One of my favourite radio shows is the BBC Radio 4 evergreen Quote Unquote, and last Monday evening they had a round devoted to performers trashing critics, a favourite theme of quote recyclers. Asking an artist about critics is like asking a lamp-post about dogs, ha, ha. That kind of thing.
I wonder what the film-maker in question would make of this, from the ever droll Mark Steyn, dissing his latest effort, a would-be thriller called Trapped:
Purely by coincidence, the other day I happened to be re-watching Suddenly, Lewis Allen's 1954 thriller with Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, James Gleason, Nancy Gates, etc. Frank hadn't quite fully emerged from his pre-From Here To Eternity slump, which is part of what makes the film such fun: instead of palling around with Crosby or Kelly and romancing Kim Novak or Rita Hayworth, one of the great icons of the 20th century is pulling his weight in an ensemble piece with reliable Fifties B-movie types. He plays, like Bacon does, a somewhat unstable type leading his accomplices through a plan that's perfect on paper. As in Trapped, his victims quickly get the measure of him and start messing with his head. But Suddenly is far more secure in its sense of itself. Unlike Trapped, the one-word title isn't just a lame generality pulled off the shelf: it refers to the setting - the sleepy small town of Suddenly, California. You get the feeling it would never have occurred to the makers of Trapped to set it in Trapped, Oregon. They don't think that way, and their clumsiness is perhaps the film's saving grace. An efficient thriller about child kidnapping would seem disgustingly manipulative and exploitative, but Trapped is so incompetent those are the least of its worries.
Very droll.
And how about poor old George Clooney's outburst at a televised press conference not long ago when some Euro-journo called his recent rather boring remake of Solaris rather boring.
Memo from Brian's Culture Blog to Hollywood: Don't remake good films. Remake bad films, i.e. films that were not done properly the first time around and about which a teacher might say "Not good enough, do again." "That's a classic, do a remake!" makes no sense. Memo from Hollywood to Brian's Culture Blog: By Jove, Brian's Culture Blog, how very right you are, we'll change our entire remake procedure from now on.
Well of course Hollywood would never say such a thing. If it deigned to say anything at all, it would probably say: Stop pissing on our lamp-posts you Euro-prick. And what I'm here to tell you today is: Hollywood has a point. (Besides the point, I mean, that the original Solaris was all in foreign and had subtitles which means that no one normal will have seen it and that a remake for the benefit of normals makes perfect sense.)
No matter how clever a put-down of a film may be, and no matter how lame the original film may be, there is something disproportionate about the time and effort that goes into the film, and then the time and effort that doesn't go into the put-down. I mean, I haven't even seen that Solaris remake. I haven't even given the thing the time it takes to watch it (although I understand that the time it takes to watch it is considered by many critics who have seen it to be one of its bigger problems), and yet here I am, smugly consuming an entire four and a half irreplaceable minutes of my life by dragging my typing fingers up and down almost half an inch per keystroke to complain about it. What I'm saying is, even as I poke my ounce of fun at George Clooney, I sympathise with him. He went on to say to his press conference tormentor something along the lines of: If you thing my film's so bloody bad you bloody well make a film, instead of just standing there like the jerk you are complaining about mine. Fair point.
Making a film must be like conducting a military operation where you deliberately put yourself in mortal danger in order to entertain the viewers at home better and have to fight the final battle a hundred and sixteen times. The film that Mark Steyn was denouncing apparently climaxes in a scene where the leading characters chase each other around, shooting at one another, in a multiple vehicle pile-up type crash on a motorway. That must have involved an awful lot of effort. They must have spent about a month running about in among tomato-ketchup smeared wreckage to get those few minutes of film. And then along comes Mister Smuggo Mark Steyn and, in one of the three world-syndicated articles he wrote that day, he says: Sorry Kevin Bacon, not as good as Frank Sinatra. Go and stand in the corner. Your film, Bacon, is not sure enough in its sense of itself. You can see how Bacon might want to put some real bullets in his gun and turn it on Steyn and cover him in real tomato ketchup if you get my meaning.
Additional memo from Brian's Culture Blog to Hollywood: After a decent interval consider doing a remake of Trapped. Call it Oh Shit, and set it in Oh Shit, Nevada.
