Pulled From the Wreckage - 11 Great Performances in Terrible Films

Do Oscar nominated performances have to emerge from good movies? It's a bias so taken for granted that it's almost never spoken of, but the category reads Best Actor, not Best Actor in a Movie We Already Like. Who's to say that performers don't deserve recognition for triumphing over weak scripts, sloppy direction and productions flying apart at the seams. In a way it's more of an achievement. Anyone can do their best work in a Scorsese film. It takes a real actor to do it in Showgirls.

Val Kilmer in Alexander - Here is a perfect example. No three films on this list combined equal the elephantine mess that is Oliver Stone's Alexander. Lumbering along for three punishing hours, Stone's tale of Alexander the Great brought down a slew of great actors, making pros like Colin Farrell, Rosario Dawson and Angelina Jolie's seem like they were acting for the first time in their lives. Rising above the dreck is Val Kilmer who gives a memorably raging performance as Alexander's father. Kilmer was clearly reaching for greatness with the role, going all out, packing on weight and make-up and bellowing his lines to the Gods. This marks the second time after The Doors that an Oliver Stone mess has smothered potentially award winning work from Kilmer.

Mike Myers in 54 - Myer's performance as Studio 54 was a naked grab for serious actor credibility. Uglied up with a make-up job, he affected a voice, did drugs by the handful, and graphically propositioned Ryan Phillippe. That the film was a debacle, edited into near incoherence by the studio, obscured the fact that Myers actually did a pretty damn good job in the role. Like a lot of work on this countdown it's easy to imagine it grabbing an Oscar nomination if one were able to airlift it out whole and drop it down in a better movie.

Rhada Mitchell in Melinda and Melinda - All Woody's late career bad habits are at flying full-mast in Melinda and Melinda. The stilted dialogue, the undercooked drama, the situations recycled out of two dozen better Woody flicks - it may not qualify as terrible but it's all so thuddingly disposable. Cutting through the mannerisms is Rhada Mitchell, riveting as Dramatic Melinda and charming as Comedic Melinda. If Woody can pull it together for another masterpiece he should give Mitchell a chance to shine in one of his great female roles, not merely rescue one of his minor ones.

Jackie Earl Haley in Watchmen - Zack Snyder's carefully mounted Xerox of the classic graphic novel is such an airless adaptation that most of the actor's seemed more concerned with hitting their marks than with filling their scenes with something resembling human emotions. Haley's Rorschach is the exception. He's the only character who seems like he has real blood pumping through his veins, the only one who's actions seem dictated by his choices, not by the script.

Emma Thompson in Love, Actually - I might anger some people including Love, Actually in the list since a lot of people have great affection for this movie. Personally, I couldn't take it. Not only does it indulge in a whole buffet of romantic comedy cliches but it can't even be bothered to invest those with any attention, skipping merrily from character to character to pick off all the easiest emotional beats. I don't mind a little cinematic trifle but watching Love, Actually is like eating the frosting off an entire wedding cake. The only scenario that registered some genuine feeling was Emma Thompson as a wife coming to grips with her husband's betrayal. She imbued her scenes with such real pain it's as if Robert Altman grabbed control of the helm for a few precious minutes.

Irma P Hall in The Ladykillers - On the other hand, I doubt anyone will come to rushing to the defense of this movie, which is pretty much universally acknowledged to be the Coen's only total misfire. One of the many problems with the film is how erratic the tone is, shifting violently from scene to scene, and from performance to performance, and almost always landing way over the top. The whole cast and crew would have been wise to stop and observe Hall who is an island of professionalism and control amidst the chaos. It's a career capping triumph squandered on a dud.

Peter O'Toole in Troy - Troy is an unabashedly cheesy B-movie, which would be no great crime except that it insisted on wasting a boatload of Hollywood's finest actors on material unworthy of Adam West. Few escape with their dignity, but only Peter O'Toole escapes with a good scene. The moment when O'Toole confronts the man who murdered his son to beg for his son's body is so well acted by the old pro it almost makes the whole bloated money-waster worthwhile.

Josh Brolin in W - Stone again wasting some stellar work, this time blowing a solid lead performance from Josh Brolin in his shallow take on George Bush the II. Brolin clearly brought his A game to the set but the script seems to intentionally side-step the most interesting aspects of W's rise to power and focuses instead on W's greatest hits with little more depth than a Jay Leno monologue. Any resonance the film maintains as the years leave this movie behind will be entirely due to Brolin's masterful work.

Sheetal Sheth in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World - A surprisingly flat effort from the usually reliable Albert Brooks, Comedy has Brooks missing the heart of his material. Instead of focusing on finding the common ground in an alien culture, Brooks focused obsessively on why they did not find his act, specifically, hilarious. It makes for a strangely lifeless movie, but in it Sheth shines out brilliantly as Brooks' relentlessly positive assistant. She steals the whole show just by standing behind Brooks, beaming her thousand watt smile, and attacking every line with the energy the rest of the film lacks.

Hugo Weaving in Matrix Revolutions - The Matrix wasn't exactly an actor's piece to begin with, but by the final leg of the trilogy any trace of charisma from Fishburne or Moss had been swallowed up by the endless philosophical gobbledygook and the interminable, monotonous actions scenes. In the end, Hugo Weaving was the only actor who managed to find amusing little character moments amid all the apocalyptic sturm and drang. Weaving could even putting an entertaining sinister spin on lines as leaden as, "I'm going to enjoy watching you die." It's an instructive example of how a skilled actor can make a character interesting despite having practically nothing to work with.

Nick Nolte in Hulk - It's definitely stretching it to call this a great performance but damned if it wasn't entertaining to have Nolte show up after long, dull stretches of Ang Lee's failed Hulk flick, stomping in like a cross between a tasmanian devil, the Unabomber, and late-period, crazy Brando. Nolte sputters, growls, and generally flails about like he's on fire. It doesn't take long for Nolte's weird performance art to become infinitely more interesting than the film around it. The audience sits wondering, "Just how insane a performance can one manage to sneak into a major Hollywood franchise flick?" By the time Nolte is literally chewing on the scenery at the film's finale the answer turns out to be, "Much, much more insane than anyone would have guessed."

Decisions, Decisions...

Couldn't help but notice this juxtaposition when passing through the DVD's on the way to the plastic container section:

So for 17.99 I can get no fewer than four essential, indisputable classics, or, if I want to pony an extra two dollars, I can get a guy in a bear costume having his way with Brendan Fraser and seven different varieties of poop joke. It's as if a restaurant offered you the choice of a four course gourmet meal or the slightly pricier option of a half-eaten Slim Jim dug out from between couch cushions.

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Reviewing a film like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World can be a real drag. Scott Pilgrim, directed by Edgar Wright, based on the series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley, has barely a shot that passes without some form of whiz-bang showmanship to make it pop off the screen. Wright and company are working up such a ferocious sweat at times it feels like they won't be satisfied unless audience members actually levitate out of their seats with joy. After all that work, here comes the film critic pulling on his hall monitor sash and scolding, "Hey, can we please slow down and remember the fundamentals of character development? Your movie will thank me when its older."

It leaves the reviewer open to the age-old criticism that critics aren't happy unless every film is Citizen Kane. There may be an element of truth to that but the fact is a film either succeeds or fails on its own terms. Nobody should criticize Hotel for Dogs for lacking transcendent statements about the human condition. You criticize it if it's not a fun movie about puppies. Likewise, Scott Pilgrim lays out its own markers by which it will succeed or fail, namely, to be a fun tribute to the Nintendo generation, to be a skewed action movie where we root for Scott Pilgrim to triumph, and to give a truthful, albeit hyper-stylized, take on relationships. Scott Pilgrim succeeds on the first two counts but comes up short on the third. It's a noble attempt to be sure, but any gamer will tell you, two out of three pieces of the Triforce doesn't equal victory.

Great Shots: Black Narcissus

Normally, it is advisable for filmmakers to apply symbolic imagery with a light touch, couching it safely in the context of the story and rarely if ever calling attention to it. When movies use strokes as bold as Powell & Pressburger's Black Narcissus they run the risk of looking either appallingly pretentious or laughably overwrought or both. Yet Narcissus accomplishes the neat trick of making its highly stylized imagery seem downright logical. With the character's emotions swooning as dizzyingly as those Himalayan heights, a straight-forward presentation of this material is unthinkable.

In the scene above, Sister Clodagh and Mr. Dean have been burst in upon by Sister Ruth, her pristine white nun's habit blood-stained from work in their makeshift hospital. I'm sure I don't need to explain the litany of meaning the color red or the blood has on its own or in the context of Sister Ruth encountering the first desirable man she's seen in months. I could also point out the way the slant of that beam underlines the impact his leering or the way that shadow acts as a visual barrier to represent the social barrier between them. It might all be too much if not for the fact that no amount of symbolism can match the orgasmic glee with which Sister Ruth announces that a patient has nearly bled to death at her hands. The visuals don't overwhelm the material. On the contrary, they can barely keep up.

Red is used throughout the film in ways both obvious, the flowers Sister Philippa plants, and not-so-obvious, the red hair we know to be under Deborah Kerr's habit or the red circles that creep into Sister Ruth's eyes as she loses her grip on reality. At one point a red fog even fills the screen at a moment of unbridled passion (Hitch must have been taking notes for Vertigo.)

In its own way Narcissus is as color-coded as The Cook, Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, which, if you haven't seen, is a film where character's costumes change color back and forth within scenes depending on what's happening. Jack Cardiff's brilliant cinematography acts in Narcissus as another layer of storytelling, the same way voice over narration acts in a Billy Wilder film. It gets to the point where a change of clothes has an effect most films achieve with the firing of a gun.


This post is also part of the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience. By all means check out the other choices. Black Narcissus is without question one of the most visually stunning films ever made. Click here for my take on another brilliantly shot masterpiece from Powell and Pressburger, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.

Most Anticipated : August Update

Leaving the list this month is Get Low which is currently playing to moderately decent box office and moderately decent reviews on select screens. I still have to catch it since I refuse to miss anything with both Murray and Duvall, but I don't have any expectations beyond being as moderately entertained as everyone else.

Making the list this month is Paul written by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg. They have assembled a stellar cast of comedy stars including Kristen Wiig, Jane Lynch, Jason Bateman, and Seth Rogen for this tale of comic book geeks (obviously) encountering alien life. Paul is the third film for Frost and Pegg after the modern comedy milestone Shaun of the Dead and the slightly less brilliant but still hugely enjoyable Hot Fuzz. They are teaming up for the first time with director Greg Mottola, who is also on his third film after the modern comedy milestone Superbad and the slightly less brilliant but still hugely enjoyable Adventureland. Hopefully third time is the charm for everybody.

The Wonka / Fincher Connection

So I was watching that movie the other day. You know the one...

It's about a madman....

...who unleashes his master plan...

...sending the population into a panic.

The movie starred a young hero and his elderly companion

In pursuit of the madman's secrets the heroes endured a series of horrors.

The first one to go was the glutton...

...followed by the greedy
and the prideful.

The slothful met with a
particularly bizarre end.

At one point the young hero and his elderly partner break the rules...

...which nearly leads to their gruesome demise.

The madman's henchman sets the stage for the final confrontation...

...which involve the madman's attempts to provoke the young hero to anger.

The older partner nearly prevents it from happening...

...but the last piece of the grand plan falls into place.

Whatever movie it was it gave me nightmares.

Great Shots: Angels in America

"Oh wow, look. The magic of the theater." - Harper

The HBO production of Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that plays need to be opened up when adapted for the screen. This line of thinking goes that plays need to shed any traces of theatricality and embrace the expanded possibilities of the cinema. While it's true there is nothing worse than a stage-to-screen adaptation that looks like it merely plunked a camera down in the tenth row and left it at that (The Producers, I'm looking in your direction.) Mike Nichol's version of Angels challenges this idea by succeeding best when it remains the most theatrical, embracing long monologues, dramatic lighting changes, and soaring performances.

Take the shot of Mary Louis Parker above. The traditional Hollywood view is that this scene should be the first on the chopping block. Basically an extended monologue from the Mormon Mother come to life, it is stubbornly and unmistakably a piece of theater. But Nichols manages to make it riveting film because he takes advantage of the camera's ability to frame an image and focus the audience in ways impossible on a Broadway stage, delivering an elegant visual expression of Harper's plight that is as powerful as Kushner's poetry. 

Despite arriving largely in tact from the stage it is as cinematic as any shot Nichols ever staged of Benjamin Braddock:

When a shot like this clicks, you get an image strong enough to tell a character's whole story in miniature. Nichols gives us Harper the Pioneer. Like her Mormon ancestors she has traversed the country, and she will do it again by the story's end, setting out alone. When we see her last she will be over that rainbow obscured in the background (A rainbow that maybe functions as one more sly reference to The Wizard of Oz?)  

The most obvious take away from this image is to underline how much of a sham her marriage is by partnering her up with a fake version of Joe to compliment the fake husband she already has at home. On top of that, the children dummies recall her fake pregnancy from Part One and her connection to the dummy echoes her earlier statement that she imagined she might fall apart like wax. Nichol's framing of the shot allows him to bring home the point by showing how truly trapped she is by surrounding her with the whole fraud family at the same time the Mormon mother discusses the agonizing difficulty of change.

And, just for a second, Nichols catches her in a moment where she, like so many characters in the story, looks skyward for answers. 

This post is also part of the Hit Me With Your Best Shot series at The Film Experience. Go see what other shots were chosen from Angels in America for this event. I know I had a Hell of a time narrowing it down to one choice. 

Previous Entries in my Great Shots series:

The Royal Tenenbaums

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

There Will Be Blood

Review: The Kids Are All Right

Because Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right contains a married lesbian couple at its center it's going to be pegged as a controversial movie no matter what. The fact that it is not the least bit interested in pushing hot button issues or acting as propaganda for one viewpoint or another probably won't make a difference. There are people for whom simply acknowledging the existence of a committed gay relationship is enough to have them reaching for the picket signs, but this movie cannot be held responsible for their irritability when their heads are temporarily yanked from the sand.

No, the real subject of The Kids Are All Right is family in the tradition of such films as Terms of Endearment or Hannah and Her Sisters. More exactly Kids is about the way personalities wear over the long haul of a committed relationship and the way the family unit deals with the introduction of new psuedo-members in the form of previously unknown relatives.

5 Ways to Save M. Night Shyamalan

It's no fun to be M. Night Shymalan these days. His three previous films haven't just been disappointments, they have been the kind of megaton stink bombs that have the critics kicking the crap out of them Pesci-style before being buried in an unmarked grave in the desert.

Show Us What You Got M. Night

Now, this fourth of July The Last Airbender landed in theaters much the way King Kong landed on the pavement below the Empire State building. Passable box office aside, it is poised to join such landmarks as Catwoman and Battlefield Earth on the list of titles synonymous with unfathomable awfulness. Compassionate theaters would have the doors to Airbender blocked with police tape while cops dispersed any crowds gathered to gawk at the catastrophe, "Move along, folks. Move along. Nothing to see here."

So yeah, his name is mud. The trailer for the Devil has been causing peals of laughter when the title card "From the Mind of M. Night Shyamalan" appears backed by a portentous rumble on the soundtrack. One can't help but wonder how is he is still standing after a string of failure epic enough to finish off three careers. The answer is A) most of his flops have managed to eke out decent box office due to big openings before being destroyed by word of mouth, and B) until Airbender, M. Night Shyamalan was a brand that provoked, if not trust, certainly interest. Those days are over.

So now M. Night has expanded from underperforming with his own modest campfire tales to crashing a potential cash cow franchise for Disney. It is fair to assume that Mr. Shyamalan is down to his last strike. One more flop and he's directing original productions for Syfy (Oh my God, Sharktopus was a ghost the whole time. Twist!)

But before everyone makes Mr. Shyamalan walk the career plank we should pause a moment and consider that beneath that slag heap of mannerisms and bad habits there is a natural born filmmaker worth saving. Remember how excited everyone was for the young wonder-director who could create suspense just by pointing his camera? Newsweek wasn't far off when they declared him the next Spielberg. It's just that he's turned into a horrible alterna-Spielberg who won't stop making Hook over and over again.

So how can M. Night Shyamalan be saved? Let us consider the following routes to salvation:

Limit His Budget

This one is obvious. It's a well-worn rule that limitations force creativity, whereas unlimited options promote excess and sloppiness. Jaws is probably twice or three times as good because Spielberg could only use the shark for a fraction of the shots he wanted to. When Spielberg had free reign to create a full scale alien invasion we got the numbing overkill of War of the Worlds. The exceptions to this rule are numerous (big budgets haven't stunted Christopher Nolan's skills any) but as maxim's go it's a solid one.

All the most memorable moments of Shyamalan's career have been low-flame mood things that wouldn't be out of place at the Sundance Film Festival. Haley Joel's visit to the funeral in Sixth Sense or that blurry children's birthday tape in Signs. Signs flew right off the rails the instant Shyamalan tried to deploy some real effects. As soon as he gave us a clear look at the alien the air went out of the movie faster than you can say "Swing away." Multiply that times a thousand and you'll get the limp CGI Toon Town that is The Last Airbender.

Yes.

The trouble is, aside from Airbender, M. Night's films are already pretty modestly budgeted. (Another reason he still has a career) Happening for example, cost just under fifty million - relatively spare for a big Summer movie. But, since we're trying to jolt someone out of a rut here, I say cut all his budgets in half no matter what. Force him to get right to the heart of his story, no gilding the lily.

No. No. A Thousand Times, No.

Difficult Actors

M. Night Shyamalan's next film must star some combination of Sean Penn, Christian Bale, and Dustin Hoffman. It's simple - M. Night needs to be challenged and he's not going to get it casting sweethearts like Zooey Deschanel and Bryce Dallas Howard. He needs someone who has been around the block seven or eight times, someone who has just returned home from a jungle shoot with Werner Herzog and isn't about to put up with any bullshit. Let M. Night try to convince Mickey Rourke to use that monotone-and-blank-stare acting style he loves so much and see how far he gets.

"I've got an idea. How about I say it however the hell I want."

Of course, Mr. Shyamalan also needs to be challenged before he gets to the set at all ...

Hire a Co-Writer

Really can't underline this one enough. If M. Night has Hitchcock's eye for suspense he also knicked George Lucas's ear for dialogue. The deeper he gets into his career the more his characters sound like lobotomized exposition delivery machines. It makes the earnest clunkiness of a James Cameron sound like borderline Mamet. A sensible co-writer could infuse Shyamalan's high concept with a little humanity, and nix all the stuff that doesn't pass the laugh test.

More to the point, it would get M. Night out of the mindset where he is an unassailable genius above explaining himself every time the suits question one of his masterstrokes. Word is that Shyamalan ignored all kinds of good advice about what an unfilmable shambles his Lady in the Water script was. One can get away with that kind of behavior when you are directing Magnificent Ambersons and your last film was Citizen Kane. When your last film was The Village and your making a story about a guy named Cleveland Heep protecting a "narf" from an angry "scrunt", you just come off as a lunatic.

"M. Night...if we could discuss these, uh... scrunts for a moment."

A co-writer would force M. Night to acknowledge that he has weaknesses as an artist and free him up to focus on his strengths. If he's too proud to hire a co-writer, he should at minimum be forced to explain his script ideas to a class of unruly third graders. If they don't get it, he has to change it. That would have put a stop to all that Happening killer tree business right quick.

And while we're on the subject of killer trees...

No Morals Allowed

Not morals in the ethical, good or bad sense. I mean no morals in the Aesop's Fables kind of way. Nothing sinks one of his flicks quicker than when M. Night decides he's going to lay some wisdom on us. His best two films, Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, have no really deep meaning to them, or at least none that I can spot. Maybe "Ghosts are people too." or "It's not all roses being a superhero.", but anything more than that and you're on your own because M. Night is just here to entertain.

Unfortunately, somewhere during the writing of Signs M. Night decided he was more than a gifted craftsmen. He was now also a enlightened spiritual leader. So he set about ruining what should have been a run of solid genre flicks by larding them up with a lot of grand, plodding Messages with a capital M.

The messages of M. Night Shyamalan summarized:

The Village - Society is wicked and violent so the best thing to do is form an alternate society based on lies where everyone talks like ten year olds playing pilgrims, although maybe penicillin wasn't so wicked after all.

The Happening - Don't abuse nature because it will rise up and destroy you. Even if nature has to use methods that don't make sense at all, that won't stop nature. That is how badass nature is.

Lady in the Water - Critics can just go straight to hell. They are bitter douchebags who hate it when geniuses like M. Night Shyamalan (represented symbolically in the movie by M. Night Shyamalan) try to make the world a better place with their awesome writing, which is awesome.

Signs - You should have faith in God even though he does awful things like kill your wife with a truck because, if you look closely at all the awful things, they are just proof that God has a super plan to look out for you, even though proof is the opposite of faith but never mind. Then when aliens attack, all the subtle clues God hid for you will make sense and decode into important messages like, "Whomp the aliens with a baseball bat." or "Aliens hate water." You should continue having faith in God even though this clearly makes him a terrible person who can't just come right out and say, "Spray the aliens with the garden hose", but instead pulls elaborate pranks involving squishing your wife and giving your son asthma to reveal his secret message - a message which further proves that God could have polished off the aliens himself with some drizzle, if only he didn't have such a sick sense of humor.

The only message I really get from these films is that his time would have been better spent on:

Unbreakable 2

Normally, I am squarely opposed to unnecessary sequels, but Unbreakable was a film that felt like it stopped midstream, and since it represents the last fully successful artistic endeavor of Mr. Shyamalan's career I suggest he return to it to regroup and find his bearings.

Besides, what are the odds Unbreakable 2 would have been worse than any of his last four films?