Moviegoer Diary: American Gangster, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

AMERICAN GANGSTER

Plot in a Nutshell:
Denzel Washington is a ’70s Harlem drug kingpin and Russell Crowe is the New Jersey cop determined to bring him down.

Thoughts:
I spent the last couple of days catching up with the last few Oscar nominees I still hadn’t seen. (I don’t think I’ll ever get around to watching Elizabeth: The Golden Age or La Vie en Rose, though. I feel more guilty about that second omission than the first one, especially since Marion Cotillard looked like such a movie star when she accepted her Best Actress Oscar, but since Oscar-baiting musical biopics have replaced post-apocalyptic action movies and fantasy epics based on multi-volume children’s novels as my new least-favourite film genre, I think I’ll just wait to catch her next year opposite Johnny Depp in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.)

Anyway: American Gangster! Wow... Ruby Dee is barely in this thing! I’m guessing she has less than five minutes of screen time—her performance might even be briefer than Judi Dench’s Oscar-winning turn in Shakespeare in Love. (Has anyone gotten out a stopwatch and actually calculated which performance is longer? I’d be curious to find out.)

Even though the bit where Dee slaps Denzel Washington after learning the extent to which he’s in trouble with the law is a fun, melodramatic acting moment—it really looks like she slaps him, too! I mean, she really gets in a good wallop!—Dee’s performance as a whole left me a little cold, her “naturalistic” line delivery coming across as overly calculated and her body language distractingly busy.

But at least Dee makes more of an impression than most of the supporting performers in this curiously flat crime epic, which works neither as a cop-vs.-crook battle-of-the-titans star vehicle for Crowe and Washington, nor as a GoodFellas-style evocation of a colourful, bygone criminal milieu. Too much time is devoted to tangents like Crowe’s custody battle for his son, and Washington’s performance seems like a miscalculation—I assume he and director Ridley Scott were hoping to show the paradox of a ruthless, amoral drug dealer who could also be extremely charming in his personal dealings, but they end up only sentimentalizing him. By the time I got to the film’s final image—a would-be “iconic” freeze-frame of Crowe and Washington, now middle-aged best buddies, cradling their takeout coffee as they cross a busy New York street—I no longer had any idea what Scott was trying to say with this film. Cops and criminals aren’t so different after all? Middle age erases all grudges? Everyone becomes legit if they stick around long enough? Thank God for the person who invented the cardboard coffee-cup sleeve?

RATING: 2/5




THE DIVING BELL AND THE BUTTERFLY

Plot in a Nutshell:
Julian Schnabel’s visually inventive adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir about life as a nearly completely paralyzed victim of “locked-in syndrome.”

Thoughts:
This is a really silly point to start off with, but why do reviewers always say that Jean-Dominique Bauby “blinked out” his memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly? Since he could move only one of his eyelids, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that he winked it out? Or does that just make him sound too coy and flirtatious?

I don’t think Bauby would have taken offence at my observation—one of the best moments in Schnabel’s film comes when a pair of workers arrive in Bauby’s hospital room to install a speakerphone next to his bed. When they learn that he’s completely paralyzed, they ask Bauby’s therapist what use he could possible have for a phone, whereupon one of them remarks, “Maybe he’s a heavy breather!” The therapist angrily scolds them for their irreverence, but we hear Bauby chuckling to himself via voiceover, laughing from deep within his cavernous physical prison.

This light Gallic spirit helps distinguish The Diving Bell and the Butterfly from so many other disease-of-the-week movies—it’s less about the misery of Bauby’s condition than it is about Bauby’s ability to recall the sensual pleasures he enjoyed when he had command of his body, and to appreciate the small bits of colour and stimulation that exist even within the restricted world of his hospital: the red and white stripes of a nearby lighthouse; a new fur hat; the illustrations in an old copy of The Count of Monte Cristo; the beauty of his female therapists; the heartbreaking sound of his aging father’s voice over the telephone.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly seemed to strike a personal chord particularly with movie critics, who perhaps identified with the way so much of Bauby’s day consists of nothing but passive observation, and painstaking writing sessions. It’s easy to feel like little more than a disembodied eyeball when you’re a full-time movie critic, and it’s nice to see a movie that makes living life that way seem so brave and heroic.

RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: The Mountain Goats' Heretic Pride

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
Heretic Pride
(4AD)
*** 1/2 (out of five)

When I say that John Darnielle is the best lyricist working in rock music today, I know that’s an entirely personal assessment. Something about the discipline of his song structures, the way his verses proceed inexorably toward their final rhyming syllables, the specificity with which he evokes settings and characters (the way, in the title song on The Mountain Goats’ new disc Heretic Pride, he takes the time to note “the honeysuckle on the faint breeze” even as a mob is tearing his body to pieces), his ability to retain a certain wry, clinical detachment even in the midst of some fairly extreme emotional states... it all works for me in a way few other songwriters do.

The Mountain Goats release new material at such a reliable pace—roughly an album every 12 or 13 months—that it doesn’t matter so much to me that Heretic Pride isn’t the emotionally shattering masterpiece that I thought its predecessor, 2006’s Get Lonely, was. Keep giving me half a dozen songs every year like the self-hating screed “Autoclave,” the vivid relationship sketch “How to Embrace a Swamp Creature” or the mysterious “Tianchi Lake,” and I’ll be more than happy.

The Trouble With Dribbles

Semi-Pro takes place in 1976 during the last season of the freewheeling American Basketball Association before it was absorbed into the more staid NBA. Will Ferrell plays Jackie Moon, the owner, coach, and power forward of the fictitious (but wonderfully named) Flint Tropics: told that the top four ABA teams will join the NBA and the rest will be disbanded, Moon makes it his mission to pull his hapless squad out of the basement and finish the season in fourth place.

The makers of Semi-Pro aren’t much more ambitious in their goals. No one’s trying to make a classic comedy here—unlike Slap Shot, one of the film’s obvious inspirations, Semi-Pro isn’t really a movie so much as a place where Will Ferrell and his comedy buddies (who this time out include Will Arnett, Andy Richter, Rob Corddry, and Woody Harrelson) can hang out for 90 minutes or so. They’re like a bunch of veteran athletes playing an inconsequential mid-season game without many people in the stands: they can pass and shoot like All-Stars, but they’re not exactly hustling for the ball.

And I was fine with that: Semi-Pro’s amiably sloppy tone actually seems perfectly appropriate to a story about a basketball team so poor that it can’t even afford to pay the winner of a $10,000 halftime free-throw contest. One of my favourite scenes shows Ferrell and a couple of his teammates sitting around a poker table in a smoke-filled rec room with the two sportscasters who cover the Tropics for the local TV station. The scene doesn’t really go anywhere, but I like the convivial vibe it establishes, not just the fun of watching guys like Ferrell, Arnett, and Tim Meadows casually riffing on each other, but the way it suggests a certain camaraderie between the athletes and the broadcasters, all of them stuck in a third-rate city and doing what they can not to feel like failures.

I’m sure critics are going to slam Ferrell for playing yet another blowhard idiot in yet another smart-dumb sports comedy, as if Talladega Nights, Kicking and Screaming, and Blades of Glory hadn’t already exhausted the genre. I’m more forgiving towards it; I tend to view Will Ferrell movies as sort of a throwback to the movie comedy series of the ’30s and ’40s starring Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, comics who played essentially the same parts in film after film. Did people back then complain their movies were repetitive? I don’t think so; if anything, I think the repetitiveness was kind of a virtue.

It helps that Jackie Moon is one of Ferrell’s more appealing characters—unlike his blustery, macho buffoons in Talladega Nights and Blades of Glory, Moon is more of an overgrown, easily wounded kid, a one-hit-wonder who used the money from his big song (a surreal bit of sub-Barry White bedroom funk called “Love Me Sexy,” whose lyrics, it turns out, he stole from his mother) to buy a basketball team and thereby realize his dream of playing in the pros. The only place you see him throwing his weight around is in the DJ booth at the nightclub he owns, where a little sign taped to the glass amusingly warns, “We don’t take requests anymore!”

That’s too bad, because I have one. I'm cutting you some slack on Semi-Pro, Will Ferrell, but if you do decide to make another sports comedy, could you at least be sure to get John C. Reilly to be in it too?

Black Hole Stuns

The news that David Fincher has signed on to a prospective film version of Charles Burns' amazing graphic novel Black Hole seems as apt an occasion as any for me to post this interview I did with Burns when the book first came out, back in December of 2005. Even then, there was movie interest in Black Hole, but back then the director attached to the project, as you'll see, was High Tension/Hills Have Eyes 2 horror auteur Alexandre Aja. Fincher seems like a definite upgrade: done right (if it gets done at all), the film version of Black Hole could combine the pitch-perfect ’70s sense memory Fincher displayed in Zodiac with the not-everything-here-is-as-it-seems unease of Seven.

Man... already I can't wait to see it.

Plus, I couldn't be more pleased at the thought of a mainstream audience getting exposed to Burns' distinctively eerie sensibility—although I hope that Fincher brings his own visual style to the material and doesn't try to do for Burns what 300 and Sin City did for Frank Miller and simply Xerox Burns' inky black-and-white images onto the big screen. But enough of my thoughts: let's hear Burns speak for himself.

* * * *

Once you’ve had one of Charles Burns’s illustrations pointed out to you, you start to recognize them everywhere—once you know what to look for. Flowing lines, precisely inked shadows, luscious pools of black, black ink, a vague sense of uneasy menace that underlies even his work for ultra-mainstream publications like The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly. (The people he draws all seem to have flashlights shining up under their chins.) Maybe you recall the memorable cover he drew for Iggy Pop’s Brick by Brick album, or saw the national ad campaign he designed for Altoids or the multiple portraits he’s created for the cover of every single issue of The Believer. He’s worked so long and so successfully as a graphic artist, he says over the phone from his home in Philadephia, that “many of the people in that world of illustration have absolutely no idea I draw comics.”

But Burns does draw comics—brilliant, disturbing, haunting, unforgettable comics full of monsters, nightmarish violence, Mexican wrestlers and deviant sexual behaviour. (He once published a children’s book, but it was called Face-tasm: The Creepy Mix-and-Match Book of Face Mutations.) For the last 11 years, Burns has been working on what most critics consider his masterpiece: a graphic novel named Black Hole. Fittingly, one of the main characters is a teenager who circulates among the normal kids at his high school, none of whom realize he’s actually a mutant.

First published serially in 12 separate installments by Fantagraphics, Black Hole is the culmination of themes Burns has been exploring since 1981, when his friend Art Spiegelman invited him to contribute to the third issue of Raw, the influential magazine that played a pivotal role in convincing the literary establishment that comics could be a legitimate vehicle for adult artistic expression. Burns’s stories were in some ways the most traditional things Raw every published—they had strong narratives, they borrowed from familiar genres like detective mysteries or boys’ adventures, and they employed an accessible, old-fashioned visual style that recalled the look of ’40s romance comics or Tales From the Crypt. But Burns had an unerring talent for taking a familiar, innocuous setup for a story and tapping into the Jungian pool of dread lurking just beneath it. His closest cinematic equivalent is probably David Lynch; a typical Burns comic starts out like Blue Velvet and ends up like Eraserhead.

Black Hole is probably the most mature work Burns has ever created; its pages still contain plenty of images of deformed flesh, but Burns creates such a vivid sense of time and place—an unnamed town in the Pacific Northwest in the early ’70s—that it lingers in your memory as a work of naturalism, not a sci-fi/horror story about a sexually transmitted disease that turns teenagers into monsters. “There are certainly things in the book that happened to me to one degree or another,” Burns said, “although they certainly weren’t that extreme. I had a much more sheltered existence than what I portray here. But I could have told a similar story without the whole idea of the teen plague. There were certainly runaway kids hiding out in the woods where I grew up who led very similar, difficult lives to the ones in the book.”

Both the “normal” teens and the mutant teens hang out in the woods in Black Hole: the normal ones gather in a clearing they call “Planet Xeno” to smoke dope and ponder their empty futures; the mutants (once-normal teens whose bodies now sport a wide, unpredictable variety of goiters, growths and pustules) sit around the fire and eat buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken they’ve foraged from the outskirts of town. But one of the most intriguing things about Black Hole is that the line between the normals and the mutants is much hazier than you’d think: a boy named Rob still goes to high school, wearing high collars and turtlenecks to hide the miniature second mouth, complete with teeth and tongue, that’s appeared on his throat; a beautiful budding artist named Eliza has sprouted a tail, which she kinkily tells her new boyfriend Keith to grab onto as they make love; a girl named Chris doesn’t even realize she has a seam in her skin opening up along her spine until she goes skinny dipping with some friends and wonders why they’re all pointing in horror at her.

“I put a lot of thought into how the disease would manifest itself in each character in metaphorical ways,” Burns says. “You’ve got Chris, who’s literally shedding her skin like a snake—so you’ve got the idea of being that age and wanting to slip out of your skin and transform yourself and get away from yourself. There’s Rob with his other mouth, which speaks when he doesn’t want it to speak, as if his subconscious mind starts to talk when he’s sleeping and revealing things he doesn’t necessarily want to admit to.

“But one of my favourite touches is also this overweight girl who you see sitting with the mutants in the woods even though you can’t see anything that’s necessarily wrong with her. I like the idea that you’ve got this group of outcast kids living out in the woods, and perhaps she’s been treated horribly all her life because of her weight and so she’s run off to be with them because she feels more comfortable in those surroundings. It’s nothing I spelled out, but I like playing around with those ideas. The same thing happens in that scene where Keith is tripping out on LSD and runs into this group of kids in the woods—they’re all staring at the fire the way his friends were staring at the TV, but he feels more camaraderie with them than he does with his own friends.”


There doesn’t appear to be a surrogate “Charles Burns” character in Black Hole, but the entire book contains so many well-observed images and snatches of dialogue and tiny details—the stultifying educational films the kids watch in science class, the bologna, lettuce and Miracle Whip sandwiches for lunch, the David Bowie Diamond Dogs LP on the turntable sounding like a dispatch from outer space—that it all seems autobiographical.

“In theory, the story could happen now,” Burns says. “But ultimately I decided to set it in the ’70s because I thought it would help me speak with authority about what I was going through at that time, because that was the time I was going through it. And I just thought that early ’70s atmosphere helped enrich the story; it’s the aftermath of the ’60s, the sexual revolution has taken place, drugs are now part of the everyday culture, but the wave has crashed and everyone’s kind of settled into this much less idealistic culture. You’ve got that stoner house with the Jimi Hendrix and M.C. Escher posters on the wall, but they’re all just settled in there like zombies—they’ve got long hair, but they’re more like fratboys who are smoking pot instead of drinking beer.”

There’s a bit of a stoner vibe to the book’s overall mood as well, in the sense that the plot doesn’t so much move forward as wander deep inside its characters’ heads and circle around and around in a series of impressionistic, allusive flashbacks and flash-forwards, dreams and nightmares. It’s not a fast-moving Dawn of the Dead thriller about a band of heroes trying to hold off the spread of a plague; the disease is just a fact of life in Black Hole, and no one seems to be doing much to stop it from spreading or to help its victims. At times, in fact, the book’s mood of hopeless, all-pervading sadness is almost overwhelming.

“I had a few false starts on the story,” Burns says. “Initially I approached the story in a more plot-driven way: ‘Okay, here’s what happens to this society when the plague breaks out.’ The parents were rounding up the kids and putting them into sort of internment camps and so on. But it just felt very heavy-handed to me. I found that I liked it better when the characters treated the disease like it was just part of their existence. And so I made a conscious effort to really focus on the characters and make the book more of a reflection of my internal world when I was that age. And I also made a conscious effort not to have any adults in the book. When you’re that age, you’re very self-centred—there’s this total immersion you do into yourself and your friends, and my memory is that parents might be there, but they’re not really players.”

A movie version of Black Hole, to be directed by Alexandre Aja (of High Tension fame), is currently in the planning stages at Paramount Studios; in the meantime, Burns is working on an animated film for a French studio as well as an anthology of various uncollected stories and commercial illustrations. He’s busy, but it’ll probably be a while before we see something else on the scale of Black Hole from him. “I don’t know if I have a whole bunch of other long stories in me,” he says. “I enjoyed working that way, starting and stopping over a period of years. It was a frustrating pace at times, but it was probably ultimately a good way to work; it allowed me to step back sometimes instead of barreling through. It’s just nice now not having to worry about getting into a car wreck and dying before it’s all finished.”

Moviegoer Diary: Be Kind Rewind, The Red Balloon

BE KIND REWIND

Plot in a Nutshell:
Two friends make their own no-budget versions of Hollywood movies when they accidentally erase the entire stock of the VHS rental store where one of them works.

Thoughts:
No movie that loves Fats Waller as much as this one does can be all bad—although it’s a little puzzling why director Michel Gondry doesn’t include more footage of Waller performing or use more of his music on the soundtrack. (I’m particularly fond of “The Only Oyster in the Stew” myself—I once even wrote a novel with that title!)

Then again, I suppose this is a movie where original creative artifacts don’t matter as much as the homemade tributes and recreations of them. And the ramshackle, completely fictitious Fats Waller biopic that closes the film is as impishly delightful as anything Waller ever recorded—there’s a beautiful, brief image of an upright piano with a bunch of neighbourhood residents hiding inside it and sticking their fingers through a long slot to create the “keys.” (And of course the keys are black and white!)

Be Kind Rewind is full of winningly goofy gags like that one, many of them so silly you can’t imagine them working anywhere outside a cartoon. I’m thinking of the incredibly specific camouflage gear Jack Black and Mos Def don to break into a power plant, or the scene where Danny Glover writes Mos Def a message on the window of a train—Def dutifully copies down the backwards letters and spends the next few days trying to decipher what these strange symbols could possibly mean. (The lightbulb finally goes on when he notices the marker has soaked through to the other side of the paper... the letters readable at last!)

I love that this movie has about as much interest in explaining the finer details of its plot as we in the audience are—i.e., practically zero. When Jack Black gets magnetized, the scene has all the scientific plausibility (and the cheesy special effects) of an ’80s comedy like Weird Science... and the scene where he gets demagnetized is even goofier. (He basically eliminates the magnetism out in a thick, yellow stream of magnetized urine that attracts all sorts of nuts, bolts, and stray auto parts as it trickles into the sewer.) Gondry seems to realize we in the audience are so eager to get to the scenes where Black and Def start making their ramshackle versions of Ghostbusters and Driving Miss Daisy that we’ll go along with whatever excuse the film cooks up to get us there.

For all its shaggy imperfections and its (intentionally?) clichéd I’ve-got-a-crazy-plan-to-save-the-business! plotline, by the end of the film, Be Kind Rewind has built up a surprising amount of audience goodwill. The plot may be sloppy, but a lot of care has been lavished on the relationships between the characters and the agreeably rickety production design. (The sets look as though they could fall apart if an actor so much as nudges them the wrong way.)

This is what you call a movie with its heart in the right place—it has an affection for the mongrel, homegrown culture of those pockets of the United States into which the corporations haven’t yet penetrated that reminded me of those great Jonathan Demme movies of the ’70s and ’80s: Melvin and Howard, Citizens Band, Something Wild, Married to the Mob.

I wonder if any of those movies are in stock at Danny Glover’s video store. If they are, I’d happily pay the $30 fee to rent them.

RATING: 4.5/5




THE RED BALLOON

Plot in a Nutshell:
Albert Lamorisse’s beloved 1956 short film about a Parisian schoolboy who befriends a sentient balloon.

Thoughts:
I know it’s the title, but I really wasn’t prepared for how incredibly red the balloon in this movie turned out to be. I’ve never seen a balloon this red in my life—do you think the filmmakers treated the balloon with some kind of special paint or dye to get it looking that way? At the end of the movie, when a mean kid throws a stone at the balloon and causes it to deflate, you can see this weird, oily coating kind of cracking all over its surface.

The balloon is also a lot bigger than I was expecting. I mean, wow—no wonder all those kids start throwing stones at it in the final scene. It’s an irresistible target!

My favourite scene in the movie is when the kid and the balloon visit a flea market. There’s a quick, funny moment where the balloon floats past a mirror and pauses in front of it, apparently to look at itself. I wonder what’s going through the balloon’s mind at this moment. Has it ever seen a mirror before? Is it thinking, “Damn—I am one good-looking balloon!” Or maybe, “Jesus, how did I get so fat?”

There’s another silly but amusing scene where the boy and the balloon encounter a little girl walking the other way and holding onto a blue balloon. Immediately, the red balloon switches directions and floats after the blue balloon. I wonder what the balloon finds so sexy about this balloon: the colour? The shape? If it were a little less inflated, would the red balloon consider it less attractive? Do some balloons identify as male and others as female? Do balloons reproduce? Do they have sex? I picture a kinky light-bondage scenario with the red balloon rubbing the blue balloon on a sweater and sticking her on the ceiling for a while.

RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters

HERBIE HANCOCK
River: The Joni Letters
(Verve)
** (out of five)

Are the Grammys hopelessly out of touch, or do they simply not give a fuck? I used to think it was the former, but last week when the Grammy electorate awarded Album of the Year to a disc as completely irrelevant to the 2007 music scene as Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, I’m wondering if they’re deliberately sending a message to artists everywhere. Stop forging innovative new business models, Radiohead! Your visionary songwriting gives us a headache, Arcade Fire! Quit trying to impress us with your street-savvy world music hybrids, M.I.A.! Oh, and LCD Soundsystem? Screw you.

Weren’t you listening to us back in 2005 when we gave Album of the Year to Ray Charles for that Starbucks album Genius Loves Company? I mean, if you want us to take your album seriously, we’d better hear Norah Fucking Jones singing on it somewhere.

Look—Herbie Hancock and Joni Mitchell are both indisputable music icons. But this dull, suffocatingly tasteful album, full of competent playing and inoffensive guest vocals by Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, and, yes, Norah Jones, hardly represents their most innovative or memorable work.

An enterprising music journalist needs to do a piece about the behind-the-scenes politicking that resulted in this obscure, backwards-looking album, which neither sold well nor got particularly glowing reviews, winning one of the music industry’s top awards. Done right, it could win a Pulitzer—and it might even deserve it too.

And The Oscar Goes To... Carice Van Houten?

Here's an article that's going to appear in this week's issue of SEE Magazine, the Edmonton alt-weekly I work for. It doesn't exactly have a groundbreaking premise—two critics offering alternative, off-the-beaten-path choices for nominees in the five major Oscar categories—but hopefully some of our picks will be lively and interesting. (By the way, G.H. Lewmer's "Freedom of Choice" column, which gets alluded to in the introduction, is an interesting feature that I think may be unique in North America. It's devoted to discussions of movies that are legally available to be viewed online—sometimes on YouTube or Google Video, and sometimes on smaller, more specialized film sites. It's worth a click on the SEE Magazine site.)

Anyway, enjoy the article! I tried my hand at creating some fancier-than-usual visual elements for the blog version of this article, and I think they look pretty slick, if I do say so myself—for someone who barely knows his way around Photoshop, anyway.

* * *

The Oscars are going to happen after all, and hallelujah for that—what would SEE’s squadron of film critics have to complain about otherwise? Somehow, moaning about the tacky production numbers at the BAFTAs just wouldn’t have been the same.

Well, we at SEE may not have the resources to stage an elaborate awards ceremony or convince George Clooney and Nicole Kidman to hand out statuettes or hire Jon Stewart to host or even pay Bruce Vilanch to write our jokes for us. What we can do better than just about anyone, however, is second-guess the nominations in the five major categories and offer our suggestions as to personal favourites and under-the-Academy-radar obscurities that, in a perfect world, we would have liked to have seen nominated instead. Remember: these are not predictions as to who will win, but rather our choices of films and actors who probably never stood a hope in Hell of even showing up on the shortlist.

SEE film editor Paul Matwychuk sat down with “Freedom of Choice” columnist G.H. Lewmer last week to hash the whole thing out. Here’s their conversation.



BEST PICTURE

Paul Matwychuk: The conventional wisdom you see among critics is that this year, for a change, the two leading contenders for Best Picture—No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood—are also the year’s two biggest critics’ darlings. And that almost never happens. Then you’ve got Michael Clayton, which I probably wouldn’t have nominated myself, but which is a solid, grown-up thriller that will probably age very well 20 years from now. And then Juno and Atonement, which I thought were pretty bad movies. To me, Atonement is like Out of Africa or The Mission—one of those “prestigious” Oscar nominees that a year later no one even remembers. And Juno... good gravy, I think Juno is just about the worst movie of the year.

GHL: Well, that’s interesting, because the two films I liked the most were the two films you hated. And I was appalled that There Will Be Blood was even nominated. That’s a terrible, terrible film—I’m shocked and saddened that people actually consider this a great work of art. The first part of the film is made with a lot of artistry, but then at a certain point, it’s as though Johnny LaRue gets into the director’s chair. By the time you get to that final scene in the bowling alley, it’s become so dramatically ludicrous that I was cringing in my seat—one guy is channeling Al Pacino and the other guy is channeling Jerry Lewis. I had a similar reaction to No Country for Old Men: the whole narrative falls apart after the first five minutes. But I find that whole serial-killer metaphor fairly tiresome. Juno, on the other hand, surprised me: it’s very much a working-class film, which is very, very rare in Hollywood. It reminded me of a Leo McCarey film—it’s very well-cast, with likable people in all the roles...

PM: Very likable people, but oh my God, that dialogue drove me up the goddamned wall. It’s so precious, so overwritten... I wasn’t convinced by a moment of it.

GHL: Well, it has a very unsettling subtext in the way it makes a baby seem like a pretty disposable thing—after it’s born, you sit around with the father and write really bad songs and sing off-key. But again, what I think resonates for audiences with that film, what makes it seem like such an “underdog” movie, is that there are so few movies with strong working-class characters and so few films that deal with genuine human emotions. Give Jason Reitman credit: the sets and locations have a wonderful, non-manufactured quality to them, which is very rare nowadays.

PM: I’m reluctant to give Juno credit for doing anything well, but I’ll give it that. But is there a film you think was even more deserving of a Best Picture nomination than Juno?

GHL: Well, I came up with three, and they’re sort of replacement picks for three of the actual nominees. Instead of Atonement, for instance, I think they could have nominated a film like Paul Verhoeven’s WWII thriller Black Book, which is a much better-made film, and much more disturbing and unsettling. Instead of Juno, I think another small film that really resonated with people was the Sean Penn film Into the Wild. And instead of Michael Clayton, I would have preferred to see a nomination for Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which I think really had its finger on the pulse of the economic meltdown going on right now in America and their decline as a world superpower. I think 20 years from now, it will be remembered much more favourably—but of course, the Academy isn’t exactly known for its vision.

PM: I have two picks here. One is a title that a lot of other critics have singled out as this year’s biggest Oscar snub, and that’s Zodiac. I’m not a big David Fincher fan, but I think here he really does something amazing. You get those bravura visual coups he’s famous for—the Transamerica Building sequence, that “impossible” overhead shot of the taxicab—but what lingers in your memory is the way all the tedious minutiae of this case add up to something larger, into this profound statement about the nature of obsession, the irresistible attraction of immersing yourself in an unsolvable riddle. And my other pick is a title that only I seem to love, and that’s William Friedkin’s Bug. It’s the kind of small, completely nutty movie that has no chance of getting Oscar nominations, but I’ll tell you: no other movie from last year got under my skin the way this one did. No other movie was scarier—not even Zodiac—and no other movie was more romantic.



BEST ACTOR

PM: I’ve got a few people on my shortlist in this category: I was thinking of Chris Cooper, who does a fascinating character study in Breach; I was thinking of Gordon Pinsent, who’s been kind of overshadowed by the praise for Julie Christie in Away From Her; and I was also thinking of Glen Hansard, who’s so natural and likable as the street musician in Once. But I finally settled on Thomas Turgoose, who plays the kid who falls in with a skinhead gang in This Is England. I love this kid. I’m often ambivalent about child performances; so often the memorable ones are almost like a kind of freakish stunt where you’re really just marveling at their ability, their poise in front of the camera more than the quality of their characterization. But this performance doesn’t feel studied in that way; to me, it’s like the kind of performance Marlon Brando might have given if he were 12. It’s a complicated part, and I love the way Turgoose takes you all the way through this kid’s moral development, less through dialogue than by the look on his face.

GHL: I only came up with two choices here, and one of them is arguably a supporting performance. That would be Vincent Cassel in Eastern Promises. I thought he did a fine job in a difficult role—he has to be very showy, but he also has to be complementary to Viggo Mortenson. He really became that character. My other choice would be Christian Bale, for... well, for a collection of performances he gave last year. If I had to, I would single out Rescue Dawn, but he’s great in 3:10 to Yuma as well. He’s a movie star in the way that Gary Cooper or John Garfield was—he’s a good actor who also knows how to take on larger-than-life characters, and seeing actors do that is one of the reasons we go to the movies. Oh—I nearly forgot: I also loved Philip Seymour Hoffman in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead.



BEST ACTRESS

GHL: I have two women who I thought would be worthwhile nominees. One is Carice van Houten from Black Book. She is amazing in that film. She’s in every single scene, I think, and Verhoeven really puts her through the wringer.

PM: That’s a great choice. If that movie was in English, she would be a huge star by now.

GHL: Absolutely. She’d probably have won this category hands-down too. The other person I thought about was a French actress named Déborah François, who was in a movie called The Page Turner. This was a very creepy, very well-modulated, very on performance that I know really resonates with the handful of people who’ve seen it. She carries that film, and she does so in a way that never lessens the mystery at the centre of it.

PM: I was thinking of people like Molly Shannon in Year of the Dog—don’t roll your eyes at me!—and also Amber Tamblyn in a little movie called Stephanie Daley, which is a much more perceptive and provocative movie about teen pregnancy than Juno. It’s a crime Ellen Page from Juno is getting all this hype and Amber Tamblyn isn’t getting any. But for me, the performance of the year was Ashley Judd in Bug, in which she is so fierce, so fearless, so committed, it’s stunning. To me, it seems like evidence of a sort of institutional sexism in the critical community that Daniel Day-Lewis gets all this unanimous praise for his over-the-top performance in There Will Be Blood but when an actress like Ashley Judd really digs deep and goes big in a similar way in Bug, people laugh at her or get embarrassed or feel compelled to denigrate her work.



BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

PM: Okay, are you ready for my obligatory countdown of people I considered and rejected? In this category? I’ve got Kurt Russell, who gives pretty much a career-best performance in Death Proof, the Quentin Tarantino half of Grindhouse; I’ve got Brian Dierker, who is so unaffected and true as that middle-aged hippie who Emile Hirsch befriends in Into the Wild; and I’ve got Vlad Ivanov, who plays the villainous abortionist Mr. Bebe in 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. But my vote is going out to Gene Jones, who plays the gas station attendant in the coin-toss/“Friendo” scene in No Country for Old Men. He’s only in that one scene, but I think Jones makes as strong an impression as anyone else in that cast. His physicality is so specific—the skeptical, not-quite-fearful look in his eyes, the uncertain way his mouth hangs. And I think he creates a character who you believe has a life offscreen—you can imagine him working at this gas station in the middle of nowhere for years before this scene, and after it’s over, you wonder what happens to him, what he does with that coin Javier Bardem gives to him.

GHL: It’s a really well-cast movie. For me, the only supporting performance I could think of that really affected me was a guy named Joe Anderson in Across the Universe. He played Evan Rachel Wood’s brother who goes off to Vietnam. It’s a very problematic movie—

PM: To say the least!

GHL: —but I think he really does have starpower. I was really surprised at how drawn I was to him. He has a magnetism that I haven’t seen in a lot of actors in a long time. There’s a charm and exuberance to him that’s almost like James Cagney, and I have a feeling he’ll go on to a lot of bigger and better things.



BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

GHL: The person I’d have to say here is Maggie Cheung from Lust, Caution. It’s a minor role, but one that’s very important to the plot, and she completely disappears into the role. You would be surprised, knowing how glamourous Maggie Cheung is, how deeply she immerses herself into the role. You’d never recognize her.

PM: You know, I haven’t seen Lust, Caution. I knew it was long and kind of slow and so, despite the generally positive reviews, I just never quite felt up to watching it.

GHL: Yeah, it got kind of critically lambasted, which was pretty unfair—and, I thought, quite childish. It was as though people were punishing Ang Lee for the success of Brokeback Mountain. It deserved better.

PM: Some of the women I was thinking of as possibilities here were Kate Winslet, who’s cast wildly against type in Romance and Cigarettes, and Anjelica Huston, who has this lovely, mysterious power in The Darjeeling Limited. But my pick is Sigourney Weaver in a little Hollywood satire called The TV Set. She plays a TV executive named Lenny, who’s sort of the nemesis of this writer who’s trying to get a pilot he’s written on the air—and she’s the one who keeps urging him to dumb it down and take out all of the darker elements that make it interesting in the first place. I love that Weaver doesn’t play her as a villain—she’s one of those friendly, smiling corporate suits who’s always there to “help” you, who’s “on your side,” who’s urging you to “be practical.” It’s such a sharp, funny, recognizable characterization—very few of us ever meet guys like Daniel Plainview from There Will Be Blood in our lives, but I think all of us have encountered plenty of Lennys.

GHL: Show business breeds them.

Charles In Charge

When I was a kid growing up in the ’70s, some of my very favourite TV programs were daytime game shows. As a result, I regarded Paul Lynde (centre square on The Hollywood Squares) and Charles Nelson Reilly (the top-right chair on The Match Game) as the two funniest men in the world—well, second only to Bugs Bunny.

I was maybe eight years old, so the fact that Lynde and Reilly were gayer than Liberace’s living room zoomed right over my head. They just had a funny essence to them that went beyond their exaggerated voices. I liked their willingness to be silly, but you could tell they had very sharp minds and weren’t just clowns. They seemed endlessly amused by the world around them, and to me they also always seemed like they were getting away with some kind of secret joke that, judging by the scandalized reactions on those Match Game contestants’ faces practically every time Reilly opened his mouth, was probably really naughty. They made me laugh even if I was too young to understand their jokes. I felt like I was hearing something I wasn’t supposed to.

It turns out I was righter than I knew. At one point in The Life of Reilly—a filmed performance of Charles Nelson Reilly’s autobiographical one-man stage show Save It for the Stage—Reilly recalls a meeting early in his career with a powerful executive at NBC. This would be in the late ’50s, and while Reilly had done a lot of theatre, he had yet to break into television. According to Reilly, the executive took one look at him and said, “We don’t let queers on television.”

That executive, whoever he was, could not have been more wrong: if you watched TV at all in the ’70s, Reilly’s bespectacled face would have been pretty hard to avoid. He was a regular on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and kids’ shows like Lidsville, a guest star on countless sitcoms, a game show mainstay and, after Bob Hope, Johnny Carson’s most frequent all-time guest on The Tonight Show. In The Life of Reilly, he describes his habit of looking through the TV Guide and counting how many times he’d be on that week—sometimes the total would get as high as 56.

There are plenty of funny showbiz anecdotes in The Life of Reilly, but at its heart are Reilly’s heartbreaking stories about growing up amidst a profoundly dysfunctional family, which included his depressed, alcoholic father (an illustrator who never got over his failure to accept a job offer from Walt Disney), his lobotomized aunt, and a mother who seemed determined to crush the dreams of everyone around her.

Except for a couple of references to adults in the neighbourhood calling him “odd” (or worse), Reilly doesn’t talk much about what it was like to be gay in this environment, and yet his story is suffused with the sense of how important it was for this lonely little outsider to be able to escape into a world of make-believe, whether that meant putting on puppet shows, going to the movies, or getting cast as Christopher Columbus in the school play.

And Reilly, who was 73 when the film was shot, is absolutely wondrous in what would turn out to be his final stage appearance before his death in May of last year: so funny, so focused, so touching, so absolutely present onstage, you could swear he’s reliving every story he tells all over again. This is a man, after all, who studied acting under Uta Hagen in the same class as Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, and Geraldine Page, and there’s a moment late in the film when he recites a soliloquy from Hamlet that's so unexpected, and such a transcendentally joyous affirmation of Reilly's acting talent, that it brought tears to my eyes.

I’m not embarrassed to say I cried at a few other spots in this movie, and I laughed a hell of a lot too. It’s easy to forget how much strength it takes sometimes just to be funny, and in that sense, Charles Nelson Reilly gives a performance here of rare power. The Life of Reilly is a movie to treasure.

The Musicgoer: Hot Chip's Made in the Dark

HOT CHIP
Made in the Dark
(EMI)
**** (out of five)

I was reading an interview with the hipster-pleasing British electronica/dance band Hot Chip in Blender—yeah, that’s right, Blender. You wanna make something of it?—in which they expressed unexpected affection for the cheesy Phil Collins song “One More Night.” At first, it seems as though they only like it because of the distinctive sound of the snare—one more bit of ’80s nostalgia, ripe for ironic reappropriation. But then Joe Goddard starts talking about the lyrics, which he feels have a naked longing that wouldn’t sound out of place in a Hot Chip song.

Hot Chip’s new disc Made in the Dark has a lot of fun showing off their cheeky inventiveness at the mixing board—nowhere more so than on the Todd Rundgren-sampling “Shake a Fist,” which literally stops dead a couple of minute in so that a snarky-sounding voice can invite you to strap on some headphones, crank up the volume and “play a game called ‘Sounds of the Studio.’” But on tracks like “One Pure Thought” or outright ballads like “We’re Looking for a Lot of Love” or “In the Privacy of Our Love,” they achieve a tenderness that’s remarkably irony-free. Phil Collins would heartily approve.

My Art Belongs To Daddy

Halfway through the docu-mentary My Kid Could Paint That, we see proud parents Mark and Laura Olmstead curled up on their couch to watch 60 Minutes. It’s the night that a segment is airing about their daughter Marla, who, despite being only four years old, is one of the art world’s great rising stars, with collectors paying four- and five-figure sums for her cheerful, colourful abstract canvases. She’s a pee-wee Pollock, a pre-kindergarten Kandinsky, a De Kooning in diapers, a rugrat Rauschenberg, a toddler Twombly—okay, okay, I’ll stop—and even TV shows with zero interest in modern art have been eating her story up.

At first, the 60 Minutes piece follows the Marla Olmstead boilerplate, with Mark, an amateur painter himself, describing how he first put a paintbrush in Marla’s hand, and Anthony Brunelli, the local gallery owner who “discovered” Marla and her eagerest promoter, describing her as a prodigy on par with Mozart.

But then the report takes an unexpected turn, as a child psychologist examines the footage the 60 Minutes crew has shot of Marla painting. Her mood darkens. Marla isn’t behaving the way a true child prodigy would, she says, and her painting technique seems markedly different from that of the paintings being exhibited under her name. Hidden-camera footage of Marla at work seems to suggest that her father Mark is coaching her from the sidelines. The psychologist doesn’t come right out and say it, but the segment basically implies that Mark is either embellishing Marla’s paintings after the fact or is creating them himself. Either way, the Olmsteads appear to be perpetrating a massive fraud.

In some ways, My Kid Could Paint That is more interesting before the question of the authorship of Marla’s paintings arises. I love stories about the nature of art, and the Marla Olmstead case raises exactly the kinds of questions that, as someone who evaluates art for a living, I find most provocative. Is it possible for a four-year-old with no aesthetic consciousness to make art? What’s the difference between Marla and one of those elephants at the zoo that “paints” canvases when you stick a brush in its trunk? Should the story behind the creation of a work of art, or the artist’s biography, have any bearing on art’s artistic merit? How much influence can her father have over the painting before it becomes too “tainted” to be worth anything? I’m reminded of that great moment from John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation where an art collector walks into a kindergarten classroom and marvels at the drawings thumbtacked to the walls. “Your students are all Chagalls and Cézannes!” he tells the teacher. “How do you do it?” To which she replies, “I know when to take the painting away from them.”

But these themes pretty much fall by the wayside as the film becomes more about director Amir Bar-Lev’s quest to get Marla to paint a canvas on camera. The 60 Minutes crew couldn’t do it, and he can’t either—and as all the uneventful footage of Marla in her workroom piles up, Mark’s insistence that cameras make Marla too self-conscious to paint the way she does in private start to ring increasingly false. Bar-Lev becomes more and more of a presence in his own film as he wrestles with his doubts about the true extent of Marla’s talents and his guilt over potentially betraying the trust that the Olmsteads placed in him by allowing his crew into their home.

These issues are probably of more interest to other documentary filmmakers than documentary audiences—I personally was much more fascinated by Brunelli, the gallery owner, who embraces Marla as a genius or rejects her as his little prank on the blockheaded New York art scene, whichever is most convenient at the time.

But My Kid Could Paint That is one of those stories that contains so many issues, everyone will find something different in it to be fascinated by. Near the end of the film, Laura Olmstead begins crying in the middle of an interview, much to her own embarrassment. “Documentary gold,” she mutters sarcastically as she walks away from the camera.

Indeed.

Show Me Love

As I write this, I’m surrounded by unread magazines. Big stacks of guilt-inducing unread magazines. Well, I don’t feel so guilty about not reading Entertainment Weekly, but I feel like I really need to get to work on all those issues of New York and Film Comment. The backlog was getting so severe that I had to cancel my subscription to The New Yorker—but that’s such an “important” eat-your-spinach publication that now the absence of a stack of New Yorkers, even unread ones, is making me guilty.

The problem is that the time I used to spend reading magazines is now filled by listening to podcasts, especially film podcasts. And this post is a plug for my new favourite in the genre: Show Me Your Titles, which is hosted by Cathy De La Cruz and Erin Donovan, two young film enthusiasts based in California.

Here’s the thing: the vast majority of film podcasts are hosted by men, most of them in their 30s. Many of them are good at their job and work very hard for no money to give their podcasts a professional-sounding sheen. But almost all of these thirtysomething men, for all their swagger, all the pride they take in their iconoclastic, shoot-from-the-hip opinions, have exactly the same titles in their canon of all-time classics. The Godfather. Fight Club. Star Wars. Spider-Man 2. Apocalypse Now. Trainspotting. GoodFellas. A Clockwork Orange. Se7en. Batman. Raging Bull. Taxi Driver. Blade Runner. And so on. They’re predominantly recent films, they’re all about violence or violent heroes (or superheroes), and almost none of them feature any significant female characters. I like a lot of those movies, but to hear them cited time and again, to the exclusion of almost all other titles, as the epitome of film artistry, is unbelievably tedious. (As much as I admire the production values of The Hollywood Saloon, I've never made it through a single episode.)

I became a loyal lifetime fan of Show Me Your Titles when I heard one of the hosts—I think it was De La Cruz—mention that she had never seen Star Wars and has no intention to, no matter what the male film geeks she talks to thinks: “As if my opinion on film can’t possibly be valid because I haven’t seen some shitty sci-fi movie made for four-year-olds!”

Right on!

A typical episode of Show Me Your Titles—and how great is that title, by the way?—contains reviews of one or two current films, as well as one or two older titles, chosen with little regard for film-geek cred or hipster cachet. De La Cruz and Donovan are interested in feminist readings of film, so their choices tend to reflect that fact: last year’s Halloween episode featured discussions of The Slumber Party Massacre (the first installment of the only horror franchise to be written and directed exclusively by women), Audrey Rose (the mid-’70s reincarnation flick), and Cujo (which both Donovan and De La Cruz unexpectedly raved about, in large part due to its sharp portrayal of a failed marriage). And then they interviewed Stacie Ponder, whose Final Girl blog is an essential source of fun, intelligent analysis of classic slasher movies.

De La Cruz and Donovan are both blunt, funny, and insightful, and while their show doesn’t quite have the well-rehearsed polish of a show like Filmspotting, their opinions are fresher and more unpredictable and their interplay more sparkling and lively. I only started listening to old episodes of their show a few days ago, but already they’ve joined that small group of critics whose opinions on certain movies I can’t wait to hear. They always show me something new about movies I thought I knew.

I’ve added Show Me Your Titles to the list of links on the right; you can also look for them on Facebook, Myspace, and iTunes. They’ve just added Episode #20 (There Will Be Blood, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and 3:10 to Yuma), which sounds like a blockbuster to me. It’s the perfect time to catch up with them.

Moviegoer Diary: The Orphanage, Deliverance, Fando y Lis

THE ORPHANAGE

Plot in a Nutshell:
A woman tries to set up a home for special-needs children in an abandoned orphanage, but the ghosts who live there kidnap her son instead.

Thoughts:
I don’t know if I have much to say about this well-reviewed Spanish horror movie except that it had a couple of scenes that genuinely creeped me out—especially the bit where the mother summons the spirits of the orphanage’s dead children by playing a sort of variation on “What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf?” with them. (The game involves her hiding her eyes while she says a little incantatory rhyme and then turning quickly around, and each time she turns around, the pale, solemn little children are a few steps closer to her. Spooky doesn’t begin to describe it!)

But I’m not sure if I properly understood the backstory to the haunted orphanage, and I wonder if I was really stupid and inattentive and missed a few key plot elements. For instance, how were all those children able to die all those years ago without, apparently, anyone noticing they were gone or anyone finding their bodies? And shouldn’t there have been a moment where the mother, who used to live at the orphanage, recognizes the ghosts as her old playmates? It seems like the strangeness of seeing her friends remaining eternally as children while she’s become an adult is kind of glossed over.

I also wasn’t sure about the sack that one of the little ghost children wears over his head. Apparently he was hideously deformed and wore it so the other children wouldn’t be disturbed—but who made it for him? It’s all lopsided and sloppy and ugly—did he make it himself? Even the Elephant Man had a nicer head-sack than this poor kid. Why didn’t his mother or one of the staff members try making him a nicer one? Maybe out of a nice pillowcase no one was using? If you ask me, having a deformed kid running around in an old dirty canvas sack just reflects poorly on the entire organization.

RATING: 3.5/5




DELIVERANCE

Plot in a Nutshell:
Four friends go on a canoeing trip through hillbilly country; anal rape and amateur archery ensue.

Thoughts:
I watched this one on DVD, not having seen it since I caught it on TV as a kid much too young to be watching a movie like this. I remember how in the schoolyard, Deliverance had a reputation as one of the scariest movies ever made, but I don’t remember what my reaction was to the scene where the hillbilly rapes Ned Beatty. I can’t remember if I switched channels midway through and only returned in time to see that final image of that strangely waxy-looking white hand emerging from the water... or if the content of that scene was so adult that my little kiddie brain simply couldn’t process it and disposed of it altogether.

What I remember being creeped out by, and what I thought people were talking about when they said how scary Deliverance was, was the other famous bit, the one with the inbred kid playing the banjo. I don’t think I even understood at the time that he was supposed to be inbred or mentally disabled or whatever—I think all I registered was that, to my 11-year-old self, that kid looked like a monster... and yet I couldn’t quite reconcile what a monster was doing sitting on the porch playing a musical instrument. And playing it so well! The idea that he wasn’t really a monster, but could maybe be a talented musician trapped in a monster’s body really creeped me out... along with the kid’s dead-eyed smile as he played that banjo, without even looking at his fingers. How could he not even need to look at his fingers? I was taking organ lessons at the time, and I could barely play three notes without fumbling over them.

Seeing Deliverance as an adult was a very different experience. The rape scene is so well known that I’m not sure I registered the full horror of it—instead, I was just wowed by Ned Beatty’s bravery just to be willing to have his first big movie role be as a guy who gets raped. How was he able to overcome the notoriety of that scene?

I was also surprised by how much I liked Ronny Cox, who plays the guy who brings his guitar along on the trip and duets with the inbred kid on “Dueling Banjos.” I love the open expression of joy on his face when the song gets going, especially when he realizes that the kid is too good and nimble-fingered for him to keep up with. According to a featurette on the DVD, the scene where Cox’s dead body is found downriver, his arm hideously twisted behind his head, was unfaked. Cox really could twist his arm that way! I write and perform plays, and that bit reminded me of how I can jump up and down on with my toes curled under my foot and how I’ve always wanted to incorporate that ability into a show somehow, and gross the audience out. I wasn't about to try acting out a rape scene.

RATING: 4/5




FANDO Y LIS

Plot in a Nutshell:
Early Alejandro Jodorowsky movie about a pair of lovers on a surreal journey to the mystical city of Tar.

Thoughts:
I bought that big Alejandro Jodorowsky DVD box set a few months ago, but I only got around to watching the last couple of discs this week. I bought it for El Topo and The Holy Mountain, both of which are kind of amazing, although I always feel guilty about saying that because of the time I took my ex-girlfriend to see a screening of El Topo at the local cinematheque. I’d read a lot about cult movies and was pretty excited to finally be seeing this legendary but hard-to-find picture on the big screen.

Oh my God, I’ve never seen anyone hate a movie the way my girlfriend hated El Topo—she was angry with me for a few days, and I don’t think she ever really forgave me for dragging her to see it.

Well, all I can say now is I’m really glad I never took her to see Fando y Lis, because this one’s even more misogynist than El Topo—the movie is like a surreal male fantasy/allegory about being trapped in a relationship with someone you hate.

It’s about two young lovers, Fando and Lis, who are traveling to a legendary city called Tar. Lis’ legs are paralyzed, and they believe that she will be cured if they reach their destination, but until then, Fando has to push her around on a big, unwiedly cart. And every so often, he completely loses patience with her, and he’ll leave her standing in a muddy riverbed surrounded by naked orgiasts (I know, I know, she’s paralyzed, but she’s got some kind of weird version of paralysis that allows her to stand), or he’ll chain her naked to the cart and led some strange passersby grope her, or he’ll grab her by the legs and drag her on her back down a rocky mountain pass while she screams for him to stop. And she’s a small, thin, delicate, blonde, Twiggy-looking thing too—she really looks helpless!

It’s a fairly unpleasant film, thematically speaking, but just on a surface movie-watching level, Jodorowsky’s flair for crazy imagery keeps things really lively—just when you think things are starting to get tedious, he’ll suddenly throw in a scene where a gang of transvestites attack Fando and Lis and switch their clothes, or Fando and Lis do a silly Hard Day’s Night-style musical number in a cemetery, or Fando tries to make love with Lis, only to have a parade of squealing piglets emerge from her vagina. Much to his surprise.

The film suffers from the low budget, especially when Jodorowsky tries to convince you that the characters are on an endless epic journey, but it feels as through they're walking over and over the same 500-yard stretch of a Mexican quarry. Then again, Lis makes a joke to this extent late in the movie, so maybe the effect is intentional. Or maybe Jodorowsky just knows how to laugh at his film's shortcomings—although I suspect he lost that ability by the time El Topo started shooting.

Oh, I was also impressed by the weird way Fando carries Lis around. He doesn’t cradle her in his arms in front of him like a baby; instead he holds her crosswise across her back, like a bundle of heavy sticks. Maybe it’s easier to go long distances using this technique, but to me it still looks like it requires a superhuman amount of forearm strength.

RATING: 2.5/5

Moviegoer Diary: The Savages

THE SAVAGES

Plot in a Nutshell:
Brother and sister academics must commit their estranged father to a nursing home when he develops dementia

Thoughts:
This was a strange viewing experience. On the one hand, this was one of those rare movies that I could actually, conceivably see myself living through one day. Not that my parents are anywhere near having to check into a nursing home, thank God—but my mother does have a lot of trouble with her knees and her back, and who knows what catastrophes could happen 15 or 20 years down the road?

Plus, the relationship between the characters played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney did remind me of elements of my relationship with my sister: I do have a tendency to shut myself down emotionally the way Hoffman’s character does, and like him, I’m plagued by feelings that I’m some kind of underachiever, trying to scratch out a living on the fringes of the artistic scene in a less-than-glamourous city, working away at a book that will probably never get finished. My sister is much more successful than Laura Linney’s character, a struggling playwright (she teaches English at a prestigious New England prep school... if anything, I'm the pathetic struggling playwright), but we don’t talk anywhere near as often as we should, and in the event of a family crisis, I can see where we might react to each other and snipe at each other in similar ways.

So I guess I should thank the movie theatre where I saw the film for projecting it so poorly that there was little risk of me getting caught up in its uncomfortable emotions. The projectionist had the image so low on the screen that not only could you occasionally see the boom mikes hanging over the actors’ heads—you could see the lights as well! (Whenever this happens, I always marvel at just how close all that distracting technical apparatus is to the actors during the filmmaking process. How do any of them concentrate? How can they possibly behave so un-self-consciously?)

At one point, the misframed image actually concealed a key piece of narrative information. There’s a scene where the staff and residents of the nursing home gather to watch a video of Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer, a choice of film that doesn’t exactly sit too well with the home’s predominantly black staff. Only belatedly did I realize that in the shot that opens the sequence—a shot of a handmade sign announcing the movie night—the projectionist must have cut off the part of the sign that said Hoffman had organized the event, that The Jazz Singer was his choice of movie.

Anyway, I suppose that if anyone from my family is reading this, it must look ridiculous for me to have spent all my time in this item talking about the stupid projectionist at the Westmount Cinema in Edmonton instead of processing my thoughts about my relationship with my family. I don’t know what I could say in a movie blog that would be constructive, but maybe they’re right. Maybe my priorities are all screwed up and I’m totally self-absorbed. Maybe I’m the one with dementia.

RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: Joe Jackson's Rain

JOE JACKSON
Rain
(Rykodisc)
**** (out of 5)

I can’t describe the pleasure that flooded my heart when I heard the piano chords that begin “Invisible Man,” the leadoff track to Joe Jackson’s new disc Rain. I’ve been keeping up with Jackson’s output over the last decade, which mostly consists of semi-successful classical experiments and water-treading discs like 2000’s Night and Day II and 2003’s Volume 4. But I haven’t really cared about a Jackson album since Blaze of Glory, all the way back in 1989.

Until now. Rain is a glorious return to form for the grouchy British piano man, reunited here with Graham Maby and Dave Houghton, his ace backing band from his 1979 debut Look Sharp! The songs here trade in that album’s angular punk energy for a more polished, sophisticated approach to songcraft—imagine a pissed-off, chain-smoking Burt Bacharach. Rain's 10 songs are almost all gems, but “Too Tough” and “Rush Across the Road” in particular are two of the most beautiful love songs Jackson has ever written, angry and rueful and tender in equal measure. Rain is the kind of disc that gives middle-aged rockers a good name.

Font of Wisdom

Meet Erik Spiekermann. (That's him on the left.) He’s a forbidding individual: tall, thin, stern-looking, with a clipped German accent. If he were your schoolmaster, you wouldn’t dream of talking during class. But he’s not a schoolmaster; he’s a typographer—a font designer—and it’s not disobedient students who are the objects of his wrath. No, it’s Helvetica, the world’s most popular font, the font of choice for everything from American Apparel to Panasonic to the iPhone to the U.S. space shuttle to the New York subway system. Helvetica is everywhere, but its ubiquity doesn’t impress Spiekermann. To him, that’s like arguing that because there’s a McDonalds on every streetcorner, it’s the world’s greatest restaurant.

“You can’t read it!” he harrumphs. “Every letter looks the same—that’s the problem with the Swiss. They want everything to look the same. That’s not a font—that’s an army, with everyone wearing the same fucking helmet.”

Asked why, if it’s such a terrible font, it’s so popular, Spiekermann can only offer a weary sigh. “I don’t know,” he says at last. “Why is bad taste ubiquitous?”

Most of the designers director Gary Hustwit talks to in his wonderful documentary Helvetica take a more appreciative view of the font, developed a mere 50 years ago at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. (It was initially called Neue Haas Grotesk, but they changed it to the much snappier “Helvetica” when they decided to market it in North America.) Michael Bierut has a hilarious speech in which he talks about the cluttered, old-fashioned design of magazine ads and corporate logos in the 1950s, and then compares the advent of Helvetica to crawling through the desert with your mouth caked with crud and suddenly being offered a cool, clear glass of refreshing water.

When type designer Mike Parker describes the look of Helvetica—the way the air around each character holds it so that it lives “in a powerful matrix of enclosed space”—the joy on his face is absolutely palpable. In a post on his Scanners blog, critic Jim Emerson rightly calls this scene one of the most euphoric film sequences of the year.

And it happens in a film about a font! But this isn’t a documentary like The King of Kong, which finds comedy in the spectacle of watching so many people getting passionate about something as ridiculous as a videogame. The King of Kong never convinces you that Donkey Kong is important in and of itself—but as you listen to Hustwit’s interviewees talk so energetically and articulately about Helvetica and the evolution of graphic design in the second half of the 20th century, you realize the extent to which design, and warring design philosophies, affect our everyday lives.

You realize the extent to which something as seemingly innocuous as the shapes of letters can affect our understanding of the words they spell. You realize that what might seem at first to be an unusually clean and efficient font can stand for an entire political worldview: designer Paula Scher tells Hustwit how, when she started out as a designer in the ’60s, none of her designer friends would ever use Helvetica. So many corporations had adopted it into their logos, you see, that to their mind, using Helvetica was tantamount to saying you were endorsing the companies that were behind the Vietnam War. (Hustwit asks her, if Helvetica was the font of the Vietnam War, what’s the font of the current war in Iraq? “Helvetica!” she says with a laugh. “Nothing changes!”)

Peppered with witty montages demonstrating the inescapability of Helvetica in cities as far-flung as New York and Amsterdam, and accompanied by Kristian Dunn’s droll, jazzy score—one of the best documentary film scores I’ve heard in a while—Helvetica is a delight, but not merely a delight. Ever since I saw Helvetica a couple of months ago, I’ve been recommending it to people, usually talking it up as kind of a stunt: a movie about a font that somehow manages not to be boring.

But the more I think about Helvetica, the more profound it seems. The world seems a little more marvelous after you’ve seen it, a little more filled with miracles of human ingenuity and aesthetic inspiration. And it’s nice to have naysayers like Erik Spiekermann in the mix as well—just for spice.

Moviegoer Diary: Syndromes and a Century, I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, We Own the Night

SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY

Plot in a Nutshell:
Tentative friendships and romances spring up in a rural Thai hospital, and then it all sort of happens all over again in a modern, urban hospital.

Thoughts:
This is the second film I’ve seen by Apichatpong Weerasethakul (the other being Tropical Malady), and part of me wonders what my reaction to them would be if I came to them “cold”... if I hadn’t already been “primed” to like them by a lot of critics I admire. They’re both beautifully made, but Weerasethakul has a wispy, elliptical storytelling style (if you can even call what he does “storytelling”) that, if I’d come to these films in a different frame of mind, could easily have seemed like a frustrating shortcoming instead of a strength. He seems like one of the rare filmmakers where it’s a good idea to read a few sympathetic reviews of his movies before seeing them.

I’m glad I saw Tropical Malady (which left me a little cold) before Syndromes and a Century (which I loved)—it reminded me of the way I didn’t care much for Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, but was grateful that it prepped me for his follow-up, The Long Day Closes, which remains one of my all-time favourite films.

Part of me wonders whether I’m still appreciating Syndromes for the “wrong” reasons—for all the more conventional scenes of human connection (especially the warm, lovely scenes between the monk, who once wanted to be a DJ, and the dentist, who sings pop songs in his off-hours) and not the more puzzling moments, where the same conversations take place, with minor variations, in different time periods—was Weerasethakul inspired by Hal Hartley’s Flirt, or it this “repeated dialogue” gimmick a common technique in Asian cinema?

I also adored the delightfully out-of-the-blue final scene, in which Weerasethakul, for reasons known only to him, takes his camera to a public park where a fitness instructor is conducting a free aerobics session. A big part of my delight is due to the fact that the bouncy song everyone is dancing to is one I’ve been listening to on my iPod for two years: “Fez (Men Working)” by Neil & Iraiza. I don’t care that it sounds like it could be the theme music for a TV bloopers show; it makes me bounce around too!

RATING: 4.5/5




I WANT SOMEONE TO EAT CHEESE WITH

Plot in a Nutshell:
Overweight Chicago actor goes looking for love, gets screwed over by Sarah Silverman instead.

Thoughts:
Is Larry David as self-absorbed as he looks? He seems to bring out the best in everyone he works with. Without Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld turns into an overexposed prick, Jason Alexander turns into a second-string Nathan Lane, Michael Richards turns into a flake with no internal censor, and Jeff Garlin (who plays David’s manager on Curb Your Enthusiasm)... well, Jeff Garlin is still a likable, unpretentious guy, but without Larry David getting him into trouble (or Susie Essman screaming at him afterwards), he’s not really interesting enough to put at the centre of a movie.

When Elvis Mitchell invited Garlin onto his radio show The Treatment to talk about I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (which Garlin wrote, directed, and stars in), Garlin’s almost compulsive modesty and humility were his most charming characteristics—every time he talked about the directors he admired or a simple artistic choice he made on the set, he’d get embarrassed and apologize, as if he was afraid of sounding like he was putting on airs.

That makes him a great talk-show guest, but not a great director: I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With is low-key to a fault. Garlin has a down-to-earth demeanour that inspires a lot of audience goodwill—he’s the rare overweight comedian who prefers his humour underplayed; he’s like Paul Rudd in Chris Farley’s body—but you can only sit through so many ramshackle, semi-improvised scenes between Garlin and his various comedy pals (including Bonnie Hunt, Amy Sedaris, Richard Kind, and Scott Adsit) before you start getting a little impatient. Sarah Silverman gives the film a dose of energy as a counter girl at an ice cream parlour who briefly becomes Garlin’s girlfriend, but her weirdly conceived character seems to belong to another movie. (I can’t think of another actress worse than Silverman at adapting her energy to the movie around her; even on her own TV show, she doesn’t seem to know how to integrate herself with the rest of the cast.)

There’s one terrific scene in here though, in which Garlin and Silverman do a bunch of roleplay games while shopping at a variety store—pretending to be a military cadet and a hippie chick, or a high school science teacher and a former student. This little sequence reminded me of that magical scene in the music store from Once—two strangers, a guy and a girl, getting to know each other through a small, private act of spontaneous creativity. Someone should make a movie like Once, only set in the world of improv theatre. They should cast Garlin in it too—but maybe get someone tougher to direct it.

RATING: 2/5




WE OWN THE NIGHT

Plot in a Nutshell:
Drugs, gangs, nightclubs, cops, and brotherly honour in 1988 Brooklyn.

Thoughts:
This one took me completely by surprise. I had no interest in seeing writer/director James Gray’s good brother/bad brother cop melodrama when it was in theatres, but when I saw it had scored a surprise César nomination for Best Foreign-Language Film (alongside such critical heavy-hitters as 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, Eastern Promises, and The Lives of Others), that whiff of French-approval appealed enough to my nostrils' pretentious tastes to inspired me to check it out.

Am I crazy for thinking this movie is some kind of genre classic? The plot and the broad outlines of the characters are cops-and-robbers boilerplate, but in Gray’s hands, the familiar surroundings, that willingness to honour cop-movie traditions, becomes a source of strength—they’re like the sturdy iron girders underpinning a classic piece of architecture. But Gray doesn’t just repeat hidebound clichés, either: his frame is always filled with fresh, lived-in details—the foil trays of macaroni on a buffet table at a police party, the half-eaten salami sandwich resting on a fingerprint card in a cop’s office, the grimy pattern on the inside of the bag the Russian gangsters throw over Joaquin Phoenix’s head when they’re driving him to the building where they repackage cocaine for distribution to the street.

And there are always "extra" characters hovering in the background of every scene—Tony Musante doesn't get to say much in this movie, but my God, did I love seeing his face (and his luxurious, almost feminine hairdo) standing behind Robert Duvall whenever we visited police headquarters.

The cinematography by Joaquín Baca-Asay, with its rich browns, blacks, and blues, is the equal of anything Michael Ballhaus did on GoodFellas in its evocation of a seamy yet nostalgically seductive criminal milieu. (Amazingly, the same guy also shot Super Troopers, with the Broken Lizard comedy troupe.)

Even more so than Gone Baby Gone or Eastern Promises (both movies I really liked), We Own the Night struck me as the year’s best example of “classic” moviemaking in the crime genre—I’m betting that this is the one that, 25 years from now, will have aged the best. (I bet its dutybound "shape up and join the cops" theme will look better over time as well—evidence of moral sturdiness instead of squareness.) It’s a 21st-century equivalent of movies like The Big Combo.

Good work, French film snobs! Keep it up!

RATING: 4.5/5