February 20, 2004
By D.K. Holm
The Minor Event
AGAINST THE ROPES
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
I don't think that American screenwriters understand people anymore. Character. Motivation. The consistency of character; the complexities and warring urges of motivation. I think it's gone. For the sake of expediency, for the sheer ease and comfort of writing, screenwriters no longer care if the characters they conjure make sense. The people we see in movies these days are patchwork quilts of inconsistent traits born of situational convenience.
All right, all right, so I see one movie and I think the sky is falling. Still, that's all you can do, lurch from one film to another, piecing together the culture, trying to figure things out, how it all works, what makes one movie better than another.
In the case of AGAINST THE ROPES, what would have made it better is a semblance of any reality with the real person the movie is based on.
AGAINST THE ROPES is the story of Jackie Kallen (Meg Ryan). In the real world she is a journalist who decided to take on a succession of young men as fight prospects, eventually ending up with a few champs. Kallen may be a real person but her life was not like this movie. Virtually nothing that happened to the real Kallen occurs in AGAINST THE ROPES, and the things that do occur to the movie Kallen are movieish or, worse, sit-comish.
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The movie's Kallen works as an underling for an arena manager who orders her to get coffee while ignoring her fine business-mindedness. When Kallen is lured into a bet with a sleazy, sexist fight promoter (Tony Shalhoub) and buys a fighter for a buck, a few plot complications results in Kallen managing a young turk named Luther Shaw (Omar Epps), and dragging a trainer (the film's director, Charles S. Dutton) out of retirement to turn the youth's raw talent into skill. Suddenly, with Kallen's bodice sprouting dresses and over-the-knee boots, it's Erin Brockovich meets Rocky.
Kallen proves wildly successful, but then, when it's convenient for credited screenwriter Cheryl Edwards to develop an emotional conflict — one not unlike the kind that separates lovers in limp romantic comedies — Kallen's mothering, nurturing personality suddenly undergoes an overhaul.
All of a sudden, left field over there is empty as instead of remaining driven and dedicated, Kallen becomes flamboyant and self-centered, dominating press conferences with her flirtatiousness and mocking her fighter. In the movie's terms, she needs to be taken down a peg and humbled before she can progress to whatever next level of sit-com "growth" is meant for her.
After a falling out with Shaw, she ends up going to his big final title fight anyway. She has to sneak in, so there is faux suspense as we watch her sneaking into the ring. Then, at a crucial moment, she gives Shaw the key advice that turns him into a champ. As in a similar scene from ROCKY, Shaw searches the post-fight crowd for her. But Kallen is gone.
But not really gone. For some reason she ends up at the post-fight celebration for one of those long drawn out staring-at-each-other-across-a-crowd scenes whose meaning I can never figure out. Then there's the clapping, one pair of hands, then another, until people who don't even like her are shamed into applauding. What the hell does all this mean?
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The real Kallen herself doesn't seem to care that the film is a flask of poisonous artificial vapors. She was raving about the film on NPR recently, as if it were top-notch entertainment. She sounds like Anne Rice pretending that INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE really is a good movie. If Kallen wants to pretend that this travesty of a movie about her life is a joyous inspiration to us all, well it's a free country. But be that as it may, the real horror of AGAINST THE ROPES is that a screenwriter had a real person in front of her with a truly interesting and complicated story and yet deemed her not "cinematic" enough, choosing instead to throw out the life and assemble from Tinker Toys the flimsy edifice of movieland clichés about lone women and empowerment. It's as if a producer went to all the trouble to buy a bestseller and then threw out the book only to kept the title, as if that were the only really marketable thing about it.
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I'm a big fan of Meg Ryan, and here as in HURLY BURLY and COURAGE UNDER FIRE she's trying to buck the cutesy image and "stretch" as an actress. But like several aging male actors, such as Pacino and Eastwood, her voice sounds shredded and she doesn't inhabit the sexy clothes in quite the way Julian Roberts did in ERIN BROCKOVICH. But Ryan's scrambling for credibility is the least of AGAINST THE ROPES's woes. If the filmmakers can't remember the nature of their lead character even 40 minutes into their own film, then we are all living in a culture of short-term memory loss.
Euro Train Wreck
EURO TRIP
You may recall a filmmaker named Steven Spielberg. He has done a number of films over the years. He's made entertainments ranging from JAWS to JURASSIC PARK. Then he accrued a lot of creditability and stature in the entertainment industry a few years ago when he made SCHINDLER'S LIST, his attempt to honor the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Spielberg has also lent his name to good works and helped to fund various institutions and buildings.
And then, yesterday, he pissed it all away.
His company, DreamWorks has just released a film in the "animal comedy" genre, a gross-out teen film that is meant to be a descendent of ANIMAL HOUSE and PORKY'S. Yes, DreamWorks. The house of sweetness and light. The new Disney. The family company. The studio of AMISTAD and ANTZ, of AMERICAN BEAUTY and SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and THE HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG. This studio now releases a movie called EUROTRIP that strives to gross out every audience member and offend every minority and national identity in the world. The film features more female breasts than I've seen in a long time (though I'm not really complaining about that here), but also more teen male butt and old geezer dick than I've seen in three decades. After this they'll have to change the name to CreamWorks.
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Actually, EUROTRIP is a descendent of ROAD TRIP, another Cream — uh, DreamWorks comedy. In fact, it's a remake. The premise is almost exactly the same. EUROTRIP opens with Scott Thomas (Scott Mechlowicz) graduating from Hudson High School in Ohio and being dumped by his girlfriend Fiona (Kristin Kreuk) while his parents capture the event on their digital video camera, to the delight of Scott's fat and ugly little brother (these films always need a fat, ugly, mean little brother. There was one in THE LIZZIE MAGUIRE MOVIE as well, and if this is a trend I plan to stay out of the movie theaters for a few years). Scott's girlfriend drops him, he soon learns, because she is dating a rising rock musician (Matt Damon in a cameo) whose hit tune "Scotty Doesn't Know" soon sweeps the globe in a minor thread in the film that is kinda funny.
Meanwhile, Scott has been corresponding with a German e-pen pal whom he takes to be a guy. His best friend Cooper (Jacob Pitts) suggests that the German is a potential pedophile and he should terminate the correspondence, especially if the pen pal tries to set up a date (presumably this film was made before news of consensual German cannibals hit the media). Well, the e-pen pal does venturing forth a summoning, and Scott reacts as if he were enduring a surprise proctology exam. He writes back harshly and abjures further contact.
A brief word about the "best friend" in teen comedies. What is so "best" about them? They generally undermine and humiliate the hero and seem to have little in common with him. They are usually the id figure to the hero's staunch morality, and the thrust of the film is usually to get the hero to "loosen up," apparently because being responsible and hard working and loyal is boring. Pitts is modeled on any number of Matthew Lillard performances, and it's all about hair and teeth and a dopey grin and "dude" and high-pitched whines. His sense of humor consists of retorting to civil questions, "Do you want to see my balls?" All he needs is the love of a hot young chick — I mean a good woman, and she is right in front of him unperceived throughout the whole movie in a time-honored teen comedy trope.
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Anyway, Scott's derisive brother is pleased to reveal that Scott's German friend Mieke is really a girl (German pop star Jessica Böhrs, who has no inhibitions about baring her breasts). It turns out that the name is pronounced "Me-ka" not "Mikey," you see. When Scott tries to rectify the damage he finds that Mieke has blocked his e-mail.
What to do? Why, as in ROAD TRIP, travel several thousand miles and patch things up. Thus Scott and Cooper end up in England, where they meet some soccer hooligans. The hooligans drive them to Paris where they meet up with their high school friends, the twins Jamie (Travis Wester) and Jenny (BUFFY's Michelle Trachtenberg). Together they take a train ride on which an aggressive gay Italian assaults them. It's not funny. It's lame and prolonged and flat and predictable.
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Later, in Amsterdam, Scott and Jennie eat what they think are hash brownies (they're not), while Jamie gets a blow job from a Photo Hut clerk, and Cooper goes to a cat house. It was established earlier in the film that Cooper wants to shed the Puritanism of America and embrace the kinky sex tradition of his ancestors. But it's not clear to Cooper that he has entered a house of domination (The House of Brands and Flog?) and I find it unlikely that no one would tell him until it is too late, although the joke of his "safe word" being some long unpronounceable Germanic nonsense word like "furstbistivendler" is sorta funny. It's a good idea for a joke, anyway.
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Lucy Lawless plays the dominatrix, Madame Vandersexxx, in what I assume is a joke on her Xena persona. Most gross-out teen comedies, from GET OVER IT to TOMCATS seem to require a dominatrix scene somewhere along the way (the S&M fixation in EUROTRIP extends to the shot of a post-graduation party host seductively bound to a tree with duct tape at the start of the film), and Lawless appears happy to provide one, looking far from Xena-phobic in her tight red leather bustier. Though the film makers are knowing enough about things such as safe words, they don't really bother to let us drink in Lawless's robust figure, preferring, I guess, to show us 25 hairy old men's dicks on a nude beach.
Which is another place they end up, thanks to Jamie's misreading of a Frommer guidebook (from all the product placements, Frommer's deserves co-producer credit). Twenty-five guys. All hairy. All old. Their weenies all a-dangling. Even Lars Von Trier couldn't fit this many limp dicks into a film.
Next they end up in Slovakia's capital, Bratislava, where thanks to an uneven currency conversion their $1.83 gets them a fine hotel and a night at the disco swigging Absinth. There, Jamie and Jenny lock lips in an Absinth-fueled flirtation with incest, but by this time the shattering of the Last Taboo is just another dully outrageous "thing" that's happened to them, no sweat. Their next stop is Berlin, where Scott finally finds Mieke's apartment.
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And this is where the fun really begins. For Mieke has a baby brother who sits in the background and proceeds to draw a mustache on his philturm, and then goosestep in the background as Mieke's dad tells Scott and Cooper that well, actually, Mieke is down in Rome taking a tour. Mr. Spielberg's movie company (and Ivan Reitman and Tom Pollock also deserve some of the blame) seems to take the stance that all Germans, from the crib on, are budding Hitlers. But then I guess that's a natural progression in a film that sees all Italians as gay and all Englishmen as hooligans. Mista Schindler, he dayd.
Finally, blessedly, the film reaches its last pit stop on this lamentable Le Mans. In Rome, the kids manage to set fire to some papal robes and mis-announce the death of the Pope before Scott, finally meeting Mieke in the flesh, jumps that flesh in a confessional. As an American, I'm proud to note that Scott had no performance anxiety. No, the anxiety was all mine.
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You come out of EUROTRIP feeling Euro trashed, wandering aimlessly in a haze that is a blend of awe and incredulity and profound depression. Yet it wasn't so much the gross humor, which can be mounted with taste and finesse and civilization, that seared the brain. It was more the stitching between those broad scenes, the moments where the characters try to talk to each other and make quite little jokes. It's there that the director, Jeff Schaffer (the writer of some SEINFELDs and THE CAT IN THE HAT), and fellow credited writers Alec Berg (ditto) and David Mandel (a SEINFELD and CLERKS graduate), hang the kids out to dry, with flat jokes and punch-line-free scene endings.
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It's been years since I've seen a film as truly bad and awkward and listless and misguided as this one. It's humor of cruelty is not funny; its drool jokes, its cast of imitation stars (Mechlowicz tries to sound like Brad Pitt), it's horrific credits and terrible "travel" montages, and it's limp concluding gag that echoes the opening premise, as predictable as the re-emergence of the hooligans at a crucial moment. One doesn't really want to get all moralistic and bombastic about an unambitious teen comedy and decry the decline of western civilization. But it should suffice to note that the House of Tom and Steve has reformed itself into the Quonset hut of Schindler's little shits.
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume 11
KILL BILL VOL. 1
Last week, and the week before that, I've mentioned Kim Newman's review of KILL BILL in the December issue of SIGHT AND SOUND. As you may recall, Newman points out that KB1 is set in a special fantasy Tarantino world in which the references to other films are visual, unlike QT's earlier films, which are more realistic and in which the film references are mostly verbal. What Newman is pointing out is that Tarantino's films up through JACKIE BROWN were essentially realistic in orientation. The characteristic pop culture references were embedded in dialogue, exercises of word jazz and flights of speculation that didn't necessary detract from the surface realism.
KILL BILL shows Tarantino weaving the cultural references into the texture of the film itself as mostly visual references, the citations surrounded by a basically cartoon story that has no commerce with the everyday reality of the earlier movies. Hence, the violence is free to be over the top and long lasting. Replicating the manner of his Asian masters, Tarantino is at liberty to spray blood and imbue his characters with impossible feats of agility.
In fact, Tarantino has discussed this very aspect of his films, as two readers pointed out, Theron Neel and M. E. Russell (the new second-stringer for the Portland OREGONIAN).
Neel points out that QT stated in an interview that "KB1 is a movie that the characters in his other movies would watch at the theater or on TV, which explains its sense of 'extra-heightened' reality. So, you have the real world (our reality), the world of PULP FICTION, RESERVOIR DOGS, JACKIE BROWN and TRUE ROMANCE (heightened reality), and the world of KILL BILL VOL. 1 (extra-heightened reality). He's making entertainment for the entertainment of our entertainment. That's QT for you …"
Russell reminds me that as long ago as Aug. 10, 2001, Tarantino has been talking about his "movie universes." That was when Harry Knowles interviewed Tarantino for Ain't It Cool News. Here's the relevant part of that interview:
"At this point I asked Quentin about the Universes that his films take place in. To which Quentin broke it down like so…
"JACKIE BROWN takes place in Elmore Leonard’s Universe … not his.
"TRUE ROMANCE, RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION take place in Quentin Universe #1. This universe is REALER THAN REAL.
"Meanwhile: His original NATURAL BORN KILLERS script and FROM DUSK TILL DAWN take place in Quentin Universe #2 which is the MOVIE MOVIE universe.
"Now according to Quentin, there are specific rules that govern these two Universes of his. For example … Characters from Universe #1 cannot venture into Universe #2, but say Mr Blonde can appear in Pulp Fiction, and Clarence could appear in Res Dogs, but Vincent Vega could never meet the Gecko Brothers or Mickey and Mallory. And in Universe #2 those characters can’t venture into Universe #1, but can go between the films in their universe. Why is this important?
"Well, KILL BILL takes place in the MOVIE MOVIE universe … where it is possible that Mickey and Mallory could exist … or the Gecko Brothers. BUT, also in the Movie Movie universe, characters from other movies … folks like BILLY JACK or SHAFT … well they exist in the Movie Movie universe as well. So if Quentin wanted Bruce Lee’s Chen Zhen from FIST OF FURY to appear in KILL BILL … then Chen Zhen could appear, not that Chen Zhen will appear … but it is within the realm of possibility.
"GLORIOUS BASTARDS is in Universe #1, the REALER THAN REAL universe, but due to it being set in World War 2, I’d bet money that we won’t see Mr White here. But perhaps his granddad … hehehe …
"Quentin then states that there is only ONE character in his Universe that can disobey these rules and that is THE WOLF. THE WOLF can go between the universes because while he exists in the REALER THAN REAL universe … He’s a MOVIE MOVIE character that just exists in reality. And I do not know if he’s in KILL BILL, but I think it odd that he point this out … unless it is possible.
"Now, the characters in Universe #1 … if they were to go see a movie … They would see the movies of Universe #2."
NEXT TIME: TWISTED and/or THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST
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