new to DVD: Rules Don't Apply

Film critics love to describe Warren Beatty as a maverick, and so it's perhaps inevitable that Beatty would eventually make a movie based on the idea of, and even called, Rules Don't Apply. The title ostensibly refers to the three main characters, but behind the scenes. . . yeah, it applies to Beatty himself.

The first act of the film stars Alden Ehrenreich as Frank Forbes and Lily Collins as Marla Mabrey. They're both naive, young, and new employees of Hollywood executive Howard Hughes. Frank works as one of several limo drivers employed by Mr. Hughes, but like most of his colleagues, he's never actually met the man; rather than drive for Mr. Hughes directly, the limo drivers are usually assigned to drive around Hughes's starlets. And boy does he have a lot of starlets.

I know that Rules Don't Apply is a deliberate, unapologetic mixture of fact and fiction, so I don't know if this part is true, but in the movie, Hughes has a tendency to hire would-be actresses based on nothing more than head-shots and resumes. Whereas every other Hollywood exec made his hiring decisions based on screen tests, Hughes hired the women first, showered them with luxurious gifts as if they were major stars -- by the count of one supporting character, he'd bought and given houses to no less than 26 unknown, untried actresses -- and occasionally gets around to giving these young women screen tests to see if they might actually be of any use in a movie. It goes mostly unsaid that this was Hughes's eccentric, extravagant way of basically buying sex from these women. He would never debase either himself or the women enough to actually give them cash in exchange for sexual favors, but the movie strongly, strongly implies that by the time he actually meets the women, they're so grateful for his generosity and impressed by his wealth that they sleep with him at the drop of a hat.

Marla Mabrey is one of those women, or at least that's Hughes's plan. She moves into her new house with her domineering but well-meaning mother (Annette Bening), and as the two women wait in vain for some sign that Hughes has the slightest interest in Marla's career -- for weeks on end, they don't receive any word from Hughes at all -- Mr. Hughes patiently waits, from afar, for the mother to get fed up and leave.

In the meantime, Frank and Marla fall in love, although this is a love based very much on a bond of friendship. These early scenes, in which Hughes is talked about a great deal but doesn't appear, lack the standard cliches and story beats of Hollywood romance, but are extraordinarily dull. I think the Annette Bening character is supposed to be a sort of comic relief, but it doesn't really work.

Most movies that are sometimes good and sometimes not start out well and gradually get worse, and there's a reason for that: the filmmakers care a great deal about grabbing your attention, and once they have it, they know that you've invested your time. They can then coast on cliche, knowing that you probably won't walk away from the movie even if it gets boring, as your curiosity will demand that you stick with it just to see how it ends.

Rules Don't Apply, true to its title, is the reverse of that. Its first act is extraordinarily boring, but just when you start to worry if the whole movie's going to be like that, Hughes finally makes an entrance, takes over as the lead character, and dramatically shifts the tone from romantic melodrama minus the romance and melodrama -- yes, that's what I said -- and suddenly becomes a hilarious comedy of manners. The change of tone is very welcome, but very swift, starting with the funniest scene in the film, Oliver Platt's cameo as a banker who has flown in from out of town specifically for a meeting with Hughes -- and who then becomes increasingly frustrated as Hughes not only refuses to meet with him, but won't even provide a straight answer as to why.

There's a reason why so many movies are made about Howard Hughes. He was an aviation pioneer, a billionaire, an eccentric, a Hollywood producer, and an inventor, whose eccentricity gradually became outright insanity. Any one of those aspects of his life would be ripe for cinematic exploration. Rules Don't Apply explores all of those aspects, maybe not as thoroughly as, for example, John Logan and Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, a film that is arguably superior, and inarguably very different in agenda and tone. The Aviator is a more or less factual biopic of Hughes himself, while Rules Don't Apply utilizes the real-life figure of Hughes in a fictional romantic triangle with Frank and Marla.

Both men have their pros and cons. Frank is a sincerely nice guy (and thus, as anyone knows, doomed to at least temporarily lose out in any romantic rivalry), but he's also engaged to his childhood sweet-heart -- although, tellingly, the engagement seems to be one of those that drags on for years without any plans for setting a wedding date.

Hughes is charming, single, and wealthy, but the fact that he's old enough to be Marla's father is pointedly underlined by the fact that her mother is played by Annette Bening, and Hughes himself is played by Bening's real-life husband, Warren Beatty. Hughes's eccentricity is presented as both a pro and a con: Initially, it makes him intriguing and mysterious, but as the eccentricity slides into chaos and dysfunction, it becomes increasingly clear that maybe he's not the better choice.

The story of the love triangle may be fictional, but it expertly incorporates episodes from Hughes's real life. More importantly, Rules Don't Apply walks a delicate path, presenting the eccentric Hughes as an unquestionably comical character, but never going so far as to seem like it's ridiculing the real man. You get the inescapable feeling that despite all of the wackiness in Hughes's life and personality, Beatty and his co-writer, Bo Goldman, respect the man and his legacy.

The supporting cast deserves mention. Matthew Broderick plays Frank's supervisor, Levar Mathis. Broderick may be a versatile actor to an extent, but his default setting tends to naturally convey boyish innocence, and so his role as the crude, lustful Levar seems all wrong. However, as we get to know the character beyond these surface characteristics, the role gradually starts to feel like a better fit. Still, I question the wisdom of casting him in the role; wouldn't it be better to cast someone who could sell the character's surface qualities, and then reveal inner depth, rather than cast someone who for a long time seems wrong and eventually earns a "now I get it" moment from the audience?

Oliver Platt plays Forester, and I know I already mentioned him, but I mention him again only because his brilliant comic delivery deserves a great deal of the credit for the movie's best scene. Kudos also go to Alec Baldwin in a small recurring role as a Howard Hughes employee who, like Platt's Mr. Forester, gets increasingly frustrated with Hughes's refusal to indulge even the most basic, most reasonable requests. And even Broderick, despite his initial miscasting, gets one of the best scenes, toward the end of the film, in a very, very funny scene that I won't describe, lest I spoil the humor.

But despite the fact that he doesn't show up until the movie's almost a third of the way over, this is really Beatty's movie. Once he does finally show up, his character dominates the movie, his presence felt even in the few remaining scenes he's not in. In a way, this movie is really about Frank and Marla trying to maintain their own identities despite the fact that their whole world seems to revolve around the towering figure of Howard Hughes.

Do I recommend the movie? Yes, I do. The opening act could have been livelier, but I respect the writers' refusal to indulge in romantic-movie cliches, and it's worth getting through just to get to Beatty, Platt, Baldwin, and all of the fun chaos that surrounds their scenes. Of course, normally, I wouldn't recommend a movie I liked only two thirds of, but then again, we're talking about Howard Hughes and Warren Beatty. The rules don't apply.

new to DVD: Collateral Beauty

Imagine this scenario if you will: A good man builds a company from the ground up. He's an insightful businessman and inspirational leader, and treats his employees with affection and respect. He takes three of those employees under his wing. They all become friends. He gives them stakes in the company.

Then, one day, tragedy strikes: The Good Man's daughter has died. The Three Employees act supportive and understanding, and talk a great deal about their friendship, and how much they're concerned for the Good Man. But secretly, the Three Employees decide that the Good Man's grief is inconvenient. They conspire to arrange a hostile take-over of the company. They do this in a particularly insidious manner, by stealing his mail so that they can learn his secrets, and then hiring a whole team of specialists to manipulate the Good Man's grief and sorrow to the breaking point. Then, the plan goes, when the Good Man has been completely broken and shows evidence of outright insanity -- evidence which the Three Employees are perfectly willing to fake if the Good Man proves too resilient to fall on his own -- they will present said evidence at a board meeting as proof that the Good Man is no longer fit to run the company. He's out, they get to run the company as they see fit.

Now, imagine someone so clueless that, after carefully considering every aspect of this scenario, he looks up and says, "so the Three Employees who are trying to destroy the Good Man and steal his company -- they're the good guys, right?"

That clueless man is no hypothetical. He's Allan Loeb, the screenwriter for Collateral Beauty. The Good Man in question is Howard, played by Will Smith, and the devious/ allegedly sympathetic Three Employees are Claire, Simon, and Whit, played, respectively, by Kate Winslet, Michael Pena, and Edward Norton.

That's a good cast, but even they can't sustain the ludicrous moral reversal that Loeb demands of their characters, expecting them to come across as nice people even as they work to ruin Howard's already ruined life even further. Loeb and his actors try to sell the idea that they have Howard's best intentions at heart by giving us a lot of concerned/ guilty/ sad looks on their faces, and a lot of dialogue in which Howard's alleged friends talk about how much they love him, and try to justify their actions by theorizing, unconvincingly, "maybe this is just the exact kind of wake-up call he needs" to get him out of his grief. Come on. If at this point, you're reading, and thinking, "well, I guess, maybe they have a point," go back up a few paragraphs and re-read what these people are doing to poor Howard. These people are monsters, and their love of Howard makes their actions more, not less monstrous.

There's one other extremely central plot point to this movie. Whit's plan (for he, as Howard's junior partner and alleged "best friend," is the leader of the Three Employees' attempt to crush their benefactor) is so odd that it strains this film's already paper-thin credibility even further. Whit has learned that Howard has, as a therapeutic exercise, written letters to the concepts of Death, Love, and Time. So Whit decides to hire three actors to approach Howard, pretending to be the personifications of Death, Love, and Time. They'll be convincing, Whit reasons, because the actors will be armed with private information that they "couldn't possibly know," after reading Howard's mail.

The contrast between the actors is one of the very few actually interesting aspects of the story. Raffi/Time is only interested in the fact that Whit's offer is a paying job. Briggite/Death is excited about the unique challenge to the craft of acting, and after a brief initial objection to the ethics of the assignment, very quickly reverses her moral stance on the matter, and becomes entirely convinced that Whit's reasoning is right, that this is ultimately all for Howard's own good. Amy / Love strenuously objects to the nature of the assignment, repeatedly pointing out the horrific nature of what they're all doing to Howard, and the hypocrisy of Whit's claims of friendship and love for Howard even as he devotes his time and money to further tearing the broken guy apart. Yes, she repeatedly, strenuously objects -- but she still takes the job, even after emphatically explaining "it's not about the money!"

Well then why do it? If she's not intrigued by the challenge, like Brigitte, or motivated by money, like Raffi, and she so strongly objects, then why do it? The movie strongly hints that her real motivation is that she has developed an instant crush on Whit, but this is as unconvincing as the rest of the story. They've only just met, and the only real thing Amy knows about Whit is that he's basically a horrible person whose actions disgust her. The sorta-love story between them is never really explored, which saves Loeb from having to explain what the heck she sees in him, but leaves her motivation for accepting the job completely, unsatisfactorily, unexplained.

What's really maddening about all of this is Loeb came so very, very close to coming up with a truly interesting idea for this movie that you want to cry out, "why didn't you do it the other way, why, WHY?!?"

What if, instead of being visited by three low-rent actors hired by friends trying to drive him insane (sorry, I still can't get past that ridiculous concept), Howard was actually visited by personifications of Death, Love, and Time? Think about all the ground that could explore! It could work as a comedy, as a drama, as a fantasy, as an intellectual, cinematic-philosophical treatise on what those concepts mean to us in our lives, or even as some fantastic, inspired combination of all of the above!

But no. Loeb instead decided to treat us with this convoluted scenario, and expected us to fall in platonic love with Howard's so-called friends just because, yeah, they're trying to drive him insane and steal his company, but gosh-darn it, they feel awfully bad about it, so they must be good people!

A couple of more nit-picks. Howard is black. His best friend who's trying to ruin his life is a white guy named Whit. Make of that what you will, but in a movie that never touches on race for even a moment -- and there's nothing wrong with that -- but the unintended symbolism just smacks you in the face. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of names out there, Norton's character is named "Whit"? And Loeb doesn't see the issue with this? Really?

Also, the ending. The movie throws not just one, but two twist endings at you, in a movie that, thematically and tonally, doesn't really cry out for a twist ending at all. But those twists, man. They make you say, "ohhh!" for maybe a second or two, but then you immediately say, "wait a minute!" because the twists basically fly in the face of everything that has preceded them. The twists are ultimately nonsensical, unearned, and completely unnecessary.

Allan Loeb is a writer I've long considered under-appreciated, ever since he created the fun, intriguing, highly under-rated fantasy-police drama hybrid New Amsterdam. I've admired Allan Loeb as a writer. This movie made me completely reverse that opinion.

Jack Finney: Science Fiction for People who Don't Like Science Fiction

Last night, I got up in the middle of the night -- about 3:15am or so -- and heard a woman with high-heeled shoes walking outside. To my mostly-asleep mind, the "clop clop clop" of her shoes on the pavement sounded less like a human and more like a horse. And as a result of this train of thought, I had an intriguing, vivid, Jack Finneyesque vision. What if the window I heard the clopping footsteps through was actually, at that moment, a window into another time? What if I opened the curtain and saw not cars parked in a lot, but horse-drawn carriages bundling down the street? I'm not talking about time travel, you understand; in the scenario I was imagining, if I had gone outside, I'd still be in the year 2017. But if I had looked out the window, I'd see the year 1900.

Now, don't start calling for the guys in white coats, because even in my half-asleep state, I knew all this to be imagination. So now that "he's gone crazy!" isn't the foremost thought in your mind, you may be thinking, "wait, 'Jack Finneyesque'?"

To the general public, Finney is best known as the author of the book later filmed multiple times as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. To fans of science fiction, Finney is best known as the writer of several novels and short stories involving time travel.

Now, that may cause some of you to roll your eyes. Those of you who "aren't into sci-fi." But I'm going to posit that even a lot of people who aren't into sci fi actually are, to some extent. My wife, for example, isn't into sci fi, but one of her favorite movies is Somewhere in Time, written by sci fi great Richard Matheson, in which Christopher Reeve plays a man who falls so deeply in love with a picture of a woman, that he finds himself traveling back in time out of sheer will power, just to meet her. If you think this is an exception, I'd say that you yourself, Mr. or Mrs. "I'm not into sci fi" probably are, at least just a little. Ask most people who were kids or young adults in the 80s to list their favorite movies, and they're probably going to mention Back to the Future, about a time-travelling teenager, Ghostbusters, about nuclear-powered "proton packs" that shoot specialized lasers intended to catch ghosts -- a concept that is predicated on the idea that ghosts are interdimensional beings -- and maybe, just maybe, Weird Science, a John Hughes teen comedy about two high school kids who create a woman out of a computer program. And speaking of Ghostbusters, Bill Murray and Harold Ramis would later team up again, to bring us Groundhog Day, a hilarious and almost universally loved comedy about a guy stuck in a time warp. You don't get more sci fi than those four concepts.

So yeah, as self-contradictory as it sounds, you don't have to be into sci fi to enjoy sci fi. The secret to the above cited examples is that they're all, to varying degrees, less about the science fictiony gimmicks that launch the story, and more about the relationships involved. Reeve falls in love, Marty gets to know the adults in his life from viewpoints he never would have otherwise had, Bill Murray's hellish time loop forces him to become a better man, etc.

The time travel stories of Jack Finney are like that. They're less about the intricacies of time travel, and more about how the characters feel about the science fictiony events. Finney often depicts the past as a more desirable, simpler time (an idea Rod Serling had mixed feelings about, more or less agreeing, but seeing the view as a problematic oversimplification), and his protagonists' opportunities to travel in time is often a reflection of the characters' inner anxieties and desires. An important clue that this emotional content, rather than the sci fi ideas themselves, is Finney's priority, is illustrated by the fact that Finney rarely dwells on or even establishes the reason why time travel is possible in his stories. The "reasons" are often simply depicted as explanation-less miracles. My favorite is the short story "The Third Level," about a guy who stumbles upon a time warp in Grand Central Station, of all places. The ending is kinda Twilight Zoney in its way, but in order to get to that ending, you get to know the protagonist, and he's a character worth knowing.

Oh, and incidentally, that movie I mentioned earlier, Somewhere in Time -- it may have been written by Matheson, but it uses a time travel method established by Jack Finney; you can spot the homage to the other author through the character Professor Finney.

SCTV News vs. Weekend Update: A Comparison

Although SCTV is often compared to "Saturday Night Live," one key distinction is that the recurring characters of SCTV often had extended narratives. The recurring sketch "SCTV News" is a prime example. Although the news producers insisted that they considered anchormen Earl Camembert (Eugene Levy) and Floyd Robertson (Joe Flaherty) equals, Floyd almost always got the good stories, while Earl was typically given humiliatingly insignificant news items. On at least one occasion, Earl attempted to compensate for the obvious imbalance by improvising a dramatic but imaginary news story on the spot -- and was further humiliated when Floyd called him on his fabrication while still on the air.

The dynamic between Earl and Floyd was almost always with Flaherty playing the gruff, Bud Abbottesque straight man, while Levy’s hapless Earl Camembert was a wholly original character, with his every broadcast turning into a vain struggle for dignity – a dignity that seemed to come naturally to Floyd Robertson by contrast.

Note that this dynamic emphasizes another key difference between SCTV News and SNL’s equivalent news sketch, “Weekend Update” – SCTV’s news was character-based humor, while Weekend Update’s humor has always been more joke-based.

Now, ostensibly, that may seem an odd thing to say about Weekend Update, which has consistently given us memorable and wacky characters ever since Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella in SNL’s birth year of 1975. But those characters, featured in commentaries and interviews, were never the focus of Weekend Update. The bulk of Weekend Update has always been the anchors, who invariably play minor variations of either themselves or their own personas; the Weekend Update anchors’ humor has, as a result, always, always been joke based – a joke that has consistently followed the same formula. (This is not a criticism, mind you, because the formula happens to work.) The formula being: Actual headline as the joke’s set-up. Followed by a punchline. Headline. Punchline. Headline. Punchline. Headline. Punchline. Etc. until the sketch ends.

Incidentally, that very intentional dependence on actual news headlines marks the third and perhaps final major difference between SCTV News and Weekend Update. SNL, broadcast live for 40 years, has always strived to be “of the now,” i.e., topical, and Weekend Update has always been the most obvious example of that agenda. Weekend Update’s jokes are steeped in current events until they’re steeped in history, and in order to appreciate its humor, you must be either already educated in those topics, or allow the show itself to educate you as much as it can. SCTV, taped and originally broadcast at least a week later, and often even later than that, never attempted to be topical in any way, and thus, regardless of your knowledge of current events or history, any given SCTV News sketch is exactly as funny (or unfunny, depending on your tastes) as it was when originally broadcast.

One advantage to the character-based humor of SCTV News is the freedom it gave Flaherty and Levy (who did all the writing for the news segments) to explore those characters over time. Most SCTV News segments can stand on their own, but they also have a humor that’s cumulative, as you realize that poor Earl has screwed up (or, just as often, has been screwed over) countless times before, and has just screwed up again.

The show did turn the tables on the characters one notable time, however, when Earl found himself in the “more professional” role, and Floyd showed up drunk. As a punishment for Floyd’s on-the-air drunkenness, fictional station manager Guy Caballero (also played by Flaherty) punished Floyd by making him divide his time between co-anchoring the news and taking a more humiliating role, as “Count Floyd Robertson,” sporting a very spotty Transylvanian accent and dressed as a vampire, hosting B-grade horror movies. Many fans of SCTV fondly remember Count Floyd, but not many know or remember that he was supposed to be the same character as news anchor Floyd Robertson, precisely because after the one episode establishing the reason for Count Floyd’s existence, it was never addressed again. The two can be appreciated as either the same character, or two different characters entirely. Such was the multi-layered humor of SCTV.

The link I’m posting below illustrates how impervious SCTV News is to the passage of time: Decades after SCTV went off the air, Flaherty and Levy revived their SCTV News characters for a sketch celebrating the 25^th anniversary of Second City Toronto. You can watch some behind-the-scenes clowning around, or skip to the precise 2-minute mark to watch the actual sketch, which re-enacts the “Earl just makes something up” variation, and is still, in my opinion, remarkably funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XAVS9KzTPc

7 Things I Learned While Watching "The Lost City of Z"

1. As an American, it's literally impossible for me to think of the pronunciation of the letter Z as "Zed." Impossible. No matter how many times they say it with the British pronunciation -- "City of Zed, City of Zed, City of Zed" -- as soon as I see the words in writing, I think, "City of Zee."

2. Speaking of mental impossibilities, it's apparently impossible to watch Charlie Hunnam in 7 seasons of Sons of Anarchy and then watch him in anything else without thinking of Jackson "Jax" Teller, his character from that show. I usually have a more open mind when it comes to this kind of thing, but this was too much of a challenge for me. This is nothing about his performance as Percy Fawcett, the English explorer who became obsessed with finding a lost civilization in the Amazon Jungle. The performance is good enough. But put him in period clothes and a wildly different setting, it doesn't matter. Whenever he'd get angry in this movie, I'd think, "that other guy better watch out, or Jax is gonna put him in the ground!"

3. We need strong visual signifiers to remind us what time period a movie is set in. At one point, the person watching this movie with me asked, "did they discover America yet?" and I reminded them that the movie takes place in 1905 (at least when the movie begins). It was not the other person's fault. We really need those signifiers. It's why movies set in the Vietnam War always, always include a song by either Creedence, Hendrix, or Morrison early on, why movies set in the 50s always include at least one scene with a Donna Reedish, Rockwellian family, why movies set in the 40s -- even those that don't actually have anything to do with World War II -- always contain visual references to World War II. We need those signifiers. Quick, what's a good visual signifier that cries out "1905!" Yeah, I don't know either. Neither did the filmmakers. I don't blame them a bit.

4. This is based on a true story?!? I didn't realize this until the movie was roughly halfway over.

5. There were opera houses in the middle of the jungle? I thought that was just a figment of Werner Herzog's imagination.

6. Explorer James Murray was one of the biggest ******** who ever lived. Fill in the blank with your choice of insult or swear word, and it's probably true. Having read a book on Shackleton's notorious "Endurance" expedition (the one where the ship got stuck in the ice and everyone nearly died), and having seen both a documentary and a drama based on that incident, I was vaguely familiar with Murray as an historical figure. He appears as a supporting character and a sort of pathetic villain in The Lost City of Z. And yeah. He's a real jerk.

7. The Lost City of Z is a pretty good movie! But come on, Brits. It's pronounced "zee."