Before you head to the theater... exorcise your anger about BATMAN AND ROBIN... Don’t carry it in the theater with you, don’t wear it like a Purple Heart... Let the scar tissue heal. Just go into this movie expecting the director of FALLING DOWN, LOST BOYS and THE CLIENT to deliver a pretty durn good film.
8MM could have been a trip to the David Fincher xerox machine. Joel could of hired Darius Khondji as his cinematographer and Gary Wissner to ape the look of Fincer’s SEVEN... but it was obvious to me that while Joel was headed in a similar world of the dark sewer of our reality... he did want to keep it in reality.
Fincher’s SEVEN with it’s deep textures and glorius filters and obtuse angles and sets was more of a descent into madness. But reality was not (in my opinion) a key issue with the film. Instead it felt like a bit of a reinvention of a hardcore Film Noir shot in color... and done right.
Now sure... this film could have painted a very textured arty world to devour poor Nick Cage... But that’s not what Schumacher went after. Instead it felt that he was striving for the real world. When Cage is in Miami... it didn’t feel like some sort of Hollywood MIAMI... it looked like Miami (it was Miami too).
The world of sleaze that Cage’s character dives into feels authentic and not overdone. It’s not very glamorous. And I think this was instrumental in telling this story.
We’re dealing with a normal All American P.I. The type of guy that will cease the love-making process to put his screaming baby to ease and to sleep. He’s a regular joe. He’s clean cut, if he knocked on your door you’d look at him and say, “Are you the police?”
He’s investigating something... horrible. Now... it’s real easy to just sort of blow this ‘ewwww that’s horrible’ right on off, but let’s face it folks... We exist in a world where Milk Cartons are cardboard billboards for the missing. The runaways, the kidnapped and the murdered.
There are untold thousands of missing people that we never hear from again. Where do they go? How are they found? Are they found? Alive? Dead? For each of them... there is a file. There are investigators and there are family members that just want to know... anything.
Now I don’t have any ‘related story’ of how a snuff film touched my life... THANK GOD. But just 7 blocks from my house a group of 4 girls were massacred in a Yogurt Shop one night... not so long ago... And they have never caught the killer/s. One of the girls babysat my sister when she was young... I knew her vaguely. But I can’t imagine spending my days, weeks, months, years staring at a pretty headshot from some Sears Portrait Studio.... next to the Crime Scene photographs of... well... whatever was done to her.
What does that do to a person? In SEVEN... well it made Morgan Freeman a bit cold and calculating. It made Brad Pitt... a bit angry. Well... in 8MM, a character by the name of Max Hollywood says something along the lines of “ya dance with the devil long enough, you don’t change him, he changes you.”
When I lived up in North Texas, I had to help a fella ‘clean’ a deer. As a result... well BAMBI and PREDATOR are a bit different for me to watch than they were before.
But what if you spent months diving into an investigation... you found the folks that did it... and the proof was destroyed. What then? That’s a bit of what 8MM is about. It also takes a look at the victim side, the investigator’s side and the criminal’s side. I like that.
Now, I don’t want you to think that I categorically love this film. I don’t. I do have a few problems here and there.... The main one being that I REALLY think it was a bad idea to cast Bad Guy Actors as Bad Guys in this film.
Sure... sometimes Bad Guys look like Charles Manson and you can point and say “that’s a bad guy”. But the type of film this is... that’s so anchored in the real world... It needed to have that.... ‘ARLINGTON ROAD’ angle where the bad guys look like.... suburbanites. The idea that these guys do evil things... well it just didn’t disturb me cause well.... That guy is willing to kill whores with a shotgun.... that guy will feed his partner into a woodchipper and that guy will torment the criminally insane to satisfy his own sadistic urgings.
You know that the SECOND ya see them. And the part that makes it all the worse is with the character of MACHINE... they make it painfully obvious that evil can look like a guy that takes care of his silver haired mother.... just like Clark Kent.
The film feels like a good movie, and I think it is one. It’s a bit darker than some will like... but hey... that’s what it was attempting. The detective work is real good (imho) and that... by itself was worth the price of admission.
Good work Joel. Now imagine if you were to set Batman in a universe where crime had significance. Where deaths were felt and changed the course of lives. Ultimately that’s the story you told in 8MM. It’s what you did in FALLING DOWN. Batman is no different. He’s a product of violence. Nick Cage was affected by the violence he saw. It doesn’t have to exist in a universe with giant statues and neon lights and black rubber nipples.
Batman has a profound lack of humor, he’s the dark knight. How often did you let Nick Cage laugh and be cheerful... even when the investigation was over? Not often. Crime has punishment even on those that survive it.
8MM is an example of what Schumacher can do when he wants to. I like this Schumacher, and I hope he continues along this line a while. Choosing good projects with good scripts.... casting solid actors and making solid movies.
