Category: Directors As

Room 237 (2012, Rodney Ascher)

If you told me Room 237 exists because someone wanted to test out how far the “Fair Use” part of copyright exception went… well, okay, I wouldn’t believe it because obviously there’s the other terrible stuff going on and you’d do it better if you were just trying to bring “Fair Use” to the Supreme Court or something. It’s amazing Warner Bros. didn’t sue (or wasn’t able to sue). It’s also amazing Tom Cruise didn’t sue for the film using him as an avatar for one of the interviewees.

Room 237 is probably a bit more of a trip since we’ve learned—in the mainstream culture—more about conspiracy theorists and how the conspiracy takes off and what not. So it’s identifiable in all of the interviewees, whose bad ideas about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining accompany the uninspired montage of shots from various films (mostly The Shining, obviously, but also the TV version). Director, uncredited writer, and (of course, naturally) uncredited editor Ascher doesn’t push back or have any presence in the interviews until the very end and then only for (tepid) effect. Otherwise, he just lets the various people monologue, leaving one to worry about the historian’s work in that field, ditto the reporter, who’s got some of the silliest “legit” takes. There’s a moon landing was fake guy (but, wait, the science existed to get us there, it’s just Kubrick shot the landing stuff because matte painting or something). There’s one interviewee who talks a lot about compulsively drawing maps, who doesn’t mention her profession, which is nice. It’s worse to realize these people could be promoting all their bad movie watching epistemologies, their fails in critical thinking, understanding of confirmation bias, and, I don’t know, just general bad taste. The only potentially good take is from the cartographer about the maze and the minotaur and Theseus. But it’s got a silly opener on it so it never actually resonates as an observation.

Ascher’s not interested in whether or not these people’s ideas are accurate. One of the interviewees talks about countless examples and his best one is profoundly bad. Ascher’s got the technology to examine the film and, outside occasionally highlights to showcase the interviewee’s iffy (at way best) take, never does it. You learn more from one five minute Kogonada video essay about Kubrick’s filmmaking than you do from the entirety of Room 237, which raises another question. Is Ascher just trying to embarrass all these people for the sake of attention? If so, he could’ve edited them more amusingly.

Technically, the best thing about Room 237 is the high definition original footage Ascher presumably ripped from his Blu-ray since Warner Bros. didn’t give it to him. You can still see the quality in that restoration work, something the interviewees wouldn’t have had for most of their studies of the film Seriously, Room 237 is an argument against home video. Actually, more an argument against film in general.

What else… the music from William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes could be a lot worse and the superimposition stuff (running Shining forward and backward in a composite shot) is kind of neat because you see how Kubrick shot the film. Though it’d work with all sorts of superimpositions, not just the front and back.

I get it takes a lot to work up a defense of The Shining but Room 237 isn’t just disingenuous, it even manages to do a disservice to the crackpot ideas it showcases.

Stick around for the end credits though—teaser: Ascher was able to get real clips from one copyright holder and it’s a very unexpected one.

The Last Detail (1973, Hal Ashby)

Even though Jack Nicholson gets top billing and the most bombastic role in The Last Detail, Otis Young has the harder job. He’s got to temper Nicholson, both for the sake of the audience and of the narrative. The film introduces the two men simultaneously–Robert Towne’s script almost immediately establishes an unspoken bond between the two, even though it takes them well through the first act to get to know each other.

The Last Detail is an atypical buddy picture for many reasons, with the two buddies getting thrown together being one of the more immediate ones. But more, the film is practically a parenting outing. Nicholson’s the crazy, fun dad, Young’s the responsible mother (who you don’t want to cross) and Randy Quaid’s the kid. Of course, Nicholson and Young are escorting Quaid to the stockade.

Along the way, Nicholson and Young do not go on an odyssey of self discovery. Their efforts in humanizing Quaid don’t lead to big momentous changes in their lives. Towne is reserved, saving the expository character development scenes for when Quaid’s doing something else (sometimes just napping); it makes those scenes, with Nicholson calm as opposed to manic and Young not fretting as much, rather special.

Director Ashby and editor Robert C. Jones create a tranquil, quiet quality for the film, using fades to guide the viewer’s attention. Great photography from Michael Chapman and a rather good score from Johnny Mandel.

All the acting’s great. Detail is muted, precise and often devastating.

4/4★★★★

CREDITS

Directed by Hal Ashby; screenplay by Robert Towne, based on the novel by Darryl Ponicsan; director of photography, Michael Chapman; edited by Robert C. Jones; music by Johnny Mandel; production designer, Michael D. Haller; produced by Gerald Ayres; released by Columbia Pictures.

Starring Jack Nicholson (Buddusky), Otis Young (Mulhall), Randy Quaid (Meadows), Clifton James (M.A.A.), Carol Kane (Young Prostitute) and Michael Moriarty (Marine O.D.).

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8 Million Ways to Die (1986, Hal Ashby)

About halfway through 8 Million Ways to Die, I realized–thanks to a boom mike–my twenty year-old laserdisc was open matte, not pan and scan. The widescreen zoomed suddenly made the shots tighter and crisper, regaining Ashby’s usually calmness. I suppose I should have stopped and went back to the beginning to see if it made any difference, but I doubt it. The first forty minutes of 8 Million Ways to Die suffer multiple plagues–summary storytelling, sometimes good but Jeff Bridges’s wife in the movie doesn’t even have a line when she’s on screen it’s all so fast; Alexandra Paul, who’s supposed to be playing a “wuss,” so maybe her crappy performance is intentional; and Rosanna Arquette. At the halfway point, moments after I saw that boom mike (it actually was a mike for Arquette), she changes. Goes from being bad to being good (sometimes great) in the rest of the film.

8 Million Ways to Die is a Chandler-esq “mystery” where the detective forces his way through the case instead of actually detecting anything. It’s solved because the bad guy comes shooting for the detective. But once the film gets going, the problems with the story fall away. Throughout, Jeff Bridges is absolutely amazing. It’s probably his best performance. Watching it, I wanted to rewind and watch him think about what to say next again. Amazing performance. And once Arquette takes off, Bridges is in good company. Supporting suspect slash good guy Randy Brooks is good and has some nice moments, but Andy Garcia’s great as the bad guy. It’s a wild, eccentric performance and Garcia doesn’t do these things anymore. He’s crazy; he’s great.

So Bridges and some Ashby’s real nice stuff in here–the studio the movie away from him but whoever cut it did a nice job fitting the music and sound (some shoddy cuts here and there though, lack of coverage and such)–but the really amazing thing about 8 Million Ways to Die is this five minute scene between Arquette and Bridges when they talk. They have coffee and wash dishes but they mostly talk and very naturalistic and it’s unlike most scenes in every other movie ever made. To say there aren’t scenes like it enough doesn’t go far enough, because seeing it suggests maybe all scenes should be like it. It’s beautiful.

I actually found 8 Million Ways to Die in a box of other unreleased-on-DVD laserdiscs I didn’t know I still had. It’s a shame it’s not out, but I can’t control Lionsgate or whatever likely lousy company owns the rights. But I did lose track of this film somewhere in the last eight or nine years and I really shouldn’t have.

3/4★★★

CREDITS

Directed by Hal Ashby; screenplay by Oliver Stone and David Lee Henry, from a novel by Lawrence Block; director of photography, Stephen H. Burum; edited by Robert Lawrence and Stuart H. Pappé; music by James Newton Howard; production designer, Michael D. Haller; produced by Stephen J. Roth; released by Tri-Star Pictures.

Starring Jeff Bridges (Matthew Scudder), Rosanna Arquette (Sarah), Alexandra Paul (Sunny), Randy Brooks (Chance), Andy Garcia (Angel Maldonado), Lisa Sloan (Linda Scudder), Christa Denton (Laurie Scudder), Vance Valencia (Quintero), Vyto Ruginis (Joe Durkin) and Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister (Nose Guard).

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Clean (2004, Olivier Assayas)

Clean answers a number of burning questions. Burning to someone, just not me.

  • Olivier Assayas is an excellent director.
  • Olivier Assayas is a terrible writer.
  • Maggie Cheung cannot act in English.
  • Maggie Cheung cannot sing in English.
  • Nick Nolte can survive anything.

I was surprised by numbers 1 and 3. Not so much by the rest.

After creating such a beautiful visual experience, you’d think Assayas would know something about directing actors. He does not. His direction, specifically, of the little kid in the film is astounding. It’s the worst performance of a child actor I’ve witnessed as a reasoning human being. Watching the film, you can see the kid getting direction like: be precocious. It’s awful.

I’ve seen another Assayas film, also starring Cheung (his wife), Irma Vep, but she doesn’t speak English in that one. Assayas seems obsessed with the idea of his wife in a lesbian relationship, introducing the possibility in both these films, but never following through. It’s peculiar, nothing else, and the relationship’s introduced in this film as another of its tangents.

Clean runs about 110 minutes and is filled with needless fade outs (read my recent review of Olga’s Chignon for how transitions ought to be done) and these title cards, telling us the location and the time past. There’s actually one that says “London. A few days later.” Like we couldn’t figure it out.

As a film about someone overcoming drug addiction, Clean is probably the worst. Comparing it to the standards, Clean and Sober and Trainspotting, it’s so ineffective, the drug addiction aspect could be removed and replaced by something and it wouldn’t change a thing. The lead is not a flake because she’s a drug addict. She’s a flake because she’s a flake. The drugs are wholly incidental–my favorite scene, actually, is when she explains why people need to do drugs to her five-year old son.

Cheung actually won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this film and… well, it makes me wonder. What the kind of drugs do the voters at Cannes get? I want some.