I can’t say that The Pledge, The Wedding Planner, Blooper Bunny, and Shadow of the Vampire have much in common, apart from the fact that they’re showing in Chicago this week. Yet all four do, to different degrees, feed off other movies. Frankly, that’s what I like most about The Wedding Planner—a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Lopez and Matthew McConaughey that aspires to and achieves the goofiness of a studio musical of the early 50s. And it’s what I like even more about Blooper Bunny (1991), a deconstructive eight-minute Bugs Bunny cartoon made for Warners that’s showing at the Film Center this Saturday and Sunday with Tom DiCillo’s 1995 Living in Oblivion as part of a thoughtful and intriguing series put together by programmer Martin Rubin called “New Narrative Order.” It puts a wicked spin on its many predecessors by being presented mainly in the form of outtakes from a fictional TV special, Bugs Bunny’s 51st 1/2 Anniversary Spectacular—including a tap-dance routine with Bugs, Elmer Fudd, and Daffy Duck and a layered cake sprouting skyrockets as well as Yosemite Sam.
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One of the creepy aspects of the isolationism of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking is that filmmakers tend to reject the possibility of saying anything meaningful or fresh about American life at the outset. That leaves them with the options of trying to say something meaningful about other movies or trying simply to reproduce them. The latter is the modest and mainly successful task of The Wedding Planner, a comedy about a wedding planner (Lopez) falling for somebody (McConaughey) she meets quite by chance (he saves her life in a street accident) who turns out to be the designated groom in a wedding she’s planning. Every bit of this story can be traced back to big-studio B musicals half a century ago with actresses such as Janet Leigh, Gloria De Haven, and Jane Powell and actors such as Tony Martin, Bob Fosse, and Bobby Van; the guy who doesn’t get the girl is occasionally a Latino lounge lizard (played by someone like Fernando Lamas or Ricardo Montalban), and here he’s a cheerful working-class Italian with a thick accent (Justin Chambers). I find this movie charming because of my nostalgia for a brand of romantic treacle with highly photogenic leads that we don’t get much of nowadays—and because it acknowledges where it’s coming from, signaled by two trips to a San Francisco park with improbable outdoor screenings of the obscure vintage musicals Two Tickets to Broadway (1951, with Leigh, Martin, and De Haven) and Flirtation Walk (1934, with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler). I can’t recommend it to anyone who wants a romantic comedy with more contemporary qualities, but I can recommend it if you’re on the prowl for old-fashioned glamour, schmaltz, and sexy infatuations.
Shadow of the Vampire neither reproduces nor has anything meaningful to say about Nosferatu. I suspect that what I dislike most about its cannibalizing is how contemporary in spirit it is. This exercise in glibness is predicated on the notion that Max Schreck was a real vampire, hired by Murnau (John Malkovich) in exchange for the blood of the leading lady (Catherine McCormack) in order to bring more “reality” (as opposed to artistry) to his film. In other words, it’s a movie that trashes the history, personality, taste, craft, and artistry (and, incidentally, even the sexuality) of Murnau—one of the greatest silent directors. He’s so little known today that I guess it’s easy to fabricate almost anything about him and still get some people to swallow it. Shadow of the Vampire is equally dismissive of the artistry and integrity of Murnau’s cast and crew—especially Schreck, cinematographer Fritz-Arno Wagner, and adapter-screenwriter Henrik Galeen—in its attempt to validate its cannibalizing as a more up-to-date kind of artistry. This entails such absurdities as reproducing shots from Nosferatu not as they looked in 1922 but as they look in moldy prints today—and in an anachronistic wide-screen format. Why? Because Shadow of the Vampire is in a wide-screen format.
The detective isn’t the culprit in either film, yet in both cases the moral exploration of the character—as witness and as the viewer’s surrogate—teases us with this possibility. In The Pledge, the girl’s body is found during homicide detective Jerry Black’s last day at work, during a surprise party thrown to celebrate his retirement. He insists on following the case and when he discovers that none of his colleagues have dared to tell the parents their daughter’s been murdered, he volunteers, then winds up pledging to find the murderer, swearing “by my soul’s salvation.”
Directed by Sean Penn
Written by Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski
With Jack Nicholson, Patricia Clarkson, Benicio Del Toro, Dale Dickey, Aaron Eckhart, Helen Mirren, Tom Noonan, Robin Wright Penn, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, and Sam Shepard.
Blooper Bunny ★★★
Directed by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon
Written by Ronnie Scheib, Ford, and Lennon
With Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and Yosemite Sam.
The Wedding Planner ★★
Directed by Adam Shankman
Written by Pamela Falk and Michael Ellis
With Jennifer Lopez, Matthew McConaughey, Bridgette Wilson- Sampras, Justin Chambers, and Judy Greer.
Shadow of the Vampire ★
Directed by E. Elias Merhige
Written by Steven Katz
With Willem Dafoe, John Malkovich, Catherine McCormack, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, and Udo Kier.
