Nobody Knows Anything

Not only am I late after the Russ Meyer blowout, but I’ve only watched three films this week. I really needed the break. One cinema visit this week, marked with a *. Language may offend.
Death Proof (2007) *

I’m too tired to rehash the whys and wherefores of this film that crept into UK cinemas and out again after two weeks because American audiences are so stupid that they start walking out of Planet Terror (2007) when the credits roll and don’t stick around to see the second feature, which is probably the better film (Planet Terror verdict forthcoming). Duh. Thankfully, what Death Proof has going for it is that rather than being a totally out there breakthrough film, it’s just a cool place to hang out and watch two groups of girls talk and interact before they’re interrupted by some vehicular madness that is some of the best vehicular madness that has ever been filmed by anyone. However even as I’m typing this, I can imagine Tarantino giving an interview in which he talks about the films with far superior car chases he was aiming to emulate but did not succeed. Can you too? The only thing that’s a slight indicator of the beginning of the Tarantino decline (apart from the receding incline of his hairline) is the self-referential phrase that forms this week’s title. It’s really, really not a good idea to be so indulgently quoting yourself 13 years after you made Pulp Fiction (1994). Really, really.

A Good Year (2006)

Would this have been a better film if it had been a Working Title production with Hugh Grant, just like all the reviews said? NO, IT FUCKING WOULDN’T. Oh, I’m sorry, didn’t you hear me at the back? As a man of advancing years, Ridley Scott has been slipping micro productions inbetween his macro films for the last few years before time runs out on him, and this French sorbet, filmed, as Scott says on the audio commentary, all within eight minutes of his own home in Provence, must have come as a welcome change of pace after Kingdom of Heaven (2005). There is a slightness to the project that suits the subject matter perfectly, and people with too ingrained an image of Russell Crowe hacking people to death in the Colosseum only have themselves to blame. Crowe was an actor long before he inadvertently became a movie star, and there are plenty of scenes in this film in which Crowe’s character acts like a total shit that a lesser actor would have had removed from the script before he would even deign to read it. Hugh Grant and his schtick are not welcome here.

Deja Vu (2006)

Meanwhile, brother Tony was busy in New Orleans with this thriller that begins with an explosion (it is a Tony Scott movie, after all), edges into science fiction of the mindbending Twelve Monkeys (1995) kind, and ultimately becomes a unexpected love story. To say more would spoil a treat you know you owe yourself. Meanwhile, brother Tony was busy in New Orleans with this thriller that begins with an explosion (it is a Tony Scott movie, after all), edges into science fiction of the mindbending Twelve Monkeys (1995) kind, and ultimately becomes a unexpected love story. To say more would spoil a treat you know you owe yourself. Wait a minute…

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.