Elizabeth Banks getting carried offstage by an actor playing a stripper playing a fireman; aka winning at life
I know you all looked at the title of this post and went “What the fuck, dude, what are you, writing for Slate now?” If it's any reassurance, I'm not suggesting stupid shit like “the Academy needs to be more populist in its selections” because Oscar movies are certainly not a representation of the artistic elite in cinema; Oscar movies are just as much comfort food as the stuff that wins MTV Awards, just for the palates of people who've graduated from high school. Also, for all everybody's griping about inevitability, let us remember, the Oscars did give Best Picture to a black-and-white French movie with almost no dialogue this year, and whatever you thought of it, that is something. But let's not revisit that whole fuckin mess again. On to lessons:
Look, art is important. It's a prism through which the great mysteries of life can be contemplated, it gives us language to describe the exalted, and it's as old as human beings themselves, suggesting that it's a fundamental part of our character as a species. Cinema is art. But the Academy doesn't have anything to do with art, and the fact that they pretend to when at least three out of every five years shit happens like The King's Speech beating The Social Network or Crash beating Brokeback Mountain or Slumdog Millionaire running unopposed or Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction or Ordinary People beating Raging Bull or Rocky beating Network/All The President's Men/Taxi Driver/Bound For Glory is absurd. To clarify: this isn't about my personal taste. In every single one of those cases, the ambitious picture that dares to be dark (and, in every case except the Rocky one, is the only one that people still actually watch) lost to the reassuring, safe, forgettable picture. The Academy awards artistic achievement by accident, not by design.
So, as long as they're going to be kind of silly and dick over great filmmaking, why not let their hair down and embrace the silliness? Russell Brand is hit or miss as a stand-up—a little of his I'm-above-this breeziness and faux-edgy political humor that's designed to seem to the audience like he thinks it's going over their heads but is really supposed to flatter them for “getting” the “joke” goes a long way—but his hosting was in another fucking galaxy from Billy Crystal's this year because some of his jokes actually worked. Not to mention, one of Russell Brand's biggest strengths in a context as silly as an awards show is the way his perpetually sighing vocal delivery reminds everyone that what's going on is not serious. Because it's not.
2—Categories like “Best Kiss” and “Best Fight” are not stupid, they're actually great
A continuation of point 1. These categories are the greatest strength of the MTV Movie Awards, after its realization of its own existential absurdity. Considering that the Oscars are—whether they admit it or not—about what makes movies fun rather than great, why not have Best Kiss? Or Best Fight (maybe expanded to Best Ownage Sequence to allow car chases and shit as well)? Or Best Villain?
This isn't about getting more people to watch the Oscar telecast, because fuck that (and in any case the MTV Movie Awards ratings were down almost 30% this year, making it a less-than-ideal commercial model). I'm just saying, if they gave out Best Fight right after the dead people montage and then the clips of the nominees are things like Iko Uwais ramming a fluorescent light bulb into a dude's throat, that would be awesome.
3—Wiz Khalifa and The Black Keys showing up for no apparent reason
If you need to make it sound more pretentious call it the “Luis Buñuel Memorial Appreciation For The Stochastic and Ridiculous Nature Of Existence.” Also, the performance the Keys did with Lifetime Achievement Award winner Johnny Depp (who, it should be noted, looked like he was having infinitely more fun than he does whenever he shows up to lose an Oscar) is something the Oscars should do: if someone gets a lifetime achievement award for being an awesome performer, they should have to perform. The fact that Johnny sat in with the Keys on guitar and proved that, while he looks perfect as a rock 'n' roll guitarist, he kinda sounds like shit is even better: the performance should have to have a degree of difficulty increase. Make Francis Ford Coppola juggle. The what-the-fuck quotient would actually make that shit interesting.
4—The MTV Movie Awards are only two hours long
This is tricky for the Oscars, because the best speeches are ALWAYS for the awards “no one cares about” (implying, falsely, that anyone gives any appreciable degree more of a fuck more about Best Actor and Director; half the audience is watching for the dresses and the other half's attention is drifting toward the blog posts they're drafting about what bullshit it is that Terrence Malick doesn't have more Oscars that William Wyler). But dudes, you need to tighten. Not shorten. Just only put in what needs to be there. The fact that some fuckfaces at MTV who give their Best Picture award to Twilight are doing a better job than you should make you jump out the fucking window in shame.
5—Show clips from upcoming releases
So, to explain: I watched the MTV Movie Awards instead of the Game of Thrones season finale because I was lured with beer and a post-show trip up to a roof deck and it was gorgeous out Sunday night. And I have no regrets, because the company was great and I was able to catch GoT first thing the next morning online. I already forget who won what except for Kristen Stewart earning the nickname “Pinner” after the variety of joint, because pinners are skinny, white, and full of weed, and so is she (I'm not judging, I think she's great, I'm just saying, girlfriend was fuckin hiiiiiiigh). But one thing I do remember is the coming attractions.
They debuted the trailer for The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which I don't really care about except I hope it does well so Emma Watson gets her post-Hermione career off to a good start. And, later, they made a gigantic hullafuckinbaloo about an EXCLUSIVE NEVER-BEFORE SEEN clip from The Dark Knight Rises. Which I knew wasn't going to be anything really new but still, I can't lie, I got excited. And went ahead and spent a couple minutes speculating about the structure and how Anne Hathaway figured into things. So, you know mission accomplished.
It sounds like (and sometimes is) conceding the lack of interest in the history of movies to advise the Oscars to stop the all-necrophilia-all-the-time act and focus on the present and future, but there's a way to do it right. First, acknowledge past, present, and future as one, rather than just incessantly venerating the past, and all too often the wrong parts of the past. So, yeah, look back. Then there are the awards themselves, which acknowledge the present sufficiently. But seriously, what the hell's wrong with being like “movies are still a vital, thriving thing, and here's what we've got in store”? Nothing. Don't hard sell it up too much, but a trailer or two wouldn't do any harm, especially when presented the way the MTV Movie Awards did, bringing out Christopher Nolan to a thunderous ovation—seriously, a director getting that kind of reception? Kinda cool—to say a few opaque words before unveiling the clip. Most of it was stuff we've seen before, with the exception of a little dialogue between Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but hey.
Now, the Oscars aren't in such dire shape that they really need fixing. They are what they are. And heaven knows taking too many pages out of the book of an entity that hails fucking Twilight as any kind of superlative is problematic. But none of these suggestions would hurt. At all. Especially the one about lightening the fuck up, which really is the one from which the other four derive. Silliness is a virtue, and so is self-awareness, Oscar.
Why Chris Tucker, you might ask? Well, I might answer: why not? Not only, thanks to Rebecca Black, is Chris Tucker's now the good Friday (Ed. Note: fuck you, that was funny) he's responsible for one of my all-time favorite one-scene performances (in Jackie Brown), maybe two-thirds of the dumb shit I used to say when I was stoned (Friday), and one of the single most gloriously strange, gender-ambiguous pieces of magnificently irritating performance art ever filmed (The Fifth Element). My fandom goes back even further than that, though.
I first heard of Chris Tucker back when my dad and I would watch hours and hours of stand-up comedy on TV every weekend, that being one of the only compromises we could strike because he hated movies with explosions and I hated 18-hour PBS documentaries about soybean farming. It was the middle of the early 90s stand-up comedy boom, when you could catch stand-up on TV just about any hour of the day and night. We caught a lot of great comics and had many mutual favorites (Bill Hicks, Robin Harris, Richard Pryor, Marc Maron, Richard Belzer, and early Bill Maher, the one who was funny, not the one who became convinced he was the weed-smoking Walter Cronkite). I was more partial to women comedians than he was—Laura Kightlinger and Janeane Garofalo will always have special places in my heart—and he was more partial to middle-aged guys from Boston, because he was a middle-aged guy from Boston. But for the most part, we liked the same stuff, especially if Dad had had a bit to smoke.
One show we never missed, in its first couple seasons, was HBO's Def Comedy Jam. This was back in my Dad's hilariously disingenuous period where he'd retire to the other room and come back all giggly and think he was hiding the fact that he was high. Timing was such that he'd usually do this right around the time Def Comedy Jam was about to come on TV, which worked out nicely, as the general tenor of the show was perfect for a dorky 13 year old or a bombed-out-of-his-nards 43 year old. And so we discovered a great many mediocre comics, but just as many if not more who were really fucking funny. We had formed a secular religion based around Bernie Mac in about 1993. My dad came dangerously close to comparing Martin Lawrence to Steve Allen one night before I caught him in time. And, of course, with the subject of this post being what it is, there was Chris Tucker.
He was neither the best stand-up to appear on that show, nor the most original, but he made my dad and me laugh our asses off to the point where it took us two hours to find them again afterwards. One man's mile-a-minute non-sequitur shrieking is another man's hilarity, what can I say. I dislike analyzing comedy, because analyzing comedy isn't funny, so I'll keep this brief: there are many different types of comedians, from the great sage preacher types like Bill Hicks, the raw nerves like Pryor where you're like “holy fuck, did he just say that?”, the observational types, the quipsters, so forth. There is a shortage of straight up wiseasses who are actually funny, and I'd put Chris Tucker in that category. He's no beacon of enlightenment, doesn't mine any apparent demons for cathartic laughs, doesn't do a whole lot of “ya ever notice” and his jokes can be kinda corny. What sold it for me, with him when he was young, was his “I'm just that little wiseass motormouth hyperactive skinny dude”—ness. Sometimes it could be a bit much, but sometimes it really hit the spot.
Like a lot of comedians, when Chris Tucker started doing movies, he'd basically be doing his bits instead of playing a character, but for Friday, that was what was necessary. Ice Cube—no slouch in his ability to read the public's pop cultural appetite—wrote himself a more light-hearted “hood” movie than the ones with which he'd made his initial foray into movies, which were, while groundbreaking at the time of their release, a bit grim for widespread commercial appeal. While Cube could be quite funny at times, he'd yet to attempt outright comedy, and made the wise decision to cast himself as the straight man and Chris Tucker as the funny one. The result, one of the better weed-smoking movies ever made, more consistently funny than most, with great chemistry between Chris and Cube.
As an actor, with one notable exception which we'll get to in a bit, Friday established the template Chris Tucker performance, with slight variations: the endlessly talkative goofball, frequently either high or talking about Michael Jackson, never terrribly intelligent, but never so stupid that he can't pull it together to save the day, although ultimately very very silly. Some killjoys might extrapolate this lack of variation in his screen persona to imply that Chris Tucker is a shitty actor, to which I would say: whoa, whoa, whoa. Back the fuck up. First of all, the guy isn't playing fucking Hamlet. Second of all, lest we infer from that “first of all” that comedy is somehow easy, let's just remember that dude who played Hamlet who, overhearing on his deathbed someone talking about how hard it must be to be shufflin' off the ol' mortal coil, riposted “Dying? That's easy. Comedy? That's hard.” Sure that story's apocryphal, but the reason no one gives a shit that it's apocryphal is that it's fucking true. Maybe Chris Tucker isn't the guy you turn to when you're casting a John Osborne play, but Chris Tucker can do a bit about Michael Jackson as a pimp with Tito as his assistant pimp, and he can be really fucking funny in so doing. Call Nicol Williamson for the Osborne play, I'll stick with Chris for the MJ.
After establishing what would be an ongoing relationship with director Brett Ratner on Money Talks, a commercially successful if unmemorable thing co-starring Emilio Estevez's brother, Chris Tucker broke into movie megastardom with Rush Hour, which was heralded as Jackie Chan's breakthrough role with American audiences, but I noticed a couple things in the theater waiting for it to start: one, as was not unusual in my moviegoing history, me and my mom were the only two white people in the packed theater, and two, everyone in earshot was excitedly talking about the new Chris Tucker movie. Jackie Chan was a fun but secondary element.
But since then, able to command a $20 milion fee—which he's good for, if he ever came out with a new movie that looked even remotely un-fucktarded, it'd make back that $20 mil and more the first weekend—Chris Tucker has only appeared in the Rush Hour sequels, which are what they are, even though Rush Hour 3 is only a movie if you really give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, he made $45 million in salary from those two sequels, plus he had points, and as unmemorable as they were those pictures made a lot of fucking money, so you gotta figure those points made him even richer, so it's not like Chris Tucker has to work or anything. If he's happy, that's all that really matters.
The details of his personal life are, besides being none of our business, not terribly interesting in any tabloid-y kind of way. He's a big God guy and managed to turn his lifelong massive Michael Jackson fandom into a genuine friendship; that in itself is an interesting narrative to chart, watching Chris go from gently but respectfully poking fun at MJ to actually becoming friends with him, to the point where Chris was called, deeply upset, to testify in the last kid-fucking lawsuit. That might make an interesting movie: the dialogue scenes alone between Chris Tucker and Michael Jackson would be some shit out of David Lynch.
As for Chris Tucker's movies that actually do exist, here goes (Ed. Note: this is an incomplete list):
Friday/Money Talks/Rush Hour series
You can kind of lump these all in together and have it only be a slight oversimplification, as pretty much what Chris does in all these is a variation on his stand-up riffs, playing the annoying-yet-somewhat-charming wiseass fuckup. Friday doesn't require any kind of deep analysis; it's a movie you smoke a joint to, with a handful of classic lines, to wit “You get killed with somebody else,” in re: not passing a joint fast enough, and “You just got knocked the FUCK out!” to fallen villain Tiny Lister. Money Talks is dumb but I didn't change the channel that time I caught it on cable.
The Rush Hour series, though, I rather enjoy in spite of its escalating stupidity and the uncanny ability of director Brett Ratner's to make every picture he directs feel physically small (pardon the critical synesthesia, I don't know how else to describe it, his movies feel like crowded studio apartments). My favorite line in the whole series is not, surprisingly, one of Chris' or Jackie's, it's Philip Baker Hall talking to Chris after a horrendous Chris fuckup—casting Chris as a fuckup cop with Walter Mitty Harry Callahan fantasies is pretty much perfect, by the way—but Chris' response is what sells the line:
Philip Baker Hall (a police captain, nota bene): Every now and then we have to let the general public know we still know how to blow shit up. Chris Tucker (a cop, nota bene praeter): You're goddamn right!
This has always been my philosophy toward cinéma policiers: I don't necessarily want my movie cops to resemble real cops—cuz who the fuck wants to sit through two hours of civil servants struggling to pay their bills and drinking beer watching Yankee games, really—and I certainly like movie cops to know how to blow shit up. Rush Hour, the first one anyway, is a terrifically enjoyable action comedy—easily the best thing Brett Ratner's ever done—and is so largely because of the terrific chemistry between Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. It's also nice to have cats like Philip Baker Hall, Tzi Ma, and Ken Leung show up, and Ken Leung is quite good as the villain. The sequels exist, I've seen them, they're fine, whatever. As cable movies, time-fillers/background noise/what have you, the Rush Hour series has few peers. They're dumb, sure, but they're entertaining, even the third one in Paris.
Taking a step back chronologically, 1997 ultimately was a bit of a turning point for Chris Tucker's career. His three releases each represented a possible career trajectory: there was Money Talks, Chris' first team-up with the above-mentioned Brett Ratner, which could have lead to a sequel called Bullshit Walks (not a bad alternate title for Rush Hour 3, come to think of it), and represented the safe, unambitious, commercial route. This, of course, is the one Chris ultimately took.
What could be called “the middle road” was represented by Jackie Brown. A really good movie, by an actual director, with Chris giving something recognizable as an actual performance, as the doomed underling whom Samuel L. Jackson verbally manipulates into the trunk of his car with an empty shotgun only to be cranially ventilated by bullets from Samuel L.'s gun. It's basically Chris Tucker's standard boilerplate Chris Tucker performance—a weedtarded high-pitched voice wisecracking dude who talks really fast and loud when he gets pissed off—but with good dialogue and actual beats to hit, proving that when called on, Chris actually could thesp respectably. Only problem with this path is that it would have required, simultaneously, the ambition necessary to carve out a career as an actor in good movies and the attendant patience to content one's self with playing supporting roles for a few years. And it also presupposes that that's something Chris himself gave a fuck about, which certainly doesn't appear so from his subsequent career choices.
Last, and certainly not least, is The Fifth Element.
Oh, where do we begin with this one . . . The production design and special effects are seamlessly gorgeous. Speaking of which there's also Milla Jovovich, who makes quite an impression. Bruce Willis Bruce Willises his way through the whole thing without batting an eyelash, which sucks in bad movies but is awesome in good ones, Tiny Lister is the President of the Galaxy (as he motherfucking well should be), Gary Oldman gives what would be the strangest performance in any other actor's career but for him it's merely in a ten-way deathmatch with nine other duckfuckingly insane roles . . . and then there's Chris Tucker.
Chris Tucker's performance in The Fifth Element is like if you gave a drag queen LSD and, knowing exactly when she was going to peak, had her huff a balloon of nitrous oxide. It says something that in a movie where everyone's wearing Jean-Paul Gaultier, Chris Tucker's the one who looks weird, and this is in a movie with a whole marauding army of ass-faced aliens and Milla Jovovich running around wearing gaff tape.
There's no diplomatic way to say this, so I'll say it in the least-diplomatic way possible: you could be on first name basis with the staff at Marie's Crisis, have a dick in your ass and your mouth and one in each hand and be a Republican Congressman and not be as gay as Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element. He's not just gay in this, he's Little Richard Gay. This is kind of like the difference between being a pop singer and being Michael Jackson, for an analogy in Chris Tucker-ese.
Now, I'm not saying this like it's a bad thing at all. Chris Tucker flies the freak flag like it's fuckin Fort McHenry up in this joint. At his most sedate, Chris has a tendency to talk a little fast and chirp a bit, but in The Fifth Element—fittingly for a movie with lots of aliens in it—he talks so fast and in so high a pitch it's like he's speaking an alien language. If you ever want to make a civilian cry, watch The Fifth Element with the sound way up: Chris' voice fucking tortures civilians in this movie. Every thirtieth word or so is intelligible. It's fucking awesome.
Bruce Willis is supposed to find Chris Tucker irritating, and since Bruce Willis is the hero, he's kind of the audience's eyes and ears, but as an actor, the cat isn't exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in terms of staying in character. At several points over the course of the movie you can see Bruce Willis start to crack because Chris Tucker's balls-out batshit insanity is so funny at times that he can't help but struggle a bit.
It has been said that a few of Chris Tucker's lines in The Fifth Element are audible only to dogs. Anyone who's able to interview a dog to find out, let me know, but in the meantime let us be content with the extant evidence, which is that this is one of the truly strange performances ever in cinema. While I love it, I'm a little strange myself and understand it not being people's cup of tea. But oh fuck is it ever mine.
Knowing that he's capable of such off-the-map bizarre brilliance, though, makes it a little disappointing that Chris Tucker is content to restrict his acting to Rush Hour sequels once every five or six years. But hey, it's his career. It'd just be nice if he really tried to be Michael Jackson; while he's not exactly Tito, he's in danger of becoming Jermaine. In so doing, he's in danger of no longer being germane.
One occasional annoyance of living in the Western world (it's not just America, though we fucking rule at this just like EVERYTHING ELSE) is that the commercialization of the media leads to stupid shit getting a ton of coverage because real news is boring. So, at a time when the people of seemingly every country in the Middle East and North Africa are in the streets engaged in (mostly) non-violent protests demanding democracy, our news media here in the United States of Apathy is largely occupied by the activities of Charlie Sheen's penis, liver, and nasal membranes.
And fuck it, I'm not above writing about this shit. All I know about the pro-democracy protests in the Middle East/North Africa is “Good luck, y'all, hope it works out for you,” and I don't really have anything more substantial to write about it than that, other than to say that having a sitcom starring the deposed Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Ahmadinejad all forced to live in the same apartment splitting rent after all their shit gets seized would be funny. They could even call it Two and a Half Men because Mubarak and Ahmadinejad would misogynistically make fun of Gaddafi for having female bodyguards. And with that, we segue back to Charlie.
Like most people, my reaction to Charlie Sheen's exploits is a Venn diagram of exasperation and disgust, though mine has a third circle: a hazily laissez-faire “hey, fuck it, if he can do 8-balls the size of his fist and bang porn stars and drink like a fish with a drinking problem, let him do it.” Cuz, really?As someone who's a little unconventional about who he goes to bed with and also been unwise with the controlled substances his own self, I can't really talk. Beyond that, I don't have anything emotional invested in this cat. I could concoct some kind of “he was one of the most compelling leading men to arrive in the mid-to-late 80s but never fulfilled his promise as a movie star in part due to his spiralling substance abuse issues” argument, except that's kinda bullshit. Sure he's on a sitcom now, but TV is far from its former status as purgatory, and he is getting motherfucking paid to be on that thing. Cat makes $40-50 mil a year or some shit on that damn show. It may not be any kind of apex of artistic achievement, but money's money and this is America. Not to mention, the show is incredibly patient with him; if they haven't fired him yet, they're not going to. He could fuck the boss' wife in the ass while spooning coke into his daughters' noses and still not get fired at this point.
That's probably the weirdest thing about the media narrative on Charlie Sheen. People can do all the hand-wringing they want about how he's self-destructing, consciously/unconsciously committing suicide, all that jazz, but the fact of the matter is, he's got probably more job security than anyone in the business (CBS is only now hesitating about bringing him back). Certainly more than the other tabloid piñata we'll be discussing today, Lindsay Lohan.
Lindsay Lohan, from all available and objective accounts, drinks and snorts less than Charlie, and does not have a terribly seamy sex life. Sure she likes chicks, but she doesn't piss on them or lock them in closets or anything, she just has lesbian sex with them, and lesbian sex is one of the cornerstones of a civilized society. This is how you can tell all the homophobe religious people are full of shit; anyone who claims to not like lesbians is either a fucking liar (unless you're a straight girl in a bar dealing with a belligerently determined drunk one who isn't listening, and even then if you blame the faults of each on all you're making a moral mistake) or seriously misguided.
Even if one presupposes that the tales of Lindsay Lohan's debauchery are factual and that the nature of said debauchery is as severe as all the tabloid tut-tutters maintain, she's hardly unique. There is a well-established tradition of child stars, denied a proper childhood due to having spent the entirety of it onstage or on a movie set, freaking out and getting fucked up on drugs in their teen years and young adulthood. Lindsay ain't the first and she sure ain't the worst. The tone of the vast majority of the tabloid reports on her exploits is 90% faux outrage and 10% content (Ed. Note: stats courtesy of NASA in collaboration with the Trilateral Commission) and when you sift through and find out what they're actually accusing her of doing is having a couple drinks and then passing out because she's tired. Even the necklace thing isn't all that cut and dry: celebrities get given free shit all the time and sometimes signals get crossed. Is it dumb to walk off with a necklace and assume it's free? Sure. But it ain't all on her.
So. Whence this contrast, and to what end? Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are but two examples, the most current, of heavily-chronicled celebrities who like getting fuggedup. There are two important dichotomies at play here:
a) Charlie Sheen is male and Lindsay Lohan is female b) Charlie Sheen makes evil white guys in suits money and Lindsay Lohan no longer does.
The first is important because forgetting that the vast majority of people calling the shots in the entertainments industry are guys is a mistake. It's probably the main determining factor in the bile that arises from the second point. If you're a fucked-up guy former child star, you get to be Corey Haim (well, til you OD, but you get the point). People sigh and make mean jokes about you, but there's a fondness in the way you're remembered (especially after you OD), even if it's couched in smarmy irony. Lindsay Lohan isn't getting any of this slack. This assessment has a bit of subjectivity to it, of course, and I have way the fuck better things to do than reading everything motherfuckers write about her, but it seems like there's a lot more anger to the way people write about her, and a whole lotta schadenfreude when one of her pictures flops.
None of this bullshit would be happening if she wasn't making atomic turds like I Know Who Killed Me (which is student film quality garbage) and Georgia Rule (which is just jaw-droppingly awful). Both of those are several years ago at this point, reinforcing the already painful truth that the difficulty curve for a career comeback is vastly steeper for women in the business than it is men. A couple flops, and a couple instances of unladylike public behavior, and the industry goes “My word!” and turns into a fuckin spinster aunt from a fuckin 1920s melodrama, whereas Robert Downey, Jr. (to be fair, a much different type of actor than Double-L, who at her peak was a highly competent comic leading player rather than a chameleonic Method lunatic like RDJ) is that nice young man who just needed to be given a hand.
Gender isn't the only element at play here, though. Remember, Charlie Sheen is on a massively successful TV show (forget that it looks fucking retarded, it prints money) and RDJ had that slam-your-dick-on-the-table blockbuster with the first Iron Man picture. So while Lindsay Lohan being a girl is arguably responsible for the severity of the critique she receives for her behavior, motherfuckers wouldn't give a flying fuck if she was making hits. If the right producer offered her the right project where she could transition into more adult roles, in one of those performances that gets written up as a “revelation” in the press, that turned into one of those $50-75 mil grossing Indiewood pictures and got nominated for awards and shit, next thing you know Chris Nolan rolls the dice and casts her as Harley Quinn or some fuckin thing and boom, she's in “I guess we gotta put up with the lateness and booze breath” Sheen territory.
That last brings up one of the potential elements one might bring up to counter my argument. “Charlie may get fucked up and have nine-ways with porn stars, but he always shows up to work. Lindsay is so often late and absent that guy had to send an open letter to the media complaining about her behavior.” First, let's not hold the guy who sent the letter up as some kind of crusader for decency. If you have a problem with someone, tell them about it, not the fuckin media. And second, dealing with crazy girls requires a bit of compassion; it's tempting, as a guy, to just say fuck it and wash your hands of the whole situation, but not all crazy girl craziness is malignant or personally directed at you. A lot of times it isn't even craziness, it's just behavior grounded in unfamiliar premises. Granted, Lindsay actually is kind of nuts (poor Samantha Ronson), and producing a project where your lead actor is always late is frustrating. But goddamn, dude, trying to shame her into better behavior through the media was like “Holy shit my house is on fire, let me put it out with this giant can of gasoline.” Because maybe it works temporarily, but the next time she's in a bad mood and has a couple drinks, she's like “THE FUCKING MEDIA IS RUINING MY LIFE” and next thing you know they're dragging her into a limo with no panties on and there goes that meeting the next day; “Fuck it, we're casting Emma Stone, this is too much headache.” There's a point where responsibility for one's own actions becomes moot: the feeling that the entire fucking world is conspiring against you leads to despair, nihilism, and an abandonment of any desire to play by that goddamn world's fucking rules.
And so this is why Charlie can give interviews saying sobriety is boring and nothing'll probably happen, where if Lindsay tried to pull some shit like that she'd get fired from projects she wasn't even attached to. I won't recap the reasons why, but I will add an emotional tag: it kind of pisses me off. To the point where I'd write and direct a comeback vehicle for her if I could get funding for it, just to be like “Fuck you, it can be done.” I mean, I'm not saying I'd do it without a really good contract and a couple ex-Mossad agents to follow her and keep her sober, but I'd give it a go.
As for Charlie, it's a moot point considering that show is all the work he needs to do, and if he's banked even a tiny percentage of his insane salary from that show he's set for life, however much of it is left. But I don't know, the only advantages I can see working with him are easy access to coke and porn stars. I have no use for coke, and I hang out with burlesque performers and models on the regular. Sorry, Charlie. I think you can deal with the disappointment.
Today is Nick Nolte's birthday. Rather than be all shocked about the fact that he's still having birthdays (cats who drive drunk and fucked on GHB tend to elicit that kinda response) let's instead celebrate the greatest thing Nick Nolte was ever part of: 48 Hrs.
Make no mistake, Nick Nolte fucking owns shit in 48 Hrs. Everybody remembers it as Eddie's big breakout vehicle, and while it's true, Eddie's amazing in 48 Hrs, Nick Nolte is awesome enough that it raises the bar for Eddie: “Oh, you think you're going to be awesome in this movie? Well I'm 21 years old and essentially a sentient testicle, I WILL COMPETE WITH YOU MOTHERFUCKER.” That's acting, Gary.
What makes 48 Hrs so brilliant is that, unlike every other mismatched partner movie (yes, including Lethal Weapon) that followed, it had the balls to make Nick Nolte a total, balls-out fucking racist. He claims, later in the movie, that he was just saying the shit that he did (calling Eddie a spearchucker, making cracks about watermelons, with the coup de grace “One thing you should know about me, nigger, I fight dirty” before suckerpunching him) to wind Eddie up. Eddie doesn't totally buy it, nor should be; you get the feeling that Eddie eventually warms up to Nick Nolte out of a sort of exasperated awe at just what a fucking asshole he is.
That might sound odd, except for the fact that any transcendant state of being is inherently interesting, even the state of being a transcendant fucking asshole. This is a harder level of existence to attain than one might think at first glance. For example, I'm an asshole; I'm loud, I curse too much, I shoot first and ask questions later emotionally. But ultimately, I'm harmless, since I mean well, and when I find out that some asshole-y thing I've said offends someone I'm genuinely contrite and I apologize. A fucking asshole doesn't really care, or at least not enough to stop. Nick Nolte takes that and runs with it (for a couple feet before he starts wheezing from all the cigarettes), creating, in 48 Hrs lead Jack Cates, perhaps the biggest prick “good guy” in the history of cinema.
Director Walter Hill stages a pretty impressive long take right toward the beginning of the picture, where Nick Nolte arrives at the cop shop to find all hell breaking loose—cops yelling, shoving perps around, general bedlam—and has a few conversations with other cops, concluding with Nick Nolte begin hauled into irate lieutenant Frank MacRae's office. Walter Hill is enough of a mensch that doing something difficult and badass just for the sheer fuck of it would be an acceptable explanation, but here this long take serves another purpose. It shows, in a couple random conversations where he's not even really all that pissed off, what a swaggering fucking asshole Nick Nolte is. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying he's not awesome (he is), but holy Christ is he a dick. The uninterrupted take is a great way of showing “oh no, I'm not using editing or lighting or anything, Nick Nolte's just a grumpy, growly fuck in this movie.” The use of cinema vocabulary as exposition in a nutshell, kids.
Of course, if Nick Nolte's the good guy, the bad guy has to be an even bigger twat, and 48 Hrs has a humdinger. James Remar, like Nick Nolte, has his finest hour in this picture as uberbaddie Ganz, who takes an almost sexual delight in blowing holes in people with guns. This is noted by the hooker he hires toward the beginning; the movie makes an excellent point out of her being way way way way too attractive to be a run-of-the-mill hooker (she's the white girl world record holder in the Ass Olympics, for one) and unsubtly showing how little James Remar could give a fuck, while even more unsubtly showing the utter joy he takes in shooting cops. This, of course, is not right. And this, amazingly, is how someone can be an even bigger asshole than Nick Nolte in this movie: James Remar is a rude, snarling, poorly socialized shitbag even when he isn't killing cops.
One of the most interesting things about 48 Hrs to me has always been its pace. One associates cop movies with having super fast pace, racing ahead like a patrol car with its siren on. 48 Hrs certainly doesn't drag by any means, and I want to be perfectly clear that in saying the picture feels like it's two hours long even though it's about an hour thirty five I am not saying that it's slow paced. It's simply a very dense movie, with several very tense set pieces that stretch time because they expand in the moment; their grandeur exceeds their physical size. The main one is, of course, the scene where Eddie tears the redneck bar a new asshole. (Warning, clip is NSFW because everything awesome is NSFW)
This is the most famous scene in the picture for a very good reason: Eddie rules to a degree you need really sophisticated equipment to calculate. But the reason he's given the space to do so is that Nick Nolte allows himself to become a secondary character for the whole thing. A less secure actor would be worried about some 21 year old punk comedian coming in and hogging the show, but Nick Nolte was like, “ya know what, fuck it, let's see what happens when I just hang out at the bar and don't pull focus.” A less secure actor would have gotten all up in Walter Hill's shit and demanded some kind of increased role in the scene. But no, Nick Nolte sits back and lets his co-star kick fucking ass. Sure, this sounds like congratulating someone for not kicking a puppy, but fuck it. It's his birthday.
Also, playing the straight man is a lot harder than just standing there while the funny dude is funny. The funny dude needs to be fed energy, but not too much, because the straight man can't pull focus. It's amazing that Nick Nolte does all the crazy shit that he does in this, like running around with long (and damn luxurious for such a macho dude) hair and chainsmoking and hitting his fucking flask while driving and doing so as a fucking cop and basically acting like a goddamn Bukowski character . . . and he still manages to do so subtly enough to fulfill his duties as a straight man. Of course, him so perfectly embodying the grouchy, jowly, square-ass white dude gives Eddie the freedom to be the equal and opposite reaction as a witty, fit, stylish black guy. The fact that Eddie gives the greatest debut performance in movies since Orson Welles is only partly because Eddie's awesome: give Nick Nolte some credit for throwing those batting practice fastballs right in Eddie's sweet spot so he could knock the fuckers out of the park.
The success of 48 Hrs—and the fact that the hard-drinking fuck-you lifestyle wasn't just getting in character—led to Nick Nolte playing a lot of this type of dude. Periodically he'd branch out and play a civilian, but it was always hard to buy him as a normal dude who isn't one ill-fated round of shots away from drinking himself to death. Like Cape Fear. Cape Fear arguably works better with Bobbert playing the good guy and Nick Nolte playing the fucked up psycho. Bobbert gave one large, entertaining performance in that picture, but if we're being real, swapping parts is the bolder choice. Lorenzo's Oil makes more sense if oil is a euphemism for booze and the poster is Nick Nolte holding a glass of scotch and smiling with the subtitle “His kid had a horrible, fatal, and unique disease . . . so Daddy decided to get fuckin drunk.” The Prince of Tides doesn't even count because Babs only casts guys so she can cut their balls off (see Bridges, Jeff in The Mirror Has Two Faces), and she also has to hold open calls of thousands of dudes to see who can keep a straight face when they call her a “beautiful woman,” giving her an extremely limited selection of guys to pick from.
That Neil Jordan remake of Bob Le Flambeur he was in wasn't bad, but seriously, casting Nick Nolte as a junkie is kinda lazy. Even if he isn't actually smacked out on the day you're shooting, it ain't gonna take much for him to convey that. Homeboy fucking worked it in The Hulk (the Ang Lee one); me and my buddy were like “Is he awesome because we drank all that tequila? Probably.”
This all might be taken to mean that Nick Nolte isn't awesome and a blast to watch in his pictures. This is not what this should all be taken to mean. Nick Nolte is always a delight to watch. He was even watchable in that horrible Sidney Lumet movie where he goes to fuck the guy in the ass and then strangles him, Q&A. He's a classic case of an actor who does one thing brilliantly well; this isn't a bad thing, if you do one thing brilliantly that beats the fuck out of doing several things kind of all right. When he's not quixotically pretending to be a civilian, Nick Nolte is a Hall of Famer, because no one (at all, ever) is better at being drunk and pissed off in a movie. Not even Harvey Keitel. And so, on his birthday, let us salute him in the proper fashion, by raising a glass.
Okay, it's time to lay down the law. There were some cool things about the 80s. A couple good Talking Heads albums (and Stop Making Sense). Midnight Run. The Untouchables. The Berlin Wall fucked off this mortal coil. But let's not kid ourselves; that was about it. The rest of the decade fucking sucked. Maybe it's all John Hinckley's fault for having shitty aim, maybe it's more complicated than that, maybe I'm being a little severe, but fuck it, this is a fiat from the Minister of Culture: 80s nostalgia is hereby punishable by death as of this moment. Why are some of the perfectly reasonable things to remember and enjoy from the 80s being punished? This trailer.
This is one of the single worst things that has ever existed, of any sort, forget movie trailers, or even movies. What has it been, six years since Topher Grace was in a movie? He used to be really fucking good. What the fuck is this fucking bullshit? Seriously. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS? WHY DOES THIS EXIST? WHO ARE THE PEOPLE RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS? WHERE IS MY FIRING SQUAD? KHAAAAAAAANNNN!!!!!!!
The writers of That 70s Show wrote this picture, so the same people who gave Topher Grace his start will be responsible for his finish as well, which is a far more elegant bit of symmetry than anything that appears in this bullshit fucking trailer. It actually makes perfect sense that the That 70s Show people are responsible for this, with the shallow, stupid substitution of namechecking for historical detail; this almost seems like it was something John Hughes wrote in the depths of a late-80s smack binge that his agent managed to keep quiet, until it was found, punched up by a sitcom writer and directed by those Epic Movie Felcher Seltzerberg fuckfaces.
(Ed. Note: obviously, you can't tell everything about a movie from its trailer. I wouldn't presume to. But goddamnit man. I'm sorry you all had to see this, but we all need to be aware that no matter how bad we think modern culture can get, it can always get worse.)
Note: Some shitheadedness has been redacted from this post that distracted from its actual intent. Be advised and enjoy:
Today's topic of discussion is a thought experiment proposed by Salon's Matt Zoller Seitz outlined in detail here.
The what-if game can be interesting to play sometimes, and casting is certainly a very large element of a picture's success or failure. Here are five of mine:
Fired: Diane Keaton, The Godfather Parts I-III
Recast: Mia Farrow
One Woody Allen girlfriend is as good as another, right? Diane Keaton's performance in The Godfather has annoyed me for a long time, and while a good deal of the blame can probably be assigned to Francis Coppola, who had other things on his mind than Kay in this picture, there's still the problem of Diane Keaton being a little weak at heavy drama. Make no mistake, if you've got a light comedy with a mildly neurotic heroine, you want to cast the shit outta Diane Keaton, get the fuck out of her way, and make sure the camera's pointed in the right direction, because she's about the best there ever was at that kind of role. Kay Adams-Corleone, though? No. The first movie doesn't give her all that much opportunity to fuck up, because all she really has to do is stand around and look confused at Michael. Still, she's a little vacant and tremulous. But the second one . . . I've seen a lot of movies, and with my love for shitty movies, I've seen a lot of shitty acting, but the “It was an abortion, Michael” scene might be the worst acting I've ever seen. That you can't blame on Francis, that's Diane Keaton about twelve miles out of her element as an actor.
Mia Farrow, inversamente, could have played that part in her sleep. The whole point of the role of Kay (as created by Mario Puzo and refined by Puzo and Coppola) is that she's the achievement trophy Michael Corleone unlocks in Assimilation: The Video Game, by beating the “son of an immigrant marries a WASP” mission. Admittedly, not the meatiest part for an actress, as she has no purpose outside of a man's use for her, but there are two prerequisites: a) be hot in a dignified, WASPy way, and b) be able to create the character on your own and make your own choices, because the director, in this case, only cares that you look pretty and hit your mark. Diane Keaton is a solid B+ on the first, but struggled like hell with the second, and of course, in fairness, was playing a part for which her skill set was useless. Mia Farrow, on the other hand, had proven many times over—most notably in Rosemary's Baby—that she was both attractive and able to do good work with a sexist director who didn't care about anything other than her attractiveness (delivery for Roman Polanski's chin, package: these nuts). One gets the feeling, as Kay, she'd have probably said to herself, “Boy, this part sucks, what the fuck am I doing here playing this nothing role as the trophy wife, this is bullshit, I'm gonna quit—oh, wow, look at that paycheck. Eh, suppose I'll soldier on for another week or so” and ended up giving a really subtle, perfectly calibrated performance, and she'd have kicked Francis Coppola in the balls for the “It was an abortion, Michael” line in Part II.
Fired: Jane Fonda, Julia
Recast: Glenda Jackson
First of all, she looks a hell of a lot fucking more like Lilian Hellman than Jane Fonda did. Second, Glenda Jackson could act her ass off, whereas Jane Fonda never could (though ya gotta hand it to her, Jane Fonda works like hell in everything she's ever done, you can see her sweating blood, just a shame it's all for naught due to the complete absence of talent). Third, if you pop Glenda Jackson in a movie where she has to go behind enemy lines and duck the Nazis to find Vanessa Redgrave, the two of them, upon meeting, would form like Voltron to constitute an unbeatable leftist juggernaut that would end any and all forms of fascism forever (and even, through its might, warp space-time to the point where fascism never would have existed in the first place).
Fourth is most important: Glenda Jackson gets no love anymore, which is fucking bullshit because at her peak, she was the best there was. She deserves better than to make the “name all two-time Oscar winners” trivia question a headscratcher because everyone always ends up going “Glenda Jackson won two Oscars? Who the fuck is Glenda Jackson?” A shining beacon of the Left, boy. Currently a member of Parliament for the Labour Party. She turned her back on movie stardom, not to let the other also-rans have a shot at the Awesomest Actress in the World crown, but because she thought she could do more important work in politics than in the arts. Most definitely the cinema's loss, because with Glenda Jackson being as aware and politically astute as she was and is, if you caught her in the right frame of mind with that script, she'd have been like, “You want me to play Lilian Hellman? Sign me up, let's do this. Get me a dialect coach to learn the American accent, which I will of course nail, because I'm Glenda fucking Jackson.”
Seriously, the one problem with Julia is Jane Fonda. Everything else about it is amazing. Swap her out for someone who can act at all and it's an all-time classic, but swap her out for Glenda Jackson and you've got a picture that would never leave my DVD player.
Fired: Denzel Washington, American Gangster
Recast: Chiwetel Ejiofor
Blasphemy, I know, since to speak ill of Denzel is not only a sin but usually puts the “tard” in retarded, but he was wasted in American Gangster. The movie isn't all that good to begin with, as it's way too long and has a few too many moving parts for a story so basic and—by this point—clichéd. The production history was more interesting than the finished movie (directors and co-stars fired, I'm pretty sure Denzel got his $20 mil twice due to a pay-or-play contract, all kinds of other weird crap), which suffered from director Ridley Scott being a little out of his element, and (credited) writer Steve Zaillian having a tin ear for street dialogue. That being the case, this movie was a little beneath Denzel.
This should not be taken as a slight against Chiwetel Ejiofor. The first time I saw him, playing the illegal immigrant/former doctor Okwe in Steven Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, I walked about of the movie theater with tears in my eyes going “Okwe is a fucking superhero.” He's pretty goddamn rad, but to date he's mostly played supporting roles in the bigger-budget stuff he's been in (like American Gangster, where he played Denzel's brother). I say, let Denzel go do something that needs a Denzel performance, and give the English guy a chance to flash a flawless American accent and be so dope that US audiences are willing to put forth the effort to learn how to pronounce his last name. Hey, we did it for Hakeem Olajuwon. And I think, in American Gangster's case, the narrative of “hey, check out how awesome the new guy is” would have helped it financially, as opposed to “hey, here's Denzel doing this shit . . . for some apparent reason.” Even if it didn't totally work, it'd be worth a try.
Fired: Michael Douglas, Traffic
Recast: Harrison Ford
This actually almost happened. When Steven Soderbergh was first putting the picture together, one of the first people he talked to was Michael Douglas, who looked at the script and went “you must be out yo damn mind, no way I'm playing this no-character-development havin' ass motherfucker” (Ed. Note: Michael Douglas' finest achievement as an actor has been hiding the fact that he's secretly black for decades) and Soderbergh was like, “Hmm, let's work on this a bit.”
Lo and behold, Harrison Ford was smoking weed one day and said to his agent, “Get me in one of those indemependement pictures, baby,” and his agent, smiling fondly at his client's eccentric syntax, started looking around for independent and “indiewood” projects. By the late 90s, Harrison Ford had stopped doing good shit like Blade Runner and Witness and started doing boring fucking shit like Air Force One (which sucks) and that romantic comedy with Anne Heche that looked so goddamn bad I wanted to piss on the screen every time the trailer came on. Word came to him, maybe from his weed dealer, about the interesting, increasingly commercial work originating from independent cinema. Big movie stars were taking the occasional part in one of these pictures, either cutting their rate or taking part of it in points, and having critics be like, “Look at [movie star x], with his best performance in decades, he's actually a really good actor.” Harrison Ford, lighting another joint, sighed to himself: it had been decades since anyone had said he was a really good actor. It was thus that he ended up talking to Steven Soderbergh about playing the drug czar in Traffic.
They futzed with the script and gave the character all kinds of new depth and cut all the dumb shit like him lighting up a crack pipe in solidarity with his daughter, and Harrison Ford kept on being like, yeah, this is great, I can't wait to work with a director of Steven Soderbergh's caliber. Still, people couldn't help but notice he hadn't signed anything yet, and there came to be a sense, shared by many of the Traffic peeps, that Harrison Ford might have been playing them while waiting for some more expensive movie-star thing where he wouldn't have to exert as much effort acting took shape. This sense was reinforced when they asked him to cut his rate and he went “Um, no, I'm Harrison Ford, I get $20 mil.” This after they pretty much told him, “sorry man, we don't have a ton o' money,” and he evinced chill down-with-it-ness. Eventually, he quit to go make some piece of shit with Bob Zemeckis and Soderbergh et al managed to get Michael Douglas to say yes (he liked the script changes they'd made with Harrison Ford, but insisted on his full $10 mil since they were going to give Harrison Ford his full rate; shit happens) and the rest is history and Traffic was fuckin awesome.
But still . . . I think Harrison Ford would have been a slight improvement over Michael Douglas. We're talking about the difference between an A- and an A here. If you could get Harrison Ford motivated and ready to show up and put in some work, the character of Wakefield gains a few je ne sais quoi points. He gets that quiet, reserved dignity that Harrison Ford radiates, and it's also all that more shocking that his daughter is a junkie/crackhead. Michael Douglas' one flaw in the movie is nothing he can really help, and the only time you really see it is when he gets in that shoving match with the dealer who's shlonging his daughter, when Michael Douglas Face makes a momentary appearance. I've tried to describe Michael Douglas Face before and failed, but the best I've got right now is that it's an air of “I've done cocaine out of a hooker's ass crack while my dick was simultaneously somewhere highly illegal” that happens when his eyes shift focus and his mouth shakes. The problem with a guy who can do Michael Douglas Face is that it you'd be surprised if his daughter didn't end up turning tricks for smack. And, not only that, it makes it a teensy bit of a stretch that a guy like that could pass confirmation hearings for a Cabinet post. Senator Jackweed McJesus (R-Mississippi) would look at Michael Douglas over his reading glasses and go, “Mr. Douglas . . . the prostitute was how old now?” followed by a frantic discussion with counsel and Michael Douglas nervously replying “All five of them were over 18, Senator.” Ya know what I'm sayin? Harrison Ford, you have none of those problems, the whole Senate would be sucking his dick and asking for autographs. He's just, outwardly, that slightest bit more “electable.” I know it's an appointed post, but Harrison Ford looks and sounds a hell of a lot more like someone who'd be successful in politics. Assuming, of course, he just did a pinner that morning and isn't too baked when he's giving the speech.
Fired: Al Pacino and Cameron Diaz, Any Given Sunday
Recast: Russell Crowe
and Hilary Swank
And finally, because it's Sunday, we close by getting ready for some football. Oliver Stone, jagoff to end all jagoffs, is, nonetheless, capable of making a good picture every ten years or so. Any Given Sunday was a pretty good idea: an attempt to look at the realities of the modern NFL and tackle issues like racism, the commercialization of the game and its effect on players, and how football players get their enormous balls in those tight pants. Stone made a number of inspired casting choices, like real-life football god Lawrence Taylor (who fucking kills it in this movie; when he's sitting in the sauna and says to Jamie Foxx “Nigga you led . . . but did anybody follow?” that shit's some thesping the pros envy) and the bizarre realizations that LL Cool J would make a good running back (he was) and that Jamie Foxx was capable of handing drama (which he also was). But he whiffed badly on two very important roles: the head coach and the new owner.
Al Pacino is Al Pacino, a living god, the one human being who could deliver the line “This city is like a great big pussy just waiting to get fucked” with a straight face, among his other lesser accomplishments (Michael Corleone, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, etc etc ad infinitum). But he ain't no head football coach in the National Football League. This is a head football coach in the National Football League:
Or, since there's only one Rex Ryan, this is an acceptable alternative:
Note the salient characteristics here. A proper head football coach in the National Football League must, at the very least, either be very very large or the type of Southern man who can spend 16 hours a day styling his hair in the morning without anyone ever accusing him of fagmosexuality. Al Pacino fits neither of these templates, nor the last acceptable alternative, the avuncular, zillion-year-old Tom Landry/Joe Gibbs God squad beloved dude whose playbook is ten years out of date but who is nonetheless an institution. Al Pacino would make a terrific high-blood-pressure college basketball coach, one of those little 5'6” dudes who made his college team with hustle, balls, and nonpareil hoops nerdiness and then became an assistant coach before getting the head coaching gig and going on to a couple NCAA titles and a few embarassing recruiting violations. (Ed. Note: someone call Hollywood, that story would fucking rule). But he's too little and not the right kind of badass to own an NFL locker room. He does try, and he has a couple scenes that he acts so well you forget that he's hideously miscast, because he's Al Pacino and a living god.
Cameron Diaz has the opposite problem: physically she's absolutely perfect for the role. Her lanky, rangy physique and tomboyish posture suggest plausibly that she's played sports and done so reasonably well. Cameron Diaz's problem is she's kind of a mediocre actress. She doesn't suck; she was quite good in There's Something About Mary and Being John Malkovich in two radically different roles, but in each case she had a solid script and/or really good director. In Any Given Sunday, she has an underwritten role and a space-case, drugtarded director, so she has no one to tell her that what she's doing sucks, which, as in Diane Keaton's case in The Godfather doesn't mean it's all her fault, but still, you'd want to get someone who, given that kind of apathy-bred autonomy, could come up with something cool.
So what do we do about this two-headed, movie-eating monster? The Al Pacino problem is easy: replace him with Russell Crowe. Russell Crowe may be a difficult cat to work with, and he really shouldn't have thrown that phone at that guy, but he's a goddamn genius actor, on Al Pacino's level talent-wise. More than that, he has the size and the right kind of physical vitality to be a head football coach in the National Football League. Plus, imagine the fucking pregame pep talk Russell could give by busting out some Maximus: “On my signal, unleash hell.” Large men on steroids with trace amounts of blood in their testosterone streams would respond very well to such exhortations. Also, I saw Russell on TV a few years ago talkin about football with the football guys, and he was simply dazzling with that rumbling Antipodean accent, demonstrating a beautifully erudite and insightful grasp on the sport, shocking the shit out of the American TV doodz, who by the end of the thing were eating out of his hand. Charisma, intelligence, balls: head football coach Russell Crowe will win you championships in the National Football League. Believe.
Replacing Cameron Diaz is a little trickier, because it's tempting to just find someone who's a better actress and leave it at that. Problem is, you can't go too girly, otherwise it's like “Okay, why the fuck didn't Barbie just sell the goddamn team.” So I recommend Hilary Swank. The timing doesn't quite work as far as her being someone a casting director would think to hire back then—Any Given Sunday came out the same year as Hilary Swank's breakthrough Boys Don't Cry—but she's the perfect match of really good actor and capable of balancing the “I'm clearly, unambiguously a girl” and “I know just as much about football as you if not more” requirements of the role. Even if she isn't actually a fan, she's the type who would do a bit of research and end up totally plausible.
I gotta hand it to Seitz, this is a fun thing to geek out about. Any other good ones? If you can figure out who to replace Woody Allen with in Hollywood Ending, someone who it's less laughable that he'd be choosing between Debra Messing and Tea Leoni, let me know.
One would think that being both a dazzlingly erudite—and extremely serious—intellectual and a lover of action movies would be a contradiction in terms. Well, guess what? Contradictions are a matter of perspective and shit blowing up is awesome. However, being in possession of a cerebral cortex that can melt steel does give its possessor a taste for action movies of, at the very least, a reasonably low level of stupidity. It is for this reason that I, the humble owner of one such cortex, demand a certain degree of originality and wit in my action pictures. Other variables, like the presence of Jean-Claude Van Damme, may let a movie get away with being more derivative and retarded than others, but generally, I want an action picture to at least try.
I've been a fan of Luc Besson for a very long time. His body of work as a director hits me, aesthetically, in various defenseless places: sharp visuals, brisk editing, French music on the soundtrack, Anne Parillaud, a tendency to allow actors to cut loose and munch scenery (Gary Oldman in Leon/The Professional and, yes, Chris Tucker in The Fifth Element; if you turn the treble down so his shrieking doesn't deafen your dog, that's one of the great performances in the history of unintentional homosexuality), and Milla Jovovich. At a certain point—approximately coinciding with his Joan of Arc picture, which vibed “vanity project” a little too heavily for most critics and audience—Luc Besson started producing more often than directing, leading to a string of terrifically entertaining, modestly ambitious action pictures: the Transporter series (without which Armond White's longstanding crush on Jason Statham would be less florid), the Jet Li vehicles Kiss of the Dragon and Unleashed, and several others. None of these movies reinvent the wheel, but all of them are energetic, stylishly mounted, entertaining, and—not that this matters when discussing their quality—quite profitable.
Lately, the go-to director in Besson's action movie factory has been Pierre Morel, the DP on the first Transporter and Unleashed. Not so coincidentally, the three features Morel has directed for Besson have all been, to varying degrees and in their own unique ways, massively fucking cool. While Morel employs fairly standard modern action picture camerawork and cutting, his compositions are clear, framed well—he is, after all, a former DP—and while his editing is fashionably quick, it's purposeful rather than the coked up/tweaking style of Neveldine/Taylor, Bay, Tamahori, et al. While reports that Morel's next project is a new adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune are a little worrisome, astute cineastes will recall that the last time some poor bastard tried to make Dune, his next picture was Blue Velvet, so there's certainly no reason to panic just yet.
Rather than fret about what's yet to come, let's instead look at Morel's existing body of work:
District B13 (France: 2004, US and UK 2006) As already stated, the movies generated by Luc Besson's action movie factory are not to be confused with deeply felt auteur pictures, so to say District B13 is merely a showcase for the French martial art/sport parkour is not being dismissive at all. First of all, it's a perfect showcase for the French martial art/sport parkour, which is so fucking crazy and involves such absurd physical skill that it might as well be the stuff of science fiction, and District B13 is set in the near-future dystopia of 2010 (which, some minor physical details of the militarization of French housing projects aside, they got pretty accurately).
Secondly, parkour is fucking rad. Despite Hollywood's attempts to assimilate it and drain all the pleasure out of it, parkour managed to escape relatively unscathed since only about four people in the world actually know how to do it. Two of them, David Belle and Cyril Raffaeli, star in District B13, as, respectively, a good kid from the projects taking on evil drug dealers and a good cop on a corrupt police force taking on the same evil drug dealers. Eventually, because certain laws of nature are unbreakable, it transpires that a bunch of evil white guys in suits are using the drug dealers as pawns in their nefarious scheme to nuke the projects and put up expensive housing for other evil white guys in suits, or perhaps using the fallout from the nuclear explosions to create a mutant race of evil white guys who are even more evil, a paler shade of white, and favoring an even more conservative cut of suit. We may never know, in part because the action sequences in this movie are so mind-bogglingly badass that whatever the evil white guys are up to is irrelevant. Observe:
(Note, that's really David Belle doing all that)
(Alas, it's all smushed, but you can still see Cyril Raffaeli's moves)
What makes District B13 such a fucking blast to watch is that Pierre Morel doesn't just plunk the camera down on sticks and tell David Belle and Cyril Rafaelli to jump through transoms and over cars. Morel's camera is an equal collaborator with the stunt coordinator, and the editing is, while rapid-fire enough to keep adrenaline levels in the red, still coherent enough that it works with the action rather than obscuring it. The visceral thrills generated by the action sequences function almost symbiotically with the giddily retarded storyline with all the evil white guys in suits and nuclear missiles and such, producing an end result that's about as much fun as it's possible to have watching a movie.
District B13's smashing success as a piece of escapist entertainment lies mainly in its seemingly paradoxical balance between having a sense of humor about itself and still being passionately sincere. Ironic detachment absolutely kills pictures like this, because ultimately any action movie has to be stupid, because fucktarded meatheadedness is as essential an element of the action movie as scenes where women cry and hug each other are to the Cinema of Estrogen. But if you, as an action movie (reverse reification? Put that in your bong and blow some bubbles) are just smart enough to realize how stupid you are, have you not achieved a Socratic ideal and a resultant level of aesthetic purity? Yes, Luc Besson is Socrates, Pierre Morel is Aristotle, David Belle and Cyril Raffaeli are collectively Alexander the Great, and that's the known world writhing on the ground with a foot in its ass. No more need be said of District B13, other than “if you haven't seen it, go fucking see it. Right fucking now.”
Taken (2008)
“I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you're looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money . . . but what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it - I will not look for you, I will not pursue you . . . but if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.” —transcript of Liam Neeson's induction speech to the Badass Hall of Fame
This is a very important movie, because this is the first time we really learned how severe the consequences are of getting Liam Neeson pissed off. Sure, he ripped shit up in Darkman, but he was all disfigured and miserable and shit in that movie. In Taken, the progression is simple:
(a) Bad guys kidnap Liam Neeson's daughter (b) Liam Neeson is displeased (c) Liam Neeson kills everyone (d) Liam Neeson gets his daughter back, nullifying the purpose of the bad guys' entire enterprise
No frailty. No digressions. Just straight up “oh you done fucked up now” unleashing of an extremely intelligent, competent, and dangerous man upon the forces of evil.
Morel is working in a much more naturalistic style here; Liam Neeson isn't doing that wacky Bugs Bunny cartoon parkour shit, and the picture is set in actual Paris, not extrapolated science-fiction Paris. However, “more” naturalistic does not mean that Taken is some kind of fuckin documentary or anything. Liam Neeson is practically machine-gunning bad guys with his dick for most of the movie, but the greatest lapse in plausibility is definitely that Liam Neeson's daughter and her airhead friend are in Europe following U2 on tour.
An argument can be made that Liam Neeson's daughter's interest in U2 is a sign of greater depth than that of the average teenager, and a further argument can be made that with opening acts like Arcade Fire, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, The Scissor Sisters, Kanye, and The Killers (as well as shittier but still popular groups like Snow Patrol, Keane, and Ash) on the Vertigo Tour, the girls might have been going for the opening act; the fiscal wastefulness of paying U2 ticket prices to see someone like Franz Ferdinand, while massive, is nonetheless in keeping with the behavior of privileged teenagers. But this is avoiding the central issue: teenagers dumb enough to go over to Europe and kidnapped—for all intents and purposes—in the fucking airport are not going to be U2 fans. Not in 2005 anyway.
I have an alternate theory, that rationalizes this thorny and problematic intellectual dilemma into quivering submission: having the band be someone old enough for Liam Neeson to have heard of them saves valuable screen time, lest he have to spend five minutes that could otherwise be devoted to breaking bones and blowing shit up to having to use “the Google” to find out who Kelly Clarkson is. Because, let's not forget, the intent of Taken is not to be a photo-realistic portrait of the American dipshit teenage girl. Taken is a picture about Liam Neeson reducing villains to bloody, formerly sapient heaps of viscera.
And yet, much like District B13 before it, it's just smart enough to get into some actual relevant political shit—in this case, the international sex slavery trade—without either getting bogged down in nuance or doing the issue a disservice through flippancy or exploitation for artificial drama. It's more of a symbol of the dangerous shit that can happen if you don't take your dad seriously, if your dad is ex-CIA who can kill everybody in the city when necessary and you're a dipshit teenage girl whose idea of tragedy is the wrong guy asking you to the prom. This is why if I ever have a daughter, I'm going to make sure my autocracy is subtle, because when you're too strict they end up with questionable, anachronistic taste in pop music and get kidnapped by Albanian white slavery syndicates.
Of course, everything eventually works out because Liam Neeson kills everyone, and his daughter (Shannon from Lost, with her hair dyed brunette to make it plausible that Liam Neeson and Famke Janssen fucked and had her) realizes how cool he is, finally. At the end, when Liam Neeson introduces the daughter—an aspiring singer—to the famous pop star for whom he runs security, all is well with the world. Well, except the coroner in Paris, that poor bastard is going to be working overtime for a month processing all those dead guys.
Liam fucking Neeson. Who knew? I mean, he's always been pretty cool, but again I think Pierre Morel deserves a bit of the credit. He may not, technically speaking, be a Serious Artist (very few directors who make cool movies where lots and lots of people get killed meet the criteria, sadly, though if I have anything to say about, those criteria will change) but he is a serious entertainer, and a skillful director of entertainments has the necessary mastery of his craft to know how to make his leading man look sufficiently badass at all times. Of course, Liam Neeson's dick wouldn't drag the ground in this if it wasn't big on its own merits, but the director is the guy who controls where the ground is. You know what I mean.
From Paris With Love (2010) A loose remake of the 2003 Danish kind-of-sort-of documentary The Five Obstructions, wherein Lars von Trier trolled the everliving fuck out of his mentor, avant-garde director Jørgen Leth, by forcing Leth to do five different versions of his 1967 short The Perfect Human with a different “obstruction” each time (not being allowed to have a shot longer than 12 frames—that's half a second—being the first example, and they just get crazier from there). This time around, Luc Besson and Pierre Morel lost a bet to some sadistic bastard who forced them to make an action movie starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta.
That's one theory. Another is that Pierre Morel was sitting around saying to himself “I made an action star out of Liam Neeson. Goddamn I'm good.” And, while polishing off a bottle of wine and watching MBB (Maison Boîte Bureau = French HBO) one night, Match Point came on, followed by the movie version of the Hairspray musical, and Pierre Morel started giggling to himself and said, “I am going to put the homosexual gay guy who killed Scarlett Johansson and the fat woman who played Tracy Turnblad's mother—holy merde, that's John Travolta? Wow . . . ok, sure, John Travolta—and I am going to make action film. Heh heh . . . Où est l'autre bouteille de vin, muthafuckaaaaa?” and eventually passed out, only to wake up the next morning with a massive hangover and a voicemail from Luc Besson saying “What's good, Pierre? Totally dig the casting choices, babe, Rhys Meyers and Travolta it is!”
Either way, this movie is nine kinds of crazy. Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays a well-educated, competent dork with a hot, fairly agreeable girlfriend, whose day job is playing chess and gossiping with the U.S. ambassador to France, and by night takes phone calls from some anonymous CIA guy who has him do shit like put phony license plates on a car so when the dudes in the car do spy shit, if they get caught, it'll have fake plates on it, and the local cops think some other country's dudes were responsible for the spy shit. Pretty cool night gig, all things considered, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers wants more. He wants to be a guy in an action movie, not an understated drama about a low-level covert ops dork.
Soon, after successfully planting a bug in a French dude's office, Jonathan Rhys Meyers gets his wish. His anonymous spy boss tells him to go meet John Travolta at the airport because the Customs Frogs are being all premenstrual. Although this interrupts Jonathan Rhys Meyers' engagement dinner with the hot girlfriend, she's supportive because this is his big promotion! Wow, a movie where the girlfriend doesn't bust the hero's balls about spending too much time at work. What could this mean . . .?
Jonathan Rhys Meyers arrives to find that the Customs dudes are very reasonably insisting that John Travolta's obviously fake cans of disgusting energy drink are not coming into France with him. Travolta's doing a wildly over-the-top Ugly American routine, but Jonathan Rhys Meyers intervenes. First he asks Travolta if it's going to be an excessive testicular compromise to just give his energy drinks up. Travolta says yes. So Jonathan Rhys Meyers, in a surprising turn of events, steps up to the plate and does something really badass: he slaps a “Diplomatic Mail” label on Travolta's bag and walks out. Problem solved. Baisez-toi, Froggy. (Ed. Note: Pierre Morel said it, not me)
Jonathan Rhys Meyers and John Travolta establish the time-honored mismatched buddy cop dynamic, except Jonathan Rhys Meyers keeps surprising the audience with displays of balls; when it transpires that the real reason Travolta was so insistent on keeping his six-pack of energy drink was because he had gun parts hidden in the cans, JRM's response is “I'm authorized to get you any weapon you want,” rather than getting all prissy about Travolta illegally smuggling a gun into the country. Then, following a pretty well-filmed shootout in a Chinese restaurant that resulted in me Tweeting “There is cocaine raining from the ceiling. This is win” and JRM carrying a vase full of cocaine for the next half hour of screen time, JRM's response, rather than any pussy-ass moralizing against drugs, is “If you really want to score some coke, I can get you some.” Pure, uncut awesome.
Structurally, things appear a bit off, because JRM and Travolta do a whole picture's worth of bonding in the first hour, even going so far as to do a bunch of the blow in the vase (in a hilarious apparent homage to the scene where Ethan Hawke smokes dusted weed in Training Day) and culminating in Travolta dropping a suicide bomber vest out a housing project window to blow up a car full of Pakistani terrorists. This isn't even the capstone on the sequence: Travolta's backing a car into another car into another car into JRM's SUV—wired with a car bomb by the terrorists—and detonating it, is.
Now, with the terrorists having, problematically, a bunch of photos of JRM and his girlfriend on the wall in their drug lab in the 'jects, Travolta is a little suspicious. After he and JRM hand over the confiscated drugs from the dead baddies' lab, JRM invites the antisocial Travolta to dinner with his fiancee and his fiancee's friend, and Travolta, surprisingly, accepts.
Dinner goes well, but Travolta acts strange and seems to inadvertently antagonize JRM's fiancee's friend. He does something weird with his cell phone. Then, when the fiancee's friend takes a call on her cell, Travolta abruptly shoots her in the head. Whoa. It turns out JRM's fiancee is actually a terrorist sleeper! And . . . holy shit, that plot twist actually isn't retarded! Wonders never cease. The fiancee grabs a gun, shoots JRM in the shoulder, and splits, in one of the harsher cinematic breakups in recent memory (paling in comparison to Arnold putting one through Sharon Stone's forehead and coldly smirking “Considduh dat a divoooooahss” in Total Recall, of course, but that was 20 years ago).
The good guys determine that JRM's now ex-fiancee is plotting to blow up an African aid summit and a whole bunch of important political people. There's only one thing to be done. John Travolta has to hang out the window of a speeding car with a bazooka and try to blow the bad guys up. Only it turns out the fiancee ISN'T IN THE CAR! Travolta still blows up the car, of course, because certain things must be done, and hauls ass to the summit.
JRM may have taken one in the shoulder, but since he has balls (something I was still barely used to even now, near the end of the picture) he hauls ass to the summit and gets there first. The security dudes, naturally, detain him for carrying a gun, being coked up, and having both a mustache and one of the funniest fake American accents ever (more on which in a bit), but JRM runs into his boss, who has the security dudes let JRM in, sans gun.
JRM and his ex have a bit of a showdown where it appears that, despite Travolta telling JRM talk is useless and guns are the answer, JRM is going to talk her out of it. Except, alas, she's still going to detonate her suicide bomber belt, so JRM has to put one in her forehead Arnold-style after all. Travolta, having gotten there in the nick of time, catches the now deceased ex before she hits the ground and detonates her belt. End of threat. Our denouement shows a now grown-ass man JRM having to take his Desert Eagle out of his pocket before he and Travolta play a game of very manly chess. Roll credits. Ahhhhhh.
What really makes From Paris With Love such a delight is the proudly weird tone. Jonathan Rhys Meyers' flaaaaaaat Ameeeeeeeerican aaaaacceeeeent is funny enough, but his little two-sentence back story that he relates to Travolta as they swagger into the housing project to take down the terrorist's coke lab—that he grew up in the fucking Cypress Hills Homes in East fucking New York—is just breathtaking. I mean, someone who looks like Jonathan Rhys Meyers (i.e. white, not to mention like the kind of guy who'd bottom for Ewan McGregor in Velvet Goldmine), growing up in that hood, definitely would have had to grow a pair of balls to survive.
John Travolta's performance is a slightly stickier issue. It seems, at first, to suck, but as the movie gets crazier and crazier, his performance seems to get better, but it's more because the movie itself coalesces around his weird overacting than it is that he's actually good. Which, once more, is a sign that Pierre Morel knows what the hell he's doing. They even admit in the making-of documentary that Travolta's undirectable and just does whatever the fuck he wants; faced with such a situation, some directors might keep tilting at windmills and get the difficult actor to behave and stick to the script. Pierre Morel, though, realizes that that's going to be impossible, and crafts the rest of the movie to be the right kind of crazy to make sure that Travolta's overacting and goofy improvising seems to fit.
In that same making-of doc, Pierre Morel comes off a smart guy with a sense of humor (of a scene where Jonathan Rhys Meyers is backing up Travolta on a staircase and dead extras keep falling out of the sky from offscreen, Morel says, dryly, “On the schedule, we called this scene “Chinese Rain” because it's raining Chinese people.”) This impression is certainly reinforced by his pictures, which manage to be smart—mainly by knowing when to shut up and be stupid—and entertaining.
Considering the kind of pictures Morel makes, and considering that the title of auteur could just as easily be attributed to Luc Besson on the pictures he's directed so far, just going to work, punching the clock, and doing the work is all one could reasonably expect from him. The fact that Pierre Morel invests his pictures with such pizazz, though, is a sign that he's more than just some hack cashing a paycheck: he's a genuinely inspired craftsman.
Still a little worried about him directing Dune, though . . . but maybe his unpretentious, no-bullshit (unless it's fun) style can make it work. But, hey, even if it doesn't, the David Lynch rule dictates his next picture will fucking rock.
