How I Learned To Drove

I can’t think of many end-of-the-year, Oscar-season Hollywood epics that have gotten off to a worse start than Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. Where to begin? The title crawl that calls 1939 Northern Australia a land where “romance and adventure were a way of life” before blithely going onto describe the Australian government’s practice of removing mixed-race Australian children (so-called “creamies”) from their homes? The voiceover narration by a young “creamie” named Nullah (Brandon Walters), delivered in Jar Jar-esque pidgin English that may well be linguistically accurate but whose eager-to-please cheerfulness sounds uncomfortably close to minstrelsy to modern ears? Or the scenes of uptight British aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) screaming and grimacing at every rough-and-tumble aspect of life Down Under — scenes Kidman overplays so grotesquely she makes Kate Capshaw in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seem like Jack Benny by comparison?

Ah, but Lady Sarah quickly has her hoity-toity airs kicked out of her when she arrives at her husband’s ranch in Faraway Downs and learns that not only has he been killed (supposedly by an older aborigine named King Edward, but actually by “King” Carney, the scheming cattle baron across the river) but that the only way for her to hang onto her property is to drove her cattle — Aussies say “drove,” not “drive” — across the outback to the port city of Darwin. And if she wants to do that, she’s going to need the help of The Drover (Hugh Jackman), a free-spirited horseman who once married a black woman and has been an outcast from white society ever since.

The first (and more entertaining) half of Australia is devoted to the cattle drive, which Carney’s minions do everything in their power to sabotage, and to the budding romance between Lady Sarah and The Drover. Luhrmann provides some nice shots of the rugged Australian landscape and there’s a stampede sequence during which you get to see some cows run off the edge of a cliff. Good times — assuming you can put up with the film’s condescending handling of Nullah, who has magical aborigine powers that enable him to stop cattle from stampeding just by singing to them.

Things really bog down in the shamelessly melodramatic second half, during which Nullah is hauled off to a school on a nearby island, Lady Sarah and The Drover split up, the Japanese bomb Darwin into rubble, and “Over the Rainbow” plays on the soundtrack approximately three dozen times. Lady Sarah is falsely reported to be dead for the second time in the film, a black man nobly sacrifices himself so that Hugh Jackman can survive, Nullah learns to play “Over the Rainbow” on his boomerang-shaped harmonica, and King Edward gets thrown in jail, only to escape just in time to throw a spear through the bad guy’s chest. (It should be said that King Edward is played by the great aborigine actor David Gulpilil, star of Walkabout, The Last Wave, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Ten Canoes, and who brings an unmistakable authenticity to the film, even when his character is standing in the middle of a completely computer-generated battle scene.)

The script’s attempt to be a period picture, a romance, a Western, and a war movie all at once — combined with the use of The Wizard of Oz as a touchstone of "movie magic" — suggest that Luhrmann started out trying to make Australia into some kind of self-consciously synthetic, cliché-embracing superepic, a movie that would do for David Lean-style widescreen filmmaking what Moulin Rouge did for musicals. But when he also decided to make the aboriginal “stolen generations” part of Australia’s storyline, something went tonally haywire with the project — when you write your romantic leads as one-dimensional, that can come across as intentional camp, but when you write your aborigine characters with the same lack of depth, it has a way of coming across as insensitive at best, racist at worst.

Hugh Jackman caricatures his virility just enough to get through the picture without embarrassing himself, but Nicole Kidman is not so lucky; her strangely frozen features are a constant distraction (especially in a movie set in the 1930s), at odds with her character’s supposed embrace of her spartan new surroundings.

And the whole thing is nearly three hours! It’s enough to drove any reasonable moviegoer crazy.

I'm An Almanac, And I'm A PC

Like many nerdy people with nothing better to do at midnight but watch The Daily Show, I fell in love with John Hodgman during his first guest appearance opposite Jon Stewart, plugging his book of fake trivia, The Areas of My Expertise. Clad in a jacket the colour of a Graham cracker, wearing cheap glasses and a cheaper haircut, looking like a human version of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, Hodgman provided an absolutely deadpan account of the “Great Hobo Wars” of 1932, when the vast hobo army briefly occupied the White House and installed one of their own, Hobo Joe Junkpan, as Secretary of the Treasury. According to Hodgman, American currency from that time bore Hobo Joe’s signature — “which is really just a picture of a bird wearing a hat.”

Following that appearance, North American comedy fans came down with an acute case of Hodgmania: the tubby comic became a regular contributor to The Daily Show, giving similarly nonsensical but authoritative-sounding primers on everything from lice to hurricanes, and achieved pop culture immortality starring in a long-running series of commercials for Macintosh computers (in which, paradoxically, his bumbling “PC” character came off as much more likable than the product the ads were actually selling).

Hodgman devotes a chapter in his new book More Information Than You Require to outlining his top priorities for his newly acquired enormous wealth. (They include building a dolphin sanctuary, “no more computers turning evil,” and financing a feature-film version of the TV series The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.) But money doesn’t seem to have changed Hodgman; he’s still the same (possibly insane) nerd he ever was, obsessively compiling lists of the nine American presidents who had hooks for hands, ranking the various poker hands (according to Hodgman, a royal flush is the same as a straight flush, “only the cards are made of velvet”), and providing instructions on how to foretell the future with a pig’s spleen, complete with a helpful “twelve-month spleencast.” Along the way, we also get accounts of William S. Burroughs’ 1973 appearance on the game show Match Game, a list of the seven portals into the hollow earth, and the news that “A baby that is born with teeth will be a financial success... EVEN WHILE HE IS STILL A BABY.”

Reading 350 pages of this stuff does get a little exhausting — especially since the book is so full of footnotes, sidebars, and tables that it makes a Dr. Bronner’s soap wrapper look readable by comparison. My stamina flagged a little during the 50-page section about the mole-men whom Hodgman claims live at the centre of the Earth (complete with a list of 700 notable mole-men throughout history and their occupations), but I suppose the chapter’s ridiculous length is part of the joke.

And in a time when books by popular comedians typically consist of barely more than 200 wide-margined pages more padded out than a Ralph Klein political science essay, you’ve got to give Hodgman credit for packing extra jokes into every available bit of white space. He can’t even leave the inside of the dust jacket blank — not when it’s the perfect place to put his “Taxonomy of Complete World Knowledge.” (Local readers will appreciate his list of “The Eleven Provinces of Canada,” including Quebec, Before Christ, and “The Mysterious Floating Plateau of Hohoq, aka ‘Ar,’ aka ‘Prince Edward Island.’”)

Have I quoted enough of the punchlines for you yet? (And have I mentioned how hard I laughed at how he illustrates an entry on Aaron Burr with a picture of Chewbacca, and an item about Martin Van Buren with a photo of Doctor Who?) Believe me: there’s thousands more where those came from. More Information Than You Require contains more jokes than a normal person could possibly comprehend.

"Aliens? Us? Is This One Of Your Earth Jokes?"

Talking skeletons, slinky animal-women, scientists both good and evil, aliens from the planet Marva, several horrible mutilations, and one Canadian movie critic all figure in this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio here in Edmonton. The movie is The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, Paul Blamire's 2004 spoof of Grade Z science fiction films from the 1950s and ’60s, and the Canadian movie critic is me. Click here to listen.

Moviegoer Diary: Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, Freeway

HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY

Plot In A Nutshell
Guillermo Del Toro’s comic adventure about a fearsome-looking but soft-hearted demon (Ron Perlman), employed by a secret government agency devoted to battling supernatural threats, who must stop an elf prince determined to revive an invincible mechanical army and wipe out humankind.

Thoughts
I know he’s a critic’s darling and all, but I’ve always liked the idea of Guillermo Del Toro — an unapologetic fan of every genre filled with weird-looking creatures who’s equally at home with comic-book blockbusters and sophisticated adult fantasies and ghost stories — more than Del Toro’s actual films. Even the much-praised Pan’s Labyrinth left me cold — a mixture of arbitrary (albeit spectacularly visualized) fantasy sequences and simplistic real-world conflicts. But it was obviously a film made with love, imagination, incredible attention to detail, and phenomenal craftsmanship, so I hardly begrudged it its success.

But impossible-to-please Del Toro-doubter that I am, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army is the first film from the Mexican auteur that I whole-heartedly embraced. Something about the comic tone of the first Hellboy movie didn’t work for me — I think Del Toro finds the idea that a big ol’ demon like Hellboy likes beer and cigars to a lot funnier than I do — but The Golden Army finds just the right balance of comedy, action, and wonderment.

Plus, Del Toro takes the time to ensure that all the monsters and creatures, even the new ones introduced in this installment, don’t just look interesting, but have interesting relationships to each other and to the heroes. I particularly liked the twin elves, Nuala and Nuada, who have opposite temperaments but an understanding of each other that runs so deep that when one of them gets cut, the other one bleeds. There’s also a great action setpiece where Hellboy has to fight a gigantic “water elemental” (basically a 100-storey living plant) — this creature doesn’t even have a face, but it still has one of the most poignant and poetic death scenes of any character in a movie this year.

My only quibble with the movie is all the business about the Jeffrey Tambor character’s vain attempts to keep Hellboy (and the organization he works for) hidden away from the public. So many movies and TV shows, from Men in Black to Torchwood, waste a lot of time and energy on these hush-hush, the-public-must-never-find-out-about-us subplots, which are never suspenseful or funny, and tend to result in a lot of narrative wheel-spinning. Hellboy 2 creates such a wonderful, lush, timeless fantasy world — why spoil it with a Jimmy Kimmel cameo?

Stray Observation: “I’m not a baby, I’m a tumor” — best movie line of 2008?

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

FREEWAY

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Matthew Bright’s demented trash-cinema updating of the “Little Red Riding Hood” story, in which white-trash runaway Vanessa Lutz (Reese Witherspoon) winds up in a war of wits with deceptively friendly-looking serial-killing pervert (Kiefer Sutherland).

Thoughts
Wowie-wow-wow. I had pretty much written off Reese Witherspoon after seeing the trailer for her new comedy Four Christmases, but watching her jaw-dropping performance in Freeway made me fall in love with her all over again. But then I read that she is apparently ashamed enough of this film to have removed it from her résumé, so now I don’t know where I stand with that girl.

All I know is, she should try doing more movies like this one — if indeed, other movies like this one even exist. (Although I hear that the sequel, Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby, is even crazier.) One of the thrills of watching Freeway is seeing so many recognizable actors — Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Brooke Shields, Brittany Murphy, Dan Hedaya — appearing in a film so incredibly lurid and sleazy. Oliver Stone is listed as one of the producers — was he the one who roped in all this A-list talent? If you’ve ever wanted to see Reese Witherspoon make out on a prison cot with a nymphomaniac lesbian played by Brittany Murphy (who is terrible), or see her slice open a prison guard from his ass to his appetite with a homemade shank, or see Kiefer Sutherland play a hideously deformed pedophile, then this is the film for you.

Witherspoon’s performance as Vanessa Lutz carries the film. She was 20 when she made it, but she looks all of 15, prime jailbait, all decked out in a belly-baring top, military pants and boots, a cheap red leather jacket, and a basket she plans on taking, yes, to grandma’s house. Vanessa may not be able to read — the film’s first scene shows her in school, laboriously sounding out the sentence “The cat drinks milk” (and then celebrating by making out right there in the classroom with her black boyfriend) — but there’s a keen, streetwise intelligence behind those eyes. On her first day in jail, she doesn’t hesitate to grab the cell block’s alpha female and beat her face in. Little Reese Witherspoon! Can you believe it?

Witherspoon’s performance reminds me a little of Laura Dern as the glue-huffing Ruth Stoops in Citizen Ruth in its willingness to wallow in the character’s unapologetic white-trashiness, but Ruth is an utterly loathsome character who gets by purely on the low cunning of an animal. She’s pitiful where Vanessa is fierce, and while both women behave in appalling ways, Vanessa’s appalling behaviour, in the right circumstances, can seem weirdly winning. I love the scene where Bob gets wheeled into the courtroom for her sentencing hearing, and she sees his deformed appearance for the first time since he tried to kill her. (She shot him multiple times in the head, the little minx.) Even though the judge is right there, Vanessa whoops with laughter and exclaims, “Holy shit! Look who got whupped with the ugly stick!”

Now, that’s a girl with spunk! Sure, she’s a stone-cold sociopath, but what are you gonna do? You know, I bet if Vanessa Lutz saw a theatre showing Four Christmases, she’d burn the damned place to the ground.

RATING: 4/5

Sweetened, Condensed Milk

The Oscar movie season kicks into high gear this week with the release of Milk, Gus Van Sant’s biopic of Harvey Milk, the businessman and politician who in 1976 became the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States when he joined San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. Milk was instrumental in the city’s fight for gay rights, pushing for a bill that outlawed discrimination in housing and unemployment based on sexual orientation, and playing a key role in marshalling popular opposition against Proposition 6 (aka “the Briggs initiative”), which would have made homosexuality a firing offence among California schoolteachers. Milk was at the height of his power and influence when he and gay-friendly San Francisco mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, an embittered former political colleague.

Milk is Van Sant’s first mainstream film after several formally adventurous arthouse experiments including Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park, and it also contains an unusually buoyant performance from Sean Penn as the free-spirited, charismatic Milk. I caught a screening of the film with fellow SEE film reviewer Michael Hingston, after which we sat down to share our impressions...

Paul Matwychuk: I think I had a leg up on you with this movie, since I recently watched the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk and so knew a little bit about Milk’s life and career going into it.

Michael Hingston: Right. I had read a Wikipedia entry or two about him, and that was about it. But it was obvious even from that how urgent and relevant this story was, what with Proposition 8, the anti-same-sex marriage bill, passing in California last month.

PM: Both this film and the documentary do an excellent job of explaining the Briggs initiative and the very real threat it posed to gay people’s civil rights, and what an incredible, almost ahead-of-its-time victory over prejudice and narrow-mindedness Harvey Milk helped achieve. This fight took place only 30 years ago, and yet it has nowhere near the cultural prominence of, say, the black civil rights movement or the suffragettes. It’s alarming to think how close that initiative came to passing.

MH: Part of what’s so horrifying about it is that Milk was having to fight the repeal of existing legislation — gay citizens’ big fear wasn’t that they weren’t making progress, but that they might actually lose the gains they’d fought so hard to win already. There’s a nice moment in the film where Emile Hirsch’s character, this young activist who works in Milk’s office, talks about a gay rally he saw in Spain, and how in awe he was of the way the Spaniards incited a riot at the first signs of police infringement. He wonders why they can’t get the same kind of thing going in North America. And with Proposition 8 having gone through, I couldn’t help but think, “Wow — in 2008, even what you guys are doing seems kind of out of reach.”

PM: One of the things that interested me most about the film is that it’s Gus Van Sant’s first truly commercial movie since Finding Forrester in 2000. It’s a big Hollywood biopic about an important social theme with a major actor in the lead role. And it’s coming out late in the year and is obviously being positioned for Oscar season. And I guess the disappointing thing about Milk for me is how closely it adheres to the conventional biopic formula. There are a couple of energetic visual ideas here and there, but given Van Sant’s recent films and with the great cinematographer Harris Savides behind the camera, I was really hoping for something more stylistically adventurous.

MH: Do you think that this film managed to convey more than the documentary did?

PM: Well, there are a couple of interesting visual flourishes that you wouldn’t get in a documentary, like the entire scene that’s shot in the reflection of a metal police whistle lying on the ground. And I think Van Sant’s film gives you more a sense of Milk’s private, romantic life than you get in the documentary. My recollection is that the documentary largely ignores Milk’s lover Jack Lira, the figure played by Diego Luna, who is this very high-maintenance, demanding guy who’s obviously an inappropriate boyfriend for someone holding public office.

MH: One of Milk’s big points was that every gay person should come out — the logic being that it will help “normalize” homosexuality in straight society, and that if you know someone who’s gay, you’ll be less likely to vote to take away their rights. But I have to say, I was not really that interested in Milk’s private life. I thought Luna was a lot of fun, and I liked James Franco’s performance as Milk’s first boyfriend a lot too, but I found the political story much more interesting. Milk is always fighting this battle of “How do I convince not just people in the heartland of America, but people in my own district to vote with me?”

PM: I liked the meet-cute scenes with the two boyfriends — that opening scene where he picks up Franco in the subway station is very sweet, and the scene where Luna stumbles into Milk’s store yammering on about palomino horses is very cute and sexy too. But I still feel like I’ve seen that Franco character before in so many hetero biopics — he’s the equivalent of the wife who wishes the great man would spend some quality time at home instead of obsessing about changing the world. Those scenes with the gay kid in the wheelchair who keeps phoning Harvey Milk out of nowhere to convince him to keep fighting? Or the flashback after Milk gets shot to the earlier scene of him in bed with Franco? I was amazed to see that corny stuff in a Van Sant movie.

MH: The biggest convention that I had a problem with was the way Dan White begins the film as this amazingly conflicted and nuanced character who runs for office using the most inflammatory, homophobic language possible, but who immediately tones it down after getting elected. There’s a really convincing gradual thaw in his attitude toward Milk — but then, as the drama builds to his killing of Milk and Moscone, he’s reduced to this paragon of irrationality. I thought there was a missed opportunity to make him a masterpiece of an antagonist instead of simply a villain.

PM: And yet, Brolin is excellent in the role. In the last couple of years, he’s really assembled a pretty amazing string of interesting, nuanced, surprising performances. Not long ago, we talked about him in W., and how he brought a lot of shadings to a character that might not have had much depth on the page. What did you think of Sean Penn?

MH: It’s kind of a backhanded insult to him, but he’s kind of “obviously great” in this movie. He is great, but the whole cast is really strong. The actors playing his inner circle are especially interesting. Emile Hirsch has a great role — he pops up about 45 minutes into the movie when Sean Penn catcalls him off-camera while he’s trying to get people to register to vote, and he unexpectedly develops into the admiral behind Milk’s campaign. Franco is great, and Brolin is truly excellent — I think he would have risen to any heights that part could have demanded of him. I also really liked this actress, Allison Pill, who plays the lesbian who comes in to run Milk’s office. There’s an amazing scene where she shows up in this all-male office and says, “All my friends say you hate women. Is there room for a woman here?” And suddenly it’s like there’s this crack opening up, where you realize the fight for gay rights may not have been as unified as you’d think.

PM: Do you think this film will be another crossover hit, like Brokeback Mountain? I’m a little dubious myself. Brokeback Mountain really delivered the tears along with the anti-homophobia message, but Milk seems more like one of those prestige movies people get guilted into seeing because it’s gotten a lot of Oscar nominations.

MH: It’s also not very controversial. It’s a biopic that sticks to history; it’s hard to make a controversy out of that. How about this: if Milk wins Best Picture, will you be upset?

PM: I would be happy to see a Gus Van Sant movie win an Oscar. It would be nice to see the Academy embrace a director who’s been doing excellent work for years and years, much of it way out of the mainstream. But I’m sure there must be better movies to honour this year besides Milk.

MH: True, but it’s a solid biopic about a relevant issue. The Oscars could do far worse — and if it keeps Changeling off the ticket, all the better.

Not A Movie

There’s a scene in What Just Happened where a screenwriter (played by Stanley Tucci) tells his friend, a high-powered Hollywood producer (Robert De Niro) that he’s just finished writing his latest script. “It’s about a florist,” he says.

“A florist?” Ben replies. “Flowers — onscreen?” He gives one of those little eye-crinkling De Niro grimaces of disapproval. “I don’t know — it’s not a movie.”

When I heard that Robert De Niro was starring in a film adaptation of producer Art Linson’s memoir What Just Happened? (somehow the question mark didn’t survive the adaptation), I cast my mind back a couple of years to when I read Linson’s book, a slim little tell-all that covers the period in the late ’90s when Linson was putting together movies like The Edge, Pushing Tin, Great Expectations, and Fight Club. From what I understood, the film would focus on the 15 pages of the book where Linson talks about his attempts to persuade Alec Baldwin to shave the greying beard he grew while preparing to star opposite Anthony Hopkins in The Edge — except in the movie, the stubbornly hairy actor would be Bruce Willis, playing himself. “A producer trying to get an actor to shave?” I thought to myself. “I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s a movie.”

Still, What Just Happened has one unique thing going for it: it might very well be the only Hollywood satire in which the producer is the hero. Ben’s life — and I assume Linson’s as well — seems to be devoted to massaging the egos of childlike actors and directors, getting his balls busted by studio executives, enduring the insulting responses of audiences at test screenings, and spending hours on the Los Angeles freeway. Even the interior of his luxury car is no refuge — his omnipresent Bluetooth is constantly getting calls from his wife, his assistant, the studio, to whom he constantly lies about his whereabouts, insisting that he’s only two minutes away from meetings that he knows he won’t be showing up to for another hour at least. Are there no compensating factors within this life of stress? Well, that foxy young woman who throws herself at him in the men’s room of a trendy restaurant wouldn’t have wound up in his bed if he were a plumber, would she?

The thing is, in real life, Linson really is kind of a heroic figure among producers, specializing in expensive-looking, prestigious tough-guy movies. (His credits are remarkably free of schlock, and include Melvin and Howard, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Untouchables, Heat, Heist, Spartan, and Into the Wild.) And he’s a guy who obviously likes to surround himself with talent, having cultivated long relationships with the likes of David Mamet, Cameron Crowe, Brian De Palma, and Sean Penn (who blurbed Linson’s book and also appears in the film as himself). Linson has even dabbled in the creative end of moviemaking — he directed Where the Buffalo Roam, starring Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson, and contributed to the screenplay of American Hot Wax, the terrific 1978 biopic about rock ’n’ roll DJ Alan Freed.

But for all Linson’s moviemaking experience, What Just Happened never amounts to more than a collection of tepid insider anecdotes. There’s the one about the edgy British director (Michael Wincott) who insists on ending his movie with a scene where the villains shoot the hero’s dog in the head. There’s the one about the agent (John Turturro) with indigestion so bad he can’t get through a phone call without nearly throwing up five times. And the one about the studio exec (Catherine Keener) who deliberately strands the producer at the airport at Cannes after a disastrous première.

It’s mildly interesting, in a gossipy, roman à clef sort of way, but it all kinds of dribbles away by the final few scenes. The ending of the movie Michael Wincott’s character has directed — the one with the dog’s skull spattering the camera lens — is supposed to be the height of unprofessionalism, but at least a great Nancy Sinatra/Lee Hazlewood song plays underneath it. What does What Just Happened have going for it?

The Musicgoer: Valery Gore's Avalanche To Wandering Bear

VALERY GORE
Avalanche to Wandering Bear
(Do Right)
*** (out of 5)

Valery Gore is a young jazz-trained Toronto pianist who’s been making some inroads into the Canadian music scene as a singer/songwriter. With her breathy voice and her ability to mix an old-fashioned approach to singing with unconventional piano melodies, Gore sounds a little like Tori Amos, a little like Nellie McKay, and sometimes even a little like The Dresden Dolls — but without the compelling personality that makes all of those artists worth listening to. (As a singer, Gore is more influenced by trombone players than pianists — she really needs to stop all that affected slurring and figure out how to sing her own songs in a way that makes you pay attention to the lyrics.)

But Gore is still young, and there are plenty of indications on Avalanche to Wandering Bear that she’s got a lot of fresh ideas — especially “Scared,” which takes the electric piano and fuzzy trumpet washes of Big Fun-era Miles Davis jazz fusion and puts a pop spin on it. Isn’t it about time someone took jazz fusion and fused it with something else?

Stupid Lamb, Sick Lion, Mediocre Movie

Romance for the ages or subliterate tween-marketed schlock? Ingenious update of horror conventions or coded abstinence tract? Twilight — the tale of new-to-town high-schooler Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her tortured love affair with “vegetarian vampire” Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), based on the bestseller by Stephenie Meyer — is the season’s biggest and arguably most perplexing pop-culture phenomenon. And so, my friend (and fellow SEE Magazine film reviewer) Kathleen Bell and I squeezed our way into a sold-out screening of the film at West Edmonton Mall here in Edmonton last Saturday to find out what all the high-pitched squealing is about. Here are our reactions.

Paul Matwychuk: Now, neither of us has actually read Stephenie Meyer’s book, is that correct?

Kathleen Bell: Yes. That should be made clear right from the outset. But my feeling on that is that a movie is a movie and a book is a book, and there’s no point in adapting a book unless you’re going to make a movie out of it.

PM: It sounds like you felt that this movie wasn’t sufficiently cinematic for you.

KB: Near the end it got there. Only in the last 45 minutes do you actually get effects and, you know, camera movement. It’s very static up until then.

PM: I wonder if that’s a flaw that’s built into this material. The whole “hook” of the story is that it’s about these two hot young people denying themselves. Edward can barely risk touching Bella because he’s afraid the scent of her is just going to drive him wild and he’ll tear her throat out. So all they can do is just stare at each other. Which means a whole lot of footage of Robert Pattinson glowering at Kristen Stewart from under his gigantic forehead, but not a lot of plot being advanced.

KB: I would agree that Pattinson is not very dynamic at the start of the movie, but by the time the action kicks in, I thought he became more comfortable in the role. Bella, on the other hand, I never liked. She is boring. I have no idea why he likes her.

PM: I have no idea either! She isn’t bewitching or beguiling or entrancing in the least. But I have to ask you: I’ve read a few reviews of this film by female critics — for instance, Dana Stevens in Slate — who have acknowledged that the books are trash, that Bella is a horrible female role model, that the film’s pacing is off, and yet something about this story or this situation still sneaked under their defences. As politically incorrect as the film might be, it worked on them. As the woman in this discussion, did you respond to this story in a similar way?

KB: Well... yes! It’s that classic idea of being the girl who seems ordinary but has so much more to her than anyone suspects, and then some guy sees it in her and finds it irresistible. It’s the story behind every romantic comedy and thousands of books — it’s Jane Eyre, it’s Pride and Prejudice. And how can you not fantasize about being irresistible to this centuries-old vampire who’s seen it all and still thinks no other girl is quite as fabulous as you? You want to be Bella.

PM: I wonder if part of the appeal as well, especially to the 12- and 13-year-old girls in the audience is that it makes abstinence hot. It plays on this idea that sex is dangerous and scary but it’s still something you’re helplessly drawn to. Even the big climactic scene where Edward saves Bella’s life is a big sex metaphor — it’s all about “pulling out in time,” right?

KB: I think you’re making too much of the fact that Edward and Bella can’t consummate their relationship. That moralistic take is inherent in the vampire genre. Vampires are literally “sexy beasts” and if you give in to them, you either end up dead or, if they really love you, they give you a STI called vampirism. But more importantly, “impossible” love is always part of the story in romances from Romeo and Juliet to Bollywood movies — there’s always something that keeps the couple from being together. It’s just part of the genre — we love the idea of the romance that cannot be, but must be. It makes it steamier.

PM: But did you think there was any steam between Edward and Bella in the movie? I didn’t sense much chemistry there. Maybe I’m biased because I watched Hud this afternoon, and the conversations Paul Newman has with Patricia Neal in that movie are, like, the hottest thing ever.

KB: I agree, but at a certain point, I think I just made a deal with myself to accept the premise that they’re hot for each other, and that got me through the rest of the movie. Although it would have helped, I think, if the movie had shown you more of Edward’s bad side, or done something to make you more afraid of him. You’re never scared of him in the slightest — and Bella should be scared! He’s a vampire, for gosh sake! As it is now, Edward is carrying the weight of the drama; he’s all “I love you but I can’t be with you.” And Bella’s just this passive character.

PM: And I have to say, I don’t think Robert Pattinson is a very good actor. He certainly looks right for the part, with that Byronic profile, but he never gives you the sense that he’s been alive for 100 years, that he’s this old soul in a young, beautiful body.

KB: True, but I bought it simply because he’s so good-looking. Although there is that ridiculous scene where he tells Bella, “I’m going to show you what I really am,” and he stands in the direct sunlight for the first time and suddenly he is just like a guy who uses too much bronzer. How is that scary?

PM: Well, that’s another of the film’s flaws — the effects are not very magical. The makeup job on the vampire characters, I thought, was pretty ridiculous. And the big climax, where Edward dukes it out with the evil vampire who wants to kill Bella, simply in terms of production values, is like the ending of an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s TV-level stuntwork. On the other hand, if I can contradict myself a little, one of the things I did like about the movie is that the director, Catherine Hardwicke, has a visual style that’s very different from most Hollywood blockbusters — those movies tend to be very bright, very overlit, very overdesigneed and crammed full of CGI, and they just seem intent on keeping you aware of how expensive they were to make. Twilight, meanwhile, looks like a cross between a TV show, like Everwood or 7th Heaven, and an indie family drama like you’d see playing at Sundance.

KB: The movie has the opposite feel of most movies that have been adapted from popular books. With most of them, you feel like they’re absolutely racing to get through all the necessary information, but in Twilight, I could have done without the entire first 25 minutes because nothing happens. And speaking of the adaptation, can we talk about the voiceover? It was so aggravating: here’s a girl who, I’m assuming, is supposed to be quiet on the outside but dynamic inside her head. But they never give her any interesting thoughts, even when she’s narrating.

PM: Exactly! I would have loved it if she had made a couple of jokes or went, “I cannot believe I am dating a vampire,” or just talked about being turned on by meeting an actual supernatural creature. I wonder if the film suffered from having to be rated PG so that all those multitudes of young girls could go see it. The movie isn’t free to be as hot or kinky as grownups like myself might have liked it to be. And you don’t get a sense of the violence of the vampire world — all the killing happens largely offscreen. You sure get to see a lot of them playing baseball, though.

KB: Never mind hot and kinky, how about a realistic sense of curiosity, fear, and excitement? I am interested to read the books now. I know that people say Stephenie Meyer’s writing is not very good, but the movie makes me feel like I’m missing something and I want to fill in the gaps.

PM: I can’t say I feel any urge to read the books. And the quasi-cliffhanger ending of the movie doesn’t have me counting the days until the sequel, either. I’m leaning toward two stars out of five. You?

KB: Well... once it got more actiony and once I’d sort of decided to buy into the romance, I got more into it. And the way they filmed the locations, with all those blue-green forests, was really impressive. Three stars.

PM: Really? That did not sound like three-star enthusiasm from you.

KB: But if my friends asked me if they should go see it, I’d say sure. But don’t bother with the first half hour. And I’m a sucker for vampire movies, and I’m a sucker for undying love. (Pardon the puns.)

PM: And if you had a 12-year-old daughter who was totally into the Twilight books and wanted to see the movie, would you be happy about that?

KB: I’d be like, “Okay, but watch these Buffy DVDs first.”

Moviegoer Diary: The First Great Train Robbery, Hud

THE FIRST GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

Plot In A Nutshell
Writer/director Michael Crichton’s 1979 film, set in 1850s England, about master thieves Edward Pierce (Sean Connery) and Robert Agar (Donald Sutherland) and their elaborate plan to rob a train carrying a safe full of gold intended to pay British soldiers fighting the Crimean War.

Thoughts
In honour of the late Michael Crichton, I decided to track down one of the six feature films he’s credited with directing. I couldn’t find Looker, his 1981 thriller with Albert Finney, which I remember really liking when I saw it on TV about 25 years ago — all I can remember now is a bunch of scenes involving a gun that emits some kind of strobe-light effect that basically puts anyone who sees it into a standing coma for a few hours, and a climactic cat-and-mouse chase set in some kind of futuristic TV studio. I’m not going to explain this very clearly, but the studio was set up with some kind of advanced greenscreen technology, and so the sequence’s big gimmick was that if you looked on the monitors, it looked like the heroes and villains were engaged in a violent shootout while a daytime TV cooking show progressed obliviously around them. It seemed really brilliant and satirical to me when I was 12.

The charm of The First Great Train Robbery, on the other hand, is in its absence of advanced technology. It’s basically a heist movie dressed up in waistcoats and beaver hats: instead of acquiring computer access codes, Donald Sutherland has to get his hands on four different keys just long enough to make wax impressions of all of them. (Sutherland has a lovely moment when Connery asks him if his pickpocketing skills are up to the task: he gives a dainty flex of his fingers and says, referring to his hands, “Hummingbirds!”)

It’s a great, brisk entertainment, marred only by the muddy cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth, who only five years earlier shot Murder on the Orient Express — was he the go-to guy for “nostalgic train crime” movies? — and by Donald Sutherland’s hilarious non-attempt at an English accent. But I can forgive Sutherland — that bushy mustache and curly hairdo he was sporting from Don’t Look Now right up until he went clean-cut for Ordinary People is one of the all-time great achievements in the field of male movie hair.

I’ve also got to say, the film’s climax, in which Sean Connery climbs about 100 years on the outside of a train and then back again, is genuinely thrilling. I have no idea how they pulled off this sequence — Connery really does appear to be clambering atop a fast-moving train, and there are a few moments where he seems to be mere inches away from getting his head taken off by a low bridge.

Does anyone know if Crichton’s 1984 sci-fi thriller Runaway, starring Tom Selleck, is any good? I’ve heard that the villain is a hermaphrodite played by Gene Simmons, so it can’t be all bad, right?



RATING: 4/5

* * * * *
HUD

Plot In A Nutshell
Martin Ritt’s 1963 drama, based on Larry McMurtry’s novel, starring Paul Newman in his iconic antihero role as Hud Bannon, the drinking, brawling, womanizing Texan whose conflict with his cattle rancher father comes to a head when an outbreak of foot-in-mouth disease threatens to destroy the family business.

Thoughts
And here’s another movie I was inspired to watch because one of the artists involved had died. I’m still catching up with a lot of Paul Newman’s great roles. I didn’t see Cool Hand Luke until earlier this year, and only now am I getting around to Hud, which — hey, here’s a news flash for you — is a pretty terrific movie. In other shocking developments: that Paul Newman is one incredibly sexy dude. (Even when he’s falling ass over teakettle wrestling with pigs in the dirt, he’s totally hot.)

Newman’s got the immediacy of that Actors Studio naturalism going for him, but when you combine it with his movie-star charisma, it’s incredibly potent. Brando had that combination too, of course, but Brando’s characters always seemed troubled, dangerous, neurotic, inward-looking, strange; in Hud, meanwhile, even though Newman’s character has tragedy in his past and all sorts of daddy issues that he’s trying to work out, he doesn’t seem crippled by them the way Brando’s characters do onscreen. Newman has a way of making even a heel like Hud — he nearly rapes Patricia Neal, for God’s sake! — seem like the kind of guy you want to hang out with. (It’s totally believable that his nephew, played by Brandon de Wilde, spends most of the film tagging along after him.) No — more than that. He’s the kind of guy you want to be, getting caught by a woman’s husband coming out of their house at six in the morning, and simply brazening your way past him.

Not that Hud’s isolation at the end of the movie isn’t devastating — and director Martin Ritt plays that final moment of Hud walking into his the now-empty house he now owns with just the right lightness of touch. But Newman is so damned charming in the role, and the sight of him posed in his crisp white shirts against the bleak Texas landscape (shot in unforgiving black-and-white by James Wong Howe) is such a powerful contrast — a petal on a dry, white bough — that it’s hard to completely side with his father’s condemnation of him.

Paul Newman is so charismatic, it’s positively immoral. Amazing, isn't it, how he turned out to have such a strong moral sense when the cameras stopped pointing at him?



RATING: 4.5/5

Today In Hacky Edmonton Journal Headlines

"A Lot At Stake For Vampire Heartthrob" (front-page plug for profile of Twilight star Robert Pattinson)

"A New-Fangled Heartthrob: playing the perfect vampire has been a blood-curdling task" (headline for Robert Pattinson profile)

"Robert Pattinson landed a role to die for — the vampire boyfriend Edward Cullen in the highly anticipated movie Twilight — with some frightening consequences" (caption for photo of Robert Pattinson)

"A Forbidden Love Story With Bite" (review of Twilight)

"Painter Nola Cassady is enjoying blooming good times in 2008." (opening line from Gilbert Bouchard's profile of an artist specializing in images of flowers)

...and finally, from the "We're Not Even Going To Try To Summarize This Review Succinctly" department:

"Period Piece About A Crafty Seductress Wicked Fun With Serious Social Comment" (review of Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress)

Cox Populi

Some punk kids shot Brian Cox's dog, and he's not going to rest until they apologize for it. That's the premise of Red, the straight-to-DVD revenge potboiler that's the subject of my "Hidden Gems" segment this week for CBC Radio in Edmonton. Curious to hear more? Here's the place to click!

Steering Contest

James Bond can’t stop brooding about his dead lover to savour even a moment of joy as travels around the world, driving fast cars in the company of beautiful women. Jason Bourne is tortured by nightmarish memories of the identity that the CIA erased from his mind. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson has had his career derailed by too many spy spoofs and family comedies. Jean-Claude Van Damme has no money and has lost custody of his children. Steven Seagal is fat. Arnold Schwarzenegger is old. Clint Eastwood is really old.

No, the only action star who seems to be enjoying himself these days is Jason Statham, and nowhere more so than in his two turns as all-business driver-for-hire Frank Martin in the two Transporter movies — soon to be joined by a third, directed by the awesomely named Olivier Megaton. I haven’t seen Transporter 3, but having just spent a night catching up with the first two entries in the series, I can’t wait for #3 — written, like the first two, by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, and this time featuring Prison Break scene-stealer Robert Knepper as the villain. The lead actress is someone named Natalya Rudakova; I haven’t seen any pictures of her, but if the first two pictures are anything to go by, her accent will be exotic, her lips will be pouty, and her legs will be approximately nine feet long. Not counting the stilettos.

I’m sure Jason Statham can handle her. One of the great moments in The Transporter comes when Frank discovers that the package he’s been hired to deliver is a beautiful Asian woman (Shu Qi). Against his better judgment — one of his ironclad personal rules is “Never look in the package” — he lets her take a bathroom break by the side of the road. She takes the opportunity to escape down the hill and into some dense underbrush, but Frank soon recaptures her — and just when you’re wondering how the hell he’s going to drag this woman all the way back up the hill, Statham simply lifts her onto his shoulders and effortlessly carries her up back to his car. It’s the most graceful act of Neanderthalism you’ve ever seen in your life. (When Frank finally gets her back to his place, his house is every bit the masculine dream palace you’d hope it would be: a big, square cottage in the French countryside with a large, immaculate garage, a kitchen where the only gadgets are a microwave and a good coffeemaker, and a secret exit in the cellar that you have to don scuba gear to use. Shu Qi is suitably awed, and immediately gets to work baking madeleines in the kitchen and throwing herself at Statham in the bedroom.)

Corey Yuen, a veteran Asian actor, director, and fight choreographer, directed The Transporter, and he gives the action sequences the playful staging and the physical wit that I associate with the best Hong Kong martial arts pictures. I’m particularly fond of the climactic showdown where Frank has to battle seven or eight bad guys in a garage — he tips a few nearby barrels of oil onto the floor, and then slips a couple of bicycle pedals onto his shoes so that he’s the only guy in the room with any traction. In another scene, Frank literally subdues two attackers with his sweater. (Jason Statham takes his shirt off in every movie he makes — Yuen cleverly finds a way to turn that convention into an excuse for more action.) In scenes like these, Statham combines Daniel Craig’s rough-and-tumble physicality, Roger Moore’s self-deprecating sense of humour, and Pierce Brosnan’s ability to look incredible in a suit and tie.

I was slightly less enamoured of the more cartoonish Transporter 2, in which Frank’s driving and fighting skills go from “expert” to “superhuman.” (In one famously ridiculous scene, Frank removes a bomb from the underside of his car by driving up a ramp, flipping the vehicle in midair, and sailing through the sky at just the right angle so that the bomb winds up getting removed by a metal hook dangling nearby.) With its lean plot and relentlessly single-minded hero, the first Transporter (and I know this comparison is kind of ridiculous, but anyway...) belongs to the tradition of criminal-for-hire movies like Lee Marvin’s Point Blank, but the sequel, with its cockamamie plot about a highly contagious supervirus, is strictly Michael Bay/Joel Silver stuff.

That doesn’t mean it’s not ridiculously entertaining, though — especially the outrageous scenes featuring Kate Nauta as a villainous henchwoman named Lola. Nauta is truly one of the most eye-popping physical presences I’ve ever seen in a movie: freakishly tall, long-limbed, with short blonde hair and seemingly permanent smoky eye makeup, she thinks nothing of walking down the middle of the street in broad daylight, wearing nothing but expensive lingerie, black stockings, and red stilettos, firing a pair of Uzis at a police car. She eventually dies when Statham hurls her against a really pointy piece of modern art hanging on the wall of her lover’s living room. A fitting end — she’s a work of art already.

The Transporter movies aren’t art, of course. They’re just exhilarating trash. But unlike the Bond movies, which now seem faintly embarrassed about their 45-year legacy, they have a clear sense of what they are. They have better music too. You’ll never see Luc Besson fretting about “reconceiving” or “rebooting” the Transporter series or wondering how to make them “relevant” again. He’s too busy devising outlandish scenarios for Frank to kick and/or drive his way out of. Like his hero, he wants to get from Point A to Point B as efficiently and stylishly as possible. Get out of his way.

The Musicgoer: Beyoncé's I Am... Sasha Fierce

BEYONCÉ
I Am... Sasha Fierce
(Columbia)
*** (out of 5)

Beyoncé has two personalities? In interviews, she’s barely shown even one, but on her new double-CD, the R&B superstar performs two sets of songs, each in a different identity. Supposedly, the “Sasha Fierce” character she adopts on the dancier second disc represents the bootylicious, stiletto-wearing stage persona she trots out in her live shows, while the all-ballad first disc reveals the “real” Beyoncé, the vulnerable woman trying hard not to be a “Broken-Hearted Girl.” But in fact, it’s on Sasha Fierce stompers like “Ego,” the Lil Wayne-influenced “Diva,” and the irresistible “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” that Beyoncé seems most like herself — sexy, fun, confident, untroubled by emotions running any deeper than a centimetre.

Not that the first disc is worthless — “Halo” is a decent rewrite of Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” and “If I Were a Boy” is a grand, cathartic swoon of a breakup song. But you only have to compare it to, say, Prince’s similarly gender-bending “If I Were Your Girlfriend” to see how timid and formulaic its sensibility is, and how afraid Beyoncé is, even in the “personal,” “risk-taking” half of this album, of saying anything startling or revelatory about herself. Maybe three discs next time?

Moviegoer Diary: Basket Case, OSS 117: Cairo, Nest Of Spies

BASKET CASE

Plot In A Nutshell
Frank Henenlotter’s 1982 cult horror movie about a young man named Duane who comes to New York, carrying his hideously deformed Siamese twin brother Belial in a basket, plotting revenge on the doctors who separated them.

Thoughts
I had never heard of Frank Henenlotter prior to reading the insanely long interview with him in Re/Search: Incredibly Strange Films. It was several years later that I finally saw my first Henenlotter film, the delirious Frankenhooker, and then it was roughly another decade and a half before I delved into his oeuvre again with Basket Case.

This time, my interest was piqued by the recent all-Henenlotter episode of the Mondo Movie podcast, and especially by their account of how Henenlotter had retired from directing films for about 16 years, and only got back into it when rapper R.A. the Rugged Man entered the picture — apparently R.A. is such a Henenlotter fan that he’s single-handedly putting up the cash for the director’s next few projects, starting with a horror sex comedy promisingly titled Bad Biology.

Basket Case usually gets grouped with The Evil Dead and Re-Animator, two other low-budget early-’80s cult movies especially beloved by gore fans for their blend of horror and comedy, as well as their resourceful special effects. Basket Case is probably the least accomplished of the three from a directorial standpoint, but only up until a point: just when you’ve gotten used to smiling indulgently at the clunky performances and Henenlotter’s lovably primitive experiments with stop-motion animation, the film serves up an absolutely harrowing, surprisingly powerful flashback to the night the doctors force Duane and Belial onto the operating table — I’ve still got the sounds of Belial’s inhuman shrieks echoing in my ears.

The design of Belial is pretty brilliant too: he’s such an extreme freak — he’s little more than a lump of melted flesh with a head stuck to it — that when you realize that he’s not just a rapacious monster but a creature with genuine human emotions (however twisted), it’s genuinely upsetting to see how everybody screams in terror every time they see him.

Good for you, R.A. the Rugged Man: every quirky filmmaker should be so lucky as to have someone like you watching out for them. I wonder: is Henenlotter the Belial in their relationship — the strange creature who doesn’t get out of his basket very often, but who leaves a trail of bloody cinematic mayhem behind him whenever someone leaves the lid up?

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

OSS 117: CAIRO, NEST OF SPIES

Plot In A Nutshell
Michel Hazanavicius’ 2006 spy spoof, based on a series of “straight” French espionage novels and films from the 1950s and ’60s, in which a culturally insensitive secret agent (Jean Dujardin) battles traitors, beds beautiful women, and angers Muslim extremists during a mission in 1955 Cairo.

Thoughts
The perfect antidote to the glum, heavy-hearted Quantum of Solace. Daniel Craig may give the most realistic, “grounded” performance anyone has ever given as James Bond, but as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath, French comedian Jean Dujardin captures the Bond spirit in all its smug, preening ridiculousness.

With a handsomeness that shades subtly into caricature (his hair parted just a little too perfectly, his nose and ears just slightly too big for his face, his eyebrows constantly lifting and contracting with an expressive dexterity that even Stephen Colbert would envy), Dujardin creates a character of breathtaking, unthinking fatuousness. Indeed, part of the novelty of the film is seeing a Frenchman behave with an oafishness towards foreigners that you normally associated solely with Americans: in one scene, he looks out at the Suez Canal and marvels that something so ambitious could have been built 4,000 years ago; and in another, he beats up a muezzin for waking him up early with his call to prayer.

And yet there’s something utterly lovable about him — it helps that he keeps getting carried away whenever music starts playing. There’s a hilarious bit set at a swanky party. Dujardin has just finished dancing the mambo with a sultry femme fatale; the band strikes up a catchy “twist” tune, and even though his partner has left the floor, he can’t help himself — he starts doing this delightfully daffy, completely un-self-conscious dance move, swinging his arms and grinding his hips with an expression of utter joy on his face.



I wished the film had been more consistently funny (although I suspect there were a lot of cultural references that flew over my head), but there were several sequences that had me laughing out loud, especially Dujardin’s unintentionally homoerotic memories of a dead fellow spy, and an action scene in which Dujardin and a hooded killer fight by throwing live chickens at each other — a sequence, incidentally, that is more exciting and better choreographed than anything in Quantum of Solace. The production design, which apes the look of international thrillers of the ’60s, right down to the unconvincing day-for-night photography and the obvious use of rear-projection in all the driving scenes, is as immaculate as Dujardin’s pocket square.

RATING: 3/5

Cinematic Immortality, For Just $12,000

Here's a fun quickie article I wrote for SEE Magazine here in Edmonton as part of a theme issue devoted to the subject of "Living With Less." It takes a look at six famous ultra-low-budget cinematic success stories and ranks them not by profitability, but according to how much aesthetic value they got for their money. (Note: I restricted the article to movies whose budgets were $30,000 or less, which excluded such beloved comparative blockbusters as Hollywood Shuffle ($100,000), Stranger Than Paradise ($100,000-$110,000), Night of the Living Dead ($114,000), and what, for my money, is the best-looking micro-budgeted movie I've ever seen, David Gordon Green's George Washington ($50,000).)

* * * * *

According to the Los Angeles Times, the average Hollywood movie has a budget somewhere in the neighbourhood of $70 to $80 million. Marketing that movie will cost about $35 million more. Those are sickening figures, which might explain why the public loves to hear stories of microbudgeted independent films that break through the cracks — often at film festivals like Sundance — and compete successfully against those bloated Hollywood blockbusters.

In honour of SEE’s “Living With Less” issue, here’s a list of six notable low-budget films, all of which were made for less than $30,000, all of which managed to turn a handsome profit at the box office — in fact, in terms of budget vs. tickets sold, The Blair Witch Project is the most profitable movie ever made.

But what if budget vs. pure cinematic impact was the scale you decided to measure them by? Which of these films got the most aesthetic bang for their buck? From worst to best, let’s see which of these low-budget auteurs managed to stretch their shoestrings the farthest.

CLERKS (1994)
Reported Budget: $27,575
At the bottom of the list sits Kevin Smith’s grimy comedy about boredom and sexual perversity among minimum-wage workers in New Jersey, which may be the only film on this list that when you learn what it cost to make, you wonder where all the money went. The acting is amateurish, the editing is choppy, and David Klein’s murky black-and-white cinematography makes each image look like a second-generation photocopy. Luckily, Smith’s genially filthy dialogue is entertaining enough to overcome his technical limitations.

PRIMER (2004)
Reported Budget: $7,000
Writer/director/star Shane Carruth’s science fiction film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, although I defy anybody on that jury to explain the plot. It’s a deliberately low-key mindbender about a pair of engineers who invent a device that allows them to travel back in time. At first, they use it to score big on the stock market, but soon they start sabotaging each other, altering the future, putting time machines inside other time machines, and — look, I’d happily pay Shane Carruth $7,000 right now to simply explain this damn movie to me.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999)
Reported Budget: $22,000
In terms of marketing, packaging, and buzz management, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’ vérité-style thriller is a work of absolute genius. As a horror movie... well, after all that internet hype promising the scariest movie ever made, maybe it couldn’t help but be a bit of a letdown. Here’s the thing: tiny bundles of twigs just aren’t that scary. Then again, that climactic image of the guy just standing in the corner, back to the camera, facing the wall... brrrrrrrr.

EL MARIACHI (1992)
Reported Budget: $7,000
Robert Rodriguez’ audio commentary on the DVD of his attention-getting debut feature is full of hilarious tips on how to make a fast-paced, violent action movie with essentially no budget: don’t bother hiring a crew; instead of a dolly, have any offscreen actors push the cameraman around in a wheelchair; use desk lamps instead of proper lighting equipment; don’t worry about continuity errors or bloopers — you can always come up with an explanation when you record the narration. The result is a film whose real star is its exuberantly resourceful director, not the titular guitar-playing hero you see onscreen.

ERASERHEAD (1977)
Reported Budget: $20,000
There are many disturbing images in David Lynch’s debut feature, from the grinning, puffy-cheeked girl who lives in hero Henry Spencer’s radiator to the squishy, oversized sperm that keep falling from the sky and appearing in Henry’s bedsheets. But none is more nightmarish than the “mutant baby,” a glistening cross between a fetus and E.T. that sits mewling on Henry’s dresser. To this day, no one knows how Lynch achieved this effect — is it a puppet? a cow fetus? — and in this era of humdrum CGI “wizardry,” a special effect that retains its mystery is a precious rarity.

PINK FLAMINGOS (1972)
Reported Budget: $12,000
When you don’t have enough money to dazzle your audience, you’ve got to rely on shock — and John Waters’ legendary self-described “exercise in poor taste” climaxes with a scene so simple and yet so brilliantly disgusting that even 35 years later, it’s never been topped. What were movie cameras invented for, if not to preserve the image of an overweight drag queen eating an actual piece of dog excrement? We’ve got to put John Waters at the top of our list: what other director in cinema history has done the ultimate magic trick: turning dogshit into gold?

The Death Camp Next Door

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas plays out like the eerie shadow twin of The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Both movies are set during World War II, with a young child moving from the big city to a house in the country, populated by emotionally distant, vaguely menacing adults, and where the lack of companionship makes those long summer days seem oppressive rather than exhilarating. In both movies, boredom is relieved, however, when their young heroes discover a secret passageway to an unfamiliar, frightening world.

But the world that eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield) stumbles across in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is no Narnia: his father (David Thewlis) is a rising star in the Nazi ranks, and the home where he’s taken his family is a short walk away from the concentration camp that he’s just been put in charge of. Bruno’s understanding of his father’s work is woefully ignorant: when he strikes up a conversation with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old Jew on the other side of the barbed wire fence, he actually envies the other boy’s life. “It’s not fair,” he says. “You get to spend all day playing with your friends over there, and I’m all alone.”

The slow, imperfect awakening of Bruno’s conscience makes up the bulk of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. While Bruno’s tutor does his best to indoctrinate him in Hitler’s philosophy, Bruno has a hard time reconciling his descriptions of the inferior, untrustworthy, ratlike Jews with his encounters with Shmuel, or with Pavel, the sad-eyed, Tumnus-like older camp inmate in the ill-fitting shoes who does odd jobs around the house. And Bruno isn’t the only one in the house who’s having a hard time sleeping at night: when Bruno’s mother (Vera Farmiga) realizes that the “farm” she’s living next to isn’t a work camp but a death camp, she can’t get out of there fast enough. (Bruno’s 12-year-old sister, meanwhile, can’t get enough Nazi propaganda, and decorates her room with photos of German soldiers as if they were posters of the Jonas Brothers.)

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a British production — the director is Mark Herman, the man responsible for such jovial hits as Little Voice and Brassed Off!, and everyone in the film, Nazis and Jewish prisoners alike, speak in the same incongruously plummy accents — and is a modest box-office success there already, surprisingly so, for a film with such grim subject matter.

Apparently it’s been widely used there as a teaching aid, a way to introduce young people to the concept of the Holocaust, and I can see it being an effective tool in that context — there is no onscreen violence, and the story is very skillfully constructed to show its innocent young protagonist gradually learning the true nature of the camp and his father’s connection to it. At the same time, I should warn any parents considering taking their kids to see this movie that the ending could easily traumatize a sensitive viewer. And since the ending is the part of the film I had my biggest problems with, maybe you’d better stop reading this review now if you don’t want it spoiled.

Ready? Okay... let me see if I can explain my issues while tiptoeing around the details. Here’s the thing about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas: the film is about Bruno’s acquisition of knowledge, his path to a grown-up understanding of the world and his family. (In this respect, it’s the opposite of Holocaust kitsch like Life Is Beautiful.) But the film abandons that theme at the crucial moment. Instead, the film opts for a melodramatic ending that moves away from Bruno at the moment he gains ultimate awareness of the camp’s horrors and instead places its emphasis on the agony of two Nazi parents. It’s a gutpunch of a final scene, no doubt about it, but it’s also a damned strange place for a Holocaust movie to wind up in.

Nine Women, Zero Editors

If you crossed Oprah's Book Club with Russian Ark, you might wind up with something like Nine Lives, Rodrigo Garcia's all-star female-centric "web of life" drama, which is nearly two hours long but contains only nine shots. It's the topic of this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio in Edmonton — click here to give it a listen.

Octopouty

Even though he might be my least favourite contemporary director, I’ll try not to turn this review of Quantum of Solace into an exercise in bashing Marc Forster. But the question remains: who thought it would be a good idea to hand over the latest James Bond movie to a guy whose sole directorial signature is a fondness for random, off-centre framing?

The car chase that kicks off the film gives you a good idea of what you’re in for: a flurry of closeups of fenders, steering wheels, rear-view mirrors, Daniel Craig’s eyes, drivers of random vehicles who appear to be steering to get out of his way (or are they the people he’s chasing, steering to crash into him?), all intercut with a long shot from a camera zooming toward a highway across the surface of a lake. It’s designed to be incomprehensible — an abstraction of an action scene — much like the followup scene where a shootout in a makeshift interrogation room leads to Bond chasing a bad guy on a dizzying rooftop chase that climaxes with the two men dangling from ropes on a collapsing scaffold, furiously reaching for the guns they’ve dropped and which lie just a few tantalizing inches out of reach of their desperate fingers.

Forster doesn’t seem to care all that much if audiences can follow what’s happening in these sequences. (I sure couldn’t.) In fact, he seems to have deliberately elided a lot of the connecting shots that explain how the characters got from point A to point B. The crazy thing, though, is that I get the impression that the screenwriters and the fight choreographers really did design these sequences so that they made logical sense — I can’t help but think the stuntmen must have been furious when they screened the finished product and saw what a hash Forster and editors Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson had made of all their work.

The plot of Quantum of Solace is even murkier than the staging of the action scenes, although that may be because the screenwriters assumed I remembered the plot of Casino Royale much more vividly than I actually do. This time out, Bond is still brooding over the death of Vesper Lynd — and luckily, his mission to defeat his latest foe dovetail nicely with his thirst for revenge. A little too nicely for the tastes of M (Judi Dench), who notes with deadpan alarm the death toll her favourite agent is quickly racking up.

Daniel Craig completely commits to the franchise’s new concept of Bond as a cold-blooded brute, and Mathieu Amalric’s weasely performance as resource-hoarding CEO Dominic Green will satisfy anyone who’s ever wondered what it might look like if Roman Polanski played a Bond villain. And I guess I admire the producers’ willingness to push Bond’s behaviour to the outer borders of sociopathy. But whatever happened to the idea of the Bond movies as escapist entertainment? The Bond movies used to make being a secret agent look like the greatest job in the world (and being a supervillain the second-greatest), but in Quantum of Solace, neither Bond nor Greene seem to be having any fun at all.

Whatever happened to the outlandish spirit of Ken Adam’s witty set designs? Quantum of Solace was designed by Dennis Gassner, who’s done a lot of work with the Coen Brothers; Forster has mostly assigned him to build a lot of tasteful hotel rooms and offices, the kind that I’m sure will ignite the fantasies of jet-setting business executives the world over.

The Bond girl in Quantum of Solace is Olga Kurylenko’s Camille, who spends the whole movie planning her own grim revenge against an evil Bolivian general. (Forster fetishizes the burn mark on her back, the residue of her childhood brush with the man.) The tonal shift in Quantum compared to the classic Bonds becomes clear when Forster pays homage to the death of Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger — here, a woman is found dead in a hotel room, only this time she’s covered in oil instead of painted gold. The image of the gold-coated girl in Goldfinger was inexplicable, surreal, and oddly beautiful, like something out of a fairytale; here, it’s just an ugly, unpleasant bit of sadism.

I’m surprised to be saying all this, because I thought Casino Royale was a smashingly effective film, and a much-needed jolt of energy to a sagging franchise. But Quantum of Solace barely feels like a Bond movie, and all the familiar Bond trappings — the opening credit montage, full of guns, bullets, and naked women; the swaggering Bond theme that finally reappears under the closing credits — feel like empty traditions. A Bond movie that doesn’t even want to exhilarate you? If that’s Forster’s idea of a new Bond tradition, let’s hope the producers nip it in the bud.

Moviegoer Diary: The X-Files: I Want To Believe, Cleopatra Jones

THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE

Plot In A Nutshell
Belated big-screen continuation of the spooky TV series, in which former FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully are called in to lend their expertise to a case involving a kidnapped FBI agent, an apparently psychic pedophile priest, and a Russian Frankenstein experiment.

Thoughts
Can a movie improve if you see it in the right season? The X-Files: I Want to Believe was greeted with massive critical indifference when it came out this summer, but watching it on a late Edmonton afternoon, the prematurely dark November skies outside the window and a chill in the air, director Chris Carter’s wintry landscapes, Bill Roe’s blue/grey cinematography — almost every scene appears to have been shot about 45 minutes after the magic hour — and even Mark Snow’s shivery score seemed all the more eerie and atmospheric. After watching too many TV shows faking their winter scenes, it’s so thrilling to see something like I Want to Believe, which obviously really was shot in the cold. The clouds emanating from the actors’ mouths whenever they breathe, the reddened faces, the crunch of snow under their shows — that stuff is hard to fake. And Carter doesn’t dispel that mood until the very end of his closing credit sequence, a rare case of film where the imagery under the end credits has genuine thematic importance. Would critics have been kinder to I Want to Believe if Fox had released it in November?

Maybe not; actually, I’m kind of surprised they didn’t like it in July. I Want to Believe struck me as a completely engrossing mystery whose low-key exploration of faith and religion reminded me of an earlier film starring David Duchovny, Michael Tolkin’s 1991 drama The Rapture. Maybe Chris Carter and Frank Spotnitz’ script is a little schematic in the way it cuts between Mulder’s investigation of the missing agent and Scully’s attempts to save a dying child with a rare disease, but that doesn’t mean the parallels aren’t interesting. Scully puts her young patient through a horrifically painful series of operations in the remote hope that he’ll be cured when it’s all over: does that make her no different from the villain (Callum Keith Rennie), who has gone to similarly gruesome extremes to keep his lover and colleague alive? The pedophile priest (Billy Connolly), inflicting pain and torment on an innocent child? Or Mulder, trusting in some unseen force beyond science to bring about a happy conclusion and ensure all her work isn’t for nothing?

It probably goes without saying that Gillian Anderson does excellent work here as Scully; what other actresses of her generation can so effortlessly convey strength, both moral and intellectual? Compare Anderson to, say, Jodie Foster, who plays these kinds of characters as if doing so is straining every last nerve in her body — as if she’s doing the acting equivalent of lifting a 200-pound barbell.

What probably does need saying, on the other hand, is what a fine director Chris Carter has quietly become. Besides Carter's always-keen eye for unusual locations, I Want to Believe is filled with memorable images: Billy Connolly breaking away from the FBI search team behind him, doing a floppy-limbed run across a snow-covered field; an overhead shot of a ring of black-clad FBI agents circling a piece of evidence buried in the ice; a kidnapped woman being wheeled into a grimy laboratory, only able to see a fragment of her new surroundings through a slot in her cage. I really liked a small moment in the opening scene: a woman parks her car in her garage, hears an ominous noise, looks down on the ground and sees a footprint in the snow, over top of her tire tracks, and then a rack focus to a sharp-tined gardening tool hanging on the wall behind her. Nothing sensational — just good, efficient visual storytelling.

I’ll even defend the moment that a lot of people complained about, where Mulder and Scully are abruptly discovered in bed with each other. The criticism is that Carter gives us no buildup to this moment. No buildup? Aren’t we ignoring 175 episodes of the TV series? I kind of love that Carter doesn’t show us the moment that led up to Mulder and Scully sharing a bed — after all, he shows us the important part: Scully unable to get to sleep because she’s too busy wondering why the severed arm the pedophile priest helped the FBI discover contained traces of radiation medicine and animal tranquillizers. And Mulder listens to her with complete attentiveness. Is this one of the most romantic movie scenes of 2008? I want to believe it’s so.

Stray Observation: There's a bit of a shortage of humour in the film, but I laughed out loud at a sight gag involving a picture of George W. Bush. It's even funnier than the joke involving the picture of Vladimir Putin in Burn After Reading!

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

CLEOPATRA JONES

Plot In A Nutshell
Journeyman director Jack Starrett’s 1973 blaxploitation crime thriller about a statuesque African-American special agent (Tamara Dobson) fighting corrupt cops, cocaine dealers, and a lesbian drug kingpin named Mommy (Shelley Winters).

Thoughts
Seldom has a movie seemed as awestruck by its own leading lady as Cleopatra Jones. Wikipedia claims Tamara Dobson is the tallest actress ever to play regular leading roles — the former fashion model was 6’2”, although for some reason, a shot of Cleopatra Jones’ government ID lists her height as 5’10” — and it seems like every third scene ends with some minor character (horny guys from the neighbourhood, a criminal she’s just karate-kicked, some random kid on the street) looking at her as she walks offscreen and making some comment about how incredible she looks. Even her superior officer, a skinny, balding white cop, gets in on the action: after one conversation with Jones, he turns to another officer and asks, “Did you ever have feelings of inadequacy?”

Truth be told, Dobson isn’t much of an actress, but she’s not terrible enough to damage the movie much, and she certainly looks amazing in all the fur-trimmed coats, feather-trimmed hats, platform boots, and hooded capes that she wears over the course of the film’s briskly paced 89 minutes. There’s one awesome moment late in the film where she brings down her foot like a guillotine blade across the back of a racist cop. I also like the endearingly silly battle cries she makes every time she delivers a karate chop.

I see that the film was co-written by Sheldon Kellner, a TV comedy writer for the likes of Sid Caesar, Dinah Shore, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, Carol Channing, and Engelbert Humperdinck, and who seems like an unlikely candidate to pen a blaxploitation script — I’m assuming he was responsible for the hilarious scenes involving Shelley Winters’ “Mommy,” a screeching bull dyke whose mansion is staffed with nubile young female servants for her to grope. Winters and Antonio Fargas (who plays an up-and-coming crimelord named Doodlebug) obviously couldn’t be having a better time onscreen playing these monstrous overgrown children. You can’t blame Fargas for milking his death scene (he gets riddled with bullets while wearing the whitest tux you’ve ever seen in your life); I’d hate to leave this movie too.

Stray Observation #1: The only character in the movie who dies and doesn’t deserve it is Mattingly, a British “gentleman’s gentleman” who Doodlebug hires to be his chauffeur — and the butt of lots of jokes about his accent. He’s the movie’s forgotten victim.

Stray Observation #2: There’s a shot of an X-rated theatre where one of the movies playing is called The Black Broad Jungle. Which is a hilarious porn title. If it’s not a real movie already, someone should use it.



RATING: 3/5 (I’d have gone up to 3.5 if only it had a better ending)

The Musicgoer: Lou Reed's Berlin Live At St. Ann's Warehouse

LOU REED
Berlin Live at St. Ann’s Warehouse
(Matador)
**** (out of 5)

Lou Reed’s 1973 concept album Berlin is often regarded as the most, for want of a better word, bombastic work of his career. That’s partly on account of its grim plot (lovers Caroline and Jim lead a squalid junkie existence in Berlin, the cops take their kids away, then Caroline kills herself) and partly due to Reed’s use of horns, strings, and a choir instead of his usual stripped-down arrangements for guitar/bass/drums. But I’ve always been struck more by the economy of Reed’s lyrics, his ability to sum up his characters’ wasted lives simply by repeating the phrase “sad song” over and over again.

This deluxe live version of Berlin, staged in 2006 for Julian Schnabel’s recent concert film, lacks the venom of the original album — when Reed sings the line from “Oh Jim” about “looking through the eyes of hate,” that state of mind feels more like a memory than something he connects to today. But the band (conducted by guitarist Steve Hunter, who played on the original album) is full of pep, Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons) contributes an ethereal encore version of “Candy Says,” and the massive choral climax to “Sad Song” is as goosebumpily magnificent as ever.

"The Amadeus Of Dirty Music"

Here's an interview I did last week with Nick Prueher, the co-director of the documentary Dirty Country, which plays Edmonton next weekend, as well as the co-curator of the Found Footage Festival, a live comedy show featuring all sorts of bizarre cinematic ephemera from the golden age of VHS. Enjoy!

* * * * *

Larry Pierce lives in the small town of Middletown, Indiana. He’s in his fifties and he has the gut, the thinning hair, and the out-of-style mustache to prove it. His fashion sense seems to be dictated by whatever’s on sale at the Wal-Mart: acid-washed denim shorts, cheap shirts, white socks, running shoes. He’s been married to the same woman for 22 years, and still goes dancing with her at the bar. If he has friends over, they usually barbecue some hamburgers, drink some beers, and play a few rounds of washer toss. He works at a local auto parts factory — or at least he did until recently, when they laid him off after 30 years of employment.

But luckily Larry has a second career to fall back on: every few months, he goes down to the basement, sits on a stool in his workshop — the one with all the wrenches and hammers hanging neatly on the wall behind him — and writes country songs. Really, really filthy country songs. Songs with titles like “Will You Swallow My Cum?”, “Sleep Right Next to Your Pussy,” “Hike Your Skirt Up Higher (Stank Up the Whole Room),” “Good Hard Fucking,” the immortal “Worthless Cunt,” and the admirably blunt “I Like to Fuck.” He’s recorded more than a dozen albums of incredibly raunchy music, earning himself a devoted underground following consisting largely of truckers who buy his cassettes from those spin racks at roadside convenience stores, next to the beef jerky and the off-brand pornographic magazines.

That’s where filmmakers Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher discovered Pierce’s work some 15 years ago. “We were on a road trip in Wisconsin in high school,” Prueher says over the phone from his home in Brooklyn. “We were looking for something to entertain ourselves and we found this tape called Songs for Studs. It had this hick on the cover with a hat doing a funny face, and it was $5.99. So we said, ‘We’ve got to get this and see what’s on here.’ We popped it in, and it was pretty well-written original country music, but with just the filthiest lyrics you’d ever heard. He didn’t beat around the bush. You just had to wonder, ‘Who is this guy?’”

Years later, Pickett and Prueher managed to track down Pierce and make him the central figure in their documentary Dirty Country, which places Pierce in the context of what turns out to be a long American tradition of X-rated pop music. Among the other artists featured in the film: fraternity favourites Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts; piano-playing raunchmeister John “Dr. Dirty” Valby; and R&B madman and rap-music innovator Blowfly. But Pierce is the film’s most compelling figure — in large part because he seems so normal otherwise, and has apparently no interest in examining why he’s so drawn to writing dirty songs.

“It was a little frustrating at times,” Prueher admits. “We’d try to dig a little deeper, but he doesn’t see anything unusual about it at all. We think of him as the Amadeus of dirty music: God speaks to him, and this is what he’s born to do. There’s something about the way he does it so unself-consciously that makes it work. There’s no artifice or pretense about what he does at all. You look at his salt-of-the-earth fans or his factory-worker buddies, and it’s all spawned from that blue-collar American environment. I think he’s more reflective of what true Americans are like than these factory-produced Top 40 artists that have so much polish put into them.”

And in fact, one of the sweetest stories to emerges from Dirty Country begins when Pierce meets up with –itis, a younger bunch of musicians who also play dirty country, but give it a more theatrical redneck/punk spin. Turns out, not only does everyone in –itis adore Larry Pierce, but they also agree to become his backing band, and their youthful energy and marketing savvy give fresh momentum to Pierce’s stalled career.

“We thought at first that maybe they only liked Larry ironically,” Prueher says, “but we were amazed at how sincere they were. They’re true kindred spirits. The movie is really a story about friendship and making someone else’s dreams come true. That’s definitely not where we thought our movie about dirty country was going, but it was a pleasant surprise.”



* * * * *

Dirty Country isn’t the only taste of Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher’s work Edmontonians will be getting this weekend; they’ll also be here in person to host the Found Footage Film Festival at Metro Cinema on Saturday, a collection of bizarre, sometimes disturbing, but always amusing clips from obscure and forgotten videotapes they’ve discovered during years of combing through thrift stores and garage sales.

“We have three main criteria,” Prueher says. “First, it needs to be legitimately found — we don’t take anything off the internet. The story behind finding it almost has to be as interesting as anything on the tape. Second, it’s got to be unintentionally funny. That’s our bread and butter: something that was intended to be serious but colossally fails. And third, something we’re really drawn to is people with a lot of ambition but very little talent.”

Among their prize finds: an instructional video called How to Seduce Women Through Hypnosis (which Prueher says “manages to be even creepier than its title suggests”); a clip from a cable-access TV show in which a man demonstrates how to extract mucus from his mouth using grape juice and a spray bottle; and exercise videos starring Marky Mark Wahlberg and a scantily clad Angela Lansbury... although thankfully not together.

“We’ve gotten better at telling just from the box cover whether the tape has potential or not,” Prueher says, “but even then, maybe only one out of every 15 tapes makes the cut. Finding something that’s bad in just the right way — it’s like a needle in a haystack. But it’s the thrill of the hunt. We’ve waded through hours of dreadfully boring office meetings and home movies of people opening presents, but when you find that one video where it’s a bunch of rednecks having a debaucherous Memorial Day and setting things on fire, you go, ‘Okay — this is why we do it.’”

The Movie That Made Me Like Coldplay

I'm not too proud to admit it: the documentary Young at Heart made me cry. And I was watching it on my laptop in a coffee shop, which was really damn embarrassing. And while I have some issues with the occasionally condescending attitude of director Stephen Walker, I was more than pleased to feature it this week's "Hidden Gems" segment for CBC Radio. Click here to give it a listen. Clash fans, you may want to cover your ears.

Big Brother Is Half-Heartedly Watching You

In Role Models, Paul Rudd plays a man whose job is to give anti-drug presentations at school assemblies that are in fact thinly veiled commercials for a particularly foul-looking energy drink. It’s a job that’s pretty much designed to make anybody who does it hate himself — and Rudd has been doing it for 10 goddammed years. He’s an interesting variation on the “overgrown manchild” character that’s become so common in American comedy: he has the emotional immaturity of an adolescent, but it’s combined with the joyless cynicism of a grumpy retiree. No wonder his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks) has decided to break up with him.

Role Models is Rudd’s first feature screenplay (Ken Marino, Timothy Dowling, and director David Wain are also credited as co-writers), and he keeps his character walking a very fine line — he’s a dick, but his blunt impatience with bullshit of any kind is amusing enough to keep him barely likeable. (He won me over at a campfire scene; asked to tell a scary story, he looks around at the 10-year-olds gathered around him and proceeds to fill them in on the details of the international sex trade.)

The plot kicks into action when a judge sentences Rudd and his co-worker Seann William Scott to 150 hours of community service as an alternative to prison — Rudd went on a destructive tirade after getting dumped, and Scott wound up taking the fall for the damage as well — which they serve at a Big Brother-like organization called “Sturdy Wings.” Scott is paired up with a scarily sex-obsessed black kid named Ronnie (Bobb’e J. Thompson), while Rudd gets an older kid, a geek and ardent LARPer played by Christopher “McLovin” Mintz-Plasse.

With David Wain directing, I was hoping Role Models would contain a few surreal comic tangents to rival the talking can of beans from Wet Hot American Summer, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses CAT scan machine buying spree from The Ten, or pretty much anything that ever happened on the TV show Stella. But Wain shows surprising restraint here, especially for someone who previously seemed as though he couldn’t stick to a straightforward story if you held a gun to his head. Role Models has a standard-issue “redemption of an asshole” story arc, but the actors are all believable, and Wain and Rudd earn a lot of goodwill with their loving depiction of the LARP subculture, in all its nerdy glory. (Admirably, they make sure each of the LARPers is a very specific type of geek, from Joe Lo Truglio’s hearty knight, who commits to the Olde English slang with hilarious gusto, to Ken Jeong’s smarmy King Argotron, haughtily holding court even at the burger joint where he and his buddies eat before every battle.)

They’ve also written a fantastic role for Jane Lynch — easily her best and juiciest part since she played the lesbian dog trainer in Best in Show. Here she’s Gayle Sweeny, a former drug addict (“You know what I would have for breakfast? Cocaine! You know what I’d have for lunch? Cocaine!”) who now runs Sturdy Wings with a combination of intimidation, positive energy, self-righteousness, and imperfectly worded tough-talk aphorisms. A former “user, boozer, and loser,” she’s like a much, much better-adjusted version of Jerri Blank from Strangers With Candy.

Role Models never quite takes off into the comic stratosphere, but it gives you a few good laughs (including a hilarious two-percenter about Christopher Mintz-Plasse looking like “the young Marvin Hamlisch”) and it doesn’t do anything to annoy you the rest of the time. And it also gives you Paul Rudd in Paul Stanley KISS makeup carrying a foam-rubber sword, and I’d have to be crazy not to recommend a movie with that in it.

Halloween Hangover With Molly Hartley

I wasn’t expecting The Haunting of Molly Hartley — a cheaply made horror movie marketed towards teens, starring a bunch of good-looking young TV actors from shows like Gossip Girl, Greek, and 90210, and released over Halloween weekend— to be much of a film. But I was surprised by how weirdly empty it is: I understand that when you’re making a cheapie teen horror flick, you don’t necessarily have to make it good, but don’t you at least have to include a few actual scares? Or explain your premise at some point? Or, if you’re calling your movie The Haunting of Molly Hartley, make sure a haunting of some sort takes place?

Well, I suppose that technically, Molly Hartley (Haley Bennett) is haunted by traumatic memories of her mother stabbing her in the chest with a pair of scissors. That was before the movie started; now with her mother locked up in the insane asylum, Molly is preparing to start over at a snooty private school. But she keeps having nightmares about her mother returning to attack her; what’s more, she keeps hearing spooky voices and getting nosebleeds.

It takes absolutely forever for the movie to reveal what’s going on, so let me spoil it for you up front. When she was stillborn, Molly’s parents made a pact with some kind of evil witchy emissary: Molly would get 18 years of life, after which the E.W.E.’s people would claim her. So actually, Molly’s mom was trying to save her, not kill her. And now, with Molly’s 18th birthday fast approaching, she has only a few days before she...

Well, frustratingly, the movie never explains what will happen to her, or who the E.W.E. actually is. A witch? A minion of the Devil? Will Molly turn evil? Or will she become Satan’s slave? There’s talk that she’ll acquire “great power” — what kind of power? Is it supernatural? Will she have to carry out evil missions? It’s hard to see what Molly’s mother found so horrible about her daughter’s potential fate: in the film’s final shot (easily one of the most anticlimactic horror movie endings in memory), we see that Molly, having survived her 18th birthday and now presumably having marshalled all her new dark occult powers, has now become... the class valedictorian! Presumably, she’s an evil valedictorian, but still.

It's close to an hour before we even get this much information, and so all director Mickey Liddell can do to goose the audience in the meantime is show Molly constantly getting startled: by a bathroom stall door slamming shut, by classmates touching her on the shoulder, by cars honking, dogs barking, and, in one particularly asinine moment, mail getting pushed through the slot in the front door and landing on the floor. (It’s only a couple of magazines, but the Foley guys make it sound like someone just dropped a bowling ball.) And damned if Molly doesn’t shriek with alarm every time — this girl is worse than Albin in La Cage aux Folles.

The Haunting of Molly Hartley is a strange creation: a horror movie without so much as a premise. Worry not, squeamish moviegoers: there is literally nothing to be scared of here.

Kisses For My President

With the Bush presidency nearly over, and as it becomes clearer and clearer just how far-reaching the damage his disastrous reign has inflicted upon the environment, the economy, and the United States’ reputation abroad — not to mention how many decades it will take to undo it all — how curious it is that the two major fictionalizations of the Bush White House to have come out in the last couple of months have taken a sympathetic view of the overmatched ignoramus at the centre of it all.

Oliver Stone’s film W. doesn’t exactly let Dubya off the hook for the ineffective, unmotivated war in Iraq, but by focusing on Bush’s struggles for his father’s approval and by putting Josh Brolin’s charismatic performance at the centre of every scene, Stone makes it impossible for you to regard Bush as a simplistic villain — or as a simplistic simpleton, for that matter.

In a way, Curtis Sittenfeld goes even farther towards rehabilitating Bush’s image in her new novel American Wife. He isn’t called Bush in the book — instead, he’s Charlie Blackwell, heir to a Wisconsin meatpacking fortune, part owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, and the son of the state’s former governor — but Sittenfeld is hardly trying to fool anybody. He has drug and alcohol issues, he becomes a born-again Christian, he gains the presidency through a bitterly contested recount, he gets embroiled in an increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, he makes a prematurely triumphant victory speech on board on aircraft carrier, he’s widely perceived as an intellectual lightweight.

But Sittenfeld makes the rather inspired decision to make Charlie a secondary character in the novel, and instead make the book about the Laura Bush figure, here named Alice Lindgren, a prim, bookish, Democrat librarian who somehow winds up married to a loud, often boorish, proudly anti-intellectual man who represents what some might call the worst aspects of the Republican Party.

Laura has always been the most enigmatic member of the Bush administration, and Sittenfeld works hard to postulate possible answers to all those questions that have always surrounded her: What does she see in that man? What is going on behind that frozen smile? Does she really approve of his presidency? And if she doesn’t, how much blame should we lay at her feet for not using her influence to steer her husband in a different direction?

Sittenfeld is better at answering the personal questions than the political ones. Bush’s appeal may be invisible to most blue-staters, but in American Wife, it makes total sense that a woman — even a shy, teetotaling Democrat like Alice Lindgren — would fall for him. Sittenfeld brings out the best in her Bush character — he’s brash, coarse, and boastful, sure, with a confidence in himself that comes from growing up rich and never having had his notions challenged, but he’s also un-self-consciously handsome, with a healthy sense of humour about himself and a zest for the horseplay of being alive. For all his faults — his occasional selfishness and thoughtlessness — he’s a good husband who genuinely values Alice’s presence in his life and who is willing to dramatically reform himself when he’s on the verge of leaving her.

Alice herself is a more hazily drawn character — a passive woman who seems like the truly accidental inhabitant of the White House, not Charlie. (Like Laura, she kills a high school classmate in a car crash, a tragedy that sends huge reverberations through her life which, indirectly, almost cause her husband’s downfall.) She’s a bit too much of a question mark on which to hang a 550-page book, and yet something about the voice Sittenfeld invents for her — wry, precise, self-questioning but only up to a point — is compelling enough to pull you through the story.

At least, that is, until the final section, which takes place after Charlie becomes president and whose thematic preoccupations (life as an absurdly famous person, the extent to which one can be held responsible for the actions of one’s spouse) feel like they belong to a different book. This section of the book is about public life, but it’s Sittenfeld’s insights into “George” and “Laura”’s private lives that are the book’s highlights.

This is the kind of material I wish W. had more of — the off-the-record moments with Dubya, scenes that are obviously invented but whose fictional “truth” tells you something about these figures that actual truth cannot. In that sense, the most shocking confession that Sittenfeld’s Alice makes in the book is not that she once had an abortion (which Laura Bush did not), but that she voted for the other guy. I don’t know how the real Laura cast her ballot, but I wouldn’t be surprised...

The Musicgoer: Pink's Funhouse

PINK
Funhouse
(LaFace)
*** 1/2 (out of 5)

Funhouse is Pink’s first album since her divorce from motocross star Carey Hart, and while it’s no Blood on the Tracks, it’s certainly a lot more fun to listen to than, say, Beck’s Sea Change.

For all of Pink’s proclamations of party-girl feminism (“I’m still a rock star! I got my rock moves!” she announces on the lead single, “So What”), her albums always contains a few ballads on which she either begs her guy not to leave her or begs him to come back. Their sexual politics are fairly retrograde, but actually “Please Don’t Leave Me” and “I Don’t Believe You” are two of the best songs on the disc — “Please Don't Leave Me" is propelled by a loping guitar riff that Stephin Merritt from The Magnetic Fields would kill to have come up with.

The only thing really holding the album back are Pink’s limitations as a lyricist; expressing herself poetically has never come naturally to her and too often she falls back on clichés, banalities, or howlers like “Am I sweating or are these tears on my face?” or “This used to be our funhouse, but now it’s full of evil clowns.” And why, in 2008, is she still making fun of Jessica Simpson? Find a new target, Pink! Katy Perry's standing right there!

Moviegoer Diary: Frontière(s), Get Smart

FRONTIÈRE(S)

Plot In A Nutshell
Xavier Gens’ brutal 2007 horror movie about a gang of thieves who hole up in a remote inn on their way to Amsterdam, only to be variously killed, tortured, and held hostage by a family of neo-Nazi cannibals.

Thoughts
I watched Frontière(s) on Halloween night, intrigued by all the buzz I’d been hearing about the so-called “new wave of extreme French horror” and ready to put my nerves through the wringer once again, having nearly worn them out with my viewing of Inside a couple of months ago.

What’s the French word for “ugh”? What an unpleasant, nasty little movie this turned out to be — if anything, the slickness of the cinematography and the quality of the performances (especially Karina Testa, who seems authentically shell-shocked by the end of the film) only makes Gens’ story seem more repulsive and sordid by comparison. The sight of the fat, hulking butcher’s assistant in a leather apron... the woman who performs an agonizing crawl through a pool of pigshit to get to safety, only to immediately get captured again... the long industrial corridors filmed in grimy shades of black, green, and yellow... It’s the Hostel aesthetic, delivered with even more sadism and less wit than you get from Eli Roth.

The violence in Inside was even more agonizing to watch than the various tortures inflicted upon the characters in Frontière(s), but at least the actions of the villain in Inside made a kind of demented sense. But in Frontière(s), it’s never clear exactly how this deranged “family” interacts, or how they view the outside world, or even why they want to use Testa’s character for breeding purposes when they know she isn’t Aryan.

Frontière(s) is one of those movies that may not have much narrative cohesion but which still looks “awesome” enough to get its director invited to Hollywood — Gens was hired to direct Hitman, a videogame adaptation starring Timothy Olyphant that I did not see but which got universally terrible reviews. I’m not surprised. There’s nothing in Frontière(s) to make me think Gens has anything in his director’s toolkit besides a bludgeon. He gets a memorable performance out of poor Karina Testa, but all he can think of to do with her character is to torture her further — not even Marilyn Burns in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (an obvious inspiration for Gens’ film) had to endure anything comparable. The humanity of Gens’ characters is an afterthought, much like that parenthetical “s” at the end of the title.

RATING: 1.5/5

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GET SMART

Plot In A Nutshell
Big-screen updating of the 1960s TV spy spoof, starring Steve Carell as Agent 86 and Anne Hathaway as the sleek, supercompetent Agent 99.

Thoughts
I adored Rachel Getting Married so much that I gave this one a look just to see if Anne Hathaway’s performance gave any signs of greatness to come.

The answer: well, not exactly, although Hathaway’s ability to appear in a lot of mediocre movies (The Princess Diaries, Becoming Jane, Ella Enchanted, Get Smart) without seeming like a mediocre talent herself seems like clear evidence of her starpower.

Not that Get Smart gives her much to work with. Her character’s big hook is that she underwent extensive plastic surgery, to the point where she is now completely unrecognizable. I assumed this was a set-up for some kind of big comic reveal or plot payoff — that she would turn out to actually be... I don’t know, a man, or a KAOS double agent, or both. But no: it turns out that before her surgery, she was simply... another beautiful secret agent, albeit a slightly older one. I don’t get it... did the filmmakers think they needed to give some kind of “plausible” explanation for why Hathaway is so young? There are a couple of moments where wistful music plays while Hathaway sadly notes that she used to look like her mother, but these scenes go nowhere. Are they there to give the movie some “heart”? (The movie never settles on a tone, nor does it ever make up its mind whether Smart is a competent field agent or a bumbler.)

That said, Hathaway has genuinely good comic timing — she did a great job with her recent gig hosting Saturday Night Live, which is more than Robert De Niro can say for himself — and she has a lot of scenes where she gets to bicker amusingly with Steve Carell. Plus she looks absolutely sensational in her various spy get-ups. Get Smart is one of those overproduced comedies like Tropic Thunder that is too expensive-looking to be funny — if I’d been producing it, I would have insisted on making it for one-third the money, but also tripling Anne Hathaway’s trenchcoat budget.

RATING: 2.5/5

The Two Solitudes Of Mardi Gras

Here's an interview I conducted with director Margaret Brown, whose excellent documentary The Order of Myths is showing in Edmonton next weekend as part of the Global Visions Film Festival. If you're an Edmonton reader of this blog, I encourage you to check it out — and to check out the festival in general, for that matter. The lineup is unusually strong this year, packed with all sorts of titles that you will likely not get another chance to see on the big screen — Stranded: I Have Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains, Be Like Others, Freeheld, Operation Filmmaker, I for India, and Body of War are among the most notable titles.

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One of Margaret Brown’s earliest memories of the Mardi Gras parades in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama involves the float on which Folly would chase Death around and around a broken column. Officially, the image is a metaphor for the way a good party can make you forget about mortality, if only temporarily, but as Brown says, the image has a strangeness and a pagan power that makes it impossible to reduce to one simple meaning.

“It’s the broken column of the South,” Brown says over the phone from Tuscaloosa, where she’s preparing to present her extraordinary documentary The Order of Myths, which uses Folly and Death as its opening image. “And the way it’s traditionally been done is to have all these black workers carrying braziers beside it — and I use that word, ‘traditionally,’ very specifically. It’s a complicated image that speaks to the mythology inside us all — it’s about enjoying life, but also about death being close around the corner. It always gave me the shivers when I was little.

“And it’s a very racially loaded image as well. As that symbol travels through black neighbourhoods and white neighbourhoods and mixed neighbourhoods, it changes as it moves.”

The Order of Myths is a similarly slippery creation. On the surface, it’s about the Mobile Mardi Gras, the oldest Mardi Gras celebration in North America. (Mobile was celebrating Mardi Gras long before New Orleans was even a city.) As a centuries-old event, it’s steeped in tradition: parades, balls, secret societies, incredibly opulent costumes that emulate the grandeur of 18th-century European royalty.

But as Brown makes clear, another old Southern tradition clings to the Mobile Mardi Gras: segregation. There are, in fact, two Mardi Gras celebrations in town: a black Mardi Gras and an entirely separate white Mardi Gras. Both have their own parades, their own social calendars, their own kings and queens. The Order of Myths documents the 2007 Mardi Gras, a year when — in a chilling you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up twist — the family of the white Mardi Gras queen used to own the family of the black Mardi Gras queen. Few films convey the way America’s racist history reaches into the present day more vividly than The Order of Myths.

But the film contains very few demonstrations of outright racial hostility; instead, Brown shows a city where the black world and the white world have reached a polite, even genteel impasse. We do see some attempts at bridging the distance — 2007 was the first year that the black and white king and queen appeared at each other’s balls, for instance — but those gestures toward integration are very cautious and very tentative, symbols of the idea of progress rather than evidence of the thing itself. (Then again, considering Mobile’s last lynching occurred in 1981, you could argue they’ve actually come a long way pretty fast.)

Brown says there have been attempts over the years to integrate the two Mardis Gras, but it’s difficult to gauge just how much support for the notion actually exists. “It all depends on who you ask,” she says. “There’s no one opinion. There was an editor of the local paper who tried to integrate it when he came in, some lawsuits have been launched. But the people in power don’t want it integrated. It threatens them. And the way the Mardi Gras works, there are all these secret societies, which are ways that jobs get passed down and power gets held by certain families. It’s all tied into the economy and there are a lot of vested interested. It’s a way of keeping power in certain hands, but it’s all clothed in this thing of ‘Oh, party! Mardi Gras!’”

It should be emphasized, however, that The Order of Myths is more sociological essay than exposé. The centrality of Mardi Gras to the Mobile calendar, and the amount of money that these venerable families and organizations are willing to pour into it — the parties, the parade floats, the tiaras, the sceptres, the gowns bearing the family crest — has to be seen to be believed. We are talking wedding-of-Charles-and-Di levels of opulence here.

“There’s a whole class of artisans in Mobile who essentially work on Mardi Gras all year round,” Brown says. “One time, I dropped by the studio of Ron Barrett, who made the white king’s train, and he was clearly frustrated about something. So I asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’ And he said the king’s mother really wanted there to be ermine tails on the train — they were modeling it after some European monarch’s train that had, like, 200 ermine tails on it. And he was going crazy trying to find 200 ermine tails — there’s no such thing as an ermine tail supplier anymore. There probably aren’t 200 ermine tails in the whole world! But that’s the kind of thing people want. Can you believe that?”

Ermine-tailed trains may be a thing of the past, but it appears Mardi Gras in Mobile will remain segregated for the near future. That said, Brown notes that in 2008, the black and white kings and queens paid each other an official visit, so it appears that a new integrated tradition has taken root. And she says her film may have, in some small way, gotten people talking about integration as at least a possibility.

“The film was the hot topic in town for a while,” she says. “It was a very rowdy audience, talking back to the movie. They seemed to be getting a lot out of it. I don’t want to toot my own horn, but I think it’s a way for people to suddenly see what was previously invisible to them. It’s a weird kind of mirror.”

Hathaway's The Bridesmaid

The name of the movie is Rachel Getting Married, but the scene I want to talk about takes place the night before the ceremony, at the rehearsal dinner. All the guests are crammed into a too-small dining room; they’re all laughing and joking, having eaten too much food, and there at the centre of it all is Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her husband-to-be Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, from the band TV on the Radio). Now it’s time for speeches, and one by one, various friends and family members take the microphone. Anyone who’s attended a wedding will recognize the various approaches everyone takes — the affectionate insults from friends of the groom, the heartfelt expressions of pride from the bride’s father, the sentimental gush from the bridesmaids. All familiar stuff.

What’s unfamiliar, however, or at least wonderfully unexpected, is how much time director Jonathan Demme devotes to this sequence. Minor characters we’ve barely gotten to know suddenly take centre stage — and get to remain there far longer than you’d expect them to. Demme has chosen to shoot on digital video with a handheld camera, which means that right from the first scene, the film has established a pretty casual visual style, but here it’s almost as if the movie is on the verge of turning into a home movie — much like the one being shot by Sidney’s brother, who spends the entire film with a videocamera in front of his face. And yet Demme creates such a convivial onscreen atmosphere, his frame is so teeming with life, and his affection for the characters is so obvious (and so democratic) that you hardly care that the scene has been going on for what must be close to 20 minutes without hitting a single plot point.

Then, Rachel’s younger sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) stands up to make her speech, tapping a knife on the side of her glass a little more forcefully than is necessary. Kym is literally only hours out of rehab; a prickly personality at the best of times, her presence has introduced an undeniable undercurrent of unease into the wedding preparations. This is the first public appearance of the “reformed” Kym, and she blows it completely, making “self-deprecating” jokes about her drug addiction that only make everybody more uncomfortable and wishing Rachel well in a manner designed to call attention to her own resentment and bitterness.

Anne Hathaway has been getting a lot of praise for her work in this film, and she deserves it on the basis of this scene alone. Kym is carrying around a lot of pain — pain that she will probably never entirely dispel — but instead of playing her as a victim, Hathaway emphasizes Kym’s most unattractive traits, almost to the exclusion of all others. Kym is self-pitying, self-righteous, tactless, and really kind of infuriating in her inability to talk to her family without making a scene. So much of the tension in Rachel Getting Married comes from the question of whether Kym can pull herself together for her sister’s big day, and as it turns out, contrary to all your sentimental moviegoing expectations, she really can’t. And so, when Rachel forgives her anyway — especially in the scene late in the film where she gives Kym a bath — the effect is almost overwhelmingly emotional. Family is a great source of comfort, but often an even greater source of pain, and Rachel Getting Married captures that dynamic with great beauty.

This being a Jonathan Demme movie, it’s also filled with fantastic music: just about every scene has a musician in it somewhere, either acting, performing onstage or just noodling around at the edge of the frame. (Four different bands play at the reception alone, including a combo featuring Robyn Hitchcock!) And like that magical rehearsal-dinner sequence, the film keeps oscillating effortlessly from mode to mode, from family drama to documentary to concert film. And the mood keeps shifting unpredictably as well, from joy to pain to laughter. I can’t say enough about the welcoming mood Demme creates in this film, the feeling that for two hours, you’re every bit a part of this family as the characters onscreen — or about Bill Irwin’s magnificent performance as Kym’s father, a good-hearted man aching to understand his daughter’s misery.

The death of Robert Altman in 2006 left a gigantic hole in American cinema. I can think of no higher praise than to say that in its generosity of spirit and its appreciation of the complexities of human behaviour, Rachel Getting Married is the most Altmanesque film anybody has made since.