‘X-Men’s’ Ratner: The happiest hack

Defamer.com is a Web site that eviscerates everything stupid and gross about my adopted hometown of Hollywood, California. And by stupid and gross I mostly mean Paris Hilton and Tom Cruise. Defamer attacks the bloated egos and fancy lifestyles of the rich and famous in a way that can only be likened to pouring boiling bleach on a giant ball of cotton candy. George Clooney hates Defamer. So do most other celebrities, I assume.

But for me, a not-famous person living in a city where, unlike the rest of the planet, the well-known are not a statistically insignificant per-capita presence, Defamer is like a really nice cup of organic green tea. I need some every morning to help ward off disease. You would too if you lived here and, while trying to go pick up your spouse from work — a spouse whose office is unfortunately located near Graumann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard — you were prevented from walking to that office because the premiere of director Brett Ratner’s film “After The Sunset” was hogging the entire block. The movie could be good or bad, you don’t even know, you don’t even care, but in that moment where you’re just trying to live your boring life and a blockful of jillionaires are disallowing the use of the sidewalk, you start to feel the tiniest bit resentful.

And then comes the part where you actually have to see “After the Sunset.” Or any of Ratner’s movies, in fact. Taken as a whole, they are the cinematic equivalent of a monochrome-outfits-only “event” thrown by P. Diddy, one at an imaginary velvet-rope-and-snooty-door-person venue called The End of Restraint. Michael Bay owns the place but he rents it out to Ratner at a discount.

Linsday Lohan is there, picking a fight with every other actress her age and pulling their extensions out with her bare hands because they dared look at her man Ratner.  Actual money is being served as an hors d’oeuvre. Just as the party is peaking, Robert Evans sticks his head in the door and shouts, “But wait! Aren’t family and homespun, small-town morality the most important things?” To which the celebrity crowd chants, “Hell to the yeah!” before everyone strips down and dives into a giant hot tub.

Overgrown frat boy turned auteur
Ratner — with or without his movies — is the man Defamer loves to hate most. Some readers might think that honor belongs to Cruise. But there’s no love in that equation, just hate. Ratner embodies the kegger-loving frat boy who grew up (sorta) and realized he was good at making money just by being a fun guy to hang out with. He is his movies, which makes him something of an auteur.

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Now to be fair, Ratner’s films are not inept outsider art like Uwe Boll’s or as extravagantly, defiantly stylized and stupid as Bay’s. They are what I like to call examples of the Heightened Conventional. They’re good-natured and hackish. They take humans and flatten them, making the obvious huge and pissing on subtlety. No stone is left unturned and no emotion is too big and no building is not blown up. No art is made. But everyone has a good time. Especially the director.

It starts with “Rush Hour,” the “best” of the bunch. It came on the heels of Ratner’s forgettable Chris Tucker-starring feature debut “Money Talks” and it married someone’s big idea to remake “48 Hours” — stripping away the story and making it all about shrieking and shooting things and the amusing sight of a Chinese man misunderstanding a black man — to Ratner’s vision of how awesome it would be to make another movie with Chris Tucker. You can just hear Ratner pumping his fists after the film’s  successful pitch meeting (he’s legendary already for being “good in a room”) and shouting, “Yeah! Now we f---in’ party!”

The resulting film was about Tucker screaming about “chinamen” as Jackie Chan (and allegedly his off-the-record stunt doubles) hurled himself off speeding cars and climbed up walls like Gene Kelly on a meth-binge. It was a bold piece of junk and I enjoyed myself as I watched it.  I just don’t remember a single thing about it beyond what I just wrote. “Rush Hour 2” was more of that, only not as refined or memorable, but with the added bonus of Zhang Ziyi looking constantly confused.

Then came “The Family Man,” starring Nicolas Cage as the luckiest, richest, hair-pluggiest jerk alive forced to learn the true meaning of love, family and Christmas all at once. No, seriously, it’s a heartwarming Christmas movie starring the unsettling Nicolas Cage, a man Ratner courted strenuously to be in the film. He says so on the freaky DVD bonus footage. It’s one of those movies made to keep downwardly mobile suburbanites happy with their boring lot in life. “Don’t reach for that platinum ring! Stay in Kansas with your little dog Toto!” the movie shouts. “You will lose your soul! Like we did! Waiter! Bring me more Cristal!”

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