Cleopatra

As a movie fan, I’m interested in extremity – what’s the longest movie ever released and what’s the shortest? Which were the biggest money makers, and which were the biggest financial flops. What film won the most Oscars and which won the most Golden Raspberries? Which had the biggest cast, biggest budget, biggest profit margin, or most universal critical acclaim. I’m particularly interested in giant failures, movies that misfire so badly either critically or creatively that they end careers, bring down studios, and go on to live as punchlines for years. Movie making is such a long, expensive, collaborative undertaking, when a movie like Heaven’s Gate or Ishtar or The Last Action Hero or John Carter comes along, I have to wonder, where did it go wrong? At what point in the process did things just fall apart? Didn’t somebody say, “Hey, whoa guys. We’re spending millions of dollars and this movie is actually kind of bad. Maybe we should change it so that it’s not so bad.” Of course they did. And sometimes those tweaks saved the picture. And sometimes they made things a million times worse.

 This last week, I finished a personal one-movie extreme marathon of my own. I watched all of 1963’s Cleopatra starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. The picture is the zenith of overstuffed, over-indulgent classic Hollywood filmmaking at the very tail end of the classic Hollywood period. This long, rambling story of desire and conquest literally had a cast of thousands, was the most expensive movie in history up to that point, featured a record-setting number of 65 costume changes for Elizabeth Taylor, and had an original running time of six hours. The film was directed by three different men over the three years it took to get the thing made and at least two of the lead actors bowed out before finishing, causing their scenes to have to be reshot. Many of the ornate, over the top sets had to be constructed twice, once in London and then again in Rome. Elizabeth Taylor had a health crisis in the middle of filming and had to have an emergency tracheotomy which shut production down for six months. Partly because of that delay, Taylor’s salary ballooned from an already record-breaking one million dollars to an almost laughable seven million dollars. Adjusted for inflation today, that would be the equivalent of her getting paid over fifty four million dollars. The total cost of the film ended up being 31 million dollars which in today’s dollars would be 340 million. It almost bankrupted 20^th Century Fox. As if all that wasn’t trouble enough, it was on the set of Cleopatra that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton met for the first time and began the adulterous affair that blew apart both their current marriages and marked the start of their notoriously tumultuous relationship.

Now, of course, the six hour cut of Cleopatra never made it to theaters. In fact, the credited director, Joseph Mankiewicz was fired from the production not long after her presented that cut to the studio. (He was later rehired because no one else could edit together a comprehensible version of the footage he shot.) The theatrical release was somewhere around three hours long. The version that’s available on streaming now, the 50^th anniversary restored edition, is four hours and three minutes long. It’s not just a movie, it’s an investment. 

Is the movie itself any good? That’s almost beside the point. If you’re watching a four hour epic with a backstory like Cleopatra has, it’s much more about the experience and bragging rights of saying you did it. To put it simply, the movie is too much of some things and, amazingly, not enough of others. It’s extreme but that’s sort of the point. It’s a fascinating piece of Hollywood history and is worth seeing for that reason alone.  

Star Trek Beyond

There’s a core difference between the two great sci fi movie franchises. Star Wars is mostly about myth and the epic retelling of stories that have been around for thousands of years. Star Trek, on the other hand, is mostly about ideas, questions about human nature and how that nature stays the same even when we are onboard a starship in the final frontier. With its beginnings during the optimistic, technology crazy days of the space race, Star Trek envisioned a utopian future in which disease, war, and prejudice are all but eliminated and all the races of the universe come together to explore the unknown and share knowledge. Though the franchise has seen several iterations over the last half century, the heart of Star Trek has always been a cerebral one – a brainy “what if” set in space.

When director J.J. Abrams rebooted the film series in 2009, it was a sleeker, sexier, more action oriented vision. It was less about ideas and more about souped up space adventure, but seeing how each familiar character and setting was reimagined was so entertaining, the shift in focus almost didn’t matter even to die-hard Trekkies.  The sequel also directed by Abrams, 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, was less successful and the less said about it, the better. 

 Now we have Star Trek Beyond, directed by Justin Lin, the man responsible for installments 3 through 6 of the car and wife beater fashion show known as The Fast and The Furious. I’m not saying a director can’t be responsible for brainless entertainment sometimes and smart entertainment other times. I’m just saying all the self-tanner, car exhaust, and testosterone fumes from directing that many Fast and Furious movies can’t have been good for Lin’s judgement. Anyway, the concern was that Lin’s Star Trek might be just another dumb action picture that happens to feature people in Starfleet uniforms.

The film does at least give lip service to the realm of ideas. It begins with a mopey, listless, emo Captain Kirk halfway through his ship’s five year mission to explore the universe and he’s wondering what’s it all for? Why explore? To what end? Especially when the different races he tries to help reject his efforts at making peace. Meanwhile, our favorite Vulcan, Spock, contemplates his own future, thinking maybe he should resign from Starfleet, settle down with a nice pointy eared gal and help repopulate his race after his home planet was obliterated in the first film. 

 

So there are these large themes about purpose, legacy, mortality, duty versus love, and the value of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Then the crew gets called on what they think is going to be a routine rescue mission and all of that goes out the window. What follows is a chain of sometimes exciting, sometimes confusing and cheap-looking action set pieces loosely strung together by underdeveloped characters and eye roll-worthy motivations. There’s a vampiric, shape changing supervillain intent on destroying the Federation. Why? Meh, just ‘cause. He commands a deadly superfleet of possibly drones, possibly other aliens, it’s never really clear. Where did he get them or learn how to command them? Meh, unimportant. There are holes in the basic story that you could fly the USS Excelsior through. 

Lin’s overall sensibility and general wrongness for the Star Trek franchise is summed up in the scene in which Kirk and crew destroy the entire enemy fleet simply by playing the Beastie Boys’ song “Sabotage” really loud over the radio. It’s dumb and doesn’t make much sense, but is intended to appeal to pure emotional reaction rather than our brain. It’s not very logical, if you know what I mean.

Star Trek Beyond is definitely one of the lesser films in this 50 year old franchise. You can still go see it, but I’m not sure that’s the best idea.

Ghostbusters

Sometimes in my English composition classes, I have ambitious students who wants to try something different. He wants to write his personal essay about his family but in the form of a hard-boiled detective mystery. She’ll want to write about her first job as an epic poem. One student from years ago claimed he was going to prove the existence of God with an 8 page research paper.

Sometimes I gently redirect these students and sometimes I tell them to just go for it. When I tell them it’s okay to do something ambitious or unlikely, the one thing I say is that my only criterion is success. If it works, it works and that’s what matters most.

This is the attitude with which I approached the remake of Ghostbusters. In my opinion, the 1984 original directed by Ivan Reitman is a perfect film. The writing, casting, and performances are about as perfectly calibrated as they can be. After more than 30 years, the original is still, if you’ll pardon the pun, monstrously entertaining.

So it’s either very ambitious or coldly calculating or just a little reckless to remake such a beloved film. But Bridesmaids director (and Michigan native) Paul Feig has spearheaded a 21^st century version that the internet has been buzzing about for the last two years. (As a side note, there was a strong misogynistic reaction against the casting of women as the leads. People who had this concern are cretinous knuckledraggers and don’t deserve the attention I am giving them at this moment.)

Anyway, going into it, I knew very well that no one was going to match  the original But my only criterion was success, I decided. If it worked, it worked.  

Here’s what’s successful about the new Ghostbusters: first and foremost, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. The two Saturday Night Live cast members are unpredictable, funny, and original while still occupying the roles they’re filling from the first film, that of nerdy tech geek and streetwise outsider coming to the group of scientists. McKinnon’s performance in particular is unabashed. As with Bill Murray’s 1984 performance, she give the appearance that she’s making it all up as she goes and finds it all delightful. Her clear joy combined with her distinctive quirk easily make her the standout of the film. Surprisingly, McKinnon makes a convincing action hero during her solo moment during the climactic battle with an army of ghosts. Whereas it was funny watching Kristen Wiig’s awkwardness in battle, McKinnon was actually exciting.  

Leslie Jones, while perhaps less unpredictable, can still make just about any situation funny simply by yelling about it. I about choked on my popcorn when her character Patty exorcises an evil spirit from Melissa McCarthy’s character by smacking her across the face and shouting, “The power of Patty compels you!” I appreciate the Exorcist reference but it’s her angry/panicky delivery that makes it really funny.

Chris Hemsworth also gets credit for playing Kevin, the world’s dumbest and (therefore most entertaining) secretary to the new Ghostbusters. Hemsworth shows a fun lack of self-consciousness and gets a lot of comedic mileage out of playing up his good looks and absolute lack of basic human intelligence.

Beyond that, the story is sort of unimportant. Melissa McCarthy and Kristen Wiig both do their typical schtick and do just fine. The special effects are fine but pretty standard for an expensive Hollywood blockbuster franchise starter.

The filmmakers embraced the film’s heritage and loaded the movie with cameos and winking references galore. Maybe it was smarter to do that than to ignore it, but the references became distracting after a while.

Still, considering this film could have been a giant dumpster fire of unmet expectations, the fact that it was not makes me want to label it a success. It’s not a perfect Ghostbusters movie, but that’s okay. There’s already been one of those.