Caught is the greatest movie ever, if only because there's a distinct possibility that Tommy Wiseau saw it and thought, "I can do that!" Carl Eusebius's dream evening is to watch this film and then The Room to see how little it takes to make a decent movie like this and then how badly a terrible filmmaker can cock it up. Oh who am I kidding, any evening that involves watching The Room is a dream evening.
Caught is a remake of the 429 BC Greek film Oedipus the King. It opens with fish struggling to escape a fisherman's net (oh, I get it--caught!) while the soundtrack reminds us the Director's Cut of Blade Runner came out four years earlier. Joe (Edward James Olmos) and Betty (Maria Conchita Alonso) are a married couple who run a fish shop. That not one but both of the leads are Hispanic immediately marks the film as an independent production, so lavish spectacle will not be the order of the day. The couple take in homeless drifter Nick (Irish actor Irie Verveen, in his feature debut) to live in their home and work at the store. If you've ever seen a movie before (or if you read the title of this one), I think you can see where this is going.
So Caught is hardly original, and it's about 25 minutes too long, with the extra space filled by suddenly having a character do something we've had no indication is part of that character's behavior. (Okay, it also to tries to garner some sympathy for Nick after he betrays his adoptive father-figure, and it doesn't work since the scene is so contrived.) With a story like this, it's not about seeing something new but about seeing it done well. Once again, strong acting overcomes a pedestrian script so that we get a nice little movie. The best thing to be said about the script is that it doesn't cast any character as fully to blame or wholly innocent. Everyone behaves more or less like a real person (at least real in the context of a lurid erotic drama), and the ending is tragic yet attains a kind of satisfaction. It's hardly an achievement of cinema, but if your thing is tragedy, you could do a lot worse.
Since the picture stands or falls on the its performances, let's talk a bit about the acting, beginning with Olmos's Joe. It's a challenging role to play. We have to sympathize with why Betty would be dissatisfied with the marriage, but Joe can't be such a loser that we wonder why she hasn't just left this bum already. Betty tells Nick that Joe only really cares about fishing, and indeed, the character comes alive only when he's around fish, while at home, he's withdrawn and inattentive. So you can see why Betty might stay with him so long, as he's jolly and likeable when they're working together in the fish shop, and then be tremendously disappointed that all of that goes away when they're together at home, without the fish.
If anything, Alonso has an even tougher job, since she has to pretend to be a woman sexually dissatisfied with Edward James Olmos. She is definitely the aggressor when it comes to the relationship with Nick, but she brings it across not as a Desperate Housewife(tm) but as a woman reaching out for some passion and excitement. There's a wonderful scene in which, after her first tryst with Nick, Betty makes rice pudding for the two men. Joe, oblivious to what's happening, remarks that it's been 20 years since she last made him rice pudding. They then snuggle and embrace in a way they haven't to this point, presumably just as Betty has wanted for, oh, the last 20 years. In this simple scene, we realize that Joe is withdrawn, which makes Betty lash out, which makes Joe more withdrawn, which makes Betty lash out all the more, and on and on ad nauseum. All it took was for one of them to decide to break the cycle and make a kind gesture, which is then reciprocated. The tragedy is that it took an outsider to make it happen, and by then it's too late.
Which brings us to Nick, the biggest problem in the movie. Frankly, Verveen isn't very good in the role. I was astonished to learn that he won some shit award and critical praise for this performance. He's not awful, but he's significantly below the other three principle actors, and that nearly tanks the movie because his is the central performance. He has to be so smitten with Betty that he can't leave the situation, even though his utterly unnecessary voiceover continually assures us that he's about to. (Note to aspiring filmmakers: If you aren't making either a film noir or Clockwork Orange, no voiceover. Just, just don't.) He also has to be so captivating that Betty is willing to risk everything to continue their affair in her own house while her husband is in the next room. Indeed, in every one of their scenes, Alonso looks utterly captivated (though more by what she's doing than by Nick specifically) while Verveen just stares off into space with this look of either serenity or dopiness, I can't tell which. Even after this man has been told their relationship has been discovered by a third party, he does nothing, and Verveen doesn't remotely succeed in portraying a man so taken with his mistress that he wouldn't just walk away at this point. (He's a drifter, after all, who "likes to move around".) There's an exception, in the penultimate scene, with Verveen alone on camera forced to confront his betrayal of his adoptive father-figure. He's fine here (again, not great or anything), but whenever he's on the screen with the other three principles, he can't hold his own with them.
I said there were four principle actors, and that third party is the couple's son Danny (Steven Schub), a failed comedian living in Hollywood who, to absolutely no one's surprise, eventually returns home unexpected, and the lovers are caught. (Whoops! Sorry to blow that for you.) Schub's work is quite good here, as he's totally believable as a comic trying to make it despite the fact he doesn't have it, right down to the not-very-funny jokes and the trying too hard. Danny doesn't catch his mother directly, but the evidence is there, and the movie toys with us for a long time about whether Danny has actually figured it out. He continually drops lines that could mean he knows, if you read them right, yet on the surface are plausibly deniable. Schub is so good selling this ambiguity that I suspect it was his favorite part of the role. After all, Danny's hostility may just stem from his anger at essentially being replaced by Nick as Joe's son: Nick stays in his room, wears his clothes, and cuts fish in the shop the way Joe always hoped Danny would. There's an effective bit of foreshadowing setting this up: Danny doesn't call his parents from Hollywood but periodically sends them videotapes of his act, how he's doing, what he has in the works. His parents watch these with rapt attention, until the scene in which they talk to Nick while Danny's latest video plays in the background, ignored.
I don't know if director Robert M. Young just didn't have control over the actors or if he specifically didn't present them with a single vision of what the film was to be about, but either way it actually works to the film's benefit. Because there's no one way to understand the characters, each actor is on her own page as far as her character and the other characters go. Which is just how it is with real people.
There are some rough bits. As I noted at the beginning, Danny commits an act that isn't set up at all; it seems to come out of nowhere just to pad out the running time. I
recall checking the time code and wondering how there
could be a half hour left since the story was pretty clearly wrapping up. The very next scene is Danny's out-of-the-blue moment, so we can add twenty minutes of filler. And it's a shame, because the film had been pretty even-handed dealing with its characters up to that point.
A real estate developer who wants to buy Joe's fish shop is named Donald Crump. (Come on, really?) When Nick appears shirtless in front of Betty, only a few days after he's been in the house, the actor's ripped bod doesn't look anything like a man who's been living on the street for as long as the film implies. Near the end of the film Betty declares that she loves Nick, even though the characters have shared virtually no romantic interaction outside of their illicit sex. Betty should know better than to think this is love. Indeed, Alonso seems to know better, playing the character as if she has real love for no one but Joe throughout the film, and this declaration of love is the only time her performance rings false.
As noted, the movie isn't ground-breaking. In fact, it's so predictable I felt like I'd written the script myself (at least until Danny's out-of-the-blue moment, because I immediately thought of a better way to bring about the climax given the situation the film presented). But the acting is strong, the characters behave in believable ways in the context of the story and world they inhabit, a character makes a choice in the age-old conflict between loyalty to the state and piety to one's father (the right choice, in fact), and the final scenes are a satisfying conclusion, particularly the very last scene. Everyone in the tragedy suffers and the ending can in no way be called "happy", but the most despicable of the characters gets what's coming to him, which is more than I hoped for. If you prefer your erotic thrillers grounded and not tawdry, contemplative and not flippant, Caught might be your cup of tea.
Showing posts with label edward james olmos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label edward james olmos. Show all posts
December 5, 2012
November 7, 2012
EJO Review: Miami Vice Episode 2.8 "Bushido"
I've maintained an utter loathing of the television program Miami Vice, sight unseen, since its inception. The music, the clothes, the Don Johnsons...it just screamed crap, and I've spent decades pretending it doesn't exist. Then I saw that godawful Miami Vice film. I should've known better, but it teamed director Michael Mann and actor Jaime Foxx, and we know how great their last collaboration was. (Collateral, for those heathens who don't immediately know what I'm talking about. Yes, Virginia, there are films even Tom Cruise can't ruin.) Being one of the few human beings who doesn't loathe Colin Farrell with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, I dutifully handed over a few bucks to watch Miami Vice. I mean, Gong Li, amirite? It's got Ciaran Hinds; how bad could it be? Pretty goddamned bad, it turned out, and that only reinforced my conviction that Miami Vice the television show should remain as it had been: forgotten, ignored, and shitty.
But I'm doing a series on Edward James Olmos's body of work, so I can't really ignore arguably his best-known role: Lt. Martin Castillo on *sigh* Miami Vice. Yes, Olmos is probably better known for his second banana role on a mediocre '80s cop drama than for Blade Runner, probably the greatest artistic work to come out of that entire godforsaken decade. So I did some Stephenie Meyer-level research (I read parts of Miami Vice's Wikipedia page) and found an episode focussing on Castillo and guest starring Dean Stockwell(!). Nothing's ever been made worse by having Dean Stockwell in it, so I plopped down to watch two of my favourite actors go head to head. Maybe Miami Vice wouldn't suck so bad after all.
And you know what? It didn't, though I'm not convinced that isn't because I cherry-picked an episode all but guaranteed to not be terrible. It wasn't great--being Carl Eusebius, I found plenty to bitch about--but still, it wasn't awful. This was also probably helped by Olmos's direction of this episode since as I noted in my review of American Me, Olmos is a competent, confident director, if an unexceptional one. Even better, the main characters, Detectives Crockett and Tubbs (one's black, one's white--they're the original odd couple!), are hardly even in the episode at all. If crappy cop shows have one thing in common--from the '80s to the '00s--it's that when you have a talented guest star, you shove your shitty lead players aside and let the guest star strut her stuff.
Except that doesn't really happen, either. Instead, the episode focusses almost entirely on Castillo and gives Stockwell exactly one scene in the entire 50 minutes of this episode.* That's right, one. He's the top-billed guest star (coming as he was off his turn in the hugely and unjustly popular Blue Velvet), and he's on screen for four minutes, tops. That's the top-billed guest star. He has one scene with Olmos, and then he's out of the episode entirely. Could they not afford his salary, or what? I just can't believe you would get an actor of Stockwell's calibre and then do with him not a damn thing. I have issues with the last season of Battlestar Galactica--the primary issue being that it sucked--but I never begrudged the excessive Dean Stockwell screentime. Showrunner Ron Moore said Stockwell was so good in his role that the writers kept wanting to write for the character, which is why he basically takes over the last season, and I can't say I blame them there.
Yet Miami Vice films him for one scene and goes, "Eh, just have Eddie Olmos recite some bullshit story about samurai honour to a half-Russian kid, call it 'Bushido', play some faux-Japanese music, and that's a wrap."
The episode begins with a surprisingly decent cold open, despite the show's essential '80s-ness and the writers' determination to ruin whatever atmosphere they've accidentally created. Olmos has the camera follow a hooker in a hideous ensemble on quad roller skates (the '80s!) to a beach toilet. Then we cut to Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas). Crockett is scanning the beach with a pair of night-vision binoculars while the camera lingers on Don Johnson's sweaty face and body, presumably a little something for the ladies whose husbands/boyfriends forced them to watch this crap. The highly '80s music is so loud that it occasionally drowns out the dialogue, a problem that continues throughout the episode. Crockett declares it's "snowing on the beach", cluing us hepcats in that the cocaine smuggler they're staking out has arrived. Smuggler and an obvious cop go into the toilet together in a way that totally doesn't make them look like two guys nipping off for quickie gay sex. At this point, a bunch of undercover vice cops reveal themselves--one of whom is, to absolutely no-one's surprise, the "hooker" from the opening shot--to neutralise Smuggler's supporting goons, including one cop completely buried under the sand(!!). Fortunately for Buried Guy, the goon he arrests doesn't resist, since Buried Guy's pistol would be as likely to blow up in his hand as fire, what with the barrel being full of sand and all. Each cop--including Buried Guy!--just happens to be about two feet from a goon when the order comes to neutralise them. Good thing the goons didn't mind someone conspicuously hovering around them until Crockett finally gave the signal to bust 'em all! But when Crockett and Tubbs rush into the toilet to make the main bust, their man on the inside has been rendered helpless, Smuggler is dead, and the money is gone.
Cue the signature Miami Vice theme, which I can't deny is catchy, despite being more '80s than Jennifer Beals in a gigantic perm doing aerobics while wearing legwarmers and crooning a Bangles tune. It's a pretty effective cold open, and I was intrigued about what happened. But I've been fooled before (I'm looking at you, every episode of CSI ever), so I remained cautious. Olmos's Castillo has a verbal sparring match with the cop who was rendered helpless (who turns out to be DEA) in which he implyies that the DEA agent had to have been in on the theft of the money. Immediately, though, the episode reveals that he wasn't in on it, and so all of this means nothing. It turns out that Stockwell's character Jack Gretsky stole the money, and he's just so good that he was able to kill the Smuggler, tie up and render helpless a trained DEA agent, and disappear with the drug money without anyone noticing him.
Castillo says that none of the vice cops (by which he means Crockett and Tubbs) are to approach Gretsky because he's so dangerous. Now, I love Dean Stockwell as much as any man can without turning into a ghey, yet when he appears on screen, he hardly looks like a monstrous killing machine. Stockwell is such an effective actor (and, to give credit where it's due, the writers wrote some decent dialogue for him) that he actually manages to carry off being a badass, explaining that he was able to detect every cop on the beach despite their being undercover, which is how he was able to avoid them. Still, I can't help but wonder how awesome the episode would've been if the roles were reversed. It's impossible, since Olmos was a series regular, but he's much more credible as a badass you'd better not approach, and Stockwell is more believable as the nebbishy lawman determined to bring him in despite the risks.
Gretsky, we learn, is an example of that well-worn hack writer trope, the CIA agent gone rogue. Castillo just happens to know that a local store is actually a CIA front, so he goes there and confronts two sp00ks about The Great One's being in Miami. The episode never explains why Castillo knows this. Is the CIA in the habit of informing local city cops about their front companies? The sp00ks threaten to have his badge (y'know, because the CIA can do that) and generally just behave like jerks, but they do reveal that Gretsky betrayedEdmonton both them and the KGB, so Castillo had better help the CIA get to him before the dirty Commies do. Castillo surprises me by asking the sensible question, "Why would he be any better off with you?", and the sp00ks surprise me even more by giving a decent answer: "He knows a lot of things we want to know. He can take years telling us stories."
Eventually we get the scene in which Castillo and Gretsky confront each other in a Japanese-style Buddhist temple with the faux-Japanese music occasionally making it impossible to hear the actors. Castillo and Gretsky exposit that they, again to the surprise of no-one (at least, no-one familiar with '80s cop cliches), served together in the Vietnam War, in which they apparently once fended off the North Vietnamese Army with swords. Vietnam turns out to be one of those Japanese countries, as Castillo lives in an imitation Tokugawa-era Japanese-style house and has his katana left over from the war. Gretsky reveals that he's dying, that he stole the money to help his wife and son escape from the CIA-KGB after his death, and, worst of all, that he's being traded to the Kings. He pulls a gun on Castillo and fires, plainly trying not to hit him, while Castillo defends himself. Exit Stockwell. The rest of the episode has Castillo finding the wife and kid, taking them somewhere the Russians can't find them, the Russians immediately finding them, and Castillo wiping out the Russian sp00ks with his katana. There are some hilariously inept sequences, including a truck's lightly tapping a police car causing both vehicles to massively explode (I guess the truck was filled with Atomic Gasoline), wifey being unable to find the pistol she dropped in 'the dark' despite the pistol's clearly lying in a ray of light on the floor directly in front of her, and people being shot without showing any sign of injury other than a small circle of red on their white collared shirts. The episode occasionally cuts to Crockett and Tubbs on Castillo's trail, and they show up at the end to save him, but they have even less dialogue and screentime than Stockwell.
And that's all to the good. Despite the clunky writing, the incredibly annoying and overbearing music, and the hokey Japanese references, it was a decent hour of '80s television, certainly more serious and realistic than any given episode of Knight Rider. (Okay, bad example.) Olmos's solid acting anchors the absurd premise; because he takes it seriously, so does the audience. The set-up is effective, even if the payoff isn't, and anything that puts money into Dean Stockwell's pocket can't really go wrong by me.
I can even sorta tolerate Blue Velvet, for Christ's sake.
====================================================================
* Watching this episode, I was struck by how short an "hour-long" television show is these days. In 1966, the original Star Trek was 51 minutes. Twenty years later, Miami Vice was 50 minutes. Twenty years after that, Battlestar Galactica was 42 minutes. It's like a premodern tax system: Over time, the ever-shrinking base of people who still watch TV shows on, well, TV has to bear more and more of the burden of paying for them (in the form of an ever-increasing number of commercials). How long before the lengths of the content and the advertisements reach parity?
But I'm doing a series on Edward James Olmos's body of work, so I can't really ignore arguably his best-known role: Lt. Martin Castillo on *sigh* Miami Vice. Yes, Olmos is probably better known for his second banana role on a mediocre '80s cop drama than for Blade Runner, probably the greatest artistic work to come out of that entire godforsaken decade. So I did some Stephenie Meyer-level research (I read parts of Miami Vice's Wikipedia page) and found an episode focussing on Castillo and guest starring Dean Stockwell(!). Nothing's ever been made worse by having Dean Stockwell in it, so I plopped down to watch two of my favourite actors go head to head. Maybe Miami Vice wouldn't suck so bad after all.
And you know what? It didn't, though I'm not convinced that isn't because I cherry-picked an episode all but guaranteed to not be terrible. It wasn't great--being Carl Eusebius, I found plenty to bitch about--but still, it wasn't awful. This was also probably helped by Olmos's direction of this episode since as I noted in my review of American Me, Olmos is a competent, confident director, if an unexceptional one. Even better, the main characters, Detectives Crockett and Tubbs (one's black, one's white--they're the original odd couple!), are hardly even in the episode at all. If crappy cop shows have one thing in common--from the '80s to the '00s--it's that when you have a talented guest star, you shove your shitty lead players aside and let the guest star strut her stuff.
Except that doesn't really happen, either. Instead, the episode focusses almost entirely on Castillo and gives Stockwell exactly one scene in the entire 50 minutes of this episode.* That's right, one. He's the top-billed guest star (coming as he was off his turn in the hugely and unjustly popular Blue Velvet), and he's on screen for four minutes, tops. That's the top-billed guest star. He has one scene with Olmos, and then he's out of the episode entirely. Could they not afford his salary, or what? I just can't believe you would get an actor of Stockwell's calibre and then do with him not a damn thing. I have issues with the last season of Battlestar Galactica--the primary issue being that it sucked--but I never begrudged the excessive Dean Stockwell screentime. Showrunner Ron Moore said Stockwell was so good in his role that the writers kept wanting to write for the character, which is why he basically takes over the last season, and I can't say I blame them there.
Yet Miami Vice films him for one scene and goes, "Eh, just have Eddie Olmos recite some bullshit story about samurai honour to a half-Russian kid, call it 'Bushido', play some faux-Japanese music, and that's a wrap."
The episode begins with a surprisingly decent cold open, despite the show's essential '80s-ness and the writers' determination to ruin whatever atmosphere they've accidentally created. Olmos has the camera follow a hooker in a hideous ensemble on quad roller skates (the '80s!) to a beach toilet. Then we cut to Crockett (Don Johnson) and Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas). Crockett is scanning the beach with a pair of night-vision binoculars while the camera lingers on Don Johnson's sweaty face and body, presumably a little something for the ladies whose husbands/boyfriends forced them to watch this crap. The highly '80s music is so loud that it occasionally drowns out the dialogue, a problem that continues throughout the episode. Crockett declares it's "snowing on the beach", cluing us hepcats in that the cocaine smuggler they're staking out has arrived. Smuggler and an obvious cop go into the toilet together in a way that totally doesn't make them look like two guys nipping off for quickie gay sex. At this point, a bunch of undercover vice cops reveal themselves--one of whom is, to absolutely no-one's surprise, the "hooker" from the opening shot--to neutralise Smuggler's supporting goons, including one cop completely buried under the sand(!!). Fortunately for Buried Guy, the goon he arrests doesn't resist, since Buried Guy's pistol would be as likely to blow up in his hand as fire, what with the barrel being full of sand and all. Each cop--including Buried Guy!--just happens to be about two feet from a goon when the order comes to neutralise them. Good thing the goons didn't mind someone conspicuously hovering around them until Crockett finally gave the signal to bust 'em all! But when Crockett and Tubbs rush into the toilet to make the main bust, their man on the inside has been rendered helpless, Smuggler is dead, and the money is gone.
Cue the signature Miami Vice theme, which I can't deny is catchy, despite being more '80s than Jennifer Beals in a gigantic perm doing aerobics while wearing legwarmers and crooning a Bangles tune. It's a pretty effective cold open, and I was intrigued about what happened. But I've been fooled before (I'm looking at you, every episode of CSI ever), so I remained cautious. Olmos's Castillo has a verbal sparring match with the cop who was rendered helpless (who turns out to be DEA) in which he implyies that the DEA agent had to have been in on the theft of the money. Immediately, though, the episode reveals that he wasn't in on it, and so all of this means nothing. It turns out that Stockwell's character Jack Gretsky stole the money, and he's just so good that he was able to kill the Smuggler, tie up and render helpless a trained DEA agent, and disappear with the drug money without anyone noticing him.
Castillo says that none of the vice cops (by which he means Crockett and Tubbs) are to approach Gretsky because he's so dangerous. Now, I love Dean Stockwell as much as any man can without turning into a ghey, yet when he appears on screen, he hardly looks like a monstrous killing machine. Stockwell is such an effective actor (and, to give credit where it's due, the writers wrote some decent dialogue for him) that he actually manages to carry off being a badass, explaining that he was able to detect every cop on the beach despite their being undercover, which is how he was able to avoid them. Still, I can't help but wonder how awesome the episode would've been if the roles were reversed. It's impossible, since Olmos was a series regular, but he's much more credible as a badass you'd better not approach, and Stockwell is more believable as the nebbishy lawman determined to bring him in despite the risks.
Gretsky, we learn, is an example of that well-worn hack writer trope, the CIA agent gone rogue. Castillo just happens to know that a local store is actually a CIA front, so he goes there and confronts two sp00ks about The Great One's being in Miami. The episode never explains why Castillo knows this. Is the CIA in the habit of informing local city cops about their front companies? The sp00ks threaten to have his badge (y'know, because the CIA can do that) and generally just behave like jerks, but they do reveal that Gretsky betrayed
Eventually we get the scene in which Castillo and Gretsky confront each other in a Japanese-style Buddhist temple with the faux-Japanese music occasionally making it impossible to hear the actors. Castillo and Gretsky exposit that they, again to the surprise of no-one (at least, no-one familiar with '80s cop cliches), served together in the Vietnam War, in which they apparently once fended off the North Vietnamese Army with swords. Vietnam turns out to be one of those Japanese countries, as Castillo lives in an imitation Tokugawa-era Japanese-style house and has his katana left over from the war. Gretsky reveals that he's dying, that he stole the money to help his wife and son escape from the CIA-KGB after his death, and, worst of all, that he's being traded to the Kings. He pulls a gun on Castillo and fires, plainly trying not to hit him, while Castillo defends himself. Exit Stockwell. The rest of the episode has Castillo finding the wife and kid, taking them somewhere the Russians can't find them, the Russians immediately finding them, and Castillo wiping out the Russian sp00ks with his katana. There are some hilariously inept sequences, including a truck's lightly tapping a police car causing both vehicles to massively explode (I guess the truck was filled with Atomic Gasoline), wifey being unable to find the pistol she dropped in 'the dark' despite the pistol's clearly lying in a ray of light on the floor directly in front of her, and people being shot without showing any sign of injury other than a small circle of red on their white collared shirts. The episode occasionally cuts to Crockett and Tubbs on Castillo's trail, and they show up at the end to save him, but they have even less dialogue and screentime than Stockwell.
And that's all to the good. Despite the clunky writing, the incredibly annoying and overbearing music, and the hokey Japanese references, it was a decent hour of '80s television, certainly more serious and realistic than any given episode of Knight Rider. (Okay, bad example.) Olmos's solid acting anchors the absurd premise; because he takes it seriously, so does the audience. The set-up is effective, even if the payoff isn't, and anything that puts money into Dean Stockwell's pocket can't really go wrong by me.
I can even sorta tolerate Blue Velvet, for Christ's sake.
====================================================================
* Watching this episode, I was struck by how short an "hour-long" television show is these days. In 1966, the original Star Trek was 51 minutes. Twenty years later, Miami Vice was 50 minutes. Twenty years after that, Battlestar Galactica was 42 minutes. It's like a premodern tax system: Over time, the ever-shrinking base of people who still watch TV shows on, well, TV has to bear more and more of the burden of paying for them (in the form of an ever-increasing number of commercials). How long before the lengths of the content and the advertisements reach parity?
October 3, 2012
EJO Review: Blade Runner
Okay, this week I'm doing Blade Runner.
It's part of the Edward James Olmos series. Otherwise, I'd never dare write about this film. But I can't do a series on God without talking about His personal project. As much as I'd like to have seen Ridley Scott's version of Dune (despite my inexplicable love for the David Lynch version), I thank God that in His wisdom He saw fit to kill Scott's brother so Scott would make Blade Runner instead.
What? It's art. It's a matter of life and death.
I know, I know, I hear what you're saying. "Why are you writing up Blade Runner, Carl Eusebius? What can you possibly say about the greatest science fiction film of all time that hasn't been said before?" Nothing, my little droogies. One of the most analysed, dissected, copied, questioned, talked about films of the 20th century, Blade Runner (1982), as deep as it is, is so ingrained in world culture (at least the elite technology-dependent world culture) that any way of approaching it has been done, aped, re-done, re-thought and re-tired to the dustbin of "been there, done that".
But everything old is new again, and I suppose there's a chance somebody reading this blog is such a uncultured philistine that she hasn't seen Blade Runner yet. By all the gods who aren't in Heaven, if you are such a person and you have anything that can be mistaken for a human soul, stop what you're doing right now and go watch Blade Runner. If you've ever wondered what it means to be human. If you've ever felt threatened by technology. If you've ever worried about being rendered obsolete. If you've ever questioned your emotional response. If you've ever felt alone with the world against you. If you've ever felt like an outcast. If you've ever wondered if humanity is worth saving. If you have a major crush on Harrison Ford (and who doesn't?), you need to see this film.
If you call yourself a human being--with all the good and the bad that entails--you need to see this film.
Blade Runner, on its surface, is about a cop who kills robots in the future. That's what the artsy-types told the moneymen to get the dough needed to make it. What it's really about is what it means to be human. How do you know you're you? How do you know you're human, or what it means to be human? What does it mean to say, "I'm me"? Are you a collection of memories and experiences, or is there something more? If something walks like a human and talks like a human, is it human? If it isn't, why isn't it? And is there really a way to tell the difference?
What I love about Blade Runner is that it doesn't answer these questions, at least before Ridley Scott decided to make sure everyone knows he doesn't understand why his own film is great. (See also Lucas, George.) Fortunately we still have Harrison Ford. God enjoyed his scenes with Ford in this movie so much that He blessed him with a (mostly) successful career. A mere 12 years after Blade Runner, Ford made The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones. Coincidence? I think not! It's not every day you get to be in a Tommy Lee Jones film.
Blade Runner opens with the transcendent, mystical experience of Vangelis's music, followed by a fantastic opening scene with Brion James (in other words, a scene with Brion James in it) as Leon, a replicant, the movie's unnecessary yet still awesome word for android. Leon's interrogator makes the mistake of asking about Leon's mother, and Leon makes him pay the penalty for dissing a man's momma. Then we meet Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard. He's a former "blade runner", a cop whose job it is to "retire" any replicant on Earth, as their presence here is illegal. Deckard is quickly strong-armed into meeting with his old boss (M. Emmett Walsh) by another cop called Gaff, played by God using a mix of human languages that He created Himself especially for the role. (This is Cityspeak, for those of you who play Shadowrun and wondered exactly what Cityspeak is. I got a special kick out of the fact that Korean is part of Cityspeak, though nobody but me seems to notice. God knew that Samsung would one day rule us all.) Deckard is told that four replicants are loose on Earth, and he is to retire them or else. This is complicated by at least three factors: Deckard quit a while ago and so is out of practice, the replicants are a new model (Nexus 6) that is more cunning and more powerful than older models, and Deckard eventually finds himself falling for another Nexus 6*. Oh, and one of the replicants is played by Rutger Hauer, a man who destroys lesser men with his raw sexual masculinity.
Hints are dropped throughout the film that Deckard is himself a replicant, but the film as it is does not offer a definitive answer. (Decades later, Scott says yes, Ford no. Of course Ford is right. Don't get me started on why, though. That's another whole post.) The ambiguity is perfect for the film, whose central question is the difficulty of determining what it means to be human. In a world that continues to find in animals more and more traits once considered constitutive of human beings (tool use, reasoning, mathematical ability, self-awareness, empathy, and even language), Blade Runner only becomes more relevant with each passing decade.
In addition to the rich texture of its themes, strong performances (often misunderstood as stiff by those who have to look up "subtlety" in the dictionary), and poetic dialogue ("Do you like our owl?" "It's artificial?" "Of course it is."), Blade Runner is a visual and auditory feast. I don't know that any film's visual style has been more borrowed from than Blade Runner's, and that's not even counting anime. If I had a dollar for every steal of the giant advertising blimp blaring "Visit the off-world colonies!" to the sad-sack urban poor in their decaying city slums below, I'd be rich enough to buy my own Republican presidential nomination. If I had a penny for every scene set inside a smoky room lit entirely by light streaming in through the blades of a slowly turning industrial fan, I could buy the moon.
I could go on, but frankly, writing about a good movie gives me the heebie-jeebies. I'm going to go put on The Wicker Man to erase this pleasant feeling of contentment and general appreciation of the beautiful things in the world that's running all through my guttiwuts.
Ah, there. I'm back to utterly loathing all humanity, and my pen once more drips with venom. Now, where's my copy of that Tekken movie....
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* That replicant is played by Sean Young, and Harrison Ford shows his acting chops by doing convincing love scenes with her despite that fact that he and Young utterly loathed each other from their very first meeting. I don't know how anyone could dislike Harrison Ford, but then again, we are talking about a woman who crashed the set of Batman Returns dressed in a homemade Catwoman costume.
It's part of the Edward James Olmos series. Otherwise, I'd never dare write about this film. But I can't do a series on God without talking about His personal project. As much as I'd like to have seen Ridley Scott's version of Dune (despite my inexplicable love for the David Lynch version), I thank God that in His wisdom He saw fit to kill Scott's brother so Scott would make Blade Runner instead.
What? It's art. It's a matter of life and death.
I know, I know, I hear what you're saying. "Why are you writing up Blade Runner, Carl Eusebius? What can you possibly say about the greatest science fiction film of all time that hasn't been said before?" Nothing, my little droogies. One of the most analysed, dissected, copied, questioned, talked about films of the 20th century, Blade Runner (1982), as deep as it is, is so ingrained in world culture (at least the elite technology-dependent world culture) that any way of approaching it has been done, aped, re-done, re-thought and re-tired to the dustbin of "been there, done that".
But everything old is new again, and I suppose there's a chance somebody reading this blog is such a uncultured philistine that she hasn't seen Blade Runner yet. By all the gods who aren't in Heaven, if you are such a person and you have anything that can be mistaken for a human soul, stop what you're doing right now and go watch Blade Runner. If you've ever wondered what it means to be human. If you've ever felt threatened by technology. If you've ever worried about being rendered obsolete. If you've ever questioned your emotional response. If you've ever felt alone with the world against you. If you've ever felt like an outcast. If you've ever wondered if humanity is worth saving. If you have a major crush on Harrison Ford (and who doesn't?), you need to see this film.
If you call yourself a human being--with all the good and the bad that entails--you need to see this film.
Blade Runner, on its surface, is about a cop who kills robots in the future. That's what the artsy-types told the moneymen to get the dough needed to make it. What it's really about is what it means to be human. How do you know you're you? How do you know you're human, or what it means to be human? What does it mean to say, "I'm me"? Are you a collection of memories and experiences, or is there something more? If something walks like a human and talks like a human, is it human? If it isn't, why isn't it? And is there really a way to tell the difference?
What I love about Blade Runner is that it doesn't answer these questions, at least before Ridley Scott decided to make sure everyone knows he doesn't understand why his own film is great. (See also Lucas, George.) Fortunately we still have Harrison Ford. God enjoyed his scenes with Ford in this movie so much that He blessed him with a (mostly) successful career. A mere 12 years after Blade Runner, Ford made The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones. Coincidence? I think not! It's not every day you get to be in a Tommy Lee Jones film.
Blade Runner opens with the transcendent, mystical experience of Vangelis's music, followed by a fantastic opening scene with Brion James (in other words, a scene with Brion James in it) as Leon, a replicant, the movie's unnecessary yet still awesome word for android. Leon's interrogator makes the mistake of asking about Leon's mother, and Leon makes him pay the penalty for dissing a man's momma. Then we meet Harrison Ford as Rick Deckard. He's a former "blade runner", a cop whose job it is to "retire" any replicant on Earth, as their presence here is illegal. Deckard is quickly strong-armed into meeting with his old boss (M. Emmett Walsh) by another cop called Gaff, played by God using a mix of human languages that He created Himself especially for the role. (This is Cityspeak, for those of you who play Shadowrun and wondered exactly what Cityspeak is. I got a special kick out of the fact that Korean is part of Cityspeak, though nobody but me seems to notice. God knew that Samsung would one day rule us all.) Deckard is told that four replicants are loose on Earth, and he is to retire them or else. This is complicated by at least three factors: Deckard quit a while ago and so is out of practice, the replicants are a new model (Nexus 6) that is more cunning and more powerful than older models, and Deckard eventually finds himself falling for another Nexus 6*. Oh, and one of the replicants is played by Rutger Hauer, a man who destroys lesser men with his raw sexual masculinity.
Hints are dropped throughout the film that Deckard is himself a replicant, but the film as it is does not offer a definitive answer. (Decades later, Scott says yes, Ford no. Of course Ford is right. Don't get me started on why, though. That's another whole post.) The ambiguity is perfect for the film, whose central question is the difficulty of determining what it means to be human. In a world that continues to find in animals more and more traits once considered constitutive of human beings (tool use, reasoning, mathematical ability, self-awareness, empathy, and even language), Blade Runner only becomes more relevant with each passing decade.
In addition to the rich texture of its themes, strong performances (often misunderstood as stiff by those who have to look up "subtlety" in the dictionary), and poetic dialogue ("Do you like our owl?" "It's artificial?" "Of course it is."), Blade Runner is a visual and auditory feast. I don't know that any film's visual style has been more borrowed from than Blade Runner's, and that's not even counting anime. If I had a dollar for every steal of the giant advertising blimp blaring "Visit the off-world colonies!" to the sad-sack urban poor in their decaying city slums below, I'd be rich enough to buy my own Republican presidential nomination. If I had a penny for every scene set inside a smoky room lit entirely by light streaming in through the blades of a slowly turning industrial fan, I could buy the moon.
I could go on, but frankly, writing about a good movie gives me the heebie-jeebies. I'm going to go put on The Wicker Man to erase this pleasant feeling of contentment and general appreciation of the beautiful things in the world that's running all through my guttiwuts.
Ah, there. I'm back to utterly loathing all humanity, and my pen once more drips with venom. Now, where's my copy of that Tekken movie....
============================================================
* That replicant is played by Sean Young, and Harrison Ford shows his acting chops by doing convincing love scenes with her despite that fact that he and Young utterly loathed each other from their very first meeting. I don't know how anyone could dislike Harrison Ford, but then again, we are talking about a woman who crashed the set of Batman Returns dressed in a homemade Catwoman costume.
September 7, 2012
EJO Review: Stand and Deliver
This week in our review of the body of work of Edward James Olmos, we look at the only performance for which He was nominated for an Academy Award: Jaime Escalante in Stand and Deliver (1988). If you know anything about the Academy, that right there tells you exactly what kind of film this is. Oh, and for a particular reader of this blog, I'll just point out that the Oscar that year went to Dustin Hoffman. That's right, Admiral Adama lost the Oscar to Rain Man.
I don't want to shock the hell out of you, but Stand and Deliver sees Olmos playing a Latino character trying to make something out of Chicanos trapped in the barrios. Don't even pretend like you saw that coming! This time he's a Bolivian maths teacher who takes underachievers from Garfield High School and soon has them passing the AP Calculus exam. (The film helpfully explains, for those of us who don't know, that less than 2% of all high school students in the Empire pass this exam. At least, in 1988.) The drama in the first half of the film stems from Escalante's attempts to get the students to go from expecting to fail in school and then get menial (or criminal) jobs to believing that school is worthwhile and that they can succeed. The second half deals with the problem of racism when the students do in fact do well.
A film like this succeeds or fails according to the performance of the actor playing the teacher. (See Dead Poets Society for what happens when you accidentally hire Robin Williams for the role.) Fortunately for the movie, Olmos is Olmos, so despite the very quirky affect he adopts (reportedly based on the real Jaime Escalante, as the film is based on a true story), we like Escalante and want him to succeed. The film is also helped immensely by the charisma--if not necessarily strong acting--of a young Lou Diamond Phillips, who made this film before his star-making turn as Ritchie Valens in La Bamba (though it was released after it). The best scenes are those between Phillips and Olmos and between Olmos and Vanessa Marquez as the top student whose working-class father doesn't see any value in her going to college. In addition to watching the students first reject, then accept, then excel for Escalante in the classroom, we also see snippets of their lives outside of class and the obstacles they face in their home lives. One memorable scene has Phillips asks for a second set of books to leave at home so that his fellow gangstaz don't see him carrying, like, books back and forth to school.
But in the end, I have to agree with Roger Ebert's review, where he notes that something's missing. The story should come alive more than it does. Ebert points out that the film is murky in places, often where it's most fascinating. The most grating example involves the Marquez character. Olmos has a wonderful scene in which he confronts her father in the restaurant the father owns and where he expects her to work as a server. Escalante remarks that the AP exam can lead to university which can lead to a better life for her than waiting tables. The father angrily retorts that he started out washing dishes for a nickel an hour, and now he owns the restaurant, and Mr. Escalante may consider himself thrown out of said restaurant on his ass! Marquez's chair is, of course, empty in the next class. But a few days later, she suddenly shows up and continues in class with no explanation. Did the father forgive Escalante? Did he come to see the value of a university education? Did her mother or someone else intervene? Is she attending in defiance of her father, and if so, what are the consequences? We never have any idea. A powerful dramatic scene in which Escalante, for once, may have cocked things up, and it all gets resolved, off-screen...somehow.
I can't agree with Ebert, though, about his other reason for saying the movie is weak: that the students' lives outside the classroom are uninteresting. (Well, he's right that the love story is out of place and goes nowhere.) In fact, I wanted more of these scenes. The film runs but 103 minutes. Another 15 minutes or so of these scenes might have strengthened our connection to the kids and gotten us more invested in their success and (especially) anger when they are accused of cheating on the AP exam.
The strongest scene in the second half of the movie has Escalante directly accusing two ETS investigators of only doubting his students' scores because they're kids with Spanish surnames attending a barrio school. Andy Garcia, as one of the investigators, angrily shouts that no one can accuse him of racism because he's a minority himself. The film doesn't have Escalante challenge this; it's instead left to ring hollowly in the air like the meaningless claptrap it is. The students are forced to re-take the test, and there's tension there: If they pass again, will they get an apology from ETS? Yeah, right, you're more likely to get human dignity out of Sean Hannity.
What can I say? The film worked for me. It's maddeningly vague at times, a few of its subplots don't pay off, and it doesn't explore the students' lives enough, but when my big criticisms are that I want to know more, it can't be that bad. If you're a sucker for upbeat, uplifting films about real heroes doing a truly tough job (actually teaching socially-disadvantaged kids and not just marking time in the classroom until the bell rings), Stand and Deliver is for you. If you're a cynical misanthrope like Carl Eusebius, well, Edward James Olmos might just win you over anyway.
I don't want to shock the hell out of you, but Stand and Deliver sees Olmos playing a Latino character trying to make something out of Chicanos trapped in the barrios. Don't even pretend like you saw that coming! This time he's a Bolivian maths teacher who takes underachievers from Garfield High School and soon has them passing the AP Calculus exam. (The film helpfully explains, for those of us who don't know, that less than 2% of all high school students in the Empire pass this exam. At least, in 1988.) The drama in the first half of the film stems from Escalante's attempts to get the students to go from expecting to fail in school and then get menial (or criminal) jobs to believing that school is worthwhile and that they can succeed. The second half deals with the problem of racism when the students do in fact do well.
A film like this succeeds or fails according to the performance of the actor playing the teacher. (See Dead Poets Society for what happens when you accidentally hire Robin Williams for the role.) Fortunately for the movie, Olmos is Olmos, so despite the very quirky affect he adopts (reportedly based on the real Jaime Escalante, as the film is based on a true story), we like Escalante and want him to succeed. The film is also helped immensely by the charisma--if not necessarily strong acting--of a young Lou Diamond Phillips, who made this film before his star-making turn as Ritchie Valens in La Bamba (though it was released after it). The best scenes are those between Phillips and Olmos and between Olmos and Vanessa Marquez as the top student whose working-class father doesn't see any value in her going to college. In addition to watching the students first reject, then accept, then excel for Escalante in the classroom, we also see snippets of their lives outside of class and the obstacles they face in their home lives. One memorable scene has Phillips asks for a second set of books to leave at home so that his fellow gangstaz don't see him carrying, like, books back and forth to school.
But in the end, I have to agree with Roger Ebert's review, where he notes that something's missing. The story should come alive more than it does. Ebert points out that the film is murky in places, often where it's most fascinating. The most grating example involves the Marquez character. Olmos has a wonderful scene in which he confronts her father in the restaurant the father owns and where he expects her to work as a server. Escalante remarks that the AP exam can lead to university which can lead to a better life for her than waiting tables. The father angrily retorts that he started out washing dishes for a nickel an hour, and now he owns the restaurant, and Mr. Escalante may consider himself thrown out of said restaurant on his ass! Marquez's chair is, of course, empty in the next class. But a few days later, she suddenly shows up and continues in class with no explanation. Did the father forgive Escalante? Did he come to see the value of a university education? Did her mother or someone else intervene? Is she attending in defiance of her father, and if so, what are the consequences? We never have any idea. A powerful dramatic scene in which Escalante, for once, may have cocked things up, and it all gets resolved, off-screen...somehow.
I can't agree with Ebert, though, about his other reason for saying the movie is weak: that the students' lives outside the classroom are uninteresting. (Well, he's right that the love story is out of place and goes nowhere.) In fact, I wanted more of these scenes. The film runs but 103 minutes. Another 15 minutes or so of these scenes might have strengthened our connection to the kids and gotten us more invested in their success and (especially) anger when they are accused of cheating on the AP exam.
The strongest scene in the second half of the movie has Escalante directly accusing two ETS investigators of only doubting his students' scores because they're kids with Spanish surnames attending a barrio school. Andy Garcia, as one of the investigators, angrily shouts that no one can accuse him of racism because he's a minority himself. The film doesn't have Escalante challenge this; it's instead left to ring hollowly in the air like the meaningless claptrap it is. The students are forced to re-take the test, and there's tension there: If they pass again, will they get an apology from ETS? Yeah, right, you're more likely to get human dignity out of Sean Hannity.
What can I say? The film worked for me. It's maddeningly vague at times, a few of its subplots don't pay off, and it doesn't explore the students' lives enough, but when my big criticisms are that I want to know more, it can't be that bad. If you're a sucker for upbeat, uplifting films about real heroes doing a truly tough job (actually teaching socially-disadvantaged kids and not just marking time in the classroom until the bell rings), Stand and Deliver is for you. If you're a cynical misanthrope like Carl Eusebius, well, Edward James Olmos might just win you over anyway.
August 22, 2012
EJO Review: Wolfen
Next up on our Edward James Olmos series is a real disappointment. There aren't many good werewolf films outside of Universal's Wolfman series, and Wolfen (1981) was supposed to be one of good ones. Sadly, not only does it not rank with An American Werewolf in London or The Howling, or even Wolf (werewolf Jack Nicholson!), but it's actually rather terrible. And it's not even a werewolf movie!
The film opens with a monster attack sequence that the makers of Predator clearly saw. The wolfen-point-of-view shots were undoubtedly the inspiration for the Predator's infrared vision. Since I plan to rip this movie pretty hard, it's nice to start off with something good, and the film deserves credit for its pioneering monster POV. Thank you, Wolfen; Predator would've been slightly less awesome without you, so you weren't a complete waste of celluloid. The shots of run-down New York City are also effective, atmospheric, and creepy. I miss the New York that gave us films like this and Escape from New York. Where can we find a rotting cesspool of crime and decay to film now? Thank God there's still Detroit.
Anywho, after taking way too long stalking people (and getting so close to them that you can't believe it wouldn't be seen, or heard, or smelled, a recurring problem with the stalking sequences), the wolfen kills a rich, important muckety-muck and his wife, though not before killing their chauffeur, because the black guy always has to die first. Solving this murder is so important to the city of New York that they bring in a fat, lazy drunk specially to handle the case. Said fat, lazy drunk is played by Emmy-award winner Albert Finney, who does an excellent job playing a fat, lazy drunk, and not just because he's English. In fact, despite occasionally missing with his American accent, Finney gives the film's best performance (apart from God's own, natch), and I'm thankful he was chosen for this role rather than America's home-grown go-to guy for the role of fat, lazy drunk in the late '70s and early '80s, Joe Don Baker. The other performances range from adequate (Gregory Hines(!) as Finney's coroner pal, Tom Noonan as a zoologist whose obsession with wolves even I find unhealthy) to jaw-droppingly awful (Diane Venora as a psychologist assigned to assist Finney, though her assistance consists entirely of sleeping with him for no reason other than they're the two leads in the film). This is also the film debut of Reginald VelJohnson, notable because it's possibly his only appearance in front of a camera not playing a cop.
Edward James Olmos is cast in this film according to the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule as an American Indian(!), despite the fact that he doesn't look Indian at all. You'll remember from last week that this rule allows actors in the "not WASP or black" category to freely play any ethnicity in that category, since American audiences won't know any better. He plays Eddie Holt,* a militant Indian put away by Finney's Dewey Wilson (yes, really) for killing an apple. No, I don't mean he went to prison for wanton slaughter of innocent fruit. "Apple" is apparently the American Indian version of Uncle Tom (or, to the primary audience of this blog, "banana"), that is, a ethnic minority who's sold out to the Man. Holt is so obviously set up as the werewolf that you instantly know he's not the werewolf, though it takes Olmos running naked on the beach for Dewey to figure this out. Frankly, I would've preferred that Dewey make this determination without my having to see the little Eddie. The scene has Dewey, thinking Holt is going to turn into a werewolf (it's complicated), following him to the beach where he strips naked, licks up water from a puddle in the sand (wolves drink seawater?), and runs around making growling and howling noises. While all this is going on, to absolutely no one's surprise, someone is killed by the wolfen in another part of the city, sending Dewey back to the drawing board for suspects. I admired Olmos's dedication to his art in this scene, as it must have taken serious cajones to go on camera and do the scene rather than just punching the director in the face or smiting him with a thunderbolt, and it reminds me just how prudish our society has become over the lifetime of yours truly. Still, a grown man running around pretending to be a wolf just looks silly, no matter how much gravitas the actor has or how scary the music is. It's a goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously, like something out of The Exorcist. Actually, "goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously" describes the whole of The Exorcist.
As with the previous projects, I can see why Olmos took this role. Wolfen is firmly in the vein of 1970s Western-civilization-in-decline films that portray victims of European colonization and oppression as morally superior to their conquerors. The film sets up a dichotomy between the Noble Savages (guess who they are) and the White Man Dependent on, Like, Capitalism, Man, and comes down clearly on the side of the white liberal guilt. I mean, Indians. And this is the single biggest problem with the film. It is, in fact, the reason it's a truly bad film rather than a serviceable low-key, low-FX monster flick. There is essentially only one Indian character (Holt), and more than once he gets to wax morally superior to Dewey by ponderously speechifying about how corrupt White Society is. To give you an idea of how well the Indians emerge as characters, the only other Indian has any screentime at all is credited as "Old Indian". No name, just Old Indian. We don't even find out what tribe these Indians are a part of, or even if they're from the same tribe! They're just Indians, and Indians love nature and marijuana and hate capitalism and Whitey. And the ones who don't aren't real Indians ("apples") and deserve to be murdered. The filmmakers would undoubtedly be appalled to hear that this is the subtext of their film, as I'm sure they didn't intend to treat their Indian characters as shabbily as 1960s Westerns that portrayed them as a faceless horde of identical backward savages to be mowed down by heroic white cowboys. But to quote Ken Begg, "well, you can’t not see it. I’m absolutely sure that it’s unintentional, but still, it’s kind of there anyway."
The worst example of the one-dimensional nature of the Indian characters in this film is the excruciating exposition scene near the end, in which Dewey, rather than discovering the secret of the wolfen through the White Man's Science of his detective work, has the wolfen explained to him by the Indians (again, mostly by Olmos looking righteously angry). Dewey goes to a bar full of Indians, imaginatively named the Wigwam Bar (really?), and there the Indians painstakingly explain to him what the wolfen are, why they've done what they've done, and why the White Man deserves to have it done to him. (That the wolfen have killed a number of black characters at this point goes unaddressed. I guess they're collateral damage from the wolfen's carpet bombs of justice.) Why yes, the Indians are smoking peace pipes while generic Indian chanting plays on the soundtrack.** I'm so glad you asked!
Wolfen's pacing is slow, its acting is hit (Finney, Olmos)-or-miss (Venora, the non-Finney cops and investigators), its story is a little scattershot, its kills are telegraphed (maybe they were slightly more surprising in 1981, but I doubt it), and its central monster not being a werewolf is a cheat. But all of these things could be forgiven if not for the ham-handed "message" of the film and its treatment of Indian characters as positive stereotypes every bit as offensive as the negative stereotypes it's reacting against. And then there's the ending. And I said, you find out what the wolfen are and why they're doing what they're doing, and the film clearly agrees that they have some justification. But the ending torpedoes any final hope the film had. Not because it has the wolfen offscreen teleporting from ground level to the penthouse balcony of a skyscraper, but because Dewey realises that the wise Indians are wise and that the wolfen are morally correct, and he decides they should be left to continue to murder people as they see fit. I'm serious, that's really the implication of the ending. Dewey agrees that the wolfen are right to eat the people they've chosen to eat. I can't explain to you how little sense this makes in the context of the film. It's bad enough that the makers of the film thought this, given the situation they've set up, but why does Dewey accept it? There's nothing about the character, either before or after his experiences with the wolfen, that in any way suggests he'd be okay with this. The wolfen even eat one of his friends in the movie! Dewey must've smoked some of whatever they put in those peace pipes to just accept that the wolfen have killed (including, again, a good friend of his) and will continue to kill. That, or the filmmakers allowed their own belief that the wolfen are right to impose itself on their character, regardless of whether or not the character and his experiences support that view. I'm betting on the latter.
I haven't mentioned the subplot of another entire group of investigators trying to link the murder of the rich muckety-muck to a vague, ill-defined "terrorist" group, using some kind of truth-machine that looks like whatever Egon was imaging Dana's face with in the original Ghostbusters. But that's okay, because this storyline has impact on exactly nothing, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it was included. But as I've noted, it's the film's moral failings that truly made me angry and frustrated with it. Like The Constant Gardener, the film makes its creators appears to be of the "if your cause is just, anything you do in furtherance of that cause is just" school of evil. Ends alone do not justify any and all means.
Unless the goal is to make sure there are no more Adam Sandler movies. In that case, use any means necessary.
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* How they resisted naming the character Eddie Two-Bears or something equally "Indian" I'll never know, but kudos to the filmmakers for at least avoiding this stereotype.
** Actually, the Indians give two completely different explanations for why the wolfen are killing people, but nobody ever seems to notice this.
The film opens with a monster attack sequence that the makers of Predator clearly saw. The wolfen-point-of-view shots were undoubtedly the inspiration for the Predator's infrared vision. Since I plan to rip this movie pretty hard, it's nice to start off with something good, and the film deserves credit for its pioneering monster POV. Thank you, Wolfen; Predator would've been slightly less awesome without you, so you weren't a complete waste of celluloid. The shots of run-down New York City are also effective, atmospheric, and creepy. I miss the New York that gave us films like this and Escape from New York. Where can we find a rotting cesspool of crime and decay to film now? Thank God there's still Detroit.
Anywho, after taking way too long stalking people (and getting so close to them that you can't believe it wouldn't be seen, or heard, or smelled, a recurring problem with the stalking sequences), the wolfen kills a rich, important muckety-muck and his wife, though not before killing their chauffeur, because the black guy always has to die first. Solving this murder is so important to the city of New York that they bring in a fat, lazy drunk specially to handle the case. Said fat, lazy drunk is played by Emmy-award winner Albert Finney, who does an excellent job playing a fat, lazy drunk, and not just because he's English. In fact, despite occasionally missing with his American accent, Finney gives the film's best performance (apart from God's own, natch), and I'm thankful he was chosen for this role rather than America's home-grown go-to guy for the role of fat, lazy drunk in the late '70s and early '80s, Joe Don Baker. The other performances range from adequate (Gregory Hines(!) as Finney's coroner pal, Tom Noonan as a zoologist whose obsession with wolves even I find unhealthy) to jaw-droppingly awful (Diane Venora as a psychologist assigned to assist Finney, though her assistance consists entirely of sleeping with him for no reason other than they're the two leads in the film). This is also the film debut of Reginald VelJohnson, notable because it's possibly his only appearance in front of a camera not playing a cop.
Edward James Olmos is cast in this film according to the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule as an American Indian(!), despite the fact that he doesn't look Indian at all. You'll remember from last week that this rule allows actors in the "not WASP or black" category to freely play any ethnicity in that category, since American audiences won't know any better. He plays Eddie Holt,* a militant Indian put away by Finney's Dewey Wilson (yes, really) for killing an apple. No, I don't mean he went to prison for wanton slaughter of innocent fruit. "Apple" is apparently the American Indian version of Uncle Tom (or, to the primary audience of this blog, "banana"), that is, a ethnic minority who's sold out to the Man. Holt is so obviously set up as the werewolf that you instantly know he's not the werewolf, though it takes Olmos running naked on the beach for Dewey to figure this out. Frankly, I would've preferred that Dewey make this determination without my having to see the little Eddie. The scene has Dewey, thinking Holt is going to turn into a werewolf (it's complicated), following him to the beach where he strips naked, licks up water from a puddle in the sand (wolves drink seawater?), and runs around making growling and howling noises. While all this is going on, to absolutely no one's surprise, someone is killed by the wolfen in another part of the city, sending Dewey back to the drawing board for suspects. I admired Olmos's dedication to his art in this scene, as it must have taken serious cajones to go on camera and do the scene rather than just punching the director in the face or smiting him with a thunderbolt, and it reminds me just how prudish our society has become over the lifetime of yours truly. Still, a grown man running around pretending to be a wolf just looks silly, no matter how much gravitas the actor has or how scary the music is. It's a goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously, like something out of The Exorcist. Actually, "goofy moment played straight but impossible to take seriously" describes the whole of The Exorcist.
As with the previous projects, I can see why Olmos took this role. Wolfen is firmly in the vein of 1970s Western-civilization-in-decline films that portray victims of European colonization and oppression as morally superior to their conquerors. The film sets up a dichotomy between the Noble Savages (guess who they are) and the White Man Dependent on, Like, Capitalism, Man, and comes down clearly on the side of the white liberal guilt. I mean, Indians. And this is the single biggest problem with the film. It is, in fact, the reason it's a truly bad film rather than a serviceable low-key, low-FX monster flick. There is essentially only one Indian character (Holt), and more than once he gets to wax morally superior to Dewey by ponderously speechifying about how corrupt White Society is. To give you an idea of how well the Indians emerge as characters, the only other Indian has any screentime at all is credited as "Old Indian". No name, just Old Indian. We don't even find out what tribe these Indians are a part of, or even if they're from the same tribe! They're just Indians, and Indians love nature and marijuana and hate capitalism and Whitey. And the ones who don't aren't real Indians ("apples") and deserve to be murdered. The filmmakers would undoubtedly be appalled to hear that this is the subtext of their film, as I'm sure they didn't intend to treat their Indian characters as shabbily as 1960s Westerns that portrayed them as a faceless horde of identical backward savages to be mowed down by heroic white cowboys. But to quote Ken Begg, "well, you can’t not see it. I’m absolutely sure that it’s unintentional, but still, it’s kind of there anyway."
The worst example of the one-dimensional nature of the Indian characters in this film is the excruciating exposition scene near the end, in which Dewey, rather than discovering the secret of the wolfen through the White Man's Science of his detective work, has the wolfen explained to him by the Indians (again, mostly by Olmos looking righteously angry). Dewey goes to a bar full of Indians, imaginatively named the Wigwam Bar (really?), and there the Indians painstakingly explain to him what the wolfen are, why they've done what they've done, and why the White Man deserves to have it done to him. (That the wolfen have killed a number of black characters at this point goes unaddressed. I guess they're collateral damage from the wolfen's carpet bombs of justice.) Why yes, the Indians are smoking peace pipes while generic Indian chanting plays on the soundtrack.** I'm so glad you asked!
Wolfen's pacing is slow, its acting is hit (Finney, Olmos)-or-miss (Venora, the non-Finney cops and investigators), its story is a little scattershot, its kills are telegraphed (maybe they were slightly more surprising in 1981, but I doubt it), and its central monster not being a werewolf is a cheat. But all of these things could be forgiven if not for the ham-handed "message" of the film and its treatment of Indian characters as positive stereotypes every bit as offensive as the negative stereotypes it's reacting against. And then there's the ending. And I said, you find out what the wolfen are and why they're doing what they're doing, and the film clearly agrees that they have some justification. But the ending torpedoes any final hope the film had. Not because it has the wolfen offscreen teleporting from ground level to the penthouse balcony of a skyscraper, but because Dewey realises that the wise Indians are wise and that the wolfen are morally correct, and he decides they should be left to continue to murder people as they see fit. I'm serious, that's really the implication of the ending. Dewey agrees that the wolfen are right to eat the people they've chosen to eat. I can't explain to you how little sense this makes in the context of the film. It's bad enough that the makers of the film thought this, given the situation they've set up, but why does Dewey accept it? There's nothing about the character, either before or after his experiences with the wolfen, that in any way suggests he'd be okay with this. The wolfen even eat one of his friends in the movie! Dewey must've smoked some of whatever they put in those peace pipes to just accept that the wolfen have killed (including, again, a good friend of his) and will continue to kill. That, or the filmmakers allowed their own belief that the wolfen are right to impose itself on their character, regardless of whether or not the character and his experiences support that view. I'm betting on the latter.
I haven't mentioned the subplot of another entire group of investigators trying to link the murder of the rich muckety-muck to a vague, ill-defined "terrorist" group, using some kind of truth-machine that looks like whatever Egon was imaging Dana's face with in the original Ghostbusters. But that's okay, because this storyline has impact on exactly nothing, and I can't for the life of me figure out why it was included. But as I've noted, it's the film's moral failings that truly made me angry and frustrated with it. Like The Constant Gardener, the film makes its creators appears to be of the "if your cause is just, anything you do in furtherance of that cause is just" school of evil. Ends alone do not justify any and all means.
Unless the goal is to make sure there are no more Adam Sandler movies. In that case, use any means necessary.
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* How they resisted naming the character Eddie Two-Bears or something equally "Indian" I'll never know, but kudos to the filmmakers for at least avoiding this stereotype.
** Actually, the Indians give two completely different explanations for why the wolfen are killing people, but nobody ever seems to notice this.
August 17, 2012
EJO Review: American Me
Continuing our series on Edward James Olmos, we come to American Me (1992), a crime drama inspired by the life and death of the founder of La eMe, popularly known as the Mexican Mafia. American Me has been aptly described as a Chicano Godfather, and the influence of the finest gangster film of all time is obvious upon even a cursory viewing of the film. But Me is also a product of the early 90s, and it reminded me less of The Godfather and more of Abel Ferrara's King of New York (1990). Both films feature a crime lord being released from prison, becoming disgusted with the escalating violence on the outside, and attempting to go straight (or at least to mitigate the violence), and both also end darkly in terms of the main character's fate, with the suggestion that escape is hopeless and will lead to disaster for anyone attempting to do so. Each is well directed and features a strong lead performance that elevates otherwise rather pedestrian material. In the case of Me, Edward James Olmos directs himself in the lead performance, his debut as a feature director. His direction is sure-handed and confident without being overblown or preachy, including a great shot from the perspective of a man being carried away to be beaten. The choice to direct himself is a good one, since the quiet, low-key performance of Olmos the actor well complements the quiet, low-key style of Olmos the director. There is a well-cut sequence of the main character having sex with a woman (for the first time, as he has been in prison since he was a teen-ager) inter-cut with the brutal sexual assault of the son of a mob boss as a statement of La eMe's power. The love interest is mostly believable in the role; rather than being a typical Hollywood beauty, she has the look and affect of a woman who might be drawn to the social ineptness and strange sort of innocence one might find in a man who's been locked up his whole life.
Now I appreciate both subtle acting and subtle direction, and I'll take those before over-acting and overly busy, trick-shot directing every time, but the film could have used a little more energy, and none of the other characters really emerges from the background of various gang-bangers calling each other ese (including Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, here exemplifying the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule* playing a Mexican(!) gangster). The story of the godfather of the Mexican Mafia is never quite as compelling as it should be. Olmos's performance is too subtle to overcome the weaknesses of the script, and no one else in the cast steps up to lend some fire to a story that could use a little heat. (A young John Leguizamo would've livened things up a bit.) The language and rhythm of the film is initially appealing and (to this untrained ear) reasonably authentic--I particularly appreciated the mixed patois of Spanish and English, often even in the same sentence--but after hearing the words ese, homes, and vato about 300 times, it becomes a little tiresome. There's even one Chicano character who, upon taking a hit of his illegal drug of choice, declares it "good shit, man". One wonders what Olmos, trying to make a film in which Mexican-Americans emerge as real people and not caricatures, thought when he came across this moldy Hollywood stereotype in the script.
The best scenes are those inside the prison, showing how a person can run a multi-million dollar drug business from inside the walls. Things are much less interesting outside prison, and the movie seems to realize this as the Olmos character, after spending almost half the movie in prison before being released, ends up back in prison for the final fifteen minutes or so. The film contains many of the themes and ideas characteristic of Olmos's work: white racism against Chicanos, the hopelessness and despair brought on by the poverty and disempowerment of the barrio, a respected leader's attempt to reform a corrupt subset of society and the futility of such attempts, and the lack of vision of the oppressed to try for something better. The female lead, after ending her relationship with the Olmos character, declares that there's no hope for the children of the barrios as long as people like him exist. Olmos's work, while acknowledging and criticizing the enormous barriers to Chicano progress, refuses to apologize for or elide the horrors wrought by the gangs. It may be understandable that they do what they do, but it is not excusable or acceptable. If it seems that Olmos's message is contradictory--that the conditions in the barrios make life outside of criminality impossible for young Chicano men while still holding them responsible for their criminal behavior--it is a reflection of the reality of life in the barrios. This is not a weakness of his work, but a strength.
And that's probably part of why I appreciated this film, even if I'm not especially fond of it. Overall, it's a serviceable early 1990s gritty crime drama, well directed and acted but not especially exciting or memorable. Unlike its inspiration The Godfather, this is not the sort of film you can show to anyone. Recommended for fans of gangster films and Edward James Olmos fans only.**
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* This is the rule based on the understanding that American audiences classify people into three ethnic groups: WASP, black, and neither WASP nor black. Actors can freely play any role within their group. This rule allows Chinese actress Joan Chen to play an American Indian in On Deadly Ground, Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán to play Sikh Indian Khan in Star Trek (look it up!), and Jewish actress Jenette Goldstein to play Vasquez(!) in Aliens. (To be fair, Vasquez will inevitably be played by Michelle Rodriguez, whose agent you call when you're casting the role of "macho angry Hispanic babe", in an upcoming remake of Aliens. Now that Alien has been remade (inexplicably named Prometheus), I assume an Aliens remake is already in the works.) Related rules: The Black Character Must Die First; Lead Actors Are White
** Fortunately, I happen to be both.
Now I appreciate both subtle acting and subtle direction, and I'll take those before over-acting and overly busy, trick-shot directing every time, but the film could have used a little more energy, and none of the other characters really emerges from the background of various gang-bangers calling each other ese (including Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa, here exemplifying the Hollywood Ethnic Actor Rule* playing a Mexican(!) gangster). The story of the godfather of the Mexican Mafia is never quite as compelling as it should be. Olmos's performance is too subtle to overcome the weaknesses of the script, and no one else in the cast steps up to lend some fire to a story that could use a little heat. (A young John Leguizamo would've livened things up a bit.) The language and rhythm of the film is initially appealing and (to this untrained ear) reasonably authentic--I particularly appreciated the mixed patois of Spanish and English, often even in the same sentence--but after hearing the words ese, homes, and vato about 300 times, it becomes a little tiresome. There's even one Chicano character who, upon taking a hit of his illegal drug of choice, declares it "good shit, man". One wonders what Olmos, trying to make a film in which Mexican-Americans emerge as real people and not caricatures, thought when he came across this moldy Hollywood stereotype in the script.
The best scenes are those inside the prison, showing how a person can run a multi-million dollar drug business from inside the walls. Things are much less interesting outside prison, and the movie seems to realize this as the Olmos character, after spending almost half the movie in prison before being released, ends up back in prison for the final fifteen minutes or so. The film contains many of the themes and ideas characteristic of Olmos's work: white racism against Chicanos, the hopelessness and despair brought on by the poverty and disempowerment of the barrio, a respected leader's attempt to reform a corrupt subset of society and the futility of such attempts, and the lack of vision of the oppressed to try for something better. The female lead, after ending her relationship with the Olmos character, declares that there's no hope for the children of the barrios as long as people like him exist. Olmos's work, while acknowledging and criticizing the enormous barriers to Chicano progress, refuses to apologize for or elide the horrors wrought by the gangs. It may be understandable that they do what they do, but it is not excusable or acceptable. If it seems that Olmos's message is contradictory--that the conditions in the barrios make life outside of criminality impossible for young Chicano men while still holding them responsible for their criminal behavior--it is a reflection of the reality of life in the barrios. This is not a weakness of his work, but a strength.
And that's probably part of why I appreciated this film, even if I'm not especially fond of it. Overall, it's a serviceable early 1990s gritty crime drama, well directed and acted but not especially exciting or memorable. Unlike its inspiration The Godfather, this is not the sort of film you can show to anyone. Recommended for fans of gangster films and Edward James Olmos fans only.**
============================================================
* This is the rule based on the understanding that American audiences classify people into three ethnic groups: WASP, black, and neither WASP nor black. Actors can freely play any role within their group. This rule allows Chinese actress Joan Chen to play an American Indian in On Deadly Ground, Mexican actor Ricardo Montalbán to play Sikh Indian Khan in Star Trek (look it up!), and Jewish actress Jenette Goldstein to play Vasquez(!) in Aliens. (To be fair, Vasquez will inevitably be played by Michelle Rodriguez, whose agent you call when you're casting the role of "macho angry Hispanic babe", in an upcoming remake of Aliens. Now that Alien has been remade (inexplicably named Prometheus), I assume an Aliens remake is already in the works.) Related rules: The Black Character Must Die First; Lead Actors Are White
** Fortunately, I happen to be both.
August 5, 2012
EJO Review: CSI Miami, Episode 7.4 "Sangre por sangre"
The first piece in my series on Edward James Olmos talked about his baffling appearance in the cinematic train wreck The Green Hornet. Shifting gears, let's talk about a television disaster: the lumbering behemoth of suck that is the inexplicably successful CSI franchise.
Now, television dramas on the Big Three networks have long been the bottom of the entertainment barrel. Anything interesting on television has been on cable for at least the past fifteen years. But really, this CSI thing represents a new low. I find myself mesmerized by the sheer ineptitude. The original series has been on for thirteen years despite being badly written and acted, and lacking anything resembling tension or drama. It's hard to decide what's worse--the writing or the cast. The cold open--usually a bloody crime scene--often does a fair job of getting the viewer interested in the mystery, but without exception the reveal of who did the crime and how is disappointing, and it's usually simultaneously absurd and lame to boot. Far too often, the death is accidental or a suicide or attempted suicide, which just feels like a cheat after it happens seven times in a row. The cast are somehow both one-dimensional and thoroughly unlikeable, played by shockingly unappealing actors (including that horrible gap-toothed woman with the pinched-in face and the giant-chinned palooka on the original show). I remember one show the alcoholic gap-toothed woman was pulled over for DUI but the cop let her off because she's a CSI. Now I'm sure this sort of corruption is commonplace in police departments throughout the world, but the CSI people don't raise an eyebrow at it. Aren't they supposed to be the good guys? And here's a chance for some real drama, with one or more characters struggling with whether to do the right thing and report this abuse of police power, but no, the characters are so unlikeable that they're all completely fine with police corruption as long as it protects their alcoholic friend. That's entertainment!
I confess I'm completely baffled by the notion that one hour a week of this schlock isn't enough for people so that this show has not one but two spin-offs. Actually, they're not spin-offs because they're exactly the same show. They all center on a moody, mysterious but brilliant forensic scientist who has unspoken and unexpressed sexual tension with the sexy older female who serves as his right-hand woman, the two of them surrounded by a series of much younger interchangeable nobodies from Central Casting who do the grunt work that allows the male lead to make the scene and intuit the solution to the case.
Thus, the tolerance factor of each series depends entirely on who is cast as the male lead. It's hardly any surprise then that the least terrible of the franchise by far is CSI:NY, blessed as it is with a fine lead actor in Gary Sinise. I have to wonder how much influence Sinise has over the portrayal of the character, since his "Mac" (really?) is the only one of the CSI male leads that doesn't come off as an insufferable prick. This can't be due entirely to Sinise's performance. It must owe something to the writing, so I can't help but think that behind the scenes he is also reining in the writers' genetic programming to make the male lead an insufferable prick. Which is the perfect phrase to describe Gil Grissom, the lead of the original show. Now I've seen actor William Peterson give a decent performance (in the 1996 film The Skulls, about the only thing decent about it in fact), so the fault isn't all his. Grissom is so arrogant and irritating that it would be a challenge for Morgan Freeman to make him sympathetic. Still, the Grissom character isn't done any favors by Peterson's lack of charisma and appeal in the role. He seems better suited for character work rather than lead roles, particularly when the role demands a level of charisma to overcome the character's personality flaws. (The problem, I think, is that the writers don't see Grissom's insufferable arrogance and condescension as flaws.) At the bottom, naturally, is CSI:Miami, which is saddled with the boat anchor of David Caruso(!) as its lead. Here is a man who never should've been given an acting job. I laugh heartily to know that Caruso, after the (undeserved) success of NYPD Blue, got it into his head that he was a real actor and quit that show at the height of its popularity to pursue a career in the movies. After starring in a few crap films--including Jade, the worst Basic Instinct rip-off that doesn't star Madonna--he realized he was a complete and utter failure, tucked his tail between his legs, and went back to shitty TV dramas. And here he is in the lead of another terrible cop show. With his forced gravelly whisper and silly head tilt--entirely failed attempts to make him look tough--he is a charismatic void. He's so bored and uninterested in his role that every time he stops talking you wonder if he might have slipped into a coma. (I don't want to shock you or anything, but at the time of this writing, Miami is the only CSI series that's been cancelled.)
I remember watching an episode of the original show in which some of the jokes were actually funny, the main cast was mostly sidelined to setting up punchlines for the likeable and talented guest stars, and the resolution wasn't as lame and stupid as, well, every other CSI resolution. I immediately knew something was up. I mean, an episode of CSI that was watchable--perhaps even, dare I say it, decent? There had to be an explanation. Sure enough, a few minutes of Internet "research" turned up the answer: This episode ("Two and a Half Deaths", if you must know) wasn't written by the CSI writers but by the writers of Two and a Half Men. Now Men is itself hardly an example of fine programming, but one of the writers is Chuck Lorre, co-creator of The Big Bang Theory (the only funny sit-com made in the last twenty-five years), so with a couple of Lorre regulars added to the charisma-free main CSI cast, it was an enjoyable waste of forty minutes.
This long digression about the massive suckitude of CSI is a result of my not having much to say about Edward James Olmos's appearance on CSI:NY (2010). I'm sure he picked up a nice fat paycheck, and in his wisdom he appears on the least crappy of the CSIs. Unlike his appearance in a nothing role in The Green Hornet, I can see what drew him to this material. Olmos plays Luther Devarro, founder of the (I presume) fictional Puerto Rican gang El Puño. Shortly after Devarro's release from prison, several members of El Puño are murdered. Mac, seeking to avoid a gang war, goes to Devarro to get his guarantee that El Puño will not retaliate but instead allow the police to investigate the murders. Devarro is an old school gangster and doesn't truck with all this a-shootin' and a-killin', so he gives his word that he will at least give the cops a window to act before he brings the pain himself. The violence continues, though, despite this promise. Is Devarro breaking his promise to Mac? Or is he perhaps no longer in control of El Puño? Or is it something else? (Spoiler: It's something else, something that thankfully keeps up the CSI tradition of being both utterly lame and titanically stupid.)
There isn't much more to say. The CSIing of the CSIs in this episode doesn't really figure into solving the case. The CSIs come to entirely the wrong conclusion and only understand what's happening when the person responsible for fomenting the gang war explains everything to Mac before Mac fatally shoots him. The only scenes that work at all are the conversations with Devarro and Mac discussing the generation gap between Devarro's term as leader of El Puño and what has become of the gang since his incarceration. In these scenes, Sinise and Olmos are allowed to strut their stuff, and they're fun to watch even if these scenes don't really have much impact on the story. These scenes are also undoubtedly what drew Olmos to the role, as Devarro defends the gang, at least in his day, as a necessary community to protect his poor Hispanic neighbourhood. As in the only other watchable episode of CSI I've seen, the main cast is kept largely off-stage in favour of a talented guest star. Since the main cast boasts a fine actor in Sinise, CSI:NY can successfully pull off a watchable episode by hiring a decent guest actor to go toe-to-toe with Mac, but the rigid format of the show pretty much hoses any chance of creating even a solid episode. All things considered, "Sangre por sangre" is a pretty unremarkable forty minutes of television, a effort more to be appreciated than loved.
Now, television dramas on the Big Three networks have long been the bottom of the entertainment barrel. Anything interesting on television has been on cable for at least the past fifteen years. But really, this CSI thing represents a new low. I find myself mesmerized by the sheer ineptitude. The original series has been on for thirteen years despite being badly written and acted, and lacking anything resembling tension or drama. It's hard to decide what's worse--the writing or the cast. The cold open--usually a bloody crime scene--often does a fair job of getting the viewer interested in the mystery, but without exception the reveal of who did the crime and how is disappointing, and it's usually simultaneously absurd and lame to boot. Far too often, the death is accidental or a suicide or attempted suicide, which just feels like a cheat after it happens seven times in a row. The cast are somehow both one-dimensional and thoroughly unlikeable, played by shockingly unappealing actors (including that horrible gap-toothed woman with the pinched-in face and the giant-chinned palooka on the original show). I remember one show the alcoholic gap-toothed woman was pulled over for DUI but the cop let her off because she's a CSI. Now I'm sure this sort of corruption is commonplace in police departments throughout the world, but the CSI people don't raise an eyebrow at it. Aren't they supposed to be the good guys? And here's a chance for some real drama, with one or more characters struggling with whether to do the right thing and report this abuse of police power, but no, the characters are so unlikeable that they're all completely fine with police corruption as long as it protects their alcoholic friend. That's entertainment!
I confess I'm completely baffled by the notion that one hour a week of this schlock isn't enough for people so that this show has not one but two spin-offs. Actually, they're not spin-offs because they're exactly the same show. They all center on a moody, mysterious but brilliant forensic scientist who has unspoken and unexpressed sexual tension with the sexy older female who serves as his right-hand woman, the two of them surrounded by a series of much younger interchangeable nobodies from Central Casting who do the grunt work that allows the male lead to make the scene and intuit the solution to the case.
Thus, the tolerance factor of each series depends entirely on who is cast as the male lead. It's hardly any surprise then that the least terrible of the franchise by far is CSI:NY, blessed as it is with a fine lead actor in Gary Sinise. I have to wonder how much influence Sinise has over the portrayal of the character, since his "Mac" (really?) is the only one of the CSI male leads that doesn't come off as an insufferable prick. This can't be due entirely to Sinise's performance. It must owe something to the writing, so I can't help but think that behind the scenes he is also reining in the writers' genetic programming to make the male lead an insufferable prick. Which is the perfect phrase to describe Gil Grissom, the lead of the original show. Now I've seen actor William Peterson give a decent performance (in the 1996 film The Skulls, about the only thing decent about it in fact), so the fault isn't all his. Grissom is so arrogant and irritating that it would be a challenge for Morgan Freeman to make him sympathetic. Still, the Grissom character isn't done any favors by Peterson's lack of charisma and appeal in the role. He seems better suited for character work rather than lead roles, particularly when the role demands a level of charisma to overcome the character's personality flaws. (The problem, I think, is that the writers don't see Grissom's insufferable arrogance and condescension as flaws.) At the bottom, naturally, is CSI:Miami, which is saddled with the boat anchor of David Caruso(!) as its lead. Here is a man who never should've been given an acting job. I laugh heartily to know that Caruso, after the (undeserved) success of NYPD Blue, got it into his head that he was a real actor and quit that show at the height of its popularity to pursue a career in the movies. After starring in a few crap films--including Jade, the worst Basic Instinct rip-off that doesn't star Madonna--he realized he was a complete and utter failure, tucked his tail between his legs, and went back to shitty TV dramas. And here he is in the lead of another terrible cop show. With his forced gravelly whisper and silly head tilt--entirely failed attempts to make him look tough--he is a charismatic void. He's so bored and uninterested in his role that every time he stops talking you wonder if he might have slipped into a coma. (I don't want to shock you or anything, but at the time of this writing, Miami is the only CSI series that's been cancelled.)
I remember watching an episode of the original show in which some of the jokes were actually funny, the main cast was mostly sidelined to setting up punchlines for the likeable and talented guest stars, and the resolution wasn't as lame and stupid as, well, every other CSI resolution. I immediately knew something was up. I mean, an episode of CSI that was watchable--perhaps even, dare I say it, decent? There had to be an explanation. Sure enough, a few minutes of Internet "research" turned up the answer: This episode ("Two and a Half Deaths", if you must know) wasn't written by the CSI writers but by the writers of Two and a Half Men. Now Men is itself hardly an example of fine programming, but one of the writers is Chuck Lorre, co-creator of The Big Bang Theory (the only funny sit-com made in the last twenty-five years), so with a couple of Lorre regulars added to the charisma-free main CSI cast, it was an enjoyable waste of forty minutes.
This long digression about the massive suckitude of CSI is a result of my not having much to say about Edward James Olmos's appearance on CSI:NY (2010). I'm sure he picked up a nice fat paycheck, and in his wisdom he appears on the least crappy of the CSIs. Unlike his appearance in a nothing role in The Green Hornet, I can see what drew him to this material. Olmos plays Luther Devarro, founder of the (I presume) fictional Puerto Rican gang El Puño. Shortly after Devarro's release from prison, several members of El Puño are murdered. Mac, seeking to avoid a gang war, goes to Devarro to get his guarantee that El Puño will not retaliate but instead allow the police to investigate the murders. Devarro is an old school gangster and doesn't truck with all this a-shootin' and a-killin', so he gives his word that he will at least give the cops a window to act before he brings the pain himself. The violence continues, though, despite this promise. Is Devarro breaking his promise to Mac? Or is he perhaps no longer in control of El Puño? Or is it something else? (Spoiler: It's something else, something that thankfully keeps up the CSI tradition of being both utterly lame and titanically stupid.)
There isn't much more to say. The CSIing of the CSIs in this episode doesn't really figure into solving the case. The CSIs come to entirely the wrong conclusion and only understand what's happening when the person responsible for fomenting the gang war explains everything to Mac before Mac fatally shoots him. The only scenes that work at all are the conversations with Devarro and Mac discussing the generation gap between Devarro's term as leader of El Puño and what has become of the gang since his incarceration. In these scenes, Sinise and Olmos are allowed to strut their stuff, and they're fun to watch even if these scenes don't really have much impact on the story. These scenes are also undoubtedly what drew Olmos to the role, as Devarro defends the gang, at least in his day, as a necessary community to protect his poor Hispanic neighbourhood. As in the only other watchable episode of CSI I've seen, the main cast is kept largely off-stage in favour of a talented guest star. Since the main cast boasts a fine actor in Sinise, CSI:NY can successfully pull off a watchable episode by hiring a decent guest actor to go toe-to-toe with Mac, but the rigid format of the show pretty much hoses any chance of creating even a solid episode. All things considered, "Sangre por sangre" is a pretty unremarkable forty minutes of television, a effort more to be appreciated than loved.
July 23, 2012
EJO Review: The Green Hornet
Being unable to sleep on twelve-hour flights to Korea means I end up stuck watching many hours of crap new releases. (Remember The Book of Eli? Yeah, I watched it on one of those flights, and there were only two walkouts! *rimshot*) Most of them are pretty forgettable time-wasters, though I do remember laughing continuously through the last 40 or so minutes of Rise of the Battle of the Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (yet another film in which Andy Serkis's CGI creation has more warmth and genuine human emotion than any of the actors actually on screen). I remember seeing That Mummy Movie With Jet Li in It and thinking it sucked. Then I immediately watched Jumper and thought, you know, That Mummy Movie wasn't all that bad. Next came Wanted--a film based on a comic book created by a man who apparently thinks Frank Miller's writing is too warm and sympathetic and filled with the triumph of the human spirit--and twenty minutes into it I was longing for all life in the universe to end.
Because I've seen Wanted, The Green Hornet (2012), starring Seth Rogen (*gulp*) and Jay Chou (who?), isn't even bad enough to be worth discussing. Sure, it sucks, but I've seen Disaster Movie, a film so bad Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't authorize its use on suspected terrorists. So why am I talking about The Green Hornet? Because I'm struggling with a vital spiritual question that sprang unbidden into my mind while watching it: Why the hell is God in this film?
No, really. I remember sitting through this mess, having not yet cracked a smile despite Rogen's antics, and then suddenly He was there. He had maybe two lines and was gone. He shows up in maybe three scenes total. If all the footage of Him they included in the movie amounts to even a page of script, I'd be astonished. Why you would hire God to be in your film if you don't have anything for Him to do is a big question, but a bigger one is why He in His wisdom would agree to take this nothing role in a crappy Seth Rogen flick. I guess He does work in mysterious ways!
God plays the role of Mike Axford, by all accounts the one who ought to be running the newspaper that is instead put in the hands of Rogen's Britt Reid (the titular zero--I'm sorry, I meant hero, really) when his old man bites it. Britt is an irresponsible, overprivileged slacker with no skills, training, or competence in anything other than using money he didn't earn to get drunk and bed trashy women--wait, you already knew that? Oh that's right, because he's played by Seth freaking Rogen. Taiwanese actor Jay Chou plays Kato, the elder Reid's personal mechanic, inventor, martial arts expert, and coffee maker. That's right, our Kato is a regular Renaissance man, able to single-handedly build a car that is bulletproof and has color-changing paint and no-flat tires and a license plate switcher and hidden machine guns and ejector seats, kung fu the bejeezus out of multiple armed attackers without breaking a sweat or any of them so much as laying a glove on him, and make a damn fine cup of coffee.
Now all this absurdity could work in a comedy. Sadly, the filmmakers opted not to make a comedy, since there is precious little that's funny about this film. Are we supposed to laugh that Kato--the same essentially invincible Kato that I just described, who repeatedly does all the work of taking out the bad guys while Britt just stands around looking useless (there are even a number of "jokes" about this) and never so much as takes a punch--that Kato can't take out the pudgy, clumsy, untrained Britt when they get into the obligatory fistfight? And lest you think it's because Kato doesn't want to open up a can on his friend and hurt him, after Britt puts him through a table(!), Kato gets up, enraged, and declares, "Now I'm gonna hurt you!" Yet Britt is still rather implausibly able to stand up to Kato in hand-to-hand combat. I guess it's because Kato doesn't use his ability to slip into the Matrix and superimpose red lines over enemies and/or their weapons. (The film is very sloppy about what the red lines indicate.) How did he gain this ability to enter bullet-time and see his enemies and/or their weapons as red lines? I don't know, and I don't think anybody involved with the film does, either.
Britt becomes the zero (oops, there I go again)--hero when he comes up with this Clever Plan: He and Kato will become superheroes who pretend to be supervillains, because then the other villains can't try to influence them by threatening to kill civilians. I'm not kidding; that's really his plan. Somehow, the villains are dumb enough to buy this, thinking he is a rival gang leader muscling in on their turf even though he has no henchmen, no drug labs or distribution networks or anything to suggest he is in any way replacing them, and no corrupt cops or politicians or anyone on any kind of payroll.
Much merriment is made of Kato's lack of a cool superhero name, even though he's the one with all the talent. Being from Shanghai, Kato probably can't be blamed for not making the obvious retort: the Green Hornet doesn't have a cool superhero name, either. (To be fair, this recurring joke did get the only solid laugh from me, and in the very last scene: "The Green Hornet. His reliable partner, the Blue Wombat!") And this is the name that the newspaper people give him (not knowing he's actually Britt) after Britt himself suggests, I kid you not, "the Green Bee". After they all laugh and declare him the Green Hornet, Britt checks again to see if they're sure the Green Bee isn't cooler. Now if there's one thing even a dope like Britt would know, it's that "the Green Bee" isn't cool. Bees aren't cool. Put any adjective you want in front of "bee" and then tell me it's cool. It can't be done. Even killer bees don't scare people. Who cares if the bee is green? If there's one thing manchildren talk constantly about, it's what sounds cool, yet Britt is here insisting on a patently uncool name for himself. The filmmakers can't be bothered to get the hero's characterization right.
I haven't said anything about the villain because he's played by someone I don't know, never comes across as either threatening or funny, and is given little of interest to do or say, at least until he inexplicably decides to murder his right-hand man and become a costumed supervillain because then he'll be scary. (He still isn't.) He is introduced laying the smack down on some young up-and-comer trying to usurp his position as kingpin of crime in Los Angeles. That the film would've been better with the up-and-comer as the central villain just illustrates just how misguided this entire project is.
Oh, and Cameron Diaz is somewhere in the film. I didn't want to punch her.
I have to admit, having said all this, I'm no closer to answering the eternal question of why God took a role in this film. Not even as the villain or anyone of importance, but just as a guy who sets up a few of Rogen's lame punchlines. Sure, He gets to run the newspaper in the end, but was it worth it? He looks depressed to be there, shaking His head sadly at whatever embarrassment Rogen's braindead character is currently engaged in, trying vainly to get Britt to behave in a way that is remotely mature or at least doesn't make him come off as a blithering buffoon who couldn't dress himself with both hands and a trained monkey to help. Perhaps He took such a small role so we wouldn't really notice He was there. Perhaps, in the end, He didn't come to Earth to suffer for our sins in some big public spectacle. Maybe He just classes up the joint, one Seth Rogen movie at a time.
Because I've seen Wanted, The Green Hornet (2012), starring Seth Rogen (*gulp*) and Jay Chou (who?), isn't even bad enough to be worth discussing. Sure, it sucks, but I've seen Disaster Movie, a film so bad Donald Rumsfeld wouldn't authorize its use on suspected terrorists. So why am I talking about The Green Hornet? Because I'm struggling with a vital spiritual question that sprang unbidden into my mind while watching it: Why the hell is God in this film?
No, really. I remember sitting through this mess, having not yet cracked a smile despite Rogen's antics, and then suddenly He was there. He had maybe two lines and was gone. He shows up in maybe three scenes total. If all the footage of Him they included in the movie amounts to even a page of script, I'd be astonished. Why you would hire God to be in your film if you don't have anything for Him to do is a big question, but a bigger one is why He in His wisdom would agree to take this nothing role in a crappy Seth Rogen flick. I guess He does work in mysterious ways!
God plays the role of Mike Axford, by all accounts the one who ought to be running the newspaper that is instead put in the hands of Rogen's Britt Reid (the titular zero--I'm sorry, I meant hero, really) when his old man bites it. Britt is an irresponsible, overprivileged slacker with no skills, training, or competence in anything other than using money he didn't earn to get drunk and bed trashy women--wait, you already knew that? Oh that's right, because he's played by Seth freaking Rogen. Taiwanese actor Jay Chou plays Kato, the elder Reid's personal mechanic, inventor, martial arts expert, and coffee maker. That's right, our Kato is a regular Renaissance man, able to single-handedly build a car that is bulletproof and has color-changing paint and no-flat tires and a license plate switcher and hidden machine guns and ejector seats, kung fu the bejeezus out of multiple armed attackers without breaking a sweat or any of them so much as laying a glove on him, and make a damn fine cup of coffee.
Now all this absurdity could work in a comedy. Sadly, the filmmakers opted not to make a comedy, since there is precious little that's funny about this film. Are we supposed to laugh that Kato--the same essentially invincible Kato that I just described, who repeatedly does all the work of taking out the bad guys while Britt just stands around looking useless (there are even a number of "jokes" about this) and never so much as takes a punch--that Kato can't take out the pudgy, clumsy, untrained Britt when they get into the obligatory fistfight? And lest you think it's because Kato doesn't want to open up a can on his friend and hurt him, after Britt puts him through a table(!), Kato gets up, enraged, and declares, "Now I'm gonna hurt you!" Yet Britt is still rather implausibly able to stand up to Kato in hand-to-hand combat. I guess it's because Kato doesn't use his ability to slip into the Matrix and superimpose red lines over enemies and/or their weapons. (The film is very sloppy about what the red lines indicate.) How did he gain this ability to enter bullet-time and see his enemies and/or their weapons as red lines? I don't know, and I don't think anybody involved with the film does, either.
Britt becomes the zero (oops, there I go again)--hero when he comes up with this Clever Plan: He and Kato will become superheroes who pretend to be supervillains, because then the other villains can't try to influence them by threatening to kill civilians. I'm not kidding; that's really his plan. Somehow, the villains are dumb enough to buy this, thinking he is a rival gang leader muscling in on their turf even though he has no henchmen, no drug labs or distribution networks or anything to suggest he is in any way replacing them, and no corrupt cops or politicians or anyone on any kind of payroll.
Much merriment is made of Kato's lack of a cool superhero name, even though he's the one with all the talent. Being from Shanghai, Kato probably can't be blamed for not making the obvious retort: the Green Hornet doesn't have a cool superhero name, either. (To be fair, this recurring joke did get the only solid laugh from me, and in the very last scene: "The Green Hornet. His reliable partner, the Blue Wombat!") And this is the name that the newspaper people give him (not knowing he's actually Britt) after Britt himself suggests, I kid you not, "the Green Bee". After they all laugh and declare him the Green Hornet, Britt checks again to see if they're sure the Green Bee isn't cooler. Now if there's one thing even a dope like Britt would know, it's that "the Green Bee" isn't cool. Bees aren't cool. Put any adjective you want in front of "bee" and then tell me it's cool. It can't be done. Even killer bees don't scare people. Who cares if the bee is green? If there's one thing manchildren talk constantly about, it's what sounds cool, yet Britt is here insisting on a patently uncool name for himself. The filmmakers can't be bothered to get the hero's characterization right.
I haven't said anything about the villain because he's played by someone I don't know, never comes across as either threatening or funny, and is given little of interest to do or say, at least until he inexplicably decides to murder his right-hand man and become a costumed supervillain because then he'll be scary. (He still isn't.) He is introduced laying the smack down on some young up-and-comer trying to usurp his position as kingpin of crime in Los Angeles. That the film would've been better with the up-and-comer as the central villain just illustrates just how misguided this entire project is.
Oh, and Cameron Diaz is somewhere in the film. I didn't want to punch her.
I have to admit, having said all this, I'm no closer to answering the eternal question of why God took a role in this film. Not even as the villain or anyone of importance, but just as a guy who sets up a few of Rogen's lame punchlines. Sure, He gets to run the newspaper in the end, but was it worth it? He looks depressed to be there, shaking His head sadly at whatever embarrassment Rogen's braindead character is currently engaged in, trying vainly to get Britt to behave in a way that is remotely mature or at least doesn't make him come off as a blithering buffoon who couldn't dress himself with both hands and a trained monkey to help. Perhaps He took such a small role so we wouldn't really notice He was there. Perhaps, in the end, He didn't come to Earth to suffer for our sins in some big public spectacle. Maybe He just classes up the joint, one Seth Rogen movie at a time.
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