By D.K. Holm
March 11, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
BE COOL
Enduring what I hoped was the last dregs of a flu/cold that has put me terribly behind in everything including my MPS columns, I dragged myself to see BE COOL, and I'm confident that it wasn't the flu talking when I found it to be rotten. I could write a whole book about how much I hate this film.
Its loathsomeness begins with the source novel.
Is there another example out there of a novel that is really a sequel to a movie based on a book? HANNIBAL qualifies, I suppose, though Thomas Harris would never admit it. In any case it's clear that BE COOL (originally published by Delacorte Press, ISBN 0.385.33391.9) is a book meant to either cash in on, or more generously speaking, satisfy the fans of, GET SHORTY, the movie made, obviously, from the previous novel in Elmore Leonard's so far short lived Chili Palmer series. GET SHORTY was popular, but the movie was more so, and under the stewardship of director Barry Sonnenfeld and credited adaptor Scott Frank, it captured the very movie-like quality expressed in the book, an exasperated and delightfully vengeful parody of the movie biz. Supported by a good cast and a catchy score by John Lurie, the film had the quality of an unserious lark, which made its accurate hommages to cinema all the more poignant.
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OK, so a few years later Leonard turns out a sequel. But BE COOL, which takes Palmer into the music industry, fails to achieve the same artistic success as its predecessor. And anyway, what is Leonard planning to do, to methodically plant Palmer in every major business in the nation? What's next?: DON'T WAIT, Chili's take on the fast food industry?
Well, if a book don't work, the odds are lessened that the movie will, and this book didn't work. It is a slow, tedious, repetitious tale that both mirrors, and disimproves on GET SHORTY. Among the biggest of its many disappointments is Leonard's dropping of the delightful Karen Flores character (played, of course, by the delightful Rene Russo in the film). Did Leonard know that the actress wouldn't or couldn't be in the movie, so he changed the character to the brittle movie executive Chili falls in with?
But losing characters isn't the only problem; the whole book is a drag. On the other hand, when has a bad novel prevented Hollywood from making a movie from it, especially when it is a bestseller and has a host of built in high profile advertisable signifiers, thanks to its being a "sequel"?
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Like a James Michener exercise in bulimia, pouring his extensive research into the Procrustean bed of a thin plot, Leonard talked to a bunch of people (or had his researcher talk to a bunch of people) and read some books on the subject and purports to take us behind the scenes of the music industry. That what he says is either obvious, well-known, or already out of date probably has more to do with the exigencies of publishing than the diligence of his investigations, though one suspects that Leonard can't escape the status of a square when it comes to music. But this plot stalls in explaining stuff about a relatively unfamiliar industry, unlike the movie biz, which everyone knows about. The plot pauses frequently so that Palmer can interview someone about the details of the new racket he's in.
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Leonard's strong suit is effortless-seeming but highly complex and satisfying plotting, strung along with very readable and realistic sounding dialogue. But this book is simply boring. And the plot, which blends together Palmer trying to write a new screenplay with him helping a girl break free from a shady manager, and his own escaping a bunch of Russian hoods, might have made for some successful elements if both he didn't have to stop every 10 pages and lecture the reader, and he didn't seem to feel the need to replicate high points of the previous book - film.
The potential adaptor of the tale had to have to confront the same problems that plague the book. The audience is unfamiliar with the music industry itself. How to get around that? Rely on recognizable clich2!s, as in THE BODYGUARD? If SINGLES indicated anything, it is that mainstream audiences are not that interested in the music biz per se. Music, yes, but the machinations behind the scenes? It's just not as interesting, or as glamorous as movies.
So what you are left with is a rather ordinary plot set in Los Angeles in which Palmer, once again, must pull a RED HARVEST and get all his enemies to off each other. However, none of the characters, even the villains, are particularly interesting or attractive people, unlike the selfish director of Gene Hackman or the focused malice of the great Delroy Lindo or the charismatic ignorance of Dennis Farina's cut-rate gangster.
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The bright thing to do would have been to perform, yet again the usually reprehensible triage that Hollywood has done for decades on books to the howls of critics — that is, junk most of the book and come up with a better, different story (even if you have to hire Leonard to write it). Going forward with this tale as it is wrecks the franchise. Frankly, they should have dragged back most of the characters from GET SHORTY, especially Harry Zimm and Karen and explore what their lives are like after the success of the GET SHORTY movie, which Leonard does only at the very beginning of this story. Sure, stick in some elements of the music biz story. But ultimately, that's dead weight, a drag on the narrative flow.
Like everyone else, I looked forward to a new Chili Palmer film. And when the producers reunited Travolta with Thurman for another dance scene, I was even more excited. Unfortunately, Tarantino did not direct this every. F. Gary Gray did. But that is the least of its problems.
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This movie is so awkward, so self-regarding, so eager to be a "feel good" film with its mega-happy-ending and fear of death that it makes you in turn self-conscious. For example, I don't know if I will ever be able to dance again. I now question the reason for dancing. I don't see the point of it, beyond someone trying to show off. Or singing. Why do people sing? How do they bring themselves to sing, flailing about egotistically on stage as if everyone loved them. Ugh. It's revolting. Plus, everyone is shot in this film in the most unflattering light or pose or garb. Travolta especially looks uncomfortable, the whole middle of his face from his upper lip to beneath his eyes seemingly frozen, like Sylvester Stallone's right chin. Thurman is cruelly overlit. Keitel looks like a toothless crab pot fisherman.
Fortunately, MGM has seen an opportunity to "synergize" by issuing a new version of GET SHORTY: COLLECTOR'S EDITION (MGM, 1995, $29.95, Tuesday, February 24).
Now we can see that GET SHORTY is the modern CASABLANCA. It's a happy accident of perfect source material, insider jokes, and brilliant casting choices, all conspiring to delight the viewer by being witty and intelligent without talking down to him. It doesn't make a false move. All the elements, not as successful on their own, succeed famously together.
MGM offers a transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) that appears to be the same one as the last release with a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track. The first disc has a somnolent audio commentary by director Barry Sonnenfeld (which other reviewers have suggested might be the same commentary from the laserdisc.
On the second disc, there is a long succession of making ofs, starting with "Look at Me," an out of date general featurette on the film, and followed by "Wiseguys and Dolls." A substantial deleted scene ("The Graveyard Scene"), with Ben Stiller, follows, and then some rehearsal footage in "Going Again" about the scene in Weir's house when Chili and Karen visit him to pitch. There's a gag reel and a preview of BE COOL. Finally, there is the film's trailer, a stills gallery, and promos for other MGM films. In the end the supplements are kind of negligible; the film so stands on its own.
Underground Film
In one of the more interesting film stories of the year so far, Caroline Wyatt of the BBC on line reports that some French cinephiles have been operating a movie theater in the catacombs underneath Paris. According to Wyatt, the theater was "Complete with an electric-powered screen and a bar" and was "operated by what might be called an underground movement" co-founded by one Patrick Alk. Like something out of the Luc Besson film SUBWAY, apparently there is a whole other city thriving underneath the City of Lights. Call it the City of Flights (as in, of stairs). Apparently what the cinephiles watch is old films noir. The French police were going to charge them with something, like electricity theft, but in the end did not. The authorities seem to have ceded all authority to the denizens of the dark. But it is a dangerous place down there. People have wandered off, never to be heard from again.
Jason Versus Quentin
VARIETY reported on Monday March 7th that Tarantino was in talks with New Line to do a new FRIDAY THE 13TH film, which would presumably be the 12th Jason film (if you include FREDDY Vs JASON). I was all set to speculate why Tarantino seems so eager to align himself with a franchise (you will recall that he had also been in talks — with Pierce Brosnan, if no one else — to do the next James Bond movie) but there just seemed something bogus about the idea. Tarantino has, as far as I know, expressed no interest in the 13th films, hasn't show an interest in any horror films other than Italian cannibal films, and in any case the story seemed awfully premature, despite the fact that as the story says, "Tarantino's reps at William Morris confirmed that a meeting with New Line is on the books." Confirmation for these suspicious appeared at Everything Tarantino a few days later when this invaluable site linked to some quotes from Tarantino recorded at the Empire Film Awards. The director suggested that his next film will be INGLORIOUS BASTARDS, followed by the martial arts film in Mandarin.
Media Notes From All Over
Why are the fake ads on TV more entertaining than the real ones? Geico and a few other firms recently have taken on the task of attempting to fool the viewer with misleading faux commercials (the best Geico one shows a couple in a fake reality show moving into a house whose dimensions resemble the short floor in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. These fake commercials put in mind of the campaign in which the Eveready bunny drummed his way through a series of phony commercials, such as one about a female cop. But why are they more entertaining? Probably because they step back and mock the very genre of which they are a part. It's the SIMPSONS principal. Mockery is more memorable than sincerity.
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We must have been feeling pretty hopeless back in the 1980s. When we weren't cheering ourselves up with disco movies we were watching films that drove their heroes to the brink of despair and ruin, only to pull them back at the last possible instant. Stories such as THE VERDICT tortured their characters, betrayed them, brought them to the edge of alcoholism and suicide, only to redeem them five seconds before the end. HOOSIERS: COLLECTOR'S EDITION (MGM [of an Orion picture], 1986, $29.95, Tuesday, March 8) is in that mode, taking the Gene Hackman character and bringing him numerous challenges in his bid to take a high school basketball team to the finals. His ordeals make the eventual triumph all that sweeter.
HOOSIERS is also a male weepie, one of the few films that it is permitted for me to opening weep at, like FIELDS OF DREAMS. A large part of the success of this goes to the music, by Jerry Goldsmith, and to the absolute authenticity and realism of the narrative itself.
In this fourth iteration of HOOSIERS MGM has advanced to a double disc set, with a new widescreen transfer (1.85:1, enhanced) that improves on the earlier versions, and a new, if pointless, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio (with optional English, French and Spanish subtitles).
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There is a good, informative audio commentary track by director David Anspaugh and writer Angelo Pizzo, in which they talk about the history of the project, their own backgrounds in Indiana, problems with the NCAA and anecdotes about the actors, but the biggest feature to me is the host of deleted scenes. There are 13, lasting a half an hour, and come with video intros by Pizzo and Anspaugh. They enrich the film, make the relationships make more sense, and were cut because the studio demanded a shorter movie. Anspaugh and Pizzo, who get a little testy with each other still over the film, explain all this but it is also obvious that, for example, the last shot of Hackman looking at Hershey across the basketball court doesn't make any sense unless you see the last of the deleted scenes, which is between them outside the busses going to the final game.
There is also a 30-minute "making-of", HOOSIER HISTORY: THE TRUTH BEHIND THE LEGEND, and a film apparently made for the real life high school behind the story that is a black and white compilation of the final games, the last of which you see in its entirety. Finally, there's the theatrical trailer and a photo gallery. The two discs come in a tri-fold digipak in a paperboard slipcase.
There is something very "British" about the conception of COLUMBO: THE COMPLETE SECOND SEASON (Universal, 1972 - 1973, four discs, $39.95, Tuesday, March 8). It's founded on a gimmick, a cute whimsy through which all the impulses of the show travel. Peter Falk's character is a presented on the surface as a seemingly bumbling functionary but who ends up smarter than everyone else in the room, including the crafty murderous social elites whom Detective Columbo interacts with.
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At some point in each episode, Columbo realizes that the routine suicide or death he is investigating is the handy work of one guy. We rarely see this moment clearly, but it can always be inferred. It's most obvious in the first episode of season two, "Étude in Black" in which Peter Falk's old buddy John Cassavetes is summoned to play a high maintenance conductor. If Alex benedict hadn't dashed to his victim's apartment to fetch a flower that fell off his tuxedo, Columbo probably wouldn't have considered him a suspect.
COLUMBO is also structured unusually for a mystery show. The murder is not a mystery. We know who did it and why from the start. The main character, Columbo, doesn't usually appear until about 10 or 20 minutes in. The interest of the show is the cat and mouse game between the secretly suspicious Columbo and the brainiac who thinks he can pull one over on the cops. Columbo's maddening hesitations, his bumbling, his interruptions and pestyness, are a form of tough love designed to break down the suspect into making a mistake.
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Given this template, creators Levinson and Link work a number of variations on the show. In the last of the second season's eight episodes (COLUMBO rotated with two other crime shows on the NBC SUNDAY MYSTERY MOVIE, MCCLOUD and MCMILLAN AND WIFE), Martin Landau plays twins whose rich uncle has died mysteriously. What's unusual here is that the viewer isn't sure which twin did the killing. This is also the only episode in which Columbo takes off his rumpled Burberry, when he is hijacked into appearing on one of the twin's daily cooking show. This whole sequence is weird but weirdly well acted, very authentic. Oh, and another bit of trivia is that the Columbo part was first offered to Bing Crosby who turned it down.
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Would that the show were just a little better done. That Cassavetes episode holds in synecdoche all the flaws of this cheaply made and quickly prepared show. There is a sequence early where Cassavetes, in day for night shots, must leave his victims house without being spotted by a neighbor girl friendly with the victim. She is playing in a front yard. Director Nicholas Colasanto, off of a script by Steven Bochco, does nothing with this moment. Flatly and lazily using zooms, he recounts the moment quickly and boringly, using none of the techniques that either a Hitchcock or a Spielberg, at two ends of the Universal panorama of directors, would employ in order to flesh out the scene and get you into the consciousness of the character or compromise you morally by making you root for a killer; you know, little things such as close ups and POV shots. The actors work hard on this episode, much harder than the flat presentation rewards them, and it is a shame, as this episode has an achingly tragic pallor to it (Benedict really does love his wife, the fragile Blythe Danner, and killed his mistress in part to stay with her).
This Universal package comes in two keep cases in a thin cardboard box, and has no extras. The full frame transfers are adequate for a terribly photographed and set designed show (why is every room yellow in these old Universal programs?), and the silent, static menus offer four chapter scene selection per episode.
Is Beat Takashi slipping into obscurity? Is he becoming an acquired taste, like Antonioni, or Theo Angelopoulos? Since he has strayed from the gangster genre his films have had much less exposure in the West. DOLLS (Palm Pictures, 2002, $39.95, Tuesday, March 8), for example, is the film he made before THE BLIND SWORDSMAN: ZATOICHI, which itself made only $800 thousand dollars in America, and DOLLS didn't get released here at all, now coming out solely on DVD.
I guess it is easy to see why. Its slow pace and melancholia is inimical to American taste. But for Kitano enthusiasts DOLLS helps "explain" his other films. From it you can see how important the road film is to him, and the couple in the central story, tethered to together with a brilliant scarlet rope, resembled the bother and sister in ZATOICHI, and other pairings in his films. Plus, the mood of stoic hopelessness informs most of his other movies.
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DOLLS is based on three bunraku and in fact opens with footage of a performance, before moving on to three tales of love and selfless devotion. The first concerns Matsumoto (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who returns to Sawako (Miho Kanno), his first fiancé. They end up wandering the countryside in all weather, known as the Bound Beggars. The second story concerns Hiro (Tatsuya Mihashi), an aging yakuza boos who goes in search of his old girlfriend (Chieko Matsubara), who vowed that she would go to a park every day and wait for him. The final tale focuses on a pop star Haruna (Kyoko Fukada), who, after being disfigured in a car accident, is visited by her biggest fan, Nukui (Tsutomu Takeshige).
That last story has resonance with Kitano's own life, as he was injured in an accident at the height of his popularity in Japan. But all three concern patient if hopeless devotion and the unexpected consequences, all depressing tales but apparently of sublime importance to the Japanese. In fact, being tethered to someone else is a beautiful, wordless symbol of marriage itself, while at the same time evoking the strings with which puppets are operated.
Palm Pictures offers up a beautiful transfer of the film, which in part is set in the colors of autumn. Supplements include video interviews with Kitano (14:28), which is lengthy and highly informative about his intentions, along with Kanno (3:56), Nishijima (3:41), and costume designer Yohji Yamamoto (10:01), along with the trailer (1:31), trailers for four other Palm pictures, and weblinks. The animated, silent menu offers 18-chapter scene selection.
Like Kinji Fukasaku before him, Kiyoshi Kurosawa (a man whose name is perpetually suffixed with the phrase, "No relation to …") is interested in the wastrel youth of Japan. BRIGHT FUTURE (Palm Pictures, 2002, $24.95, Tuesday, March 8) focuses on Mamoru Arita (Todanabu Asano) and his friend and co-worker Nimura (Joe Odagiri).
Their odd friendship is interrupted by the intrusion of their boss, who seems to be seeking something from the lads. Mamoru, however, sees the boss as doomed and in fact helps his and his family along the road to that fate. In the aftermath of Mamoru's imprisonment and suicide, Nimura seeks out Mamoru's father, and continues his friendship through that patriarchal surrogate.
As in Shohei Imamura's THE EEL from 1997, a form of imprisoned sea life serves as a metaphor symbolizing some of the characters or the threats to them. And like numerous other Japanese films of late, its reflections on alienation are tethered to a familiar massacre, as if the Japanese nuclear family is hopelessly imperiled.
Like DOLLS, Palm's BRIGHT FUTURE is gorgeous. If you have any ambiguity about the meaning of the film, the 01:14:23 long making of "Ambivalent Feeling" will answer all your questions. Along with that feature length supplement is the theatrical trailer (1:14), and trailers two other Palm pictures. The animated, musical menu offers 18-chapter scene selection.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might be interested in my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
NEXT TIME: THE INCREDIBLES, THE SPECIALS, THE ECLIPSE, rock music movies, more Asian action films, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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