Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Animal Movies, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Dog Movies
No, I do not care even for an instant to defend the Dog Movie genre. In fact, I’m more than happy to throw out the Animal Movie genre altogether. As far as I can tell, the rare animal-movie successes (Babe, Duma) are such only because the human story is interesting enough that the animal story is forgivable. And I’ll concede the quality of the charming–if overused–talking animal animated film (I’m a big fan of The Lion King, Finding Nemo, and Madagascar in varying degrees). But I think you’re missing the ball on the appeal of Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Eitan. Pathetic though it may be, BHC is the first film in my memory with a wide release that has a leading cast of all-Hispanic characters. Okay, granted, they’re dogs, but bear with me here. It’s a distinction that would have been lost on me had I not seen the trailer in a densely Latino-populated Los Angeles neighborhood (so much so that at this particular theater major releases were shown at select times with Spanish subtitles!). I rolled my eyes like a good film nerd, but the audience was laughing at all the right moments. BHC won’t break any box-office records, but look for it to do very well among a usually-untargeted Hispanic population. Just my two pesos.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Charles Grodin, Dog Movies, Milo and Otis, Movie Studios, Norman Mailer, The Shaggy Dog
Every day, while on the bus on my way to work, I pass by a bus stop that — without a single exception — touts a particularly heinous upcoming release. At the beginning of the summer, it was Space Chimps. Then, it was Swing Vote, a film with a concept so vomit-worthy I actually had to email Elliot to make sure it actually existed. Now, the benevolent MetroBus team has replaced Kevin Costner’s smug mug with — well, isn’t that precious — Beverly Hills Chihuahua. First, I would like to find out who exactly is selecting the movies for street-side advertising. Is there something particularly awful about College Park that we don’t deserve a poster for, I don’t know, the (almost-) SECOND HIGHEST GROSSING FILM OF ALL TIME? Is there some guy in an office somewhere with a rubber stamp, chewing on a cigar, saying things, like, “College Park? FUCK EM. Those assholes get Costner and a tiny dog for all of August!”
Secondly, I would like to take this lemon and make some lemonade from it. The lemonade I speak of, of course, is an unflinching critique of the dog movie. Looking at Beverly Hills Chihuahua, it has a mildly acceptable pedigree (haw haw). Directed by Raja Gosnell, editor of almost a dozen B.O. heavy-hitters from the late 80’s/early 90’s (Mrs. Doubtfire, Home Alone, Rookie of the Year, Pretty Woman) and director of a handful of truly awful B.O. heavy-hitters from the late 90’s/early 00’s (Never Been Kissed, Big Momma’s House, BOTH Scooby Doo movies, etc.), and starring Drew Barrymore, Salma Hayek, Jamie Lee Curtis, Cheech Marin (!!!), and P.T. Anderson mainstay Luis Guzman, you can imagine why a studio executive would throw some cash at this flick. “It’s like Homeward Bound meets Delta Farce,” Gosnell must have insisted. “Can I pay you in pastries?” Roy Disney must have asked. (This is how Hollywood works, I assume.)
On IMDB, the top question in the FAQ is, “Is this based on a novel?” I shudder to think that I live in the same country as someone who genuinely wants to know if there is a Beverly Hills Chihuaha novel available. (If there is, though, I bet Norman Mailer wrote it.)
What I wonder is how live-action family-dog movies keep getting made, year after year, flop after flop. The recent high point, all things considered, was Beethoven (I don’t include Benji, which one IMDB user calls “The Best Dog Movie Ever Made,” simply because it came out 20 years before the dog-movie renaissance, and I don’t include Eight Below, which is an expertly made survival film that just so happens to feature dogs). When the pinnacle film of a particular genre stars Charles Grodin, you know there’s a serious problem. Since that film (which I still, for some reason, hold near and dear, despite the fact that I probably haven’t seen it since I was six), we have been treated to a nonstop parade of lowest-common-denominator crap that get the greenlight if for no other reason than just the fact that they tend to break even and fill out the studio’s calendar during sluggish B.O. months.
They come in several different flavors — sports dogs, buddy dogs, intergalactic pilot dogs. You name a profession, and there is almost certainly a film dog who held down that job. The stories are all seemingly rooted in the formula made famous by Lassie, Benji, and Cujo. These aren’t great films, but they speak to the fundamental and mysterious relationships that humans — especially children — feel with their canine companions. Watching them, you’re reminded of a long-ago era when boys were boys and dogs were dogs; the chemistry they shared was based in real family experience and categorically eschewed supernatural gimmicks (the dog can dunk! the dog is a superhero! the dog can tolerate Cuba Gooding, Jr.!).
The modern family-dog movies are all founded in the crass assumption that if a dog is doing something that a dog should not be physically able to do, like be the president or answer the phones in a high-powered law firm or be married to Kristin Davis, kids will eat it up. Regrettably, the assumption is almost always true, which is why adorable gems like Milo and Otis — arguably the masterpiece of the genre, not only because of the iconic Dudley Moore narration, but because it is simply about animals acting in a manner befitting them — get thrown under the bus, and The Shaggy Dog makes $16 million its opening weekend.
There is seemingly nothing stopping the dog-movie genre from continuing to be an classless, artless juggernaut. Beverly Hills Chihuahua will get rave reviews from the only audience that counts: obnoxious kids and the wallets of their sad, suburban, Vicodin-chomping moms.
Care to defend the family-dog movie?
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Celebrity Run-ins, Richard Linklater, Speed Levitch, Waking Life
I’ve always meant to pick up a copy of The Cruise, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Funny story about Speed Levitch, though. I went to a Weezer concert at Merriweather Post Pavilion in the summer of 2002, and a bunch of bands I liked then even though I knew deep in my heart that they sucked (Sparta, Dashboard Confessional) were opening. I was mulling around on the grass, waiting for friends, when I spotted someone drinking a beer and checking out all the lame mix of hipsters, frat guys and HFS kids stomping all over the fairgrounds. It was Brian Bell — guitarist from Weezer — and no one was approaching him! “Holy shit,” I thought, “this might be as close as I’ll ever get to this band!” (I did not know then, of course, that they would later release “Beverly Hills” and “Pork and Beans.” Had I known, I would have marked my distance with a 50 foot pole.)
The kids at this Weezer show were the kind of monumentally stupid fans who really liked “Island in the Sun” and that video with the Muppets, so it was no surprise that they didn’t recognize Rivers Cuomo’s right-hand-man. As I approached Brian Bell, however, I noticed that he was standing and chatting with a friend. I instantly recognized him as the dude with the crazy hair from Waking Life. Yes, it was Speed Levitch himself. A million thoughts rushed through my head — should I tell him how much his last movie sucked? Should I chide him for tossing around Kierkegaard’s name like it was Danielle Steel’s? Should I ask him what the fuck he meant by “the ongoing WOW is happening right NOW?” Should I yell, “Salsa dance with this confusion, motherfucker!” and then punch him in the face and run off? The guy may be great in The Cruise, but his animated self is far less appealing to me.
Anyway, I ended up going up to the two of them and, to Brian Bell’s surprise, I started making small talk with Speed about working with Richard Linklater and what it was like to see his cartoon self, and complimenting him about the innovative movies he chose to star in. Then he signed the red Converse All-Stars I still have in my closet. I gave Brian Bell a knowing nod, something akin to, “Thank me later for not doing the lame ‘I’m your biggest fan’ bullshit and embarrassing you.” In a way, though, talking to Speed Levitch was probably the best way — in my 9th grader brain — to show the guitarist from Weezer that I was a cool guy. Some pathetic part of me still hopes to this day that Brian Bell thought it was cool that I actually knew who his weirdo friend was.
So that’s the story of how I almost insulted Speed Levitch to his face, and ended up with his John Hancock on a pair of sneakers. Come to think of it, it’s a story that Speed Levitch would probably love.
It seems Jennifer Connelly has one simple rule for choosing a script: she needs to end up on a pier. Below are three shots from three different Jennifer Connelly movies. All show the young Oscar-winning actress from nearly identical angles standing on a pier. And all three shots, the respective filmmakers claim, are in no way related to the others. 10 points if you can name all three movies, and the frames to which they correspond. No cheating!
Answers: Ten points to Mike! The movies, from top to bottom, are Dark City, Requiem for a Dream, and House of Sand and Fog.
Filed under: Classic Cinema, Commentary, Directors | Tags: Annie Hall, Manhattan, New York movies, The Cruise
Manhattan’s opening is of course wonderful, though as you said the film that follows leaves much to be desired. And thank you for mentioning Annie Hall! When I was thinking of my response to your Best Openings post, Annie Hall came immediately to mind, but when I went to type it up it somehow got lost. Woody’s monologue perfectly sets the stage for the personal, bittersweet story to follow, one that isn’t afraid to break all the rules of filmic storytelling (the fourth wall being just the first). I flipped through a draft of the Annie Hall screenplay a couple of years ago, and was surprised to see that the opening monologue had been written just as a series of ideas, some of which made it into the final cut and some of which didn’t. My impression is that at least part of that opening scene was improvised. As far as New York movies go, however, I think Annie Hall captures L.A. far better than it does the Big Apple.
Your “New York Movies” list is a pretty solid one, but for my money the movie that captures New York City the best is one that neither you nor most people have ever seen. The Cruise has been making the rounds on the film-geek circuit for years now.
The Cruise (1998)
A documentary directed by Bennett Miller, who went on to an Oscar nomination for his sophomore effort, Capote, The Cruise follows New York City tour guide and Manhattan island celebrity Timothy “Speed” Levitch as he leads tours of the mythical city by day, and lives the grungier life of a typical New Yorker by night. Shot in Manhattan’s black and white (albeit on a digital camera), The Cruise finds moments in the city, through Speed’s eyes, that no tourist ever could. On his tour bus, Speed points out the Chrysler Building (he sardonically quotes Lewis Mumford’s description of its crest as “uninspired voluptuousness”) and other classic landmarks (“if architecture is the history of all phallic emotion, the Empire State Building is utter catharsis”). At night, a mere man-on-the-street, he gestures toward the jail where he did a brief stint for some civil disobedience, and guides us through the friend’s apartment where he has been sleeping for lack of a home. I first watched The Cruise last summer after my third week or so of living in Manhattan, and already I suspected it was the most accurate portrait of the city imaginable. As the months went on, every experience I had in the city only confirmed my suspicion. Manhattan and Do the Right Thing may top every top-ten list, but for me The Cruise is unbeatable.
Filed under: Classic Cinema, Commentary, Directors | Tags: Annie Hall, Manhattan, New York City, Opening Scenes, Woody Allen
Interestingly enough, one of my all-time favorite opening scenes comes from a movie whose antecedent 90 minutes are among my all-time least favorite: Manhattan.
Woody Allen has always been the king of the pitch-perfect opening scene. Witness Annie Hall’s stark, self-deprecating minimalism:
On one hand, it’s a flawless and instant introduction to Alvy Singer, but it also performs another important task by establishing a sort of table of contents for the film that is to follow. The structure of the entire film is dictated by these first 90 seconds or so, and you can already map out the way the conflicts and ideas are going to play out. People often criticize Woody Allen for always playing himself, but ironically enough, the film in which he plays himself with the greatest transparency and precision is also by far his best film and his best performance.
As an opening scene, this works because it is measures out the distance we need to use to separate ourselves from the action of the film: he breaks the fourth wall and invites us in, but we mustn’t come too close because we should constantly be aware that this is an artifice so clever that we can hardly tell the difference between the storyteller on one side of the camera and the storyteller on the other side.
The opening scene in Manhattan is charmingly self-referential. Allen pokes fun at the idealization of black and white Manhattan, while giving us the transcendently beautiful Konigsburg images and Gershwin score that so effortlessly convey the essence of New York City’s floating metropolis. He starts off the film as though he were writing a book, but the theme drops off right at the end of the opening credits, which is, I suppose, just another charming mobius-strip element of the opener — he wishes he could write the definitive romantic New York novel and then is too overwhelmed by the mere idea to even continue. Maybe that excuses the lackluster (and unrightfully worshipped) film to follow; it’s hardly a great film about Manhattan itself and a lot more like his weak squabbling-couples films than his great odes to the mysteries and romance of his hometown. As an opener, though, this scene works perfectly. It’s perfectly post-modern, perfectly romantic, and perfectly cued and scored to suggest the bumbling work in progress of a writer who should know better than to try to capture the whole of New York in a single film.
Not to mention the fact that Annie Hall is probably the definitive film about New York, followed by Do the Right Thing, Once Upon a Time in America, Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon, and Taxi Driver. Any I’m forgetting?
Filed under: Commentary, Directors | Tags: American Beauty, Dirty Pretty Things, Opening Scenes, Punch-Drunk Love, Steven Spielberg, Vanilla Sky
As any screenwriting textbook will tell you, the opening scene is the most important in your whole movie. If it doesn’t draw the viewer in immediately, chances are they aren’t going to hang around for the rest of the film. Raiders is obviously a great example, and in fact just about any Spielberg movie will fit the bill: the landing on the beach in Saving Private Ryan, the shark attack in Jaws, the coffins in the river in Empire of the Sun.
Some of my favorite movie openings are the ones that withhold information, presenting you with a scene so confusing and mysterious that you just have to stick around to find out what it all means. The opening few minutes of P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love are a favorite example:
Another terrifically bizarre opening? The first several minutes of Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things, in which (and I unfortunately couldn’t find it on YouTube) Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hotel clerk is called up to a room where he discovers a human heart in the toilet and fishes it out with a wire coat hanger.
After watching Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, I did something I rarely do: I skipped back to the opening, just to watch the first scene again:
And I noticed something: I couldn’t turn it off. Not because I was so entranced by the story–I had just finished the movie, after all–but because every shot, every scene, led so seamlessly into the next. Eventually, I had to turn it off mid-scene for lack of any good stopping point. Those are the best openings: the ones that draw you in immediately and don’t give you a chance to walk away.
One last opener? American Beauty. A friend was once skeptical about watching this movie, so I invited him to watch the first scene, the long take on video of Thora Birch, and told him he was welcome to leave afterward, if he could.
He couldn’t.
Filed under: Commentary, Directors, Foreign Films | Tags: Cache, Michael Haneke, Opening Scenes
I’d like to kick off a discussion about our favorite opening scenes. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark tonight on the big screen. (Finally! I thought I would have to wait until the 30th anniversary.) It has what must be one of the best first-ten-minutes in cinematic history. It’s hard to dispute Raiders for pure pop cinematic greatness. There are a lot of recent films, however, that have phenomenal first scenes. I’m thinking along the lines of Inside Man, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Cache and others. I’ll start collecting some video and laying out my favorite few from the past ten years or so.
The genius of Cache’s opening is the timing of the rewind. It’s like being jerked out of REM sleep at the exact moment the rhythm starts to kick in. Haneke gradually raises the tension level from “abject boredom” to “cut it with a butter knife” and then, at the exact moment we begin to slink back into complacency, the fuzzy stripes of the VCR in rewind mode thwart our sense of reality so completely that we are forced to evaluate everything in the film twice or three times to make sure we are comprehending the metalevels of the narrative. The final scene of the film nicely mimics and bookends the opening, but instead of looking at a blank tableau looking for the tiniest detail, we are faced with a massive swarm and asked to separate the noise from the static. It’s a film I respect more than I like, but it’s undeniable that it has one of the more ingenious and challenging openings in recent years.
Filed under: Commentary | Tags: Incest, Joe Biden, John Huston
One of these may be our next vice president. The other one f***ed his own daughter.