Voted Most Likely to Fail (on revisiting The Mask)

Ms. jonboywalton and I went on a little nostalgia trip on the weekend and watched our newly acquired copy of The Mask (1994). I remembered enjoying it immensely when I saw it on the big screen (Ms. J and I were still dating then), but apart from a couple of scenes (like Peggy's betrayal, and the "You gotta ask youself - do I feel lucky..." sequence) I couldn't really recall much of it at all.

According to the good folks at imdb.com The Mask was the eighth highest grossing movie of 1994 in the United States. Admittedly it was up against it with the likes of Forrest Gump and True Lies, but it was only pipped at the post by Speed (with roughly $2 million more in the pot) and grossed significantly higher than Pulp Fiction (earning about $12 million more at the Box Office).

The funniest thing is, all emperical evidence points to the movie never being intended to be such a hit. The entire cast was either unproven or considered second tier, the director - Chuck Russell - had just two features to his name, the schlock remake of The Blob, and the third installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and the premise was cartoonish without actually being based on a comic book (or a video game). It just happened to tap into the zeitgeist - by 1994 society had come down hard from the giddy excesses of the eighties and everyone just wanted a little escapism. They didn't care if their heroes were unlikely (like Bruce Willis as Butch in Pulp Fiction or Arnold Schwartzenegger's Harry Tasker in True Lies) . The little-film-that-could just happened to capture the public imagination at a time when the public didn't want to think about interest rates and trade defecits.

The thing that struck me about the film, looking at it ten years on, was how pedestrian it felt. The lack of jump cuts and running scenes. The claustrophobic closeness of many of the interior sets (the interiors that weren't shot in existing buildings like the bank). The big crowd scenes where you only see about thrity people at a time. And, (I only mention this because of the obvious and rampant prejudice against them at the time) the number of "television" actors in crucial roles. None of this seemed that obvious when I saw it the first time. Has the movie-going audience grown so cynically sophisticated in the last decade that these thing stick out more glaringly than they once did? Have we become to au fait with movie making practice to ever lose ourselves in cinema ever again? If watching this again was any indication, then no. I laughed out loud and often, being surprised by how well the movie travelled, in spite of the hair styles and made-for-TV blockiness of some scenes. I think that a lot of the films timelessness can be attributed to the swing aesthetic that drenches the whole production, from Ha Nguyen's costuming to Randy Edelman's original soundtrack.

Also in it's defence (as if it needed defending) The Mask essentially launched two careers, and for this we should give thanks. 1994 was Carrey's year, with The Mask, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Dumb and Dumber all being released within ten months of each other. Since then, Carrey has gone on to do a stack of films, many good, some excellent. And, of course there's Cameron Diaz, who got an 'And introducing..." title in the opening credits. Admitedly, The Mask may not be her best work, but nobody could deny Diaz demonstrated a camera-friendliness this little black duck hadn't seen since Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. It's trendy to dump on pretty female actors, but how many would be prepared to make themselves dowdy to the point of unrecognisability for the sake of a role?