What a difference a decade makes. The last time the AFI hosted one of their top 100 films of all-time lists I was 17 and the concept of a definitive list of “the greatest” films ever (in some semblance of ranking order) felt like something of a valuable resource. Finally that bar bet could be settled over what’s the better film: Fantasia or The African Queen. Furthermore, the AFI itself struck me as a vaunted institution who merely by virtue of hosting a bloated, self-congratulatory special akin to the Academy Awards, must surely be worth taking seriously.
And once upon a time, that AFI list served an important purpose: it guilt-tripped me the fickle adolescent into the “classics” section of the video store where I received my first exposure to Wilder, Capra, Ford, Huston, and Lean. Before the AFI I’d never experience the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, James Dean, Humphrey Bogart or Clark Gable. And, a part of me hopes there are teenagers out there who will take this new list to heart the way I did and search out some of the films that aren’t familiar to them.
But really now, this thing is such horseshit.
There’s a few way of looking at the decision to revisit this AFI list a scant decade after the last one was published. AFI is claiming it’s an opportunity to observe the way films can grown and change in our perception over time. Nice thought, but really is a decade going to make Casablanca seem like less of a classic? What cultural cross-winds are blowing that will make Gone with the Wind fall from #4 ten years ago to #6 now? (it’s still one of the 10 best films of all time… only a little less so) One should read between the lines here as, the list smacks of Monday morning revisionism with most of the list’s most radical changes geared towards addressing the most vocal complaints brought up by the last list.
Gone are dated and not especially well-regarded musicals An American in Paris and My Fair Lady, replaced by dated and slightly better regarded (this year anyway) play adaptations Twelve Angry Men and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? Forgettable, curiously-championed best picture winners Amadeus and Dances with Wolves have been given the boot while Ben Hur barely hangs on, plummeting from 72 to 100 as the list caters to the fanboy sect making room for one of the Lord of the Rings, Blade Runner (not that I'm complaining) and The Sixth Sense (really?). Somehow through all of this Forrest Gump remains.
Granted, this year’s model is a little bit less clueless as far as placing sacred cows willy-nilly on the list. The Searchers which was embarrassingly for all involved placed in the 90’s on the last list is now #12. Vertigo, which despite its indifference from the general public is considered by film scholars to be Hitchcock’s most accomplished work, gets the bump from #61 to just inside the top 10. Unforgiven also benefited greatly from Clint’s time in the public eye over the past five years, moving from a head-scratching 98 to 68. Most commendable is the inclusion of Buster Keaton’s The General at #18 after not even making the last list (even if I personally prefer Sherlock, Jr which sadly is not on the list).
But even a lot of the “fixes” feel misguided, and driven more by populous than any real critical assessment. Is there anyone alive who honestly considers Star Wars a better film than its sequel The Empire Strikes Back, or is it simply easier to rubber-stamp the first film as a place holder for the whole series? You could say the same thing for the inclusion of Fellowship of the Ring which, despite being my personal favorite of the Lord of the Rings trilogy isn’t the one with 11 Oscars and a billion in box office. Chosen to represent 1999, arguably the best year cinema had since the 70’s we get The Sixth Sense? Hell, forget about the year 1999: chosen to represent the horror genre they went with The Sixth Sense over The Exorcist? When the AFI did its list of the greatest horror films (excuse me, “greatest thrills”) it placed The Exorcist at #3 and The Sixth Sense at #60. How this all comes out in the wash like this I have no clue.
For every addition that’s commendable there’s an addition that’s just plain retarded. Sophie’s Choice is one of the 100 best films of all-time? If you say so. I’m pleased beyond words they got rid of the embarrassing cultural relic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner but they replaced it with an equal antiquated Sidney Poitier race-relations flick from the same year, In the Heat of the Night, which I can pretty much guarantee no one’s been hankering to watch in the past 40 years (1967 offered a wealth of great films, either Cool Hand Luke or In Cold Blood would have been much better choices). Titanic makes the list but L.A. Confidential doesn’t, proving once and for all nothing makes a film a classic like bilking millions of teenage girls out of their allowance. And can someone please explain to me how Tootsie keeps showing up on these lists (boy is that film attracting buzzards) but Broadcast News, which just gets more prescient with each passing day, is a no-show?
I could go on and on, but you get the point. AFI is subsidized by the big studios and by putting on this annual dog and pony show it raises rentals of the studio’s catalogues so this isn’t really about promoting the best of anything, but rather creating instant revenue right around the time the studios are taking a bath on over-budgeted shit in theaters. In fact the only reason I bothered watching any of it (albeit with the generous help of Tivo) is the rumor that a certain 25-year-old sci-fi film which made a surprise appearance on the list would be getting a spiffy new trailer unveiled during the program. Speaking of which…
YouTube will no doubt take this down in the next few days, because heaven forbid someone post A FUCKING ADVERTISEMENT on the web. Because it would be awful if maybe someone saw this thing and maybe got excited to buy a product. Anyway, assuming the above imbedded video is still up, I encourage everyone to watch the new trailer for the Blade Runner theatrical re-release/DVD release which is due later this year. It made me unconscionably happy. I’m not especially vocal about it, but Blade Runner quietly became my de-facto response to the fairly stupid question “what’s your favorite movie?” over the past few years but I’ve been forcing myself not to watch it in anticipation of the bells and whistles treatment it was rumored to be receiving from Warner Brothers.
The film is notoriously difficult to crack and complaints that it’s more interested in set design than story aren’t exactly correct but are certainly easy to understand. The film values mood over clarity and atmosphere over pacing so if you’re not paying attention you’re likely to grow frustrated. Even I was fairly indifferent to the film the first time I saw a lousy VHS copy of the film. But the film stays with you. It’s both deeply poetic and unspeakably ugly. Nihilistic yet profoundly human. I’ve heard rumors that Ridley Scott filmed new scenes for the new edit, but I suspect this will be more along the lines of the work done on the Alien re-release a few years back, consisting of minor tweaks simply to conform to contemporary viewing practices (I expect the Young/Ford romance which never played especially well to be tightened and hopefully they’ll ditch Vangelis’ shitty, smooth jazz score during these interludes). Mostly I’m excited by seeing the film re-mastered and projected on film at Arclight sometime this fall and eventually owning an elephantine dvd package containing every piece of minutia compiled on the film.
Oh and as an aside, I can’t help but giggle at the irony of this thing being scored with music from The Fountain. Someone at Warner Brothers marketing has a heck of a sense of humor.
Saturday, June 23, 2007
The myth of the active blogger
Much to my disappointment, the promise of regular blog appearances by yours truly has withered on the vine somewhat, especially those arriving during the work-week. My after-hours resolve is somewhat lacking as more often than not I find myself crashing before 11 these days (frankly I blame the heat which is bordering on oppressive and it’s not even July). I can only be thankful I’m not under the gun of weekly Lost articles anymore as I’m so punch-drunk and bleary-eyed lately they’d probably just descend into protracted apologies (kind of like this entry). I suspect for the time being my updates will be limited to quick bursts primarily written on the weekends.
Monday, June 11, 2007
I slipped
Like a recovering alcoholic who crossed a pub and couldn’t keep walking I had a relapse this weekend and saw two lousy sequels, after going a few weeks now without coming within spitting distance of your various Shrek’s and Pirates. And like most relapses, after the initial high passed, I felt guilty and hollowed out and my head hurt. Sometime you need these sorts of experiences just to remind yourself of why you’re abstaining in the first place.
So what did I see? As expected I wavered and ultimately succumbed to the alleged breezy cool and stylish “fun” of Ocean’s 13 which wins the truth in advertising award by being proclaimed as “better than the last one.” True enough, although as Ocean’s 12 was two hours of some of the richest movie stars in the world tonguing their own assholes in lavish locations while wearing fitted suits, I’m searching my brain for a scenario where this wouldn’t be the case. An improvement yeah, but it’s not especially interesting even by the standards of the heist film which is a huge weakness of mine.
The question of the day is at what point did “cool” become a synonym for laziness? Ocean’s 13 doesn’t have confidence so much as it does indifference towards the comprehension and clarity of its own story. It reminds me of the title cards inserted into old films when a reel has gone missing, explaining what was excised. Ocean’s 13 should be littered with them reading “the gang does something clever to arrive at this new destination.” It’s not that I’m absolutely dying to know how, say, Brad Pitt winds up dressed as a security guard behind the scenes of an ultra-secure casino (which then allows him access to a helipad which will come into play later) or how Don Cheadle stumbles across an army helicopter. It’s that the film so completely takes for granted the fundamental brush strokes, only to pause for smug navel gazing (say getting weepy-eyed over Oprah), that in the end nothing’s especially impressive as most of the particulars have fallen into the screenwriters’ black holes. Since we’re never allowed into the film’s inner circle, because let’s face it, we’re just not cool enough to hang with these guys, there’s no tension to the film as we have no sense of what is or is not working. No one has to think quickly on their feet here as everything will go exactly as planned, even the events which clearly hinge upon failure.
Plus can someone please explain to me why the film’s bona-fide stars feel the need to disappear into their own movie. It goes without saying that in a film with this many character some are bound to get the short-shift (what part exactly is Bernie Mac playing in this particular heist? Anyone?), but Clooney, Pitt and Damon essentially recede into the background having been reduced to the roles of pimps and chauffeurs while Casey Affleck and Scott Caan run themselves ragged (it really is their film) and Cheadle gets to march out a procession of increasingly silly accents. Once upon a time everyone had a role to play and watching them excel at it was half the fun, now half the crew is on hand simply to stand around and look cool while the gimbals fall into place.
Furthermore, big time points off for a) essentially slipping Ellen Barkin Spanish fly and treating it as a joke and b) not even paying off the joke. Perhaps if the character was treated as something other than a pair of fake tits and a bobbed haircut than the urge to return to her may have been greater but really, what’s gained by reducing her to the role of horned up sorority girl and then pushing her off stage right (especially when Damon’s curious exit from the film would seem to be perfect for a rendezvous).
If I had moderate hopes for Ocean’s 13 then I had none for Hostel part II from Newton, Massachusetts’ favorite boorish frat boy, Eli Roth. Frankly I wish the film annoyed me as much as it clearly does some as I’ll take anger over boredom any day of the week. It amazes me how Roth continuously squanders this premise, which never really lives up to the Grand Guignol portent and prolonged, imaginative death set pieces the film clearly aspires to. Offensive less for the scenes of violence than for the sexual politics; the film isn’t smart enough to be a cautionary tale so it places its menagerie of leering Euro-trash hard-on’s right on the surface with only one of our heroines immune to the “charms” of the locals, and that’s only because it’s hinted she’s into girls (meaning her object of affection is a lipstick lesbian, femme fatale with a tendency to get naked). Sex is still either a boogey man or meant to invoke titters and as always it’s the ignorance of the characters which serve as their undoing. The greatest act of violation the film can conceive of is castration be garden sheers (in loving detail). Etc…
The film carbon copies the structure of the original with an unbearable amount of time dedicated to the film’s allegedly sympathetic victims, who’ve been granted a single personality trait a piece (with the exception of Lauren German who’s been given none other than “she’s the one who’s gonna live”) only for them to be plucked off in quick succession in the third act. The film actually has an interesting idea though in following Roger Bart and Richard Burgi’s mild-mannered, suburban businessmen on their journey to the killing floor (there’s even a really nicely cut, albeit not especially original, interlude showing them psyching themselves up like a couple of drunken college seniors on the prowl scored to classical music) but it serves more as a B-storyline to flesh out its villains instead of really warping the audience allegiances. The film never succeeds in getting behind what type of person gets off on torturing beautiful young women (like our director Mr. Roth clearly does) nor do any of its Abu Ghraib-like stabs at Western entitlement and corruption come close to hitting the target. In the end it’s another assembly-line junker no matter how much auteur clout Roth appears to have earned.
Next week no Fantastic Four 2 or Evan Almighty. Scouts honor.
So what did I see? As expected I wavered and ultimately succumbed to the alleged breezy cool and stylish “fun” of Ocean’s 13 which wins the truth in advertising award by being proclaimed as “better than the last one.” True enough, although as Ocean’s 12 was two hours of some of the richest movie stars in the world tonguing their own assholes in lavish locations while wearing fitted suits, I’m searching my brain for a scenario where this wouldn’t be the case. An improvement yeah, but it’s not especially interesting even by the standards of the heist film which is a huge weakness of mine.
The question of the day is at what point did “cool” become a synonym for laziness? Ocean’s 13 doesn’t have confidence so much as it does indifference towards the comprehension and clarity of its own story. It reminds me of the title cards inserted into old films when a reel has gone missing, explaining what was excised. Ocean’s 13 should be littered with them reading “the gang does something clever to arrive at this new destination.” It’s not that I’m absolutely dying to know how, say, Brad Pitt winds up dressed as a security guard behind the scenes of an ultra-secure casino (which then allows him access to a helipad which will come into play later) or how Don Cheadle stumbles across an army helicopter. It’s that the film so completely takes for granted the fundamental brush strokes, only to pause for smug navel gazing (say getting weepy-eyed over Oprah), that in the end nothing’s especially impressive as most of the particulars have fallen into the screenwriters’ black holes. Since we’re never allowed into the film’s inner circle, because let’s face it, we’re just not cool enough to hang with these guys, there’s no tension to the film as we have no sense of what is or is not working. No one has to think quickly on their feet here as everything will go exactly as planned, even the events which clearly hinge upon failure.
Plus can someone please explain to me why the film’s bona-fide stars feel the need to disappear into their own movie. It goes without saying that in a film with this many character some are bound to get the short-shift (what part exactly is Bernie Mac playing in this particular heist? Anyone?), but Clooney, Pitt and Damon essentially recede into the background having been reduced to the roles of pimps and chauffeurs while Casey Affleck and Scott Caan run themselves ragged (it really is their film) and Cheadle gets to march out a procession of increasingly silly accents. Once upon a time everyone had a role to play and watching them excel at it was half the fun, now half the crew is on hand simply to stand around and look cool while the gimbals fall into place.
Furthermore, big time points off for a) essentially slipping Ellen Barkin Spanish fly and treating it as a joke and b) not even paying off the joke. Perhaps if the character was treated as something other than a pair of fake tits and a bobbed haircut than the urge to return to her may have been greater but really, what’s gained by reducing her to the role of horned up sorority girl and then pushing her off stage right (especially when Damon’s curious exit from the film would seem to be perfect for a rendezvous).
If I had moderate hopes for Ocean’s 13 then I had none for Hostel part II from Newton, Massachusetts’ favorite boorish frat boy, Eli Roth. Frankly I wish the film annoyed me as much as it clearly does some as I’ll take anger over boredom any day of the week. It amazes me how Roth continuously squanders this premise, which never really lives up to the Grand Guignol portent and prolonged, imaginative death set pieces the film clearly aspires to. Offensive less for the scenes of violence than for the sexual politics; the film isn’t smart enough to be a cautionary tale so it places its menagerie of leering Euro-trash hard-on’s right on the surface with only one of our heroines immune to the “charms” of the locals, and that’s only because it’s hinted she’s into girls (meaning her object of affection is a lipstick lesbian, femme fatale with a tendency to get naked). Sex is still either a boogey man or meant to invoke titters and as always it’s the ignorance of the characters which serve as their undoing. The greatest act of violation the film can conceive of is castration be garden sheers (in loving detail). Etc…
The film carbon copies the structure of the original with an unbearable amount of time dedicated to the film’s allegedly sympathetic victims, who’ve been granted a single personality trait a piece (with the exception of Lauren German who’s been given none other than “she’s the one who’s gonna live”) only for them to be plucked off in quick succession in the third act. The film actually has an interesting idea though in following Roger Bart and Richard Burgi’s mild-mannered, suburban businessmen on their journey to the killing floor (there’s even a really nicely cut, albeit not especially original, interlude showing them psyching themselves up like a couple of drunken college seniors on the prowl scored to classical music) but it serves more as a B-storyline to flesh out its villains instead of really warping the audience allegiances. The film never succeeds in getting behind what type of person gets off on torturing beautiful young women (like our director Mr. Roth clearly does) nor do any of its Abu Ghraib-like stabs at Western entitlement and corruption come close to hitting the target. In the end it’s another assembly-line junker no matter how much auteur clout Roth appears to have earned.
Next week no Fantastic Four 2 or Evan Almighty. Scouts honor.
Friday, June 8, 2007
A Mighty Heart
Don’t let the existence of this blog entry fool you: I have astoundingly little to say about this film. It’s an average procedural in almost every regard that’s elevated by arguably the first great performance of Angelina Jolie’s career. Looking back, Jolie’s one of those performers who’s famous even though no one really likes any of her films (she’s essentially the female equivalent of Colin Ferrell), but this may be the first great movie star performance of her career, ironically so as director Michael Winterbottom is doing everything in his power to dispel the notion. Filmed in scatter-shot, handheld digital, Jolie is often placed at the edge of the frame, her face turned away from the camera as if she’s shielding herself from our rubber-necking. When Marianne Pearl retreats to her room to rage against Danny’s killing, her animalistic wails are a slap in the face to Oscar-clip ready emoting and the concept of tidy, cinematic mourning.
More than just crying on cue though Jolie nails the stubbornness and righteous indignation of the character that won’t allow her the time to pity herself. It’s hard to think of a character in this position coming across as unlikable but what the film does is refuse to place the character in the role of the victim until there’s absolutely nothing left to be done, allowing her to lash out and be human while living under a microscope. This is quietly strong work with the character serving as the taciturn center for the flurry of investigators and family friends that circle around and bounce off of her. The years spent working for the UN and cultivating Noah’s ark of third world children have served the actress well; her moral authority shines through in every scene.
The rest of the film could have benefited from Jolie’s conviction. Framed by Marianne’s narration (at one point even speaking to the fact that we’re watching a film) the film can’t help but come across as a movie of the week (even its very title smacks of Lifetime). Winterbottom borrows more than a few visual touchstones from Michael Mann, but lacks the latter’s propulsive style or poetic digressions. Furthermore, the entire film is dedicated to the idea of watching a woman confront impending doom, teasing out when the hammer above her head will finally fall. And unlike such films as United 93 or Letters from Iwo Jima where the filmmaker is given the opportunity to expand upon a confusing or alien period of our national history, there’s really little to tell beyond the dimming hope with each passing day of Pearl safe return. I’m sure this story needed to be told, I just don’t know that I needed to see it.
More than just crying on cue though Jolie nails the stubbornness and righteous indignation of the character that won’t allow her the time to pity herself. It’s hard to think of a character in this position coming across as unlikable but what the film does is refuse to place the character in the role of the victim until there’s absolutely nothing left to be done, allowing her to lash out and be human while living under a microscope. This is quietly strong work with the character serving as the taciturn center for the flurry of investigators and family friends that circle around and bounce off of her. The years spent working for the UN and cultivating Noah’s ark of third world children have served the actress well; her moral authority shines through in every scene.
The rest of the film could have benefited from Jolie’s conviction. Framed by Marianne’s narration (at one point even speaking to the fact that we’re watching a film) the film can’t help but come across as a movie of the week (even its very title smacks of Lifetime). Winterbottom borrows more than a few visual touchstones from Michael Mann, but lacks the latter’s propulsive style or poetic digressions. Furthermore, the entire film is dedicated to the idea of watching a woman confront impending doom, teasing out when the hammer above her head will finally fall. And unlike such films as United 93 or Letters from Iwo Jima where the filmmaker is given the opportunity to expand upon a confusing or alien period of our national history, there’s really little to tell beyond the dimming hope with each passing day of Pearl safe return. I’m sure this story needed to be told, I just don’t know that I needed to see it.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Valley Gall
Question of the day:
If Paul Haggis directs a film and it’s only half the train wreck that Crash was, should I be encouraged or disappointed?
I’m not going to get into too much Haggis bashing here as, by the time Crash won a stunning best picture victory over heavy favorite Brokeback Mountain last year, you’d have sworn the guy was a WWII conspirator who hated puppies and democracy instead of the director of a terrible and inexplicably awarded film. Haggis is part of a long tradition of cinema as diatribe, which some have confused as social consciousness. Regardless, no matter how flawed the final results invariably have been, I can’t deny that it springs from a source of good intention and a misguided belief that one film can change the world.
There’s also the issue that Haggis, an affable fellow by all outward appearances who even poked fun at himself in an "Entourage" episode, has written or co-written some of the best films to come out in the past few years, particularly his work with Clint Eastwood (it’s easy to forget how beloved Million Dollar Baby is even with the most hardened of cynics in the wake of Crash) and last year’s Bond revival Casino Royale. The problem is Haggis tendencies as a writer usually err on the side of pat characterizations and cute, Syd Field-ian storytelling devices that better filmmakers have the common sense to barrel right over whereas Haggis the director seems to wallow in them.
Haggis’ latest film In the Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, due in September) is not an awful film because it lacks the ambition and delusions of grandeur required to be an awful film. The film finds Haggis narrowing his scope from (in all capital letters) LIFE AND RACE IN L.A. to a rather intimate procedural that makes clumsy if predictably toothless swipes at the war in Iraq before an embarrassingly gooey (and poorly telegraphed) denouement. Essentially this is “A Few Bad Men” with Tommy Lee Jones channeling a Paul Schrader protagonist as he leaves the safety of his Middle America cocoon to investigate the murder and mutilation of his son near a southern military base, where he finds the U.S. military in full-on, cover its own ass mode.
It’s actually not a bad idea (albeit a fairly derivative one) and Tommy Lee’s given a plum part as a Vietnam vet and military lifer who's so ramrod straight that he remakes his hotel bed to comply with military standards and would rather grab a wet shirt out of the dryer than be seen in his undershirt by someone of the opposite sex. Jones has been playing variations on ornery and crotchety for thirty-years now but he gets some wiggle room here, finding humor in the understated, plainspoken demeanor of the character. More interesting is his losing battle with his own rage and slow realization that the son he’s pushed into a life in the military may not be the boy he sent off to war.
The problem with the film is it’s trying to be all things to all people with no one particular element executed especially well. Partnered with Jones’ character is Charlize Theron (in mousy earth-tones) whom the film dedicates an inordinate amount of time to as the female homicide detective who may or may not have slept her way into the department and must now prove her worth to her loutish male colleagues (and yes, maybe even to herself). If you put a gun to my head, I swear I couldn’t come up with a subplot in film history less interesting, yet the film keeps cutting away from its central mystery (hell, even leaving its rather vague thematic safety net of “war is hell”) to dwell on Charlize and her father-less son, Charlize the conflicted cop, Charlize the department doormat getting her grove back, etc…
Furthermore, once the film establishes the Jones’ kid is legitimately dead (the way the body is presented, I half expected him to show up in the third act) the guilty parties are readily apparent simply by virtue of what type of film this is, making the string of red herrings thrown in our path utterly transparent. I’m weary of condemning the film too heavily because issues with the film’s languid pacing will likely be addressed in the next few months (almost half the questions on the survey spoke to film length and scenes that may or may not have dragged), but it’s doubtful even with judicious editing they’ll be able to cut around the series of “A-ha!” revelations. What I gather is meant to be a stirring indictment of sociopath disassociation ends up coming across as warmed over Abu Ghraib bedtime stories, made all the more annoying by the fact that the film’s delivery system of each withering indictment of war is through one of the lamest devices imaginable (let’s just say when you’re fighting in a war it’s probably doubtful you’re going to be running the video function on your cell phone while providing a play-by-play narration during each skirmish and insertion).
But the larger issue here, albeit one that doesn’t reveal itself till the final act, is the self-congratulatory tone which elevated Crash from the level of good-intentioned but naïve to abhorrent and smug grandstanding. Jones’ character fought in Vietnam yet he seems oblivious to the idea of war crimes, torture, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, spending much of the film as the proverbial babe in the woods who’s shaken to the core but what he learns what the boys are doing over there while “spreading democracy.” Haggis is too canny a fence-sitter to lay blame on the soldiers themselves, essentially waving the white flag (as it were) at the whole concept of war, distilling his entire message down to “the whole situation’s fucked” which is exactly the sort of empty rhetoric that can generate lazy swells of applause without actually engaging with the overriding problem.
Is this really what a Hollywood liberal views as a wake-up call for Middle America, with Tommy Lee the last Red-Stater to finally get the message? In the Valley of Elah isn’t the blunt instrument swung in the name of shallow discourse that Crash was but the motion of the swing is every bit as clumsy.
If Paul Haggis directs a film and it’s only half the train wreck that Crash was, should I be encouraged or disappointed?
I’m not going to get into too much Haggis bashing here as, by the time Crash won a stunning best picture victory over heavy favorite Brokeback Mountain last year, you’d have sworn the guy was a WWII conspirator who hated puppies and democracy instead of the director of a terrible and inexplicably awarded film. Haggis is part of a long tradition of cinema as diatribe, which some have confused as social consciousness. Regardless, no matter how flawed the final results invariably have been, I can’t deny that it springs from a source of good intention and a misguided belief that one film can change the world.
There’s also the issue that Haggis, an affable fellow by all outward appearances who even poked fun at himself in an "Entourage" episode, has written or co-written some of the best films to come out in the past few years, particularly his work with Clint Eastwood (it’s easy to forget how beloved Million Dollar Baby is even with the most hardened of cynics in the wake of Crash) and last year’s Bond revival Casino Royale. The problem is Haggis tendencies as a writer usually err on the side of pat characterizations and cute, Syd Field-ian storytelling devices that better filmmakers have the common sense to barrel right over whereas Haggis the director seems to wallow in them.
Haggis’ latest film In the Valley of Elah (Warner Independent, due in September) is not an awful film because it lacks the ambition and delusions of grandeur required to be an awful film. The film finds Haggis narrowing his scope from (in all capital letters) LIFE AND RACE IN L.A. to a rather intimate procedural that makes clumsy if predictably toothless swipes at the war in Iraq before an embarrassingly gooey (and poorly telegraphed) denouement. Essentially this is “A Few Bad Men” with Tommy Lee Jones channeling a Paul Schrader protagonist as he leaves the safety of his Middle America cocoon to investigate the murder and mutilation of his son near a southern military base, where he finds the U.S. military in full-on, cover its own ass mode.
It’s actually not a bad idea (albeit a fairly derivative one) and Tommy Lee’s given a plum part as a Vietnam vet and military lifer who's so ramrod straight that he remakes his hotel bed to comply with military standards and would rather grab a wet shirt out of the dryer than be seen in his undershirt by someone of the opposite sex. Jones has been playing variations on ornery and crotchety for thirty-years now but he gets some wiggle room here, finding humor in the understated, plainspoken demeanor of the character. More interesting is his losing battle with his own rage and slow realization that the son he’s pushed into a life in the military may not be the boy he sent off to war.
The problem with the film is it’s trying to be all things to all people with no one particular element executed especially well. Partnered with Jones’ character is Charlize Theron (in mousy earth-tones) whom the film dedicates an inordinate amount of time to as the female homicide detective who may or may not have slept her way into the department and must now prove her worth to her loutish male colleagues (and yes, maybe even to herself). If you put a gun to my head, I swear I couldn’t come up with a subplot in film history less interesting, yet the film keeps cutting away from its central mystery (hell, even leaving its rather vague thematic safety net of “war is hell”) to dwell on Charlize and her father-less son, Charlize the conflicted cop, Charlize the department doormat getting her grove back, etc…
Furthermore, once the film establishes the Jones’ kid is legitimately dead (the way the body is presented, I half expected him to show up in the third act) the guilty parties are readily apparent simply by virtue of what type of film this is, making the string of red herrings thrown in our path utterly transparent. I’m weary of condemning the film too heavily because issues with the film’s languid pacing will likely be addressed in the next few months (almost half the questions on the survey spoke to film length and scenes that may or may not have dragged), but it’s doubtful even with judicious editing they’ll be able to cut around the series of “A-ha!” revelations. What I gather is meant to be a stirring indictment of sociopath disassociation ends up coming across as warmed over Abu Ghraib bedtime stories, made all the more annoying by the fact that the film’s delivery system of each withering indictment of war is through one of the lamest devices imaginable (let’s just say when you’re fighting in a war it’s probably doubtful you’re going to be running the video function on your cell phone while providing a play-by-play narration during each skirmish and insertion).
But the larger issue here, albeit one that doesn’t reveal itself till the final act, is the self-congratulatory tone which elevated Crash from the level of good-intentioned but naïve to abhorrent and smug grandstanding. Jones’ character fought in Vietnam yet he seems oblivious to the idea of war crimes, torture, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, spending much of the film as the proverbial babe in the woods who’s shaken to the core but what he learns what the boys are doing over there while “spreading democracy.” Haggis is too canny a fence-sitter to lay blame on the soldiers themselves, essentially waving the white flag (as it were) at the whole concept of war, distilling his entire message down to “the whole situation’s fucked” which is exactly the sort of empty rhetoric that can generate lazy swells of applause without actually engaging with the overriding problem.
Is this really what a Hollywood liberal views as a wake-up call for Middle America, with Tommy Lee the last Red-Stater to finally get the message? In the Valley of Elah isn’t the blunt instrument swung in the name of shallow discourse that Crash was but the motion of the swing is every bit as clumsy.
Sunday, June 3, 2007
Have You Overrated this Movie?
One of the interesting quirks in seeing a movie months before 99% of the world is your opinions are generated in a vacuum. By the time most films are released into theaters they’ve already been run through the mill so to speak, so regardless of which side of the ledger you fall on, there’s bound to be someone who can immediately validate your opinions with their own. But seeing a film at a festival or at a test screening before the opinion-makers have their say can be liberating, freeing you of outside influences and expectations, while also being a bit of a tight-rope walk.
Being first out on a limb with your opinions is a really quick way to look prophetic (as was the case with Zodiac where my early and widely quoted praise of a rough-cut set the tone for the film’s rapturous following on the net) or irrelevant (I walked out of a Little Miss Sunshine screening at Sundance convinced the film would crash and burn with audiences and be seen as another Happy Texas… whoops). It’s not that my opinions would be dramatically different if I knew which way the wind was blowing, but I’d probably consider why my opinions on a film differed so dramatically from the critical and popular consensus.
Take the case of Knocked Up which opened on Friday to near universal acclaim, with such authorities as A.O. Scott, David Edelstein and Lisa Schwarzbaum calling the film an instant classic. Not merely a winning comedy in an arid landscape of overblown, over-loud, event films, but a cultural touchstone along the lines of The Big Chill and The Graduate. Finally, dumpy, ambition-less, stoner, porn-obsessed twenty-somethings have a film that speaks for them, raising their shiftlessness and shirking of responsibility to poetic, nay mythic, heights.
Here’s the problem: I saw the film almost five months ago and indeed, the film is quite funny. It’s got a great ear for off the cuff dialogue and sly, laser-point-accurate pop culture references (I feel like there’s 80 people in the world who are going to get an “I’m breathing like James Gandalfini” reference), and in the relationship between the Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann characters, really gives a realistic sense of a relationship that’s entered an apathetic shared disappointment stage where you have two people who are in love even if they can no longer remember why. If there’s greatness to be found in the film, it’s in the scenes dominated by these two characters.
But I also found the film unspeakably lazy (appropriate no?) and something of an ugly male fantasy. Which is to say it’s a fantasy for ugly men, not that the fantasy itself is ugly (although even that’s arguable). Essentially the film is a younger, more pop culture-savvy version of the “King of Queens” where we’re meant to giggle at the inherent comedy of a fat, oafish lay-about landing himself a hot girlfriend/wife. But this isn’t merely a case of opposites attracting or the beautiful girl discovering the inner-worth of a shlub. This is a film built around the idea of a beautiful, talented, intelligent, funny, down to earth, upwardly mobile young woman (Katherine Heigl of “Grey’s Anatomy”) who makes a mistake and finds herself “with child” and the film finds for her no other suitable options other than throwing her lot in with an unreliable, emotionally unavailable loser. The calendar may read 2007 (and lord knows there are enough Spider-Man 3 references in the film to remind you of it) but socially and politically the film could just as easily take place in 1955 and boy is the film pleased with itself because of it.
Written and directed by Judd Apatow in the same artless, “place camera here and let it roll on the next 15-minutes of improv” style as his 2005 hit The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up may end up being the first “gross-out” comedy screened at the White House so wedded it is to the idea of the nuclear family where it's better for a financially independent young woman with a loving extended family to support her to stay with the shiftless drug addict who got her pregnant and sponges off of her for the duration of the pregnancy then to strike out on her own and raise the child herself. Somewhere out there Dan Quayle is quietly beaming.
The ultimate arc of the film is Rogen’s character Ben learning to accept responsibility for his actions and maturing on some small level, changing just enough for us to buy the idea of him as a supportive father and nurturing partner. The problem is the film stacks the deck so heavily in favor of Ben being a self-involved ass for nearly 100 minutes of its (way over-long) 129-minute run-time that by the time he arrives at the predictable “becoming a man by painting the nursery and building a crib” montage it’s become impossible to believe that Heigl’s Alison would have stuck around long enough for him to even have a chance to grow. Ben isn’t just immature; he’s frankly a sociopath unable to make even the smallest of accommodations to help his pregnant girlfriend out, shucking his obligations and viewing her hormonal upheavals and insecurities as though she were about to birth an alien spawn. As the film resides squarely in the stoner comedy milieu, we’re meant to giggle at scenes of Ben panicking when an earthquake disrupts his marijuana stash, with him checking on the herb before he does the woman carrying his child.
Later in the film Rogen and Rudd’s characters walk out on their respective girlfriends/wives to go to Vegas and do mushrooms and get lap dances while the girls are despondent wrecks, literally weeping on street corners. As an interesting experiment try imagining this same premise as directed by a kitchen sink realist like Ken Loach or the Dardennes and see if the film sounds quite so hilarious. Why on earth would Alison put up with Ben for as long as she does? Um… he’s a nice guy? Of course we don’t actually see him doing anything especially nice, but since he’s played by the affable and self-depreciating Seth Rogen we can largely assume that when he’s not getting high, being boorish, neglecting Alison, watching the shower scene from Carrie to help build his Mr. Skin like celebrity nudity website, or engaged in latent homo-erotic hazing with his housemates that he’s a real charmer. Rogen is a gifted comedian; he often comes across as a more Zen version of Will Farrell, slowed by years of killing brain cells but also bracingly intelligent in a shooting-the-shit sort of way. But a little bit of him goes a long way. In some respects it’s brave of the film to make its lead character as self-involved and stunted as he is. Yet the more we get to know Ben the greater the fulcrum shifts into indefensible behavior, throwing the romantic dynamic between him and Alison completely out of whack.
Part of the problem here is the character of Alison, as written, is an impossible part and Heigl, while game to muck around with all these smelly guys, is unable to rise above the limitations of the role. The character, who’s loosely based on Mann (Apatow’s wife, proving that funny, rolly-polly Jewish guys can end up with the statuesque WASPy blonde) is something of a wet-dream; classically gorgeous, talented and capable of laughing at a dirty joke (or in the aforementioned Carrie scene, marveling at the rarity of full frontal nudity in an opening credit sequence), yet insecure and needy enough that the thought of crashing at Ben’s bong-hazed flop house while her unborn child gestates after a long day of work (a day he spent playing ping pong in the driveway and goofing off with his buddies) seems like a viable living arrangement. Apatow is so enamored with the idea of a beautiful successful woman lowering herself to the level of dating a loser that he can’t bother with justifying why or how, merely allowing the sight gag of the princess and the troll speak for itself.
Knocked Up’s greatest enemy is unfortunate comparisons to the superior in every way 40-Year-Old Virgin which was also overlong and juvenile but also incredibly charming and honest and featured not only a star-making performance by Steve Carrell but an Oscar-worthy turn by Catherine Keener (I’m *dead* serious) as a 40-year-old grandmother who’s been through enough losers to recognize a great guy when she sees one, even if he is outwardly a weirdo. The beauty of 40YOV is, as the film progresses, those around Carrell who initially pitied and scorned him come to recognize the decency and depth of his character and begin questioning whether they might not be happier if they weren’t a little bit like him. Knocked Up is operating in the opposite (and more conventional) direction of the man-child having to grow up, which is all well and good but not if the film’s predicated on someone falling for him in the first place and lingering around long enough for him to begin walking upright.
The irony in all this is that on the surface I personally am not all the different from the Rogen character. We’re both Jews in our mid 20’s living in the San Fernando Valley, getting by on a nest egg that’s slowly being drained away while we figure out what to do with our lives.
We’re both socially awkward with some flab around the middle (although it needs to be pointed out that I’m in *much* better shape) who spend most of free time hanging out with guys we’ve known for years. We both love Munich and internet porn and like Ben, on those rare, annual occasions where I do actually have sex it’s of the wide-eyed, dumbstruck “how the hell did I luck into this situation?” variety. But the difference is the film celebrates Ben’s self-involvement and rough-around-the-edges qualities as they’re ultimately what make him such an interesting comedic protagonist, while in real life there isn’t a woman alive who wouldn’t view this guy as a raging asshole. The film seems to be doing well with the date crowd and with female critics (more on critics in a second) but I can’t help but wonder how many women would find this sort of behavior amusing if its what was waiting for them at home every night after a long day at the office (and swollen ankles to boot). Which leads me back to my original point: why is this film, of all films released this year (Rotten Tomatoes just issued a press release announcing the film the best reviewed wide-release of the year) being placed on a pedestal by exactly the sort of people who should be raising the issues that I am? Has the state of mainstream comedies become so dire that people are willing to overlook how morally repugnant a film is if it offers a few good belly laughs? Or does the film play that much better after various third installments of the Spider-Man, Shrek and Pirates of the Caribbean anthologies. I have my own theory though and it has to do with the make-up of critics in this country. A film where the protagonist is out of shape, socially awkward male with a quick mind for obscure pop culture who gets the girl and lives happily ever after. Hmm… does that sound like a winning scenario for the pasty-faced Alt Weekly set or what?
If the film really is a fantasy then I guess we now know who’s really seeing themselves ending up happily ever after.
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