Twelve (and Joel Schumacher)

I asked a friend of mine recently, “how come Joel Schumacher doesn’t get any respect?”  To which he replied, “you know why he doesn’t get any respect.”  Ok so Batman & Robin was a shit fest but I oddly enjoyed it somehow.  I guess it was so bad it came back around to be being kind of good?  I dunno, that sounds pretty silly.  Maybe it was The Number 23 that sank him.  Well whatever it was he hasn’t had a theatrical release in a while (at least where I live).  But you know what?  His last two movies were pretty good.  With Blood Creek and Twelve it feels like he has more freedom to do what he wants.  If that’s not the case then these two movies sure don’t show it.

Schumacher’s career has been an interesting one to say the least.  None of his films look or really feel the same.  He’s a guy that does it all.  He’s made a film in pretty much every genre of cinema along with all kinds of budgets and stars.  Take for instance one particularly bizarre period in his repertoire.  Schumacher made Batman Forever then A Time to Kill then Batman & Robin and then 8MM after that.  Jesus.  He went from a cartoony comic book movie to a courtroom drama dealing with racism in the south to an even more cartoony comic book movie to a sleazy film about underground porn.  This was all in a short stretch from 1995-1999.  That’s one film a year except for 8MM which was two years after Batman & Robin.  But you have to wonder what was going through his mind at the time.  “Alright enough of that Batman shit.  I need to make a movie about people that get slaughtered in porn videos.” 

I love that he diversifies though and I wish that more directors would take on different genres like he has.  And the thing is that he actually does these different genres pretty well.  For example, his war movie was Tigerland.  A great movie and his best film in my opinion…although Falling Down was fucking badass.  Anyway, Tigerland takes place during Vietnam and is shot Saving Private Ryan style with muted colors, shaky cam, gritty textures and shows how terrible war is.  Or how terrible even training for war is.  There’s no actual war shown in the movie but being in the training camp with these guys makes it ever present and a very scary idea that you’ll have to do this shit for real one day.  

And Blood Creek is cool ‘cause he went back to his horror roots with this one.  And I know you’re thinkin’ “what’s so good about this shit?”  Well I have just two words for you: zombie Nazi.  It’s different from Dead Snow (which I actually haven’t seen yet) in that there’s only one zombie Nazi in this movie instead of a whole army.  And there’s no snow.

A Nazi comes to America to stay with a German family at a farmhouse in West Virginia.  It was supposed to be some plan by the Third Reich to use the Viking stone or whatever it is that the family has to give Hitler’s soldiers supernatural powers.  Well, it didn’t really work because the Nazi ended up turning into a zombie requiring the family to keep him alive by bringing him fresh humans to feed on.  Now tell me that doesn’t sound like a kick ass idea for a movie.  And it’s good too.  I recommend it.

Then there’s Twelve which is totally different.  It’s about a drug dealer named White Mike played by Chance Crawford (Gossip Girl).  His mother died recently and he doesn’t know what to do with his life so he deals drugs to mainly rich white kids in Manhattan.  His supplier is Lionel played by 50 Cent (Get Rich or Die Tryin’, music shit).  Twelve is this new drug that Lionel deals but White Mike doesn’t want any part of it so he sticks to slinging pot.  There are a couple of other stories happening at the same time including White Mike’s cousin getting arrested for a murder he didn’t commit, a girl getting hooked on twelve, two brothers that have a real fucked up relationship and White Mike’s estrangement with a lady friend of his.  These stories and characters eventually collide with each other but it’s not incredibly annoying like in Crash (2005) or Amores Perros or nothing (Cronenberg’s Crash (1996) is way better and sexier by the way).  These characters already have some sort of a relationship with each other so it’s not totally out of the blue that they would suddenly come together.

I like how Manhattan feels in this movie.  It’s glamorous and sleazy at the same time but always kind of charming.  Schumacher captures the different lives of the characters in this environment well.  The drug dealers look just at home as the Upper East Side brats.  It’s also cool how the film portrays rich people’s lives as being kind of carefree but also intertwined with the underworld of drugs and that these two worlds can’t stay separate.  Yeah, fuck those rich people.

This film is based on a book of the same title and does feel pretty booky.  It’s narrated by Kiefer Sutherland (The Lost Boys, A Few Good Men, Dark City) and it feels like he’s reading you the story straight from the manuscript.  He talks through a fair chunk of the movie but he’s not irritating like Kiefer can sometimes be.

Twelve has an ok idea that was done better than what you would expect.  On one hand it feels like a young director’s subject material but on the other it has the execution of a pro.  Schumacher has finally come to develop his own style and it’s what I just described in the previous sentence.  The movies he makes now have plenty for the audience to soak up but know where to draw the line and call it a day.  It’s that sixth sense that makes Schumacher’s recent films so enjoyable.  They don’t beat around the bush that much.  He knows what you want and for the most part he gives it to you.  So all I’m sayin’ is Schumacher’s good.  His movies deserve a chance.