Thinking Out Loud

  • The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s 8½

    The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is Terry Gilliam’s 8½

    If I hadn’t seen The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with my own eyes, I’d have trouble believing it exists. So Terry Gilliam has finally made his Quixote; but it might be more accurate to say that he finally made his 8½.

    In a way, Gilliam has been making this movie over and over for years. Longtime fans will recognize his longtime themes of guilt, unhealthy fantasy, escape, and delusion. His infamous, years-long struggle is cleverly written into the story. Adam Driver plays a film director reflexively hailed as a genius, but for a work so obscure that it is remarkable for it to surface in a bootleg copy — but yet somehow also so well-known that he is asked to superficially replicate it for a television commercial. I wonder if it was ever contemplated to incorporate the small amount of footage shot in 1998 with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp, but I suspect the last thing anybody involved with this cursed project wanted was more legal issues.

    Jonathan Pryce and Terry Gilliam in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
    Terry Gilliam tempts fate, on the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

    I appreciate that while The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is extremely Gilliamesque in its themes, it is rarely egregiously so in its art direction. In the 1996 documentary The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam observed that by that point in his career, craftspeople were so aware of and influenced by his work that he found they could deliver Gilliamesque costumes, props, and sets without his input. Things escalated to the point of self-parody in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus‘ woozy digital phantasmagoria, but thankfully things here are once again mostly practical.

    Trivial perhaps, but if I may add a heartfelt complaint: a pox on Screen Media Films for authoring a blu-ray specifically designed to not remember where you stopped, and to disable the FFWD, NEXT, or MENU buttons during the trailers. I will never understand this kind of consumer hostility. Why punish the movie lovers who have paid to own or rent your film?

  • Sit on my interface: Hackers is a 90s treasure

    Sit on my interface: Hackers is a 90s treasure

    I can’t believe I haven’t had the pleasure until now. Energetic, funny, quotable, and scattered with fantastic montage sequences. The moment when Johnny Lee Miller sees Angelina Jolie for the first time is choice. And check the surreal imagery and avant-garde editing of its characters’ erotic nightmares — seriously; more than one!

    It’s all laughably preposterous, but in a good way. And I’m not even talking about its hilariously fantastical vision of internet technology — I’m talking about: Miller’s accent, Lorraine Bracco’s horny sexbomb lawyer, Fisher Steven’s hair, the floppy discs tucked in trousers, the animated cityscapes of cyberspace, the rollerblades. Most of the actors playing high school kids are too old, and most of the actors playing grownups are too young. I could go on. A delight.

    “Eww… hard copy.”

  • Vote for Joe Biden & Kamala Harris

    Vote for Joe Biden & Kamala Harris

    I clearly remember the November day four years ago, waiting in a line stretching around the block to vote for what would/should have been the first woman President of the United States. Very late that evening, we sat at home weeping in front of the television.

    I know it amuses Trump supporters to picture “libs” being “triggered”, to use their lingo. U mad? Yes, I mad. But if Biden & Harris win this election, I do not wish for Trump supporters to weep. I hope against hope that as a competent, compassionate administration takes over and begins to undo the damage of the past several years, that Trump’s supporters will slowly notice their lives improving, and perhaps they may come to reflect on their mistake.

    My wife & I are of course among the most lucky and privileged. We wish we could visit family without fearing we will sicken them, but we have not been too directly affected by the Trump administration’s actions or inactions. We had no children taken from us, we did not get sick or lose our jobs during this mismanaged pandemic, we probably won’t immediately lose our healthcare if the corrupted Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act, and we were not beaten or teargassed. But we could literally see and hear some of these things outside our windows, and it pains me to know that our friends and neighbors are hurting. It’s all the more appalling that this administration’s many crimes were cynically disguised in false patriotism and christianity.

    In my thoughts today are the state where I grew up, Pennsylvania, where the Trump campaign and administration (for they are the same thing) say they will sue to stop the vote count. The state where I went to school, North Carolina, where police teargassed voters on their way to the polls. And my now-home state of 24 years, New York, which created the disgusting parasitic charlatan that has destroyed our international standing, solicited bribes from his properties, orphaned migrant children, rejected science & expertise, mismanaged a pandemic, is a credibly accused rapist, and… I could go on but we all know who he is.

    Please vote for Joe Biden & Kamala Harris. Perhaps your life doesn’t depend on it, but many others do.

  • L.A. Takedown is the rough draft for Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat

    L.A. Takedown is the rough draft for Michael Mann’s masterpiece Heat

    I finally, finally, finally had the opportunity to cross L.A. Takedown off my movie watchlist — a largely unavailable holy grail that I’ve been desperately curious to see for years.

    If director Michael Mann had not reworked this material into the masterpiece Heat, L.A. Takedown would probably be pushed so far down his IMDB or Letterboxd listings that it would get lost behind his more readily available TV work like Crime Story and Miami Vice. But for students of his work, L.A. Takedown is an incredibly fascinating relic; like reading a rough first draft of a well-known novel.

    It’s amazing to see how virtually the same material (plot, structure, character, and even exact dialogue) in the same order — including the deafening downtown LA shootout — can comprise the ingredients to both this and the polished near-perfection of Heat. There can’t be many precedents for this; maybe Alfred Hitchcock remaking his own The Man Who Knew Too Much?

    L.A. Takedown
    Director Michael Mann poses with the cast of L.A. Takedown.

    Aside from everything it shares with Heat, it’s just as interesting to consider what L.A. Takedown lacks:

    • 100% less Henry Rollins & Tone Loc, and it’s the poorer for it.
    • What I consider one of the key moments in Heat: Hanna (Al Pacino) spotting a sad woman alone in a car, and deducing that Neil (Robert De Niro) has seen the heat around the corner.
    • Acting. I know, ouch, right? The main cast is pretty blah (and hard to tell apart, to be honest), but in supporting roles: Michael Rooker! Xander Berkeley (who’s also in Heat)!
    • Another of Heat‘s unfair advantages: a killer soundtrack. But this does have the then-contemporary Jane’s Addiction live on stage, and an exclusive Billy Idol song, which isn’t too shabby for a TV movie.

    It’s also difficult to imagine a time when US TV networks would finance and produce a violent, handheld, and hard boiled movie like this — any movie at all, really, even if it was originally intended as a backdoor series pilot episode. I’m not even sure what the hook or selling point would be for a casual 1980s TV audience, but I’m sure it’s no accident that L.A. Takedown has more of a “just desserts” moralistic ending than Heat.

  • Daylight is anti-city-living propaganda

    Daylight is anti-city-living propaganda

    The best part of every disaster movie is the opening montage depicting unrelated people boarding the boat that’s going to sink, the airplane that’s going to crash on a desert island, the tower that’s going to inferno, or the bus that’s going to be hijacked in an overly complicated scheme by a charismatic villain. These kinds of movies like to pretend that catastrophe is the great equalizer, uniting victims across class, race, and gender, but we all know that’s just pretend.

    Rob Cohen’s 1996 Daylight exemplifies the genre’s failings, notably the stock stereotypes (the sassy Caribbean woman, the guy who loves his sneakers, convicts in a prison bus, etc.), and that there’s always a macho Sylvester Stallone-type around to take charge.

    Daylight also earns major demerits for its pervasive anti-city-living propaganda. There’s no way that Amy Brenneman’s character, a struggling divorcée living in a walkup rat trap studio, owns a car. This was clearly written for the tourist who happily dips their toes into Manhattan for a Broadway show, an overrated cupcake, and maybe The Met, but then turns right around and says “sure, it was nice to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there…”

  • Motherless Brooklyn is a civics lesson wrapped in an actorly exercise

    Motherless Brooklyn is a civics lesson wrapped in an actorly exercise

    I understand the generally negative reception that Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn encountered, but I didn’t dislike it for two very mundane reasons:

    1. I happened to watch it in the middle of binging HBO’s Perry Mason miniseries (with which it coincidentally happens to have a great deal in common), and frankly, Motherless Brooklyn comes out on top. Perry Mason‘s unrelenting dour tone and gruesome violence could have used a dose of Motherless Brooklyn‘s lightness and humor.

    2. I recognized at least one location as being just a few blocks from my apartment. Funny how a few simple props like a vintage phone booth and some old newspapers can zap a Brooklyn street decades into the past.

    But yes, Motherless Brooklyn is not great in and of itself. Ed Norton’s performance is little more than an actorly exercise, and it’s bewildering how many other characters his character Lionel meets are so patient and understanding of his tics. Alec Baldwin’s growly performance is more The Simpsons‘ Mr. Burns than Glengarry Glen Ross. And for a movie about racist civic policies, it’s awkward for it to feature Michael K. Williams as the apparently unnamed “Trumpet Man”, a character dangerously close to magical black person cliche.

  • Toys shoot to kill in G.I. Joe: Retaliation

    Toys shoot to kill in G.I. Joe: Retaliation

    Jon M. Chu’s 2013 toy-based sequel G.I. Joe: Retaliation is inappropriately cruel for a movie based on children’s toys/cartoons/comics, in which nobody ever really got hurt. The gun fetishism is unsurprising, but it is surprising that its heroes and villains both shoot to kill. There’s a spectacular amount of onscreen death: first half the cast, then an entire city.

    It’s also a mess structurally — particularly all the ninja business, which seems crudely spliced in from a different movie. But it does have its pleasures:

    • The pure action poetry of the mountainside monastery fight sequence.
    • Jonathan Pryce clearly enjoying himself. You know he positively leapt at the chance to play an evil master of disguise impersonating the US President. But today, the assumed reverence for the Commander in Chief now seems like it’s from another century.
    • Lee Byung-hun’s torso. My goodness.
    • Campy Cobra Commander strutting in slow motion never stops being funny.
    • A handful of actually amusing one-liners, so props to whomever punched up the script — wish you could have fixed more.
  • The Hunt is weak tea, at a time that calls for strong coffee

    The Hunt is weak tea, at a time that calls for strong coffee

    I watched Craig Zobel’s The Hunt mostly out of curiosity, to see what the red hats were so worked up about. Turns out it is not what today’s generation of American fascists assumed, but neither is it otherwise. There is potential for satire somewhere in the premise, but it’s too confused and unfocused to be anything other than just more both-sides-ism. Besides, Kevin Smith already covered similar territory in 2011 with Red State.

    The Hunt‘s gentle caricature of Trumpism is weak tea, at a time that calls for strong coffee. The movie seems more interested in taking shots against political correctness — a pitifully tired target in 2020. Does anyone find it funny anymore that it’s polite to try to refer to people as they identify, and not how someone else identifies them? This is especially infuriating when Trumpism is currently leading to police rioting in the streets, government inaction while a pandemic is killing thousands, a resurgence of overt racism, and eager submission to authoritarianism. But no, let’s make jokes about how libtards listen to NPR, har har.

    Betty Gilpin in The Hunt
    Betty Gilpin in The Hunt, with nary an NPR tote in sight.

    The Hunt seems to equate liberalism with wealth, which looks just plain retrograde at a time when Americans are marching in the streets for equality and to please not to be murdered by Officer Friendly. If I were to stretch and strain to give this movie more credit that it deserves, perhaps the point is to frame America’s current divisions as primarily class driven, with ideology as performative cloaking. But I doubt it’s being that clever.

    Also, I must say the shared DNA with Donnie Darko was unexpected, and Hillary Swank and Betty Gilpin are superstars that deserve better showcases than this.

  • Interstellar is a yet another time twisty Nolan scenario

    Interstellar is a yet another time twisty Nolan scenario

    The torturously complex premise of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar requires a constant stream of exposition throughout, something I don’t recall being a problem in the director’s other time twisty scenarios like The Prestige and Inception. It’s also less emotionally urgent than either, perhaps indicating that the high-concept structure overwhelmed everything else.

    If Coop (Matthew McConaughey) — and by proxy, the audience — needs to have everything constantly explained to him (before, during, and after anything happens), maybe he’s not the right person for the job. I know, I know, he’s the pilot, and realistically each member of such a crew would have their area of expertise. But perhaps the protagonist of the film, and the one that is most lauded by humanity at the end, should have been either Murph (Jessica Chastain) or Amelia (Anne Hathaway).

    And I think maybe we were supposed to feel sentimental affection for the robots? I couldn’t even tell you how many there were.

  • What are men, compared to rocks and mountains: Pride & Prejudice

    What are men, compared to rocks and mountains: Pride & Prejudice

    Who doesn’t have great affection for the beloved 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice? But: I daresay Joe Wright’s 2005 feature film adaptation (the one with the ampersand) is my P&P. It may be less faithful to the text, but that’s fine; it’s its own thing. It’s delicious and I adore it.

    I think of it as the precision-tooled sportscar version of Jane Austen’s novel; it may lose a lot of nuance, but it is a marvel of adaptation, It perhaps only suffers from omitting too much of the Wickham material, and softening Mr. Bennett’s culpability in the family’s dire situation.

    Pride & Prejudice

    The cast was selected with laser-guided missile accuracy, and the necessarily highly condensed screenplay makes some welcome adjustments:

    • Mrs. Bennett (Brenda Blethyn) is less broad, and less oblivious to Mr. Bennett’s (Donald Sutherland) teasing, which is tweaked to be more loving than cruel.
    • Lady Catherine (Judi Dench) is less of a cartoon villain, and is instead truly imposing and powerful. She may be wrong, but you can understand where she’s coming from.
    • Lydia (Jena Malone) is more naive than an out-of-control wild child.
    • And one other adjustment that I quite like: this Caroline Bingley (Kelly Reilly) has a begrudging respect for Lizzie (Keira Knightley), recognizing her wit and formidability, as opposed to her all-encompassing contempt in the 1995 version.

    Rewatching the 1995 and 2005 adaptations in quick succession, an important (and in retrospect, obvious) point struck me for the first time, despite having also read the novel some years ago. Charles and Caroline Bingsley inherited their fortune from their late father, a tradesman. In other words, they are nouveau riche, not landed gentry like the Darcys and the Bennets. That they look down on tradesman like Lizzie’s uncle Mr. Gardiner, a lawyer, is nakedly hypocritical. Jane Austin bringing the socioeconomic critique!

    For those interested in further exploring Austen’s extensive Hollywood career, please consult her official Letterboxd page.

    (We watched this on old-fashioned DVD, and it was a very stressful experience: the previews were non-anamorphic, but thankfully the feature was anamorphic. My heart!)