Dungeons & Dragons

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Early Marlon Wayans attempt to leave Wayans Brothers empire (see: Senseless)
• Predicts the great Lord of the Rings fantasy boom of a year later
• Thora Birch

In this blog’s last entry, I pondered weather the dated computer-generated monster effects in Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man – and bad CG in general – could possibly age as well as practical, KNB-style puppetry and makeup. In retrospect, I should’ve saved that question for 2000’s Dungeons & Dragons, the big screen adaptation of the legendary role-playing game that popularized the 12-sided die and coined “immersive” as the go-to term for trying to make fantasy sound smart. Dungeons & Dragons features armies of dragons (though no dungeons?), each one rendered in the absolute best computer generated effects a $30 million fantasy film in 2000 could afford – which today looks roughly as good as Sci-Fi Originals’ Boa Vs. Python, made four years later for a tenth of the budget.

Dungeons & Dragons tarnished the perfect record for movies based on board games that began with 1985’s Clue and ended with 1985’s Clue — the only other board game film made (unless Sneakers is based on Scrabble).  Unlike Clue, which followed the Parker Brothers’ game so closely it even had random endings, Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t really interested in its source material. Aside from a two-second, appease-the-fans appearance of a beholder, the movie uses Gary Gygax’s creation only for the namesake, a hook on which to hang a worse-looking Willow:

In the kingdom of Izmir, people are divided into two social classes: the lowly peasants, and the aristocratic mages (another D&D reference, though a dated one) whose ability to wield magic keeps them in power. (Making all magicians greedy instead of wise was a novel touch.) The fair Empress Salvina (Thora Birch) dreams of changing this unjust caste system — a dream she professes in a series of senatorial addresses to a room full of grumpy politicians. There’s a strong similarity in these addresses to Amidala’s trade disputes in The Phantom Menace. If you weren’t already convinced that decade-old films are relics from the past, let this open your eyes: they were taking their cues from Episode I.

Standing in Salvina’s way is the evil mage Profian (Jeremy Irons), who seeks a magical rod that will allow him to control red dragons — the most dragony of the dragons — and help him stage a coup d’état, ousting Salvina and keeping mages on top of the social pyramid. Irons plays Profian with a nobody’s-seeing-this-anyway intensity that makes him one of the crown jewels of the movie — not exactly a Herculean task, but admirable nonetheless. Roughly 90 percent of his screen time is spent shouting, spinning, gripping his rod (heh heh) and gesticulating at imaginary dragons:

Summoned to keep the Rod from Profian’s hands are two cunning thieves: Ridley (Justin Whalin) and his anachronistic-jargon-shouting sidekick, Snails (Marlon Wayans). Whalin, Izmir’s answer to Han Solo, is probably best known for playing Jimmy Olson on ABC’s Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, though former USA viewers will always remember him as grown-up Andy in Child’s Play 3, which the network was legally required to play at least three times a week. D&D probably remains Whalin’s biggest role, and one can only imagine the high hopes New Line Cinema had for the handome young star, whose floppy bangs made him the poor man’s River Phoenix, or the poorer man’s Jonathan Brandis, or the rich man’s Corey Feldman.

In a choice that represents either brilliant post-modern storytelling or lazy writing, the movie’s standard ”call to arms” scene — it’s Council of Elrond or “Help Me Obi Wan Kenobi…” if you will — in which our hero (and we) learn exactly what the hell is going on, takes place entirely off camera. Ridley is sucked into a magic map (as will happen) and reappears several minutes later with full knowledge of his quest. It’s like the narrative trickery used in Mission: Impossible 3, which skips its climactic heist scene. There’s something admirable about admitting we’ve seen your plot so many times before we need not bother with the specifics: Hero seeks rod.

But deconstructing our very perception of linear storytelling as we know it isn’t the only brilliant part of the Dungeons & Dragons movie –- there’s also a maze! Ridley’s quest leads him to the Antieus Thieves’ Guild maze, a booby-trapped labyrinth that’s claimed the lives of many an Izmir thief — MANY an Izmir theif. Sounds corny, but I cannot overstate the primordial fun of watching someone navigate a maze. I had more-or-less written D&D off as a unmitigated disaster and was prepared to attack it in print as ruthlessly as though I were wearing a +3 constitution belt. But when Ridley began dodging bladed pendulums I grew enchanted. If young filmmakers take nothing else away from the Dungeons & Dragons movie (and they won’t), take away this: put a maze in your movie. It’s the attention-retaining equivalent of that insanely hot pool scene in the otherwise-boring Species. Or that insanely hot pool scene in the otherwise boring Color of Night. Mazes are like sex in a swimming pool.

The maze is the most “fun” aspect of the D&D movie by leagues — the only other competition is the it’s incredible score, which is more epic than any Marlon Wayans film should be. The Antius maze is so fun, in fact, that it was adapted by Wizards of the Coast into a playable Dungeons & Dragons RPG Adventure as a tie-in for the movie. (That’s right, not a movie. But REAL.)

Incidentally, during this trip to the WotC website to search for the tie-in, I stumbled upon the company’s official page devoted to the then-“new” D&D movie. Frozen in time since 2000, the page has a now-tragic enthusiasm for a film that was doomed to Blockbuster 3-for-$10 shelves. It was like meeting one of those Japanese soldiers deserted on a South Pacific island who think World War II is still being fought.

Hollow Man

Was Paul Verhoeven the most underrated director of the 1990s, or the most overrated?

This was what went through my head as I watched a see-through Kevin Bacon twist a supermodel’s titties with his invisible fingers in Verhoeven’s 2000 sci-fi thriller, Hollow Man. The movie is the last film Verhoeven directed in America, capping off a strange, hilarious, outrageous decade-long stay in Hollywood. In just over 10 years, Verhoeven made a series of perverse sci-fi gorefests and softcore erotic thrillers that bookended the 1990s in a clasp of bare chests and mutilated corpses including RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Starship Troopers: all films of almost poronographic excess.

Hollow Man is the underwhelming swan song to Verhoeven’s freewheelin’ ’90s. It’s his worst movie, but it’s also his least insane. This makes Verhoeven unique among filmmakers. Often directors do their worst stuff when they venture off the rails (Heaven’s Gate, Southland Tales). Not Verhoeven. He’s so comfortable off the rails I’m not even sure you can call him a train. He’s more like some kind of Dutch, steam-powered off-road transit system. Like the giant spider in Wild Wild West, which is not a Verhoeven movie, though it’s crazy enough to be one.

Your average Verhoeven character might be covered in toxic waste and splattered into a watery mess. He might be stabbed in the crotch by Martian midget prostitutes or have his brains sucked out by trailer-sized insects. She might have champagne pored over her bare chest by Kyle MacLachlan or have all three of her titties felt up by a future California Govenor. Verhoeven is the reason the phrase “hard R” was invented. He never had a bad guy punched when a metal rod could be shoved through his neck. His bad guys seem to call women “bitch” for no reason. My brother and I watched Total Recall a dozen times growing up, almost exclusively on TNT and TBS. When I finally saw the unedited version in college I was shocked at all the wonderful touches of carnage I’d been missing, like the way Quaid (Schwarzenegger) dislodges his backstabbing friends neck and the hollow popping noise that accompanies it.

And yet, there was always just enough craftsmanship present beneath the tacky paint jobs of Verhoeven vehicles to indicate they might be worth keeping in the driveway. Critics and fans bestowed upon his giant bugs, robotic law enforcers and horny sociopaths a redeeming social importance normally witheld from genre fair until a few decades pass. Invasion of the Body Snatchers had to wait half a century before film snobs took notice of its Red Scare themes, but Verhoeven’s films seemed to get revisionist critiques before the ushers had finished sweeping the Goobers from the theater floor. Mostly RoboCop, which eventually got a Criterion DVD release, but also Basic Instinct (which screened at Cannes) and the fascist undertones of Starship Troopers. Even Showgirls became a bonafide cult classic with its own boxed-set DVD. 

Against all odds, then, Mr. Verhoeven wound up making just one bad movie in America: Hollow Man. Sebastian Caine (Bacon) is a brilliant, arrogant biologist who defies his government backers and uses himself as a test subject for a serum that turns organisms invisible — or, to use the terminology of the film’s pseudo-science, shifts them “out of quantum sync with the visible universe.” Reluctantly assiting Caine is a team of lab technicians and PhD’s whose importance in the project is directly proportional to their sexiness: Josh Brolin and Elizabeth Shue are his right and left hand men, whereas curly-haired Joey Slotnick  spends the movie tucked neatly far behind a bank of computer monitors. He might have just stayed put after Twister.

The centerpiece of Hollow Man is an extended scene where Caine, straped to a hospital bed, shifts the fuck out of quantum sync and vanishes into air, into thin air. Ah! But the hook is that Caine doesn’t simply fade into transparency like Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance; he disappears layer by layer. First skin, then muscles, then veins and organs, you get the idea. It’s like those Bodies exhibits, but without that creepy thought that a Chinese prisoner had to die to make your trip to the South Street Seaport worthwhile.

Seeing Kevin Bacon’s pancreas and central nervous system do make for a cool 5 minutes, not only for the scene’s then-novel use of special effects but for its graphic, mildly disturbing look at human physiology that also marked the coolest parts of RoboCop and Total Recall.

Had Hollow Man stayed on this trajectory it might have been a nice transition for Verhoeven into the realm of CGI (a transition that began with Starship Troopers). But no sooner does invisible Bacon go invisible nuts that the film turns into the same monster-picks-off-team-through-metal-corridors scenario that science-fiction has been retrofitting since 1979, when a fanged xenomorph popped out of John Hurt’s stomach and turned the Nostromo into its own personal Ponderosa Steakhouse. 

Given some time, though, I can see Hollow Man carving out a nice little niche for itself as an offbeat special-effects sideshow: in the same Netflix “related movies” column as The Blob or Tron. Computer-generated art, unlike puppetry and latex makeup, don’t age very well — there’s a reason ReBoot hasn’t been immortalized — but let’s hope it does, lest Verhoeven’s flawless resume be cursed with a normal movie. If all goes well, in 20 years Hollow Man could come to be seen as our generation’s Clash of the Titans, just with a lot more exposed titties.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Fake MTV News brief with Kurt Loader
• Nu metal soundtrack (including System of a Down)
• “Goths aren’t evil!” debate

The best part of re-watching Book of Shadows, 2000’s follow-up to The Blair Witch Project, isn’t watching the film at all, but re-visiting (by proxy) the Great Blair Witch Craze that the sequel proved the culmination of. America in 1999, not yet interested in which cave bin Laden was inside and no longer interested in whose mouth the president was, turned its full attention instead to the story of three film majors who tote cameras into the Maryland woods, get lost, and find themselves thrown into a scenario terrifying even by student film standards.

We all know the story: The Blair Witch Project was a no-budget film that, thanks to a clever premise, ahead-of-its-time marketing tactics, eerily natural performances from its three stars*, and some genuine thrills grossed (to date) a quarter of a billion dollars. More importantly, the movie became more damn ubiquitous than just about any film since.

It’s difficult to imagine in 2010 the significance a single motion picture could once have. Today, movies are so desperate for attention they’ve literally added an entire dimension. The Blair Witch Project represents the last time every type of American citizen was talking about the same movie at the same time. If you were alive and possessed optic nerves in the summer of 1999, you saw The Blair Witch Project. It was like a shopping mall version of the Camp David Summits, bringing together diverse cultures of the era, form rich kids in Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts to dudes who Sharpied their fingernails black during statistics class to your Tae Bo-toned stepmother, for the shared goal of being scared shitless and watching shaky cameras pointed at leaves. If the morlocks had taken over planet Earth that July, they would’ve lured the eloi with promises of a free underground Blair Witch screening. And if parody is representative of cultural influence, than The Blair Witch Project was like The Renaissance meets The Beatles meets season one of Survivor. Blair Witch parody in fact became an industry unto itself, supporting not one, but two feature spoofs: The Bogus Witch Project and Steve Odenkirk’s The Blair Thumb.

This simply doesn’t happen anymore. Even Inception, the first film in a while that was talked about for more than a week after its release, lasted a fraction of how long The Blair Witch stuck around. And to last just that long Christopher Nolan had to make the most complicated mainstream film of all time. Somewhat ironically, the source of modern Hollywood’s attention deficit — technology — was the very source that propelled The Blair Witch Project to its phenomenon status. The film was marketed through the Internet in a way that today is glaringly obvious and by-the-book, but in 1999 was apparently more revolutionary than the decoding of the human genome. Every article written during Blair Witch Mania that I read spoke with wide-eyed astonishment about the ability of a movie to be discussed on the information superhighway. The still-active BlairWitch.com was hailed as a breakthrough in online promotion when it launched, and when the co-directors premiered the trailer not in theaters but on Ain’t It Cool News, it made it into a Time magazine cover story.

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 was how Blair Witch Mania ended: not with a bang, but with a hastily-produced whimper. To be fair, the sequel begins with lofty ambitions. It attempts to play with narrative conventions and blur lines between fiction and reality the way its predecessor did, presenting a fictional story about four Blair Witch Project fans (a sexy Wicca, a sarcastic goth and a pair of married historians) who hop in a grungy van on a “Blair Witch Tour” through the (fictitious) woods of Burkitsville, Maryland. They are led by Jeff (Burn Notice’s Jeffrey Donovan), a potentially insane tour guide who resembles 80% of the supporting actors on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.

That’s where the ambition stops. Book of Shadows quickly turns into the exact kind of horror film the original Blair Witch was a reaction against, complete with little girls in Victorian dresses, stabbings and NIN in-your-face editing. The movie ends (spoiler alert) with Jeff and the tourists accused of committing a brutal murder motivated by an “obsession” with The Blair Witch Project. “Sadly, as has happened so many times before in this country, violent art has inspired real-life violence,” sermonizes a reporter. It’s a pretty eye-roll-inducing allusion to the blame that trench-coat celebrities like Marilyn Manson and the Wachowski Brothers faced in the late ’90s. It’s dated not because we’ve stopped caring about violence that much, but because we’ve stopped caring about movies that much.

*Heather Donahue, the awesome female lead of the first Blair Witch who improvised the most famous movie shot of the ’90s (the snot-nosed Donahue Confession), is today a marijuana legalization proponent who has written for the Huffington Post. This doesn’t have anything to do with Book of Shadows, but was too interesting not to share.

Road Trip

Year 2000 Trademarks:

• Blockbuster Video jewel cases
• Tom Green (specifically this scene):

When American Pie was released, in 1999, it was hailed as the rebirth of the “post-teenage gross-out genre” of the 1970s and 1980s. The ancestor it was most frequently compared to in particular (by, among others, the New York Times) was Porky’s, the 1982 comedy about horny high-schoolers desperate to sneak into a strip club. And why not? Both featured a pact of teenagers pledging to rid themselves of their virginity with humiliating, terrifyingly sexual results. And both featured a handful of tent-pole hard-R scenes designed to firmly cement the movie as a gross-out classic. (Porky’s had its hole-in-the-girls’-shower scene; Pie its pastry-fucking shot.)

But the comparison isn’t totally correct. Unlike Porky’s, which was a fun-but-nihilistic romp, American Pie had heart. Granted, that heart was interlaced with scenes of girls drinking semen-spiked Coors, but it was there. Just look how the film ends: two of the four friends may engage in wild, eyebrow-raising sex worthy of Lambda Lambda Lambda (Finch hooks up with Stiffler’s mother, while Jim has a kinky one-night stand with band geek Allison Hannigan after she famously informs him where a flute was once inserted). But the remaining two friends, Oz and Kevin, are used by the filmmakers as sermonizing tales on the dangers of rushing into sex, and the benefits of “waiting for the right time” (cue ’90s educational health class video theme). No, American Pie is less like Porky’s and more like rebirth of John Hughes’s mildly-naughty but ultimately heartfelt teenage films – a Sixteen Candles for the American Online set.

Road Trip is, in fact, the film that proudly picks up where Porky’s left off. It is a movie for frat guys who considered American Pie on-par with a Merchant-Ivory picture. Who considered There’s Something About Mary a flick “for pussies.” The film stars Breckin Meyer as Josh, a desperate college student who enlists three  friends (including Sean William Scott, a/k/a American Pie’s “Stiffler,” that movie’s only morally vacant character) to embark on a road… um… venture from Ithaca University in New York to the University of Austin in Texas to recover a personal sex-tape (starring a topless Amy Smart, whispers my 15-year-old self excitedly while grinning a set of silver braces) accidentally mailed to his long-distance girlfriend.

It is here I should stop to focus on this driving plot of Road Trip. Its entire plot, its entire reason for existing is predicated on the act of communicating with a friend by parcel-mailing videocassettes halfway across the country. Much like Scream 3’s gags about cell phone memory, this plot-point places Road Trip at a very specific technological moment. It is not an archaic look at the early days of computers like WarGames, nor does it feature cutting-edge technologies. Instead, it lies somewhere in the Late Cretacious Period of the World Wide Web’s history in America. In 2000 the Internet was alive and well. Even non-technophobes Had Mail. This was, after all, a full two years after Nora Ephron had Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks soft-core cyberfuck each-other through dial-up modems.

What we didn’t have was bandwidth. Or at least not enough for the casual 2000 websurfer to easily share videos. DSL and other broadband services existed, but were by no means ubiquitous. (According to an article in the UK Telegraph, YouTube in 2007 consumed as much digital space as the entire Internet in 2000). If only Road Trip’s Josh had waited two or three years to sleep with Amy Smart, this whole situation could have been avoided with the purchase of a webcam. His crisis, however, wound up being a eerily precient warning about the dangers of leaked sex tapes that would go on to haunt various celebrities, fuled by the Internet, in the decade to come.

We’re treated to another example of the emerging Internet culture (and its dangers) during Road Trip’s climax, as Josh and his compatriots arrive at the University of Austin’s mailroom to demand the sex tape (the one with topless Amy Smart!). As they approach, they’re cut off by an uptight clerk typing frantically away on a laptop computer, reading with pride his online destination: “www dot Episode II, dot spoilers, backslash…” Not only does this hark back to a day when people were still looking forward to new Star Wars movies, it introduces the pop-cultural world to a new villian: the net nerd, prowling for spoilers and scoffing at the real-world problems of the decent folks in front of him. And what happens when the gang gets physical with him? He leaps from his computer and beats the shit out of them.

The message is clear, and we should have seen it coming: the Internet larkers are coming. And they are stronger and more violent than they look.

28 Days

In 28 Days, Sandra Bullock plays a boozy New York writer who gets sloshed at her sister’s wedding with Dominic West (what McNulty fan woudn’t?), crashes a limo into a nearby house, and is sentenced to a stint in rehab. Bullock arrives at the wooded retreat grudgingly — a city-smart gal who, even in 2000, is constantly talking on a mobile phone or typing away on her ThinkPad. Soon enough, though, her harsh exterior is melted by a community of loveable recovering addicts whose damaged lives we can only imagine (and have to, since this brutal analysis of addiction is rated PG-13 and doesn’t really want to show the, you know, unpleasant side of addiction).

This Sandra Bullock — stern, no-nonsense, a little bitchy — is the Sandra Bullock we know today. But it is a nice reminder of Ms. Bullock’s earlier, action-packed days that 28 Days should be most frequently rememberd for the abstract reason of not being Danny Boyle’s zombie thriller 28 Days Later.

The year 2000, in which 28 Days was released, nicely cleaves the collected work of Sandra Annete Bullock into two halves. And the first of these halves was Bullock’s breakout era of the mid 1990s, which includes testosteriffic blockbusters like 1993’s Demolition Man and Speed. Among the time traveling and exploding busses of those films (not to mention Dennis Hopper), Bullock emerged as the perky, spunky, Alanis Morissetey new face of Hollywood actresses. (In its review of Speed, The New Yorker called her “Claudette Colbert in the age of hard rock.” Which sounds like it was written by the oldest and whitest human being on Earth, but the point of which is still valid.)

Let’s compare that with the late ’80s , when Norma Rae and Working Girl had already hit theaters, when female empowerment was a perrenial 20/20 installment, and when Michael Crichton was writing Disclosure. Back then your typical female lead was Sigourney Weaver or Melanie Griffith: strong women with powerful permed hair and padded shoulders that made them resemble linebackers more than actresses. Women who could emasculate even Harrison Ford:

If this photograph hasn’t sufficiently tripled you’re blood’s estrogen content, I recommend viewing the music video for Carly Simon’s “Let the River Run,” from the Working Girl soundtrack. (I’m 90% sure I grew fimbriae after one play):

Young Sandra Bullock represented a dramatic shift from Sigourney Weaver’s Reagan-Era alpha-woman. She was, arguably, Generation X’s first female superstar (like a higher-paid Blossom). She wore floppy hats with sunflowers on them. She looked like Phoebe from the first season of Friends (or Wynona Ryder from Reality Bites). She probably owned a few pairs of overalls and a sang along to Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” while recording a road trip on Hi 8. She was decidedly of her time. (Who else but Sandra Bullock could have starred in The Net, a picture about the looming threats of of dial-up modems?)

In my adolescent version of a perfect world, Sandra Bullock would have remained the sweet, happy-go-lucky fifth-grade teacher’s assistant whose floral blouse I’d stare down when she leaned over to help me with my long division. But this obviously wasn’t what Ms. Bullock aspired to – which brings me to the second act of her career. Ten years ago, Bullock abandoned her perkiness and never looked back. No more zany, free-spirited bus drivers or futuristic San Angeles peacekeepers. No more Forces of Nature. No more Practical Magic. Not even another Hope Floats.

2000’s 28 Days would be our last taste of that Sandra Bullock. The same year, Miss Congeniality was released. A major turning point. Miss Congeniality represents a clear and sudden turn of Ms. Bullock’s toward stern, powerful women – women who wouldn’t hesitate to plow their SUVs into the old, perky Sandy’s ‘96 Geo. It is telling that the plot of Miss Congeniality concerns a woman who must fundamentally alter her personality for her career.

In particular, last year highlights the post-Congeniality Bullock. She received 2009 Golden Globe nominations for two roles (in The Proposal and The Blind Side) as assertive, steely women who probably wouldn’t let their Honor Roll kids watch Demolition Man, let alone star in it themselves. For reference, check out the first 25 seconds of the Blind Side trailer. You can almost sense the 20th-century Sandra Bullock fade away amid a chorus of middle aged working mothers snapping, You go girl: