The Naked Gun (2025)

Serving 20 Years for Mans Laughter

or

"Usual is Unusual, Usually" 

 

I was worried about this one. The original "Naked Gun" series (the ones that starred Leslie Nielsen as Lt. Frank Drebin) came out of of the Z-A-Z team—the guys that made the original Airplane!—they would be David and Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, who had a free-wheeling style of evergreen comedy and an impeccable sense of timing that made their movies work, despite production values that would have been suited for a Hallmark movie. That stuff's tough to duplicate—just ask anyone who saw the non-Z-A-Z sequel, Airplane 2, which was a desperate cash-grab and desperately unfunny despite writers credits by two of the geniuses behind "The Simpsons". 

 

"The Naked Gun" films came out of a Z-A-Z TV series that lasted all of six episodes (before being cancelled) called "Police Squad!" and I remember it as being fitfully funny and not quite up to par with the laugh-a-minute styles of Airplane! or their "Elvis-fights-the-Nazis" follow-up, Top Secret! The ideas were good, playing with the tropes of television and especially cop shows, but they were slightly hampered by 1980's TV censorship and the comedic pace never matched their movie work. That changed eight years later when they revived the concept for feature films and everything went up a few notches. Three "Naked Gun" films were produced between 1988 and 1994, the last only having David Zucker involved with the writing. The complete Z-A-Z team acted as producers. There'd been talk about doing a fourth "Naked Gun" movie with Nielsen, but nothing came of it. His death in 2010 put the stopper in it.

Now, thanks to producer Seth McFarlane's clout, there's a new one, the duplicate-titled The Naked Gun, featuring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin, Jr., the son of Leslie Nielsen's character, and he's a chip off the old blockhead. Not the most original of concepts, but Neeson does such an amazing job of playing it absolutely straight while still nailing the comic timing that it's a pleasure to see him make the Nielsen transition from drama to high comedy with nary a misstep. The review for the movie at RogerEbert.com stated that it is "legitimately" Neeson's best screen performance, and one comes out of The Naked Gun actually believing it, so deft is his way of fusing comedy with the deadly-serious "I have skills" intensity that he brought to his "action-star" phase.

What's the plot? Who cares? Surely, you don't think the efficacy of a "Naked Gun" entry lies in the carefully crafted screenplay. No, this is a matter of throwing all kinds of shit at a fan—which became a literal joke in Airplane!—and seeing what sticks. But, loosely, it's about a tech billionaire (Danny Huston, who's sounding more and more like his Dad every movie), who's into breaking things and starting from scratch...including populations. Somehow, Junior Drebin gets involved in all this, as well as getting involved with the sister (Pamela Anderson, who's actually quite good) of an "accident" victim.

One is struck by how good the movie looks, with lots of mood-lighting and leaning into noir styles (as opposed to the Z-A-Z approach of key lighting everything, lest you miss a joke in the shadows, and also aping the style of its inspiration, "'M' Squad"). That's a bit of a shock, but seeing as this one is a couple generations removed from its source, it's a good shock.

Is it funny? Comedy is always subjective (he hedged)—one man's laugh-riot is another's snooze-fest—but, the first hour or so provided some genuine howlers and some inspired bits of business...then right about the time director Shaffer cuts to a shot of the house band of the villain's "Bengal Club" (and does nothing with it), the movie coasts to the end, wasting joke opportunities, occasionally perking up, but seemingly on comedy auto-pilot until the end. That wouldn't be so discouraging if the first two acts weren't so darned good.

Hopefully, there'll be more. It's refreshing to find a movie that's funnier and sillier than watching the nightly news. 

 

Oh. And don't call me "Shirley."

  Wilhelm Alert: @ 01:15.00

Avatar: The Way of Water

It's All About...Family

or 

Fleeing Na'vi Dad
 

I was one of the few inhabitants of this planet that was unimpressed with James Cameron's Avatar—the most popular movie of all time (based on inflated movie receipts, truth be told). I felt it was Cameron at his worst—recycling shop-worn ideas under a veneer of technology and engineering—while also being a fun watch (if you didn't take it too damned seriously).

 

The sequel (first sequel) Avatar: The Way of Water was released at Christmas, and I was in no hurry to see it. I wanted to avoid big crowds, I wasn't "enthused" because I was underwhelmed (while being simultaneously over-stimulated) by the first and expected "more of the same." I also knew that it would be around in theaters for awhile, maybe even held in 3-D (where most movie-chains drop the refinements down to "Standard version" after a week). But, mostly I waited because James Cameron was in no hurry to release it, so why should I be in a hurry to see it. I mean, what's the rush? It wasn't going anywhere.

I did go see it, finally, in XD and 3-D. You might as well go the full yard. And, I found that to be a wise decision, as it brought up many aspects to the film, which I wouldn't even have noticed had I seen it "flat" and "standard." In fact, what is a tad revolutionary in the film and—to me, anyway—makes it worth seeing are the technical aspects of the film, which have achieved a new threshold in presentation of-screen.

 

It's certainly not the story, which can be Cameron's Achilles Heel. Concept, sure. But, what he does with it, not so much. His movies look good on paper, like an architect's sketch, but the blue-prints fleshing it out may reveal some flaws where hard reality conflicts with imagination.

A:TWOW begins with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now permanently on his surrogate-planet, Pandora, living with his mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, who clearly knows how to eke out a subtle, effective performance from motion capture) and their kids, Notoyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as adopted kids Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the child of Dr. Grace Augustine's avatar, produced by immaculate conception of something, and "Spider" (Jack Champion), the son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), both of whom died in the original film.

Well, they're baaa-ack. Dr. Grace as a hologramatic image and spiritual Obi-Wan, and Quaritch as a hologramatic image and his own avatar (something, as I recall, that the original Col. Miles was dead-set against...oh, well...blue-prints). Quaritch's avatar is given one of those too-lame-to-be-inspirational Quaritch pep-talks about how he needs to man-up and take down Jake Sully because...well, he has to. Jake beat him last time fair and square, by having his wife shoot him, but...ya know...there was a conspiracy and rigged voting machines and Quaritch has no life but a huge ego and...blue-prints. There IS no reason for him to revenge himself against Sully, even if one doesn't include the fact the original character is dead and his avatar is only vengeful-by-proxy...and he's told to do it.

As specious as all this seems, it's enough to send Jake and family packing to another part of Pandora as refugees and depend on the kindness of the Metkayina tribe who live on Pandora's eastern seaboard and have a society based mostly on water and the denizens therein.* They must fight discrimination from the Metkayina ("they'll take our jobs!" and, more legitimately, "they'll lead the Earthers right to us!"). Along the way, Jake's kids want to sit at the BIG kid's table, and complicate matters. 

Not that there's much to contemplate. Earthers are bad. Pandorans are good. Earthers-gone-Native are good. Sometimes, parents just don't understand. At some point, Belle from The Little Mermaid should show up and do an "I know, right?"

"Jake! This is where we first met!"

 

But, as simple as it is, it's a three hour movie and Cameron fills the spaces with a lot of his Greatest Hits: two equally matched fighters slugging it out in an industrial setting (pick a Terminator, any Terminator), learning how to manage your breathing underwater (The Abyss) and finally, having to get out from under-deck of a sinking boat (Titanic). Things look different in Metkayina—the folks are greenish around their gills—but it doesn't matter where Cameron goes, there he is. It's very familiar.

Except when it's not. Kudos to the design team to make the Metkayina look like a different culture (I think, by now, movie-goers are hep to accepting and even embracing that concept). But, the real eye-opener is how good the CGI (mostly from New Zealand's WETA) has gotten. Performances are sharper and subtle (as I said, Saldana shines at this), and they even manage to make a Sigourney Weaver character look "right"—I remember there were audible grunts of disappointment at the appearance of her avatar in the last one as the CGI looked "uncanny-valleyish."

Look at the subtlety of expression in Saldana's character.

She is clearly giving Sully the "Dad's being a little heavy-handed" look

 

The CGI characters are so good and so realized that when a real-life human being shares the screen with them, they look flat and slightly less real (the human actors do have the disadvantage of being subject to gravity) than their pixelated counterparts. Maybe it's the effects of 3-D capture, or the differences between reflected lighting and computerized grading, but this is particularly true in the character of Spider, who often gets lost in the wash of images and is bound by the limits of movement bound by the laws of physics. Now, that will be an interesting challenge for Cameron and other film-makers in the future.

There are still issues with close objects "fritzing" as they move across the screen, so maybe objects should be less enfolded in the scenery.** Where the 3-D really, really works are in shots of floating screens and in the underwater shots that dominate the second hour of the film. Cameron went to the trouble of filming his motion-captured actors in a studio water-tank swimming about and there's something about the heavy influence of water and the languid way things move in it that feels particularly realistic with CGI rendering and 3-D projection, far more effectively than with the open-air scenes. It's a particularly effect feat of magical image-making that is incredibly credible and remarkable.

Now, if they could apply the same ingenuity to the scripting as they apply to the technology, that would be something. Maybe like losing the Quaritch character and its lunatic revenge story-line, would allow Cameron to concentrate on something worth the effort, both on his and our parts.

 

* Jake never once thinks that his leaving may not deter Quadritch from laying waste to the Omaticaya, anyway. Because he was so subtle and nuanced in his approach LAST time?

** There is a caveat to this: some of the "Ridley-Scott-fluff" that Cameron inserts into the frame doesn't always "work" but his insects were good enough to provoke the kid in the seat in front of me to reach out to try and grab them. That's a good (if amusing) testament.

Benny and Joon

So...I guess there's some trial going on?

Since so many people on the inter-webs are trying to make bank on it by "regurginging" it, I thought I'd do the same thing...but in a nice way. I'm transferring a couple of Johnny Depp movies from my old site to this site (where they'll seem like new content). I have no axe to grind. The reviews are rather complimentary to Mr. Depp, even if they do contrast his light and dark sides. I'd have done the same for Amber Heard, but...I don't have any old reviews of her stuff. Lest I be accused of bias or anything (although I don't think any uber-fans can sign a petition to kick me off my own blog...I think).

 

Benny and Joon (Jeremiah S. Chechik, 1993) When examining the career of Johnny Depp, one looks to the blockbusters: the Pirates movies, the many Tim Burton collaborations. But then there are the films that fall through the cracks—not unlike the characters in this film. For anyone doubting Depp's ability to not depend on his looks and create a compelling character, Benny and Joon is a revelation.

 

Filmed in Spokane, Washinton, it tells the story of of an auto mechanic, the 1/3 eponymous Benny (Aidan Quinn) taking care of his 1/3 eponymous but schizophrenic sister, Juniper (Mary Stuart Masterson). He's torn between his commitment to Joon and his desire to live a life, free of her responsibility. But, his sense of duty and brotherly protectiveness trap him into doing nothing else, even though he might be inadequate at the care-taking task.

By luck of the draw, Sam (Depp) drops into their lives...literally; Joon wins him in a poker game. That plot development prat-falls Benny and Joon directly into "twee-ville," but Sam's addition to the cast arrives just in time to avoid it. Sam is a movie-freak, who knows every movie—the weirder the better—and models himself as the love-child of Buster Keaton and The Little Tramp. Eccentric, scruffy, but in a non-threatening way, Depp's head-tilting performance is just the right fizz to put in this Shirley Temple of a movie. You wonder what he's going to do next, and Depp is given enough ground to deliver a number of mute routines that are laugh-out-loud charming.

But, there are more joys to be had with guest-turns by Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, CCH Pounder, Oliver Platt, and Dan Hedaya—the kind of movie where your attention is slapped every few minutes with a "They're in this?" It might get a little heavy for kids in the third act—"everybody's MAD at each other!"—but there's a satisfying resolve. And if you have a sister or daughter not in love with Johnny Depp yet, this one will do it.

Benny and Joon is a Chick-Flick that guys can enjoy.

 

2022 Update: I still think Benny and Joon is an enjoyable film—it's enough to make you want to forget his film of The Avengers (almost—he's been doing a LOT of TV since then). I still have the creepy feeling that it's a dumbed-down, sugar-sprinkled look at mental illness, The Child's Guide to Schizophrenia. That's something that will help NO ONE. It does have a couple of good lessons about being a caretaker, though—don't be so regimented and go with the flow because it's easier on the caretaker and caretakee. It's a marathon, a long game, and minor things are spilled milk in the long run. That's something that needs to be said. And Benny and Joon says it very specifically, especially if you think the movie is less about Mary Stuart Masterson (please come back, we miss you) and more about Aidan Quinn.

Avatar (2009)

Re-published from 2009.

"I Was a Marine in the Na'vi Reserve"
or 
Dances with Smurfs

Avatar is this Holiday season's elephant in the room. It is too big a target to not take pot-shots at, and will probably be too successful to avoid the temptation. Not that one needs motivation; there's plenty to be critical of. Like that proverbial elephant, take away the visuals and it will be seen as bits and pieces of other films: a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Something old, nothing new, something borrowed, and mostly something blue. Yes, it's derivative* (all James Cameron's films are). Yes, it's 3-D effects are spotty (Cameron can't resist getting too close to the "lens" frequently, so that the tip of things lose their coherence, and close-up ferns tend to become transparent, and there are early sequences that just move too fast for clear 3-D optics). The right-wing pundits will blast it for being "anti-military" (Can't argue with that—an occupying Army force that is the muscle for a rapacious corporation is the villain**—we've seen that in The Abyss and Aliens—on the other hand, Cameron gives them the coolest toys). Yes, it's too expensive. Yes, it's big and obvious and dumb. I'll grant you all of that. Sure.

But, damn, if it isn't fun. And thrilling. And at times stunningly beautiful, even breath-taking. There are moments (when Cameron actually feels the need to slow things down so you can appreciate it) when the imagery evokes such awe that you forget that you've seen it before in other films, and sometimes done better.

In the year 2175, paraplegic Marine Jake Scully (Sam Worthington—well, his head, anyway, the rest is an actual paraplegic) is offered the chance to replace his late twin brother in a scientific program to blend in with the indigenous tribe of ten foot tall aliens called the Na'vi. Brother Scully had been in training for years for the task, but because Jake's DNA matches his brother's, it's easier to let an untrained rookie with conflicts of interest take his place rather than train a replacement for such an essential mission. That mission is to move the Na'vi off their sacred land that contains a rich source of what the decimated Earth needs to run its machines, a floating mineral called "Unobtainium."***

There were legitimate titters in the audience at that one. It is indicative of Cameron's grab-bag approach to Avatar that he seriously uses a scientific in-joke, as well as exposing how little care he was taking with the story. "Unobtainium" is just lazy writing, like a detective looking for an actual "McGuffin," or a tech explaining that those scanners run using the latest "Vaporware." He couldn't come up with a more clever name like "dilithium," or "adamantium," or "Upsidaisium," or "Wedonthavenuffovum?"****

Apparently not. Because what we have in Avatar is a case of James Cameron becoming George Lucas. The two have been at odds over the years with competing films and competing SFX companies (although Lucasfilm's ILM—not Cameron's acquisition Digital Domain—worked on the FX of Avatar, the majority of which were done by New Zealand's WETA) that now the Tiger-hunter has become the Tiger. Avatar is the equivalent of the sumptuous "Star Wars" prequels, with more care given to how ships look when they land than to how people sound when they talk. We have more of the 22nd century humans using contemporary 20th century idioms and lame wise-cracks. No one's advanced—Earth is infected with a military-industrial simplex whose short-term strategies have decimated the planet (the corporate weasel is played by Giovanni Ribisi, rather than Paul Reiser this time, and the off-his-rocker military honcho is Stephen Lang, rather than Michael Biehn--Michelle Rodriguez plays the Latina soldier in the wife-beater, and Sigourney Weaver...is still Ripley, believe it or not.) Your afterward discussion meal will be peppered with discussions of "Well, if they could do THAT, why couldn't they do THAT?" and so on.

The Na'vi are innocent cat-like savages with golden eyes bigger than those in Keane paintings. They have three fingers and a thumb on their hands and six toes on their feet—if that sounds a little evolutionarily suspect, here's another one for you: the horses on Pandora have six legs, two in the back, four in the front. The people are based on every "noble savage" cliche ever used in the English language—everyone speaks in low, measured pronouncements and the chief is played by Wes Studi (it's always Wes Studi--I love him, but, c'mon!), his obligatorily high priestess of a wife is CCH Pounder, and their daughter, the princess—with whom Sully becomes romantically involved, opening up the floodgates to sources—is played by Zoe Saldana (Uhura of the new Star Trek). Nice cast, but they weren't given much to do to stretch their acting muscles—in fact, the roles are a little regressive. There's more challenges voicing a Disney film.

Get out those 3-D glasses, kids (No, the tinted ones)

One watches with a gob-smacked smile on one's face, but before too long it's apparent how it's going to turn out...and what complications are going to ensue before we get there. One has to conclude that, except for his technological savvy and his rather loopy art design, Cameron just doesn't have any new ideas. If you're looking for revolutionary in your films or film-makers, it is not here.

And, as you know it would, it all climaxes with an all-out battle between the Na'vi and the military, which Cameron knows how to direct so it's quite a bit more effective than a "Transformers" battle. It's mighty violent with lots of explosions and death and some nasty punctures by big Na'vi arrows. Parents should be warned—I saw a bunch of kids go into hyper-activity during the battle scenes. You're going to wish you had one of Cameron's heavy-lifting "AMP suits" to get 'em back into the car.

But, as a sci-fi re-telling of the "Native" tropes written by European writers, it's fun. Just don't be disappointed once the fancy wrappings are taken away, you find it's the same present you got last year.


* Aw, why drag it out? The sources are Run of the Arrow, the "Pocahontas" story, Poul Anderson's "Call Me Joe"(which is about humans using brain-linked native avatars on Jupiter), Dances with Wolves, "Dune," FernGully, heavy doses of Edgar Rice Borroughs' "Tarzan" and "John Carter of Mars," the "Dragonriders of Pern" series, the original storyline of Star Wars (in which a primitive tribe defeats a technologically advanced one—a Lucas favorite theme), allusions to the decimation of the American Indians, the VietNam War and the War in Iraq. And if it's a "'civilized' man learns from indigenous tribe that they are more civilized than him" story, it's in Avatar.

** There wasn't. I'd forgotten—The company releasing Avatar was 20thCentury Fox, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. There were no conservatives grumbling until after the movie had cleared $1 billion dollars in receipts.

*** "Unobtainium" was also used in The Core—it is the metal coating plating the ships to make them resistant to molten temperatures and pressures.

**** "Dilithium cystals" power the U.S.S. Enterprise (rather than what Dr. McCoy prescribes Kirk for...his...ADD), "adamantium" is the metal that coats Wolverine's bones, "upsidaisium" was an anti-grav metal in "Rocky and Bullwinkle," and "Wedonthavenuffovum" I made up.