Passion Play (2010)

A long time ago, I figured out the only reason to create anything is that no one else has.  The books I want to write are the books I want to read, but nobody has written them yet.  The films I want to make are the films I want to see, but nobody has made them yet.

My wife used to drive me crazy by starting to fix films the minute we left the theater.  I don't think we've seen more than one or two films over the years she didn't have ideas about ways to make them better.  I wrote it off to her politics.  Well, hell, I'd say.  Go make your own film if you don't like that one.  Go make a film that fits your politics or your aesthetics or whatever. 

Lately, I've come around to her way of thinking.  Why not fix broken films?  Why not start with the idea that what's missing in the world is a better version of a film somebody made or a book somebody wrote?  Where does it say you have to start from scratch?

Now you take Passion Play (2010), a first film by screenwriter Mitch Glazer, for example.  That's a gorgeous little film that never comes together.  It has two pretty people: Mickey Rourke all broken down and Megan Fox just coming into womanhood.  It has Bill Murray, reprising the gangster he created for Mad Dog and Glory (1993), jazz, the desert, a freak show, LA, a woman with wings.  What's not to like?  The realization of the script for one thing.  And, ironically, the script itself for another. 

Rent the movie and come back.  We're going to make it clear that for most of the movie Mickey is dying or dead, and that the entire film, from the moment that Mickey is improbably rescued by Native American sharpshooters, takes place on the plane between life and death.

As a comedy writer, Glazer has never had to trouble himself with thoughts about what is real and what is not.  In fact, the unexpected is an essential element of comedy.  But in a movie that mixes comedy with surrealism, allegory and film noir, keeping things orderly--keeping images, characters and events on their proper plane--is what distinguishes the work of filmmakers like Fellini and Bergman from gutsy but unfinished efforts like Passion Play. The problem with Passion Play is that everything exists on the same plane.  The viewer is forced to process everything in the movie--winged women who learn to fly, broken down musicians, miraculous rescues by Native American warriors, ironic dialogue, cool humor, incongruous locations--all on a plane that represents a gritty, slightly droll reality, in spite of the fact that the beat up, beat down, booze and drug-whacked brain of the Mickey Rourke anti-hero who rescues the winged girl and, in turn, is rescued himself, though not redeemed, seems perfect for processing alternate realities.

At the end of the film, Rourke is being transported in the arms of an angel.  He looks down and, in a wide shot, sees his dead body, lying in a ravine and his murderer driving away.  Glazer intends for us to realize at that moment that the film has been Rourke's experience of his transition from life to death, a dying hallucination that calls to mind the last scenes of Terry Gilliam's brilliant Brazil (1985).  What I need right then is a close shot of Rourke's body as he leaves it behind to nail that moment of realization down in memory.


Passion Play (2010), Annapurna Productions and Rebecca Wang Entertainment

Glazer doesn't get close enough to Rourke's dead body to make that scene work. I need to see Rourke's dead face. And it would help to fade out on the Native Americans and fade in on Rourke, walking in the desert, to mark the transition to the dying hallucination earlier in the movie, too.  I'd cut the rest of the film in half. (The arbitrary length of "feature" films has done in more than one first film.) I'd get Fox past the idea that she won't be taken seriously as an actress if she does nude scenes. I'm dying and I imagine Fox with her clothes on? Please.

That's the quick fix.  A complete makeover of Glazer's beautiful but personal film would require too much work. The problem is that Rourke dies so early in the film that the revelation at the end of the film that the action has taken place on some spiritual plane feels like a clever gimmick.  Frankly, I'm not sure I care enough about the Rourke character for it to make a difference to me whether he's dead or not.  And does it really matter if the film is taken literally or not?  Would anyone care if Glazer left out the shot of Rourke's dead body altogether?  Is Passion Play some kind of filmic Book Of The Dead, full of hidden images and code words scholars could spend years discovering?

It could be that the best news about Passion Play is that a film as personal and esoteric as Passion Play can even get produced.

Or maybe it's that Megan Fox can act.  I have to wonder how smart Spielberg and Bay feel after seeing Fox in this little film.

Jonah Hex (2010)

It's easy to be dismissive of Jonah Hex (2010), Jimmy Hayward's box office flop.

The film grossed a meager 5 million bucks the weekend it opened, far behind Toy Story 3, and was universally panned by reviewers -- and not without good reason.

The plot is trite and hard to follow, the acting average, and most of the time Hayward's visualization of the comic book material is boring. Ironically, Hayward got his start in the Toy Story franchise. He was an animator on Toy Story and Toy Story 2.  But watching Hayward's Hex, I was reminded of an old friend's put down of Midland, Texas. I spent a week there one night, he told me.

Josh Brolin, a talented and intelligent actor who has been on a roll lately, plods along in the title role. John Malkovich seems to have dropped in for a couple of disconnected scenes. Malkovich can play villains like Quentin Turnbull, Hex's arch enemy, in his sleep, but there is so little connection between him and Brolin that you have to wonder if they were ever on the same set at the same time.

Megan Fox is billed as a star but comes across as a bit player, making a cameo appearance. Fox badly needs to make the transition from teenager to woman to put the Transformer franchise behind her, but in Hex she comes across as a kid, dressing up in her grandma's clothes. There is something about her voice that works against Fox. She hasn't learned to make the slight disconnect between her body and her voice work for her the way Monroe did.

Hex won't appeal to fans of the Jonah Hex comic books, either. The writers left too much good stuff out.  Fox's Tallulah Black is a far cry from the disfigured female bounty hunter of the Hex books, and El Diablo and Lazarus Lane, two -- or one, depending on how you look at it -- of the books' most imaginative creations, are missing completely.

Tallulah Black and El Diablo

Unlike Watchmen, the seminal graphic novel that established the form, the Hex books spanned so many years and versions that the writers had to boil the comics down in an attempt to distill the essential Jonah Hex from the books. In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, they invariably chose to use the most hackneyed elements of the comics.

The next blockbuster franchise and comic book superhero turned movie icon won't be Jonah Hex.  And yet, for anyone who is interested in pop culture and genre films, Jonah Hex is an important movie.  Jimmy Hayward has made a very bad film. But, in making it, he has -- inadvertently, perhaps -- tested the limits of turning graphic novels into films. 

Hex looks exactly like what it is, a first film by a director who knows absolutely nothing about the way real people move through real space. It ends up being a jumble of disconnected portraits, shots -- panels, if you will -- and, in memory, exists as an exact replica of a comic book.  Watching Jonah Hex is like spending 81 minutes reading a graphic novel. No one will come closer to literally translating a graphic novel into film than Jimmy Hayward has.

But will anyone want to? Is thumbing through a graphic novel what most of us go to the movies to do?

Genre films, especially action-adventure films, require a compelling narrative and fast action. Action that is suggested by the static panels of a comic book must be realized in film.  If you want to see what happens when a director ignores that basic truth, go see Jonah Hex. If not, save your money and catch Watchmen on cable TV.

The real Jonah Hex