BEFORE: Today's the big North American eclipse, and of course it was mostly cloudy. I went out for lunch at the time of the big moment, and thousands of people were looking up at the sky, both with AND without the appropriate eyewear - so I'm guessing this will be big news for optometrists and ophthalmologists, who will be very busy this week fixing everyone's retinas. I learned long ago to not get too excited about these astronomical events - as a kid I remember my mother was big on annual meteor showers, but the nights we planned to go see them, it was almost always cloudy or rainy. I saw one spectacular lunar eclipse when I was a teen, and then there was that Hale-Bopp comet a few years back, but for the most part it seems that my luck is terrible when it comes to astronomy. Y2K, Harmonic Convergence - these sort of things do tend to disappoint.
(Of course, I'm planning a vacation to Nashville, within the zone of totality, but it's not until late October. That figures.)
Warren Beatty carries over from "Rules Don't Apply", and despite the 15-year gap, this was the last film that Beatty acted in before "Rules". He sort of took a little break, right? Tomorrow I'll go back even further to a film from 1971. Maybe this film genuinely belongs in a February romance-themed chain, but I need the linking now - I can't be sure if this is going to link to anything in next February's schedule.
AFTER: I've heard terrible things about this film, but of course I can't just take everyone else's word for it, I have to watch the film and find out exactly what is wrong with it. First off, this feels like a Woody Allen film without being a real Woody Allen film, so I guess it's a Woody knock-off? A riff on Woody Allen? Allen Lite?
What went wrong here, besides the obvious - namely the poster image of Warren Beatty hanging out of a window over the NYC skyline wearing boxers with hearts on them (a scene which, thankfully, does not occur within the film...). I mean, I guess that image screams "bedroom farce", but it's just so painfully tacky, right?
Of course, the main character isn't self-deprecating enough to be in a Woody Allen film - and Warren Beatty would be a poor stand-in for Woody, a real Woody Allen film would need someone more self-deprecating, like Jason Biggs or Alan Alda, or preferably the Woodman himself. The plot here seems more designed to cater to Warren Beatty's ego, since his character sleeps with just about every woman in the film, much like his character in, say, "Shampoo". Even if his character is going through a mid-life crisis, it's a stretch of the imagination to depict an older man having SO many affairs in such a short period of time. It's almost like the entire plot was designed to set up the scene near the end where all FIVE women that he's been sleeping with (or almost sleeping with) end up in the same restroom at an event at the same time. Did Beatty really need that much of an ego boost in 2001? Or was it a situation reminiscent of that scene from "Amadeus", where Mozart tries to get as many opera characters singing all at once, with no recitatives?
In addition to his wife, Beatty's Porter Stoddard sleeps with his best friend (who's going through a divorce, but still, this should be taboo...), a beautiful cellist, and not one but TWO women that he meets while on a trip to Sun Valley. Well, I guess he almost has sex with those two women, the specifics are somewhat in doubt, but then why does one's father chase him down with a rifle, for NOT sleeping with his daughter? This was very strange....
I've learned over time to not only spot a bad film, but to be able to carefully analyze WHY it's bad, whether it's from a directing problem, or a writing problem, or an acting problem. I think in this case the majority of the film's problems come from bad writing, which itself can be broken down into bad plot writing and bad dialogue writing. Symptoms of bad dialogue writing include too much repetition, characters appearing to constantly be at a loss for words, or not making much sense, which are all signs that actors are being forced to improvise.
But I think most of the problems here stem from bad plot writing - only about half of the elements introduced over the course of this story turn out to be relevant, and the other half go exactly nowhere. Who were all those Asian men being shown around the couple's beach home? That's one thing that was never explained, for example - the writer or director never took the time to follow up, so we're left to wonder. There are plenty more of these - what was up with the couple's daughter's Turkish boyfriend? Or their live-in maid's boyfriend, who liked to walk around their NYC apartment almost naked? These are like little plot threads that are sticking out, and just like with a sweater, if you pull on one of these threads, the entire story might unravel.
The worst story element is probably Porter's best friend, Griffin, who happens to be gay. And the implication here is that he might have feelings for Porter, too - another ego boost for Beatty? But he can't seem to tell everyone that he's gay, not his best friend or his wife. This is a plot problem, because I'm pretty sure that in 2001, when this film was released, it was OK to be gay - and if you were an antiques dealer in NYC, chances are that people already suspected that to be true. What's bothersome is that the screenwriter probably never did five minutes of research into what it means to be gay, because instead we see him going to a hotel with a man dressed as a woman, and from what I understand, that's a somewhat different thing. So either he's got a thing for transvestites, or he's merely TRYING to make his wife think he's having an affair. That second possibility allowed for better story possibilities, I think, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.
What's more, the pieces just don't fit - either he's gay or he's not, right? And if he's gay, why do we see him hitting on a woman dressed like a spider at the Halloween party? Did he suddenly forget that he's not into women? He makes a joke about being a "leg man", and therefore attracted to the spider with 8 legs, but the joke doesn't land because the wrong character is saying it. Comedy fail.
NITPICK POINTS abound: Why did Porter's son travel with his wife to Idaho, arriving there to spoil his Dad's vacation - who does that? Why did someone travel to their cabin in Idaho during winter, and not have enough blankets on hand? Who brings a moving van to a house, just to remove a couple of suit jackets and a pair of golf shoes? The main character's mistress was dispatched from the story in a method that I didn't even understand - so was she pregnant, or not? If so, was it Porter's baby, or not? It's all quite unclear.
Inconsistencies like this that stretch across the entire film are no doubt caused by the massive re-writes and re-shoots that this film had, reportedly it took over three years to make this film, as the re-shoots were delayed again and again - then it took another two years to release it, probably because the studio knew they had a lemon on their hands.
Also starring Diane Keaton (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Goldie Hawn (last seen in "Best Friends"), Garry Shandling (last heard in "The Jungle Book"), Nastassja Kinski (last seen in "One From the Heart"), Andie MacDowell (last seen in "Hudson Hawk"), Jenna Elfman (last seen in "EdTV"), Josh Hartnett (last seen in "The Faculty"), Charlton Heston (last seen in "The Agony and the Ecstasy"), Marian Seldes (last seen in "Hollywood Ending"), Katharine Towne (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Ian McNiece (last seen in "Around the World in 80 Days"), William Hootkins (last seen in "The Island of Dr. Moreau"), Terri Hoyos, Tricia Vessey (last seen in "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"), Marc Casabani, Del Zamora, Buck Henry (last seen in "Catch-22"), Azura Skye, Johnny Brown, with cameos from Holland Taylor (last seen in "She's Having a Baby"), Scott Adsit (last seen in "The Music Never Stopped").
RATING: 3 out of 10 special clothes hangers
No comments:
Post a Comment