Capsule Film Reviews: Chances Are

Chances Are (Emile Ardolino, Columbia TriStar, 1989) is yet another attempt by Hollywood to recapture its glory years. In this instance the film from its classic past that Hollywood hopes to recapture is Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Columbia, 1941). This is not the first time that Hollywood has remade Here Comes Mr. Jordan. Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (Paramount, 1978) was a remake and updating of this classic man comes back to life in another body and wackiness ensues comedy subgenre.

In Chances Are, a film made by the same studio as Here Comes Mr. Jordan--that makes rights issues easier--Robert Downey Jr. plays Alex Finch, a recent graduate of Yale who dreams of getting a dream job at the Washington Post. Chances Are was made in the wake of the Watergate scandal which the Post played a major role in uncovering. While applying for a job at the Post Finch meets and is befriended by Phillip Train (Ryan O'Neal). Phillip takes Alex to the house of his friend and the woman he has loved for much of his life, Corrine Jeffries, played by Cybil Shepherd, and her daughter Miranda (Mary Stuart Masterson). Gradually Alex, who has bonded with Miranda, begins to realise that he is Louis, Corinne's husband, who died almost twenty years previously in an accident. Louis has been, in a scene right out of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, told by heaven's bureaucrats that he is dead but that he will be recycled back into a body of a just born infant. One of heaven's bureaucrats has accidentally failed to give him the shot of forgetfulness, however, and all sorts of wackiness ensues as Alex tries to convince Corinne that he is Louis. Chances Are ends in typical Hollywood fashion as Alex cracks a case Louis had originally solved, is offered, as a result, a job at the Post, gets the girl, in this case Miranda, and watches as Corinne and Philip finally marry. Don't you just love fairy tales with happy endings?

I didn't find Chances Are a great film. I did, however, find it a creditable effort by Hollywood to recapture its golden days. If you are looking for an adult light romantic comedy that is right out of the old Hollywood I think you will enjoy Chances Are. I'll give it two and a half stars on the Maltin meter.

By the way, it is a pity that Cybil Shepherd, who was also wonderful in the screwball television show Moonlighting (Glenn Gordon Caron, ABC, 1985-1989), wasn't around during the golden age of the fantasy factory because I think that she, like Barbra Streisand who was superb in Peter Bogdanavich's latter day screwball comedy What's Up Doc (WB, 1972), would have been a great actor in the era of Hollywood's golden age.

One more thing before I go, Chances Are uses the Johnny Mathis song "Chances Are" for its opening credit sequence. That song, which is kind of a throwback to the classic age of American songwriting, is a very appropriate one for a romantic comedy like Chances Are. It is also a song I have always loved.

Capsule Film Reviews: Cutthroat Island

Cutthroat Island (1995, Studio Canal/Carolco/MGM/Lionsgate DVD) is a Hollywood tale of family squabbles, greed, and revenge as niece (Geena Davis) and uncle (Frank Langella) and their pirate crews fight each other across the Caribbean in order to obtain three maps which will show them the way to a hidden pirates pot of gold and jewels on the unknown Cutthroat Island.

Cutthroat Island was Hollywood's latest attempt, in the 1990s, to revive and re imagine the pirate genre by adding a bit of humour to the action adventure mix that dominates contemporary Hollywood and is a favourite of its juvenile demographic. What the film really was, however, was an excuse for director Rennie Harlan and his crew to blow lots of stuff up and play with a lot of toys. And blow up lots of stuff and play with a lot of toys they did. The films sexual repartee was apparently what passed for wit in 1990s Hollywood but is no match for the real wit of pirate films of the more distant past like Captain Blood (Michael Curtiz, WB, 1935) and the Sea Hawk (Michael Curtiz, WB, 1940). The film's attempt at a kick ass third wave show us some cleavage female hero in the form of Morgan Adams (Geena Davis) was apparently what passed for feminism in the Hollywood of the 1990s. It is questionably feminist and certainly doesn't atone for Hollywood's sins of commission and omission of the past.

What there is in Cutthroat Island is exactly what one would expect of a Hollywood pirate film. There's elite British military fops, a peg leg, a lost buried treasure, a treasure map, a monkey, some alien like grotesque eel like creatures, betrayals, blue seas, a storm, a ship tossed at sea, an unmapped jungle island, a secret cave, skulls and bones, a pitched sea battle, and, of course, romance as our kick ass Morgan finds true love with flim flam man William Shaw (Matthew Modine) in this paint by the genre numbers Hollywood film. What a waste of a reported $99 million dollars.

In a way, I suppose it could be argued that, Cutthroat Island and Roman Polanski's earlier 1986 Pirates may have been the wrong films at the wrong time. Cutthroat only took in a "paltry", paltry by Hollywood standards that is, $19 million dollars at the box office. Pirates, which cost $40 million, took in only a paltry $8 million. It is these numbers which rule Hollywood today. A similar pirate action adventure/humour/romance mix with a little Disney supernaturalism, Johnny Depp doing his best Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty (Lewis Milestone, MGM, 1962) impression, and, in all but the fourth, the queen of the contemporary costume movie, Keira Knightly, thrown in, would prove more popular at the box office when Jerry Bruckheimer brought his four Pirates of the Caribbean films to the big wide screen in 2003, 2006, 2007, and 2011. Viewers apparently couldn't resist the Pirates franchise and that is why, I guess, they keep pumping them out. Another one is apparently on the way as I write. I, on the other hand--I am too old for this juvenalia--did, do, and will resist any Pirates of the Caribbean film, past, present, or future. And I certainly resisted finding Cutthroat Island anything more than yet another mediocre Hollywood big budget extravaganza aimed at the kiddies and the kiddie within. Cutthroat Island, then, is a film I cannot recommend.

America's a Mess, It's in Their Rhetoric...

Whenever a tragedy occurs you can be sure that the religious kooks will come out of the proverbial woodwork. Whether it is Jerry Falwell blaming godlessness in New York for 9/11, Pat Robertson blaming Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans decadence, or now,  Mike Huckabee blaming the mass murder in Shady Hook, Connecticut on secularism, it seems like so many Christians are absolutely bonkers these days, bonker kooks who have not only no sense of propriety but have no knowledge of statistical correlation. So many Christians, in fact, are so totally wacky these days that it is a wonder that there is anyone left who wishes to call himself or herself a Christian anymore.

Let's get real. Human violence has been around longer than prostitutes and spies have. It is new weapons technologies, of course, the gun, the machine gun, chemical weapons, the atomic bomb, handguns, assault weapons, not god or a lack of god, that have made it possible for humans to kill more of their own kind not to mention greater numbers of flora and fauna across the planet. So get real dimmed Christian bulbs, if you want to lessen human violence deal with the weapons that turn inherently flawed human beings into ever more mass killers.

Anyway, it seems that Christian hucksters are even more difficult to get rid of in the US than dangerous weapons of mass destruction. By the way, isn't it funny how these self-righteous celebrity Christians who ascribe terrorist attacks in New York and secularism in the Northeast to the g.o.d. don't seem to blame droughts in the "Christian" state of Texas on the g.o.d.?

An Irony for Yet Another Mass American Murder...

I just can't help reflecting on the fact that while people in Newtown and Sandy Hook Connecticut are praising teachers as heroes, Michigan's and Wisconsin's Republican's are taking the right of collective bargaining and benefits from their teachers. Ebenezer Scrooge lives.

On that thought I wish you all Happy bah humbug Holidays...

Dissing the Donut Hole: Why I Have a Problem With Crystal Ball Textualism

My problem with a lot of what comes out of English Studies and Film and Television Studies programmes is that the crystal ball textualism that dominates those programmes and the writing that comes out of them is not grounded in little h historical analysis. It is not grounded in archival analysis. It is not grounded in interviews with those who "created" literary works, films, or television programmes. To paraphrase the title of a book by noted cultural anthropologist and historian Eric Wolf, it is the product people of literature, film, and television without a sense of history.

I suppose this historical amnesia in literary, film, and television wouldn't be a problem if, contra the crystal ball textualists, historical analysis on how a text was produced, including its authorship, wasn't essential and central to the understanding of literary, film, and television texts, their sociology, their authorship, their economics, their politics, their cultural contexts, their demographics, and their geography. History, little h history, as a method, is and has to be, I would argue, the first step toward an understanding of any text, literary, film, television, or national, and a mandatory first step before textual hermeneutics and aesthetics takes place.

One fundamental problem with much literary, film, and television analysis is that the ahistorical, if not antihistorical, analysis the crystal ball textualists engage in is actually a type or types of reader response. Unfortunately, most crystal ball don't realise this simple fact. Crystal ball textualist readings of texts, which generally stand in for real reader response analysis--surveys, ethnography, and interviews with a random group of readers of literary, film, or television texts--is not akin to Chomsky's notion that you can learn all you need to learn about language from and through one language speaker. You cannot learn all you need to know about a literary, film, or television text from one academic or even a group of academics because the practise and the knowledge of academics, and particularly crystal ball academics, is constructed in specific social and cultural contexts and bear the cultural and ideological traces of those social and cultural contexts.

The only way, I would argue, to get beyond the tautological and fetishistic tendencies of crystal ball textualism is to tie textual readings to the empirical, to an empirical textual production grounded in archival research, ethnographic research, surveys, interviews, and so on, and which, as a result can be verified or not falsified in an empirical rather than an ideological way, and which can serve as an empirical check on readings of literary, film, and television texts.

The Dullest Games People Play: Another Day, Another Really Bad Hollywood Movie...

I am being punished for buying $3 dollar DVD's from the bargain DVD bins at Big Lots. Yesterday I had the misfortune of watching the dreadful Catwoman (2004) starring Halle Berry, Benjamin Bratt, and Sharon Stone, which I bought in the bargain bins at Big Lots. Today, the film torture, and it is torture of the iron maiden variety, continues thanks to another bargain DVD I bought at Big Lots, the Olsen Twins 2000 magnum crapus Our Lips Are Sealed.

I really don't want to say a lot about this film because it doesn't even deserve to have more than two words wasted on it, and here they are, IT STINKS. But I have to say a bit more about it. Our Lips Are Sealed's stereotyping and caricaturing of Aussies--the film is set in a Sydney to which the twins (Mary-Kate and Ashley) have to escape after they testify in court against a murderous bunch of family thieves--borders on racism. Everything about Our Lips Are Sealed is cliched populated as it is with high school cliques, high school stereotypes, mean girls, bumbling bad guys, clueless parents, poor poor pitiful middle classers whinging about not being considered cool by the in crowd, cute pets, picture postcard touristy locales, and overly simplistic lessons learned. The camera style and scene length befits the ADD generation it appears to be aimed at. The film, which went direct to video, seems pitched to a clean family values audience that mistakes Father Knows Best (CBS, 1954-1960) for real American life and who think that an occasional breaking of the fourth wall--Our Lips Are Sealed does occasionally break the fourth wall--is cool and cute. Presumably this is who the Olsen Twins and their handlers thought their ideal demographic was.

Our Lips Are Sealed, to put it bluntly, is wretched in the strongest sense of the term. Yesterday I was convinced that Catwoman was the worst film I had ever seen. Today I am fully convinced that the worst movie I have ever seen is Our Lips Are Sealed. I cannot recommend NOT watching it highly enough. What a pity that now I be forced to recall that the name of this film is also the name of a Go-Go's song I have always liked. A pox on the Olsen Twins. Oh, and I did learn a lesson from Our Lips Are Sealed: be more discerning about your purchases from Big Lots.

One final note, the extras on the Our Lips Are Sealed DVD, particularly the Olsen Twins commentary and an extra on the the Olsen Twins fashion for the film--a fashion sense, by the way, which seems to me as derivative as the film itself--seem to be aimed at promoting the Olsen Twins and the public money making identities they and their handlers have fashioned to appeal to their demographic. In the commentary the twins sound so studied and the commentary so scripted that it suggests that the disneyfornicated Olsen's couldn't be authentic and spontaneous to save their lives. All hail the cult of happy faced we are geniuses so you should buy our product so you can see how cool we are and you can become cool by buying our products cult.

Addendum:
I watched the Olsen Twins New York Minute (Dennie Barnes, 2004) yesterday, 18 December 2012. I enjoyed the film and its screwball comedy of accidental mishap after mishap and accidental mishaps which lead to romance much more than I did Our Lips are Sealed. New York Minute wasn't a great film, but it was certainly, except for the horrible stereotypes and caricatures it played in during the Harlem House of Bling scenes, watchable and at times even enjoyable. I suspect the reason I found New York Minute a passable and watchable film, is because of the presence of SCTV alumni Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin in the cast. That said, the Olsen Twins do a creditable job of playing the screwball sisters, goody two shoes overachiever Jane Ryan (Ashley) and rebel rocker underachiever Roxy Ryan (Mary-Kate), who, by the end of the film, learn the lesson that there is a little bit of Jane in Roxy and a little bit of Roxy in Jane and that sister love conquers all even the death of a mother. And hey, Mary-Kate gets to play drums on "Suffragette City".

Death By Cat Scratch Fever...

I don't know what to say. Let me start with this. I have been watching films for some fifty years and I have seen some pretty awful movies including some bad Fassbinder films, the In a Year of Thirteen Moons (1978) in particular, and the awful End of the Game (1975, Maximilian Schell). But nothing, nothing prepared me for the awfulness that is 2004's Catwoman.

Catwoman, a film that reaches its height during the opening credits and goes downhill very quickly from there, has, in its cinematic DNA, all of the things that make contemporary Hollywood so dreadful: obvious cgi, camera movements that seem to be done largely for camera movements sake, a style that seems more appropriate to a rock video or video games, scenes which rarely last more than a few minutes, unmemorable pop music for the kiddies (physical or mental) at whom most Hollywood films are aimed these days, a pop music, of course, that is in the film in the first place to sell corporate pop music product not to say something about the character or the cinematographic landscapes the films characters traverse, the sex that sells, cliched catch phrases masquerading as wit, and a star who is in the film not because she was born to play the role of the Catwoman but because the makers of the film thought her presence, the presence of Halle Berry, would sell tickets. Blah.

One more word to the wise, it is always advisable to steer far clear of any film directed by someone who apparently fancies that he is so cool that he only needs one name. In Catwoman's case the one named bandit is Pitoff. Pfft.