Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
I find myself fascinated by the way New Line has evolved over the years. The first time I was actively aware of them as a company was around the age of 14, when A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET was released. They were an exploitation company at first, releasing independent films aimed squarely at a niche market, and they managed their brand as well as anyone in town. When I realized they were also the ones responsible for unleashing John Waters on the world, I decided that these were people worth paying attention to, and over the years, they have been.
There’s no doubt that LORD OF THE RINGS has changed New Line forever. They are finally thought of on par with the other studios in town, able to produce event films as big as anyone anywhere, and even more importantly, able to sell them the right way. Gordon Paddison, guru of marketing for the company and all-around big brain, has been one of the reasons they’ve been so beautifully managed these last three years. The ways he and his incredible team of people have come up with to reach out to the fan communities and to educate the public about their product has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Filmmakers dream about having people like this selling their films. Fine Line has also helped shift the perception of what precisely is a New Line film, thanks to releases like the amazing HEDWIG & THE ANGRY INCH and THE ANNIVERSARY PARTY.
But now, as LORD OF THE RINGS winds down (all we really have left is one last DVD release), how is New Line going to define itself again? Are they a major studio? Are they still a genre-oriented exploitation house? Or are they going to step up the arthouse side of things? Their entire schedule was built around these particular event films for the last four years now, and there’s nothing on the horizon that has the same iconic immediacy. As a result, all of that marketing muscle has to be used somewhere, and that means we get an amazing, beautifully orchestrated campaign for... HAROLD & KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE?
Really?
I have to say, I’m not just underwhelmed by Danny Lenier’s third film... I think it stinks. The fact that so many people are giving it a pass just proves that comedy is perhaps the most subjective of film genres. Either you laugh or you don’t, and no amount of intellectualizing is going to convince you otherwise. In the case of H&K, I didn’t laugh. There are maybe 15 minutes in this movie where I was mildly amused, and the rest of it actively annoyed me. There’s something great and subversive about the way it starts, when we’re introduced to two stereotypical jock white guys who prepare for a weekend of pot smoking and drinking and womanizing. When one of them brings up some work they have to do, they decide to just dump it on the Korean kid sitting in the corner. Normally, that would be the last time we saw that Korean kid, but in this case, that’s Harold, played by John Cho, and it’s his story that we follow. I admire that set-up, but I wish it led into something more than just the 8 zillionth variation on the “straightlaced friend and wacky friend have an adventure where the straighlaced friend learns to lighten up” formula. One of the main reasons this film falls flat for me is that I never believed that Harold and Kumar (Kal Penn) would be friends in the real world. They’re just too obviously drawn as opposites. Just saying that they both smoke pot is hardly enough reason for them to hang out with one another, let alone be best friends. When you get a chance to see SHAUN OF THE DEAD, there’s a friendship in that film which is central to everything, and even though they’re very different people, you can see why they would be friends with one another. That friendship is the reality that everything else works off of in that film, and it just doesn’t exist here.
I also think the script by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg is just plain lazy. They set up comic situations, but rarely follow them through to any sort of conclusion. I’m baffled when I read Quint or Harry refer to the “Battleshits” sequence as any sort of comic highlight. I think it’s base and stupid, and doesn’t even make sense within the context of the joke. Listening to people shit is not a punchline in and of itself. So much of the humor in this film feels like an idea that was never fully formed, like those sketches on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE that run between 12:30 and 1:00 when they figure everyone’s already tuned out of the show and it doesn’t really matter what they put on.
There are a few funny things in the film. Neil Patrick Harris, for one. He sends up his own image with an abandon that the rest of the film is sorely lacking, and the result is that you walk away wishing you’d seen a whole movie about him. Strong supporting characters are key to making a film like this work, but they should never overpower the movie completely. I don’t think either Cho or Penn give performances that sufficiently ground the movie, so they’re almost always bested by the weird characters that pop up. I mean, I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Anthony Anderson is actually one of the funnier things in the movie in his brief appearance. Too many of the incidents along the way try for wacky but just fall flat, and the result is a sort of impatience that set in for me. Maybe if Lenier had a more confident or aggressive way of handling the material, it might have worked just based on the energy of it, but he shoots everything in a flat TV style that does the script and the actors no favors at all. Which is strange, since some of his TV work (like his hilarious FREAKS & GEEKS episode “We’ve Got Spirit”) is better than his feature film work.
It’s the forgettable nature of this film that frustrates me most, and that’s a reaction, I think, to how hard New Line’s been jamming it down our throats as an audience. Overselling a movie can be the kiss of death, because it sets up expectations that have to be met. In this case, HAROLD & KUMAR will be forgotten by the audience almost as soon as they walk out of the theater, and not just because they’re high. Actually, I wish the pot humor was smarter here. I adore the first three Cheech and Chong films. UP IN SMOKE is great, NEXT MOVIE is fun, and NICE DREAMS is flat out hilarious, and it’s because the films don’t rely on the pot humor to carry the day. They are really well-constructed comedies first, pot comedies second. HAROLD & KUMAR isn’t even as funny as HALF BAKED or HOW HIGH, if we’re just discussing this one narrow genre, and that’s pretty sad.
On the other hand, I think New Line’s been surprisingly quiet about MARIA FULL OF GRACE, their other film that is currently platforming around the country, and that baffles me. It’s a confident debut picture that, while imperfect, paints a persuasive human portrait of a character who we are primed to dislike based on the propaganda spread by those who still think the War On Drugs can be won with weapons other than education and compassion.
The greatest compliment I can pay to writer/director Joshua Marston came from my wife as we walked out of the New Line screening room. She wholeheartedly believed that the movie had been made in South America by a South American filmmaker. When I told her that Marston’s an American filmmaker, she refused to believe me at first. She said he got everything right, from the social details to the particulars of regional language, and she was enormously impressed. Marston does a great job of painting an authentic portrait of life in Colombia. Maria is just trying to get by like everyone else, working in a flower factory where she spends her days de-thorning roses for export. Her paycheck goes to help her mother, her grandmother, her sister, and her sister’s baby, leaving next to nothing left over for herself. Catalina Sandino Moreno is a hell of a find, and Marston should count himself lucky to have been able to cast her as Maria. She gives the character a real world-weariness, despite her youth, but she also conveys a sort of unflagging optimism and a quiet courage. She’s determined to figure out her place in the world, and when she learns she’s pregnant by her idiotic occasional boyfriend, it wakes her up, shocks her out of her routine. She quits her job, not sure what she’s going to do next. All she knows is that she wants out of her life, her town, her future.
That makes her a perfect target for Franklin (John Alex Toro), a slick local hustler who recognizes that yearning in Maria. He knows what it means when he sees that look in her eyes, and he preys on it, uses it against her, convincing her that a better life is just a few easy jobs away. All she needs to do is make a couple of trips to and from the United States. Cushy plane rides with a free vacation in the middle. Couldn’t be easier, and the pay couldn’t be any better.
Oh... sure... there is that whole swallowing-sixty-cocaine-filled-condoms thing, too, but let’s not get hung up on the details, right?
What makes Maria such a compelling but frustrating protagonist is the fact that she makes questionable choices, one after another. She has this picture in her head of how life should be, but she just doesn’t have the tools to make it real. She’s impetuous, rash, and she frequently does things that are ill-considered. Through it all, Moreno makes us understand the heart of this girl. Even when you want to shake her and yell at her to wise up, you can’t help but understand her, and that’s the real power of Marston’s film. It’s an empathy exercise more than anything else. It’s easy to forget when you’re raised in America that our standard of living is totally different than what much of the world experiences, and a film like this allows us to look through fresh eyes at the enormous privileges that we seem to take for granted. One of the reasons I married my wife is because I am endlessly impressed by the strength she drew upon to move to this country, and how she rebuilt her life from scratch when she got here. When I moved from Florida to LA in 1990, I remember thinking it was a big deal, but I had a support system I could fall back on, and I had a writing partner who moved out at the same time. No matter how hard I struggled, I always managed to make ends meet, and for many people, that’s not possible, no matter what. Do I agree with Maria’s choices to bring drugs into this country? Absolutely not. But I understand exactly what pressures lead her to make a choice that terrible, and by the end of the film, I forgave her for her mistakes. Marston puts a human face on the term “drug mule,” and he makes it impossible to think of them as skin suitcases, chess pieces in the drug war. These are people, and in some cases, they’re not evil. They’re just looking for a way to get a foothold that may provide them a chance at a life that they’re told they can never have.
Technically, the film is polished and confident. It’s got an effective score by Leonardo Heiblum and Jacobo Lieberman, and the cinematography by Jim Denault strikes a lovely naturalistic tone that’s handsomely complimented by Lee Percy’s editing. It all comes back to Marston, though. I’m dying to see what this guy does for a second film. This isn’t the sort of splashy debut designed to launch someone right into the heart of the Hollywood machine, churning out anonymous Bruckheimer action movies or crappy mainstream romantic comedies. This is heartfelt, complex, character-driven work, and it’s a great example of what Fine Line does so well.
... which brings us back to the central question of the day: what is New Line right now? Thankfully, it’s not a question they have to answer right this second, but it is a question they have to start strongly considering. What has traditionally made New Line unique is their strong sense of identity, which has shifted many times over the years. This is one of those moments. A seismic shift is upon them, and how they respond will either show that survivor’s spirit that has always made them so much fun to root for, or prove that they have finally become “just” another studio.
Either way, it’s going to be a hell of a show.
"Moriarty" out.
