The scarecrow's resemblance to the Reaper is no accident.
Slow West (2015) is a stunningly sensitive bad-ass nuanced balls-out Western that looks like a John Ford picture, if Utah were in Colorado and Colorado was in New Zealand. Over the last decade, Westerns have been forced into the false choice between repetition of standard tropes for an undemanding audience (usually of cable TV subscribers) and European-style deconstructionist elegies both for an historical moment that may never have really existed and for an era of filmmaking when art could comfortably hide behind genre formulas, undetected by the mainstream press, and happily taking care of itself without anyone getting wise.
It seems only Quentin Tarantino can make a Western for the theatrical market without being accused of Art, which is ironic, given that Tarantino's Django is one of his usual post-modern collages of other people's work, decipherable only in a world of manufactured objects and without reference to real people, real history or the real world at all. If that's not arty, I don't know what is.
Slow West may be a Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner (how many Westerns have ever come out of Sundance?), but it has a story simple enough for a Randolph Scott-Budd Boetticher film, a similar running time and Michael Fassbender in a part Scott would have been comfortable man, the bad man who has decided to do something good for a change and a little bit of money (which of course turns out not to matter). A Scottish boy pays an ex-bounty hunter to guide him West to claim his love, whose father has taken her with him a-pioneering. That's it -- just a lot of hard country to pass through, and, as you will expect if you know Westerns, a destination far different than the one anticipated.
I think this clip demonstrates the tantalizing balance between heavy consequences and light reaction that guides the film.
Sure, Jay almost died a gruesome death and got an arrow through his hand, but Silas's reaction is "Nice catch." And the slapstick payoff would have made Buster Keaton proud.
Certainly an American fan is going to miss familiar markers -- Bronson Canyon locations, oft-used character actors, dialogue tropes (I don't think one person says the word "reckon" in this film), but otherwise it is absolutely completely satisfying as a piece of Western entertainment, fusing the Ford-Hawks vision of the individual in the landscape with the long, slow buildup to terrible violence of a Leone film. The two styles live very well side-by-side, with a surprising and terrible conclusion, that is satisfying, right and largely unanticipated. The final encounter between Jay and his beloved, (Caren Pistorius) results in two acts of brutality that are beautifully and poetically balanced.
And, as evidenced by the clip, the film has a wonderfully black sense of humor -- the finale (which seems to have been directed by a morbid Harold Lloyd) gives new life to the phrase "rubbing salt into the wound."
Not many films today give such balance to word, picture, character and story as does writer John McLean here; although he does seem to favor picture. I commend to you a stunning sequence with a farmhouse under siege, the villains hiding in the tall grass you see at the picture at the top of this post. Given that the occupants in the house have barely any ability to fight back, it probably is not necessary that each gunman pop up, fire a shot and then disappear like a lethal brand of Whack-A-Mole. But it makes for a lethal yet funny sequence, the illogic of which one forgives for the sake of the visual poetry.
And, oh yeah, there's three Congolese guys singing in French in the middle of the prairie. For no good reason. Gotta love that.
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.
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?
Forget five years -- 124 minutes! There's a reason that romantic comedies, which The Five-Year Engagement (2012) is not, uniformly last 90 to 100 minutes. The ground has been covered, no matter what it is, and once the audience has sussed out your new twist or gimmick, it's your obligation to get off the stage as quickly and entertainingly possible.
But, as previously asserted, TFYE is not a romantic comedy. At times it is only a comedy the way Uncle Vanya is a comedy, which is one reason I regret it was directed by the crass Nicholas Stoller, whose last credit, Get Him To The Greek , was dedicated to the proposition that there is nothing funnier than Jonah Hill's butt crack. Moreover, Mr. Stoller and Mr. Segal seemed to be so busy acting and directing that they did not notice the fairly easy cut they could have made which would have lopped off 20-25 minutes to this film and substantially improved it.
(The cut I mean is to go from Jason Segal's character learning that his fiancee has kissed her boss straight to Segal returning to San Francisco. That would have omitted the disgusting attempted adultery-with-condiments scene and the disgusting frostbitten toe. The Apatow crowd seems to be stuck in the pubescent phase of confusing bodily fluids and food plus a fascination with bodily mutilation.)
On the other hand, Segal and Stoller have to be applauded for trying to make something different and better, even if they didn't succeed. The idea is that relationships are hard and don't match ideals, that we fail and fall short and we still love each other. Not new, but needs to be repeated for each generation.
Because TFYE is really, at heart, an example of what art historian Stanley Cavell termed the "comedy of remarriage" of which Noel Coward's Private Lives is the modern progenitor. (Cavell finds its roots in Shakespearean comedy.) In TFYE, the break-up and reunion happen in the context of an engagement, rather than requiring divorce and remarriage, but that is merely a function of changing social customs and movie censorship. The principal is the same. Unblemished happiness cannot survive, will not survive. The characters must be tempered, must be chastened, punished perhaps (maybe that's why the frostbite) so that they may learn. It might even be considered a comedy of lessons.
What makes TFYE disconcerting is that whereas Coward masks his character's pain in badinage with only the briefest of lapses revealing the truth, the characters in Segal & Stoller's script talk the way real couples having real trouble really talk. Which is fine, except for the sort of style problems raised when such material is in juxtaposition with the Apatow brand of not just fall-on-your-prat humor, but fall-on-your-prat-in-poo-three-times-over humor.
That said, I laughed not infrequently and there is one Hall of Fame scene between Emily Blunt and Alison Brie. They are arguing about the long engagement and marriage in front of a young child, and have therefore adopted (rather poor) imitations of Elmo and Cookie Monster, respectively to conduct the argument, which concludes, "'C' is for condom!"
One other odd element -- the cinematography of Javier Aguirresarobe, who not only has never shot a comedy before, but is responsible for some very dark horror films and thrillers (The Road, The Others, some of the Twilight films). TFYE looked very dark, with many rollicking comedy scenes in half-shadow and the comic violence invoked real terror and pain. Now the fact is, I saw the film in my neighborhood theater, which is a little old and shabby, and it just may have been that the projector bulb was dim and that the film is very bright and cuddly and cheerful. But honestly, when a comedy film's characters get depressed, should you be just as depressed as well? I sure was.
Ten years ago, Steve Carell was an adroit actor/comedian emerging on The Daily Show, albeit without such a set persona as Rob Corddry or Steven Colbert. Then, with the double-whammy of The Office and 40-Year-Old-Virgin, Carell's name became a household word. But Carell still had the power to decide what that household word would mean.
Many, probably most, comedians become brands. Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Bob Newhart -- we know what we are in for when we walk in. (Peter Sellers is perhaps the only brand known for its unpredictability; however, we should note that his superstardom is owed to the rather narrow character of Inspector Clouseau.] But recent performers have straddled the divide between brand and ac. Perhaps Bill Murray was the first; certainly Will Ferrell is working both sides of the street, especially since it appears that his brand (the overgrown adolescent) may not be sustainable as he ages. (This is what happened to Jerry Lewis.) Jim Carrey is attempting to negotiate the transition, but it has been rough for him.
Carell's brand, which is what he relied on in that bit of commercial fluff, Date Night, is a quiet, decent everyman who wanders across a range from narcissism to self-deprecation, but hovers over the reasonable center. If he's going to do something crazy, it's because he has been pushed to it, whereas a Jim Carrey-branded character starts at stark raving bonkers and amps it up from there. Crazy, Stupid, Love. cements that trend and rests a lot of its ambition on the skill and warmth of Carell's acting, as seen here, partnered with the impeccable Julianne Moore.
This is worlds away from the disconnected and perhaps insane weatherman Carell played in Anchorman, one of the films that helped build his reputation. But more surprising, having made the step up to feature film leading man, is that the crazy, spontaneous improv comic is still lurking around, albeit literally disguised.
Ordinarily when animators hire famous actors to voice characters, they are trading on the recognizability of the voice being engaged. (Before the modern era, voice experts rendered their own versions of voice types. Paul Frees or Daws Butler had their own version of Ed Wynn, Charles Butterworth, Lou Costello or even Phil Silvers. June Foray has a devastating Marjorie Main. Sometime in the 1980s, it became evident that real movie stars, many of whom grew up on animation, were willing to become, nay enthusiastic to serve as animation voice talent. Imitators were no longer necessary, except for dead personalities, e.g. Maurice LaMarche's great gloss on Orson Welles.) So when Despicable Me (2010) was announced to star Steve Carell, it was not to be expected what a transformative performance he would give.
One good sign -- the character designs bore no resemblance to the actors providing their voices, clearly signaling the animators' disinclination to trade on the actors' celebrity personas, including those of Russell Brand, Jason Segal, and most especially Julia Andrews, none of whom are cast in ways they would be in a live-action film.
It is rather heartening to hear Mr. Carell hold onto his inner Peter Sellers. There are comics around who still trade on their versatility -- Hank Azaria and Christopher Guest come to mind. But such performers are rarely stars. So here's hoping that while Steve Carell solidifies his brand, he hangs on to the versatility and range which were so important on the way up.
James Emerson has written this lovely tribute to and analysis of Buster Keaton's first true feature, Our Hospitality (1923). I really can't say any of it better than Mr. Emerson did, so I urge you to click this link. Reading his piece is going to make you really want to see the film (again, if applicable). Luckily, you can do that right here:*
* It's 73 minutes, so while it is completely safe for work, I wouldn't recommend you watch it there unless your employer has very lax standards. Or your job is to watch great films.
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 Wakeis 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. __________ * The film is available on both Hulu and Netflix streaming, so you can easily test my assertions against your own assessment.
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.
Like most film buffs, I get asked about my favorite film, but that's an embarrassing question, because many of my really and truly favorite films are not really good films at all, but comprise those occasions when somebody pointed a camera at a great comedian. Or even two or three great comedians.
I love film comedy teams, and I worship Laurel & Hardy, the greatest of them all. But I am also rather indiscriminate when it comes to comedy. Laughter can neither be counterfeited (well) nor (truly) suppressed. It is a natural act that reveals the true mind of the actor, and therefore out of the control of either snobbery or good taste and I can savor Oscar Wilde and Benny Hill with equal gusto.
Accordingly, thanks to the ministrations of Turner Classic Movies and Warner Archives, I am able to enjoy the antics of the antique comedy of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, who pranced madly for RKO from 1929 to 1938, when Woolsey died. And they are a proper subject for discussion in film, because they were, Laurel and Hardy, almost entirely a film-only team.
Teamwork is not easy and takes years to develop. Most film comedy teams have live performance origins, in vaudeville, burlesque or legitimate. The Marx Brothers, Three Stooges and the Ritz Brothers were family-based acts and the Marxes began together in childhood. Clark & McCullough ran away to the circus together as boys and Abbott & Costello put in a decade in burlesque breaking out on radio, while Martin & Lewis and Rowan & Martin were the product of nightclubs.
The teams that reach us deeply do so not because of jokes, but, I believe, from the way they reflect or ridicule important relationships. Laurel and Hardy were brothers united against the world, Abbott and Costello were brothers who are rivals, with the older brother (Bud) taking advantage of the younger; Martin and Lewis were similar, but Dean did not exploit Jerry and even tried to help him. The Stooges are a dysfunctional family, with Moe the impossible-to-please father. Burns and Allen were an actual married couple. This may sound odd, but Paul McCullough seems like a doting and enabling mother to the obnoxious Bobby Clark, and the Ritz Brothers are those three loud boys who live next door and break up the party.
Two exceptions remain. The Marx Brothers, who were actual brothers, function as three parallel comedy acts with only the flimsiest relationship, which is what makes it so endearing when Groucho decides to chuck being a respectable physician, college president or even president of a country in order to hang out with two insane hobos, Chico and Harpo. Groucho, when appearing with his brothers, represents a deep wish fulfillment for all us decent middle-class people--the wish to tell all the people in charge to go to hell and hang out with the friends our parents told us to stay away from.
Wheeler & Woolsey are the only major film comedy team to follow in the Marx mode and operate as parallel comics, although W&W do have more verbal byplay together, especially in the last third of their films. It makes sense, because W&W might be described as an artificial team. They were two journeyman comics who had been paired up by no less than Florenz Ziegfeld for a big musical called Rio Rita. When Joseph Kennedy and David Sarnoff of RCA had engineered the complex series of acquisitions and mergers that resulted in RKO Radio Pictures in 1928, a company dedicated to making only synch sound films, they wanted the first production to be big and hard to miss. They decided on Ziegfeld's show, and Rio Rita (1929) was a big picture the year of its release, starring longtime silent star Bebe Daniels (she had been Harold Lloyd's leading lady a decade earlier). While RKO jettisoned much of the plot, songs and cast, they did bring Wheeler & Woolsey out to repeat their roles, especially the celebrated slapping routine, seen at the end of this two-color clip:
Most people are a little startled at the final kiss. Wheeler & Woolsey's reputation has improved in recent years because of their bawdy streak, which was still on display until 1934, when the Production Code began to be enforced. Before then the double entendres and innuendos were on full display and that incorporated a lot of drag and sissy humor. I wouldn't go as far as some commentators have, to claim for them a gay sensibility, but there is an uninhibited attitude toward sex that makes them, for all their corny puns and stale wordplay, just a bit contemporary.
The racy humor also contrives to give them a team identity, since they didn't develop as performers together and don't have the close simpatico exhibited by other teams. Instead, after the success of the film version of Rio Rita, they were, somewhat to their surprise, cast together in another comedy and then another. Only after a few films do they formalize their status as a comedy and form a legal partnership. No endless years on the road together for them, our routines reaching back into their distant past together. Instead, Bob and Bert relate to each other with the camaraderie of fellow professionals, who appreciate and enjoy each others' skills and the traditions they come from. Woolsey is a road-company Groucho, leering and puffing on his cigar and delivering straight-up jokes with set-ups and punchlines. Wheeler is a caricature of a Broadway juvenile, with a high piping-voice and an air of mock innocence. Wheeler also boasts a good singing voice and first rate skills as a hoofer, so part of the W&W tradition would be Wheeler's flirtation with a sweet young thing, played more often than not by a girl named Dorothy Lee (who appeared in almost no other films), which led into a song and dance routine.
Here's a more-or-less typical Bert-and-Dorothy routine from Peach O Reno (1931) a very saucy comedy in which W&W run a divorce-mill law firm which becomes a casino every night.
Wheeler & Woolsey were so important to RKO in those early years, keeping them afloat financially, that they four films in 1930 and four in 1931. RKO even tried splitting the golden goose, giving each of them a solo film in 1931, but they made no impact, and the team was reunited. So perhaps, to the public, they were appreciated as a team. Like the Marx Brothers, the existence of the team relieves monotony, as each comic could engender his own mayhem. And this sort of alternation made a "straight plot" with young lovers who need to be reunited or otherwise overcome some sort of obstacle was completely unnecessary and eschewed, another factor which makes the W&W films feel less dated than they might have been.
RKO looked back at the blockbusting success of Rio Rita and attempted to lure lightning again with an adaptation of the Gershwin show Girl Crazy (1932). Again most of the plot, characters and score were tossed aside, with only "Biding My Time", "I Got Rhythm" and "But Not For Me" surviving the transition, and only the middle tune given its full weight. ("But Not For Me" is bizarrely staged as a lover's quarrel, although the lyrics are that of a torch song.) To the credit of the new songwriters, the new song for Bert and Dorothy, "You've Got What Gets Me" is a catchy little ditty that holds its own in this fast company.
This composite clip (which unavoidably begins with a commercial -- sorry) includes a bit of the opening credits, Bob & Bert's meeting scene, the strange staging of "I Got Rhythm," the aforementioned "But Not For Me" and the appalling impressions of long-forgotten celebrities by a strange child named Mitzi Green, later famous in theater history for playing a former child performer in the musical Babes In Arms.
The end of Ms. Green's career as an impressionist was not hard to predict. (Incidentally, she turned up in 1952 in an Abbott & Costello film called Lost In Alaska, in which she is a rather snappy chantoozie, and almost the only entertaining thing in the film. So even child performers can change.) As this clip reflects, W&W almost became guest stars in the seven-layer cake that comprised the 75 minutes of Girl Crazy.
These are the only three of their 18 films which are officially released. Dixiana, another super-production follow-up to Rio Rita, Half Shot at Sunrise and Hook, Line & Sinker have gone into the public domain and are widely available. In fact, you can watch them now in their entirety by clicking on the links in the previous sentence. None of these six films are considered their peak works, which include So This Is Africa, Cockeyed Cavaliers, Hips Hips Hooray and Kentucky Kernels (co-starring Spanky MacFarland). I hope to have the opportunity to write about those when they receive legitimate releases.
Until then, let's leave them gamboling about the green, which is what Wheeler & Woolsey do best, in this somewhat lunatic musical number from Half Shot at Sunrise, with the ever-game, ever-plucky Dorothy Lee:
Bob and Ray, the endlessly prolific radio comedians had a short run of sketches called "Brush with Greatness" with sketches like a cabdriver in whose cab Heywood Hale Broun had once left a half-finished crossword. (If you don't know who Heywood Hale Broun was, the joke may be even funnier.) There is a small sub-genre of comedy about contact between celebrities and non-celebrities. The celebrity is often fictionalized, as in The Man Who Came To Dinner,Funny People and Notting Hill, but played by an actor who closely resembles the genuine article.
This is the template for Get Him To The Greek (2010), a sloppily assembled Xerox of My Favorite Year which is meant to combine low comedy, sentiment and character development, in the pattern of the Judd Apatow comedy factory. But Aldous Snow, the Russell Brand cannot be turned into a character we care about because rather than fashioning a life story and circumstances that might have shaped a real person, the filmmakers have attempted build a person entirely out of jokes. We are supposed to believe in his real affection, attachment and need for his girlfriend, but she is an incoherent imbecile engaged in casual unfaithfulnesses making it impossible to believe anyone would care for them. (The girlfriend is played with a surprising comic flair by Rose Byrne, best known for the melodramatic Damages.)
I suppose I find it hard to care for any character played by Jonah Hill, because he is played by Jonah Hill, a squat repulsive pustule apparently made of the residue left once Seth Rogen lost weight and started washing regularly. The idea that he would have Elisabeth Moss as a girlfriend borders on science fiction, but it least it moves toward developing sympathy for him. When at the end of the film, she accedes to an absurd suggestion by Russell Brand in order to get revenge on the unfaithful Jonah Hill, it is clear the filmmakers not only can't write and create real human beings, they may not actually know any.
Some of the things I was supposed to laugh at was sex on a toilet, vomit and inserting drugs in one's anus in the middle of an airport. Here's what I did laugh at - the appearance of the actor who plays Draco Malfoy looking just as annoyed at Jonah Hill as I felt, and the appearance of Paul Krugman in a Today Show segment (and what a gang of whores NBC has become since it has been owned by Universal). The latter encounter consists of vomit-stained Jonah Hill landing on a sofa and looking surprised to see Nobel laureate Paul Krugman sitting opposite him. "You're Paul Krugman," says Hill just as we were coming to the same realization. "Yes," says Paul Krugman, doubtless wondering what he was doing in this tribute to bodily functions. I don't know why, but that was comedy gold. Far more rewarding, perhaps because the author did not have to invent his main character is the woefully under-distributed Me and Orson Welles (2009). It does help that Richard Linklater, director of Dazed and Confused, Before Sunset, Waking Life and School of Rock, is a talented filmmaker, which Nicholas Stoller is not. Add to that the circumstances that the celebrity in question is real and the story is a more compelling coming-of-age story based on a young adult novel, and the results are bound to be better.
Welles is theater history nearly as much as he is film history, staging several seasons of classical repertoire, including a Voodoo Macbeth, a contemporary Julius Caesar, the original production of Richard Wright's Native Son and a failed Shakespeare epic Five Kings, comprised of the Richard (II, III) and Henry (IV, V & VI) plays.
The story takes a familiar pattern of a young man seeking to find his own place in the world while coming within the orbit of a very strong mentor and, as it turns out, frenemy. Zach Efron need only be reasonably intelligent and personable, and he does that just fine, and be attracted to Clare Danes, which seems pretty easy. But the sine qua non of a film like this is the actor playing Orson Welles, a role assayed in the past by (among others) Vincent D'Onofrio (Ed Wood), Angus McFayden (Cradle Will Rock), Liev Schreiber (RKO 281) and Orson Welles (The Man Who Came To Dinner, television 1972). British actor Christian McKay tops them all (including Welles). McKay vaguely resembles Welles physically, but he has the voice to the tee, as well as the brio, the arrogance, the smugness and the childish petulance of the young Welles.
Of course, Welles could get away with all this because he was brilliant, especially when he was under pressure. Realizing that, he seemed to spend his career contriving high-pressure circumstances for himself, even when otherwise unnecessary. In the film we see Welles's sharp, bold staging and playing of Julius Caesar, and a very pleasant bonus on the DVD is the inclusion of about 12 minutes of the play, most of which was unused in the final film, but is of historical curiosity and could be useful to people like me who frequently have to teach the play in school. The play also takes the trouble to identify and evoke many of Welles' collaborators, including the waspish John Houseman, the tightly wound George Couloris (the old banker in Citizen Kane), the easygoing Joseph Cotten and the ambitious Norman Lloyd (although in this case the physical casting is right, the actor conveys none of the sharp nasal projection of Lloyd, who had a long film career, most memorably as the headmaster in Dead Poets Society.) Most memorably Welles takes the brief throwaway scene of the mob engulfing Cinna the Poet and instead of cutting it, as most directors do and Welles thought of doing, building it up through staging and using contemporary stage and acting technique build it into one of the centerpieces of the play. (There's a very good textual argument for doing so, but there's not time or room to go into that now. Let us simply note that the tyranny and the fickleness of the mob is one of Shakespeare's major themes.)
The design of the film is spot-on, especially for a film which did almost no shooting in New York. Perhaps most impressive is the fakery that creates Bryant Park where there was none. I must confess I haven't a lot to say about Richard Linklater. He is a filmmaker with superb technique who does not impose a set style on his material, but as appropriate for such an eclectic artist, lets the content dictate the style. If there is something that unifies his work, it is the progress toward maturity, understanding and responsibility for one's own actions. This is well handled here by the independent character played by Zac Efron, who is temporarily seduced both by Welles and the Clare Danes character, but has enough sense of himself to avoid devastation when all the rugs are pulled out from him. Instead, he's grateful for the knowledge gained and ready to move on. And his penchant for long takes and camera movement not only serve story and setting (the theater, the ultimate long take), but of course complement Welles's own theater-based style. The film may not be great or moving or startling, but it is terrifically satisfying, and that's a rare quality these days.
And apropos of Welles's theater career, here is the only film we have of the Mercury's work in the theater, a 4-minute newsreel report on the 1936 Macbeth originally presented by the Negro Division of the Federal Theater Project at the Lafayette Theater at 131st Street and 7th Avenue:
Make sure no one in your family overdoes it with the liquid refreshment, or you'll have problems like Buster has here with his new bride:
This is from his last silent feature, the underrated Spite Marriage(1929). (Ignore the stupid canned laughter - it stops fairly quickly, and this is the one internet copy of this scene I could find that doesn't clip off the final gag.)
To revisit my undergraduate thesis for just a moment, one might characterize Stuart Gordon's deliciously nasty little film Stuck (2007) as a lehrstück. This was a species of play designed originally by poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht for the edification and moral instruction of young people. Gordon, best known for the Re-Animator is quite a stern moralist himself, and he gets to dictate moral justice in a way that is more satisfying than the real-life facts the film is based on.
For those of you joining our story already in progress, the film was inspired by an incident in 2001 when a former nurse's aide struck a homeless man and, rather than risk punishment for driving while intoxicated on drugs and alcohol, left the man on the hood of her car to expire after she parked the car in her garage. (At least one other feature and episodes of two different TV series were woven around these facts.) The actual perpetrator successfully concealed the evidence and the crime and was only caught because she began to brag, whereupon she was tried and sentenced to a long term in prison. This was not sufficient for Gordon, who concocted a more dramatic sequence of events, putting the battle between good and evil front and center.
But maybe the most fun of the film is the way it compacts most of its significant events into the small shed-like garage in which the car is parked. That description makes the film sound limited and monotonous, but Gordon works a variety of characters and situations into that tight frame, including a good-hearted family of illegal immigrants who cannot risk exposure and a series of decisions by the character played by co-producer Mena Suvari and her lowlife boyfriend.
As is often the case with Gordon, he removes the events from the context of decent society, leaving the characters to be judged in a landscape of purely self-interested lunacy; the result is a streak of jet-black humor provided by the viewer. That is, the humor is not within the film, but takes place in the space between the film and the audience (assuming the audience is not composed of sociopaths, who might find the film to be a documentary).
And most amazing of all, the distinguished Irish actor Stephen Lea creates a witty and complex performance with a character who is nearly comatose for most of the running time. Most interestingly, he rejects vengeance when it is available to him, yet achieves it anyway. The denouement has a kind of wonderful perfection, violent, wicked, gory, cruel, just and logically derived from what has gone before.
With just a week before Halloween, this is one of the best monster films you may not have seen. And the monster is a cute little blond who is kind to old people.
P.S., speaking of Halloween and monsters, see Cloverfield if you haven't yet.
It's a good thing for Pixar that A Town Called Panic opened in 2009, because while Toy Story 3 is a very good movie, Panic is an explosion of lunatic creativity like I haven't seen in a long time. If any movie deserved the appellation "LOL," Panic does.
This is not just a smart movie based on a TV show with limited animation, like Rocky and Bullwinkle. The limitations of the animation, using the sort of figurines that children play with (based on real figurines bought at flea markets and garage sales) is an inherent part of the style. Smoother, more "realistic" animation would spoil the jokes.*
Once you've absorbed the silliness of the animation, the next thing that hits you is the speed and density of the events and the gags, and the way they link to each other with a child-like explosion of imaginative leaps. Some commentators say the story follows its own logic or carry ideas out to their logical conclusion. But that is an inadequate explanation of how the heroes fall through a trap door to the center of the earth (where they answer their cell phones), find a door that connects directly to an Arctic tundra where they encounter a giant robot penguin flinging giant snowballs to other parts of the earth. Later, we discover that the creatures stealing the walls belonging to Cowboy, Indian and Horse look like the Creature from the Black Lagoon and live far, far below the pond in the neighboring farm. This is nothing like any kind of logic--it just follows, the way a child makes up a story as he plays.
The whole film feels like a long session with a hyper-creative child. There is very little snarky adult satire in the film--only the double vision of a child's adaptation of the world to their own understanding and the adult's unfortunate knowledge of how things really are. Why shouldn't they make pianos that horses could play (not to mention toothpaste dispensers)? Why can't a little police booth expand into a local jail (like an earth-bound Tardis)? Why can't an angry farmer attack you with parachuting cows? (see the clip.)
Happily, Zeitgeist Films has chosen not to produce an English track, because the over-excited voices are an integral part of the whole thing. (Indian is constantly hysterical, Horse sounds like an American comic doing Charles Boyer, neighbor Steven is apoplectic non-stop.) And they add to the sense of speed, which makes The Simpsons seem stately and majestic by comparison. That contributes the child-like nature of the film, since healthy children at play think, talk and act at the speed of light. It's amazing to learn the script took years to develop and refine--the film seems like a mad improvisation, like a playtime locomotive bearing down on you at top speed.
And one of the best things about this film is it dispels the notion that only 3D CGI characters are compelling enough to entertain nowadays. Now I just got to find a crazy kid to watch this literally hysterical film with. _____________________ * Panic originated as a Belgian TV series. Belgium is France's answer to Canada; a neighboring country which doesn't take itself as seriously and has an extra language (or two) to contend with.
It only took 40 years, but finally there is a truly great parody of James Bond, and surprisingly it's from the French, many of whom think Jerry Lewis is funny. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies (2006) is an amalgam of wit, buffoonery, satire, slapstick, social comment and silliness that would probably be impossible for an American filmmaker outside of perhaps Christopher Guest.
Whereas Austin Powers reverts to poo-poo jokes, Clouseau to pratfalls by stuntmen, Maxwell Smart to Yiddish verbal schtick, the Naked Gun to meta- joking, this parody of what was originally a serious spy series predating James Bond is willing to take on colonialism, racism, sexism and general white male narcissism in a way that is genuinely funny. The clip shown above is a fairly good example, and demonstrates the subtlety of Jean Dujardin's playing. It helps that the overall silhouette resembles that of the Neanderthal Sean Connery version of Bond. (The tilt of Dujardin's eyebrow as he says "Don't feel like it...It was the cow joke" in the clip above cracks me up each time.)
This is an idiot who thinks Islam has to be stupid to ban alcohol, who beats up a muezzin who wakes him up in the morning and likes to flick the lights off and on in the henhouse just to hear them start and stop cackling. More than that, one has to appreciate the precision of the parody--the sets, costumes, lighting, style of camera movement and editing all hark back precisely to the early 1960's, without self-reference or vaudeville self-mockery. Even the opening titles sequence can elicit a chuckle of recognition from anyone familiar with light thrillers of the era (not only the Bonds, but Charade and that ilk).
Most laugh-out-loud comedies have a streak of stupid. But for OSS 117: Cairo, the stupid belongs to the character and the society from which he has emerged, not to the film itself, which is very smart indeed. Put this one in your queue now.
Hollywood Cavalcade (1939) starts out so well-intentioned, it is easy to forgive a lot of its conflations, misstatements and mythologizing. You gotta like a film that doesn't just concoct a story about the invention of throwing pies in slapstick comedies, but actually delves into the question as to what are the best types of pies to throw.
1939 marks the beginning of self-consciousness for Hollywood. The talkies had been in place for 10 or 11 years and it was becoming apparent that the pioneers of the first decades of film were at or near retirement age, and that it was time to memorialize film history. Hollywood, like John Ford, has always believed "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So a story was concocted for Don Ameche to play a pioneering filmmaker who begins as Mack Sennett and transmogrifies Cecil B. DeMille, two figures who, together embrace much of American silent film history. (Alice Faye is the heroine, but given that they took away her one and only song for the movie, she hardly makes a mark in the film, except as a darn good sport with all those pies and all that mud.)
It is of course, marvelous, for a slapstick buff to see not only Buster (still relatively young and fit) but Chester Conklin, Hank Mann, Snub Pollard and Ben Turpin in Glorious Technicolor. For that one is willing to accept some gross, but probably not important, inaccuracies. It bunches all of these fellows (including) Buster into a proto-Keystone Kops group. (Few of them were in the Kops, and Buster never worked for Sennett and never threw pies at all in his movies.) Buster does re-create the motorcycle stunt from Sherlock, Jr. with the very game Alice Faye. There's even a brief doff of the hat to Fatty Arbuckle, as a rotund actor is seen from behind walking through the lot and is greeted by a stagehand, "Hi, Roscoe."
Later, the Don Ameche character starts to get into biblical epics and the romantic complications with Alice Faye take center stage, and those have the same effect on me now as they did when I was 10 or 11--get rid of the mushy stuff and back to the slapstick!
Oddly, though few of the "facts" about film history in this film are correct, the spirit is right, not to mention, recreation of silent film stages and production procedures. Unfortunately, some of the clips were used over the years as authentic examples of silent film, but Hollywood Cavalcade can't be blamed for that. The participation of so many who were there makes it a valuable historic resource for the look and feel the silent era. The Buster Keaton Story, produced 19 years later, should only have had that level of authenticity.
There's nothing wrong with film that couldn't be cured with more Buster Keaton. (Wouldn't you love to see Buster's version of Inception?)
The entertainment industry trade papers routinely refer to the films and television programs with which we, thelumpenproletariat fill our empty hours as "product." This is not meant to be derogatory. Most of the entertainment business is engaged in distribution and in order to distribute, you have to have something to distribute. That is "product."
If you view Valentine's Day (2010) as "product" rather than aesthetic expression, it is far less offensive. Everyone in a committed relationship has to do SOMETHING on February 14, and the benevolent masters of New Line Cinema have engineered a product to meet that need. And given the obligatory nature of the entire exercise, it's not all that egregious.
Yes, it's slick, yes the stories are superficial, yes there are no movie stars, except Julia Roberts, who, in an extremely underwritten part is called upon to do what only a Movie Star can do. But it keeps moving along at a brisk pace (not brisk enough for my wife and I to guess at least two of the story "twists.") Nonetheless, the film does not slavishly adhere to either romcom or sitcom conventions: not every person is happily paired up, and not every single person is miserable. The cast is engaging and hard-working, and it was nice to see director Garry Marshall's good-luck charm, Hector Elizondo in a significant role. One good aspect of the engineering is that while some of the subplots were extremely simplistic, they informed--at times literally--the principal plot strands. And I am going to out on a limb and say that I think Eric Dane is underrated and I would like to see him given some heavy lifting, acting-wise. I think he's up to it.
The only thing that spoiled our experience of the film Valentine's Day was my wife's rash decision to look at that film's template, Love Actually a few days later. The quirkiness and originality of both the stories conclusion and the cast, the greater interpendence of the stories and the stronger sense of the stories moving together to a cohesive conclusion about love in general, not just romantic love (highlighted by the brilliant documentary footage shot in an airline terminal of family and loved ones exchanging heartfelt kisses) threw Valentine's Day deep into the shadow (or better yet, a studio sunlamp) compared to the genuine sunshine of Love, Actually.
But it is still important to recognize Valentine's Day as a good product, especially when seen in stark contrast to poor product, such as All About Steve (2009). It's very possible AAS did not begin as product. It seems as though it has things it wants to say about being an individual, about being unafraid to be oneself, to follow one's passion, to avoid subsuming one's identity in the pursuit of a partner. What resulted is an uneasy merger of romantic comedy and very silly slapstick.
One problem could be that the romantic object is the suddenly popular and utterly uninteresting Bradley Cooper. I must assume that this actor's agent has photos of important film executives in compromising poses with farm animals, for there is no other possible explanation for his consistent employment. He is so bland and generic that I must presume there is UPC code tattooed on the back of his neck.
Give Sandra Bullock credit, both as star and co-producer. I believed she tried to do something different, and has always been unafraid to appear foolish. Moreover, the film deftly avoids the symmetrical yet phony resolution it seems to be heading toward. But it never arrives at the triumphant feeling for its conclusion that it apparently intended.
The Goods (2009), on the other hand is about nothing but product, both on-screen and in the industry. The Will Farrell-Adam McKay franchise has become an assembly line, for which Will Farrell's presence is no longer necessary. The story concerns moving cars off a used car lot that have been sitting there too long and the film itself has an air of having set around too long. There is no sense that this story has to be told now--no sense of innovation or discovery. Everyone is going through the motions. Ultimately, it doesn't even seem to matter if the cars are actually sold, as long as some sort of 90-minute film has been delivered to the distributor. Foolishly, Jeremy Piven is supposed to be a sympathetic character. (This is as welcome as a lovable Kevin Spacey or a cuddly Gary Oldman. Give me a break.)
The Farrell-McKay franchise has never been able to tell the difference between a 10-minute TV sketch premise and a 90-minute film story, and the unevenness of tone and style here crops almost minute to minute. The actors barely seem to have been on speaking terms with each other. Many jokes have nowhere to go and, not surprisingly, pay off, despite the fact that they involve pedophilia, homosexual assault and other bizarre practices. You can make joke about an erection--the inability to get one or to get rid of one. Simply showing a phony "tentpole" does not actually constitute a joke, especially when the pants involved belong to James Brolin. Unlike other used car comedies (including Used Cars--which promised, "Nobody ever died over $50," and Cadillac Man) little of the alleged humor is unique to the selling of cars. They could be moving marital aids as far as the script concerned, since most of the jokes are the kind of sex humor guaranteed to crack up 13-year-olds of all ages.
And what does it mean that the once-revered Vertigo shot, tellingly used in both Jaws and Goodfellas now appears to ineffectually punctuate a comedic con sequence? (I suspect it might be one of the signs of the approaching apocalypse.)
After all, what do you get when you try and sell 211 cars in 3 days? Desperation and exhaustion, which The Goods exhibits in spades.
This is the film blog I began to provide a model for my Film Studies students and encourage them to maintain a blog of their own. I no longer write about every film I see, but I try to take note of the unusual, the remarkable, the strange or interesting connections.
Please comment copiously!Or write to me directly at my e-mail address.
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