I finally got around to watching the Final Cut of Blade Runner yesterday evening, and I was pretty impressed by how Scott went even further of a dreamlike atmosphere than the previous cuts that I had seen. I wonder if this was his way of acknowledging that certain aspects of the characterization were never going to coalesce in a satisfying manner, and thus pushed the visual storytelling even further than before, feeling more fragmented and yet much more rounded at the same time. It feels like a sadder film now, which is impressive given that it was never sunshine and rainbows to begin with, despite the borrowed footage from The Shining may want you to believe in the theatrical cut.
Given the tidbit that we learn about Scott's personal life early on in the utterly comprehensive documentary on the entirety of the production in Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, it makes sense why the film turned out the way it did, but it also reveals just how much of a miracle that it wound up even finished. While the doc never takes on an antagonistic view of how the production spun out of control, it does expose a director who walked the very thin line between genius and insanity throughout, making investors nervous about the production that was spiraling out of control, and yet being able to back up what he was attempting with dazzling scenes that had never been captured on film before. At three-and-a-half hours, it's hard to imagine that there are any stones left unturned, as it covers everything from the pre-production process through the troubled filming (boy, is it hard not to sympathize with Harrison Ford and his reluctance to talk about the film for as long as he did) through the extraordinary post-production work, all the way to its disastrous box office run and eventual re-appraisal with the release of the Director's Cut a decade later. The decision to order the process as chronologically as possible without the need of moderation helps capture the enormity of everything that transpired, but I felt like it could come off at times as a bit too segmented, as if it was several different featurettes stitched together rather than a cohesive whole. In a weird way, a similar comprehensive documentary in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy feels a lot breezier despite being a half hour longer, all thanks to how well it keeps everything on the task of charting the evolution of that series and its main attraction. Nevertheless, I feel like behind-the-scenes documentaries benefit much more from being candid than they do as PR pieces, and you'd be hard-pressed to call Dangerous Days anything but. Not the most engaging documentary on the whole, but certainly one that is a fount of fascinating information.
So, naturally, I followed up that evening by watching a film where Elijah Wood winds up in an even more ridiculous plot than the one he was made to endure in Grand Piano.
Open Windows is nothing if not busy. After a terrific fake-out opening, the film then settles into its central conceit of watching the events unfold through the laptop of our hero, Nick. It begins simple enough: Nick is the webmaster of the world's biggest fansite for actress Jill Goddard, waiting for a dinner with her as his prize for winning a contest, all the while watching a live stream of a preview for her new film. Capitalizing on his ownership of the site, he screenshots the live stream and immediately posts them on his site. A web chat comes through and gives him the bad news: the dinner has been canceled and there is no consolation prize. Or so it would seem.
To say that the plot begins to quickly unravel isn't doing it justice. Imagine a ball of yarn the size of the moon, and you will get an idea of how remarkably convoluted things get. There is probably enough ideas in here to fuel at least five different films, and there's a sense that this film feels like a few stitched together. Director Nacho Vigalondo bets the farm on the way the story is told, unfolding as a progressively more complex series of open windows on Nick's laptop as he's trying to make sense of a situation that is going well above and beyond any level of rational thinking, and it is certainly an interesting way of telling that story. But not even on the corner of the internet where you click a page to be greeted with a hundred pop-ups of penis enlargement pills would be enough to capture everything that this film attempts to do with its narrative, and there's simply no way to reconcile that, as I can state as eloquently as possible, this shit is too fucking batshit loco. For many people, it's a hurdle that simply will not be cleared, no matter how stylish it is.
At some point, and I think it was between the part where Nick seems nonplussed at rope and a gag ball are hiding in a secret compartment in his hotel room's night stand and finding out that the gag ball is electrified, I accepted that this film was never going to make any sense at all, so I decided to ride with it as best as I could, and to my surprise, it's an incredibly entertaining mess. It is certainly never boring, and its eagerness to stay one step ahead of you without doing too much cheating is admirable. While I can't imagine that they'd be in the highlight reels, both Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey do fine jobs in their respective roles, doing their best to keep you emotionally invested in what happens long after any level of intellectual engagement is shot into the sun. A simpler plot would have served the style well in the format of a short film, and be all the better for it, but there's something to be said about admiring a batter's form even if he's not hitting that many balls, and the ones he is hitting are often fouls. But as it happens, some of those foul balls manage to cause a Rube Goldberg-esque pile-up of calamities that simply needs to be accepted as is without any deeper thought given to them. It's when that happens that you realize that sometimes, a home run can be pretty boring in comparison, and boy, are there some pretty amazing foul balls that the film is willing to hit by its conclusion.
