18 JANUARY, 2001: I meant to review the big Christmas blockbusters weeks ago (you know, around Christmas?) but shit, I’ve been busy and tired and frankly none of them were much of anything to get worked up over.
My big Christmas trioka consists of Nancy Meyers’ mindless romantic comedy “What Women Want”, Robert Zemekis’s somewhat interesting but ultimately aimless “Cast Away”, and Brett Ratner’s likable and highly forgettable “The Family Man”. “What Women Want” and “Cast Away” have both been runaway hits for the past few weeks; “The Family Man” is the best of the three, so it is of course a box-office disappointment.
“What Women Want” stars Mel Gibson, proving for the second time this year (after “The Patriot”) that he needs to get a better gauge of which movies are worth putting his best performances into. His performances in both films are as good as he’s ever been; both films could have used a lot of work in a lot of other places. Here he plays a sexist pig (but, you know, a movie star in a big Hollywood movie sexist pig) who is passed over for a big promotion at his ad agency when his boss (Alan Alda-RETIRE!) brings in a tough woman exec (Helen Hunt might be in every third movie this year, but there’s worse things to look at on a big movie screen. Alan Alda, for example). In the process of some very convoluted doings with the women’s products he should be selling, he gets knocked out and when he wakes up he can hear women’s thoughts (such insightful nuggets as “Hey, lighten up on the aftershave there, buddy!” HA!) and wacky complications ensue, and…
Oh, fuggit. This whole thing could’ve worked if it weren’t for the fact that Nancy Meyers couldn’t direct Shannen Doherty into a traffic light at 3am on her way home from the Viper Room. The movie is way too fucking long at over two hours (romantic comedy! Pick up the pace!) and maybe, just MAYBE, it should’ve occurred to somebody that the whole subplot about the suicidal girl at the office who he tries to save was not only a big waste of time, but might be MARGINALLY out of tone with the rest of the light, frothy romantic comedy-type goings-on. And speaking of wastes of time—did somebody forget to send Meyers the memo about little music video sequences going out with the 80’s? In the middle of a movie that is, as I believe I put so eloquently, “way too fucking long at over two hours”, Meyers stops the whole show for a scene where Gibson is taking his teenage daughter out shopping for prom dresses and we get three minutes of her showing him dresses and him mugging to the sultry sounds of Christina Aguilera’s “What A Girl Wants” (I’m not making this up). At one point, Gibson holds up A SIGN that says “HOW MUCH?” (I swear to Christ I’m not making this up). The whole damn sequence feels like the projectionist has a remote in the booth and decided to switch over to the upteenth showing of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” on Comedy Central.
And speaking of ridiculous musical moments, there’s a scene early in the film when Gibson is bombed and needing an injection of testosterone, so what does he do? Watch “SportsCenter”? Pop “Cool Hand Luke” into the VCR? Get on the Internet and look at some porno? Nope. He puts on a Sinatra record, which he sings along with and (I SWEAR TO GOD!) dances with a coat rack. This isn’t just a woman’s idea of what men do when they’re alone to feel manly; it’s a clueless, mentally challenged woman’s idea of what men do when they’re alone to feel manly. Is it a nice sequence? Sure, in and of itself. Kinda charming, and Gibson can dance. Does it fit in the movie? Uh, no. It is characteristic of Gibson’s chauvinist asshole? Absolutely not.
Nobody apparently cares, though, since everybody seems to love this piffle of a flick and it’s made more money than most European nations. So has “Cast Away”, which is the most frustrating case of 2/3 of a great movie since “Cruel Intentions” a couple years ago.
In the process of reviewing it, I’m going to give away the entire plot of “Cast Away”, and I don’t feel the least bit bad about it. The movie has been subjected to one of the most ridiculously overdone advertising campaigns I’ve ever seen, headed up by a trailer which showed me so much of the movie that I wanted to get up and run out of the theatre. Nobody apparently cares if you know the entire movie going in, least of all asshole director Robert Zemekis (more on him later), so if they don’t wanna keep anything from you, I don’t either. Here goes:
Tom Hanks plays a FedEx efficiency expert whose life runs by the clock and who has to plan time with his girlfriend (Helen Hunt, again) by breaking out their planners (these opening scenes are very well-done and effectively paced compared the isolation and quiet of what’s to follow). On Christmas, he has to fly out to Malaysia or somewhere, and his plane crashes into the ocean (another superb sequence, frighteningly real) and he washes up on the shore of a discarded desert isle (with Gilligaaaaan… sorry). Once he realizes he’s stuck and he’s alone, he has to make do, and develops the best life he can, and so forth. For the record, this is where the trailers should have stopped. Nothing past this point in the movie should have been seen by any of us. Movie would’ve been ten times better, for me, as an educated viewer. Anyway…
Four years pass, and one day two walls of a Port-a-Potty wash up on the shore and he gets the idea to use them as a sail and try and raft the fuck outta there. It works, and he is discovered at sea (another terrific scene, which is nice, because from here on out the movie goes to shit). After a convenient “five weeks later” title (what happened in that five weeks? Anyone? Class? Bueller?), he gets a heroes welcome from FedEx and has to adjust to all the changes that have happened since he’s been gone, including Hunt’s new marriage and baby. They have a few laughs and would clearly like to hook back up, but it’s too late, and she’s got responsibilities, and he has to get on with his life. And then the really shitty final sequence, which I’ll get back to in a moment.
Here’s what’s wrong with “Cast Away”, besides that you see the whole movie in the trailer:
-Music. Zemekis makes the very brave decision to use no music for the first two acts of the film, letting us make our own assumptions about Hanks in the opening and increasing the isolation on the island. It is amazingly effective. Then, during his journey home, he starts using music, and it’s another of those phony, Hollywood, twinkly bullshit scores by Alan Silvestri, who should frankly be dragged into a parking lot by Thomas Newman and Danny Elfman, who could then beat the shit out of him with bats and chains and never let him fuck up another movie with his bad music. The rest of the movie is wrecked by Silvestri’s horrid song stylings. Uck.
-I’m all for not having Hanks say bad expositional dialogue out loud for no reason, and bringing the Wilson volleyball character in is a smart idea. But before that, we have no explanation for some of his moves, especially why it takes him so goddamn long to open up the FedEx packages that washed up on the shore with him.
-When he finally does, he opens them all except for one package, which has the stupid little angel wings emblem thing on it. We saw a package with that emblem leave a farmhouse/barn at the beginning of the movie. We don’t know what’s in it. Neither does Hanks. But you know what he does? He doesn’t open that one package. The whole four years. Do they give us a reason? Nope. When he leaves, you know what he does? Ties the goddamn thing to the raft and takes it with him (who wrote this shit?). And then, in the movie’s final sequence, he goes to the farmhouse, leaves it there with a note about how this package “saved my life” (come again?), then on the road leaving, he runs into the moderately hot girl who sent it, they chit-chat, she drives off, he sees the angel emblem thingy on her truck, end of movie. WHAT? Not only do they not tell us why he doesn’t open it, or why he takes it back with him, but then they don’t fucking tell us what was in the goddamn thing! I promise this isn’t just me being dense. I’ve asked other people who’ve seen the movie. Nobody can explain it to me. Yet everybody just keeps going to the theatre, in droves, and I guess everybody’s so worried that they’re a schmuck and people will think they didn’t “get it” that nobody will tell Zemekis that he’s guilty of sloppy, lazy stortytelling.
Speaking of Zemekis, you would think that any director worth two shits would be all pissed off that the jagoffs in marketing are giving away his whole movie in the trailers—and they really do, I promise. I tried to imagine how much more effective the sight of the thin, scraggly Hanks would have been if I’d never seen it before. And I knew he was gonna get off the island (it’s a Hollywood movie), but I wouldn’t have known that he sailed off himself if the trailer hadn’t showed me. Anyway, I digress. Listen to what Zemekis said recently about advertising for films:
"We know from studying the marketing of movies, people really want to know exactly every thing that they are going to see before they go see the movie. It's just one of those things. To me, being a movie lover and film student and a film scholar and a director, I don't. What I relate it to is McDonald's. The reason McDonald's is a tremendous success is that you don't have any surprises. You know exactly what it is going to taste like. Everybody knows the menu."
Go fuck yourself, Zemekis, you elitist prick. You know how that comes off to me? “Well, I’m a real movie lover, I’m an intellectual, but everybody who goes to movies instead of making them must be a mouth-breathing dullard, so I’ll just have to show you fuckin’ idiots the whole movie to get you to see it.” And comparing movies to Big Macs? What kinda shit is that? McDonald’s is commerce, asshole. Movies are an art. Well, they are to some directors.
The worst part, of course, about this whole argument is that the grosses for “Cast Away” seem to have proven Zemekis right, and all the lemmings went to see it knowing exactly what they’d see. But I say they would’ve been just as high if we’d just gotten the original teaser trailer (ending with Hanks, alone on the island, yelling “HELLO?”). Hanks, director of a “Gump”, on an island. It still woulda killed. And some of us might not’ve left so pissed off.
Conversely, there was nothing to get pissed off about in “The Family Man”, Brett Ratner’s “It’s A Wonderful Life”-style family comedy, which is warm and nice and absolutely insubstantial. Nicolas Cage plays an asshole executive who mentions something to Don Cheadle (who should, for my money, be in every single movie) about having everything he needs. Cheadle’s an angel or something, though, and Cage wakes up the next morning beside his college sweetheart (the wonderful Tea Leoni), with two kids and a dog and the life he turned down all those years ago.
I’m not exaggerating about the movie being lightweight; I saw it a month ago and I can honestly barely remember it (I suppose it would be professional of me to get around to writing these things a little quicker). What I do recall is the Cage was spot-on, Cheadle wasn’t in it nearly enough, and the show really belonged to Leoni. She looks fabulous, is a convincing mom, and continues to be one of the most purely interesting actresses around. From the first time I spotted her, in “Bad Boys”, her raspy voice and effortless sexiness stuck out; she has a way of putting a spin on even the most banal dialogue and giving it life. The movie lives and breathes around her. She should work more.
So that’s what I saw around Christmas, because the smart movies were only in New York and LA and they’re trickling down slowly. I’ll have a Year-End Wrap-Up soon. Maybe early February? Can we get everything here by then?