Sam J. Miller, we hardly knew ye
April 26th, 2001

The latest film from Ivan Reitman is Evolution, a sci-fi comedy due out in August. About the film itself I want to say little, since the print I saw was missing the last fifth, and had poor sound dubbing and music in spots, and lacked some of the visuals that would be added later with computers. At a press function in L.A. over the weekend the director and several of the actors discussed the film, and the state of movies in America.

Everybody involved with the film was supremely diplomatic, and it’s always fun to observe in action the fabulous trick, common to anyone who has to deal regularly with the press, of looking at the most idiotic reporter with a perfectly straight face and cheerily answering the most wrong-headed question.

In Evolution Reitman is working with some nice material, including a crack staff of special effects people, and some very funny writing, and, most notably, Orlando Jones, Julianne Moore and David Duchovny, who all turn out to be great comic actors. He’s also saddled with some detrimental necessities.

The first of these is Seann William Scott, the most popular current archetype for the idiot-teen in the idiot-teen-flick. His characters in American Pie and Road Trip and Dude…Where’s My Car have all been pretty defiantly anti-intellectual, focusing all their energy on either sex or something just as vapid (in Evolution he really wants to be a fireman).

Scott is only one symptom of a larger problem, namely, the influx of moronic sicko humor into otherwise smart, interesting situations. Scott himself said that “I think people are getting pretty sick of gross-out humor,” which is bad news for young actors who have made a career out of it. To see how much things have changed in American film since Reitman’s earlier successes, imagine how inconceivable an anal probe scene, or the line “all she needs is a good humping,” would have been in Ghostbusters. “I like really intelligent, smart people in my movies,” Reitman said. “Even though I make movies where, sometimes, silly things happen, I like to tell stories about smart people.” It’s certainly one of the things that makes his films so good, but it also makes the really coarse, low-brow stuff in Evolution seem all the stranger. A very funny running gag has Julianne Moore just falling down a lot, but that sort of thing is not the problem — low slapstick is light years away from low I.Q..

These additions can be well integrated, and well-handled gross-out humor can really be funny, but in this film they’re jarring, and they seem tacked on because it’s currently what the kids, supposedly, want. “Movies have gotten a lot more expensive, and marketing has gotten a lot more expensive,” Reitman said, “and that’s had an enormous effect. It means that studios take less chances on stranger, more difficult things, and it means that a lot of films have a sort of sameness to them as they get developed in a certain kind of direction.” Every major studio film invariably gets certain things tacked on in the course of its making — lately, those things just happen to include lewd, often misogynist humor.

The hope for American cinema, if there is any, lies outside of the traditional route. “Right now there’s a whole world of independent filmmaking that just did not exist [when I was starting out],” Reitman said. “And now there’s alternative means of distribution.”

David Duchovny was optimistic about what that would mean for the future of American film. “With the advances in all the technology, digital cameras and things like that, it would seem to me that the studios are going to be the dinosaurs. You guys are going to be able to make movies if you want, and it’s not going to be that expensive. There’s no reason to go through the studio.”

Article courtesy of insidefilm.com.