Tag: Jennifer Lopez

Out of Sight (1998, Steven Soderbergh)

Right up until the third act, Out of Sight has a series of edifying flashbacks, which reveal important facts in the ground situation; almost enough to set the start of the present action back a few years. The film starts in flashback, which isn’t immediately clear, and then the series of consecutive flashbacks builds to inform the opening flashback. The film opens with George Clooney getting arrested for a bank robbery, the film proper starts two years later when Clooney’s planning a prison escape.

Or does it, because it’ll soon turn out there’s something from two years before the start of movie with the arrest and it’s really important.

We—the audience—get to know Clooney more through the flashbacks than the present action. In the present action, outside having a strained friendship with ex-wife Catherine Keener (in a fun credited cameo, the film’s got a bunch of both), we don’t learn anything about Clooney except he really, really likes Jennifer Lopez. Lopez is the U.S. Marshal who happens across Clooney’s prison break and he takes her hostage, only for her to outsmart one of his partners, played by Steve Zahn, and escape.

So the movie is Clooney and his partner, Ving Rhames, trying to pull off one last job while Lopez is after Clooney because of professional pride and a bewildered enthusiasm, while Clooney is trying to flirt with Lopez. At no point does Out of Sight not embrace the fantastical nature of their attraction; Clooney’s a weary career criminal, Lopez is a gun enthusiast who likes beating the shit of out bad guys when they deserve it, and she can’t figure out if Clooney deserves it. Those deliberations lead to some inevitabilities, some more tragic than others. All of them wonderful. Clooney and Lopez’s chemistry, under Soderbergh’s lens, Anne V. Coates’s cuts, Elliot Davis’s photography, David Holmes’s music, Scott Frank’s script… is singular. Lopez is great in Out of Sight, while Clooney’s just very, very good. But Lopez is just as singular as their chemistry. And it’s her movie… right up until the third act turns out to be a poorly engineered addition on the actual plot.

If Out of Sight is about Lopez’s Three Days of the Condor with Clooney, it’s pretty great. There’s not enough of a finale scene between the two of them; it’s like Soderbergh and Frank split it up, but what the film’s already established is Lopez and Clooney need to spend more time together, not have more scenes together with a lot less time. It’s a strange bummer because it’s this very obvious rising action and they screw it up. But it’s pretty great. And it’s Lopez’s movie. Obviously.

But if it’s about Clooney’s last big score, which conveniently involves the exact same cast of characters as appear in the flashback so there can be all sorts of neat reveals as the runtime progresses… Out of Sight is a fail. It’s a high fail. But it’s a fail. There’s just not enough of a story to it. Soderbergh’s direction is always great, but Frank’s writing isn’t as invested in the homage to seventies crime thrillers thing Soderbergh is doing. It’s underprepared. Beautifully shot, with some great dialogue, but this aspect of the film feels artificially constrained. Because the actual protagonist in the crime arc ends up being Zahn’s in-over-his-head stoner. Zahn’s fine. He’s not great. He needs to be great for it to work. So even if it weren’t a problem character in the narrative, it’d also be a problem performance. But a fine one. There aren’t any bad performances in Out of Sight, just great ones, good ones, middling ones, and concerning ones (i.e. was Isiah Washington’s terrifying sociopath just his real personality). Soderbergh gets really good performances out of the cameos too (with the exception of Michael Keaton, pointlessly crossing over from another Elmore Leonard adaptation, Jackie Brown). There aren’t a lot of comic moments in the film and Soderbergh clamps down hard on all of them. Keaton’s scene has Dennis Farina elaborately messing with his head in pseudo-polite conversation. Farina’s sadly the least of the good performances. There’s also no meat to the part.

Luis Guzmán gets a good small part in the first act. He’s good. Rhames is good, Don Cheadle’s real good, Albert Brooks is good. Really nice performances from Viola Davis and Nancy Allen, like Soderbergh goes out of his way to showcase their acting. It’s very cool.

Though no one’s real super cool. Out of Sight’s careful with its potential crime glorification. Clooney’s a tragic figure, he just also happens to be George Clooney. Lopez finds herself in his attempt at a fantasy world, one where he lets himself get distracted by their chemistry, then reality—Cheadle and Washington are vicious killers—crashes in. Only not because Lopez isn’t part of the movie in the third act.

It’s also never close. Like. Sight runs a nimble two hours and there’s never a moment you think it’s actually going to work out as well as it should. The third act is a disaster if anyone but Soderbergh and crew are pulling it off. They leverage Lopez and Clooney’s chemistry to get across the finish line; it’s craven.

It’s also real good. It’s a usually faultlessly executed motion picture and Lopez is phenomenal.

Blood and Wine (1996, Bob Rafelson)

Boiling them down, three things ruin Blood and Wine. Stephen Dorff, the script and the approach. The last two are complicated, because it’s hard to see determine where the script and the approach differ. Blood and Wine was, at the time of its release, promoted as the conclusion of an informal trilogy for Rafelson and Nicholson–Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens and this one. It isn’t. Blood and Wine is no character study. It’s an attempt at extracting the thriller elements from a film noir. In that aspect, it’s at least interesting. Rafelson gives the characters, who are still essentially archetypes, some more time to become full. Jennifer Lopez gets the most of this attention, playing the femme fatale, only with depth. Lopez’s Cuban accent comes and goes, but her performance is strong more often than it is weak.

Rafelson’s direction is brilliant. Nicholson is great. Judy Davis is great. Michael Caine is astounding–it’s hard to believe he gave this astounding performance then almost immediately started hacking it out. Seeing Dorff with these actors–though the majority of his scenes are with Lopez, who’s far better than he is, but not astronomically–is uncomfortable. Watching Davis (in her, unfortunately, glorified cameo) act opposite him… it’s incredible she was able to keep a straight face. She’s giving this layered, textured, beautiful performance and he’s got less screen presence than a wilted tulip. He’s just awful. Much of Blood and Wine can be spent imagining someone else in his role and how much more successful the film would have turned out.

But it isn’t just Dorff being a terrible actor, it’s how loose the script gets when it concerns he, Davis (as his mother) and Nicholson (as his step-father). Dorff’s an indeterminate, younger than Lopez in the film–at times it seems like he should be a teenager, then he drinks a beer in a bar so it seems like he should be at least twenty-one. The script makes him hostile to Nicholson–and turns him into an adaptive killing machine like Michael Biehn in The Terminator–so Blood and Wine flops when it tries to position the two as some kind of (albeit dysfunctional) father and son.

The scenes where Nicholson is caring for Davis, who he mistreats, are stunning. Or when he and Caine (as his partner in crime) are on a road trip, peerless. The scene where Nicholson cares for the ailing Caine… it’s wonderful. It’s a shame the film acts like Dorff and his romancing of his step-father’s girlfriend Lopez (which fails because Lopez isn’t visibly any older than Dorff) is a better plot thread.

The end of the film–it’s hard to say if Blood and Wine is too long, because it’s entirely too crappy in general by the final third, to really concentrate on assigning specific blame–is a misfire, almost a damning one. I had to force myself to remember how well Rafelson made the film and what beautiful performances sixty percent of the cast turned in.

Both Harold Perrineau and Mike Starr are good in smaller parts–especially Perrineau. Michal Lorenc’s music is wonderful, as is Newton Thomas Sigel’s photography. The editing–from Steven Cohen–occasionally has some bumps, like maybe Rafelson didn’t get enough coverage.

It’s an incredible disappointment.

1/4★

CREDITS

Directed by Bob Rafelson; screenplay by Nick Villiers and Alison Cross, based on a story by Villiers and Rafelson; director of photography, Newton Thomas Sigel; edited by Steven Cohen; music by Michal Lorenc; production designer, Richard Sylbert; produced by Jeremy Thomas; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Starring Jack Nicholson (Alex), Stephen Dorff (Jason), Jennifer Lopez (Gabby), Judy Davis (Suzanne), Michael Caine (Vic), Harold Perrineau (Henry), Robyn Peterson (Dina Reese), Mike Starr (Mike) and John Seitz (Mr. Frank Reese).

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