Wonder Boys (2000)

Director: Curtis Hanson

Cast: Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, Robert Downey, Jr., Frances McDormand

Have I Seen It Before: Oh, my, yes…

Did I Like It: I was having a conversation with a friend recently, and she described Free Enterprise (1999) as one of—if not her absolute—favorite film ever. That caused me to shake my head a bit, as even when I first saw that film at the tender age of 17-or-so, I found the film to be a cheap, misanthropic riff of Play it Again, Sam (1972) and Swingers (1996) (and that’s when it was hitting its intended target). Seeing my dubious reaction, she immediately explained that watching the film feels like “being with my people.”

She hardly turned me around on the fictionalized exploits of Mark Altman and Robert Burnett (or Shatner rapping, certainly) but I couldn’t help but think of this movie.

I can’t imagine myself as accomplished and revered (or even as easily traditionally published) as even the most hapless character in the movie, but: Have I sat, mildly disaffected at a party, idly providing character histories for the people apparently enjoying themselves? Yes, yes I have. Have I stifled a laugh while attending a writing lecture? Yes. Yes, I have. Many times. Have I thought that writing conferences were kind of silly, and only wanted to go do some writing or hang out with other people that might actually have some ambition towards the completion or consumption of a book? Yes. Many, many times. Would I feel like I don’t have anything to contribute to an adult conversation other than movie trivia, and would be far more interested in priceless movie memorabilia than anything else at the host’s house? Have you met me?

Maybe these characters are not “my people,” but they are what “my people” are often like at their best. They’re what I want my people to be.

That’s more than enough to recommend the movie, I would think. But is it objectively good. Do I extol the virtues of the film, only to invite the sideways glances I give Free Enterprise? I would think not. The film manages to wrangle Chabon’s sprawling contemplative novel into a night-in-the-life story which tends to deflect the maudlin and embrace the jaunty. Putting aside my sentimental feelings for the movie, Douglas harnesses the same “likable asshole” energy which even ten years earlier would have been right in Jack Nicholson’s wheelhouse. The rest of the cast is great, too, to a performer straddling the line between funny and authentic*.

*Remember when Robert Downey Jr. was in movies which didn’t give a rat’s ass about the four quadrants? I do too, and… I might just be itching to get to my screening of Oppenheimer (2023).

Romancing the Stone (1984)

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Cast: Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, Danny DeVito, Alfonso Arau

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure, but it’s probably been twenty years or more. Before motion capture carried the day, I was a Zemeckis completist.

Did I Like It: There’s a unique pleasure in not keeping a movie generally beloved—and, indeed, I remember liking—in regular rotation. I would give almost anything to see something like Back to the Future (1985)* with new eyes. Thankfully, I took to this film with only the dimmest of memories, and it was essentially like I was taking it in for the first time.

The story unfurls with such a breathless confidence that I’m surprised it isn’t taught as an example in screenwriting books, and it’s a real bummer that more work from Diane Thomas—including a supposedly lost draft of a haunted house-centric third Indiana Jones film—didn’t see the light of day before her untimely death.

The screenplay could blow away in the wind if the chemistry between Douglas and Turner wasn’t enough to sell entire movies on their own. There are few pairings on screen who are more fun to kind of/sort of hate each other. Don’t believe me? Just take a look at The War of the Roses (1989).

The film is probably a little less ageless than Zemeckis’ other epics of the 80s, and I can’t understand why/how Alan Silvestri was talked into a sax and synth-heavy score. Honest to God, the whole film sounds like the opening titles for an episode of Siskel & Ebert. I’m not even opposed to that in these circumstances, I just know that a different approach might have moved the film from merely charming to truly timeless. I know all the principals involved can ultimately do better.

That is a minor complaint, when so much of the film works so thoroughly, but it might just keep me from re-watching it too soon. Maybe in twenty years or so I can take it the movie in again as if it was almost new.

*Which would not exist without this film, as Zemeckis’ main claim to fame prior to ‘84 was being at least partly responsible for the only flops with which Steven Spielberg was associated.

The American President (1995)

Director: Rob Reiner

Cast: Michael Douglas, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Michael J. Fox

Have I Seen It Before?: My DVD copy is one of those weird half-cardboard numbers Warner Bros. put out in the world twenty years ago? Whatever happened to those? This is all to say I’ve spent several years putting it on just as regular of re-watch as my DVDs of The West Wing, which is quite a bit.

Did I like it?: Criticism of the work of Aaron Sorkin be a tricky thing. One either has no taste for him, or absolutely adores him. You’d think that this divide might exist with some correlation to political differences, but that isn’t always the case. Certainly, he has a propensity for writing women character who are by all rights intelligent and self-possessed, but somehow end up spending a great deal of time having passages of Intro to US Government explained to them by male characters. He uses certain lines* across his work so often that I’m a little worried he doesn’t remember having written them before his sobriety.

But plenty of people—yours truly included—who have tried to imitate him, so I don’t quite buy the temerity of the latter-day naysayers. At the very least, I am in the camp that lives and dies with his writing, and this was a test-bed for everything that made his greatest work as good as it was. The optimism and decency leaps from the words and lives within you. At least, it lives within me. Your mileage may vary.

Beyond that idealism that admittedly confirms my own thinking about the world, this might even work better as a pure romantic comedy than it does as a polemic. Even then, I can’t conceive of a conservative who might be warmed by the proceedings, even though Ted Cruz somehow managed to plagiarize the climatic speech President Shepherd (Douglas) uses to win Sydney Ellen Wade (Bening) and the country back when he was defending his wife from attacks by the garbage fire that eventually won that election. So, who knows?

* “All you have to do at the end of the day is come home.” “This isn’t camp. It’s not important that everyone gets to play.” “If you had invented/written/created Facebook/Whatever the hell was so goddamn important on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” Google common Sorkin lines; there are gigabytes of articles on the subject.

Ant-Man (2015)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas

Have I Seen it Before: Oddly enough, this is the only Marvel movie so far that I somehow missed at the theater, although I have since caught in on DVD.

Did I Like It: Ok. So, here’s the thing.

It is ultimately unfair to judge a film through the prism of what it was during pre-production or its earliest development. David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. Tim Burton’s Batman Forever. Patty Jenkins’ Thor: The Dark World*. And at the same time, it is hard to watch the final result and not think about the potential abdicated.

So, too is it with this movie. Edgar Wright had been attached to direct throughout pre-production, but eventually dropped out of the project, citing creative differences with Marvel. The resulting film directed by Peyton Reed is at the disadvantage. One wants to imagine what the film could have been under Wright, and determine that any flaws (like the protracted training sequence that plays like a cut scene from a video game tutorial) are a result of the studio interference.

It’s a lively comedy when judged within its own context, with just enough a caper feel to it to differentiate it from the rest of the Marvel oeuvre. It is largely buoyed by the undeniably engaging presence of Rudd in the lead role, and remnants of Wright’s influence on the film (he retains an Executive Producer and writing credit). Which I think is one of the better realities about our sometimes over-produced blockbuster system. So much of the work is done in the pre-production that the resulting film can never fully pull away from a vision about which the studio might have had second thoughts.

*Although, to be fair, had any of those auteurs actually made the films in question, it is reasonable to assume that the world wouldn’t have been that dark, Jedi might not quite return, and Batman would be finite in the temporal sense.

Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

Director: Peyton Reed

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer

Have I Seen it Before: Yep.

Did I Like It: It’s the Marvel movies that are the least burdened by setting up Bigger And Better Things™ and instead content to be a movie. This could have been weighed down by the task of providing the missing link between the hopelessness of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and what—at the time of this writing—is the hopeful rebound of Avengers: Endgame (2019. Instead whatever place-setting obligations the film has is largely relegated to the post-credits scenes where they belong.

Thus the film operates as a diverting extended comic chase sequence with plenty of sci-fi weirdness gobbledegook. It is about as perfect an example of counter-programing to the aforementioned Infinity War as one is likely to see.

And still, I wonder how the film and the series would be different if Edgar Wright had gotten to direct the movie he wanted to way back when.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. CGI de-aging is getting good. Scary good. Whereas Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan tried to take the 80s by storm in X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), the technology seemed so pointedly stupid that I couldn’t fathom why filmmakers kept coming back to it. Now, I’ve traded in my request for a Batman Beyond film for a hope that Warner Bros. can just get their act together and give as the third Michael Keaton Batman film we all deserved. This film practically has a proof-of-concept for such a dream film in the performance of the hypnotic-at-any-age Michelle Pfeiffer. Hell, Pfeiffer could play 90s era Pfeiffer without CGI de-aging. But that statement may have more to do with my chronic 90s nostalgia madness. 

Oddly enough, it’s some of the scenes where Lang has to interact with a slightly larger world that—while funny—don’t work as brilliantly on the special effects side of things. Not all special effects are perfect, and even fewer advance along the quantum leaps (see what I did there?) of the CGI de-aging process.