13 Assassins [Jûsan-nin no shikaku] (2010)

Depending on your point of view, 13 Assassins is either very familiar or very unusual.  For those with even a casual knowledge of Japanese cinema, the film is immediately recognizable as a remake of the better than average The Thirteen Assassins, a film that was a lesser riff on Seven Samurai.  As a remake of a film that was heavily inspired by a classic in the genre, 13 Assassins does little to deviate from the traditional story.  If you have no knowledge of Japanese films, 13 Assassins will feel like something altogether new and original–a period piece that doesn’t skimp on action, suspense, or blood and guts.  No matter which camp you come from, the film succeeds as a wholly entertaining action film.

Set in 1844 Japan, the film takes place after a long period of peace has been instituted by the previous shogun and continued by his son, the current shogun.  This has led to little need for the samurai warriors who still populate the countryside.  But peace is threatened by the shogun’s half-brother, Naritsugu (Gorô Inagaki).

A sadist of the most brutal variety, Naritsugu takes pleasure in raping, torturing, and murdering anyone he chooses, even if they are nobility.  This causes a scandal that threatens the shogun’s power, but he refuses to do anything to punish Naritsugu.  This leaves Sir Doi (Mikijiro Hira), the shogun’s head of justice in a difficult position.  Sir Doi knows that Naritsugu deserves to be punished, but he cannot go against the will of the shogun.  But when news spreads that the shogun plans to appoint Naritsugu to a political post–where he can do harm on a national scale, Sir Doi takes drastic measures to make sure this doesn’t happen by bringing in Shinzaemon (Kôji Yakusho), a veteran samurai who has all but retired to a quiet life of fishing in his autumn years.

Sir Doi’s request is simple: Shinzaemon is to assemble a group of samurai and assassinate Naritsugu as he travels across the country to return to his brother and take up his new post.  Shinzaemon recognizes he is being handed a suicide mission, but as a samurai long without a master, he is thrilled at the prospect of finding an honorable death while protecting the citizens from the reign of terror that is sure to befall them with Naritsugu’s increased political power.

13 Assassins feels very much like two different movies.  The first movie is a period piece  about the final years of the samurai in everyday Japanese life.  The second movie is a straightforward action flick that encompasses a jaw-dropping forty-five minute battle scene that is both exciting and vicious, stylized and brutal.  This sudden shifting of gears is slightly jarring and gives the film a schizophrenic nature, but both halves are so well-done that it’s a flaw easily overcome.

Director Takashi Miike is one of the true wildcards of world cinema.  Incredibly prolific–IMDB credits him with directing 84 films since 1991, counting theatrical, DTV releases, and television projects–and traveling anywhere his interests take him, he often brings his own nutty sensibility to routine genre films.  This has led to a number of misfires, but when he hits (Audition, Visitor Q, Ichi the Killer), the results are like nothing seen before.

That’s why it’s a surprise to find 13 Assassins to be such a traditional film.  Despite the slightly jarring nature of the narrative structure, this feels like a film that would easily have fit into the Japanese film movement of the ‘50s.

But traditional does not mean that Miike fails to add his personality to the proceedings.  Especially in the early scenes that showcase Naritsugu’s penchant for cruelty and violence, Miike is able to push the envelope when it comes to the portrayal of sadistic violence (the reveal of one of Naritsugu’s pitiable victims is one of the most horrifying images I’ve seen in a film this year).  And while the inevitable comparisons will be made to the House of Blue Leaves sequence from Kill Bill when talking about the climactic battle, Miike seems to be taking more inspiration from Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.  But even when approaching the violence of the battle in such an ugly, bloody manner, he still finds ways to include odd, stylistic choices that reminded me of the hilariously over-the-top climactic battle in Dead or Alive, his twisted take on a cops and gangsters film.  That these absurdist touches melded so seamlessly with the gritty realism present in the rest of the battle is a credit to Miike as a director.

Interestingly, where the film doesn’t feel traditional is the fact that it refuses to view the samurai code through the rose-colored glasses that so many of these films do.  This is shown through the competing viewpoints of Shinzaemon and Hanbei (Masachika Ichimura), the samurai bound by honor to protect Naritsugu.

Old rivals, Shinzaemon and Hanbei view duty and honor in two different ways.  Hanbei is personally disgusted by Naritsugu’s actions and fears what his increased political power could lead to.  But he believes that it is not his place to worry about such things–the only thing a samurai should concern himself with is the safety of his master, even if that means laying down his life for him.  Shinzaemon recognizes the end of the samurai way of life is imminent.  With no master to protect, he takes it upon himself to make the people of Japan his master, choosing to adapt the samurai code to changing times and put himself on the side of righteousness, even if it means destroying a fundamentally decent man like Hanbei to achieve his goal.  It’s an interesting and unexpected look at the way morality and ethics change as a culture evolves.

Along with Super, 13 Assassins is the most satisfying movie I’ve seen this year.  Purely as an action film, the climactic battle sequence puts most bloated studio blockbusters to shame.  Add in a healthy dose of philosophical soul-searching and it becomes that rarest of film species: an action movie with a brain.

It’s currently in limited release in select cities and available on demand.

Criminally Ignored: The Ice Harvest (2005)

When most critics and film nerds speak enthusiastically about the films Harold Ramis has written or directed, they usually wax nostalgic for comedies like Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, Stripes, Animal House, or Groundhog Day.  There’s good reason to celebrate those films, they are all legitimately funny and hold up today when many comedies from the late ‘70s through the early ‘90s feel dated and cheesy.  But it’s a sad fact that his career took a downturn in the late ‘90s with such dreck as Analyze This, Bedazzled, and the even more abominable sequel, Analyze That.  When his comeback film rolled around in the form of The Ice Harvest, Ramis had been all but written off as past his prime and the film bombed.  Even on DVD, which would seem the ideal place for such a cynical, bleakly funny movie to find an audience, it has failed to make much of an impression.

Charlie (John Cusack) and Vic (Billy Bob Thornton) are miserable bastards.  Charlie is a shady lawyer in Wichita, Kansas who works for Bill Guerrard (Randy Quaid), a mobster based out of Kansas City.  Divorced from his cold wife, hated by his son, and depressed by his empty existence, Charlie wastes away his days by drinking steadily at any one of the several strip clubs that operate as fronts for Bill.  Vic also works for Bill, managing one of the strip clubs, various massage parlors, and pornography shops.  He resents his wife who has slowly eaten herself into obesity, and has a deep anger at being stuck in Wichita.

As the film opens, it’s Christmas Eve and Charlie and Vic have quietly embezzled two million dollars of Bill’s money.  All they have to do is get through the night as though nothing has happened, drive to the airport in Kansas City, and fly away from all their miseries forever.  But Charlie quickly grows paranoid as Roy (Mike Starr), an enforcer for Bill, arrives in town and begins asking questions about where Charlie and Vic are located.  To make matters worse, they can’t leave town until the morning because of an ice storm that has made it dangerous to drive.

To say anymore about the plot would ruin much of the fun of watching the film.

Interestingly, going just off this plot setup, the viewer could be forgiven for thinking it could only go in two directions:

1. A hard-boiled film noir about trying to get away with the perfect crime when everything is stacked against you.
2. A whacky, slapstick comedy that finds Charlie and Vic trying to screw each other out of the money while avoiding Roy and the possibility of violent death at his hands.

Ramis, working from a script by veteran writer/director Robert Benton and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Richard Russo, throws a curveball by revealing the film is actually a grim character study of Charlie.  Sure it has elements of film noir in the stylized lighting and a femme fatale in the person of Renata (Connie Nielsen), the owner of yet another strip club, whom Charlie has convinced himself he’s in love with.  And the film is also very funny in places with witty, caustic dialogue and vividly drawn and performed supporting characters.  But when all is said and done, Ramis is merely presenting us with the sad tale of a man who thought he could sink no further only to discover there was still a long way to go before hitting rock bottom.

In many ways, the film feels almost experimental.  After the first fifteen minutes that establishes who Charlie, Vic, and Renata are and that Roy is bad news, Ramis shifts gears and spends the next twenty minutes following Charlie as he is dragged into the drinking binge of his friend, Pete (Oliver Platt).  It seems that Pete is married to Charlie’s ex-wife, but the two of them are still friends, bonded over their mutual hatred of the woman both of them have married.  The scenes between Charlie and Pete are often hilarious, but they also serve to show the fear that Charlie felt of being swallowed up in the family life, something he never believed he could handle.  Seeing how Pete has gone downhill since he essentially took Charlie’s place in the family, only to wind up a miserable drunk, Charlie feels that his decision to abandon his family and not to feel guilt was a sound one.  As he puts it at one point: “It is futile to regret.”

But this cavalier attitude is tested time and again as the film rolls along, forcing Charlie to examine the deadly consequences his initial decision to steal from Bill has led to.  As the cowardly and amoral Charlie finds the morality and backbone that he thought he had lost forever, he finds himself acknowledging that his belief system is flawed.  But as Ramis makes abundantly clear, this realization is not the same thing as redemption.

That’s a hell of an arc for an actor to play, and Cusack nails it.  He tweaks his slightly smarmy, nice guy routine to make Charlie the ultimate sad sack.  He may talk a good game about the futility of regret, but as he encounters the ghosts of his past and the escalating horrors of his present, the overwhelming weight of a lifetime of bad choices plays across his face in beautiful, subtle moments.  From the pity he shows Pete to the fear he feels in the presence of the increasingly unstable Vic, Cusack is able to convey everything his character is thinking with his expressive face.  You could practically watch the movie on mute and still understand what is happening.

But I do not recommend muting this movie.  You would miss some of the sharpest dialogue this side of Aaron Sorkin’s script for The Social Network.  Benton and Russo (working from the novel by Scott Phillips) provide line after brilliant line for not only Cusack, but also Thornton, Platt, and Quaid.  Ranging from Vic’s caustic one-liners to Pete’s sadly sincere expressions of regret about his marriage, there’s never a false note in the dialogue.

While it’s Cusack’s show, every member of the cast must have realized how good the script is because they all bring their A-game.  Thornton taps into his blunt, caustic Bad Santa performance to make Vic simultaneously hilarious and frightening.  The sadistic glee he shows at turning the tables on Roy is something to behold.  Platt hams it up nicely as the oft-drunk Pete, but he understands that people are often at their most honest when under the influence.  He also perfectly captures Pete’s swings between jovial celebration and self-pity.  Quaid proves a surprisingly scary villain.  While his dialogue is quite funny, he plays Bill’s anger and murderous intentions for real, lending a true element of danger to the film just when it needs it.  Even less important supporting characters like Sidney (Ned Bellamy), a bartender with anger-control issues, is given a sense of actual humanity through the excellent writing and Bellamy’s demented performance.

I know that some people may complain that we never see how Charlie and Vic manage to steal the money or how certain plot twists transpire.  The simple answer to the first charge is that it doesn’t matter.  The film isn’t about a heist, it’s about the sober realization that getting away with a crime is far more difficult than committing the actual crime.  As far as not learning about how some of the plot twists happen–I found that refreshing.  The film follows Charlie as he often stumbles into the aftermath of violence and other absurdities.  The audience only knows what Charlie knows and since he’s in survival mode, I found it believable that he wouldn’t ask a lot of questions about how a character wound up stuffed in a trunk.  If anything, I find that Charlie’s acceptance of such bizarre facts contributes to the suspense and very dark humor.

Backed by great cinematography from Alar Kivilo and an atmospheric score by David Kitay, Ramis walks a tonally difficult tightrope to offer up something original.  The Ice Harvest is unlike any other film he has taken on.  Maybe the expectations for a laugh-out loud comedy are why it bombed at the box office, but that’s no reason to consider the film a failure.  Quite the opposite, this is a great film that deserves to be seen.

NOTE: The following trailer is the only one I could find.  It completely misses the tone of the film and is mostly made up of material that wound up on the cutting room floor.  I feel this massively miscalculated bit of marketing contributed to the film’s anemic showing at the box office.

The Cohen Case Files: Guilty as Sin (1993)

Written by Larry Cohen

Considering Larry Cohen’s ability to coax strong performances out of his casts at the same time that he embraced the absurdity of his often ridiculous, lurid plots, it’s not a surprise that his scripts, when directed by others, would result in the occasional bad movie.  That Sidney Lumet, one of the greatest American filmmakers of the twentieth century would be interested in Guilty as Sin, one of Cohen’s goofy, twisty thriller scripts is surprising.  That he was unable to get a handle on the tone and directed a train wreck of a film, sadly, is not surprising.

Jennifer Haines (Rebecca De Mornay) is a sought after defense attorney with a powerful Chicago law firm.  When the film opens, she is methodically ripping apart the prosecution’s extortion case against her mob defendant.  Despite the fact that she knows she’s representing a man who is guilty of any number of crimes, she never bats an eye as she helps set him free.  Watching the trial with amusement is David Greenhill (Don Johnson).

Five minutes after David introduces himself to Jennifer (by casually strolling into her office, unnannounced), it becomes obvious that he is a sociopath.  It seems that David is a suspect in the death of his wife and he wants Jennifer to represent him.  David claims that his wife committed suicide, but made it to look as though he threw her out the window of their eighteenth floor condo.  To make matters worse, David is a relentless ladies man, freely admitting to marrying his wife for her money and cheating on her at every opportunity.  Against her better judgment, Jennifer takes him on as a client.

But it doesn’t take long for her to regret her decision.  David makes numerous comments on her beauty, pays a threatening visit to her boyfriend, Phil (a woefully miscast Stephen Lang sporting a cheesy mustache and perm), and tries his best to make it appear to Jennifer’s friends and bosses that they’re having an affair.  By the time Jennifer finally comes to the obvious conclusion that David did indeed murder his wife, the Judge (Dana Ivey) presiding over his trial bars her from dropping him as a client.

Legally bound to defend David to the best of her abilities and not divulge his many incriminating statements to the prosecution, Jennifer sets into motion a cat-and-mouse game that will allow her to rid the world of David without being disbarred.  To do so, she employs a crusty old private investigator named Moe (Jack Warden) to dig into David’s past.  When he finds evidence of other possible murders, Jennifer finally begins to fear for her life (long past the point when any other rational person would have) and takes drastic measures that aren’t strictly legal.

With Guilty as Sin, Lumet and Cohen are working both in and out of their comfort zones.    Having spent half of his career directing police procedurals and courtroom dramas, the plot obviously appealed to Lumet’s tastes.  With a trashy murder mystery that is twist after twist (some of them effective, but most of them insane) and a leading man who is smarmy and infinitely more interesting than any other character in the film, Cohen’s fingerprints are evident on the finished product.  But why did they feel the need to set the film in Chicago?  Both men have benefitted greatly in the past from mining the atmosphere of New York City streets that they know so well.  Not only does Lumet fail to do anything to capture the flavor of Chicago (most of the film is set indoors–these scenes were shot in Toronto), but Cohen’s script mangles the way Chicagoan’s talk (forcing characters to refer to the Trib as “The Chicago Trib” and the Bears as “The Chicago Bears”, really annoyed me–these people are supposed to be natives of the city), while name dropping obvious Chicago landmarks (The Water Tower, University of Chicago) to prove that a few seconds of research went into choosing the city.  There’s nothing about this film that made it mandatory to set it in Chicago.  If Lumet and Cohen had stuck with New York, it probably would have still been a bad film, but at least it would have felt a little more authentic.

Beyond my complaints about failing to fully utilize my favorite American city, Guilty as Sin is a complete mess.

I think I’ve made it abundantly clear that the script has serious absurdity problems, so let’s start with the performances.  Normally, I don’t like to heap criticism on an actor.  It’s a difficult job to let down your guard and allow a camera to capture your every move, look, and gesture for posterity.  It actually does take a measure of courage to act, so I usually look the other way when it comes to a bad performance.  But De Mornay’s work in the film is nothing short of stupefying.  I never once understood most of Jennifer’s actions.  Some of this blame belongs to Lumet and Cohen, but a lot of it goes to De Mornay.  Trapped in a state of wide-eyed incredulity, she takes Jennifer from being a smart, take-charge woman to an idiotic slasher movie bimbo in record time.  At every turn, she seems shocked that David could be as evil as he is–never mind that he practically seems eager to confess the nature of his murderous deeds from the second he meets her.  As each telegraphed twist and shock is revealed, De Mornay meets it with such over-the-top, melodramatic stares and gasps that it’s hard to root for her character against David.  It’s not that Johnson gives a particularly good performance, but he at least seems to understand the absurdity of the story and has some fun chewing the scenery.  In the meantime, normally reliable character actors like Lang, Warden, Ivey, and Luis Guzmán phone in dreary, lifeless performances that fail to add any texture to the flat atmosphere.

But as disappointing as the cast and Cohen’s script are, there is no getting around the fact that Lumet never seemed to understand what kind of film he was making.  While the script is one gratuitous sex scene away from being a particularly ridiculous entry into the early ‘90s erotic thriller canon, Lumet does his damnedest to turn it into one of his tasteful courtroom thrillers.  This leads to scene after interminable scene of witnesses and experts talking about the details of the murder.  If the characters providing the testimonies were more interesting, or if they had more entertaining dialogue, perhaps I wouldn’t have needed to fight so hard to stay awake.  Unfortunately, there’s no intrigue or suspense to these scenes.  There’s never a sense that what these characters have to say is important because it’s obvious almost at once that David is guilty.  The suspense should come from determining how he plans to go after Jennifer and how she plans to turn the tables on him.  Granted, this is pulpy material, but it’s far more interesting than the story Lumet seems to be interested in.

I understand that Lumet was probably intrigued by the idea of exploring what happens when a lawyer’s ethics and morality are in direct conflict.  That is an interesting theme that’s worth exploring.  But he tries to hang the “is he or isn’t he a killer” plot on that theme instead of using the cat-and-mouse game between Jennifer and David.  Simply put, he chose the wrong angle to focus on and the entire film collapsed because of that choice.  It honestly pains me to be so blunt in my criticism of Lumet so soon after his death, but I’ve sung his praises so many times in the past, it would be hypocritical of me to turn a blind eye to his mistakes on this film.

But Cohen doesn’t get a free pass, either.

Even if Cohen had directed this film, I doubt it would have worked.  The main reason is that the cat-and-mouse game that I feel should have been the focus of the film is poorly developed.  Only once does Jennifer seem to gain the upper hand on David, but he quickly turns the tables on her and remains several steps ahead of her for the rest of the film.  This leads to a redundancy in the film as scene after scene in the second and third act feels like a slight variation on a scene that happened just five minutes previous.  This also leads to a selling out of Jennifer’s character.  She’s supposed to be as smart as they come, but she’s quickly reduced to a quivering little girl incapable of making a decision.  This impression is furthered by De Mornay’s disastrous performance.

There is also something slightly sexist about the way Jennifer is presented.  There is the ever-present idea that a woman can’t be successful in her career and have a happy personal life.  But there is also the subtext that no matter how strong or powerful the woman, they can be manipulated by a handsome man with a great smile.  Part of the reason that Jennifer takes David on as a client is that she is attracted to him.  This is never stated, but it’s strongly implied.  This idea that a high-powered attorney would risk her life and career because a murder suspect is handsome never works and only cheapens the entire film.

This is the first time that I bothered to watch Guilty as Sin and it’s the first truly negative entry in the Cohen Case Files that I’ve written.  Coincidence?  I doubt it.  I just hope my instincts on the other Cohen films that I’ve avoided are wrong, or this blog could quickly turn ugly.

I couldn’t find a trailer to embed, but you can check out a thirty second ad for the VHS release of the film on its IMDB page.

Criminally Ignored: The TV Set (2007)

I suppose it’s almost a miracle that writer/producer/director Jake Kasdan is still allowed to make movies.  From Zero Effect to Freaks and Geeks to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Kasdan has brought his apparent jinx to several films and TV series over the past fifteen years.  Perhaps he’s still allowed to work because the failure of these projects to find an audience at the time they were presented to the public is not his fault.  He’s done great work on everything he’s touched, leading those projects to become cult favorites after audiences caught up to them.

But being told your work is best viewed after several years has elapsed has to be the ultimate backhanded compliment.  Sure, it probably feels nice to eventually be vindicated, but in the “What have you done for me lately?” world of film and television production, it can only really lead to frustration.  This frustration surely fed into The TV Set, Kasdan’s bitter satire about the network television development process.  It’s readily apparent that the film is a personal project for Kasdan (it’s based on his experience working on Freaks and Geeks and attempting to turn Zero Effect into a television series), but it’s also a universal look into the compromise between art and commerce and how that compromise can quickly turn into bullying when commerce holds all the power.  The fact that it has failed to generate the kind of fervent cult following that Zero Effect and Freaks and Geeks has amassed could have something to do with the cynicism on display, but that’s no excuse for the cold shoulder it received upon its release or its inability to find an audience on DVD.

Mike Klein (David Duchovny) is a television lifer.  He has put in his time as a staff writer on various TV shows and has finally worked himself into the position to create his own show.  Working from the tragedy of his brother’s suicide, Mike writes a pilot script that everyone loves.  From Lenny (Sigourney Weaver), the president of the network, to Richard (Ioan Gruffudd), the head of programming, everyone agrees that Mike’s script is the best one of that pilot season.  Now they just have to beat all the originality and creativity out of it.

The slow slide into mediocrity begins when Mike’s first choice to play the lead is overruled by Lenny in favor of Zach (Fran Kranz), a hack actor whose range stretches from over-the-top to way-over-the-top.  Mike accepts this compromise after Lenny not-so-subtly threatens to kill the pilot if he doesn’t cast Zach.  Resigning himself to working with a less talented actor, Mike throws himself into production.

But between Zach’s inability to maintain a consistent tone, a director (Willie Garson) who can’t stay on schedule, a surly director of photography (M.C. Gainey), a leading lady (Lindsay Sloane) who simultaneously flirts with and rejects a confused Zach, and Lenny applying constant pressure to drop the suicide of the main character’s brother–the inciting incident of the entire show, Mike starts to crack under the pressure.  Instead of standing up to Lenny and her idiotic demands, he caves time and again, watering down and homogenizing his script until it’s barely a ghost of what he started with.

If this all sounds like entertainment industry navel-gazing and sour grapes, I suppose it is.  But it’s intriguing, entertaining navel-gazing and sour grapes, and that’s what matters.

Kasdan doesn’t forget that the average audience member doesn’t understand the ins and outs of television pilot season.  The film opens with some cleverly animated graphics that quickly explains how pilot scripts are commissioned, how many are shot, and just how few ever actually make it on the air.  He then provides the audience with a relatable protagonist in the person of Mike.

I’ve never seen such a realistic portrayal of a writer on film.  By turns cynical, depressed, hopeful, enthusiastic, and nervous, Mike is like several writers I know personally.  He’s not the most socially aware guy in the world, but neither is he an antisocial dweeb, wallowing in frustration.  While there are self-pitying aspects to his personality, he never comes across as an ungrateful wimp.  He knows he has chosen this life and that he has a job to do to support his family.  He’s also well aware that his fight to maintain at least a small part of his original vision is bound to make him sound like a self-important jerk.  Duchovny captures all these competing personality traits and gives Mike a self-effacing sense of humor and sadness that centers the film, allowing Kasdan to skewer the absurdity of network television executives in the form of Lenny and her cavalcade of yes-men.

If the story had the possibility to contain a weak spot, it was in the potentially thin character of Lenny.  But Weaver is so straight-faced and sincere in her passive-aggressiveness that she sells even the most outrageous of lines.  I don’t want to spoil too many of Lenny’s ridiculous thoughts, but I’ll share just a few to give you a taste:

“Everyone always wonders, can Xena be funny?  And I’m the person who’s saying: Fuck, yes!  Let’s do it!  I’ve always believed that Lucy Lawless has a great half-hour comedy in her!”

“It’s true, they’re both attractive, but Laurel is also really cute and I think that’s a good thing.  She doesn’t let her cuteness get in the way of her hotness and that’s really special to me.  Also, I think that Jesse has fake breasts and I believe that over the life of a series, the audience can feel that.”

“It’s a sexier version of the same thing, only they have Carmen Electra and a better concept.”

Kasdan’s contempt for Lenny and her ilk is palpable and he tries to cut this acidity by having Richard attempt to act as her conscience.  Brought in from a successful tenure as the head of programming at BBC, Richard is supposed to be the voice of the artist within Lenny’s inner circle.  But he quickly realizes that Lenny is a nearly unstoppable force and his instinct to always protect the writer could quickly lose him his job.  It’s an interesting back-and-forth to watch Mike and Richard both betray their ideals and see the different effect it has on each man.

Beyond the horrors of production and dealing with obtrusive network notes, Kasdan also gives the viewer a glimpse into the everyday frustrations of working in the television industry.  From Alice (Judy Greer), Mike’s chipper, double-talking manager to the toll it takes on everyone’s family life to the uselessness of audience testing, the film aims at many targets and scores a bullseye with all of them.

The TV Set received a barely there release in 2007.  While it was hardly the stuff that blockbusters are made of, it deserved a better fate than it ultimately received.  It’s failure to find an audience on DVD confounds me.  While it is very specific in its targeting of the networks and their fear of anything that shows any originality, it remains a very funny movie with just enough broad jokes (the network’s biggest hit is a reality show called Slut Wars) to appeal to the mainstream while remaining a cautionary tale to aspiring Hollywood scribes to be careful what they wish for.  It is an incredibly bitter film, but like most of Kasdan’s work, it’s well worth seeking out.