Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
Odd combination, but here’s what he’s got to say:
Hi Harry,
I’ve been a longtime fan of Ain’t It Cool News, but I’ve never written in before. I have a connection here in New York City, and go to screenings all the time. Thought I would start getting my thoughts down, because I’m a huge movie buff. Hope this is something you can use for your website.
SHOPGIRL
On Thursday, I saw an advanced screening of Steve Martin’s new film Shopgirl. I’d never heard of it before, but learned it’s adapted from his best selling novel, yes, that’s right, “the” Steve Martin wrote a best selling novel. Anyhow, when I got to the AMC on 42nd Street here in NYC on Thursday night, I see a bunch of people waiting in line for another movie, and learn it’s for The Terminal. Being a huge Spielberg fan, I tried to finagle my way into that screening, security was pretty tight, and was unsuccessful. So I went into Shopgirl a bit disappointed and not really wanting to see it, wishing I was at The Terminal screening.
Well, I have to say, I was very pleasantly surprised by this gem. After crap like Bringing Down the House and Cheaper by the Dozen, this is the return of Steve Martin folks. While comedy has always been his forte, I’ve always admired his more dramatic roles like in Grand Canyon and The Spanish Prisoner, or when he accomplishes the perfect mix of drama and comedy like in Parenthood and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. And while Shopgirl is at heart a romantic comedy, the characters are written so well, that it allows Martin to come off in a very realistic dramatic way.
Claire Danes plays Mirabelle Buttersfield. She works at a counter at Saks Fifth Avenue selling gloves, and leads a mundane life. She’s a wholesome Vermont girl, whom has moved to LA to make contacts, but nothing has happened as of yet. She does some drawings on the side, but only sells about 1 every six months. In short, she is lonely.
In comes Jeremy (a long-haired Jason Schwartzman) who plays an artist, who designs fonts, yes, computer fonts. When they meet and go on their first date, there is some genuinely funny moments. Right before they are about to have sex, he reaches in his pocket and realizes he grabbed a mint, instead of a condom. He then asks Mirabelle if she has a plastic baggie to use instead of a condom.
Jeremy is written to come off as the poor artist, and there are some funny moments with that. One small problem though, is that they just drop the font design, and he ends up going on the road to sell amplifiers to bands.
So things don’t go quite right on their dates, so in comes Ray Porter (Steve Martin), a suave charming rich guy, who of course is supposed to juxtapose Jeremy, the poor struggling artist. Now it may sound weird, or dirty, at first that Mirabelle, in her 20’s, would fall for Ray, who says he’s past fifty, but looks really 60 (Martin is actually 58). But we understand Mirabelle’s character, that she’s really lonely, she’s not really attracted to Jeremy who can’t even afford a movie ticket, and in comes this guy who buys her a $145 pair of gloves.
Romance ensues, and she sleeps with him on the second date. It’s actually funny, because she ends up seducing him. They go back to his apartment, and when he steps out of the room, she gets naked. Now we only get to see Claire’s backside, which of course we’ve seen before when she wore a g-string bikini in To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday. There are a couple more scenes where Claire gets naked, but again, she doesn’t really show anything (i.e. her tits, she must have a non-frontal nudity contract).
Basically the story comes down to, does she want to be with a rich guy who cheats on her and won’t commit, or the poor artist, who maybe doesn’t do everything right when it comes to romance, but at least his feelings are real. It may sound a bit cliché, but I really felt the characters were real, and played real. There’s nothing cheesy here.
There was one moment where it just got a bit too serious too quick. We learn Mirabelle has been taking anti-depressants, and she went off them, and is now very depressed. There’s not a good transition into that scene. Another thing that doesn’t quite work well, is Steve Martin narration comes and goes, and you’re not really sure why.
Finally, they play the Gattaca music at the end. Now the release date is currently set for November, and they said the music wasn’t set in stone yet, so I really hope they change it. While it works ok for the scene, as a filmmaker, you really have to be aware of where music has been used before. For instance there’s this montage scene in The Luzhin Defense where they play the Eyes Wide Shut music (from the opening). While it works quite nicely for the scene, you just can’t use it. For Gattaca lovers like myself, all I identify the theme music with Gattaca. Therefore you must choose something else, unless of course you’re using it for a satirical effect, like P. T. Anderson in Magnolia.
Anderson used the music from 2001 to introduce Frank T. J. Mackey, Tom Cruise’s character, and it worked brilliantly. A) Because he was introducing one of the biggest actors in the world and B) because he was introducing the biggest character, or character with the most ego, in the film. Plus, the music just cuts off in the middle, which was a nice touch. It’s basically playing as a way to display Mackey’s ego and pretentiousness.
In both Shopgirl and Luzhin, there is no other reason, just that it sounds good with the scene.
A better title for this film would have been L.A. Story, because LA really plays a part in this film. There’s a blond co-worker of Mirabelle’s who really displays the superficial tendencies of LA girls. But of course Steve Martin already wrote and starred in a film by that name. Shopgirl is just an awful title that really doesn’t catch the significance of the film. It was the title of the best selling novel though, so I guess they won’t change it.
Could Shopgirl be the next Harold and Maude? Well, not sure on that, but I will say it was quite enjoyable, and different than I expected. I’m glad to see Steve Martin doing a serious project again.
THE TERMINAL
So after being delighted with Shopgirl, but still disappointed because I didn’t get to see The Terminal, I check Fandango Friday morning, and what do you know, there are sneak previews all over NYC of The Terminal Friday night. So I bought my ticket and caught it at Union Square.
I’ll begin by saying what I yelled out at the end of the film, while some of the audience was applauding, “I can’t believe Spielberg made this load of crap.” Yes, you heard me right. Now, I’m a huge Spielberg fan. Minority Report was by far one of the best films of 2002, and I loved what he did with Kubrick’s A.I., despite the cheesy Mission to Mars rip off of the aliens at the end.
But I thought there wasn’t much to Catch Me If You Can. It was a fine film, well-made, but just not much too it, anyone could have made it. So I kind of went into The Terminal thinking it was going to be like that. I bought into the previews thinking, hey, this cheesy high-concept could work, if done right—a man without a country discovers America in JFK airport; it will be a satisfying film. And I’ll even admit I’ve been humming “Leaving on a Jet Plane” for the last couple weeks.
Boy was I wrong. The Terminal is an absolutely bogus Hollywood feature, aimed at pleasing the mass audience with dumb jokes, with a horrible script. Even while writing this, I still can’t believe Steven Spielberg directed this load of crap; what was he thinking? Is Spielberg turning into Ron Howard (Ransom, How the Grinch Stole Christmas), or even Robert Zemeckis (Cast Away), doing big budget films just to make money?
Tom Hanks plays Viktor Navorski whose stuck at JFK airport because there was a coup in his country. In the beginning, he’s taken to Frank Dixon’s (Stanley Tucci) office and is told he must not step foot outside the airport doors. The problem is, Viktor doesn’t speak any English, and they don’t speak his language. This is the first part that leads down a long slope of unbelievability.
I just can’t believe they wouldn’t have an interpreter at JFK airport. They wouldn’t just let a man who doesn’t speak English walk around the airport if they weren’t sure he didn’t understand what was going on. And if Spielberg is trying to criticize immigration into this country, he shouldn’t be doing it in a comedic way, making a joke at the fact that Viktor doesn’t know what is going on.
He tries to get into the bureaucracy of the immigration laws by showing how Dixon wants Viktor to take advantage of a loophole that would allow him to leave the airport, but Dixon’s character is played so bogus, that it’s just not believable.
And it really makes no sense why Viktor just doesn’t leave. Is it because he just wants to follow the rules? Well later we learn he’s learning how to break the rules, how to find the loophole, with the “goat” incident. The “goat” scene really makes no sense, because Dixon could just check and see if the medicine is for people or for animals. The whole motivation behind the scene is that he didn’t want Viktor to show him up. And he just lets Viktor show him up.
Again, this is just poor writing. The writers felt they needed a bad guy in the movie, when they don’t, and made Dixon out to be the stereotypical bad guy, instead of making him seem like a real person. No wonder this is so poorly written, because one of the screenwriters, Jeff Nathanson, wrote both Rush Hour 2 and Speed 2.
Dixon’s anger at Viktor makes no sense. Dixon suddenly decides, that because he’s angry at Viktor, he’s now going to try and keep him at the airport forever. It’s a stupid Hollywood device, the protagonist must have an antagonist, or you have no movie. No matter now stupid it plays out.
I’d like to invent a new phrase and call this film: White Water Spielberg. The Terminal is a scam, it’s bogus, it’s whitebread mass audience appeal, with watered down stereotypical clichéd plot and story.
A lot of the jokes are just plain dumb. Like the coins shooting out at him when he returns a bunch of pushcarts. They didn’t shoot out before, just cause a bunch come out at a time doesn’t mean they would fly out like that. It’s this type of little detail that shows how much Spielberg has turned into the typical director hack sell-out. Stanley Kubrick, who Spielberg took over and directed A.I. after Kubrick’s death, would never overlook such details.
The audience was eating up the dumb jokes though, so I guess when you want to make a movie that will have mass audience approval, you have to dumb down the script and write down to the audience. This is done all the time, just not in a movie directed by Spielberg, I expect more from him.
More little details ruin this film as well, like Viktor goes to Borders to buy travel guides on New York City to learn English when he has no money for food. Those travel guides, especially in an airport bookstore, are expensive, probably at least $10 a piece. And when they showed he could just barely afford a $0.75 burger at Burger King (which is also a false price by the way), how could he afford to buy the books. And later it’s revealed the Head of Homeland Security Department at JFK makes less than $19 an hour. That’s just under $40,000. I highly doubt that is possible.
There is a kind of inside joke that is humorous. Kumar Pallana’s character in The Terminal stabbed a guy back in India, which is why he fled to the US. In The Royal Tenenbaums, his most well-known role as Royal’s loyal friend and butler, he stabbed Royal in the backstory.
The subplot with Diego Luna, from Y tu mamá también, is too sentimental, and stupid. It’s just not believable that there would be a wedding in an airport, give me a break.
Finally the ending is tied up too nicely. Why would Dixon leave the others alone, once he finds everything out about them. Are you telling me the head of homeland security at JFK airport is going to let a known criminal, a criminal who assaulted a police officer, still work there, and not have him immediately arrested? Great, I feel safe traveling now.
The sentimentality over-kill comes in once more when we learn what Viktor has in his peanut can, and why he came to America. We never find out anything else about him, if he has a family back home, what his job is. But his reason for coming to the US is just plain dumb.
I am just dumbfounded that Spielberg made this film. I guess this is his Planet of the Apes, oh wait, no, that’s going to be The War of the Worlds.
You can call me:
Bill the Butcher
Ooooooof. Y’know, I hope SHOPGIRL is a nice Martin movie. I’m tired of disliking the work Steve Martin does. I was a huge fan for a long time, and I like him as a screenwriter, especially when he deals with the romantic. Both LA STORY and ROXANNE are favorites of mine. This guy really, really didn’t like THE TERMINAL, though, eh? Thanks for writing in, and if you do attend a lot of screenings, let’s hear more from you, Bill.
"Moriarty" out.
