Somebody Save Jackie Chan!

In the mid-nineties, I was dragged to an art-house movie theater by a friend to see some Hong Kong Kung Fu films. We sat through Drunken Master II and Super Cop 2. I was blown away. The movies were funny, touching, and had kick-ass (literally) fight scenes. I came out of that theater with a new hero—Jackie Chan.

Oh Jackie, what hath Hollywood done to you? Rush Hour 3 is released today, but I won’t be in line for that stinker. Chan brought a great comic sense to martial arts films. Bruce Lee was the master, and Jet Li does that leg split thing, but only Jackie Chan brought a intentional sense of humor that martial arts films need so badly.

When I saw him all those years ago, I thought, what is Hollywood waiting for? What I forgot was the complete lack of cojones Hollywood has. Let’s look at Chan’s American films: the Rush Hour series, Shanghai Noon, The Tuxedo, and other embarrassments. What is the problem here? The studios are too timid to let Chan man his own film. They pair him up with Chris Tucker, Owen Wilson and Jennifer Love Hewitt?!? Oh the humanity.

He still makes Hong Kong films, and I’m sure they use his talents much more then the American films do. I just wish to God they would write a film that is tailored to his talents. Let’s look at the reviewers say about Rush Hour 3. Here’s the New York Times review:

Given how much pleasure both have provided over the years, especially Mr. Chan, here’s hoping they were paid by the truckload. Mind you, it would be nice if they could find mainstream projects that didn’t insist that the only way an Asian man and an African-American man can hold the screen together is if they engage in mutual abasement and self-humiliation. It would be nicer still if Mr. Chan didn’t have to play the sexual neuter and Mr. Tucker stopped popping his eyeballs.

And here is Salon.com’s review:

But it's frustrating that no Hollywood…has been able to showcase his subtler qualities as a comic performer. Tucker and Chan are a strange mix to begin with, and not just for the dumb, obvious reason: Tucker is an overbearing actor, the kind who'll run off with every big line without even really intending to. Chan is a charming and wonderful comic actor, but he needs room to breathe, and that's the last thing Tucker is capable of giving. So while Tucker grabs laughs with the silliest, most obvious gags -- he woos Genevieve, stroking her skin and murmuring "Jay tam!" and "Voolay voo!" -- Chan is most often left looking as if he doesn't know what movie he has stumbled into. No one has bothered to write a real scene for him, and that's a drag.

That is a drag. Tucker is lucky that Chan is around. Who would pay to see him screech like he does? Chan is getting older. I don’t see how he can do his stunts much longer. If Hollywood is smart, they would scan the world looking for the next Jackie Chan. But in the meantime, let this man star in his own vehicle for the love of sweet and sour Jesus.

I'll Have a Large Popcorn and a Dry Martini

Every Sunday, my whole family would go to the movies. While the good Mormon families of Utah would do whatever good Mormon families do on Sundays—perhaps playing basketball or patching up their Mormon underwear—we would be munching popcorn and taking in everything from Star Wars to Barry Lyndon.

Now days, I rarely go to the movies. I love the experience, but somehow I rarely make it past the front doors of the multiplex. There are a variety of reasons: my friends aren’t into the same movies I am into; the movies suck; it’s easier to watch DVDs at home; tickets are pretty expensive; and there are so many other things that attract my attention.

The movie offerings are pretty sad indeed. Sequels, especially third and fourth installments are pretty dreadful, but studios love ‘em. This summer we have sequels to Spiderman, Pirates of the Caribbean, Bruce Almighty, Shrek, Harry Potter, and The Bourne Indentity. Of which I have seen none. We’ve also been treated to another Michael Bay schlockfest, Transformers. I’d rather bathe in hot coals than see a Michael Bay film. Anyone who has seen action done so beautifully in a Hong Kong action films cannot sit through the close-ups and quick cuts of a Bay brain ache.

Apparently few summer movies have legs and they drop in sales considerably after the first week. A lot of this is due to the huge amount of blockbuster films released every week. How many blocks can you bust when you’re gone from the theater in a week? Of course this is business and the money supposedly lies in catching the attention of teens and twenty-year olds.

Thankfully there is another way of thinking. There is a theater in Los Angeles that might be on to something:

The lobby contains a restaurant, a bar, and a book-and-gift shop. Before the movie, people hang out and have a drink or leaf through a hot new novel or a movie-star biography. The rest rooms are spotless, and the concession stand serves delicious coffee. All the seats are reserved, and they are plush, with plenty of legroom. The steeply raked auditorium is dark, and insulated from the sound of the other theatres in the same multiplex. Is this some sort of upper-bourgeois dream of the great good place? A padded cell for wealthy movie nuts? No, it’s an actual multiplex, the ArcLight, on Sunset Boulevard near Vine.

The idea of user-friendly theatres may be catching on. Sumner Redstone’s daughter Shari, the president of National Amusements, the family-owned theatre business, has vowed to convert half the lobbies of the chain’s hundred and nineteen theatres to social spaces with comfortable lounges, and to build more. Martinis will be served; newspapers and magazines will be offered. If theatres go in this Starbucks-plus-cocktails direction, the older audience might come back, with a positive effect on filmmaking, and the value of the movies as an art form and an experience could be preserved. After you are seated at the ArcLight, an usher standing at the front of the auditorium tells you who wrote and directed the movie and how long it is. He promises that he and another usher will stay for a while to make sure that the projection and the sound are up to snuff. There are no advertisements following his speech, and only four coming attractions. The movie begins, and you are utterly lost in it.

This is the way to go. I would go to movies a lot more often if they served martinis with Hendrick’s gin. It becomes an experience. I think people are hungry for social spaces, especially in suburban areas where isolation comes too easily. This is why Starbuck’s coffeshops are so successful; people crave that social area. And if movies theaters have good coffee (unlike Starbucks), good food, good drinks, good books and good movies, Hollywood would find their movies sprouting legs and running marathons.

Starring Zack Braff as King Lear

I felt confusion and then pique when Scatman Crothers received an axe to his stomach. As a preteen in the theater watching The Shining, I thought I knew the story. I read a whole lotta Stephen King as a kid and when Scatman gets offed by Jack Nicholson, I was offended that Stanley Kubrick decided to kill off one of the heroes of the book. What I didn’t understand then was this was a Kubrick film and not a King book.

Richard Schickel writes about Hollywood adapting movies from books in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. You can read it here, but let me summarize: Hollywood improves low culture books, ruins high culture books and tries to capture middle brow books like Harry Potter and Gone with the Wind. He also thinks movies are closest to Victorian literature, in that they are narrative-driven.

Although he doesn’t say it, I assume he meant standard-fare movies, movies for unwashed masses at the multiplex. There are lots of movies out there that are not narrative-driven. Besides famous foreign art films like Breathless and La Doche Vita, there are American films like Waking Life, Magnolia, and perhaps the entire oeuvre of Robert Altman.

Unlike in my pre-teen years, I now believe novels and movies to be apples and oranges. Charlie Kaufman certainly proved that with his film, Adaptation, which has zip to do about orchid thieves. I prefer to movies to change the book, otherwise I might as well stay home. Silence of the Lambs was so thoroughly like the book that I was bored. They should carry the spirit of the book. The movie Troy was a complete stranger to Homer’s Iliad, but it certainly nailed the hubris and pointlessness of the battle. I could have done without the prerequisite “NOooooooo” scene, in which the hero cries out when he sees a friend about to be hurt, but petulant Pitt seemed as narcissistic as Achilles ever could be.

Of course it would take a director with balls as big as church bells to do something drastically different to the Harry Potter franchise. The Potter books and movies are fine entertainment, but I giggle like a little girl thinking of what a maverick director like Kubrick or a visual artist like Mathew Barney, or a whackjob like Alejandro Jodorowsky could do to a Potter film.

But people are comforted by predictability. Even French movies are easy to predict—a main character will die. Our lives governed by enough chaos as is, a little celluloid familiarity is a good thing I suppose. So Harry Potter will do exactly as the book has plotted him to do. But I recommend only reading books that can’t possibly be turned into movies. Gertrude Stein, anyone?