I walked into the theater to see Mystery Men secure
in the knowledge that, owing to both mixed critic reviews and its admittedly low
opening weekend take, it was not a particularly good film. I admit, now and
forever, that, in my opinion, I was wrong.
Mystery Men, while not a laugh-out-loud comedy, is
nonetheless an amusing trip through superhero-land. Based on a comic book from
Dark Horse Comics, Mystery Men is a parody of superhero films as well
as the comics. Taking a lot from Batman and Superman, especially
in its depiction of the neo-retro Champion City, the film is fun and has heart.
The film begins with three superheroes attempting to make it in
the big city: the fork-hurling Blue Rajah (Hank Azaria), the shovel-wielding, er,
Shoveler (William H. Macy) and the oft-raging Mr. Furious (Ben Stiller). It’s
pretty clear that they’re small potatoes next to Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear),
who’s not only managed to jail nearly every supervillain in Champion City, but
also nab every endorsement known to man.
It’s that very lack of an arch-nemesis that’s causing Amazing to
lose some of his sponsors. This leads the superhero, in his alter-ego as "Lance", to free Casanova von Frankenstein
(Geoffrey Rush), one of his old foes. But the plan
backfires; within hours, Frankenstein captures Amazing and locks him away, with
the very clear intention of killing him at some later date.
Thus, it’s up to Mr. Furious, the Shoveler and Blue Rajah (who,
as his compatriots constantly remind him, has not a shred of blue clothing on
him) to stop Frankenstein. But they need more help; and they find it in the
Spleen (Paul Ruebens, of Pee-Wee Herman fame), Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell, of Keenan
and Kel fame) and the
Bowler (Janeane Garofalo), not to mention the proverb-spouting Sphinx (Wes Studi).
The rest of the film centers around this super team attempting
to save Captain Amazing. Watching them deal with their admittedly weak or
situation-specific powers is amusing, especially whenever Mr. Furious gets mad,
thrusting out his fists in a Shatner-like expression of rage before nearly
breaking his arms trying to do any real damage. Of them all, the Bowler seems
the obvious choice for the most powerful; but even her powers are undermined by
the fact that her super-powered ball is controlled entirely by the ghost of her
dead father, whose skull is encased inside the ball.
The entire cast is strong, and give good performances. Stiller
does an excellent job with the average shmo trying to pass himself off as a
superhero, clearly trained entirely from comic books and movies; Macy is the
sensitive hero, with a wife and family, doing what he does from a sense of civic
duty; Azaria’s Blue Rajah has moments with his estranged mother that are also
wonderful; and Garofalo’s Bowler, who argues with her ball-trapped father even
while giving the Blue Rajah advice about his relationship with his mother,
rounds out the group perfectly.
Tom Waits’s crusty old gizmo genius is also worth mentioning;
and Ruebens’s Spleen is appropriately disgusting. Claire Forlani, as Stiller’s
love interest, doesn’t have much to do besides look good, but the character does
a good job playing off Mr. Furious’s blustering false machismo.
The plot is rather predictable, and has been played out in
dozens of comic book films and television shows, but the strength of the cast
overshadows it. The effects are top-notch, as is to be expected in this day and
age. All in all, Mystery Men is a great popcorn movie, and having so many
characters keeps you interested, whereas films like Austin Powers 2
dragged in places. Now, I have only one question: where’s my Mr. Furious action
figure?
—08/17/99
When my friends suggested we go see Drop Dead Gorgeous, I
agreed only due to the fact that I had a gift certificate and therefore was not
actually paying to see the film. Unfortunately, the Theater Nazis said my gift
certificate could not be used on movies that just opened. Why this is a policy
is beyond me. I could go to the same film with the same certificate a week
later. Where’s the logic?
In any event, I realize that being so biased against a film
ill-suits a self-titled ‘reviewer.’ Therefore, I will assure the reader that I
had no innate bias against the film; I simply was looking more toward
seeing Inspector Gadget or Deep Blue Sea.
Drop Dead Gorgeous was curiously similar to Election,
which came out earlier this year. Both are about competition, and both have
heroines with high aspirations and cutthroat tactics. But where Election
combined both the ambition and the ruthlessness into a single character, Drop
Dead Gorgeous divides it between Denise Richards’s spoiled rich girl and
Kirsten Dunst’s sweet girl next door.
The film is in the format of a documentary, which seemed to me
an odd choice for this film. The documentary is about an annual beauty pageant
in Mount Rose, a small town in Minnesota and apparently the ‘oldest beauty
pageant in America.’ The only entrants are members of the town, and the pageant
is run by former pageant winner Gladys Leeman (Kirstie Alley), whose own
daughter Becky (Richards) is in the pageant this year. Becky’s major rival is
Amber Atkins (Dunst) a poor trailer-park denizen whose mother Annette (Ellen
Barkin) can’t seem to stay away from the bottle (does it mean anything that I
saw the film two nights ago, yet had to go look up all the film names on IMDb?).
The old tradition of ‘bizarre quirky small-town behavior’ is in
full swing here, as Amber practices her tap dancing while working at her
after-school job, putting make-up on corpses at the local funeral
parlor. Becky, on the other hand, just practices being pretty – and
using her handgun at the school gun club, where she’s vice-president. The
president is yet another pageant candidate, and when she is the victim of an
unfortunate tractor accident – it explodes – the film begins its main plot.
While it’s not difficult to figure out the culprit behind the quenched beauty
queens, there is more than enough for the audience to do in is figuring out who
the next victim will be.
While the performances are fine, none of them are particularly
outstanding. Kirstie Alley does fine as the fading beauty queen using her
daughter to fulfill her dreams, but she never truly rounds out the villainous
feel of the role. Richards has nothing to do in the film except look
disturbingly perfect and happy, though she ends up with one of the funniest (and
twisted) scenes in the film.
The star is Dunst, who comes across endearingly as the ambitious
girl who seems too nice to push to achieve her dreams, but they end up being
fulfilled anyway. Dunst portrays Amber with as a sweet, intelligent and nice
girl who gets exactly what she deserves.
And so does everyone else. In fact, pretty much everyone in Drop
Dead Gorgeous ends up with what they deserve. It’s a refreshing film with a
refreshing (if naive) message – everything comes out in the wash.
—08/07/99
Deep Blue Sea is a JAWS rip-off. Of course, you
might be one to say that about any film with monster sharks eating humans – I
certainly would. But that’s because I’m a big JAWS fan. However, bias
aside, Deep Blue Sea is not shy about letting you know it’s a JAWS
rip-off. It not only acknowledges it, but it plays with it. And guess what? It
pays off in an entertaining, if not original, movie.
The film stars no one except Samuel L. Jackson, who plays a
millionaire entrepreneur financing the whole ‘cure Alzheimer’s disease with
shark brain goo’ project, and LL Cool J, who plays a chef/preacher/alcoholic.
The rest of the main characters are played by actors I’ve never heard of who do
an adequate job of being victims.
What this film will become famous for is the utterly surprising
killing of one of the main characters at a completely surprising moment. No
amount of preparedness can save you from the abrupt chomp on this poor
victim.
There’s not much to say about the plot. Basically, scientist Susan
McAlester (Saffron Burrows) lost a relative to Alzheimer’s disease, so she
believes that she can cure it with some sort of chemical found in mako shark
brains. So off she goes into an underwater lab once used to build submarines,
with a fleet of computers and a tough-guy shark wrangler (Thomas Jane).
Unfortunately, to get enough liquid to do the job, McAlester had to increase the
brain mass of the shark by at least five times – making for
super-intelligent sharks. Oddly enough, this also requires that the sharks get
nearly five times larger than your average mako shark.
Anyway, the usual Jurassic Park-style storm shows up,
knocking everything haywire just when the super-makos decide to rebel. Then, we
switch to Alien, with the sharks hunting the humans down the flooded
halls of the complex. Then it’s chomp chomp, chomp chomp, only a few survivors
are left. And lots of homages to JAWS sprinkled about.
As a thriller, however, the film works. The filmmakers get a lot
of mileage out of how hard it is to see a shark in when you’re on the surface
and it’s in the water (although when it’s a 20-foot shark in a 30-foot room, I
have a hard time believing you wouldn’t see it, but anyway).
LL Cool J’s character is fun, and Jackson is his typical cool
self, but otherwise the actors are just there as fish food. But it’s fun to
watch them fight the sharks or, ultimately, lose the battle. Either way, there
are indeed thrills and chills here, it’s just that we’ve seen them before.
—08/07/99
My first taste of The Blair Witch Project came from Newsweek,
who ran a combined article on American Pie and Blair Witch. But
where American Pie was standard Hollywood fare – better than much that
comes out of Hollywood, but Hollywood fluff nonetheless – The Blair Witch
Project is one of the most frightening, elemental, and powerful films I have
ever seen.
First, I must provide the essential premise of the film, as it has
been shown all over the media:
In 1994, three student filmmakers vanished in the woods while
filming a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.
Those words adorn the very beginning of the film. From there on,
everything you see will be tainted by the realization that there can (probably)
be no happing ending to this footage.
Once the film begins, we are entirely within the world of the
camera, much more tightly than we ever have been before. This is raw footage,
(seemingly) uncut, with a definite sense of someone on the other side of it. Due
to its format, The Blair Witch Project has a sense of realism almost
unheard of in modern cinema.
Back when movies were first made, black-and-white classics like Frankenstein
and Dracula, and especially the very early Nosferatu, were scary
to its audiences because cinema was so new. To those audiences, there was a
realism in seeing people moving on a screen, of seeing an unearthly white
vampire moving toward someone, that is unheard of in our postmodern, jaded
society. That’s why Blair Witch works; we all make films on our own
little videocameras, and they look just like what we see in Blair Witch.
So when the weird noises start in the woods, when the strange voodoo objects
appear, the effect is much more real than – oh, I don’t know, say a
computer-generated cherub opening its eyes and looking at you in the
multi-million dollar special effects extravaganza The Haunting, which
opened last week?
While Blair Witch does ultimately become very scary, it is
mostly a ‘creepy’ scary, a sense of something being not quite right, of
impossible things actually occurring. The sense of realism is so strong that
innately, we find it hard to believe that these strange sounds and voodoo
objects are really there; such things don’t actually happen in real life.
And of course, in the back of our mind we know it’s simply a fictional motion
picture; regardless, the creepiness remains. There are also scary parts in the
tried and true tradition of modern horror, but they’re wisely spread out through
the film.
One caveat: as the above implies, if you’re going in hoping for
another Scream, don’t even bother going. Much of the film is devoted
simply to the teens being lost in the woods, and in fact, The Blair Witch
Project is almost as effective a dramatic film about being lost in the woods
as it is a horror film. Also, these are real kids out in the woods without a
script, and half the time they’re a lot funnier than their scripted blockbuster
counterparts.
The film will, of course, become a cult classic, sharing a place
with such preeminent horror as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original Friday
the 13th, and The Evil Dead. As of right now (the weekend of July
30th), Blair Witch – which was bought by its distributor for $1 million
– has been making more per theater per day than it cost to make
($30,000-$60,000, I’m not sure of the exact figure). For a film shot entire with a standard video camera and a Super 8, I
would definitely label that an accomplishment.
In any event, The Blair Witch Project is a very frightening
film, but the key element is imagination. An unimaginative person would not be
scared of strange noises in the night; they’d assume it was an animal, or some
other easily explainable occurrence. But, to quote a character Thomas Harris’s
novel Red Dragon: ‘Fear comes with imagination, it’s the penalty, it’s
the price of imagination.’ When it comes to a film like The Blair Witch
Project, this is one of the truest statements ever made.
—08/07/99