Tag Archives: Harvey Weinstein

Hollywood’s Villainy Problem

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Hollywood has always struggled with diarrhea of the mouth. It can’t help but spew forth when it gets excited. Trailers give away the entire movie. Sequels dwarf originals. A comic-book film works? Clone away! A star is trending on social media? Put star in everything. Image result for adam driver

One of its golden rules, however, used to be: Never give away the ending. Remember when people were shocked that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense? Or that the heroine in The Crying Game was actually the hero? Oh yeah, spoiler warning. Secrets were easier to keep before the internet, but, even now, studios request that reviewers not post spoilers on social media outlets.

But leave it to Tinseltown to burn the tinsel down. Last week, Rian Johnson, the director of the whodunit  Knives Out, recently sat down for an interview with Vanity Fair to break down a scene from the film. During it, he revealed that Apple, a sponsor of the film, doesn’t allow “bad guys” to have an Iphone on screen. As part of Apple’s guidelines, the company confirmed, third parties can only show their products “in the best light” and “in a manner or context that reflects favorably” on the company.Image result for knives out

Well, there goes your whodunnit.

Corporations have always flexed Darwinian dominance on celluloid. Ever seen James Bond in a smashed-to-hell Aston Martin? Or Tom Cruise  in a dented BMW? Or a hero whose Ferrari isn’t spit-polish clean? Exclusive car manufacturers have their own usage guideline, the underpinning one being: “Don’t make our cars look like shit.”Image result for james bond in car

But that didn’t affect a movie’s plot.  We already know James Bond isn’t going to die in any spy installment. That the man’s wheels are as polished as the man is no great stretch.

But Apple’s villainy clause underscores Hollywood’s villainy problem. The Usual Suspects, for instance, would not exist, or require Keiser Soze to use a Tracfone or some other cheap 7-Eleven burner. And you know Kaiser don’t Android. Cell phones played a key role in The Departed. Would  the studio have insisted on those old brick handsets?Image result for keiser soze

While the Apple disclosure isn’t going to send shock waves through the industry (Netflix and Amazon do that), it does underscore a larger problem the film industry faces in portraying bad guys.

Time was, studios would appoint villains the nationalities of any countries we saw on the battlefield. Native Americans. Asians. Germans.

In the 70’s, Hollywood took a bad-guy-bead on nationalities. Black and Hispanic actors, in particular, were easy, disenfranchised foible fodder. Clint Eastwood built his legend on challenging minorities to bullet counts.Image result for dirty harry and criminal

In today’s online, social justice frontier, however, there are fewer choices of folks to vilify. The Hunt, a violent human prey film from Blumhouse pictures, was delayed for months because protesters saw it as a political screed against political correctness. It was quietly re-edited and will be released next week.Image result for the hunt

So who’s left? Pederasts and serial killers are usually a safe bet — just be careful the color and gender you choose for the antagonist. Aliens are a pretty safe bet, as long as you make it clear we’re talking about space aliens.

I’m sure Hollywood will think of something. Who knows? Sometimes, they’re even in your own backyard. Image result for harvey weinstein

 

All the News That Fits a Title Sequence

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It must be Oscar time, because suddenly Hollywood’s credulity is in question. Again.

This is an old refrain the final months leading up to the Academy Awards, which are annually inundated with biopics and historical epics, all vying for statuettes. This year’s favorite accuracy arguments concern popes and the press. Clint Eastwood was pilloried for his attack on the media in his drama Richard Jewell, and Netflix’s Oscar hopeful The Two Popes earned the ridicule of some papal purists who considered the Fernando Meirelles film inaccurate and dumbed-down for commercial audience. (Full disclosure, I also railed about Jewell, though for personal reasons).Image result for the two popes

To my fellow film critics, I ask: Shouldn’t we be as diligent “truth squadding” movies the other eight months of the year? Either that, or accept Oscar fare as pure entertainment, as we do with, say, summer movies? To hold a film to a higher threshold of accuracy because of its release date is not only unfair to directors; it’s inaccurate for readers and viewers.

The truth is, in 15 years of movie reporting and reviewing, I have never interviewed a feature film director much concerned with getting the facts straight in any “based on a true story” (BOTS) film. Documentary film directors are a different lot (particularly Werner Herzog), though make no mistake: They edit footage with the same intention as their feature film counterparts — to tell a compelling story.Image result for werner herzog volcano

But from Chris Nolan (Dunkirk) to Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas) to Eastwood, details have always taken a backseat to drama. Without exception, directors promoting their BOTS films have told me that their jobs aren’t to teach history (if anything, studios consider that box office death). Instead, they say, their job is to accurately capture the tableau of emotions that spring from that history (directors love the word zeitgeist). Even Tom Hanks, who played the titular role in the much-maligned Somali pirate film Captain Phillips, told me he was drawn to the role because it captured the strains of living life at sea, not the subtleties.Image result for captain phillips

That “capture-the-essence” approach isn’t likely to change anytime soon, particularly given the success of two films this weekend at the Golden Globes, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In both cases, the directors  took on based-on-true stories, but with approaches starkly different from competing filmmakers.

In 1917, the fictional story of two World War I soldiers racing to prevent a suicide march, director Sam Mendes ended the movie with a postscript that said the film was dedicated to his grandfather, WWI vet Alfred Hubert Mendes, who told his family that story innumerable times.

Quentin Tarantino, who directed Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, went even further. He loves to wreak havoc with historical accounts. In Inglorious Basterds, he ends the film with the heroes killing Hitler in an eruption of bullets and flames.

He did something similar in Hollywood, taking the real-life horror of the Charles Manson slayings and giving viewers the visceral ending they would have preferred (and get in most other straight-up features).

Their strategy worked like a Swiss watch. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association showered both movies in awards. 1917 won Golden Globe for best drama and director, while Hollywood took best comedy or musical and best screenplay for Tarantino. Popes, The Irishman and Jewell were all but forgotten.Image result for 1917 movie

Even holding a BOTS film’s feet to the fact-fire seems silly. What effective entertainment, on some level, isn’t based on a truth? Just as all music draws from notes that have been played before, so too are the reductive themes in film. Star Wars is essentially a father-son story. Casablanca is about love during wartime. You can’t copyright feelings.

Hollywood executives even go out of their way to point out a film’s factual failings — as long as it’s from another studio. Harvey Weinstein was renown for knocking the veracity of other studios’ BOTS movies. I can’t count how many publicists whispered under the breath when I asked about a competing biopic or historical portrait, ‘I hear it’s not a bad movie. Too bad it’s not true.’

So if Hollywood isn’t going to change its ways, perhaps we need to. Both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketma, for example, are rife with inaccuracies in portrayals of their subjects, Freddie Mercury and Elton John, respectively. But Rhapsody, which came out during Oscar season 2018, drew much more rigorous examination than Rocketman, released this summer. To scrutinize one but not the other implies one has accuracy issues, becoming in itself a journalistic inaccuracy. Image result for bohemian rhapsody rocketman

Perhaps the answer is to treat BOTS films the way we treat political rallies, which are eerily similar: both take liberties with facts to win favor with a largely dim-witted crowd that won’t bother to look up facts on their own.

So the job falls to us to watch “true stories” with a boulder-sized grain of salt and the assumption they will require some fact-checking. Who knows? It may even improve our film reviews, a sidebar comparing fact to fiction.

It’s time we decide whether we’re going to treat these films as reporters or audience members. We  need to regard BOTS films for what they really are: not a kiddie pool of facts, but a diving board into deeper knowledge. Hollywood films are just the divining rods.

Movie critics already have fallen out of the fact-finding business. Maybe it’s time we work some muscle memory.