Thursday, November 24, 2016

Westworld (1973)

Director: Michael Crichton                              Writer: Michael Crichton
Film Score: Fred Karlin                                  Cinematography: Gene Polito
Starring: Yul Brynner, James Brolin, Richard Benjamin and Dick Van Patten

For all his popular success, Michael Crichton was never a great writer. Most of the time it’s not that evident in his film productions, when someone else is adapting screenplays from his novels. But Crichton wrote and directed Westworld, and it shows. It was his first original screenplay and none of the studios wanted to go near it. But he finally was able to strike a deal with MGM, and filmed it primarily on their back lot. Even compensating for the fact that it was filmed in the early seventies, the film still looks like a television production rather than a feature. The sets are clearly TV sets rather than anything remotely realistic, and much of the crew was from television as well. The cheapness of the sets can be explained away by the premise of the film in which a sort of computerized theme park gives guests a realistic experience of being able to kill or sexually dominate robots, allowing visitors to experience the illicit without the illegality. So it stands to reason that the park wouldn’t be that realistic. Still, while the premise is intriguing, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The special effects, especially the shots out of the windows of the futuristic plane in the beginning, might have been advanced for the day but they are hopelessly phony here. The practical effects, on the other hand, are well done. Even so, the production was never going to be able to rise above its obvious artistic deficiencies.

The film begins with television reporter Robert Hogan interviewing people who have finished vacationing at a futuristic resort that allows visitors a full immersion experience in either Roman times, the Middle Ages, or the American West. All of the interviewees are gushing in their praise. Then the scene shifts to James Brolin and Richard Benjamin who are on their way to Westworld. After landing and being outfitted they wander down to the saloon where Yul Brynner verbally abuses Benjamin at the bar. Brolin, who has been there before, urges Benjamin to confront him. When he finally does, the two draw and Benjamin kills him with three shots to the chest. Brynner is dragged away soon after and back in their room Benjamin wonders aloud if Brynner might have been a guest rather than the realistic robots that inhabit the theme park. Brolin suggests he try to shoot him, but the gun won’t work when aimed at a warm target. Later the two go to a whorehouse and have sex with robot prostitutes, and all the while a bank robbery is going on across the street. In a somber scene that night, workers come out and remove the robot bodies that litter the street. They are taken behind the scenes and repaired, with head “doctor” Alan Oppenheimer in charge of the operation. He notices that there has been an increasing rate of central mechanism breakdowns in the robots in all three worlds and, most disturbing, it’s acting like a virus that threatens to infect all of the robots.

Eventually a series of minor mishaps leads to the death of one of the guests in the Medieval World, and though the technicians try to turn off the power in the complex it does no good and the robots begin to go rogue, especially Yul Brynner in Westworld. Brynner, who earned his western bona fides in The Magnificent Seven in 1960 and Invitation to a Gunfighter four years later, is the perfect relentless robot in the film. The look of his character was even based on that from the earlier movie. Barrel chested, with pale eyes and a hard face, he shows no signs of stopping as he pursues Richard Benjamin. But there are a number of things that strain credulity, chief among them the fact that the entire complex was apparently designed so that the technicians will be locked in if the power goes out. Of course they shut down the power and then can’t get it back on, trapping themselves inside, powerless to do anything as the robots go on their rampage. Also, for no apparent reason, they upgrade Brynner’s optical and audio systems, enabling him to chase down Benjamin with even greater efficiency. This was also one of the first films to use pixelated imaging to suggest the robot’s point of view. But that is sort of negated by the bulk of the computer screens in the control room displaying nothing but meaningless computer art of the kind found on early screensavers.

One of the things Crichten is able to do well early on in the film is to inject the repair scene with a lot of pathos. The technicians are dressed like doctors, and computer readouts look and sound like medical machines in a hospital. The effect--as intended--is jarring. There’s also no denying the influence of the Brynner character on the Terminator films. But overall the film is little more than a string of clichés, from the TV sets, the corny music by Fred Karlin, the costuming, right down to the acting. Yul Brynner is the best actor of the bunch and he’s playing a robot. While James Brolin and Richard Benjamin made a lot of feature films in the seventies, they are primarily associated with television as well, and for good reason: they’re just not that convincing. Add to that Dick Van Patton as the new sheriff in town, as well as a host of low-level television talent rounding out the rest of the cast and it was always going to look like a TV movie. Nevertheless, fans at the time made it a huge hit, but to Crichton’s dismay it was more because of its camp value than for the cautionary tale he had tried to tell. The film spawned a sequel, Futureworld, that starred Brynner again but that Crichton had nothing to do with, and quite naturally a television series called Beyond Westworld. And it has been recently revived by HBO as a series as well. The concept of Westworld is intriguing, and there is much that could have been done with it, but it never really rises above its television pedigree and remains a missed opportunity.

Saturday, January 2, 2016

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Director: Wes Anderson                                Writer: Wes Anderson
Film Score: Alexandre Desplat                      Cinematography: Robert D. Yeoman
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, F. Murray Abraham, Tony Revolori and Jude Law

While Wes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel was something of a critical darling, and was even nominated for a best picture Oscar, it is actually more of a disappointment than anything else. It seems as if what he’s attempting here is a cross between the Coen Brothers and Tim Burton, but Anderson lacks the narrative sophistication of the former and the visual imagination of the later and so what results is the worst version of both. The story is based upon the writings of Stefan Zweig, an Austrian author who was popular between the World Wars but had nevertheless received mixed reviews for his numerous works. Anderson’s story takes from some of the fictional and some of the autobiographical incidents in Zweig’s work and fashioned from them an abstract tale that attempts to make up for in humor what it decidedly lacks in artistry. I fully admit to finding these types of work distasteful because of the dearth of intellect they display, so it’s not that I don’t get it. But like a Jackson Pollack “artwork” or an Ornette Coleman “song,” Anderson’s “film” is utterly bereft of the kind of intellectual discipline that has informed genuinely great films from the inception of the art form. The fact that critics like it is almost a warning label for those who see film’s greatness as a narrative art being slowly eroded by the increasingly vacuous intellects of young filmmakers like Anderson.

The film begins with Tom Wilkinson as a famed author, talking about the tedious question of where an author’s stories come from. He states that, if one is willing to listen to others, the stories will come to the author. From there he relates his visit as a young man to the Grand Budapest Hotel in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka. In the flashback the younger author is played by Jude Law. Curious one day about the appearance of an old man, F. Murray Abraham, he is told he is the owner of the hotel. In the baths the two strike up a conversation and over dinner Abraham tells Law the story of his life. In this flashback, the young Abraham is played by Tony Revolori who suddenly appears at the hotel as a Lobby Boy. The officious but charming concierge, Ralph Fiennes, at first dubious about his capabilities, nevertheless takes him under his wing and this sets Revolori off on numerous adventures that he experiences traveling in the wake of the eccentric hotel manager. This includes seducing wealthy old women like Tilda Swinton, confronting her son Adrien Brody and the family’s lawyer Jeff Goldblum over the will, talking himself out of an arrest by de facto Nazi Edward Norton, evading hit man Willem Dafor, escaping from prison with the aid of Harvey Keitel, and calling on the network of hotel managers led by Bill Murray to help him find the man responsible for his false arrest.

The film itself is highly stylized, with no real concession to realism in either the look or the narrative. This is done through the use of miniatures of exteriors of the hotel, and wide-angle lenses in the interiors. The colors are manipulated to give the film a faded, sepia-toned look to invoke the historical nature of the tale while the set design verges on a sort of steampunk aesthetic to go along with the surreal nature of the story. The real draw of the film seems to be the number of well-known actors in the piece, as well as the bizarre nature of the narrative. But while it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, the categories in which it won the Oscar are indicative of its failure as a captivating piece of filmmaking, winning for production design, costume design, hair and makeup, as well as the Eastern European folk music score by Alexandre Desplat. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how many big stars are in a film if they are given one-dimensional characters to portray in the screenplay. And that is certainly the case here. The characters are cartoons, mirroring the kind of graphic novel approach of the visuals. There are some funny lines, and some winning moments, which seems almost inevitable given the density of acting talent shoehorned into the film, but on the whole endeavor lies flat and curiously unengaging through most of its running time. The Grand Budapest Hotel will certainly have a lot of fans who have been weaned on Twitter feeds and YouTube videos, but I’m never going to be one of them.

Friday, January 1, 2016

Double Jeopardy (1999)

Director: Bruce Beresford                              Writers: David Weisberg & Douglas Cook
Film Score: Normand Corbeil                         Cinematography: Peter James
Starring: Ashley Judd, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Greenwood and Annabeth Gish

Double Jeopardy makes a valiant attempt at being an action movie, at being suspenseful, and at telling an engaging mystery story. Unfortunately the film can’t bear the weight of all the mistakes it makes and, as such, is a huge disappointment. Despite star power and a veteran director with two Oscar nominations, the screenplay is so incredibly bad that it drops like a rock tossed into Puget Sound. The set up is interesting enough, but it is over by the time the credits have finished. Ashley Judd and her businessman husband Bruce Greenwood live on the beautiful shores of Whidbey Island in Washington State, just north of Seattle. They have a small son, Benjamin Weir, and Greenwood is throwing a lavish party to raise money for his small school on the island. The boy’s teacher is Annabeth Gish, who also acts as something of a nanny for him. Judd has always wanted a particular sailboat and when Greenwood buys it for her they set out on the water that evening. The first head scratcher is when Judd is pointing out the geography while they are out of sight of land. She claims that while Alaska is to the north, and Japan is to the east, that the Straight of Juan de Fuca is off to the south of them, but the Straight runs slightly northwest and it couldn’t be south of them unless the were practically on top of Vancouver Island. Granted, that one depends on a knowledge of the setting, but there are plenty more to come that don’t.

After a night of romance and drinking Judd wakes up covered in blood like John Marley in The Godfather, but instead of a horse’s head she finds a trail of blood leading up to the deck and no Greenwood. She sees the bloody knife on the deck and, of course, she picks it up, just in time to have the coast guard arrive and see her with it. I realize that this film is already fifteen years old, but that was a tired trope even then and I think it’s time to retire it. Soon she’s thrown in jail, with no bail, and then brought to trial . . . even though Greenwood’s body has never been found! None of the trial preparation is shown at all. Suddenly we’re in the courtroom with her hearing a tape of Greenwood sending a distress call to the Coast Guard saying he’s been stabbed. Prosecutor Betsy Brantley tries for the sarcasm of Glenn Close in Jagged Edge, but the writing is so poor and juvenile that it’s actually embarrassing. Even with the tape, and the insurance policy, a murder conviction without a body is incredibly rare and so it doesn’t just strain credulity it utterly torpedoes any suspension of disbelief. But wait, there’s more. Since she doesn’t get the money, Judd begs Gish to adopt their son so that she’ll have access to the money in trust, and then is sent to prison. Again, however, the abysmal pacing destroys the story. Absolutely no time is taken to establish her relationship with the great Roma Maffia, who happens to have been a lawyer and holds the key to the title and the rest of the film.

When Judd hasn’t heard from Gish or her son in a month she makes a call to the school, pretending to be Gish and checking on the address for her “severance check.” First of all, there is no such thing as severance pay for teachers. And secondly, the school wouldn’t handle it even if there was. The state handles all of that from the teacher’s individual retirement fund. Anyway, Judd manages to find out Gish’s new address and phone number in San Francisco. She chews out Gish first, but when she’s talking to her son Greenwood walks in the door and he calls out, “Daddy,” which Judd hears. Now she knows he’s faked his death. Maffia, in another brief drive-by appearance, tells her to do her time quietly and try to get out on parole because of double jeopardy, which means no one can be tried twice for the same crime. “That means you can walk right up to him in Times Square, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.” Wrong. When she gets out she’ll be on parole, which means that any violation of parole, including that gun, will send her right back to prison to finish her original sentence, I’m guessing, without another chance of parole. It’s maddening just how stupid this film is. So then she starts buffing up while she waits to get out, but she’s not Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and when she’s done she looks just as skinny and fragile as when she went in. She doesn’t meet Tommy Lee Jones, the head of the halfway house, until after she gets out but by then it’s too late. The film is already a lost cause and it’s only a half hour old.

Ultimately the screenplay is the downfall of the film. David Weisberg had only written three films prior to this . . . and wasn’t able to sell another one for fifteen years, which makes sense considering how bad this one was. His partner on all of those previous films was, no surprise, Douglas Cook. What’s so mystifying about all of this is that the director, Bruce Beresford, didn’t demand that changes to the screenplay be made. Beresford actually earned an Academy Award nomination for his own screenplay on Breaker Morant, and another for his directing on Tender Mercies. In addition he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his direction of Driving Miss Daisy. In this film he seems to have gleefully purchased a ticket on the Titanic and decided to go down with the ship. Judd’s journey of revenge lurches along with no time to develop anything like concern for the characters including, ironically, Judd herself. Her miraculous escapes that Weisberg and Cook have written for her are as sophomoric as they are unbelievable, and Beresford just went ahead and filmed them. Tommy Lee Jones is wasted, Roma Maffia is wasted, and so is Bruce Greenwood, all of which renders the star power of the film moot. If you though the deus ex machina was working overtime in The Pelican Brief, you’ll want to steer well clear of Double Jeopardy.