“Your name means Scooby Poop.”

This sound bite is courtesy of the Scooby Doo ad campaign, though it would appear that the clip in which Velma utters these prophetic words about the film didn’t make the cut.  Given that Velma is writhing on top of a bar when explaining the new branding for the film, it might be one of the marijuana edits that was made to get the PG-13.

And let me just say, without reviewing the film in any way, that Ain’t It Cool’s angry attacks on the casting of Matthew Lillard were misplaced.  Lillard does the job as Shaggy and he does it well.  Linda Cardellini knocks the lesbian right out of Velma, even getting a chance to outrack Ms. Gellar’s Daphne, two breasts to a wonder bra.  Gellar and Prinze are fine, though they have the least to work with in the script and neither fits the pure caricatures that they remain.

But I’m getting a few days ahead of myself…

IRONY CENTRAL:  The movie business is an angry, angry place.  I think that a big part of that is because people are chasing goals that are so out of reach that there is a level of desperation attached.  When some succeed, they suddenly jump in a balloon, floating far above the rabble, suddenly believing that they have earned their bubble.  We all tend to forget that we were the same person with the same level of talent before and after we got the job. 

Here’s the irony part… talent and tenaciousness and effort all go into building a career.  But the eternal frustration is that people just don’t see struggling people as individuals.  They are still wells of potential.  Then, stardom comes and it gets very individualized, very personal.  And that drives them – many of them – equally nuts. 

Fighting for success is somehow romantic and thrilling.  Having success and fighting to maintain your position… a nightmare for most. 

Then there is the nagging problem that with few exceptions, success in a business like this one is not earned in a real way.  Quality winning the race is an industry rarity.  Quality is just one of many variables.  And there is an element of dumb luck that just drives people crazy.  They can never admit that they are lucky or their success will be taken away, won’t it? 

The idea that when we “succeed,” we deserve it, but when we “fail,” we have been screwed is pretty funny on the face of it.  But it is really hard to see that when we are in the midst of either end of the spectrum at any given time. 

I used to think that people changed.  But they rarely do.  Still, I believe that one can dig deep and still find the heart that still beats under all the fatty bluster.  We are all so fragile.  And we are all so tough.

GREAT STUFF:  One gets a lot of cool stuff from studios all the time.  Warner Bros. sent out a real paddle ball with a ball that had lots of legs, like a spider, for the upcoming Eight Legged Freaks… clever.  DreamWorks had a great poster for Hollywood Ending and cool horsey stuff for Spirit. 

But Fox, which hit a home run sending out Ice Age ice cream in big styrofoam containers loaded up with dry ice, has topped themselves.  In fact, I’m not sure that I have even seen anything cooler from any movie in my decade or so covering this stuff. 

A big black box that looks like something from Tim Burton’s Franklin Mint Collection arrives, sealed with a Department of Precrime sticker.  Minority Report.  It sat on my table for a few hours before I cut it open while idly chatting away on the phone.  In the middle of the box, sitting in Styrofoam, is something circular and metal.  A little black piece of paper says, “The enclosed case unscrews to reveal information about Minority Report.” 

But when you pull away the 2”x2” piece of paper, there is this thing.  And it has a thick plaque with the Minority Report symbol on it.  Pick it up.  It must weight three pounds.  What is it?  It unscrews.  It’s a CD container.  There is two Minority Report CD-Roms inside… turns out that they are pretty basic publicity stuff.  But the presentation is so smart and different that it really grabs one’s attention in a market of same old, same old.

ROLLERBALL:  I finally caught McTiernan’s folly on DVD this weekend.  And I was pleasantly surprised.  It has become such a quick fix to say that a movie is “great” or that it “sucks” these days.  And make no mistake, Rollerball is an absolute failure.  But it is an interesting failure.

The internationalism of John McTiernan’s vision (initiated in Ferguson & Pogue’s screenplay) is really smart.  The idea of a WWF-like show that tours the world and whose fans are insanely nationalistic is not so far from reality.  Ratchet up the insight by making the teams that each country roots for as nationally diverse as the arenas are not.  Interesting.  Then add the idea of global television, an idea that Rupert Murdoch and Time-Warner are racing towards.  Live television that is managed by second by second ratings… didn’t you get the feeling that the XFL, the WWF football league, would have done it if the technology was there?  The idea of giving the mob blood to get it excited is older than the Coliseum (Roman, not Los Angeles).  But it remains fascinating.

Then look at the movie.  McT opens with a chase sequence that should have been historic.  Two guys race down San Francisco’s steepest spots on oversized skateboards… I’m sure there’s a name for them, but I’m not hip enough to know it.  Shades of Bullitt and The French Connection and even the great mini-chase in Sudden Impact.  But right away  McTiernan makes the mistake that will damn his entire movie… and which is a problem with so many CG-based films made now.  He overreaches.  He creates a race that cannot be shot.  Because the stunts are so difficult, he has to cut away constantly to avoid showing his stuntmen wiping out.  Too many close-ups, not enough sense of anticipation because he needs to keep cutting to try to get the scene to work.  But the scene would have worked better if we could have really believed that it was possible.   When one of the racers inevitably wipes out, he hits the tire of a car and flies twenty feet through the air and crashes into a restaurant window.  Too much.  A more realistic four-foot flight into a window or the car hood would have been so much better… not because it was as dramatic, but because it was real.  The audience needs some connection to reality, at least they do in a movie that is trying to be realistically gritty and bloody and tough.

Next, McTiernan sets up the worldwide network of Rollerball… and the sequence is sensational because it is extreme, but close enough to reality for us to identify as realistic.  But then, he creates a game of Rollerball that is so visually complicated that McTiernan has to keep cutting to animated images in order to explain the spacing.  Are the ideas of the complications cool?  Yeah.  But if the audience can’t play along with the game, the movie is lost.  And indeed, it is.

Team internationalism isn’t a problem, but the movie fails to define characters on each team that we can track in a real way.  They wear different colors and have some different looks, but they all blur into one another, with few exceptions. 

McTiernan’s juxtaposition of gameplay, business talk, instant ratings and cash from different countries being counted is pretty brilliant.  It makes the point.  It is clean.  It is smart.  But it is also done too many times, beating itself to death.

The music is interesting, but it doesn’t help McTiernan sort things out.  The idea that it is the same all the time, just changing accents… okay.  But the way that music is used to manipulate emotions in stadiums now… far more sophisticated than what we get in Rollerball.  The only story the music in Rollerball tells is that the game is loud, angry and out of control… yawn. 

This movie reminded me a lot of Driven.  It always looks intense and pretty, but it’s always hard to follow the action.  The story elements are super-simplistic and yet there always seems to be an effort to make it far too complicated.  And while Driven is meant to be a return-to-grace story of a former champ and a future one, it never tells that story well.  Rollerball is a basic murder mystery in which the hero has to choose between fame and honor… that that story is lost in all the noise. 

For those of you who are considering the DVD, it’s not too special.  There is commentary from the three stars, but not from the director.  The special additions are soft.  They are touting this as the tougher, R-rated edition, but with the exception of a few breasts and a few dirty words, not very tough.  The once-much-touted Rebecca Romijn-Stamos nude scene is less nude than a Sports Illustrated swimsuit video.  She looks great, but she’s always cloaked in shadow. 

Rollerball was much a more worthwhile waste of two hours than I expected… and as disappointing as expected as well.  There are so many good ideas.   And if McTiernan, whose best work is always his cleanest, just told the story and stopped trying to hype up the film to a level above the style of Norman Jewison’s original, it really could have worked.  Alas…

READER OF THE DAY:  The ever unedited Hong Kong Steve writes:  “I was such busy Last week , saw four movies a week.  Well, Buena Vista Taiwan and Warner Bros. Taiwan chose the same day to do their own media screening. So I saw "Eight Legged Freaks" in the morning, "Bad Company" in the afternoon.  When I thought CGI spiders were worse enough, "Bad Company" remind me how terrible a film would be if the two leading actors had no sparks at all. And that made "Eight Legged Freaks" became so much better for entertainment choice this summer.

And Buena Vista turn the cinema into a Hawaii festival next day for "Lilo & Stitch". Each journalist received a pack of Hawaii chocolate candy, and vacation guide brochure. Buena Vista Taiwan also displayed all merchandise available in Taiwan market and co-marketing partners in the entrance. Of course, every staff wore Hawaii shirt. 

It seems to me that "Ice Age" is "Three men and a baby" met "Dinosaurs", both films from Disney. Fox is really smart, to steal the ideas from Mickey Mouse then turn it into their own.

E ME:  We are the world.  The column was down during the Roller-Debacle.  Thoughts?  And say you had $40 to send out a promotional item for a film… what would you create for what film?