May 26, 2004

The Disaster The Day After Tomorrow

I want to start this piece with a sincere tribute to the team over at Fox. I cannot recall a single movie during my decade covering the film business - or even in decades of movie loving - that has been made to look as good as The Day After Tomorrow for as long as Team Fox has made this thing look good and which turned out to be as truly horrible a movie as this thing is. I'm not kidding. (I'm being a smart ass, but I'm not kidding.)

No one at Fox will soon acknowledge just how bad they know this movie is... but they know. They must have known for months. Like Universal did with Van Helsing, Fox execs took a risk with a commercial writer/director who has delivered in the past and who had an idea about taking a traditional genre and pumping up the volume. And when it was clear that that roll of the dice came up snake eyes, Team Fox did what few studios are willing to do, since it is just so very unpleasant… they put one of their big summer movies under uber-lockdown.

It was an act of genius. Because it is now Wednesday, less than 48 hours before The Day After Tomorrow is to be unleashed on the world, and no one sees the tsunami that is about to smash into American moviegoers. If they started screening this film early or - heaven forbid! - tested it, the storm clouds would have been gathering for months and there would be a real threat to the four-day opening weekend. But unlike some films that might have been helped by testing or early screening, The Day After Tomorrow could only be helped by reconstructing the entire story so that it offered narrative logic, emotional interest, and/or the slightest hint of a sense of humor.

As it is, the only earthquake you'll feel is the natural sensurround of people snoring in their seats through the second act (waking them would be unkind) and then again in the third act as people run for the exits when the boredom becomes too excruciating to bear. But come next Monday afternoon, you can be sure that more than $60 million will be in the Fox piggy bank and that is a remarkable achievement indeed.

Unlike the smarmy jackass at FoxNews.com who ran a blistering review of the film yesterday because he was not given a ticket to the opening night party, my shock at this film required no hard feelings against Fox. As far as I'm concerned, they treat the media as well as any studio and sometimes better. I genuinely like the team over there and sympathize with them, since this is the ugliest moment for the studio since Myra Breckenridge… well, since no one seems to remember Freddy Got Fingered anymore.

The trouble with this movie is classically Roland Emmerich. I may be the first person you read who compares this film unfavorably to Godzilla, but I won't be the last. But the problem is very much the same. Ememrich is a guy who makes big dumb movies who desperately wants to bring a reality to them. But that would require an act of genius. Emmerich knows what he's doing behind the camera, but he is not a directing or writing genius.

As we now know, no one really cares why Godzilla is attacking New York and no one really cares whether an ice age can come to the northern United States in a few weeks. What they care about it watching stuff get destroyed in a really cool way by really cool people. And besides the endless time wasted in both films explaining why the nonsensical makes sense, neither film has had a single human character as compelling as the characters played by ID4's Will Smith, Jeff Goldblum, Randy Quaid, Harvey Fierstein, Viveca Fox, Robert Loggia or even Bill Pullman.

This speaks to the cardinal lesson of Summer 2004… Less is More. Think about how limited the effects in ID4 really were. They blew up buildings. There were some cool creatures, all done with puppets, I believe. But the human beings carried the film. In The Day After Tomorrow, the actors don't stand a chance… they have nothing to do… they have no opportunity to deliver real heroism… they are tertiary characters.

Dennis Quaid plays a paleoclimatologist. Really! If you think that the big word is the problem, try defining it! Can any of you identify with a paleoclimatologist? Wouldn't you be a lot more likely to connect to a weatherman?

The other huge problem with the film is that it manages to move along both too fast and too slowly all in one movie. It doesn't help that the film apologizes for its own unreality in that first act, as we keep being told that what we know we are about to witness couldn't happen in our lifetime, couldn't happen in 20 years, couldn't happen in six years and couldn't happen in six weeks… all before it happens in six days.

Then, once it happens - and here is a consumer report… virtually everything you have seen and loved in trailers and commercials happens in the first act and never reoccurs later - there is a lot of waiting. But what are we really waiting for?

Things are so utterly unrelenting that as Dennis Quaid goes on his ridiculous trek to the Manhattan Public Library, there is no sense of anticipation for the audience to grasp onto. Then, as he finally arrives, as the sun comes out - yes, the sun comes out a few days into our next ice age - you realize that if he had just waited a day or two, he could have choppered into New York, no problem. I guess a paleoclimatologist wouldn't have thought about that. (A weatherman would have!)

There are all kinds of tiny deaths in this film that are not quite horrifying enough for The Day After Tomorrow to be the Springtime For Hitler of summer movies. There is the sick bald child, whose illness and medical needs are never explained. There are the morons who burn books instead of wood shelves. There is the wardrobe malfunction from the normally reliable Renee April, who didn't seem to realize that a bunch of brunettes bundled up in lost & found clothes by a fire would look like they were in a badly cast high school production of Fiddler On The Roof. (I kept waiting for Jake Gyllenhaal to break out in "Anatevka… Anatevka…") The CG wolves are irritatingly CG. Why is Jake almost drowning by using a payphone when a cell phone works just minutes later. (And why are cell phones working in this kind of weather?)

There is a moment where the lyricism of the idea of much of the United States being frozen over is ripe. At one point on the Quaid quest, the trio is threatened by the glass ceiling of a mall. But the only thing that we get is the survival (or failure to survive) from that experience. What about the massive tribute to mindless consumerism that a mall is? Isn't nature forcing us to give up what came too easy poignant? Instead, we get overwrought speeches about the Guttenberg Bible.

I was stunned by this movie… really. It was beyond any expectation of failure. And I didn't feel that way about Godzilla at all. I felt that movie had some cool stuff in it, even if it didn't really work. But even in that film, we had Hank Azaria as the pathetic comic relief. If there is a single sin that damns The Day After Tomorrow to hell even more profoundly than the others, it is its utter lack of humor. It is so bad that even trademark Emmerich gags didn't draw any laughs in the screening I attended. That silence was deafening.

Remember, the turning point in ID4 was when the humans stopped reacting to the alien threat and started taking aggressive action. This film doesn't allow for that moment. It could easily have been a first act of destruction, a second act of survival and a third act of a father trying to recover his son who everyone else assumes is dead.

Fortunately, we have Harry Potter and Tom Hanks coming to our movie rescue. And if you need something sooner and enjoy coarse humor, take a ride on the Soul Plane this weekend. But if I were at Fox this week, I'd be praying for an ice age that would bury me alive and thaw me out next week, because the global warming on this film is about to get as hot as any we've seen in a long time.

READER OF THE DAY: Another flaw in Monday's column came to light on Tuesday. I would be curious if anyone else knew the following based on media coverage. But here to explain is RICKY'S LITTLE BROTHER: "Just a quick correction to your otherwise thorough and right-on breakdown of the various media lies/distortions surrounding "Fahrenheit 9/11": your claim that "the urge to sell this political lie was so strong that Tarantino and his jury held an unprecedented post-awards press conference to explain their selection to the press" is, in itself, not quite accurate. The post-awards jury press conference was indeed "unprecedented"; however, contrary to your implication, the decision to hold the press conference had nothing to do with "Fahrenheit 9/11" at all but was made well before the 2004 slate was even announced, presumably as a reaction to the controversy engendered by last year's selections (i.e. giving Gus Van Sant two prizes for the same film and shutting out the early favorite, "Dogville," entirely). Such press conferences should be expected in future festivals regardless of whether or not Michael Moore is competing, unless of course Gilles Jacob changes his mind."

And THE RYOWAN writes: "I'm sorry you were disappointed by the lack of response to your comments about Michael Moore and your problems with the hype and spin surrounding his movie. How ironic that the man who is trying to expose the hype and spin of politics at the highest level is engaged in some of the highest levels of spin in a different medium? However, maybe that is the reason behind the lack of response to Michael Moore's attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of entertainment journalists in the way same way that Karl Rove and Co. do on a daily basis in the political world.

The reason I believe Moore has the most incentive to lie is that he might subconsciously realize that people who actively read about politics and follow current events have probably already seen, assumed, consumed and digested the things that are occurring in his movie. Are there many people who read the major newspapers in America, watch "Meet the Press" and other such shows, and read magazines such as "The New Republic" (the audience Moore thinks will be with him) who will learn anything new from this film?

Wasn't this Todd McCarthy's chief complaint that he refers to throughout the review:

"Pic fails to provide any hard facts or make any incriminating connections that a reasonably informed person doesn't already know about, so intellectually Moore is largely preaching to the converted in this blatant cinematic 2004 campaign pamphlet."

Put simply, I really do think this upcoming election is an election of ideals- people who believe what is going on Iraq, the World and in the Bush administration is morally right, and people who believe otherwise.

If it takes a person like Michael Moore and his spin to convince people that the Bush administration might have lied or cheated the moral ideals of the American public, then maybe the spin is worth it. But doesn't it say something about Moore and what he thinks of the average American who will learn many things from his film that he has to distort the truth in order to get them into the theaters? On a much, much smaller scale, isn't he distorting to truth in order to get his way in the same way as Bush?

For me, it's a tough ethical line. Is it worth it to spin small lies in order to bring down big ones?"

And this from THE LAWYER: "About a year ago, I would support Bush. Just doing my duty as a citizen to back my President during a time of war, a war I thought was right, and I war I felt we had to do. Now, a year later, fuck Bush, and everyone associated with him.

It would be easy to get pissed at Moore, for using half-truths and plain old lies to sell this movie. However so many in this country just HATE Bush, that his tactics hardly phase me or possibly those in concurrence with my opinion. If this movie can get a limited number of people to vote for Kerry, then it is a good thing. Bush must not be re-elected, and why should I bitch at Moore for trying to make this happen in his own twisted way?

Moore does not seem to be taking the ethical way to getting a president out of office, but not like our President or his associates know a thing about ethics. I hate our President, and let Moore and Howard Stern raise as much hell as possible to make sure he can go back to that ranch in Crawford, TX for good.

At this time David, I think it would be hard to find people pissed off at a man being shady, but using that shadiness to get an even shadier President out of office. Everything counts in large amounts."

E ME: Will you be going to the movies on The Day After Tomorrow?