Category / Film

by Edward Champion

The Real Enemy Mine vs. The Reel Enemy Mine

My review of The Reel Stuff, an anthology of horror and speculative tales turned into Hollywood films edited by Brian Thomsen and Martin H. Greenberg, appears in today’s Los Angeles Times. In addition to the reading (in most cases, rereading) I had to do for the review, I watched many films: hence, the crazed kudos for Candyman posted at some ungodly hour not long ago.

Johnny Mnemonic had the consolation of some unintentionally hilarious moments and Screamers was a hoot, complete with a distinguished Canadian actor licking a knife and scowling, “It’s never sharp enough.”

But the worst film of the bunch was Enemy Mine. I hadn’t seen the film in almost two decades, but time had not been kind. Its failure, however, had less to do with its sweeping production value (even with the visible matte lines) and more to do with its almost total bastardization of Barry Longyear’s Hugo and Award-winning novella. Aside from changing the book’s ending to include a literal mine (did they really think the audiences were that dumb?), screenwriter Edward Khmara and director Wolfgang Petersen placed less emphasis on Davidge’s unexpected role as surrogate father, introduced over-the-top meteor showers, and otherwise muted the novella’s themes of war and camaraderie. There is even a terrible moment in which Pepsi product placement gets Dennis Quaid excited.

Longyear’s novella was collected in a handsome book put out by White Wolf called The Enemy Papers, which also featured two other stories, “The Last Enemy” and “The Tomorrow Testament,” set in the same universe. But this went out of print. Thankfully, the book is also available through Back in Print. Longyear also has a website and an interesting history.

by Edward Champion

Edward Douglas, Hopeless Hack and Amental Film “Journalist” — Part One

New York hack “journalist” Edward Douglas, a creative typist employed by ComingSoon.net and an intellectual coprophiliac quite happy to scarf down the moist cloacal deposits offered by film publicists, recently left a comment. Mr. Douglas writes that telling the truth about Hollywood and the junket system is “the reason why blogs like [sic] shouldn’t be considered viable outlets to do these interviews.” Is that so?

In a moment, I’ll address the question of whether Mr. Douglas is a writer with enough credibility to make such a claim. But for now, there is a more pertinent question: What makes Mr. Douglas’s idiot tinkerings at ComingSoon.net any different from a blog? It appears that Mr. Douglas doesn’t write for newspapers. In fact, he writes exclusively online. Could it be that Mr. Douglas is merely a piss-poor journalist? Could it be that Mr. Douglas’s isn’t that good of a writer? Could it be that he is a small insect creeping his way up the dunghill of film journalism? A mere mite to be smashed with a robust and responsible Doc Marten?

In an effort to determine precisely why and how Mr. Douglas is a lazy and inept journalist, I’m initiating a weekly series that will examine Mr. Douglas’s work (if his scrabbling can be called that) as it appears on his site, ComingSoon.net. This is the first installment.

MR. DOUGLAS’S OFFENSES AGAINST JOURNALISM AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE — THE WEEK OF JUNE 1, 2008

On June 5th, Mr. Douglas interviewed Jon Favreau. Instead of using this time to investigate Iron Man 2 at length or ask Favreau about some of the interesting connections between his earlier and more “real” films (Swingers and Made) and these newer fantasy blockbusters, Mr. Douglas preferred to state the obvious to Mr. Favreau, asking him the vapid question, “So now you are back to being in front of the camera and goofing off?” Clearly, it is Mr. Douglas who is the one goofing off here with this slipshod inquiry. But, of course, since Mr. Douglas (and the other junketeers who were present for this interview) is a consummate ass-kisser, this early question was merely a setup to stroke Mr. Favreau’s ego with this scintillating observation concerning all potential superhero epics now in the planning stages: “I guess you will have to direct all of them.” Again, we see that Mr. Douglas and his unsearing peers prefer constant assuaging over journalism.

Also on that day, Mr. Douglas wrote this amazingly idiotic piece of hackery in relation to Anand Tucker. Marvel at this atrocious sentence!

It must have been a bittersweet departure, because it would have been a fantastic film under Tucker’s guidance and he was a big fan of the books, but leaving the film allowed the director to successfully dodge the bullet and the backlash when the movie bombed horribly, something that many felt greatly accelerated the decline and death of New Line in its previous guise.

Mix your metaphors much, Mr. Douglas? Split your infinitives much, Mr. Douglas? Separate your clauses at all, Mr. Douglas? Are you even aware of Strunk & White, Mr. Douglas? Does anybody edit your pieces, Mr. Douglas? Unable to deploy a figurative metaphor (“the bullet”) for his object, Mr. Douglas feels a strange need to introduce a literal one (“the backlash”). And who are the “many” who felt that The Golden Compass was responsible for New Line’s decline? Is this like the tribunal scene at the end of M? Mr. Douglas suggests by this cavalier item that he is an insider. But he is a dilettante. A proper journalist would offer a link or a specific authority for others to follow.

Let us also ponder the modifier “exclusive” — a word that Mr. Douglas seems peculiarly fixated upon. An exclusive interview suggests that Mr. Douglas is nabbing these interviews on his own, that he is obtaining bits of information that nobody else has. Mr. Douglas is not in the habit of confessing when he’s at a press conference or a sharing a roundtable interview with other journalists. So perhaps he has deluded himself into thinking that he’s getting an “exclusive.” Or this is what he tells the people who pay his checks. Either way, he is a liar. And further examinations into the “exclusive” nature of Mr. Douglas’s material are forthcoming.

But for now, I note that Mr. Douglas reported that he had “an exclusive” item involving Werner Herzog’s upcoming movie, Bad Lieutenant, with Herzog claiming that his film was not a remake of the Abel Ferrara film. But if Douglas had such an “exclusive,” why then did the same news (with a strikingly similar quote) crop up on Defamer one day before Douglas’s report? Could it be that Defamer’s S.T. VanAirsdale (who also blogs at The Reeler) was at the same junket/press conference? (VanAirsadle, to his credit, had the humility and the decency to avoid the word “exclusive,” pointing to “some minor miracle/apparent PR botch” that permitted this interview to happen.)

On June 3, the hopeless Mr. Douglas posted his conversation with documentary filmmaker Nina Davenport, where one can see Mr. Douglas’s considerable deficiencies as an interlocutor. Davenport was commissioned to film an Iraqi film student. The resulting film became an altogether different documentary named Operation Filmmaker. Sounds like an intriguing exposé into cultural transition, yes? Well, not for Mr. Douglas. He was not so tickled at putting forth remotely challenging questions on, say, how much Davenport and her camera might have been inadvertently responsible for the film student’s erratic behavior. In fact, since Mr. Douglas is apparently incapable of using his noggin (or unwilling to) for his questions, we get three questions from Mr. Douglas that rely upon the “It must have been hard”/”Was it difficult?” interviewing cliche.

Let us consider this hackeneyed phrase. In what world do you utter such a conversational banality and not get your ass kicked? You don’t ask a dentist if it’s “difficult” for him to fill in a cavity. You don’t tell a barista that “it must have been hard” to make that latte for the last customer. Why are amental hacks like Mr. Douglas so content to treat their interview subjects like children? (Answer: Because today’s junketeers aren’t interested in adult conversations. They remain inveterate assuagers.)

Douglas really thinks his readers are idiots. Why else would he write, in relation to a junket with Kung Fu Panda co-director John Stevenson, “A lot of what he had to say will certainly be of interest to anyone hoping to one day break into the animation or computer effects field.” Even discounting the fact that Douglas (or one of his fellow roundtable junketeers) foolishly compares the Head of Story position with ADing, is Douglas arrogant enough to believe that aspiring animation students will be going to ComingSoon.net to get technical information? Compare Mr. Douglas’s condescending flummery with Steve Fritz’s more comprehensive and informed interview of both Kung Fu Panda directors, where Fritz not only gets answers on how fight moves were animated and carried out, but even obtains a concise paragraph on key frame animation.

It will, of course, take some time to examine the spineless atavist known as Edward Douglas. I should observe that Mr. Douglas’s affronts to journalism are, as I have intimated with the comparisons above, by no means endemic to film journalism as a whole. I have my problems with David Poland, but at least Poland is attempting some basic ratiocination. One cannot say this of Mr. Douglas, whose execrable word spewing makes Poland look like F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is not just the ineluctable conclusion that Mr. Douglas writes with all the dependability and precocity of a malfunctioning dot matrix printer that should trouble us. He actually gets paid for this.

It is now my goal to inform those who pay Mr. Douglas for his services that they are getting a terrible deal. It is he who is the one not deserving of any credibility. It is he who is the one who should be confined to a go-nowhere office job without the benefit of air conditioning. Future dispatches will follow.

by Edward Champion

Candyman

Candyman, the 1992 film adapted by Bernard Rose from Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden,” is perhaps one of the most underrated satirical horror films of the 1990s. Boasting crisp cinematography from Anthony B. Richmond, a haunting quasi-Koyaanisqatsi music score from Philip Glass (with Koyaanisqatsi-like aerial shots of Chicago housing projects reminding one of Pruitt-Igoe), and precise and intelligent direction from Rose, Candyman not only evolves Barker’s vicious take on white academic efforts to understand London slums, but dares to suggest that privileged efforts to understand life in the housing projects are indelibly linked to a more disturbing primordial journey that involves whether or not you’re willing to believe in an urban legend. Plunge into the unwashed lives if you dare. You will find yourself not only confronting the unexpected consequences of your empathy, but the hidden human costs of your interventions. I don’t think it’s an accident that Chicago is such an apposite location for Barker’s transplanted tale. Much as John Cusack and company effortlessly transplanted Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity to the Second City, Chicago, perhaps more than any other American city, evokes a misunderstood sector of society in a manner that is almost seamless.

And yet Candyman has escaped the kind of retrospective accolades one would assume that a complex film of its type would garner. It is not discussed with the same reverential susurrations that the knee-jerk film geek applies to Dario Argento, which is particularly surprising, given that this film is about as close to giallo as mainstream American film is likely to come. This was a film that Rose somehow managed to sneak through the studio system. The film’s racial subtext is unthinkable by today’s play-it-safe standards. Virginia Madsen’s academic colleague is African-American, but lighter-skinned than the residents in the housing project that Madsen’s character investigates. So is the kindly detective looking into the case, who turns hostile as events develop. It takes an assault on a white woman to get people investigating the grisly murders near the housing project. There are mirrors that likewise connote this double standard: a mirror is unsettled in Madsen’s apartment, but a gaping hole in a housing project’s bathroom permits Madsen to climb through a crevice into another graffiti-laden apartment. And it takes Madsen talking with African-American janitors to begin her investigations into the Candyman mystery. When Madsen is asked to remove her clothing by a by-the-book police officer, one is instantly reminded of Alex’s dressing down in A Clockwork Orange (a scene, incidentally, written by Kubrick that wasn’t in Anthony Burgess’s novel). And the film’s bitter finale is a wonderfully skeptical pisstake on how female martyrdom stacks up against upward mobility and class disparities. There is also something within Rose’s many false shock moments as Madsen probes further, as if to suggest that investigating beyond your class unfurls an entrenched fear.

It’s a shame that this highly revealing film has been forgotten, and it’s particularly egregious that there remains little room for a thinking horror film along these lines within today’s studio system.

by Edward Champion

Joseph Minion Plagiarized Joe Frank

After Hours is perhaps my favorite Scorsese film. I am also a big Joe Frank fan. So it was considerably astonishing to learn that screenwriter Joseph Minion appears to have pilfered a Frank monologue for the first 30 minutes of the film. The details are, in many cases, taken astonishingly verbatim. In a March 2000 interview, Frank was apparently “paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won’t name) that plagiarized his dialogue.” (via Fimoculous)

[ALSO: Minion also plagiarized “Before the Law” from Kafka’s The Castle for this scene. Kafka, however, was not in the position to settle out of court.]