“Dune” (1984) – David Lynch
David Lynch didn’t so much “lose the plot” with “Dune,” as find one – 412 pages of plot, to be precise, that, as the resulting film evidences clearly, he had some difficulty marshalling into a manageable, understandable 2 hour-long film. Which is to say, he didn’t. Audiences found ”Dune” incomprehensible, grotesque and overly involved (all criticisms that have been laid at Lynch’s subsequent work but, you know, in a good way), and stayed away in droves. In retrospect, it’s easy to think he was a poor choice from the beginning, but this was a Lynch with only two features behind him, “Eraserhead” – which showed an appropriately off-kilter, retro sci-fi sensibility and “The Elephant Man,” – which showed he could do classic, crowdpleasing fare too: on paper, who more perfect to take on the beloved Frank Herbert epic? Now, full disclosure, this writer actually kinda loves the film despite the clunkiness of the dialogue, the redundancies of those horrible voiceovers, the cheese ‘n’ hamminess of some of the acting, and the, oh, about a million other problems. But in those rare moments when “Dune” succeeds, it’s actually dazzling – the steampunk design of the House Atreides interiors, the ornate, intricately detailed sets (all 80 of them), the improbable but oddly great anachronism of Toto’s ’80s guitars meeting Brian Eno’s glimmery drones on the soundtrack: all these elements are truly visionary, and if you can get a handle on the narrative, the epic sweep of the filmmaker’s ambition actually serves the Messiah origin story rather well. However, Lynch did not have final cut (the studio added exposition-y voiceover and ruthlessly excised subplots and entire characters to reduce the running time) and since he largely refuses to talk about the notoriously troubled process of making the film, we’ll probably never know just how much better, or worse, his longer version might have been (this piece is good and Lynch shoulders a lot of the blame himself). That his next directorial outing would be his first truly auteurist masterpiece, “Blue Velvet,” however, a miracle of tonal control, creeping unease and economical storytelling, speaks volumes for just how steep a learning curve Lynch went through on “Dune.” For that, if for nothing else, we should be glad of it.
“Elizabethtown” – (2005) – Cameron Crowe
When Cameron Crowe made “Vanilla Sky” it seemed to fans that he had veered somewhat off course, and when the promos for “Elizabethtown” arrived 4 years later, it seemed that he had gone back to his roots. Music, kids in love, angst, road trips, and a great actress in the role of matriach (Susan Sarandon). Wrong! Instead, what we got was a watered-down version of the indie-hit-by-numbers of the year before, “Garden State”. “Elizabethtown” stars Kirsten Dunst as the Manic Pixie Dream Flight Attendant who’s seemingly waited all her life to save Orlando Bloom, the Braff-wannabe who is unable to forge a meaningful connection and whose life is totally going down the gurgler – aw, sad face. Throw in the family reunion, the aforementioned road trip, some Ryan Adams and Tom Petty on the soundtrack and it’s all downhill from there. “Elizabethtown” is barely a shadow of Crowe’s quotable and beloved hits “Say Anything” and “Almost Famous.” His attempts at quirk appear phony, there is so much music it becomes a distraction instead of a complement and his characters are little more than 2-by-4s. The only saving grace is Alec Baldwin’s brief appearance as Bloom’s boss at the beginning of the film — which is long forgotten once you’ve sat through Sarandon’s speech and dance number .
“The Island of Dr. Moreau” (1996) – John Frankenheimer
Not the first bad film John Frankenheimer ever made (the man had far too long and diverse a career for that), “The Island of Dr. Moreau” is probably the worst bad film John Frankenheimer ever made. If the near-legendary tales are true, the shoot was miserable from the get go, and that it should result in such a miserable experience for the audience is probably only fitting. It’s muddled, tonally erratic, and by turns high-falutin’ in attempting to provoke religious, ethical and even existential debate, and downright silly as a bunch of dog-men find machine guns and stuff explodes for no reason. Disastrous onscreen, it was pandemonium offscreen: Frankenheimer himself was a last-minute replacement for Richard Stanley who was fired after four days’ shooting, having worked on the project for four years; rewritten script pages were turned in minutes before scenes were shot, and Val Kilmer was going through a messy divorce and demanded a change of role with Rob Morrow. Who subsequently walked off the set, to be replaced by David Thewlis. Who hated working on it so much he vowed never to watch the finished product. So why did everyone put themselves through this? For most of the talent involved, the answer was the same “to work with Marlon Brando.” Brando, himself grieving from the suicide of his daughter and having his lines piped into his ear via a radio transmitter, gives a performance so pantomimed that it might prove the lowest of the film’s many low points, were it not for Kilmer. Ah, Kilmer: all baffling line readings and inappropriate emotional reactions, the nadir is reached when Val’s Dr. Montgomery replaces Dr. Moreau, giving Kilmer the opportunity to “do” his Brando. Perhaps Frankenheimer, director of true classics like “The Train” and “The Manchurian Candidate” can’t wholly be blamed for phoning it in, in an effort to speedily put the whole thing behind him, but he still needs to take at least partial responsibility for the resulting fiasco: as ill-starred as the production clearly was all along, sometimes remarkable work can be borne from chaos, witness “Apocalypse Now,” or just about any Herzog film. “The Island of Dr. Moreau” however, was not one of those times. Oh the horror, indeed.
