Other than pointing out that both films had characters involved in the movie industry.
Amanda: Maybe we could examine how Skyline would have played out differently in the days of the studio system, or...uh...what if Norma Desmond destroyed LA and harvested brains?
me: HEE HEE HEE!
Poor Joe Gillis...could have escaped his fate if he'd only thought to hide behind some cupboards.
Yes, it's harder than it was in the first round, where our crap movie actually had points of interest and competent performers (though I am still puzzled by what Adrien Brody was doing with that voice) and the classic movie we watched wasn't such a classic. An understandable classic, most definitely, but still... as Amanda pointed out right as we began, " Let's watch this movie that we have heretofore experienced only as familiar pop culture reference points!"
There were stretches of time during our Gchat where we sat in relative Gsilence during Sunset Boulevard (and thank you, Nathan Lane, for saying it Sunset Booooolevard in the movie version of Jeffrey--now I want to do that every single time). I don't know what Amanda was thinking, but I spent several stretches of the movie feeling a sort of dread I haven't felt since No Country for Old Men. During their New Year's Eve kiss, where Joe Gillis finally sinks full-on into rent-boy-ishness, Norma doesn't so much embrace him as entwine him like she is a poisonous plant that subsists on life force. [I was thinking, "This is a really good movie. No wonder people have been talking about what a good movie this is for fifty years. Probably going to be hard to find something new to say about how good this movie is." --Amanda]
Some folks talk about the relative unlikeability of the characters on Mad Men, how they are sad and pathetic and unhappy and empty. To them, I say: watch Sunset Boulevard and measure Joe Gillis and Norma Desmond on that same scale. I bet you feel a lot more generous towards Roger Sterling.
The one thing Sunset Boooooolevard and Skyline had in common is that both set their story in the world of Hollywood and filmmaking. Of course, Sunset existed in a specific period of time when "talkies" were established but the remnants of silent films were still standing, whether in star (Norma) or director (Cecil B DeMille, who cameos as himself) form, and that history, along with Amanda's observation that "[Nowadays] Celebrities don't fade into obscurity so much as they fade into ironic t-shirt based nostalgia" makes the storytelling very specific, but relatable, not necessarily through yards of exposition, but via the characters and how they behave towards each other and talk about "the business."
In Skyline, Donald Faison's character is a...producer? Director? Hard to tell, because he yells movie words into a phone in a manner that suggests that either the screenwriter hesitates to let us into the fantastic world of moviemaking, or the screenwriter is some 10-year-old child that has been thrust into the role of screenwriter and is taking a childish guess at what moviemaking entails ("A man tells other people what to do real loud and then movies happen!"). In place of a sense of specificity, we're given...what's the mathematical equivalent of less-than-cliche? Is there a symbol in Microsoft Word for that. I never thought I'd see the day when Entourage feels like a more accurate representation of Hollywood than...something. Including a hand-drawn picture with stick figures that I made illustrating a plotline of Entourage.
Sunset is a classic from 1950; Skyline was made in 2010, yet retains many of the qualities of some of the terrible sci-fi films from the 1950s that were featured on MST3K. Amanda actually name-checked The Unearthly, and I think that's apt, as both had the same leaden lack of urgency in their pacing, the same one-set-fits-all feel, the same Godot-like rehashing of one or two arguments. The only thing Skyline had over The Unearthly was millions and millions of dollars of special effects that left us with this amazing feat of migs and megs of memories:
At one point, Amanda said, "Maybe it's not aliens. Maybe the city of Los Angeles has gained sentience, and is rising up to cleanse itself of douchebags." And if the movie had shown an ounce of that style of sense of humor and self-awareness, the fact that their menacing aliens were Itty Bitty Book Lights or Skynet Wacky Wallwalkers probably wouldn't have mattered so much.
And let us speak a minute about Eric Balfour. Who gave that guy a leading role? I mean, honestly...
In the end, Sunset Boulevard ends with Joe Gillis cruelly demolishing his chances of lasting romance with Betty Schaefer, then attempting to flee Norma's prison to (supposedly) return to Ohio to work at a small-town paper. The movie starts to ends where it began: Joe is floating dead in Norma's pool. But since Norma is a star, the movie truly ends as she closes in on her imagined closeup, the picture blurring until she disappears as well. A tragic ending, flawlessly presented with only a few now-oft-quoted words and intelligent use of filmmaking technique.
Skyline ends...Well, it just sort of ends. As Amanda so adeptly put it, "Whatshisname Dumbtattoo is finally ready to be a responsible family man, and then gets his brain put into an alien cyborg body." That's...pretty much it. No one ever gets to the boat that is referenced as salvation.
me: What happened to the boat plan? Is that shot just because they don't have cars?
Amanda: I guess they were really not committed to that boat plan.
Or...the production could not afford a boat.
I think another option is that the boat was a conveniently created reason for the characters to have any kind of escape plan that didn't look like what they did for most of the film: hide behind cupboards and run around aimlessly like the maldeveloped idiots that they were.
Soon, How Did This Get Made? will have a podcast regarding Skyline, and I imagine they will cover the other details I neglected, like:
- How tremendously unappealing Donald Faison's character was, which is so weird, because Donald Faison is fantastic and funny and charismatic.
- How chintzy the special effects are, especially for the people/company credited with Avatar.
- How tremendously unappealing Eric Balfour is. Period.
- Los Angeles: is this the best they could do? Really?
- Hey, it's That Guy! (that blog doesn't exist anymore, right?) from Oz and Dexter. Boy, he's sure great until his character has his brain removed.
- Death of a Dog: just goes to show what a lazy sack of crap with no emotional depth this movie is/has/was/forever will be.
Amanda's light bulb as we continued to discuss the film and writing a blog entry: Billy Wilder (or maybe it was his partner, Charles Brackett) wrote, in the sardonic, 'I may be dead but I'm still jaded' voice of frustrated artist/struggling hack Joe Gillis as he sat down to read Norma Desmond's undoubtedly loony script for her comeback film, Salome, "Sometimes it's interesting to see just how bad bad writing can be."
