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Los Angeles inspires this kind of movie. Perhaps it's that city's sprawling disconnectedness, its smiley-faced cruelty, its obsession with surface and status that make filmmakers want to impose connections, to bring together people from different worlds and make that contact meaningful.

............ Mick LaSalle ( from his review of February 28, 1997 )

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When you enjoy something, you must never let logic get too much in the way. Like the villains in all the James Bond movies. Whenever Bond breaks into the complex: 'Ah, Mr. Bond, welcome, come in. Let me show you my entire evil plan and then put you in a death machine that doesn't work'.

............ Jerry Seinfeld, "Sein Language" ( from www.moviecliches.com )

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Evil Clone: You're late again. Tsk. 'Time waits for no man'. Hey! There's another cliche for ya!

OnM: Time doesn't wait for anybody or anything. Time isn't sentient, therefore it cannot wait.

EC: Still a cliche.

OnM: Alright, yes, I don't dispute that. But I have many obligations to meet, and this is just one of them. I do what I can, when I can. Reality has to be factored in.

EC: I like that Seinfeld quote. He's right, you know. I like the Bond films-- well, most of them anyway, I mean, Moonraker sucked-- but in general they are entertaining. People say they don't like cliches, but they flock to see the latest blockbuster nevertheless. Almost everything is potentially a cliche, or maybe a stereotype.

OnM: Don't go there. That's still making my head hurt. It is possible to think too much about some things.

EC: (mock gasping): Heresy! Heresy! Hummm... I wonder, is there a himesy?

OnM: I'm sure there is somewhere, and if there is, you'll discover it. But I need to get to work here and finish the column and you're interrupting me-- as usual.

EC: Hey, a clone's gotta do what a clone's gotta do.

OnM: See, now a lot of the time a remark is funny once, maybe a few times, but it becomes a cliche with endless repetition. That's really what people object to. They want to experience something new, not the old same thing over and over. Simultaneously, though, they have a fear of the new. Familiarity also breeds comfort, and a lot of the time people want comfort more than they want new experiences.

EC: Seeing aliens from space blow up the White House or the Capitol building is comfortable?

OnM: Well, isn't it? It's safe, space aliens are the ultimate disposable minority. You can kill 'em all and not feel even slightly guilty.

EC: OK, bad example. Boredom and rage, a dangerous combination. I know-- how about the stories where you have a whole buncha disparate characters, who somehow cross their multiple paths, and all influence one another in strange and dramatically satisfying ways? You see that one all the time. And people flock to those movies.

OnM: Sometimes they do. Other times, they don't because a film is accused of being a 'knock-off' of someone else's work, and so it gets tainted. Then, the stereotype works against someone who has actually made a decent, even excellent film. The one I'm reviewing this week is a good example of exactly that.

EC: A good film? I thought this was the month for your 'guilty pleasures'. Don't you pick on something that most peeps would find hard to justify as a 'good' film and then wrest some greater meaning from it all?

OnM: Sometimes, yes, but the official title of this series of riffs is 'Guilty Pleasures / Buried Treasures'. It can be either/or, or both at once. Thus, the slash mark and its ambiguity.

EC: This is a gay movie?

OnM: Not that kind of slash. Although, (chuckling) I am reminded of that funny dialog where Harmony comes into Spike's crypt and finds him with Dru. She immediately jumps to the incorrect conclusion that Spike wants a threesome, and tells him absolutely not, 'unless it's boy-girl-boy... or Charlize Theron'.

EC: Ya lost me, dude. This is a movie about threesomes?

OnM: No, this is 2 Days in the Valley, by director John Herzfeld.

EC: It is? Oh, cool! That's a great movie! But why a buried treasure? It did OK at the box office, didn't it?

OnM: OK, yes, but just OK. It pretty much breezed in and out of local moviehouses, and I think it did so because somehow the word got around that the film was Herzfeld's version of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, except that no one knew who Herzfeld was. They assumed, 'knockoff', and didn't check it out. Big mistake. This film certainly is a treasure, saith I.

EC: Down with that, dude! And, whoa, Theron was very hot. Wasn't this her first film?

OnM: Close to it, I think. Haven't researched it yet. And Herzfeld was very new to movies, although he had done quite a lot of TV work before 2 Days, many years in fact.

EC: There are similarities to Tarantino, but they're all good ones-- clever screenwriting, great performances, good cinematography. Certainly not a cliche-- err, stereotype-- errr, whatever.

OnM: The screenwriting is excellent. Roger Ebert was so impressed with the way the various character's stories came together at the end of the film, that he wondered whether Herzfeld had started at the ending, and worked his way back.

EC: Teri Hatcher was good too. Kind of playing against type for her, after the 'Lois and Clark' stuff.

OnM: The characters are all nicely complex and multidimensional, considering that the film really moves along at a brisk pace, and we have quite a large number of people to 'get to know'. It would be easy to make them into the usual 'he's the sleaze, she's the evil bitch, good cop, bad cop, etc. etc.' movie shorthands, but that doesn't happen.

EC: Well, then go get the word out. Hey, is there a commentary track?

OnM: Probably, but we have the laser version, which doesn't. The DVD might.

EC: So go buy one then! I'd love to hear what they were thinking of when they choreographed the fight between Hatcher and Theron.

OnM: You go buy one. Take it out of your allowance.

EC: Ahhhhh....... cheapskate.

OnM: Just use your imagination. You probably are anyway.

EC: Theron was hot, you gotta admit.

OnM: The whole movie is 'hot', in the best possible sense. Now let me get to writing about it, or it'll be Monday already.

EC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Always my fault. (heads back down the cellar stairs).

OnM: Now that's a cliche.

EC: (calling up from the basement) No, it's a stereotype!

OnM (cradling head in hands): Another obligation-- begin a campaign to promote ethical behavior in genetic research. (sighs deeply) Now where was I? Oh yeah, unfair pre-assumptions part deux. Or is it tres? Doggone mind is just not minding the store these days...

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What constitutes a cliche? This might seem like something that would be easy to define, but it really isn't. You can usually point them out when you see or hear them (kinda like porn), and many people will agree with your observation, but even then what is a cliche (or porn for that matter) for you and yours may not be for them and theirs.

There has been a lot of talk about the use of artistic decisions in BtVS or AtS that could be interpreted as cliches, but as I have already pointed out in a previous column, it may never be possible to resolve these issues. So much of whether or not a film or literary work embodies a tendency toward cliche is really entirely dependent on intent, and the amount of forethought that the artist put into the work. If the artist is well established as someone who normally is clever and innovative, we tend to give the benefit of the doubt, and let them 'get away with it'. Am artist who is 'new and untested' generally doesn't; we consider any slight shading of 'done this before' to be a lack of vision, or worse, an attempt to clone some other artist's work and claim it as 'an original vision'.

But there are no original visions.

No, there aren't, don't tell me there are. This reminds me, as things often do (given my strange bent of mind), of an audio-related situation. I had occasion during the last two weeks to play around with one of the new multi-channel 'high-quality' audio optical disc formats, and the results were very interesting. (Note: I'm not going to say which one it is, because I am poor and paranoid and fear lawsuits from companies with evil web-scanning software. But, I will say it isn't the DVD-based one). My conclusions pretty much came down to 'this is a crock', for several reasons. I won't go into them all, because it would be long and boring and not of much interest to non-audiophiles, but a tipoff came very early on when I noticed this little switch on the back panel of the unit, marked 'Filter'. Consulting the owner's manual, I discovered that this switch, when in the 'normal' position, acts to filter out ultrasonic information from the output of the player, so it doesn't freak out amplifiers or speakers (which it very well might).

So why does the player output ultrasonic energy in the first place? Damn good question. On first glance (and for many glances thereafter) the technically astute individual would conclude that this is a defect either in the player or in the disc playback standard itself. But the owner's manual states otherwise-- it turns out this isn't a 'bug', it's a 'feature'. (Hummm, where have we heard that before?) Future amplifers, the manual states, will be able to handle the extra energy, and so provide 'superior sound because of the higher bandwidth' or words to that effect.

Talk about a cliche-- Let's set up a technical straw man and then knock it down. You can't hear ultrasonic energy. There is no benefit to be gained from amplifying it and reproducing it through speakers. No responsible engineer in the audio field will dispute this statement. This 'high bandwidth' thing has been tried many times before in different incarnations in various products over the last 30 years. It isn't a new idea, worse, it's a bad idea. It comes, it goes, it shows up again, it dies out again. It's all marketing b.s., people. It's like a trailer that really hypes up a film, but the film itself is a loser, or at least pointless.

So why should anybody care? Because after a while folks get so cynical, they make a judgment in advance, and end up not only avoiding the bad stuff, but avoiding the good stuff. And yes, I've brought this up before, but it's worth bringing up over and over again because the battle to suppress mediocrity and support the truly innovative or at least decent is neverending. This whole month's worth of 'guilty pleasures / buried treasures' celebrates this goal. My contribution, tiny though it may be, still helps to leave the glass at least 17/32nds full. (And as Buffy and Willow said in Gone: Yea, us!)

This week's Classic Movie did respectably at the time of its original theatrical release, but it could have done better had the word not been passed around that it was a Pulp Fiction copy. I'm not sure where this impression came from, because most professional critical reviews were very positive, but for some reason I kept hearing this topic surface whenever 2 Days in the Valley was mentioned. Maybe it was because the director had worked almost entirely in the TV field, and this was his first actual feature film. TV people are often stereotyped as being unable to 'handle' the 'more significant art form' that the movies supposedly embody.

So, I'm going to do what I can by starting out the month of August with a big recommendation for this particular 'buried treasure.' The plot summary followeth:

The first two people we meet as the film opens are Dosmo Pizzo (played by Danny Aiello), a professional hit man who we soon find out has fallen on some hard times and is working to regain his self-respect, and Lee Woods (James Spader), a very cool and very obviously dangerous younger man in the same 'profession'. It is nighttime, and Lee and Dosmo are spying on a woman, Becky Foxx (Teri Hatcher) and her ex-husband Roy (Peter Horton) from the top of a hill overlooking 'The Valley'. Becky and Roy are having a heated argument, and after they fall asleep, the two men break into the home and murder Roy after injecting Becky with a sedative to keep her unconscious. Becky wakes up the next morning, and promptly freaks as she discovers Roy's dead body next to her. But all is not as it seems, as we discover much later in the film.

Meanwhile, we meet Allan Hopper (Greg Cruttwell), an extremely self-involved and obnoxious art dealer, who has a kidney stone attack while driving down the city streets, and ends up being rescued by a man in a stolen car. Next day, we meet Hopper's secretary (Glenne Headly) a sweet and kindly soul who nurses him, although he constantly insults and belittles her, claiming his only real intention is to 'help her'. Right.

There are two cops, Wes (Eric Stoltz) and Alvin (Jeff Daniels). Wes has always dreamed of being a homicide detective, but finds himself on the vice squad, where he lacks the heart to entrap a sweet, harmless girl (Kathleen Luong) who works in a massage parlor. Alvin is angry at Wes for his lack of drive, but we find that he is a burnout case who is clinging desperately to his police work to keep what little sense of self-worth he still possesses.

Then (yes, there's still more!) there's Teddy Peppers, played by the well-known film director Paul Mazursky. Teddy is a screenwriter-director whose career has gone way beyond downhill. He once made an Academy Award-winning film, but absolutely everything he's done for the last several years has been a miserable, money-losing flop. He plans to commit suicide but holds back because doesn't want to leave his little dog homeless. (The dog is adorable, BTW, and I'm not a big dog fan myself). Just as he is finally about to go through with killing himself, he meets a woman (Marsha Mason) who's willing to take responsibility for locating a new home for his beloved pet. As he walks away from her car, heading back to meet his end, she calls out to him that he should come along with her and meet the man she intends to give the dog to. He relents and go with her.

Dosmo returns to the foreground, and meets up with the art dealer and his secretary. As the plot grows in complexity, we also meet Helga Svelgen (Charlize Theron), who is the lover of Lee, the younger hit man. I won't give away the relationship between Becky Foxx and Helga, but suffice it to say that these two women very much don't get along, leading eventually to a wonderfully choreographed fight scene led into with a subtlely rising, nicely-timed musical score that explodes into full force as the action begins.

There are various walk-ons by a number of well known actors, and it seems very clear that everyone involved had a good time making this movie. All portrayals, across the board, are so well handled by the acting crew that they make us become emotionally involved with the characters, even the evil ones. In one way or another, destiny/fate/chance/whatever brings all of these characters together, although not always at the same time or in the same place. Are there cliches involved in this film? Of course, if you choose to look at them that way, but it is clear that the film would not work as intended without them, and like Joss often does with his own visions in the Buffyverse, the cliches are often twisted or perverted in ways that are amusing or clever.

This is an immensely satisfying flick, and if you liked Pulp Fiction, you will almost certainly enjoy 2 Days in the Valley. (Caution-- if you didn't like PF, then do steer clear, since Valley employs much of the same dark humor and tendencies towards flashes of violence that can be disconcerting). If you appreciate stories of redemption where losers can still have a sense of honor, the bad guys ultimately get theirs (mostly), and the hero finally triumphs (or at least gets away with it), you'll find this a very worthwhile evening in front of the TV set.

'Smiley-faced cruelty', indeed.

Oh yeah, and by the way, Charlize Theron is hot. It's no wonder Harmony was willing to make an exception!

E. Pluribus Cinema, Unum,

OnM

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Technical spandex catfight:

2 Days in the Valley is available on DVD, the review copy was on laserdisc. The film was released in 1996 and the running time is 1 hour and 47 minutes. The original theatrical aspect ratio is 2.35:1, which was preserved on the laserdisc edition and is likely so on the DVD. Screenwriting credit goes to the director, John Herzfeld. The film was produced by Jeff Wald and Herb Nanas. Cinematography was by Oliver Wood, with film editing by Jim Miller and Wayne Wahrman. Production Design was by Catherine Hardwicke, with art direction by Kevin Constant, set decoration by Gene Serdena and costume design by Betsy Heimann Original music was by Anthony Marinelli. The original theatrical soundtrack format was Dolby Digital.

Cast overview:

Danny Aiello .... Dosmo Pizzo
Greg Cruttwell .... Allan Hopper
Jeff Daniels .... Alvin Strayer
Teri Hatcher .... Becky Foxx
Glenne Headly .... Susan Parish
Peter Horton .... Roy Foxx
Marsha Mason .... Audrey Hopper
Paul Mazursky .... Teddy Peppers
James Spader .... Lee Woods
Eric Stoltz .... Wes Taylor
Charlize Theron .... Helga Svelgen
Keith Carradine .... Detective Creighton
Louise Fletcher .... Evelyn
Austin Pendleton .... Ralph Crupi
Kathleen Luong .... Midori

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Miscellaneous:

Item numero uno: Here's a nice little summery movie bit to check out: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/entertainment/3797593.htm

Exerpt:

Blue Crush, director John Stockwell's film about female surfers has already won over some tough critics-- the professional wave shredders who appear in the movie. (...) All praise the film's authenticity.

"No one's ever really put women's surfing, or surfing, on the big screen like this," said (Kate) Skarratt, the blond Australian who is president of the International Women's Surfing body within the Association of Surfing Professionals. "It's powerfully representative of what surfing really is."

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Item numero dos: Director Oliver Stone disses George Lucas' obsession with promoting digital video projection for theaters! Read all about it here (scroll down until you see this exerpt):

Q. I was amused by the e-mailer who said he was "convinced of the greatness" of Maxivision, though he had never seen it in use. Cost issues aside, why should Maxivision be considered superior to digital? And why don't we hear more about it in the general press?

http://www.suntimes.com/output/answ-man/sho-sunday-ebert28.html

And while we're on the Ebertian trail, Roger just gave M. Night Shyamalan's Signs four stars in his review. Heck, I'd've gone to see it anyway-- M. is (deservedly) becoming somewhat of a local movie hero in southeastern PA.

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Big thanks to Sheri, Rob and anom for input and links on the movie cliche stuff this last week. You guys help put the 'Optimal' in 'OT'!

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The Question of the Week:

Many artists who work in the TV field long to get into movies, because movies are 'respectable' in a way that TV is not, or so it is claimed. I don't buy this. To me, art is good or not within the range of personal interpretation, and the medium isn't intrinsically important. I've seen equally good results achieved by both television and the movie industry, and find it annoying that TV is constantly 'ghettoized' this way.

What do you think? Is TV always destined to be thought of as a 'lesser' media, or is this characterization unfair?

So post'em and all that there stuff, you know the deal. Finally, a big old Wow!! and mucho many thanks to the multitude of respondents who made last week's post the best-followed-up-upon in CMotW history!

Take care, and see you next week, when I'll probably be late again, but hopefully not too annoying otherwise.

;-)

******* Classic Movie of the Week - August 3rd 2002 - 2 Days In the Valley