Spider-Man

In 1997, Batman & Robin nearly killed off the comic book superhero movie. It was famously reviled by critics and underperformed at the box office. Blade (1998), however, came out the next year and proved that there was still interest in the genre. It wasn’t until the phenomenal success of X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002), which managed to tap into the pop culture zeitgeist in a significant way, that the genre returned to prominence. Both movies were made by directors who grew up with these comic books and were fans. More importantly, they understood what made these iconic characters work and strongly identified with them.

Sam Raimi, in particular, was an inspired choice to direct Spider-Man. In many respects, his 1990 film Darkman was a comic book superhero movie not actually based on an existing title. It demonstrated that he had the innate storytelling instincts for the genre and the stylistic chops to transport the famous webslinger from page to screen. The end result was a loving homage to his humble beginnings at the hands of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko while still feeling contemporary.

Raimi immediately established Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) as a pasty-faced dweeb that admires his high school crush Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) from afar. It’s not like he’s invisible as the movie makes a point of having her stick up for him while others ridicule him. He is an outcast and is friends with another outsider, Harry Osborn (James Franco), a rich kid that flunked out of private school and is tired of living in the shadow of his brilliant scientist father, Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe). David Koepp’s screenplay efficiently introduces all the significant people in Peter’s life and establishes the relationships between each other. Raimi has fun introducing the core supporting characters in Spider-Man’s world, like the Daily Bugle’s publisher J. Jonah Jameson played with perfect bluster by J.K. Simmons who captures the essence of the notoriously cheap yellow journalist while also taking an instant dislike to the webslinger.

The movie soon establishes a parallel between Peter and Norman as they undergo physical enhancement that also affects them mentally. With Peter it happened accidentally but Norman made the choice to do it, which drives him insane. Initially, Peter’s newfound powers make him cocky and selfish as he uses them for profit. It is only when this behavior results in the death of his beloved Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) that he learns to use his powers for the greater good.

Maguire has a memorable scene with Cliff Robertson when Uncle Ben has a heart-to-heart with Peter, telling him, “These are the years when a man changes into the man he’s gonna become for the rest of his life. Just be careful who you change into.” He then utters the movie’s most famous line, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Instead of listening, Peter foolishly chastises Ben for telling him what to do and to stop pretending to be his father, which visibly wounds the elder man. Robertson is excellent in this scene as he makes you care about him so that you feel bad when Peter dismisses him so callously. Maguire is quite strong in this scene as well, showing how Peter has become drunk with his newfound powers, believing that no one can relate to what he’s experiencing. He is also quite affecting in the aftermath of Ben’s death. Peter is in his room quietly crying, devastated by what happened and with the knowledge that it was his fault. He could have prevented it.

Kirsten Dunst brings a fresh-faced girl-next-door vibe to the role of M.J. She’s obviously beautiful but the actor isn’t afraid to act disarmingly goofy when posing for Peter’s pictures during their school field trip. She isn’t bored by the science stuff and actually looks interested in the tour guide’s spiel. The movie wisely has the relationship between her and Peter as its heart, establishing their friendship in scenes like when they tell each other their aspirations after they graduate from high school – she wants to be an actor and he wants to be a photographer, working his way through college. It a wonderful character building moment as Peter encourages M.J. to follow her dreams.

The two actors have fantastic chemistry together. We want to see Peter and M.J. get together yet it is always tantalizingly just out of reach. The scene where he saves her from would-be muggers as Spider-Man and she rewards him with a passionate kiss is a moment of intimacy that is missing from a lot of the current crop of comic book superhero movies, which are strangely asexual. What, superheroes don’t get to have love lives? The potential romance between Peter and M.J. is one of the best things about Spider-Man.

Willem Dafoe does a great job conveying Norman’s gradual transition to the dark side and the emergence of a split personality. It allows the actor to play two separate characters – Osborn, the victim, and the Green Goblin who wants to punish those that wronged him. The movie takes the time to show what motivated a decent man like Norman to go bad, transforming himself into the Goblin. He’s not a simple, world dominating baddie but a tortured soul driven mad by self-imposed pressures and corporate machinations. It was a quite a coup getting someone of Dafoe’s caliber to play the villain. He gives the role his own distinctive spin, like the Thanksgiving dinner he attends at Peter and Harry’s place. It looks like Norman but the way Dafoe plays it you can tell that the Goblin persona has taken over in the way he leers suggestively at M.J. and threateningly at Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) when she slaps his hand for touching the food before saying Grace.

As he demonstrated with Darkman, Raimi has a knack for kinetic camerawork and editing tailor-made for a comic book superhero movie, which he demonstrates during the Green Goblin’s attack on the Oscorp Unity Day Festival in downtown New York City. While trading blows with him, Spider-Man saves several innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire, most notably M.J. The CGI in this sequence is impressive, seamlessly showing off both combatants’ abilities. Technology had finally caught up to what the comic books had been doing all along and brought Spider-Man’s webslinging powers vividly to life.

At the end of Spider-Man, Peter sums up his lot in life best when he says, “No matter what I do no matter how hard I try, the ones I love will always be the ones that pay.” This movie shows the sacrifices a hero must make in order to keep the ones he loves safe. Spider-Man is about what it takes to become a hero and what it means to be one. All it takes is one fateful moment to change your life forever. For Peter it was refusing to stop and armed robber who goes on to kill Uncle Ben. At that moment Peter realizes that his actions have real consequences and that he must use his powers responsibly. Thus, Spider-Man is born. It is this moment that sets him on the path to becoming a superhero.

Raimi Fest Blogathon: The Quick and the Dead

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post is part of the Raimi Fest over at the Things That Don't Suck blog. There are all kinds of fantastic submissions going on, check it out!

Ever since Clint Eastwood's film Unforgiven (1992), the western has enjoyed a lucrative revival in Hollywood. That film's success paved the way for a whole slew of new takes on the genre from the traditional (Tombstone) to the gimmicky (Posse), with homages to all the old masters — most notably John Ford. However, no one had tried to pay tribute to Sergio Leone and his colorful Spaghetti Westerns (with the exception of Alex Cox’s surreal ode, Straight to Hell) that were wild, often surreal explorations of the western genre. No one that is, until Sam Raimi's film, The Quick and the Dead (1995) was released.

Raimi, best known for turning the horror genre upside down with his Evil Dead trilogy, was the ideal filmmaker to re-visit the Spaghetti Western. Like Leone, Raimi is not afraid to inject his own unique style into a film with the intention of breathing new life into a tired genre. Leone did this first with the western and later, the gangster film, while Raimi chose the horror film before tackling the western. The result: The Quick and the Dead is a playful, entertaining film that doesn't aspire to do anything more than take the viewer on a thrilling ride.

Essentially a series of shoot-outs, The Quick and the Dead distracts us from this simple concept with a twisted tale of revenge. Enter a mysterious woman (Sharon Stone) who is not only quick with her gun but with her snappy comebacks to snide remarks. She soon finds herself in the sorry excuse of a town named Redemption (you can almost cut the symbolism with a knife) conveniently before the start of its annual quick draw contest.

The competition throws all sorts of colorful characters into the mix: from Ace Handlen (Lance Henriksen), a preening card player and a crack shot, to The Kid (Leonardo DiCaprio), a young upstart who is as cocky as he is fast with a gun. To make the whole spectacle a little more interesting, the town's sheriff, John Herod (Gene Hackman), forces Cort (Russell Crowe), a lethal killer who used to ride with the lawman, into the contest. However, Cort has given up killing and turned into a repentant preacher with his lack of bloodlust adding a bit of variety to the proceedings.

The contest is run by Herod, a truly evil man, who delights in keeping the town under his tyrannical boot heel. It soon becomes apparent, however, that the contest isn't the only reason that Stone's character has arrived in this town. The competition serves as a convenient excuse for her to exact a little revenge and also for us to watch these wild personalities square off against one another.

The Quick and the Dead was a refreshing change of pace for filmmaker Sam Raimi. He had just survived an exhausting and often frustrating battle with Universal Studios over Army of Darkness (1993), the last film in his Evil Dead trilogy. His budget had been cut back considerably, to the point where Raimi and the film's star Bruce Campbell were forced to use their own money to finish the film. To make matters worse, critics and audiences alike subsequently panned Army of Darkness. Raimi viewed his new project as a way of putting this horrendous experience behind him.

But he was not the first choice to direct The Quick and the Dead. Simon Moore, a British screenwriter, wrote the script and intended to direct the film himself. However, the producers had other ideas when Sharon Stone came on board as one of the stars and a co-producer as well. She was great admirer of Raimi's work and recommended him as director. "He was the only person on my list. If Sam hadn't made this movie, I don't think I would have made it," she said at the time of its release.

Raimi accepted the job for a number of reasons. Up until that time, he had always been known primarily as an independent filmmaker working outside of the system. Raimi viewed this new project as his first Hollywood film with big name stars. "So it was time to see what it would be like to make a big Hollywood movie. It had always been a dream of mine, but I'd never done it." On another level, he saw this film as his homage to one of the masters of the western, Sergio Leone. No one had attempted to pay tribute to this particular filmmaker and Raimi thought it high time that someone did. As he commented in an interview with Cinescape magazine, "the current genre cycle, the 'Spaghetti Western,' which was Leone's cheesier, less-classy version of the big studio Western, hasn't really been re-explored. This script really hit upon that, updating it with a female lead and a different set of values."

What could have been just another novelty twist on the western is transformed by Raimi's Gonzo style into a slick film filled with dramatic slow motion shots, adrenaline-fueled zooms, tracking shots with unusual perspectives, and extensive usage of deep focus photography that resembles a demented Orson Welles on speed. This rather showy excess of style playfully sets the tone of the film between parody and seriousness to the point where you are never quite sure which side of the fence the film is on. This was Raimi's intention from the beginning as he saw this extravagant approach "as entertainment for the audience. This is a fun, entertaining Western for a '90s crowd."

Raimi's approach also keeps the film interesting to watch. In what is fundamentally a picture built around a series of shoot-outs, he keeps things fresh and exciting by filming each significant showdown in a different style. Raimi’s wild approach also gives The Quick and the Dead an almost surreal quality: we get an unusual perspective shot through a huge bullet hole left in one gunslinger's head that seems almost cartoonish in nature (only to be recycled in the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers). The bad guys are photographed at dramatically low angles as they chew up the scenery with their sneering, dirty looks and obvious contempt for anything decent. Pathetic fallacy also plays a large role in the film. When a fierce storm of biblical proportions hits the town, sure enough something rotten is bound to happen. Of course this all seems like some sort of pat cliché, but there is a playful quality and chutzpah on Raimi's part to use every camera trick and technique in the book, that gives the film real charm and makes it worth watching.

Another reason why The Quick and the Dead is so watchable lies in the fine group of actors that assembled to make this film. It’s a good blend of big name, marquee value stars like Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio and Gene Hackman, mixed with strong character actors like Lance Henriksen and, at that time, Russell Crowe, who just starting out in Hollywood. Even though most critics admired Stone’s turn as a no-nonsense gunslinger that ably holds her own against any man, I found Crowe’s tortured killer turned preacher to be the real standout performance of the film. You can almost feel the pain and frustration boiling inside Cort as Herod forces him to kill time and time again, even though he has renounced his violent ways. Crowe doesn’t have nearly the amount of screen time that Stone, DiCaprio or Hackman have, but he makes every scene that he’s in count by playing against type — his character is quiet and reserved when everyone else threatens to go over the top with their performances.

The Quick and the Dead wasn’t all that well-received by mainstream critics when it first came out. Roger Ebert gave it two out of four stars and wrote, “As preposterous as the plot was, there was never a line of Hackman dialogue that didn't sound as if he believed it. The same can't be said, alas, for Sharon Stone, who apparently believed that if she played her character as silent, still, impassive and mysterious, we would find that interesting.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan wrote, “The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “Suffice it to say that Ms. Stone's one tactical mistake, in a film she co-produced, is to appear to have gone to bed with Mr. DiCaprio's character … This episode has next to nothing to do with the rest of the story. And a brash, scrawny adolescent who is nicknamed the Kid can make even the most glamorous movie queen look like his mother.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe also criticized Stone’s performance: “Stone seems to conceive of acting as a series of fixed facial expressions. She goes from one to another — two in all — like someone playing with Peking opera masks … Suffice it to say, there hasn't been acting this mechanical since Speed Racer.” Finally, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “Of course, the superficiality of the characters wasn't a problem in Raimi's other films; those pictures reveled in their lurid cartooniness. Perhaps he's trying to outgrow his brazenly adolescent style, but if so, he picked the wrong genre in which to do it.”

The Quick and the Dead has become something of a forgotten film in Raimi’s canon. Not weird enough for his hardcore fans and too strange for the mainstream, it has been relegated to cinematic limbo. I think it is time to re-evaluate this film. The Quick and the Dead may not have anything profound to say about the human condition but so what? That's not the film's goal. It serves as a piece of escapism, to make one forget about the problems of the real world and enter a fantastic realm filled with vivid characters and exotic locales that only the power of film can deliver. And on that level, Raimi’s film is a success.

The Hudsucker Proxy

It had to happen. After an impressive run of critically acclaimed independent films, culminating with Barton Fink (1991), which won the top three awards at the Cannes Film Festival, the Coen brothers – Joel and Ethan – made their first Hollywood studio film, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), with none other than uber producer Joel Silver. Most film critics were unimpressed with the final result and if hitching their wagon to Silver was the Coens’ attempt at appealing to a broader audience that too failed as the film flopped at the box office. So, what the hell happened? It certainly wasn’t from a lack of trying as The Hudsucker Proxy starred a trifecta of stellar acting talent with Tim Robbins, Paul Newman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. Hell, the Coens even enlisted their long-time friend and fellow filmmaker Sam Raimi to co-write the screenplay.

As if eerily foreshadowing the film’s fate, the opening voiceover narration observes the protagonist’s destiny: “How’d he get so high and why’s he feeling so low?” I’ve always felt that The Hudsucker Proxy is the Coen brothers’ most (unfairly) maligned film, which is a shame because it has a lot going for it, including witty dialogue, incredibly detailed production design, some jaw-dropping set pieces, and their usual rogue’s gallery of doofuses, blowhards and snappy wiseasses. This film should be seen as the Coens’ affectionate homage to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s.

The camera moves over a snowy New York City at night on New Year’s Eve, 1958. As we move past several buildings, we finally come upon the imposing Hudsucker Industries building with a massive clock adorning its façade along with their slogan, “The Future is Now,” thereby introducing the film’s prevailing theme: time. The opening voiceover narration is all about the passing of time as it talks about the beginning of a new year and how people at Times Square are waiting for it to arrive, “all trying to catch hold of one moment of time.” We are introduced to one of the film’s “lost souls” – Norville Barnes (Tim Robbins) – as he climbs out of his office window, ready to commit suicide. The voiceover narration describes him as someone, “out of hope, out of rope, out of time.” The narrator ponders Norville’s fate and offers this sage observation: “Well, the future, that’s something you can never tell about. But the past, that’s another story.” As this last line is being spoken, the camera pans from Norville to the large clock on the building and we travel back in time, one month, to find out what brought him to this sorry state of affairs.

Recent Muncie School of Business Administration graduate Norville Barnes arrives in New York City to make it big. Through a rather Coens-esque twist of fate, he lands a mediocre job in the mailroom at Hudsucker Industries just as the company's founder and CEO Waring Hudsucker (Charles Durning) takes a swan dive off the 44th floor to his death. The Coens continue their obsession with time by having Waring start his watch before he jumps out the window. As he runs across the large boardroom table, the ticking of his watch gets louder as his time is running out. Fearing that the leaderless company will have to go public and “any slob in a smelly t-shirt” will be able to buy stock, the board of directors, led by the ruthless Sidney J. Mussberger (Paul Newman), have one month and decide to find a proxy, a puppet, a pawn, “some jerk we can really push around,” as Sidney puts it, to fill the vacant position left by the recently departed Waring. This will drive the company into the ground so that they can buy back the stock at a cheaper rate. We first meet Sidney looking out the window that his boss just jumped out of with the massive building clock looming ominously overhead.

Norville’s brief stint in the Hudsucker mailroom is depicted as a hellish Orwellian nightmare right out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), complete with all kinds of office drones scurrying back and forth. A trip up the elevator offers glimpses of floors filled with seemingly endless aisles of desks like something out of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment (1960). Norville becomes the patsy and is soon blundering his way to success thanks to a little invention called the hula-hoop. And with the catchy slogan, "You know, for kids," Norville's invention becomes all the rage but spells potential disaster for the Sidney and his cronies. As if Norville's problems aren't enough, Amy Archer (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a determined newspaper reporter for the Manhattan Argus is thrown into the mix as she tries to uncover the real story at Hudsucker Industries. Their meet-cute is inventively realized by the Coens as seen and told from the point-of-view of two taxi cab drivers which is a novel way of depicting one of the oldest clichés in the screwball comedy genre.

If The Hudsucker Proxy is remembered at all, it’s for the show-stopping sequence where the hula-hoop is created, marketed and brought out into the world where it eventually becomes a monster hit among kids all over the country. Directed by none other than Sam Raimi, with his usual stylistic virtuosity, this sequence is visual storytelling at its finest. Nice touches include three anonymous Hudsucker executives (seen only in silhouette) in the “Creative Bullpen” (one of whom is Raimi) thinking up names for the hula-hoop – “The Dancing Dingus! The Belly-go-Round,” while in the foreground a secretary reads War and Peace to cheekily convey the passage of time (in a subsequent shot, she’s apparently finished that book and working her way through Anna Karenina). There’s also the bit where a lone hula-hoop rolls down a street only to be discovered by a child and this kickstarts the whole craze. The energy conveyed in this sequence is electric and is a pure cinematic moment.

In The Hudsucker Proxy, Norville has the air of a holy goof about him. He’s a doofus who happens to luck his way into good fortune without being aware of how it happened. Tim Robbins uses his tall, lanky frame for maximum comedic effect as evident in the scene where he first meets Sidney and proceeds to start a fire, runs around with a water cooler jug trying to put it out and then gets his foot stuck in a now flaming wastepaper basket only to almost send the aging businessman out the window. Robbins often sports a goofy grin and instills Norville with unflappable optimism and enthusiasm, especially for his big idea – the hula-hoop.

Amy Archer is your typical career gal, a no-nonsense mash-up of Rosalind Russell and Katharine Hepburn that never stops talking as Jennifer Jason Leigh brilliantly recreates the rat-a-tat-tat delivery of dialogue that was synonymous in films from the ‘30s and ‘40s. Amy, and her distinctive (grating for some) accent, was part of an informal trilogy of period dialogue accents that Leigh perfected in the 1990s along with Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) and Kansas City (1996). The only problem is that Amy eventually falling in love with Norville doesn’t seem believable. There’s no real chemistry between Leigh and Robbins. The Coens try to make it work but it is the glaring flaw in an otherwise excellent film.

Paul Newman fits seamlessly into the Coen brothers universe as the malevolent puppetmaster Sidney J. Mussberger, a name that evokes that of J.J. Hunsecker from the Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Like Burt Lancaster’s bullying columnist from that film, Newman’s businessman is out for himself and crushes anyone who gets in his way. Sidney is a master manipulator who thinks he has all the angles figured out. It looks like Newman is having a lot of fun with this role as he gets to ham it up a little as a tyrannical tycoon. Watching him spout the Coen brothers’ colorful dialogue is a delight.

The attention to period detail is impressive. It’s not just the cars and what people wear but how they speak that so vividly evokes the 1950s. Blink and you’ll miss a cameo by the late Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith as Norville’s fashionable girlfriend once the hula-hoop takes off and makes him a media sensation. Coens regular Steve Buscemi even shows up for an obligatory cameo as a beatnik bartender. Other Coens alumni, like John Mahoney, as her grumpy editor who always smokes a stogie and yells all the time, and Bruce Campbell, as one of her co-workers and foil, are along for the ride and contribute memorable moments as Amy’s co-workers at the Argus.

Barton Fink's rather impressive collection of awards and accolades drew the attention of big time Hollywood producer Joel Silver who had admired the Coens' films since Blood Simple (1984). He envisioned their next project as the big breakthrough into the mainstream. To aid in their endeavors he used his considerable clout to give the brothers two things that they never had before: a large budget of $30 million and big name stars like Tim Robbins and Paul Newman. As a result, the Coens decided to resurrect an old project that they had shelved years ago called The Hudsucker Proxy. Written in 1986 with Sam Raimi, the Coens had never considered filming Proxy because of the rather large scope that they had envisioned for the film. As Joel explained in an interview, "The reason why we didn't make it when we wrote it is we realized how expensive it was going to be; it had special effects and it was all done on stage sets." Silver's involvement provided them with the means to make the film a reality. And so, with Raimi along for the ride, the Coens set out to subvert the mainstream with their own unique vision.

The Coens were very conscious of The Hudsucker Proxy as a throwback to classic Hollywood cinema. Ethan said, "The script, which contains a lot of traditional genre elements, was marked by a kind of heartwarming fantasy element out of Frank Capra. It also had a lot of verbal comedy, the kind you see in films by Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks, with dialogue delivered in a rapid-fire, machine-gun style. But it was bigger and broader, with physical comedy sequences and a lot of oddball action." While trying to sell Blood Simple after making it, the Coens shared a house with Raimi and this was where The Hudsucker Proxy was written. It took them two to three months to write the script and as early as 1985, the Coens were quoted as saying that an upcoming project "takes place in the late Fifties in a skyscraper and is about big business. The characters talk fast and wear sharp clothes."

This first image that they conceived of was that of Norville about to jump from the window of a skyscraper and then they had to figure out how he got there and how to save him. They decided to incorporate the hula-hoop because, according to Joel, “we had to come up with something that this guy was going to invent that on the face of it was ridiculous. Something that would seem, by any sort of rational measure, to be doomed to failure, but something that on the other hand the audience already knew was going to be a phenomenal success." Ethan said, "The whole circle motif was built into the design of the movie, and that just made it seem more appropriate."

Art house darlings, the Coens wanted to make a film that would be seen by a lot of people and so they approached Silver. Despite his reputation, the producer was hands-off with the Coens and his only input was to convince the filmmakers not to shoot their film in black and white. Silver pitched the project to Warner Brothers by saying that they would get a film that the critics would like and that everybody would want to see. The studio agreed but only if the Coens cast movie stars in the main roles. To his credit, Silver promised to protect the Coens from the studio and convinced executives to give them final cut.

The Hudsucker Proxy would see the Coens utilizing their largest budget up to that point in their career. They needed it in order to build large sets and use elaborate special effects. They had screened Blade Runner (1982) before making The Hudsucker Proxy, which also used elaborate sets and a large, detailed cityscape. Twenty-seven craftsmen spent three months building a '50s New York skyline, constructing fourteen skyscrapers. The film's skyline was based on photographs from a book that art director Dennis Gassner found called, New York in the Forties and the scale after Citizen Kane (1941). Principal photography began on December 1993 on soundstages at Carolco Studios in Wilmington, North Carolina with a budget of $25 million, although, some trade papers reported that it increased to $40 million.

The first signs of trouble surfaced when it was reported that the studio held test screenings for The Hudsucker Proxy. Audience comments were varied and the studio suggested re-shoots. The Coens obliged because they were very nervous working with their biggest budget to date and were eager for mainstream success. They added some footage that had been cut, shot some additional footage and added to the ending. Variety magazine claimed that the re-shoots were done to try and save the film because it was going to be a flop. However, Joel addressed the issue: "First of all, they weren't reshoots. They were a little bit of additional footage. We wanted to shoot a fight scene at the end of the movie. It was the product of something we discovered editing the movie, not previewing it."

The Hudsucker Proxy received mostly mixed to negative reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and wrote, “And wasn't there something dead at the heart of all of this? A kind of chill in the air? A feeling that the movie was more thought than art, more calculated than inspired? Doesn't the viewer spend more time admiring the sights on the screen than caring about them? Isn't there something wrong when you walk out of a movie humming the sets?” The Washington Post’s Desson Howe felt that the film was, “pointlessly flashy and compulsively overloaded with references to films of the '30s.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum called the film, “a jeering, dreamlike comedy with little on its mind except how neat the Coens are and how stupid or contemptible everybody else is, including the audience.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C” rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, “For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.” Time magazine’s Richard Schickel wrote, “Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.”

However, in her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “Carter Burwell's music is excessive in just the right way, echoing the overwrought, clue-giving scores of 50 years ago. And Dennis Gassner's design is a flawless addition to the film's muted, fairy-tale mood.” Empire magazine’s Kim Newman wrote, “While the story and the characters are perfect pastiche, making them hard to be involved with, human warmth is imported by the sheer joy of the directorial flourishes.”

The Hudsucker Proxy is about the passing of time and even stages the climactic set piece on the cusp of the New Year as two omniscient figures fight within the cogs and gears of the Hudsucker clock while Norville’s fate hangs literally in the balance. The Coens craftily suspend time for a few moments as they seem to be saying that an individual doesn’t have to be defined by their past and that the future always brings the promise of something new, a chance to redefine oneself. The future is now indeed.

The Hudsucker Proxy contained all of the Coens’ trademarks, however, something seemed to be missing from the mix. Perhaps it was the fact that Proxy was the Coens' second homage to the screwball comedy (the first being Raising Arizona) and this time out their reach far exceeded their grasp. As a critic in Sight and Sound observed, Norville Barnes is a Preston Sturges hero trapped in a Frank Capra story, existing in a world created by Fritz Lang. It is this rather odd mixture that may account for Proxy's demise. Or it may simply be that the Coen brothers do not make mainstream films. They have always had a detached view towards their characters – we never fully identify with them or get to know what makes them tick. As a result, there is no meeting the Coens half way. You either like their films or you don't. It didn't hurt that despite the media blitz for the film, it was virtually absent from most movie theaters outside of large, metropolitan cities. That being said, there is a lot going on and a lot to admire in The Hudsucker Proxy. The film has aged surprisingly well over the years and deserves a long overdue re-appraisal.

Darkman

After the phenomenal success of Tim Burton’s Batman (1989), everybody and his brother wanted a piece of that lucrative pie and tried to produce their own franchise of super hero films. For Universal Pictures it was Darkman (1990) – the greatest comic book film not actually based on a comic book. While its director Sam Raimi did an admirable job with the first two Spider-Man films, I have always felt like he was holding back stylistically. I miss the unbridled fun and pulpy charm of the Raimi who made Darkman, a dark, R-rated super hero film that fused together the sensibilities of Beauty and the Beast, The Phantom of the Opera and The Shadow. It demonstrated that Raimi could make the jump from low-budget independent films to Hollywood without compromising the Gonzo style that endeared him to his fans. Darkman also showed that he was maturing as a filmmaker by creating a dramatic and tragic love story while still featuring his show-stopping action sequences.

Raimi sets an appropriately comic book super hero-ish tone right from the get-go as two criminal gangs engage in a violent turf war. The action starts when a gang member reveals that his wooden leg conceals a machine gun. All hell breaks loose as cars come flying out of big wooden crates (?!) and miscellaneous henchmen (one sporting an eye patch so you know he’s a bad guy) are dispatched en masse with nary a drop of blood. Pretty soon, one side is sufficiently decimated and the dominant one, led by Robert G. Durant (Larry Drake), deals with the survivors, in particular, their leader Eddie Black (Jessie Lawrence Ferguson) in a way that establishes the film’s darkly goofy gallows humor. This sequence also sets up rather nicely that Durant is not a guy to be messed with as he has a rather nasty habit of collecting severed fingers from his victims.

Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson) is a brilliant scientist trying to create liquid skin that could help disfigured people or burn victims lead normal lives. However, after 99 minutes in the daylight the skin disintegrates. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) works in real estate and comes across something fishy in a deal she’s working on for Strack Industries. Mr. Strack (Colin Friels) has a lot of money riding on the deal and she discovers that he has ties with Durant. When Julie confronts Strack about it he sends Durant and his goons to recover the incriminating memorandum she has in her possession.

Unfortunately, it’s located at Westlake’s lab (which is also where he lives) and Durant and co. arrive right when he is on the verge of a breakthrough with his synthetic skin. Raimi shows off his innate understanding of the way action is depicted in comic books when Durant and his cronies attack Westlake and trash his lab. Raimi employs all sorts of skewed camera angles, unusual point-of-view shots and snap zooms that evoke the vivid, panel bursting action of Jack Kirby’s explosive, panel-bursting artwork. Durant beats Westlake viciously and leaves him to die in an explosion that destroys his lab. Westlake is blown clear but burned beyond recognition.

Somehow, doctors get a hold of him and perform a procedure so that impulses of pain are no longer transmitted to his brain. This also amplifies his emotions, including uncontrolled rage accompanied by surges of adrenaline which produce augmented strength. With everyone (including Julie) thinking he’s dead, Westlake takes refuge in an abandoned, run-down warehouse where he recreates his lab and plots revenge against Durant. Westlake uses his synthetic skin to pose as members of Durant’s gang and to recreate his old visage in an attempt to reconnect with Julie in the hopes of restoring things back to the way they were. But let’s face it, Westlake is only fooling himself and herein lies the tragic element of the story.

Raimi depicts Westlake’s first surge of uncontrolled anger rather imaginatively with a heady montage of starbursts, flames, fireballs, a skull, and other bizarre images that evoke some of the go-for-broke imagery of the first two Evil Dead films, especially the second one when Ash (Bruce Campbell) becomes possessed. Perhaps the two most obvious influences on Darkman are Beauty and the Beast and Phantom of the Opera which are evoked when the bandaged and disfigured Westlake, having just escaped from the hospital, finds temporary salvation in an alley one stormy night. He even dresses a bit like a cross between the Phantom and The Shadow, adopting the latter’s persona as an elusive avenger who strikes fear in the heart of men.

Raimi infuses the film with his trademark darkly comic slapstick like when Darkman dispatches Rick (Raimi’s brother Ted), one of Durant’s goons. The henchman pleads for his life, “I told you everything!” to which Darkman replies, “I know, Rick. I know you did. But let’s pretend that you didn’t!” The vigilante proceeds to stick Rick’s head up through a manhole into oncoming traffic and he meets the wheel of a transport truck with a sickening splat. Raimi also has a lot of fun with Westlake posing as Durant and his goons which gives the actors playing them an excuse to act out of character.

At one point, Raimi considered Gary Oldman to play Westlake but went with Liam Neeson instead and now it is hard to see anybody else in the role. Neeson gives his character the necessary gravitas and makes us feel sympathetic for his plight, even when he becomes horribly disfigured and the actor’s marquee good looks are buried under all kinds of make-up. This is due in large part to Neeson’s natural charisma but Raimi never lets us forget Westlake’s tragic dimensions, like when he takes Julie to a carnival and his emotions boil over after a sideshow barker pisses him off. Westlake breaks two of the man’s fingers, terrifying her. He can never be with Julie like before the explosion so long as his synthetic skin lasts only 99 minutes. Westlake will always be an outsider, an emotional mess living on the fringes of society.

Julia Roberts was initially considered for the role of Julie but Raimi cast Frances McDormand whom he had worked with on Crimewave (1985). Raimi had to fight to cast her in the role as the studio wanted Demi Moore to play the part. According to Raimi, he cast her to “bring that soul to the picture” so that audiences would care about what happens to her character. Although, he found it difficult directing her, despite knowing the actress personally for many years. He said, “our conception of the best movie to make differed, arguing in trying to make the best picture possible. We did come across disagreements, but they were very healthy.” At times, she admitted to having trouble separating her long-standing friendship with Raimi and his role as director. She said, “there are times when I was mad ... and I didn’t try to be diplomatic about it.” McDormand is an unconventional choice for the film’s love interest. She doesn’t have the typical Maxim magazine model looks (thank god!) that seem to be all the rage now, but rather seems like someone you’d actually know and not some unattainable beauty. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t really give her much to do except pine tragically for Westlake and become a hapless damsel in distress at the film’s climax.

Years before Darkman ever became a reality, Raimi had been interested in adapting an established super hero or comic book property to the big screen. He tried and failed to secure the rights to Batman and The Shadow (both went on to become films). Raimi decided to create his own super hero. Darkman started as a short story entitled, “The Darkman,” written by Raimi and then, with the help of his brother Ivan, he expanded it into a 40-page treatment. Ivan was a doctor and grounded the medical aspects in reality. Originally, it was a story about a man who lost his face and had to take on other faces only for it to evolve into a story about a man who uses this power to fight crime.

Raimi pitched this idea to Universal Pictures who liked it and gave him a budget of $11 million. At the time, this was the biggest budget and crew he had worked with. The screenplay went through several drafts and several people. Ex-Navy SEAL Chuck Pfarrer wrote the first draft of the script, followed by another draft by Sam and Ivan. During this stage, Raimi and co-producer Robert Tapert toyed with the notion that Darkman could become a franchise (indeed two sequels have been made). For this to happen, the script needed improvement and writers Daniel and Joshua Goldin were brought on board to write the fifth draft. The Goldins made sense of the various drafts and “lots of little story documents,” into a coherent script. It was also their job to build suspense in the story and work on the emotional aspects, like Westlake trying to reunite with the love of his life. They worked on the project for a month before moving on to another film and Ivan and Sam took over, writing drafts six through twelve.

Raimi told production designer Randy Ser that the look of the film would be a homage to the 1930s Universal horror films. For example, they designed Darkman’s laboratory with Dr. Frankenstein’s in mind. Ser saw Westlake as someone “living in a world filled with light and golden hues” and his lab was painted a golden sun yellow and lit to reflect the sunlight coming in. In contrast, Darkman’s lab “becomes a place of darkness and more chaos.” His lab was a real location, a former refrigerated food warehouse in downtown Los Angeles. It was converted into soundstages for the production. Ser also faced the challenge of creating key props for the film, chief among them Westlake’s skin-making machine. The result was a hybrid of a computer, a photocopier, a hologram and skin mold, which allowed the artificial skin mask to push and bulge visibly. The skin mold portion was modeled on a real-life device known as pin molds, popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Ser consulted with David Copperfield’s people and told them he wanted to build an illusion that would operate all the way through the sequence with no edits.

Raimi pulls out all the stops for the film’s climactic action sequence where Darkman hangs onto a cable dangling from a helicopter flying through the city, slamming into buildings in a way that eerily anticipates a very similar sequence in The Matrix (1999), only without all kinds of CGI. There is something real and exciting about seeing a stuntman actually hanging onto a cable from an honest to goodness helicopter that is missing from the Wachowskis’ film. The second part of this sequence takes place on the top floors of an unfinished skyscraper and allows Raimi to have a blast with several characters nearly plummeting to their death... and a few who do. This sequence took two-and-a-half weekends to complete because they were flying through the city below five hundred feet and had to have special permits to do it. A stunt double was used and was hooked up on two cables in three different spots in case one failed. The filmmaker had to shut down several blocks of downtown L.A. on consecutive weekends. The results speak for themselves and are exciting and dynamic.

Raimi had a problem with the editor that the studio assigned. Eight weeks into assembling the rough cut and he wasn’t following Raimi’s storyboards, had a nervous breakdown and left. Tapert and Raimi had a difficult time dealing with the studio. Tapert remarked, “it isn’t the picture we thought it should be, based on the footage we shot ... The studio got nervous about some kind of wild things in it, and made us take them out ... We fought until the very last minute to get some of it back in.”

Raimi was surprised by the commercial success of Darkman because Universal told him that it had tested badly with some people who rated it the worst film they had ever seen. According to executives, it was one of the worst-scoring pictures in the studio’s history. However, Raimi liked the “brilliant” marketing campaign the studio came up with, releasing posters in advance with a silhouette of the main character and the question, “Who is Darkman?” According to the director, “the marketing made the film a money-maker.”

Darkman garnered mostly positive reviews from mainstream critics. In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Wilmington felt that Darkman was the only movie at the time "that successfully captures the graphic look, rhythm and style of the superhero books.” The New Yorker’s Terrence Rafferty wrote, "Raimi works from inside the cheerfully violent adolescent-male sensibility of superhero comics, as if there were no higher style for a filmmaker to aspire to, and the absence of condescension is refreshing.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "B" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "The movie is full of jaunty, Grand Guignol touches (the main gangster enjoys snapping and collecting fingers), but Raimi's images also have a spectral, kinetic beauty.” In his review for the Washington Post, Joe Brown wrote, "Though Raimi seems to be trying to restrain himself, his giddily sick sense of humor still pops out all over the place – Darkman is a frenetic funhouse ride that has you laughing and screaming at the same time.” However, Time magazine’s Richard Corliss felt that Raimi wasn’t "effective with actors" and People magazine’s Ralph Novak called Darkman, a "loud, sadistic, stupidly written, wretchedly acted film."

While Raimi’s Spider-Man films are plagued by a protagonist that is a little too angsty for my tastes (especially the awful third film), he gets it just right with Darkman. I’m a fan of his early films with their wild and loose style as typified by his hyperactive camerawork. Darkman proved that he could bring this kinetic approach to a prestigious Hollywood blockbuster and anticipates his work on the Spider-Man films in many ways. However, this is a project that originated with Raimi and so it has a more personal feel that is missing from his later films where he was basically a director-for-hire (which makes his recent Drag Me to Hell feel like a return to form). Darkman also features Raimi’s trademark slapstick humor which deflates some of the pretentiousness of the more angst-ridden aspects of its tragic protagonist. The film doesn’t take itself so serious all the time and this results in a fun, entertaining ride.

This post was inspired by Mr. Peel's excellent take on Darkman over at his blog.

SOURCES

Arnold, Gary. "Sam Raimi's Flair Makes Darkman A Reel Delight." Washington Times. August 23, 1990.

Counts, Kyle. "Heart of Darkness." Starlog. December 1990.

Counts, Kyle. "Black Heart." Starlog. January 1991.

Italie, Hillel. "Beauties, Beasts and 'Biff!' 'Bam!' 'Pow!'" Associated Press. September 12, 1990.

Johnston, Sheila. "Beauty Within the Beast." The Independent. November 9, 1990.

McDonagh, Maitland. Filmmaking on the Fringe. 1995.

Muir, John Kenneth. The Unseen Force: The Films of Sam Raimi. Applause Books. 2004.

Portman, Jamie. "Horror can be a labor of love." Toronto Star. August 16, 1990.

Stanley, John. "Darkman Brings Director's Talent to Light." San Francisco Chronicle. August 26, 1990.

Warren, Bill. "The Man Behind Darkman." Fangoria. September 1990.

Warren, Bill. The Evil Dead Companion. St. Martin's Griffin. 2001.