I know nobody had very high hopes for this one, but I kind of figured it would be okay just because it’s James Mangold, director of WALK THE LINE. Not a visionary by any stretch of the imagination, and not to brag but I am a visionary so my imagination stretches really far. But he’s usually a decent director and not known for this type of thing, so it seemed potentially interesting I thought. Incorrectly.

The action is actually not bad, ’90s studio style, no post-action bullshit. In fact there are a couple parts I really dug: Cruise doing a spectacular motorcycle freeway overpass jump and mid-air dismount landing on the hood of Diaz’s car, but shown entirely from her perspective. Also the continuous shot of a group of goons walking together and the guy in front doesn’t notice the guys behind him being lassoed and yanked away one-by-one.

Also there’s a gimmick where she gets drugged and then she kind of fades in and out with foggy visions of various huge action scenes that he’s carrying her through, until she finally comes to on an uncharted island. I thought that was a pretty clever idea the first of the three times they did it.

The problem is the movie lost me early on with these characters. Cruise I think is just supposed to be playing his MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE guy, but in a comedy. I guess what makes it a comedy is that he’s used to being drawn into high speed chases, shootouts, deceits and triple crosses, getting framed, set up and back-stabbed in a fight over a powerful alternative energy device, but Diaz is just supposed to be a regular girl trying to get to her sister’s wedding. So she’s supposed to sit in for us when she gets mixed up in all this and doesn’t know if this guy is joking, crazy, lying or for real. She doesn’t know how to shoot an uzi, screams when stuff explodes, etc. Ha ha. She’s like us.

Except we’re not idiots, in my opinion. She’s just so dumb from the beginning, and it doesn’t seem to me like it’s ROMY AND MICHELE type funny-dumb, just badly written type annoying-dumb. There’s too many parts early on where people don’t act like humans in order for the story to happen. Like, let’s say you are a human woman, and you’re flirting with this stranger on a plane, and you go to the bathroom and when you come back you don’t notice that there’s been a huge brawl and the guy has killed everybody else on the plane. Okay, fine, we’re human, we make mistakes. Then the guy starts explaining what happened, and says that he shot the pilot. You assume he’s joking – fine. But as a human, and especially as a human on an airplane in post 9-11 America, don’t you feel a little bit nervous about standing in the middle of a plane laughing while a man you just met loudly “jokes” about shooting the pilot? Yes, you do, because you are a human.

Cameron Diaz in this movie is not a human, so she laughs like it’s a funny joke and thinks nothing of it.

Another example is when her still-in-love-with-her ex (Marc Blucas) comes to her apartment because he thinks she might have been on the plane that just crashed. He’s worried enough that he comes to the home of his ex–girlfriend to check on her, but not worried enough that he stays past 2 or 3 knocks or is visibly relieved in any way when it turns out that she is not dead.

These are dumb little things but too many of these dumb little things kept me from identifying with these characters and situations, killing the comedy and making the movie tedious. Cruise is fine, but he’s playing a superhuman character, he can do anything and never seems to be in danger. He’s kind of somewhat mildly funny in the way he keeps assuring her that everything is fine, especially when he’s hanging upside down and swinging like a pendulum. But it would be much better if she was more convincing as an everywoman.

So the filmatists are utterly failing to ground this Day character, meanwhile they’re busy trying to make her awesome. In THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY I think it was a joke that Diaz was so much a man’s fantasy of the ideal woman that she loves nothing more than sitting around watching sports on TV. But I don’t think it’s a joke here that she’s an expert on restoring vintage sports cars. Then they have to explain this and why she can throw a punch so they have her claim “My dad wanted a boy.” It’s like the old “I learned to shoot guns by playing video games” joke with a light sprinkling of sexism.

I’m probly being a little hard on this movie. I’ve seen worse, and I made it through in one sitting. But it’s just such a waste of time for everybody involved in making and watching it. There’s only one writer credited (Patrick O’Neill, some guy who was in a several John Cusack movies) but it turns out this was one of those things that got started down one road and took too many lefts and ended up getting so lost that it forgot which road it was on, where it was headed and how to put on its pants.

Check out this explanation from IMDb trivia:

Patrick O’Neill originally wrote a serious action thriller, starring Gene Hackman and ‘Justin Long’ (I), with the title “All New Enemies.” When that fell through, Joe Roth’s Revolution Studios retooled it as “Trouble Man,” a romantic action comedy starring Chris Tucker and Eva Mendes. After that fell apart, the script was revised and given a new title, “Wichita.” That script caught the attention of Adam Sandler, who later passed. Gerard Butler considered it, but passed to do The Bounty Hunter (2010) instead. Cameron Diaz became attached after reading a rewrite by Scott Frank. Diaz told her friend and Vanilla Sky (2001) co-star Tom Cruise that he should co-star with her. Cruise took the role. After 7 other writers doctored up the script (Dana Fox, Laeta Kalogridis, Ted Griffin, Nicholas Griffin, Timothy Dowling, Simon Kinberg, and director James Mangold), and Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman gave it a new title early in production, the project finally became the action comedy “Knight and Day.”

So you watch it wondering why exactly they thought this was a movie worth making, and I’m not sure any of those people listed above would be able to remember. It’s like an animal that started out as a dog and got groomed so much it turned into a bird at the end. Of course it’s not gonna know how to fly.

Why bother to put so much time and money into developing something that just gets developed and developed and developed until there are no edges on it at all? There’s nothing left, it’s just okay, mediocre, set on medium heat, sitting in the middle of the road, not knowing why it’s called “Knight and Day,” but I guess call the co-chairman and see if he can remember.

Late in THE BOX somebody asks, “Can I be forgiven?” The character is talking about a lapse in moral judgment that caused harm to others. But you kind of hope it’s also writer/director Richard Kelly talking about his last two movies, SOUTHLAND TALES and DOMINO. Both are more like drugged out brainstorming sessions than actual finished movies – a couple funny ideas wrapped in a thousand, uh… other ideas, then chewed up and spit onto the screen with no second thought given to concepts like planning, timing, restraint, coherence or entertainment value. To me those are two of the most tedious, headscratchingly ill-conceived disasters of modern film, and the motherfucker did them in a row. With only one pretty good movie under his belt to hang his hat on*.

No. Not if this is an era of accountability. You can’t be forgiven.

So it’s in the spirit of forgiveness and Christian redemption that I say I thought THE BOX was pretty good. His best, for what that’s worth.

Based on a premise from a Richard ‘I Am Legend’ Matheson story (also made into a TWILIGHT ZONE episode in the ’80s) it’s a slow-boil ’70s-set thriller about what happens when a disfigured Frank Langella shows up at your house, gives you a box with a button on it and tells you you have 24 hours to decide whether or not to press the button, which will cause the death of a stranger but net you 1 million in clean, tax free cash. You know how it is. The family is literature professor Cameron Diaz, engineer James Marsden and their son.

They go through various stages of reacting – thinking it’s a prank, something connected to a sister’s wedding, taking apart the box to see how it works, running tests, investigating the man’s background. As the hours pass it becomes more and more clear that something weird is going on here. Situations change to make them need the money more. People around them do strange things, give them reason to be paranoid. Somebody gives them a photo of Langella before the scarring – he looks like the man in the moon. The NSA is spying, Marsden isn’t going to Mars, people’s noses keep bleeding, Diaz has a fucked up foot with missing toes that gives her sympathy for Langella. This is not your run of the mill box-that-kills-somebody-and-gives-you-a-million-dollars situation is what I’m telling you.

I like that the movie treats all this dead serious. No clowning around and laffs. It’s an ominous tone with an old school classical score. It sort of has that feeling I’ve talked about before, that confident air that it can lay everything out and you don’t know where the fuck it’s going but you trust that it does. The thing is, Kelly isn’t a master filmatist, he hasn’t earned that trust. In fact quite the opposite. So that created extra tension for me. The further it got the more it worried me, because I really was enjoying it but I could see the writing on the walls. It seemed likely that a story that by all means ought to be headed somewhere might really just end in scattershot pseudo-Lynchian weirdness. When it introduced the levitating rectangular water portals I figured it was doomed.

But you know what, it pretty much comes together. Not a great ending, but good enough to work. It pretty much explains what was going on. What was going on is preposterous, but so is a box that you push to kill somebody and get a million dollars, so it’s only fair. Nobody was misled that there was gonna be a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this, just one that makes sense in the world that has been presented to us.

Acting-wise Diaz is the weak link. Shouldn’t have made her do that accent. But she has some good moments. The highlight is definitely Langella. He has such a great voice, deep and elegant. He was a good hunky Dracula and at this age he’s a good Willy Wonka from Hell. He doesn’t even need that chunk digitally taken out of his face to be creepy. There are many good touches. Overall this seems like the work of a responsible adult who knows what he’s doing.

You see that Kelly? Was that so hard? You can do all your look-at-how-crazy-this is showoffy business, but if you just ground it a little it works better. Put it in a recognizable world, have a recognizable central plot there, a set of characters who have something they’re trying to do. Pretty simple.

This proves that with discipline Kelly can direct pretty well – he maintains tension at a slow pace, gets some good atmosphere, squeezes creepiness out of simple things like a man looking through a window or a kid smiling at you at a rehearsal dinner. Not bad. You don’t have to push a button that lets you make the movie you want but also causes emotional and artistic harm to everyone who watches it. Making movies doesn’t have to be a deal with the devil.

-

*Wait – hang your hat under your belt? That’s two different articles of clothing. what? I need to work on some of these metaphors.

[ratings]

Everything is fucking remakes now, huh? The above took place in Seattle, Washington, where as we speak the Dreamworks company is hard at work on an unneccesary remake of (the) RING. History has not been kind to american remakes of foreign pictures. Even when you get the same guy to remake it – like with THE VANISHING or NIGHTWATCH – the movie will piss everybody off and the director will be forgotten forever.

Well I didn’t like VANILLA SKY as much as OPEN YOUR EYES (which, by the way, I didn’t like as much as THESIS) but it is surprisingly good for an americanization of a spanish picture. The director is Cameron Crowe, who always does the pictures about what music people listen to when they’re falling in love. It shows improvement in the filmatism in my opinion. It is a very good use of sound and music, and cinematographing. There are some subtle touches here and there and more emotion in the character that Cameron Diaz plays, the woman Tom Cruise casually dates who goes nuts on him and tries to kill him. In OPEN YOUR EYES she was more of a nut, here she makes a pretty good point about even if you make it clear you’re not serious about this woman, when you fuck her you gotta realize it means something to her. Come on, don’t be an asshole Tom Cruise.

In some ways this is an unusual character for Tom Cruise to play. Mainly because he wears a halloween mask. But I guess he did that in EYES WIDE SHUT too so, maybe that’s his new thing. But in other ways it’s the same old shit from him. He plays a rich prick who drives a ferrari and owns Maxim magazine. This guy is such a rich prick that he has a hologram of John Coltrane to entertain at his parties. I mean jesus tom, how can you do this to John Coltrane? At least do it to Louis Armstrong or somebody. I don’t know what’s worse, that he’s a minstrel for Tom Cruise, or that he’s a space age minstrel for Tom Cruise. I didn’t love supreme that. But anyway.

So of course he runs into some difficulties. He gets his face completely mauled in a car accident, and then it’s a trippy psychological thriller and what not (like OPEN YOUR EYES) with some LOST HIGHWAY type identity confusion (like OPEN YOUR EYES). And the point is, can this rich piece of shit redeem himself?

(Why are movies so interested in saving the souls of rich guys anyway? From Citizen Kane to Ebenezer Scrooge to Nic Cage in the fucking Family Man. Everybody wants to save the soul of a rich guy. Is it because we wish we were the rich guy, and don’t want to see ourselves in movies? Or is it because we think real rich guys don’t have souls, and we fantasize about changing that? I really don’t know.)

Penelope Cruz reprises her role as the love interest, but here they cutified her. She wears funny clothes and says wacky, unexpected things and she puts her hand in the virtual John Coltrane and giggles. But most of all she says little wise things out of the blue so that Tom Cruise can repeat them at the end when he realizes how truly wise and significant they are. Camerone Crowe must have real different taste in gals than I do, because the women he paints as godesses are always kinda annoying to me. I realize that the relationship with Cameron Diaz almost ended in a murder-suicide, but I liked her kinda spunk better than Penelope’s. I woulda stuck that one out, gave it a second chance.

Jason Lee is pretty good. FINALLY, a chance to really stretch out, in a breakthrough role as the funny best friend.

The story twists and turns and ends up pretty much the same place OPEN YOUR EYES did, but with about ten minutes of classic american style explaining. Don’t worry, we won’t let you go home not sure what happened.

But what makes it all interesting to me is that as the movie starts to explain itself, it starts unraveling this theme of pop icons infusing themselves into reality. Images from movies and album covers recreating themselves in your life and your dreams. Your dreams basing themselves on pop art based on the dreams of the people who made them. This is an appropriate theme for an uneccessary remake.

Overall not bad. Definitely see OPEN YOUR EYES, then maybe see VANILLA SKY if you’re still interested. Unless you’re just doing it to find out what the title means. It doesn’t mean shit. sorry.

[ratings]

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