david duchovny

Working Girl (1988)

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Harrison Ford lately, mostly by happenstance. He’s in TV commercials promoting a new Captain America film as a tomato-red variation of The Hulk transformed by the magic of CGI. He’s lurking in the background of Awards Season ceremonies, disrupting live broadcasts with his signature geriatric-stoner aloofness. When I last went to the theater, he unexpectedly appeared against-type as a young, stone-faced villain in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation. Harrison Ford is everywhere, as long as you happen to be making the exact programming choices I am. So, when I was flipping through my stack of unwatched DVD purchases, I had to follow the pattern and watch the first movie that featured Ford’s handsome face on the cover: Mike Nichols’s late-80s romcom Working Girl, where Harrison Ford plays the lead romantic interest for star Melanie Griffith. Despite Ford’s lengthy screentime and central importance to the plot, it turned out to not be an especially great watch if you’re looking for pure Harrison Ford content. He’s mostly used as a sex-symbol prop, an object to be ogled. Like in my recent everyday life, he’s just kind of . . . there.

Besides the film being a star-vehicle for Melanie Griffith, the reason Harrison Ford doesn’t make much of a strong impression in Working Girl is that the cast is overflowing with a surplus of supporting players, of which he just happens to play the primary hunk. Alec Baldwin plays Hunk #2, a perfectly cast meathead himbo. Sigourney Weaver gives a hilariously broad performance as Griffith’s boss & romantic rival. Joan Cusack plays her even more eccentric bestie. Oliver Platt appears as her workplace enemy, a Wall Street slimeball. Kevin Spacey plays an even slimier Wall Street slimeball. David Duchovny shows up as a background player at her surprise birthday party. Working Girl has the kind of stacked cast of character actors that has you shouting “Holy shit, look who it is!” all the way until the final minute. The last one that got me was Suzanne “Big Ethel” Shepherd from A Dirty Shame delivering exactly one line as an unnamed receptionist in the final few minutes, one of two single-scene appearances from John Waters players, including an earlier appearance from Ricki Lake. Casting director Juliet Taylor was a real over-achiever, as evidenced by roping in someone as classically charismatic as Harrison Ford to just stand around and look handsome.

Working Girl is essentially a fish-out-of-water comedy about a Staten Island party girl (Griffith) who struggles to be taken seriously in the Big Business world of Manhattan across the bay. She rides the ferry to work every morning in her stockings & tennis shoes, switches to the sensible heels stored under her desk, and struggles to keep her hairspray-sculpted lioness mane vertical while battling sexist stereotypes in the lion’s den of stock trading. Her big break arrives in the form of a broken leg, when her much more refined Manhattanite boss (Weaver) injures herself skiing and is briefly taken out of the picture. Our titular working girl makes a power move by taking over her boss’s life & wardrobe, Single White Female-style, and attempting to broker a major corporate-buyout deal with a hotshot fuckboy broker (Ford) before she’s discovered to be a fraud. After the movie comes dangerously close to kicking things off with a date-rape meet cute, they genuinely fall in love and a series of silly deceits & misunderstandings ensue. The entire two-hour runtime is dedicated to the contract negotiations of their singular business deal together, but that doesn’t really matter. What matters is Griffith’s self-described persona of having “a head for business and a body for sin,” a line so perfectly written it belonged on the poster instead of in the dialogue.

Griffith’s sinful body is frequently put on display here, as lacy, overly complicated lingerie appears to be just as much of her Big Business uniform as her pencil skirt; she even vacuums in it. Harrison Ford is tasked to strip too, for a sense of balance, at one point taking a whore’s bath during a phone call in his glass-walled office while his female coworkers gawk & applaud. As a Reaganite cultural clash between the small-town vulgarity of Staten Island and the big-city sophistication of Manhattan, Working Girl is a little conceptually vague. As a collection of always-welcome faces, however, it’s exceedingly charming from start to end (Spacey excluded). You can tell it’s charming just by clocking that there are two overlapping cast members from Moonstruck featured here (Cher’s mom & Cher’s hairdresser), which is the undisputable masterpiece of this 80s NYC romcom subgenre. Harrison Ford is just one handsome face among many. He hadn’t yet learned how to be a dazed, scene-stealing agent of chaos, but thankfully there were plenty of other over-the-top performers around to pick up the slack (with Weaver & Cusack doing most of the heavy lifting in that respect).

-Brandon Ledet

The Craft (1996)

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Two of my childhood-favorite horror classics from the year of our Dark Lord 1996 screened at The Prytania Theatre this month: Wes Craven’s teen-slasher renaissance sparker Scream and Andrew Fleming’s teen-witchcraft charmer The Craft.  Of the two, I only made time to revisit the latter, where I had the pleasure of sitting behind a row of giggling college students who were enjoying it for the very first time.  Repertory screenings of The Craft are a much rarer treat than screenings of Scream (as evidenced by only one of those titles also playing at The Broad this month), which makes sense given the stature of Scream‘s director within horror nerdom and given that it is still being kept alive by endless discourse & rebootquels well into the 2020s.  Both movies meant a lot to me as a wannabe goth young’n who never earned his eyeliner wings, if not only because I was the perfect age to look up to their much cooler, slightly older teen protagonists when the movies were fresh arrivals on the shelves of my local Blockbuster Video.  My anecdotal research (scrolling through my Letterboxd follows’ flippant one-liner reviews) suggests that The Craft is considered the much lesser of the two works, especially in recent years, which is the exact opposite opinion that dawned on me while watching it on the big screen for the very first time.  As a kid, Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics I needed to catch up with in future video store rentals, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years – a substantial, self-contained work that required no extratextual viewing.  Among the two slick ’96 teen studio horrors currently enjoying victory laps around the city, my heart clearly belongs to coven; praise be to Manon.

Pitting these two enduring sleepover classics against each other is mostly a game of 1-on-1 performance match-ups.  Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic in The Craft as Matthew Lillard is in Scream, but she’s much better dressed – sporting mega-goth bondage gear instead of oversized sweaters from The Gap.  Neve Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both, playing the genre’s most sensible Final Girl in Scream and the coven’s most vulnerable pushover in The Craft, where she cedes power to Balk, Rachel True, and Robin Tunney.  Skeet Ulrich is the deciding factor, then, putting in the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell in The Craft, which comes slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret in Scream.  It’s unlikely that these names mean anything to anyone born outside the Millennial age range of 1981 – 1996, but I can confirm from first-hand observation that Skeet Ulrich’s performance in The Craft still kills with the modern teenage crowd.  The row ahead of me was explosive with giggles every time he showed up at Tunney’s feet, adorably perplexed over why he was so magnetically attracted to her despite his usual aloof bad-boy demeanor.  Of course, a lot of the film’s current entertainment value is rooted in nostalgia for 90s pop culture aesthetics, whether it’s the extremely dated teen cast or the tie-in CD soundtrack that includes artist like Jewell, Julianna Hatfield, Letters to Cleo, Portishead, Elastica, and Our Lady Peace.  Even on that end, I’d say The Craft has Scream beat, since it’s only invested in setting a traditional witchcraft story within that 90s pop arena instead of simultaneously cataloging & restaging tropes from previous missteps & triumphs in its genre.

When I say that The Craft doesn’t require extratextual viewing the way Scream does, that doesn’t mean I didn’t immediately go home to watch all of the Special Features on my ancient DVD copy as soon as I left The Prytania, so I could prolong the pleasure of the experience.  There were some fun insights in its promotional behind the scenes “interviews”, mostly in the cast’s recollections of Fairuza Balk’s contributions as a true-believer Wiccan bringing authenticity to the production (along with hired outside Wicca consultants) and in Rachel True’s observation that as the coven’s magical powers grow stronger & stronger, their skirts are hemmed shorter & shorter.  Mostly, my extratextual journey outside The Craft was a horrified scroll down Letterboxd lane, where I found a lot of complaints from cinephiles I usually trust about a movie I’ve always loved.  Most reviews among mutuals range from 1-to-3 star ratings, with a particular disdain for the third-act dissolution of the central teen coven.  It’s true that the “Fuck around” section of the movie is a lot more fun than its “Find out” counterpart, as that’s when we watch goth teen witches confidently strut down their Catholic high school hallways to 90s pop tunes in defiance of their school’s usual social power rankings.  Once all four witches have solved their very simplistic personal issues at home (racism, body dysmorphia, the powerlessness of poverty and, least significantly, crushing on a bully) through dabbling in dark magic, there’s nothing left for the movie to do than to show what happens when they take their magic powers too far.  It’s a political blow to idealists looking to The Craft for depictions of feminist solidarity (who would be best served skipping the ending entirely), but it at least opens the movie up to other themes besides the allure of power to teen-girl outsiders: addiction, fear of losing social stature, the willingness to cower behind an overly bossy leader for convenience, etc.

Speaking of extratextual viewing, what’s interesting to me about the complaints over The Craft‘s third act is that someone did attempt to correct its political issues in a modern revision of the film.  Zoe Lister-Jones’s recent soft reboot The Craft: New Legacy smooths out a lot of the original film’s rough spots in representation, feminist solidarity, and third-act resolution, mostly by giving its own coven an outside enemy to fight instead of each other (David Duchovny as an MRA warlock) and by putting their hunk-bully stand-in for Skeet Ulrich under a “woke” spell instead of a love spell.  It might be a more politically sound film, but it’s also a thoroughly dull one, mostly because its poorly lit, dialogue-heavy teen drama registers more like a backdoor pilot for a CW series than a legitimate Movie.  Say what you want about the original, but it at least has a sense of style, something the recent remake only approaches when copying the exact occultist-imagery graphics of the original’s opening credits as lazy homage.  The Craft‘s style happens to be tied to a very specific era in commercial filmmaking that I happen to be susceptible to nostalgia for, but it still looks fantastic.  It probably serves me right, then, to see this same story warped into an extremely dated generational touchstone for a different era of potential horror nerds, so I can see how generic one of my childhood favorites looks to people who it didn’t hit at the exact right time.  To me, The Craft: Legacy is cute but inconsequential, which is seemingly what most audiences also think of the original, even among my peers.  So, maybe I should shelve my argument that there’s more overt queer sexuality in the suggestive wagging of Fairuza Balk’s fingers during the original’s iconic light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board scene than there is in the entirety of the deliberately inclusive Queer Representation remake.  I’m already risking sounding like an out-of-touch whiner about the good old days here, exalting the pop culture residue of my youth as if it were a sacred text.

-Brandon Ledet

Evolution (2001)

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Sometimes, your heroes let you down. And sometimes, you’re not really “let down” per se, and the person’s not really a hero, he just directed some of the most formative films of your childhood. Ivan Reitman has made a lot of films, from the classic (Ghostbusters, Stripes) to the mediocre (Ghostbusters II, Twins) to the well received but essentially forgotten (Dave, Legal Eagles) to the infamously bizarre (Junior) to the simply infamous (Six Days, Seven Nights) and the simply bad (My Super Ex-Girlfriend), and even a personal favorite (Kindergarten Cop). But the truth is, as he has aged, he hasn’t grown much or matured, and nowhere it that more evident than in the 2001 flop Evolution. It’s a piece of shit.

Starring David Duchovny as Dr. Ira Kane, a disgraced former military scientist reduced to teaching biology at an Arizona community college, Evolution concerns the arrival of a meteor bearing life forms which rapidly evolve from blue ooze to worms before branching out into monstrous versions of seals, dragons, primates, and such strange beings as carnivorous trees and giant insects. His best friend is Harry Block: professor of geology, women’s volleyball coach, and deliverer of painful one-liners. They arrive at the location of the meteor crash, bluff their way into taking over the site from the local police, and meet Wayne (Seann William Scott), a firefighting cadet whose car was destroyed by the falling space rock. Of course, then the real military shows up, led by General Woodman (Ted “Buffalo Bill” Levine), with scientific advisor Dr. Alison Reed (Julianne Moore). There’s rivalry between the two groups, revelations about Kane’s past failures that resulted in his discharge, and romance! It’s terrible!

Outside of Christian propaganda, I have never in my life seen a movie that was so out of touch with its era and so obviously trapped within the sensibilities of the past. This movie is so sexist and gross, y’all. When it first surfaces, one’s initial reaction is to kind of laugh at it in how dated it is. Like: Reed’s a lady doctor, but she has to be a fucking klutz so she doesn’t come off as threatening to the fragile male audience and their avatar Kane (supposedly this was Moore’s idea, but that smells of the shit of the bull to me). Block and Kane meet her for the first time, with little interaction at all, and then Block spends the rest of the movie egging Kane on to just hit that already, sometimes in non-consecutive scenes that do not feature her appearing between them at all. She’s even subjected to listening to Kane describe her over the radio as a frigid bitch in an overlong monologue as her male colleagues stand around and laugh and make faces at each other like, “He’s right though, eh?” That’s not even getting into the appearance of poor Sarah Silverman acting as Kane’s ex-girlfriend (she’s ten years younger) in a diner where Kane belittles her in front of her new boyfriend about the shirts she never returned (haha?) that is essentially an excuse for Silverman to have to take her top off in a restaurant. And let’s not forget Block’s student Nadine, a woman whose only goal is to pass Geology so that she can get into her nursing program, not because she wants to help people but because appearing to want to help people will give her an edge in some beauty pageant, or the suburban women who find a monster in a pantry and want to make it a pet. Women, am I right? It’s unbelievable how mean-spirited the whole thing feels.

I can’t remember the first essay or article that first brought the underlying pro-Reaganomics anti-government themes of Ghostbusters to my attention; it’s been repeated and bandied about the internet for so long that it would be impossible to track down the originator of that reading (I’d wager it was someone over at Cracked though). But once you see it, you can’t unsee it. For the uninitiated: Ghostbusters can be read as a pro-capitalist text in which Our Heroes™ are underdogs providing a necessary service to the people of New York and collecting a fee, but the incompetent government (manifested in the goon from the EPA) won’t stop trying to keep the working man down. Also, Venkman won’t stop trying to get Dana to sleep with him, despite her repeatedly saying “no.” All of this is true, but Ghostbusters is also funny and of its time, two claims that cannot be made in defense of Evolution. Not to mention that in spite of Ghostbusters‘s contemporary mixture of misogyny and masculinity, it also had Janine, whose no-nonsense attitude served to counterbalance the boys club that she was surrounded by.

That same disdain for government is on full display here. This movie came out in the summer of 2001, making it not only probably one of the last American films to feature the military without alluding to the War on Terror but also the last American film to show the military as being full of incompetent blowhards (at least until that became one of the narratives of the War in Iraq). Every level of organized government in this film is full to brimming with nincompoops with itchy trigger fingers, from the judge who supports the ousting of Block and Kane from the meteor site, to Woodman and his cronies, to the local police, to the governor of Arizona (played by Dan Aykroyd, who had a line in Ghostbusters mocking the world of public academia in comparison to the “private sector,” which is echoed in Evolution when Reed gives up her posting with the Army to join Kane’s ragtag group of misfits citing that she “always knew the real money was in the private sector anyway”).

The jokes on display here are just so old and out of date, not just for 2018, but for 2001. Poor Orlando Jones has is anally invaded by one of the creatures and it has to be extracted using a scary-looking tool. This is a pretty good example of the level of comedy in this movie.

Doctor: It’s moving too fast! There’s no time for lubricant!

Block: There’s always time for lubricant!

Comedy!

Honestly, this movie is garbage. As with Ghostbusters, this film could have gotten some slack if it were funny, but it’s just so painful. A flying alien dragon monster ends up in a mall, where Seann William Scott sings off-key at a convenient mic stand to lure it back. Orlando Jones goes up a giant life form’s anus in a “clever” payoff to one burrowing up his own ass earlier in the film. Toward the end of the movie, Reed tells Kane that she’s going to “Rock [his] world” once this is all over, and Moore has this look on her face like she just realized that no paycheck in the world was worth the humiliation of being in this throwback. This one’s on Amazon Prime, but you’re better off just watching Ghostbusters. Or Kindergarten Cop.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Schizopolis (1996) Goes Hollywood: Full Frontal (2002)

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When Steven Soderbergh filmed the largely improvised, aggressively irreverent Schizopolis in the mid-90s, he seemed to be deliberately disrupting the flow of his career. After a few consecutive big budget duds failed in wide release, the director returned to the themes & means of his popular debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, with the intent of burning them to the ground & shaking himself out of a creative rut. Soderbergh’s one-for-me-one-for-them creative pattern never felt as drastic as when he filmed Schizopolis, which was seemingly made with an audience of one in mind: Steven Soderbergh. The trick worked. The next stretch of the director’s career brought on a string of mainstream successes that made him a formidable creative force within the Hollywood system, instead of a one hit wonder in the 90s indie cinema boom he helped spark. Even success has a kind of complacency to it that begs disruption, however, and early in the 00s Soderbergh returned to the cerebral irreverence of Schizopolis to shake himself out of the comfort of Hollywood System filmmaking.

Following on the heels of major financial successes Traffic & Erin Brockovich, the Hollywood-insider comedy Full Frontal returned to the low-fi absurdism & disjointed structure Soderbergh gleefully turned into a Looney Tunes farce in Schizopolis. Full Frontal is a little less aggressive in its sense of silliness than that 90s work, but is just as prone to jarring non sequiturs, unexplained shifts in form & reality, and playful experimentation with improv. Shot in less than a month on intentionally low quality digital video, the film was called out by contemporary critics for being confusing & visually amateurish, as if those effects weren’t deliberate. For at least the second time in his career, Soderbergh was consciously working in low-fi, anarchic modes of expression to break away from a creative comfort zone that threatened to dull his output. The only difference, really, was that Schizopolis featured mostly non-professional actors (including Soderbergh himself & his real-life ex-wife Betsy Brantley), running amok in the Baton Rouge suburbs, while Full Frontal heavily relies on a vapid Los Angeles movie industry playground for its own hijinks, including public persona-subverting turns from Major Movie Stars like Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, David Fincher, David Duchovny, etc.

Full Frontal vaguely tackes the shape of many 00s indies with large casts. A collection group of characters weave in & out of each other’s lives in a loose, everything-is-connected narrative over the course of a single day. Actors, producers, public relations drones, playwrights, and every other brand of LA industry type you can imagine entangle and drift apart in various combinations in the day leading up to a mutual friend’s birthday celebration. Occasionally, Julia Roberts poking fun at her America’s Sweetheart™ persona or Catherine Keener asking nonsensical, stream of conscious questions to her employees in layoff interviews will steal the show, but the movie is ultimately more concerned with form than it is with performance. Jarring shifts in visual quality & location of setting will intentionally disorient the audience, especially as (borrowing a page from Sex, Lies, and Videotape) the audio drifts out of sync from the image presented, to a dissociative effect. Sex is blurred & obscured from the camera. Movie within a movie layering & voice-over interviews deliberately confuse what’s “real” within the narrative. Character introductions are presented in headshots before the opening credits (which are actually credits for a non-existent movie Rendezvous) as if they were a playbill in motion. Much like Schizopolis, Full Frontal feels like a filmmaker playing with the basic tools of his craft to reach for freshly innovative effects he could not achieve in the more well-behaved works that preceded it.

There are plenty visual & thematic details connecting Full Frontal & Schizopolis if you intentionally keep an eye out for them. Catherine Keener’s slow-motion romantic breakup with David Hyde Pierce certainly echoes the domestic fallings out between Soderbergh & Bentley’s various doppelgängers in the earlier work. The reality-breaking interview tangents, the drab office place settings (including scenes set in workplace men’s rooms), and Soderbergh’s choice to appear in front of the camera (this time with a blurred-out face, as if he were an episode of Cops) are just a few blatant connectors that run as parallels between the two films. What’s more important is the way the films use an improv-style spontenaity to make the audience feel as if anything could happen. In Full Frontal, a nameless neighbor is shown performing simple domestic chores in a full Dracula costume; an unnamed man crawls across a hotel hallway on all fours in his underwear, unacknowledged; an actor with a Hitler mustache sings the theme song to Cops in a makeup mirror (there’s that show again). This spontenaity revitalizes Soderbergh as a filmmaker, a creator. Instead of shaking up the romantic ennuii of Baton Rouge suburbanites, it disrupts the business-as-usual mundanity of Hollywood’s sycophantic starfuckers & namedroppers, but the intent remains the same even in the transported setting. Unfortunately, these films also share the burden of being overlooked & undervalued for the deftly absurd ways they reshaped & untidied Soderbergh’s career as it evolved into Hollywood-insider status. They’re two of his best films, yet somehow two of his least loved.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the irreverently cerebral Steven Soderbergh comedy Schizopolis, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, this comparison of its romantic doppelgänger crisis to the similar themes of Anomalisa (2015), and last week’s look at how it violently subverted the director’s hit debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989).

-Brandon Ledet