THE JUDGE (2014)

Posted on October 25th, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 25 October 2014.

Today’s totally paint-by-the-numbers-film seen theatrically: THE JUDGE, with Robert Duvall, Robert Downey Jr., Vincent Donofrio, Billy Bob Thorton, and Vera Farmiga all playing parts they could have performed in their sleep, acting out deep years of family epiphanies that play out exactly as you might have expected; a Lifetime movie with overqualified actors, worth watching only because of those overqualified actors.

It’s not terrible. The story plays out predictably, but it plays out well. There are just no surprises in it, at any time, not even down to the last scene.

One of the lighter subplots has Downey meet up with Vera Farmiga, the sweet girl who he left behind after high school (and who is conveniently still available); in the meantime he meets and makes out with a cute barmaid who he LATER finds out is Farmiga’s daughter.

Very uncomfortable, right? Especially after he gets interested in Farmiga again and does the back-dating. Could it be…? Did he make out with…?

Okay, so Farmiga finally takes pity on him on tells him, no, she’s not your daughter, I had a one-nighter with your older brother after you left town.

SO HE ONLY MADE OUT WITH HIS NIECE.

He is soooo relieved.

He actually is.

But the worst issue about the movie is that it’s made to spoon-feed its audience.

I I gotta tell ya, if I ever again wonder aloud how come people make movies like this and don’t realize how UTTERLY and TOTALLY hackneyed they are, then remind me of my experience in the theatre today, in which:

Robert Downey Jr. plays a hotshot attorney who learns that his mother has died. Further dialogue establishes that he is estranged from his father, the judge. He takes a plane to the town he comes from, shows up at the funeral home, strokes his mother’s hand where she lies in state, is greeted and hugged by his two brothers, who talk about “Mom” and “Dad”; he exchanges stiff greetings with Robert Duvall; he goes to clean out his old room at Robert Duvall’s place; the two stars exchange more mutual resentment; he tries to bitch to his brother D’Onofrio about his resentment of Dad and his brother tells him, not now….

…and hand to God, after all that, almost half an hour in, somebody behind me says, “Wait a minute, Robert Duvall’s supposed to be his Dad?”

One reason movies like this are built around easy-to-summarize epiphanies: to many audiences, EVEN THE SIMPLEST LOGICAL LEAPS ARE TOO HARD TO MAKE.

Or must be carefully explained to one another.

When I saw ALL IS LOST, there was a scene where a freighter appears on the horizon, and draws closer, and over the course of long minutes comes to dominate the screen, and finally passes by close enough to read the labels on the cargo containers, and the fuck sitting in front of me helpfully explained to his wife, “It’s a ship.”

Tags: ALL IS LOST, Assholes, Movies, Robert Duvall, Robert Redford, THE JUDGE, Vera Farmiga, Vincent D'Onofrio | Category Movies

Enough With the Fershlugginer Chocolate Cake, Already

Posted on October 22nd, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Look, I’m going to explain this in terms you might be able to understand.

I like chocolate cake just fine.

I think chocolate cake is one of the things that makes life worth living.

As a fat guy, I not only return to chocolate cake more often than is healthy for me, but can actually wax rhapsodic about great slices of chocolate cake from my past.

I’m perfectly capable of sitting down with you and geeking out over chocolate cake.

But I can’t eat just chocolate cake.

I would die.

Hell, long before that I would grow to hate the very taste of chocolate cake.

So I eat other things, occasionally even healthy things, and as a result my palate becomes a bit more sophisticated. I grow to enjoy flavors other than coma-inducing sweet. I come to recognize that some dishes, prepared with more subtlety, actually reward my taste buds in ways that chocolate cake cannot. I don’t eat Escargot, for instance, because I’m a snotty poseur intent on showing my superior breeding. I eat it because I was taught to eat it and I grew to love it and consider it a treat. You might hate Escargot yourself, but the principle does apply; just pick another rarefied flavor, if you prefer.

Now imagine that you live in a world where people are obsessed with chocolate cake, to the point where they discuss it ad infinitum, slaver with anticipation over chocolate cakes to come, but refuse to cross the street to sample anything else; chocolate cake is not just their favorite, it’s their standard, and they will happily change the subject to chocolate cake even if you are discussing filet mignon. Filet mignon? We want to talk about chocolate cake!

Imagine that if you say you are sick of chocolate cake they take it personally.

You would start to resent the constant harping on chocolate cake, would you not?

Now imagine you’re a movie fan and you grew up on Kubrick, Altman, Hitchcock, Lumet, Kurosawa, Scorcese, Chaplin, Keaton, John Ford, Sergio Leone, Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola, all the masters who came after them. Imagine you’re a science fiction reader and you grew up on Asimov, Clarke, Ellison, Sturgeon, Sheckley, Vonnegut, Le Guin, all the masters who came after them, Octavia Butler, more.

Imagine that you love great literature and you grew up on Twain, Steinbeck, Dumas, Shakespeare, all the storytellers of lesser or greater skill who came after them. You don’t mind a little down-and-dirty empty pleasure reading from time to time, just like you don’t mind an occasional epic slab of chocolate cake.

But you know the spectrum. You are aware of it.

Imagine that every single time you make a critical observation about one of the many other contributions to our culture, or subculture, somebody sooner or later insists on bringing the conversation back to chocolate cake.

Now imagine that you can foment outrage by any perceived disrespect of chocolate cake.

People start yelling, “I can like chocolate cake if I want to!” Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh…

Now imagine chocolate cake is STAR WARS.

Tags: Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Arthur C. Clarke, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Francis Ford Coppola, Harlan Ellison, Isaac Asimov, John Ford, Kurt Vonnegut, Martin Scorcese, Orson Welles, Robert Sheckley, Science Fiction, Sergio Leone, Sidney Lumet, Stanley Kubrick, Star Wars, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula Le Guin | Category Books, Life Wisdom, Movies, Science Fiction, Sneaky Metaphors

Remake Chronicles: It’s Time To Forgive David Soul’s CASABLANCA

Posted on October 21st, 2015 by Adam-Troy Castro

Originally published on Facebook 21 October 2014.

Despite it being accepted as a given by everybody who ever mentions it, the CASABLANCA TV series starring David Soul was not some one-of-a-kind, historical icon of awfulness.

Really. It wasn’t. It wasn’t terrible at all. It just wasn’t special.

Nor was it the crazy stupid thing TV did that one time; in point of fact, it was the *second* time somebody attempted a CASABLANCA TV series, the first time being in the 1950s. I have an episode of that show, packaged as an extra on my DVD of the movie, and that was bad; so bad, in fact, that I cannot get more than a few minutes into it. (The moment where the camera pans past the mirror at Rick’s bar and captures itself, not fleetingly but in full glory, was too much for me.)

TV has had a bunch of such shows, attempting to render serially what the movies told in-and-out. Some of them were good, others weren’t. There was a show starring Harry Lime, from THE THIRD MAN, cast in a heroic light. Really. I can’t tell you anything about it except that I am dumbfounded by the very idea.

The David Soul CASABLANCA was handsomely mounted, well cast, well-meaning, and even — insofar as it could be — well-written. David Soul, remembered as terrible in it, did the best he could with the material. He really did. The embarrassment was seriously not his fault.

The real problem with the show was two-fold, and illustrates the key problem with writing prequels, sequels, and tie-ins to established classics.

First, as a prequel, it immediately trapped itself in amber, as far as character development was concerned. Its Rick, imprisoned in the era before Ilsa returned to his gin joint, had to be both the embittered cynic who never stuck his neck out for anybody and the protagonist who did just that on a weekly basis; he couldn’t advance, and as a result he experienced the same epiphany in the fourth episode that he did in the first. Had the show gone on for seven seasons, it would have been giggle-worthy to then append the Bogart movie, and watch everybody be so scandalized that Rick suddenly behaved like a man with ideals, when in fact he would have done just that on a weekly basis all the years before it.

Second, it had the hubris to tackle material so beloved, so iconic, that it would have needed to be ten times better than the original CASABLANCA just to be considered any more than a pimple on its ass. This is too high a bar for any TV series to leap. Indeed, it’s too high a bar for most movies to leap. See also the Disney film RETURN TO OZ, which is actually a terrific movie, and according to some lights, including Peter David and myself, in many ways a *better* movie than THE WIZARD OF OZ; people reacted with outrage that another Oz movie was even attempted and many of those who watched it were upset that it was not the same movie all over again. I saw one review that blasted it for not having any songs as good as “Over the Rainbow” — in fact, it had no songs at all — and that’s the problem right there: when a movie can be criticized and condemned for not having a song as good as one of the most beloved songs of the entire damn century, there are no conceivable circumstances where people will ever be willing to judge it on its own merits.

Ditto with Soul’s CASABLANCA. How could any episode, let alone every episode, live up to one of the most adored stories of our time? If it was just *terrific*, it would still fail. And it did not quite reach terrific.

Judged by itself, the David Soul CASABLANCA was a perfectly competent, mildly interesting, visually arresting TV series set in an interesting milieu, and starring some interesting characters; it was not the worst TV series on even at its time and is certainly not the all-time icon of awfulness it is described as in the frequent lists that celebrate TV’s low points. It is even brilliant compared to some shows that are raging hits today. Seriously: on a night when TWO BROKE GIRLS is the only thing on, I would watch Soul’s CASABLANCA again in a heartbeat, and even enjoy myself. You can even give the show props for trying to be about something. I’m not saying it’s ripe for revival. I’m saying that rhetoric painting it as “unbelievably awful” is colored by the need we have to remember it that way.

In a world where we have turned sequels to GONE WITH THE WIND and LES MISERABLES into bestsellers, and have made a TV series about Gotham City before Batman showed up, we need to get off its ass.

We can agree, though, that it was a truly terrible idea.

Tags: Batman, Casablanca, David Soul, Gone With The Wind, Gotham, Les Miserables, Movies, Peter David, remakes, Return to Oz, The Third Man, The Wizard Of Oz, Two Broke Girls | Category Commentary, Movies, Remake Chronicles, TV