By D.K. Holm
May 6, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
Mind Games
MINDHUNTERS
We've been here before.
A group of like-minded citizens is confined to an isolated setting. Soon they learn that one of their members is intent on killing them, picking them off one by one. The killer's motivation is unknown; and he or she has a preternatural ability to anticipate the victims' most likely actions.
This "and then there were none" approach to story structure has a long tradition in films, evolving from the original Agatha Christie premise to become the essential foundation of most teen serial killer horror films.
MINDHUNTERS begins with a prologue that shows J. D. Reston, (Christian Slater) and Sara Moore (Kathryn Morris of later COLD CASE fame, though this movie was made first) in action. They are on a case, looking for the kidnapper of two girls. They end up in a large country estate that is more like an abattoir out of a Rob Zombie movie. Not to spoil anything, but it soon turns out that the "case" they were on is a tactical exercise for these prospective psychological profiling unit candidates. They even unnecessarily fall down and play dead, all in what turns out to be an elaboration of a small moment in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.
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When the theatrics are over, Jake Harris (Val Kilmer) steps out from behind the curtain to chastise the team for laxity and bad assumptions. Their boss is a distant cinematic relative of SILENCE OF THE LAMB's Scott Glenn, only a tad seedier and more of a suspect than a leader. He is the FBI's lead mind reader, but his methods have evoked the ire of his superiors and he functions under a cloud. His students have one more task before graduation or dismissal from the psychological profiling unit. That is to spend the weekend on a remote island off the coast of Georgia normally used for military exercises, where they will "solve" a crime.
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On the eve of their trip they meet in a bar for drinks and in their relaxations unveil various tension among the crowd: Vince Sherman, who is in a wheel chair has learned that he has been passed over, and he tells Sara that she has been, too; meanwhile there is something going on between Reston and Patricia Velasquez's hot mama Nicole, who is trying to quit smoking. All the other characters look the same and it takes a while to distinguish among them.
Then, when one of the marquis stars dies in a bizarre and convoluted set up, a cockeyed Rube Goldberg affair featuring domino plaques and freezing hydrogen (the victim disintegrates like the villain in TERMINATOR 2 or a runner in a Gatoraid TV commercial).
The consequence of losing a charismatic lead player so soon is that you are stuck with the remaining actors, whom no one has ever heard of. The good thing about this is that because they are basically anonymous we really don't know which is the killer, if any. The bad thing is that I'm not sure who any of the characters are, or the actors who play them, except for Cliff Collins, Jr., who plays the guy in the wheelchair.
LL Cool J, who is equally charismatic, ends up being one of the survivors, but then, he is not a member of the team. His backstory is that a government oversight body has assigned him to observe the weekend's events to make sure that Harris's teaching procedures conform to FBI guidelines. But he is a better profiler than they are: in a nifty scene, he basically nails each one of them to the core, which also helps the viewer to understand much of what happens in the rest of the film.
Dimension usually has a gory thumb when it comes to horror but scenes such as that one may have made them think that this release as too "brainy." MINDHUNTERS has had a convoluted releases history. Miramax's horror unit Dimension originally planned for an April 2003 release. That was changed to January 2004, then January 23rd, then June 4th, then March 11th, 2005, then May 27th, then May 6th, and now finally May 13th (I think).
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There are two obvious reasons for this juggling. First, Miramax was seeking to find an opening spot for the film that was "just so" during a span of time that heralded the release of a Harry Potter film and now a STAR WARS capper. The studio obviously didn't think that the film could stand on its own when confronted with the least bit of competition. But in addition, Miramax was also going through a lot of sturm und drang over its Disney relationship, finally resolved when the Weinstein brothers were cut loose. So now, as the Weinsteins and Disney divest themselves of each other, now there is one very good reason why the film is released. It happens to be on the shelf.
MINDHUNTERS also appears to have had many fathers. On screen it is credited to Wayne Kramer (THE COOLER), whose idea it apparently was originally, and Kevin Brodbin (THE GLIMMER MAN). But Greg's Previews suggests that numerous other hands were involved in a ghostly doctor's manner: Kario Salem (THE SCORE), Cary Bickley (THE GUN IN BETTY LOU'S HANDBAG), Yuri Zeltzer (BLACK & WHITE), and even Ehren Kruger (SCREAM 3, THE RING). This stew of authors has the usual effect: to make it feel impersonal and programmatic. That any of the film is salvageable is testimony to the vitality of its genre.
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Which brings us to the director, Lauri Harjola, otherwise known as Renny Harlin. MINDHUNTERS falls between his hectic, coded Stallone racecar epic, and his excoriated version of the EXORCIST prequel, released first. Among the mainstream, Harlin's career has been in "decline" since the heights of DIE HARD 2, the other great DIE HARD movie. CUTTHROAT ISLAND was a misguided paean to his then wife, while DEEP BLUE SEA was sub-JAWS, according to the movie press. But there are few movies I return to as often as his other so-called disjecta, CLIFFHANGER and THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT. I love both these movies, and figuring in DIE HARD 2 Harlin appears to be much better for me when he is in the snow then the water.
It must be, then, that it is Harlin's hand that compels a sneaking admiration in me for MINDHUNTERS.
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Despite its relying on conventions of the serial killer and teen slasher genre (two of them are the spry heroine who must "face her fear" and the survivors being a racially mixed couple) which, coupled with its outlandish death scenes, will no doubt make for a toxic cocktail for the daily paper reviewers, who must guard the nation's moviegoers from anything not embodying received Hollywood movie-style or doctrinaire Oscar quality "Heritage" blandness. The film's heroine is dynamic and does indeed overcome the impediments that are stumbling blocks to her career but which also potentially doom her on this enclosed island. As an elaborate puzzle, the film plays fair with the audience. No, it doesn't have the intellectual ambition of MEMENTO or the realistic underpinning of the otherwise outlandish SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Yes, it is drive-in fodder — but without the continued existence of actual drive-ins, this is now a state of mind or a sub genre rather than a distinct commercial option.
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Most films in Harlin's "late" period are tales of women struggling for identity in a man's world a strangely satisfying theme for a man who in western eyes has a "girl's" name. Shouldn't he be admired for this? Shouldn't this invoke some interest in Harlin, especially from the gender-feminist-post-structuralists? Instead, Harlin has become some kind of joke director. It doesn't take a mind reader to see that Harlin, who has fallen on the bad side of the critics, couldn't even murder his way into their good graces.
Media Notes From All Over
It's heavy enough to do qualify for a gym workout. It sits in your lap with all the elegance of an airplane wing. And it comes in its own handy cardboard briefcase, with a plastic handle. It is THE STANLEY KUBRICK ARCHIVE (Taschen, 544 pages, $200, ISBN 3822822841) and while on the one hand it is a valuable addition to Kubrick scholarship it is also something of a rip-off.
These, and what follows, are first reactions to this major publishing event. If you are a Kubster fan like me the news reports last year of Kubrick's archive snooped through by a fan-scholar made you yearn for the day when that material might be made public. Jon Ronson reported in the the GUARDIAN about opening box upon box of Kubrick's stored memorabilia, material not only from each of his films but for several unmade ones, such as NAPOLEON.
When news reached the fans that Taschen, which in recent years has expanded from an art publisher through erotica to, now, film books — a trio of deliriously sensuous art forms — was issuing the fruits of the Kubrick archive (under the editorship of Alison Castle) such fans could do nothing but begin saving their pennies for the big expense.
With these higher end products Taschen goes all out, as seen by its publication of SOME LIKE IT HOT, a huge unmade bed of a book filled with all manner of Wilderian trivia. ARCHIVE, for example, comes with a DVD of an interview with Kubrick from 1966 and a 12-frame strip of 70mm film from 2001. Mine, for example, shows the sun peeking out from between planets. And the cherry red colored leatherette cover modeled after a scrapbook is luscious, while the multi-colored tabs are conducive to easily accessing sections of the book on specific films is at the least handy.
Taschen's downfall with KUBRICK ARCHIVE, however, is that for all its aspirations for intellectual credibility it is still an art publisher in its bones. Thus half the Kubrick book is a series of stills from nine-tenths of Kubrick's films. All of them, that is, except FEAR AND DESIRE, as per Kubrick's dismissal of that first feature as journeyman work — which leads to the second problem with the volume, which is its emerging from within the pockets of the Kubrick estate, i.e., the widder Kubrick, who seems intent upon tidying up Kubrick's from cold veneer to pet-loving gourmand. Similar debates rage about Orson Welles, who made just as many films as Kubrick, and with the same level of fierce independence.
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So when you finally past through the "art" half of the book to the "archive" part of the book, you get snap after snap of Kubrick on the set, smiling away in defiance of the commonly held view that he was a humorless tyrant. Sure, there is indeed archival material in the book's second half, including photos of costume test shots for NAPOLEON and other research material: notebook jottings, and whatnot (and by the way, why not the whole damned NAPOLEON script?). But much of this section is also filled with previously published interviews with Kubrick, such as the PLAYBOY and SIGHT AND SOUND, interviews easily available elsewhere, and numerous essays, memoirs, and chronologies by the likes of Vincent LoBrutto, Michael Herr, and Gene Philips, recognized Kube experts and authors of several of the 10 or 12 Kubrick books that have been published since 1996.
The widder Kubrick's efforts to control his legacy (again, not unlike the competing heirs of Welles's estate) are doomed to failure. Now that he is dead Kubrick is about to enter the post-death film community, where newfound commercial exploitation is disguised as an ongoing "conversation" about the filmmaker, just like Welles, in this as in so many ways his equivalent. There will be films about Kubrick, and one-offs such as the John Malkovich project about the real life guy who wandered through London's night-life pretending to be Kubrick.
Bottom line (and it is a big bottom line when the asking price is $200 dollars), the Kubrick fanatic must have this book. I just hope that its relative skimpiness (to judge by the suggestions found in Ronson's article about the extent of the archives), even though enclosed within great beauty, is not a prelude to an equally expensive "sequel" a few years down the line.
I expressed my main views of NATIONAL TREASURE at the at the time of its release and they remain the same. It is what its opening logo says it is, a Walt Disney movie, i.e., for kids aged five to 10 (and that's stretching it); it's asexual, non-threatening, and celebrates the family.
NATIONAL TREASURE (Walt Disney, 2004, $29.95, Tuesday, May 3, 2005) comes in an excellent widescreen transfer (2.35:1, enhanced,) with Bruckheimerian DD 5.1; there are French and Spanish subtitles, and a French language track, plus closed captioning.
The supplements appear to come in two tiers. The first extras menu announces "NATIONAL TREASURY on Location" (11:17) a conventional if slightly more detailed than most "making of" featurette. Also on hand are a couple of deleted scenes, the first one part of the flashback about the roots of the map and the treasure, and the second an extended version of the climactic sequence in which Cage and company descend the shaft (together the scenes come to 7:47, and there is an optional director commentary).
In addition there is an "animatic" storyboard version of the treasure lore story, with an intro by the director plus optional commentary (2:21).
And there is an alternate and much calmer ending, (1:50) in which Cage and Co. gaze at the Declaration of Independence restored to its rightful place, far from the mega-happy ending of the released version of the film. This also comes with an intro and an optional audio commentary track.
The box indicates that there are three other featurettes on the disc, "The Knights Templar" and "Treasure Hunters Reveals," along with something called "Riley's Decode This," which may lead to yet another Easter egg. Unfortunately, to get to these you have to follow a convoluted series of quizzes that it takes four pages of a six-page insert to explain. I suppose that this game might be of interested to the six-year-olds who seem to be the film's target audience, but here's my attitude to Easter eggs. If you want me to watch your fucking extras, put them in the menu; otherwise I don't have the time to spare.
The musical, animated menu offers 19-chapter scene selection. It all comes in a keep case that requires three hands to get the damn disc out of the spoke.
Letters
From Eddie C:
"I'm a huge fan of the HITCHHIKER series and the obvious didn't occur to me. Terry friggin' Gilliam. He would have been perfect to helm the adaptation. I don't think its any coincidence that fellow Python member wrote a book with Adams called STARSHIP TITANIC (nothing to do with the HITCHHIKER series). Too bad asshole movie executives don't have your instincts (I mean, you didn't even read the series, though you should). Instead, they made the piece of crap that, as you put it, can't even be enjoyed by the average moviegoer. Nobody wins. At least if Gilliam had directed, it would have been a good film and probably faithful to the original material. What a friggin' opportunity missed. It could have finally launched him to stardom and he could have done the sequels (he'd be the new Peter Jackson). Instead, the movie will most likely be a box office disappointment with no sequels (thankfully, if that's the road they're gonna go down)."
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And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
NEXT TIME: THE GIRL FROM MONDAY, STAR WARS: THE REVENGE OF THE SITH, more Asian action films, movies on music, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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