Posts Tagged ‘Harrison Ford’

Cowboys & Aliens

July 28, 2011

Once in a while, even the most tried and true narrative formula needs repackaging for retail-friendliness. Or so it must seem at least to those bottom-line minders who cut checks to Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford.

So let’s do this: a thing and another thing…but not the other thing you expect! And the thing is cool, and the other thing is differently cool, so as to convey a vibe of maybe just being plum crazy enough to work. This being a delicate art, it’ll involve some trial and error. Like so.

Spaghetti and meatballs: Classic.

Spaghetti and glass shards: No thank you!

Spaghetti and Gummi Bears: Keep talking….

And before we know it we’re in the Old West, but with invading extraterrestrials. “Cowboys & Aliens” may sound conceptually obvious, but in fact it is obvious in every other way, too. For instance, Craig and Ford don’t play the aliens. And if this is not exactly what you expect from director Jon Favreau and an original movie-ready property by comic book industrialist Scott Mitchell Rosenberg, it must be because you’re not sure who those guys are anyway. No matter.

The stars look great, but unfortunately that’s no matter either. If anything could redeem this, it would be the sense of a kid gathering all his random toys together, non sequiturs be damned, into one sincerely urgent, internally logical superstory. What “Cowboys & Aliens” lacks, aside from the better execution we’ve already seen more than once in Pixar’s “Toy Story” franchise (not to mention Ford’s own frolic with Gene Wilder in “The Frisco Kid” some 30-odd years ago), is an attitude of abandon.

All the cheerfully winking genre enthusiasm Favreau brought to such fun romps as “Elf” and the first “Iron Man” is not readily apparent here. “Cowboys & Aliens” feels like a perfunctory, mercantile exercise — sagging misshapenly under the weight of its way too many producer and writer credits, which include some big shots whose demands may well have simply worn Favreau down.

Neither homage nor satire, quite, it’s more like a brainstormed shorthand checklist of plot points and payoffs. The characters got sketched in at some juncture, and since then everyone seems to have just decided to leave them sketchy, letting stereotype pose as archetype. There’s the loner hero (Craig) with no past, and no fear. The crusty rival-cum-ally (Ford) with a heart of gold. The irksome whelp (Paul Dano) on whom the hero puts a beating, to comic effect. There’s the hero surrounded: by thugs, by Apache, by aliens, and the surprise cavalry-arrival rescue(s) just when all seems lost. There’s the creature all up in your business, with body parts within its body parts. The uncertain but timely weapons proficiency. The boy and his dog. The manly speech. The humbling. The vision quest. The warrior honor bullshit. The woman (Abigail Spencer) who gets to make out with Daniel Craig. The other woman (Olivia Wilde) who gets to make out with Daniel Craig. There’s the blah blah and uh huh and whatever.

Some scenes begin promisingly but most just tend to stall out. We’re invited to do the dramatic (or occasionally comedic) legwork ourselves, but not at all required to, so it’s doubly insulting. If you’re sick of cowboy cliches, Favreau seems to be saying, just wait for the space-invader cliches. If you’re sick of those, it’ll be over soon.

Sam Rockwell brings some less contrived humanity to his tagalong supporting part as a docile shopkeeper, and the movie seems happy to have him, so that’s nice. But of course it’s a movie whose principal achievement probably is the stoic array of straight faces it has managed to gather under its own silly circumstances. Just about everyone who appears here does seem wholly convinced that he or she populates and Old West being invaded by extraterrestrials. There is some squinting, what with the scorching southwestern sun and the interstellar trespassers’ probing beams, but winking at the audience? Next to none.

That leaves us and the bottom-line minders standing glumly in a pile of packaging. “Cowboys & Aliens” really is just a hooky premise in search of a paycheck. Don’t let it abduct yours.

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Brüno

July 7, 2009

bruno

So there he was, getting repeatedly whipped by the dominatrix at that redneck swingers’ party, which he attended more or less on the advice of the gay-converter priest, and suddenly I could feel the whole weight of the cultural moment, as if this were some perverse sort of movie-comedy apotheosis.

Like that dominatrix’s breasts, the film is unmistakably unreal but ominously inflated. It’s unsettling to think that the inflation itself has become our new reality baseline. And it’s hard to know or even care anymore about what parts have been staged and who’s in on it and how much is true. But it’s not hard — and therefore rather unpleasantly satisfying — to see that when he’s getting whipped, that much at least is for real.

And he’s so willing to take a beating, it makes you wonder if he actually wants to get hurt. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Everybody has a kink. But you have to own it. It seems like the chief concern of Brüno — in which Sacha Baron Cohen’s faux-flaming, fame-craving Austrian fashion correspondent from Da Ali G Show comes to America and to feature length — is to push, hard, until somebody pushes back. Lewd innuendo intended.

When he’s not getting whipped, he’s hunching naked in the night and nudging at the tent flap of a rifle-toting hunter; or prancing in short shorts around some Middle Eastern city where orthodox Jews will chase him through the streets; or making out with his doting personal assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten) in a cage surrounded by a drunken, gay-hating mob. Really asking for it, in other words. It’s like Punk’d multiplied by Jackass, although hell if I know what that equals.

Then another thought occurs: If Woody Allen really wants to do misanthropy, maybe Sacha Baron Cohen, not Larry David, is the leading man he needs. Director Larry Charles evidently wants to do misanthropy; before Brüno, Charles’ last movie, Religulous, also used a gay-converter priest (among other easy targets) for sport, and before that he made Cohen’s Borat. Charles has specialized in situational comedy built not from jokes but from incendiary stunts, predicated on the merciless exposure of human shortcomings in an age of obliterated privacy, pandemic vanity, and desiccated dignity. For this, Cohen seems like the perfect muse. And I just thought it worth mentioning here that watching him get whipped somehow also made me think of Woody Allen.

Like Borat before him, Brüno is a satirizing buffoon. He doesn’t merely push boundaries; he gallops headlong across them. Or sashays. Or pedals his dildo-adorned exercise bike. He is critiquing the ritualization of preposterous juvenile shenanigans by ritualizing preposterous juvenile shenanigans. He’s not just giving small-minded homophobes the finger; he’s giving them the dancing, talking penis. And some gay people surely will consider him the embodiment of homophobia.

Brüno’s goal is to become famous. He tries to get an agent and some acting jobs. He attempts a few celebrity interviews. “These are Mexican Chair People,” he explains to Paula Abdul, inviting her to have a seat on a crouching man’s back. “Demi Moore has two of them in her house.” On another occasion, Harrison Ford tells him to fuck off. Then Brüno finds a pair of impossibly ditzy publicists, who suggest he take up a cause. “Darfur is the big one now,” he says. “What’s Dar Five?” They don’t get it. It’s genius, hilarious, awful.

One focus-group responder informs Brüno that his show is worse than cancer. Another suggests that what he needs to do is make a sex tape. So he somehow corners Ron Paul in a hotel room and tries to seduce him. Yes, that Ron Paul. Is there another for whom this would be more outrageous, more embarrassing? Anyway, it does not go well.

And we watch and laugh and cringe and judge. Satire should aim precisely and scour accordingly, but Brüno often feels unfocused and unclean. It’s like the comedy equivalent of an enhanced interrogation technique. Sure, it’ll rip the lid off a seething pit of prejudice and narcissism and stupidity, but what if it also causes those things, or really is made of them? There are scenes in which the humor goes so low as to have negative value. Which scenes these are will vary according to audience threshold.

This cultural moment feels like stinging tedium, like being whipped. But at least some people can get off on it.

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Crossing Over

March 23, 2009

crossingover

No, Crossing Over is not about that psychic dude who pretends to field messages from your dead relatives (although it is similarly exploitative and disingenuous). Nor is it about making headway with a heretofore unfamiliar demographic (although it does crassly stock up on token ethnic underdogs and reduce them all to the lowest common denominator). In fact, this cheap, clenched melodrama from writer-director Wayne Kramer is a fractured saga of immigration and naturalization, in the same discursive way that Traffic was a saga of drugs and Crash and Babel were sagas of pretty much the same basic stuff as this, but from different perspectives. Look at all the perspectives! The ensemble here includes Harrison Ford, Ray Liotta, Cliff Curtis and Ashley Judd, each deserving better. It just goes to show how many ways there are to stir melting pot. And the box-office cash register till.

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Blade Runner: The Final Cut

March 7, 2008

Director Ridley Scott is a man’s man. He has cigars for fingers. He wrestles tigers. Or maybe he wrestles Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe. Or Washington, Crowe and tigers. Scott’s movies lock and load and mess you up and make much use of heavy lens filters. Last year, he did American Gangster, which might as well have just been called Balls. Now, he’s adapting Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian, which makes No Country for Old Men look like Little Women. Hell, Scott’s so macho, he once made Demi Moore shave her head and shout “Suck my dick!” in a close-up.

But long before the 1997 catast-erpiece G.I. Jane, Scott actually made more interesting, less ludicrous films. His most enduringly popular, and possibly least mantastic, is 1982’s Blade Runner, a shadowy, rainy, neo-noir futurist melodrama based on fiction by Philip K. Dick, with Harrison Ford in the year 2019 contemplating his feelings and chasing androids in silly costumes.

“Android” isn’t precisely correct. They’re “replicants,” if you please—manufactured, highly humanlike organisms. So humanlike that it doesn’t always occur to them that they’re not human. They were created for offshore slave labor, among other things, the shore being Earth itself. Under penalty of death (“retirement,” as they say in the business), replicants aren’t allowed back on the planet, but a few renegades have broken that rule in order to confront their corporate-creepy-genius creator (Joe Turkel) and demand a lifespan longer than the standard four years. (You’re thinking: If they only last four years anyway, why go to all the trouble of taking them out by force? Bear in mind what four-year stints can yield. Remember, this story takes places not long after two consecutive Bush administrations. Nerves have frayed. Patience, not to mention civil society, has expired.)

That’s where Ford comes in, as Deckard, a replicant bounty hunter. Which is to say, a bounty hunter of replicants. Or, wait, maybe a bounty hunter who is a replicant. Eh? Eh? OK, you knew all this. Or never really cared. Either way, by now, the real dramatic question is: Why do people keep coming back to this movie?

There are a few reasons.

First, for all its armor of brutalizing urban dystopia (and, boy, is there a lot of that—you could fund a war on terror with the fog- and rain-machine budgets alone), Blade Runner has a gooey center. His job may be tough, but in private moments, Deckard tends to finger his piano and daydream of unicorns. Unicorns, for chrissakes. Does he also have a collection of Rainbow Brite stickers stashed away somewhere in a super-futuristic Trapper Keeper? Meanwhile, Sean Young, a replicant possibly in real life as well as in the movie, diddles Deckard’s piano, too, and then lets her hair down to a swell of lush, only-in-the-’80s synth pads and ersatz sax by Vangelis. Message: In a world so grim, even artificial feminine wiles will do—it might be all that can make this unicornless life worth living. And people still think Scott’s cringe-inducing Thelma & Louise was feminist?

Plus, Deckard has professional supervision from a dandified origami hobbyist (played by Edward James Olmos, now a pro at android-intensive drama in Battlestar Galactica), and a tender rapport with his chief replicant opponent, Roy (played by fellow softhearted tough guy Rutger Hauer). “All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain,” Roy laments of his too-short life, to which Deckard responds by shedding a tear. Possibly. It’s hard to tell, because, as usual, it’s raining. See, that was Roy’s point.

Yes, Blade Runner is, for Ridley Scott at least, a curiously delicate picture. Sensitive, even. Save for a few oil-tower fireballs, there’s nary an explosion in sight. And only a few bullet wounds. And only two squished eyeballs.

Another reason moviegoers can’t stay away from it, though, is that Scott keeps releasing different versions of the damn thing. And different versions of the versions. So indecisive. How manly is that? By now, you can get the two-disc DVD set of Blade Runner: The Final Cut, or the four-disc one, or the five, which comes in a shiny suitcase announcing your official resignation of a social life. Or—OK, and—you can see it properly, on a big screen, for a limited time.

After which, before you know it, like tears in rain, it’ll be gone again—at least until the release five years hence of Blade Runner: The Yeah, Sorry About Implying That Last One Would Be Final, 30th Anniversary Cut. Of course, who knows if it’ll be as good then. Word is Scott’s cutting that one with his own rusty straight razor.

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