I don’t know why I even bother seeing De Palma films any more. They’re not just bad; they’re offensively bad. As I mentioned a while back, Scarlett Johansson has a very limited range – if she’s pushed to do anything beside acting dumb, it’s really more than she can handle. This pushes her pretty well out of that range. Even beyond the lousy acting, the script is horrible – it goes from soporifically boring and unengaging for the first two acts to being just ludicrously absurd by the end. That final showdown is just profoundly over the top and stupid. De Palma should probably just stop making movies.

While my hostility to Ridley Scott continues unabated, my fondness for Tony Scott continues to grow. Anyone who, when fishing around for someone to write up a long-lingering biopic, comes across the screenplay for Southland Tales and says “That’s the guy for me” is all right in my book. Scott’s mid-career ADHD is in full bloom in this film, as is his fascination with on-screen text (also seen in Man on Fire). Kelly’s screenplay is impressively odd – needlessly complicated and convoluted – but was apparently stranger (I’ve heard mention of the entire cast of 90210 serving as a Greek chorus in the original script). The DVD features two commentary tracks featuring Scott and Kelly, which I intend to go back and listen to when I get the chance. It probably doesn’t bode well for Kelly that critics are so hostile to his weirdly pop-culture soaked scripts (and perhaps explains the very normal-sounding upcoming adaptation of The Box).

Another pointless remake. I guess there’s a significant portion of the American viewing audience who won’t watch something with subtitles, and they might have missed out on the very well-written Nine Queens so a nearly scene-for-scene remake will be heartily enjoyed by them. It’s hard to say if this is any better or worse than the source material – I think they’re pretty comparable, but I question the casting of John C. Reilly. Diego Luna, on the other hand, was excellent. I’ve managed to avoid all of the highly praised films he’s been in (as well as the less critic-friendly ones like Vampires: Los Muertos), but I should probably track down a couple of them.

According to Wikipedia, there are seven versions of Blade Runner. This was the 7th – Ridley Scott’s “Final Cut” which is, unless you check the notes, very hard to differentiate from the previous released “Director’s Cut” (which was, despite the name, not cut by Scott). I know I’ve seen the “Director’s Cut” before, but, trapped in a theatre and unable to multitask, I don’t think I ever realized how lethargic the film is without the voiceovers. There’s virtually no dialogue in the film and no real insight into the investigation (so that it seems Deckard stumbles onto the replicants periodically). I feel kind of bad siding with the studio executives instead of the director, but then I remember that the director is Ridley Scott.

So, like I said in the last post, why remake something like The Fog? It may not be my favourite Carpenter film, but it’s quite good and any shortcomings it has are pretty central to the premise itself (i.e., leprous ghost pirates who travel via fog bank). It’s not as though there was a particularly bad performance that might be mitigated with a different actor in the role. The budget on the original was good enough that the execution of the script left nothing to be desired. There’s pretty much no room for improvement. I mean, sure, there’s the obvious motive of wanting to make some money without having to come up with an original idea, but that’s just offencive.

All that aside, the film has some significant problems in casting. The script is pretty clearly written for people at least ten years older than the actors portraying them, which creates far more instances of cognitive dissonance than I think the filmmakers probably intended.

I know I should be morally opposed to the movie on the grounds that the first hour is a pretty blatant (and apparently legal actionable) rip-off of Clonus: The Parts Terror, but, while there are certainly legal and ethical problems, I’m sort of all right with it, aesthetically. One of my long-standing complaints with remakes is the tendency to remake good movies, which seems like a complete waste of time. New versions of Rollerball, Westworld, or Logan’s Run aren’t going to be any better than the 70’s versions – they’ll just be louder and (probably) stupider. Something like Clonus though, which had a pretty decent core concept, kind of deserves to be made with a decent budget that would allow for a proper execution. Now, I’m not actually saying The Island is a better movie, but it doesn’t really fall apart until they deviate from the Clonus script. The first hour or so is actually pretty good and kind of feels like what Clonus could have been.

After the first hour, things fall apart pretty significantly. Though, I was very pleased that our in-movie conversation theorizing that clone-Ewan had been given an American accent to differentiate him from the Scottish accented non-clone-Ewan once he was introduced turned out to be accurate. Also, Scarlett Johansson is very good at “acting” stupid and confused.

While I’m generally amused by Billy Bob Thornton’s recent decision to ditch serious acting in favour of just being foulmouthedly misanthropic, this one just felt like a pretty lazy effort. Certainly doesn’t come close to the quality of the Freaks and Geeks episode with the same premise.

I’m fairly certain the ability to enjoy this movie rests mostly on the degree to which you can set aside your hatred for Dane Cook. My hated from Dane Cook runs pretty deep – so deep that I was never quite able to set aside my resentment that I was watching a movie in which Dane Cook plays a pretty significant role. While he does finally get a bit of comeuppance, it’s not quite satisfying enough to justify having had to put up with his (slightly restrained) smugness for the previous for hours.

Aside from that, it’s not a particularly bad movie. Costner and Moore are better than they’ve been in a long while. Really, the main problem for me lies in the third act development which posits that the protagonist is able to fool his own subconscious (personified by William Hurt). The only real reason for this (which kind of undercuts the idea that we’re watching Brooks’ internal conversations) is to create a narrative twist that, honestly, isn’t particularly surprising. It seems like lazy writing.

And, speaking of lazy writing, if you have to end your movie on a dream sequence to give it a shock ending, you might want to reconsider things.

As widely reported, this movie’s bad, but there’s something very strange going on with explicit discussions about narrative within the narrative itself that makes it almost interesting. We’ve got one character named Story and another character who appears to be, if not quoting, than speaking in the style of Story. I suspect the goal here is to highlight the fact that this is supposed to be in the style of a bedtime story, not necessarily a three-act film (a structure Shyamalan’s clearly not crazy about, given the one-act nature of Unbreakable). Certainly, the section of the movie in which the characters begin taking McKee-style advice is the one in which things feel most clearly wrong, which is almost certainly the point, but I’m not sure the alternative narrative structure the film presents is significantly more compelling. I certainly have nothing wrong with attacking traditional narrative structure (which is really only effective at outlining one particular approach that tends to work, but, as with any system, can lead to an attitude that there are no other approaches), but I’m not sure the alternate “and then some stuff happens” approach we get here is really a viable option.

As I said the first time I saw this, I wanted to see the film a second time before I really made a final decision. Both Tennenbaums and Aquatic were much better the second time through (though I liked Aquatic a lot on first pass), so I figure his films require at least one viewing to get used to the sometimes strange rhythms. I think this one actually worked a little less well the second time around, as, knowing what was coming, I realized the film feels like it’s nearly done for at least the last third. I still like the film overall, but I think I liked it less on repeat viewing.