Who Shot It: Michael Ballhaus. Ballhaus barely wasted any time in his career before rising to prominence, starting what would be a 16-film collaboration with fellow German wunderkind Rainer Werner Fassbinder only about two years into his career. During their time together, Ballhaus would shoot classics like The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Fox and His Friends, World on a Wire, and Martha. If he stopped there, he could be content with his cinematic legacy, but Ballhaus kept going, eventually coming to America in 1983 with John Sayles’ Baby It’s You. It wasn’t long after that that Martin Scorsese took note of him, and hired him to shoot his hyperactive nightmare comedy After Hours. That would begin Ballhaus’s second great collaboration, their films together (After Hours, The Color of Money, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York, and The Departed) all making spectacular use of the camera in almost every frame. If his career ended there, he could reasonably call himself one of the all-time greats. But no, this guy had to keep going beyond that. He spent much of the late 80s and early 90s as the go-to DoP for studio comedies, including Mike Nichols’ Working Girl (Nichols would work with him again on Postcards from the Edge, Primary Colors, and future entry What Planet Are You From), Frank Oz’s Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and What About Bob?, James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News and I’ll Do Anything, and Steve Kloves’ The Fabulous Baker Boys (for which he received an Oscar nomination). And there’s still a lot more to go! He also worked with Robert Redford (on Quiz Show and future entry The Legend of Bagger Vance), Francis Ford Coppola (on Bram Stoker’s Dracula), Prince (on Under the Cherry Moon), Wolfgang Petersen (on Outbreak and Air Force One), Barry Levinson (on Sleepers), Irwin Winkler (on Guilty by Suspicion), and Nancy Meyers (on Something’s Gotta Give), before deciding to retire in 2006 (although he did return to work in Germany in 2013 with the drama 3096). And he also shot today’s entry, Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld finished Goodfellas for Ballhaus when he had to move onto another project, so his decision to shoot this isn’t quite inexplicable), although, as is always the case for big blockbusters, someone else had to do second-unit work, those duties being handed to…

Bill Pope. It’s fitting that Pope and Ballhaus have worked together, as they both share a keen eye for camera movement (Pope maybe moreso; I’m sure “tableau” is a dirty word for him). Like Ballhaus, Pope got started real early, breaking through with his cinematography for Sam Raimi’s Darkman, only his second credited feature. From there, we worked once again with Raimi on Army of Darkness and shot the alien abduction movie Fire in the Sky, the future entry Blank Check, and the peerless teen comedy Clueless. From there, he hooked up with two brothers named Andy and Larry Wachowski, for whom he shot the lesbian neo-noir Bound, and later, all three of the Matrix films (and, of course, his camera movements there are still some of the most iconic in recent cinema). But that’s not all! In between Bound and The Matrix, he lent his talents to Vondie Curtis-Hall’s Gridlock’d (featuring Tupac Shakur’s last performance), Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect, and Kasdan’s pilot for Freaks and Geeks (that also has a brilliant camera move, moving from on the bleachers to underneath them as a statement of principle). After all the Matrix films, he shot another all-time great popcorn movie with Spider-Man 2 (his reunion with Raimi), as well Team America: World Police the same year. He then shot Spider-Man 3, and Frank Miller’s The Spirit (I’d say that’s a future entry, but I don’t know if I want to do that to myself), with the oddball drama Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus tucked in there as well. Recently, he’s struck up a collaboration with Edgar Wright, and it was a match made in whip-pan Heaven, as the results (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and The World’s End, plus the upcoming Baby Driver and almost Ant-Man) can attest to. His latest works are the miniseries remake of Cosmos and Jon Favreau’s new version of The Jungle Book. And he also shot Men in Black 3 for Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of Wild Wild West. Segues, everyone!

What Do You Mean, Story?: In the last 25 years, three film years loom particularly large in the memory. They would be 1994, 2007, and 1999. That last one in particular was a goldmine for pretty much every kind of movie imaginable. You had The Matrix, Toy Story 2, South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, Three Kings, Election, The Limey, Fight Club, The Iron Giant, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Ghost Dog, Eyes Wide Shut, Bringing Out the Dead, The Insider, Galaxy Quest, and The Talented Mr. Ripley all opening within a reasonable distance of each other, which is kind of insane. But, of course, I’m not here to talk about any of those. I’m here to talk about that year’s big behemoth, the one that went down immediately as opposed to over time, Wild Wild West. Reuniting the star of Men in Black, Will Smith, with its director, Barry Sonnenfeld, the film went through the pens of six writers (always a great sign), was hyped only slightly less than the potential second coming of Christ, had a budget which reached, by slightly conservative estimates, $170 million, and was the recipient of utterly scathing reviews for its troubles. Sure, it made money on first weekend, but the buzz was so toxic that it ended up flopping big time by the end of its run, before getting showered with Razzies like someone throwing dollar bills on someone who’s unconscious. I’d ask if it’s really that bad, but to be more accurate, I’ll instead ask you this; did it really make me regret allowing write-in votes when I polled people to ask them what I should cover for this series?

James West (Will Smith, at peak Will Smith brashness) is an army Captain who’s hunting down notorious Confederate general “Bloodbath” McGrath in the years following the Civil War. Artemus Gordon (Kevin Kline) is a U.S. Marshal with a fondness for inventing gadgets and wearing disguises, who’s also hunting down McGrath, to find out about his kidnappings of major American scientists. President Ulysses S. Grant (also Kline) decides to team them up for the case, so they’ll need to get along and learn to fight together and tolerate each other if they can find out McGrath’s connection to former Confederate scientist Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh, who really should have given more thoughts to choking hazards before eating all this scenery at once), who is missing the bottom half of his body. He’s got big plans for Grant, and it’s up to West and Gordon to put a stop to his computer-generated mayhem before it’s too late. Can they do it? Why is Salma Hayek even in this movie? Have I always felt this empty inside, and this movie just dredged up those feelings?

Like I said, this was chosen by my “fans” as the next entry in this series. Certainly, I may have included it as a possibility, but I think that I probably would have turned it off somewhere around 20 minutes in, distressed by the lack of material I was getting from this. This movie isn’t bad in an amusing way, or even in just an interesting way. This movie is dire. It’s a comedy, and yet it has fewer jokes that hit than Shoah. It’s all jokes, except for the brief occasions when it’s not, like West’s inexplicable “emotional” backstory. The set-ups to gags and setpieces are so thuddingly obvious that they can be seen from a mile away by someone whose eyes are closed. The steampunk elements are maybe novel at first before quickly becoming tiring, then exhausting. The spider shit is obviously shoehorned in by fuck it, I’m done. I’m done with this shit.

Screw That, Let’s Talk Pretty Pictures: Oh boy, I’m genuinely not sure I can do this. Certainly, Ballhaus’s love for kinetic camera movements is in full force here, meshing well with Sonnenfeld’s experience as a DoP for the Coens (there are some chase scenes that share a lot with some scenes in Raising Arizona, which in turn were inspired by Evil Dead). Those movements are exacerbated by his and Sonnenfeld’s decision to shoot much of the film with wide-angle lenses, creating a very dynamic look even during regular dialogue scenes. What also carries through from scene to scene is very warm lighting. There’s nary a shot that goes by without some version of orange or yellow making it into the frame, paired with an impossibly perfect blue sky in many scenes. All in all, it’s a looker of a movie. That is all it is.

Favorite Shot/Sequence: Fuck if I know. I guess the giant mechanical tarantula walking into the sunset at the end. I guess.

Is It Worth Watching: Goodbye / You can keep this suit of lights / I’ll be off with the sun / I’m not coming down / (Down) / I’m not coming down / (Down) / I’m not coming down.

Stray Observations:

• Never did I think that this movie’s theme song would be one of the top three least painful aspects of it.
• So, fuck it, we’re doing another episode of The Narrator Talks U2 to U. So, they said that Songs of Experience should be coming out this year. And they said that Brian Eno convinced them to make it something like Zooropa (my fourth favorite album of theirs). So that should be great, especially considering how good Songs of Innocence was for a band that had released some real shit in the decade prior. That’s it, that’s all I got, folks.

Up Next: Another reader’s choice entry, hopefully one that doesn’t lead to a brain aneurysm.