Be Kind Rewind (2008)
Making movies is one of our society’s real, tangible magics (assuming magic can be real and tangible and still be magic-that might actually completely contradict the definition of the word). For that, everyone, regardless of their level of devotion to the medium, is incapable of not participating in a movie if given the chance. To be in a movie, whether it’s an MGM musical or a handmade backyard epic; is to draw for a golden straw. Be Kind Rewind (taking off, I assume, from the true story of several children who spent their formative years remaking Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot; it was released in some theatres as Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation) is a tribute to our need for something otherworldly, and undeniably ours, as we face a society that continues to sink deeper into cooperate-sanctioned-group-fuck. Be Kind Rewind is, yes, a tribute to the imagination, a genre that has a habit of being the least imaginative on the block.
The picture was written and directed by Michel Gondry, of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep and many startling music videos. Your reaction to Gondry’s name is a fair indicator of how far you’ll buy into Be Kind Rewind. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a powerful pop-existential-sci-fi head trip, in part because it wedded Gondry’s inventive, playful, sometimes downright ghostly imagery to something that was authentically wounded and real-the picture was screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s working out of his intellectualized-book-movie-television-influenced view of the battle of the sexes. If two people can’t ever, truly, penetrate one other, give themselves over to one another, trust one another, then how are we not doomed to loneliness? The answer, poignantly, was to drop all pretenses and fencing and scoop those messy tingly things up and hug them and go running down the beach screaming full-tilt like a lunatic. Live; as opposed to cowardly rationalizing your pleasure away. This sounds like “seize the day” treacle, and it easily could have been, but Kaufman’s exploration was moving and human, in part, because he doesn’t play the part of lecturer or even the part of the “great artist”; he’s not hovering above it all, he’s right there in the bar with a drink with the rest of us. (It’s a young Woody Allen-sci-fi movie.)
I go on about Kaufman because, without Kaufman, Gondry is a bit of a problem. Watching The Science of Sleep (and portions of Be Kind Rewind) is akin to being trapped in one of Jim Carrey’s more nightmarish childhood episodes in Eternal. Trapped is most certainly the word. Gondry’s visuals can be wizardly, and they’ve been celebrated as so, but can we also admit that the effects also have a habit of being suffocating and ugly: all self-conscious whimsy with little in the way of human current? Gondry is a clever, intelligent man, and he most likely recognizes his shortcomings as a writer-because he builds those handicaps into his stories. Science of Sleep and Be Kind Rewind are supposed to be chaotic and amateurish and insufferable! It’s empathy you see.
I just about hated Science of Sleep, primarily because I couldn’t forgive that one, final, dash of kinda reality (it’s really hypocrisy). The ending is a bit like watching a Skinamax movie that suddenly, just as you’re getting to the reason you’ve suffered through the “exposition”, blacks out and morphs into one those sermons they televise on Sunday mornings. I can tell what some of you are thinking: that Science of Sleep’s ending was “uncompromising”. It’s also a cheat. The picture builds and builds towards a great bursting leap of imagination, a romance amongst the construction papered stars, only to reveal the lead to be even more of a self-absorbed, fanatical prick than we suspected. The ending is effective, but it’s also canned, cruel emotion; and the picture preceding that ending isn’t strong enough to support it.
Be Kind Rewind doesn’t cheat us like that-this one is more amiable and plays fair-it’s a mildly better movie that’s much more enjoyable. The picture has its neat, homemade effects, and it has some very likable actors clowning around and that’s about it. The first act is a chore: the cast talks over one another in an effort to establish a screwball tone that never gels, and instead achieves a mild incoherence. Then Jack Black gets magnetized (in a funny bit) and erases all the videotapes of a small mom-and-pop video store in the process, which sends him and video clerk Mos Def scurrying to replace the tapes before the owner, played by Danny Glover, returns.
Unable to replace the tapes (no one, with the exception of the store’s three or four customers, uses them anymore) Mos Def and Jack Black go about remaking the pictures using whatever they have at their disposal. These moments of recreation (or “sweding”), which include Robocop, Ghostbusters, and Driving Miss Daisy, are dizzy and magical; tapping right in, gracefully; to that sense of giddy-play we felt when we first fell for the movies. Be Kind Rewind, in general, has a sense of folksy-silent-1980s movie camaraderie that’s bullshit (it reminded me a little of Spielberg’s Twilight Zone: The Movie segment) but comforting. Gondry (thankfully) ultimately doesn’t have Spielberg’s 1980s heavy-hand here though; his legitimate enchantment with the in-camera effects and gadgets dries that out. Gondry’s inability to stick with a story bails him out too; he’s too preoccupied to get too bogged down in the mechanics of the clichés he’s reveling in. A Ghostbusters alum turns up late inning to halt the homemade movies (which are becoming profitable) and, sighing, I thought, “Oh no, this thing’s going to court.” It doesn’t, because Gondry doesn’t care anymore about that than you do.
You should probably see the picture once. Beyond the sporadic movie scenes, there is also the charming cast. Jack Black and Mos Def are an able team, and not nearly as sentimental as you may be expecting (racial tension is acknowledged). Def and Black have a sing-song give and take, the cool and collected versus the deranged id, they click-it feels right. Melonie Diaz, as a laundry girl the guys recruit, is spunky and sexy, with an off-kilter looniness that’s unforced-this is the girl you wish for in expensive fascist romances. She has a scene with Def, that I won’t ruin, that suggests the flakey-romance we hoped for in Science of Sleep. Mia Farrow also appears in a few scenes (she looks terrific) and reminds us of The Purple Rose of Cairo, which could have very well been another of Gondry’s influences here. Farrow’s voice has gotten even softer and slyer (or maybe I just miss her) and her largely long absence from the movies (she was scarier in The Omen remake than the movie deserved) is a far more effective reminder of the movies’ increasing calculated plasticity than Gondry’s more overt protests. Danny Glover functions as a similarly stirring found object here, though I didn’t much care for his stacked-deck past musician subplot.
Be Kind Rewind is one of those mixed-frustrating pictures that, perhaps unintentionally (though I’m not sure), inspires a guilt-trip. Everything about the picture’s theme is inarguable (maybe too inarguable) so, as a movie fan, you’re going to feel a little hesitant about not enjoying it more. The 1980s kid-movie nostalgia. The anti-cooperate fill in the blank. The love of creation. We’re all in favor of all of those things. But Gondry appears to be conflicted-and insecure. Gondry trusted his inventions too much in Science of Sleep; he doesn’t trust them enough in Be Kind Rewind. This new picture is shapeless and sloppy, sort of boring, it’s a restless unwieldy thing that has little to do in between the movie-making set pieces, so why not devote the film to those set pieces? They illustrate Gondry’s tribute, his point. The rest is just the filler that Def and Black would immediately scrap upon remaking.
★★½
Married to the Mob (1988)
Jonathan Demme said, if I recall, that the intention of his The Truth About Charlie was to remake Charade in the vein of the French New Wave, which had reached full bloom at around the time of the original Cary Grant/Audrey Hepburn film’s release. That is a fine idea, only sporadically successful at best (though I confess to not remembering the picture too well) but the real problem with Charlie may have been that Demme had already made his French New Wave pictures. Something Wild, a tonally disorienting tight-rope walk of a screwball comedy punctuated with violence that counts, plays like an American approximation of some of the French New Wave’s experiments with genre flexibility. Married to the Mob, while lacking a bit of the classic Something Wild’s pulse, is of the same key, and underappreciated.
There are few things more exhilarating in the movies than a picture impressing us with its creator’s amusement. I don’t mean glib post-modernism. I mean, as with some of Joe Dante’s pictures, a film that projects a sense of a talented, assured movie-maker recognizing the clichés and limitations of certain genres and casting them aside like the shackles they are, and racing for the moon of his id instead. If we had to continue to belabor the French New Wave comparison, Demme would probably be most in line with Truffaut, a director with an encyclopedic knowledge and love of movies who also happens to be a major humanist.
Something Wild is certainly a major film, a nearly peerless working of a good-bad-rowdy-party-boy-wish-fulfillment tone with three classic performances. Married to the Mob isn’t as much of a surprise; the most obvious reason being that Something Wild came first, so we were on to what Demme was up to by this point. Married to the Mob is also broader than Something Wild, riffing, as the title suggests, on the familiar Italian sitcom clichés. The broadness is part of the joke though-part of the picture’s absurdist surreality; and Demme is always aware of what his story could possibly devolve into. The redemptive factor of Married to the Mob is that it is legitimately gonzo kooky, a flakey comedy thriller that, occasionally, suggests the irreverent screwball wit and spirit of a picture that you might watch during the day on Turner Classic Movies with Ralph Bellamy or Don Ameche mated with something more undeniably in tune with the me-me-me-1980s.
Married to the Mob opens brilliantly. Two men, dressed in dowdy Wall Street-ish business apparel, wait for someone at a station as the train rolls in. We are consciously led to believe that this third man is a co-worker, a fellow cog in the traditional day to day tedium that is our working stiff lives. This third man, looking a bit like an upright egg on two legs, catches the train at just the right minute, and the two other men board behind him. The train passes through a tunnel, and one of the men shoots the egg man in the back of the head. In a typical bebop tonal corkscrew, an inappropriately romantic-somber song begins to play on the soundtrack-New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle”.
The two men close the egg man’s eyes, wiping a bit of blood away, allowing him to appear to be just another morning traveler, exhausted with ennui, facing the next day of caged banality. The two men, who we can now confidently call hit-men (one of which is played by Alec Baldwin) wonder how anyone can do that to themselves day in day out, squished like sardines. The idiocy/cowardice of the modern working drone is voiced in nearly every crime movie we’ve seen, but it’s a testament to the scary-sad-funny power of this opening, that, for once, you think the hoods just might be on to something.
Demme never plays with his material this masterfully in Married to the Mob again, but there are many pleasures to be had-the first hour in particular radiates that Demme specialty-a hum of life and eccentric good humor that’s propelled by a self-consciously strange, fantastic, throbbing soundtrack. The “plot”, such as it is, doesn’t really intrude until the too busy, not-as-flip-as-it-thinks-it-is climax. The “plot” is an old standby. The Alec Baldwin character, called “Cucumber” Frank de Marco, returns home to his wife, Angela (Michelle Pfeiffer), who is clearly just as exhausted with her lifestyle as the train passengers in the opening moments. Angela is first glimpsed in a hair salon, getting her beautiful-intimidating red-brunette curls touched up (by the always welcome, familiar to Demme, Charles Napier), as the New Order song concludes. Angela’s a heroine with a traditional to the movies problem: she’s a siren oblivious to her powers, clouded by a feeling of claustrophobia. Her obligatory girlfriends hate her, perhaps because they rightly sense that Angela has checked out long ago (and secretly recognize that Angela is much more beautiful).
Something happens, and Angela finds herself getting what she wished for: freedom for herself and her young son from the mafia. The head of this picture’s mob, Tony “The Tiger” Russo (Dean Stockwell), has sexual designs on Angela, of course, and won’t let Angela stay as gone as she’d like. The FBI, represented, primarily, in this picture, by Mike (Mathew Modine) and Oliver Platt, believe Angela to be sleeping with Tony and follow her-hoping to implicate Tony in a murder. Tony’s wife, played by Mercedes Ruehl in the part that most actively courts cliché, is convinced that Tony and Angela are sleeping together too, and follows along as well.
Married to the Mob isn’t as labored as the above would lead you to believe, few Demme pictures are. The picture revels in incidental, possibly ad-libbed, moments of humanity, danger and high comedy: Tony nearly dying because his henchman forgets his onion rings; Platt and Mike’s exchanging of a high-five; Angela and Mike’s meet cute inside of a cramped elevator, with Mike pinned under Angela’s new street bought chair; Angela’s pleading for a job in a hair salon; Angela and Mike’s making out, after spending the platonic night together, the following morning. Angela and Mike don’t kiss in the boringly photogenic fashion of most movies, its full-bodied, hungry, emotionally needy and naked; and considerably more moving.
The performances are on par with Something Wild. Michelle Pfeiffer, having now committed the Hollywood sin of passing her fifth decade of existence on this planet, is now playing villains in films that I’ve mostly skipped. But Pfeiffer, in the 1980s and early 1990s, was one of our very strongest, most beautiful, most vulnerable, most interesting movie stars. Pfeiffer has a gift: otherworldly looks that can still somehow exude a feeling of Earthbound need: she sells you the familiar to the movies pabulum of her needing to be saved by a man without you feeling too guilty about it in the morning. It has something to do with Pfeiffer’s eyes; they’re stunning, but also just a bit bigger than they should be, a little not quite right. It’s fitting that Pfeiffer has worked with Tim Burton in probably the best female performance to grace his oeuvre; as her eyes conjure an image of a crazy Burtonian little girl frying ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass. This wonderful, stylized, broad, movie-powered presence is ideal for a part such as Angela, which is a pure confection of genre anyway. Pfeiffer is a lead actress you feel you could actually successfully buy a drink, and that, in and of itself, would nearly be enough.
Mathew Modine appears to be on a different planet here, and that’s to the picture’s benefit. Modine’s Mike is an oddball, one who clearly also resents his job (the notion of discarding past things runs through the entire picture-though it never intrudes) and finds strange ways of his voicing his malcontent. Mike’s flip, usually intentionally unfunny remarks are occasionally allowed a greater edge than one would expect, and Modine seizes on the character’s wobbly mood swings; his line readings are appealingly helium contemptuous-he gets the manic tone of the entire picture. There’s a moment, mid-way, when Ruehl bursts in on Mike and Angela’s first date, expecting to find Angela with Tony. Ruehl asks Mike whose husband he is, and, Mike, not missing a beat, says, in perfect planet Jupiter-faux-good-humor “I don’t know, whose husband were you looking for?”
And there’s Dean Stockwell, a routinely wonderful character actor (he had the best moment in Blue Velvet, which is saying something). Ray Liotta was the heavy in Something Wild, and it’s among his strongest performances, but Stockwell, in his way, has an even more daunting assignment. Tony, the mafia chief, is the picture’s villain, but he’s also Mob’s comedic poker. The trick is to play the dangerous and the funny without canceling one or the other or both out and winding up with a performance of barely calibrated, miscalculated goo. Stockwell leans on his fey-menacing-macho qualities (Blue Velvet brought this out too) with the invention and dexterity of both a good actor and a natural comedian. Stockwell murders someone early in the picture, and tells them “You disappointed the shit out of me”, this line could’ve been a throwaway, but, in this picture, it’s the throwaways that linger and sting and tickle.
Married to the Mob isn’t without problems. One wishes that Demme had scaled back on the hyperbole of the violence. Something Wild became Something More, because the violence truly intruded on a genre with which it didn’t belong (few films manage this effectively). Married to the Mob never gathers that kind of surprising weight beyond isolated episodes, and it threatens to evaporate altogether before the end credits. The climax is well-staged but unrewarding; Demme not quite managing to totally elude the shackles of the genre after all. But Married to the Mob is still an unruly, loosey-goosey gem, a picture with spark and personality that feels authentically nourishing and good for you in a way that pure entertainments rarely do. And, of course, we lost Demme, as it seems we must usually lose our great filmmakers, to the boring Oscar machine-the ultimate train to conformity. Perhaps someone should stage a spiritual hit, or at least find a way to pipe “Bizarre Love Triangle” into Demme’s office. But that’s only the movies. Nothing in real life seems to trump change, our need in real life to move on from something already perfectly wonderful.
★★★
Made (2001)
Friendship is one of those intangibles of life that most movies are destined to cheapen or over-explain or just plain get wrong. The movies, due to their mostly Point A yields Point B yields Point C yields Climactic Revelation structure, generally don’t allow that friendship, like love (and this is a problem of many romances too) usually, for better, for worse, for neither, just is. Made, Jon Favreau’s first and, so far, best picture, is a buddy movie, small in scale and ambition, but it transcends that condescending description because it embraces both the “small” and the “buddy” to their fullest. The smallness of the picture reveals a humble generosity of spirit that has remained, to a certain extent, in even the bigger Favreau pictures, such as this year’s Iron Man. The buddy (and the miracle) of this picture is that we actually believe that the two protagonists, Ricky Slade (Vince Vaughn) and Bobby Ricigliano (Favreau) are life-long friends, destined to forever screw one another over and bail one another out at the last minute.
Made was Favreau’s first picture as both writer and director, but he also, as we know, wrote and co-starred in Swingers, directed by Doug Liman, a few years prior. If memory serves, Made was considered by many to be a weaker sauce follow-up, a similarly themed picture that lacked the startling break-out-new-thing energy of the prior film. This is unavoidably true, to a certain extent, and I admit that I fell into that MORE! NEWER! MORE! NEWER! trap upon seeing Made the first time. But time has evened the playing field, revealing Swingers to be what it always was: a likeable, well-meaning, calling card for a talented group of men. Made is a more confident, shaggier picture, the jokes subtler and less readily announcing of their struggling screenwriter cleverness.
Ricky and Bobby are struggling boxers, though Ricky, it is immediately apparent, is only along for as long as Bobby sees fit to take the vocation seriously. Both are financed (vaguely) by the underworld, represented here by Peter Falk in a scary, profane, more vicious than is immediately apparent kind of performance that never gets awards consideration, but should. Falk finds seemingly innocuous lines, such as (paraphrasing a little), “I don’t mean to interrupt your little dream-fantasy whatever” and imbues them with a hilarious matter of fact old man’s no bullshit danger. Columbo as the crank you always suspected he was.
Ricky, normally the more divorced from reality of the pair, recognizes the boxing ambition for the joke that it is, and attempts to hammer this through to Bobby in the opening scene as they slug away at one other in the ring: two amateur friends too inexperienced, timid (and affectionate towards one another) to do anything besides stage a fight that elicits boos from even the sort of people who would attend such a match in the middle of the day. Ricky wants Bobby to cash in his goodwill with Falk and get them both started as criminal underlings. Bobby wants to stay legitimate, working slightly more innocent (and considerably lower paying) jobs such as driving around his own stripper girlfriend (Famke Janssen). That is a volatile arrangement, and it soon gets Bobby in a situation in which he can no longer resist Falk’s needling to get further in. Stuck, Bobby vouches for Ricky too, and the two are sent to act as gophers for a money drop in New York.
The above could be taken from a more action driven comedic thriller, Midnight Run perhaps, but I’m making Made sound more plot oriented than it actually is. Favreau sets his story in motion succinctly, gracefully, and uses it as a framework to stage virtually every imaginable scenario in which two very good friends can drive one another bat-shit with over familiarity. Onscreen, Favreau is a rarity: a legitimately interesting straight man who can upstage more stylized performers with a defeated, slumped, sharper than you expect verbal dexterity that calls attention to itself precisely because it doesn’t call attention to itself. Favreau has an unerring feel for desperation and defeat; and it shades his jokes of awkwardness and embarrassment in a way that shows such as the hellishly redundant American version of The Office repeatedly fail to understand.
Vince Vaughn is a stylized performer himself, of course, especially in this picture, and one that even Favreau can’t trump with his matter of fact under-acting. It’s no mystery why Vaughn has become a star; the mystery is that he hasn’t become an even bigger star. The tragedy is that either degree of stardom invariably leads to more lucrative and forgettable work. Vaughn is a delirious tight-rope walker here though; he and Favreau take that wonderful final scene in Swingers, in which Trent is revealed to be the deluded child we always suspected he was, and push that for the entire running time here. It’s aggressive, absorbing, brave, dangerous work: the sort of work that begs to become tiresome or self-amusing, but never does; because Vaughn and Favreau never lose track of the character’s damaged sense of humanity: his need to assert his existence and importance, regardless of how much it may increase his chances of getting himself and his friend killed in the process.
Ricky’s giddy, reckless, nearly surreal self-absorption and entitlement (watch the scene on the airplane or in the hotel with Sam Rockwell), particularly when stacked next to Bobby’s struggling to put things together wannabe family man, drives the central question of Made: why the hell does Bobby continually suffer this egomaniac? Favreau manages something tricky here: he answers that mystery, striving for pathos near the end, without compromising the picture’s unencumbered, airy tone. By the end we feel as if we’ve witnessed a true, fair (Bobby is ultimately just as naïve, in a less obnoxious though equally self-damaging way) exploration of two friends; two people who punch one another out so they can eat pizza together that night. For that alone, Made is an accomplishment, an authentically human movie.
★★★½
Real Life (1979)
Albert Brooks’ twenty years ahead of its time satire of our unattainable, inexplicable quest to imbue our entertainment with “reality”; to reproduce real life that’s blessed with sense, perspective and general watchability. That all of these elements are elusive and contradictory seems to always be beside the point. Reality television, in its current incarnation, is largely a blatantly false soap opera, catering not to our need for reality but to our obsessive drive to experience the most outwardly, obviously voyeuristic sensation that we possibly can, devoid of any distracting elements such as craftsmanship and story; the windows of Hitchcock’s Rear Window, without the killer and (unfortunately) without Grace Kelly.
Real Life isn’t targeting the spectators of reality television though (reality tv had yet to become a fashion statement). This picture instead concerns the ego of a wannabe creator of the sport: a filmmaker played (using his name) by Mr. Brooks himself. Real Life, Brooks’ first as director, has that not quite tangible tang that is always both the best and worst quality of an Albert Brooks film. Real Life, like the hero of Brooks’ Defending Your Life, doesn’t push its reason for being far enough-every joke (most of which are promising) hangs in the air, unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment is disappointing but it is also precisely this lacking that gives a Brooks movie its charge. The tempo of Brooks’ pictures is original and true-and uncompromisingly reflects the self-loathing temperament of their filmmaker. This is why Modern Romance remains Brooks’ overall masterpiece-that picture picks up joke after un-punched joke too, only to eventually arrive at a cumulative effect that is unexpectedly heartbreaking- a major (in its minor key) movie of inner despair’s toll on basic human interaction-on the self-denial of the damn thing called love.
There’s always a POP moment in a Brooks movie though, at least the goods ones, that brings the entire picture together. In Modern Romance it was Brooks’ appeal to his woman, his assurance that, yes, he’s insane, but he’s devoted to her in a way that sanity prohibits (the picture, particularly for us fellow neurotics, is quite, legitimately, romantic). In Real Life, it’s also a moment near the end-when Brooks, after one setback and failure after another, caves in a fit of desperation and egomania. Brooks gets on his knees, and begs, begs, pleas for another shot at his failed attempt to capture an average American family, just as they normally would be (after countless intrusions).
The little things you wished Brooks had pushed farther up until this point: the attempt to sleep with the wife in order to save her marriage (have to see it to understand it); the racism, elitism and resentment batted back and forth between Brooks and a black colleague; the inner disintegration of the family (including a subtle Charles Grodin): all come to inform that final Brooks meltdown at the end; where he offers, after many promises of integrity, to splice just about any popular film into his real entertainment. Brooks has already sung for the public, has already played the literal clown, now, reduced to nothing, he faces the lowest of the low dark side of his manipulative, diseased effort to capture something “real”. This scene, and the ending this outburst triggers, is a major, unsettling, comedy moment, worth, like Modern Romance, all of the half starts that have occurred before. Here’s hoping that Albert Brooks, who has appeared to have succumbed to bitterness in his last few films, rediscovers his blistering black comic humanity of the unsaid, particularly in a world where Real Life’s finale is now just another thing on Fox, a taking off point for Meet the Baios, perhaps.
★★★
Mr. Jealousy (1997)
Noah Baumbach was there for me at a time when he was very much needed. I discovered Baumbach’s first two pictures, Kicking and Screaming and Mr. Jealousy, when I was eighteen, a freshman in college, living with a roommate I detested, and working through all the other self-indulgent things young people generally find themselves working through. Baumbach didn’t invent anything with either of these pictures, but he achieved something almost as admirable, he redeemed a genre that’s generally a sitcom: grasping clichés we (especially young men) have to live with and turning them into something palpable and moving. These two pictures owe the usual debts to prior movies that most talented young person’s films have a habit of owing to (French New Wave, Woody Allen) but there’s a current of insecurity in Baumbach’s early films that’s specific to the last few generations, and justifies his playing in a familiar sandbox.
The insecurity being the kind that’s brought on by an aimlessness triggered by a surfeit of options, the illusion that we’re all “unique” and meant to amount to something more impressive or noble than living a life as a normal person (Wes Anderson recruited Baumbach as collaborator on the script for The Life Aquatic, which is appropriate as Anderson captures this youth-fueled discombobulation too, only in a more heightened European by way of Hal Ashby sense, Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first film, most especially taps this). This illusion can be paralyzing, and while waiting, we find that we’re pushing thirty, forty, and still haven’t really done anything. We pass this or that girl up, possibly because she didn’t promise the specific adventure we had in mind when telling our love story to ourselves, or perhaps we turn down certain jobs or certain cities because we fear they might interfere with an airy outline of a job or opportunity that might happen should we might, might, might, maybe go to grad school, or raise money to make a film, or perhaps persuade a publisher that our collection of short stories is the next generation defining masterpiece.
Mr. Jealousy, Baumbach’s second film, isn’t as strong as Kicking and Screaming, it’s “minor Baumbach” to paraphrase an oft-quoted (around here anyway) character from Squid, but it’s a charming picture, self-conscious (Baumbach seems to include certain references, such as to Sunrise or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, more out of eagerness to prove he’s seen them than in the service of any dramatic or comedic effect) but confident in its slightness. The picture is about an insecure man, now 31, called Lester Grimm (Eric Stoltz), who is currently taking a break from harboring dreams of being a great writer. He’s teaching (of course), hanging out with friends, most prominently Vince (Carlos Jacott, a scene stealer) and dating. A narrator (Baumbach), who will pop in and out throughout the picture, explains to us, briefly, Lester’s dating history, which is, logically and unavoidably, a chicken and egg extension of his general self-loathing. Lester always believes girls are cheating on him, is always convinced he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with, thus effectively ensuring that they always cheat on him, and that he’s the least impressive person they’ve been with. Lester is not oblivious to this self-fulfilling irony, but his awareness is of no use to him beyond further self-justification.
Lester soon meets, through Vince and his fiancée (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Ramona (Annabella Sciorra). Ramona appears to be ready made for Lester (as they always initially), she’s beautiful, works in a museum (encouraging an interest in culture and the arts that compliments Lester’s film buffery) and has a certain endearing clumsiness. Ramona is a woman of the movies, a woman blessed with a man’s ideal looks and approachability, with just enough eccentricity to be interesting without irritating (Baumbach wouldn’t be too generous with his women, really, until Margot). Lester has the usual issues, but he’s managing, courting inner growth, until Ramona reveals that she used to date Dashiell Frank (Chris Eigeman), an acclaimed writer their age who has been heralded by critics as “the voice of his generation.” Lester, after a few episodes that manage to be more convincing than they’d sound if I were to recall them to you, decides to join Frank’s group therapy, which, in a nice touch, is led by director, actor and film-historian patriarch Peter Bogdanovich (I wish he’d act more, he has an instantly credible onscreen elder-statesman sanity that is only rivaled by fellow director Sydney Pollack).
This is a promising situation for farce, and I’d be curious to see what the present day Baumbach, with the searing death-ray barbs of Squid and Margot, would do with it. The ultimate problem and (simultaneous) chief appeal of Mr. Jealousy is that it does nothing with the situation. This frustrates because part of us senses that Baumbach has a New Age screwball comedy in him, a neo-ironic picture that emulates the distant past pictures in wit but otherwise invents its own specific to present society rules; for once, perhaps, a modern screwball picture that wouldn’t feel like a tour through a condemned factory (a problem with a few of the Coens’ attempts at screwball, and it looked like it was a problem with Leatherheads).
This dead-end has its happy surprises though, it lends Mr. Jealousy an unexpected warmth and leisure; it’s refreshing to see a modern comedy so uninterested in actually making you LAUGH OUT LOUD. The picture is talky, and awkward, but you never fault it, the awkwardness, in fact, ultimately contributes to the picture’s truthfulness and ungainly empathy with its hero. It doesn’t hurt either that Eric Stoltz is terrific, Lester is probably his surest, most charismatic performance; and Eigeman, playing a purposeful cliché (he’s that maddening asshole who writes a best-seller by 25 and rues his inability to cat around with more discrimination) is nearly as good. Lester and Dashiell become unexpected friends, and my other regret of Mr. Jealousy is that it doesn’t pursue this avenue more aggressively. Lester’s romance with Romana is sweet, but bland. Baumbach is nothing if not self-aware enough, read in film criticism enough, to grasp that undefined women are a common thread in many young men’s films, and he seeks to address that, but he would have been better advised to stick to another cliché of the young writer, “write what you know”.
The ending finds Lester having finally written something he’s proud of, a play that’s (surprise, surprise) based on the events we’ve just seen. Lester, apparently more confident in himself, sees Ramona one more time, and the picture assures us of the usual ending (though it doesn’t show it) but I wanted to know where Lester exactly stood with Dashiell, they have a final toe to toe reckoning themselves, but they both seem unable to understand that they may be the true font of one another’s hopes and ambitions, which could, perhaps, might, maybe, might, perhaps yield a play about a book about a man writing a play about a man who finally realizes just to plain, simple, fucking, drop it and be.
★★★
His Kind of Woman (1951)
His Kind of Woman is one of those old-school nonsense pictures that Hollywood no longer seems capable of producing without an accompanying shot of self-congratulation; every light little thing now comes packaged with a twinkle in the stars’ eye to assure everyone that they know they’re above it and most assuredly don’t MEAN it, which diminishes the fun by half (an exact figure). That was my issue with the later Steven Soderbergh Danny Ocean pictures, Soderbergh’s fear of being mistaken for a mere entertainer was palpable, and led to the assumption that an incoherent trifle would be less of an offense to the Great Filmmakers’ Code of Conduct than an enjoyable one.
I’m not as far off track as it may appear, His Kind of Woman is, like the Danny Ocean movies (either past or present), an excuse to transport several stars and character actors to a beautiful setting and stage a series of flirtations, near death escapes and exchanges of sideways movie-star banter, all under the flimsiest pretense of some larger story, which, in this case, has something to do with a deported gangster’s efforts to get back into the States and enjoy his illegally gotten gains. The gangster sets up an on again/off again gambler, Dan Milner (Robert Mitchum, who should’ve just been called Robert Mitchum from picture to picture, no writer could invent a name more apt for that man) to take the fall so he can make off with Milner’s identity and get back on U.S. soil. That’s the plot, and it doesn’t kick in for real until about the ninetieth minute. Milner’s in the dark for the majority of the picture, knowing only that he’s to take a fat paycheck and hang out and absorb the pleasures of the island until someone steers him in the right, or any, direction. There has to be self-satire in there somewhere.
His Kind of Woman, produced by Howard Hughes, directed by Richard Fleischer (credited to John Farrow, though Fleischer evidently re-shot most of it) also boasts Vincent Price in a generous, charismatic, humorously unconvincing turn as a famous actor; Charles McGraw (memorable in Fleischer’s significantly tighter The Narrow Margin) as a baddie ; Jane Russell’s breasts as the chief love interest, Tim Holt as a supposedly drunk, late night bearer of exposition, and, why not?, Raymond Burr as the gangster pulling the strings.
The film rests on Mitchum’s no, I really, truly, don’t give a shit charisma (Otto Preminger exploited that apathy to effective, perverse extremes in the Hughes produced Angel Face) as well as the other stars’ game for anything spirit. The picture is never thrilling, rarely truly funny (though it has a few lines that snap) but everything taken together has an unruly appeal that is intensely pleasurable to experience and look back upon later. Films where stars are clearly having fun aren’t always fun themselves, but this is an exception. The chief appeal of His Kind of Woman lies in its determination to follow its characters’ whims with no regard to the constraints and requirements of the genre, allowing for human little moments of tenderness, cleverness, and sensuality. This picture has conviction in something more important, in this case, than story: a lolly-gagging, roundabout, distinctly Hollywood utopia of movie stars screwing around. This is a truly escapist picture, and you won’t find yourself whispering that word under your breath as if you’re in confession: the film wears it proud, and so should you.
★★★
Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Writer-star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a bit more ambitious than the previous Judd Apatow produced or directed odes to unflagging pop-culture enthralled young male self-absorption. The prior films were charged with a bracing, seemingly free form geeks have inherited the world id driven obscenity, laced with an articulation that is at once ironic and celebratory. The heroes of The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad were the good guys, but they weren’t the PG/PG-13 eunuchs of the 1980s movies getting boxer shorts pulled up their asses by the privileged bullies, they embodied ferocious, empowered, unchecked fuck you will, until, and this is the problem, the pandering sets in, the “we don’t really mean it or want to offend anyone especially the ladies” third act u-turn that finds everyone hooking and growing up on cue, common sense be damned.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall has no such third act turn-around, the film is slower and (just a shade) more reflective from the get go. This may be the first of this current wave of Apatow productions that can be accused of self-consciousness, recognizing the last minute efforts of the heroes of Knocked Up and Superbad to be unconvincing. This film has at its center a more sentimental, wounded hero, a man-child who requires more than a five minute montage of images near the end to figure things out. The picture attempts to dramatize Segel’s in and out, some days good, some days bad road to recovery, after being discarded by the titular woman (Kristen Bell, bland).
The usual stereotypes are all accounted for (shrill ambitious woman, obnoxious, more successful new beau, stoner, confidant) but their dimensions aren’t as pat as the prior films. Marshall has a surprising compassion; the characters are largely good, open, looking for connection. It’s this unexpected, across the board fairness that has critics, ridiculously, likening the picture to the work of Preston Sturges.
The film is also, unfortunately, the slowest of the pictures we’ve mentioned. Segel and Stoller were right to question the conventions of the prior films, but in revising those clichés they muted the wild man party camaraderie that gave the earlier pictures their bite, it’s a gremlins movie without the gremlins. The reliable company players, Paul Rudd, Jonah Hill, Bill Hader, etc. are all bland and inert here, their comic impulses adrift. This film takes too much of its mood from the tranquil Hawaiian waters that serve as the backdrop: this picture is truly about as interesting as watching someone else on vacation. Segel and Stoller have made the Apatow third act somewhat more palatable but in doing so they’ve neglected the first two acts entirely, leaving nothing to distract from the please marry and procreate at the appropriate age woman’s picture formula that remains despite their best intentions. The film mistakes striving for maturity for maturity, lacking the characterizations to justify such a slow tempo. Forgetting Sarah Marshall may, ironically, play worse with the folks who are determined to defend it.
The picture still has its moments, primarily because Segel, always the strangest of the Apatow boys to begin with (he suggests Jim Carrey in an earlier Apatow effort, the underrated The Cable Guy) is an appealingly lumpy, unconventional (even for Apatow) leading man. Unlike that force of nature Seth Rogen, or Hill, Segel doesn’t bless his character Peter with confidence in his own obsessions, which include an ambition to stage a more autobiographical than he knows puppet musical of Dracula. The film’s one legitimately original moment takes off from this admirably bizarre conceit: the girl of redemption and second chances (Mila Kunis, more appealing than expected, but has nothing to work with) sets Peter up, without his knowing, to sing a song from his unfinished project. Peter isn’t sure of course, he isn’t sure of anything other than his need to glob onto another woman, but he takes the stage, and wins over the drunk, impatient patrons of the bar with a song of surprising conviction (he even does the sub-Transylvanian thing) that briefly takes over the movie. Peter sheds his self-loathing fully, convincingly, and it’s a wonderful moment.
There are a few other moments that threaten to jump the tracks of formula as well. Russell Brand’s Aldous Snow, Sarah’s new rock star beau, is almost completely unoriginal, save an unexpected kinship with Peter. Peter and Aldous find themselves surfing together, and Peter, unable to deny it any longer, exclaims “God, you’re cool.” It’s a disarming, poignant scene; an emotionally naked moment that the filmmakers refuse to capitalize on.
Moments such as these prove we should be harder on Apatow and his talented camp of hooligans. These guys are too promising to be wasting their and our time replicating the same clichéd rubbish over and over again. The audiences’ taking it doesn’t surprise me, but the critics’ refusal to call foul is disappointing. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is better than most any mainstream young person romantic comedy that will probably come out in the near future, but what’s that saying exactly? It’s time to change the criterion by which we judge these men, time to up the ante, because, at this point, the Apatow guys are treading closer and closer to dangerous waters, to making the sorts of movies they would’ve ridiculed before they were famous.
★★½
In Bruges (2008)
We’ve seen so many bad hitman movies, either of the junk videogame (take your pick) or boring, self-conscious pretend its a metaphor for something to disguise its emptiness variety (Road to Perdition) that it’s forgivable that audiences would greet In Bruges, the writing-directing debut of playwright Martin McDonagh, with hesitation. In Bruges has the appearance of yet another of those pulp pictures in denial, a film that mistakes under-known location and stars for something higher than the usual business. We expect suffocating art-direction, reaching, false, over-literate dialogue, we expect to be lulled to sleep, with even worse self-gratifying conversation over dinner to follow.
In Bruges, thankfully, plays those frustrations against the audience, reaching for the next, providing we haven’t gotten there already, level of post-modernism: the post-modernist post-modernist thriller, the B movie that scores points on the B movie that pretends to score points on the B movie in hopes of being an A movie. The picture isn’t really about anything, and it has a rigid cross the T’s, dot the i’s irony that tips one off to McDonagh’s theatre background, but it’s also appealingly woolly and squirrelly, you know where it’s ultimately going, but you never know where each individual divorced from the narrative scene is headed. McDonagh takes several stock in the genre moments (the meet cute, the jealous boyfriend, the hit, the final standoff) and shakes them up and lets them loose in directions that are wilder and less polite than usual. In Bruges, in short, reminds you of why you fell for genre movies to begin with, before the inevitable repetition born of seeing too many of them set in.
The film concerns two hitmen of the traditional contrast: Ken (Brendan Gleeson) is older, experienced, worn down, respectful, doughier; Ray (Colin Farrell) is young, inexperienced, electric, sexy, buzzing all over the place. The two have just completed a job that has given them unexpected trouble and, at their boss Harry’s (Ralph Fiennes) insistence, have fled to Bruges (in Belgium) where they are to lie low until Harry contacts them. Ken, distrusting of what the Bruges trip may or may not mean, takes the city in stride and appreciates what’s in front of him while it’s in front of him; Ray, a canny gloss on Farrell’s backstage infamy, is an impatient wild man with an open disdain for Bruges, for quiet, for anything that doesn’t involve forward movement toward a buzz or a lay (he’s, to borrow Woody Allen’s reasoning from Annie Hall, a shark, only of the party variety).
The pair’s bickering, over tourism, drinking, and fucking, constitutes the entirety of the picture’s first act, and a large portion of the second: its an Odd Couple scenario, a gifted writer’s opportunity to, in addition to the genre tweaking listed above, riff on the glib self-congratulation that can be a part of sight seeing, or seeing an art film that primarily concerns itself with sight seeing. We’ve be down the bad guy ironically concerned with frivolous things highway before (Tarantino has made it practically kabuki by now) but McDonagh’s dialogue has a non-sequitur strangeness that’s intensely enjoyable, and the performances are terrific.
Brendan Gleeson is ideal for the kind of tonal tightropes that McDonagh has him walk here; as he’s a contradiction of the best sense himself. Gleeson is big, intimidating, a “tough guy” with a jolting vulnerability that’s informed by a precise intelligence and awareness. Gleeson imbues In Bruges with a pathos that, surprisingly (and this is a testament to the picture’s mood ring tonal durability) doesn’t overwhelm it; his big, open face softens and grounds the picture.
Farrell, a good actor who continually traps himself playing troubled artists’ idea of the Icon, is revelatory here: the fleeting charge of his supporting performance in Minority Report topped and sustained for the entirety of this picture. Farrell’s Ray is trickier than initial appearances may reveal: he’s entrusted to carry both the film’s “morality” and comic charge, no mean feat, but Farrell lets go, it’s a rare self-amused performance that’s audience inclusive. Farrell zigzags his eyes, twists himself in knots, punches people out, and dares everyone, including us, to reign him in. It’s a testament to McDonagh and Farell’s will that Ray, above it all, remains likable.
The picture’s final third is the only portion that carries a whiff of obligation. The Harry character, while funny and well timed by Fiennes, is derivative, warmed over Ben Kingsley from Sexy Beast. McDonagh’s imagination also disappointingly fails him, after initial promise, in the girl department. Ray’s relationship with a sexy drug dealer, Chloë (Clémence Poésy), is, at first, reckless and subversive of the usual googly eyes enchantment (they bring out the worst in each other as opposed to the expected opposite) but, by the end, the girl is just the girl, wincing at the appropriate moments. One expects something to happen with this young lady with the quick fingers and aloof come hither smile: a betrayal, a violent defense, a desertion, anything, but McDonagh doesn’t commit, the picture goes a little soft and tries life affirmation on for size instead, perhaps, like Ray, to atone for the horrible act of violence that occurs early in the picture.
Truthfully though, sentimentality might just be the ultimate subversion here, hard to tell with this corkscrew of a picture. I’m trying to be polite and not reveal too much, but the Farrell character would be the villain in most films, and you may feel guilty for cheering his survival a few hours after the lights have gone up and you’ve had time to consider what he actually did. I can’t tell if McDonagh has managed a supremely moral or just the opposite feat with that, but I applaud the ambition and discomfort. In Bruges is, essentially, just a trick, but it’s a memorable trick, an occasionally nasty movie with a little moxie.
★★★½
Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007)
The glib title is, mercifully, the hardest lump to swallow in Wristcutters: A Love Story, a picture that doesn’t so much evade the Sundance Toys-R-Us “independent” film ingredients (willfully eclectic cast, audience pandering coming of age road movie scenario) as slightly transcend them. These characters aren’t showy about their unhappiness: they drink cheap beer, shoot pool, and work grungy jobs, with little hope of ever turning another corner. They could kill themselves of course, and one would be tempted to consider these indulgent still kinda youths a suicide risk, except they already thought of that. The characters of Wristcutters have all successfully “offed” themselves, and the punishment turns out to be yet another level of thankless not quite middle class hell, an afterlife that, in the words of the star, Zia (Patrick Fugit) is “just slightly shittier than everything before.”
The writer-director, Goran Dukic, apparently understanding that novelty concept afterlife movies don’t normally work (usually a stream of increasingly tiring heavenly puns capped with a self-righteous happy ending), and that coming of age youthster pictures are even more hazardous, finds a careful balance between low comedy and a despair that’s really a gentle befuddlement. We never remotely believe that Zia is detached enough to have actually offed himself, the act feels entirely too heavy for the story that follows, but the picture’s sidestepping of that never really becomes an issue. The film has an early Jim Jarmusch/ Jonathan Demme vibe: affection for its characters, as well as a poignant understanding of its own slightness. We root for Wristcutters.
Or more accurately we root for the three characters the film has to put to the road: Zia, Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) and Eugene (Shea Wigham). Zia is looking to find an ex, Mikal is convinced she wound up in the New Jersey karma turnpike wasteland by mistake, and Eugene is trying to get laid. This is the first Fugit picture I’ve seen since Almost Famous, and he proves here, unlike Kate Hudson, that he may not be a one notable performance deal. Fugit has the uncalculated emotional deflation and ironic sex appeal of a young Bud Cort. Like Cort, Fugit glamorizes and satirizes movie character misery in equal measure; you buy his unoriginal problems without feeling stupid in the morning.
Sossamon, winning in the better than it’s thought to be A Knights Tale, has the flakey-hot intelligence of Winona Ryder in the 1980s; an ability, like Fugit, to renew canned clichés and emotions. You want these two to get together (if you thought Fugit was going to get with the ex, you don’t care enough about movies to read my site) because they sell the melting of one another’s mutual self-containment with a minimum of effort; there’s no grand scene or contrivance to shove their affection down our throats, its just, simply, beautifully, there.
Wigham and Tom Waits ensure that Wristcutters meets its weird quotient, but they work. Wigham takes a potentially problem part, “the foreigner”, and scores a few strange comic bulls-eyes, his attempted seduction of Sossamon so shameless and disgusting that you can’t help but root for him. It’s also a shame that Waits doesn’t find more film work that interests him, because he’s a truly original presence in movies: a hipster poet badass with the primal rasp of a great movie monster (his delirious Renfield is a highlight of Coppola’s also underrated Dracula), though Waits might disrupt the consistency of Wristcutters’ vision: its hard to believe that any world with him as a guardian angel can be all that bad.
It’s also testament to the picture’s charm that I not only accepted the ending, but encouraged it: a normally irritating reversal of woes that, for once, ends on the correct beat, resisting the urge to cheapen the emotion with a few more scenes of tidying up. We don’t know what happens to Zia exactly, but a beautiful woman is smiling at him, and, for the moment, that is more than enough.
★★★
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
It’s my understanding, after thirty seconds of cursory research, that Warner Brothers gave director Joe Dante the keys to the kingdom for The New Batch. Dante wasn’t interested in another gremlins movie, the studio tried to proceed without him, nothing went anywhere, so they granted him the right to do whatever he wished with the property. The result is probably the most anarchic picture Joe Dante has ever made. The original Gremlins is a witty, surprisingly vicious mating of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and every monster movie Dante has ever seen. Gremlins 2: The New Batch is lighter, more self-aware (the outright horror dialed down), and even more insane. The pretense of human feeling, that leftover E.T. pathos that executive producer Spielberg always seems to instill (even, most ridiculously, in Transformers) has been dropped, any conventional three act structure discarded.
The New Batch sets itself a daunting task: to sustain the delirious, deranged cotton candy high of the first film at its best for the entire running time. This Dante picture, made at the height of an earlier wave of blockbuster testosterone fever, could cynically be reduced to the formula that was on all ambitious studio execs at the time. Dante had essentially given Warner Brothers Die Hard with Gremlins, or, more accurately, a tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. Or, even more accurately, an affectionate tongue in cheek screw you to everyone who wanted a Die Hard with Gremlins. The trick that Dante pulls in picture after picture is an affectionate, silly, satirical vibe that somehow manages tonal coherence. The New Batch fully plays to Dante’s strengths, a seemingly never ending trip-wire invention laced with an intoxicating love of movies that many don’t take too seriously.
One could draw parallels between The New Batch and Batman Returns, which seems to have been made under similar “the first for you, the second for me” circumstances, but the truth is, while the Burton films have an admirable personality that’s lacking in most expensive filmmaking, they don’t age that well. The New Batch mostly holds, melding a surreal, bent, soul consuming work environment that could have informed Office Space with a mischievous post-modern sensibility that precedes Tarantino’s later films by more than a decade. The picture even sports Christopher Lee before it was cool to cast Christopher Lee in anything beyond Hammer films.
The film, again like Batman Returns, seems to be an excuse for the filmmaker to unload all of the bric-a-brac that had probably been accumulating at the back of his mind for years. A likeable Trump daydream embodied by John Glover appears (though Dante’s goodwill doesn’t serve him here, Glover’s stoned Santa portrayal doesn’t jive with the cooperate hell the film has implied he created, the character should have closer resembled Glover’s shark in Scrooged); as well as a washed-up horror show host (Robert Prosky), harboring dreams of respectability, who lands a key interview with the talking “Brain” Gremlin (voiced, of course, by Tony Randall); we also get a spider gremlin; a bat gremlin (yes, the film elicits a laugh from a Batman parody); an electro-gremlin, and a starlet gremlin that is actually, and this is no mean feat, the ugliest of all the gremlins.
The film has the pleasure of a pinball machine, with Dante’s various hazards and inventions banging off one another in a series of vignettes of surprisingly even quality. It’s a testament to Dante’s mojo that he even ends his so-called children’s film on a triumphant note of bestiality without somehow compromising the overall good will of the endeavor.
I miss Joe Dante. He recently directed a doesn’t quite suck as much as the all others episode of Masters of Horror (though I didn’t see his second episode), and before that, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (that subtitle having the similarly inane on purpose ring of The New Batch), which, truthfully, I never caught either. Pauline Kael wrote, in a review of The Howling, that Dante seemed to be equal parts talent, amateur, style and flake. That’s precisely why his films are so engaging, he’s a talent with a child’s awe of genres many artists feel beneath them, capable of spinning his daydreams into an Americana rhapsody of monster-mania. Dante, similar to many of his characters, would seem to be an idealist from a past world, and I’m hoping that he hasn’t quite been swallowed yet. The horror film needs him. The comedy needs him. The bloated blockbusters could even use his teasing again, perhaps a third Gremlins, which I guess nowadays would be called something along the lines of G3. If anyone could make that idea tolerable it would be Joe Dante.
★★★½
© Copyright 2007 Bowen's Cinematic.
Site Designed by Ben Markowitz.
Bowen's Cinematic is powered by WordPress | RSS
