The Fly (1986)

It's October..."so maybe I should pay attention to horror films." How cliché. I have some planned and in the hopper, but I noticed "The Large Association of Movie Blogs" is showcasing director David Cronenberg, so I'm also going to be throwing in a bunch of Cronenberg reviews from the past and the retrospective present. 

After all, you can't have a Cronenberg movie without a little bit of horror...somewhere.

The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) It was a time when things were just getting gooier in movies. The things you could do with special effects make-up and mechanics were taking a quantum leap. Alien came out in 1979. John Carpenter's version of The Thing was released in 1982. It seemed like a perfectly natural thing for 20th Century Fox to attempt a remake—not so much that Mel Brooks and his Brooksfilms would be the production company—for director David Cronenberg to update a version of the completely awful horror flick The Fly (even if it DID have a screenplay by James Clavell). 

And why not? Cronenberg had a way with viscera and making icky movies with a brain...and a spine (a distended spine, maybe, but they were solid features). But, what was a bit different about his version of The Fly was it also had a heart. It was a bleeding, spurting heart, but...it was a heart.

Reporter Veronica Quaife (Geena Davis) meets inventor and theoretician Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) at a party being thrown by his funders, Bartok Industries, and he tells her about his research on transportation. Realizing this could be a scientific break-through, Veronica pitches it to her editor Stathis Bohrens (John Getz). As Brundle's transportation device requires the conversion of matter to energy and then the top to bottom resequencing of the energy back to matter, he gives the story a pass. Veronica's disappointed, but a visit from Brundle to the magazine's office to stop any story makes the decision an opportune one for all parties.

Brundle's research has hit a snag. His transporter can move inanimate objects, but living things—well, that's another tissue, entirely. Test subjects don't show up the same way they left. Veronica sees this for herself when Brundle invites her to document his research—a test baboon materializes inside out—convenient for autopsies, maybe, but not for the betterment of mankind.

All that apartment visiting and recording of horrific lab accidents (and the resulting unseen clean-up afterwards) must have an odd erotic effect, as Brundle and Veronica become attracted to each other and sleep together, a conjugal conflict of interest in journalistic circles. But a passing remark by Veronica inspires Brundle to try another approach in programming and voila!—the next test actually produces a baboon with internal organs staying internal in the pod. Eureka!

Plans are made to do the story, but that means Veronica is spending more time with her ex than with Brundle and for someone with a lot of intellect but no perspective, that raises a monster—a big green one.

If that were all that came from it, it would be preferable. But Brundle is compelled to test the transporter on himself.

If only he'd thought to include a bug-zapper in the transporter...or at least a screen-door.

During the test, Brundle's DNA is combined with another living organism in the pod—a stray fly (it begs the question of how well he cleaned up after the first baboon test...or what would happen with any other micro-biology in the chamber). At first, he isn't aware of any change, except his strength and stamina have increased. It isn't long, however, before bug-hairs start sprouting from his back and he gets a mean case of psoriasis. Checking the logs for his experiment, he realizes that his DNA has been scrambled with the fly in the chamber, and that his body is starting to react to change—he isn't the same man he was before he transported and transubstantiated. Everything worked out well for Peter Parker, but Brundle gets the powers, the wall-crawling, but also the not so pleasant ability to eat by spewing digestive bile onto his meal and melting it in order to consume. Plus, he starts to lose limbs and shed his skin...and well, turn into a fly.

Even as Brundle deteriorates, we see his transformation through the eyes of Veronica, who has an additional worry—she's pregnant with Brundle's...whatever. It's her mounting horror over what is happening to someone she loves that keeps The Fly as grounded as it is, without clipping its horror-wings while doing it. 

More than one reviewer mentioned the AIDS epidemic in their review at the time of the film's release (although Cronenberg dismissed the specificity of it). It could be cancer or Lew Gehrig's Disease or MS or any other disease that turns the body against its host that the film has an emotional connection to that might resonate with audiences. We've all been helpless watching disease take someone we love and transform them. We've all lived through our own horrors—maybe not as extreme as this—but still scary, which makes The Fly a strangely heart-felt tragedy and turned into Cronenberg's biggest box-office hit in the United States.

It seems so easy on "Star Trek"...except in "Mad" Magazine parodies.

In a World (2013)

Written at the time of the film's release.

The Cult of Non-celebrity
or
Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics...and Marketing

Lake Bell's comedy In a World (she wrote, directed, stars in, and wins The Welles Award for over-achievement this year) is a funny, funny look at the L.A. studio scene, or at least the LA studio scene of a few years ago.* She gets the nuances right of the bubble-verse that a lot of folks get into, and the sexist nature of the industry—female voice-overs for commercials have broken the glass recording booth ceiling, but movie trailers are still reliant on the paternalistic "Voice of God" to "sell" the image the studios want.

Bell stars as Carol Solomon, a periphery actress, semi-content to act as a vocal coach to other artists (like Eva Longoria because her cockney accent makes her sound "like a retarded pirate."), carrying around a mini-recorder to capture any vocal inflections to add to her collection (a habit that has more than one irritation and complication in the film) and generally do The California Hang Out, professionally waiting for the big break to happen.

That big break translates to not telling others how to do voice-work, but doing it herself, whether voicing commercials, or, even better, movie trailers, the toughest nut in voice-over work to crack. The reason?  Women don't "do" voice-overs for trailers. How does she know? Her father (Fred Melamed) does voice-overs for movie trailers, and is only too happy to tell her that it's a man's market, and that she can't possibly break into it because 1) women don't do voice-overs and 2) she can't do voice-overs because she's not as talented as he is and he does voice-overs. 

In any industry there are out-sized egos, and the voice-over field is no different.** Most have a healthy sense of perspective and a genuine gratitude for being paid to (as one voice-over guy described it) "talk out loud for a living." But, there are those (and sadly, you don't know who you are) who see it as "art" and their every syllable is "golden." Carol's dad is one of them, and despite his extraordinary ego, he still sees himself following in the wavelengths of the King of Trailers, the late Don LaFontaine, who, "legend" has it (or at least Don had it), "created" the "in a world" tag-line, and who, in his honor, the line has been retired since his death.***  

However, there's a new chic-lit-based "quadrilogy" movie series coming out, and they just might be using that "In a world..." line for their trailers. Carol's father, in his largesse, bequeaths it to up-and-comer Gustav Warner (Ken Marino), who's lost a couple of gigs to "some chick" over a throat ailment, and the two chortle about how they can screw her over—not realizing that "some chick" is his own daughter.

At about this time, anybody with a few movies under their eye-lids is going "Oh, he'll find out it's her, feel remorse, and turn over a new leaf..." Bell's movie isn't that easy. In fact when he hears that she might get the gig, he decides that he'll audition for it himself ("Auditioning," oh, the humiliation. Don't they know who he is?), in a fit of ego and competitive envy. That's surprising. But...I gotta say, not out of the realm of reality.  

If the movie were all that, it would be a thin script, indeed. But Bell complicates this world, with others in the fringe—Carol's sister, Dani (played by Michaela Watkins) a concierge, whom Carol has to crash with when her Dad tosses her out so his 30-something girlfriend (Alexandra Holden) can move in with him, thus messing up the lives of her sister and her husband (Rob Corddry, proving he can play a normal guy, for once), a reality television editor. Then there are the studio crew, including her engineer-friend (Demetri Martin) who promotes her work, enabling him to keep burning the torch he has for her. The repartee among these players is refreshingly spontaneous-sounding, with half-finished sentences, colliding overlaps and repetitions, stray asides, floating exiting explanations, and general discomfiture, making great use of actor/comedians for improv/mumblecore cred—the difference being that it's actually funny here, and not just awkweird.

There's a line from In a World... that does raise a point, despite it coming from one of the most insufferable characters: "a great voice isn't just a blessing, it's a choice." Bell takes it somewhat seriously, she was/portrays a vocal coach, and makes it a point several times to decry the up-inflected "sexy baby voice" that seems to be "the rage" these days, after it's been perpetuated by reality-show denizens and nondescript and untrained readers, like the kind that fill up "This American Life." She has a point, but a narrow one. The commercial world reflects the real world, but not very far, and certainly without any degree of real innovation, as it's always art by committee. And once the mad men discover a trend, they do it "to death," until it passes into the cliche mode and stops making the short-term money. But, I found it a little disingenuous for Bell to be on her soap-box about how people talk, because, as the line implies, we can't all be blessed, nor can we all afford vocal coaches.  We work with what we have, whether it fits into an "acceptable" niche or not. In a World does a good job of turning its eye on the chauvinism in the marketplace, but it's blind to it in its own little bubble-verse.

Easy for her to talk. 

A compilation of movie trailer cliches as voiced by Hal Douglas, Peter Thomas, 
Dom Morrow and (three or four times) Don LaFontaine


Hal Douglas can't say 'In a World...'


A rare female voice on a trailer...Melissa Disney (featured in In a World) for Gone in 60 Seconds

* "In a world" of DSL lines, fiber-optics transmission, satellite feeds and home studios, the voice-over business is not quite as concentrated in Los Angeles as it used to be.  It's where a lot of production is done, but a lot of the voice-over artists now do things from their own home and "travel" when the technology demands it (or the egos of the producers do).

** During one session in my memory, one well-known national voice-over talent was told by the writer-producer that he'd "fluffed" a line and the response was "Fluffed?!  FUCK YOU!"  And then there are those famous out-takes by Orson Welles and William Shatner.

*** This is bull-shit.  The line has certainly been used (and probably too much in the past few years since LaFontaine's death) as a pop culture cliche—an easy go-to  laugh  among the most dull of hipsters.  And it's also bull-shit because LaFontaine was only one of the voice actors who did that style of "read" (the most prominent probably being Hal Douglas), but spent the last year of his life (sadly) promoting himself as the "In a World..." guy.  THE "In a world..." guy.  And the only way he got away with it (and the man was dying, so the industry let him) is because so many people have a tin ear and can't tell the difference between LaFontaine and the other dozen or so voice-actors who "do" trailers. One wonders, besides marketing, why he did it.  The ones who did the news stories and puff-pieces did it because...well, they didn't know any better and bought the hype for a good story.  LaFontaine had great pipes. 

 But he was no Ken Nordine.