Every Monday morning, InsidePulse Movies Czar Scott “Kubryk” Sawitz brings an irreverent and oftentimes hilarious look at pop culture, politics, sports and whatever else comes to mind. And sometimes he writes about movies.
One of the things I watch with my father that isn’t sports is Entourage. We don’t have similar tastes in a lot of things when it comes to television, never really did, and this has become one of the few things we can watch together. And while every show has a point where it needs to go away, Entourage has been one that both passed it by at least two seasons and ends with us wanting more. It’s the only way I can describe it; as it ends, this season deserves an extended run because it actually is remarkably interesting. But the show is a couple seasons past its expiration date, too, at the same time.
That’s the one thing that always bothered me about the show; the final two seasons. After Season Six you had a perfect opportunity to end the show and everyone walks away happy. Instead we’ve had two seasons where the show has jumped the shark, so to speak, mainly because it got away from the two big reasons why the first six seasons succeeded: Vince (Adrian Grenier) and Ari (Jeremy Piven).
I’ve always thought of the show as both of their stories intertwined with one another. Vince is the prince, Ari is ultimately the man behind the prince, and about half of each show is dedicated to both of their worlds. The show may be about the perils of Hollywood, et al, but it always comes down to the star and the man there to clean up his messes. Every other character has a connection to one or the other and I’ve always thought of the show as both of their stories meshed into one.
On one hand you have Vince Chase, a flavor of the month actor trying to establish a permanent career on the marquee. If you only viewed the parts of the show that focused on Vince you have a long story about a wannabe movie star trying to show he has acting bonafides; the whole problem for Vinnie Chase throughout the series is that he’s good looking and charismatic enough to get anything he wants. True adversity and struggle is hard to come by and he’s always trying to prove that he’s more than the pretty face. He wants a vindication of his talents and that he’s a good person, to boot. When season six ends Vinnie is en route to start film Ferrari and has found repeatable success as an actor and as a movie star.
On the other you have a veteran Hollywood agent trying to keep him there. Ari is driven by his desire to be the best and it puts him at odds with everyone, including his wife on occasion. Ari is defined by his professional success in the same way Vince is; both have this urge inside to want validation for the work they put in. He’s put in the work over the years, been ruthless to everyone around him, and wants to prove that all that work was for something. When season six ends, Ari is about to buy his biggest competitor and become the biggest agent in Hollywood.
And if the show ended there you’d have the rise, and fall, of two men bound together by fate. Vince and Ari are meant to have a working a relationship and everything always points them back to it. This is about as happy as it gets: Vince is on his path to mega-stardom and we don’t need to guess where it’s going. Ari is on the path to being the most powerful man in Hollywood not in a studio office. Vince is joined by his brother, finally given a vehicle to step out of his brother’s shadows. Turtle has direction. And Eric is on the path to the family man that seemed foretold, finally placing the priority in his life to the love of his life instead of sacrificing it for his friends.
But then something funny happened: two more seasons of the show occurred that were fairly directionless.
Season 7 was more of a glorified tequila commercial than a season but gave us something interesting; both Ari and Vince succumbing to personal demons. For Vince it was drugs, developing a cocaine habit fueled by a dangerous liaison with a porn star (Sasha Grey). For Ari it was the demons of his rise to the top that brought him down, leaving him professionally successful but without his family. It was much more of an artistic bent than anything in the show and it gave the floundering some merit at least; was the show going to go in a direction that might make it interesting for the final eight episodes?
It didn’t.
What finished up last night wasn’t really anything but half a season of episodes with an entire 16 episode run of material built in. It felt rushed instead of the natural conclusion the show was aiming for, which kind of bothered me. This isn’t the way Entourage was supposed to go out; instead of a bang we get a whimper.
When we last saw the gang everything had seemingly been smoothed out. Drama’s show is back on, Turtle has the money to become a restaurant owner, Vince has a date with a reporter (Alice Eve) he’s ga-ga over and the only two storylines without any real conclusion is that of Ari’s marriage and Eric’s impending fatherhood. Everything else has been taken care of the week before and really put the onus on this episode being a grand finale of what were the only real storylines carried over from episode 1: Sloan & Eric’s breakup and Ari’s divorce. Throw in the Vince’s pending nuptials and you have a larger story that encompasses everyone of principle involved.
And with those two storylines given some sort of finale in the end, including an appearance from Terrance McQuewick (Malcolm McDowell), you have a happy ending that wraps up the show in a nice happy bow. Entourage is all about the happy endings, like a seedy Asian massage parlor, but here’s the thing. It was happy but the entire season felt compressed and rushed.
The resolution to a lot of angles felt forced; there wasn’t as much of an organic feel this season as there has been in the past. Everything was forced to develop faster and the conclusions to the various subplots developing this season were mostly closed early. It felt like a show with a 16 chapter story in mind but only enough time for half of it; instead of cutting out a handful of things they opted to try and include everything, just cutting out massive plot points that would’ve made it more interesting. This felt like a season of half-stories told at full length; 16 episodes of Ari in the dating world, and his shenanigans with Dana Gordon while pining for his soon to be ex-wife, is something that hasn’t been explored and would’ve made for a great story arc.
Instead we get eight episodes of a season that ends up being lackluster. When the book on Entourage is written, the first six seasons will be the show’s peak and then crashed down significantly thereafter. Was it still entertaining? Yes. But they beat that dead horse for two more seasons than they should have.
Random Thought of the Week
One of the big stories this month has been many changes George Lucas made to the original Star Wars trilogy before releasing it on Blu-Ray. A handful of websites have taken to keeping track of all the changes made, as well, so it’s rather staggering to see how many changes George Lucas is making. And I can see why, oddly enough.
There were plenty of reasons why he made the changes, mainly so he could change the three good films he made that bore the title Star Wars in them to have more of a connection to the prequels in terms of story and quality. Look at what he changed: audio and visual. He added in some dialogue to give it references to the original three as well as cleaned up the perceived poor quality of his visuals to make it look like the CGI of the prequels. I can see why he’d want to do that; he always viewed the original Star Wars trilogy as incomplete and wanted to change them wholesale to match up to the vision he always had in his head.
I can see and justify why Lucas made the changes he did. In fact I support them in a way. They are his films, after all, and every director not completely satisfied with their work will try to re-edit it into something better. Ridley Scott did it a handful of times with Blade Runner and we don’t give him that much slack for it because the ends justified the means in this case. The final version of Blade Runner was the definitive version because it was finally Ridley’s version. It was the version he wanted, the one he saw in his head when he made it and forces outside collaborated to prevent, and I can see Lucas seeing what Ridley did and wanting to do the exact same thing.
With the advances in digital technology available, why not clean it up a bit and make the version that you wanted to but couldn’t because of the constraints of technology at the time? That facet of George Lucas I totally get and understand. He’s an artist and a perfectionist with a bank roll that’ll crush small countries.
And I bet George Lucas in 1988 would slug this George Lucas right now.
Why? In 1988 before Congress, Lucas said the following:
“The preservation of our cultural heritage may not seem to be as politically sensitive an issue as “when life begins” or “when it should be appropriately terminated,” but it is important because it goes to the heart of what sets mankind apart. Creative expression is at the core of our humanness. Art is a distinctly human endeavor. We must have respect for it if we are to have any respect for the human race.
These current defacements are just the beginning. Today, engineers with their computers can add color to black-and-white movies, change the soundtrack, speed up the pace, and add or subtract material to the philosophical tastes of the copyright holder. Tomorrow, more advanced technology will be able to replace actors with “fresher faces,” or alter dialogue and change the movement of the actor’s lips to match. It will soon be possible to create a new “original” negative with whatever changes or alterations the copyright holder of the moment desires.
In the future it will become even easier for old negatives to become lost and be “replaced” by new altered negatives. This would be a great loss to our society. Our cultural history must not be allowed to be rewritten.
There is nothing to stop American films, records, books, and paintings from being sold to a foreign entity or egotistical gangsters and having them change our cultural heritage to suit their personal taste.”
At the time Lucas said that he was arguing against the colorization and other manipulation of classic films but the point remains the same. You shouldn’t mess with the originals, no matter what, because there’s a certain facet of history that we lose every single time we do so. That’s what his thought was and it’s something I 100% agree with. I always hated colorization because there’s a beauty in black & white that you can’t capture with color from that era. The black and white era had so much good stuff in terms of cinematography that you don’t see as often with color being involved.
And the thing I’ve always hated is that Lucas has fiddled with Star Wars this way when he came out so vehemently against others doing so many years ago.
Lucas has many times gone back and made significant changes to his original three Star Wars films for release while never releasing the originals, in their original form, with anything but subpar audio and video. Lucas’s intention is clear: either watch my new versions of film utilizing technology or suffer through cruddy transfers to hold on to the original films as you originally saw them. That bothers me on any number of levels for one reason and one reason only: there’s something to be said about the original trilogy as it originally stood that needs to be out there.
We lose a lot by not having the original Star Wars and the inferior effects that the ‘70s had in comparison to CGI and Digital Effects Work of the modern era in a first rate format. With all the changes to the original three films we’ve lost something special. And this isn’t some sort of “George Lucas is ruining my childhood” rant that generally tend to come out whenever George Lucas’s name is mentioned when it comes to changes in the Holy Trilogy.
If George Lucas making changes to The Empire Strikes Back has ruined your days as a child you ought to take a major reconsideration of your life to this point.
I can’t justify spending any more money on anything Star Wars related anymore because George Lucas refuses to do the one thing with the original Star Wars trilogy he needs to do to not be a complete hypocrite: release the original trilogy in the best possible format. They are a part of our cultural history, to use Lucas’s own words, and as such they have an important place in the American cinematic lexicon. When people talk about the original trilogy of Skywalker they are referring to that: the original film. All the changes that have been made are rewriting Star Wars to the point where we aren’t going to be able to tell the difference between the original films and the new trilogy.
While I imagine that’s Lucas’s stated goal, as anything less would point out the imperfections of his prior work, we lose something in the process. Sometimes art needs to be left alone, or at least have its original available for comparison in the same exact conditions as the new one so that a fair comparison can be made.
It would be as if Leonardo da Vinci decided to make changes to the Mona Lisa a decade after originally painting it. It started out as this:
Then morphed into this:
Then finally changed into this:
You really can’t call the final two the Mona Lisa, despite da Vinci screaming about how this is his painting and he can make changes to it as he sees fit. In the end we don’t recognize it and it takes away from the American cinematic lexicon despite the fact that it perhaps looks better on an aesthetic level. Not having the original available in any decent transfer, and with all the massive story-telling changes he’s made over the years they probably never will until the man’s dead, short-changes us as a culture because the films he presents as the Holy Trilogy aren’t that.
They resemble them very strongly but they aren’t the films that Lucas originally made.
I understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, using his original as work-prints and forever tinkering with them, but there comes a point where tinkering with small changes compound over time to make a film into something wholly unrecognizable by all involved. All it does is make them more in line with the last three films, as opposed to having written and produced the original three to make more sense. My guess is that Lucas realized that what he wanted to and what he had done with the trilogy couldn’t be reconciled without massive changes so instead of acknowledging that he’s trying to rewrite his past, making it fit with how he sees it, Lucas’s original trilogy is starting to become unrecognizable by anyone but Lucas himself in their original form.
The films may be George’s to tinker with as the copyright holder but the gangster Lucas envisioned ruining classic films to suit their personal taste is the same man who decried the practice over 20 years ago.
A Movie A Week – The Challenge
This Week’s DVD – Collateral
It was one of my favorite films of the first decade of the 2000s and one I saw like four times in theatres and actually was the film that got me hired onto Inside Pulse.com. I wrote a review of it for Steve Coogan, who hired me with the rest of the gang, and it’s one I’ve written about in depth for a philosophy class back in the day. Something about the duality of man in both Vincent (Tom Cruise) and Max (Jamie Foxx) or some b.s like that. Back when I was pursuing Bachelor’s degree #2 in Philosophy I could spin any movie into a paper for class, mainly because I was actually really lazy when it came to paper topics.
My professors thought it was great I could incorporate movies into my papers but I feel bad in hindsight because it was sheer laziness for the most part. I mean I wrote a paper on identity using Batman Begins, amongst others, and basically just used my DVD Collection (Of DOOM!) as background sources with which to write. It’s the ultimate in laziness, at least I think now, but I don’t regret it. Mainly because it was good films that were being used, as opposed to dreck like Creature, so it’s not big a deal in the long run.
And Collateral is a great one totally worth watching again.
It’s a fairly simple premise. It’s just another day for Max, a cab driver in Los Angeles. After a great conversation with a US Attorney (Jada Pinkett Smith) while driving her around, he picks up a smooth talking guy who convinces him to drive him around all night. When a fat criminal winds up crash-landing on his hood, he figures out Vince’s real purpose: he’s a killer on a one night job through the City of Angels. Forced to drive Vincent throughout the city of his mission of mayhem, Max is forced to confront the choices of his life that have put him into this place and have made him the man to deal with Vincent as it stands.
I loved this film the first time I saw and it’s one of those that never loses anything on repeated viewings. How come? Because it gives us Tom Cruise in a role he’ll probably never repeat as a sociopathic villain willing to do and say nearly anything to finish his job. Throw in a quick but insanely awesome cameo from Javier Bardem, and a great sub plot with Mark Ruffalo and Pete Berg as cops investigating the murders, and you have a great cast that only Michael Mann could direct to awesomeness. Plus it has his signature HEAT moment, when the tempo of the film changes and that final bulb clicks onto one of the main characters at the same time as the audience.
Highest recommendation.
What Looks Good This Weekend, and I Don’t Mean the $2 Pints of Bass Ale and community college co-eds with low standards at the Alumni Club
Drive – Ryan Gosling is a getaway driver who gets caught up in a robbery gone wrong.
See It – It’s been getting insane buzz and has a synth score.
I Don’t Know How She Does It – Sarah Jessica Parker gets another movie to star in where she’s a married woman who does it all and is tempted to cheat on her loving and wonderful husband.
Skip It – Just like Sex and the City 2, but without the two other whores and their mom.
The Lion King (3D re-release) – A lion cub goes from birth to being king and stuff.
See It – It was a great film and now it’s in 3D. It’s something you take the kids to and they’ll have their mouths shut for 90 minutes.
Straw Dogs (2011) – A bunch of rednecks led by the vampire dude from True Blood attack. Cyclops from X-Men fights back.
See It – The original was fairly brilliant, I really can’t imagine them screwing it up badly.
Scott “Kubryk” Sawitz brings his trademarked irreverence and offensive hilarity to Twitter in 140 characters or less. Follow him @MMCritic_Kubryk.
