UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Music, Music, Music, Music

I Went to a Remake of a Kurosawa Film and a Concert Broke Out.

High and Low (1963. Screenplay by Hideo Oguni & Ryûzô Kikushima & Eijirô Hisaita & Akira Kurosawa, based on the novel King’s Ransom by Evan Hunter [Edo Makubein]. 143 minutes)  and Highest 2 Lowest (2025. Screenplay by Alan Fox, based on the Kurosawa film High and Low,  Screenplay by Hideo Oguni & Ryûzô Kikushima & Eijirô Hisaita & Akira Kurosawa, based on the novel Kings Ransom by Evan Hunter, writing as Ed McBain. 133 minutes)

High and Low is my favorite Kurosawa film. OK, Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), The Hidden Fortress (1958), and most of the others are not chopped liver, but High and Low grabs me and never lets go.

It has one of the great opening twenty minutes in movies. Gondô is a senior executive at a shoe company.  His associates want to move him out, but he has put together a plan to buy them out.  While they are talking, he gets a phone call saying his son has been kidnapped.  Is he going to pay the money he has for the deal to ransom his son?  He is a tough guy who struggles over that, but decides to pay the ransom. Then his son walks in the door.  The kidnappers have taken his best friend, the son of the family chauffer Aoki.  Is Gondô willing to spend his money to ransom the other kid?  His son is one thing, the other kid… Well, what would you do?

Most of the first hour of the film is in Gondô’s house, and Gondô is played by the great Japanese actor Toshirô Mifune, whom you cannot not watch.  He dominates the screen as he always does.

And then we hardly see him again.  The second half of the film is a police procedural.  The Ed McBain novel is the tenth book in his 87^th Precinct series, so the move away from the Gondô equivalent is understandable in the novel when the cops come in, but movies are different.

Kurosawa’s film works because Mifune’s presence is so powerful that it hangs over the rest of the film.  The only time I know that taking the major star out of the picture for long periods of time in an American film is The Godfather (1972).  The reason it works there is the The Godfather is Michael’s film, i.e. his story, from clean cut guy to the new godfather.  The same thing happens there that happens in High and Low: Brando’s presence is so powerful it hangs over the scenes he is not in.

There has been talk for decades about doing an American remake, but it has not happened until now.  Is there an American actor now who could hold the screen when he is not on screen?  And if you turn him into a Death Wish vigilante, it becomes just another potboiler.

Alan Fox’s solution is rather ingenious, at least for us who know the original.  Fox turns Gondô into David King, a high-flying record executive whose company is also under assault.  He can get the money to get enough shares to take over.  Unlike H&L, H2L, does not spend its first hour in one room.  We follow King from home to office, around New York City.  It makes the opening less constrained than the opening to H&L.  The son being found does not have the simple impact of him walking in the door. 

On the other hand, Kurosawa’s handling of the chauffeur is less compelling than Fox’s.  In H&L Aoki is just a sad, miserable little man.  Paul in H2L is a longtime friend of King’s as well as his driver.  Paul is also an ex-con, which means the cops will be suspicious of him.  Paul is played by the great Jeffrey Wright, who it will not surprise you to learn more than holds his own with the great Denzel Washington as King.

I think Fox’s scenes of King reluctantly sweating out where to ransom Paul’s son are richer and fuller than the equivalent scenes in the earlier film.

The cops in H&L are very sympathetic characters, which probably comes from the fact that the novel is part of a series with some of the same characters.  They also have sympathy for Gondô, which most of the cops in H2L - there are a couple of exceptions - do not have for King.

Fox and Spike Lee, who directed, obviously do not want to keep Denzel Washington off screen for the second half of the film.  He does not turn vigilante, but he learns the identity of the kidnapper through his musical sense.  I won’t tell you any more than that.

One of the great scenes in H&L is the exchange of the money, which Kurosawa does on the then new Bullet Train.  If you ever have a chance to see it on a big screen, do so.  It is exciting enough on a DVD, but better bigger.  Lee’s version is flashier, on a subway full of Yankees fans and a Puerto Rico Day Parade, but not as suspenseful.

King tracks down the robber and they have a face-off in a recording studio that is one of Washington’s greatest scenes.  The audience I saw it with laughed and applauded and you will see why. Then we get a scene in the hospital where King talks to Paul and his son.  Should be the end.  Nope.  King has another scene with the robber, OK, but not as powerful as the earlier one.  And still not the end. We now have King and his wife and son together in the penthouse they did not have to sell.  And the son has brought his girlfriend to audition for dad.  She sings, and sings, and sings.  He agrees to sign her.  I am not sure we need all that, but then the last 20 minutes or so of H&L seems a bit too long to me as well.

Sniffle, Sniffle, a Few Songs, Sniffle, Sniffle.

Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025. Written by Julian Fellowes.  123 minutes)

It is London, 1930.  Wonderful CGI backgrounds of theatre marquees. The Crawleys are in town to see a show, Noël Coward’s musical Bitter Sweet.  Why that show?  Because the star is Guy Dexter.  You remember him.  He was the movie star who was making a movie at Downton Abbey three years ago.  Robert, Cora, and Mary are in seats in the orchestra, and Mr. and Mrs. Bates are in the balcony.  Class is still a crucial element in the upper reaches of British society.

That is why when the Crawleys go to a party just after Mary’s divorce hits the newspapers, the hostess of the party insists they hide under a stairway when a couple of royals show up.  Silly, but that was the way it was then.

The first half of the film is not as compelling as it could be.  There is a lot of showing what a lot of the characters are up to now, which we don’t mind seeing, but slows the film down.

When the plot finally kicks in, it is about something that has been part of the world of Downton from the very beginning:  As Robert, Lord Grantham, is getting on in years, is he going to accept what everybody else knows he needs to do: let Lady Mary take over the running of the estate. He has been reluctant to do this since 2012, sorry 1912.  Now it is everybody’s come-to-Jesus moment, and it is not pretty.

But boy is it interesting to watch.  Hugh Bonneville, who plays Robert, has some of his best scenes in the series and films as he resists. Michelle Dockery of course holds her own with him.  Fellowes’s writing here is wonderful, and, has been the case in his years at Downton, he gives the actors wonderful scenes to play. That’s true of many of the supporting players, but the Robert-Mary scenes are Fellowes at the top of his form.

Hope for the finances of Downton shows up with the arrival of Harold, Cora’s American brother.  Their mother has died (so no scenes with Shirley MacLaine, alas), but Harold has been taken in by Gus Sambrook, a swindler.  We, and the Crawleys, are taken by him at first and Mary, who has done things like this before, has a quickie with him one night.  No good can come of that.  The woman who gets the better of Gus is…Lady Edith.  Boy, has she matured.  In the opening seasons of the series, she was the youngest sister who seemed to be waiting around for Mary and Sybil’s leftovers. But she got into journalism and married into a titled family and is a tough cookie.  The scene of Edith and Gus, at Ascot no less, is one of Fellowes’s better ones.

You remember Noël Coward? We not only see a song from his show, but he turns up at the Abbey with Dexter.  Well, what does that have to do with Lady Mary and the Abbey? Just this.  The locals have been shunning Mary since her divorce.  At the Abbey the Crawleys are planning a dinner party, but the locals who are invited are all refusing.  Then the word gets out that Noël Coward will be attending and everybody starts calling to say they can come after all.  Coward sings a couple of his songs, although none of my favorites. The actor playing Coward, Arty Froushan, lays on the fey side of Coward a little more than Coward did.

Fellowes and his film editors come up with a nice scene toward the end as the rest of the characters have left.  Mary is more or less alone in the Abbey. She begins to remember past moments and we see her dancing with Matt, and Violet is in the crowd.  Unfortunately Maggie Smith died last year, so Fellowes did not have a chance to write one more great Maggie Smith line for Violet’s ghost.

I Went to a Concert And a Movie Broke Out.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025. Written by Christopher Guest & Michael McKean & Rob Reiner & Harry Shearer, based on characters created by Christopher Guest & Michael McKean & Rob Reiner & Harry Shearer. 83 minutes)

Not an 11, I’m afraid.

Like a lot of people, I loved This is Spinal Tap (1984). It was fresh and funny. What was fresh about it was that it used the techniques of contemporary documentary film (Direct Cinema: following people around with a camera, and Cinema Verité: interviewing people) to make a satirical fiction film.  It may not have been the first film to do that, but it was close. So close that some people did not realize it was a satire.  One member of a first day audience came out and asked the theatre manager why they made a documentary about such a bad band.

The freshness of that approach has worn off.  Even network television shows do it. I watched a couple of episodes of Abbott Elementary and gave up when everybody mugged for the camera after they said a line.

The first film was funny because we had seen a lot of rock documentaries and this film gave us the impression we were seeing a truth about the life and times of rockers.  The problem now is that there is not that much that is that funny.  If this is what they put in the final film, I would hate to see the outtakes.  Yes, there are occasionally funny lines, and funny reaction shots, but not enough.

The guys who play the Tap characters are simply not at the top of their form.  The credits indicate they wrote the material for themselves, but a lot of it looks and sounds improvised.  The character detail they bring to each character is simply not very interesting.

They bring in some interesting guest stars. The best actor of the bunch is Paul McCartney, whose line readings and reactions are entertaining.  Well, he studied with John Lennon.

The “plot” is that Tap has gotten together after 15 years for a reunion concert in New Orleans.  The concert is a typically overproduced light show, but their version of “Stonehenge” finally gets its due.

One of the running gags of the first film is that drummers keep dying.  Their new drummer is Didi, played by the marvelous drummer Valerie Franco.  You keep wondering what will happen to her.  Stick around to the end of the credits for the payoff to that and the funniest gag in the picture.

In other words, DO NOT WAIT TO SEE THIS ON STREAMING where they will cut off the end credits before the gag.  You have been warned.

I Went to a Disney Movie and a Concert Broke Out.

Freakier Friday (2025. Screenplay by Jordan Weiss, story by Elyse Hollander and by Jordan Weiss, based on the novel Freaky Friday  by Mary Rodgers;  based on characters created by Leslie Dixon and Heather Hach. 110  minutes)

You can see from the credits why I think of this movie as a remake of a remake of a remake. The first film version in 1976 had a screenplay by the novel’s author, Mary Rodgers.  Rodgers, by the way, was the daughter of Richard Rodgers, the composer of many great musicals.  She did the music for the frequently revived musical Once Upon a Mattress.  She also wrote the music for the great Sondheim song, “The Girl From.”  And it was Rodgers who told Sondheim all about marriage and divorce, which he turned into his great musical Company.

Now, where were we?  Ah, yes, Freaky Friday.  That first film had Barbara Harris as the mother and Jodie Foster as the daughter.  It was entertaining.

The second Freaky Friday was in 2003, which is where Leslie Dixon and Heather Hach come in.  I don’t know what sort of characters they added.  That version starred Jamie Lee Curtis as the mother and Lindsay Lohan as the daughter.  While I remember enjoying the 1976 film, I do not remember a lot of it.  I liked the 2003 version the best mostly because of Curtis and her chemistry with Lohan.

The problem with this version is that they have tried to push the body-changing that was between mother and daughter into a four-way switch.  Tess (Curtis) is now a grandmother, Anna (Lohan) is now an adult with a teenage child Harper (the great Julia Butters, now a teenager).  Anna is now going to marry a British guy, who has a snooty English teenage daughter, Lily.

So what the writers have set up is not the old two-way switch, but a four-way switch.

Wow, talking about upping your degree of difficulty.  You have to write, and keep in mind, who is who, and who is now this other who.  Weiss and Hollander do a good job of that as the film gets going. Later as the film speeds up, it can get confusing.  The writing of each character both as themselves and as their other seems to lose its sharpness.  In the last half hour I was often confused (as were some critics I have read) about who was who.  Some of that is the writing, some of it is in the acting, some of it is in the directing. What they need is the sharpness and precision as a writer, that yes, him again, Billy Wilder brought to his writing and directing. Of course it helped in Some Like It Hot (1959) that the costumes mostly made it clear was who was who.

The first part of the film is the most enjoyable, since Curtis, Lohan, and Butters are at the top of their form, as are the writers.  That may be enough for you.

As the film rounds into its last half hour, we get a concert Anna has been promoting, which ends up with her singing along with a singer (who is only a singer and not anybody else) some of which were hits by Anna when she was a teenager. So we see Lindsay Lohan not only has her comic acting chops but her singing chops.  It gives a great extra level of feeling to the film to see her back in form.