The House Next Door

By Vadim Rizov

Most bands' self-titled efforts throw the gauntlet down, serving notice they've finally found the sound they've been looking for (either that, or name-brand groups like Zeppelin—and later, parodically, Weezer—get a bit too complacent about everyone knowing precisely who they are and how to tell each album apart). That qualifying parenthetical (The Album) is typical, then, of the push-pull between Jeff Tweedy's insecurities about himself as a musician/songwriter and Wilco's hard-to-ignore status as a beloved concert act with a large fanbase which worships Tweedy. It's a declaration of Major Rock Band Hubris, but it isn't! As if that wasn't enough self-aggrandizing self-deprecation, there's the totally hilarious "Wilco (the Song)." It's expert, textbook unimaginative rollicking '70s stuff, complete with a plodding, ridiculously simplistic keyboard riff that's just the same three notes repeated in a downward 5-4-1 progression.

The lack of stretching is deliberate; this is Wilco's purposefully hemmed-in self-definition, doing all the simple stuff their critics don't like and staking those boundaries as their turf. It's not as if Tweedy doesn't know Wilco's become totally uncool these last few years: “I’m probably the only person that wanted to be a rock critic and failed at it and started a band" he told The New York Times a few years ago before going on to rhapsodize about Battles and Grizzly Bear. The man has had Deerhoof and The Fiery Furnaces open for Wilco (and when I saw the latter opening at Radio City Music Hall years ago, it was clear the Furnaces had the crowd flummoxed; "Rock-'n'-roll," some lost 40something soul chanted, which is the wrong answer). Tweedy's aware of spazzy music that pushes things forward; he just has no interest in doing it himself. The furor over Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, then and now, seems to be totally missing the point; for all the frills at the corners, it wasn't particularly "experimental," and the fact that Wilco was adopted as a banner standard by critics seems more of a show of ideological solidarity with stuff marginalized by major labels than a genuine response to an admittedly excellent album. That so many people have since complained that Wilco has morphed into something much blander is missing the point; they were always pretty bland, just with a slightly different attack for each album.

So the chorus of "Wilco (the Song)" is a double-edged sword: "Wilco will love you baby" is a promise requiring no reciprocation. If you want to come around on Sky Blue Sky, they'll be there, patiently waiting. If you think it's a bland piece of shit, that's cool too; the Wilco faithful are unshakable, wearing the dad-rock smear like a badge of honor, none more proudly than the band itself. All Tweedy's offering is a "sonic shoulder for you to cry" on; he's disowning any grander ambitions.

The first six tracks are as great as anything Wilco's ever done; unfortunately, it's an 11-track album. "Deeper Down" goes a lot of places without building to a cumulative impact, but it's a curious, tentative song whose opening gets stuck in my head anyway. "One Wing" has a ripping guitar solo in the middle in E major; the rest is all minor-key build from tentative strumming to all-out break-up chorus. You can mentally add the cowbell yourself; it's so clearly not there it's almost like a negative presence stripped away. The metaphor's simple enough ("One wing will never ever fly dear"), and it's the thematically appropriate prelude to the album's three-track mini-masterpiece run, which starts with a dysfunctional relationship, switches to a healthier one, then moves to a place of a-/anti- sexual calm.

First up: "Bull Black Nova," one of the simplest lyrics Tweedy's ever written (which is good, because sometimes his aspirations to poetry fall flat on their face). "It's on my hair, it's on my clothes" is clarified, one verse later, the "it" being "blood on the sofa…blood in the trunk." This is a man who's killed his girlfriend, and—aside from the reveal of the third verse confirming the darkest hints of the first—there is nothing hard to understand about this. It's krautrockin' like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" (as noted by damn near everyone), but it's way less digressive and hence much less of a patience-tester. Tweedy will never be confused with Nick Cave vocally, but the music is intense enough to make up for whatever true danger he's simply incapable of projecting, stacking terrifying guitar solo and insistent, tension-ratcheting piano octaves on top of Wilco's default '70s chug 'til there's no place left to run and Tweedy screams he's about to black out. This is easily Wilco's darkest song, though "dark" is pretty much relative; they're mostly just morose, generally speaking. There's precedent: "Bull Black Nova" extrapolates "Via Chicago"'s opening admission "I dreamed about killing you again last night and it felt alright to me" and expands on it, and the same album (1999's Summerteeth) also has "She's A Jar," with its closing shot, "She begs me not to hit her." But those were Tweedy building on frustration from his marriage (with his wife's grudging permission); on Wilco (The Album), Tweedy spends more time singing in character than at any point since possibly Being There. He was never exactly confessional, but it's good to have him freed up for experiments like this.

"You And I" mostly speaks for itself; it's a good joke to follow up "Bull Black Nova"'s murder with a relationship duet (with Feist!), though this is one bleakly adult, barely romantic partnering: "I don't need to know that much about you, and you don't need to know that much about me." (Good advice, honestly.) And then there's "You Never Know." I have very mixed feelings about this song. To wit: the lyrics are beyond smug and preachy. "Come on children, you're acting like children," announces the super-wise, seen-it-all, world-weary Mr. Tweedy; "every generation thinks it's the end of the world." But not Tweedy! Why? "I don't care anymore," he repeats over and over for the chorus, as if he's suffered so long and hard that he's achieved transcendent, elder guru status, attaining ultimate karma in this lifetime alone. My immediate reaction is that it's the kind of smug bullshit you'd hear from an aging hippie and must be killed, and also that it's a bit rich for a man who two albums ago was inflicting 10-minutes of drone on unprepared listeners to share the tenor of his migraines with us to now go around building himself up as past suffering and worth taking advice from. On the other hand: this song fucking rocks. There's a cribbed guitar riff from "My Sweet Lord" and a hypnotic, most-'70s-ever verse that has organ drone and the kind of slinky, jazzy drum pattern people just don't play anymore, because it screams instant 1974. Perversely, that's what makes it refreshing, as annoying as I might find the real thing: the ability to seamlessly recreate a sound with impeccable musicianship for no real reason other than a personal fixation, something I automatically respond to probably a little more than I should. I prefer simulacra of sounds I don't care about to the real thing.

The back half of the album is fine, though it's basically retreads of their past work: "Solitaire" the generic ballad of loneliness, "Everlasting" the generic cathartic closer repudiating the last album's conclusion of "Please don't cry, we're designed to die." Only "Sunny Feeling" sticks out, but it's basically a breather for hardcore fans and probably unconvincing to everyone else. Still, the first half is spectacular. This is the most schizophrenic, least internally consistent album Wilco's put out maybe, like, ever. The only thing holding it together? "Wilco" (the concept).

_________________________________________
Vadim Rizov is a New York-based freelance writer. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Onion AV Club and Paste Magazine, among others.

Read more!

By Brendon Bouzard

[Editor's Note: "Summer of '84" is a co-production of The House Next Door and the Blog Talk Radio shows Back by Midnight (hosted by the initiator of this project, Aaron Aradillas) and Movie Geeks United! (hosted by Jerry Dennis and Jamey DuVall). Click the links above to access this series' corresponding podcasts.]

A now-forgotten treasure trove of kids television: the early ‘90s weekend afternoon movie block on Nickelodeon. Too poor at that point to provide viewers with an entire station’s worth of original programming, Nick filled out its schedule with awesome remainder-bin oddities like the Fleischer Gulliver’s Travels, the dreadful Filmation Treasure Island (with Davy Jones as the voice of Jim Hawkins) and the Chuck Jones Jungle Book movies (I still have fond recollections of an afternoon spent watching and rewatching the beguiling Rikki-Tikki-Tavi). I only have a liminal recollection of that era’s television programming, but when I look back at early Nickelodeon, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer frugality of the entire venture: the existential dread of cheapo Canadian import Today’s Special and the endless Inspector Gadget and Lassie marathons.

Was this real? Did I dream it? I’ve never found someone else who can confirm ever having seen these on Nickelodeon, but I know it happened. I was young, yes, when these programs were on the air, but these images constantly replay in my head. Most of what aired during this block has been remanded to the dustbin of cinematic history, but I absolutely treasure these movies, or at least my memories of them: the way a screwed-up Betacam SP transfer of a fading print of Lassie Come Home gives that film a hazy pink sheen that enhances its glorious images of the California countryside, the way my parents wood console television framed a murky transfer of John Hubley’s 1959 masterpiece short “Moonbird.” My memories are fuzzy, but they’re mine, and I credit a childhood of fuzzy misunderstandings of old children’s movies with my dreams of making my own films.

Of the early Muppet films, The Muppets Take Manhattan was the only one to find itself on the Nick movie block and was far and away the biggest ticket item syndicated in that time slot. The bastard of the original trilogy, its rights belonged to Tri-Star (later Sony) and not ITC/Henson (later Disney), so its syndication was cheaper. It made sense otherwise as a programming choice—it tied into Nickelodeon’s animated Muppet Babies (a series inspired by one of the film’s more imaginative, if unmotivated, musical sequences) as well as the channel’s syndicated reruns of Fraggle Rock and The Muppets.

I loved the Muppets growing up, and so when I discovered in considering the Summer of ’84 prompt Keith sent us that The Muppets Take Manhattan was released a scant few weeks after my birth, I decided to revisit it and its role within the Muppet franchise. It was only in doing research for this piece that I really came to realize just how much Muppet property there is: the Henson/Muppet canon consists of dozens of television series, movies, one-off television specials. What struck me was not the sheer quantity of the material but the consistency—a word I use in two ways. First: the relative high quality of Muppet programming (Muppets from Space withstanding), the unwillingness of the Muppet creative team to pander, taking for granted the intelligence of their young audience. Second: the ability to produce a sense of internal continuity from one show or film to the next .

It occurred to me that the Muppets—as defiantly modernist as any children’s entertainment (dig the fake film-burn midway through The Muppet Movie, which caused the projectionist at the theater I used to program to freak out mid-screening)—are also an update of one of the hoariest and oldest theatrical traditions: a Commedia dell’arte troupe. Establish Kermit and Miss Piggy as The Lovers (their love plot serves as a major narrative thread in nearly every Muppet movie, including this one) and the rest of the troupe falls into place: Gonzo as the deformed, foolish Pulcinella; Rowlf as the self-effacing, loyal Pedrolino; Fozzie as Arlecchino, the slow-witted clown. The Muppet films speak to us in part because they reapply centuries-tested comic traditions to addressing and critiquing television and film themselves. Part of Jim Henson’s creative genius was that he understood how to walk that delicate line between traditional storytelling and self-conscious address, and The Muppets Take Manhattan is a thorough application of his style. There is no narrative continuity between The Muppets, The Muppet Movie, and The Muppets Take Manhattan, and it’s the creators’ strong ability to create dynamic characters that allows them this freedom.

Of the original trilogy of Muppet films, The Muppets Take Manhattan is the least reflexive—there are no obvious moments of fourth-wall breaking, and the film itself isn’t an outright genre parody in the style of The Great Muppet Caper (or adaptation of kid-friendly public domain literature, in the style of the later Muppet Treasure Island and Muppet Christmas Carol). At no point does Dr. Teeth break out a copy of the script in order to clarify the narrative throughline, as in The Muppet Movie. Yet, like that film, Manhattan serves as an origin-story of sorts—a way of exploring the rise to fame of a group of animals (“And—other things,” Kermit acknowledges in front of a cheering audience) that preserves the comic relationships and types built into the franchise.

Manhattan offers a genial, weightless narrative inspired by studio-era genre cinema. Where The Great Muppet Caper plays as an ersatz Howard Hawks screwball, The Muppets Take Manhattan is pure MGM: idealistic youth, extended song-and-dance numbers, relentless cornpone. Think of Kermit as Mickey Rooney and Miss Piggy as Judy Garland. Its narrative is one that could have been scooped directly from Depression-era mid-budget gems like Babes on Broadway or Babes in Arms: Kermit and gang graduate from Danhurst College (Vassar alums will recognize their campus serving as stand-in) and struggle to put the college variety show he authored on Broadway. They part ways, take half-assed service jobs to pay the bills, and continue to plug away at their Broadway dreams. It alternates between delirious highs—one sequence has Kermit trying to create a buzz for his show by replacing Liza Minnelli’s caricature at Sardi’s with his own—and dolorous lows: Scooter taking a job as an usher at a dollar movie theater in the Midwest, Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem reduced to playing polka to pay the bills, Kermit contemplating his fate (“My friends—my friends are all gone.”) while looking out from the top of the Empire State Building.

Suffice it to say that rewatching it now, years later, living in a sub-200 sq. ft. studio in New York, it’s all so very real to me: Kermit’s resilient naivete and drive to perform are the stuff commencement speeches are made of, and his third-act crisis, in which amnesia drains him of his will to perform and forces him into a soulless corporate job advertising soap, is a marvelous encapsulation of the crisis-of-conscience faced by post-collegiate types. It’s Kermit’s drive that makes him the most enduring of Henson’s creations. Underneath his cheerful demeanor and deadpan wit is an almost Machiavellian need to come out on top, to convince anyone and everyone to love him. The humanity of Kermit is his willingness to put himself out on the ledge, as in the terrific sequence in which he schmoozes John Landis wearing an Afro and leisure suit, or his quiet dignity in the face of a scam artist (Dabney Coleman) trying to bilk him out of $300. Unlike other post-collegiate films like Kicking and Screaming or Reality Bites, Manhattan has little interest in pursuing narratives of ennui or inaction. It’s a childish fantasy to hold on to and pursue dreams like the ones Kermit seeks, to insist that his group of friends stay united to put together a show, but it’s a beautiful one too. Twenty years ago, The Muppets Take Manhattan pointed me toward a dream of becoming a filmmaker, and today it’s given me a swift kick in the ass telling me I’m not working hard enough to do it.

_________________________________
Brendon Bouzard is author of the blog My Five Year Plan.

Read more!

By Tom Stempel

COMING UP IN THIS COLUMN: Up, Summer Hours, A Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Easy Virtue, The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, but first:

***
FAN MAIL: Brandon suggested I may have missed some details of How I Met Your Mother, and he certainly has been a little more perceptive about the show than I was. He’s right that the significance of the meeting with Stella is the connection to Tony and that it leads Ted to teaching. I will also buy Brandon’s point about the story being told the kids over one day, but I was getting in a dig that has bedeviled series television from the beginning: the set-up that is difficult to sustain. Here are three examples from different decades.

Racket Squad was an early fifties show, first in syndication, then on CBS. As I wrote in my book on the history of television writing, they dropped an interesting approach: “In the first episodes, [Captain] Braddock [of the Racket Squad] narrates the stories, but in the second person, addressing the victim of the con. This supposes that Braddock knows everything about the con before the victim tells him, which makes him rather obnoxious.” They changed the narration to third person.

In 1963-64 there was a ninety-minute series called Arrest and Trial. In the first 45-minutes, the cop (Ben Gazzara) arrested somebody. In the second 45-minutes, the defense attorney (Chuck Connors) proved they were innocent. As Sy Salkowitz, who wrote a couple of episodes, said, “If Ben Gazzara made a good arrest, Chuck Connors couldn’t get him off. If Chuck Connors got him off, it made Ben Gazzara look like a stupid ass.” The show died after a year, and it took another 25-years for Dick Wolf to figure out the simple solution to make it work: the lawyers in the second half of the show are THE PROSECUTORS. Duh.

In the first season of Crossing Jordan in 2001, Jordan solved crimes with the help of her ex-cop father by acting out what they knew about the crimes. It was obvious and clunky, and it was dropped fairly quickly.

***
UP (2009. Screenplay by Bob Peterson, Peter Docter, story by Peter Docter, Thomas McCarthy, Bob Peterson. Yes, in the onscreen credits, they avoid the “and” and “&” completely; it’s known as collaboration. 96 minutes): Nobody cared.

Up has been driving me nuts. In my book Understanding Screenwriting, I made the point in writing about Finding Nemo that the GAPS (Geniuses at Pixar) make a point of writing films that can only be done as animated films. You could not do a live action film about fish having those adventures. You could not do a live action film about cars with those personalities. You could not do a live action film about Monsters Inc. In the book, I gave the 2003 animated film Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas as an example of an animated film that could have easily been done live action (except for Eris’s hair, which was beautifully animated). So here’s the story of Up: Carl, a cranky 78-year-old man, decides to fulfill his late wife Ellie’s dream of going off to Paradise Falls in South America. Being a former balloon salesman, he attaches hundreds of balloons to the house and with the Wilderness Explorer Russell as a stowaway, they fly off. In South America they discover Charles Muntz, the aged explorer who originally inspired both Carl and Ellie as kids, but he turns out not to be very likable. Carl and Russell protect a bird Muntz is trying to capture, and then new best friends Carl and Russell return to civilization to eat ice cream. Anything in there that requires animation? No. CGI effects for the house flying maybe, but not animation. The characters are real human beings, not fish, rats, or trash compactors. The locations could be found. It could have easily been a live action film.

But it isn’t. And it’s a brilliant ANIMATED film. How the hell did they do that? O.K., I know it’s the GAPS, but how the hell did the GAPS do that? Let’s take care of the obvious things first. As usual with the GAPS, there is a strong, strong story. Danny Munso’s excellent article in the May/June 2009 Creative Screenwriting will tell you how much work went into the process of developing the story. They spend a LONG time developing the story at Pixar, going off to help out on other films as a way of refreshing their brains. The effort shows in the final product. Near the beginning there is a four-minute montage of the life of Carl and Ellie that has received great praise, and rightly so. An article in the Los Angeles Times mentioned that as they originally laid out the montage, it ran twenty minutes. They cut it back to just what they needed. Pay attention to the details in the montage; EVERYTHING in it comes back throughout the picture, sometimes in surprising ways. Meanwhile, it works because you are so caught up in the story and the characters.

Also as usual with the GAPS, there is great characterization. Carl is not just a cranky old man, although he is that as well. Having seen his life with Ellie, we know what all of the adventures he goes through mean to him. Ellie essentially disappears early in the film, but her presence stays with Carl and us. And, as the writers told Munso, the character of Russell calls to mind the character of Ellie, so we can see why, in these circumstances, Carl puts up with Russell, however grumpily. And Ellie’s character pays off beautifully at the end when Carl once again opens up her “My Adventure Book” and gets a surprise.

Writing about WALL-E in US#2, I mentioned that the GAPS are great at writing for the performance of the designers and animators as well as the voice actors, and that is true here. We get the house (and look at how much they get out of the house), the balloons, the scenery, and Muntz’s dirigible.

O.K., all of those things (story, character, visual look) could be done in live action, so we are back to the central question of today’s seminar: why animation for this story? A friend of my wife’s was for many years a medical illustrator at UCLA. Why have a medical illustrator when you can have photographs? Photographs give you so much more detail. Yes, but a good illustrator can draw only what the surgeon, for example, needs to see. How many times have I mentioned that as a writer you only should write what you NEED in a film? The GAPS have used that ability of animation to isolate only what you need to tell THIS story, which in turn focuses our attention on the essentials. They have done this because for twenty some odd years they have been working as a team refining their understanding of their medium (animation) and the stories they bring to it. I doubt if they could have brought off Up when they started, but that they can now is a tribute not only to their talents and collaboration, but to the institution of Pixar. Sometimes individual geniuses are great, but in filmmaking sometimes collaborative genius is essential.

Oh, one other thing. When my wife and I went out to see Up, our intent was to see it in 3-D. The 3-D showing was sold out, so we figured we’d see it in 2-D, since that show was only ten minutes later. Neither we nor the rest of the audience seemed to be bothered by the 2-D version. I am sure the 3-D version has some stunning visuals (mind the GAPS), but our audience was so caught up in the story and characters it gave it a round of applause at the end. In other words, Jeffrey Katzenberg, nobody gave a flying fuck it wasn’t in 3-D.

***
SUMMER HOURS (2008. Written by Olivier Assayas. 103 minutes): An auteur film, but not really.

As French producers have discovered over the last several decades, you let an auteur director make the film he wants and it is usually a mess: lots of jump cuts, fancy camerawork, people sulking, and not very interesting scripts. So while Assayas is definitely an auteur (he directed as well as wrote this film), he has written a brilliant screenplay for himself, much more coherent than those for some of his other films. Tony Rayns, one of Sight & Sound’s regular critics, described the film in his August 2008 review as “Not exactly plotless but with no clearcut structure.” Which is what you get when you let auteurist critics try to deal with screenwriting.

The plot is very simple on the surface: When Hélène, the 75-year-old mother dies, her three adult children must decide what to do not only with her house out in the provinces, but with the artwork in the house. Frédéric, the oldest and the only one still living in France, would like to keep the house and artwork together and in the family. Adrienne, a designer who lives in New York, and Jérémie, who is living in China and about to move there permanently, would just as soon sell everything and split the money. In an American film you could see this quickly turning into a raging melodrama with lots of yelling and screaming and family secrets spilling out all over the place. It will surprise you to learn that there are only a couple of scenes in which voices are raised in this film. It is obvious the siblings disagree, but equally obvious they love each other.

That plot may justify Rayns’s “not exactly plotless,” but the structure is very rich and complex. This is not just about the family, this is also about France, French culture, and globalization. At the family get-together in the beginning, before Hélène dies, she goes over with Frédéric what is in the house and what she would like done with it. We can’t follow all the names and art pieces, but we get enough. Later, we see the representatives of the Musée D’Orsay and others going through the house and evaluating what is there. This scene works beautifully because we know what these things MEAN to the family. And that scene is matched near the end when Frédéric and his wife are “visiting” several of the objects on display at the Musée. American films tend to look more at individuals rather than the culture, but Summer Hours is as much about culture as character.

Assayas also beautifully structures the characters. In addition to the siblings and their stories, there is Frédéric’s wife Lisa, who is a classic example of someone who has married into the family and as a partial outsider sees it a lot clearer than the insiders. You know someone like that in your family. We first see this during the family gathering, then it pays off in the scene in the Musée.

Frédéric’s and Lisa’s daughter, Sylvie, the oldest of the grandchildren, is first seen in an informal treasure hunt at the family gathering. Then she disappears from the film, only to come back when Frédéric has to pick her up after her arrest for shoplifting. I thought this was an extraneous scene, but it’s not. The three siblings have figured out that the kids are not really interested in the house and therefore are not part of the discussion on what to do with it. Sylvie’s attitude in the police station would seem to confirm that. Then in the final sequence Sylvie and her younger brother and a group of their friends have a last weekend party at the house. You can see what’s going to happen. Only it doesn’t, as Assayas the screenwriter pulls off two or three twists, including a final one that provides the most sublime ending of a film since Julie Delpy’s lack of reaction to Ethan Hawke’s “I know” in Before Sunset.

***
NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM: BATTLE OF THE SMITHSONIAN (2009. Screenplay by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon, based on characters created by Robert Ben Garant & Thomas Lennon. 105 minutes): Bigger, better, but not necessarily funnier.

One thing before we start: Not only does Charlie Dickens need to get a new agent (see US#26), but so does Milan Trenc. And who’s he when he’s at home? He wrote the book that the 2006 Night at the Museum was based on. He was credited on that film, but not on the sequel, while the two screenwriters get credits not only for screenplay but for the characters. O.K., O.K., they did elaborate on what was essentially a children’s book, but since I am required by blood oath to defend writers, I’m just saying…

I was mildly amused by the first film, but it struck me as somewhat underdeveloped. While generally I am not in favor of sequels becoming bigger, this is something of an exception. The original focused on Larry Dailey, who ends up working as a night guard at the American Museum of Natural History. The exhibitions come to life at night and hi-jinks ensue. Some of them were funny, but I felt more could be done with the idea.

When Garant and Lennon were asked to do the sequel, they decided to take some of those characters they created for the first Museum to the Smithsonian in Washington. The setup for the sequel is that the old exhibits are being shipped off to storage in the Federal Archives, which for purposes of this film are under the Smithsonian. Larry, who has kept up his friendship with the exhibits, learns that the tablet that enables them to come to life has been shipped with them and could cause harm if it falls into evil hands, which of course it does. Since the Smithsonian is several different museums spread out over the Mall, this gives the writers a lot more to play with. The brother of the boy Pharoah in the first film plans to use the tablet to bring to life the most evil characters in history, including Napoleon, Ivan the Terrible, and Al Capone, to help in his plan to take over the world. He tries, Larry tries to stop him, hi-jinks ensue. Sounds like a plot to me.

What is it with reviewers and scripts? Both the reviewer of the film and columnist Peter Bart in Weekly Variety (May 25-31), complained, with Bart commenting, “Most important, this is a film that displays a truly surreal sensibility in that it has no tenable plot.” What they were both thrown by is the fact that structure in gag comedy is not as crucial as it is in other genres. Look at the reviews of the “early, funny” Woody Allen movies and they all complain about the lack of plot. Look up the original reviews of the Marx Brothers movies and you will find the same thing. The plot in the new movie is a very simple framework upon which to hang the gags. A picture like this depends on the gags, and they are as surreal and off-the-wall (literally in the sequences when paintings and photographs come to life) as anything in Duck Soup. The ratio of hits to misses is very high in this movie.

Yet I was not laughing, and usually I am an easy laugh. But I was not laughing because I was so charmed by surrealism of what they came up with that I did not mind not laughing. I have that response sometimes to Buster Keaton’s stuff as well. The way they use the famous photo of the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square at the end of World War II is just plain ingenious. Watching one of Jeff Koons’ balloon pieces come to life is charming. The quick meeting of Amelia Earhart and the Tuskegee Airman comes with a throwaway line that contains more social comment that most films manage in two hours. A comedy can work if it makes you laugh a lot. It can also work, as this one does, by making you enjoy what you are, if not laughing at, smiling at.

The writers, who are performers as well as writers, have also written great parts for the actors, which help hold the film together. I think this may be Ben Stiller’s best work, surprisingly subtle in his reactions to the craziness going on around him. The evil Pharoah is Kahmunrah and is played by the great Hank Azaria. Azaria is imitating the voice of Boris Karloff, who starred in the original The Mummy. Bill Hader is as good a General Custer as Errol Flynn was in They Died With Their Boots On, but in a very different key. (Hader was equally good a few months ago in a more realistic role in Adventureland. I am not sure he is going to be a star, but he’s already a better character actor than his work on Saturday Night Live would lead you to believe.)

I love Carla Gugino, but she was not particularly memorable in the first Museum film. The equivalent part here is Amelia Earhart, played by Amy Adams as a combination of Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Rosalind Russell, and Claudette Colbert. Garant and Lennon have given her some great thirties dialogue and she runs with it. She more than holds her own against the great CGI effects. Shawn Levy, the director, was quoted in the June 1 New Yorker on what he discovered about male members of the audience, “I spent two years working on this highly complex movie, loaded with FX and C.G.I. [sic. Somebody tell David Remnick that Industry Standard is no periods] stuff, the most memorable visual turns out to be Amy’s, uh, rear in her jodhpurs.” Would you consider that writing for performance?

***
EASY VIRTUE (2008. Screenplay by Stephan Elliott & Sheridan Jobbins, based on the play by Noël Coward. 97 minutes): It’s Coward, but not as funny.

While Noël Coward’s great plays such as Private Lives, Design for Living, and Blithe Spirit (currently on Broadway; Congratulations to Angela Lansbury for her Tony for it; Geezer Power Rules!) are often revived, the 1926 play this film is based on is not, and with good reason. As Stephan Elliott told Peter Clines in an interview in the May 22 Creative Screenwriting Weekly, what we think of as the great Noël Coward wit simply is not there in this early drama. Coward himself did not think much of the play and those who have seen Eliot Stannard’s 1927 film adaptation are not that crazy about it, either. (Yes, yes, I know, the 1927 film was directed by the fat little kid Stannard was teaching everything he needed to know to make movies; see Charles Barr’s elegant English Hitchcock for details of Stannard’s importance to the kid’s career.)

When Stephan Elliott, who also directed, and his writing partner took on the project, they decided to bring some Coward-like wit to the story. There is some, some of it probably from the play, which Elliott found rather vicious, but the melodrama aspects of it keep crowding it out. In the play Larita is an older woman who marries a young British man, John, and goes with him to his parents’ country house, which she finds absolutely stifling. The play is set entirely in the house, but Elliott and Jobbins have opened it up, although that is not entirely the word for it, since they have made sure that even in the exterior scenes Larita is hemmed in by others. Though they have made Larita closer in age to John, there are still a number of lines that suggest a greater age difference than we can see. The writers have brought the period forward to 1929, to judge from a reference to the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and Larita has now become a race car driver cheated out of winning the Grand Prix at Monte Carlo because she is a woman. She is first cousin to Night’s Amelia Earhart, but the writers here have not given her great dialogue Garant and Lennon have given Earhart. The costumers here have also not given Jessica Biel the formfitting jodhpurs the other costumers gave Amy Adams.

I have not read the original play, but it is obvious from its production history that Larita is the star part. The film is written that way as well, with the writers picking up and expanding on Larita’s wish to be rid of the stuffy upper-class English society. Jessica Biel has given some good performances (The Illusionist), and she gives a good performance here. Unfortunately, it is not the required movie-star performance. She does not come in and command the screen the way she needs to do. She is not helped by the platinum blonde hair, the makeup and the cinematography. Biel is not as physically luscious here as she usually is, which is too bad, because that could have given her performance an interesting texture. Kristin Scott Thomas does take command as John's mother, who is determined to keep up appearances. Thomas knows her way around a bitchy line, and while Biel holds her own in that department, we have to score it advantage Thomas.

The drama sort of works, and there is a nice moment when John’s father, played by many women’s definitive Mr. Darcy, Colin Firth, does the tango with Larita when John won’t. Which nicely sets up the very satisfying ending.

***
THE BOYS: THE SHERMAN BROTHERS’ STORY (2009. No writing credit. 101 minutes): Collaboration.

Robert (lyrics) and Richard (music) Sherman came to work for Walt Disney as the only songwriters on staff at the studio. They not only wrote the songs for Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book, but “It’s a Small World” for the exhibit of the same name at the 1964 World’s Fair and the later rides at the Disney theme parks. The pre-credits sequence establishes most of that and then gives us the kicker: the two brothers couldn’t stand to be around each other when they weren’t working together. The film is made by Gregory V. Sherman and Jeff Sherman, two cousins, each one the son of one of the brothers. They had not spoken to each other for nearly forty years when they met up and decided to do this film. They were not able to reconcile their fathers, but they have come up with a terrific film that shows you how the brothers managed to create such terrific songs while not otherwise speaking to each other.

As we have talked about on many occasions, documentaries can give us wonderful characters, and the brothers, who are still alive, are definitely characters, in every sense of the term. They are surrounded by other interesting characters as well, many of whom we see interviewed for the film. We get not only interviews with actors like Julie Andrews and Haley Mills, but musicians like John Williams (there is some wonderful footage of a much younger Williams hanging out with the brothers; who knew the composer of Star Wars used to be a hippie?), Randy Newman (no slouch at doing songs for animated films himself), and Alan Menken (The Little Mermaid, Aladdin).

What is at the heart of the film is the collaboration of the brothers, and especially their collaboration with Walt Disney himself. I am not the only person to point out that John Lasseter, the head of Pixar, who is also interviewed, is the closest thing we have to Disney in his sense of story and his belief in the collaborative process. See the comments on Up above for details. Seeing this film the day after Up gave me a real sense of connection between the past and the present in animation. And quite frankly, it also made me appreciate how much better the animation is in some Pixar films than it is in some of the Disney classics.

As I mentioned in US#2 about The Order of Myths, one question that nearly always comes up with documentaries is what was left on the cutting room floor. One person who is never mentioned in the film, and who appears only briefly and unidentified in one clip, is Michael Eisner. Eisner took over Disney in the early eighties and revived the studio, bringing back animated musicals. He was the Emperor and Pope of the studio, appearing on television to introduce Disney shows. Why isn’t he here?

One possible answer to that comes from Alan Menken, who talks in the film about coming to the studio to do The Little Mermaid. He was told the Sherman Brothers had an office down the hall, but the person telling him said it in a rather dismissive way. That may have come from Eisner, since the Pope and Emperor sets the tone, in this case a deep lack of respect for tradition.

I was thinking about this after I saw the film and I was reminded of a visit I made to the Abbey at St. Florian, outside of Linz, Austria, in 1998. We were shown around the apartments that had been grandly decorated for potential visits from Popes and Emperors (you didn’t think I was just being snarky about Eisner, did you?). Nobody was particularly impressed, especially when we learned the Popes and Emperors almost never visited. But down at the end of the same hallway, there were two little non-descript rooms. One had a small bed, the other had a table, chair and piano. We were enthralled. These were the rooms when Anton Bruckner lived and composed.

Power fades, talent abides.
______________________________________
Tom Stempel is the author of several books on film. His most recent is Understanding Screenwriting: Learning From Good, Not-Quite-So Good, and Bad Screenplays.

Read more!

A Weekly Webcomic by Peet Gelderblom

[Editor's Note: This is the final episode of Directorama. I want to extend my deepest thanks to Peet for his efforts, his commitment and his insightful sense of humor, which I'd personally put up there with Bill Watterson, Hergé and the Termite Terrace contingent. Hope you'll share your thoughts in the comments section.—Keith Uhlich]

[Author's Note: For more information or to browse earlier episodes, visit www.directorama.net.]

Click to enlarge:

__________________________________________
Peet Gelderblom directs, edits and develops commercials, TV programs and broadcast design in Amsterdam. He founded 24LiesASecond, for which he wrote and edited several essays, and is the twisted cartoonist behind Directorama (the website as well as the book).

Read more!

By Ross Ruediger



Writing about the fourth Doctor Who Christmas Special is, admittedly, about as much fun as sitting down to eat a bowl of shredded wheat. I feel as though I’ve said everything there is to say about how these one-offs operate, and am not sure I can bring a whole lot that’s new to the table. (Need further proof? Click here, here and here.)

It’s unfortunate that I’m coming at this material from such a blasé angle, too, because “The Next Doctor” may actually be the best Christmas special Russell T Davies has yet unveiled. Then again, it may not – such is the luxury of using the word “may.” It’s certainly a vast improvement on 2007’s “Voyage of the Damned,” although it wouldn’t be tough to improve upon that story. Watching David Tennant decorate a fucking tree for an hour would be more entertaining than another bombastic adventure set to the same tune as “Damned.” Luckily, “The Next Doctor” is a sweetly inspired piece of entertainment that goes to show that maybe, just maybe, there’s actually some life left in this yearly offering that aims to do nothing more than provide a little something for families to gather around the tube and enjoy together after they’ve feasted on a fine meal of turkey or ham or whatever it is people in Britain eat for Christmas dinner.

The TARDIS arrives in London at Christmas in 1851. Along with ample amounts of snow, the sweet smell of comfort and joy wafts through the air. It’s almost comical how often the Doctor ends up fighting alien menaces at Christmas by this point, as this is the fifth such occasion since the new series began (one must not forget that Season One’s Dickens tale, “The Unquiet Dead,” was also a holiday adventure). For the hardcore fan, it has become repetitive. For the casual viewer – the average English bloke who watches Doctor Who like most Americans watch their TV shows – it’s likely much less of a nuisance, since it only happens once a year; he isn’t dissecting and analyzing the series through countless DVD viewings like some of us do.

Anyway, within moments of arriving, a panicked female voice shouts for the Doctor, and it’s like the best present he could ever get. (“Someone’s in trouble! My specialty!”) He rushes to the rescue, only to find that the woman not only doesn’t recognize him, but seems rather peeved by his presence. The woman continues to call for the Doctor and on cue, a proper English gentlemen shows up. The Doctor asks him who he is and he replies, “I'm the Doctor. Simply the Doctor. The one, the only, and the best. Stand back. This is a job for a Time Lord!”

The Next Doctor is played by David Morrissey (who previously co-starred with David Tennant in the excellent Blackpool), and his companion, Rosita, is played by Vilile Tshabalala. He’s of course not really the next Doctor, because it’s fairly common knowledge at this point that Tennant will be handing over his TARDIS key to Matt Smith in 2010.

But that wasn’t the case in December of last year, when this special first aired in the U.K., and Davies does a pretty good job of convincing us that this may (there’s that magic word “may” again) indeed be Doctor #11. In fact he goes back and forth with it, teasing the viewer and the real Doctor as well, and providing a logical reason (amnesia) that this potentially new Doctor doesn’t recognize his predecessor. The real Doctor basically assumes the role of the companion for the first half of the story, and along the way he’s introduced to the world of the Next Doctor in much the same way a new companion would be introduced to the world of the Doctor proper. The Next Doctor's rationalization of why his ordinary screwdriver is indeed sonic is a hoot. The scenario culminates in another hugely funny sequence in which the Doctor is shown the Next Doctor’s TARDIS – a massive blue gas balloon that has yet to make its maiden voyage. In this case, TARDIS stands for Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style, which looks silly on paper, and yet Morrissey delivers the line with such style that we’re forced to go along with his logic.

The Next Doctor is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with the Cybermen, who apparently slipped through the void and back into our universe during the events of last season’s two part finale. They are aided by a human with no soul, Miss Hartigan (Dervla Kirwan), who is nothing if not heaping doses of Cruella De Vil, the witch from Snow White, and every other classy evil woman ever created under the fantasy banner. People are dying and children have gone missing – most notably the mysterious Jackson Lake, who, we discover as the story moves forward, is not dead after all, but actually the true identity of the Next Doctor. His wife was killed by the silver beasties, and his son was stolen from him as well, which, along with some help from an infostamp, led to him having a breakdown, after which he assumed the identity of the Doctor.

Ah, yes – the Cybermen infostamp. What would a story such as this be without a tube that ends up functioning as everything but a bong and a suppository? The infostamps can hold the history of London and the entirety of the Doctor’s past. They can be lodged into the chests of Cybermen to retrieve all this information, and perhaps even be used against them in these situations with a little tweaking. They can also be used as a literal arsenal of weaponry. But most importantly, they move the plot along, and nearly every single dramatic development that takes place in this story relies on or is caused by the infostamps.

Oh well – at least we don’t have to think too hard, and I wouldn’t trade that sweet little classic Doctor montage for nothin’. However the infostamps are merely contrived, whereas the Cybershades must surely be the dumbest looking and least threatening creature the new series has unveiled. An obvious descendant of the Cybermat from the classic series, the Cybershades look ridiculous even compared to their low budget ancestors. What on Earth were they thinking? “OK, we’ve got a shitload of these Cybermasks leftover from the last Doctor Who Magazine giveaway that nobody bothered to enter, and a dozen gorilla suits laying around. Can we make it work?” Where is Tim Gunn when you need him?

Those are the only real complaints I have about “The Next Doctor.” Everything else is really quite splendid, and for once it’s nice to watch a Christmas special that takes its time and moves along at a leisurely pace, instead of cramming one action sequence after another down our throats. I’m dazzled by Doctor Who when it takes time out to get its characters right, and the real reason “The Next Doctor” works is everything about David Morrissey, the Next Doctor and Jackson Lake.

This guy is one of the most underrated actors working in the business today, and I’m continually amazed by Hollywood’s inability to find a way to properly utilize his talents. I was actually a huge supporter of making him Doctor #11, although obviously not played as he plays the role in this episode, which is a different animal entirely. I still think it’s a tad unfortunate that he wasn’t selected as he’s so different from Tennant, which Matt Smith at least doesn’t appear to be, and he would’ve brought an immense amount of cred to the role. Doctor Who would’ve flourished with him taking the lead. That’s not to say it won’t with Smith, of course, just that Morrissey would obviously have rocked the TARDIS and brought some much needed gravitas back to the series, after Tennant’s rather ebullient take on the character.

The story ends as many Doctor Who stories do, with a battle against a monster - this time it's in the form of a giant, hulking steampunk Cyberking. It’s really a pretty glorious creation that fits in nicely with all the Victorian décor that litters the tale, and it of course gives Tennant a chance to use the gas balloon, and once again, the infostamps. Sigh. Goofy stuff, to be sure, but great fun nonetheless, and above average for a holiday offering from this series, although it must be said that it’s become increasingly difficult to judge these things objectively, given how little I've come to expect from the Christmas specials. Christmas of ’09 will see the start of David Tennant’s two-part finale as the Doctor. I hope to God (which is quite the leap of faith for an atheist) he doesn’t regenerate after having been trampled to death by eight tiny reindeer.
_________________________________________
Ross Ruediger is a San Antonio-based writer. In addition to contributing to The House Next Door, he also publishes The Rued Morgue and writes for Bullz-Eye.

NEXT MONTH: BBC America premieres the first Doctor Who Easter Special, "Planet of the Dead," which was partially filmed in Dubai, and guest stars Michelle Ryan and Lee Evans, on Sunday, July 26th.

Classic Who DVD Recommendation: Be sure to look at the outstanding "E-Space Trilogy" which was recently released and stars Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, Matthew Waterhouse, and John Leeson as the voice of K9.

Read more!

By Simon Abrams

[Written By screens Monday, June 29th at 11am as part of the New York Asian Film Festival at IFC Center. Click here for more information.]

Writer/director Wai Ka-Fai’s collaborations with Johnnie To stand out from To’s filmography. Preoccupied with the concept of predestination and fated protagonists, Wai’s films feel more heady, more intellectually dense. As a screenwriter who worked his way up the ranks at Hong Kong’s top TV station TVB, he’s earned respect and celebrity beyond perhaps even To’s venerated status within the film community thanks to early minor successes like Too Many Ways to Be No. 1 and later commercial hits like Running Out of Time and Needing You, all of which were produced by To’s production company, Milkyway Image.

I sat down with Wai the evening after his latest solo project, Written By, had its world premiere at the New York Asian Film Festival (June 19-July 5). Written By stars frequent Wai collaborator Lau Ching-wan as a writer who dies in a car accident. To deal with her grief, his daughter Melody (Kelly Lin) creates a story in which she died and he lived. In that alternate reality, he too deals with his grief by writing a story in which he died and she lives. Wai didn’t answer many of my questions directly, but in his own way he provided an interesting perspective on his creative process.

***
SIMON ABRAMS: Your new film, Written By, is very different from the majority of your work with Milkyway. It seems like a more personal film. Where did the idea to make the film come from?

WAI KA-FAI: I’ve always been interested in death as a topic and as I get older, I’ve wanted to explore that a little more. Ultimately, it’s common to all humanity that you have to face. Two small quick stories for you that served as my inspiration. The first one is that a friend who was a screenwriter was married and her husband passed away. Every day, for ten years, she was unhappy. Only afterward did I notice that that was depression and that she had been unhappy for a long time. I remember that and I try to portray the pain of losing your loved ones.

Another story: an editor friend of mine who I ran into told me that years ago he was editing a newsclip that involved a building that looked very familiar. It turned out to be the building he lived in and the newsclip was about a woman that had jumped from the building with her child. He realized that it was his wife and kid. So instantly he froze and didn’t know what to do. A couple of years later, he didn’t know how to react to it so he told me that story. We weren’t close friends but he told me that story because he needed to tell somebody because that pain had not gone away for many, many, many years.

SA: At one point in the film, Lau Ching-Wan asks "Why can't fate just let go of me?" That question of being helpless and at the mercy of unseen forces is one that recurs often in your films. Would you agree and if so, why do you think that is?

WKF: I think it’s not just in my movies but in life in general. When they feel frustrated, they think, “Why me? Why am I in this position?” This is a topic that everybody faces.

SA: At the same time, that same question always remains for your characters. You don’t see that as a particular preoccupation of yours?

WKF: I think directors know that they can’t avoid fate but because this is something that they don’t understand, I think that some of them try to avoid it. Some filmmakers think that people go to the movies for entertainment, to avoid reality. While some directors go that way, I try to make movies that try to remind my audience of what is closer to reality.

SA: To cope with their grief, the characters in the film resort to recreating their lives through fiction. Many of your films in that sense are about how characters employ coping strategies to get over their emotional instability. Do you see any kind of progression in how the way you think has affected how your characters deal with their personal losses?

WKF: Death in unavoidable so I think that if there’s some change in the way that I’ve [approached the] topic when I was young, maybe I was more poetically thinking about it. Maybe evil cannot beat the good ultimately. As I get older, my thinking has become, “Well, sometimes you can choose.” When death comes at you—because it’s almost inevitable, you can’t do anything about it—maybe that evil doesn’t always get beaten by the good. That’s the change in the way I’ve approached the topic.

SA: In Written By, it eventually becomes impossible to distinguish between fictional characters, ghosts and living people. What is so unique about fiction to you as a form of escapism?

WKF: When I was editing the film after shooting, I followed the thinking of Melody. I tried to give the audience an understanding of what happens to her mindset. Ten years ago, she lost her father and so she’s tried to recover by writing this book but then her mother and brother die, too. One can never imagine how that feels; she must be so lonely. In the two days after her mom and brother die, she has very violent thoughts and they go back-and-forth between the two stories. There’s a violent switch between the two—it could be storming with lightning outside in one moment and then peaceful the next. I tried to do that, which I think leads to what you said about perception and how you can’t distinguish between the two worlds.

SA: How would you say that your own personal beliefs about death and reincarnation affected the way you wrote the script for this film?

WKF: From the day I started to explore this topic of death until now, I realize that there’s more…more…more to it. For me personally, I think death is a terrible thing on its own but it brings meaning to life. Life itself is not meaningful on its own if there wasn’t death. That’s something I’ve realized over the course of making this movie.

SA: Your projects have a large range of different subjects and tones, ranging from comedies to mysteries. Often you mix various different genres in one film. What kind of stories are the most challenging for you? What attracts you to your characters and what kind of stories do you like to tell?

WKF: Every time I start a new movie, I begin with these big topics, big areas that I want to explore. I’ve said this earlier but I believe movies and my projects have life so they are unconventional in the sense that I just let them play out and lead to places that I didn’t think I intentionally meant for them to go. Over time, I noticed that these topics are interconnected.

SA: You’ve worked with Johnnie To on several occasions, most recently on Mad Detective. Your collaborations however all seem somewhat more intricate than most of To’s other films. How is his creative process different than yours and how does that affect the way you two work together?

WKF: To put it simply, I’m initially the creative mind and Johnnie is the producer. In shooting, we’re both there. Johnnie is a genius in that whatever I want to describe, he’ll do that and then capture, once it’s become a visual image, something different. We’ll talk about it and the script and then we’ll look at the footage and then something else will come up. This back-and-forth is a creative dialogue between us and that carries throughout our projects.

SA: You’ve worked with Lau Ching-Wan many times in the past. Do you think when you wrote Written By that you were catering to his strengths and weaknesses?

WKF: Lau Ching-wan and the lawyer are quite similar in their age. Both have a very successful career, a good wife and a family. Over the course of the shooting of the film, he came to me and told me that it was a very tough project for him because it was getting personal. All of a sudden, to go from having what he has to losing his family in the movie—he came to me a couple of times to tell me, “This is almost too much.”

SA: How has making films after the handover of Hong Kong (in 1997) affected the way you make films? How has it affected the way you think about your characters?

WKF: I don’t think it’s so much the turnover that had a great significance (on my filmmaking) but I think it’s a coincidence that at the same time, Hong Kong’s movie business went from [being] so high[ly successful] to so far down. This fall—before, it was Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese investors coming in but in a way that created a lot of restrictions. There were very strict rules about genres, about how a movie is produced because you make this and sell it to the Taiwanese in a certain way.

When all of these (investors) were gone, it gave more freedom to producers in Hong Kong because all of a sudden, you’re not confined to those old rules anymore. There’s more creative freedom and I think that’s a positive thing for Hong Kong.

SA: What contemporary filmmakers do you think have had an impact on you?

WKF: Akira Kurosawa, the director of The Seven Samurai, has had a big influence on me. In terms of contemporary directors: I don’t really spend that much time following them. There isn’t one but there is Dogville, produced by a Dutch director [Lars] Von Trier. That also has had a big impact on me.

SA: You have such a big amount of influence in the Hong Kong filmmaking community. Is there anyone you haven’t worked with yet that you’d like to in the near-future?

WKF: There are these famous Hong Kong siblings, [comedians] Sam and Michael. I’ve had the chance to work with Michael and I knew him from a long time ago but I haven’t had a chance to work with Sam. I was a big fan of theirs since growing up and if there was anyone, he’d be the one. The songs [Sam Hui was also a popular Cantopop singer] also had a big impact on me.
_________________________________
Simon Abrams writes about comics, books and movies for the Comics Journal, the L Magazine, the New York Press and Slant Magazine. Since last year, he's been obsessively keeping a film journal where he writes down something about every film he's seen.

Read more!

By Matt Noller

“It seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies…in be[ing] willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I’m scared about how sappy this’ll look in print, saying this. And the effort to actually to do it, not just talk about it, requires a kind of courage I don’t seem to have yet.”

—David Foster Wallace, quoted by D.T. Max in "The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass Infinite Jest"

***
[SPOILER WARNING: This piece may reveal certain plot elements of Two Lovers. I don't think this would in any way affect a first-time viewing of the film, but consider this a heads-up anyway.]

I’m not going to impress anyone by arguing that we live in a post-modern society. We are aware, perhaps now more than ever before, of not just popular culture but of the mechanisms and processes behind popular culture. It’s not a new phenomenon for works of art to reference other works of art, of course, but only fairly recently has reference in and of itself become culture. What do you say about the style of a director paying homage to, say, Wes Anderson, when Anderson himself is already paying homage to Francois Truffaut, who himself was already paying homage to his own heroes? This type of influence-citing can of course be meaningful and worthwhile, openly honoring the history of one’s predecessors while applying their styles to expressive new forms of discourse; I love Anderson (both Wes and P.T.) and Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers (and so on) and begrudge none their quotations. But it’s harder, if not impossible, to seriously defend Epic Movie and its ilk, or the disingenuous condescension of VH1’s I Love the… series, or a self-consuming celebrity culture in which one can be famous simply for being famous.

Given this, it is easy for ironic detachment to become our dominant attitude. When we’ve become so consciously aware of how our culture functions, it’s tempting not to take any of it seriously. David Foster Wallace wrote and spoke frequently about the difficulty of producing sincere art in such an environment. How to create “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction” (as he wrote in an exceptional essay on Dostoyevsky collected in Wallace’s Consider the Lobster) when anything really emotionally open and direct tends to be rejected as embarrassing or cliché or, even worse, uncool?
_______________________________________
To read the rest of the article at Uh, Movies, click here.

Read more!

By Robert Humanick

I’m sick of this notion that movie critics don’t like to have fun. Like any broad accusation, it's pure cop-out, especially when founded on the basis of but a handful of films, as is usually the case. Though a minority opinion in my circles, I liked the first Transformers. It was big, loud, and dumb in that manner that recalls the childhood ambition of instilling life in one’s toys. More importantly, it stayed just behind the line of headache-inducing excess that stands as the starting point of this new film. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is to its predecessor like a medieval torture chamber is to a playground, but that won’t keep many from swallowing it hook, line and sinker, quickly and indiscriminately. I can only hope that my feelings here are the general consensus—not just for critics, but for human beings. Few elements of Fallen are completely odious unto themselves, but rolled together it becomes a wave of inescapable proportions—a literal tsunami of shit.

I mourn the volume of human life being wasted on this thing. If the film makes $100 million this weekend and tickets cost $10 a pop, that’s ten million viewers and a total of twenty-five million hours, not including previews, travel and the time spent earning the wasted money. If the average person lives to be 75, that’s 38 lives. This seems to me a crime, but even more deeply do I fear the thought of impressionable young minds being subjected to Fallen’s imagination-obliterating, standard-lowering disease—who knows how far the implications of this disaster will reach? With its grade Z humor, dearth of wit and ass-backwards ideological simplicity, this movie has been made with nothing but children in mind—more so the 36-year-old kind than the six-year-old kind, but children nevertheless—in that most contemptuous, “they don’t deserve better” of ways. Showing this thing to young eyes is to deliberately spawn a cinematic crack baby.

Only an asshole could have made this film, or, at the least, a jerk of the most obnoxious and insecure order. Michael Bay has proven this before, and Fallen is his most repugnant creation since Bad Boys II. I pity the people who find these things entertaining. Their synapses must be fried. Like that Will Smith/Martin Lawrence sequel, Fallen is all climax (which is to say, not at all—just what is Bay hoping to compensate for here?), free of anything comparable to pacing, fluctuation in tone, or flow. Make no mistake: this film (and anyone in creative control of it; why, Steven, why?) has nothing but contempt for their audience. It wants to make them feel small and dependent, to eat garbage and ask for more. Calling it the death of cinema would be an insult to cinema; film thrives, and will outlive even the biggest of dumps taken on it. Nevertheless, it is an affront of the greatest order, and it will take years of scrubbing to get the stain out.

Is this what we need to “escape”? Frankly, if Fallen proves anything, it’s that we don’t live in the real world enough as it is. On the idiot scale, it ranks off the charts. Walter Chaw points out the throwaway sound byte in which the film’s military forces, thus the audience, are reminded that the Egyptian citizens in the film are “friendlies.” I was already aware that a large chunk of Americans still think all Middle Easterners are terrorists, but a little bit of me dies inside every time our collective stupidity is reinforced. Even worse is the film’s wallowing in mass destruction—why not just stay at home, microwave some popcorn and YouTube clips from 9/11? This isn’t entertainment so much as exploitation of our political moment (don’t even get me started on Roland Emmerich’s 2012, the preview for which precedes Bay’s film in most theaters), with Bay acting as some kind of perverse ringleader, savoring every massive body count like the kid next door did his dismantled and blown-up toys in Toy Story.

Fallen has no connection to real life—only the pipe dream kind Hollywood has successfully programmed the masses to think is actually attainable. Like McDonald’s, cigarettes and post-'80s MTV, the film trades exclusively in the unhealthy and mass-produced, and like Pavlovian dogs we’re supposed to sit there and lap up Bay’s hideous potpourri sideshow: gangsta Transformers with buck gold teeth, fire-farting household appliances, suburban moms too stupid to know when they’ve bought pot brownies and preps deemed pussies because they break down in the face of death. I don’t doubt that these things could have been delivered in a manner somewhat resembling actual humor with the proper sleight of hand, but these clashing elements amount to nothing more than button pushing punchlines in the context of Bay’s rapid-fire technical assault. Fallen fails as a throwback to childhood fun because its maker never grew up in the first place, and like an overgrown man-child, it’s a case of arrested development that will likely be cured only in death.

The word bombastic applies even before one considers the attempts at action spectacle: pure visual noise, Bay once again proves unable to compose or orchestrate a damn thing that could be called even remotely coherent or linear. Admittedly, by the halfway point of the final desert battle, I gave up trying or caring and simply prayed for the end. I mean, Jesus Christ, zoom out a little! These are ten-story robots slugging it out (something I actually want to *see*), and more than half the time we’re confined to the upper torso region, barely able to follow the fist-fighting progress of it all until the typically out-of-nowhere killing stroke. Sure, if you focus hard enough, you get the idea, but whereas the unfairly maligned Speed Racer was simply edited with too sharp a razor for most to follow (or to even care to try), Fallen splatters on the screen like diarrhea about a porcelain bowl. Action scene starts, things move constantly for a period of time, action scene ends. Exposition. Toilet humor. Do not rinse. Repeat.

Few things help to cement a film’s atrocity more so than feelings of déjà vu, and Transformers 2 hits that nail on the head. Though less awful than Bad Boys II (one of the four or five worst things I’ve ever seen), the film remains cut from the same rancid cloth—one that soaks into your bones and makes you feel every godforsaken second of its padded running time. When I first saw Bay’s 2003 sequel, I abstained from checking my watch as long as seemed physically possible; when I finally glanced down, I saw, to my eternal horror, that only an hour had managed to pass. The same scenario occurred this past Wednesday morning: as I darted out of the theater to relieve my bladder, my cell phone confirmed that, indeed, not even half of the torment had yet unfolded. Jesus must have felt the same way in Hell on Friday.

_________________________________________________
House contributor Robert Humanick's writings appear in Slant Magazine and on his blog The Projection Booth.

Read more!

A video essay by Michael Joshua Rowin and Matt Zoller Seitz

_________________________________
To view the video at The L's website, click here. To read a transcript of Rowin's narration, click here.

Read more!

Two icons. Two deaths within hours of each other. Please share your thoughts and remembrances in the comments section.

Read more!

By N.P. Thompson

[Chéri opens tomorrow in select theaters.]

There was a brief spell in the late 1980s when Michelle Pfeiffer had me completely enamored. Granted, our romance lasted only two films, Married to the Mob and The Fabulous Baker Boys, but that is longer than some romances last, whether onscreen or in life.

I haven’t seen either movie for well over ten years; I’ve no idea if I would recognize in them now what spoke to me so clearly then, but in the summer of ’88, seeing Married to the Mob, what would prove to be Jonathan Demme’s last film of pure delight before he turned falsely serious, became almost a weekly ritual, with me slipping into matinees six or seven times. In retrospect, it may have been the animus between Mercedes Ruehl and Dean Stockwell that kept me coming back for more, and most of what gave Mob its kick—its subliminal weirdness, such as the Chris Isaak robbery sequence—had nothing to do with Pfeiffer. Nonetheless, the actress stopped being merely pretty when she worked with Demme and later with Steve Kloves in his valentine to jazz obscurity: she became interesting, too, and after having left few traces through monotonous films for nearly a decade, she had morphed into a fine, light comedienne capable of depth and empathy. And, yes, was stunningly beautiful as well, which rarely hurts. In 1993, Pfeiffer’s reticent, fragile qualities seemed exactly right for the hounded, disgraced Countess Olenska in Martin Scorsese’s off-the-mark adaptation of Edith Wharton’s great novel, The Age of Innocence. (Among other things, the humorless Scorsese completely missed Wharton’s satirical wit, flattening out her incisive lampoons of Old Money, and worse still, scoring a narrative set in the 1870s to Enya—an anachronism as unwelcome as it was uninspired.) Following The Age of Innocence, though, Pfeiffer’s choice of roles grew depressingly mainstream. I stayed away from her films. For some reason, I did catch Jocelyn Moorhouse’s deplorable A Thousand Acres (1997), a movie so heinous it finished off not only my interest in Pfeiffer, but in Jessica Lange to boot. And now, twelve years later, comes Chéri, which, as we all know, reunites our beloved leading lady with the director Stephen Frears and the scenarist Christopher Hampton with whom she collaborated on Dangerous Liaisons twenty-one years ago. I arrived at the screening hoping for reasons to worship at the altar.

It isn’t fair to ask a woman of 50 still to be as sexy and desirable as she was at 30. Some women, true, manage this without missing a trick, getting more alluring as they age. I don’t think that has quite happened with Pfeiffer—not as she’s made to look in Chéri anyway. Even so, her physical appearance here is fair game for criticism precisely because that’s mainly what Chéri concerns itself with. Yet before that, there’s this: the movie is ignominiously bad. Not shrill and offensive, as in Mrs. Henderson Presents, but miscast, poorly acted, poorly written, and “directed” in such a stillborn slog that I wondered if Frears were having an out-of-body experience on the set. On those occasions in the past when Frears seemed to have a strong personality as a filmmaker, the personality invariably belonged to someone else—to Hanif Kureishi, or more recently to Peter Morgan in The Queen, Frears’s most impeccable creation to date. The problems with Chéri, conversely, begin with the shallowness of Hampton’s writing. I haven’t read the two Colette novels that Hampton adapts, but if nothing else, his hack job inspires me to delve into the source, to find out for myself what the French novelist was aiming for in examining middle-aged former courtesans, women who amassed their fortunes largely on the power of their looks. In Hampton’s hands, however, the scenario plays off a once-beautiful woman’s fear of shriveling up into a monstrous hag, which could be valid subject matter were it not for the palpable creepshow aura that Hampton and Frears glaze onto the proceedings: neither man evinces the slightest affection for or understanding of women. As with the issue of the loss of Christian faith in Dangerous Liaisons, Hampton approaches complexities of the heart and mind entirely from the outside in, and then as now, that is why his screenplays fail to convince.

Chéri begins inauspiciously, with a voice-over done by an Englishman in a faux-upper crust style that strives to be light in tone and entertaining, filling us in on the back-story of Belle Époque prostitutes and alerting us to all the decadent naughtiness that’s supposedly ahead. For a moment, I thought Chéri would be another godforsaken marionette show a la Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “Today,” the narrator pipes up, spoon-feeding the viewer overstuffed morsels bit by bit, “she was visiting her former colleague and feared rival.” This type of dismal anti-storytelling shows no faith in either the material to assert itself or the audience to figure it out, yet mercifully, Frears drops the voice-over, for the most part, until the very end when he needs a quick way out of the picture. Left on their own, Pfeiffer, as Léa de Lonval, and Kathy Bates, as Madame Peloux, a pair of drawing-room “frenemies,” trade stiff repartee. The often excellent Bates, who was the best reason to endure the insufferable Revolutionary Road, couldn’t be more unsuited to a frothy, costume period piece. We’re intended to take Peloux as a manipulative vulgarian; the designer, Consolata Boyle, rigs Bates up in a parade of grotesque outfits of frilly brocade that over-emphasize the actress’s plump figure and high neck lines that contort her soft cheeks into quivering mounds of flesh. Which might matter less if Bates had a handle on the role; stranded by Frears, she’s way off pitch. What’s worse, she and Pfeiffer, throughout their several scenes together, have zero rapport. They don’t convey a sense of women who’ve known and competed with each other all their adult lives, and neither demonstrates inner strength, so that their shared intimacies and parlor game rivalries aren’t merely weightless, they feel uninhabited, as if the screen were going blank.

Pfeiffer has to share in the blame for this. When first we spy her, standing alone on her balcony at night, Pfeiffer’s Léa looks wistfully lovely, and she has a winsome moment as she slips between the silks in her boudoir, asking her faithful maid, “Is there anything better than a bed all to oneself?” Soon enough, though, it’s apparent that Pfeiffer’s heart isn’t in Hampton’s un-artful dodges. Gaunt rather than svelte, she seems like a stranger. And she (deliberately?) brings nothing to the part, thus agitating the alienation effect into high gear. She reads her lines sans enthusiasm, at times sounding nearly as nasal as Gwyneth Paltrow, in a voice so thin I expected it to crack and wither like parchment. I kept waiting for a sign that the old/young Pfeiffer still lurked within, yet if she’s there, the actress withholds that part of herself.

What Pfeiffer can’t be blamed for are the sins that the camera and the make-up artist perpetrate. I would love to know what lens the cinematographer Darius Khondji used to make the star’s skin so creaseless while at the same time going gauzily adrift at the four corners of the frame. I’ve marveled at Khondji’s work in the past, most recently in Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, and summer in Central Park has rarely looked more beguiling on film than as Khondji shot it in Woody Allen’s underrated Anything Else. The outdoor scenes in Chéri, alas, present us with greenery bathed in lemon light, the focus warped around the edges, as if the forest were falling prey to funhouse mirrors. I’m guessing that Khondji might have wanted to evoke a sense of Alphonse Mucha’s poster art, with the light defusing through shades of golden brown and yellow, and with Léa, the flowing-tressed muse at their center. It’s an odd effect, though, and I was never taken in by it. Where the filmmakers, in their concerted effort at fostering the illusion that Pfeiffer retains her youth, truly negate their intentions lies in the handiwork of make-up designer Daniel Phillips, who coats Pfeiffer’s face with such heavy foundation that it lends her countenance a distinctly unhealthy, pale grey pallor—rather as if she had been embalmed. All this jazz in the press, such as the computer-generated Vanity Fair puff piece proclaiming her “still smoldering hot” is just wishful publicizing.

In the third major role, as the boy whom Léa nicknames Chéri, the longhaired, thin-lipped Rupert Friend comes across more as early ‘80s glam than turn of the last century bon vivant. With his milky complexion, pouty persona, dark locks, and a singular talent for sucking down cigarettes, Friend suggests a Duran Duran cover band hopeful. To say that the movie rides on his ass literally as well as figuratively would not be an exaggeration. In the absence of insight or compelling characterization, Frears and Hampton bank all their hopes on the sex scenes between Friend and Pfeiffer, and on Friend’s contrived nudity in general. (It was someone’s idea that Friend play out a lover’s quarrel while towel-drying his fluffy armpits.) Unfortunately, for this viewer, at least, the couplings between Pfeiffer, born in 1958, and Friend, born in 1981, carry no erotic frissons at all. If I found the boy attractive, there might be some joy in watching Pfeiffer bed down with a kid young enough to be her son. Friend, however, isn’t an exciting physical presence, and no matter how frequently he’s bandied about bare-chested, or fetishized when smoking, he doesn’t become any less un-exciting. Colette, according to Hampton, was going for a reversal of gender traits, with the man being soft and docile while his businesswoman paramour held all the cards. With Pfeiffer and Friend in the roles, their performances are interchangeably androgynous; there’s no heat.

________________________________
Earlier this month, House contributor N.P. Thompson wrote about Julia and Outrage. Amazingly, he liked them both. He also photo blogs at Centuries Since the Day.

Read more!