Joel Schumacher (1939-2020)

[DarkImbecile]

Joel Schumacher

[thirtyframesasecond]

I'm trying not to be too down on Schumacher's career but he made two films I incredibly dislike (Falling Down, A Time To Kill), which is something, I guess.

[whaleallright]

I guess one could make a case for him importing a certain taste for camp excess into the very heart of the blockbuster mainstream, but that argument has to contend w/ the fact that the films are, by and large, just no fun.

Car Wash (which he wrote but did not direct) is an excellent film, and D.C. Cab is not bad. Both suggest an almost termite-like, street-smart raggedy enthusiasm that none of the later stuff seemed to display. Interesting that several of his early successes (as a screenwriter and then director) were black-cast (or largely black-cast) movies, all at a moment when studio interest in that sort of thing was beginning to wane after a few fertile years.

[Apperson]

I do feel sad hat he died, having so much written about him over the years in such a heated fashion will make his place in Hollywood interesting in retrospect.

I think he had fun stylistic touches but basically no actual film-making chops whatsoever.

[Reverend Drewcifer]

A Time to Kill is one of the few films I believe actively harms its viewers.

[whaleallright]

But seriously, what a legacy.

[okcmaxk]

The Lost Boys is fairly enjoyable, if not just to see Dianne Wiest go from 4 consecutive Woody Allen films to a stylized Florida vampire film.

[thirtyframesasecond]

The Lost Boys is fairly enjoyable, if not just to see Dianne Wiest go from 4 consecutive Woody Allen films to a stylized Florida vampire film.

Oh yeah, that's good fun, sure. And he launched Colin Farrell's film career, at least.

[therewillbeblus]

I actually like Batman Forever... partly for nostalgic resonance but I don't think it's as terrible as everyone else does. The cartoonish live-animation is a logical transition from the superior Burton film that precedes it, and I think Kilmer and Kidman do well in their respective parts with Kilmer bringing a dramatic weight to the trauma of the character that had been missing thus far. The Lost Boys is also good in its own special way.

[flyonthewall2983]

I hated 8MM, felt it was being lurid for only being lurid. That's the one I have the most extreme reaction to. I liked Falling Down and The Client well enough for being middle-of-the-road thrillers.

[domino harvey]

My collected works on Schumacher's output

the Lost Boys (Joel Schumacher 1987) I don't think much of Schumacher as a director (though if Hell truly is being trapped with obnoxious people, St. Elmo's Fire is the greatest horror film of all time), so I was stunned at how virtuosic this ultra-stylish 80s vampire flick is. I expected another cheap-o teen cash-in but the results are rather bold for such a populist genre flick. The premise is decent, but it's the nightmarish dementia of some of the set pieces, like the fog-covered railroad tracks or a room filled with stuffed animal carcasses, that really sells this. On a side note, I can understand teenager Corey Haim having a giant Molly Ringwald poster, but why the beefcake Rob Lowe poster on his closet… or is that too obvious to even say?

Flatliners (Joel Schumacher 1990) A thoroughly unlikable collection of egotistical med students decide to kill themselves in order to experience the afterlife, which totally makes sense. However, once they’re brought back to life (in dramatic fashion, naturally), it turns out they’ve brought the physical manifestations of their past transgressions with them. So, that bully that Kieffer Sutherland threw rocks at is now going to show up in his bedroom and hit him with a hockey stick. And so on. Yes, the film is ridiculous, and filmed with the same brazen stylizations that worked so well in the Lost Boys but are already stale and useless here. There are few things sadder than a silly film that doesn’t know it’s silly.

A Time to Kill (Joel Schumacher 1996) I'm pretty sure I spent the summer of '96 with the TV permanently turned to E! so I saw the trailer for this film (during Coming Attractions with ultra-bland Todd Newton!) enough that I could easily reconstruct it from memory during an actual viewing. I probably could have stuck with the trailer, but on the whole this is a well-made and well-acted film, better than you'd expect from it being an Important Film about race in the South and the Klan and legal maneuvering &c &c &c. Cribbing from the Pelican Brief cheat-sheet, this Grisham adaptation follows suit and casts America's Sweetheart at the time of casting, the top-billed Sandra Bullock, though she only has about twenty minutes of screen time out of the two and a half hours. The film is really Matthew McConaughey's as the well-meaning lawyer who defends a guilty Samuel L Jackson against the charge of shooting the white trash who raped his ten-year-old daughter before they could even go to trial. There is some lurid over-excitement in the way the film devotes so much time to Klan activities and terrorization, and the film does much better when it sticks to the colorful characters surrounding McConaughey and doesn't try to swing out of its weight class with the preachiness. Overall it's not nearly good enough to recommend on its merits, but despite its unfashionable status it's not bad enough to recommend against either.

[beamish14]

Julia Phillips' incredible memoir You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again has a very funny dig at Schumacher, as she calls
him a "costume designer who never had any business directing a film".

I remember liking Falling Down quite a bit, and I do want to re-assess it through the lens of America's current boiling point situation.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Even Stanley Kramer would have blushed at the unsubtle messaging of A Time To Kill. The judge is even called Noose!

Falling Down is the kind of film whose message is so ambiguous (and not in a good way) that crazies on the left and right will equally delight in D-Fens's actions. He takes on gang members and rip-off Korean store owners, his wife has a restraining order out on him, but he can't be totally bad because Frederic Forrest is an ACTUAL Nazi. It seems such a lazy way to rehabilitate the main character.

[hearthesilence]

I didn't realize he was that old. I'm not a fan of his films, but I'll say this - during the run up to Batman & Robin's release, I remember very well how the entertainment press criticized and exaggerated Alicia Silverstone's modest weight gain. During one of his interviews, Schumacher blasted the media, pointing out how disgusting it was to see that coverage when the widespread problem of eating disorders was becoming better known and more challenging to address. He was the only person I can recall bringing that point up, and given the way he made his argument, it would have been cheap and cynical to dismiss it as someone thinking of his own financial stake in a multimillion dollar enterprise.

[knives]

Whatever his qualities as a director were I do think it's fair to say that he did a lot to help underdog folk. The two prominent examples of Silverstone and the casting of black actors have been talked about, but he also fought with a lot of '90s homophobia. Everyone was taking pot shots at him for being gay and making mainstream films in heterosexual dominated genres.

[Forrest Taft]

I haven’t seen Falling Down since my early teens, but have been thinking about revisiting it after hearing Joe Dante referring to it as a great LA-film on an episode of his podcast.

Phone Booth is probably my favourite from Schumacher. Larry Cohen’s script is neat, and the film is a good, slickly made action thriller. Cohen gone mainstream.

Batman Forever was so incredibly awesome when it came out. Not so much now, but I do remember having seen it - and loved it - on the big screen, and eagerly awaiting the vhs release. When it came on rental, the guy who ran the local video store refused to carry it because «it sucked» (he would later do the same with Lost Highway), thus becoming my arch nemesis. When the vhs came available for purchase, I bought it asap.

[willoneill]

A Time to Kill isn't great, but isn't terrible. I find it interesting in that a) it came off a little racist, until I went and read the actual novel; and b) John Grisham refused to let Woody Harrelson have play the lead because he felt Natural Born Killers glorified vigilante violence, despite this being a story about a man be exonerated for committing vigilante violence.

[Paupau]

I'm also quite fond of Phone Booth, i like the premisse and it's rithm, the kind of movie you dismiss but come to realize ut holds up and compares favorably to the annual parade of action movies.
Also gonna plug the great Tigerland, which is probably his best movie, with a great Farrell performance.
Need to rewatch Lost Boys, can't understand all the praise. I can't remember much other tha disliking it.

[tenia]

Having rewatched Batman Forever just last week, I forgot how awful it is, especially in terms of construction. The first half hour in particular is a nightmare in how rushed and confusing it feels, something I completely forgot before rewatching it.

Phone Booth always felt like a simple smooth B-movie. It's certainly not a masterpiece but it felt like a smart movie that isn't too eager to show off in ways it couldn't sustain.


Following the above post about his personal behavior in interviews, I kept reading how fun and sincere he was during them, so I'm not surprised by this Silverstone story.

[colinr0380]

Add me to the Phone Booth fanclub, although that might be as good as it is as much because of the Larry Cohen script as for the direction. And he had an incredible debut with the advertising satire comedy (where a suburban housewife's home actually is going to kill her!) starring Lily Tomlin, The Incredible Shrinking Woman that really needs to be unearthed again. And I also have a soft spot for The Lost Boys that almost perfectly straddles the line between teen drama and full blooded horror.

That reminds me that Schumacher worked a heck of a lot with Kiefer Sutherland, giving Sutherland a lot of his most memorable roles: the leader of the vampires in The Lost Boys, the head of the group of med students experimenting with life after death in Flatliners, the voice over the phone tormenting Colin Farrell's character in Phone Booth. He is even the narrator in Schumacher's last theatrical film, Twelve (I really want to track down Twelve now since it features Emma Roberts and Emily Meade in a film together six years before they appeared together in Nerve!)

Other items of interest: propelling Brad Renfro to (short lived) stardom in The Client; doing the two big Julia Roberts vehicles around her stardom in Pretty Woman with Flatliners (which is the ultimate example of style over silly substance, but what style! I especially like it now that there is the much more underwhelming remake to compare it to) and Dying Young. Doing two films with Jim Carrey with Batman Forever and the numerological conspiracy horror The Number 23. And of course he did the Kiss From A Rose music video by Seal to tie in with his Batman Forever film.

I also have to admit to liking 8mm for the way that it fully buys into the gloriously dark 'elite snuff film ring' premise! (This is Schumacher's take on Paul Schrader's Hardcore, I think!) I want to revisit Falling Down too, and since Stanley Kramer has been invoked in this thread, that film is Schumacher's It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World equivalent (Robert Duvall's police inspector is in the Spencer Tracy role, with his regular phone calls to his wife and dealing with all the madness on his last day on the job!)

And isn't St Elmo's Fire one of the seminal "Brat Pack" films along with The Breakfast Club, About Last Night and Young Guns? At the very least like The Lost Boys and Batman Forever it features a famous song! (Was he one of the first directors to really get to grips with the idea that you have a tie-in music video to play on MTV that promotes your film?)


I have not seen Flawless as yet - that is the film with Robert DeNiro's conservative crank having to take singing rehabilitation lessons after suffering a stroke that force him into a relationship with Philip Seymour Hoffman as a pre-op transgender drag queen next door neighbour. It sounds like Schumacher might not be exactly the type of director to treat the material with the subtlety that it may require, but then again his work is full of characters in flux, having double lives and getting transformed (even wearing ludicrous outfits that often include long flowing capes!), so maybe he could be the best director for the material after all!

[whaleallright]

I often get Flatliners and Jacob's Ladder mixed up—they came out the same year and there's some overlap in their premises. But from what I recall the former is pretty silly while the latter (no pun intended) is genuinely frightening and unsettling.

[colinr0380]

The big issue with Schumacher is that he was evidently drawn to dark and moody subject matter a lot in his career but that often clashes against the highly stylised look of his films which makes them feel rather too beautiful (EDIT: perhaps the better word might be "slick") to be truly scary, which makes everything feel a bit silly as a consequence (The Lost Boys really works because it plays a lot of it comically with the younger kids, that balances out the older teen dramatics). His Batman films are the prime example of this, where the campier comic book style kind of works in Batman Forever (the death of Robin's parents is both tragic and hilarious simultaneously!) and then just all falls apart in Batman & Robin.

I would argue that all of which meant that he was quite an inspired choice to helm the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera adaptation from 2004, which I think may be the only successful Lloyd Webber adaptation for the cinema so far (though I have a soft spot for the Madonna Evita film too). The perfect marriage of his sensibilities towards overblown flamboyance and gothically romantic darkness!

[whaleallright]

I would dispute that "they always look great"! They definitely look like something, but that something is often hideous.

[domino harvey]

I looked at his recent output and didn’t recognize much, but boy Blood Creek sounds like it could be ridic fun in a Boys From Brazil vein (though without the level Peck and Olivier are able to elevate the schlock to just by being in it)

[colinr0380]

And that film features Michael Fassbender in it! How did that go under the radar? For that matter how did a thriller starring Nicolas Cage and Nicole Kidman being threatened by Ben Mendelsohn manage to completely pass me by too?