Similes that may go nowhere...

Papa John's has made pizza creation an exact science. When you order a large pepperoni pizza, the dough is pre-measured, slapped out in a uniform way, sauced with an exact portion of sauce, topped with two cups of cheese, and pepperonis are placed in three rings; the outer ring should have 24 pepperonis, the second 16 and the third 6. The company has a distribution wing that delivers the same product to each store, and they procure their products from the same sources continually, thus guaranteeing that every time you order a pepperoni pizza, it will be exactly the same product that you ordered last month.

I'm all for quality control, and I understand its the goal of the pizza empire to assure that its product is uniform, that their customers can expect the same quality of pizza from any store they order, any time they order it. My guess is also that these exacting measures wind up saving the stores in food costs, etc. What I wonder is, if we were offered a taste test - Papa John's uniform pizza process as it stands today, or a pizza from John Schnatter's original pizzeria in Louisville, KY, which didn't have any of these systems in place to ensure uniformity of product, which would we prefer?

My money is on the original product. While I know what to expect from a pepperoni pizza at Papa John's, I also think back to years ago when we first heard about the franchise, and it strikes me that I liked the pizza back then a lot more than I do now. Has the quest for uniformity erased the unique touches a creative person may have felt inclined to add to the product when those strictures weren't in place? While I agree that there's a lot of science you can consider while cooking, at the end of the day good food is more art and passion than science.

Like Papa John's pizza, I think some producers have discovered that they have 'perfected' the movie industry and on-screen storytelling in general, and that there is a uniform product that can be dispensed to theaters nationwide that will guarantee 'x' return in box office proceeds. Light hearted romances are a prime example of my point - it's exceedingly difficult for me to discern any real tangible difference between The Ugly Truth, How To Lose a Man in 10 Days, or The Proposal. It's not that the films are bad, it's just that they follow a formula that's been honed in Hollywood over the past 20 years or so into an extraordinarily predictable film. The jokes are a little different, but you know that two people are thrust into an awkward situation and fall in love, and they do so at a stunningly similar pace.

There's no question that people remember Gone With the Wind and Casablanca as remarkable love stories and treasures of the movie industry. Which romance film of the past twenty years lives up to those older films now? I would think that a truly special movie is rare in any day, and I think it's true that when Casablanca came out studios were releasing a film a week, so perhaps it's inevitable that with so many monkeys typing at once you'd be bound to get a copy of Hamlet or two. What does our generation have to look forward to, in terms of quality film? What makes a film unique storytelling experience?

What's the process these movies follow to get made? Are these uniform films developed by a committee? While playing an online game I had the fortune to briefly meet the author of the blog Kung Fu Monkey, who writes and produces the TV show Leverage and also wrote the original script for the movie Transformers. I remember asking him what the storyline was, since the film was still in production at the time, and he told me that after everyone in Hollywood had their say about it, the film would be nothing like his original draft. Does every script get shredded so badly by Hollywood these days, that no matter how original or interesting the script initially was, it inevitably becomes cliche by the time it is released?

The Age of Remakes?

Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark was released into theaters in 1981 and created a sensation across the country, much in the same way that Star Wars (1977) and Jaws(1975) did in the mid-to-late seventies. They were revolutionary movies, and helped to usher in a new era of films that borrowed elements of those films - setting, plot, special effects, dialog, soundtrack, actors, that set the stage for the new style of storytelling for the following decades. Each film explored different themes - the very primal concept of man v nature for Jaws, the old saga for the Star Wars trilogy, and Indiana Jones appealed to a theme of high adventure, a variant of the old King Solomon's Mines sort of storytelling with some Nazis mixed in for good measure.

So many films have tried to copy the themes of these three films, with varying degrees of success. Jaws bred a veritable cornucopia of giant animal related knockoffs, from giant snakes (Anaconda) to giant alligators (Lake Placid) and more, most of which are singularly awful. Star Wars made sci-fi cool in a way that Trek never did or ever would (sorry Trekkies) and spawned an immense number of space-themed films in its wake. Raiders spawned several high adventure themed films - High Road to China, for instance, but I think that most people missed the charm of Harrison Ford's everyman in Raiders. I attribute most of the action hero films of the 80s to the success of Raiders, even though Jones is no Rambo. Action films generally are forgettable.

At least all of these knock-off films made some attempt to distinguish themselves from the films they tried to imitate; it seems that people are less interested in coming up with something new these days; they'd rather take an old film or television show and make it new again.

It seems as though we're plagued with films and shows that are remakes of older original ideas. Battlestar Galactica was rehashed on the Sci-Fi channel, we've just seen a remake of The A-Team hit theaters in the past couple months, as well as a do-over of Clash of the Titans. Ang Li's Hulk had barely made it to video before producers were calling for a mulligan, and a retooled Hulk came out five years later starring Ed Norton. This winter we'll be feasting our eyes on the not-awaited-at-all sequel to Tron, a curious film to remake considering how far computers have advanced since the original came out in 1982.

Okay, so the Kraken looks better than it used to...

Is it just pure laziness that prompts people to not seek out an original story to tell? Or is the film industry just cynically squeezing big bucks out of a new Knight Rider movie because people of my generation have a special desire to see our childhoods redone on the screen? Age eight, mark 2.0, still starring David Hasselhoff? I know the truly original story is rare, but I also don't remember a remake of The Howdy-Doody Show coming out in the past twenty or thirty years, so I'm guessing it has something to do with people of my age group, rather than those of my father's.

Or... are we as the consumers so lazy that remakes are what we demand? Have we given up on investing our time and thought on something new? Or are we so stung by being charged $8 for a ticket and $795 for popcorn in a film that we instinctively dodge new themes as dangerous and rather stick with what we know will at least be marginally entertaining? Clearly, it's easier to chuckle at the antics of Faceman and B.A. Baracas than to invest our time and psyche on becoming attached to new characters - is the cost of investment in something new too high to chance it these days? If so, we're never going to see the a groundbreaking sensation the likes of Raiders again.

Harmless, Aimless, Crude Fun

Hot Tub Time Machine

It was actually pretty funny. Not as funny as The Hangover - and the plot was definitely disjointed and didn't make much sense... but what are you expecting from a film whose plot centers around a hot tub that travels through time into the 80s?

Hot Tub carries on in the same humor vein that The 40 Year Old Virgin and The Hangover did - fairly crude but not so disgusting that you can't watch the film. If you enjoyed those two films you'll enjoy this one, only slightly less.

The one thing that really bugs me about this film is that Cusack, one of the premier icons of the 80's, does nothing to play this up as they meander about a 1980s ski lodge. I think it would have been so easy to offer a cameo to Curtis "Do you realize what the street value of this mountain is?" Armstrong or Demian "I want my TWO DOLLARS!" Slade from Better Off Dead, a film that features Cusack skiing throughout the film. It seems as though someone really missed the boat on that facet - or maybe it was something that the legal dept killed.

**Note** - An astute reader (I have one or two!) pointed out two items in the film that I didn't notice; in one case I must have been grabbing a beer, and the other went straight over my head. The "Two Dollars" joke was dropped pretty early on in the film (this is the one I must have missed because of beer) so I'll have to retract my complaint. The other tidbit was a cameo I completely missed - William Zabka showed up as the gambler in the sports bar that Rob Corddry's character watches football in. Zabka is better known to the world as Johnny, the bully in The Karate Kid. Kudos to Brandon for the catch!

Alien Film Cute But Safe. Too Safe...

Planet 51

I should probably preface this entire post by admitting that I love animation - drawn, pixel-lated, what have you, I think it's a great medium for film, and I find it a little saddening that there's hardly any animation out there that embraces more adult themes, rather than catering to kids and families. The last truly adult animated film I watched was The Simpsons Movie but I think you could make a case that The Simpsons was always intended as a family show - the writers on that show always made sure that the adult jokes would go over the heads of any kids watching. The last truly adult animated movie I recall seeing was The Triplets of Belleville, which came out in 2003. (Good movie, incidentally. I highly recommend it to those who are interested in excellent animated stories.)

I've been a big fan of the product coming out of Pixar and Dreamworks - The Toy Story and Shrek franchises have been enjoyable and profitable - and that says nothing for The Incredibles, Wall-E, Bolt, and Ratatouille (probably my personal favorite, since it combines animation with food). All these films don't even consider the Disney revolution of the nineties, which were (for the most part) the drawn-by-hand old fashioned variety. But I've noticed a real trend, or formula with these films, and I hope someone does something to break out of it soon, because it's getting stale. (A side note - I haven't seen the most recent Shrek or Toy Story films, and I hear one did well while the other did not. Perhaps I'll get a chance to review those soon.)

Planet 51 is the first film release of new Ilion Animation studios. It's okay in every sense you could define a film, but really great in none of them. The film just seems to meander its way through its storyline according to formula until suddenly its over. The concept is very cute, the animation very clean, but I just never felt like jumping out of my seat for anything in the film, from start to end.

Quick summary - Lem (Justin Long) has just scored a job at the local observatory, where he'll help explore the stars. He and his friend Skiff (Seann William Scott) are big movie fans, and loves the films where the aliens land and ravage the local populace. They live in your standard 1950's small town; the only twist is that this 50's town, replete with malt shop and jukeboxes, are on another planet and Lem and Skiff are green aliens with antennae!

Lem is about to ask out his sweetheart Neera (Jessica Biel) when out of the sky comes a capsule, discharging a scary human explorer who is surprised to find the planet inhabited. Captain Charles T. Baker (Dwayne Johnson a.k.a. The Rock) befriends Lem and hides, and together they attempt to get the bewildered astronaut back onto his capsule without being captured and vivisected by paranoid General Grawl (Gary Oldman) and his mad scientist Professor Kipple (John Cleese).

The film doesn't seem to know exactly what plot lines it wants to cover; the love story between Lem and Neera, the camaraderie of curious astronomer with space traveler, the juxtaposition of the movie concept of the drooling alien bent on conquest v the reality of Captain Baker being a somewhat surprised and fairly scared stranger in an unexpectedly strange land. There are more as well. Planet 51 tries to cover everything at once, and so we get marginal character development across the board. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what was so interesting about Neera that Lem would consider her to be a real prize, since she spoke a total of about three lines until the last ten minutes of the movie.

Technically, everything goes over well; the animation is good, the voice acting is spirited even though the script is sometimes a little tepid. My belief is that we have a story concept that was so exciting to the creators that they wanted to explore every plot line and story angle very thoroughly, and perhaps the original run-time came in at three and a half hours. Cuts were made, but nobody could lose their own pet project entirely, so we get snippets of what should have been a much larger story.

The film could have gotten away with a little confusion about plot-lines, if only it had taken some risks in the film to mark this project as somehow different from others out in the field. It simply doesn't. The film simply doesn't try to be a mold-breaker in any way. It sticks to what's safe in animated movie making, which in the end is what makes it mildly enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable.

I'd love to start documenting incidences of formula a person watching all these films can point to recurring again and again, but at the moment the idea is more a nagging sensation than something I can concretely grab hold of. What I can define in my head is that if I saw a script for an animated film, I could by just looking at it know if it was being developed by Pixar or if it was a Dreamworks project, and I would do it based directly on the sense of humor projected from the script, in the same way you could tell if a joke were written by George Carlin or Eddie Murphy. Ilion is clearly trying to imitate Dreamworks in Planet 51 but the humor just doesn't come off as well as it could - whether due to the writing or due to the fact that I'm just tired of hearing that same style of joke, I'm not sure.

How John Cusack escapes everything except this bad bad movie.

2012

2012, and Roland Emmerich are prime examples of the exact sort of Hollywood movie I've grown to loathe; all flash and no story. If we simply wanted to show a lot of destruction, we could have cut the dialog from this film and finished watching it in about twenty minutes. It might have been worth seeing then.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that the cycles on the Mayan calendar indicated not "The end of the world" in a rapture-esque manner that Christians tend to buy into, but rather a reshuffling of the world order in a more spiritual, attitudinal sense. Brief research on the internet indicates that the Mayans simply look at December 2012 as the tripping of their calendar's odometer, like watching your car hit 100,000 miles. I'd love to have a discussion of this with people who are more knowledgeable about it than I am, but not in the tin foil hat/FBI agents are using the fluoride in your toothpaste and flu vaccines to control your mind vein.

At any rate, Emmerich seems to have decided that he can ride the hype and repeat the same dull formula that made him some bucks in Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow. He recruits a new set of actors and directs their careers off a cliff. We'll see if they miraculously escape Emmerich's effect as well as they escaped his special effects.

The movie boils down to this. Everything blows up, and John Cusack and some of the people he travels with barely escape from all of it. I didn't mark it all down, but Cusack manages to outdrive an earthquake and a volcano (the first in a stretch limo, the second in a Winnebago) and then his ex-wife's new boyfriend manages to take off and dodge rampant destruction no less than three times.

They have to ditch an aircraft in the mountains in China and do a Temple of Doom improv scene, before they barely manage to sneak onto one of three giant arks that have been secretly made to hold humanity's expected sole survivors. Once he's on there, he becomes (naturally) the only person on the boat who can save them from certain destruction; a tidal wave has knocked the ark into a collision course with Mount Everest, and Cusack must clear some gears in order for the ark to power up and avoid the rocks. By the time the ark is ponderously inching toward Everest (of course it's Everest! What other mountains are there in the Himalayas?) I was actively rooting for people to die.

I wonder how actors like Cusack wind up in movies like this. He's been in a lot of great films and he's acted well in them, so we know the guy's got talent. Sure, he's been in a dog or two (War, Inc. comes to mind) but at least the film itself was risky in the sense that it was a very off-beat sort of film to make. Cusack signing on to make something like 2012 smells of someone desperate for a quick check. I pray that actors have higher standards, but maybe that's all it really is. Maybe Cusack needed to get real paid for this film, so he could continue to sign onto films with better plots but less box-office draw.

Maybe I'm being silly. Maybe they believe in the film. I have to think Will Smith thought that Independence Day was going to be good work. It certainly made his name a household word. I just can't imagine though that these people look at the script for this movie and say "Yeah, that's gonna be a classic piece of work, and ROLAND EMMERICH is going to be writing, directing, and producing it! This is going to be awesome, because The Patriot kicked so much ass too, and people everywhere loved Godzilla with Matthew Broderick!"

What I would like to do to Hollywood after watching this film...

Here's the kicker: this film made a lot of money. Over at Box Office Mojo I see that Emmerich spent 200 million to make the film, and the studio grossed roughly 769 million from sales worldwide. So as rancid and horrible as this dog of a film was, until we stop watching these films when they hit the theaters my guess is that we're going to be served up with more of the same. I'm guessing that blowing up the White House (again) and the Vatican using CGI graphics is probably cheaper than blowing up models the way he did in Independence Day, so maybe dollars per effect is more efficient now than ever before.

What isn't efficient is screen time for actors. Amanda Peet and Cusack, Oliver Platt and a host of other high-pay actors spend the entire film delivering stilted lines and screaming a lot. The screaming is only slightly more convincing than the dialog. By the end of the film, we've come to realize that Cusack is a failed author, but we still haven't heard much about the book he wrote that nobody read; well, nobody except all the important people who are sailing on this arc.

The film deviates not a whit from formula. Cusack even hooks back up with his estranged wife in almost exactly the same way Jeff Goldblum (also playing a bumbling failure role) does in Independence Day. Every explosion requires another lucky escape. Nobody in the film can turn a corner without some new potential disaster unfurls. Don't worry though, they escape or stop the bomb when the clock winds down to one second remaining. You saw this film twenty years ago, it was just different stuff that blew up.

Add Emmerich to the list of producers/writers/directors to avoid. His works continue to disappoint those of us who wish to see a real story.

Avoid this film at all costs!

The Last Airbender

I'm really not sure why I kept giving M Night Shyamalan more chances to disappoint me over the years, but seriously, The Last Airbender is the end of the line. Shyamalan has written, produced, and directed the ugliest dog of a movie to come along since Battlefield Earth.

Is it really that bad? You better believe it! Shyamalan has odd ideas of casting, worse feel for direction, scripting that makes Lucas look competent, sub-par effects, shoddy camera work, and no feel for putting together his own movie. The end result is a mess, more comedic and sad than enjoyable.

To try to give credit where none is really due, I haven't seen the cartoon the movie was supposed to be based on. Judging by how incomprehensible the plot line to the average Dragonball Z episode is, Shyamalan may have been a little challenged to explain to us about his world of spirits and elementalists. Watching Akira, Princess Mononoke, or Ghost In The Machine can be a little difficult for the unfamiliar, but a dedicated viewer can pick up the story pretty quickly, even if the theme isn't what we're used to seeing. Mononoke and Final Fantasy go on interminably about spirits and spirit worlds, but at least at the end of it all, it makes some sort of sense. I'm not sure Airbender made much at all, and I am sure that I didn't care.

Story (such as it is) goes like this - a hundred years in the past, the world was balanced and at peace, and special people in the world could harness the power of the elements. There were fire people, earth people, water people, and air people. Among all the people of the planet, there was one avatar, who could wield the power of all the four elements together (though he inexplicably was born and raised amongst the air people every time he reincarnated) and he kept the balance of the world together. The air people had found their new avatar in young Aang (pronounced Ug?) and were very excited, but Aang didn't want responsibility and all that nonsense so he runs away and gets frozen in a block of ice for a century.

Flash forward to what can only be called the present day in strange world - a girl and her useless older brother stumble across Popsicle boy frozen in the ice with a giant flying beaver/dragon/thing about a hundred feet from their eskimo village. Girl and useless boy bring him back to their village where they are accosted by the beginning of a long line of horribly miscast characters, Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire as confused villain Prince Zuko. Zuko kidnaps him for no particular reason, discovers his avatar nature, and then promptly loses him again.

What follows is a mish-mash of a bunch of inept villains chasing girl, useless boy, and the avatar as they dance-fu across the world. We learn that Aang needs to master the other elements to really come into his power, but by the time the film ends he's only master of air and water. Aasif Mandvi takes villainy to new lows; not only is he horribly miscast (I spent the entire time watching him on screen thinking of The Daily Show) but his prime act as a villain was - wait for it - stabbing a fish!

Your dance-fu is not strong!

So we have a hopelessly confused plot line, bad script, hapless villains and hopeless heroes. But at least we have great effects, right? Right? Nyet! Bad green screen effects abound from the movie's outset, and it seems the lighting crew really couldn't get together with the CGI guys to figure out where the sun was going to be in any scene. The elemental effects are cleaner, but still pretty pedestrian for the $280 million this film cost to make. Sadly, for all that cash, most of what we see is Aang and friends assume dance-fu positions as the camera pans around them. At least they weren't talking.

Even the choreography was disgraceful. The fight scenes were repetitive and unimaginative. As the fire people attack the water city Shyamalan has a golden opportunity to live up to Roland Emmerich and Micheal Bay and at least create some interesting destruction. In this, he fails as well. Water and fire masters apparently don't work as teams or do anything really interesting together. It doesn't really matter I suppose, because the standard warriors aren't really into the whole fighting thing either. During the heat of the battle, warriors of both sides drop everything to stare up at various events at least three different times.

Why have people been giving Shyamalan work for all these years? The only film of his that I can recall even remotely enjoying was The Sixth Sense, which incidentally was his only film that he didn't produce. The Village was bad on a historic level. I remember being outright angry at the end of that film. I managed to resist watching Signs, The Happening, and Lady In The Water, with the help of being warned off by friends who weren't as lucky. The Last Airbender should be the clinching proof that Shyamalan should be kept away from film studios at all costs.

Substitute boredom for marginal excitement!

Surrogates

It's probably not wildly apropos to make my first real post a discussion about a film that is neither a classic nor current release, but it's what the wife and I watched last night, so it is what sits on my mind. Initially we did try to watch The Awful Truth starring Cary Grant, but it turns out that he did in fact star in a few flicks that were pretty forgettable, this being the foremost example of that.

It's the beauty of having Netflix attached to our Wii; you can stream so much content and if you're bored with it, just stop. I've been living in a content-saturated dream for the past two weeks. Surrogates happened to be available for download, and since it had Bruce Willis and robots, both the wife and I were satisfied to give it a try.

The film is based on a graphic novel of the same name. The plot goes a little something like this: in the not too distant future, people can leave their flesh bodies on a table at home and control a sleeker, sexier robot version of themselves out on the town. The robot suffers all the risks associated with leaving your house and have become ubiquitous in society. Inexplicably, crime becomes almost unheard of, as well as disease and inhibition as the streets fill up with replaceable custom robot bodies, controlled by their human masters safely from home. People who can't get with the times relegate themselves to human-only ghettos, from whence they plot revenge against the robot takeover. The movie doesn't really explain why.

Everything is fine until a pair of lecherous robots come face to face with one of these humans, who has an interesting weapon. Not only does it fry the robot he uses it on, but it also kills the human who controls the robot remotely. Bruce Willis heads up the FBI team that investigates this crime, which ultimately threatens the whole surrogate way of life.

The plot was specious enough to have the wife and I skeptical from the outset (wife asked me several times "Why is crime almost zero?" and "You'd think with a robot body you'd do all kinds of crazy stuff and wouldn't care about consequences!" and most often "Did I miss something important here while I wasn't paying attention?") but the action plugs along at a pretty good clip and we as viewers stopped asking as many questions as more attention developed around the murder mystery.

Sadly, the film can't maintain that plot much either. I have to admit, I haven't read the graphic novel, so I don't know if they're working with the story as given, or if they've made some changes which made the storyline in the film flow more smoothly but make less sense.

The villain in the film (James Cromwell) uses robots to be everywhere at once, but nobody seems to consider it odd that he can maintain so many robots - especially robots infiltrating the human-only ghettos - without being discovered. Cromwell's motivation for villainy? He was fired by his own robot company, and they started marketing robots in a way that Cromwell didn't like, even though he uses them throughout the film in exactly that same manner. His son is the first victim of our mystery weapon, but we can't really attribute his death to the plotting of his father, since he had apparently already gone to great lengths to plot the downfall of robot-people before his son's tragic death came into the picture.

Furthermore - the weapon was developed by (dun dun dun!) the same company that makes the robots, and they made it for (dun dun DUN!) the military, which initially pretended to know nothing about it. Inexplicably, Bruce Willis' boss at the FBI is somehow involved in the murders and cover up, though nobody ever stops to ask why anyone would bother to involve him in the plotting in the first place. Bruce Willis finally defeats the villains and stops the world from being destroyed with the ticking clock reading 0:02 or somesuch nonsense.

What we're left with is a film that has an interesting but flawed premise that goes to a formulaic conclusion in the span of 89 minutes. It wasn't bad by any real stretch - technically, it does everything it needs to, the acting was serviceable, the direction okay. The film was just too generic to be memorable, which is sad considering how exotic its premise was.

Side note - I know it's not fair, but seeing James Cromwell on the screen after his role in L.A. Confidential - I just knew he was the villain from the moment I saw him. He does evil well, but I think I need to see him in some other good roles to banish my typecasting bias.

In the beginning...

A friend of mine and I were talking over dinner a year or so ago, and we got on the subject of movies. I can't recall exactly what film we were talking about; you could probably pick any one of the fifty action flicks that came out last year and it would be as good a guess as any other.

I asked her if she was intending to see it, and she responded with a marvelous little piece of wisdom about the state of the movie industry now; in the age of computer generated graphics, THX sound and green screens, you can do absolutely anything and make it look real on screen. Her hopes would be that the art of storytelling would reassert itself on the screen again soon, because it apparently was out to lunch.

I'd like to say its not really enough to make a visual feast on screen anymore and completely ignore storyline, but ticket sales probably indicate otherwise. Avatar was epic on the visuals but pretty weak on story - Dances With Wolves meets eight foot tall blue aliens - but it raked it in at the box office. The continued success of tech wonder films, high on visuals and low on plot, leave those of us who are hoping for a good American film to come along high and dry.

"ToTonka!"

In creating this blog, I hope to explore ways in which Hollywood makes or breaks movies, critique films old and new, and enjoy new and different points of view. In this blog I get to rant about my peeves in film and rave about scenes that blow me out of the water. Feel free to comment and help me armchair-quarterback the movie industry.