Sunday, December 27, 2015

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.

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