8 MM (1999)

Outline: Mrs. Christian (Myra Carter) hires private detective Tom Welles (Nicholas Cage) to authenticate an 8 millimetre snuff film she finds among her deceased husband's belongings. Once he does, she asks him to find out everything he can about it: who the girl was, how involved her husband was, and who made it. Welles' investigation takes him to LA, where he hires a porn store clerk, Max (Joaquin Phoenix), to help him navigate through the industry.

My second example in as many weeks of Joel Schumacher (director, obviously) being only as good as the script he's working with.

There are two detective archetypes in movies: 1) The family man whose perfect American life (wife, daughter, nice house) is contrasted with the filth and immorality he pursues or 2) The hard boiled, hard drinking man cut off from the world because of his contempt for it (just look at the base creatures he investigates in his line of work!) who only needs the love of a good woman to straighten himself out.

Welles is the former. The sexy and talented Catherine Keener is his wife. Some baby is his daughter. In the likely way, Welles becomes obsessed with finding the girl in the film, obsessed with hurting those who hurt her, in shocking twists that shock no one. Cage does very little with the role except pull an impressive face at one point. In the same way that Liz has a Michael Douglas rule, I have a Nicholas Cage rule: nothing with Cage can ever be all that good. He does Welles' descent into violence pretty realistically, but, at least at first, he's utterly too squeamish to be a detective. It's like he's never seen anything violent and degrading before, which raises the question as to how he could even authenticate the film if the world of snuff filmmaking is so new.

If I start asking questions like that now, I'll never finish this review. Basically speaking, Cage's characterization was over-the-top, like many of his egomanical performances we are so frequently "treated" to.

Phoenix amused me as a blue-haired, tightly-clad clerk who wasn't as interested in his product as he was in rhyme and his own idiomatic speech patterns (no wonder the band didn't work out). He always manages to rise above the archetype, in this case he who no one believed in, who (likely) ran away, and who never managed to succeed (perhaps he never believed in himself?). Welles takes a shine to him (not like that), and he wants to protect him, so we all know how that's going to turn out.

Andrew Kevin Walker's screenplay didn't do it for me. I'm cracking up because I was thinking about how much better it would have been if Welles' squeamishness had been played up for comedic effect like Ichabod Crane's (Johnny Depp) in Sleepy Hollow, which Walker also wrote. So, there ya go, Walker! Just stick with stuff like that. He also wrote two of the "The Hire" screenplays, all of which I am dying to see. Special shout-out to anyone who knows where I can get them.

Oh, get this: The actual script by Andrew Kevin Walker was reworked by Joel Schumacher and Nicholas Kazan after Walker left the project in disagreement with the director. (Click here for the source).

Also, what was with Jenny Powell's line readings?

Oh, Schumacher. Blindingly brilliant visual style. At an absolute loss for what to do with a formulaic script. Not that it was all that bad. I've seen far, far worse. B