Tragedy Of A Religulous Man

Here's a Q&A I did this week with director Larry Charles about his new film Religulous for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton. If you've read my review of the film, you'll know I wasn't entirely on board with the film, but Charles was more than happy to address my concerns. I don't know if I found his responses entirely convincing, but it's interesting hearing the creative viewpoint of someone who's coming from a place that's completely outside the documentary tradition.

As it happens, this is my second interview with Charles — I talked to him in 2003 about Masked and Anonymous, his Bob Dylan movie, a few months after its initial release. The film had gotten pretty badly beaten up by the critics, but he didn't seem too bitter about the whole experience, and took solace in Dylan's prediction on the set that reaction would be hostile toward the film at first, but that its reputation would improve as the years went on. He's a good guy, as far as I can tell, and with three films under his belt, he's quietly turning into one of the more unpredictable, adventurous directors in Hollywood. His next film is apparently an adaptation of Tommy Lee's Mötley Crüe book The Dirt, which definitely provides him with no end of awesome source material.

Here's our conversation:

* * * * *


“If you want to make God laugh,” the old proverb goes, “tell Him your plans.” To which director Larry Charles might add, if you want to make an atheist laugh, show him Religulous.

In Religulous, Charles follows comedian Bill Maher as he travels around the world, from the Holy Land theme park in Orlando, Florida to a bar for gay Muslims in Amsterdam, as he talks to a wide assortment of Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, both leaders and followers, as well as a few people who follow fringe faiths of their own wobbly design. Maher, whose mother was Jewish but who was brought up Catholic and now lives in a state of contented atheism, spars energetically with everyone he meets, trying to understand how so many intelligent people — many of them government officials of powerful countries — can possibly believe in an invisible, all-powerful person living in the sky or that the genealogy of all of mankind can be traced back to a garden inhabited by a talking snake.

Larry Charles’ career genealogy is equally improbable. He started out as a TV comedy writer, turning out dozens of episodes of shows like Seinfeld, Mad About You, The Tick, and Entourage before cutting his directing teeth on Larry David’s semi-improvised series Curb Your Enthusiasm. His first feature film as a director — 2003’s Masked and Anonymous, an underrated musical allegory starring and co-written by Bob Dylan — was savaged by critics, but Charles bounced back in a big way three years later with Borat, the one-of-a-kind Molotov cocktail of satire, road-trip documentary, and performance-art provocation that became one of the breakthrough pop cultural events of 2006.

Religulous is being marketed as a companion piece to Borat — get ready for another outrageous, taboo-smashing trip across America! — but it’s a much different animal. Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat, Bill Maher is playing himself, and except for a couple of moments where Maher’s subjects threaten to walk out on the interview, there’s much less of a sense of anything-can-happen danger to Religulous. And where Borat was an agent of chaos, Maher is a staunch advocate of reason: he likes science, he likes logic, and he wishes that the 15 per cent of Americans who identify themselves as belonging to no religious faith would get organized and push back against the fundamentalists who he believes are ruining his country.

Charles is an admirably clear thinker as well when it comes to his unique brand of comic documentaries. He spoke to me — and addressed some of my misgivings about Religulous — earlier this week over the phone from his office in Los Angeles.



Q: What was the mandate that you began with for Religulous? Did you go in with a specifically atheist agenda?

Larry Charles: There was definitely no atheist agenda. The hypothesis behind the movie was basically to make a Saturday night date movie, a rollicking, rock ’n’ roll rollercoaster ride through religion. We wanted to make a romp about religion. We wanted it to be a very funny movie about this very volatile, controversial subject that might shift the paradigm in some way.

Q: The movie has some of the flavour of Borat to it, but this one lacks that "prank" element that Borat had. I don’t know if that’s the word you would use —

LC: I wouldn’t, actually. With Borat, we created an alternate reality and the people in the film accepted that reality and operated within it as their own reality. Within that reality, they behaved absolutely honestly. It’s a lot more interesting conceptually than a prank, I would say.

Q: Fair enough. But did you learn anything, either technically or tactically, while making Borat that came in handy with Religulous?

LC: Yes. On Borat, we developed a filmmaking style that was very simple, very stripped-down, a very small-footprint style that was something I applied to Religulous as well.

Q: By “small footprint,” do you just mean a small crew?

LC: Yeah, our crew on Religulous was everybody that could fit in a van. There were no chairs, no crafts services, no glitter or glitz. Everybody had to get in the van, jump out, start filming, jump back in, and drive away. And that enabled us to get into places that we ordinarily wouldn’t have been able to — and to be in places where we didn’t belong, because we were so inconspicuous.

Q: What is your role on a film like this as a director? Are you guiding Bill Maher’s “performance” to any extent?

LC: The way I look at it is that Bill and I are making a film together, and that’s the feel that the movie should have. We’re driving along, I’m talking to him in the van, we’re hanging out, we’re talking to people, we’re laughing. My role in Borat and on this movie is to do whatever’s necessary to get the movie made. And that encompasses a lot of things between choosing angles. There’s a lot of X-factors on a movie like this that you can’t predict until you actually do it.



Q: One thing about the film that I did have misgivings about was that technique you employ of interpolating old movie clips and subtitles into the interviews to undercut what the people are saying. Could you talk a bit about what’s behind those choices?

LC: Well, I shot about 400 hours of film, and I have about 14.5 hours cut. So in the editing room, when we started to make choices about what to use, we decided to use those techniques when we thought they were somehow illuminating. And we thought they had to be earned. I could go through each of those moments and tell you why they exist, but I’ll give you an example. Take the interview with Jeremiah Cummings, who’s the African-American preacher who couldn’t quote the Bible properly.

Q: This is the guy who was in Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes?

LC: That’s the one. Now, here’s a man who’s a minister, who’s speaking before large congregations every Sunday, and who’s obviously some kind of charlatan or scam artist. And when the time comes for him to quote one of the most important passages from the Bible, he screws it up and manages to completely subvert its meaning. And I think that’s worth mocking and pointing out — that’s where the edgy, dark satire is. I want the audience to know that this guy is basically full of shit. I don’t think we pick on people in the movie at all, but I think when they’re being incredibly hypocritical or scary, it seems worthwhile to talk to the audience directly, in a sense.

Q: It seems as though, when you were picking out people to put in the movie, there are a lot of fringe figures and crackpots in there—

LC: Well, I would disagree with that. We’ve got Francis Collins, who’s one of the highest-level scientists in the country, we have two high-level Vatican priests, we have a senator, leaders of the Islamic church. There are numerous examples of people who are legitimate, valid, rational, normal members of society. I don’t think there’s a large percentage of crackpots. They may stand out more, because they’re so out there, but there’s not the preponderance that it might seem.

Q: Did you really try to interview the pope?

LC: Of course! We made inquiries to everybody — knowing, of course, that it was unlikely we’d get an audience. But you never know.

Q: Who is the core audience for this film? Is it that 15 per cent silent minority of atheists and non-believers?

LC: I suppose that’s the core audience, but to me, what will make this movie successful is if people who would normally be aghast and offended by its subject matter find themselves at the mall on a Sunday night, they’ve seen The Dark Knight and Tropic Thunder, so they go see Religulous and they find themselves laughing in spite of themselves. That would be the greatest goal of the movie: to reach those people and have them go, “Yeah, religion is a little silly, isn’t it?” and shift the paradigm just a little bit.

Q: There’s a striking moment in that closing sermon where Bill Maher addresses what you might call the “soft believers,” the non-fundamentalists, and kind of calls on them to recognize the harmful effects of religion on the world and sort of lay off it, the way you might make a vow to stop eating fast food hamburgers.

LC: I think that’s a good assessment of what he’s saying. And that’s one of the things I most respect and admire about Bill — that he’s willing to talk to the people who would normally agree with him and risk alienating them for the sake of being honest with them and say what he believes is the truth. It’s a controversial part of the movie, because it attacks the people who would naturally its fans.

Q: I don’t know if it’s too early in the game for any controversies to have erupted yet, but are there any parts of the film that you think people might target, that you think are particularly incendiary?

LC: It’s interesting that you ask that — I’ve never been asked that. The only answer I can give is that you can never predict what people will seize upon. I know from screenings at Toronto and whatever which characters people tend to gravitate to, but I don’t know what scenes or ideas people are most offended by. There are many choices, obviously!

The Musicgoer: Nick And Norah's Infinite Playlist (Original Soundtrack)

ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
(Atlantic)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

One of the more frustrating moments in the film Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist is the scene where the titular pair of indie-rock nerds leave a club just as Bishop Allen takes the stage and launches into their opening number — and instead of sticking around to hear what sounds like a really great, peppy song, the damn fool camera follows the kids out into the street.

Luckily, the soundtrack album lets you hear that song (“Middle Management”) in its entirely, as well as 14 other tracks by cool-kid faves like We Are Scientists, Takka Takka, and Devandra Banhart. The playlist is finite but well-chosen: I particularly enjoyed The Real Tuesday Weld’s dreamily jittery “Last Words,” The Dead 60s’ angular, guitar-driven “Riot Radio,” and Chris Bell’s marimbalicious “Speed of Sound.” There’s also a new Vampire Weekend track here called “Ottoman” — I have no idea what the acceptable hipster opinion of these guys is anymore (has the backlash to the backlash begun yet?), but it’s a nifty tune, and if Michael Cera approves of them, that’s good enough for me.

Ben Behaving Badly

In Elegy, Ben Kingsley pulls off an acting trick that I bet is a lot harder than it looks: he convinces you not only that's he's really smart, but that he’d also be really, really good in bed. Not since Daniel Day Lewis in The Unbearable Lightness of Being has an actor pulled off this tricky combination, and it's a skill set that's absolutely vital when you’re the lead character in a Philip Roth story — Elegy is adapted from Roth’s 2001 novella The Dying Animal. Kingsley plays literature professor, esteemed critic, and radio talk show host David Kepesh, a man whose sexual appetites remain undimmed even with his 70th birthday looming too distantly on the horizon. Compact, confident, muscular, Kingsley looks at potent as it’s possible to look at his age — and his shaved head only makes him look all the more phallic.

We’re told that Kepesh has a long history of dalliances with pretty female students, but his latest conquest, a Goyaesque Cuban beauty named Consuela Castillo (Penélope Cruz), connects with him on a deeper erotic level than any woman he’s ever known. And yet, he can’t bring himself to fully commit to her: he’s too self-conscious about the gap between their ages to make their relationship fully public, too fully convinced about the inevitability of her leaving him, too irrationally jealous of her previous lovers. Plus, he has his other, more age-appropriate lover Carolyn (a surprisingly sensuous Patricia Clarkson), who he’s not quite prepared to give up.

Elegy doesn’t try to replicate the urgent, stabbing qualities of Roth’s prose — there are none of Roth’s trademark, tortured arias of lust and guilt and self-recrimination and self-justification here. But Isabel Coixet (best known in Canada for directing the Sarah Polley tearjerker My Life Without Me) substitutes a meditative, autumnal mood of yearning and regret that’s just as potent and gripping. Elegy was written by Nicholas Meyer, who also wrote the script for The Human Stain, Hollywood’s previous attempt to put Roth onscreen, which never recovered from the fundamental miscasting of Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman.

No such problem exists in Elegy: Kepesh is easily Kingsley’s best role since Sexy Beast, and he nails every aspect of this man’s personality — the charming seducer, the man of intellect, the runaway father who refuses to apologize to his resentful son, the coward who lets love slip through his fingers.

Indeed, Elegy is a film about all the precious things that are so impossible to hang onto: love, beauty, health. All these characters are so vital, so hungry for life, and yet they’re all at a point in their lives where the spectre of death has begun whispering faintly to them. There’s an amazing, shockingly intimate scene where Kepesh visits his best friend George (Dennis Hopper), a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who has suffered a stroke. Bedridden, unable to speak, and in great emotional tumult, George grabs Kepesh, pulls him close, and kisses him on the mouth. There’s nothing homoerotic about it; it’s a gesture of pure friendship, but of course, to Kepesh, it must also feel like being kissed by the grave.

Meanwhile, Penélope Cruz, wearing an incongruously girlish headband, disproves the popular critical notion that she can only give good performances in Spanish. The quiet, contemplative Consuela makes a nice contrast to the deranged spitfire she plays in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Indeed, one can’t help but notice how much more nuanced and sexually sophisticated Elegy is compared to Allen’s recent work. Elegy feels refreshingly wise, adult, and professorial, while Allen, now in his 70s, still speaks with the voice of an undergrad.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Mockery

I was lucky enough to see George Carlin in concert here in Edmonton last year, just a few months before he died. He gave a great show, and part of his act that amazed me was the part where he talked about religion: Carlin started off by irascibly dismantling the popular Christian notion that one’s dead relatives spend all their time in heaven fondly looking down on you, after which he proceeded to dismiss all religious belief as a form of mental illness. It was so bracing to hear someone express such a sweeping sentiment, one so rarely heard in public yet so firmly rooted in science and common sense, delivered with total fearlessness, without feeling the slightest need to equivocate or apologize or pay lip service to any true believers who might have been in the theatre. There must have been hundreds of people there that night, and it was just as bracing to hear their roar of approval.

That’s the crowd that Bill Maher’s new documentary Religulous is directed at: the atheist minority. In the film, Maher quotes a statistic that states somewhere around 15 per cent of Americans say they have no religious affiliation whatsoever — which means that atheists greatly outnumber all sorts of other, much more vocal “special interest groups,” including Jews and gun owners, but somehow lack their clout in Washington. Maher begins Religulous by claiming that he wanted to gain a greater understanding of what makes people believe in God, but he’s really more interested in energizing the atheist base, encouraging them to rise up and speak up for science and rational thought. And the stakes are high: in the sermon that concludes the film, Maher even argues that unless we humans can get past our religious superstitions, we’re doomed to annihilate ourselves. But I think his true thoughts about religion are less apocalyptic than they sound. To Maher, religion isn’t a scourge; it’s more like a greasy fast food hamburger. It might taste good and satisfy a few cravings, but it’s still bad for you, and if you eat enough of it, it’ll kill you.

How you react to Religulous will probably depend on how annoyed you are by the gap between what it purports to be and what it actually is. It’s not a voyage of discovery, for one thing: even after Maher has traveled the world, talking to dozens of religious leaders and members of various faiths, you don’t get the sense that his experiences have shaken his beliefs one iota. And except for a segment early in the film where Maher visits a roadside chapel designed especially for truckers, he wastes most of his time on fringe figures, fundamentalists, and crackpots: a Puerto Rican preacher who claims to be the direct descendant of Jesus; an “anti-Zionist” Jew who attended that Holocaust denial conference organized by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinajad; a Muslim musician who specializes in inflammatory “terrorist rap.”

I would argue it’s not even a true documentary — it’s more like a feature-length version of one of those field segments from The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, in which all the interviews are whittled down to a highlight reel of comic zingers and reaction shots of interviewees looking uncomfortable. Maher and director Larry Charles (who also directed Borat) aren’t content just to volley one-liners at their subjects; they even edit in a few extra jabs after the interview is over, printing sarcastic subtitles at the bottom of the screen, or (an especially annoying habit) undercutting their comments with quick, campy clips from old educational films and Biblical epics, in much the same manner as Myra Breckinridge or the old HBO series Dream On.

And yet, for all my misgivings about Maher and Charles’ approach to this material, Religulous still has enough preaching-to-the-choir entertainment value for me to recommend it... assuming, of course, that you’re a member of the choir. The thing bops along at a brisk pace, Maher runs across some very entertaining people along the way (especially a crusty old Catholic priest with a hilariously iconoclastic attitude towards official Church dogma), and Maher is a much less grating presence on the big screen than he is on TV — although, like Michael Moore, he fills his movie with way too many scenes of his crew getting thrown out of buildings by security guards.

What would George Carlin think if he were looking down on Bill Maher from heaven? He’d probably approve of Maher’s message, but he’d have some doubts about his methods. Man, how sad is it that he’s not actually up there?

Merging With The Infinite

Whenever old-time screenwriters complain about the public’s ignorance of their importance to the moviemaking process, they like to say how a lot of people believe that the actors just make everything up themselves. I’m not one of those people, but when it comes to Michael Cera, I’m not so sure. That kid really does seem to be making up his dialogue on the fly. He has the rare comic gift of being able to make his scripted punchlines sound as natural and as tossed-off as his ad libs, and he has the even more enviable gift of a delivery whose rhythms and timing are so funny that he almost doesn’t even need jokes to get laughs: the way he speaks — that rabbit-in-the-headlights stars, the nervous pauses, the bashful smiles, but with a sense of cool comic poise always in control of how it’s all put together — is inherently funny without seeming affected.

On the DVD audio commentaries for Arrested Development, I was always surprised to hear the cast constantly rave about Michael Cera’s comic skills — he was great on the show, but he certainly didn’t seem like the next comedy star. Once again, I was wrong. In Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, he doesn’t pull any new acting tricks out of his bag, but it’s easy to imagine him becoming a heartthrob for a certain kind of teenage girl — he’s sweet, non-threatening, funny, considerate, approachable, fun to be around, and a bit of a goof. If I were a teenage girl, I'd date him in a second.

In Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, he’s Nick, an indie-rock-loving teen still devastated over being dumped by Tris (Alexis Dzenia), who is set up in her first scene as such a mean, superficial bitch — making fun of the mix CD he’s given her and dumping it in the trash — that it’s hard to imagine him even being interested in her. Norah (Kat Dennings, who’s much more appealing here than she was in The House Bunny) is more his type, a cool girl with a sardonic sense of humour which she has an unfortunate habit of unleashing on nice guys but keeping bottled up around jerks. The two of them don’t quite hit it off at first, but as they spend a long, eventful night driving around New York City trying to locate a secret concert by their favourite band as well as Norah’s drunk, AWOL friend Caroline, they inevitably fall in love.

And it’s sweet watching it happen. Disappointingly, for a film with Infinite Playlist in the title (and a soundtrack packed with hipster bands like Vampire Weekend, Bishop Allen, We Are Scientists, and Ratatat), they don’t spend much time arguing about music — and for a film whose main characters are named Nick and Norah, there isn’t as much flirty, sexy, funny banter between them as I’d hoped, either. But the film has its charms all the same. It’s a “one crazy night” teen comedy that stays refreshingly grounded in reality — no one breaks the law, no one gets publicly humiliated, no one has to dress up in a crazy costume or confront a criminal or run for their life. Nick and Norah don’t even drink. They just drive around, they run into their exes a few times, they dance a little, and they get to know each other. And I loved how the film shows two young people who want to have fun but who, without getting overly earnest or snobby or dorky about it, are also serious about the music they enjoy. It’s just a given in the movie that they like good bands and will get excited about seeing especially good ones live. So many Hollywood movies depict young people’s cultural preferences as being completely frivolous, but Nick and Norah is a teen romantic comedy that celebrates the discerning taste of its heroes — for bands as well as romantic partners.

There’s also something appealing about its depiction of New York City as the world’s most exciting playground for young people — all the young characters are bridge-and-tunnel kids, but they seem to have a better knowledge of all of Manhattan and Brooklyn’s nooks and crannies than the people who actually live there. (The TV show Gossip Girl also does a fun job of setting young people loose on New York — although, of course, those kids are much richer, hornier, and better dressed than sweet little Nick and Norah.)

I also enjoyed the performance by Ari Graynor as Norah’s friend Caroline, who is very funny to watch as she floats through the movie in a blissful, drunken haze, beaming as serenely as Glinda the Good Witch in her magical bubble (except Caroline’s bubble likely has a small pool of vomit collecting on the bottom).

I don’t know if director Peter Sollett had this movie in mind as a model, but Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist almost qualifies as a teen version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. The writing is nowhere near as sharp or as touching as that classic, but it does get you rooting for these two likable young strangers to get together. And late in the film, it does conjure up a couple of images that are pure teen love poetry: a wiper erasing a lipstick print on a car windshield to symbolize the end of a romance, and the lights on a VU meter in a recording studio zooming into the red to symbolize the start of a new one.

On Leave In Las Vegas

Three American soldiers find themselves sharing the same plane to New York: Cheever (the oldest) has finished his tour of duty in Iraq, while Colee (the girl) and TK (the ethnic guy) have a month’s leave before they have to return to the desert. They’re a mismatched bunch of strangers, and The Lucky Ones wastes no time arranging for them to all wind up in the same minivan, driving across America. And naturally, each of them has their own emotional crisis that gets worked out over the course of the trip: Cheever’s wife has told him he wants a divorce, while his son needs $20,000 in order to pay for his tuition to Stanford; Colee wants to bring her dead boyfriend’s guitar back to his family; and TK, who’s been shot in the groin, wants to go to Vegas and get himself a high-end call girl in hopes of resuscitating his penis before he reunites with his girlfriend.

Wow, this movie sure sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But the surprising thing about The Lucky Ones is that, despite its screenwriting contrivances (there’s even a third-act hurricane), despite the predictability of its tonal shifts from comic to dramatic, despite director/co-writer Neil Burger’s refusal to take any political stance on the war — despite all that, despite even the hurricane and the jaunty score and the scene where Robbins locks the keys in the car, it’s actually pretty watchable. (Remember: faint praise is better than no praise!)

It helps immeasurably that the three leads are so appealing — and, unlike the stars of almost every other Iraq War movie of the last three years, none of them is gunning for an Oscar nomination. Tim Robbins anchors the film as Cheever, a middle-aged guy who accepts all the reversals fate deals him —a failed marriage, a vanished civilian job, a bad back — with the same pained stoicism. Rachel McAdams usually plays such sharp cookies that it takes a few scenes to get used to her as Colee, a young private who does a lot more talking than thinking. (When the three of them go to McDonalds for dinner, Colee exclaims, completely without irony, that “It all looks so good, I can’t decide!”) And as TK, Michael Peña (from Crash and World Trade Center) finds a way to play a character who keeps his emotions to himself without letting his own performance become boring and remote.

Having recently driven across the United States myself, I was also pleased to find that The Lucky Ones is one of the few road movies that doesn’t turn into an “America the Beautiful” travelogue. These characters stick to the interstate, where the landscape consists of featureless Indiana asphalt, chain restaurants, gas plazas, Motel Sixes, airport bars, and prefab housing developments just visible a couple of miles from the exit ramp. Not that Burger is trying to make any kind of anti-American statement here. His camera doesn’t linger over the bland, ugly surroundings; he’s just working matter-of-factly with the landscape that he’s been given. This must be one of the few Hollywood films where you see the characters eating at a Perkins-style restaurant and you don’t feel the director condemning them for their bad taste. It’s a small thing, but an important one.

Burger is a tough director to figure out. His first film, 2002’s Interview With the Assassin, is one of my favourite straight-to-DVD discoveries, a mockumentary conspiracy thriller about the JFK assassination cleverly conceived to make the most of its budget limitations. He followed that up four years later with The Illusionist, a sepia-tinted romance based on a Steven Millhauser story and starring Edward Norton as a 19th-century stage magician which became a surprise date-movie hit. The Lucky Ones is much more conventional than either of those two films, and has virtually nothing in common with them except for being better and more tasteful than it looks.

Indeed, if Burger has a main strength as a director, it might be... well, taste, or at least an ability to pull back the reins the moment a story threatens to become too hokey. The hokum is still there in The Lucky Ones, but at least Burger persuades his actors to underplay it and not embarrass themselves. They all get through the movie in one piece — and in Hollywood, that’s a successful tour of duty in anybody’s book.

I Can't Believe I Asphyxiate The Whole Thing

The plot of Choke feels like the aftermath of a massive explosion at the quirk factory. The main character, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), is a sex addict who might almost qualify as a recovering sex addict if it weren’t for the fact that he frequently sneaks out of his 12-step meetings to bang the girl he’s sponsoring on the floor of the men’s room. His mother Ida (Anjelica Huston) is in a nursing home, but never recognizes him when he comes to visit. The home is expensive, and Victor’s job as an Irish indentured servant at a colonial re-enactment theme park doesn’t cover her expenses, so he picks up extra cash by intentionally choking on his food at fancy restaurants and then exploiting the protective emotions of the people who Heimlich him by persuading them to send him money. It’s an extreme way to make a living, but his mother’s habit of kidnapping him from his foster homes and then taking him along with her as she steals buses and breaks into zoos to free the animals would mess anybody up. (He’s got a chunk missing from his ear where an escaped lynx bit him.) But there’s evidence that he might be the half-cloned son of Jesus Christ, so he’s got that going for him.

There’s an unmistakable cleaning-out-my-drawers quality to the plot of Choke, both Chuck Palahniuk original novel and the new film that’s been adapted from it — the plot feels like a collection of leftover ideas and images that Palahniuk couldn’t find room for in his earlier books Fight Club or Invisible Monsters. But like a multicoloured ball squeezed together from scraps of plasticine during kindergarten art class, the final product doesn’t feel like a single, organic whole. And still Choke keeps packing in more oddball details: a wall of stones that Victor’s best friend Denny begins building, only to have it turn into a communal art project; an anal bead that gets lost up Victor’s ass; Ida’s nurse (Kelly Macdonald), who may hold the key to Victor’s identity (and who briefly renders him impotent); Victor’s hardass boss at the colonial village (played by writer/director Clark Gregg), who insists on saying “thee” and “thou” even when no tourists are around.

What does it all amount to? Damned if I know — I suspect we’re just supposed to turn our brains off and enjoy the whole subversive ride. Myself, I quickly tired of Palahniuk’s brand of cheap black humour (few of which are done any favours by Gregg’s tonally muddled direction): the scenes in the nursing home, where a demented old lady constantly accuses Victor of touching her “woo-woo,” feel particularly tone-deaf.

The sex-addict group therapy sequences, on the other hand, revisit territory that Palahniuk previously explored in Fight Club. But I was reminded more strongly of a book by one of Palahniuk’s contemporaries: Infinite Jest, by the late David Foster Wallace, another wildly plotted novel that touches on the world of 12-step programs, but which does so with so much more compassion and insight, and an underlying sense of genuine sadness and loss, emotions Choke pays only lip service to. In Choke, death and addiction are merely springboards for throwaway gags about tranny hookers, naked nuns, and chocolate pudding.

Fight Club may not have been much deeper as a novel, but director David Fincher found exactly the right darkly arch tone to give Palahniuk’s sardonic observations about the sterile, cubicle-bound culture of the North American male some resonance. Choke, meanwhile, is filmed in drab, hospital-corridor colours by cinematographer Tim Orr, and features an appropriately disheveled lead performance from Sam Rockwell that, while game, never convinces us that Victor’s fate or the identity of his father is worth caring about.

What, then, is the appeal of Chuck Palahniuk’s writing? I recall once reading a review that said his books are mainly popular among guys who don’t read many novels, but who think Palahniuk is the world’s greatest writer. (The other day at the office, I wondered aloud who reads these books, to which my co-editor Fawnda Mithrush wearily replied, “A whole lot of ex-boyfriends.”) Like Fight Club, Choke is the story of an angry, underachieving shlub who finds out he might actually be a modern messiah. I can see how the notion would be appealing — the Harry Potter books are built on a benign version of the same fantasy — but in Choke, I had a tough time swallowing it.

Chuck Palahniuk And Tyler Perry: Unlikely Bedfellows?

The Musicgoer: Okkervil River's The Stand-Ins

OKKERVIL RIVER
The Stand-Ins
(Jagjaguwar)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

The Stand-Ins is Okkervil River’s sequel/companion piece to their much-ballyhooed 2007 disc The Stage Names, and it shares many of the thematic obsessions as its predecessor: the lonely lives of minor celebrities, breakups, the emptiness of the rock-star lifestyle, and the lies that musicians tell in their personal lives as well as their music. On a technical level, Will Sheff’s lyrics often display a phenomenal level of craftsmanship: he begins “Pop Lie” with this labyrinthine sentence: “Sweetly sung and succinctly stated, / Words and music he calculated / To make you sing along / With your stereo on / As you stand in your shorts on the lawn” — and then he carries the same busy rhyme scheme through three more verses.

But for all their artistry, few of these songs reach an emotional climax — you get the feeling that Sheff gets more caught up in the structure of his songs than their meaning, chasing after rhymes like a dog chasing its own tail. The most notable exception is “Blue Tulip,” a haunting song from the perspective of a lovestruck rock groupie determined to make her idol “mean the words you sigh.” The Stand-Ins is a fine record, but I wanted Okkervil River to sigh like they mean it.

Moviegoer Diary: You Don't Mess With the Zohan, Mandingo

YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN

Plot In A Nutshell
Adam Sandler is an outrageously virile Israeli Special Forces soldier who fakes his own death so that he can go to America and pursue his dream of becoming a professional hairstylist.

Thoughts
This must have been a difficult one for critics to wrestle with. Which would win out: their collective disdain for Adam Sandler (who used up all the critical goodwill he earned with Punch-Drunk Love with last year’s gay-panic comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry) or their fading-but-still-strong affection for co-screenwriter Judd Apatow? And would the fact that TV comedy guru Robert Smigel also had a hand in the screenplay tip the reviews in its favour?

I was under the impression that Zohan had gotten generally favourable reviews, so I was surprised to see that its Rotten Tomatoes rating is a measly 35% — not much higher than bombs like Babylon A.D. and Bangkok Dangerous, which I didn’t think anybody gave a positive review to.

Now, I know I have a weakness for really stupid comedies — my enthusiasm for Semi-Pro, Step Brothers, and the scenes with the monkey in Speed Racer are a matter of public record — but I got a lot of genuine laughs of out You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, and I don’t think alone. When the commercials for the film started playing on television, I was taken aback to hear my mother (who is not exactly Adam Sandler’s target audience) tell me that she was thinking of seeing it. “It looks kind of funny!” she said with an embarrassed laugh. I forget exactly how I responded to her, but it was probably somewhere between a skeptical snort and an incredulous guffaw.

I haven’t seen I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, but I gather from reviews that it goes out of its way in its early scenes to establish Sandler’s character as an ultra-heterosexual pussyhound — as if to make absolutely certain, critics suggested, that no one in the audience would question Sandler’s masculinity in the later scenes where he and Kevin James pretend to be a gay couple.

Weirdly, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan seems to follow that same template (only in a much funnier, less defensive way). Zohan is arguably at its funniest in its first 20 minutes, when it’s establishing Zohan as the most virile, casually indestructible man on the planet, punching through walls and catching bullets in his nostril — basically, Superman with jean shorts and a Jewfro. (There’s a blissfully silly moment where Zohan celebrates a moment of triumph by high-fiving a passing seagull.) But once Zohan arrives in New York, having restyled his hair into a pompadour-like configuration that his 25-year-old Paul Mitchell stylebook calls “the Avalon,” one of the film’s few understated jokes is the way Zohan’s fashion sense (lots of shorts, shiny shirts, and Mariah Carey tees) makes him look gay. Refreshingly though, unlike Chuck and Larry, that confusion isn’t the end of the world, and Zohan takes it all in stride. The friendly, confident, laid-back Zohan is easily one of Sandler’s most likable characterizations, free of that seething undercurrent of sociopathic anger that Paul Thomas Anderson tapped into in Punch-Drunk Love.

Sure, the film has the weaknesses that plague so many Adam Sandler comedies: the shameless product placement, the pointless celebrity cameos (John McEnroe, wrestling announcer Michael Buffer, Mariah Carey... who actually is pretty funny — much funnier, in fact, than John Turturro), the presence of Rob Schneider. But the milieu of the film (transplanted Arabs and Israelis who find themselves operating businesses in New York City on the very same streets) is an unusual one for a mainstream Hollywood comedy — the scenes set within an Israeli-owned electronics store that’s perpetually “going out of business” are particularly sharp. (A sign in the background of one scene advertising “Eiweew” brand speakers cracked me up.)

And I can’t remember the last time I laughed as hard as I did at the scene where Zohan has dinner with his parents — at one point, his father (Shelley Berman) nonchalantly, inexplicably dips his eyeglasses into a tub of hummus and eats it up. And then, at the end of the meal, he takes a spoonful of hummus and casually stirs it into his coffee. Here's an interesting question for students of comedy: which of these two gags is funnier... the surrealism of Berman using his glasses as a spoon, or the subtler hummus-as-coffee-additive joke? Or am I an idiot and neither joke is amusing in the least? Share your theories in the comments section!

RATING: 3.5/5

* * * * *

MANDINGO

Plot In A Nutshell
Director Richard Fleischer’s notorious 1975 potboiler involving rape, miscegenation, murder, incest, and infanticide set on a plantation in the antebellum South and starring James Mason as the sickly, racist patriarch and Perry King as his crippled, nominally more sympathetic son.

Thoughts
It was an old issue of Movieline that sparked my interest in seeing Mandingo: the issue’s theme was the ’70s, and the editors had included a good article where they asked various actors and directors to name their favourite ’70s movie. I can’t remember now whether it was David O. Russell, Alexander Payne, or maybe Richard Linklater who picked Mandingo, but I do remember that whoever it was said that you could learn more about American race relations from watching Mandingo than from any more “reputable” source.

I didn’t know much about Mandingo going in. I knew that it was “about” a slave who has sex with a white woman, and I had heard about the film’s most outrageous image, James Mason resting his feet on a black child’s stomach as part of a crackbrained plan to alleviate his “rheumatizz.”

Both of those elements are there in the movie, but not in the way I imagined — the relationship between Susan George’s plantation wife and Ken Norton’s slave, which I had assumed would be the main focus of the film, doesn’t arise until the final 15 or 20 minutes or so, and then only as part of George’s desperate, insane attempts to avenge herself on her husband (Perry King), who much prefers the company of his compliant black “wenches.” (I also thought, incorrectly, that “Mandingo” was the name of the slave — I didn’t realize it was a variation on “Mandinka,” the West African ethnic group, which apparently was especially prized among slaveowners.) And while I had assumed Mason would have only one scene with the black kids under his feet, in fact, unbelievably, he continues this bit of business throughout the movie. The jaw-dropping scene where Mason is shown in bed with a naked black boy curled up at his feet is particularly creepy.

But the biggest surprise about Mandingo, a movie so disreputable that a lot of people nowadays even seem embarrassed to say its name, is how thoughtful and powerful it turns out to be. Sure, it’s a potboiler. Sure, the situations are tawdry and sordid. Sure, some of the performances (especially Susan George) are a little undisciplined. But Mandingo is uncannily vivid in the way it shows how a sick, hypocritical system corrupts everyone it touches — from Perry King’s loathsome cousin, who we see whipping a black girl before he forces himself on her, explaining blithely that “It gets a man excited... and she likes it too!”, to Agamemnon, the house slave who can hardly decide whether he’s more disgusted with his masters or with himself for obeying them.

The movie also contains several fascinating examples of what you might call “stereotype inversions,” where the white characters demonstrate character traits that racists have ascribed to blacks. It’s the white characters, for instance, who are obsessed with sex — we gather from several offhand bits of dialogue that Perry King has fathered dozens of “suckers” with various female slaves and has sold off most, if not all, of them. (And he’s the most sympathetic white character in the movie!) The whites are also more credulous when it comes to rumour and folk wisdom — witness James Mason’s rheumatism “cure.” And I’m not sure if this was the intention of screenwriter Norman Wexler (who also wrote Serpico and Saturday Night Fever), but the climactic scene, in which King forces Ken Norton into a gigantic pot of boiling water is like a grotesque parody of those racist cartoons about jungle savages boiling missionaries into soup.

In the year 2007, there almost seems to be something indecent about a movie like Mandingo, which derives so much of its power from the twisted interracial sexual mores of the plantation world. But that fascination is undeniable — I was very struck by the recent interview with critic/filmmaker Godfrey Cheshire on the blog The House Next Door, in which he observed that the bestselling American novel of all time (Uncle Tom’s Cabin), the most popular silent film of all time (The Birth of a Nation), the most popular sound film of all time (Gone With the Wind), the most popular American play of all time (the stage version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), and the most popular TV serial of all time (Roots) all deal with plantation life and slavery. And yet the essence of slavery, in all its horrible, dehumanizing awfulness, is rarely captured on film. (Kevin Willmott’s superb, bitterly funny 2004 mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America did a good job of it by putting the tropes of slavery into a modern pop-cultural context.)

Mandingo recently came out on DVD, albeit in a distinctly low-rent, no-frills edition that probably won’t do much to rehabilitate its reputation. Susan George, Perry King, and Ken Norton are all still alive and presumably available to do interviews, and it would be fascinating to hear a commentary track featuring the likes of Toni Morrison or Spike Lee or Armond White. I have no idea if any of those people even like this movie, but I’d love to hear their opinions of it. Special edition DVD — get on it, Paramount!

RATING: 4/5

Moviegoer Diary: At Long Last Love, Bigger, Stronger, Faster

AT LONG LAST LOVE

Plot In A Nutshell
Peter Bogdanovich’s much-maligned 1975 musical about a romantic roundelay involving a millionaire, a socialite, a Broadway actress, an Italian gambler, and a bunch of old Cole Porter songs.

Thoughts
At Long Last Love is a disappointing artifact for a movie archivist: neither as jaw-droppingly terrible as its reputation, nor the misunderstood gem that some claim it to be. (Check out Joe Baltake’s review of the film on his site The Passionate Moviegoer for a more enthusiastic defence of its virtues.) Still, I’ve wanted to track this one down ever since I read about it some 25 years ago in the Medved brothers’ book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, and I can finally cross it off the list.

I heard about the film from the Medveds, but I didn't want to sneer at it. I was truthfully expecting to really love it — one of my very favourite movie microgenres, alongside "French Foreign Legion movies" and "comedies about people putting on a play" is “musicals starring people who can’t really sing or dance,” a category that also includes One From the Heart, 8 ½ Women, the BBC version of Pennies From Heaven, Everyone Says I Love You, and Romance and Cigarettes. There’s something about seeing characters straining to lose themselves in the dreamworld song but not quite being able to leave reality behind that I find incredibly poignant.

But At Long Last Love isn’t poignant; its musical numbers are more about actors making the best of a difficult situation. One of the film’s more notable features is that the cast performed the songs live on the soundstage instead of lip-synching to an existing musical track. In principle, I love this idea — I suspect that the reason a lot of people have trouble accepting the musical convention whereby characters suddenly burst into song is precisely that awkward moment where the acoustics of the scene suddenly shift and actor’s voice suddenly takes on the unnatural, studio-bound tone that comes from being recorded in a glass booth.

The problem with At Long Last Love is that a lot of the time, you’re not hearing a great musical-comedy star burst into song; you’re hearing Burt Reynolds sitting in the back of a limousine, trying to come across as an idle playboy as he croons “Poor Young Millionaire.” Even Madeline Kahn, who is a terrific singer and comedienne, has trouble finding her footing — I wonder if she’s tamped down by Bogdanovich’s somewhat stodgy staging of the musical numbers, heavy on master shots but lacking in choreographic inspiration.

The actors who fare the best are John Hillerman and Eileen Brennan, playing Reynolds’ very proper butler and Cybill Shepherd’s vulgar maid. They have a sly chemistry, especially when they’re singing the off-colour duet "But in the Morning, No." Seriously, this song has the filthiest double entendres this side of a Butterbeans and Susie record — although Porter wraps them up in such an elegant melodic package you could almost overlook how completely inappropriate this song is if you weren't listening too closely.

As for Shepherd, there’s a cheerful amateurishness to her performance that works in the comic scenes — I love the girlish way she chirps “Where? Where?” during a trip to the racetrack when Brennan points out the horse she’s bet on — but not in her musical numbers. Her performance of “I Get a Kick Out of You,” flinging open a pair of French doors and then fighting with the lace curtains as she tries to find her way back into the room, is an embarrassment, as is her desultory tapdancing during “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love.”

Still, give Bogdanovich credit for filling the movie with Porter obscurities like “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love,” “But in the Morning, No,” and my favourite, “I Loved Him (But He Didn’t Love Me)”, whose wry, cynical lyrics, worthy of a Dorothy Parker poem, I’ve always loved ever since I heard the song on an old Pearl Bailey record I bought at a garage sale. Even on better-known songs like “It’s De-Lovely” or “You’re the Top,” Bogdanovich gives show-tune nerds a treat and includes lyrics from the tunes’ rarely performed later verses.

So: At Long Last Love... is it the real turtle soup or merely the mock? It’s mock, I’m afraid, but not “merely” either. This is pretty decent mock, I’d say. Even if it’s not a dish I’d go out of my way to eat again, it held me until the next meal.

RATING: 2.5/5


* * * * *

BIGGER, STRONGER, FASTER

Plot In A Nutshell
Christopher Bell’s 2008 documentary about the use of steroids by American athletes, with special focus on his two steroid-using brothers.

Thoughts
Bigger, Stronger, Faster turned out to be a surprisingly apt companion to Speed Racer, which I had watched just a couple of days earlier. One is a documentary and the other is a wildly stylized fantasy, but both contain the same central conflict: an idealistic young athlete who is shattered to learn that the sport he loves with the innocence of youth is rigged — or at least, that cheating is an accepted practice even among the squeakiest-looking champions.

According to Bell’s opening narration — which owes a big stylistic debt to the faux-innocent autobiographical voiceover that opens Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine — he and his two brothers Mike and Mark grew up in the ’80s idolizing the likes of Hulk Hogan, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Although the three Bell brothers were pudgy kids, they all took to weight training with a vengeance and quickly transformed into thick-necked, broad-shouldered behemoths. Christopher had a moral objection to steroids and never took them, but Mike and Mark both did — Mark became a champion power lifter, while Mike knocked around the professional wrestling world and still clings to desperate dreams of becoming a WWE star. He has a loving wife and family, so his situation isn’t anywhere as grim as the one facing Mickey Rourke in the upcoming film The Wrestler... but give him a few years.

Bell does a convincing job of debunking the myths surrounding steroids, which he argues are much safer (and their side effects much more easily reversed) than all those TV-movies about “roid rage” would have you believe. He also asks several good questions about why using steroids constitutes cheating when other forms of futuristic body alteration like Tiger Woods’ Lasik eye surgery are okay.

Instead, he delves into a deeper paradox surrounding steroids: the conflict between two deeply held American beliefs: that anyone can be a winner if they apply themselves and work hard... and that winning is everything, so you’d better do whatever it takes to make sure you don’t become a loser. We may bemoan the way athletes like José Canseco or Mark McGwire have sullied baseball’s good name, but we sure did cheer whenever they knocked a ball into the upper bleachers.

Bell has obviously watched a lot of Michael Moore documentaries —his uniform of muscle shirts and cargo shorts is sort of the gym rat’s version of Moore’s standard plaid shirt/jeans/baseball cap ensemble. And he’s got Moore’s signature combination of informal interviews and super-slick editing down pat. The movie is almost too slick, to be honest — all those TV and movie clips are the documentarian’s version of performance-enhancing drugs, an artificial burst of energy that kicks in whenever Bell’s argument threatens to get too talky.

But unlike Moore, Bell comes off as someone who genuinely wants to present an accurate, factual picture of both sides of an issue. He never tries to make any of his subjects look foolish — not the man who started an anti-steroid foundation after his son killed himself, he claims (with iffy evidence to back him up), as a result of steroid abuse, and not even Gregg Valentino, the man with the world’s largest biceps, who freely admits he looks like a freak.

Well, okay, Henry Waxman — the Congressman who called the baseball steroid hearings — looks pretty dumb, but only because of how distressingly unprepared he was to answer Bell’s fairly basic questions. He's intellectually outmuscled.



RATING: 3.5/5

All Whitey, Then!

According to Stuff White People Like blogger Christian Lander, some of the stuff white people like includes documentaries, Michel Gondry, film festivals, the Criterion Collection, and Wes Anderson. Those are all film-related, right? So I can get away with posting this interview I did with Lander for SEE Magazine on this blog, right, and nobody's going to call me on it? Gosh, I certainly hope so, because here it is...

* * * * *

Entry #1, posted on January 18, was about coffee.

Then, in quick succession, came a flurry of other posts exploring other topics. Film festivals. Farmers markets. David Sedaris. Yoga. ’80s nights. Having two last names. Oscar parties. Mos Def. Standing still at concerts. Having black friends. Microbreweries. Earlier this month, entry #108 appeared: pretending to enjoy classical music.

By this time, just eight months after it started, the blog Stuff White People Like had become a genuine internet phenomenon — the site’s exhaustive catalogue of the favourite people, products, and pastimes of an entire generation of culture-conscious, consumerist hipsters had gotten over 40 million hits, and its author, Christian Lander, had landed a tidy book deal with Random House, said goodbye to his day job at an interactive ad agency, and moved to Los Angeles to pursue opportunities as a comedy writer. (The book, which contains several new entries, came out in July. Naturally, it’s laid out in Helvetica, white people’s favourite font.)

Lander’s success is amazing, but not unearned: far from being a self-congratulatory celebration of hipster culture, Stuff White People Like (the book and the blog) is a frequently devastating work of satirical sociology. Take his entry on the Toyota Prius: “The Prius might be the most perfect white product ever. It’s expensive, gives the idea that you are helping the environment, and requires no commitment or life changes other than having slightly less money. It’s a pretty sweet deal for white people: you can buy a car, continue to drive to work and to Barack Obama rallies, and still feel like you are helping the environment.” Or his entry on Tibet: “In the history of white causes, there might never be one bigger than the need for China to ‘get out of Tibet.’ Unlike many other problems that have exceptionally complex solutions (global hunger, poverty, the environment), Tibet presents a rather clear-cut solution and is much easier to support blindly.”

For a white person, reading Stuff White People Like can be a uniquely painful experience, one where the guffaw of recognition quickly gives way to uncomfortable chuckles as Lander dissects the hypocrisy underlying white people’s professed hatred of corporations, our desire to eat only in ethnic restaurants where no other white people are at a table, or the absurd contortions we will go through at the office in order to avoid any kind of confrontation with our co-workers.

Christian Lander spoke with me last week just a few days after appearing on Late Night With Conan O’Brien, a show that doesn’t appear in the book or the blog, but ought to. So should alternative weeklies, come to think of it. Here’s our conversation.

Q: I’m sure you’ve told the story about the origins of the blog many times before, but let’s hear it again. What made you decide to become an amateur white-person sociologist?



Christian Lander: Well, on January 18, my friend Myles and I were having an IM conversation at work, and we were talking about the TV show The Wire, and Myles said he didn’t trust any white person who didn’t watch that show. And so we started joking about what those people were doing instead of watching The Wire — how they were probably going to yoga, going to therapy, getting divorced. And I had been interested in comedy writing and getting some kind of side project going, and it seemed like a funny idea. But of course, I never in a million years expected it to get where it is now. I just thought it would be like any other blog, and get read by my friends — if I was lucky.

Q: Do you have a sense of where the tipping point came and the blog was really starting to catch on?

CL: I sent it to about 20 of my friends, who sent it to their friends, who sent it to their friends, and the next thing I knew, it was on the Comedy Central blog and the Good magazine blog. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never reached out to them; they both just discovered it through friends of friends of friends. And it grew from there.

Q: You made a key decision right from the start of the blog, to write the entries as if they were directed toward non-white readers seeking to understand their white friends.

CL: Absolutely. These are good tips! Aside from all the humour, if an alien came down from space or a robot needed to be programmed to interact with white people, you could put the book or the blog in there, and white people would go, “This robot has pretty good taste!” There’s actually good advice in here, and I think that’s why it resonates, because the things I tell non-white people to say to flatter their white friends really would work on me.

Q: The other thing that really elevates your blog above just namechecking aspects of white culture is that just about every entry makes this underlying assumption that white people don’t necessarily like these things for their intrinsic qualities, but because of the way that these things make them feel, or the social signals that owning these objects or expressing these beliefs sends out to the wider world.

CL: That’s what it is. Some people take the blog the wrong way and say, “Why are you criticizing vegetarianism? Vegetarianism is a great thing, it helps the earth, blah blah blah.” But I’m not making a judgment on vegetarianism or nonprofits or whatever or saying they’re inherently bad; I’m just saying that part of the problem is that a lot of these things that people like, they like more so for being able to tell other people they like them and are therefore better than them.

Q: As you assembled this book, did you spot any constants or any qualities that the things white people like tend to have in common?



CL: One big theme is that white people like anything that makes them feel like they’re saving the world without having to make any sacrifices. Priuses, Whole Foods, that kind of thing. You’re still getting into a car, you’re still going to the supermarket and eating mass-produced goods, but everything about them tells you to feel good about what you’re doing. That’s one of the things that got me upset after graduate school, was the insane groupthink of the people I was surrounded by. I mean, I was living in Ontario, I was voting NDP, it’s not like I wasn’t a part of it, but as I got older, my eyes opened to the way that everyone thinks they’re so unique, so different, so counterculture when they all think exactly the same! They’re almost more of a bloc than the conservatives who they hate so much.

Q: I have to admit, there’s something a little depressing about reading the book and realizing over and over again that so many things I thought I had come to on my own are in fact proof that I’m just one big cultural cliché.

CL: And I’m making fun of myself too — that’s why I put my picture next to so many of the entries. And I’m including all sorts of pretentious things that I say and stupid things that I like.

Q: What’s the most ridiculous, absurd thing that white people like?

CL: For me, it’s probably bicycles. I ride a fixed-gear bike and it’s absurd how much I love it and how much I’ll talk about how amazing it is. Expensive sandwiches, that’s another one. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re paying $14 for a sandwich. And waiting in line for food — that’s gotten absurd over the last 20 years. That’s how you know it’s a good restaurant when you’re a white person, when you see a long line of people at a breakfast place or a sandwich place. You just instinctively get in line — you just know at the end of this line, there’s going to be something with prosciutto on it.

Q: Have there been any entries that turned out to be unexpectedly contentious?

CL: Yes, Myles — who I must stress is Filipino — wrote a post on Asian girls, which is by far the most offensive, racist post on the site, and Myles happily calls himself a racist in interviews. It sparked, like, 5,000 comments and caused what Myles calls a “race war” on the site. There was some ridiculousness to it, but some truth to it as well, and I think that’s what bothered people the most. But I find that it’s almost exclusively white people who get offended by the site.



Q: Are they mad about getting stereotyped? Or are they misunderstanding the premise of the site? What’s going on there?

CL: Well, in the ’80s and ’90s there was this big equality push, these campaigns that were really about equality of treatment — which is unequivocally a good thing — but which a lot of people misinterpreted to mean that everything is equal in every single way. And what that meant was that some people started thinking that recognizing difference was a value judgment and was therefore racist. So I think what my site has done — and maybe this is part of the reason for its success — is say that we are different, we do have a different perspective on things, but it’s not a value judgment. There’s a spinoff site called Stuff Educated Black People Like that includes things like “moving to Atlanta.” And it’s about the weird things that connect black people together. It’s not done in a hateful way. Stereotypes have been used for so long in a hateful way, to say, “You’re stupid. You’re a savage.” But the stereotypes I’m putting up are not in any way meant to make people hate white people. These are common experiences that I’m talking about in a fun way.

Q: By the end of the book, though, it all starts to seem like this narrow echo chamber of a lifestyle. Is there a way to break free of the prison of stuff white people like? Is there a way to pursue a more “authentic” life, away from all the Criterion DVDs and the New Balance running shoes? Or is the pursuit of “authenticity” just one more dumb thing that white people like?

CL: Yep. One of the things I’ve been talking about lately is the idea of gentrification. Do you have any idea how much work it is to keep up an authentic neighbourhood? You have to stop stores from opening, you have to put in building codes, you have to have homeowners’ associations — being authentic is a real fight against the way the world is going. Ultimately, I think the book’s message is to worry less about what people think. Winning and being declared the person with the best taste on earth doesn’t mean anything. The real focus should be on enjoying life for what it is. And the other thing to realize is that latching onto someone else’s culture isn’t going to provide you with what you need either. That’s not to say you should never go to a Chinese restaurant or never explore other cultures, but I think there’s an entry on “trying too hard” that should be read by some people. But it’s hard. We’re the first generation that will be downwardly mobile from our parents. Most of us can’t afford the house we grew up in. It’s not like we’re facing the end of the world in terms of a nuclear holocaust, but there’s a sadness about it.



Q: It does seem like there’s some kind of minor cultural crisis coming for our generation in that we don’t have as much money as our parents did, but our tastes are much more expensive. Something’s gotta give there.

CL: That’s exactly right. I grew up in Riverdale, which was a working-class neighbourhood in Toronto near the centre of the city with these older Victorian homes that are big and gorgeous but the area still has a “city feel” to it. That’s what I thought I’d have when I grew older. It was a reasonable lifestyle for my dad in the late ’70s, but it’s fucking expensive right now! Where can I go? I can’t live like that in New York or Chicago or Toronto. Where can I get that life back? And I can’t. It’s tough. I guess one of the answers is just give up on that dream and start an organic farm.

Q: But that’s not going to happen to you just yet. What’s your next project? Has this “white people” thing pretty much run its course?

CL: Yeah, I’ve had nine solid months of white people every single day. You know, my life’s dream growing up in Canada was to be a comedy writer. I grew up in the same neighbourhood as The Kids in the Hall and just looked up to them as idols. So we’ll see if I can make it as a comedy writer in TV or film. I’m in L.A. now, which is certainly in the right city for it.

The Musicgoer: Kimya Dawson's Alphabutt

KIMYA DAWSON
Alphabutt
(K)
*** (out of 5)

Both as a solo artist and as a member of The Moldy Peaches, Kimya Dawson has made a career out of creating children’s songs for grownups, so it’s not surprising to see her doing an album like Alphabutt, which is aimed directly at children (and the parents trying to potty-train them). Some songwriters would hesitate to record a song like “Pee-Pee in the Potty” (“Pee-pee in the potty! / Starts as milk from mommy! / Then that goes through your body!”), but Dawson has no problem about approaching kids on their poop- and fart-obsessed level. The title track is a hilariously scatological tour through the alphabet in which “D” is for doo-doo, “E” is for elephant doo-doo, “F” is for fart, and “G” is for gorilla fart. (And “H” is for huge gorilla fart.)

Alphabutt should be enough to reduce any proper three-year-old to helpless giggles, hopefully softening them up for the political messages later on in the disc: “Sunbeams and Some Beans” takes a stand against corporate farming while “We’re All Animals” is Dawson’s kid-friendly explanation for why she doesn’t shave her legs.

"This CBC Segment Is Not About Vietnam. This CBC Segment Is Vietnam!"

If you've already read my blog entry on Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse but wish you could hear me express the same thoughts in my seductive, radio-friendly voice, then boy, do I have good news for you: my CBC "Hidden Gems" segment on Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper's classic documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now has been posted to the CBC site. Click and enjoy!

Vroom At The Top

I might have skipped Speed Racer altogether were it not for Dennis Cozzalio’s impassioned defence of the film on his wonderful blog Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, in which he proudly departed from the critical majority who had dismissed the film as an incoherent, empty-headed exercise in candy-coloured visual overload and named it “the movie of the year for me so far.”

I finally caught up with the film this morning, and to my great surprise, I found it every bit as thrilling and delightful as Dennis did. I’m quite frankly baffled by the critical drubbing it received, especially from someone like Salon’s Stephanie Zacharek, who in the past has been one of the biggest defenders of Brian De Palma, whose ability to convey plot information through complicated visuals instead of dialogue has a lot in common with the Wachowskis’ approach to storytelling in Speed Racer. Indeed, you could look at the Wachowskis' use of computer technology to stitch together several individual shots into a fluid whole as a deluxe version of what De Palma was doing in the faux-single take that takes up the opening 15 minutes of Snake Eyes. (The De Palma comparison occurred to me when I was watching Speed Racer, so I was vexed to see Dennis had already made it in his review. Dammit — and I don’t think that’ll be the last observation about this movie that he got to ahead of me.)

I can’t imagine any movie lover not getting caught up in Speed Racer’s ingenious visuals, which really do feel like some kind of evolutionary step forward in film editing. Practically every scene in the movie contains some imaginative, playful new visual idea, but the Wachowskis’ most remarkable achievements are the three big race sequences that give the film its structure. (Far from being “incoherent,” the plot is quite satisfyingly built around these three races, each of which presents fresh challenges to Emile Hirsch’s Speed.)

The first race is a tour de force of visual invention, zooming freely back and forth in time from Speed as a child idolizing his older brother Rex to Speed in the present, still haunted by Rex’s death, on the verge of breaking Rex’s speed record before thousands of cheering fans. (The Wachowskis literally show Speed “chasing his brother’s ghost” as he circles the track — an idea that sounds thuddingly obvious on the page, but which is executed with a surprisingly light touch onscreen.) The second is a dangerous cross-country race through twisting mountain roads, deserts, and ice caves — in just one of several exciting touches, the Wachowskis show Speed, his girlfriend Trixie, and their ally Racer X communicating via walkie-talkie not by cutting between them in their various cars, but by whooshing effortlessly from one car to the next, the camera pulling us along after it, deep into the frame, over and over again. And after the final race, there’s a lovely pop image of Speed and Trixie kissing as the out-of-focus flashbulbs in the background turn into blurry neon hearts.

Speed Racer may be one of the most relentlessly horizontal movies ever made. Instead of cutting, the Wachowskis keep everything as fluid as they can, like a driver constantly maintaining his forward momentum. New images are constantly sliding into the frame from the side: characters’ heads or cars wiping across the screen, trailing a new scene behind them. Speed Racer is occasionally a little disorienting, especially in scenes like a nighttime conference between two of the film’s villains, which the Wachowskis deliberately film in such a way that we can’t tell if they’re facing each other, standing back-to-back, or both looking ahead in the same direction until the very end.

Make no mistake, though: this isn’t the brainless, hyperactive, CGI-enhanced cutting of a Michael Bay or a Tony Scott, which seems designed to make incoherent action sequences even more impossible to follow (stimulation without design) — this is more like cubist filmmaking. We get the essence of each bit of action, all of it adhering to its own clear internal logic, even if the laws of the physical universe are often being held in abeyance. (Sometimes the same characters shows up two or three places at once within the same shot.)

And, far from being bewildering, Speed Racer is filled with dozens of genuinely clever gags — many of them much more fanciful than I would have thought the Wachowskis were capable of. One of my favourites is a little moment during the second race where one of Speed’s rivals tries to shred his tire with a little circular saw that emerges from his hubcap. Speed activates a tire shield to defend himself, and for a couple of seconds, the saw and the shield have a little gladiator-style fight scene, zooming across the desert at 200 miles per hour.

After reading so many bad reviews of Speed Racer (and seeing stills of the cast in their startlingly bright-coloured costumes, especially John Goodman in his Super Mario mustache) I had assumed that the actors functioned more as props — one more element in the Wachowski’s elaborate production design. So I was surprised to see how soulful many of the performances were, especially John Goodman and Susan Sarandon as Mom and Pops Racer, who never condescend to the material or wink at the audience... even when Sarandon flips pancakes or fixes her boys a giant plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, she never seems to be playing a caricature. (She has a surprisingly moving speech where she tells Speed that when he drives, what he does is every bit as beautiful as art.)

And her eyes are a great visual match for Christina Ricci, who’s just unbelievably cute as Trixie, her bobbed hair emphasizing the perfect roundness of her head, her giant eyes the equal of any animé heroine. Few movie images this year have delighted me as much as our first glimpse of Ricci piloting a pink helicopter while wearing a purple jumpsuit.

I was expecting to grow pretty sick of Paulie Litt, who’s got a comic-relief role as Speed’s kid brother Spritle (whose inability to stop gorging on candy seems like the Wachowskis’ private joke about their own visual style), but I didn’t count on the fact that whenever he’s onscreen, he’s accompanied by his pet monkey Chim-Chim. I know I’m going to sound like a moron for saying this, but that monkey cracked me up every damn time. In one scene, we see Spritle and Chim-Chim watching Saturday morning cartoons — Spritle is wearing pyjamas with a Paul Frank monkey pattern on them... and then we cut to Chim-Chim wearing pyjamas with a little boy pattern on them. It's such a cheerfully silly Nancy and Sluggo kind of joke that you can't help but be won over by it.

Indeed, as Speed Racer wore on, I became increasingly incredulous that a movie so audacious and yet so giddily enjoyable could have been so roundly rejected by critics and audiences. And I haven’t even mentioned Roger Allam’s gleeful turn as the villain, a corporate zillionaire with a fondness for cream-coloured suits and purple shirts. (He has a fantastic monologue about how every auto race is secretly nothing more than a catalyst for profit.) Or the odd, mystical moment near the end of the film where Speed seems to commune with the spirit of his car, as if he can read its mind. Or the ninja attacks! (Christina Ricci gets my favourite line in the movie: "Hey — was that a ninja?")

By the time the closing credits arrived, with Ali Dee and the Deekompressors’ infectious bubblegum rap version of the old Speed Racer theme —the lyrics delivered in a flurry languages, as if calling for the entire world to unite in cheering Speed Racer to go, go, go! — I had completely surrendered to this movie’s charms. Thanks, Dennis! Now to see if The X-Files: I Want to Believe and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan are as underrated as you say they are too...

The Musicgoer: Ballboy's I Worked on the Ships

BALLBOY
I Worked on the Ships
(Pony Proof)
**** (out of 5)

My favourite song from Ballboy’s I Worked on the Ships is “Above the Clouds the Sun Is Always Shining,” which builds an intricate five-minute fugue out of nothing but these lyrics: “You’re walking home/And you’re on your own/And the mobile phone/Has no news at all.” The song couldn’t be better: it perfectly captures the feeling of... well, walking home all alone without getting any messages on your mobile phone. And the cello and the piano and the glockenspiel add a lonely, autumnal feel to the whole thing—you can practically feel the dead leaves under your feet. Ah, what could be sadder?

This is the fifth studio album from the Scottish indie band (a favourite of the late British DJ John Peel), and like its predecessors, it’s a beautifully observed collection of gentle half-sung, half-spoken story-songs that manage to be melancholy without being depressing, expressing a fundamental faith in humanity even on a post-9/11 tune like “Godzilla vs. The Island of Manhattan (With You and I Somewhere In-Between).” Like their countrymates Belle and Sebastian, they're way on the twee side of the pop spectrum, but a little glockenspiel here and there never killed anybody. Now if only they can work on shortening those song titles...

Moviegoer Diary: Mishima, Standard Operating Procedure

MISHIMA

Plot In A Nutshell
Paul Schrader’s 1985 biopic about Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, complete with mini-adaptations of three of his key novels.

Thoughts
I’ll admit it: I bought the DVD because of the packaging. Criterion really outdid themselves with this one—a shiny gold box stamped with pink and orange flowers, a mesmerizing pattern of outward-radiating lines, and bunch of photos of Ken Ogata as Mishima, all arrayed in mirror patterns so that looking at the artwork is like staring into a kaleidoscope. It’s like the visual equivalent of the most epiphanic moments of Philip Glass’ score.

I hadn’t watched this movie since it came out, although I vividly recall seeing it at the (sadly now-defunct) Broadway Theatre in Hamilton, Ontario with my friend Ken, and how both of us were blown away by its breathtaking visuals and by Mishima’s passionate, rather frightening commitment to his art and his determination to wed beauty to action. I was a little surprised to see that the climactic seppuku scene was nowhere near as gory as I remembered it—over the last 20 years, my mind had embroidered that scene to the point where I pictured guts spilling all over the floor.

It’s amusing to listen to Paul Schrader’s audio commentary and learn that the artist he originally was planning to write a biopic about was Hank Williams, and that he only switched to Mishima when his brother Leonard, a lifelong Japanophile, brought his books to his attention. I’d still love to see what Schrader’s Williams script would have looked like, though—judging from Mishima, Patty Hearst, and Auto Focus, his other forays into the biopic genre, it probably wouldn’t have been a Walk the Line-style crowd-pleaser. When Auto Focus is the most “traditional” biopic on a director’s résumé, you know he’s not exactly courting Oscars.

Still, Schrader’s script deserves some kind of reward. I’m kind of surprised that movie biopics of famous authors haven’t used Mishima as a template—the idea of incorporating these pocket-sized adaptations of his novels as a way of understanding his character and his evolving outlook on the world just seems like such a sensible approach. I’ve never read any of Mishima’s work, so I don’t know how faithful Schrader’s versions of them are—from what I can gather, he’s really boiled them down to their essentials, concentrating more on capturing their central themes than on the nuances of the characters. But I love the way he stages them—I don’t know whether it was the Mishima material itself, working in Japan, or collaborating with Eiko Ishioka (the brilliant, visionary production designer whose work on Tarsem’s The Fall I also wrote about recently), but Mishima offers a level of visual pleasure that’s pretty much unique in Schrader’s filmography.

Mishima deals with topics that I am woefully inexpert on: Mishima’s writing, Japanese culture, bodybuilding, militarism, kinky sex. Twenty-three years after my first viewing, I find I’m still as blown away by it, and in exactly the same untutored, wide-eyed way. Wow, that Golden Pavilion set is amazing. Wow, did Mishima really take an army garrison hostage and commit ritual suicide by the commanding officer’s desk? Wow, I’d nearly forgotten what a great score Philip Glass wrote for this movie!



RATING: 4.5/5

* * * * *

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

Plot In A Nutshell
Errol Morris’ 2008 documentary about the atrocities committed by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, with special attention paid to the dozens of photographs they took documenting some of the worst examples of prisoner abuse.

Thoughts
Well, I’ll say one thing for Standard Operating Procedure: it contains the most beautifully photographed, immaculately lit scenes of Iraqis being waterboarded in the history of cinema. Robert Richardson’s camera captures every drop of water bouncing off the burlap and sparkling in the light. I wonder if there’s anywhere where you can buy stills from this movie—they really deserve to be framed.

But seriously, folks—what was Errol Morris thinking when he made this movie? Stylized, slow-motion recreations of events have been part of Morris’ films ever since The Thin Blue Line, but here, that tic has gotten completely out of control. It’s so hard to pick out the most ridiculous moment, but my vote goes to the moment where one of Morris’ interviewees tells an anecdote about Saddam Hussein, on the run, showing up at a farmhouse, inviting himself in, and frying up an egg in the kitchen—whereupon Morris treats us to a long, lingering close-up of someone cracking open an egg and the yolk drip-drip-dropping into a puddle of cooking oil. It’s like something out of CSI, where if William Petersen so much as mentions that a suspect was coughing during an interview, the producers feel compelled to illustrate his comment with an expensive computer-animated zoom down someone’s trachea. (Second place: an endless shot of a Bic razor dry-shaving off some guy’s eyebrow.)

Perhaps it’s not fair to penalize a movie like this simply because a few other documentaries on the same subject arrived in my city earlier, but there’s not much in Standard Operating Procedure that didn’t get covered more thoroughly and hauntingly in Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib or Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side. Kennedy and Gibney also do a better job than Morris of showing the way policy decisions back in Washington trickled all the way down to the dimly lit prison cells in Iraq—and they did so without hyping their discoveries with a lot of obtrusive music and scary sound effects from the Foley guys.

Morris is a very, very smart guy, but based on my sole viewing of the film, I wonder if he got lost here in his intellectualized approach to the material. He tries to introduce this notion that photographs don’t tell the whole story, that you can’t properly evaluate an image without examining what’s just outside the frame. Maybe so, but it seems like a problematic notion to introduce into a film where the interviews clearly contain multiple ellipses and tricky edits that, for all we in the audience know, completely jumble the order in which the words originally appeared.

I greatly admire Morris’ work, but this was one of my biggest cinematic disappointments of the year.



RATING: 2/5

No Country For Flabby Men

It was less than a year ago that Joel and Ethan Coen released No Country for Old Men, the sombre, Oscar-winning adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel that many critics regarded as their masterpiece. Their followup, Burn After Reading, has, if anything, an even more illustrious cast—George Clooney, Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins—but this one is a much goofier, light-hearted affair.

The premise is a classic Coen bumbling-criminal scenario: a pair of gym employees (McDormand and Pitt) discover a computer disc belonging to a disgruntled former CIA analyst (Malkovich), and decide to blackmail him for the return of his “highly sensitive shit.” But their plan, inevitably, goes awry, with McDormand’s new boyfriend (Clooney), Malkovich’s unhappy wife (Swinton) and McDormand and Pitt’s boss at the gym (Jenkins) all complicating matters, both wittingly and unwittingly, while a pair of senior CIA supervisors try, without much success, to make sense of the ever-growing mess.

I attended a screening of Burn After Reading last week with Michael Hingston, one of my fellow movie writers at SEE Magazine in Edmonton, and we sat down immediately afterward to share our thoughts.

* * *

Paul: What were your expectations going into this movie?

Michael: Well, I suppose the trailers led us both to expect a sort of light, funny shoot-’em-up coming after their dark masterpiece No Country for Old Men. So the big question was whether this light, throwaway movie would get panned by critics hoping they’d do something as weighty as No Country for Old Men. We were both talking before the movie about how this reminded us of when the Coens followed up their earlier Oscar-winning film Fargo with The Big Lebowski.

Paul: Right, because when it came out, The Big Lebowski did not get great reviews—it was regarded as this rambling disappointment, whereas now it’s probably the Coens’ most beloved movie. Do you think a similar fate awaits Burn After Reading?

Michael: Well, I don’t think there’ll be any conventions built around this one. I might as well state on the record here that I despise The Big Lebowski. I think it’s every bit as posturing and hollow a comedy as those critics originally said it was. I’m sure I’ll receive plenty of hate mail for saying that...


Paul: Of course you will, because you’re completely wrong. The Big Lebowski is awesome. But go on—make your larger point.

Michael: Sure. My larger point is that Burn After Reading seems like a far more effective kind of palate-cleanser, particularly after all of those claustrophobic scenes in motel rooms and intense, nail-biting chase sequences in No Country for Old Men. Here, they do that comic trick of having everyone taking something very seriously when in fact the stakes are quite minimal—in fact, you could argue that in this movie, the stakes are nonexistent.

Paul: It’s a favourite Coen Brothers tactic, to have a whole lot of complicated action and plotting and counterplotting and violence take place over nothing: in Fargo, it’s a fake kidnapping, in The Big Lebowski, it’s a fake kidnapping and a fake ransom payment, in Miller’s Crossing, the murder that sets everything in motion is a random accident. But I had an odd reaction to Burn After Reading: I got plenty of laughs out of it, and I really admired the deft plotting and the way the Coens juggle a whole lot of balls at once, but at the same time, there’s something kind of heartless and mechanical about the whole thing. It feels a bit like a screenwriting exercise and nothing more—they don’t really seem to care about the fates of any of the characters and the ending especially has a kind of cold, indifferent quality to it.

Michael: Yeah, the movie ends with a character closing a file folder, and you can almost picture the Coens putting their pens down at the end of the screenplay or closing their laptop screens. It’s very self-contained. But while I agree with you that that last moment is fairly mechanical, I still thought that the movie as a whole is a joy to watch. The way they pile on the miscommunications and have the characters all operating on partial information really makes it work as a chaotic movie, although it does take about half an hour to get going.

Paul: That’s certainly true. Its tone is much more tamped-down than, say, Raising Arizona. The characters are older, their emotions are a little more bottled up, the colours are a lot less garish. And there aren’t any over-the-top “virtuoso Coen Brothers setpieces” in this one either. Which is fine—it’s a different kind of movie.

Michael: The movie’s stance toward its characters is a little unexpected, too. When you hear the Coens are doing a movie that involves the CIA, you kind of expect that some kind of bumbling agency bureaucracy is going to be one of the factors complicating the story. But the twist in Burn After Reading is that the people in the CIA, without exception, are the smartest people in the film—certainly smarter than the people working in the gym. The highest-ranking guy in the movie is the guy played by J.K. Simmons, and he’s the smartest person in the movie.


Paul: And that left me feeling a little uneasy, especially the way they treat Frances McDormand’s character. In Fargo, McDormand’s character was easy to dismiss at first too, this pregnant sheriff with the funny accent who eats greasy, deep-fried fast food and waddles around the crime scene. But by the end of the movie, you see that she’s actually pretty sharp, and she’s become this really admirable figure—the moral centre of the movie. In Burn After Reading, McDormand plays this not-too-bright, fairly shallow woman—the only reason she participates the blackmail scheme in the first place is to raise money for some cosmetic surgery. I think we’re supposed to see her as pathetic, and nothing that happens in the movie ever changes that view. Even late in the film, when Clooney, this guy she really likes, abruptly breaks up with her, that ought to be kind of a heartbreaking moment. But the Coens don’t film it that way.

Michael: Yeah, instead they play up Clooney’s spooked expressions as he suddenly thinks everyone around them is a spy. I don’t know if I was bothered by the tone of the film to the extent you were—it’s just such a slick, well-put-together movie and the actors are so much fun to watch—but I recognize that it doesn’t really have any larger connection to the world. What did I learn about the world or human nature from this film? Not much.

Paul: Maybe this is a good springboard to talk about the actors. Who were the standout performers for you?

Michael: I really liked the contrast between John Malkovich and Brad Pitt. Malkovich is only 10 years older than Pitt, but they really push the age difference as far as it can go—Malkovich has no hair, he’s grey, he’s drinking like an old man, and Pitt looks like he’s supposed to be in his mid-20s.


Paul: It’s really amazing—he’s 45 years old and yet he’s completely convincing as this dimbulb twentysomething personal trainer. I think Pitt’s a terrific actor, and a lot funnier than he gets credit for.

Michael: He really nails this part—the way he punches the air, with the iPod earbuds permanently lodged in his ears. And he’s great in the scene where he meets with Malkovich and tries so hard to pretend he has leverage over him, only to have Malkovich quickly make it clear he has none at all. Pitt affects this menacing squint throughout the scene, but there are three or four times where you see him slowly forget and then suddenly remember to start squinting again. That seemed like genuine acting to me, in the best sense of the word.

Paul: That’s a nice bit. And I hope I haven’t sounded too negative, because the movie is filled with truly enjoyable stuff. There’s something violent that happens to one of the characters midway through the film that’s a genuine shock. And the scene where we finally get to see what it is that Clooney is building in his basement is really hilarious. I think it’s safe to say that neither of us saw that one coming.

Michael: It’s true. And the hints he drops along the way—it’s homemade, it costs less than $100, he got the inspiration from a similar product in “a gentleman’s magazine”—really don’t do it justice. It’s a nice, subversive twist in a film full of polished ones.

Moviegoer Diary: Sorcerer, Hands On A Hard Body

SORCERER

Plot In A Nutshell
William Friedkin’s 1977 remake of The Wages of Fear, about four desperate criminals living in squalid exile in Nicaragua who take a job hauling two truckfuls of nitroglycerin 200 miles through the jungle to the site of an oil well fire.

Thoughts
William Friedkin does perhaps the most pompous, insufferable DVD commentaries of any director in America—when he’s not pedantically explaining what’s going on in every scene, he’s trying to establish his highbrow bona fides with completely banal references to famous authors and artists, always pausing for emphasis before each word of praise. (“I’ve always admired... the great... Latin American novelist... Gabriel Garcia Marquez... in particular... his great, great novel... One Hundred Years of Solitude.”) Listening to him truly drives me crazy.

And yet! After watching movies like Bug, Cruising, To Live and Die in L.A. and now Sorcerer for the first time, all within the last year or two, I’m becoming quite a fan of his oblique style of action filmmaking and his dark, deliberately deglamourized protagonists.

Watching a bootleg copy of Sorcerer last week, it was easy to see why the film was such a flop upon its original release. This is one of those movies that, from a cynical commercial perspective, has too much sense of place: Friedkin really wallows in the filth and the grime and the crushing poverty of this Latin American setting. (It’s never actually named, but a couple of clues have led critics to believe it’s supposed to be Nicaragua.) I mean, the place Roy Scheider’s character, a former New Jersey gangster, is genuinely grim—I could practically hear audiences back in 1977 recoiling from it and saying, “It’s just... so... so... so Third World!”

And Friedkin’s storytelling feels unnecessarily slack—it’s not until we’re, like, an hour into the film that the big story “hook” of the nitroglycerin delivery is finally introduced. And a lot of what precedes that scene is pretty murky—lots of stuff with Scheider and Bruno Cremer and Amidou looking at each other suspiciously and sweating through their clothes. (I have to admit, I never did understand the first thing about Amidou’s character.)

But damn, once those trucks start driving down those twisty mountain roads, Sorcerer is a pretty amazingly tense experience. I can’t even begin to imagine how some of these scenes were accomplished, on location and without CGI effects—especially the justly famous sequence in which the two trucks inch across a flimsy rope bridge in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. Plus, maybe this is heresy, but I think Friedkin actually improves on the original ending of The Wages of Fear, which I’ve always found a little bit cheaply ironic. Give me Sorcerer’s elegant fatalism instead. And give me more shots of Roy Scheider’s incredible, flat-nosed profile while you’re at it—truly, that guy had one of the great movie faces of the ’70s, especially with a cheap little hat on his head and a cigarette clenched between his lips.

Here's the Sorcerer trailer, which I believe is narrated by... the great, great... recently deceased... voiceover announcer... Don LaFontaine.



RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

HANDS ON A HARD BODY

Plot In A Nutshell
S.R. Bindler’s 1997 documentary about a 1995 contest at a Texas auto dealership which awarded a brand-new truck to the person who could keep one hand continuously on the truck for the longest period of time.

Thoughts
Given the choice, I’m not sure which experience would be more grueling: driving a truckful of nitroglycerin through the Nicaraguan jungle or spending nearly four days on my feet without sleeping. Watching what the contestants go through in Hands on a Hard Body, the rickety rope bridge looks fairly appealing.

I’ve always heard good things about this hard-to-find movie, but I especially wanted to see it upon learning that before he died, Robert Altman was considering making a fiction version of it as his followup to A Prairie Home Companion. The idea has Altmanesque potential—lots of room for a big cast to improvise, and a situation that can’t help but be a metaphor for the (possibly empty) pursuit of the American dream—but I also wonder if making it a fiction film would remove a lot of the unpredictable drama from the situation. Maybe Altman would have approached the film sort of like the poker mockumentary The Grand and make the contest real—to shoot it in real time and have the actors participate in it while always remaining in character.

Well, it’s pointless to speculate on what the Altman version would have been like, especially when the original is here to watch. It’s mildly disappointing, if only because of its technical and budgetary limitations: director S.R. Bindler doesn’t seem to have been able to properly mic all of the contestants, and even with a tiny area to cover, his skimpy camera crew constantly misses the competition’s most dramatic moments. (Of the 24 contestants, I think we see less than five of them actually drop out.) The editing is primitive and the visual style never rises above what you’d get from a segment on the local newscast.

But Bindler does have a lot of colourful characters to work with (and he admirably resists the temptation to condescend to any of them), from the contestant who tells Bindler that he’s planning to fast for the three days of the contest “except for some oranges and some Snickers,” to the woman who listens to gospel music on her Walkman and won’t stop laughing because she’s so filled with “the joy of the Lord,” to the guy who claims that he's got a 20-ton air conditioning unit that's capable of cooling his home to 12 degrees below zero, to Benny Perkins, who won the contest three years earlier and who keeps dispensing words of wisdom as solemnly as if he’s Ernest Hemingway writing about bullfighting.



RATING: 3.5/5

The Musicgoer: David Byrne & Brian Eno's Everything That Happens Will Happen Today

DAVID BYRNE & BRIAN ENO
Everything That Happens Will Happen Today
(www.everythingthathappens.com)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

It was 27 years ago that David Byrne and Brian Eno released their influential album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and only now have they rejoined forces for a followup. The result, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, is sort of like My Life in the Lawns and Hedges. It’s a sort of suburban gospel album, full of major-key pop melodies, stacked, sterile harmonies, and lyrics that struggle, in a time of global uncertainty, to find comfort in images of domesticity. (“Home, with our bodies touching/Home, with the cameras watching/Home, where my world is breaking in two.”)

I’ve never quite bought Byrne when he’s in his populist, heartland-of-America, “City of Dreams” mode—to me, he’s much more convincing on a Talking Heads song like “The Big Country,” where he takes one look at the U.S. Midwest from the window of a plane and remarks, “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me to.” There’s some uplifting stuff on Everything That Happens—especially the mid-album stretch of the title track, “Life Is Long,” and “The River”—but it lacks the earthiness (and the communal spirit) of true gospel. It’s earbud gospel, available exclusively online as an MP3.