On July 26, 1998, two friends and I started out on a three-and-a-half week drive to see baseball games in 12 American ballparks, and two Canadians ones. It was supposed to be 14 American and 16 total, but we had to skip Detroit (had to fix an issue with our car radio) and Pittsburgh (end-of-trip exhaustion and one guy had to leave early for a job interview).
We ended up seeing games in Montreal, Toronto, Chicago (Cubs), Milwaukee, Minnesota, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles (Dodgers), San Diego, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Cleveland and Baltimore. Not too shabby.
In reality, it was the best road trip, full stop. However, I can't say we weren't totally fed up with each other by the end, and I was almost out of money. I literally think I had less than $20 in my bank account by the end of the trip.
But the movie I'm telling you about today ties in to the very beginning of the trip -- the very first night, in fact.
I had spent all the previous night moving out of my apartment in Providence, literally not sleeping as I again poorly planned how much time it would take to move out of an apartment. My last trip up to Boston, an hour drive, included so many things strapped to the roof of the car, and so much blocked visibility, and so much lack of sleep, that I'm surprised a) I didn't die or at least b) I wasn't pulled over by the police. And then after finally unloading all this stuff in my dad's garage, then I had to pack to go out on the road for nearly a month.
Our first stop was Montreal, and that meant all of the sudden reading signs in French. As if I weren't disoriented enough.
French was, in actual fact, the default foreign language of the school system the three of us attended. Our town wasn't actually that close to Montreal -- I believe it was a four-hour drive to get there on that first night of our trip -- but we were a lot closer to where people spoke French than to where people spoke any other language. (Spanish was eventually offered in middle school, and by high school you could take Italian, Latin and other languages.)
Our first sign of the change, literally and figuratively, was when we saw road signs advertising the different directions you could go on other roads. E was not an issue -- both the English and French words for "east" start with E. The thing that made us laugh was east's opposite, which was indicated by the letter O: "ouest." Tickled by this and only 25 years old, we over-pronounced the beginning part of that word.
The stadium in Montreal was called Stade Olympique, as it was built for the 1976 Olympics. This only increased my sense of oddness and disorientation. The Expos' stadium had this odd cobra-like tower sticking out over the top of the field, so when you looked up, it was looking down at you like something out of 1984. We were quick to label it dystopic. Here, see for yourself:
Sadly the web isn't obliging with a view looking up from field level, but suffice it to say it was ominous.
I'm finally getting to the point of this post.
As we watched the Expos and Giants, a video ad for the new Brian De Palma movie starring Nicolas Cage played on the big screen. Students of cinema, we knew this movie to be called Snake Eyes.
Of course, in French it had another title:
Mauvais Oeil.
(Mo vays oy, if you want to know how it sounds.)
As proven from the highway sign example, we considered French words starting with the letter O to be funny. But that wasn't what made us laugh so much about this title. From eight years of taking French, we knew the actual translation of Snake Eyes would be something like Les Yeux du Serpent.
This translation was:
Bad Eyes.
And actually, not even Bad Eyes but Bad Eye, singular, since the plural of "un oeil" is "les yeux."
We laughed and laughed, and it became the first meme of the trip. Many an utterance of "MAUVAIS OEIL," in the overly serious voice of a French ad copy reader, followed.
Twenty-five years later, I have finally seen this movie.
(And please forgive the indulgent preamble.)
If I'd really wanted to honor the anniversary month of this occurrence, I would have waited a day to watch it. It was my final viewing of June on Friday the 30th. But at least I'm writing this post in July.
The movie is a bit of a hot mess, but that's probably exactly what Mauvais Oeiul should be: a mixture of the really good and the quite terrible.
Really good: De Palma opens the film with a 20-minute Steadicam shot inside an Atlantic City casino and boxing ring, at least 12 of which occurred in one take, with some hidden edits in the other eight. The degree of difficulty is high, especially coordinating all those extras, but the actual occurrences within the shot are fairly straightforward, mostly walking and talking. A movie like Extraction 2 might laugh at its relative simplicity, but for 1998 I suppose it was pretty impressive.
Quite terrible: Many of the other storytelling choices. De Palma uses character POV about three different times in this film, and there's a reason you don't see this device used more often. It's pretty hacky and it has the effect of making the character who's doing the viewing seem like a deaf-mute. Even if the character speaks during the scene, the voice has an alien, disembodied quality to it. The conceit of the film, rather poorly realized, is that different characters have different perspectives on the assassination of the secretary of defense during a boxing match, Rashomon-style. This POV approach is meant to approximate that. But because little new information is actually yielded from these differing perspectives, it just makes the awkward device all the more pointless.
The handling of Cage's character is a mix of the two extremes that tear this movie apart. It's admirable that De Palma attempts to treat this character with a modicum of realism. Cage plays a corrupt cop, and he's actually, really corrupt, not just a hero with a few blemishes that are easily smoothed over in the grand scheme of things. No, he really is on the take from criminal organizations and he really does look out for his own hide before anything or anyone else. Of course he has some maturation to undergo in that regard during this night, but he starts out as pretty crap.
The funny thing is that he also starts out pretty dumb -- and kind of stays that way. We'd at least expect Rick Santoro to be shrewd, and he is in some respects. However, he's also easily duped on multiple occasions, trusting people he shouldn't despite ample evidence that he shouldn't, and even making costly errors in keeping secret the location of the witness he's harboring (Carla Gugino). If we can't expect a hero to be morally spotless, at least we expect them to be clever, and Santoro is not.
(Incidentally, I kept thinking of former senator Rick Santorum during this film, which made me laugh.)
I did appreciate De Palma's commitment to realism in terms of the medical realities of getting beaten up by a boxer. As most noir heroes do -- this is vaguely a noir -- Santoro gets roughed up as the villains try to extract the witness' location. When it's a professional boxer -- nay, the heavyweight champion of the world -- doing the roughing up, you don't recover from it quickly. Some movies would have had Santoro just bounce back, but Cage spends the latter stages of this film in a state of real medical emergency, his face all fucked up, his ribs broken and affecting his ability to walk properly. Instead of a cut on his cheek perfectly manicured by the makeup department, it's refreshing to see a hero, in his inevitable moment of ultimate triumph, with his eye drooping disturbingly toward his cheek, barely able to enunciate his words. Talk about a mauvais oeil.
De Palma's status as a filmmaker who continually examines the darker side of human nature gives Snake Eyes -- sorry, Mauvais Oeil -- a little more staying power than it would otherwise have. But in reflecting on it a couple days later, I'm more inclined to remember the things about it that didn't work than those that did.
One thing I thought was really random: The villain, played by Gary Sinise, is named Kevin Dunne. The actor Kevin Dunn also appears in the movie, and even has to speak the full name of the character Kevin Dunne on at least one occasion. There had to be a reason behind it, because you can name a fictitious character anything you want. Either the screenwriter had already named the character, and then they thought it would be funny to hire the actor into a different role in the movie, or they had hired the actor and as some kind of inside joke, changed the name of the character. I suppose they wanted to avoid questions by having the character have an E on the end of his name. Plausible deniability, you know.
Anyway, this has kicked off another round of me saying "MAUVAIS OEIL" -- at least in my head -- and for that I am grateful.
