red_hyro

What an awful, awful film.

I saw a few years back, drawn by Goldie and Bowie, whose music I enjoy, the last time I've made that mistake.

Bowie and Goldie, limited as actors but effective in the proper roles, did fine here, but rather than get a film which assigns them one note characters in order to better focus the viewer on the fact that the director is edgy, the writer is subtle, and the main actor has a great body, is a great dancer, and rivals Deniro in talent. All three are Andrew Goth, and all three sucked out loud, especially in scenes so irrelevant to the plot and narcissistic that they are painful to watch. For instance...

Did you know the main character, Ray, played by Goth is an honorable thug, but also a greater dancer? Does he pursue a dancing career in the film or is the dancing otherwise relevant to the plot? You ask.

No, but it's crucial that we have a long scene about him being a great dancer, just like we need a long scene to see that he can do a lot of pull ups, in order to understand that Nietzsche's Ubermensch walks the earth and is named Andrew Goth, I mean Ray.

Oh yes, and the movie is about a couple friends released from prison, one determined to go straight and one who is a psycho. Comic mayhem ensues.

The movie was memorably bad, which is an accomplishment I suppose, in an "Ed Wood" sort of way, since I've already forgotten so many mediocre films, but "Busted" aka "Everybody Loves Sunshine" has stuck with me, and even now recalling it, I have to shake the bad off my skin like so many wet slugs. Yuck!

Watching the Detectives is a loving homage to the screwball comedies of the 30s and 40s, adopting the basic formula of Bringing up Baby, i.e. daffy broad woos uptight dork. The dork is Cillian Murphy's Neil, an esoteric video store owner obsessed with being part of the movie reality he spends so much time the passive viewer of. Along comes Lucy Liu's Violet, a moderately insane woman who doesn't need to watch movies because she is always starring in her own, and is determined to have Neil as her costar. She involves him in a string of situations reminiscent of classic movies, noir and screwball alike, while attempting to help Neil realize she's the best thing that ever happened to him The movie is pleasant, though meandering at times, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The story could have used a little stronger of an underlying plot arc to tie together the comic episodes beyond the basic premise of Liu's pursuit of Neil. This plot arc component is what made Bringing up Baby, It Happened One Night, and other classic screwball comedies so good, the laughs occurring within a tight script. Watching the Detectives' script is funny if a bit flabby, but Lucy Liu and Cillian Murphy deliver inspired performances amidst a talented supporting cast, and are able to make you forget the film's flaws and enjoy yourself.

The central message of the film is good one for all of us who spend too much time watching and not enough time making our own movies.

Stephen King's version of the Danish Miniseries "The Kingdom", about a hospital filled with oddballs and ghosts, manages to render what had been a funny, thoughtful, and eerie story into a boring piece of dog poop. Skip it and make the effort to find the original by Lars von Trier, you'll be glad you did.

In his other works, King is good at occasionally creating scary moments, some even filled with prolonged dread; yet what makes his novels readable and other television projects such as "Rose Red" watchable when wading through the banal characters, plot points and scenes, is here lacking, which is strange. It may be explained by his inability to create the subtle forms of eeriness on display in his source material, which used quiet and stillness, not as the preface to a suddenly scream, but a soft murmur. King doesn't have the patience, and instead fills up the spooky quiet with incessant yammering.

Gone as well are the often comic and/or obsessive, yet believably human characters which were the backbone of the original series by Lars Von Trier. King instead treats us to boring clichés reminiscent of one dimensional characters from his other works.

The charmingly arrogant, scheming and blustering doctor Stig Helmer, one of the original series' many treasures, is robbed of his intelligence and turned into Dr. Stegman, a craven moron whose own arrogance, bluster and scheming ways would have seemed too broad on M.A.S.H. King can't stand to create mere A-holes, they must be inhumanly evil and stupid. Yosemite Sam was more nuanced and received less cloyingly saccharine comeuppance from his adversaries, although Yosemite's comeuppance was distinguished by being funny: no such luck with Stegman, and the Kingdom Hospital is plagued by King's inability to write intentionally funny lines. (Unfortunately the hilariously awful similes which turn up in his prose works have not appeared to have made it into his scripts, but there are laughs to be found here in the dialogue.) We are also treated to elements familiar to readers of King: tedious interior monologues; annoying singing by various characters; inhuman, snarling bad guys; a wise-cracking, delightlessly sassy god-character (here, a giant anteater); and writing which leaves nothing to be spelled out by the audience. This last quality is perhaps the most annoying of King's as writer, his inability to allow for ambiguities, to let something remain less than obvious.