing groove for the first time in a while.
Be sure to check out (or at least give a charity click to:
Best Websites of 2010
Biggest Oscar Mistakes of the Last Decade

Johnny Belinda (1948):

Thiz film is the tale of an ostracized deaf girl, Belinda (Jane Wyman), in a remote corner of the world who finds hope through a caring doctor. The good doctor (Lew Ayres) is new in town and despite the her father’s inability to pay (living with his sister, he’s one of the poorer residents of the town), he teaches her sign language.

It’s an uplifting and engaging story, but it does take some surprisingly dark turns for a movie from 1948. For instance, Belinda gets raped and impregnated. I would have expected slightly more repercussions over the rape thing. It’s the kind of non-derivative plot point I admire that after Belinda is raped, the doctor convinces the dad not to direct his energy towards anger at the mystery perpetrator but rather towards comforting the daughter and it shows how strong Belinda is that she’s never let herself get caught up in victimhood too much. Still, the film rushed things a little too fast when Belinda’s emotional trauma from the incident seems to be cured over the course of a single conversation and a suggestion by the doctor that they go into town. It also seemed like a very plausible and worthwhile idea to go after the rapist. Although he eventually got his, it was a little disconcerting that the villain
went unpunished for so long in the movie.



The strength of the film is in the relationships between Belinda, her aunt, her dad and the doctor. Although the young woman develops closer bonds with her father (Charles Bickford) and Aunt (Agnes Moorehead) through her maturation, it’s really about the relationship between the young woman and the doctor (Lew Ayres) if we’re going by who gets top billing in the opening credits. Their relationship definitely straddles the line between platonic and romantic love. In the middle of the film, the doctor suggests to the dad he marry the daughter to save her the shame of being a single mother, but the dad says that it’s no use if he doesn’t love her. It doesn’t seem that particularly evident that he’s later willing to marry her except for economic necessity (there’s one sort of half-kiss between them) and, ironically, that doesn’t take anything away from the film’s storybook ending.

Jane Wyman won a well-deserved Oscar for the film as Belinda even though she didn’t speak a word on screen. She’s the first husband of Ronald Regan and their marriage was being strained at the time because both of their acting careers had plateaued. Wyman’s marriage was already through by the time she won the Oscar, but winning did give her plenty of consolation after a reportedly rough year. Also, Agnes Moorehead slept with JFK (and famously spilt the beans that he wasn’t a good lover) which means two actresses in this film had sex with presidents. Bit of trivia for you.

One other thing that strikes me about this film is that it’s set in Nova Scotia, Canada, but it seems like some of the actors and actresses weren’t informed of this, because they’re talking in Irish accents.

Reviews of Recent Films: Fair Game, 127 Hours, I Love You Phillip Morris

Check out my article on the Top 10 Websites of 2010:

Fair Game-Directed by Doug Liman, Starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn:
The movie recounts the events that appeared in the news between 2003 and 2006 in which Karl Rove's aide L. Scooter Libby outed a CIA agent to discredit her husband who was an ambassador to Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame.

The film reminds me of the issue of how much you can truly hype up an event film when it is based on a story that played out on several years over the news. It's not just like Titanic or 127 Hours where some of the drama plays out as you know what happens at the end of the film. The moviegoing audience has been saturated with the story: Every turn in the narrative has been played out and analyzed out over several years in the news.

Perhaps it's because of that or because of something else, I didn't see anything extaordinarily creative in how the story was told. It was pretty much standard for political thriller and/or suspense story. A movie ike "In the Loop" or even "Lions for Lambs" are both more memorable because they are original looks at Washington Politics.

Aside from being very traditionalist genre fair, the movie delivered. It showed the emotional heart of the story, sharp dialogue and had ample suspense. If Sean Penn hadn't already won two Oscars this decade, I could easily see him getting nominated for this performance.

The age-attractiveness gap here was unforgiving. Naomi Watts is so gorgeous and Sean Penn is so not that I can't see the two together.


127 Hours- Written by Simon Beaufoy, Directed by Danny Boyle, Starring James Franco, with a small role by Amber Tambelyn

127 Hours is Danny Boyle's follow-up to his masterpiece Slumdog Millionaire. With Beaufoy, Boyle, Franco, the beautiful scenery of Utah, and the ambitious premise, this was a film I entered the film with a lot of anticipation.

I found that the film delivering in interesting ways but I also found that the film dissapointed on a couple fronts.

On the plus side, James Franco's performance was a raw undiscoved place. The idea of telling the story entirely from the point-of-view of the stranded hiker was an interesting way to tell the film and increased the intensity of the film. Personally, I thought the film was already intense enough and I would have liked to have had some glimpse of the rescue effort but I admire that they stuck to their own methodology. The film is a little like "Spirit of St. Louis" in that it makes a somewhat solitary experience more spacious through flashbacks and, in some cases, hallucinations. Tom Hanks had a volleyball in "Cast Away," James Stewart had a fly in the cockpit, and James Franco's Aron Ralston has a video camera to speak into.

The movie manages the feat of holding our attention, but it's a little short and I didn't like how the standard romance-as-plot-solution figured so heavily into the plot. The movie didn't explain well enough that a vision of a child late in the process convinced him to keep going. I didn't necessarily want the film to center around how his life was completed by a child three years later. It was fairly distant from the action at hand.

Overall, a very good movie.


I Love You Phillip Morris-Written and directed by the guys from Bad Santa, starring Jim Carrey, Ewan MaGregor and Leslie Mann

Like "Bad Santa" 2003, the filmmakers aren't afraid to go to crude places in their humor but whether they can effectively mine satire from that crudeness is something your mileage may vary on. For me, the crudeness was a little excessive.

As a sign of the rapidly changing times we live in, "I love You Phillip Morris" treats homosexuality and scenes of gay sex almost as an afterthought. Not that I personally mind the homosexuality as much as I find the general crudeness a little dissonant with the love story, but it's interesting to note that it just five years ago that we were relatively shocked with homosexuality on screen with Brokeback Mountain.

Nonetheless, "I Love You Phillip Morris" presents itself as a straight love story and a pretty effctive one at that. That's one of the only strong things about the film. Jim Carrey and Ewan MaGregor give great performances as lovers who meet in prison and the other strong element of the story, Steven Russell's (played by Carrey)relationship with his ex-wife, is due to the strong performance of Leslie Mann.

The tone is somewhat inconsistntant and jarring. The other element of the plot, that Steven Russell is a conman, gets a little repetitive and overly cyclical. None of the turns in the story are developments that we, as an audience, become overly invested in, since they occur so fast.

The Hangover and two other films reviewed

The Hangover stars 4 B-listers, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Bradley Cooper and Justin Bartha. What an interesting cast: Ed Helms is a former Daily Show star and something like the 5th or 6th most popular character on the Office; Justin Bartha is best known as Nicholas Cage's sidekick in the National Treasure films; Brad Cooper was a member of New York's prestigious actor's studio (think James Lipton) who went on to star as the villanous boyfriend in Wedding Crashers; Zach Galifianakis is known so much more for his stand-up then his acting career that it almost seems like him being in this movie is cross-promotional for his latest comedy tour.

This didn't affect whether I saw the film or not, but without a big name star, the general public is less likely to see this film. However, they did see the film in large droves because it was really good, and therefore, all four actors now will have bigger careers.

Sorry, I'm not giving much a review, but in a nutshell:
The movie is about four friends who go to Vegas for a wild weekend before one of them gets married. They wake up after a really crazy night of partying in a lot of trouble and their friend missing. The plot sounds like something that's been done before but the way surprises come out of left field and hit you before you saw them coming is what makes the film a really fun and unique experience. The movie is entirely solid with very few bad or off-color jokes, which is surprising considering it goes to places that are so ripe for such things to happen.

Here are two other movie reviews:
[url]http://www.examiner.com/x-3877-DC-Film-Industry-Examiner~y2009m8d8-Two-movies-I-recommend-this-weekend[/url]

Review of Valkyrie

Valkyrie features Tom Cruise as star and producer of a true story about a group of German officers who made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Hitler and launch a government coup over Germany in order to spare the country a more merciful surrender pact with the Allied forces. Despite a few setbacks, Valkyrie is an impressively well-crafted political thriller.

Chief among these setbacks is Tom Cruise, himself, which is somewhat a disappointment because this man has taken a lot of beatings from the press and general public over the last couple of years and I'm usually one of his starch defenders. Cruise doesn't even attempt a German accent and doesn't really inject any personality into the role. It's ridiculously hard to suspend your disbelief and think you're watching anything other than some strange time travelling story of Tom Cruise playing himself inserted into 1944 Germany. But Cruise produced and bankrolled the film and stuck with it through several release date delays, so credit goes to him on that. Fortunately on the acting front, Cruise is surrounded by a really solid cast: Among others, Bill Nighy, Terrence Stamp (My Boss' Daughter, Get Smart), and Tom Wilkinson, fresh off his amazing performance in Michael Clayton last year. Wilkinson's character as a top general with loyalties to Hitler could have been someone you could have built an entire movie around.

As in the X-Men series, director Bryan Singer doesn't just jump into the action but takes his time building suspense, even if the score is annoyingly over-dramatic at parts (it sounded like a horror film). If you're expecting an action film, you're bound to be disappointed. It's more of a backdoor political piece that reminded me a little bit of The Contender. For the first half of the film, Cruise is just going from Nazi official to Nazi official trying to find the right allies and gather signatures to enact his grandiose plan. The payoff is well-worth it, however. It's thought-provoking, tragic, and well-shot.

Mystery Men (1999) review

On the surface, Mystery Men, is a kind of a parody of your classic superheroes and villains. Greg Kinnear plays Captain Amazing, more or less copied off of Batman, he benefits from the comical stupidity of villains, he has an incredibly obvious alter-ego personality who's a billionaire, etc. When Captain Amazing's nemesis captures him, it's up to a group of 2nd-rate superheroes to save the city, played by an ensemble of underrated stars (Well, these days Ben Stiller might be classified as overrated, as he's played the same exact role in Along Came Polly, Duplex, Meet the Parents, AND Starsky and Hutck, but this was back in 1999, so back then this "Mr Furious" kind of persona, was original for him).

Underneath the surface of this movie is kind of a postmodern superhero movie, echoed by the setting, which reminds me of a rust belt city, an aging town marked by decaying downtowns, abandoned amusement parks, a general lack of vibrancy and youth, but a clear picture that the city, was once long ago important. Similarly, the heroes in this movie are people who grew up watching those famous heroes Batman, Superman, Wonderwoman, etc, and are trying to invent catchy names and themes for themselves, and struggle to define themselves in an original way. Of course, as we see in the scene where the Mystery Men are cornered into a back alley by some thugs and start laughing at the thugs for being too cliched in their choice of weapons and costumes before getting the crap beaten out of them, the heroes eventually realize that they have to actually be able to fight in addition to having cool costumes.

However, out of all this comes a moral, which comes to Ben Stiller's character, Mr. Furious, who tries with no luck to pick up a waitress at a diner by impressing her with his superhero persona. For example, he talks about how dangerous the city is and suggests he walk her home because she might need protection, which she obviously doesn't buy. The waitress (Claire Folani) eventually starts liking him, but she plays pretty hard to get, and he only starts getting anywhere with her when he drops the superhero persona and starts being his self, and that's kind of the moral, which i think is a little more all-encompassing than this film. It's all about growing up with certain role models and becoming dissapointed about not living up to them. The other moral kind of comes out of William H. Macy's pep talk when everyone decides to give up, and he establishes that #1, we're not really the best heroes in the world, and #2, however, we are the only guys who can do the job and whether we accept it or not, it's up to us to stop the villain. This kind of touches up on the idea that no one really is asked to be a hero, sometimes they just have a job to do.

Anyway, I think this movie in addition to being both intelligent and hilarious, is really fresh and original. If you've read through this review, and are thinking "huh?", you'll know what I'm talking about, cause just the main idea and so much else in the film are really just so far out there compared to so much else.

Blindness (2008) review

Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore, and Gabriel Garcia Bernall star in a
Dystopian sci-fi thriller of sorts that takes place in an unnamed (and
unfamiliar looking) that doesn't seem so far removed from us in what
appears to be the not-too-distant future. When an epidemic causes
people to suddenly go blind, the police place the first wave of victims
in a quarantine with limited resources and as the prison guards become
less visible for some unknown reason (the film brilliantly provides us
only with the point-of-view of the people inside the prison), anarchy
develops from which separate wards engage in a struggle over food.

"Blindness" is Brazillian wunderkind Fernando Meirelles' second
English-language film after breaking out to North American audiences
with his Oscar-nominated gang epic "City of God," and while it lacks
the frantic pace of "God" or "Constant Gardener," the rawness and
visual intensity of Meirelles' previous works is still on screen. The
film's epilogue runs a little long and the pacing is a little slow, but
it's thought-provoking and has a unique voice.

One might compare it to Children of Men or No Country for Old Men in its lack of interest in character development in any conventional sense. If there is any prologue before the action sinks in, it's of very little use. The characters are defined mostly by action when confronted against a seemingly unstoppable force (in Children of Men, it's a mob, in No Country for Old Men, it's a seemingly invincible man, and in Blindness, it's a natural epidemic). However, I sensed a richness to Blindness that I didn't sense in Children of Men or No Country for Old Men (even though those were Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning films and this got bashed review wise) in that the situations the characters were placed in made for a compelling morality play as well.

I saw a sort of first-world/third-world metaphor with Ward 3 and Ward 1. Ward 3 had superior firepower (the gun) so they were able to control the resources and subjugate the other wards, much like Europe was able to do with South America, Africa, and the rest of the world. There were many other takes on the film that my friends had as we had a sort of discussion afterwards. I never saw Children of Men or No Country for Old Men having that kind of potential (although NCfOM came closer). Blindness had a clear aim to be about something more than the immediate action at hand.

Melvin and Howard (1980) Review

The actual story the film is based on: In 1968, four years before reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes died, he was reported to have had an encounter with a good-natured blue collar worker, Howard Dummar. Dummar picked up Hughes when he was stranded on the side of a Las Vegas road and gave him a ride to Las Vegas. When Hughes died,he bequeathed money to Dummar as a reward for his good deed. Unfortunately, Hughes' estate and the Nevada courts found Hughes' story too unbelievable to be true and Dummar never got the money.

The movie itself is well-intentioned and it truly has interesting characters. An actor I've never heard of before in my life, Paul Le Mat, plays Dumar with an innocent "aw shucks" attitude that endears him to the audience and strengthens our opinion of him as the rightful heir. He lets himself get easily seduced by an older female customer when he's delivering milk and when the woman who turns out to be his second wife makes suggestive innuendo at him, he says in a flabbergasted tone "Bonnie, aren't you a Mormon girl?"

His first wife Linda, who was the focus of my attention on this film based on the fact that the only thing I knew about the film was that it was Mary Steenburgen's Academy-award winning role, was also an interesting character: underneath the guise of her provocative clothing and desire to be a dancer (be it exotic or tap), she's equally innocent and oblivious to the world around her.

Except for the one scene in which Bonnie seduces Howard, she's woefully underdeveloped and there's very little reason to be happy to see her and Howard at the end of the film together. The film wants us to feel that the tragedy that is hitting Howard is hitting Bonnie' as well, since she's his wife. Because of the way marriages were coming and going in Howard's life and the initial chemistry between Linda and Howard, I was kind of hoping that Bonnie was just a temporary road stop en route back to Linda. Never mind that in REAL LIFE, Howard and Linda didn't get back together, the story never made me see Bonnie as anything more than some impulsive farmgirl in need of a man. The chemistry or story arc between the two needed to be strengthened up front.

Another woefully underdeveloped relationship was that between Melvin and Howard which is what someone might get the impression the film is about, considering it's the title of the film. The story, or the most interesting part of it, was all about Melvin's inheritance of Howard's money, and that only came back in the last 20 minutes of the film as a sort of epilogue to the story of Melvin's unsuccessful marriage to Linda. Some reviews said that the story was about the myth American dream of the American dream unearthed as Melvin's story was a backwards version of Howard's story. To me, however, it seemed like there needed to be at least some allusion to Howard Hughes- a reminder that he was in the story in any capacity at all - between the first ten minutes and the last twenty.

While I understand the film is a classic, to me, the film never really knew what it was about: A man's failed on-again off-again marriage, an almost complete portrait of a man who would go on to become a footnote in history, or the story of a man's controversial claim to inheritance.

Burn After Reading review

I have now seen 8 Coen films to date and would not profess myself a major Coen fan. I was baffled by No Country for Old Men, I fell in love with Oh Brother Where Art Thou, I watched the cult status behind Big Lebowski and Fargo grow from the sidelines, I enjoyed Intolerable Cruelty, and I lost my faith in the brothers with Ladykillers and Man Who Wasn't There.

As you can see, it's an up and down relationship that I've had with their films, and was hesitant to log in an 8th Coen outing (I feel 7 is more than enough films to see of a director you're not crazy about) but couldn't resist the bizarre-sounding plot and the idea of seeing Brad Pitt go into full comic mode. And I thoroughly loved the film.

For one thing, I'm a native of D.C. and the Coens have a great sense of place in their films: the superficiality of sunny Hollywood in Intolerable Cruelty, the bible-belt-based bluegrass-churning populist Southern Charm in Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and the quirkiness of the Minnesota cold in Fargo.

I can't tell you how great the reception was in my theater in D.C. where we might not see these things as that far-fetched: beauracrats (in the form of JK Simmons) making decisions about what to do when people are getting killed and secrets are being spilt out to other nations on the basis of what takes the least paperwork and allocating $50,000 for a random lady's plastic surgery for virtually no reason at all.

The plot is truly screwball and does a far better job of past Coen films at raising the ante in the third act so that we're invested to see what deliciously improbable ways the screenwriters will tie up the loose ends. It also doesn't help that some of the protagonists are actually likable: Brad Pitt as the airhead exercise junkie who's as faithful a friend as they come, Frances McDormand as the gym worker who just wants to look pretty, Richard Jenkins as the poor schlub who likes her, etc.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

From 1963, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World takes place over the course of a particularly eventful day along the highways of Southern California, where a group of strangers comes across a man's dying confession that a large sum of money is hidden in Santa Rosita, California. The group of four or five different cars and about a dozen people can't agree as to how they're going to split this money so it becomes every man for himself.

The film is also the loose inspiration for the 2001 film Rat Race except it was a far more solid film that doesn't compromise its audience with overly crude or pandering humor. It's based around a timeless concept: the humor of the chase, and that has been used by every great comic Buster Keaton's The General, to Harold Lloyd's vertical version of the chase in Safety Last. And it never gets old.

The film is also directed by Stanley Kramer who primarily made message movies (i.e. Inherit the Wind, Ship of Fools, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner) and while it's tempting to think that Kramer was just taking a break from heavier themes and just having fun, the movie isn't entirely morally devoid of any theme. There is a certain undertone amid all the comedy of how money corrupts absolutely. Watching the film a second or third time with that theme in mind might make for a different viewing experience.Stanley Kramer made the film with the aim of casting as many comedians in the film as he possibly could, and he succeeds quite well, so the film ends up being a who's who of the '60's.

It is interesting to note that a great number of the stars of this film are completely unrecognizable to my generation today. They are unrecognizable to myself and I'd like to think I've seen my fair share of TV and movies from the old days. Here is who I knew and didn't know:-I had heard of Sid Cesar because he gave Mel Brooks and Woody Allen their starts, Carl Reiner I knew as the director of some films and I've seen him on Whose Line is it Anyway?
-I had heard of Phil Silvers because I knew he was the inspiration for Sargent Bilko, but I had never seen him in person
-I knew Buddy Hackett, Spencer Tracy and Ethel Merman
-The cameos of the Three Stooges and Don Knotts I recognized fairly instantly
-I had heard the name Milton Berle but couldn't recognize him
-I had not ever heard of Edie Adams or Dick Shawn. Dick Shawn, may I say, is quite funny.
-I knew Mickey Rooney but couldn't recognize him on sight
-I've heard references to Jimmy Durante in TV shows like the Golden Girls, Dick Van Dyke Show and I believe I Love Lucy, etc., but still wouldn't recognize him

Review of The Island

Island, dir. by Michael Bay (2005), Starring Scarlett Johannson, Ewan MaGregor, Sean Bean, Djimon Hotsou, Ethan Phillips, Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Buscemi

Michael Bay usually achieves high grosses on films that are rejected by critics and most moviegoers of good taste. Richard Roeper called Bad Boys II the worst picture of the decade. Therefore, it was kind of odd that this 2005 film turned out to be a little bit the opposite: It completely bombed at the box office, making for Bay's lowest film to date, yet it might have been his most interesting film.

"The Island" is a sci-fi film along the lines of GATTACA or I, Robot, set in some dystopian future, where the protagonist comes to the rescue of everything by transcending the limits of what the more rigidly stratified society places on him. It's also incredibly close to the plot of the truly awful Arnold Schwarzenegger film Sixth Day, but that film was so hauntingly abysmal that I don't even want to devote an entire sentence to plot synopsis for fear of the awful memories it will bring up. Nevertheless, the story revolves around a futuristic factory that promises to prolong the lives of its clients through cloning the clinets and using the clones' organs for transplants. The clones live in this isolated world with implanted memories and the idea that there is no life outside of this world. They're made to perform tasks that lead to the operation of the factory, so that saves labor costs. The only salvation for the clones is the belief that they will be taken to a paradise called the island if they're selected in a lottery, but in reality when a clone wins the lottery, that means the client needs an organ and the clone is killed. Ewan MaGregor and Scarlett Johannson play two clones who somehow find out about this outside world and are on the lam from the people who run the factory who view this as a doomsday scenario. So, being a Michael Bay film, this is also an action film, and a great one at that.

As I said earlier, it's by far Michael Bay's most interesting film but the plot leaves a lot to be desired. While I'm a sucker for a good sci-fi film, there seems to a complete ignorance of the fact that we've made a lot of progress in terms of harvesting replacement organs already that doesn't require building entire clones. I also feel like the premise attempts too hard to position the story of two runaway clones as the defining tale of this futuristic society to be a little bit of a stretch. Sean Bean is not playing God and can't make people immortal, because there's a point with many diseases beyond where a single organ replacement can save a life anyway, despite what he claims.

Also, considering the quality of the cast, the acting is a little subpar. Ewan MaGregor has the challenge of playing two people and I applaud him for that, but with the exception of Sean Bean, I don't really feel like anyone gave a remotely memorable performance. Visually, there were a lot of interesting things to look at, but it didn't look like anyone bothered to dress up the exterior shots to look equally as futuristic as the clone factory.

Review of The Hoax (2007)

“The Hoax” might be termed a feel-good story about the Watergate Era with Cliff Irving making a surprisingly likeable antihero.
Gere plays Clifford Irving, a down-on-his-luck author who nearly got away with the scam of the century as he authored a best-selling tell-all biography of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes whom he had never in fact met.
I found the film to be n oddly sublime marriage of director and material: Lasse Hollstrom’s penchant for rich storylines that veer towards happy endings is combined with characters that add a certain satirical element to the film. Hollstrom asserted in an interview with Scott Hollerean of box office mojo that Cliff Irving was symbolic of the anti-establishment attitudes of the era. When asked for what motivated Cliff Irving, Hollstrom said, “And I think it was a part of the early Seventies—which was all about finding a cool way of needling the Establishment, of questioning the Establishment.”
The film makes Gere’s Irving a character to root for and encourages its audience to push our reservations about Irving’s morals into the back of our minds. Irving is portrayed as a shade of grey, through most of the story and he is also in conflict with his own morals. He had an affair but struggled with himself for it, as he tried insisting that the mistress divorce him and get married. The film asks, more importantly, was Cliff Irving really that bad of a guy when neither of the two big figures in the film were honest?
Backed by Gere’s likeable anti-hero who gives us someone to root for and Alfred Molina supplying an odd couple dynamic with Gere, the film is an enjoyable ride.

The mathematics of Guess Who

Guess Who: 2 ½ (2005): 1 ½ stars (out of 4)

Ashton Kutcher meets his future father-in-law (Bernie Mac) for the first time and laughs arise aplenty from the cultural clashes that occur. This film is a remake of a 1960’s social commentary film, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” but it comes across more as a remake of Meet the Parents with black jokes than it does a message picture. This film is so derivative, in fact, that I can actually be summed up in a mathematical formula:


2/3 (Meet the Parents + Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner -1 – Social Significance – Ben Stiller + My Boss’s Daughter’s Ashton Kutcher) + 1/3 (half-hour sitcom of the UPN) = Guess Who.

So that pretty much sums it up right there. Not only is the picture formulaic, but I can give you this picture in an actual mathematical formula and you could probably predict the plot development at any given point:

And here’s a key to how the plot works:
The movie is supposed to be a loose remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a socially conscious picture from the 1960’s about an interracial couple seeking their parents’ approval. The exponent of -1 is because the racial roles in the film are reversed. I also subtract the social significance because in the 1960’s an interracial couple would have have faced threats to their lives as well as discrimination in employment and housing whereas the worst a 2005 interracial couple would have to face would be arguments over whether to watch BET or CBS. There’s also a little bit of My Boss’s Daughter thrown in. In that film, Kutcher also played a young professional trying to impress his love interest’s father, and it was Kutcher’s very last film, so if you’re wondering if anyone’s getting bored of seeing Kutcher in the same role over and over again, well, apparently not Ashton Kutcher.
In the third act of the film, when both Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher have made their respective love interests so angry that they leave them, then the two have to team up to get them black and Ashton Kutcher “blacks it up” by singing some Barry White to his fiancée to serenade her back. This part significantly deviates a little from the message-less social significance remake/Meet the Parents hybrid and turns into one of those shows on the now deceased UPN filled with clichés.
But nevertheless, this doesn’t rule out any and all merit to the film (it rules out most of it, though). I’m not that much of a stickler for originality anyway. I ended up judging the picture more as a genre film now, in that I’m seeing how it handles the conventions of this same plot that I’ve see in A Guy Thing, Meet the Parents, The In-Laws, My Boss’s Daughter, etc. So here are my notes:

-Ashton Kutcher and the leading lady have no chemistry whatsoever, if the film is going to earn the right to be a remake of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, that would’ve been key. This same thing happened in the Score with Angela Bassett and Robert De Niro or “Executive Decision” with Kurt Russell and Halle Berry and I have yet to see a film with an interracial couple with any chemistry, although I think Pierce Brosnam and Halle Berry came close.
-Bernie Mac was surprisingly good. Judging by his work in Ocean’s 11, where he’s the stereotypical threatening black guy in Ocean’s 11, or a vice presidential candidate with the potential to make Dan Quayle look like a member of MENSA, I might have expected Mac to cater to negative African-American stereotypes, but I felt like he tight roped a thin line between being humorous and being a dignified father figure
-Ok, Bernie Mac going to sleep with Ashton Kutcher was kind of funny, I will admit and the fact that he didn’t just sleep in his bed the first night but every night thereafter was also pretty funny.
-The sideplot of Ashton Kutcher losing his buiness was more interesting than the main plot, and since this plot is so derivative, I might have preferred to see that as the film in retrospect
-The climactic conversation is funny, I’ll give it that
-An akward attempt at slight commentary here: stereotypes with sports, the “I had a black girlfriend, I’m not racist"
-The advantage is that Bernie Mac can be more corrosive or scary which could lead to more comedic situations

10th Anniversary of the Titanic: Titanic Review

This is an essay I wrote on the Titanic in a film class that I think might be one of the best things I've ever written on films: Titanic as the collision of two worlds

Titanic was a monumental blockbuster that shattered box office records in 1997 and 1998 and was hailed as a critical success. However, the picture has been forgotten and dismissed as a very lucky yet unremarkable blockbuster, in the wake of the overload of big-budget pictures that have come along in the last few summers and holiday seasons. Titanic, at 3 hours and 14 minutes, is really two pictures rolled into one. For the latter two hours, it is a disaster movie that marvels in special effects, tense situations, and showdowns heroes and villains who are defined by how they chose their fate in one of history’s most famous moments.

For the first hour and a half, however, Titanic is a story about the traditional rags-to-riches myth, as epitomized by the character of Jack Dawson. The rags-to-riches myth, coined by Horatio Alger in essays about Americana, is about the man who can rise to success from humble beginnings to gain wealth and ingenuity. Dawson, dressed in period blue-collar clothes, wins a ticket on board the Titanic in the most capitalist of ways: a combination of wit, luck, skill and a willingness to invest his money into a poker game. He demonstrates ingenuity in his ability to be act under pressure in the scene where he saves Rose’s life. In contrast, his nemesis Cal is unable to react with anything but anger, frustration, and even bouts of violence when he faces an unexpected turn of events. Also, Dawson and his friends in third class are a metaphor for the “melting pot” of America with different cultures converging together. Dawson’s traveling companion, Fabrizio, is a stereotypical Italian and they room with Germans. Another example is from the juxtaposition of scenes between the formal dinner in the stateroom and the party on the lower deck.

On the lower deck, the third class passengers are very active as they create their own eclectic brand of music and dance to it, while the dinner guests on the promenade are passive spectators to a string quartet.

The rags-to-riches myth embodied by Jack Dawson, is contrasted by the antiquated class-stratified society of Europe that the American dream was born out against, symbolized by characters like Rose’s mother and Cal. The film characterizes these people as being obsessed with appearances as well as being lazy and unwilling to work. Rose’s mother is a widow explains to her daughter that all they have are, “bad debts hidden by a good name,” and is desperate to marry her off because she doesn’t want to have to work as a seamstress.

Thus, she and her friends were always concerned with looking proper and maintaining appearances. For instance, Cal disapproves of Rose’s choice of art, maybe because he doesn’t like it but also out of defensiveness. Cal doesn’t want to empower any art or artists outside the accepted conventions, which he would have been doing by buying their work.

In fact, the concern of the rich to keep the poor out is symbolic of the Titanic itself. Besides, the obvious metaphor of the passengers being divided by class, there’s also the fact that Jack would have never been accepted onto the promenade without the help of Molly Brown, an insider, who gave him clothes (again, the theme of appearance resurfaces). The upheavel over Jack’s romance with Rose is because he’s seen as someone who threatens to infiltrate their world.

The Titanic is usually seen as a fascinating trinket in history regarding man’s overconfidence in technology and the power of nature to destroy something which man once thought was invincible. However, director James Cameron portrays Titanic as something more than a story about a shipwreck. To him, Titanic was an inevitable collision between those two worlds. The Titanic’s mistake wasn’t that the watchman didn’t spot the iceberg soon enough or even hitting the iceberg, for that matter, because the Titanic would not have been remembered nearly as well if everyone was evacuated to safety. The Titanic took aboard 3rd-class passengers, to maintain the illusion of a harmonious society but that illusion was exposed by the fact that they didn’t provide enough lifeboats for them and they perished which made bigger headlines than any of the Titanic’s accomplishments in engineering ever did.

This is all the more ironic when you consider that the ship’s designer explains in the film that they didn’t put enough lifeboats on board because he didn’t want to clutter up the deck, a most literal concern with appearances. Once the ship hits the iceberg, the drama plays out through images that echo this theme. One of the most emotionally moving images is of a string quartet playing to their deaths so that the rich will have something pleasant to listen to as they board their lifeboats is great. The primary concern, once again, was to keep life pleasant for the upper classes at the cost of the safety of the lower classes.

The Titanic was a ship bound for America and that is both literal and symbolic: that antiquated era of class lines would end soon, and the bright spot of the movie is that somehow Rose survives into that new era. The line in Celine Dion’s song “I feel you in my heart forever, my heart will go on,” suggests that it was through meeting Jack Dawson and absorbing his vision of what America is today that she was able to chose the right path (not with Cal who would later shoot himself) when she got off the boat.

Two Altman films: California Split & Buffalo Bill

I've always proclaimed myself an Altman fan before i saw a lot of his films, mainly because the other new wave directors seemed so obsessed with violence and he had a wider range of interest in other subjects. I also really liked the ensemble feel of his films.

I love his work in MASH, McCabe and Mrs Miller, The Player, and Prairie Home Companion. Other than that, I saw Dr T and the Women but didn't like that as much.
Recently, I've seen a couple more in Buffalo Bill and California Split.

Buffalo Bill is interesting but vague. It's an incredibly interesting story and I notice that auteurs with a very strong sense of personal style have a tendency to drown out a good story. The very idea of Buffalo Bill is such a great pitch that a director with no personal style who's just guided by studio deadlines and a script could turn it into a relatively great movie, which is why it's slightly annoying that Altman felt he had to work much magic into it at all, because it distracts from the story: Mainly confuses it. I had to watch the story twice to really understand it, because the main plot points are deeply hidden in indistinct conversations. Some advice to anyone watching an Altman film: Use subtitles to get past the overlapping dialogue. I also expected something akin to Bronco Billy or Greatest Show on Earth where they actually show more of the circus or the show. I saw a little bit of Annie Oakley shooting, but I don't think the movie has a scene of the recreated battles that the characters are all talking about and I would have been excited to see.

I was at the video store recently trying to redeem myself by choosing a bad Altman film by trying to chose a good Altman film. I was trying to decide between California Split and Long Goodbye, and I should've taken Long Goodbye. California Split has some good acting and one of the strengths is that I got to see the guy from Just Shoot Me as a young matinee idol. What a treat! I also felt the high-tension atmosphere of the poker room in the opening scene was engagingly convincing.

California Split has that trademark Altmanesque style, but if you strip away the Altmanisms, it's just a gambling film that I've seen done better (even in recent entries like Lucky You and Rounders). I think the theme of California Split was that Elliot Gould represented George Segal's sense of temptation. You know that gimmick in TV shows and movies where an angel and devil are on each side of the character's head and trying to persuade you to either make the right choice or the sinful one? George Segal would have been the devil in that scenario. Still, the movie kind of rambles on through its plot to a fairly obvious conclusion.

So, I guess Altman's tally for me comes to 4 brilliant films (McCabe, The Player, MASH, Prairie Home Companion), one decent one (California Split), and two that are not worthwhile to watch (Buffalo Bill, Dr T.)

National Treasure Review (2004)

National Treasure gives a new meaning to the phrase "living history", and it really is something thoroughly amazing for a work of historical fiction. It is entwined in a gripping mystery which uses as reference points, things you can find in your pocket, like a dollar bill, places you've probably been to like the national archives, the mall in D.C. etc, making for a truly interactive experience.

Complaints about lack of character depth in National Treasure should be made keeping in mind the context in which Bruckenheimer (did i spell that right?) made the film. If you're Jerry Bruckheimer, you went from being a very hot commodity after making a $285 million-grossing film, Pirates of the Caribbean, to making King Arthur, a flop, and you want to preserve your reputation as a commercial success. Therefore, you're #1 goal is to get people into the theater and what's gonna get them there is the plot. The movie is all plot-centered and even though Nicholas Cage might have won an Oscar way back when the truth is that most of his movies "gone in 60 seconds", "snake eyes", "8 mm", etc, are not films you go to expecting character development.

I don't think they were aiming for character depth: No one was going into this film thinking they'd snag an Oscar or golden globe nomination, Not that you shouldn't want to have a challenging part to want to act in, but I was pretty fine with the limit on character development because the plot was cool enough. The one thing I can say was, at the very least the characters were self-conscious, for example, the Abby Chase/Ben Gates hook up we could all see coming from miles away, but evidently so could the screenwriter so he gave Ian the line "well, you got the girl at the end" cause it's so blatantly obvious.

Also, the plot is absurd in itself, stealing the declaration of independence? And it's actually quite a wonder in itself that the movie presented a historically accurate, seemingly plausible and thoroughly engaging plot out of the circumstances that in no way dumbs down to the audience. Making the plot work in itself, deserves credit.

The film played to its strengths well.

Lions for Lambs review (2007)

Lions for Lambs is a cinematically sparse film, with so little effort toward presenting a polished cinematic package, that the viewer might find it a little jarring. Three parrallel stories occur over a period of one hour.

A journalist (Meryl Streep) conducts a one-on-one interview with Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) over his new initiative in Iraq. Irving, played with all the cockiness that some of us liken to the Tom Cruise persona (and mistakenly Tom Cruise himself) is forceful in trying to get Streep to see a certain point of view and borderline bullies her into accepting his line of thinking that this new strategy is going to work and is worth the human cost. If you replaced Matt Lauer with Meryl Streep, it would practically be a dramatic reenactment of Cruise's famous tirade on The Today Show arguing against prescription medicine. My point here is Cruise is perfectly cast, and I think Redford was very aware of Cruise's recently damaged likeability rating at this point in time.

The second piece of the puzzle is two bright students who volunteered for the army to prove that they were pro-active citizens, against the urging of their professor. These characters are more likeable in the flashback scenes because in the present day military conflict their foolishness (in the name of chivalry) stretches plot credibility a little thin.

The third story arc and the one which I found most compelling was between a college professor (the same college professor who discouraged his two former students in plotline #2 from enetring the war) and his most promising student during a one-hour advising session. The student (Andrew Garfield) was once a catalyst for some of the class's most most interesting discussions and showed great intelligence, but lately he is becoming more interested in fraternity life and girls and doesn't believe politics are worth it because "they're all crooked." The student is the apothyoses of disengaged undergraduates today and credit goes not just to the actor (it would be easy for a young person to portray a stereotypical member of today's college youth) but to the 40 year old Matthew Carnahan for capturing his language reasonably well. Redford has the most presence on screen out of anyone of the film as the professor.

This is a good and bad thing because I can understand people seeing Redfordt's a blatantly transparent method of getting his political message across that Redford casts himself as the professor and provides the most intelligent source of discourse. This is likely to draw hostility from audiences and be seen as arrogant. I remember they responded that way when M. Night Shamylan cast himself as the writer who would later be the savior to humanity in Lady in the Water. One criticism I might agree with is that rather than making this film, Redford could just as easily go around the country making personal appearances and speaking about these issues (although the answer would be: that would be far more time consuming), but for a filmmaker who has something to say, I can't think of many films (except a Michael Moore documentary) that are so that are so effective at saying it. Redford's film speaks so directly to our generation and the current situation.

Cinematically, Lions for Lambs is not the best film out there. It feels less like a serious and concerted effort on Redford's part to make a good narrative film than it should. But at the same
time, I think it says things that haven't been said before, and whether you agree or disagree with his finer points, it's surely an eye-opening experience. It' the larger theme about how this generation deals with the alienation from pointless wars and crooked politics that resonates.

Waterworld

I saw Kevin Costner's Waterworld this afternoon and I found it to be a pretty interesting and engaging film. The main reasons that the film kept me engaged were:

1. I'm a sucker for pirate films or films involving the ships and oceans, or whatever you call this genre

2. Fast enough pace to keep the action moving as well as good enough action in itself. The film even moved faster than Dances with Wolves and even if you felt Goodfellas was a better film, Dances with Wolves was considered somewhat of a masterpiece. Long epics (Waterworld is over 2 hours) generally have a hard time keeping audiences on their seats.

3. Fairly imaginative blending of genres: pirates picture and sci-fi to create an imaginative world.

4. The chemistry was pretty good between the leads


Really minor point: I don't like Kevin Costner's girly hair style in the picture, but other than that it seemed Terry Gilliam-esque.

This film, of course, is remembered as being a humongous flop and poorly reviewed. It's up there with Gigli on the pantheon of bad films, but you also have to figure that like Gigli, no one actually has seen this film in the last 10 years. Gigli isn't the most hated film in America, because you have to actually watch the film to hate it, and very, very few people watched the film Gigli. It was only out for a week in the theaters and died very quickly, so it didn't have much of a box office take.

The same is probably true for Waterworld, in terms of DVD sales (it did make quite a bit at the box office, just not enough to recoup their costs).

My point: Don't let the media universally decide on your behalf, what a bad film is and what you shouldn't see

Ed Wood Review

I’m starting to learn that I usually find one work that I love from every director. I’ve never been a particularly big fan of Lubitsch and have no idea why a far superior director, Billy Wilder, felt that Lubitsch was a good. But I absolutely love Ninotchka. I don’t think the Coen Brothers are the great ushers of comedy in the post-modern era that others make them out to be, but I feel the same way about Oh Brother Where Art Thou. For Stanley Kubrick, that film would be Paths to Glory and for David Lynch, Mullholland Drive.
I can understand Tim Burton’s cult following but it’s just personally never been my cup of tea. I like his two installments of Batman and have appreciated them more in retrospect but his offbeat visions in Edward Scissorhands, Beetle Juice, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory were too bizarre for me, and although I can appreciate a good animated films as much as the next casual film goer, I’m personally not a film connoisseur of film animation which explains why I didn’t go gaga over the animation innovations of The Corpse Bride and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Ed Wood, however, is a brilliant idea for a biopic and it’s a celebration of film making and a justification for it, even if the results are less than stellar. The subject of the film is a moderately eccentric man (played by Johnny Depp) who has attracted a cult following after his death by virtue of being considered the world’s worst director. I know that’s a hard title to place when you have guys like Michael Bay and Raja Gosnell still floating around along with countless film school graduates who have never even made it out of small-town film festivals. What separated Wood from the directors who spew out commercialized crap, however, was that Wood aspired to be Orson Welles and (in the film’s portrayal of him, at least) he was so optimistic and upbeat about it that he thought he was well on his way to becoming him. That’s what the film’s about. It’s that life isn’t about success or failure but rather by creativity and how much you love what you do. Wood is portrayed as a winner because he dared to direct films and there’s no better way to celebrate filmmaking than finding merit in the worst filmmaker.
I think it was also interesting that with the exception of his first girlfriend, Wood had a creative team (i.e. Bill Murray’s character, the wrestler) that followed him through all of his creative pursuits and acted as a quasi-support system. If this story weren’t based on fact, I would be left to wonder why these people would keep working with him despite the fact that he failed so often and I think that’s another way that the film highlights Wood’s optimism. Perhaps, this is a parallel to Orson Welles’ consistent use of the same people and his famous repertory company called “The Mercury Players. Of course, Wood’s relationship is closest to Boris Karloff, his idol as a kid, who he later befriended and had the privilege of directing him in film after film. The relationship between the two and the chemistry between Depp and Martin Landau is at the heart of the film. Landau, by the way, is stellar and very deserving of his award.
As for the question of what separated Wood from the many people who never made it far past film school, there was surprisingly little. Wood’s films were mostly independently produced and he was largely an unknown commodity when he died. He gained fame when his film “Plan Nine from Outer Space” won a book-sponsored contest in 1981 of the worst films of all time. It’s a film that was shown in the first week of my first film class and it’s high number of inconsistencies and bloopers are very easy to spot. The movie answered questions for anyone whose watched this film about why it was made so haphazardly: Apparently, it was simply made as a way for Wood to appease his landlord and Burton’s film has this great sense of dramatic irony as Jonny Depp’s character says, “I know this is the film I’ll be remembered for,” but not in the way he wanted.