The Battle of Shaker Depths.
Fan magazines in the past created a basis of fantasy-projection that aided Hollywood's manufacture of fiction. Audiences were put in a position to empathize with the figures on screen and follow story lines as extended life-lessons. Today, the new fan magazines and websites tell us so many irrelevancies about the making of movies?the stars' private lives, business deals and box-office figures?that false sophistication has set in. Hype precludes the public's willingness to assimilate and construe fictional propositions. Because people can discuss the intricacies of film production, they think they have penetrated a film's meaning.
This cultural change best benefits those Hollywood movies that aren't about anything beyond simply making money?which would be the most wretched of them. But it's also fostered a circumstance in which no one, from the floor of the sound stage to the popcorn line, seeks meaning. The discussion of hype?a cultural tautology of the media repeating movie publicity?predominates. (I feel this dread all over again now that promotion for the home-video release of the loathsome Chicago has begun?it's as certain as a low-grade fever that precedes a flu.)
Those of us who have not lost the confidence to venture a personal response to movies find ourselves stymied by increasing numbers of films that frustrate any reaction other than a jump or a smirk. Such deprivation may explain why so many reviewers fall for the gimmickry of The Blair Witch Project, Far from Heaven, Russian Ark, 28 Days Later; those formalist hoaxes distract from vapid or inane content. (However, most of the public must be applauded for smelling a rat and staying away from 28 Days Later. People won't be conned by a movie they literally cannot see.)
The Battle of Shaker Heights itself can barely be viewed at all because, chopped-down to a running time of 80 minutes, it's almost non-existent. This production is the victim of the most craven ideas in the contemporary film industry?Make It Funny! Appeal to the Kids!?just like Freddy vs. Jason, a movie that had no reality-tv series exposing its flaws. As a typical industry product, The Battle of Shaker Heights is simply the flavorless story of a working-class Ohio teenager, Kelly (played by Disney's Shia LaBeouf), who is disaffected from society, history and his parents. After pulling several pranks with a privileged rich kid (Elden Henson) and becoming infatuated with the scion's older sister (Amy Smart), Kelly eventually settles down for the everyday struggle.
A yawn would be more exciting than the emotions this movie provokes. The bland, youth-pandering story is typical of what passes for creativity in indie filmmaking; the supposedly sensitive storyline is one that 80s movies from No Small Affair to The Flamingo Kid (and lesser ones in between) handled with some aplomb. The indie method internalizes those plots, then regurgitates them minus entertaining production values?just stolid solipsism. Damn right, it can be viewed fairly; it just can't be watched enthusiastically because its elements are tired and stale.
Perhaps what some journalists feared in anticipation of reviewing The Battle of Shaker Heights was their own ennui?the inner instinct that the movie before them would be another cause for disenchantment, another reason to gather their fortitude and maturity, go against the promotional tide and actually practice criticism. (The Voice took the cowardly way out, attacking the males on Shaker Heights, personally coddling the female screenwriter with sisterly first-name references.) Fact is, the connection to Project Greenlight is the only thing that keeps this movie from being absolutely negligible.
Why Shaker Heights is bad is apparent on its surface: Nominal directors Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle never create a "tone." The scenes look like "takes." Television-pro LaBeouf is overly eager, which works against sympathizing with Kelly's snottiness. Screenwriter Erica Beeney's story, as it develops, gets downright insensitive. (A subplot in which Kelly razzes an overweight schoolteacher and gets bullied by the teacher's own teenage son is misconceived. It poorly parallels Kelly's relationship with his parents, then leads to a disproportionately sadistic prank that is a sign of Kelly's own self-hatred.) That's what we're given. That's what can be legitimately disparaged. No different from the Freddy vs. Jason killathon, it's proof of a film company patching together a superficial plot and hastily filmed cliches.
All Project Greenlight makes us privy to is that Shaker Heights was doomed from the beginning. The contest put on by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Miramax and Blockbuster is based on the fallacy that independent filmmaking is more artist-friendly and art-minded than studio filmmaking. It suckers in opportunists who fancy themselves serious rather than lucky, submitting scripts and show reels that are little more than undernourished imitations of Hollywood movies. As the series' early episodes showed, ambitious, personal projects were weeded out first. Without ever saying so, the Greenlight honchos were looking for minions who would allow Miramax's midlevel factotums to exercise more "no" power than they ever could to a Scorsese. Shaker Heights would never be anything more than grist for Miramax's gears.
Rankin and Potelle may have been self-deluding to think (after the first Project Greenlight debacle) that they would be given the opportunity to be junior Tarantinos, but as the contest actually played out (pairing the neophytes from Maine with a script they never wrote and a studio full of L.A. slicksters) the persnickety young men were given just enough freedom to fail. Miramax controlled the production (especially casting, script and editing) at almost every turn except on the shooting floor where Rankin and Potelle needed the most help?and yet were discouraged to accept it through a passive-aggressive pissing match with the producers Chris Moore and Jeff Balis.
You don't need conjecture to review Shaker Heights, but the battles of Project Greenlight all require conjecture. Like every reality-tv show, the "truth" has been selected according to the whims of those who financed it. Crucial information is left out?especially details that would make clear exactly what kind of movie Damon and Affleck preferred. All we see is their pretense at benevolence. But in truth, talent isn't important in Hollywood?agents and deal-making are. Everyone works to promulgate the sanctity of indie filmmaking, from the Sundance Festival announcement of the contest winners to the script discussions that avoid mentioning commerciality?the 800-pound gorilla in the head of every Hollywood exec.
Given this disingenuous context, the winners look like ingrates because the false sophistication of our era overlooks that they were never treated honestly. Project Greenlight is entertainment for people who already think they know everything about film production yet neglect to consider the basic divisions of labor and on-the-job politics. Only an Entertainment Weekly subscriber thinks he knows how a movie set operates without a guide. Poor Rankin and Potelle never got an orientation to the lion's den. (Beeney was similarly misled; she was kept on the production throughout shooting and editing when professional screenwriters are, in fact, unwelcome and well onto their next project.)
Producer Chris Moore was the chief facilitator of the indie-movie myth, swooping in from the set of American Wedding to advise the directing team of how much they were doing wrong. (Although Moore stood idly by when a whole day was wasted traveling to a location to shoot a car interior that could have been faked anywhere.) But would the producer of American Wedding and American Pie know a quality movie from squat? When a test screening of Shaker Heights received a less than 55 percent favorable response, the blame is put on the directors, not on Moore and Miramax's decision that Beeney's sensitive script be turned into a teen laff-riot. The hatred Moore expresses for his director-team was a shocking revelation that Project Greenlight is only about the arrogance of Hollywood players attempting to aggrandize themselves.
What you don't see in Shaker Heights is a scene in which Kelly and his father come together over mending a brick wall. "Too hokey!" Chris Moore had decreed. Everything that's wrong with our contemporary cinema can be traced to that cynical dismissal of metaphor. Meaning?and healing?is sacrificed to hipness and power.