Wag the Dog (1997, Barry Levinson)

Wag the Dog is a relic from the unrevealed world. Though prescient enough to know sexual misconduct isn’t enough to derail a president from either U.S. political party. As an old—who saw it in the theater, probably opening day—it’s hard to imagine how it plays to someone who’s grown up with Republicans spewing lies and hatred and the Democrats spewing different lies and conditional hatred.

There are political parties in Dog, but the film never identifies allegiances. The one time “personal” politics comes up, it seems like the good guys are Republicans (Anne Heche attacks Dustin Hoffman’s liberalism). But she could just be a Democrat too.

Heche is a White House damage control staffer. The President has just been accused of sexual misconduct and brings in image expert Robert De Niro. Heche is his handler and sidekick. Hoffman is the Hollywood producer De Niro hires to create some war media for them to distract from the molester-in-chief.

Dog’s very cynical about the rape allegations. No one cares. Again, prescient but not about everything. It’s still a world without racism—it’s pre-9/11, so the islamophobia is generalized. In fact, the imaginary Muslim fundamentalist terrorists are white. So as a satire of political reality, Dog is profoundly naive.

Luckily, it’s rarely a political satire. Director Levinson and screenwriters Hilary Henkin and David Mamet avoid it as much as possible, putting the more satirical moments on television actually, which the main characters watch and ridicule.

It’s more often a Hollywood satire, with Hoffman always ready with a self-aggrandizing showbiz anecdote. But the film’s success comes from its position as a Hollywood fable. Hoffman is the populist producer—hair modeled on Robert Evans—who finally achieves important something thanks to De Niro. The stakes are higher, though Hoffman takes a while to understand the dangerous waters he’s found himself in. Just because De Niro’s working for the President doesn’t mean everyone in the federal government wants to go to such extremes to protect a sexual predator.

I mean, haha, right? How naive can you get?

The film runs a brisk ninety-seven minutes, with De Niro and Heche leading the film from location to location. Hoffman’s top-billed, the protagonist, but he’s the protagonist because of that arc, not because of his presence. Heche, then De Niro are the driving forces, making De Niro’s performance the most important in the film. He’s got to convey a lot with a very little; heck, he sleeps through the first big brainstorming session, where Hoffman assembles the hitmakers to figure out how to gin up a war with Albania.

Director Levinson’s got a phenomenal crew here. The most impressive technical is Rita Ryack’s costumes. Whether it’s Denis Leary’s outrageous outfits (he’s “Fad King,” who figures out all the licensed goods opportunities) or De Niro’s frumpy but still stylish attire, the costumes do a lot of establishing work in the film. There’s a lot of talking (usually Hoffman talking over people—oh, and Hoffman’s outfits are fantastic too), and there are a lot of characters coming and going; the costumes don’t just help establish, they further inform as scenes play out. Also, while obviously De Niro and Hoffman can act while looking like models in very different early eighties clothes catalogs, the performance Levinson gets out of Leary is incredible. His outfit’s too absurd to be believed (though it just looks like most nineties comic book “realistic” costumes).

Anyway.

Then there’s Stu Linder’s photography. Levinson occasionally does quick emphasis zooms, and the camera’s often mobile, not going for raw, jarring documentary, but closer to cinéma vérité than not. Except Linder shoots with these bright lights, shots’ subjects practically shining, overemphasized. Despite being ostentatious, it immediately becomes one of Dog’s hyper-realisms. Neither De Niro, Hoffman, nor Heche operate in the real world. De Niro can control the national narrative, Hoffman can produce fictional reality in real-time, and Heche thinks her party will take care of her. No one in Wag the Dog’s in touch with reality because it’s not about reality; it’s about an entertaining fantasy world of respectability. The joke in Wag the Dog is they’ve got to subvert accountability because the filmmakers are so naive they think accountability exists.

It also might be hard to grok Dog without at least a passing knowledge of Hollywood trivia, specifically twentieth-century blockbusters. Lots of Bible epic and Jaws references would date the picture if the politics didn’t make it a fantasy.

The casting’s impeccable throughout. Besides the lead trio, everyone else is in an extended cameo. The most important—and successful—is Woody Harrelson, an unlikely soldier who gets wrapped up in the scheme. But Willie Nelson’s got a fun part as Hoffman’s songwriter of choice. Another thing to note about Dog’s unreality—there’s little Black presence in American pop culture. Though it’s also an appropriately white cast for the profoundly callous plot.

Some of the other casts aren’t exactly cameo level, but the parts have limited presence and require the actors to do a lot in a little time. They just happen to be the female assistants to great (white) men. Suzie Plakson’s Hoffman’s assistant, Andrea Martin’s Leary’s. Plakson’s great. Martin’s good but with so much less. Plakson gets a pre-crisis scene to banter with Hoffman, which almost no one gets in the film. Similarly, White House press guy John Michael Higgins is one of those not quite cameos but would be with a different actor. He actually gets the least to do (literally parroting for the main trio), but it works with the constraints.

Kirsten Dunst has a good scene as a young actress. William H. Macy’s got an okay one as a CIA agent. He’s there to give De Niro someone good to act off, not to act himself.

While Hoffman’s the whole show—Levinson sparingly does close-ups of Hoffman, like we’ve got to wait to see him execute this divine performance—De Niro and Heche are excellent too. De Niro’s got his less is more thing going, which leaves Heche to draw him into scenes. She’s the breakout performance in the film; she stays salient amid Hoffman doing a victory marathon and De Niro oscillating from napping to cheering Hoffman on.

The film doesn’t have a lot of time for character development, but there’s a very nice, very tragic friendship for Hoffman and De Niro. They’re star-crossed alter egos.

Wag the Dog’s outstanding. It’d be much more dated if it weren’t for the incredible naïveté. Levinson, Hoffman, De Niro, Heche, Linder, Ryack all do spectacular work. And the Henkin and Mamet script’s fantastic.

Orgazmo (1997, Trey Parker), the unrated version

The best thing about Orgazmo is the opening title’s song, Now You’re a Man. Unfortunately, once the song’s over, there are ninety more minutes of movie.

Orgazmo tells the simple tale of a Mormon missionary (co-writer and director Parker) who happens upon a porn set and ends up the star of a superhero porno (also ‘Orgazmo’). The porno director, Michael Dean Jacobs, promises Parker enough money to go back to Salt Lake and marry his fiancée, Robyn Lynne Raab, in style. Well, style for Mormons.

Plus, Parker doesn’t have to perform the actual sex; they’ll have a stunt player handle it.

The movie tracks Parker’s experiences making the porno—including making a de facto best buddy in Dian Bachar, an engineering scientist double doctor who makes pornos because it’s the only way he can get chicks (he’s short). The porno becomes a crossover sensation, which still isn’t enough for people in Utah to have heard of it, so Raab doesn’t know anything about it when she arrives in L.A. unannounced to see her beau.

Throw in some dance club thugs terrorizing a neighborhood and Ron Jeremy in a supporting role, and it’s a movie. Apparently.

The first act’s better than the rest of it. Especially since the third act is all about the bad guys getting ready to rape Raab and the movie playing it for laughs. One of the few points Orgazmo gets is how it handles the female nudity. There isn’t any; the lack of it is one of the few successful repeat jokes, if only because the rest of the repeat jokes—there are so many—are terrible and tedious. But instead of leaning into not objectifying, Orgazmo just finds different ways to make fun of women.

There are also a whole bunch of Asian jokes, including baking in some jokes about Black people. Orgazmo didn’t age poorly or rot; it was always bad. Because it’s also really not very funny. Even when Parker and co-writer Matt Stone have a good joke, the actors tend to ruin it. Porno director Jacobs is so bad actual porno star Ron Jeremy acts circles around him. Overall, the best performance might just be David Dunn as Jacobs’s shitty bro nephew. He’s never bad, whereas everyone else ends up having at least one bad scene. Sometimes because of the jokes, but mainly just because of their acting.

Orgazmo is one of those NC-17 movies where they kept the rating instead of cutting (given Bachar’s sidekick costume involves sex toys, I doubt they’d ever get it though at R), but there’s nothing to the movie if they’re not trying to get the NC-17. There’s no story. Parker’s got a rote character arc, which—naturally—involves Raab seeing things his way because he’s the man.

Until turning the attempted rape into a gag, the running jokes (or attempted running jokes) are the worst thing in Orgazmo, which is already dull. They just draw attention to how long the movie’s been going on and not been amusing.

They could’ve used the song again in the main action instead of waiting for the end credits.

Technically, it’s low-budget middling as far as competence. Kenny Gioseffi’s photography is sometimes impressive for how good the poorly composed shot looks (Parker hasn’t got an eye at all), but then another shot will be unintentionally out of focus. Michael R. Miller and Parker’s editing is never good.

I think the fight choreography might be the most impressive technical, actually. Even when it’s not at its best—the superhero fights—it’s not bad like the acting or desperate like the script.

The Nice Guys (2016, Shane Black)

I recently joked to a friend I wanted to claim “audacity” as a complementary phrase, but just for Stanley Kubrick. Something simple like, “Stanley Kubrick: Audacity can be a compliment.” But then she called me on it being gross.

The Nice Guys is basically, “Shane Black: Humility is for [slur we’re allowed to use because the movie’s set in 1978].” It’s never terrible, though Black’s got his usual “no, but, maybe you’re misogynistic for saying this scene or characterization is misogynist,” which gets exasperating. Especially since it’s in the Boogie Nights riff part of the movie. Nice Guys is a pseudo-noir and mostly a series of lifts from other movies, including ones Black wrote for other directors.

The film’s heroes, The Nice Guys, are soulful bruiser Russell Crowe, who hates his comically evil ex-wife and protects young women from predators, and sad drunk private investigator Ryan Gosling. Except the de facto protagonist of the movie is Angourie Rice, playing Gosling’s daughter. Since she’s a thirteen-year-old in 1978 L.A., tagging along on her dad’s job to porn parties, hunted by vicious hitmen, she’s always in danger, and the audience knows it. Gosling and Crowe forget about it at the drop of a hat, but the film’s always about reminding terrible things could happen to Rice anytime. So when she’s not around, it just means she might be in danger, which focuses the film on her.

Of all the things Black didn’t think to rip off… it’d be a fine “Veronica Mars” riff.

Gosling is bilking client Lois Smith (the film’s most successful cameo but only because the others mostly stink); she’s convinced her pornstar granddaughter is alive, even though the movie showed her dying in the first scene. You know, kind of like Lethal Weapon 1.

He’s actually doing some investigating—which the movie never shows and instead uses as gotchas from Gosling to other characters—and is pretty sure Smith really saw Margaret Qualley. Qualley knows Gosling is after her, so she hires Crowe to beat him up.

Then the actual bad guys looking for Qualley—an okay but wasted Keith David and an annoying Beau Knapp—go after Crowe, so he has to team up with Gosling (and Rice).

There are various chase scenes, drunk comedy scenes, objectified young women (it’s the seventies so it’s okay), fight scenes, kidnappings, and so on. At one point, Knapp warns the real villain of the movie isn’t even in town yet, letting Crowe know he’s got a big fight in the third act.

At some point, Nice Guys becomes just a period-action comedy instead of something else with those themes. No one gets an actual character arc, just the potential for a sequel.

Both Crowe and Gosling seem like they’re playing sidekick to the star. Of the two… Crowe’s better most of the time. Rice is fine. Her performance is more successful thanks to script and blocking, but she’s charming enough.

As the film progresses, there’s more supporting cast introduced. Kim Basinger, Matt Bomer, Yaya DaCosta. Basinger’s terrible and derails the movie. Boomer’s terrible, but because of the script and the directing, he’s just aboard while it derails. DaCosta’s got a thin part, but she’s good.

Technically, Nice Guys is solid. Black’s direction is fine—he doesn’t have a single well-directed action sequence, though, which is a problem—Philippe Rousselot’s photography is good, John Ottman and David Buckley’s music always seems like it’s just about to get good and never does. The visual stars are obviously production designer Richard Bridgland and costume designer Kym Barrett’s recreation of seventies L.A. In some ways, it’s more impressive how much they’re able to recreate, not their actual designs.

Nice Guys is fine. It’s got a whole bunch of problems, and all of them are Black’s, but it’s fine. It’s better than the Shane Black movies it rips off but not better than the other movies it rips off.

Summer Days, Summer Nights (2018, Edward Burns)

Summer Days, Summer Nights never really has any “grabber” moments. It’s got a couple big misses, one I’ve got a lot to say about, the other would technically be a spoiler. If it weren’t also a total cop-out. The movie looks the cop-out in the eye and blinks, with writer, director, and costar Burns deciding to acknowledge the big miss he’s committing to making.

Directing-wise, Burns does a fabulous job with Summer Days. The film takes place over Summer 1982 in resort-town Long Island. It’s on a budget, so Burns figures out all these great ways to showcase what he’s got to budget to include. There’s a big block party set-piece, and it’s beautifully done. Shame it comes at the end of the first act, and Burns never tries anything else anywhere near as complex or ambitious with the rest of the picture.

It’s also where the soundtrack—with one exception, the movie’s got a great soundtrack—intentionally reminds of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Summer Nights shows its hand a little much. Burns is doing an eighties teenager movie without any gratuitous sex or racism. There’s non-gratuitous sex, of course. But no racism of any kind. There aren’t any Black people. Lindsey Morgan and Anthony Ramos are Latinx. They’re it for people of color.

There’s also no class privilege stuff, which is weird because it’s part of the setup.

But Burns also isn’t doing a revisionist eighties teen sex comedy. Every female character in the movie proves her worth by having a boyfriend. Summer Days doesn’t just not pass Bechdel; it doesn’t even entertain the possibility it may. There’s even a terrible insert scene where Rita Volk cries to mom Susan Misner about how a boy likes her, and she likes him too, and it’s just not fair for some reason. Burns’s script is a series of romantic dramedy tropes. They never succeed, but sometimes the cast is likable enough, or the filmmaking’s solid enough; it doesn’t matter.

Other times it matters. Especially with Volk’s arc.

The film’s split between three couples. First, there’s protagonist Pico Alexander, playing the son of Burns’s character. They’re working-class, but Alexander only hangs out with the rich kids. When Summer starts, he’s planning on going to college to become a Wall Street tycoon, even though everyone tells him to be a writer. The writing thing isn’t important. It’s Burns’s biggest backstory cop-out. Right away, rich girl girlfriend Carly Brooke dumps him, and he soon finds summer romance with slightly older woman Morgan.

Morgan tells him it’s just going to be a fling. We don’t find out anything about her backstory until the second half of the movie, despite her being the strongest female character.

There’s just no time with the other arcs.

Like Ramos and Caitlin Stasey. They were high school sweethearts, and she broke his heart. Fast forward seven years, she’s back in town. Now, neither Ramos nor Stasey have any personality outside this backstory, so they’ve got couple friends, Zoe Levin and Jon Rudnitsky, to keep their story busy. Levin and Rudnitsky are sort of Summer Days’s unsung heroes, right up until the third act when Burns forgets they were around. But Ramos and Stasey’s plot is a “will they or won’t they” one.

Then again, so’s Volk’s arc with Amadeus Serafini. Serafini is Alexander’s cousin and staying with him and Burns for the summer. Burns sets Serafini up with a job at Misner’s dock, where daughter Volk also works. Volk’s sad her rich boy boyfriend left her for the summer, and Serafini’s got the hots for her because… she’s a girl, and he’s a boy. There’s no other story to them.

Until we get to Serafini’s live music performance, which is kind of a surfer dude Bruce Springsteen song, only it’s a creepy, controlling stalker song about how Volk needs to get with Serafini, or her life is meaningless. He sings it to her in public. It’s a lot. Like, there’s a concept for a relationship there, but the movie does nothing with it. Instead, it’s just Serafini mooning soulfully at Volk about why she should love him back.

Burns does seem to think the eighties setting and the decidedly strong production values are enough to get him a pass on all the lazy, shallow writing, but he is incorrect. They are not enough, mainly since his enthusiasm—directing-wise—for the eighties setting lessens after the first act and is immaterial by the third, except the occasional payphone.

And the third act’s so dramatically inert, strong production values aren’t going to help.

Best performances are Rudnitsky, Ramos, Stasey, and Levin. They kind of come in a bundle. Alexander and Morgan aren’t exactly good, but they’re very likable. They’re the most fun couple, thanks to that likability. Serafini and Volk are the worst. When he’s doing soulful surfer dude, Serafini almost makes it. When he’s weird creeper coworker, not so much. Volk’s got the worst part in the movie, and it’s kind of impressive she’s never terrible. She doesn’t have enough of a part to be bad; it’s a dreadful role.

It’s pretty clear by the second act Burns doesn’t actually have anywhere to go with Summer Days, Summer Nights. But he knows how to get an hour and forty minutes out of that inertia. Unfortunately, ever-competent and often exquisite filmmaking isn’t enough to make the third act palatable.

Even with lower and lower expectations, Summer Days, Summer Nights disappoints. It’s too bad. It looks phenomenal—William Rexer’s photography, Timothy J. Feeley’s editing, Stephen Beatrice’s production design, and Rosemary Lepre Forman’s costume design. They all do great work, as does Burns as far as directing.

Shame Burns didn’t make the script worth the production or even actors.

Tin Cup (1996, Ron Shelton)

Tin Cup’s got very few problems. It’s just a romantic comedy about a ne’er-do-well golf pro who decides to improve himself to impress his rival’s girlfriend. There’s a little more nuance to it, but not much. Kevin Costner plays the hero, Rene Russo plays the love interest, Don Johnson plays the other guy. Because all the cast members are in their forties, Tin Cup has a little more sophisticated air. Costner’s old enough to have become a would-be golf sage. Russo’s got a grown-up backstory with a lot of implications. Johnson… well, Johnson’s sort of ageless. The part’s a caricature, but it’s caricature Johnson passively exudes, so every utterance is a revelation of asshole.

But he’s not a great villain. He’s too likable. The movie gets away with it thanks to the cast’s charm, but it does sort of reduce the dramatic impact of Costner’s wooing Russo. There are a couple places in Cup where they avoid a topic or skip a thing because otherwise, it’d get too heavy. If it ever gets too weighty, it’s time to move on. Costner’s got a lot of West Texas golf pro zen monologues about golf to make, and those are funny and successful because Costner turns on the sincerity for a gag. But if you actually have to think about him—he’s basically an immature, lovable jackass who gets by thanks to innate intelligence and being good-looking and charming like a movie star. Costner’s against type partly because most of it requires a scrub, not a movie star.

What’s strange is the film leans into being more comedic in the first act and then dumbs it in the second. The third act is a sports movie and a good one, albeit a low-stakes one. Director Shelton goes out of his way to showcase Russo’s comedic ability, only for her to not be in the movie enough in the second act for them to matter. Once the sports story starts, Russo’s demoted, but she also gets a lot less comedy. So when she’s with Cheech Marin—who plays Costner’s best friend, caddy, sidekick, and conscience—it’s fantastic because she gets to have fun.

It’s when she’s not Johnson’s girlfriend; it’s when she’s got agency.

But most of Tin Cup’s problems resolve themselves, and a couple become strengths. For better or worse, demoting Russo in the second act changes the impact of the third on Costner, making him a fuller character and giving the dramatic sports finish even more gravitas. Shelton’s got a problem with changing the tone for it; it gets more serious—real golfers are cameoing now—and almost all the jokes are gone. But it also makes the third act stand alone and special. Tin Cup’s an exquisitely produced film.

For the most part.

It has what I assume is a 1996 Top 40s Country-Western soundtrack. Shelton seems to try to cover for the pointless tracks with on-the-nose tracks (there are golf country songs), but the music doesn’t fit the characters. At times we’re supposed to think Kevin Costner is listening to these songs on his Walkman. Or at least the songs are playing, and Costner is inexplicably wearing a Walkman like he lost a bet to a guy at Sony, so maybe he’s listening to them? It seems more like he’d be listening to books on tape—for the character at his place in the movie, even if it were a golf book—but Costner gets zero self-improvement.

Tin Cup is about being so special at one thing, you never have to say you’re sorry for anything else.

Wow; sort of a metaphor for how the movie can still be good with that lousy soundtrack. William Ross does the score, and it’s okay—it really comes in for the sports finale, but then it’s basically just Hoosiers music—so I don’t know if he’d have brought enough personality. But the movie begs for a good score versus lousy songs.

Though there’s a Chris Isaak song where you realize Costner’s mooning over Russo isn’t as dramatic or romantic as the song, which then makes it too serious for a moment. It’s an interesting glimpse into the movie being done straight dramatic.

And the last song isn’t not catchy. The sex scene song, however, is grating. Though the sex scenes themselves are a little pointless. So, regular romantic comedy problems, but with a good cast and a fine production. And a terrible, worst kind of media conglomerate synergy soundtrack.

All the performances are good with asterisks. Russo’s excellent in the first act until she gets reduced to girlfriend in the second act. Johnson’s outstanding, but it’s a thin part. Costner’s successful, but it’s hard not to be successful when the movie’s about your character never actually being wrong and usually quite the opposite. He’s a little loose on the more comedic—Marin’s there to pick up the slack—but he’s got the sincerity. And when scenes do go wrong, it’s not Costner’s fault. It’s the soundtrack.

Tin Cup’s a mostly delightful nineties romantic comedy. One’s mileage may vary with the soundtrack—even if you like the songs, they’re pointless selections. Costner, Russo, Marin, and Johnson are a fine team. Linda Hart’s good as Costner’s ex.

It’s a good time.

This post is part of the Odd Or Even Blogathon hosted by Gill of Realweegiemidget Reviews and Rebecca from Taking Up Room.

The Linguini Incident (1991, Robert Shepard)

I watched most of The Linguini Incident’s 108-minute runtime waiting to go read the IMDb trivia page and discover what wealthy New Yorker bankrolled a movie for their kid to star in with Hollywood actors. Except there’s no such item on the trivia page, and it doesn’t appear to be the backstory to the film’s production. And now Linguini makes even less sense.

The Linguini Incident takes until the third act to reveal what the title’s referencing, and then it skips through it because writers Tamar Brott and director Shepard couldn’t come up with a compelling story. So they punt. They punt on the “linguini incident” being at all relevant, which kind of carries for the film itself. There are multiple times Brott and Shepard’s script introduces character traits as reveals (not to mention a big twist with one of the main actors), and if it were an artlessly produced vanity project, not going back and fixing the movie would make sense. But if they’re doing Linguini straight? It’s bewildering what they miss.

The film takes place mainly in a swank New York nightspot called “Dali” because the interiors are surreal. Sort of. There are some nods to surrealism like they had enough money to decorate a quarter of a wall, and then the rest of it was just a warehouse turned into a restaurant. It’s okay, Meatpacking District, whatever. Though it’s not supposed to be in a trendy area, at least not based on the street location for the entrance.

All the staff wear silver latex-y outfits, except the owners, Andre Gregory and Buck Henry (who hack and ham their way through this thing like they’re trying to find the bottom of a pit). Gregory and Henry wear big band suits. Linguini really doesn’t understand how to make quirky happen. Director Shepard’s got fail after fail in the movie—and, arguably, the direction of Gregory and Henry’s even worse than not being able to make it quirky—but still. Gregory and Henry aren’t in it very much until the last third. They’re at the opening, they’re terrible, but then they go away. They have to come back for one of the reveals. Their third act spotlight takes the movie away from Rosanna Arquette, who’s been losing the picture to every costar after the first sequence—including at one point a rabbit—but it’s still a surprise.

Okay, fine, the quirky. Let’s talk about the quirky. Outside the costumes and Arquette’s character—she’s a former Catskills tween entertainer trying to make her comeback as a Houdini-inspired escape artist, only she’s terrible at it—Shepard’s big idea for quirk is to have people utterly incapable of delivering comic lines deliver comic lines. Usually, Eszter Balint, who plays Arquette’s best friend and her ostensible rival for David Bowie’s affections. Also, Viveca Lindfors. Shepard does a terrible job directing Lindfors’s cameo as an antique shop owner. Bowie’s not quirky. He’s also better dressed when he’s not at work—he’s a bartender, Arquette’s a waitress—which seems weird, but then he also has really precise hair throughout. It’s like Bowie brought along his own costume designer and hair person, not trusting Linguini’s. I mean, rightly so. But still.

Bowie needs to get married for a green card, and he’s got his sights set on hostess Marlee Matlin. Matlin’s one of the only well-timed comedic performances, James Avery’s the other; Avery’s got three lines and better timing than anyone else in the movie. You can almost see him ignoring Shepard’s direction and just doing the delivery well.

So Matlin wants a pay-off to marry Bowie; he’s going to have to rob their place of work to get her the cash. But then Arquette wants to rob Gregory and Henry too so she can buy some memorabilia from Lindfors. No spoilers, but the robbery thing is a red herring to get the movie into its third act, which makes sense if you’re trying to appease some kid’s rich parents bankrolling your movie. For an actual motion picture where, presumably, at least one person read the script more than once… not so much.

Linguini could be worse, to be sure. What if Bowie, Arquette, and Balint were as lousy as Gregory and Henry, for example. But they’re also not unlikable. It’s hard for them to be sympathetic because they’re absurd and poorly written, but Bowie’s got some energy. Arquette and Balint run out of it quickly—possibly because they’ve got no chemistry—but they aren’t energy vampires like many other cast members.

The music—from Thomas Newman—is best described as half-ass, and the other technicals aren’t any better. Sonya Polonsky’s editing is terrible, Robert D. Yeoman’s photography is bland; however, given they’re working with Shepard’s direction, it’s not like it could be any other way. There’s no way to cut Shepard’s shots together any better, no way to light them better.

A rewrite, a better director, some recasting, The Linguini Incident would still be missing a protagonist and a point. Shepard and Brott can’t commit on Arquette, Balint, or Bowie and hand it off to Gregory and Henry instead of making any decisions.

It’s kind of incredible it’s comprehensible at all. Some of the acting’s terrible and whatnot—some of the writing—but it’s clearly all director Shepard’s fault.

Hotel Splendide (2000, Terence Gross)

Hotel Splendide is based on a novel by Marie Redonnet. She doesn’t get any credit in the film, director Gross instead taking the full writing credit. Guess the WGA is good, actually.

The film having a novel source explains a few things, principally why Hugh O’Conor is narrating the movie. O’Conor’s ostensibly an aquaphobic staying at the titular hotel, a sanitarium set up on a remote island. I say ostensibly aquaphobic because the film implies, time and again, O’Conor’s really there for something else, and everyone’s been lying to him about his fear of water. There’s even the implication the hotel staff intentionally gave him aquaphobia to take his mind off his real problem, which—based on O’Conor’s character otherwise being entirely devoted to peeping on sexual congresses and playing solitaire with nudie cards—seems to have been him being a sexually frustrated serial killer.

Doesn’t matter because O’Conor disappears in the second act when the film finally gets around to letting Daniel Craig have some agency, only to bring O’Conor back to screw up the finish.

And it’s impressive Splendide’s gotten to a point where O’Conor can drag it back down. The film rallies big time when it really shouldn’t be, including turning Stephen Tompkinson into a dangerous villain when he’s previously just been a simpering mama’s boy without a mama. The mother ran the hotel, dying a year before the present action kicked off. Toni Collette has returned from the outside world, having left five years before when the mother disapproved of her and Craig’s love affair.

Someone—not Craig, who starts the film enraged at Collette for abandoning him—wrote Collette to beckon her back. Her arrival will ruin Tompkinson’s control over the hotel, which is killing off its residents and not getting any new ones since no one who’s been off the island still thinks eating nothing but eel and seaweed stew to constipate yourself and require daily enemas is a good idea anymore. Or at least, one would hope. Splendide requires a bunch of suspension of disbelief, like how the family running the hotel—who’ve presumably never lived anywhere else—have such good vocabularies or how they get power (they get gas by converting residents’ shit into methane to fuel the hotel forever, with the furnace being an angry stand-in for the departed mom), or why they seem to have new clothes. Maybe the novel explains it. Or perhaps the novel’s good enough it doesn’t have to explain it. Or perhaps the novel just avoids it like the movie.

The film starts with director Gross overestimating how charming quirky can be, especially since the quirkiness is laden with ableism, misogyny, and… icky. O’Conor’s icky without being dangerous, while Tompkinson is odious and potentially dangerous (though when the dangerous comes out, Gross makes it ableist to further villainize him, which is a lot). But the person who has it worst—other than maybe actually physically abused kitchen staff Toby Jones—is the sister, Katrin Cartlidge.

Tompkinson manages the hotel, Craig runs the kitchen, Cartlidge handles the physical therapy whether she likes it or not, and retired since his widowing dad Peter Vaughan just hanging around. The film presents Vaughan as a sympathetic old dodderer, too weak to stand up to the dead wife, but then has all these terrible details about him as he perpetuates a bunch of abuse. Gross seems entirely unaware because it involves women, and they aren’t really characters in Hotel Splendide, like when top-billed Collette essentially becomes Craig’s accessory for the second act.

At times, both Collette and Craig are quite good. Unfortunately, usually not in their scenes together. If they aren’t bickering about Collette literally not wanting to be abused by Craig’s family, Collette’s just silent when Craig does things. The third act doesn’t completely whiff their relationship development, but it comes pretty close. Then the denouement makes them irrelevant. It’s very messy.

Besides Collette and Craig, there are good performances from Cartlidge, Joerg Stadler, and Helen McCrory. Everyone else is fine, save Tompkinson and O’Conor, who are both terrible, though it’s unclear how much is Tompkinson’s fault and not just Gross’s script or directing. O’Conor’s, unfortunately, a charisma vacuum, with or without Gross.

Technically, Splendide hasn’t got much going for it. Gross’s direction of actors is slightly better than his composition, which wouldn’t matter if it were better because Gyula Pados’s photography is terrible. Though not as bad as Michael Ellis’s editing or, especially, Mark Tschanz’s music. The film relies on Tschanz’s score more than anything else, and, even with O’Conor’s annoying narrator, better music probably would’ve saved the day.

For a while, it seems like Splendide will end up being a mildly compelling oddity for Collette, Craig, and Cartlidge. Sadly, it doesn’t. Though it doesn’t fail Collette or Craig anywhere near as much as Cartlidge. It fails her something fierce.

A Fantastic Fear of Everything (2012, Crispian Mills and Chris Hopewell)

It’s so easy to pick on A Fantastic Fear of Everything there’s basically no fun in it. The only thing worse than co-director Crispian Mills’s script is his and Chris Hopewell’s direction. For the first half of the movie, when Simon Pegg’s basically all by himself making a mocking impression of someone with paranoia, the direction is shockingly inept. It gets a little better in the second half once Pegg leaves his flat and ventures into the world.

The “story” is simple. Pegg is a successful children’s book author who wants to be a legit historical true crime playwright because the world needs garbage. Filled with Victorian-era classist ideas about what does and does not make a murderer, which will fit with the film’s general xenophobia and obsessive punching down, Pegg becomes terrified the world is full of murderers. Including some who live in his flat with him.

The paranoia thing is all a bit to fill runtime. Fear is an excruciating hundred minutes, and once Pegg’s out in the world, the paranoia thing pretty much doesn’t matter. Then he’s just a guy with crushing social anxieties the film mocks. But it’s all going to be okay because Pegg is a white guy who loves gangsta rap, so he’s obviously going to fail upwards. If he can survive the killers after him. And the Vietnamese gangs. Lots of Fear is about being afraid of Vietnamese people, which makes it okay to be low-key racist since they bring down property values after all.

The third act’s a little better than the rest of the film; Pegg’s not acting off himself or his terrible narration, and there are finally other actors. Unfortunately, in the first act, it’s just agent Clare Higgins, who’s xenophobic and maybe homophobic—I actually blocked it out—and she ignores him, so he’s basically just riffing on the entitled white guy author bit with a disinterested successful female agent. Fear’s only got tropes. Tropes, an embarrassing performance from Pegg, lousy writing and direction, and bad editing. Not a great combination.

But the third act’s got Amara Karan, who’s more professional than anyone else in the film, and she brings it up (as much as possible). There’s only so much anyone could do.

Silly, bad cameo from Paul Freeman as Pegg’s obnoxious therapist.

There are no redeeming qualities to the film, though there are more competent moments than others. There’s an impromptu stop motion sequence, and it’s effective enough. It’s not great, but it’s not incompetently produced. So much of Fear is just blisteringly inept; whether Pegg’s acting or Mills and Hopewell’s direction, competence goes a long way. Even middling competence.

There are a few laughs in the movie; there ought to be more given most of its slapstick. You feel bad about all the laughs, of course, because they’re funny but bad. As opposed to desperately unfunny and bad, which is ninety-eight percent of Fear. Mills, Hopewell, and Pegg only impress in what a crappy movie they make together.

Beverly Hills Cop (1984, Martin Brest)

Beverly Hills Cop opens with a montage of Detroit street scenes. Kids playing, people talking, walking, Black and white. It’s beautifully cut—even at its most tediously cop action movie procedural, the editing is always glorious (though there’s lots of technical magnificence in Cop—and is well-done enough you even forgive the film for Glenn Frey’s The Heat is On. The thing about really tightly chosen soundtracks is when a song doesn’t fit the characters, and Glenn Frey is definitely not what Eddie Murphy’s Detroit super-cop puts on the stereo hi-fi. It’s okay enough. And the montage is excellent.

But it’s nothing compared to the first action sequence, which has a cigarette smuggler wreaking havoc in a stolen truck on the streets of Detroit, all the cops in pursuit, Murphy swinging around the back of the trailer, The Pointer Sisters’ “Neutron Dance” blaring, every shot cut perfectly to the music. It’s mesmerizing. And director Brest makes sure to show off Murphy’s reaction shots. After that opening scene with the cops arriving to set off the truck chase, the entire movie is pretty much watching Murphy figure out the story. Brest just sets the camera on him and waits for Murphy to lead the scene to its finish with his deliveries and expressions. So when Lisa Eilbacher is just staring at him on the job, waiting for him to find the next clue, it makes perfect sense. He’d be just as transfixing to the people around him.

Brest directs Cop with a spotlight on Murphy, leveraging Bruce Surtees’s very grim and gritty photography (even for an action movie) and Murphy’s ability to make the comedy work. Because everyone’s Murphy’s sidekick in a series of sketches. Well, until the third act. And it’s sluggish through the second act when Murphy teams up with Beverly Hills cops and buzzkills John Ashton and Judge Reinhold. The movie takes a while to really loose Ashton and Reinhold as a comedy duo—they’ve got a whole slapstick number at one point, with Harold Faltermeyer’s scorekeeping the energy up until they’re able to take it through unfunny into a good gag. And the last one before the big action finale.

It’s a decent big action finale, with Murphy able to deliver the thriller goods while Ashton and Reinhold take over the comedy. There are a lot of reasons Beverly Hills Cop could never get made today, not least of which being if a bunch of white guys with assault weapons are shooting at a Black man (even one with two white friends) on their Beverly Hills estate… would the cops even show up? Cop ages rather strangely. Starting with none of the white cops just shooting Murphy when they don’t recognize him. It’s uncomfortably optimistic.

But there’s also the Beverly Hills angle. Cop’s able to treat it as an absurd foreign land, where every car is a Mercedes, every person white but polite, and the cops tattle on each other for infractions. It leads to a lot of funny scenes. Murphy, Brest, and Cop can get quite a bit of material from it. The big changeover in tone comes after the strip club scene, which isn’t the worst eighties action movie strip club scene, but it’s still utterly pointless. Cop doesn’t have female characters—Eilbacher’s art gallery director is only female because they wouldn’t have been able to sell a straight male art gallery director. She and Murphy don’t have any romantic chemistry; they’re just old friends. The first act of Cop is very much about old friends. And it’s definitely not about girls. If you look in the end credits, it’s Eilbacher then fifteen guys (and only one Black guy) before you get to the next female character. Murphy spends the entire time in the strip club flirting with the waitress, and there’s not even a reaction shot. Cop’s about boys.

To be incredibly fair to it and what they pull off: Beverly Hills Cop takes place over four days, three of them consecutive, and there’s only dull moment is trying to figure out if Bronson Pinchot is intentionally stalling the scene. Brest and the editors time everyone else in the movie with Murphy, but Pinchot against him, and it’s almost like a dig to make Pinchot more unlikable. Like maybe he was actually too likable, and they screwed it up for a laugh. But the laugh is he’s foreign and an art gallery clerk.

Paul Reiser does better in his bit part as Murphy’s Detroit sidekick, but he’s really just there to dump exposition and set up jokes.

The best supporting performance is probably Ronny Cox as the Beverly Hills captain. He’s got the least to do in terms of action but the most character while doing it. Then probably Steven Berkoff’s off-putting but successful villain. Then Eilbacher holds her own against everyone and helps maintain Murphy’s energy even when he’s in Beverly Hills. Ashton and Reinhold are both good, likable, funny. Reinhold’s got a couple long comedy bits, but they eventually pay off enough. Brest doesn’t care to showcase anyone else. He just wants to watch Murphy, which makes sense because Murphy’s almost indescribably good. Nonpareil. It’s a profoundly successful showcase (and very unfortunate he and Brest never teamed up again); Beverly Hills Cop is no crappy blue Chevy Nova; it’s the perfect star-making vehicle.

The great technicals just make it better. Cop’s unimaginable looking different from Surtees’s contrast heavy but still muted photography or playing differently than how Arthur Coburn and Billy Weber cut it. Not to mention the Faltermeyer score. Or the often great soundtrack (Patti LaBelle contributes the two other big songs, not Frey).

And Brest’s direction is excellent. The film’s a singular success.

MASH (1970, Robert Altman)

MASH is timelessly white liberal. There’s even a lovable Southerner (Tom Skerritt) who knows in that science way Black folks are just folks, but he still wants to be a dick about it. And his white male Northeastern elitist friends, Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould, are totally fine with that bigotry because, you know, it’s not hurting anything, really.

But then there is something going on actually hurting people, and it’s evangelical Christian Robert Duvall. In what initially seems like a pronounced case of bullying, it turns out director Altman, actor Duvall, and screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. (whose actual dialogue infamously got edited out for the final product) do a great story arc about Duvall’s Christian Nationalism hurting tangibly hurting and maybe even killing people. When it’s not about Sutherland, Gould, Skerritt, and every other guy in the movie sexual harassing their female colleagues, it’s an exceptionally subtle look at life in this Army M*A*S*H unit.

Altman is doing an anti-Vietnam picture from a pro-war Korean War novel, and the studio is interfering; MASH is a film made in the editing room to some degree. The chaos of the film and the chaos of the content are in perfect sync. When you get to the saddest moment in the picture, you don’t even know why it’s sad; the actors knew why it was sad, but it’s out of sequence and haunts differently. MASH has these occasionally bewitching moments, sometimes even the problematic romance arcs, so Altman and editor Danford B. Greene have sort of set the tone for it to continue. MASH intentionally overloads the audience with information—conversations over one another, basic transition scenes ignored, actual voiceover contrasting a different scene—they work at it from the opening. MASH’s story begins when Sutherland walks into frame, and some quotes roll. But the opening titles are scenes of the unit bringing in the wounded from the helicopters. The film starts with a kick in the gut, one Altman never really brings up again—the gory death surrounding the characters. There are a scant handful of medical cases—MASH is anti-procedural—but their drama’s never tied to them. It’s incredible the film Altman made with the performers not knowing where the film was going. It’s organized chaos.

Just like the war.

Okay, so there’s the white colonial savior shit, which I’ll group with the permissive white liberal racism, and then the classism. Though the classism is more about the misogyny, which is a sort of post-sexual revolutionist excuse for predatory and grooming and gaslighting behavior. Then there’s Duvall’s puritanical shit, which is actually very harmful, and Duvall’s playing a gross, evangelical shit. It’s depressing how secular MASH was allowed to play in 1970.

And then Sally Kellerman’s regular army, but professionally skilled, but performatively puritanical. She’s actually the film’s most realized character, and her purpose is to suffer sexist assaults and hijinks from Sutherland, Gould, and Skerritt. MASH goes out of its way to expertly convince Duvall is actually bad enough of a guy to deserve it, but with Kellerman… the film batters her, and she preservers through it. It’s an excellent performance from Kellerman. Especially since she’s playing a generic harpy in most of her foreground scenes for the first half of the picture. The character development’s in the background.

And when there isn’t character development, it’s about why there isn’t character development. Sutherland, Gould, and Skerritt are the Marx Brothers as drafted, drunken, horny, disaffected brilliant narcissist surgeons. Skerritt’s simultaneously the most and least sympathetic since he’s the unapologetic bigot. Oh, the homophobia. I forgot about the homophobic story arc. MASH is a series of interrelated story arcs; they’re not really vignettes just because they’re all sort of happening at once. At least until the third act and the zany football finale.

Yeah, there are a lot of things going on in MASH. The homophobia arc basically then turns into a patriarchal, classist toxic masculinity objectifying thing for the resolution. Like it’s fucked up. And it does say a lot about the characters creating manipulating those situations. Altman’s got a peculiar narrative distance with the protagonists. Skerritt’s going to get demoted in the third act because he’s gone soft for a girl—everyone’s got a wife back home, but it’s okay because maybe the nurses have husbands. There’s an ever-present but never directly explored romance between base commander Roger Bowen and nurse Indus Arthur. In addition to being married, Bowen’s helplessly aloof; his corporal, Gary Burghoff, basically runs the base. So Arthur’s always doting on Bowen, and it’s kind of icky, but also maybe it’s sweet. But then there’s this added layer where Arthur’s aware Bowen’s a doofus and laughs at it with her friends, including Burghoff. MASH is basically able to get through all of its… well, from Sutherland calling a Black guy a “racist” for giving him shit, MASH is white liberal edge-lord. While also being great.

It’s able to get away with it by never going too far in any one direction—the homophobia is literally genially presented, the racism levels are fine with Fred Williamson, so it’s got to be okay, something something something with the sexually predatory behavior (the nurses are all enthusiastically consenting because the men Altman cast to be normal-looking are all love stallions). It’s a movie, after all, a Hollywood movie, and it’s a comedy. And a war movie. So a Hollywood war comedy. MASH requires a very delicate touch, and Altman’s got it.

Acting: Kellerman’s the winner, then Duvall. Then it starts getting difficult to list it out. Not Skerritt. Kind of not Gould. Kind of not Sutherland either. In terms of irreplaceability, it’s Burghoff. He’s not in the movie as much as he’s in the TV show; he’s definitely a D-tier character (he’s got no subplots to himself). But he’s holding it all together. But also, everyone’s great. Williamson’s great—he ends up commanding the majority of the third act—Rene Auberjonois is great, David Arkin is great, Bud Cort is great; no one’s not standout. Even the objectified nurses. Actually, the treatment of the nurses is kind of where the Marx Brothers comparison comes in.

MASH is awesome. It’s also very privileged, elitist, sexist, and generally misanthropic. But, again, white liberal edge-lord and still gets away with it. When Altman’s great, Altman is great.