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)

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)

Payback Straight Up – Director’s Recut version

Hi Aki,

A couple of days ago I watched Payback: Straight Up the director Brian Helgeland’s recut version. (Helgeland had to deal with two studios, Paramount and Warners, in making the movie; Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions was also the producer of record. And even though everybody had read the script, when they saw the movie, which was just what the script had advertised, they didn’t like it. They wanted more fun, apparently, and two days after Helgeland won the Oscar for Best Direction of LA Confidential he was fired from Payback and they shot a new opening scene and scenes that replaced all the third act. Seven years later Helgeland got a chance to recut the picture closer to the script; this version is not quite the cut he and editor Kevin Stitt delivered to the studios, but it is closer to a fine cut, finessed version of that.)

The story is based on a Donald Westlake pulp-paperback crime novel which he wrote under his Richard Stark pen-name. The book was The Hunter about a guy name of Parker who was double-crossed in a heist and now, a few months later, comes back from the dead to get the money that was his share. He has to wade through about a dozen bodies and go up against the now-corporate crime organization ‘The Outfit’ to get it; but Parker gets it and goes on to feature in many other books. The 1961 or so book was made into the 1967 John Boorman film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin (as ‘Walker’ not ‘Parker’) which stressed the story’s more existentialist aspects and made other changes as well, and is at the top of most everybody’s lists as one of the greatest crime tough-guy movies of all time. So Helgeland did himself no favors when he tried for the remake here. Helgeland loves pulp and genre and he wanted to get closer to the Westlake novel. Mel Gibson was a perfect star for the project, and everything looked good at the start.

Story shows Mel Gibson’s ‘Hunter’ (not ‘Walker’ or ‘Parker’) walking back over a bridge into the city (in the story it was New York, but this version shot in Chicago and never named the city) just like in the book. He hasn’t a penny to his pocket and proceeds to rack up very easily a few thousand dollars by theft and fraud. (This establishes that Hunter doesn’t really need to go after the money he was cheated out of; indeed this is a violation of the original ‘Parker’s’ commandment of never getting tangled up with the big criminal organizations, but he does it in the book too.)

Next stop is his wife’s apartment. She (Deborah Kara Unger) stumbles home late at night, and he busts in on her. She’s alone and he’s disgusted by the needle marks on her arm. They get into a knock-down fight in the kitchen, and he carries her into the bedroom where he takes away her heroin and shooting works and locks her in. She has told him she’s getting a couple thousand bucks a month from Val Resnick as ‘payoff’ though it’s not yet explained just what has happened. Hunter showers and sleeps on the couch. When he wakes up in the morning he finds his wife dead in bed – she has gotten hold of another shooting works and has overdosed. (This convenient exit is the same in the book as I recall. It’s left unclear whether the OD was accidental or if she has deliberately suicided.)

Now Hunter lies alongside his wife’s corpse and recalls how he got into this mess. He hooked up with Val who put him onto a money-laundering operation by the Chows, a Chinese crime bunch. Every day around noon they drive off with a suitcase full of cash. Hunter arranges to hit them on Friday, and they get away with the money after a particularly brutal assault on the Chows (Helgeland talks in the commentary of liking stories and heroes with a certain ‘balls to brain ratio’ and seems to like Hunter having more balls than brains, but in the original story, and here too as you’ll see, the hero is quite resourceful). But in the split between Hunter, Val, and Hunter’s wife Lynn, there isn’t enough money for Val. He needs $130,000 to buy back into the good graces of the Outfit and get a job with them. And the Chow heist only brought in $140,000. Lynn shoots Hunter twice in the back, Val leaves a picture of Hunter with another girl which Val has used to play on Lynn’s jealousy, and the two drive off, leaving Hunter for dead. (But nothing kills Hunter!)

A messenger comes to the apartment on the appointed day with Lynn’s cash, and Hunter ambushes him and starts on a trail that leads him to Val, and Hunter’s $70,000 demands. But Val and everybody else have no intention of just giving Hunter the cash, even though to the Outfit such money is petty change. Instead Hunter has to kill Val, then Carter, one of the upper echelon, then ambush Fairfax, before Mrs Bronson, who’s a voice on the phone and seems to be as high up as anybody, agrees to send the money to the drop where Hunter tells them. Of course she double-crosses him and sends instead an army of killers, and he expects it. So Hunter (in the third act which is totally different from the 1999 theatrical studio version) kills or knocks down all the killers at the train station. But even as he puts his hands on the blue backpack with the money, he’s shot down by a woman assassin (Helgeland said he liked having Hunter’s weak spot be women, which is why he made Bronson a woman, and had the coup de grâce delivered by a woman.) He staggers down the steps to the street, where three more hit men are waiting; manages to kill them by skill and dumb accident before he collapses in the gutter and passes out, seeming to die. But the woman from the photograph (Maria Bello), a hooker Hunter used to drive and bodyguard (in a nod to Neil Jordan’s Mona Lisa apparently) appears – she’s been protecting Hunter and protected by him throughout the story – and slaps him back awake, revived from the dead again.

She drives him across the bridge he walked in on, and he lies there bleeding to death, the cash under his hand holding her hand. ‘Where to now?’ she asks and he answers, ‘Just drive, baby.’ (He’s mentioned a doctor who might save him, presumably the same one who saved him before, but Helgeland said he shaped this ending to be like that of Cool Hand Luke where Paul Newman’s Luke ends up dying, and smiling, in the car at the end – only we don’t see him die there, and here too Helgeland wants to leave us able to choose our own ending.)

The movie is very hard-edged with a dry, laconic sense of humor. There isn’t any humor in the original story, as I recall, and in Point Blank the only moment of humor is when Walker reacts to the corporate Outfit’s executives when they seem to belittle what he’s asking them for. The humor here adds a very nice touch. One point that embarrasses me to watch is Lucy Liu’s turn as a dominant tough-broad hooker who beats up Val and is beaten by him. The whole concept is a bit ridiculous, doesn’t give me any chuckles, and could only work as referring to Val’s lack of manhood. And yet Hunter himself is unmanned by his feelings for women and the only ones to hit him are his wife and the hitwoman in sneakers at the station. But I’m sure all the teen boys loved seeing Lucy Liu in leather chaps using the whip on Val.

Point Blank is one of my favorites, and I like the original pulp novel too. The idea of the guy who has one focus and doesn’t let anything stand in the way of getting it, appeals a lot to me. It also has something of the flavor of the later Don Siegel movie Charlie Varrick, Last of the Independents when all the other members of the criminal underworld are employed by, or trying to be employed by, the Outfit, which is nothing but a white-collar corporation now, far from the notions of Puzo’s The Godfather or the gangster gangs of the 1930s. The lone operator, surviving by balls and brains – but mostly by brains, because balls alone just won’t plausibly make a dent in the Outfit – it’s something of an American ideal, something out of Westerns and movies as diverse as Tucker An American Dream.

(25 April 2009)

The Barefoot Contessa – Structure

Hi Tim,

I saw the Joseph Mankiewicz (writer and director) movie The Barefoot Contessa a couple of days ago. It’s a flashback-movie, and I was struck by the way the flashbacks do or don’t coincide with Frank’s idea of the 8-sequence structure.

Opening on funeral

After the titles we see a small cemetery in Rome. (Note that credits claim the picture was shot entirely on the Cinecittá lot outside Rome, though there are location shots along the coast. Also of interest is that this is a ‘Figaro Production’ so I would say that Mankiewicz had almost total control here – this is his baby all the way, although he might not have been able to get his ideal cast.)

Harry Dawes (Humphrey Bogart in trench-coat) appears as our main narrator. Although it’s raining, Harry’s VO tells us that the lighting is ‘exactly’ what the Contessa would have wanted. We see the statue of the Contessa in Grecian robe showing beneath the hem one bare foot, and Harry launches us into his first flashback.

This is entirely expositional, and sets up the flashback structure; more like a prologue. If this picture is anybody’s story, it is Maria’s. This scene tells us

1. She was famous
2. She is dead at a young age
3. She was a Contessa although a recent one
4. She is buried here in Rome
5. She was a famous and beautiful movie star in her life

Flashbacks:

Harry No 1 part 1

This flashback consists of 4 technical scenes, or one ‘greater scene’ set in a small nightclub in Madrid. It introduces us to most of the main cast.

We open with a scene of Maria Vargas (Ava Gardner) doing her dance, the fame of which will bring super-rich oil-man and neo-producer Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) and his entourage from Rome to Madrid. But we don’t get to see Maria dance. Instead while she dances, we get shots of a half dozen patrons watching her dance, and we are treated to mini-stories of each of them – the fat rich man who’s trying to seduce an unwilling younger girl, the rich man who sits alone and lusts after Maria, the wife angrily watching her husband get hot under the collar while watching the dance, and one or two others. This scene is covered by Harry’s VO and the music only. At first I wondered if this was a clever way of giving us the idea that ‘Maria is a great and super-sexy dancer with tons of charisma’ without having to teach Gardner how to dance. But later on in the story we do get to see Maria dance. So I guess that this is just part of the buildup to her: the delayed or indirect introduction. We’ve seen the statue and heard how famous she is, now we see how a typical audience reacts to her performance.

The second technical scene is in the same space. To the ‘Reservado’ table which has been featured prominently in the montage of audience, are ushered the American movie people: Kirk Edwards, producer; Harry Dawes, famous though over-the-hill writer-director; Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien), press agent; and a slightly over-the-hill blonde actress we assume is Kirk’s latest mistress. Kirk is producing a big, big picture (his first) and is seeking ‘a fresh face’ he can launch as a star (and own exclusive rights to, and get to fuck as well). To this end he has bought Harry Dawes who has a great script he’s been working on at least 6 months, in all of which time he’s been on the wagon. Harry is a drunk trying to stay sharp for his comeback. Oscar is the typical press agent, and the blonde is here to help establish Kirk’s character and contrast with Maria, who will never take the shit this blonde must swallow all the time.

They’ve come too late to see the dance so they tell the manager to get Maria out there. But Maria has a rule, she never mingles with the customers, and the manager returns Oscar’s money. Kirk sends Oscar in to fetch Maria; soon Oscar returns, without Maria. All the while Harry has been enjoying the sight of Kirk not getting his way, and needling him. Now Kirk tells Harry to go and bring Maria back – if he doesn’t, Kirk will drop the picture and Harry’s comeback, and let it be known that Harry’s script is no good and Harry was too drunk to do the job.

Scene 3 of the flashback shows Harry back in Maria’s dressing room meeting her for the first time. At first the room seems empty, then Harry sees her bare feet under the curtain to the closet, and reveals Maria kissing her ‘cousin’ a guy who plays in the band. (This is to be the first in a line of many ‘cousins’ or nameless penniless studs Maria takes up with, all the while refusing to go to bed with any of the stars, producers, or rich men who lust after her.) Harry and Maria have a talk. She knows his name from his great pictures of the 30s, which surprises him. She has mixed feelings about the whole movie star life and is only really interested in whether Harry can help her become a great actress. She consents to go back out to Kirk, since Harry reframes it not as mingling with the customers, but having a business meeting with a famous producer. But she takes her shoes.

Scene 4 brings us back to the showroom of the club. Maria takes the measure of Oscar and Kirk. She excuses herself for a moment. And Harry tells Kirk he’s lost and that Maria won’t return. Harry enjoys needling Kirk. Kirk sends Oscar to get Maria but sure enough, she has left. Kirk is furious and tells Harry to meet them in an hour at the airport where they will take off with Harry and Maria, or without both of them – which will mean the end of Harry’s career.

Harry No 1 part 2

Harry’s flashback continues without (I think) a return to the cemetery and present time. But clearly the Inciting Incident has taken place in Maria’s story: she has met with rich Americans and been offered a screen test and a chance to become a movie star. But she has turned her back on it.

The flashback continues and will carry us through the second sequence. This one flashback will give us the entire First Act (after the expository Prologue of the funeral scene.) ‘Harry No 1 part 2’ has two scenes.

Harry comes to a poor section of Madrid, to the squalid apartment buildings where the Vargas family have their home. At first the Mother refuses to admit that Maria is at home. Then the brother says she is. Maria comes out and she and Harry have a long scene on the open walkway outside the apartment. I didn’t clock the scene but it must run more than 5 minutes of two people standing and talking.

There isn’t much overt conflict in the scene, let alone action. They stand and are blocked here and there on either side of a support pillar, and closer to the building or to the railing over the street in the moonlight. Harry does want to bring Maria back with him, direct his comeback picture, and get his career back on track. But he also hates the idea of delivering Maria into Kirk’s money-stained hands. Maria tells Harry all about herself and her childhood in the Civil War and how she only feels safe with bare feet and her toes in the dirt. She also wants fame and fortune, but she distrusts Kirk and all rich men, doesn’t want to wear shoes and all that shoes entail, and is wary about ending up like the blonde (though she doesn’t say so explicitly). She ends up agreeing. She and Harry come to an understanding that they will support each other against Kirk and the other Kirk types in the business (though this too is left unstated).

The second scene of this sequence is in a screening room in Rome. Maria’s screen test has just been run for Kirk and Oscar and Harry and three distributor/producers, one American, one English, one French. This is the first time any of them have seen it (Harry probably has seen it though.) The other producers recognize the test for what it is, that one improbable great screen test where a star is born. They all want to deal with Harry; Kirk insists he owns the rights to Maria, but it’s a lie, as Maria has signed no contract at Kirk’s own insistence – he wanted to see the test before he committed any money. Now Harry has outfoxed Kirk; Kirk can no longer sink Harry or bury Maria, as they can go to any one of the other producers and get a deal. Kirk is defeated, angry about it (although he never much shows emotion) and agrees to Harry’s terms.

This ends Act 1. We go back to the present at the cemetery, and the camera moves from Harry to oscar who is also present at the side of a black-haired man who we’ll later learn is the Argentine Maria Bavano (Marius Goring – couldn’t they even have gotten an Italian Lothario to play this part? Why an Englishman? Weird casting). Oscar then launches his first flashback:

Oscar No 1

Oscar’s first flashback has 3 scenes, but really only one. Oscar is explicitly a man who doesn’t understand Maria and doesn’t know any of her secrets; his flashbacks are mainly expositional in nature and tell us not only of Maria’s rise to stardom but also of the incomprehension of the Hollywood establishment to understand a woman of Maria’s caliber.

In the first semi-scene Oscar back in Hollywood is hard at work in his office as his VO explains how Maria made the picture, but never went to the famous nightclubs where the elite of Tinseltown do their gossiping, flirtations, and important business. She stayed completely out of all that and even though Oscar tells us he succeeded in planting lots of rumor-stories in the rags about Maria’s dates with famous stars, none of it was true, and nobody knew the real Maria.

In the second semi-scene Oscar tells of the premiere of The Dark Dawn (or something) Harry and Maria’s first picture together for Kirk. Maria doesn’t even bring a date to the premiere, but shows up with Harry and his young script-girl wife. But the premiere is a success and the picture will surely be a blockbuster.

In the third, and only full scene of his flashback, Oscar arrives in the London hotel suite Kirk has rented to launch the picture internationally. Kirk is there and the British distributor/producer we saw earlier. Everything looks good about the picture except one bit of bad news: back in Madrid Maria’s father has just murdered her mother. Mother-worship is one of the main stays of the Hollywood bible, so Kirk tells Oscar to call Harry back in Los Angeles and make sure that Maria never learns of this news until the picture can have its European premieres. They are all afraid that Maria, who hated her mother and loves her father, might get involved in the scandal, which would sink not only the picture but Maria’s career.

But when Oscar calls Harry he learns that Harry already knows – Maria told him, and she’s already flying to Madrid to be by her father’s side.

So this flashback gives us success in Hollywood, playing by her own rules, and a setback to the rise to stardom. So it’s Sequence 3, the first of Act 2?

Harry No 2

Back to the cemetery, and Harry launches us into his second flashback.

Harry attends the trial of Maria’s father – so does Oscar. The trial is a semi-scene, with no dialogue, covered entirely by Harry’s VO. Maria, Harry tells us, spares no expense and effort to get her father cleared. She even takes the stand herself and gives the greatest speech of her life in which she says everything that no star should ever say – her poverty and squalor, how her mother was a bad person, etc. And she wins her father’s acquittal, and walks out of the courtroom a bigger star than she was when she walked in, thereby disproving every rule Oscar and his kind live by.

The second scene (actually 3 technical scenes) of the flashback tells of a party a year later after 2 more pictures; she is now a super-star, Kirk is holding this party (improbably in Maria’s house) to celebrate their grand success. But Maria is thinking of leaving Hollywood and going back to Madrid. She is being courted by the Argentine, a man even richer than Kirk, and the two big-wallets are engaged in some rivalry over her. Oscar meanwhile is courting the Argentine, hoping for a bigger job and paycheck from the international playboy. Harry and his wife play backgammon. The blonde is also around, her career even bleaker than when we saw her in Madrid.

Third technical scene gives us Maria and Harry out on her terrace, apart from the other party-goers. Here Harry and Maria discuss again her fairy tale life, and compare her to Cinderella without, so far, any Prince Charming. Harry hears music playing from the property’s bungalow, and he surmises Maria is keeping yet another ‘cousin’ there for fun and games. In the balcony scene in Madrid, Maria called her sexual dalliances with handsome studs her own ‘sickness’ and claims she can’t help it; though it’s an important plot device to call her a nymphomaniac and liken it to a disease, by today’s standards her sex life is about the healthiest part of her whole life. But Harry thinks it’s really bad for her, and he has heard that this latest ‘cousin’ even abuses her. But Maria claims he is no better or worse than any of the others.

Fourth technical scene brings Harry and Maria back into the main living room where a pissing-match has sprung up between Kirk and the Argentine. Kirk calls the Argentine immoral, the Argentine admits it freely and laughingly, but says that what he does openly, Kirk does in secret, so Kirk in addition to all the Argentine’s vices is also a hypocrite. Maria gets dragged into the quarrel, the Argentine invites her to sail with him on his yacht in the Mediterranean, and Kirk forbids her. In defiance of Kirk, and with no love for the Argentine, Maria agrees to go sailing.

This flashback then would be Sequence 4, and it would follow the pattern of the previous flashback: success followed by a check, danger, or setback. It also brings us to the Midpoint, which would mark a big change, and so it does: Maria leaves Hollywood and begins a new phase of her life. She will never make another picture, and we know that, because in the opening cemetery scene Harry has told us that Maria only made 3 pictures in her life.

Oscar No 2

Oscar (who has also won the job with the Argentine) now tells of Maria’s life among the rich and titled. She won’t sleep with the Argentine, but Oscar tells us the Argentine doesn’t care about that, so long as everybody believes that she is sleeping with him. The first semi-scene of the flashback takes place on the yacht, where we get no location sound, just music and Oscar’s VO. The Argentine sports a black eye – evidently he was more insistent than Kirk – and Maria takes off her robe to sunbathe on the deck, while all the men present leer and ogle her in a scene that somewhat mirrors the nightclub dancing scene.

The second scene, a full one, lets Oscar tell us about the ‘International Set’ in Monte Carlo, composed of rich Americans and European penniless Pretenders. The Argentine is gambling, Maria seems somehow happy – it’s the first time we’ve seen her happy, and Oscar wants to know why. Maria offers only a vague answer. Then the Argentine comes in from the tables, furious at Maria. He says she stole money from him at the table, which ruined his luck, and he curses her publicly. Then a handsome stranger intrudes, slaps the Argentine’s face, offers his hand to Maria, and takes her away. And that’s the last time Oscar saw Maria alive.

Oscar’s second flashback might comprise a full sequence, but here the notion that a flashback = a sequence falls apart. In terms of the story, Oscar’s second overlaps with the Count’s flashback, and the end of sequence 5 straddles the two, is I would say doubled – it shows up in both.

Count

Back in the cemetery, the camera moves over to the Count (Rossano Brazzi) also mourning his beloved dead Contessa. His flashback is the most complicated with the most scenes.

It opens as the Count, plagued by insomnia, drives into France to distract himself from what is bothering him, but whose cause he doesn’t tell us. Along the way his car overheats, and he stops and gets water from a gypsy camp. There the gypsies are playing, and the Count has his first sight of Maria, dancing with a handsome young gypsy. The Count gets a pail of water and drives off, sure that he will meet Maria again, even though they only exchanged a single glance of a few moments.

He goes into a casino that night, and wins his second sight of Maria taking up some chips at the side of the Argentine, all smiles and winning; sees Maria cash the chips and go out to a balcony where she tosses down the wad of bills to the young gypsy, who tips his cap and races off. Maria and the Count exchange glances again; Maria seems unsettled and goes on to the table where Oscar and the ‘International Set’ are whiling away the empty hours. The Argentine comes in and curses Maria, and the Count slaps his face and takes Maria away.

Out in his car, the Count proposes that Maria go get her things at her hotel and go back with him to his home. She resists, though she’s attracted to the Count, but the Count insists that there is a mystical bond between them, they are destined to be united, and it’s no use even resisting. She agrees.

At the Count’s ancestral palazzo he shows her the paintings of his ancestors, and shows Maria off to his widowed sister (Valentina Cortese). Maria admires one painting and sees a resemblance to the Count, which flatters him: this ancestor was one he especially likes, and was one of Cesare Borgia’s assassins.

Some days or weeks later, Maria enjoys dipping her bare feet (hmm, maybe Buñuel should have directed this one, that would be a treat) in the surf, and on the heights above, the Count asks his sister if she would approve if he married Maria. The sister says that she’s never seen a woman as much in love as maria is, and claims that it would be cruel if the Count married her. She herself is barren, and so with these two their illustrious house will end, and she accuses the Count of only wanting to have a beautiful portrait of the last Count and Contessa. The Count is moody and sad, and grimly mentions the date of October 25, 1942 as his justification for doing what he will do. He has made up his mind and his sister won’t stop him.

This ends the Count’s flashback. So the close of Sequence 5 must be meeting the Count, but actually going away with the Count is what really changes Maria’s life, so maybe it comes in the middle of this flashback.

Harry No 3

Back at the cemetery the camera picks up Harry again, and he launches his third flashback.

He is now location scouting in Italy. Maria appears – of course she has written him many letters about meeting the Count and falling in love.

The second scene in the flashback is set in the Count’s palazzo with Maria posing for her statue (which reminds us of her death) and Harry talks with the Count, telling him that far from being one of Maria’s lovers, Harry is more like her father, and in fact will be giving her away at the wedding.

The third scene is a half-scene: the wedding, just a few shots of the beautiful bride covered by Harry’s VO.

The fourth scene is the reception. Outside the palazzo the servants and peasants are dancing and enjoying themselves; inside the elite nobility are as lifeless as the paintings and statues. Maria joins Harry at the window overlooking the servants, and suggests they go join them for more fun; Harry is disturbed by the suggestion she might be reverting to her ‘cousin’ loving ways. They are joined by the Count, Maria gets permission to go down outside, and Harry bids farewell to the Count. Harry has a sixth sense about people, and he intuits that something is wrong here in this marriage, but he doesn’t know what. He warns the Count not to hurt Maria.

This flashback (or part of one – see below) brings us Sequence 6 and the second curtain will of course be the wedding. Maria has now met and married Prince Charming and all is well. She has achieved her life’s happiness, fame, fortune, a title, a wonderful man who loves her as her bridegroom. But we have a few intimations that tragedy will follow, and we know that Maria will soon be dead.

Harry No 4

I don’t know if we return to the cemetery or not at this point, to break Harry’s flashback in two. It makes sense, since there is a gap in time, but I don’t remember.

Months later, Harry is in production for his Italian picture, and rewriting the scenes he will shoot tomorrow, when Maria comes without warning into his hotel room. Something is wrong, but at first she denies it; we learn she has been married for 13 weeks, and then she tells Harry her husband kisses her hand. And that is all that he does.

She proceeds to tell Harry the story of her wedding night, and we go into her flashback.

Maria (flashback inside Harry’s flashback)

Inside Harry’s fourth flashback comes Maria’s flashback.

On their wedding night, the Count meets with Maria and professes his total love for her. Then he hands her a paper, an official medical form, and reveals what he should morally have told her before he proposed: that on October 25 1942 he was wounded by a bomb and is impotent. Their marriage will be in name only. He loves her with all his heart – and only his heart. And Maria will sleep alone on her wedding night.

These two flashbacks would be Sequence 7, and the twist is: Prince Charming is not the perfect man for Maria, and her marriage is a sham, and a terrible mockery of her dreams.

Harry No 5 (continued out of Maria’s flashback)

After telling Harry this, Maria goes on to admit, at Harry’s demand, that yes, she has been involved with a new ‘cousin’ since getting married. But this time it’s different, she insists: she only took up with him to make the Count happy. What will make the Count happy is a child and heir; Maria is now pregnant, she will raise the child as the Count’s, and will break off with the ‘cousin’ and proceed to tell everything to the Count, whom she still loves deeply.

Harry protests that she has misunderstood the Count, and he’s a sick, morbid man who would never accept the arrangement. But Maria thinks she knows the Count better than Harry does, and all will be well. She leaves, and from his window Harry sees her drive off in the night – followed by another car. With a terrible foreboding, Harry goes down to follow them both

At the palazzo Harry finds the two cars. No one answers at the door so he goes around back through the gardens. He sees her statue again, and hears two shots. The Count appears bearing Maria’s body. He has shot them both. He had long suspected something was going on, but rather than accept it he had to spy and sneak and finally kill – this confirms that Harry had a better take on the Count’s heart than Maria did. She never got a chance to tell the Count her plans and intentions, and Harry hasn’t the heart to tell him now. The Count calls the police, and Harry sits holding Maria’s corpse in his arms.

So ends the final flashback, and Sequence 8: Rise and Fall of Maria Vargas.

Final wrap-up at cemetery

Back in the present, the sun is now shining over the little cemetery – the lighting at last matches Harry’s original description as being perfect for Maria – and the mourners depart. The Count is taken away in handcuffs by the police. Last to leave is Harry, who walks off as the camera cranes up.

(19 April 2009)

The Barefoot Contessa

Hi Aki,

Last night we watched The Barefoot Contessa a 1954 movie written and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz. It stars Ava Gardner and Humphrey Bogart.

The story opens on a small cemetery in Rome where a funeral has just taken place. In the rain Harry Dawes (Bogart) the veteran American movie director and writer, is among those mourning the passing of the Contessa, whose marble statue surmounts her tomb. The movie unfolds in flashbacks. In the first, Harry remembers meeting the Contessa, aka Maria Damata, aka Maria Vargas, for the first time.

It was in Spain. Ultra-rich Texan Kirk Edwards (Warren Stevens) has decided to finance some movies; he has hired a press agent Oscar Muldoon (Edmond O’Brien) and Dawes, who at this point is a washed-up drunkard and has-been who might still have another picture in him based on his latest script. They have come in search of a ‘new face’ and hope to launch a new star to grace the picture. In Rome they heard of Maria Vargas who dances in a small club in Spain; they flew here to meet her and arrange a screen test.

Maria (Ava Gardner) doesn’t know if she wants to go into pictures. She does know she despises Oscar and finds the Texan repulsive. He doesn’t drink, or smoke, and holds himself in total, hypocritical self-control which Maria senses comes out of an innate sickness. But she likes Harry and loves his old movies, and if he can help her become a good actress, she’s willing to go through with it.

In a long scene, Harry tracks her down at her home, a small dirty apartment in a poor part of town where her family lives. There Harry and Maria swap stories and confess who they really are. And Maria tells how when she was a little girl in the Civil War, she dug in the dirt with bare feet and felt safe. To this day she doesn’t like to wear shoes, she likes to feel the dirt on her feet.

Harry does convince her, and the screen test is a great one. Now Harry’s flashback ends, we go back to the funeral, and Oscar takes up the tale.

Everyone agrees Maria has all the makings of a star, and the first picture is a smash hit. But with all the rumors and gossip, nobody ever catches Maria dating her producer, her costars. She doesn’t go to the usual nightclubs or schmooze the business. She shows up at the premiere of her debut picture without any date, accompanied only by her director Harry Dawes and his wife.

The picture is a smash in America, but just as it’s about to be released internationally, Maria’s father is arrested for the murder of her mother.

Back to the funeral, and Harry starts a new flashback. Maria hated her mother. She does everything she can to defend her father. She breaks every rule in Hollywood. And she gets her father acquitted, and emerges a bigger star than ever. Maria goes on to make two more pictures which the Texan produces and Harry writes and directs.

But then she has a falling-out with the producer and goes away with an Argentine playboy to sail with him on his yacht on the Mediterranean Sea.

Harry’s second flashback ends and Oscar starts his second. The Argentine also hired him, and Oscar went on the cruise as well. But even as Maria never would fuck the Texan, so she won’t fuck the Argentine; Oscar doesn’t know it, but Maria only sleeps with common men, men who arouse her and don’t buy her, men who are in the dirt. (This is shown in the earlier Harry flashbacks. Harry understands Maria, so in his flashbacks we see an understanding of her. But Oscar doesn’t ever understand her, and all we see in his flashbacks reveals his befuddlement and what he himself knows and understands.)

On the French Riviera, in gambling casinos, Maria is bored by the ‘International Set’ while the Argentine gambles. Sometimes he wins big. But one day he loses big, and he blames Maria. He’s not getting any sex from her anyway, and he erupts and curses her in front of the socialites in their parties. Another man appears (Rossano Brazzi) and slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria away. And that’s the last time Oscar sees her.

Now we return to the funeral and find the Count who married her (Brazzi) and he gives us his flashback of her. He remembers when, driven out of his mind by sleeplessness and despair, he drove out of Italy into France. His car overheats along the road, and he goes to a gypsy camp for water. There in the gypsy camp he is enchanted to see a woman dancing with one of the gypsies. She is beautiful and no gypsy – she is in fact Maria; this is the Count’s first sight of her. For a couple of seconds they look at each other; then the Count gets a pail of water and returns to his car. He drives away, confident he will see this woman again.

And so he does, at the casino. He sees her collect some of the Argentine’s winnings, cash the chips, and toss the bundle of money out the window to the gypsy she danced with. Then he sees her confrontation with the Argentine, who blames her taking the chips on the change of his luck. The Count slaps the Argentine, and takes Maria out to his car. And so they go to his ancestral home.

To Maria the Count is a perfect gentleman, the Prince Charming of her Cinderella dreams (the fairy tale is mentioned in several conversations between Harry and Maria in earlier and later flashbacks). He never tries to fuck her, he only kisses her hand and gazes at her with love. And she loves him back. But there are warnings we get in a conversation between the Count and his sister. They talk about the end of their family; she is barren, and he – ever since October 25, 1942– The sister tells him she sees that Maria is completely in love with him, and it would be cruel of him to marry her. Just to have a beautiful portrait of the last Count and Countess of their house. But the Count will not be talked out of it.

Harry gives us his final flashback. He was in Italy scouting locations for a new picture. Maria of course has written to him many letters of her newfound love. Now she comes to him and takes him to meet the Count. Harry gives her away in the marriage ceremony. But Harry has a foreboding. Something is wrong about the whole setup, but he doesn’t know what it is.

Harry doesn’t see Maria for some time after that. Thirteen weeks later, she comes to him in the middle of the night. He’s hard at work rewriting the scene he’s going to shoot tomorrow. She confesses the dreadful secret to him, the thing that made him uneasy. Her husband never did anything more than kiss her hand. In a flashback-inside-a-flashback, Maria tells Harry about her wedding night, when the Count came to see her, handed her a military medical form, and explained how in the war he almost died in an explosion, and the doctors saved his life but not his manhood.

And ever since then, Maria confesses, she’s been sleeping with one of the lusty earthy men she can’t help fucking – one of the servants. But she’s going to break it off now, because the affair did what she wanted: she is pregnant and she will give her husband a child and heir.

But when Harry watches her car drive away, he sees another car drive after her. Worried, Harry gets in his car and follows … to the Count’s palazzo … where he sees her statue, finished at last … and hears two shots fired.

The count comes out of the gardener’s cottage carrying his dead Countess. He has shot both of them. Maria never got to tell him she was pregnant. And Harry doesn’t have the heart to tell him.

Back at the funeral, the rain has stopped. The sun has come out to shine on the statue of the barefoot contessa. The mourners break up. The Count is led away in handcuffs. Harry bids her a final farewell and walks away.

The picture was shot in Italy in Technicolor but I always remember it in black and white. It would have been better in black and white; Gardner’s coloring and cheekbones and chin dimple come out great in black and white with kickers and rear cross key and obi lights. The color in the print was a little washed out, uneven. Jack Cardiff was the DP, he’s famous for his nature photography, but this is mostly on sets. But the production ownership might be mostly responsible for the unevenness of the print; it wasn’t made and owned by a major studio that could safeguard the elements.

What is most curious about the film to me is the attitude toward sex, and lust. Maria is a woman of great physical beauty and desires; there are many men in her life; not one of them fucks her. Much is made in the script about the difference between how stories turn out in real life and how they turn out in scripts. So maybe Mankiewicz is deliberately going against type here. Of course the ad campaigns all stressed Maria’s many men and hinted at wild sex orgies. And of course the film would have sold a lot more tickets with even one hot love scene. Did Maria even get to kiss a man? I mean a passionate kiss? I don’t recall one. I only remember kisses to the cheek and hugs.

Beyond this, the men seem to fall into two categories, or three: the least important are the nameless ‘cousins’ that Maria beds down along the way, unable, she says, to help herself (although today we would probably call these the most healthy and ‘normal’ expressions of love/sex in the story, oddly enough). None of these guys gets a name or a single line of dialogue, they don’t really count, which is why they don’t really deserve to get a category of their own.

The other two categories are the big shots, the money men, who try to buy Maria’s favors, and the men who are gentlemen and understand her, but for all intents and purposes might as well be gay. The failure of the money men is foreshadowed in the first scene in the Madrid nightclub: Maria Vargas has a rule, never to come out to sit with the customers. She ends up working for the Texan, and ‘sitting with’ the Argentine, but won’t sleep with either.

As for the gentlemen, Dawes is the father figure, too old to fuck her, too tired. He is saved from being the ‘gay friend’ (only just saved, mind you) by having an attractive young wife (his third or fourth according to the script) and being played by Bogart. But this character might as well be George Cukor for all that, and I wonder if Mankiewicz really intended to code Harry Dawes as the gay friend. As for the Count, he too seems gay – my old dad thought that would be the Count’s secret, although the mention of a specific date that begins his misery told me it couldn’t be that – but impotent is just as good, and if he were gay, then there couldn’t be the fullness of irony that he loves her with all his heart, but hasn’t the body to follow through on it.

Ava isn’t given really enough to do here. The role seems written around her limitations as an actress; as a sex star, she could have given a lot more with the right cameraman and if only Mankiewicz had stooped to giving us fans a little more of the salaciousness we crave, and that the ads promised. But Ava had a reputation of looking good but not remembering lines so good. We should be glad she manages to suggest a Spanish accent – really not an accent so much as a foreigner’s way with English.

The movie also is one of a long line of ‘inside Hollywood’ pictures that they seem to relish so much. As though the plumber really is that interesting when he goes on at length, down at the bar, about how he fixed the leaky faucets…

(17 April 2009)

The Seeker: The Dark is Rising

Hi Aki,

Today I watched The Seeker: The Dark is Rising which is adapted from Susan Cooper’s YA novel The Dark is Rising. Cooper’s book is one of a series of 5 novels she published back in the 1960s and 70s. The adaptation is Fox Studio’s entry in the ‘Harry Potter Blockbuster Series Imitation’ sweepstakes but, like New Line’s The Golden Compass, is probably destined to be a one-shot money loser.

The story has the Stanton family in England from their native California. Will is the youngest of a big brood of 6 brothers and one sister. His brothers pick on him, and when he gets home from school for Christmas term break, he finds that his second-oldest brother has come back from college and has taken over his room. Well he’s not going to move in with the twins who are always picking on him, so he puts a futon up in the attic of the old house.

Strange things are happening in town, though, and Will is starting to see some strange things – usually swirling shapes in patterns. And there is a man all dressed in black who rides around town on a white horse, and stops Will on the road and demands that he hand over ‘the Signs.’ But Will doesn’t know what these are.

The answer is soon to come as the people of the Manor house take Will into an ancient church and tell him they are the Old Ones, who have been fighting on behalf of the Light against the Dark in an age-old struggle. Will they claim is an Old One himself, in fact the all-important Seeker – the one who can read The Book and know the Signs. Six Signs there are, hidden over the ages from the Rider who is the incarnation or representative of the Dark. The Rider’s powers are growing, for it is the time of the age once more when the Dark will rise and threaten to overwhelm the world, unless the Old Ones can assemble all Six Signs and use their power to counter the Rider. The Signs are made of different elements like glass, wood, iron; but the sixth Sign is in a human soul, and can never be found. On top of all this, Will can go through time to find the Signs where they were hidden. And there are only 5 days before the Rider’s powers will be at their peak, and if the Signs are not found before then, the world will be done for.

Well Will doesn’t believe this, but the Rider comes again, and the representatives and allies of the Rider, and there are thousands of black crows over the town, and the Old Ones walk Will from winter into spring, so what’s so hard to believe? One by one Will finds the signs; he sees the swirling fractal pattern glowing, and walks through time into the past, and retrieves the Signs.

But even members of Will’s family, and even the girl he’s got the hots for, can be tempted by the Rider into betraying Will. And though Will gets the five elemental Signs, how on earth will he find the Sign that cannot be found?

Of course there is a happy ending and young Will Stanton, the Seeker, uses his growing super powers to defeat the Rider and save the town and the world from snow and ice and dark. But it isn’t the end. The age is still one of conflicts, and there will be more battles ahead for … the Seeker!!!

The movie makes several crucial changes from the novel. It’s a while since I read Cooper’s books, so I only know a bit of the changes they made. The basic one, that sums up all the others, is that Cooper told of a family of Londoners who were on vacation in a small town in England, a quaint old place where they had some relatives. But Hollywood is sure that American kids can’t sympathize with British kids, Harry Potter notwithstanding, so Fox has to have a California Stanton pack.

And in the book Will didn’t have the super powers – or not so much anyway – and he was humble. But Americans today aren’t humble, if we ever were, and Hollywood wants to pander to our self-deceptions, and feed our egos. So Will is American, he is the Destined One, the Chosen One, and a Superboy all in one.

The books have their faults. It’s quite difficult to show a world of fantasy coexisting with our modern world; in fact I don’t think anybody succeeded in doing so before Joanne Rowling. In addition, The Dark is Rising is hard to film because it’s a puzzle tale: six signs have been hidden about the town, and all six must be found. That makes for six sequences of clues and discovery, on top of which there must be a couple of opening sequences to show Will in his status quo ante and learning who and what he is, and then coming to terms with it, and a climactic battle scene. It makes for a movie with about 10 sequences, all of them involving flashy special effects, and a huge budget with a long running time.

Fox chose instead to short-change the puzzle sequences, making them very short, which makes the puzzles seem easy, and not true puzzle at all: Will is just going along, suddenly sees the swirling fractal pattern, and boom! – he’s in the past and sees a Sign, grabs it with a bit of a struggle, and boom! – he’s back in the present.

But each of the sequences, almost all the scenes in fact, are packed with typical Hollywood digital effects. And the director tries to shoot everything to make it look ‘magical’ so it’s all pretty crazy to look at. This movie almost qualifies in the ‘looks great, stupid script’ line of films I started keeping track of when I first noticed that The Avengers looked cool and awesome with the sound turned off. (Tomb Raider is another in that line.) But The Seeker: the Dark is Rising doesn’t look good enough to quite qualify, and the cutting is so crazy (probably to bring it in with a short running time; there are something like 3 credited editors) that I couldn’t really enjoy the production design and effects anyway.

In the end the most damning thing I can say of this movie is how bland and generic Fox has made it. If they wanted just to imitate Harry Potter, why not come up with their own script property – surely 50-year-old minor British books aren’t famous enough to warrant this treatment, and the rights to the book must be less than the shoot’s craft services budget – paltry in comparison to the hundred, two hundred million dollars or so it cost Fox to develop, shoot, post and launch it (and it only grossed 8 million in North America, and 22 million abroad, for a really dreadful 31 million dollars total – somebody for sure got fired for this one).

Nobody in power understood that the charm in Cooper’s book lay in the specificity of the time and place, and the humble and unassuming nature of the tale, meant to be read over a school break to while away boredom of being shut in while the bad weather raged outside.

Just a waste, in fact.

(16 April 2009)

True Romance

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched True Romance and I just can’t write about it yet. But I ought to say something to start with, anyway. I really like Quentin Tarantino’s writing on the surface level. I just wish he had written something about life. He reminds me of comic book illustrators who only learned how to draw from copying other comic book artists. They never learned how to draw a real person or building or anything from life. It’s just stylization of stylization. With Quentin Tarantino it’s even worse, because he’s honest enough to tell you in his script what are the movies he is stealing from. Yeah I know Kids who will go on and on about the ‘cool movies’ or comics they have seen or read. But when you make a movie which just has a Kid telling you about the cool movies he has seen, it seems beside the point. Why am I not watching those cool movies instead of this movie telling me that other movies are cooler?

Tony Scott directed, and it’s kind of a joke to see the dvd marked ‘director’s cut’ since there really is no personality to any entity called ‘Tony Scott’ – this is all Quentin Tarantino all over the place, and (to carry the comics illustration metaphor a little farther) this is just Tony Scott playing Mike Royer to Quentin Tarantino’s Jack Kirby. He’s just inking what Quentin Tarantino has drawn and trying to exactly duplicate the pencil lines. Though I will say that Scott knows how to shoot a scene better than Quentin Tarantino ever will.

The opening and closing voice over narration by Patricia Arquette gives you the poetry of Quentin Tarantino, and the scene between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper is just great dialogue delivered by two masters. A wonderful scene.

The story is just junk and teen boy fantasy. It plays out like a dream, and the embarrassing moments come when Tony Scott tries to pretend that he cares, or wants us to care, about somebody dying. The most ludicrous example of this is the cop who has about 3 lines, he gets shot at the climax and dies. And we have a long lingering shot of him dying. Like we care. Like anybody who would like this movie, or would like Quentin Tarantino’s arrant badassery, as tim calls it, would care about anybody dying. It’s just a movie quote after all.

Christian Slater plays a nerd name of Clarence Worley who loves Sonny Chiba movies and works for peanuts in a comic book store. Not unsurprisingly, this guy has no girlfriend! so his boss the store manager hires a hooker to ‘accidentally’ meet him at a Sonny Chiba triple feature and pretend to fall in love with him, and sleep with him. So they do that. Only she does begin to fall in love with him. And she confesses all this after the fact. He falls for her too – why wouldn’t he, she’s like a dream come true to him – and they get married.

Now casting Patricia Arquette as the girl, ‘4 days into a life as a call girl which is not a whore there’s a difference you know’ – is just perfect. But Christian Slater is not well cast as the Kid, because he’s not nerdy enough to be the geek at the opening, and he’s also not cool enough to be the master gangster of the end. I don’t really know who could have pulled it off. Brad Pitt has a small comedy role as a stoner, and he could have done it, but he would never be believable as the nerd who doesn’t have a girl friend.

So there’s a problem with the structure of the script. The lead can’t be cast. You have to go one way or the other: A real geek who won’t be believable as the guy who gets away with it at the end, or a badass mofo who’s unbelievable as the nerd. Scott goes with Slater as a badass type. But I think I would rather have seen the geek. This movie really should have toned the violence way down and the language as well, and gone comedy and satire all the way. Because the more satirical scenes are the ones that succeed best.

Now this Kid is also obsessed with Elvis, but not any Elvis you ever knew. Instead his Elvis is a badass. And in his fantasies Elvis tells him what to do. And Elvis tells him to go over to the pimp’s place, the pimp who owned Patricia, and kill him. This is not what any comic book store geek would have nerve to do, and he certainly would not be able to get away with it.

Anyway, Slater goes on over. The pimp is a sort of keystone to the movie and its notions. It’s a black pimp played by british actor Gary Oldman in his hollywood badass period. Oldman is quite watchable. But the scene is ridiculous. So the british actor is playing a black pimp wannabe. Who is totally scary and intimidating in that Gary Oldman way, and somehow Slater turns the tables on him and manages to kill him. This is presented as the Kid having the balls and guts to do it, but really it should be a total accident, just lucky – again, the scene would have worked better as a comedy rather than chilling and thrilling.

Oh yeah, in collecting his wife’s dresses from the pimp’s place, the Kid finds a suitcase full of cocaine, and he steals this.

Problem is, Gary Oldman had stolen that suitcase from ‘Blue Lou’ a bigtime gangster, and though the cops don’t care who killed a pimp, Blue Lou wants his coke back, and sends out Christopher Walken and his Sicilian boys to get it. Walken kills the Kid’s dad (Hopper) and learns that the Kid has gone from cold snowy Detroit to LA.

In LA, the Kid hooks up with a longtime buddy, who’s trying to be an actor. Through the actor they set up a deal to sell the cocaine to a big Hollywood producer. But the gangsters are after them, and the police get wind of the sale too.

It all comes together in a swanky luxury hotel suite, with cops and bodyguards and gangsters in a shootout, the Kid gets his eye shot out, but the cops and bad guys all kill one another, and the Girl gets the Kid out, and they make it with the money to Mexico, where all outlaws with money dream of going. And in Cancun they raise their little boy named Elvis.

Tarantino is trying here to marry abstraction and idealism with gritty ‘reality’ as real as he can manage. So what it is, is a mashup of romance movie with crime movie. Star vehicle with action genre flick. That is tough to do, and escapes Tony Scott, but I don’t think anybody could have pulled this off. Scott would later, I think, go on to direct Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers script, which covers a lot of the same ground, and there too the satirical scenes play pretty well, but the action and bloodletting just seem unexciting and overkill. Yes they can fire off a hundred rounds and blast sound around the theater, yes they can splash fake blood over the actors. But it ends up just an assault on the senses that leaves me stunned, exhausted. Which is why I didn’t want to write about it immediately, and I thought I didn’t have anything to say about it.

I wonder if Quentin Tarantino would have been a better writer or director if he had had to work in genre with low budgets for a decade before being feted as an a-picture star.

(14 April 2009)

Baby Mama

Hi Aki,

Tonight we watched Baby Mama a comedy (semi-romantic comedy) that came out last year, starring two women stars of Saturday Night Live.

Kate (Tina Fey) is a successful vice president of a natural food grocery chain, given the biggest assignment of her career, to open up the biggest, best ‘Round Earth’ healthy food store in Philadelphia, where the chain first started. But unknown to all her colleagues, Kate has a secret longing: she has always wanted to have a child. And now at age 37 the urge has completely taken over her mind.

She tries everything. Nothing works. Her specialist tells her she has no better than a one in a million chance of getting pregnant herself. As a single woman, she will have to wait for years on lists before any institution will consider allowing her to adopt a child.

At last she signs up with a clinic which, for a $100,000 fee, will oversee impregnating a surrogate with Kate’s egg, fertilized from artificial insemination from a sperm bank.

All that is left is to find the woman who will be the surrogate, and even this is hard: the surrogates, in short supply, get to choose which infertile women whose eggs they will carry. And as a result Kate ends up teamed with Angie (Amy Poehler) who is in every way opposite to Kate (surprise surprise!) – she loves junk food, never graduated from high school, and is a total loser in life … except she gets pregnant really, really easily. In addition Angie is living with a total yahoo jerk of a boyfriend, who put her up to ‘the baby business’ in the first place.

Well, Angie gets pregnant all right, but then the trouble starts. Angie has a fight with her boyfriend and moves in with Kate. Kate is totally possessive and demanding, and wants to control everything Angie eats, what music she listens to, everything she does while pregnant. The ‘odd couple’ pairing is set up for lots of gags and laughs.

But there’s a twist or two along the way – of course! This is Hollywood! In the first place Kate meets a guy she likes (Greg Kinnear, who has made a career out of this kind of part). But the big twist is that Angie isn’t pregnant after all. She failed to get pregnant, but she and her boyfriend figured they would go on collecting checks from Kate for 9 months, then escape with the money. And the boyfriend keeps turning up, demanding that Angie come back to him or he will tell Kate that Angie is lying to her.

Over and over, Angie makes up her mind to tell Kate. But every time she tries … she can’t do it. Finally she is undergoing ultrasound, when the truth must come out, she tries really hard to tell the truth – and finds out the ultrasound checks out. She is pregnant after all. But, it’s with the boyfriend’s baby, not Kate’s.

So there is another lie, another secret that Angie hides. But in the baby shower, it all comes out when her boyfriend bursts in. Kate learns Angie has been lying; boyfriend learns that he will be a father (again, I guess, unless Angie has been having abortions … which might be true); and Kate on her part tells Angie that as part of the process, the pregnancy test might have given a false negative – the baby might still be Kate’s. Meantime Kate’s boyfriend hears about this for the first time, and Kate breaks up with him.

Months pass, and at a court hearing, Kate and Angie meet for the first time to learn the official DNA tests. It isn’t Kate’s baby. Awwwww… Kate is disappointed. But out on the street Angie goes into labor, and Kate takes her to the hospital, and attends the labor, and faints.

And in the morning Kate is told she is pregnant! Hurray!

An epilogue shows the party for Angie’s kid’s first birthday. Kate is there with her baby and boyfriend/fiancé, Angie’s boyfriend is there, still a jerk … most of the cast is there, all one big happy family while the credits roll.

I laughed at several points in the movie. There were good gags. Not a waste of time. But, to apply your test: $8 ticket worthy? $2 ticket worthy? Worthy to watch on TV for $0? Hmmm.

This movie of course is pitched at women, not me. I’m not the audience for it, except maybe for boyfriends and dates the women drag in with them. So, I would say in that regard, it is worth it. I mean, if my girlfriend or wife says, ‘We have to see this movie!’ I will go with her, and I won’t feel that I wasted my time.

The biggest annoyance here was the use of montage. Honest, there must be 10 montage sequences in this sucker. That is about 10 too many! It’s as if the writers and director (credit is given to one guy as writer and director, but I’m sure Tina Fey and Amy Poehler contributed gags, and Fey had her whole TV show writing crew on set with her every day) don’t know how to make a scene. All they know how to do is come up with gags. So the montage sequence lets them throw up a whole bunch of gags. One or two will get a chuckle, at least, then move on.

I think there should be a movie rule: No more than one montage sequence in any movie. And, zero is better than one!

Another thing that struck me is how awkward it is to film on location. They chose Philadelphia as the location and, since this is not Los Angeles or New York, they had to insert local flavor references and shots. Even though they didn’t advance the story or have anything to do with the story. So we have scenes shot out on location that aren’t conducive to good performances, good sound, and that just plain distract us in the audience from what is going on.

Finally, there is just one little other thing. This is a common complaint of Hollywood movies. Kate is a ‘successful career woman.’ Fine, but does she have to be a bloody millionairess to be called successful? I mean, as soon as she agrees she will pay $100,000 to a service just to have a baby, she puts herself outside the category of almost every other woman on Earth!

People have real problems out there. Like having a job, any job. Like getting enough food to eat. Like getting an operation or medication to stay alive. Seriously, $100,000 to buy a baby? What kind of world do these Hollywood writers and executives live in, anyway? Why the hell do they have to blow everything up to such absurd levels? And then they try to pass Kate off as just Everywoman with a fertility problem?

Okay, I know I said ‘finally’ up there, but there’s another thing. The whole ending. This movie is about surrogacy. Only it ends up not being about surrogacy at all. Angie doesn’t carry Kate’s baby, and Kate ends up getting pregnant anyway! COME ON!!! Maybe this is the most annoying part. None of the whole plot was necessary. A deus ex machina reached down out of screenwriting Heaven and gave Kate her own baby with a cute guy who is going to marry her anyway!

I know you like the stories to end with everybody getting what they deserve. But this is just too much. This is giving everybody what they want. Moral of the story: you can do everything and have everything.

You don’t have to live in reality when you’re in a Hollywood movie.

(8 April 2009)