Haven't we suffered enough?

Julianne Moore tries to convince Nathan Lane they make the script work.

The English Teacher (2013) is about a woman who mistakes a bad script for a good one.  But enough about Julianne Moore, let's talk about the character she plays in the film.

This woman reads nothing but great classical literature but somehow becomes convinced that the faux avant-garde playscript written by a former student is immortal art, the implication being that she is biased because the writer IS a former student.

It is possible that the writers of this film not only don't know any English teachers, but never had any English teachers.  Maybe they always cut class.  Most English teachers I know care for their students very much but start out with the assumption that whatever they write is going to be absolutely terrible and that the teacher must decide how and what is fixable before this writing is unleashed on an innocent public.  They do NOT begin with the premise that their former student's play is going to be a piece of genius, such that they walk around in a fog for WEEKS until they SUDDENLY realize that the play was crap all along.  I mean these people READ FOR A LIVING.  It's questionable whether the writers and producers of such drivel are literate at all.

This is also the kind of movie in which nobody notices that Julianne Moore is hot because she is wearing classes, and nobody notices that Nathan Lane is a pompous fraud because, well, actually, I have no idea why they don't notice that.  He virtually has it tattooed on his forehead.  (And why haven't Lane and his boss, played by Norbert Leo Butz realized that instead of running this crummy school, they should be co-starring in a HILARIOUS Broadway musical?)  Moreover we have to endure the movie-high-school-play-production cliche that the acting is terrible but the set, which is either beautiful or hideous, is in any event, completely professionally assembled, clearly painted by members of Local 829 of the United Scenic Artists who happen to still be attending high school.

Most insultingly, we are also subjected to the common Movie World idea that all of high school is permeated with a sweaty cloud of sex.  Now while a lot of our students may be walking around in that sort of funk, no faculty I have been a part of (and I have taught in rural, suburban AND urban settings) is anything but a bit ascetic.  Frankly, you can't survive in a school setting without a parental mindset.  Teachers call their students "my kids" partly because it's useful shorthand, but partly because there is some truth.  To a limited degree they are your kids.  You share responsibility for part of their lives.  Any teacher who does otherwise is dangerous and may even be psychologically unstable.

[UPDATE:  I've since heard an interview with the writers which implied that they had no intention of portraying real teachers, but reflecting a students-eye view of teachers.  That would have been nice if your screenplay had articulated that idea.  From what is on the screen, I can only presume that the script reflects the writers' own immature ill-formed ideas of who teachers are.  Look, kids, I never said teachers don't have illusions.  They do.  But somebody already made a GOOD film about a teacher having his illusions stripped away.  It's called ELECTION, it's adapted by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from a very good novel by Tom Perotta and you should be required to watch it twenty times from beginning to end before you're allowed to try and write another script of any kind ever again.]

I've already spent more time, and wasted more of YOUR time on this thing than is worth it.  Much, much better films have come and gone without comment by me.  (But I'm working on catching up.  Really.  I am.)  But this is a milieu that I knew well.  That, in fact, MILLIONS of people know well and the sheer effrontery of preserving and rehearsing these destructive old cliches about schools and teachers is especially galling.

Still -- somewhere there's a movie co-starring Nathan Lane and Norbert Leo Butz waiting to be made.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliquescently...

The Kings of Summer perform the primal drainage pipe dance.

So in comparing The Kings of Summer (2013) with Not Fade Away (inevitable because, not only are both first features by refugees from television and both are male coming-of-age stories, but Not Fade Away is the film I saw immediately prior to this one), I must address the age-old critical dilemma -- is it better to aim high and fall short or to have more modest goals and achieve them?  Because Kings of Summer lands with an assurance in its off-kilter humor and a skepticism toward its central character that Not Fade Away can not manage, still nursing 50-year-old resentments and injuries.

But Kings of Summer knows that we grow and change and has the preciense to reconstruct our larval selves with an ironic and skeptical eye that renders the vision more accurate than Chase's precise recollection of every fight, every betrayal, every abandonment.  But Chris Galetta, the writer of Kings and its director, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, knows that those clashes that formed the crucible of our character are long forgotten, plastered over in our memory by the sheer pleasure of having survived it all and having become who we are.

This is a great example of how you can be less realistic and be more true.  Early in the story, best friends Joe and Patrick acquire a completely unexplained mascot, Biaggio, who provides much of the energy and variety of the piece.



As played by Moises Arias, likely to become a significant comic personality, Biaggio proves to be the glue of unasked-for, unearned loyalty and affection that holds the boys and the film together.  Biaggio is ridiculous, he resembles no actual human being who lived and yet there is an essential truth to both his weirdness and his steadfastness that no character in Not Fade Away can lay claim to.

But finally the difference between the two films is that Chase has still not left television.  His film is made up of pictures of people talking (to use Hitchcock's phrase) and dialogue is the key to understanding the characters and their relationships.  Chase does not even demonstrate much skill in staging and the use of space to delineate his ideas.  He wisely puts his rebellious teen across the yard in a grey-looking barbecue scene, but proceeds to break up the scene in a set of reverses that obviates any relationship between Alienated Youth and the family trying to act out a scenario of happiness.

The Kings of Summer is all about control of space.  The boys want to escape their parents' spaces and create a new one of their own, the house they build in the woods out of scrap that provided the original name for the film -- "Toy's House."  Instead of imitating their parents lives, like the frustrated and frustrating teens of Chases's film, Joe, Patrick and Biaggio try to reinvent life from first principles.  Sadly, both films revert to the Yoko trope, the Girl Who Wrecks Everything.  In fact, in both cases, the girl in question has been with multiple boys in the band, real and metaphoric in the respective films.  But Kings of Summer doesn't even need that idea -- it seems merely a device to create a separation between Joe and Patrick.  Joe takes command of the space by himself and defends it against the ultimate Edenic intruder, a poisonous snake, defending girl, father and almost Biaggio, who inserts himself in the snake's path to his regret.

At the end of both Not Fade Away and Kings of Summer there is a supporting character in the hospital.  In Not Fade Away he provides a small plot development, pushing the hero to the West Coast by himself (reinforcing the narcissism of what is supposed to be the identification figure).  In Kings of Summer, Biaggio finds himself under medical care due to a heroic if misguided gesture that resonates with the central themes of the film.  But Mr. Galetta's and Mr. Vogt-Roberts's craftsmanship and emotional logic are far more impressive than that of the famous, grouchy and evidently self-absorbed David Chase.

BTW -- are Nick Offerman and Megan Mullaly now the center of the Six Degrees of Separation game?   They are becoming ubiquitous lately.  I think Nick Offerman has appeared in more movies this year than Bryan Cranston, which is saying something.  (Incidentally, he's just fine, although Mullaly is a bit cartoon-y, as is her wont.)

Finally, I can recommend Kings of Summer to any women who want to understand men of any age in the way it lays out that the specifics of that narrow passage from adolescence to the beginning of adult life.  That is truly news you can use, if you have males in your life.

What, and give up show business?

The noxious barrennes of the San Fernando Valley

Just caught up with two small films set on the margins of show business that have a surprising amount of common ground, given their different milieus.  In both cases, the corrosiveness of dreams of fame give way to the pull of new and deepening friendships, friendships formed to almost deliberately spite the bitch goddess of showbiz.

Starlet (2012) by Sean Baker approaches its story from one direction, that of a seemingly aimless young woman befriending a very old woman who appears to be harboring secrets.  The irony is that the young woman has a much greater secret, namely, that between bouts of getting high and shopping she is a porn "model," an occupation which seems to mean nothing at all to her.  Certainly not as much as her friendship with Sadie and her dog Starlet, the first Chuahuahua I've ever seen that actually seemed more like a companion than vermin.

Sadie has a different secret than her young friend thinks, but it's worth your time to watch this mostly quiet, contemplative (and not sleazy, despite ts frankness) film.  One of its most striking aspects is Radium Cheung's anamorphic cinematography, which captures the burned-up, burned-out grey-green-greasy littered sterility of the San Fernando Valley, its oppressive openness and lack of landmarks or even directionality.  It is the most densely inhabited physical and spiritual desert in the world, and Cheung seems to have captured life near the bottom of this languid and rancid bowl.   

Clarence explains the music biz as if he knew something.

It makes a startling contrast with the virtually artless photography of Craig Zobel's Great World of Sound (2007), a semi-improvised dramedy about song-sharking, the art and science of taking money from people based on their hope of having a music career.  Where Starlet is set in the airless open sky of the Valley, Great World is shoved into cramped motel rooms, chain restaurants and airport lobbies, all lit by seemingly radioactive flourescent light radiating cancer into the souls of those who would feed on the hopes of others.

Martin and Clarence, having failed in other fields, wash up in a conclave of hopefuls summoned by a set of hucksters straight from Glengarry Glen Ross, substituting recording contracts for real estate deals.  Their job is to blow into town, advertise that they are looking for recording talent, let the folks sing a song or two, then get them to put some earnest money down towards a recording session, which will lead to a record release.  Whether the session or the release happen is no concern of theirs.

Martin is a well-meaning milquetoast who would like to be an artist, or at least involved with artists.  Clarence is a man who would to like to eat regularly and will say, well not ANYTHING, but a lot of things in order to make that happen.  After the expected friction, they arrive at a good cop-bad cop routine that gets the hopefuls hopeful enough to plunk down a few hundred or even a few thousand of the ready.

But for all its virtues, it is a film aesthetically at war with itself.  The engine that drives the movie is this Odd Couple relationship.  But the raison d'etre of the film is the prank at its heart.  The filmmakers really did advertise for hopeful musical artists, really did film their auditions and the sales talk.  (The last part was actually sort of brilliant, since it forced the actors to do their best to close the deal.)  After the "scenes" were finished, the situation was explained to the auditioners and the filmmakers got the releases, so there were no surprises when the film was released -- but two problems remain.  The scenes we are seeing are not really not part of the story -- they are honest-to-goodness pranks.  And secondly, the auditioners were rarely at a laughable level of awfulness.  Most of them are very good amateurs, not ready for a professional arena but not suitable for ridicule.  I suppose the message here is how very nice and decent people with some talent, if not blinding talent will let their ambition and naivete and belief in themselves will let them be tricked by cruel and ruthless hucksters.  Including the hucksters who made the movie.

Here's a roughly typical example of the level of talent that appears in the finished film:

What do you do with this? You're not overwhelmed, yet you can't dismiss it, either.  And that painful ambiguous knife-edge, resting on the line between competence and genuine art is a self-inflicted wound at the heart of Great World of Sound.

See it anyway, because the experiment was worth trying and nearly everyone in the film provides good company on the journey.

Found in America

Aladeen explains the fine points of the Bill of Rights to a NYC policeman

You knew as you were watching Sasha Baron Cohen's film Borat that, like Daffy Duck blowing himself up, it was a one-time only performance.  The film's very popularity would make it impossible for Cohen to slip invisibly into another identity with which to trap and trick people.

It turned out to both true and not, as people have short memories and Cohen has a very adaptable face.  Still he is never going to take America by surprise quite the same way again.  So he can hardly be faulted for taking the scripted route to pursue many of Borat's themes and tropes again in The Dictator (2012)   He can be faulted for adopting the hoary old substitute-the-double-for-the-king plot that goes back at least to The Prisoner of Zenda and never seems to stop being reworked.  You'd think monarchies would have the good sense by now to seek out all the perfect doubles that seem to riddle the earth and have them done away with to avoid problems.

Three other observations.  The female lead played by Anna Faris claims to have attended Amherst College.  This is impossible because (a) she is wearing the Mt. Holyoke College uniform (basically grunge drag) and (b) she pronounces the name of her school "Am-hhurst."  Even those who attend U Mass are aware that the "h" is not pronounced.

Second, what is there about comedies about dictators which calls for a speech late in the third act?  Chaplin's Great Dictator speech is (rightly) criticized for being overlong and unfocused.  Cohen avoids such problems and goes straight for the jugular.  Yet, though this is the sharpest humor in the film, it seems to go unnoticed amid the slapstick and buffoonery.



By definition the film can't be as outrageous as Borat but it almost makes up for it by incorporating a large cohort of sketch and stand-up comics, probably the contribution of director Larry Charles, who is more likely to be plugged into American comedy circles.  Aasif Mandavi, Rizwan Manji, Horatio Sanz, Chris Parnell, Jessica St. Clair, Chris Gethard, Fred Armisen, Chris Elliot, Jon Glaser, Bobby Lee, Joey Slotnick, J.B. Smoove, Kathryn Hahn, Seth Morris, Nasim Pedrad, Ed Norton, B.J. Novak, Jim Piddock, John C. Reilly and Gary Shandling all have walk-ins and sometimes quite a bit more in this film.

It really suggests that what Cohen and Charles should be reworking instead of Zenda is an all-star comedy extravaganza along the lines of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Clowns in my coffee, clowns in my coffee

Kevin explains it's all part of a cosmic pattern and it is.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home (2012) is part of the subcategory of Shaggy Dog Stories in which everything takes place on one magical day after which Nothing Is The Same.  Such conceits carry a high component of whimsy (and as Groucho said when told he was full of whimsy, "Can you tell from over there?") but that is somewhat familiar country for the Duplass brothers, as is stories about battling brothers in different places in their lives and the struggle for meaning and purpose.

But Jeff pulls off a neat trick which I can only analogize to Hitchcock's feat of switching audience sympathy from Norma Crane to Norman Bates in Psycho.  As the film starts, one gets the impression of a nascent stoner comedy, with Jason Segal, as Jeff,  trotting out his pathetic man-child yet again.  But he is not so pathetic as he is poetic.  He is part of the half of the human race which thinks everything makes sense cosmically and in the long run and that everything eventually connects.  I just have to point out that this is a natural bias for an author, who has the power to make his or her universe do just that thing, connect, make sense and explain itself.  I would advise authors subject to that trap to spend some time doing group improvisation, let go of the need for control and see what it does for their writing.

In the book of interviews Hitchcock/Truffaut, Hitchcock discusses his troubles with the part of the audience he calls the "plausibles."  He dismisses criticism about coincidence, asserting that life is full of coincidences, but rejects convenience, by which the creator makes things too easy on himself and gets the snake to swallow its own tail.  I can't accuse the Duplass Brothers of making things easy for Jeff, but they do permit some self-satisfaction on the basis of a single selfless and, indeed, heroic act which does not do a thing to address the serious problems in Jeff's life, and which in fact, he seems to use to justify his continued aimless existence.  Nonetheless, warm fuzzies all around.

And speaking of coincidence, a man was fished out of his car the very day in the very city I saw this film.  As that provided no benefit to me, I guess Hitchcock was right.  Coincidental, but not convenient.

It is interesting to see the way artists like Les Freres Duplass can enter the mainstream partly because the type of actors they need to execute their ideas, actors like Jason Segal, Jonah Hill, Ed Helms and John C. Reilly are available and bankable (at least for Duplass-level budgets).  A nice case of artistic temperament meeting the zeitgeist.

Speaking of the zeitgeist, can we put to bed, the term "mumblecore."  All it means is a low-budget film which is dialogue based.  That defines at least 80% of low-budget films, because the cheapest thing in the world to shoot (and safest) is people talking to each other.  Untrained actors often don't have the most distinct diction, just like actual humans.  And maybe if film writers stop using the term mumblecore, the Duplasses will no longer feel obligated to fool around with the zoom on the camera constantly.  In at least one case in the film, the zoom felt like a "meta" comment on what was happening, like Jimmy Finlayson swinging his head around in a big vaudeville doubletake in a Laurel and Hardy movie.  This zooming doesn't make the film feel natural, it feels just the opposite, constantly saying to the viewer, "Don't get involved, don't get attached.  This is just a movie, it's all fake."

I direct plays with novice actors and I have to teach them that one of the most unnatural-feeling postures on stage, standing straight with your arms at your side looks the most natural on stage, far better than folding one's arms or clasping hands.  Try it.  Try standing with your arms hanging straight down and doing nothing.  Feels weird, right?  Doesn't look weird.  So in film, it seems artificial to take a camera, pick an angle and plonk the camera down on a tripod and leave it alone.  Almost theatrical, setting a frame around the actors and events.  But on screen, it looks natural, just as cutting between opposite angles looks natural.  Perhaps we've grown accustomed to these conventions, or they are inherently natural, but they pass by our eyes without objection or comment.  Shooting hand-held, whipping the camera around to catch the action and fiddling with the zoom and focus ARE natural, but LOOk unnatural.  So, Duplasses, your next movie, however low the budget, get a tripod.  People will start treating you like grown-ups.

What is left unsaid

It is fascinating to see film writers go after what they consider implausible in the couples-counseling-comedy Hope Springs (2012), a procedure they would never consider undertaking for, say, the latest installment of the Batman franchise.  That is because they think that movies obey different rules according to genre, but the fact is that all narrative adheres to the rules of narrative, and genre merely denotes the existence of conventions, merely a framework of expectations between audience and filmmakers, not a genuine difference in the rules of storytelling.  So it is not necessary to debate the real-world plausibility of this kind of film, but merely examine its consistency according to the rules it sets up for itself.  But because Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones do not dress up in black rubber suits and ride in a jet-powered automobile, the critics seem to expect Hope Springs to be some sort of documentary, rather than an entertainment.  

What is remarkable about a film driven by its script and acting is what it accomplishes by non-verbal means, and by that I don't mean merely the panoply of grunts and shrugs that make up Tommy Lee Jones's performance.  Most especially there is the mise en scene, from the careful calibration of familiar middle-class locales--the home with too-large simulated antique furniture, the spare EconoLodge room, the fussy but delightful New Englande Inne, the spruced-up shabbiness of a New England town undergoing a mini-boom.  There is the extremely careful costume design by theater great Ann Roth, particularly for Meryl Streep's Kay, who nervously vacillates between revealing herself as a woman and trying to cover herself and disappear into the woodwork.  (How interesting that Roth emphasizes Streep's weak point as a film actor--her too-small eyes, by giving her heavy-rimmed glasses to hide behind, so as to better bring off the reveal when those glasses come off and we get a gander at Meryl's baby blues.  And additional kudos to Ms. Streep's hair stylist, who offers similar character hints.)  And I would guess that Tommy Lee Jones's wardrobe was bought entirely at Sears and/or Kohl's, while Steve Carell has been outfitted at L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer, as would be appropriate for a casual professional in Northern New England.

But the greater challenge is the sequence of scenes in Carell's office which are the principal expositional device.  Although there must be at least six or seven of those scenes in the same locale, never once is it lit in the same way, altering not only the pattern of light and shadow but the color temperature, which lends variety to the costumes and even the actors' skin tones.  It would be interesting and instructive to lay screen grabs of all of the office scenes next to each other to see what cinematographer Florian Ballhaus, with the collaboration of production designer Stuart Wurtzel, has done to reinforce and illuminate the narrative thrust of each of those very different scenes.  They range from a warm and sunny red-to-yellow range after the couple has had a rapprochement to a virtual film noir Venetian blind-shadowed look when they are closest to crisis.  And I wonder how much of the audience even noticed.

The most frequent criticism of the film is that its resolution seems unmotivated or unexplained.  I think what people are feeling but not saying is that the resolution is not verbal, not logical and rationalized.  It is the product of non-verbal, nay pre-verbal passion, the very basis of all such relationships.  Such things are not easy to dramatize, and perhaps this one was not well prepared, but it doesn't change the fact that for this viewer, who has lived and been married about the same time as these characters, the ending made perfect sense to me.  Essentially, Jones's character says to himself, "the hell with what I've been fronting all these years, it's better to just be happy.  Never complain, never explain."

The final vows on the beach are utterly charming--I urge you to stay through the whole film.  But I can't think of a beach in Maine that looks anything like the one in film, not surprising since it was shot in Connecticut.  And after all, what would "Hope Springs" be doing in Coast Maine?  Natural springs virtually never occur that near the shoreline of the ocean.  This is a landscape of the heart.

More wander, less lust

Wet Hot American Summer, Part 2

Wanderlust (2012), which is a pretty uneven entertainment, is interesting mostly as another bid for mainstream success by members of the sketch comedy group The State, whose heyday was 20 years ago. Given that the group had 11 members, it is not surprising that they have divided into various writing and performing teams, many with overlapping membership. Of all these groupings, the most successful in the movie business has been the screenplay team of Thomas Lennon and Ben Garant, the moving forces behind the relentlessly unfunny Reno 911 and creators of the almost-as-unamusing Night in the Museum series (the entertainment value of which is almostly entirely derived from the odd-couple teaming of Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney). Lennon and Garant are also engaged to “punch up” other writers scripts and have even published a book on how to sell out and write crappy Hollywood movies.

Director and co-writer David Wain and co-writer and actor Ken Marino have done the most to keep the anarchic spirit of The State alive, progressing from the episodic cult hit Wet Hot American Summer through the sketch comedy The Ten (of which I am,as far as I can find, the world's only fan although I think less than half of the movie works) to the mentorship of Judd Apatow, who sponsored Wain and Marino's Role Models, which made enough money to make Universal ask for another film from the Wain-Marino team, again under the Apatow aegis.

Whereas Lennon-Garant have mastered Hollywood formulas well enough to vomit them back up between the covers of a book, Wain and Marino still have to graft stray bits of stories from other movies onto their sketch ideas in order to get their 90 minutes of entertainment to resemble a movie. Most egregiously in Wanderlust, they manufacture a crisis for the entire cast of characters very late in the second act without a scrap of foreshadowing, then dismiss it with the airiest of deus ex machinas, almost as if to acknowledge that narrative is a stupid waste of time in their eyes. From interviews with the creators, it is evident that they write by proceeding from ideas and concepts rather than characters, a procedure which is painfully obvious in the finished work.

Moreover, when it comes to the jokes, Wain and Marino veer rapidly from drastically overstating and repeating their jokes to throwing them away so as to be almost invisible. Endless amounts of time are spent on toilets in this movie, with little additional comic effect after the first statement of the joke. On the other hand, one of the best laughs in the film is invisible as Justin Theroux dismisses Paul Rudd's categorization of his group as a “commune.” “Communes” he scoffs, just means “hippies smoking pot and playing guitars” as he leans against a doorway through which we see and hear a room full of hippies smoking pot and playing guitars. There is no cut-in, no take, no signal to the audience that there has been a joke, which is admirable, but perhaps self-defeating.

The single best comic performance (other than Alan Alda, who gets better and better at kidding his own persona) is by the film's editors, David Moritz and David Nassau who create and improve innumberable jokes with some superb cuts and juxtapositions.  In fact, the very first out-loud laugh in the film involves the cut into the title card itself.  

The question remains as to whether Wain and Marino will ever successfully fuse their sketch-oriented form of humor, based on wildly exaggerated characters and an improvisatory freedom with a real story in which real characters wrestle with real stakes.  In The Silent Clowns, Walter Kerr described Harold Lloyd as an "architect of sympathy," building the gags in his films into a narrative structure that virtually forced the audience to feel for the main character and want his dreams to be realized.  What made Lloyd (and Chaplin and Keaton) great is that the narrative push in their best films was not imported from exterior sources but grew up out of the characters and the visual comedy they were prone to, given the quirks and proclivities of those characters.  Character, narrative and gag were all fused, rather than being pasted together.  That takes a lot of time and a lot of films (Lloyd may have made 100 short comedies before arriving at the character who made him great.)  I hope Mr. Wain and Mr. Marino have the opportunity and the ability to realize that fusion.

My mother the bear

Don't look now, but your mother's right behind you

Brave (2012) really has the animation fan world's knickers in a twist, fiercely debating as to whether Pixar has slipped and whether they are losing their knack of inventing and telling heart-rending stories.  I suppose time will tell.  As I sat down in the movie theater, I regretted not having a kid to watch the movie with, but then had the pleasure of three young girls behind me of various ages to react to, discuss, explain and evaluate the movie.  Believe me, I didn't mind their talking through the movie, because it was such a valuable window into how the film was working on its intended core audience.

And they LOVED it.  Brave gives us the second female archer of the year (after Hunger Games), although the story doesn't turn on that skill as much as the posters and trailers might make you think.  The title and the advance publicity led me to expect a female-centered action adventure film, but what Pixar has done is invent a new fairy tale which, like so many fairy tales, turns on questions of growing up, changing family roles and coming into one's "powers."  I have to admit I didn't expect a movie with so much time spent on bears, especially when one of them sort-of resembles those dumb bears that used to help the fat park ranger clean up the park in Disney shorts of the 50's.

In a way, I don't care.  Because the reason to see an animated film is not to see more of what live-action films do -- tell stories about characters.  Everybody tries to do that.  The joy of an animated film is that absolutely everything you see is completely fabricated.  Not one thing has been taken unadorned from life in front of us.  It is an entirely designed, drawn, engineered world.  Nothing is real, and you are asked to believe in it all.  This is something only movies can do.

There is nothing inherent about the arranging of images in a sequence in time that requires three-act tales of conflict, challenge or personality development.  The technology is neutral.  It dares the creator -- "Go ahead, put some pictures in order and let's see what an audience will accept."  It's moving ink blots; what you see is a function of what your brain is willing to organize.  So the derivation of classical American cinema from the theater is merely a matter of economic expedience -- this is the cheapest way to put together a whole lot of stories using the resources we already have and understand.  But it is not the complete catalog of what somewhat might choose to put in front of a lens.

So we have Merida's incredible curly, frizzy, tangled mane which is a wonder to behold in and of itself and which would have used up half the computing power in the world 30 years ago, I should imagine.  We have the multiplicitous ways in which dozens of goofy Scottish lairds march into a hall, each of those walks created by an animator expressing his art.  Every background, prop, leaf and arrow, all created by artists, not imported from the "real world."  And to that extent, I will never stop feeling wonder at first-class animation.

If you don't believe me, see the incredible way King Fergus, voiced by the immortal Billy Connolly, impersonates his own teenage daughter as he and his queen roleplay a mother-daughter conversation.  "I don't want to get married, I want to stay single and let my hair flow in the wind as I ride through the glen firing arrows into the sunset."  It is gloriously and hilariously demented in a way that only animation, and excellent animation, can render.


I don't know whether Brave represents a slipping of Pixar's standards or if Merida is a wonderful new entry into the pantheon of Disney princesses.  But it is a superb piece of animation.  And just the way there are things that only Americans can play in jazz and only the French can do with a fish, there are things in film that only great animation can do and you should go see that, and on a big screen if possible, if only for that reason.

Down in the depths on the 90th floor

No va.  The movie, not the car.

I'm serious:  Tower Heist (2011) should be taught in film school.  It has the worst, clumsiest, most textbook-awful exposition in many, many years.  I mean, there is actually a scene in which the loveable old doorman tells Ben Stiller he is about to retire and he is shore lookin' forward to that there pension, you bet and by golly.  And the guy rased the subject -- it didn't flow out of any previous dialogue or dramatic situation.  It was if he thought, "Oh, crap, I forgot to drop that exposition into this scene.  I better get it in here now."  There are a dozen examples of information dropped like steaming cups of boiling lead over a film that is not very light on its feet to begin with.

Does Eddie Murphy care about anything anymore?  He's not even good at being Eddie Murphy anymore, even as a supporting guest star.  Producers, you can save a lot of money and hire Jay Pharoah to be Eddie Murphy.  Add to that Alan Alda's sweaty incompetence as a villain, and you have an filmgoing experience that resembles going to see a friend in a community theater production and concentrating with all your mind to find things you can mentioned you liked about it.

About Mr. Alda -- we refer to our great movie villains as "the man/woman you love to hate."  The greats -- Basil Rathbone, Alan Rickman, Kevin Spacey, Cruella DeVille all relish their badness, revel in it.  They are unrepentant and unapologetic.  Alda constantly looks sorry for being so mean, and one expects him to follow his wickedest lines with, "I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that.  I've been so stressed lately.  How can I make that up to you?"  It's just not in his enjoyable but fairly narrow range as an actor.  He can be a narcissistic shit, but he just doesn't have that psychic mustache he can twirl.

I'm sure the producers congratulated themselves on not making Gaborey Sidibe the subject of any fat jokes, instead making her a super-competent safe cracker.  Except that she then embarks on a "hilarious" liaison with Eddie Murphy.  Why do I know it's supposed to be "hilarious."  Because she's fat.  And fat people wanting and getting sex is always unquestionably funny, right?   It's not like they're regular people or anything.

It is left to Matthew Broderick, who has evidently graduated from quirky if adenoidal young leading man to burned-out and/or grumpy adenoidal middle-aged man, but there is no doubt that he is still as deft with a wisecrack as he was on Broadway in Brighton Beach Memoirs back during the Reagan administration.  He should be glad to have been moved from starter to reliever, because he is a natural clean-up man.

Look, if the picture comes on TV on a Friday when you have nothing to do and the alternative is to go around to your wife's sister and choke down her bone-dry carrot cake, watch this movie.  Come to think of it, you still could read a book.  Maybe a book about screenwriting, which the people who made Tower Heist have clearly never done.

Idiot savant or idiot idiot?

This is not a special effect.

Johnny English Reborn (2011) is a perfectly agreeable, if anachronistic slapstick Bond parody.  Given that it is now in home video, if you choose to watch it, it will be merely a matter of adding it to your Netflix queue or dropping a buck at Redbox, and not $28 at the nearby MegaPlex 3000, there is no reason for you not to do so, unless you don't care for laughter or entertainment.

But it IS anachronistic.  How can we keep kidding Bond movies 40 years after the fact?  They are not only no more or less funny than they always were, but Mike Myers has clubbed that particular dead horse beyond recognition, with diminishing returns.  (Yes, I know the leaping-off place is Michael Caine's Harry Palmer character, but believe me, the Myers films are kidding Bond not Palmer.)  And that's not to mention Inspector Clouseau, Maxwell Smart or the hero of the OSS 117 films played by Jean Dujardain.  (We will not discuss Jack E. Leonard as The Fat Spy.)  The woods are full of inept spies.

So decisions must be made.  Clouseau is a supremely confident idiot who sales through adversity, triumphing by bizarre accident.  In the meantime, his ineptitude causes social embarassment for himself and physical harm to others, but rarely harm to himself.  He never becomes self-aware, and none of his gambits work the way he plans for them.  Same for Maxwell Smart, who alternates confidence and sheepish humility for Clouseau's oblivious arrogance.  Dujardin is physically capable--he can even intentionally kill, but he has wandered in from another era, and it is his sexism, racism and thick-witted intransigience that makes the OSS films funny.  The Austin Powers are more cultural send-ups.  Powers is also sexist, but the character's childlike enthusiasm excuses his worst behavior.  But Powers is not inept, just a bit culturally clueless and capable of catching up fast.

But Rowan Atkinson, perhaps the greatest combination of comic gifts -- body, face, voice and writing -- combined in a single person of any person alive, can not get Johnny English to settle on a single joke.  Bring him into a room with dangerous and/or breakable things, and they will go zooming and crashing around, causing financial and physical mayhem.  But minutes later, he can outwit and outfight an opponent using sly and clever tricks and even execute Bond-style witticisms--not vulgar burlesques of them, but actual wisecracks a la mode.  Sometimes he understands the mission, sometimes he doesn't and there is no way of predicting it.

Buster Keaton flirted with this problem. His character was frequently referred to by others as a dimwit or a dunderhead, but he had this fabulous intuitive understanding of the natural universe. Perhaps the movie Buster (not the real man) was the first Asperger's comedian, brilliant within his area of expertise, but lacking the ability to read other human beings, or master their strange social customs.  Somehow he made it all hang together.


Jerry Lewis does not and does not seem to be aware there is a problem.  His basic character has been described as a parody of a juvenile idiot.  But if it is necessary to become brilliant to pull off a momentary gag, Lewis will do it, because nothing is important to him as the gag of the moment, and if it distorts the character or the story, Lewis doesn't care.  His movies have Attention Deficit Disorder, which in turn, weakens the gags, since they are rooted in nothing.  For those of you, who get the reference, Jerry Lewis was the Larry Semon of the 1960s.

Atkinson has no such problem with Mr. Bean.  Mr. Bean is inexplicable, but consistent.  He is a child, but, like Harpo Marx, a child who has been around a little bit and seen some things.  But Johnny English, funny as it is, is always in danger of turning into Thirty-One Gags In Search Of A Movie.
One incidental note -- when did the English decide Gillian Anderson was English?  She's from Chicago, and her English accet is only passable, especially in comparison with a Gwyneth Paltrow or a Jennifer Ehle.  But she's done two Dickens mini-series and now this picture.  There have to be some working actresses in Great Britain between 35 and 55, surely.  Anderson isn't convincing to me as a Yank--what could she sound like to a Brit? 

McCarthy pulls the hat trick

With Win Win (2011) co-writer-director Tom McCarthy has pulled the filmmaking hat trick and dodged the sophomore, or any other slump. If he decides to release home videos of his cat next year, I will go.



As has been my habit recently, a few disconnected observations:



Paul Giamatti is especially good at two modes: the guy who is already exasperated at what you're about to say -- he uses that for his villains and for John Adams; and the guy who knows he's going to be found out, and that it's too late to do anything but wait for it all to come down on him. He employs the latter in Win Win.



I am prejudiced toward any movie not set in New York, Los Angeles or shot in Toronto or Vancouver pretending to be New York or Los Angeles. By the way, I've seen a number of films set in Montreal, but has there ever been a film shot in Toronto which was set in Toronto? Anyway, it made me said that Long Island had to stand in for New Jersey. Still, there's a way that our houses and streets are set in this part of country that we don't generally see in the movies, something that almost screams, "this is not a movie, this is really happening." I know it isn't, but I like the illusion that it is.

McCarthy has achieved the rare accomplishment of placing a "gun in the drawer in the first act" and never pulling it out again, in violation of all conventions of play- and screenwriting. I refer to the threatening furnance in the basement. Maybe it should have its own movie (a horror film, of course).

I'm in favor of more films about high school wrestling. The more we can divorce wrestling from the trashmouth vaudeville they have on TV, the better. But it makes no sense that the leading character, played by Alex Shaffer, an excellent wrestler who plays an excellent wrestler, claims to wrestle as if he were escaping something that was trapping him. Surely only us bad wrestlers (which includes me and the co-authors of the script of Win Win) felt that way. Good wrestlers seem to float over the surface of their opponents, as does Shaffer in this film.



Non-actors like Shaffer can only work on film next to great actors like Paul Giamatti and Amy Ryan. A non-actor working alongside actors awash in artificial technique would seem too small, too understated and subject to criticism for not acting. But put an actor next to a Giamatti and the understatement will blend in seamlessly.



I can't wait for the doctoral theses soon to be produced about the "McCarthy trilogy." I just hope Mr. McCarthy never reads any of them.

Mach One Mock Doc

This is the trailer for a partially improvised documentary about a year in the life of four public school teachers (and administrators) called Chalk (2006). I don't like to use trailers because they are not the movie and often contain things that are not in the film or distort the tone of the film. But this trailer is reasonably accurate and gives a sense of the upbeat deadpan tone of Chalk. Its immersive quality is reminiscent of Christopher Guest's films but at no time do the characters have the distance and occasional aloofness that sometimes visit the Guest films.

These teachers are not above the events in the movie -- they're not above anything. Neither are they caricatures or buffoons. Well, one is a buffoon, but the film is not out to be cruel. And never has the terrible yet sometimes rewarding experience of the first year of teaching been so well represented on film.

A real, grass-roots mockumentary like Chalk highlights how TV series like The Office and Modern Family, funny as they are, have bastardized the form they sprung from. Chalk uses only a handful of professional actors, filling out the cast with friends, family and real teachers and students. One of the funniest teachers, a seriously repressed neurotic, is played by the film's assistant director. None of the teachers is dishonest or contemptuous, or a lout. They are genuinely trying to do their best. Some are under-experienced, some are overworked, some lack perspective on themselves and one teacher is just not very bright. That happens, although not as often as politicians would have you believe. But they all want to do well by the students.

[I didn't see the Cameron Diaz atrocity Bad Teacher because I refuse to patronize a movie that says that a drunken lazy slut can become a teacher without any accountability. Sorry if I'm a little over-sensitive, but that just doesn't strike me as funny. What if they made a film about a drug-addled terrorist who became a uniformed police officer? Does that make any sense? Is it funny? Neither was Bad Teacher's premise.]

Chalk is unique for maintaining the teachers' points of view. Students do not become significant or notable characters. (This is not true in a teacher's working life, but they had to keep the thing down to 90 minutes.) This manages to defuse the traps of sentiment and melodrama that something like Up the Down Staircase was inclined to fall into.

But what I've failed to say is that not one minute goes by in this film that doesn't make you laugh. Or at least made me laugh. And some minutes much more than that. And its sincerity and lack of condescension make you feel as though you saw something when it was over, not just a string of gags and blackouts. I especially recommend this to my fellow teachers -- it is funny because it is very true. (Incidentally it is available on Netflix streaming until February when the Starz contract expires.)

How girls do gross-out comedy

There is nothing much to say cinematically about Bridesmaids (2011), but it may mark an interesting moment in social-cultural history. Obviously, The Hangover is the template, and the looming and immovable date of a wedding provides a strong narrative "clock" that dozens of production executives, producers and screenwriters find irresistible. But whereas the male "get me to the church on time" movie focuses on the zany shenanigans of the men in question, the female version--as one would expect--focuses on the dynamics of the relationship among the women in the wedding party. Bridesmaids is no exception, and the principal plot constitutes a competition between an old friend (Kristen Wiig) and a new (rich) friend (Rose Byrne) for the affection and attention of the bride (Maya Rudolph).

Wiig and her co-writer Annie Mumalo smartly raise the stakes by having Wiig's life (and sanity) circle the drain throughout the movie. In the sequence in question, maid-of-honor Wiig has arranged for a lunch at a questionable looking Brazilian barbeque restaurant prior to a group fitting at a swanky boutique. Although the food is apparently delicious, extraordinary repercussions follow during the fitting as shown in the clip above. What follows is every variety of gastric distress experienced in some very expensive clothing.

From interviews with director Paul Feig and Ms. Mumalo I glean that this sequence was not the original one written for this place in the story. Ms. Wiig had her character getting lost in a long romantic fantasy, which, as described, seems difficult to picture on screen. Producer Judd Apatow insisted that Wiig's character needed to make a large mistake at this point and proposed the food poisoning scenario, although Mesdames Mumalo & Wiig, accepting the idea, wrote the actual sequence.

I'm pretty immune to poop-and-vomit humor, which delights two-year-olds of all ages. And Bridesmaids has the courage of its conviction. It doesn't turn its head (although I turned mine) at the sight of bodily fluids washing over its characters. The film certainly wanted to cash in on the transgressive nature of putting women in the kind of low comedy sequence previously reserved for the boys (not men). We're in the land of Comedy of Discomfort which via programs like The Office has become a dominant subgenre today.

For all the nausea and hysteria and some very funny ad-libs, especially those by Melissa McCarthy, the real power of the sequence comes from the humiliation and embarrassment of these now-well-established characters, rather than the pre-adolescent wonder at the strange things our bodies emit that one finds in the man-boy movies. The centerpiece is the truly perversely lovely image of Maya Rudolph in a gloriously white wedding gown, heading across a city street in search of a functioning bathroom, moving into a crouch as her lower intestine begins (we presume from her face) to betray her, gradually shifting into a Groucho crouch under that voluminous gown, until it is all too late, Nature has triumphed over civilization, and Rudolph collapses near the curb, the disaster having happened -- happily unseen, with Defeat writ large on her crumpled and disappointed face. The juxtaposition of the beautiful fantasy of the princess bride in her unstained whiteness concealing the truth of what exactly our bodies do with food is the kind of Bergsonian incongruity that makes for comedy that is bigger than gross-out jokes and gags, comedy that is real and human and universal and grand for all its pettiness.

Craziest damn movie.

Most of the time a new medium arrives, it does not utterly supplant a predecessor medium, but the roles and functions of the media often get rearranged. Since the arrival of the internet, television--including cable--has completely dispensed with distributing news and facts and has turned all of human existence into a tasteless zoo. When television arrived, radio stopped dealing with narrative, but took over music and breaking news completely, leaving records for collectors and newspapers for obsessives. Television also took over what remained of vaudeville and the variety stage, and those two forms have completely disappeared other than in the completely vestigial form of comedy sketch shows with music acts tossed in to fill time. (Incidentally, those music acts are not there to draw audiences -- music has a much smaller audience than the relatively small audience for hardcore comedy.)

But for awhile, radio proudly carried the banner of vaudeville and variety, albeit with some technological limitations. Although there was a concerted effort to make radio stars into film stars, the only ones who succeeded were Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. Jack Benny, the #1 star in radio, had a film career that literally became a joke, at least on Benny's program, and his pretend rival-and-nemesis, Fred Allen, only made a handful of films. But in one case the resulting film did a good job of projecting the trademark Allen mixture of cynicism and insanity. Fred Allen was sort of the David Letterman of his era, a decent and sensible guy who could be made cranky when contemplating the news, celebrities and the machinations of the entertainment business. Best remembered as the man who said that television is called a medium because nothing in it is well done, he once had a character conducting a tour through 30 Rock say, "That man with the moss on him is an NBC vice-president."

It's In The Bag (1945) was made independently, is based on the same story as Mel Brooks' The Twelve Chairs and boasts one of the most insane cast lists of all time. New Yorker humorist Robert Benchley plays a exterminator, Jerry Colonna plays a psychiatrist, horror star John Carradine plays an evil lawyer in top hat, morning coat, striped pants and pince-nez, William Bendix plays a deadly gangster called Bill Bendix, Jack Benny plays himself and at one point the down-and-out Fred Allen joins a quartet of singing waiters comprised of Don Ameche, a fading film star of the 30s, Rudy Vallee, a fading radio star of the late 20s and Victor Moore a faded stage star whose career began at the dawn of the 20th century. This would be akin to a movie in which a washed-up Conan joins a rock band comprised of Steven Tyler, Englebert Humperdinck and Robert Wagner.

This is the kind of movie in which Fred and his wife (played by Binnie Barnes, whom people like me may remember from Abbott & Costello's The Time of their Lives) are told by Jerry Colonna that they need to kill some time, so they should go to a movie. They are told that there is immediate seating for the feature Zombie in the Attic (is this a Val Lewton RKO or a Universal horror picture -- I wonder?). There is in fact no seating, which they learn after taking an elevator to the top balcony which appears to be 16 stories about the screen and squabble and joke with a half-dozen managers about the price of movies and crowding in theaters. Finally, when Fred demand a seat, the manager reaches into his closet and hands Fred one of the five chairs he is looking for according to the scrap of an anecdote that serves as a plot, which you had forgotten about for the last ten minutes.

What I'm trying to say is that this is not any kind of a movie. It is a very funny thing, but it lacks most of the rudiments we expect from cinema, such as story, character, setting or connection to the known universe. It is a craziness like International House, Hellzapoppin' and Never Give A Sucker An Even Break. Given the technological and distribution facts of the day, the craziness had to be shot on film and shown in movie houses, but that doesn't make it a movie. But cinema or not, I wish they still made things like this today. (I can just hear the development executives saying, "but you have to make your hero sympathetic." Fooey.)

Here's the opening of It's In The Bag, startling for 1945, which trades on the old joke of the host telling the radio or TV audience, "We've got a great show for you tonight." We all know that's a lie. The thing is on every week, or sometimes every day. There's no way it could be "great" again tonight, and even if it were "great," how would the host know in advance? It's a crap shoot, let's accept it, and the odds are against. Personally, I never get tired of the "this show is crap" joke, as practiced today on NPR's Car Talk and on Craig Ferguson's show. This version has Fred Allen deconstructing the credit sequence in an extremely post-modern way:

Words words words

The late Woody Allen, the one who wrote and directed Take the Money and Run, Annie Hall and Bullets over Broadway once had as fine an ear for idiomatic American comic dialogue as any of this contemporaries from Sid Caesar University such as Neil Simon, Larry Gelbart, Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, etc., etc. Sadly, this enjoyable filmmaker died and someone calling himself Woody Allen is making all-star tax-shelter movies in Europe without scripts, style or indeed any idea for a movie.

Last year this imposter turned out something called You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger (2010) which ostensibly poses the question: Can you predict the future? The answer is no. Any questions?

There is the usual Allen mix of scads of miscast stars (Antonio Banderas plays someone named Greg. Can you imagine Antonio being Greg? Or indeed any Spanish man named Greg?) an old man justifying his romance with an inappropriately younger woman, a failed artist or two, some pointless adulteries, a half-baked criminal act, the fear of discovery of which will drive much of the film, and as has been the case for the last 10 years, a foreign location to make his international investors happy, and because Manhattan is kind of sick of him tying up the streets for his snooze fests.

But his films are not bad for all the usual reasons that films are bad, such as there was no reason to make them or the filmmaker is inept. Neither is true here. Woody Allen has simply stopped writing scripts. He writes down ideas for scripts, with detailed notes of what the lines should be, but seems to have forgotten to write actual dialogue that could be spoken by actors who are trying to create the illusion of a character.

Starting about 10 years ago (that was the year of Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Allen's uncontested rock-bottom worst movie), instead of writing lines, his characters speak their unconscious intentions, what actors and directors call the subtext of a scene. "I have decided to leave you because you remind me of my lost youth and the impossibility of retrieving my lost youth." "Well, then, I have become an alcoholic due to your emotional abuse and neglect, and am sinking ever further into a morass of self-pity." "Don't blame your terrible decline on me; I am in search of that moving principle that once guided my entire existence." "I'll blame what I like you, because I am the embittered representative of a generation who was lost and lied to."

Mind you, this is not actual dialogue from an Allen film. There's no way I could remember such dreck, and nobody quotes this crap on line. You can't find a Woody Allen quote online any more recent than 1995, the year of Mighty Aphrodite, his last really good movie. But New York feels obligated to support Allen year after year, like making a contribution to the Planetarium. You don't go anymore, but you'd hate to see it gone.

It's not unusual for comedy writers to lose their touch, especially with dialogue. It happened to Billy Wilder and to Blake Edwards. My hypothesis is that once they become Hollywood celebrities, they don't encounter actual humans talking anymore. As William Goldman wrote, "In time they write plays about their agents." And in Woody Allen's case, he profoundly hates being around other human beings, which many might consider a disqualification for writing about them. It's not that he'll be mobbed as a celebrity -- if the portrait of him in Wild Man Blues is to be trusted*, this guy would rather lock himself in a closet with a TV so he can watch the Knicks than do anything, including write and direct movies.

And it shows. And believe, anyone who can still devote any brain cells to following the Knicks... he's done.

(Yes, I know he has a hit in the theaters currently, something about imagining he's in Paris with Hemingway. But from what I hear, it's as stilted as ever--he's just come up with a story that justifies the stiltedness.)
________________
* And why should it be? Allen seems to have agreed to participate in it just to reassure everyone that it's OK to marry your stepdaughter.

Crazy love, but not crazy enough

A couple of unrelated observations about crazy people in love.

It's Kind Of A Funny Story (2010) seems to be the official demarcation of Zach Galifianakis as a film object. It is not necessary to have a well-written role for him, or something that interesting or unique for him to do. (The height of eccentricity in this movie consists of patients wearing doctor's scrubs - Wow, is that Zany!) No, you simply hire Galifianakis to certify that your film is quirky and offbeat whether or not it actually is. It's a sad degradation of an artist who is dangerously close to leasing out what is valuable about himself to entities who don't appreciate it. Robert Benchley, one of the finest writers of light humor was an alcoholic who couldn't deal with his belief that he had drunk his talent away and spent the last 7 or 8 years of his too-short life appearing in Hollywood movies not worthy of his talent.

Where he is usually a strange and primordial presence in most films, here he gets heartfelt and sincere advice and has a balanced perspective on himself on his illness, confusing ZG with any old actor out of the casting files. I have to assume the man has tax problems.

What's worse, whether he means to or not, the mere presence of Galifianakis pulls the entire film off-balance and away from the sweet if flimsy teen romance that is meant to be the center of gravity. It's as if you cast Robert DeNiro is the kindly man next door. Not only is it a waste of resources, but everybody will be waiting for the moment when that guy next door goes OFF!

The real problem with this movie about crazy people is that it's not crazy. It does, however, have one of the best-ever uses of the "object of reconciliation." This is a hoary old storytelling device, though it usually works very well. There are lots of ways to get there, but in essence you need (a) a rift between two characters; and (b) an object loaded with significance for one of the characters, but not for the other. It is best if the object is obscure and difficult to obtain so that the character for whom the object has no meaning must go through many trials in order to obtain this talismanic thing and then present to the other at the most emotionally critical point. In IKOAFS, the object is Egyptian music which, upon being played during a party on the ward lures the hero's reclusive and depressed roommate from his room. I don't think I ever saw music used as the object and worked like a charm. Unless maybe it was a song from childhood. Rats, it's not unique as I thought. Still worked.



Elling (2001) on the other hand, does involve actually crazy people, much to its merit. It was the number one film ever produced in Norway, which is why me and all my friends rushed out to see it. (Not really.) Also, it won an Academy Award for best foreign language film.

I sought out this film because it is based on a novel which was also the basis of a spectacular Broadway flop in the 2009-10 season. (To be fair, the play was a hit in London, but in a different production). It tells the story of two men completely unequipped to adjust to life on their own being forced to adjust to life on their own. One seems to be somewhere between autistic and OCD and the other is just a plain old-fashioned foole.

And if Elling had been produced in the 1920s or 1930s, they would have just been a pair of fools. But today we give such characters a medical diagnosis and put them in realistic situations and realistically limited options for solving them. This has its rewards in grounding comedy in the plausible and the natural, but it has its drawbacks in closing off the realm of the fantastical, which was available to the great fools such as Laurel & Hardy, Jerry Lewis and Ed Wynn.

But this is not an American film, it is a Northern European film, a world of limited resources and constricted dreams, compared to the mythos of the great American landscape and dreams of freedom, success and escape which lives in every American psyche. So their adventures -- going on a car trip, having a relationship with a woman, maintaining an apartment -- are plausible and relatable, and the film is likable. But this viewer would have liked an over-the-moon adventure (as in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest), a little romance, a little poetry.

The diagnosis for both films -- terminal niceness. Could use a dash of real madness.

Humor Risk

Wild Target (2010) is rather a standard issue British black comedy, an aesthetic which posits death as the ultimate cosmic joke. Based on a film by French people, who first discovered black comedy and then wrote long boring essays about it quoting Hegel, who, you should know, is not funny at all. But then humor is not funny to the French, or else they would not admire Jerry Lewis, who makes movies that look as if they might be funny, or are planning to be funny in the near future, but somehow never quite get there.

Anyway, Wild Target is rife with stray bullets and inconvenient dead bodies and is funny like a mousse is tasty. Really enjoyable right now, but it just doesn't stay with you. Everybody involved does a good job until some git insists that the story have "an emotional through-line" which is an idea usually confined to Hollywood development executives. So we are meant to care about the heartaches of a middle-aged hitman, and only the fact that the role is played by the estimable Bill Nighy makes it tolerable.

But the worst failure is the failure of nerve over the central joke - we all die - and the compounding joke that our death doesn't matter to anyone, other than a very small core of family and friend. Our death will do nothing to stem the vast tides of life washing over everybody, and our greatest responsibility upon dying is to get the hell out of the way. But those who die in Wild Target are either unknown or of no consequence, which completely vitiates the power of the joke. So all the film earns is a few quick gasps of surprise at the outset, and then it settles into an everyday screwball romantic comedy, surrendering any claims it had to being audacious or unique.

Moreover, the film asks us to accept that being a hired political assassin can be a long-term occupation, handed down from one generation to the next and permitting a quiet upper middle-class existence, which might be intended to increase our identification with the central character, whereas the sheer unreality of the idea has the opposite effect.

Four Lions (2010), on the other hand, dares all and reaps the reward of that risk. Although the principal characters are ethnic Arabs raised and living in London (and don't all Americans love seeing brown and black people with those cute London accents?) they are people with jobs and families and in one case, hopes for his children. They seem to have drifted into jihad in order to find greater purpose in their lives and, most importantly, to form fraternal bonds that root their lives. That is, the film is coated with a surface of political satire, but at its heart it is, as its director describes it "The Hangover with bombs."

Some of the humor follows traditional British verbal satirical tropes, as in the character of Barry, a non-Arab former reactionary who has (mis) read the Koran, converted himself, become radicalized in much the manner of Life of Brian's People's Front of Palestine. Here's Barry making a video:



But, as it must in a comedy about terrorism (those are odd words to type), the joke has to go past words. Here's our first inkling of things to come:



The would-be bomber, Faisal, undergoes some cosmic justice for this insult to the animal kingdom. In fact, this very joke keeps spiraling up and up, finally past the point of humor, which is, ultimately why Four Lions might be called transcendent. It is not afraid of how big a joke it's making, and sees it to its logical conclusion; although not in a joking way. After all, these men do have real lives, real families and real grievances, though they be clueless as to how to address those grievances, both politically and practically. The mock-doc style -- improvisation-type acting (although reportedly there was little real improv on the set), jittery camera work, sharp editing all bolster the film's roots in reality.

Personally, it's a mode I think comedy should always aspire to -- you laugh and laugh and laugh until you are made uneasy about what you've been laughing at. Because laughter is distance, and by implication, cruelty and condescension.

Which is a natural attitude to adopt toward K. Roth Binew, the central character of The Living Wake (2007). This may be the most deliberately eccentric movie of the first decade of the century -- it certainly seems to be aiming for that distinction.* And in pursuit of that goal, the risks it takes are tremendous, the results mixed, but not without some successes.

Binew is a self-proclaimed artist who is about to die of a deliberately vague fairy-tale movie disease and spends his remaining time settling scores and preparing his own send-off. His concept of creativity is to hand-create a terrible morbid story "for children" and then insert the book onto the shelves of the local library, where he delivers the story itself in person:



The film takes place in some odd made-up New Englandy world in which no one lives but the characters in the story (a hallmark of ultra low-budget filmmaking). But whether or not it was an economic necessity, the strange Mr. Binew is deprived of any sort of context. Yes, he is part of a small circle of lunatics, including a bitterly hated rival (played by the immortal Eddie Peppitone) who rides by flinging slices of ham steak to demonstrate his contempt for Binew. The isolation is unnerving. (There is a scene with a psychic that looks as though the shots had been grabbed when the crew discovered an abandoned shack.)

The result is reminiscent of those well-intentioned low-budget film versions of plays such as Godspell or works of the American Film Theater in which film adaptation consists solely of taking the sparsely populated closed universe of the play and putting it against a grand landscape, which only amplifies the artificiality, rather than vitiating it. And if the characters are whimsical or eccentric, then there is almost nothing the film medium can do to lend plausibility or identification to such a narrative. The Living Wake treads the line between a determined piece of outsider humor and a "hey-let's-get-our-crazy-friends-together-and-make-a-movie" ethos.

Here's an example of the home movie sort of whimsey that the film not only lapses into, but is virtually built on:



Yes it's funny, but it's theatrical, and sketch-oriented, rather than being a sustainable arc of character-based satire. The Living Wake is funny, but perhaps it should not be watched in a single sitting. Broken up into 10 or 15 minute chunks, this might be one of the funniest films of its decade.

Like it or not, you can't deny it's brave, and for that it deserves more praise than the cautious faux-noir humor of a Wild Target.
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* The film is available on both Hulu and Netflix streaming, so you can easily test my assertions against your own assessment.

Furious improvisation

Improvisation was once a rehearsal tool for actors and directors developing a production of a play. It was never intended to be seen by the audience, being designed to help actors discover aspects of their characters not directly addressed by the script of the play.

It only became a production mode in the US in the late 1950s when, at the same time, the Compass Players and its successors in Chicago and John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke and other filmmakers in New York started assembling scenes improvised by actors based on an agreed-upon storyline into full-length works. These two strands produced some of the most influential actors of the 1960s. From Chicago came Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Ed Asner, Jane Alexander and Alan Arkin. From New York came Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands. The Chicago group emphasized variety and the inconsistent, surprising aspects of human nature. Where Chicago went wide, New York went deep, drilling down to the hidden springs of feeling, especially those of loss and pain.

But whereas Compass was intended to be a full-spectrum theater group, presenting classics of world theater and full-length improvisations on contemporary issues, its successor, Second City packaged improvisation as a comedy brand, focusing wholly on short sketches with broad types, running jokes and blackout punchlines. The end became the means, and the basis of not only Saturday Night Live and SCTV, but all the films that sprung from those sources. (The 80s sketch group boom, such as UCB and The State, which are fundamentally writer-driven cooperatives probably trace their ancestry to Monty Python.)

Currently the biggest sub-brand of the Second City brand is the Will Ferrell film, specifically, the Adam McKay-Will Ferrell movie, which also traces its lineage from Blazing Saddles and the other Mel Brooks burlesques. Mel Brooks was the first to bring the sketch mentality to bigtime Hollywood films, by which character consistency, plot development, thematic integrity and good taste are all tossed overboard for the sake of a gag, any gag so long as it gets a laugh. So what if it contradicts other scenes in the movie, so what if it short-circuits the progress of the story. If people will laugh at men farting when they eat beans, who needs a story or characters?

(This scene has always driven me crazy. Why do people find it funny? Back in 1973 there was some humor in breaking a taboo and assaulting the Western genre, which was semi-sacred. Now we've scene routines with the Queen or Grace Kelly farting, so the fart taboo is pretty much exhausted. AndB there's nothing inherently incongruous about farting. Some foods produce more gas in the G.I. tract and press for more and faster relief. Other than puncturing someone's dignity, farting is as hilarious as any other body function. The unrelieved NEED to fart is still funny, the fart itself just a natural event.)

But the Mel Brooks burlesques were written down, with fixed scripts. I'm sure a certain amount of staging and business were worked up on the set, but there was no tradition of wholesale improvisation for that generation of comics, even though they first began work in impromptu resort camp shows. Not until Christopher Guest began his series of films improvised around a scenario that full-on improv made it into the movies.

What the SNL and Ferrell-McKay group brought to movies was called improvisation, but it is really riffing, a time-honored practice of comics who converge on a subject or a situation and come up with alternate set-ups and punchlines. There is even a well-known improv game, often called "Ding" in which a moderator hits a bell and the improviser must substitute a new line for the line he or she just said. At its best, it promotes spontaneity and openness. Abused, as it often is, it turns an actor into a joke machine.

Will Ferrell is a talented performer. He is far more effective than, say Jim Carrey, in what might be called "serious comedy" such as Stranger Than Fiction or Melinda or Melinda. But his "friends" like Mr. McKay keep pushing him into shallow waters and forcing him to stay there. The man is capable of a Dr. Strangelove or a Network, and he is in danger of turning into Eddie Murphy. The day you see him show up in a fat suit will be his expiration date.

That said, The Other Guys represents a considerable improvement over the mild-chuckle inducing Talladega Nights (Although - can we declare a moratorium on overweight middle-aged guys in tighty whities? Yecch) and the abominable Step Brothers. Having Mark Wahlberg aboard helps, as he is neither an improviser nor especially silly. In fact the film adheres to its story so closely that it doesn't give Steve Coogan a chance to be funny, which falls in the category of a waste of a precious resource. And the story turns out to be an extremely plodding police procedural, even though it is decorated with silly ideas, like Will Ferrell being sexually irresistible. Soon it even forgets to make fun of the super-violent buddy super-cop movies that is the essential premise of the movie and finally it has no target and the wispiest sketches of characters. It is neither an actual movie nor an effective comment on a movie. Oh, it's a reasonable time-passer, but I can't imagine anyone hauling this out in 30 years to show their kids what a great comedy is.

The Duplass Brothers make far more productive and organic use of improvisation, born out of extreme humility. (This may be the humility borne of great arrogance, but it's humility nonetheless.) Simply put, they have literally NO pride of authorship when it comes to dialogue. They work out character, situations, scenes, structure, but do not consider themselves as good at creating dialogue as actors on their feet can be. So they write dialogue, but they tell their actors not to bother following it to closely. Instead, dialogue develops and evolves out of rehearsal and repetition, like jazz players working off the "I Got Rhythm" changes. You still have to play the chords, or you will be in discord with the other players, but you're free to work out your own melody. And in the rehearsal process -- and even during shooting -- the Duplasses are unafraid to completely invert the intention or the action of the scene if they feel what they initially created doesn't work. This makes financiers and distributors nervous, but it is a very effective method of storytelling and if everyone is prepared for it, very successful.

Cyrus (2010) demonstrates emphatically that this system does not rely on amateur or semi-amateur actors like Mark Duplass or Greta Gerwig to work. Instead, professionals like John C. Reilly and Marisa Tomei lend a crispness, clarity and sense of purpose to the film and enhance the energy and drive. They know how to get to the point of a scene, and even with variations and decorations, keep that purpose solidly in mind. I found the film so effective that the ugly greasy slug often identified as Jonah Hill was not too nauseating, except insofar as his character was meant to be. (Although the American people need to put their foot down. Mr. Hill must not take his pants off in the movies anymore AT ALL. He has abused the privilege. Do any of you know a Congressperson or Senator who can do something about this?)

It's questionable whether this script could be pulled off at all with anything less than top-level actors. Not that there's a weakness in the script, but I can't see an amateur walking that fine line between psychopathy and comedy that Jonah Hill is called upon to do here. Or that anyone with such a lumpy face and bad hair could be as plausible leading man as the sweet and funny John C. Reilly. Or that any non-pro actress could simulate loving devotion with something like Jonah Hill. Believe me, that takes real acting.

The camerawork is still rudimentary. The film features Catherine Keener, queen if indie movies, so you know that it's still a little movie, even if a studio is involved. The story still moves in fits and starts, static for a long time, then shifting into overdrive. But whereas a writer can sit and think that a girl could endear herself to a man by starting to dance to the inane pop tune which he is trying to compel the whole party to dance to, it takes a Marisa Tomei to know how to do that, to be light and funny and spirited and yet terribly seductive. And the people who nominate people for awards are going to have to stop overlooking John C. Reilly. His gallery of characters is as fecund and diverse as Paul Giamatti or Phillip Seymour Hoffman, yet he is always taken for granted by the nominators, though not be filmmakers who know how extraordinary his range is. Is there another actor alive who could be equally at home in Magnolia and Walk Hard?

In a project like this, improv becomes a tool for actor-writer-director collaboration and for a greater naturalness in performance. (I hate those super-written lines that become staples of movie trailers, often announcing the theme. Much as I admire The King's Speech, the line, "I have a voice" is one of the worst motivated and baldly obvious lines in it, clearly emanating from the omniscient author and not the character, yet the line is plastered all over the commercials and trailers, incidentally demolishing the effect of the scene it's in when audiences come to see the movie.) Instead of gladiatorial combat, as in the world of Adam McKay and Judd Apatow, improv is put to its original purpose, arriving at the truth lurking just below the words of scripts. A kind of meta-writing. If Cyrus is an example of the Duplasses "selling out" and working in the studio system, I hope they do a lot more of it.