Nathan Rabin's Happy Place's Definitive Guide to American Movies about the Film Industry
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After the back to back to back mainstream commercial triumphs of Erin Brockovich, Traffic and Ocean’s Eleven Steven Soderbergh got artsy, independent, experimental and insufferable with his 2002 show-business comedy Full Frontal. The critically maligned flop explores a cross-section of shallow show-business types as they prepare for the birthday party of Gus (David Duchovny) a Harvey Weinstein-like pig obsessed with getting off and pushing the limits sexually with any attractive women he encounters. Weinstein lookalike Jeff Garlin somewhat confusingly also very briefly plays a Harvey Weinstein figure named Harvey in this Miramax production.
Soderbergh gave his star-studded cast a series of Dogme 95-like rules encouraging improvisation and forbidding many of the perks of studio filmmaking, such as trailers, drivers, make-up artists, craft service and costumers. Unfortunately forcing Julia Roberts to pick up McDonald’s on the way to shooting did not result in a masterpiece or even a particularly good film.
The result is a movie filled with famous faces like Catherine Keener, Blair Underwood, David Hyde Pierce, Julia Roberts, David Fincher, January Jones, Terence Stamp, Rainn Wilson and Brad Pitt that combines the worst elements of mumblecore and Dogme 95.
Full Frontal is shot largely in digital video by Soderbergh himself under the name Peter Andrews. The playful and misguided filmmaker seems perversely intent on making the ugliest, cheapest, most amateurishly filmed movie possible.
Like a true auteur Soderbergh gave himself and his cast the time, space and freedom to get hopelessly lost and venture into wildly self-indulgent, deeply uninteresting places.
At its best Full Frontal resurrects the gleeful absurdism and gonzo satire of Soderbergh’s Schizopolis. But moments of inspiration are few and far between. Soderbergh’s final rule for his players in Full Frontal is "You will have fun whether you want to or not.” That enjoyment, unfortunately, does not extend to an audience more likely to feel confused and underwhelmed than entertained.
Postcards from the Edge (1990) FM
With her autobiographical 1987 novel Postcards from the Edge Carrie Fisher recreated herself as a legendary wit, Dorothy Parker if she had a curious history as an outer space Princess in a gold slave bikini. With Postcards from the Edge Fisher drew upon the absurdity and dark comedy of her tabloid existence as Hollywood royalty who is troubled even by the very lenient standards of the breed. As a second generation movie star Fisher understood the bleak cosmic joke that is the entertainment business as well as anyone and chronicled her life and her trade with biting, self-deprecating wit and keen insight.
In an extraordinary, Academy Award-nominated performance, Meryl Streep stars as Suzanne Vale, a Fisher surrogate who ends up in rehab after a drug overdose. The weary survivor with a genius for sarcasm wants to work but the studio insists that, for insurance purposes, she lives with her mother Doris Mann (Shirley MacLaine), an old school movie star with a colossal ego and reluctance to share the spotlight with anyone, particularly her daughter.
Postcards from the Edge is a beautifully realized comedy-drama of recovery that chronicles, with great humor and empathy, its savvy but self-destructive heroine’s spiritual and professional journey as she tries to rebuild her life and career without the crutches that allowed her to just barely tolerate Hollywood’s rampant cruelty.
Carrie Fisher's mother Debbie Reynolds reportedly was eager to play a show business icon based on her. Who is better qualified to play a Debbie Reynolds type than Debbie Reynolds herself?
Director Mike Nichols instead chose Shirley MacLaine, who delivers a dazzling star turn as a maternal monster of id and ego who must learn to relate to her daughter as a profoundly flawed human being rather a movie star or a reflection of her.
The relationship between a woman in the scary early stages of sobriety and a mother unwilling to confront her own alcoholism and the role she played in her daughter’s dysfunction is the film’s warm, beating heart. Despite memorable supporting performances from Dennis Quaid as a cocky stud, Richard Dreyfuss as a warm doctor who pumps Suzanne’s stomach, Gene Hackman as a tough but supportive director and Annette Benning as savvy sexpot, this is largely a two hander for two legendary, perfectly c actresses with potent chemistry.
Like the book it’s based upon, Postcards from the Edge is funny, sad and wise, a gift from its author to a universe that adored her but could never quite understand her idiosyncratic genius.
Interior. Leather Bar (2013)
James Franco and Travis Matthews’ experimental 2013 film Interior. Leather Bar is all about the blurring on lines. It purposefully questions and crosses the lines separating reality from fiction, narrative from documentary, scripted from unscripted and gay from straight. Interior. Leather Bar is a deeply self-involved meditation on the ethics of sex scenes and onscreen sexuality. So the revelation that Franco had transgressed any number of ethical lines involving sex in his own films casts a dark shadow over an already dodgy endeavor.
Interior. Leather Bar imagines what the forty minutes minutes of footage that were cut from William Friedkin’s controversial 1980 gay sadomasochism-themed psychodrama Cruising to prevent it from getting an X-rating might have looked and felt like. To that end he cast his heterosexual friend and collaborator Val Lauren, who previously played gay actor Sal Mineo for him in Sal, in the Al Pacino role of a straight cop forced to examine his sexuality when he goes undercover in the world of leather bars to investigate a serial killer.
The filmmakers are less concerned with being true to Cruising than in exploring the boundaries of how far its straight actors will go in pursuit of creative truth or at least pleasing the big movie star in one of the director chairs.
As always Franco finds the inner lives of actors infinitely more compelling and entertaining than they actually are. As a prominent onscreen presence Franco comes off as an insufferable caricature of a self-important artiste.
Interior. Leather was previous just pointless and irritatingly self-indulgent. Franco’s career cratering thanks to issues similar to those in the film makes it pointless, irritatingly self-indulgent and uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons.
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