new to video: Red 2

Red, written by Jon and Erich Hoeber and released in 2010, was a good movie.  Red 2, also written by the Hoeber brothers, and released last year, has a few minor merits, but for the most part, is pretty lousy.  The difference in quality -- mostly on the script level -- is so blatant that it's almost difficult to believe that both movies are written by the same guys.

The first film told the story of a group of assassins and secret agents classified as RED -- Retired, Extremely Dangerous.  Struggling to integrate with normal society, these spies were suddenly thrust back into the world of espionage when, for mysterious reasons, they suddenly became the targets for arrest and termination.  Led by Frank Moses (Bruce Willis), the disparate group overcame their old age to team up, solve the mystery of who targeted them and why, and defeat the bad guys.

Red 2 repeats this formula exactly, but that's not the problem with the movie; heck, it's more or less expected for action sequels to repeat the formulae of their predecessors.  The problem with Red 2 is that the writers clearly forgot why the characters worked so well in the first film.

The first Red got much of its comedy from two characters:  Frank's love interest Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker) and old colleague Marvin Boggs (John Malkovich).  Sarah served as an audience surrogate, and Parker and the writers got a lot of humor out of her trying to adjust to the idea that the seemingly normal guy she's been flirting with is actually a superspy.  Marvin was by far the wackiest of Frank's colleagues, a paranoid, marginally crazy black ops expert who clearly used to enjoy his job a little too much, and was more than happy to get back in the game.

The opening scene of Red 2 misleadingly implies that the story will follow these characters with a natural progression.  As Frank, Marvin, and Sarah shop in a Costco, Frank eagerly embraces the banality of civilian life, Marvin laments "you haven't killed anybody in months!" and Sarah, having learned to accept and even embrace Frank's superspy identity in the last film, is now bored and confused by his "Mr. Normal" persona, and is eager for another adventure to break the mundanity.  All of this is mildly amusing, and makes sense when taken in context with what has been established about these characters.

But once the story gets going in the next scene, the characters of Marvin and Sarah each do a complete, and completely inexplicable, about-face.  Aside from some occasional mugging for the camera on the part of Malkovich, Marvin is more or less played straight in the events that follow.  Sarah, on the other hand, who had been established by the first film as the "normal" woman in the midst of chaos, becomes some kind of thrill-seeking lunatic throughout the rest of the movie, not only repeatedly defying Frank's pleas to remove herself from danger, but also upping the ante by engaging in car chases and gun-fights.  It's a one-joke premise, but the writers can't even decide what that one joke is -- is it that she's hopelessly out of her element and a constant screw-up, or is it supposed to be that she's surprisingly a good fit for Frank's world of espionage and explosions?  At other times, she's depicted as a jealous shrew, whining endlessly about the fact that one of Frank's enemies (played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) is one of his former lovers.

With her character written with such wild inconsistency, Parker makes matters worse by over-acting outrageously.  I accused Malkovich of shameless mugging, but at least he knows how to do it and when.  Parker's performance is more of an exercise in scratching fingernails on a blackboard; her character, apparently, is supposed to be annoying.  The writers need to learn that the concept of "comically annoying" characters is a difficult one to pull off, and here they fall into the obvious trap:  Sarah isn't annoying in a funny way, she's just plain annoying, to the extent that you repeatedly wonder what Frank sees in her.  It really cannot be overstated how thoroughly irritating the Parker character is in this movie; she pretty much ruins the whole thing, as she, in all of her maddeningly vexatious glory, is in nearly every scene.

And then there's the Anthony Hopkins character.  When I first heard that Hopkins was joining the cast of Red 2, I thought he'd be an excellent fit, and it's true that, in the few scenes where Hopkins is allowed to act like a normal human being, he brings a touch of class to the proceedings.  Unfortunately, the writers decided that his character would have a couple of screws loose, and then Hopkins decided to play this aspect of his character as broadly as possible, and so in addition to Parker's unsuccessful comically annoying Sarah, we have Hopkins's equally unsuccessful, comically crazy Doctor Edward Bailey.  Now, I won't argue that Hopkins doesn't have a comedic bone in his body, but slapstick and wackiness ain't exactly his forte, so to cast him in a role better suited for Peter Sellers is a miscalculation of head-scratching proportions.  It's as if the filmmakers wanted John Cleese and then said, "might as well get Anthony Hopkins, they're pretty much the same person, right?"  At one point, Hopkins even does a Cleesian silly-walk.  It really, really doesn't work.  Who was in charge of casting this thing?  Hopkins may be a great actor, but that doesn't mean he's right for just any role.

But at the risk of redundancy, Hopkins's miscasting is nothing compared to the wreckage of Parker's character, and if I'm going on about it a bit too much, then you're getting an idea of how much I hated her in this movie.  I'm not saying she's a bad actress; I enjoyed her in The West Wing, for example, and even in the first Red movie. But the character's many flaws so dominate the film that it's impossible to enjoy the movie's escapist qualities as an action comedy.

Hey, I have an idea for the storyline to Red 3:  Frank Moses is out for revenge because an enemy from his past killed his girlfriend!  Oh don't bother with the admonitions, she's a fictional character, remember?  Besides, if you see this movie, you'll understand what I mean.

book review: The Autobiography of Garry Marshall

If you don't know who Garry Marshall, the author of My Happy Days in Hollywood is, that's okay; you know his work.  Happy Days.  Laverne and Shirley.  Pretty Woman.  Even if his name doesn't have instant household recognition, his movies and TV shows certainly do.  This is one of those Hollywood living legends who has worked on everything from truly classic, iconic TV shows (he was on the writing staff of The Dick van Dyke Show) to movies starring such modern-day celebrities as Seth Meyers and Zac Efron.

This is the type of Hollywood autobiography I love, because the subject's career is so extensive and varied that you feel like you get a little taste of all aspects of the biz.  So, from that perspective, understand that I'm a little biased when I said that I enjoyed this book.  But that's okay, because it's a fair reflection of how you'll probably react too:  If you like Hollywood biographies, you'll like this one.

That's not to say that the book is without flaw, and while I did enjoy the book overall, and while some of the following complaints may sound to you like nit-picking, these things really did bother me about the book.  Specifically, I have three bones to pick with My Happy Days in Hollywood.  The first is the chapter on Laverne and Shirley.  Marshall spends most of the chapter complaining about the stars of the show, and their allegedly uncooperative behavior.  Now, it's been my observation that there are two types of Hollywood autobiography.  There's the "let's dish the dirt" tell-all, which attempts to titillate the reader with a "warts and all" depiction of Hollywood's good and bad sides, and there's the schmooze-fest, in which the author, out of either sincerity or fear of alienating Hollywood power players, has nothing but nice things to say about everyone they've worked with.  Granted, this is not an "either or" dichotomy, but rather a spectrum, but Marshall's style clearly leans much, much more towards the schmoozing side of things, so his chapter-long complaint about Cindy Williams and Penny Marshall is really jarring in terms of tone -- especially since Penny Marshall is the author's sister, which makes all the complaining even more awkward.  Later on, Garry Marshall mentions several compliments toward his sister, including the rather strong praise that she is a physical comedian on par with Lucille Ball (whom Garry Marshall has worked with), but the praise seems hollow in light of all the complaining he'd done earlier.

I also take exception to Garry Marshall's take on Exit to Eden.  I've noticed that, with rare, rare exception, most Hollywood autobiographers tend to turn on their own work when it was financially unsuccessful.  Sometimes this may be an example of someone just understanding where they went wrong, but more often, I get the feeling that it's a form of hypocrisy, as if to say, "well, if the public doesn't like it, then guess what, I don't like it either!"  If the unsuccessful work is acknowledged at all, the details that follow tend to be a contradictory mixture of "mea culpa" confessions, and "not my fault" excuses.  Marshall's chapter on Exit to Eden, a movie I happen to like, is the perfect example of this.  Occasionally, I'd like to just read someone say "hey, you know what, this movie didn't do well, but I stand by my work!"

But here's the part that really annoyed me:  After the usual mixture of "here's where I went wrong"s and "not my fault"s, Marshall does eventually admit that he occasionally gets compliments from the general public about Exit to Eden.  But Marshall interprets these compliments as examples of people "understanding what I tried to do" with the film.  This bothers me because, for all of Marshall's success, and for all his self-praise about understanding how an audience thinks, he is here illustrating a stunning amount of ignorance in the matter.  People either like or don't like a movie, and while their reasons may vary, I have never heard of someone liking a movie simply because "well, the movie sucked, but I understand what the director was trying to do."

But my third and most prevalent complaint about the book is not confined to any one chapter: For a professional writer, Marshall, surprisingly, has absolutely no ear for dialogue.  This is more annoying than you may think.  Whenever Marshall attempts to use dialogue in the book to recreate a moment in his career, the real-life characters speak in a flat, entirely unconvincing manner.  For one thing, no one apparently uses contractions in Marshall's world, not even when he is trying to convey the most casual conversation.  Sentences like "do not worry, it will all work out," or "I am telling you, it is going to be a hit" sound remarkably untrue (re-read those lines with the contractions to see how much more natural they sound) to human nature, and at the risk of repeating myself, a professional writer of dialogue really should know better.

Okay, nitpicks aside (although I really did find the whole "no contractions" thing to be a constant annoyance) I do recommend the book for people who like Hollywood biographies.  For one thing, the most boring part of this type of book is usually the "before they were famous" part, as the authors wax on about their uneventful childhoods, and the reader impatiently waits for the name-dropping and Hollywood insider stuff.  Marshall, however, manages to make his earlier life sound interesting, thanks in no small part to the alleged quirkiness of his family life while growing up.  He also does a good job with the gradual transition from nobody to Hollywood success, explaining the step-by-step process of his career with clarity, humor, and a good narrative flow.  His later, occasional reminders that "I'm just a kid from the Bronx" are sort of unnecessary, as he well illustrates how he got to the place where he is.  And, because Marshall's background is mostly in comedy (as he does tend to explicitly remind us a tad bit too often) his Hollywood anecdotes, even if they lack in sordid dirt, are fun to read, not so much because of what happens, but because of Marshall's generally humorous and upbeat take on the events of his own life.

In summary, My Happy Days in Hollywood is definitely a flawed book.  But if you can get past the flaws, and you should, then you are in for an enjoyable read.