By The Joker. Studio note number 63: “The protagonist isn’t likeable enough.”
My response: “Likeability? That didn’t stop the studio from hiring you.”
Welcome to The Tyranny of Likeability.
You’ve just read a very common studio note that suggests the basic problem with today’s compulsive over-tinkering on comedies. Sometimes characters aren’t supposed to be likeable. Sometimes that’s why they’re funny.
Take Dinner for Schmucks. Based on the vastly superior French film, Le Diner de Cons (“The Dinner Game”) – written and directed by Francis Veber – Dinner for Schmucks is about a group of mean-spirited executives who invite idiots over for dinner in order to make fun of them.
In other words, the film is about a group of actual schmucks.
"Please like me."
Surprise, surprise, after the French film was remade by the studio, test audiences found the executives to be “too unlikeable.” The studio panicked, the film was recut, and voilà, the characters were suddenly redeemable.
Too bad the movie wasn’t funny anymore.
Part of the problem here is relying on test audiences and focus groups. A studio questionnaire will literally ask, “What was your least favorite scene?” Invariably, audiences choose scenes in which something bad happens. (I’m sure if they had NRG screenings in the 1970’s, the audience’s least favorite scene in Rocky would have been: “when Rocky loses the fight.”) The studio interprets this as a scene that needs to be fixed instead of a scene that merely evokes negative emotions (perhaps masterfully). And since the studio is afraid of films testing badly, they force absurd changes on the story.
Because as I mentioned previously, fear is what rules Hollywood. And when people are afraid, they want to be liked. Call it The Tyranny Of Likeability.
By Jason Apuzzo. Does the poster on your left grab your attention? It certainly caught mine, although perhaps that had to do with the fact that there was an approximately 100 foot high version of it draped over a building I drove by recently here in LA. I have a great interest in firearms, you understand, and seeing an automatic rifle that large immediately caught my attention.
I’m being facetious, of course – at least with respect to the relative appeal of firearms. Nikita, for those of you who may not have heard,is the CW’s reboot of a TV show – La Femme Nikita – that was actually once run by an acquaintance of mine, 24 producer Joel Surnow. And Joel’s show, in turn, was based on the 1990 Luc Besson film of the same name, about a young criminal babe recruited to work for French intelligence – and to otherwise fire guns while wearing 4-inch heels.
There was a so-so American remake of Besson’s film that followed in 1993, called Point of No Return, starring Bridget Fonda. Then came Joel’s gritty, noirish and very successful show in the late 90s – until that show ran its course, roughly around the time he was developing 24.
And whereas the specific plotlines of these various Nikitas have changed, one element has remained constant: a sexy young misfit woman, who must be able to fire semi-automatic weaponry while wearing cocktail dresses, is recruited by mysterious intelligence forces to fight … somebody.
Perhaps you already see where I’m going with this.
In Joel’s version of La Femme Nikita, sexy young Nikita (played by Peta Wilson) is recruited by a shadowy government organization to fight terrorism. [Bear in mind that this anti-terrorist plotline was developed prior to 9/11 – as was 24‘s original plotline, incidentally.] Some of La Femme Nikita’s basic plotline and vibe eventually got rolled into 24 – with fantastic results, of course.
Wrong! In the new Nikita series, we’re the villains. Or at least, the C.I.A. and American intelligence services are the villains (see here and here or the video below). Angry, pinch-faced W.A.S.P. bureaucrats in cheap suits are the villains. [And I’ll bet they have bad aftershave, too!]
This irritates me. I would like to be able to watch this show, for reasons I presumably don’t need to explain (at least to the male readers of this website). Doing a series like this should be so easy – a breeze, actually.
Peta Wilson, from the original series.
You find some good looking gal, and have her hunt down, say, a snarling member of the A.Q. Khan smuggling network who’s trying to get nuclear materials into Miami … while he enjoys a few martinis at the Skybar. Maybe he’s a Russian mobster with a weakness for Incan quinoa and Fantasy Football.
Our delectable heroine pulls up to the club in a Lamborghini Murcielago (CUT TO: camera capturing her shapely leg as the doorman helps her out of the car); after some perfunctory banter, and few snappy and/or inane quips (“Next time, make sure my salmon is served cold!”) she pulls a Glock out of her garter and has a shootout with the Russian and his gang, and escapes from a fireball or two – just in time to make it back home to her charmingly oblivious boyfriend in the suburbs, who just got back from a sale at Ikea.
I mean, the story writes itself.
Instead, the CW has decided to make us the villains. What a drag. These kinds of shows are being made all the time (e.g., Alias, Dark Angel, Painkiller Jane), and there are many different ways to go with the material. CW is making the most idiotic decision imaginable by making our own intelligence services into the bad guys.
Why idiotic? Because your garden variety Hollywood liberal – one thinks here of, say, Jeffrey Wells – isn’t going to watch this series anyway just because there’s a snarky, leftie-conspiratorial plotline. They’ll consider this show too déclassé to begin with … while potential viewers like me get alienated. And again, why? What’s the purpose? Because the producers want to make some asinine point about U.S. foreign policy?
Is that really why they think we watch this stuff?
By Patricia Ducey. Time in Cairo is slow. Very slow. Glances are exchanged. Background concertos are heard. Sparks, however, are not ignited, ever, between Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), an American magazine editor and Tareq (Alexander Siddig of Syriana), her supposed Romeo in Cairo Time.
This is not Shakespeare, or even English Patient (a great weepy if ever there was one). This is one nuanced love affair.
Juliette and Tareq represent archetypes of the East and West, yet they are actually more alike than different: both inhabit internationalist circles – Tareq just recently retired from the U.N., where he came to know Juliet’s husband (a UN operative in Gaza), and Juliet herself a feminist women’s magazine editor. Not much of a culture clash here. At a few points in the film Tareq lightly (and rightly) scolds Juliet for her easy outrage over a few social problems in Egypt. This hints at further story is to come, perhaps a real discussion of custom and culture, but nothing develops. (The Last King of Scotland, by contrast, brilliantly portrayed the deadly consequences of feckless liberalism in its main character.)
Juliette arrives in Cairo to await her husband’s arrival from Gaza so they can enjoy a long dreamed of vacation together. He is delayed, though, by trouble in the refugee camp he manages – so he asks his old friend Tareq to see after his wife until he can join her. Juliette seems anxious, tentative and tongue-tied from the start – odd behavior for a successful magazine editor. We wonder why – middle age crisis, bad marriage, illness? – but we never find out. She loves her husband, children, and her job. Tareq tries to draw her out but she rebuffs him. Later, though, she mystifyingly shows up at his men-only coffeehouse to visit him – not once but twice.
This fog of ambiguity never clears, and slows the movie down to a crawl. Juliette wanders the streets alone, inexplicably tossing aside her husband’s warnings about women traveling alone. Naïve, self-destructive? One can only ponder. This behavior does reveal the only people who seem to know who they are, sadly: the bands of leering men on the Cairo streets who consider her, a Western woman alone on the street, as something south of “available.”
Juliette finally takes action after her husband is delayed again and again. She hops a bus to the border and to Gaza to find him, but the Egyptian police stop the bus and send her back to the hotel; they realize the situation in Gaza is dangerous. As Juliette follows the police, her seatmate – a young Egyptian woman – stuffs an envelope into Juliette’s hands and implores her to deliver it to her lover back in Cairo. Again, hints at a story: tension, mixed up in politics, danger – but this too goes nowhere. She gives the letter to the young woman’s lover.
Non-doomed lovers.
The narrative of any melodrama demands some rupture of the moral code. English Patient’s doomed love story was played out on the canvas of a World War, when the old world order was collapsing in England and the Middle East. The lovers in English Patient violated every norm of class, race, gender and sexual orientation and died in agony for their transgressions. Patricia Clarkson’s protagonist, on the other hand, is a modern Western woman and thus is left with no moral code to rupture whatsoever. What will she lose if she betrays her husband, what would happen if she did betray him with Tareq? Not much. Tareq is an Egyptian Muslim who is kind of secular, kind of not. We are not quite sure what his moral code is either, or if he has one. Perhaps this is why the greatest doomed love stories take place at least pre-1950.
Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda has underwritten both the characters and the story. The characters’ physicality – walking, talking, eye gazing, walking, talking – as well as their sparse dialogue reveal little. Clarkson and Siddig do their best but have little to work with.
My inner writer asks, what do these characters want? Apparently not each other. Or at least not very much. Perhaps Juliette will remain faithful to her husband, perhaps not, but it is of no real import to a woman in the grips of such anomie. Tareq was content pre-Juliette and is content post-Juliette. I am not asking for these characters to outrun a fireball or gun down CIA assassins – I just want to know why their lives and loves matter.
By Jennifer Baldwin. It’s August and that means Stars. Movie Stars. August is the month when TCM airs its annual “Summer Under the Stars” festival — 31 days of movie stars — with each day devoted to the films of a different star. This year’s schedule includes days devoted to Basil Rathbone, Norma Shearer, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Olivia De Havilland, Clint Eastwood, John Gilbert, Warren Beatty, Thelma Todd, and many more. Thanks to “Summer Under the Stars,” August has become a month that classic movie fans can’t help but love.
But why do we love it? First of all, we love the posters. Seriously, TCM does a phenomenal job with their advertising when it comes to the “Summer Under the Stars.” Last year’s promotional art posters were so good, in fact, that I wish TCM had sold them as full-sized glossy posters that I could put on my wall. This year, graphic artist Michael Schwab has designed eye-popping silhouettes for each of the thirty-one stars.
Why else do we love the “Summer Under the Stars”? Well, there’s the chance to see films rarely shown on TCM. When you’ve got twenty-four hours devoted to say, the films of John Gilbert, there’s bound to be a lot of movies that don’t normally make the TCM rotation. This year’s rarities include films starring Gilbert, Thelma Todd, and Woody Strode. Also, days devoted to Gene Tierney, Julie Christie, Ann Sheridan, Bob Hope, Kathryn Grayson, Lee Remick, and Robert Ryan offer the opportunity to dig a little deeper into the filmographies of stars who don’t get as much play as some of the perennial heavy hitters like Flynn, Bergman, and Hepburn.
But beyond the promotional art, and the rare films, the biggest reason we love the “Summer Under the Stars” is because we love the stars themselves. Sure, TCM shows a Katharine Hepburn movie at least once a week (and that’s on a slow week), but there’s something about watching an entire day’s worth of her films (or Errol Flynn’s, or Paul Newman’s, or Ingrid Bergman’s) that’s just… special. A big part of loving old movies means loving old movie stars.
That’s why I’m distressed to see a few articles on the web recently claim we don’t need movie stars anymore (and even more radically, that we never really needed them in the first place). Sure, the annual “Are Movie Stars Dead?” article is as predictable as the old “Did Jaws and Star Wars Kill the Movies” article. But this new trend – to not just lament the death of movie stars but to say “good riddance” as well – is a bit disturbing. Who are these people who think that movies don’t need movie stars?
It’s an idea that’s utterly foreign to me. I got into old movies because of the movie stars. I wouldn’t have become the crazy, obsessive classic movie fanatic that I am today if it hadn’t been for the movie stars I came to love. I was first introduced to old movies by my mom: folding laundry with her on the couch, a rainy Saturday afternoon, an old Hitchcock film or 1940s romance on the TV. I enjoyed these old movies well enough, but they didn’t mean all that much to me. I hadn’t fallen in love with them yet. Continue reading Who Needs Movie Stars? I Do!
By Jason Apuzzo. • Patricia Neal has passed away, at age 84. What a great star she was. I actually just saw her recently on the big screen at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, where they were showing The Day the Earth Stood Still. Patricia Neal appeared in so many of my favorite films, including In Harm’s Way, The Fountainhead, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, A Face in the Crowd, Operation Pacific and on and on … and of course, everybody remembers her (rightly) for Hud. Neal had the same kind of urbane, sexy, flinty-yet-romantic persona that Betty Bacall had in her prime, and she will be deeply missed.
We don’t have women nowadays on film, so much as overgrown girls. Neal and Bacall are arguably the last of their kind.
The live action TV show is kind of on hold because we have scripts, but we don’t know how to do them. They literally are Star Wars, only we’re going to have to try to do them at a tenth the cost. And it’s a huge challenge, a lot bigger than what we thought it was gonna be.
On the one hand this is disappointing, because this is a series that a lot of us have been looking forward to. On the other hand, I’m glad that they’re being ambitious with the storyline. Knowing the way the folks at Lucasfilm are, they will probably be developing an innovative new palette of technologies in order to make this series affordable. We’ll be watching this story as it develops in months to come.
I can hardly believe that in my recent writings about the new wave of alien invasion films/TV shows, I actually forgot to mention V! One of the reasons this is such a glaring omission is that V (both in the original and the new miniseries) manages to harness the alien invasion theme to political commentary about America’s potential drift toward authoritarianism. I’ve actually read Kenneth Johnson’s 2008 V novel, which could not be more obvious in its criticism of current trends in liberal governance. (The novel even features a hilarious, narcissistic San Francisco mayor based quite blatantly on Gavin Newsom … who has an affair with a Beyoncé look-alike.) I haven’t seen much of the new TV series – which was thought by many to offer a sub rosa critique of the Obama Administration – but the series seems to depart rather dramatically from the novel in its plotline, and appears to be more along the lines of a straight-forward reboot of the original TV show.
In any case, these trends in sci-fi continue, and we’ll be keeping an eye on them here at LFM … especially when the new season of V revs up later this year. Btw, if more aliens looked like Laura Vandervoort, would we really mind being devoured by them?
• DAILY PSYCHO REPORT: The new Maggie Thatcher biopic with Meryl Streep is apparently going to be a full-on, unvarnished hit job on The Iron Lady, exploiting even her recent dementia … and I’m totally disgusted with Streep and her participation in what appears to be an ugly, nakedly propagandistic project. I can only assume Streep has no conscience whatsoever, and like so many recent celebrities is simply surrendering her career – now that it’s on the down side – to tendentious partisan hackery.
By Joe Bendel. Probably no division of the Academy Awards has more byzantine rules than the documentary wing. Their mandated seven day theatrical runs in both New York and Los Angeles can be difficult hurdles for nonfiction filmmakers to clear. However, every selection of the 2010 DocuWeeks will be officially Oscar eligible once they finish their week long runs at the ArcLight and IFC Film Centers. As is seemingly the case with every documentary series, this year’s DocuWeeks is a mixed bag, but two films in particular offer intriguingly intimate glimpses into lives of ordinary individuals living a world away from the arthouse cinema scene.
Even though he was badly hung-over, he knew there was a national crisis. Though the bleary-eyed Russian did not know at the time the hard-line Communist coup had deposed Mikhail Gorbachev, he saw that Swan Lake was the only program on television. For some reason, the Soviets always broadcasted the Tchaikovsky ballet during periods of internal turmoil. It is telling details like this that connect the personal to the grandly historical in Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, which screened earlier this year at New Directors/New Films.
A Russophile in high school, Hessman was working for LENFILM, the Soviet film agency based in what was then Leningrad, at the time of the infamous coup. Through her time working and studying in Russia, Hessman developed a keen appreciation for the stoic nobility of average Russian citizens, which is clearly reflected in Perestroika. Using five former classmates as representative everymen, Hessman subjectively presents the last forty-some years of Russian and Soviet history through their reminiscences and home movies.
Yes, there is a certain nostalgia for their childhood years lived under the yoke of Soviet tyranny. However, they are really wistful for their lost innocence rather than the supposed virtues of the Brezhnev era. As becomes clear in their interviews, as the Perestroika generation came of age, it also became quickly disillusioned.
Still, not all of the film’s lead voices are doing badly. An entrepreneur with a small chain of high-end men’s clothing stores, Andrei has done quite well for himself. He is also the most vocal critic of the current Putin regime. While none of the five have led exceptional lives, Hessman had the good fortune to find participants who had been somewhat in the vicinity of great events. Indeed, the experiences of Perestroika’s subjects defy easy classification, at various times lending credence to wide array of political interpretations (though it is hard to find much in the film to justify any faith in Putin’s puppet government).
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Tibet is also changing drastically, which is exactly what China wants. For instance, it has become increasingly difficult for Tibetans not fluent in Chinese to conduct business transactions. Such are the challenges facing a young nomadic family in Tibet’s eastern Kham region as presented in Summer Pastures, an intimate new documentary from Lynn True and Nelson Walker (with co-director Tsering Perlo), also currently screening as part of DocuWeeks LA.
In many ways, Locho and Yama are much like any other parents you would find anywhere else on Earth. Their greatest hope is for their daughter to have greater opportunities in her life than have been available for them. However, their daily chores are far removed from those western audiences will be familiar with, including the daily spreading and drying of manure for fuel that starts Yama’s daily routine. It is a hardscrabble life, but it is what they have always known.
Unfortunately, it is not clear whether the nomads’ way of life will be sustainable much longer. Inflation constantly drives up the price of their supplies, while they seem to have less to show for their labors. Adding further uncertainty, Yama suffers from a persistent heart ailment, yet she keeps working like an ox – in contrast to Locho, who often seems like an overgrown kid herding their livestock.
Even in their remote corner of Tibet, Locho and Yama feel the impact of great macro forces. However, True and Walker focus their sites on their deeply personal family drama, (somewhat timidly avoiding the occupying Chinese elephant in the room). Yet by conveying such a strong sense of the nomadic couple’s personalities and relationship dynamics, Pasture will have most viewers rooting for this family as the film unfolds.
Pasture forgoes filmmaker commentary, instead capturing the nomads’ lives unfiltered, in a style not incompatible with that of Digital Generation Chinese independent filmmakers. Though it requires some patience, it is certainly rewarding to meet Yama and Locho, whose spirit and resiliency the filmmakers capture quite vividly. Both Pasture and Perestroika are difficult films to pigeon hole, but they have more merit than most docs released this year. They are currently screening in Los Angeles, as DocuWeeks continues at the ArcLight.
By The Joker. Studio note number 63: “The protagonist isn’t likeable enough.”
