|
|
| |
|
|
Michael Bay's Island getaway; Richard Linklater's underachieving Bears
BY PETER KEOUGH
|
THE ISLAND
Directed by Michael Bay | Written by Caspian Tredwell-Owen + Alex Kurtzman + Roberto Orci | With Ewan McGregor + Scarlett Johansson + Djimon Hounsou + Sean Bean + Steve Buscemi + Michael Clarke Duncan | A DreamWorks release | 127 minutes | At the Regal Clarks Pond 8.
BAD NEWS BEARS (RATING: TWO STARS)
Directed by Richard Linklater | Written by Bill Lancaster + Glenn Ficarra + John Requa | With Billy Bob Thornton + Marcia Gay Harden + Greg Kinnear + Sammi Kraft + Jeff Davies | A Paramount Pictures release | 111 minutes | At the Regal Falmouth 10 and the Regal Clarks Pond 8.
|
|
|
|
Bearing up
Or, Richard Linklater bares all fNEW YORK CITY — Bad News Bears might be the least original film Richard Linklater has made, but it's also the most personal. Slacker (1991), Before Sunrise (1995), and Waking Life (2001) established him as a leading independent director. School of Rock (2003) proved that he could hold his own with the studios. He’s even done a sequel: Before Sunset (2004), the long-distance follow-up to Before Sunrise. But a remake? "It was like, this movie needed me in some way," he explains. "Like I am the guy who would make this not suck as bad as it could. You gotta feel you’re the only guy who can do the movie, even though you’re not. You still feel like ‘I’m the guy.’ " The reason? Partly an affinity for the films of Michael Winner, who directed the original Bad News Bears in 1976. ("A Hal Ashby type of the ’70s. It’s like, ‘Wow, that’s a studio film?’ ") Partly the film’s slacker attitude. "The crappy attitude of the loser pissed-off kid always pressured to win. Kids don’t win. You spend most of your childhood losing rather than winning. The good thing about this remake, I tell people, is, if this was an original screenplay idea, it wouldn’t get made. There’s no way any Hollywood studio would touch this. As a family movie, a kid movie. It’s just too . . . wrong, too rough. But since it was a successful earlier film, it kind of gets you off the hook. It allows us to get this film made." Mostly, though, Linklater feels connected to this movie because it lets him reconcile himself with his secret past. "I was a baseball player and I always wanted to make a baseball movie. I went to college on a baseball scholarship and my career ended overnight. I had a heart condition and I couldn’t really run anymore. You know, one day you’re batting third in the line-up, playing in left field, knocking in runs. The next day, you’re focusing on drama classes." In retrospect, perhaps the heart problem was a blessing. Had Linklater persevered in baseball, maybe now he’d be coaching a Little League team instead of making a film about someone who is. "My career would be over," the 44-year-old director acknowledges. "I’m like Cal Ripken’s age, you know, sort of long-retired. Although Clemens is still going. I played against him in high school." Roger Clemens? "I won’t get into it. But he’s a lot better now, he was good in high school, but he got really good in college. I have the utmost respect for him. I don’t know if I could have hit major-league pitching. But I could hit the long ball. And so this movie put together two distinct parts of my life. There was my baseball life, I mean, I was always writing, and creative and stuff, but I wanted to be a pro baseball player who actually was a writer too. And when that was over, I never picked up a sports page or a bat; just film was my life. It’s only recently I’ve been saying that I played baseball. No one knew. It wasn’t on my résumé for 10 years, because it just didn’t seem like me. The me who was making movies wasn’t the me who was that. But now I’ve reconciled them. This movie has been a lot of fun, even cathartic in bringing my two worlds together, so ultimately it’s a really personal film." What other secrets has Linklater not told us about? His next film will be an animated adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly. Was he a drug-addicted undercover cop? "It’s really personal, maybe the most personal, uh, it’s about an undercover narcotics agent who’s hooked on this drug that is causing a brain split in him, but he’s assigned to observe himself and his friends. It’s a future world where there’s a lot of surveillance, a lot of stuff like Big Brother. I shot it like a year ago; we’re animating now. This is a little more film-like than Waking Life, more designed, much more advanced. It’s not all hand-held. It’s like a real film and it looks like a graphic novel. It’s really cool. But it’s really our future, it’s very contemporary." _PK RELATED LINKS Bad News Bears' official Web site Gerald Perry talks with Richard Linklater about Before Sunset and Before Sunrise Chris Fujiwara reviews Before Sunset. Michael becomes a political filmmaker like . . . Jean-Luc? NEW YORK CITY — Who’d have thought that the most political movie of the summer might be a Michael Bay thriller? Certainly not the filmmaker himself. In fact, it looked for a while as if Bay might not even make it to the junket for the film. He was nowhere to be seen during the morning interviews. Informed of his absence, Walter F. Parkes, the producer of The Island and co-head of DreamWorks, looked nonplussed. "He likes to party," Parkes admitted. Nonetheless, Bay slouched into an afternoon press conference paired with Scarlett Johansson, who, her blond hair brushed back in a ’60s bob, might have been Anna Karina circa Alphaville next to the ashen, unshaven Bay’s Jean-Luc Godard. But there, as Johansson discussed the rigors of the film’s action sequences, the resemblance perhaps ended. "Of course, when you’re reading a script and it says, ‘slides down a drainpipe,’ you don’t think that’s actually going to happen until 7.30 in the morning on the day when Mr. Michael Bay is just going, ‘So you just slide down this drainpipe, and then we’ll do it again from another angle, and again from another angle.’ Some of the days we had were really long, and I’d kind of look at Michael and be like, ‘I can’t do it again!’ But he was very sensitive about it and would go, ‘Just ONE more, just ONE more, I know you can do it!’, and I’d be like, ‘Fine . . . ’ And then I almost lost an eye, that was fun. Did you see the playback of it? It was so close." "I did," Bay replied. "When they’re riding the wasp [a flying, futuristic motorcycle] through the building . . . " "And we weren’t harnessed into this wasp!" "And Ewan’s cojones," Bay added. "When the ramp went off, it was a little harder than we intended . . . " "He was in agony!" "It threw Scarlett forward, and she hit her head on the wasp." "It was very close to my eye." "But she’s tough, I gotta tell you. She was hanging on that giant ‘R,’ from a wire, about 30 feet up . . . " "It was just to defy you." Back to the politics. Doesn’t The Island, like Alphaville, touch on contemporary issues? Stem-cell research, abortion, class politics? From his expression, Bay seemed to see the box office plummeting. "What I intended was to have the audience think, would you, if you could, have a clone? If there were a facility like this, I’m sure there are enough selfish people who would. It’s a universal theme in this movie that we all want to live longer, but how far would you go? It’s not to comment on stem-cell research; it’s amazing how they feel they can cure so many diseases. This is just taking cloning in a sci-fi way to the ninth degree. It’s just to open discussion, that’s it." How about class conflict? The bad guys in the film are all rich, ruthless, and selfish. The good guys are poor and downtrodden. The clones themselves are all duplicates of people who seem mostly wealthy, entitled, and white. "The concept was, the facility is going to start off really expensive, and maybe it’ll come down later, just like with DVD recorders, it’ll drop in price. I did have a lot of foreigners there, that old Japanese man, looks like he runs Tokyo bank. I had lots of tall people, like a basketball player. I put a rapper in there." "There’s Michael [Clarke Duncan, in a truncated role as a clone]," Johansson chimed in. "He was a football player. We think these are the people who could afford this $5 million policy. I thought it was what it was supposed to be. "I don’t believe movies deliver messages. I don’t pick movies for the message. I think when you leave the theater, you question, how far would I go to test fate? But when I come out of a film I’ve paid $10 to see, I want to be entertained. You want to say, ‘That was cool, I had a lot of fun, that was an entertaining experience for me.’ Films that always have to deliver the big picture, it’s so boring, especially if they’re offensively preachy." _PK RELATED LINKS The Island's official Web site The official Web site of Michael Bay
|
Long before cloning became the controversial cutting edge of science, it provided the template for Hollywood success: high concept, adaptations, remakes, sequels. Originality? Too great a risk. Independent filmmakers like Richard Linklater struggle to adapt to the system, sometimes subverting it, more often compromising themselves. Generic technicians like Michael Bay thrive. This weekend the pair release contending blockbusters. Bay offers a film about cloning, Linklater a clone of a film. Given Linklater’s past success with kids in School of Rock and Bay’s track record of mind-numbing success (his last two are Bad Boys II and Pearl Harbor), Bad News Bears would seem the likely winner for originality, if not at the box office. Maybe some exchange of creative genes took place, however, because News is old whereas The Island seems like a brave new movie. Not that it’s original. Within 10 minutes, a half-dozen other movies come to mind as Bay plunges into a nightmare involving a boat, Scarlett Johansson in white, watery doom, and a rapid-fire collage of barely recognizable images. Then Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) wakes up, but to what? A Spartan but tasteful cell in a monochromatic beehive of childlike people in white jump suits. The décor and the costumes evoke Metropolis, The Time Machine, 2001, and Sleeper. The enigmatic, sardonic tone recalls the Terry Gilliam of Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. And when the story gets under way, so do other comparisons: THX-38, Logan’s Run, The Matrix . . . For Lincoln Six Echo, though, it’s all new. As played by McGregor, he’s nearly a blank slate, but with an edge of indignant curiosity. He’s been told that he and his fellows are survivors of a worldwide disaster, rescued, rehabilitated, and sheltered from the poisoned world outside in this secure if regimented community. What they live for now is to be chosen by "The Lottery" to be sent to "The Island," where all their desires will be fulfilled. In short, he’s received the same indoctrination as most of us: the world is a fallen place, but if we behave, we’ll go to Heaven. Meanwhile, Lincoln has a few questions, like who launders the jump suits and what is the meaning of life? Merrick (Sean Bean), the dour but kindly head of the community, invites him into his office, which is decorated with monochromatic abstracts by Picasso and Franz Klein. (In a Michael Bay world, such tastes are sinister.) He reassures troubled Lincoln and inserts tiny mechanical spiders — leftovers from Minority Report? — into his eyes. Lincoln’s uneasiness nonetheless intensifies. He’s drawn to Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson), so much so that he’s close to committing "proximity." He also has an illicit liaison with McCord (Steve Buscemi), a guy in greasy overalls he meets up with in the grimy pipe work behind the facility’s sleek façade. McCord offers a different kind of friendship — something is unsaid behind his mouthing of the familiar platitudes. He also offers snorts from his hip flask of whiskey. Inevitably, through various little clues and coincidences, Lincoln is led to traumatic revelations, primal scenes disclosing the truth about his birth and destiny. He and Jordan flee to the world outside, which turns out to be a Michael Bay movie with car chases and astounding action sequences. This time, though, the action has significance and wit as well as volume, wreckage, and body counts. One sequence involving a giant capital "R" is especially surreal and absurdist, and all the stunts have a satisfying physical logic, if not probability. I was a little disappointed, however, by the climactic scene in which a giant, illusion-producing holographic device must be destroyed. Too close to representing the Dream Factory from which Bay earns his fortune, I guess. The real surprise is Bay’s subtle, subversive subtext — not just old chestnuts like appearance-and-reality but down-to-earth issues like abortion and stem-cell research. (The film could be seen to support arguments on both sides of these issues — which may be the point.) True, there’s Bay’s old bugbear of characterization — in particular the unlikely conversion of certain characters from good guys to bad guys. But these inconsistencies almost make sense if you see the film as a parable about class conflict. Lincoln and Jordan (the names are not arbitrary) aren’t just alienated from the products of their labor, they are the products. Those who recognize their kinship with them win a different kind of lottery. Given his eerie and seductive Waking Life, Richard Linklater’s version of The Island would have been something to see. Not so his Bad News Bears. What went wrong? Linklater had converted the likely treacle of School of Rock into a primer of how a " kids " movie should be made. Here he had the proven material of the 1976 original, a near-perfect blend of cynicism and sentiment, wholesomeness and scatology. He had Billy Bob Thornton, whose Bad Santa will live on as one of the most hilarious of cinema misanthropes. He even had the two guys who wrote Bad Santa, a screenplay proudly defying standards of decency and good taste. That might be the problem: the difference between this film and the one from three decades ago is political correctness. Now we can have fart jokes, but as for humor that might violate anyone’s sense of outrage, good luck. Such political correctness, is in fact, confronted head on by the film’s premise. The Bears are a team of misfits established by Liz Whitewood (Marcia Gay Harden), an attorney, community activist, and single mother who sees no reason why underachieving children should not be allowed to compete in the local Little League. (A cut to the surly kid in a wheelchair is bound to get a laugh.) To coach these losers she hires Morris Buttermaker (Thornton), a former minor-league pitcher (he once struck out Mike Schmidt) and current drunk and exterminator who could use the extra cash. Here’s Thornton at his best, bouncing batting practice pitches off his hapless players while rambling incoherently. It almost makes you forget Walter Matthau’s rumpled, dyspeptic asshole with a heart of gold. Too bad Linklater and company couldn’t forget him. Instead, they adhere slavishly to the original, the only differences being what has been omitted (kids smoking cigarettes, drinking, uttering the " n " word) to fit the finicky times. Or diluted, like the character of Bullock, the coach of the hated Yankees. Played by Greg Kinnear, he’s no match for the brooding menace and lingering machismo of Vic Morrow in the 1976 version. When Morrow went out to the mound to comment on his son’s pitching, he didn’t just knock the boy’s hat off, he knocked him down. No such menace or edge lies behind this version. Its best player, Thornton, has his nihilistic glee replaced by an ersatz version of Matthau’s fuddy-duddiness. Every pitch is predictable, and they’re all hanging curves. Like all Linklater’s films, Bad News Bears is a paean to underachievers; here, though, the biggest underachiever is Linklater himself.
|
