People who write letters to newspapers
complaining about nudity, cursing, and anti-Christmas content in Love Actually (Lobsters in the manger
scene?Those heathens!)will
die if they see Bad Santa (opens Wednesday, November 26). It will literally
kill them. Their heads will explode like popcorn kernels, so be careful who you
sit near in the theater. They probably won’t even realize they’re in for one
bumpy sleigh ride when Bad‘s
title pops up on the screen at the same time its protagonist christens an alley
behind a bar with his vomit.
           Bad is perfect counterprogramming
for the similarly holiday-themed but PG-rated Elf. It’s about a suicidal, alcoholic, and incontinent man named
Willie T. Stokes (a perfectly cast Billy Bob Thornton) who teams up with a
three-foot sidekick (Tony Cox) to pull an annual Christmas Eve robbery of the
very same department store that has been employing them, respectively, as Santa
and an elf. But the dynamic duo has to suffer through an entire month of
dealing with jam-handed kids in order to get the other 11 months off each year.
           Here’s a
typical scene from Bad: Kid sits on
Santa’s lap. Santa impatiently says, “What the fuck do you want?” The kid tells
him he wants Pokémon. Santa looks confused and
drunkenly shouts, “What the fuck is that?” Santa also makes backdoor Christmas
deliveries to female shoppers in the dressing room of the store’s plus-size
department.
           Take your
kids to Bad? You might want to punch
the filmmakers for having kids in it.
But here’s the thing: Bad is really
good. It offers quality, behind-the-camera talent ranging from producers (the Coen brothers, who came up with the idea for the script) to
director Terry Zwigoff (who made the award-winning Crumb and Ghost World). Like those two films, Bad is full of sad, ugly people
(inside and out) who remain flawed, despite the slightly uplifting ending, when
the closing credits roll. And that makes Bad more real, and gives it more heart and soul than The Grinch and
The Cat in the Hat put together.
           You could
think of it as a modern take on the Scrooge tale, only with the various Ghosts
of Christmas being replaced by a criminal mastermind dwarf, an 8-year-old with
a perpetually snotty nose, an alcoholic bartender with a Santa sex fetish, a
half-dead sandwich-obsessed grandmother, and a 500-pound prostitute. Not only
is there a refreshing lack of product placement for a Christmas film set in a
mall, but Bad is also the last time
you’ll see the late John Ritter on the big screen. Happy holidays!
The Singing Detective (opens Friday, November 28, at the Little) is a film about a guy coming to terms with his past
and his problems in a very painful, hostile way. It’s also pulpy… and it’s a
musical. These are things that would not ordinarily go together, and I’m not
sure they really bring out the best in each other here. A good potboiler is one
thing, but gumshoes who burst into song are something
else entirely. The same kind of theory applied to, say, Cop Rock.
           Detective, which is based on a wildly
popular six-hour British miniseries penned by the late Dennis Potter, swaps
’40s London for Chicago in the ’50s in terms of setting, while replacing
BAFTA-winner Michael Gambon’s Phillip Marlowe with walking punch line Robert Downey Jr. and his
appropriately named Dan Dark. The angry Dark, a pulp writer, spends the entire
film — physically, at least — within the confines of a hospital where he’s
being treated for a rare skin infection which makes it look like he has
second-degree burns from head to toe. Dark refuses to take painkillers (oh, the
irony) and, because of this, he can only lay immobile in his bed and let his
thoughts get the better of him.
           Because of
Dark’s state of mind, we’re not sure what parts of Detective are real and which exist only in Dark’s gloomy head.
Complicating matters is a possible third scenario in which Dark is imagining
characters from his novels. These figments include a hit-man version of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Adrien Brody and Jon Polito), a
whorish mother (Carla Gugino), and a regular whore
(Carla Gugino again), a happy-ending nurse (Katie
Holmes), and a wife (Robin Wright Penn) who might be screwing another guy
(Jeremy Northam) while they both try to screw Dark
out of the movie rights to one of his novels.
           Sounds
pretty nutty, right? And then, every once in a while, the walls roll away and
people start belting out period hits like “At the Hop” and “Mr. Sandman” (don’t
worry — they’re only lip-synching). The song-and-dance numbers are light,
even though they’re fully rooted in fanciful paranoia and bewildering delusion,
unlike Dancer in the Dark or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. As if that
weren’t enough, Dark makes occasional visits to the hospital’s shrink (Mel
Gibson, trying way too hard for a Best Supporting Actor nod — Detective was financed by his Icon
Productions) who uses some unorthodox treatment techniques on our boy.
           Slowly, Dark starts getting better, both physically and spiritually
(making us wonder if the skin condition wasn’t all psychosomatic). But
by then I stopped caring about Dark’s problems and focused on my watch, which
suddenly seemed to be moving counterclockwise. Maybe there were problems
hacking Potter’s epic story into a 110-minute film, though the thought of Detective running another four hours
makes me want to burn down a church. Downey’s
performance is good, but it gets muddled in its ridiculous surroundings. I will
say this for Detective: It made me
feel nearly as delusional as Dark was supposed to be. That’s got to count for
something.
Interested in raw, unsanitized
movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com),
or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.
This article appears in Nov 26 – Dec 2, 2003.
