The Screengrab : war

The Return of Mark Leyner

Phil Nugent — Wed, 14 May 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the forthcoming John Cusack movie War, Inc. comes in the opening credits, which reveal that the movie's screenplay is by Cusack, Jeremy (Bulworth) Pikser, and Mark Leyner. Leyner, now 52, was that rarest of things, a genuine literary star in the 1990s, when such books as Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroentesterologist were both critically acclaimed and commercially trendy. Leyner, whose writing danced on the line between experimental meta-fiction and stand-up comedy, was a popular get for magazine profiles and a welcome guest on the David Letterman and Conan O'Brien talk shows. But after his 1998 novel The Tetherballs of Bougainville, he slipped from view. Where's he been all this time? Trying to break into writing for TV and movies, it appears. He developed "a pilot about a kilt-wearing, punk rock surgeon for MTV called Iggy Vile, M.D." and wrote scripts for the acclaimed mental-health-ward network drama Wonderland, which ABC cancelled almost instantly--before, in fact, any of the episodes Leyner worked on had a chance to air. One upshot of that was that he met the show's medical consultant, Billy Goldberg, who would collaborate with Leyner on two books of goofball medical questions-and-answers, Why Do Men Have Nipples? and Why Do Men Fall Asleep After Sex? That must have seemed an amusing goof for someone who'd been touted as an important, form-redefining writer and a doctor who'd gotten one foot into show business via a cause celebre' TV series. The books sold better "than all of Mr. Leyner’s books combined" and were "spun off into a desk calendar."

Leyner's association with John Cusack began, Cusack says, when the actor "called him up, kind of as a fan, and said, ‘Let’s do something together? Can we do something?’” Today, they worked on a doomed treatment of a movie version of Et Tu, Babe before hatching the idea for the Iraq satire War, Inc. As Leyner sees it, he brings something a little different to the table than his worthy collaborators. “What John and Jeremy might see as the foreground of the movie, I kind of saw it as the background. I’m more interested in other aspects of the movie. The sort of critique of heroic iconology. The idea of a person who’s actively in conflict with himself.” He and Cusack are working on another movie idea, but Leyner has also sketched out a new work of fiction. (No fool, he is also working with Dr. Goldberg on another book of funny medical lore.) Regarding how long it's been since he had to dodge book reviews, he says, “Whatever this period of time has been, I’ve needed it. Given the extremity of my personal identification with that work, I think 10 years is probably sort of minimal. … I made a very conscious decision to try to do other things.”

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "War, Inc."

Phil Nugent — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

John Cusack gets his smug on in War, Inc., a satiricial action comedy with a touch every bit as light and precise as its sledgehammer title. Cusack, who co-produced the movie with Grace Loh for his New Crime Productions, and splits the screenplay credit between himself, novelist Mark Leyner, and Bulworth scripter and Huffington Post blogger Jeremy Pikser, plays a hit man who is hired by Tamerlane, a Halliburton-like corporaton that is staffing America's first war that has been fully outsourced to the private sector. The movie intends an attack on how big business profits from, and may even influence, American foreign policy, but its ideas about how that's reshaping the world seem to have only gotten as far as slapping company logos on the sides of tanks and in smoking urban war zones, a device that mainly results in some really questionable product placement deals. (The Get Smart-style entrance to the lair of the American intelligence officers is through a Popeyes chicken joint, arguably the most prominent space that franchise has been awarded in a major Hollywood production since the Adam Sandler vehicle Little Nicky established that the denizens of Hell thought quite highly of their product.) The movie hits its targets only once in a great while, particularly when it goes after the gullibility and culpability of the media. There's a choice sequence about an imbedded group of reporters who get a taste of what it's like in a war-ravaged country by being treated to a Sensurround-style simulated ride through rough terrain. (They cheer with excitement, just like Geraldo every time he sees his name in the paper spelled right.)

War, Inc. positions itself as a sort-of-sequel to the 1997 New Crime Production Grosse Pointe Blank; it doesn't continue that movie's story or revive its characters, but it does reunite some if its key personnel while aiming for something similar in tone and approach. Cusack's emotionally confused master assassin with a streak of white in his dark hair is Martin Blank with ten years on him in all but name; Joan Cusack is once again his personal assistant (but this time, infuriatingly, is subjected to unflattering lighting and funhouse lenses and camera angles), and Dan Aykroyd turns up to do his Dick Cheney impression as the self-satisfied master of the universe dealing Cusack his orders. (They are joined by Marisa Tomei, who, as usual, pumps an incredible amount of sexiness and vitality into her corner of the vaccuum, and Ben Kingsley, who attempts what I think is meant to be a Texas accent, though it could just as easily have labeled his character as an Australian, a Venusian, or just a raving nut.) This is actually a clever approach--just as it was when the cast of A Fish Called Wanda did it in Fierce Creatures, a movie that didn't work either--but it mainly serves to highlight how opportunistic the difference between the two pictures feels. Grosse Pointe Blank, which came riding in on the last fumes of the Pulp Fiction bandwagon, treated murder as a hip slapstick joke. War, Inc. has the same kind of what-me-worry approach to violent chaos and the same admiring attitude towards its hero's murderous prowess, but it expects to be taken as being on a deeper, more meaningful level of smirking cynicism because Cusack has sunk to working for Republican CEOs. (In both films, Cusack is paired with a heroine--Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank, Marisa Tomei here--who expresses horror at his violent side until she needs rescuing.) War, Inc. is set to go straight to DVD after a non-victory lap of the festivals and a token New York/Los Angeles theatrical release, and Cusack and company are welcome to console themselves with the thought that their movie was punished for the sharpness of its bite. But its "satire" is the kind of thing that The Daily Show regularly makes fun of.

Box-Office Quagmire

Peter Smith — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Remember fifteen minutes ago, when people were complaining that nobody was making movies about Iraq? Well, while you were blinking, the octoplexes got overstuffed with movies about Iraq. The only problem is that, as A. O. Scott points out, nobody's going to see them. The films that've opened this past year — In the Valley of Elah, Rendition, The Kingdom, The Situation — have been greeted with "soft box office returns." Similar commercial fates may await the string of films currently lined up on the runway, which include Brian De Palma's Redacted and Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, as well as Grace Is Gone, an indie tearjerker starring John Cusack as a father of two who is widowed by the war, and the adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s best-seller The Kite Runner, set in Afghanistan during the reign of the Taliban. (As Kim Masters recently wrote in Slate, Lions for Lambs also has its own special problems: it stands to be the next exploding boxcar in the continuing train wreck of Tom Cruise's career.) For all the automatic clucking about how American audiences don't really want to see movies about real problems, some of the recent Iraq movies make it clear that there's a built-in problem in trying to make drama out of an ongoing national trauma. As Scott puts it: "What is missing in nearly every case is a sense of catharsis or illumination. This is hardly the fault of the filmmakers. Disorientation, ambivalence, a lack of clarity — these are surely part of the collective experience they are trying to examine. How can you bring an individual story to a satisfying conclusion when nobody has any idea what the end of the larger story will look like?" — Phil Nugent

Redacted Redacted

Peter Smith — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:00:00 GMT

Brian De Palma has always been fascinated by contrasting points of view, and by the way the media frames and filters complex events to serve its own purposes. His new film, Redacted, which got the sixty-seven-year-old director his first invitation to the New York Film Festival, is based on an actual atrocity committed by American soldiers in Iraq; it tells its story through mock-documentary footage, YouTube and video blog postings, and one soldier's video diary. It's clearly a staged and acted film; De Palma isn't out to fool anybody, though there have still been reports of walkouts during a couple of key, horrific moments. But the movie ends with a brief montage of actual photos of carnage from Iraq, photos that look like scenes that have come before them, yet are so much worse that they put the whole film into perspective.

De Palma has great faith in the power of images to change the world; after Redacted won him the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival, he confidently told reporters that "The pictures are what will stop the war," and he's chastised the media for not showing Americans the full awfulness of what has been unleashed against the Iraqi people. So it's an oddly apropriate sick joke — a De Palma-esque joke — that Redacted itself is being, as its director says, redacted: the movie's producers are insisting on "protecting" the anonymity of the dead and wounded in the photos by placing black bars across their faces, as if they were in a vintage stag film. De Palma has been using the bully pulpit of the NYFF stage to complain about this, and even to publicly argue with his backers. Blogger and critic Jurgen Fauth has posted video of a recent Q&A here. — Phil Nugent