Not your Alien

I can’t see why Harmony Korine wanted to make The Beach Bum, but it’s easy to understand what attracted Matthew McConaughey to the project.

He saw Spring Breakers, marvelled at James Franco’s gonzo performance and thought “I’d like to do that.”

But this is not your Alien, McConaughey. Nor is it your The Dude, which is also in there.

It’s easy to tell that The Beach Bum is from the same director as Spring Breakers. Both films are set in sun-dappled Florida. Both films use a montage approach to the narrative. Both films feature kind of a “pimp lifestyle,” one of which seems appropriate to the subject matter and one of which seems vaguely absurd. Both feature a setting with an outdoor piano, as well as other excesses of the rich. There’s a similar kaleidoscopic color scheme and both films were shot by Benoit Debie. Both films even include a High School Musical alum (Vanessa Hudgens there, Zac Efron here).

Oh, and both feature an over-the-top performance by a character with an outlandish nickname.

In the superior Spring Breakers – which a friend of mine has recently dubbed “Korine’s Citizen Kane” – that character is Alien, played by Franco.

In The Beach Bum, it’s, er, Moondog.

Moondog is played by McConaughey, channeling Franco.

It’s not that Moondog is anything like Alien, in the overt sense. Alien is a drug dealer with corn rows and gold teeth, while Moondog is a stoned space cadet hippie poet. But McConaughey is channeling, or trying to channel, the go-for-broke commitment to a particular character that Franco delivered for Korine in Spring Breakers, imagining that he might carve out his own spot in the cinematic cult character hall of fame.

Nice try, but no.

Moondog is one of the most face-punch-worthy characters I have met in recent memory. He spends all his time in a stupor – sometimes drunk, sometimes stoned – which, miraculously, the other characters consider endearing. He floats around the greater Miami/Florida Keys playing bongo drums amidst semi clad women, constantly smoking joints. He crashes the vows of his own daughter’s wedding – massively underdressed, mind you – in order to grope the groom’s balls in order to prove he’s not man enough, or something. The guests love it. “That crazy Moondog.”

Also, his poetry is shit.

I suppose that’s why some critics have called The Beach Bum an “epic goof.” Then again, some people also thought Korine was punking his audience with Spring Breakers. I pity those people, but they were out there.

Is how I felt watching The Beach Bum how other people felt watching Spring Breakers?

I hope not, because I really wanted to punch this movie in the face, along with its main character.

Of course, I could have wanted to do that with Alien, as Franco’s performance is as stylized and filled with tics in its own way. Except in that case, all the specific wardrobe and hairstyle choices, and curated mannerisms, work. Here, none of them do.

I suppose at this point you might want to take a better look at Moondog. Here he is:

You can probably see why the choices remind me of Alien, in a way. He’s festooned with eccentricities. Probably the most laborious of these is the sunglasses, which are flipped up here. When down, they look more like those sunglasses old people wear, which I guess is meant to provide additional blockage of rays, or possibly help with their glaucoma. When up, he also sometimes wears reading glasses in order to better read his terrible poetry to an adoring audience.

Who knows, maybe he actually has glaucoma, and that’s why he smokes that much weed.

We’re supposed to believe that Moondog was a renowned poet who once made something genuinely great, although old VHS video of him also makes it look like he was once a motivational speaker of some kind, only a tad less wacko than he is now. That’s how he attracted the attention of his wife, a bit of a trainwreck herself but also quite the catch in many respects, played by Isla Fisher. What she would want to do with him, the film never tries to argue. We’re supposed to just believe his blend of carefree free-loving goofiness is an aphrodisiac to everyone he meets. He's kind of like the words used to describe Cosmo Kramer -- "do nothing, fall ass backwards into money, mooch off your neighbors and have sex without dating" -- only without the charisma, and completely insufferable.

The Beach Bum wastes all this time with Moondog without us ever learning what really drives him or why we should care about him. In the end, it has utterly no meaning. People said that about Spring Breakers, but you can see the difference between having no specific viewpoint – i.e., not celebrating or criticizing the behavior you present – and just having no meaning at all.

Is this really what Gerard Butler wanted?

Gerard Butler was a person of substance at one point. I'm sure of it.

In fact, the way I first learned his name was watching Joel Schumacher's 2004 adaptation of Phantom of the Opera. Back then I guess they didn't understand the potential appeal of Butler's face, because it spent the whole movie concealed under the phantom's mask. And there may be no character in cinema who takes himself more seriously and has less of a sense of humor than that titular phantom.

But since then? It seems like Butler is trying to emulate the career of Matthew McConaughey more than the career of Hugh Jackman, which should seem the model for a tough, handsome, charming guy who can also sing.

Then again, maybe not even that, as McConaughey has tried to remake himself in the past year with a number of daring roles, while Butler is still stuck in that Playing for Keeps phase that McConaughey has been trying to shrug off.

Playing for Keeps may be a fine movie, but just one look at this poster tells me it it's what I have referred to in the past as "this year's Nancy Meyers movie." (See here for a fuller discussion of this phenomenon.) That poster is not a poster, really. It's a poster template. If you have a romantic comedy with heart that you're releasing during the holiday season, just swap out the title and the head shots of your cast, and blammo, you're ready to go with the next one. In fact, note how similar this poster is to the one for How Do You Know?, which was the inspiration for the linked post about Nancy Meyers. Even down to the stars appearing in squares with different-colored backgrounds.

Also, that title? It's quintessentially bland, and interchangeable with any number of other titles in this genre.

It seems all too easy these days for Butler to take a role like this.

Most people first became aware of Butler from 300, when his iconic shouting and sculpted pecs seemed to destine him for a career comprised of logical offshoots of this film. So I suppose it's to his credit that he hasn't been quite that predictable. I only wish it was good unpredictable rather than bad unpredictable.

Butler's next prominent film was the one that I believe set him off on the wrong track. He made the truly bizarre romantic drama P.S. I Love You, which went back and forth between sickeningly sweet and oddly depressing, as it features a grieving woman (Hilary Swank) going on this intricate gauntlet of self-actualization tasks set up by her dead husband (Butler) while he was dying of cancer. The tone of this movie is all over the place, including a ten-minute argument at the beginning of the movie that's the only scene we actually see between Butler and Swank while he's still alive. Then the rest of this movie is this syrupy succession of cheesy life lessons punctuated by strangely misplaced jokes. I hated it.

In 2008 Butler made at least one good decision, Nim's Island, a kids movie with a ton of heart. I don't know whether RocknRolla was a good decision or not, because I didn't see it. But at least it wasn't a squishy romantic movie.

But 2009 saw him come out with The Ugly Truth, which is the very worst kind of romantic comedy -- a Katherine Heigl romantic comedy. I will grudgingly admit that I liked the first half of the movie, before it went into a tailspin in the second. He finished off 2009 with two truly abysmal movies that both featured the physical Butler, Gamer and Law Abiding Citizen.

In 2010 he was back to a light and fluffy romantic comedy in the form of The Bounty Hunter, which I will also admit had its share of enjoyable moments (while being mediocre at best overall). That year he also provided a voice for How to Train Your Dragon (his voice being one of his most distinctive assets). The following year brought Machine Gun Preacher and Coriolanus (neither of which I've seen, but at least Coriolanus is Shakespeare), and his only other film since then was October's Chasing Mavericks.

Now that I've performed a career recap that you could have easily gotten on IMDB (which is, in fact, where I did get it), I realize that I'm really only talking about four movies when I complain about Butler's tendency toward undemanding romantic dramas/comedies: P.S. I Love You, The Ugly Truth, The Bounty Hunter and now Playing for Keeps. But that's three more than Jackman has made (Kate & Leopold), though still fewer than McConaughey.

Okay okay, Jackman also made Someone Like You in the same year as Kate & Leopold. But this was only one year after Jackman made his splash in X-Men, and it's fair to say he was just taking the opportunities that came to him, glad to be a Hollywood commodity. Butler should be past that phase now.

But maybe the person I should be blaming is Butler's agent. Butler's agent hasn't gotten him a hit in any of the movies Butler has selected since 300, except for How To Train Your Dragon, though the success of that film can hardly be attributed to Butler in any meaningful way. 

But maybe I really just shouldn't be comparing Butler to someone like Hugh Jackman. Yeah, both men can sing, but Butler hasn't done it since Phantom, so it hardly seems like that was the way he intended his career to go. And it's hard to compare anyone to one of the breakout stars of the past decade, which I think we can say Jackman is.

I suppose if Butler just ends up as a Scottish McConaughey, there are worse careers he could have.

And that means that sometime in 2017 or 2018, we should expect to see him start playing the roles that McConaughey has been playing in 2012.

A hot mess

I don't know when I first heard the phrase "a hot mess," but I think it wasn't that long ago -- almost definitely within the past five years. It could just be that "a hot mess" had been eluding me all these years, or it could be that some clever wordsmith strung these three common words together for the first time only recently.

In any case, I find it a very accurate descriptor for a person or thing in a particular state of chaos. Someone or something that is a hot mess is disjointed, disheveled and disorganized, and if this person or thing has hair, the hair is almost certainly sticking out in all directions. A literal element of heat often applies as well.

But the phrase is not entirely derogatory. There's an element of love to it -- a sense that the current state of this person or thing is an aberration, and that in most circumstances he, she or it is a lot cooler and cleaner. And there's also the implication that there's something interesting in this "mess" -- that it's "hot" in some way, perhaps in the way Paris Hilton famously said "That's hot."

The definition seems to apply in almost every way for Lee Daniels' The Paperboy. It's hot, but it's definitely a bit of a mess.

I saw The Paperboy yesterday as the last of my Monday matinees. You may remember in this post that I discussed my plan to go into work at 5 a.m. on Mondays for a period of about six weeks, to help with the East Coast rollout of my company's new rental software. And since I'd get out at 1:30 but didn't need to pick up my son from daycare until 5, I'd have a perfect opportunity to squeeze in a movie. It turned out to be only five weeks, only four of which was I actually the guy who came in at 5, and only three of which featured a Monday matinee. After Celeste & Jesse Forever, I saw Lawless the following Monday. Then missed two in a row before catching The Paperboy yesterday. The software is now rolled out, so I'm back to my usual 7 a.m. start next Monday.

I was drawn to The Paperboy for two reasons: 1) It was directed by Lee Daniels, whose first film (Shadowboxer) was definitely a mess, but not a very hot one, and whose second film (Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire) was a masterpiece; 2) It featured Nicole Kidman, one of my favorite actresses, serving as the embodiment of the phrase "a hot mess."

If you haven't seen an image of Kidman in The Paperboy, here's one:

While her hair is generally in order, that's about the only thing you could describe that way. Even if you saw no moving images of the things she's doing in this movie, you'd probably know just from this one shot that Kidman's character does not have her shit together. Not only is she dressed slutty, but she's also got a bra strap creeping its way down her right arm. She's been through the ringer and back.

If you did see some moving images of this film, you'd see that the film stock is practically sweating. The Paperboy is shot in a dingy, grubby style in which particles of dirt seem to hang in the air, and you can practically hear a chorus of cicadas in the background, adding extra dimension to the swampy Floridian summer in which the movie is set. In fact, the environment depicted here shares something in common with Beasts of the Southern Wild, which teems with images of swampy animals up close in all their wriggling beauty and ugliness. (I'm sure part of why I think that is that you see an alligator being gutted in The Paperboy, with its hot mess of guts spilling out all over the place.)

But Kidman isn't the only hot mess in this movie. How about John Cusack?

He plays an accused murderer so vile that he the sweat dripping off him is like malfeasance oozing out of every pore. If you don't think Cusack could play this role, check it out -- the hatred and ignorance simply emanate from him.

Even Matthew McConaughey, deep into the independent phase of his career that movies like Failure to Launch and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days seem to have financed, is falling apart at the seams in this movie:

He's got scars on both sides of his mouth, one of which you can see here, and in one scene he's covered with some kind of pox that gives him the appearance of a truly unwell individual.

Zac Efron still looks pretty much like a Tiger Beat pinup, but he appears in only tighty-whities about four different times in this movie. And if you recall this post from years ago (in a discussion of another film starring Nicole Kidman), tighty-whities are the favored undergarment for hot messes everywhere.

Of course, the biggest mess here is what we expect to be going on, emotionally, among the characters. Not only is Kidman sleeping with any number of them, which creates plenty of problems, but this being Lee Daniels, you know that there's a simmering racial element underneath it all. In fact, the movie is narrated by one of the film's two black actors, Macy Gray -- an actress/singer who has been a hot mess in almost every role she's played.

But is The Paperboy a hot mess you should check out?

A day later, I'm still undecided. My initial reaction to it was quite positive, as most of the performances and all of the filmmaking were executed at a very high level. However, I soon started wondering what it all added up to. In the end I couldn't figure out exactly what message Daniels was trying to leave us with. Or if he was only trying to leave us with a mess.

But I think the very nature of a hot mess is that you have to take the good with the bad. In the end, you're there because you know it's going to be interesting.

And since I didn't start to nod off once, even after my day began at 4 a.m., I'd say it definitely was.

The perils of prejudging

I've slammed Matthew McConaughey several times on this blog, both directly and indirectly.

But I believe in fairness, and when I actually like a Matthew McConaughey movie, I'll say it.

Such is the case with Fool's Gold, the re-teaming of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days co-stars McConaughey and Kate Hudson. Usually when you re-team a pair of likeable stars, it's because their first go-around was terrific -- leaving the second one inevitably inferior, often by a huge margin (Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in The Runaway Bride, anyone?). In this case I found that the reverse was true -- that How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days was insufferable, and that Fool's Gold was actually quite charming.

(And if I may interrupt myself for a moment -- Fool's Gold is another case of a director who gravitates to similar titles. Andy Tennant also directed the only other movie I've seen that starts with the word "fool:" Fools Rush In. It's like Brian de Palma with Mission: Impossible and Mission to Mars all over again).

I'm not going to say I loved Fool's Gold or anything, but it did succeed quite well for me in terms of turn-your-brain-off escapism. The leads are not only charming, but have oodles of chemistry. They're involved in generally funny scenarios while trying to find sunken treasure off the coast of the Bahamas and/or the Florida Keys, many of which feature McConaughey escaping death in absurd ways. The tone is generally light (despite a modest body count), and damn it if I'm not a sucker for the setting -- even though my own trip to the Florida Keys was something less than I was hoping, that setting still holds a certain romanticism for me. I say it's "turn-your-brain-off escapism," but I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment either; I thought some of the dialogue was actually quite witty. I guess I should really call it "ignore-the-snobby-part-of-your-brain escapism."

Unfortunately, I'm the only one who seems to think Fool's Gold was worth more than a squirt of piss. Which makes me a little bit the fool, don't you think?

I called this post "The perils of prejudging" in part because that's what they had to do at my website. The film remains unreviewed -- it was one of 25 on a request list I submitted on Wednesday, and by watching it, I took a leap of faith that they'll actually approve me for it. (Now that new releases take up all the staffers' time, no one is scrambling for a Matthew McConaughey vehicle from February of 2008 -- no one but me, that is). But even without a review, it still gets a star rating -- a star rating that they determine from a general consensus of critics out there.

That star rating for Fool's Gold? One-and-a-half. Out of five.

Unconvinced that everyone else could really have hated Fool's Gold this much, I checked some of the other websites that tabulate critical responses to movies. And 1.5 stars summed it up pretty accurately.

Metacritic? Twenty-nine percent out of 100. "Generally unfavorable reviews."

Rotten Tomatoes? It gets even worse. Only 14 out of 137 critics considered it "fresh," the other 123 going for "rotten." Leaving it with a freshness rating of a measly 10%. Granted, the strict thumbs up/thumbs down scale is a bit more rigid, but still. That's as low as it gets.

The funny thing is, this doesn't mean I have to write a 1.5-star review of Fool's Gold. In fact, as I have been told, there's no such thing as a review that's too positive. After all, many of the websites that buy our content are in the business of selling these movies as DVDs. An honestly given positive review is perfect -- not only is it sincere, meaning the critic can live with him/herself, but it also helps move product.

Does it lose me credibility with my colleagues, though? Eh, only if I make a habit of it.

The one thing I do wonder -- any time I like a movie much more than other people -- is what I'm seeing that everyone else couldn't see. Am I a fool? On some level? And does a movie like Fool's Gold function as my fool's gold?

Well, I stopped analyzing any of that too closely years ago. Sometimes a movie just works for you. And as for concerns about the respect of my peers, I've been writing for them for nearly a decade. If I was going to lose credibility with them, it would have happened a long time ago.

I'm just glad that there are movies like Fool's Gold that come along sometimes -- movies I'm reviewing that I've prejudged as terrible, but end up satisfying me more than I expected. I can think of others like it, though I almost hate to list them here. Okay, twist my arm: Inspector Gadget. Without a Paddle. Swing Vote. The Story of Us. Numerous others I can't remember right now. They're all movies I reviewed, expecting to hate them; in fact, using my expected hatred -- of the star, the director, the genre -- as a reason to want to write about them in the first place.

But if these movies were all bad, that means I'd spend even more of my life's hours on drivel. Much better that some of them provide me a modicum of guilty enjoyment -- maybe even not-so-guilty enjoyment.

Fool's gold? Heck, I'll take it.

Ghosts of movies past

It may surprise you to hear this, but Matthew McConaughey is actually a halfway decent actor.

When I first became consciously aware of The Shirtless One, it was while watching the John Grisham adaptation A Time to Kill (1996). He delivers an absolutely knockout courtroom summation near the end, his face buckling believably under the emotion of the words he's speaking. Of course, I should have been aware of him from Dazed and Confused (1993), except it's such a different role that I didn't make the connection. His Wooderson is the classic archetype of the post-high school charming skeezeball. Then there's Reign of Fire (2002), where he's a post-apocalyptic commando with a shaved head, whose eyes burn with fire, and who chews scenery and spits it out with an awesome trashiness.

Unfortunately, Matthew McConaughey has also made 29 other movies.

And a heckuva lot of them are almost exactly like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Forgive me if I make assumptions about a movie I haven't seen, but the repetitive nature of Mr. McConaughey's body of work just begs you to do that.

The second non-Christmas movie based on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol within the past year -- following the execrable Republican propaganda otherwise known as last October's An American Carol -- Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is Matthew McConaughey at his laziest. You might say "at his paycheckiest." The guy can do other things, he just chooses not to. And to think I criticized Brendan Fraser for sticking to his comfort zone.

Actually, the first ten years of his career were pretty promising, or at the very least, diverse. This is a guy who appeared in everything from The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1994) to Amistad (1997). He's in several movies I really love, including Contact (1997) and Boys on the Side (1995), not to mention those listed at the start of this posting.

But it was right around the time of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003) that McConaughey decided to lose his career in ten movies. Okay, maybe "career" is not the right word, since he's clearly still very castable. How about "critical respect"?

Consider what has come since: Sahara (2005), Failure to Launch (2006 -- you could have a field day with that title), Fool's Gold (2008) and now Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Even occasional trips off the beaten path, like We are Marshall and a very funny appearance in Tropic Thunder, can't change the public impression of his downward trajectory into abject creative sloth. He liked what he tasted in EdTV (1999) and The Wedding Planner (2001), and those movies quickly became his standard, rather than his change of pace.

And there's just something about that oily, insincere, devil-may-care smirk on the posters that suggests he's pulling one over on us. And he knows it.

Matthew McConaughey is hardly the first actor to become excessively comfortable with his typecasting, and he certainly won't be the last. But I think the reason his current path is so dispiriting is that the character type is so essentially unlikeable. The charming and handsome lothario who won't commit? Really? Is there anything else we can possibly learn about this archetype?

I'm just hoping there's still something more we can learn about Matthew McConaughey. The actor's next announced project on IMDB is called Hammer Down, and it's projected for release in 2011. (I must say, I have a hard time believing he doesn't have at least three more brainless romantic comedies scheduled for release before then.) In Hammer Down, McConaughey plays a former NASCAR driver involved in a heist.

It's different, I'll give him that.

And that's really all I'm looking for.