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Wyatt Earp (1994, Lawrence Kasdan), the expanded edition
Thirty-nine years old when Wyatt Earp was released, all Kevin Costner needed to do to de-age himself twenty years was smile. During the young Earp days, Costner looks younger than costar Annabeth Gish, not to mention Linden Ashby (playing his younger brother).
The extended version of Wyatt Earp clocks in at three and a half hours. It’s not available on DVD, which is a shame, since it’s the only way to watch the film. Wyatt Earp is a tragedy, spending an hour setting up the character as an affable, hopeful (and a little simple) young man, then destroys him. If he weren’t destroyed, of course, he wouldn’t be much of a main character but I’d forgotten how affecting his destruction is to watch. The film is unique in its lack of acts–first, second and third–it follows the character from youth and, while it must skip some boring parts, contains little in the way of rising action. For example, there’s every indication Joanna Going is going to be as insignificant to the film overall as Téa Leoni. In fact, Leoni’s got more potential as a romantic interest than Going.
The romance between Costner and Going, the emotional reconstruction of his character, is one of the more singular things about the film, as is the friendship with Dennis Quaid’s Doc Holliday. For the first hour and a half, the strong emphasis on the Earp brothers (for someone who constantly derides the film, Michael Madsen has never been as good as he is in this film). The scenes with the brothers rarely allow for emotion in the first half (family being pre-decided) but the relationship with Holliday allows for not just wonderful scenes, but also a striking rumination on friendship.
Those scenes, the romantic ones and the friendship ones, allow Costner to act. After the first hour, he quickly becomes the uncompromising Wyatt Earp of legend. Only Going and Quaid provide an outlet for the emotion left behind. Except for when the film makes its big final change–the film goes through three major moods, which I guess could be used to mark act changes, but not really–and these moods are marked gradually. They’re the sum of what’s come before in the story… the last one is the best, because it allows Costner to visualize it for the audience, something the first one doesn’t provide.
Before I forget–a major aspect of Wyatt Earp is its condemnation of the West and its settlers. Not just the Indians, which is only barely suggested–the contrast between the scenes in civilized Missouri, the untouched West and the “settled” West are striking. It’s a lot like High Noon in its portrayal of (the majority) of the townspeople throughout.
The acting is uniformly excellent, though I suppose Quaid gives the best performance. I’d sort of forgotten he was going to be in it, since he doesn’t show up for an hour and twenty and then he has his first scene and I remembered what an exceptional performance he gives. Gene Hackman is the Earp family father for the first hour and he’s good (his performance might be what makes Costner’s as a twenty-two year-old more work). Like I said, Michael Madsen’s actually good for once and Linden Ashby’s great. JoBeth Williams, David Andrews and Lewis Smith all have some good scenes. Bill Pullman too. But I really could just list the majority of the cast, all of them have good scenes.
Kasdan’s direction is fantastic, both in the scenes between characters and the more epical, Western-type shots. Wyatt Earp is one of the last biopics I’ve seen–the genre seems to have petered out, but maybe I’ve just stopped seeing them because they all look terrible or something. Most are terrible, but there are some great films like this one. Still, even the good ones are often simple, and Wyatt Earp is exceptionally complex.
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Rise: Blood Hunter (2007, Sebastian Gutierrez)
How did the producers of Rise: Blood Hunter ever get cinematography superstar John Toll to shoot this movie? Piles of money, I assume. Probably the same piles of money they used to get Michael Chiklis to play a toned-down version of Vic Mackey. I was thinking, as Chiklis was confronting vampire slash vampire killer Lucy Liu, it played a lot like a TV show–not a bad TV show, maybe a Showtime pilot or something reasonable–except for the cinematography. John Toll is shooting Sam Raimi’s “for foreign markets” garbage. Amazing.
Rise is actually a pretty harmless, personality-free affair. The direction is not kinetic action, which I was expecting (and even hoping for after Liu went through bad guy after bad guy with no variation), but it’s as competent as a… Showtime show. The writing is really goofy. It kept reminding me of Count Yorga, but without the acknowledgment of its goofiness. It’s sad when a silly movie is unable to accept itself and really embrace the possibilities.
One big problem is the vampire set-up. They can go out in the daytime, they sleep in beds, they drink liquor, they don’t fly, they don’t have fangs, they aren’t stronger than normal people… they’re really boring. The lack of anything interesting is what makes Rise, an otherwise pedestrian effort, so unique. It’s like everyone showed up and made a movie, but no one cared what was going on. I’ve never seen a film with a writer slash director (would he qualify as an auteur?) so disinterested in his own film. Characters and subplots fall off all over–and it’s not an eight-three minute movie or a seventy-eight. It runs ninety-eight, which is perfectly respectable.
Some of the casting is good. I don’t know if I’m being unfair to Chiklis, but I doubt it. A goatee appears and disappears and he strokes it when he thinks–working on a case he’s not supposed to be working on. I couldn’t help thinking they cast him just because he already knew the right way to hold a gun from his “Shield” training, so they wouldn’t have to pay anyone else. Elden Henson–who I’d forgotten about–shows up for a few scenes and he’s good. Mako’s kind of funny. Holt McCallany, omnipresent in the 1990s, pops in for a bit. Carla Gugino is in it for a few scenes and is terrible. As the lead (her name isn’t Rise, which makes the title a little obnoxious–I think they were trying to convince people it was from a comic book so they’d go see it), Lucy Liu is fine. When she’s the reporter for the weekly, trying to get stories, she’s good. As the tortured vampire killer, she’s okay. The role’s stupid. It’s not so much badly written as just… dumb. Gutierrez is a hack.
There are some blood effects and Nick Lachey and Marilyn Manson both have cameos, suggesting someone involved in the film was either desperate to get it some attention or he or she has a definite range of friends (they aren’t in the same scene together, unfortunately).
I think the film got a theatrical release. Ah, it was limited. It’s probably in Raimi’s contract all his crap gets theatrical releases of some kind.
Robert Forster has a cameo at the beginning. It’s funny and he’s good in it. Maybe they should have hired a better writer and eighty-sixed the vampire malarky and had the cast make an engaging newspaper picture instead.
Terrible music, can’t forget about that noise. Does a real disservice to Toll’s lightning to have that lousy music play over it.
ⓏⒺⓇⓄCREDITS
Written and directed by Sebastian Gutierrez; director of photography, John Toll; edited by Lisa Bromwell and Robb Sullivan; music by Nathan Barr; production designer, Jerry Fleming; produced by Greg Shapiro and Carsten H.W. Lorenz; released by Samuel Goldwyn Films.
Starring Lucy Liu (Sadie), Michael Chiklis (Rawlins), Carla Gugino (Eve), James D’Arcy (Bishop), Mako (Poe), Holt McCallany (Rourke), Elden Henson (Taylor) and Robert Forster (Lloyd).
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Blood Simple (1984, Joel Coen)
I’m pretty sure I saw the Blood Simple director’s cut twice in the theater. Seems like I did. The second time I helped a couple underage Coen fans get in, and I already knew the recut was a disappointment. I got the original cut from the UK, where it used to be available and might still be found, and waited almost ten years to watch it. I’m glad I did. I can appreciate it more.
What Joel Coen does in Blood Simple is adapt the Western for interiors, visually speaking. There are sweeping camera movements more at home in Monument Valley than in a loft, but there’s Coen using them anyway. It’s impossible to identify every moment of greatness in Blood Simple‘s filmmaking, because it’s probably every frame. From thirty-five seconds in to the film, I was already stuffed–it’s a sumptuous (or decadent, the word the wife prefers–in general, not specifically for the film) experience. Every scene is a wonder. It’s not just the sound, editing, music, cinematography, composition, dialogue–which is the best they’ve ever written–it’s everything together; it’s the experience of watching an endlessly brilliant film. It’s one of the best films of the 1980s, like a combination of late 1970s John Carpenter and early 1980s John Sayles. The tone of both those filmmakers fuses in Blood Simple, creating something different and singular.
Blood Simple is free of the Coen Brothers brand–starting with The Hudsucker Proxy, but almost with Raising Arizona, part of a Coen Brothers film is acknowledging it’s a Coen Brothers film. Except Blood Simple isn’t a Coen Brothers film in that sense. The silliness isn’t there. Usually, the silliness is only absent in their non-beloved films (with recent exceptions), but there’s no fluff on Blood Simple, no fat. It’s a Coen Brothers film about real people, not their standard caricatures. The acting and writing really come together to make something different. She’s the least assuming, but Frances McDormand turns in a great performance. I didn’t even realize, until about half-way in to the film, McDormand’s developed an on-screen persona these days. It’s nice to see her without. Dan Hedaya plays the second most sympathetic character in the film and he’s a complete terror. When the bad guy gets sympathy, somebody’s doing something right. M. Emmet Walsh is good as the villain, John Getz is good as the lover who gets between husband and wife Hedaya and McDormand. The other really great performance, which I did remember from the last two times, is Samm-Art Williams, who’s done little other acting work, but he’s fantastic.
Blood Simple is filled with an energy it’d be hard for the Coen Brothers to keep up these days (they aren’t hungry anymore and haven’t been for at least fifteen years), but what’s so telling is how much they disrespected their first film when they went back to recut it. Either they’d forgotten what made it great, or they hated it and wanted the film to somehow “fit” better with their modern successes. Unfortunately, I suspect it’s the latter. Otherwise, they’d have made some more films approaching this one’s caliber. But seriously, it’d be impossible to surpass it. Blood Simple is stunning… and it’s a tragedy they’ve never made this version available–readily available–on DVD.
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Mortal Sins (1990, Yuri Sivo)
Mortal Sins is a couple things one would think were mutually exclusive. On one hand, it’s a standard direct-to-video thriller, even if it shot on location in New York (featuring a bevy of actors who went on to “Law and Order” guest spots). On the other, it’s a serious attempt at an examination of the main character, an unmarried Jewish man unable to commit to his girlfriend, who only has Italian friends. And it’s a comedy (the murder mystery is set around competing televangelists, which I’m almost positive was also the setting for one of the Perry Mason TV movies). Frighteningly, the movie almost pulls it off.
There are two rather significant problems. First, Brian Benben is terrible. Benben’s usually likable or, at least, he’s supposed to be likable, but in Mortal Sins, he’s a complete jerk. Why he’s a jerk is the second significant problem–the script is not funny. The scenes with Benben teasing and mistreating his girlfriend (who sometimes spends the nights at his parents’ house with him) are terrible. Maggie Wheeler plays the girlfriend and she gets through the bad script, which is bad in a peculiar way. It’s not funny and it’s trying to be funny, but it still somehow works in the scenes with Benben and his friends. There’s also the scenes where Benben hassles his mother. Spending a movie hoping his father takes a baseball bat to his head before the end doesn’t make for a rewarding viewing experience.
But there are some good performances in it besides Wheeler. Peter Onorati is good and so’s Anthony LaPaglia. Most of LaPaglia’s scenes are the ones where Mortal Sins appears the most like a good, low budget comedy. There aren’t enough of them. The New York locations set the film a little apart. It’s a veritable tour video of the city (I’m sixty percent sure I know the big rock they shot at in Central Park) and it lends the film an agreeable tone, even if it’s dishonest. Well, it might not be dishonest. Watching the movie, I kept thinking it was a financed by a ten years of laundry profits. There’s something–behind the camera–very amateurish about the production ad and I’ll bet it’s a more interesting story than the film itself.
For such a peculiar film, the direction’s actually quite acceptable. Sivo knows how to shoot the scenes with the friends and family–better even-and he knows how to make the rest of it look like a direct-to-video thriller.
It’s the second time I’ve seen the film and I only kept it around because I remembered it being lame, but in an intriguing way. That diagnosis has not changed.
★CREDITS
Directed by Yuri Sivo; written and produced by Allen Blumberg; director of photography, Bobby Bukowski; edited by Dorian Harris; music by Simon Boswell; production designer, Ray Recht; released by Panorama Entertainment Group.
Starring Brian Benben (Nathan), Debrah Farentino (Laura Rollins), Anthony LaPaglia (Vito), James Harper (Malcolm Rollins), Brick Hartney (Billy Beau Backus), Maggie Wheeler (Marie), Peter Onorati (Diduch), Anna Berger (Mother Weinschank), Frank S. Palmer (Paul Martin) and Steven Marcus (Cousin Benjamin).
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Woman in the Dunes (1964, Teshigahara Hiroshi)
Episodes of the “Twilight Zone” ran thirty minutes, or whatever without commercials, for a very good reason. Stretching a one-note story out to an hour would be too exasperating. Woman in the Dunes stretches it out to, I guess, two and a half hours.
The film starts interestingly enough. An entomologist looking for bugs finds himself in a strange village (where the people live in houses surrounded by sand) and hears about a new species of insect. Having read Abe and seen another film he wrote before, I expected Woman in the Dunes to go somewhere, namely to exploring this strange world. But it doesn’t. It gradually–the scenes are lengthy and padded–becomes clear the film isn’t going anywhere, just like the trapped entomologist and his trapped insects (the symbolism is blatant–actually, it isn’t symbolism… it’s simile). The characters are poorly written. While the man’s captor is just a woman trying to survive, she’s also a raving lunatic, so it isn’t a strike against him when he tries to ransom her for his freedom (if anything, it takes him five or six minutes too long). Except he’s not a good character either, Abe’s fast and loose with him–being an entomologist is his defining trait–and Okada’s either just as lazy (or a rather mediocre actor).
There are some decent shots of sand. Sometimes it falls, sometimes it looks like water running across the surface, but mostly it’s just there. There’s never any point to the shots of the sand. It’s never a symbol of man doing this or that or feeling this or that. It’s all filler and sometimes neat-looking filler. But mostly not.
I can appreciate, like I can appreciate an episode of the “Twilight Zone,” some of the generative reasoning behind the film. I can’t imagine the novel’s similarly paced, since I’ve never heard of its mass burning by attempting readers, but it’s way too long and way too shallow. I guess the director’s cut, which I attempted, runs a half hour longer than the theatrical, which puts a lot of the blame on the, well, the director.
Films appearing to be pretentious and empty are often not difficult to consume–if there were content, even pretentious content, they’d be consumable–they really are just pretentious and empty. And Woman in the Dunes is definitely one of those films. While it’s harmless (except to my time), Abe and, particularly Teshigahara, who fills the film with meaningless shots of sand, knew they were playing to a particular audience and knew they didn’t have to do much work and exploited them.
It’s astounding they not only went on to make an acceptable film, but a decent one (The Face of Another).
ⓏⒺⓇⓄCREDITS
Directed and produced by Teshigahara Hiroshi; screenplay by Abe Kôbô, based on his novel; director of photography, Segewa Hiroshi; edited by Shuzui Fusako; music by Takemitsu Toru; production designers, Hirakawa Totetsu and Yamazaki Masao; released by Toho Company Ltd.
Starring Okada Eiji (the entomologist), Kishida Kyoko (the woman) and Ito Hiroko (the entomologist’s wife).
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