“Gentlemen, you have just seen me do a disgusting thing…but you’ll always remember what I just did. If no one remembers your brand, you’re not going to sell any soap.” I’ve seen The Hucksters exactly once, and honestly? I don’t remember a thing about the plot or any lines spoken by Clark Gable or Deborah Kerr or Ava Gardner…nothing. But I’ve never forgotten that glob of spit.
“Most good scenes are rarely about what the subject matter is,” screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown, Shampoo, The Last Detail) once said. “You soon see the power of dealing obliquely or elliptically with situations, because most people [in real life] rarely confront things head-on.”
The finest, most realistic and effective screenplays, in other words, are mostly about the things that are not said. And when all the things that are not said and that finally need to be said are finally said…that’s the great catharsis of the movie.
The absence of this, to me, is what’s terribly, agonizingly wrong with Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert‘s Everything Everywhere All At Once, which I’ve been avoiding for months but which I finally sat through last night.
It took me three and a half hours to get through this curiously successful A24 release. Because I needed breathers and time-outs. I needed air. I needed to talk things out with a friend who also had difficulty sitting through it but finally got there after three attempts. But I finally made it to the end, and I have to say that despite my anguish I absolutely loved the ending, or more precisely the last two lines. (I’ll explain in a minute.)
But my head had been aching from all that hammering, on-the-nose exposition, and enduring this gave me great pain. I don’t want to imagine Robert Towne’s response.
All those parallel universes and all that verse-jumping. The constant milking of the Matrix-like idea that there are multi-dimensional hallucinatory realms above, beyond and within our day-to-day regimens and banalities, and how the multiverse is being annoyingly threatened (here we go) by Stephanie Hsu‘s Jobu Tupaki, who “experiences all universes at once and can verse-jump and manipulate matter at will”, etc. And whose “godlike power has created a black hole-like ‘everything bagel’ that can potentially destroy the multiverse”…my head was splitting.
The pornographic overuse of martial-arts battles. Jamie Lee Curtis‘s over-acting as the IRS agent, and the more-more-more of it all, which made it feel all the more synthetic and gimmicky.
There are two necessary stages in good writing. The first stage is turning the spigots on — you have to turn them on and let it all pour out. But once you’ve written it all down, you have to prune the unnecessary stuff (blather, repetitions, darlings) and maybe do a little reshaping.
Kwan and Scheinert’s script certainly began with the spigots, but they didn’t seem to edit much after the first draft or two.
But I love the very last bit, which uses one of my favorite screenwriting practices — refrain. During the first IRS meeting Curtis notices that Michele Yeoh‘s Evelyn Quan Wang, the co-owner of a laundromat, is seemingly day-dreaming and probably not focusing on the matters at hand. Yeoh’s “day-dreaming”, of course, is the doorway to all the trippy imaginative stuff, which is what the film is visually about.
During the second and final IRS meeting, Curtis again asks Yeoh if she’s paying attention. Yeoh gently smiles and says, “I’m sorry…did you say something?” or words to that effect. Perfect.
The film’s $100.5 million gross thus far and especially the enthusiastic Zoomer-Millennial response pretty much seals the deal that Everything Everywhere All At Once will be Best Picture-nominated. But there’s no way in hell it’ll make any serious headway in that regard. No. Way. In. Hell.
Yesterday it was hot all across the Southwest, Los Angeles included. Hot and somewhat humid. I showered quickly around 5 pm, and despite the air-conditioned living room climate I had to wait and wait for my hair to dry. I needed a drive on the rumblehog, I decided. I went downstairs, turned the ignition key, revved the engine. I then decided on the spur that it was too hot to wear headgear. So I took off with my white helmet under the seat….”fuck it.”
With my faintly damp hair getting whipped around as I motored north through quiet, tree-lined streets, it was one of the most glorious sensations I’ve felt in months.
The angel on my right shoulder was saying “okay, you’ve had your fun, now pull over and put the helmet on.” But the devil on my left shoulder said, “No, don’t…this is way too pleasurable, let’s keep going.” Block after block, slowly cruising, my eyes peeled for the bulls. I became braver and braver. I crossed La Cienega and ducked into another side street. I was ecstatic about the wind fluttering through my Prague follicles; the feeling of coolness and the scent of this and that…absolute heaven.
After a while I began to think that getting a ticket might not be so bad. Well, it would but I was so delighted to re-experience a portion of what it was like to be 16.
It used to be okay to ride around without a helmet. California’s mandatory helmet law kicked in on 1.1.92. Warren Beatty rides his Triumph without one in Shampoo.
A white guy playing a Cuban revolutionary? Muy bueno! And for two reasons: (1) Precisely because casting directors aren’t allowed to cast Anglos as Latinos because it’s ethnically incorrect — HE admires the impudence. (2) Maybe Franco will give a great performance?
I was equally down with Benicio del Toro’s Che Guevara in Steven Soderbergh’s Che aswellas John Vernon’s portrayal of “Rico Parra,” a senior Castro loyalist, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Topaz (‘69).
I also love AlecGuinness’s portrayal of PrinceFeisal.
I’m very sorry for poor Anne Heche and all those who are reeling and breathless after today’s bizarrecar–crashinferno in Mar Vista. Self-destruction comes in all sizes, shapes and colors. Ghastly.
Last night I re-watched Roger Donaldson‘s Thirteen Days, a generally absorbing drama about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I hadn’t seen this New Line release since it opened in 2000. By any fair standard it’s well done, fairly gripping, decently acted, tightly edited. I didn’t miss a line or a plot turn.
Based on “The Kennedy Tapes” and told from the perspective of President John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood), Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (Steven Culp) and appointments secretary Kenny O’Donnell (Kevin Costner), David Self‘s screenplay covers all of the particulars, and there are many scenes that I found riveting.
My favorite episode follows a low-altitude photo reconnaissance mission over Cuba by Navy pilot William Ecker (Christopher Lawford) and another fighter jock. Prior to leaving Ecker is ordered by O’Donnell to not get shot down, as such an event would force JFK to respond militarily, which would lead to war. Ecker understands what O’Donnell is saying and agrees to play the game.
He flies and snaps photos over Cuba and is strafed all to hell by Russian and Cuban bullets. Back at a U.S. air base, Ecker insists that the holes in the wings were caused by flying sparrows. When questioned by Air Force General Curtis LeMay (Kevin Conway) about whether he was fired upon, Ecker says “it was a cakewalk, sir.”
Costner was a senior producer, and he used that leverage to amplify O’Donnell’s insignificant role during this complex political drama into that of a senior player, so he’d have a meatier role to play. (Or something like that.)
After seeing the film, Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara (very well played, incidentally, by Dylan Baker) said that O’Donnell “didn’t have any role whatsoever in the missile crisis…he was a political appointments secretary to the President…that’s absurd.”
The duties performed by O’Donnell in the film, McNamara said, were closer to the role Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen played during the actual crisis. McNamara: “It was not O’Donnell who pulled us all together…it was Sorensen.”
The only thing that really doesn’t work are the knowing or haunted or alarmed “looks” that the principal sympathetic players give each other. (And which are performed to help the chumps in the audience understand the concerns that these characters had at various junctures.) In actuality nobody gave anyone a “look” about anything during this crisis, trust me, because that would have conveyed emotional distress or vulnerability to any antagonist or disloyal participant in the room who happened to notice.
Greenwood is a particular problem in this regard because all he does for the most part is roll his eyes and glare daggers and sweat bullets when the notion of military conflict of any kind is discussed. You’re watching him go through the paces and you can’t help but think “this isn’t working…Greenwood just can’t bring it.”
The poor guy does a reasonably good job of handling JFK’s dialogue, so to speak, but he’s doomed by the fact that he’s unable to exude even a fraction of Kennedy’s preternatural cool and charisma — Greenwood is a good Canadian actor as far as it goes but JFK was a glam political superstar, and Greenwood just doesn’t have it.
Plus his JFK wig is way out of whack. How the makeup and hair people blew it this badly is astonishing. We all know what Kennedy’s thick auburn hair looked like with the brushed upsweep, and the Greenwood thatch doesn’t even resemble it. It’s like “what were they thinking?”
I somehow hadn’t paid attention to a radical new trailer that first appeared five or six weeks ago. I’ve only just watched it. The visual scheme is nothing if not eccentric (Invaders From Mars on mescaline, and then re-imagined by Peter Fonda‘s character in The Trip), but I can’t help wondering why the haunting Invaders From Mars score, credited for decades to Raoul Kraushar but actually composed by Mort Glickman, wasn’t used.
The new trailer is fine, or certainly harmless. I happen to be a bigger fan of the old ’53 trailer, which has also been restored.
My last piece about Ignite’s Invaders From Mars 4K Bluray appeared just over four months ago (3.31). The deluxe disc (stacked with extras) pops on 9.26.
