The Wolfman Bites

::: Benicio growls at a sucky script! :::



I admit that headline & the follow up are not fresh or creative, but neither is this film. This abysmal attempt to revive the classic, hairy movie monster falls flat. Trust me, this movie sucks. Shame on Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, & the money men behind this big budget waste. Stand in a corner, you bastards! I wish I could tell you faithful readers of Skynet that this film had some merit, but it was just so bad I'd be lying to you otherwise.

Do not see this film.

What pains me most in advising you of this involves the same sad reluctance I had when I ripped into Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds a few months ago (remember?). I care not a whit about public adoration of a film, as I rarely agree with what is popular anyway. I realize Inglorious Basterds will net Quentin some Oscar gold soon enough. That film, for all its faults, was superbly cast and well acted, especially in the performance of that film’s Nazi bad guy, Col. Handa (Oscar-nominated Christoph Waltz). But even that did not save the film from being poor in my estimation. Buzz is for bees, not quality cinema, and while it may sell tickets on opening weekend, it does not equal quality after the fact. Both of these films, in my advised opinion, fell far short of where I hoped and prayed they would land after launching.

The only horror genre which I value more than lycanthrope movies is undead flicks. This makes George Romero my hero for his zombie films. This also makes both Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), as well as Zach Snyder (Dawn of the Dead 2004), default studs of the realm. These guys knew how to remake greatness. They envisioned it through a proper lens, and they did the homage thing to a point, but they did not mess with the concept, story, or essence of the ideal. They nourished the fanbase but also gave them something new. Ditto Danny Boyle and Alex Garland for their 28 Days/Weeks Later efforts. It is not easy to impress me when it comes to flesh-eaters, but these cats reached the summit of blood splatter, gore, and evisceration. HUZZAH!

So back to my pan-comparison of Tarantino’s Basterds and Johnston’s Wolfman … in both of these films, I saw potential greatness of production value and prior excellence by the director and production team. I saw respected actors. I imagined great plots worthy of reset in a modern context. Nazis and werewolves are both great antagonists, and with lycanthropes, there is even more to be done than with anti-semitic Teutons. Nazis choose to be evil and murderous. Wolfmen like Lon Chaney, Jr (The Wolf Man 1941) and David Naughton (American Werewolf in London 1981) become hapless victims of the evil curse of Magyarian deviltry. Would that a mere wolf bite justified Adolf’s twisted mindset. I can feel for a wolfman, but I cannot feel for a nazi. Anyway, enough about that paper-hanging jackass and his boot-shined cronies …

In The Wolfman (title role of Lawrence Talbot-Wolfman by Benicio Del Toro, tri-produced by him as well, and directed by Joe Johnston with Andrew Kevin Walker on the scribe), a bloody mess is made and lasts 102 minutes. These men took the weighty tale of the Talbot family, and its associated horror, ancient curses, and 19th Century Victorian fears … and somehow bungled it with plenty of money and ample resources. This is a bigger choke than any in recent film memory. If this were golf, it would be a mulligan. Thereby, The Wolfman absolutely shanks the Titleist into the deep, dark, Victorian woods.

OK . . . golf metaphor over…


::: Lon Chaney, Jr. in the original 1941 The Wolf Man :::


I was impressed enough at the pedigree of the production team to hope for better treatment of the clawed terror. Del Toro has long had that smoldering quality in his performances that he looked ready to play brooding and tormented this time out. Johnston directed kiddie fare like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Jumanji, so he initially seemed unprepared for the required adult-content presentation here. Yet, that is no excuse. George Waggner lacked the chops, too, but he scored big his first time out. Who the hell was that guy, you may ask? I’ll tell you. George Waggner directed Lon Chaney, Jr. to world fame as the hairy one in 1941’s classic The Wolf Man. Waggner had previously worked as a studio western director, and later in similar, albeit loftier work, with John Wayne. Years later he did thriller episodic TV and some God-awful 60s nonsense with Buddy Ebsen. But this STILL did not stop the guy from making a first rate wolfman movie when he got the chance. He was a professional, and when handed a great story, he delivered the required product. The man become beast is sympathetic. In that original, you cared about Talbot, an innocent shmoe who meets the wrong wolf at the worst possible time. He dreads his fate, and the world watched that man be destroyed despite not wanting to harm the innocent.

Keep in mind as well, that the wolfman concept was an original script – no novel existed to base the story to literature. Dracula and Frankenstein came from literary circles, but this story was legend, and it netted movie gold. A pro director puts aside his ego, or he should, to make a great film via a great story. My point here is that you have no excuse in today’s mondo movie budget world to screw up a story this basic. It’s not like some silly new movie concept designed to trick the audience. Everybody knows this story already. That is why Shakespeare was so cool. The audience knew his ending already, so he just told the story well. In the audience, you get to see how the tragic figure melts down. That is the catharsis. We die a bit as the ordinary guy effs it all up, just like we so often do.

So what do these jackasses do? They put Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, and Hugo Weaving into a vehicle as bitchen and high-speed as a Porsche, a Jaguar, a Lamborghini … and off the assembly line comes a pink & chartreuse jalopy with no brakes and a busted transmission. They give us a Kia! If I were the borderline psychotic type, this movie would set me on a spree to target the filmmakers.

It is beyond ludicrous to see a great franchise bludgeoned into unrecognizable roadkill as they did this time. And frankly, it pisses me off. The $11 I forked over annoys me to a certain extent, but the movie ITSELF plain PISSES me off. That is far worse. It will be rented, checked out on Netflix, and even . . . perish the thought . . . purchased at Wal-Mart. Judas priest!

Do not see this film.

I am going to say three nice things about this one before I forget. Here they are: great cinematography by Shelly Johnson (he is a guy, btw) amazing set decoration by John Bush (Topsy-Turvy, The End of the Affair, plus Emma for TV in 1996), and quality production design by Rick Heinrichs (Pirates of the Caribbean, Pts 2 and 3, and the Lemony Snicket movie). This last one is for my girlfriend. She acts and directs plays, plus she is also a first rate set designer, too. She remarked that this film had that going for it, but she likewise hated this movie. So take those plaudits for what they are worth, because they are not worth much. The proverbial stopped clock is correct twice daily, and while great cinematography and design are lovely to gaze upon, I pay for stories, and stories are driven by great scripts and acted by committed performers.


::: The Wolfman's cast attends the script's funeral ::: -->


So, the primary blame therefore goes to the writers. The supposed-script in question here was penned primarily by Walker, who earlier flashed actual talent with Sleepy Hollow and Se7en. I liked those movies very much, not for superb scripts per se, but for scripts which matched their genre and actors who respected the content. Those films were not a tour-de-force of scriptwriting superbity, but the stories they weaved were indeed excellent, and together with excellent lighting and cinematography, Walker’s writing crafted a good story with fine actors. Notice I left the acting until last – well, so did Del Toro and Hopkins. Benicio had money in this, so he could be seen trying to act out this doggy script, but nowhere did Hopkins show up, not even for a second. He acted like he just woke up, could not wait for lunch, or just ate too big of one, and was glad for the payday, which better have been sizeable for him to lower his rep after this buswreck. A second writer was credited as well, named David Self. He worked on Road to Perdition, which I loved also. I could browbeat his dumbass to boot, but my knuckles are plenty bloody from beating hell out Walker, and he should know better all by himself. If Walker crows about this movie in anyway, I swear I will wish him into the cornfield until I die.



Like my earlier panning of Inglorious Basterds, I will not cite dialogue or specific examples here. Neither Walker nor Self deserve enough credit to see me type their dreck anywhere. If there were worthy examples of creativity in this effort, I would gladly share. Sadly, only a few throwaway lines were present, and every one of those lines was spoken by a supporting actor, if not a one-line extra. Only Hugo Weaving held his own, in the thankless role of the Scotland Yard detective on the case. He plays Abberline, the cop who sought Jack the Ripper, and who now hopes to catch the hirsute beastie tearing Blackmoor’s residents into bloody portions on the marshy property of the Talbot clan. Weaving brings some whimsy to a scene in the local tavern, and in one or two other brief exchanges, but that is all.

Do not see this film.

Here is when I knew this movie blew – within fifteen minutes, not one scene involved more than a single, spoken, uncut exchange of longer than 15 seconds. The same applied at the half hour mark, and the same for 45 minutes. It was just after this point that Hopkins and Del Toro actually ACTED in an uncut take for all of . . . 40 some odd seconds. I nearly dropped my Aquafina. Two acting Oscars for these two fine actors and the writer and director cannot give the audience a prolonged scene between them that allows the audience to chew on the themes and characters (yes, that pun was intended). That alone was inexcuseable. But by film’s end, the entire film had MAYBE three such scenes. It was like Michael Bay directed while being possessed by a ferret who just downed a double espresso. I have seen longer attention spans on toddlers. Quick cuts and piecemeal scenes like that are typical of a script with no substance. If the subject matter is action-based or adult content, no one expects more than that, but this is supposed to be a horror movie about characters, and the cast demands development. Yet . . . nothing!

When I look back at that original 1941 film, I smile wistfully. I recall that for Chaney to define himself beyond his father’s rep in that film was to rebuild a flagging career, and he did so. Before that film, Chaney was a character actor. After that, he was a star. I realize the average person is not that into the film perhaps, so I write that for you to know. Chaney’s dad, Lon Chaney Sr., was a bigger star in his day than ten Brad Pitt’s today. So for Lon Jr. to find his star vehicle that late in his career, it is a great story, and apt when you consider the character he brought to life in Talbot’s cursed man-wolf.

So today, we have Benicio Del Toro. He has no such anchor on his name, as he built a career gradually from the mid 90s out of smaller films and gradually made the mega-millions as his stock rose. He earned more in his life before 30 than Chaney did his entire life, and that is in adjusted dollars. But now, his career is clearly on the ebb. The last thing he did worth a damn was Traffic and that was ten years ago. In Hollywood terms, and that is like dog years, Benicio has not actually had a hit since … well, since Lon Chaney’s kid put on spirit gum and a crap load of doghair and growled. So pardon me if I have no mercy on Benicio. He has talent, but he is pissing it away in efforts like this. He produced this movie, so why did he not demand a better script? Where are his artistic gonads to allow this film to be screened in this insipid form? It is really disgusting . . .

So stop ruining my horror icons, Hollywood. And as for Johnston and Walker . . . and you, too, Benicio … suck it, boyos.

And don’t EVER come near my zombies or this will come to blows.

Finski

Much Ado About Quentin

Let me say first that I love movies. I think that next to literature, all things film are glorious, minus the business aspect anyway. Whether it is the acting, screenwriting, cinematography, and/or editing related part of the creation, as much as anything in the arts, moving pictures touch me the most and influence my perceptions of culture. Baseball was my first love as a boy, and the Dodgers remain my passion, but the game has changed with corporate ownership, PEDs, and merchandising that borders on propaganda mind control. Movies changed, too, but for whatever reason, I considered them partially prostituted anyway, so seeing baseball become a low-grade hooker in the last 30 years has been more jarring to my false innocence.

I used to go to films so often I knew the theater workers better than my siblings. In my 20s, I'd go to the Syufy Cinedome Theaters in Orange twice or three times a week for the matinee - $2.50 before 2 PM. I had a night job so it was great for a film lover. I once anticipated film openings as if I were some sort of underground version of Walter Winchell. All the ships at sea would one day know of my feelings about Red Sonja or whether or not I enjoyed Pale Rider more than Silverado. It was pre-internet, and I was a dork just a few years removed from playing D&D.

All of this is preface to my anti-review of the latest film by Quentin Tarantino (writer-director), Inglourious Basterds, because I have no nice way of expressing what I am about to do, so I thought I'd begin wistfully. I wish I could have said this right off because it pains me to say it, but I told you that stuff about myself because typing this actually hurts.

Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is not a good film. The plot is too ambitious, the characters varied and overmany. 2/3 of the lines are spoken in a language other than English and 90% of those are subtitled. At film's end I turned to my buddy Dave and his wife Lora and said, "Disappointed . . ." And I still am.

I have read no other reviews of this film, and have no idea what the pros think. Perhaps I'm the only one who feels this way. I can say this much, and that is that I went into that theater to see a Tarantino war movie in the vein of Don Siegel, Samuel Fuller, Sergio Leone, and Sam Peckinpah. I wanted a bloodfest of dead Nazis and I wanted to see Jews get payback on white power bastards. I have no qualms with films that are homages, ripoffs, or borrowed techniques of other directors. I actually like that style of film. I expect Quentin to wax Antonioni as he drag-pans his camera here and there. I expect anachronisms aplenty because Quentin cares nothing for such purist drivel. He makes movies that pop and the devil take the hindmost.

So when I say this movie was not good, I mean it and I say it with head lowered. Professional film critics get free admission, press releases, and access to interviews I do not get. But I spent $10.50 of my own teacher's pay greenbacks to see this, and I wish now that I had waited until my friend could pirate me a decent copy next week. Even then, I would have been disappointed.

In my limited but extremely wisened and layered "watched-400-movies-on-VHS-in-25 years-and-another-200-in-theaters" over the same span experiences, this film is Tarantino's worst effort as a director, and as a writer. I usually like Tarantino films, and three of my all-time top 25 are Quentin's babies, but this was just not a good one. UGH!

Was that clear enough? I hope so.

So here goes a few reasons why. You can stop reading now if you like. I know how it goes. If you like a filmmaker, and if you haven't seen his latest effort, and some dickhead pans it, you start to think, "What does your dumbass know anyway?" Who are you, David freaking Lean? Go back to community theater and try out for 'Pippin' again, reject!" I understand that feeling. And you may be correct, except to say, in my defense, I'm too tall to play a hunchback anyway . . .

So allow me to explain the ways that I see Tarantino's latest mondo-actionfest effort as a poor product. There are no spoilers, as this is less a blow-by-blow than it is a post-mortem. I watched this less than 16 hours ago and I'm still bummed out at how it failed to deliver the goods.

What's Wrong With "Inglourious Basterds"

The Dialogue - Normally sharp and irregular simultaneously, this Tarantino script dragged like a dog with no legs. His script lacked the flow of Pulp Fiction or From Dusk Till Dawn, arguably the writer's two finest hours for melding multiple characters into a nice combo of funny, profane, profound, and uneven humanity. Other than the lead character of Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), most of the cast was stuck staring languidly across the lens, speaking lines that had little sizzle whatsoever. Yes, there were good moments, but this film lasted an obtuse two-and-half hours, and I assessed its best lines as totalling perhaps 15 minutes of screen time. Younger viewers will doubtless quote lines like "I want my scalps" or "Business is a-Boomin'!" as if these cleverly black whimsies rained from the film's heavens - but they did not. There were times when I wished the characters would either die off quickly or lose their ability to speak, but please GOD stop blurting out your nonsensical, non-realistic blather. I do not blame the actors, as most did the best they could. I blame Quentin. It was his script, or as he called it recently, "my masterpiece." Sorry, but it is not and you've done far, far better, Mr. T.

The Gore Factor - When you make stuff go splat like QT does, your fans hope for the usual. Gimme an ear slice, gimme a point-blank execution, gimme vampires and zombies popping like rotten cantaloupes on hot pavement. Yeah, GORE! This film's problem is the predictability of the splatter. At no point was I genuinely surprised, and no situational irony of any kind arose to make me think, "Dear God, he isn't going to show THAT, is he?" Oh sure, there's ample scalp-taking, knife-carving, bat-swinging and gunshot-riddled Nazis, and good guys, bad guys, and even bar girls get dead inventively enough in this flick. But it was too rote, too expected, and too, too "Meh!"

Allow me to return to my earlier baseball framework here, so bear with me, please. QT's movie gore has become what Barry Bond's last 200 home runs were in his steroid phase. Both could do their thing well before they started cheating. Both saw others steal their technique and gain fame as well. Both reacted to that imitation by going for a compromise in their approach to their art. Bonds and Tarantino act as if MORE is better because of excess alone, not because of the quality of the process itself. If I lost some of you non-baseball fans, I apologize. It is just that Tarantino need not show off his flair any more, yet he keeps fetishistically going for some sort of goreapalooza in his movies. I'm over it and this is the worst I've seen from him. Be new and better, not just more graphic for its own sake. In a zombie film like Planet Terror, it makes a certain measure of sense, but I've seen Nazi movies like Peckinpah's Cross of Iron and Siegel's Hell Is for Heroes and those films were just as horrifying in their violence without the cheap jolts that QT uses in this mess. Neither of Don's or Sam's iconic WWII tales required a bat-braining scene like this film employs. Oddly enough, Inglourious Basterds was graphic but ridiculous that way, and I consider Gaspar Noés' ferocious bludgeoning scene (in 2002's Irréversible) the standard of what Tarantino tried to do here but failed to achieve. Gaspar wanted to horrify you in that film - SUCCESS, Gaspar ~ Epic Fail, Quentin! Finally, neither Peckinpah nor Siegel of old needed nor wanted the viewer of their film to laugh at what was not, in truth, evil and disgusting. They let war's horrors be horrifying, not farcical.

The Cutesy Comments - Suffice it to say that Inglourious Basterds has a hatful of these Tarantino quoteables. I'll give him his due. I laughed a few times, but a few means five or six times in this case. In the theater in which I watched the film, the laughs were common early but tapered off to a scattered few by the halfway point and were pretty much nil by the last reel. If you remove the Aldo Raine character from this film, and if Brad Pitt were NOT cast in this key role, I assure you that those same lines that got laughs and snickers would have netted almost no such reaction. Tarantino stunt casted with Pitt, an actor I don't laud often but who is a talented performer regardless of how paparazzi-ed out his persona has become. The guy can act, and he saves this film from being a total loss. Several other actors try hard and do what they can, but because half of this film is subtitled from French and German into English, I must say that I would have preferred they left the titles out. If you are reading them it is tough to appreciate the silent film stylings that most of the unknown actors in this film were usuing to affect their characters. The fact that most of the cast faces a fatal mission to go undercover into Nazi-occupied France and they die trying to fight the evils of fascism makes you WANT to watch their faces, but you cannot, because you are reading subtitles.

Stunt Casting - Putting Mike Myers into a British officer's role for seven minutes, or giving Rod Taylor a few lines to play a muted version of Winston Churchill, or letting us hear Samuel Jackson do mindless voice-overs or a disembodied Harvey Keitel speak over a telephone at film's end does not mean a movie is good. It sure does not make the script better. Wasting fine German actors like Christoph Waltz (as Nazi Hans "The Hawk" Landa), Diane Kruger (as Bridget von Hammersmark, a boiled down hybrid of Marlene Dietrich & Hedy Lamarr, real life European actresses who doubled as spies for the Allies), and Sylvester Groth (a brilliantly creepy Joseph Goebbels) in a film this bad makes me wonder why Tarantino bothers to place his old pals in cameo roles anymore. It is as if he wants us all to know how these stars were in his former films. Well, Quentin, we get it, and these stars you drop into your project like so many rats in a maze, merely to speak a line and leave . . . they detract from where the focus ought have been - on your script and on those actors who tried to form the core of the action. They deserved better, and sadly, they could not save your film.

So, that's a mess more verbiage than I might have opted for here, but if you read my District 9 review a week or so ago, you know I'm a wordy bastard. I swear I meant to keep this shorter, but fear not. You can read this in less than 15 minutes, and know that in that same amount of time, Tarantino managed to write an equal amount of dialogue into a 153-minute massacre of French, German, English, and Brooklynese.

But I guess if you kill Nazis by the bushel and make carnage seem cool, an albatross script and a macro-managed plotline can be forgiven. To me, it cannot be. I'll re-watch Reservoir Dogs this week and try to remember how good QT used to be. I hope he rebounds next time, because I want him to be great again.

Finski