The Girlfriend Experience

(500) Days of Summer contains several scenes that capture the ineffable ebb and flow of romantic relationships as surely as any mainstream romantic comedy in memory — those dim late afternoons when you can’t tell if the other person is merely bored with the day or completely bored with hanging out with you. And the two leads are very appealing: the lanky, boyish Joseph Gordon-Levitt is like a more expressive version of Keanu Reeves (one who can actually be funny on purpose). And Zooey Deschanel’s charms have never been exploited onscreen so ruthlessly. She plays the Summer of the title, one of those cool, pretty, saucer-eyed girls so beguilingly feminine no boy can resist her — the script is unclear whether Summer is aware of the intoxicating effect she has on every man she meets, but Zooey Deschanel must be aware of it in real life, because why else would she take a part like this?

There’s a lot to like about (500) Days of Summer, but I came out of it vaguely disturbed. Something about this movie stinks.

But what? I couldn’t put my finger on it. As I drove home from the theatre, though, I started to think about the scene where Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel attend the wedding of a co-worker. The bride and groom are an African-American couple in their 50s, and yet the music that plays on the soundtrack during the ceremony is “Mushaboom” by Feist. Clearly, this is not music that has anything to do with the people getting married — this is music that has everything to do with this white boy sitting in the fifth row. (During the reception, we get to hear the wedding band perform “At Last,” but that moment is mainly about getting the audience to laugh at the singer’s enormous Afro.)

“Mushaboom”! It’s a small touch, but it points to a larger flaw in the film, and that’s the way its entire worldview is limited to Gordon-Levitt’s character. This movie has zero curiosity about the inner lives of anybody else in the film — not their emotions, not their backstories, not their opinions or ideas, except to the extent that they relate to Gordon-Levitt and his romantic problems. They’re all props: the morning after Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel first have sex, everyone on the street as he walks to work breaks into a spontaneous dance number with Gordon-Levitt as the star. Not long after he finally breaks up with Deschanel, he meets a new girl whose very name suggests she’s been placed in his path by a benevolent universe that’s made his personal happiness a key part of its grand cosmic plan. Two hours in a world that revolves entirely around the emotions of this twerpy employee at a greeting card company... it's suffocating. In a key scene, Gordon-Levitt plays The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” — but this is a movie about a guy who always gets what he wants.

And what does he do to deserve it? Precious little, except doodle some buildings and sing a Pixies song at a karaoke bar instead of something by, I don't know, Queen or Led Zeppelin or Elvis, like a normal person.

I worry that I’m sounding like an Armond White-style scold here, but the more I think of it, the more (500) Days of Summer, with its Threadless t-shirt/messenger bag/skinny tie visual aesthetic, seems like a movie designed to make spoiled-rotten hipsters feel soulful. And the fact that it occasionally really is soulful doesn’t make me like it any better.

Moviegoer Diary: Sharky's Machine, Tokyo!

SHARKY’S MACHINE

Plot In A Nutshell
Burt Reynolds directs and stars in this 1981 crime drama about an Atlanta vice cop who falls in love with the high-class prostitute (Rachel Ward) he’s surveilling as part of an investigation of a crime boss (Vittorio Gassman) with ties to a rising politician (Earl Holliman).

Thoughts
I don’t know if I ever would have watched this film if my interest hadn’t been piqued by Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essay about it. It’s a really interesting movie, but I don’t know if I have much to say about it that MZS didn’t say more eloquently already. Here’s his critique:



Pretty insightful, right? Even so, I’m not sure it capture the peculiar tone of Sharky’s Machine, which has one foot in the “this city’s a sewer” tradition of movies like Fort Apache, The Bronx and Cruising, and one foot in the tradition of dreamlike thrillers like Laura and Vertigo, in which it’s hard to tell romance apart from obsession. And then there are the quirky character touches embroidering the edges of the plot: Charles Durning as a sputtering police captain; Richard Libertini, chattering away like Elliot Gould in The Long Goodbye as a wiretapping expert; Bernie Casey as a black cop who’s fascinated by Eastern philosophy and describes an incident where he escaped certain death by essentially willing himself to become invisible.

I have to assume Reynolds himself is responsible for this film’s offbeat mood. Sharky’s Machine is one of a string of four pictures he directed in the late ’70s and early ’80s — the others are Gator, The End, and Stick — before he apparently lost interest in directing features. (He went on to direct a fair bit of television, including a big pile of episodes of Evening Shade.) As MZS notes in his video essay, one of the more unusual features of Sharky’s Machine are the numerous silent passages — his piece includes the long sequence in which Reynolds’ rhythms begin to correspond to those of the woman he’s spying on, but my favourite is a snappy bit that takes what in a normal cop movie would be 10 minutes of evidence-gathering and visits to the morgue and the lab, and telescopes it all into a clever montage that’s free of dialogue and accompanied by some glossy lite jazz.

That’s another one of this movie’s unusual touches: the score is packed with upscale ’80s jazz by the likes of The Manhattan Transfer and Flora Purim. The closing theme is sung by none other than Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan. Could all that jazz music be Reynolds’ way of nodding towards the Atlanta setting? Even if it is, truth be told, this movie could use a stronger sense of place — just about the only time I was conscious that the film was taking place in the south was the scene where Reynolds visits Libertini’s house and his daughter pronounces his name “Shockey.”

Apparently, a remake of Sharky’s Machine, to be directed by Phil Joanou, is being planned for a 2012 release — a somewhat baffling move, since the original has minimal name recognition and no cult following to speak of, as far as I’m aware. But perhaps the remake will rekindle interest in the original, which is far too interesting to be forgotten. Not only do you get the surprisingly complex characters played by Reynolds and especially Ward, but you get baroque action scenes like the fight between Reynolds and a pair of nunchuck-wielding assassins, and the enjoyably protracted showdown between Reynolds’ fellow officers and the seemingly unkillable, Rasputin-like hitman played by Henry Silva. The guy just refuses to go down!

RATING: 4/5

* * * * *

TOKYO!

Plot In A Nutshell
Directors Michel Gondry, Léos Carax, and Bong Joon-ho each contribute to this anthology of three short films, all set in the Japanese capital.

Thoughts
Somehow, I’ve managed to miss just about every all-star omnibus movie of the last five years — I missed Three Extremes..., I missed Eros, and I can’t even remember if I saw Paris, Je T’Aime. I think the last one I saw might have been Aria all the way back in 1987. (Ah, Ken Russell, you wonderful kook!)

But the array of behind-the-camera talent that the producers of Tokyo! had managed to line up, not to mention the wild-card presence of actor Denis Lavant, was enough to lure me in. And I came out the other end mostly satisfied, even though Bong Joon-ho’s “Shaking Tokyo” — about an agoraphobic man who leaves his apartment for the first time in 10 years to track down a cute pizza delivery girl — was by far the weakest of the three. The segment is gorgeously photographed, but it’s hard to feel all that invested in a central character who’s spent an entire decade mooching off his parents and obsessively stacking toilet paper rolls and empty pizza boxes.

Much better is Michel Gondry’s fable “Interior Design,” which he co-wrote with cartoonist Gabrielle Bell. The story begins as a wry social comedy about Hiroko (Ayako Fujitani), a young woman who arrives in Tokyo with her filmmaker boyfriend — completely broke, they crash with one of Fujitani’s old school chums and try, without much success, to find jobs, a cheap apartment, and a place to park their car where the cops won’t tow it away. Things don’t get really Gondryesque until about two-thirds of the way through, when Hiroko undergoes a bizarre physical transformation that’s too much of a crazy surprise for me to spoil here. Suffice it to say, the story resolves itself in a way that manages to be both sexist and a sly spoof on sexism.

Best of all is “Merde,” the first film from Léos Carax since 1999’s Pola X. It stars Denis Lavant as a character initially identified only as “The Creature From the Sewer,” a feral creature of unknown origin — he’s blind in one eye, and with his crooked red beard and filthy green suit, he’s a cross between a leprechaun, a homeless man, and Mr. Mxyzptlk. Whoever he is, and wherever he comes from, he’s made his home in the Japanese sewer system, emerging every so often to roam the sidewalks and terrorize the citizenry, stealing cigarettes, eating flowers, and licking the armpits of petrified schoolgirls. If mischief really gets into him, he’ll lob a few live grenades around. (Lavant is wonderful in these scenes — between this movie and Mauvais Sang, he’s the all-time champ when it comes to cavorting down city streets — but Jim Carrey does an even funnier anarchic freakout in Me, Myself and Irene.)

Anyway, “Merde” turns into a courtroom drama, of all things, when Lavant is finally captured and put on trial. His lawyer is a Frenchman played by Jean-François Balmer who is the only other person who can understand his strange language, which involves emitting high-pitched squawks, slapping himself in the face, and tapping his teeth with his disgustingly long fingernails. (It’s never quite explained how Balmer knows Lavant’s language, but it apparently has something to do with also having a twisty red beard and a milky eye.) The closing credits, hilariously, promise a “Merde” sequel set in New York, which seems like a much more hospitable location for him. I predict he’ll have his first NEA grant in six months and his first Off-Broadway hit before the year is even out.

RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: Cass McCombs' Catacombs

CASS McCOMBS
Catacombs
(Domino)
** 1/2 (out of 5)

“You’re not my dream girl/You’re not my reality girl/You’re my dreams-come-true girl.” Cass McCombs is pleased enough with that turn of phrase to make it the opening lyric on his new album Catacombs; to me, they seem like a distinction without a difference, but they’re set to such a pretty Everly Brothers-esque melody that I can’t get too exercised about how meaningless they are. (Plus, the guest vocal by actress Karen Black makes me think of the movie Nashville, and thoughts of Nashville always make me happy.)

That same tug-of-war continues throughout the rest of the album: lots of pretty melodies always on the verge of being pulled into the mud pit by muddled, pretentious lyrics. “My Sister, My Spouse” feels like a bad Decemberists knockoff and “Don’t Vote” a failed attempt at Randy Newman-style satire. On the other hand, “The Executioner’s Song” (which has nothing to do with Gary Gilmore) and “Harmonia” are exquisitely simple songs about men making peace with violence and betrayal. Just beware: with McCombs, “simple” also means “two minutes longer than they need to be.”

Moppets Who Kill

Is there a good actress with more dubious taste in material than Vera Farmiga? In just the last two years, she’s starred in Quid Pro Quo (a painfully arty thriller about amputee fetishists), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (a contrived drama about the son of a Nazi S.S. officer who befriends a Jewish concentration camp inmate and who accidentally ends up in the gas chambers himself), and not one but two thrillers about mothers of evil children. Joshua, which came out in 2007, got some decent reviews, but I found Farmiga’s performance as a woman unraveling from post partum depression embarrassingly overwrought. Orphan isn’t a very good movie either, but at least it has none of Joshua’s pretensions of seriousness: it’s a big, dumb thriller about a pint-sized psychopath, a throwback to “[blank] from hell” movies of the ’90s like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, with a few dashes of The Bad Seed and Don’t Look Now, of all things, thrown in for good measure.

As in Don’t Look Now, the film is about a married couple still recovering from the death of a child. (Both couples even have a small lake in their backyard that their kids are perpetually on the verge of falling into.) In Don’t Look Now, Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie take a trip to Venice where they’re menaced by a creepy dwarf; in Orphan, Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard invite the creepy dwarf to live with them — they go to an orphanage and pick out a nine-year-old girl named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) to bring home. (Apparently they get to bring her home that very day, like a puppy from the pound.)

With her Russian accent, her unusually self-possessed demeanour, and her habit of dressing in old-fashioned ribbons and pinafores, Fuhrman doesn’t exactly fit in with her new siblings or classmates, but to Farmiga and Sarsgaard, she’s just misunderstood — nothing a little love won’t fix. The fools! Little do they realize how cunningly Fuhrman is manipulating everyone around her, sending the school bully to the hospital, bashing in the brains of an overly inquisitive nun from the orphanage, and systematically driving a wedge between Farmiga and Sarsgaard, pushing them toward divorce so that daddy’s little girl can have daddy all to herself. (Most amusing are the scenes where little Fuhrman effortlessly terrorizes her older brother into silence.)

As directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (who also did the Paris Hilton remake of House of Wax), Orphan gets off to a terrible start, complete with a tasteless dream sequence and way too many cheap false scares, including the old “face in the medicine cabinet mirror” trick. Shameless! But Isabelle Fuhrman is such a compellingly creepy screen presence that she almost sells this ridiculous movie single-handedly — even the uproarious twist that takes us into the film’s final 20 minutes (and leads to an especially queasy scene between Fuhrman and Sarsgaard).

With a remake of the 1987 shocker The Stepfather (which starred Terry O’Quinn as a murderous stepdad) due out in October, I wonder if Orphan is merely the first of a wave of domestic horror movies still to come, eerie tales of families being infiltrated by evil outsiders. Don’t worry, though, evil children: no matter how unloved you may feel, Vera Farmiga will always be there to take you in.

"I Sure Haven't Met Any Girls Like You"

I'm not sure why there's a new DVD edition of Near Dark out now. Are they trying to capitalize on the media attention Kathryn Bigelow has been getting for her new film The Hurt Locker? Is it the popularity of vampire romances like Twilight and True Blood? Or is it the announcement of a Near Dark remake, which the IMDb says is scheduled for a 2012 release?

Whatever's going on, it's a well-crafted, atmospheric B-movie that deserves all the attention it gets. And I'm doing my part by making it the subject of my weekly "Hidden Gems" DVD segment for CBC Radio. Hopefully you can forgive the moment a couple of minutes into it where I totally talk over top of the host — I had my head down, looking at my script, and before I knew it, I was totally barreling over her as she tried to interject a comment. Still an amateur at this radio thing, I guess.

Click here to listen to it, etiquette breach and all.

Porcupine, Porcupine, Porcupine Racetrack!

At their best, the comedy troupe The State felt like the closest American TV has ever come to Monty Python’s Flying Circus: a fast-moving half-hour of cleverly linked sketches that avoided celebrity impressions and pop culture spoofs and instead wallowed in absurdity for its own sake. At their worst... well, you got skits like “The Coffee Family,” which consists of the cast running around a room screaming and pouring pots of coffee all over themselves.

Every episode of The State (along with a full complement of deleted scenes and unaired sketches) is now available on a five-disc set from Paramount. That’s a lot of sketch comedy, but since The State is one of the few shows of its ilk that actually got stronger with each season, watching the whole thing in less than a week, the way I did, is a pretty painless experience.



There’s also the novelty value of seeing a comedy troupe trying to operate with 11 members. And while the show definitely had its stars (Ken Marino, Michael Ian Black, Thomas Lennon, Ben Garant, Michael Showalter, Joe Lo Truglio, Kerry Kinney), they aren’t lying on the audio commentaries when they claim that they thought of themselves as a true ensemble. Just compare them, for instance, to Saturday Night Live, a show that frequently had just as large a cast, but whose sketches tended to be showcases for only one or two performers at a time. The State, meanwhile, is often at its best in high-energy group sketches like “Precinct,” with 11 different characters all chiming in with one-liners. (They even have the luxury of being able to “waste” a cast member on a part whose sole function is to deliver a single but hilarious non sequitur.) The huge cast also allowed them to pull off ambitious bits like the much-loved “Porcupine Racetrack,” a pastiche of Guys and Dolls that packs about eight songs into two and a half minutes.

The State compares favourably to SNL in other ways as well. They avoid recurring characters — on the rare occasions when popular characters like ’70s love daddies Barry and Levon or adenoidal teenager Doug would make return appearances, the new sketch would function more as a satire on the idea of recurring characters and idiotic comedy catchphrases. Also, The State would actually try to supply their sketches with endings. They weren’t always brilliant endings, but at least they didn’t trickle awkwardly into nothingness like so many SNL bits.

I have no evidence for this, but I’m going to guess that writerly discipline was imposed by Wain, Black, and Showalter, whose later show on Comedy Central, Stella, for all its absurdity, is probably the most tightly written and stylistically controlled of all the State spinoff projects. (Reno 911!, the semi-improvised sitcom starring Lennon, Kinney, and Garant, recalls broader, more loosey-goosey State sketches like “Festis, The Birthday Hobo.”) In later seasons, the quality of sheer gag-writing on the show became impressively high, with the cast coming up with dozens of clever riffs on high-concept premises like “Roughing It” (in which a bunch of vacationers turn a man’s apartment into their campsite for a week) or “One Camper” (about a summer camp with just one kid).



What keeps The State from joining the upper echelon of TV sketch shows like Mr. Show and The Kids in the Hall are the wildly uneven and undisciplined performances. On the audio commentaries, the cast members frequently admit that they probably did too much screaming, and they’re right — Kevin Allison and Ben Garant in particular are so strident and so incapable of modulating their shouting and their mugging that I found myself instinctively cringeing at any segment that looked like it would prominently feature them. I should also warn potential viewers that the shortage of women in the cast means that each episode is jam-packed with some of the ugliest drag performances in TV history.

Still, it’s good to see this very funny show getting its due on DVD. Even with much of the original music missing, The State has stood the test of time much better than the overpraised The Ben Stiller Show, whose cultural references passed their expiration date more than a decade ago.

American Bigelow

The Hurt Locker opens in medias res, and then it pretty much stays there for two solid hours. The heroes of the new film from director Kathryn Bigelow are the members of an elite U.S. bomb squad in Baghdad in 2004; every time an army patrol spots a suspicious nest of wires or a parked car with an unusually heavy load sitting in the trunk, they’re the ones who get called in to defuse the threat. Usually they’re working in an area crawling with locals, any number of whom could be hostile — which means anyone who pulls out a cellphone could simply be checking his messages, or they could be sending a “detonate” order to their confederates.

The film was written by Mark Boal, who based his script on his experiences as an embedded journalist in Iraq. (He wrote the Playboy article that Paul Haggis adapted into the moody 2007 homefront drama In the Valley of Elah.) The script is practically all setpieces: one tension-filled, you-are-there bomb scenario after another. And that’s how we get to know our three heroes (played by unknowns Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, and Jeremy Renner) — not through monologues, or voice-overs reading their letters home, but almost exclusively through their behaviour on the mission.

I’d call it an existential war movie, but the appeal of The Hurt Locker is more visceral than cerebral. After all, it’s directed by the woman who made Point Break, perhaps the most shamelessly enjoyable action picture of the ’90s, and in an odd way, The Hurt Locker could be looked as a companion piece to that film: like Patrick Swayze in Point Break, Jeremy Renner plays a leader driven by his addiction to danger. He’s defused more than 800 bombs in his career, we’re told, and he sleeps with a box of bomb components under his cot — “stuff that nearly killed me,” as he puts it. He courts danger so relentlessly, in fact, that in one scene, Mackie and Geraghty semi-seriously contemplate killing him before he can pull them into a situation that kills them first. They’re convinced he has a death wish, but by the end of the film, Bigelow makes it clear that the truth is more complicated: this job is the only thing that gives Renner’s life meaning. If the situation isn’t life-or-death, how is he supposed to make any decisions at all?

The Hurt Locker is relentless, but the same couldn’t be said for the pace of Kathryn Bigelow’s career of late. One of the few female directors to have made her reputation almost exclusively in the action genre, Bigelow has stayed under the radar since the box-office disappointment of 1995’s Strange Days, with only two little-seen films, 2000’s The Weight of Water and the 2002 submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker to her credit. But with The Hurt Locker, which she filmed in Jordan just over the border from Iraq during the U.S. “surge,” she’s rediscovered the energy of her early genre landmarks like Near Dark, Blue Steel, and Point Break and combined it with a real-world, journalistic immediacy.

I had the chance to speak with Kathryn Bigelow on Friday. She's been talking about this movie for about a year now, but she had obviously not tired of discussing the material or the experience of helping to turn it into a film. Here’s our conversation.

Q: I rewatched your vampire movie Near Dark the other night to help prepare myself for this interview, and there are many moments in that film where characters say, “Fuckin’ daylight.” I couldn’t help but think that you must have said that a lot as well when you were making The Hurt Locker. It looks like it must have been a punishing movie to make.

Kathryn Bigelow: I was just going to use that term! Actually, though, the light and the landscape were so epic that you kind of forgave the heat and savoured the look. It was probably the most punishing on Jeremy Renner, who had to wear that 100-pound bomb suit. We were in the Middle East, it was summer, it was 100, maybe 110 degrees, and that was a real bomb suit full of Kevlar and metal plates — it was not a creation of the wardrobe department. And then you add the helmet, which has a fan, but which was not as effective as it could have been. That was perhaps the most logically challenging aspect of the shoot — just making sure Jeremy was cool and comfortable and conscious.

Q: I wonder if there were challenges conceptually with the film as well. It’s so much about these setpieces without a lot of dialogue — was it hard to envision the film from what was on the page?

KB: Well, actually, the script was very carefully crafted with such a high degree of specificity. Our goal was to transport you, the audience, into what it’s like to be a bomb tech in Baghdad and walk in their shoes. So a lot of that was right there on the page. And Mark was present during the shoot, and we were both very careful to ensure accuracy where we could.

Q: I was very impressed by how the tension is sustained throughout the whole film — especially since, in most conventional thrillers, scenes where the hero has to defuse a bomb are actually kind of... well, boring. There’s no doubt that the hero is going to survive. Were there strategies that you came up with in the writing or the shooting to keep the suspense alive?

KB: I was very inspired by Mark’s first-hand reporting, and I was very keenly aware upon reading the script of how inherently dramatic and inherently tense the life of a bomb tech would be, so I wasn’t actually comparing it to other films. I was just very focused on what it would be like to be there — in an environment that provides 360 degrees of potentially volatile situation with no respite. There’s no Saigon. Even in the green zone, you could potentially be hit by a mortar round. It’s a pervasively threatening environment, and I think that really informed the screenplay and the production. Then you add the camerawork, which is very alive and muscular and gets you inside the emotions of the characters while also placing you within a clearly mapped out geographic space. I think this conflict has been kind of abstract — at least, it has been for me, as a member of the general public. So I was keen to grasp the opportunity to make it specific, even if the film is set circa 2004.

Q: And there’s no clear enemy. There’s the bomb that has to be deactivated and a whole lot of people who might be enemies or might be innocent bystanders.

KB: It’s one judgment call after another. The thing to remember is that their job is to render safe these devices. Their job is to save lives. But you’re right: it’s not like the plot transitions into something where they have to track down the triggerman. I think a lot of that comes from the nature of Mark’s reporting. During his embed, he saw everything from the soldiers’ perspective, and that became the perspective of the film. That’s your point of entry. And at the time, language was a huge barrier — engaging with the local population was very difficult, even if you as a soldier wanted to. Which telescopes the perspective of the film even more.

Q: Some pundits have said this could be the first film about Iraq that actually does some business at the box office.

KB: I think there’s always a market for a classic war film. Yes, Platoon is specific to Vietnam, but it’s also a classic, defining film about men during wartime, and the psychological price of war. Those are timeless, universal thematic investigations worthy of constant exploration.

Q: I read Manohla Dargis’ recent profile of you in The New York Times, and was fascinated by her description of your first short film, The Set-Up, which shows two men fighting while a pair of female semioticians provide a voice-over that deconstructs the symbolism of the images. So you come to filmmaking from this academic background, you studied with Susan Sontag, and you have a deep familiarity with critical theory. So I’m curious to know the extent to which that background comes into play with a film like this one. You watch a movie like Blue Steel, and you practically hear all the academic papers being scribbled down. But does the semiotician in you have a place in a more reportorial film like The Hurt Locker?

KB: I think it’s perhaps relegated to the deep background or the subconscious. But it never really disappears. There’s that thing called “clean room” theory — they use it in the legal world — that says you can never un-know what you know. So it’s there, but it certainly doesn’t become the text, the way it did in The Set-Up, which is all about puzzling out what creates that engagement with what you’re seeing onscreen. What makes your heart pound? You know, when people watch The Hurt Locker, in that scene where Brian is trying to clean the blood off the bullet, they sometimes find themselves trying to conjure up spit in their mouths along with him.

Q: Right — I think David Edelstein from New York magazine said that in his review, didn’t he?

KB: Exactly. My interest was always in what creates that physiological reaction and trying to unpack that process.

Q: You get asked this question a lot, but here it is again: one of the things that people always note about you is that you’re this anomalous figure, a female director who is interesting in portraying — and so good at portraying — these insular male worlds. And The Hurt Locker is no different. Is that kind of milieu something you’ve always understood from an early age, or is it that you’re simply curious about them and ask a lot of good questions?

KB: I definitely pursue these films, so it’s not that they just land in my lap with all the financing. I wish they would! I’m interested in character first and foremost, but I am drawn to characters who find themselves in great danger or who have these peak experiences. And that ties in with my desire to use the medium in a really experiential way — to put you at ground zero in a particular conflict. This is me kind of analyzing it all after the fact, but for me, you get excited by character, and then the character finds himself in these potentially threatening, dangerous situations that allow you to use the medium in a way that expands and stretches the form. It goes from the inside out.

Q: How would you describe your relationship to violence? Are you fascinated by it? Appalled by it? How do the percentages break down?

KB: I don’t really look at it as violence per se, but I am fascinated by that physiological contract that the viewer makes with the screen, and that a certain kind of material can achieve. Comedy is a similar thing too — you’re laughing at those characters. So what transcends the purely visual process of watching? How and why are you engaged to a point of... I mean, when I was screening Strange Days, I loved watching the audience react to that opening sequence, the point-of-view shot of that character running up those stairs. People in their seats would have their legs moving! What creates that engagement?

Q: I still remember that long, long foot chase in Point Break through those narrow back alleys where you don’t really know what’s around each corner. And I don’t know what the trick is — like, if you put the camera the right number of feet above the ground combined with the right lens, does some magical alchemy happen with the viewer?

KB: You never quite know. It’s not scientific — it’s ephemeral, you can’t quantify it. I think that’s where art comes in.

The Musicgoer: YACHT's See Mystery Lights

YACHT
See Mystery Lights
(DFA)
**** (out of 5)

On their new album, the synthy dance-punk duo YACHT asks a big philosophical question right out of the gate: “Will we go to heaven or will we go to hell?” And then they answer it right back: “It’s my understanding that neither are real.” Of course, they follow up this track with a song called “The Afterlife,” which complicates their position somewhat — but apparently, if this song is anything to go by, there is no heaven and no hell, but simply a limbo-like region where everyone spends eternity dancing to music that sounds like LCD Soundsystem crossed with The Spoons.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take this album — are titles like “You Can Live Anywhere You Want” and “We Have All We’ve Ever Wanted” meant ironically? Seriously? Or does the tone occupy the same limbo-like in-between region I mentioned in the first paragraph? My guess is the former title is sincere, and the second is ironic, but since just about every song on See Mystery Lights comes complete with some inventive hook (the equalizer-bustingly loud woodblock “THOCK!”s that punctuate “Don’t Fear the Darkness” are particularly ear-catching) or a merry bit of lyrical nonsense (like the talking kitchen in “Psychic City”), I’m too busy dancing to be bothered to debate the matter.

Magical Misery Tour

This is the print version of my review of The Great Buck Howard — it repeats many of the same points as my radio review below (and in many of the same phrases), so I apologize for the redundancy. But for those Moviegoer completists out there, I'm posting it anyway!

* * * * *

The Amazing Kreskin was born in New Jersey, but I always used to think he was Canadian. That’s probably due, in part, to the TV show he used to host, The Amazing World of Kreskin, which was shot in Ottawa and aired on Canadian TV stations seemingly throughout my entire childhood. But it’s also due to his endearingly nerdy personality — those dorky glasses (his signature!), his eager-to-please grin, the way he had of getting flustered in the middle of an interview whenever his excitement ran away with him. There was something unpolished about him, something small-time that seemed a little out of place when he’d make one of his appearances on The Tonight Show, back when Johnny Carson was hosting it.

Writer/director Sean McGinly once worked as Kreskin’s road manager, and those experiences form the basis of The Great Buck Howard, a minor but very likable little comedy/drama that came and went from theatres faster than a magic trick. It stars Colin Hanks as Troy Gable, a would-be writer who impulsively drops out of law school, where he’s miserable, and who just as impulsively takes a job working for Buck Howard, a once-famous stage magician now reduced to playing half-empty “arts complexes” in places like Bakersfield, Cincinnati, and Akron. (He’s very big in Akron.) The job doesn’t make Troy any less miserable, but at least now he can say he’s in showbiz.

Buck is played by John Malkovich, who combines his usual lofty aloofness with an unexpected Vegas-style brashness — he shakes everyone’s hand so hard, he practically yanks their arm off, and no matter what two-bit town Buck finds himself in, his first words are always a boisterous “I love this town!” (It’s especially a treat to see Malkovich sit down at the piano and deliver a hilariously earnest spoken-sung rendition of “What the World Needs Now.”) It may have been years since his last Tonight Show gig, but Buck still carries himself like a star, his hair perfect, always clad in tuxedos and orange dress shirts and cufflinks, and pitching diva fits at even the smallest setback. He has plans for a comeback too — one astonishing effect that he’s convinced will put him back on top. The chances of that happening seem dim, but it’s probably unwise to count out a man with the ability to predict the future.

The film was produced by Tom Hanks (who is Colin Hanks’ dad, and who has a couple of scenes in the film as his fictional father as well), and it has the same affection for the lower rungs of old-time show business as That Thing You Do!, his sole film as writer/director. McGinly knows this landscape well: it’s a world of not-quite-elegant hotel rooms, local morning shows, and cheap snacks in the backstage dressing rooms. And he knows the dreams and delusions of the people who inhabit it — the way, for instance, that Buck clings to his 61 Tonight Show appearances as that one incontrovertible piece of evidence that proves he’s cut out for bigger things than a one-night-only gig in some Midwest theatre. There’s a nice scene where Buck casually brags that he does more than 400 shows a year, and refuses to back down from the statement even when someone good-naturedly points out how that number seems impossibly high.

At the same time, McGinly is very careful to remind the audience that, as cheesy and old-fashioned as his act may be, Buck is a genuinely talented performer. He’s a pro. He really can hypnotize several hundred people at a time. Every one of his shows concludes with the same trick (it was Kreskin’s signature effect as well): he gives a member of the audience a wad of cash that represents his payment for that night’s performance, and while he’s backstage, has the crowd hide the money somewhere in the theatre. If he can’t find the money, he says, he forfeits his payment for the show. And Buck always finds his money. No one knows how he does it, not even Troy.

It’s a lovely metaphor for that mysterious X-factor talent that any good performer has — and for the idea that Buck really is where he belongs. It’s not some empty showbiz phrase — he really does “love these towns!” And somehow, magically, they give him the sustenance he needs to survive.

He Always Finds His Money

John Malkovich's Kreskin-like title character in The Great Buck Howard is a distant cousin of the scam artist he played a couple of years ago in Color Me Kubrick: two eccentrics (and flamboyant dressers) doing what they can to get by in the lower rungs of the showbiz universe. And both men have a talent for deception, or at least illusion: even at the end of The Great Buck Howard, you still don't know how Buck performs his signature trick... you don't even know if there's some secret cheat he uses, or if he really does have psychic powers after all.

The Great Buck Howard is a minor movie, but it's a tremendously likable one, and it's my "Hidden Gem" DVD pick this week on CBC Radio in Edmonton. Click here and you'll be able to listen to the segment... it's like magic!

Fuck Buddies, Or, Zack And Murray Make A Porno

If you’re writing a sitcom or a comedy sketch and you want a guaranteed laugh, all you have to do is have two male characters kiss each other. (Cheers ran for 11 seasons, and seldom did they get a bigger, more delighted response from the studio audience than when two gay guys kissed Norm — or when Norm and Cliff gave each other a peck as a gag.) By that logic, writer/director Lynn Shelton’s Humpday should be the funniest movie ever made: it’s the story of two longtime male friends who decide to have sex with each other.

That’s a pretty startling premise, but Shelton arrives at it in a surprisingly plausible way. Mark Duplass (one half of the Duplass Brothers filmmaking team, who made the mumblecore hits The Puffy Chair and Baghead) is Ben, a paunchy Seattleite in his early 30s whose somewhat sleepy domestic routine with his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore) is disrupted by a surprise visit from his buddy Andrew (Joshua Leonard, who you may recognize as one of the three doomed heroes of The Blair Witch Project). Andrew — bearded, bohemian, well-travelled, wearing a hat he claims was given to him by a princess — may be an immature slacker, but something about the way he looks at Ben’s house with its neat little kitchen and its coffee table books plants a few seeds of dissatisfaction in Ben’s head.

Soon, Ben finds himself at a party with Andrew in a house full of sexually liberated strangers where the conversation turns to porn — specifically Humpfest, the amateur porn festival The Stranger runs every year. Andrew, who fancies himself an artist, talks vaguely about wanting to create a submission — to which Ben, a little drunk, a little high, with Anna at home, perhaps wanting to prove to the assembled crowd that he’s not as square as they probably think he is, observes that if Andrew wants to create something really fresh and original, he should make a movie in which two guys have sex. Two straight guys. You know, like him and Andrew. He says he’d totally be into it. Even the next day, after he sobers up, he says his mind hasn’t changed.

Shelton has written a very shrewd screenplay here. The humour in Humpday doesn’t depend so much on the idea of two guys deciding to have sex as does on the way a certain young, well-educated, left-wing segment of the population talks about sex. Ben, Anna, and Andrew have no idea what they really think about anything — at one point, Ben literally says he has absolutely no idea why he is so determined to go through with his “date” with Andrew — but they are hilariously articulate about their inchoate emotions. Ben may not know why he wants to try having sex with Andrew, but he can talk Anna’s ear off about how wanting to have sex with him makes him feel. It’s a small, buried running joke that while the only thing Humpday’s characters ever want to talk about is sex, up until the final scene between Ben and Andrew, there’s not a single sexual encounter that ever gets consummated. (Of course, I wouldn’t dream of spoiling whether Ben and Andrew actually get it on.) Conversation is these characters’ preferred method of intercourse — Shelton could almost have titled it Deep Throat.

I don’t know how well Humpday’s no-name cast and semi-improvisational acting style will go over with multiplex audiences, but the mere fact that this cheaply made little comedy is getting the wide distribution it’s getting represents some sort of cinematic landmark: it may be the first commercial film in which it’s not entirely outside the realm of reasonable possibility for a straight guy to consider having a homosexual experience. If Ben and Andrew have their misgivings about the idea, it’s not because they’re worried about “turning gay” or being penetrated; on the contrary, they’re just not sure they can overcome their inalterable heterosexuality long enough to complete the act.

If Brüno tries to make the case that America is populated by latent homophobes, Humpday takes the opposite position, and suggests that America is full of people who’d at least be willing to give homosexuality a shot, if only for a night. But it would have to be with a good, trusted friend. And there’d need to be a video camera recording everything. See it with someone you love — but never even considered kissing until now.

A-List Movie Review Maxout Mit Brüno!

Five years ago, if you had asked me what the odds were of a guerrilla pseudo-documentary starring a Cambridge-educated British comedian, rated 18A, and featuring several extended sequences of explicit gay sex becoming one of the most anticipated films of 2009... well, I would have kept my betting money in my pocket.

But Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to his surprise blockbuster smash Borat, is now playing packed theatres. I caught the film on opening night with Michael Hingston, one of my fellow movie writers at SEE Magazine in Edmonton, and sat down afterward with him to share our thoughts on the spectacle we'd just witnessed.

* * * * *

Paul: This was my first exposure to the Brüno character, a flamboyantly gay, extremely shallow, not terribly smart Austrian television host who sort of embodies the fame-hungry vapidity of the fashion world. Unlike you, I’ve never seen Da Ali G Show, where the character debuted, but the conventional wisdom seems to be that of the three characters on that show — Ali G, Borat, and Brüno — Brüno is the weakest of the bunch. Would you agree with that?

Michael: Definitely. I think all of these characters work on shock value, and the laughs really come from the gut — your id, not your superego. And it just seems funnier to me in theory to see how far people will go to put up with someone who talks in crazy British hip hop slang like Ali G, or some well-meaning but unbelievably offensive foreigner like Borat. The joke that “I’m gay, so I don’t understand straight taboos” seems to end before it begins; it’s also the stereotype that, of the three, has been the most thoroughly debunked by pop culture already. I will give Cohen enormous credit, though, for his commitment to the character — whenever he sees an opportunity to explode a bombshell of crassness, he goes for it. But he also seems far too willing to fall back on cocksucking jokes.

Paul: Well, let’s not forget that this movie contains some excellent cocksucking jokes. That montage at the start of the movie showing Brüno’s home life with his pygmy Filipino lover is pretty inspired. It is like the most overheated fantasy of all the crazy stuff gay men do to each other. At the same time, I wonder if it makes Cohen’s satire a little incoherent — if one of the goals of the film is to expose North Americans’ latent homophobia, then what does it mean when Brüno turns out to live up to all those homophobic stereotypes? He really is promiscuous and shallow and sexually insatiable and unfit to be a parent.

Michael: I don’t even know if homophobia is the right word for what Cohen’s pranks are revealing. He’s goading his subjects. There’s a bit where Brüno decides that if he wants to achieve his goal of becoming über-famous (maximum umlauts!), he needs to be straight, so he goes to see these ministers who promise that they can convert gays into heterosexuals. And you think, “Yeah! Those are horrible people!” By all means, tell that minister he has “great blowjob lips,” because you want to see his eye twitch as he stews in his own uncomfortable juices. But that’s the exception here, not the rule. I mean, every time someone who’s black or Jewish gets killed, it’s not necessarily a hate crime. Similarly, if you get mad at some guy who derails the ultimate fighting cage match you’ve paid to see with some crazy gay makeout scene... you can call that bigotry if you like, but mostly Brüno is just being annoying.

Paul: Some of the strongest scenes in the film have no gay content at all. There’s a bit, for instance, where Brüno visits these two amazingly stupid PR consultants who specialize in hooking celebrities up with charities — I don’t know how these women even stay in business when they can’t even pronounce “Darfur.” And there’s a scene where Brüno needs some babies for a photo shoot he’s planning, and he auditions a series of parents who are appallingly willing to agree to the most outrageous requests.

Michael: “Does your baby have a problem operating large, antiquated machinery?” “No, she’s great with that.”

Paul: I think “Does your baby have a problem being near lit phosphorus?” was my favourite.

Michael: To me, that’s the best scene in the entire movie. And to their credit, Cohen and the director, Larry Charles, seem to recognize when they’ve got a good hook. And in that scene, you really see the horrific underbelly of a world where people have no moral qualms whatsoever about peddling their own children. When Brüno asks one mother if she’d consider giving her 30-pound baby liposuction to lose 10 pounds, she literally says, “Yes, if it gets her the job.” That is the most chilling documentary scene I’ve seen in years, and you can only get there with a foil like Brüno. Let me ask you, to what degree were you suspicious of what you were seeing?

Paul: You mean, the extent to which various scenes were staged? It was certainly something I was thinking about in practically every scene and which maybe distracted me from laughing in a few cases. The first scene with Brüno’s agent in L.A., for instance, contains so much plot exposition that I was pretty sure the agent was fictional. But then there’s a later scene that’s staged in such way to make you believe he’s not in on the joke after all. Then there’s a scene where Brüno gets a job as an extra on Medium that I’m sure had to be completely phony. You know what? I’d almost rather see a version of Brüno that jettisoned the fictional veneer and was simply a documentary about Sacha Baron Cohen traveling around the country and going into these situations and doing these Brüno stunts. You’d still get the impact of the comedy, the sociological experiment would still be intact, but there wouldn’t be these lingering, distracting questions about what’s real and what isn’t.

Michael: It’s true: he doesn’t really give you enough foundation to judge a lot of the comedy. When Paula Abdul shows up, she’s clearly not in on the joke and runs away, but at the end of the movie, there’s an all-star charity song featuring Bono and Sting and Elton John, and they’re clearly Cohen’s famous friends, all of whom are in on it. And I have to say, that scene smacks of a kind of latent elitism. I mean, Sacha Baron Cohen is now famous. He has all these contacts he can pull in, and there is something seedy about that — he can make fun of Paula Abdul because she’s not as famous as Sting. Let’s not forget that Cohen himself lived on the lower rungs of celebrity for many years.

Paul: We’re raising a lot of objections to the film, but I have to say, I cannot say enough about Cohen’s performance. It is phenomenal how he remains firmly in character within these wild, unpredictable situations. I don’t know if he has destroyed some kind of self-censoring mechanism within his brain or if he’s actually some kind of comedy sociopath, but it takes a special kind of fearlessness to go out on a hunting trip the way Cohen does, with this group of small-town Alabama rednecks, and look up at the stars and say, “Makes you think of all the hot guys out there in the world.”

Michael: Or to show up naked at their tent in the middle of the night asking if he can come in and sleep with them.

Paul: “A bear ate all my clothes.” I would not have it in me to deliberately, willingly court the antagonism of so many people the way Cohen does.

Michael: I do have to wonder, though, whether Brüno, by being literally the gayest thing imaginable, is not so much drawing out homophobia as he is creating homophobia.

Paul: It’s so hard to unpack. In a way, I think Cohen’s character in Talladega Nights is a much sharper, more coherent satire of American homophobia and how the character’s mere presence destabilizes all these red-blooded NASCAR guys around him. Nathan Rabin at The Onion A.V. Club raised a good point: because Cohen is Jewish, he could get away with jokes like Borat getting up and singing a song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.” But Cohen is not actually gay, so with Brüno, there can’t help but be an element of minstrelsy in his performance.

Michael: It strikes me as a dangerous movie in that sense. When Cohen does hit his targets, it’s an incredibly subtle, nuanced stand against homophobia or xenophobia. But I feel like there were a lot of people around us in the theatre who were not getting those nuances.

Paul: Cohen doesn’t give a lot of interviews that aren’t in character. Do you think, if you pinned him down, he’d be able to give a coherent explanation of what Brüno’s themes are? Would he just say, “It’s all pranks and whatever happens, happens”? Or would he say, “I believe America is deeply homophobic, and I created this character in order to demonstrate that fact, and I designed these various situations in this specific way to achieve these particular effects”?

Michael: He’s clearly a very intelligent guy with such talent and commitment and craft that he is certainly aware of the themes he’s unpacking. At the same time... you know, he’s English, so why did he go to America? Because it’s simply an easier target, I think.

Paul: Well, that begs the question of where he goes from here. Would a scripted satire have anywhere near the cultural impact that Cohen has had with Borat and Brüno?

Michael: I don’t know. I think this style of comedy documentary might not have anymore legs to it. Cohen’s such a gifted performer, but what can he do now that’s not a step down? I showed up an hour early for this movie because I thought it would sell out, and it almost did! They’re showing it every hour.

Paul: I believe Cohen has said that he’s so famous at this point that if he were to do another project like this one, he’d have to go to eastern Europe or someplace like that so as not to be recognized immediately.

Michael: Kazakhstan, perhaps?

The Musicgoer: We Were Promised Jetpacks' These Four Walls

WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS
These Four Walls
(Fat Cat)
**** (out of 5)

If Belle and Sebastian are all about wry, literate lyrics and Franz Ferdinand are all about stripped-down rhythms, then their fellow Scottish indie rockers in We Were Promised Jetpacks are simply all about the sound: room-filling guitars, soaring vocals, drumming whose precision doesn’t detract at all from its emotional insistence. They’re just a quartet, but on These Four Walls, WWPJ fills the room as if they were Arcade Fire, with the added virtue of writing songs that go easy on the messianic uplift.

Instead, the lyrics are rooted in everyday experience, of being young, walking the Glasgow cement, and flipping up your hoodie against the bitter cold: “It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning” describes a drunken walk home with a girlfriend, while “Roll Up Your Sleeves” and “Keeping Warm” will resonate with anyone who’s lived through the onset of a few Edmonton winters. These Four Walls just gets better as it goes along, with the triple whammy of “Quiet Little Voices,” “Moving Clocks Run Slow,” and “Short Bursts” providing a late-in-the-album shift into hyperdrive. Who needs jetpacks anyway?

Illuminating All Opposition

“Fierce Light” is a phrase that documentarian/activist Velcrow Ripper lifts from bell hooks to describe what he sees as a powerful new grassroots movement springing up around the globe, one that uses spirituality and nonviolence to effect social change. It’s a form of spiritual activism modelled on the example of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi — and indeed, Ripper’s interviewees in Fierce Light: Where Spirit Meets Action include former SNCC chairman and King associate John Lewis, and Leela Kumari, an Indian lawyer whose work is a continuation of Gandhi’s efforts to end discrimination against the lowly Dalit caste.

But that’s just the beginning of Ripper’s itinerary: he takes his camera to anti-government protests in Oaxaca, Mexico, to Vietnam in the company of exiled peace activist and Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and to South Africa for a brief interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. There are stopovers at the Vietnam War Memorial and the 2001 protests in Quebec City, and probably a few too many slow-motion shots of water cascading over leaves and people carrying candles.

Ripper’s passion is unquestionable, and it’s hard not to admire his belief that true spirituality should be directed outwardly, towards actively making the world a better place, rather than inwardly, towards complacent self-satisfaction. But that doesn’t make Fierce Light any more satisfying (or coherent) as a viewing experience: Ripper takes his camera all over the world, but he gets the same interviews from everyone he meets, vague testimonials to the power of love and the necessity of peace, but few specifics of how these people managed to buck the odds, mobilize like-minded people, and put their beliefs into action. At one point, Ripper’s narration mentions the Baha’i principle that people should not be told what to think, but his film is essentially a long string of unchallenged assertions — Ripper expresses them in a very soothing voice with gentle music behind him, but that doesn’t make Fierce Light any less of an exercise in pamphleteering.

The only situation Fierce Light explores in depth is an extended protest at a vast urban farm in South Central Los Angeles that was established in the wake of the L.A. riots and has since become a valuable food source and gathering place for the neighbourhood’s poor, but which has been sold to a developer who plans to bulldoze it all and put up warehouses. The protests attract much media attention as well as a few celebrities, most notably actress Daryl Hannah, who camps out in a tree along with two other activists for several weeks — “beautiful weeks,” in Ripper’s words. To him, the protests show a community gloriously united against a powerful opponent, a shining example of “fierce light” in action.

But Ripper’s shortcomings as a filmmaker become glaringly apparent when you compare Fierce Light to The Garden, Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s Oscar-nominated documentary about the South Central Farm, which not only does a better job of placing the protests into their context within L.A. history, but also shows the infighting among the various protesters (not all of whom were acting out of altruism) and the simmering tensions between the blacks and the Hispanics affected by the sale of the farm. Kennedy is still on the side of the protesters, but his more nuanced, less willfully idealized depiction of their struggle will be much more enlightening and useful to anyone hoping to fight a similar battle in their own neighbourhood.

Direction, But Not Destination

Okay, we're all caught up now: here's the "Hidden Gems" radio segment I did on Thursday. This week's choice is One Week, the feel-good Canad-o-rama that the Toronto Star's Peter Howell recently named the second-best road movie of all time, second only to It Happened One Night.

High praise indeed, but as you'll hear me explain to John Archer (filling in for Ron Wilson, who usually is the other voice in these segments), it's a movie that's pretty hard for any Canadian viewer to resist. Shots of the prairie sky at sunset + cameo appearance by Gord Downie + Stanley Cup = Canadian catnip! Click here to take a sniff.

The Continental Op Cuts Class

Sorry to be a week late getting this link posted to you, but the person who normally posts my "Hidden Gems" DVD segments to the CBC website is on vacation, so they're a little behind on updating their online content.

Luckily, last Thursday's choice is a pretty timeless movie: it's Brick, the "Dashiell Hammett goes to high school" debut feature from writer/director Rian Johnson, whose somewhat less successful followup film The Brothers Bloom is currently in theatres. If Bloom feels like a film that overindulged on production design, Brick is a great case of a filmmaker getting maximum visual impact out of a tiny budget. It'll be interesting to see what he does next — Bloom has earned him a lot of (unfavourable) comparisons to Wes Anderson, but he's like a Wes Anderson who went straight from Bottle Rocket to The Life Aquatic with nothing in between.

What were we talking about again? Oh yeah, my review of Brick. Click here to listen to it.

Moviegoer Diary: Calmos, The Landlord

CALMOS

Plot In A Nutshell
Bertrand Blier’s loony 1976 comedy about two Frenchmen, a pimp and a gynecologist (Jean Rochefort and Jean-Pierre Marielle), whose decision to abandon all contact with women and live in the countryside sparks a surreal battle of the sexes all across France.

Thoughts
Calmos may be the most misogynist comedy that I’ve ever loved. It reminds me of the comic novels of Philip Roth, like Portnoy’s Complaint, the ones where he really gets his most outrageous ideas cooking, the ones where he just lets his id take over the writing process while his ego and his superego laugh helplessly from the sidelines.

What I admire most about Calmos from a writing standpoint is how it wastes absolutely no time establishing its premise. It begins with a hilariously tasteless, dialogue-free opening scene in which a well-dressed female patient comes into gynecologist Jean-Pierre Marielle’s office, strips naked, climbs onto the examination table, and puts her feet into the stirrups — and then has to stay there, her legs spread open, while Marielle sits behind his desk, more interested in fixing himself a lunch of bread and fish pâté than in examining yet another vagina.

It’s the maw that broke the camel’s back: he unceremoniously leaves his office, and as he’s striding down the street, he strikes up a conversation with Jean Rochefort, who’s feeling exactly the same way about women. Within a couple of minutes, they’re fast friends. They don’t even go home to collect their things; off they go to the train station to move to a new town and start a new woman-free life.

How many comedies hit the ground running the way Calmos does? One of the great things about Blier’s movies is the ease with which his male characters form instant bonds with each other, no matter what their regional or class differences might be. I love the way every man in France becomes magically aware of Marielle and Rochefort’s plan to avoid women — halfway through the film, they’ve somehow acquired an army of hundreds of followers without doing a single bit of recruiting.

Of course, one of the problematic things about Calmos — especially if you’re not a man — is that all the female characters really do turn out to be as rapacious and insatiable as Marielle and Rochefort say they are. Not that Calmos is remotely interested in social realism, of course — it’s a cloud-cuckoo-land satire, sort of a gender-reversed spoof of Lysistrata in which the women are the ones for whom living without regular sex is torture. They even mobilize an all-female army to take the runaway men prisoner. In one of Blier’s wildest setpieces, Rochefort and Marielle are strapped into a pair of beds, given chemical treatments that render them permanently, hugely erect, and forced to service dozens of women every day in an antiseptic white space that’s part hospital room, part torture chamber. (The process seems just as humiliating to the women, who must strip naked before being herded one by one to the copulation room.)

But Blier has at least one more surreal twist in store for us: a disorienting jump cut several decades into the future, as Rochefort and Marielle, now old men with long, white beards living as fugitives in the countryside, make one final escape attempt from the enslavement of women. They hop onto some hang gliders and fly for days, landing on a gorgeous Caribbean beach. Well, not technically on the beach: they land in the pubic hair of a gigantic naked black woman and crawl inside her vagina where they discover a small group of male characters from earlier in the film, living in the cave like Pinocchio inside Monstro.

The final image of the film shows the giantess’ equally huge black lover joining her on the beach, presumably to make love to her. It’s unclear whether this will mean oblivion for our heroes (and if it does, whether they’ll be crushed, suffocated, or drowned) — but Blier at least deserves credit for giving new meaning to the phrase “le petit mort.”

Stray Observations
• Jean-Pierre Marielle was also terrific in Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. I’d never heard of him before, but he’s quickly turning into one of my pet discoveries. I wonder where I’ll stumble across him next?
• Here's a YouTube clip of the film's nuttiest scene. There are no subtitles, and it's definitely NSFW.



RATING: 4.5/5

* * * * *

THE LANDLORD

Plot In A Nutshell
Hal Ashby’s 1970 social comedy about Elgar Enders, a privileged young white man (Beau Bridges) who buys a run-down tenement in an all-black neighbourhood in Park Slope with the intention of evicting all the tenants, only to decide instead to fix up the building and become a proper landlord to the residents.

Thoughts
I’ve been reading a few articles and listening to a couple of interviews with Nick Dawson, the author of the new biography Being Hal Ashby, and so many of them make special mention of The Landlord as one of Ashby’s greatest achievements — and this is the guy who made Coming Home, Harold and Maude, Shampoo, and The Last Detail — that I was eager to check it out.

The film’s handling of Bridges’ character turned out to be more complex and ambiguous than I thought it would be from the synopsis. I had expected a story in which, after some initial hostility and miscommunication, Bridges’ characters gradually becomes accepted (and even beloved) by his black tenants. But that’s not quite what happens: even at the end of the film, most of the people in the building still distrust him or outright resent him, many of them take advantage of him, and one even attacks him with an axe. Bridges doesn’t even stick it out in the building; he moves away (although he does decide to raise the baby he fathered with one of the tenants during a drunken party).

In a fascinating scene near the end of the film, a Black Muslim tenant named Professor DuBois, who has always shown Bridges nothing but stony dislike invites him to sit in on one of the classes he teaches. His students turn out to be about nine or ten years old, but DuBois has got them so well drilled that they seem ready to attend grad school. At the end of the lesson, DuBois calls on each of the kids by name, who stand up and proclaim, “I’m black and I’m beautiful!” Finally, DuBois calls on Bridges, who remains silent. “You see, ladies and gentlemen?” Dubois says. “Some people can’t learn what we learn.”

That’s the film’s key line. Bridges does eventually become a little more comfortable in his new surroundings, but he never quite stops making gaffes (like taking his half-black, half-Irish girlfriend to a very white-bread charity costume ball where his brother-in-law has come dressed as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, complete with blackface). He can’t ever quite learn what his tenants instinctively know. He tells one black woman he meets that she’s beautiful, and he means it, but he doesn’t really understand what his tenants mean when they say, “Black is beautiful.”

As in his second film, Harold and Maude, Ashby’s depiction of the uptight establishment is pretty cartoonish, but Lee Grant’s Oscar-nominated performance as Bridges’ dotty mother is so funny and the scenes are edited with such energy and staged with so much action within the frame that the lack of nuance doesn’t really hurt. (That said, the scene where Bridges takes out his anger at his family’s Republican values by garishly humiliating their black butler is so rooted in the racial attitudes of another generation that it’s hard to know how to react to it in 2009. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to make of it when a character I wanted to identify with did something so appalling.) The script was by a black screenwriter, and adapted from a book by black woman, so it makes sense that the black and female characters are all so well-rounded.

Al Kooper’s funky score, featuring The Staple Singers, is terrific too — although I wonder if music clearance issues are what’s holding up the release of the film on DVD. Who would have ever predicted that a special extended cut of Ashby’s late-career flop Lookin’ to Get Out would beat The Landlord onto home video?

RATING: 4/5

The Musicgoer: Art Brut's Art Brut Vs. Satan

ART BRUT
Art Brut vs. Satan
(Downtown)
**** 1/2 (out of 5)

There are few frontmen in rock less concerned about appearing cool than Art Brut’s Eddie Argos. Art Brut vs. Satan (as produced by Frank Black) is almost a concept album in which each song is designed to strip Argos of another layer of hipster credibility: on “The Passenger,” he admits that he never learned to drive and willingly takes the bus everywhere (“I love public transportation/Train or bus, they’re both amazing”); on “Am I Normal?” he describes having a crush on a pretty girl in his school and running away every time he had a chance to speak to her; and on “The Replacements,” he makes the most embarrassing admission of them all — he’d never heard of Paul Westerberg’s seminal indie rock band until just last year.

Like Jonathan Richman, Argos is the rare songwriter without a pretentious bone in his body. He sings about sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, but the sloppy, embarrassing parts: taking too many pills, making a fool of himself at parties, waking up in bed with girls he doesn’t even like. He’s a master of the rhyming couplet: “I don’t know how I managed to do this/But I woke up this morning covered in bruises. “Life is especially hard/When no one trusts you with a credit card.” “Why is everyone trying to sound like U2?/That’s not a very cool thing to do.”

There’s that word “cool” again. Well, Argos will never be cool like Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits or even Bono, but he’s a better songwriter than any of them.

The Musicgoer: Eleazar Vs. John's Pits In The Sandblaster

ELEAZAR VS. JOHN
Pits in the Sandblaster
(Eleazar)
**** (out of 5)

The subgenre of electronic music known as “glitch” is kind of a contradiction in terms: it’s artificial music that tries to sound organic, full of dusty, “imperfect” textures which actually require hours of studio tinkering to produce. I love the sound, with all its ratchety clicks and squeaks and pops — hey, sometimes you need to give your woofers a break and let the tweeters take centre stage.

Pits in the Sandblaster is the debut disc from Edmonton glitchers Eleazar Vs. John (known to their friends as Adam Palmer and Greg Goa), and it’s a beauty. The noises may not be natural, but they always remind you of something from the real world — knuckles popping, or snow crunching under your boots. The disc is further humanized by Lane Arndt’s acoustic guitar, and the breathy, unpretentious vocals. Highlights include the groovy, ruminative “Of Age”; “Sport,” whose melody curves into a spike like a fishhook; and the soothing closer “Chamomile,” which is practically a folk song. Palmer and Goa call their music a blend of glitch, trip hop, and bluegrass; can we start calling the combination “gluegrass” or can someone out there think of a better name?

Moviegoer Diary: Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?, The Unknown

WHO IS HARRY KELLERMAN AND WHY IS HE SAYING THOSE TERRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME?

Plot In A Nutshell
Ulu Grosbard’s 1971 comedy/drama about George Soloway (Dustin Hoffman), a hugely successful pop songwriter reflecting on his life while hiding out in his penthouse apartment from his business managers, flying his private plane over New York City, spending sessions with his shrink (Jack Warden), and trying to figure out why someone he’s never heard of is spreading nasty rumours about him among his friends and family.

Thoughts
Remembered these days (if at all) for its loony title, WIHKAWIHSTTTAM? is one of a handful of wild-card titles in Dustin Hoffman’s early film career, along with those weird Italian/Spanish co-productions Madigan’s Millions and Alfredo, Alfredo that Hoffman agreed to do for some reason. (Maybe a quick buck before the big Papillon/Marathon Man paycheque parts started rolling in.) But it’s easy to see Hoffman looking at a goofy lark like Kellerman as a welcome holiday from the heavy lifting he was doing around the same time in Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, and Straw Dogs. In Kellerman, he basically only needs to shuffle around in his bathrobe, strum his guitar, flash his boyish smile, and sing a couple of Shel Silverstein songs in his appealingly untrained voice.

Kellerman is one of those surreal, self-indulgent artist-in-crisis movies that a lot of directors felt they suddenly had license to make in the wake of Fellini’s 8½ — Alex in Wonderland is another one — and it may be the least interesting of all of them. The world of 8½ was in constant bustle, and it had a sense of proportion in its portrayal of Marcello Mastroianni’s midlife crisis; in Kellerman, Hoffman seems merely like a spoiled narcissist, and he’s practically alone onscreen for much of the running time. It’s not a lot of fun being alone with a narcissist, especially one whose problems are all self-created. (Literally so, as the film’s unsurprising twist ending reveals.)

But then, very late in the film, a miracle happens: Barbara Harris enters the story as a would-be singer auditioning for Hoffman, and she sits on a chair on an empty stage, one hand gripping the ghost light, unable to let go of it, and she delivers this amazing extended monologue about how today is her 34th birthday and yet she still doesn’t feel prepared to live her life. It’s a very stagy speech in a lot of ways — the script is by Herb Gardner, author of A Thousand Clowns — but boy, does Harris sell it, especially when she talks about splurging on an expensive hairdo and eyelash treatment that she couldn’t really afford just to look nice at this hail-Mary pass of an audition. The only other notable Harris performance I’ve seen (not counting the original Freaky Friday, as the mom who switches bodies with Jodie Foster) is, of course, as Albuquerque, the aspiring singer who winds up in the spotlight at the end of Nashville — she’s very good at playing women clinging tenaciously, even foolishly, to their creative dreams. (I also note, upon consulting her IMDb entry, that four years earlier, Harris appeared in Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad, so she really had the market cornered on idiotically long titles.)



The other thing that struck me about Kellerman was that it seemed like a huge, unacknowledged influence on Woody Allen’s films of the late ’70s — indeed, with its neurotic Jewish sensibility, its habit of interrupting serious scenes with outrageous sight gags, the long, static compositions from Hoffman’s point of view, with characters talking into the camera, Kellerman is the sort of film that Annie Hall might have turned into if Allen had been a little less lucky in the editing room. Also, the shots of Hoffman’s apartment, whose walls are decorated with enormous blow-ups of magazine covers featuring Hoffman’s face, anticipates the sets in Stardust Memories, as do the scenes of Hoffman being besieged by agents, managers, and assorted business types, hounding him with song suggestions and job offers he wants nothing to do with.

I always thought Allen’s cinematic inspirations stopped after Ingmar Bergman — it’s amazing to think that the only film made after 1970 that he borrowed from might be Who Is Harry Kellerman.

RATING: 2/5

* * * * *

THE UNKNOWN

Plot In A Nutshell
Tod Browning’s 1927 silent classic starring Lon Chaney as a thief who hides out in a traveling circus, posing as an armless knife-thrower, and falls in love with his beautiful assistant (Joan Crawford), a woman with a neurotic phobia about being touched.

Thoughts
I’m speechless. Few movies can claim to have a plot as delirious as this one — and yet, there’s a wonderful inevitability to each insane development that reminds me of Sweeney Todd. I knew going in that Chaney’s character (who bills himself as “Alonzo the Armless” — catchy!) was only pretending to have no arms, but I was delightfully shocked to learn the reason for his masquerade: he has two thumbs fused together on one hand, which would make his fingerprints a dead giveaway to the cops investigating the string of robberies taking place in every city where Chaney’s circus performs. (Together, the two thumbs look vaguely like a heart — a lovely touch.) And then, when Chaney blackmails a surgeon into amputating his arms for real so that he can ask Crawford to marry him... oh my God, the idea is so operatic and played with such conviction, it’s intoxicating.

Speaking of opera, a classical composer here in Edmonton recently approached me with the idea that we should try writing an opera together. I promised to try and think of a story — and now I’m thinking that The Unknown would be perfect operatic material. The story is so outrageous that it could probably only work in song, the setting is properly exotic, and certainly the emotions are larger than life. I don’t know how we’d stage the climax, which would require us to put two horses onstage, each running on a treadmill, but I figure that’s a problem for the director and the set designer, not me.

RATING: 4.5/5

Glacial Discrimination

If the tremendous box-office success that Pixar has had with movies like Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Wall•E, and Up provides heartening proof that a studio that animated films with sophisticated, adult themes and unconventional storytelling techniques can still find an enthusiastic mass audience, the success of Blue Sky Studios’ Ice Age films proves that you can make a whole lot of formulaic computer-animated junk and just as many people will show up to see it.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs — a title that is probably giving biology teachers across the country conniptions even as we speak — is being marketed to kids, but the characters’ preoccupation with aging and family planning, the references to pop culture from the ’70s and ’80s, not to mention the script’s mortifying reliance on dick jokes, suggest that the film’s true audience consists of undemanding married couples in their 40s.

The less-than-urgent plot begins with woolly mammoths Manny (Ray Romano) and Ellie (Queen Latifah) preparing for the arrival of their first child; meanwhile, sabre-toothed tiger Diego (Denis Leary) is feeling old and out of shape, chafing at his domesticated state. Meanwhile, Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo), itching to start a family of his own, has adopted three apparently abandoned dinosaur eggs and when the gigantic infant reptiles hatch, he does his best to be their “mommy.” When their real mommy shows up, however, she grabs her children as well as Sid and carries them back home — a lush, tropical jungle that apparently exists in the centre of the earth, unbeknownst to everyone living in the icy world above — forcing Sid’s friends to follow after him and figure out a rescue plan.

Am I alone in thinking that the Ice Age movies are some of the ugliest-looking animated films ever made? There’s none of the rich visual detail and production design that you get in a Pixar film, or even something like Monsters vs. Aliens — just a bunch of hastily drawn backgrounds and inelegant, thick-bodied character designs. (They look like clay sculptures, not animals.) Sid, especially, is a grotesque creation. I realize he’s supposed to be the “wacky” character in the bunch, but with those crossed eyes sticking out from either side of his head, the three or four pieces of hair sprouting crookedly from his skull (each strand as thick as an extension cord), and the gigantic, curved nails at the ends of his paws, he’s the stuff of nightmares. And the voice John Leguizamo has devised for him — a lisping, saliva-spewing riff on Daffy Duck — is equally repellent.

Supposedly the “breakout” character in the series is Scrat, the prehistoric squirrel who races through the background of all three films in pursuit of a maddeningly elusive acorn. The Ice Age producers seem to believe that Scrat is a classic animation character, not unlike Wile E. Coyote, but there was something poignant about Wile E.’s inability to catch the Road Runner; with Scrat, all we get is a lot of strident, bug-eyed slapstick as yet another rock (or tree or ton of snow) falls on his head. In any case, Scrat has to contend with a female rival this time out: a sexy red squirrel named (obnoxiously) “Scratté.” Her presence doesn’t make the gags any funnier — unless playing a Barry White song under their first meeting is your idea of fresh-as-a-daisy hilarity.

Every scene in the film seems to have been created in a spirit of “meh, I guess that’s good enough.” Evolutionary theory says that’s the kind of attitude that renders you extinct, but somehow the Ice Age series has managed to thrive; Dawn of the Dinosaurs made more than $42 million this weekend alone, nearly as much as Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Could Darwin be wrong after all?

Happiness Is A Warm Tommygun

John Dillinger, as every schoolkid (or at least every juvenile delinquent) knows, was gunned down in 1934 outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago after watching Clark Gable, William Powell, and Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama. In his new movie Public Enemies, Michael Mann spends a lot of time sitting with Dillinger in that movie theatre — Dillinger knows that the cops are on his tail, and that in all likelihood this could be the last night at the movies he ever enjoys. Mann does an uncanny job of letting us see Manhattan Melodrama through Dillinger’s eyes, isolating those snippets of dialogue that resonate with his live-for-the-moment criminal philosophy, pulp screenwriting given mystical significance by the silvery black-and-white images simmering on that gigantic movie screen.

But Public Enemies is not shot in silvery black-and-white; instead, Mann, working with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, films everything with handheld digital cameras that gives the faces, the period costumes, the cars, and the buildings a startling, hard-edged immediacy. There’s none of the Armani catalogue look of The Untouchables or the sepia-toned mythmaking of The Godfather Part II; as a writer for The Onion A.V. Club put it in their recent podcast about the film, when Dillinger gets gunned down, the scene looks like some tourist went back in time and filmed it with a camera he pulled out of his fannypack.

If I’m lingering on the look of Public Enemies, it’s because there’s very little else about the film to get excited about. Which is a surprising thing to say about a film in which practically every character has a Thompson submachine gun on him at all times. The script covers the 10 eventful months leading up to Dillinger’s death, starting with his daring jailbreak from the Indiana State Prison in October of 1933, his subsequent string of bank robberies throughout the Midwest, and his romance with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). (There’s a second escape from police custody in there too, not to mention several deafening gun battles — I haven’t heard gunshots this loud since Mann’s previous film, Miami Vice.) But it’s also the story of the birth of the FBI, of J. Edgar Hoover’s (Billy Crudup) attempt to use Dillinger’s notoriety as a lever with which to expand the scope of his powers. And it’s the story of Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the G-man who spearheaded the hunt for Dillinger.

That’s enough material for three movies, so it’s a mystery to me why Public Enemies feels so undercooked. In Heat, his masterpiece, Mann told a similar story about a lawman on the trail of a professional outlaw, but there he gave the proceedings an epic grandeur — you felt an almost mystical connection between the cop and the crook, so much so that every gun battle, despite their frenzy, felt like a Zenlike meditation on male codes of power and honour.

But there’s none of that metaphysical frisson in Public Enemies. Depp does a decent job of playing Dillinger’s bravado — the quips to the reporters at his arrest, the way he walks right into the “Dillinger room” at the Chicago police station in broad daylight, just to have a look around, practically daring the cops to recognize him — but without any crazy wigs to wear or childlike affectations to fall back on, Depp doesn’t seem to know what to do with the role. What makes him want to rob banks? Or fall in love with Billie? Is he motivated by fame? Greed? Adrenaline? Social factors, maybe? It’s impossible to know. And Bale is a total blank as Purvis — you need to keep reminding yourself he’s even in it. The best performances are the funniest ones: Crudup as Hoover, and Peter Gerety as a slick gangland lawyer.

I suppose it’s not enough these days for a gangster picture to be “just” a gangster picture; these days, it’s got to run more than two hours and serve as some kind of grand statement about America. Mann toys with a few big themes in Public Enemies — the morality of American justice, love and loyalty, the rise of social institutions — and there’s a whiff of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford in there too, in its sympathetic twilight portrait of an outlaw watching the world change around him. I think Mann knows what his themes are, but not what his story is. It’s a movie that really makes you want to watch Manhattan Melodrama again.