Turn The Blue One

The word on Darren Aronofsky’s upcoming BLACK SWAN, a thriller set in the world of ballet with an apparently twisted bent to it, has been slipping out of the Toronto Film Festival where it recently screened and right now I officially can’t wait to see it. But, for now, I’ve been sitting here in L.A. with images of a certain other ballet-world horror film swirling through my brain since I saw it at the New Beverly over a week ago, wondering how the two films might go together in a double bill someday. The chance to see Dario Argento’s SUSPIRIA projected in 35mm isn’t as common as it should be and more than most films offers a considerably different experience that viewing it on video in any format. Something just becomes different about it all when you’re being enveloped by those images on a large screen, those colors suck you in, that dreamlike nature becomes more prevalent and I get lost in those camera angles as well as all that perverse violence. The suspense at times feels dragged out to unbearable lengths to the point where I just found myself just sitting there watching it thinking, “This film is insane…This film is INSANE.” While completely loving every minute of it, of course.


I actually know someone who at one time had only seen the film on pan-and-scan video and hated it. Then one day he had just seen it in its full 2.35 Scope ratio for the first time to which his response was basically, “I get it now,” and he had become a fan. So when that kind of feeling is allowed to happen in a crowded theater it really takes hold. And to my surprise when we got to the second Argento film of the evening, DEEP RED which he made before SUSPIRIA, I found myself almost impatient with this film that I had seen and enjoyed many times in the past. In that film’s plot lead David Hemmings spends time looking for clues, investigating a children’s song, leading to an author who may have information, discovering strange drawings behind a wall and frankly after a film that pretty much dispenses with the rational, telling us that “magic is everywhere” this type of totally linear storytelling with pieces that barely seemed to fit together anyway just seemed a little too, well, ordinary in this context. At least for Argento. The beginning of the director’s now-legendary “Three Mothers” trilogy and written by Argento and Daria Nicolodi, SUSPIRIA has its problems, anyone who’s seen it knows that. Too much is never fully explained, some elements just seem to fall out of the movie and there’s always been the lack of real confrontation at the end with certain characters that have been built up which has left the ending as slightly unsatisfying for me through the years (you know, that famous tagline is right--the first 92 minutes are scarier!) but damn, those colors, those angles, those huge close-ups, those eyes of Jessica Harper peering in disbelief at everything around her. Who needs pure logic and spending a half-hour of screen time hunting down red herrings? Not SUSPIRIA. Not with everything that goes on in that frame.


As the opening narration tells us during the opening credits, ballerina Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) has decided to perfect her dance studies in “the most famous school of dance in Europe,” choosing the celebrated academy of Freeborg. Things go wrong almost instantly from her arrival during a huge downpour and just as she is attempting to get into the school she has a brief encounter with a girl who soon after is brutally murdered under extremely bizarre circumstance. When she is finally able to enter the next day Suzy learns of the murder but also encounters a rather strange environment within the school as well as coming down with a strange sickness she is overcome with resulting her being shuttled from one bed to another. Even when she instantly gets well, strange things continue to occur and she soon becomes faced with the possibility that this dance academy with a staff that includes Academy Vice-directress Madame Blanc (Joan Bennett) and ferocious instructor Miss Tanner (Alida Valli) may have something treacherous going on within the labyrinth of its walls.


So much has been written about SUSPIRIA over the years in terms of its fairy tale vibe and insanely violent murder scenes which go far beyond what you may expect that all maybe all you can really say about the experience is how the movie seeps into you while watching it. Details jump out of the frame when viewing it on the big screen right from the instant the opening credits crash to a halt with that cut to the board announcing the plane arrivals into Germany, local time. As Suzy Banyon makes her way through the airport towards those sliding doors, as if irrevocably bringing herself into this world of witches, I noticed a poster placed in several places, as if advertising a tourist spot, reading BLACK FOREST, almost like telling Suzy where this fairy tale she’s landed in is about to take her. And it makes so many shots and moments that I’m used to, that I always find myself waiting for, stand out to an even greater extent. Her entry into this world, via a horrendous rainstorm that seems to have begun solely as a warning telling her to leave immediately, is interrupted by the sudden departure of student ‘Pat Hingle’ (hey, what are you gonna do—played by Eva Axen) who disappears much like Francesca Ungaro does at the beginning of Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, both beauties last seen running off into the darkness, both about to meet horrible ends. It’s pretty much true that SUSPIRIA’s first fifteen minutes really are the best, indoctrinating you into this Technicolor world in the loudest, most brutal way possible and with visuals that are almost too overwhelming for anything to possibly follow and have any effect (noticeably trimmed down in the American cut, by the way). Combined with that amazing Goblin score which feels like it’s enveloping every inch of the film and the theater (it almost seems wrong to simply call it the film’s ‘score’), giving it all a ferocious feel of total cinema that really is quite extraordinary, not something the film ever really lives up to again but at times the genuine delirium of it all comes close.


Suzy Banyon’s delayed arrival at the Academy is marked by her walking right into the frame when she reemerges the next morning, glancing all around at this world she’s completely unfamiliar with and there’s true strangeness felt at times in the framing of every shot (photographed by Luciano Tovoli) that seem somehow off in a way that can’t fully be explained and maybe it just comes down to how movies like this from this point in time will always be somewhat strange to me no matter how many times I return to them. When the camera tracks back and forth with Suzy as she is basically forced by Miss Tanner to do that “easy step” the viewer barely knows what is happening any more than Suzy herself does and watching the long, drawn out suspense sequences that more often than not end in massive bloodshed while sitting there in the theater, nothing to distract me with, at times it’s hard not to wonder if the suspense is ever going to end as tension is stretched to the breaking point. But I can’t stop watching it, lost in those shots courtesy of Argento’s deliberate style that envelop everything within them and you could make a whole art exhibit purely out of giant frame blow-ups of frames from this film with that extreme brutality melding into everything around it, just getting lost in one hallucinatory image after another. Complaining about the violence or even the very style of SUSPIRIA is like complaining about the thin script or all those rich colors or how deafening the music is or that they hired actors to say the dialogue. It’s an integral part of what it is. The way the legs of Jessica Harper and Stefania Cassini flail about in the pool as seen from over head during an extremely quite scene between the two, with the film itself almost getting hypnotized by the sight, stood out to me like never before on the New Beverly screen, until it was like that trance in itself was what the film was really about.


There is a slight vibe to the final section of Suzy alone in the academy which gives the impression that something has gone missing, making me think of THE EVIL DEAD in a ‘we lost all our other actors’ kind of way. That total isolation felt by the character during her final encounter with legendary witch Helena Markos after she remembers the secret of the iris that she has known all along certainly works better in a theater, with nothing else to pay attention to as you get lost in the intensity of all that production design. Suzy Banyon is given massive amounts of exposition that she isn’t really looking for by two different characters, one right after the other (the pragmatist followed by the believer) separated by a very high angle shot right out of NORTH BY NORTHWEST and how this relatively normal sequence is filmed adds to the strangeness as much as anything. Maybe it just comes down to how such movies from this point in time will always be somewhat alien to me, like the cut to that low angle of Udo Kier’s earnest psychiatrist when he says, “They were kind of wild ideas…” which always unnerves me somehow with the hollowness of the voice used to dub him.


What Suzy, the rare character in one of these movies who seems to react to all this oddness in a reasonable way, learns here from both men doesn’t aid her as much as it opens her up to the possibility that ‘magic is everywhere’ which gives her the wherewithal to confront this place populated by witches, mentally disturbed or not, once and for all. In addition to Kier’s speech reminding her how those drawn into this world that she is up against are certainly already damaged themselves (“Bad luck isn’t brought by broken mirrors, but by broken minds…”), once Suzy can accept the existence of that magic she can not only win, she can finally leave this bizarre place free and clear. That look on her face the last time we see her as she exits the frame always seems more like it’s expressing the feelings of Jessica Harper more than Suzy Banyon, reveling in how this Italian horror movie madness courtesy of Dario Argento can finally end. For some reason I always imagine that as soon as she exits frame with that smile the actress gets into a car and is immediately driven off the set, never to return. Once you’ve embraced that madness, it’s as if the only smart thing to do is just leave. The world it’s set in is insane, just as the film is insane. And since this is SUSPIRIA, that’s exactly the way it should be. It’s a masterwork of horror.


It was an absolutely gorgeous print of the film screened at the New Beverly, of course the American cut which has been playing lately on FMC, here seen with the International Classics logo that Twentieth-Century Fox attached to it and missing some of the most extreme violence as well as a few other scenes. There was even some noticeable slight distortion presumably from the Technovision lens used to shoot the film that was amplified in certain shots (such as the initial wide shot of the first dance rehearsal) and it’s also present on the DVD now that I look for it. The international cut is what I’ve gotten used to by now through multiple viewings on VHS and DVD so the opening murder always plays a little choppy to me and the absence of the scene where Miss Tanner fires blind piano player Daniel over his dog supposedly attacking Madame Blanc’s nephew Albert feels like a loss (maybe Fox felt the brief beer hall scene was merely superfluous travelogue and I’m not sure if I have a strong opinion on that one way or another). Not only does it explain what eventually happens to Daniel but it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to cut such an extreme Miss Tanner freakout anyway as well as one that offers even more of a feel of something genuinely wrong in this place.


And yet, for a film that seems to be all about its style it seems like almost a contradiction to say that there is no film without Jessica Harper’s performance, but that is absolutely true. There is no SUSPIRIA without Jessica Harper. This is one of a handful of films which make me want to worship Jessica Harper. Undeniably human in everything she does, moreso than just about anyone else in an Italian horror movie, trying to understand what’s happening to her in a totally rational way until there are no other options. I love Jessica Harper if only for that sideways glance she gives that final glass of red wine, making it clear that she’s fed up with the whole thing already. Stefania Casini is Sara, the other girl whose name begins with S and the one person at the school Suzy can trust, Joan Bennett and Alida Valli are each ideally imposing through their various intimidations, Eva Axen’s eyes almost are as big and noticeable as Harper’s in her brief role. Udo Kier is Dr. Frank Mandel though that’s obviously not his voice and Rudolf Schundler of THE EXORCIST as Prof. Milius is the one who in fact tells us that “Magic is everywhere.” Someone who gets one of the other most famous lines, a certain one involving snakes, is Barbara Magnolfi is the unforgettable Olga, obviously not using her voice either, who unfortunately disappears from the film by a certain point (although I did enjoy noticing her vamping about in the background of a shot before she’s introduced) and the actress appeared for a Q&A in which she indicated that she was in fact meant to be a witch in training and that the excursion to the Bolshoi opening night which we only hear about was at one point meant to involve an entire setpiece.


At the Trailers From Hell site there is a commentary by Edgar Wright in which he mentions the time a Cinespia screening of SUSPIRIA at Hollywood Forever was ruined for him by, as he called them, “lots of hipster dudes making snarky comments all the way through” turning an experience he’d been anxiously waiting for into something terrible. Sadly, Wright wasn’t at the New Beverly that night for this double bill, a screening which not only played the film to a packed house but to an audience made up of Dario Argento fans that clearly loved this film and remained open to the possibilities of its madness. I guess it’s just another reason why the New Beverly absolutely rules and Cinespia obviously, well, doesn’t. It’s gotten too crowded there lately anyway. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the absurdity in SUSPIRIA—that seems to have been Janet Maslin’s response in a fairly decent review she gave the film in The New York Times in August ‘77 although she seems more bemused than anything. But if you go into the film willing to accept its delirium and all its ‘wild ideas’ through images that are both beyond beautiful and beyond rationale, ultimately providing a display of cinematic horror unlike any other, it can be a way of accepting that magic really is everywhere when you’re sitting there in a movie theater. It can make one more open to other strange films with wild ideas, leading to a whole new world and maybe even sometimes making it easier to laugh at the insanity of it all.


You have been reading the Mr. Peel’s Sardine Liqueur review of SUSPIRIA.

Something That Happens

Looking at the ads for THE AMERICAN leading up to its recent release it was hard not for me to think, wow, it’s like George Clooney’s totally taken himself out of the game. He doesn’t care about this summer blockbuster stuff or even winter blockbuster stuff anymore, perfectly content to make a quiet art film off in Europe and I’m not sure that I blame him in the slightest. Of course, his most recent film UP IN THE AIR stuck around for a while and took in a healthy $83 million dollars without even ever cracking the top 5. In comparison, THE AMERICAN opened in a healthy first place over the normally slow Labor Day holiday weekend, maybe helped by an adult audience who wanted to see a film actually aimed at adults and the response has apparently been pretty terrible. I kind of loved the film myself, with what I got being exactly what I wanted it to be: Clooney-as-hitman brooding in a small village somewhere in Italy with guns, beautiful girls and the ever present mood of ennui wafting through the air. Honestly, I want to go see it again right now. OK, I’m in the minority but I also know that a few people out there responded to it as I did so I’m not the only one. Occasionally Clooney has connected with what people want to see—THE PERFECT STORM was a massive hit but I always that it was pretty terrible so I’ll be more than happy if he goes on making films like THE AMERICAN for the next ten years. Others might lose their patience. But what can I say.


The very oddness of something like THE AMERICAN opening wide in over 2,800 theaters marketed as a slick action caper made me think of another Clooney film once released with a genuinely cool poster (either one would look great on my wall right now), the Steven Soderbergh-directed Elmore Leonard adaptation OUT OF SIGHT. It was the film that really set him down the path he’s on now, the one that indicated he might be more than just a TV-to-movies flash in the pan and it was also the one that began his lengthy collaboration with director Soderbergh, leading to the blockbuster OCEAN’S trilogy as well as a few titles that didn’t perform quite as well. A box office disappointment when it was released in June 1998 the reputation of OUT OF SIGHT was helped in the long run by great reviews along with a feeling that Universal had somehow fumbled this sure thing and how it seemed to reenergize Soderbergh’s then-dormant career trajectory. I’ve always liked OUT OF SIGHT quite a bit but it’s never been a film that I’ve jumped up and down over. The film doesn’t even seem to ask that anyway, instead asking you to just go along with the cool rhythm of it all as it glides through scenes feeling absolutely sure of itself. At two hours and change it may be a little too long but it really is a truly elegantly made crime film that takes the wacky FedEx aesthetic of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Leonard adaptation GET SHORTY and dials things down to a level of dealing with these characters as individuals as well as being just a fun film to relax to. It’s a great latter day example of two people who look like they should be movie stars having chemistry that really does illicit sparks and it makes the movie memorable as a result.


Soon after being sent to prison for an impulse bank robbery, veteran crook Jack Foley (George Clooney) is involved in a breakout that through various circumstances gets him locked in a car trunk he’s escaping in with Karen Cisco (Jennifer Lopez), a U.S. Marshal who just happened to be arriving at the prison during the break. As Jack’s buddy Buddy (Ving Rhames) drives the car the two of them get to know each other and afterwards when they’re separated as the aftermath of the getaway goes slightly wrong, Karen continues her pursuit of Foley with the local authorities in Miami. When that doesn’t happen, she eventually follows him and Buddy all the way to Detroit where there’s a plan underway with the very nasty Maurice Miller (Don Cheadle) to rob the house of crooked businessman Richard Ripley (Albert Brooks) who the various cohorts knew while he was doing time, bragging about the diamonds he had stashed somewhere in his mansion. As Karen continues to look for Foley, he looks for Karen as well, with the certain idea of a timeout in mind.


OUT OF SIGHT is like a groove thing, moving nice and easy through its darkly funny world of crime, featuring well-drawn characters and vivid location work that lets us practically smell each location we’re in. Working off a very sharp script by Scott Frank (pretty faithful to Leonard), Soderbergh directs his film with the utmost confidence, bringing a genuine feeling of looseness to things and it really does come across that the director wants to take this opportunity to relax a little, maybe just make a fun Hollywood popcorn movie with enjoyable characters that still very much contains his particular filmic personality. Quick freeze frames punctuate moments, the chronology hops around in flashbacks, freewheeling second unit shots introduce us to Detroit in the second half, the camera almost seem to caress Jennifer Lopez in the most loving way possible during some of those close-ups (credit to cameraman Elliot Davis as well) and George Clooney is smoothly likable all the way through as if he’s realizing for the first time that this is the kind of movie star he wants to be. There are a few things that come off as very much a part of the post-Tarantino nineties like some violence-drenched dark humor and a few movie references but even those feel germane—every time I see the film I’m a little surprised by how much I smile at Clooney misquoting Peter Finch’s famous line in NETWORK (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take any more of your shit!”) and Karen Cisco expressing reticence about the plausibility of THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR’s love story is a clever touch to sidestep any issues with the attraction portrayed here. It’s just a cool Hollywood movie and considering how Hollywood doesn’t really make this sort of thing anymore, it’s almost amazing that OUT OF SIGHT was even made at all.


There’s genuine heat between the two leads of the sort that other films rarely achieve as they catch each other in their gazes and the way they look at one another is really what the film is about in the end, captured in the forced intimacy of the car trunk scene where they meet for the first time as well as that later glance across the Miami hotel lobby (“He waved at you?”). But this chemistry is felt most of all during the famous scene which intercuts the two talking in the Detroit hotel bar where they rendezvous with them slowly undressing later on back in her hotel room (by Soderbergh’s own admission, slightly lifted from a much more explicit scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie in Nicholas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW). It’s a beautiful sequence, well written, well played, brilliantly cut (all hail Anne Coates, let’s remember) and pretty damn sexy too, a veritable short film all on its own that plays like a long, slow sip of the best kind of whiskey imaginable. It’s easily the best thing about the whole movie and when I’m not watching OUT OF SIGHT the film’s modest nature (particularly in this day and age) almost makes it easy to forget just how good it is. I think it’s because in my mind with some distance I sometimes think the film could use just a little more snap to it but then I put it on and within a few minutes I get sucked into it again, even if I’m just starting from a random point in the middle. The small pleasures that come from the moments and the characters while that ultra-cool David Holmes score plays (not to mention a few tracks by The Isley Brothers) all add up to it ultimately becoming an extremely satisfying piece of work. It’s not my favorite Soderbergh film, maybe because the vibe is just a little too laid back for me at times so maybe I prefer the ferocity and genuinely daring approach taken in THE LIMEY and, I swear, I maintain a huge fondness for the glossiness of OCEAN’S ELEVEN and its sequels. The R-rated OUT OF SIGHT with its likable crook played by Clooney plays now as a slight warm up for the more audience friendly OCEAN’S but the vibe it maintains is very much its own, almost a well-kept secret waiting there for anyone who wants to give it a try.


Not to forget that the film doesn’t just feature Clooney & Lopez acting cool together, there is of course a big heist that it all eventually builds to in the third act that pays everything off very smartly but it’s the characters that linger in the brain long after. Never in any real rush, it’s to the film’s credit how willing it is to just pause and occasionally pay attention to what they have to say, knowing that’s where much of the pleasure comes from. Soderbergh even mentions on the DVD commentary how one of the very best scenes in the film, Jack Foley’s post-coital speech on the idiocy of his profession, came within seconds of being dropped right before picture was locked and he was right to finally keep it, with the scene lending a depth to things that wouldn’t otherwise be there. I’m not sure the pacing always works—no matter how many times I see the film I always find myself zoning out for a few moments when we hit Detroit at about the halfway point and spend a few scenes with Glen and Maurice, who are maybe among my least favorite characters in the film. It’s not the fault of the actors—they each do good work here—but it’s as if the film is paying a little too much attention to plot stuff a few minutes more than needed when the characters I’d rather be hanging out with get slightly lost at this stage as the story is in transition from one point to another. But this really is a minor issue and the way things have been structured with various flashbacks revealing more of Foley and what brought the character to the opening bank robbery where we first meet him ultimately makes for a very rich, satisfying experience. It’s as if the film doesn’t build to the final shootout in the climax, it builds to what is necessary for the characters and that more than anything is what makes OUT OF SIGHT so rewarding to revisit.


This is easily one of my favorite George Clooney performances. The character was somewhat older in the book, and based on things said about Foley that would make sense, but the actor plays things as so cool and assured that I wouldn’t want anyone else in the role. Jennifer Lopez is simply fantastic, following up on the promise she displayed in a few films that didn’t quite work (Stone’s U-TURN, Raefelson’s BLOOD AND WINE) for reasons that weren’t really her fault and so good that it seems like she’s about to be in a different career than she wound up in, being a celebrity more than anything and starring in crappy romantic comedies. It really is a shame because she’s got a true movie star vibe here along with totally convincing in showing the utter confidence and brains of Karen Cisco. And the way the film shoots her, she’s ridiculously gorgeous as well. While watching the movie this time it struck me that most (if not all) of Soderbergh’s periodic freeze-frames seem to favor pausing on Lopez. Not that I’m complaining in the slightest and he must have been as taken by her as everyone else and it’s almost as if the film is gazing at her as Jack Foley does—looking for a time out, wanting to hold that image of her in the brain as long as possible before it dissipates. In just a few years she’d be off to J. Lo land never to be anything like this again but this film, like those freeze-frames, captures her when she was at her absolute best as well as the screen presence she probably should have been for years afterward.


Ving Rhames makes his guilt-ridden crook always somehow likable, Don Cheadle brings slippery danger to Maurice which makes him be genuinely threatening, Steve Zahn is appropriately annoying as Glenn, Dennis Farina makes every second he has onscreen a true pleasure as Karen’s bemused father and Albert Brooks nails the slimy corporate nastiness in his big speech to Clooney. It’s a fantastic cast all the way down the line, very well utilized by Soderbergh with even the bit players (with a few recognizable from the director’s SCHIZOPOLIS) making an impression. Catherine Keener is Foley’s magician’s assistant ex-wife, Isaiah Washington is Kenneth, Wendell B. Harris Jr is the overly officious Miami FBI guy, Luis Guzmán is Chino (making this the second straight summer 1998 with Guzmán in a minor role that I’ve written about), Paul Calderon is Detroit cop Raymond Cruz, Viola Davis makes the first of several appearances in a Soderbergh film, Nancy Allen is a welcome presence as Ripley’s maid and an uncredited Michael Keaton reprises his JACKIE BROWN role as Ray Nicolette, maybe the only time this kind of odd crossover has ever happened. It’s a shame Keaton has never played Nicolette again since in another Elmore Leonard-related project.


OUT OF SIGHT holds up pretty damn well as a smooth ride, one that moves its characters through an engaging plot yet still knowing that what it really needs to be about is George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez’s hands brushing against each other on that glass of bourbon. Working with a director who obviously knew how to use him in the frame in a way that no one else had at that point, for Clooney it was maybe the best possible way to prove that he could overcome the lame vehicles Hollywood had been sticking him in as he emerged on ER. Not all of his films in the twelve years since this film’s release have worked but there’s always the feel that he really is going for quality and he’s already shot a film with director Alexander Payne so there’s something else I can spend the next year desperately waiting for. Still, I always like returning to these films where the actor quietly proves his star power with all the mature coolness imaginable as he portrays someone on the other side of the law but in terms of the film world, to me he’s one of the good guys. All these years later I still like OUT OF SIGHT. And now I like THE AMERICAN too. Of course, your own personal mileage may vary.

There's Worse Things To Be

A line of dialogue heard at the very beginning of Brian De Palma’s 1998 thriller SNAKE EYES where a TV news reporter is told to refer to a hurricane as a tropical storm in her report for purely financial reasons announces right off the bat the film’s theme of how the truth gets covered up in the world. It’s a clever way to begin this pre-9/11 look at military conspiracies covered up by the military and how terrorism was sold through the media so it should for every conceivable reason announce the start of a Brian De Palma masterwork but that unfortunately doesn’t happen. On the long list of De Palma films SNAKE EYES isn’t anywhere near among the worst but it certainly has to rank as one of his most flat-out disappointing. All of the elements are there—an idea that seems perfect for the director, strong actors, enigmatic females, powerful visuals, a virtuoso opening shot that attempts to out-virtuoso anything he’d shot before. I can imagine it all flowing just fine on the page and it probably played great in the dailies. Even individual scenes work strongly on their own yet when the pieces are assembled together something just doesn’t work, like a machine that’s been put together precisely according to the instructions but the parts still aren’t able to fit somehow. I almost can’t figure it out what the problem is. Some of it—hell, a lot of it—works just great for the first hour but where it all leads to not only feels like kind of a dramatic dead end it winds up hurting the effectiveness of earlier scenes as well. It’s clearly a key title in the creative evolution of De Palma’s stylistic thrillers but it felt like an unfortunate fumble to me when I saw it on opening night way back on August 7, 1998 and many of those problems have never completely gone away. It’s not a bad movie—it does, after all, offer too many examples of vintage De Palma being as good as he can be—but it is an unsatisfying movie, one that practically falls to pieces as the celluloid moves through the projector. I can barely understand why.


In the middle of a massive hurricane, gleefully corrupt Atlantic City detective Rick Santoro (Nicolas Cage), married and with a mistress, is attending a heavyweight championship bout at what will be the final event held at the legendary Atlantic City Arena before renovation. Rick has snagged his ringside seat due to his friendship with U.S. Navy commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise) who is in charge of security for the Secretary of Defense, also there to see the fight. Several minutes into the bout and just as a mysterious blonde woman in white (Carla Gugino) sits down to speak to the Secretary, shots ring out, mortally wounding the Secretary and causing panic in the arena. With the presumably lone assassin killed almost instantly by Dunne, Rick immediately begins his investigation which involves several odd circumstances surrounding the moment the shots rang out, including a mysterious gorgeous redhead, some strange behavior from the heavyweight champ and what the woman in white was saying to the Secretary. Rick quickly pieces together that a possible conspiracy led to the event but as he conducts his search for the missing woman throughout the arena his close friend has his own secret agenda in mind.


There’s so much to admire in SNAKE EYES (screenplay by David Koepp, story by De Palma and Koepp) that it almost becomes like breaking down the formula of a complex algebra equation to figure out what went wrong. De Palma’s visual mastery is always present through the various setpieces but the problems are such that maybe they can only be traced back to the story’s conception and any flaws found there. Much of the story is set within about an hour-and-a-half, roughly the length of the film itself—there are no shots of clocks to give things a ‘real-time’ feel (I can’t help but wonder if that was originally part of the plan) but it’s probably pretty close. This sort of story trope would work great in a more noir-tinged storyline (and there are elements of noir at the root of this film set in the sleazy gambling world of Atlantic City) but it doesn’t quite fit with what’s here. Rick Santoro stumbles onto the first threads of figuring out this massive conspiracy and cover-up almost by chance but since he puts it all together practically right away it doesn’t seem like it was much of a plan by those involved (the marketing was also at fault here—the trailer reveals way too much). The level of needed complexity that would make figuring things out through these multiple flashbacks of the assassination genuinely satisfying doesn’t happen with the boxing side of things—certainly adding to the noir feel—doting too long on the anguish being displayed by boxer Stan Shaw that does damage to the momentum even before the thirty-minute mark, the first sign that something is going very wrong. And since just about everything is known practically by the time the film is only half over it gives it all a feeling of, is that it? Not to get heavy into spoilers but after Nicolas Cage retrieves Carla Gugino from the hotel room and brings her into the stairwell (about the 57 minute mark) it’s almost like there’s nothing left to happen, no excitement left to come and when Nicolas Cage has to figure one last detail out for himself the audience has been placed way ahead of him already. One key piece of the twisty puzzle is revealed before Cage learns it--I can imagine De Palma and Koepp arguing over whether we should find out when Cage does while they were writing the script and I’m not sure they aren’t correct in how they played it but the pieces as they are don’t quite go together as well as they should.


The story really becomes something else when we hit the hour mark—not about uncovering this conspiracy but about the character of Rick Santoro, corrupt but carefree cop, looking himself in the mirror about the concept of loyalty and friendship, realizing that he can’t go this extra step for literal blood money that’s being asked of him. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with the theme, it’s just that the execution feels so lackluster. Maybe this empty feeling in the third act was an issue during production which at one stage involved a tidal wave resulting from the hurricane that figured into the climax—years ago I glanced at a script which included a scene description that was something like, “A MASSIVE TIDAL WAVE ENGULFS THE CASINO FLOOR” (I wish I had that script right now). All this was shot and, from what I’ve been told, previewed (some of this even survives in the credits for ILM at the end, like one for “Digital Wave Research & Development”) though ultimately replaced with the somewhat underwhelming confrontation we have now that ends too quickly to be completely satisfying—it winds up playing a little bit like how the climax of De Palma’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE might have gone if it stayed in that baggage compartment without ever going up on top of the train for all the helicopter action. Isn’t it correct for a Hitchcockian thriller to give us a Hitchcockian climax? It feels like the movie shrivels up when it needs to explode and when we get Nicolas Cage actually referencing the discarded ending we never saw in the final scene (“I keep dreaming I’m back in that tunnel, underwater. Only in my dream I drowned.”) it feels a little like the movie has thrown up its hands, knowing that it can’t be saved. There’s something off about it all, as if the dream logic De Palma can be brilliant at is lost here in favor of maybe trying to make the scenario too realistic and there are nevertheless many nagging questions about the plausibility of it all, like the arena filled with thousands of panicking people emptying out just a little too quickly or Carla Gugino wandering around this huge crowd for even thirty seconds looking as bloodied as she is in the wake of the shooting. BLOW OUT was about something that had to do with the real world as well, but that film was also about reconciling it with the film world bringing the two styles together. Here, the themes of flashbacks and looking closely at the truth behind things, going through the events of the assassination over and over just doesn’t resonate. Even the score by Ryuichi Sakamoto, which sounds perfect for a De Palma film, is somewhat more analytical than the emotional delirium that the scores by the likes of Morricone and Donaggio provided for him in the past which raises the question, how important is it for a De Palma film to strictly adhere to the concept of realism? Is that an approach he should be leaving to other directors?


All of this said, it’s important to say how much there is to admire here—seriously, there are camera pans in this movie that I find exhilarating to rewind and look at again. The 13-minute opening shot, following Nicolas Cage into the arena leading up to when the fight begins is truly awe-inspiring, a genuine triumph for De Palma, staying right on Cage the entire time with the cuts that are no doubt hidden in there never diminishing the achievement in the slightest. De Palma and Cinematographer Stephen H. Burum’s roving camera through the arena/casino/hotel setting is vividly laid out, with a hypnotic effect developing from the repeated nature of the assassination (that huge American flag draped over the arena offers more shades of BLOW OUT) and the tracking of Carla Gugino via security cameras through the casino floor up into the hotel is a particularly exciting section, complete with one long, steady movement literally over the activity in various hotel rooms during the search for her. There’s continuous invention from De Palma all the way through like when the camera switches from a first-person POV to outside of that within a single shot and the film actually gets away with it. I even like the feel that the recurring use of blue and purple gives to the overall effect. The promise of some of this extreme cinematic skill makes it all the more disappointing when it never becomes as visually complex as it needs to be to thrill or as narratively complex as it needs to be to satisfy. The running time is 98 minutes, fairly brisk for De Palma—were things streamlined to make the density of the information easier to consume for audiences? Since we know everything by a certain point, there’s nothing left for things to build to in the third act except for a beaten-up Nicolas Cage wandering through the hallways like a poor man’s Terry Malloy at the end of ON THE WATERFRONT and it’s not even clear what the character hopes to accomplish at this point. The film ends with an extended take featuring a conversation between two characters leading to action that continues under the end credits (while annoying pop song plays), finally settling on a minor revelation at the very end (actually, a little like the final shot of SISTERS), but you could hardly blame anyone for not remembering what it’s even a callback to. In the end, maybe that says all that needs to be said about SNAKE EYES—a film about looking closely into a certain image, ultimately leading to a revelation that turns out to not be much of anything at all, so it never really resonates as it should. De Palma’s feel of pure cinema is present in every single moment but the unsatisfying nature of the final result makes it more depressing than if it had been just directed by some hack.


Looking at the film again now, it’s very clear for me how the film in some ways plays as if the De Palma of BLOW OUT, BODY DOUBLE and CASUALTIES OF WAR is trying to atone for the fates of the women who have been treated as innocent lambs to the slaughter in his earlier films. It takes a lead character who has no interest in being a hero but is intent on doing what those other protagonists have failed in and in the context of De Palma’s filmography SNAKE EYES is maybe trying to move past whatever cynicism found in earlier films towards a more hopeful feeling for the future (“I’m naïve,” says someone at the end. “There’s worse things to be,” is the response). The director’s slightly insane RAISING CAIN from 1992 seems to throw up its hands at the madness of it all but SNAKE EYES offers the idea that there is some good to be found in even the most corrupt places where everyone has an angle (Rick has no real ambitions beyond maybe being Mayor of Atlantic City someday) and that maybe trying, hell, demanding that certain people aren’t done away with can really be worth it in the end. The theme continued in 2002’s FEMME FATALE from the director, but while the feeling of hope that the Clinton-era SNAKE EYES strives for may seem more at home in the years before 9/11 its hints at military/industrial cover-up involving a faulty missile system do come off as somewhat prescient now, a reminder that even when De Palma wants to suddenly seem optimistic the feeling can’t entirely take in the corrupt world he presents. These are lots of tantalizing threads, but unfortunately not much of an end result that knows what to do with them so there’s never much of an impact. The final twenty seconds of BLOW OUT wouldn’t have had much effect if the movie it had been up to that point wasn’t as powerful and whatever the ending of SNAKE EYES is it doesn’t ever really comes close.


The lead actors are certainly strong right through when the film begins to falter. Even the stairwell scene where things start to come apart is undoubtedly well played as it happens. As this corrupt cop in an impossible situation, Nicolas Cage enjoyably brings his patented gonzo insanity to the role, with his carefree nature correctly draining away the deeper his character gets in all this. Gary Sinise has a somewhat trickier part to play—I’m not sure the script gives him the necessary support to make things totally believable, but I do enjoy that robotic way he has of walking down those hotel corridors like he’s the T-1000 or something. Carla Gugino’s pageboy haircut is a slight comedown after that blonde wig but she’s ideal both as a figure of mystery and the rational representative of the real world later on, a strong early example of just how good he can be. Character actor Kevin Dunn has a sizable supporting role as a reporter for the pay-per-view outlet covering the fight, providing the odd experience of watching an actor play scenes opposite someone whose character, Sinise’s Kevin Dunne, has practically the same name. John Heard bellows loudly while lightning crashes overhead as the Trump-like developer, familiar faces Luis Guzmán, Mike Starr & David Anthony Higgins turn up to remind us this film was made in the late 90s and the enticing Jayne Heitmeyer with all that red hair is the mysterious Serena.


In the end, SNAKE EYES really just feels like an unfortunate performance by a master conductor, a film where something is undeniably missing even while the director’s visual brilliance is as alive as ever. Seriously, I kind of want to look at the opening shot or certain other sections again right now but something seems to have gone wrong at some point whether in the pursuit of clarity, issues that arose during editing or just flaws in the basic concept. Maybe it was also a case of the director miscalculating his own approach to cinematic delirium versus the real-world issues of friendship, loyalty and cynicism that the movie was addressing. I’m not really certain what the problem ultimately is, only that it doesn’t stand up on its own. The final line of dialogue spoken follows through on what gets stated at the beginning so the film’s attachment to theme holds through to the end. It’s the style that falters somewhere along the way, the loss of that love-of-cinema feeling we get from De Palma at his most daring so there’s never any real satisfaction from the result. And if that feeling isn’t there then all we’re left with is an ordinary time-killing thriller. Which isn’t always a bad thing but when the name Brian De Palma is involved we’re always waiting for that high, that hit of pure cinematic nourishment of the sort that only he can provide us. And if it’s not there in its most pure, uncut form than it doesn’t do us any good at all so we’re just left sitting there, wondering what happened to this film that had so much promise. As good as some of it is, as great as it can be to stare repeatedly at that jaw-dropping camerawork once the film ran through the camera and the dice was rolled something wound up going wrong so, sadly, we’re left with nothing. Snake Eyes.

A Funny Sort Of Day

I’ve never been the sort of person to embrace being up late at night. Even when I had a car I didn’t drive around the streets at odd hours, I’m not the sort of person to be found brooding in a bar at last call—although there was a night at the Dresden a few weeks ago which was an exception—and I’m not usually the sort to be sitting at an all-night diner’s counter at 3 AM drinking decaf. Does anyone ever go to Fred 62 and actually do that? What I’m feeling lately isn’t quite insomnia, because I do eventually fall asleep. But there is plenty of tossing and turning so I know that I’m worried, consumed with thoughts of anything that might be coming in the future. It’s been that kind of summer, that kind of August, the kind where I look up and go…what the hell happened? It’s been a strange time, so I’m in kind of a mood. And I still don’t have a car. I don’t even have much interest in looking right now.



So Edgar Wright’s SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD has opened and whatever has happened in terms of its reception has happened. I enjoyed the film (with some reservations but since I’ve only seen it once I’m not going to be writing anything on it right now), maybe slightly more as I was watching it than while thinking about it afterwards, just as I also enjoyed his previous film HOT FUZZ. But, for me, very few films over the past decade have come close to how I feel about Wright’s own SHAUN OF THE DEAD and I really don’t exaggerate when I say that it stands out to me more than just about any other movie that opened in the aughts, right up there with MULHOLLAND DRIVE, SIDEWAYS and maybe a few others. SCOTT PILGRIM examines its array of mostly twentysomething characters from a somewhat outside perspective while still identifying with them and their world as much as possible. In contrast SHAUN OF THE DEAD feels very much right in there with its characters who have moved past the twentysomething stage and are moving close to actually being the perilous age of thirty. I’ve moved long past that stage now too.


To go back a little bit, several years ago I got in the habit of watching SHAUN OF THE DEAD a lot. And I’m not exaggerating, I did at least one viewing a week for what seemed like months. At least once I even followed it up immediately with the original DAWN OF THE DEAD, which is probably a little obvious but it was a great double bill anyway. That was back during the period before I started to write this blog and in some ways it was a good thing to stop watching it so much. For one reason, looking for new films to write about gave me the excuse to start seeing things I hadn’t seen yet, to continue my education as it were. But I saw it enough that returning to it after some time away for another viewing didn’t really offer any new revelations. And now that I’ve seen each episode of SPACED multiple times, seen the various actors in other things, had Edgar Wright fall asleep in the row behind me at the New Beverly during a showing of BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, there’s no way it can provide the same sort of surprise for me that it did way back in ’04. If anything, returning to it now kind of depressed the hell out of me for the first few minutes serving as an almost vicious reminder for me how I haven’t moved as far away from what the lead character is going through as I would have liked to by this point in my life. I’m still trying, but in that sense it kind of stung. And if the film was still going to get me to respond in this way, that has to say something. At a certain point, I was able to put all the feelings of regret and depression aside, allowing me to love it like I always do.


If you haven’t seen SHAUN OF THE DEAD, I don’t know what you’re doing reading this, but just in case: Directionless 29 year-old Foree Electric salesman Shaun (Simon Pegg) who is perfectly content to spend most of his nights drinking pints at the local pub The Winchester is given an ultimatum but longtime girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) to turn his life around but though he wants to he blows what seems to be his one last chance. After Liz dumps him in full view of her best friends David (Dylan Moran) and Diane (Lucy Davis) Shaun spends the night drinking away his sorrows with best pal Ed (Nick Frost), a low-level drug dealer who’s even more of a screw up than Shaun is. They wake up the next morning, fully hungover, with Shaun determined to figure out how to turn his life around, only to discover that something has changed and that for reasons unknown London is suddenly being overrun by zombies. Realizing that he has no choice but to spring into action, Shaun decides he must venture out into the world to rescue his mom Barbara (Penelope Wilton) and stepdad--not his dad--Philip (Bill Nighy) but also make sure that Liz is safe and with Ed decides that there’s only one place where they can all be safe, the very place where Shaun probably would have been spending the day with Ed anyway.


Back on my first viewing in Fall 2004 the experience of viewing SHAUN played as a needed tonic to the unnecessary remake of DAWN OF THE DEAD from earlier that year, a film which after an effective first ten minutes became loud, frantic and witless. From the first moment of SHAUN, I could sense several others in the audience laughing at the same things I was while others there were just as obviously sitting there completely stone-faced but, of course, that’s just the way it goes sometimes with films that ultimately become known as cult movies. More than the spoof it may have seemed from the ads and more than the straight-out horror films that it pays loving tribute to SHAUN is simply a perfectly pitched character comedy that gets deserved, organic laughs in scene after scene while still making plain its complete love for every zombie film ever made in a way that truly means it. Wright’s directorial eye, trained in TV all those years, knows exactly what to be aiming its camera at, whether during the celebrated repeated Steadicam shots of Shaun making his way through his neighborhood in the early morning as well as during the multiple wide Scope shots of his entire ensemble trapped in the middle of this unexpected zombie outbreak. Barely taking a moment to breathe, the film keeps things expertly paced right from the start with the well-staged opening sections containing a growing feel of genuine dread emerging from the background. As a director Wright even uses inserts well, not something that you can say about any number of hacks directing $200 million movies out there. And the references to other famous zombie films, particularly from the Romero universe, feel layered and pertinent such as the radio heard reporting on a returning Jupiter probe and even when the in-jokes are placed in the foreground like the infamous “We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” it manages to still not play as intrusive. The movie manages to nail the issue of exposition in its treatment of explaining why this outbreak has happened and even the news reports seen on TV—always a tricky element of these films—feel completely authentic. The occasional offhand pop culture references feel right as well. Who needs to hang on to their copy of Prince’s BATMAN soundtrack, anyway?


By the time I returned to the film on its DVD release I found myself watching it repeatedly, moving beyond just the jokes and references, intensely connecting to it in how it came from an obviously personal place in its creator’s lives while at the same time getting me to laugh out loud even while watching it by myself. The ultimate joke of the Winchester being the most dependable romantic spot as well as thought of as “an impenetrable fortress” could only have been conceived by somebody who woke up hungover one morning and realized they may have been spending a few too many nights in the same place. I think I’ve been there. The screenplay by Wright and Pegg feels absolutely airtight in how it builds its story through enormously clever dialogue and character development, constantly delineating the ultra-twisted nature of this particular hero’s journey with true expertise in storytelling all the way down to the perfect final shot. Hell, even the film’s fart joke is good and anyone who knows me would confirm that’s something I never say. Just about the one minor issue I can pinpoint on a screenplay level might be how the titular character doesn’t really have much to define him like how Simon Pegg’s SPACED character wanted to draw comic books—background info of him being a club DJ was almost entirely cut out presumably because it didn’t have much to do with things in the end (kind of like how Billy Peltzer’s ambitions of being, what do you know, a comic book artist in GREMLINS didn’t have much of an effect in that film either) which is just about the biggest flaw in how the script is laid out. Of course, if that’s the biggest flaw then it’s probably a good sign and Pegg’s performance infuses him with the right amount of inner life anyway. The schematics of the script do become somewhat apparent after watching it multiple times, which of course sometimes adds to the humor, with dialogue callbacks (“Glad somebody made it”) and repeated actions intended to underline certain situations but the way it all plays there’s not a wasted moment—the running gag with Yvonne certainly has an added level to it after seeing SPACED but it works great either way. It remains amazing to me how the film juggles its tone from having the comedy mix with the gore but neither one ever overwhelming the other and still becoming emotional by a certain point with spot-on dialogue for each character that couldn’t be better. Besides, there’s a lot to be said about a film that correctly balances so many elements in its screenplay as this one does—hell, I’ve tried that before and pretty much failed each time. There have been plenty of late nights where I’ve sat there practically in tears during some moments near the end of this film and, to be honest, that’s probably as much of a reason as anything for my multiple viewings over the years. I love this movie.


The cast couldn’t be more ideal during all comic and serious moments throughout with Wright making his ensemble work together just as well , maybe better, than the cast of SPACED ever did. Simon Pegg is just amazing in the lead role, making his character’s transformation to from indecisive electronics salesman to DEER HUNTER-style warrior totally believable in this context. The leap in the quality of his performance as Tim on SPACED, where he was arguably sometimes outshined by his female co-star, and Shaun in this film is undeniable. Nick Frost as Ed pulls off the neat trick of playing someone who should by all reason be totally intolerable and making him a believably loyal friend. Kate Ashfield also does a good job with what is a very tricky role that in other hands might come off as too much of a drip—after all, Lucy Davis might be a little cuter but Ashfield plays Liz as someone who would be a great girlfriend if you’d pay the right kind of attention to her. She’s intelligent enough that you can believe she wants something a little more while also injecting a little humor into the character so you can buy why Shaun feels so strongly about her. Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran and the great Bill Nighy each bring a great amount of sharp comic depth to the quirks of their supporting roles and every time I see the film Penelope Wilton as Shaun’s mom Barbara just destroys me in her final scene to the point where I sometimes feel like skipping past it. There’s not a bad moment by an actor here, even the bit players and Wright’s treatment of things makes it so even the unlikable ones make sense—Roommate Pete as played by Peter Serafinowicz (the voice of Darth Maul, of course) really is kind of a ‘prick’ in how he behaves, but he’s not wrong in what he has to say to Shaun either. Maybe I’ve seen this film so many times that I easily separate it from SPACED in my head and I never quite see the character of Daisy in Jessica Hynes née Stevenson’s very funny running cameo of Yvonne. If anything, I’m always wondering just what’s going on in that character’s own, immensely more exciting movie as we’re probably supposed to do.


It’s the personal tinge to SHAUN OF THE DEAD that moves through every hysterically arch and deadly serious moment that I feel in my bones, that has made me want to keep watching it countless times over the years, As if that touch not only adds to the drama but to the cinematic invention in there as well, a release of everything creative that Wright and Pegg had ever wanted to achieve up to that point with the final result working beautifully. HOT FUZZ is very enjoyable but it feels like more of a genre goof in comparison and even if Wright did shoot most of that film in his hometown, maybe following through on some childhood fantasy of what kind of film he could shoot there, the touch of the undeniably personal feels lost. SCOTT PILGRIM is a bigger, more intense clash of real life vs. pop culture in all its forms (movies, video games, music, whatever) than he has ever attempted before and while there are many things about it I genuinely like I’m not sure how much of it has stayed with me. The female character of Ramona Flowers in that film is the sort of cool, attractive girl I’d go for myself but she remains a little too much of a vision as opposed to a character even when compared to the younger, more excitable Knives Chau, who seems nice enough but I’m not sure I could ever stand to talk to her for more than thirty seconds. Maybe some of this has to do with why the film hasn’t stayed with me all that much. I’m not sure what the answer is for the next film (the third in the presumed trilogy with Simon Pegg?) or even if he wants to go more personal again—an 8 ½-style comedy about a film director who uses Twitter a lot? It would probably be a lot better than the film of NINE but is that really the answer? Besides, if I ever said some of any of this to Edgar Wright he could very well glare at me with anger and say that SCOTT PILGRIM couldn’t have come from a more wrenching, personal place from the very bottom of his soul. And all this has to do with my own personal response, my own attachment to SHAUN OF THE DEAD, anyway. It’s been a film I’ve been able to count on through the years and it’s still there now as I sit here and wonder what the hell happened this summer? What the hell do I do now? Am I ever going to feel like getting a new car again? Am I ever going to feel like I’ve moved away from the sort of thing Shaun is going through at the beginning of his story? Maybe part of my problem is that I’m looking for an answer to these questions by relating what I’m going through to movies and TV shows. But that’s just what Edgar Wright has always done, come to think of it, and maybe if that sort of thing results in a movie like SHAUN OF THE DEAD then it’s not such a bad idea after all.

Life Has Its Little Bonuses

Both DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE and the remake of THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR, each film directed by John McTiernan, begin on a morning in a pre-9/11 New York that is currently in the middle of a sweltering Indian Summer. It’s curious why this is—maybe the director found the basic setup more interesting than just having it part of a regular hot summer day and since it worked well enough the first time he decided to do it again. There’s not all that much to actually say about this point of comparison but I bring it up because it’s one of any number of things in DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE that play as kind of interesting but are still just sort of tossed in there to see if they’ll stick to the narrative. Released in May 1995, the third in the DIE HARD series came five long years after the release of DIE HARD 2 and was the first film directed by McTiernan, who sat out the first sequel, since the train wreck of 1993’s LAST ACTION HERO. DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE feels like a calculated attempt by all involved to give the audience what it wanted while still tossing a few new elements into the mix and for the most part it pretty much succeeds at what it wants to do in its over-the-top fashion. It is a curious film, partly in how it drops the whole conceit of setting the film in an enclosed space on Christmas Eve (a version set on a cruise ship was scrapped when UNDER SEIGE hit, to later sort of resurface as SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL) and the departure of producer Joel Silver from the franchise affects the feel of things as well. McTiernan’s level of craft definitely helps but the film was made at a time when the ways that digital effects would alter the industry were still being formed so the film feels somewhat caught between eras, between optical and digital, between old-school craftsmanship and the all-encompassing hell of Michael Bay that was yet to come. All things considered it is certainly the second best DIE HARD film ever made but considering the competition that may not be saying too much—Renny Harlin’s DIE HARD 2 is a piece of hackwork that’s kind of watchable but hasn’t dated all that well and my complete hatred for the fourth film, which I maintain was made by people with contempt for the DIE HARD franchise and its fans, is equivalent to the heat of a thousand suns. The third entry isn’t without flaws and is probably a little all over the place but I liked it when I saw it on opening day and I still like it now. It’s sort of half a DIE HARD movie and half something else but that’s probably enough. The other half is pretty good anyway.


When a bomb explodes in New York early one morning, a mysterious man named Simon phones the police and informs them that he will continue to strike unless the one and only Lt. John McClane (Bruce Willis), currently suffering a massive hangover in the middle of a suspension from his job, performs several specific tasks. When the first thing McClane has to do goes dangerously wrong it results in an encounter with militantly angry Harlem electrician Zeus Carver (Samuel L. Jackson) whose role in assisting McClane catches Simon’s attention and insists Carver follow along with this ongoing game of “Simon Says”. After the next assignment the two men must follow results in a massive subway explosion down in lower Manhattan, the identity of Simon (Jeremy Irons) soon becomes clear to everyone although as McClane & Carver jumping through Simon’s hoops the ultimate goal of the mad bomber’s plan, which is bigger than anyone possibly realizes, remains secret.


For the first forty-five minutes or so DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE plays just swell, working as a canny character-based action thriller with two leads bickering nonstop that is tightly plotted and also manages to not seem like a retread, tossing in some decent New York flavor as well. Taking a script by Jonathan Hensleigh entitled SIMON SAYS and converting it into a DIE HARD entry with the screenwriter, the film barely stops moving once it revs up which is a good thing and easily the strongest elements of it are in the early stages that keep things on a more earthbound PELHAM ONE TWO THREE level. Even the scoring is fairly sparse during the first third and very well done, like the percussive nature of the taxicab trip through the middle of Central Park and as the sequence moves into the subway section it pulls off the feel of the music gradually building with the rising nature of the tension working extremely well. When the nature of Simon’s master plan becomes clear it all begins to shift into full-fledged DIE HARD mode as big as it can possibly be which is fine—it’s appropriate, after all considering what the movie is—but maybe because the basic plot involving the Federal Reserve is a little unwieldy, not to mention totally implausible, it never becomes quite as satisfying as what went on back in Nakatomi Plaza on Christmas Eve. Watching this film where key sequences are set down in lower Manhattan with the World Trade Center visible in numerous shots (the 1993 bombing is even referenced in dialogue) also makes plain how much this storyline comes from another time for the city of New York, with even a jokey cutaway to financial bigwigs watching the goings-on from their office window, no real concern for what’s actually happening. Things were different then.


It needs to be said how much of the success of the film is due to the chemistry between the two leads. It’s obviously a marked change from the lone man DIE HARD formula and the ongoing arguments about each man’s racism feels too shoehorned in at times (somewhat dating things, keeping it back in the post-Rodney King 90s) but the different approach gives Bruce Willis different notes to hit in his character and he rises to the occasion in a story that puts John McClane in a bad place at the start but it feels consistent with what always seemed like a self-destructive nature in the character anyway. The backstory of whatever has happened to McClane in between movies gets kind of brushed aside and with Bonnie Bedelia’s Holly McClane absent I can’t help but wish we could have actually seen a movie detailing the breakdown of their marriage, which reminds me--what kind of paperwork is involved with a cop going from the NYPD to the LAPD and back again within just a few years? The two leads are definitely building on whatever energy they got from the recently wrapped PULP FICTION, a film they really had no scenes together in. There’s even some (probably ad-libbed) dialogue alluding to that film which hadn’t even opened when this began shooting and the way Willis & Jackson come off as fearless in bouncing off each other helps the movie past any number of its rough stretches.


Much as I enjoy it, I do wish that—yes, this would have required a totally different plot for the second hour and I have no solution to this problem—the film had found a way to keep itself confined to the island of Manhattan, which wouldn’t have necessarily violated the concept of a DIE HARD film in an enclosed space. The plot as it turns out dictates that things do have to veer away from the city, unfortunately, with some of the NY flavor falling out of it at this point (some shooting was done in South Carolina) and after all these years I still can’t figure out just where that bridge the two men spot the barge from is supposed to be in the reality of the film, with geography that doesn’t make much sense at all. There is some pretty decent plotting to keep things moving and unpredictable, particularly in the first hour, although McClane’s hangover that he keeps commenting on does play as a slightly contrived equivalent of having no shoes in the original. There’s also bits like Zeus Carver just happening to drive by as McClane shoots right out of the aqueduct hole which feels like the production just said “oh, screw it,” when trying to rationalize the moment. And the missed opportunity nature of the strangely brief Yankee Stadium sequence feels like they either ran out of shooting time or maybe rewrites prevented them from figuring out a way to actually utilize the location within the story.


On a deeper level than contrived individual moments DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE winds up not having very much depth to it in the end with the two leads eventually forgetting all the tension between them and getting along, well, just because. The pretense of the bad guys faking a political slant to their scheme is just too close to what Hans Gruber’s game plan was in the original—at least that was given a comic spin to it (“Asian Dawn?”)—so here the conceit doesn’t have any real teeth and it makes the bad guys not as strong as a result. By the time their full plan is revealed lots of narrative balls feel in the air anyway--as it goes on DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE contains numerous strands that increasingly feel like compromises between people who couldn’t agree on an ideal solution so in the end they had to shoot something, deciding to toss every possibility into the mix. The ok-but-not-great final sequence was shot months after the fact and feels it, but it probably delivers better than the discarded ending found on the DVD which is interesting, but really doesn’t feel much like part of a DIE HARD film. Frankly, there are probably other films where pieces like the whole subplot with Zeus’s nephews would bug me more than it does here but I suppose sometimes when you’re with a movie you tend to forgive certain things. And I could believe that multiple rewrites resulted in a few strands that don’t matter—Irons’ migraines seem to result in a payoff that feels hackneyed beyond words and the character’s stuttering trait serves no purpose whatsoever.


It’s not perfect but the film is extremely tightly paced throughout in all the right ways and since digital technology wasn’t being used as much just yet there are a great amount of impressive stunt work and physical elements on display—the subway explosion actually done on set is much more effective than a similar sequence in last year’s Nicolas Cage vehicle KNOWING which lamely did it with CGI. Now that I know a few of the shots in this film that do have digital enhancements to them (like a car effectively screeching to a halt right next to Bruce Willis’ head) I’m still pretty impressed by how they mixed things together. It’s not up to the level of the original DIE HARD (the events of which are referred to here as “that thing in L.A.”—the audience remains more impressed by what John McClane once did than anyone in the film is) and it doesn’t even always feel set in the same universe as DIE HARD but at least it doesn’t insult that film or its fans. As a giant action extravaganza it’s directed by someone who knows how to map these sequences out in the right ways and to deliver all the elements that are needed making for me what has always been an enormously satisfying 131 minutes. Even if it isn’t perfect. It has a healthy amount of disarming humor with bit characters and once things get going after the first act the DIE HARD style comes into play again full throttle—McTiernan’s wide Scope use, massive lens flares and roaming Steadicam work all help give it that feel of continuous excitement. Producer Joel Silver no longer being involved does change things in ways that seem to veer away from what was then seemingly the producer’s house style—that 80s-90s pop feel is long gone, not to mention how this film’s bad guys don’t necessarily kill everyone they come into contact with. This film also doesn’t bother with any annoying side characters that seem to exist primarily to annoy John McClane—all the professionals here, once the tension ratchets up, are completely willing and able to get along. Michael Kamen’s music, once it goes full steam in the second half, certainly helps a great deal with a bouncy quote of “Singin’ In The Rain” as the aqueduct gets flooded and while making the conceit of the score be “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” may not be quite up to the sophistication of “Ode To Joy” (I’m guessing part of the joke is that it can be connected to another Kubrick film) it still works off the visuals very well, correctly adding to the nonstop feel of things.


Bruce Willis expertly falls right back into playing his iconic role, reluctant as he is, and he comes off exactly as confident as he needs to be while Samuel L. Jackson’s racially charged electrician with Malcolm X-type glasses, both someone for McClane to argue with as well as being a slight audience surrogate at the time felt like a solidification of the actor’s stardom following the thunderbolt of PULP FICTION. Looking at it now some of feels maybe a little too calculated with a few speeches clearly designed for the way he could scream them but a small beat like the intensity of his saying, “Just go,” when the pair can’t deal with some handcuffs also shows how good he can always be with just a few tiny words to say. Jeremy Irons seems to be playing his role as kind of a lark but considering the way it was written I’m not sure there was really any other approach he could have taken—it’s more of a gimmick than a character and while Irons has his moments—moving from one phony character to another, calmly eating a hard-boiled egg as Jackson confronts him, the character is too often isolated from things playing his game of “Simon Says” and his lack of interaction with others (at least in person) means that the character isn’t as effective as he probably should be. Sam Phillips, a singer making what is practically her only acting appearance, doesn’t do all that much as the silent but lethal henchwoman Katya, complete with a love-triangle that barely seems alluded to, but she’s certainly striking to watch no matter what she’s doing and the film cuts to her so much within scenes it begins to feel that McTiernan is quite frankly fascinated by her. I’m not sure I blame him.


The supporting cast also brings added strength to some stock characters with McClane’s fellow cops Graham Greene and Colleen Camp (heavy on the New Yawk accent) bring weight to their minor roles—Greene crossing himself at a key moment and Camp cradling a few kids before she thinks something terrible is about to happen feel like genuinely human touches that never seem to turn up in these kinds of movies. Larry Bryggman brings believable concern to his role as McClane’s captain and Kevin Chamberlin is likable comic relief as the bomb expert, hitting just the right humorous tone with a touch of heroism. BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES screenwriter Michael Cristofer is the government official “with another agency”, Joe Zaloom gets some laughs as the history buff truck driver and Aasif Mandvi of THE DAILY SHOW appears for about three seconds as a taxi driver whose cab is hijacked by McClane. Apparently Dick Cheney is in the film as an extra—seriously—but when John McTiernan says, “There he is,” to point him out on the commentary it’s not entirely clear who he’s referring to. Exactly what this possible association says about John McTiernan, the director of one of the finest action films of the past thirty years and currently appealing his conviction for lying to the FBI in the Pellicano wiretapping scandal, is something I’d frankly rather not speculate on.


DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE pulled in an even $100 million at the domestic box office (much more internationally) which wasn’t too much less than what DIE HARD 2 has grossed but it didn’t seem to make the same splash in pop culture. Even the ad campaign was somewhat subdued, possibly a result of the Oklahoma City bombing. Looking at it again now the film feels like one of the last gasps of the old school Hollywood action film, which by the time the late 90s were happening had begun to morph into a sort of Jerry Bruckheimer-Hans Zimmer fusion-of-sound-and-fury extravaganza, no matter who the director was. These days this type of well-crafted, non-ironic R-rated entertainment feels like an endangered species, surviving mostly in forms of unexciting, PG-13-rated, CGI encumbered nonsense (one even tried to pass itself off as a DIE HARD film) and I don’t have much hope that things will turn around. There’s always the small chance, I suppose, that a filmmaker will come along with the ability and know-how to do things right which would be one of the best things to happen to the action genre imaginable. Because this type of movie should always be around, to give us reasons to look forward to eating that popcorn amidst massive explosions, huge orchestral scores and one-liner quips as henchmen are dispatched. Like Lt. John McClane himself, the action genre as we will forever know and love it needs to die hard.