Nov. 11, 2009 - Issue #734: Hanky panky

SideVue

Third Time’s The Harm

As this column enters its second year, it faces the sophomore slump—that hit (or myth?) notion that an artist’s second work can often be, well, quite secondary to his or her stunning/acclaimed/magnificent/(insert over-the-top adjective that sets up inevitable disappointment with next work) debut.

But the third film, which can save or slay the director’s critical rep or box-office magnetism, can matter as much or more. Call it “junior junk,” “tertiary-scary” or “third time’s the harm” syndrome, but it better applies to the high-stakes Hollywood world of today than yesteryear, when studios took the fall for flops as much as directors. Now, is the creator’s career more likely to be done like dinner when the chef’s served up leftovers twice in a row?

And why do delicious debuts get followed by dog’s breakfasts? Do some filmmakers only have one good film in them? Is the debut’s success down to other factors (the writing, the acting, the marketing campaign or a lack of expectations)? Can a studio screw up a second enough to throw a director’s career off-course? Do some directors lose touch with what made their first film so good, then become too lost to find their way back? Or do some just try to go back and stamp out cookie-cut molds of their first film onto the screen? Try to figure out where taste goes wrong from this smorgasbord of “three’s misery” filmmakers:

Richard Kelly. After his debut, the teen thriller and cult favourite Donnie Darko (2001), disaster struck with dystopia sci-fi satire Southland Tales (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtp14ikRvxo), from the cast-soup (The Rock, Wallace Shawn, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Miranda Richardson, Mandy Moore) to a booing Cannes premiere (The Observer’s Jason Solomons: “so bad it made me wonder if [Kelly] had ever met a human being”), down to Roger Ebert noting, after seeing the recut film upon wide release, “I recommend that Kelly keep right on cutting until he whittles it down to a ukulele pick.” Kelly’s avoided a wholly original screenplay for his third, adapting The Box—released this past week—from a short story by Richard Matheson, but after the $17-million production of Southland Tales only took in six digits worth on release, The Box’s box-office is all that matters now for Kelly, or else the big red button will almost certainly be pushed on his career.

Thomas Vinterberg. OK, so technically The Celebration was his second film. But he kicked off Dogme 95, and his international career, with that blackly comic family drama, one of the best debuts of the ’90s and impressive enough to draw Claire Danes, Joaquin Phoenix and Sean Penn to his next project. Except that one, five years in the making, was a bizarre leap in scope, subject and genre, with Vinterberg apparently time-travelling into the future as a Danish Richard Kelly, writing and directing a sci-fi film, It’s All About Love (2003), that tried to spin together hit-jobs, zero-gravity, and figure-skating, and zero-gravity before wiping out (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suiHxcNFeD8). When Vinterberg asked for help with the film from Ingmar Bergman, he “roared with laughter and said I had to be out of my mind. There was nothing he was less interested in. And he also said I was an idiot that had not decided fast enough what to do after The Celebration (Festen), which he, by the way, called a masterpiece. It was a very contended conversation.” Rumour has it Danes cried upon seeing the finished film. Vinterberg’s unlucky third was the US-set, gun-control drama Dear Wendy, co-written with Lars von Trier. Unlike von Trier’s comeback, though, from his second film Epidemic, Dear Wendy failed to reinvigorate Vinterberg’s career, and his latest film, a small-scale Danish production, A Man Comes Home, couldn’t return him to the success of his debut either, selling only 31,232 tickets.

Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez. Remember all that super-buzz for the first online-hyped Hollywood hit, 1999’s The Blair Witch Project ($60,000 budget equaled $40 million gross)? The pair behind it stumbled into the void afterwards. Myrick’s horror flicks went to video, though his latest, the Afghanistan-set supernatural thriller The Objective, did get a screen release but no known viewers, other than scathing critics, and its most horrifying element was pulling in, according to Box Office Mojo, $95 from one screen after costing $4 million. Sánchez’s films have vanished into the mist of the sci-fi/supernatural genre, too. It’s the kind of flame-out that casts doubt on the original. Take away the hype, and how much was The Blair Witch Project, as Variety’s Alissa Simon says of The Objective, just about its “low-budget look, cliched dialogue, a stale plot and so-so acting . . . the pic’s objective, given its long list of exec producers, cynically seems to be to make money.”

Karyn Kusama. Her debut Girlfight got strong reviews, but Æon Flux (2005) didn’t kick much ass with Charlize Theron as an assassin who finds herself caught in a tangle of a remade MTV animated sci-fi series, then trying to leap over bad dialogue and avoid plot holes. Peter Chung, the creator of the original series, noted cuts the studio had made, against the writers and director’s wishes, but felt it was “a travesty,” adding, “[seeing it] made me feel helpless, humiliated and sad.” (http://community.livejournal.com/monican_spies/44607.html) Then came this year’s Jennifer’s Body, which, perhaps more because of than despite a super-wordy, listen-to-me script by Diablo Cody, has been dug an early grave. It could become a cult-hit, but Kusama seems to have traded interesting drama about recognizable women for shallow, Kill Bill-style pop-feminism.

Billy Bob Thornton. Sling Blade (1996) was a small-scale debut that was hugely impressive. Four years later, Thornton’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses, despite starring Penelope Cruz and Matt Damon, was anemic and took in $33 million after costing $57 million. His third, Daddy and Them (Laura Dern, Ben Affleck, and Brenda Blethyn, plus Jim Varney in his final film appearance), had actually been shot before All The Pretty Horses, but was corralled by Miramax for three years before going direct-to-DVD (http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51M7659108L._SL500.jpg) Decent reviews didn’t matter by then. After giving up directing, Thornton went on to rant at a CBC radio host about how he didn’t want to always be associated with acting (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJWS6qyy7bw&feature=fvw).

Danis Tanovic. His No Man’s Land (2001), a bracing absurdist-comic study of the Yugoslavian war, won Best Screenplay at Cannes and the Best Foreign Film Oscar. His next, L’Enfer, adapted from a Kieslowski script, was good but largely ignored, seeing only disc over here. He’s gone back to the front with Triage, starring Colin Farrell as a traumatized war photographer returned from Kurdistan (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8B54HrWE-c&feature=related). It got mixed reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival and is still waiting to be picked up by a distributor. His fourth film, already filming, is a more immediate homecoming, to Herzegovina, but by then it may be too late.

Erick Zonca. He, too, wowed Cannes, with his sublime debut The Dreamlife of Angels, followed by the amazing—but unknown over here—65-minute film The Little Thief (1999). His third, the Cassavetes-remake Julia, has seen limited release but boasts a bravura performance by Tilda Swinton. Zonca’s future may be most determined by him; after struggling with alcoholism, it was eight years before Julia’s release, though his addiction also fuelled the film (http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/nov/28/julia-tilda-swinton-eric-zonka).

With his third film, Rian Johnson will be hoping to rebound from the disappointment of last year’s The Brothers Bloom, after his surprising 2005 debut, the noir Brick, dropped a lot of them in delight. At the big-budget end of the sophomore spectrum, Frank Miller’s recent The Spirit lacked any after his blockbuster comic-noir Sin City, but it’s back to the formula for Sin City 2. Maybe that’s the ticket—you don’t need to be third time lucky when you’re going back for seconds and patrons are willing to swallow formula food.
 

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