Reviews

So, why am I giving only 5 out of 10 to A Good Old-Fashioned Orgy? For that, I have an answer: they screwed it up. That is to say the producers and the director screwed it up.

First of all, there are a lot of funny people in this movie, and there are some great throw-away lines that just melt off the dialogue spool until the simile runs out of its metaphorical fishing pole. And even though we have the same setup here that a lot of successful - if not great - R-rated comedies do (Hot Tub Time Machine comes instantly to mind: not that great a film, but good enough to remember instantly when talking about another comedy which is less successful), we do not have a really successful (i.e., it makes people laugh) movie.

Something happened on the way to an R-rating for a basically PG-13 film. I can't pretend to know what happened, how it happened, or why, but it happened. And what you get is a very tame "orgy" that could have almost been on Lifetime save for one short boob shot from the lovely Angela Sarafyan. One. I can't remember a single other boob shot in the movie though there may have been one or two.

So, clearly, other than language, we have a PG-13 movie. So why not clean up the language and just go for PG-13 which would, ostensibly, make more money because it opens up the movie to that magic demographic of 13-18 year-olds who, well, buy everything?

Did Reed Hastings - the smooth-mover who built then destroyed Netflix - produce this movie? Aaaaarrrrgh….no, he did not. Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory did, and they are two really funny dudes who have produced some of TV's best series including the Larry Sanders Show, King Of The Hill, and Frasier. Did Reed Hastings direct AGOFO? He did not. The same producing duo directed the film as well. In other words the fault lies with them (yes, the company that financed the venture might have been pressuring them, but I don't know that for sure).

And I'm left with the same conundrum: Here is a very lightweight R movie that would have fared better if it had done one of two things: 1. Gone for the R and made it a lot more naked, or 2. Cleaned up what little there is and get the coveted PG-13. What's there is just not strong enough for either. But lest you think I am hung up on a ratings thing, let me say that the storyline failed to punch up the jeopardy (whoa! Dad's going to sell the house, how can we stop that from happening? And then maybe written in three hilarious attempts to do that – all of which fail. And THEN plan the naked orgy party of ALL TIME! And then, for God's sake Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory, DELIVER THE GOODS! Make it happen, Guys, because what you've done is left a fish gasping on the dock and in grave danger of not working at all as a metaphor for the film's failure! Now that's jeopardy.

But we never feel that we have an all or nothing situation happening here. Nothing that happens HAS to happen. And when they do have their orgy, the camera suddenly goes all coy on us. Some lovely people in the film who look good all over never even get down to bikinis, well maybe at the end, but nothing whatever sexy ever happens. And sexy is what the word ORGY promises! ORGY=SEXY. Simple lexical algebra. It's false advertising. And people break orgy rules like the guy whose girl does actually flash the only set of tots in the movie goes berserk and insists that she not be in the orgy after all. Wha…? And it's downhill from there. Which is a pity because there was a lot of humor knitted up in that mix and if they'd only have spilled a little nudity…not metaphorically…onto the screen they might have ignited a minor hit. At least a 7-star hit from me.

This movie proves that Tony Scott wasn't always a great director. One review said that this film was the basis for a much superior film (tho' not to him), Man On Fire. Seen in that light, I can say 'good on ya, Tone,' you made up for this thing with a really superior revenge flick.' It's Man On Fire that should have been called 'Revenge'. This movie starts out like it's going to be sensational, but soon it begins to drift. Then the clichés pile one upon the other until the last painful scene which was pulled almost directly from Wuthering Heights. Even to some of the camera angles! The dramatic keg that Tony was filling with gunpowder, the fuse that was going to light it, it all gets wet with scenes that look promising but never deliver. This is dramatis interruptus. Costner is very uneven and Quinn is Quinn. Madeleine Stowe looks fantastic. Overall the movie looks great. But beyond that it's a frustrating film from a director who became great. Just not yet.

Apparently there was a longer version of The Black Dahlia that author James Ellroy thought was good whereas he had reservations about the theatrical cut which was the one we saw. Sure, a longer version would have filled in some holes, but the way the film is constructed is just not terribly good. There is an elaborate setup involving the manufacture of a triangle consisting of the characters played by Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johannson, and Aaron Eckhart. Right away, I was disenchanted. I thought the whole triangle was a total waste of time. There was no reason at all for the Scarlet Johannson character except to form one part of that unnecessary triangle. The point of the book was simple: Who killed Elizabeth Short? Why Brian DePalma thought he needed to make a whole other movie in order to establish and answer that question is beyond me.

You have one simple job as a writer/director: tell a story. OK, make it noir, great, make it moody, fine. DePalma has always been a stylist and a good one, so we expect a highly-stylized film, but style needs to be used in the service of story and here it simply is not. The film is overwrought to say the least, plot threads seem to break off and end like the whole "Nash" episode. We are to assume it is all heading in the direction of finding out Who Killed Elizabeth Short, but in the end it is an exercise in movie-making for its own sake.

Maybe DePalma thought he was doing another Chinatown, his Chinatown. Or The Big Sleep, his Big Sleep. But the movie just does not have the immediacy - nor the import - of Chinatown even though it is a film about a real, not an imagined, murder. And it doesn't, for all its deliberate contortions, have the complexities nor the sly humor of The Big Sleep. The murder of Elizabeth Short is reduced to a simple plot manipulation, a kink in a story instead of the story itself, the real obsession that it is supposed to represent. We are supposed to believe that Hartnett's character has become obsessed with Elizabeth Short, but there was no indication of that outside of the rather excessive dialogue between him and Hilary Swank in the motel room. The obsession belonged to Eckhart's character which was explained as having to do with his own sister's abduction and murder at fifteen, but Eckhart's character is too thinly spread to be the glue to hold this together.

The murder investigation is reduced to Hartnett following up on the tortuous "clues" that he deduces from his conversation with the Linscotts. There is really little proper investigation at all. The movie just doesn't work because it doesn't tell the story it is supposed to tell and it doesn't follow the dramatic protocols that make this kind of story come to life. DePalma's attempt to deepen the connections between the characters and to explicate the themes of madness, pornography, money, and ultimately, love, takes us farther away rather than closer to the real story of the Dahlia. What we wanted was the Dahlia, what we got was DePalma in the sunset of his creative years. It's a pity, he could have really made something forceful, visceral, and good.

Ellroy's book has a certain sick pornographic feel to it, and DePalma recognized that and wanted to bring that element forward, but he also knew that an actual story needed to be built around it because the book wasn't dramatically constructed at all. But the story DePalma cooks up is oddly removed from Ellroy's (and L.A.'s) own sick fantasies which would have been much better as the foundation for The Black Dahlia film than what DePalma ends up offering us. Instead of embracing the sordid mania of the killing itself he distances us from it by introducing too many other elements like sick rich people and overly-intricate plot mechanisms like characters who exist mostly off-screen and in the past. What is wrong with: There is the naked body of a young woman found cut in half and lying in a vacant lot? It is already creepy and fascinating, it reeks of sadism and sexual perversion. It has everything you need to make the thing work, yet it doesn't. As William Hurt's character in A History Of Violence says to one of his henchmen who has failed to complete a simple task of murder: "How do you f*** that up?" How indeed.

Head-on is a movie about love, hate, obsession, loss, pain, alcoholism, drug addiction and the confusion that results from this meaty broth being eaten too fast and in too great a quantity. It was a much better film than I expected. I was quite smitten with the lead actress who is the flawed, fractured essence at the center of this story, Sibel. Equally powerful and at once both compelling and repulsive is the husband, Cahit. These mismatched people are doomed to break apart from the beginning, but first they must come together. That, in effect, is what this movie is about. The growth of the spirit, the growth of love and compassion, and the growth of the awareness that life requires more from us than anger and bitterness regardless of how we may feel justified in these emotions. It's not a film for the faint of heart. There are scenes of brutality and violence that may disturb some viewers. The last scene is a bit of a cliché having been used in movies for at least sixty years. But I was still hoping that, after some time, things would change and the two people at the center would arrive at different, more satisfying conclusions. In effect, I imagined the movie continuing on and decided to end it my own way. A good rental.

I don't know what it was I was expecting in this film, but what I got sure was different. It started pretty quickly, too, with the first sex scene in the tent. To begin with, the sex happened way too quickly given who these guys were and what this kind of sex meant in those days. It was so sudden that I just guffawed. It was a big, Huh? There was tremendous social pressure against it. Two men could certainly fall in love and have sex, happened all the time, however, under the circumstances given by the movie, it was just too quick. There wasn't the kind or lead-up that you would expect. I wanted more character development. I needed to see what drove both these men to suddenly indulge in what was a forbidden love in that time and place especially. This wasn't after all, New York or San Francisco. While Jack Twist seems to have always been the truly "gay" one of the two, he would have been more careful about going after Ennis like that. A guy could get killed. Merely running around a campfire, having a few conversations, and then the guys are yanking each other's clothes off? I can't buy it.

The movie was choppy. It was hard to follow the scent since the two guys lived far apart and needed to meet up a few times a year for their trysts. And little or no discussion of what all this did to their home lives, their children and wives. It was incredibly selfish and self-involved. Like somehow this was sacred, the love that is above all others. It was guilt-free which is complete nonsense to me. Ennis does mention that once, but truly, the pain that these two men were causing other people seemed to mean little or nothing to them. It made the characters seem extremely cold, selfish men. Yet I believe it was the director's desire that we should be completely forgiving of any shortcomings because this was just too big to be concerned with little things like other people's pain. The single, final confrontation between Luann and Ennis, long after they have divorced, was the one nod to the terrible selfishness and cruelty Ennis visited upon his wife and family. And even then it is as if Ennis never really gets it. He's incredibly dumb.

Also, I found the film to be quite melodramatic. In a sense, it is a bodice (Pendleton?)-ripper, an overripe romance novel kind of love story. No one ever discussed this film in those terms with me. Either people hadn't seen it or they just thought it was the best movie EVER (or at least since Dances With Wolves). But really, this movie falls into a genre which is better described as a chick flick. I understand now why women seem to be the ones who just "adore" this film. Go take a look at the Brokeback Mountain IMDb boards. It's to swoon over! Seen in that light, I better understood what it was people were feeling. The film takes itself way too seriously, too. There is barely a glimpse of humor in it. I felt that the director and writers, good as they are, felt they were making something very important, something that was so special that it needed to be treated in an almost hallowed way. Once you sanctify something you have removed the humanity from it. Luckily, the last act stepped back a bit from that. Ennis's solo trip to find out about Jack's life and death was the best part of the film for me.

There was one thing in particular that I found quite jarring, however, when Anne Hathaway tells Ennis about how Jack died. The director suddenly stuck a flash insert into the film that showed Jack being beaten to death by two men. This was a cheat. Did this actually happen? Is this Ennis's imagination (that doesn't ring true)? Why is that there? The reason given by Hathaway's character was perfectly good enough. It was banal, as it should have been. No drama, just a stupid accident. I didn't read Proulx's story, but I think she meant that he did die in a stupid tire-changing accident. The best revelations in the last act are how Jack Twist's father talks about how his son kept dreaming of bringing someone up to the ranch and setting up a household there and bringing the ranch back up to speed again. And the final scene with Ennis arranging Jack's shirt and jacket on the hanger was beautiful. Very touching. Too bad the film itself didn't have more of that kind of poignancy in it.