| 11/24/96
This Week's Victim Report:
The Long Kiss Goodnight Written by Shane Black
Directed by Renny Harlin
While this isn't exactly a book, I thought I'd review it anyway, simply because it derives from some of the costliest paper ever pulped. Shane Black got four million smackers for his script, which, if we guess the length to be about 110 pages, works out to about $33,000 per. Imagine that he's an average writer doing a page every half-hour...that's $66,000 an hour! Surely James Joyce would have swallowed his own hat to be rolling in that kind of dough. So I think it behooves us to take a look at the thing and give it a thumbing.
Straight off, it's a pretty fucking good movie. I recently abandoned using traditional stage drama criteria for films. Films are about (in decreasing importance) Vision, Motion, and Sound. The Long Kiss Goodnight jacks these to the nines. Its winter scenery left me feeling twice as cold as I normally do in a theater, and when I left I realized that my chest ached, sympathetic to all the characters that had been shot in that region. The film communicates strongly on a purely visceral/visual level, and it's unfortunate that the soundtrack is so manipulative. They could have left the orchestral music out entirely and relied on the rock-n-roll to carry the mood. The Art directors, the director of Photography, the sound mixers...all these guys are on my cool list. The Thesps (got that term from Variety) all do their jobs, shooting or getting shot at with passable realism. Geena Davis is stronger as the housewife-with-amnesia then as the killer-without-knickers, but that's a minor quibble. The main villains (does anyone remember their names?)are suprisingly good-looking and sexy. It's normal that the villains are more charasmatic than the good guys, after all, they're the one's who get things done, but it's rare to find them so smilingly likable. Samuel L. Jackson continues to make the case that every other tough-guy actor should just pack his nappies and go home.
But in reviewing the work of the Four-Million-Dollar-Man what I need to talk about is the one thing that's gone to near the bottom of my critical criteria: Plot. (Dialogue is something else entirely. Dialogue falls under the category of Sound. The Music, the gunshots, the elongated vowels and labial fricatives from the actor's mouths, these are all one to me. Dialogue passes from author to actor and the director can meddle there, too. Geena Davis, like her ex-husband Jeff "Action Figure" Goldblum, always gives the impression that she's forgotten her lines and is making them up anyway. The dialogue in this film shines, but that's not what got Shane Black his retirement fund.) The plot here...is it so amazingly innovative or bankable that it should make an account get all sweaty? Is it gonna win awards? Is it gonna change the world? Uh, no.
It's not even close, and it's probably worth a sociology degree to work out which drugs the money men were on when the approved the payday for Mr. Black. I mean, if you take all the leftover bits from a slaughterhouse you get Spam, which sells pretty cheap compared to filet mignon. It should be the same if you scrape up all the little bits from old slaughterhouse movies. There's even a comic or two in there...the amnesia and the key are prominent in "Somerset Holmes", which came out ten years ago. The female assassin is La Femme Nikita. The little girl is any Spielberg picture you care to name. The villains who use death traps instead of bullets are straight out of the Batman TV series. Does anyone still enjoy going to films where as soon as every character appears you know whether he'll be alive or dead at the end? (Well, if the deaths are as groovy as these, sure...)
Here are some questions I have about Shane Black:
¥Does he have any idea how long it takes to drive around the East Coast in the winter?
¥Has he ever had a girlfriend? Does she still respect him?
¥Did Finlandia Vodka pay him directly, or was that the director's fetish?
¥Does he have any idea how long it takes to strap on a pair of skates?
¥He's never met an amnesiac, has he?
¥What did he spend the money on?
¥Does he really think that a top secret mission at Niagra Falls is gonna be named "Operation Honeymoon"?
¥Does he know that ruthless killers who mow down train stations full of people are not being low-profile? And that they wouldn't go to ridiculous lengths to make the deaths of two people look like accidents if they didn't need to?
¥Can he spare fifty grand? I've got this great idea for a film about these two hit men...
That's all from this side of the squeeze box...
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