A Christopher Walken bedtime story

This really has nothing to do with Christmas (or any holiday for that matter), but somehow it seems appropriate to post.

Here's Christopher Walken (in an absolutely crazy sweater) reading "The Three Little Pigs."

Enjoy.

A few words about Avatar

Note: contains spoilers. Namely, that Avatar is pretty much a hunk of shit. But seriously, I'm going to reveal a few plot points. Especially any that I can make fun of. Which would be most of them.

As I write this, Avatar has an 83% positive rating on Rotten Tomato's famed Tomatometer. A few days ago, it was 95% (the ratings from the "Cream of the Crop" reviewers is still 94%). For the past two weeks, every guest on The Tonight Show (whether they were in the movie or not) has raved about it. Everywhere you go, magazine articles, TV reports and the general buzz have told you this movie is so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap, indeed, would be to diminish it.

Perhaps not surprisingly, none of these things ever get around to mentioning what the movie's actually about. All the trailers indicate is that there's lot of explosions. And, uh, blue people. Oh, and that this movie is so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap would be to blah blah blah.

Sitting at home, we absorb all of these stray pieces of information (James Cameron hasn't directed a movie for a while because he's been doing this) and that makes our brain go, "hey, this thing might be a work of genius." And of course we take this into the movie and it makes us more likely to like it. It's been a truly brilliant marketing campaign, executed at the level of the best political campaigns, and someone somewhere should get a medal for it (or a punch in the face... either way).

So okay. With all that out of the way I'll say right here at the top that as spectacle -- in terms of the effects -- it's a very good movie. Top quality effects. Movie changing or even mind blowing? No. We've seen it all before. Imagine a bunch of Golems from the Lord of the Rings movies -- only blue and tall and heroic -- and that's what it is. They haven't crossed that threshold toward making it look actually real, but there's a reasonable chance they never will, so who cares?

Either way, that's not what I'm going to talk about. My issues were with the story.

We start on a spaceship that has traveled 4.3 light years to Alpha Centauri in the year 2154. Nevermind how it got there going the speed of light looking, well, like something that can't go anywhere close to the speed of light.

Does it at least come with a supercharger?

Anyway, once we arrive at Pandora, it's time for the Incredibly Obvious Metaphors to start flying around. Pandora is populated by the Na'vi (Native Americans), who use bows and arrows (um), engage in mysticism (yeah), and at one with their environment (yep).

Sadly, Pandora is rich in the hilariously named fake element unobtanium (standing in for oil), which is necessary toward solving the economic and energy crisis on Earth (a crisis you would imagine might be somewhat less severe if we hadn't spent all that cash to built spaceships that can fly at the speed of light to Alpha Centauri and hold what seems to be an almost limitless supply of helicopters, gunships and men, though of course no one asks me about these things).

Anyhow, the most concentrated source of unobtanium on the entire planet happens to be right under the home tree of the Omaticaya Clan of the Na'vi (and no, I can't believe I just typed that). Obviously, they'll have to be moved.

Or won't they? I mean, you just flew a spaceship at the speed of light part way across the galaxy, and you have the technology to establish a perfect telekenetic link with a Na'vi whose DNA has been combined with that of a human and then grown in a test tube. You can do all that, and I'm supposed to believe that you still have to strip mine this ore out of the ground like we're back in West Virginia (strip mining here standing in for strip mining)?

At the center of all this is a disabled marine named Jake Scully, whose identical twin brother was a scientist specializing in the Na'vi and who managed to get killed just before the mission (and this is really only a minor quibble, but is it really all that common for one identical twin to end up as a marine and the other identical twin to end up as a scientist who, if I remember right from the flaccid dialogue, had a few Ph. Ds?).

Anyhow, Jake's brother's specially grown Na'vi just can't go to waste, so they let Jake use it, and of course the first thing that happens on a mission after he plugs in telekenetically (and it really bears pointing out just how ludicrous the whole idea of that is), is that he gets separated from the group.

Of course he meets a Na'vi woman, of course she hates him (but not for long!), and of course he'll have a rocky introduction to Na'vi culture, but of course eventually he'll get the hang of it, and of course he'll eventually get everyone's respect and pass a ritual and marry the Na'vi woman and become part of the tribe and begin to hate his original employers and fight on their side of what's right against the imperialist blah blah blah.

I mean honestly. This movie is supposed to be so fucking amazing it will revolutionize the way we watch movies. To call it a quantum leap, indeed, would be to diminish it.

And it can't do any better than to completely rape the plot of Dances with Wolves, The Last Samurai and like, 50 other movies? Give me a break. The plot, the motivations, the villains and the resolution are all totally obvious from, well... from 4.3 light years away (25 trillion miles or so). I mean, the main villain even has a bunch of scars on his head. How much more un-revolutionary can you get that to copy just about every Bond villain ever created? Did Cameron have to be physically restrained from putting an eyepatch on him, too?

Here's another example of what I mean. Late in the movie, Sigourney Weaver's character is wounded. The Na'vi tell Jake they might be able to transfer her consciousness into a Na'vi body, making her a Na'vi permanently. Only, it doesn't work. She was too wounded (big shock). Can anyone guess what will happen to Jake at the end of the movie? Will he become a Na'vi permanently?

And can anyone guess what will happen when one character says a huge flying beast has only been mastered by five Na'vi since recorded Na'vi time began? Yup, here comes Jake Scully. He's been a Na'vi for a few months. Clearly he's the best guy we have. If anyone can master the un-masterable beast, it's the guy with the funny accent who just got here a little while ago.

And you know what makes it that much worse is that there are actually serious issues at play in Avatar. Gross over-miliarization, deforestation, the Iraq war and the destruction of native peoples are real things. Many of the indigenous people of the Earth have been systematically wiped out by people in need of land and resources who were greedy enough, as one character says in the movie, to make anyone who stands in their way an enemy, and thus justifiably wiped out.

That's a real truth of history, and a hard one. And the destruction of the natural world, even for someone like me, who's far from an ecologist, is a tragic thing.

But by sticking to the most cliched of plots, the movie cheapens the issues to the point of demeaning their seriousness, rendering it, say, an open letter for peace and conservation written in crayon and filled with internet slang.

And about those robots...

1.) Was I the only one who laughed out loud at the bi-pedal robot, controlled by a human, who was carrying what looked like a huge machine gun? Carrying it in it's arms, like a human would, rather than having it as part of the design? What kind of bumblefuck would expect us to believe that?

Oh.

2.) And as bad as that was, they managed to top it by having the robot pull out a fucking knife and engage in hand-to-hand combat! I mean, a knife! Who designed this goddamn robot? Who looked at the plans and said, "yeah, this is a pretty cool robot.... but, it's missing something. Hmm. Oh, I know! It needs a two foot bowie knife and a knife sheath! Why? Because at some point, I envision this robot getting into a situation where the gun will be knocked out of it's 'hands' and it's 'hands', which are apparently just 'hands' and don't do anything, will really need to grab a knife and start stabbing something. No no, don't make the knife just come out of their hands, like Fulgore. Are you an idiot? Make it have to hold the knife, like we do. Waaaaay cooler that way!"

Netflix cont'd cont'd (and also cont'd)

So even though the erstwhile (whatever that means) topic of this blog is the fact that, you know, one of these days I hope to be a Hollywood screenwriter so rich and fabulously successful I could, as Lewis Black once dreamed, hire someone just to wash my balls, I haven't really talked much about what I'm actually working on.

And I know what you're thinking about that. So yeah, you're welcome. After all, who (besides me, presumably) gives a shit? This blogging crap is self involved enough as it is.

But for the purposes of this entry, I'll say that the totally original, totally plausible, totally commercial but totally artistic project of mine has something (though not totally) to do with gangsters and the underworld.

And it should. I'm a huge fan of gangster/crime movies and always have been, so I can think of no better place for a bumblefuck like me to start.

With this in mind, I've been using most of my Netflix queue to rent and watch gangster/crime movies. Mostly foreign ones, as I've seen many of the American ones already. A few of these, like Rififi and Shoot the Piano Player, I've written about already. Here are a few more:

Bob le Flambeur (1956)

Longest. Trailer. Ever.

Translated as "Bob the Gambler" or "Bob the High Roller" (rather than, I dunno, "Bob the Flammable"), Jean-Pierre Melville's noir story centers on the eponymous Bob, an ex-con and compulsive gambler who, after years away from crime, plans a casino heist.

Bob has hit a bad run of luck but can't stop gambling. Even the slot machine in his apartment won't pay out. As his money ebbs to nearly nothing, an old friend who works for the police begins to get suspicious. Don't do it, Bob. Bob takes the rest of his money and goes to the track to bet on horses. He loses it all. Then, at his absolute ebb, he hears about the safe at the Deauville Casino, which holds a fortune, and suddenly, forgetting everything, he decides to gamble the one thing he has left: his freedom.

Surrounding Bob is a young man -- Bob's protege -- who desperately wants to be like the smooth, cool Bob, a young girl who's bored by everything, including sex, a longtime fixer and friend of Bob's, and a whole galaxy of safecrackers, con men and street criminals, all of whom Bob orchestrates in a plan so detailed that, in a famous scene, he draws out the floor plan of the casino in a field to practice.

But all is not destined to go well. The wife of the inside man at the casino wants more money for her husband's part in the crime, and in the best tradition of film noirs, he is weak and she is greedy, and will try to sabotage everything if she can't get her way. The girl Bob's protege is sleeping with thinks they're all just pretending and tells a rival mobster who's in debt to the police for information about the plan. The policeman who's been friends with Bob ever since Bob saved his life is heartbroken and tries to warn him, but Bob can't be reached.

The director, Melville, loved everything American. He wore Ray Bans and listened to American radio and drove a big American car. But especially, he loved American movies, and even more especially film noir (a term invented by the French to describe the gritty American crime dramas that came out of Hollywood -- mostly Warner Brothers -- in the 40s and early 50s). He shot Bob le Flambeur sporadically over two years, working a few days at a time whenever he had the money to film.

His innovation was to combine the basic plot of American film noir and combine it with the free-wheeling camera, on-location shooting and naturalistic acting style of French and Italian neorealist movies of the time. The result was what most people consider the first film of the French New Wave, a group of movies directed mostly by French film critics -- Godard, Rohmer, Truffaut -- all of whom loved American crime movies and strove on meager budgets to make their own versions.

The movies they made eventually found a way back over the Atlantic, sparking a mini-movie revolution known as the New Hollywood of art-house American movies in the late 60s and early 70s (Bonnie and Clyde being one particularly notable example).

But that history aside, Bob le Flambeur really is a fine movie. Watching it, I was struck by how much P.T. Anderson had borrowed from it for his first movie Hard Eight, also a story about a world weary professional gambler and the protege who wants to be just like him (and the woman the protege gets involved in that puts everything at risk).

Roger Duchesne, with his dome of silver hair, perfectly projects Bob's world weary cool. Though he's a hopeless gambling addict, he really seems cares about people, especially his eager protege. When a violent pimp comes into the restaurant he's in with a new girl, Bob confronts him and forces him to leave. Bob has already done prison time for trying to rob a bank, we learn. Bob's just a gambler now. Everybody likes Bob. But Bob's cool, we sense, and his distaste for carelessness and danger has been slowly eroded by his run of bad luck and his inability to stop gambling (not that he even entertains the idea).

The final sequence -- the attempt at the casino -- takes on the style of a Greek tragedy, in which Bob, assigned to watch the casino from the high roller's room, can't help himself but sit down for a hand, and when he does, finally hit a run of luck so huge he loses all track of time and his role in the robbery.

Very good movie.

4 out of 5 stars

Drunken Angel (1948)

A different kind of crime movie, this one from Japan, directed by Akira Kurosawa, probably best known to the West for his Seven Samurai (1954), which was later remade as The Magnificent Seven.

Anyhow, Drunken Angel centers on a House-like asshole doctor played by Takashi Shimura, whose practice is in a slum on the edge of a poisonous scum pond. Shimura's doctor drinks too much and yells at anyone he thinks is being stupid or careless -- which is everyone -- especially a young yakuza (Toshiro Mifune) who comes in for treatment for a wound in his hand.

The hood tries to pretend he hurt his hand innocently, but Shimura wearily pulls out a bullet, and after the hood, looking pale and sickly, starts to cough, Shimura pulls out a stethescope, listens to his chest and crudely tells him he probably has tuberculosis, and with the way he lives his life, that means he's dead man walking. Mifune's hood is mortified, beats the shit out of the doctor and leaves, but a few days later he comes back. Shimura tells him to go get X-Rays to confirm the diagnosis and to clean up his sorry-ass. Mifune beats the shit out of him again and leaves.

But a few days later Mifune comes back, drunk as hell, but with the X-Rays, which confirm the tuberculosis. He wants to live. He wants the doctor's help.

And it's really at this point where things begin to get interesting. Mifune's amoral murderering mob boss has just been released from prison. He has a history with a nurse who works for Shimura and comes looking for her.

But when he shows up, Shimura basically tells him to fuck off -- you were terrible to her and you're a shithead yakuza -- a move that will almost surely get him killed. Mifune, now an outcast with the organization due to his illness and with a sort of grudging respect and gratitude for the doctor, decides he must intervene. He goes to a meeting of his bosses to beg for the life of the doctor, but all they do is throw money at his feet and kick him out.

What Mifune does after that, which I won't reveal, says a lot about what Kurosawa thought about the immediate post-war and American occupied Japan during which the movie was made.

"The Japanese love to sacrifice themselves for stupid things," the doctor says at one point. And Kurosawa's portrayal of the yakuza as a bunch of hedonistic murderers who care a lot more about getting drunk and screwing dance hall girls than rebuilding their bombed-out shithole of a city. They profess to have a code of loyalty, but when Mifune gets sick they throw him out. His girlfriend leaves him for his boss. He's nothing.

All that's left is the doctor, with his rudeness, his over drinking and his rigid honesty, which at first repels and then slowly begins to make us admire him, even though it takes someone else's sacrifice -- this time, not for something stupid -- to keep him alive.

3.5 out of 5 stars

Note: sorry about the long delay between posts. I wish I had a better excuse than I have (which would be none). Anyhow, I'll be back in a few short days to talk about a few noirs that were, uh, not so good.

The Underused Actors Club: Christopher McDonald

The noted philosopher Tommy Lasorda once said: "the difference between the impossible and the possible lies in a person's determination."

And here I thought it was impossible for an old fat guy to flip that way.

Anyhow, it's not just ol' Tommy. This quote (or others like it) have entered the common usage to the degree that we just take them as an article of faith.

Fortune favors the bold. Winners make their own luck. Success is one percent inspiration and 99 percent copying off people smarter than you.

Or something like that.

Anyhow, these quotes are crap. And the reason they're crap is because they don't recognize what is almost certainly the most important part of success: luck. Sometimes blind, sometimes stupid, sometimes out of the blue, but always luck. Without it, even the most phenomenally talented piano player to have ever been born couldn't transcend, you know, being born on a reed island on Lake Titicaca.

Or how about this. You, you out there reading this. You could be the most talented person who's ever walked the face of this Earth at, uh, playing the harmonica. Your harmonica playing could revolutionize the world of music (which would be quite a feat, considering the harmonica). You could be celebrated throughout the harmonica playing world as a goddamn DiVinci of the harmonica.

Only, you've never played the harmonica, have you? Too bad. If only you'd grown up next door to a guy who played one. He might have showed you how and encouraged you.

And just in case I haven't made my point, try this sometime for fun: go up to the next paralyzed person you see and ask them why they don't have the determination to just get up and run a marathon.

Yeah, not so much. The truth is that in any profession, in any walk of life, to have the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time is at least as important as having the right skills, and it's only when all of those things come together that you have success.

So what does all of that have to do with Hollywood?

Well, a lot. And it's in that spirit that I'd like to start a new series here on the ol' HH: The Underused Actors Club, a tribute to actors whose luck has (so far) not truly matched up with their talent.

First up?

-Christopher McDonald-

Where you (might) know him: Dirty Work, Happy Gilmore, Requiem for a Dream, Spy Kids, Star Trek: TNG, The Faculty, Quiz Show.

Oh, that guy!

Yes, that guy.

A character actor with a career spanning 30 years (his first role was in a 1978 TV movie as an usher), McDonald has become mostly known for playing douche bags in movies made by guys who were on SNL (this is just a long way of saying he was the bad guy in Happy Gilmore and Dirty Work).

Awesome.

These movies and those roles are harder than they look. Compare McDonald to, say, Bradley Whitford's performance as the bad guy in Billy Madison. Whitford -- a fine actor, as his work on The West Wing proves -- falls into the hammy minefield of broad comedy and in my opinion ends up sort of looking like an idiot.

I mean, we all remember Shooter McGavin, right? But can anyone name Whitford's character? I thought so.

So while McDonald was pretty great in those movies, he's also done a few other things (for instance, those above things).

But for every role in a really good movie like Quiz Show (playing vapid game show host Jack Barry) or The Faculty (playing Elijah Wood's dad) he's slogged out in the shitty bog of Hollywood tripe, appearing in such stinkers as Fair Game, The House Bunny and American Pie presents Beta House (as Mr. Stifler).

Sigh.

Only now and again has he been able to show that he could do more than this crap. Take for instance his role in Requiem for a Dream, where, in a mostly improvised performance, he plays TV pitchman Tappy Tibbons, whose "Month of Fury" secret to losing weight is abstaining from red meat (yeah), processed sugar (uh huh) and orgasms (uh, what?!).

So okay, then. What kinds of roles should he be doing?

Well, how about a real person, for starters? The only time McDonald seems to get a part of any size is either as the villain in a broad comedy or as some kind of television personality, where his bland good looks and smooth voice are put to effective use. As good as he is in Requiem for a Dream, he's still playing a TV pitchman, it's just a twist on the role. Darren Aronofsky (who directed), uses his casting as a kind of shortcut, expecting us to believe him as the pitchman because that's the role we usually see him in.

But me? I see him maybe as the adulterer sidekick in a Woody Allen film. Say, Michael Murphy in Manhattan. If he were somewhat younger, I think he could have played Aaron Eckhart's role in Thank You for Smoking, that of an amoral cigarette company pitchman.

But while McDonald has a very effective lying smile that's he's combined with a jackass attitude, you know, a lot, I really think he could also play a genuinely good guy (by all appearances, he's one in real life, which helps). He guest starred on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Yesterday's Enterprise," believably portraying a heroic junior officer and love interest (McDonald had been a finalist for the role of Riker three years before), and he's been used many times for voiceover work, notably as Jor-el (Superman's father) in Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League Unlimited.

But, you know, what do I know? I'm neither a casting agent, a director or a studio head, and unless these people are a lot more interested in Hollywood blogs than I think they are, this is probably falling on deaf ears.

But it shouldn't. Look at Robert Forster, whose career had gone completely to the shithouse before Quentin Tarantino put him in Jackie Brown (he's great in the movie, by the way). And how about Gloria Swanson, a second rate Golden Age of Hollywood actress who made it in the business 70 years before she won an Oscar for Titanic.

That's all I'm saying. Give McDonald a chance, people.