Strictly From Hunger

Except when it isn't

2010-09-07T09:26:00.001-05:00

"I’ve also had a nice chance to see the inner workings of that Hollywood world, which was interesting and not irrelevant, I think, to someone trying to understand American culture: this big storytelling machine, that employs some of the most talented/beautiful/energetic people in the world, and has complicated financial/corporate constraints, but still manages, sometimes, to make something wonderful and yet, on the other hand, is pretty much totally misrepresenting life on earth, except when it isn’t." — G. Saunders

A perfect joke

2010-09-02T17:03:00.003-05:00

Sheila: You guys think you're so cool, with your inside jokes. We've got inside jokes, too. Hey Susan, remember the green hat?
Susan: No.
Sheila: Damn you, Susan!

Trailer Treasure, Movie Trash (part 1 of a, well, probably 1-part series, but you never know)

2010-06-28T00:42:00.004-05:00

Never trust a trailer. "It's all in the editing" is a vaguely annoying movie-talk cliché, but in the case of trailers it's absolutely apt; within those 2.5-minute collages of densely packed images and sounds, a movie can be remixed and repackaged to look and feel like damn near anything. The content of a trailer so often fails to represent the essence of its corresponding film that deciding whether or not to see a given film based on a trailer is just about the most foolhardy mistake a curious filmgoer can make. This works both ways: the arguably more common (and certainly more explicable) instance of an uninspired trailer doing a disservice to a good movie, and the more mysterious and fascinating (and, yes, disappointing) situation of an outstanding trailer raising expectations for what turns out to be a dud. What makes all of this extra-interesting is that trailers are, for all intents and purposes, authorless; that is to say, they're never credited to any particular editors or filmmakers. I don't know how much control a director has over the trailer for his/her film—I suspect not much, if any, in most cases—but since his/her name isn't on the trailer (as, indeed, no one's is), does it even matter?

Ah, heady questions. But what I'd like to share now are just a few trailers that I really loved as trailers, despite reacting in varying degrees of distaste to the films they were commissioned to advertise. Consider this post a defense of the trailer as a standalone art form, capable of great beauty, boldness, visceral and emotional and intellectual thrills, maybe even profundity—independent of its function as a commercial promotion. Another way to look at it: perhaps these disappointing movies all had the raw materials to be great, but something got screwed up along the way, and their trailers serve as the sole surviving evidence of what might have been. Needless to say (yet I'm saying it anyway; funny how it always works like that), judgments are subjective blah blah blah, and you might think these movies are awesome and that I'm being a churl or a contrarian by professing to prefer their trailers. To which all I can say is: I calls 'em like I sees 'em. Only four movies for now, recent ones, because a) the art of trailermaking has changed pretty drastically in the past decade and I think my thesis above (if I even have one) is most applicable to the trailers wrought by those changes; and b) I've simply seen way more trailers of the past several years than of the preceding century of cinema, so I'm gonna go with what I know. Maybe follow-up posts to come if I can think of more good examples of this particular phenomenon, which right now I'm sort of struggling to do, frankly. But it's late.

I Am Love (2010): The inspiration for this post. Thanks to the Siskel Center's European Union film festival, I'd seen this Italian family drama before the trailer was even released, and when I first saw the preview (attached to a print of Please Give, iirc) it put me in a state of self-doubting shock: I'd been lukewarm-at-best on the film, but the trailer was such a dazzling tour-de-force that I momentarily questioned my own judgment. After some reflection and reading, I determined that this was, in fact, a classic case of...see title of post. The film's meticulous imagery and insanely, overemphatically awesome music score are better-suited to the trailer form, where nothing needs to follow logic. Trailers can afford to be sensual feasts that make no sense, because they can hint at levels of meaning that are not, in the cussedly literal movie form, necessarily present. I Am Love and its trailer may be equally empty, but the trailer is capable of convincing us otherwise, and the movie isn't.

Pineapple Express (2008): Granted, the first half of this trailer is a standard introduce-the-characters-and-premise studio comedy preview. But as soon as "Paper Planes" kicks in (at a moment in history just before that song became the cultural equivalent of a dead metaphor), the trailer becomes a free-floating parade of pure cinema, suggesting the lyrical David Gordon Green production this movie should have been, but wasn't, despite Green's auteurial byline. The movie I'd later see was a largely dull mix of limp '80s nostalgia and already-tired Apatovian tropes, but the trailer never ceased to delight me during those middle months of 2008. When Seth Rogen leaps superheroically to attack gun-wielding thug Gary Cole in the film, it's just another banal action beat; when the same image occurs in the trailer, it's something very close to sublime. Or maybe I just really like listening to "Paper Planes."

Synecdoche, New York (2008): Just about everyone whose taste I respect loves this movie, so I know I owe it another viewing. But man, I don't want to put myself through that misery-fest again. Whatever your feelings on the film, you can't deny that the trailer is awfully misleading: it promises a warm, witty, screwy, humanist intellectual comedy in the vein of I Heart Huckabees (complete with earworm Jon Brion tune) or Charlie Kaufman's previous work. And then you sit down to see the movie and find, instead, the most singlemindedly dour and unpleasant American film (I realize these qualifiers make me sound like Rex Reed or some other completely out-of-touch asshole, but the heart hates what it hates) since, I don't know, something from the '70s, when dourness was de rigeur. Look, anyone who knows me knows that I would never dismiss a movie based on "unpleasantness," but something about Synecdoche rubbed me the wrong way, and I think a huge part of that had to do with my love of the trailer's sweetly off-kilter, aphoristic cleverness and suggestion of profound-meets-goofy humor. I know it's not fair to want this movie to be I Heart Huckabees II, but blame the lovely trailer for putting that idea in my head.

The Limits of Control (2009): Like many effective trailers, this one sort of doubles as a great short film on its own. It's got everything: splitscreen effects, quotable dialogue, and Bill Murray. As with I Am Love, the lack of literal sense only makes the trailer more attractive. But the movie's a head-scratcher if ever there was one, and I say that as a fan of pretty much everything else Jim Jarmusch has done. He's certainly allowed a whiff now and then, but it would've hurt less if the trailer hadn't been so damn cool.

From the dept. of amusing quotations

2010-06-25T23:35:00.002-05:00

"I laughed my ass off at much of Home Alone the first time I saw it, in 1990, and nothing I can say in the aftermath of its obnoxious cultural iconography, or any perceived moral imperative to hold any Chris Columbus project in contempt, can change that." — Glenn Kenny, from his evenhanded post about Cyrus.

PSYCHO liveblog

2010-06-16T18:10:00.028-05:00

Few movies as famous as Hitchcock's Psycho are also as good. It was one of those rare moments of cultural harmony, as with The Beatles' mature albums and The Simpsons' 1990s run, when a ginormous, game-changing masscult phenomenon was also an artistic masterpiece. J. Hoberman gets at some of the context of that phenomenon in this piece from earlier today, which also reprints Andrew Sarris' original 1960 rave review. The occasion? Psycho turns 50 today. Younger than my parents, but older than Barack Obama.

I watched Psycho a million times on VHS as a kid, but it's been many years since I sat down and watched the whole thing—though I've certainly read many words about it in the intervening years. For this liveblog I won't be going for profundity, since, as Kim Morgan noted today, Psycho is pretty much the most over-analyzed film ever made and there's really nothing new to say about it. So this is just for giggles, the fun of re-encountering a childhood favorite that I happen to know will hold up.

00:53: Wait, Janet Leigh actually gets an "and" in the opening credits??? I guess that wasn't yet thriller-code for "certain death" in 1960. Actually, was this the first instance of an "and" for a star in the credits? I'm too lazy to look this up, but it seems plausible.

01:34: Hm, Saul Bass credited as "pictorial consultant," in addition to his credit for the titles sequence. Uh. What exactly are the duties of a pictorial consultant?

02:19: Couldn't have told you this was supposed to be set in Phoenix, AZ. Of course, this was shot on the backlot with Hitchcock's TV crew, so we don't exactly get the sparkling location photography some of his '50s films had. And do we really need to know that it's "FRIDAY, DECEMBER THE ELEVENTH"? At "TWO FORTY-THREE P.M."?

06:07: This is probably my first time watching the film in the 1.85 ratio. The shots look pretty tight...maybe too tight. I assume this was shot open matte? Has there been any AR controversy over Psycho like there has over Touch of Evil? Could be I'm just being oversensitive.

07:06: Department of stuff I didn't realize was fucked up when I was a kid: "My mother gave them to me the day of my wedding. Teddy was furious when he found out I was taking tranquilizers!" This secretary is awesome, though. If time travel were possible I'd expect to see her on the new season of Mad Men.

09:13: The rich, cowboy-behatted real-estate buyer is the real villain of this film. Seriously, Norman and his mother don't say anything as vile as this guy's "buying off unhappiness" bit. Plus, he cheats on his taxes.

12:22: Love the constant cutting to the envelope full of money in this otherwise banal Janet-Leigh-gets-her-shit-together scene. All it needs is a hissing sound effect to be the snake in the garden.

17:14: As great as Bernard Herrmann's score is, I feel like at times it's more distracting than tension-producing. Although that is probably just the perspective of someone who's seen the movie a hundred times.

24:18: This voice-over dialogue-from-the-future in the car: JL's imagination, or Hitch cluing the audience in to info she's not privy to? Pretty neat trick either way; surprising it's never really been used again.

25:40: In Vertigo, we got Jimmy Stewart driving around San Francisco from the perspective of the driver. In Psycho, we get Janet Leigh driving around California highways from the perspective of the road.

28:12: Twelve cabins, twelve vacancies.

29:52: Ha, Norman being unable to say "bathroom" is a great bit of psychosexual weirdness.

30:47: Norman's actually pretty charming at first, in a dorky way. Who wouldn't take him up on his offer of sandwiches and milk?

42:49: I think the key to Perkins' performance is that he looks more like a weird guy you went to high school with than someone who had any business toplining a Hollywood movie in 1960. And his weird, halting, naturalistic line readings, like "fals...fals...falsity." And how he switches between haunted solemnity and forced levity. Just a great, great, great performance and a really inspired bit of casting.

42:49: Just throwing this out there: Noel Black's Pretty Poison (1968) is a great, underseen movie that brilliantly capitalizes on post-Psycho audience expectations of Anthony Perkins. He co-stars with the luscious Tuesday Weld at her Tuesday Weldiest. Netflix that shit, yo.

43:42: That whole sandwich-eating scene is so riveting. I've always loved the dialogue in that scene—not just the (deservedly) famous bits like "a boy's best friend is his mother" and "we all go a little mad sometimes," but Norman's little speeches about taxidermy and mental institutions (which, duh, I now realize he has obviously spent time in). I don't know if this dialogue originates in Robert Bloch's source novel (which I haven't read but am curious about) or Joseph Stefano's screenplay; either way, it's a reminder that Hitch isn't solely responsible for the movie's enduring awesomeness.

44:19: The close-up of Norman's eye and the peephole: surely one of the most beautiful shots Hitchcock ever composed. If you stare at it for a few seconds it starts to look almost abstract. And surely 1.85 is the correct ratio for this shot.

44:19: The fact that Gus Van Sant literalized the peeping scene by having Vince Vaughn visibly jerk off represents everything wrong with the remake—with his remake specifically and with the idea of a Psycho remake. Just...no.

49:55: Supposedly the shower scene has 50 cuts and 77 different camera angles. Those numbers seem impossibly high to me, but the scene plays so beautifully that I'll credit them. The spiraling zoom out from her eyeball to her shock-suspended, sideways face is, I'd posit, the scariest image in the film. It's the picture of cold, hard death. No punches pulled. And I like how Hitch's pan from the bathroom to the big house outside includes a stopover to show the envelope of money again. Like, here's why you're dead, you poor sap.

59:55: Norman cleaning up the crime scene is a solid 10 minutes without a single word—in its own modest way, nearly as impressive a feat of "pure cinema" as the shower scene that precedes it.

Stopping for now due to tiredness and headache. Poor Vera Miles, I'm ignoring her part of the movie just like everyone else does.

Prescience

2010-05-12T19:47:00.002-05:00

This isn't film-related, but today I started reading Richard Powers' 1995 novel Galatea 2.2 and found within its first ten pages a strikingly prescient passage about the internet, or as his narrator calls it, "the world web." After several paragraphs waxing on about the web's unprecedented wonders, the narrator explains why the bloom starts to come off the rose:

"But the longer I lurked, the sadder the holiday became. People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with wonder. The web began to seem a vast, silent stock exchange trading in ever more anonymous and hostile pen pals.

"The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways not to say it."

And that was fifteen years ago!!

Nicole Holofcener and Kevin Smith: A Match Made in the '90s

2010-05-09T17:40:00.003-05:00

In a funny way, Nicole Holofcener is sort of the distaff doppelganger of Kevin Smith. (Or, if you prefer, Kevin Smith is Holofcener's evil twin.) Hear me out: they both broke into the mid-90s indie scene with lo-fi Sundance hits (Smith's Clerks in '94, Holofcener's Walking and Talking in '96) that prized chatty eloquence over any kind of visual strategy, and they both rode the wave of Sundance buzz to ongoing success as mid-level indie filmmakers with healthy cult followings and critical respect. But to look at where these two oddly parallel directors are situated in 2010 is, as they say, instructive: one of them just made her best movie yet, which opened to glowing reviews, and the other one directed-for-hire an abysmal piece of buddy-cop dreck before getting thrown off an airplane for being grotesquely obese. The box office numbers of Cop Out may mean that Smith is laughing all the way to the lipo clinic, but by any measure of integrity Holofcener has emerged victorious. Good guys (and girls) win.

Film blogger Jordan Hoffman made an important point recently when he reminded us that the Kevin Smith phenomenon was entirely a case of being in the right place at the right time. Hoffman writes: "If [Smith were] just a little younger and made his first flick in the age of video and not film, none of us would have ever heard of him. He's a lucky dude." Arguably the same is true of Holofcener. If she were ten years younger and had made Walking and Talking in the VOD/DVD/Internet era of disappearing indie distributors, it seems unlikely that her film would've made much of a splash outside the festival circuit, the kind of movie that today is picked up by IFC for a Video On Demand release and a brief run in New York before heading to DVD semi-anonymity. But starting out when she did allowed Holofcener to find a comfortable niche in film culture, making small, sharply observed character studies and giving her BFF Catherine Keener one juicy role after another. The latest and greatest of these is the new Please Give, which feels more expansive, cohesive and poignant than anything else she's done—not to mention funnier.

Woody Allen's name is popping up in some reviews, which makes sense given the film's NYC location and focus on the comic possibilities of Rich People's Problems. But there is a complexity of character, empathy of spirit, and subtlety of theme here that never really existed in Woody's world. I was particularly impressed by the contrast between Keener's character, an unhappily wealthy woman who desperately wants to shoehorn some altruism into her life to keep her gnawing guilt at bay, and Rebecca Hall's character (the real heroine of the movie), who is so casually, naturally kind that she throws the other, basically likable characters into relief as the flawed, confused fuckups that they (and we) are. And the cranky grandma is awesome.

At this point, some critics would say, the only thing that Smith and Holofcener's films have in common substantively is that they use the camera more as a tool to record performances than an expressive instrument. But I'm not sure that's actually true anymore. There are some lovely shots in Please Give, like when Hall discovers her grandmother dead and the camera holds the shot long past when most directors would cut, Hall's face registering the shock and then staring blankly at the TV, bracing herself for the sad hours to come. Or the shot in the following scene, when the grandmother's dead body dissolves away, leaving an empty chair as a visual metaphor for loss. Or the penultimate shot of the film, a shallow-focus composition with Keener and husband Oliver Platt (who is so, so wonderful) in the blurry background and their newly elated daughter in the foreground, emphasizing the daughter's shift in mood and personality. So I'm pretty much not buying the line that Holofcener pays no attention to form or visuals. Meanwhile, Kevin Smith tried to break out of his own formally apathetic comfort zone by staging the usual array of chase scenes and shootouts in Cop Out, and I guess I have to give the guy points for effort, but where he tried for dynamism he achieved only headache-inducing clunkiness. The girl you brought to the party, Kev: dance with her. And no, that girl isn't Nicole Holofcener. She's at a much better party.

The Tyranny of Calendars: Four movies that would've made my 2009 best-of list had I seen them in time

2010-05-06T00:30:00.004-05:00

The fractious nature of indie/foreign film distribution in the U.S. doesn't always agree with the arbitrary corralling of movie lists into yearly groups. It's one thing to place a film under the year of its commercial release rather than of its original premiere, but what happens when, say, the commercial release only reaches New York and L.A. in 2009 and hits other cities (e.g. my Chicago) in 2010? If we believe that the practice of listmaking matters even a little bit, these films can fall through the cracks: not always seen in time for consideration in 2009, and inapplicable for lists at the end of 2010.

My 2009 year-end post was already bloated and unwieldy—a reflection of the year's cinematic richness. (I just couldn't help myself from going big.) But if I'd been able to see these four films—three of which I saw at the Gene Siskel Film Center this year, and the other I just caught up with on DVD—I'd have made room for them somewhere, knocking off other titles in either the list proper or the honorable mentions. Consider them all worthy additions to your Netflix queue.

• Andrew Bujalski's Beeswax is a great leap forward for the father of mumblecore, a dryly comic study in hipster passive-aggression that's riveting and meaningful in ways that upend all expectations about Bujalski and the DIY movement he helped create. Shot on warm 35mm film that makes it look more like the American classics of the '70s than the video-noise of today's digital youth, Beeswax transcends mumblecore by interrogating conversational tactics rather than simply having actors stumble over words for the sake of naturalism; just about every dialogue exchange in the film is fraught with doublespeak, ulterior motives or barely-concealed resentment. The dramatic stakes are still relatively low, but Bujalski finds the tension in the everyday. This is the kind of American independent film event that's genuinely galvanizing, or at least should be. Would have easily made my top ten of '09 if it had come to Chicago in time.

• Ursula Meier's Home is a strange and wonderful French film that didn't receive much critical attention upon its NY/LA micro-release late last year; it was only on my radar because Mike D'Angelo and his weird Jim Jones cult of cinephiles voted it one of the top 20 films of 2009. I appreciated Meier's fresh take on the family drama: instead of charting a dysfunctional clan's conflicts and eventual unity, Meier begins with an unusually close-knit, content family and gradually bulldozes their happiness via the reopening of the long-dormant highway across from the family's secluded house. The weirdness mounts organically so that by the time drastic measures are taken for the sake of the family's protection (I'm being vague to avoid spoilers)—measures that would feel like bullshit in a lesser film—I was entirely credulous. Tough to describe this one, honestly, so maybe just take my word that it's a beauty.

• Noah Buschel's The Missing Person is a fascinating attempt to update the tradition of the 1970s anti-detective movie (Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, Arthur Penn's Night Moves) for post-9/11 America. Its greatest asset is the explosively brilliant character actor Michael Shannon, who won my loyalty forever with his work in William Friedkin's Bug and Jeff Nichols' Shotgun Stories and takes on more interesting roles every year. Shannon's skill at suggesting his characters' internal lives makes him perfect for the role of a lost, world-weary private detective, drifting numbly through life; it turns out his condition is rooted in personal tragedy, one that comes to the fore when the tail job he's hired for turns out to have 9/11-related resonance. The plotting is a long way from elegant, but no good detective story is ever about its plot anyway. Buschel nails the elegiac tone and the Long Goodbye-esque incongruity of putting an old-school PI in the modern world. Although the title refers to a literal missing person (again, think 9/11), it's also clearly referring to the detective, and watching the film I fondly recalled the classic tagline of Night Moves: "Maybe he would find the girl. Maybe he would find himself."

• Scott Teems' That Evening Sun, a hit at SXSW '09, is probably the least accomplished film of this quartet, if only for its incoherent third act. But for a while, at least, it's an outstanding character study and showcase for Hal Halbrook as a get-off-my-lawn oldster without, um, a lawn: he escapes from the old folks' home only to find that his longtime farm property has been rented out by his son to a family of no-goodniks. First-time director Teems loads up the film with regional flavor (it's set in Tennessee) and grants humanity and perspective to all the characters, even the ones trying to screw over poor old Hal. Movies about (and starring) octogenarians are so rare that I'm inclined to celebrate this one's virtues and overlook its flaws, which are mostly relegated to the unsatisfying ending anyway. In an added bit of sad real-life resonance, Holbrook's dead wife in the film is played in flashbacks by his recently-deceased actual wife, Dixie Carter.

Note: I'd originally planned to write this post after seeing the French animated film A Town Called Panic, which I regrettably missed in its February run at the Music Box. But I can't find any information about a future R1 DVD release, so I have no idea when I'll be able to see it. But I'm taking an "innocent until proven guilty" approach and, for now, assuming that it belongs on this list of 2009's bastard children.

Lost in the '70s, #8: Who'll Stop the Rain (1978)

2010-04-11T03:53:00.001-05:00

Here's a true story about how dumb I can be. Back in college, in an intro American lit class, I was assigned Robert Stone's 1974 novel Dog Soldiers. If that seems like kind of a quirky selection for a 100-level survey course, it was; the professor only included it on the syllabus because Stone happened to be the visiting writer-in-residence on campus that semester, a fact that failed to impress me because I was a total greenhorn when it came to literature and I'd never even heard of Robert Stone. Lazy bastard that I am, I read something like 50 pages of the book before deciding I'd done enough homework that week and casting it aside. So naturally I skipped class on the day our knowledge of the book was to be tested—the day the professor had arranged for Robert Stone himself to visit our class and discuss his novel with us. I remember feeling a modicum of guilt for willfully missing out on this opportunity, but I shruggingly rationalized it because a) I wasn't prepared and b) a week ago I hadn't even known who the hell this guy was.

Cut to 2010 and the egg on my face is fresher than ever. I'm now more familiar with Stone's literary reputation, although I still haven't read anything by him, and I just watched Karel Reisz's spectacularly good film adaptation of Dog Soldiers, retitled Who'll Stop the Rain in a nod to the CCR song prominently featured on its soundtrack. I'm so fascinated by this movie that not only do I want to finally read Dog Soldiers, I want to go back in time and coerce myself into attending class on the day Robert Stone was there to field our questions.

This is on one level a pulpy adventure film, with a tough-guy hero and a girl trying to outrun thugs who are after their MacGuffin heroin stash. But it's also one of those films about the point at which the beautiful dream of the late '60s curdled into the nightmare of the early '70s, and a study of how the Vietnam War drained the humanity out of, apparently, everyone in America—or at least everyone in this movie, in which even the heroes are criminals or drug addicts. In a performance that earned him comparisons to early Brando by the critics of the day, Nick Nolte plays a soldier, getting ready to ship out of 'Nam, whose war-correspondent buddy (Michael Moriarty, striking the right note of dehumanized creepiness) convinces him to smuggle some heroin (or "scag" as everyone keeps referring to it) into California. Everything goes wrong and Nolte ends up on the run with Moriarty's wife (Tuesday Weld, one of my all-time favorites for her performances in sixties films Lord Love a Duck and Pretty Poison, both in my personal hall-of-fame canon). The movie delivers the goods both viscerally and intellectually, driven by Nolte's perfect underplaying of a character capable of both brutal violence and cockeyed philosophical thought.

You can sort of sense where the movie doesn't catch up to the novel. The Moriarty and Weld characters never come entirely into focus. There's not really sufficient preamble to establish precisely why these basically decent guys have entered the drug underworld; we know it's because the war fucked them up, but Reisz and Stone err a bit too much on the side of vagueness with respect to their motivations. I usually don't like to read the book after seeing the movie, but in this case I have a hunch it will be a great supplementary experience rather than a redundancy. And it'll make up for a youthful indiscretion.

Even though only the first 10 minutes take place in Vietnam, this is a much better Vietnam-related movie than the same year's disgustingly overrated The Deer Hunter.

Lost in the '70s, #7: The Landlord (1970)

2010-04-07T02:19:00.009-05:00

A confused, angry, wacky, heartbreaking film for confusing, angry, wacky, heartbroken times, Hal Ashby's directorial debut is one of the most complex, original and intellectually searching movies about race in America—not to mention unquestionably the funniest. If it's finally too diffuse and messy to constitute a coherent sociological statement, well, who wants that from art anyway? Screenwriter Bill Gunn even gets in a jab at the comparative shallowness of Hollywood's previous forays into racial drama: the protagonist's racist mother, cautioning him against getting too involved with black people, says, "Remember when I took you to see Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? Well, you know, they're not all like that." The picture inhabits the same Bermuda triangle of race, class and real estate in '70s Brooklyn as Jonathan Lethem's novel The Fortress of Solitude, 'cept this is a primary document, and an utterly fascinating one.

Beau Bridges plays a rich kid who rebels against his blueblood family by buying an apartment building in the black ghetto, then located in now-gentrified Park Slope. Well, it doesn't necessarily start as rebellion, and it doesn't end that way, either. At first he just has asshole ideas about evicting all the black tenants and using the building for...whatever. It's not clear that he even has a plan; he's just a self-absorbed, pampered dumbass. But as he involves himself more and more in the lives of the black folks—including two separate romantic liasions—he finds a liberal outrage he'd never had, even as most of the people in the black community continue to resent or despise him. But he's too busy with personal entanglements to bother with political ones, and he gets a lot of growing up done via his exposure to that black community. In his adrift coming-of-age, the movie often resembles an interracial take on The Graduate.

The first half of the movie is a daring, freewheeling screwball comedy—complete with Godardian asides, jazzy nonlinear editing, jokey insert-cuts and scenes of dinner-table family humiliation—while the second enters considerably more somber, compassionate territory. I have to wonder if Salon's Andrew O'Hehir fell asleep halfway through the film when he called it "something like a Marx Brothers movie charged up on LSD and left-wing politics." It's tough to think of any movie that treats the commingling of white and black, not just sexual but plain old interpersonal, with this kind of casual, immediate honesty. It turns into something quite moving, its beauty aided greatly by that genius cinematographer Gordon Willis, who finds lovely visual symmetry in the earthtones of the Brooklyn neighborhood locations and the people inhabiting 'em.

Something else unique about this thing: it presents a wide array of interesting, multi-faceted black characters in a movie that isn't expressly for black audiences or made by a black director, or considered a "black" film. Sad to say that's still an extreme rarity in movies today.

Despite its status as a perfect example of what made early dispatches from the New Hollywood so special, The Landlord has never been released on DVD. I recorded it off TCM and enjoyed a not-bad print, though of course I'd jump at the chance to see it projected on film someday. I understand, however, that MGM is about to make it available via that newfangled DVD-on-demand service, in which studios will burn you custom DVD-Rs of films they figure aren't gonna be profitable enough released the standard way. Order here! It's worth it.

And if you want to read a legitimately wonderful review of The Landlord please check out Steven Boone's piece, written for The House Next Door at the time of of a 2007 revival at Film Forum. Here's the money quote: "Thirty-seven years on, The Landlord is still shocking, but not because it's salacious or cynical. The film is shocking because of how tenderly and patiently Ashby attends to certain transgressive moments while asserting that in a sane, just world, they wouldn't be taboo at all." I also love Boone's observation that in one scene, the red light Willis bathes a white and black character in effectively renders them the same color. Good stuff in the comments section, too, as Matt Zoller Seitz jumps in several times. Seitz calls it "Ashby's most adventurous movie, photographically and in terms of editing, performance and variety of tone." From what I've seen of Ashby that is absolutely true. Seitz also claims, as a lead-in to discussing Ashby's radical stylistic choices in The Landlord, that "it might be one of the most influential American films that almost nobody but filmmakers and film buffs has seen." You know what? That's my favorite kind.

Lost in the '70s, #5 and #6: The Sunshine Boys (1975) and The Goodbye Girl (1977) [Neil Simon double feature]

2010-04-06T02:31:00.011-05:00

Oy, why did I do this to myself? Neil Simon is annoying. I'd recorded both these movies off TCM during their February "31 Days of Oscar" thing—George Burns won for Sunshine Boys, Richard Dreyfuss for Goodbye Girl—so I must have had my reasons for wanting to watch them. Neither one is awful, and I even kinda liked The Sunshine Boys, but if you're talking about the Hollywood revolution of the '70s Neil Simon is one name that will never cross your lips. I think the perfect counterexample of why I'm not a Neil Simon fan is Elaine May's brilliant 1972 comedy The Heartbreak Kid. Now, Neil Simon is credited with the script for that film, but by all accounts May favored improvisation and ran roughshod over Simon's words to suit her own looser, funnier, far more interesting purposes. But most Neil Simon movies are like sealed ziplock bags; directors (in the case of these two pictures, Herbert Ross) treated his scripts with the utmost reverence, leaving no room for life outside of Simon's contrived, stagey banter. You might get a few chuckles out of his quippy dialogue, but good luck giving a shit about his characters 15 seconds after the movie ends—and, if you're like me, you're going to do more eye-rolling than laughing anyway.

Having said all that, The Sunshine Boys is actually pretty cute, and certainly the more enjoyable of the two films. It's Walter Matthau and George Burns as an old vaudeville comedy duo, now doddering old men who hate each other's guts, reuniting for one last show. The strange thing here is that Matthau wasn't doddering yet in 1975 and Burns was. Matthau was 55 playing 20 years older, sort of ironic given his late-career success playing grumpy old men when it was actually age-appropriate, while Burns was already 80—dude was born in the 19th century—and about to be launched into what must have been unprecedented stardom as a nonagenarian. Burns' Oscar was bestowed for purely sentimental reasons, I guess, because his accomplishment here doesn't really extend beyond remembering his lines while being an adorable little old venerated showbiz legend. But Matthau's transformation is remarkable. You truly believe that he is the contemporary of this man 25 years his senior. Certainly no thanks are in order to the amateur-grade makeup; this is all Matthau. Unfortunately it's kind of a two-faced performance, because he has a tendency to go waaaay over the top that I guess Ross didn't feel like reining in. Unusual for Matthau, and pretty annoying, but I still got a kick out of him.

Of course, you also have to deal with what feels like endless screen time for Richard Benjamin playing the world's most boring straight man, Matthau's nephew and agent. And when Simon tries to inject some sentimentality into this uncle-nephew relationship late in the movie...uggghh. No thanks. I also thought it was a mistake to show so much of the sketch rehearsal, because this supposedly classic vaudeville scene was in fact incredibly lame. I was reminded of Aaron Sorkin's pathetic attempts at writing sketch comedy for Studio 60. There is lots of fun stuff here though, like when Matthau tries to explain to his nephew which words are funny and which aren't. "Words with a k in it are funny. Alka-Seltzer is funny. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny. All with a k. Ls are not funny. Ms are not funny." I wonder if this was the inspiration for Krusty the Clown talking about the word "mukluk." (See also this article.) Simon's quippy style is well-suited to a story of old vaudevillians, and their bickering is amusing most of the time.

I was less amused by The Goodbye Girl. These characters are just so irritating. I don't mean they're unsympathetic or alienating as written, I mean they're unintentionally grating. Marsha Mason with her whining, Dreyfuss with his dumb quirks. I love Dreyfuss, but his Oscar this year should have been for Close Encounters. Alert: this movie also contains a precocious child character. I did enjoy seeing that weird Andre the Giant-lookin', gigantism-afflicted character actor Paul Benedict pop up as a theater director, especially since one of his best-known-to-me roles is the would-be titular character in Waiting for Guffman. But man, the trajectory of the romance is evident from the moment Dreyfuss shows up at Mason's door, and I did not relish the details of its playing out. Boo.

This was sort of a bracing experiment, in a way, moving from a genuinely radical comedy like Hi, Mom! to something so calm and conventional as a Neil Simon double feature. Everything has its place...but I think my allegiances are obvious, then as now.

Lost in the '70s, #4: Hi, Mom! (1970)

2010-04-04T11:14:00.005-05:00

Wha...I...uh...

I don't know where to begin. This movie destroyed me. It is utterly brilliant and insane and a certain addition to my constantly shifting mental list of all-time favorites.

First of all, anyone who still thinks Brian De Palma is just a Hitchcock ripoff-artist with fancy camera moves needs to see this and have their tidy little false narrative shattered to pieces. Hi, Mom!—part of BDP's early output of late-'60s/early-'70s gonzo-comedies that I once read somewhere referred to as his "Godard period"—is completely unlike the director's famous thrillers. It bears several of De Palma's signature thematic obsessions, but examines them within the context of wackily satirical, countercultural irreverence. And just when you think you've got the movie's bizarro tone nailed down, De Palma drops you into a new situation that culminates in one of the most harrowing and vivid scenes the man ever filmed, before tying it all together in mind-blowing fashion.

The film stars a pre-stardom Robert De Niro as the same character from De Palma's previous film Greetings (which I haven't seen but now desperately want to), an aspiring filmmaker/pornographer named Jon Rubin with a fetish for voyeurism he hopes to translate to cinematic success via a new form of "peep art." In checking over contemporary reviews I see that many people have noted an eerie prescience in this character's similarity to Travis Bickle, and I would have to agree, although Rubin's particular form of sociopathy manifests itself such that De Niro gets to play creepily funny rather than creepily tragic. The movie's first scene is Rubin's hilarious encounter with a porno producer who says things like, "Look at that cleavage! You're not gonna find that in a Fellini film!" and warns Rubin never to enter the men's room at a XXX theater. Rubin's peep-art ambitions fail, hilariously, but he ends up forging a fraudulent romance with one of the subjects of his peeping, based on a series of outrageous prevarications. She thinks he's an insurance salesman up to the very end.

I may be making it sound like a farcical sex comedy, but that's only a tiny fraction of what the film is. I don't want to get into endless plot summary here, but let's just say that Hi, Mom! turns out really to be two films in one, and the other one involves a radical theater troupe of black-power activists documented in black-and-white verité-style for an ostensible TV documentary. When the troupe stages their performance art it's one of the most disturbing scenes I've ever seen on film—more disturbing, to me, than anything in Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, to name one film whose shock value I think has been overstated. And it's all the more unsettling for the sick joke with which De Palma buttons up the scene.

Oh, I don't know. De Palma auteurists can and have written about how the themes of voyeurism and meta-textual awareness in Hi, Mom! fit into his larger career; check out this piece at Reverse Shot, whose author agrees with me about the devastating power of the "Be Black Baby" sequence, calling it "the best moment of De Palma's career, and perhaps the key to it, as well." All I know is that the movie's wild mix of tones and uniquely skewed take on sixties counterculture did a number on me. I'm a long ways from being a Brian De Palma completist—I'd kill for a retrospective to hit Chicago, because if anyone's work demands to be seen on film, it's De Palma's—but this movie's iconoclastic gamesmanship has burrowed into my brain more than anything I've seen by him to date. Stay tuned for my "Lost in the '00s" feature, when I cast my lot in with the defenders of De Palma's underrated Mission to Mars!

Lost in the '70s, #3: The New Centurions (1972)

2010-04-03T09:42:00.004-05:00

Sucks to be a cop, man.

That's the not-terribly-nuanced thesis statement of this aggressively pessimistic police drama, an adaptation of the first novel by L.A. cop-turned-author Joseph Waumbaugh. Or at least by its last half-hour or so.

One of the first things I observed when I started exploring this period of American cinema was how pessimism and cynicism were so fashionable, almost the status quo. Even otherwise innocuous or generic movies seemed to take narrative turns that support a stiflingly bleak view of human nature and society. In its home stretch, The New Centurions takes several such turns that I just didn't buy. A key character commits suicide for no discernible reason other than sentence one of this blog post, which I felt was horribly misguided; suicide is a trump card that dramatists should basically never, ever pull unless it's abso-fucking-lutely the necessary and best choice for the character. After that, the other main character's life goes into a similarly unconvincing tailspin and the movie becomes a lot less interesting to me.

Which is a shame, because for a while there in the early going, it's pretty great. One of the fascinating things about this era is that movie clichés as we know them didn't really exist yet. Sure, there were clichés and tropes of Hollywood v1.0, but when those were discarded in the late sixties following the collapse of the Hays Code and the sea change in American culture, the slate was suddenly blank. New forms and ideas would eventually ossify into cliché, but for a brief, thrilling period everything was up for grabs. So here, you have a situation—innocent rookie cop (Stacy Keach) shown the ropes by cynical, near-retirement older cop (George C. Scott, wonderful even in an underwritten role)—that sounds clichéd now, but plays fresh in the film. In fact, what the early scenes feel like—as directed by veteran Richard Fleischer, one of those guys who was around in the old days but adapted well to the New H.—is an episode of Law & Order as directed by Robert Altman. There is that sense of free-floating possibility that I associate with Altman. Fleischer avoids a strict narrative, opting for a collage of seedy Los Angeles ghetto activity: a hooker roust (Scott just gets them drunk, drives them around and deposits them back on the street), an intense domestic disturbance, dealings with various shady crooks and lowlifes. Fleischer decorates these scenes with plenty of location ambiance, and the funky Quincy Jones score helps make everything feel very '70s and cool.

The movie spends a lot of time showing how policework destroys a cop's personal life. Nowadays, this is about as banal and clichéd an observation as you can make about cops. There's nothing wrong, exactly, with how the scenes of Stacy Keach's troubled home life are handled, and I liked Jane Alexander's performance as the wife, but they feel boilerplate compared to the gritty, funky rhythms of the cops' late-night rounds. Then the aforementioned suicide happens, and the Altman-esque sense of possibility is replaced by a banal fatalism. Still, if you have any sort of fondness for crime fiction and/or the '70s, it's impossible not to be delighted by at least some parts of this film.

Postscript: What the fuck is going on in that poster? Just look at it. It is hilariously awful. "Hey, this movie is based on a book, so let's put a GIANT BOOK on the poster and have characters from the movie climbing—stairs? a ladder?—into the pages of the book," or something. What.

Lost in the '70s, #2: Hester Street (1975)

2010-04-02T12:03:00.004-05:00

Less to say about this one, as it's perhaps more interesting for its novelty value than anything else. What makes it an oddity? For one thing, it was an independently produced, self-distributed film in an era when the word "indie" didn't yet exist and non-studio films were made mostly for the grindhouse. It's a near-plotless film in black-and-white, about a group of Jewish immigrants in 1890s New York, and here's the kicker: writer-director Joan Micklin Silver's commitment to authenticity was so strong that half the movie's dialogue is in fucking Yiddish.

I couldn't believe it either. One of the basic items of disbelief-suspension in American movies is that when characters from non-English-speaking countries talk to each other, they're probably going to speak English, because the movie is for English-speaking audiences who don't want to read subtitles. Not so here. I wonder—did the actors actually learn the dead language, or just train to read their lines phonetically? The only known quantity in the cast is Carol Kane, whose wonderfully subtle performance is several worlds away from her familiar flighty comic schtick. (She was nominated for an Oscar for the role, which is kind of cool.) Her character is an old-worlder just off the boat who's having trouble adjusting to life in America, while her husband, who's already been in New York for a while working at a sweatshop, already considers himself a proud Yankee. That's the only real conflict in this loose, episodic film, which verges on tedium at times but is ultimately rescued by charm and authenticity.

This is surely the only movie ever made to climax in an elaborate Jewish divorce ritual—and still somehow end on a happy, upbeat note. Silver's blithe disregard for audience-coddling makes this a notable film, albeit not the most engaging the decade had to offer. It's no classic, but it's an odd little gem that's both of its time and unique. Oh, and Ray Romano's mom from Everybody Loves Raymond is in it. Jeez, was she ever young? Alas I don't think she speaks Yiddish in the movie. But pretty much everyone else does.

Lost in the '70s, #1: Play Misty for Me (1971)

2010-04-02T00:53:00.011-05:00

Usually when I pop onto this blog to electronically scribble some semi-coherent ramblings about movies, it's contemporary fare that inspires me—gushing over Greenberg, for instance, or defending Shutter Island from the wrath of A.O. Scott. I'm more of a "purist" these days: less interested in home video, all about the 35mm theatrical experience. But lately I've been feeling the urge to dive back into the era of cinema that I started exploring on DVD in earnest a few years ago: the wild and woolly 1970s. Although every decade since the medium's inception has much to offer, there is something enduringly exotic and exciting about the '70s, and not just for the well-worn mythology concerning the period—the creative freedom given to young film-school auteurs by major studios, the rise and fall of the New Hollywood, all that obvious stuff—but for reasons less easily defined than that, more mysterious and elusive.

In the spirit of investigating that weird X-factor that makes '70s films so special, I'm launching a new feature here at Strictly From Hunger, the not-too-creative title of which you can find in the subject line of this post. Wonder if I'll stick with it...

In his outstanding video essay analyzing a scene from George Lucas's THX 1138, critic Steven Boone suggests that what primarily sets apart the Hollywood of the '70s from the Hollywood of today is the former decade's allegiance to a basic formal competence that seems lost now. He writes: "Post-1970s, post-MTV, post-AVID, post-Internet, post-DVD, this is what mainstream American cinema has lost. Studios throw money at the problem, when, as this sequence illustrates, the solution starts with filmmakers who understand the subtleties of true film craft...and the power of its simplest tools."

One filmmaker who's been wielding those tools pretty effectively for 40 years is Clint Eastwood, and what's really impressive is that he evinced an understanding of "true film craft" right out of the box: the terrific thriller Play Misty for Me was his directorial debut. Working with a low budget of under a million bucks—even adjusting for inflation, there are no studio pictures today made for that cheap—Eastwood makes every shot count. It's a simple film, with not much on its mind beyond delivering a well-crafted Hitchcockian thriller, but beautifully effective in the way Eastwood and his collaborators employ the basic tools that Boone's essay elegizes.

An example: because Eastwood keeps the camera relatively static in most scenes, you know it means something when the camera does move. When the first scene of violence comes, Eastwood films it with a quick series of spazzy POV closeups and odd angles. The effect is jarring because the preceding scenes were shot straightforwardly, and the violence has real meaning and impact as a result. You don't just nod to yourself and think "violence is happening now," as so often happens in modern action sequences; you feel it. It hits you. All filmmaking is violence, but good filmmaking is a sucker-punch to the gut; bad filmmaking is a sloppy drive-by shooting that misses its target and wipes out innocent bystanders.

Today Eastwood has been anointed a "classicist" for his adherence to this approach, although he rarely gets in as many good sucker-punches as he did in Misty. But one of the interesting aspects of this picture is how loose and playful it is compared to most of Eastwood's later work, which, at its worst—like the airless mediocrity Invictus—is too rigid to leave much of a mark. By loose and playful I mean that Eastwood lets himself indulge in the occasional whim; after a startlingly non-linear cut that took two characters from one scene to another in the middle of a line of dialogue, I actually said out loud to myself, "Eastwood would never do that now!" So too with the lovely but narratively extraneous love-montage set to a Roberta Flack song, or the weird detour into fiction-meets-documentary footage of an actual jazz festival the cast and crew invaded for a scene that, Eastwood revealed in a DVD interview, he threw in for the express purpose of burying a piece of narrative info to ensure that audiences would be surprised by an impending twist. In one scene he even blurs the line between dream and reality in a nearly De Palma-esque fashion. That kind of directorial frippery is the opposite of what we expect from Eastwood, but he can get away with it because, to paraphrase John McCain, the fundamentals of his technique are so strong. And it gives the film an added dimension of intrigue that feels very '70s to me.

If I have a problem with the movie it's Eastwood's performance, which isn't nearly as sophisticated as his direction. Clint wasn't yet comfortable playing verbally active human beings rather than stoic, abstract icons of violent machismo. For me, the dude wouldn't fully ripen as an actor until he was old enough to recast those icons in a revisionist light; in other words, I think his first really interesting performance was as William Munny in Unforgiven—still his masterpiece and quite possibly the best film of the '90s. In Misty he doesn't quite seem to know what to do with himself playing a realistic, peaceful man. Blessedly his co-star is the amazing Jessica Walter, known to discerning fans of the modern sitcom as Lucille Bluth, who is terrifyingly convincing every step of the way as Clint's one-night-stand turned psycho stalker turned attempted-murderer. This woman belts out some primal screams of passionate violence that will curdle the blood and bump the goose. You'll never look at Arrested Development quite the same way.

I haven't said much about the plot because it isn't particularly interesting, except in that it more or less invents the template for sexually charged thrillers like Fatal Attraction and its many sleazy imitations. But don't hold that against it. I don't think there are any weird gender politics going on here; the Jessica Walter character is less a sexual predator than the kind of socially retarded nuisance we've all known, regardless of gender, who manages to involve us in their life against our wishes. Fair enough, I say. Oh, and while it really isn't a horror movie at all, the poster's tagline features a fun, horrorific riff on a Flannery O'Connor story title: "The scream you hear may be your own!"

In a 2008 blog post, Matt Singer wonders why Eastwood's name never seems to come up in discussions of '70s New Hollywood vanguards: "His exclusion probably has more to do with his personality than his work: unlike so many of the New Hollywood directors, Eastwood wasn't prone to wild flights of druggy inspiration and always brought his productions in on time and on budget. The fact that Eastwood was a huge movie star, and thus seen as an actor first and a director second, certainly hurt his perception as a "young artist." His politics...no doubt distanced him as well. It's worked out in the end; while so many New Hollywood directors crashed and burned along with the linings of their nasal cavities, Eastwood's matured into a director the equal or superior of those who hogged all the early acclaim." This latter assertion is debatable, I suppose, but the simple-yet-quirky excellence of his debut film really isn't.

Everything's Gone Greenberg

2010-03-27T01:08:00.008-05:00

It's kind of a shame that so much of the filmosphere-media-hivemind's focus on matters Greenberg has been related to the paranoid blatherings of professional lunatic Armond White. There's an actual movie behind all that bullshit—and, in my opinion, it's a great one, the movie to beat in 2010.

Moreso than any other current American filmmaker, Noah Baumbach inspires polarizing reactions. Either you're deeply wowed by his dark character studies of toxic intellectual narcissists or you think he's a bratty huckster with Oedipal issues. I'm always amazed by the quickness with which Baumbach haters seem to dismiss the very notion of spending quality time in the company of unpleasant or unsympathetic characters. I like Atticus Finch as much as the next guy, but if he were the subject of every film I'd get bored with the medium in a hurry. Let's face it: life is filled with all manner of assholes, and if a filmmaker is brave enough to explore the hearts and minds of some of those assholes, why should he be shunned for failing to coo us into calm slumber with warm platitudes? The common label of "misanthrope"—applied even by some of Baumbach's supporters—is, I think, a misnomer. Baumbach—or rather the Baumbach of his last three features, after he graduated from those early Whit-Stillman-meets-Woody-Allen comedies of manners—is intensely interested in lives that go off the rails, in the alienating and alienated, in people who have been bitterly disappointed by life, and in the sorrowful victims of their casual abuse. Misanthrope nothing—if anything, Baumbach is a prickly sort of humanist. What true misanthrope would care enough to put these vituperative fuck-ups under the microscope in the first place?

Shedding the dysfunctional-family milieu of The Squid and the Whale (still probably his greatest accomplishment, if only for the exquisite tension of finding out whether or not the Jeff Daniels character's asshole tendencies will be passed down to his son) and the somewhat more problematic Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach has delivered his most darkly hilarious and subtly heartbreaking film to date. His biggest gamble, I suppose, was casting Ben Stiller in the lead, as an underemployed 40-year-old fresh off a nervous breakdown and subsequent stint in a mental institution. (One of the triumphs of Baumbach's screenplay is the casual, gradual way it doles out this info about Greenberg's recent past. It's neither a facile entry point into his character nor some big bad dark secret that changes everything. It's just some stuff about him that's true. In a more general way, Baumbach's facility with smart, careful exposition is pretty amazing here.) But it's a casting gamble that paid off in a huge way. I'm always interested in instances of comedians donning the tragedian's mask, and Stiller's performance as Greenberg is one of the best of those I've ever seen. (It's everything Adam Sandler's turn in Funny People should have been but wasn't.) Stiller shows not a sliver of vanity. He's unafraid of going to dark places and baring his soul, but the great thing is that he can have his cake and eat it too, because he's funny at the same time. Indeed, this is the funniest of Baumbach's three dramas by a long shot. Who could avoid cracking up at Stiller's flustered reaction to a little kid picking up the phone? (It won't make sense out of context, but his reading of the line "Is this a child?" after several moments of confusion made me lose my shit, as did his delivery of a simple "BYE!" after another character told a shaggy-dog story that pissed him off so much he stormed out of the house.)

As revelatory as Stiller is, he's matched every step of the way by the she's-got-something-but-I-can't-quite-put-my-finger-on-it quality of Greta Gerwig, the breakout mumblecore starlet who A.O. Scott recently vaunted as possibly "the definitive screen actress of her generation." It remains to be seen whether Gerwig's disarming naturalism will translate to an ongoing career in bigger-budget indies—I can definitely see her taking the Michelle Williams route, though it's equally plausible that she'll go back to the DIY scene that created her—but she adapts her own odd style of anti-acting to a somewhat more mainstream setting quite well as Florence, Greenberg's younger sorta-paramour who's drawn to some inner kernel of goodness in the man that others can't see. The relationship between Greenberg and Florence doesn't follow any formula. It's a weird coupling based on an icky cocktail of self-loathing, inertia, curiosity and vain hopes of cracking the shell, and Baumbach lets it play out at its own rhythm. It's also, in its strange way, the most moving screen romance I've seen since Punch-Drunk Love, which is sort of its fractured-fairytale flipside. And if the movie seems a little light on Gerwig screen time in proportion to her off-the-charts charisma, well, look at the title.

And there are the pleasures of Baumbach's language. No one writes sharper dialogue. It's the kind of movie that makes you wish you had a notepad handy to jot down all the juicy zingers. I didn't, but here's one from memory, Greenberg on L.A. parenting culture: "All the men dress like children, and all the children dress like superheroes." Cinematically, Baumbach and master cinematographer Harris Savides—whose work with Baumbach is wildly different from his work with David Fincher, which is wildly different from his work with Gus Van Sant, and so on—work on a widescreen canvas that that showcases the expansiveness of L.A. while continually placing Stiller on the margins of the frame, reflecting his semi-willful alienation. It's a literary film in some ways, but unlike so many actual lit adaptations it doesn't suffer from lack of psyche-probing prose, because Baumbach's characters are designed for the screen rather than the page.

Although the Atticus Finch crowd likely won't feel this way, I was surprised by how much I ended up liking Roger Greenberg. For all his selfishness and oblivious cruelty, there's a yearning and a sadness at his core that goes beyond humanizing a dickhead and into the realm of deep pathos. He is not the raging monster of Nicole Kidman's Margot—I love the critic Steven Boone's suggestion that Margot works best as a horror flick with Kidman as the bogeyman—but a lonely, wounded man whose delusions and off-putting mannerisms were borne of self-protection. Two scenes—a crushingly revealing coffee with an ex-girlfriend and a rambling drunk-dial voicemail to Florence—drive this point home with subtle clarity. By way of closing, let me point out that Roger Greenberg is about the age that Jesse Eisenberg's character in The Squid and the Whale would be now. Is Baumbach drawing a cross-film continuum of "hurt people hurt[ing] people"? Let's just say it's not hard to imagine Greenberg—a failed musician—trying to pass off Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as an original composition at a high school talent show.

America's sweethearts.

2010-03-18T23:55:00.003-05:00

Some quick mythbusting

2010-03-08T10:32:00.003-06:00

Boy, am I tired of the "no one saw The Hurt Locker" meme. I know it's the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner ever, which obviously makes it awesome that it beat the box-office juggernaut Avatar. I understand the David vs. Goliath angle that the media has taken, and I don't have a problem with it.

But every time I hear some variation on the "no one saw The Hurt Locker" line from some media outlet, all I can think of is, just because you didn't see it doesn't mean no one did.

I hate looking at box-office numbers, but let's take a look, shall we?

First, please understand that The Hurt Locker is what you call an independent film, which means it was MADE OUTSIDE OF THE STUDIO SYSTEM. At the most basic level, that is what "independent film" means. It was made for $11 million, which isn't cheap by normal human standards but obviously is considered "low-budget" by the standard of Hollywood studio productions. Given that the movie was independently produced and financed, and released by smallish indie studio Summit Entertainment, IT WAS NEVER GOING TO HAVE A SUPER-DUPER WIDE RELEASE. Look, I feel for the Oscar telecast viewers in South Dakota or wherever who were scratching their heads at why they hadn't heard of this year's Best Picture winner. But media folks, you should know better.

OK, now let's crunch the numbers. According to Box Office Mojo, The Hurt Locker has made about $14.7 million domestically, and $21.3 million worldwide, which is, as far as I can tell, really fucking good for an indie in the current climate. By comparison, the similarly mid-level indie A Single Man, which had a budget hovering in the same ballpark ($7 million), made something like half of Hurt Locker's domestic gross with about $8.5 million. Or to really get some perspective, the beloved-by-me indie Humpday, which was a micro-budget affair, made only about 400 grand.

The Wikipedia article on The Hurt Locker is instructive as to how successful the film was: "It held the highest per-screen-average of any movie playing theatrically in the United States for the first two weeks of its release, gradually moving into the top 20 chart with much wider-released, bigger budget studio films."

The Hurt Locker was a smashing success. It's dumb to pretend that it was some out-of-nowhere obscurity that toppled Avatar despite being seen by no one.

The prevalence of that ignorant attitude is just one reason why this victory for independent film is such a necessary and welcome one.

R.I.P. Barry Hannah

2010-03-02T00:01:00.004-06:00

"I looked over the despondency of the home crowd. Fools! Fools! I thought. Love it! Love the loss as well as the gain. Go home and dig it. Nobody was killed. We saw victory and defeat, and they were both wonderful."

--Barry Hannah, 1942 - 2010. You have to read this guy's stuff. Go track down Airships or Ray as soon as you can. If you've ever trusted me on anything.

Here is the AP story on Hannah's death.

(Photo of Hannah via Jack Pendarvis.)

On feeling dumb, vis a vis "The Ghost Writer"

2010-02-26T22:41:00.005-06:00

I'm always bad at political thrillers. Even though I'm fascinated by the genre's conspiratorial whispering and paranoiac behavior, the twists and plot developments in these movies are such that I'm left in the dark almost every time. This is particularly true of the vaunted conspiracy-thrillers of the '70s, when directors like Alan J. Pakula were less interested in narrative coherence than in conjuring a zeitgeist-y mood of sociopolitical dread and mistrust.

Roman Polanski's impressive new political thriller, The Ghost Writer (no relation to either the Philip Roth novel or the '90s Nickelodeon TV series), is enjoying critical comparisons to Hitchcock, which makes a certain amount of sense, but I think Pakula's may be the more pertinent name to drop. Watching The Ghost Writer, I was reminded of my frustrated attempts to parse confounding Pakula efforts like The Parallax View and Klute. These movies, and others of their '70s-paranoia ilk, enjoy an unusually healthy reputation among cinephiles, and not without reason—they're uncompromising works that speak volumes about their times, both socially and cinematically. But they also don't make much of an effort to satisfy the viewer's narrative appetites, or to resolve themselves in ways that, you know, make sense.

Really, The Ghost Writer isn't nearly as challenging as something like The Parallax View or even the tongue-in-cheeky Winter Kills. (Here it's worth noting that one of the key entries in the '70s paranoia movement, and one of its most accessible and enduring films, is of course Polanski's own Chinatown.) In fact, it's comparatively straightforward, although Polanski's approach to the story is quite leisurely—not at all "tight" or "taut," not even really a "thriller" in any practical sense. But here's what I wanted to talk about: during portions of the movie, and especially in the last act after a game-changing plot event that I won't spoil, I was so confused about what was going on in the story as to feel stupid. When the final twists came, I got what they were, but I couldn't grasp their implications, or the chain of events that led to them. I think I've maybe reasoned out some plausible explanation to myself now, but I dunno.

What's the proper reaction when you fail at basic plot comprehension of a convoluted movie? Is it your fault for being thick, or the movie's fault for not revealing itself more carefully? Is it possible to engage with the film on any higher critical-thinking level if you're not entirely certain what the devil happened in it? Of course the answer to the latter question is yes, but it's hard to surmount those feelings of, "Ugh, why am I being so dumb here." I've never been one of those people with a strong inner compass for the contours of stories—I'm never the guy who guesses the twist in advance, for instance. And at any given plot-driven movie, there are typically a few particulars that I don't worry about when they go over my head; I focus on the big picture—and, of course, on elements more important than mere plot. Even people like my parents are way better than me at the whos, whats, wheres, and whys of story consumption. I don't really have a problem with this, but it can be seriously frustrating when I don't get closure on an involving movie like The Ghost Writer.

Good movie, though. It's definitely improving with thought. You should see it. There's an incredible monologue involving a metaphor about airport lines that reminded me of Noah Cross bellowing, "The future, Mr. Gittes! The future!" The final shot is amazing. And, without giving it away, there's one respect in which the film calls to mind the greatest political thriller ever made, John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate. Not that it's in the same league, of course. And by the design of the story, Polanski never really allows a certain character to reenact a certain Manchurian Candidate scene that I would have loved to see. But perhaps I've said too much.

ME VS. A.O. SCOTT: RUMBLE ON SHUTTER ISLAND

2010-02-20T04:31:00.003-06:00

I generally like A.O. Scott. He's a clever writer who understands and respects cinema. (Look up the opening sentences of his Pearl Harbor review for one of the all-time great burns in film criticism.) But sometimes his cleverness goes too far in the wrong direction. Scott's merciless takedown of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, a movie I'm pretty much in love with just hours after seeing it, is one such instance. Frankly, I'm calling bullshit. You hear that, Tony? (Yeah, that's right, I know your friends call you Tony. "A.O," like keeping your name a secret makes you so fucking cool.)

Let's look at the first paragraph. I think it establishes that Tony and I are just not on the same page with this film. He complains about the "frantic" and "demented" "amplification" of "every detail and incident in the movie." For him, I guess this is a bad thing. Huh. You know, me, I sort of think that a psychodramatic horror-thriller steeped in noir and Hitchcock that's set at a freakin' asylum for the criminally insane...I sort of think a movie like that calls for a little amplification. Of the frantic and demented variety, even. This would not be the right film for Scorsese to practice the restraint and subtlety of, say, his adaptation of The Age of Innocence. Even our Tony concedes that the histrionic style is "not always unenjoyable," which I think is his absurdly fussbudgety way of admitting that he had a good time. But, whatever, what this opening graph comes down to is that this movie just isn't in Scott's wheelhouse. It is so centrally located in the exact sweet-spot of my own wheelhouse that I can only imagine how drab Tony's wheelhouse is. But enough talk of wheelhouses.

The next paragraph finds Scott paying lip service to Scorsese's directorial acumen. He observes that Marty uses his "considerable formal dexterity" to "conjure a tingly atmosphere of uncertainty and dread." Yes—I think this much is undeniable, so I'm glad Scott didn't try to deny it.

After getting that obligatory praise out of the way, Scott sets his sights on a rather puzzling target: the Boston accents of Leo DiCaprio and other cast members. He picks on these "dialect-coached Boston inflections" that "spread through the movie like a contagious disease." Um, okay. Tony, what the hell do you have against Boston? Is this some weird New Yorker thing? Why are you spending precious review space on this topic?

In a paragraph introducing some supporting players, Tony makes the flat-out dumb assertion that protagonist Teddy's death-camp liberation flashbacks are "gratuitous." Really? Expertly deployed visual depictions of a character's psychological demons and life-defining backstory don't strike you as, I don't know, at least potentially important?

From there Scott launches into a vague yet comprehensive list of the movie's narrative components, which he seems to regard, condescendingly, as silly. "All these riddles send out tendrils of implication that end up strangling the movie," he says. "Mr. Scorsese’s camera sense effectively fills every scene with creepiness, but sustained, gripping suspense seems beyond his grasp." Wait, really? You didn't find this shit gripping? What the hell, man! I guess this is hopelessly subjective territory here, but I can't even remember the last time I was so purely, undistractedly enthralled by a movie. My enthrallment had everything to do with Scorsese's "camera sense," in concert with what I think is a damned well-constructed story by acclaimed thriller novelist Dennis Lehane (adapted by Laeta Kalogridis, quite well I thought). If Tony didn't find the movie to be long-term suspenseful, I think that owes more to his own unwillingness to accept Scorsese's heightened, melodramatic approach than to any failure on the director's part.

Now here's where the review gets really annoying: it's time for A.O. Scott to prove how clever he is. He's so clever that, get this, he figured out the twist ahead of time! And because he's such a smart fella, the movie must pay the price of being deemed "a strained and pointless contrivance." Imagine you're Professor McBrainiac A.O. Scott, you're sitting through Shutter Island and it's halfway done or so, and you guess the twist. Now, you could spend the rest of that time examining Scorsese's stylistic stratagems and their thematic resonance. Or you could "study the threads on the rug [Scorsese] is preparing, with lugubrious deliberateness, to pull out from under you." A clever line. But I thought those threads on the rug were kind of, I don't know, interesting and beautiful. And the claim of "pointlessness" says to me that Scott wasn't studying that rug closely at all. Because really there are all kinds of larger resonances here, on a societal level (the state of the mental-health profession in the '50s, creepy postwar paranoia), a personal level (post-traumatic stress, guilt so powerful you have to step into elaborate fantasies to escape it), and a meta-cinematic level (all the Val Lewton, noir, Hitch, and dozens of other genre influences that Marty has spent a lifetime internalizing). There's stuff here, but Scott doesn't want to acknowledge it because...

...It turns out he's got a big ol' agenda to push: A.O. Scott isn't down with the critical adoration of Scorsese. He says that certain people will ignore the silliness of this movie "out of loyalty to Mr. Scorsese, a director to whom otherwise hard-headed critics are inclined to extend the benefit of the doubt." This agenda was confirmed on Twitter, where Scott posted that his review was sure to offend all the "Martisans" out there. (Again, very clever coinage, but stupid idea.) No one argues that Marty's been making perfect movies lately, or that he's batting a thousand in his filmography. But to attack Scorsese as overrated (as Scott implicitly does here) is basically like attacking Hitchcock as overrated: it smacks of wanton contrarianism and is hard to take seriously. Scott writes that Scorsese was "unable to locate what it is in this movie he cares about, beyond any particular, local formal concern." I think it's pretty clear that he cares about the DiCaprio character, about his tragic trajectory of violence and shame, and that the "local formal concerns" add up to a crushingly, damningly powerful ending, a "perfect note of empathetic despair" (to quote Glenn Kenny), pairing a final line and a final shot that collectively propel the film beyond simple narrative gamesmanship. But then, I didn't figure out the twist ahead of time, so I guess I'll never be as brilliant as A.O. Scott.

Why I'm not okay with THE ROOM.

2010-02-16T22:13:00.003-06:00

I haven't seen Tommy Wiseau's The Room, the neo-Ed Wood cult phenomenon that's cornered the market on so-bad-it's-good movie appreciation in the early 21st century. And as of now, I have no plans to see it.

It's not that I'm above it all. I've engaged in my share of laughing at crappy art over the years. Last year, I went with some friends to a midnight screening of Troll 2, another popular title in the so-bad-it's-good genre (there's even a monument to its amusing awfulness in the form of a documentary called Best Worst Movie, whose makers were on hand to shoot footage at the screening I went to). I was reticent at first, but ended up having a pretty good time. It was liberating to partake in the shared experience of loud, collective snarking—not that every drunk dude in the audience with a propensity for derisive quipping was funny, but the fact that we were all breaking down the doors of the holy temple of cinema that is the Music Box Theatre and trashing it with this weirdly watchable gem of junk-culture crap made for a fun evening. For one night, the venerated rituals of polite moviegoing went out the window, and we masochists were free to let loose our inner Tom Servos.

So, okay then, why don't I want to recreate that experience with The Room, which is held in equal esteem by smart critics and undiscerning cultists?

Coupla reasons. For one thing, The Room is inseparable from its creator, the mesmerizingly unself-aware anti-auteur Tommy Wiseau. A cursory glance at any interview/appearance by Wiseau—try this one, which I had the dubious honor of transcribing in my stint as A.V. Club intern—reveals that, to put it simply, there's something wrong with him. The people responsible for inflicting Troll 2 on the world are nowhere to be seen, but Wiseau is front and center in every aspect of Room-mania: he attends as many screenings as he can, gives interviews, and even appeared as one of the tragicomic sideshow attractions on Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job. As far as this poor sap is concerned, the audiences who flock to midnight shows of The Room are there because they find its drama so emotionally compelling. I'm deeply uncomfortable with the exploitation of Wiseau, who clearly has mental health problems of one kind or another. Somehow this guy got a movie made. If you want to gather 'round and laugh at its ineptitude, go for it—I'm sure it's just as epically terrible as everyone says. But in what cruel universe is it considered acceptable, much less a fun night out, to mock borderline-retarded people to their face? Even if you disagree with my premise that Wiseau suffers from some sort of mental malady, surely you wouldn't dispute that creating a cult of personality around someone only to ridicule him to his face is just plain mean. I mean, this guy is getting on airplanes, traveling all over the country for screenings—he thinks people love his movie. He think it's a hit, that he's made it big! Don't you have something better to do?

Which brings me to the other reason why the ever-increasing popularity of The Room frustrates me. This past weekend, the film played to multiple sold-out crowds at the aforementioned Music Box, a beautiful old movie palace that dates back to the silent era. It currently serves as Chicago's major arthouse theater. According to their website, the theater seats 800 people, which means that capacity sell-outs are rare; after all, arthouse fare like Andrea Arnold's lovely Fish Tank (currently drawing low-attendance crowds at the Music Box) isn't known for putting asses in seats. But here's my beef: if you're gonna make it out to the Music Box for the schadenfreude festival that is Tommy Wiseau's traveling freakshow, why not maybe come back next weekend to see A REAL FUCKING MOVIE? It's a revolting injustice that a cult turkey like The Room can sell out a theater like the Music Box while films of actual, non-ironic value struggle every week to find even a meager audience. Is our film culture so diseased that an arthouse theater only draws the attention of its city's populace when it's overtaken by mean-spirited camp-lovers? Apparently, the answer is yes.

So go ahead and keep tormenting a damaged filmmaker while devaluing the meaning of arthouse theaters. I'll be giving my money and time to some movies that deserve it.

Unlikely trios, #1

2010-01-26T03:40:00.003-06:00

John Belushi, Jack Nicholson, Christopher Lloyd; Goin' South, 1978.

Unlikely pairs, #1

2010-01-26T03:21:00.004-06:00

Christopher Lloyd and Jack Nicholson, Goin' South, 1978.

Looking ahead: 15 anticipated films of 2010

2010-01-01T18:17:00.002-06:00

FUCK YOU, 2009! You are in THE PAST! Here are some movies I'm excited about that are theoretically coming our way in the new year, a.k.a. THE FUTURE, in alphabetical order:

The Adjustment Bureau

Writer-director George Nolfi is an unknown quantity, but a Philip K. Dick adaptation starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt? That seems like something to get excited about. I know PKD's work has fed a bunch of lousy films, but I've got a hunch about this one. Damon's choice of roles has been pretty much unerring in the past decade (leading IFC to declare him "The Actor of the '00s"), so I trust that this will have at least some merit. No release date yet, but Universal's got the rights and we can probably expect it in the fall or holiday season.

The American

Droolworthy: a collaboration between Anton Corbijn (the Dutch filmmaker who directed a number of visually striking music videos as well as that Ian Curtis biopic that I never saw) and George Clooney (he's "The American," all right). IMDb's one-line plot summary: "An assassin hides out in Italy for one last assignment." Works for me! Drops in early September, with Focus Features distributing.

Black Swan

Darren Aronofsky's follow-up to The Wrestler (which is feeling more and more like one of the key films of the decade that just ended) is set in the world of New York City ballet and stars Natalie Portman “as a veteran ballerina who finds herself locked in a competitive situation with a rival dancer, with the stakes and twists increasing as the dancers approach a big performance. But it’s unclear whether the rival is a supernatural apparition or if the protagonist is simply having delusions." So, it's some kind of psychological thriller that may or may not have a lesbian sex scene between Portman and Mila Kunis (who plays the rival). Works for me. Fox Searchlight will reportedly be distributing but no release date has been set.

Dogtooth

I know very little about this Greek drama except that it racked up huge raves at Cannes and Toronto last year from discerning critics such as Karina Longworth, Mike D'Angelo, and Scott Tobias. When people stand up and applaud a film with no advance buzz by an unknown director, you can bet something extremely interesting is up. Kino's acquisition of the film will hopefully allow us to see what that something is in 2010.

Greenberg

Noah Baumbach is one of the only American filmmakers with the perceptive eye and nuanced insight into human behavior of a great novelist. I fully expect him to apply these talents to Greenberg, which stars Ben Stiller as a guy dealing with his mid-life crisis by "trying to do nothing for a while." His (much younger) love interest is played by beguiling, oft-nude mumblecore ingenue Greta Gerwig. The trailer looks promising, and Baumbach has never led me astray before. Comes out in March via Focus Features.

I Am Love

Fresh off her triumph in Julia, Tilda Swinton appears in this Italian melodrama; when it premiered at Toronto last year, reviews pegged it as a visual stunner worthy of Sirk and Hitchcock. Magnolia Pictures has picked it up for U.S. release some time this year.

Inception

Even though I had major reservations about The Dark Knight, I can't deny that the enigmatic trailer for Christopher Nolan's upcoming film is brain-ticklingly exciting. Nolan is currently in the rare and enviable position of being a brainiac intellectual filmmaker with a free pass to do whatever the hell he wants in Hollywood, thanks to the massive success of his previous film; here's hoping he takes advantage of it. With a tagline describing it as a sci-fi thriller "set within the architecture of the mind," there's a good chance this film will be closer in tone to Nolan's brilliantly clever Memento than to the overstuffed, quick-cut bombast of The Dark Knight. We'll find out when Warner Brothers releases it in mid-July.

Never Let Me Go

I'm worried about this one. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is one of my favorite novels, like, ever, and even if Mark Romanek gets it right, I feel like he can never really get it right, you know? But I can't wait to see what he comes up with. Fox Searchlight will be releasing it, probably some time during awards season.

Paul

This year, beloved British goofball-geeks Simon Pegg and Nick Frost have separated from longtime collaborator Edgar Wright (more on him later) and hooked up with American director Greg Mottola, whose lovely coming-of-age film Adventureland was one of my favorites of 2009. This sci-fi comedy, which Pegg and Frost wrote as well as star in, is some kind of road movie about two nerds traveling cross-country with an alien. And the alien is voiced by Seth Rogen. Again, works for me. I can't find any info about possible release dates, but Universal is distributing; a summertime release would make sense.

A Prophet

One of the big critical hits of last year's festival circuit; supposedly an epic, tough-as-fuck crime drama set in a French prison. Definitely in my wheelhouse. Some reviews have compared it favorably to The Godfather, and I won't have to wait too long to see it: Sony Classics is distributing in late February.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

Bryan Lee O'Malley's cult comic book series, a giddy bubblegum-slacker adventure comedy, couldn't ask for a better cinematic translator than Edgar Wright. The comics are all very goofy and irreverent and perfectly suited to the man behind Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. I'm not thrilled about the Michael Cera factor (why hasn't Darwinism allowed Jesse Eisenberg to destroy him yet?), but this should be great fun nonetheless. Comin' atcha in August via Universal.

Shutter Island

We all know the deal: Martin Scorsese made an awesome-looking horror movie, it was supposed to come out in October '09, Universal shelved it because it wasn't prestige-y enough to compete in awards season, now we're getting it in February—which would normally be dumping-ground season, something of an insult to Marty. If this doesn't make my top ten at year's end, I'll shave my eyebrows off.

Somewhere

Sofia Coppola returns. Stars Stephen Dorff for some reason. A Hollywood story that's reportedly influenced by Sofia's experience growing up with Francis as her pops. I don't love Sofia's films but I find myself very interested in what she's cooked up here. Hey, if it's even half as sensuously satisfying as daddy's Tetro, I'm on board. Focus Features has the rights but there's no release date yet.

Toy Story 3

I don't believe this requires any contextual information. Comes out in June. Thank god Don Rickles lived long enough to participate in this.

The Tree of Life

My heart was broken when Terrence Malick's long-gestating fifth film didn't come out in 2009 as originally planned. I may not survive to see 2011 if I am denied again. Newish distrib company Apparition supposedly has the rights. This movie may or may not contain dinosaurs.

List 'em up, 2009.

2009-12-31T00:23:00.001-06:00

OK, I'll do one'a these this year. Why not? (I attempted a best-of-decade list, but it was daunting and kind of a drag, and I'm sick of seeing those anyway. So here's this.)

There's the usual caveat that I haven't been able to see everything yet, blah blah blah, but I doubt that, like, The White Ribbon is going to crack the list anyway, so I'm ready to pull the trigger. My 25 favorite films of 2009, counting down, starting with the also-rans.

Honorable mentions: Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces suffers from a serious case of Third Act Problems, but for most of the way it offers further proof that nobody in world cinema tells a story as enticingly as Pedro; Lone Scherfig's An Education is also hobbled by a botched ending, but it's got some of the year's loveliest performances, and its take on the myopia of young romanticism is moving and subtle; Ti West's The House of the Devil is almost the Gerry of horror movies, with its rhythmically slow build and masterful mise-en-scéne; Cary Fukunaga's Sin Nombre, a harrowing immigrant drama by an exciting new voice in Mexican cinema, features some of the year's most gorgeous widescreen lensing; and Armando Iannucci's In the Loop can't sustain its early reels' headlong rush of verbal brilliance, but as a caustic satire it's probably the closest we'll ever get to a Dr. Strangelove for the Bush era.

Dishonorable mention: Is it possible to believe that Lars von Trier's Antichrist is great art that's also completely full of shit? Von Trier's artistry is undeniable, and the performances are incredibly brave and committed, but the laziness and faux-profundity of the script is hard to overlook. "There's no such constellation," indeed.

THE LIST PROPER:

25) Crank: High Voltage. Like Michael Bay as filtered through old Warner Bros. cartoons and the French New Wave. Jason Statham is an axiom of ownage.

24) Harmony and Me. Hilarious collection of deadpan comic vignettes; also a surprisingly moving picaresque about the redemption of a sad-sack slacker and the therapeutic power of art.

23) A Single Man. Beautiful companion piece to Mad Men, for more than just the 1962 setting: it's almost a feature-length exegesis on Don Draper's exhortation to "limit your exposure."

22) Collapse. An intimate conversation with one of those street-corner nuts ranting about the end of the world—except he may not be a nut this time, and the end of the world might be real.

21) Whip It. No, I'm not kidding: Drew Barrymore's roller derby movie is a bright, heartfelt, irresistibly energetic tale of teen girl self-actualization—the cinematic equivalent of a great young-adult novel.

20) The Hurt Locker. I don't love this as much as everyone else does, but who am I to say no to a blisteringly single-minded character study of men in war that also blows stuff up real good? Best shot of a supermarket in cinema history.

19) Drag Me to Hell. In a welcome return to his roots, Sam Raimi finds the perfect sweet spot where horror and comedy intersect. Contains the most outlandishly conceived, outrageously executed set pieces of the year.

18) Public Enemies. Gotta love a rough-edged art film disguised as a blockbuster. Michael Mann's half-ugly, half-stunning digital video scrubs away all residue of nostalgia associated with the '30s gangster genre.

17) Adventureland. I didn't think the world needed another coming-of-age story about sensitive outsiders sharing a summer, but Greg Mottola's authentic script and graceful direction convinced me otherwise.

16) Pontypool. Locked-room suspense gives way to the year's strangest narrative tangent, which I daren't spoil even here. Grizzled old Stephen McHattie is both dryly ironic and almost romantically sonorous.

15) Tetro. Are we still allowed to use the word "classical" in 2009? Francis Ford Coppola, the returning champ, doesn't care about anything other than the images and emotions swirling around his old-fashioned brainpan.

14) Somers Town. My fave British filmmaker Shane Meadows masterfully locks into the languorous rhythms of two lost youths aimlessly wandering around London. A lyrical, magic-tinged wonderment; 70 minutes of pure happiness.

13) The Girlfriend Experience. Steven Soderbergh's digital follow-up to Bubble is just as uncompromising and aesthetically thrilling. His jazzy, circuitous, experimental editing upstages even Sasha Grey.

12) Big Fan. Robert Siegel gets how fandom tempers alienation; this absorbing character study presents a scenario in which the fandom is compromised and the fan must reckon with the confusion that remains.

11) The Brothers Bloom. Clever writing, exuberant filmmaking, perfect performances—how was Rian Johnson's second film dismissed as a mere Wes Anderson knockoff? For shame, critics.

10) Sita Sings the Blues. Buoyant meditation on music, mythology and heartbreak. Stylistically and thematically, Nina Paley's labor of love beats all the lame, overrated animation offered by the big studios this year.

9) A Serious Man. In which the Coen brothers go rooting around for the meaning of life in their own childhood backyard. A seriocomic reversal of the old saw, "somebody up there likes me."

8) The Box. All the sweet, sweet crazy we've come to expect from Richard Kelly, made with just enough discipline and adherence to traditional horror methods. Kelly is in communication with those who control the lightning.

7) Moon. Like a great episode of The Twilight Zone writ large: a minimalist genre work that remembers when sci-fi was about ideas, not spectacle. Also a master class in resourceful use of a low budget.

6) Me and Orson Welles. Maybe it's just the erstwhile theater-dork in me, but this sparkling love letter to the stage pleased me all out of proportion to its lack of buzz. Kinda like Almost Famous, weirdly, but better.

5) Silent Light. An immersive movie experience if there ever was one. Love, sorrow and the sanctity of daily rituals painted in stunning widescreen tableaux. Proves that "art films" needn't be remote or inaccessible.

4) Two Lovers. Start appreciating James Gray. No straining for Oscar approbation—just a beautiful, finely detailed, character-based drama that recalls U.S. cinema's '70s Silver Age. Guess they do make 'em like this anymore.

3) The Informant!. Zany farce, twisty tale of corporate corruption, close-up character study of the world's funniest sociopath—Soderbergh went two for two in '09 with this carnivalesque psychocomedy. Best voice-over EVER.

2) Humpday. My favorite movie to emerge from the DIY/mumblecore school. Lynn Shelton uses humor to suss out subtle truths about human relationships, and shapes her lead actors' improv with unprecedented precision.

1) Inglourious Basterds. An apotheosis of Tarantino's penchant for measured pacing and rigorous structure. Every shot and every scene is mapped out with beautiful exactitude. In a time when quick-cut incoherence rules the market—when "the shot has been banished from mainstream commercial cinema"—we need QT now more than ever. Plus, it's the best script the man has yet written: "If this is it, old boy, you won't mind if I go out speaking the King's?"

Deflating UP IN THE AIR

2009-12-04T22:14:00.007-06:00

I don't really get any pleasure from tipping sacred cows. Okay, I kind of do, but what I mean is that I want to like every movie I see. So it's with some reticence that I report that Jason Reitman's new Oscar-bound dramedy Up in the Air, which is currently rocking an 82 (that's "Universal Acclaim") at Metacritic, didn't really do it for me.

I've read interviews with Jason Reitman, and I can tell that he's a bright guy who genuinely wants to make good movies. Fine—I'll keep seeing whatever he comes up with. But there's something almost insulting about the way this dude has been hagiographed by the press in the months since his new movie premiered at Toronto. Some asinine movie bloggers even made the laughably hyperbolic statement that Reitman is "the new Billy Wilder," or some such bullshit.

Whatever his strengths—and I'm not convinced that he has any definable ones, other than picking good projects—Reitman is a decidedly unambitious filmmaker in an era (or at least a year) in which original American voices are flourishing in cinema more than the press would have you know. 2009 has seen a string of remarkable films by authentic, talented young American directors: Lynn Shelton, Rian Johnson, Robert Siegel, Duncan Jones (a Brit, but humor me); not to mention more established names like Steven Soderbergh, James Gray, Richard Kelly, the Coens, Tarantino. But none of their films are going to make the awards-season splash that Up in the Air was poised to make before it even opened. So that's where I'm coming from when I say that Up in the Air is not worth getting excited about, and why I'm slightly offended by the hero's welcome it and its creator have received (and will continue to receive all the way through Oscar night).

Now, the movie. It's not bad. The actors are appealing, the script has its share of clever exchanges. But for a movie ostensibly about alienation and regret, it feels fundamentally hollow and unaffecting. In her astutely skeptical review, Karina Longworth opines that the film's "inherent brightness [is] tinted blue but never significantly darkened." Yes. The main problem with Up in the Air is Reitman's inability to fully engage with the pain and melancholy that gradually overtake its protagonist's life. Reitman wasn't the right man for the job; imagine what a more emotionally nuanced filmmaker could have done with this material—someone liked the aforementioned James Gray, perhaps. Reitman attempts an unhappy ending—the twist (I'll be cryptic to avoid spoilers) is that, even though Clooney has the standard big third-act epiphany, he can't act on it. This is an improvement on Juno's cloying exeunt, but it doesn't sting the way it should—not by a long shot.

And what of Clooney himself? In recent years, the mega-star has proven himself a resourceful and inventive performer; consider the range between, say, his hilariously goofy mugging in Burn After Reading and his classicist composure in Michael Clayton. But this strikes me as a regression for him—for the first time in years, he's relying on movie-star charisma rather than acting chops, and the film feels shallower for it. It's the women of Up in the Air who come close to redeeming it: neither Vera Farmiga nor Anna Kendrick is a household name, but they probably will be once this film's Oscar campaign is over. Farmiga knocks it out of the park in exuding the smoldering mystery that entices Clooney, and when the painful truth behind that mystery is revealed, Farmiga's consistence retroactively sells it. Young Kendrick steals all her scenes as a more grounded-in-reality version of Election's Tracey Flick; the lone scene that Clooney shares with both these women is perhaps the most interesting segment of the movie.

One reason the ending (and by extension, the whole film) doesn't go down like the jagged little pill it should have is that Reitman tips his hand with a montage of recently laid-off employees extolling the importance of family and close relationships (y'know, the stuff Clooney doesn't have). The intended irony is obvious, but the schmaltzy montage itself seems truer to Reitman's softie nature. All I could think of was that episode of King of the Hill where ditzy Luanne, having taken over as the local TV weatherperson, warns of an incoming storm and exhorts her audience, "Hug your babies tight!" Reitman wants his own exhortation to be more complicated (complete with gestures toward way-we-live-now portent), but he can't disguise his true calling as a maker of slick, harmless, reassuring entertainment. And let's not forget that his visual sense is about as sophisticated as Kevin Smith's. Embrace it, Jason—you're not a poet of solitude. You're just a guy who's about to win a bunch of Oscars.

sand, sky, gun, hat

2009-12-01T22:43:00.002-06:00

The horizon is unusually diagonal in this strikingly composed shot from Tommy Lee Jones's The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

Jerry's America

2009-11-29T19:02:00.001-06:00

Today, a fascinating confluence of three things I love: (1) Jerry Lewis, (2) Dave Kehr's DVD column in the New York Times, and (3) 1960s culture. It seems there's a new DVD set collecting sketches from The Jerry Lewis Show, a TV show that aired from 1967-69 and that I didn't even know existed. Kehr covers it here, and this is the paragraph that really fascinated me:

"The most interesting sketches in this collection find Mr. Lewis confronting [the social changes of the late '60s]. A two-part parody titled “My Bonnie Lies Over the Clyde” offers Mr. Lewis and Audrey Meadows as the outlaw couple played by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the 1967 film, which had come to symbolize the “new Hollywood.” Presented by “Nice Clean Pictures,” the sketch begins by satirizing the unprecedented level of graphic violence that “Bonnie and Clyde” had introduced to American movies: Mr. Lewis’s Clyde enters a bank, mows down a dozen extras with a machine gun, and announces, “Nobody move and you won’t get hurt.” But with his Bogart lisp and “Scarface” tuxedo, Mr. Lewis is playing a gangster of Hollywood’s old school, not Mr. Beatty’s stylish new model, and a revealing disconnection sets in."

My curiosity about this may not be strong enough to actually track down the DVD, but I like the idea of Jerry as an avatar for the Mad Men generation of formerly hip gents watching their own obsolescence in slow motion. There's something poignant about the idea of Jerry fucking up his attempt to engage with the changing times, as per Kehr's latter observation about the outmoded gangster impression. Jerry's richest artistic period—his run of self-directed films from 1960-1965, in my estimation—was also, as far as I can tell, the last time he was really taken seriously as an American cultural institution. Once the proper-noun Sixties began in earnest, so too began Jerry's descent into public ridicule; as early as '67, Roger Ebert was already indulging in that now horribly clichéd practice: making fun of the French for loving Jerry Lewis.

Incidentally, Lewis's influence can currently be seen in multiplexes, as Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox (a disappointment, but that's another subject) uses the same Jerry-derived visual trick that he borrowed for The Life Aquatic—the "cross-section" shot, used to show the boat in the earlier film and underground tunnels in the new one, was deployed by Lewis in his 1961 film The Ladies Man to show all the busy rooms of a house. JERRY 4 LIFE.

Comedian's manifesto

2009-11-13T00:15:00.001-06:00

"To be sure, gentlemen, my jokes are in bad tone—uneven, confused, self-mistrustful. But that is simply because I don't respect myself. How can a man of consciousness have the slightest respect for himself?" —Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground

Mad worlds: Richard Kelly's THE BOX

2009-11-06T20:04:00.007-06:00

Though it lacks the vividness and depth of feeling that made Donnie Darko a contemporary classic, The Box belatedly confirms Richard Kelly's gift for creating mind-bending tales of both personal and cosmic disorder. Like Kelly's debut and its colossally misguided follow-up Southland Tales, this is a confusing film that I wish came with a user's manual; I'll have to see it again before I can determine if its narrative convolutions make some kind of sense or are merely red herrings. I suspect it's a little from column A and a little from column B, but it hardly matters. Kelly has crafted a deeply involving, unnerving, and singular sci-fi/horror film—and he's done it, for the first time, from within the trenches of the studio system.

When I heard that Richard Kelly was adapting a Richard Matheson story for his next film, I thought it would be an opportunity for him to take a back-to-basics approach and rein himself in after the miserable excesses of Southland Tales. Yes and no. While the what-would-you-do morality drama of the premise does ground Kelly to a certain degree, expanding the original story to feature length gives him ample room to explore the stratosphere of his own vast imagination. After the expected tension produced by Matheson's set-up—Frank Langella (deliciously creepy in the tradition of genteel, matter-of-fact monsters) shows up at a nice family's house with the button that'll give them a million a dollars but ensure a stranger's death—Kelly's script veers into bizarre blind alleys and ambiguous sci-fi conspiracy-theory madness. His obsession with water imagery (remember Donnie's weird projectile liquids) shows up in a breathtaking sequence that verges on the psychedelic. The middle portion of the film resembles a fever dream.

And yet, because this is a studio film—or maybe just because Kelly learned his lesson after last time—this weirdness doesn't sink the movie. The key to The Box's success is that it's filled with relatively traditional scares. From the first reel Kelly plants little suggestions that some malevolent forces are intruding on the characters. Kelly's tone is one of dread, of perpetually creeping mystery and terror. Here is a film in which the simple pleasures of old-fashioned horror storytelling rub up against the wild eccentricities of an outré fantasist. The result is ungainly at times, but it works, and as more than just a prepackaged cult commodity.

As in Donnie Darko, Kelly is committed to evoking the suburban details of a particular time, in this case the 1970s. Steven Poster's cinematography bathes the characters in a halo-ish glow that signifies at once nostalgia for a bygone era and the presence of cosmic forces interfering in the lives of ordinary people. Kelly's framing is precise and chosen for maximum creepiness; he seems to be in total control, even when the plot runs off the rails.

If there's something missing from The Box, it's the absence of Donnie Darko's emotional richness—the one area in which Kelly doesn't seem to be operating at full potential. But this is somewhat rectified in the film's haunting, if not exactly unpredictable, conclusion. Kelly has at last made a worthy follow-up to his debut: once again, the dreams in which he's dying are the best he's ever had.

The Catch.

2009-09-08T23:47:00.002-05:00

Barb said, “The catch. Don’t tell me there isn’t one. And don’t tell me these tickets to Vegas aren’t part of it.”

Pete stashed his piece. “Are you saying that two tickets was being optimistic?”

“No. You know I’ll never leave you.”

Pete smiled. “There’s some fuck-ups I wouldn’t have made, if I’d known you better.”

Barb smiled. “The catch? Vegas? And don’t make eyes at me when we have to run for a plane.”

Pete shut his suitcase. “The Outfit has plans for Mr. Hughes. Ward’s putting some things together.”

“It’s about staying useful, then.”

“Yeah. Stay useful, stay healthy. If I can get them to bend a certain rule, I’d call it a lock.”

Barb said, “What rule?”

“Come on, you know what I do.”

Barb shook her head. “You’re versatile. You run shakedowns and you sell guns and dope. You killed the President of the United States once, but I’d have to call that a one-time opportunity.”

Pete laughed. Pete made his sides hurt. Pete leaked some wiiiiild tears. Barb tossed a towel up. Pete wiped his eyes and de-teared.

“You can’t move heroin there. It’s a set policy, but it’s probably the best way I can make the Boys some real money. They might go for it, if I only sell to the spooks in West Vegas. Mr Hughes hates jigs. He thinks they should all be doped up, like he is. The Boys might decide to humor him.”

Barb got This Look. Pete knew the gestalt. I fucked JFK. You killed him. My craaazy life.

She said, “useful.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

Barb grabbed her Twist gowns. Barb dropped them out the window. Pete looked out. A kid looked up. The blue gown hit a ledge.

Barb waved. The kid waved back.

“The Twist is dead, but I’ll bet you could get me some lounge gigs.”

“We’ll be useful.”

“I’m still scared.”

Pete said, “That’s the catch.”

— James Ellroy, The Cold Six Thousand, pp. 68-69

Adventures in aspect-ratio geekery, or, why I love the internet, or, leave it to Bogdanovich

2009-08-01T00:10:00.004-05:00

So I saw a 35mm print of Orson Welles' The Lady From Shanghai tonight at the Music Box, and of course it was glorious. But I noticed something very strange. During the legendary climactic funhouse-mirror sequence, the aspect ratio appeared to change from the standard 1.37:1 Academy ratio (the square shape of all pre-1953 Hollywood films) to a rectangular ratio, with the screen letterboxed (black bars at the top and bottom), looking closer to 1.85 or 1.66:1. This was shocking because widescreen ratios weren't a thing in Hollywood until CinemaScope arrived in 1953. At first I thought it might just be a projection snafu of some kind, or a quirk of the print that wasn't supposed to be there. But that wasn't a satisfactory explanation; I wondered if Welles was up to something.

So I poked around on the internet.

What I found was a thread on Wellesnet.com addressing this exact topic, originated by a poster who had my exact experience: he saw a theatrically projected print of Lady From Shanghai, noticed some letterboxing funny business in the funhouse scene, and wondered what the hell was going on. Some speculation followed, and then another poster delivered the goods by transcribing a comment made by Peter Bogdanovich on a DVD commentary track:

"In some scenes - it's noticeable particularly in the funhouse scene, in the mirror scene at the end, but there are other places where you can see it - he actually changed the aperture in the camera when he shot, so that sometimes the image was narrower than normal, top and bottom. He did that on purpose in a way that in fact DW Griffith did, changing the shape of the image by masking the top and bottom or the sides or whatever, something that Griffith did. Orson brought that into sound pictures, something that very few people did. He was amused that he'd done it and nobody'd ever noticed it."

Well I noticed it, Orson.

It does make sense, really, because creating a wider image gave him more room to convey the scope of the funhouse and all the mirror doubling. He probably figured that you couldn't quite get a full sense of the visual distortion in the square ratio.

What I'm wondering now is if this has any implications for the ongoing, vociferous debate over the correct aspect ratio for Touch of Evil. It's all very involved and confusing, and there's no definitive proof either way, but a lot of people got upset when the recent DVD special edition of the film presented it in 1.85:1, even though by 1958 almost all theaters were projecting films in some kind of widescreen ratio. The argument, or one argument, goes that Welles hated the widescreen processes and composed his shots in 1.37:1 even knowing that they would eventually be masked for 1.85:1, or something like that. But to me his experiments in Lady From Shanghai indicate that he was interested in playing around with aspect ratios and widescreen effects. So it adds another layer to the debate. Or rather it would if any of those people read my blog.

Quiz kid

2009-07-26T19:06:00.002-05:00

Noted film blogger Dennis Cozzalio is known for posting occasional quizzes for other film bloggers to fill out, discuss, engage with, etc. I've seen 'em before but never participated. There's a new one, and I figured, why not. So here are my answers:

1) Second-favorite Stanley Kubrick film.
The Killing. (#1 is Paths of Glory.)

2) Most significant/important/interesting trend in movies over the past decade, for good or evil.
Either good or evil, depending on the filmmaker: the increasingly prevalent use of digital video (as opposed to film). Some directors (Fincher, Mann, Soderbergh, Lynch, Coppola, et al) have done lovely and/or interesting things with the new medium. Many others have used it to unwittingly create ass-ugly, shit-looking, hideous pieces of shit. Either way, it's the future of cinema and we have to deal with it.

3) Bronco Billy (Clint Eastwood) or Buffalo Bill Cody (Paul Newman)?
Sadly I've seen neither film as of yet.

4) Best Film of 1949.
Hard not to say The Third Man, but my heart belongs to The Set-Up.

5)Joseph Tura (Jack Benny) or Oscar Jaffe (John Barrymore)?
The former.

6) Has the hand-held shaky-cam directorial style become a visual cliché?
No—that's like asking if the Steadicam has become a visual cliche. It's just a visual strategy that filmmakers have at their disposal. Like anything else, it can be used for good or for evil. Is it sometimes used falsely or ineptly? Sure, but no moreso than, say, false or inept use of the 2.35:1 widescreen ratio (which rankles me a lot more). Whether or not it's overused is the wrong question; the important thing is how it's used.

7) What was the first foreign-language film you ever saw?
Hard to say, but the first one I saw theatrically must have been Amelie.

8) Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) or Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre)?
N/A.

9) Favorite World War II drama (1950-1970).
There are a lot of major ones I haven't seen, so for now I'll say Stalag 17.

10) Favorite animal movie star.
Uh, has there ever been a good one? I will opt for a smartass answer and say the frogs at the end of Magnolia.

11) Who or whatever is to blame, name an irresponsible moment in cinema.
Paul Haggis' Crash irresponsibly allowing smug, ostensibly PC white people in the audience to pat themselves on the back for not being racist like the characters on the screen.

12) Best Film of 1969.
Again, too much I've yet to see; I'll have to put down The Wild Bunch, even though it's not one of my favorite Peckinpahs.

13) Name the last movie you saw theatrically, and also on DVD or Blu-ray.
Theatrically, a double feature of Humpday and In The Loop. On DVD, Joe Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch. All splendid films in their own respective ways.

14) Second-favorite Robert Altman film.
The Long Goodbye. (#1 is McCabe & Mrs. Miller.)

15) What is your favorite independent outlet for reading about movies, either online or in print?
Impossible to pick just one since I take everything in via RSS feeds and such. But if I have to single something out, I get a reliable combination of laughs and enlightenment from Glenn Kenny's wonderful blog.

16) Who wins? Angela Mao or Meiko Kaji? (Thanks, Peter!)
N/A.

17) Mona Lisa Vito (Marisa Tomei) or Olive Neal (Jennifer Tilly)?
N/A.

18) Favorite movie that features a carnival setting or sequence.
Some Came Running. (I was going to say Carnival of Souls, but realized it doesn't actually feature a carnival.)

19) Best use of high-definition video on the big screen to date.
Motherfuckin' Zodiac, in a walk.

20) Favorite movie that is equal parts genre film and a deconstruction or consideration of that same genre.
Can't decide between McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Unforgiven. I like the former more in general, but I think the latter works better as a deconstruction.

21) Best Film of 1979.
It's been too long since I've seen Alien, which I suspect is the correct answer. In lieu of that, I will put down All That Jazz, which I can safely say is the greatest musical about self-destruction and thanatotic obsession ever made.

22) Most realistic and/or sincere depiction of small-town life in the movies.
I don't know about realistic, but for sincerity it's hard to beat Jacques Tourneur's underseen Stars In My Crown. (In the contemporary realm, of course, there are David Gordon Green's first two features.)

23) Best horror movie creature (non-giant division).
As Val Lewton understood, the scariest creatures are always the unseen ones. Having said that, I love the Gremlins in Joe Dante's comedy-horror diptych. And those things in The Descent were fucking scary.

24) Second-favorite Francis Ford Coppola film.
Too many gaps in my Coppola viewing. I'll say Apocalypse Now even though I only saw it in my youthier days. (#1 is The Conversation.)

25) Name a one-off movie that could have produced a franchise you would have wanted to see.
The AV Club did a fun list related to this topic a while back. I don't know if I can think of one, since this question presupposes that movie franchises are a worthy undertaking, and I'm not convinced that's the case.

26) Favorite sequence from a Brian De Palma film.
Any scene from the trashsterpiece Body Double. I love every moment of that giddily over-the-top, quintessentially '80s film. (And I suck at remembering individual sequences.)

27) Favorite moment in three-strip Technicolor.
Does the dream ballet in An American In Paris count as a moment?

28) Favorite Alan Smithee film. (Thanks, Peter!)
I am happily unqualified to answer this one.

29) Crash Davis (Kevin Costner) or Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau)?
N/A.

30) Best post-Crimes and Misdemeanors Woody Allen film.
I'm actually rather fond of his ingratiating, underrated comedy Scoop, from 2006.

31) Best Film of 1999.
American Movie: The Making of Northwestern (the only documentary I love as much as my favorite fiction films). For best fiction feature of '99, I'd pick Eyes Wide Shut.

32) Favorite movie tag line.
"Who will survive and what will be left of them?" (from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).

33) Favorite B-movie western.
As others have pointed out, this depends on your definition of B-movie. I haven't really seen any true B-westerns (that's the cheapo kiddie stuff from the '30s, Roy Rogers and down). Closest thing I've seen is probably the Boetticher/Scott cycle, of which my favorite is Ride Lonesome, but even that's way above the B-movie station.

34) Overall, the author best served by movie adaptations of her or his work.
Great question. I'd say Stephen King, but there have been as many shitty films based on his work as good ones. I'll go with Raymond Chandler: Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, and Altman's The Long Goodbye ... an unimpeachable trifecta, even if it can't quite hold up to the best King adaptations (Carrie and The Shining being the preeminent examples).

35) Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) or Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard)?
The former.

36) Favorite musical cameo in a non-musical movie.
Is cameo the right word here? I can't think of anything.

37) Bruno (the character, if you haven’t seen the movie, or the film, if you have): subversive satire or purveyor of stereotyping?
Inconsistent—the film is half satirical, half farcical. Cohen can't decide if he wants to expose hypocrisy or make himself the butt of the joke; his stuff usually works better when in the latter mode. Either way, I don't think negative stereotyping is really an issue, although he does rely a bit too heavily on the premise that gay sex and male nudity are inherently hilarious.

38) Five film folks, living or deceased, you would love to meet. (Thanks, Rick!)
Damn, tough one. Orson Welles is a given. Billy Wilder would be a delightful conversationalist, I'm sure. Martin Scorsese, obviously—we know that man can talk. In the actor realm there's Jean Arthur, because I have a long-standing crush on her. And finally a man who I conceivably could meet, given that we share a city: the one and only Roger Ebert.

Liveblogging BTTF2 for some goddamn reason

2009-07-22T01:36:00.003-05:00

Sigh. I was passively flipping channels tonight when I came across a cable channel that was just about to show Back to the Future II. These are, for me, the ideal conditions to watch a Back to the Future film, and it's very difficult for me to resist the impulse to do so. And because I'm apparently a masochist (and, if anyone else reads this, a sadist as well), I was seized by the urge to liveblog that shit. So I did. My efforts follow.

--------------------

-Wait so, maybe this is explained elsewhere and I'm just forgetting, but how much time has elapsed for Doc between the end of Part 1, when he oh-so-wistfully departs for the future ("About 30 years... seems like a nice round number") to the beginning of Part 2, when he shows up back at chez McFly? Of course it's only been a matter of seconds in real time — just long enough for Marty to drool over his shiny new car (and his literally new girlfriend, Elizabeth Shue replacing the jobber from Part 1), glance back at his new parents, and declare that "everything is great." But how long has Doc been gallivanting around the space-time continuum in the interim, and what exactly has he been up to (besides bearing witness to the poor life decisions of Marty's progeny)?

-Allow me to quote myself from an email I sent to Abe in response to this video: One of my favorite little nuances of the trilogy is that when he sees the DeLorean flying, Friendly Nu-Biff *instantly* reverts to Original Asshole Biff, presaging Evil Tycoon Biff. It's all there in that little moment. Thomas F. Wilson FTW.

-Jennifer is rather implausibly credulous in her response to finding out she's in a time machine. But that does set up the cute gag of Doc knocking her out with a future-y science tool. ("She's not essential to my plan.")

-Ugh: "The justice system works swiftly in the future now that they've abolished all lawyers." Some of these it's-the-future jokes are really lame.

"Power laces! All right!" Marty, your earnest enthusiasm about "power laces" is adorable.

-Despite the flying cars, weird clothes, and holographic shark-attack (an ad for "Jaws 19" that scared the holy living fuck out of me as a kid), the vision of 2015 Hill Valley is kind of mundane. It's neither a Blade Runner hellish dystopia nor a glowing vision of progress. It's just a crappy '80s suburb projected 30 years forward, like those computer composites of missing children.

-Speaking of the '80s, this '80s nostalgia cafe remains a truly inspired touch. And yes, here I will note the new resonance of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" blaring out of the cafe's speakers and a pixellated MJ computer animation appears as a waiter.

-Old Biff, I love you. How many different Biffs does Thomas F. Wilson play in this film alone?

-Oh my god, Griff is fucking hilarious. I can't believe Wilson got away with such a recklessly over-the-top caricature.

-WAIT. WAIT. Griff is Biff's grandson, yes? So this implies that Biff was married or at least got it on with a lady, and had some kind of family and life outside of his association with the McFlys (which is all we know of him). I, for one, would like to know a lot more biographical details about Biff. (Speaking strictly of regular reality Biff at this point, not skewed-tangent Evil Tycoon Biff, about whom we actually know a fair amount thanks to that helpfully exposition-packed video that plays in the casino later on. I want a bio-vid like that for the other Biff permutations too.)

-Um, that arcade joke — "You mean you have to use your hands? That's like a baby's toy" — doesn't really work by itself; it pays off in Part 3 at the shooting gallery. Sometimes the rhyming effects in the sequels are fun; sometimes, as here, they're kinda stupid.

-I'm sure this has pointed out a million billion times by nerds before, and I don't actually give a shit, but according to the interal logic of the trilogy shouldn't there be a space-time continuum-unraveling paradox when Marty comes face to face with Marty Jr in the cafe? Or at least one of them should faint, a la the two Jennifers later on? #whocares

"Your jacket is now dry." Maybe this is a utopian future after all.

-WTF: Why did they put an actor in crappy age makeup for the "save the clock tower" guy rather than just hiring an old actor? My first instinct was that it was the same guy from the first movie, but no — that was a lady.

-Much like Marty quoting Taxi Driver in Part 3, I did not understand Marty Jr's Midnight Cowboy reference for many years. Actually, in Part 3, I spent years thinking "You talkin' to me?" was a Clint Eastwood quote since Marty borrowed Clint's name as his nom du cowboy.

-"I was fraaamed!!!" This first act is maybe a little too goofy, but Griff makes it all worthwhile.

-Oh, wait, I guess the time paradox deal is only if you meet your future self, not your future son who looks exactly like you. Works for me.

-"So...Doc Brown invented a time machine." Aaaand time for the commercial break, if this were the taped-from-basic-cable VHS that I watched throughout my childhood! It really is a beautifully dramatic moment.

-Even as a kid, I appreciated the inventive wordplay of the line "Hilldale: nothing but a breeding ground for tranks, lobos, and zipheads." Although for a supposedly rough neighborhood there sure are some big, nice-looking houses. I think this was just a half-assed attempt to make some comment on (sub)urban decay, cf. Marty getting excited when he finds out he ends up in formerly richy-rich Hilldale.

-I really will never forgive this movie for putting Michael J. Fox in drag.

-On one of the channels Marty Jr is watching on that big multi-TV: an ad for a product called "The Headlight Tit," showing a busty woman with a bright light emanating from her, ah, endowment. Where's Billy Mays when we need him most?

-Where's Doc while Biff is stealing the Delorean? Is this explained later? I'm thinking it isn't.

-NEEDLES!!! Greatest 45-seconds-of-screentime character in the history of cinema. Bless you, Flea.

-"Read my fax." Ew boy. Couldn't somebody have told Zemeckis and Gale that probably no one would be using fax machines in 2015? On the other hand, I had to use a fax machine at my recent internship sometimes and felt the embarrassing sting of having to ask people how the hell to use a fax machine.

-Okay so. Biff keeling over when he returns the DeLorean never made sense, but I seem to recall a deleted scene on the DVD (I've since lost the DVD set I got when it came out, which is a fucking shame...got lost in the shuffle of going away to college) that explained it. But I do not remember what the explanation was other than that it was mind-blowing. I think it involved Biff being "erased from existence" per Marty's fam in Part 1. But I don't remember why. Shit, I need to replace that DVD set. Maybe if/when I eventually go Blu-ray.

-I love this stretch of the movie, exploring the dystopian alternate 1985. "I don't remember bars being on these windows..."

-Whoa uh, Doc is pretty cavalier saying he's about to dismantle the time machine. Did he make an announcement to that effect earlier? Guess it doesn't much matter; presumably Doc immediately noticed that something was rotten in Denmark and changed plans.

-At least two different Michael Jackson posters on the black girl's bedroom wall (formerly Marty's bedroom wall).

-Major tone shift now. The dopey humor of the 2015 segment is gone. "We ain't gonna be terrorized!" This scene is so evocatively hellish. Silvestri's score is really the fifth Beatle of these movies — it's so insistent.

-I love that Strickland addresses the gang who just tried to murder him in a drive-by shooting as "slackers."

-Aaand it's the best use if "I Can't Drive 55" ever. And here's that Biff bio video - "America's greatest living folk hero"(!)

-"I just want to say one thing...God bless America." Thomas F. Wilson you are perfect.

-Ha, I'd forgotten (or never noticed??) that this video links Biff to Marilyn Monroe.

"You're so...big." I wonder how many viewings it took before I understood this as a reference to Lorraine's boobs.

-The talk of George McFly's virtue does make me miss the presence of Crispin Glover. I'd like to know more about the supposed falling-out between him and Zemeckis that resulted in his exclusion from the sequels.

-And here's the line that delighted me for years with the impact of its coincidence: "Your father is in the same place he's been for the past 12 years...OAK PARK CEMETERY!" Seeing it now, it doesn't seem so odd - there are a few other towns called Oak Park and it's a fairly generic-sounding name for a cemetery. But, you know.

-"English, Doc." Marty really is not too bright, is he?

-Can of worms: since Biff creates an alternate reality by giving himself the Almanac, couldn't the sports results conceivably be totally different from those of the original reality, thus rendering the Almanac useless?!?!

-I was always impressed by the stairs trick Marty uses to ditch Biff's goons. I like when Marty gets to be a wily badass.

-Maybe the most rousing, triumphant, perfectly timed moment in the trilogy: Marty riding the DeLorean, Doc knocking Biff out cold with the car door, and this exchange: "You're not gonna believe this - we gotta go back to 1955!" "I don't believe it!"

-The idea that Nov 5, 1955 is some kind of fulcrum of the entire time space continuum is pretty fucking cool. "On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence." I like that they never explain which of those options it is.

-And now we get the second big shift in tone. We had the broad humor of the first act in 2015 turning to the hellishly grave drama of the alternate 1985, now back to the sweet "Mr. Sandman" world of 1955 Hill Valley and the misadventures of young bully Biff as he throws kids' soccer balls into gutters, haggles over the price for fixing his manure-messed car, and tries to woo the young Lorraine who is currently besotted with "Calvin Klein" aka her own son, our intrepid hero who's currently hiding in that selfsame car. And the wacky doubling comedy of the Old Biff hanging out with Young Biff. Although, again: why no universe-threatening paradox?

-I like how the Biffs are just out of earshot as Old Biff starts to explain that Young Biff should murder Doc or Marty if they ever come around asking about the almanac.

-Oh man. This scene between the two Docs is kinda sublime. Even if Zemeckis and Gale are really running out of ways for characters to talk about "the future" unknowingly in sentences. Christopher Llloyd consistently nails the pathos of this character.

-I wonder if audiences in 1989 remembered Part 1 well enough to really get this stretch of the film (at the dance), which is all about reconstituting scenes from the first movie from other perspectives. It had been four years, after all.

-The suppressed physical anguish on Marty's face as Strickland backs the chair into his hand might be Michael J. Fox's best acting moment in the movie. Which, frankly, isn't saying that much — MJF was kinda phoning it in for the sequels.

-Love that Marty gets the chance to see his old man deck Biff. And then we get a shot of original Marty panicking at the photo of his siblings being erased from existence. Very nice - makes up for the lame-ass "talk about deja vu!" line.

"I think he took your wallet! I think he took his wallet."

-Nice framing on this shot of Marty and a bloodied Biff on opposite ends of the frame standing outside the window showing other Marty saying goodbye to his futureparents.

-Quibble: the sequels did some retconning in how they downplayed Doc's tenuous grip on sanity. The point of Doc in Part 1 is that he's sincerely a crackpot weirdo who happens to create one successful invention. The Doc of the sequels is a reasonable, infinitely wise old man. It doesn't bother me too much, but it's worth noting.

-If you think about it, "I hate manure" is an utterly pointless declaration. Who likes manure?

-And off Doc goes to the wild wild west. A problem with this movie: anti-climax. I mean, the scene with Joe Flaherty as the Western Union man is pretty great, but it's not exactly a satisfying conclusion. The movie spends too much time setting up Part 3, when it could've been doing stuff like, oh, I dunno, EXPLAINING WHY BIFF KEELED OVER AND I GUESS DIED.

-I always loved Marty's use of the definite article in this scene: "IT'S FROM THE DOC!" and "THE DOC'S ALIVE!"

-Yeah, this ending is pure setup. Kind of lame. But jesus, I just spent two unplanned hours in the middle of the night watching this movie for the trillionth time and it was 100% pleasurable, even if it is a far cry from the geometrical perfection of Part 1. But of course it's impossible for me to objective about this. I briefly tried putting on my cinephile goggles to see if I could do any sort of high-minded auteurist analysis, but it was useless - these don't even register as movies to me so much as, I dunno...finding an old diary in the house you grew up in and reading over the entries. Or something. It's late.

Bloodstains on the carpet

2009-07-07T19:06:00.002-05:00

I was never a Michael Jackson fan, and I continue to be weirded out by all the cultural obsessiveness over his death/funeral, but I do have one MJ memory that seems worth recording.

I'm sure I'm not the only member of my generation for whom "Smooth Criminal" was a Michael Jackson song second and a shitty Alien Ant Farm cover first. This cover was briefly ubiquitous for a spell in what Wikipedia says was 2001 (but what I could've sworn was the late '90s), and as with many such hits, I thoroughly absorbed it into my bloodstream without particularly giving a shit about it. Then, some time later, after the cover's glory had faded, I listened—or paid attention—to the original "Smooth Criminal" for the first time, and it was a revelation. Like, wait, that annoying thing from MTV was actually this? Not only was it a gorgeous, electrifying pop song; it exuded a stylish sense of danger, a sense of cool, that the Alient Ant Farm version didn't even come close to capturing. I'm sure this is all no-shit-Sherlock stuff to MJ fans (which apparently is fucking everybody; I seriously had no idea that the man was regarded as anything but an '80s relic turned creepy psycho), but to me it was (and is even more now that I'm revisiting it) a pretty cool piece of news.

(I chanced to walk into a video store the other day while it was playing Michael Jackson videos on the TV, and this song caught my ear in a pleasant manner. Then they showed the one with an interminable intro starring George Wendt and Macauly Culkin. I think George Wendt got launched into outer space for some reason.)

Outlands: VISIONEERS and MOON

2009-06-19T23:02:00.002-05:00

Going to the movies the past two nights, I've encountered two indies set in the near future, both built around lonely, passive protagonists. They both owe a strong debt to films and ideas of the past. Only one is pure sci-fi, but it struck me as odd or somehow meaningful that I saw them so closely together. (In between the two I saw Francis Ford Coppola's new film, Tetro [yeah, I go to the movies a lot, you wanna fight about it?], which I liked very much but which, alas, I cannot shoehorn into this discussion.)

Jared Drake's Visioneers is undistributed—and it looks like it's going to stay that way, given that a DVD release is slated for later this summer—but I was able to see it last night at Chicago's magical Gene Siskel Film Center at the ceremony for the winners of some kind of local award for indie comedy. The one-man "celebrity" jury was this guy, who is totally cool with me because he wrote The 'Burbs and that is a great fucking movie. (It's a must-see for fans of Bruce Dern, who also starred in Silent Running, which was a major influence on Moon. See what I did there?!) I also had a random quasi-celebrity sighting in the audience: this awesome motherfucker, who played the dude who played Kramer in the show-within-the-show on Seinfeld (sidebar: Wikipedia says this guy was Larry David's first choice for the role of the actual Kramer). I spotted him just hanging out in the lobby/cafe area before the movie, although he did have an official-looking badge on. Insider events!

So, this movie. It's a disappointment—partly. I'd been excited about it since seeing the trailer last year, partly because it's a beautifully cut trailer but mostly because of the promise of seeing one of my favorite comedians ever, Zach Galifianakis, in a leading role. I did get to see that, and more on Zach later, but anyone who shat themselves with excitement over that trailer should brace for a letdown (and get some new pants—seriously, it's time). Basically it's an earnest, extremely derivative attempt at Orwellian satire that I might have retitled Dystopia For Dummies.

Corporations are inhuman and soul-crushing! Self-help gurus are full of shit! Having thoughts and emotions is better than not having them! These are a few of the facile non-profundities peddled by the Visioneers script, written by Brandon Drake, the IRL brother of director Jared Drake. (Will they someday be known as The Drake Brothers, a la Messrs. Coen and Duplass? Probably not, but let's call them that anyway. Their mom would probably love it. Mrs. Drake, if you're reading this, you should still be proud of your sons even though someone you've never met has reservations about their movie.)

The ideas in this movie are ideas that you have encountered before—cherry-picked from 1984, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, the stories of George Saunders, and any number of other sources you could name. It's set in a vaguely-defined corporate dystopia in which people have been exploding (literally) if they...well, it's not too clear what the prerequisite for explosion is other than that our protagonist, an unhappy corporate drone trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman obsessed with a TV self-help show, is in danger of being the latest explosion victim. He's been dreaming at night, which his doctor tells him is veeerry baaaad (because good things like dreaming are bad, because the corporate power structure hates emotions and independent thoughts and authentic lives...you begin to see the movie's perspective?) I guess the idea is that people who break out of the bland complacency that's standard in this society get 'sploded, but the thing is, we only actually see one explosion take place—perhaps due to budgetary limitations—and the poor guy wasn't actually doing anything subversive. So the ideas here are both familiar and half-baked. Anyway, the only bright spot in Zach's existence is his daily phone conversation with a higher-up at the office named Charisma. Then Charisma gets fired, for being too nice I guess, and Zach has to save her from being de-emotioned by the evil corporate baddies. Will love conquer all? Will anyone care?

Okay, so it sounds like I'm being pretty harsh. But here's the thing: I felt that the directing half of The Drake Brothers actually treated this well-worn material in a paradoxically fresh, unpredictable way. There's an off-kilter approach to Drake's framing and cutting that suits the material. For a low-budget movie it's a surprisingly stylish affair, and here's where I shall praise Drake for shooting on film rather than going down the dark road of shitty digital video (as most of his microbudget peers understandably do). The 35mm print screened at the Siskel Center looked yummy. Drake's camera often lingers on scenes well past the point when a Hollywood counterpart would have cut away, like a party guest who won't leave, increasing the sense that everyone in this society is essentially uncomfortable with their lives.

And then there's Zach G. His performance here is so restrained and internal that anyone familiar only with his broad hijinks in The Hangover would be shocked. It is comprised alternately of long vacant stares, hushed line readings, and controlled physical freakouts that combine to suggest a basic discomfort with such acts as speaking and moving. It's a character that flirts with maddening passivity (Syd Field would disapprove) but Zach owns it—you can't take your eyes off him, even when he's just staring off into space (and Drake lingers searchingly on close-ups of his face, a lot, to a point that's kind of disconcerting, in a good way).

Even though I was ultimately let down by the film's adherence to age-old ideas about how it would totally be better to live in an imperfect world with genuine emotions than a perfect world with robotic sameness, I was never less than intrigued along the way. (It's also worth mentioning that during the first 10 minutes or so I thought I was watching a future classic; the opening scene is a perfectly realized peek into absurd corporate routine that the film never quite lives up to.) There are a lot of odd little details and grace notes—a largely unexplained subplot about a commune of hippies coming to live in Zach's backyard bears some nice absurdist fruit—and enough skill in the filmmaking that I'm eager to see what The Drake Brothers cook up next. The forthcoming DVD is something worth checking out.

And yeah, Moon. I don't know that I have a lot to say about it right now, even though it's a far far better film than the one I just wrote about. It is a modest, melancholy little sci-fi masterpiece that I look forward to seeing again. Although it does call to mind the idea-driven SF films of the pre-Star Wars era, writer-director-sonofDavidBowie Duncan Jones isn't interested in reinventing cinema or making grandiose statements about mankind, a la 2001 and Solaris. Indeed, one of the movie's virtues is its perfect simplicity, its smallness. Despite the big second-act "twist" there's not actually that much going on plot-wise. Jones finds the perfect tone and the perfect look, and the rest is taken care of by the amazing Sam Rockwell, who I believe may be the best actor of his generation (and this is his finest showcase to date). For the work of a first-time director this movie is almost shockingly fully-realized, especially compared to the other debut I saw last night, which was more "promising" than anything else. This is a sad, funny, and deeply human film despite the hard-SF trappings. J.R. Jones of the Chicago Reader picked up on that humanity when he wrote this poignant line: "As it turns out, the moon is just another shitty place to work, and as the hero discovers to his horror, even his own selfhood is company property." As of mid-June this is my favorite new film of the year...unless you count Silent Light as a 2009 film, which I do, so okay, it's my second-favorite new film of the year so far. Not too shabby.

WHOA I NEVER THOUGHT OF THIS

2009-06-15T03:02:00.004-05:00

You know, for as many times as I've watched the Back to the Future trilogy in my life, I've spent relatively little time thinking about it. Because these movies were a part of my life since I was very young, they were sort of imprinted on me before I was old enough to intellectualize them, which is kind of a shame considering that there's a lot of really fun, twisty, mind-bending stuff going on in the time travel plots, if you take the time to think about them.

This is all to say that I recently stumbled on to a blog, by circuitous googling that had absolutely nothing to do with Back to the Future, called Alternate 1985. It's a cool blog by some dude with well-written thoughts about various subjects. One of those subjects is Back to the Future, and Doc bless him, he likes to intellectualize the fuck out of it.

Much of the discussion of the films on his blog and in the comments section are of an explosively mind-blowing nature that I'm presently too tired to devote serious thought to. But one of his insights -- apparently first suggested in the pages of "some sci-fi magazine I remember seeing when I was a kid" -- is simple enough for me to understand it at 3:00 a.m., yet TOTALLY MIND-BLOWING. Behold:

"So Marty McFly goes back from 1985 to 1955 and changes the course of history such that, when he returns, his family is different (more confident, richer), Twin Pines is now Lone Pine or something, and Doc Brown wears bulletproof vests after ripping off terrorists. Right? But he remembers the original 1985, is from the original 1985. Even ignoring the problem that he's evidently exactly the Marty that his new family expects to find in their house that morning (why is he the only sibling unchanged by happier parents?), there's this problem: what about the Marty that he watches drive off in the time machine? That's the Marty who was raised by the actualized George and the satisfied Lorraine, the one who never had any reason to think that Biff had wrecked the family car, the one whose mom always liked his girlfriend and fully supported their going off to the lake for some good old-fashioned teenage sex. So what happens when he goes back to 1955, and what 1985 does he return to? Remember: whereas the Marty we know went back to 1955 knowing that his parents fell in love after Lorraine's father hit George with the car, this Marty knows that his parents fell in love after George rescued her from Biff at the Fish Under the Sea dance or whatever it was called; will he push George out of the way of the car?—and if so, will he do what our Marty did to try to get his parents together? Because if not, no way is George going to punch out Biff. And wouldn't that mean that the 1985 that Marty comes back to will be rather a lot like the one our Marty left? Back to the Future Part II is the one that specifically concerns itself with an alternate 1985, but because no unbroken circle can be formed, even the first movie seems to imply a potentially infinite series of alternate 1985s, or at least a kind of eternal oscillation."

IT'S SO CLEAR BUT I NEVER SAW IT BEFORE.

And of course, the REALLY mind-bending shit happens in Part II. The above refers to the otherwise relatively non-mind-bending first film.

I love this shit.

Goggins Recognized

2009-06-07T20:29:00.002-05:00

It's time again to check in with our exalted obsession Walton Goggins, the actor late of departed television powerhouse THE SHIELD, and the one individual who causes us to use the "royal we" in our bloggings.

The recent news, as reported by revered TV critic (and fellow Goggins fan) Alan Sepinwall, is that Goggins has been nominated for a Television Critics Association award for "individual achievement in drama." I'll say! Goggins' achievement in the final season of THE SHIELD (the final two seasons, really) was exceedingly individual, all right, some of the most powerful acting we've seen on the small screen. As Shane became an increasingly volatile character, it was like a great '70s Method performance was dropped in the middle of a cop show. We believe, in fact, that Goggins deserves the award over his more widely-heralded fellow nominees Jon Hamm and Bryan Cranston.

Note that Sepinwall leads off his post with the same photo of a distressed-looking Goggins that we used in a previous post.

Also note that the un-fucking-believable final season of THE SHIELD comes out on DVD on June 9th. You're welcome, Sony!

Go Goggins!

A FEW REASONS WHY "BREAKING BAD" OWNS YOUR GODDAMN FACE

2009-05-05T23:33:00.006-05:00

Breaking Bad is groundbreaking, in a lot of ways. It does things that not even the canonical HBO dramas have done. And it does so while COMPLETELY OWNING YOUR FUCKING ASS with raw, unflinching, dark-night-of-the-soul brutality and despair and excitement and humor and horrible/beautiful humanity. And all that on basic cable!

Some stuff that the show does uniquely well:

•Pacing. This is a show that knows how to take its time. The writers balance the occasional big, plot-advancing, high-drama episodes of nightmarish intensity (usually involving bloodshed of some kind) with lower-key episodes that slow everything way down and zoom in on the characters, their relationships and their internal lives. Even in plot-momentum episodes they're not afraid to keep the pace measured and deliberate. Other shows may have taken similar tacks, but none have pulled it off this gracefully; partly due to the pacing, Breaking Bad often feels more like great theater, or like an art film, than a television show.

•Visuals. Many recent dramas have showcased excellent writing, but few, if any, have prioritized visual storytelling. Breaking Bad benefits from top-notch directors who find ways to tell the story in visual terms to complement the writers' verbal ones, and cinematographers who seize on the sun-baked loveliness of the New Mexico landscape in contrast with the human ugliness on display in the writing and acting. Several episodes have experimented with jazzy editing tricks and varied film stocks in kinetic montage sequences. Breaking Bad is perhaps the only TV show I've ever seen that looks and feels truly cinematic.

•Characters and acting. Okay, so lots of shows have complex characters and deep performances, but none that I know of are as single-minded about developing and penetrating a character. As played with can't-look-away intensity by Bryan Cranston, Walt is a fascinating riff on the anti-heroes that have driven many of the big dramas: Al Swearengen, Vic Mackey, Tony Soprano, et al. But the writers here never really ask us to root for Walt as he descends into a hell of deception and criminality, or to identify with him, or to place us in a what-would-you-do moral quandary. The show doesn't make excuses for Walt other than the excuses he makes, unconvincingly, for himself. Instead it studies him, gazing with fascination at his increasingly corrupted soul. Throw in the outstanding Aaron Paul as Walt's reluctant young partner-in-meth, and a host of interesting supporting characters—including, in a recent addition, the great Bob Odenkirk as a crooked lawyer—and you're really, um, "cooking."

•Termite Art, motherfuckers. I would argue that even the best TV dramas up to this point have fallen more or less under Manny Farber's designation of White Elephant Art. Deadwood and The Wire are sweeping, grandiose epics that take on the topics of, respectively, the forging and breakdown of American society. Breaking Bad has none of that grandiosity. It's about moments, and sometimes-mundane reality, and people dealing with bad situations in real time. And within that framework they find room for stuff like, oh, the decapitated head of Danny Trejo strapped to a turtle wired with a bomb. I call that having your cake and eating it too, and I say hats off to the show's creative team for pulling it off.

Did I mention the show is also really funny sometimes? The point is this is the dopest fucking shit you will see on television or even at the movies for that matter. Even when Don Draper and his merry band of morally challenged visitors from the 20th century return in August, they will take a fucking backseat to the absolute undisputed ownage of Breaking Bad.

I guess I should have posted this on Twitter? I don't even know anymore.

2009-04-26T19:49:00.002-05:00

Does Wes Anderson know about Duncan Browne's Give Me Take You? Cuz these songs would all fit nicely up in his world. Or in any world.

2009-04-19T22:30:00.002-05:00

Warden: Second prize is...Freedom.
Prisoners: Yay!
Warden: ...by Neil Young on compact disc.
Prisoners: Boo!
Warden: ...with previously unreleased material.
Prisoners: Yay!

There's a new axiom in town.

2009-04-15T22:39:00.005-05:00

Seems everyone's going crazy over Jason Statham these days. It started with a blog post by Patton Oswalt titled GAY-THAM FOR STATHAM. Patton recognized that Statham is a force of authentic, exciting, hardworking badassery who transcends the sometimes-questionable quality of his films. Everyone, including me, is rather giddily looking forward to this weekend's release of Crank: High Voltage. (I caught up with the original Crank on DVD a couple weeks ago; it's everything a dumb action movie should be, and then some.)

So all this Statham love reminded me of something. Back in the sixties, French critic Michel Mourlet made what Dave Kehr calls "the single most notorious pronouncement in the history of film criticism" about Charlton Heston, referring to the actor as "an axiom of the cinema." Rereading the full quotation, it struck me that one could easily substitute Jason Statham's name in for Heston's and the result would be totally resonant for the growing cult of Statham-worshippers. So here is the full, doctored-up passage, courtesy Kehr's transcription:

“[Jason Statham] is an axiom. He constitutes a tragedy in himself, his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty. The pent-up violence expressed by the somber phosphorescence of his eyes, his eagle’s profile, the imperious arch of his eyebrows, the hard, bitter curve of his lips, the stupendous strength of his torso - this is what he has been given, and what not even the worst of directors can debase. It is in this sense that one can say that [Jason Statham], by his very existence and regardless of the film he is in, provides a more accurate definition of the cinema than films like Hiroshima Mon Amour or Citizen Kane, films whose aesthetic either ignores or repudiates [Jason Statham]. Through him, mise en scène can confront the most intense of conflicts and settle them with the contempt of a god imprisoned, quivering with muted rage.”

I am reminded of Armond White's similarly rapturous gushing over Transporter 3 (Armond is an axiom himself, really). A bit of Mourlet's homoerotic longing: "No star runs in character better than Statham," Armond swoons, "whose agile body is superbly sculpted while his voice remains tender—despite gruff edges." And just as Mourlet threw Citizen Kane and Hiroshima Mon Amour under the bus for either ignoring or repudiating Chuck Heston's glistening, quivering tragedy, so too does Armond dismiss the fall awards-season fare for not recognizing the Statham: "Nothing in cinema this week is more important than Transporter 3," begins his review. Call it hyperbole if you must, but once an actor has earned axiom status—and if Statham hasn't yet, he's well on his way—no words are too strong to describe our new "god imprisoned." Have you accepted Jason Statham as your personal lord and savior?

First I observed, now I report

2009-04-11T20:49:00.005-05:00

I wish I hadn't read anything about Observe and Report before seeing it. If I hadn't encountered the deluge of bemused reactions to the film's dark, Taxi Driver aspirations, I might've been surprised and delighted by its jarring tonal shifts instead of suspicious of them. But for better or worse, I knew going in that Jody Hill's new comedy would be subversive, that it would be weird, that it would be violent, that it would feature a protagonist modeled after Scorsese/DeNiro creations Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin. What I didn't know is how scattershot it would be, how lost-at-sea, especially compared to Hill's much more cohesive and tonally controlled HBO series Eastbound and Down. Alas, Observe and Report is more satisfying in theory than in execution, but its crazed half-vision has an undeniable pull.

Joining the parade of delusional, obsessive grotesques that dominates certain corners of modern comedy (including Hill's previous feature The Foot Fist Way and the aforementioned Eastbound and Down, both starring Southern-fried creep/hero Danny McBride) is Ronnie Barnhardt, head of mall security, bipolar, lonely, angry and convinced of his potential to do great things. The main difference—and it is a welcome one—between McBride's characters and Ronnie is the teddy-bear sweetness of Seth Rogen (giving his "fat years" a hell of a send-off). Rogen makes us care about this messed-up loser even as he descends into violent, psychotic behavior. It's a memorable character, and there's bold commitment to him on both sides of the camera, but the movie surrounding him is an indifferently assembled mishmash of scenes—some funny, some heartbreaking, some disturbing, some that just flat-out don't work. It's not that I'm against a mixture of tones, but there has to be a sense of some purposeful authority behind it all, and you don't really get that here.

The film is not without its triumphs, however. The ending, for one, is a masterstroke of offhanded gear-switching, an unpredictable head-scratcher that has led some to speculate on whether it might in fact be a fantasy in Ronnie's head. The picture is stocked with excellent musical selections, and Hill is quite good at incorporating them, even if he's clearly taking cues from Wes Anderson in that department (a key montage during Ronnie's "date" with would-be paramour Anna Faris is set to the gorgeous ballad "Brain" by obscure '60s mod-rockers The Action). Speaking of Faris, she's the funniest thing in the movie, and I wish she had more screen time; her dead-on caricature of vapid, pretty party-girls will be painfully familiar to anyone who's spent time in a high school recently—or, I suppose, at the makeup counter in the mall. And then there's the excitement of not really knowing where the hell this thing is going, and of the unapologetic (if ineptly directed) weirdness of it all. Ultimately, the movie is rather like Ronnie Barnhardt himself: unbalanced, incompetent, unpredictable, yet somehow coming through it all victoriously. No one is ever going to confuse Jody Hill with Marty Scorsese, but it still makes me happy that somebody tried to make Travis Bickle: Mall Cop—and that the resulting misshapen oddity is playing in actual malls across the country.

The Unfortunate Progression of Whit Stillman's Brief Filmography

2009-04-07T22:43:00.004-05:00

For me, the career of Whit Stillman forms a perfect downhill slope: it moves from the sublime (Metropolitan), to the mildly charming (Barcelona) to the unwatchably grating (Last Days of Disco). If he ever makes a fourth film, and if the pattern holds, it will be a suckfest of epic proportions. I think Stillman's one of those guys who really only had one great work in him (the sublime Metropolitan, in this case) and so there was nowhere to go but down. Maybe Stillman himself realized this and chose to spare us any further decline. I don't know, maybe there are people who love Last Days of Disco (it's currently streaming free on Hulu, which is what brings about this rumination), but to me it substantiates all the anti-Stillman arguments that weren't true of Metropolitan because it was so funny and sweet and sociologically fascinating—the whole "why should we care about these obnoxious, absurdly overprivileged, joyless snobs who speak in artificial screenwriter tongues?" line of thinking. Metropolitan is cannily predicated on the audience asking itself these very questions. In that film we ask those questions as a sort of defense mechanism because we are so immediately interested in these characters and we feel slightly ashamed about it—and then Stillman spends the balance of the film answering those questions, and we're like, "Ohhh, I get it." But in Disco, there is no "Ohhh, I get it" moment. The movie is a plotless black hole of stilted dialogue and sloppy characterization. It's a character-based drama without a single character to care about. It's a lifeless retread of Stillman's (and Noah Baumbach's) earlier, better comedies-of-manners. It's a period comedy without any period detail—or any laughs.

The only ill effect of Stillman's de facto retirement from filmmaking (and Baumbach's ascension to bigger and better things) is that the great Chris Eigeman seems to have a hard time getting work these days. Although apparently he did an episode of FRINGE. Nice.

Goggins Triumphant / Dinosaur Matters

2009-03-23T22:18:00.006-05:00

Yes, it has happened—I have more or less lost my drive to blog, for the time being. But I must drop in with exciting news about That Evening Sun, the new film co-starring blog obsession Walton Goggins. It has won two awards at SXSW: the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, and a Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast. That award-winning ensemble cast includes Goggins! Triumph! As far as I know the film has not yet secured distribution, but I look forward to seeing it EVENTUALLY.

Meanwhile, my viewing of Goggins's no less triumphant gig on TV's The Shield has slowed down considerably for no good reason. I have a few episodes left of Season 4 yet to watch, and from there it will be on to Seasons 5 through 7; at my current pace I might not be finished with the series until well into the bowels of 2009. Why the slowdown? Well, I don't think Season 4 is quite as good as Season 3. It seems slightly less purposeful and more confused about what kind of show it wants to be, and Vic Mackey is gradually shifting from portrait-of-evil anti-hero to straight-up, morally unquestioned protagonist. I have heard that the show gets REALLY awesome starting in Season 5, though, so I am not worried.

Now to address another recent subject of blog fixation, the upcoming Terrence Malick film that may or may not contain dinosaurs. Some of my questions about the odd project are addressed by Jeffrey Wells in a recent post. Apparently the parallel IMAX project will be called Voyage of Time, will run 45 minutes, will be released simultaneously with Tree of Life, and may share some footage with Tree of Life. Oh, and some source claims that it's still a year away from completion, which means a likely 2010 release (The Year We Make Contact, in case you've forgotten). This all seems too complicated. Terry, why can't you just put the dinosaurs in the damn movie and forget the IMAX thing? Nobody wants to schlep out to IMAX to see 45 minutes' worth of supplemental dinosaur material, some of which will apparently be a rerun. Come on! Dinosaurs in regular 35mm or not at all! (Pictured: dinosaurs demonstrating the coolness of cigarettes to kids)

Not So Fast

2009-03-03T17:06:00.003-06:00

Remember how excited I was about the prospect of a Terrence Malick film with dinosaurs in it? Well, now my excitement is more like confusion, because some sources are claiming that Malick is splitting the movie up into IMAX and non-IMAX sections, with the IMAX-only film being the one with the dinosaurs in it, while the regular film (the one w/ Brad Pitt and Sean Penn that's in post-production now) is presumably dinosaurless. I'm not sure I understand this news, and even if I understand it I'm not sure I like it. Are these two completely discrete films, or will there be some overlap? Will the IMAX part be an actual feature or just a little dinosaur supplement? Does Malick even know the answers to these questions? Will this movie even be released within his lifetime, given Malick's penchant for spending eons in post? Things looked much simpler yesterday when I was able to make joyful exclamations about "motherfucking dinosaurs."

OMFG YES

2009-03-01T20:02:00.002-06:00

The upcoming Terrence Malick film WILL CONTAIN DINOSAURS. Motherfucking DINOSAURS!

Haha, also it's hilarious that the guy quoted in that article bothers to point out that the shots of the dinosaurs will be "long and lingering." Given how much attention Malick has previously lavished on trees and water and shit, I think it goes without saying that goddamn DINOSAURS will get the same treatment.

Hey

2009-03-01T01:36:00.002-06:00

Has enough time passed for everybody to acknowledge that the Ethics 101 "prisoner's dilemma" scenes in The Dark Knight are a load of facile bullshit? Hey, Chris Nolan, thanks for showing us that SOMETIMES SCARY BLACK MEN HAVE COMPASSION.

I know there's no good reason to bring this up now (the fanboys have moved on, I guess there's this thing coming out called "The Watchman"). I'm just fascinated by the question of how history will remember TDK. And I have a feeling that us doubters/naysayers will be vindicated.

Also, will anti-Watchmen critics be subjected to death threats and subliterate castigations like Keith Uhlich and others were for suggesting that TDK wasn't the most awesomest thing ever? Only time will tell. Time, and Jeffrey Wells.

An Observation

2009-02-27T23:25:00.010-06:00

Just returned from James Gray's Two Lovers, which I loved. But while watching Joaquin Phoenix's performance I couldn't help but notice that, in addition to his usual internalized roiling, Joaquin was affecting a slurred speech pattern which, combined with his character's troubled psyche and unpredictable behavior, kept reminding me of none other than Dr. Steve Brule. Some cursory googling indicates that I am the first person to make this observation. For your health!

I might post more substantive thoughts about the movie later, if I feel like it. For now, suffice to say that if James Gray didn't exist it would be necessary to create him—I loved his underrated, beautiful crime drama We Own the Night, and this, despite some basic implausibilities in the concept that are easy enough to get past, is perhaps even better.

Overblown Warning of the Week

2009-02-25T20:58:00.003-06:00

As part of his borderline-obsessive tracking of pre-release Watchmen buzz, Jeffrey Wells cautions: "I say again that only non-vested straight-talkers who were never that into comic book geekdom can be trusted on this movie. It may be a great film, or a very good or deeply stirring one, but only the pure of heart and the culturally uncommitted can determine this. Trust no one with any kind of deep-rooted, strongly Catholic investment in geek fanboy culture." (Bolding his.)

Now, I understand Wells's frustration with fanboy culture and his quickness to disregard the opinions of that world. But isn't it slightly wrongheaded to claim that the only people who can be trusted to fairly judge an adaptation of something are those who haven't read the source material? It's rather like saying to avoid reviews of Revolutionary Road by anyone who has read the Richard Yates novel. If anything, the opposite is true in that case; you'd want the most informed opinions possible to tell you what kind of adaptation it is.

Still, I can't help be endeared by Wells's paranoid phrasing. And when you get right down to it I agree with him, and I do not give much credence to any of the early geekgasm reviews that are trickling in. As an erstwhile comic book nerd myself, do I resent Wells's implication that comic fans are not "pure of heart"? No; it made me laugh too much to resent this delightfully crazy old bastard for anything. Keep it up, Wells!!

Important

2009-02-24T23:27:00.002-06:00

If you happen to be reading this, you should know that Nina Paley's animated film Sita Sings The Blues—which has racked up rave after rave at festivals, plus effusive praise from Rog, but which cannot be conventionally distributed due to legal issues pertaining to music rights—will be streaming online at the Reel13 website starting this Thursday. I gather that Reel13 is a public TV show in NYC dedicated to film, and that the station will be airing Sita Sings the Blues regular-style for those who live in New York in addition to the online option. I'm stoked about this because I foolishly passed up the chance to see the movie at last year's Chicago Film Fest (I was planning on going, but scheduling conflicts with other festival fare precluded it), and it may never show up in a theater near me again. Watch it!

OH MAN

2009-02-23T01:10:00.002-06:00

Forget the Oscars—the truly memorable TV moments this month came from Conan O'Brien's final week of "Late Night" shows. Even though he's only moving one hour earlier, his 16-year "Late Night" run got a proper and very moving send-off last week. It was great television with plenty of memorable moments, but the best was Nathan Lane pulling a Bette-Midler-on-Carson and serenading Conan with this hilarious "My Way" rewrite, "Your Way." Special props for finding something to rhyme with "Andy Richter" in the song's funniest couplet.

Boo-urns

2009-02-22T23:00:00.004-06:00

I was looking forward to two things at tonight's Oscar telecast: Jerry Lewis's acceptance speech and Mickey Rourke's. The former was disappointingly generic and brief, and the latter didn't happen. But at least I got to see a McDonald's commercial with an Os Mutantes song in it.

Also, what happened to clips? I'm not sure how I feel about this "five presenters" thing. And for the record, I thought Hugh Jackman brought his A-game but was woefully underused.

?!?!

2009-02-22T20:13:00.000-06:00

Os Mutantes in a McDonald's commercial. For real.

That's what I get for not allowing enough buffer time on the DVR'd Oscar telecast.

The Prospect of Wit

2009-02-21T00:55:00.005-06:00

They were talking quickly and getting laughs on intonation alone, the prospect of wit. This isn't really funny, Lyle thought. It seems funny because we're getting half smashed. But nobody's really saying funny things. Tomorrow she'll say what a funny night and I'll say it just seemed funny and she'll give me a look. She'll give me a look—he saw the look but did not express it in verbal form, going on to the next spaceless array, a semi-coherent framework of atomic "words." But I'll know I'm right because I'm making this mental note right now to remind myself tomorrow that we're not really being funny.

—Don DeLillo, Players, 1977

THIS JUST IN

2009-02-20T16:30:00.002-06:00

Haha, David Lynch twitters the weather. And yeah, it's really him.

Edit: apparently he's been doing this for a while, in video form. What a goofy goober.

Department of cruel tricks of fate

2009-02-19T07:01:00.003-06:00

Oh you've gotta be kidding me. When I tried searching mp3 aggregators for "The Fall of Troy" by Tom Waits, I got a song called "Tom Waits" by some damn hardcore band named—wait for it—The Fall of Troy. Is this some sick joke? Come on.

Not bad, not bad

2009-02-18T19:38:00.004-06:00

This comes perilously close to the Freiberg/Seltzer maxim of "Recognition = Parody," but the details redeem it: the economic doomcasting used in place of review blurbs, the handheld camera authentically mirroring specific shots from the movie, the masterstroke casting of Alyssa Milano as Marisa Tomei, and the Uncle Sam conceit itself. Springsteen ensures that this carries most of the pathos of the original trailer, too.

(Edit: the embedding is screwed up, so make sure you click the "expand to fullscreen" button.)

The Uncler w/ Uncle Sam and Alyssa Milano from Alyssa Milano

Like "The Shield," But With The F-Word

2009-02-17T18:35:00.003-06:00

Well, this is timely. Just after I finish watching the awesome third season of awesome cop drama "The Shield" (which is largely about a corrupt and brutal elite squad of L.A. cops known as the Strike Team), footage surfaces of real-life, inexplicable police brutality on a CTA bus (via Chicago Cop Watch).

"The Shield" was on FX, so they didn't get to drop the F-bomb. "Do you want to fight me???" I'd like to see this guy go head to head with Vic Mackey in a sociopath-off.

Goggins Slandered

2009-02-16T16:03:00.008-06:00

We were shocked and appalled recently to discover slanderous remarks made against blog fixation Walton Goggins by NPR "journalist" Mike Pesca. In a largely favorable review of The Shield's third season DVD, Pesca opines that the cast is uniformly excellent "with the exception of Walt [sic] Goggins, who plays Mackey's chief flunky Det. Shane Vendrell. The character is played as too hot-headed and careless to have escaped serious censure for this long."

More than anything else we feel pity for poor misguided Mike Pesca, who was apparently too hung up on niggling matters of plausibility to enjoy Goggins's intense yet subtle performance as Shane Vendrell. Moreover, I would argue that Pesca's criticism has nothing to do with Goggins and everything to do with the show's writing, which does require a certain level of disbelief-suspension in order to buy that the corrupt Strike Team has gotten away with their malfeasance for this long. This is not a serious problem, though, and certainly not one to pin on "Walt," as Pesca took the liberty of calling him.

Everything you need to know about this Pesca character is revealed in his NPR bio, which offers this nauseating nugget: "He lives in Manhattan with his wife Robin, son Milo, and their dog Rumsfeld." That's right: Mike Pesca, anti-Goggins crusader, has a dog named "Rumsfeld." Now, it's not clear whether this dog was so named as an ironic joke or a sincere tribute, but either option reflects poorly upon Pesca, his family, and his judgment.

At the risk of stating the obvious I'd also like to point out that Walton Goggins could kick Mike Pesca's ass. And that The Shield is fucking awesome.

Just For The Surreality Of It

2009-02-15T02:13:00.004-06:00

Theoretically I shouldn't care about this, but that new title sequence in 16x9 widescreen just looks fundamentally wrong. I might have to tune in just for the surreality of it. Matt Groening once complained on a commentary track about how people were watching Simpsons DVDs in the wrong aspect ratio because they didn't know they had to switch from 16x9 to 4x3 fullscreen. Well, now if anyone buys Season 20 (J.H. Fucking Christ, can you believe that number?), they won't have that problem.

"Something dark will happen to them anyway"

2009-02-13T20:09:00.004-06:00

Hilariously awkward clip of our generation's Saint Valentine, Stephin Merritt, interviewed on local Atlanta news before performing.

Whistlin' past the graveyard

2009-02-13T05:23:00.005-06:00

I'm stealing this from Pendarvis because it's possibly the single funniest image I've ever seen, anywhere:

If Chicago ends up getting the Olympics in 2016, I'm storming Mayor Daley's office to demand that "Cemetery Pranksmanship" be added as a new event. And that this young man be retroactively awarded the gold medal.

Things we heard about five months late

2009-02-13T00:08:00.003-06:00

So I guess this is happening. Man, that dude is prolific. If only his fellow TV genius named David, Mr. Milch, were as dedicated...

Between two ferns, so to speak

2009-02-11T23:17:00.009-06:00

I'm a month or two late to be chiming in on this topic, but I'm still fired up, dammit. Basically, I'm feeling caught between two equally wrongheaded camps in my (favorable) response to Gran Torino. Ever since I first saw the movie in December I've been growing increasingly frustrated at members of my generation who are inclined to view the film as "unintentionally" funny or otherwise inept. And now I have another group to be frustrated at, thanks to the good-ol-boys at the National Review, who are doing a whole thing about the top 25 "conservative" movies. Gran Torino is #25. I'm not going to dignify them with a link.

I don't want this to come across like I'm saying "I'm the only one who understands it!", because that is not remotely true. Manohla Dargis got it. Glenn Kenny got it. Scott Foundas got it. Many other smart souls on the internet and in print have written smarter appreciations of this movie than I am capable of producing. Still. I don't think it's one of Eastwood's best films and I don't think it's a masterpiece, but it deserves better than (to put it in the reductive terms of the 2008 election) the snarky, narrow-minded, uninformed derision of Obama-voting youth and the racist myopia of McCain-voting geriatrics. (As long as I'm getting all CULTURE WARRIOR about this, let's say that my comrades on this issue belong to the part of the venn diagram showing the intersection of Obama voters and Gran Torino fans. And no, the irony that Eastwood leans conservative and supported McCain is not lost on me.)

At first I was thinking that the movie is something of an auteurist litmus test, since most of the positive notices take at least a semi-auteurist tack in placing Gran Torino within the context of Eastwood's career (as both director and actor), and most of the snark is coming from people who probably haven't even seen Unforgiven, let alone Bronco Billy or A Perfect World. But then how to explain the millions of Americans who ate the movie up and carried it to #1 at the box office (doing record numbers for an Eastwood-directed film)? Not a lot of auteurists in that bunch, I'm guessing, and there's obviously nothing wrong with that. But how many of those people watched the movie through the same lens as the National Review douchebags? Probably not that many, but still, read Andrew Breitbart's conservative take on the movie and you'll see why I'm uncomfortable with the reaction: "[Eastwood] blows away political correctness, takes on the bad guys, and turns a boy into a man in the process. He even encourages the cultural assimilation of immigrants."

Ugh. There's always a risk of this kind of misidentification—it's like when wannabe thugs view The Wire as a cool celebration of gangster life, opining on message boards about how Namond deserved to get got. Conservatives are particularly myopic about this stuff; if they see any representation of conservative "values" they automatically assume it qualifies as an endorsement. The politics of Eastwood's movies are famously ambiguous, but Gran Torino takes Clint's character Walt Kowalski on a journey that not only gives lie to Breitbart's Dirty Harry fantasies, but renders questions of political views pretty irrelevant (if they were even relevant to begin with).

As for my snarky contemporaries, I don't want to go all Denby on their asses, but gah. Listen hear, people: did it occur to you that while you were laughing at Clint's overheated growling and dated racial epithets that you were supposed to be laughing? Why did so many people jump to the conclusion that this humor is unintentional? Clint Eastwood knows what the fuck he's doing! He's working in a specific register, in which everything is melodramatically heightened and slightly removed from reality in its bluntness. Yes, he literally growls, and you're supposed to find it a little funny—it's not a flaw or deficit in the filmmaking or acting. It's the intention. Not many filmmakers adopt this kind of tone these days, so I understand why it confused some people. But you should investigate your confusion rather than chalking it up to dumbness or ineptitude on the film's part. And look, it doesn't take an auteurist to figure out that Eastwood is playing with his own iconic image—something he's been doing for decades, but rarely with the blunt humor on display here. That seems too obvious to state and yet I worry that members of my generation (and I'm talking about, you know, the smart ones) are so disinterested in film history/culture that it's lost on them. When snarkheads try to prove that they're smarter than Gran Torino, they're actually proving that they're stupider.

Ha, and then there's the splinter cell within the online critical community that's declaring Gran Torino overrated, best represented by this questionable piece of contrarianism at Reverse Shot, which muses: "The fact that so many smart, discerning critics have fallen in line behind such an obviously terrible movie speaks to entrenched auteurist agendas: Eastwood’s consensus status as the last American 'classicist' (to use a much-abused term) gives him a pretty long leash and leads to some remarkable feats of critical calisthenics—my favorite being the idea that Gran Torino is a seriocomic work of mischievous and pointed self-parody."

Well, self-parody isn't quite right, but uh, the movie is unequivocally a seriocomic and pointedly introspective work on Eastwood's part. And I'm not even getting into the movie's other virtues and subtleties, which are many. Really. As for the argument that critics give Eastwood too much slack because of his rep, how do you explain the mixed-at-best reaction to Changeling? Sure, there's always the danger when a living artist becomes canonized that his work won't be judged objectively. But it's insulting to both critics and Eastwood to suggest that the warm reception of Gran Torino is purely the result of "entrenched auteurist agendas," especially when that suggestion is clearly disproved by the reception of a movie released only a couple of months earlier.

This post is too long. I'm sorry. I blame Abe, for bringing that National Review list to my attention. I can only assume he was punishing me for some unknown offense. And now, if you read this, I've punished you.

One last thing. To the dismissive snarky jerks of my generation, and to the creepy crypto-racist Republicans of my parents' generation, may I politely suggest that all of you get off my lawn?

Goggins At Large

2009-02-11T01:43:00.004-06:00

The following Goggins news item broke all the way back in November, but I just found out about it and am honorbound to relate it here (due to my pledge to provide the ultimate Goggins resource). The item in question is the announcement that Walton Goggins is set to star in a new drama for the AMC network, currently in development, titled "Rectify." The big story here is that Walt gets a true-blue leading role, his name on the metaphorical TV marquee. No longer will Goggins be held back by the tyrannical narcissism of a certain bald-headed Emmy-winner whom we shall not formally recognize by name on account of his ruthless obfuscation of co-star Goggins. Now Baldy is likely seething with jealousy because he does not get to play "a man released from a lengthy prison term after being exonerated by DNA evidence"! That is a role only Walton Goggins can sink his Georgia-sharpened teeth into. Just think: before long, Walton Goggins and Jon "Man-Crush" Hamm will coexist on the same network! The mind boggles. Or should I say, the mind "goggins"!!!*

*No, I should not say that.

What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About Our Anger At The CTA

2009-02-10T20:07:00.002-06:00

While sitting on stalled trains tonight it occurred to me how crazy it is that the Traveling Wilburys existed. Stop and think about it for a minute. It's just really weird/unlikely/awesome that such a group was assembled, regardless of if their music was any good or not (I've only ever heard that famous single). It's easy to take such things for granted. Was this the "silver lining" of tonight's painfully long, headache-inducing commute home? No. There wasn't one of those.

Dessert

2009-02-10T11:24:00.001-06:00

If you enjoy outlandishly unhealthy foodstuffs or pictures of same, you just found a new favorite website. You're welcome. I didn't think it was possible to cringe and salivate simultaneously, but this website was all, Yes We Can.

In which we take a firm stance against a certain proclivity among bloggers (and then casually rescind it)

2009-02-10T09:50:00.002-06:00

Why does m——core (I don't like typing out the full name) always inspire so much prognostication? It feels like every piece I read is either announcing its death, or proclaiming its rejuvenation, or some other damn projection of the unknowable. Today's variant, courtesy feisty blogger Karina Longworth, seems to carry the unwritten tag "M——core Gone Mainstream" (Ms. Longworth would never write such a tacky headline as that, but she did write one that illustrates my point about bloggers' prognostication fetish).

Okay, so Noah Baumbach is putting m——core muse / hipster sexpot Greta Gerwig (pictured) in his next movie, and he's bringing along the (non)movement's contentious kingpin Joe Swanberg as a cameraman. Karina is convinced that This Means Something. For her, it portends that "the m-word might cease to exist as a stand-alone concept" as "its stars and spirit are being assimilated into mainstream indie film." I dunno. Steven Soderbergh shoots a couple of DIY-style features on video and all of a sudden we're talking about assimilation and existence-ceasing? Unless Karina has intel she's not sharing, there's no indication that Baumbach's Greenberg will be DIYish or shot digitally or bear any m——core signifiers. Isn't it possible, even likely, that Baumbach merely wanted to make use of Gerwig's talents as an actress and wanted to give Swanberg experience on a professional set?

It's been acknowledged many times over that m——core exists more in the minds of critics than in the intentions of filmmakers, and that the tag has become an albatross for movies that want nothing to do with it (see one of my favorites of last year, Joshua Safdie's entrancing The Pleasure of Being Robbed, which was interesting largely for the ways in which it broke from m——core tradition yet still was lumped in with the "movement"). So can we further acknowledge that this relentless prognostication—a symptom of the blogosphere's instantaneity—about m——core and The Future of Indie Film isn't really any more useful than, say, Oscar predictions?

I don't want to target Karina, who I think was being at least slightly tongue-in-cheek with that headline about The Future, and I'm grateful to her for bringing this item to my attention. The prospect of Greta Gerwig paired up with Ben Stiller (!) is more than a little intriguing, and I liked Baumbach's last two features enough to follow him pretty much anywhere. (I've avoided most of Swanberg's features, so I'm not as, erm, intimately aware of Ms. Gerwig as I could be, but I liked her a lot in the Duplass Bros.' funny genre mishmash Baghead). But if bloggers and critics (and filmmakers) are all so eager for the m——core moniker (and associated talking points) to go away, why don't they stop talking about it?

Because that wouldn't be any fun, stupid. (I'm addressing myself as stupid, for the record, not Karina or anyone else.)

GOGGINS UPDATE

2009-02-05T19:03:00.002-06:00

In addition to its regular function of pop-culture punditry (or whatever-the-hell-I-want punditry), this blog aims to be your one-stop source for news related to our favorite rugged young Southern actor, Walton Goggins. Today's Goggins update is an exciting one! Mr. Goggins has lent his sly, offbeat charisma to a new film, That Evening Sun, which has recently been announced as a competitive entry in this year's SXSW Film Festival. Congratulations to Walton as well as the rest of the cast and crew, which includes star Hal Holbrook. SXSW synopsizes the film thusly: "A ruthless grudge match between two old foes. Lines are drawn, threats are made, and the simmering tension under the Tennessee sun erupts, inevitably, into savagery." Intriguing! That Evening Sun is based on a short story by acclaimed Southern author William Gay. We are familiar with Mr. Gay's reputation thanks to the recommendation of our blogging inspiration (and Facebook friend), hilarious author Jack Pendarvis. So it all comes full circle! That's all for today's update, but keep checking in for all your Goggins needs. (Pictured: Walton Goggins looking pretty stressed out. Hang in there, Walt!)

Yeah I didn't see this coming either

2009-02-03T13:34:00.001-06:00

It breaks down like this:

1st season of "Chuck" = uneven, amusing diversion
2nd season of "Chuck" = one of the best things on TV right now.

I totally wrote this show off when it premiered because I was angry at the trend of giving handsome, charming actors some stammering dialogue and a pair of glasses (or pocket protector, in Chuck's case) and passing them off as "nerds." Turns out that was mostly just packaging, though, and a stupidly short-sighted reason not to give the show a chance. I've been sick the past week and, looking for something light and engaging to watch in my clogged-up stupor, I took my fave TV critic Alan Sepinwall up on his recommendation of this goofy spy-comedy.

In its outstanding second season, "Chuck" has realized the Platonic ideal that shows like "Veronica Mars" and "Reaper" have only been intermittently successful at: a perfectly balanced blend of outsized genre-geek storytelling and relatable human comedy. It's gotta be the most purely pleasurable series on the air right now. Its espionage plotting provides more credible action and thrills than any network drama, and its heavy doses of comedy provide more laughs than this season's soap-opera-ish episodes of "The Office." Adam Baldwin is especially hilarious as a terse, grunting, Reagan-worshipping NSA agent.

Until "Mad Men" comes back this summer, "Chuck" is my favorite show of the moment. No more snap judgments about TV programs!

NO NO NO NO NO

2009-02-02T14:05:00.002-06:00

WHY
WON'T
HE
DIE

Buddy Love vs. the Wheelchair Assassins

2009-02-01T22:58:00.001-06:00

From the people who brought you the short-sighted, missed-the-point protests of Tropic Thunder comes the latest round of misplaced P.C. aggression against Hollywood. Yep, they're protesting the Academy's decision to bestow the humanitarian Oscar on showbiz legend and emulsion-licking auteur Jerry Lewis.

Now, it's one thing to take issue with Jerry's fundraising methods. If they think the MDA telethons propogate negative stereotypes about the disabled, then it's valid to make that point. But is it anything but mean-spirited to try depriving an 82-year-old legend of his last chance at honorary recognition? And there's also the issue of looking a gift-horse in the mouth: Jerry Lewis has done more to raise money and awareness for your cause than, oh, everyone else in the history of that cause combined, and you're gonna give him a big fuck-you just like that?

Then there's this line, which I have no idea what they're even referring to: "Under the guise of 'schtick' and zany, slapstick humor, Lewis’ early films mocked people with developmental disabilities." Wait, really? I haven't seen all of Jerry's early movies but I'm having trouble imagining a scenario in which any of them would even include disabled characters, let alone make fun of them. Are they talking about the fact that Jerry's characters were usually bumbling, stupid weirdos? Is wacky clumsiness a developmental disability now?? That's insane!

Seriously, all this kind of thing accomplishes is give conservatives fodder for deriding us as a bunch of P.C. whiners.

Actually a good rejoinder to these charges would be the climactic scene of Jerry's own The Nutty Professor, but I can't find it on youtube. The movie's be-yourself message, spoken by Jerry after his hepcat Buddy Love persona has worn off and he's been exposed as ugly nerdy scientist Julian Kelp, jibes pretty damn well with what the disability protesters want to make clear: "You might as well like yourself; just think about all the time you're going to have to spend with you."

Since I can't find that scene, enjoy this clip of Buddy Love performing "That Old Black Magic" at the eternal Purple Pit. Incidentally, a note to members of my generation who might be put off by memories of the icky Eddie Murphy remake: Jerry's original The Nutty Professor is one of the most perfect films ever made, and essential viewing for anyone with even a cursory interest in American comedy and/or American cinema. Oh, and this interview with Jerry from Entertainment Weekly is an enjoyable read. It confirms that Jerry is upset that the award is for his humanitarian work rather than his film artistry.

Goggins!

2009-02-01T14:24:00.002-06:00

You know who has an awesome name? Walton Goggins. No, that's not a Hobbit, it's one of the stars of FX's The Shield. Just say that name to yourself: Walton Goggins, Walton Goggins, Walton Goggins. Actually, his name isn't the only reason I admire him. With his rough-hewn features, jagged charm, and sense of humor that's always on the brink of violence, Goggins reminds me of '70s tough-guy icons like James Coburn and Warren Oates. And I do not hand out Warren Oates comparisons lightly. Plus, check out this awesome fact on his Wikipedia page: "At the age of 10, Goggins and his mother were the statewide champion cloggers, otherwise known as Mountain Dancing. When B.B. King was on tour, Goggins and his mother opened for him at the Atlanta Fulton County Prison." I count four distinct awesome things about that fact. IMDb gives us another taste of Goggins' authentic Southern background: "He won first prize at the Gold West State Days Hog Calling Contest." Goggins!

A reckless, unreliable prognostication

2009-01-30T23:21:00.003-06:00

So far, most of the chit-chat about the upcoming Watchmen adaptation has centered on two things: (1) the legal horse-race between Fox and Warner Bros over ownership rights, and (2) the question of whether or not the movie will, like, totally suck.

I'm not really interested in that question, since I'm neither fanboyish enough to get defensive of the comic nor gullible enough to be taken in by the movie's faux-prestige hype (the best part is when the trailer tells us that Zack Snyder is a "visionary"—what a fucking joke). But there is an idea that's been rolling around in my mind-grapes, that I haven't really heard proposed anywhere, and so I'm gonna lay a bold prediction on you. It probably won't come true, but on the slim chance that it does, you heard it here first:

I think that Watchmen could be a disastrous commercial flop.

Okay, maybe not "disastrous." I shouldn't push my luck here. But I think there's a real possibility that the movie could seriously underperform at the box office. And if it does, that could be a major game-changer in this whole superhero new wave that won't go away. A couple of points to support this claim:

•Superhero fatigue is bound to set in sooner or later. There's no way the American public is going to eat this stuff up continuously for all eternity; it's only a matter of which movie will push them over the edge. I submit that that movie could well be Watchmen. 2008 was an almost absurdly loaded year for superhero fare, and after the record-breaking success of The Dark Knight the only way to go is down. The "fatigue" phenomenon isn't new; it happened with Vietnam War movies in the '80s, when America was so burned out on Vietnam that it almost totally ignored Brian De Palma's Casualties of War, despite the fact that the film starred one of the biggest box-office draws of the decade in Michael J Fox.

•The vast majority of movie-going Americans are not inherently interested in superheroes or revisionism thereof. Watchmen is banking on the notion that people are "ready" for Alan Moore's deconstruction because of the success of all these Marvel and DC films. But you know what? People don't go to those movies to see "superheroes." They go because they want to see big summer action flicks with famous movie stars in them doing cool stuff and playing recognizable, culturally iconic characters. And let's get real: Watchmen ain't got either the stars or the iconic characters. I mean, the biggest name in the cast is Billy Crudup, and while Mr. Crudup is a very good actor, he doesn't exactly put asses in the seats. The only movie so far with non-established superheroes to do well was Hancock—and that was Will Smith, the biggest movie star in the world, on his annually-pwned 4th-of-July weekend. Something tells me we're not going to be seeing any McDonald's tie-in deals with little Dr. Manhattan and Nite Owl happy meal toys. The mainstream appeal of superheroes, insofar as there is any, is about brand recognition. There's really nothing to hook in non-fanboy viewers here, except for a massive ad campaign, but that didn't work for Speed Racer and I don't think it'll work here.

I'm probably wrong. But what if I'm right?

United States of... Whatever?

2009-01-29T15:02:00.002-06:00

It's difficult to approach Showtime's new series The United States of Tara with anything like an objective eye, given the massive clusterfuck of hype, backlash and anti-backlash that series creator Diablo Cody still carries with her from the Juno fallout. That said, I tried to set aside my distaste for Cody's public persona (which I find more objectionable than her actual writing; take this recent interview by Alan Sepinwall, in which she says at least a couple of eye-rollingly stupid things) and give the new show a chance, on its own terms.

Mostly, I like it. I've seen the first three episodes, and so far the show is breezy and highly watchable and maybe has potential to be something more. I do have some qualms, though. They're more nagging annoyances than major flaws, but I'll list them here just the same:

•I'm not sold on Toni Collette's performance. She's fine as Tara, but as the "alters" (multiple personalities) she seems way too actor-y and over-the-top, more like a precocious high school theatre kid's conception of Dissociative Identity Disorder than a stab at the real thing. Of course, it's defensible that the alters wouldn't be realistic depictions of their respective identities ('50s housewife, gruff male trucker, slutty teenager) because Tara has never been any of those things. But Tara also isn't an actress, and I have trouble buying the idea that an average sufferer of DID would have such theatrical identities.

•This is related to the first qualm, but I'm slightly uncomfortable with the show's treatment of DID in general (thus far). It feels a bit too glib and played for comedy. I admit that this reaction stems partly from my issues with Juno's flippant treatment of teen pregnancy (the worst part of that movie is the scene where Juno decides against having an abortion because of 15 seconds of clicking pens). I can see that the show is trying to examine the disorder's impact on the family, at least, so there's reason to believe this qualm will go away.

•Why the hell is the show set in Kansas? None of the actors talk like they're in Kansas. There are no signifiers at all; we could've easily assumed the family lived in California until the setting was explicitly stated in episode 3. I think it's safe to assume that Cody and the other writers know fuck-all about Kansas. So what's the point, other than to take potshots at closed-minded middle America?

•Not really a qualm, but an observation: Juno haters will be glad to see that Cody's stylized dialogue has been toned down a lot, probably due to her being part of a writing staff rather than sole wordsmith. So far only one line has really irked me, and it was a pop culture reference. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with pop culture references in comedy, but they bring two dangers: (1) overusing them and (2) not doing them convincingly. Cody's been guilty of both, but in this case it was (2). I don't buy for a minute that anybody's mom, even a relatively cool mom like Tara, would make a fucking Small Wonder reference in conversation with her husband. And it wasn't even funny in context. Diablo, I like your show, but you are NOT good at pop culture references.

Anyway, that's it. I feel bad for focusing on the negative, but there's actually not that much to say about the positive attributes of the series so far. I will say that I really like the character of Tara's effete, awkward, probably-gay son. The young actor playing him will remind people of Michael Cera, without the reliance on stylized mumbling and before Cera became a tired brand-name and a party-pooping little jerk. Oh, and the show's supporting cast is well-stocked, with such awesome folks as Patton Oswalt (playing the dad's landscaping partner/buddy), Tony Hale (as an uptight teacher), and Rosemarie Dewitt (as the unsupportive sister). It's worth checking out—even if you hated Juno.

I wouldn't want to do that to the world

2009-01-29T04:20:00.001-06:00

This video is amazing, but it has the unfortunate (if apropos) side effect of getting the original song stuck in your head for hours/days/eternity:

Morbidity

2009-01-27T18:38:00.001-06:00

Huh. We now live in a world in which Philip Roth still breathes but John Updike doesn't. Weird to think about. I can easily imagine the two men—born a year apart, in 1933 and 1932 respectively—joking with each other about who was more likely to kick the bucket first. The Jew and the gentile, Nathan Zuckerman and Rabbit Angstrom, the two great termite-art realists of the postwar era. I recall a passage from one of the Zuckerman books in which Nathan (Roth's fictional stand-in) receives a piece of salacious mail intended for Updike. I think it is safe (and funny) to assume this really happened. Confession: I haven't actually read an Updike novel. A few short stories here and there, which I honestly wasn't crazy about; suburban marriage trouble is not a subject that holds great fascination for me, at least not in and of itself. But I've got an old copy of Rabbit, Run sitting on my bookshelf. It's been there for years. Maybe now's the time? After all, Updike was gracious enough to appear on The Simpsons ("Shut up, Updike!") which is more than we can say for grumpy old Roth.

BLOG-ojevich

2009-01-25T20:46:00.002-06:00

This isn't a political blog, but I absolutely could not let this item pass without comment. Don't worry, it's movie-related.

As part of Rod's recent and ongoing media blitz, he compared his situation to the lynch-mob persecution of horse rustlers in the Old West. Now, Blago doesn't get specific (although he claims to be a great fan of Westerns), but I happen to know that he is in fact referring to William Wellman's The Ox-Bow Incident, based on the famous novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. The film, which stars Henry Fonda in a role that prefigures his conscientious juror in 12 Angry Men, is a rather preachy if effective message picture about the dangers of mob action.

Now, you can probably guess the basic story: several men from an Old West town plagued by cattle-rustling form a posse and accuse three people of stealing the livestock. The townspeople have no proof to back up this accusation, and their blind stubborn certainty leads them to hang the strangers, despite the protests of a small minority of doubters led by Henry Fonda. The movie's final scene is actually quite powerful and non-hokey, as Fonda—framed by director Wellman such that the brim of another man's hat obscures Fonda's eyes the entire time—recites a letter written by one of the condemned men to his wife. The content of the letter shames all the men into silence, but the deed has already been done. The whole scene is up on YouTube, and can be viewed here:

It doesn't take a genius to see that this bears no resemblance whatsoever to Blagojevich's case; if the posse'd had the condemned men ON TAPE TALKING ABOUT STEALING THE CATTLE and about how dumb it would be NOT to steal the cattle—"it's a fuckin' valuable thing!"—then maybe he'd have a point. But it does reveal something kind of fascinating about how Blagojevich sees himself, as a victimized martyr for justice. In Blago's fantasy world, a gentle-voiced Henry Fonda will absolve him with homilies about justice and conscience—but if he had any conscience to begin with ("a piece of the conscience of all the men who ever lived"), he wouldn't be facing impeachment and possible jailtime right now.

If we're talking Westerns, our governor has more in common with the greedy bastards in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or the weaselly hotelier E.B. Farnum on HBO's Deadwood. Or, given Blago's apparently off-the-charts level of self-delusion, we might compare him to the most tragically deluded character in all Westerns: John McCabe (as played by Warren Beatty) in Robert Altman's staggering masterpiece McCabe & Mrs. Miller. There's also a whole subset of Westerns about corrupt town bosses that Blagojevich might want to take a look at. What I'm saying is, he picked the wrong one. If Blago were a character in an old white-hat/black-hat cowboy movie, it's pretty clear what color hat he'd be wearing.

Which He Claimed Was Medicine

2009-01-25T12:52:00.001-06:00

I realize that writing about a dream you had might violate blogging etiquette, but this one's relevant: I dreamt last night that I was killed by some Nazis, and the head Nazi agent who did it was—Liam Neeson. Yup, Schindler himself! What's up with that? I mean, it wasn't the actor Liam Neeson; Neeson was playing the Nazi character, except I was really me and I died. He poisoned me with a needle in the arm, which he claimed was medicine. Mr. Neeson was very convincing as the Nazi though he did not, to my recollection, affect a German accent.

Jerry

2009-01-23T00:01:00.004-06:00

I just found out that Jerry Lewis will receive an honorary Oscar at this year's ceremony. That almost makes up for my grievances about the nominations! Although, no disrespect to Jerry's humanitarian work, which is commendable and all, but I can't help but feel sore that the award is for that instead of his legendary emulsion-licking.

I'll take this occasion to paste the famous (ok, not that famous) opening sentences of Jerry's book The Total Filmmaker:

“Film, baby, powerful tool for love or laughter, fantastic weapon to create violence or ward it off, is in your hands. The only possible chance you’ve got on our round thing is not to bitch about injustice or break windows, but to make a concerted effort to have a loud voice. The loudest voice known to man is on thousand-foot reels. Campus chants about war are not going to help two peasants in a rice paddy on Tuesday. However, something might be said on emulsion that will stop a soldier from firing into nine children somewhere, sometime. Now, next year, five years from now. Try emulsion instead of rocks for race relations and ecology. That, and love and laughter, has to be what it’s all about. Then you’ll survive. Maybe we’ll all survive. Maybe.”

If the Oscar people could read that, they'd be like, wow, we should given this man one of these a long time ago. And they'd be right!

Jerry!

Explanations, investigations

2009-01-19T20:28:00.002-06:00

Greetings, internet chums and anonymous wayfarers.

Allow me to begin this new blogging enterprise with an explanation of its title. "Strictly from hunger" was an idiom of 1940s America, appended to a sentence in order to express that an act was done solely out of desperation or financial need. I first came across this oddly musical phrase in a blog post by hilarious author Jack Pendarvis, and only a couple of days later I heard it uttered in the excellent 1942 gangster drama Johnny Eager. Was this synchronicity a sign of something? Of course I'm aware of the principle that after we learn a new word, we think that word is suddenly popping up all around us even though really it was there all along and just wasn't on our radar. But a forgotten expression from the '40s? Surely I was meant to adopt this phrase and use it as the title of a new blog. Surely.

The provenance of "strictly from hunger" is rather ambiguous, and as always, the internet both sheds light on the subject and adds to the confusion. This gentleman on the "Phrase Finder" message board seems to think it originated as beatnik slang before being adopted widely in the '70s as a catty dismissal of low-rent fashion. This would seem to contradict the observations of Mr. Pendarvis and myself, who have happened upon the phrase in numerous 1940s Hollywood films. A fellow over at the always-enjoyable Everything2 doesn't have a lot of information, but he does point out that "Strictly From Hunger" was the title of a 1937 collection of writings by the esteemed American humorist S.J. Perelman, a noted "idiom collector." Tantalizingly, the New Yorker offers the abstract of a 1944 story by Decla Dunning called "From Hunger"; the abstract contains the full phrase "strictly from hunger," but a paid membership is required to read the whole story. A jaunt over to IMDb informs us that Ms. Dunning wrote for the movies during the '40s as well. Her credits include the Orson Welles noir The Stranger (generally regarded as Orson's least personal and least notable film as director) and a Eugene O'Neill adaptation that I can only assume is misleadingly titled. Many google hits lead to info about a rare 1969 album by obscure psychedelic rock band Hunger, titled you-know-what.

Where does all of this take us? I don't know. I intended to write a brief introductory explanation and ended up flinging myself to the far corners of the internet in pursuit of some elusive information that is likely not interesting to anyone but myself. I'm left with the impression that the phrase is pretty elastic and, while it has had the connotation I described at the beginning of this post, it can also just mean general things like "bad" and "cheap." Maybe I should try to track down that S.J. Perelman book. In the meantime you and I can both enjoy this blog, which I promise will never again be so focused on lexicography. I'll leave you to chew on this: I am an unemployed recent college-grad in the toughest economic times since the Depression, so I guess you could say this blog is, in fact.......strictly from hunger. Thank you, thank you, I know I'm clever, thank you, you're too kind.