Day: February 9, 2013

I don’t know why I’ve had so much trouble posting a review of Steven Soderbergh‘s Side Effects except to say that while I knew I was watching an efficient thriller with unexpected twists and turns, it didn’t get me in the gut. It didn’t turn me on as much as placate me in the way that all Soderbergh films do because they’re always so smart and disciplined and well crafted. But the whole time I was going “hmm, interesting” or “yeah, nicely done” more than “oh, super-cool…I really love this.”

My second problem with reviewing Side Effects in a timely way is that I saw it before Sundance/Santa Barbara, and by the time the embargo was up I had moved on to other places and currents and I had trouble restarting. The initial mojo had left the room. I need to review films fairly quickly…tap, tap, tap…throw it out there. I tried to get it up two or three times and it wouldn’t happen.

The third problem is that it’s hard to review Side Effects without spoiling the plot turns. It’s a bit like Psycho in that you start out with a Janet Leigh-like character (i.e., Rooney Mara‘s)…an attractive woman who’s flawed but basically sort-of sympathetic. And then things turn suddenly and then your allegiances shift over to…well, not a Tony Perkins-like character but a basically good guy (i.e., Jude Law‘s) who’s either made a serious mistake or has been played…and then some more twists occur. I really can’t figure how to dive into this without saying anything.

Mara’s Emily Taylor has a mild-mannered husband (Channing Tatum) just getting out of prison term for insider trading and is therefore a woman with reason to feel at least semi-hopeful about things, but she’s also a little glum and disconnected and not into sex. So she goes to see Law’s Dr. Jonathan Banks, a psychiatrist who prescribes a new medication that he’s getting paid to dispense. This brings Emily back sexually but makes her act…well, oddly in other ways. Or maybe she was always odd. That’s as far as a I can go with this, I think. Things take a sudden turn and before you know it Law is in serious trouble, and then…

I don’t what else to say except there’s some nice lesbo action in the third act. Jesus, I’m dropping the ball here. I have to stop.

Side Effects is a very good film (I actually wouldn’t mind seeing it again) but it’s more of a head-trip thriller than anything else. It has a post-2008 recession vibe, or…maybe I really mean an ’09 or ’10 vibe. It has the same general attitude as The Girlfriend Experience, in a sense, and the last few Sodies for that matter — Magic Mike, Contagion, even Haywire. Quiet ruthlessness, rhymes and reasons on hold, walls closing in, people finagling each other, sidestepping rules or making up their own. A very chilly realm.

On 2.6 I expressed disappointment that Peter Landesman‘s Parkland, a currently-shooting drama about the killing of President John F. Kennedy on 11.22.63, will not strictly focus on the activities at Dallas’s Parkland hospital (which the title obviousiy implies) but will involve various locales and perspectives. But then I was sent a draft of Landesman’s script. I finished it last night, and I have to say it’s a sturdy, convincing, well-structured effort.

There’s no telling how the film itself will turn out. There are probably 50 ways Landesman can screw things up and he’s a genius if he can think of 35 of them, but I know authentic-sounding dialogue and good screenwriting architecture and when scenes run just the right length, and there’s no question that on paper at least Parkland is a taut, gripping recreation of a dark and horrific day. It smells like reality.

Dark and Horrific Day is a more truthful title than Parkland as Landesman’s script follows four story lines with four separate clusters of characters in a host of Dallas locations. (The film has been lensing in Austin but will go to Dallas for some pickups, or so I’ve read.)

Roughly half of the script deals with the Parkland gang including Dr. Jim Carrico (Zac Efron), Dr. Malcolm Perry (Colin Hanks), Dr. Jerry Gustaffson and Nurse Doris Mae Nelson (Marcia Gay Harden), who attended to the mortally wounded JFK as well as his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, on 11.24. Another Parkland character is Father Huber (Jackie Earl Haley), who administered last rights to the President.

The other half is split between three groups. About 25% or 30% focuses on Abraham Zapruder (Paul Giamatti), the guy who took the famous 8mm color footage of JFK’s murder, and all the people who dealt with him that day — a couple of film processing guys, Dallas Morning News editor Harry McCormick, FBI agent Forrest Sorrels (Billy Bob Thornton), Life editor Richard Stolley. Maybe 15% deals with Lee Oswald (Jeremy Strong), his older brother Robert (James Badge Dale) and their loony-tune mother, Marguerite Oswald (Jacki Weaver). And 5% or 10% focuses on two FBI agents — Gordon Shanklin and James Hosty (Ron Livingston) — who destroyed letters and other paper documents concerning Oswald and his wife Marina.

Largely based on Vincent Bugliosi‘s “Reclaiming History,” Parkland is definitely an “Oswald acted alone” movie.

If you agree with Howard Hawks‘ definition of a good film containing “three great scenes and no bad ones,” then Parkland will be a good film because it has several very…well, perhaps not necessarily “great” but very strong scenes.

A strong scene is a back-and-forth that makes you sit up in your seat and go “wow, that was something” or “whoa, intense stuff.” It’s a moment that you know you’ll remember. There are at least three such scenes at Parkland hospital (Carrico and Perry’s attempts to save Kennedy’s life inside trauma room #1, angry FBI and Secret Service guys removing JFK’s casket in defiance of Dallas police officials wanting to perform an autopsy, Oswald being wheeled into Parkland and reactions of staffers), at least two or three scenes with Zapruder, two exchanges at Dallas police headquarters involving Robert Oswald (one with Lee, another with a police officer), a scene acquainting us with Marguerite Oswald’s dementia, a making-room-for-the-casket scene on Air Force One, and a burial-of-Oswald scene at the very end. What is that, ten?

Some of the descriptions of JFK’s wounds and certain procedures followed in the trauma room indicate that Parkland will be fairly bloody and graphic here and there. Not for the squeamish unless, of course, editing intercedes.

Parkland will come out sometime around the 50th anniversary of JFK’s murder.

In a rant about Rex Reed‘s mean-spirited remarks about Melissa McCarthy‘s weight in his review of Identity Thief, Deadline‘s Michael Fleming sounds wise and perceptive for the most part, but also in basic denial by failing to acknowledge a difference between garden-variety corpulence and morbid, health-threatening obesity, which is a national pestilence as well as a dark metaphor.

Wise and perceptive: “I don’t care who the girl is, it hurts to be insulted about your weight, or to be defined by it. If I was McCarthy’s husband, brother, father or even her agent and I saw Reed, I’d have to fight off the temptation to open a can of whup-ass on him. I’d hope that I would be smart enough to swallow that urge and instead see Reed for what he is: a tired, cranky old critic who in this case lost his basic sense of compassion. He really ought to try rising above superficial cruelty and recognize what it takes for a woman like Melissa McCarthy to overcome to become a singular talent. If the movie sucks, fine, go to town, but c’mon Rex.”

Basic denial: “I don’t know if [Reed] has kids, but I have two daughters. It sensitizes you to many things, including the temptation to obsess about being rail thin. All you want for your girls is that they feel comfortable in their own skin, and McCarthy is a shining example of that. Reed obviously doesn’t even consider that McCarthy is breaking boundaries and making it okay for girls all over to feel good about themselves even if, when they look in the mirror, they don’t see a waif-like Victoria’s Secret model staring back.”

Fleming presumably understands that no fair-minded person would ever slam McCarthy for being simply overweight or corpulent or rotund or whatever term you want to use for someone who has girth. I know I have a reputation for being a fat-person antagonist but I’ve never had the slightest issue with acceptable, no-big-deal fat in the vein of Charles Laughton or Peter Ustinov or John Candy in Only The Lonely or Lou Costello or Oliver Hardy in the 1920s and ’30s. I agree that the mindset among God knows how many tens of millions of women that you have to be skinny thin is neurotic and oppressive, but Fleming knows perfectly well that, Reed’s cruelty aside, McCarthy’s issue is not her failure to be thin as a reed but her being much more than just fat. Some people are simply bulky — it’s just the way they’re built — but McCarthy’s size is way over the top. She’s clearly indulging in a way that’s not going to be good for her in the long run.

Is Fleming saying that all the people who have voiced fears or suspicions that Gov. Chris Christie will probably face serious health issues down the road unless he loses some weight…is he saying such talk is cruel and heartless and without merit? I doubt that. It’s obvious that McCarthy is in the same boat as Christie, and her proclaiming that she’s comfortable with being dangerously overweight is nothing to applaud or be proud of. On one level she’s saying that she accepts herself and that, I suppose, is temporarily fine as far as her present-tense attitude is concerned, but on another level she’s saying to millions of morbidly obese women out there that everything’s fine, that they should embrace their neuroses and keep eating crap and make themselves as super-sized as they want because they’re beautiful people inside and that’s what matters. Which is true on one level — who a person is spiritually and emotionally and creatively is the key thing. In this sense I worship Guillermo del Toro. And I’ve always admired Orson Welles.

But obesity is a national disease that has gotten worse and worse over the last two or three decades. Corporate crap food + kids spending all their time online and playing video games and watching the tube and not exercising + the situation as conveyed in Food, Inc is not a rumor. These are facts. Except for upscale urban healthies (i.e., people with a semblance of discipline who care about their bodies and exercise now and then) we’ve become a nation of sea lions. And Fleming knows this. And he should know that applauding McCarthy as a “shining example” of positive self-acceptance is not the right way to put it.

Yes, it makes perfect sense that Identity Thief, by most accounts a landmark stinker (25% Rotten Tomatoes, 37% Metacritic), is expected to earn $35 million (or $10 million more than projected) by Sunday night, even with Nemo putting a significant dent in attendance in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and (to a lesser extent) New York City

If people want to see something, you can’t stop ’em. They don’t give a shit about anything. They just want to see it.

And the people who wanted to see this reportedly agonizing comedy (which I might see today or tomorrow if Jason Bateman or one of his pallies slips me a pass…sorry) are Bridesmaids fans (particularly Melissa McCarthy fans) who don’t read or care about reviews. Which accounts for…what, 90% of the moviegoing public? And no, there wasn’t any kind of rally-round-McCarthy sympathy factor over the Rex Reed hippo review because, as I just said, 90% of the public doesn’t read reviews or the review-aggregate sites. They’re in their own realm and off the grid.

Same principle apples in the case of a really well-reviewed movie that doesn’t look right for whatever reason. They look at the ads and decide if it has what they want and if they sense that it doesn’t, game over. They won’t go with a gun pointed at their heads. They’re incredibly thick and stubborn. The girly-girls refused to see Silver Linings Playbook (which is now at $84 milllon) for weeks and weeks until finally award-season hoopla turned them around, but before that happened they were adamant. Not for us!

I realize, yes, that millions wanted something to go to last night, and Identity Thief was the only new wide-release comedy out there, and most people want to kick back and enjoy themselves on a Friday night. I get it. I get it. But they’re still slow and thick and obstinate.

Steven Soderbergh‘s Side Effects — a much, much better film than Identity Thief — pretty much tanked. Yesterday it made $2,800,000 on 2600 screens, or about $1075 per screen. Maybe $8.5 or $9 million by Sunday night. Over and out and on to Netflix.