Nice. I’m not the biggest fan of that movie, but it’s decent and seems like excellent Rewatchables fodder.
Slightly less respectable Bill Paxton character being covered this week.
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I’m gonna put together a write-up of Primal Fear and post it this coming weekend. It’s ad-free on Hoopla and ad-supported on Pluto if anyone wants to join. One of my all-time favorites.
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Awesome. I’m putting it on tonight thanks to Pluto.
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So many great scenes. Really looking forward to this one.
I nearly raced to the thread to complain about CR’s early-episode take of “I would have taken True Lies 2 over Avatar,” but then I was frozen by the expected reality that you would co-sign that take.
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You thought right. Avatar was so bad, worth seeing only in big screen cinema for the at the time innovative 3D. Are you seriously saying you prefer it to the glory that would have been TL2?
Yeah these guys are way overboard about this movie, all three of them. This is not a top five Arnold movie.
Boy there’s nothing good happening in this post, and I’m squinting really hard to find something.
Tell me your take on Avatar so I can say the same back atcha. I understand not liking True Lies, but I’d never have put you as an Avatar stan.
Ehh, “stan” would be way overstating it, but Avatar is a LOT better than True Lies. Even without having seen it in the theater, I thought it was really strong and should have beaten Hurt Locker for BP.
Anyway, tagging in actual noted Avatar stan @ctr123, even with my kind words for it I’m pretty sure he liked it a lot more than I do.
Boy there’s nothing good happening in this post, and I’m squinting really hard to find something.
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I do love Avatar, but I still haven’t seen True Lies, so I can’t rule out I’d like it even more ! (although to be fair I estimate this event as extremely unlikely lol)
btw fun fact is that True Lies is a remake of a 1991 French film called “la totale”. I doubt it’s good (or even watchable) but who knows, I’m sure it was a hit here at the time…
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Alright, it’s time.
• Most Rewatchable Scene
Honorable mention to the excellent ending, but I tend to think that the first scene where innocent Aaron Stampler gives way to Roy should get the prize here.
It’s honestly a pretty short list throughout my movie-watching life where a movie specifically gives me goosebumps, but this moment does it even on rewatch. Distressed, pained Aaron suddenly looking up and saying, “Well how the FUCK should I know?” is just pristinely executed. I think it’s a great bit of misdirect in the filmmaking to fixate on the blinking red light and the beeping coming from the camera as if that really caused some sort of physiological reaction in Aaron.
But just in general, it feels like if you power-ranked this movie’s scenes by their rewatchability, you would list every single Ed Norton scene and then finally start in on the other ones.
• The Neil McCauley “A Book about Metals” Award for Best Line from the Movie
“I thought you liked it better this way. That way you don’t have to look at the person.”
• What’s Aged the Best?
Richard Gere as a lawyer. I like Gere generally, I liked him in his younger roles in An Officer and a Gentleman and American Gigolo, but being the smarmy lawyer is just perfect for him, and there’s a reason that it isn’t the only time he showed up prominently in this role. It’s perfect for him.
The decision to cast Edward Norton in this role. There were other established names up for this – Dicaprio was apparently originally attached before the role went to Norton – and he paid off their gamble beautifully. Aaron Stampler’s stutter being an improvisation of Norton is truly a stroke of brilliance, especially as you see how Norton’s career has played out. Most of the time, he is not very interesting as a seemingly positive figure in a movie. His characters in Keeping the Faith, The Illusionist, and Red Dragon are underdeveloped and don’t tend to leave you with the sense that he’s a very believable good guy; he basically has to be a bad guy or at least a tweener. And apparently, consistent with this observation, when they cast him in this role, their primary concern wasn’t that he would lack believability as Aaron but not as Roy. He was ridiculously believable as Aaron, and that choice has everything to do with it.
It feels like a weird thing to say “aged the best” because it’s awful, but: boosting the narrative of sex abuse within the Catholic church? This movie is pre-Spotlight, so the scope of the problem really hadn’t become widely known yet. Maybe I was just too young to have known about it, because I do remember watching with my mom and her saying, “ohh it’s one of these priest sex abuse things,” so there obviously was some sort of knowledge out there that this was more than an isolated problem.
Anyway, back to more enjoyable stuff: where this movie sometimes fails in its straightforward jokes, it has a few sequences that are irresistibly funny to me:
- “Vail?” “Who else?” “Clever prick.” I love John Mahoney’s bitter delivery of “clever prick” so much. It made me go forward always hoping that one day I could make someone angrily say that about me behind my back. Unfortunately I’ll probably never know if I’ve achieved that goal.
- In tandem with that, when Linney confronts Gere at the bar: “And you get sympathy for your poor little abused boy!” “You think so?” “I hate you.”
- “In fact, there was a house over there where I kissed my first girlfriend. Got her pregnant too.” “Hell of a kiss, Joey.” “Oh yeah.” Bauer’s amused “oh yeah” gets me every time.
- The first time Marty sees Roy appear. “Well looky here, who the FUCK are you?” Marty’s startled and much weaker reply of, “Who the fuck are you?” is great.
- “So Aaron did kill the Archbishop.” “HELL no. Jesus Christ, where’d they find you?” That last line, “Jesus Christ, where’d they find you?” is another derisive line that lives on in my head as something I want to trot out whenever applicable.
Also: this pic. I’ve seen it used wordlessly for “start looking for a job” on the internet, and I love it every time. As we all know, gifs and jpgs on the internet should have text on them as little as possible, and true artistry is attained when you simply convey the message with the image without the additional visual aid.
• What’s Aged the Worst?
Gere raises a very reasonable pretrial argument to exclude crime scene photos as more prejudicial than probative. Linney eventually gets exasperated and says, “I’m sorry, Your Honor, but this is too much. Next thing you know he’ll be objecting if we want to bring in the murder weapon.” Gere replies, “Well, now that she brings it up…” This is played for comedy, like I really feel that the audience is supposed to buy that it’s absurd for Gere to object to the admission of the murder weapon. Of course there could be some sort of tainting of that evidence. We don’t know the chain of custody of the obtaining of that evidence. Crucial evidence gets tossed on pretrial motions and takes cases apart; it’s part of what a defense attorney should do. This feeds the bullshit where people talk about “case was thrown out on a technicality,” and the “technicality” is…oh I don’t know, a violation of the person’s Constitutional rights. Anyway.
This movie has some funny moments, but it also has some fucking HACKY lines:
- “And I don’t mean to be argumentative…” “Hey! That’s what we pay you for.” KILL ME, KILL ME NOW. Fuck, it was even obvious that they just recorded that in post later and added it, as it comes entirely from off-camera and doesn’t even fit the tempo of Linney’s continued sentence. Whoever’s great idea that was, I hope you’ve retired from the industry.
- “A boy scout…with a merit badge in carving.” Groan.
- “His so-called charities…” “So-called? The guy was a priest, for Christ’s sake.” Few things in this life as painful as SUPER CLEVER quips like this.
- This is a bit of a cheat, but: “Well, I must say, I haven’t seen this many lawyers and politicians gathered together in one place since confession this morning!” I mean…that’s exactly the sort of hacky joke an archbishop might tell at a formal dinner like this, so I’m to totally sure they actually meant that one to be funny. I’ll give it a pass.
Also, the twist doesn’t age super well. Like, I think the movie remains rewatchable in spite of it, but once you actually know the resolution, the malingering by Stampler just looks phony as fuck, and it feels ridiculous that you ever bought it on first go.
• The Dion Waiters Award for Best Heat Check Performance
I feel like Frances McDormand should count here? She does her part in the pivotal Roy reveal, the debrief with Gere afterward, and she testifies. I think she’s in little enough of the movie to qualify, and I always like her part in it.
• The Joey Pants “That Guy” Award
I think this actually kind of has to be Terry O’Quinn, since all I could ever process him as was “John Locke with a mustache.” Unfortunately for him, he was the one saddled with that “that’s what we pay you for” line. Poor bastard.
• The “Ruffalo/Hanna/Rubinek/Partridge” Overacting Award
There are no terrible culprits here, but I guess Jon Seda as Stampler’s friend Alex isn’t great. Overacting? I don’t know. This category is tainted by its creator. I haven’t listened to the Rewatchables pod of this movie for a good while, but I’m guessing Bill points to the scene where Gere yells at his assistant after the Hawthorne 832.156 reveal in court.
• Casting What Ifs
From TVTropes
“Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Edward Furlong, Jason Marsden, Danny Masterson, James Van Der Beek and Wil Wheaton were all considered for the role of Aaron.”
If so, what an odd group. Would have been interested in the DiCaprio rendition, but sure glad they went with Norton. As for Martin Vail, it appears that they approached Gere directly for it. It appears that Connie Britton read for what ended up as the Maura Tierney part.
• Half-Assed Internet Research
Mentioned above that the stutter was a Norton improv that became indelible in the Stampler character. He also apparently improvised that slow clap during the reveal in the finale. Nice touch.
“The filmmakers considered an alternate ending in which Martin Vail would trick Aaron into revealing himself in court. It was decided that Aaron triumphing over the egotistical lawyer was a better ending, and the alternate was scrapped.” Yeah…if true, they chose wisely.
Interesting additional stuff from Damon:
“Matt Damon really wanted this part, saying, “It was clear that whoever got that role was going to blow up.” Though he didn’t have much money at the time, he paid for a dialect coach to help him perform better in his audition. Getting passed over was the reason Damon and BFF Ben Affleck finished and sold their script for Good Will Hunting (1998). The actors worried they would never break into Hollywood unless they created their own opportunity.
That was one of the things that was really the impetus behind Ben and I writing Good Will Hunting and focusing on it, was because when Primal Fear, when Edward Norton got Primal Fear, we went, ‘F***. There’s not gonna be another one of those that’s gonna come around. We gotta do our own thing.’”
And more Norton/Damon jockeying for position:
“Edward Norton says that after Primal Fear he and Matt Damon were both up for the role of Rudy Baylor in The Rainmaker (1997) and Damon beat him out. Norton did American History X (1998) instead. Damon played a role almost as duplicitous as Primal Fear‘s Aaron Stampler in 1999 when he was the title character in The Talented Mr. Ripley, the same year Norton played another man with DID in David Fincher’s Fight Club.”
• Probably Unanswerable Questions
There would have been an obvious question of how Martin Vail handles the fallout, but apparently there’s a sequel book. And it is panned just terribly. But I guess the answer is in that? I’m trusting the reviews. I tried reading the book that this movie adapted and found it relatively clear that this was the rare “movie is better than the book” situation.
Also, during the Shaughnessy testimony, they fix the camera a couple of times on a young adult in the audience, and I’m guessing it’s meant to be one of Rushman’s past victims who Shaughnessy simply ignored allegations from? But they never clarify that.
• Sequel, Prequel, Limited Series, or All Black Remake
no
• Apex Mountain
Well, Gregory Hoblit, yes. He never really launched as a director. This was both better and a bigger deal than Fracture, though I like Fracture a decent bit. Lots of no otherwise.
Norton’s apex was probably Fight Club
Gere’s was maybe Pretty Woman? Or one of the earlier roles like American Gigolo. And really Chicago was probably a bigger deal for him too. Anyway, it wasn’t this.
Linney clearly got bigger later, with several Oscar noms and her Ozark run.
Andre Braugher probably hit his highest point at Brooklyn 99. It still really sucks that he’s gone too soon.
• Who Won the Movie?
Norton by miles and miles and miles. Few actors get this sort of launch out of their very first movie.
• Picking Nits
Okay, so: let me preface this by saying that I don’t generally get annoyed by the bungling of things happening in legal movies. I enjoy legal movies quite a bit. But this movie has some stuff.
Surprise witnesses basically aren’t a thing. I actively dislike it when movies use them. “This person wasn’t on the list” probably means they’re never testifying, and if they are then the other lawyer is almost certainly getting some sort of continuance to prep for a new witness rather than being thrust into dealing with them right then and there. The airmen in A Few Good Men could probably testify as rebuttal witnesses; that movie got that detail right. But things like the surprise calling of Shaughnessy and Goodman in this movie…bleh.
The judge threatens Gere, “Next time you want to get someone off on insanity, you plead that way. Or I’ll have you disbarred.” Uhh, what? Certainly it’s true that you can’t backdoor an insanity defense in after the plea is entered, but a lawyer is not getting disbarred over seemingly attempting to. I’m not even entirely sure that he couldn’t make some sort of run at establishing reasonable doubt about his client’s mental state based on the client’s apparent mental lapses just under a standard not guilty plea, but I’m uncertain about that.
Also: was it the filmmaker’s intent to convey that Vail was doing just a terrible job in cross-examining witnesses when the State was presenting its case?
- “Could there have been a third person there?” “There’s no evidence to suggest there was.” “No, but there’s no evidence to prove there wasn’t!” GOOD ONE.
- “Is it possible that the real killer – a third person – who maybe was smart enough not to tramp a whole freeway of blood through the apartment…” Janet Venable’s hair is on fire when a defense attorney tries to exclude damning evidence through routine motions, but she’s not objecting to blatantly argumentative questions like this? Absurd.
- (After it’s established that a left-handed person stabbed the archbishop and that Stampler is a lefty) “Well then it’s possible that a right-handed person could’ve deliberately used his left hand to inflict some of these wounds.” “Yes, I suppose that’s possible.” “Then it would be a reasonable to assume that there was, in fact, a third person at the crime scene.” What in the blue fuck, man. Venable furls his brow at the absurdity of this one, so to some extent she’s signaling to the audience how stupid that was, but then we cut straight to the TV news talking about “strong cross-examination by Martin Vail” in the case that day.
• The “Great Shot Gordo” Award for Most Cinematic Shot
• The Vincent Chase Award: Are We Sure This Character Is Actually Good at Their Job?
For reasons just named above, I question how good Vail is. Great lawyer, or handsome man with a great talent for self-promotion? It could be either, honestly.
Obviously the McDormand character is prime for this since Stampler just fucking runs circles around her.
• The “Big Kahuna Burger” Award for Best Use of Food and Drink
I’ll give this to the blatant product placement wherein Gere, wounded in the attack by Roy, holds a fucking ice-cold Coca Cola up to his head to stave off swelling.
• The “Butch’s Girlfriend” Award for the Weakest Link in the Film
The side character of Alex is weak. I guess that’s it. I really like the cast overall.
• The “Ron Burgundy Flute” Award for the Best Time for a Pee Break
The entire chase sequence where Gere and Braugher chase Alex on foot and then Braugher makes a citizen’s arrest is stupid and bad and definitely a time to pee freely. It also feels like it’s from an entirely different movie, so I’ll just use this for that category too even though that category generally asks for a person.
• Is There a Better Title for this Movie?
Well…I don’t ever say yes, but I’d say yes. This is primarily a courtroom drama. This name is not a courtroom drama name. It’s certainly not a bad name, but there has to have been a better option. Not saying I can be the one to come up with it or anything.
• The Mallory Rubin Award for “Did This Movie Need a Better Sex Scene?”
I manually subbed this into the categories from the usual Rewatchables show, because: yes. Gere and Linney banging one out should have happened. What are we doing here?
• Just One Oscar
Norton absolutely should have won Best Supporting. C’mon with this Cuba Gooding award. Not saying Gooding wasn’t good in Jerry Maguire, but the Academy got this wrong.
• Best Double Feature
Honestly, it would be kind of funny to double-feature this with Chicago and take in Gere’s two big attorney roles.
• The “Andy and Red – Zihuatanejo” Award for What Happens the Next Day?
Based on the look we see between Gere and Linney in the judge’s chambers, I’m guessing they may have had an interaction the next day. Otherwise I’m guessing Gere drinks a lot. Which may be tied in with the Linney interaction. But really, there’s not a lot a lawyer can do, the attorney-client privilege seems pretty damn solid here.
• The Coach Finstock Award for Best Life Lesson
“Why did you leave?”
“Dead end job. You either run for office or become a judge. Why be an umpire when you can play ball?”
• The “Slow Ride” / “Kid Cudi – Pursuit of Happiness” Award for Best Needle Drop
Cancao Do Mar does the trick. Not pretending I would have been able to identify this song otherwise, but this is the one where Gere compliments it to Steven Bauer in the pool room and then Bauer gives him a CD at the end and pinpoints the track for him. This sequence:
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Ok, this episode features one of the strangest tangents that I can remember, and it’s still burned in my mind.
Starts around 1:16:30. CR’s primary nit to pick is:
Janet walks in to the bar and says “Stu, I’ll have the usual”. And then they just bring her a Bud Light.
CR and Bill (and Craig, too) go to the mat that “the usual” absolutely can’t be a beer. It has to be a drink that’s actually prepared/mixed for them. Sean is the only one with any sense, realizing that it means “You know who I am and you know I get the same drink every time, and ‘the usual’ signals that I would like that drink now please.” This is somehow a >3 minute conversation that ends with CR and Bill legitimately bullying Sean about how bad his takes are.
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Okay, yes, I just went to the link, I’m 100% with you on this. Very weird on the part of everyone but Sean. There was a bar I frequented for a while in my mid-20s and the waitress would legit just come bring me a Bud Light without me having said anything first. I mean we could have done the “Bud Light?” “Yep,” but there was no cause for it.
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Clever prick. A truly great improvisation since there ended up being a few lines referring to the stutter by other characters. I’d like to think Leo would have brought something equally defining to the performance. I love Damon but think passing on him was right for this one.
Great attention to detail LKJ. This was as good as an episode of the podcast. I even learned a few things from your half assed internet research.
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I feel like I should have noted that this is the entire plot driver in Fracture, Gregory Hoblit’s second-most prominent film. Anthony Hopkins murders a woman early in the movie, the audience gets perfect knowledge that he’s the murderer, he openly confesses to the crime, and he does it all in service of being able to win the case anyway through this sort of legal maneuvering. Just kind of funny that a decade earlier, the thought of facing motions in limine to exclude key evidence would be treated with a scoff in the same director’s movie.
I need to see Fracture again. Been a while. But it’s not streaming anywhere right now.
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No Way Out is coming on Monday.
Haven’t seen it. Am going to watch. It’s on Hoopla and Tubi.
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It’s decent.