Sense and Sensibility

In honor of my friends who are having a Jane Austen marathon as I post this:

With unfortunate frequency I find myself frustrated at the lack of new movies. I don’t mean there aren’t new releases every week, but rather that they seem to be simple repackaging of the same stories over and over. Now, I know that there are only 36 situations in stories , but at least the story should look new at first gloss, right? Instead, I seem to see constant remakes and sequels of older movies, comic books, novels, even biographies – all of which were better the first time around. Just think of the big movies of summer 2007: Spiderman 3 (a sequel of a comic book adaptation); 28 Weeks Later (sequel); Shrek the Third (sequel of a pop culture/fairy tale mashup); Pirates of the Caribbean, At World’s End (sequel); Ocean’s Thirteen (sequel of a remake). We got another Die Hard movie, and another Harry Potter adaptation. Hairspray was a movie version of a stage production. Even the Simpsons movie was basically just a full-length version of a 22-minute regular episode. Of course, there were a couple new movies (like the brilliant Ratatouille), but adaptations and sequels seem to have taken over the big screen.

I understand the business reasoning behind such endeavors – it takes less work to get people to come to a movie they already know. I mean, Harry Potter movies practically sell themselves just by the title. Even ostensibly new movies get sold as “from the makers of . . .” and even Ratatouille got billed by its connections to prior successes with the Pixar label.

But every once in a long while a beautiful adaptation comes along, making me succumb to old stories. Surprisingly enough, three of my favorite adaptations come from Jane Austen: Clueless (an adaptation of Emma), Pride and Prejudice (not the A&E version, the Keira Knightly version, believe it or not), and the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Emma Thompson. My plea to the writers of the many many adaptations to come, if producers remain as risk-averse as they have been lately: learn from Ms. Thompson and Ang Lee, the director (yes, of Brokeback Mountain fame).

The key to a wonderful adaptation is to figure out the essence of the story without feeling burdened by it. A two hour movie is basically equivalent to a novella in length – you just aren’t going to be able to have the plot and character development of a full novel. Don’t even try. The only times it’s ever worked is the A&E Pride and Prejudice marathon and Ken Branagh’s endless uncut four-hour Hamlet. I must admit that though I love Jane Austen stories, the prose gets incredibly cumbersome, which is perhaps why adaptations of her work tend to fare relatively well. No movie is going to take twenty minutes analyzing the quality of the garden hedges, so let’s just cut that wholesale.

Second, feel free to add scenes, but only if you can understand the material enough to be seemless. Apparently, many people have written Emma Thompson or told her that they loved that she kept their favorite part of the book in the movie – a scene about the little girl Margaret being coaxed out of hiding by Elinor and Mr. Ferras pretending to not know any geography. But this scene isn’t in the book. It just fits so well that people thought it was.

Third, remember your medium! My favorite part about the movie is that it’s so clearly a movie. Ang Lee does amazing things with his shots, covering in seconds what takes pages and pages in a book. I’ve seen the movie many times, and every time give a little shudder of delight with the abrupt cutting between Elinor and Mr. Ferras when they are awkwardly talking in the stables. Those cuts make the scene hilarious in a way that even the best comedic adaptation couldn’t do on its own. Mr. Lee also uses the English landscape to set the tone of a scene in a way that would make Ms. Austen proud – one scene, for example, brilliantly uses a long interior shot allows the audience to see the wind rustling the cloaks by the door to create a sense of expectation and foreboding.

Fourth, casting casting casting. The cast in Sense and Sensibility is basically perfect. Costume dramas are hard to cast, as the horrible miscasting of Keanu Reeves in another Emma Thompson movie makes clear. You have to get people who are comfortable with language, and who make sense for the parts. If there’s every a place to typecast, this is it, and Sense and Sensibility does so with a loveable but inept Hugh Grant as Mr. Ferras (does he ever play any other part) and Alan Rickman as the kind but brooding Colonel Brandon. Kate Winslet plays young and impetuous Marianne well, which probably was less playing and more just being a nineteen-year old who lied about her age to get the part. If the original source uses physical attributes to display character traits, by all means do so in your casting here, as the rotund and ridiculous Mrs. Jennings (played by Elizabeth Spriggs) and the haughty and pointy-nosed Fanny Dashwood (Harriet Walter) exhibit.

All in all, this adapation is everything an adaptation should be – great story that’s made into an equally great movie, with a brilliant cast (some of whom got their big breaks here) and a brilliant script and brilliant director. 4 stars.

The Skulls

I went ahead and watched The Skulls, which I posted in its entirety just a couple entries ago. I had watched it a few times in high school as one of those trashy movies you put on in the background during a sleepover, so it brings back fond memories for me, even though I couldn't remember the plot at all. In fact, I could only remember two things about the movie before watching it: that at one point the main character says "Hell yes!" instead of "Hell yeah!" which was the topic of conversation during one of these sleepovers, and that there were a couple beautiful scenes, by which I mean the visuals (aka people) are beautiful, not that they are written beautifully or anything.

My review, then, is colored by the movie sending me back to high school, so please cut me some slack when I say I enjoyed it. It is the movie equivalent of one of those mystery/thriller novels you buy for summer reading: sleek, cleverly crafted and terribly fun, even if it's not "highbrow" fare. Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker are sexy and assured in their roles as two very different undergrads at Yale -- the working class boy and the rich legacy boy -- who both become members of a secret society. The working class boy (Jackson) is the main character, of course, and the one with the ethical convictions, of course, even if those convictions waiver for a while in the face of the riches and opportunity that come with being part of the elite Skulls. When his best friend dies while trying to write a newspaper story on secret societies, Working Class Boy calls on the help of Trusty Female Sidekick/Love Interest to help free him from the clutches of his new pal, Legacy Boy, and the rest of the powerful members of the Skulls. The plot is moderately well developed (even though it's trite and the end feels slapped together at best), and Leslie Bibb does a wonderful job as the only female role of any substance and the only character who seems to have normal human reactions -- like screaming in fear -- to the things going on around her. There are some fun lines and slick moves on the part of the main characters, even beyond that "Hell yes!" scene. So while there are very few interesting characters for a conspiracy-theory story, and while the characters sometimes become caricatures, and even while Paul Walker can't shake being too stiff at times, it's enjoyable enough to pull it out of being a complete mess.

2 Stars

The Jerk

I just watched my first full length movie on hulu and would first like to mention that this service and the others like it aren't going to kill the DVD any time soon. Even with my high speed internet in a college town, the picture stopped pretty often to "buffer" itself, and of course the resolution was no match for the full screen of my beautiful 15" apple computer. But most importantly, when you have to create a login to watch an R rated movie like The Jerk, you sort of expect it not to be a censored version of the movie. One of the most pervasive jokes in the movie is a dog named S***head, but in this movie his name was dubbed to Stupid. This completely changes the joke, and though it might not be extremely funny in my opinion the original way, it certainly doesn't hold up to repetition when it's just Stupid.

Given this movie's cult classic status (see, e.g., episode 14 here), I was actually a bit worried to watch it. I expected not to like it very much, because most of the time my humor isn't the same as a 12 year old boy's. And while I love the SNL spawn of Blues Brothers [music in link], I don't buy into the idea that all SNL touches is gold.

Thank goodness it was just a rehash of a lot of Steve Martin stand-up routines that I already knew and loved, like Cat Juggling, which is on the marvelous record A Wild and Crazy Guy. Like some of the best comedies, the plot seemed a loose connect-the-dots between gags and jokes for the starts of the show, a formula that worked well for a standup comedian like Steve Martin. With some great lines ("You know, you can tell so much about a person from the way they live. Just looking around here I can tell ... you're a genuinely dirty person," "That guy gypped me; he put daisy stems on my roses!" and yes, I'll even give you "He HATES these CANS!" ), Martin really carries the movie to a loveable place, and somehow even the incongruity of Bernadette Peters in such a slapstick movie seems part of the joke rather than a factor working against it. And, really, who wouldn't laugh at those juggled cats?

Then again, it was kind of a rehash of routines I already knew, like his bit about what happens to a guy when he tries to ask a girl out (frankly, I like the stand-up version better). It's a good movie if you've never heard it before, and a decent one if you have, but even with a running time of 1:35 some of the jokes feel tired by the end.

I can't say I love this movie, at least my first time around. Although it does seem obvious to me how it would get better the more times you see it, just waiting for the next of your favorite oh-so-quotable lines to come around.

2.5 stars

P.S. A little research revealed that the cable-edited version I saw did include some scenes not in the original, like the Tilt-a-Whirl scene (which I felt went on too long) and the cracked leather airplane seat conversation (brilliant). Don't know if that changes anything, but for any aficionados I may have offended with this review, maybe that's the difference. Well, that and all that buffering.

Intellectual Property Update

Last week, a great website finally went out of beta testing: hulu.com. There, in a completely legal medium, I can watch tv shows and movies for free. I can even post them on websites, email them to people, or share them in other sites (like myspace or facebook) with customized start and end times. They have limited commercials through them, but so far seem less annoying that the studios' own websites for tv shows (although it still annoys me that it doesn't archive all the episodes for some shows, like Psych). And yes, the movie selection is pretty crappy so far. But let's give some props to network executives who do something other than whine about piracy, and instead work to serve consumers in a way that the extreme lack of quality control in the world of piracy is worth it.

And, besides, some of the movies and TV shows are good. Take, for example, Sideways or The Usual Suspects or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Or, for less high class fare (but more likely something you decide to watch on a whim, which is what streaming access is for, right?) you can try out some guilty pleasure-type movies, like The Skulls. Yes, I'm embedding it. Because I can.

ANTM

Sometimes TV creates the best parody of TV. See now a pretty close representation of the essence of America's Next Top Model, from the brilliance of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders:

Bull Durham

I finally got around to watching Bull Durham last week. I think I put it off for two reasons: 1) it's supposed to be an amazing movie and 2) it's about a place and a team I grew up watching. The mixture of the two just couldn't live up to expectations, I thought. And that famous speech that's supposed to be so amazing ("I believe in . . .") I had seen as a clip and it wasn't that impressive.

Well, that speech still doesn't move me the way it apparently does everyone else. But all the rest of my worries were thoroughly dispelled. Susan Sarandon is the heart of this movie, and she controls both the plot and the screen. Next to Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind, this is certainly the best southern woman role -- may be the best female role period -- in the movies (yes, even including Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor roles). She's smart, powerful, experienced, wise, silly, conflicted, and searching all at once, and it's a joy to watch Sarandon swim around in the depths of her character.

And then there's Tim Robbins, who is so much funnier as the talented but naive rookie than I ever realized he could be, since I mostly know him from The Shawshank Redemption and Mystic River. He's great in a totally different way from either Susan Sarandon or Kevin Costner (who is probably the most predictable and boring character of the three: the wise but frustrated older player -- but Costner does it well, as we all know he can from all those other sports movies he's been in).

Then, there's the plot. I won't go through the plot here, since it's classic enough that plenty of others have done it thoroughly. But I hadn't known before I watched the movie that it was written and directed and produced by men who had actually been minor league baseball players, so there's a fidelity to reality that I hadn't expected. I mean, authenticity isn't exactly what makes sports movies popular. People watch sports movies for the same reason they watch sports: to see their guy win. The only other "authentic" sports movie I can think of is Bad News Bears, which I don't actually like that much for some reason or another. But here, sports isn't about a team winning or losing, it's about a bunch of guys trying to make money and getting girls and prolonging adolescence as much as possible. Though I've never known a minor league baseball player, it seems to me that would be pretty spot on.

Finally, there's Durham. Thank goodness they did it on location. Those dingy brick building, the clay that's practically in the air, the potholes in the roads on the outskirts of Durham -- these details make me homesick, believe it or not, but also lend credence to the size of the characters' world -- the idea of the major leagues does seem like a paradise when you're working in rundown towns with working class spectators, and not too many of them at that. Sounds depressing, but the movies that affect me the most tend to be those that realize that the big dreams of ordinary people are important and inspiring and engrossing, at least to the people who live them.

4 stars.