UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Summer Fun at the Movies

Oh yea! The new Phoebe Waller-Bridge flick.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023. Written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold. Based on characters created by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. 154 minutes)

OK, so the title tells us this is an Indiana Jones movie. And it certainly starts like an Indiana Jones movie. It is near the end of World War II and Indy is being chased by and chasing Nazis---wait a minute. Harrison Ford is now eighty, but the Harrison Ford on-screen is only about forty. Is this whole scene an outtake from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)? Nope, it is a new scene with CGI used to “de-age” Ford, and I have to admit the de-aging process works very well.

So, Indy and the Nazis yet again. Voller, the head Nazi here, and Indy are fighting over something called the Dial of Destiny. I am not sure when it gets named, but if Indy and Voller are fighting over it, it must be something worth fighting for.

They are all on a train, so there is a lot of running around in the train and on top of the train. Well, we’ve been there before too, in the opening of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). But that train sequence was in brilliant sunlight and photographed by Douglas Slocombe, who photographed the first three Indy movies. The train sequence here is at night and is photographed by Phedon Papamichael, ordinarily an excellent cinematographer. But the whole scene is so dark it is almost impossible to tell what is going on. This is a problem I have with a lot of contemporary theatrical films. I am not however sure it is entirely Papamichael’s fault, since I have read a couple of articles recently that say that a lot of theatres do not keep their equipment in good shape, which can lead to a darker image.

So we then jump to 1969 and a truly eighty-year-old Indy gets out of bed to complain to his neighbors about their loud music. Ford gives great grump. Then we get a clever throwback scene. Indy is teaching a class and instead of the students being interested and flirting with him, as they did in Raiders, they are dozing in the dark and obviously have not studied the material.

It is Indy’s retirement day, and he is given a large clock, which is funny if you know where the movie is going.

So he goes off to a bar, and a woman who knew the answers to the questions in class comes in to join him. I have always thought that women were underserved in the Indy movies. Marion gets a great introductory scene in Raiders, then becomes a damsel in distress. Willie in Temple of Doom (1984) mostly screeches. Elsa in Last Crusade is a bland spy. The best so far is Irina in Kingdom of the Crystal Meth Lab (2008), but she is played by Cate Blanchett, who understood how to play that character in that movie.

Yeah, I know it was Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was just making sure you were paying attention.

So who is the know-it-all dame who walks into Indy’s life? As the line in the trailer that is not in the movie tells us, she is Indy’s goddaughter. Helena is the daughter of Basil Shaw, whom we met back in the opening scene. Basil was obsessed with the Dial of Destiny, and his daughter is too. Except she has more mercenary ideas of what to do with it than Basil and Indy did. So sometimes she goes along with Indy, and sometimes she does not.

And, most importantly, she is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, the British actress-writer. She wrote and starred in the British TV series Fleabag (2016-2019) and created and wrote the TV series Killing Eve (2018-2022). There were rumors at one time that she was also working on the script for Dial, but if she did, not enough survived to get credit for it. I did not spot any lines that sounded like they came from the author of Fleabag, so whatever she wrote may not have fit into the script the boys wrote. In any case, James Mangold, who also directed, understood what he had with her as an actress and she more than holds her own with Harrison Ford.

There are rumors that there may be a spinoff of her character into her own film. There are already misogynistic trolls complaining about her in this film, so I suspect they would not show up for such a film. I would.

Oh yes, the rest of the script. Not as good as it should have been. I have the feeling, looking at the number of credited writers on this film, that stuff got moved around or most likely dropped. For example, Voller shows up and there are hints that he was a German rocket scientist who helped get us to the moon, but the film does not make that clear. There is a parade celebrating the astronauts who made the moon landing, but no connection is made to Voller. We have learned earlier that Mutt, Indy and Marion’s son, was killed in Vietnam, and I think we are to make the connection with the war protestors in the parade, but it is not clear.

Helena steals, well, whatever it is she steals and goes off to Tangiers to sell it to the highest bidder. Indy shows up to steal it back. A chase in the streets of Tangiers happens, but it is pretty much a run-of-the mill chase.

Next, they are on a boat, captained by Renaldo, played in a too-brief appearance by Antonio Banderas. They are now searching for the sunken Roman ship that had been carrying the Dial. Well, that is not what they find, but are now off to the grave of Archimedes, who invented the dial. At one point Indy and Helena are climbing up a wall in a cave (there are always caves in Indy movies) and Indy has a little aria that seems to come out of nowhere about the difficulties of getting old. It would have worked better as a running gag throughout the film rather than piled on at once.

So Vollmer ends up with the Dial, and we find out what he wanted it for: to go back in time to 1939 to kill Hitler take over the country, and run the war right so he could take over the world. Well, a boy can dream. Except he miscalculated (he needed Doc Brown’s flux capacitor) ends up at the Siege of Syracuse (Sicily, not New York) in 212 B.C., and the special effects team goes wild. Indy meets Archimedes, who invented the Dial, gives it back to him, and tells Helena he intends to stay here with Archimedes. He goes on and on about it and Helena, having seen all the Indiana Jones movies knows exactly what to do.

So Indy is back in New York, recuperating from his wounds, and who walks in the door…well, if you have not read about it or heard about it, I am not going to tell you.

And You Thought No Hard Feelings Was Raunchy.

Joy Ride (2023. Written by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong & Teresa Hsiao; story by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong & Teresa Hsiao & Adele Lim. 95 minutes)

If you read last month’s column, which you can read here, you will remember I whacked both No Hard Feelings and Book Club: The Next Chapter (both 2023) for suffering from too much American Puritanism.

Joy Ride, about three Asian-American women on a trip to China, makes up for that in spades. Unlike No Hard Feelings, this film does what I gave the earlier film more than a little s**t for not doing: keeping the raunch going all the way, or nearly all the way, through. And unlike both of the earlier films, the raunch is both verbal and visual.

We first meet Audrey and Lolo as little girls in one of the great meet-cute scenes in recent years. The scene is in the trailer, and it plays just as fast in the film as it does in the trailer. Audrey, Chinese-American, but adopted by a white family, grows up to be a typical “model majority” Asian-American. She wins all the prizes, goes to law school, and works for a prestigious law firm. Lolo is the flake of the two who makes more than vaguely obscene artwork. We see a lot of it and it is hysterically funny. Like a lot of this movie, it will make you laugh your a*s off.

The plot gets moving, and boy does this picture move. Look at the running time. The dialogue goes at a breakneck speed very much in the tradition of His Girl Friday (1940). At the risk of promoting the competition, there is an excellent interview in Creative Screenwriting of the two screenwriters. You can read it here. The two women talk about their influences, but they also talk about the other themes they wanted to explore, such as friendship, the place of Asian-Americans in America, and how they feel about it.

Audrey is assigned to go to China to make a deal for her law firm. She does not speak Chinese that well. She brings along Lolo as an interpreter, and Lolo drags along her cousin, Deadeye, a non-binary person who is a perfect deadpan most of the time.

In addition to making the deal, Audrey wants to get together with Kat, her college roommate, and maybe even find her birth mother.

So Audrey has a business dinner with the man she is supposed to make the deal with. She drinks a very Chinese drink and vomits all over him. He forgives her, and when he learns she is going to see her mother, he invites her to his mother’s birthday party on Friday so the two families can get together.

Assorted high-jinx ensue. Kat is now a big star on a Chinese soap opera and is engaged to the male star. What she has failed to tell him is that she f****d like a bunny in college, and is having a very hard time pretending she is still a virgin, especially around the other women.

I gave No Hard Feelings some real s**t for taking such a long time to get around to its “first sex” scene. The sex montage in this film comes earlier as the women are given a ride (they lost their passports) by a men’s athletic team. The girls have a lot of sex with the guys. No, I have no idea what game the team plays. I do know that the morning after most of the guys are in bandages and on crutches. The whole sequence is funny, especially visually. See folks, it can be done.

Audrey eventually finds the adoption agency from which she was adopted. The writers get a little serious at this point, but we have grown to love all the characters (even Kat when a costume foul-up reveals that he has a large tattoo of the devil’s mouth on her p***y, caught by a lot of cameras). The scene in the adoption agency begins a series of four plot revelations that may blow your mind. They connect to a lot of things the movie has been about all along. One revelation brings in a guest star whom you will recognize by face if not by name. He is the perfect actor for this part in this picture.

The casting overall, by Rich Delia, is perfect. Ashley Park is great as Audrey, the square one who appreciates others, and she has the right weight as things change when the revelations begin to fall. Listen to her and watch her as she realizes what all this means. Adele Lim, who worked on the story, is directing her first film and she knows when to keep the focus on the actors. Sherry Cola is a great counterpoint to Park’s Audrey and gets some of the best lines and best bits. Kat is played by Stephanie Hsu you may not even recognize as the daughter from Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). Sabrina Wu is a wonderful Deadeye, even when they are not. You will have to see the film to figure that out.

See Tom. See Tom Run. See Tom Run, and Run, and Run. See Tom in the Greatest Train Wreck EVER in the Movies.

Mission: Impossible-Dead Reckoning Part One (2023. Written by Erik Jendresen and Christopher McQuarrie, based on the television series created by Bruce Geller. 163 minutes)

We are in a Russian submarine, which looks like leftover sets from The Hunt for Red October (1990). They are proud of their new gizmo that lets them go anywhere undetected…oops, they have been detected, but nothing’s there, except…

Nice opening. More suspenseful than action-packed, so it works to set a tone of the opening of a novel rather than an action film. Not a bad thing considering how many movies open with large bangs these days. The film moves at more of a novel’s pace than a film’s, which gives it a nice solidity. Jendresen, who was written a variety of kinds of films and television, and McQuarrie (who also directs), who has written the last two MI’s as well as this one, know how to pace this kind of film, as well as connect the dots, as the writers on the Indy movie above did not.

For all their deliberate pacing, they know when to deliver the goods. Pretty soon Ethan Hunt is chasing across the desert trying to find the person who has the key, well one of them, to the gizmo. In most movies of his kind, there is one MacGuffin: money, jewels, microfilm, etc. Here the MacGuffin has several elements. In this film, we are all chasing after the two halves of a key. But what do they unlock? And where is it? Keep in mind this is only part one.

So Hunt finds the key in possession of Ilsa Faust, whom you may remember from the last two MI films. Pretty soon she is killed, and in the great tradition of the Fast & Furious films, she does not stay dead for very long

While Ilsa is dead, Hunt takes up with a newcomer, Grace, a thief, a pickpocket, and a lot of other things. She is played, very nicely, by Hayley Atwell. She and Cruise have great chemistry. They are involved in a superb suspense scene at the Abu Dhabi airport. Jendresen and McQuarrie take their time in this sequence, which helps build up the suspense.

Yeah, so when are we going to get a big action scene? Right away, when things move to Rome. Hunt and Grace, handcuffed together, are escaping from the police in a very small car. They are also being chased, in a police armored vehicle by Paris. Not the whole city, but the craziest driver in Rome. The scene is better than both the Rome chase in FastX and the Tangiers chase in the new Indy movie because it is about the characters.

The big finish is the cars and the vehicle crashing down the Spanish Steps. I mentioned the cinematic history of the Spanish steps in my recent review of Book Club: The Next Chapter here. The scene here appears to do serious damage to the historic landmark, so I was very relieved to learn, late in the credits, that the scene was shot on a set in the backlot. Whew!

So now we are off to Venice, where McQuarrie has a long, single take of Hunt running around the town. As the shot went on, I kept waiting for Cruise to fall down and stop breathing, but if he did, they cut it before he fell.

So now we (multiple villains and people are we not sure of) are on the Orient Express steaming along in the Alps. There is supposed to be a handing-off of the keys. But the real baddie (someone whose connection with Hunt goes back to before he got recruited to the IMF, although we have never met him before), has figured to get the keys and get off the train before it goes across a bridge…he has planted dynamite on. The dynamite explodes and we know what will happen: the train will plunge into the gorge below. But Hunt and Grace have slowed the train so that after the engine and tender go over, each car hovers until Hunt and Grace can get up and into the next car.

Cecil B. De Mille would be envious.

Oh, yeah. Somebody tells somebody else where the gizmo is that the keys go to. There is a reason this is only Part One