Memoirs Of An Invisible Man LINK
The following morning, a hungover Nick attends a shareholders' meeting at Magnascopic Laboratories. Unable to endure the droning presentation by Dr. Bernard Wachs, Nick leaves the room for a nap. A lab technician accidentally spills his mug of coffee onto a computer console, causing a meltdown, and the entire building is evacuated. The building seems to explode, but there is no debris. Instead, much of the building is rendered invisible, including Nick.
Memoirs of an Invisible Man
Nick hides at the Academy Club. He locates Dr. Wachs and asks for his help to reverse his condition. Wachs agrees to help, but Jenkins kills him to keep Nick's invisibility a secret. Jenkins' team gets a hold of Nick's background information but it doesn't prove very useful in finding him. It says that Nick has never been married, his parents are both dead, he has no relatives, a few friends but none that he's very close to, and he's not really dedicated to his job as he does it fast and loose. After reviewing Nick's profile, Jenkins says that Nick was an invisible man even before the accident. Nick infiltrates the CIA headquarters to find any information that can be used against them. Jenkins discovers Nick and tries to recruit him, but Nick is disgusted by the idea of him killing people. They have a confrontation, but Nick gets away.
Nick goes to San Francisco and stays in George's remote beach house. George arrives with his wife Ellen, Alice, and another friend, to spend the weekend. Nick phones Alice and tells her to meet him nearby. He reveals his condition to Alice, and she promptly faints. When she revives, Alice decides to stay with Nick and help him. They travel to Mexico, where Nick can start a new life. To make money, he trades stocks using Alice as a proxy. Jenkins tracks them down, and shoots Nick with a tranquillizer gun. Nick falls into a river, revives and escapes. He makes his way to a video store, where he records his memoirs on video tape, including an ultimatum for Jenkins: exchange Alice for the tape, or Nick will give it to the CIA and the press. Jenkins agrees to the exchange.
Chase found Goldman's script too comedic, "Clark Griswold becoming invisible", and sought screenwriters to rework it, reportedly to do something "more serious, with more adventure", eventually approaching Dana Olsen and Robert Collector. Richard Donner was attached to direct for eight months given his experience with visual effects, something that made various potential directors turn down the project. Eventually someone suggested John Carpenter, and Chase approved the idea.[8] Carpenter was then in a legal dispute with They Live production company Alive Films regarding his contract. He had several projects fall through: a film with Cher called Pincushion, Exorcist III, and a version of Dracula. He was reluctant to make Memoirs at first. "When you have lots of money and lots of time, it's really grueling. I enjoy being an independent, and it's not possible to be one in this situation. But then I thought. 'Why not?' I hadn't done a movie for a long time."[9] The actor had to convince Warner Bros. that Carpenter, who they still saw as a horror director, could work well for the picture.
Chase would wear a blue bodysuit below his clothing, so that computer artists would erase his body through chroma key and match the clothes with computer-generated replicas so that even the inside of the clothing could be seen, along with other touches such as erasing the shadow made by Chase's body. A particularly elaborate effect had Nick's invisible face being covered in flesh-colored make-up. The make-up was applied to Chase as his head was covered in viscous blue cosmetic, tongue and teeth coated with blue food coloring, and the cornea of each eye covered with blue contact lenses, an uncomfortable makeover made worse by the June heat and heavy studio lighting.[3][13]
David Jenkins: I've dealt with people like this before. No close personal ties, no strong political beliefs, no particular interests... in fact, when you think about it, the man has the perfect profile. He was invisible *before* he was invisible.
"Memoirs of an Invisible Man" counts among its achievements the answer to the problem, what happens to the stuff inside the invisible man? The invisible men of the movies have traditionally been invisible because they were transparent - and not, say, because of some kind of optical refraction. Therefore you should be able to see the visible things inside of them. The contents of their stomachs, for example.
"Memoirs" does not go quite to that extreme (one potentially messy scene is handled by having him put on a coat), but there are amusing shots showing his lungs filling with smoke after he inhales on a cigarette. I am the sort of person who is inspired to strict logic by scenes like that, and found myself wondering: What about the fillings in his teeth? Dirt under his toenails? Contact lenses? "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" would have been paralyzed as a movie if it started asking questions like that, but it does ask questions that didn't occur in the classic Claude Rains "Invisible Man" of 1933. And it forces the woman in the invisible man's life to ask some questions, too, although not perhaps the most provocative ones.
The story this time involves Chevy Chase as a man who is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a secret government experiment goes haywire. He is rendered invisible, and so are parts of the building where the experiment took place. The building is left resembling a large block of Swiss cheese with large holes here and there, as if a postmodern architect had finally been given completely free rein.
The plot is lazy and conventional. What is good about the movie involves Chase and Hannah, who have to work out between them the logistical problems of their strange relationship. It's one thing when love is blind, but another when the lover is invisible. Chase appears in public muffled in clothes from top to bottom, or he sneaks around invisibly and eavesdrops on people, or in one clever sequence Hannah creates a face for him by painting one on with makeup.
Unlike, say, HOLLOW MAN (another supposed mediocrity by an auteurist favorite), where a bad guy's worst impulses are exacerbated by power and lack of accountability, this is its narcissist protagonist's worst nightmare, a hellscape where survival is dependent on nobody knowing you're even in the room. It's less interested in all the cool stuff you could do if you were invisible and the power that might ostensibly give you, instead spending most of its time on the day to day pain in the ass of not being able to see your hands in front of your face.
In some ways, Memoirs of an Invisible Man is a 1992 film directed by John Carpenter about a stock analyst who turns invisible after a spilled coffee mug blows up an experimental laboratory. But in more ways, Memoirs of an Invisible Man is the story of Chevy Chase becoming the Joker.
Imagine Sam Neill in the Chevy Chase role and Chevy Chase removed and retired from acting. We might actually have a digestible film. One with Carpenter's name over the title. As is, you cannot call it a Carpenter film. It's a Chevy vanity film. And has there ever been an actor less suited for drama - or noirish voice over - than Chevy fucking Chase? A Carpenter/Neill invisible man circa '92 just sounds like peanut butter and jelly to me. Neill's the perfect Claude Rains surrogate too. There can be a vulnerability to him but also seeds of menace. The perfect hollow man type. But Chevy fucking Chase is in this and his black hole performance frightens for all the wrong reasons.
Like the bewildered moviegoers of 1992, I was expecting this to be more of a comedy, but it's actually a pretty straight scifi North by Northwest riff about how being invisible would actually be a nightmare, aka a pretty poor vehicle for the particular acting talents of Mr. Chevy Chase. But it has plenty of other pleasures, smooth and watchable even when it isn't particularly identifiable as Carpenter, and I gotta love the whole lefty anti-authoritarian/CIA/finance vibe it has. Sam Neill, as always, nails it completely through the wall.
The central joke is that Nick Holloway (Chase), an overly-libidious, hard drinking stock market analyst, devotes his time to keeping a low profile at work then is accidentally turned invisible. Cue a prolonged chase by an off-the-rails CIA man (Holloway is perceived as the final word in espionage) and Alice (Hannah) who, curiously, is keen to carrying on seeing, as it were, a man who is totally invisible.
Chevy Chase plays Nick Halloway, a rich San Francisco investment banker who gets turned invisible by a scientific accident. Sinister government intelligence agent and hatchet man David Jenkins (Sam Neill) pursues Nick as a potential asset. Nick meets a pretty woman, Alice Monroe (Daryl Hannah), who helps him out. Eventually, Nick outwits Jenkins and goes to live in Switzerland with Alice, although he stays invisible. Roll credits.
I never bothered with the movie, but the book was pretty good. It definitely went into all sorts of details about how hard it would be to live, thrive and survive in New York if you were invisible and on the run from a dedicated nutjob with the backing of the US government. Definitely worth a read if the concept interests you.
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The story tells of Nick Halloway, a self-absorbed stock analyst who, through no fault of his own, becomes involved in a scientific accident which renders him invisible. Nick soon finds himself on the run from a renegade CIA operative who will stop at nothing to have him captured and is forced to seek the help of Alice, a girl he sought to romance before the accident occurred. 041b061a72