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'Tonight He Is Overcooked'

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Hancock (2008)

For mre coverage read‘Hancock’ started it’s journey to the screen 12 years ago as a spec-screenplay by first-timer Ny Vincent Ngo, titled ‘Tonight He Comes’.

I first learned about Ngo’s screenplay through some fanboy site like Harry Knowles’ AintItCool.com. Ngo’s script created something of an uproar in Hollywood despite comic book properties being at a fallow moment after Joel Schumacher’s assumption of the Batman franchise with ’s ‘Batman Forever‘ (1995) and the revolving door that the title role became after the departure of Tim Burton and Michael Keaton.

‘Tonight’ launched a bidding war and got Ngo signed by CAA, jump-starting Ngo’s screenwriting career and several premium-cable writing gigs. But along the way, the script also got the attention of Writer-Producer Akiva Goldsman who bought the script and subsequently doctored it to fit his number one screen-doctoring client, Will Smith.

Out of circulation for a good while, a copy of Ngo’s original script has resurfaced here, but without, apparently a final page, as the script has, a decade later, come out of the backside of Hollywood’s Assistant and Gopher Army, Xeroxed to death before the advent of scanner-copier combos.

Having not yet read the entirety of the script, this much is true: ‘Tonight’ was intended as a sort of post-Tarantino, post-Dark Knight Returns play on Superman, though the script never mentions the protagonist by that name™:Instead, Hancock is just named by the script as a generic superhero who wears a red cape and blue outfit though this goes uncapitalized in the movie.

DKR (1986) and Watchmen (1986) of course heralded a new age of darker, grittier comic book fare that culminated in Frank Miller’s Sin City (1992). But the other thing that re-characterizes Hancock-the-Movie from the original race-neutral (and presumably Caucasian) disposition of the screenplay is the working-class aspect of the Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman characters. In the original screenplay, Ray Embrey (née Horus Longfellow ) is depicted as a Brooklyn Security Guard and his wife Mary is a housewife short on everything but but disappointment. By moving the story from Sheepshead Bay, New York to Beverly Hills script doctors Vince Gilligan and John August have eliminated whatever class and racial friction that might had remained between the Embreys and Hancock as depicted by Will Smith.

For the first 2/3rds of its running time, Hancock proceeds like one of those awful genre-parody movies that gets released every 6-8 months — it is ‘Sky High 2′ and ‘Superhero Movie 0′ but with A-list performers, rather than has-beens and actors you’ve never heard of before.

Why anyone would think that a movie about a jaded, alcoholic super-hero would qualify as ‘entertainment’, much less ‘comedy’ is anyone’s guess, but it’s A WILL SMITH MOVIE and everything he touches turns to action-movie comedy gold — that’s what Akiva Goldsman is there to ensure. But after the first hour of the movie’s 91 minute running-time, the spoof collides with some sort of strange ::SPOILER:: and never quite recovers its footing. That’s the twist; if you haven’t seen it, swipe the spoiler-text at your own peril.

Far from fulfilling the promise of either Frank Miller’s revisionist Batman or Alan Moore’s ‘Silver Age’ Watchmen stumbles when the script fails to properly characterize the place of Superheroes within modern culture. For a moment, the movie seems to want to go for an MLA equivalence pointing out that Hancock and his ilk may have once walked the world as gods. But that description fails when Hancock is considered as a proper reflection of American culture rather than one of the pan-cultural musings of someone like Joseph Campbell and his ‘Hero of A Thousand Faces’ mythos. Super-heroes are a product of the Industrial and Atomic age: Typically the products of science and ingenuity rather than elemental forces like Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.

Written in 1996, ‘Tonight’ seems to have been a meditation on the irreconcilable worlds of superheroes and mere mortals, ‘Hancock’ has been reduced to a mere Will Smith vehicle. While the efforts of Peter Berg, Vince Gilligan and John August are to be admired for continuity, I feel that Mr. Ngo’s intentions — whatever they were – got lost during the 3rd draft or the 2nd trip to the editing room. Six weeks before the opening, there were reports of Columbia/Sony ordering Berg to reshoot portions of the story for a PG-13 rating, which might explain the plot-holes and uneven nature of the final product.

The story is a mess, but it’s a spirited and entertaining mess

The script-doctors left their paw-prints all over this one. For more coverage read Tambay Obenson's script review.

Posted Friday, July 11, 2008 7:24 PM by vhsparrow | with 0 comments

Exumed from 1981!

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Dead and Buried (1981)

Wow, wow, wow -- I guess this movie *is* as obscure as I expected if there's only an All Movie Guide summary of it up here. First of all, credit is due to where I discovered ‘Dead & Buried‘, on the Video Nasties Project, which is a blog created by some fellow named Ben who has the temerity and no doubt the stomach to pursue the 79 B-movies that were banned by the British Nanny State after the invention of the VHS player in 1979.

A list of all 79 of the ‘banned’ movies is available here, but as we all know, just because something is banned it doesn’t mean that college kids and high schoolers aren’t going to figure out a way to smuggle the item home from the Continent or that long summer vacation in the US.

For some reason, each of the 79 movies on the VNP list got the dander of right-wing British pols like Mary Whitehouse, a member of the British equivalent of America’s Moral Majority. Importantly, Whitehouse was interesting in prohibiting all sorts of morally degrading crap like cannibal zombie movies and morally ambiguous stuff like ‘I Spit On Your Grave‘ (1978). Well, the Video Recordings Act 1984, which was entirely irrelevant by 1997 — just in time for DVDs.

Anyway, ‘Dead & Buried‘ a/k/a ‘Dead and Buried’ (1981) was written by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett, the screenwriters better know for their 1979 hit ‘Alien‘. I should add here that Shusett and specifically O’Bannon were responsible for several other big genre his of the ’80’s, including John Carpenter’s ‘Dark Star‘(1974), ‘Toral Recall‘ and ‘Return of the Living Dead‘ (1985), so O’Bannon’s B-movie water-into-wine chops are pretty formidable, given that he was inspired by the dross of ‘Queen of Blood‘ (1962) and ‘It! The Terror from Beyond Space‘ (1958).So essentially ‘Dead & Buried’ is the Shusett-O’Bannon take on the small New England town of Stephen King’s ‘The Fog’ (1980) or the seaside community of H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Dagon‘, ‘Dead & Buried’ takes the high concept of the bucolic locale one step further.

More to the point, ‘Dead & Buried’ is a strange sort of mash-up of ‘The Stepford Wives’ and some sort of zombie movie. While that may just be a huge spoiler, the pleasure is in the execution of the thing and the pleasure of watching the whole thing play-out. The only thing that hurts Dead as a film is the 27 years of twist-ended films that have been made since 1981. As a writer myself, I can’t help but to watch Dead today and reflect on the numerous ways in which the story might be updated for contemporary audiences.

Dead stars James (’Ironside’/'Melrose Place’) Farentino as Sheriff Dan Gillis and Jack Albertson as the town Coroner-Undertaker. The typical sort of seaside horror-drama gets set up when a number of visitors to the scenicPotter's Bluff keep turning up dead, only to have their bodies disappear from the morgue. For genre fans, the movie features early performances from both Robert Englund and Prince of Darkness‘ Lisa Blount.

It’s not quite a classic but it’s a necessary film for any self-respecting horror buff to investigate. It’s definitely a movie that warrants a second look, if not a remake.

Is it 'lost' or just 'forgotten' if I'd never heard of it before?

Posted Tuesday, April 22, 2008 6:18 PM by vhsparrow | with 0 comments

A Good Start, But A 'Missed' Opportunity

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Stephen King's The Mist (2007)

Now don’t get me wrong, here — ‘The Mist‘ (2007) was adequately executed, beautifully shot and well cast, but Frank Darabont ought to have done more to haul the premise of Stephen King’s novella out of the ’50’s.

I used to be a King fan way, way back and read a good few of his books back in my junior HS days. I even followed some of his adaptations for a while — his adaptations from other people’s ideas and other people’s adaptations of his work — but that was before Frank Darabont started making his filmazations.

From the commercials that advertised the movie last fall, it looked as though ‘The Mist’ was going to be a King-remake of John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog‘ (1980), which seemed entirely unnecessary and redundant to me, considering we’d just had a widely panned ‘Fog’ remake in 2005.

Lo and behold, ‘The Mist’ was based on a 1980 novella — early, as far as King’s career is concerned — and not necessarily one of his more apparent/glaring ripoffs, since ‘The Fog’ only appeared on screens in 1980. That, and the ‘mist’ in this case inexplicably provides cover for extra-dimensional insects and flying lizards, as opposed to the ghosts of dead pirates. King’s ‘inspiration’ for ‘The Mist’ was more likely one of the old EC comics — you know, the ones about zombies and coprophages — that created an uproar among politicians and lead to the creation of the Comics Code Authority.

Where ‘The Mist’ falls down is the writing — with all of the crappy, Red-State themed teen-slasher ‘Deliverance’-type flicks we’ve seen over the past couple of years and the ‘War on Terror’ fear-mongering, you’d think that Darabont could mine something more involving than this Cold War-inspired invasion flick. But that’s precisely where Darabont leaves it, with a Twilight Zone-type twist ending, rather than a resolution of the many Red State vs. Blue State conflicts that he creates on the central set-piece of his supermarket.

As an end calculus, I think that Darabont opened up too many worm-cans: He may have been faithful to the King novella, and masterful about eliciting the conflicts between his supermarket protagonists — hats off to Macia Gay Harden as the crazy church-lady — but the insects, the scifi element and the implied social commentary (or lack thereof) just didn’t hold together at the end.

That, and he kills off both Alexa Davalos’ and Andre Braugher’s characters too early.

Posted Monday, April 14, 2008 10:16 AM by vhsparrow | with 0 comments

Well worth watching again

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Minority Report (2002)

With the Eliot Spitzer bust and talk of the NSA’s ‘Total Information Awareness’ program back in the wind, I was compelled to take another look at Steven Spielberg’s ‘Minority Report‘.

I’d seen the movie and written another review of the movie back in 2002 and wasn’t so impressed with it — I felt that Spielberg had taken the Philip K. Dick material and slicked it up just a bit too much. When Ridley Scott adapted ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep‘ (cf. Blade Runner’ (1982)), he made an exerted attempt to ground his story in a world we’d understand, a polyglot, super-ethnic place that had felt the pre-millenial bleed-in from Hong Kong and other portions of east Asia. Even if Minority Report is set in D.C., it feels as though Spielberg’s future is a bit too squeaky-clean, a Googie architecture for the early 21st century.

That’s not to say that Spielberg and his gang of futurist consultants didn’t present us with a compelling vision of the future, with his mag-lev superhighways and reconfigured cityscape, the world of Minority Report looks more line the year 2554 A.D. rather than the intended 2054. We’re still nowhere near the place where the police are able to use jet-packs as personal accessories.

There are interesting details in MR that I wish I’d paid greater attention to the first time, specifically the Precogs’ relationship to the illegal drugs - neuroin - that Tom Cruise’s John Anderton procures on the ‘back-streets’ of a very shiny, futurist Washington, D.C. Apparently the Precogs are all some 21st c. version of crack-babies that have been rehabilitated enough to make their precognative birth-defect useful to the larger society.

Since production on Minority Report started on March 22, 2001, there’s no way that Spielberg and company could have anticipated 9-11, much less incorporated its effects into Scott Frank’s script.

But the National Security Agency’s Total Information Awareness program seems to be very much the stuff that Spielberg’s Precrime Division of the Justice Department was after — however, rather than use precognitives to divine their subjects, the Bush II Justice Department uses credit information and unlawful wiretaps.

The operative motivation in Information is guilt-by-association — Total Information Awareness — renamed the ‘Terrorism Information Awareness Program’ after Total tested poorly — assembles financial information, telephony and the movement of individuals as a digital surveillance package. In short, there are already computers out there tracking your ‘movement’ when you purchase your lunch with plastic, when and whom you telephone, and who calls you and the movement of your EZ Pass™, when you need to pay tolls, not to mention the alarms that go off if you attempt to transfer more than $10.000 to another entity.

As a former D.A., Sptizer should have known all about anti-money laundering restrictions and the ramifications of asking Ashley Dupré to transport controlled substances across State lines for him. The fact of the matter is that the NSA, the FBI and Homeland Security already use a collection of invasive tools that make Clinton’s partisan problems with FISA seem quaint by comparison.

So, the Bush Administration has invented their own version of a Precrime Division and promoted the NSA officers formerly in charge of it to senior positions at the Pantagon and the CIA. Bravo to those unreasonable searches that the Constitution was supposed to protect us from. Philip K. Dick, a drug-addict and paranoid schizophenic somehow predicted the future. Just sayin’.

But, to return to the matter of the film, it must be said that Tom Cruise’s star-power damages this film somewhat, since the story literally grinds to a stand-still whenever he isn’t on screen.

Besides all of the lavish production values, what’s also to be admired in Minority Report is the always sturdy Neal McDonough and Lothario-in-real-life, Colin Farrell. If any of their gravity could have been injected into the plot-important scenes between Max van Sydow and Kathryn Morris, specifically the Agatha and Anne Lively subplot it would have helped the flagging 3rd act. More energy, enthusiasm or even musical emphasis might have some breathed life into final 30 minutes, which goes flaccid after Farrell’s Witwer is ::SPOILER::.

Even though it’s now 6 years old, Minority Report is well worth seeing again.

Posted Tuesday, April 01, 2008 11:31 PM by vhsparrow | with 0 comments

Wondorous Credulity

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Wondrous Oblivion (2004)

So, Delroy Lindo. 13 years ago he was the one shining moment — an uncredited cameo in the otherwise execrable adaptation of Michael Crichton’s ‘Congo‘ — forget that Crichton has become a flack for the anti-Global Warming lobby. Hats off to Laura Linney and Dylan Walsh there and all, but Delroy stole your movie, even though his participation there was limited to all of 5 minutes of screen-time.

16 years ago, he was West Indian Archie in Spike Lee’s award-winning ‘Malcolm X’ (1992) adaptation, but what has he done between then and now? ‘Clockers’ in 1995, ‘The Devil’s Advocate’ in 1997, ‘Gone in Sixty Seconds’ in 2000, ‘The Core’ in 2003 and ‘Domino’ in 2005 — sure he’s been working, but in each one of those roles, he’s been relegated to supporting roles rather than the front-and-center position that one would think that he’d have earned by now.

And 3 weeks ago, you can imagine my chagrin in seeing him on the cover of ‘Wondrous Oblivion’ (2003), appearing in what appears to be a family picture, supporting some white kid.

From badass to lovable Cricket instructor, Lindo’s career reads like Michael Chiklis‘ in reverse, so you can imagine my reluctance to uncan and spool this film.

Fact of the matter, Wondrous Oblivion isn’t that bad of a film. What the film concerns is an awkward moment in British history — the early ’60’s — when South London became integrated — when Jewish immigrants (refugees, really) became the neighbors of West Indian immigrants in one of the Thames’ poorer quarters. When one group of ethnics takes up residence in anothers’ traditional neighborhood, there are always tensions, and so it goes with Oblivion.

Here, Sam Smith plays young, Jewish David Wiseman, whose grandparents escaped the Holocaust to relocate in England. David’s mother, Lillian, is married to Victor, 20-30 years her senior as a matter, one assumes, of economic security. David is a cricket fan who obsessively collects cricket paraphernalia, though he has no skill at the game and is relegated as the scorekeeper at his grammar school. Enter into this picture Dennis Samuels (Delroy Lindo) and his family, not to mention his two young daughters (Leonie Elliot as Judy and Naomi Simpson as Dorothy) . It also turns out that Dennis also a cricket fanatic and no sooner than moving in next door to the Wisemans, he constructs a netted practice-area in his backyard.

Of course, David’s father and the xenophobic, working-class people of David’s Brixton neighborhood take umbrage, such that hate-mail is followed by other threats while Dennis teaches David to play a proper game of cricket. This is all fairly by-the-numbers stuff that we’ve seen in movies as formulaic as ‘The Karate Kid’ (1984) and ‘The Bad News Bears’ (1976) and ‘My Bodyguard’ (1980). The thing that makes this film a bit more palatable is the examination of racial tension and the picture we get of South London during that period.

I sort of appreciate the effort to create some sort of cultural outreach here, but ultimately, the effort stretches credulity somewhat, here. In the real world, Dennis Samuels would be making an effort to keep David away from his daughters, for fear of some sort of collateral damage by association, since local racists would be as likely to assault his girls as well as young David, especially if they were seen together. This Mister Miyagi nonsnse is better suited to greeting cards than movies that might be seen by impressionable children. There's also a suggestion of romance here, between Dennis and David's mother that's best left unspoken.

Making a notable contribution to this film is the music — authentic ska, courtesy of Judy and Naomi, without which, this would simply be another by-the-numbers, coming-of-age and learned racial tolerance film.

This one gets an extra star just becasue Lindo is in it and young Leonie Elliot turns in a memorable performance.

Rating:

Posted Tuesday, April 01, 2008 10:39 PM by vhsparrow | with 0 comments

Scott Frank's directorial debut

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The Lookout (2007)

Did anyone see any advertising for the directorial debut of screenwriter Scott Frank last year? “Scott who?,” you say — and that’s where the problems begin…

The other sadness is that Mr. Frank, the award-winning writer of ‘Minority Report‘ (2002), ‘Out of Sight’ (1998) and ‘Dead Again’ (1991) got next to no promotional support for his debut feature. It was budgeted at $16M, took in $4M and slipped quietly beneath the waves 5 weeks later.

Problem is, Mr. Frank’s feature shared it’s opening weekend with last year’s Tarantino/Rodriguez double-feature ‘Grindhouse’ (2007) and it was released by the post-Weinstein Miramax and Spyglass Entertainment. So, given a choice between promoting a celebrated screenwriter in an open field against the brand-names Tarantino™ and Rodriguez™, Disney chose to punt. The unfortunate fact is that it’s a pretty good, if over-budgeted film, far more engaging than the two-fer that Wonder Twins Tarantino and Rodriguez produced.

“Over-budgeted”, you ask? Despite the fact that Mr. Frank has been revered as the go-to script-doctor out in Hollywood for more than a decade, his first feature could have/should have been able to do more with less. The cinematography just a bit too assured, the music just a bit too lush for a film that’s essentially a neo-noir set in a midwestern town someplace (really Winnipeg, Manitoba). However, I guess Disney/Miramax wanted to treat Frank well, considering all of the work he’s done for Spielberg, Jodie Foster, Kenneth Branagh, Steven Soderbergh and Sydney Pollack.

From all accounts, the screenplay was finished back in 2002, yet sat on a shelf for 4 years. By all rights, The Lookout should have been an independent film, but what are you gonna do if someone offers you $16M to make your first feature?.

The story is sound here. As other writers have observed, Frank’s main strengths are sharp dialogue and character-driven stories, which is particularly why the film is overproduced: The script is an admirably small-scaled character-driven thing, full of unknowns, save for Jeff Daniels — yet the quality of the production is entirely A-List, nothing that Spielberg or Soderbergh or Pollack wouldn’t be disappointed with.

Early scenes in the film are so beautifully presented that they are at odds with the would-be grittier feel of the story that follows. Frank’s script might have benefitted from a more verité treatment. Of course, those production choices could be Frank’s alone and not that of his DP or production designer; ultimately though, it all falls back upon Frank.

Numerous reviewers have commented that The Lookout seems to be a cross between ‘Memento’ (2000) and ‘Fargo’ (1996) due to its rural small-town location, and the hook of a protagonist with memory problems, but Frank’s most remarkable invention in this film is his use of the amnesiac story-device — writing things down — to create a meta-narrative that speaks to the very heart of screenwriting.

“Ritual, Pattern, Repetition”, mutters our protagonist, Chris Pratt (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) , during a session with his occupational therapist. As a result of the events in the film’s teaser episode, he has suffered a traumatic brain injury that denies him a short-term memory, requiring that he write everything down, just to get through his day as a janitor at a local bank. Eventually, this writing serves the story in a central way as Chris plots against his antagonists to rescue his best friend, Lew (Jeff Bridges), from arch-crooks Matthew Goode and Greg Dunham. As his therapist suggests, “Start at the end, and work your way back toward the beginning,” thus, Mr. Frank’s graduate school lessons are made available to us mere-mortals spec-monkeys.

All told, The Lookout is ultimately a noir film, down to it’s femme-fatale, it’s central caper and betrayal.

In any case, this one is highly recommended — stick it in your Netflix cue or catch it on cable — whichever comes first.

Posted Thursday, March 20, 2008 2:47 PM by vhsparrow | with 0 comments

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