Wednesday 11 December 2013

'Cannes You Dig It?' 
In praise of ‘Seduced and Abandoned’ a documentary by Alec Baldwin and James Toback.

This week I watched Seduced and Abandoned, part of the HBO Documentary season running on Sky Atlantic at the moment. Fronted by actor Alec Baldwin and screenwriter James Toback, the film is a fascinating peak behind the curtain of the Cannes Film Festival and acts as a ‘state of play’ snapshot of making movies in Hollywood in 2013 and the film industry in general. Baldwin, with Toback in tow, attends the festival for the first time under the pretence of rustling up financial backing for an original script he intends to star in, while also making a documentary film recording their efforts. Hitting countless brick walls and encountering many of the film industries great and good ( past and present) along the way, the film leaves you with the feeling that it’s a miracle anything other than sequels and franchise movies ever gets made.
 The pair’s idea to make a film set in Iraq that mirrors the (literally) balls-out, non-commercial spirit of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango In Paris - with Baldwin subbing for Marlon Brando and Scream star Neve Campbell as his female lead – is met with unanimous blank stares. Maybe these guys have seen the bedroom scenes from Baldwin’s ‘bonking divorcee’ comedy, It’s Complicated, or are trying to save Campbell from a lifetime of therapy and PTSD – or it could be they just think it sounds like a pretty terrible idea! Aware of the necessity for foreign investors and the need to secure overseas distribution and home entertainment rights upfront, Baldwin and Toback are looking to raise approximately $15-$18 million to make their movie, but based on the two actor’s ‘marquee value’ they are told that they will be lucky to bag anything near that amount. Several unconnected foreign investors quote a max budget of $4-$5 million with these stars attached and they suggest that Baldwin should stick to what he knows – the idea for a submarine based comedy, with lots of sex thrown in, featuring the star of 30 Rock and The Hunt for Red October is something that these guys can really get behind. It’s this incredibly blinkered and unimaginative thinking that prevails and at that point the first of several hard and fast rules surfaces – Money Follows Stars. The only names that seem to be on anyone’s lips at this year’s Cannes are Jessica Chastain and Ryan Gosling. With this in mind our pair of intrepid filmmakers set up interviews with both these actors and pitch their idea. As you can imagine it doesn’t exactly go down well, but both actors are gracious enough to say they’d need to read the script before they signed on – I imagine a waste paper bin with the words ‘In Tray’ printed on the side of it will be that script’s final resting place.
Next stop is trawling the adjacent marina for several lunch dates aboard the yachts of some of the world’s wealthiest men. The impression you’re left with is - Billionaires stay Billionaires because they like to keep a tight hold on their cash – protecting their money with the quiet, steely determination of a 1970’s BBC TV presenter sneaking into the auditions for Bugsy Malone.
This could all be very depressing and leave you despairing where your next Blue Valentine, The Descendants or Before Midnight is coming from, but our hosts are suitable aware and bring a wry smirk of optimism to the proceedings. Baldwin is quick to admit that, in terms of movies at least, his star power faded very quickly first time around and his new-found success as a TV comedy actor is a solid, if fleeting, platform from which to launch a second movie career. He also acknowledges the shift in power away from Director towards Actor that has occurred in recent years, stating that back in the late 80’s, in the hands of Mike Nichol’s, his director in Working Girl, he was just “a spatula he used to flip an omelette, I wasn’t the omelette...I was the salt that you might have sprinkled on it”. He sums up his inability to maintain a high profile career as follows, “The way you make it in this business is you have to become a real selfish mother-fucker”. He’s not kidding! And if to prove a point, he hooks up with Brett Ratner – the man who made his name directing the Rush Hour franchise and un-made his name by almost derailing the lucrative X-Men franchise with Last Stand and making dubiously sexist (and anti-gay) comments ahead of his abortive attempt to produce the Oscar Ceremony in 2012 – talk about making a target of your target audience.
As Baldwin and Toback’s vision appears to be slipping further and further from their grasp, the film takes several sideways glances at some of the most iconic films in cinema history, offering up behind the scenes anecdotes and insights into the making of Goodfellas, Chinatown, The Pianist, The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, Last Tango In Paris. We are treated to interviews from the likes of Roman Polanski, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford-Coppola and James Caan who reminisce about their experiences, the ever changing landscape of film and the true Hollywood legends (including Robert Evans - subject of the OTHER great Hollywood insider documentary, The Kid Stays In The Picture – well worth a viewing if you can squeeze it in).
In the end you are left with a fairly bleak picture of the major studios and the cinema industry as it stands – no one actually thinks it’s any harder to make films these days – in fact technological advancements and across the board access to all manner of affordable camera equipment has made the process easier than ever - but it is a hell-of-a-lot harder to rustle up the funding – it’s either $100 million plus blockbusters, franchise pictures or re-makes or $5 million Indies and very little inbetween. In an industry where senior executives are constantly looking over their shoulders at the ‘next guy’ with THE HIT under his belt coming up fast behind, where the wishes of the marketing executives and the projected sale of home entertainment rights are considered long before a script has even been written or a director hired, where everyone is fixated on ‘running the numbers’ and fearful of producing anything untested or with no in-built audience, It has never been more difficult to raise the money to produce a mid-budget film based on an original screenplay or anything like a unique, visionary concept. Ron Meyer, President and COO of Universal Studios and co-founder of CAA (Creative Artists Agency) sums it up perfectly, “In the Industry we make some shitty movies and we make some great movies...the real problem in this business if you make a great film that no-one goes to see, versus a bad film that everyone has gone to see, the way you keep your job is you make that bad film...you don’t get points for that good film.”
Toback’s highlights his fear that something remarkable and unrepeatable, the ‘auteur’ cinema of the 1960’s and 70’s, has withered and died with virtually no fanfare, aside from in the memories of some of the directors and actors who participated in those ‘glory days’, by quoting a poem, ‘Requiem’, by John Updike:

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise – depth unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.

If nothing else the film gives insight into a world that may have passed, but will always remain in the work that was produced. What it fails to acknowledge is that fact that outside the Hollywood system and within certain genre’s things are different – ‘horror specialist’ Blumhouse Productions made their mark with Paranormal Activity. This was a small budget film – made independently for $15,000 – that grossed nearly $200 million dollars worldwide in 2009 when licensed for distribution through a Hollywood studio, Paramount. The company has gone on, under a strictly enforced ‘mission statement’ that caps budgets at the $10 million mark - with most coming in at around $3-$5 million - to make consistently high grossing horror genre films including The Purge, Dark Skies and Sinister. They have chosen their market, realise the potential built into that market and cater for it almost exclusively. Their ethos dictates that ‘the director is king’, encouraging inventive filmmaking, out-of-the-box marketing and a promise that the creative’s vision will be unaltered and remain free from ‘studio intervention’ if they stay under the afore-mentioned budget ceiling. They also attract relatively big name’s and quality actors such as Ethan Hawke, Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne by offering them percentage of back-end gross over up-front salaries – and when a movie makes over 130 times its budget, there’s plenty of ‘back-end’ to go around. Surely this model could be easily translated to fit films in any genre and work inside the studio system.

You would hope the news that the independently produced, Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa had passed the $100 million thresh-hold in the US this week would be a wake-up call. This is a comedy with no big stars (sorry Johnny! but with all the will in the world I can’t really bring myself to put you on the Hollywood A-list), with a price tag which puts it neatly into that ‘twilight zone’, mid-range budget that has been all but eradicated from our cinema screens. This little movie cost less than $15 million to make and has so far out grossed some of this year’s biggest studio turkeys at the domestic box-office, including The Lone Ranger (budget $225 million), Elysium (budget $115 million), White House Down (budget $150 million ) and Jack The Giant Slayer (budget $ 185 million). Unfortunately, with mega-budget sequels such as Transformers: Age of Extinction just around the corner, it looks like we might have to wait a while for that Baldwin/Neve political fuck-fest, Last Tango In Baghdad, to see the light of day...but put like that, maybe that’s not such a bad thing!

Thursday 5 December 2013

Khan You Feel the Force?

Films of the Year:
Star Trek: Into Darkness

On its initial release, I saw Star Trek: Into Darkness three times at the cinema and scored it a more than solid 9/10. I described it as “an ‘everything-I-could-possibly-have-wanted’ Star Trek movie”. I read several four star reviews and the team at the ‘Empire’ podcast were gushing more than the competition winners whisked backstage at a One Direction concert to meet the band. Then something weird happened. At the time of the DVD/Blu-ray release, there seemed to be a lot of revisionist reviewing going on. The film was suddenly dropping stars from its ratings faster than the stars of The Counsellor were dropping that film from the top of their CV’s. Where there had been endless praise for the pacing and giddy excitement surrounding the casting (and subsequent performance) of Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as uncontainable speculation about whether or not he was or wasn’t Khan, now there was bitching about it being too shallow, a post Fifth Estate Cumberbatch was experiencing a bit of a back-lash (a Batch-lash if you will) and suddenly he was ‘chewing the scenery’ - munching the walls of his ‘Enterprise’ cell as if he was a Hollywood starlet the day after her ‘Vanity Fair’ cover-shoot – and the revelation that Cumberbatch WAS in fact Khan was seen as some sort of a ‘cop-out’ and ‘shitting all over the memory of Wrath of Khan’! Make up your mind guys! First you want it. Then you don’t! It’s Anne Heche and cock all over again!
Seeing the film again, I’m inclined to stick with my initial assessment. I liken the experience of watching it in December, looking all the way back to its release in May, as akin to the ‘space jump’, from the ‘Enterprise’ to the USS Vengeance, undertaken by Kirk and Khan in the film. Like the mine-field of debris and ‘space-junk’ that stands in their way, I can’t help but think of the garbage I should have made more effort to avoid – yes! I’m looking at you Wolverine, Man of Steel and After Earth!
Any criticism of the cast being too ‘pretty’ or lacking the depth of character of any previous ‘Enterprise’ crew is easy to ignore. The 2009 Star Trek introduced Chris Pine as Captain James T. Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Karl Urban as Dr ‘Bones’ McCoy, Simon Pegg as Scotty, Zoe Saldana as Uhura, John Cho as Sulu and Anton Yelchin as Chekov  – ‘pretty’ they may be, but they are also the best ensemble cast this side of the Avengers being Ensembled...sorry I mean Assembled. It’s the strength of these actors working individually and in different groupings that really shines in Into Darkness. Okay, some of them have less to do than would seem appropriate, but they all get at least one moment to shine – Sulu’s “If you test me...you will fail” threat as he takes the Captain’s chair, Scotty struggling to run, end to end, in the massive cargo bay before delivering two great lines – “Captain, this door is very wee” and “Are you Star Fleet or private security?” Uhura has some great scenes with Spock – best of all being the ‘passive aggressive’ argument on the way to Kronos  and the subtlety of the tiny, tortured cry she emits when Spock forcefully breaks Khan’s arm during their final showdown in San Francisco – Chekov rescuing Kirk and Scotty with a life-saving game of Monkey Barrel, Bones in the torpedo deactivation sequence and in his dead-pan delivery of lines like, “Don’t be so melodramatic...You were barely dead!” and most of all the bantering to-and-fro between Kirk and Spock – best exemplified by the scene where they attempt to outrun the Klingon Warbirds by flying their shuttle into a very small space between two buildings:

Spock: If you are suggesting that we utilise the passage between the approaching structures - this ship will not fit.
Kirk: We’ll fit.
Spock: Captain, we will not fit.
Kirk: I told you we’d fit.
Spock: I am not sure that qualifies.

The deepening friendship and mutual respect that acts as the glue to every Kirk/Spock related Star Trek story is central to Into Darkness and acts as a believable touchstone for the events of the film’s final coda. Don’t get me wrong, I still have problems with that final act – following (but flipping) the final resolution to Wrath of Khan is just the wrong side of ‘affectionate referencing’ for me and I would have been happier if they’d had the confidence in their audience to carry Kirk’s ‘resurrection’ over into film No.3 - or at least end the film with a more subtle shot of the seemingly dead Captain, closing in on his face as his eyes open – but to be honest, that’s a small niggle in a mountain of large gold nuggets. Like Julie Andrews on a dark and stormy night, I’m inclined to think about my favourite things – while Kirk’s non-death might seem like a ‘bee sting’ or a ‘dog bite’, there are too many ‘whiskers on kittens’ and ‘raindrops on roses’ to mention...but I’ll try:
The pre-backlash Benedict Cumberbatch adds real weight to, what might be in another’s hands, some fairly over-wrought dialogue – the first prison-cell scene is pitch-perfect and his delivery of the “I will walk over your cold corpses to recover my people” line is chilling and exhilarating in equal measure.
It’s in the script department that Into Darkness really sets itself apart. Aside from previously mentioned gems there are numerous other grand-standing speeches and some very quotable lines, none more so than this exchange between Spock and McCoy:

McCoy: Tell me this is going to work.
Spock: I have neither the information nor the confidence to do so Doctor.
McCoy: Boy, you’re a real comfort.

There’s no shortage of edge-of-your-seat set pieces either – The ‘cold opening’ / pre-credits mission has JJ written all over it – he was pulling this stunt as far back as season one of Alias and Mission Impossible III - The entire Kronos sequence bodes well for Episode VII, riffing as it does on several key Star Wars moments including the Millennium Falcon escape from the exploding Death Star at the end of The Return of the Jedi and the dog-fight escape from Mos Eisely in Star Wars.
The warp-speed chase between the ‘Enterprise’ and the ‘Vengeance’ is virtually unparalleled in its dazzling visuals and, after the finale free-fall from space, the ‘Enterprise’ rising through the clouds might be the ultimate Star Trek ‘money-shot’.  
Best of all is the aforementioned ‘space jump’ between the two Federation Starships - Exhilarating, tense and a master-class in the use of special effects and sound-design. News of this sequence must have elicited a few beads of cold sweat from Alfonso CuarĂ³n, the director of ‘Gravity’ - considering that his four-years-in-the making, ‘ground-breaking’ and ‘uniquely innovative’ film’s plot hinges on a lengthy sequence that involves his characters ‘space walking’ in a deadly debris field as they try to escape from a destroyed space shuttle to the safety of a nearby space station!
Aside from the broader strokes – original series references including Tribbles and Nurse Chapel – and that much talked about Alice Eve ‘underwear shot’ – in its defence, aside from a similarly unnecessary shot of Kirk in his ‘tidy-whities’ earlier in the movie, there was a similar Uhura scene in the first film and that kind of ‘titillation’ was definitely in keeping with the tone of the original series – the film has some fun with its source material. I especially like the transition shot that fades Scotty’s exclamation of “Holy Shit” with the ‘Shhhh’ swishing sound of the opening door to the bridge of the ‘Enterprise’. I also liked the squashing of the Alcatraz prison by the crash-landing ‘Vengeance’ – a sneaky “F –You” to the Fox Network for cancelling JJ’s ‘Alcatraz’ TV series after one, 13 episode, season?

All in all it stands up to repeated viewing and I maintain that the Star Wars franchise couldn’t really be in safer hands. Now all he has to do is steer clear of anything amphibian with questionably racist undertones and avoid showing his lead actress in any gratuitous bikini shots - because you’d never get THAT in a Star Wars movie...oh! Wait a minute...Who’s that chained to Jabba’s throne?