April 9, 2004

Sometimes, being a film critic sucks just a little bit…

The Alamo and Ella Enchanted have just a couple of things in common. First, you can tell that the filmmakers were really giving it their all. Second, they both suck.

Those two things have more in common, perhaps, than they would seem to at first glance. John Lee Hancock has proven to be a wonderful director of intimate dramas. His script for A Perfect World made for one of the most underappreciated (by America), intimate films of the early 90s. The Rookie was one of 2002's surprise triumphs for the then-rookie studio director, albeit written from a true story by someone else. But it again fit into Hancock's interest in Americana and the dark and light of the men who breathe it.

Tommy O'Haver made a well-liked, fluffy low-budget gay character romp called Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss that was a big hit in 1998 and followed it with the forgettable and forgotten Get Over It, which served as a marketing sequel to the surprise hit Bring It On, even though it was no such thing. O'Haver's light touch with young actors was apparent and his interest in being the next Hollywood romp-master was clear.

So what made Disney and Miramax think that these two directors were ready for a giant leap forward? Hancock faced the challenge of making an epic based on a very dramatically tough true story, multiples larger than anything he had previously shot, carrying the baggage of a near-greenlit deal death involving a recently Oscar-winning director and one of the world's biggest movie stars. If I were Disney, I would want to make a forward move with John Lee Hancock too. But I would be looking to get him hooked up with A-List talent, whose humanity he could bring out and remind audiences why we all loved them… not handing him Ron Howard's tainted leftovers and saying, "Here is The Big List O' Limitations."

O'Haver, ironically, fell into the chasm that I wrote about regarding The Fantastic Four and Tim Story just days ago. The guys who have successfully made the leap from smaller, character movies to big movies are usually the ones who have remarkable visual senses writ small when working with less. Taxi will surely be less static than Barbershop. But there is no reason to think that it will be, say, Blood Simple or Raising Arizona, where Barry Sonnenfeld made his name as a DP of great style. Likewise, Brad Silberling had no less than Steven Spielberg covering his ass when he leapt into Casper, a film of enough size to qualify him for taking Lemony Snicket over from Sonnenfeld this last year Moreover, both Lemony Snicket and The Addams Family are visual feasts, but not really massive digital effects movies. And in both cases, there were significant budgets in place. Tommy O'Haver being sent to make his first effects movie for $40 million with an ambition no smaller than creating a live-action version of Shrek was a fool's errand indeed.

It was Disney that figured out what to do with Mark S. Waters, the indie director who gave the studio an explosive hit with Freaky Friday last summer. They gave him two strong actresses and a strong premise and let it be simple. You want Tommy O'Haver to do the next Jim Carrey comedy and I'll say, "It's a big responsibility, but he might get something fresh out of Carrey… cool." Give John Lee Hancock Denzel Washington or Russell Crowe or Tom Hanks in a movie about men who love their families but have to overcome an obstacle and I would jump for joy. But these two assignments… they sunk their battleships…

The Alamo is an inherently non-cinematic story. Men gather. Men wait. Men are slaughtered. Men who didn't get slaughtered use military skills to slaughter the "bad guys." Lots of waiting. But it could be Henry V or the story of Davy Crockett, which is likely where Ron Howard was heading before he and Russell Crowe jumped ship. The tale of a man who is trapped into a battle by his own fame and doesn't quite believe that he is the hero he will turn out to be is good dramatic stuff. But Hancock, the Alamo lover that he is, took the big bite and ended up with so much in his mouth that the movie pretty much dies of asphyxiation.

My bet would be is that the longer version is much better, albeit still not a commercial hit of a movie. Instead, we get a pastiche of some of the most boring men alive. Billy Bob Thornton is fine, but he is pretty much in the Renee Zellweger/Cold Mountain role, stealing scenes by being the only thing onscreen with a noticeable pulse. Jason Patric, after really waking up for Narc, is in the kind of role that has made him a Hollywood also-ran despite his looks and brooding acting skills. Dennis Quaid snarls his way through the movie as though he was passing a stone. And when Patrick Wilson tells Mary Louise Parker that he's gay, well… you pray for a single second of emotion in The Alamo as rich as any second of Angels in America throughout the whole film. Perhaps the saddest performance of them all is by the great and subtle Mexican actor Emilio Echevarria, who is reduced here to every Snidley Whipash move short of using the blood of virgins to make his bread.

But still, it is the story structure that does this movie in. There is none. This movie is almost the mirror opposite of The Passion of The Christ, another movie where we know the ending. But Mel Gibson whips the audience with nearly the same ferocity as the Romans do Christ. Here, the foreknowledge of the inevitable does not stir any special inspiration from the director and writers. It just plods along. Even in Jim Bowie - who I kept mis-thinking of as "David Bowie" during the screening - there is a character who is quickly emasculated and never regains anything other than a feeble commitment to the Lord over the knife… but in case that sounds interesting, I'm giving that moment too much credit.

Even the work by composer Carter Burwell and cinematographer Dean Semler that shows moments of brilliance ends up inconsistent and patchy.

With due respect to John Lee Hancock, whose next film I will anticipate with great hope, I took nothing away from The Alamo that I will remember on June 1, much less forever. He delivered a movie that only the Alamo-obsessed could love.

Ella Enchanted should have been Miramax's first major franchise. It has all the elements going in. It's not for everyone. But it is meant to be good kitschy fun and has just enough immaturity to be more easily sequel-able than Bill Goldman's The Princess Bride. But here is the biggest problem… you can't make this movie for less than $100 million unless your director understands what a $100 million idea on a $40 million budget means. It could have worked on the smaller budget.

What this movie needed was a dead smart screenplay that was structured tighter than Anne Hathaway's wardrobe… which would have been a challenge even if they were ace screenwriters. The story and the performances, not the effects - which are truly hideous here - make a movie like this fly. They had the right girl, the right pretty, cornpone guy (who plays Galahad in the Bruckheimer King Arthur that's coming… written by John Lee Hancock) and the roughly the right tone. But after that, it is pretty much a disaster.

The casting somehow manages to be terribly clever and terribly obvious at the same time. I don't know how desperate Cary Elwes is for money that he would take this role that was so clearly meant to be Princess Bride ironic. Love Joanna Lumley, but way too on the nose here. And introducing the new Miramax road show team - Vivica A. Fox, Minnie Driver, Parminder K. Nagra, Jimi Mistry and Nora-Jane Noone. Even Lucy Punch, new to U.S. eyes, appeared in a Brit TV version of Cinderella - apparently playing an evil step-sister there too - just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps the biggest tech failure, since we can't blame the shoddy effects on anything but the budget, is cinematographer John de Borman, which is stunning in light of some of this guy's credits. He did beautiful work on Hideous Kinky, Serendipity and The Guru. The women looked fabulous in all of those films. But here, the lighting is so bad so often that if I didn't know better, I would be calling this the "Before" movie of "Extreme Makeover: The Motion Picture." Even Anne Hathaway, who gets the most lighting attention, has a scene where there is an apparent indentation in her nose that should never, ever be seen on film. But there it was. Even the guys were slaughtered. The lines around Cary Elwes' eyes are going to make people think he is his age! I can only imagine that De Borman will rebound brilliantly with Shall We Dance, where he lights J-Lo, Susan Sarandon and Richard Gere… or at least one has to pray. Maybe he didn't know how to light blue screen and still keep it warm. Or maybe he just didn't have time on this schedule not to use way too much overhead light. I don't know, but "ouch."

Then there are the musical numbers… about which I barely have the heart to write. All I will say is cliché, cliché, cliché, cliché. I am such a sucker that I got a little rush when Ella and The Prince started singing an old Elton John number that really made no sense in the context of the movie. But that went away. Hathaway's energy in these scenes, of course, was wasted because even though there was good stuff on the soundstage, T.O. just didn't know how to shoot it.

But all of that aside, the real problem with Ella Enchanted is the big problem. O'Haver drowned in a sea of Miramax decision-making. They weren't wrong for asking him to do what they did… he was wrong for believing he could deliver it. By the time we got to a two minute sequence where they simply decided not to bother doing the effects to put Jimi Mistry inside his book (you'll have to see the movie or at least the commercials to understand), I just shook my head in pain for O'Haver. (And that sequence was surely meant to be animated, as when Mistry is not clearly seen, they had a dummy book with a plastic likeness of his face. Here, it was blank.)

It seems almost cruel to write it, but when I was about halfway into the film, I started thinking about how this film was the version of Lord of the Rings that Harvey Weinstein wanted to make. Giants via effects from Land of the Lost … ogres distinguished by blue painted foreheads… elves in green suits and striped leggings… and a talking snake who looked like he just escaped from Disney's animated Robin Hood. I know that Peter Jackson would never have made a movie quite this lame. But $40 million is $40 million and that's what the budget for Rings was and when the film left Miramax, Weinstein wanted it all to be one movie.

Of course, in the end, Ella Enchanted will be a popular video/DVD for young women and maybe even some boys. The effects troubles will be less noticeable on television and the failure of size will also be shrunk. Comedy almost always plays better on TV. And it is not all hideous. It just doesn't fly. And that's too bad.

I am truly sorry to have to smack these two films this way. Many critics out there won't have the stomach for it and will write reviews that don't really demand too much from either film. But no one who isn't right dead center in the sweet spot of these two films has any business coughing up hard earned dough to sit through them. No matter how good the people involved, you wouldn't hire Bill Clinton to teach freshman lit at a girl's school and you wouldn't hire George Bush as a public speaker. The wrong person for the wrong job just has no chance to get it right.

Finally, on a side note, Anne Hathaway has taken the Jessica Biel road to her young womanhood. Before Ella or The Princess Diaries 2 arrived in theaters, Hathaway made it clear that she will be performing in the nude in her next film, Havoc. Whether that movie will be good or bad, I do not know. But when America met the then-18/movie shot at 17 Anne Hathaway, she was a girl. She is now 21 and moves like a woman. Like Biel, she seems sexually mature and not in a coy or pervy way. She feels somehow like a girl who was brought up on an intellectual commune who believed that she had the power to own her sexuality and thus, feels free to flaunt it without selling it. I doubt that Disney will decide they can hire her for Princess 3, should there be one, after she is on-screen having sex with gang members. So it will be fascinating to see how her career moves along after this. She is reminding me more and more of a young Christine Lahti or Mary Steenbergen, both of whom did early nudity and went on to be highly respected actresses who still work regularly. Good luck to her… good luck indeed.

READER OF THE DAY: THE GUT writes: "I don't think it's so laughable a notion for Quentin Tarantino to pitch a low-budget Bond film. True, "Kill Bill" went over schedule and over budget, but it still came in at $80 million (according to your article today). What was "Die Another Day" budgeted at? $100-120 million? (I'm sorry I didn't look at the IMDb before writing this e-mail.) Maybe using the term "low-budget" is grossly inappropriate when the definition is $80 million compared to $100+ million, but still, "Kill Bill" is genius and the Broccoli family would be wise to entertain Tarantino's pitch. I know it would get me to finally go see a Bond film. (I suppose I did go watch "The World is Not Enough," but that was because Garbage did the title song and I'd just seen them in concert and I was trying to see as many films in theaters as possible that year. I got up to 147. God, I was a fucking loser.)"

And JEWISH RESURRECTION writes: "Speaking of judging by trailers, I just wanted to mention that the promo for Garden State just gives me this warm, fuzzy feeling, and I can't stop streaming it from the website. I know some at Sundance thought it may have been a little too precious for a debut, but from what I can see Zack Braff's got some serious visual skills. It's similar in some ways to the enjoyable Eternal Sunshine trailer, but unlike that one, this gives you zero plot information whatsoever. Perhaps a more detailed ad will follow, but for now my appetite is seriously whetted.

Let's just thing about how cool it is to advertise what is in one sense a romantic comedy without incuding any dialogue from the movie. That's a bold, creative move, assuming the dialogue doesn't suck and they're hiding that fact (from what I've read, not the case). While the main thrust of the trailer is "the song", whether you like it or not it deilvers a very off-kilter feeling that, to this viewer, somehow becomes uplifting. I know a lot of compairons have been made about Garden State's "Graduate" asipirations, but it definitely appears to have the same tone. When I see these beautiful, wordless shots of Braff in solitude, I'm reminded of Benjamin Braddock at the bottom of the swimming pool. Something about it makes me think I'm really going to love this film, and while those may be unrealistic expectations, it's a credit to the person or people who fashioned the piece (Braff himself?). Also you do have to give Miramax a ounce of credit for attempting this method of marketing for a not-very-commercial film (in contrast, think about how lame and uncreative the Cold Mountain trailer that Miramax released was)."

E ME: Do you feel… like I feel?