Saturday, May 16, 2009

War (part 2)

Aki:

Nobody really found the original Rogue’s body, right? That should be used in the plot. So Rogue vs Rogue II. No, it’s a comedy.

Aki

I should have been clearer. Rogue, the original, is dead. John Lone killed him, shot the rest of his face away, put his own wedding ring on Rogue’s finger, then burned down his house, so that Rogue’s bones would be taken for John Lone’s body.

Ok, here’s what I missed, and it wasn’t long:

Statham gets a call from new-Rogue. I was wrong in thinking Statham had figured it out, he still thinks Rogue is Rogue. Jet Li tells him to meet ‘Where we first met’ so that part was right in my guess: the movie ends in the warehouse by the docks where it began.

Statham and Jet Li have a terrific fight. Jet Li is not wounded; even having his arm half cut off makes no difference to him! Corey Yuen directed the fight scenes, and they are up to his usual standard of excellence.

At the climax of the fight comes a moment of pause and Jet Li reveals who he is. At first Statham can’t believe it but then he does. ‘Look into my eyes, John. They’re the only thing the surgeon can’t change!’

One more flashback, of when Lone set fire to his cabin. Out on the road he finds Rogue’s car, in the trunk is a suitcase with money, guns, passports and presumably everything he needs to take Rogue’s place.

‘Jesus, Tom, is it really you? Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘It was the only way I could get at Shira. But why did you betray us?’

‘They said they just wanted to rough you up for shooting Rogue in the face. I tried to stop working for him so many times. I couldn’t. Can’t you forgive me, Tom?’

‘Tom Lone is dead. There’s only Rogue now.’

Jet Li aims his gun at Statham. There is no forgiveness in him.

But Statham knows he has stationed a sharpshooter with rifle back there. When Jet Li stands up so the shooter gets a clear shot, Statham leaps up between them. Jet Li fires, but the sharpshooter holds his fire so as not to hit Statham; Statham crumples to the ground. The sharpshooter looks through his scope for another shot but Jet Li, Rogue, Tom Lone, is gone.

A final set of shots show Jet Li getting into his sports car, driving off, and driving away across the Golden Gate Bridge.

So I was wrong that he had nothing to live for. The sequel is going to feature Jet Li as Rogue (if there is a sequel) but since we only saw Statham’s body on the ground, he might still be alive. I think they cheated there a little bit, and instead of what I guessed (Jet Li would die but not-die) they did the other way, and Statham died, but they can say in the sequel he was just wounded.

I must say seeing Jet Li drive away was not satisfying.

But one other thing I never made clear: we never see the original Rogue’s face. In the warehouse prologue, before he’s shot in the face, his face is in shadows or offscreen. When he comes to kill Tom Lone and family, he wears a mask; probably to cover the half-shot-up face.

So, the only scenes where we see Jet Li and know it’s Jet Li, he is a good guy, though we think he’s a bad guy.

Ah!

So you got the ending right, almost. You liked the movie, though?

The movie is crap! But I like Jet Li, I like Jason Statham, the stunts are good. Moreover, they use a flashy jump-cut music-video style that usually I hate, but I found it worked for me in this movie. I wish I could tell you why or how it worked. Partly I think it worked because the jump-cuts were not in there only to be flashy, but they sped up the storytelling, moving the story along faster. But I think it goes beyond that.

(5 May 2009)

War (part 1)

Hi Aki,

A couple nights ago I watched War which stars Jason Statham and Jet Li. Statham basically plays a cop in San Francisco. Jet Li plays a professional assassin who is playing the Yakuza against the triads to start a war. And Statham is obsessed with this ‘Rogue’ assassin because ‘Rogue’ killed Statham’s partner (John Lone) 3 years ago.

Nobody has ever seen Rogue, there are no pictures of him.

He has had plastic surgery several times, changing his face.

He was trained by the CIA but years ago he rebelled against them and went to serve the Yakuza (one specific clan) as an assassin.

He is known only by the very particular bullets he uses (yeah, right!).

Statham is one of those tough cops who know it all, can speak Japanese at least, maybe Mandarin as well. He lives for his job, which caused his wife to divorce him years ago, shortly after his partner was killed, with all his family, by Rogue (after a raid they show as the movie prologue, Statham and Lone break into a smuggling operation where Rogue is killing people, a fact Statham and Lone learn when they find the special spent cartridges only Rogue uses, on the floor. Lone manages to shoot Rogue in the face, Rogue falls into the water of San Francisco bay, presumed drowned, though no body is found. A few days later, Statham is driving to Lone’s cabin in the hills for barbecue, when Rogue breaks into Lone’s house, shoots Lone in the face, and then shoots Lone’s wife and kid in front of him. By the time Statham arrives, the house is a burned down, smoking ruin, the police and fire department are there, only bones of the bodies – but Statham does find one of the special bullet cartridges there.

It’s suggested that this even tore up even Statham, leading to his wife divorcing him.

Now Rogue is back, and he seems to be playing Statham against the Yakuza, the Yakuza and triad against each other.

The climax comes when Rogue kills the triad boss, but lets his wife (improbably, a Latina!) and little girl go, contrary to the orders of the Yakuza leader. The Yakuza leader learns of this betrayal, and orders Rogue killed – but nobody can kill Jet Li. Even when the Yakuza boss wounds him horribly, Rogue has the upper hand, and is about to kill the Yakuza. ‘Why are you doing this? Why?’

Rogue answers, ‘Because 3 years ago, you ordered a hit.’

‘I order many hits!’

‘This one … was different!!!’

So flashback: we learn that after Rogue killed Lone’s wife and daughter, Lone got free, turned the tables, killed Rogue.

In the three years since, Lone has masqueraded as Rogue, having plastic surgery to look like what Rogue would have looked like (remember both of them have just been shot in the face). And all this time he has worked to create this war and lure the Yakuza boss to San Francisco (the clan boss of this Yakuza group has always stayed in Tokyo for some reason too complicated to get into. And for some reason Lone finds it easier to engineer this 3-year campaign to set triad against Yakuza instead of doing what you or I would do and buying a plane ticket to Tokyo!!!)

In response, the Yakuza guy tells Rogue/Lone: it was your partner. He was working for me. he’s the one who’s really responsible!

Cut to Statham in the park, looking mournful. He is not only the kind of cop who knows the underworld, he’s smart to boot: he has been asking, ‘Why would Rogue start a war between the triads and Yakuza?’ Now, it seems, he has his answer: it seems as though he knows who ‘Rogue’ really is.

The showdown is all set up, when…

…when the cable box changed channels! We have the recorder set to record a comedy show every Thursday night at 9.30.

So I didn’t see the end!!!

Now, how does it end? This is another puzzle like Gossip (remember that one?).

We know everything going up to the climax. It looks like the toughest cop is up against the toughest bad guy (who is not a bad guy after all, but who has done horrible things, though only to criminals, for revenge).

Who will win?

  • Will both survive and make peace? (No – not in a violent movie like this!)
  • Will both die? (maybe, but isn’t that a downer?)
  • Will Statham defeat Jet Li /Lone and find some sort of redemption? Does he have some sort of explanation for what he did? Something that Lone/Jet Li might forgive? (I don’t know about this one. It really doesn’t look like anybody could beat Jet Li, but he’s had one arm just about hacked off by the Yakuza boss, so he’s not 100 percent here)
  • Will Jet Li / Lone defeat and kill Statham? But then what’s left for Lone? This is the sort of character arc that ends only in death.

(This is how you tell about that: if along the path of vengeance the guy meets a girl, or a child, or an animal – something to save, something to give him a personal relationship, a reason to live – then he can live on after achieving vengeance. But if he finds nobody, then he will die, always, 100 percent of the time. The only people who fit this bill are the triad widow and child. But Jet Li has had no real relationship to them; he is his usual cold, distant self with the little girl.)

So I don’t see how Jet Li can live at the end of this.

I don’t see how Statham can survive either.

What’s your prediction, if you didn’t see it yet? I got to record the end tonight, and I’ll watch it first thing tomorrow morning.

I really don’t know what I predict. Statham has to pay for what he did. Lone has nothing to live for. And yet I don’t see them both dead and the audience looking at two corpses when the credits roll, do you?

Hey, I know your solution! They start kissing in the middle of fighting, and end up going to some state that allows gay marriage!

Haha!

I had another thought as I was walking home: here’s how I would do it.

Big fight between Statham and Jet Li. Reveal that Rogue is Lone.

Statham explains. Wife sick, kid with cancer – something that needed money and the family required he sell out.

Jet Li exacts revenge. But he leaves Statham alive – just maybe shoots him in the face.

Then a sniper Statham’s pal shoots Jet Li. Jet Li falls into the bay just like Rogue did (all this should happen on the scene of the prologue). They are sure Jet Li is dead, but no body is found.

Statham, wounded, leaves flowers on the grave of Lone/wife/child and walks, limps, away.

– this makes Statham pay, makes Jet Li pay, but leaves both men, potentially, alive so we can have War 2 sequel.

I will tell you what really happened when I hear your prediction.

(5 May 2009)

36 Hours

Hi Aki,

We watched 36 Hours tonight, made in 1965. WW2 drama starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, Rod Taylor. Black and White, Panavision.

It’s May 31 1944. Garner knows the secret plans for the allied invasion. The Germans seem to believe the landing will be in Calais, but in reality it’s Normandy. But maybe the Germans are only pretending to believe it’s Calais. Garner has a contact in Lisbon who might give them a clue whether the Germans believe in Calais or are only fooling.

Garner goes to Lisbon but he is drugged, put on a truck, a plane, flown to Germany. There near the Swiss border the Germans have constructed an exact copy of a US military hospital. This is their plan, to convince Garner that it’s now 1950, the war is long over, he has had amnesia. In this way they hope to fool him into revealing the actual details of the invasion. It is a plan the Germans have used before, 18 times, without fail, but those men were simple soldiers. Garner is a top intelligence man. The SS doesn’t trust Dr Gerber (Rod Taylor) to succeed here. They give Gerber 36 hours to find out; then the torturers will go to work.

Gerber has Garner’s hair dyed to look older, puts drops in his eyes to make him need glasses. Garner wakes up and is disoriented, and at first the plan is working out well. Gerber is helped by nurse Anna (Eva Marie Saint) who pretends to be Garner’s nurse as well as wife.

Garner is totally fooled. He gives away the plans in great detail. Then…

…Then he finds he has a paper cut on his finger. He got that paper cut the night before he left for Lisbon. Desperately he tries to unravel the mystery. In a couple easy ways he gets it. He threatens Anna and she tells him the truth. She was in a concentration camp, she agreed to anything to get out, she was a nurse, she spoke English, so she was brought into this plot.

Garner gets Anna to help him. She tells Gerber and the SS man that Garner has escaped, that he knows the truth, has seen through them from the start.

Garner is captured and brought to the SS. But first Gerber talks to him. Gerber (in an unbelievable scene they try to sell as well as they can) reveals he created this amnesia gag at first to help German soldiers shell-shocked coming back from the Russian front. And over the months, studying Garner’s file, he has come to know and like him. And he’s not only sorry for what Garner will now face, but Gerber is still unconvinced that Garner was lying when he told them the invasion would be Normandy.

Shock, the SS man, has no such thoughts. He believes the invasion is most likely to come at Calais because that is where the high command thinks it will come.

For a couple days, Garner (and Anna, because Shock finds out that Anna betrayed them) are tortured. The torture is this: they are put in comfortable chairs for a few hours. Yes, the comfy chair!!!

Meanwhile the Allied Command knows Garner has been taken, and they don’t know if he can stand being tortured. They know he will try to sell the Germans on the idea it will be Calais. So they arrange for German spies in England to be fed clues that it will be Calais on June 7 though in fact it is set for Normandy June 5.

When this fake intelligence makes it down the German command, and Shock tells Garner, ‘We know it’s Calais,’ then Garner seems to give up. They release him and put him and Anna in a suite of rooms in a castle on very comfy beds. Yes, the comfy beds!!!

When Garner wakes up, he sees the clock-calendar. It’s early hours of June 5 so he relaxes and tells Anna that it’s too late for the Germans, he and she have made it. The invasion is already beginning.

In walks Gerber who has had the room bugged. ‘Oh, this clock is set ahead, by the way. It’s only 11.42 – June 4. And you were telling the truth about Normandy, eh? Glad to hear it.’

Gerber sends the information by courier to the top general in the area to be delivered personally, but the courier instead gives it to Shock.

But meanwhile the dawn of June 5 comes … and no invasion. (This is a clever use of history; the invasion was set for the fifth, but bad weather made them put it off. Everybody knew it was going to be 5 or 6 or 7 because that was the dark of the moon and the tide was right.)

So Gerber is now totally discredited, even though to be a traitor. Gerber knows he has nothing to lose, so he helps Garner and Anna escape. He stays behind and is arrested. He injects himself with poison to cheat the SS guys even being able to torture him or shoot him.

Garner and Anna go cross country to the Minister in the nearby town. This man has helped American flyers get across the border, but he’s out of town. Still his housekeeper helps them. She puts them in contact with a fat, old, very comical and cynical Home Guard border patrol man (Sig Ruman, later to be famous as ‘Sergeant Schultz’ on TV). For some money he will help them.

But Garner has mentioned this minister in the talks with Gerber and the SS man before Garner realized that they were Germans. The SS man goes to the minister’s house, gets the plan out of the housekeeper, and arrests Garner and Anna just this side of the border. He intends not to take them back but to shoot them. But he gets shot himself, by the Home Guard comedian, who helps Garner and Anna get away, and drapes Shock’s body over the fence as though he had been shot trying to escape.

In Switzerland Anna and Garner say farewell. He is bound back to London, she for an internment camp for refugees. She finally manages to cry with relief, for the first time since her brutal treatment in the concentration camp took away her last tears. The two cars drive away, parting at a fork in the road, and the credits roll.

The movie is based on a Roald Dahl story. But here’s the interesting thing, in the credits in big letters it says, Based on ‘Beware the Dog’ by Roald Dahl then in small letters it says, Also on a story by X and Y (I can’t remember those names).

So here is my guess: the basic premise, of the fake amnesia, the ‘doctor’ trying to get him to ‘remember’ 6 years that haven’t actually happened yet, etc. – this is in Roald Dahl’s story. It’s very clever, and the story probably starts with our hero waking up. Confused. How did I get here? Kind of stuff. Then ‘Why do I look older? Why do I need glasses now? what’s this date on the paper – 1950?!?’

The doctors come in, and try to help him.

He gives away the place and troop disposition of the invasion.

Then he figures it out, by a clever means (probably the paper cut gag, though that seems to rely a bit too much on accident to me). And now he must fool the ‘doctor’ into believing that he was onto them from the beginning.

It’s all a game of psychology, faking, convincing, lying.

There is the hero, the doctor, maybe a torturer too. But probably just hero and doctor (maybe another doctor).

There are no girls and no romance and no thrilling escape.

This would have been a good:

  • play
  • live TV drama
  • intense movie (the kind that we were taught makes a good debut feature: ‘2 guys in a room talking’ kind of feature)

It does not make a good wide-screen big-name movie from MGM using all the props they have on hand from the other WW2 movies they were making at the time.

So, in adapting, I imagine that the producers said something like, ‘We need a GIRL! We need ROMANCE! We need ACTION! We need the guy not just to fool the Nazis and get killed, or go into prison camp like in the Dahl story, we need him to ESCAPE!’

And they pulled in this cheap pulp story of a guy hooking up with a woman who was being used by the Nazis after getting out of concentration camp, and the cynical border guard, all that stuff. Everything cheap and bad about the movie, in other words, comes from:

  • this second pulp story
  • introductory material setting up the problem (the part about sending Garner to Lisbon, and the scenes in Lisbon)
  • and whatever else the producers thought would make for better box-office

But of course the only scenes that work in the movie are those that come from the Dahl story. And it starts to go wrong as soon as we have to build up the girl and she says she is married to Garner. This is preposterous of course. And as soon as he figures it out, he starts acting in pulp action-hero manner, threatening the girl, running, fighting – crap.

Where does the sympathetic portrayal of Dr Gerber come in I wonder? This part almost seems as though it doesn’t come from either story, but is instead a condition of getting a big name star to play the part. ‘Rod Taylor doesn’t want to play a Nazi, man! He wants to be a good guy! All the potential stars for this part don’t want it! We gotta sweeten the deal but we can’t PAY more; anyway money isn’t the problem. Hey how about we make him a GOOD Nazi, not a bad one? He can even have good motives for his work, and he can help Garner escape! Oh, he’ll do it now? Great, baby, great!’

The biggest problem lies in how the introductory big-budget stuff and the later crappy escape stuff crowd in on the core of the movie, the scenes of convincing, being fooled, catching on, trying to trick back, trying to convince them. This is the only part that is suspenseful or interesting. As soon as Garner says ‘Normandy’ and goes on to give all the code-names for the beaches, and tell what troops will be landing on what beaches, it really got me going. ‘How is he going to take this back? He can’t kill them, it wouldn’t do any good, they have passed on the words already. He’s going to have to fool them back, and how on earth is he going to do THAT?’ – That’s what went through my mind, I was all excited to see how they were going to handle.

You can’t imagine my disappointment as we move into the laughable ‘Torture in the comfy chairs!’ part, and the crappy, too-easy, escape.

(5 May 2009)

Billy Liar

Hi Aki,

Today I finished Billy Liar a movie I recorded, and watched about an hour friday, 20 minutes yesterday, the end today.

This was a play. Then it was a movie. Then it was a TV show. The writers really hit the jackpot with this one. John Schlesinger directed.

The story is set in a small town in northern england, early 60s. Billy (Albert Finney in the play version, then Tom Courtenay took over the role in the play, then Courtenay played in the movie) is a young man with big dreams. We open with a radio show just going on-air at 6 am. The host begins what he usually does: read letters and dedications that listeners have sent in.

As we continue to hear the radio show and the many dedications, we see exterior shots of houses, apartment buildings, all over town, as happy housewives react when their letters are read. These are all extreme long shots (the film was shot Panavision, black and white) from the street; the women are far away. Finally we end on a closer shot of a woman (Mona Washbourne playing Billy’s mom) behind a window. We go inside with her. she’s wondering when the radio show will ever get around to reading her letter and playing her record. The Mum, Dad, and Mum’s Mum are all around the breakfast table getting ready for the day. They occasionally shout upstairs to son Billy to come down and have breakfast or he’ll be late for work.

Billy, meanwhile, lies in bed, daydreaming of Ambrosia, the country he imagines. Ambrosia has just won the Great War, for peace and freedom and independence. We see Billy as the general who won the war, as the wounded leader of a wounded squadron, as one of the women recruits … all marching in parade before the general-king of Ambrosia (also, of course, Billy).

Billy at last goes down stairs, half an hour late. He gets in a fight with his Dad and Mum, his Dad especially attacks him constantly and in one flight of fancy Billy turns, now in uniform, and guns them all down with submachine gun (a recurring motif Billy imagines whenever somebody is giving him too much grief).

Another point of contention is the wardrobe in Billy’s room. His Mum wants to clean it, she wants him to unlock it, and why does he want to keep it locked for, anyway? When Billy goes up to get ready for work, he unlocks it, and we find out why: inside it are 200 or so calendars from his workplace, a funeral home. Billy was supposed to mail them out. Instead he spent the postage money himself, and now is stuck with all these calendars and no idea what to do with them other than hide them in his wardrobe!

Billy goes on to work (late, and yelled at for it) and along the way he indulges in some more fantasies. He imagines being caught for pilfering the postage money; thrown in prison, he dashes off an exposé on prison life that turns into a major best-seller before Billy even gets out of prison; the Warden thanks him, and Billy leaves the prison to universal fame and acclaim.

Being a writer seems to be the core real-world ambition Billy enjoys: he has a novel he keeps intending to begin, and he has sent sample scripts to a radio comedian who happens to be in town to open a supermarket; Billy is sure the comedian will hire him and take him to London. But the comedian doesn’t even remember Billy’s scripts and just gives him the brush-off when Billy finally does get to see him.

Real-world problems are mounting for Billy: he has gotten himself engaged, twice, to two very different girls: Barbara, the shy, repressed girl who really loves him but won’t even kiss him before they are married, and Rita, the brassy waitress who’s been shagging Billy. Billy gave Rita an engagement ring, only he got it back from her ‘to give to a jeweler for alteration’ and gave it to Barbara. Now Rita wants the ring back, and Billy is trying to get Barbara to give up the ring ‘for alterations’ to get it back to Rita. Only Barbara won’t give it up. To make matters worse, he has invited both girls to his home for tea on the same day. And, of course, he has told them both a pack of lies about his home life. And on top of this, an old flame, Liz (Julie Christie in her first big role on film) has come back to town.

Billy is telling everybody that the comedian will hire him and he’ll be going to London. This is his escape. He tries to quit his job at the funeral home only to have his obnoxious boss Mr Shadrack (Leonard Rossiter) let Billy know they are on to him and the calendar/postage gag, and he can’t quit until he’s worked off all the money he owes.

Billy goes in and out of fantasy. Walking by a stadium where a football (soccer) match is in progress, he dreams he is the Prime Minister of Ambrosia promising a new and better future for all (in best Winston Churchill imitation) to the mad cheers of the populace. But his real life is getting worse and worse. The two women are pressuring him for the ring, to see his parents. The comedian doesn’t know him and has no job for him. And when Billy shouts at his Grandmum, she has a bit of an attack, making his Dad even harsher on Billy.

That night the whole town congregates at the dance hall. Billy tries to avoid Rita and Barbara (he has dates with both, of course) but they meet up and the whole business of two fiancĂ©es and one ring comes out; the women fall into a catfight. The band though is playing a song Billy and a mate wrote, which is good – until the MC gives Billy credit and announces Billy will be going to London to write the radio show; more humiliation is bound to follow when this is revealed as a lie, and indeed, several of Billy’s pals are razzing him when the dance hall applauds him, calling out, ‘Billy Liar! Billy Liar!’

Billy escapes the dance hall for a walk with Liz. They catch up on old times. Billy is amazed that Liz has left the small town so many times, but she says it’s easy, you just get a ticket and get on the train. Liz seems to really understand Billy, she knows all his faults and fibs and likes him anyway. They share a penchant for day-dreaming, and Billy reveals to Liz, the first person ever, his fantasies of Ambrosia. Liz wants to make love to Billy in the park, he proposes, really seems to mean it, and they lie down in the grass. Only Billy’s mates have followed them, and mock him. The secret of ‘Ambrosia’ is now out, and it’s a sure thing that by Monday night the whole town will know all about it.

Billy is furious but Liz tells him it doesn’t matter, those guys, the whole town, aren’t worth it. She tells him they can go to London tonight on the midnight train; that she’ll be on it, and she gets him to agree to meet her at the station.

Billy goes home, once more full of hope. At home though, unpleasantness awaits: his Dad tells him that Grandmum is in the hospital and Mum is there waiting for Billy. And they know all about the calendars and postage, and they’ve broken into the wardrobe and found Mum’s letter to the radio show dedication, which Billy never sent either. Billy tries to stand up for himself and stick to his promise to Liz, and he packs and leaves to go to the infirmary.

There he sits with his Mum. She is no less determined to keep Billy at home, though she uses gentler tactics. Grandmum dies, and Mum grieves, and Billy departs for the station.

He walks to the station, dreaming of his regiment’s military burial of his Grandmum in Ambrosia and humming a military tune. But the camera pulls away and reveals Billy walking down a dark city street, engulfed in shadow, his tune more like whistling in the dark. We know Billy is not going to London, even though he thinks he is, and is making every move to go.

At the station he finds Rita, dragging around one of Billy’s mates who is drunk. There’s also a young soldier who is going off to serve, and supported by older women relatives. And out on the platform he finds Liz.

They board the train and wait. Only minutes before it will depart. And Billy is feeling anxious. He tries to get Liz to ask him to go back out to get something to eat – she has packed sandwiches. What about something to drink? She doesn’t want anything. Some milk? She doesn’t want any. But Billy goes out to get the milk anyway.

He stands at the vending machine. The train will depart any moment and Billy takes his time. He holds two cartons of milk in his hand, his back to the platform. He could still make it but he waits until he’s just too late, and only then turns and runs, runs when it’s too late, runs just to make a show of trying to go.

In the carriage window Liz looks out, shaking her head. She knows Billy too well, is sorry he couldn’t come but doesn’t seem to blame him too much. She didn’t really expect him to go. She has left his suitcase out on the platform for him.

Billy walks home, alone on the dark streets. But he walks a bit faster, parade march, and behind him march in step the paratroopers of Ambrosia. Billy marches up to his house and inside, and the camera pulls back down the street, as the national anthem of Ambrosia rises on the soundtrack. Billy’s window is the only one lit in the house, far away, at the end of the street, as the anthem ends and closes out the movie.

It’s an excellent picture. Schlesinger was a terrific filmmaker for about 10, 15 years. The beginning, with the radio program and shots of the streets, has a nice, naturalistic feel, but it was a bit flawed in that it’s just an effort to ‘break out’ of the play, which probably opens on Mrs Fisher dusting and cleaning and making breakfast while the radio plays the other dedications.

The biggest challenge for the picture is bringing us in and out of the daydreams. This is done usually with sound helping: either we begin to hear Ambrosia before picture takes us there, or we go on hearing Ambrosia after picture brings us back into ‘reality.’ I wonder how it might have felt if they had had the budget and tried The Wizard of Oz gambit, putting all the Ambrosia/daydream scenes in color?

One thing that had my head turning while watching was thinking how Albert Finney would have been as Billy. Tom Courtenay is a frail, slight man, and so I interpret his Billy as the recourse of a weakling; when he interacts with others, telling lies, it’s like somebody who has this one defensive mechanism to help him through life. But Finney is much heartier, stronger physically. He was playing Tom Jones at about this period, so I have a good picture of what he was like in a somewhat similar genre (comedy of a young man against the forces of the established order). Finney as Billy would have been more cheeky, more aggressive, more mocking. He would have been lying more out of strength than weakness, or else more out of a boyish, Peter Pan, not-yet-grown-up personality. Whilst Courtenay is lying and fantasizing because life is too heavy and hard for him, Finney might have been doing it because, well, it’s fun! And to hell with everybody else if they can’t take a joke! Finney would have been more ‘dangerous’ if you will as a suitor in the scenes with Rita and Barbara. More calculating.

I don’t know if I would have liked Finney’s Billy as well. I certainly wouldn’t have sympathized with him, or pitied him so much. But Finney is an amazing actor, and I expect he would have won me over if not with pity, then with sheer ebullience and sense of enjoyment.

The other thing that struck me is one scene. It’s the scene where Billy enters Mr Shadrack’s office to resign (because he’s so sure that he’ll get the radio scriptwriting job). Mr Shadrack isn’t there, so Billy imagines a conversation with him. Billy goes on and on, talking to the empty desk, and I was sure that the scene would take a turn for the worse when Mr Shadrack appeared in the doorway behind Billy. Sure enough it happened, but not the way I expected. The usual way to do this, the ‘elegant’ solution, is to have the camera move to follow Billy. Generally camera movement is invisible to the audience when it is ‘motivated’ by something that happens on the screen. Billy walks screen right, and the camera follows him. This is invisible to us because it gives us what we want to see; our brains are hard-wired to track such side-to-side movement. The camera moves just as our eyes would move if we were sitting where the camera is.

The natural, ‘elegant’ solution to revealing Mr Shadrack then is to get the camera over behind the desk, looking at Billy; Billy walks to one side or the other so the doorway behind him is gone out of frame; then Billy walks back, camera follows, and there is Mr Shadrack, appearing as if by magic.

Schlesinger doesn’t do it that way. He moves Billy around the desk, and pans the camera after him, right enough. For several shots the doorway is offscreen. He then moves Billy back around in front of the desk. Still the doorway is offscreen. All Schlesinger needs to do now is move Billy a little bit farther screen left.

Instead, Billy stays put, and the camera, from an unmoving spot, ‘decides on its own’ to pan left, and find Mr Shadrack.

Now why did Schlesinger do it this way? I thought it was a ‘mistake’ at first. But in general it’s never the best approach for a critic to assume the artist is ‘wrong’ but instead assume he is ‘right’ and find some sort of reason why Schlesinger would want to prefer to do it the way he did; and then see if that reason might be valid, a ‘better’ solution to the problem.

When a character commands the camera – when the camera must follow him, and nobody else in the scene – that character acquires power. He is dominating the shot. This is generally true, and so the opposite is often true as well: if the camera ignores a character and moves against him, then the character loses power. Here Billy is ‘cut down to size’ if you will, when the camera, ‘on its own’ decides to ignore him and look over there – over to the door. (I don’t think this movement is motivated by a sound from Shadrack – say a footstep or clearing of the throat – but I can’t say for sure.) Since Billy has been fantasizing of himself as a big man, an important man, someone superior to the imaginary Shadrack, when the camera moves against Billy, it deflates this image which the filmmakers hope Courtenay’s acting will have won us over (after all, the audience should be on Billy’s side at this point, and who among us hasn’t daydreamed about telling off our obnoxious and petty bosses?).

Schlesinger’s camera move might, therefore, be a deliberate effort to accelerate Billy’s loss of stature, to tear us back into ‘reality’ before Billy himself is ready for it, or aware of his boss’s presence.

I still don’t much like it though. Because the second half of this scene, in which Shadrack enters the office and proceeds to tell Billy off, rejecting Billy’s resignation in no uncertain terms, will cut Billy down quickly enough. What after all is the first thing that’s going to happen in this part of the scene? Mr Shadrack is going to walk into the office, go behind his desk, sit down, open the letter of resignation, read it. Shadrack thus can capture and command the camera with his moves, and acquire power; the camera follows him and lets Billy go in and out of frame, undermining Billy’s power in this part of the scene. This sort of solution is generally used and preferred and considered more ‘elegant’ because it is invisible and organic – organic in the sense that it is invisible and the camera is following the blocking of the actors.

(4 May 2009)

Monday, May 11, 2009

Executive Suite

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Executive Suite a 1954 movie. Directed by Robert Wise with all-star cast.

The story centers on the Treadwell furniture company. The legendary president Avery Bullard drops dead without a successor. The 5 top men of the company are all on the company board; there is also a Wall Street investor and a woman with an emotional breakdown in her past; she is Julia Treadwell (Barbara Stanwyck), the daughter of the company’s founder, and the ex-mistress of the dead president.

So it’s all about: who gets to be president next? The financial guy, the bean-counter Shaw (Fredric March), wants it bad, and he is maneuvering like mad to get it. The others, including perennial #2 man Alderson (Walter Pidgeon), head of Sales Dudley (Paul Douglas), head of Manufacturing Grimm (Dean Jagger), and Don, the young hotshot designer (William Holden), are horrified. Nobody wants the bean-counter, but they can’t agree on who should get it. The only hope is the young furniture designer, but he’s too young, he’s unknown to the bankers, he is more concerned with making furniture.

It all comes down to the meeting of the board (the entire action of the story covers about 29 hours, from Friday afternoon until Saturday 7 p.m., and the clock is a major player – it even announces the cast in a really awkward bit: as the stars’ names appear on screen, they zoom up bigger, and stop at full-size just as the clock of the tower BONGGGGS to count the hours!). Shaw, the bean-counter, seems to have everything locked up when he bribes one man and blackmails another into voting for him, and has Julia’s proxy, moments before Don gets into a vicious fight with Julia, sinking any chance he ever had. Julia in despair walks out the president’s office to jump off the Tower, even as her father had years before – but the great Clock BONGGGS to announce 6 o’clock – the time of the fateful board meeting. This must be the second curtain.

But, the bean-counter doesn’t win on the first vote. I suppose this is the ‘twist’ that takes us into the second half of Act 3. It does bring us 2 scenes that break up the long boardroom scene: out in the anteroom, Don is called by his wife (June Alyson), who confesses that Alderson had called her to tell Don to delay the meeting until Alderson arrives (presumably, and in the event, with Grimm in tow) – but she confesses that she didn’t call, didn’t try to pass on the message, because she doesn’t want Don to be President, fearing that it would take him away from their home too much. The other break in the boardroom scene takes us into the executive washroom where Caswell (Louis Calhern) the Wall Street gambler that Bullard had brought grudgingly onto the board to satisfy the Wall Street crowd, tells Shaw that he is the one who voted ‘Abstain’ in order to pressure Shaw a little more. (When Caswell saw ahead of the news that Bullard was dead, he sold Treadwell stock short in hope that he would make a killing when the stock dropped like a stone come Monday morning; but Shaw released the quarterly earnings Friday night, which were good, and should guarantee that the stock price won’t fall; panicking because he lacks the cash to cover his bet, Caswell wants Shaw to sell him stock to cover his short sale.)

That brings us back into the boardroom. Now all the stars are present, and Shaw is all set to go; only Don begins a speech as a delaying tactic until Alderson and Grimm arrive, but it ends as the chief message of the picture, as the philosophies of Don and Shaw are revealed. Shaw thinks the purpose of the company is to increase the dividend payout to shareholders; his means are first to cut expenses, and second to finagle preferential tax treatment. But Don thinks the purpose of the company is to make furniture! Don goes on to deliver an impassioned speech that reveals his goals, his dreams, his vibrant passion for making good furniture, better, not cheaper and worse, than the company has made before. His speech carries the day, winning over Dudley and Grimm and Don ends up elected unanimously. ‘Together, we can do it,’ was one of his themes, and as soon as the vote is recorded, he goes to shake Shaw’s hand. Shaw offers his congratulations, and Don says ‘thanks’ and calls Shaw by his first name for the first time.

A brief scene out in the anteroom concludes: Julia warns Don’s wife that she will lead a lonely life from now on, but to forgive her husband for loving the company more than his family; and Don and his wife leave.

The good guys have won, but what makes Executive Suite not dated, and especially poignant, is that this is the battle America has been fighting for 60 years – and losing. In real life, the Shaw bean-counters did eventually prevail; American manufacturing, riding high in the 1950s with the delusion that we were ‘best’ (and not taking into account that the industrial base of all our competitors had been destroyed in the War), coasted for 20 years, and then, well, beginning in the 1980s the bean-counters dominated, and have captured the American economy in the years since, producing cheap goods made in factories in third-world countries where governments would look the other way over worker conditions that border on slavery, and pollution that poisons their populace. Here, in this picture, we can see the beginning of the debate, and a clear focus on the path that the country should have taken, but didn’t.

Ernest Lehman adapted the best-selling novel (it was Lehman’s first job, according to commentary by Oliver Stone) and MGM provided props and production design that was, as usual back then, top-notch. The design of the executive suite is according to Stone, typical of the boardrooms and top offices of the time, but it reminded me of a medieval church or monastery. The rich woodwork, low doors, stained-glass windows, with Gothic arches.

The story is amazingly complex. The running time is only 104 minutes, but there are half-a-dozen major characters, each with his own story, and a very complicated backstory that even Stone couldn’t quite grasp. I suspect that only those who’ve read the novel really know all that has been going on. But I won’t bore you with the full rundown.

Wise (and John Houseman, who produced) give us no score music at all. There is only a little source music in the Stork Club as Caswell sits with his expensive mistress and worries that he might be sunk if Bullard turns out not to be dead after all. And then there is the tolling of the bell, that sounds like some Call for the Last Judgment by God Almighty, bringing Bullard to his death, and forbidding Julia from jumping off the balcony even as her father had done in the Depression when the factory closed and the whole town faced dire straits. Most of the principal characters have wives or mistresses, everybody is drawn very well, though quickly and efficiently.

The final boardroom scene is a tour de force. What makes it so amazing is how nobody who isn’t a director will think it’s special in any way. You know how Bob Miller taught us that one of the toughest scenes to direct is the dinner scene where a few people are sitting around a table – how hard it is not to cross the line, to match all the eyelines, not to confuse the audience as to who is talking to whom – well this scene, in its first part, has 6 people sitting around a table; in its second part the stakes go up, and there are 8 people to keep track of. And it goes on for about 20 minutes! Wise worked out the blocking, the shots, everything – he had begun as an editor, after all – and made it work. There’s only one cut that bothers me: when Grimm comes in, he sits opposite Don. Grimm at this point has been wooed by Alderson to support Don’s candidacy, but Grimm, who is Don’s direct boss and jealous of this young hot-shot being hired to teach Grimm his business, is against him, and Alderson has failed to convince him. Grimm sits down, and looks straight at Don, a look that says, ‘No way buster!’ Grimm here looks almost into the camera, just a few degrees off it. In the next shot, a cut to Don looking back at Grimm, taking in this message, Don is decidedly off angle – it’s a bit off being a side profile. The shots don’t cut together at all. Why did Wise do it this way? Was it a mistake? All I can think to justify the shot is that he’s suggesting that Don isn’t so aggressively opposed to Grimm as Grimm is to Don; Don at this point has already learned Grimm ‘can’t be budged’ to support him, and Don probably has only the slightest hope that he might stop Shaw. So his angle tells us that Don is reading Grimm’s message and accepting it without confronting Grimm or asking Grimm to reconsider, or positioning himself as an enemy. (Don, we have to conclude from earlier scenes, will leave the company if Shaw is President, because Shaw will certainly kill Don’s R+D budget to find new means and methods of molding the furniture.)

The nicest part of this double-scene is the place of the dead Bullard. There is one throne-like chair at the head of the boardroom table. Executive Secretary Erica Martin (Nina Foch – did you ever take her class at USC? I didn’t, one of my regrets) in setting up the meeting, by habit puts a pad at Bullard’s place. She has loved this man in a chaste way (well, we have to wonder what the novel might say about the relationship, but in the movie Martin is more like the High Priestess in the Cult of Avery Bullard, and not his mistress – though I believe that had Bullard wanted her in his bed, Erica would have jumped at the chance) and now she moves his chair away from the table. Later when Shaw comes in, he walks right to the head of the table, intending to sit in the throne, and is discomfited to see the place empty, the chair against the window. So he pulls up a chair at the opposite end, the ‘foot’ rather than the ‘head’ of the table.

Throughout the boardroom scene(s) that place is empty, and when Grimm and Alderson arrive, all the places are filled except for that spot. Don in his big passionate speech walks around half the room. He ends up standing in the space where Bullard would have sat, framed against the stained glass windows. That shot (there are actually a couple of them, broken by an insert showing Don walking to the side of the room to pick up a crappy table the company makes, his example of everything the company is doing wrong) tells us that Don is indeed the new Bullard. It’s a great example of how to make a powerful scene:

  1. Start with the writing to get it right.
  2. Carry on with the performances and casting.
  3. Finally in production, the direction just enhances and supports what the writing and performance deliver.

Another very interesting choice was how the opening sequence was presented. How are they going to cast Avery Bullard, an old man, a man of immense charisma and intelligence and drive? Remember they have put the top stars they could get in these subordinate positions. So they need a star who is going to outclass them by that magnitude, and who’s out there? What’s worse is that in Don’s climactic speech he admits that Bullard was slipping in his final years. So not only do we want a star to out-star all the other stars, but we have to ask him to portray a character who is over the hill.

Who’s out there? Well, Clark Gable would be my first choice. We could totally believe him as the driving genius who rescued the company, seduced Barbara Stanwyck, dropped her when he got what he needed, and inspired the worship of Nina Foch, Walter Pidgeon, Bill Holden, and the others. But at this point in his career Gable is still playing leading man opposite Doris Day and other young cuties; he probably wouldn’t do it. There’s also the Psycho problem. Psycho was infamous for killing the biggest name in the cast half way through the picture. How would audiences react to seeing Clark Gable, ‘the King,’ drop dead in the gutter 4 minutes into the picture?

So instead of all this, the opening sequence, in which Bullard says good-bye to the Wall Street broker with whom he’s had lunch, goes down the elevator, into a telegraph office, dashes off a telegram to Erica Martin commanding a special meeting of the Executive Committee that evening, walks out to hail a taxi – and drops dead – is shot all POV, subjective camera. We hear Bullard’s voice and see his hand – that’s all. It makes for a great hook. We want to know who this guy is, what did he look like? Right away the Wall Street guy and Caswell have a talk about Bullard, the way he runs his company. And when the telegram comes into the Tower and Miss Martin informs people of the meeting it sets off more speculation and questions, What’s on the old man’s mind? What is the meeting for?

Over the course of the first half of the picture everybody weighs in on Avery Bullard, pro and con. He achieves his shadowy, almost legendary status by virtue of these talks, as well as from the fact that we have not seen his face, we have only these abstract conversations from which to judge him.

(4 May 2009)

We Own The Night

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched We Own the Night a picture written and directed by James Gray.

The story is set in New York in 1988. Bobby Green (Joaquin Phoenix) is on top of the world, the manager of a glamorous nightclub with a gorgeous girlfriend (Eva Mendez) who loves him intensely. Bobby also has the great trust and love of the club’s owner, a Russian immigrant who makes most of his money importing furs and who treats Bobby like a son.

But Bobby has another family, and he takes his girlfriend to meet them on the occasion of his brother’s promotion to captain of the police force. These are the Gruzinskys, and Bobby is so alienated from his brother Joe (Mark Wahlberg) and father, Chief Al (Robert Duvall) that he has taken his mother’s name of Green and keeps it a shameful secret that he has cops in his family. Joe and the Chief take Bobby apart from the celebration and tell him they are hot on the trail of a Russian drug dealer and importer, Vadim Nijinsky. Vadim is using Bobby’s club as his dealing HQ, and Joe is about to come down hard on him. Bobby can’t believe it. And he won’t help them, which wins him the contempt of brother and father.

Bobby carries on with his wild, fun, partying, wealthy life with girlfriend and best pal Jumbo. But one night the cops bust into the club, led by Joe. They shake down everybody, grab a couple of Vadim’s lieutenants, and really give Bobby the business. The result is Bobby is in the tank overnight, and Joe gets shot in the head outside his home.

Bobby, in spite of his arguments and heated words with Joe, takes the news hard. Even worse is that his father and other top cops believe Bobby himself had a hand in ordering Joe’s attack. Joe is alive, luckily, but is in critical condition – it will be 4 months before he can get out of the hospital and return to work.

Meanwhile Bobby is approached by Vadim himself. Vadim is the club owner’s ‘crazy nephew’ and there are rumors that Vadim only gets to operate out of the club because he has his uncle’s blessing. But the chief and other cops have checked out the owner for months, and have found no evidence that he’s involved in anything illegal. Just a nice old guy who loves his grandchildren and may not even know the full extent of Vadim’s dealing. Now Vadim admits to Bobby that he is a big-time dealer, and will have a huge shipment coming in soon. He trusts Bobby because his uncle loves him, and he offers Bobby a chance to help distribute the drugs. Bobby asks if it isn’t dangerous now that the cops have busted the club, but Vadim is unconcerned: he dismisses the cops and says he put the hit on Joe, and has a contract out on Chief Al and some others there.

Bobby ‘Green’ goes straight to his old man and tells him all of this. The chief doesn’t have a real plan. So Bobby proposes to take Vadim up on his offer and lead the cops to Vadim’s stash house.

Bobby is taken by the Russians to the house, but he gives himself away. The cops are only just in time to save his life, and they manage to capture Vadim, but Vadim learns who Bobby really is now, and vows revenge. Bobby is put with his girlfriend under witness protection, a miserable life of motels and hotels and hiding out, watched over all the time by cop bodyguards.

Vadim later escapes. Bobby watches his father shot and killed in a car accompanying Bobby to a new hideout. Bobby decides to join the cops to fight Vadim and avenge his dad. But his girlfriend can’t stand the life and leaves him. Then Bobby finds out that his best friend Jumbo gave away the secret of where Bobby was, and the person he told was – the old Russian furrier. The man who was like a father to Bobby.

They lay siege to the old man when he tries to unload the big shipment of drugs. Vadim escapes and Bobby tracks him into a bank of river reeds. Bobby shoots and kills Vadim, but feels no great release or satisfaction in it. Bobby has lost every part of his old life.

The final scene shows the graduation ceremony of the Police Academy where Bobby is the salutatorian. For a moment Bobby thinks he sees his girlfriend in the audience but it isn’t her. He is left with his brother and a cop’s life.

There are a few things I find interesting in this one. On the whole I found it well-mounted and shot; the car chase in the rain was an excellent scene, concentrating on Bobby in his car, only cutting outside for brief shots when it was needed to make sense of the action. The acting is quite good, and yet I didn’t believe the ending. And I was left unsatisfied.

James Gray on the commentary says that he looked on the story as one of destiny, of fate. Of course the audience will know from the third scene that Bobby will end up in uniform, and so Gray isn’t interested in what will happen so much as how it will happen. He wasn’t at all expecting the audience not to believe that Bobby would join the cops – the way I didn’t. I fully expected Bobby to use his temporary status with the force only to avenge his father on Vadim and maybe the old furrier as well, then (like Will Kane in High Noon and Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry) throw down his badge and walk away. So Gray is constructing his screenplay with a major misapprehension when it comes to viewers like me.

He also says that he didn’t want to make a ‘rah, rah, go cops’ kind of movie, but to follow in the track of 1970s movies which end on a mixed note. But I was struck by how closely Bobby Green’s story follows Michael Corleone’s in the original The Godfather – both stories have a son who leaves the family business, but who is drawn back in when his father is threatened, and who ends up a better and more ruthless exemplar than his formerly-respected brother. The idea that the cops are like the mob put me into thinking Bobby’s end was almost entirely negative; combine this with my disbelief that Bobby would even want to be a cop, and it seems like a total loss. Gray did too good a job portraying the glamor and appeal of the nightclub manager’s life; who in the audience would think he ended up better off as a lowly rookie cop in the cold, dirty, police precincts after lording over a huge nightclub as its king with a super-hot princess at his side?

The third point that interested me concerns my reactions to Joaquin Phoenix as Bobby. Bobby has to draw me through the story. It isn’t enough that the character be well-drawn or well-acted. It isn’t enough that he be believable (he wasn’t believable for me, anyhow). But he also has to be likable. I have to like Bobby and want to identify with him, to empathize with him, to root for him. If Gray can manage to get me to do this, then he can count on Bobby pulling me through the story even if I don’t entirely believe it.

Now, there are two ways to get us to like a character.

  1. Likability can be built into the script, or
  2. The character can be played by an inherently likable actor.

Way No 1 needs scenes, lines, actions. It’s easy enough to pull off, but it takes valuable screen time in something that is like exposition but not quite. There are two things that happen in the First Act of a movie:

  1. We learn how the predicament is built. This happens inside the story.
  2. We learn how we are supposed to respond to the movie. This happens between us and the movie: are we supposed to laugh or cry? Does it engage our feelings or our intellect? Are we supposed to like what happens, or get good and mad at it? What genre of movie is it we’re watching, anyhow?

Adding scenes and lines and bits of business to manage our feelings toward the hero is part of the second item there. They can and should be interwoven with other actions and scenes, but no matter what, they do take up running time, and there’s a shortcut to doing it, that involves casting.

Cast Kirk Douglas in the role, we will expect one kind of movie, and respond, and expect to respond, in one way. Cast Jim Carrey, or Lee Marvin, or Joaquin Phoenix, or Charlie Chaplin, and we will expect something else.

Gray doesn’t do anything to make us like Bobby Green, other than to portray him as living a life we would all enjoy (but this implies that we will feel unhappy when he loses this life, and we won’t like it when he becomes a mere cop). This means the movie depends almost entirely on Joaquin Phoenix to make us like Bobby enough to carry us through the changes in his life.

This ‘likability’ is a mysterious, undefinable, unmeasurable thing. In television, they just call it Q instead of anything tangible. It’s the rarest thing. It isn’t just charisma, though charisma helps. It isn’t just sex appeal, although that helps too. It isn’t strength of character or anything racial or generic.

And Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t have it – for me, anyway. Which makes me wonder how I would have reacted to the same movie if a more likable actor starred in it.

(30 April 2009)

Premonition

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Premonition a sort of hybrid genre of family drama, tearjerker, and supernatural thriller. Oh yeah, a puzzle picture too.

The Story has Linda Hanson (Sandra Bullock) a very-happy wife of a very-happy husband with two cute adorable little girls. Well, maybe things aren’t so happy because one day Linda wakes up to hear a phone message from her husband who’s off on a business trip. Then at the door there’s a cop telling her that her husband is dead in a car accident.

Linda has to go through the whole day, not believing, barely able to cope with the news. Good thing her mother is there to help with the kids. Linda finally goes to sleep … and wakes up next to her husband. She passes a whole day in which her husband is alive … next day he is dead … next day he’s alive … next day he’s dead…

The tale is one of her recurring premonitions of the future all of which are true and not true, so it’s kind of impossible to pull everything out of it. The DVD has a commentary track with the director and Bullock which undoubtedly explains it all, and if you watch a second time I bet you get a lot more out of it, puzzle-wise. In the end (after the midpoint, when Linda figures out what has been happening) she makes a calendar and tries to work out what happened or will happen on what days.

Something similar would have helped us too in the audience. Why didn’t they give us one? I think there are two reasons:

  1. They want us to share her dislocation and confusion and her sense of horror. There’s a way to pitch this script as a horror movie, and it was undoubtedly pitched that way at least once. Maybe it would have been more successful as straight horror.
  2. More interesting though: if they had given us titles, like ‘Monday’ ‘Thursday’ ‘Tuesday’ ‘Saturday’ ‘previous Sunday’ it would have seemed as though Linda was really going through time, which isn’t what is happening, even though it seems like it.

In fact, what we have is a flashback/flashforward structure in this picture, only the heroine goes through it in movie-time just like we do. She is half in the audience herself in a weird way. She only knows and experiences each day based on her knowledge of the previous day and the day before that, in this jump-ahead, jump-back pattern.

They change her outfit every time she wakes up, which helps, and there’s a lot of Hitchcock-style glance-object cutting, along with a bunch of hyper-realistic moviemaking. Which kind of bugged me, it was too much.

At first Linda is increasingly upset and confused at what’s going on. She meets people who know her but they are strangers to her, because she met them in the past – their past, not hers, because she has skipped that day (in her dreams or premonitions which seem to come at night and begin with her waking and then living through an entire day). So there is a double dislocation which comes from this: not only does Linda not know what happened on the intervening days, but the premonition is false when it comes to her, and true when it comes to everybody else. What I mean is that in her premonitions she sees what other people will do, what will happen to them, but she is reacting as she would from the past and not as she will react when she actually lives through that day. So on Saturday, the day of the funeral, Linda in her premonition doesn’t believe her husband is dead, causes a scene – several – and ends up being committed by a psychiatrist – all because she is foreseeing this Saturday from Tuesday, or Monday, or Sunday night before, before her husband’s death, before she figures out these are premonitions. But then when Saturday does come, will she think he’s still alive, after she turns out to have been on the scene and witnessed his death on Wednesday?

And yet the final scene is some months after her husband’s death. And her daughter still has scars, from running through a glass door, which she does in part because Linda is screaming to her in a distraught state, because at this point Linda is in a premonition or suffering the dislocation of having been seeing future.

I think this sort of puzzle makes the movie hard to grasp emotionally. There is a double set of emotional reactions we have. First there are the feelings of strangeness and fear and alienation we share as we follow Linda through the fractured time, knowing only a little more than she does, what is going on. Then there are the feelings of what she is going through: learning her husband might be, is, is considering, sleeping with the hot blonde at work, feeling that he really is more of a roommate than a lover, and finally coming to terms with this and loving him anyway, trying to save him from the accident she knows is coming.

Of course, part of the reason the picture fails to satisfy is that she can’t forestall the future she has seen. Her daughter does get cut running through the glass doors, which seems to set up a possibility in reverse way, that Linda might save her husband. (Yeah, that sounds irrational, but I’m thinking not in real terms but in movie-goer terms: because she couldn’t stop her daughter’s accident, she will be motivated to try very hard to stop her husband’s accident; because she fails to prevent one, we are being forewarned that the husband’s accident is not forestallable, which would make for a very happy twist if she could forestall her husband’s accident – see?)

There is a priest who talks like a scientist and when Linda tells him of these crazy dreams, actually can pull out right away a book where he has marked all the pages of historical incidents where people had visions of the future that came true.

I sense a lot of different cooks messing with this stew. There are several production houses involved, and two studios, Tristar and MGM (MGM outside the Bond franchise is an almost sure sign that a movie is going to have problems these days), and even though there is only the one screenwriter credited, I wonder mightily if this script hasn’t gone through a few incarnations, one of which was the straight Lions Gate or Dimension Films horror movie, then Sandra Bullock got involved, she’s not doing a cheap horror movie, now the premise can be re-envisioned and look at the wider implications of knowing the future; as Linda asks after finding out her husband was getting interested in the blonde, ‘If I let Jim die, is it the same as killing him?’

Then there is a big strained reach after this bit of added meaning: when the priest explains his way of thinking on all this, he tells her that faith is not religion or God or Catholicism, but instead just having something outside yourself you’re willing to fight for. Linda answers, ‘I don’t know what to fight for.’

Oh yeah, here’s the climax: she knows that her husband died at mile marker 220 on the highway. She drives after him on the fateful Wednesday morning, talking to him on cell phone. He’s about to tell her about the blonde, she says she already knows all about her; he says he didn’t want that any more, he now wants to make a fresh start with her (and the picture commits the fatal flaw of telling us that he hasn’t gone through with boning the blonde yet; a rather stupid way of trying to redeem him a little). This makes Linda smile. She gets him to pull over off the highway, he does, then she notices that it’s mile marker 220. She tells him to turn around, he does, then he almost collides with a car coming the other way. His car is sitting in the middle of the highway. He tries to start it, the engine is flooded. Along comes an oil tanker truck (just so we can get a big spectacular explosion, which is more hyper-realism and a cheap, though very expensive, way to end things) and totally destroys him. Right in front of her eyes.

The final scene has her waking one last time. Her daughters come in, and we learn it’s moving day. Even as we opened the picture seeing how the husband surprised Linda with this house, buying it without telling her, we close on her moving out. The cut daughter’s face is healing well, it looks like there will be no scars. And when Linda rises to go out to meet the movers, we see she is pregnant in a shot that seems added on, it’s so poorly designed – as though a few cooks got messing with the stew even in postproduction, and wanted to give her something good to come out of all this, too.

(28 April 2009)