| for this week's TRIBUNE : 'What Just Happened' [4/10] |
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------------------------------------------------------------------------------ What Just Happened USA 2008 Starring : Robert De Niro, Bruce Willis Director : Barry Levinson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ HOORAY for Hollywood? Not if the movies themselves - such as What Just Happened - are any guide. Even before cinema's HQ relocated from New York to Los Angeles, the industry has near-invariably presented its own machinations as venal, corrupt, unwholesome and/or unappetising. This combination of navel-gazing and self-flagellation can occasionally yield bracingly tart fruit, especially if the gazer/flagellator is the rare film-biz insider with a maverick/outsider temperament: see The Player, Robert Altman's faithful 1992 rendering of Michael Tolkin's pleasingly sardonic novel. We're a long way from that level with What Just Happened, an ill-advised fictionalisation of an emphatically non-fictional memoir by Art Linson. Oddly enough, the adaptation is 'credited' to Linson himself, a veteran producer who - in two persuasive and readable books - chronicled tangles with various tricky and/or egomaniac talents. Here he's fictionalised into Ben (De Niro), contending with a hectic private-life while sorting out troubled blockbusters starring, respectively, Sean Penn and Bruce Willis. Though second-billed, Penn (as himself) makes only fleeting appearances here - and he's much less bother than his pretentious English director, Jeremy (Michael Wincott), whose "artistic" vision for (daft-looking) action-thriller Fiercely is at odds with the studio's commercial demands. With weeks to go before a high-profile Cannes Film Festival premiere, emergency reshoots and recuts are on the cards. Willis (as "The Actor") causes Ben further headaches - refusing to shave off his shaggy beard and generally behaving like a smug, spoiled brat. The elements are thus assembled for what should and could have been a deliciously acerbic Tinseltown satire. But instead we get a meandering affair that rarely hits the comic target - and which, irony of ironies, hasn't benefited from recutting that reportedly followed its own film-festival premiere (at Sundance, back in January.) Wry smiles rather than belly-laughs are the order than the day, in a picture that aims for a kind of jazzy looseness - with some flashy visual/editing flourishes - but generally suggests director Levinson had a series of "off" days. It doesn't help that certain key details fail to convince: the movies-within-the-movie are, for example, no match for than the side-splitting mock trailers so recently seen in Tropic Thunder. And it's distracting that such eminently recognisable figures - including De Niro (who's actually pretty good) - play characters, mingling with other stars who play themselves. Not so much a case of "What Just Happened?" as "What Were They Thinking? Neil Young 18th November, 2008 written for 26.Nov. edition of Tribune magazine WHAT JUST HAPPENED : [4/10] : USA 2008 : Barry LEVINSON : 102m (BBFC) : seen 2nd October 2008, Vue Leicester (press show - CinemaDays event)  |
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