Playing The Game

By Steve Evans

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.” – German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

I re-watched David Fincher's The Game (1997) last night. The picture is not as clever as its creators think it is, but remains thought-provoking. And that's rare for a big-budget film starring Michael Douglas. 

In retrospect, casting Douglas was an ideal choice. The man has an uncanny way of tapping into and exploiting social issues with precision timing: 

In 1979, he co-starred in The China Syndrome, about an accident at a nuclear reactor. The film's premiere coincided within weeks of an actual accident at the nuclear plant in Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island.

A decade later, as public sentiment began to turn against the money-obsessed, Douglas won an Oscar for Wall Street in which he famously declared that "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good," creating in Gordon Gekko a villain for the times, if not the ages, as he would return two decades later as the same character played on a more sympathetic note (the poorly titled Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps).

Around the same time, Douglas starred as a walking metaphor for the dangers of marital infidelity and, perhaps as subtext, the very real risk of contracting a terminal disease, in the wildly successful Fatal Attraction.

Eight years later, Douglas was an improbable victim of sexual harassment in the workplace in Disclosure.

And he was right for The Game as a millionaire investment banker who gets a strange birthday present from his brother (Sean Penn). It is a voucher from a sketchy company known as Consumer Recreation Services to play a mysterious game that the brother assures "will change your life." Soon, the wealthy man wonders whether the Game is designed to kill him, instead. 

The Game is that rare thriller that stretches credibility to the outer reaches of the breaking point, yet holds together in its enduring theme: the importance of living the examined life. It is a fascinating metaphor for breaking down a man to his raw components -- as life will do -- and waiting to see if the man can rebuild himself into something better. 

Fincher's third directorial effort is also a uniquely American film that taps into the cultural obsession with fame and wealth, while privately enjoying the fall of the famous and wealthy. The Game panders to this perverse Schadenfreude as viewers envy the protagonist's comfortable life, then gloat when complacency and riches are forcibly taken from him. Yet by the end of the film, Douglas' unpleasant millionaire regains his humanity after he is force-fed a rather large serving of humility by Consumer Recreation Services, a corporation that seems to take malicious glee in playing God. Viewers may feel sorry for Douglas’ persecuted character, even come to like this man.

The Game understands and exploits American culture like few modern films. Its story arc follows a typical celebrity confessional on an episode of Oprah: An arrogant and self-obsessed individual comes tumbling down from grace, makes penance (in The Game, it is a proverbial trial by fire) and seeks absolution. Everyone has a good cry and walks into the light. Salvation at last.

At its core, The Game can be seen as a Christian allegory of redemption – if we can get past the outrageous plot and treat the film as character study. It is ultimately the millionaire’s personal mettle that is put to the test; the rest is slicked-up action entertainment by cinematic craftsmen at the top of their own game.

Though many critics have commented on the mean-spirited nature of The Game, it actually remains Fincher’s most humane and hopeful film. And that, like the cultural zeitgeist flowing below the surface of The Game itself, is a curious paradox not found in any other contemporary film.

Note: The always-excellent Criterion Collection recently released a special edition of this film.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2012 by Steve Evans. All rights reserved.

In Defense of Film Critics

By Steve Evans

Moviegoers might wonder why film critics seem to enjoy attacking and picking apart motion pictures. We're talking about critics who go far beyond a simple thumbs up or down; they eviscerate the movie and chew it up. Such vitriol. How mean-spirited of those nasty critics. For fans of a particular director or actor, negative reviews might spur outrage far disproportionate to the actual criticism.

You'd think it would be a non-issue. So many publications have eliminated film critics from the payrolls that a huge void in cultural analysis has been created and may never be filled, except perhaps by academics whose influence exists outside the sphere of mainstream movie going. In conversations with fellow film lovers, I have been asked whether contemporary critics deliberately rip into movies in order to spur controversy, sell publications and possibly hold onto their jobs. We are, after all, an endangered species.

I’ll always defend movie criticism as an important part of the cultural dialog. While there may be a few constipated critics who hate everything they watch, their numbers are minuscule in comparison to the true professionals who bring passion, integrity and a genuine love of the cinema to their reviews. Film criticism may be the most misunderstood of the rhetorical arts.  

As someone who has spent many hours in movie theaters, writing about films for newspapers, magazines and websites, I have had to sit through a lot of bad cinema. Sometimes the story doesn’t work or the narrative structure holding the tale together unravels, instead. Maybe the problem is a poor performance or miscast actors. Often, though, it is not one thing that causes a movie to fly off the rails and crash, but an accumulation of incompetence and bad creative choices, compounded by the filmmakers’ arrogance, hubris and access to too much money -- or perhaps not enough.

So why the critical hostility? Is it really a big deal when someone makes a bad movie? I suspect that those of us lucky enough to get paid for reviewing movies may have a lower tolerance for lousy ones, since we see so many. But when a movie actively insults our intelligence, that crosses the line and the pointed pens come out.

In fairness, no one ever set out to make a bad movie, but plenty of marketing dollars have been spent trying to promote movies that the studios realized, after the fact, are rotten to the core. The job of a film critic is to penetrate this smoke screen and answer a fundamental question: does the movie hold appeal for its intended audience? Analysis of a movie’s technical and artistic merits can help answer this question.

There is the old axiom that “everyone’s a critic,” which is certainly true, although I prefer to read the criticism of individuals with informed opinions. Someone who has seen many movies, who knows the history of the medium and its key players, has the contextual knowledge and experience to understand what works in a picture – and what doesn’t. Movie critics are part of the last bastion in a dying part of commerce: quality customer service. By reading reviews of critics whose insights you respect, you can make better decisions on how to spend your entertainment dollars. That's good value. That's customer service.

I have yet to read the work of any critic who ripped into a film without good reason.

Expect the worst if you read reports that a film was not screened in advance for critics. That is almost always a clear signal to hold off going to the theater for a few days, as the studio that made the film has no faith in its ability to sell tickets. Studios try to get a jump on revenues by bypassing critics and hauling in at least one day of ticket sales before word gets out on a bomb.

The sole function of movies made by the American studio system is to extract money from you in exchange for an experience that typically lasts two hours. You have no way of knowing whether it will be a good or a bad experience. Like any investment, buying a movie ticket is a gamble. So critics should indeed attack bad movies — savage them without mercy if they are utterly incompetent in the core areas of technical and artistic skill. People should not have to spend money on inferior goods. 

A good critical drubbing helps clear the marketplace of lousy product. It certainly won’t eliminate bad films but it can help.

Going to the movies is an increasingly expensive entertainment option. Theaters in most U.S. cities have long since broken the $10-a-ticket barrier, although a matinee costs a little less. It would be disingenuous to argue that theaters upgrading to digital projection would not pass along those costs to consumers at the ticket-buying level. Expect concessions to increase as well. Going to the movies is an investment.

Taken in that light, compare a film critic to a stock analyst. A good, unbiased analyst can help you make a sage investment decision with those precious entertainment dollars. This is especially true when confronting an artfully constructed movie trailer or TV advertising for a film. A skilled trailer editor can make a bullshit movie appear as shimmering gold. That's their job. The job of a film critic is to holler, “The Emperor has no clothes!” when necessary, no matter how slick the marketing effort.

Ah, and now my favorite argument in defense of critical attacks on lousy films: There is a unique pleasure to be enjoyed in watching a knowledgeable film critic tee off on a really bad picture. Comedy is where you find it, and I find that bad movies bring out the best writing in many critics. Roger Ebert's popular book, "Your Movie Sucks," is proof of this.

Finally, I may go see a hideously ravaged film despite the negative critical sentiment just to see for myself how bad it really is. You can learn a lot about making good films by watching the blunders in bad films.

Truly awful films are sublime — they are like a window into the deranged mind of the film’s creators. Take Mesa of Lost Women (1953) starring poor, old Jackie Coogan, struggling for a paycheck after his mother and step-father ripped off his fortune earned as a child actor during the Silent Era. Coogan plays mad scientist Dr. Arana, creating spider-women and dwarves on his isolated mountain bluff. Why he does these things defies explanation. Ah, but there’s so much more. Mesa of Lost Women has flashbacks within flashbacks, alternating points of view, atrocious acting, a narrative structure that an elementary school theatre group could easily surpass, plus bad special effects, disjointed editing, characters recalling events at which they were not present to witness, a grating Flamenco guitar and piano musical score, plot threads that go nowhere, and a thick layer of preposterous, hubba-hubba sexploitation, 1950s-style. Some bimbo named “Tarantella,” performs a weird dance in a bar in the middle of the picture — for no reason any sane person can discern, although it certainly holds the attention of the barflys watching her with glassy eyes.

With the exception of Coogan, who went on to a career in television, every other actor in this picture soon vanished like a virgin on prom night. Behind the scenes, the work that went into this low-budget movie required the efforts of two directors, two screenwriters, two editors and four producers, which is easily twice the number of creative individuals needed to make most films, including bad ones. 

Mesa of Lost Women is a fascinating 67 minutes of “Huh?” It is inept at every conceivable level of the filmmaking process and also entertaining as hell.

That is a fair and accurate assessment of the movie. On the chance you've never heard of this picture, as a film historian and critic I feel obliged to point out its existence as a high-ranking contender for the worst film ever made.

Whether you seek out and watch it is a decision that I leave up to you.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2012 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.

Norman Mailer's Drug-Addled Cinema

By Steve Evans

Mailer in a rare moment of repose.

I have read much of Normal Mailer's literary output through the years, as well as a comprehensive and unauthorized biography of this egocentric talent, but only recently have I come to know the two-time Pulitzer winner as an experimental filmmaker.

My lone experience with a Mailer film had been his 1987 directorial curiosity Tough Guys Don't Dance, which is a positively insane film noir. Ryan O'Neal staggers through most of this picture looking like he suffers from the worst morning-after in the history of hangovers. As his father, gravel-voiced Lawrence Tierney (the crime boss in Reservoir Dogs) talks endlessly about his desire to "deep-six the heads" when corpses begin to accumulate and the weirdness quotient expands exponentially.

It's a film worth experiencing just for the peculiar dialog.

There is an amazing exchange at a bar between Ryan O'Neal's besotted character and the femme fatale of the picture, Miss Patty Lareine. As she comes on to O'Neal, Miss Patty leans in close and purrs in a thick, Suthern drawl, "Ah used to have golden-blond pussy hair until ah scorched it with the football team."

This is not something you hear every day.

Character actor Wings Hauser, who specialized in convincing portrayals of psychotics, here plays the corrupt police chief in O'Neal's small town. Of his enthusiasm for smoking marijuana, Hauser's police chief declares, "I like your home-grown. It puts feathers on my ass. Godly stuff."

Such is the cinema of Norman Mailer, who adapted the Tough Guys script from his novel.

Lesser known is the fact that Mailer also produced, wrote, directed and starred in several drug-fueled cinéma vérité experimental films in the late '60s/early '70s that were mostly improvisational -- though just as Tough-Guys crazy. Most of them were shot in the Hamptons with Mailer’s friends and family. Drugs and booze allegedly flowed freely throughout this creative process -- with decidedly mixed results.

The Criterion Collection thinks highly enough of Mailer's early cinematic exertions to offer them in a boxed set.

The clip below is an unscripted scene from Maidstone (1970), in which Mailer and character actor Rip Torn, both probably high as monkeys, get into a vicious brawl with the cameras rolling. Rip whacks Mailer on the skull with a hammer and says he intends to kill Mailer's character in the film. In practical terms this amounts to attacking Mailer himself, though the writer-director seems unprepared for the assault. Mailer eventually takes a bite out of Rip's ear, prefiguring Mike Tyson by a couple of decades, while Mailer's wife and children scream in evidently genuine horror.

It certainly does not resemble a typical, staged movie fight. Mailer was not known to back down from conflict. His machismo is legendary, despite the fact -- or perhaps because -- he was a relatively small man.

As for his cinema -- is it avant-garde or drug-addled idiocy?

Decide for yourself:

Norman Mailer died in November 2007, age 84. His six marriages produced nine children.

Notable literary works include The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song and Ancient Evenings, which are all particular favorites of mine. He was a co-founder of The Village Voice newspaper. He twice won the Pulitzer Prize and received the National Book Award.

His forays into film were considerably less successful.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2012 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.

Sean Connery's not-so-greatest hits

By Steve Evans

Sean Connery, the Academy award-winning Scotsman whose suave manner in a tuxedo was the epitome of 1960s cool, turns 82 next month.

Aside from his seven performances as the most famous vodka-martini-drinking spy in the world, Connery's oeuvre also includes such gems as Hitchcock's unfairly-maligned curiosity, Marnie, filmed in 1964 around Connery's Goldfinger shooting schedule, as well as the Disney children's classic Darby O'Gill and the Little People, in which we get to hear Sir Sean sing a song:



Apparently, Walt Disney was counting on American audiences not to discern the difference between Connery's Scottish brogue and a genuine Irish accent.

Connery was tailor-made for The Man Who Would be King, one of John Houston's last great films. And Connery won the Oscar, of course, for DePalma's The Untouchables. Given his pedigree as an action hero, he also seemed the logical choice to play Harrison Ford's on-screen father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Great films, all, and by no means an exhaustive list.

While Connery will probably always be best remembered as the greatest actor to portray Bond, James Bond, here at Cinema Uprising we suspect there may be one or two films the Scotsman would just as soon forget. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comes to mind. But perhaps his most awkward moments are on display as the ruthless, diaper-wearing anti-hero Zed in John Boorman's insane 1973 film Zardoz. Hard to believe he could have read the script (or consulted with the costume designer) before signing on for this one.

Sir Connery, I would like to thank you personally for the James Bond films, which meant a lot to me as a teenager. In spite of your superstar status, you remain a consolation to millions of people everywhere who occasionally make bad wardrobe decisions, though perhaps not as bad as this one from Zardoz:

Love the boots, Sean.

Still, I'll stick with From Russia With Love (1963) and try to get that last image out of my head.

Cinema Uprising copyright © 2012 by Stephen B. Evans. All rights reserved.