10/21/14 (Part One): Take This Job and Shove It

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31 Days of Halloween, barbarians, black comedies, Botched, Bronagh Gallagher, cinema, co-writers, Derek Boyle, directorial debut, Eamon Friel, Edward Baker-Duly, favorite films, feature-film debut, film reviews, films, gallows' humor, Geoff Bell, high-rise building, horror, horror-comedies, hostage situation, Hugh O-Conor, Ivan the Terrible, Jamie Foreman, jewel heist, Kit Ryan, Movies, Raymond Friel, Russell Smith, Russian mobsters, Sean Pertwee, set in Russia, Stephen Dorff

Although filmmakers have been crafting big-screen, live-action adaptations of cartoons for some time, to greater or lesser (mostly lesser) effect, very few have been able to actually approximate the sheer insanity of said cartoons. In most cases, it’s enough to simply cast real actors that kind of look like their cartoon counterparts and put them into settings that kind of approximate their respective animated backgrounds. For the most part, however, the number of live-action films that have the chaotic energy and feel of classic Merrie Melodies or Looney Tunes cartoons are pretty few and far between.

The reason for this, of course, should be pretty simple: by their very nature, animated works can get away with about 1000% more things than live-action productions can. As an example, think back to that hoariest of all animated clichés, the mid-air “run and fall.” It’s a pretty simple task to make a cartoon Bugs Bunny run on thin air, stop, ponder, pull a sign from some hidden orifice and then plummet to relative safety at the bottom of a canyon: to paraphrase some old baseball movie, “If you draw it, it will happen.” Try this same gag in a live-action format, however, and it’s automatically a whole different ballgame: as a rule, flesh-and-blood actors and animatronics are much more beholden to the law of gravity than their animated counterparts. Toss a real actor over a cliff and see how long they tread open air before crashing to terra firma: I’m guessing it won’t be a pretty sight.

All this is by way of saying that live-action features that actually have the zany, unpredictable feel of cartoons are exceptionally rare beasts, scattered unicorns in a field full of shaggy ponies. Of these rare beasts, one of the very best, brightest and most outrageous would have to be Kit Ryan’s no-holds-barred Botched (2007). Nominally about a botched heist, Ryan’s amazing little film manages to throw everything and the kitchen sink into the mix, coming up with a film that’s howlingly funny, unbelievably violent, ludicrously hyper-kinetic and endlessly surprising. It’s a movie that plays on audience expectations before systematically shattering them, all the way to a great twist ending that feels less tacked on than absolutely necessary. I fell in love with Botched the very first time that I saw it: if you’re an adventurous movie fan, I’m willing to wager that you probably will, too.

The movie kicks off with a thrilling diamond heist, led by the perpetually unlucky Ritchie (Stephen Dorff). As the title tips us off, Ritchie ends up botching the heist something fierce, losing his accomplices and the stolen ice in the process. Returning to his no-nonsense boss, the stony-faced Mr. Groznyi (Sean Pertwee), Ritchie gets a chance to make everything right, via yet another heist. This time, Ritchie must travel to Russia, where he teams up with the bumbling brother duo of Peter (Jamie Foreman) and Yuri (Russell Smith): the three men are charged with infiltrating a high-rise office building and stealing a special jeweled crucifix from the penthouse suite. As luck would have it, Peter is a complete and total psychopath and ends up blowing someone away, leading the trio to be locked-down on the top floor, along with a handful of hostages.

The hostages are a decidedly odd bunch, including a group of conservatively dressed, ultra-religious women, led by Sonya (Bronagh Gallagher), a dim-witted Russian soldier by the name of Boris Bogdanovich (Geoff Bell) and the uber-nerdy Dmitry (Hugh O’Conor). During a bit of organized chaos, Sonya pulls a gun and flips the script, taking Ritchie, Peter, Yuri, Boris and the others hostage, all in preparation for a big sacrifice to “the Almighty.” Did I mention there’s a mysterious, blood-thirsty barbarian (Edward Baker-Duly) roaming the halls of the office building wielding an enormous ax and an equally massive, bug-eyed, grin? Yeah, well, he’s there’s and he’s a real hoot, let me tell ya.

With all of these decidedly strange forces massed against him, Ritchie must stay the course and complete his assignment, lest he wind up in Groznyi’s crossfires when/if he should survive his trials. There’s more to the mysterious office building than meets the eye, however, and Mr. Groznyi might be more intertwined with Sonya and the barbarian than it first seems. If he’s not careful, Ritchie may just end up on the business-end of a huge ax, just one more victim of the working-class malaise.

At first blush, there probably doesn’t seem like a lot of parallel between Botched and something like a Wylie Coyote short. Digging a bit deeper, however, they don’t look so radically different: both are kinetic, hyper-self aware and ultra-violent little jewels that barrel ahead on their own feverish logic and display a blatant disregard for such things as basic anatomy and physics. There’s one point in the film where Baker-Duly’s gleeful berserker gets blown up and stands there, smoking and covered in soot, that should be readily familiar to anyone who grew up on old Daffy Duck cartoons: all he’s missing is an orange bill spinning around his dazed face.

So much of the film is pitched at a cartoonish pace that Botched often has the feel of a rollercoaster ride where we’ve begun just as the car is accelerating down its first huge drop. With little exposition, the film throws viewers into the deep end and then keeps shifting gears into each fresh absurdity: the heist aspect of the film turns into a hostage comedy which suddenly ratchets up into a strange occult shocker before leveling off into something that could best be described as a “light-hearted serial killer bloodbath.”

Throughout everything, however, the film manages to never lose either its inherent good nature or its sense of humor. Since the entire film plays out like a live-action cartoon, the over-the-top bloodshed takes on an altogether different…daresay I say “wholesome” feel: bodies are cleaved in two, heads roll, more fake blood is shed than a Gwar concert and yet the film never manages to seem mean-spirited or oppressive.

Part of the credit for this goes to the genuinely funny tone that’s maintained throughout Botched’s quick running time. Chalk this up to a superbly sharp script, credited to Raymond Friel, Eamon Friel and Derek Boyle: three writers would normally spell the kiss of death for a script but they obviously functioned like a well-oiled machine. The humor in the film is a great blend of witty dialogue and absurd, outrageous situations/sight gags that make for a heady mixture: the comedy is often pretty rapid-fire and there’s almost always something to laugh at, whether it’s Boris explaining how a filing cabinet can be deadlier than a tank “in the right hands,” Dimitry cautiously determining just what “saved” means before he volunteers (it’s not what he hoped) or the unforgettable scene where Sonya realizes that her brother is getting up to some unsavory business with the bodies. Unlike many horror-comedies, both sides of the coin are duly served: Botched is laugh-out-loud funny and just as horrifying as any “serious” fright film out there.

This would all be for nought without a killer cast, however, and there are some absolutely priceless performances here courtesy of Stephen Dorff, Jamie Foreman, Bronagh Gallagher and Geoff Bell. Dorff is perfect as the exasperated thief who just wants something, anything, to go right in this shitty nightmare that he calls a life, while Foreman and Bell bring just the right amount of sweetness with their psychopathy: neither guy are the kind of person you’d want in your home but either one would (probably) be a real blast in a dive bar. Top marks must go to Gallagher and Baker-Duly as the gonzo, batshit crazy dastardly duo: they’re both amazing comic actors with impeccable timing and every minute they’re on-screen is a real delight. Truth be told, the villains in Botched are so fascinating that you really end up wanting to spend more time with them then you do: Dorff is no slouch, mind you, but Sonya and the barbarian are something else entirely!

There’s so much to love about Botched that I’m tempted to call the film one of my all-time favorites, despite the fact that it’s not even ten years old. Lightning-paced, stocked with fascinating characters, hilarious situations, witty dialogue, lavishly-executed setpieces and enough gore to please the most jaded of hounds, Botched is an absolute treat from start to finish. I’ve always wondered what happened to director Kit Ryan but I now see that his sophomore feature, Dementamania (2013), just opened in the UK this month. If his new one is anything like his first one, it looks like I’ve got another potential “favorite film” to add to my list.

 

9/7/14: Anywhere But Here

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absentee father, Amanda Anka, Benicio del Toro, boredom, Chris Pontius, cinema, coming of age, divorced parents, dramas, electronic score, Elle Fanning, ennui, film reviews, films, Harris Savides, Hollywood actors, independent film, indie dramas, living in a hotel, Lost in Translation, Movies, parent-child relationships, Phoenix, Sofia Coppola, Somewhere, Stephen Dorff, The Virgin Suicides, writer-director

If there’s one big take-away we can get from Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere (2010), it’s that being young, rich and famous is just about as tedious and dull as it gets. Sure, Johnny (Stephen Dorff) may be a famous actor who indulges in endless partying, drinking and womanizing, attending one gala overseas movie premiere after another but it’s the in-between moments that are particularly telling: when not surrounded by paparazzi and sycophants, Johnny’s life seems to entail sitting alone in his hotel room home, drinking and smoking one cigarette after the other. Entitled? Absolutely. Glamorous? Not on your life.

Since this is the movies, however, we know that it won’t be that simple: there’s got to be some sort of catalyst for change. And there is, of course, in the person of Cleo (Elle Fanning), Johnny’s 11-year-old daughter. Johnny’s ex-wife has sent Cleo to spend some time with her absentee father and he’s reluctantly agreed, despite the monkey wrench it will throw into his wastoid lifestyle. Somewhere along the way, however, a funny, cinematic thing starts to happen: Johnny and Cleo begin to connect and the lay-about actor starts to feel the first stirrings of some pretty alien emotions – love, responsibility and a new-found sense of purpose. Perhaps there’s more to life than empty partying and pleasure-chasing. Perhaps it will be 30-something Johnny who finally begins to grow up, rather than his pre-teen daughter. Perhaps it’s actually up to the child to teach the adult the real ways of the world. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…

As someone who thoroughly enjoyed Sofia Coppola’s first two films, the gauzy, hazy The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Oscar-winning Lost in Translation (2003), I was really looking forward to seeing Somewhere. While I haven’t kept up with Coppola’s career in the same way that I have her father’s, for example, I’ve long felt that she was a ridiculously talented writer/director who was managing to develop her own unique, distinctive vision, a vision that didn’t look quite like anyone else’s (least of all, her father’s). Alas, I found Somewhere to be something of a mess, alternating between deadly dull non-action and bizarre, awkward, vaguely nonsensical “arthouse” elements, none of which sit comfortably side by side. It’s a film that opens with a terribly tedious, repetitious static shot of a car racing around a track and then manages to one-up this tedium at every possible opportunity.

While there’s undoubtedly an intriguing film to be made out of the skewering of movie star lifestyle clichés, Somewhere just doesn’t have a whole lot to say. Sparse and spare to the point of feeling underdeveloped, the film comes across more as a series of tedious vignettes than any kind of organic, cohesive narrative: Johnny watches in abject boredom as awkward twin dancers perform a strange pole-dance to the Foo Fighters’ “My Hero”; Johnny watches Cleo figure-skate for what feels like 10 uninterrupted minutes; Johnny shares an elevator with Benicio del Toro (playing himself, natch); Johnny sits for a lengthy makeup session that involves the application of an old man mask; Johnny has an awkward encounter with a male masseuse who drops his own drawers since “if his clients are naked, he should be, too”; Johnny and Cleo attend an Italian awards show; Johnny and Cleo lounge by the pool…it (literally) goes on and on and on. Of the various “scenes,” most are deathly dull, although the bits involving the awful twin dancers and the naked masseuse are, at the very least, more entertaining than the mind-numbing figure-skating routine.

There are a few nods to an actual storyline buried in here (Johnny keeps getting mysterious texts from someone who asks him not to be an “asshole,” pushy paparazzi keep tailing him) but nothing ever develops past the most basic level: in essence, Somewhere is 90-odd minutes of minutiae and ennui. There’s no character development, even if Johnny, technically, finishes the film with a different mindset than he began it (never mind that his character arc ends with his car breaking down and he merrily walking into the horizon because, you know, “regular” people walk places): Cleo never seems to serve as more than a plot device, save for one nicely realized scene where father and daughter share room-service gelato and watch Italian-dubbed episodes of Friends on TV.

It doesn’t help that Johnny is kind of a shitty person to spend any amount of time with: he’s moody, disinterested in everything to the point of being disengaged and seems to exist in a constant state of horny boredom. At a certain point, his non-stop womanizing becomes unbelievably silly (Johnny is so desirable that anonymous women flash him, in public, and he always seems to be coming home to a new, mysterious, nude woman in his bed), although there’s something undeniably creepy about his tendency to follow strange, attractive woman around. Is it only considered stalking if the creep isn’t rich and famous? Inquiring minds want to know.

From a craft standpoint, Somewhere is decent but certainly nothing to write home about. While the cinematography, courtesy of frequent Fincher collaborator Harris Savides, features some truly beautiful night shots, it just as often simply revolves around medium close-ups of Stephen Dorff looking bored. The minimalist electro-score, by French electronica-pop band Phoenix, is so restrained as to recede almost completely into the background, providing the kind of generic score that could have been contributed by any number of faceless soundtrack pros. The acting is just fine throughout, although none of the actors, in particular Dorff, ever seem to display much beyond passionless disinterest and melancholic acceptance.

I really wanted to love Somewhere but I’ll be honest: the tedious opening set a tone that, unfortunately, the rest of the film was only too eager to fulfill. Although I’ve yet to see Coppola’s take on Marie Antoinette (2006) or her critically acclaimed recent film The Bling Ring (2010), I must admit that Somewhere has made me extremely wary. While one less than stellar film does not a career break, necessarily, Somewhere felt like an expansion and doubling-down of the worst affectations in Coppola’s first two films. I’m still curious to see what Coppola has in store for the future but count me as someone who would rather have been anywhere than Somewhere.