Blade Runner

Years ago I fell asleep during a screening of Blade Runner (1982) in a college class called Art of Cinema. Last night I finally sat down to give it another go, and lo and behold, the same problem reared its head. For all its lush, grandiose production design, Blade Runner is a bore: a beauty with no personality. Harrison Ford, usually capable of carrying a movie when it's not so hot, wanders through Blade Runner a prisoner to its massive size. That bigness ends up sinking both the actors and the plot: they're crushed under the film's dead weight.

Director Ridley Scott tries to utilize the same deliberate pacing he employed so effectively in Alien, but it doesn't translate well to Blade Runner, because there's no pay-off, and we're just waiting, waiting, waiting, occasionally admiring the film's artistic prowess, even shaking our heads that the movie got some of its prophesies--it's set in a wastelandish Los Angeles future (2019 to be exact)--right (such as the increasing specter of advertising in our lives, although I suppose that wasn't so different in the early 1980s).  

Alien is one of the slowest movies I've ever seen, and yet I find it absolutely riveting. The whole movie has a palpable tension running through it because you know something is going to happen, and while Alien is a visually stunning film in its own right, it also practices a kind of economy that makes its pace and its characters (about whom we know very little, and dare I say, care for even less, at times) work for it. Blade Runner has both the slow pace and the unlikable characters, but it's saturated in a kind of artiness that works against it: you feel immersed in the murky surroundings of the neo-gothic urban decay and it fills you with dread. The synth score by Vangelis provides the final sheen of heavy-handed excess. (And yet many people seem to see in Scott's second major film a masterpiece.)

Scott seems intent on conjuring up the American movie past in Blade Runner. One of his heroines--Sean Young--is made up to resemble Rosalind Russell from a Howard Hawks movie, and it's pretty clear that Harrison Ford, who plays a robot bounty hunter (the robots are called replicants because they are such perfect imitators of humans--down to their memories and emotions--and he's called a blade runner) enlisted to assassinate four robots that have illegally returned to earth to exist among the humans. Ford's mission is complicated when he falls in love with one of the replicants and feels guilty for killing another. We're supposed to ponder deep philosophical questions about what it means to be human, and while these are interesting questions, they're not enough to sustain a movie that feels so intentionally important. I didn't have to work to enjoy Alien. Blade Runner demands that I appreciate how significant it is.

Based on the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick. Adapted for the screen by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. With Rutger Hauer (who's an impressive, captivating actor just to behold; he commands the screen when he's in front of the camera), Daryl Hannah, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmett Walsh, William Sanderson, Joe Turkel, and Joanna Cassidy. ★★

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

For years, my adult self looked back on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) with fondness. It was a movie I watched fairly regularly, and it shared a VHS space with George Romero's Day of the Dead. (In those days, my parents taped movies off television, and we had hundreds of them, three to a video-cassette tape.) Well, having just re-watched Roger Rabbit for the first time in probably eight or nine years, I must report that I no longer feel the same affection for this movie. This time, I was struck by the fact that it's noisy and chaotic and not as entertaining as it used to be.

The director is Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), and Steven Spielberg co-executive produced the film, which was made by his production company, Amblin. And yes, it's some kind of an adult tribute to cartoons, from the old to the new, from MGM to Warner Bros. to Disney. The effects of intermingling live action and animation were, of course, something else a quarter-century ago. Today they're a bit dated, but the film is still watchable in that sense.

The plot is taken out of some 1940s L.A. noir. A washed-up, boozing private eye named Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) is hired by a studio executive to take some lewd photos of a cartoon named Jessica Rabbit (uncredited voice of Kathleen Turner, who was the Lauren Bacall of the 80s) in flagrante delicto with Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye), the owner of Toontown, which is exactly what it sounds like. When Jessica's husband the daffy Roger Rabbit sees them, he becomes infuriated. Next thing you know, Marvin Acme is bumped off, and Roger of course becomes the prime suspect. The obvious culprit isn't Roger, though. It's the ominous and clearly malicious Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd), who has big plans for Los Angeles as it finishes out the 1940s.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is designed to keep the kiddos interested. And with that, the filmmakers lose no opportunity to keep things flying at you. There's barely a moment to catch your breath. When the film slows down and allows Bob Hoskins to actually dominate the screen, it becomes more watchable. He's a marvelous actor who commands the screen when he's allowed to. He looks like Ed Asner: a lovable bear of a man, whose British accent occasionally slips out, generally when he's shouting.

Hoskins is paired off with Joanna Cassidy, who plays the no-nonsense bartender Dolores, his girlfriend who's too realistic to be bowled over with ideas of romance or being swept off her feet by her has-been of a beau. Cassidy doesn't have much room for character growth, but she's able to convey a lot just by the way she stands with her hands on her hips, or in the way she pronounces Eddie a failure with a look or a simple gesture. These are the kinds of actors you need in a film like this, where no one is particularly interested in the acting. All the eye candy is on display to titillate us, so why would we ever care about something so drab as performances? They make it palatable.

As the voice of Roger Rabbit, Charles Fleischer doesn't fail to inject a certain madcap genius into his vocal performance. But Roger grates on the nerves: he's the annoying sidekick who keeps ruining everything for the hero, and the fact that he's constantly trying to steal the show and be cute didn't endear him to me this time around.

There are lots of familiar voices popping up, as this isn't the kind of movie that's content to let the humor or the excitement build of its own momentum. It's all shoved into our faces at break force speed, with director Zemeckis seemingly screaming, "SEE? ISN'T THIS GREAT STUFF?!" You'll find: Betty Boop (Mae Questel), Bugs Bunny and various other cartoon characters performed by Mel Blanc. With Lou Hirsch as Baby Herman, David Lander as the Judge's right-hand-weasel, Alan Tilvernas R.K. Maroon, and Richard LeParmentier. Amy Irving sings "Why Don't You Do Right" as Jessica Rabbit. Written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman. 104 min. ★★½

The Late Show

The Late Show (1977) is a lovely, tattered valentine to the golden age of Hollywood film noirs. Art Carney plays Ira Wells, an aging private eye whose best days are behind him. A flaky ex-actress named Margo (played with daffy energy by Lily Tomlin) hires him to track down her cat, which is being held for ransom by a low-life to whom Margo owes 500 dollars.

Things get more complicated, as they usually do in this sort of flick. It's full of lurid characters and memorable set pieces. The scene where Ira and Margo are skulking around a sleazy apartment complex is pure gold: the lighted pool casts a glittery reflection on the stucco facades, and you realize how unappealing L.A. really must be.  

The Late Show de-mythologizes the allure of Hollywood, and of the private eye, just like Robert Altman's 1973 film The Long Goodbye: Ira has a bad ulcer and he's out of shape and not as quick on his feet as he used to be, and he sees his era and all its players fading before his eyes. (Robert Altman, incidentally, produced this film, which was written and directed by Robert Benton). With Eugene Roche, Bill Macy, Joanna Cassidy, and John Considine, all playing grimy, rotten heels.