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Films Watched January 22 - January 28
Slow week.
Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006) - It's been said that Mike Judge's agenda with Beavis and Butt-head was making fun of the people who would watch it. Clearly, this would make his real demographic difficult to pin down - and that's probably one of the reasons Fox effectively aborted Idiocracy's box office life, dumping it in 125 theaters with (literally!) no promotion, not even a trailer.
The film suggests that since we've eliminated nearly every natural cause of death aside from old age, natural selection will no longer favor the best and brightest, it will simply favor the people who have the most children - i.e., the careless and less intelligent. So when Luke Wilson, the most average soldier in the army, accidentally wakes up in the year 2505 thanks to a botched cryogenics experiment, he finds that the world (or at least the USA) has degenerated into a population of braindead, foul-mouthed Eloi wandering around a landscape that resembles a giant post-apocalyptic McDonalds. And after taking an I.Q. test (which asks him questions like "If you have one two-pound bucket and one five-pound bucket, how many buckets do you have?") it turns out he's the smartest person alive.
The premise is ripe for lots of good gags, and many are strewn about the film. The highest grossing movie in 2505 is called Ass, which consists entirely of a 90-minute shot of an ass occasionally farting. Crops are dead because water has been supplanted (everywhere except the toilet) by a green sports drink called Brawndo, whose parent company owns the FDA and the FCC. Normal, everyday language has been reduced to a handful of vague profanities - when Luke Wilson is examined at a hospital, his doctor (played by Mac guy Justin Long) tells him, "I don't wanna be a dick or nothin', but uh, your chart says you're fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded." Most of the comedy arises from the reductio ad absurdum of things you can see today walking down the street, picking up a newspaper, or especially turning on the TV (e.g., Fox News). And lots of it is rather funny - or at least it would be if it wasn't so sadly, creepily imaginable.
Unfortunately, the film is a mess. It shows clear signs of having been chopped to bits several times over, so it's difficult to determine which shortcomings come from where. To start with, the film is edited together like an outtake reel, treating the story and any sense of pacing as if its something that'll just happen on its own if you put all the jokes in the right order. Not only does this cause waning interest in what's going on, it also means the film's intended message, which I gather is supposed to be the rather optimistic notion that even an average, unexceptional person can change the world for the better, gets diluted and all but extinguished by the gags. What results is a message more like "People are idiots and we're all fucked!" which in turn defeats any efforts to beef up the comedy. I feel safe blaming that on the studio's hack job, but I'm inclined to hold Judge responsible for what I felt was the film's other major drawback: there's just no sense of scale. Garbage mountains notwithstanding, the story feels very small and self-contained, which gives one the unhelpful impression that the problems of 2505 are easily overcome.
I love a good sci-fi comedy, I rather liked some parts of this one, and the concept definitely had great potential, so its sad that the best way to watch Idiocracy is to imagine you're watching the film it might have been instead of the film it is. It's like the Little Engine That Could, but it doesn't.
The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006) - Even with my expectations sufficiently lowered by the cool critical reception and a lukewarm reaction from pont_mirabeau (who I know had really been looking forward to it) this film was a disappointment. De Palma doesn't seem interested in the murder very much, and the melodrama that seems to be his favorite part doesn't yield enough interesting material to justify shifting the focus so far away from the murder. It seemed like the only way I ever knew what the characters were feeling was by being told what they were feeling - none of it actually come through the screen and affected me. And it doesn't help that the grand revelation at the end - which is stupendously preposterous anyway - involved characters and events that were wholly peripheral to the rest of the film, so much so that when they started talking about who did what I had no idea which character they were referring to until a flashback came up and showed him to me.
Even substandard De Palma usually looks good. But there's something just plain weird about the murky, muddy, drowned-in-sepia world on display here. Definitely a post-production job, the brownish-yellow hue looks like some misguided afterthought and it really doesn't jive with Vilmos Zsigmond's lighting. It's as if De Palma was trying to mute and subdue what was originally a much starker look. The set pieces are also lacking, and the only one that stood out as exceptional (at the hotel, ending with the fountain) did so only as a passing "oooh! ahhh!" moment.
Josh Hartnett is major subtraction, too. When the film began I initially admired what I mistook for cold stoicism, but as the film rolled on I grew increasingly irritated with what I soon realized was plain old woodenness. The way he reacted to every emotional setback with that confused, Bush-like squint was especially annoying.
And then there's Scarlett Johansson. Not bad, but terribly out of her element. And holy fuck, Fiona Shaw. Man, do I feel sorry for her. I have to assume De Palma had some hand in her performance, but I don't know what the hell they were thinking.
So who comes out on top in this? Aaron Eckhart is good, as usual. Hilary Swank turns out to be a phenomenal femme fatale. And Mia Kirscher's performance is astounding, the most moving part of the film, by far. And then there's Mark Isham's score. He's a composer who's done a lot of mediocre work, but every once in a while something snaps inside him and he becomes a genius for the duration of one project. This is one of them. Bravo!
Some wires weren't crossed right in this production. You can even see it in the fluffy promo interviews on the DVD. Screenwriter Josh Friedman talks about how he approached the story as historical fiction and strove to avoid film noir pastiche, citing specifically how he took out a great deal of Ellroy's stylized dialogue in favor of something more grounded. Then two minutes later De Palma talks about how much fun he has working with all the fast-paced, stylized dialogue, and elsewhere said he wanted to make the perfect film noir. Hartnett was chosen (for marketability) by the producers prior to de Palma's involvement, and he'd be totally out of place no matter how the material was approached. Zsigmond was hired, but post-production work (as far as I can tell) completely un-Zsigmondizes it. Nothing really came together here.
Slow week.
Idiocracy (Mike Judge, 2006) - It's been said that Mike Judge's agenda with Beavis and Butt-head was making fun of the people who would watch it. Clearly, this would make his real demographic difficult to pin down - and that's probably one of the reasons Fox effectively aborted Idiocracy's box office life, dumping it in 125 theaters with (literally!) no promotion, not even a trailer.
The film suggests that since we've eliminated nearly every natural cause of death aside from old age, natural selection will no longer favor the best and brightest, it will simply favor the people who have the most children - i.e., the careless and less intelligent. So when Luke Wilson, the most average soldier in the army, accidentally wakes up in the year 2505 thanks to a botched cryogenics experiment, he finds that the world (or at least the USA) has degenerated into a population of braindead, foul-mouthed Eloi wandering around a landscape that resembles a giant post-apocalyptic McDonalds. And after taking an I.Q. test (which asks him questions like "If you have one two-pound bucket and one five-pound bucket, how many buckets do you have?") it turns out he's the smartest person alive.
The premise is ripe for lots of good gags, and many are strewn about the film. The highest grossing movie in 2505 is called Ass, which consists entirely of a 90-minute shot of an ass occasionally farting. Crops are dead because water has been supplanted (everywhere except the toilet) by a green sports drink called Brawndo, whose parent company owns the FDA and the FCC. Normal, everyday language has been reduced to a handful of vague profanities - when Luke Wilson is examined at a hospital, his doctor (played by Mac guy Justin Long) tells him, "I don't wanna be a dick or nothin', but uh, your chart says you're fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit's all retarded." Most of the comedy arises from the reductio ad absurdum of things you can see today walking down the street, picking up a newspaper, or especially turning on the TV (e.g., Fox News). And lots of it is rather funny - or at least it would be if it wasn't so sadly, creepily imaginable.
Unfortunately, the film is a mess. It shows clear signs of having been chopped to bits several times over, so it's difficult to determine which shortcomings come from where. To start with, the film is edited together like an outtake reel, treating the story and any sense of pacing as if its something that'll just happen on its own if you put all the jokes in the right order. Not only does this cause waning interest in what's going on, it also means the film's intended message, which I gather is supposed to be the rather optimistic notion that even an average, unexceptional person can change the world for the better, gets diluted and all but extinguished by the gags. What results is a message more like "People are idiots and we're all fucked!" which in turn defeats any efforts to beef up the comedy. I feel safe blaming that on the studio's hack job, but I'm inclined to hold Judge responsible for what I felt was the film's other major drawback: there's just no sense of scale. Garbage mountains notwithstanding, the story feels very small and self-contained, which gives one the unhelpful impression that the problems of 2505 are easily overcome.
I love a good sci-fi comedy, I rather liked some parts of this one, and the concept definitely had great potential, so its sad that the best way to watch Idiocracy is to imagine you're watching the film it might have been instead of the film it is. It's like the Little Engine That Could, but it doesn't.
The Black Dahlia (Brian De Palma, 2006) - Even with my expectations sufficiently lowered by the cool critical reception and a lukewarm reaction from pont_mirabeau (who I know had really been looking forward to it) this film was a disappointment. De Palma doesn't seem interested in the murder very much, and the melodrama that seems to be his favorite part doesn't yield enough interesting material to justify shifting the focus so far away from the murder. It seemed like the only way I ever knew what the characters were feeling was by being told what they were feeling - none of it actually come through the screen and affected me. And it doesn't help that the grand revelation at the end - which is stupendously preposterous anyway - involved characters and events that were wholly peripheral to the rest of the film, so much so that when they started talking about who did what I had no idea which character they were referring to until a flashback came up and showed him to me.
Even substandard De Palma usually looks good. But there's something just plain weird about the murky, muddy, drowned-in-sepia world on display here. Definitely a post-production job, the brownish-yellow hue looks like some misguided afterthought and it really doesn't jive with Vilmos Zsigmond's lighting. It's as if De Palma was trying to mute and subdue what was originally a much starker look. The set pieces are also lacking, and the only one that stood out as exceptional (at the hotel, ending with the fountain) did so only as a passing "oooh! ahhh!" moment.
Josh Hartnett is major subtraction, too. When the film began I initially admired what I mistook for cold stoicism, but as the film rolled on I grew increasingly irritated with what I soon realized was plain old woodenness. The way he reacted to every emotional setback with that confused, Bush-like squint was especially annoying.
And then there's Scarlett Johansson. Not bad, but terribly out of her element. And holy fuck, Fiona Shaw. Man, do I feel sorry for her. I have to assume De Palma had some hand in her performance, but I don't know what the hell they were thinking.
So who comes out on top in this? Aaron Eckhart is good, as usual. Hilary Swank turns out to be a phenomenal femme fatale. And Mia Kirscher's performance is astounding, the most moving part of the film, by far. And then there's Mark Isham's score. He's a composer who's done a lot of mediocre work, but every once in a while something snaps inside him and he becomes a genius for the duration of one project. This is one of them. Bravo!
Some wires weren't crossed right in this production. You can even see it in the fluffy promo interviews on the DVD. Screenwriter Josh Friedman talks about how he approached the story as historical fiction and strove to avoid film noir pastiche, citing specifically how he took out a great deal of Ellroy's stylized dialogue in favor of something more grounded. Then two minutes later De Palma talks about how much fun he has working with all the fast-paced, stylized dialogue, and elsewhere said he wanted to make the perfect film noir. Hartnett was chosen (for marketability) by the producers prior to de Palma's involvement, and he'd be totally out of place no matter how the material was approached. Zsigmond was hired, but post-production work (as far as I can tell) completely un-Zsigmondizes it. Nothing really came together here.