Kind of a drag, man.
I got stampeded into seeing Savages last Friday, 6 July, the day that it opened; this is the new Oliver Stone-directed / Oliver Stone co-written movie based on the novel of the same name by Don Winslow, who also got a co-screenwriter credit. It stars Taylor Kitsch (who first rose to prominence on the TV show Friday Night Lights about a high school football team in Texas, and played the eponymous character in Disney's not-as-misguided-as-it's-reputed-to-be John Carter, a not terrible but somewhat muddled and disappointing [though good-looking, especially in 3D] adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars [Barsoom] series; he was also in this year's WTF? based-on-a-game movie, Battleship), Aaron Johnson (the titular character in Kick-Ass), Blake Lively (from TV's Gossip Girl), and, in character parts, Salma Hayek, John Travolta, and Benicio Del Toro.
I'd really wanted to wait to see it until after I'd read the novel, which I picked up for a song (trade paperback edition) from Borders last year on one of the last days that their stores were open; but, owing to the conflicting reviews I'd read Friday and how much I dug an earlier Winslow novel, The Death and Life of Bobby Z (1997; it was filmed ten years later, but I've no desire to see it), I opted to see it at a midnight-ish showing.
Meh: as far as Stone's technique -- different film stock, the editing, the camerawork, the sound, the rewind/fast forward effects, the crazy dissolves -- the movie's a wow. As far as story, plot, dialogue, characterization, well....
The Death and Life of Bobby Z was hyper-kinetic, smart-assed, ultraviolent, explicitly sexual, laugh-out-loud in spots, jaw-dropping in others, and, finally, as close as I can get to a Hollywood-meets-Hallmark type of happy ending without going into insulin shock; while TDaLoBZ read like a movie in many parts, anyone with a lick of sense could tell that it would be terribly, nigh-impossibly hard to adapt into a good movie.
I suspect that the novel Savages will prove to be the same (his most recent novel, published late this June, is a prequel to Savages called The Kings of Cool; based on Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times, I'm champing at the bit to read Savages and, when I can score a cheap copy of it, The Kings of Cool [the NYT also had a nice feature article on Winslow in their Sunday, 24 June edition]), to wit: while there are recognizable bits of Winslowesque dialogue (too few, alas) and situations in the Oliver Stone movie of Savages, everything is flattened, banal; the bleeding-edge-of-reality effect prevalent throughout the novel The Death and Life of Bobby Z is wholly absent from the movie Savages: even the denigrating use of the word "savages" by various characters to describe the behavior of characters who aren't present isn't nearly as funny as it should be -- as it probably was, in the book.
And maybe I'm jaded as hell -- given my reactions to movies such as Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer and Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence), I like to think not -- but I think that Kenneth Turan's horrified review of Savages in last Friday's Los Angeles Times was a bit over the top, moreso than he accused Stone's movie of being. I expect that type of loosey-goosey reaction from Rex Reed or the former movie critic for the Detroit News, Susan Stark, not from Turan. Then again, maybe I haven't read enough of Turan's reviews to get a true sense of his sensibilities; maybe he never forgave Stone for Natural Born Killers.
Honestly, Savages is worth a rental if you have a taste for crime movies where justice is not necessarily served, if you've a liking for movies with just a bit of "meta-" to them (no Peter Greenaway or David Lynch haters need feel unwelcome here), if you dig catching anything that Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek or John Travolta are in, or if you're something of a fan, or at least an interested observer, of the work of either Don Winslow or Oliver Stone; but it sure isn't worth paying full price, as I did.
Ah, well; The Bourne Legacy will be coming out on 10 August (it got bumped back a week): hopefully it'll be more enjoyable.
I'd really wanted to wait to see it until after I'd read the novel, which I picked up for a song (trade paperback edition) from Borders last year on one of the last days that their stores were open; but, owing to the conflicting reviews I'd read Friday and how much I dug an earlier Winslow novel, The Death and Life of Bobby Z (1997; it was filmed ten years later, but I've no desire to see it), I opted to see it at a midnight-ish showing.
Meh: as far as Stone's technique -- different film stock, the editing, the camerawork, the sound, the rewind/fast forward effects, the crazy dissolves -- the movie's a wow. As far as story, plot, dialogue, characterization, well....
The Death and Life of Bobby Z was hyper-kinetic, smart-assed, ultraviolent, explicitly sexual, laugh-out-loud in spots, jaw-dropping in others, and, finally, as close as I can get to a Hollywood-meets-Hallmark type of happy ending without going into insulin shock; while TDaLoBZ read like a movie in many parts, anyone with a lick of sense could tell that it would be terribly, nigh-impossibly hard to adapt into a good movie.
I suspect that the novel Savages will prove to be the same (his most recent novel, published late this June, is a prequel to Savages called The Kings of Cool; based on Janet Maslin's review in the New York Times, I'm champing at the bit to read Savages and, when I can score a cheap copy of it, The Kings of Cool [the NYT also had a nice feature article on Winslow in their Sunday, 24 June edition]), to wit: while there are recognizable bits of Winslowesque dialogue (too few, alas) and situations in the Oliver Stone movie of Savages, everything is flattened, banal; the bleeding-edge-of-reality effect prevalent throughout the novel The Death and Life of Bobby Z is wholly absent from the movie Savages: even the denigrating use of the word "savages" by various characters to describe the behavior of characters who aren't present isn't nearly as funny as it should be -- as it probably was, in the book.
And maybe I'm jaded as hell -- given my reactions to movies such as Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects, Takashi Miike's Ichi the Killer and Tom Six's The Human Centipede (First Sequence), I like to think not -- but I think that Kenneth Turan's horrified review of Savages in last Friday's Los Angeles Times was a bit over the top, moreso than he accused Stone's movie of being. I expect that type of loosey-goosey reaction from Rex Reed or the former movie critic for the Detroit News, Susan Stark, not from Turan. Then again, maybe I haven't read enough of Turan's reviews to get a true sense of his sensibilities; maybe he never forgave Stone for Natural Born Killers.
Honestly, Savages is worth a rental if you have a taste for crime movies where justice is not necessarily served, if you've a liking for movies with just a bit of "meta-" to them (no Peter Greenaway or David Lynch haters need feel unwelcome here), if you dig catching anything that Benicio Del Toro, Salma Hayek or John Travolta are in, or if you're something of a fan, or at least an interested observer, of the work of either Don Winslow or Oliver Stone; but it sure isn't worth paying full price, as I did.
Ah, well; The Bourne Legacy will be coming out on 10 August (it got bumped back a week): hopefully it'll be more enjoyable.