Falling and Nightcrawler

Last week, the Utah-based independent filmmaker Richard Dutcher filed a lawsuit against the makers of the movie Nightcrawler saying, in essence that it was a rip-off of Dutcher’s own movie, Falling which came out in 2008. When I read this news online, I was immediately intrigued. Of course, lawsuits and accusations of plagiarism are as common in Hollywood as an actor waiting tables. But this particular case is unique for me. I wrote my dissertation about Richard Dutcher and his films, including an entire chapter devoted to Falling. I’ve watched it dozens of times and feel like I know it as well as I know any film I’ve ever seen. If Falling is being plagiarized, I figured I had to investigate. 

 Falling is the story of Eric Boyle, a lapsed Mormon living in Los Angeles trying to make it as a filmmaker with his aspiring actress wife, Davey. To pay the bills, Boyle works as a stringer – a cameraman who trolls the streets of La La Land filming car crashes, house fires, suicides, and homicides. He then sells the footage to local news broadcasts. The bloodier and more dramatic the footage, the more he gets paid. Spending all night filming tragedy and all day getting told his screenplays aren’t violent enough takes its toll on Eric and we see him fraying at the edges even as the film begins. Things really go south for him when he stumbles upon and films gang members killing a man. Boyle makes big bucks selling the footage, but then the killers, unhappy with the publicity, slowly and methodically track him down, brutally attacking everyone in their way. The film ends with an excruciatingly visceral face-off between Boyle and the men he filmed.

Nightcrawler came out last fall and was written and directed by Dan Gilroy. It stars Jake Gyllenhall as Louis Bloom, a sociopathic small-time thief who becomes a stringer. He spends his nights listening to police scanners and filming accidents, fires, and homicides, but unlike Boyle, Bloom crosses the line and begins altering crime scenes in order to get better footage. He does literally whatever it takes to get the best, bloodiest, most dramatic shots possible, even when it means invading crime scenes, breaking and entering, or in some cases actually causing things to happen so he can be on hand to film them. Things begin to go south for Louis when he stumbles across a murder in progress and films it. The climax of the movie is an intense confrontation with the murderers.

Despite the obvious similarities, Falling and Nightcrawler are not the same. Falling is a spiritual film in the tradition of Robert Bresson. It’s bleak and unforgiving. It attacks its viewers with Old Testament vengeance. It is a film of spiritual, emotional, and physical consequences for both its characters and its viewers. It is about the loss of one man’s soul.

Nightcrawler is a glossed-up commentary on the American dream. It suggests that as long as you are a successful self-made man, it doesn’t matter what sort of man you’ve made yourself into. Louis Bloom stands in for every successful politician, media figure, or power player who was willing to step on the necks of those around them to achieve a goal. Unlike Eric Boyle, Louis Bloom has no soul to lose. And despite the high body count in the film, there’s no sense of real consequences anywhere.

So the films are not the same, but that’s not what the lawsuit alleges. It claims that Nightcrawler is a derivative work which means it takes obvious, identifiable elements of an already existing work and uses them without permission. While Nightcrawler is good movie – suspenseful, well-shot, well-acted – I doubt it would exist if Falling hadn’t existed first. The whole thing feels as though Dan Gilroy watched Falling and said, “You know what would be really cool in this movie? If the main guy was a sociopath!” Nightcrawler is essentially really well-made Falling fan fiction.

Of course, I have no idea what will come of the lawsuit. Cases like this can go on for ages, and the makers of Nightcrawler are powerful and well-funded.  But I have high hopes because, having seen both films, it seems obvious that Falling came first. 

Spring Preview: The Stories Disney Tells About Itself

T. S. Elliot wrote in his poem “The Wasteland” that “April is the cruelest month.” No offense to T. S. but I think that the title of cruelest month easily belongs to February – mainly because it IS a wasteland. All the joy of the holiday season is over and the warm weather and good times of spring seem like they will never come again. For being the shortest month of the year, February is one long, lightless, icy, gray punch in the neck.

To distract myself from the fact that I live in winter’s meat locker here in Michigan, I think about spring movies, the pre-summer blockbusters, comedies, and dramas that give me something to look forward to. They give me hope that one day I can go to an evening show at the theater and not have to scrape my windows when the movie’s over. Looking forward to a movie coming out in May reminds me that May is actually coming.

Two interesting spring movies  are Cinderella, coming out in March, and Tomorrowland which comes out in May. Cinderella, of course, is Disney’s live-action retelling of its classic 1950 animated movie. It stars Lily James of TVs Downton Abbey and was directed by Kenneth Brannagh. From the looks of the marketing, it’s going to be very straightforward – wicked step-mother, glittery blue dress, glass slipper left behind, the whole deal. There doesn’t appear to be much revision on the horizon.

The exact details of Tomorrowland are hazier. The film’s plot has been kept secret and only now is Disney beginning to release teaser trailers and other crumbs of information. The plot involves a girl named Casey who discovers an alternate reality called Tomorrowland. The movie apparently hints that Walt Disney named the futuristic section of his theme parks after the secret dimension that he somehow discovered. George Clooney plays an inventor who had something to do with Tomorrowland and who serves as Casey’s guide there. 

Cinderella was directed by Kenneth Branagh, who got his start with high-minded Shakespeare adaptations but has remade himself into a genre director with movies like Thor. I’m curious to see how his eye for adaptation fits with Disney’s regimented, corporate-driven ways. Can a talented director make a good adaptation when one of the biggest companies in the world is standing over his shoulder, making sure that everything fits with the merchandising?

Tomorrowland is interesting because #1 it was directed by Brad Bird who has made some of my favorite movies of all time and #2 it has jetpacks. I’ve never been disappointed in a movie with jetpacks. I’m a sucker, I know.

The two movies together represent a fascinating time in Disney’s existence. The company has been around for so long that it’s begun making movies about itself and retrofitting some of its older properties to suit the 21^st century. 2013’s Saving Mr. Banks was a revisionist white-washing of the story of how Mary Poppins got made. It turned Walt Disney from the ruthless creative steamroller he was into a folksy, avuncular friend to the masses. 2014’s Maleficent was a feminist reworking of Sleeping Beauty, taking a standard prince-rescues-narrative and turning it into a story of a woman reclaiming her goodness and power from the patriarchal society that stole it from her.

Disney is mythologizing itself while trying to make its classic stories more relevant and politically correct. It’s an intriguing accidental sub-genre they’re creating. I hope Cinderella and Tomorrowland are good movies but even if they’re not, they’ll provide an revealing look into the how the Disney corporation wants us to view it. Plus, even if they are bad, a bad movie in May is better than anything in February.

This preview was originally broadcast on Q90.1. www.deltabroadcasting.org .

Jupiter Ascending

This week saw the release of the Wachowski siblings’ latest film, the sci fi bonanza, Jupiter Ascending. The movie treads some very familiar territory for the Wachowskis who directed, among other things, the Matrix trilogy. For one thing, it’s another “chosen one” narrative, but this time, instead of the wooden Keanu Reeves as the savior of the world, we get Mila Kunis playing the improbably named Jupiter Jones, a workaday drone who cleans toilets for living but then finds out she is the most important person in the world because she is actually reincarnated space royalty and, in fact, the rightful owner of planet Earth.

The other familiar idea here is that, once again, the human race is being used as livestock. In The Matrix we were a food supply for evil robot monsters, and in Jupiter Ascending, we learn that these powerful royal families from space actually stock planets with people, allow them to grow to the point of overpopulation, and then harvest them so they can be turned into intergalactic Oil of Olay. That’s right. The evil space-baddies process a hundred human beings to one champagne bottle-sized portion of eternal youth potion. A trio of these eternally young villains discovers Jupiter’s reincarnation and decides to eliminate her because they want Earth’s harvest for themselves. The action really begins when she is rescued by Caine, the genetically engineered ex-solider played by Channing Tatum. Caine is part wolf and apparently part Vegas stripper from the look of him.

The movie is a mile wide and an inch deep. Mila Kunis is a charismatic actor, but her character doesn’t behave in ways that make sense. While she does scream at appropriate moments, Jupiter is surprisingly cool with being chased by assassins, being rescued by a dog man too afraid to love, hopping from planet to planet, and finding out that she is essentially queen of the earth.

The dialogue drags along like the rusted out muffler of a ’79 Malibu. This is particularly true in the occasional quiet, romantic moment between Jupiter and Caine, Those moments are supposed to be romantic, but the entire script seems as though it was carved in a block of Velveeta.

The thing that saves Jupiter Ascending (for me anyway) is the fact that the Wachowskis are great visualists. It’s as though they gave their art director 175 million dollars and a bag of crack and said, “Go for it, dude.” Space ships bursting through crystalline curtains of ice, swarms of bees dancing in unison over an Illinois farm, Jupiter’s bonkers headpiece when she’s about to get married – all over the top, ornate, and beautiful. You could watch a lot of the movie with the sound off and probably have a better experience.

One odd thing is that with all the Wachowski’s attention to detail and large budget, the film still has some terrible special effects makeup. One of the characters has big alien ears so fake looking you would think they were bought on November clearance at a going-out-of-business Halloween store in a Florida strip mall. Clunky dialogue might be subject to interpretation, makeup that looks carved out of wax isn’t.

  
Jupiter Ascending isn’t a good film, but it is fun. Arial dog fights over a glossy Chicago skyline with Channing Tatum skimming away on his anti-gravity boots, winged dragon men being used as royal enforcers, and Eddie Redmayne giving a performance that appears to be from a different movie entirely? It is a fantastically great bad movie.  

Auteurism, the Coen Brothers, and Blood Simple

In the early 1950s, people in France were exposed to a huge influx of American movies. During World War II and the subsequent years of rebuilding, few Hollywood films made it overseas and so there was a massive accumulation of classic American movies that Europeans saw basically all at once. A group of French film critics noticed similarities between movies made by the same director. 

 

They noticed that films by John Ford, for example, has similar themes, shots, and camera angles regardless of whether it was a western, a war picture, or a comedy. This may seem like common sense to us now, but back then directors really weren’t that big of a deal. In some cases, they were just glorified managers who made sure the camera was pointed in the right direction. However, these French film critics developed what is known as auteur theory, the idea that despite the fact that moviemaking is a very collaborative process sometimes involving hundreds of people, the director is the film’s author, the person who puts his or her individual stamp on it.

There was a lot of debate in the 50s and 60s about whether auteur theory was a valid way of looking at movies, but our culture has completely bought into it. Directors are brands these days. We know what it means when a Tarantino movie or a Spielberg picture comes out. We know the difference between a film by Martin Scorcese and one by Wes Anderson before we even see them.

 

Two of our most consistent and interesting auteurs are Joel and Ethan Coen. The Minnesota-born brothers have shared writing, producing, directing, and editing tasks on sixteen films starting in the mid 80s. They had a mild mainstream hit with 1987’s Raising Arizona and made even more of a splash with the dark, quirky, and award-winning Fargo in 1996. Since then, they’ve had some big hits like No Country For Old Men and True Grit and some less successful films like The Man Who Wasn’t There and The Ladykillers.

The Coen brothers’ movies have several consistent elements that mark them as auteurs. They work with a stock company of actors who regularly appear in their work like John Goodman, John Turturro, and Steve Buscemi. Also, their movies usually take place in distinctly American settings: the vast, bleak American west, cities dedicated to excess like Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  They love characters with sharp regional accents whether it’s from Texas, Minnesota, or New York. Thematically, the Coens are preoccupied with the mundane, greedy evil that resides in the human heart. Most of their movies seem to suggest that we are all just a choice or two away from becoming a force of evil in the world. Sometimes the darkness is played for laughs, but the Coens are at their strongest in their dramatic films that show the results of too much unrestrained desire. 

Their first film, the little-seen Blood Simple, came out in 1984. It is a film noir tale of infidelity, double crosses, and murder. The main characters quickly morph from everyday people a little dissatisfied in their job or their marriage into killers who scramble over each other just to stay alive. It’s surprisingly accomplished for a first movie and absolutely has all the hallmarks of later Coen brothers films. In fact, the brothers reused several shots and sequences from Blood Simple in other movies. One sequence involves the main character Ray trying to haul a bloody body off the road before an oncoming car gets close enough to see. Coen fans will know that sequence was remade almost shot for shot twelve years later in Fargo. You should watch Blood Simple, especially if you’re a fan of the Coen’s other films. You’ll find that those 1950s French film critics were onto something and in Blood Simple you’ll see Joel and Ethan Coen’s distinctive auteurist stamp.