THE STRANGERS - Strange Script

This was another film I was jazzed about. I'm a huge horror fan, and I'd heard great things about Bryan Bertino's script, which was a quarter-finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship competition the Academy puts on.

SPOILERS, SCHMOILERS...

I thought the setup was good -- we got two people deeply in love with each other who have a problem. He proposed and she said no, now it's awkward and they're stuck in a remote vacation home together for the weekend dealing with the consequences.

The first time one of the strangers pops up with a mask on, standing in the background, it scared everybody in the audience. But the film repeats this shot about twenty times, so it quickly loses its impact.

The story suffers from a lot of poor choices. The heroes don't seem particularly intelligent. It's a guy and a girl in a house with a gun. Verus a fat wheezy guy and two seemingly hot girls. Shotgun should win out every time. Even after the hero accidentally kills his friend, there's no reason for him to leave the safety of the closet he's in and give up his advantage.

There are other dopey decisions the hero and heroine make. At one point, they're in their car trying to back out of the driveway and escape. The bad guy's truck rams them from behind. In front of them -- a chick in a mask. What does the hero do? Get out of the car and run. How about running down the asshole in front of you? They're not stronger than a truck.

The guy and girl get into and out of the house so many times, it becomes exhausting to watch and suck all the tension out of the proceedings. There's nothing for them to do other than react in shock every time a masked weirdo shows up; so Bertino tries to give the script some business by having an old CB radio out in the garage. As soon as the heroine gets to it, the bad guys smash it. Not very interesting or unique.

And the script doesn't even have a point at the end -- we watch as the good guy and girl are brutally stabbed. If I'm going to watch someone be terrorized for an hour and a half, I at least want them to kick some ass on the bad guys at some point (the major flaw of FUNNY GAMES as well -- although that sucks worse because the heroine gets her revenge and the director "rewinds" the movie and undoes it).

Smart heroes are always more fun to watch. And how do you make them smart? By having the bad guys do intelligent things that back the heroes into a corner, then the heroes figure a way out of it. Having mundane bad guys do boring things leaves our protagonists simply reacting. And that's not satisfying dramatically.

Hell, Boy!

Benicio Del Toro is an extremely talented filmmaker (and a pretty damn good writer too -- the script for PAN'S LABYRINTH was near-brilliant). I like that you can tell one of his films -- whether it's a more personal effort like PAN'S or a big film like BLADE II -- instantly. And he has a gift for making flawed characters, whether they're a young girl with an overactive imagination, a dicky vampire hunter, or a big red demon, sympathetic.

I quite liked HELLBOY. I'd read the comics and enjoyed the first movie. Del Toro did a great job capturing Mignola's difficult tone -- pulp fiction by way of Lovecraft with a dash of humor.

So I'd been looking forward to HELLBOY II, particularly after the kick-ass trailer showing sword-wielding elves and a giant ogre with a metal hand.

SPOILERS UP IN THIS BITCH!

The film delivers on the story and visuals. Hellboy has to stop an evil elf from unleashing an unstoppable mechanical army, all while fighting with his beloved, plus Abe Sapien falls for the elf's twin sister. And there are plenty of interesting action setpieces involving tiny carnivorous faeries, monster fights, and a battle with elf-robots.

Here's where the film goes off the rails a bit.

1) Hellboy's arc. Hellboy and Liz are fighting because he's a slob and doesn't listen to her. Hellboy also wants to "come out" into the public eye. So what does his story become? He outs himself, gets a little famous, people don't like him that much because he's a freak, Liz doesn't like his need to be loved by everyone, the evil elf tells him he should join the elves/freaks, and then he realizes he loves Liz. This is all a giant mess.

If Hellboy's going to be in the public eye, go with it. He becomes famous. He becomes a famewhore and a bit of a dick. That throws his team into jeopardy and eventually he realizes he loves Liz and gives up the public eye for her. In the film, it's a bit of a mish-mosh -- a lot of little bits of things that don't all go together. He never has to make a choice between the public and Liz, and that's unsatisfying the way his character need is established.

2) Hellboy being stabbed with a magic sword/spear/whatever. Hellboy is wounded. He's going to die unless the magical spearhead is taken out. So his team trundles him up to Ireland to go looking for faeries. They can't find a way into the faerie realm. And they happen to bump into a mysterious figure (the Dwarven Metalsmith/whatever) who not only can let them into faerieland, but also knows a guy who can take out the arrowhead. This is doubly convenient for our heroes.

Del Toro tries to gloss over this lazy writing by having the guy who can remove the arrowhead be Death (with a capital "D"). And Death warns Liz that if she saves Hellboy, he'll destroy the world. But that's a false choice. We know she loves him and is going to save him (both because of her nature and because the movie breaks if she says "No, let him die.").

3) Abe's romance. It's nice to see Abe bonding with the elf princess. And we get why they like each other -- they're almost the same person, intuitive palm-reading included. But that's about all we get for their relationship. And once it's established that elf-chick and elf-dude share a sympathetic nervous system, it's pretty clear she's going to have to die so that he can go down too. This was a missed opportunity.

4) The Evil Elf. What's his motivation? This is delivered almost entirely in dialogue/exposition, and it feels a little weak. He hates the humans for trashing the world and forgetting the old gods. Well, show us that -- show us faeries living in ruin, show us more than one shot of E.E. twirling his sword in the subway. SHOW US why he feels this way, then we don't need him to say it. And we'll understand why he kills his own father (and about forty other dudes) in order to wreak havoc on the humans.

So the movie's a lot of fun, and it looks really cool. You get to see a demon fight an ogre and elves and elf-robots. And that's worth the price of admission.

But all the emotion falls a litle flat -- both for Hellboy and Abe (the real emotional center of the movie). And the entire Third Act feels like a bit of a cheat, due to the heroes doing nothing other than bumping into someone who can get them into faerietown and save Hellboy's life.

THE DARK KNIGHT - Too Long to Be Perfect

I was really excited for THE DARK KNIGHT.  The first Chris Nolan Batman film was amazing -- a great mix of casting (except for Katie Holmes), theme, story, and action.  They really nailed the tortured nature of the Batman mythos and how he's not quite a regular superhero and just short of being a vigilante.

SPOILERS SMACKING YOU UPSIDE THE HEAD BELOW...

DK has its brilliant moments.  All of the Joker stuff is amazing.  Jonah (Jonathan) Nolan's script makes several great choices -- not giving him a backstory because he's just a random psychopath, introducing him in the midst of a great, twisty 70s-style heist scene, and unleashing him as an agent of chaos determined to plague the Batman and watch Gotham City burn.  Christian Bale is great as always, and the casting is even better this time around, ditching Katie Holmes for the far-superior Maggie Gyllenhall, and adding in Aaron Eckhart and Eric Roberts to the mix.

Where the film veers off the rails of greatness is mainly that it's too damn long and the length -- and all the plot the filmmakers cram into the last hour -- make the film suffer from a split personality (fitting in a way because of Harvey Dent, but frustrating dramatically).  The film has a natural endpoint -- in the hospital, when Harvey Dent is lying there scarred and the Joker comes in and hands him a gun and tells him to go cause chaos.  That's your Luke Skywalker with his robot hand at the end of EMPIRE STRIKES back.  The film should fade out there, and then the entire next film is about Harvey Dent as Two-Face -- his rise to villainy and his eventual death (and possible redemption).  Instead, Nolan and company cram an entire film's worth of plot into 45 minutes or an hour, giving short shrift to Harvey and his story.

And that's not the only thing that happens at the end of the movie -- we also get the Joker and his ferryboat bomb plot -- the one scene in the movie that rang really false for me.  The Joker's not out to prove everyone's crazy like him; he's just a nutjob out to shake things up.  And the moment when Tim "Tiny" Lister grabs the bomb and throws it overboard is just plain cheesy.

The other action scene that feels tonally off is when the Joker tells everyone to kill the dorky accountant who knows Batman's identity or he'll blow up a hospital.  As the film proves shortly thereafter with the disappointing ferryboat scene, regular people aren't killers.  So it doesn't really work to see construction workers and cops ready to gun down a guy in cold blood because their mothers are having hernia operations.

Thematically, the movie gets a little heavy handed with all the talk about Harvey Dent being the shining face of Gotham and its white knight.  I got it the first ten times I heard it, I didn't need the other 75.  And he can't be such a white knight if he's willing to shoot a man in the head to find out where his girlfriend is being kept.

With a little focus and editorial strictness, THE DARK KNIGHT could have been the best superhero film of all time.  As it is, it's a solid B.

THE INCREDIBLE HULK - Much Better Than the Last One

Being a comic geek, I eagerly anticipated the last HULK outing.  Eric Bana, Ang Lee -- what could go wrong?  The answer was the Hulk battling a radioactive poodle and a giant electric Nick Nolte.

This time, I was a little more cautious, and waited to see the new Hulk for a bit.  But the film gets it mostly right.

SPOILERS, beeotch!

Zak Penn's script does several smart things.  

One, it gives us Bruce Banner's transformation from regular guy to superpowered green monster in a credits/dream sequence.  This gets across a lot of information that most of the world already knows after the comics, TV show, and last movie quickly, without bogging the film down with an origin story.  

Second, it puts Bruce on the run in a favela in Brazil, a visually inventive and interesting choice that shows us the lengths he'll go to to spare the woman he loves, how his daily life is impacted by his curse, and allows some jiu-jitsu training from the Gracies.  There's loads of good drama the special forces team sent to capture him and the local toughs out to beat him up, and a great chase scene.  

Finally, the film gives the Hulk a worthy adversary, in the form of Tim Roth's power-obsessed soldier who becomes a monster in order to fight the Hulk.  Since the Hulk is insanely strong and is shown swatting away bullets and explosives and blowing up tanks and military gunships, he needs another superpowered bad guy to fight in order to provide a good obstacle.  

Finally, the film gives Bruce Banner a believable character arc.  He goes from trying to control the Hulk outbreaks to trying to rid himself of them to finally accepting that he needs to use his power to stop an even worse threat.  This is a true hero's journey.

The film misses the boat in two key areas.  One, pacing.  The first hour or so of the film is great, setting up where Bruce is and that the military is after him.  After he returns to the US, the film drags a little because the story gets muddled.  There's no clear throughline.  Bruce wants to find the mysterious "Mr. Blue" he's been IMing with and get help, but the film has him go to Betty's university, stay overnight with her, and a few other things, as well as bouncing around to William Hurt's General and Tim Roth.  It's not quite clear what Bruce is doing or why until he shows up at Mr. Blue's college.  This could have easily been solved by adding in a couple of lines of dialogue where Bruce explains to Betty why he's back -- "I need to get the data and get it to Mr. Blue at such-and-such college."

Second, Tim Roth's Emil Blonsky character.  Other than a single line of exposition -- "I wish I could take what I knew now and put it in my body ten years ago." -- we don't know why Blonsky is obsessed with power to the extent that he'd take two experimental serums to get it and risk turning himself into a monster.  Because his motivation is expressed solely through one line of dialogue, it feels a little weak.  It would have been better to set Blonsky up as the ultimate badass, a guy who never failed on a mission, even under impossible odds.  When he meets the Hulk, it's his first failure, and he chalks it up to being too old and too slow.  Then he could give his line of dialogue about sticking his mind in his younger body.  This is a simple change that would have been easy to address in existing scenes, and it would have set him up as a guy who can't stand to fail and is willing to do whatever it takes -- including dosing himself with experimental drugs -- to succeed.  

And the Tony Stark cameo was cute, even if it was basically the exact same epilogue as the one in IRON MAN.

HANCOCK - Where's the villain?

I was really looking forward to HANCOCK.  I'd read Vincent Ngo's spec script a few years ago and was impressed by its dark tone and modern take on the superhero story.  The final movie is decent, but suffers from a few major problems, all story-related.

SPOILERS BELOW, HOMIE

The tone of the film shifts significantly, veering from flat-out comedy to a bit of romance to more straight action.  

The film has a split personality, being half the story of a PR guy out to change the world, and half the story of an asshole superhero who faces his past.  Focusing the film on either one of these stories would have resulted in a better movie.  Instead, we get less of both.

There's no villain in the movie.  The film tries to introduce one, turning a dopey, easily defeated bad guy introduced about an hour into the action into the recurring antagonist.  But this fails for several reasons.  One, we've seen Hancock defeat him with little effort.  Actually, not just defeat him, but chop his hand off like the guy was a total bitch.  Second, we know Hancock is invulnerable.  The film attempts to introduce some lame rules about how his invulnerability fails when he's near his "opposite," but this comes about ten minutes before the bad guy fight, so it feels weak and tacked-on.  And basically just an excuse to make it seem like the bad guy might kill Hancock when we know he has no chance otherwise.  And finally, the villain is such a pussy, Jason Bateman, an ordinary guy, is able to defeat him.  And not just defeat him but chop his other hand off.  A superhero needs a powerful villain in order to provide a challenge; if he can't be another Superman in terms of strength and power, he needs to have the smarts of a Lex Luthor; if he's not as combat-trained as Batman, he needs the craziness of a Joker.  Not some schmo who keeps getting amputated every time he's in a fight.

Finally, the movie severely punks out on Hancock's character.  In the spec script, Hancock is a giant asshole.  Like the movie, the script tells the story of an immortal with amnesia who learns he's not the last of his kind.  He has an opposite, a female whom he loves and keeps coming into contact with throughout history.  The big reveal in the script, which is far better than what they do in the film, is that Hancock keeps fucking her over throughout history because he's such a dick.  And he realizes this and goes away from Mary, leaving her to be happy with her new family.

Now that's a character arc -- an asshole who gives up the woman he loves because he knows she won't be happy with him.  That's reminiscent of CASABLANCE, arguably the most romantic movie of all time.  HANCOCK, which was presumably watered-down once Will Smith signed onboard, instead gives us a dick with amnesia.  But the amnesia's not his fault, because a crowd beat him half to death due to his interracial dating in 1920s Miami.  He just can't be with his soulmate because they make each other human and vulnerable, so he has to go away to make them both safe.  So he's not really a dick at all, just an angry guy who didn't know why he was angry.  While this may be a little more commercial, it's far less satisfying dramatically.

And the whole we-make-each-other-mortal business is extremely weak, coming as it does almost entirely through exposition and at the end of the movie.  If this is what Will Smith and Peter Berg wanted to do, at least set it up in the first or second act.  Have Will Smith suddenly have a nosebleed or skin his knees when Mary's around.  Maybe a bullet grazes him and he wonders why he's suddenly feeling pain and getting wounded.  If this was worked into the story, when it's revealed that the two of them make each other mortal, this would be a payoff rather than something that comes out of nowhere.

Overall, Hancock gets a B-.  It's still enjoyable and there are some funny moments.  But it could've been much better.

On an unrelated note, I can't wait until DARK KNIGHT comes out.  I saw it four months ago (and signed an NDA), so I've been dying to talk about it.  I will say there's some amazing stuff in the film, but that's all I feel comfortable saying until next Friday.

INDIANA JONES - 18 Years for This?

I'm a huge Indiana Jones fan.  The first movie is one of the great action films of all time, and the rest, for all their flaws, are eminently enjoyable.  Which is why the last movie was so disappointing.  It was a popcorn movie, but I expected better from everyone involved, especially since it was so long between movies.  If we're going to wait 18 years and go out with one more movie, this was it?

I'm not even going to nitpick some of the goofy stuff, like the gophers.  I'll let them go.   The script had several major problems.

SPOILERS HO!!!!

One, the setup is clunky.  Indy's in trouble.  There are Russians after alien corpses.  Indy escapes the Russkies.  The government fires him from his university job.  He goes looking for the skull with his son.  He's not sure if he should return it where he found it or bring it to the lost city.  Blah blah blah.  Jeez.  That's confusing.  How about this instead?

You open with the current setpieces (Area 51 and the atomic bomb test) as Indy evades the Russians.  But the baddies grab the crystal skull from Area 51.  The FBI comes to Indy -- there are 13 crystal skulls.  The Russians have 12 -- if they get the last one, they get the power of the skulls; it's like the Ark on crack.  They'd take over the world.  Indy says -- so you need my help?  They say yeah, point us where the last one is, we're gonna go get it.  Without you.  You're too old.  And then Indy hooks up with Indy, Jr. and goes looking for the final skull to save Professor So-and-So and the world.  And has difficulty pulling off the tasks by himself because he is too old.  He has to rely on Mutt (really, that's what you named him?) to help him out.  It's a much cleaner setup, and it establishes a problem for Indy -- how can he save the world when he's getting on in years?  It also intertwines a minor arc for Mutt -- how he goes from being a rebellious punk to a hero taking direction from Indiana Jones.  You have some conflict built in -- Indy and Mutt butting heads over giving/taking orders, Mutt and Indy's whole relationship changing when they realize they're father and son, etc.  All of which is better than what played out onscreen.

Other major flaws include the double-agenting of Ray Winstone, which matters not at all in the film except for which Jeep he happens to be riding in; the fact that Karen Allen has nothing to do other than to get all misty-eyed when Indy pays attention to her; and that nobody even bothered to give an arc to Indy, Jr.   So there's no emotional journey for anyone in the film, just chasing around and some action setpieces leading up to a murkily defined climax.

Throw in the most thoroughly unimpressive bad guy in the series and the fact that the ending manages to rip off both RAIDERS (in that Indy does nothing and the bad guy's head catches on fire; although in RAIDERS, it was at least novel and Indy proved he knew what he was doing by averting his eyes) and LAST CRUSADE (in that Ray Winstone greedily grabs for gold while a pyramid falls on his head) and you've got a movie that's instantly forgettable.

Obviously Steven Spielberg can direct, and David Koepp has writtten some of the best genre films out there, including SPIDER-MAN.  So it's hard to understand why we got the movie we did.

Here's hoping Indy 5 is better.

WALL-E vs. KUNG-FU PANDA - Battle to the Death!

Saw both of these today.  And both are good movies.  KFP is the more enjoyable of the two, but WALL-E is the better movie, because of Pixar's continued emphasis on story.

---MORE SPOILERS, HOMIES---

SPOILER SPACE

---END SPOILER SPACE---

KFP tells the story of Po, a panda who dreams of becoming a kung fu master.  All the other animals laugh at him -- he's a fat panda and can't possibly be The Dragon Warrior.  And in true kids' movie fashion, you can't judge a book by its cover and fattie turns out to be the only one who can stop an evil Leopard creature from kicking all kinds of ass.

Jack Black turns out not to be annoying, the martial arts action is inventive and highly visual, and the representation of the animal styles of kung fu with their respective animals is genius.  The weakness in the script is that, apart from a brief dream sequence at the beginning that establishes Jack Black's love of kung fu (and a couple of mentions to his father), we don't get much of a sense of who Po is or what he wants.  Much is made about how the other animals, including the master, don't think Po is the hero everyone is looking for.  And Po has a little breakdown where he talks about how he wanted to learn kung fu -- even at the expense of being berated by a man who hates him -- because it was so awkard being him he'd seize any chance to improve.  But we never see that.  The film misses a golden opportunity by telling, not showing.  Late in the movie, Po tells his father that sometimes he wonders if he's his son; this is played purely for laughs -- Po is a panda and his dad is a stork or something.  Instead, the film should've showed how Po doesn't fit in anywhere.  Give him some brothers or sisters, he's the only panda there.  He causes havoc in the noodle shop, knocking things over with his clumsiness and lack of attention.  Maybe he takes kung fu classes, but he's stuck in the beginner class with children, never advancing beyond yellow belt; and the kids there make fun of him too.  That way, when the turtle tells everyone Po's the Dragon Warrior who will save them, we know he's not -- he's a goofball who gets beaten up by kids and can't even make noodles properly.  That sets up his arc even better by demonstrating he doesn't belong anywhere; when he breaks down and says this later in the film, it's been established visually and dramatically, instead of coming through pure exposition.

WALL-E on the other hand, has an amazing script.  With very little dialogue, a character is established, given a goal (to find someone to love/hold hands with/dance with), meets his potential mate, who has a mission that interferes with them being together (her directive to find and protect plant life on the dying earth), and is opposed by a series of robot enemies and other obstacles.  Visually, the movie uses several excellent cues to reinforce the action, such as the glowing lines the robots and floating couches follow, the giant versions of WALL-E, and the use of red clothing to identify "awakened" humans from the slumbering consumer blue blobs.  They even introduce the Captain character halfway through the movie and manage to give him a complete arc.  The film also pulls off the hat trick of visually/dramatically representing WALL-E's amnesia and recovery with animation tics like the way WALL-E's eyes click and the gesture of holding hands.  By the time the film wraps up, we've seen two robots fall in love, hope return to a dying planet, and watched a story about the fall and rejuvenation of a generation ship, all thematically tied into a message about saving the environment and stopping mindless consumerism.  Not bad for a cartoon.

It's still not as fun as watching a panda do kung fu while trying to eat a bowl of dumplings, though.

I WANTED a Little More Logic

MAJOR SPOILER ALERTS!!!!

-----SPOILER SPACE----

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I was really looking forward to WANTED.  I read the comics and loved them, and I read the first draft of the script Brandt & Haas did and was impressed with the way they toned the extreme violence and mayhem down into something a bit more commercial.

I was also jazzed that Timbur Bekmembatov (sp?) was directing.  I saw DAYWATCH ages ago, and was blown away by his visual style.  I couldn't wait to see what he'd do with a more linear (i.e. logical) story to anchor his amazing eye candy.

WANTED's got a decent main character and a good arc for him -- zero to hero -- even if the voiceover and coming-into-one's-own by way way of violence totally steals from FIGHT CLUB. However, the script/final film sags in three key areas.

One, pacing.  The middle of the movie drags -- between when Wesley finds out his destiny and starts training until the big conspiracy reveals himself.  I realize they need to service his whole training regimen, but this could have been helped with a little more conflict -- some additional missions for him, more reservations about who he's killing, etc.  The movie basically delivers a 45-minute montage with little tension other than when will Wesley stop getting the crap kicked out of him.

Two, the whole device of the Loom of Destiny(TM).  Basically, we're shown a loom that's supposed to randomly determine who needs to be killed to maintain balance in the universe.  This fails for a couple of reasons.  First -- that's moronic.  How would a magical loom that spells out binary code come to exist and get the power and ability to figure out who needs to be killed?  How would weavers figure out what it meant and crack the binary code (presumably a thousand years ago, there weren't many people familiar with computer languages)? Now granted, there's no logical way this could happen, but there are a few more plausible alternatives -- a specially-bred psychic or seer who figures out who needs to die, a computer program that prints out the results in plain English, etc.  Either of those off-the-top-of-my-head suggestions would work better.  Second -- the loom spits out coded messages that aren't visible to the naked eye.  They need to be interpreted.  So we have a bunch of sequences that are Morgan Freeman telling people -- oh, here's a sheet of paper with a fabric swatch, go kill this guy.  And then our hero saying -- no, Morgan Freeman had a swatch, he was supposed to die.  And Freeman retaliating with swatches of Angelina Jolie and all the other characters.  To the audience, these are sheets of paper with fabric swatches -- they mean nothing.  If you're going to stick with a Loom of Destiny(TM), at least have the loom weave in a name in the fabric or something else the audience can see.

The third is just a logic point, but a pretty large one.  If Wesley's father wanted to save him from joining The Fraternity, and he was camped out in the apartment next door, why didn't he take one of the thousand opportunities to grab Wesley BEFORE any of the havoc happened?  Or when Wesley was on his way to work after meeting Angelina Jolie for the first time?  The only reason this didn't happen on any of those occasions is that the movie would totally break; and that's not good writing to just gloss over that.  Figure it out -- give us a line of dialogue between Wesley and Terrence Stamp where Wesley asks if dad was next door all this time, why didn't he call him or stop by?  And Terrence Stamp tells him that dad knew he was being watched by The Fraternity.

Oh, and did they really need to blow up nine hundred thousand rats?  What'd the rats ever do to anybody?

Welcome

I am a screenwriter and this is my blog.  It will be mostly about movies, mostly new ones, and what I like and don't like about them from a script/writing perspective.  Occasionally, my personal life may bleed in, but I'll try to keep that to a minimum.

Screenwriting is a craft, and through analyzing what's out there, we can demand -- and get -- better movies.  There's no reason a bad movie should be made.