It’s somewhat surprising, considering that one story is nominally about a deformed , insane composer who commits flamboyant murders, and the other is about a white guy raised in the jungle by apes, but in the recent Musical version of The Phantom of the Opera and the 1980 Bo Derek Tarzan, the Ape Man the stories center almost exclusively on the female leads, and the titular characters don’t even get a lot of screen time. They’re potentially interesting (and in just about every other filmed version, they are, and dominate the movie, but in these two cases you don’t see enough for them to be interesting, and Christine Daea and Jane Porter – well, they don’t “steal the show”, they’re Handed the Show.
For that matter, in the book and in the more faithful adaptations, Dracule gets little time, and the story is carried by Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, and others. Dracula’s easily the most interesting character (I don’t think anyone’s yet made a version where Mina steals the show), but you don’t get anywhere near enough of him.
I’ve never seen Mary Reilly, but it sounds lke a candidate for this threadm too – the titular Mary Reilly is Doctor Jeckyll’s housemaid.
Heat had a couple different storylines going on at the same time.
Al Pacino searching down Robert De Niro
Val Kilmer and Ashley Judd’s marriage
The Waingro character causing problems
Unfortunately for the movie, #3 was more annoying than interesting and #1, which was supposed to be the main storyline, ended up being less impactful than #2. If the main storyline hadn’t been bested by the secondary, the movie probably would have done significantly better critically and financially. (I don’t think it did bad as it was, of course.)
Yeah, as actors or just due to the way the story was written with them never really meeting, it never came together like it seemed like it should have.
Still, I’ll pop the movie in and watch the first 10-15 minutes regularly.
I saw a movie called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. There was a character who’s only on for a short time – Himley, Hamner, something like that. He was intriguing; somebody should write a whole story about that character.
The ensemble comedy/dramas **The Big Chill ** and Diner are probably pretty typical in the way the central character or audience stand-in figure is the steady if bland eye in the storm of character-driven quirkiness.
In Chill, the central figures (and organizers of the reunion) are the pretty-happily married couple played by Kevin Kline and Glenn Close. They provide the crash pad and a bland soundtrack of 60’s Motown and classic rock. Their friends are quite a varied bunch, though: a TV action star; a *Rolling Stone * writer; a grad-school dropout-turned-drug-dealer; one woman who’s trying to get pregnant; another who’s trying to reignite an old flame with the actor; the deceased’s weird girlfriend…
And for Diner, Barry Levinson’s somewhat fictionalized nostalgia piece, the Tim Daly character is basically Levinson as a young man; his only interesting angle is that he’s knocked up a good friend with whom he had an ill-advised one-night stand. It’s his friends who supply the funny anecdotes: the music obsessive who knows all the B-sides but who’s marriage is getting stale; the unserious law student with a gambling problem; the Baltimore Colts superfan who’s determined to call off the wedding if his fiance can’t pass his football trivia quiz; the brilliant but troubled college dropout who pulls pranks and commits acts of minor vandalism; etc.
Altho Charlie Brown had a loveable grumblebum thing about him, all the other characters from Linus to Pigphen, Peppermint Patty and her wife, to Joe Cool and Woodstock, are what made it. The Muppets was similar. Kermit was Cool, and this was evident even before he caught his big break as a reporter on Sesame Street but he was most valuable as a Straight Main for the zaniness around him. It would not have worked so well without Kermit or in many cases that week’s guest star playing second fiddle to the comic foils, but Gonzo stole the show.
I don’t know if you were referring to this fact but the Bo Derek version of Tarzan, the Ape Man began as a script called “I Am Jane” which retold the Tarzan story entirely from the perspective of Jane Porter who’s depicted as a radical feminist/anti-imperialist rebelling against her proper upper class upbringing. That could’ve been an interesting movie but by the time John and Bo Derek got a hold of the project, nearly everything having to do with the initial “Jane the Edwardian countercultural radical” concept was gone and we got a slow-moving bungle in the jungle that wasn’t even saved by Mrs. Derek’s nude scenes (and even that ended up being cut down due to objections from the Burroughs’ estate). In any case, I still think that in the right hands, a Tarzan story told from Jane’s POV could be an intriguing subject for a film or graphic novel.
Donald Duck is a jillion times more interesting than Mickey Mouse. But the mouse wants top billing, and what the mouse wants, the mouse gets. No wonder Donald’s so short-tempered all the time!
Kevin Costner’s character , Tom Farrell, in No Way Out is supposed to be the big hoohah but I find him utterly boring. The interesting people here are David Brice(Gene Hackman) and Scott Pritchard (Will Patton, my future husband). One is a US Senator who has deadly relations and the other his faithful aide who stops at nothing to protect his boss.
Granted, the limo sex scene with Costner and Sean Young is hot, but that’s about all that keeps his character interesting. As those who have seen the movie know, there is a twist at end that involves Tom Farrell and a Russian mole, and it’s pretty good. Still, one doesn’t leave the movie thinking how great that Commander Farrell was, but what astounding jobs Hackman and Patton(my future husband) did with their roles.
The same is true of Costner and Patton in The Postman, a vastly underrated film. Costner’s character was likable, but it was Will Patton as General Bethlehem who stole that movie. It was honestly one of the best performances of a power-drunk madman that I’ve ever seen (as was Pritchard in No Way Out) but the character is played with such a pompous and theatrical flair that he can be funny and terrifying in the same scene.
Will Patton - definitely an unsung hero of actors.
