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.

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.

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.)

Side by side by 'Scope

Here it is September, and I'm still catching up with the last few Academy nominees for last year; specifically Mike Leigh's Another Year (2010), which was nominated for screenplay, which is ironic given Mr. Leigh's modus. Reportedly, he works with a group of actors around some characters and themes he is interested in. After a few months of improvisation, he goes away and writes a complete script based on that work. So in a way, Mr. Leigh partakes of a committee-type writing procedure, even within an Art tradition.

A few disjointed observations. The critical consensus was that this film was about class. Perhaps that is a British perspective, because I don't see a disparity in income as synonymous with membership in a different class. One can be part of the managerial-professional class without being particularly well-heeled. Class is substantially, if not primarily, a matter of self-identification. And the major characters in this film are all middle-class in outlook, even if some of them are skint. There are no laborers and no aristocrats to be found.

The film is not so much about the unequal distribution of money so much as it is about the unequal distribution of happiness and how people choose to deal with it. Some writers have found the central couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen to be smug and self-satisfied, whereas I think they are simply comfortable with themselves, a trait many people are not familiar with, and therefore find strange.

But to my mind, the film is structurally flawed at its heart, perhaps due to the quality of those afore-mentioned improvisations. It seems as though the film was meant to be an ensemble piece, not perhaps full-on Altmanesque, but a widely distributed set of storylines revolving around a theme, rather than the usual toolbox of suspense and melodrama. But Leslie Manville's Mary (seen in the clip) above and her desperation to belong and to be loved hijacks the film, sucking the energy out of every other corner of the film. This includes the sequence that should have been the highlight, wherein Broadbent goes to help his older brother bury the brother's wife, a procedure interrupted by a bitter, estranged son. But the incident feels isolated and without resonance, and Broadbent's brother becomes significant to the film only because of his brief awkward scene with Manville. Even Broadbent struggles to remain at the center of what was supposed to be his own vehicle.

I love Cinemascope ratio, described variously as 2.35, 2.39 and 2.40. Doesn't matter much. It seems to me to be made to show two or even three people sitting side by side. Academy ratio is for isolated stars, or perhaps two stars in tight embrace. But 'Scope lets you see the space between people (or the lack thereof) and seems to me to be far more useful in storytelling. Throughout this film, Mary wants to be close to people who don't want to be close to her, and vice versa and 'Scope is the perfect vehicle for this trope.

One odd thing about Leigh's technique -- given that it is actor-based, one would expect long, uninterrupted takes. But I was not aware of long takes or gaps between cuts. Everything proceeds along relatively conventional lines. And thankfully Leigh does not indulge in the usual practice of American character-based filmmakers -- the long static shot of a character doing nothing. I never know what to do during those. They seem embarrassing. Leigh keeps his comedy of embarrassment on screen, among the characters, rather than between the characters and the audience. It's all part of being British, I suppose.

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.

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.

Poisoned valentine

Film history is riddled with so-called "love letters to the theater": All About Eve, Stage Door, Les Enfants du Paradis, The Band Wagon, The Last Metro. All exhibit not only an affection for the theater, but a knowledgeability, an insider's authenticity.

This makes John Cassavetes Opening Night (1977) genuinely unique. Not only does it seem to have a contempt for live theater, as contrasted with film--at least independent film, but it is shot through with inaccuracies and contrivances which bolster that contempt.

I've spent a lot of time reading and thinking about film, but I've spent more time actually working in theater. And I have never seen such a shambles in the professional theater as the mess that is presented in this film as a rehearsal. (As an example, look at the video above, in which a woman who should be sent for professional help is badgered and bullied into attempting some very half-baked and unconsidered staging.) Nor could a show hoping to go to Broadway expect to get there with such an ugly and dysfunctional set. There are stairs and doors that do not seem to go anywhere, not to mention scenes that boast a similar lack of direction and purpose.

Perhaps Cassavetes's purpose was to demonstrate how artificial live theater is compared to his own improvisatory film technique. But he stacked the deck. In an interview, Cassavetes admitted that although he knew he was supposed to write a "play within the film," he hated that play and could never complete it. If so, why did he go ahead with the film? Why not wait until he had the script of a good play, or at least a plausibly professional one, as one would expect from the playwright in the film, played by the affable Joan Blondell?

Then, once it is evident that the leading actress played by Gena Rowlands, on whom the financing of the show rests, has serious problems, why is no one assigned to be with her, stay with her, make sure she shows up when and where needed? (Not to mention no understudy and no back-up star. The producer in this film, played by Paul Stewart, is the worst ever. He obviously learned nothing from his days with the Mercury Theater under Orson Welles and John Houseman.)

And what is the purpose of the subplot about the fan who is killed in a random auto accident and begins haunting Rowlands? That whole thread is built up and massaged through some abortive visits to mediums, and then it is dropped and never reappears through the entire climax of the film, instead of precipitating the actress's final breakdown, which would have been logical.

Maybe she just has a breakdown because she realizes she's in a crappy play with a crappy director and a self-absorbed co-star. (Scary how good Cassavetes is, as he is in Rosemary's Baby at playing a narcissistic actor.) What Cassavetes is bad at is improvisation. Here he is, the grand guru of improv, elevating into an entire method and an aesthetic principle of filmmaking, and he is atrocious. He is repetitive, self-conscious, breaks character, completely without creativity or imagination. Were Cassavetes alive today, he could not pass the audition for the most basic improv class around today. Perhaps that explains why his films are so prolix and off-topic--he literally couldn't tell the good material from the bad.

One last note--what was the deal with Zohra Lampert? She is the most inert actress who ever lived. Her voice is flat and her face looks like it was shot with those tranquilizers that freeze your muscles. She expresses absolutely nothing, yet she worked non-stop through the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe directors thought that, instead of fighting with an actress to get her to do the scene right, they would get an actress who just did nothing--then at least, it's not wrong.

God knows she's not going to upstage Cassavetes.