Brave

Dear Brenda Chapman, Co-Director,

What a shame you had to leave this project back in 2010. Of course, that hasn’t stopped the hype machine from taking advantage of your contributions. Pixar’s first female lead! Pixar’s first female director! But now, with some version of your ginger warrior finally reaching the screen, I can’t help but wonder if Brave might have ironed out some of its kinks by sticking to a bold, singular vision.

The biggest (and best) parts of Brave tell the story of Merida (Kelly MacDonald), a willful, self-confident princess in medieval Scotland, and her relationship with her very proper mother (Emma Thompson).  Merida doesn’t want a life dictated by protocol and what it means to be a lady in waiting; she yearns to break free of everything her mother represents. After tensions reach a breaking, she does just that, fleeing the kingdom, igniting tensions between the various clans that have come to compete for her hand in marriage. What happens next between mother and daughter is the heart of the film, and even with its fantastical elements (including wisps, witches, and spell gone wrong), it’s handled with the nuance and attention to character that I’ve come to expect from Pixar. 

However, this film comes from two very different sensibilities, and has two distinct, discordant voices. One comes from a tradition centered on character, emotion and organic storytelling. The other, well that one comes from the Pixar who made Cars.

And here is where I wonder if your voice got lost.

This other part of the film, for lack of a better term, I’ll simply call shenanigans. Characters who are always doing something crazy (and noisy); scenes ending in a cavalcade of slapstick (and noise), whether it’s appropriate to the tone or not (did I mention the noise?). These aren’t constructed jokes, with an intricate build up and payoff. No, they’re just noise that made me think some of those involved didn’t trust the story enough to hold an audience’s attention on its own. I was disheartened to see this element smash its way into the film because in a setting this rich, with animation this gorgeous, I was happy to just luxuriate in the environment. I didn’t want my attention diverted every 30 seconds. The film was, from the beginning, in such a hurry to be funny before anything else, I had to actively work against what I was watching to enjoy the film. It’s pretty much the opposite of the early scenes in Up.

I also couldn’t help but notice that one of your two co-directors, Steve Purcell, had a story credit on Cars (as he does here). Does he represent the part of the Pixar story machine that’s uneasy about crafting a film that’s too, dare I say, girly? I don’t mean to use that as a pejorative, I’m simply trying to find a reason for these shifts in tone. If both Up and WALL-E could spend large chunks of their first acts in near silence, slowly integrating the audience into their worlds, why does Brave need to try so hard? I’d hate to think that Pixar—responsible for bringing so many of Hayayo Miazaki’s strong female leads to North American audiences—would turn out to feel more at home with Mater than Merida.

Thankfully, though, most of this forced wackiness is in the early parts of the film, and things do eventually settle down into a moving, character-driven tale. Even though you’re listed as one of three directors and one of three scriptwriters, you have the sole story credit. And it’s that story’s heartbeat that can be heard clearly through all the added noise and fury, making Brave such a satisfying experience.

Status: Air Mail (4/5)

That’s My Boy

Dear Ronit Ravich-Boss, Script Supervisor,

I’m going to list some numbers for you. Tell me if they seem significant.

3, 14, 19, 10.

No, it’s not a list of scene numbers for you to keep track of. Nor is it a secret code that has to be punched into an underground supercomputer to keep the world from exploding, or the cipher that reveals the true historical birthplace of Jesus Christ. These are, in chronological order, the Rotten Tomatoes scores for your last four films. I don’t think either of us will be surprised when the critical consensus for That’s My Boy continues the trend.

As script supervisor, I realize that you’re responsible for the continuity, not creativity, of what happens onscreen. What you do is really for the benefit of the production schedule: you make sure that details aren’t missed, that coverage is covered, that scenes make sense so that everyone can move on to shoot the next one. But you must also feel some small bit of pride about the finished product, the actual film, the palpable outcome of all those days on the set. After all, it’s sent out to the world with your name on it.

In the case of That’s My Boy, the finished product is the story of B-level celebrity Donny Berger (Sandler) trying to reunite with his long-lost son (a painfully restrained Andy Samberg). Along the way, we get to see: a twelve year-old boy having sex with a grown woman, an obese stripper’s scarred and swollen breasts, a character shitting his pants, copious amounts of masturbation (in bed, in a back alley, in a strip-club locker), characters getting slimed with semen, a character unknowingly eating semen, an elderly woman having sex with Vanilla Ice, and a very important act of incest (the denouement hinges on it).

The raunch isn’t the point. When it’s done well, raunch is sublime (you know all about that from working on Superbad). But this is a film that gives up completely on being a film. It shrugs off its own narrative, betrays its own characters, mistimes its own jokes, and double-crosses anyone who dares suspend their belief. It gives up on the audience the same way, I worry, that you’ve given up caring about what films you work on.

Now, I don’t mean for this letter to be censorious. What I wanted to talk to you about was your larger body of work. Before you fell into the putrid morass that is the post-millennium Adam Sandler oeuvre, you worked on Terry Zwigoff’s brilliant Ghost World. When you went mainstream, you did it admirably: Girl Interrupted, Legally Blonde, the Austin Powers films (everyone forgets what a surprise the first one was). Even the early scripts that you guided through production – I’m talking American Ninja and Missing in Action III – held a sort of esteem among genre enthusiasts; it must have felt good, one some level, to sate their desires for roundhouse kicks and exploding machine-gun towers, to make sense of it all. 

Maybe you need a little break from the Happy Madison crew. Maybe seek out a smaller film to work on. Or a younger, greener filmmaker to work with. Something – anything – that might allow you to put to better use the considerable on-set experience you’ve acquired. Wouldn’t it be nice to impel, with your supervision, a film that aims for something higher than a shot to the groin? 

But, hey, in this economy you have to take what you can get, right? And I have respect for what you do. Keeping track of all that semen surely wasn’t easy.

Sincerely,

Jared Young

Status: Junk Mail (1/5)

Rock of Ages

Dear Sean Flanigan, Key Hair Stylist 

Looking over your past gigs, I see there’s an advantage to your profession: you can work on anything. You did sleek close-crops and comb-overs for Mad Men. You did space-siren curls and post-grunge cheerleader-chic for Joss Whedon’s Serenity and Buffy. With some oh-so-carefully-applied gel, you convinced the world Val Kilmer was gay in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. And then, well, you did Killers. If there’s hair, you can go there. And – Judas Priest! – does Rock of Ages have hair!

Lots of it. It flows and falls and curls and folds in clichéd, sexy, weird, and even funny ways—all in that order, perfectly echoing the most frequent elements of the movie (also in that same order).

Even better, your work supports the plot itself. When the two lovers, played by Julianne Hough and Diego Boneta, fall out with each other and lose themselves, you show it in their locks. When Hough’s Sherrie Christian is preparing excitedly for her hot date, her hair is distinctly – and authentically – erect. When Alec Baldwin needs to be gruff and intimidating (which is nigh impossible when you’re prancing and singing the whole time), your hairstyle tells me the story. There isn’t much time for exposition between ballads (I think more words are sung than spoken), but your hairstyles unobtrusively kept me on track. Imagine if you had worked on Prometheus.

Your craftsmanship even makes up for the mistakes of others. The cinematography is sometimes messy, as if it were actually filmed in a dark, cramped music venue; people’s heads always popping into the frame, the angles constrained. The only way I recognized some characters is by curly blond or hairspray brunette.

Even with such faults, it’s hard for me to dislike a musical. They play by different rules and carry a necessarily lighter load. Here is a love story, lots of sincerity, a peppering of wry wit, beautiful people, and song and dance. The rest is a grab bag of eternal themes that help pass the time: love vs. trust, greed vs. authenticity, sexual expression vs. repression, innocence vs. experience, hypocrisy vs. itself, and Tom Cruise’s penis vs. everyone. Somehow, it all adds up. Even though it’s a little lame, Rock of Ages is still a pleasure.

My only pause is that, like your impeccable and multifaceted hairstyles, it’s all impossibly dated. The political backdrop is that of a repressed America trying to kill a form of music that threatened with its wildness and purity. It may have felt that way in 1987, but the truth is that Tipper Gore was simply scaring people for political points. Music today is so diverse and fragmented, you can see the real reason why rock was an easy target then: it was pretty homogeneous. No one cares about how controversial rock music is anymore, because no two people could even agree on what rock is.

Today the truly wild stuff is happening on the edges, where genres are mixed up. But when Diego Boneta’s character leaves his rock roots for another genre, it is a betrayal, not a potential revolution. Did the filmmakers forget that Danger Mouse mixed the Beatles and Jay-Z eight years ago? What about those Beastie Boys/Led Zeppelin mashups? And that’s just the stuff that old people like me know about. We live in far more interesting times, musically, than the movie’s characters do.

The problem may be that the movie doesn’t really take music seriously—which is strange for a musical about music. Perhaps musicals are best when they are about gangsters, war, cowboys, or Mormons—distinctly unmusical things. Cabaret wasn’t actually about the cabaret. A musical about music may be a fundamentally compromised premise. It can only turn inward to indulge fantasy instead of connecting with the outside world 

So, it’s a little dumb. But: fun! There are other places to go if you are really into music. Or really good singing. This one has a drunken baboon and a bare-chested Tom Cruise and some strippers and a Brian Cranston that all show their asses. There is KISS and Bon Jovi and REO Speedwagon. The romantic couples are cute. The ladies, hot. Everyone sings, even if they actually can’t. Alec Baldwin is adorable. Paul Giamatti is adorable. Russell Brand was a little tame, but that is probably a good thing. This movie is a tribute to fun that just happens to be in the house of rock.

Yours in hair metal,

Cory

Status: Standard Delivery (3/5)

The Hospital

Dear Howard Gottfried, Producer

You, sir, must be a fighter. To make a movie this challenging must have demanded repeated boxing and wrestling matches. Perhaps not even just verbal ones. Writer Paddy Chaefsky and actor George C. Scott are at the height of their powers here, and it couldn’t have been easy to contain them. Any production as large as a movie requires compromises, but when it comes to the script and performances in The Hospital, I can detect none. 

The result is that even now, 40 years later, this movie kicks the crap out of me and anything that I dared to hold sacred but unexamined. Through Scott’s character, Dr. Herbert Bock, and his unnamed hospital, it throws punches at everything in the proverbial room – gender relations, race movements, pacifists, America, optimism, pessimism, striving, and even the idea of just giving up.

In one of my favourite scenes, a drunken Bock essentially picks up the entire edifice of modern medicine by the balls and bellows into its face:

We can practically clone people like carrots, and half the kids in this ghetto haven’t even been inoculated for polio. We have established the most enormous medical entity ever conceived, and people are sicker than ever. We cure nothing! We heal nothing! The whole goddamned wretched world, strangulating in front of our eyes.

The critique is powerful, accurate, and like Network, sadly contemporary. In fact, the issues that inspired Chaefsky are even more true now, if you look at the corruption of the both healthcare industry and the larger political sphere by powerful and cynical moneyed interests. The villains in this old 70s movie are our villains today. Even if the message’s delivery seems at times a little overwrought, it’s because the subject demands such treatment.

Maybe it wasn’t that hard of a fight; a story like this might have just sold itself. The story itself is nicely contained. It follows Dr. Herbert Bock through two days of his life. He is brilliant, and angry. There is a murder mystery. There are politics. There is a fiery romance. But with Chaefsky writing the actual words that the characters deliver, The Hospital is elevated to a compelling polemic that you don’t want to end.

I don’t know who would risk making a movie like this today. It must have cost you a lot personally, and you must have had more than one second thought. I’ve read that when Chayefsky was later diagnosed with cancer, he refused surgery, claiming that he “feared retribution by the doctors” for his portrayal of Bock in the film. He died just a year later at the age of 58. That may be the price of fighting the good fight, and fighting it well.

Punchdrunkenly yours,

Cory

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5)

Prometheus

Dear Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, Screenwriters,

I’m writing you a letter. It’s also a movie review. That’s what we do here: write movie reviews in the form of personal correspondence. I’m about to review Prometheus, the film that you both co-wrote. I was disappointed by it. Mostly because of your screenplay. It’s a screenplay that, unfortunately, doesn’t mince words. See, sometimes words need to be minced. Or else you end up with something like this: a letter that is a movie review that is written exclusively as exposition and is therefore interminable to sit through.

Let me get this straight…you were hired to write the screenplay for Prometheus, the not-quite-a-prequel prequel to Alien, which would be Ridley Scott’s decades-late return to sci-fi, the genre that launched his career – who, despite recent evidence to the contrary (see Robin Hood), still possesses the craftsmanship to conjure beautiful and coherent big-screen spectacle – and the best you could do for him was to construct a generic scientific-mission-in-space-gone-wrong plot around philosophical questions about the origin of mankind that seem lifted straight from the term paper of a precocious junior high school kid?

Hold on a second. You’re telling me…that you have at your disposal a willing crew of A-list actors, including Noomi Rapace, Idris Elba, Charlize Theron, and Michael Fassbender (who figuratively – then literally – channels Peter O’Toole), and you’re able to do nothing more than reduce them all to attractive exposition delivery devices who constantly describe what his happening onscreen (often while it is happening) and are motivated only by the conveniences of the plot?

Okay, I think I’ve figured it out…you don’t trust the audience. Or maybe you didn’t trust Ridley Scott, in his advanced age, to tell a lucid story with his images. Why else, when Fassbender obscures his video feed from Charlize Theron’s corporate overseer, thereby cutting her off from the sortie to the alien ruins, does she proclaim indignantly to the empty room: “That bastard; he cut me off.” And why, long after the audience has discovered that a certain character has secretly been on the ship the whole time, another character observes, in a moment of redundant epiphany: “You’ve been here on the ship the whole time!” These lines, and countless others like them, are self-conscious footnotes. They are clearly coming from you, the writers, the architects of the story. It’s like you formatted the screenplay in reverse and Ridley Scott filmed the dialogue and had the actors speak the scene descriptions. It’s that famous writerly advice expressed in antithesis: telling, not showing.

You want to know why I’m being so hard on you guys?…because there are some truly great moments in Prometheus. Potentially iconic moments. But it’s telling, don’t you think, that the film’s most captivating sequences are the ones that occur in silence: the magnificent opening credits sequence, the ensuing extraterrestrial sacrifice ritual, and, shortly thereafter, David bicycling through the silent space-cruiser, studying ancient languages and shooting hoops. It’s telling, too, that these moments occur in the first half of the film; the assembled talent – from the impeccable production design to the breathtaking digital cinematography – are able to disguise the incompetency of your screenplay for only so long.

So, in case you didn’t get it, let me explain…you’ve written one of the most visually stunning radio plays I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching—and the misfortune of listening to. You leave a lot of questions unanswered, and not in the good, 2001: A Space Odyssey kind of way. I get the feeling this open-endedness was meant to elicit debate, but, unfortunately, the only debates to be had are about the gaping holes in logic.

I’ll tell you what you did wrong…you wrote a whole lot of dialogue that begins with “Let me get this straight…” and  “So what you’re telling me is…” and other rhetorical qualifiers, and while it might do wonders to explain the mechanics of the narrative, it does nothing to impel the characters, humanize them, or provide any insight into the mess of pseudo-profound musings you implant, like so many stillborn xenomorph fetuses, into their chest cavities—which remain, I was disappointed to observe, thoroughly unexploded. 

This is the part where the letter ends,

Jared

Status: return to sender (2/5)

The Intouchables

Dear Olivia Bloche-Lainé, Set Decorator,

It’s hard not to be impressed by the riches on display in The Intouchables. I’m not just talking about your sets, which do a great job of contrasting social clashes that are key to Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano’s feature film, but also the depth of talent on display. Even more impressive is how this unlikely tale has translated into one of the biggest box-office hits in European history.

In one sense, I could argue your task was easy. It doesn’t take much imagination to contrast the lives of a poor African immigrant, played brilliantly by Omar Sy, with an out-of-touch French bourgeois portrayed by François Cluzet, whom he’s tasked with caring for. As an audience, we’ve been here, seen that before. Yet the results are rarely ever this satisfying.

The basic set pieces on screen feel like they came from a pawn shop of Hollywood clichés: a poor, uneducated free-spirit, a rich, up-tight enfant gate, and a journey through melancholy to rediscover purpose and love. Disney has been using this formula for ages. They’ve just never made it a platonic love story between a street thug and a wealthy quadriplegic.

Together, you’ve built a world we at once recognize, sympathize with, and envy. You make it easy to share Sy’s joy as we see him soaking up his new gold-plated bathroom only days after he seemed doomed to the indignity of bathing in a housing project full of needy children. Moments of spontaneity also help lock us into place, like the brilliant flash-forward opening sequence. We see the unorthodox relationship bloom as the two race through Parisien streets. We get hooked, and care about where this story is going, even if we’ve been there before.

The result is funny, touching, and a breath of fresh air. In other words, you and your team really classed up the joint – even when it was filled with prostitutes and actual joints.

A bientot!

Christopher

Status: Priority Post (4.5/5)

Piranha 3DD

Dear Martin Bernfeld and Devin C. Lussier, Editors,

You guys must be close pals by now. Just last year you worked together in the editorial departments of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse alongside the legendary Michael Kahn, his longtime collaborator. So, having now seen Piranha 3DD, the film you both edited, I’m curious: which of the lessons you learned from working in such intimate proximity to one of the most significant editor/director partnerships of all time did you apply when you started stitching together the footage for Piranha 3DD?

Maybe one of the lessons was: recognize the value of the individual pieces.

David Koechner and Paul Scheer both bring strong comedy credentials; Christopher Lloyd and Gary Busey bring some manic B-movie gravitas; even David Hasselhoff shows up in a pleasantly self-deprecating mood. And, of course, lots of tits. Hours and hours of footage of tits: at rest and in motion, up close and afar, dripping with water, dripping with blood.

Unfortunately for you, the sum of these individual pieces, in execution, is less than whole: Koechner is resurrecting a half-wit ghost of Champ Kind, Scheer is just as diaphanous, Lloyd and Busey are given woefully little to do, and Hasselhoff, when he shows up, seems to be performing in his own private version of The Kentucky Fried Movie. Only the tits live up to expectations, moving the plot forward in ways that no performer or scene or line of dialogue seems able to: there’s an adult-themed waterpark, some piranhas left over from the first film, and despite the best efforts of our beautiful, bland, forgettable protagonists, the twain shall meet.

That’s not much, but it’s enough. Dare imagine what Spielberg and Kahn could have made out of it (or maybe Verna Fields). But one gets the sense that Piranha 3DD was shot sequentially, and, as time passed, the filmmakers quit caring altogether and improvised entire shooting days with random sight gags, non sequitur exchanges of dialogue, and reams of B-roll that looks like camcorder footage of someone’s filthy fish tank. And thank God for that second unit, am I right? Without them – and with the murky footage of that one underwater plant to pad the transitions from scene to pointless scene – there would be no movie.

The official running time is 83 minutes, but at least 15 minutes of that is the epic, interminable end credit sequence. Part epilogue, part blooper reel, part deleted scenes, part making-of featurette—you guys took all the future DVD extras and assembled them into a circuitous David Lynch-ian nightmare sequence. In a way, it’s the best part of the movie. In another, more accurate way, it’s the worst. It’s also a pretty perfect summation of the movie as a whole: a lot of different things happening at the same time, with no cadence and no momentum to unite them, all set to a soundtrack of contemporary tunes that sounds like a compilation of the worst late-90s alt-rock.

I think I know what you guys were going for. You were trying to make a subversive, self-referential, self-aware horror flick that indulges all those frat-boy fantasies about big boobs and sharp knives while at the same time, with a knowing sneer, observing it all from a distance. Right? Something like that? A version of Cabin in the Woods for readers of Maxim and watchers of Manswers. And I guess you partially succeeded, because, in a way, Piranha 3DD is like Cabin in the Woods. Except with the cleverness-to-breast ratio reversed.

So, what lessons did you apply from your internship with the most popular director of all time and his unsung architect?

Clearly, it was this: when all else fails, cut to a close up of bouncing tits.

Sincerely,

Jared 

Junk Mail (1.5/5)

Snow White and the Huntsman

Dear Joe Roth, Producer

I’m sorry, but no one knows you. Yet as “the Producer of Alice in Wonderland”, you’ve given yourself top billing in the Snow White and the Huntsman ad campaign. What a lame way to promote this bold and striking re-imagining of a classic fairy tale. Was there really no one on the crew you could have used to align the film with its true inspiration, Lord of the Rings?

Why not instead advertise that you have three-time Academy Award winner Colleen Atwood on board, who out-does her previous costume designs in this film and is a slam-dunk for Oscar number four?  Or Andrew Ackland-Snow, who also art directed every one of the Harry Potter films? The man even has “Snow” in his name, dammit! Stretch it even farther if you have to:

From the Storyboard Artist of The Dark Knight

From the Armory Coordinator of War Horse

From the Archery Coach for Robin Hood

All these are equally true, plus they are the types of films you’re better off comparing yourself to. And frankly, this Snow White is more at home in this company than with that prissy Alice.

Walt Disney immortalized the fairy tale by making her the first in a long line of princesses who could talk to animals and get rescued by handsome princes. In this beautifully shot non-Disney reboot, you’ve given Snow White some guts and agency, turning her escape from captivity and building of an army into a Joan of Arc tale. Using a bankable property is a smart bait and switch strategy, but you still might not catch all the audience you could have for this film unless you find a better way to get the word out.

As you know, people only really care about what the actors or director will bring to a project. You’ve got the Twilight vote all locked up by putting Kristen Stewart’s face on all the ads as the iron-clad hero-to-be. She tries admirably in the film, and looks better than she probably ever has on screen. Only problem is she still struggles mightily when trying to bring more than one emotion to the surface at a time. She could learn a few things from Charlize Theron who plays Ravenna, the evil queen, and has both dramatic depth and beauty to spare.

You’re real gamble, however, was going with first-time filmmaker Rupert Sanders. Full credit goes to you for putting together this ambitious big budget film with a completely unknown director. Hard to promote the fact he cut his fantasy chops on Monster.com and Axe deodorant commercials. The latter, at least, is evidence the man knows sexy. Even his kick-ass Call of Duty: Black Ops spot opens with a drop dead gorgeous woman yielding an M:16 and a power suit. Sanders manages to bring that bravado to the project, without ever falling into brainless Sucker Punch territory.

Fact is, most people don’t even know what a producer does. And unlike other positions, every producer defines his or her job differently. There are the studio stooges, looking after the budget, the creative partners who get into the thick of every decision, and even honorific titles given to people who help the film get made from the early stages.  Someone with your heavy-hitting background, having directed Christmas with the Kranks and Revenge of the Nerds II, clearly focuses on creative. So come clean about where it came from.

Evan Daughtery, who wrote Snow White and the Huntsman as a spec script a decade ago, has no problem admitting his influence. Other films say they are “inspired by a true story” even when they bare next to no resemblance from the original source material. Why not just say “Inspired by a Peter Jackson trilogy” and get it over with?

You must have used something similar in boardrooms. The rest of the world might as well hear it:

Snow White is a sexier version of Frodo. Ravenna is a way sexier version of Saruman. Two cute fairies replace the ugly Gollum. Legolas is the prince. The Huntsman is Aragorn with better billing. And screw those other useless Hobbits, we’ve got seven fighting dwarfs.

See, how easy that was?

Yours truly,

Christopher

Delivery: 4/5 (Air Mail)