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Once upon a time
in America, at least up until the dawn of the 1950s, more
than two-thirds of the population went to their local movie
theater on average once a week, Hollywood studios made virtually
all their money from this audience, and, consequently, they
made films with a narrative structure that this vast movie-going
public could follow. There was a beginning, middle and end,
rising and falling action, a climax and denouement. Times
are somewhat different now. Less than 10% of the population
goes to movie theaters in an average week, and studios make
most of their money not from theatrical releases but from
the sale of ancillary rights for video, television and toys,
forms less demanding of a story with a narrative structure.
Just how far movies have separated
themselves from storytelling is evident in Sony's animated
film "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within." It is directed by
Hironobu Sakaguchi, who previously directed 10 installments
of the computer game "Final Fantasy." Set in 2065, in New
York City and in a crater where the Caspian Sea is now, the
film concerns a small group of human heroes, played by computer-
generated images, who battle a larger group of aliens, played
by computer-generated images. The human team is led by the
beautiful and brilliant Dr. Aki Ross (voiced by Ming-Na),
who, to rid her body of an alien invader, has to find something
called the Eighth Spirit. In lieu of any sort of story, there
are contiguous action bumps, with Dr. Ross and company zapping
the aliens with epileptic flashes of light and noise for the
benefit of humankind.
These computer-generated simulacra
are amazingly lifelike in their movements (though the drivel
they speak does not even rival the wisdom found in fortune
cookies). The animators' true-to-life creations rate high
on the Wow scale, but to marvel over their technical wizardry
-- or, for that matter, to try to criticize it -- misses the
point. "Final Fantasy," although packaged as a movie, is in
reality a clever 106-minute promo for Sony's PlayStation II
games. Its purpose is to sell an audience of kids on a game
machine through which they, like Dr. Ross, can deal with their
fantasies and other adolescent impulses by deploying a cast
of human-looking simulacra.
Last year, Sony made almost 37% of
its total profits -- out of an earnings base that included
CDs, consumer electronics, insurance, movies and television
programming -- from a single product, the PlayStation. Its
movies, on the other hand, generate little, if any, corporate
profits from their theatrical releases. So why not use movies
as a platform, just as fashion designers use runways, to promote
and publicize their PlayStation games?
'Legally Blonde'
For a slightly older audience "Legally
Blonde" will be more rewarding. At least it has the semblance
of a story, adapted by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith
from Amanda Brown's novel and directed by Robert Luketic.
Its premise is that a beautiful blonde, who looks, walks and
talks like a Barbie doll, is clever, but, because of her looks,
no one takes her seriously. In a Beverly Hills variation on
Judy Holliday's Billie Dawn in "Born Yesterday," Elle Woods,
brilliantly played by Reese Witherspoon, is assumed to be
mindless by everyone she knows or meets, including her sorority
sisters, parents, mall salespeople and even her boyfriend.
When her boyfriend jilts her for a brainier classmate he gets
to know at Harvard Law School, Elle decides enough is enough.
She applies to Harvard and aces the entrance exams. Although
the students and professors in Cambridge also jump to the
assumption that Elle is a Beverly Hills ditz, she proves them
wrong -- by using the skills she acquired in beauty spas and
shopping malls -- and becomes the valedictorian of her law-school
class. The moral of the tale is that knowledge of hair styling
and designer shoes can be more important than logic when it
comes to career advancement. Now that is a fantasy that can
"play" in Hollywood even without a PlayStation. It is also
a fantasy that will offend nobody. All sex, nudity, violence,
logical distinctions and other adult distractions have been
assiduously airbrushed out. Nevertheless, thanks to Ms. Witherspoon's
artful portrayal of a winning, if beachless, Gidget, I found
"Legally Blonde" very enjoyable.
'Bully'
Larry Clark's "Bully" takes a darker
view of youth. Rather than winding up as valedictorians at
law school, its Gidgets become murderers. When the film begins,
these well-tanned and scantily dressed young people aimlessly
cruise the beaches, shopping malls and video-game salons of
Hollywood, Fla. Their only pursuits are surfing, drugs, video-games,
unprotected sex and sadomasochism. The thread Mr. Clark follows
in his examination of this vacuous culture is a brutal murder
that actually took place in Hollywood in 1993.
The bully, Bobby (Nick Stahl), punches
around his muscle-bound best friend, Marty (Brad Renfro),
and forces Marty's girlfriend, Lisa (Rachel Miner), and her
friend, Ali (Bijou Phillips), to have sex with him. Afterwards,
Lisa, Ali and Marty decide to murder Bobby. They recruit others,
people with no motive at all, into the scheme. None of this
makes much sense, but presumably neither did the real-life
murder. Mr. Clark's interest, as in his earlier film about
nihilistic adolescence, "Kids," is not in a conventional plot,
but in producing a you-are-there, no-holds-barred, warts-and-all
peek into the doings of a band of morally bankrupt teenagers.
I have no objection to Mr. Clark's
uninhibited voyeurism -- what are movies if not vehicles for
voyeurism? -- or to his sexually-explicit photography. His
avowed purpose, after all, is to show this youth culture stripped
of all its protective romantic myths. My problem is that the
lack of narrative structure deprives the film of any suspense,
and without suspense the film eventually collapses from its
own heat like a soufflé that has been in the oven just a few
minutes too long.
'The Score'
"The Score," which was directed by
Frank Oz and boasts Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro and Edward
Norton, is a welcome reunion of method actors, but hardly
an original heist thriller. The premise is that a master thief
(Mr. De Niro) has to team up with an unknown younger thief
(Mr. Norton) to pull off his last job. His motive in taking
this engagement is that, even though he already lives in luxury,
he wants to retire with even more loot. To succeed, he has
to break into a vault and steal a scepter guarded by multiple
burglar alarms and television cameras. If this sounds a mite
familiar, it may be because there have been scores of similar
deluxe capers, including Jules Dassin's classics "Rififi"
(1955) and "Topkapi" (1964).
Unfortunately, "The Score" lacks a
crucial element of the heist subgenre: ingenuity. Unlike William
Wyler's "How to Steal a Million" (1966), in which the hero
uses a clever bird-releasing ruse to fool the alarms, the
burglars in "The Score" simply use an unexplained black box
that turns off the alarms when the script calls for it. The
rest of the mechanics of the caper were too murky for me to
follow. And the starry cast's method acting doesn't clear
it up, or even make you care if the robbers succeed in enriching
themselves
VIDEO TIP: If you enjoy seeing
Robert De Niro steal, watch him do a better job of it in
Michael Mann's "Heat" (1995)
JULY
20th Review
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