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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, February 4th, 1998 - Comments Off on Ranting and Raving
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Ranting and Raving

Readers often ask why movies don’t work. Particularly movies that have all the right elements. Stars we like. Ideas we like. Style. These films are incredibly infuriating because they come so close to being the moviegoing experiences we crave. Almost.
If there were ever a perfect example of this, it’s The Replacement Killers. Chow Yun-Fat is one of the great Hong Kong stars and a great guy on and off screen. Mira Sorvino is an Oscar-winner taking a chance, changing her looks and voice to fit the film. First-time feature director Antoine Fuqua has visual skills to spare. The supporting cast is a cornucopia of good actors from every country on the map. And the story is interesting.
So what went wrong?
Well, start with a screenplay by Ken Sanzel that imitates Hong Kong, but utterly misses the point. The humor that makes those films wonderful is symbolic irony. Arnold-esque tag lines don’t belong in this film, yet they reign. Worse, they aren’t funny. He even puts one in Chow’s mouth. Argh. When Mira tries to sell one line that doesn’t get a laugh, the silence is deafening.
Then there’s Fuqua. God, this guy is talented. But he may be the next Tony Scott, a visualist who throws away story for style every time he has a chance and occasionally gets saved by a great script. His theft of moments from other films is rampant. The worst is when he plagiarizes the brilliant Danny Trejo death scene from Heat while Trejo himself is in the movie. And he suffers a bad case of my ultimate action pet peeve — space-itis. We have no idea where the players in fight scenes are. There’s no tension if you can’t anticipate the danger.
Which brings up an odd element of this film. It’s under the hour and a half mark that serves as the bare minimum length for a studio film. You can be sure that it wasn’t meant to be that short when they started production. My guess is that there were a lot of studio-requested post-test screening cuts, perhaps of entire scenes. This would also explain why many pretty, but meaningless shots we see early in the film are excessively long.
Here’s my solution: Bring back this cast and crew, but get Mira’s boyfriend Quentin to write the film. Fuqua has the visual style that QT lacks and Tarantino makes sure that every line of dialogue builds character and moves the story. Exactly what’s missing in Killers. Fuqua would have to respect the script enough not to dump thoughts for visuals. Sorvino would have a chance to relax a little and just act. The really bad guys would be wittier. And Chow Yun-Fat would become the American star he deserves to be.
READER OF THE DAY: “How about ‘Don’t Go Postal?’ Several things come to mind. Think about it …” — Stephen G

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon