Nobody Knows Anything

Two cinema visits this week, marked with a *.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (2005)

I’m not just a Douglas Adams fan, I have completely absorbed everything the man wrote into my DNA to such an extent that when I try to write funny, all I see is his influence. It thus goes without saying that I am the kind of Hitchhiker’s fan who thinks the original radio series did it best, and all the subsequent attempts to cross Hitchhiker’s into other media (including towels) have been distractions that kept Douglas Adams from writing something new (though this may have been the intent; Adams himself has written about his extensive attacks of writer’s block [writing about writer’s block may have been his way of trying to break the block]). So does it need to be a movie as well after it’s been everything else? At least an Englishman directed the film and kept it in touch with the original. And the film has so many good bits in it that they paper over the cracks of the bits that aren’t so hot. And if you don’t start to tear up at the first strains of Journey of the Sorcerer (about 20 minutes in), well then you were never really a Hitchhiker’s fan in the first place.

Tideland (2005)

People are idiots. Visit the imdb and read the morons commenting on this film. After the disaster that was The Brothers Grimm (2005), this was billed as a return to form for Terry Gilliam, and so it is. This is a film of such startling brilliance and originality that it was clearly doomed to failure at the box office and later rediscovery as a cult classic 10 or 15 years down the line. My advice would be to beat the rush and start reclaiming the film now. You’ll be able to look back in 2015 and say things like, “Oh, you’ve only just realised Tideland was one of the great films of the last decade now, I’ve been into it for years.” Children are not victims. You are not stupid. If you’re tired of blockbusters, this is one place to start. It’s a film on the edge, where film ought to be.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End (2007) *

Without giving away anything of the ending, I find it terribly intriguing that all of the millions of moolah this franchise (ugh!) has been generating at the box office has enabled the filmmakers to resolve their trilogy in two ways: with an ending that’s really downbeat only if you think about it, and which leaves the way open for more pirate movies in the years to come (which may or may not be a good idea). Yes, it’s too long, and yes, there’s both too much plot and not enough, but it’s never dull and it’s frequently very funny.

Zodiac (2007) *

It’s a privilege to watch a filmmaker at the height of his powers, and David Fincher is fast becoming a challenger to the unelected post of North America’s greatest living film director (currently held by David Cronenberg; that’s who Martin Scorsese thinks should have the job). Zodiac isn’t just as good as you think it might be, it’s way better than that. Dense, complicated and thoroughly unnerving, it’s inspired a number of no-think articles about how the directors that came of age in 1999 haven’t been quite so able to connect with audiences recently. The truth is that it’s the audience that’s behind, and it’s up to the audience to catch up with the directors. Don’t wait for the DVD on this one, get thee to a cinema post haste.

Dirty Harry (1971)

In a simpler age, the real life Zodiac killer inspired this ripped from the headlines thriller that so offends Inspector David Toschi when he goes to see it in Zodiac (2007) that he walks out of the screening. It’s noticeable that 36 years later David Fincher was pretty much unable to capture the kind of views that are casually thrown into the background of the many sequences in Dirty Harry that take place on rooftops; San Francisco has changed that much. Instead, Zodiac seems more claustrophobic, but that works for the film. Most of Dirty Harry takes place outdoors. It deliberately sensationalises a lot of things the real Zodiac killer said he would do, but never did, such as targeting children on a school bus. And of course this film has a resolution that the real case did not. It did strike me that Dirty Harry is even more of a western than it may have looked in 1971, a genre where a man can solve his problems with his gun instead of his brain.

Heat (1995)

Heat looked and felt like a masterpiece in 1995, and it’s only got better over the years. One of the ways you can watch the film is to concentrate on its female characters and watch as their lives are ruined by the obsessiveness that drives the men on both sides of the law. All of the things the film was famous for 12 years ago (Pacino and De Niro act in the same scene! a cop and a criminal have so much in common! etc) are all of the things that don’t seem quite so interesting today as opposed to the human cost of the events that unfold. I’m starting to think that my favourite character in the film is the one played by Dennis Haysbert, the ex-con whose first job on parole is a shitty one flipping burgers in a restaurant run by a petty tyrant who steals a quarter of his take home pay, a situation which is not happily resolved when De Niro’s crew come up one short for their bank heist.

May require a penny in the swearbox. When we left our hero last week, he’d just had one of the most artistically satisfying experiences of his life (directing Tarantino’s script for True Romance) only to see it more or less shunned at the American box office. One of the things that becomes apparent when comparing the budgets with the grosses of Scott’s films is that the budgets have increased and the grosses haven’t really. If Enemy of the State had been made for $15m and made as much money as it did, then it would be easier to declare it a big hit. As it is, Scott’s movies have continued to make enough money for his career to continue and he’s continued to work with Jerry Bruckheimer, Don Simpson having passed away in 1996.

Crimson Tide (1995)

Budget $53m - US gross $92m

The difference in the 1990s is that the scripts have improved, especially on the Jerry Bruckheimer productions, and Scott has started to get really good performances out of really good actors. The great pleasures of Crimson Tide aren’t to be found in the mechanics of the plot that manufactures another variant on the Cuban Missile crisis but in watching the actors tearing great chunks off each other in the confines of a nuclear submarine. Probably only Tony Scott could have made as dynamic a movie in a claustrophobic environment where the action sequences are all in the dialogue (polished by Tarantino in the wake of Pulp Fiction (1994)). The unbelievability of it all disappears because everything is played with such conviction.

The Fan (1996)

Budget $55m - US gross $19m

Two thirds of The Fan is great. The opening dialogue sequence, which any normal director would have staged in a bar with all the protagonists in the same place, has instead been opened up and staged in two separate moving vehicles and a radio phone in studio with helicopter shots, driving stunts, and six cameras filming everything at once (in all likelihood). Robert De Niro, who has of late attracted much criticism for using the phone to deliver his performances instead of turning up on the set like he used to in the 70s, is creepy as all get-out in the first two thirds of the movie; all of the scenes he has with his onscreen son are as disturbing as Travis Bickle was on his own in Taxi Driver (1976). De Niro’s ability to switch moods between funny and angry and loving and hate-filled remains unmatched. And then it all goes to hell. The moment the De Niro character decides to kidnap Wesley Snipes’ son is the precise instant the film becomes just another generic Hollywood thriller, the kind of film it promised not to be. Credibility flies out the window, the plot becomes stupid, the action becomes contrived, the talents of the cast are wasted, and even the deployment of the largest bank of rain machines in history for the film’s climax is unable to disguise this. The Fan is one of those odd films that works until it doesn’t. It’s a real disappointment.

Enemy of the State (1998)

Budget $90m - US gross $112m

In direct contrast, Enemy of the State is anything but a disappointment. The pace of the editing has started to accelerate. But not at the expense of telling the story or revealing character. People including the man himself sometimes tend to forget that Will Smith can actually act, and he acquits himself well in this “wronged man has his life trashed and has to discover the truth and expose the bad guys” role. And Gene Hackman’s character is a respectful tip of the hat to Harry Caul in The Conversation (1974). It’s occurred to me that there isn’t anything particularly original about Scott’s films strictly on a plot or story level. Scott can be found in his commentaries making precisely the same point - “everything’s been done” - but he maintains that what he can bring to the table is a freshness.

Spy Game (2001)

Budget $92m - US gross $63m

Releasing a morally ambiguous spy thriller with a key scene involving the suicide bombing of a building in the wake of 11th September 2001 is probably the reason for the box office droop, but Spy Game has an unappreciated brilliance. The restlessness of Enemy of the State has been amped up even further, aided by Scott’s discovery of the digital intermediate process first trialled the year before on an entire movie on the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). The digital intermediate allows filmmakers to manipulate the colour of the film before it’s output to negative and processed chemically into prints. It gets Scott halfway to what he finds later on (see below), as each section of the film is assigned a different look: sepia yellow for Vietnam, cold blue for Berlin, and high contrast colour in Beirut. As opposed to the ersatz baubles of tentpole blockbusters, this is proper moviemaking with a dense script, tough characters and a satisfying denouement.

Man on Fire (2004)

Budget $70m - US gross $78m

Boy, I’ve read a lot of crap about this movie. There’s something about the whole revenge thing that really rubs some people up the wrong way, but art has always been obsessed with the subject, and it’s not going to go away any time soon. And what is the current situation in Iraq but a product of revenge on all sides by all creeds on all peoples? This may be Tony Scott’s masterpiece. The editing is now utterly out of control, Scott has been allowed to do what he couldn’t on Spy Game: shoot on reversal stock, cross processed, for heightened colours, black blacks and white whites. He uses hand cranked cameras, multiple exposures, all sorts of wacky stuff. And yet it’s all to serve the story and get inside his character’s heads: the sequence in which Denzel Washington contemplates suicide is an extraordinary barrage of harrowing imagery and strong performance. The technique would be nothing without the actor. Revenge is a meal best served cold, and if you don’t like that kind of cold dish, expertly served, there’s nothing I nor anyone else can do for you. But if you do…

Domino (2005)

Budget $50m - US gross $11m

Based on a true story. Sort of. I don’t think people liked the trailer. I don’t think they liked Keira Knightley’s cut glass RP voice enunciating the phrase, “I am a bounty hunter.” As if all upper class English accents belong in romantic period pieces, you know, chick flicks. Well, guess what, Domino’s a chick flick too. Confronted at a horrid sorority by a blonde with attitude who says she has the chest of a ten year old boy, Domino’s response is to ask, “Have you had a nose job?” before decking her. Who could not love that? And could a man make a film more extreme than Man on Fire? Oh yes. In our vapid, image-obsessed, MTV culture, how come the 13 year olds who flock to all those shitty blockbusters weren’t interested in sneaking in to a vapid, image-obsessed MTV culture movie like this that’s doing all these things for purposes of satire. On mescalin. With Tom Waits as a preacher in the desert for no other reason than that it’s very, very cool. In an odd way, Domino is a comedy, and I’ve come across a review online somewhere that sees it as the future of cinema. So there. Check it out.

Conclusion

So what have we learned from a fortnight of Tony Scott?

1. Things are always better when they’re exploding in balls of flame.

2. Fuck is one of the best words in the English language.

3. There is no such thing as “restrained” in a Tony Scott film. More is more is his mantra.

4. If Michael Bay ever directs a movie with a good script, we’re all in a lot of trouble. (Thankfully, this looks like it may never happen.)

Peace. Out. Normal service to be resumed next week. Though I am promising a season of Russ Meyer when I’m all better.

May contain strong language.

So who is this Tony Scott guy anyway, and what has he done to deserve a fortnight’s scrutiny here? Isn’t he precisely the kind of filmmaker serious film buffs are meant to hate? You know, he makes this commercial garbage that people actually want to see. How dreadful. And his films are so vulgar, full of violence and explosions and swearing. How distasteful. Why can’t he be more like Merchant Ivory and make some bland, generic, coffee table bullshit that can win some Oscars and be called respectable. Isn’t Tony Scott just the death of film as art? And isn’t he responsible for Michael Bay?

In an unusual step for me, I’ve posted some monetary details just under the title of each of the films. All details come from the imdb so I can’t vouch for their accuracy. If you’re wondering what the worldwide gross for the movies was, take the US gross figure and double it. It so turns out that the movies which were the most financially successful (Top Gun & Beverly Hills Cop II) are the movies which are the least successful artistically. And the movies which failed the most at the box office (The Hunger, Revenge, True Romance & Domino) are the artistic successes, and quite frankly, the better films.

The Hunger (1983)

Budget $11m - US gross $6m

Prior to The Hunger, Tony Scott had spent a couple of decades directing commercials and music videos through the company he ran alongside his brother, Ridley. It should come as no surprise then that Scott’s first cinema film looks like a lesbian vampire movie in the style of Blade Runner (1982). Smoke has been used on every set for texture, and the majority of the light comes from windows behind the actors because this was the era of backlit is best (see also the films of Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne). These are traits Scott has stuck with throughout his career. The Hunger is a fairly typical studio-produced horror film in that not for one moment is it scary, and whole swathes of the story fail to make any sense. The Hunger isn’t really about anything (it has serious script problems which Scott was unable to solve) but it is never less than watchable. It has Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon sucking each other’s blood, lots of ankhs and all around gothicness, and Pete Murphy singing Bela Lugosi’s Dead, so it’s not all bad news. It’s a walking definition of a cult movie though (I enjoy the brief small role of Ann Magnuson) in that it isn’t really any good, it failed at the box office, but it does have an overbearing sense of style and taste. If Tony Scott was going to make any headway in Hollywood, he needed to attach himself to a more commercial project.

Top Gun (1986)

Budget $15m - US gross $177m

The days when you could make a glossy hit movie for as little money as $15m have gone forever. Tony Scott’s feature length advertisement for the US Navy’s Top Gun flight school has been kicked to death by enough critics not to need me to elaborate that much, though it did famously inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Sleep With Me (1994) speech:

http://www.godamongdirectors.com/scripts/sleep.shtml

It may be that the gay subtext is the only worthwhile thing to come out of Top Gun. The script is shockingly bad, the characters are bland ciphers, and the mechanics of the plot only attempt to provide an illusion of depth where there is none. This is, as Jerry Bruckheimer says, “Star Wars on Earth”. It’s high concept filmmaking where the whole film can be summed up in four words: Beverly Hills Cop II.

Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)

Budget $20m - US gross $154m

These two films mark the zenith of Tony Scott’s financial success in Hollywood, but represent the nadir of his artistic achievement. This is one of those 80s sequels where everyone seems to have been motivated by greed rather than anything worthwhile or, God forbid, original (cf. Ghostbusters II (1989)). Notable only for an early cameo from Chris Rock and a gratuitous visit to the Playboy mansion, the film manages to revisit every cliché of 80s cop movies: police chiefs function by yelling at everybody, everyone says fuck all the fucking time, everyone wears sharp suits and drives expensive cars (which in reality they would never be able to afford), and women are only allowed to have functions rather than characters. A plus for Tony Scott was that because Eddie Murphy liked to improvise on the spot (some of it works, some of it doesn’t), Scott had to film scenes using two cameras running simultaneously. This was the start of the multi camera set up Scott’s used ever since (on Man on Fire (2004) as many as six cameras would be running for every single take of every single scene).

Revenge (1989)

Budget $?m - US gross $16m

And then suddenly Tony Scott gets everything right. Revenge is the first film that feels like it has material with which the director is fully engaged. It has strong characters defined by their actions, a proper role for a woman and Kevin Costner as an utterly convincing badass in one of the strongest performances of his career. I can no longer remember why I went to see Revenge in the cinema in 1990, but I must have read a good review somewhere. At this stage of Scott’s career, I’d only seen The Hunger and Top Gun on video, so this was the first time I saw one of his films in the cinema. My theory is that Scott’s emphasis on visuals and atmosphere is so strong that the script and characters have to be equally as strong. Only when this is the case do the films work, and fortunately, for the next sixteen years, Scott would have access to some powerhouse scripts. It would be nice to think that Tony Scott realised this himself, and however much fun he had filming F-14s in Top Gun, he worked out he could have even more fun if he filmed actors with interesting things to say and do. Before that began though, there would be one step back into the commercial maw.

Days of Thunder (1990)

Budget $60m - US gross $82m

Isn’t it interesting that the only film to have a Tom Cruise co-story credit is so irredeemably awful that Cruise has never sought a writing credit ever again, even though it’s well known he likes to work with writers to fashion scripts to his liking. Does Days of Thunder even have a script? I don’t know, I was totally confused. This by the way was the first time I’d ever seen it, having steadfastly managed to avoid it all these years. High concept: “It’s Top Gun on wheels”, who could not love that? Maybe it’s because I just don’t like cars. And whereas I can appreciate the skills of Formula 1, NASCAR seems to be interminably boring; they just go round and round, that’s it. The whole thing is full of contrived bullshit conflict with people flying off the handle for no reason at all. It has an early appearance by Nicole Kidman at the height of her frizzy redhead period as cinema’s least convincing doctor, but there’s nothing she can do to bring this corpse of a script back from the dead. A script written by Robert Towne no less! Presumably in his sleep. If there was any justice in this world, Days of Thunder would have been the Heaven’s Gate (1980) of 1990 and sent Paramount into financial ruin, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Kidman married Cruise and Tony Scott found a proper script.

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Budget $?m - US gross $60m

Stop reading this right now. Go to your retailer of choice, buy this film, watch it, and then report back. Have you just seen one of the greatest films ever made or what? Working from one of the notorious million dollar scripts of the early 90s, Tony Scott fashions a high octane, hilarious, violent, foul-mouthed, inflammatory ride that gobs in the face of political correctness. It has more scenes-we’d-like-to-see than any other movie I know. And explosions, lots and lots of explosions. Bruce Willis has never been better, it’s a mystery why Damon Wayans didn’t become the Will Smith of the 90s instead of Will Smith, and Halle Berry is an exotic dancer. It’s everything Beverly Hills Cop II wasn’t.

True Romance (1993)

Budget $13.5m - US gross $13m

Hang on a minute. Isn’t there some sort of typo there? Surely the US gross of this movie was $113m? Don’t people love this movie? What the hell’s going on? I thought True Romance was a big hit? Well, True Romance was a big hit in the UK, and a big hit on video and now DVD, but no one went to cinemas in the US in 1993 to see it. Now that Quentin Tarantino has become part of the furniture, it’s easy to forget that in 1993 he was the new kid on the block with something fresh to offer. And yet even then it should be remembered that Reservoir Dogs (1991) barely covered its budget on its initial cinema release in the US; in 1992 Dogs grossed $3m, which is, as they say, pocket change. The difference is that everybody in Hollywood saw it: every actor, every director, every writer, and all of these people wanted to be in on the next Quentin Tarantino project (or they wanted to rip him off wholesale, cf. Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead (1995)). This is why True Romance, Natural Born Killers (1994) and Pulp Fiction (1994) are rammed to the gills with the best actors in Hollywood. Tarantino was hot shit, and everybody wanted a piece of him. Actors didn’t care how big the part was, they just wanted in. Which is why Brad Pitt is in True Romance for 6 minutes as the stoner Floyd and Val Kilmer is in it for 4 minutes as the ghost of Elvis Presley. As with Shane Black’s script for The Last Boy Scout, Tarantino’s script is so powerful that Scott can stage the infamous Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper facedown with minimal directorial intrusion. Scott sits back and lets the actors go at it with relish. True Romance is a film that is loved.

But Tony Scott was only getting started. More next week.

No cinema visits this week. We seem to be in the three month pit of despair that American film distribution enters when January begins and the studios dump all the crap they couldn’t release before Christmas into theatres. It reaches us in the UK about two months later. So thanks for that. At least we have a summer filled with sequels to keep us happy. The last time there was a summer filled with sequels was 2003, when such dogs as Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle were unleashed on a carefully test-marketed public who had sworn blind they wanted to see more Angels. Except the public lied. What people really wanted to see was Finding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. My prediction for 2007: the real breakout hit of this summer will be a non-sequel that no one was expecting. Why? Read title of blog.

La Belle et la Bête (1946)

There’s very little new I can bring to this one, except that if it isn’t one of Terry Gilliam’s favourite films I would be completely shocked. Why can’t more artists make films like this? Made in conditions so impossible it only appears to have become a finished product through the sheer will of its driving, creative force: Jean Cocteau. For a scene in which they needed unpatched sheets hanging up to dry, they could only find four, and then four more when it became clear that four wasn’t enough. Why couldn’t they find unpatched sheets? This film began production while the Second World War was still underway. Martin Scorsese has said of Powell & Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948) that having been told to go out to die for our country during WWII, the Archers were now telling us, the war now over, to go out and die for art. Jean Cocteau says the same.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

Christopher Frayling mentions in his commentary on La Belle et la Bête that Disney make no mention whatsoever of Jean Cocteau in the credits to their animated version of the same French fairy tale. Which is a real shame because whole scenes have been, shall we say, homaged in the most direct way possible. This is the 2nd film in Disney’s post-Little Mermaid, pre-Pixar “Imperial” period, in which they could do no wrong, and audiences flocked to the films. The key figure in the success was Howard Ashman, who contributed as much on a story level as he did with his brilliant, witty lyrics. This is a film where everything works for me and I find myself going all misty at key points; when the emotional manipulation is this good, I really don’t care.

Moulin Rouge (2001)

This was my film of the year for 2001, and it has, if anything, only got better with the passage of time. It didn’t appear to do much for Hollywood composers though. It was shut out of the original score category, presumably because so much of the music comes from pre-existing songs. No one seems to have realised what an exacting proposition it was to a) piece all these songs together in the first place and b) write original linking material to tie them together into a unified place. I guess Moulin Rouge had to go first so Chicago (2002) could win all the Oscars.

One from the Heart (1982)

And so to one of my very favourite films. This, like Moulin Rouge, was an original musical created entirely in the studio that takes a highly unusual approach to the score. Where Moulin Rouge is collage, One from the Heart has original Tom Waits songs sung by Waits himself with Crystal Gayle forming point and counterpoint to the onscreen activities of its principal lovers: Frederic Forrest and Teri Garr. There’s no better moment in cinema than the scene towards the end of the film where Frederic Forrest unexpectedly breaks into an out of tune rendition of “You Are My Sunshine” in an attempt to win Teri Garr back. You’re just going to have to see the film to discover why.

Form and Content

I discovered quite early on that I prefer form in film to content. I’ve met people, real actual people, who’ve said, to my face, that they’re real big Steven Seagal fans, or people who’ve said they just can’t stand that Tom Cruise. These are content people. People who like westerns and don’t care if it’s the worst western ever made; as long as it’s got a man on a horse with a gun, a saloon, a tart with a heart, and a gunfight, they’re in hog heaven. I prefer form, I appreciate style, I follow directors. Brian De Palma is probably my favourite director and of all his films, Blow Out (1981) is probably my favourite and his best.

So this is a tip for people who want to watch good films: find a director you like and watch all of their other films. I guarantee you will see more good films than you would if you followed a particular actor. Imagine the dreck you’d have to sit through if you were a Cameron Diaz fan, or even worse, Jennifer Aniston. As for me, I think Cameron and Jennifer are great in the movies, because I’ve only ever seen them in films made by directors I like. This may seem like a trifling distinction, but believe me, it’s not.

For the next week or two (or three): Tony Scott.