It's no secret I'm a fan of the works of Robert Zemeckis. The man just seems to be tuned into my senses of humor, wonder and all-around fun. From the perfectly made Back to the Future movies, the Oscar-winning Forrest Gump and the breathtaking classic that is Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Zemeckis wows audiences with advanced technology while balancing clear story and characters.
However, his first film post-Spielberg does not get much acclaim outside of its cast. It definitely strikes more adult than both the Future trilogy and Roger Rabbit. Bringing his effects to bear, Zemeckis wanted to make a statement on the vanity of some Southern California women and their obsession with beauty. Meryl Streep, Bruce Willis and Goldie Hawn give this dark fantasy a comedic makeover with DeathBecomesHer.
All their lives, Madeline Ashton (Meryl Steep) and Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) have been in endless competition with each other over men. Madeline stole Helen's fiancé, the meek mortician Dr. Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) and proceeded to make his life a living hell. However, Madeline is appalled to see Helen years after she stole her potential groom looking quite stunning and gorgeous. Fearing her own decaying mortality, Madeline reluctantly finds herself in the presence of a modern-day witch, Lisle (Isabella Rossellini), who sells her potion guaranteed ”[to stop] the aging process dead in its tracks”. After taking it, Madeline does gain a new lease on life with her revitalized body. However, her years of giving grief to poor Ernest has taken its toll and he pushes her down the stairs of their mansion. Without thinking about it, Madeline picks herself back up and realizes that her body has not only stopped aging, it has stopped pulsing. To all medical science, she is a walking, talking corpse. And to her and Ernest's astonishment, it seems as though Helen has taken the same treatment.
The above plot synopsis seems awfully complex and it is, because the film does span a few decades. It tracks the ups and downs of Madeline and Helen's lives and how they would naturally collide in this unnatural way. The film does not waste any time setting up these characters and has no fear of making them unlikable. However, it's clear that Streep, Hawn and Willis are at their best; especially Willis playing wildly against type as the manic Dr. Menville. Without going into much detail, I have never cared for the career of Meryl Streep and her countless Oscar nominations do not add much for me in her favor. Still her performance here is very satisfying and gives me a good chuckle. I should also mention Hawn is having a ball with her role, in particular the scenes where her character goes through an overweight crazy cat lady phase.
Apparently there is a least thirty minutes to an hour worth's of footage left on the cutting room floor including a subplot involving Tracy Ullman (best known as the host of the sketch comedy show that gave birth to "The Simpsons"). To me, this is evident in the standout sequences where Helen and Madeline are fighting, with their undead bodies taking massive damage. These seem to be the scenes the movie's promotional materials were built around but it does not appear to be all that was filmed. The fights end too quickly. Still, ILM's master animators and technicians did a brilliant job of keeping up the illusions and most assuredly earned their Academy Award for Best Special Effects.
Death Becomes Her is full of fresh ideas and on-point satire, but it feels lacking in what it was promoted as. This is, of course, not Zemeckis' fault. He delivered the movie he set out to make. It's not as thrilling as Back to the Future or as funny as Roger Rabbit, but it showcases another side of a great director. This ghoulish side would later reappear to develop "Tales from the Crypt" for TV and introduce America to future Best Director winner Peter Jackson with The Frighteners (interestingly, Alan Silvestri's score for this film was used in the trailers for Jackson's film). Maybe someday Zemeckis will indulge his spookiness again.
NOTE: I am vengeance. I am the night. I am SPOILERS!
“‘You irritate or vex me, you die.’ ‘I'm known for being quite vexing. I'm just forewarning you.’ ‘Shut up, woman.’”
- Colonel Rick Flag (Joel Kinnaman) and Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie), Suicide Squad
Superhero cinema has come a long way from “biff, bam and pow!” We have sat through the lows of the Schumacher Batman films and the highs of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. DC Comics, taking its name from the comic book that gave birth to Batman (“Detective Comics”), has not had the best of luck adapting material that does not include Batman or Superman. Sure there have been a few outliers like the dismal Supergirl, the forgettable Steel and the less said about Jonah Hex and Green Lantern the better, but there is a larger universe in their vast literary history that has not been tapped into. On the other side of the proverbial fence, Marvel has hit practically nothing but home runs with their meticulously crafted Marvel Cinematic Universe. Gazing from the cheap seats, Warner Bros. quickly crafted a plan. A plan so idiotic their brains would explode if they even began to know what they were thinking about.
If Marvel could put a lot of time, money and effort into crafting individual movies, casting the best possible actors, and bringing in filmmakers with a deep respect for the source material, surely Warner Bros. could take the fast pass to cash by doing practically the exact opposite? And Batman v. Superman became one of the biggest laughingstocks of 2016, with its incoherent plot structure, shoehorning characters and being filled with ill-made promises of better things to come. A R-rated Ultimate Edition was released to Blu-Ray with the assurances from Zack Snyder and WB that it would be clearer and more concise with what fans wanted was barely acknowledged as an improvement on the theatrical cut. If Warner Bros. was going to fix their self-proclaimed DC Extended Universe, they needed to work fast. They already had another movie on the way within months.
In the months following the death of Superman, a government agent named Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) has been quietly detaining low-rent super criminals in order to build a secret team that can be deployed when meta-humans (the DCEU name for “superheroes”, despite DC actually owning the trademark to the word “superhero”) attack. One of her valuable resources, an archeologist named June Moone with the spirit of an ancient goddess inside of her (both played by Cara Delevingne) is unleashed upon an unsuspecting metropolis (but not Metropolis). Thus, to go in and save the day, Task Force X is initiated – the master hitman Deadshot (Will Smith), low-rent Australian thief Captain Boomerang (Jai Courtney), the monstrous Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), Asian swords-woman Katana (Karen Fukuhara), a fiery gang member El Diablo (Jay Hernandez) and the murderously mischievous Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie). None of them want to be there, naturally, but they are all told there is an explosive device implanted in their necks and if they manage to survive, time will be taken off of their sentences. With no other options, no way out and nobody to trust, will the Suicide Squad manage to turn over a new leaf or will they end up dead on the streets?
So is this the movie that will save Warner Bros.’ desperately needed DCEU? Nope. Is it at least better than Batman v. Superman? Yeah, but not by much. For all the Warner Bros. brouhaha that apparently went on behind the scenes, this movie was cut to an inch of its life. WITH NO LESS THAN 7 EDITORS. I am not talking about 7 people in the editing department. 7 separate editors. This is not Koyaanisqatsi, for crying out loud. The film moves at a breakneck pace and it is massively disorienting. I knew the backstories of most of these characters to begin with, but if I was like every other Regular Joe that had never heard of these characters, I would massively lost. Ayer has claimed that this is his final cut and if that is true (and it apparently is not), that is massively disappointing. Just something more coherent would be preferable.
One of the major points that the marketing has been selling heavily was Jared Leto’s The Joker, his first acting gig after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. And I hate to break it to you, but you have already seen 95% of his performance in just the trailers. He has the shortest runtime of any Joker ever on-screen. Granted, following in the footsteps of both Jack Nicholson and Heath Ledger's signature performances would have to be challenging to any actor. But it feels like this movie is not willing to give him a chance. I do not much care for his design, but at least it is different. Leto only gets one brief scene that I felt he completely owned with Margot Robbie as Harleen Quinzel. It is a bit of a blend of both of her origins (from "Mad Love" and the New 52) so she willingly chooses to jump into the same vat of chemicals that turned the Joker. I guess that was put in there to ward off angry people. Oh wait!
Another well discussed movie of summer 2016 was the new Ghostbusters film. It is bad. Very bad. Not Vacation (2015) bad, but pretty bad. So what connection does this movie have to Suicide Squad? Well, the climax of the movie is basically more Ghostbusters (1984) than Ghostbusters (2016). The Squad has to face off against the evil Enchantress. From the way Cara Delevingne is dressed, I was halfway expecting Dan Aykroyd to step out from behind a pillar and say,
"Gozer the Gozerian? Good evening. As a duly designated representative of the City, County and State of New York, I order you to cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension."
It continues even when she is defeated; because she was possessing the body of the well-intentioned Dr. June Moone, Rick Flag (her boyfriend) assumes from her petrified body that she is dead. Then, like in Ghostbusters when they break apart Dana Barrett from her Terror Dog stone statue form, Moone peels herself away. Again, all that was missing was the uplifting Elmer Bernstein score. I was taken aback from the shameless rip-off that was not even the actual shameless rip-off.
But that is not to say the movie is totally without merit. There is just not a lot of it. The needle-drop soundtrack was better than expected but pales to the superior Guardians of the Galaxy. The cast does well with their roles, but they do not have a lot of screen-time as individuals and sharing the screen often strikes too similar to The Avengers. Margot Robbie stands out as Harley Quinn, correctly capturing the playfulness and the tragic nature of her character. Will Smith clearly made the right decision to join this movie and snub Independence Day: Resurgence. This is probably the best thing I have seen Joel Kinnaman in, except the only other thing I have seen in him was that RoboCop remake.
David Ayer has repeatedlydenounced Marvel since being hired to direct Suicide Squad. Which is not only a majorly dumb move as well as massively hypocritical; this is a Marvel movie in DC clothing. It is not an unwatchable movie by any means, but it had so much potential squandered that it is really disappointing. For a similar movie with better storytelling, I recommend Batman: Assault on Arkham. It has a few of the characters represented in this movie, but it is a standalone story and not beholden to the whims of a studio gone mad.
It is no secret that I am a huge fan of "Looney Tunes": they are hilarious, fun, and altogether wonderful. I am also a fan of the classic 1984 film, Ghostbusters: again, they are also hilarious, fun and altogether wonderful. Putting these two things together should be a slam dunk (and God knows it was not). However, a few years earlier, a cartoon anthology film teased us with such a concept. And wasted it completely. Well, sort of.
Before I detail the plot, I should quickly explain what this sort of anthology film is. In the late '70s to early '80s, the "Looney Tunes" were getting overshadowed by the likes of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and "He-Man". Still, the Warner Bros. bosses were trying to find some way of bringing these characters back to life. Starting with The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, WB hired a lower-class animation team to create newly animated sequences to tie in to the already classic cartoons of the past. It was a way of getting these shorts back into the public eye at a cheap budget. It came to an end with Daffy Duck's Quackbusters.
Daffy Duck (the first of all characters voiced by the eternally legendary Mel Blanc) is a streetwise prank salesman who learns on TV that a dying billionaire J.P. Cubish would give a cool million to anyone who can make him laugh before he dies. After hilariously dispensing with the shifty butler, Daffy accidentally accomplishes his task and Cubish begins hysterically laughing night and day. That is, of course, until he actually does die. As promised, Cubish's will provides Daffy with the wealth he has only dreamed of. Daffy, naturally, plans to be a miser about it until he is visited by the ghost of Cubish who demands that Daffy use his money to providing a public service. Daffy reluctantly agrees but to spite Cubish, he plans to open a supernatural elimination agency. He quickly recruits Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny as his employees and sets out to take on every monster the world can throw at them. However, Daffy must learn to keep his cool or Cubish will start taking his money with him.
I do not want to be too hard on this movie, because it does feature a lot of great classic cartoons. Most notably "Daffy Dilly", which is fantastic from start to finish. The bigger plot that is tying these cartoons together is okay, but not the movie one being suggested by the title. Obviously Ghostbusters is a huge pop culture icon and the "Looney Tunes" are naturally bigger than that, but if one is going to try and tie them together, it should look like it. They are fighting more monsters than ghosts (though one of the newly animated shorts "The Duxorcist" is a light-hearted parody of The Exorcist). Despite the clear audio difference between the '40s and the '80s, it is good to hear Mel Blanc; I truly smile every time I hear a great Daffy line or a funny Bugs quip.
You might be wondering what Bugs and Porky are doing in this movie if they are not the title characters? Well, you need Bugs. You cannot have a Looney Tunes movie without Bugs. Bugs has a run-in with Count Blood Count, a vampire whom he manages to outsmart. It is all pulled from "Transylvania 6-5000", with little to no changes. Porky's segment takes him to Dry Gulch, New Mexico where he spends the night with Sylvester the Cat in a haunted hotel - all from "Claws for Alarm". I get that the point of this movie is to reintroduce these characters to the next generation, but why not try and do something bigger? A wholly new animated film? Maybe try a deal with Disney to get everybody toget-- Oh wait. That was a year away.
So once you get past the title, Quackbusters is a fun way to spend time with these classic characters and see some great cartoons. The new content is hit-or-miss, but one can tell there was at least the minimum effort put forth. 2D animation is an extinct artform but it will never be forgotten. If it took Quackbusters to get to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it was all worth it.
NOTE: Sorry I've been gone for so long, several obligations have occurred and scheduling has been brutal. I'll try to keep more up-to-date postings as best I can. RETRO REVIEW
"The woman I love is living with a little monkey that looks like me."
- Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser), Monkeybone
A long time ago... in the 1990s... there were two rising talents in Hollywood. One was a master of stop-motion animation: Henry Selick, the acclaimed director behind The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach (both produced by Tim Burton). The other was an actor who had enough charisma and likability to beat the band: Brendan Fraser, star of such dramas as With Honors and School Ties as well as family-friendly comedies like George of the Jungle and Dudley Do-Right (oh, and the now defunct Mummy movies).
These two men had no reason to work with each other; that is, until, they both came across the underground graphic novel "Dark Town". Sensing a chance to follow in the footsteps of The Mask by turning a dark and gritty comic book into a broad mainstream comedy, 20th Century Fox and producer Chris Columbus (best known for the first two Home Alone films and Harry Potter films and despised for - among others - Rent, I Love You Beth Cooper and Pixels) hired Selick to direct, Batman (1989)writer Sam Hamm to pen the screenplay (and has apparently since retired) and Fraser to headline the film. Selick would bring his expert team of stop-motion animators to bring the renamed Downtown to life. But in the initial graphic novel, there was no sidekick for the protagonist to bounce off with; a necessary ingredient for the buddy comedy Columbus and Fox wanted. What they got was an annoying little chimp voiced by John Turturro with the name Monkeybone.
Stu Miley (Fraser) is an up-and-coming cartoonist and his beloved creation, "Monkeybone" is about to be turned into a cultural phenomenon with a cartoon series with toys and other merchandise galore. This is both a blessing and a curse. Stu wants to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Julie (Bridget Fonda, in her final major theatrical film appearance) and now has the clout to do it, but he is uncomfortable with the fame and adulation that will inevitably come with the "Monkeybone" deal. Unfortunately, Stu and Julie get into a car accident that leaves Stu in a coma. In his mind, Stu has arrived at the macabre Downtown where nightmares are the inhabitants' sole source of entertainment. He comes across Monkeybone as a living breathing incarnation, who begins to annoy him ceaselessly. Stu desperately wants to go home, but in order to do so, he requires an "exit pass" from Death herself (Whoopi Goldberg). After retrieving one, Monkeybone betrays Stu, abandons him to be captured by Death's army and commandeers his body in the real world in order to give Downtown new sets of nightmares by hijacking Monkeybone dolls with fear toxin. Now Stu has to escape Downtown and reclaim his life before Monkeybone makes monkey business for the world.
This is a fairly terrible movie. It is all over the place when it comes to things that matter: story, characters, motivations, dialogue, tonal shifts, set design, etc. Somehow Brendan Fraser seems more cartoonish here than he did actually playing two different cartoon characters. Everyone else in this film looks embarrassed to be a part of it. Especially Rose McGowan who plays a character named Miss Kitty (the most likable character in the film) who I swear was invented to cater to the fandom that would soon become known as furries. The whole look of the film is just plain ugly. There is making charming, quirky and weird stop-motion animation but trying to realize that in a live-action setting is disturbing to an unnatural level. To add to the oddities are the cameos. Selick is good friends with the geniuses at Pixar and a few of their folks appear in the film: Lou Romano (Linguini in Ratatouille) plays a trigger-happy cop near the end of the film and the late Joe Ranft (Heimlich the Caterpillar from A Bug's Life) plays the voice of a street-squashed rabbit. Even Harry Knowles, the geek king of Ain't It Cool News, appears briefly in a scene and even he hated the film upon release. They tried to offer the character of Stephen King to the actual Stephen King, who was apparently up for doing the part but could not make it to the set. Monkeybone is most likely the second worst film released in 2001; the top spot obviously going to Tom Green's Dadaist take on his hatred of Adam Sandler films, Freddy Got Fingered.
Once a person sees a film like this, the question naturally asked is "Who's to blame?" (pitchforks and torches sold separately). While promoting the 2008 family action movie Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D (his last majorly successful film appearance), Brendan Fraser seemed to be in good spirits and had this to say to the AV Club:
"You're talking to a guy who was in an $85 million arthouse movie called Monkeybone. Love it or hate it, it had a lot of highly technical elements to it. There was puppeteering, there was claymation, there was CGI, there were huge setpieces. I don't know what happened, they gave the keys to the inmates of the asylum. We went nutty and we made a movie. The studio saw it and went, 'Huh?' I was like, 'You guys don't watch the dailies or read the script? Whatever, here you go!' Me and [co-star] Dave Foley were like, 'We have the dubious honor of being in the world's most expensive arthouse film ever created!'"
As for Henry Selick, his career fortunately rebounded with the better-received Coraline (and is supposedly working on another stop-motion film with Keanu stars Keegan Michael-Key and Jordan Peele). But, in a separate interview with the AV Club, he vented his frustrations with the proverbial monkey on his back:
"It's very hard to know with Monkeybone what the variables were. There was a regime change when I was at Fox. There's a longer version of the film. When Hollywood gets afraid of something, they just say, 'Make it go faster.' Usually, faster isn't better. So there's another version of the film that's about 15 minutes longer. I know that it works better. We had a different lead originally, and that probably would have had an impact —Ben Stiller was the lead, but he wanted to bring in writers, and I chose to be loyal to the writer that was on it. It actually would have been better to go with Ben and his writers. There's a lot of variables looking back, what-ifs. But who knows. I learned my lesson that in the live-action world, you have to earn the support of people over a very, very long time. And in animation, I already have the support."
But in another interview, Selick seems to lay the blame with producer Chris Columbus:
"I would never do another predominantly live-action film again. It was kind of a slippery slope. The original idea for Monkeybone was meant to be far more animation, as much as James and the Giant Peach, and the powerful producer that I hooked up with, he had his own take on it and, you know, if you’re getting a name actor, you have to keep him in the whole movie. And he loves stop-motion, but we couldn’t actually afford to do that sort of Ray Harryhausen combo for a big chunk, so…no, the culture of live-action that’s all focused on one shot, it’s just not my realm. I’m much happier in the animated realm."
At the end of the day, as refreshing as it is to hear about the behind-the-scenes aspects of what went wrong with a project and Henry Selick certainly seems to have learned from his mistakes, Monkeybone is still such a wild misfire of a film. It is too weird be a mainstream comedy, it is too bawdy to be a kids' film and yet it is also too juvenile to be taken seriously as an adult film. If a movie that thinks it is a crowd-pleasing movie fails to have a crowd, does it really please? To paraphrase Roger Ebert's review of Freddy Got Fingered, "The day may come when Monkeybone is seen as a milestone of neo-surrealism. The day may never come when it is seen as funny." Brendan Fraser's career has seemed to be lost to time. If he ever decides to return to mainstream moviemaking, he would do well to avoid projects like Monkeybone. Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on you.
