Friday, 23 July 1999

WEEKEND PREVIEW

This should be a scary, scary weekend at the movies. Now if only it were because there was a good horror movie out there. Ironically enough, the only new wide release this weekend really worth seeing is the one that the least of you will see, Drop Dead Gorgeous. Some have complained that the film is mean-spirited and too biting, but for me, I can't get enough of that in a satire, assuming it's funny. And Drop Dead Gorgeous is Drop Dead Funny. Like any great satire, it takes the very real emotional underpinning of people and raises the volume (to quote the king of all mockumentaries) to 11. In this case, it's a story of poor, extremely white, Middle Americans desperate to find a way out of their dead end lives. It's one of the smartest and kindest parts of this picture that, by the end, only the potential escapees are still really hoping to get out. Others have realized that they have to make the best of what they do have. Every once in a while, Drop Dead Gorgeous, a broad farce, really goes over the top. And in those moments, I can see some people shaking their heads. But from top to bottom, DDG was well structured, well designed, really, really well acted (Kirstin Dunst dominates the brassier Denise Richards with no apparent effort) and, most importantly, laugh out loud funny. There are always people who don't like a film. But I have a feeling that this one will connect with almost everyone but teenage boys.

Teenage boys (Isn't it unpleasant to be put in a box, guys? Sorry.) get no relief from The Shi...I mean, The Haunting. This film is a stunning achievement. Absolutely stunning. I still can't quite get over it. (See The Ugly for the rest.) Meanwhile, Inspector Gadget appears to offer no hope for any movie lover. I still have not seen the movie. Why? Because I was told by Disney that the screening was full. Here is a basic truth in Hollywood. There has never been a full screening in the history of the industry if they want you to see the movie. Star Wars: Episode One -- The Phantom Menace was loaded to the gills, but if Fox or Lucasfilm wanted you in, there was a seat to be found. I will see Inspector Gadget on Friday and, if I like it, you will read it here Monday. If I hate it, you will read it here Monday. (You will also be able to hear it on KABC-790 radio on Saturday on my weekly radio show with George Pennachio, starting at 10aPT.)

For all the venue counts and my box office predictions, check out Box Office Extra.

THE GOOD: This may be one of the uglier weekends of the summer, with The Haunting and Inspector Gadget overwhelming what good could come from Drop Dead Gorgeous. But fear not. Good stuff is on the way. Bowfinger is wall-to-wall laughs. Steve Martin's script is smart, insightful and lean. Eddie Murphy is a scene stealer in both of his roles. Universal is taking a gamble that I hope pays off by hiding the "other" Eddie in the advertising so far. And Frank Oz is probably the most underrated comedy director working in Hollywood today. Word has always been that a lot of people just don't get along with the guy. But he always delivers a level of comic craftsmanship that rises above almost any other director of comedies out there these days. I can barely think of a comedy in the last year that wouldn't have been improved by his touch. I also rocked at Detroit Rock City. Is Adam Rifkin secretly Allan Arkush's love child, because Detroit Rock City is truly the Rock-N-Roll High School for the 90's. The soundtrack is a brilliant melange of '70s hits that leaps out like an endless bouquet of memories. The actors are uniformly likeable. They're never challenged to be much more than that, but so what? I'm not a KISS fan and never was, but this film caught me. I predict that it will either become a huge teen cult hit or it will be unceremoniously lost in the summer surf, stuck between adults who think it's about kids and kids who think it's about their parents. (It's both.) But even if the latter occurs, the film will find a life on video and cable. This is not an important movie, but one you can easily fall in love with. Also, Iron Giant is wonderful and worth a look. The buzz is improving on The Thomas Crown Affair. Runaway Bride is an old-Hollywood movie star hit and will be bigger than Notting Hill, as predicted here months ago. The Blair Witch Project is just beginning to reach out. And, even without seeing it, I am really looking forward to Dick. Great cast. Great idea. Does it deliver? I'll tell you as soon as I can.

THE BAD: Jack Valenti's decision to resort to name-calling (THB 7/21) rather than to face the reality that the NC-17 has been a complete failure was bad, bad, bad. What's good, good, good, is that America's voices on movies have been strengthened and united by the rage of being called "whiners" by Valenti. The L.A. Film Critics Association, as I wrote here yesterday (THB 7/22), picked up the cudgel, looking to smack Jack right in the head. Now, Roger Ebert, who has long been a proponent of the A rating, differentiating art from porn, also stoked the fire in Thursday's Variety, in an open letter to J.V. The East coast still hasn't been heard from. Perhaps this is because many of those critics are too busy healing their wounded egos after not being able to see that something other than a softcore porn film was happening in Eyes Wide Shut. This is one of the reasons why I fear using EWS as a rallying point. This issue is bigger than any one movie and as I keep writing, the successful creating of a working adult rating will make the R, the PG-13 and the PG work better too. But, Jack, calling us all names, well, you did a bad, bad thing.

THE UGLY: Stunning. The Haunting has pushed all others aside to take the current crown as The Worst Movie of 1999. Only Simply Irresistible can begin to compete, and that film's failure falls so far short of The Haunting on the ambition scale that Jan DeBont can rest easy knowing the crown is his. I'm going to try and explain what is so wrong with this film without spoiling anything, which should be easy because anything that might surprise you...scratch that...nothing will surprise you. The first real "BOO!" beat comes 1 hour and 10 minutes into the film, and then there are a variety of effects pulsing through the last 40 minutes. But what do you get for your 1 hour and 10 minutes of waiting? Almost nothing. Catherine Zeta-Jones is very sexy. Buy a copy of Maxim, she's sexier there. The great Lili Taylor actually develops a character. Turns out, hers is the only character with any storyline to follow in the entire movie. God bless DreamWorks for being willing to put Lili Taylor in a lead role in a big movie. God damn them for wasting her talent. Not to mention the sleepwalking Liam Neeson and the sleepjoking Owen Wilson.

Any arguments about too-much-CG or a too-limited color scale from the otherwise great production designer Eugenio Zanetti, the unmitigated illogic of two of the "action" moments and almost anything else are made moot by the complete lack of storytelling in the screenplay. I have to assume that David Self can write, given the enthusiasm around town for his screenplay, Thirteen Days. But I defy anyone to tell me what, outside of being the most meaningless kind of infrastructure, the Zeta-Jones, Neeson and Wilson characters are doing in this movie. I mean, don't even get me started on the arrival and departure of the characters (did they even have names?) Alix Koromzay (who may be a great actress, but seems to be a replacement for an unavailable Vicki Lewis here) and Todd Field (who got more attention during the screening for being in Eyes Wide Shut than for the 2 line performance here.) And what of the caretakers, who have some of the only good dialogue in the film? Well, the dialogue from Marion Seldes, cleverly repetitive and a major plot point, turns out to be a complete lie. Listen to what she says and then tell me whether it turns out to be true.

The quality of the CG effects is mixed. Some of them are quite wonderful and beautiful. But, like any other part of movie magic, if you aren't connecting to the storytelling, the beautiful moment means nothing... absolutely nothing. My list of redeeming moments for this entire film is 4, totaling maybe 2 1/2 minutes of enjoyment in about 2 hours. And it is stunning. Really. It is hard to understand how this happened. Neil Jordan's shot at a DreamWorks horror film failed, but it failed brilliantly. There was magic in In Dreams, no matter how flawed it was. And that has been the mark of DreamWorks. They have reached for more almost every time. Even the choice to remake The Haunting, the choice of Lili Taylor, the choice of Owen Wilson, the choice of Liam Neeson and on and on indicate good and special intentions. Another intention, the hiring of Caleb Deschannel, who was essentially fired by DeBont and replaced with Karl Walter Lindenlaub, was also good. And his exit now makes more sense than ever. He had to know how badly DeBont was failing, even visually. And I'm sure that he told DeBont. And I'm sure that DeBont thought he knew better. He didn't. This is a heartbreakingly bad film. The actors will live to see another day. And well they should. But DreamWorks needs to get out of the horror business unless they decide to start hiring solid craftsmen like Wes Craven. And Jan DeBont needs to take a step backwards and get back to shooting some film, a skill he has in spades. Speed is a wonderful, tight movie. But that script was a near-perfect machine. Without a blueprint, this guy just can't build the house. I wish his post-Speed work (even Twister) left some hope otherwise, but it does not.

GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Sunday night in L.A. the 40th Anniversary of Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder will be celebrated with a new print of the film. Anatomy of Murder was scored by Duke Ellington and stars the legendary Jimmy Stewart and George C. Scott. This film creates a lot of arguments about how great or not-great it really is. But any chance to see a true classic of cinema on a big screen, especially with a new print, is truly a golden opportunity. Check out the rest of the info on this screening and more at www.egyptiantheatre.com.

READER OF THE DAY: MSU: "The AMC theater chain is a leader in another unfortunate development as well. They were the first chain (as far as I noticed) to start showing commercials before the previews. They're the only chain in the Washington, DC area that consistently does, and they show as many as 6 commercials in a row.

I try to avoid multiplexes if I can, especially on a weekend. Yes, people really do just show up and go into whatever show is playing soonest. I've heard these conversations at the box office. And since they don't particularly care about the film they're seeing, they're liable to talk all through it, ruining the experience for the rest of us. Also - and some multiplexes are better at controlling this than others - you tend to get bands of teenagers roaming from one theater to the next. They'll come in, sit down, make loud comments about the movie, leave a few minutes later, and then do it all over again.

The idea of having a wide variety of films with more showings per movie is a good one, but it never quite works out like that. Rather than, say, ten films at a 16-screen multiplex, where you could get blockbusters on two or three screens and a couple of indies at one screen apiece, it's usually Wild Wild West, Big Daddy, and the like on 4 screens each. Indie and foreign films, at least in the DC area, are relegated almost entirely to small, dingy, aging theaters in the city or suburban theaters that can be a pain to access.

Sorry this is so long, but I'm particularly bitter about multiplexes just now. A new one opened near me recently, and the film society I belong to had been told by the theater's manager that he would make screens available for smaller films. These turned out to be movies that had already been in other area theaters for two months or more. The rest of the screens were taken up with the current mindless summer movies."

E ME: For me, the target of advertising complaints has been Cineplex Odeon. But every market has different games at play, I guess. AMC didn't run commercials here in L.A. until recently and now limits them to an NCN promotion. Tell me about The Haunting, Inspector Gadget, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Blair Witch or anything else you see this weekend. How about telling me about the multi, mega or solo-plex experience you have when seeing these films? And are you stil being carded for R-rated films?