the evil that movie men do
5.3 miles. It's been overcast in the mornings, keeping the temperature down to 67 or 68 degrees. Much more pleasant than 77 or 78.
DIANE leans over the balcony.
DIANE
Hey Darin!
DARIN (O.S.)
(annoyed)
What?
DIANE
Happy Bastille Day!
SNORTS of derision emanate from the bottom floor.
Hey, any excuse for a party. And when the French party...
Why is it that "France" and "the French" are just natural punchlines to us? (Is it the same way in Britain?) You have to explain something weird, so all you say is, "It's French," and everyone understands. Whenever France's posturing for greater say in NATO/the European Community/the G7 is reported here, you always get the idea that the news anchor is thisclose to laughing out loud. When Tracing's Often ring got ripped off, absolutely no one was surprised that it wasn't by, say, the Spanish or the Germans. No, the culprits were French, which just about summed it all up.
I wonder why that is.
I myself had a marvelous time in Paris. I didn't even find Parisians rude. Hey, I had French people ask me for directions (and I was able to give them).
So, I thought of a movie in which a child is killed and it wasn't the center of the storyline: The Last Action Hero
Which pretty much proves my point, don't you think?
I found The Last Action Hero to be unbelievably crass and insulting. I thought it treated its audience like idiots for enjoying action movies. The characters were superficial, the plot was meaningless, and most of all there were some moments of violence that were so unbelievably evil that I wanted to hit whoever was responsible.
I just want to be clear about this: I did not like The Last Action Hero.
The storyline that involves the fiction action hero Jack Slater's son getting killed by the crazy murderer was a big part of why I hated it. For one thing, the audience has seen these summer blockbusters, they know that little kids don't die in them. So already we've got a cognitive disconnect: we're supposed to believe something this heavy and traumatic is going to happen in a movie series that doesn't include the words "The Godfather" in the title.
We then have this incredibly superficial movie within the movie, which is nonsensical and moronic, once again insulting the audience watching--note to filmmakers: if you're going to show a movie within a movie, make it a movie the audience might actually want to go see--and during the major climax in the Real World we're supposed to feel Jack Slater's pain when he confronts Arnold Schwarzenegger with the knowledge that Jack's lost his son so that Arnold could make another movie.
It doesn't work. And that such a terrible event in the life of any parent is used in this way--I want to slap anyone who thought of it. Or at least let it get watered-down to this point.
The other scene that sticks in my mind as being truly loathsome was when the bad guy from the film comes through the screen to New York and shoots a man on the street. He announces loudly to all concerned that he's just killed a man, and then he's intensely pleased that absolutely nothing happens to him as a result. One of the reasons we go to movies--particularly good vs. evil summer action movies--is that morality prevails: the good guys win, the bad guys get punished. This is not about the Real World. And a stupid, insulting movie suddenly pretending it's about the Truth made me wanna hurl.
Darin and I watched Anastasia last night on Pay-Per-View.
Darin summed the movie up best: "It's like an evil parody of a Disney animated film."
The story was bad. The songs were atrocious. The screenplay sucked. The animation was at best good and the frequent mixture of computer animation and hand-drawn was awkward and obvious.
I think the problems with Anastasia started with the concept--yet another wacky animated movie about the slaughter of the Romanov family and the horrors of the Russian Revolution--but Darin thinks that could make a good movie.
But everything else failed. For example, because the recent Disney movies have been musicals, their imitators have been making musicals. Only there's a key factor in the making of musicals that the imitators clearly have missed: there has to be a point to having the song. An emotional moment--that's a good reason to have a song. To give exposition in a witty manner--might be an okay reason for a song.
Because someone scribbled into the screenplay, "Put song here"--not a good reason for a song. Anastasia had lots of inserted songs, all of them mediocre and unmemorable. Darin's reaction: "Who is this lyricist? I hope he never works again."
One of the major failures of this story is the subplot with Rasputin. (Let's not even get into the historical accuracy of the whole story, not the least of which has Rasputin as an evil sorceror who puts a curse on the Romanovs.) It's simply not interesting. Rasputin spends most of his time in Limbo--not interesting. The evil bugs that surround him are mostly cute, not evil.
And most icky: the fantasy aspects are not consistent. This is deadly. If you're going to have fantasy elements, the audience has got to know the rules. You can't have Rasputin being able to do anything...except the one thing he really needs to do. It's confusing and doesn't work.
For example: Rasputin wants to kill Anastasia, because when he does he gets out of Limbo. So he uses his powers to interfere with a train that Anastasia and company are on. He makes the train conductor disappear, he welds the car Anastasia is in to the engine so that she is sure to be pulled along with it, and he blows up a bridge that the train's about to go over.
What he does not do, that is clearly within his power, is blow up the car Anastasia is in. Why not? Because it would interfere with the plot, of course, which is not a good reason.
If Anastasia had ixnayed the subplot with Rasputin, it would be left with a pretty good yarn about a girl from Russia who goes to Paris to fool the Dowager Empress into believing she's Anastasia, and whoops: she is. Of course, that's the plot of the Ingrid Bergman version of Anastasia, and perhaps 20th Century Fox didn't want to get into a rights issue or something.
(Addendum: Karen wrote in and said that she found the biggest problem with Anastasia was the fact that Our Heroes don't even know about Rasputin's existence--and the fact that he's trying to kill them--until Act 3. There's no conflict if the Good Guys aren't afraid of the Bad Guy 'cause they don't even know there is one. This is a very good point and one I wish I had made.)
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