Patrick Stoner welcomes your questions about movies and the people who make them. Send your questions to pstoner@whyy.org. Here's the current question and answer:
Q: How many light summer films can you recommend WITHOUT reservation?
A: One!
Granted, I haven't seen all of the potential mass-market, escapist summer fare (for example, AIR FORCE ONE looks like it might have potential), but I HAVE seen most of the lighter movies now, and there's only one that I liked unreservedly -- MEN IN BLACK.
It won't save the universe, but it's a wonderful little movie ABOUT saving the universe. It's directed by Barry Sonnenfeld (who also gave eccentric life to GET SHORTY and THE ADDAMS FAMILY). You know how you're always saying, "Boy, it was such a good IDEA, but they just didn't pull it off, AND it had no ending (or, too many endings)"? Well, you won't say that here. Sonnenfeld took a good idea, executed it briskly and brilliantly, and had a clever ending all planned from the outset.
What's the concept? I assume most of you know this, but just for the record, here's the describing sentence in the associated book: "Since the 1950s, rumors have persisted of an ultra-secret government agency whose mission is to police extraterrestrials living on Earth -- a kind of intergalactic immigration service." These agents are the Men in Black. Why? Because when the first contact with ET's supposedly got noticed in the '50s, people were warned by "three men in black not 'to report this.' " From the legends that have grown in the past half century, the tradition of the Men in Black has grown.
Fine. This is all good fun -- or deadly serious. Take your choice. I'm a film critic, so I'll leave the cosmic musings to those who specialize in that area. What matters to me is that Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald optioned the rights to a comic book series called THE MEN IN BLACK (created by Lowell Cunningham) and decided to produce this film.
Ed Soloman, whose writing credits included BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, LEAVING NORMAL, and some of TV's IT'S GARRY SHANDLING'S SHOW, was brought in to write the screenplay. Four years later, with final help from director Sonnenfeld, there was a script -- not the usual meandering mess, but a real script.
It's Sonnenfeld who makes the film. Of course, the crucial player in any film is the director, whose vision animates it. For MEN IN BLACK, it would have been SO easy to mess it up -- to turn it into a broad spoof, to try to match INDEPENDENCE DAY in special effects and fireworks, to recreate ALIENS on Earth.
What makes this work is the TONE -- that indescribable sense of sophisicated fun that is so sure of itself that it doesn't have to wink at the audience to show you it knows it's being funny. Instead, everybody except Will Smith plays it absolutely straight -- Tommy Lee Jones is perfect as the senior partner. Since Smith is "us," the audience, in this view, he's allowed to react the way we would -- with wide-eyed disbelief, shock, and irony. Sonnenfeld then fills the frame with interesting visuals and keeps the pace moving at a rate that gives a sense of urgency in spite of the comedy. Only a director with an absolutely sure sense of the film's continuing tone could have pulled it off. Sonnenfeld does.
So, check it out yourself.
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