Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Watched Death to Smoochy
I picked a DVD of this up on Friday, but I wanted to hold off on seeing it until I could see it with Erika. Our chief interest in this film: Erika had worked on it. And I had visited the film set on a few occasions with Vanessa in tow: a couple of times at Maple Leaf Gardens, and once at a large CBC sound stage (my Blogger entry for which seems to have been munched. Grr.)

We watched the whole of the DVD: the movie, the "documentary" (just a collection of clips sans voice-over or narrative, still better than the usual ET gloss-o-rama production), out-takes and bloopers, production stills and then a good chunk of the commentary track featuring Danny DeVito and the cinematographer. It was a long, though enjoyable, night.

The movie is good. In fact it turned out better than I thought it would. I remember while reading the script thinking that it was funny, but it was "busy", with a lot going on. From what I saw on set, I didn't think Ed Norton could pull off the kind of assertive dippy-ness his character required, but he does so admirably. They also streamlined the final movie, making the movie less busy.

Erika's occasional comments as we watched the commentary track were interesting: a lot of scenes with surround lighting made it very hard for her to find a place for her boom pole. The rhino picture from the Penthouse set that DeVito says he gave to Norton afterwards as a wrap-up gift was a bane to Erika as her boom always got reflected in it. Another interesting comment was with the scene where a homeless Rainbow Randolph is visited by his friend who gives him some magazines to read and one of them shows Mopes with Randolph's former girlfriend: the prop man sweated bullets because he only made one copy of this magazine. He wanted to make more, but was told only one would be needed. So Robin Williams proceeds to shred said magazine in the first take (which makes perfect sense for his character to do). In between each of 5 or so takes for this scene the prop man had to carefully piece together the magazine each time.

I can see the movie becoming a cult film in time, but it is a problem movie. There's so much going on there's little time to take stock and reflect on what's happening and why, and Robin William's character isn't well set up -- we really only see the bad side of him from the outset, so his "conversion" near the end rings hollow. One of the pivotal scenes of the movie, where Randolph confronts Smoochy and Nora in the penthouse with a gun has a curious lack of tension -- this is a madman with a gun guys, maybe you should take this more seriously? Still, the character performances are dead-on, and fit what's needed for it all to work. The psychology behind the people who "switch sides" isn't convincing, though I remember thinking that while reading the script.

After seeing the results of the movie, I am amazed at how much time is spent for so little screen time. All of those hours I spent on the two location sets translated to less than a minute of total film, perhaps even less than 30 seconds.

Erika does appear briefly once or twice during the out-take sequences, and I can hear her distinctive laugh as Robin Williams does a brief monologue during a take doing John Wayne talking about cookin' up some couscous.