Movies, we've got movies

[mmcirvin]

Yesterday Kibo and I (and samantha2074, for the first part of it) had a theme-oriented movie night of recent self-referential movie-insider movies. There are too many of these, but they can be entertaining on occasion.

First was CQ, an obscure movie made by one of the lesser Coppolas. It's the story of a young film editor (Jeremy Davies, the annoying slacker kid from Soderbergh's Solaris) working on a hilariously stylized Diabolik/Barbarella-type European science-fiction spy flick at the end of 1969, who unexpectedly ends up tapped to finish the movie after the egotistical director (Gerard Depardieu) bugs out without giving it an ending that the studio likes. It isn't bad, but has a flaw characteristic of many first novels and first movies made by young people: the protagonist is something of a tool, a callow youth who steals film stock to make a pretentious, obsessive movie about his personal life, treats his girlfriend poorly, seems paralyzed into complete inaction for much of the running time, and fantasizes about the movie's sexy female spy-hero until it starts to eat his mind. I already became familiar with that guy in unprintable stories I wrote in college; I don't need to see any more stories about him. But everything else about the movie is fun. The period detail is great, both in the real-world scenes and in the wonderful bits of the movie-within-a-movie that we see.

The other movie was Adaptation, which Kibo had described as a much worse version of the same story as CQ. Hoo boy. This movie is a feature-length advertisement for samantha2074's frequent complaint about convoluted metafiction, namely, that repeatedly signaling to the audience that you know you're writing a crappy story is still no excuse. In this case, Nicolas Cage's dual performance as the neurotic screenwriter (named after the film's screenwriter) and his dense, outgoing identical twin brother is the only reason to pay attention to the movie; he's kind of fun. But everything else about it—the endless tedious scenes of Meryl Streep romancing an orchid poacher—reeks of the filmmakers' reach exceeding their grasp, and that they keep telling the audience "Oh no! Our reach is exceeding our grasp and as a result those scenes with Meryl Streep are not interesting!" doesn't help any. To make matters worse, just to make it more inside, the early parts of the film keep reminding us of the existence of Jonze and Kaufman's earlier, much better movie Being John Malkovich. Just watch that one again instead.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the warning. I liked Being John Malkovich so now I won't bother seeing the other two. Gotta love Catherine Keener. She was also great in Death to Smoochy, a wonderful, funny, biting indictment of the children's television industry which was completely mis-marketed (as if it really were a children's movie, which it is so not), and thus did not get an audience.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

I was fascinated by Adaptation in that i felt, like you, that it should not have worked, because it was so meta. But i felt that Kaufman and Jonze pulled it off, and that even though the Donald half of the movie, by measure, stinks, it's supposed to stink, and that they pulled off the stink so well lets me put up with it. If i felt it had been just a bit not as well done, i would've flunked it.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Re: Adaptation: Ha ha, so true. Also, the new compulsion to pastiche something and say 'No, really, it's bad because the thing I'm imitating is bad! Isn't that cool? Haven't I done a brilliant thing? I'm being BAD ON PURPOSE!' makes me very bitter. You have to have added some new levels to the concept and have planned very well for that to work, and I don't think I have yet seen it do so. It almost seems to be a childish 'we don't know really what we're doing, so we will revel in that fact' sort of thing, as well.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the distinction is that parody can be good (I would say that, since I've written about a million parodies of things, two or three of which I think were kind of funny), but slumming is usually bad.

First, as a parodist you owe the source material you're parodying some small degree of respect, which is to do a little bit of homework and attack deserving targets, rather than just being gratuitously sloppy and then trying to laugh at the source material on the basis of your own sloppiness. (In other words, do Young Frankenstein, not Spaceballs.)

Second, you also owe the audience enough respect not to be boring, even if you're making fun of something else for being boring. The "Donald half" of Adaptation succeeded well enough on the first count but fell down on the second.

I actually kind of like comedy that has a raw, we-did-this-to-amuse-ourselves-on-a-shoestring feel. But it only really works when the rawness comes out of necessity; you can't fake it or just be lazy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I kind of liked "Death to Smoochy"; it was an underrated movie. But Catherine Keener played exactly the same character in it as in "Being John Malkovich" and the wretched "S1m0ne". It's a funny character, but either she's horrendously typecast or she hasn't got much of a range.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

It wasn't really the same character, but I guess it was similar enough to irk people. But since the setting was actually a bit different and she had different actors for interacting, it really had a very different feel. Besides, Edward Norton never fails to please, and Danny DeVito is actually underrated as a director. And Robin Williams was his usual self (which is both very bad and kind of good at the same time).

I didn't see S1m0ne because ever since Devil's Advocate, Pacino has freaked me out too much, and the previews made it look like a terrible film -- the usual thing when non-techie Hollywood recyclers try to grok an SF-ish subject.

What in particular did you find wretched about it, and what was it that made you want to see it in spite of the awful vibe coming from the trailers?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Ah, you have to understand that Kibo and I are gluttons for punishment, and frequently have Bad Movie Nights. Some movies are funny-bad and some turn out to be just bad-bad. "S1m0ne" looked like a good target for mockery, and it turned out to be so. The main problem with it was that it had a remarkably pure Idiot Plot: for the story to work, everyone in the entire world had to be really stupid. And the depictions of computers were so ridiculous, they were reminiscent of what appeared in movies from before most people had actually seen a computer.