Movies as machines with replaceable parts

It’s very common to go back for reshoots on a movie, to fix up things that don’t work, or add things that are only needed as the result of some change in the thrust of the story or the tone.

What’s not as common – in fact, I don’t ever remember it happening – is what we’ve seen on Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World.

When Kevin Spacey became a pariah a couple months ago – a scant few months ago when you consider this movie and its looming release date – everyone did as much as they could to distance themselves from him. That included Netflix removing him from promotional materials for House of Cards – and the future of the show, which also was cast in doubt until they decided to go forward with Robin Wright as the primary focus. It also included deciding to reshoot the scenes in All the Money in the World in which Spacey appeared, using Christopher Plummer instead.

Which was, as it turned out, a lot of scenes.

When I first heard this news, I figured this was an ensemble movie in which Spacey played a comparatively small role. A person like Spacey can make an impression in a movie even with a small amount of screen time, or maybe a lot of screen time but in just a couple scenes. To reference another Spacey movie, you could have easily reshot the Alec Baldwin character in Glengarry Glen Ross. One of the most memorable characters and scenes in the movie, but you could easily do it again with another actor without major disruptions.

That’s not the kind of role Spacey had, and Plummer now has, in this movie.

I couldn’t tell you for sure how many scenes J. Paul Getty is in, but it’s upwards of 20. He’s probably in as many scenes as Mark Wahlberg and nearly as many as Michelle Williams, even. He’s no minor character. In fact, you could almost quibble with the fact that Plummer was nominated in the supporting category at the Golden Globes, though ultimately, that’s the right category for him.

Let’s consider that for a moment. Plummer was nominated for a role he had not even shot yet two months ago.

The reshoots – extensive reshoots – occurred from November 20^th to 29^th. The first time Plummer came on screen, I immediately looked for signs of him having been digitally inserted into existing footage. There were certain visual phenomena I thought I was seeing that I might be able to attribute to this. And though there may have been some, it was not all done this way, as I read now that both Wahlberg and Williams were involved in the reshoots. Maybe not all of them, but at least some of them.

And as the movie went on, I stopped looking for evidence of the way Plummer was integrated into this movie. I didn’t need it. He felt fully like he had always been there, like he was an organic part of this project from day one.

And that’s the miraculous part. Plummer is a very good actor, one of our current treasures among elder statesmen, but I can’t imagine it must have been easy to act in a movie that had already been completed, into which you were drafted at the 11^th hour. Not only did he have to learn all his lines, but he had to feel the character, something that sometimes starts developing as early as the table read months before shooting even begins. It’s at such a table read that you also start forging a chemistry with your co-stars, the kind that makes the characters feel like they actually know each other, and brings out the best from everyone.

Plummer didn’t need any of that. He took what was kind of the equivalent of acting against a green screen and knocked it out of the park. Having seen the film, I can say that Golden Globe nomination was fully warranted, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Oscar nomination following in due course. If it did so, it would not just be a symbolic snubbing of Spacey and a celebration of Plummer’s heroics in replacing him. It would be a genuine reward for genuinely great work.

Even more impressive: Plummer is nearly 90 years old. He was 87 at the time of shooting but has turned 88 since. That’s a lot closer in age to what Getty was during the events of the film than Spacey is, which makes the original casting of Spacey all the stranger. (Scott now says it was because the studio wanted a "bigger name" than Plummer, who was his original choice – though I sometimes take what Scott says with a grain of salt. I also bristle at the notion that Plummer is not a big name, though it's probably true -- I mean, the guy was in The Sound of Music for crying out loud.) 

It’s funny that a direct replacement for Spacey would have been someone 30 years his senior, and I wonder if they actually aged Spacey up with makeup, considering that the 58-year-old is meant to have teenage grandchildren. Anyway, it’s a much better choice for the film and the fact that the actor was in his late 80s didn’t prevent him from giving the performance the film probably always deserved.

Holy shit, I just checked what Spacey was to have looked like in this film, and they did indeed age him. See below:

It appears that this would have been, could have been, a career-defining type of role for Spacey, something that might have earned him tons of praise, or at least some hosannas over his range. That he was denied this kind of makes it all the sweeter. 

I can’t even imagine Spacey in the role, even with the latex making him age appropriate. In one sense I can – J. Paul Getty had something monstrous about him that he undoubtedly shares in common with Spacey. I mean, this is a man who refused to pay the ransom for his grandson’s kidnapping, eventually leading the boy to have an ear cut off before Getty finally figured out a way to make the ransom payment tax deductible. (Sorry, I guess that’s a spoiler, but the film is based on a true story.) But the fact that there is something undeniably paternalistic about Plummer, something innately human that Spacey doesn’t have, makes his monstrous qualities all the more chilling. Here is a man who seems like he has huge amounts of empathy and the capacity for sentimentality, who still refuses to part with an inconsequential percentage of his fortune to save someone he admits to being quite fond of. I don’t know that I would have bought that from Spacey, who cannot express genuine human warmth even in the best of times.

More than anything, as teased in the title of this post, I find this an interesting commentary on what is possible with a film that’s on the verge of release. If a machine is broken, you don’t trash the machine – you just replace the broken part. However, you usually wouldn’t expect to get that machine on the schedule you originally planned to get it. There would be some kind of delay.

With All the Money in the World, they replaced the broken part … without any delay. And we’re not talking about a car with one of its hub caps missing. We’re talking about a car that needed an engine overhaul. I’m having trouble imagining a larger part of a movie that needed to be changed in order to salvage it. Considerably lesser changes might logically prompt a studio to delay the release by six months.  

I guess it’s just another of the undeniable miracles that is Ridley Scott, who I trashed on this blog just two days ago. At age 80, Scott is not only making films at a ridiculous pace – this is his second of 2017 after Alien: Covenant – but he’s making large scale movies, and then sometimes he’s having to reconfigure those movies just weeks before their release. In something like All the Money in the World, he also makes it look effortless.

I gave the film only 3.5 stars out of five, but I’m wondering if that four-star rating was more appropriate, even if only in recognition of what Scott and Plummer did. But it wouldn’t be just in recognition of them, as Michelle Williams is great in this movie, and Wahlberg is better than he usually is. It’s a really solid movie, and it’s also a triumph over psychopaths who seduce and rape underage boys. Win win. 

Ridley Scott and his stupid big head

You know how Donald Trump says stupid things and thinks he's so great?

Ridley Scott is like that, too.

The difference, other than a couple years in age, is that Ridley Scott is actually great sometimes.

But boy does he make it hard for us to acknowledge that.

The inspiration for this post has nothing to do with Scott's new movie, All the Money in the World, which I expect to see on Thursday night. It has to do with a new interview he granted to the Toronto Sun in promoting that movie, in which he got sidetracked talking about his most famous franchise and said the following patently ridiculous thing:

"There's no reason why Alien should now not be on the same level for fans as Star Trek and Star Wars. So I think the next step as to where we go is, do we sustain the Alien (series) with the evolution of the beast, or do we reinvent something else? I think you need to have an evolution of this famous beast because he's the best monster ever, really."

These comments come on the heels of Fox saying it wouldn't go ahead with a sequel to Alien: Covenant after it was a dismal box office failure. Making them all the more idiotic.

So let's recap:

1) Ridley Scott thinks that his franchise is on a par with arguably the two most beloved intellectual properties that exist. (Arguably. Some of the superheros, and maybe Harry Potter, might edge out Star Trek.)

2) Ridley Scott thinks that the star of his series is the "best monster ever." That includes monsters like Frankenstein's monster, the wolfman, the Kraaken, etc. All monsters that have ever existed.

3) Ridley Scott makes these claims on the heels of fans implicitly rejecting the Alien franchise, really in terms of their reaction to both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant when you come right down to it.

4) Ridley Scott thinks that even if you move away from the "best monster ever" and "reinvent something else," there's something intrinsic to the Alien universe -- perhaps his beloved androids -- that still makes it great. That still makes it viable.

Oh Ridley.

I wouldn't be slapping my forehead so violently if it weren't for comments he made a couple years ago, when Scott was asked his favorite science fiction movies of all time and listed not one, but two of his own movies: Alien and Blade Runner. (At least he had the good sense to bump them down to the three and four slots behind Star Wars and 2001. Given these recent comments drenched in franchise envy, one wonders if he'd be so courteous to Star Wars now.)

The funny thing is, I don't totally disagree with what he's saying. He's definitely in the neighborhood of that greatness. In a piece I wrote for ReelGood earlier this year, which talked about 2017 containing movies that are both direct sequels in Scott's two signature franchises (Alien: Covenant and Blade Runner 2049) and possible ripoffs of those franchises (Life and Ghost in the Shell), I said the following:

"In spite of being a total wanker about his own creative output, it could be argued that Scott has contributed as much to science fiction popular mythology as George Lucas or Gene Rodenberry, Ray Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke."

It's one thing me saying it. It's another thing saying it yourself. Let others sing your praises, Ridley. And if that praise dries up, then go away humbly and quietly.

If we're draining the swamp of sexual miscreants who use their positions of power to abuse young women and men, can we also drain the swamp of boastful idiots who have no awareness of the tone of their own comments?

Did Russell Crowe ruin Ridley Scott?

Ridley Scott sucks anymore.

Forgive the questionable grammar/semantics -- it is 100% intentional. My friend Greg from college introduced me to this terrific phrasing, which is essentially a more effective combination of "So-and-so sucks these days" and "So-and-so is not good anymore." It gets you to the point faster and makes perfect sense to anyone who hears it.

So I repeat: Ridley Scott sucks anymore.

Personally, I blame his muse, Russell Crowe. And am just glad Crowe doesn't read my blog, or at the very least, doesn't know who I am, because I hear he has something of a temper.

So Robin Hood has gotten universally negative reviews. What a surprise! Who didn't see that coming?

I think I've seen it coming since Gladiator.

Before we get any further, let's make one thing perfectly clear: At one point in his career, Ridley Scott was a great director, someone to be envied by all his peers. He made two of the best science fiction films of all time (Alien and Blade Runner), and in Thelma & Louise, one of the best of all time of two different categories: the road movie and the female empowerment movie. He wasn't always a hit-maker -- G.I. Jane, anyone? How about White Squall? But those three movies bought him a career's worth of leeway.

It was when he received mainstream recognition of his efforts in the form of an Oscar that Scott started to become significantly less interesting, and not coincidentally, significantly more prolific. Perhaps also not coincidentally, Gladiator was his first film with Russell Crowe, another creative talent who was previously excellent, and has not been so excellent since. So perhaps the destruction was mutual.

Then again, he hasn't even shown a Burtonian level of commitment to his own version of Johnny Depp -- since starting to work with Crowe, he's made as many films that did not feature Crowe (four) as those that have (four). But Crowe has appeared in his last four, and I think that's when Scott's suckitude has really started to pick up steam.

Let's consider them in order:

1) Gladiator (2000). I liked Gladiator fine, but never in a million years thought it was best picture material. It was an impressively shot action movie that looked gorgeous, featuring Scott's trademark partial slow-mo technique. I am describing this terribly, and if anyone reading this can help me out, I'd appreciate it, but it's a technique he uses regularly that seems to allow him to linger on details without actually slowing down the film speed. For example, clumps of dirt that flew through the air in the Colosseum would be clearly visible in relief against the background, almost like they were hanging there a moment longer than they actually were. (In my colleague's review of Robin Hood, I see this correctly attributed to DP John Mathieson and described as a "high-frame-rate action style." That's as good a description as any.) Anyway, it was a breakthrough technique, and I think that this is Gladiator's real contribution to cinematic history. Everyone knows Crowe should have actually won his Oscar for The Insider the year before, and that Scott should have won his Oscar for 1492: Conquest of Paradise. (Ha.)

2) Hannibal (2001). The technique I described above was present again in this film (and will continue to be, so I'll stop pointing it out), and there was a certain grandiose, international quality to this film, but otherwise, it was considered a failure as a much-anticipated follow-up to Silence of the Lambs. Perhaps we needed Jodie Foster instead of Julianne Moore. This film is bizarre and gross, though paradoxically, its best part is its most bizarre and gross part: the horribly disfigured Lecter victim played by an uncredited Gary Oldman.

3) Black Hawk Down (2001). And this is where Scott starts to establish the persona he retains to this day: technically masterful yet devoid of emotional content. A movie about soldiers killed in a skirmish in Mogadishu should have been moving in some small way, but the characters end up faceless and interchangeable in this film. There's impressive filmmaking going on, for sure, but I remember leaving the theater thinking that I wanted to like it more than I actually liked it.

4) Matchstick Men (2003). Scott's attempt at a grifter movie with Nicolas Cage and Sam Rockwell is weirdly forgettable. It seems like an especially strange choice for a director who had been working on such a large canvas. Although I guess the fact that Cage's character has OCD gives it one additional layer.

5) Kingdom of Heaven (2005). Aside from Robin Hood, this is the only Scott film since Gladiator that I have not seen, despite the best efforts of my mom's boyfriend. (My sister and I joke about the time he wanted me to watch this giant epic about the Crusades on his iPhone.) It's a logical movie for me to have seen, but I think part of the reason I didn't is that I had seen one too many movies lately where the main character speechifies in some trite way: "Today! Is the day! Of all days! Of our destiny! Of our freedom!" And then two armies run at each other for an epic skirmish. In fact, when I was at one point going to focus only on the fact that this type of material seems incongruous for a Robin Hood movie, I was going to call this Scott's crutch, and point out that it also appears in Gladiator. I was going to call the post "Braveheart's sloppy seconds." I mean, aren't you kind of sick of that shit also?

6) A Good Year (2006). It seems strange, in retrospect, that the first film to reunite Scott and Crowe after Gladiator was a movie so unlike what either of them had ever made before. Normally I would applaud such diversity in an artist, but A Good Year is so slight and so frivolous that a person has to genuinely ask why either of them really wanted to make a movie about an English businessman with a hard shell who inherits a French vineyard. Maybe just as a chance to catch their breath after all the epics? It's not terrible, but it's also not consequential in the slightest.

7) American Gangster (2007). And here's where I really start to hate Ridley Scott. This is an over-long and pointless film that rips off many better gangster movies, and ends in one of the most peculiar ways you can imagine. I won't give too much away here, but you can't spend an entire movie making us view a character one way, then ask us to change how we view him in the last ten minutes of the movie. (It's Denzel Washington's character I'm talking about, not Crowe's). Although this film certainly has its fans, I consider it an utter waste of celluloid.

8) Body of Lies (2008). I actually watched Body of Lies last night, giving it the opportunity to provide Scott a stay of execution on this post. And actually, it sort of did -- until I woke up this morning and decided I wanted to write something with my morning coffee. Body of Lies is highly watchable and genuinely entertaining, but it's not something you will ever think about again afterward. Not every movie needs to be something more than it is, and here is a reasonably clear espionage thriller involving modern Islamic terrorism, set in numerous locations throughout the Middle East. Leonardo Di Caprio and Crowe are both good. However, I can't help but see this as another symptom of Scott treading water artistically, even though I enjoyed it.

9) Robin Hood (2010). Haven't seen it, don't really plan to, at least not in the theater. Crowe looks like he's playing Maximus again, and it's just shoehorned into the Robin Hood story. In this way it seems like it might be purely lazy, more than any of the other films on this list. Familiarity can breed contempt.

To take any ten-year period of a director's career and say that it's not as good as some other ten-year period is not really fair. Especially since Ridley Scott is not a young man -- he'll be 73 this year.

But I don't get the sense that Scott is winding down -- in fact, quite the opposite. Although IMDB is notoriously inclusive in terms of rumored future projects, it lists 18 such projects for Scott, at least three of which he's supposed to direct: two Alien prequels (this is the first I've heard of this) and a film called The Kind One. So far, none of Scott's future projects seem to be the same as Crowe's future projects. Maybe they had a dust-up on the set of Robin Hood. I could see Crowe punching out a man 25 years older than him.

And because Scott is still so active, I think it's fair to hold him accountable for his choices, and to expect more from him. This is a man whose films once had soul; now they do not. Whether his partnership with Russell Crowe has anything to do with that or not is left up to the speculation of bloggers like me.