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.)

Spoof of a travesty

Wet Hot American Summer (2001) was the first quasi-official feature film project of the sketch comedy group The State. I've already discussed the transition into feature films by Derrick Comedy, another NYU-based group. Actually the 15 intervening years between The State and Derrick say something about the development of cutting edge comedy in the US. The State was a theater and video oriented group, transitioning easily to episodic television, especially with Monty Python as a model. Derrick Comedy is from the age of YouTube, in which the short film is the primary mode. The former tends toward absurdism, non sequitur and repeating characters. The latter tends toward parody and burlesque, but with a narrative basis. The contrast between the two groups is virtually a perfect statement of the essential differences between theater and film.

As an example, consider the difference in the way the groups approach the concept of a "character." In Mystery Team, the three leads play characters which are absurd and bizarre, but who are consistent, interact with other characters in plausible ways, feel emotions, grow and change. Characters on The State are primarily vehicle for comedic concepts, such as Louie the Guy Who Repeats His Catch Phrase. This is not meant to bear any relationship with a human being. It is not even a springboard for actual comedy. It is a comment on the very idea of comedy, specifically the threadbare device of running characters and their tired catch phrases. (I think Ricky Gervais nailed this topic in the second season of Extras, where the cardboard character and his hackneyed catchphrase became an albatross for Gervais.)

In point of fact, The State's best film work is the sketch comedy The Ten, riffing on the Ten Commandments. It almost seems like a Python premise. Of the ten sketches, three or four of them are gut-bustingly funny. But The Ten is not a real movie, any more than And Now For Something Completely Different is.

Wet Hot American Summer tries to have it both ways, or even three ways. It is primarily a parody of low-budget 1980s slob comedies (specifically camp comedies such as Meatballs), an object of nostalgia for people who graduated college in the late 80s and early 90s, like The State. So there are a number of gross-out jokes, some simple mistaken identity gags, sex frustration and crazy weird character gags, like the insane chef portrayed by Chris Meloni.

Sec0nd, like the films being parodied, WHAS would also like to establish characters with whom you sympathize and about whose ultimate fate you are supposed to care (I don't). Hence, there is a lukewarm romance between Janeane Garafolo and David Hyde Pierce, sex comedyu threads for Ken Marino and Michael Showalter, a weird romantic thread for Paul Rudd and Elizabeth Banks, and one for Amy Poehler and Bradley Cooper, which somehow culminates in a wedding between Bradley Cooper and Michael Ian Black, evidently the only stable and well-balanced romantic pairing in the movie.

Third, the film wants the freedom to make non sequitur sketch-type gags, regardless of what they do to the continuity or plausibility of the film. Hence the most famous sequence of the film, in which the counselors go to town for an hour to relax and get away, start mugging the citizens for drug money, wind up in a crack den and return happily to camp, none the worse for their hour of getting away from those pesky kids. Or Paul Rudd can make out while letting campers drown without apparent consequences. Or Janeane Garafolo can go ballistic when a camper is in trouble, begin screaming for a phone and proceed to trash the camp nurse's office, losing all sight of the object of the panic--finding a phone--and just knock everything to the floor and scream, ignoring the phone that is there. And in the final talent show sequence, one character can cause Skylab to land harmlessly in the middle of the camp with his mind--again, regardless of the facts about Skylab.

The fact is that the crazy stuff is the most fun and provokes the most outright laughter, but it also makes it impossible to accept WHAS as an actual movie. I trace this whole line of films back to Blazing Saddles, which was the first full-length burlesque I can remember, and which quickly abandoned all claims to plausibility, identification or narrative flow. The trap is that once you discard those elements of filmmaking, then your jokes must be awesome and constant. In Airplane, the flow of jokes is steady, but the quality tails off drastically. Blazing Saddles can't even find an ending, repeatedly deconstructing itself into boredom. Mel Brooks himself realized that this format was a dead end, and returned to sympathetic characters and a real story arc with the next film, Young Frankenstein (conceived by Gene Wilder).

Members of The State seems to have realized it and dialed it back in subsequent years, writing screenplays for the Night at the Museum series, a couple of the Herbie movies, Role Models, the tedious Reno 911 series and movie, Balls of Fury and the best feature work attributable to this group, Michael Ian Black's first-rate screenplay for Run, Fatboy, Run. But none of these aspire to the groundbreaking type of humor that The State once stood for.

So the question comes down to--how funny do you want to be? 'Cause for maximum laughs, you may have to blow up your own movie.