Ensemble Casts and 200 Cigarettes (1999)

“Everybody's having fun out here. They drinking, they fighting, they pissing on the streets. It's New Year's Eve. They loving the ladies.”

When watching a movie, a single performance can take a movie from being middle of the road into being something more.  A good performance can elevate a movie into being better than it otherwise would have.  Looking at the opposite effect, a bad performance can lessen the quality of a movie.  This is especially true of lead performances.  When one character is the primary focus of a story being told, the quality of that character in both the writing and the performance can completely change how a movie is seen by the critics and general audiences.

You might think that making a movie with an ensemble cast could alleviate the trouble of one performance overwhelming the entire product.  Sometimes that is true.  In order to show you how, I am going to have to differentiate between the three different kinds of ensemble casts that exist.  Only one of the three kinds can truly reduce the influence of a performance on the overall quality of a movie.  The other two can still be highly compromised if an extreme (good or bad) performance is present in the film.

1. Separate Stories

I’m going to completely disregard the typical anthology films in which there are separate segments that are completely disconnected from one another.  These movies, such as The Summer of Massacre, are basically a collection of short films.  Each segment plays out like its own movie with a lead and such.  Instead, I want to focus on the mixed up anthologies like New Year’s Eve or Pulp Fiction, in which there are separate stories being told, though they are all connected in ways that will be revealed throughout the movie’s run.

Let’s use New Year’s Eve as an example of what I mean, since it is a movie that I have covered while doing the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  There are multiple stories happening throughout New Year’s Eve.  Hilary Swank is trying to put on the New York celebration, including the ball drop.  She is the star of that specific story.  There is a story in which Zac Efron is trying to help Michelle Pfeiffer have a New Year’s Eve to remember.  Another story involves Josh Duhamel trying to get to a party on New Year’s Eve.  Sarah Jessica Parker plays a mother who is watching her daughter grow into teenage semi-freedom at the turn of the year.  And then there is a love story with Lea Michele and Ashton Kutcher.  Oh, and there’s a childbirth story and a love story between Katherine Heigl and Jon Bon Jovi.  There are a lot of stories that all end up sharing characters and intertwining as they go about their business.

This method of ensemble casting doesn’t work quite as well at reducing the influence of a performance as you might think.  The problem is that there are so many stories with their own leads that one standout performance, whether good or bad, can change that story in a major way.  The charismatic performance that I remember Zac Efron giving in New Year’s Eve (he’s quite a charismatic guy in everything, really) helps to elevate his story above the rest of the fairly safe, middle ground stories.  It makes the rest of the movie feel worse because none of the other stories give off quite the same sort of charm as that one.  His performance made the story work better but the movie feel worse.  One performance still had a great influence upon the rest of the movie.

200 Cigarettes is also in this category of ensemble casts.  There are many stories going on at once throughout the movie that all culminate in a party near the end.  There’s the story of Paul Rudd who is un-celebrating his birthday with Courtney Love.  Then there is Martha Plimpton who is waiting for people to come to her party.  Dave Chapelle is driving a taxi around picking everyone up.  Jay Mohr and Kate Hudson have a love thing going on.  Christina Ricci meets Casey Affleck.  Women are going crazy for bartender Ben Affleck.  It’s a bunch of stories like this on the eve of the new year.  Weird how I’ve now watched two movies set on New Year’s Eve that are ensemble movies heavily influenced by romance.  Though, this one is the anti-romantic movie while New Year’s Eve was pro-romance.  Interesting double feature idea there.

There are no real standout performances in 200 Cigarettes.  That actually makes the movie more palatable.  Without one overpowering or underwhelming performance in the movie, it all blends together to make it perfectly enjoyable.  Sure, the quality of the movie is questionable.  Sure, it’s cynical in the way that only characters of that age would be.  They are past the childhood wonder of their early lives and haven’t yet reached the stable later years of their lives.  The negativity palpitates through the movie.  That might be a put-off for many people.  But it is more watchable than its pro-romance counterpart because all of the acting is on the same level.

2. Lead with Ensemble Support

There are, of course, movies in which the lead actor is supported by many great supporting actors.  The ensemble cast of supporting actors aren’t as big a part of the movie as they could be but they make the most of the time they are on screen.  They are there to help build up the lead and make the movie better for him or her.  They are the foundation to what could be a great movie without taking away from the lead actor.

Of course, this type of ensemble cast means that the lead actor still has a very large influence over the movie.  Take a movie like Death Race, for example.  Jason Statham is the biggest influence over the movie because he is the lead actor.  It feels more like a Statham movie than anything else.  However, there is a great cast there to help Statham give it his all in the movie.  Tyrese Gibson, Ian McShane, Jason Clarke, Robin Shou, and Joan Allen all surround him in order to give the rest of the movie the foundation it needs for him to build upon.  Just as important are the rest of the racers in the titular Death Race and their sidekicks.  It might not be the same level of ensemble as a movie like The Green Mile, where every actor is giving one of his or her best performances, or The Shawshank Redemption which is the same way, but Death Race shows how a supporting cast can build a foundation upon which the star can still influence the feel and quality of the movie.

How much did Jason Statham influence Death Race?  Some of the common traits he has in his movies are a part of it.  He drives fast.  That’s in there.  He has a sidekick, typically female.  Yep, that’s there too.  He fights people in hand to hand combat.  Yep, that’s in Death Race.  His past comes into play in his present situation?  Sure.  He used to be a race car driver and now he is in prison racing cars.  It uses many of the Jason Statham tropes to great effect, showing just how much sway a specific actor can have on a movie just by being the lead, even with an ensemble behind him.

3. Team Movie

This one needed to be discussed separately from the second type of ensemble cast for a reason.  Though a team has a leader, the rest of the team is focused upon throughout the movie.  Though the leader’s story tends to have at least one more layer than the rest of the team, the primary story is about the team as a whole.  They all get their time to shine and they are as important to the movie as anyone else.  This is the one ensemble cast type in which one performance doesn’t have quite as much of an effect upon the whole.

The easy go-to movies when discussing team movies are sports movies, the Ocean’s movies, the Expendables movies, The Avengers, and Gone in 60 Seconds.  At least, those are the movies that first pop into my head.  The one I want to use as an example for this post, however, is The Room.  Why?  It was covered in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, so it would be the perfect movie to write about for another post in this blog series.

The Room is primarily about the love triangle between Johnny, Mark, and Lisa.  Though, I don’t understand the term triangle since there isn’t really a romantic relationship between the Johnny and Mark side.  Whatever.  It’s about that love triangle.  But the movie focuses on more characters than that.  Like any movie I am categorizing in the team movie, there is a cast of characters that are all a part of the main storyline.  They get hints of their own stories, but that’s about it.  There’s Denny, Mike, Michelle, Lisa’s mom, Chris R, Peter, and replacement Peter.  Each of them gets their big moments and have a semi-large part in the main story.  They are like Tommy’s team against what Lisa and Mark are doing.  This team feel helps to reduce how bad Wiseau’s acting is, though that is also helped by the fact that most of the actors in the movie are also bad.  The movie is terrible, but it has that ensemble cast that makes for good placement in this post.

There are, of course, other types of large ensemble casts that you might be able to point out.  Slasher movies usually have larger casts of important characters.  That’s because there need to be people killed throughout the movie.  I think this is a variation on the team movie, much like The Room is.  The characters have a closer to equal importance.  There are one or two who stand out above the rest, but the movie still treats the characters as a team, following one story as it goes along.  The story in the case of a slasher being a group of people being killed.

Having a large cast in a film can help to reduce the effect that a performance that is great or terrible can have on a film.  A great performance could lift the film or just plain feel out of place.  A terrible performance can make a film worse.  Ensemble casts even the playing field so that it is more difficult for the outliers to change how the rest of the movie feels.  There will still be influence coming from the larger roles in the ensemble and the influence is dependent upon the type of ensemble as much as the performance itself.  Though, in the end, isn’t it just nice to see that many people in a movie?  Especially when they’re all actors you like to watch.

And now for some notes:

• 200 Cigarettes featured Christina Ricci who has already been heard in the Sunday “Bad” Movies, voicing a character in The Hero of Color City.
• Also in 200 Cigarettes was Paul Rudd, an actor who was in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
• Then there is Marshall Dancing Elk Lucas, the interestingly named actor who was in both 200 Cigarettes and Money Train.
• I mentioned the movies The Summer of Massacre, New Year’s Eve, Death Race, and The Room in this post.
• What are your feelings about ensemble casts?  Do you think I missed something?  Was I talking out of my ass (I probably was)?  What about 200 Cigarettes?  Discuss anything related to this post in the comments.
• Is there a movie that you think I should watch for the Sunday “Bad” Movies?  What movie are you thinking of?  There is a comments section below where you can tell me what I should watch. You can also use my Twitter timeline to tell me.
• Next week’s movie is going to be Furry Vengeance.  Brendan Fraser and animals.  I’ll see you back here next week for that big ball of possible fun, possible disaster.

The Relevance of Jingle All the Way (1996), But Not Jingle All the Way 2 (2014)

Christmas is the time of year for family, friends, and the thought of giving something nice to the ones who you love.  It is also a time of year for rampant commercialism and angry customers in the retail locations that normally seem semi-friendly.  The amount of money that people spend during the holidays is, on average, unmatched at any other time of year.  Travel, gifts, and food take up a lot of money at this time of year.  Money rules the holiday season, starting with Thanksgiving and Black Friday in the USA and ending with Christmas and Boxing Day in Canada.

One such movie that encapsulates the idea of holiday commercialization is Jingle All the Way.  You might be thinking that this is a throwaway family Christmas film that was part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s attempt to appeal to all ages.  It might seem that way on the surface.  I mean, the movie is about Schwarzenegger trying to get a toy for his son.  But the movie is oh so much more than that.  In today’s day and age, nearly 20 years after its original release, Jingle All the Way manages to be a better representation of the consumer mindset than nearly any other film.

Jingle All the Way takes place on Christmas Eve.  Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Howard Langston, a working father who doesn’t pay quite enough attention to his family.  When he realizes that he hasn’t yet gotten his son Jamie (Jake Lloyd) the Turbo Man doll that he wants, Howard goes on a citywide quest to find the action figure.  He goes to stores, malls, warehouses, and a parade all in an attempt to get the one toy that his son wanted for Christmas.  There was violence and mayhem through the entire day.

Throughout the majority of Jingle All the Way, Howard is battling against a man named Myron Larabee (Sinbad) to get the Turbo Man doll.  The extreme lengths that this battle goes to might seem rather heightened to the normal person.  Myron hits Howard with a mail bag.  They tear out phone cords.  Howard trips Myron with a remote control car.  They even end up in costumes fighting with each other at the parade, for all the viewers to see.  The two fight almost the whole movie, making the obtaining of the toy seem like a life or death situation.  This might seem over-the-top for most shoppers, but a lot of similarities can be seen in the stories we hear about Black Friday every year.

Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving in the United States of America.  It is the day in which people change their focus to the Christmas holidays.  Retailers have made sure to capitalize on the day after Thanksgiving by offering people cheaper products and limited quantities.  The deals manage to entice more people to go to the store and purchase goods.  Stories come out year after year describing the frenzy that goes on during the Black Friday sales.  Injuries and even death have been reported as a result of people fighting over cheaper products.  In 2008, a Walmart worker was trampled when customers flooded into the store for discounted items.  That same year, two people were shot to death at a Toys ‘R Us.  This makes the Jingle All the Way altercations seem perfectly reasonable.

What makes Jingle All the Way so great is that it is cartoonishly accurate to what these stories of Black Friday tell us.  The extremes that the main character goes to in order to get his son the Turbo Man doll don’t seem so extreme when placed side by side with these seemingly real stories.  The movie depicts the insanity through the battle of the two main characters, as well as the general hysteria of the entire Turbo Man situation.  The stores that both characters go to depict situations that the real stories are about.  The first store has the doors open and people running into the store, trampling an employee.  That is the 2008 story depicted in a movie more than a decade before.  There is a scene in a store that involves all of the customers fighting over bouncy balls, much in the same way that people at Walmart fight over the newest in electronics, including the use of pepper spray or mace in order to get the toys.  The movie depicted these things before the stories were widespread through the internet.

Yet, in 2014, when WWE studios decided to produce Jingle All the Way 2, they left out all of the good social commentary that keeps the original as relevant as it is.  Larry (Larry the Cable Guy) is a divorced country guy living in a trailer.  Sometimes he gets to hang out with his daughter Noel (Kennedy Clements).  Other times she’s with her mom Trish (Kirsten Robek) and stepfather Victor (Brian Stepanek).  Larry is jealous of Victor’s wealth and ability to provide the perfect Christmas for Noel, while Victor is jealous that Larry is Noel’s father.  These jealousies lead to a battle over who can make a better Christmas for Noel.  Larry finds out that Noel wants a Harrison Talking Bear for Christmas.  Victor finds out what Larry knows and buys up all of the Harrison Talking Bears before Larry can get one.  And that’s about it.

There is very little social commentary about how everyone is fighting to get one of the toys in this sequel.  Instead, it is more about two fathers trying to one up each other and make a memorable holiday.  Though still semi-entertaining, it lacks the bite that the original had in regards to commercialization and the increasingly violent Black Friday type sales (though that may have been unintentional in the original).  There is only one scene that involves a mass of people trying to get at one toy, and that scene only involves them waiting in line then rushing to the shelf.  There are no altercations along the way.  This is a very safe imagining of these types of situations, and a massively toned down version of the Jingle All the Way franchise.

Perhaps it is an unintentionally relevant and scathing movie, but Jingle All the Way manages to show its viewers the problems of holiday shopping mania in a cartoonish, joking way.  It is more relevant than ever.  The second movie in the franchise shies away from this relevance to instead only focus on the farce.  That doesn’t take away from how much the first movie speaks to our culture.  Jingle All the Way is an unexpected Christmas classic and deserves more respect than it garners.

Now let’s get some notes into this post:

• The director of Jingle All the Way 2 was Alex Zamm.  That same director also directed Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger was featured twice in the Sunday “Bad” Movies before this week.  Those movies were Hercules in New York and Batman & Robin.
• Two actors featured in New Year’s Eve were in Jingle All the Way.  Their names were James Belushi and Yeardley Smith.
• Danny Woodburn appeared in Jingle All the Way.  He was also in 30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
• Jingle All the Way 2 featured Eric Brecker, who was also in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.
• Jeff Gulka, from Stan Helsing, was also in Jingle All the Way 2.
• And last but not least, Jingle All the Way 2’s Brian Stepanek was also in Beverly Hills Chihuahua 2.
• Other WWE movies that I’ve covered that come to mind are The Marine, The Marine 2, The Marine 3: Homefront, and The Marine 4: Moving Target.
• Have you seen Jingle All the Way?  Do you think it is as relevant as I think?  Have you seen the sequel?  Is it weird that Larry the Cable Guy usually plays characters named Larry?  You can talk about these movies or this post in the comments below.
• You can also use the comments section to suggest movies to me.  I’m always looking for more movies to watch as a part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  If not there, find me on Twitter and tell me what movies I should watch.
• Next week, I will be watching 200 Cigarettes.  I have no idea what it is.  All I know is that it takes place on New Year’s Eve.  That’s why I’m going to watch it.  And it isn’t a popular movie.  So, yeah.  See you next week for 200 Cigarettes.