I spent a good amount of last month watching a lot of movies that I had been putting off seeing until after I was done with other projects - mostly cult classics and obscurities that had been recommended to me at some point. I enjoyed some of these, like the thriller "Brimstone and Treacle," with a young Sting, and "Pump Up the Volume," a teen angst movie with what might by Christian Slater's best performance. I'll write up notes on these separately.
However, a lot more of these turned out to be duds. Well, I want to be careful here, because some of these movies clearly mean a lot to people. I didn't find these movies enjoyable to watch, whether it was because of their quality not meeting my (probably inflated) expectations or because, in several cases, they didn't age well. None of these are interesting enough to write about separately, but I thought they might be worth writing about together.
Let's start with a fun one. David Mamet's 1997 film "The Spanish Prisoner" has a reputation for being an excellent confidence game movie, where there are twists upon twists and the rug is pulled out from under the audience's feet multiple times. The trouble is that the film is totally hampered by the Mamet dialogue. If you aren't used to Mamet characters' mannered, ornate way of speaking, it's incredibly distracting. This is one of his first scripts without a lot of swearing in it, so maybe that also played a part. Campbell Scott is fine in the lead role, and it's nice to see Steve Martin in a dramatic part, but the way the cons are revealed, one by one, is pretty predictable and too over-the-top to take seriously. Mamet's "House of Games," a similar con game movie made about ten years earlier, works much better because the stakes are kept smaller and more believable.
I can understand why "The Spanish Prisoner" would be impressive if you hadn't seen too many twisty films like it. And I guess you would be impressed by 1995 indie "The Last Supper" if you hadn't seen too many black comedies that talk frankly about politics. There are a lot of familiar faces here, including Bill Paxton, Cameron Diaz, Courtney B. Vance, Ron Perlman, and Annabeth Gish. Five liberal grad students unexpectedly have a conservative ne'er-do-well in their midst at a dinner party, inadvertently kill him, and ponder doing it again to make the world a better place. Given the current state of the American political climate, "The Last Supper" is very, very relevant to the world today, and I was hoping it would dig deeper into the Right/Left divide. Instead, all the characters are pretty shallow, with the rightwingers being a collection of easy caricatures. There are some smart ideas here, and the finale with a Rush Limbaugh stand-in is pretty satisfying, but overall "The Last Supper" is not enough. It's got admirable ambition and it's tackling big ideas, but the story falls apart under the smallest amount of scrutiny and the messages are so muddled it doesn't seem to commit to any position at all, except a weak appeal for moderation. It's a movie of its time, which is fine, but far less cutting or insightful than it looked to be at the outset.
Finally, let's talk about "Cats Don't Dance." I had pretty high hopes for this one, which was directed by "The Emperor's New Groove" director Mark Dindal. I remember the discussion around this from the time of its release in 1997, because it was Turner Animation's big shot at making something that could challenge Disney, and it felt like the whole animation community got behind it. However, I'm sorry to say that it hasn't held up well at all. The villain, an evil child star named Darla Dimple, is still pretty funny and nasty in a kid-friendly way. The rest of the showbiz story, however, doesn't work. The hero cat, Danny, isn't just a naïve rube but an annoying showboater who I never felt like rooting for. The other characters are underdeveloped and very one-note.
Throughout "Cats Don't Dance," I couldn't help comparing it to Illumination's "Sing," which is also about animal entertainers with showbiz dreams. Now "Sing" was a movie I didn't like all that much, but it handled the basic story beats and characters so much better. "Cats Don't Dance" is clearly a passion project, and very well intentioned, but you can tell the filmmakers simply didn't have many resources and were aiming at a very safe family audience. Even mediocre animated films these days are far more sophisticated. I appreciated some of the Hollywood insider jokes and gags - the movie within a movie seems to be based on the insane production of the 1928 "Noah's Ark" movie - but "Cats Don't Dance" is the product of a bygone age, and best left to the viewers who grew up with it.
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