Going Back To Where You Came From

Over the last six years, when he wasn’t turning out crime novels, George Pelecanos also wrote scripts for the HBO series The Wire. The show’s creator, David Simon, would traditionally assign Pelecanos the penultimate episode of each season—and season after season, Pelecanos would proceed to rip viewers’ guts out. It was Pelecanos who wrote the episode in Season One where Bodie and Poot killed Wallace; he killed off Sobotka in Season Two and bumped off Stringer Bell in Season Three; in Season Four, he orchestrated that agonizing scene where Sgt. Carver walks down that long, long corridor and abandons little Randy to an indifferent social services system, and in Season Five, he showed cheerful, unlucky Dukie walking down an alley into a life of poverty and probable drug addiction. TV critic Alan Sepinwall said it best: “Fucking George Pelecanos. Why do I let him stomp on my heart time after time?”

Pelecanos’ new novel The Turnaround is a pleasant change of pace in that it actually has a fairly happy ending. But the characters sure have to experience a lot of misery to get there.

The story begins in 1972 in Washington, D.C. It’s summertime, the weather is hot, the blacks don’t like the whites as well as the reverse, the streets are lively and a little bit dangerous at night, and classic rock and funk tracks are pouring out of everyone’s stereos. On this particular night, the lives of six young people will violently converge: three white teens driving a stolen car through a black neighbourhood and three black kids on the sidewalk. The white kids hurl a few racial epithets out the window and speed off... straight into a dead end. By the time they try driving back the way they came, a mob has gathered, and they’re out for blood. When the smoke clears, one of the white kids is dead, and one of the black kids winds up in jail.

But even the survivors bear the scars of the incident—literally so, in the case of Alex Pappas, who was beaten badly enough to lose an eye. Pelecanos picks up the story 35 years after that fateful night, with Alex now running his father’s restaurant and two of the black kids looking for closure, each in their own way. Raymond Monroe, who now works as a physical therapist at Walter Reed Medical Center, has a chance encounter with Alex and cautiously approaches him, groping sincerely to achieve some kind of reconciliation. Charles Baker, on the other hand, is a sociopathic career criminal who hopes to shake down Peter Whitten, the other white survivor (now a prominent civil rights lawyer), for some easy blackmail money. In other words, that fateful incident back in 1972 is still the central fact of these men’s lives. In Pelecanos’ world, the past isn’t something you ever leave behind—you always reach a turnaround that forces you to back up and drive through it again. And the second time through is usually much, much harder.

For me, though, the main source of pleasure in The Turnaround isn’t its crime-thriller plot, however well-turned it may be. Instead, it’s Pelecanos’ journalistic eye for detail and his ear for tangy dialogue that give every scene, now matter how mundane its content, the air of freshly observed truth. I especially loved the scenes in Alex’s restaurant, Pappas and Sons, which are full of practical details about how a business like this operates, from the compromises that Alex has to make with his mostly Latino staff over what station on the satellite radio to tune into, to the trick of tearing off the cash register tape at 3 p.m. so that the business can pocket a little extra money that the taxman won’t know about. Pelecanos’ depiction of the proud tradition of Pappas and Sons occasionally verges on sentimentality, but it’s sentimentality bolstered by a sincere respect for the hard work that goes into keeping a small family business afloat.

Turning out books as good as The Turnaround is hard work too. Thankfully, reading them is easy.

Moviegoer Diary: The Fall, Married Life

THE FALL

Plot In A Nutshell
Tarsem’s visually opulent fantasy, set in a 1920s hospital, about a paralyzed Hollywood stuntman (Lee Pace) who improvises a fairytale to an injured little girl (Catinca Untaru) as part of a plan to persuade her to steal enough morphine from the dispensary for him to kill himself.

Thoughts
I sure wasn’t expecting to like this movie as much as I did—Tarsem’s previous film, the serial-killer thriller The Cell, struck me as self-indulgent nonsense... plus the guy dropped his last name a few years ago and now just calls himself “Tarsem,” for God’s sake.

But wow—The Fall really put me under its spell. It’s the movie that Terry Gilliam wanted The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to be, before the sheer size of the project crushed him under its weight. It’s a movie that revels in the joy of storytelling, but which also recognizes the power of stories to do horrible damage if used for the wrong purposes. And it’s a movie that genuinely respects the innocence of childhood—I can’t think of another film that combines such careful, precise, complex camerawork with such a natural performance from a child actor. (Oh, wait—I just thought of one. City of God.)

Catinca Untaru was about six years old when her scenes in The Fall where filmed, and her behaviour is so unaffected that it’s almost startling—you’re simply not used to seeing a child onscreen who acts the way normal children do. Her scenes with Lee Pace were largely improvised, and it’s wonderful to see the way she misunderstands him, interrupt him, talk over his lines, answer his questions with total non sequiturs, and once or twice even completely “block” his improvs. Her accent (I’m assuming from her name that she’s Romanian) occasionally makes her a little hard to understand, and the fact that she’s missing her two front teeth doesn’t help matters any, but there’s such a purity to her presence onscreen that you can’t take your eyes off her.

That said, when she’s not onscreen, Tarsem certainly gives you plenty to look at. The imagery here isn’t much different from what he gave us in The Cell—lots of deserts and silk banners flapping in the wind, lots of male models in flowing robes, lots of slow-motion shots of people running and falling from great heights—but for some reason it all clicked for me here. Maybe it helps that there’s a bit more humour to Tarsem’s presentation of the images this time out—Pace’s stuntman is constantly revising the characters’ backstory (and sometimes even their voices and appearances) according to Untaru’s whims. And so the images often contain deliberately, delightfully absurd details, like the outrageous feathered coat, as gaudy as a pink-and-white peacock’s tail, that one of the heroes of Pace’s story wears at all times, even when he’s trudging across the desert. (Even more absurd: the character is supposed to be Charles Darwin.) It’s like Alejeandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain reconceived as a children’s storybook.

But it’s a children’s storybook with shadows crouching on the margins—the person telling the story wants to die, and there’s a very real sense that at any given moment, he could take all his characters down into the chasm with him. (There’s a key subplot involving an older patient who briefly befriends Untaru as well; he tells her that if she’s ever frightened, or if unhappy thoughts fill her head, all she has to do to banish them is say the magic words “Googly googly!” A few scenes later, we learn that the old man has killed himself. “Googly googly” wasn’t enough for him.)

The costumes, by the way, were designed by Eiko Ishioka, whose other film credits include Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mishima, which is near the top of the pile of DVDs on my TV set waiting to be watched. It’s right underneath the 20th anniversary edition of Child’s Play, which suggests that my DVD-watching priorities are kind of askew.



RATING: 5/5


* * *

MARRIED LIFE

Plot In A Nutshell
Ira Sachs’ Sirkian suspense film, set in 1949, about a married man (Chris Cooper) who wants to leave his wife (Patricia Clarkson) for a younger woman (Rachel McAdams), but is so determined to spare her any pain that he decides his only option is to kill her instead.

Thoughts
If Mad Men is looking for directors for upcoming episodes, they should check out Married Life and let Ira Sachs into their fold. Married Life takes place about 12 or 13 years before Mad Men does, but it has the same measured pace and the same fetishistic fascination with the strange sexual mores of a bygone time.

And wow, does it love the period details! The inlaid wood in the elevators, the broad-brimmed hats, the neon café signs, the Bakelite telephones, the uniformed ushers at the movie theatres, the pleated pants on the men and the satiny blouses on the women, the way the road looks late at night illuminated by the headlights of a vintage Cadillac—it’s all here, laid out in luscious colour by cinematographer Peter Deming (who also shot Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, and who obviously knows a thing or two about shooting late-night California highways). Sachs could not have had a very large budget on this film, but it looks superb. It appears that most, if not all, of it was shot in Canada, and I’d love to know what city has office buildings and restaurants that look as great as the ones in Married Life, because I’m moving there immediately.



The film is based on a 1953 novel by John Bingham with the perplexing but evocative title Five Roundabouts to Heaven. It was apparently set in France, but something about Chris Cooper’s character—that odd, repressed sense of propriety that would actually make him think poisoning his wife is more humane than divorcing her—seems quintessentially American to me. (Sachs wrote the adaptation with Oren Moverman, who also wrote I’m Not There with Todd Haynes and worked on the script to Jesus' Son as well. Who is this Moverman fellow? He intrigues me.) It reminds me a little of The Deep End, that odd little “domestic noir” from a few years ago with Tilda Swinton, whose character, like Chris Cooper’s, shows a surprising willingness to resort to murder in order to preserve an air of domestic tranquility.

Hey—I forgot to mention that Pierce Brosnan is in this thing. He plays Cooper’s best friend, a bachelor who’s immediately attracted to Cooper’s lover and who quietly sets about manipulating events so that she winds up with him instead. He’s excellent, just like he was in The Tailor of Panama and The Matador—he’s settling into a nice, effortless dapper-but-dangerous groove which makes me think leaving the James Bond series was the best thing that could have happened to him as an actor. (Let’s just pretend Mamma Mia! never happened, okay?)

Also: Married Life has some of the most stylish opening credits of the year—an animated sequence set to Doris Day’s version of “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby” that makes witty use of images from vintage magazine ads. Another bit of Mad Men overlap!



RATING: 4/5

Sacks And Violence

Four struggling actors sit together in a bar after attending a screening at the Los Angeles Underground Film Festival. The way to kickstart their career seems obvious: drive to a cabin in Big Bear far away from the distractions of the city, and spend the weekend banging out a screenplay for a film that the four of them can star in. After all, the results couldn’t be any worse than the movie they just finished watching: a pretentious romance called We Are Naked (shot on black-and-white digital video for less than $1,000) which climaxes with the two leads stripping off their clothes and embracing in the sprinkler on their front yard. During the post-screening Q&A, someone asks the director if the film contained any improvisation, to which he replies, “That’s an interesting question. When you wake up in the morning, do you plan out everything you’re going to say?” If a tool like that guy can make a movie, our heroes figure, then we can too.

The first half of Baghead, the new film by Jay and Mark Duplass (whose The Puffy Chair was one of the slicker entries in the low-budget “mumblecore” movement), is a knowing comedy about life on the outermost fringes of the movie world, where even getting a short film into a third-tier film festival is a barely achievable goal. And as the quartet—shlubby, lovesick Chad (Steve Zissis), cocksure Matt (Ross Partridge), ditzy, self-involved Michelle (Greta Gerwig), and aging blonde beauty Catherine (Elise Muller)—assemble to write their script, they spend a lot more time getting drunk, flirting, and generally clowning around than hammering out plot points.

And then, as if combining two genres—the mumblecore romantic comedy and the Hollywood satire—weren’t enough, the Duplasses introduce a third, the madman-in-the-woods slasher picture. One night, as Michelle stumbles outside to throw up, she sees a mysterious figure with a paper bag over his head standing in the forest. Was she dreaming? It’s not clear—but soon, the others start impersonating the “baghead” too, pranking each other by popping out of closets and looming over their beds as they sleep. It all seems like one big goof... but if it is, who stole the battery from their car?

The Duplasses execute the genre shift with surprising ease—their blend of semi-improvised dialogue and shaky, handheld cinematography turns out to lend itself equally well to naturalistic relationship comedy as to frantic “Oh my God, there’s something at the window!” horror-movie shocks. When Matt, the most motivated member of the group, decides to make their script a horror movie about four friends getting killed off by a baghead in the woods, the movie threatens to become too meta for its own good, but the Duplasses avoid the trap of self-consciousness (at least up until the fairly predictable final twist).

Still, I would have liked to have seen Baghead push any of the three genres it combines a little farther. In a weird way, it’s sort of a low-budget cousin to Tropic Thunder—but at least Tropic Thunder, despite its somewhat off-putting air of Hollywood-insider, boys-club big-budget privilege, took its premise into some fresh, genuinely outrageous comic territory, whereas Baghead kind of falls into a rut of arguing and sulking and arguing and sulking.

Actually, the most horrifying sequence in the film takes place long before the mad slasher arrives on the scene. It’s the bit where Michelle—one of those bad-news girls who keeps drifting through social scenes, getting drunk and breaking guys’ hearts without ever realizing the damage she’s leaving in her wake—boozily invites Chad up to her room at the end of the night, only to tell him how she thinks of him as a brother, and then giggles when he clumsily tries to kiss her. Believe me: Chad’s protracted humiliation is tougher to watch than anything in Cannibal Holocaust.

The Most Expensive Female Performance In Film History!

The Summer Movie Time Machine makes its final voyage this week, clanging, coughing, and sputtering its way to the misbegotten summer of 1996—the year that brought us not just the empty experiences of Twister, The Rock, and Independence Day, but utter fiascoes like Striptease, Jack, Kazaam, The Fan, The Phantom, A Time to Kill, and the unforgettable The Island of Dr. Moreau, the movie that indirectly inspired Verne Troyer's entire career. Luckily Peter Jackson was around as well—his underrated horror comedy The Frighteners provided one of the summer's few bright spots.

It's a lot of ground, but I manage to cover most of it in my latest segment for CBC Radio. Give the CBC site a click and have a listen!

Moviegoer Diary: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Abominable Dr. Phibes

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

Plot In A Nutshell
American tourists Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall dally with Spanish artist Javier Bardem in Woody Allen’s latest comedy/drama.

Thoughts
I’m not sure one what level Woody Allen expects audiences to appreciate this one: as a breezy meditation on whether it’s better to be ruled by your heart or by your head; or simply as a Spanish travelogue featuring lots of attractive actors in stylish clothes.

Myself, I went with the second option: Woody Allen, Bergman-worshipper that he is, has never been a terribly sensual director, but working with cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe (who also shot The Sea Inside and The Others and just finished work on The Road), Allen delivers his most visually enjoyable film in ages. For once, he seems more interested in photographing actors than buildings—thankfully, he doesn’t get too distracted by all the Gaudí architecture and instead lets his camera linger on Scarlett Johansson’s bare shoulders, Javier Bardem’s impeccable chin stubble, and the adorable spatter of freckles on Rebecca Hall’s nose.

It’s a bit of a disappointment that, even in a film that tries to draw such a contrast between Hall’s rational approach to life and Johansson’s more impulsive, passionate personality, Allen can’t quite bring himself to stage his sex scenes with more verve—his lovers are always chastely fornicating just outside the camera’s view, and demurely hiding their nudity beneath clean white sheets. Why so tasteful, Woody? Around the time of Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, and Celebrity, it looked like Allen was allowing a newfound vulgarity into his films, but he’s completely backed away from that tendency and into toothless retro exercises like Small Time Crooks and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.

Still, these days, any Woody Allen movie that doesn’t make you actively wince counts as a blessing. (I can still remember sitting through Hollywood Ending with a frozen half-smile on my face, waiting in vain for anything that would give me an excuse to laugh.) The night I saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I was sitting in front of some guy who throughout the film kept nudging his wife and cheerfully exclaiming, “Typical Woody Allen!” I’m not sure what exactly he was referring to, since the film has none of Allen’s trademark humour or his visual style, but if a pleasant but undercooked middlebrow diversion like Vicky Cristina Barcelona is what’s now become synonymous with Woody Allen’s name, that’s a shame.

RATING: 3/5

* * *

THE ABOMINABLE DR. PHIBES

Plot In A Nutshell
1971 Vincent Price vehicle in which the horror icon plays Anton Phibes, a supposedly deceased concert organist who concocts a series of elaborate murders, inspired by the 10 plagues of Egypt, as a way of avenging himself on the team of doctors who fatally botched his beloved wife’s surgery.

Thoughts
The premise is suitably outrageous, Vincent Price cuts a commanding figure with his waxy skin and ceremonial robes (in their scenes together, he appears to be about twice the size of Joseph Cotten), and the gaudy Art Deco sets and costumes set the film apart visually from just about every other horror movie of the ’70s... and yet I think I still prefer Theater of Blood.

I guess I wish Price had been allowed to take a little more theatrical zest in the role—Phibes goes about his mission with such a regretful, mournful expression on his face, and the occasional private smiles he affords himself weren’t enough for me. (Then again, it turns out that Phibes is actually wearing a rubber mask throughout the entire film, so perhaps Price is simply trying to reflect that fact in his performance.) And the direction by Robert Fuest is just a tad static for my tastes; I wouldn’t have minded just a little bit more visual flamboyance.

That said, there are some delicious images here: I particularly enjoyed the shot of Phibes coolly examining a glass tube filled with locusts which he plans to unleash upon a sleeping nurse. The business with the hole on the side of Phibes’ neck through which he speaks is pretty enjoyable too—at one point, Price even pours a martini into it, and he does so with such stoic dignity that you’re not even sure whether to laugh. There’s also a nice, sick deadpan gag involving one of Phibes’ victims, who’s been impaled upon the horn of a brass unicorn and whose corpse must be “unscrewed” before they can take it to the morgue.

According to Wikipedia, in earlier drafts of the screenplay, Phibes’ mysterious, silent female assistant Vulnavia (the alluring Virginia North) turns out to be an automaton, a more advanced version of the mechanical dance band that provides the music in his mansion’s vast, empty ballroom. That revelation would kind of make sense, but I think I prefer to leave Vulnavia completely unexplained. It’s tantalizing to imagine what scenario could have possibly brought these two people together—the horribly disfigured, revenge-obsessed musician and the much younger lover. And are they lovers? They certainly seem passionate about each other as they dance together. Does Vulnavia imagine that once Phibes’ plan is completed, he’ll put his memories of his wife behind him and marry her? What kind of name is Vulnavia, anyway?

Maybe those questions are answered in 1972’s Dr. Phibes Rises Again. I’m eager to track that one down, if only because it’s so funny to think that even after all the murders he perpetrates in the first film, Phibes still bears a grudge against enough people to fill a sequel.



RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: Glen Campbell's Meet Glen Campbell

GLEN CAMPBELL
Meet Glen Campbell
(Capitol)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

My parents’ old stereo wasn’t just a stereo; it was an honest-to-God piece of furniture, heavy, wooden, as big as a coffin, with burgundy velvet covering the speakers that reminded me of church. But the music I associate it with isn’t hymns but the country-pop crossover records by Bobbie Gentry, Anne Murray, and Glen Campbell that my mother liked to listen to.

Meet Glen Campbell, the new record by the 1970s’ most apple-cheeked chart-topper, would have sounded great on that stereo. It recreates that slick, earphone-filling “AM Gold” sound of three decades past, but this time out, Campbell is singing songs by The Foo Fighters, Travis, and Green Day.

And the whole unlikely-sounding project works beautifully. Campbell’s voice has aged very gracefully; he brings a gentle tenderness to The Replacements’ “Sadly Beautiful,” and his version of U2’s “All I Want Is You” is majestic without turning bombastic. (Are you listening, Bono?) Maybe his version of The Velvet Underground’s “Jesus” lacks the darker shadings that Johnny Cash might have brought to it, but that’s okay: it’s good to know the Wichita Lineman is still on the line.

Moviegoer Diary: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, Looking for Mr. Goodbar

MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY

Plot in a Nutshell
Bharat Nalluri’s 2008 period comedy about a frumpy, down-on-her-luck governess (Frances McDormand) in Depression-era London who finagles her way into a job as the social secretary for a flighty, man-crazy American singer (Amy Adams).

Thoughts
Is simply being irresistibly adorable a legitimate acting talent?

That question occurred to me as I watched Amy Adams in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, as it does whenever I watch Amy Adams lately. It’s hard to think of another contemporary actress who has thrived on unfiltered adorability the way Adams has. I don’t detect a backlash forming just yet, but I suspect that if she gives one more performance as a wide-eyed naif whose unworldly innocence, rather than being annoying, comes across more as a stage of grace, that critics might start to turn on her. Critics don’t like feeling fooled, and what struck the critical community as such an inspired, out-of-nowhere acting turn as the pregnant Ashley Johnsten, her starmaking, Oscar-nominated turn in Junebug, could start to look like a predictable bit of shtick now that we’ve seen it couple more times in Enchanted and now Miss Pettigrew.

Then again, there’s something about Adams as a performer that inspires a feeling of protectiveness in the viewer—you’d have to be a pretty cold-hearted critic to scold Amy Adams. Her lip would start to tremble, and she’d probably burst into tears right there in front of you. We’re going to need someone heartless to do the job—is John Simon available?

Adams’ appeal is encapsulated in a nice little scene from Miss Pettigrew. Her character—a bright-eyed, hip-wiggling starlet with the wonderful name “Delysia Lafosse”—is emerging from her luxuriously enormous bathtub, and director Bharat Nalluri poses her in front of the giant seashell painted on the tiles so that she resembles Botticelli’s Venus. Miss Pettigrew is gently scolding her for the way she’s juggling three boyfriends at once. “Haven’t you ever been torn between more than one person at the same time?” Delysia asks.

“No,” says Miss Pettigrew, the old maid, her expression hardening a little. “I can’t say I’ve ever had that particular problem.”

And then, there’s a strange little moment: Miss Pettigrew turns around, and sees Delysia standing there, all pink and young and curvy and covered with bubbles, her nakedness barely concealed by a fluffy white towel. “You are beautiful, Delysia,” she says, to which Delysia responds with a pleased, childlike smile. “Well,” she says with a giggle, “it’s not a bad figure if I do say so myself!”

The line might sound obnoxiously self-satisfied if it were spoken by almost any other actress, but Adams gives it an undercurrent of uncertainty, a need to be reassured, that suggests Delysia, for all her flighty superficiality, realizes how much her good fortune depends on her ability to charm everyone around her, and how little time she has before she gets older and her streak of good fortune comes to a crashing halt.

Delysia isn’t the only one who realizes that the good times won’t last forever; Nalluri, the director, artfully weaves in enough reminders of the coming war to keep the movie from being merely a frothy exercise in nostalgia. There’s a particularly lovely scene where a cocktail party is interrupted by the sound of bombers flying overhead, and it becomes obvious that Miss Pettigrew and a sombre-faced lingerie designer played by Ciarán Hinds are the only two characters old enough to remember the previous war.

It seems appropriate that Delysia leaves England at the end of the movie to set sail for America. It’s hard to picture her (or Amy Adams) suffering through the Blitz. The Pettigrews of the world can withstand hardship, but you can’t help thinking, sentimentally, that the Delysias should be spared. I like to picture her finding a place stateside in the USO instead, wearing a cute soldier’s uniform and singing Irving Berlin songs for the troops in front of a gigantic American flag. Or dancing with GIs about to ship out overseas. I don’t think even Miss Pettigrew would begrudge her that happiness.

RATING: 3.5/5


LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR

Plot in a Nutshell
Diane Keaton plays a single woman whose habit of picking up men for evenings of casual sex proves fatal in writer/director Richard Brooks’ 1977 film version of Judith Rossner’s novel.

Thoughts
I’ve wanted to see this movie for a few years now, ever since reading Joe Bob Briggs’ appreciation of it in his book Profoundly Erotic, a terrific collection of essays about 10 “sexy movies that changed history.” He’s not a fan of the film—he calls it an anti-feminist adaptation of a feminist novel—but at the same time, he argues that the film’s thematic incoherence kind of makes it even more fascinating than a more faithful adaptation of Judith Rossner’s book would have been. In the film, the main character (schoolteacher Terry Dunn, played by Diane Keaton) is both a tragic heroine and “a speck on the cosmic landscape, swatted by God, like a fly”; she’s both a goofy, Annie Hall-like searcher and a woman in love with danger; her tale is a celebration of female sexual freedom and a puritanical horror story. You could argue about this movie for hours precisely because the movie itself hasn’t come to any conclusions either. It’s a classic example of an “incoherent text.”

Briggs’ essay helps set the film it its proper context—both in relation to the times, as well as to the real-life case of Roseann Quinn, which inspired Rossner’s book. As it turns out, a lot of the darker details in the film that don’t really mesh with Keaton’s characterization—the dirty dishes piling up in Terry’s sink (evidence of her clinical depression), the scoliosis scar on her back (which Terry takes as a visible manifestation of her own contaminated soul), the scenes with her black drug dealer—were in fact drawn from Quinn’s case history... lumps of truth that haven't quite been smoothed out beneath fiction's carpet.

But seen completely out of context—on a washed-out bootleg copy by a male viewer in 2008—the moments in the film that stand out are the lighter ones. I’m thinking of the many scenes in which Terry experiences genuine sexual pleasure—seriously, Diane Keaton does some world-class orgasm acting in this movie. I love the scene where she finds herself alone in her apartment after she’s just spent the night with a dangerous but good-looking stud (played by Richard Gere); thrilled by the great sex, by the surge of freedom, by the sheer fact that she’s gotten away with something her stern Catholic father would completely disapprove of, she joyfully hops around her bed, punching the air. I’ve never seen the exultation of sex dramatized in a movie before—not the thrill of the physical act, but the excitement that comes after the act, knowing that you pulled off the complicated feat of attracting a stranger, bringing them home, and having the time of your life with them.

Keaton has spoken warmly of working with writer/director Richard Brooks on this project, but the movie feels like a tug of war between their two sensibilities. Brooks insists on seeing Terry as a woman with a light side and a dark side—the woman who teaches deaf children and the woman who haunts the singles bars—competing for supremacy, a point he hammers home by filming Terry’s murder by strobe light: light/dark, on/off.

But Keaton’s performance keeps undermining Brooks’ dualistic conception of the role. Terry doesn’t turn into a different woman when she’s prowling the bars; she’s the same cheerful, teasing charmer she is during the daytime. And I like that aspect of the film—as someone who’s fairly shy about asking girls out on dates, I found myself really rooting for Terry to succeed in her sexual odyssey, and ignoring all the moralistic tsk-tsking Brooks does from the sidelines. (I was already ignoring all of his arty flashbacks and the proto-Ally McBeal fantasy sequences, so ignoring a few more of his annoying habits wasn’t too difficult.) I was even willing to overlook the thematic implications of Terry’s murder; I guess Brooks wants us to regard her death as an inevitable consequence of her dangerous lifestyle, but it’s presented as such a random occurrence—just a “wrong place at the wrong time” kind of accident—that I find it hard to go along with Brooks’ “blame the victim” take on the material.

That said, I was surprised at how much I liked the film. I was expecting it to focus pretty much exclusively on Terry in the singles bars, but at 135 minutes, it winds up going into a surprising amount of detail on the other areas of her life—I couldn’t believe, for instance, how much time it spends on the deaf classroom, even cooking up a whole subplot about a little black girl, her skeptical older brother (LeVar Burton!), and Terry’s efforts to get her the money for a hearing aid.

I wish I could find a YouTube clip of the opening credits—a series of evocative, grainy black-and-white images of Keaton wandering through various bars and nightclubs that immediately creates a mood of sleazy dread—but instead, you’ll have to make do with this little scene, in which Keaton first encounters Richard Gere’s on-the-make Tony. I like the coked-up way Gere keeps drumming his hands on the bar—he’d use a similar tic a few years later in the thriller Power, in which his character liked to unwind by listening to old Benny Goodman tapes and drumming along with Gene Krupa.



RATING: 3.5/5

I've Seen Faris, And I've Seen Rainn

One nice thing about all those movies from the Judd Apatow comedy factory: you no longer have to be good-looking, or even famous, to have a big-budget mainstream Hollywood comedy built around you. Nobody knew who Seth Rogen was when Knocked Up came out, but they put his giant face on the poster anyway. Steve Carell had a certain following from The Daily Show and The Office, but he was hardly a name-brand comedian when posters for The 40-Year-Old Virgin started appearing in movie theatres. This year, Jason Segel got his chance to become a movie star with Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Jonah Hill and Martin Starr get their shot as well.

Rainn Wilson and Anna Faris have spent years as comic supporting players, but this week they both get their first shot at carrying an entire Hollywood comedy on their shoulders: Wilson is starring in The Rocker, and Faris is in The House Bunny. Judd Apatow didn’t have anything to do with either film (and The House Bunny is more in the mould of an old Goldie Hawn vehicle or Legally Blonde than an Apatow comedy), but I’m betting the success of his films made it a lot easier for them to get made—and the marketing for both films has definitely been influenced by the poster campaigns for Knocked Up and 40-Year-Old Virgin. If only either film made better use of its star.

On the other hand, it may be that Rainn Wilson (best known as Dwight Schrute on The Office, although I think his choicest role was as Arthur, the creepy apprentice mortician on Six Feet Under) may simply be better in small doses—he has a weird, intense, bug-eyed energy that gets a little exhausting over the course of a feature film. In The Rocker, he plays Robert “Fish” Fishman, who still hasn’t recovered from getting kicked out of the hair-metal band Vesuvius just before they got signed to a major-label deal and became multi-platinum rock stars. He’s spent the ensuing 20 years doing one soul-crushing minimum-wage job after another, his shaggy hairdo an increasingly pathetic remnant of his hard-rocking past.

But when his teenaged nephew’s band needs a drummer, Fish reluctantly steps in, and rediscovers his passion for music. The band gets noticed, thanks to an embarrassing YouTube clip of Fish practising in the nude, but the lead singer/songwriter has talent, and soon it looks like the music stardom that once eluded Fish is now once again in his grasp.

The Rocker (ugh, what a generic title) has a classic Apatovian "manchild-forced-to-grow-up" story arc, but the details aren’t grounded in reality the way the best Apatow movies are. The movie goes wrong right from the opening scene where Fish’s bandmates decide to dump him in order to land a record contract—instead of focusing on Fish’s pain, director Peter Cattaneo turns the scene into a Terminator 2 parody, with Wilson ruthlessly chasing down his bandmates as they try to escape in their van. And despite a strong cast (Will Arnett, Fred Armisen, Jeff Garlin, Jane Lynch, Howard Hesseman, and Demetri Martin all put in appearances), Jason Sudeikis is The Rocker’s only consistently funny presence, playing an obnoxious label rep. Someone needs to give that guy a movie.

The House Bunny is fairly dire too, but at least it gives Anna Faris room to create her own idiosyncratic variation on the “blonde bimbo” comic stereotype. (You leave The House Bunny wishing someone would give Faris better material; you leave The Rocker ready to take a nice, long holiday from Rainn Wilson.) Faris—who gave one of the funniest female performances of the decade earlier this year in the barely-released stoner comedy Smiley Face—plays Shelley Darlingson, a Playboy bunny forced to fend for herself after getting ousted from Hugh Hefner’s mansion. Broke and homeless, she stumbles onto a university campus and talks her way into a job as a “house mother” for Zeta Alpha Zeta, the school’s least popular sorority.

I don’t think I need to go into the rest of the plot—if I say there are makeovers, parties, and a snooty sorority across the street, you can probably figure out most of the major story beats for yourself. (The screenplay is by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith, the team who also wrote Legally Blonde, another story about a ditzy blonde girly-girl invading academia, which begs the question of whether it’s still a rip-off if it’s your own work that you’re stealing from.)

All the gags at the expense of the nerdy Zeta girls are pretty hopeless and lazy and kind of insulting—although Emma Stone (who, coincidentally, is also in The Rocker) has obviously had some of Michael Cera’s comic timing rub off on her after working with him on Superbad.

But somehow in the midst of this boilerplate plot, with its endless succession of dim gags, Faris keeps finding moments of daffy comic inspiration—somehow she even makes the running gag about Shelley’s inability to pronounce “philanthropy” amusing. Looking “sexy” is a full-time job for Shelley, and yet somehow, Faris makes her seem perfectly wide-eyed and innocent—she’s like a cross between Little Annie Fanny and Amy Adams’ Princess Giselle from Enchanted.

Perhaps someone will see Faris in Smiley Face or The House Bunny and be inspired to create a vehicle for her that’s worthy of her talents. Maybe it’ll even be Judd Apatow. Why not? Faris deserves to be in a film that’s genuinely funny from the ground up for a change, and not something like The House Bunny, which isn’t even a real comedy. Like The Rocker, it’s just a script with a sellable premise.

"I'm Gone. Long Gone. Like A Turkey In The Corn."

The summer of 1992 was all about icepicks and creamed corn, femmes fatales and Log Ladies, the Blanks From Hell and The Man From Another Place. At least, that's how I sum it all up in my latest Summer Movie Time Machine segment for CBC Radio, in which I discuss one of that summer's biggest hits (Basic Instinct) and biggest flops (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). Click and enjoy!

The Musicgoer: Stereolab's Chemical Chords

STEREOLAB
Chemical Chords
(4AD)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Hooray! A new Stereolab CD! That means I get to pull my Stereolab Listening Chair out of the closet! It’s a large, egg-shaped device that stands on a square of white shag carpeting in one corner of my apartment. (The CD slides into a retrofitted slot on the left-hand side, right next to the drink holder and the button that makes the chair rotate.) The exterior is made of spotless white molded plastic and the seat is upholstered with mauve vinyl, which I must admit gets a little sticky against my thighs in the August head. But you have to climb inside it and rest your head on the cushion between the built-in Koss Pro 4A headphones if you want to hear the vibraphone on “Silver Sands” or the vintage synths on “The Ecstatic Static” really pop!

The chair takes up a lot of storage space, and my girlfriend keeps nagging me to get rid of it. But I’m sentimental, so back in 1994 I made her a deal: I’d sell off the chair as soon as Stereolab made a record that didn’t sound like all their others. Chemical Chords is their 11th album, and the chair is still mine.

"When Gary Busey Is Playing The Voice Of Reason, You Know Your Movie Has Gone Through The Looking-Glass"

There's been more Summer Movie Time Machine action on the CBC website. The latest addition to the archive revisits the summer of 1991, when Hollywood's greatest-ever husband-and-wife team of action filmmakers both made what were arguably their masterpieces. Terminator 2: Judgment Day was a pretty good movie, I'll admit, but as I try to argue in this segment, it doesn't hold a candle to Point Break.

Enjoy!

Coogan Behaviour

Sorry for the absence of new posts this week... I had my hands full co-ordinating my newspaper's coverage of the massive Edmonton International Fringe Festival. That means lining up reviews of more than 130 plays in just four days, a task that kept me up past 2 a.m. writing and editing for the last four nights in a row. But I'm back now, with a review of Hamlet 2 and an interview with its star, British cult comedian Steve Coogan. Hamlet 2 doesn't necessarily show Coogan at his best, but it'll be interesting to see if the combination of this film and his supporting performance in Tropic Thunder helps raise his profile with North American comedy fans.

I felt a mild sense of trepidation about interviewing him; in his films, he gives the impression of a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly. But he was very warm and engaged, providing me with thoughtful answers even though I was only one stop in the long parade of interviews he was doing that day. Plus, all the Alan Partridge fans among my friends are now totally jealous of me! Here's how I wrote the piece up for my newspaper...

* * * * *

To watch the filmography of British comedian Steve Coogan is to bear mortified witness to life at the lowest rungs of the show business totem pole... to experience an endless succession of snubs, failures, and personal humiliation... to spend hours in the company of some of the most clueless, hapless, and just plain self-absorbed characters ever to have stepped in front of a camera—or, for that matter, behind it.

Many of them are even named Steve Coogan: in 2005’s Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Coogan plays himself as an insecure actor convinced that his co-star Rob Brydon is upstaging him in every scene; and in his segment of Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 anthology film Coffee and Cigarettes, he meets fellow British expatriate Alfred Molina at a Los Angeles café, his air of barely disguised boredom speedily replaced by calculating, careerist eagerness the moment Molina mentions he’s friends with hot, hip director Spike Jonze.

It’s doubtful whether Coogan’s most famous character—talk show host Alan Partridge—would even know who Spike Jonze is. (We’re talking about a man, after all, who once accidentally shot a guest dead on live television. On another episode, he punched a wheelchair-bound man in the face.) Fatuous, selfish, and mesmerizingly unpleasant to his guests and his staff, Partridge is perhaps the kind of character who could only be a cult figure in Britain—and indeed, Coogan played him to great success on two radio series, three TV series, and various specials and one-offs, most of them unknown in North America beyond devotees of British comedy.

Around these parts, we know Coogan better for his performance as legendary TV presenter, record executive, and proud Mancunian Tony Wilson in 2002’s 24 Hour Party People. Wilson would count as Coogan’s only successful “creative” character—this is the man who discovered Joy Division and The Happy Mondays and ran the thriving Hacienda nightclub—if it weren’t for the fact that Wilson was such a terrible businessman that his record label and nightclub were losing money even when they couldn’t have been more popular.

Coogan turns up in two big comedies currently in theatres, and he plays incompetent directors in both of them. In Tropic Thunder, he’s the in-over-his-head auteur of the “biggest war move ever”—a production so disastrous that just five days into production, it’s already a month behind schedule. And in Hamlet 2, which opens this Friday, he has a much more substantial role as Dana Marschz, a dim-witted failed actor and failing drama teacher in Tucson, Arizona whose stage adaptations of Hollywood hits like Erin Brockovich get routinely panned by the school’s prepubescent drama critic. The principal has had enough: come next semester, Dana’s position will be eliminated from the school.

But desperation can sometimes fuel the greatest feats of creativity: inspired by a roomful of skeptical new students (and an accidental dose of LSD), Dana feverishly hammers out a new play for his class to perform: a musical sequel to Shakespeare’s Hamlet featuring graphic sex, a time machine, and Dana himself playing a singing and dancing Christ during the show’s showstopping number, “Rock Me Sexy Jesus.”

Coogan talked to me earlier this month about the difference between “pathetic” and “foolish idiot,” crying on camera, and whether Jesus has sex appeal. Here’s our conversation.

Q: In Hamlet 2, you’re once again playing a character who embodies the more foolish, undignified aspects of being in show business. Are you deliberately seeking out these kinds of roles, or are they finding you?

Steve Coogan: I’ve not consciously done that, but it’s nice to gravitate towards things that you know about, and things that are familiar. And this is certainly territory I’m familiar with. I’m not sure why I do it, though—I’m sure there are probably deep-seated psychological reasons for it.

Q: Would you say that this character is the most pathetic character you’ve ever played?

SC: I do think he is pathetic—but in the pure sense of the word, in that he evokes pathos. He is a bit of an idiot too, but I think he’s vulnerable and innocent too, and I think the reason the film works as well as it does—and I think it does work—is that there’s an emotional truth to the character that makes people care about what happens to him. I don’t normally play characters who are that naïve or that innocent or who try to do the right thing. I usually play people who are much more unpleasant, so playing vulnerability was something quite new to me.

Q: I was wondering whether this is the kind of character that actors would find it hard to look down on. Do all actors know on some level that if they hadn’t gotten a couple of key breaks, that could be them doing the cheesy late-night infomercial?

SC: I’m sure any actor who’s smart will realize that luck and timing and things beyond their control have an awful lot to do with their success—that it’s only partly due to their talent.

Q: Which begs the question: how talented do you think Dana is? He’s a bit of a laughingstock, and yet Hamlet 2 does come together into something the audience enjoys.

SC: The director, Andrew Fleming, and I talked a lot about this: if he’s an idiot, how can he produce such a successful play? I don’t think he’s without talent—he’s just a hapless person who lacks a certain amount of self-awareness. That doesn’t mean he hasn’t got something to say. And if there’s enough authenticity and originality and passion in what you do, that can still carry you through. I always compare it to a rock song by a band who are not maybe great musicians, but has such verve and energy that they charm you anyway.

Q: Is there an equivalent to this sort of figure in Britain—the painfully earnest drama teacher?

SC: There may be, although I’d say there’s a streak of cynicism that goes through British culture that makes it less likely. They exist, but they’re probably not as earnest and open and unsullied as Dana.

Q: I believe this is the first movie you’ve done where you’ve worked mainly with young actors. Was that a novelty for you?

SC: It was great. It was really good. It taught me a lesson, actually. Skylar Astin [who plays Rand, the teacher’s pet], who’s 20, came up to me a couple of times to give me pointers and advice. At first, I thought, “Why is this kid giving me suggestions? I’ve been around the block a few times, you know.” But I was shocked to realize that what he was telling me was incredibly good advice that I’d wind up using—small, technical things that were such funny ideas. After that, I encouraged the younger actors, if they had any ideas, to chuck them my way.

Q: Do you have any favourite moments in your performance—any small touches or line readings that you’re particularly proud of?

SC: I do quite like it when I do things that are funny and sad at the same time. I like it, for instance, when I do that speech about growing up as a little farmer’s boy. I genuinely feel those moments, and those are real tears. I’m really feeling that emotion, but at the same time, I know that it’s funny. I also like the scene where I’m writing and crying at the same time, because the creative process is so demanding. That makes me laugh—I’m so overwhelmed by the beauty of my own words that I can’t stop crying.

Q: Hamlet 2 was one of the big successes at Sundance—Focus Features almost paid as much for it as Fox Searchlight paid for Little Miss Sunshine in 2006. What was your Sundance experience like? Is it even possible to have a sense of what's going on?

SC: Well, you see a lot of Hollywood people walking around in earmuffs and mittens and big, fat coats. It’s just a change of scenery, I think. As for our film, I think there’s a freshness and a positivity to Hamlet 2—it’s not self-conscious in the way that a lot of Sundance movies can be. There’s often a feeling that independent films can’t be too funny, and this one is very funny, so perhaps it stood out that way.

Q: Would you be surprised if a struggling actor or a struggling director came up to you and told you he found Hamlet 2 inspirational?

SC: No, because I think there’s a positive message at the heart of the film. There are a lot of people in the world who are prepared to tell you how bad you are, and this is an encouraging, life-affirming film that tells you anything is possible and to feel good about yourself.

Q: Let’s close on a short question. Is Jesus sexy?

SC: I’ll take that as a loaded question. I mean, when you hear it in the film, it sounds like an error in judgment on Dana’s part. But if you break it down and look at it, there will be people who will be offended by it—wrongly so. They will say you shouldn’t apply that adjective to a religious figure. But that presupposes that “sexy” is an insulting, pejorative term, and I don’t think it is. I would say that if you asked Michelangelo or Caravaggio if Jesus was sexy, he’d say He is. Is Jesus sexy? Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar seemed to take the attitude that he was. So I’d say, all in all, without being too controversial, in a certain way, probably yes.

Q: Wow. That’s a much more thoughtful answer than that question deserved.

SC: You’re very welcome.

Far From Elsinore

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym. And at the high school where drama teacher Dana Marschz is employed, those who teach gym are constantly shooing him off the basketball court where he’s trying to hold rehearsal.

As the new comedy Hamlet 2 opens, the melancholy Dana has sunk about as low on the showbiz ladder as it’s possible to go: a failed actor whose principal credits include an undignified guest shot on Xena: Warrior Princess and a bit as the “There’s got to be an easier way!” guy in a late-night juicer informercial, he’s now reduced to a starvation-wage teaching gig in Tucson, Arizona.

And even that humiliating job is on the verge of disappearing, thanks to budget cutbacks (and a long string of bad reviews in the school paper). But when a scheduling fluke delivers him the biggest drama class he’s ever had in his life, Dana decides to go out with a bang and stage as his final show something called Hamlet 2, a delirious musical sequel to Shakespeare’s play in which Hamlet uses a time machine to change history and prevent all those deaths in Act V. Jesus fits into the plan somehow too.

Hamlet 2 was co-written by Pam Brady, who worked on the scripts for South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut and Team America: World Police, and like those films, it’s a celebration of the cleansing, liberating power of political incorrectness—Dana’s play, which is full of onstage sex and a big production number called “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus,” becomes a cause célèbre when the school tries to shut it down. The ACLU even wades into the action—Amy Poehler has some very funny moments playing a tough-as-nails civil-rights attorney with the absurd name Cricket Feldstein. By the time opening night rolls around, Hamlet 2 has become the most talked-about play in America.

The film’s final half-hour or so, in which Dana and his students perform Hamlet 2 to an incredulous (but not unreceptive) audience, is a lot of fun—you totally buy it when the sock-hop singalong “Rock Me, Sexy Jesus” wins the crowd over.

But the first two-thirds of the film are a much rockier ride. It sounds counterintuitive to criticize a comedy for encouraging the audience to laugh too much at its main character, but as Steve Coogan plays him, Dana is so clueless, so pathetic, so abject in his decade-out-of-date wardrobe, that it’s not much fun to watch him experience each new humiliation. The poor guy’s wife, Brie, is even played by Catherine Keener in full ball-breaker mode. It’s no wonder that Dana needs to go to a fertility clinic—if I were married to Brie, I think my sperm would be demoralized too. (The Marschzes’ trip to the fertility clinic does include the film’s biggest WTF? touch, though: the nurse turns out to be Elisabeth Shue. She’s not just played by Elisabeth Shue, you understand; she is Elisabeth Shue—she tells Dana she got sick of Hollywood, dropped out of the business, and got her nursing degree.)

Shue’s extended cameo is typical of Hamlet 2’s we’ll-try-anything spirit—this is a very uneven comedy, but at least it’s unpredictable. There’s a strange role for David Arquette, as the Marschzes’ boarder (whom Brie has apparently forbidden from speaking), and a slapstick running gag involving a female student who keeps getting hit on the head. (She performs the same comic function in Hamlet 2 as the lapdogs did in A Fish Called Wanda—as an innocent target of unceasing physical abuse.) But I wished director Andrew Fleming, who also made the classic Watergate spoof Dick, had spent less time on Dana’s bumbling and a little more time showing us his students gradually getting caught up in making Hamlet 2 a reality.

Still, for all its flaws, Hamlet 2 has some of the summer’s biggest laughs. (“If my Dad finds out what I’ve been up to,” Dana-as-Jesus exclaims at one point, “he’s gonna crucify me!”) Then again, maybe I’m cutting it some extra slack simply because it contains one of the most positive depictions of a critic I’ve ever seen in a movie: Coogan regards the theatre reviewer at the school paper as his personal nemesis, but every time he talks to him, the kid gives him excellent dramaturgical advice.

Full Metal Laughtrack

Wow... the reviewers who complained that the climax of Pineapple Express was too violent for a comedy are in for a surprise when they see Tropic Thunder. The very first scene of the film—well, not counting a bunch of very funny fake commercials and trailers starring the main characters—is a wild spoof of bloody Vietnam films like Platoon and Apocalypse Now in which a minor character’s head wound performs the same basic comic function as a seltzer bottle. The scene is going well, with the characters getting their hands blown off and their guts slit open right on cue—until stars Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) get into a fight over who gets to cry during their big emotional scene together. Before you know it, they’ve stormed into their trailer, leaving director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) so distracted that when a planned $4 million explosion goes off, none of the cameras are rolling to catch it.

Shades of the opening scene from The Party! But the main characters in Tropic Thunder aren’t oblivious extras like Peter Sellers’ Hrundi V. Bakshi—they’re pampered Hollywood divas too intent on making sure their hotel room has TiVo (as per their contract) to bother reading the script. It would take me many more paragraphs to explain how they all wind up lost in the jungles of Laos; or why Kirk, a white Australian, has had surgery to turn him into an African-American; or how Tugg gets taken prisoner at a heroin farm; or why they tie lowbrow comic Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) naked to a tree. Suffice it to say that all this happens, and it all makes a certain amount of off-the-wall narrative sense.

I had a divided reaction to Tropic Thunder. On the one hand, plenty of this movie is laugh-out-loud funny in a gleefully tasteless way—especially all the stuff dealing with Simple Jack, a box-office bomb in which Tugg, hoping for an Oscar nomination, played a mentally retarded farmboy. (Robert Downey Jr. has an inspired speech in which Kirk—who’s won five Oscars—informs Tugg that if you want to win an Academy Award with that kind of role, you have to play a character who only seems retarded, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man or Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump. Tugg, on the other hand, made the same mistake Sean Penn made in I Am Sam: he went “full retard,” and the Academy never gives the award to full retard.)

And yet, at the same time, there’s something oppressive about this movie, which wants to be a scathing satire about Hollywood excess at the same time that it wants to impress you with its own expensiveness. This is no quick-and-dirty shoestring comedy: the cinematographer is John Toll (who also shot The Thin Red Line, Legends of the Fall, and Braveheart), who may be the unlikeliest person to photograph a Hollywood comedy since Vittorio Storaro shot Ishtar. Stiller spares no expense, from the costly songs on the soundtrack right down to the supporting actors: he even gets Tom Cruise and Matthew McConnaughey to do extended cameos as, respectively, an abusive studio head and Tugg’s agent. Neither performance is particularly amusing (the endless scenes of Cruise in his fat suit dancing to hip hop are especially tedious, and constitute a much more embarrassing minstrel act than Robert Downey Jr.’s “blackface” routine), but that’s not the point. Tropic Thunder is, on one level, a big party for the Hollywood cool kids, proof of the power of Stiller's Rolodex, and the presence of insiders like Cruise and McConnaughey lets you know Stiller is sitting at the best table in the cafeteria.

Ben Stiller is a strange case. Of the big comedy stars in movies right now, he may be the least naturally gifted performer. There’s always something guarded about him—I can’t think of a single spontaneous moment he’s had in front of the camera, not even when he’s improvising. He’s always eager to “make fun of himself,” as on Extras or The Ben Stiller Show, but even then, there’s a fundamental narcissism to his personality that makes those bits ring hollow. He plays ball: for all of Stiller’s potshots at the shallowness of Hollywood, Tropic Thunder also contains some of the year’s most obvious bits of product placement—TiVo as a major plot element, an incongruously long shot of Tom Cruise holding up a copy of Maxim.

But he’s a hard worker—you don’t develop biceps the size he sports in Tropic Thunder by being lazy—and he’s smart about surrounding himself with talent. Getting Robert Downey Jr. in the cast, for instance, was a masterstroke. His Kirk Lazarus is a dazzling characterization—with no first-hand knowledge of black people, Lazarus has cobbled together a new “black” persona apparently based on half-remembered Fred Williamson movies. He’s not fooling anybody, but he’s such a committed actor that he simply cannot break character. He’s gone “full black man.”

Then again, maybe I’m selling Stiller short. Maybe it takes an insider, a consummate studio politician, to get a movie this loony made in the first place. Tropic Thunder has the feel of an early version of a script, with all the nonsensical, cockamamie stuff that movie executives usually demand to be rewritten somehow still left in. I still prefer the casual good-time buzz that a movie like Pineapple Express leaves me with over the macho comic aggression of Tropic Thunder, though. Why go through the trouble of putting Tom Cruise through hours in the makeup chair to turn him into a fat, hairy, foul-mouthed chatterbox? Seth Rogen can deliver all of that the moment he steps out of his trailer.

The Musicgoer: Randy Newman's Harps & Angels

RANDY NEWMAN
Harps & Angels
(Nonesuch)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Anyone familiar with Randy Newman knows to take a song title like “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country” with a grain of salt. Sure enough, the best thing Newman can think of to say on behalf of the current U.S. administration is that at least they’re not as bad as Caligula. (“Hmm,” he remarks, “that’s not a very good example, is it?”)

Harps & Angels is Newman’s first album of all-new songs since 1999’s Bad Love, but all those years of writing songs for animated cartoons haven’t dulled his jaundiced attitude towards love and politics one bit. The American empire is crumbling, the Chinese are taking over the world, and every girl Newman falls in love with winds up divorcing him a few years later.

Occasionally, Newman’s touch is too heavy-handed (as on “Korean Parents” or the overproduced “A Piece of the Pie”), but for the most part, his conversational delivery and New Orleans piano-playing help Newman’s misanthropy go down easy. It’s not Newman’s best album, but it’s not as bad as Land of Dreams either. Hmm... that’s not a very good example, is it?

Why Must I Be A Teenager On Camera?

I’ve always tried in my reviews to avoid laying down absolute rules when it comes to movies—or penalizing filmmakers who go ahead and break them. Every genre of cinema, from comedy to action to noir to documentary, is elastic; in fact, it’s practically the duty of any ambitious filmmaker to see how much they can get away with, to turn genre rules upside-down.

And so, my problem with Nanette Burstein’s new film American Teen, a documentary about a year in the life of five kids attending Warsaw Community High School in Warsaw, Indiana, isn’t that it indulges in so many techniques that are usually reserved for fiction films—slick, highly manipulative editing, a wall-to-wall pop soundtrack, what appear to be scripted voiceovers, and several animated dream sequences. (I can hear Frederick Wiseman’s head exploding already.) My problem is that Burstein’s use of all these techniques is so banal and patronizing.

For instance, when Jake, a shy, pimply, videogame-playing band geek dreams about getting a girlfriend, Burstein illustrates his fantasy with a computer-animated sequence in which Jake becomes... sigh... the hero of his own World of Warcraft-style videogame. Aspiring basketball star Colin is shown running around the stars and shooting hoops in outer space, while moody Hannah becomes a stop-motion doll looking at her reflection in a cracked mirror and wandering around a cobwebby basement straight out of a Korn video. The images in these dream sequences aren’t surprising, revelatory, funny, or even all that beautiful—they’re just empty visual padding, like the cheesy “music videos” on American Idol.

The only dream sequence with some subversive kick is the one about Megan, a self-described “popular girl” whose big goal is getting accepted into Notre Dame, her father’s alma mater. As Megan rhapsodizes about the wonders of Notre Dame and the “better quality of people” who attend classes there, we see a blonde girl, as generic and faceless as a figure in a USA Today infographic, floating slowly through the campus gates and taking her place within a sea of hundreds of equally anonymous figures in an ecstasy of conformity.

You’d almost feel a twinge of pathos at her naïve teenage dreams if it weren’t for all the horrible, horrible things you see this girl do earlier this movie: make vicious prank calls to a female classmate who’s had naked pictures of herself forwarded throughout the entire school; spraypaint “FAG” on the home of a rival student; and barely get punished for any of it. It says something about the level of trust Burstein established with her subjects that Megan and her clique did all of this stuff on-camera—I can’t imagine the evil shit she was up to when Burstein’s crew was elsewhere. (During the senior prom, you half-expect to see her backstage with a rope and a bucket of pig’s blood.)

Much more sympathetic are Colin, whose future depends on his ability to land a basketball scholarship, and Hannah, a would-be filmmaker whose classmates regard her as a weird, arty outsider even though she’s smart, funny, creative, and looks like Julia Stiles. The most compelling scenes in American Teen are the ones where Colin and Hannah grapple with their parents over their desire to leave Warsaw and go to college. Hannah’s ability to believe in her dreams even after her manic-depressive mother tells her, point blank, “You’re not special,” is genuinely inspiring. (As is a postscript that shows Jake’s acne finally cleared up.)

But American Teen still feels like the dumbed-down version of the film that Burstein could have made instead. Somewhere in those hundreds of hours of footage she shot, there surely must be a more complicated, nuanced depiction of this high school’s class system, more footage of interesting peripheral figures like Colin’s black friend and Hannah’s gay friend, a film with more on its mind than 20-year-old memories of The Breakfast Club. A documentary version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, on the other hand, maybe directed by Ross McElwee—that I want to see!

"I've Always Wanted To Perform For A Captive Audience"

Another of my "Summer Movie Time Machine" segments has been posted on the CBC website. This one deals with 1989, and it's a fun one: on the one hand, you have the youthful, state-of-the-art game-changing blockbuster that was Tim Burton's Batman... and on the other, you've got the creaky, tired, arthritic Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Kirk battles God! Meanwhile, I battle boredom! Who will win? Click and find out!

Moviegoer Diary: The Happening, National Treasure: Book of Secrets

THE HAPPENING

Plot In A Nutshell
M. Night Shyamalan’s ecological thriller, in which the plants on the east coast of the United States begin releasing an invisible windborne toxin that causes humans to kill themselves.

Thoughts
Well, I finally caught up with The Happening, which vanished from all the first-run Edmonton theatres with lightning speed and which is currently playing in a fleapit discount theatre at West Edmonton Mall—a decaying multiplex where they save money on staff by forcing the kids at the concession counter to also sell you your tickets.

This theatre, where even the candy racks were barren and the refrigerator was empty except for a few lonely bottles of Dasani water, seemed like the perfect place to view M. Night Shyamalan’s little-loved non-blockbuster, on a small, stained screen with maybe five other people in the audience, all of them as bored as I was.

Well, truthfully, it would be wrong to say I was bored, exactly—The Happening exerts a low fascination as a movie in which almost none of the director’s planned effects come off. I’m sure Shyamalan hoped that audiences would leave the theatre unable to look at a tree or a bush again without a small quiver of fear, but the concept of malevolent plantlife is such a weird, abstract, underdramatized, unconvincing notion in the film—a notion, furthermore, that doesn’t really tap into any kind of subconscious fear we all share already, the way any effective horror movie has to—that Shyamalan’s “eerie” images of the wind blowing through the trees produces nary a tickle on your inner dreadometer.

The scenes of various anonymous characters going into a trance and killing themselves, like suicidal zombies, are also disappointing, especially after all the hype about this being Shyamalan’s first R-rated film. They’re certainly bloodier than anything in his previous films, but his overly tasteful staging mutes their impact. No one panics, no one seems traumatized. The world is turning into a madhouse, but Shyamalan acts as if he’s watching everything through a telescope—and through the wrong end.

But The Happening isn’t just a horror movie that isn’t as scary as its creator hoped; that kind of movie comes out all the time. What’s so disconcerting about it is its total absence of recognizable human behaviour, to the point where you start to wonder if Shyamalan has some kind of undiagnosed Asperger's condition. There’s something “off” in almost every one of the big sequences—the way the construction worker doesn’t flinch or panic when his co-workers keep falling from the sky, but instead just stands still, looks heavenward, and tearfully says, “God in heaven!” Or the way neither Deschanel nor Wahlberg says a single word when the strange old lady in whose house they’ve taken refuge slaps the hand of the little girl they’re taking care of. Or the infuriating climactic scene, in which Deschanel and Wahlberg apparently decide to commit suicide by leaving their hideouts—despite the complete absence of any imminent threat, despite their knowledge that the toxin will dissipate shortly, and despite the fact that their “romantic” gesture will mean the little eight-year-old girl in their care will die too.

Or just about every moment in Zooey Deschanel’s truly weird performance as a woman who behaves as if having tiramisu with another man and not telling her husband about it is an indiscretion worthy of Henrik Ibsen. She may be the stupidest character in any non-comedy this summer—I say “non-comedy” as a way of eliminating what we mathematicians refer to as “the Step Brothers variable”—except none of the other characters seems to treat her as the idiot she obviously is. My favourite moment comes after she’s had several encounters with the windborne toxin that’s killing everyone: Wahlberg is frantically calling out to her, yelling, “Close all the doors and windows! Do it!”

Deschanel’s response: “Why?”

Could this be why she’s able to survive to the end of the movie? Maybe the plants recognized one of their own and decided to spare her. I’m surprised that when the wind blew through her hair, Shyamalan didn’t have her start emitting neurotoxins along with the nearby ferns. After The Village, it would have been only the second most ridiculous twist ending in his filmography.

RATING: 1.5/5



NATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS

Plot In A Nutshell
Jon Turtletaub’s 2007 sequel to his 2004 hit National Treasure, in which ultrapatriotic treasure-hunter Ben Gates goes in search of a legendary book containing all the most closely guarded secrets of the United States, in hopes of clearing his ancestor of accusations that he participated in the scheme to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

Thoughts
Guilty secret: I get a huge kick out of the National Treasure movies. Actually, I was hoping this post would be a guilty-pleasure double-bill, except The Happening turned out to be just as terrible as everyone said it was.

M. Night Shyamalan could have used a lot more of the self-deprecating humour and the cheerfully ridiculous plotting of the National Treasure franchise in The Happening, actually. They’re easy to make fun of, but they’re just about the only movies in the six years since Adaptation that have used Nicolas Cage properly. And Jon Turtletaub may not be the world’s most respectable director, but any filmmaker who can persuade three Oscar-winning actors (Cage, Helen Mirren, and Jon Voight) and a four-time Oscar nominee (Ed Harris) to spend what must have been several days soaked to their skins inside a tank of water must have the charm and persuasive power of a dozen normal men.

I don’t get too worked up about the National Treasure movies’ paranoid depiction of every significant event in American history as the outcome of conspiracies and secret plots, their true meaning locked inside an endless series of riddles, ciphers, brainteasers, and anagram puzzles. (There is something very American about this strain of thought, though, isn’t there? You sure don’t see Canadians writing airport thrillers about treasure hunters looking for codes embedded in John Diefenbaker’s secret diary.) I just enjoy these movies’ nimble screenplays, which are always full of clever touches like the bit in Book of Secrets where Cage figures out a way to make a copy of the inscription on an ancient piece of wood in the middle of a car chase.

I also appreciate the way these movies have an old-fashioned sense of honour to them. Book of Secrets may be the only Hollywood action movie I’ve ever seen where the hero ends a car chase because he doesn’t want any innocent bystanders to get hurt. Even Cage’s whole raison d’être throughout the movie is appealingly altruistic: to clear his ancestor’s good name. The fact that he discovers an underground city made entirely of gold in the process is entirely incidental.

I should also mention another member of the film’s slumming cast members: Harvey Keitel, who reprises his role as FBI Special Agent Sadusky, and who gets my favourite line in the movie, a bit that’s such a dopey, artificial movie moment that I fell in love with Keitel for delivering it with such panache. Here’s the setup: in order to lay his hands on a clue located inside the “book of secrets,” a top-secret volume only presidents are allowed to read, Cage’s Ben Gates kidnaps the president... or at least “borrows” him for a few moments inside a secret passageway underneath Mount Vernon. Cut to Keitel answering his cellphone at FBI headquarters. “The president’s been what?” he says. Then he hangs up, stares into the middle distance, narrows his eyes just slightly, and whispers one simple word, more to himself than any of his underlings: “Gates!”

I ask you: why can’t all idiotic Hollywood-franchise paycheque movies be this enjoyable?

RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: Clinic's Funf

CLINIC
Funf
(Domino)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

“Funf,” as Kurt Vonnegut once taught us, is the German word for good old “five.” It’s also the title of the fifth LP from the Liverpool post-punk band Clinic, an odds-and-sods compilation of B-sides, vinyl-only tracks, and “impossible-to-find rarities” the band recorded over the last 10 years. It’s also proof that the quartet is capable of making much harsher-sounding music than the atmospheric but still rhythmic minor-key rock sound they perfected on 2002’s Walking With Thee and which was already sounding a tad formulaic by the time 2004’s Winchester Cathedral came out.

The electric guitars come to the forefront on Funf, replacing their signature vintage keyboards and making tracks like “The Scythe” and “You Can’t Hurt You Anymore” sound like a cross between a ’60s garage-rock band and The Jesus and Mary Chain. It’s a bit of a novelty to hear Clinic with some of the polish rubbed off, but there aren’t enough sustained musical or lyrical ideas here to keep even Clinic fans interested for long.

High Anxiety

Hiring David Gordon Green—a Terrence Malick/Charles Burnett disciple whose films play to niche audiences, even in arthouse cinemas—to direct a mainstream action comedy about two stoners who go on the run after witnessing a murder? It’s the kind of idea that you’d only come up with if you were high—and for all I know, that’s precisely the state actor/screenwriter Seth Rogen and producer Judd Apatow were in when they called Green up and asked him to be a part of Pineapple Express.

But Green always had an affinity for lowbrow “dude” comedy. My old paper, Vue Weekly, interviewed Green when All the Real Girls came out—it’s embarrassing, but I truly can’t remember if I did the interview or if my pal (and fellow blogger) Josef Braun did, and now I can’t find the file online or on my computer—but I do remember being struck by Green’s response when Josef or I asked him what movies he’d seen recently and liked. “Old School!” he responded—a surprising endorsement from a guy whose movies had very little frathouse spirit about them.

Anyone who’s looking for them can spot the David Gordon Green touches throughout Pineapple Express—his spirit is there in the smeary, blurry freeze-frames that end several of the scenes; in dreamy slow-motion interludes like Seth Rogen and James Franco’s bumbling trek through the forest or the montage of clumsy dance moves they perform in a back alley for a bunch of kids they’ve just sold some weed to; in all sorts of throwaway moments like the shot of the little girl in thick eyeglasses and a bathing suit watching Franco through a fence as he sits in a playground swing, sobbing his heart out as he wolfs down a cheeseburger.

Franco, whose career has been derailed by a string of pretty-boy roles in movies like Tristan and Isolde, Annapolis, and Flyboys, gives a performance here that’s almost as much of a who-knew-he-had-it-in-him? revelation as Heath Ledger’s turn as The Joker in The Dark Knight. He plays Saul, a heavy-lidded, greasy-haired stoner who still bears dim traces of the nice Jewish boy he used to be before he got into pot dealing as a way of paying for his grandmother’s retirement home. The key to Franco’s performance may be the way he suggests Saul’s loneliness—there’s a telling bit early on in the film where he tries (sweetly, pathetically) to persuade Seth Rogen’s Dale to hang around his apartment for a few minutes longer. “Be my friend!” he might as well be saying. “Please by my friend!” When Dale cruelly informs him that he’s not Saul’s friend, he’s his customer, it’s the most emotionally devastating moment in the film.

Not that the film is what you’d call a weepie, exactly. It’s more like the kind of movie where guys get heavy glass ashtrays thrown at their head, where one character sticks his face in a bag of premium-grade weed and announces it smells “like God’s vagina,” and where no greater karmic punishment can be imagined than being reincarnated as an anal bead. (There are subtler jokes in here too—I like the way, for instance, that Green never underlines the irony that the secret government testing lab where marijuana was first declared an illegal substance gets a second life as a state-of-the-art grow facility. And I liked the way all of Rogen and Franco’s most paranoid suspicions turn out to be true: the cops really can use a discarded joint to trace their whereabouts; they really can triangulate their cellphone signals; every authority figure really is out to get them.)

I’m not sure whether to credit the script (by Rogen and his Superbad collaborator Evan Goldberg), the actors, Green’s direction, or producer Judd Apatow, but I might as well credit all of them for the way all the dialogue, even the funniest jokes, feels as if it were made up on the fly, as if the actors were all tapping into the same comic vibe hanging over the set like a cloud... not to be confused with the miasma of pot smoke also lingering over the heads of everyone in the cast, and possibly most of the crew.

The last half hour of Pineapple Express is surprisingly violent—so much so that it threatens to dispel the good mood generated by the first 90 minutes. It almost seems like a fundamental violation of the rules of the stoner film to show characters actually getting hurt, and even dying. But that initial discomfort is soon replaced by delight—even elation—when you realize how well-staged all the violence is. No lie: Pineapple Express contains three major action scenes, all of them more exciting and visually coherent than anything in The Dark Knight.

And then, Green finds a way to bring the film back down to earth. The final scene finds our three heroes (Rogen, Franco, and Danny McBride, who played Bust-Ass in All the Real Girls, will also be featured in Tropic Thunder later this summer, and seems poised to become the year’s big comic discovery) sitting in a diner, having apparently crawled their from the flaming wreckage of the film’s climactic showdown, their hair thick with blood, dirt smeared across their face, scarfing down eggs and sausage and laughing over the events of the film as if they had already become just one more wild anecdote about “that time we got so high....”

If they can even remember anything that happened once they sober up.

The Musicgoer: The Mann Who Knew Too Much

I've been an interviewing fiend lately: in addition to my Q&A with Guy Maddin (which you can read in the post below this one), I got to talk briefly last week with Aimee Mann, who's coming to town for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. I only got 15 minutes with her, and I got the feeling she's not the most garrulous person even under the best circumstances, but she gamely answered my questions, and patiently put up with sometimes herky-jerky interviewing style.

Here's the profile of her I wrote for SEE Magazine in Edmonton. (One tidbit that didn't get into the final piece: when I interviewed Jim White in July, I mentioned to him that I'd soon be talking to Aimee Mann, who contributed a guest vocal to a track on his album Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See. He told me, "Ask her if she got the coats!" Apparently, White had sent Mann a couple of thrift-store coats as a thank-you gesture for appearing on the album. Sure enough, I began my interview with Mann by asking her about the coats Jim White sent her—she said she got them, but they were too big for her. I got the feeling she was more puzzled by the gift than touched by it. It was hard to tell over the phone, but she seemed a little annoyed even to be reminded of the incident, and as a result, my rhythm was off for the rest of the interview. Thanks a lot, Jim White!)

* * * * *

Most rock stars are ruled by their ids, but not Aimee Mann, the cool, cerebral, pale blonde singer/songwriter who even named her independent CD label “SuperEgo Records.” She’s spent her last six albums—including her most recent release, 2008’s @#%&*! Smilers—keeping her wilder impulses in check, seldom raising her voice above that familiar mellow croon of hers as she sings about heartbreak, lost love, urban anomie, her meticulously crafted lyrics full of complex verse structures and internal rhymes. Listening to an Aimee Mann song is like doing the Sunday Times crossword puzzle on Quaaludes.

“Some people are great songwriters without having to work on it or stew over it or mull over it,” Mann says. “It would be great to be one of them, but I’m not. I do have to do some work on them. You’d think working within a tight rhyme scheme would help narrow down the possibilities, but it doesn’t—there’s an infinite number of ways to phrase something. If you’re backed into a corner with a certain figure of speech, there’s always another one that seems like it’ll work just as well, except with a different set of nuances. For me, writing is more about choosing a strong figure of speech than fitting words into a pattern; if I’m attached to a certain image, I find that helps the song flow into the next verse, from point A to point B.”

Point A in Mann’s career, unlikely as it seems now, was as an MTV staple, thanks to “Voices Carry,” the 1985 hit she recorded with ’Til Tuesday, one of those New Wave “haircut bands” who dominated the music-video channel in its early days. But Mann had already been asserting herself as a songwriter by the time ’Til Tuesday broke up in 1990; she went on to record two solo albums for major labels (1993’s Whatever and 1995’s I’m With Stupid), neither of which made much of an impact among record-buyers.

Everyone knows what happened next: the combination of the Paul Thomas Anderson film Magnolia (whose soundtrack prominently featured several new Mann songs), an Oscar nomination for the plaintive ballad “Save Me” (she lost to a Phil Collins song from Tarzan), and the release of Mann’s first independent disc, Bachelor No. 2, resulted in a career renaissance—proof that, contrary to the message of Mann’s songs, sometimes things do work out for the better.

“I certainly lost nothing by going indie as opposed to staying on a major label,” Mann says. “But going the indie route isn’t for everyone. And you need a partner—I’m not sitting there poring over budgets and making calls to retailers to make sure the records are getting to the stores. Being independent is not something you can do on your own. The big problem for me is the public perception of downloading and burning CDs as an alternative to paying for music. It’s decimated the entire music industry, but I’d say that indie record labels have been hit harder than the majors.”

And if there’s an artist whose CDs merit purchasing as physical objects instead of electronic downloads, it’s Aimee Mann—starting with 2002’s Lost in Space, which featured an booklet illustrated by the Canadian cartoonist Seth, the packaging of Mann’s albums is often as compelling as the music they contain. (In the case of 2005’s The Forgotten Arm, a disappointing concept album about an alcoholic boxer and his girlfriend traveling across the United States, the CD booklet, illustrated by Owen Smith, was arguably the disc’s main attraction—Mann won her only career Grammy Award for the packaging of The Forgotten Arm.)

“Even when I was on major labels, I tried to be involved with the packaging,” she says. “Of course, there you have to fight just to get access to the art director. They don’t want you involved that way. My father is in advertising, so I guess it runs in the family.”

The @#%&*! Smilers booklet is the work of Canadian-based artist Gary Taxali, whose weathered, faded clip-art illustrations, like signs that have spent the last six decades standing in the rain, immediately set the tone for the album’s sad, abandoned-carnival vibe. “It’s a street in a town where winning isn’t sweet/And every win is the beginning of defeat,” goes a typical lyric. I have a friend who refers to Aimee Mann’s songs as “music to feel bad to”—and it’s hard to argue with her. I mean, just look at that album title, right?

“‘Fucking smilers’—that’s a phrase a friend of mine and I started using after coming across it in a newsgroup called alt.bitter,” Mann says. “It was a thread started by someone ranting that if they ran across one more person telling them to smile, they were going to kill somebody. But I cartooned it up for the album. It seems much less harsh that way.”

Cold Enchantments!: Guy Maddin On My Winnipeg

Guy Maddin liked to tell interviewers that his autobiographical 2007 film Brand Upon the Brain! was “96 per cent literally true.” The breakdown of the prairie auteur's latest epic, a delirious exercise in hometown pride called My Winnipeg, is more complicated: “The movie’s about one-third fact, one-third legend—which, if you think about it, is truer than true in many ways—and one-third just honest lamentation. It’s all various species of honesty, but I don’t think there are any real whoppers in it.”

Still, anyone who’s been to Winnipeg may have a hard time recognizing any traces of that often prosaic city within Maddin’s version of it. The Winnipeg of My Winnipeg is a city whose nighttime streets are choked with sleepwalkers, all of them carrying the keys to their old houses and apartments (a city ordinance requires those dwellings’ new residents to let them in, too); a city whose former mayor used to preside over sleazy “man pageants,” male beauty contests whose winners would be rewarded with plum jobs at City Hall; a city where a herd of runaway horses once drowned in the icy river, and remained there, their frozen heads dotting the landscape, for the rest of the winter; and where for years, the most popular TV show was the locally produced LedgeMan!, a daily drama in which the same young man would walk out onto a building ledge, threatening to jump off, only to be talked back inside by his mother.

But My Winnipeg is also the story of Maddin’s home life—especially his relationship with his domineering mother, a figure moviegoers previously encountered in Cowards Bend the Knee and Brand Upon the Brain! (and who’s played here, in a casting coup, by Ann Savage, the star of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 cult noir Detour). One of the film’s funniest running gags consists of Maddin’s attempts to exorcise his own childhood traumas by hiring actors to recreate key events from his past. Only then, Maddin tells us in his hilariously overheated narration, can he be free of Winnipeg’s hold on him. “Maybe I can film my way out of here!” he says. “This time I'm leaving for good—again!”

The always genial Maddin was kind enough to speak to me last week about My Winnipeg (and the impending DVD release of Brand Upon the Brain!). He’s still in Winnipeg.

Q: This seems like the kind of movie where the most outrageous claims will turn out actually to be true.

Guy Maddin: Yeah, no one believes that “If Day” [a phony Nazi invasion of Winnipeg staged by the Rotary Club as a stunt to sell war bonds] happened. And it was completely forgotten immediately afterward. It’s very analogous to Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast, in which as legend would have it, thousands of listeners flew into a panic—got into car accidents, committed suicide—because they feared the Martians had landed. It became part of American myth. But Canadians are so timid about self-mythologizing that they didn’t even bother talking about the If Day invasion.

Q: The film stands out from your other work in that it has this very tactile, emotional component that breaks through the stylized visuals and the sometimes arch language of the narration. In the section about the demolition of the Winnipeg Arena and the building of the MTS Centre, for instance, your anger is really palpable.

GM: Yeah—now that I’ve shouted it out, I’m not so angry anymore, and my anger has been replaced by my usual resignation. I guess the advantage of ranting about this stuff in the context of a movie is that there’s nobody around to interrupt me. But I was genuinely upset about the arena getting torn down. And I don’t trust people who run for city council anyway—the job pays so poorly, I always figure the people there aren’t in it to help the city, but to help themselves get some sort of subdivision zoned so they can make a million dollars off of it. All these people seem to walk away from these poor-paying jobs a whole lot wealthier than they were when they got them. I don’t like it. I’m wary of every one of their decisions. Every one of them!

Q: So what is your level of celebrity in Winnipeg these days?

GM: I’d say about a Grade D. I can get my late DVD rental fees forgiven and occasionally a free coffee at a local café, but that’s about it. It’s not bad. It’s a comfortable level of celebrity. A movie director’s picture doesn’t appear in the paper very often. Although we got a great turnout when we showed the film in Winnipeg and I narrated it live.

Q: Did you learn anything about performing your own writing from watching the screenings of Brand Upon the Brain!, where people like Isabella Rossellini and Eli Wallach would do live narration?

GM: Yeah, I learned that unless you embrace the melodrama unashamedly, you’re going to die onstage. The stuff is meant to be florid and hypnotic—it’s got to be dialed up to 11, whatever the emotion is. I’m not Bob Newhart; I have to be more of a 19th-century melodramatist.

Q: Do people ever get choked up at this movie? I was kind of surprised to find myself feeling genuinely moved by the sequence near the end where you imagine “Citizen Girl” magically restoring the city to its former glory and undoing the damage of history.

GM: You know, every now and then, someone will admit that their eyes sort of misted over during the film. They won’t say where—they’ll just say “the end”—so maybe they mean there. That was always a goal of mine, to choke people up.

Q: Well, speaking of tearjerkers, one of the films that My Winnipeg strongly reminded me of is It’s a Wonderful Life—both films really tap into this idea of a hero who tries as hard as he can to leave his hometown but can never quite break free. It’s such a potent theme. I assume that’s something that you’ve struggled with in your own life as well.

GM: [Sighs.] Yeah, yeah... although Jimmy Stewart was trying a lot harder than I did. I always felt I should be trying harder, and as I was making this movie, I realized I should have been trying harder 20 years earlier—which is why I put a younger “Guy Maddin” into the movie. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of my favourite movies. God, it's potent. And it says so much about home and family and the things that make a home. I could never do something as good as It’s a Wonderful Life, but it was nice to try.

Q: I have to ask about the casting of Ann Savage as your mother. Where in the world did that inspiration come from?

GM: Well, she’s always been a favourite of mine. Detour is my favourite and the most famous Poverty Row film ever made, and I’m a Poverty Row filmmaker myself. And she’s the most fearsome femme fatale in film noir history. And so when I was looking for someone to play my mother, I needed someone to be a real force of nature—not just a mother, but the mother. Really, only Ann Savage or Bette Davis could play such a thing, and I remember reading that Bette Davis was scared of Ann Savage! So I figured I’d better go for Ann Savage! I remember, I was lamenting to a friend in L.A. that I couldn’t have Ann Savage because I assumed she was dead—and he told me that he’d had her at his wedding and gave me her phone number. It took me two or three months, but I talked her out of retirement. She hadn't been onscreen in more than 50 years.

Q: Is that fearsome quality something she puts on for the cameras, or is she a tough cookie in real life too?

GM: Oh, she’s a tough cookie. She talks like a film noir broad, even at 87. She’s spitting rivets the whole time. She’s really lovable, but she’s a tough broad.

Q: The DVD of Brand Upon the Brain! is also coming out this week, as part of the Criterion Collection. That’s got to be a thrill for any director.

GM: It is a real thrill. I think the film stands a good chance of being seen by more people now, just because people trust Criterion. And they did a really great job of packaging it—I have my own copy already, and it looks beautiful. In lieu of a director’s commentary, they decided to make a documentary of interviews with me and my collaborators. I felt a little conflicted because I’m very loyal to my other distributors, like Zeitgeist, but Criterion was very generous—they made a point in the interviews and in Dennis Lim’s essay in the booklet to make sure my other titles got interesting-sounding mentions. Very classy. I got to visit them when I was in L.A. recently. At the end of the tour, they let you visit a room called “The Closet” where all their DVDs are, and you just take a big bag and fill it up with Criterion discs. The Closet was my favourite part.

Q: Which discs did you snap up?

GM: Oh, too many to count.