Retro Review: Reality Bites

 A note from the Cap'n: Retro Reviews are different from normal Blogorium Reviews in that they deal less with the film and more with the evolving relationship between the movie and its audience (in this case, the Cap'n). As a result, they tend to be more anecdotal and will often lack a synopsis, and will often assume that anyone reading this has also seen the film at some point. For good examples of what a Retro Review is like, I suggest reading Dazed and Confused or Tron entries in the series.

 I had the strangest sensation while watching Reality Bites for the first time in a very long time (possibly since it came out twenty years ago): for the life of me, I couldn't remember what happened in the movie. I know I've seen it, and that assertion was reinforced when scenes I could remember vividly popped up (the rooftop sequence at the beginning, the gas card scam, the premiere of Leilana's documentary at In Your Face TV, Troy standing in front of the apartment in a suit), but watching it again, I had no idea where the movie was going. It was refreshing, in a sense, because it gave me the opportunity to watch Reality Bites again for the first time, fondly recalling moments but generally unfamiliar with its story.

 Reality Bites is, in many ways, a natural extension of Say Anything, even though they don't have the same writers, directors, or cast members (save for one small role). In the retrospective documentary (from the tenth anniversary DVD) included, one of the producers mentions that he thinks Reality Bites is in the same category as Cameron Crowe and John Hughes films, and I think that's pretty accurate. It has a lot in common, thematically, with Say Anything, as they are roughly spaced apart to deal with graduating from high school (Say Anything) and then college (Reality Bites) and the five years between films is reflective of particular trends from the end of the 80s (Lloyd's fascination with kick-boxing) and the middle of the 90s (the commodification of "Generation X").

 More importantly, they both share a similar thematic thread with Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused (released, appropriately, between the two films), about the feeling of helplessness and directionless-ness in a world of "what we were promised" vs. "reality." It's a universal theme, and one that resonates particularly with young adults from high school to their mid-twenties - not coincidentally the exact age ranges of all three films - and while I'm a generation removed from the characters in Reality Bites, the experience is still identifiable. More interesting than that was seeing the film from the other side of thirty: in that respect, Reality Bites encapsulates everything that was good, bad, and ridiculous about those heady times of "what do I do with my life?" in the wake of college.

  While I remembered that Winona Ryder (Leilana) and Ethan Hawke (Troy) were the stars alongside Ben Stiller (Michael) - making his directorial and starring debut - and I had some passing remembrance of Janeane Garofalo (Vickie) being in the film (mostly from the "My Sharona" video tie-in), I had completely forgotten that Steve Zahn (Sammy) fills out the group, let alone that he had his own narrative arc about being closeted and afraid to come out to his mother. It's not a major part of the film, but Sammy's story is probably the most important part of Leilana's in-progress documentary about the lives of her friends, post-college. Tellingly, it's also the part completely removed when In Your Face TV buys the footage and turns it into a Real World knock-off.

 Which brings us to the bulk of Reality Bites' story, if you want to call it that - the love triangle between Leilana, Michael, and Troy. You can probably guess from the poster that's what Reality Bites is "about," and the contrast between the bohemian Troy and the buttoned up Michael is what drives most of the conflict in the latter part of the film, but it might also be the one weak point in the film. For better or for worse, Reality Bites is about Leilana being torn between the world she knows (her friends and a carefree, albeit aimless lifestyle) and the world she feels like she's supposed to be in post-graduation (a career, carving out her own space in the world, responsibility). It's not always clear what side screenwriter Helen Childress is leaning towards, even at the end, when Leilana makes the figurative choice by choosing her lover and the somewhat ambiguous closing shot that follows.

 I guess after twenty years, the statute of limitations is pretty much over for SPOILERs, and it's not going to blow anybody's mind that she chooses Troy over Michael, although there's some question of what changes he went through while in Chicago near the end of the film. Michael is amiable, and well meaning, but is never really a viable option for Leilana. What's interesting is that while I initially thought she went with the "Lloyd Dobler" of her respective film, I'm starting to doubt that. Troy is the lovable loser, to a degree, but he's also emotionally manipulative, insensitive, and at various times is cruel to nearly every character, and not simply in a "I'm smarter than you" way. In some ways, Michael is more like Lloyd in that he means well but doesn't know how to function in the world he finds himself.

 Now, is it possible that I'm giving Michael more of the benefit of the doubt because where I am in life and what I'm doing is closer to where he is than where Troy is? Yes, that's certainly possible. There is an aspect of being in your twenties that scoffs at characters like Michael (his last name is, not coincidentally, Grates), people who "work for the system." (There's a great joke about that in Ghost World, another movie about post-graduation angst, about a character desperately trying to convince Enid he's not "selling out" by "taking the system down from within"). I'm not saying there's something inherently wrong with Troy's nihilistic take on the world, but when Leilana calls him out on not being able to commit to anything, there's more than a kernel of truth to it. Michael is meant to represent everything that's wrong about corporate America and, I suppose, be a sort of 90s version of an Alex Keaton, but Stiller has an inherent likability that keeps him from being a stereotype.

 Yes, he sells Leilana's footage to the network he works for, naively thinking they won't take it and re-edit it to commercialize twenty-something angst in order to sell pizza. And yes, when faced with the truth that of course they would, he rationalizes it horribly (comparing it to tricking children into eating meatloaf), but he does make a sincere effort to make things right before realizing it's too late. He also calls out Troy on his "indifference" act towards Leilana when everybody else feeds off of their "will they or won't they" chemistry. His character represents everything that young people who want to be wild and free are afraid of, and the very end of the film hints that his experience pushes him further down that rabbit hole, but I don't question his sincerity about caring about Leilana for most of the film.

 The last part, after the "new apartment" shot with Troy and Leilana, is one of many shots Stiller takes at MTV - a fictionalized version of the documentary with former VJ Karen Duffy and Lemonheads frontman Evan Dando as surrogates for the main characters. In Your Face TV also has a parody of House of Style, with a Cindy Crawford stand-in "reporting" on fashionable gang apparel. Stiller also sneaks in Soul Asylum's Dave Pirner as one of Vickie's many "boyfriends" during the documentary, and a few Real World cast members in small roles in the film. While more subtle than Tropic Thunder, the targets of Stiller's satiric ire are evident even in his first film. What's also interesting is how less overtly comedic Reality Bites is. It's not unfair to compare it to John Hughes or Cameron Crowe films in that it fits somewhere between comedy and drama and slips back and forth between the two, often effortlessly.

 I'd be remiss in not mentioning the supporting cast (particularly the adults), many of whom I'd completely forgotten were in the film. Every one of the four main friends in the film come from broken families, although we only meet one. After her commencement speech, there's an awkward dinner with Leilana's mother (Swoosie Kurtz) and father (Joe Don Baker) and their respective new spouses (Harry O'Reilly and Susan Norfleet) that hints not only at the tenuous relationships she has with both parents, but also her unwillingness to accept a "status symbol" (her father's old BMW*). Leilana's first job out of college is working for Good Morning Grant!, hosted by the outwardly jubilant Grant Gubler (John Mahoney, who was in Say Anything), a man who is anything but friendly when the cameras are off. After being fired for sabotaging his show, Leilana seems incapable of making a good impression during interviews with potential employers, who include Ben Stiller Show alum Andy Dick, David Spade, Keith David, and Stiller's mother, Anne Meara. (His sister, Amy, plays the voice of the psychic that Leilana runs up a $400 phone bill talking to.)

 The interview scenes, by the way, serve as an interesting counterpoint to how we've seen Leilana up to this point: she seemed to be the most "together" of the four of them, and her blunt dismissal of Vickie's offer to work for her at The Gap does make sense for what we know about her. If she really has a plan and has it together, then it would be a "step down," and insult Vickie takes to heart. However, when Leilana runs out of options in TV production (David flat out turns her down, Meara doubts she can handle newspapers, and Dick is hiring a video pirate), Spade's fast food job turns out to be too much for her to process. Leilana not only doesn't know what the word "irony" means, but she lacks basic math skills. She's not actually as well adjusted as we thought, so Michael's offer to buy the documentary isn't as much of a moral quandary as you would think.

 Watching Reality Bites again, with both life experience beyond the characters but also no memory of where the film was headed was interesting. When I first saw it, I was in high school, and at least six or seven years younger than the protagonists. Their cultural points of reference were (and still are) different: watching it now, I still don't have the same affinity for songs like "My Sharona" or "Tempted" that Vickie and Leilana do. On the flipside, seeing the film this much later (and not remembering that it happened at all) gave me a better appreciation for Troy's cover of "Add It Up" late in the film. I'm not sure if it was Troy's room or Leilana's, but one of them has a poster for Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, which struck me as strange, even for 1994. Still, despite being generationally removed from the characters, I can now look back at that heady era of living with roommates and having "big" ideas about life, the universe, and everything. About how if you had just that one shot, you'd make it big time and change the world.

 And then reality kicks in, and you have to settle for things and take lousy jobs for menial pay. To work for people who hate that they settled for menial pay and stayed there, and who will take it out on you. For your friends to come and go, and sometimes not come back. And yeah, that reality bites. The movie ends with Leilana and Troy together, like Lloyd and Diane, or "Pink" and Simone, heading off somewhere we can't follow them. It's hopeful, but ambiguous, a reminder of the good times. I wonder if someday I'll be looking at The Big Chill with the same affinity? Time will tell...


* Interesting tidbit: for a movie about twenty-somethings who are outwardly anti-commercialistic, there's a shocking amount of product placement throughout the film. Not only is Troy fired for eating a prominently displayed Snickers bar, but on three different occasions you see the group buying Diet Coke, extolling the virtues of the Big Gulp, using a Sprite can to smoke pot, and mentions of preferring Camel Straights and Quarter Pounders with cheese. The last two, buy the way, come from Troy.

Cap'n Howdy's Best of 2013: Before Midnight

 When Richard Linklater is on, I can sit in front of the screen with a big old dumb smile on my face. The Cap'n has had a somewhat scattered relationship with the Austin, Texas auteur's filmography: there are movies of his I absolutely go nuts for (A Scanner Darkly), and ones I grow to appreciate with every passing year (Dazed and Confused), but there are also the ones that I just cannot stand (Slacker, Waking Life), ponderous exercises on philosophy that you'd hear in a haze of bong smoke in freshman dormitories (not that I'd know anything about that, obviously). When I say "cannot stand," I mean that I've tried to watch Waking Life and Slacker again and I usually turn them off, because the only thing I think following one interminable monologue after another is "so what?" It's somebody's cup of tea, but not mine.

 There are also the movies he makes where I can't quite wrap my head around the fact that Richard Linklater made that, like The Newton Boys, School of Rock, Fast Food Nation, or Bad News Bears. I guess it's kind of a "one for them, one for me" situation that I often equate with Steven Soderbergh, but reconciling that the guy who made Tape or who spend twelve years making a movie (Boyhood, coming out later in 2014) also made a movie about kids rocking out with Jack Black boggles the mind sometimes.

 If there's one universal exception to my "will I like this Linklater joint or not" rule, it's the "Before" triptych: Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and now Before Midnight. The series is a sort of accidental experiment: nine years after Before Sunrise, Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy found themselves wondering where Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) were in their lives, and what happened after they parted ways. Did they meet up, like they promised to? Did one of them show up, but not the other? The result, Before Sunset, was a sequel that was even better than the first film, where youthful optimism was weighed down with the reality of adulthood. Jesse and Celine spent an afternoon in Paris, just talking, and at the end, another question lingered: as Celine dances to Josephine Baker while Jesse watches, would he catch his plane back home or not?

 Before Midnight, set (and made) nine years after Sunset and eighteen years after Sunrise, doesn't wait long to answer that question, or to present the ramifications of Jesse's decision. He's dropping his son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) off at the airport in Greece. After a summer vacation, it's time for Hank to go back home to his mother, Jesse's ex-wife, in Chicago, while Jesse, Celine, and their twin girls Ella and Nina (Jennifer and Charlotte Prior) enjoy a few more days in Messinia. They've been staying at the home of Patrick (Walter Lassally), a writer and friend of Jesse's, and some of his friends, for good conversation, but lingering and unresolved issues about Hank, Celine's career, and the vacation itself bubble up as the day wears on.

 What's so fascinating about revisiting these characters after nearly twenty years is the sense of immediate familiarity with them, of knowing their history and being able to jump right back into their lives without needing to be reintroduced. I'm not sure how Before Midnight would play for someone who hadn't seen Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, but I have to imagine much of the appeal to the film is being able to come back to their relationship further along in time. And Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke make a very interesting decision with the third film: instead of taking a snapshot of the two of them connecting or reconnecting, Before Midnight is about the reality of them staying together and being in a long term relationship. We aren't seeing them together for the first time or navigating crossing paths again, but instead seeing them living their lives together after nine years. It's a different experience, but wholly rewarding.

 The film is broken into what amounts to six scenes, six conversations, each building towards the last thirty minutes, where resentment and unspoken demands boil over in a hotel room. We see the foundation of the argument building in the car ride from the airport, at Patrick's house, during the walk to the hotel, and in the lobby, and the way that Jesse and Celine use their history against one another. It's a slow build, where slights go ignored first, but are later held for use to really hurt someone's feelings, to dispute the idea that someone is "winning" this fight. It never feels artificial, never scripted: their conversation flows like two people talking, picking up on half finished thoughts and running with them throughout the film, holding on to them for later.

 And in the background, we as an audience can feel their history, can relate to it, because we've been there with them, even if it wasn't the entire time. Jesse and Celine lived on in our imaginations, so when we pick up with them in their 40s, we bring along everything we hope they did or saw since the last time we saw them. It's a unique opportunity for Linklater to explore a relationship onscreen over time, where the audience fills in the ellipses. It wouldn't work if Before Midnight didn't have something compelling to add, and it does, but it's nevertheless impressive that a fictional relationship continues to have such resonance.

 Hawke and Delpy slip back into the roles effortlessly. Yes, they're both older, and life has changed in many ways since Paris of 2004, but who they are is still there. Things are just more complicated, and they've had nearly a decade of being together, of being parents, of navigating a divorce and custody and trans-continental families to contend with, and there are strains. They might be growing apart, and it's scary. All of this comes out organically through their conversations, often presented in long takes with just Delpy and Hawke on camera. The hotel scene could be a one act play, and a potent one at that. The coda, following the argument, is ambiguous in a way that surpasses either of the first two films. Depending on how you choose to read it, it could be sad but hopeful or be the last light in the face of resignation. To credit the three of them (who co-wrote the screenplay), it's up to us to decide.

 Whether we meet Jesse and Celine again in 2022 or not, I'm grateful to have been able to take this journey with them, and for Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke taking what could have been a one-off about romance in Vienna and crafting into a lasting portrait of relationships, ups and downs. Before Midnight is easily the best of the three, and that's saying something when it follows Before Sunset. If you've already seen the first two, this is an absolute no-brainer: watch it now. Before Midnight is an exquisite feast of storytelling. If you haven't seen any of them, do yourself a favor and get caught up: it's worth your while and then some. And, if you don't mind being bored to tears at animated theories on life, the universe, and everything, I suppose you can see Linklater's theoretical tease (between Sunrise and Sunset) at the Jesse and Celine to come in Waking Life. That's probably a chapter you can just skip to, so you might want to do that. Seriously. But to end it on an up note, I'm very excited about Boyhood - Linklater, Hawke, and Patricia Arquette have been filming on and off for the last twelve years to tell the story of a family as their son (Ellar Coltrane) grows from kindergarten to high school. Very interesting stuff...

Hamlet Week: Day Four (So You Won't Have To)

Greetings, readers! Welcome to the fourth day over Cap'n Howdy's investigation into Hamlet on the big screen. Today we come to a very different take on Hamlet, and I'm going to be perfectly honest with you upfront: I must be cruel, but it is not to be kind. As I'll detail below, this particular adaptation of William Shakespeare's play really got under my skin, and I nearly turned it off.

I'm also going to be doing something a little bit different with today's in depth review, because sometimes it's not enough to just tell you about stupid things that happen in a film; sometimes I need to show you.

Cap'n Howdy's Handy Hamlet Handbook:

Date of Release: 2000

Directed By: Michael Almereyda (Deadwood, New Orleans, Mon Amour)

Dramatis Personae: Hamlet (Ethan Hawke), Claudius (Kyle MacLachlan), Gertrude (Diane Venora), Horatio (Karl Geary), Polonius (Bill Murray), Laertes (Liev Schreiber), Ophelia (Julia Stiles)

Other Notable Cast Members: Sam Shepard (Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff) - Ghost, Steve Zahn (Reality Bites, Shattered Glass) - Rosencrantz, Jeffrey Wright (Basquiat, Syriana) - Gravedigger, Casey Affleck (Gone Baby Gone, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) - Fortinbras, Larry Fessenden (Broken Flowers, Bringing Out the Dead) - Kissing Man, Tim Blake Nelson (O Brother, Where Art Thou, Leaves of Grass) - Flight Captain

Setting: New York City, home of the Denmark Corporation, the year 2000 (as a title card makes clear).

Run time: 111 min

What's Missing: Take your pick. 90% of the speeches have been pared down to change the meaning, either on the part of the person saying it or to insinuate something on the part of the listener. Laertes no longer accepts Hamlet's apology on principle, only to insist his honor is tainted; he just walks away like a jerk.

Yorick is gone, not merely in flashback form (as was the case in Branagh's expanded Hamlet), but in skull form too, unless you count two instances I'll detail below, neither of which improve the film in any fashion. The Players are removed entirely, replaced instead with a student film project of "The Mousetrap", a "film by Hamlet Prince of Denmark" (which is what the title cards say). Osric doesn't really exist in this version of Hamlet either. His lines are either given to Horatio, an unnamed fencing officiant, or are, like all other servants of the Denmark Corporation, handed over to a fax machine.

Don't let the frequency of his name appearing fool you: Fortinbras is nothing more than a glorified cameo, usually Casey Affleck's face appearing on a newspaper or on a TV screen. For example:



Fortinbras is a glorified red herring in the 2000 Hamlet, designed to give you the facade of something going on beyond the main story, because Almereyda desperately needs to justify why this interpretation has to take place in the world of big business.


Other Deviations: It's hard to decide where the deletions end and where the deviations begin, since everything cut out is generally replaced by something that is rarely justified. Changes to Hamlet are made seemingly without rhyme or reason, but happen because a) it would look cool if it happened, or b) it makes the material "edgier" or more contemporary.

To wit: one of Hamlet's many videotaped soliloquies involves him putting a gun to his temple, in his mouth, and under his chin, followed by the line "to be or not to be," which Hamlet, in watching this, feels the need to rewind three times so that we "get it." This is following extended TV footage of Peace Is Every Step: Meditation in Action: The Life and Work of Thich Nhat Hanh, which hammers the term "to be" into the ground, just so we understand why Hamlet is thinking about being and not being when he gets to the video store (where the soliloquy takes place).

The clearest deviation beyond this is moving Hamlet from Denmark to New York, for reasons which are unclear at best. Since the text is only conveniently deleted or moved around, all of the characters still refer to "Denmark" and royalty as though they were synonymous with the operations of corporate structures. Which they might be, but this version of Hamlet does a terrible job of making those connections.

See?

Of course, this Hamlet is pretty bad at making connections too: for some reason, Almereyda decided to remove the Prince of Denmark's ability to quickly surmise why Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have arrived to visit him. Instead, Hamlet finds out that they've been sent for by overhearing a phone call between Claudius and R&G. Why? I really don't know. Maybe because he assumed the audience might not be familiar with Hamlet, so it's better to keep us all in the dark?

Ophelia still sort-of goes crazy, but not in any way that's radically different from where she is earlier in the film, when the angsty, twenty-something daughter of Polonius imagines herself jumping into Claudius' pool while they discuss Hamlet's letter. Considering that each version I've watched to this point deviates as to whether Ophelia actually has the flowers she's giving to Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius, I don't actually take umbrage with photos of rosemary, daisies, or rue being handed out. Her drowning (in the lobby's fountain) kind-of makes sense, depending on whether you think she jumped off of the balcony or not.

There are other, little things, like Marcellus becoming Marcella, Horatio's girlfriend, that are functionally harmless. It means that she appears pretty much every time he does but doesn't say much of anything after the opening scene of the play (which is restructured as a flashback while they recount the tale to Hamlet). I'm not certain you ever hear Bernardo's name, which I felt was a bit rude; instead he's just some security guard.

Going back to the issue of guns, I need to get into two BIG deviations; one involves Claudius' "my offense is rank" scene and the other the final duel. Hamlet carries a gun around for most of the movie, and after the "Excellent well, sir. You are a fishmonger." scene with Polonius, he marches into Claudius' office, weapon drawn, ready to shoot. He draws his firearm again on Claudius, only instead of being in a Chapel, it's in the King's limousine, with a drastically altered speech designed to remove any sense of guilt on Kyle MacLachlan's part.

Of course, Hamlet doesn't shoot, which brings us to the really stupid part. Recall that yesterday I gave credit to Kenneth Branagh for visually anticipating the duel by demonstrating that Hamlet was, in fact, practicing constantly. Well, in the 2000 Hamlet, there's no hint at any point that either Hamlet or Laertes has ever fenced in their lives (and considering the choices made about the kind of person Hamlet is, I doubt highly he ever would), and yet here we are, at the end, for a rooftop duel of fencing foils.

Not a poisoned foil, mind you, just fencing foils, because when the time comes for Laertes to "cut" Hamlet, he shoots him. Then Hamlet grabs the gun and shoots Laertes, so that we can have this scene:

To set up this:

Where Hamlet guns down Claudius. The other deviation, and it's a massive one, is that Gertrude somehow figures out that the wine goblet is poisoned by looking at it out of the corner of her eye, and willingly poisons herself, even though Hamlet would still not take a drink. I suppose it's meant to enhance the "tragedy," but all it really does is make the downfall of Claudius that much more pointless, up to and including being shot in the back by Hamlet.

What Works: This is really going out on a limb, because I barely finished watching Almereyda's version of Hamlet, but the use of security camera footage does, in some way, lay the groundwork for the 2009 Royal Shakespeare Company's adaptation (which is also a contemporary take on the play). Julia Stiles is okay, and so are Kyle MacLachlan, Ethan Hawke, and Liev Schreiber, or as okay as they can be with the changes imposed on their characters. They do the best they can with reconstructed and depthless versions of Ophelia, Claudius, Hamlet, and Laertes. Diane Venora isn't bad as Gertrude, per se; she just doesn't register for most of the film.

If you liked Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, I guess there's an off-chance you'd enjoy this, although it lacks the kinetic energy (some would say ADHD editing style) of that film.

What Doesn't Work: Where do I begin? The "Generation Y" Hamlet isn't merely a bad take on the play, an adaptation full of needless and lazy alterations, but it's barely a watchable movie.

Since the title card plants us firmly in the year 2000, one might hope that it's just because that was the year the film was released in (possibly made in) and not indicative of the music, fashion, tech fads, and attitudes. Right? We don't really want a Hamlet where the Prince of Denmark is wearing a snow cap and eyeliner, do we?

Oh.

A picture's worth a thousand words, so strap on your "I Love the New Millenium" oversized-Jamiroquai hats and have a gander at this artifact of a bygone era:


This film is so shamelessly linked to the turn of the millennium that Hamlet becomes a time capsule in all the wrong ways. It's hopelessly dated; Hamlet wanders around with a Super-8 camera (how American Beauty of him!) and portable dvd player, alternately filming everything he sees or watching video of himself delivering speeches cut out from the narrative proper:


But not only is Hamlet the worst kind of navel-gazing narcissist, but then Almereyda thinks he'll get clever with it by including clips from Rebel without a Cause, something I'm pretty sure is Days of Heaven (it looks like the locusts scene, timed to coincide with Sam Shepard's arrival of the Ghost. How clever!), and... wait for it... Hamlet. Yes, Hamlet is watching Hamlet! Intertextuality, you guys!

But wait, there's more! I'm going to give Michael Almereyda way more credit than he probably deserves here, but there's some accidental intertextuality in the "to be or not to be" scene that a halfway clever film scholar can extrapolate. The timing of dialogue and background image lends itself to a nice joining of William Shakespeare and Graham Greene:



Well, yes, I suppose that is true. That is exactly what happens to Harry Lime in The Third Man (visible behind Hamlet's right shoulder). Am I giving Almereyda more kudos than he deserves? Probably. After all, he does juxtapose "or take up arms against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" with Hamlet walking down the "Action" aisle. You know what, I'm going to just hang on to that Third Man thing, just so people don't start handing out intertextual kudos to this Hamlet.

Onto the most egregious error in casting: Bill Murray is woefully miscast as Polonius. I'm on the record as being about as big of a Bill Murray fan as a normal person can possibly be (and as I'm far from normal, just work out the implication yourself), and I know for a fact he can be serious. I've seen Broken Flowers and Lost in Translation. Hey, he's even okay in the unwatchable Limits of Control, but not here. Every line reading lands like horse dung on hot pavement. It's embarrassing.

Not that Steve Zahn or Dechen Thurman fare much better as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; they're reduced to leather jacket wearing, grunge hair and facial messes, yelling, beer drinking buffoonery. Because Hamlet (and by proxy, the audience) is too stupid to figure out that they're spying for Claudius and Gertrude, we're repeatedly exposed to scenes where Claudius is talking to a phone with R&G's disembodied voices on the other side. Kind of like when Ophelia dials MovieFone for no apparent reason and we listen to the recorded intro.

This brings me to the Product Placement. See, it's not enough for Hamlet to deliver his "to be or not to be" soliloquy in a video store (or after it's so painfully and obviously teased out in two different places earlier in the film); no, it has to be in a Blockbuster. How do I know? Because of this:


and this, which is somehow even more dull than the still suggests, possibly because it holds for fifteen seconds:

By the way, if you're wondering, The Crow: City of Angels is playing in the background.

And yet, that's somehow tame compared to this:


That's Sam Shepard, as The Ghost of Hamlet, standing in front of a Pepsi One drink machine. He materializes in front of it, then dematerializes walking into it, so that we get two good looks at what we should be drinking when our dead father returns to task us with vengeance for murder most foul.

I save my favorite "why bother?" for the last one. When I saw Jeffrey Wright's name attached to Gravedigger, I was excited. That's a great pairing of actor and role, so imagine my disappointment when Wright is in the film for thereabouts five seconds. The Gravedigger is singing "All Along the Watchtower" for a quick cutaway shot prior to Hamlet and Horatio inexplicably pulling up to a graveyard (there's no reason they'd just wander by since they're on a motorcycle riding from the airport into town) and finding Ophelia's funeral almost done with. Why even hire Jeffrey Wright if that's what you're going to use him for? A cheap music cue that doesn't actually serve the film in any way or add depth (and don't give me the "joker to the thief" line being some arcane reference to Yorick.)

Final Thoughts: It wouldn't matter if the Cap'n hadn't watched three other versions of Hamlet prior to this adaptation; it's a bad movie, no matter how you take it in. Decisions are made that have no logic to them, characters are badly sketched out stereotypes, and Michael Almereyda continually hits us over the head with references that are (at best) tangentially connected to the narrative. This isn't just something I recommend you skip, but it's best you just forget that I ever mentioned it and move along. It's not even worth your time as a "trainwreck" movie. In fact, I'm going to slap a SO YOU WON'T HAVE TO tag on this bad boy...

Blogorium Review: Daybreakers

Much to my surprise, Daybreakers is a very good, mostly serious vampire movie. I don't really know why, but I thought based on the trailers that it was going to be very silly or corny and stupid; a kind of Underworld mentality crossed with the vampire society from the first Blade movie. Fortunately, it's nothing like that, and better still, it's less tonally messy than Michael and Peter Spierig's previous film Undead. While it's not quite a Thirst or a Let the Right One In, I fully recommend you check out Daybreakers, as it is a damn solid film that manages to tell a different kind of vampire story, and even manages to add to the lore instead of pick and choose (ahemTwilightahem).

Set in the not-too-distant 2019, Daybreakers is the story of a world post-vampire plague, a world where the Wesley Snipeses and James Woodses and William Ragsdales have failed miserably. Being that all of these vampires used to be humans, they do what people do best: adapt. Vampires work at night and sleep during the day, have subterranean travel systems if they need to do some daytime work, and have cars with clever window tinting and cameras to compensate for the lack of reflections in mirrors.

I actually like the idea of showing (not telling) the various little ways that vampire society adjusted to the change, and it actually makes sense considering the shifts we would probably making if forced to adapt to a nocturnal lifestyle. In short order, we're given a quick indicator of how the disease probably spread, the way that society operates (hint: not much differently than ours, except at night), and the class structure (hint also: really not that different, save for one important point I'll get to in a second). Clearly they're all pretty happy being vampires, as immortality cleaned up pesky diseases and smokers are allowed to go for it because, well, what's going to happen? Not much.

The downside to the world of Daybreakers is that the human population is rapidly dwindling, and so too is the blood supply that vampires so desperately need to survive. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a hematologist at Bromley Marks, is trying to synthesize a blood substitute with little to no avail, much to the concern of Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), who watches his existing blood supply diminish daily. Bromley's attitude towards finding a substitute is (mostly) from a business standpoint, but Edward has some genuine concern about humanity, in part because he was "turned" against his will by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman).

When Edward accidentally runs a group of humans off the road and hides them from the police, their leader, Audrey Bennett (Claudia Karvan) introduces him to Lionel "Elvis" Cormac, a vampire-turned-human by circumstances Edward can't quite explain. With the possibility of a cure at hand, will a society accustomed to eternal life be willing to go back to mortality if it means solving the blood crisis? If the cure is as hard to crack as Edward thinks it is, will anyone try to change back?

The reason this matters at all is that Daybreakers sets up an interesting conundrum: if vampires go too long without drinking human blood, they begin to regress into feral, bat-like creatures. Early in the film viewers get a glimpse of blood-starved, homeless vampires, ignored by the upper class and two or three days away from posing a serious threat. When Frankie comes to visit Edward on his birthday ("I've turned 35 ten times now") with a bottle of human blood, an ensuing fight about ethics leaves shattered glass and blood on the wall, attracting the attention of a wandering feral vampire. The subsequent home invasion is handled in a way that's unnerving and a bit sad. It's clear that the bat-creature is just starving, and it's attacks on Edward and Frankie are instinctual rather than malevolent.

I enjoyed the way that Daybreakers doesn't go for silly or over the top most of the time. It tends to set things up in one direction (making you think that Audrey might be the long-missing human daughter of Bromley) only to head another way (introducing her in a later sequence which is tangentially related to the main story). Many of the problems that I had with Undead came from the fact that it was never clear what kind of movie it wanted to be: was it a horror-comedy? A zombie film? An alien invasion film? Daybreakers manages to be a serious (and entertaining) movie about vampires that doesn't treat them as disposable fodder for some badass hunter or as a prop to tell teen romances or sell books.

The one issue I had with the film came from an initially broad performance from Willem Dafoe, who plays Elvis a little broader than anybody else in the movie. This is not to say that Ethan Hawke or Sam Neill are playing wholly restrained mopey vampires - there is actually some nuance to both characters - but Elvis rolls into the film singing "Burning Love" and flinging around a southern twang that really sticks out initially. Eventually he settles down, but I couldn't help but feel like Dafoe was more like a character from John Carpenter's Vampires than the Spierig brothers' Daybreakers.

Still, it's a very minor complaint. I had really expect Daybreakers to be some goofy, over-serious film about vampires contemplating mortality, a maudlin extension of Interview with the Vampire or The Hunger or something like that (both movies I like, by the way), but instead the Spierigs take the material seriously, aren't afraid to play both the quiet and vicious sides of vampire lore, and ultimately deliver a story that's fresh and fun to watch. These vampires aren't just cool or scary, and they don't spend all of their time pissing and moaning about living forever (in fact, the film opens with a child vampire committing suicide because she'll never grow up). Much like Thirst, the film takes a concept that could be pretty trite and goes in different directions with it, and I for one was pleased with the results.

Now it's just a matter of conveying it to the folks sick to death of The Vampire Diaries...