Underrated MOTM (Special Edition): The Truman Show (1998)

(Despite being a huge fan of his music and dancing, I didn't plan on posting anything about Michael Jackson here for the very reasons that I'll mention, namely my unease about celebrity (and especially non-celebrity) idolization. All I had in mind was a Perfect Song, Perfect Scene clip as a tribute, but on second and third thoughts I ended up with this additional post. Plus my girlfriend wanted me to write something about MJ, and I was ultimately happy to oblige.)

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With three Oscar nominations and solid 95 RT and 90 MC ratings, one of the things June's Underrated Movie of the Month (MOTM) is not is underrated; many people consider it one of the greatest movies of the 90's. But let's just nevermind that this month, especially since "underrated" is always defined by me anyway. The truth of the matter is that I've been voluntarily and involuntarily caught up in the Michael Jackson madness since last week, and now, just as the media coverage graduates from somber commiseration to sickening commercialization, my thoughts have led me to choose here between The Jacksons: An American Dream and The Truman Show. I ended up choosing the latter, but first I have to reflect on the former.

If you were to ask me I wouldn't have had any idea what year it was when I watched The Jacksons: An American Dream. I remember it as an engrossing mini-series about a pop star that I saw all over the TV and radio, and whose songs ("Heal the World") we sang at school. I would have been about 11 years old when it aired in 1992, old enough to become a fan of the then-current "Dangerous" album, but too young to understand the background of the Jackson family and the influence of their music. Disturbingly, what I remembered the most from The Jacksons: An American Dream is this scene, in which Joe Jackson instructs Marlon to "Go! Outside! Get a switch!". Whether that incident of abuse was dramatized doesn't matter at this point; both Joe and Michael admitted that abuse occurred during the famous children's formative years.

My reaction to that scene may not have immediately changed my impression of Michael Jackson, but as the years went by I gradually realized that this man's life was a complete construction, and the public's confusion about him was probably not nearly as bewildering as the isolated confusion he must have been experiencing in his own head. At least to me, then, his physical changes and bizarre behavior made perfect sense.

He didn't understand and perhaps wanted to escape his own identity, so he changed his appearance. He never - literally, never - had a childhood, so he tried to relive those fantasies as an adult (not that he might have understood what that meant), even if not always in the most appropriate ways (not that he understood what that meant either). "The public at large has yet to really understand the pressures of childhood celebrity, which, while exciting, always exacts a very heavy price," he said in 2000. "More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible."

At the end of the day, I think Michael Jackson never had any idea of who he really was. Sure, he understood his status as a pop culture icon, but he never really knew who he was as a human, what his identity was comprised of and how it related to the identities of others. Even other childhood celebrities get the relief of a drug-addled teenage meltdown or a quickly faded career. Not so Jackson - his relief away from the spotlight only came when he was in his 40's, far too late for him to discover himself.

I don't think he was Norma Desmond-crazy and I don't think he was a perverted child molester. I think, aside from being unquestionably and unconditionally the greatest all-around entertainer and pop icon in my lifetime (and undoubtedly the very last of his kind), Jackson was relegated to being a moonwalking, talking, pop culture commodity. We made him, bought him, sold him, abused him (know the background on "Billie Jean"?), scolded him, celebrated him, provoked him, and in many cases, literally bowed down and worshiped him:

Watching that clip, is it any surprise that his self-awareness, and thus individual identity, was on a completely different level than the rest of us? How would you feel if complete strangers reacted to you like that? Like Truman Burbank, the main character of The Truman Show, Michael Jackson was not just a marketable product, but a literal source of life for millions of his fans. We were much more dependent on him than he ever was on us; it's as if we drained the humanity from him like leeches. I mean really, watch the last minute of the above video (truth be told, I haven't been able to sit through the whole thing yet - it's just too insane). Sadly, this phenomenon continues with the increasing popularity of conflict-based "reality" television shows - truly The Truman Show brought to life.

Last year I called The Siege "eerily, presciently ahead of its time", and the same came be said for The Truman Show, which was also released in 1998, just two years before "Survivor" would fatefully change television programming forever (or at least what appears to be forever). As Christof (Ed Harris) explains in the freaky opening to The Truman Show, "While the world he inhabits is in some respects counterfeit, there's nothing fake about Truman himself. No scripts, no cue cards. It isn't always Shakespeare, but it's genuine. It's a life."

Maybe the most disturbing aspect of this analogy, then, is that unlike Truman, Michael Jackson was a real person, and a real person that could always see Christof's control booth and the cameras in his face. He knew that his life was a show, and there was nothing he could do about it other than fight back in song, earlier (1987) with the frustrated pleas of "Leave Me Alone", and later (1995) with the angry hysterics of "Scream".

Or, just as likely, maybe he didn't realize that his life was a show. Never having experienced any other life situation (unlike the Beatles, and Elvis, and Madonna, and every other larger-than-life star), he has to be literally the only person outside of a royal family to live his entire life, from age 5 on, as a prominent international celebrity.

You can ignore everything I've already written here and understand my Michael Jackson-as-Truman Burbank analogy really easily by watching the following five-minute interview on the set of the classic "Beat It" music video. In it, a 24 year-old Jackson admits that he never really went to school and, when pressed, answers that he doesn't really have any "close personal friends" outside of Quincy Jones and Diana Ross. Clearly, he has no concept of any normal social relation to people outside of his family.

Not surprisingly, he casually admits, "I get afraid of...well, I don't know people...I get afraid of people sometimes. It's a whole other life that I - I haven't really experienced that. Like friendship is a thing I'm just beginning to learn about. I was raised on the stage, and that's where I'm comfortable. And everything else is like foreign to me. I'm just beginning to know and learn about people, friendship, things like that."

(Addendum: Well, this is really unbelievable. I honestly had no notion of this fact beforehand, but just now, after having finished and revised this entire post, I poked around the internet to see how many other millions of bloggers focused on the Truman-Jackson connection. There were many, if not nearly as many as I thought.

But what really shocked me was the discovery of an unconfirmed quote, supposedly made in 2002 and supposedly made by The Truman Show director Peter Weir: "You watch The Truman Show and, I mean, Jim Carrey did a fantastic job, but Michael Jackson is Truman. He’s who I based him on and he is the nearest thing to Truman. And Michael Jackson, he is also the real life Victor in Simone. He had a talent and all he wanted was to share this and bring people happiness and escapism through entertainment. And people turn it around, they make it about the individual rather than the creation. It is the actual films, the actual music - that’s what it’s all about… People lose sight of this and the media make it all about the celebrity.”)

REVIEW: Yes Man (C+)

Of all the quirky character traits a movie's protagonist could have, an inability to say the word "no" has a surprising amount of potential. Unfortunately, Yes Man's team of young writers took the concept far too literally; the awkwardly meandering story makes it clear they were saying "yes" to just about any idea that popped up in their writing sessions. As I haven't read the book on which it's based, which details the real-life experiment of Scottish humorist Danny Wallace, I can't say with any authority that parts of it are completely made up.

But if the idea was to make an inspiring movie about living life out loud and seeking new experiences, ridiculously juvenile scenes (portraying oral sex from an elderly neighbor, for example) greatly reduce any chance that Yes Man can be seen for anything other than what it is: a completely predictable, ultimately disappointing romantic comedy. Clearly playing off of Liar Liar, the set-up also reminded me of Shallow Hal, which yes, also has plenty of immaturity to spare (it is a Farrelly Brothers movie), but leaves you with a more meaningful lesson, if not a lot more humor, than Yes Man.

Jim Carrey's career is in need of a good boost, but as perfect as he is for this part, the spotlight primarily shines on Rhys Darby, who doesn't stray much from his character on HBO's "Flight of the Conchords", and Zooey Deschanel, the underachieving actress who unknowingly almost killed her career last summer in The Happening. Together along with Bradley Cooper (an experienced actor known mostly from Wedding Crashers) and Terence Stamp (who plays a conscientious S.S. officer next week in Valkyrie), the cast ambles its way through repetitive gags and a disappointingly bland storyline.

The major laughs come from the minor situations - a Harry Potter-themed party, a mail-order bride fiasco, Korean language lessons (Carrey actually learned some Korean for the part). This is the good stuff, but it's still overshadowed by one too many sight gags, as if to prove Carrey can still do slapstick comedy as he inches toward age 50. Why not make use of his dramatic talent and add a little heart and soul to the character? And here's another thing: at one point his character clearly says "No" (in denying that he's a terrorist). Is this an egregious error in the story, or is there something I missed about the rules of the game? If so, forgive me for losing focus - and interest - as the movie progressed.

"Hey buddy, don't you go stealing every scene from me now..."

I'm not exactly sure why Yes Man is being rolled out during the Christmas season, where it's likely to get lost in the shuffle of the award contenders. Why not position it for a strong March or April release, where it clearly belongs? Maybe the story has come to life and the studio is saying "yes" to a risky marketing campaign. Or maybe I'm wrong and the movie will strike gold during this gloomy economic period. Either way, can you wait to see it on DVD or during its inevitable repeated play on TBS? Yes, man.

Grade:
Writing - 7
Acting - 9
Production - 7
Emotional Impact - 8
Music - 5
Social Significance - 3

Total: 39/50= 78% = C+

Underrated MOTM: The Cable Guy (1996)

Don't confuse October's Underrated Movie of the Month (MOTM) with Larry the Cable Guy's Witless Protection, which I've never seen and have no desire to ever see. This is the Jim Carrey version, and yes, it's a total coincidence that I just posted about his next movie. Apparently this is Jim Carrey Central all of a sudden.

The Cable Guy is not a movie that did much for me on first viewing. I can't actually remember if I saw it in the theater, but it was sometime within its release year and it was still when quoting lines from it was all the rage. I would be remiss right now if I didn't mention that one friend in particular, Jeff Sauer, basically championed this movie for a decade. I'm not sure if it's still his favorite movie, but if not for his enthusiasm, I likely would never have eventually accepted that it's truly funny.

According to IMDb, the title character was originally written for Chris Farley, which would undoubtedly have made for a very different movie. It may have been just as funny, but it wouldn't have been nearly as subversive, creepy, or lasting. Jim Carrey was an odd choice at the time, having just starred in Ace Venture 2: When Nature Calls, but it may have been his work in 1995's Batman Forever that showed he had a bit of a dark side, and we now know that director Ben Stiller has a knack for such comedy (see: Tropic Thunder).

With The Cable Guy, Stiller (whose only notable directing credit had been 1994's Reality Bites) worked from an original screenplay by former Los Angeles city prosecutor Lou Holtz, Jr., whose filmography is positively prolific. How is that possible? Well, none other than a young and uncredited Judd Apatow, "claiming that he wrote much of the movie's dialogue and many of the scenes", went so far as to challenge an official ruling by the Writers Guild of America (IMDb). So that's one explanation for the career of "Lou Holtz, Jr.," the other being that Lou Holtz wrote this film as a side project when he wasn't leading Notre Dame to ten straight winning seasons in college football.

Whoever wrote it, they certainly weren't reinventing the wheel. Stalker movies have been a common genre since Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, but The Cable Guy deserves credit for both adding comedy and subtracting the silly jump frights common to so many 90's stalker thrillers like Sleeping With the Enemy. In his two star pan of the film, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone (back when he didn't love everything) called it, "Single White Female with single white males; Fatal Attraction with sick laughs instead of sick sex."

OK...so what's the problem, if the laughs work?

Well, for most people the problem was seeing Jim Carrey play a wicked weirdo. Janet Maslin of the New York Times spoke for most of America in her scathing review: "Mr. Carrey, who won legions of fans just by speaking from his buttocks, now tries the creepy gambit of talking with a lisp, sneering at strangers, behaving like a deranged stalker and wallowing in sad, stale references to ancient television shows. The film's only unifying attitudes are misanthropy and contempt. Such antics are sure to scare off part of Mr. Carrey's devoted following...there will be fallout from the fact that he has been paid $20 million for giving a scary, uneven performance that's often painful to watch. This is the way to kill a golden goose." So what are you saying, Janet - if I have a lisp, then I'm creepy?

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times chimed in as well: "Not funny enough to be a successful comedy and not coherent enough to be taken seriously, the latest film to star the talented Jim Carrey is a baffling combination of Ace Ventura, Pet Detective and Cape Fear, a misguided attempt to extend the actor's range by having him play someone who is demented and dangerous." (my emphasis - typecasting, anyone?)

See, but that's the point, Kenneth! He's supposed to be scary and creepy and weird and all of those things that you fear about the strangers in your life who stare just a little too long, stand just a little too close, and generally insert themselves into your personal life. Carrey is amazing in this role because he stays in character so well and, as he did in Dumb and Dumber, somehow injects believable emotion into a caricature of a creep. (Here's where I also mention the bit of trivia that I've always loved about this movie. Apparently, Jim Carrey couldn't dribble a basketball, so it had to be superimposed in post-production. I'm not in the NBA or anything, but doesn't dribbling a basketball qualify as a basic motor function?)

Matthew Broderick was a perfect match opposite Carrey here, as he was in the process of solidifying the character that he's played in pretty much every movie since: the mild-mannered stiff who makes puppy dog faces and always seems be juggling one too many balls in the air of his daily life. His best friend was aptly played by a young Jack Black and his girlfriend was - how about this? - Leslie Mann, future wife of Judd Apatow (seriously, this is how they met, even though his involvement on the film is mostly unknown to this day).

But we can forget about those two, because nobody really knew of either one of them at the time. No, The Cable Guy was Carrey and Broderick's movie to carry, and when it opened on June 14, 1996, expectations were high. The result: a #1 spot at the box office, pulling in $19.8 million opening weekend - just less than the record $20 million paycheck Carrey received for his performance. After that weekend, it was pretty much over for The Cable Guy. The crowded summer was already bursting with three blockbusters in Twister, Mission Impossible, and The Rock, and it would be only three weeks after The Cable Guy opened that Independence Day would arrive and own the month of July on its way to a $300+ million box office gross, tops for the year.

So, what have learned since 1996? That Carrey has finally proved his critics wrong, not only succeeding in his own dramatic roles, but also opening the door for other wacky comedic actors (Will Ferrell) to give drama a shot; that Ben Stiller excels at directing dark and/or satirical comedies; that Judd Apatow owned Hollywood comedies a full decade before anyone even knew it; and that my friend Jeff knew he was talking about when he called The Cable Guy one of the most unappreciated movies of the mid-90's.

On the Horizon: Liar Liar 2?

Look familiar?

This is the first "On the Horizon"-featured movie that I haven't actually seen, but it's a fun feature and this situation is a little weird, so I'm going with it. You might have seen the trailers for Yes Man start a full promotional campaign in theaters and on TV in recent weeks.

I know others have also noticed that Yes Man appears to be an alternate version of either Bruce Almighty or Liar Liar - witness:

Jim Carrey plays a self-absorbed jerk who receives his comeuppance after some kind of psychological switch turns his life upside down. All of his past decisions and habits are reversed; hilarity and hijinx ensue with a sex joke or embarrassing freak-out every keeping the pace every five minutes. The jerk learns his lesson and everybody goes home happy.

Which movie did I just describe?

Tough to say, but regardless, I'm not really complaining since I kind of like this Jim Carrey. You see, there are actually five Jim Carreys:

• the "funny straight guy" Yes Man/Liar Liar/Bruce Almighty Jim Carrey
• the "ultra dramatic" Eternal Sunshine/The Majestic/Simon Birch Jim Carrey
• the "creepy" Me, Myself and Irene/The Cable Guy/The Number 23 Jim Carrey
  
• the " wacky" In Loving Color/Ace Ventura/The Mask Jim Carrey
• the "costumed" Grinch/Lemony Snicket/Christmas Carol Jim Carrey

With few exceptions, I'm not a huge fan of the "costumed" or the "creepy" Jim Carreys, but I mostly enjoy the other three. In fact, I think his "wacky" performance in Dumb and Dumber deserves to be considered one of the most impressive roles of the 90's, and no, I'm not joking. Comedy is not as easy as it seems, and no one could have pulled off that role like Carrey did. Anyway, I think he's a great comedic talent who's had a few recent missteps (Fun With Dick and Jane, The Number 23), so if Yes Man is a return to one of his better personas, well that's fine with me.