Archive for the ‘Comedy’ Category

« Older Entries

Working-Class Heroes

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

Actor/co-writer Will Ferrell and director/co-writer Adam McKay have a habit of making movies that promise better ones. Anchorman is a broad absurdist comedy with shards of gender resentment; the picture seems to want to blossom into something more ambitious than its’ already-assured status as the next Caddyshack, but it’s ultimately more or less content to color within the lines. Talladega Nights is more clearly split in sensibility; there’s that long, much-discussed Sunday dinner scene with the crass product placements and the shouting and the ridiculous Jesus outbursts; and there’s those occasional intrusions into the film by (pretend) sponsors. Step Brothers is the most rambunctious, insane, and complete of the duo’s projects, but it never quite finds a target or a focus (clearly partially the point) even if it is still one of the better mainstream comedies in the last several years. A movie, I might add, with which I completely missed the point of the first time out.

The general preoccupation of these movies, besides creating varying ever-escalating opportunities for Ferrell and company to blow their tops, is the hostility that men and women tamper down in order to function in society. The point of these pictures is that that hostility is unleashed; Ferrell and his ensembles, relying on considerable improvisation, wallow in the confusion and self-consciousness and self-absorption that consumerist society encourages. This is most apparent in Step Brothers, with the intentionally overt references to the Cheesecake Factory, to Dane Cook, to Bed, Bath and Beyond. The happy ending of Step Brothers, which I initially took to be straight-forward, is, it now seems to me, meant to be ironic. Ferrell and John C. Reilly are delusional losers who, near the end, pick a different delusion in order to function more conventionally in mass society. Yet, every successful character (most memorably Ferrell’s brother’s wife) is painted as deranged and miserable, with a clock ticking over their heads toward the inevitable implosion.

The Other Guys is Ferrell and McKay’s most successfully conventional movie (though Ferrell isn’t officially credited as screenwriter this time). This movie proves that these guys can, from start to finish, make something that looks like a mainstream all-star movie, with three clearly defined acts with action beats that, while not especially memorable, are at least in league with most of what constitutes action these days. The picture is more clearly “blocked”, with more mind paid toward shots looking like shots. There’s less turn-the-camera-on-see-what-we-get spontaneity this time, most of the jokes play as if they were scripted, then rehearsed, then delivered.

Yet again, The Other Guys suggests potential for a movie that doesn’t quite materialize. The picture is initially meant as a parody of buddy cop action movies, a premise that’s, of course, as unoriginal by now as the subject of the parody itself. The Other Guys opens with a predictably loud, hyperbolic chase, with two rowdy badasses (Samuel L. Jackson and The Rock) smashing and grabbing and destroying half the city to bring down what turns out to be minor perps. Most of the first act is awash in promising jokes that don’t quite land their targets. Jackson and The Rock are too obviously posed as fascist hunks, particularly Jackson, who is entirely incapable of a performance these days that isn’t pitched to the rafters of a theater somewhere on one of the outer rings of Saturn. At first, you think that the scale here – the largest McKay has worked on – has mooted the team’s sensibility. Everything is played obvious and too buddy-buddy, including the casting of the supporting cops, which includes that one seemingly senseless, brain dead lug from the terrible tazer scene in The Hangover.

Then Jackson and The Rock leave the picture (in another promising gag that doesn’t quite pay off) and we see that the buddy cop thing is misdirection. The Other Guys are Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg; one a dweeb content with the paperwork (seen as the bitch work), the other a bad boy cop himself disgraced by a screw up (yet another promising joke that doesn’t quite work). These misfits find themselves with a case that could potentially sweep them into the limelight, to the place once occupied by Jackson and the Rock, and it is here that the movie somewhat takes off. The Other Guys is, like the other McKay/Ferrell movies, about repression and barely-checked outrage at the status quo of society, it is about our media addictions, with jokes on the inferiority complex of online writers, the physical discrepancies between people who look like Ferrell (a lot of us) and people who look like Wahlberg (not nearly as many), and the humiliating jobs that supposed bad boy cops have to take on the side (another Bed/Bath reference), among others. The picture, in short, is meant as a parody of the desperation the recent economic collapse has caused, a parody of the fame/regular guy caste system. (It is certainly no coincidence that the villain, played by Steve Coogan, is a Bernie Madoff variation, or that one of the best, most uncomfortable, jokes involves one of his henchmen supposedly killing himself.)

We see what the new found McKay (kinda) polish could build toward: contrast; a picture that opens conventionally and slowly unleashes the old Ferrell madness, which would seem crazier with a normalcy effectively established as counterpoint. Sadly, The Other Guys, a PG-13, never quite goes far enough; you keep counting the great-on-paper jokes that should be allowed to mutate into something more outrageous and thematically complete. Ferrell’s character turns out to be a hidden madman, a great idea that, again, gives the actor contrast, a starting point, a course. Ferrell is a dwarfed regular guy, a regular guy with dimensions of survival and self-preservation and canniness that Wahlberg doesn’t grasp. Ferrell, in a gag that does pay off, has an inexplicably beautiful wife (Eva Mendes), as well as a parade of ex-lovers who aren’t over him. The idea goes with the Jackson/Rock riffs in the beginning, as well as with the businessmen who are screwing everyone over – this is a little guy empowerment thing, a somewhat self-loathing parody of a guy enjoying the baubles of celebrity with nary an explanation (I wish they hadn’t delivered an explanation at all, but that joke works too.) The partners, over the course of the movie, switch places: Ferrell is the sexual aggressor, Wahlberg is the emasculated one with a woman he can’t quite get.

The picture is eventually a tribute to the anonymous working-class, and while that jives with everything that comes before, you wish that Ferrell and McKay hadn’t been so forgiving. You wish that a great sex joke between Mendes and Ferrell, with him screwing her while she’s dressed as her mother, would be allowed to grow wilder and wilder. You wish that Ferrell and Wahlberg’s wonderful performances had been allowed to reach full lunacy. You wish that Michael Keaton, who is every bit as good as you hope as the police captain, had been used in more original ways. You want, after four movies worth of implication, for these guys to throw the pop-cultural hand grenade that they seem to be capable of throwing. The Other Guys, still amusing, at least shows that McKay and Ferrell now know how to dress a wolf up in sheep’s clothing.

The Eclipse is an easy movie to overlook, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it has a modesty that is becoming and ultimately rather poignant. That has a lot to do with Ciarán Hinds and writer-director Conor McPherson’s treatment of him. The Eclipse is one of those movies where a bereaved man mostly performs quiet tasks while being quietly bereaved. The difference between this and any number of “mysterious tragedy long ago” pictures is Hinds’ containment, his refusal to pity himself. Hinds’ character, Michael Farr, lost his wife sometime in the past. He’s also a failed writer working a visiting-writers’ workshop in a small seaside Irish town; which means he also has to weather the casual superiority and entitlement of the visiting writers. Michael doesn’t pull any of the tricks you expect him to: he doesn’t pester the writers to look at his work, he doesn’t hint, he doesn’t cry in his room once he’s all alone at the end of the night in order to assure that we get it. He tends to his work, he tends to his daughter, and you can tell that, to him, his dull sort of bored lack of happiness is a relief from the pronounced unhappiness of his past. You grow to admire Michael, who has moved beyond notions of self-entitlement. He’s bravely parred of expectation.

And that pulls you toward him, you sense that he’s reached a point that deserves reprieve. The picture eventually becomes a kind of ghost story, with Michael seeking a visiting supernatural writer’s advice, and McPherson’s quiet, calm, command of mood takes you in. This is a supernatural picture with a sense of the every day, so the appearances of the ghosts feel like an actual intrusion, which is unusual for most horror films announcing themselves as horror with a capital H. Michael Farr is one of the most purely likeable characters I’ve seen in a movie this year; and, in the irresistible ending, he gets to, as a Peckinpah character once said, “enter his house justified”.

Everyone in The Expendables tries to enter their house justified. This is a Sylvester Stallone movie, which means there’s a lot of lame self-congratulatory humor disguised as self-deprecation. You know this picture by now: it is a Dirty Dozen animal with a bunch of past-their-prime stars invited back for another round of back-slapping, knife-throwing and gun-firing: in addition to Stallone, there’s Mickey Rourke, Eric Roberts, Dolph Lundgren, Steve Austin, Randy Couture and, for relevance, the younger Jason Statham and Jet Li. In an exceptionally lame cameo, there’s also Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis.

I will be forthcoming: I could only make it through an hour of this thing. If you feel that should disqualify me from weighing in, then I understand and hope you still steer clear of this movie in case you haven’t already checked it out anyway. I am somewhat usually sympathetic to Stallone’s shtick, I admire his clever ability to stay in the game, but The Expendables is one of his worst pictures…ever. (Yes, I’ve seen Cobra.) Dull, ineptly staged, Stallone takes himself too seriously to stage a simple blood bath, he wants you to feel for these cliches, to miss the meat-head, sexist, politically pathetic action movies of the 1980s. There are a few moments that are passable in comparison to the rest of the picture: Rourke gets to do his bit where he rambles on for minutes about nothing in a way that’s ludicrous and still sort of cool. (It’s his version of Brando’s late career nonsense authority.) Statham, the only real actor in a prominent role (Rourke, from what I can tell, is just a walk-on), somehow convinces you that this somehow means something to him. But this picture is the pits, a condescending effort by a rich star to throw red meat to what he sees as his beer-swilling rube audience. The Expendables are faux working-class.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

Strands of Need

Wednesday, August 25th, 2010

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, based on a series of “graphic novels” by Bryan Lee O’Malley, is a romantic comedy set among the contemporary early 20s set, which means its set among the perpetually indecisive. Scott (Michael Cera) plays in a band, crashes with his gay (sexual orientation highlighted because it is – purposefully – the character’s only defining characteristic) roommate Wallace (Kieran Culkin), and dilly dallies with a high-school student called Knives (Ellen Wong) who clearly adores him. Scott’s issue is somewhat vague in that you can’t quite tell if he’s stuck, lazy, or playing at some sort of hipster malaise. A little bit of all most likely, but he strikes you as being mostly befuddled, crippled by an especially intense strain of self-absorption. There is nothing he wants, and so he does mostly nothing.

Scott’s saving grace – for him, at least – is that he is a photogenic kind of dork-loser. He isn’t especially physically attractive (Cera’s chin appears to be evaporating – he could be the live-action Chicken Little), but he’s faintly cute in a way that women tend to think of when they say they’re into funny guys, or that they are into “geeks”. Scott is the kind of guy – undemanding, with a vacancy upstairs that gives him an illusion of confidence – that gives girls an illusion of their own originality; they can applaud themselves for not dating a stereotypically attractive or successful man. It’s an extension of the pretend-rebellion you see in people who must behave as artists to compensate for not actually creating art: men-children such as Scott go with (or for) the colored hair and the tattoos and the voices of unceasing disenchantment. Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) turns out to be the neon-hair girl literally of Scott’s dreams. She’s an object to pursue, a potential do-over in place of a past ex who has gone on to the sort of successful music career with which Scott pretends to aspire. The picture is about Scott confronting Ramona’s “7 Evil Exes”, with a few of his own exes refusing to be forgotten as well.

The opening is funnier and more knowing than most any youth picture I can recall since Ghost World (which Scott Pilgrim resembles in a number of ways). In between the volleys of verbal bitchery, we see the confusion and loneliness. Scott’s band launches into a primal-stripped number, and the camera pulls back and zooms in at once – a Hitchcock trick – to underscore the vacuum, the hopelessness, of these characters, with the music literally floating toward the sky in self-consciously retro 1980s Nintendo/Atari/arcade graphics that will come to partially define everyone in the picture.

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World gives you a lift – its a beautifully transporting whirly-gig of a movie. This picture is exhilarating in a specific kind of way: you sense a promising filmmaker beginning to take hold of the medium in a way that is his; you sense his glee at his blossoming powers. The central contradiction is between the method of the movie and the characters themselves (again like Ghost World): the characters are – poignantly- self-pitying and adrift, while the film itself is breathless and ecstatic, an explosion of the various pop culture artifacts these people cherish. This movie is shot, cut and lit like a comic book and a primitive video-game at once, with pop-up facts and word bubbles, and super-powers that aren’t dully over-explained: they just are. Scott Pilgrim uses video-games to conquer the problem that movies have had with depicting how the internet has changed and affected us: surfing the web isn’t cinematic. Here, video-games, physically dynamic and exciting, allow us to see how the internet has influenced youth, how it has merged with pop culture to empower and confuse us.

The director here is Edgar Wright, and this is his third film following Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I have a great affection for those pictures, particularly Hot Fuzz, which somehow mashes the movies of Tony Scott, Bad Boys II, The Wicker Man, and a British comedy of manners into something coherent and original. Shaun of the Dead was well-directed in a somewhat self-effacing way that fit the material, but Hot Fuzz implied formalist ambitions. Hot Fuzz, which calls for an approximation of Tony Scott’s nearly subliminal hyper-stutter style, revealed Wright to have the potential goods of a cinema madman himself. Hot Fuzz doesn’t parody 1990s/2000s action movies; it recreates their occasionally addictive, pompously bombastic sugar-rushes only with visual (and mental) clarity. (It was also pretty damn funny.) Wright, a smash-up artist and gifted mimic, approximates his various sources even more effectively this time out. This picture is a sensory rush reminiscent of De Palma, and, like good De Palma, all the tricks and bits (split screen, animation, etc) mesh into something of one piece. And, again like De Palma, there are satirical implications, such as an early scene (a possible steal from Natural Born Killers) of Scott and Wallace exchanging glib one-liners that’s set to the Seinfeld score and laugh track. The picture, time and again, parodies the idea that TV and the internet have given us of everyone being a star, and, like The Incredibles, it shows what that indiscriminate elevation to celebrity leads to: everyone, once again, being just another number. The internet, revealing every niche to have followings in the thousands, obliterates our illusions of originality. Everyone in Scott Pilgrim is a rock star, a dancer, a warrior, a superhero, and what keeps the film from being a drag is that it understands that all of this sound and fury is still a fucking blast. But a blast with a price; even the picture’s setting, Toronto, is used as a gag for mass anonymity. A reliable, economically feasible, movie stand-in for cities across the world, Toronto is, like Scott and his friends, culturally everything and nothing at once. This movie, some kind of classic, is a true picture for its generation.

Scott Pilgrim is a romantic comedy with a refreshing streak of responsibility, characters who would be quickly discarded for plot convenience in other movies refuse to be forgotten – they get their say and their due. The Thorn in the Heart, Michel Gondry’s newest picture, is similarly empathetic, and it pulls a devastating sleight of hand on you. Michel returns to France to shoot his aunt Suzette telling stories of her marriage to Jean-Guy and of her adventures teaching in various school houses throughout the rural countryside. Suzette is a commanding presence, small and somewhat stooped, but with eyes that are piercing and intelligent. We see right away that Suzette fits the bill of that strict teacher you despised at the time but grow up to adore; the one, as the movies say, who “got through” to you. Suzette is an engaging storyteller, and she isn’t prone to undue sentimentality or to self-congratulation; like any great teacher, she puts you there, and the certain elements – the points – resonate long afterward.

The picture opens with a Gondry dinner. Suzette is telling a story of how Jean-Guy, who is now deceased, acted at a dinner many years ago. The scene is long and doesn’t explicitly inform much of what will follow, but it is possibly the key to the entire movie. Jean-Guy, a work-horse, a giant in the family, is, in a different way, the only equal in Suzette’s sphere, and the story of Suzette and Jean-Guy is really the story of Suzette and their son, Jean-Yves, who we slowly realize has continually disappointed his parents and himself. Jean-Yves, big, strapping, but awkward (he looks a little like the filmmaker Terry Gilliam), hides under long hair and bandannas and layers of clothing. At first, he appears to be an amusing anecdote along the route of mapping Suzette’s teaching experiences (he was a student of hers too), but we see his defensive body language, his hurt. We see how Suzette and Jean-Yves look at one another: quickly, now on to other things.

Michel never admits this, but it is clear, after watching the entirety of The Thorn in the Heart, that the movie was a ruse to unite Suzette and Jean-Yves. This isn’t the situation of popular melodrama, in which one of them is conveniently responsible or clueless. It is clear that a series of casual misunderstandings slowly took hold and became a much larger elephant in the room too difficult to work around. Jean-Yves is different from his parents at every turn: he’s gay, potentially a stifled creative, and the picture doesn’t give you much idea that he’s employed. It is suggested that Jean-Yves’ artistic ambitions may have been similar to Michel’s. It is more than suggested that Suzette always felt a greater affinity for her nephew, the magnificent creative, who didn’t have the masculinity of Jean-Guy or the mental ferocity of Suzette to contend with, Michel could be a whirlwind guest and could then go home. Jean-Yves is mostly “not Jean-Guy” or “not Michel”.

A few years ago, Gondry directed, from Charlie Kaufman’s script, one of the best pictures of the decade in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (a picture, I might add, that would make an interesting double-bill with Scott Pilgrim). In that movie his boundless visual imagination was justified and deepened. Since then Gondry’s been – not surprisingly given his free-associative talent – considerably uneven. The Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind have their moments, but they’re also irritating and never really take root. The Thorn in the Heart strips Gondry of most of his artifice, and what remains is a stirringly direct honesty and compassion: a true humanity. You respond to Gondry’s generosity: he never exploits his family, he never pries them for juicy moments of heartbreak, most of what I’m describing is slightly off-screen, a ghost. The picture, beautifully shot, boils down to something devastating in its simplicity: the need for communication, for interior atonement, the need to reach beyond yourself. One of Suzette’s final lines (altered slightly to make sense out of context), in reference to Michel, not Jean-Yves, says most of it:

Even when you were a boy we didn’t have to show our claws. With you there are things that I pick up on, that I grasp without feeling the need to make long speeches.

The Thorn in the Heart is a great movie.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Documentary, Reviews | No Comments »

Through the Cracks

Saturday, August 14th, 2010

For forty-five minutes, The Runaways is a good rock-n-roll movie. It’s a woman-empowerment picture that holds the empowerment – primarily of Cherie Currie (Dakota Fanning) and Joan Jett (Kristen Stewart) of the titular jail-bait rebel-yell act of the 1970s – in proper perspective, recognizing it as a hypocritical, manipulative snow job orchestrated by men, most prominently Kim Fowley (Michael Shannon), to get other men off. The picture allows this, but also understands that this sham-catharsis is still, for these girls, very real; and this gives the picture a contradictory pull that isn’t fussily sentimental. The family scenes – the girls are troubled in the usual ways – are stock but that’s intentional and makes sense: the desires that lay below most classic rock songs are stock. Fanning and Stewart are self-conscious performers, and this has limited them in the past, but that is obviously called for in this sort of picture. Stewart isn’t the focus – this is really Currie’s movie – so she isn’t called upon to do much more than she usually does, but this is her most satisfyingly human appearance in a movie since Into the Wild. Fanning is clearly a monster talent, and though she doesn’t get the charged sleazy chaos of the real Currie’s performances – some things can’t be faked – she has a frailty, unstudied (a Fanning first), that draws you in. Michael Shannon gives a classic coked-weird performance; and the scenes of he and the girls creating the signature “Cherry Bomb” have a distinctive magic: the beauty of working your ass off, of trial and error, of the sweat and tedium and calculation. (Most art/rock/writer movies avoid work – Rumpelstiltskin might as well be responsible for the output of most artists as portrayed in the movies). The second half of the picture is less interesting, it’s familiar come-down “what we did wrong” stuff, and it compromises the initial exploitation movie buzz of this thing. As it is though, The Runaways is still recommended.

Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile would make a wonderful double-feature with The Runaways. This doc, just an hour, goes into the making of the Stones’ classic Exile on Main Street. The picture is relatively dense with detail – the tax issues, the French mansion, the travel, the drink, the drugs, the myths – but it’s also lively and reverent without being too reverent. Stones in Exile manages something that should be impossible: it demystifies the album without demystifying it. Let’s try that again: the picture, and it is important that more movies do this, stresses the work that goes into creating anything, just as it stresses the incalculable chance of endeavors such as Exile on Main Street, which appear to be perhaps accidental leaps of faith. That said, the mystery of this album – an exhilarating, heartbreaking hurly-burly genre-bending masterpiece – remains.

The Losers is one of a number of band-of-tough-guys movies out this year. Here’s the secret: they almost always sound more fun than they actually are, because they generally have so many personalities to contend with that they never really get out of Act I and go anywhere. The Losers is thoroughly mediocre in that so-dull-its-relaxing-to-sorta-watch-while-drinking-a-six-pack-with-your-brother way. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has a gruff, charismatic sexiness; Idris Elba is wasted in a nothing disgruntled second banana role; Zoe Saldana has a slender/lithe woman-of-dreams sexiness (she’s also better than almost every movie she’s given), while Jason Patric enjoys whatever club in Miami this movie bought him.

Saint John of Las Vegas is so good-intentioned it doesn’t exist, with a number of indie-movie stereotypes hanging around so you feel better about your life. That said, it stars Steve Buscemi, the poet laureate of the broken alcoholic (when will he make a Bukowski movie?), so it isn’t all that bad. Well, it is, but Buscemi is still open, amusing, devastating, memorable, generous – a great actor.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Reviews | 1 Comment »

What We Always Want

Sunday, July 4th, 2010

Most stories, whether they be movies or paintings or print, are stories of people finding their place in the world, or of not finding that place. The Toy Story movies are a remarkable series of mainstream American pictures in that that subtext grows more and more urgent with each entry: more urgent, more original, more powerful. The first Toy Story, as my memory allows, is a fun, streamlined adventure that was basically a tale of sibling rivalry. Toy Story 2 was, particularly in its “to be or not to be…packaged” dilemma, a mortality play – a symbolic story of young people’s first realization that they are destructible. Toy Story 3 bridges the concerns of the first two pictures together: it’s about characters who, understanding their impermanence in this world, need something that allows them to be truest to themselves while they’re here.

Reading myself, it occurs to me that I’m making Toy Story 3 sound like an existential slog, the sort of thing that Woody Allen has been boring us with for decades. This was also my issue with Pixar’s prior Up, which wore its subtext on its sleeve at the expense of invention. In the case of Up, the critics mistook a marvelous opening for an entire picture, and let the sentimentality and dull “old man/kid” scenario slide. Toy Story 3 is basically, in terms of broad story, the same movie as Up: both are “what the hell do we do with the old man” movies that bear a bit of resemblance to Leo McCarey’s heartbreaking Make Way for Tomorrow. In Toy Story 3 though, the subtext is fleet, organic, allowed to enrich an adventure story that would be functional even without the “grown up” melancholia.

In Toy Story 3, the same amount of time has passed for the characters that has passed for us since the last entry. It is a decade or so later, and Andy is about to go off for college; his toys, which he carelessly refers to as “junk” (one of the more casually devastating scenes in the movie) are ready to be either packed in the attic (likely), taken with Andy (absurd), or donated to a daycare center down the street (very likely). As Mick LaSalle wrote, each possibility carries a parallel that the movie is polite enough to allow us to grasp for ourselves: the attic is pawning you off on a relative who doesn’t really want you, college with Andy is letting your child keep you, the option you really want even if you know you’re secretly putting your child out, and the daycare center is, well, a daycare center, which we generally call “homes”. Death, barely thinkable, is the trash, a possibility that hangs over every turn.

By this point, the Pixar team has convinced us of this world: the inner-relationships among Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, Pig, T-Rex, etc, have a specificity and dimension that doesn’t match the best episodes of The Simpsons, but at least comes closer than most contemporary comedies do. The subject matter, of course, has ready made pathos, and there is a sentimentality here that transcends any real world equivalent: the toys are selfless, their happiness defined solely by the happiness of someone who no longer needs them. There’s a chance for parody in this notion, an opportunity to tweak the absurdities we sell ourselves of eternal, selfless devotion, but this picture isn’t interested in that – this is a naked, cleansing desire, free of irony. A desire that is poignant because we recognize it as fantasy. Lotso (Ned Beatty), the best villain the Pixar team has given us, scrambles this devotion reverie a bit. A huge purple teddy bear, Lotso is part corrupt prison warden (much of the movie is a riff on prison escape pictures, with a little horror movie/Sam Fuller Shock Corridor for good measure), part slave trader, part glad-handing southern Senator, all deranged manipulator (one could be cute and say that all of those roles are the same anyway). He’s self-interested fury, a twisted monster born of a casual misunderstanding that broke him. (The tale of that misunderstanding is Pixar’s best five minutes: period.) Toy Story 3 is – occasional broad speed bump notwithstanding – a great movie.

The place for the characters of Get Him to the Greek is a place – traditional to the work of producer Judd Apatow – of understanding with a good looking woman or famous person or both handy to inflate your sense of yourself as someone who can readily hang with hot and/or famous people. The picture, written and directed by Nicholas Stoller of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, is a spinoff of that earlier film. The amusingly named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), the reformed rock star last seen banging Sarah Marshall, is now quite resolutely off-the-wagon: shooting up and wallowing in one night stands and elaborately logical justifications of self-pity. His savior is Jonah Hill, a green (Green is his name even), idealistic record company employee recruited to rope Snow into a 10 year anniversary concert meant to boost sales of a flagging library of titles.

The picture is the funniest and most purely appealing movie from the Apatow factory since the nearly-demonic Superbad. The Apatow-ian leisure with scenes, which is normally a polite way of saying that someone could stand to cut footage for the sake of the movie and not friends’ screen time, actually serves this picture: the ease sets Greek apart from recent impersonal amateur-hour smashes like The Hangover. Hill and Brand are both terrific. Hill’s live-action Cartman shtick was wearing him out quickly, in this role he rolls with the vulnerability that’s always implied but rarely explored. Hill, young as he is, is almost shockingly in touch with his physicality – he knows, frankly, what his considerable weight needs to accomplish for him any given scene. In Superbad, Hill played an intolerable blowhard overcompensating for a belly he knew people found, at best, unappetizing. Hill is playing a different, more poignant, fat boy here: someone imprisoned by their weight, a wallflower who discounts himself before anyone else has the chance. Hill is a promising actor, and he’s ready to break free from Apatow, who limits his performers with his beyond-tiresome adherence to condescending geek-empowerment bullshit. Get Him to the Greek repeatedly tells us that Brand must reign in his addictive, self-destructive tendencies without ever holding the mirror to Hill, a young man who clearly, at probably nearly four hundred pounds, has addiction issues of his own. This is part Apatow snow-jobbing, part grander society snow-jobbing, which pretends that weight problems are a different sort of addiction best handled by various meaningless generalities spoken to abide by something vaguely defined as “politically correct”. Hill gives a real performance here. Hollywood, give him a real character.

I can’t tell if Brand is an actor or a found object, but he at least proves that he’s an interesting found object, he gives Aldous strands of eccentricity and purposefully showy displays of self-loathing that struck me as fairly real, or at least real as defined by crap like Entertainment Tonight. But, Brand is also compromised by the canned feel-good TV movie stuff that made the Apatow-directed Funny People long and false and weird. Get Him to the Greek is basically a faster, funnier remake of Funny People: it is about the intense hope that a celebrity finds you cool, and, by the picture’s rationale, makes you a better person. That’s incredibly suspect, dangerous (and typical) stuff for movies to tell us. Get Him to the Greek is well-performed and funny, and Stoller has potential – its pretty good total bullshit, and, like most things, it won’t hurt you as long as you understand what it is.

Posted in 2010, Action, Comedy, Reviews | No Comments »

Wearing It Well

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Pierce Brosnan is a switch-hitting movie-star/actor – Hugh Grant is another – who uses his handsomeness as implicit satirical barb. The joke of a number of Brosnan performances is that he’s every bit as self-absorbed and mercenary as his getting-better-with-age looks imply. This attitude syncs with the world view of many of Roman Polanski’s movies, particularly his mysteries (Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Ninth Gate); as the punchline of many of his pictures is the obviousness of their solution: the clearest explanation is usually correct, but everyone still misses it, they’re distracted by their own self-absorption and wishful-thinking and need to over-complicate. Brosnan, with his what-you-see-is-exactly-what-I-am self-critique, is an ideal embodiment of Polanski’s cynicism, which isn’t tedious because we see how amused Polanski is; the director has a gift for making futility funny.

As former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, under investigation for suspicious involvement with the torture of suspected terrorists by the CIA (an allusion to Tony Blair), Brosnan carries a little more weight in the middle than usual and subtly undermines his own authority as a self-reliant star; his Lang is a charismatic cipher that’s more than a little vulnerable and lost, and this is never more obvious than when Lang is, of course, at his most blustery and self-impressed. Stars pretend to challenge their vanity all the time, many of them never seem to be happier than when gaining or losing weight for an Oscar, but Brosnan doesn’t rub your face in it – he’s a good looking man playing a good looking man whose perhaps limited usefulness has begun to reach its potential end. That, in its quietness, is sadly somewhat daring for a movie star. This is Brosnan’s best performance since the terrific, under-seen, The Tailor of Panama.

The rest of the movie matches him; you watch The Ghost Writer with the simple, exhilarating pleasure of knowing that every single scene is played in exactly the right tone and held for exactly the right amount of time – and that everything on the surface is a casual, resigned parlor game. The picture is, by general definition, a “political thriller”, but that conjures thoughts of bloated, convoluted, earnest messes. Polanski’s picture is another of his domestic power plays in restricted spaces, in this case, the Langs’ gorgeous, creepy vacation hideaway somewhere off the East Coast. The house, as others have written, is a character in itself (I love Glenn Kenny’s observation that the Langs’ residence is everything the sterile, nearly sci-fi environment of Branagh’s remake of Sleuth wanted to be) and the place has, with masterly Polanski suggestiveness, the air of a hard, too-geometrically “right” piece of art that looks as if it could actually hurt you. Images of Lang’s “ghost”, the titular writer assigned to oversee his memoirs played by Ewan McGregor, sitting in front of windows revealing vast expanses of gray, insinuating nothingness have the kind of light, under-the-skin eeriness that was sorely lacking in this year’s earlier Shutter Island. The plot only makes as much sense as it needs to, and the final twist doesn’t quite have the bite that seems to be intended, but Ghost Writer is still mid to top-shelf Polanski, with wonderfully pared, nasty dialogue, and other sly, confident performances by McGregor (the first to deliver on the benefit of the doubt extended him for fifteen years), Olivia Williams, Tom Wilkinson, and, yes, Kim Cattrall. I wish the picture had a little more sexual heat, but that might not even be appropriate anyway; sex is just more procedure for these characters, like the formal dinners or the press conferences. The only element of common life that’s discussed with any passion here is the booze.

Noah Baumbach is a very talented filmmaker, and I’ve enjoyed, to varying extents, all of his pictures; but he could stand to learn that it isn’t always soft-soaping to occasionally allow characters to authentically enjoy themselves and one another – even the most miserable can, by decree of odds, experience a great kiss, or a really good hamburger, or, God forbid, love that isn’t tainted by hypocrisy. Baumbach is so obsessed with undermining platitudes that he over-compensates and winds up with something equally false in the other direction. I thought this worked in the overly reviled Margot at the Wedding, because I took the picture as a parody of the lies we sell one another at get-togethers, particularly weddings. But Baumbach’s new picture, Greenberg, isn’t a parody of anything – it is meant to be taken as a more or less straight (yet qualified) exploration of L.A., as well as an attempt to inject a contemporary movie with the loose threads and more novelistic, misleadingly rambling, structures of 1970s pictures such as those made by Hal Ashby, Paul Mazursky, and the Irvin Kershner of Loving. But Baumbach can’t get beyond a theatre of redundant, uncomfortable sequences in which, to quote one of the characters, “hurt people hurt people”.

That said, Greenberg is still one of Baumbach’s best pictures, and it’s nice to see a director look to the 1970s cinema for more than a chance to strip-mine the ironically beautiful grain aesthetics. Greenberg isn’t just pretty (though it is pretty), it structurally resembles 1970s mid-life pictures in allowing characters to just hang out. The opening credits sequence is particularly quiet and evocative: of terminally insecure/vulnerable Florence (Greta Gerwig) singing along with Steve Miller as she runs errands for her employer, a rich family that means clearly more to her than just a paycheck. It is established – in a few appealingly quick, lucid early scenes – that Florence looks at this as her family, particularly in her poignant concern for the house pooch.

Ben Stiller’s Greenberg is the black sheep of the family, and he moves in to house sit while everyone else (except Florence, who isn’t family when it really counts) ships off to Vietnam for reasons that are probably related to business. Greenberg, of course, falls into bed with Florence, allowing Baumbach another of his pictures in which every taken-for-granted convention is quietly dismantled with awkwardness and resentment. As I said above, it gets a little old, but the actors are vivid and impressive, and they shake up Baumbach’s scheme. Stiller doesn’t play a “prick” but an actual prick recovering from a stay in a mental institution that was probably more justified than everyone acknowledges. Unlike a number of comedians playing serious versions of their persona, Stiller doesn’t go dull and plead for pathos – his line readings are consistently surprising, and his physical acting is somewhat extraordinary (he’d fit with the Lang house). I’ve seen Gerwig in three or four pictures, and I still can’t tell if she’s an actress yet, but she is certainly a presence, a wonderful correction to our movie society of falsely confident robot starlets. She’s, to risk hyperbole, one of the truest embodiments of a woman in her 20s that I’ve ever seen. Gerwig seems to be chemically incapable of the sort of detached, big-boobied snark that rules the female roosts these days, and a number of her scenes here are jarringly raw…and right. The “girl sings a song in a bar to show us her tortured inner self” bit has been used in nearly every movie featuring a girl with a tortured inner self, but it’s actually effective here because Gerwig shows us what’s at stake, that private inner flesh that Greenberg will either release or destroy, or, more likely, temporarily release and destroy.

There are two other very good performances: by Rhys Ifans, who is heartbreaking in a simple role, and by Jennifer Jason Leigh, another actor chemically incapable of emotional subterfuge. Greenberg has quite a bit to recommend it, but it feels trapped; and a great late sequence, a party scene, shows us the movie that Baumbach otherwise allows to get away from him: we see that Greenberg’s bitterness and hostility play well with the younger generations, as they mistake his desperation for confidence (as Florence has been). That’s an interesting observation that the movie should have run with, and it would’ve imbued Greenberg’s numbing brow-beating with a much needed tongue-in-cheek quality that would also let the air out of the pompous self-pity of most youth movies. Baumbach needs to let go, or at least take a cue from Polanski’s cynicism and relax a bit. Polanski makes checking out look glamorous, that might be dangerous but it’s also a good night at the movies.

Posted in 2010, Comedy, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

9.

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Kael famously wrote that a great movie is rarely a perfect movie, but Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise is a perfect movie. That’s not showy hyperbole or misplaced ego on my part, if you’ve seen the picture you know exactly what I mean – and it isn’t really even a subjective issue. There isn’t a misplaced scene, there isn’t an “off” line or performance, and there isn’t one moment that is too long or too short. Trouble in Paradise, is, as is widely accepted, a masterpiece.

More young filmmakers need to familiarize themselves with masterpieces such as Trouble in Paradise, as one gets the impression that the contemporary idea of masterpiece has become one of a blunt, unpleasant, clobbering, thematically obvious movie. And romantic comedy directors could certainly stand to brush up on their Lubitsch, as he routinely achieved in seconds what many directors are more than happy to spend minutes upon minutes of pointless exposition establishing. Five minutes into Trouble in Paradise (including that justifiably famous opening, which introduces Venice with a trash collector), we know that our leads, Lily (Miriam Hopkins) and Gaston (Herbert Marshall) are thieves and that they are perfect for one another – equally matched. A few minutes later we are given – through a brilliant montage of various servants – the thieves’ eventually mark, Madame Colet (Kay Francis), one of those infuriatingly wealthy people blissfully ignorant of the processes of income and outcome that come to dominate many of our adult lives.

Trouble in Paradise has that traditional Lubitsch wit (“From Geneva comes the news that the famous international crook, Gaston Monescu, robbed the peace conference yesterday. He took practically everything except the peace.”), and the performances are somehow screwball, suave, and sexy all at once, but the picture, more importantly, hides a point in broad daylight. It’s another class picture, with the thieves going to work for the Madame, with Gaston, of course, falling for her. Jokes are routinely made of the Madame’s entitlement and myopia (the crooks have to tell Colet she’s been robbed in order for her to notice) but the picture isn’t mean spirited, “points” aren’t scored. The resentment between the have and the have-nots is explored within the boundaries of a peerless romantic fantasy of worlds few of us know populated by people who look as few of us look.

The gentle satire deflates the pomposity, self-congratulation, faux modesty, and moneyed fascism that has come to dominate so many romantic comedies, because Trouble in Paradise is empathetic to real human need, and it lands its final, most significant, point at the end when Gaston realizes that he can’t go on with the Madame, that’s he’s best for that little pickpocket who lifted his prize in the opening minutes. He can’t be with the Madame because she practices a different dishonesty – born of what she sees as the proper backslapping. Gaston sees that the Madame, attractive and charming as she may be, is trapped. And it’s a testament to Lubitsch’s mastery that the reconciliation of Lily and Gaston is succinct, witty, and moving – all in about a minute. These two are meant to have their hands in one another’s pockets.

I know the idea of this month, which I’ve already violated a number of times, didn’t have anything to do with contemporary movies, but I think it would be useful to discuss Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air in the context of one of the best romantic comedies ever made, as it represents almost everything that is wrong in American movies today. What is the most dangerous trend in American movies right now? I think it’s a glamorization of self-pity, an encouragement of self-absorption. More and more frequently, characters, particularly in romantic comedies, are allowed to run roughshod over everyone else, without any kind of examination on the part of the actors or the filmmakers. It’s an extension of how we view movie stars themselves: the awful Duplicity, for example, which has a plot not that dissimilar from Trouble in Paradise, is about nothing other than Julia Roberts and Clive Owen reminding us that they are Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.

Dracula and Sherlock Holmes are said to be two of the most oft-filmed characters in cinema history, but Ebenezer Scrooge might take the lead if you count all of the hypocritical anti-money movies that Hollywood has made, particularly over the last twenty years. The pictures are so prevalent they’re almost unnoticeable – white noise; but they are grotesque and morally skewed. These pictures – The Family Man comes to mind, Sweet Home Alabama is another – tell us that money doesn’t matter; and that the pursuit of it will warp us and divide us from our families. Middle-class people, who are generally portrayed as tasteless, poorly dressed rubes, are contradictorily worshipped as pillars of basic values and little ambition. Rich people are telling us that it’s ok we aren’t rich, because we fools are much luckier to be living forgettable lives unburdened by progress or self-examination. We are free to eat our ribs, and sit on the couch with our wives we secretly loathe (because these movies secretly believe us to be cowards for not being artists) and stew in our blissful ignorance.

Up in the Air follows this model to the letter, and, while you’d think it to be so bad as to be too obvious to be dangerous, it seems that many people, smart people even, seem to be taken in by it. The Scrooge of the movie is, of course, George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a smoothie (what else?) who is always mobile – always in flight – literally up in the air traveling cross country to fire people for companies wishing to dissociate themselves from the down-scale. The picture is fashionably incompetently shot and staged in the Jason Reitman tradition (he also made Thank You for Smoking and Juno) and it would be a forgettable, typical piece of hypocrisy-Americana were it not for a series of dismissal scenes that are said to be played by real unemployed people. These moments are the sort of clumsy bid for “relevance” that’s typical to contemporary movies, and Reitman, a Hollywood baby (Ivan is his father), is even more amazingly ignorant of the basic psychology of loss than you’d suspect. The laid-off people, who, as presented, might as well be perturbed animals in a zoo, are either enraged or sad, and they voice the film’s intentions in neat, pathetic little bites that sound like no one who has ever been fired. I’ve been laid off a number of times in my life, and I’ve seen many others get laid off or fired, and the prevailing mood is not one of sadness or anger, though they are the subtext (non-existent in this picture); the surface is one of feigned cheer and “adjustment”, of mild sucking up, a grasping at straws to maintain connections or maybe even somehow (though you secretly know this to be absurd) salvage some bit of the position or pay. There are few things more demoralizing than having to beg for a job you intensely despise. Reitman is a rich man trying to make a romantic comedy with a current of economic anxiety (a good idea), and he makes the mistake that only a rich person can make: that losing your job builds character and that, most offensively, these people are luckier than the hunky, rich Clooney because the girl he just banged turns out to be married.

Up in the Air has drawn some admiration for the ending, and, yes, it’s less resolved than we are used to (and Reitman has been very forthcoming with praise for himself on this and other matters) from our romantic comedies, but “sad” and “open” are not automatically synonymous with “good” and “reflective of common sense”. Clooney is left at the end, after reaching out to the girl (Vera Farmiga), still rootless, still hunky, still gainfully employed. We’re supposed to gather that he didn’t recognize the charms of his typically boorish family soon enough. This is an insidious, disgusting self-entitlement: Clooney holds everyone at arm’s length for his entire life and we’re to take it as tragedy that he’s rebuffed once. Rejection, doubt, embarrassment, self-loathing, these are traditional ingredients in the romantic stew of our lives, and we continually swallow them for the brief moments that someone looks into our eyes just right, or kisses us just right, or touches our shoulder just right, or leans into us just right, we weather the pain out of hope. Clooney is meant to be taken as damned, as symptomatic of our culture, when he’s just a superstar who has actually undergone a humbling, human, experience; if anything, that is a happy ending, but the movie doesn’t know that, and it doesn’t know anything else either.

Clooney does nearly career best work however, his age is showing more, and he has an unforced gravity that Up in the Air doesn’t earn. Farmiga is sexy and slightly skewed in that fashion that is becoming distinctive of her, and she has a legitimately intimate, hot chemistry with her leading man. You hope these two will one day have the opportunity to work together in a real movie.

Posted in 1932, 2009, Comedy, Reviews | 6 Comments »

4.

Friday, March 5th, 2010

Alexander Payne had been working toward Sideways throughout his previous three pictures – Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt – all of which alternated moments of well-oiled SNL caricature with messier, more tender, more ambiguous bits and pieces of uncertainty and longing. Payne is up to the same thing in all pictures, and his aim is so (sadly) unusual and admirable that I admit that I’m tempted to overrate him for intentions alone: he’s interested in making mainstream comedies populated by actual people; that are embraceable by all audiences without making impersonal concessions. Payne has been compared to Sturges, but that strikes me more as writers wanting readers to know they’re familiar with Preston Sturges. Payne’s heart is clearly at least partially in the 1970s (thankfully he doesn’t shamelessly ape 1970s aesthetics, one of the more dispiriting trends in acclaimed American movies these days), and a clear inspiration is Hal Ashby. Sideways is bathed in the sort of ironically gorgeous heartsick lighting that characterized Shampoo; and Payne also has an Ashby way of wringing a slightly different juice out of stock moments.

Sideways is, obviously, a buddy movie, one of those pictures where the horny guy and the nerd go on a road trip, and the horny guy rides the nerd for not getting laid as an excuse to rub the nerd in his own masculinity and indulge his own appetites. Paul Giamatti is, of course, the nerd, and he has a body language that tells us most of Miles’ story at first glance. The picture has a wonderful opening: we hear knocking on a door over a black screen, Miles, asleep, asks who it is, it’s a construction worker, and Miles’ hung-over exasperation – he’s suffered a mild defeat ten seconds into the day – tells us everything. Every episode in Miles’ life is a chore at best, an affront at worst, and he’s a serially depressed pill in desperate need of the kind of broken, approachable angel with which all desperate, depressed pills find themselves dreaming. Miles’ buddy, Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is aging relatively gracefully – he’s edgy and a little haggard in a fairly sexy way, his confidence is somewhat unjustified (he’s far too eager, and we see that in the way he fumbles and stretches his stunned “yeah” when a woman returns his interest) but we get why he’s does as well as he seems to do.

Payne tends to over-telegraph actors’ body language, but it’s refreshing to see a director working in the mainstream who even values body language – he’s staging little wars in his actors’ gestures. The moment where Miles and Maya (Virginia Madsen) discuss wine, with Miles giving her his autobiography through pinot noir grapes, is widely and justifiably quoted, but the more revealing moment comes right before that exchange: sitting on a couch, hearing Jack and Maya’s friend have loud sex, they flirt, not with one another exactly, but with whether this is a good idea. Giamatti’s posture – awful, squashed into the couch as asexually as presumably possible – is so madly right for this situation it would be worth seeing the picture for alone; and Madsen, who is playing a bit of an idealization (quiet, smart, kind, tolerant, shy, attractive, available) is just as good, her positioning is open, perhaps to a fault, she’s daring this dweeb to take a hint. (Compare this with Miles and Maya’s language together once they’ve had sex and grown more comfortable: lounging separately-yet-together reading and doing crosswords in the sun and grass.)

Miles’ inability to take a hint, is, once the sex and weddings and pining and alcohol have been pared away, the real drive of the movie. The picture ends (perfectly) with a different kind of knock on a door, perfect, not because we’re supposed to take that he and Maya will permanently wind up together (we doubt it), but because Miles has come to a point in his life in which he’s willing to open himself up – to take a damn hint.

Sideways is free of the cartoons of About Schmidt (which had lovely moments) – this picture has maybe ten scenes as memorable as Schmidt’s awkward trailer come-on, or his wedding speech, or his heartbreaking catharsis at the end. Church’s breakdown in the motel toward the end didn’t initially work for me, I thought it was false, but on re-watching it is clear that it’s supposed to be false – the work of a self-absorbed wannabe actor trying to get his bobble back. One thing many people have overlooked in Sideways is Jack’s own mid-life terror, which is every bit as intense and self-destructive as Miles’, only channeled differently.

Payne’s problem? He needs to relax his staging, which means he needs to be more prolific. You feel Payne, in the vineyard montages, wanting to cut loose from the very precise, clear blocking – you sense him wanting to get messy. Payne’s pictures, as wonderful as long stretches are, strike me as a tad too careful – you know he’s an intelligent man who knows the mechanics of making a movie that will be at least moderately well-received. Payne is capable of certain Ashby moments – such as most anything in Harold and Maude – but he hasn’t shown himself to be capable yet of making something as volatile as The Landlord. And you can tell he wants to – I’ve read interviews with Payne saying that he wants to start a script with no prescribed source or structure and see where it takes him. He wants, and needs, to knock on the door.

Posted in 2004, Comedy, Reviews | 2 Comments »

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call – New Orleans (2009)

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

bad20lieutenant20port20of20call20new20orleans20movie20posterI would love to run the credits experiment on Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans: remove director Werner Herzog’s name, replace with an unknown, maybe, I don’t know, Jaume Collet-Serra (his Orphan, far superior, could’ve used a bit of BL’s critical benefit of the doubt), and recalibrate the press’ response. The picture might get a few positive reviews anyway, it still has enough in the vaguely relevant satire department to register with a number of paid writers: New Orleans post-Katrina, Nic Cage in a consciously wiggy Vampire’s Kiss, apologetic-for-past-paychecks performance, a bad script performed with so straight a face it must be satire, etc. The picture has its moments, but it’s a workshop, not a movie, its talented people playing an on-set game of Mystery Science Theatre 3000: you get the straight-faced version of the lame scene right along with a slightly-off riff on the same lame scene.

It’s nice to see Nic having fun again; I’m somewhat sympathetic to his run of bad action movies, they’re more personal than many acclaimed contemporary performances in that they are clearly the work of a talented man having a mid-life crisis. Cage has as much conviction in his work in Con Air or Knowing as he does in Vampire’s Kiss or Leaving Las Vegas; the poignancy is in everyone else’s knowledge that that conviction is misplaced. In Bad Lieutenant, Cage is in on the joke, and, while there are a few bits in amusingly bad taste – such as a new version of the road-side sexual assault from the Keitel/Ferrara picture – its mostly just predictable, stale, self-amusement. This new picture is a post-modern, hip illustration of Farber’s gimp string: Cage/Herzog will stage 15 uninterrupted minutes of cop procedural that wouldn’t pass muster on Law and Order, and then justify it with a pull of calculated weirdness: a seemingly five minute lizard point of view, a break dancing soul, or a Jennifer Coolidge as a drunk in her worst performance.

There are things to admire: the flooded prison opening, Shea Wigham in a Michael Shannon performance (the real Michael Shannon also appears) and Eva Mendes is funny in a brief, purposefully thankless role, I’ve long suspected that she’s a better actress than her curves or lips will allow. The picture also has a nice way of allowing the worst thing possible in any given scene to actually happen, it parodies that pretend-humanity that most cop-thrillers revel in to excuse their bloodshed. Cage’s cop does whatever he pleases whenever he pleases, flips loyalties whenever it conveniences him, and nothing ever comes from it. The characters are gleefully mercenary and racist, and the equal-opportunity racism (everyone hates everyone) strikes me as more honest and potentially hope-affirming than the labored democracy of pictures like Forrest Gump, Crash, and probably The Blind Side and Precious. As a gangster everyone knows killed someone no one really cares about, Xzibit potentially upstages everyone else in the picture – his disbelief that a white man, let along a cop, would bother to smoke his crack is the closest this Lieutenant comes to being human.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Crime, Reviews | 1 Comment »

Pot Luck

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

sherlock-holmes-movieAs the new badge on the right signifies (or will signify), Paul C. and the gang have invited me back to participate in the Muriels, their online celebration of the prior year of movies; a party that includes other friends and luminaries such as Craig Kennedy, Daniel Getahun, Dennis Cozzalio, and Jim Emerson. The Muriels are a delight and I look forward to participating each year, honored to jump into the mad dash of “catching up” that is familiar to any essentially unpaid blogger.

I generally don’t care for or approve of one or two sentence “quickie” reviews that glibly sum up half a dozen movies in a hundred or so words, but, as I have no intention of devoting several more thousand + word posts to ’09 (time to move on), I figured I’d make a hypocrite of myself. The movies of ‘09 will inspire one, maybe two, more proper longish posts (certainly on This is It, Bright Star and Crazy Heart) and we shall then move on to our current year, which has already offered Fish Tank and a number of promisingly gory revenge thrillers to get to.

One more thing before the bullets that you’ve probably already skipped down to: I find that the month-long sprint rarely significantly changes my reaction to the movie year, though there’s always one picture, one masterpiece worth ten forgettable or mindlessly over-praised movies. In 2008, that exception for me was Mike Leigh’s glorious Happy-Go-Lucky, which would’ve been sung to infinitely annoying hyperbole on BC had I gotten to it in time. Last year, the picture was Jane Campion’s beautiful, bracingly intelligent Bright Star, which I saw in time to celebrate on the Muriels ballot as well as ponder in my next post.

As always, I enjoy this more than I should admit. And here we go:

Sherlock Holmes: not bad, not really much of anything. It’s a post-modern variation of the Butch and Sundance routine: we watch two charming, good looking men flirt, only this time the homosexual subtext is intentional, toyed with. Not really intentional enough though, Sherlock, despite the stars (Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law) and the director (Guy Ritchie) and the big sets and dirtier-than-usual period London detail, is primarily just the same-o. A good idea – linking Sherlock’s street brawling to his feats of deduction – goes nowhere, and the picture has a weird similarity in plot (cults, is-or-isn’t-he-for-real magician) to the not usually well-liked Spielberg production Young Sherlock Holmes.

A Perfect Getaway: fits right in with writer-director David Twohy’s series of sturdy, better than you expect, still somewhat unremarkable productions (Pitch Black, Below). This is another endangered tourists-somewhere-they-shouldn’t-be picture, though it has the nice novelty (and unrealized potential black joke) of featuring Americans in a strange land still stalked by Americans. The further you go, the more it’s the same. There’s a good twist here, something that points to a more interesting movie: a dirtier/messier prodding of the resentments between white-collar and blue-collar men. As the nerd with hot wife, Steve Zahn does his best work; he brings to the surface the wiry discontentment that has always given him potential. As the hunk with hot girlfriend and mad survival skills, the usually underrated Timothy Olyphant is just as good: coiled passive-aggressive, bitter. These performances are wasted though, A Perfect Getaway could’ve been a nasty pulp cover of A Knife in the Water, but the last fifteen minutes are terribly rote, leaving it a well-made time killer I still enjoyed.

Food, Inc.: I’ve read Fast Food Nation and parts of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, so I was familiar with most of the concerns of Food, Inc. going in. The picture offers two surprises: a. that visual evidence, particularly when it concerns the corn paste and shit-bathed meat that comprises the majority of most American’s diets, is far more persuasive than the written; and, b. the calm, focused, completely condescension-free tone. Food, Inc. could’ve been another exclusionary picture designed for foodies to congratulate themselves, but it instead looks you square in the eye and asks you to understand. This picture is designed to be understood by the masses, designed to affect real, measurable coherent change. That it most likely won’t only contributes to its poignancy. (I say this as someone who drinks enough diet soda per month to fill several swimming pools.)

The Cove: an ideal double-bill with last year’s Man on Wire, both are slick and entertaining at the expense of anything else. The Cove is a now familiar breed of heist documentary where, in this case, we follow several activists’ attempts to end and expose a Japanese island’s corrupt dolphin fishing expeditions. It packs a wallop in a pure emotional sense disconnected from reason or fact – the death of a dolphin, which the camera lingers on in a moment that could be called exploitive (it’s the equivalent of a prosecutor showing you messy murder photos whether they apply or not), is heart-wrenching. The remorse of Richard O’Barry, the lead protestor who feels personal responsibility for having corralled dolphins for the TV-show Flipper, is commanding. But the picture offers no real proof of its two significant points: 1. that we shouldn’t eat dolphins because they are a species of higher consciousness than previously believed; and 2. that we shouldn’t eat them because they are poisonous to eat and will deform and kill us. Point 2 is landed somewhat more convincingly than Point 1 which, going on this movie, is based on about as much hard fact as John Carpenter’s Starman. As Craig and others have also written, The Cove, beneath the smoke and mirrors, is basically arguing that we shouldn’t eat dolphins because they are cute.

Away We Go: Director Sam Mendes’ acclaim springs from two wells: 1. the belief that “art” must be laborious, obvious and unpleasant, and 2. that anything anti-American is profound. The anti-American thing particularly serves Mendes, who, as a Brit, serves us picture after picture of pretend peaks under the consumerist shell at the resentment and hypocrisy underneath. Of his pictures – American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road (a waste of a brilliant novel), and now Away We Go – I can only (kinda) recommend Perdition, which is deadly slow and apologetic of its B-movie tropes, but is at least generally well-acted. Think of it this way: if an American filmmaker were as obsessed with another country, and just as routinely stereotyped and just plain-out missed its culture, would they be celebrated?

I digress: Away We Go is potentially Mendes’ worst picture; written by the super-glib Dave Eggers and wife, it lacks even Mendes’ surface talents of mise en scene, as he is trying to ape an American indie style of pointedly little polish for the sake of integrity. But the Mendes method pushes through: this is polished non-polish, which is to say that Away We Go has the embarrassing hip-courting fashionably ugly look of an elderly man wearing tight, intentionally faded torn jeans. The performances, excluding Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels and Jim Gaffigan, are ridiculously over-the-top and self-congratulatory (Allison Janney, whom I normally like, is particularly dreadful): this is another group of rich performers reveling in their superiority of the middle class, who are, once again, generally characterized as confused cowards with little or no variation. One of the worst of ’09.

For an idea of what Mendes always misses, check out Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s artful, funny, occasionally devastating Tokyo Sonata, which plays as a sort of Japanese answer to Laurent Cantet’s also fabulous Time Out. Which means that Sonata is another financial anxiety picture, and Kurosawa keeps the tension simmering by omitting the wish-fulfilling catharsis that an American Beauty or Fight Club revels in: the lead character loses his job, and we cut away before we’re expressively informed of either the firing or the lead’s reaction. A boy yearns for piano lessons, misuses money to purchase them, and we cut away before we can hear him play, in a dispute between father and son, we see the mother frozen in the background – literally stunned – calculating the move that will keep her family from completely disintegrating. We don’t need the fireworks; as the father, Teruyuki Kagawa has this wonderfully expressive corkscrew face that tells us everything: he’s (unintentionally) splintering his family to maintain some desperate absurd understandable sense of pride in the face of being a Director-of-something-or-another-turned-janitor. The picture takes a risky, interesting on paper, left turn into thriller territory at the end that it doesn’t quite pull off, but Tokyo Sonata is mostly amazing, especially because everyone’s pain is treated with respect, and equally.

Lorna’s Silence, the latest from the internationally adored Belgium siblings The Dardennes, isn’t on the level of their Son or Child, but those pictures manage the awesome feat of actually being as good as everyone claims. At their best, The Dardennes manage a challenging, original empathy without resorting to showy hand-standing to ensure we get the universality of their movies. Lorna’s Silence, essentially a thriller with their delicate, minute touch, doesn’t walk as fine a line. The Dardennes lose perspective on their Lorna, we’re invited to sympathize with a fairly tedious creature who (convincingly) shim-shams back and forth, trying to hold on to a bit of morality in a scam that hinges on at least one murder. The performances are, as usual with the Dardennes, wonderful; and there is a great scene between Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) and her prospective mark (Jérémie Renier), a heroine addict, who she sleeps with to keep from relapsing. That moment has the surprise of The Son and The Child. The rest is a well-staged delay of the inevitable, and it is somewhat sentimental.

Posted in 2009, Action, Comedy, Documentary, Drama, Reviews | No Comments »

The Invention of Lying (2009)

Sunday, January 24th, 2010

lyingThe Invention of Lying read beautifully on the page, an appealingly modest tribute to the bullshit and delusion we need to get through each casual defeat; on the screen, however, the picture is an indifferent botch. Ricky Gervais’ comedy always threatens to tumble into self-absorption, self-loathing, and condescending faux-modesty, but his timing, and ironic compassion (and the fact that he’s pretty damn funny) usually redeem it. The Invention of Lying, which Gervais co-wrote and co-directed in addition to headlining, is a tribute though, a big gimmick designed to tell that world that it really loves Ricky beneath his portly frame and snub nose, both of which are repeated punchlines. Invention of Lying is basically the comedian’s Barbara Streisand movie.

The premise, that no lying, humoring, fiction, or pretense of any form exist, is neat but quickly becomes tedious and flawed as the “truth” of this picture is a predictable stand-up comic’s truth: that everyone will always say the worst thing imaginable (as bad as PG-13 will allow that is). The Invention of Lying can be broken down into two or three alternating scenes: a good looking person dwarfs Ricky, a bad looking person tells Ricky he wants to die, two good looking people revel in their pleasure of being good looking. The truth is that Gervais clearly agrees that bad looking people are always miserable and less socially adept than good looking people, and he is celebrating himself as having crossed over into the Promised Land with his fame and considerable talent. The party is accented with a number of celebrity cameos and guest performances that have little to do with the picture: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Edward Norton, Tina Fey, Rob Lowe, etc. (A few of these bits are vivid – Hoffman gives a fuller impression of pain in ten seconds than Gervais does in 100 minutes, and Jonah Hill goes farther with his melancholia than you’d expect.)

It has a few nice little quips, but the cast is so (touchingly) in awe of Gervais that nothing is at stake; and nothing means much of anything. The picture isn’t badly directed, it isn’t directed at all – ugly, no pace, no shape, no rhythm. The Invention of Lying would be a forgettable vanity project if it didn’t turn into an unoriginal religion parody in its last third. As an agnostic, I’m sympathetic to the picture’s aim, but Gervais doesn’t quite land the one scene that tries to empathize with our need for pretend governing beliefs (as an illusion of structure in the midst of death); instead its just hip distance. For Gervais in movies, see the vastly superior, sadly underrated Ghost Town.

Posted in 2009, Comedy, Reviews | No Comments »

« Older Entries