Author: Colette Arrand

Movie Review: A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III (2013)

The only explanation for a movie like A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is that America loves a good rehabilitation story, and few in that vein have been juicier than Charlie Sheen’s. For all the attention garnered by his very public firing from Two and a Half Men and the meltdown that followed, Sheen’s path back to respectability—whatever that means to him—is very different from that which has been encouraged by reality television. Instead of signing up for a session with Dr. Drew and engaging in public bloodletting, Sheen returned to work. He created and produced a one man show and toured around the country. He signed on to a new sitcom, Anger Management, and went on a marathon binge of filming, creating 90 episodes where once there was but a whisper of a show about a Charlie Sheen like character attending anger management courses. And now, with Charles Swan III, Sheen has made his long-promised return to film. He should have stayed away.

Sheen’s career over the past few years has been deeply rooted in his belief that people like him. This isn’t an unfair assumption. To tour as Charlie Sheen and to play Charlie Sheen on television is to court a certain audience—fans, mostly—who are willing to put up with a performer’s foibles in order to enjoy his vibe; his Charlie Sheenness, if you will. These are designed to be disposable units of entertainment, each installment as forgettable and vaguely pleasing as the last. Films, however, are different. They’re longer, obviously, but movies—especially art movies, which is what Charles Swan III desperately wants to be considered as—tend to be indelible, a side effect of being projected on gigantic screens. Even from a balcony, there is no mistaking the Charlie Sheen of Charles Swan III with a mere mortal. He’s a being of pure ego, a puppy demanding your love and affection with the force of a hurricane.

Director and screenwriter Roman Coppola caters to Sheen’s sensibility, casting him as a successful artist whose commercial prospects have made him a rockstar. His friends love him, women can’t get enough of him, and when life gets him down, the world stands still waiting for him to roar back to life. Charles Swan III spends a considerable amount of time in a funk. His girlfriend (Katheryn Winnick), enraged that he keeps a drawer full of candid nude Polaroids of ex-flings, dumps him. Depressed, he gathers her shoes into a garbage bag and attempts to throw them over a cliff. When he fails, his frustration leads him to crash his car in a record producer’s swimming pool, where he has a mild heart attack. Over the course of conversations with his sister (Patricia Arquette) and friends (Jason Schwartzman as comedian Kirby Star, Bill Murray as his accountant, Saul), and Charles’s elaborate fantasies about death, sex, and persecution, Coppola tries his damnedest to paint Swan—and Sheen—as a figure deserving of sympathy, but he fails his man at every turn.

Charles Swan III is a fairly detestable human being, and the world he lives in is a male fantasia where women are either sex objects, ball busters, or savages. Murray, Schwartzman, and the rest of the cast play down to Sheen’s level, presenting caricatures of the personae they’ve developed in the films of Wes Anderson, which is appropriate given that Coppola—who co-wrote Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Limited—has chosen to make a cardboard Wes Anderson picture. Beyond the early notion that Swan has an overactive imagination, there’s no reason for him to have a couch that looks like a fully-dressed hot dog or for his car to have gigantic decals of bacon and eggs applied to the doors other than that it looks cool and whimsical in some modest, unexplained way. The production design of Charles Swan III is the only element of the film worth praising, but even that must be within reason. However dollhouse-like Anderson’s films often end up looking, at least his houses, schools, and trains feel lived-in. Coppola’s, on the other hand, tend to feel like a warehouse filled with kitschy “vintage” stuff he found on Etsy, like Juno’s hamburger phone if the point of making Juno was the hamburger phone.

Before accepting that he’s a likable, misguided, goofball lothario, Charles Swan III spends a lot of time fending off accusations of selfishness and laziness. Coppola’s film strikes this apathetic tone early, which may be proper of any movie where Charlie Sheen tap dances on his own grave. Though Coppola has said otherwise, positing his decision to cast Sheen as an opportunity for the talented actor of Wall Street and Platoon to once again make something of himself, the resulting movie looks, sounds, and feels like a too-late cash-in on the Year of Charlie Sheen, nudging his 60 Minutes interview and his Comedy Central roast into decidedly pretentious waters. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III is excruciating, like watching a 90-minute press junket interview where Sheen pretends, albeit not very hard, to be a more likable version of himself. He’s already done that across several forms of media, many considerate enough to allow one to change the channel.

A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III. With Charlie Sheen (Charles Swan III), Jason Schwartzman (Kirby Star), Bill Murray (Saul), Katheryn Winnick (Ivana), Patricia Arquette (Izzy), Aubrey Plaza (Marnie), Dermot Mulroney (Doctor), and Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Victoria). Directed by Roman Coppola and produced by Coppola and Youree Henley. Screenplay by Coppola.

February 10, 2013
Movie Review: Django Unchained (2012)

Django Unchained, the latest in a string of violent revenge fantasies from director Quentin Tarantino, never quite feels like a finished film. According to Tarantino and Samuel L. Jackson, there exists a much longer cut of the movie that fills in crucial information on a number of characters, and given that its soundtrack is punctuated with bits of dialog not heard in the film, that longer cut is also a few shades more sadistic than what made theaters. Much has been said and written about the way Tarantino peppered Django Unchained with racial epithets unbecoming of a white director or a politically correct society, but it’s the violence I keep coming back to. Not the cartoonish shootouts pitting skillful bounty hunting duo Django (Jamie Foxx) and Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) against any number of hickish gunslingers, but the violence of slavery itself, particularly as it is visited upon Django’s wife, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), who is whipped, branded, raped, scolded, and locked in an iron box under the hot sun as punishment for trying to run away.

At this point in his career, it’s easy to accuse Tarantino of fetishizing violence against and the traumatization of women. Though the perpetrators often get what’s coming to them, Tarantino has been pedaling in this kind of sick thrill since Kill Bill Vol. 1, wherein The Bride is awoken from a coma mid-rape by a mosquito bite. Her rapist has his tongue bitten out and her pimp is beaten to death, but Tarantino luxuriates on the possibility of her rape, just as he does Stuntman Mike’s pursuit of his “girlfriends” in Death Proof and Col. Hans Landa’s psychological torture and eventual murder of double agent Bridget von Hammersmark in Inglourious Basterds. With poor Broomhilda, Tarantino turns up the heat. Looking beyond the director’s pedantic argument that his use of language and human misery is “period accurate,” the constant terror and abuse suffered by the largely agentless Broomhilda von Shaft serves two purposes: fulfilling the obligations of the exploitation genre, and sweetening Django’s revenge.

In transplanting the spaghetti western to the antebellum South, Quentin Tarantino has succeeded in creating both his largest, most beautiful film to date, and his most narrow in scope. Having moved far beyond the nihilism that marked early efforts like Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, Django Unchained is exploitation filmmaking at its most agitating, using slavery and racism to titillate, humor, and enrage the audience. It works very well: the white slavers of Django Unchained are cruel, horrible men whose deaths elicit something close to joy. Unlike in Basterds, where the cruelties of Nazi Germany took place off screen and out of sight, men in endless number are shackled and marched through deserts, forests, and mud-caked auction towns. Black men beat each other for their white owners’ entertainment, black women are treated as objects of lust, and those who disobey are fed to the dogs.

The two halves of Django Unchained, joined though they are by a brief training montage, play as a film and its sequel. In the first half, Django is set free by Dr. Schultz, a bounty hunter looking for three cattle rustlers by the name of Brittle. Schultz has never seen these men, but Django has: they were the overseers at his old plantation, three sons of bitches whose idea of punishment was pure Old Testament—Broomhilda still has lash marks on her back proving that. During their travels, the naïve Dr. Schultz learns that Django has a wife, and that he plans to buy her freedom with the money he’s been promised for identifying the Brittle brothers. This is a risky gambit: to find his wife, Django will have to find records of her sale in a Mississippi auction city. Even with papers stating that he is free, the odds of him walking out of that city with his freedom intact are quite low. So Dr. Schultz offers Django a deal: partner up for the winter and learn the business of bounty hunting, and gain a partner in the rescue of Broomhilda.

If one looks at the two halves of Django Unchained as origin story and follow-up, then the film becomes a tale of two plantation owners. In the first half, Django and Dr. Schultz travel from Texas to Tennessee to The Big House, which is owned by a repellant man who is referred to as Big Daddy (Don Johnson). Big Daddy’s plantation functions as a brothel, where he sells his attractive young slaves to anybody with a big enough pocketbook. Later, the two discover that Broomhilda has been sold to a bloodsport named Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), who inherited the fourth largest plantation in Mississippi. Though his plantation is known as Candie Land, he, too, calls the house that stands on its grounds The Big House. Candie is a major player in mandingo fighting, a Tarantino invention that pits burly slaves in brutal death matches before a private audience. In both cases, Dr. Schultz and Django’s play is the same: in offering a ridiculous sum of money for the particular kind of human flesh Big Daddy and Calvin J. Candie deal in, they gain access to their marks’ plantations and carry out a search for their true prize. Finding the Brittle brothers and Broomhilda, however, is not the hardest aspect of this plan: it’s getting out of those plantations alive, treasure in tow, that matters.

That Big Daddy and Calvin J. Candie bear as many similarities as they do is intentional: these are vain, horrible men, and it is to our great satisfaction to see them executed by our heroes as such. The difference between the two is that Candie’s second—the head house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson)—sees right through the bounty hunters’ charade. When discussing the characters they’re set to play, Django tells Dr. Schultz that being a black slaver is a lower calling than being the head house slave. If that’s true, Stephen certainly tries to make up for it by being every bit as snide and underhanded as he is old and hobbled by his age. In this role, Jackson is at his most engaging in years; though his character is one whose time on screen was whittled down, he is a man of extremes: before guests and the white workers on the plantation, he is a bumbling, ornery old coot; in private with his master and Django, he is as cold and cunning as they come, as bitter and vengeful as Shylock.

There is a lot about Django Unchained that doesn’t quite add up; like many of Tarantino’s films over the second half of his twenty year career, his ambition to present a sprawling, grandiose epic of five or six hours was compromised by the need for a Christmas Day release to make money. Working with editor Fred Raskin—Tarantino’s regular editor, Sally Menke, died in 2010—Django Unchained’s seams show more than what’s typical of a Tarantino film. The jokes aren’t as crisp, the characters aren’t as well developed, and the film’s six-shooting bloodbaths eventually blur together, distinguished mostly by what song is playing to pass the time. And yet, Django Unchained is one of the more wildly entertaining films of 2012. Beyond Stephen—the film’s best creation—Jamie Foxx’s Django is as solid a spaghetti western hero as there is, and Christoph Waltz once again establishes himself as the Tarantino actor, the director and screenwriter’s dialog never seeming like words on a page. If the plight of Broomhilda von Shaft is cause for squeamishness—and it should be—and the reward for enduring her pain is pleasing—and, for me, it was—then Tarantino is doing his part as an exploitation filmmaker, and that, really, is the only shield he’s ever held up in defense of his work. As beautiful—the sweeping parries, manicured plantations, and torch-bearing lynch mobs are unprecedented compositions in a Tarantino movie—and exciting as Django Unchained often is, after twenty years, it would be nice to see the director’s raison d’être evolve with his skill.

Django Unchained. With Jamie Foxx (Django), Christoph Waltz (Dr. King Schultz), Leonardo DiCaprio (Calvin J. Candie), Samuel L. Jackson (Stephen), Kerry Washington (Broomhilda von Shaft), Don Johnson (Big Daddy), Walton Goggins (Billy Crash), and Jonah Hill (Bag Head #2). Directed by Quentin Tarantino and produced by Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, and Pilar Savone. Screenplay by Tarantino.

February 4, 2013
The Fear of a Ghost Planet Guide to Film: 2012 Edition

The Fear of a Ghost Planet Guide to Film: 2012 Edition is now available for purchase on the Amazon Kindle. It will be available on the Barnes and Noble Nook in due time. For 99 cents, you get all of my film reviews from the past two years, a slew of articles from the inception of this blog to my personal Best of 2012 list, and more. In keeping with the rest of the book being free to read on this blog, I am posting the introduction in this space. A great deal of thanks to Jason Teal of Heavy Feather Review for coding the book, and Alex Kittle of Film Forager for her tremendous cover.To purchase the book for the Kindle, click HERE.

My favorite experience at the movies took place during a film I still haven’t finished. It was 1997; I was nine-years-old and my sister eight. Our dad decided one weekend to take the two of us to The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Being a nine-year-old boy, I couldn’t wait to see the dinosaurs. Being an eight-year-old girl, the prospect of flesh-eating lizards larger even than the theater screen was enough to get my sister screaming as soon as the lights dimmed. Before either of us saw a dinosaur, our father hustled the us out of the theater, his head bowed low to avoid the eyes of other moviegoers. Those fifteen minutes in the theater, to me, have always stood as a symbol of film’s power to excite, to awe, to inspire, and to terrify. Living in a city like Detroit for most of my life, I’ve had the benefit of dollar theaters, drive-ins, arthouses, and movie palaces with still-functioning organs, but none of the films played at these venues have inspired within me the genuine terror my sister experienced that afternoon at the long gone Showcase Cinemas about a mile from our home. I fell in love with movies that afternoon, and have been chasing after something like my sister’s emotional response to The Lost World ever since.

That’s why I write about movies. Fear of a Ghost Planet was officially launched on September 5, 2011, but its roots extend back to 2007, when I wrote my first “review” on Careful With that Blog, Eugene, a personal blog that mostly documented how I used my free time. While the contents of this e-book only date back to 2011, Fear of a Ghost Planet’s origins in the world of personal blogging are evident even in the last posts I wrote that year, reviews of The Sitter and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Still, were you to visit the site and pull up one of those early essays, you’d not only see a clear progression in my ability to write a review—my earliest can charitably be described as “not very good”—but in how I respond to movies on a personal level. (more…)

February 3, 2013
Movie Review: The Last Stand (2013)

Though botox, spray tans, and intense training regimens can try to reverse the ill-effects of time, even the most stalwart action hero will eventually succumb to the ravages of his old age. Though Channing Tatum, Sam Worthington, Gerard Butler, and Jason Statham are for one reason or another incapable of claiming the skull- and gun-hewn thrones of 80s titans Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, nearly every role the two have taken since Terminator 3 has acknowledged that their heads will eventually be unable to bear those heavy crowns. Of course, the empire the pair surveyed has shrunken considerably since the 1980s. While Stallone has been able to make hay by revisiting Rocky and Rambo and has made a small fortune with the Expendables movies, the kind of dumb, charming action movies he and Schwarzenegger used to make between tentpole movies like First Blood or Predator are no longer the cash cows they once were, nor do they make tentpole movies like First Blood or Predator anymore. After an extended dalliance with politics, Schwarzenegger makes his proper return to action films with The Last Stand but, instead of being hailed as a conquering hero, finds himself saddled with a January release date—typically the death knell for films that aren’t expanding Oscar contenders.

Is this fate necessarily fair? Yes and no. The majority of The Last Stand, in making every accommodation for Schwarzenegger’s considerable rust, creaks and groans with its star as he goes through the motions. Even during his prime, that a movie would ask its audience to believe in Arnold Schwarzenegger, small town sheriff, is a stretch—something from a lazy sketch comedy show—and yet there he is, patrolling the dusty streets of an Arizona hamlet, teaching his bumbling deputies (Luis Guzmán, Zach Gilford, and Jaime Alexander) the finer points of police-work while bemoaning that the town’s war hero (Rodrigo Santoro) has become the town drunk. Things on patrol are so boring that most of Sheriff Ray’s deputies can hang out with local gun nut Lewis Dinkum (Johnny Knoxville) without missing a beat. Out in the big city, however, the FBI botches the transfer of a big-time Mexican drug kingpin (Eduardo Noriega) who takes an FBI agent (Génesis Rodríguez) hostage and takes off for the border in a souped up muscle car. With head agent John Bannister (Forest Whitaker) utterly powerless to stop that kingpin from slipping over the border, its up to Sheriff Ray and his skeleton crew to make a stand.

This is the American debut of director Kim Ji-woon, whose versatility and appreciation for genre filmmaking makes him uniquely suited for a modern Schwarzenegger film. He’s hamstrung by a screenplay that divides its time between Whitaker’s bumbling pursuit of the bad guy and Schwarzenegger’s bumbling attempt to stop the bad guy’s henchmen (led by a wonderfully hammed-up Peter Stormare) from constructing a bridge that spans the ravine separating America and Mexico. Drug kingpin Gabriel Cortez almost smothers The Last Stand with his cheap suits and macho platitudes; every scene save his demise at the hands of Sheriff Ray is forgettable, though they try really hard to make something more of him. The FBI is also patently unnecessary save for your usual exchange between local law enforcers about how ticked that the FBI is coming to town to take over jurisdiction. In fact, The Last Stand is so overstuffed with inessential characters and details that its easy to miss out on the fact that Ji-woon is setting up for an impossibly pleasing final firefight in Sommerton Junction, abandoned for the weekend for an out-of-town high school football game.

That battle—really the film’s third act—is one of the most satisfying bloodlettings a standard action movie has featured in awhile, using effective staging, a varied arsenal, and a car chase that sends two muscle cars through an endless cornfield before Sheriff Ray and Gabriel Cortez meet on the bridge for their final slugfest. Even that feels like a breath of fresh air: despite Schwarzenegger’s imposing physique, very few of his movies end in hand-to-hand combat. Here, both Ray and Cortez rely on an arsenal of brutal looking maneuvers adapted from professional wrestling and combat sports. It used to be that wrestlers and martial artists showed up in Schwarzenegger movies with guns and grimaces to serve as cannon fodder. That the man himself ends up in a triangle choke feels like a more genuine acknowledgement of changing tastes than Chuck Norris’s deployment in The Expendables 2 as a man dispensing seven-year-old internet memes.

Were Stormare the main villain and the FBI left behind at the scene of their botched operation it’d be possible to talk about The Last Stand in terms of it being a comeback vehicle. Instead, we’re given Schwarzenegger and a collection of incomplete characters creating chaos in the desert. Say this for the man: though Hollywood has strip mined his formula, he still manages an effortless charisma. He’s not much of an actor, but he’s still a hell of a personality, and within his genre, that counts for a lot. Movies like The Last Stand and men like Arnold Schwarzenegger may not prop up the industry like they did 20 years ago, but they’re also not a bad accompaniment for a tub of popcorn.

The Last Stand. With Arnold Schwarzenegger (Sheriff Ray Owens), Johnny Knoxville (Lewis Dinkum), Forest Whitaker (Agent John Bannister), Peter Stormare (Burrell), Jamie Alexander (Deputy Sarah Lawrence), and Luis Guzmán (Deputy Mike Figuerola). Directed by Kim Ji-woon and produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura. Screenplay by Andrew Knauer.

February 1, 2013
Movie Review: Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

David O. Russell was seemingly born to make movies about the modern American male. As codified in Three Kings, The Fighter, and now Silver Linings Playbook, an American man is intense, uncompromising, and without a filter. He is always underestimated. He is driven to conquer. In search of Kuwaiti gold, championship belts, or the satisfaction of winning a high stakes gambit, an American man never rests. To rest is to die. Patrick Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is unquestionably an American man. Told by his wife that he needs to lose weight, he dons a hoodie and a garbage bag and sprints through the neighborhood. Wishing to reconnect with her, he reads every book she assigns to her high school students. Told by doctors, friends, relatives, and the police that he can’t see his wife again, his mind races; he has to see her—the only question is how?

Pat has recently been diagnosed as bipolar. As Silver Linings Playbook opens, his mother is signing the papers necessary for his release from a Baltimore mental institution. He was there because, upon finding his wife in the shower with another man, he nearly beat that man to death. Pat dedicates himself to overcoming his disorder, but he is unwilling to take medication, his friends and family treat him much differently than before, and his wedding song, which was playing when he found his wife in the shower with another man, is a trigger for his rage. One wonders if his release from the mental hospital was a good idea—not necessarily because it’s too soon, but because his support system isn’t exactly the world’s finest. His mother (Jacki Weaver) is nice enough, but his dad (Robert De Niro) is a case study in obsessive compulsive disorders and likely has a gambling addiction. Having taken up bookkeeping, he spends his Sundays watching Philadelphia Eagles games. He has three remote controls, all angled a certain way. He clutches and rubs his Eagles handkerchief. He intends to get his son in on his compulsion, but Pat. Jr. is always running, always reading, always trying to get his wife back.

He meets Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence), a widowed woman whose coping mechanism is sex. Meeting each other for the first time, they compare medications. It’s clear that there’s something between them, but Pat doesn’t see it; eyes on the prize. Until Tiffany offers to circumvent the restraining order placed against him by his wife, she’s just somebody Pat can compare his ailments to, another crazy person. Pat wants to write a letter to his wife. Tiffany wants to enter a couples dance competition, but was never able to do it with her husband. With the specter of the letter hanging over Pat’s head, Tiffany is able to blackmail him into learning a dance routine. As the Philadelphia Eagles tortuously navigate their way towards the NFC Championship game, Pat and Tiffany grow into a cohesive unit.

Silver Linings Playbook is structured like a standard romantic comedy and is replete with hang-ups, half truths, and quirky parents who just want the best for their son. The difference—really, the privilege of a David O. Russell rom-com—is not just a matter of talent: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, and Robert De Niro all have ability, and have leant it to a fair number of undeserving vehicles. Silver Linings Playbook—as is true of all of Russell’s films—not only plays on the strengths of his cast, but adapt them to suit the emotional response of the widest possible audience. Christian Bale, for example, had already bent his body into a grotesque horror-show for the purposes of The Machinist, but it was The Fighter that won him an Academy Award. Robert De Niro has been playing an aging tough guy for decades now, with the caveat that very few of those tough guys have been vulnerable. Here, De Niro’s character isn’t just suffering from his OCD and gambling problems, but from the very real possibility that he has failed his son. Though there have been bright spots here and there over the past few years, Silver Linings Playbook gives De Niro the most he’s had to work with in years, and watching him is every bit as invigorating as when he was at the peak of his power.

Of course, the bulk of Silver Linings Playbook depends on the relationship between Cooper and Lawrence working, which it does. Though Lawrence has detoured post-Winter’s Bone into the much more lucrative world of comic book and young adult novel adaptations, she remains a phenomenally talented young actress. Though her age goes mostly unremarked upon, there’s something deeply unsettling about this young widow and the way she feeds on tragedy. Unlike most romantic comedy misunderstandings, the game she plays with Pat’s unshakable desire to reunite with his wife borders on cruelty. By the time her ploy reveals itself, however, Pat’s unstable brain chemistry—convincingly played by Cooper in a number of wrenching, early scenes—is no longer the often unconquerable monster of reality, but a movie illness. With the help of his family (De Niro and Jacki Weaver are one of the more convincing screen couples of recent years), his friends (Chris Tucker, John Ortiz, and, as his therapist, Anupam Kher), and a few well-applied montages, he’ll pull through.

It’s easy to envision a darker, less comic version of Silver Linings Playbook, one that maintains the tone of its early scenes, where much about Pat is uncertain and those around him are almost queasy remembering what landed him in a mental institution. Indeed, that version exists on the cutting room floor, where De Niro is meaner and less understanding of his son’s condition, nodded at with the brief presence of Pat’s lawyer brother, who is quick to point out his successes and Pat’s failures. Instead, with its climactic dance sequence and what follows after, Silver Linings Playbook practically wills itself to be a saccharine sweet crowd-pleaser. It’s not the wrong instinct to follow, by any means; Silver Linings Playbook is an easy film to be won over by. That being said, the film also has a certain responsibility to the disorders it invokes, one it willfully ignores in its push to send the audience home grinning. Even with the film’s conscious decision to play as something nice and minor on the table, it’s one nudge too far.

Silver Linings Playbook. With Bradley Cooper (Pat Solitano Jr.), Jennifer Lawrence (Tiffany Maxwell), Robert De Niro (Pat Solitano Sr.), Jacki Weaver (Dolores Solitano), Chris Tucker (Danny), Anupam Kher (Dr. Patel), John Ortiz (Ronnie), and Julia Styles (Veronica). Directed by David O. Russell and produced by Bruce Cohen and Donna Gigliotti. Screenplay by Russell, based on the novel The Silver Linings Playbook by Matthew Quick

January 31, 2013
Movie Review: Movie 43 (2013)

Way out west they made this movie, a movie I want to tell you about, movie by the name Movie 43. At least that’s the handle its loving producers gave it. Movie 43 doesn’t have much use for the name, itself. This Movie 43, even though its about a deranged man (Dennis Quaid) who pitches a movie to some poor schmuck producer (Greg Kinnear) at gunpoint, never calls itself anything. That’s fine. Movies as bad as Movie 43 probably don’t wish to self-identify. There’s a lot about Movie 43 that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and a lot about where it was produced, likewise. But, then again, maybe that’s why I find that place so darned interesting.

They call Los Angeles, “The City of Angels.” I don’t find it to be that, exactly. But I’ll allow, they make some nice movies there. Of course I can’t say I ever saw one where Hugh Jackman had testicles on his chin, or where Superman slicks his spit curl with his super sperm. And I ain’t never seen a cartoon cat violate itself with a toilet brush, as a fella says. But I’ll tell you what: after seeing Movie 43, this movie that I’m about to unfold, well, I guess I’ve seen something every bit as stupefying as you’d see in any other movie, and in color, too.

Now this here movie I’m about to unfold took four years to make, just in the spare time its wildly overqualified cast had in-between other projects that people actually enjoy; movies and TV shows—many of them comedies—with some degree of critical and/or popular acclaim. I only mention this because sometime’s there’s a movie—I won’t say a film, because what’s a film?—but sometime’s there’s a movie—and I’m talking about Movie 43, here—sometime’s there’s a movie, well, a movie that’s absolutely the result of spare time. Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Seth MacFarlane, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, Emma Stone, Richard Gere, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell, Kate Bosworth, Chloë Grace Moretz, Halle Berry, Terrence Howard, Elizabeth Banks—they just fit it right in there, in their spare time. That’s Movie 43. Filmed in Los Angeles. And even if it’s a lazy movie—and Movie 43 is most certainly that, quite possibly the laziest movie filmed in Los Angeles County,which would place it high in the running for laziest worldwide—sometimes, there’s a movie. Sometimes, there’s a movie.

Lost my train of thought here. Aw, hell. I’ve done introduced it enough.

Movie 43 wastes no time, opening with a sketch wherein Kate Winslet goes on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, who, as mentioned, has a pair of testicles dangling from his chin. Winslet—who is, as Quaid’s pitchman describes her, smart and career driven—is the only person in the five star restaurant who can see Jackman’s pendulous scrotum, though if it’s because of Jackman’s money or Movie 43’s unfailing belief in women as shrill, howling she-beasts is unknown. This sketch—and most of the sketches contained here—is modeled off of the hair gel joke from There’s Something About Mary, a gross out gag designed to get people in the theater to go home and tell their friends about that one hilarious scene. Those who went to see There’s Something About Mary were rewarded with a complete film. Those who see Movie 43, on the other hand, will be seeing 90-minutes of sketch comedy that can be charitably described as “half finished.” Even Movie 43’s wrap-around sketch, the plot that’s meant to justify the rest of the movie, a segment that had four years to find a resolution, instead ends with Kinnear, Quaid, Common, and Will Sasso throwing up their hands and shrugging their way into the penultimate sketch, which is about how black people are really good at basketball.

There’s nothing about Movie 43 worth praising, but hey, at least it’s out to offend everybody, right? Though twelve people directed bits and pieces of Movie 43, its preoccupation with race, gender, and sex suggest something of a hive mind mentality. Even if white people can’t jump and Asian men aren’t attractive to Halle Berry, the women of Movie 43 have it the worst. Their demands—like Anna Ferris’s wish for Chris Pratt to incorporate scat into their sex life—are unreasonable. Their behavior—like Emma Stone’s general filthiness and Elizabeth Banks’s abuse of an animated cat—is unconscionable. When Kate Bosworth points out that horny teenage boys are likely to stick their appendages into the moving parts of an iPod designed to look like a naked, catatonic woman, she’s regarded by the mostly-male board of an Apple-like conglomerate as a buzzkill. When Chloë Grace Moretz has her first period, not only do her boyfriend and Chistopher Mintz-Plasse freak out about the blood, but her father and Patrick Warburton regard her condition as, quote, disgusting. Even if you’re the sort of person able to mine pleasure from watching the incredibly famous humiliate themselves, Movie 43 has little to offer: as the blooper reel that plays during the credits handily illustrates, everybody involved is more in on the joke than you’ll ever be.

Movie 43 was pretty clearly inspired by The Kentucky Fried Movie and Amazon Women on the Moon, though what genre it’s out to mock is beyond me. The targets, I suppose, are hacky, feel-good movies prone to rousing speeches, slow clapping, bro hugs, and passionate first kisses, but when a sketch mocking modern superhero movies ends in the BOOFs and POWs of the old Batman TV show, the result is something botched and horrible: a Frankenstein’s monster akin to Epic Movie or Meet the Spartans, but with the benefit of legitimately funny people like John Hodgman, Aasif Mandvi, and Jack McBrayer standing around with their dicks in their hands, as opposed to a gaggle of folks from central casting. Not every sketch movie gets to be Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, but few make as succinct an argument against the genre as does Movie 43. As a fella wiser than me once said: sometimes you eat the bear, sometimes the bear, well, he eats you. Just pray that the bear doesn’t have testicles dangling from its jaw.

Movie 43. With Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts, Anna Faris, Chris Pratt, Kieran Culkin, Emma Stone, Richard Gere, Kate Bosworth, Jack McBrayer, Aasif Mandvi, Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell, John Hodgman, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Chloë Grace Moretz, Patrick Warburton, Gerard Butler, Seann William Scott, Johnny Knoxville, Halle Berry, Stephen Merchant, Terrence Howard, Josh Duhamel, and Elizabeth Banks. Directed by Peter Farrelly, Banks, Griffin Dunne, James Gunn, Bob Odenkirk, Brett Ratner, and 6 others and produced by Farrelly, Charles B. Wessler, Ryan Kavanaugh, and John Penotti. Screenplay by Gunn and 17 others

January 28, 2013