A long time ago, I met Ethan Hawke’s half brother. “Half brother” is how he introduced himself*. I don’t know which parent they have in common, father or mother—maybe he told me at the time, but I’ve forgotten in the years since—but it was interesting because Hawke was a pretty big star at the time, on his way to becoming a bigger one, making quite a few high profile movies. I was in the Army then, fresh out of artillery school at Fort Sill, in Korea for my first assignment, dripping butter from my gold 2nd Lieutenant’s bars all over the place. Ethan Hawke’s half brother was a Second Lieutenant in that same artillery battalion at Camp Casey, and one of the first guys I met after “in-processing” into the 2nd Infantry Division.
He was a nice enough guy, friendly, outgoing. He’d been there a few months already and seemed to know his stuff. Later I came to understand that some of the other guys in the battalion didn’t like him all that much because he apparently had a penchant for, um, “sucking dick” with the higher ranks—that is, going to lengths to ingratiate himself with superiors for career advancement. I never witnessed this reported penchant myself, but that’s what I heard.
I was interested to find out that he was Ethan Hawke’s brother, or half-brother, in the same way that almost anyone finds a brush with fame—and this was a pretty light brush— momentarily interesting. For a moment, just a teasing moment, you can imagine what it might be like to be famous, admired, cool, massively popular. For a moment, just a moment, you realize that the famous, admired, cool, and massively popular are regular people, too, and that’s always an interesting sensation. Ethan Hawke was once a kid with this lieutenant I had just met. They probably played sports and goofed off and maybe even went to a community swimming pool and played videogames and watched movies like I did when I was a kid.
Another thing that I noticed about this lieutenant was that he’d already been to Army Ranger school, which immediately put me on guard a little bit. The Army is a highly status-obsessed organization, where who you are is what you wear on your collar and arm and chest, and the Ranger tab was (and probably still is) a great indicator of status. Ranger training is easily one of the toughest schools in all of the world’s military. You’ve got to be strong, tough, smart, and focused to make it through, and Ethan Hawke’s half-brother had done it. I had not. I had a measly Airborne badge on my uniform, having graduated basic jump school between my junior and senior years of college. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of the accomplishment, but jump school is really not that tough if you keep your head down, do what you’re told, and are willing to jump out of an airplane. Airborne school is to Ranger as single-A baseball is to the World Series.
I may have paid some lip service to Ranger school, because you’re supposed to want to do stuff like that when you’re young and in the Army, but really, I didn’t want to. I didn’t have it in me. I probably wouldn’t have made it. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now.
As Dirty Harry so famously said, “a man’s gotta know his limitations.” And some of mine are these: I’d much rather be comfortable and well-rested than uncomfortable and tired and hungry. There it is.
Years passed. I left the Army in 1997 as junior captain. I had an OK career. My efficiency reports made me sound like the second coming of Douglas MacArthur, but in the Army’s badly inflated ratings system at the time, they all did—or else you were dirt. In truth, I was a passable, B-grade officer, good at some things, not so hot at others. I could have stayed if I’d wanted to, but ultimately, the smartest and most honest thing for both me and the Army was for me to leave, and so I did.
I’m not that big of an Ethan Hawke fan. I like him all right. I certainly don’t dislike him. “Training Day” is a fucking awesome movie, but that was mostly because of Denzel Washington’s gargantuan (and justly awarded) performance in it. I like Hawke's movies with Julie Delpy, particularly the second one, “Before Sunset.” Just about everyone in my generation has some appreciation for “Reality Bites.” And I thought his directorial debut, a movie called “The Hottest State” (apparently based on a novel he wrote) was actually pretty good, rather underrated and unseen.
Not long ago, I read and interesting article that Hawke wrote for Rolling Stone about Kris Kristofferson. And even more recently, I saw that he was in a new movie, something called “Daybreakers” that actually sounds kind of cool but that I probably won’t see at least until it gets to DVD.
I don't know why this occurred to me now, but in the way that some ideas just swing into your head at some times rather than others, I thought I’d use the powerful internet to see what had become of Ethan Hawke's half-brother. Sometimes I search out guys that I was in the Army with and sometimes I only find a trace of them. I'm not really that nostalgic or sentimental in general, but sometimes it's just interesting to follow up.
So I went to Google and typed in the name and got a got result right away. And when I clicked on it…
The Second Lieutenant that I knew back in the early 90s is now a Lieutenant Colonel. That was disorienting for a good long moment, until I did the math and realized I’d probably be a light colonel now if I’d stayed in—that’s the career path.
What really kind of freaked me out was looking at his accomplishments. Re-branched Special Forces (the Green Berets) a few years after Korea. That’s tough business: my understanding is that SF isn’t quite in the same vein as Ranger, but it’s still highly selective, elite soldiering, and you’ve got to have a lot of the same general qualities that a Ranger needs.
Then I read through a long list of accomplishments that sounded like the resume of a character in a Tom Clancy novel. Something to do with snipers. Something else with undersea diving. Some specialized parachuting school. Some deal with SERE, which I think is a survival school where you’re treated like a POW. A few tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Lots of awards, and big ones – a Bronze Star, I think, which is one of the highest military awards short of the Medal of Honor.
What really got to me about finding this out was not the accomplishments themselves. Sure, I was once in the Army, and things like Ranger and SF and all of that high-speed stuff will always carry a certain cachet with me, and elicit a little jealousy too. But just a little. If I’m being honest with myself, I know I’m not cut out for that life, the same way I’m not cut out for the life of a rock star or an actor or an NFL quarterback.
What got to me was seeing someone I once knew who had identified what they were good at, what they wanted to do, pretty early in life, and then had gone for it full-bore, all in, with total commitment, and had made it work for him, and now had a heap of accomplishments to show for it. I haven’t done that—I’ve tried a lot of different stuff, but I haven’t committed fully to any of it.
Which I think is a common ailment in people of my rough demographic.
Sure, I’ve done some stuff. I was a commissioned Army officer, promoted twice, and I do have a college degree. I’ve worked for two civilian companies and have doubled my salary in 12 years. I’ve won a few awards and accolades. I’ve written a book, learned a musical instrument and a martial art. I’m probably in better physical shape now overall than I was when I was in the Army. I’ve been a homeowner twice and currently live in a house with a swimming pool in a modestly upscale area of the Atlanta suburbs. I’m married and have a great two-year-old son.
But sometimes, a lot of times, really, all of those things don’t seem to add up to much. Maybe it’s a basic human tendency we have to downgrade our own accomplishments, but sometimes it all feels like air. Intangible. Fleeting. Except for my son, of course.
I’m betting that when Ethan Hawke’s half brother looks in the mirror, he knows exactly who he is and what he’s done. Me, I’m not so sure all the time.
One of my favorite novels is Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and one of the sharpest lines in that great book comes near the end, after the narrator has been accidentally shot. His wound is not life-threatening, and he goes on to recover. But even though he knows he was only accidentally injured, the circumstances make it appear as though he was heroic and put his own life on the line.
“…it made me feel better in some obscure way: imagining myself a hero, rushing fearlessly for the gun, instead of merely loitering in the bullet’s path like the bystander which I so essentially am.”
A bystander. Sometimes that's how I feel -- like a neutral bystander in my own life. A watcher, not a doer.
I’m not complaining, even though it may seem like it. I have it a lot better than many, many others. I should feel lucky.
But sometimes I can’t help but wish I’ve done more, that I could do more, if only I could shake off whatever condition keeps me from getting more fully invested in life.
And to Ethan Hawke’s half-brother: hats off to you, man.
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* By the way, if it matters, I know the guy wasn't lying because I saw him named and quoted a few years later in a Rolling Stone article about Hawke. Also, Hawke himself referenced him (although not by name) in the piece he wrote for RS about Kris Kristofferson.
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movies. Show all posts
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Up In The Air
Having finally seen "Up In The Air," I've now caught a whopping two out of the 10 films most likely to be nominated for Best Picture of 2009 ("The Hurt Locker" was the other). If I go to see "Avatar" as planned at the end of next week, I'll actually be at 30% of the presumptive nominees - not that great, but still miles ahead of last year.
But anyway. I did finally see "Up In The Air," starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga and directed by Jason Reitman. It's gotten quite a bit of awards buzz, although that seems to have cooled a bit in recent weeks. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, whose job is to travel the country and fire people. We see a lot of scenes of him doing this: sitting in conference rooms with the corporately downsized, telling them about opportunity and wake-up calls and severance packages. He has a favorite line, some claptrap about building empires, and it sounds like he's trying to motivate his victims to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but really he's just trying to get them out of the room before they start throwing furniture. He's pretty good at his job, and he likes it. And he loves the rootless life that the job allows him. When we meet him, he's used to traveling some 300 days out of a year; when we see his "home" in Omaha, Nebraska, it's as sterile and anonymous as a hospital room, devoid of even a single personal touch, which makes perfect sense because he's never there.
Since the movie's less than two hours long, a lot of things don't really get explained, so we don't know what came first with Ryan Bingham: did he get the job because he likes to travel so much and doesn't like being tied down, or did he have the job first and discover that he likes being up in the air all the time? No way to tell--maybe that's covered in the source novel by Walter Kirn, but I'll probably never read it, because I've got no itch to revisit these characters.
Which is not to say it's a bad movie. Far from it. It's actually pretty good. The script is decent, quite well above average for a big Hollywood movie, and the direction is confident, even if Reitman clearly adores "The Graduate" way too much and throws in a few too many scenes scored to hip acoustic music. The acting is never less than solid. Clooney is a bona-fide movie star because, even though he basically plays the same character over and over (with the exception, possibly, of "Syriana"), he exudes an effortless charm and affability that makes for an acceptable audience surrogate in a lot of cases--his performances work not because they're stellar displays of acting technique, but rather because we want to be like him.
On one of his many trips, Ryan meets Vera Farmiga's Alex, another frequent traveler (her exact job is ambiguous, probably on purpose), and they bond over comparing travel-club memberships and frequent flier miles and the like, kind of like the way the guys in "Jaws" bonded over their various scars. Alex and Ryan indulge in some casual sex and then try to arrange their travel schedules to see each other again*. For a time, everything's cool in the world of Ryan Bingham--he's on the road as much as he wants, racking up his miles in the pursuit of the magical ten million goal, and he has a nice no-strings relationship going, and he looks like George Clooney.
Of course, a complication must arise to perforate all this perfection, and it does in the form of Anna Kendrick's young go-getter Natalie Keener, a hotshot recent college grad who just joined Clooney's firm and pitches the concept of going "glocal"--that is, basically, cutting the road trips and having the layoffs happen by teleconference from a single location. Immediately sniffing out the threat to his peripatetic existence, Bingham does into attack mode on Keener's initative, even taking her on the road himself to show her the advantages of axing someone in person.
I think the movie's single best touch was the way Reitman filmed Bingham's preparations for travel and movement through airports: like a soldier performing a drill, he knows exactly what to pack and how, and while seldom-flying yahoos like me are fumbling with belts and shoes and grumbling about security, Bingham knows exactly what to do at each step of the process and floats right through it all with ease and an enviable economy of movement, on his way to the next Medallion-or-whatever-level lounge and a nice glass of preflight Scotch.
When the Academy Award nominations are announced in just under a month, I'm pretty sure "Up In the Air" will get a nice handful of nods, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Clooney, director for Reitman, and probably Best Adapted Screenplay. I think it's going to lose to "Avatar" for Best Picture, but I was all but sure that "Saving Private Ryan" was going to win the top prize back in 1998 or whenever, so what do I know? Clooney is probably in the top two for Actor, although Jeff Bridges (pretty much considered the only other horse in the race) should win because he's never won in four previous nominations even though he's been around a lot longer than Clooney, and Clooney already won once (albeit for a supporting role). If Reitman wins director over Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker," I'm gonna lose it -- but that'll wait until another day. As for adapted screenplay, who cares, except the guys that win it.
This movie shouldn't win Best Picture because, even though it's pretty well made, when it's all said and done, there isn't anything very cinematic about it--it's a quality television production writ large, and it really just comes down to people talking in rooms. It doesn't have the heft that a Best Picture winner ought to have. It doesn't do anything to push the limits of film and show us something we've never really seen before. Now, I'm not saying that every movie needs to do those things, and even though the Best Picture award has been squandered on plenty of smaller movies in the past, this one just doesn't feel right. It's missing something, some key ingredient for a truly lasting impression. It's kind of like Ryan Bingham himself--the kind of guy you'd find yourself forgetting an hour after meeting him.
And so, it'll probably win.
A lot of hay has been made about the movie's topicality because it shows people getting laid off while the country is experiencing a generational high in unemployment. But I've been in corporate America for more than twelve years now myself, and layoffs have been a near-constant threat for at least nine of those years. There's not really any such thing as job security in America anymore. Things may be statistically worse now than in recent years, but don't believe the hype: "Up In the Air" is not really any more topical in 2009-10 than it might've been at the end of the last decade, or the decade before that.
Final verdict: a good if ultimately lightweight movie. Solid, but unspectacular. There's really nothing significant to dislike about "Up In The Air," but there's not really that much to love, either.
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* I'm on the fence about the resolution of the Ryan-Alex arc because even though I was almost certain that she was hiding something (I'm not gonna say what, but it's not that hard to guess) pretty early on, I still had a fraction of a doubt right up until that something is revealed. I guess that's actually a tribute to the quality of Clooney's acting, because even in the face of almost certain disappointment, I was still kind of rooting for him to find happiness.
But anyway. I did finally see "Up In The Air," starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga and directed by Jason Reitman. It's gotten quite a bit of awards buzz, although that seems to have cooled a bit in recent weeks. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, whose job is to travel the country and fire people. We see a lot of scenes of him doing this: sitting in conference rooms with the corporately downsized, telling them about opportunity and wake-up calls and severance packages. He has a favorite line, some claptrap about building empires, and it sounds like he's trying to motivate his victims to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, but really he's just trying to get them out of the room before they start throwing furniture. He's pretty good at his job, and he likes it. And he loves the rootless life that the job allows him. When we meet him, he's used to traveling some 300 days out of a year; when we see his "home" in Omaha, Nebraska, it's as sterile and anonymous as a hospital room, devoid of even a single personal touch, which makes perfect sense because he's never there.
Since the movie's less than two hours long, a lot of things don't really get explained, so we don't know what came first with Ryan Bingham: did he get the job because he likes to travel so much and doesn't like being tied down, or did he have the job first and discover that he likes being up in the air all the time? No way to tell--maybe that's covered in the source novel by Walter Kirn, but I'll probably never read it, because I've got no itch to revisit these characters.
Which is not to say it's a bad movie. Far from it. It's actually pretty good. The script is decent, quite well above average for a big Hollywood movie, and the direction is confident, even if Reitman clearly adores "The Graduate" way too much and throws in a few too many scenes scored to hip acoustic music. The acting is never less than solid. Clooney is a bona-fide movie star because, even though he basically plays the same character over and over (with the exception, possibly, of "Syriana"), he exudes an effortless charm and affability that makes for an acceptable audience surrogate in a lot of cases--his performances work not because they're stellar displays of acting technique, but rather because we want to be like him.
On one of his many trips, Ryan meets Vera Farmiga's Alex, another frequent traveler (her exact job is ambiguous, probably on purpose), and they bond over comparing travel-club memberships and frequent flier miles and the like, kind of like the way the guys in "Jaws" bonded over their various scars. Alex and Ryan indulge in some casual sex and then try to arrange their travel schedules to see each other again*. For a time, everything's cool in the world of Ryan Bingham--he's on the road as much as he wants, racking up his miles in the pursuit of the magical ten million goal, and he has a nice no-strings relationship going, and he looks like George Clooney.
Of course, a complication must arise to perforate all this perfection, and it does in the form of Anna Kendrick's young go-getter Natalie Keener, a hotshot recent college grad who just joined Clooney's firm and pitches the concept of going "glocal"--that is, basically, cutting the road trips and having the layoffs happen by teleconference from a single location. Immediately sniffing out the threat to his peripatetic existence, Bingham does into attack mode on Keener's initative, even taking her on the road himself to show her the advantages of axing someone in person.
I think the movie's single best touch was the way Reitman filmed Bingham's preparations for travel and movement through airports: like a soldier performing a drill, he knows exactly what to pack and how, and while seldom-flying yahoos like me are fumbling with belts and shoes and grumbling about security, Bingham knows exactly what to do at each step of the process and floats right through it all with ease and an enviable economy of movement, on his way to the next Medallion-or-whatever-level lounge and a nice glass of preflight Scotch.
When the Academy Award nominations are announced in just under a month, I'm pretty sure "Up In the Air" will get a nice handful of nods, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Clooney, director for Reitman, and probably Best Adapted Screenplay. I think it's going to lose to "Avatar" for Best Picture, but I was all but sure that "Saving Private Ryan" was going to win the top prize back in 1998 or whenever, so what do I know? Clooney is probably in the top two for Actor, although Jeff Bridges (pretty much considered the only other horse in the race) should win because he's never won in four previous nominations even though he's been around a lot longer than Clooney, and Clooney already won once (albeit for a supporting role). If Reitman wins director over Kathryn Bigelow for "The Hurt Locker," I'm gonna lose it -- but that'll wait until another day. As for adapted screenplay, who cares, except the guys that win it.
This movie shouldn't win Best Picture because, even though it's pretty well made, when it's all said and done, there isn't anything very cinematic about it--it's a quality television production writ large, and it really just comes down to people talking in rooms. It doesn't have the heft that a Best Picture winner ought to have. It doesn't do anything to push the limits of film and show us something we've never really seen before. Now, I'm not saying that every movie needs to do those things, and even though the Best Picture award has been squandered on plenty of smaller movies in the past, this one just doesn't feel right. It's missing something, some key ingredient for a truly lasting impression. It's kind of like Ryan Bingham himself--the kind of guy you'd find yourself forgetting an hour after meeting him.
And so, it'll probably win.
A lot of hay has been made about the movie's topicality because it shows people getting laid off while the country is experiencing a generational high in unemployment. But I've been in corporate America for more than twelve years now myself, and layoffs have been a near-constant threat for at least nine of those years. There's not really any such thing as job security in America anymore. Things may be statistically worse now than in recent years, but don't believe the hype: "Up In the Air" is not really any more topical in 2009-10 than it might've been at the end of the last decade, or the decade before that.
Final verdict: a good if ultimately lightweight movie. Solid, but unspectacular. There's really nothing significant to dislike about "Up In The Air," but there's not really that much to love, either.
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* I'm on the fence about the resolution of the Ryan-Alex arc because even though I was almost certain that she was hiding something (I'm not gonna say what, but it's not that hard to guess) pretty early on, I still had a fraction of a doubt right up until that something is revealed. I guess that's actually a tribute to the quality of Clooney's acting, because even in the face of almost certain disappointment, I was still kind of rooting for him to find happiness.
Friday, August 21, 2009
Don't Mess with Beyonce
Once upon a time, some critics called the television show "In Living Color" the "black Saturday Night Live," even though it came on Sundays and wasn't aired live, on account of it being a comedy sketch show in which most of the performing cast was black. I'm not entirely sure, but I'll bet that label really pissed the creators of "In Living Color" off.
The movie Obsessed could be called "the black Fatal Attraction," and it probably was, because the media never met a convenient label it didn't like--just look at how many movies over the years have been described as "Die Hard on / in a bus/boat/airplane/house/etc." But in this case, I doubt there was any angst or fuss. For one thing, the comparison is to a 20-year-old movie that became a cultural touchstone and still holds up today; "Saturday Night Live" is a touchstone as well, but also a warhorse franchise with a decidedly checkered resume. And Obsessed is a profit engine, a highly calculated piece of work, not a scrappy comedy show looking to forge a unique identity on a fledgling network. Obsessed was designed to open in theaters in that late-winter-to-early-spring lull in most major studio release schedules, after the Oscars but before the summer blitz, a low-cost venture built to turn a tidy profit with a couple or three decent earning weekends. It's organized entirely to move characters to one particular scene, which I'll get to in a bit. If the comparison to Fatal Attraction got more butts in seats, I'd imagine the makers of Obsessed were all for it.
Obsessed stars Beyonce Knowles (hereafter just Beyonce) as the wife of a high-profile executive (Idris Elba) who learns that an attractive temp worker (Ali Larter) at her husband's company has developed a dangerous--maybe even fatal--ahem, attraction to her man. Now, this being a different film, Elba's character never succumbs to temptation, like Michael Douglas did in Fatal Attraction. But Larter's character still attempts suicide, and there's a bit where she menaces Beyonce's kid, and there's a climactic confrontation at the end. Then again, most of those same beats also occurred in Play Misty For Me, so maybe Obsessed is really the black Play Misty, except that there's no late-night jazz radio DJ and dewy soft-core interlude in the woods. After all, Fatal Attraction wasn't much more than a riff on Play Misty with a mid-80s corporate sheen.
It's never really revealed what Elba's character does for a living -- something to do with stocks or bonds or portfolios or something --but it's clear that he's successful, because he drives a sleek Mercedes and the house he shares with Beyonce is full of rich dark wood and his office is all bright glass and stainless steel and he wears nice shirts and ties. Elba, after being so good and full of cool, coiled menace as Stringer Bell for three seasons of HBO's The Wire, pretty much just plays a guy here, and you can't really see the role demanding much of an acting stretch, but you can't blame him for that; after elevating the role of the drug dealer so well on TV, he surely didn't want to go there, and it doesn't seem that there are a lot of other good parts for black actors out there outside of Tyler Perry movies.
So Elba is just a smart, hardworking, and successful dude who runs into the wrong woman--maybe he kinda/sorta leads Larter on, but it's also pretty clear that no one who wasn't already a psycho would ever go as far as she does.
Like much of the movie itself, this is all a lot of preamble--what really matters is the catfight, the sequence I alluded to earlier, the money shot. The movie has to have some build up to it, but it dispenses with the buildup pretty efficiently. In Fatal Attraction, you kinda thought that Glenn Close and her witchy black eyeliner actually hated Michael Douglas when they first met, but here you know Larter is into Elba right off the bat. And when it comes, the fight is pretty good, as far as these things go. Yes, it goes on way too long, and in typical movie fashion, both women sustain blows that would have put either in the hospital long before the climax, but there are a couple of really good flurries between Larter and Beyonce, and Beyonce even goads Larter on at a couple of points, and I'm sure a lot of audiences ate that up. And it doesn't take itself as seriously as any part of Kill Bill. If catfights are your thing, this movie probably deserves a place on your shelf.
And give the writers some credit--I was almost certain that the mirror that happens to be in Elba and Beyonce's bedroom ceiling was gonna come into play at some point, maybe in a dream sequence in which Elba looks up at night and imagines himself in bed with Larter, or maybe somehow in the final fight with Larter getting showered in falling glass from it, but that never actually happens. Maybe in the Director's Cut.
The acting is OK, nothing special, but there really isn't much that actors can really do with roles this transparent. Beyonce was in Dreamgirls I think, but I don't really remember--all I really remember of that movie is its crazy split personality and abrupt shift from musical biopic to full-blown musical. But while Dreamgirls was a prestige grab that wound up working better for Jennifer Hudson than it did Beyonce, Obsessed is just a disposable sorta thriller, and she comes out no worse than unscathed. In fact, none of the cast (including Jerry O'Connell in character actor mode) embarrasses themselves, except for Larter, but that's because her character has to -- if she doesn't, there's no movie.
My first reaction to this movie wasn't positive, but in the end, I didn't hate it anywhere near as much as, say, Rob Zombie's remake / defiling of Halloween. While I won't look back on Obsessed with any particular fondness, I don't feel unclean.
And I learned that Beyonce can be one badass bitch when she wants to be.
The movie Obsessed could be called "the black Fatal Attraction," and it probably was, because the media never met a convenient label it didn't like--just look at how many movies over the years have been described as "Die Hard on / in a bus/boat/airplane/house/etc." But in this case, I doubt there was any angst or fuss. For one thing, the comparison is to a 20-year-old movie that became a cultural touchstone and still holds up today; "Saturday Night Live" is a touchstone as well, but also a warhorse franchise with a decidedly checkered resume. And Obsessed is a profit engine, a highly calculated piece of work, not a scrappy comedy show looking to forge a unique identity on a fledgling network. Obsessed was designed to open in theaters in that late-winter-to-early-spring lull in most major studio release schedules, after the Oscars but before the summer blitz, a low-cost venture built to turn a tidy profit with a couple or three decent earning weekends. It's organized entirely to move characters to one particular scene, which I'll get to in a bit. If the comparison to Fatal Attraction got more butts in seats, I'd imagine the makers of Obsessed were all for it.
Obsessed stars Beyonce Knowles (hereafter just Beyonce) as the wife of a high-profile executive (Idris Elba) who learns that an attractive temp worker (Ali Larter) at her husband's company has developed a dangerous--maybe even fatal--ahem, attraction to her man. Now, this being a different film, Elba's character never succumbs to temptation, like Michael Douglas did in Fatal Attraction. But Larter's character still attempts suicide, and there's a bit where she menaces Beyonce's kid, and there's a climactic confrontation at the end. Then again, most of those same beats also occurred in Play Misty For Me, so maybe Obsessed is really the black Play Misty, except that there's no late-night jazz radio DJ and dewy soft-core interlude in the woods. After all, Fatal Attraction wasn't much more than a riff on Play Misty with a mid-80s corporate sheen.
It's never really revealed what Elba's character does for a living -- something to do with stocks or bonds or portfolios or something --but it's clear that he's successful, because he drives a sleek Mercedes and the house he shares with Beyonce is full of rich dark wood and his office is all bright glass and stainless steel and he wears nice shirts and ties. Elba, after being so good and full of cool, coiled menace as Stringer Bell for three seasons of HBO's The Wire, pretty much just plays a guy here, and you can't really see the role demanding much of an acting stretch, but you can't blame him for that; after elevating the role of the drug dealer so well on TV, he surely didn't want to go there, and it doesn't seem that there are a lot of other good parts for black actors out there outside of Tyler Perry movies.
So Elba is just a smart, hardworking, and successful dude who runs into the wrong woman--maybe he kinda/sorta leads Larter on, but it's also pretty clear that no one who wasn't already a psycho would ever go as far as she does.
Like much of the movie itself, this is all a lot of preamble--what really matters is the catfight, the sequence I alluded to earlier, the money shot. The movie has to have some build up to it, but it dispenses with the buildup pretty efficiently. In Fatal Attraction, you kinda thought that Glenn Close and her witchy black eyeliner actually hated Michael Douglas when they first met, but here you know Larter is into Elba right off the bat. And when it comes, the fight is pretty good, as far as these things go. Yes, it goes on way too long, and in typical movie fashion, both women sustain blows that would have put either in the hospital long before the climax, but there are a couple of really good flurries between Larter and Beyonce, and Beyonce even goads Larter on at a couple of points, and I'm sure a lot of audiences ate that up. And it doesn't take itself as seriously as any part of Kill Bill. If catfights are your thing, this movie probably deserves a place on your shelf.
And give the writers some credit--I was almost certain that the mirror that happens to be in Elba and Beyonce's bedroom ceiling was gonna come into play at some point, maybe in a dream sequence in which Elba looks up at night and imagines himself in bed with Larter, or maybe somehow in the final fight with Larter getting showered in falling glass from it, but that never actually happens. Maybe in the Director's Cut.
The acting is OK, nothing special, but there really isn't much that actors can really do with roles this transparent. Beyonce was in Dreamgirls I think, but I don't really remember--all I really remember of that movie is its crazy split personality and abrupt shift from musical biopic to full-blown musical. But while Dreamgirls was a prestige grab that wound up working better for Jennifer Hudson than it did Beyonce, Obsessed is just a disposable sorta thriller, and she comes out no worse than unscathed. In fact, none of the cast (including Jerry O'Connell in character actor mode) embarrasses themselves, except for Larter, but that's because her character has to -- if she doesn't, there's no movie.
My first reaction to this movie wasn't positive, but in the end, I didn't hate it anywhere near as much as, say, Rob Zombie's remake / defiling of Halloween. While I won't look back on Obsessed with any particular fondness, I don't feel unclean.
And I learned that Beyonce can be one badass bitch when she wants to be.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
On Quentin Tarantino & "Inglourious Basterds"
In the last 20 years, no American director has made a better film than Pulp Fiction. I borrowed that line from Owen Gleiberman, except he was writing about Blue Velvet, and Velvet has now been more than 20 years ago. So I lifted it for Pulp Fiction, and it's every bit as true.
Pulp Fiction was one of those very rare things, the perfect collaboration of story and direction and acting. It was electrifying in its confidence, the way it took a familiar world but just twisted it this way and that to show something different. We know about mobsters and boxing and breakfast diners and armed robbery, or think we do: we've seen it before. We've seen heroin use before. But never quite like that, set askew and cranked up to 10 or 11 and turbocharged with wit, sharply observed and just ambiguous enough at the right times. What's in the briefcase? Why is Winston Wolf wearing a tuxedo early in the morning - is it that he's at a party that's gone into the morning hours, or at some bizarre gathering that requires formal attire at 7 am? Who is Russell and what happened in his old room? Being the fan of ambiguity that I am, that scores big points with me. Those unresolved questions ring up cherries every time I watch the movie. I think you've gotta have balls as a filmmaker to tell a story but know exactly what parts to leave out.
Quentin Tarantino has been chasing Pulp Fiction ever since 1995. It's the kind of work that redeems an entire career; let's say Pulp Fiction were a rock album, and you could say "well, the band's career was pretty much shit, but they DID make Pulp Fiction," and everyone in the room would have to nod and stop bashing the band, if only for a second or two. Or if The Beatles had only done Sgt Pepper's, they would have still done at least that (although I like Revolver better).
Now, Tarantino really hasn't done that much since Fiction, if you really sit down and look at it. In fourteen years, this pretty much sums it up: Jackie Brown, which I never saw and can't comment on; an episode of the television show "ER," which I used to watch and like, an episode that was tonally out-of-step with the rest of the show and a mistake the producers never repeated; some cameos and bit parts in some terrible movies, like Desperado (awful) and From Dusk 'Til Dawn (worse); Kill Bill parts 1 and 2, fetishistic drivel that I wish I'd walked out on, instead of hanging with in the vain hope of some redemption that never came; half of the stunt / vanity project Grindhouse with Robert Rodriguez, something called Death Proof that bored me stupid for the five minutes that I watched. Oh yeah, there might've been a vignette in a collaborative movie called Four Rooms somewhere in there. Didn't see that, either.
And now there's Inglourious Basterds, which stars Brad Pitt and concerns a band of Nazi-killing Jews in Germany sometime near the end of World War II.
What makes Inglourious Basterds an almost complete non-event for me is the fact that, over the course of his nineteen years as a director, Tarantino has exhibited very nearly zero artistic growth. He's making the same movies with the same flourishes and bratty penchant for over-the-top macho situations and violence. It's patently obvious after watching only the TV commercials for Inglourious Basterds that you could transplant a great deal of it into almost any other movie in Tarantino's oeuvre and the world would be no poorer culturally; to put it another way, the scenes I've seen look exactly like they were taken from the part of Pulp Fiction that didn't measure up to the rest and was cut out.
I personally can't think of much I find more boring than an artist that doesn't push themselves a bit, that doesn't try to stretch, at least to a degree. Pearl Jam is my favorite band, and the Pearl Jam of today doesn't sound anything like the Pearl Jam that came on the scene in 1991 - around the same time as Quentin Tarantino, in fact. They realized that they and their audience would grow bored quickly with the same riffing on "Evenflow" and "Jeremy" album after album.
Pulp Fiction was one of those very rare things, the perfect collaboration of story and direction and acting. It was electrifying in its confidence, the way it took a familiar world but just twisted it this way and that to show something different. We know about mobsters and boxing and breakfast diners and armed robbery, or think we do: we've seen it before. We've seen heroin use before. But never quite like that, set askew and cranked up to 10 or 11 and turbocharged with wit, sharply observed and just ambiguous enough at the right times. What's in the briefcase? Why is Winston Wolf wearing a tuxedo early in the morning - is it that he's at a party that's gone into the morning hours, or at some bizarre gathering that requires formal attire at 7 am? Who is Russell and what happened in his old room? Being the fan of ambiguity that I am, that scores big points with me. Those unresolved questions ring up cherries every time I watch the movie. I think you've gotta have balls as a filmmaker to tell a story but know exactly what parts to leave out.
Quentin Tarantino has been chasing Pulp Fiction ever since 1995. It's the kind of work that redeems an entire career; let's say Pulp Fiction were a rock album, and you could say "well, the band's career was pretty much shit, but they DID make Pulp Fiction," and everyone in the room would have to nod and stop bashing the band, if only for a second or two. Or if The Beatles had only done Sgt Pepper's, they would have still done at least that (although I like Revolver better).
Now, Tarantino really hasn't done that much since Fiction, if you really sit down and look at it. In fourteen years, this pretty much sums it up: Jackie Brown, which I never saw and can't comment on; an episode of the television show "ER," which I used to watch and like, an episode that was tonally out-of-step with the rest of the show and a mistake the producers never repeated; some cameos and bit parts in some terrible movies, like Desperado (awful) and From Dusk 'Til Dawn (worse); Kill Bill parts 1 and 2, fetishistic drivel that I wish I'd walked out on, instead of hanging with in the vain hope of some redemption that never came; half of the stunt / vanity project Grindhouse with Robert Rodriguez, something called Death Proof that bored me stupid for the five minutes that I watched. Oh yeah, there might've been a vignette in a collaborative movie called Four Rooms somewhere in there. Didn't see that, either.
And now there's Inglourious Basterds, which stars Brad Pitt and concerns a band of Nazi-killing Jews in Germany sometime near the end of World War II.
What makes Inglourious Basterds an almost complete non-event for me is the fact that, over the course of his nineteen years as a director, Tarantino has exhibited very nearly zero artistic growth. He's making the same movies with the same flourishes and bratty penchant for over-the-top macho situations and violence. It's patently obvious after watching only the TV commercials for Inglourious Basterds that you could transplant a great deal of it into almost any other movie in Tarantino's oeuvre and the world would be no poorer culturally; to put it another way, the scenes I've seen look exactly like they were taken from the part of Pulp Fiction that didn't measure up to the rest and was cut out.
I personally can't think of much I find more boring than an artist that doesn't push themselves a bit, that doesn't try to stretch, at least to a degree. Pearl Jam is my favorite band, and the Pearl Jam of today doesn't sound anything like the Pearl Jam that came on the scene in 1991 - around the same time as Quentin Tarantino, in fact. They realized that they and their audience would grow bored quickly with the same riffing on "Evenflow" and "Jeremy" album after album.
Look at Bob Dylan. Look at the Beatles. Look at Pablo Picasso. In a more modern and cinematic context, look at Paul Thomas Anderson. I'm not a huge fan. I liked Boogie Nights pretty well, but the movie has a lot of flaws. I couldn't get into Magnolia or Punch-Drunk Love. There Will Be Blood was very good, but I agree with the Academy Awards that the better film of 2007 was actually No Country For Old Men.
But one thing you can definitely state about Paul Thomas Anderson is that he tries something different with each movie; There Will Be Blood, a period drama, is absolutely nothing like Punch-Drunk Love, a contemporary black comedy with fairy-tale underpinnings. And that's nothing like Magnolia, which is nothing at all like Boogie Nights. He stretches himself, and that makes him interesting to watch, whether or not I can embrace everything he does.
Well, anyway. I suppose that there's a market for consistency - after all, a Big Mac tastes pretty much the same in Florida as it does in Texas or California; and after all, they made eight or nine or ten Friday the 13th movies, and they all made money, even though they're all pretty much the same thing over and over and over again.
I think I'd rather watch Pulp Fiction again; there's bound to be more energy in almost any given scene than the entirety of Inglourious Basterds*, which just has the feel to me of rich people jerking off into piles of money.
But if you want to see QT churn out more of the same sausage, slightly different seasoning--in this case, Brad Pitt's cartoonish accent--Basterds is now open nationwide.
***********************************
* - To Tarantino's credit, he hasn't really tried to explain the oddball spelling of the movie's title, outside of owning up to it as an artistic flourish; my guess is that it's to distinguish this movie from an older one called Inglorious Bastards, which apparently shares a fairly minimal set of characteristics. Kind of like the way the movie Kalifornia (also starring Pitt - wow!) spelled its title with a "K" to make it stand out from another film called California -- but in Kalifornia they actually tried to work the misspelling into the movie itself instead of letting it stand on its own, which was stupid.
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