July 11, 2003

There are so many tag lines that one wants to use for The League of Extraordinary Crap…

Sense Does Matter.

Like A Really Expense Set Of Cliff Notes… With Most Of The Pages Torn Out.

Movie Stars… We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Movie Stars!

Found Nemo, Threw Him Back.

It Sucks, But Not The Way Peta Wilson Makes You Wish It Did

You Say Jeckyll, I Say Hyde, Why Didn’t They Call The Whole Thing Off?

But seriously folks…

LXC is not the worst film of the summer.  Almost worse, it is the most faint.   It is impossible to hate, like the earnest child in a schoolroom who desperately wants to understand long division, but just can’t master the logic. 

Everyone is writing about the literary elements of the film, but they didn’t bother me.  One thing the film doesn’t do is to get too bogged down in the history of each character.  However, the film fails completely in finding a way to mesh this group together.  I have written about this issue in thrillers and it is especially true here… movies like this really work well when the audience can do some of the lifting itself and is then rewarded with both elements they expected and elements they did not.  Why do these particular characters have to come together as a team?  As the old schoolyard joke goes, “to get to the other side” - or in movie parlance, to get to the third act.  One character is so irrelevant that he disappears, literally and figuratively, for a full half hour.

As I sit here and want to accuse this film of not developing character, I have to acknowledge that every one of these characters does get some kind of arc.  I guess the truth is, I never cared.  Why?  Probably because the film promises a complex group dynamic and delivers a series of dyads instead.  And of course, every one of these dyads is boring – Jeckyll and Hyde, Quartermane and Tom Sawyer, Mina Harker and Dorian Gray, and the two members of The League who have no real relationship with anyone, Nemo and The Invisible Man.

The one pairing that seems ready for greatness, Harker & Gray, the two immortals, each of whom needs to find a way to kill another immortal, simply never surprises. 

More so, the kitsch of this picture never hits the level of “fun.”  I kept hoping that this film would take a look in the mirror and stop taking itself so seriously.  But it never happened. 

The filmmakers clearly went out of their way to be loyal to the comic book.  But here is the problem… comics and movies are very different mediums.  A giant, misshapen Hyde is an interesting idea… until the execution is so poor that the character is nothing but a distraction.  Remember what people claimed The Hulk looked like in the Super Bowl spots?  Hyde is everything wrong with a CG character.  Somehow, they’ve managed to make this creature look like they attached giant foam rubber arms to Jason Flemyng’s body.  It’s like a step backwards from Robin William’s Popeye musk-les from over 20 years ago.  And again, unlike The Hulk, this character’s rampages seem to have no boundaries in physics. 

The two major set pieces are both so absurd – not in a fun way – and so disconnected from character, they just don’t matter.  Is Tom Sawyer known for driving?  Is it really possible that all of Venice is so busy partying that they don’t notice a ship the size of two city blocks moving though their really-not-deep-enough-for-this canals? 

And then there are moments where details just slip by.  How can they be on the deck of the Nautilus with still water all around and then go to a wide shot of the ship moving faster than any ship in history?  If The Invisible Man is going to use white make-up to allow us to see his face, how can we see his day’s growth of facial hair?  Why do the Nautilus interiors always feel like they are on dry land with no effort whatsoever to suggest that they are a part of a moving ship?

You also get a strong sense of the re-shoots in the third act of this film, leaving you to wonder how whatever they had before could be any worse.  The villain of the piece, who appears in all three acts, suddenly gets a third act makeover for no apparent reason.  I’m sure that someone who has read every draft of the scripts will enlighten me over the weekend.  But it won’t really matter.  Either it’s in the movie or it’s not.

I get no joy in tearing into LXC.  It doesn’t have the hubris of Full Throttle or the incompetence of Red, White & Blonde.  But it is this summer’s The Phantom…. or The Shadow… or Congo… or Batman & Robin.  These are the big, well-intended, flashy expensive messes that will have some fans but will forever be remembered for sending people out of the theater wanting less.

TV OF THE HIGHEST ORDER:  I don’t normally write about TV, but I caught three episodes of a new-to-America series called MI-5 that will start on A&E later this year and I have to crow.  As a great fan of Brit TV dramas that push the emotional envelope harder than all but a few American shows, like Homicide: Life on The Street, I am thrilled to see that MI-5, titled Spooks in England, joins that family. 

The show, which runs without front or back credits, follows a handful of Brit secret agents as they do their jobs.  But the show is not afraid to take on hot topics.  In the three episodes I saw, they covered abortion doctor murders, organized racism and The IRA.  In each episode, the series manages to deal with these issues, but also ride the second track of the character’s personal lives without exposing the effort that the feat requires. 

This is the kind of television show that has a young woman, Keeley Hawes, who in real life looks like a young Grace Kelly with slightly stronger facial lines.  But she seems to have that kind of personality, grace in a modern age, and legs for days.  But on the show, they shorten her hair and keep it a mousy brown.  While she is still attractive, she is not presented as a bombshell. 

Meanwhile, the male lead, Matthew MacFayden, has an on-show girlfriend who may actually be a year or two older than himself and who has the glow of a happy single mother instead of the more expected gym rat physique and look.  And the inclusion of Jenny Agutter as a spinsterish info cruncher is enough to give any man in his late 30s a smile, since she was so much the object of young lust from a generation that watched her seduce the Dr. Pepper guy in An America Werewolf in London and run with Michael York in Logan’s Run.  These small touches make a lot of difference.    (By the way, Agutter and another MI-5 star, Peter Firth, were both in Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of Equus with Richard Burton.)

The process of making television is so different in England than it is here.   It really is like making a series of short films over there.  The work seems to be less formulaic, with each film forced to take you on a story that is, as the best American drama is, more than a rehash of the same old stories with a whole new cast.  I recommend this show highly.  Check out the pilot, but make sure to get at least one show farther in… you’ll find yourself hooked, even if they talk funny.

WEEKEND PREVIEW

There is not a lot to chew on here.  Pirates opened on Wednesday with an estimated $13.5 million.  Unlike Legally Blonde 2, I expect that word of mouth will make for a weekend of increasing numbers, not decreasing. 

Does The League have any traction?  I don’t think so.  My guesstimate may turn out to be a little generous.

And the big second weekend question mark is Terminator 3.  Will it drop from exhaustion and a pirate attack or will it hold on its way to a $200 million domestic total?  This weekend will tell the tale. 

WEEKEND GUESSTIMATES

1. Pirates of the Caribbean - 3269 venues – new  –  $52 million
2. Terminator 3 – 3504 venues – off 53 percent –  $20.7 million
3. The League - 3002 venues – new  –  $13 million
4. Legally Blonde 2 - 3350 venues – off 62 percent –  $8.4 million
5. Finding Nemo - 2643 venues – off 33 percent –  $7.4 million
6. CA2: Full Throttle - 3202 venues – off 57 percent –  $6 million
7. The Hulk - 2560 venues – off 50 percent –  $4.1 million
8. Sinbad – 3086 venues – off 42 percent –  $4 million
9. 28 Days Later – 1396 venues – off 36 percent –  $3.8 million
10. The Italian Job - 1364 venues – off 35 percent –  $2.7 million

READER OF THE DAY:  I want to do a page of letters about yesterday’s MCN column, An Immodest Proposal.  But I am too tired to do it justice right now (2:41 am), so look for the page this afternoon. (And here it is! - 1:17pm )

TAIWAN STEVE writes:  “After I saw "T3", I realized every possible tone that human can say in the words "Oh, My God" was totally performed by Claire Danes. She kept saying the three words all the time, from beginning to the end. It's so funny that She never drive T-X or Arnold crazy by saying that.”

NOT A HOUSE ROLL writes:  “First off, just saw Pirates and liked it, but didn’t exactly love it. I thought it was a touch slow in the opening, and never quite got that whole “jovial pirate action thing” going. I will, however, complain about one thing that’s stupid, nobody’s fault, but just plain kept annoying me: Keira Knightley looks SO much like Natalie Portman in so many scenes, I had to keep telling myself it wasn’t her, and that sort of kept breaking the suspension of disbelief you need to truly get caught up in a movie like this. *sigh* Oh, well. Still, fun flick, and the best living skeleton effects I can remember seeing. (I haven’t watched or read anything on how they did it, but will probably see it on the DVD. I couldn’t tell if it was all motion-capture, which seemed like a hell of a lot of work, or straight CG, which seemed way too fluid to be true. Probably something in between, but that’s the magic and mystery of FX I suppose.)

OK, so now I’ll get cranky. I liked Cutthroat Island. I know everybody else on the planet hated it (I’m used to being in the minority on stuff like this), but I have yet to read or hear anybody say WHY they hated it. The performances were just as good as in the new Pirates (OK, maybe Mathew Modine was a bit rough, but he wasn’t that bad), the story was just as good, the action was just as well done (with the exception of Pirates big Depp/Rush sword fight at the end; that was nice!), and you couldn’t argue with the camera work or direction. So why was it a huge dud and PotC will be a moderate to big hit? I truly thought Gina Davis was working hard toward action-babe, but was she just not hot enough? Not Sigourney enough? Or couldn’t audiences make the jump from her earlier roles? I don’t know, but it really kind of pissed me off. (Long Kiss Goodnight got killed too, and I thought it was every bit as good an action pic as Damon’s Bourne Identity. Were audiences and critics just not up to female action movies yet?) So, are my likes and dislikes just way too pedestrian to be valid? I don’t claim to be a critic, but I my reaction has always been based on a simple question: Did I leave the theatre feeling like my money was well-spent, and how much would I like to see It again, or maybe a GOOD sequel? In short, was I entertained? (Even CA:FT didn’t make me feel THAT bad about the money, and it was awful as a film, but entertaining enough taken for what it was.) Anyway, I was entertained by Cutthroat, as much as I was entertained by Pirates; so I reiterate, what makes this one a hit and that one a dud?

Finally, I am assuming that you meant League of Extraordinary Crap, and man does THAT piss me off, but only because I REALLY wanted it to be good. I like Sean Connery, I like Peta Wilson, I love good action films, and have a special affection for pulpy flicks like these, and to see another one with potential become another Bulletproof Monk just makes my teeth grind.”

Finally, NOT A HILTON SISTER writes:  “Why get mad when you can get even?  I hear people bemoaning the fact that there's nothing out there to see, but in the last three weeks I've seen some great, fun movies (May, 28 Days Later, Swimming Pool, and Dracula:  Pages From A Virgin's Diary).  Okay, maybe folks have to look around for the gems, but isn't that just par for the course in the life of a movie addict?  I too have been sort of let down by some of the franchise movies I was excited about at the start of the summer -- T3 -- cough -- (though I am the only kid on my block who liked Hulk).  So get even.  Search out the gems on the weekend and see the blockbusters during the week, when no one pays attention to the numbers.  How could the amount of hubris in Full Throttle surprise you?  Wasn't hubris the main reason the movie was greenlit (confidence that there will always be fellas out there who will pay to see photogenic ladies in their undies)?

I was pleased, however, to read Angry Rick's comment about trying to raise money for something not so commercial ... as Godard said, the best response of all to a film is to make a film of your own.  Don't get mad, get even.  Don't get mad that there's millions of dollars being spent by numbskulls, finish your film and show it somewhere on the night that the next greenlight movie opens in the theatres.  Even if it ends up being a VHS viewing with friends at your apartment, you're still getting even!

Sic Semper Franchisus!  Sic Semper Greenlightus!”

E ME:  Weekend e-mail awaits!  What will you see?  What have you seen?  What do you want your money back from?

 

The Matrix Reloaded. Reloaded.
Read Part One
Read Part Two