Sleepy Bruce Willis

I swear I'm not on some Bruce Willis kick, all evidence to the contrary. Yesterday I wrote about how I watched my second quarantine-themed Bruce Willis movie of quarantine, and one day later, I've already watched a third Willis flick. This one isn't quarantine-themed, unless you count one scene where a couple guys rob a store wearing half-masks that are basically surgical masks. That was the only possible connection to COVID-19 I could make.

In fact, I certainly wouldn't have watched Cop Out on Friday night if it weren't for a discovery I made the night before, shortly after finishing Surrogates. I can't remember what bit of internet research it was that led me to it, but I stumbled across the information that Willis acted in a stage version of Stephen King's Misery, which ran from late 2015 to early 2016. He played Paul Sheldon, of course. (What, did you think he played Annie Wilkes? That was Laurie Metcalf. Would have really liked to see this.)

I messaged the surprising information to a friend, another big Stephen King fan, and he responded that he didn't think Willis would have the chops for that. I countered that Willis does have the chops, he just doesn't usually use them. In this case he might, since he would obviously not have taken that role for a paycheck. In all other cases, at least lately, he tends to phone it in.

So Friday night, as proof of my theory, I decided to watch him phone it in.

I had heard awful things about Kevin Smith's movie -- both that it was bad, and why it was bad. The latter, at least, was according to Smith himself, who hasn't been shy about talking about how difficult Willis was to work with. I'm not googling his exact quotes now, but I think it was both an attitude issue and a preparedness issue. Like maybe Willis didn't want to be there, hadn't learned any of his lines, and was an asshole to everyone on set.

I was inclined to believe it, even as I also subtracted points from Smith for blaming the failure of a movie on one of the actors. For directors, in most cases, the buck should stop there. Or at the very least, accept the blame publicly even if you don't privately.

But in the ten years since Cop Out was released, I hadn't had occasion to see for myself how terrible Willis was in the movie, which would likely either confirm Smith's comments or render them as overblown blame-shifting.

The thing I remembered before watching was that I thought Willis looked "sleepy" on the poster. That was what I wrote in this post, a decade ago. It was a slightly different version of the poster than the one here, a version where he looks sleepier. I can't use the same one due to my long-standing rule of not using the same poster art twice for two posts on my blog -- even when they are separated by ten years. Anyway, that's why I'm invoking the adjective "sleepy" in the subject of this post, even if it comes a little closer than I'd like to Trump's lame characterization of Joe Biden as "Sleepy Joe."

Well, Willis may be sleepy in this movie, but I'd argue it's a lesser sin than other elements of Cop Out that are way too awake.

The worst scene in a very bad movie is not a Willis scene at all. He's in it, but he's on the other side of the glass of the interrogation room where Tracy Morgan is busy hamming his fool head off. Screenwriters Mark and Rob Cullen -- Smith can't take the blame for the script, at least -- apparently thought it was a good idea for a five-minute scene in which Morgan's character plays bad cop to a perp, roughing him up with lines he's gotten from movies. The joke is supposed to be that the lines start out as from cop-related movies, but devolve into famous quotes from any movie. It's actually a funny idea, but it goes on at least four times as long as it should, and Morgan doesn't sell it well. That could be because he's also wildly putting the perp in headlocks and pushing his head into the interrogation table while trying to deliver his lines.

Willis' responses, on the other side of the glass, are pretty sleepy, but they aren't what makes the scene so painful to watch.

This is just one example of the typical mode of Cop Out, an early tone setter. Willis is not good in it, and maybe he isn't as engaged as he should be, but his disinterest wouldn't have stood out to me if Smith hadn't called attention to it. There's no doubt the movie is quite bad. It's reasonable, I suppose, to conclude that Smith was so worn down having to cater to Willis' diva mentality that he had nothing left for the rest of the movie.

It occurs to me that Cop Out represented an interesting turning point for both men, in different directions. It's only a year after Surrogates, in which I thought Willis was quite good, and definitely engaged enough. After this, though, he started steadily sliding into where we find him now, selling his phoned-in performances for increasingly smaller paychecks on increasingly smaller movies. (The theory works better if you disregard Looper in 2012, in which he is again quite good.)

On the other hand, it's only a year before Red State, which is still the best directing Smith has ever done if you are considering both the performances of the actors and the overall craft of the film. I know most people don't like that film as much as I do -- it made my top 25 of last decade -- but I hope most people at least acknowledge that it is good by Smith's standards. You can see him having used the experience of Cop Out as motivation to be better. The win streak continued with Tusk before he came back down to earth again.

Well, one thing I can tell you for sure -- tonight will not be my third straight Willis movie.

Directors who take their ball and go home

Much has been made about Steven Soderbergh threatening to quit directing. Since his Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra is set to appear on HBO, Side Effects, releasing today, could be his last theatrical release, if you are to take him at his word.

Then again, his word has also been modified from this rather absolutist stance. Maybe the specter of a future devoted entirely to painting seemed a bit daunting, so he has lately decided to re-dub this break from filmmaking a "hiatus."

Either way, I find there to be something a little petulant about people who state that they'll quit doing the thing they're doing. Especially when they do it as well and as frequently as Soderbergh does it.

It's the frequency part that really smacks of something that could almost be described as hypocrisy in the case of Soderbergh. How do you go cold turkey after spending several years on a pace of releasing a movie every seven months?

Sure, burnout is a possible factor. But if you are starting to burn out on something you love, can't you usually see the warning signs and forge for yourself a less intense schedule? Most directors are comfortable making one movie every two years, and some less frequently than that.

Which is why I always get the feeling in these situations that the person is really saying "I'm not getting the creative respect that I want/deserve. So I'm taking my ball and going home."

It's nothing overt the person is saying, but rather, a reading into the situation. Usually, a person quits doing something because they have become disillusioned with the process of doing it. And usually that's the result of this thing not bringing that person the rewards he/she believes it should bring. According to wikipedia, Soderbergh said that "when you reach the point where you're saying, 'If I have to get into a van to do another scout, I'm just going to shoot myself,' it's time to let somebody who's still excited about getting in the van, get in the van." Couldn't you extrapolate from this comment that he's saying "If I have to get in a van to do another scout and I'm not winning an Oscar on the other end, I don't want to do it anymore"?

Okay, that's reading a lot into it. And Soderbergh strikes me as the kind of guy who doesn't care that much about Oscars (I could probably find a quote from him that said as much if I googled it). But I don't think it's totally off base either. If Soderbergh found "getting in that van" to be so odious, why did he do it so often? In fact, so often that it looked like he was trying to set a record for the most films shot during the least amount of time?

My second example of a possibly petulantly quitting director is perhaps a clearer example. Kevin Smith has also told people that he will be wrapping up his directing career after he makes the hockey movie Hit Somebody, which was then expanded into two movies before ultimately becoming envisioned as a six-part TV miniseries. Clearly wanting to go out with some kind of feature rather than just fading away, Smith changed those plans to directing a third Clerks movie pending some other details falling into place.

Like Soderbergh with his painting, Smith also has other time-consuming passions that could easily replace the time he spends making films, as he has a knack for instantly expanding into any new form of social media. His podcasts are really popular too.

But here it seems a bit more like he was dissatisfied with the way he had started being received, and is quitting as some kind of "I'll show you" act. The announcements about his future coincided with his release of Red State, which he had to distribute himself and which was not greeted with universal acclaim (though I felt it should have been). At that point he started saying things about how he was "running out of stories to tell" and talking about how Harvey Weinstein had built him up as a celebrity auteur because his films couldn't stand on their own. Sounds pretty bitter to me.

The reason I feel more confident in accusing Smith of these petulant motivations is that I doubt he would have said or done any of this if Red State had been greeted as the masterpiece that I believe it is. If he'd gotten more love from critics and audiences on this movie, don't tell me it wouldn't have given him renewed encouragement about his own capabilities. It would have easily inspired him to continue these initial strides as a serious filmmaker, who thinks about how he composes his shots and writes stories that don't provoke merely with potty humor.

If you're detecting a little petulance in me, well, that may just be because I don't want to see either of these guys disappear. I alternate liking and not really liking Soderbergh's movies, but the ones I like (Magic Mike), I like a whole lot. And I would argue that Smith is currently making the best movies he's ever made. Both Red State and another movie he listed as one source of his low cinematic morale -- Zack and Miri Make Porno -- are comfortably in my top five Smith movies.

I was even looking forward to the hockey movie. So here's hoping neither Soderbergh nor Smith takes his puck and goes home.

Who directed that?, Part II

When Kevin Smith released Cop Out in early 2010, I was inspired to write a post called "Who directed that?," exploring directors who seemed like an unlikely match for the material of one of their films.

I probably should have waited for Smith to direct Red State before writing that post.

In fact, so blown away was I by Red State that at first I was going to write just a single word as my entire post on it:

"Whoa."

But if I did that, it might have left you wondering if I really liked it, or was just disturbed by it in some way.

The answer is, both. But I'm not going to tell you a lot more about the movie, if you've avoided learning anything about it to this point. (This poster hints at certain things, but believe me, it leaves a lot of surprises yet to be discovered.)

See, I knew nothing about Red State before watching it yesterday. We often say we "knew nothing" about a movie, but that's never really true, and indeed, it isn't quite true in this case. "Nothing" in this case is that I knew that Kevin Smith had directed it, and I knew he wanted to hold an auction for the distribution rights to his movie. When that plan fell apart, he ended up self-distributing in a very limited way. Suffice it to say, almost no one who has seen Red State has actually been able to see it in the theater.

All of this led me to believe it was either amateurish (not true) or polarizing (true). But the plot? I knew literally nothing.

Knowing Smith's politics and knowing what (until now) I perceived to be his limitations as a director, I assumed (mostly from the title) that this would be some kind of wimpy liberal whining. (For the record, I'm a liberal -- but that doesn't mean I don't recognize wimpy liberal whining when I see it.)

Uh uh.

And that's all I'm going to say, really, except to repeat that this movie floored me.

If you think you know Kevin Smith, think again, and see this movie.

As soon as possible, please.