November 16, 2004

A little information is a dangerous thing…

This struck me in a political context this morning, as someone was attacking a group of people - in this case, a conservative attacking liberals - and selecting a few convenient facts to beat up the entire group. There was no subtlety… no acknowledgement that complex ideas are complex even for people who have strong opinions. Classically, this is the argument that being pro-choice is being pro-abortion and being pro-life is being anti-woman. I would venture to say that the vast majority of the world is somewhere in the gray in between seeing abortion as an aspirin-level medical procedure and seeing it as the premeditated murder of an innocent. I don't know any woman who has gone through an abortion or a miscarriage who is blithe about the experience.

But I digress…

It seems to me that a lot of big movies this year are suffering from a little information.

The complexity of making a movie, especially a large one, is similarly complex to a truly emotional and divisive political discussion. The demand on the director to keep focus on both the macro and micro view of the work, as in "How does this scene affect the theme and by the way, are these buttons on the drapes okay?" The bigger the movie, the more difficult it is to see the whole picture all the time. Or as I used to describe it in my period of bad script doctoring, trying to keep the whole movie in RAM memory, so you can jump from scene to scene in your head without having to go back to the brain hard drive.

If you want to understand why development tends to suck at most studios, it is (in part) because very few people can keep it all in their head and what you change on page 10 really does effect what happens on page 37 and page 85. I don't know what Farrah Fawcett looked like when she woke up in the morning, but layering changes into a script is even more complex than layering her hair. Very few such styles come out perfect. And thus, it is the norm for the thing that made a script or project shine at first to lose its luster through "improvement."

In this day and age, few audience members and very few critics can figure out where a movie lost them. So you hear and read wide strokes… "it was too long"…. "I hated this character"… "it just didn't get to me." I am susceptible to this too. Not many people want to really dig into a movie… especially one they don't really like. And conversations are often better when brief.

So when a movie like Alexander goes wrong, what kind of conversation do you have? After talking to the cast of this film, there is no question of their love of and loyalty to Oliver Stone. They got into the movie because of him and they followed him through a life-changing experience. I'm not being a suck-up in saying that with Colin Farrell, Jared Leto and Rosario Dawson, you have a trio of as honest a group of name actors as you will find. I didn't have a chance to spend time alone with Rosario, but I found the other two to be just straight out uninterested in bullshitting around, in very different ways. And all three really honored Oliver, even when he drove them nuts.

One specific case is the accents in the film. Colin explained at last night MCN Screening Series Q&A that after Oliver selected him to play the lead, he created a system of U.K. accents that would represent the same diversity of the Macedonians and natives of other areas in the film that was quite specific. Every movie that is in a non-American place but that is in English has to deal with this. And Stone did it with specific intent.

But a part of the audience will always wonder, "Why is Alexander Irish?" Whose failing is that… the audience or the film?

In a movie like The Aviator, you can be sure that meticulous research was done to figure out what the true experience of Howard Hughes going slowly down the rabbit hole into insanity was like… how his insanity and his genius was balanced through the younger years of his life.

But what is true and what is cinematic might be two very different things. And making the movie experience of Howard Hughes' remarkable life a fulfilling one is a different challenge than offering up the truth. In the case of this film, a factually reality that Scorsese, Logan and Co. assume we can keep track of on our own is the love life of each of Mr. Hughes' more famous conquests. On the other hand, the film is quite detailed about Mr. Hughes' tendency to lock himself into a screening room, take off his clothes and urinate into milk bottles. Perhaps both are equally entertaining… perhaps not. Audiences will make that call.

The Phantom of The Opera is playing well with audiences, but it is fascinating to discuss the various elements that embraced and rejected. Joel Schumacher discusses going to the Paris Opera House and finding out that most of the crew on the operas lived in the space, a bohemian commune of magic and the arts. He built parts of his movie on this notion. But someone recently remarked to me that they knew a lot about the Paris Opera House and that the film had not faithfully recreated it in detail and he didn't understand why. Gerard Butler is alternately "the only real performance in the movie," the possessor of "a terrible voice," "not Michael Crawford" or "perfect." Emmy Rossum's performance is judged a lot differently when people find out that she was a trained opera singer and sang the role herself. Etc, etc, etc…

Did you enjoy the show, Mr. Lincoln?

Then there is Sideways, my great love of 2004 and certainly the clear favorite of critics among studio and dependent movies. What does it say if it is not the choice of the Academy… if it isn't even nominated? Are Academy members then fools to be ridiculed? Do they become "red staters" if they like Phantom more than Sideways? And most importantly, are they any different today than they will be after we know how they vote?

We are all seeking answers. Some questions are big, others minute. In the end, people like what they like. They believe what the choose to believe. And when you are on the "winning" side, it all seems to make sense. And when you are on the losing side, "they" all seem like idiots. But the truth, as with so many things, is somewhere in between.

My only suggestion is that we lead with our guts… but try to find some peace with the fact that others disagree. And when it is time to fight for those things for which we each must decide to fight as individuals, fight on! But Emmy Rossum didn't elect George Bush anymore than the openly gay Mr. Schumacher did. (Red Staters: "He's not that kind of gay!" Yeah… right.) And being a failing writer who is obsessed with Pinot Noir doesn't move a political agenda forward… Miles does feel like a political liberal, but to deny his raw humanity by politicizing him would be a travesty of art.

Perhaps we all know too much these days for the traditional movie epic, simplistic by the nature of the under-three-hour beast, to work. These stories now scream for complexity. We do care whether Alexander is gay or not and if it wasn't relevant back then, we as an audience need to be able to understand that from the movie. If Hughes was carnal, that's cool, but if he was a obsessive in bed as he was in his business life, that should be a part of the story… I don't need to get into Kate Hepburn's bed, but if Hughes' romantic life was defined by a need to be neat about it, that tells you a whole lot about the boundaries of women's attraction to him.

One of the things about Sideways that I love so much is in this same vein… Miles identifies with a grape. It seems so obvious and even, without anyone else having done it that I know of, cliché. But it is the heart of the film. It is complex and yet clear. His life is small enough that he can express his own fragility and we can connect to it.

So much information in such a small thing. And so little often offered in things that are so big.

READER OF THE DAY: DAN THE MAN writes: "I read Geoff Pevere's commentary that you posted on MCN today ("Journo as movie fan? Not this man") and was shocked. That kind of stuff really happens
at junkets and press conferences?

I've worked in sports journalism for years now and in the events I've
covered, autographs and the kind of behavior Pevere outlined are forbidden. Our press passes always say "NO AUTOGRAPHS" and the comraderie between the press and the athletes are kept to a minimum. Yeah, there's joking and some light moments, but I've never heard someone shout "You're the Man!" as a player exited the showers and waited for reporters.

Anyway, knowing (and appreciating) your stance on the declining levels of entertainment journalism, I'm sure that story touched a cord with you.

E-ME: As my MCN headline indicated, I thought he ran into some of the most subtle behavior... scary, huh?