The Benchwarmers (Dennis Dugan, 2006, USA) March 2, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews , add a commentDir. Dennis Dugan; screenplay by Allen Covert/Nick Swardson; starring Rob Schneider, David Spade, Jon Heder, Jon Lovitz, Craig Kilborn, Molly Sims
I’ve been very critical of director Dennis Dugan over the last few years. Who could blame me? He gave the world the awful Saving Silverman and followed it up with the spiteful racial slurs of National Security (a film that embodied bad taste). So, with trepidation I began to watch his 2006 film The Benchwarmers with little in the way of expectation. What I learned was with a good script and some energetic performances, Dugan can turn out a decent movie. In fact, this is the best film he’s made since Happy Gilmore.
The film concerns grown-up ‘nerds’ Gus (Scheider), Richie (Spade), and Clark (Heder) who, after witnessing a helpless kid getting bullied by the little league baseball team, decide to form the ‘Benchwarmers’. With the help of billionaire Mel (Lovitz) they start a baseball competition in order to beat the little league teams who won’t let the weirdos, geeks, and computer nerds play ball.
Essentially, and the main reason the film is so delightfully entertaining, is that it’s basically about adults beating the hell out of scrawny little teenagers. There’s a fabulous moment when Richie gets his first hit. Remembering the jibes the chubby, young catcher had given him, he rounds third base and decides, instead of going easy on the twelve year old, he’ll jump in the air and fly, feet first, straight into his head mask. The child, dazed and obviously confused, hits the floor semi-unconscious. Talk about pulling no punches. There’s a great undercurrent to the humour in that it utilises childish sarcasm and silly physical comedy in a way that mocks the stereotypes inherent in young culture. The film accepts that children can be very cruel to both other children and adults due to their less-informed and polarized, pop-culture dominated view on the world, and basically mocks them for it. It’s refreshing to see a film that sheds the innocence of childhood, and The Benchwarmers certainly reminds of that other cynical baseball movie The Bad News Bears with Walter Mathau.
The film also seems to be made by a group of people either, continuously high on something or, thanks to the catering crew, given a diet consisting of far too much sugar during production. You can only applaud the introduction of baseball legend Reggie Jackson with an old photo depicting a young Reggie with a huge afro, or Jon Lovitz’s mechanical butler who delivers any sandwich your heart desires from its plastic belly. You’ve also got to love the billionaire’s home which is decked out with Star Wars figures, and made to look like the dinner hall from the Starship Enterprise. When Lovitz turns up in Kit from Knightrider you know the film is celebrating the sort of nerd-culture that makes some unfortunate children the target for spiteful bullies.
You’ve also got to give the film credit for the performances, especially Jon Heder (from Napoleon Dynamite fame) who is basically a twelve year old in a twenty year old body. He is the highlight of the movie with some wonderfully sardonic asides. Amongst many excellent moments there’s a great scene when Heder, whose favourite meal is macaroni, asks what steroids are, and gets the reply that it makes your ‘Pee Pee’ smaller. Heder suddenly has a revelation and says, ‘there must be steroids in macaroni!’.
The Benchwarmers is a delightful comedy that, while the kids laugh at the insane nature of it all, adults will be chuckling in the background thinking they can finally get their own back on the pesky little tearaways. Dugan allows the film to get preachy towards the end but it moves along at quite pace, clocking in at under eighty minutes, so hardly outstays its welcome. It’s refreshing, crazy at times, cynical throughout, and sweet when it needs to be, but above all else, it’s one funny movie.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Rounders (John Dahl, 1998, USA) February 18, 2008
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1990s, Drama, Film reviews, Crime, Sports , 1 comment so farDir. John Dahl; screenplay by David Levien and Brian Koppelman; starring Matt Damon, Edward Norton, John Malkovich, John Turturro, Gretchen Mol, Famke Janssen
Rounders, a film about Poker culture and the people who are involved (directly and indirectly) with the highs and lows of the game, could be a definitive Hollywood expose on the game’s new-age popularity if it wasn’t let down by wayward characterizations and poor plotting.
Mike McDermott (Matt Damon) is a great player who lost all his money and quit the game. When his best friend Worm (Edward Norton) gets out of prison owing money to the wrong sorts of people, Mike is forced back into the game he loves but at the cost of putting both his friendship, and his relationship to girlfriend Jo (Gretchen Mol), on the line.
The film is blessed with good performances – certainly from Norton (as usual) and Damon – but also from the excellent supporting cast including John Malkovich, Martin Landau, and John Turturro. Director John Dahl, who has given us such enjoyable films as Joy Ride, also gets the poker action spot-on, not just providing us with Texas Hold ‘Em but other forms of the game too. For people not versed in the game’s rules, etiquette, and slang, he throws in a whistle stop lesson, seamlessly interspersed in the action so as to not lose part of the audience. Indeed, when Rounders is concentrating on the game, it’s a winning formula of tension and ballsy attitude built on smoke-filled, sweat-drenched bluffs and high stakes.
Yet, Dahl’s control of the supporting characters lets the film down with both Mike’s relationship to his long-term girlfriend and, more importantly, his friendship with Edward Norton’s Worm, allowed to drift into the ether with no sense of closure. In fact, Norton simply disappears with twenty minutes remaining, his character becoming simply a passing mention in the film’s closing moments.
Yet, Rounders, despite its flaws, is an enjoyable, fast-paced sports-drama that will entice new fans to the game and make established Poker players salivating for their next big win.
Rating: 3 out of 5
R.V. (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2006, USA) June 1, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure , add a commentDir. Barry Sonnenfeld; screenplay by Geoff Rodkey; starring Robin Williams, JoJo, Cheryl Hines, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Chenoweth
I’m not saying my sister has bad taste in films, I’m just saying our tastes differ, and when she recommended Robin Williams’ 2006 film R.V. to me, I had some reservations. I had seen the trailer and liked what I’d seen but thought surely it was a low-grade National Lampoon’s Vacation with childish humour that didn’t equate very well with an adult audience. After watching it, in many respects I was right, but Sonnenfeld is a director who for me personally, makes three bad films to every good one, and while R.V. might be bereft of the wry sarcasm and ensemble selection of characters from Harold Ramis’ National Lampoon’s Vacaton, it maintains the fish-out-of-water histrionics and innocent, familial values that made the aforementioned film so endearing. R.V. isn’t a great film, but it certainly doesn’t deserve to be ignored by anyone wanting ninety minutes of escapist fun. Yes, it’s aimed at young teens, and it’s slot on Sunday afternoon television is already assured, but Robin Williams has a ball with his character (getting back into comedy after several dramatic roles), and while the humour might not be to everyone’s liking (indeed, comedy can be such a fickle genre to review), I found myself getting caught up in the physical eccentricities of it all and really warming to it.
The film reminded me of a few eighties movies, perhaps the reason I liked it so much. It has an obvious homage to Richard Donner’s The Goonies when the family of characters find themselves falling down a rain-soaked hill that looks uncannily like a waterslide. There’s a little bit of Parenthood in there, and most certainly National Lampoon’s Vacation. Indeed, the film takes on the very same ideals, which make it interesting for parents who watch it with their kids. The film begins with Robin Williams’ character Bob Munro telling his very young daughter that they will be the best of friends forever. We then cut to several years later when the daughter is a rebellious fifteen year old who not ‘hates’ her father. Munro finds himself being alienated from his family – he works too much and doesn’t get to spend time with his wife, while his son struggles to come to terms with is small stature, and his daughter desperately seeks individualism. Munro himself can’t really understand where it all went wrong. He started a family and, effectively, in working hard to support it, has become a bit-part player. This sets up the vacation, which Munro uses as a ruse to get to a business meeting he doesn’t want to tell his wife about. Throughout the journey, Munro begins to bond with his family and learn about himself, especially the value of a family unit.
You could easily say it’s pretty rudimentary storytelling, almost contrived, and it is to a certain degree, but Sonnenfeld keeps the pace up and never allows the film’s message to become preachy. Where it falls down is in the characters beyond Munro, who are little more than caricatures. His wife is dutiful but wants the exuberance of their early relationship to come back, his son and daughter are both rebellious but all they really need is some tender loving care from their father; it’s uninspired and seriously hampers the film on multiple viewings. But what makes the film so watchable is Williams, who energises the movie with his great physical humour, his love of comedy excreting from every pore.
R.V. is enjoyable in a innocent, childlike, Sunday-dinner-round-the-table, type of way. If nothing else, it’ll keep the kids happy for a couple of hours.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny (Liam Lynch, 2006, USA) May 29, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure , 2 commentsDir. Liam Lynch; screenplay by Jack Black & Kyle Gass; starring Jack Black, Kyle Gass, Jason Reed, Ronnie James Dio, Tim Robbins, Dave Grohl, Ben Stiller
Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny is a film aimed primarily at their fans. It’s also targeted, unfortunately, at those who enjoyed This Is Spinal Tap, the Beatles in Yellow Submarine, rock opus Tommy, or Eric Idle in The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash. But beyond its novelty, it pales in comparison.
At times, the film seems more concerned conforming to rock and roll conventions like the psychedelic hallucinations brought on by a rampant overindulgence with acid that made Yellow Submarine so unique but ultimately completely rubbish. The Beatles movie might have been a strange affair with little merit, but at least it was honest. The Pick of Destiny wants to be the Yellow Submarine of the MTV-generation, it wants to celebrate music like Tommy, and it desperately wants to be as funny as This Is Spinal Tap, but it’s nothing more than a poorly-scripted set of sketches (Black and Gass are much more suited to their television work and comedy sketches seen on The Complete Masterworks).
Jack Black tries his level best to make it work, and has some amusing moments, but he’s not helped by Kyle Gass who reminds me of a middle-aged man at a wedding party trying to score with the twenty year old bridesmaids. Gass is a master of the guitar but he’s a terrible actor.
Apart from a beautiful transition for the opening credits when electric guitar-driven music is seamlessly dissolved into an orchestral score (this is right about the time when you’ve still got high hopes for the film), it’s incoherent, messy, and seriously lacking in laughs. I’m both a fan of Tenacious D and Jack Black, but this isn’t a celebration of rock n roll, it’s a feature-length promotion for a sub-par rock album that won’t sell very well.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Into The Psyche of a Broken Man…revisiting John Landis’ Into The Night May 16, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1980s, Desert Island Films, Drama, After Hours at Cafe 80s, Film reviews, Action/Adventure, Crime , 7 commentsInto The Night (John Landis, 1985, USA)
Dir. John Landis; screenplay by Ron Koslow; starring Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Pfeiffer, Dan Aykroyd, John Landis, Bruce McGill, David Bowie, Richard Farnsworth, Clu Gulager
John Landis might be remembered for Trading Places, Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf In London. He might also be remembered by his detractors for the unfortunate incidences that occurred during the filming of The Twilight Zone, but for me, his career should almost be defined by his 1985 masterpiece Into The Night.
The film, starring Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer, is a little seen gem (not unlike his vampire flick Innocent Blood) that sheds the genre trappings of say An American Werewolf and the iconic prominence of stars and celebrity in, for example, Trading Places, Blues Brothers, or Coming To America. It’s a film that focuses on character, very much inspired by its time, with Landis not having to worry about special-effects (ala man changing into werewolf) or eccentric spectacle (look no further than The Blues Brothers or Animal House). It’s Landis’ most assured piece of filmmaking, and debatably, his greatest ever achievement.
The film is also prominent because it was the first Landis made after the tragedy of 1982 when Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le, and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, were killed when a helicopter stunt went wrong. Landis and other production crew were initially blamed and charged with manslaughter. Many people still hold Landis responsible for the deaths but the fact remains that after a long trial, Landis and the other crew members were acquitted in a court of law. The director was clearly deeply affected by the terrible deaths – more than many give him credit for – and this can be seen in Into The Night. His vision is pessimistic and bleak. He shows a disregard for commercialism and a materialistic world, and uses Los Angeles (the most fictionally abused city by American cinema, where dreams are made and broken) as his backdrop. His main character is confused, alone, miserable. He can’t sleep, almost an indication he has to spend more waking moments in his misery than those who can sleep. The film is very a much an investigation into what happens when conventional life loses its boundaries and suddenly a cavernous space opens up with infinite possibility. It’s about a frightening reality that isn’t governed by pop-culture, television adverts, or consumerism. Landis depicts a world where we have to make choices – not always the right ones – but choices that aren’t necessarily straight-forward. Ed, the main character, learns what he wanted by the end of the movie but can’t fathom what it is at the beginning. The choice, therefore, isn’t always in front of us, and we might never know what it really is, but it exists.
Retrospectively, it is wonderful how director John Landis has actor Jeff Goldblum working in a plain office doing a job that needs no other distinction than appearing awfully boring, and probably requiring its workers to turn-up nine to five, five days a week. His job description is not required, the only thing worth noting the fact it has something to do with the machination of technology. It’s an idea that extends to his life in that he is so bored with the everyday machination of his being (like in the board meeting when his turn to speak interrupts the flow because he isn’t doing his work properly), he’s inadvertently trying to break down the boundaries of the familiar conventions that bind him. It’s almost as if he wants to breakout but he can’t bring himself to do it - a fear of the unknown, of what isn’t conventionally part of his life - preventing his desperation to break free. The fact he has insomnia signals that inadvertent rebellion. Coming home one day to hear his wife screaming in orgasmic pleasure with an anonymous stranger triggers his pursuit of change – his pursuit for adventure.
Into The Night shares some similarity to Scorsese’s After Hours - two films that flirt with the idea of ‘ordinary’ thirty-something men working in jobs that appear to trap them, both looking for the catalyst that opens new territory and new ideas. They share the femme fatale and both are primarily set at night, but these films are not about a lewd concourse between a man and a woman, they’re about musing about life outside of one’s own and finding adventure when the walls of the American dream have broken down.
Into The Night begins with a plane landing, followed by shots of corporate Americana before gently moving towards a quiet suburb, entering the bedroom of a house owned by Ed Okin (Jeff Goldblum). He sits in bed, wide awake, next to his sleeping wife. Ed has insomnia. He tells his friend Herb (Dan Aykroyd) who recommends he uses it to his advantage and should take the late flight to Las Vegas. He’s unsure at first but when he comes home to find his wife having an affair, he heads to the airport. Parking the car, Ed takes a moment to survey his predicament, but his attention is quickly removed to a distraught young woman who gets in the car and begs him to drive away. Four armed men chase the vehicle out of the parking lot but Ed is able to escape. The girl tells him her name is Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer), and that she doesn’t know why the SAVAK (Iranian secret police) are following her, but they murdered her friend as they got off the plane. Ed probes her for information that she isn’t willing to provide, she just asks him to take her home. However, Ed is about to get more than he bargained for as an already long night begins to throw up more mystery, more murder, and a lot more intrigue, as he inadvertently becomes another player in a dangerous cat and mouse adventure, set against the backdrop of a cold Los Angeles night.
Essentially, Into The Night is about superficiality, in that life is based on false pretences. If we live our lives by pre-conditions what will happen if we are faced with a series of unconditional, uncertain avenues? Ed Okin is told that Diana (Michelle Pfeiffer) has nothing of her own, that she has only what is given or what she takes. This is mirrored in him because his own life is simply based on what has been given to him such as the conventions of getting married, having a steady job, a car and a house – all things that are supposed to equate to happiness (in both the conventional sense of the word, and the way such life choices are viewed by common American values) but there’s something distinctly missing in his life. He’s accepted all these things because he knows of no other way but if they are supposed to make you happy, then why isn’t he? Director Landis continually abuses our senses with the superficial world that surrounds us – Diana is a model for instance, and Ed examines the stylised photos at her apartment. Her brother idolises Elvis and tries to live like the man himself, driving around in a car that proclaims ‘The King Lives’. Indeed, when Ed and Diana visit a film set in search of her friend, it is the artificial props that cause Ed a problem as he leans against a false wall and falls through it, and sits on a papier-mâché rock crumpling it to a pulp. When he tries to make a call from a payphone two prop engineers look at him questioningly as they pick up the prop and take the phone from his ear.
It’s interesting that the men that chase Ed and Diana around the city destroy every place they visit looking for clues to their whereabouts, as they put to the scrap heap the very physical embodiments of the superficiality that bind us. They break a film director’s awards, smash televisions, vinyl records and stereos. In essence, Landis reverses the narrative psychology of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ character roles, in that what the corrupt, and potentially evil SAVAK are doing is the very thing Ed needs to save himself. The SAVAK agents are not content with what is given to them, they are chasing the riches. When Ed and Diana meet, it’s at the airport and Diana asks Ed why he is there. He tells her that his life isn’t working out somehow, but Diana wonders why he is drawn to the airport. He has no answer, but it seems to lead to the idea that he inadvertently tries to chase the riches, like his insomnia being an inadvertent rebellion to life’s constraints. The airport signifies a place of relatively infinite possibilities with its key to the world – other countries, other cultures, other people. Finally, when cornered by the Iranian secret police and questioned Ed starts to fictionalise his reason for being caught up in the situation – ‘I’m on her majesty’s secret service, we’ve got the place surrounded’. Shrugging he says, ‘I’m really from immigration, we thought you had some illegal aliens working around here.’ Ed begins to breakdown the superficiality that binds him, embracing it, consciously fictionalising his predicament into a fantasy world that holds no such boundaries, conventions or constraints.
Landis paints Ed’s adventure much like a dream, Goldblum’s forlorn facial expression indicating he can’t remember the last time he slept. He allows bits of information to come through but Landis captivates the viewer by a languid narrative that is part road-movie, part mystery, which seems at times as rebellious to convention as Ed wants to be. Landis takes the film on quite unique tangents, his unhurried pace a sign of Ed’s tired insomniac. In between quips about American consumerism, he keeps Ed and the audience in the dark, much like the night that surrounds them, and through following a rather arbitrary plot direction Landis is able to instill the indistinctive, incomprehension of a nightmare that bares no outcome. Indeed, the film could be seen as Ed’s dream played-out in reality, though it takes the form of a nightmare because that is how he sees his life. It’s ironic then, that to learn from a nightmare you have to stay awake all the way through it, but that again is another example of the film’s rebellion of constraints that bind society.
Whether Into The Night is an interpretation of Ed’s dream or reality itself, it’s quite unforgiving in its bleak outlook. Landis depicts a world of corrupt excess and pessimism rooted in big business capitalism that permeates from characters that are seemingly miserable in their riches, or chasing such riches within the confines of violent, greed-ridden crime. The SAVAK want Diana’s diamonds and are willing to kill anyone that gets in their way, while a mysterious French entrepreneur with a British henchman also wants to get their hands on the loot (Landis using their very different nationalities to suggest that the problem is hardly local, perhaps a rather haphazard criticism of globalisation), all manoeuvring in the criminal underworld. Yet the ones that have riches fair no better as Diana’s ex-sugar Daddy is a dying cripple who hates his wife, and whose many expensive cars lay soullessly in an oversized driveway. Similarly, a Hollywood producer is more dismayed at his film awards being smashed than the well-being of his trophy-girlfriend. When the police ask he claims he doesn’t know what happened to her even though her dead body lays a hundred yards away on the beach, his preoccupations going no further than his broken living room. Landis provides a quite horrid sense of life based on commercialised excess to the point of it being an epidemic that breeds through a weakened, consumerist society. This is beautifully depicted in Diana’s brother whose fascinated, idolisation of Elvis Presley has turned him into a social misfit who struggles to even afford a downtrodden, one bedroom apartment. In a sense, it isn’t apparent what Ed really wants, but he doesn’t know himself, because his life has become alien to him. When a gun is held against Diana’s head and he’s facing the possibility of his own death, he says: ‘Let me ask you something, maybe you can help me. What’s wrong with my life? Why is my wife sleeping with someone else? Why can’t I sleep?’. This is a haunting reminder that the answers are a little hard to come by when the reassuring conventions that govern one’s life have broken and you’re looking beyond the profit-margins and collector’s items, the adverts for cheap dinners and the fast cars that guarantee the trophy-blonde.
Into The Night has been criticised for being overly self-referential and it would be unwise to overlook Landis’ constant use of cameos in the form of ‘director’ friends that show-up constantly in the movie (from Lawrence Kasdan, David Cronenberg and Landis himself, to Amy Heckerling, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Mazursky, and Don Siegel, plus many more), and his homage to one of the first films that could be termed post-modern - Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein - which is shown within the film. In many ways, Into The Night acknowledges itself as an entity apart from the ‘real’ world, much like the nineties vogue kick-started by Wes Craven with New Nightmare and continued through Scream and its sequels. Here were movies where the characters acknowledged their existence within a film, their lives governed by conventions set out in fictionalised accounts within previous films. It’s certainly an idea that examples Landis’ love of movies, but also shows how popular culture governs cultural identity as reality and fiction blur, so that they are hardly separate entities at all. Taken at face value, this is as superficial as the phony-reality the film criticises, but at its root it’s a post-modern fear of mass cultural identity disappearing into itself, so that Ed’s question of ‘what’s wrong with my life’ becomes the rather more complex ‘what is life itself?’
Landis has certainly concocted an enjoyable journey into the enclosed, urban expanse of inner-city Los Angeles - an ‘island’ surrounded by the build-up of its own excesses. Ed’s adventure is frequently amusing, largely through Goldblum’s laconic, deadpan performance but Landis juxtaposes the humour (the SAVAK’s pursuit painted in cartoon-like styling as if they are bumbling bad guys following a treasure map) with reasonably graphic violence (when a girl is drowned, and when David Bowie’s psychotic Englishman kills some people who offered to help Diana). The film takes no half-measures right down to a genuine fear of the upper classes, and a lack of confidence in an evidently corrupt police force. Yet the film’s sense of ambiguity (both in Ed’s character whose core is born out of an existentialism that is suggested by the world that surrounds him, and in the mystery of Diana’s femme-fatale) is what holds everything together. The film’s episodic nature is far more fulfilling than the term might suggest, each segment offering another clue to Ed’s predicament and his world, rather than a narrative cog for the plot to move forward. Landis is far more concerned with Ed’s life than Diana’s survival, that everything that happens is simply a clue to where ‘X’ marks the spot, not in terms of hidden treasure but in Ed himself. For Ed, the ‘gold’ is the answer to his question ‘what’s wrong with my life’, and for Landis, it is the utterly brilliant premise for us to find out. This is a true, underrated, eighties classic.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Click HERE for further information on Into The Night
A Cock and Bull Story (Michael Winterbottom, UK, 2005) May 12, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Drama, Film reviews , add a commentDir. Michael Winterbottom; screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce; starring Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon, Keeley Hawes, Shirley Henderson, Dylan Moran, Jeremy Northam, David Walliams, Gillian Anderson, Kelly MacDonald
Said to be an un-filmable novel (and probably rightly so), approaching the movie adaptation of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy you’d be forgiven in wondering just how the hell director Michael Winterbottom pulled it off. Well, he didn’t, exactly. It isn’t that the film doesn’t look at both the ‘life’ and the ‘opinions’ of Laurence Sterne’s titular character, it’s more that it rolls it all up into a bite size bundle of non-linear narrative, film within a film within a film inventiveness, and wry satirical asides which celebrate the originality, humour and post-modern techniques of the original literature. So how do you adapt a selection of books that cannot be cinematised – you don’t. You use the books as inspiration for a film that is as unique, as weird, and as funny for a 21st century audience as the books were to18th century readers.
You’ve got to praise Michael Winterbottom if only for his willingness to take chances. You’ve also got to thank him for giving the British film industry an injection of vitality, always producing edgy films that flirt between mainstream and niche, art house cinema. In many ways, he’s a modern day auteur, one who works within his own constraints, unhindered by Hollywood sensibilities. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work (9 Songs), often it does (24 Hour Party People, Road To Guantanomo), but rarely is Winterbottom’s dark, cynical outlook portrayed without style and intelligence.
For A Cock and Bull Story the director takes Tristram Shandy’s difficulty in finding meaning in his life, or ability to articulate his feelings in a linear form, and weaves them round Steve Coogan’s attempts to portray the character on film. This is all going on while Coogan has to deal with his off-screen relationship issues and the birth of his first child. The film seemingly taps into the rampant market of reality television, providing its audience with a behind-the-scenes look at art imitating life imitating art, with the awkward, surreal comedy of Charlie Kaufmann. Indeed, the film isn’t a far cry from Kaufmann’s own Adapation - a film he wrote for director Spike Jonze about the writer’s struggles to adapt Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief.
Coogan’s portrayal of Shandy is intermittently interspersed throughout the movie as he both plays the character and acts as narrator. Fans of the books the film is inspired by shouldn’t see the movie expecting a glorious, Peter Jackson-telling of an age-old story. Indeed, there isn’t much of the page that reaches the screen. This becomes a nicely implemented sub-plot with the characters squabbling about what should and should not be in the movie. But it’s Winterbottom’s use of the literature to mirror that of a modern story, where Coogan’s fictional representation of himself struggles to come to terms with the birth of his baby, and can’t find time for his ‘girlfriend’ (not his wife as he likes to remind people), that is the main draw. There’s an absurd but brilliant moment when Coogan, playing Shandy, is entombed in a freestanding womb as the other characters mock him. It both works as a representation of Shandy’s obsession with his own birth and insecurities, with Coogan’s feeling of entrapment as an actor, a father, and a public figure.
But the greatest attribute of the film is its two leads. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are superb. Friends in real life, the two British actors play off each other with a comic ease that cannot be manufactured. Brydon’s brilliant impression of Coogan’s television character Alan Partridge is one of the film’s funniest moments, showcasing in all its glory the self-reflexive attributes of the movie. In many ways, it’s this self-reflexive, knowingly-cynical, satire that makes the film so appealing. The movie opens with Brydon and Coogan playing themselves in the make-up room as Brydon muses over the colour of his teeth. Later, Coogan complains about the size of heal on his shoes, and while wearing a rather bent latex nose, asks his girlfriend if she would have had a baby with him if he looked like this in real life. The glorious self-mocking comedy is a staple of both Brydon and Coogan’s comic brand, totally lacking in pretension, and works so well in much of their improvised scenes within the movie as well as underlying the difficulty in bringing such literature to the big screen. In a sense, their self-mocking behaviour is indicative of the film’s irresistible approach to adapting the books – if you can’t do them justice, make fun of your failed attempts in doing so. It’s unique, it’s funny, and it’s rather charming.
If anything the film can be too clever for its own good. The non-linear narration of Shandy’s story disjoints the linear ‘making-of’ sections which takes something away from the overall effect. Indeed, Winterbottom’s approach might be too left-field for those wanting a serious adaptation of Laurence Sterne’s work. However, it isn’t as if the director doesn’t take the source material seriously, because the film’s inspired humour and style are clearly influenced by Sterne’s wayward thinking. Further, it shouldn’t be forgotten that the component parts of the movie add up to a whole that is as weird and interesting as Tristram Shandy himself, and rather than mocking the literature, mocks the filmmakers attempts to adapt it for the big screen. Evidently, as the film is as digressive as the novel, what can only be described as a loose cinematic version of ‘The Life and Opinions’, is in fact, a celebration of the books, the forward-thinking technique, and of Sterne himself.
In many ways, Winterbottom couldn’t have made a better stab at it. He’s not only made a very competent movie that is both funny and endearing, he’s made a story for a new audience. Perhaps that oft-used word ‘adaptation’ should really be ‘adaptability’. A Cock and Bull Story is adaptable for an audience pruned on high-concept Hollywood exports. In taking care of that unfortunate problem he’s made sure Sterne’s inventive 18th Century writing isn’t an excluded niche that doesn’t fit the mainstream. That, for me, is the film’s lasting and most important attribute.
Rating: 4 out of 5
Happy Endings (Don Roos, 2005, USA) May 7, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Horror, Comedy, 2000s, Drama, Film reviews , add a commentDir. Don Roos; screenplay by Don Roos; starring Lisa Kudrow, Steve Coogan, Jesse Bradford, Bobby Cannavale, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jason Ritter, Tom Arnold, David Sutcliffe, Laura Dern
Counting how many movies writer/director Don Roos was trying to make with Happy Endings is about as difficult as deciphering Steve Coogan’s unusual pseudo-American accent. Not that I’m saying Coogan is bad in the film. I clocked he was gay from a screen shot of the film based on his feminine poise, which indicates he’s believable in his role as he does indeed play a gay character. Yet, Coogan, like so much else in this film, is wasted. The British comic’s talent is much more akin to the sort of offbeat niches seen in A Cock and Bull Story, 24 Hour Party People and his television roles. He actually suited an American-style character in The Alibi much more because it served his awkward humour, giving him a character on the wrong side of weird. In Happy Endings, anything Coogan brings to the film is lost with everything else Roos is trying to achieve as he can’t find the sum for all his parts. The film is full of quirky story arcs and possibly interesting characters, but the switching from story to story, character to character, makes it very difficult for an audience to keep up. Tarantino was able to make it work in Pulp Fiction with brilliant dialogue and sensationalised stories. Roos, in trying to keep attention on his characters, tries to work the interlocking element of their lives into a coherent narrative but he misses Tarantino’s trick. Instead of the interlocking nature of the plot being a sort of negligible oddity, Happy Endings’ is contrived and predictable.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Who says it’s a Camberwell Carrot? April 4, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 1980s, Desert Island Films, Drama, After Hours at Cafe 80s, Film reviews , 1 comment so farWithnail and I (Bruce Robinson, 1987, UK)
The trials and tribulations of iconic British due Withnail and I.
Dir. Bruce Robinson; screenplay by Bruce Robinson; starring Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, Richard Griffiths, Ralph Brown
For many, the first introduction to Bruce Robinson’s tale of friendship at the end of the ‘greatest decade in history’, appears not in the form of a video, a curry, and a group of mates, but by the discovery of an intoxicated body lying forlornly on the living room floor. ‘What happened here,’ someone will ask, to hear the reply: ‘He was playing the Withnail and I drinking game.’ Of course, anyone not familiar with the film might not immediately see the significance until reminded, ‘you know, the one where you drink every time Richard E. Grant drowns his sorrows in either alcohol or lighter fuel. Of course, the lighter fuel must be reserved only for terminal cases and those who can’t afford the alcohol.’
Of course many associate the film with student life. The living in squalor – the kitchen with an ever-growing tower of dirty dishes turning last weeks leftover chips and gravy into new life forms, larger with every day, seeking south for winter. It’s easy for your average student to take one look at the greasy stove and congregation of plates and cutlery (that are beginning to smell like a morgue) and decide to ‘sort it out tomorrow’. It’s even easier to start watching ‘Withnail and I’ trying to sort out their own messy sink because at least you get to keep your hands clean and have a few laughs for good measure.
Released in 1987, ‘Withnail and I’ was, during its production, hampered by a producer who couldn’t see the merits of the film, and a director who admitted he didn’t really know what he was doing. Bruce Robinson, by this time, had already accomplished himself as a writer. He’d been nominated for both Oscar and Bafta awards for his screenplay The Killing Fields which looked at the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from the experiences of three journalists. Yet, his real passion was acting, or at least that was until he became disillusioned with whole practice after spending years being rejected and having to live off the state. However, since he couldn’t make it as an actor, he decided he may well profit from telling the story of his trials and tribulations. That’s where the genesis for ‘Withnail and I’ came from. But, Robinson’s script takes more from the essence of the period, and the way he was feeling at the time, than from any one situation. The film doesn’t rely on strong plotting, it relies on characters in a predicament; friendship in a world of confusion, counter-culture, and loss.
To say Robinson didn’t have any success as an actor would be to perpetuate the director’s own modesty. When it comes to this film he sees the merits of his own screenplay but downplays his visual direction, claiming the film doesn’t look pretty. Certainly however, the writer/director focuses his attention on those out-of-work days, when experimentation with drugs was commonplace and alcohol became a secure part of any diet. You can see the autobiographical nature of the film reflected in both Withnail and his counterpart ‘I’ (or Marwood, to which he is never referred to on screen). Withnail’s constant barrage of self-righteous nonsense is clearly the mark of Robinson’s pre-Romeo and Juliet acting struggles (although the character is more specifically based on his drinking buddy and close friend Vivian Mackerrell), while Marwood’s jittery anxiety is a product of rampant rejection and over-indulgence with amphetamines. There’s an unsympathetic tone to the period, and an apprehension for the future. No wonder so many students can cling to the film’s ideals. Withnail and Marwood’s friendship is true but built on fear of failure, poverty-induced paranoia, and a loveless world that pervades not only their relationship but Marwood’s homophobic panic (believed to be inspired by Robinson’s difficulties working under gay director Franco Zeffirelli who allegedly assaulted him), Uncle Monty’s loneliness and inability to garner the attention of another male, gay or otherwise, and the fact there is no romantic sub-plot for either of the two friends.
Indeed, when you strip ‘Withnail and I’ of its linguistic jousting and infinitely quotable lines, you lay bare a heartfelt parable of two friends fighting themselves. Marwood laments poetically, his inner-monologue introducing the viewer to this urban squalor in Camden’s miserable town, while Withnail’s destruction appears self-warranted, as if his only way to live life to the full is finding the most hallucinogenic way to end it. The film’s heartbreaking finale sees the friendship conclude, with Richard E. Grant’s Withnail delivering his finest, and perhaps final, theatrical performance to an uninterested pack of wolves. His injured pride is laid naked on this ‘stage’ as he reads from Hamlet, which is both a poignant finale and bitter indictment of the situation. It carries more power because Grant so brilliantly encapsulates the scene, Robinson not allowing any cinematic extravagances to take anything away from Withnail’s ‘moment’. It is also saddening given Robinson’s later essay for Criterion where he paid tribute to Withnail’s inspiration – Vivian Mackerrell – who battled and later died from throat cancer. As Robinson nostalgically remembers his friend laughing in the face of death, he says ‘that sad, brilliant, bitter face of yours laughing. Good-bye my darling friend. This [the movie] is for you forever. And I know if there’s a pub in heaven, you’ll be in it.’ For everyone else, film fans at least, who only knew the on-screen Withnail, this becomes an unpleasant but deeply effectual denouement for both friendship and Withnail’s exit stage left.
Yet, nothing can take away from the film’s wonderful humour. Nor can it be claimed the film isn’t unabashedly funny. It was voted the third greatest comedy of all time in 2000 and its unsurprising why. Robinson’s script is full of joyous wordage born out pathos, paranoia and bitterness. Infinitely quotable, the film is one of the most oft-imitated and referenced. It sits proudly alongside the likes of This Is Spinal Tap, The Big Lebowski, Some Like It Hot, and just about anything Neil Simon ever wrote.
Over course, it wouldn’t be half as funny if the actors didn’t give career-best performances (interesting in that both Grant and McGann were starring in their first major film). McGann was fired by Robinson during filming but swayed the director back on side when he swore he’d deliver an accent more fitting with what was required. Robinson was so particular with his dialogue (and who wouldn’t be with such a wonderful script) that he insisted on pauses and intonations being in the right places. The director would later praise Grant, who was a teetotaller, on delivering the best performance of a drunk he’d ever seen. Robinson got Grant drunk just once during production so that he could use the experience for the film. It certainly worked. Grant is simply spectacular. He encapsulates Withnail’s bitter, alternate view of the world with as much zest as a million sour citrus fruits. His sudden outrage at something living in the overgrown sink, his fishing technique, and trying to look sober in front of a police officer, all exude the self-righteous bitterness of Withnail. McGann, conversely, hides Marwood’s fears inwardly. His quiet indignation held more closely to home. He of course must come out of his shell in the face of what Monty (Richard Griffiths) calls ‘burglary’, when he’s trapped by the amorous wannabe-thespian while Withnail sleeps off another session of over-drinking. And like McGann, Griffiths and seedy, drug dealer and part-time philosopher Ralph Brown, are all excellent. Even if Robinson doesn’t give himself much credit as a visual director, he certainly gets the most out of his actors.
You’ve also got to give the director plaudits for the use of music in the film. The low-budget origins might well show up in the original music composed for the movie by David Dundas and Rick Wentworth, but there’s a certain charm to it that becomes unique to the film. The opening slow-tracking shot of Marwood as he laments, King Curtis’ live version of A Whiter Shade of Pale playing over the scene, is inspired but even more melancholic given the singer was killed moments after the performance. Also, the film is one of few who were allowed to use original music recorded by The Beatles (largely due to George Harrison being one of the film’s producers). Indeed, notoriety must also be shared with Jimmy Hendrix’s songs, as the film’s soundtrack became unavailable to buy after the late-musician’s family did not want his music associated with drink or drug use. However, the songs remain in the film with All Along The Watchtower brilliantly used alongside shots of buildings being demolished.
It all adds up to a wonderfully entertaining movie that has lost none of its humour or effect in the twenty years since its release. Indeed, its iconic influence on the cult following who hold it so dear might well have grown stronger. Unsurprising, since it represents one of the last quintessentially British movies to come out of the country’s independent cinema before American big-business and the rampant multiplex-building of the late 1980s changed the face of the U.K film industry forever. Perhaps the film’s greatest attribute is the pervading sense of an unsure future, taking nothing for granted. But that’s where it’s wrong. Robinson, Grant, McGann and co. left us one thing we know we can control: the rewind button. And the great thing is: you can always go back to the beginning and watch the whole thing all over again, if you still don’t know what you want to do tomorrow.
Rating: 5 our of 5
Click (Frank Coraci, USA, 2006) March 22, 2007
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Romance , add a commentAdam Sandler’s come a long way from his back-to-school antics in Billy Madison, his golfing heroics in Happy Gilmore, and his coming-of-age in The Waterboy. Indeed, we find him at the beginning of Click with a wife, a good job, two children, and a fairly secure middle-class lifestyle. Yep, he’s all grown-up now.
To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much from Click. I liked the premise but I found his recent films (50 First Dates - his worst movie to date, and The Longest Yard) to be lacklustre. Yet, my pessimism was quickly turned upside down by an actor back to form - his bumbling antics tempered by a moralistic story and some great supporting actors.
The idea of a remote control that can manipulate life is used brilliantly - in a superbly constructed story arc, and for comedic exploitation.
Sandler is also excellent - he’s likeable, funny, and clearly suited to the role. He’s also the reason the film never gets over-sentimental.
My only problem with the movie is Kate Beckinsale - she’s not a great actress and again she borders on awful in this movie. The only thing she does well is a convincing American accent.
However, despite Beckinsale being simply nice wallpaper, the film is an enjoyable fantasy-comedy that never preaches its morals. It’s also very, very funny - Sandler’s funniest film since Anger Management.
My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwick, USA, 2002)
Posted by Daniel Stephens in : Comedy, 2000s, Film reviews, Romance , add a commentA likeable culture-clash comedy from the very talented Nia Vardalos who writes and stars in the movie. The initial boy-meets-girl set-up is a little under established but that doesn’t detract too much from the movie’s overall effect. I would have liked to have seen a bit more conflict as the narrative becomes too straight-forward and the eventual pay-off is predictably predictable. Yet, there’s funny characters, some very touching moments and the delightful Vardalos for company, so the film will most likely please most fans of romance.