Well our sacred gold hunter was searching for a nugget of hope when he saw TWILIGHT starring Paul Newman the other day, but instead it looks like he came up with some dirt instead. Take a look, things aren't too grand.
Hey, it's Aguirre, got to see the new Paul Newman, Gene Hackman, Richard Benton directed flick Twilight the other day. That sounds like I'm billing the thing up,don't it? Ooooo, big stars. Ewwwww, shitty movie. I'll try to shorten up the blabbering a bit on this one.
Now listen, I love film noir. Some great, great movies. T-men, Touch of Evil, The Killers, etc... If you haven't seen any of those, see them. Really cool movies. And black and white is an intrinsic part of noir. Everything has to look darker, to just bleed black and make you feel seedy for just sitting in the theatre watching the movie. Try to do it in color and you really kind of mess it up.
Why is any of this important? Because Twilight is basically trying to be a color film noir that ends up like a bad episode of CHiPs. WHat the fuck, this whole story could have been told in a half-hour episode of Mike Hammer, and that's an hour long show. The first three fourths of the movie is like The Big Sleep because nothing makes any sense, and then the ending is so freakin anti-climatic that...damn, I can hardly remember walking out of a theater feeling so blah.
Film opens with Paul Newman as a private dick in Mexico, getting Reese "Freeway" Witherspoon (who is naked, very nice) out of having relations with Cotton Weary from Scream II. Sooooo, God this is tedious, Paul ends up getting shot in the leg (which turns into this supremely lame joke throughout the movie about everyone thinking his dick got shot off...jesus...) and then the movie flashes forward two years to Newman talking to cops which in turn flashes back to the event's of the movie itself. Then we see that Newman is now the housemaid or something at Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon's house, where he lives. Witherspoon was Hack and Sarandon's kid. Hack and Sarandon are aged actors in their twilight years (!, holy crap, the name of the movie). Soooo, god this is really tedious, okay, fuck it.
Damn, I just deleted this giant plot rundown because I gave away WAY too much of the film. Basically, Newman has to deliver a package, and stuff goes awry. Newman get shot at by a bloody, fat cop. Newman gets beat up by a fat woman. Newman meets up with a crazy Latino limo driver who has no point at all. Newman pushes Cotton Weary's face into some chicken wings...wait, is Cotton Weary the guy who invented the Cotton gin? Oh crap, I don't know, I have a headache from thinking about this damn movie.
Newman is okay, but the guy is a legend, and he deserves much better roles than this. Pretty lame dialouge, and a very bad narration. Is this supposed to be a satire on film noir? If so, it fails pretty badly. Hackman is fine, but he's just blah. Sarandon is the same, although for a bit I thought she was going to pull a Norma Desmond with all the pictures of herself around the house and the whole SPOILER HERE BUT C'MON IT'S SO OBVIOUS MAN- sleeping with Paul Newman she's a vamp thing- OKAY END OF VERY OBVIOUS SPOILER. But nope. Reese Witherspoon is given some baaaaaad dialouge brother "They're just stars in each other's love story, and we're all just bit players." OH shut the hell up, that's so lame.
I thought it might be a parody or maybe a satire on noir also because of the excessive use of noir-ish music. I mean excessive baby. Pretty good, though- and sorry, I forgot the name of the composer, maybe Epstein- but then again, I was the one who didn't like Glass's score to Kundun, and that has recieved more praise than anything from that film (I still stand by what I said).
Benton is an excellent director, but this just doesn't suit him. I know, he co-wrote the screenplay, but the real rough existence he put so perfectly onto the screen with Kramer vs. Kramer and the beauty of Places in the Heart...Well, the grittiness that you need to make a color noir, or any noir for that matter, is just severly lacking here. L.A. Confidential was a color noir-ish film that succeded because- well, the story was much better- but also because of how it was shot. You wanna make these people look dark, look like their lives are just masks they put up to cover the dark corners of their past, well, you have to shoot them that way. The film is shot just like any other movie. Not that that's bad, but for a film noir to even be a film noir those shadows have to play off their faces for a reason. You can't just splash some shadows on someone and call it noir. Damn, when you're outside in the daytime it should LOOK DARK MAN! It just doesn't work, I'm sorry.
I hate slamming a movie because I know how much work goes into it.
Sorry fellas, but this one stinks. It's not funny, maybe a line or two got a chuckle from the audience I was with. James Garner is pretty good, and Stockard Channing has an okay role. This movie is soooo anticlimatic man o man, I felt like the demon from Chinese Ghost Story had stuck her tounge down my throat and drained the life out of me, it's that boring. Maybe I just have a bias against L.A. (where the movie takes place). Ah well, go rent Sunset Boulevard instead. Billy Wilder, where are we when we nead ya'...
