FILM REVIEW OF ''8MM" (1999)

Columbia Pictures should have kept “8mm” (* OUT OF ****) in the can. If you thought Nicolas Cage’s previous movie “Snakes Eyes” was crappy, director Joel Schumacher’s second-rate, slipshod, murder-mystery about a runaway girl, a snuff movie, and our pornographic society may alter your opinion. Co-starring Joaquin Phoenix and James Gandolfini, “8mm” lacks originality, kinky intensity, and catharsis. Although the filmmakers take audiences on a tour of the sleazy hindquarters of American society, “8mm” balks at pushing the envelope in its depiction of decadence. Never as disturbing as the Al Pacino movie “Cruising,” the George C. Scott film “Hardcore,” or the Charles Bronson’s thriller “Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects,” this darkly lensed pseudo-suspenser simmers far too long before the plot comes to a boil. Fans of “Se7en” scenarist Andrew Kevin Walker may wonder how much Columbia diluted his script to yield such comatose claptrap.

When an industrial czar’s rich widow, Mrs. Christian (Myra Carter of “The Witches of Salem: The Horror and the Hope”), opens her recently deceased husband’s safe, she discovers what she suspects is a snuff movie. In this one-reel film, a young girl appears to die at the hands of a leather-clad sadist. The elderly Mrs. Christian hires clean-cut, buttoned-down Tom Welles, a small potatoes private eye, to determine the authenticity of the snuff film. Welles accepts the assignment without high hopes. He treats it as a missing person’s case. Once he has identified the girl as May Anne Matthews (Jenny Powell), he contacts Mary Anne’s working class mom (Amy Morton) and snoops around the runaway’s room.

The trail takes Welles to the West Coast where he hires a smart-aleck porno-store clerk, Max California (Joaquin Phoenix), with an encyclopedic knowledge of kink to guide him through the underworld of hardcore pornography. Max warns Tom before he begins his tour, “There are things you’re going to see that you can’t unsee.” Max is a tough young man who has not let the filth and pornography affect him. When Tom Welles meets him, Max has a clover of a cheap porno novel wrapped around a copy of Truman Capote’s bestseller “In Cold Blood.” Throughout the case, Tom grapples with the question that bugs him about the dead millionaire: “Why did he want to film a little girl being butchered?” Tom keeps L.A. porno producer Eddie Poole (James Gandolini of “True Romance”) under surveillance until Poole leads him to a guy who produced the snuff movie, the infamous Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare of “Armageddon”), who has his headquarters in New York City.

Tom and Max fly to the Big Apple, contact the fiendish Dino, and give him the front money for the movie. Tom has one condition: they must allow him to observe them as they film. At this point, Tom sends Max packing out of harm’s way, before he confronts the pornographers in an abandoned warehouse at the edge of town. The killers surprise Tom and turn the tables on him. “Satan ex machine,” quips the nasty Dino with relish as he shows Tom that they knew about him from the start. Further disclosure would spoil what little suspense Schumacher conjures up.
“Se7en” scenarist Andrew Kevin Walker has inked a lukewarm murder-mystery yarn shot on surprises but long on clichés. The co-scenarist on “Hideaway” (1995), Walker provides standard set-pieces such as a rain swept graveyard fight, a “Silence of the Lambs” confrontation in a creepy house, an “In Cold Blood” style murder sequence, and a “Death Wish” vigilante hero. The villains epitomize stereotypical predators who pose little threat to the sanitized knight hero. The action plods more often than it pulsates. Obviously, Schumacher deploys atmosphere (i.e. , set design) as a smoke screen to cover up the pornographic material that good taste and censorship prevent him from showing. Indeed, as prudish as “8mm” is, the filmmakers had to contrive something more than prurience to attract an audience.

“8mm” makes the most of Nicolas Cage and shows Joaquin Phoenix at his best. Cage imbues “8mm” with his unique brand of underdog charm and antithetical heroism. Cage plays Welles as a sad-faced Sam Spade with a nagging wife (Catherine Keener) and an infant daughter. Young, ambitious, mobile, and polished, Tom devotes himself to his family. When he isn’t on a case, he’s raking the front yard. Tom is the heart and soul of “8mm,” and the filmmakers make him tough, resourceful, but vulnerable and hen-pecked. Tom Welles serves as the conscience and custodian of morality of “8mm.” A great deal of John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards from director John Ford’s “The Searchers” jostles for prominence in Nicolas Cage’s performance. Eventually, Tom begins to obsess over poor Mary Anne Matthews and her plight. Cage struggles to make straight-arrow Tom Welles a flesh and blood fellow, but Schumacher doesn’t abet him. Tom Welles doesn’t have much of a back-story. He is a cipher defined only by Cage’s repertoire of looks and gestures. Mind you, Cage gives a soulful, serious performance. Tom Welles may be too tightly wrapped, and Cage never lets his guard down. Welles can be defined by how much he can absorb before he buckles. “8mm” is another exercise in masculine control, and the film charts his growth from law-abiding private eye to lone vigilante.

The bad guys in “8mm” wear their villainy like placards. Four villains menace Tom Welles, but the fourth is not unmasked until the climax. All deserve to die, and as the offal of humanity they earn miserable, ignominious deaths. As a porno-movie producer, Eddie Poole (James Gandolfini) elicits nothing but contempt as the kind of verminous scum who sodomizes women, guzzles liquor, curses blasphemously, and dresses like a lout. He is a repository of politically-incorrect and socially unacceptable traits. As another porno producer, Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare) hams it up with a crossbow and the beard of a vaudeville villain. Chris Bauer creates evil incarnate as ‘Machine,’ the leather-clad star of S & M videos who kills because he enjoys it. Machine’s speech at the end of “8mm” serves as a commentary on the face of evil.

The villains in “8mm,” like some in real-life, do what they do because they can afford it and they enjoy it. They are not pawns of a disease. The late tycoon commissioned a snuff movie because he had the money, and wealth represents power in American society. The one real film lay in his safe like a scalp in a poacher’s bag. Eddie Poole made the snuff movie because “it was something I did for money.” Machine dismisses societal reasons for his homicidal behavior. “I was beaten as a child. I didn’t hate my parents. I like it.” Machine makes these comments as he slips on a pair of dorky glasses and leers at Tom.

Director Joel Schumacher has helmed several classy Hollywood movies, such as “Falling Down,” “The Client,” “A Time to Die,” “Batman Forever,” “Batman and Robin,” “The Lost Boys,” and “Flatliners.” The veteran director imitates Tim Burton this time out with his emphasis on Stygian lighting, gothic color schemes, and prosaic storytelling. Sadly, the story is presented in such a procedural manner with the accent on reality that it amounts to a bore. Cage takes breaks from the case to call up his plain-Jane wife and his baby daughter to apologize for not being with them. When things go too far, his wife reads him the riot act and threatens to leave him.

Essentially, Schumacher has gone too far in the other direction. From splashy comic book super heroes, he has retreated to dreary, world-weary ordinary mortals forced to make life’s disasters his omelets. Rather than immerse audiences in sex and nudity, Schumacher approaches the obscene then swings the camera on Cage’s face to see the effect it registers on Tom Welles. Always the epitome of subtlety, when he wants to suggest sleaze, Schumacher punches up the volume on composer Michael Danna’s electronic, Arabic-flavored music score. “8mm” drags along with a burst of energy near the end that does little to redemn the long wait to which the filmmakers subject their audience.

Altogether, “8mm” is a dull, clammy, little exercise in voyeurism and perversion. Columbia Pictures and director Joel Schumacher couldn’t have contrived a better bedtime story for the Super Court Justices to lull themselves asleep to than “8mm.”

FILM REVIEW OF "SHAFT" (1971)

The NAACP gave up trying to persuade Hollywood to cast more African-Americans in films and television shows in 1963 and resorted to legal measures and economic sanctions. Consequently, blacks began to appear in both major and minor roles in greater numbers. Actor Sidney Poitier emerged in the late 1960s as the first truly popular African-American actor and qualified as an example of "the model
integrationist hero." By the 1970s, African-Americans had turned up not only in ghetto-themed movies but also every other film genre and television show. Meanwhile, the discrimination that black actresses encountered simply mirrored the shortage of roles white actresses had contended with in Hollywood since time immemorial. Former Cleveland Browns football star Jim Brown rose to prominence in the wake of Sidney
Poitier as the new African-American hero. Poitier and Brown served as precursors for Blaxploitation.

Eventually, the pendulum swung from one extreme with the racist depiction of blacks as subservient Sambo characters before the 1960s to the newest extreme with blacks portrayed as Superspades in what later constituted a cinematic phenomenon called Blaxploitation. Essentially, the golden age of Blaxploitation movies occurred between 1970 and 1975 and these movie targeted primarily black audiences. Blaxploitation heroes and heroines displayed a social and political consciousness, and they were not confined to single roles. They were cast as private eyes,
policemen, vigilantes, troubleshooters, pimps, etc. In each instance, these characters worked within the system, but they did so as they saw fit and sought to improve the African-American community. Not surprisingly, blaxploitation heroes often clashed with whites, but they refused to depict whites in strictly monolithic terms. Good whites and bad whites jockeyed for prominence in the films. Although one NAACP official described blaxploitation as just "another form of cultural genocide," African-American audiences flocked to see them. Blaxploitation movies knew no boundaries and encompassed comedies, musicals, westerns, coming-of-age dramas, slave plantation films, and horror movies.

Director Ossie Davis' urban crime thriller "Cotton Comes to Harlem" (1970), about two African-American N.Y.P.D. cops, Coffin Ed Johnson (Raymond St. Jacques) and Gravedigger Jones (Godfrey Cambridge), based on the Chester Himes novel, paved the way for the movement. When the film premiered, critics did not categorize Cotton as blaxploitation. Interestingly, the term "black exploitation" first appeared in print in the August 16, 1972, issue of the show business newspaper "Variety" when the NAACP Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch president, Junius Griffin, coined the term in a speech about the derogatory impact of the genre on African-Americans. Later, black exploitation was abbreviated as blaxploitation. The two films that historians have classified as "germinal" were independent filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles' "Sweet
Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" (1971) and mainstream director Gordon Parks' "Shaft" (1971). Peebles's film supplemented the content of Davis' film with sex and violence, and Sweetback's success with black audiences triggered the blaxploitation craze, one of the most profitable in cinematic history. Major Hollywood film studios rushed similar films into production. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer followed Sweetback's
success with their private eye thriller "Shaft" (1971) starring model-turned-actor Richard Roundtree as the equivalent of Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade gumshoe character in "The Maltese Falcon." Some critics complained that movies like Shaft simply substituted blacks in roles that were traditionally played by whites. Initially, MGM thought about of rewriting the African-American lead in Shaft, based on Ernst
Tidyman's novel as a Caucasian.

As a detective movie, Shaft observed all the conventions of the genre. The action opens with the trench coat-clad protagonist wearing out shoe leather in Manhattan to the tune of Isaac Hayes' iconic, Oscar-winning theme music. The lyrics provide a thumbnail sketch of the hero's persona. Private detective John Shaft lives up to those lyrics as "the cat who won't cop out when there's danger all about." At this point in the action, Shaft makes his rounds and checks in with his people and learns that some people are looking for him. Mind you, not only are some hoods looking for our protagonist, but also the N.Y.P.D., in the person of Lieutenant Vic Androzzi, is looking for Shaft. Androzzi has been hearing some bad things and wants to check up with Shaft of what's happening. Meanwtime,an infamous Harlem crime lord, Bumpy Jonas (Moses Gunn), loosely based on real-life criminal Bumpy Johnson, hires Shaft to locate his missing daughter Marcy. Shaft goes out looking for an old friend who has gotten into the revolution frame of mind, Ben Buford and he finds him at Amsterdam, 710. The villains stage a raid on Ben's building and only Shaft and Ben survive a massacre. Eventually, Shaft discovers that the Italian mafia has abducted her and he assembles a motley crew of black militants called The La Mumbas to help him rescue Marcy. Ben Buford (Christopher St. John of "For Love of Ivy")is the man in charge of The La Mumbas who helps Shaft out during the rescue in a blazing, shoot'em up finale in the last scene. Shaft and Buford have a face-to-face confrontation when the latter accuses the former of being a "Judas." The success of Shaft spawned two sequels "Shaft's Big Score" (1972) and "Shaft in Africa" (1973) and later a short-lived television series. Many blaxploitation movies gained notoriety for negative portrayals of African-Americans trapped in the ghettos that resorted to crime and
vice to triumph over their hostile surroundings and oppressive white
landlords.

MOVIE REVIEW OF ''THE BIG SLEEP" (1946)

Howard Hawks ranks as one of the least pretentious Hollywood filmmakers. In Todd McCarthy’s seminal biography, “Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood,” Hawks summed up his philosophy about messages into his movies. “I never made a statement. Our job is to make entertainment. I don’t give a God damn about taking sides.” First and foremost, Hawks considered himself a storyteller, and he let nothing come between the story and him. Second, actors and actress either adhered to Hawks’ dictates or he wrote them out of scenes, sometimes movie entirely, and gave their action to others. Not surprisingly, when Hawks hired William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman to adapt mystery novelist Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep,” he told them, “Don’t monkey with the book—just make a script out of it. The writing is too good.”

Between 1944 and 1947, Chandler’s shabby but chivalrous private eye Philip Marlowe appeared in four films, including “Murder, My Sweet” (1944) with Dick Powell, “The Big Sleep” (1946), “The Lady in the Lake” (1947) with Robert Montgomery, and “The Brasher Doubloon” (1947) with George Montgomery. During this period, Hollywood filmmakers made what French critics later called ‘film noir’ movies. Essentially, ‘film noir’ movies occurred at night either indoors or outdoors. The gritty black & white photography stressed gutter realism, while the expressionistic lighting forged haunting shadows with a fatalistic flavor. Urban thrillers more than detective mysteries bore the marks of this movement. Unsavory male heroes and the fallen women that trapped them in a web of intrigue populated these films. The atrocities of World War II and Nazi persecution of the Jews destroyed the innocence of American isolationism and created more mature movies where characters suffered from flaws. Although “The Big Sleep” fits into this oeuvre, Hawks shunned such artificial narrative gimmicks.

In “The Big Sleep,” Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) works for $25 a day and expenses. He uses his wits and fists to relieve the wealthy but crippled General Sternwood (Charles Waldron of “The Real Glory”) of an extortionist. Sternwood has two beautiful but pampered daughters: a divorcee, Vivian Sternwood Rutledge (Lauren Bacall of “To Have and Have Not”), and a drug addict Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers of “Marine Raiders”). An amusing scene occurs early on when Carmen tries to sit in Marlowe’s lap while he is standing up. Later, when Marlowe visited General Sternwood, he has to weather the hot house heat that enables the decrepit General to survive. The General explains that he has to indulge in his vices by proxy. In other words, he sits and watches Marlowe as our hero drinks and smokes.

Arthur Gwynn Geiger (Theodore Von Eltz) demands $5-thousand dollars from the General for a sheaf of gambling debts that bear Carmen’s signature. No sooner has Marlowe gotten onto the case than an assailant shoots and kills Geiger. Marlowe enters Geiger’s house moments after the murder and finds Carmen sitting in a nearby chair drugged out of her mind. He finds a concealed camera but the film has been removed. Marlowe discovers a black book of addresses and hustles Carmen back home. Marlowe’s former boss, Chief Inspector Bernie Ohls (Regis Toomey of “Spellbound”) with the District Attorney's Office, pays him visits at home while Marlowe is examining the black book. Bernie informs him that a Sternwood limo has just been pulled out of the ocean with Owen Taylor, the Sternwood’s chauffeur, dead behind the wheel. Ohls wants information. Marlowe explains the blackmail angle and later divulges what happened to Geiger, but he leaves Carmen’s part out of the murder. Marlowe runs into a cagey gambler, Eddie Mars (John Ridgely of “Air Force”), who is flanked by a couple of goons, while he investigates the death of Geiger. As it turns out, Vivian and Mars are connected to each other. B-movie cowboy hero Bob Steele makes an impressive cameo as murderous gunsel Lash Canino and has a shoot-out with Bogart at the end of the movie.

“The Big Sleep” qualifies as one of the most convoluted murder mysteries to emerge from Hollywood. Hawks and Bogart argued over the identity of who killed the Sternwood chauffeur. They called up Chandler, since he wrote the novel, but he could not conjure up a plausible answer to their question. “I don’t know,” Chandler told them. Eventually, Hawks and Faulkner contrived a solution. The solution to Taylor’s murder, however, remained hidden until 1995 when the original version of “The Big Sleep” was made available to the public. Initially, Warner Brothers showed the original to American troops overseas, but Jack L. Warner shelved the movie until after the war so the studio could release its other war-themed movies before the Axis surrendered.

Meanwhile, after winning the critics’ approval in “To Have and Have Not,” Bacall had received abrasive reviews for her performance in “Confidential Agent” (1945), and her agent, a worried Charles Feldman, pleaded with Warner reshoot several scenes and invent new ones to showcase the insolence of Bacall’s character. When Warner Brothers released “The Big Sleep” in 1946, Hawks had jettisoned the expository Taylor murder solution scene and added other scenes that would have been more appropriate in one of his screwball comedies. One of the scenes that they added contained the risqué horse racing scene that serves as a veiled commentary about sexual relations. Somehow the censors at the Production Code Administration neither complained nor demanded that Warner Brothers delete this dialogue. Ultimately, Marlowe solves the case, eliminates the villains, and woos Vivian, but the plot makes very little sense, which may account for the film’s following. McCarthy quoted Hawks about the director’s own perplexity: “I can’t follow the story. I saw some of it on television the other night, and I’d listen to some of the things he’d talk about and it had me thoroughly confused because I hadn’t seen it in twenty years.”

“The Big Sleep” is really a classic. The Warners Home Video contains both the 1945 pre-release version and the 1946 theatrical version.