The Year Of The Apatow

It seems like this is Judd Apatow's year. The next comedy he is producing has been announced - A Whole New Hugh - adding to an already heavy slate of pet projects he isn't even directing himself, and it looks like he's gotten the studio execs eating out of the palm of his hand.

I remember the first inkling I got that 40 Year Old Virgin might be something special. There was an article in Creative Screenwriter which discussed Apatow and Carrell's approach to writing - and they had a very sensible approach, truthful, structured and logical and definitely dedicated to quality. They really seemed to know what they were doing.

Even still, the film surprised me hugely. It was probably my favourite film of 2005, though not the one I would say was 'best, necessarily'. Not quite, anyway.

And now comes Knocked Up. I must be one of a handful to have not seen this at some kind of advance screening somewhere, and I am bitterly jealous of the billions who have. If Apatow and company have nailed this one as squarely as I've been told, then that pretty much cements the director's standing. Judd Apatow appears to be the new Billy Wilder. Well, if Cameron Crowe wasn't the new Billy Wilder, anyway. The other new Billy Wilder.

The key difference, time and place aside, is that Wilder didn't produce a massive heap of secondary projects that he himself wasn't directing. As I was worrying about above, Apatow's plate is looking pretty full - You Don't Mess With the Zohan, A Whole New Hugh, Walk Hard, Attorneys At Raw. For the moment at least, Apatow seems to be a one-man greenlight machine, launching films he finds interesting, giving leg-ups to the talent he admires. Lucky fellow - and that goes for his admirees too.

When will it end? Well, I expect it to be dialled down rather quickly. If Zohan or Attorneys, say, winds up a big money loser, that will probably see Apatow's wings clipped. But his primary career (I'm supposing) as a writer-director would still be safe. Curtailing that anytime soon would take Knocked Up to flop, and I'm confidently predicting that it won't.

Indeed, I'm confidently predicting over $100 million in domestic takings.

My main point, however, is that we're living in the time that Judd Apatow is actually working. and not looking back on it like some kind of golden era, as I've had to with Wilder, Preston Sturgess or even the 'first-half Mel Brooks'. Apatow is going to be treasured for decades but right now, he might be seen as 'just another Hollywood comedy director', if a particularly good one. It seems to take a whole lot of wasted time for studio films to get their due respect, while 'independent' films, of course, come under (typically unjust) consideration immediately.

Why are we surprised that the big, cash-rich companies can afford the talent to make most of the best films and make them well? For an independent film to meet the best studio productions on every level there's a ridiculous amount of luck required - principally involving good cast and crew being available at that budget level.

These 'Hollywood' folk make more of the truly great films than any other single 'industry' on the globe. They certainly don't make them all, and they also make an almost incomprehensible amount of dreck too, but there's no sense in knocking 'Hollywood' so quick-and-easily all of the time.

Danny Boyle's Sunshine: Now I've Seen It, I Can Knock It With More Authority

Danny Boyle's Sunshine just isn't as good as you've heard. The idea is fair enough, neither special nor ridiculous. The cast too are quite a strong bunch, but nothing to write home about. Alwin Kuchler's cinematography is far more than competent but his collaborations with Boyle don't ever acheive anything as pioneering or awe inspiring as did Derek Vanlint and Ridley Scott on Alien or Geoffrey Unsworth and Stanley Kubrick on 2001.

For the most part, the problems stem from Alex Garland's script. Again, there's a fair smattering of strong moments - Harvey's apology to Capa, for example - but there's far more mediocrity and lots and lots of confusions and contradictions.

When Billy Wilder said "If you have a problem with the end of your script, really the problem is with the beginning" he must have meant "really the problem is with the end AND the beginning". He's not suggesting the ending is correct and the beggining should be moved to meet it, he's suggesting that there's a structural fault and that, as a result, a change must be made. More often than not, both ending and beginning - or that is, set-up and pay-off - will be altered. So, to explore one example of Sunshine's dicky structure, when Mace grabs his tool from the coolant and gets iced over (as it were) in a fraction of a second, this implication is no more at fault, really, than when he later plunges into the coolant for much longer, and mutliple times, without turning into a human icicle. The contradiction is the issue and as a result, there's confusion and the film doesn't seem to play fair, and when the film isn't playing fair, all suspense disappears in the mind of an attentive, observant audience.

So, the popular opinion that Sunshine is very good until the last act isn't harsh enough. The many mistakes in the last part are echoed and rooted in the earlier sequences of the film.

But the end of Sunshine actually is much worse than the already-whiffy first two acts. For one thing, the screen geography and geometry - handled with competence in a fair amount of the earlier material - go to blazes (pun intended). Also, we meet a mad killer character that enacts a convenient action climax that simply left me dumbstruck. He's just dumped into the plot, requiring a certain amount of disbelief-hoisting, and then, with nothing like believable human psychology, he sets about killing people and babbling quasireligious nonsense. This business has been rightly compared to Event Horizon - but it's even worse.

This slasher sequence is where Boyle's camerawork and cinematographic conceits get the most out of hand. There's hardly anything like a reasonable cut to be seen and the images are wildly distorted. At first the idea seems to be that the impressionistic defacement of the image represent the damage that exposure to the now extremely-nearby Sun has caused to the villain's eyes. Of course, though, the effect isn't limited to his pov shots - even though it was heralded by his appearance and there's no doubt that what it is trying to suggest is related to his optical disability.

There's a few (hokey) explanations possible for this, and the most likely of them makes as little sense as the other excuses I could cook up. Let's stick with "The exposure to the sun has damaged his eyes so much, not only his but everybody's vision has been damaged. Even that of the supposedly-objective overhead camera angle we sometimes see". I know that doesn't make any sense, but trust me, it's the most rational explanation for what you'll see. What would you prefer? "He's such an ungodly sight that his entrance alters everybody's senses"?

I could go on about Sunshine for hours, it really is that interesting in it's curious catalogue of errors, pretentions and contradictions. Maybe I will. Any questions?

Criterion's Ace In The Hole

Billy Wilder's masterpiece Ace in the Hole - aka The Big Carnival - is coming to Criterion DVD. So says this penguin.