Horrible bosses

B-

Foul-mouthed incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill impossibly nasty bosses.

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Slightly more frequently than a blue moon, a movie is so badly written that a viewer with more than one brain cell will soon abandon all hope of it developing interesting plot lines or characters. It will be walked out of or ejected. Horrible Bosses is one such stinker. The key facts to note are the names of the people responsible for it, to ensure one approaches their future efforts with much caution.

The foul-mouthed story and totally incredible screenplay about three white male losers conspiring to kill their impossibly nasty bosses were created by Michael Markowitz, a US TV series writer who worked on Becker and Duckman. It appears that he accumulated a bottom drawer of story ideas and supposed jokes that had been judged too racist, homophobic, misogynistic or crude for TV, and recycled them into a movie concept, reportedly earning a six-figure auction bid from New Line Cinema.

Six years later, the screenplay had been adjusted by him and a pair of other writers. Young John Francis Daley, a TV series actor (Bones), had previously written a screenplay just once, for an episode of Bones. Older Jonathan Goldstein was a veteran TV series producer who'd also never written for the cinema previously.

Another TV specialist, Seth Gordon, got the director's chair. His only previous movie feature was Four Christmases, a seasonal effort for New Line starring Vince Vaughan; it was relatively successful (its box office gross doubling its hefty US$80 million budget).

Horrible Bosses had a more sensible budget of less than US$40 million, despite having a trio of minor star names playing the ludicrously non-amusing bosses (Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell). Another fading star, Jamie Foxx, took a humiliating cameo as a black murder consultant called "Motherfucker", apparently changed at his request from "Cocksucker". There are quite a lot of cock-sucking jokes strewn around the self-proclaimed black comedy.

The trio of "pussies" plotting their bosses' demise are typical 21st century Hollywood serio-comic anti-heroes (a la Hangover etc), played with stereotypical wry grins and wan smiles by bland actors. Charlie Day, a youngish supporting player in Drew Barrymore's Going The Distance, cringes as a registered sex offender working for offensively lustful Jewish dentist Aniston. Middle-aged TV comedian Jason (SNL and 30 Rock) Sudeikis is a dead-pan accountant for Farrel's coke-snorting imbecile boss, and charming Jason (Arrested Development) Bateman looks very tired of being an inconsequential foil for Spacey's megalomaniac character.

None of the bosses are OTT comic figures, not even black-comedic symbols. None of the anti-heroes deserve chuckles or cheers, yet this film's box office gross truly was: US$210 million and still counting, before going to DVD. The coven of writers must know they've found a mother lode: all those obscene and inanely unfunny ideas they dust-binned during TV brainstorms will sell tickets galore to movie-goers eager to wet themselves in a cascade of dirty words.

Choses secretes

Choses secretes (Secret Things) was a 2002 "New French Extremity" movie, another example of French auteurs' self-conscious effort to push their envelopes without crossing the line into inanity. That's difficult creative juggling, which was beyond the skills of writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau (then almost 60).

A bisexual nightclub nude dancer opens the movie with a ponderously-staged full-frontal display that captivates a new bartendress. Cue a very long teasing tete-a-tete (one full of giggles, the other of frowns) before they get round to mutual passion. Entering a state of happy flatmatedness, they get extra kicks from wandering through Paris with nothing under their raincoats.

They organise their lives and future by both working for the same corporation. Its middle-aged human relations chief is ripe for seduction, its young maliciously rakish heir-apparent is their prime but dangerous target for marriage and wealth. In the end, they get what they want, after some semi-comic orgiastics, lovers' deceptions, sibling incest and a murder.

In non-French eyes, such soft-porn noir can either be camp or horrifying, but should be fun cinema either way. This effort isn't, and its consolatory award at Cannes 2003 is yet another condemnation of that festival's past directorate.

Relax ... it's just sex!

Since the mid-1980s, P J Castellaneta has written and directed one short and two features portraying gay scenes in the USA. Together Alone focused on a talkative couple and won several gay film festival awards. Relax ... It's Just Sex! (1997) was talkative too, and tried very hard to be serio-comic. It probably didn't win awards because gay film goers like to take themselves seriously when it comes to handing out awards. Apart from which, the movie is not good as a movie, let alone a gay movie.

Gay movies rarely feature both male and female homosexuals, as singletons and couples, alongside heterosexual friends. At first, Relax looked as if it might be a prejudice-challenging version of TV's Friends. In Castellaneta's movie, ten buddies dine in each other's apartments and take an unhealthy amount of interest in each other's private lives.

You can guess that one of them has just been diagnosed HIV-positive, another has met the latest love of his life, the lesbian couple will get confused, and that a pregnancy-hungry fag hag (Jennifer Tilly) is holding them all together. The only other known faces were Paul Winfield, playing a black agony of an auntie, and Kristin Scott Thomas' younger sister as a lady-like Englishwoman swapping a black for her male Latino cousin. Yes, it's another rainbow-worshiping movie.

The major plot detail sounded original (drunken gay man rapes one of his hetero muggers) and looked almost comically hard to believe. Some artfully OTT jokes and cute insults were tossed into the characters' verbal ping-pong games. There's a lot of data about HIV/AIDS. Nothing else is memorable in a positive way.

Hachiko

Hachiko was a real-life Akita who belonged to a professor in Tokyo in the 1930s. When his master died suddenly, the dog spent the rest of its life -- seven years -- faithfully returning to the local railway station (Shibuya) every day to await its master's homecoming from work. Its canine loyalty, some might say pigheadness, is commemorated by a statue at the station.

I've seen a similar statue at Simonstown station in South Africa, and in Discovery Bay a neighbour's massive hound could be seen every weekday waiting on a slope above a bus stop. Like Hachiko, it also knew instinctively what time of day it should turn up, report for duty, show obeisance to the alpha animal or whatever primeval thought process it followed.

A movie about the dog was made in Japan in 1987 (Hachiko Monogatari). It was sentimental and tear-tugging. When Richard Gere decided to re-make it as Hachiko : A Dog's Story, starring himself as the dog-owning professor, he understandably Americanised the location. Inexplicably though, by having the young Hachi (meaning the lucky number of eight) shipped from a Japanese temple to a New England address that doesn't notice its non-arrival.

Showing his own version of Hollywood loyalty, Gere retained the Swedish director, Lasse Hallstrom, who'd worked with him on The Hoax, a critically-acclaimed film and box-office disaster. (Immature movie critics would want to remind readers that Gere could hardly pass over a director almost called Lassie whose breakthrough feature was My Life As A Dog, but I'm too mature to do that outside parentheses.)

Surprisingly, Gere kept the dog's breed. He should have known better, as he's worked in Japan and surely knows his shiatsus from his chihuahuas.

Akitas, the movie's simplistic script tells us, are mankind's longest-serving canine friend, for 4,000 years. It doesn't take that long for Gere's cuddly plump brown-haired puppy, found lost at the commuting professor's local station, to be happily accepted by the professor's wife (Joan Allen) and daughter. With a quick cut, the movie time-jumps the puppy into a fully-formed mostly white-haired dog whose ancient origins clearly lie in a handsome wolf pack.

There is one major problem for movie-makers working with an Akita in the lead role. The dog breed is as close to expressionless as man's best friend can be. This may have been totally acceptable in Japan, where a hero is supposed to be inscrutable, loyal unto death, and never distracted from his goals, even by a frisky female poodle.

Other than licking, staring intensely and looking handsome, Hachi doesn't do much to justify a 90-minute movie. (Parenthetically, an immature critic would note that this is also a dog that never does Number Ones or Twos, rubs against visitors, chases cats or causes human allergies. Okay, this is a fable about love, but touches of canine reality might have enriched it.) The one novelty is seeing scenes from the dog's viewpoint, which is apparently virtually monochrome, but the device doesn't increase perceptions of the dog's thoughts.

Hachi's crucial dramatic scene is the day it senses its master will die. Thus, believe it or not, which I found hard to do, it decides to bring a ball to him for the first time in order to try to keep him at home. Hachi is a deadpan character, but the human cameos stuck in the railway station and the professor's life are even less credible caricatures.

Even harder to believe is the apparent commercial nous of Gere's distributors in the USA. They haven't screened the movie publicly. It opened in Europe, and got a pun-ishing licking from the critics in London.

Little traitor

Every nation's film industry is entitled to a nationalist phase. It would usually arise soon after the land's most recent revolution or military campaign. Heroic figures appear centre stage, full face and overlit. Peasants find cause to dance in the streets or frolic in fields. Political issues and internal disputes are invisible, airbrushed or rewritten in line with the victorious party's platform or leadership egos. The resultant self-image of proud new nations is displayed ingenuously in many state-sponsored movies. Even in Israel's The Little Traitor.

It is such an old-fashioned cliche-splattered piece of stagy film-making that a 21st-Century movie-goer might assume it was produced around 1950, soon after the creation of Israel. The movie covers the last year of the British Mandate, as seen by an 11-year-old sabra (locally-born) boy in Jerusalem, "Proffy". It's hard to warm to the precocious, egocentric, would-be anti-British terrorist and frustrated killer, even though his young actor (Ido Port) smiles nicely at times.

His migrant parents are lovingly harsh, preoccupied with providing nocturnal safe passage for Jewish refugees from Europe. Consequently, believe it or not, his best adult influence will prove to be a middle-aged British army sergeant (Alfred Molina valiantly coping with a preposterous plotline and script). The Brit is studying Hebrew, he's bewitched by the second Book of Samuel, and he invites the clever boy to visit him at the army hotel for mutual exchanges of vocabulary. The man's army mates see nothing odd in his behaviour, which could lead a modern viewer to chuckle at the naivete of military men and their security systems back in the 1940s.

Maybe they were. The script, by producer-director Lynn Roth (a New Yorker and veteran US TV series producer) is supposedly based on a book by Amos Oz, an Israeli author Ms Roth claims is "world-renowned". The movie's final scene indicates that his book was based on the experiences of a possibly real Zionist professor called Avi Liebowitz. He met his British mentor in London, 30 years after the sergeant left Palestine and little Proffy had overcome charges of treachery for fraternising with the enemy.

By then, the sugariness of the fable had become life-threatening. Maybe none of the managers of Israel's film industry funds were younger than 70 when they met Ms Roth. Somehow, she persuaded them that their nation needed a 90-minute spoonful of schmaltz, celebrating the foundation of their nation with peace and goodwill to all, especially the nice Brits who left (unlike the evil Nazis) and the nice Arabs who sat around the marketplace smiling (the only Arabs to be seen) and the nice UN delegates who approved the establishment of Israel (unlike nasty Saudi Arabia etc).

Believe it not, this movie was released in 2007. It's reported that it won an award at a Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and another in Palm Beach. Now, that I can believe.

Whip it

Drew Barrymore has the makings of an all-American icon. She inherited the surname of a renowned acting dynasty. She wowed audiences very young, in ET. She grew up in Hollywood, apparently without ill effects. She made a wise investment in, and high returns from, transforming an old TV series, Charlie's Angels, into a snappy action movie franchise co-starring herself. She's gained awards and kudos for serious acting in TV movies such as Grey Gardens.

Now she's directed her first feature, Whip It, successfully in the eyes of critics (83% per Rotten Tomatoes). It's a charming, fun-filled romp about a Texan girl (Ellen Page) who joins a roller derby team. That makes it a chick flick on skates. So why did it fail at the box office, grossing less than US$19 million? I'd guess its producers hadn't found a target audience. Who goes to roller derby carnivals in real life? Not so many, I guess. Then the producers (including Barrymore) picked the wrong lead actress.

Ellen Page is a winsome little actress (who gained attention with Juno) without a wide fan base. She was miscast as a small-town nobody finding herself and a vicious streak on the roller track. The role needed a credibly tough bully-girl to fit into the rough contact "sport". Anyone who tries to look tough alongside team-mates like Juliette Lewis needs to look much older and wickeder than Ms Page. She looks lost on the track, in ensembles, and set beside Lewis and other ageing pros (including Barrymore herself, playing a dumb-belle).

The producers obviously wanted a family-friendly censors' rating, so there aren't even any shower or locker room scenes to attract male teen interest. Everyone in Hollywood should know that a sports movie without semi-nudity isn't very sporting.

In order to appeal to moms and pops, the movie offered them recognisable faces -- Marcia Gay Harden and Daniel Stern as the girl's confused parents, Jimmy Fallon in a one-note role as a comic manic roller derby emcee. Unfortunately, everyone involved got very recognisable cliched characters and dialogue.

Ms Barrymore's debut as a director could be seen as promising; she's crafted a competent effort. Does that sound as if I'm damning her with faint praise? No, I don't damn her, but I do hope she gets a meatier script and clearer cinematic vision next time. How else is the USA to gain a worthy successor to Shirley Temple as a national icon?