UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: More Movies and Television

A January Movie in February.

Cocaine Bear (2023. Written by Jimmy Warden. 95 minutes)

In 1985 some bricks of cocaine fell out of an airplane. A 175-pound bear found one of them and digested most of it. He behaved a little strange. More like a sketch than a film.

Jimmy Warden (he also goes by James Warden, presumably on his more up-scale projects, like his announced work writing the sequel to Tár) has only had one other screenplay produced. He has written a script here that turns the incident not only into a movie, but a funny, scary, entertaining one.

It is a movie that manages a consistent tone while shifting gears. It helps that he has Elizabeth Banks, the director of 2015’s Pitch Perfect 2, directing. Look at how she choreographs and photographs Keri Russell, the tree, and the bear. Hitchcock could not have done it better.

What was probably one of the first things Warden did was make the bear 500 pounds rather than 175. At 175 almost any macho actor could take him; 500 pounds, not so likely. So we have a dangerous bear on the loose.

Although the titles tell us this is “inspired by true events,” Warden has created a group of totally fictional characters. Well, who would you write into the story? You want some characters who do smart things and some who do dumb things. You want some that the audience is perfectly willing to see killed by the bear. You also want some that you can surprise the audience by killing.

There are some familiar faces in the cast, but mostly not. Warden kills off a couple of familiar faces, including one I was very sorry to see go. Near the end of the picture, there is a moment when I thought he was going to show that person had not died. But he did not. Good for Warden.

By the way, I was funning with you a bit earlier. Warden has not been announced as the writer of the sequel to Tár. Although watching Lydia Tár take on the bear would be fun.

Frantic!

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022. Screenplay by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, story by Tommy Swerdlow and Tom Wheeler. 102 minutes)

I am not a fan of a lot of current animation, and you can see why when I get into discussing this movie. I do like a lot of Pixar’s stuff, as you can tell from my review of Soul (2020) you can read here. I bring up in that review the stupidity of Pixar’s parent company Disney, which did not release it in theatres where it belonged, but only (at first; later it was available on DVD) on their streaming service. As I mentioned in that review, they left a lot of money on the table. They have begun to realize how much money they are leaving on the table: a billion dollars a quarter.

So what does this have to do with DreamWorks’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish? Well, traditionally Disney had a big animated film release each Christmas. They did not this past Christmas, leaving more money, etc. So I went to see the DreamWorks movie, which was in theatres.

I had only seen two of Puss’s first appearances. He was not in the first 2001 Shrek, but showed up in #2 (2004) and #3 (2007), both of which I saw. Then he appeared in a lot of shorts, TV shows, TV movies, and who knows what else. He got his own film, Puss in Boots in 2011.

I think the reason he became a star on his own is that he is voiced by Antonio Banderas. Banderas has the perfect voice for a swashbuckler (he starred in two Zorro films [1998 and 2005]), but also has a seductive purr. Tom Wheeler has been writing Puss for several of his appearances, so everybody seems to be on the same page for this. It helps when the writers and the actors are in sync.

The film gets off to a nice, twisty start. Puss gets involved in a duel and…gets killed. I told you it was twisty. But cats have nine lives, so he figures he has several more to go. The administrator of these matters informs him that he has used up eight (nice dialogue as Puss counts them up) and only has one left. What’s a cat to do?

One solution is to find a place that will give him one last wish. So he is off with his former fiancée Kitty Softpaws (a tough cookie in spite of her name, voiced by Salma Hayak; Kitty Softpaws is the best name for a female character since Pussy Galore). Their previous relationship gives the writers some good dialogue to write.

Needless to say, the two run into trouble. The Shrek movies generally stuck with the characters from William Steig book, but here the writers bring in some interesting fairy tale figures. We get Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldi is by now a punkette who bullies the bears. We also get Jack Horner, not so little anymore because he keeps eating stuff he gets on his thumb. He is called Big Jack Horner now in reference to his size. He has an inferiority complex because all these other characters are from fairy tales, and he is only from a nursery rhyme. There is also a cricket named Ethical Bug, whom we guess is related to Jiminy Cricket, although Jiminy is owned by Disney. DreamWorks solves that problem by having Kevin McCann, the actor reading the part doing it in an imitation of James Stewart.

So we have a solid structure, interesting characters, and some funny dialogue. What’s not to like? Well, I’ll tell you. The pacing is fast, normally a good thing, but the action scenes, of which there are a lot, go by so fast that they occasionally make it difficult to both understand and enjoy what is going on. I have seen this in a lot of contemporary American animation. It can get very exhausting over the length of a feature film (and this one is surprisingly long for an animated feature). I was relieved when the film was finally over and I rested in my seat reading the credits, which were long and, thank goodness, slow.

The True Company of Lies You Keep.

The Company You Keep (2023---, created for American television by Julia Cohen, based on the Korean television series My Fellow Citizens [2019---, created by Jung-hoon Han], multiple writers. One-hour episodes) and True Lies (2023---, created for television by Matt Nix, based on the film True Lies [1994, written by James Cameron] and the film La Totale! [1991, written by Simon Michaël, Claude Zidi, and Didier Kaminka])

So here we have two new television series, both about crooks, spies, men, and women. One of them is very good. The other is not.

Let’s start with the best one. In spite of its title, The Company You Keep bears no relation to the 2013 Robert Redford movie of the same name. It is instead an American version of a Korean series. In the original, a con man falls in love with a woman he does not know is a detective. Julia Cohen has upped the ante for the American version. Here the male lead Charlie is a con man, from a con man family. His sister, his mom, and his dad are all involved in the cons. His girlfriend runs off with the money they scored in a big con. Charlie goes out to a bar and meets Emma. She is a CIA officer who has just discovered her boyfriend cheating on her. Charlie and Emma get the hots for each other and make the beast with two backs. Several times. Needless to say, neither one tells the other what they really do.

It helps that the two stars, Milo Ventimiglia as Charlie and Catherine Haena Kim as Emma, have charisma out the wazoo, and they have great chemistry together. The showrunners on this one are holding off letting Charlie and Emma find out what the other does. Even though they are dealing with some of the same bad guys. The showrunners are having fun keeping them from learning about the other. In episode three Charlie and his family are working a scam about selling a racehorse, which is running in a big race. The race is being televised…and Emma is sort of watching with her family. So is she going to spot Charlie or his family (whom she has had dinner with) on the telly? No, and you have to laugh when she doesn’t.

So I figured the writers were going to hold off letting them discover what the others do. Once again writers have outsmarted me. At the start of episode 4, a blindfolded Charlie is dragged into an interrogation room and attached to a lie detector. It’s the FBI. But Emma is watching behind one-way glass. Have they all discovered Charlie is a con man? Of course not. They know he and Emma are together and don’t know what he was doing for a period of time in Latin America. He tells them he hit an official and was in prison for several months. The lie detector tells them he is telling the truth, and Emma is satisfied. But is Charlie able to beat the lie detector test?

So that’s the beginning of episode 4, which means there will not be another similar revelation in this…whoops, near the end Charlie is making a payoff to Daphne (never mind who she is), but Emma is on the stakeout and thinks she identifies Charlie. Except when she goes to see him, she doesn’t say anything about it to him. Man, are these writers sneaky. Loves me them writers.

The supporting characters are well-drawn and well-cast. Charlie’s mom and dad are played by Polly Draper and William Fitchner. Just when you think they are being underused, the writers come up with great stuff for them to do. Emma’s family is well-to-do, to put it politely. Her father is a former Senator and her brother is now running for dad’s old seat. Her mom is played by the great Freda Foh Shen and she gets a lot more to do as Emma’s tiger mom than she usually does as a judge or a doctor on other series.

True Lies is not up to The Company You Keep. It is based on the 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, which is based on a French film. The French film was a relatively small-scale comedy-drama about a spy who uses his colleagues to spy on his wife. How French. The American version was written and directed by James Cameron, so it became a big, successful action picture. I recall walking out of the theatre after seeing it and hearing a guy say, “That’s the best James Bond movie I ever saw.” He had a point.

The pilot for the TV series is a highly condensed and more fiscally restrained version of the film. Harry and Helen are a married couple. He is supposedly a computer salesman, but really a spy. She is a slightly bored housewife. By the end of the pilot, she has learned he is a spy and she is being recruited to be one as well. Unlike Company, the showrunner Matt Nix, formerly of Burn Notice, does not hold off letting Helen know.

That means the show is going to restart itself as she goes through training and becomes a spy. In episode 2 she gets a training montage and then is sent on a mission with Harry, even though she has not finished her training. In episode 3 she goes on another mission and when she suggests something Harry disapproves of, she tells him, “It’s in the training manual.” She says this in this episode so many times it runs the gag into the ground. I hope the writers do not keep using it.

The film was criticized by some as misogynistic, partly because of its woman villain and partly because Helen is sometimes a little flakey, although Jamie Lee Curtis’s charm helped overcome that. There are some flakey elements to TV’s Helen, played by Ginger Gonzaga, but I hope they don’t lay that on too much because it could get tiresome rather quickly.

Gonzaga is not as charismatic as Kim is, but she is good on her line readings.

Steve Howey as Harry is not a match for Ventimiglia. The lack of chemistry between Gonzaga and Howey is lethal in a show like this. The supporting characters are not particularly well drawn or well cast. There may be hope for the show, but I am not holding my breath.

Son of a…

History of the World: Part II (2023---, 15 writers, based on the film History of the World: Part I [1981], written by Mel Brooks. 8 episodes)

History of the World: Part II is in the tradition of History of the World: Part I.

Which is not a good thing.

Part 1 is one of the weaker Mel Brooks movies. There are only a few funny lines in it (my favorite was “I bring you these 15 [crash], ten, ten commandments”), and a lot of slow spots.

I am normally a great laugher, but I did not laugh once in Part 2. I chuckled a bit, and smiled a bunch, but the show is designed to get major-league guffaws. The actors may have suspected the material is not great, which is why they are pushing so hard for laughs. You have never seen so much overacting in your life.

Interestingly, the women come off better. Wanda Sykes plays it reasonably straight as Harriet Tubman and in the seventies sitcom parody about Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm (I am not sure much of the audience will know who she was, but for those of us who do, the scenes sort of work). Pamela Adlon is good as the mudpie maker’s wife in the Russian Revolution, while Nick Kroll is all over the place as her husband.

Kroll is better as Judas in the Jesus episodes, especially “The Last Supper Sessions,” which has J.C. and the Apostles trying to record some songs. The sequence works better than most of the segments because it is better focused.

The structure of the show is that each half-hour episode has several sketches. Some sketches, such as the Civil War, the Russian Revolution have scenes spread out over several episodes. Some are one-and-done. One that builds nicely starts with Kubla Khan talking to Marco Polo, then has Khan promoting Khancestory, which shows that everybody is descended from Kubla Khan, and then branches off into “The Real Concubines of Kubla Khan” and then crosses over into another ongoing set of sketches about a family business that removes historical statues.

At the end of the series Mel Brooks, who narrates but does not act in the show, threatens us with season two. I’ll buy it if they hire Jimmy Warden to write a sketch on Lydia Tár and the bear.