CulturePulp.

THE CULTUREPULP Q&A: Christopher McQuarrie

 

According to Christopher McQuarrie, "Valkyrie" was supposed to be a tiny, fast-moving production. The Oscar-winning screenwriter of "The Usual Suspects" got his friend, "Suspects" and "X-Men" director Bryan Singer, interested in filming McQuarrie's tense, unapologetically old-school World War II screenplay (co-written with Nathan Alexander) -- which recounts a failed conspiracy by German officers to kill Hitler, take over the government and end the war in July 1944.

"Bryan and I were going to make this as a little movie between two giant studio movies that Bryan would make," says McQuarrie. "This was going to be $17.5 million, a little project we were gonna have fun doing, and it was going to be us getting back to our roots: 'From the creators of "The Usual Suspects" comes a different kind of lineup.'"

Fate -- or, more specifically, Tom Cruise -- had other plans.

They took the film to Cruise's studio, United Artists, which "led inevitably to a meeting with Tom, and it was expressly understood that this was not a meeting with Tom the actor -- this was a meeting with Tom the studio," says McQuarrie. "We were happy with that.... We weren't there to ask, and he wasn't there to impose. But out of that meeting emerged this partnership. And the movie took on a life of its own."

By "a life of its own," McQuarrie means Cruise decided to take the lead role of conspirator Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, the budget blew up to somewhere in the neighborhood of $75-90 million, and the film found itself the subject of endless entertainment-press chatter -- fueled by Cruise's controversial celebrity antics -- about everything from a rough shoot to budget bloat to speculation about whether the accents worked.

"What do you want to know? I'll tell you anything," McQuarrie says. (He'll lay out in detail how an expensive opening battle scene was always in the script, how the "troubled" test screenings never happened, how Cruise was a thoughtful producer, and how "the accent issue" was carefully considered.) "No one called us to verify any of the stories. And in the cut-and-paste universe of bloggers as journalists, they would just forward the story with their own spin on it -- and all of it was reading tea leaves....

"What I'm most proud of in this movie is that it never stopped being that film that we set out to make," he says. "It got bigger, and we got a lot of toys to play with, but it kept the spirit of that gritty, straightforward World War II movie."

McQuarrie (who also wrote and directed the 2000 cult crime flick "The Way of the Gun," which he grossly underrates) talked for nearly an hour about the myths and facts surrounding "Valkyrie," among other things. An edited transcript follows the jump.

The Oregonian's 'Best Films of 2008.'

Yours truly contributed more than a few sentences (and a top 10 list) to the "Best films of 2008" package in today's Oregonian. Here's the whole thing online:

Part 1: Shawn Levy's intro
Part 2: "The Oregonian's Best Films of 2008"
Part 3: "Other Lists: Worsts, Double-Bills, & 'No, They're Really Goods!'"
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The Old Year's Gone: Movies 2008 (The Oregonian)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Valkyrie' and 'The Day the Earth Stood Still'

On the final "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast of 2008, I show up in the final third or so to discuss "Valkyrie" (which I quite liked) and "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (which I half-liked, sort of).

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Dec. 19, 2008) [ iTunes ]

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Valkyrie'

From today's Oregonian....

The tight WWII thriller "Valkyrie" lugs a steamer trunk full of undeserved baggage: producer/star Tom Cruise's celebrity meltdown, barely reported chatter about a rough production, speculation about accents few people have actually heard. There's also the ridiculous cultural expectation that every WWII movie since "Saving Private Ryan" has to be some kind of Oscar-whoring Important Statement About War.

I hope gossip-choked moviegoers can see past all that, because it has nothing to do with what matters: the final story unspooling onscreen. For my money, "Valkyrie" works more or less exactly as intended: as a taut, unpretentious and unapologetically old-school brand of WWII flick where the accents are all over the place and you're too caught up to notice.

The film reunites director Bryan Singer with "Usual Suspects" screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie (working with Nathan Alexander), and has more in common with men-on-a-mission classics like "The Great Escape" or "Von Ryan's Express" than it does with "Private Ryan" or "Flags of our Fathers." And as far as I'm concerned, thank God. Like "Suspects," "Valkyrie" concerns smart men and failed heists. This time, the smart men try to steal a government. It's based on the true (and much-filmed) story of disgusted German military leaders (played by Kenneth Branagh, Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy and others) who staged a failed coup against Hitler on July 20, 1944. Their risky plan involved killing the Führer, shifting blame to the German High Command, and using Hitler's own reserve army to take the country and end the war. Carrying the most dangerous burden is Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise), who lost an eye and one-and-a-half hands in the African theater.

Of course, as one character puts it, "This is a military operation -- nothing ever goes according to plan." The movie is a tense study in failure and grace under pressure, and a return to form for Singer after the stately bloat of "Superman Returns." His attention to detail is meticulous without derailing the story's momentum, and he earns suspense by cleanly setting up the geography in every situation, from the layout of Hitler's Wolf's Lair compound to the inner workings of a bomb to the layout of the Reich's phone network. I loved the film's clear sense of how big plans hinge on tiny details -- a look, a perfectly worded sentence, the decisions of minor bureaucrats. (One of the movie's big set pieces is an attempt to secure the cooperation of various German leaders via a series of phone calls, and it plays a little like a life-or-death version of the scene where Jerry Maguire loses all his clients.) The screenplay is spare, full of great conversations in which everyone has to dance around the traitorous point.

If movie has a weakness, I suppose it's that Cruise plays Stauffenberg as blandly laser-focused, despite Stauffenberg making some big mistakes. The actor anchors the film well enough -- as Shawn Levy told me later, "If this was 'Where Eagles Dare,' then Cruise was Clint Eastwood" -- but Branagh and Nighy are more vulnerable, nuanced and fun to watch.

Still, the film is a minor Christmas miracle: It succeeds on its own terms, despite the gossip hounds' best blood-sniffing efforts, and dares to be an entertainment rather than a statement.
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B-plus; 120 minutes; rated PG-13 for violence and brief strong language.

'Valkyrie' (The Oregonian, Dec. 24, 2008)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'The Spirit'

From today's Oregonian....

"The Spirit" is a loony, embarrassing mess that takes the late Will Eisner's classic comics creation and beats it senseless with a giant toilet bowl (literally, at one point).

The film is the solo directorial debut of another comics legend, Frank Miller. I love Miller's older graphic novels, including 1986's "The Dark Knight Returns" and 1991's "Sin City." His last significant comics work is the decade-old "300," adapted to film last year. He co-directed the "Sin City" movie with Robert Rodriguez. I weep for fans of those movies, because they're about to learn something readers of Miller's comics have known for a while: At some point in the late '90s, Miller stopped telling dense, ambitious stories, and his art became fixated on a tiny set of over-the-top visual fetishes -- including swastikas, Converse sneakers, dinosaurs and the fannies of lethal women in dominatrix garb.

This makes him an ill match for the pioneering Eisner, who created "The Spirit" in 1940 as a weekly newspaper insert and used the title character -- a masked, undead vigilante in a suit and fedora -- to play with the language of comics storytelling. And sure enough, Miller (who's in way over his head as a filmmaker) ignores Eisner's legacy in a way that feels almost hostile, instead writing and directing a story that's convoluted and campy while wallowing in Miller's above-listed visual fetishes -- fetishes he already digested far more skillfully with Rodriguez.

Miller should be paying homage. Instead, he repeats himself.

The movie is a septic tank of vapid noir posturing, bad narration, bizarre pacing, cartoonishly hot femme fatales and ineptly staged slapstick -- in which The Spirit (Gabriel Macht) squares off against an ex-girlfriend turned jewel thief (Eva Mendes) and an eyeshadow- and Nazi-uniform-wearing villain named The Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson) over some supernatural treasure.

There's not enough newsprint to document the endless, cover-your-face, can-I-get-a-refund foolishness that ensues. Miller gives George Lucas a run for his money in making Jackson and the rest of the cast (including Scarlett Johansson) look like dinner-theater thespians floundering in a world of green-screened art direction. I'll just describe two scenes, likely missing from Eisner's source comics -- one in which Mendes calls someone a "perfect a**" while Xeroxing her perfect fanny, followed by another in which The Spirit uses the resulting photocopy as a suspect photo, which he shows to assorted doormen until one of them recognizes it.

Imagine 90 endless minutes of that sort of puerility, and worse. Try not to imagine that future Pixar directors Brad Bird and John Lasseter nearly made their own "Spirit" feature in the '80s, because that would only depress you. Eisner is probably spinning in his grave with enough force to burrow to the Earth's core.
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D-minus; 102 minutes; rated PG-13 for intense sequences of stylized violence and action, some sexual content and brief nudity.

'The Spirit' (The Oregonian, Dec. 24, 2008)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Seven Pounds'

From today's Oregonian....

As D.K. Holm recently pointed out -- citing examples ranging from James Cagney to Steven Seagal -- "actors can be just as much the auteurs behind their films as directors." This seems especially true of male stars prone to action roles: Why, despite a rotating roster of directors, is Mel Gibson always getting tortured? Why does Tom Cruise have a long streak of films in which he learns a vocational skill or wears a mask? Why is Seagal always playing guitar and yakking about the environment? Why is Harrison Ford always rescuing his wife and holding up his Index Finger of Doom?

We can now definitively add to this list Will Smith -- who in "Seven Pounds" continues the lonely-messed-up-savior streak he started with "I Am Legend" and "Hancock."

"Pounds" reunites Smith with "Pursuit of Happyness" director Gabriele Muccino, and it's one of those "puzzle" films that build to a Big Reveal in their final minutes, making it more or less impossible to synopsize without wrecking the surprise. Let's try. Smith plays lonely, messed-up IRS agent Ben Thomas. He's making mysterious calls on troubled people -- including a including blind beef salesman (Woody Harrelson), a graphic designer with a heart ailment (Rosario Dawson) a cost-cutting nursing-home administrator (Tim Kelleher) and an abused mother (Elpidia Carrillo).

Ben comes off as part angel, part avenger, part creep, and his visits are clearly part of some secret agenda. But what? And why?

Unfortunately, the mystery is the whole movie, and the crypticism gets annoying fast if you figure out what's going on early (which you likely will -- I formed a mostly accurate working theory in fewer than 20 minutes). The film also becomes interminable when the bizarre main story comes to a screeching halt so the filmmakers can develop a late-movie insta-romance between Smith and Dawson.

All that said, Smith is really strong here. I loved his weak, sad smile and slight inarticulateness, which struck me as reasonably adventurous for an actor accused of coasting on charm. "Seven Pounds" is also beautifully shot (Muccino makes good use of the silhouette of Smith's jug-eared head ), it's ambitiously edited, and it features a tweaked piano melody on the soundtrack that manages to be simple, beautiful, sad and twisted in one go.

The movie gets just enough right that the things it doesn't get right (beyond its over-dependence on a not-so-surprising story puzzle) smack you cold in the face. For example: How ill, precisely, is Rosario Dawson's character supposed to be? Other than a few fainting spells, some pale makeup and a slight darkening under her gigantic limpid eyes, she strikes me as the most athletic, ambulatory and sexually alive terminally ill heart patient in recent film history. She takes long walks, wrangles a horse-sized Great Dane and even gets a bit carnal as occasion demands. Her romance with Smith is so conventional, so sudden, so deeply Hollywood, that it feels out of place in a movie trying so hard, albeit with limited success, to mess with your head.
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C; 118 minutes; rated PG-13 for thematic material, some disturbing content and a scene of sensuality.

'Seven Pounds' (The Oregonian, Dec. 19, 2008)

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Dark Streets'

From today's Oregonian....

The best thing about this job is championing easy-to-miss small movies that dare to be different ("JCVD," "Let the Right One In"). The worst thing about this job is pouring haterade on easy-to-miss small movies that dare to be different and (in my opinion) fail spectacularly. Writing about these films with any degree of honesty feels a bit like punching kittens.

"Dark Streets," unfortunately, falls in the latter category. It's a cool-looking, low-budget attempt at making an impressionistic film-noir blues musical, and if the filmmakers had spent one-tenth as much time on their dream project's screenplay as they did on the music and art direction, they might have had something special.

The story, expanded from a stage musical, is set in a 1930s fever-dream world that looks like a puree of "Moulin Rouge!" and "Dark City." Nightclub owner Chaz (Gabriel Mann of "Mad Men") is a dull fop with a pencil mustache whose energy-executive father died under mysterious circumstances. Chaz runs afoul of every obvious film-noir cliché -- a hidden pile of money, a mysterious note, evil politicians, a crooked cop (Elias Koteas), a femme fatale (Izabella Miko), a troubled singer with a heart of gold (Bijou Phillips) and an African-American emcee who speaks exclusively in wise-but-hardboiled truisms (Toledo Diamond).

The producers and director Rachel Samuels ("The Suicide Club") try to bury these clichés in blues music and art direction that are fairly impressive, considering the budget. Budding cinematographers could probably study the way Samuels uses lenses, light, offbeat props and existing architecture to create a feeling of lushness using minimal resources. Half the movie is shot from low angles so the ornate ceilings of Los Angeles' historic Tower Theater can do much of the atmospheric heavy lifting, and there's a soft focus to the edges of the frame that looks like either a dream or a really cool projectionist's mistake.

Unfortunately, two problems kill the movie dead. First, Gabriel Mann's Chaz (who looks uncannily like k.d. lang) comes off as a total lightweight. Any charisma this actor has is swallowed by the film's overwhelming atmosphere -- and the fact that two gorgeous, vivid women fight for his affections is a bigger mystery than the identity of Chaz's father's killer.

Second, and much worse, the script is just all kinds of terrible. The characters are hollow mannequins telling a thin, depressing story that's less of a noir and more of a simple-minded bummer full of barely connected scenes and stunningly empty dialogue. Every other line is something like "A bullet's kiss is a cold way to meet betrayal" or "This city's cold, man -- it just grabs you by the throat and it don't let go" or "Delilahs are and always will be the root of every sap's demise." An end-credits dedication to the displaced musicians of New Orleans feels unintentionally funny following a movie this slight.
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C-minus; 83 minutes; rated R for some sexual content, drug use and brief violent images.

'Dark Streets' (The Oregonian, Dec. 12, 2008)

The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Holiday Special.

In their latest comic, beloved instructional characters Mr. Do and Mr. Don't teach us how to behave in Portland, Oregon during The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

The Mr. Do & Mr. Don't Holiday Special (Webcomics Nation)
Complete CulturePulp archives at WCN

MOVIE REVIEW: 'JCVD'

From the Friday, Dec. 5 Oregonian....

One of the best movies playing in Portland is, I kid you not, a loopy dramatic thriller starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, who gives an angry, vulnerable and occasionally devastating performance as ... Jean-Claude Van Damme.

"JCVD" has been surprising film-festival audiences for a while, occasionally reducing them to tears. (Really.) In it, the Muscles from Brussels plays "Jean-Claude," an aging action star mired in a sad late-career slump. He's broke. He's a joke. He's making lame DTV action flicks and losing parts to Seagal. He's also losing a custody battle for his daughter, who's embarrassed by his filmography.

It sounds like a self-referential comedy premise, but Van Damme and director/co-writer Mabrouk El Mechri are after something far deeper, stranger and more ambitious. The actor, exhausted, returns to Belgium to regroup -- and stumbles into a robbery/hostage crisis in a post office. The drama that ensues is full of impressive single-take camera work, Tarantino-style time-hopping and genuinely earned suspense.

But this biggest shock is Van Damme's work as a man grasping for his spiritual center in the middle of a police standoff. Giving the performance of his life, largely in French, Van Damme delivers a soulful self-analysis -- including one stunning four-minute, single-take monologue in which he addresses the camera, apologizes for his public embarrassments, bursts into tears and somehow reclaims his honor as an actor and maybe even as a man.
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B-plus; 96 minutes, rated R for language and some violence. Currently playing at Portland's Living Room Theaters.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Punisher: War Zone' and 'JCVD' (again)

During the Friday, Dec. 5 "Cort and Fatboy" broadcast, broadcast live from the Bagdad Theater, I talk about "Punisher: War Zone" and the amazing "JCVD" (now that I've finally seen it).

(Also, for the record, that remark you hear at the top of the show is the tail end of some sort of self-deprecating joke.)

Cort and Fatboy (Friday, Dec. 5, 2008) [ iTunes ]