Sky K Studios Movie Blog

Big Fan - parking while Malbin is down

2010-02-11T10:22:00.001-08:00

We live in a Golden Age of sports revisionism movies. 2008 brought Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Sugar, a tender hymn to washouts, and Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, the athlete as sex worker, a body for sale. 2009 brought Wrestler writer Robert Siegel's Big Fan (which the former Onion writer--who claims responsibility for the 'Area Man' trope--wrote and directed), which finds the serious fan on a perpetual seesaw of striving and emasculation. Some spoilers after the jump.

Patton Oswalt plays sad sack and big fan Paul Aufiero. He lives with his mother on Staten Island, works in a parking garage, and stays up late after his shift to call in to a radio show and defend his beloved Giants from the ravages of Philadelphia Phil (Michael Rapaport), an Eagles fan in enemy radio territory. When he spies his favorite player, the beloved quarterback Quantrell Bishop at a neighborhood gas station, he follows him through the city to a Manhattan club hoping to meet him. For his trouble, QB Q.B. beats Paul into a three-day coma, leaving a ring around his left eye that suggests game day.

The police need his cooperation to press charges. His family want him to sue. And here Paul becomes part Bartleby, part battered wife. His love of sport has a holiness that he can't find in the ways his brother and sister have made their ways in the world, she in a marriage born from adultery, he in a bargain-basement personal injury practice. (My dad took off his glasses at the end of his TV spot too. Ouch.) The beating gives him the power to turn his failure to reach adulthood into a rejection of its compromises. He prefers not to use the system to redress his wrongs. Justice is much more compromised than sport.

His romance with purity has a broken side, too. Paul blames himself for Bishop's suspension and the Giants' consequent losses, and though it's never spoken, you have to wonder if he doesn't think that by refusing to press charges he'll win his idol's appreciation, if not his love.

As physical pain turns to public humiliation, the only man's way out Paul can find is through what he sees as redemptive violence... in Philadelphia. Siegel scripts and shoots this as a passage through the underworld, Oswalt's face painted half in sticky white (the other half in green -- Eagle colors) and surrounded by fans whose passion plays like a Satanic inversion of the one true faith. The final sequence, though it swerves away from true horror, is phenomenal and inevitable, wild and earned.

One quibble: Oswalt affects no New York accent, but his lower-middle-class family is thick with class and ethnic markers. His pneumatic and orange sister-in-law in particular is an astonishing grotesque. It's an unnecessary thumb on the scales, but Oswalt doesn't otherwise play it as superior. Played slightly less sensitively, the movie could have wandered into Million Dollar Baby territory, where Hilary Swank's white-trash family were portrayed as uncaring vultures. But Siegel writes them as real characters, motivated to help Paul in ways that estrange them from him. At the same time, the man who defined the Area Man isn't just tenderly tweaking our American foibles; is not above rage and contempt.

Babel

2007-01-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

How a naked Japanese schoolgirl can make you cringe, or Why Academy voters are killing me (for the second year in a row).

Now that the Oscars nominations have been announced, there’s really no more avoiding the topic of Babel. I saw it two and a half months ago, and I meant to blog about it right after. And then a little while after that, I decided that too much time had passed. But I can see now that I’m going to have to go on record defending my claim that this was the Worst Movie of the Year.

I didn’t go into Babel expecting to hate it. But by the time that Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett were being helicoptered away from those brown people and their warm Coca Cola, I found myself silently rooting for their helicopter to please, please crash, get shot down, something. Part of this was because the script was so amazingly bad (Border agent to nanny sin papeles: “They are not your children. Plus you’re in this country illegally.”). Most of it was because of the truly offensive nature of the movie.

Babel was nothing more than very beautifully shot, reasonably well acted porn. Suffering porn. Watch all of these people suffer, Iñárritu tells us; feel good that you’re not one of them. Ah, but aren’t we? we’re to ask. Isn’t Iñárritu saying that we are all connected, whether in joy or suffering?

That is what he seems to be saying, and it’s a great thesis for a political film. (True, too, but that’s neither here nor there.) The problem is that Babel undercuts its own claim to be political.

Babel has all of the trappings of a political film: the hotbutton locations, the conflicts, the nationalities. Witness: Rich Americans vacationing in war-torn north Africa. Poor Moroccans struggling to eke out a living under a brutal government. A nanny in Southern California, here illegally, trying to cross the border. All right, you might say, rubbing your hands together, as the lover of political cinema that you are, All right, bring it on.

But all of that setup is just a tease. The movie has no politics at all, it turns out. None of the horribleness that befalls everyone in this movie (and there’s quite a bit of horribleness) stems from any identifiable political cause. What then causes all of the suffering that we’re forced to endure? Interpersonal misunderstandings and accidents are the problems, not political, economic or structural conflict. The movie is called ‘Babel’ after all, and it is saying, in the most wide-eyed and simple-minded way imaginable, “If only we all spoke the same language then we would have no conflict.” In this way, Babel is basically just Crash with subtitles. (Babel = Volcano minus volcano plus subtitles?)

That Babel has a serious chance of winning Best Picture, just one year after Crash took that honor, should depress the fuck out of all of us. (If, you know, anyone — besides Jeopardy contestants — really cares about the Oscars.)

(If the Academy really wants to make it up to us for last year, they’ll have to not only give Best Picture to Little Miss Sunshine, but they’ll drag Iñárritu into a screening room and make him watch Soderbergh’s Traffic until his eyes bleed.)

The Queen

2006-11-10T18:50:00.000-08:00

Stephen Frears’ The Queen begins with an epigraph from Shakespeare: “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” The association with classical tragedy is audacious, and the film’s great achievement is that it undermines and complicates that association in a very contemporary way.

The movie begins with the ascension of Tony Blair and his “modernizing” Labour government; the meat of it takes place in the two weeks following the death of divorced Princess Diana, as the royal family fails to apprehend the public dimension of the princess’ death and finds itself needing advice from the striving, smiling prime minister.

Almost the entire thing is shot in interiors. It could be a stage play, divided between the royals hunting and taking tea at their Scottish summer home and the Prime Minister working in his casual, frenetic, first-name-basis offices and slouching about his “constituency”, or household, where he’s so modern as to do his own dishes. (Really?) There’s really only one sweeping exterior shot, a helicopter fly-by of the Scottish cliffs where Charles and Diana’s children stalking a stag. In its way, it doesn’t break the pattern of alternating interiors between the public offices of the Prime Minister and the cloisters of the royals: this landscape, after all, is just another private room in the House of Windsor.

The lead actors’ work is uniformly perfect, especially Helen Mirren’s as the Queen, and the movie asks on some level for empathy with the royal family. It accomplishes this: the royals represent the last gasps of the Stiff Upper Lip, and they are pained to find themselves estranged from an emotional and demonstrative public, even more captive to the spectacle of Diana in death than they were in life. But the seams and spans, however ill-fitting, of the dress of private grief do not make royal tragedies.

Intercut with the interiors at Downing Street and Balmoral are real bites of video footage, from CNN and the BBC and half a dozen other news agencies, of the country’s and the world’s reaction to the Princess’ death. The public haunts the movie but does not exactly appear in it. Blair may be the Queen’s subject, but he does not represent the public, who have no more of a stand-in in The Queen than does the storm in King Lear. Rather, the public becomes context, and it unmoors the royals from their thousand years of precedents and power.

Laying seas of cellophane-wrapped flowers and Mylar balloons at Buckingham Palace, mediated through grainy video, the public is a storm, a force of nature (post-nature?) that structures the conflict of the film. Diana, famously a ‘candle in the wind’, gives over to it, amplifies it, and succumbs to it (an early statement from the royals lays the blame squarely at the feet of the media; Blair’s oily-genius communications director clucks, “that’s not who you want to blame”). The Queen suspects it will blow over, that she has no more to fear from it than do the cliffs at Balmoral. Only Blair understands it perfectly: he knows that this wind, ill or true, can be neither turned nor controlled, but it can be sailed. His wife, a “known anti-monarchist”, hopes that the public’s souring feeling towards the royals will result in their abolishment, but Blair knows that his New Labour isn’t so revolutionary (he chastises his staff for including the R-word in a speech). Canny and empathetic at the same time, he rides the public’s feeling, absorbing its power but knowing that it does not crave the abolition of the royals, just the royals’ recognition of themselves.

Of course, it’s nothing new. Hobbes insisted that the King’s right comes not from on high but compiles the people’s will from below. Blair agrees: he doesn’t think the royals are going anywhere, he just understands them better.

The Last Kiss

2006-10-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Paul Haggis brings to gender relations the same nuance and sensitivity that he brought to race relations.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand

2006-06-08T13:28:00.001-07:00

The novelty of the first X-Men movie was that mutants can allegorize social alienation like nobody's business. The novelty of the second X-Men movie was that damn, Wolverine just goes around killing people, doesn't he! With Part Le Troixieme, we have all the metaphorical baggage and body count you could ask for, but no real new elements to make it interesting. Frazier Crane makes an admirable Beast, the evil mutants would have been cooler if they had had more screen time, and Angel never should have been played by whiny little Russell from Six Feet Under. The guy's a handsome, wealthy playboy! What happened to the days when handsome wealthy playboys were played by people like Cary Grant? Not that Cary Grant would have looked good flying around with a pair of bird wings, but still. The X-Men could use a dapper charmer to offset all the mopey metaphorical baggage handling.

Any comics fan knows that boys and girls have slightly different roles to play in comics scenarios. The X-Men series, like Spider-Man, Batman and most superhero movies, offers a lot of Big Character Issues, and notably, most of the female characters' Big Character Issues are about S-E-X.

Rogue's power is that she absorbs the identity and powers of anyone she touches, traumatically for both her and the victim; this has prevented her from getting it on with her boyfriend Iceman, because no one at Xavier's School for the Gifted can find the URL for Good Vibrations.
Mystique, presented in true ComiCon form as a really hot, bumpy-blue naked chick, falls out of Magneto's good graces when a de-mutantizing dart leaves her a hot, white depilated naked chick on the floor of a van; the movie wrings a cheap laugh out of how ugly Magneto finds a hot naked white chick who is no longer a mutant, and then Mystique squeals on the Evil Mutants because "hell hath no fury like a woman scorned".
Most telling, and most central to the plot, Jean Grey returns from the dead as Dark Phoenix, psychically powerful beyond all control. How does she manifest this new unleashed power? By fucking Cyclops out of existence. Back at the ranch, monitored in her (hot) underpants on a shiny hospital table, she tries to do Wolverine into oblivion too, but he gets away from her wily vagina.

This all brings to mind what Twisty over at I Blame The Patriarchy calls "the sex class". (I'm sure someone else thought of it. If you know, let me know.) Under patriarchy, sex is located on and in women's bodies. Men act out of courage, or out of fear, out of fellow-feeling, or for power; women act, or are acted upon, because of sex. It's a useful heuristic for understanding, say, why it's harder than you'd think to tease out a space for non-patriarchal "erotica". Or just imagine Hugh Jackman lying on the hospital table, writhing in his underpants, threatening the world because he's just so fucktastic. Much less giggle-worthy if you just have him stick his claws in people.

Of all the main character mutants in the movie, Storm has the least sexified problems. Her big problem is that she's played by Halle Berry.

Is this a movie blog?

2006-05-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

A song pairing for you:

"No Children", Mountain Goats

"Good Man", Josh Ritter

North Country

2006-03-26T14:21:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I didn't want to watch North Country in the theaters. It would have passed into rapid obscurity after middling reviews last year except that during Oscar nominations, someone smacked his head and said, "Oops! We forgot to put women in movies last year!" and so they gave Charlize Theron a nomination for best actress, and that put the movie back on some people's radar. Mine included.

In Essential Cinema: On The Necessity of Film Canons, Jonathan Rosenbaum distinguishes his project from those of other canon-builders by saying where others (e.g. Harold Bloom, or hell, his evil twin* Allan) worship at the altar of a necessarily transcendent quality of Transcendent Quality (I am so paraphrasing here), he insists that some movies you should watch simply for the importance of their content, not because they necessarily advance the art form qua art form. (Jane Smiley, Ernest Hemingway, have at it.) So that was my attitude going into the movie: it's a fictionalized telling of the first class-action sexual harrassment suit, filed in 1989 against a Minnesota mining company. I like a good social drama, I like movies about labor, and I'm down for a good feminist yarn, and who cares if it ain't gonna give me insights about storytelling.

The movie is a bit clumsy with its storytelling, in telling ways. It's divided into two parts: the straightforward telling of how Charlize Theron's character Josey Aimes came to work at the mine and the harrassment she and the other women experienced there; and the courtroom unfolding of her sexual harrassment suit—specifically, her petition for class status.

The mine story is harrowing and believable in the best of Hollywood underdog stories. Degrading sexual mockery comes nonstop. Women are told they're humorless, to take it like a man, etc. When Ames complains about an assault from a co-worker, she's accused of trying to seduce him&mdashand the accusation comes from the man's wife. (The way that the harrassment shapes the community at large is rendered very well.) Classic Hollywood heartbreaker: Aimes' son calls her a whore. Ooch.

[Spoilers ahead, if you care.]

Unfortunately, the courtroom drama is simply inane. It's hardly news that realistically grinding legal proceedings don't lend themselves to drama, and since the end-title informs us that the case was not settled for nine years, it's reasonable that the filmmakers would choose to use the certification of the class as the fulcrum for the legal drama. But what is this thing? I'm no lawyer, but I feel fairly confident that you can't win in court because, during a lull in the proceedings, your ALS-debilitated co-worker (Frances McDormand) in the back of the room has her husband read a defiant statement announcing that she joins the class, and then some women stand up and join the class, and then some men who work at the mine do too, and then some men who don't work at the mine do as well. I'm pretty sure that's not how it happens. In fact, it smacks of "we are running out of film", and I hope that the development of digital video will relieve us of such artistic compromises in the future.

Other parts of the courtroom scene are a bit more troubling. It comes into the drama a little creakily, but it's no surprise that the company's defence includes labelling Aimes as promiscuous by letting one of her workplace assailants, who knew her in high school, describe her rape by a teacher as consensual. The courtroom mechanics are preposterous, but the technique of using rape as a tool for economic control of women deserves the exposure. The scene, however, is played as a showdown between two men: Aimes' lawyer (Woody Harrelson!) and Bobby, her workplace tormentor. It devolves into a kind of cock-waggling I Deride Your Truth-Handling Abilities showdown.

The most pernicious thing about the movie, in fact, is its inability to show women as the heroes of their own lives. Included on the DVD is a deleted scene that dramatizes this exact problem: the lawyer confesses to Aimes that, behind her back, he met with the company president to discuss the possibility of a settlement.

Another key climactic scene comes when Aimes's friend's husband, played by Sean Bean The Menschy Guy, challenges her young teenage son, who has turned against his mother in the face of the town's animosity. It's another showdown between two males, positioned as the emotional climax to complement the courtroom climax, and it suggests that the real accomplishment of the movie hasn't been women taking power in the face of the twin threats of rape and poverty, but the recuperation of a situation that threatens patriarchal control into one that demonstrates its essential decency. Life lesson: be a man, not a member of the mob.

The same function plays itself out in the relationship between Ames' parents, affectingly portrayed by Richard Jenkins and Sissy Spacek. It's thrilling when Spacek, who has defended her husband's rejection of her daughter when she takes "a man's job", leaves him a note and a sandwich and checks into a hotel. But Mom's emancipation is just a tease for Pa's redemption: in order to keep the social order of his home intact, he has to defend his daughter against the mob of men at a union meeting.

The portrayal of the union hall as a mob scene was troubling, but not totally unbelievable. I would have liked to see the movie state more explicitly how useful it was for the company to have the male workers energized against their sister workers—assigning the blame pattern downwards, as Utah Phillips likes to say. And it's good to see Silkwood for a version of how a union makes it possible to speak truth to power in the workplace.

This seems like an indictment of the movie, but it shouldn't serve as one. The movie was three-quarters great Hollywood underdog drama, with genuine social consciousness in the depiction of sexual harrassment in the workplace. It avoided the trap of portraying white-collar workers as somehow more decent: the company management is somewhat more silken-tongued in its sexism, but just as vicious. It's just that dramatically, it can't bring itself to show women as the agents of their own victory, and I suspect that that's a fundamental trap in Hollywood storytelling.

Matt Feeney on V for Vendetta

2006-03-24T13:23:00.000-08:00

Uh-oh, a pile-on's starting. At least I've seen this one.

Nothing better illustrates the simplism of V for Vendetta, or better highlights the unflattering contrast with Brazil, than V's motto: "There are no coincidences." The comic beauty of Brazil's portrait of totalitarianism is that everything rests on random coincidence, which nudges the bureaucracy into its own blind and murderous momentum: A dead fly falls into a computer printer and—voilà—poor law-abiding Buttle is mistaken for dangerous subversive Tuttle.
In V for Vendetta, there are no coincidences because, of course, it's all a big, seamlessly executed conspiracy. The fascist supreme leader's (John Hurt) total control dates back to a terrorism crisis that the government itself concocted [...] The regime's very evil propagandist Prothero (Roger Allam) is also the former commander of the concentration camp where V was experimented on. So, V kills him. And the camp's indifferent chaplain is now not only a high-ranking Anglican bishop, but also a vicious pedophile. So, V kills him, too. (In other words, there are coincidences. Very convenient ones.)

The author, Matt Feeney, is a terrific critic who inspired me to watch Cruel Intentions and Wild Things with this piece and wrote a very nice tribute to Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming here. As one of two former owners of Los Angeles' only "I'd Rather Be Bowhunting" bumper stickers, I tip my hat to him. I hope Slate gives him a steady gig.

(via Hit and Run.)

V for Vendetta

2006-03-18T13:02:00.000-08:00

I feel bad for V for Vendetta. It would not seem easy for a movie to fail by being at once too faithful and not faithful enough to its source material, by being too handsome and not handsome enough, and by being too smart and not smart enough, but V has done it. Maybe it was the fault of the man two seats down from me who shushed me during the preview for An American Haunting ("Ken Burns' Poltercrap!" I may have shouted), but the very expensive-looking thing on screen never even rose to the level of fourteen-year-old boy opening-night excitement.

It's easy enough to fail by not sticking to the source material, and Alan Moore's pre-emptive refusal to participate—he took his name off it before it was made, based on what had happened to other movies—seemed bratty and prima-donnaish, though, in the end, correct. It's more interesting to me how the source material bogs down the movie.

For starters, the titular terrorist V wears a Guy Fawkes mask through the whole movie. On the page, the frozen smile of the mask is iconic and haunting, depersonalizing the revolutionary ardor of V into a free-floating cloud of question and dissent that gets inside Evey and fuels her transformation. On the screen, however, it's as if Natalie Portman has to fight, love, and hide alongside King Friday from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood for two hours. He doesn't really give a lot back, and he's a bad kisser.

The nature of V's resistance also seems better on the page of a comic book than blown up on the screen. V doesn't lead a slave rebellion: the film never quite makes up its mind whether the whole populace is suffering under the government's heavy boots, or whether a few outgroups suffer in secret gulags to justify the complacence and security of a middle class that doesn't take its government too seriously. The book, though it leans more towards the first scenario than the movie does, never solves this problem, but on a structural level, a comic leaves more up to the imagination than a film does. It's not just that there's more activity for the mind between the panels on a page than there is between the 29 frames per second; it's also that a big-budget film defaults to Triumph of the Will before your eyes in a way that a little-known graphic novel becomes Common Sense in your hands. A scrappy little thing can be inspiring and open-ended in a way that a heavily CGI'd extravaganza, twenty feet tall and luminous (I do love the Arclight) reifies and beautifies the violence of both the state and its antagonist.

Not to mention that the things just falls down at the level of storytelling. It's an action movie in which Hugo Weaving's V never comes into physical jeopardy, a police procedural in which Stephen Rea's unanswered questions never tantalize, a romance in which Natalie Portman's yearning never approaches the physical. It was opening night at the Arclight, and I never once whooped or hollered.

Except during the trailers. Can't wait for Take the Lead! ("You put your chocolate tango in my hip-hop peanut butter," I may have muttered.)

UPDATE: All is forgiven, Natalie.

Temporada de Patos (Duck Season)

2006-03-11T03:04:00.000-08:00

A day in my childhood that I remember very clearly I would not, at the time, have called childhood, not at all. I had my bicycle at school, and found myself with three friends. One was a boy who could not leave soon enough. The other two were girls. One of the girls had a crush on me, and I had a crush on the other. In a patch of grass by a small bridge over a drainage pipe, they covered me in purple flowers and we recognized to each other, in so many words, the futility of our situation. We hid in the first girl's bedroom as the day turned dark, whispers straining to become innuendos. At last I drove home to find an angry father. "Did you ever have one of those days..." I began in my defense. It didn't work.

In the apartment where Duck Season is set, the passage of time is as undependable as the electricity, which cuts out in the middle of a couple of video games, handing the day over to magic and love.

"Quince minutos, nada mas." Fifteen minutes, no more, says Rita as she arrives towards the beginning of the movie, complicating and catalyzing the two boys' time outside time. If the apartment is an Edenic space, she plays both Eve and serpent with neither blame nor expulsion. "Fifteen minutes" means nothing, of course, as sex and drugs flow from her presence and weave into the day, free from the cumbersome conventions of moralizing.

Instead of wringing melodrama from the conflicts of the characters, the conflict arises from time against timelessness. The arrival of a pizza delivery boy in his twenties (significantly named Ulises as T. reminded me) allows the boys to stage a fight over paying for the food, but serves really to introduce a theme of disappointment and the threat of the passage of time. "El asunto es ver quien se chinga a quien", the issue is who fucks over who, says Flama, gazing into the painting of ducks over which his parents have chosen to stage a custody proxy battle.

The structural challenge of the movie is keeping the gang of four together. The kids have nowhere else to go, and affection for each other, but how on earth does the pizza delivery boy justify staying in the apartment when he so clearly needs his job? The movie has a sufficient number of gambits to keep him put, but the answer is this: he is no less subject to the magic of a timeless day than the children. My straining suspension of disbelief betrays my father's No in me, and tells me where my childhood ends.

More Crash Hating

2006-03-10T08:09:00.001-08:00

Since I didn't see Crash, I feel it's proper to explain why I felt so justified in not bothering. I will happily add your picks to the examples below:

Left-wing Crash-hating (thesis: by dwelling on universal culpability for racism, Crash excuses it, closing off the possibility of political and social action that would fight racism and inequality.)

Kenneth Turan, L.A. Times
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Nathan Newman
Richard Kim, The Notion
Armond White, New York Press (last two via Left Behinds)

Right-wing Crash-hating (thesis: Los Angeles isn't really that bad. People do get along, honest! Here I find the evidence accurate but the intention dishonest: yes, L.A. mixes up people, but that's insufficient to disprove that power here is divided on antagonistic racial lines. The Lopez piece is just funny.)
Matt Welch, L.A. Times
Steve Lopez, L.A. Times

Altogether different: Tom Hayden (thesis: people who say Crash is a bad movie are covering up that Los Angeles is a racist cauldron. Here I find Hayden's evidence useful to marshal in the left-wing Crash-hating column, though Hayden himself clearly does not hate Crash.)

Up next: commentary on a movie that I have seen! And maybe even enjoyed! Maybe.

Crash vs. Volcano

2006-03-09T13:13:00.000-08:00

(I've been on a comments tear at other people's blogs about Volcano and Crash, so I thought I'd reproduce my comment 46 from michaelberube.com over here. See also this discussion at Left Behinds.)

Thank you, thank you, thank you for pointing out the importance of Volcano as a precursor to Crash! Much more so, I think, than Short Cuts and Magnolia, though those vastly superior antecedents also bear mention. But what’s wonderful about Volcano is that it has both a much more cogent argument about race in Los Angeles AND Tommy Lee Jones kicking the ASS off a volcano.

Now, Michael, you probably remember Volcano’s argument about race as the treacly end bit where once everyone is covered in volcanic ash, they all look the same. Well yes, that’s there, and hey, outta the mouths of babes! but the setup for that is actually a much more politicized account of spatialized segregation in Los Angeles than that offered by Crash.

You see, the heavy in Volcano (besides the volcano) is the developer who opposes the extension of the subway to the Red Line because it will bring poor brown people near his fancy condo tower. That’s a real conversation that happened in Los Angeles and helped thwart a cross-town subway. L.A. is just now moving past it. Compare that to Crash’s account of spatial segregation, which is the bit how in order to meet people who look different, you need to bend their fender. (Compare also to the Cronenberg ‘Crash’, which also recommends auto accidents as a good way to get to know people better.) Anyway, while critics pointed out that people mostly have their prejudices confirmed in Crash, Volcano provides a much better ending, because the racist developer gets his beautiful condo tower BLOWN UP to stop the volcano—in essence, Tommy Lee Jones kicks the developer's ass as a byproduct of kicking the ass off the volcano. And the racist developer’s girlfriend leaves him for being a racist, which is the kind of comeuppance that you should have in a good liberal movie.

Brokeback Mountain

2006-02-23T13:53:00.000-08:00

A conversation between Minky and me, via e-mail:

Seton: I saw Brokeback Mountain last night, finally. I can see why you are newly into Heath Ledger. He pulled off being unbelievably magnetic in spite of the fact, as CSM commented, he had his eyes closed for half of his performance. I've never seen anything like him on screen, though I feel like I do know him well in men of my acquaintance, which is what made him so riveting to watch.

Minky: That's interesting. And yes, definitely riveting. It's interesting (as I probably already said) to watch the earlier movies after this one--to watch the heart-throb version of Heath Ledger--because you can kind of see it in there somewhere: both the actual acting ability and that particular tone of tortured detachment. It makes those films (I've seen A Knight's Tale and Ten Things I Hate About You) almost comically miscast. And it makes you realize how cookie cutter hollywood's romantic roles are. He just seems vaguely ridiculous chasing after this princess in the knight film. (Made all the more ridiculous, though somewhat more enjoyable, by the fact that her dresses are all inexplicably this contemporary sort of haute couture, and not at all medieval.) (But then the film's soundtrack is all early eighties classic rock, so I guess you can't really hold it accountable for anything.) It's really difficult to believe that he actually wants this woman, and it made me think how little that actually matters in mainstream films. The fact that he's supposed to, expected to, is enough. Which, I guess, only underscores the significance of Brokeback Mountain as a film.

Though I have to say, I'm getting getting a little uncomfortable with all the hype. Did you know that someone paid $100,000 for those two shirts yesterday? I'm convinced that a similar sort of force is lying latent in Ryan Philipe, just waiting for the right director. I've always liked him without quite knowing why, and there was one moment in Cruel Intentions where I saw it struggling to come out: this interesting, potentially rich brand of masculine woundedness.

Michael Pitt comes to mind, too, as some a young male actor who brings a really interesting sort of presence in films. And he's managed to bypass (I think) the hearth throb thing. I've been thinking about him because I've had it in mind that one of the characters in my book looks a little like him. Did you see the Dreamers? I'm a little embarassed to say, but I really loved that movie. I think he's pretty mesmerizing to watch. In Hedwig and the Angry Inch too, which I also loved. And of course in Last Days.

Seton: I saw that item about the $100,000 shirts in the LA Times today. Where does a gay rights activist get a disposable income that allows him to spend that much on shirts? I don't really get it, either. I didn't come away from the film thinking it was about gay men, but about men and masculinity in general--the fact that they are gay of course complicates all that, but really it seemed to me a device for framing a way broader exploration of male identity. Which is to say, I think I was moved by HL not because he embodied so well the sad particulars of his situation as a gay man, but because he just reminded me of so many guys I know who seem to struggle with how to be who they are in a culture that doesn't care who they are but, as you say about the romantic comedies, only that they behave in the way they are supposed to, expected to, behave.

I haven't really seen Ryan Philipe in many movies, but I figure he must be quality if he's married to Reese. He was roguishly attractive in Gosford Park, and forgettable in Crash, which itself was pretty forgettable so it's not his fault, I guess. The only film I've seen with Michael Pitt is Last Days.

Minky: I totally agree about the gay thing. Well put. Which is one of the big problems with that sort of identity politics: that it's reductive, doesn't acknowledge the full scope of human experience, and all the factors involved.

"Inspired by a true story."

2006-02-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

"It's not a docudrama. But this event happened, and that is what the whole movie is centered upon," Mr. Marshall says. He adds that the words "inspired by" are used because "it's important to know that this could happen. It validated the hook of the movie."

In the Wall Street Journal, John Lippman considers the trend of movies based or inspired on a true story (or real dog). While Lippman doesn't actually demonstrate that there are more "reality-based" (truthy?) films in theaters tonight than there were twenty years ago, it's fair to say that memoir, reality television and based-on-a-true-story have a cultural privilege right now over fiction and invention.

Why? Since this has been sitting in the draft pile for a while, I'll leave it as a question and come back to it in a later post, if it continues to nag me. I suspect that our tolerance for lies is at one with the denigration of imaginative capacity, of the truth in fiction. Now, evidence!

The Top Ten for 2005

2006-02-04T14:57:00.000-08:00

The ones I would throw down for in a bar fight:
Mysterious Skin
New York Doll
The Squid and the Whale

The really good ones:
Grizzly Man
A History of Violence
Munich
War of the Worlds
Last Days
Serenity
Good Night, And Good Luck
In Her Shoes
Funny Ha Ha

The "what's a top ten if it doesn't reach fourteen" ones:
Brokeback Mountain
Walk the Line

10 Things I Hate About You/Well, that was embarrassing

2006-02-02T15:50:00.000-08:00

As a kind of scourge for not posting on the movieblog in seven months (and not even having a preemie to show for it) I changed the template to argyle. Nice, huh? But here the Academy Award noms are all out and stuff and I haven't even written something almost entirely needlessly contrarian but also basically true about Brokeback Mountain.

This much I'll say: 10 Things I Hate About You was, like, the Gay Coming Attraction Movie of 1999. Not only was Ennis del Mar the A-couple heartthrob, but Mysterious Skin's Neil McCormick (a/k/a Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and how did Dan Savage call that one just from watching Third Rock? Hello?—follow link and scroll to the bottom) played the B-couple nerd. Poor Julia Stiles, left in the knitting circle with Ann Hathaway and that other girl who acted real good but isn't as famous.

A list of 2005 movies I saw

2006-02-02T15:33:00.000-08:00

THE ARISTOCRATS
BAD NEWS BEARS
THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE
BATMAN BEGINS
BREAKFAST ON PLUTO
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
BROKEN FLOWERS
CINDERELLA MAN
THE CONSTANT GARDENER
THE 40 YEAR-OLD VIRGIN
FRANK MILLER'S SIN CITY
GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK.
GUS VAN SANT'S LAST DAYS
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE
THE ICE HARVEST
IN HER SHOES
KISS KISS, BANG BANG
KUNG FU HUSTLE
LAYER CAKE
MAD HOT BALLROOM
MARCH OF THE PENGUINS
ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
MILLIONS
MR. AND MRS. SMITH
MUNICH
MURDERBALL
MYSTERIOUS SKIN
NEW YORK DOLL
NINE LIVES
PALINDROMES
RED EYE
SAHARA
SARAH SILVERMAN: JESUS IS MAGIC
SERENITY
THE SQUID AND THE WHALE
STAR WARS: EPISODE III REVENGE OF THE SITH
SYRIANA
THE TALENT GIVEN US
THE UPSIDE OF ANGER
WALK THE LINE
WAR OF THE WORLDS
WEDDING CRASHERS

Wedding Crashers

2005-07-19T23:46:00.000-07:00

For queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "homosocial" describes a set of sex/power relations where interactions with women are a way of expressing sexual desire between men. The crudest example might be the way men at a strip club might act out their unspeakable desire for one another by displacing it onto the performers. Comedy movies have done this forever and haven't always been coy about it (Some Like it Hot comes to mind and I'm sure there are other better examples), but the thing about Owen Wilson is, he makes it look like that's the only kind of sex anyone would ever want to have.

In The Cut

2005-07-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

remember back when "the crying game" came out and everybody was abuzz about the surprise ending? well i first saw it some years after its release, and what was more surprising to me at the time was that the "ending" occurs midway through the movie. which is to say that while it was generally received as a mystery-thriller, all that stuff was really secondary to its smart and compelling exploration of identity politics.

"in the cut" is like the opposite of that. i mean, who's idea was it to let andrea dworkin re-write sea of love? which is not to say that it failed, exactly. but its earnest attempt at being a gritty thriller is its own undoing; what is potentially interesting about the movie has nothing to do with its stale whodunit plot twists or its broad address of sexual politics, but with the strange psychologies of the meg ryan and mark ruffallo characters and, very simply, the relationship between them. damn, jane, there is enough fodder for "things i might say about sexual politics" right there; you don't have to resort to using stalkers and strip bars and scary black guys and all that nasty decapitation.

War of the Worlds (Guest Blogger!)

2005-07-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

This comes from Seton Seeley, who remains too lazy to set up a profile:

i saw war of the worlds last night, which i enjoyed a lot more than i thought i would. sure it's a run-of-the-mill summer blockbuster action movie with a totally hackneyed storyline, but spielberg had such adelicate touch with it in spite of it all that it really came off as fairytale-ish, dark and even sort of charming, like brothers grimm meets independence day or something. even tom cruise, running around effeminately in his bootcut designer jeans pretending to be adockworker, didn't bother me so much.

Evil Dead

2005-06-12T13:31:00.000-07:00

I'd always thought that my not having seen this was a fault, that this was one of those demographic standards I'd somehow missed. I'd assumed the reason so many people liked it was that it's schlocky-good (like Spiceworld); turns out it's because it's so-bad-it's-good (like Plan Nine from Outer Space).

Totally missable. Anyone want to provide an apologia?

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

2005-06-11T11:48:00.000-07:00

Grosse Point Blank is certainly a better action comedy about the internal lives of hitmen. And there's no question that Mr. and Mrs. Smith does not see Doug Liman as on top of his game as he was with Go, a hip yet tender riposte to Pulp Fiction, and The Bourne Identity, which matched Matt Damon's deep and twisted masculinity with top-notch genre filmmaking. (I dug Swingers, too.) The movie makes fun with summer explosions and two affable stars, but where it really deserves recognition is in the film canon of suburban angst and repression.

Kevin Spacey's adolescent regression in American Beauty came at the expense of wife Annette Bening, who had to become shrill and castrating to put his suffering in relief. The inevitable violent denoument was something of a Rube Goldberg return-of-the-repressed; Spacey was killed by Chris Cooper's psycho-homophobe-soldier-dad, who thought he saw his son giving Spacey head in the neighbor's garage when he was only bending down to pick something up near Spacey's reclining figure! Goll, he musta felt dumb.

Pitt and Jolie in Mr. and Mrs. Smith also live in the kind of anesthesia-mansion that usually denotes a set decorator's lame fealty to Pottery Barn, or the dread airless suburban anomie. (The lived-in, junky bungalow in which fellow assassin Vince Vaughn lives demontrates that there is method to the blandness.) Because the Smiths are well-paid assassins of never-clear targets, the house also holds munitions sufficient to arm the Tamil Tigers. While the movie makes good fun out of resolving the couple's sexual deficiencies with violent, ballistic abandon, the real fun is when they take it out on the goddamn house. Brad and Angelina survive endless rounds of small- and large-arms fire. Their tasteful furnishings do not. (Although the Subzero fridge prove bulletproof.)

If there were any question that the movie's key target is the BoBo and his commodity fetish, the final action sequence clears that up. The Smiths hole up in a store that seems to be a Crate-and-Barrel warehouse concept. Cornered in a garden shed, they emerge like Butch and Sundance to survive double the fusillade that killed those two in Bolivia. The store, like their house, takes the hit.

Crash

2005-05-24T10:22:00.000-07:00

Ugh.

Crash : racial relations :: Shindler's List : Holocaust

Paul Haggis seems to confuse, on the one hand, the repeating & depicting of the ugliness of racial stereotypes with, on the other hand, an actual conversation about them. It's not the lack of nuance that's so terrible about this movie-- it's the fact that the film appears to think that it is nuanced.

As Phoebe Evergreen said, this movie is Volcano without the volcano. (Plus, we now have the answer to the question: "How bad does a movie have to be for Phoebe Evergreen to not be interested in seeing it?")

Someone please lock Paul Haggis in a room with Thom Anderson until only one comes out alive.

Melinda and Melinda

2005-04-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge sucker for Woody Allen. The man, to me, is one of the best chroniclers of humanity in all of our inanity. Another way of saying all this, to be sure, is that for at least a decade he's been a near-constant disappointment. The Woody of the 90s seemed to stop dealing with the issues that showed him to be the genius he can sometimes be, or when he did try to tackle them, he did it poorly and/or offensively. So I've seen a gradual lowering of my own expectations every subsequent time I go see one of his films.

What a treat, then, to leave a Woody Allen film for the first time in as long as I can remember, and not simply shrug it off as another miss.

First, let's do some categorization. By and large, Woody is a comedian, but there's comedy and then there's comedy. In what we'll call his Group A movies (this is an attempt to group, not to heirarchize, though I probably wouldn't dispute a rough lining up of the two), are the works such as Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Hannah and Her Sisters. Comedy, yes, but serious comedy: here, Woody struggles with serious existential and interpersonal issues. (I'd argue this is also Woody at his best, but for the moment let's keep to theme.) Since Hannah (1986), he's picked up this thread a few times, not with any great results. I liked 1992's Husbands & Wives more than most did, but the warmth and good nature evident in his earlier Class A works was gone. The shrillness and vitriol of H&W then hit its apex in 1997's Deconstructing Harry: Woody at his most hateful and, yes, mysoginistic. Other than these two entries, I don't think anything since Hannah has really picked up these Class A threads.

So what the hell else has the Stephen King of film been making in all his prolificness? Silly comedies, or what I'll call his Class B films. This is a lot of what he's known for, and often for good reason. Here's where he started his career, and it's been his touchstone: the best of the Class B include Love & Death, Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo, Bullets Over Broadway. Just about everything he's done in the past decade has fallen into this group. This isn't surprising, but these have struck me as mere placeholder films-- he's doing something, you know what you're going to get with them, but they're pretty forgettable. Curse of the Jade Scorpion? Small Time Crooks? Celebrity? Everyone Says I Love You? Are these standout films for anyone? About the only reason to see them is to see how Kenneth Branaugh or Ed Norton will play the obligatory Woody stand-in role.

Of course, there's no bright line separating Class A from Class B-- the silly comedies have plenty of seriousness in them, and the more serious works have plenty of silliness in them. So maybe I am categorizing based on quality after all-- maybe Class A is just the group of films that work (even if they are offensive). But the Class B films have a feeling of formula to them: a situation is set up and the players are put in motion. The Class A films feel more driven by characters than by plot.

(Let's leave alone for now the Class C films -- his "dark trio" of Bergman-inspired films: Interiors, September and Another Woman. And let's also acknowledge that a (very) few films do not fall neatly into this categorization, including some good works like Crimes & Misdemeanors and Shawdows & Fog.)

So we've always assumed that Woody would return at some point to a real Class A work, and that he would do it in a way that wasn't filled with bile. I'm pleased to say that with Melinda and Melinda, he's finally done that. Does it rank up there with Annie Hall or Hannah? Hells no. But he has definitely picked up on the same themes, and done it with the same humanity.

The conceit (as if you don't know) is that a comedist and a tragedist (both playwrights) are arguing over whether life is essentially comic or tragic. They each take the same set of basic facts (suicide attempts, faltering marriages, deception, lust, frustrated artists, and of course a black piano player who amazingly manages not to be named Sam) and each spins out his own version of the story. Two sets of characters, two parallel tales-- one comic, one tragic.

(Parenthetical shout out to Will Ferrell, who does two very impressive things here: first, he does comedy with pathos and in a way that is not cartoonish-- in contrast to most of the shit he does. Second, he plays the obligatory Woody stand-in role better than anyone in a really long time: he conveys the anxiety, and the mix of self-importance and self-loathing without falling back on a cliche Woody Allen imitation.)

Probably what keeps this film from being among his best works is its modesty of goals. Instead of positing answers, Woody seems to be exploring the ambiguity. Of course life isn't comic or tragic-- we have both. So in setting up the conceit through a frame story, Woody tells us exactly what he's about to do, and then he does it. It's great to see the stories play out, but once the frame is given, we know exactly what he's going to be doing for the next hundred minutes. And he does it well. But there's no real moment of redemption. No "you've got to have a little faith in people." No epiphany while watching Duck Soup (though that moment does have its revival house analogue here).

The lack of such a moment is only half a problem, though. Because those revalatory moments (throw in the end of Annie Hall, also) are revalatory in that they finally embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty. It's Woody shrugging off any real answers: "Knowability? Verifiability? Real truths?" you can hear the one-time philosophy student saying, "Forget it-- let's try just hanging onto decency and humanity, because we'll have our hands full with that alone." So the seeds of Melinda and Melinda's ambiguity are there, have been there for decades. Which brings us back to the modesty-of-enterprise issue.

But screw it. No one, not even Woody Allen, can be Woody Allen every time out. Let's just be thankful that this time, he was. He wasn't his best self, not by a long shot, but after a long, dry and painful decade, he is back.

The Ballad of Jack and Rose

2005-04-08T17:18:00.000-07:00

The Ballad of Jack and Rose tells the story of a dying man and his daughter. They live on an island, among the ruins of an intentional community that has faded away since its height in the sixties. The island and the title characters bring to mind Dr. Rappaccini and Beatrice of Hawthorne's short story Rappaccini's Daughter. In that story, a scientist raises his daughter amid poisonous plants as an experiment to make her immune to the worst of the world; Jack has kept Rose out of school since she was eleven, preserving in her the last vestige of the commune's dream of a better world.

The intensity of their relationship drives the movie but also strains belief, and the movie comes off as something of a frostbite victim, pulling warmth away from the extremities and into the core. Jack and Rose on their own are pitiable curiosities, and the time the movie spends with just the two of them is suffocating. But the scenes where Jack and Rose have to live among people crackle unpredictably.

The movie's great accomplishment is that as much as Jack (Daniel Day-Lewis) would like to suck all the oxygen from the room, he can't: the other actors are too damn good. Catherine Keener plays a co-dependent, blue-collar single mom who with moves out to the island to take care of Jack in his decline. She comes with too little preparation and two sons, each the fruit of a different (but equally ill-advised) affair. In stark contrast to Jack and Rose's willed fantasy of separation, every move she makes is desperately social. She needs people, and she knows they won't stay around her without a lot of deliberate, planned labor. By themselves, Jack and Rose are just about too far gone, veering towards incest and airlessness; the movie is at its best when Keener's human character has to adapt to their funhouse commune. Keener's two sons, a proto-sexy acne-touched burnout and a schlubby gay hairdresser, neither played by a recognized actor, each hold their own and more. Even the "evil developer" whose encroachments threaten all that is good is written and played humanely; it helps that he's Beau Bridges, who can play this part as a stolid citizen who likes building places for people to live (albeit over wetlands), not as a villain who cackles and counts his gold bags.

The sympathetic portrayal of the developer is to Jack and Rose's political credit; but its portrayal of the sixties is even more politically complicated. My first though was that it was outright reactionary. Jack's communal vision could only be underwritten by his personal fortune; the only end to that vision is in a hospice cloister, with incest and poisonous serpents looming. (Rappaccini's Garden was an inversion of Eden, and it's just as likely that Miller was playing with that myth and ending up in the same place as it was that she cribbed from Hawthorne.) But, of course, it's not the only end; daughter Rose escapes the island, and you could argue that in her quasi-communal, agrarian life After The Fall, the vision of the sixties continues to play out. But though life she builds is generous and organic, it is not political.

For politics, it seems, are too toxic. At the end of Rappaccini's Daughter, the dying title character Beatrice asks her father, who has made her immune to poison but fatally susceptible to its antidote, "Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in thy nature than in mine?" Rose can purge the poison from her system. But it is quite clearly poison.