Cool, here's a new spy that gets into his/her/it's role of being a spy. Hopefully we'll be hearing more from John Robie as she/he/it makes contact with Hallenbeck and Moriarty... thereby gaining the floorplans to all that is sacred in Hollywood. He/She/It's looking at Sam Raimi's latest directoral gig, A SIMPLE PLAN. A film I absolutely love, Moriarty Loves, Hallenbeck loves, Tom Joad Loves... well shucks, just about everyone I know that has seen it.... loves it. As well they should.
Harry,
I hope this pigeon reaches you safely,
John Robie
I crawled into the theater through an air duct that some proletarian popcorn jockey had left unscrewed. I was looking for diamonds...acutally, no I wasn't, I don't do that anymore. I'm not a cat burglar. I'm a stud who lives on the Frech Riviera that picks up hotties like Grace Kelly. I wanted to see a free movie, that's why I broke in. I also just looked up the word proletarian. I think it fits. I saw a free movie. It ruled more than my deep dark tan or my big French villa. Someone get me that fat director I used to know. He coulda made a movie like this.
A Simple Plan works so well because it's coming from a director who knows exactly what kind of movie he wants to make and exactly how to make it. The level of craft here is astounding. This is Sam Raimi, Sam fly-the-camera-through-the-forrest-at-mach-ten Raimi, and it's subdued. The camera work is so subtle, so simple...yet so perfect, so freakin' great. It doesn't call attention to itself-it calls perfect attention to the people on screen, to the tracks they leave in the snow, to the birds hovering like angles of death in the trees, to the pregnant wife with warm, gentle curves. It's so perfect, so fitting to the tone of the movie, that it elicits mental screams of joy. Sam Raimi took on a movie completely different from anything he's done in his past and rose to the challenge.
But then again, Raimi's always done that. Yes, he's done the Evil Dead movies, and yeah, he's behind Hercules and Xena. Look at Raimi's body of work, though. His first bigger film (I know, it ain't big, but after stuff like Clockwork...) was Evil Dead, an outright horror film.
Crimewave was a slapstick comedy that would make Mac Sennet proud. Evil Dead 2 was one of the first of it's kind, an action horror movie that didn't skimp on the horror and piled on great dialouge, great scenes, great characters...oh, man, what a flick. Army of Darkness followed in much the same vein but tweaked it a little bit, adding mythical elements that a lesser movie, a lesser director, would squander. Darkman was a nightmarish superhero flick. The Quick and the Dead was a western. A Simple Plan is deep, intelligent drama. His next movie, For the Love of the Game, is a romantic comedy! LOOK AT THIS MAN!!! Raimi is doing what someone like Hawks (speakin' of celluloid gods) did, going all over the place, hitting every genre, challenging himself and making a great flick. Peter Jackson comes to mind now, going from something like Dead Alive to Heavenly Creatures and now The Lord of The Rings, but really, there ain't that many directors out there challenging themselves like this.
This is just too cool.
Now the excitement here is about what Raimi did. The actual film itself, while fucking terrific, is so incredibly emotionally draining...it's like Cuckoo's Nest. I can't watch that movie more than once or twic a year. It's like an emotional marathon for me. Or the part in The Best Years of Our lives where the little kids are looking in on the guy with the claws. The fact that a sequence of images and sounds coming from a screen can do that, can hit so hard, is a testament to great filmmaking. This is a heavy, heavy flick. There are some ugly choices made here, some gut-wrenchingly painful decisions that will leave you a bloody mess in the theater. But the characters are done so well that it matters. It so matters.
Movies hardly ever get white trash right. If they're over the top characitures like The Hills Have Eyes it's one thing, but it's rare that a movie will present hicks as a human, feeling bunch. Gun Crazy did it (yeah, they were hicks). Boy does A Simple Plan do it. Bill Paxton is like the one who moves away, forces himself away from his past, making sure that he makes it, that he makes something of himself. Billy Bob Thorton is the one who resigns himself to his lot in life. Doesn't ask for much other than a place to rest his head and a regular supply of beer and melancholy. He's perfect. Paxton is great, but Thorton is perfect. He is better than he was in Sling Blade, better than he's ever been in anything else. And you cynical bastards can shut your traps about Sling Blade. That movie was fuckin' great. Billy Bob Throton has gotta win somethig for this. If not for anything else, for the one scene...damn, I can't spoil it, but it's in a truck, and it is played better than any scene I've seen in the past couple years. You could write novels about what goes on in that scene. It is beautiful.
DAMN AND THIS IS A SAM RAIMI MOVIE OH IT'S SO FREAKIN' COOL!!!!
Bridget Fonda is unrecognizable when she first appears. She ends up being worse than the old lady in the basement, and I mean that in the highest regards possible. She's not evil. That would be way too easy. She's greed, she's the unrestrained emotion to pine for a better life no matter what the cost, she's...sick. And she's great in the movie. It would have been really easy to make Brent Briscoe's character, Lou, the typical moron. Thank God nothing is typical in this movie. He's so great...an idiot who works the weak gears in his mind to their fullest capacity, and it's still not even close to being enough. At turns ugly, funny, pathetic, aggrivating,...shit, he hits just about all of 'em.
Oh man, the score works. It so works. How perfect. How great to filter in the piano over the freshly fallen snow, to crank up the intensity without cranking up the volume, to make more with less. Can you tell I don't know jack shit about discussing movie scores? Hell, I just thought it was terriffic.
I haven't even said what the movie is about. All this time, when someone out there just wanted to know what the movie is about. Well, it's about three men, two of them brothers, who find a bunch of money in the forest in the dead of winter. The cast is great, the script is great, and the director....well...thank God there's a thing called movies, and thank God a guy named Sam Raimi makes 'em. Now I'm gonna go see if I can get some nookie from Grace.
