WARNING: May contain traces of SPOILERS...
There's a famous story, one of the most famous film stories ever, about the time George Lucas, still recovering from a shoot so arduous he didn't direct another movie for 20 years, invited a bunch of his favourite movie friends over for an early screening of Star Wars at his home in San Anselmo. Whether the story's true or not is not really that important in the scheme of things. Truths and untruths about the gestation of Star Wars have long since merged into one, overriding any sense of proportion about what is, in the cold light of day, an entirely pleasant piece of sci-fi fluff but little more. Anyway, to be fair, this really was a long, long time ago. Back in March 1977, in fact, before midichlorians, before Jar Jar Binks, before Boss Nass and the soggy swamp monsters of Naboo and all the other junk that came to represent the worst of the Lucasfilm pomp and excess derided by fanboys everywhere.
The screening was nothing short of a disaster. The editing was rough, the sound effects shoddy and the performances functional to say the least. Perhaps most crushing of all, there was just no sense of the scale of the thing. At this point in post-production, the ultimately groundbreaking visual effects by a fledgling Industrial Light & Magic were still nowhere near completion, so in addition to flogging a hokey B-movie narrative and showcasing some of the most chin-grindingly mundane dialogue ever committed to celluloid, the movie just looked cheap and incomplete, its visual spectacle a twinkle in the eye of its troubled creator. Lucas even had to resort to splicing B-roll footage of WWII dogfights into key action sequences in an attempt to replicate the unfinished shots and convey on-screen the very real, very intimate human drama of intergalactic warfare in a galaxy far, far away.
None of this went down particularly well with the cine-literate audience gathered in San Anselmo. The screening was so calamitous that George Lucas's wife Marcia allegedly burst into tears, declaring the entire project a write-off. "It's the At Long Last Love of science-fiction, it's awful," she said. Let's be honest, when your own wife hates your movie, you might as well just take taking a running jump off the end of the Hollywood sign and hope for a swift and merciful death at the hands of Pauline Kael. Brian De Palma famously didn't get it at all (but then again, Brian De Palma directed The Black Dahlia & Femme Fatale, so perhaps his scepticism shouldn't be taken too seriously.)
There was, however, one lone dissenting voice in the crowd and that belonged to Steven Spielberg, himself deep into post on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which even at the time was seen as the more serious, thoughtful rival to Lucas's indulgent space western. Spielberg fell in love with the movie straight away. It's no secret that Spielberg admired Lucas's simple, direct style of film-making, albeit begrudgingly. He's since gone on record as saying, "I was most jealous of George," he says, "because I thought and still do to this day, I just thought American Graffiti was the best American film I'd seen." There and then, he predicted that Star Wars would make over $100 million, and later that year he was proven right when Star Wars went on to join Spielberg's own monster hit Jaws as one of the biggest box-office bonanzas of all time.
The point is that when it comes to telling the difference between a hit and a flop, no one knows anything. Unless they're Steven Spielberg. For years now, Spielberg has been Hollywood's harbinger of box-office success. The guy simply knows what audiences want to see. Not niche, discerning, audiences, the kind of people who would rather eat a rat's ass than watch the latest Michael Bay. But mainstream, Saturday-night audiences, folk who only see a handful of movies every year at the multiplex and almost always with a massive bucket of popcorn resting on their lap.
Just ask Oren Peli, the writer/director of last year's breakout horror hit Paranormal Activity. According to reports, a screener of the movie made its way to Spielberg while Paramount were negotiating terms with Peli, specifically whether the movie should be remade on a bigger budget or put on general release in its existing cheap and cheerful form. Allegedly, shortly after watching the film, Spielberg noticed that the door to an empty bedroom had inexplicably locked, convincing him that the movie itself was haunted. Just to be sure, the screener DVD was returned to the studio in a large bin bag. Because we all know plastic bin bags are anathema to the supernatural, right?
Sure, Spielberg's reaction was nothing compared to Billy Graham's accusation that real life demons were living inside the reels of The Exorcist back in 1974. Even so, his close encounter not only convinced Paramount to take the movie to theatres without being reshot from scratch, it allowed him to pitch an entirely different, more cinematic ending to Peli for inclusion in the final edit. Several closing scenes were shot but after pretty extensive testing, it's Spielberg's ending that ultimately wowed cinema audiences over the world on the film's eventual release at the back-end of 2009. Why? Because it was better.
There are two "original" endings to Paranormal Activity apparently in existence. In the first, which downplays the "ghost story" aspects and pitches the film as a "real-life" slasher tale, a deranged Kate kills her husband Micah following an off-camera fight in the living room of the house and then gets shot when the police storm the house in the closing moments. The second ending shows Kate actually slashing her own throat on-screen after killing Micah, thus injecting some genuine gore into something that had, up to that point, been more about suspense than blood and guts. It's Spielberg's finale, however, in which there's no doubt whatsoever about Kate's possession, that delivers on the paranormal expectations of the title and allows the film to create its own new horror mythology i.e launch a franchise. And it worked. To the tune of $178 million worldwide. That's a lot of money when the initial cut of the film cost just $15 thousand.
Peli's next effort will be another low-budget "found footage" movie, this time telling the story of three teenagers who undertake their own investigation of Area 51...Maybe he heard that Spielberg knows a few things about alien movies...
(Incidentally, if want a completely different take on The Beard i.e. not the usual puffery you'll read in the mainstream film press, go and purchase the sensational Julia Phillips autobiography/bitchfest You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again with immediate haste. Phillips produced some of the biggest movies ever, including The Sting, Taxi Driver and Spielberg's own Close Encounters of the Third Kind and her memoir is a massively entertaining, no-holds-barred portrait of the coke-stained world of 70s Hollywood. Phillips died of cancer in 2002 but not before slinging an admirable amount bile and of ire in the general direction of the industry that made her. She was amazing, if a little cuckoo. I think she may have even been a Republican, which everyone held against her.)
When it was first announced that Peter Jackson, the Oscar-winning director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, former splatter master and all-round King of Geeks, was lined up to direct an adaptation of Alice Sebold's much-loved bestseller The Lovely Bones, there was a lot of speculation about whether the man who made a self-indulgent mega-budget remake of King Kong was exactly the right person to bring the story of murdered teenager Susie Salmon to the big screen.
It was never meant to be that way. Initially touted by producers as a small, low-budget production (estimated budget: $15million) with Ratcatcher's Lynne Ramsay attached to direct, the rights were lost when backers Film4 folded in 2002. Pretty gutting for all concerned - Film4 first acquired The Lovely Bones in 2000 when it was still an unfinished manuscript. No one had a clue the book would eventually turn into a minor literary phenomenon. Inevitably, a year later the project landed on the desk of Steven Spielberg (movie fact: 87% of all films in Hollywood end up on the desk of Steven Spielberg.) The Jaws director, who'd already made his own ghost movie with 1987's romantic drama Always, passed on the idea, allowing Peter Jackson and his own Wingnut Productions to acquire the rights and eventually the develop the script. Shooting finally commenced in 2007, although after years in development hell the budget had escalated to $65million, effectively turning a small-scale production into a major studio picture.
In actual fact, Jackson already had form with this kind of material. To this day many still regard his low-key 1994 drama Heavenly Creatures (starring newcomer Kate Winslet) as his finest non-Hobbit related moment. In that film, based on a shocking true story, the increasingly deranged fantasies of two teenage girls eventually lead them to commit murder in 1950s New Zealand. Critically acclaimed around the world upon its release, Heavenly Creatures won the Grand Prize at the Venice Film Festival, earned Jackson a Best Original Screenplay nomination at the Academy Awards, and secured his transition from Brain Dead gore hound to bona fide serious film-maker. In other words, it was a goodie. Sadly, although thematically in similar territory as Jackson's earlier film, The Lovely Bones isn't quite in the same league and seems destined to take its place as a minor work in the Kiwi's filmography .
Saoirse Ronan, prodigal child actress du jour following her creepy turn in Atonement, plays Susie Salmon, a 14-year old teenager in 1970s Pennsylvania who is murdered by her next door neighbour (Stanley Tucci in full-on "sinister paedo" mode.) But as her physical body passes away, and her remains locked in a corner of her killer's basement, Susie's spirit continues to live on the "in-between", her own personal version of heaven, a fantastical landscape made up of giant bottled ships and neverending corn fields. It's from this discreet, supernatural distance that Susie observes her family not only deal with their loss, but piece together the mystery of her death.
The film is a weird hybrid of suspense-fuelled thriller and sentimental family melodrama with a whole bunch of other New Age crud about life after death thrown in for good measure. When it's in thriller mode, The Lovely Bones is almost ruthlessly efficient, Jackson clearly in his element. Take, for instance, the sequence in the final act when Suzie's sister plays detective and, convinced of her neighbour's guilt, breaks into his house and hunts for evidence. It's an expertly-staged set-piece of nail-biting tension. Jackson really knows how to do "impending doom" better than any other mainstream director today, which means that every creak, every shadow, every break in the soundtrack - it all matters. Genuine edge-of-the-seat stuff, oddly reminiscent of the build-up in the Mines of Moria sequence in The Fellowship of the Ring although obviously on a much smaller scale. And there's just about enough of this good stuff throughout the movie to warrant the price of admission. However, despite the effectiveness of individual scenes, it never truly resonates as a whole and that's disappointing. In his previous films, whether it be zombie horror or fantasy epic, Jackson never did things in halves. The Lovely Bones, on the hand, is split straight down the middle. In other words, when the film's depicting events in the real world then it's good, when it's concentrating on the afterlife, well, that's another thing entirely.
The problem lies with the way he pitches the "heaven" sequences. Strongly reminiscent of the awful Robin Williams weepy What Dreams May Come, Jackson goes crazy with the green screen, coming up with something that's part-Lewis Carroll, part-Salvador Dali but much less interesting. In truth, these moments are actually a little boring, and not even that spectacular. Indeed, some of the CG looks pretty ropey. It's as if Jackson's trying to take basic human emotions and visualise them on an epic, almost phantasmic canvas. And it simply doesn't work, mainly because the film doesn't need them. In a novel, you can get away with long, internalised descriptions but in a commercial, story-driven movie, the narrative has to keep pushing forward or else the audience will lose interest and the movie won't play. Susie's voiceover is effective and tells you everything you need to know about her own particular afterlife, which means the literal depiction of heaven, if indeed that's what it is, is an entirely unnecessary distraction. And besides, the film never makes it entirely clear what impact Susie's afterlife is having on the real world. Perhaps it would have been a braver move to ditch the heaven stuff entirely and, like the book, simply let Suzie tell her story in words. (Apparently, when the movie's US release date switched from March to December 2009, Jackson took the opportunity to shoot some additional footage in order to flesh out these scenes. Big mistake - they needed less, not more.)
In addition to occasional CG wobbles, the film's other technical specs are also slightly all over the place. After investing so much time and money in wonderful production and costume design, both of which brilliantly evoke the small-town American dream of the 1970s, the digital cinematography lets everything down by going in and out of focus, apparently randomly, or appearing very blurry in some ill-advised extreme close-ups. The overall effect is jarring and proves that Jackon's still finding his feet when it comes to the digital video revolution. Apparently controlling your very own visual effects empire is still no guarantee of visual panache. (Seriously, some of the shots look like Inland Empire.)
Despite all this, the cast are great. As the movie's central focus, Saoirse Ronan nicely captures the hope of a teenage girl moving into adulthood, her Susie carrying just the right amount of wisdom and naivety to convey the promise a life not quite lived. And don't blame Ronan if, when invited into an isolated bunker in the middle of an empty field by a suspicious man in his late-40s, Suzie seems a little easily seduced. That's Jackson's fault. The film needed to work harder to make her abduction more convincing.
Successfully moving on from the double-whammy of shit and misery that was The Happening and Max Payne, Mark Wahlberg finds his feet here as a man whose obsession with catching his daughter's killer ends up driving his family apart. He nicely underplays throughout and it's a slight return to form for an actor who was, prior to this, on the verge of alienating his audience. Susan Sarandon has little more than a cameo, in all honesty, but she makes the most of it, getting the movie's only real laughs as Susie's eccentric, alcoholic grandmother. And Rachel Weisz comes and goes, literally in fact, as the family's oft-absent mother.
The real star of the movie, however, is Stanley Tucci. Everything you've heard about his performance is true. As a lonely man consumed by sinister desires, he dominates every scene in a charismatic, evil turn that threatens to veer into panto villain territory but stays just about restrained enough to be convincing. It's telling that despite being touted as an early awards contender, the only Academy Award nomination The Lovely Bones actually received in the end was Best Supporting Actor for Stanley Tucci. And if it wasn't for Christopher Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, he'd win it, too. (Interestingly, Tucci's wife had tried to convince her husband not to take the role on the basis that it was too harrowing.)
But ultimately this is Peter Jackson's film and he has to carry the can. He's taken a lot of flak for softening Sebold's novel, and shying away from some of the more distasteful elements of the story (you won't find any suggestion of Susie's rape in the movie.) Jackson's defended his adaptation by claiming that film is a visual medium and you don't need to see a lot of that stuff directly in order to get a sense of it. He's right, of course, and the criticisms are, for the most part, unfair. It's shame he doesn't follow his own advice when it comes to the supernatural sequences. In that respect, The Lovely Bones is an ambitious and admirable failure.
There's a really old method of torture called scaphism, that essentially involves being left to rot in the beating sun while insects use your rectum as an egg sack and turn your innards into a bowel smoothie. That the word "scaphism" itself derives from the Greek for "scooped" or "hollowed out" should give you some measure of its savagery. Death is inevitable but never sudden. It's long and arduous and immeasurably painful, and for those poor, pitiless victims, quite simply the feeling of being eaten alive.
Having said that, at least they'll never have to watch The Happening, the latest thriller from one-man incredulity factory M. Night Shyamalan. Because if there's one movie in recent years that faithfully reproduces in celluloid the flesh-eating, diarrhea-inducing fun of scaphism, then this is it. In many ways, it's a triumph, in that it's a film called The Happening in which nothing actually happens. It's like calling your movie The Day The Earth Stood Still and then having the Earth carry on as usual when the spaceship lands, as if somehow the annihilation of the planet was entirely secondary to completing a sudoku, or knocking one out over the latest issue of Record Collector.
The basic premise of The Happening is that plants have had enough of your shit and they just aren't going to take it any more. They're so angry at humankind for screwing up the planet that they unleash some kind of deadly toxin or spore into the air which causes general havoc and makes bad actresses walk backwards and kill themselves. Mark Wahlberg plays the worst science teacher in the world, Elliot Moore, a man so inept he goes around making unscientific observations like "the event must have ended before we went out today" while pretending that his wife, played by Zooey Deschanel, could ever love anyone so insipid. We follow him and a bunch of social inebriates around an assortment of fields and country lanes and other locales of terror and death, all the while hoping that, like Bill Clinton at a frat party, they do not inhale. True, it's hard not to love any film that has, as its key action sequence, a scene in which the protagonist successfully out-runs the wind (the wind!) but even taking into account the usual suspension of disbelief that comes with genre twaddle, The Happening shows a disregard for logic that's borderline insane.
The movie's first big lie is a bit of a no-brainer, the idea that somehow plant life can consciously and collectively defend itself against the human race. To clarify, and I admit to you at this point that I'm not a botanist: plants cannot under any circumstances seek revenge against humankind. Even if they wanted to, and until there is definitive proof that plants have developed fully-formed consciences, it's unlikely they'll ever really "want" to do anything, there are just too many obstacles in the way. The inability to bear a grudge, for one. And unless you're either (a) a Triffid, or (b) Audrey 2 from Little Shop Of Horrors, then walking around, wreaking all kinds of freaky botanical mayhem and freaking out sexually frustrated shopkeepers, well, that's probably a non-starter too. Put it this way, no matter what you think, when nettles sting, they don't do it out of spite. A little schadenfreude, maybe, but never spite. (Let's be honest here, Audrey 2 was an anomaly - for all that "feed me, Seymour" rubbish, it's really anyone's guess as to whether the results could be successfully reproduced in laboratory conditions. And the Trifffids were an alien race intent on the invasion and ultimate destruction of Earth, so they don't count.) Anyway, the whole lack of consciousness thing? BIG problem.
The film's second big porky is slightly less frivolous, namely that science as you know it is ENTIRELY WRONG. Check out the classroom scene right at the beginning of the film, before all that crazy killer spore action kicks off, in which Mark Wahlberg's character argues that "science will come up with some reason to put in the books but in the end it'll just be a theory." Now presumably he got his degree from the same place as Gillian McKeith because this really is, to be perfectly frank, a schmorgasbord of piss and shit. At this point, I defer to the US National Academy of Sciences, which defines "theory" as thus:-
"Some scientific explanations are so well established that no new evidence is likely to alter them. The explanation becomes a scientific theory. In everyday language a theory means a hunch or speculation. Not so in science. In science, the word theory refers to a comprehensive explanation of an important feature of nature supported by facts gathered over time. Theories also allow scientists to make predictions about as yet unobserved phenomena."
It's telling that Shyamalan uses a common misappropriation of "theory" rather than the more specific and, you know, scientific definition. More than anything, it exposes his suspicion that science isn't the best tool to help is unravel the mysteries of a complex and beautiful universe. Because of this reluctance to understand, and despite a convenient conclusion in which the inital threat abruptly and absurdly disappears, The Happening ultimately comes across as a very bleak film, one that suggests humans are incapable of establishing pragmatic solutions for any kind of anomalistic occurence. Instead, in Shyamalan's convoluted narrative, things just tend to "happen." Which is total guff as we all know. In the real world, things tend to happen for a reason and Newton's Third Law very much applies. In the real world, we have a process of evidence and observation. What's the alternative? God? No thanks. I've seen The Passion of the Christ and it wasn't pretty. In fact, it was the exact opposite of pretty. And by "the exact opposite of pretty" what I actually mean is "really fucking disgusting."
Interestingly, earlier in the very same classroom scene Wahlberg asks his students a very important question and that question is, "you're not interested in what happened to the bees?" And as everybody knows, the correct answer to this question is always, "frankly, Marky Mark, I lost interest in anything this film had to say approximately 20 seconds into the opening credits."
M. Night Shyamalan will return with The Last Airbender. It's about a kid who actually BENDS the air! Incredible. Oh, and by the way, Bruce Willis? TOTALLY a ghost.
