Category: Directors Am

Copycat (1995, Jon Amiel)

It’s easy to pick out the “best” thing in Copycat because it’s almost entirely atrocious. Christopher Young’s highly derivative score is lovely—it’s a mix between John Williams and then Aliens whenever Sigourney Weaver is in thriller danger. Thanks to the score, Copycat makes some interesting swings, like emotive, romantic music during the most inappropriate sequences. Again, outside aping Ripley moments, it never fits the content, but it is definitely lovely.

Otherwise, the high point is J.E. Freeman’s performance as the grizzled police captain. He’s fine. They cut away from him too soon because he’s clearly knawing on the set. I really wanted to see him munch on his coffee mug, which always seems inevitable.

Besides those two elements, it’s just a matter of what’s not godawful and what’s just bad.

What’s impressive about Freeman is he’s the only acceptable performance. Everyone else is either incompetent or appalling. A lot of it is Amiel’s direction. He’s inept at composing the Panavision shots—it’s a special kind of bad to waste San Francisco like Amiel wastes it (the lighting is fine, thanks to László Kovács’s photography but wow, what a waste of Kovács)—but he’s even worse at directing actors. Whether Weaver, who’s got a risibly written part, soulful surfer tech bro cop Dermot Mulroney, or incel serial killer William McNamara, Amiel does an incapable job with all of them. Oh, I forgot Will Patton. Poor Will Patton.

Copycat is supposed to be about Weaver teaming up with San Francisco homicide inspector Holly Hunter, but second-billed Hunter deserves an “and” credit. She takes a back seat to Mulroney, McNamara, and even Patton as her erstwhile love interest. Patton’s a sexist, racist fellow detective—Hunter and Mulroney are partners—and until it turns out he’s dangerously unfit, he just ruins scenes. Not because he’s the worst actor in them; instead, he’s a purposeless boil on the film. He’s there, so they don’t have to do a whole trope, just a three-quarters trope.

Of the main cast, Hunter’s the least bad. She’s never good because it’s a terrible movie, but you’re never slack-jawed at the badness of her performance. Like Weaver. So much bad acting from Weaver.

The script, courtesy Ann Biderman and David Madsen, is worse than Amiel’s direction. Likewise, Jim Clark and Alan Heim’s editing is lousy.

Copycat’s so abominable I don’t even want to talk about Harry Connick Jr.’s cameo as a hillbilly serial killer, which starts worse than it finishes, but only because his bad performance is less bad than the many other bad performances. It’s a derivative, insipid motion picture, so obviously rotten the cast don’t even earn sympathy for their embarrassing participation.

Pretty music, though. Very pretty music.

Pierre Paolo (1998, Rachel Amodeo)

Pierre Paolo is a five minute short, set in a seaside Italian town. It opens with a simple, handwritten title card, then there’s a montage of the town set to classical music. The action rests on an old woman (Filomena Paletta) sitting on some stairs. Text appears across the bottom of the frame, explaining she’s thinking about her husband, the titular Pierre Paolo. When he appears, he’s a little boy on the beach, playing with a little girl (presumably the old woman on the stairs).

The action cuts to a younger version of the woman (director Amodeo) near the same, or similar stairs, in the town.

While the short raises some unaddressed questions—i.e. does it matter if the footage was all shot contemporaneously—the young boy is played by Pierre Paolo Pegnataro, the young girl by Govanna Saboureault, so is it old found footage or did Amodeo sort of create this nostalgia piece—the questions don’t have any affect on the effectiveness of the short. There are some limitations from the medium; clearly shot on film, it appears to be edited on video with that medium’s too static pauses. But it’s extremely well-edited, the music fits just right, and Amodeo’s composition is excellent.

It’s even better if she did go and stage kids playing on the beach in the thirties or forties or whatever. Those flashback sequences are lovely.

Pierre Paolo has its issues, but they’re from the video (the onscreen text is that always somewhat ugly nineties video editor generated text); Amodeo’s creative impulse is nicely executed. It’s a touching memory visualized. Or imagined. It’s nice work.

Creation (2009, Jon Amiel)

Creation is the not the story of how Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) and the ghost of his oldest daughter (Martha West) collaborated in the writing of On the Origin of Species. That story would make a much better movie.

The film opens with a title card explaining it will be about Darwin writing that book, released in 1859. Some conversation early on places the present action in 1858. So a year. At this point, it’s been twenty years since he published Voyage of the Beagle. Some of those adventures show up in flashback–a flashback’s flashback–as Bettany recounts stories to West.

Well, at the beginning. Then not. The Beagle flashbacks are the biggest budgeted sequences in Creation and director Amiel treats them as set pieces. Only then such flashbacks (in flashbacks) stop and so do set pieces. Instead, it’s just Bettany hanging around at home, making churchy wife Jennifer Connelly real upset with his blasphemous manuscript and research. It seems like this narrative floundering is covering a lot of time but it turns out it isn’t. Amiel and screenwriter John Collee are terrible at pacing. Why do they need pacing when they can have Bettany talk to West (not an actual ghost, just a narrative contrivance). If only the exposition moved the film along.

After a promising first act, Creation settles into that “ghost” story. Amiel and Collee tease out details of West’s death in the present while flashing back, at first, to unrelated family bonding scenes. The flashbacks eventually get confusing because Bettany’s makeup for Darwin age forty-nine is bald with stringy hair, very pasty skin, a paunch. The film skips back seven and eight years to the West flashbacks–those seven actual years in between Darwin’s daughter’s death and the Species’s completion are apparently empty of worthy story material. Darwin age forty-two makeup is bald with stringy hair, mildly pasty skin, general nineteenth century upper class flab. It’s not hard to tell them apart, but only because Bettany’s good. But in terms of filmmaking–Amiel’s direction, Jess Hall’s flat photography–well, it’s good they have Bettany.

Also because it’s an entirely thankless part. Collee’s script is deceptively worse than first impression. It’s not bland biopic stuff, it’s bland biopic stuff without any characters. Amiel, whose direction is never better than mediocre (outside the special effects sequences of animal decomposition and so on), he at least tries occasionally. He really likes his close-ups. So the actors can spout either ominous lines (because of hiding daughter West’s fate in flashback) or exposition.

While Bettany’s got it bad, he at least gets to walk around in his make-up. Connelly is left to take care of the kids and give disapproving looks when Bettany doesn’t take his “war on God” seriously. And Connelly never really gets a role. She ends up with one poorly written, well-acted scene. It’s exceptionally impressive filmmaking from Amiel, Hall, and editor Melanie Oliver. It’s this entirely manipulative, cheap, soapy scene and it still works. Because Bettany and Connelly. Connelly gets some character motivation at what might as well be the end of the movie. There’s still more movie and it’s bad, but that moment is when Creation could’ve got out in the black.

But it doesn’t. Because Amiel and Collee are entirely artless with Creation. They want all to benefits of melodramatic contrivances without ever embracing those contrivances. There’s also the issue of how the film characterizes the religious. Caricaturizes. Connelly and Jeremy Northam (extended cameoing as the village clergy) are inappropriately villainized. But meaning they need to be villainized differently. There’s no dramatic fodder in it as is.

Bettany’s good. Not great. Better than decent or fine. West is decent. Connelly is problematic; the part’s crap. Northam’s cameo is too thin. Ditto Toby Jones. He’s bombastic though. Energy is a lot in Creation, as the film stops producing any once the second act hits. Benedict Cumberbatch is good. He tries.

If there’s a great film about the final year of Darwin writing Species, Creation sure ain’t it. Amiel’s just too bland a director to save the film from the script. It could’ve at least maintained mediocre, but as it becomes more and more clear how bad Collee’s plotting and pacing is going to get… well, mediocre’s way out of reach.

The awful Christopher Young score doesn’t help either.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Jon Amiel; screenplay by John Collee, based on a story by Amiel and Collee and a book by Randal Keynes; director of photography, Jess Hall; edited by Melanie Oliver; music by Christopher Young; production designer, Laurence Dorman; produced by Jeremy Thomas; released by Icon Film Distribution.

Starring Paul Bettany (Charles Darwin), Jennifer Connelly (Emma Darwin), Martha West (Annie Darwin), Jeremy Northam (Reverend Innes), Benedict Cumberbatch (Joseph Hooker), Jim Carter (Parslow), Bill Paterson (Dr. Gully), and Toby Jones (Thomas Huxley).

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The Punisher: No Mercy (2013, Jason Ambrus)

About half of The Punisher: No Mercy is effective. From the credits, it appears the fan short is a labor of love for star Shawn Baichoo–who apes Karl Urban’s voice from Dredd, which doesn’t work here. Baichoo cowrote the script and choreographed the fight scene between himself and Amber Goldfarb.

The fight scene isn’t very good. It’s hard to tell if it’s the choreography, Jason Ambrus’s lackluster action direction or James Malloch’s decidedly limp editing. Mercy, throughout, has terrible sound effects. They should have splurged for a better sound effects CD.

The script’s multi-layered, which is almost neat. The problem is that fight scene. It takes up most of the second half and between the boring fight and Goldfarb’s terrible performance (not to mention it’s all on a confined set)… the short loses all momentum.

Mercy shows talented amateur filmmaking; it’s too bad it’s a waste of time.

The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997, Jon Amiel)

As unlikely as it might seem, The Man Who Knew Too Little could have been really good. Here’s the basic plot–an American rube, who loves movies and television so much he knows the lines, is confused for a dangerous psychopathic hitman involved in international intrigue while vacationing in the UK. All of his hitman lines, for example, could be from movies or something.

Instead, Too Little is a train wreck of a star vehicle for Bill Murray. One has to wonder if co-stars Joanne Whalley, Peter Gallagher and Alfred Molina recognized Murray’s terrible performance on set. If they did, and still managed such good performances opposite him, it says something about their skill… and professionalism.

Murray is awful. Obviously, the script is at fault to some degree, but it’s really Murray. An engaged actor could have overcome any script problems.

However, Murray’s not entirely at fault for Too Little. Director Amiel is the other obvious culprit. Amiel’s attempts at a spy thriller–even a spoof of a spy thriller–are awful. He apparently told composer Christopher Young to make the score sound like a Pink Panther cartoon. Young’s credited as “Chris Young” here… maybe he was embarrassed by the lame score. It’s technically fine, just stupid.

Another fine performance is from Anna Chancellor, in her too small role as Gallagher’s wife. Of course, the film forgets about branding she and Gallagher terrorists so it can get to its idiotic finish.

Too Little is dreadful and shouldn’t have been.

0/4ⓏⒺⓇⓄ

CREDITS

Directed by Jon Amiel; screenplay by Robert Farrar and Howard Franklin, based on a novel by Farrar; director of photography, Robert M. Stevens; edited by Pamela Power and Paul Karasick; music by Christopher Young; production designer, Jim Clay; produced by Arnon Milchan, Michael G. Nathanson and Mark Tarlov; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Bill Murray (Wallace Ritchie), Peter Gallagher (James Ritchie), Joanne Whalley (Lori), Alfred Molina (Boris ‘The Butcher’ Blavasky), Richard Wilson (Sir Roger Daggenhurst), John Standing (Gilbert Embleton), Simon Chandler (Hawkins), Geraldine James (Dr. Ludmilla Kropotkin), Anna Chancellor (Barbara Ritchie), Nicholas Woodeson (Sergei), Cliff Parisi (Uri), Dexter Fletcher (Otto) and Eddie Marsan (Mugger #1).

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Zeiram (1991, Amemiya Keita)

Zeiram is a Japanese low budget sci-fi action film. Except it also has a strong slapstick vibe and a real minimalist feel to it. While, visually, the budget might be responsible for some of that minimalism–certainly in concept–the film takes it even further. It’s fight scenes set to Philip Glass, which one needs to see to believe. Whether one goes for that sort of thing or not is a whole different question (my fiancée, for example, did not go for it).

Like many low budget sci-fi films, Zeiram knows how to spend its money. The story’s set in a “zone,” which is just a duplicate of a section of the city, just without people (i.e. paid actors), save the leads. This zone can go from day to night, all depending on when the hero shoots the ceiling with a flare. She only does it a few times, and once to turn it off, so they mustn’t have gotten much filming done during the day. Especially not in exteriors of empty streets. While the low budget nature of the narrative occasionally becomes a little too apparent, for the most part it’s natural and unforced. Occasionally, particularly toward the end, when there’s a lot of stop motion (good work and well-composited), there are these incredibly tight shots and you can just tell they can’t shoot an inch right or left because there are adjoining sets or something.

The direction, by Amemiya Keita, is either deliberately constrained to fit into that minimalist motif or he’s just boring. I’m pretty sure it’s the first, because the latter wouldn’t explain for the music, which would have been done after he composed his shots. His direction of his actors is similarly lax. The comic relief characters, played by Ida Kunihiro and Hotaru Yukijiro, are both great. Hotaru is almost always funny, but Ida gets the great line about the scantily clad hero getting cold. This hero, played by Moriyama Yûko, runs lukewarm and cold. By the end of the film, Amemiya sort of assumes the audience is going to be involved, going to be buying it, so he gives up on any real sense. There wasn’t much sense, character-wise at the beginning, but there was some consistency. It goes, but it really doesn’t matter.

Zeiram reminded me a lot of Trancers, probably because of the budget, and it seemed like something USA used to play on “Up All Night.” There’s an old dubbed version, so maybe it was broadcast there. If you get into it, it’s a neat little cheap movie, with a lot more going on under the hood than it lets on.