Thursday, 29 July 1999

First, my pseudo-apologies for not being quite as attentive to e-mailers' needs as usual. My sister and her two kids (Charles, 10 and Alli, 8) are here this week and I am spending an unusual amount of my time being a tourist. Tuesday, we went to Universal Studios, and I had perhaps my best experience there ever. Why? Well, the T2-3D ride is really worth the trip, the kids loved Jurassic Park: The Ride, and the live Nickelodeon Show was a hit. But the best part of the trip was that we left after about 5 hours. I had to be back home to do Drop Dead Gorgeous chats. (During which, writer Lona Williams and actress Amy Adams reminded me that women are reason enough for men to rejoice being alive. Great people. Good chats. I'm afraid I had more fun than the audience did.) So, we didn't eat any of the crappy, overpriced theme park food. We didn't spend hours in the gift shops searching for just the right toy for so long that the overtired child in question couldn't decide and had to start screaming and crying out of frustration. And we didn't even get on the trams. Not that there's anything wrong with the tram. I've just been on it too many times. The other great thing is that because we are planning a trip to San Diego during their 10 days in L.A., we got two-day Universal/Sea World passes for a little less than the combined cost for both places. So, we will be going back to Universal to do Back To The Future, to see a couple of stunt shows, to take the tour (the backlot is amazing...the first million times) and yes, to ride Jurassic Park: The Ride over and over again until we get the photo just right. In the meantime, please forgive me if I'm a little less quick to respond to my mail. I don't ever get to return every piece, but I do read it all and I do respond to much of it.

THE DEVIL AND THE MOVIE TITLE : The pattern of Summer 1999 is becoming all too evident. Movie after movie has been somewhere in the middle. Any given audience member can be completely supported in enjoying the film, just as another can be supported in hating it. It started with The Mummy, which had good, old-fashioned Spielbergian thrills and some real ripe cheese in it too. Star Wars was either a starting point for a trilogy with the most amazing CG work in a film, or a slow, muddled mess lacking in energy and insight that pandered to kids. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me had people laughing at the first film's jokes, added laughs with Mini-Me, but wasted Heather Graham and made Chili's jokes, for better or for worse. There are plenty of people who enjoyed Wild Wild West, as damaged as it is. Big Daddy is probably Adam Sandler's weakest comedy, yet it may be his biggest. American Pie hit a home run with some and was little more than a can of corn for others. And would Arlington Road and The Haunting be among the worst ever in their genres or the best? Depends on who you are.

Which brings me to Deep Blue Sea. I saw it Tuesday night in a full theater in Westwood. About 15 minutes before the end of the film, I glanced back at the crowd. The audience was listening. They were paying rapt attention, waiting for the next big jump beat. And I can't blame them. If you want to hate a dumb shark movie that doesn't hold its structure very well, tries to explain itself with the most absurd, illogical exposition at times, and doesn't give us the Bissett-erific reality of water's effect on women's undergarments, you sure can. Silliness abounds. But if you tell everyone you hate this movie, you lose your right to smile broadly as you tell your friends about the clever casting of the film. Or about a big Hollywood movie whose two best performances are by black men. Or about how even though some of the CG work with the sharks is amazingly unrealistic, it made you jump anyway. Or how you laughed and screamed and jumped and were surprised throughout the film, all the while complaining about the color of the water in Aquatica. One of the funniest things for me was that this movie was so much like Lake Placid in some of the CG shots. There are animal gags that are completely unrealistic but seem to have caught the imagination of CG programmers and are now standard in "big toothy animal" movies. This is much more of a thriller than Lake Placid, which was really a comedy with a killer croc.

Make no mistake, this is a shark movie. Jump beat after jump beat after jump beat. There is nothing there but scenes setting up the jump beats. And that's okay. It is stupid fun. And that seperates it from Jaws, which was sophisticated in a way this film was not, as though Spielberg was Hitchcock to Renny Harlin's Jules White ("Three Stooges" director). So it may not be a coincidence that Jules Peimer (see the name connection?) of WKDM Radio coughed up the stupidest quote of the summer, saying, "Bigger, better and more frightening than Jaws!" Peimer must not have seen Jaws because the filmmaker clearly did and clearly knows that Jaws is at the top of the food chain for this kind of movie. You can love this movie and say, "Jaws for the '90s," but to say "better than Jaws" is to expose your quote whoring ways too blatantly. There are few objective criteria in the movie review business, but the superiority of Jaws to Deep Blue Sea is one of them. I really enjoyed the Deep Blue Sea experience and I figure that most of you will too (if you are willing to leave your pickiness at the door), but come on!

Of course, the most overt relationship to Jaws is Deep Blue Sea's music, which has apparently become like every copy machine being referred to as a "Xerox," because composer Trevor Rabin seems to have had zero concern about stealing directly from John Williams' score, adding just a couple more instruments as cover. And the opening sequence is kind of an homage to Jaws. But that's about it. This is more like the haunted house of Alien with a lot of water, though I must admit that I was a little disappointed that they didn't play that off more. The film puts three of the seven main characters in locations that are of their control (the lab of the main doctor, the dining room of the cook and the bedroom of the female doctor) for their confrontations with the sharks. I really like the idea of it, but it only really works in one of those three circumstances, where knowledge of the surroundings adds to the choices the human makes. But this is not a great script. Samuel L. Jackson gives one of his most stunning performances by making lines that do not work at all work beautifully. He controls the rhythms of one scene so well that he saves the filmmakers what could have been an embarrassment.

And now, reviews from my family. First, my sister Amy, age 34: "I loved it. It was exciting and funny. And my favorite part was with Samuel L. Jackson. I never got the name of his character because you know it's Samuel L. Jackson. If you want to be scared, definitely go. It was The Poseidon Adventure with sharks."

Next, my nephew Charles, age 10: "It was extreme. It was all in very fast motion. It had a lot of action in it. It was a great movie. I liked LL Cool J the best. He was really funny. I wasn't really scared. It was a funny movie. The scariest scenes and the funniest scenes were with LL Cool J. I thought that Samuel L. Jackson was Bill Cosby."

And finally, from Alli, age 8: "It was good. (What did you like about it?) I don't want to be on the Internet."

OTHER COLUMNS ON OTHER MOVIES : The mail on Eyes Wide Shut has been fast and furious. And I've not responded to a lot of it, knowing that I would be laying out my thoughts about what the film is really about in Working Hollywood. And now, I have. Read it here and let the real debate begin. Also, you can go back and see footage from my set visit to Deep Blue Sea here.

SCAMGM : How about this for a sales pitch? "We're bringing Rocky back!!!! Hooray, hurrah!!! Now give me money." MGM's Chris McGurk "unveiled" (The Hollywood Reporter's word) his plan to bring Rocky back to MGM/UA on a call to corporate investors. I don't know if he actually followed that up by asking them to find the red queen, but MGM's number shuffling has sounded a lot like a desperate game of three-card monte to me for months. And the Rocky ploy is like "mistakenly" folding the corner of the red queen before the shuffle. Suckers! MGM/UA will survive on the strength of its libraries. The idea of bringing in an as-of-yet unwritten, uncast, uncrewed, unplotted, cheap ($30 million or less) Rocky film to bolster the company is exactly the kind of Hollywood myth/sucker seduction that people have been buying into for decades. You can't say that McGurk doesn't know what he's doing or that he's not a pro. If he pulls this scam off, he's worth even more than Kirk Kirkorian paid to bring him to MGM.

(NOTE: For those of you who may not know, three-card monte is a street hustle with three cards: two red, one black. The player/sucker is enticed to "find the red queen." The person tends to get involved after watching a few fake rounds of the game in which the queen is exactly where you think it is. Then, you may be allowed to win a round, usually $20 or so. Now that you are hooked, the guy takes your money. And the more you lose, the more likely you are to go after your money. When he thinks you are leaving, one of the shills that works with the "dealer" will bend the corner of the queen as the "dealer" looks away and you think you have a sure bet. Sucker! When they recruit movie execs, they make a mistake by not interviewing these guys.)

SCAM 2 : MGM/UA is also floating the idea of giving "specialty unit" United Artists to Francis Ford Coppola to run. Again, a dramatic flash. Again, an unrealistic ruse. I love Francis Coppola and I have always supported his wish to have his own studio. But he lives in San Francisco and he's not a part of today's young Hollywood or in touch with the Brit crowd. Maybe they are hoping that he won't deliver more than three films a year. Seems likely. This also shows the desperation of the industry for execs, as I discussed in yesterday's column. Or it could just be a negotiating ploy with someone like the now-homeless, but well-respected Bingham Ray. Funny how these deals seem to be on the verge of happening on the same day as the meetings with the money guys.

READER OF THE DAY: Chris writes: "What ever happened to the movie + movie + movie = feature? (David Note: That would be "Two Movies Equal") Like: SWEOTPM + DreamWorks + The Blair Witch Project = The Phantom Studio Project. Three Hollywood moguls venture into the wetlands of Playa Vista to build a new studio. The use of their real names adds an eerie tinge of reality to the project. They are never heard from again. A year later, George Lucas cobbles together a feature-length film from over 200 hours of computer-generated effects, which reveals Jar-Jar Binks living in the marshes. Audiences worldwide scream in terror.

E ME:Interesting imagery. Very scary.