Tag Archives: New Line Cinema

Pride and Glory

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Pride and Glory movie poster

 

Pride and Glory was one of the last New Line Cin­ema pro­duc­tions made while still a semi-autonomous com­pany, before being evis­cer­ated by par­ent com­pany Warner Bros. in 2008. For the mor­bidly curi­ous, Van­ity Fair recently related the sad tale in its lat­est Hol­ly­wood issue. Dis­claimer: I worked for New Line Cin­ema through its end times, but had absolutely noth­ing to do with actu­ally mak­ing or mar­ket­ing its movies, and nobody there cared what rank-and-file employ­ees thought about the artis­tic merit of their prod­uct anyway.

For still undis­closed rea­sons, Pride and Glory was com­pleted in 2006, but sat on the shelf for almost two years. Direc­tor Gavin O’Connor (Tum­ble­weeds) pub­licly blamed New Line (and co-head Bob Shaye in par­tic­u­lar) for bury­ing his movie. Stars Edward Nor­ton and Colin Far­rel also spoke out about it in the press, clearly dis­ap­pointed but yet more under­stand­ing (per­haps these sea­soned actors were more jaded, and unsur­prised by stu­dio machi­na­tions). New Line coun­tered that the slid­ing release date was intended to avoid the lead actors’ com­pet­ing projects from dif­fer­ent stu­dios. It was even­tu­ally sched­uled for March 2008, but not actu­ally released until late 2008.

Colin Farrel and Ed Norton in Pride and GloryColin’s a bent copper

This atten­tion helped it become a minor cause célèbre among online movie afi­ciona­dos that couldn’t resist the bait: a scan­dalous tale of a sup­pressed mas­ter­piece. But the sad truth is that Pride and Glory is a god-awful, depress­ing, point­less mess of a movie. Actu­ally, that’s not fair; it’s not poorly made from a tech­ni­cal stand­point. Not to go out of my way to defend the stu­dio, but it now seems likely there was no actual con­spir­acy to bury a mis­un­der­stood mas­ter­piece. Per­haps New Line sim­ply couldn’t slot the film into its slate, fig­ure out how to mar­ket it, or was forced to shunt some projects aside dur­ing the stress of the immi­nent destruc­tion of the entire com­pany. Or maybe even, most unlikely of all, New Line had the sense to real­ize Pride and Glory just wasn’t a very good movie.

Also con­tribut­ing to the aura of con­tro­versy was the bun­gled film­ing of a police funeral scene at the actual cer­e­mony for New York City offi­cer Eric Her­nan­dez, acci­den­tally killed by friendly fire in 2006. The pro­duc­tion report­edly promised the fam­ily they would be respect­ful and stay out of their way, but reneged and clum­sily intruded on the sen­si­tive affair. Hav­ing seen the com­pleted scene, I don’t see any rea­son why it couldn’t have been effec­tively staged with a com­ple­ment of extras in full dress uniform.

Pride and Glory was writ­ten by broth­ers Gavin and Gre­gory O’Connor. As the sons of a police offi­cer, they had unusual access to the New York Police Depart­ment. If their film is sup­posed to be a trib­ute to hon­est cops, its cor­rup­tion plot must feel like a slap in the face. The movie’s fic­tional cor­rupt cops are wholly, utterly evil, with no gra­da­tions of char­ac­ter or moti­va­tion. Jimmy Egan (Far­rel) and a clutch of fel­low cops have been skim­ming money off drug busts for years, and have grad­u­ated to mur­der and sell­ing drugs them­selves. Egan’s brother-in-law Ray Tier­ney (Nor­ton) finds him­self in a posi­tion where he could turn Egan in. Com­pli­cat­ing mat­ters, Tierney’s pop Fran­cis Sr. (John Voight) and brother Fran­cis Jr. (Noah Emmerich, brother to New Line exec­u­tive Toby Emmerich, and type­cast as a cop after his role in Lit­tle Chil­dren) are also in the force. Fran­cis Jr. also knows about the cor­rup­tion, but doesn’t have the courage to man up. If Ray does the right thing, it will not only tear up his fam­ily but the New York Police Depart­ment itself. But events con­spire such that the good guys don’t have to act; three crooked cops self-destruct of their own accord, and the story reveals itself to the press. Jimmy and Ray are freed to set­tle their per­sonal griev­ances as two stereo­typ­i­cal movie Irish cops ought: fisticuffs in a pub.

John Voight in Pride and GloryCheese it, it’s the fuzz!

I sus­pect O’Connor had pre­ten­sions to mak­ing another L.A. Con­fi­den­tial, but his result doesn’t mea­sure up to the stan­dards of such a supe­rior film noir. Note the super­fi­cial resem­blances: police cor­rup­tion, drugs, fam­ily pride. Pride and Glory’s plot only seems com­plex, but is actu­ally stupid-simple. Expo­si­tion scenes basi­cally lay out the plot quite early, drain­ing any sense of mys­tery or sus­pense. The dia­logue is pep­pered with a tor­rent of names that are chal­leng­ing for the audi­ence to con­nect with faces, a tech­nique that pro­vides only a super­fi­cial com­plex­ity to a sim­ple plot.

The tone is absurdly grim and totally humor­less, and devoid of any human emo­tion beyond Ray’s grim sense of duty. The clas­sic film noir ele­ment most notably lack­ing in this boy’s club pro­duc­tion is any hint of women or sex. What few women there are in the cast barely fig­ure into the plot. The most sig­nif­i­cant female char­ac­ter is cancer-stricken Abby (Jen­nifer Ehle), whose sole pur­pose in the plot seems to be to human­ize hus­band Fran­cis Jr. Pride and Glory utterly lacks the sense of verisimil­i­tude of the tele­vi­sion series The Wire, sim­i­larly set in the worlds of inner city drug and police cul­tures. Now is as good a time as any to state that The Dork Report does not apol­o­gize for tak­ing advan­tage of any oppor­tu­nity what­so­ever to evan­ge­lize The Wire.

The set­ting is a ver­sion of New York City that may or may not actu­ally exist. In fact, there’s an unusual dis­claimer before the end cred­its stat­ing its char­ac­ters and events are totally fic­tional. Obvi­ously, if there was an actual case of such mas­sive cor­rup­tion in the NYPD, we’d have heard about it. After the cred­its, there’s yet another dis­claimer I’ve never seen before, stat­ing that no one con­nected with the pro­duc­tion took any money to pro­mote the use of tobacco prod­ucts. This Dork Reporter don’t smoke, and never has, but is offended by the notion that movies are influ­en­tial in this way. Granted, movies are a pow­er­ful art­form, and can affect people’s hearts and minds. The ills of soci­ety are real prob­lems that require com­plex solu­tions, but cen­sor­ing movies is not one of them. It’s a cheap and easy way for right­eous fools to believe they are com­bat­ing a prob­lem. Where’s the cor­re­spond­ing worry that lit­tle kids will watch this movie and be inspired to grow up to be cor­rupt cops?

Offi­cial movie site: www.prideandglorymovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Menace II Society

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Menace II Society movie poster

 

Let me just come out and say it: I utterly and totally loathed Men­ace II Soci­ety. The Dork Report’s 1/2 star rat­ing is reserved for true cin­e­matic crimes against human­ity, movies that I think the world would have been a bet­ter place had they not been made (zero stars are for those rare and spe­cial cases, beyond the pale, where bad trans­mutes into good, like the per­versely enjoy­able Plan 9 From Outer Space — read The Dork Report review). Of course, I’m a rel­a­tively priv­i­leged white boy from sub­ur­bia, so it’s going to be tricky for me to explain my pas­sion­ately neg­a­tive reac­tion to a movie about African Amer­i­cans trapped in racist, drug-infested Watts, South Cen­tral Los Ange­les. The cheap way out would be to claim I’m not the tar­get audi­ence, but that itself would be a kind of racist copout.

Menace II Society

The best way to explain how I feel about this movie is to com­pare it to two of the best works of fic­tion I’ve ever seen: Do the Right Thing (1989) and The Wire (2002–08). Men­ace II Soci­ety opens with stock footage of 1965 Watts riots, and then fast-forwards to Watts in 1993. It’s a cheap and crass stab at social rel­e­vance that only movies like Spike Lee’s mas­ter­piece Do the Right Thing have earned. I don’t know how much fac­tual or bio­graph­i­cal truth is in Men­ace II Soci­ety, but every­thing that fol­lows strikes me as exploita­tion; which is to say, the worst, most sen­sa­tion­al­ized depic­tions of drug cul­ture dra­ma­tized to scare the bejeezus out of sup­pos­edly civ­i­lized cin­ema goers. Do the Right Thing pre­sented one of the most com­plex views of racial ten­sion ever seen in the movies, but Men­ace II Soci­ety is a mere low­lights reel of relent­less vio­lence and deprav­ity that seemed to me to be racist itself. Caine (Tyrin Turner), O-Dog (Larenze Tate), and Tat (Samuel L. Jack­son), not a sin­gle char­ac­ter can speak a sin­gle sen­tence with­out at least three n-words and two f-bombs.

The Wire is one of the only TV series to approach the level of lit­er­a­ture, and like Do the Right Thing it counts race among its many deep themes. Many of its char­ac­ters are also under­priv­i­leged African Amer­i­cans on the wrong side of the law. But not once did I ever sense The Wire was exploita­tive or sen­sa­tion­al­is­tic in any way. Men­ace II Soci­ety barely deserves to be men­tioned in the same para­graph as The Wire, but I did note a very sim­i­lar scene in both: in the sec­ond sea­son of The Wire, Bodie and Sham­rock take a rare road trip out of Bal­ti­more and, unable to find any hip-hop on the radio, instead find them­selves lis­ten­ing to NPR’s A Prairie Home Com­pan­ion in baf­fled silence. Like­wise, the best scene in Men­ace II Soci­ety is of an African Amer­i­can fam­ily at home on Christ­mas Eve watch­ing It’s a Won­der­ful Life, and utterly unable to relate to or derive any plea­sure from it.

Menace II Society

Men­ace II Soci­ety (1993, New Line Cin­ema) is the debut film from twin broth­ers Albert and Allen Hughes, who would later go on to direct From Hell (2001), and com­pletely miss the point of the source mate­r­ial: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel. In direct con­trast to John Singleton’s sim­ply, clas­si­cally shot Boyz n the Hood (read The Dork Report review), Men­ace II Soci­ety is a slickly pol­ished pro­duc­tion (which, I believe, only con­tributes to its glam­or­iza­tion of the thug gangsta lifestyle). But it’s a clumsy film in other ways, with ter­ri­ble voiceover nar­ra­tion stu­pidly telling instead of show­ing. But it pays off in the end with the real­iza­tion of the only inter­est­ing device of the film: it’s nar­rated by a dead man.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Dark City (Director’s Cut)

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Dark City

 

I recall Dark City being one of my favorite films of 1998, and I would have rated it quite highly had I been keep­ing score at the time. Dark City is a bold sci­ence fic­tion film noir most obvi­ously indebted to Blade Run­ner, but also to Dork Report favorites Brazil (espe­cially the sequences of build­ings sprout­ing up out of the ground), Metrop­o­lis, M, and City of Lost Chil­dren (read The Dork Report review). In each of these films, a pro­tag­o­nist sur­vives in a hos­tile, often name­less dystopian city, often with the sus­pi­cion that his depress­ing exis­tence is some­how not real. Alex Proyas, Lem Dobbs, and David S. Goyer’s screen­play explores the same fla­vor of para­noid schiz­o­phre­nia that also fig­ures in the lit­er­a­ture of Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick.

Dark City was over­shad­owed at the box office by Titanic like all its con­tem­po­raries, but like its later odd­ball dis­tant cousin Don­nie Darko, its extended life­cy­cle included becom­ing a cult hit on DVD. In the mean­while, direc­tor Alex Proyas fur­ther raised his bank­a­bil­ity with later com­mer­cial suc­cess I, Robot. So for Dark City’s tenth anniver­sary, New Line Cin­ema financed Proyas’ com­ple­tion of a Director’s Cut for a spe­cial edi­tion DVD. Watch­ing it for the first time since 1998, it all nev­er­the­less seemed famil­iar to this Dork Reporter, who found it dif­fi­cult to spot any­thing new from memory.

Dark CityThe worst loo in The City

DVD bonus fea­tures are dryly referred to by movie stu­dio home enter­tain­ment exec­u­tives as “value-added con­tent.” Repur­posed elec­tronic press kits typ­i­cally fea­ture film­mak­ers con­grat­u­lat­ing them­selves on how won­der­ful a film they’ve made and how bril­liant all their col­leagues were. In con­trast, the Dark City DVD squeezes in an inter­est­ing and fairly can­did feature-length doc­u­men­tary on the mak­ing of the film and its impact upon numer­ous philoso­phers and film crit­ics. No less a mar­quee booster than St. Roger Ebert praises the film and con­tributes and entire com­men­tary track. Ebert has long cham­pi­oned the film, even includ­ing it among his series of Great Movies. Among other excel­lent insights, he points out it pre­dated the similarly-themed The Matrix by over a year.

Proyas describes his Director’s Cut as “more com­plete,” and blames the audi­ence test­ing process for New Line Cin­ema pres­sur­ing him to add an explana­tory voiceover. As he put it, the process under­mined his con­fi­dence as a film­maker and thus com­pro­mised the film. As was the case with the 2007 reis­sue of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner, Proyas has now removed the open­ing nar­ra­tion, spit-polished the spe­cial effects, and extended some scenes.

Dark CityHappy Birth­day, Mr. Murdoch

The film­mak­ers relate their amus­ing strug­gles with the MPAA. Shown a rel­a­tively inof­fen­sive cut of the film, they nev­er­the­less wanted to give it an “R” rat­ing, the best ratio­nale they could give being its over­all weird­ness. So, faced with receiv­ing an R no mat­ter what, the film­mak­ers actu­ally decided to add more nudity and vio­lence. But there is still no pro­fan­ity in this anti­sep­tic uni­verse. Dark City is a film noir of the sort where even hook­ers say things like “Aw, shoot.”

Of the cast, only Rufus Sewell par­tic­i­pates in the doc­u­men­tary. He’s noth­ing like I would have expected; actu­ally kind of goofy and ani­mated, in direct con­trast to his moody seri­ous­ness in the role. Kiefer Suther­land overeggs his per­for­mance with a limp, facial defor­mity, and speech defect. His char­ac­ter is a remorse­ful col­lab­o­ra­tor that turns on his mas­ters, inter­est­ing enough with­out all the actorly accou­ter­ments. Jen­nifer Con­nelly is as lumi­nously beau­ti­ful as ever in Dark City, but seemed a bit more… how do I put this politely… soft than usual. Was she preg­nant at the time? A strik­ing shot of Con­nelly stand­ing on the end of a pier matches my mem­ory of a sim­i­lar shot in Requiem for a Dream.

Offi­cial movie site: www.darkcity.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.