Click

Michael Newman is a talented architect for a high-powered firm. He wants to be partner. Michael Newman is also a father and husband. He wants to be a partner there, too. But he’s stretched too thin, and can’t fully satisfy his ridiculous boss while paying attention to his family, too.

One evening, while dead tired, he goes in search of a universal remote control in order to help him simplify his life. The only store that’s open (it’s that kind of comedy) is Bed, Bath and Beyond. Newman goes on in, thinking a Bed-and-Bath store might find what he’s looking for (did I mention that it’s that kind of comedy?).

In the Way Beyond department, he meets a supernaturally odd technician named Morty (delightfully and refreshingly played by Christopher Walken, who seems to be channeling the spirit of Johnny Depp, and also seems to be the only performer really enjoying himself). Morty gives Newman a remote control that allows him to fast forward, pause, mute, and access the Special Features of his life. This literal Deus Ex Machina provides all that a highly credulous audience needs to accept the fashion in which the movie allows the audience (and Newman—get it?) to learn just how much this poor soul is a slave to ambition, technology, and the daily grind.

Ultimately, Click plays much like a cross between A Christmas Carol, It’s A Wonderful Life, and Bruce Almighty (with running gags about dry-humping dogs, tiny penises, Hobbits in Speedo suits, fat people, and bratty neighbor boys thrown in).

And there, buried underneath the Adam Sandler formula, the Man-Learns-A-Lesson-About-Life formula also struggles for credibility. The struggle is worthy, if not terribly convincing. Newman does learn that his family’s opinion is more important than his boss’s. He does learn that time is fleeting, and it’s better to enjoy what you’ve got before it all passes you by. He does learn that the mistakes you make with your children can have devastating downstream effects.

But A Christmas Carol—in all its permutations—demonstrated how personal redemption can also enrich those in the broader community. It’s A Wonderful Life (in addition to the obvious empathetic strength of Jimmy Stewart’s personal character) sold us on the sobering darkness of life without Goodness. And Bruce Almighty (like its cinematic predecessors) deigned to take its central conceit seriously, and offered at least one convincing scene portraying the emotional plight of the hero. Click, on the other hand, seems like nothing more than an over-extended gag-reel metaphor for family-man Sandler’s struggle to pay proper attention to both Home and Work. Click also seems to demonstrate that Adam Sandler the Producer has yet to strike the right balance.

If only Click didn’t end up seeming so self-centered. If only its pandering to Family Values wasn’t so perversely twisted. If only Sandler’s humor didn’t sell itself so short. If only the talents of Henry Winkler, Julie Kavner, Sean Astin, and James Earl Jones weren’t so pathetically wasted.

If only Michael Newman could learn that loving one’s family is nothing more than an obvious starting point—that loving one’s neighbor is a pretty key ingredient in the whole equation, too. I didn't see much of that in Click.

Wordplay

My wife and I are really into word games. In airports, we draw stares when we crossword-race. To do this, we buy two copies of identical crossword puzzle books, and race to connect opposing corners. By and large, Jenn wins—but we're fairly matched. But word search races? She usually beats me by seven or eight words. And the first time we played Boggle? I had maybe 23 points to her 100. And the game lasted three rounds, I think.

So what we're into, really, is the competetive use of words. That's natural for editors, I suppose.

We were excited, of course, to get an advance look at Patrick Creadon's Wordplay, a documentary about New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz and the annual crosswod puzzle tournament he organizes and hosts. The film is at times wry, at times educational (as when it lays out the process by which puzzles are created, submitted, selected, edited, and published), and at times revealing. At times it's also rather dull.

One third of the movie focuses on Shortz. Another third (or so) focuses on the contributors to (and celebrity fans of) the New York Times puzzles. (Jon Stewart was the highlight of this section, naturally.) The more interesting third of the film spends time with several of the contestants at a recent American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held anually for almost thirty years at the Stamford, Connecticut Marriot.

Oddly, even though Jenn and I are word game enthusiasts, and even though the conclusion to the tournament is actually pretty mindblowing, Wordplay was not particularly compelling for us—from that standpoint. What was most interesting about the movie was its portrayal of a very distinct (and very white) subculture. It was illuminating in the same way that watching a documentary about, say, an Amish community (or a Colorado Springs community church) might be.

The fact is, people of similar interests are drawn to one another. And the more esoteric those interests, the smaller and more eccentric those communities appear.

So what if they all look the same? So what if they're kind of inbred? Every affinity community will appear, from the outside, to be homogenous.

But doesn't diversity in the larger community embrace crossword geeks, church geeks, film geeks, drift geeks, and hip hop geeks? I think it does.

The Omen

I missed out on the original Omen/Exorcist craze in the 70s. By the time I caught up with things, it was 1984 and The Exorcist III had just come out. I went to see it at the old UA Cinemas in downtown Seattle, and was one of only four or five people at a late-night midweek screening. The experience creeped me out to such an extent that to this day I shudder at the thought: William Peter Blatty took this stuff dead seriously.

To a certain extent, such seriousness is a prerequisite for the subgenre to which The Omen belongs—which is not horror, precisely, but Demon Possession Flicks. “Many believe the prophecy from the Book of Revelation provides a map to a terrifying future,” says publicity material for The Omen, or that it “presents fragments of history that have come to life in our time.” Either way, the basic premise of The Omen hinges on taking biblical prophecy seriously.

Or semi-seriously, at any rate.

Last year’s Constantine played many of the same mindgames—utilizing just enough of the trappings of Roman Catholicism to get us to buy into the religious milieu of the Demon Possession genre. But just as Constantine quoted non-existent verses to bolster its plot (and pointedly avoided quoting any actual Scripture), The Omen mixes actual snippets of Scripture with pure fabrications in order to set its plot in motion. What’s perhaps more perplexing is the idea that a conclave of Roman Catholic cardinals would buy into an end-times scenario promoted by Left Behind and The Omega Code. Catholics, by and large, just don’t subscribe to such readings of Revelation.

So as director John Moore’s remade story of demon-child Damien plays itself out on the silver screen, we may find ourselves wondering: Just how seriously does Moore take this stuff? For me, the film doesn’t work particularly well. When bodies start getting skewered and decapitated, and croquet mallets start flying, the movie almost feels as if the material is being played for laughs.

It was refreshing, however, to spend some time with Moore the day after the press screening and discover that he finds the idea of angels and demons both laughable and unnerving. On one level, he sees stories such as The Omen as purely metaphorical of the human condition; but on another level, the human capacity for evil leads Moore to very concrete metaphysical speculations. If The Omen reflects a certain ambivalence toward demonic forces, that’s because Moore himself is ambivalent. Fair enough.

It was even more refreshing, though, to talk with an agnostic BBC producer that same day. In the real world, she doesn’t take issues of religious faith seriously at all; but The Omen’s premise—that all this demonic mumbo jumbo might actually be true, as she put it—was for her perfectly gripping.

The more I thought about my own reaction to The Omen, the more I realized why it didn’t work for me. It wasn’t that John Moore doesn’t take the supernatural seriously enough.

The problem is that, in the twenty-plus years since seeing The Exorcist III, I have come to take spirituality so seriously that it’s impossible for me to be entertained by popcorn-chomping presentations of it. And that’s my own problem.

The bottom line? My guess is that The Omen will work quite nicely for those who find issues of spirituality stimulating—and entertaining—food for thought. John Moore (and most fans of the genre) should be pleased, even if I was not.

The Devil Is Us

An Interview with Mia Farrow

On Tuesday, June 6 (06/06/06—get it?), director John Moore (Flight of the Phoenix) and 20th Century Fox bring us a remake of the 1976 horror "classic" The Omen. Mia Farrow, who opened her career long ago with another horror film, Rosemary's Baby, brings her list of roles full circle with a turn as Damien's nanny, Mrs. Baylock. I sat in on roundtable interviews on press day for The Omen in NYC a couple weeks ago. Our talk with Farrow was particularly interesting.

The questions come from a variety of different journalists, including me.

I was so glad to see some of the outtake footage and realize that was a croquet mallet you went after Liev Schrieber with, and not a sledge hammer.

MF: It was a croquet mallet.

Much more friendly.

MF: More refined. Respectable. John gave me the croquet mallet, with a message all written lovingly out, as my own personal memento. I said, “John, I don’t think I can carry this on the plane! Can we send it?” It’s a huge mother of a croquet mallet!

What kind of preparation did you do for your role?

MF: Well, honestly? I’d love to tell you that, you know, I went and studied with... bad people. But in fact, I went about it in the same boring way that you go about playing any character. I found those things that were identifiable that I had, and she has—which, through my spectrum, would be boring and ordinary. I have a work ethic; she has a work ethic. I’m a team player; she’s a team player. She has her faith; I have my own. She can be really focused and objective-oriented; I can be that, too. So, I mean, in essence I found enough things that I could play her. That fact that it’s for another purpose is the thing that makes it different. But finding the elements was not difficult.

Unfortunately, we’ve not seen a lot of you lately. What made you decide to do this?

MF: My kids are getting older now. I have a whole group of them that are seventeen and eighteen—going on eighteen—years old. So, next year in fact, I’m going to have one kid at home. It means that I can have more time. So I was able to do a play, which I could never have considered when they were all babies; and as some of you may know, I have many children who have different disabilities, and I just felt it was the responsible time of my life to be with my kids, and my pleasure and my joy. But I didn’t leave them easily. Even to come into the city. So I couldn’t have even contemplated going to Prague. As it was, I brought two kids with me, and one son’s wife—one of my older kids. We just had the best time.

When actors are able to go into characters that could be very different from themselves, and maybe it’s even a form of escapism in their artwork—when you’ve had two roles that require you to lean so heavily on the dark side of life, in a spiritual sense, it’s different than doing a mom in a sitcom. Or is it? Help me understand the connection to the demonic—the satanic stuff, the creepy stuff. It is like, “Aw, I just went and did it, it was work and I’ve got a role to play,” and you just leave all that stuff on the set...

MF: Or?

Or is there a sense in which you feel the weight of that? Or is there? I’m just curious.

MF: Nothing was further from my mind when I accepted this role than Rosemary’s Baby. I was intensely involved in Fran’s Bed, this play by James Lapine that I was doing with Julia Stiles. And John called me; he’s just so super-passionate, and he gave me all these reasons why I had to do this film and why he was going to make it for his generation, and make it his own. Nothing else would do. He had to do it. And then he dropped Liev’s name, and I was like, “I need to do it, too!” And then John says, “And Julia Stiles is in it...” And I said, “She’s right next door! She’s rehearsing a scene.” And he said, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “We’re doing a play together! It’s an omen!” So I hate to disappoint you. I don’t have any thread going through this, unless you really look at The Great Gatsby, and find THE thread in all forty-something of my films. No, I was lucky to get a good part in what I hope will be a fun movie for people.

Two of my favorite films are ones that you’ve been in—Crimes and Misdemeanors and Another Woman.

MF: Interesting choices!

Well, it seems to me that there are connections between movies like The Omen and those movies, because they do deal with the problem of evil—on a personal level.

MF: Yeah. That’s a different matter. In a more serious way.

In a more serious way. But in the way that Martin Landau’s character in Crimes and Misdemeanors sets the plot in motion—

MF: I think that’s Woody Allen’s best movie.

Yes, I think so, too.

MF: Excellent movie.

But the way that he sets the plot in motion by these very small decisions that he makes, regarding dishonesty—

MF: Right, right.

This movie does the same thing by setting the plot in motion with the priest convincing Liev’s character that the one small lie will be forgiven.

MF: Uh-huh.

So is that the level at which you interact with these characters being evil?

MF: Well, not far from that point, I was brought up a Catholic, and in my early catechism books, the devil was portrayed as a little character with horns, and a tail, and a pitchfork—and he’d be whispering in your ear, and if you were lucky you’d have an angel whispering in the other ear. Well, what’s more interesting and accurate is the dual nature of humankind and our—I’m stating the obvious, but—our capacity for altruism and tremendous good, and our capacity for evil and the terrible... I mean, you don’t have to look further than the Darfur region of Sudan as we sit at this table. Four hundred thousand people dead. And counting. There were three million people relying on the world food program, and their rations were cut! This is in the front of my mind, because I am going there, on the sixth of June. So the fact that we have the capacity for both of these things makes the representation of evil in this film, though it may be simplistic—but the face of a child is more accurate than that cartoon devil in my catechism book. I’m a great believer in education. I think it should start, of course, at home; but in every level of education, we must acknowledge that it isn’t just some little devil on the outside. Unfortunately, the devil is us. And unless we acknowledge that, teach our children that—especially our male children, because they are the ones who are victimizing women around the world... I have seven sons. I take my role very seriously. Peaceful resolution to conflict is like number one in my house. And responsibility. All these issues are big ones. So I make a movie. It’s a just movie. That’s true. But if evil is personified by a human being, I think that’s a good beginning, or a good opening for a conversation.

What organization are you going to Darfur with?

MF: UNICEF. You know, you can’t get in, otherwise.

As a private individual.

MF: Yes. And this wonderful woman from the Times is going with us—Lydia Polgreen is coming. It’s very hard for people to get in now. If the region is closed to humanitarian aid, too, then our journey will end in Khartoum. But we shall see.

The responsibility, then, to get involved. Obviously, the parents in this movie have a demon child, so they have a responsibility to get involved. On a personal level, what is the responsibility to get involved in areas that are outside of our domain, for social good?

MF: Well, here’s the old philosophical question, Philosophy 101: You’re walking by a pond; a baby’s drowning. Do you have an obligation to take the baby out? Most people would say yes. Even if you’re in a hurry? Yes. Even if you’re hurrying to work, and you might lose your job? It gets more complicated. What if your house is burning? Now, suppose that the baby is a mile away, drowning in the pond. Do you have a responsibility there? Supposing you just hear the cries? Do you have a responsibility? You’re late. You have a job. Therein lies a lot of the great, philosophical, Solomon-like decisions. My own personal feeling, and I can only say for myself, is yes. I think we have human responsibility. We are a family, of humankind. Our brothers and sisters, on another continent, are in great need. And for us to turn away and just take care of ourselves, is not only—and I hate to deal with this in simple terms, like “right” and “wrong”—but it’s unacceptable. But also, just looking at it economically and every other way, it’s the post-McLuhan world. We’re all connected. We’ve seen how irresponsibility and pillaging in the Middle-East has resulted in, first, humiliation and then outrage; do we want to do that with—well, we are—with another continent?

Where would you say, then, that involvement becomes imperialism?

MF: Well, there’s a difference between assistance and ruling. I don’t believe that we should take over. I don’t believe that we have any role in that capacity. But to assist, and help people find trade, and help people find the stability that we have here—health-wise, and economically—I think we could do that. You just drive down Fifth Avenue, and you think, “It just can’t be right, that everything is so A-OK, and it’s not A-OK everywhere.” I think we all have a shared responsibility.

The Break-up

The Break-up not only carries on the tradition of romantic comedies, it dares to make them grow up. Think “When Sally Left Harry.” Think of all the Boomers you know whose marriages have busted. Think of how humorous all that can be.

Given the genre, I was expecting a movie along the lines of so many Meg Ryan romantic comedies, movies in which there’s plenty of angst on the journey toward a (more or less) satisfying relational resolution. I was also expecting the comedy to be more compelling than the angst. In The Break-up, however, the angst is the more compelling aspect, even though the comedy is very effectively handled. Oh—and, as in real life for disillusioned Boomers, there is no tidy resolution for the relational fireworks in Brooke and Gary’s romance.

I really thought this movie was in trouble during the opening credit sequence. After Brooke and Gary “meet silly” at a baseball game, the credits take us on a photo-montage tour of their romance and partnership. How seriously, I thought, can we take their romance? We know the break-up is coming; will a scrapbook sequence make us care?

Ordinarily, the themes of a movie interest me more than the performances themselves, particularly when it comes to mainstream popcorn flicks. Not so in this case. The meltdown that Brooke and Gary go through is completely sold by the outstanding characterizations and performances of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn. Frankly, I was shocked at how good they were in these roles. I was completely convinced that the failure of their relationship was devastating to both of them. And because their performances convinced me that the break-up mattered to them, it mattered to me, too.

Judy Davis, as the owner of the art gallery where Brooke works, and Jon Favreau, as Gary’s bartending buddy, also deliver dynamite performances in supporting roles. Sure, such colorful characters are stock types in romantic comedies, but Favreau and Davis take things to a new level. And I haven’t had this much fun watching Vincent D’Onofrio since, oddly, Full Metal Jacket.

My hat’s off to director Peyton Reed. The Break-up may not serve up boffo boxoffice, but it dares to tweak the genre in surprising and realistic ways, and it delivers some of the most memorable characters that romantic comedies have ever seen.

It’s also a poignant reminder of how romance works out in real life: unpredictable, heartbreaking, and still full of promise. TV evangelists may try to sell the world the vision of a blissful, rosy existence. But The Break-up, quite honestly, knows better. It’s closer to the truth than prayer hankies will ever get you: sometimes love hurts, and sometimes—as Jesus knew in Gethsemane, and as Gary learns in The Break-up—sometimes love means not getting what you want.