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HACKS 2004
Written and Directed by Glenn Rockowitz.
Starring, Angela Muto, Bart Shattuck, John Roach, Tracy Tobin, Victor Varnado
David G. Cohen, Perry Wohlberg, Ken Forman Mark Yuhasz and Glenn Rockowitz.
Hacks is supposed to be some sort of subversive look at the dark and hopeless underbelly of stand up comedy. What is actually is, is fairly funny, deliberately offensive and an example of how comedians have a weakness for mediocre improv.
A mockumentary that focuses on the talent agency of Lucius Diamond (Glenn Rockowitz) and Baxter Hutz (David G. Cohen) and the desperately bad stand-up comics they book into a series of humiliatingly low rent gigs. There’s an aggressively bad female comic and her anal husband/manager who really wishes he were the star, a foul-mouthed black comedian who happens to be an albino, a middle aged impressionist with a Catskills-era repertoire, a wheelchair bound observation comic who’s ever lame, confrontational observation starts with “What is it with…?” and an “alternative” comic who does pseudo-Kaufmanesque performance art without understanding what he’s doing.
A lot of the humor in Hacks is not supposed to come from the comedians, because they suck. It’s supposed to be funny to watch them be horrifically unfunny, no matter how hard they try, and you can get laughs out of that concept. Johnny Carson was a master at taking the silence after a joke that bombed and getting the audience to laugh at how bad it was. But Carson would only have to do that once or twice in a 5 to 10 minute monologue. Hack is great evidence you really can’t stretch that out over an entire movie. After a certain point, being unfunny just can’t be funny, no matter how much you exaggerate it.
There are some great jokes and great bits in the film, but in the guise of being too offensive or dark for people to laugh at. However, as a farm kid born and bred in rural Iowa, I really didn’t find anything in the film that shocking. Dirty? Yep. Politically incorrect? You betcha. But offensive in the sense of “I can’t believe someone would joke about that”? Nah. The people making this film sure thought they were being naughty, though. Maybe they were raised Amish.
I suppose I could talk about how Hacks never really focuses on just what it’s trying to say as a film or about how the story doesn’t really build or go anywhere. But, except for trying to spend the last 3 minutes of the film building up to an ending that doesn’t really follow the first 80 minutes of the movie, Hacks isn’t really about plot or character development or really making a statement. It’s about a lot of comedians improv-ng their way through a series of basic scenes.
I didn’t try and find the script for Hacks, but I’d bet 5 bucks it’s one of those films where there’s not many jokes or much dialog written down. They come up with the characters, put them in a situation, turn and the camera and just go. Here’s the thing about improv, though. It’s very hard to do. At all. It’s not just hard to do good improv. It’s just as difficult to do mediocre improv and it’s even just as much a challenge to do bad improv. Comedians are generally the only folks who really understand that, and it makes them poor judges of whether or not improv is actually funny. Comedians know that just getting through the scene, making it up as you go along and staying in character, is quite an accomplishment. But they seem to get so impressed by the simple performance of improv, that they can’t appreciate that you can make it up as you go along and stay in character…and not be funny at all. There’s too many scenes in Hacks where you can tell they’re improv-ing, you can tell they’re trying to be funny, you can tell they’re close to actually being funny…but they never quite make it all the way to laugh land.
There are some genuine laughs in Hacks and it’s short enough that the almost-but-not-really-funny stuff doesn’t go on too long. So, if you’re looking for something quick and dirty that will occasionally make you laugh out loud, try it out. But if you’ve got a short attention span or high standards for humor, give it a pass.
HANNIBAL RISING 2007
Written by Thomas Harris.
Directed by Peter Webber.
Starring Gaspard Ulliel, Gong Li, Dominic West, Rhys Ifans, Richard Brake, Martin Hub, Kevin McKidd, Joerg Stadler, Stephen Walters, Ivan Marevich, Richard Leaf, Ingebora Dapkunaite and Helena-Lia Tachovska.
It’s fairly standard for Hollywood to take a writer’s work and bastardize it beyond recognition. It’s somewhat rare for a writer to willingly bastardize his own creation. Hannibal Rising is an example of the latter as Thomas Harris takes his most famous and compelling creation and refashions him from murderous psychopath to ill tempered Batman knockoff. I don’t know what effect the fame and fortune of The Silence of the Lambs had on Harris personally, but this film is the mark of an embarrassing creative collapse.
This movie is about the origins of Hannibal Lecter, which is a problem right from the start. Lecter is a brilliant work of fiction, a charismatic monster who almost transcends his evil nature. He is not at all realistic. There are sadistic madmen in the world, but they have as much in common with Hannibal Lecter as the average policeman has with Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. The more you see of Lecter, the harder it is to deny the fantastic, unbelievable aspects of the character. That’s why he’s more fascinating and effective when he plays a small role in a story, such as the novels Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs and the film adaptation of lambs. The more you focus on him, such as in the book and film versions of Hannibal and this movie, both Lecter and his stories become more ridiculous and hard to swallow. So, trying to make a serious movie that’s entirely about Lecter is a doomed endeavor.
The film begins with Lecter as young boy in World War II Lithuania and the terrible tragedies his family suffered. It then jumps forward to Lecter as a young man (Gaspard Ulliel) who gets taken in by his Japanese aunt in France. As Lecter deals with his almost-Oedipal attraction to Lady Murasaki (Gong Li), he’s haunted by a desire for revenge on the band of looters than savagely killed his young sister Mischa (Helena-Lia Tachovska). There’s also French Inspector Popil (Dominic West), a war crimes investigator who complicates Lecter’s efforts to slaughter those who slaughtered his sister. Playing out more like a 1970s revenge flick than anything resembling the previous Lecter films, a bunch of variously evil people meet relatively ungruesome ends and Lecter slips away at the end.
Hannibal Rising not only starts out as a bad idea, it’s even worse in the execution. At the point where his Japanese aunt is training Lecter in the martial arts, I actually laughed out loud at the cheesy stupidity of it. That’s not something I could have ever imagined doing after I first watched Silence of the Lambs. It doesn’t help anything that Gaspard Ulliel looks like a male model doing Zoolander’s “Blue Steel” face through the whole movie. This thing is devoid of any of the cleverness or complexity of any of the previous Lecter stories on the page or the screen. It’s more like a really pretentious Steven Seagal direct-to-DVD release.
I loathed the ending of the novel Hannibal. It was such a gross violation of the essence of both Lecter and Clarice Starling that I was convinced Harris was intentionally trying to piss off his fans so they’d stop bothering him for more Hannibal stories. But he then went on to write another Lecter book and then the screenplay for this cinematic joke. I no longer have any idea why he’s done these things, only that he should be punished and not rewarded for them.
HATCHET 2006
Written and Directed by Adam Green.
Starring Joel David Morse, Deon Richmond, Tamara Feldman, Kane Hoder, Mercedes McNab, Joleigh Fioreavanti, Joel Murray, Parry Shen, Richard Riehle, Patrika Darbo, Robert Englund, Joshua Leonard and Tony Todd.
This is a fetish movie. I don’t mean that in any sort of sexual way, only that it’s aimed at satisfying a rather particular taste for shocking, brutal violence, a heaping dose of comedy and the kind of childish meanness that enjoys burning ants with a magnifying glass. If you like that sort of thing, then Hatchet will be the sort of thing you like.
Ben (Joel David Morse) has been dragged down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras by his friends. Having just caught his childhood sweetheart cheating on him, Ben isn’t really feeling the generalized debauchery of the occasion. So he talks his best friend Marcus (Deon Richmond) into taking a night tour of the surrounding swamps. They jump on a boat with a Cajun-Asian tour guide from Detroit, a middle aged couple from the Midwest, a guy and two hot chicks making their own version of Girls Gone Wild videos and Marybeth (Tamara Feldman), a local girl looking for her missing brother and father in the swamp. Then end up trapped in the swamp, facing a deformed killer named Victor Crowley (Kane Hoder) who may or may not be supernatural in origin. They all end up running around the woods like an old Scooby Doo cartoon, getting killed in horrifically graphic fashion, until the movie hits us with one of those nihilistic endings that are beyond played out.
When I compare Hatchet to an old Scooby Doo cartoon, I do not mean that as an insult in any way. Yeah, the later episodes where never better than mediocre and the less said about the Scrappy Doo era the better, but the original “Scooby Doo, Where Are You?” cartoons were really good and so are the individual elements of this film. The comedy is genuinely funny. The violence is shocking and disgusting. It’s fast moving and smart without being pretentious. Aside from a tiresome conclusion, just about every piece of this film is well done.
The problem with Hatchet is that most folks probably wouldn’t like how all the pieces are put together. It’s too funny for most people to appreciate it as a horror movie and it’s too viciously gory for most people to appreciate it as a comedy. This is for horror movie fans who want to have a good laugh but still see human bodies ripped apart like they were made out of bloody papier mache. That’s a niche audience and this is a niche film. It’s a very good niche film, with quality acting, writing and directing…but it’s still niche.
Writer/director Adam Green has made an interesting and effective horror-comedy with plenty of laughs, butchery and naked boobs for everyone who enjoys that sort of thing. But it’s also both too funny and too gross for most folks.
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