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.

What we all need right now are some surrogates

My self-proclaimed outside-the-box quarantine-themed viewings continued last night, as I saw my second Bruce Willis quarantine movie. And by that I mean not only was it my second Bruce Willis movie during quarantine, but it was my second Bruce Willis quarantine-themed movie during quarantine.

The first, Twelve Monkeys, dealt with an actual virus. The second, Surrogates, deals with how we cope with threats from the outside world, a virus being only one possible example.

So all you peons out there, watching your "obvious" quarantine movies, need to check out the movie where people put artificial simulacra of themselves into the world to avoid getting killed. It's got loads of current relevance.

I was actually a fan of this comparatively under-the-radar 2009 sci fi flick back from the start, but given how far under the radar it flew, I hadn't really considered watching it again in the intervening 11 years. Then the other night it jumped into my mind for reasons I can't remember, and then stuck there to the point that I paid good money to rent it after not finding it on any of my streaming services. (It's just the kind of movie that should have been hiding away somewhere among Netflix's offerings, much as its characters are hiding away, but no.)

If you aren't familiar with the basic premise, it looks at a world in the not-too-distant future where people (known pejoratively as "meat bags") stay at home all the time, and instead of going out themselves, they pilot around androids that do all their real-world interfacing for them. Some look like their hosts, some look 100% different -- which makes sense, as they are, in a way, walking and talking chat room avatars. That 47-year-old man pretending he's a 22-year-old coed is entirely possible, maybe even encouraged, in this world.

The technology allows the actual humans, the people susceptible to violence and accident and disease, to stay at home in the protection of their apartments, where they sit in comfortable dentist chairs and connect up to a rig that allows them to see the world through the eyes of their robot surrogates. They can get into fist fights or jump off buildings or have sex with whoever they want, all while their increasingly fragile bodies stay at home, safe against everything except the ruination caused by lack of exposure to fresh air and lack of the use of one's muscles.

As I watched these "meat bags" walking around their apartments, unshaven, in bathrobes and slippers, squinting painfully against the stray beams of sunlight that reach them, I saw ourselves in the time of quarantine.

For the more enterprising of us, it's not that bad. We venture out for exercise and grocery shopping, using masks as the technologically viable alternative to having our own personal robots. We do get out and we do move around.

But some of us have probably gained an additional ten percent of our previous body weight, have lost any real inclination toward personal hygiene, and are the willing prisoners of devices and other virtual experiences that help us escape from the drudgery our lives have become.

And how good would it be, right now, to actually have a surrogate? The surrogate can go to the store, go to the movies, ride in a packed subway, even do your job -- and if your job is a dangerous one, your surrogate can do it without even wearing a helmet. In short, surrogates can keep the economy going in times of pandemic.

Alas, no one thought it fit to invent surrogates, even though Jonathan Mostow's film came out 11 years ago, even though the film series that helped inspire it -- The Terminator and The Matrix -- predated Surrogates by even longer than that. Why did they spend so much time on other things, like Tik Tok and chicken sandwiches with Krispy Kreme buns?

Of course, having your surrogate live your life for you is no way to live life, the movie is sure to let us know. Nor would we want to, I hope, in the long run, though this movie has interesting ideas to explore about how virtual reality could increasingly be a replacement for real life experience. During a pandemic, though -- when a vaccine is still probably more than a year away -- it could be handy.

Until then, we'll probably all be slightly hairier and more bathrobed versions of ourselves, squinting at the sunlight.

First in line

I don't usually go to see movies on opening night. But when I do, you'd think it would be a movie I was really jazzed about. You know, like the tweens who had their parents drive them to the theater for the 12:05 a.m. screening of Twilight: Eclipse, or the geeks who camped out for weeks before Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

Nope, not really. In fact, last night was just the latest movie I saw on opening day/night despite having only mild interest in it. I should say, I had mild interest going in, and heavy interest coming out. Yeah, Piranha 3D was "super fun," as I said to the friend who saw it with me.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I guess my thinking goes like this: If you go to see almost any movie during the primetime slot of its opening night, it's going to be a clusterfuck. Every movie has some subset of the viewing population that's interested in seeing it, and these are the people who will come out for that primetime Friday night show. That's nice when it means you're surrounded by like-minded individuals who plan to cheer and applaud; it's not so nice when you get stuck in the front row, because you bought unassigned seats earlier in the day, but didn't get there in time to claim something good.

And so I've developed something of a policy toward seeing movies on the day of their release: I'll see only ones I don't really care about.

Here are some recent(-ish), funny examples:

Surrogates (2009, Jonathan Mostow). Released: September 25, 2009.

I didn't even know if I planned to see this in the theater, but I'd written one of my Friday morning pieces about it, and I was hankering for an after-work screening, so I hit whichever one started in the 4 o'clock range. As might be expected, the screening was fairly sparsely attended -- the movie ended up grossing less than $40 million, and I think I may have liked it better than anyone else in the world, except possibly Jonathan Mostow.

Splice (2010, Vincenzo Natali). Released: June 4, 2010.

I had gone through a bit of a rollercoaster in my feelings toward this movie, at first thinking it would be an exciting genre buster, then thinking it would be a completely interchangeable startle-scare horror film. I ended up going Friday afternoon because my boss had failed to comp me the afternoon on the previous Friday, before Memorial Day weekend, as he usually does, but had forgotten to this time. So I got out around 1 o'clock that day and took myself over to the theater. I don't know that the movie actually busts its genre, but it is unforgettable in a number of other ways -- some good, some I'm not so sure about.

The Last Airbender (2010, M. Night Shyamalan). Released: July 1, 2010.

This one doesn't quite count, because I actually saw it on July 2nd. The whole time leading up to it, however, I thought they were releasing it that Friday. Then for some reason they moved it up one day to Thursday. This was a similar situation to what was supposed to happen with my Friday-before-Memorial-Day early release, except on the Friday before July 4th, it did actually happen. This screening was also sparsely attended -- maybe everyone already knew that the movie had been ripped to shreds. Me, I thought it started out abysmally and then improved enough in the last 45 minutes or so that I thought it was fine. But because my failure to hate The Last Airbender is not what I came to talk about today, I'm not going to say any more about that.

Piranha 3D (2010, Alexandre Aja). Released: August 20, 2010.

And then there was last night. A friend and I had been trying to find some common ground on a movie -- a movie my wife didn't have any interest in seeing, at that -- and Piranha was what we came up with. We were trying to jam it in before my wife goes into labor (could happen anytime in the next 10 days to two weeks) and before he goes to Burning Man (next weekend). Plus, yesterday was his last day of work on a gig that was located down near where I live. So he got off work, we met for dinner, then went to the movie. In fact, we dilly-dallied enough that I thought we'd shot ourselves in the foot, getting to the theater only 15 minutes before the show was scheduled to start. But instead of having to crane our necks at the 3D from the front row, we hadn't actually needed to buy tickets in advance at all. Strangely, the theater was only half sold -- and this was a prime location on the Santa Monica Promenade, albeit a theater that probably hasn't been renovated in 20 years.

That could have been some kind of forewarning about the quality of this movie, but it wasn't -- at least not for me. My friend wasn't as enthusiastic about it as I was, but I was enthusiastic enough for the two of us. It was a rollicking good time -- exactly what I wanted it to be. Awesome piranha carnage and lots of hilarious gore -- stuff that made our audience howl, squirm and grimace. Some of the gore was truly horrifying -- I can't get that image out of my head of the woman being scalped by the outboard motor, pulling her face right off -- but Aja's tone was such that it was "all in good fun." Besides, the idiotic spring breakers who had come to the fictitious Lake Victoria were portrayed as so vapid and so obnoxious, it all really seemed like their just desserts.

A movie like Piranha 3D really argues for that opening Friday night showing. Even though we were only half full, we were the ones who were really excited for that bloody mayhem up on the screen -- and we probably enjoyed it a lot more than we would have during that 1:35 showing next Thursday afternoon.

My name, but not my face

Well just lookee what the good old internet can find for you. A five-panel montage of the most common outdoor ads for Surrogates, due out tomorrow.

(And yes, I do recognize the following irony: I vowed last Friday to dig deeper into the meat and potatoes of films, rather than dwell on things like their advertising campaigns, yet three of my four posts since then have been about movie posters. Let's just say that old habits die hard.)

The first billboard I ever saw for Surrogates was the middle one, the blonde lying on her stomach. I considered there to be a couple interesting things about this billboard:

1) I laid my eyes on it about three times before ever realizing it was even an advertisement for a movie. Since it was executed in the abstract style of ads for perfume and clothing, at first I just mistook it for one of those -- a prospect made easier by needing to keep most of my attention on the road while passing at 35 mph. I think the second or third time, I noticed the word "surrogates" and thought that seemed like a strange name for a perfume. I now laugh at myself that it took until the fourth time before I realized the woman's midsection was incomplete, composed only of metal endoskeleton. That would have been more immediately evident if I'd seen either of the top two posters first.

2) Bruce Willis, whose name is on the billboard, does not appear on the billboard. Nor does he appear in any of these other four pictures, though his name appears in each. With the two that feature the guy -- who, like Willis, has a shaved head -- you might for a second think "Damn! Bruce Willis has been working out!"

It was #2 that made me realize that there can be an odd disconnect between wanting to advertise the star of a movie, and wanting to advertise its content.

Now, I'm not saying that the only posters that should bear the names of movie stars are the posters that also bear their faces. That would obviously be quite restrictive. Besides, many of the best movie posters don't have the face of an actor or actress on them at all.

But I do think it's a little weird when there's one name on the poster, and one face on the poster, and they don't match. If you'd added one more star -- um, let's see, Radha Mitchell -- then it might have made a little more sense. But as it was, it struck me as odd.

Yet I really like the concept of the campaign. I'd hardly want to sacrifice that, either. It tells you a lot about what you might be getting -- without telling you much at all. What the hell do I mean by that? It sets a mood. You know this film will be something about the artificial creation of physical beauty. The fact that they appear to be androids makes it all the more intriguing -- it's science fiction, and science fiction always holds the potential to blow your mind. (If you're like me, you forget all the times it massively disappoints you).

Someone must have felt the same sense of uneasiness I did about Willis' name next to the body of a smoking hot cybernetic organism, because after awhile, I started to see these posters appearing:



Okay, that answers one concern: You've got Bruce Willis appearing next to his name.

But what else do you really know about Surrogates from this poster? The blue hue and the circular tunnel both give you an idea that it probably takes place in the future. But you really have to squint if you want to see what else they're trying to offer you, which is a row of, well, surrogates, I guess, along the bottom. And squinting's not that easy to do at 35 mph.

So the posters of the models win. But then, do you take Willis' name off?

Like most of the discussions on this blog, this one is academic. The movie comes out tomorrow, and there will be no new posters made.

And I think I might go. In fact, I think I might go tomorrow. My wife has not shown particular interest in Surrogates, which means it gives me the perfect opportunity for a solo expedition after work. I'm not "opening day pumped" for it -- it just happens that tomorrow is the day I can conveniently see a movie, and it's opening day. After all, it's been a whole nine days since I've seen a movie in the theater. I'm falling behind during this September, which has been a surprisingly fertile one for new releases.

Normally, a sci-fi film released in late September should not inspire a person with much hope, and there's every chance this could be more S1mone than The Terminator. However, there is a chance it could be The Terminator, and here's why: Surrogates is directed by Jonathan Mostow, who also directed the quite passable Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. Of even more interest to me is that he directed a little 1997 Kurt Russell thriller called Breakdown, which I happen to love. (As well as U-571, which I did not see).

So ultimately, whether Bruce Willis is in it (not the draw it was ten years ago), or whether there are hot model robots in it (still a draw), is not as important to me as the guy behind the camera.

Where's the Surrogates poster featuring Mostow's mug?