By Tom Stempel.

Astonishingly Uninventive

Zootopia

(2016. Screenplay by Jared Bush, Phil Johnston, story by Byron Howard, Jared Bush, Rich Moore, Josie Trinidad, Jim Reardon, Phil Johnston, and Jennifer Lee. 108 minutes.)

While Pixar has had a great run of wonderfully inventive animated features, the output of its sister organization the Walt Disney Animation Studios has been uneven. I liked Tangled (2010) because of its freshness and fun. You can see in my comments on it that it did a lot of things well: story, character, slapstick and a great takedown of the Blonde Industry. I was not quite as taken with Frozen (2013) as you can see here, but it had its moments. Zootopia doesn’t even have those.

I liked how Pixar’s 2009 Up and last year’s Inside Out got off to really great starts, setting up the worlds of those films. The writers try to do that here and they fall flat. We are watching a grade school play in which the animals, led by our leading lady, uh, bunny, are explaining how there used to be violent conflict between predators and prey. Now the predators and prey live happily together. Unlike the openings of Up and Inside Out, there is no wit or texture to this scene. The scene and the dialogue are very flat, conventional exposition.

Then our heroine Judy tells her parents she wants to be a police officer. Her parents give her a very conventional lecture on how you cannot always attain your dreams and in real life you have to settle for an ordinary life. Since nearly every American animation film of modern times has the “reach for the sky” message, I would have thought the writers would realize we could not take that seriously and give it a witty twist or two. They don’t.

Judy goes off to the police academy, but being rather small, she flunks out. What is the most obvious scene the writers could put in here? Yep, you guessed it, a training montage as she prepares herself to try again. The montage has nothing in it we have not seen many, many times before. Think about what you could write with a small bunny doing workouts.

Part of what may be the appeal of Zootopia is the anthropomorphism of a wide range of animals. But we have had anthropomorphized animals since well before we had animated movies, but with great characters. Just drawing a bunny behaving like a person is not enough.

Judy has no texture as a character, and neither does Nick Wilde, a fox who is a con man. His “baby” does, but that character disappears after a couple of scenes. Judy eventually graduates, but is assigned to parking detail, where she deals with Nick. Ginnifer Goodwin voices Judy, and the usually wonderful Jason Bateman voices Nick, but the writers have given nothing that makes use of their vocal ranges.

Judy’s boss, Chief Bogo, is voiced by the great Idris Elba, but the writers make him just a cliché cop supervisor. Just imagine what sort of animated character that you could create that would make great use of his Elba’s vocal talents.

The police department does not support Judy as she tries to find a missing person, uh, mammal. She gets a license number of a car, but cannot access police files, so Nick takes her to his friend at the Department of Mammal Vehicles. Can you see the joke coming a couple of miles away?

The animals at the DMV are all sloths, and they are as slow as sloths tend to be. You may have seen this scene in the trailer. In fact, it was the only scene in the trailer. For good reason: it is the only scene that the audience I saw the movie with and I laughed at. The character work is sharper and the timing is better than any other scene in the movie. You see what the movie could have been.

Eventually Judy and Nick track down the missing mammals (there are fourteen), we learn the mayor has put them in a secret prison), all is well, and the movie is over. Except it’s not. We are only an hour and twenty minutes into the movie. So the movie has to start all over again with Judy and Nick trying to figure out why the major put them in prison. They could just ask, and we would have a ninety minute movie. No such luck.

So we get more chases, which arrive regularly, like clockwork, in this movie. Eventually Judy and Nick discover the real villain is the… assistant mayor. She has now become mayor. Talk about an anti-climax.

Some reviewers have indicated they think there is some social comment in the film about discrimination, but it’s just as bland as anything else in the film. Yes, some creatures are discriminated against, but we know that already.

One thing to be thankful for: since this is not a DreamWorks Animation film, it is not swamped with pop culture jokes. I only caught one. A drug distributor refers to two of his supplies as Walter and Jesse, I assume a reference to Breaking Bad.

Zootopia has been a huge success at the box office, and we have to wrestle with the question: why? Maybe it just came out at the right time, after all the heavy award-bait movies at the end of the year. I suspect for audiences it may also be a relief to get a simple animation film after the complexities of Pixar films like Inside Out, Toy Story 3 (2010), and Up, although there have been a lot of other simple, even simple-minded, animated films in the last five years that were not as successful as Zootopia.

Sometimes you just don’t want to work that hard at watching a movie, although the enormous success of the Pixar films makes the case that most times we do. Zootopia is what I call a hollow shell of the movie that has a good outside appearance but nothing much inside. Sometimes audiences just love a film like that. Picky people like me may not, but in this case millions have.

When I wrote the Understanding Screenwriting book, I deliberately chose several box offices successes to put into the Bad Screenplay category. There are pictures with bad screenplays, like Titanic (1997), that connect in some ways with audiences.

What drives critics, and Hollywood as well, batty is that sometimes audiences are not “right.” But they are still the audience and they see and like what they want. So what can you learn about screenwriting from this?

I hope you are not learning that you can go ahead and write a bad script and pray for luck. Most films with bad scripts are flops, and the exceptions are few. You will get much better odds if you write a good script. But it’s worth it to look at the films with bad scripts that succeed to try to figure why the films worked.

When I was trying to get the book Understanding Screenwriting published, one publisher turned it down on the grounds that I should only write about good scripts. I said I was writing about bad scripts for the same reason medical schools study disease and business schools study product disasters like Edsel and New Coke. If you see what can go wrong, maybe, just maybe, it will make you a better writer.

At Least No One is Running Through Fields of Grass in This One.

Knight of Cups

(2014. Written by Terrence Malick. 118 minutes.)

You may remember from US #111 that I had problems with Malick having his leading lady spend a lot, and I mean A LOT, of time running through the grass in To the Wonder (2012). I even suggested at the end of the item that he be banned from having women running through the grass for at least two films. Well, one down and one to go.

I discussed in my item in US #76 on The Tree of Life the various joys and problems I had with Malick’s films in general. This film is one of his better recent ones, but it certainly has its peculiarities.

It may shock you to learn that he even has something resembling structure to this film. Notice I just said “resembling,” but that is not to be sneezed at. Do not expect a three-act Hero’s Journey, because Malick is never going to give you that.

What he does in the opening scenes is have a voiceover from John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress read by the late John Gielgud no less. What’s crucial are not the lines themselves, but the recurrence of the word “dream,” which tells us we are going to be a dreamlike state for most of the movie.

Also included are lines with the words “sleep” and later “begin.” You can take the word “sleep” to mean connecting with the dream-like tone and/or you can take it to mean that the main character Rick is asleep in his life and trying to find ways to wake up. You can take the word “begin” at the end to believe he is coming out of his dream state and getting back to the real world. See what I mean about having a structure?

As usual Malick is rather vague about his characters, although not as vague as in To the Wonder. We get hints that Rick is a screenwriter, but he is the least talkative screenwriter I have ever met. Usually you can’t get them to shut up.

Rick wanders through the dreamy world of Los Angeles (and briefly Las Vegas) Mallick has created, but Rick does not appear to be paying attention to what he is seeing and hearing. In Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963), Guido, the writer/director we follow through his dreams, always seems to be paying attention, so it makes for a satisfying ending when he figures out how to put them everything together into his film. So here we get a structure but not much of an ending.

The secondary characters are even less well-developed. Rick meets several people along the way. First up is Nancy, his ex-wife, who is a doctor. We get several shots of her at work, but with no indication how she feels about it and how she feels about Rick. Cate Blanchett is a little more vivacious here than she was in Carol, but not much. At least she gets to do something.

Then we get Helen, a fashion model who is even blanker than fashion models traditionally are in films. (I know a woman who was a fashion model in her late teens, then got into science and has had a very successful career. She’s one of the brainiest women I know.) We get Rick’s brother and his father and there seems to be a lot of family conflict, but we don’t know what it is about. As usual Malick is giving us a lot of voiceover instead of the dialogue, but the voiceover is not written to clarify anything.

Eventually Rick meets a dancer of the pole-and-strip variety. I can’t tell you her name. The dialogue never lets us hear anybody’s names. The only reason I can identify Rick, Nancy, Helen, the brother and father for you is that they are played by recognizable actors (Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Freido Pinto, Wes Bentley, and Brian Dennehy, respectively).

I said the dancer was of the pole-and-strip variety, but she is really closer to being a go-go dancer of the sixties. Like the model Helen, she is a very sixties type of character. Most of the women in the film are, even dressing like hippies: long flowing hair, long flowing dresses, and usually barefoot. Judging by the billboards in our neighborhood, the women at today’s “gentleman’s clubs” do not look a bit like anyone in the sixties.

The whole film feels like the sixties. Malick was a student at the American Film Institute in the late sixties and early seventies and I can’t help thinking this is his nostalgic look back at the time.

In addition to the sixties’ male view of dancers, models, and hippies, there is very little else in the film from modern Los Angeles. Yes, the cars are current, but virtually all the locations are from the sixties and before. Yes, Malick does have a brief shot of Chris Burden’s recent assemblage of streetlights at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and some scenes at the Creative Artists Agency building that opened in 2007 in Century City. But there are no shots of the Getty Center, Disney Hall, Staples Center, or any of the Metro Rail trains.

Come and join us in the 21^st Century, Terry.

Send it Back for Another Draft.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

(2016. Screenplay by Robert Carlock, based on the book  The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker. 112 minutes.)

A few people have noted that everything in the trailer for this film comes from the first hour of the film. That makes sense from a promotional standpoint, because the first half emphasizes the comedy in the story.

The movie is about Kim Baker (in the film; Barker in real life—they could have been more inventive with her screen name), a television news producer who goes to Afghanistan to report on the war in 2003. She is not really prepared to become a war correspondent, and she gets instructed by her fellow journalists there.

Carlock wrote a lot on 30 Rock, so he knows how to write to Tina Fey’s strengths (Fey not only plays Kim; she also produces) as a performer: her ability to deliver a sharp line and have interesting reactions to any craziness going on around her. We get the craziness in bits and pieces, without much of a through line.

The second half turns into more of a drama as Kim gets serious about her reporting and upset she is not getting stories on the air. There is also her growing interest in the politics of the war, including the treatment of women in Afghanistan, but they are dealt with in not much depth, more in the bits and pieces style of the first hour.

For example, in the first half of the script we meet a soldier who admits on-camera that sometimes he does not load his weapon when going out on a mission. He gets transferred and we later learn he loses his legs in combat. In the film’s final scene, Kim looks him up and he delivers a very intelligent speech on the history of invasions of Afghanistan. It would have worked a lot better if the second half of the film had been better prepared for.

What Carlock needed to do in the script is lay in scenes and material in the first half that shows us that Kim has a serious side. Instead Carlock has turned Kim into a standard-issue Tina Fey character: smart and funny, but without a lot of emotional or intellectual depth. If he had managed some of the latter, he would have set us up for what comes later.

It may have been there in the script and Fey and the directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa just missed it. Ficarra and Requa have previously directed Crazy, Stupid Love (2011) and Focus (2015), both of which have a few serious edges to them, so it is probably the script. On the other hand, Ficarra and Requa made a similar mistake in Focus, as I pointed out in US #126.

If the script for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot had come into me when I was teaching screenwriting, I would have sent it back for a rewrite to have him try to tie the two halves together tonally.

You Probably Had to be There.

Everybody Wants Some!!

(2016. Written by Richard Linklater. 117 minutes.)

George Lucas’s 1973 American Graffiti takes place over one night in 1962 as a group of kids from high school are deciding what to do with their lives. The script, by Lucas, Gloria Katz and Willard Huyck, has a great gallery of characters involved in a variety of activities.

Richard Linklater’s 1993 Dazed and Confused deals with a similar group of high school students in 1976 on the last day in school. Again, we get a lot of interesting characters and a rawer look at life among them than we got in the more relentlessly nostalgic Graffiti. It also takes place over one night.

Linklater’s new film takes place over three days, but that is not the problem with it. We are following members of a college baseball team in the three days leading up to the first day of classes in September in 1980. The time period includes the first “unofficial practice” of the team. Yes, baseball is a spring sport, but the practice is to begin to build the guys into a team.

To help develop that team unity the team is living in two off-campus houses. The movie starts with Jake, a freshman pitcher and the one character we will follow most closely in the film, arriving on campus and getting to know the guys on the team. So part of the problem Linklater gives himself is that all his main characters are jocks.

They have their differences, but not as many as the characters in Graffiti and Confused do. The first hour of the film is repetitive, tiresomely so. We also get a lot of detail about a Texas college town, including the variety of bars the boys go to, that is probably interesting if you were there at the time, but not so much if you weren’t.

On the first day he’s in town, Jake spots Beverly, an attractive coed, but it is well into the second half of the film before they actually meet and talk. Compare that to how involved the women are in both Graffiti and Confused from the get-go. And she is the only woman we get to know at all in the film.

Beverly is a theatre major and takes Jake (and, uninvited, the other guys on the team) to a theatre student party. This leads to one of the few good lines in the film. One of the guys on the team notices that while they are at home, all they talk about is “pussy,” but now they are in a room full of it, all they seem to talk about is baseball.

Not only are the characters disappointingly flat, so is the dialogue. For all the talk about baseball and the sexist trash, there is not a lot of interesting dialogue. That’s a surprise coming from Linklater, the writer or co-writer of the Before series, Bernie (2011), and Slacker (1991), as well as Dazed and Confused.

The players at one point talk about how living together and the practice is to help bring them together, but we don’t see it. Jake and Beverly talk about how they were stars in their fields in high school, but everybody in college in their lines were also stars in high school. That’s true but rather flatly stated. Linklater is telling us, not showing us. A rookie mistake.

The night after I saw Everybody Wants Some!! I was browsing through the cable channels and came across Bull Durham (1988). I watched about five minutes of it, and that five minutes had more texture, character, and great dialogue than all of the Linklater film. It was the section that ended with “The rose goes in the front, big guy,” only one of the memorable lines in the film.

More Than Just Light Comedy.

Q Planes

(1939. Screenplay by Ian Dalrymple, story by Brock Williams & Jack Whittingham & Arthur Wimperis. 122 minutes)

The London police break into an office where they think some bad stuff is going on. The office is a mess, but the only person they find is a nicely dressed gentleman who is waking up on the couch, apparently hung over. He does not tell them who he is, but insists he be taken to Major Hammond of British Intelligence. The detectives manhandle him to Hammond’s office, one of Hammond’s associates thanks the police and takes the man into Hammond’s office. The associate chuckles as we realize the man is Major Hammond himself.

Well, how can you not want to follow a guy like that? Intelligence work with spies with a charming leading man to take you through the story. Sound like a Hitchcock movie to you? Well, it’s not. Charles Bennett and his Fat English Friend had nothing to do with this. Bennett and Hitch’s films had Bennett’s light touch, but this one comes closer to American screwball comedy than theirs did.

The producer in this case was Alexander Korda, a Hungarian refugee who became one of the best known producers in England in the thirties. Usually he went for material based on literary sources, such as the 1936 Things To Come, based on the H.G. Wells novel.

In the case of Q Planes, the idea came from a newspaper story Korda saw and had worked into a screenplay. Ian Dalrymple was an editor who moved into producing, but he also wrote. The year before Q Planes he had won an Academy Award as one of the group of writers who worked out the script for Pygmalion (that year was the first and only time the Academy had an “adaptation” category, and Pygmalion was the only nominee; that’s what Dalrymple won for). So he knew from wit. But the Q Planes script is less Shavian wit and more Hecht-MacArthur farce.

Major Hammond is convinced there is a plot to destroy or capture experimental planes, and he finds a pilot, Tony McVane, who is the only one at the aircraft company that agrees with him. There is also a woman in the company lunch room who is taking notes whom we suspect is a spy.

But she knows Hammond, which baffles Tony, and it turns out she is not only Hammond’s sister but a reporter. So we get three British actors arguing over what’s going on like they were in His Girl Friday (1940). Will it make your mouth water if you know that not only did Dalrymple work with Shaw on Pygmalion, but Hammond is played by Ralph Richardson, Tony by Laurence Olivier, and the Sister Kay by Valerie Hobson. When they have their scenes together, you forget the plot and never want them to stop.

That’s partly because the American director Tim Whelan, who started his career in the twenties as a writer on five of the major Harold Lloyd silent comedies, now knows just to shoot them in two shot, especially just the Richardson-Olivier scenes. I say “now” he knows, because the year before in The Divorce of Lady X, he directed Richardson and Olivier together, but there kept cutting back and forth between close-ups. Here he just lets Ralph and Larry get their mojo going, and then throws Hobson into the mix. She more than holds her own.

If you care, they do capture the guys who are trying to steal the supercharger in the plane.

Korda and Airplanes

The Lion Has Wings

(1939. Screenplay by Adrian Brunel and E.H.V. Emmett, story by Ian Dalrymple. 76 minutes.)

The day after Germany invaded Poland, Korda called together his staff and told them they were going to make The Lion Has Wings. They asked what it was. He replied, “Oh, it is a film we are going to make to show we are going to win the war.” (The quote and much of the information in this item is from Karol Kulik’s 1975 biography Alexander Korda: The Man Who Could Work Miracles.)

Korda’s interest in airplanes did not start with Q Planes (look at the airplanes in Things to Come), and it may be that he was encouraged by his friends in the government.

To get the film out quickly it was decided to be part documentary and part fiction. Ian Dalrymple was in charge of production and came up with the story line. He worked with Korda’s American film editor William Hornbeck (who had started in Mack Sennett’s silent comedies) to create what Dalrymple called “a rude opening sequence denigrating Nazism.”

The sequence cuts back and forth between the Nazis and the British, comparing the military marches of the Germans with the sports of England. A shot of people at the Nazi rally has the baaing of sheep over it. They intercut Hitler speaking with King George, the Queen Mother, and Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret playing games with kids in a school yard. It is the most creative sequence in the picture.

The RAF raid on German warships in Kiel Canal is a reconstruction, using actors as the plane crews, but it is reasonably convincing, even after the narrator tells us at the end of the sequence that it is a reconstruction. The big problem is the fictionalized scenes.

In the Kiel sequence we get at least one actor, Anthony Bushell, the audience might recognize, but then we get several scenes with Ralph Richardson as an RAF officer and Merle Oberon, who was married to Korda, as his wife. They look and sound contrived.

They are a little too well photographed and the dialogue is rather stilted, especially Oberon’s final speech. The audiences of the time disliked those fictional scenes the most. British audiences liked the movie, but were not particularly convinced by it. The audiences’ reactions may have been the beginning of what led to more realistic English dramas after the war.

Two of the filmmakers went on to do more interesting work in the war. Dalrymple became the producer of several of the quiet, poetic war documentaries of Humphrey Jennings. Hornbeck returned to the States and was the supervising film editor for the Frank Capra Why We Fight series.

The first of the series, Prelude to War (1942) opens with a sequence comparing and contrasting the Free World and the Slave World. One can’t help but wonder if Hornbeck showed Capra The Lion Has Wings and suggested they do something like the “rude opening” of that.