Z Whiz

I joined Netflix last week, and ironically the first Netflix DVD I watched was a heartfelt tribute to the kind of business that Netflix is making obsolete.

The film in question was Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, and in it, director Xan Cassavetes (John’s daughter) tells the story of a legendary Los Angeles pay-TV station that became famous in the late ’70s and early ’80s for its innovative, unpredictable, cinephile-friendly programming. The director Henry Jaglom compares Z Channel to “a delicious meal that just keeps coming” and it served its small but loyal audience a steady diet of unusual, obscure, revelatory movies from blaxploitation to Buñuel, softcore porn to hardcore art films, indie discoveries to underappreciated gems from Hollywood’s Golden Age—the full range of the cinematic experience, spanning the years from Louise Brooks to Jacqueline Bisset.

Two decades before the DVD revolution (and a few years before even the VHS revolution got off the ground), Z Channel was presenting directors’ cuts of titles like The Wild Bunch, 1900, Heaven’s Gate and Once Upon a Time in America and taking care to show even trashy B-movies in the proper aspect ratio. The station was such a sensation that a thriving black market in bootleg Z Channel videotapes sprang up among L.A. movie nuts unlucky enough to live outside their broadcast zone. Alexander Payne tells Cassavetes he still has hundreds of those tapes in his collection, and Quentin Tarantino has a hilarious moment where he recalls how angry he was at a friend who taped Samuel Fuller’s Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street for him but didn’t record Park Row as well.

The mastermind behind Z Channel was a workaholic programmer named Jerry Harvey. Harvey started out with ambitions of becoming a scriptwriter (he co-wrote the grungy post-Leone Western China 9 Liberty 37), but Z Channel turned out to be a much better fit for his obsessive energies and his encyclopedic film knowledge.

Harvey seems to have been a true rarity: a film lover with genuinely original, personal taste. So many film bloggers—even the ones who pride themselves on their “offbeat,” “culty” tastes—all turn out to share the same, numbingly predictable touchstones: Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, Seven, Trainspotting, Pulp Fiction, Star Wars.

Not Jerry Harvey. Cassavetes incorporates dozens of tantalizing clips of classic “Z Channel” movies into her documentary, and I was stunned by how many of these titles were completely unfamiliar to me: Le Magnifique, a 1973 spy spoof starring Jean-Paul Belmondo; Overlord, a strikingly photographed low-budget 1975 war movie from director Stuart Cooper; The Moon’s Our Home, a screwball comedy from 1936 starring Margaret Sullavan and Henry Fonda; Something of Value, an anti-apartheid melodrama from 1957 (!) with Sidney Poitier and Rock Hudson (!!); The Main Thing Is to Love, an influential romantic drama directed by Andrzej Zulawski that barely played U.S. theatres upon its original release.

We’ll probably never know how many viewers were drawn to Z Channel because of their interest in international cinema and how many just wanted to see all the racy Laura Antonelli movies that made up much of the station’s late-night programming, but the frank way in which Harvey’s favourite directors handled subjects like sex and nudity probably didn’t hurt Z Channel’s subscriber base. A Magnificent Obsession revived my own fond memories of the early days of pay-TV—I was 13 or 14, and spent many hours watching scrambled movies on Superchannel, waiting for those moments when the picture would stabilize long enough to give me a few precious seconds of green-and-purple-tinted female nudity.

What keeps A Magnificent Obsession from being simply another exercise in nostalgia for ’70s moviemaking (along the lines of A Decade Under the Influence, which was also produced by the Independent Film Channel) is the story’s horrifying, violent conclusion: in 1988, Harvey shot his wife (apparently with a pistol that Sam Peckinpah once gave to him) and then turned the gun on himself. Z Channel, increasingly unable to compete with HBO, Cinemax and Showtime, not to mention home video, went out of business not long after.

Watching A Magnificent Obsession is an unsettling experience for any moviegoer—Harvey battled psychological problems all his life, but you can’t help but wonder if all those hours he spent in darkened screening rooms watching all those dreamlike fantasy images play out before his eyes did his brain any favours. I was reminded of that line from Wonder Boys where Michael Chabon says something similar about writing—how being inside your own head for such an unnatural length of time can eventually give you what he calls “the midnight disease.”

That may be nothing but pseudoscience and speculation, but I’ll tell you one thing: by the time Cassavetes’ film was over, I sat there alone on my couch, feeling tired and square-eyed from another night of movie-watching I didn’t know whether to add a dozen movies to my Netflix queue or cancel the damned service altogether.

Re-Opening Pandora's Box

Last week my friends Emmy, Sam and I went to see a special event at Tropic Cinema, the beautiful and well-run arthouse cinema here in Key West. It was the final weekend of the annual Key West Literary Seminar, which meant that I got to stand in line for popcorn behind Paul Auster, Michael Cunningham and Ian McEwan and watch the movie while seated behind Jeffrey Eugenides, Siri Hustvedt and Amy Tan. Very exciting. But unfortunately, the movie we were watching was Lulu on the Bridge, a weird little fizzle written and directed by Auster that briefly played theatres in 1998.

I sensed even before we went into the screening room that Auster wasn’t exactly pleased with how Lulu turned out—as I waited for my coffee, I overheard Auster telling Cunningham that he’d been forced to leave a whole bunch of Mira Sorvino’s scenes on the cutting room floor. In the film, Sorvino plays Celia, a struggling actress who lands the Louise Brooks role in a remake of Pandora’s Box. Apparently, Auster shot some footage of this film-within-the-film, but soon realized that Sorvino just couldn’t come anywhere close to equalling Brooks’ singular charisma. “She’s a lovely girl and she could totally play the other scenes in the movie,” Auster said with a sad shake of his head, “but she couldn’t handle the rest of it.”

Actually, he was being generous: Sorvino is awkward all the way through this misbegotten film. She’s not playing a character but the idea of a character—the beautiful young woman who wanders into an older man’s life, loves him unconditionally, understands his pain, and gives him reason for living again—and her performance is so full of uncertain half-smiles and nervous, ingratiating, nice-little-girl laughs that it’s hard to imagine anyone mistaking her for the iconic Lulu. She could barely pass for Jennifer Aniston.

It’s not her fault, though. Harvey Keitel is awkward in this movie too—he’s a jazz musician who discovers a magical, glowing, levitating rock shortly after getting shot in the chest. So are Mandy Patinkin, Gina Gershon and Harold Perrineau. So is Willem Dafoe (playing a role that, Auster revealed in the Q&A session following the screening, was originally intended for Salman Rushdie). So is Auster’s daughter Sophie (who has a major role opposite David Thewlis and Irène Jacob in Auster’s upcoming film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, and whose acting has hopefully improved since Lulu). I began to wonder, in fact, whether the performances were awkward by design—perhaps Auster is one of those directors like David Mamet, for whom unconvincingly, unnaturally delivered dialogue is part of some perverse overall cinematic vision.

A more likely explanation, however, is that Auster is one of those guys who, despite his great taste and intelligence as a novelist, simply doesn’t have that instinctive knack for visual storytelling that I guess you could call “film sense.” I’ve enjoyed many of Auster’s novels in the past and even appreciated them for their ability to combine a literary style with pulpy, “movie-ish” themes—in fact, back in the days when I used to fantasize about becoming a screenwriter, an adaptation of Auster’s City of Glass was one of my big unrealized projects—but these days I have a hard time of thinking of writers less suited to making the leap from literature to film.

The problem isn’t just Auster’s George Lucas-level ear for dialogue—his conversations, which barely even pass muster on the page, sound hopelessly stilted when they come out of the mouths of living, breathing actors. And it’s not just his plots, which rely on strings of cosmic coincidence and magical happenstance that, unless you’re Alan Rudolph, are very hard to pull off onscreen. (And even then!)

It’s the fact that Auster doesn’t think through his camera. Nothing in Lulu seems to be happening spontaneously onscreen—Auster isn’t making a movie here, he’s just filming a screenplay. Even worse, it’s the kind of pretentious screenplay that names the heroine Celia because it’s a homonym for “s’il y a” and the hero Izzy because it sounds like “Is he?” It’s the kind of movie that tips you off to the fact that it’s all talking place inside the hero’s imagination in the moment before he dies by showing you a poster for Grand Illusion. Worst of all: it’s the kind of movie that takes place entirely inside the hero’s imagination in the moment before he dies.

I’ve got to say, though, Auster has a lot of charisma in person. He has the hooded eyes and graceful carriage of someone like Raul Julia—it’s easy to see how he could have charmed a skeptical producer into giving him the money to film this ridiculous script. (He sure convinced the audience at Tropic Cinema they’d seen something profound.) Maybe he should consider giving up directing and trying his hand in front of the camera instead. Sam Shepard’s getting old, and Hollywood could use a new literary heartthrob.

Dunce Upon a Time

Idiocracy, the new comedy by Office Space/Beavis and Butt-Head creator Mike Judge, came out on DVD last week, and by now 20th Century Fox has probably fired the person responsible.

I’m being only slightly facetious: Fox has handled this movie with such indifference—briefly releasing it, after two years on the shelf, in only seven cities, unsupported by publicity, newspaper ads, or even so much as a trailer—that you have to wonder if Fox was taking marketing advice from Jennifer Coolidge’s producer character in For Your Consideration, who wanted to put “Don’t Go!” on all her movie’s posters.

Given Judge’s premise—a cryogenically frozen soldier awakens 500 years in the future and encounters a world where human intelligence has declined so precipitously that his once-average IQ now qualifies him as the smartest man on the planet—it’s tempting to make a cheap joke about how if the same thing had happend to those morons at Fox, they would have fit right in. But it appears that something more insidious than simple stupidity is at work here. As Time’s Joel Stein noted, with Idiocracy, Judge committed Hollywood’s worst sin: not making a bad movie, but making one that doesn’t make a good ad.

Ironically, Idiocracy takes place in a world where advertising is completely inescapable—a NASCAR speedway would look tasteful by comparison. Everyone in America wears shiny, disposable shirts and pants emblazoned with logos—you just pull a fresh one out of the dispenser in the wall every morning, like a tissue from a Kleenex box. Everybody’s favorite TV show is Ow! My Balls!, which they watch on their big-screen TVs. (The screens have to be big to accommodate all the flashy pop-up ads for fast food and Viagra.) The country’s banking system is apparently run by Taco Bell.

I was initially planning on pointing out how Idiocracy is sort of a comic doppelgänger for Children of Men—both movies take place in futuristic, garbage-strewn dystopias, and both deal with apathetic heroes forced against their better instincts to take a role in saving humankind, mainly by helping a woman get pregnant. But since I’ve already been beaten to that observation by several of my favorite film bloggers (including Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun, Vince Keenan from vincekeenan.com, Dana Stevens from Slate and God knows how many others), and since I don’t want to spoil any more of Judge’s truly inspired gags (let’s just say that Starbucks’ product line has undergone some slight alterations), let me take a moment instead to praise Luke Wilson’s lead performance as Pvt. Joe Bauers.

In an early scene in Idiocracy, a sergeant complains that given the choice between leading, following or getting out of the way, Bauers always gets out of the way. All too often, that’s Wilson’s preferred choice as an actor, too. Unlike his brother Owen, Wilson’s performing style is too recessive for him to be able to impose his own sensibility upon a film—and when that film is something like My Super Ex-Girlfriend, Wilson recedes into the background, his blandly handsome looks blending in all too well with his generic surroundings.

In Idiocracy, however, Wilson delivers exactly the kind of comic performance the film requires. He’s not a fast-talking joker like Jim Carrey or a larger-than-life kook like Will Ferrell or a laid-back hipster like Bill Murray. As Joe, Wilson doesn’t even say particularly funny things. Romantically, he’s a bit of a drone. When he talks, nobody pays any attention to him. (They just laugh at the “faggy” way he talks.) When a computer glitch results in Joe being renamed “Not Sure,” it suits him perfectly.

But as Joe realizes what’s happened to him, that he’s marooned in an America where the president is a former porn star and ultimate fighting champion and “You’re shit’s all retarded” passes for a medical diagnosis, Wilson’s brow-furrowings and low-key double takes gradually evolve into an ever-deepening expression of horror—especially after Joe realizes that the entire country expects him to use his giant brain to fix all their problems. Wilson doesn’t hit a single false note here: in a film where the production design is so intentionally cheap, vulgar and ugly, Wilson’s likable underplaying grounds each scene with a much-needed sense of humanity and decency.

Joe Bauers may be one of the most relatable heroes in recent films—like Joe, none of us have the slightest idea how to fix the world, but we’re sure that almost everyone we meet is an imbecile. Idiocracy make contain a lot of jokes about dicks and farts, but it also makes a potent political statement—“If you think the world is going to hell,” Judge asks, “why don’t you do something about it, if you’re so smart?”

Children and Death

When I was a theatre reviewer, I always used to get riled by the way so many playwrights, after killing off a main character, would always succumb to the temptation to bring them back for one final scene—more often than not to offer the surviving characters some parting words of wisdom delivered with preternatural calm, usually from behind some kind of filmy, artfully lit scrim. (This convention is so ingrained that I even used it myself in one of my own scripts.)

This unwillingness to actually let characters stay dead is starting to infect pop culture too. For instance, I’ve spent the last few days slogging through the sad final season of the espionage series Alias on DVD—now there’s a show that was completely ruined by the producers’ habit of killing off the cast and then resurrecting them a few episodes later. Perhaps aware of the increasing absurdity of their surroundings (clones! zombies! unkillable villainesses!), the actors fought back by making their performances more subdued than ever. Despite all the deaths, all the explosions, all the nefarious plotting, Alias’ status quo never changes: the show’s theme became the stoic denial of catastrophe. It’s the perfect Bush-era TV program.

Are there perfect Bush-era movies? I’m not sure, but I did go to see Children of Men last week, and saw a trailer for a Sandra Bullock thriller called Premonition, in which she plays a woman who finds herself moving between two parallel realities following the death of her husband—one in which her husband is dead and one in which he’s still alive. Apparently Bullock is able to use the information from the still-alive reality not just to solve the mystery of his death—but to prevent it from ever happening. You can’t help but be reminded of the recent thriller Déjà Vu (Denzel Washington travels back in time to rescue a woman from a terrorist bomb) or the TV show Day Break (Taye Diggs relives the same day over and over again and having to save his wife’s life each time out). In The Fountain, Hugh Jackman tries to save his wife’s life too—he may not hop around in time, but the movie sure does.

It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to see these premises as a reflection of a pervasive American mood of regret over September 11 and the war in Iraq: If only we could go back and fix everything! It’s no wonder United 93 didn’t do well at the box office—that entire movie was an exercise in foreordained conclusions, a painful reminder of the implacable inalterability of history. Director Paul Greengrass’ entire approach was designed to foil audiences’ desire for fantasy—instead of changing history, he and his crew went to painstaking lengths to recreate every little detail as accurately as possible. (I wonder: would Superman Returns have done a better job of capturing people’s imaginations if Bryan Singer had carried his homage to the Richard Donner originals even further and shown Superman saving Lois Lane by flying around the earth and turning back time?)

That’s part of what I found so amazing about Children of Men—and please don’t read any further if you plan on seeing this movie, because I’m about to give away one of its biggest surprises. Children of Men respects the finality of death. Less than half an hour into the film, there’s a stunning sequence—filmed in one virtuoso shot so complicated it defies the laws of physics—in which the car Clive Owen is riding in is attacked on a country road by a ferocious mob. (The film is set in 2027 England, and the social order has nearly collapsed now that mankind is no longer able to reproduce.) Shockingly, midway through the scene, the character played by Julianne Moore is shot in the chest and dies in Owen’s arms.

It’s almost incomprehensible. Moore gets second billing in the credits—you can’t believe they’re killing her off. It’s a moment of genuine horror: one moment she and Owen are playfully firing a Ping Pong ball back and forth into each other’s mouths, and the next she’s lying limp in the front seat, covered in blood, her mouth now slack. (Moore does the most uncannily convincing onscreen death since Kevin Spacey in L.A. Confidential.) For a moment, you even think it’s a trick. The film is set in the future—maybe they’ll use some kind of Alias-style cloning machine to bring her back?

Of course not. Children of Men is science fiction, but it’s set in the real world. She’s gone. And while the film ends on a redemptive note, that note is played on a very small and grim violin. Even if we found a cure for infertility, Owen says in one scene, what would be the point? The world’s too fucked up now; it’s beyond fixing.

Hmm... if that’s his attitude, maybe Owen would have been a bad choice to play James Bond after all. Saving the planet is a task better suited to the Jennifer Garners of the world. In the final season of Alias, she even gave birth to a baby in about five minutes flat.

Godard and Theraflu

I was in pretty rough shape last night. It’s been a busy couple of days for me: I finished moving the last of my possessions—about two carloads’ worth—to my new apartment. I had gone on an extended shopping spree, buying laundry hampers and shower curtains and a bookcase that felt like it weighed as much as I do, or at least that’s what I thought at Home Depot when I dropped it on my toe.

I spent my entire Saturday alone at the office, trying to get caught up at work. I found out that my shower and my dishwasher don’t work, and probably won’t work until late next week, after the holidays. The same goes for my cable installation. I cut a gash in the base of my thumb on a shard of broken glass while trying to hang a picture. Oh yeah—and I’m sick. My body aches, my head throbs, I feel a sharp pain in my back whenever I cough and two thin rivulets of mucus trickle from my nostrils whenever I bend forward. I’m so sick that I think I’m going to have to postpone my first-ever face-to-face date with Carrie, a woman I’ve been ardently corresponding with over the internet. On New Year’s Eve, no less! The perfect kissing opportunity!

I desperately needed some cheering up, and the DVD I chose to do the job may surprise you: Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental 1961 “musical” A Woman Is a Woman. (My very cool parents gave me the Criterion edition of the film for Christmas.) I had seen it only once before, and that was many years ago—I remember absolutely loving it, but had only a hazy recollection of the film’s specifics.

I remembered the seemingly random way Michel Legrand’s score abruptly cuts in and out on the soundtrack, as if Godard couldn’t stand to hear it for more than four seconds at a time. I remembered the scene where the film’s gorgeous star, Anna Karina, performs a striptease at a club—I loved the way she looks right into the camera as she sings a song about how men forgive her everything because she’s just so beautiful. Oddly, though, my clearest memory of the film was the way Jean-Claude Brialy, playing Karina’s husband, briskly brushes the dirt off the soles of his feet before climbing into bed. It was one of those squalid bits of everyday human behaviour that I’d never seen depicted in a movie before, and to me it seemed like a minor cinematic breakthrough.

But of course, this whole exhilarating film plays like a series of cinematic breakthroughs. Shot in sequence, without a finished script, A Woman Is a Woman feels as though it’s making itself up as it goes along. At one point, Karina announces she wishes she were in a musical starring Cyd Charisse and Gene Kelly, and without warning, brassy music starts playing and Karina performs a quick, charmingly amateurish dance routine right there on the dingy Parisian streets. In another scene, Karina, who’s trying to decide whether to go to a club with Brialy or Jean-Paul Belmondo, says she’ll accompany the man “who does the most extraordinary thing”—whereupon Brialy and Belmondo each perform a flurry of silly mime routines. There’s only the barest pretense that the actors are playing characters: Belmondo makes a (literally) winking reference to “my pal Burt Lancaster” and Jeanne Moreau even makes a cameo appearance late in the film. (They ask her how the shooting of Jules and Jim is going; she shrugs modestly and replies, “Moderato.”)

I love the tossed-off casualness of this film, as if making a movie were as easy and spontaneous as scat-singing. And I treasure the sense of freedom it creates—as if there’s no human problem that a simple jump cut can’t solve. When Karina needs to quickly change out of her striptease costume at the end of one scene, she simply steps through a “magic” box backstage and emerges two seconds later on the other side, miraculously back in her street clothes again.

It’s no big challenge to transform your life, Godard seems to be saying. And even though I’m barely able to move, I believe him. I feel like big changes are afoot for me in the New Year. Carrie seems smart, funny and incredibly cool. She plays Nina Simone songs on her guitar at one in the morning. And I won’t be sick forever.