Narrative Junkie

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Regarding comedies that have had a measurable effect on my worldview, only two handfuls come to mind: Tootsie, Lost in America, Golden Age Woody Allen, This is Spinal Tap,  Modern Times, some Frank Capra... There must be more, but even so it’s a short list in relation to more serious fare. Which is to say, most comedies, I think, have a hard time sneaking into the “relevant" column. So even though writer/star Jason Segel and director Nicholas Stoller have loaded Forgetting Sarah Marshall with laughs galore, recalling affecting moments past the time it takes to write this review is not in the cards.

That's not a knock, per se; this is a movie I liked. Segel plays Peter Bretter, your classic sedentary, ambitionless, movie schlump. When he's not at home eating bowls full of Froot Loops in front of the TV, he's writing the music for a low-rent "CSI"-type show, which his girlfriend Sarah Marshall (perky Kristen Bell) stars in. When she dumps him for a pretentious hyper-sexed Brit rocker (portrayed by Russell Brand with the no-holds-barred brio of the fake music stars in Andy Samberg's SNL shorts), Peter embarks on Operation Fetal Position, crying in bed, weeping at Heidi Klum's elimination of a contestant on "Project Runway," and wallowing in Sinead O’Connor love dirges. He embarks on a would-be rejuvenating trip to Hawaii, only to find Sarah Marshall on vaca there with the new bf. Bwaa bwaa bwaaaa! Luckily, the sexy brunette hotel hostess takes a shine to him, and the rest of the film concerns itself with whether he will re-connect with Sarah Marshall or continue this new romance. And, analagously: Can he get it together long enough to pursue his life’s dream of producing an Avenue Q-like puppet musical about Dracula?

The product coming out of the House of (Judd) Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin, Bad Boys, Knocked Up, this) occupies a niche I'd call lower-middle brow; not quite puerile, not altogether brainy. Where the Farrelly Brothers have made a mint exploiting reflexive giggling at bodily functions, the Apatow Way more subtly melds the juvenile with the cinematic, so that a lot of gags emanate from a facile use of the medium. It’s not that the movie's above using multiple full-frontal shots of Jason Segel’s naked and comically flaccid body, it’s that these short glimpses are strategically placed for maximum self-conciousness, on the part of the audience. Segel's just-short-of-fat corpulence economically communicates his eminent lack of qualifications for dating a TV hottie, and the gambit of flashing his flabby-guy ding-a-ling pays off in a titillating viewer awareness of never having seen such up-front male nudity at the Cineplex. These visual punchlines, frequently delivered by the editing, help create a riffing comedic tempo. At times the gags are so loose, off-beat, and fresh, you feel they must have been devised on-set, in the manner of the improvised "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The politics of the sexual quadrangle are also more nuanced than usually found in such fare. And, this being a break-up comedy, the lack of a Drew Barrymore presence cannot be overstated. A RomCom with teeth, Sarah Marshall would be an excellent Netflix "It's Friday night my workweek sucked I wish I were dead" pick.

Linkateria:

• More Sarah Marshall reviews
• 10 Sarah Marshall clips (CinemaBlend.com)
• 50 Greatest Comedies of All-Time (Filmsite/Premiere Magazine)

The Party

When I was a kid, I once stumbled across The Party on TV and stayed up till 3 am watching it. The film seemed to me at the time the height of sophisticated tomfoolery. When I saw it scheduled at The Castro last week, I figured, what the hey? The Castro at 5pm, I'm in a cruddy mood...what could make better sense?

I only half-remembered you have to put all notions of political correctness aside to enjoy this 1968 vehicle for Peter Sellers in which he dresses up in South Asian brown face and affects a heavy Indian accent. I guess in 1968, the year MLK was assassinated, it was considered acceptable for an English comedian to appear in what's essentially a minstrel show as long as the assumed character is of exotic extraction. And outside of Gandhi, who knew any Indians back then? The fact that Sellers' make-up makes him look more like a first-week student in camouflage class than someone from the subcontinent adds to the embarrassment. But the few in attendance at The Castro weren't in the mood for indignation: hearty laughs ensued the first time he opened his mouth and out popped some mock Indian phrasing.

Sellers plays an actor named Hrundi V. Bakshi, imported from India to add authenticity to a Hollywood film about the British occupation or something. The opening joke, in which Sellers' plays a character within a characer -- a bugler (it's a parody of Gunga Din, I think) who takes an interminable amount of time to die, is itself interminable, a perfect example of the fallacy of imitative form. Next up: a gag in which he prematurely blows up a fort while the crew is still setting up. That one's funny enough to have been cooked up by Buster Keaton, and we're off and running for 99 minutes worth of hit-or-miss hijinks.

The rest of the film is set up when a producer, played by pre-Mary Tyler Moore Gavin Macleod, kicks Hrundi V. Bakshi off the set, but a secretary's clerical mistake results in his invitation to a soiree thrown by the head of the studio. There we meet the usual assortment of Hollywood straw men -- windbags, showboats, doyennes, and martinets -- for Sellers to bounce off. In the process, he completely destroys the house, including a particularly funny slapstick scene in the bathroom. The Bakshi character clearly seems an extension of Sellers' Clouseau persona – a bumbler, a klutz, though without the delusional self-regard that characterized the French Inspector. This was director Blake Edwards third go round with Sellers, made before the team’s biggest success with the popular Panther films of the 70s. Some of the scenes in which crowds of people move through various set-pieces puts one in mind of the films of Jacques Tati, though the level of action going on in each frame is much more shallow and less meticulously staged. How much the Sellers/Edwards  team was influenced by Tati’s direction and Mr. Hulot character, I don't know. 

The funny thing is, since few of the jokes are predicated on a clash of cultures (a ridiculous bit with an elephant is one of them), there’s really no reason for the Sellers character to be Indian. He could have easily been a bumbling American, Englishman, anything. This type of broad ethnic humor, relegated to a scene or two, can just wash over an audience in a stream of riffing, but over the course of an entire film, it's hard to sustain. I suppose you could say the film's heart is in the right place, with Sellers winning the love interest (played by Claudine Longet, best known for fatally shooting her boyfriend, skiier Spider Sabich, in real life) and the Hollywood producer suffering the brunt of the humiliation. If you're an insatiable Sellers fan, browse this one up on on Netflix or better yet wait for it to run on TV way late at night when insomnia-induced lightheadedness makes you prone to giggle. Or else just watch it when you're stoned.

Linkateria:

• More Party reviews
• PeterSellers.com
• Senses of Cinema: Blake Edwards

The Counterfeiters

The Counterfeiters won the Academy Award for best foreign language film. I enjoyed it as much as anyone can enjoy a movie that takes place largely in a concentration camp. It’s based on the memoirs of Adolph Burger, who worked on Operation Bernhard, the Nazi plan to de-stabilize Britain by counterfeiting millions in Bank of England pound notes. The main character is Salomon Sorowitsch, a Russian born German Jew who is also the world’s greatest counterfeiter. When Sorowitsch is arrested for passing forgeries of the American dollar, he is sent to a concentration camp, where he trades on his by doing portraits of Nazi officers in exchange for food. Thus, the theme of survival versus collaboration is introduced.

Eventually Sorowitsch is transferred, along with other useful Jewish tradesmen, to Sachsenhausen, where they will work on Operation Bernhard, run by the  policeman-turned SS officer who had arrested Sorowitsch in the first place. This group is separated from the main population and given better food, their own Jewish doctor, and after the success of the Bank of England operation, a ping pong table. This last privilege is the most perverse -- an ironic symbol of Nazi depravity. As if these men, slave labor coping with the deaths of loved ones at the hands of the same captors who treat them marginally better, could be incentivized by such an offering. As they play, they hear the horrors afforded their fellow prisoners on the other side of a wall.

The rest of the film is a good combination of the prison, caper, and, as crass as it sounds, holocaust genres. You get an oblique sense of the horrors of the camps: One of the men comes across his dead wife's passport; another temporarily loses his mind when he's certain they will be gassed in the showers. Still, a certain cinematic artifice obtains. When the Nazis charge the men with replicating the dollar, the character of Burger (the memoirist and co-screenwriter) sabotages the effort because he believes its success will lead to a final Nazi victory. The commandant then chooses five men who will be killed if the group doesn't produce. In this situation, Burger  becomes a stand-in for the idealism of sacrifice in a cause worth dying for, Sorowitsch becomes an unlikely master at threading a moral needle, and the story  gives itself over to the dilemma: Do you participate in an evil cause in order to save yourself?

That's a timeless quandary played out on a smaller scale by all of us every day. But director Stefan Ruzowitzy tries to subdue the theatricality inherent in such a monumental question by shooting the film in semi-documentary style. The screen bristles with shaky hand held shots, quick cuts, tight close-ups, panicky zooms. To show a secret conversation between Sorowitsch and the commander, the camera zooms in from far away, giving an overt impression of spying on something forbidden. In addition to the problem of using anachronistic techniques in a work depicting an historical event, this sort of "you are there" style combines with the film's more classic elements to produce a confused tone. I mean, here we have an ostensibly real-life event occuring during the worst self-created catastrophe mankind has ever faced, but it's communicated to us through the filming of a screenplay based on the writing down of memories. So let's just take as a given that with each successive traduction, we travel further away from the original event's truth. Do we really need the overlay of fake documentary to titillate us into imagining "we are there"?

Issues surrounding memory and the Holocaust aside (way aside), I wonder at the recent over-use of documentary style in almost all forms of visual entertainment. Look around; it's everywhere. From Christopher Guest mockumentaries to "Battlestar Galactica" to  Cloverfield, we're constantly being told, "This is real!" Watch material even as seemingly non-conducive to cinema verite technique as the "John Adams" mini-series on HBO -- yep, there it is, too. When did faking "real" reality overtake the normal methods for creating stylized verisimilitude so enjoyable to consumers of make-believe for the past hundred years? My subjective view of the culture pegs the trend as gathering momentum with the release of This Is Spinal Tap. (But for earlier examples see Medium Cool, Citizen Kane, and Orson Welles's radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds.”) More recently we've seen the confounding of reality with fiction in the re-enacted scenes of Errol Morris documentaries, TV shows like "The Real World" and "Survivor," fake documentaries like “The Office,” and video clips of almost any Bush administration official expounding on Iraq. Whatever happened to the majesty of cinema? Meticulous blocking, obsessive framing? Swooping crane shots, Kubrickian tableaus? Certainly eminent practitioners of the cinematic arts still abound. (Scorsese and PT Anderson: two dazzlers who come to mind.) But as the proliferation of tools puts the means of visual production more and more in the hands of, well, anyone, I wonder: Will technique become sloppier and sloppier, so that quick-and-dirty, on-the-fly visual capturing becomes the norm, and we'll no longer be able to discern who’s a master of emulating amateurs, and who’s just an amateur? And will it be fucked up when we can no longer tell what was the original visual documentation of an event like that depicted in this film, and what's just a simulation of that record?

Linkateria:

• More Counterfeiters reviews
• Operation Bernhard
• The War of the Worlds - Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre scare the hell out of America

In Bruges

I once ate some mussels in Brussels. Rhyme and cobblestoned old world charm aside, the experience was ruined when a cowboy-hatted Louisianan and his posse sat at the table next to us and started filling the centuries-old streets with booming new world anecdotes about the oil industry, football, and other topics of conversation used to ward off old world effeteness. I offered the waiter a look of disgust in solidarity, but he made it clear that he thought all Americans were philistines. New York or New Orleans: That was just splitting cheveux.

Who could have guessed, back in 1987, that European views of this country would actually get worse? The running joke in In Bruges is the hostility Colin Farrell’s Ray feels toward Americans. When he warns an obese man in a Yankees cap that maybe he doesn’t want to climb a tower with particularly narrow stairs, the man takes offense and chases him until he collapses, out of breath. When a dwarf actor (Peter Dinkage) apologizes for being from the States, Ray says, “That’s okay, just don’t say anything loud and crass.” Later, he attacks an obnoxious man in a restaurant who complains about the cigarette Ray's date is puffing on, delivering a final blow with “And that’s for killing John Lennon.” (He later regrets that the man turns out to be Canadian.)

You have to appreciate the anti-Americanism, but my wife noted that playwright McDonagh's first film owes much to the still-contemporary Scorcese/Tarantino trope of putting the inner lives and outward quirks of sociopaths front and center in their narratives. In McDonagh’s version, two hoods are sent to Bruges, in Belgium, to lay low after a hit has gone terribly wrong. One of the men, Brendan Gleeson, is an aesthete. He's a voracious tourist, wowed by the medieval splendor of the town. His cohort, Ray, is  a younger, rougher sort,  yet he is tormented to the point of suicide by the appalling act he has committed . This situation becomes a springboard for the pungent dialogue McDonagh has made such good use of in his plays, most notably The Pillowman. As in a good play, the story works best when it lies in the dynamic between the characters, and the back-and-forth frequently wrings a laugh from the most gruesome of circumstances. The two leads do a fine job of toggling between comedy and pathos, and Ralph Fiennes, playing a role similar to Ben Kingley's Don Logan in Sexy Beast is seamless as their crime boss.

Visually, McDonagh has stacked the deck by shooting in a location that looks like it’s out of a “fairytale,” as is remarked several times in the film. And as one might expect, the best moments come out of the writing and performances, not the direction. But who can doubt this wunderkind will only improve his cinematic technique? Not that I'm dying for that to happen. As nifty a little suspenser as this is, it's really nothing special, and in the last 15 minutes, the film falls apart in an orgy of gore and existential irony. The Pillowman, on the other hand, is a work chock full of original ideas and large themes. There must be at least several thousand film auteurs running around, putting together their little projects and gathering accolades at film festivals. If McDonagh winds up in Hollywood, maybe he'll be an object of scorn by Brussels waiters too, and rightly so.

Linkateria:

• More Bruges reviews
  
• Trailers and clips
  
• A Mind in Connemara (Fintan O’Toole, The New Yorker) - 2006 profile of playwright Martin McDonagh
  
• The Pillowman (Google Books)
  

Be Kind Rewind

Be Kind Rewind takes a stand against gentrification, copyright laws, Hollywood, and urban renewal. It's in favor of community, locally-owned business, amateurism, and Fats Waller. Who can argue with that? No one, that's who, without seeming a spoil sport. But the film wears its artificial heart a little too much on its sleeve. Most of the goings on strain credulity, to say the least, and the characters at times exhibit a striking lack of common sense. These elements render the whole enterprise fablesque, which is another way of saying that while the Michael Gondry's production has its moments, it doesn’t really score any direct hits against or for the above-mentioned targets.

Here's the plot: Mos Def plays a clerk in a moribund Passaic, New Jersey video store, which the city has slated for demolition and which is being slowly bled by competition from a Blockbuster-like DVD store anyway. Jack Black, playing an off-the-wall curmudgeonly type (surprise!) , becomes magnetized when he tries to sabotage the local power plant and then somehow demagnetizes all the VHS tapes in the store (owned by Danny Glover.) Black and Mos Def then come up with a plan to re-shoot all the movies using ingenious homemade innovations in place of the films' big budget special effects. Sort of like the plays produced by the precocious impresario Max in Rushmore, but not as good. The ersatz films become so popular, the movie industry sends hatchet woman Sigourney Weaver to put the kibosh on the whole thing and confiscate the moviemakers' entire oeuvre. If one wanted to, one could interpret the film as an homage to all those YouTube do–it-yourselfers, nascent auteurs shooting movies on cell phones and editing them on iBooks, and as a slap at the vacuous big budget junk projected onto screens at a multi-plex near you.

But for a movie whose credo is “movies with heart and soul” (this voiced by Mia Farrow, whose presence graces any project), the home-made films themselves, re-makes of Robo-Cop, Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and others, are curiously uninteresting. They're clever enough in execution, but that's all. They don't have any particular take on the source material, and an opportunity for some prime satire is wasted. Again, I think of the movie-based plays in Rushmore -- deadly earnest affairs made even more absurd by the presence of teenagers playing cops, soldiers, and other familiar action genre figures.

To me, movies like Robo-Cop and Ghostbusters -- they're pretty good to begin with. Do I want to see a grade-Z version of these grade-B guilty pleasures? Even if people I vaguely know are in them? Storywise, it would have made more sense to re-make some real crud, but then nobody would have any frame of reference for the spoofs. The film wants us to see movie-making as a labor-of-love and conducive to community involvement. But anyone who’s shot even a 5-minute class project knows the most conventional cinematic idea can’t be just dashed off in presentable form in a single afternoon, like they are here. And forget about scheduling and organizing your amateur talent working for a couple of free pizza slices at lunchtime. It's just not that easy, and the eagerness of the residents of Passaic to participate in these productions seemed more like a a sign of community-wide despair than a take charge bit of civil disobedience. For me, the atmosphere of depression and decay easily suction off the film's mawkish high spirits that are intended as remedies.

Performance-wise, for once Jack Black, an actor with the most defined comic persona since perhaps Billy Murray, doesn't help. He pretty much phones in his usual imploding maniac bit. A mumbly Mos Def is a lot more interesting as the clerk in search of a father figure in Danny Glover.

I’ll tell ya, the web site is sort of more interesting than the film. Check it out.

Linkateria:

• More Rewind reviews
• Trailers and video clips from the film
• Be Kind Rewind web site
• The Max Fischer Players presents the MTV Movie Awards

The Savages

We live in an age where medical science has endowed us with a mixed blessing: We get to live longer, but so do our parents. This has created a host of thorny financial and emotional issues, not the least of which is voiced in this film by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Jon Savage to his sister Wendy, played by Laura Linney, about their father: “We’re taking care of the old man better than he ever did of us.” That is the crux of the conflict: What obligation do children have to elderly parents who failed miserably as caretakers when it was their turn at bat?

The theme of responsibility versus resentment might have been given greater play here. Hoffman’s character, adrift from his true feelings, never sits with the emotional fallout of having to deal with the waning life of a man who was, apparently, a real bastard. But that doesn’t diminish the performance. As Jon, he moves around perpetually distracted, going through the strictly obligatory motions of facilitating his father’s care while simultaneously coping with the termination of a romantic relationship. Laura Linney proves his equal as a woman who seems to be failing on all cylinders. Pushing 40, she’s a long-term temporary office worker who can’t get arrested as a playwright and is involved in an affair with a married theater director. She’s just a stupendous mess. Together, these two fine actors are more than the sum of their parts, and they evoke all the nuances of sibling rivalry and attenuated family ties, counterweighted by a shared history of growing up traumatized.

Tamara Jenkins has written The Savages so well (she also directed), the film feels novelistic in its storytelling. Like another work peopled by indelible characters, Sideways, its most revelatory moments lie in finely observed details. Example: During sex, with her married boyfriend furiously pumping away at her to no effect, Wendy reaches out with her hand to pet his dog, sitting faithfully near by.

Directorially, the David Lynchian vision of Arizona as a brightly lit retirement hell (where the Savage father, played by Philip Bosco, resides) overstates the case, as does its contrast to the wintry blue hues of Buffalo. But the acting and writing here are top-notch, and well worth the hour and 53 minutes of your time.

Linkateria:

• More Savages reviews
• Trailer

There Will Be Blood

I like a movie that tells you up front what to expect, especially when it comes to bodily fluids. Like, if The Exorcist had been named, or at least subtitled, There Will Be Satanically Green Puke, I might have managed to cover my eyes in time. The title of PT Anderson's film may have several meanings, but since the topic here is oil, it seems appropriately titled in any case. After all, how much blood has been spilled in quest of that dark commodity?

The main character, Daniel Plainview, will certainly earn a spot in the pantheon of capitalist villains, right beside Lionel Barrymore's Mr. Potter and Orson Welles's Charles Foster Kane. With his hunched posture, John Huston voice, and pitch perfect intonation of lines like “I don’t like explaining myself,” Daniel Day-Lewis has created one of the most striking personifications of American-style free enterprise in film history. That this characterization serves large and timeless themes elevates the film (based on the novel Oil, by Upton Sinclair) to the level of near-masterpiece. It's the kind of work that will be discussed in film schools, bandied about for inclusion on Best of lists, and scrutinized on DVDs (or whatever format replaces them) for decades to come.

Day-Lewis's Plainview embodies capitalism at its most soulless. In the film's opening sequence, Plainview, in the first in a series of accidents during attempts to extract wealth from the earth, slips and falls into his dig, nearly breaking his back. His eye, however, catches a telltale cluster of sparkles, and his excitement trumps his physical pain. It's a perfect illustration of capitalist monomania – a fiendish yen for treasure superseding all other concerns. Later, Plainview’s adopted son loses his hearing when one of his wells gushes oil, causing a rig to ignite and collapse. Amidst the fiery devastation, Plainview celebrates his jackpot covered head to toe in oil and looking for all the world like a petroleum-based demon who has just successfully plumbed the depths of hell for his heart's desire. It’s not that he isn't concerned about his son’s horrific injury, it’s only that on balance, it’s been a good day. Here, drilling for oil serves as a metaphor for capitalism at its most elemental: a penetrative, invasive process leaving a byproduct of palpable devastation.

Plainview’s rival demon is Eli, a young, self-styled preacher whose family Plainview has paid for drilling rights on their land. Through Eli we see the interwining but shifting relationship of religion and money-making in American life. Eli and Plainview engage in a dynamic of mutual exploitation. Plainview detests Eli’s religious charlatanism and self righteousness, yet he knows how to make use of them for his own ends. At one point, Plainview makes a show of accepting Jesus in front of Eli’s congregation in order to strike a deal. In the film’s final sequence, Plainview extracts his revenge for this humiliation by demanding that Eli, in desperate need of cash, pronounce himself a sham and declare the non-existence of God in exchange for financial help. Of course, Eli complies, because religion here is shown to ultimately be just as concerned with acquisition (Eli wants a bigger church) as drilling for oil. And no humiliation is too great to suffer in its pursuit. Plainview (and here the character's name comes into play) detests Eli because Eli has the same insatiable lust for wealth, yet dissembles it behind a veneer of righteousness.

In an indication of the depth of Day-Lewis’s characterization and PT Anderson’s direction, after the film I and my companions debated the purity of Plainview’s evil. For he does have moments of seemingly genuine tenderness toward his son (who is not really his son, but was a fellow prospector 's infant offspring when that man met his fate on a dig), and he even intervenes on behalf of a young girl when he hears of her beatings at the hand of her father. And when a long-lost half brother shows up, his craving for connection is obvious. (The title of the film, perhaps, can also be seen as a reference to the two family members whom he is not actually related to.) Yet, in a fit of pique, he throws the truth of their relationship at his son, averring that he cared for him only because he enabled the marketing of the Plainview operation as a “family business.” And we have seen this, to be sure. But was all feeling for the boy merely mercenary? One viewer argued that even if Plainview's sentiment was genuine, it was still just another form of selfishness due to his complete lack of connection to anyone else. Perhaps! What's clear is that his singular obsession with money has become his only purpose; when he has a chance to sell out to Standard Oil for a huge windfall, he declines, blurting out, "What would I do with myself?” Making money has become its own end, the answer to every existential question.

The last 20 minutes or so depict a period some years later, when we see the festering consequences of a life spent in such a manner. The film ends, I think, on the wrong note, but that doesn't detract from the overall impact. Some brilliant cinematography and a propulsive music score accenting the industrial processes at the visual heart of the film fill out the experience. It's rare to see an American film this serious about critiquing the fundamental organizing principal of our society . “There is a competition in me,” Plainview says. “I want no one else to succeed.” While this burning to come out on top isolates him from humanity, it also perfectly suits him to rise to the top in a system that treats such cupidity as a prized trait.

Linkateria:

• More Blood reviews
• cigarettes and red vines - PT Anderson resource
• Upton Sinclair made his mark as a California muckraker (SF Chronicle)
• Upton Sinclair's Oil - first five pages
• The enigma of Day-Lewis (Guardian)

I Am Legend

Because I grew up in Manhattan, between the Empire State Building and what used to be the World Trade Center, I frequently have the privilege of sitting down at a movie theater and watching my home town blown up, inundated by the Atlantic Ocean, frozen solid among walls of ice, or, in the case of I Am Legend, merely atrophied into semi-wilderness and haunted by formerly-human ghouls afflicted with viral plague. I’ll never be convinced the original reason to keep destroying Manhattan isn’t that the rest of the country gets its jollies by watching, as Woody Allen so aptly put it, left-wing, communist, Jewish homosexual pornographers finally get their due.

But this equation, for obvious reasons, has changed, and it’s pretty clear that purveyors of pulp cannot resist the obvious ploy of tapping into the barely submerged (and in NYC, omnipresent) fear sown by the events of September 11th. After all, these days, how hard is it to elicit a visceral response to images of teeming masses of panicked Manhattanites taking time out from slurping Frappacinos to run for their lives? These films used to be fun, what with studios pouring tens of millions of dollars into depictions of the Statue of Liberty under water or the Manhattan skyline re-designed by extraterrestrials. But what used to be a level of destruction only imaginable by CGI technicians is now all too easily conjured up by anyone owning a TV from 9/11 on. Where our movie heroes used to battle monstrous terrors with plucky insouciance, now they evince a fear so palpable it's almost difficult to watch. For before-and-after examples, observe Will Smith's curmudgeonly do-gooder in Independence Day and the hyperventilating, fear-riddled character he at times portrays here. Yep, it's all about the fear --  read terror -- read terrorism. 

I first noticed a change of tone in the apocalypse now genre in Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, an effective study in raw panic. In that film, Tom Cruise eschewed his usual bluff and smarmy persona for that of a stunned parent confronting something previously unthinkable. Spielberg traded on September 11th imagery shamelessly, and calling that manipulation reprehensible may not be far wrong. On the other hand, hasn't sci/fi always been about sublimating the collective terror-of-the-times into fantasy? Because it's a lot easier to watch radiation-spawned Godzilla and Mothra go at it than it is to take in a documentary on the effects of Hiroshima.

In I Am Legend, director Francis Lawrence taps into latent 9/11 trauma by cultivating a somber mood and a persistent sense of loss, puncuated, natch, by spurts of explosive action. Another strategy he employs may be equally below-the-belt: that of focusing on Will Smith’s relationship with his dog – his last link to a vanished life and his only company in a city full of zombies. Smith is a thoroughly likable screen presence, anyway, but is there anyone who can watch a macho guy like him lovingly care for his pooch and not be moved to feelings of apotheosis? Smith also graduates from his primary role as physical specimen capable of outrunning aliens and robots to that of all-around superman -- he's buff and a genius researcher and a humanitarian military officer, as well as the last best hope for saving the human race. (He also lives in one of those brownstones right off Washington Square Park – how he got NYU to cough up that piece of real estate ranks right up there with outwitting mutants.) Smith's not what I’d call an electric actor -- his big-time bankability among white audiences lies in an almost total lack of edginess and a well-honed affability, sort of like a bad-ass Tom Hanks, or a more polished Barack Obama. But he's still cool.

This is a good film of its kind, and it features some economical storytelling. I especially liked the placement, without verbal allusion, of Van Gogh ‘s  “Starry Night”  on Smith's condo wall; he's obviously taken the opportunity to save/plunder a little something from MOMA before one of the devolved masses tries to eat it. One major break in realism (aside from the plague-riddled zombies): A broadcast supposedly occuring in 2008 shows Katie Couric still hosting the "Today Show." Dudes, talk about breaking the spell! I was forced to improvise my own backstory in which the current CBS anchorwoman is forced into her old job due to poor ratings.

A larger problem occurs about 3/4 of the way in, when an annoying French woman and her son materialize. Out of nowhere, the woman starts talking about God, introducing a ridiculously contrived religious argument. I swear, ever since that Passion of the Christ bonanza, Hollywood is looking for any opportunity to salt its product with religious nonsense. And now that The Golden Compass has flopped, things will probably only get worse.

But in general, I think all this post-September 11th seriousness actually makes for better movies. Personally, I like my sci-fi minus the levity; I’m the only person I know who thinks the latter round of Star Wars flicks superior to the originals, with those lame fucking robots kvetching and bleeping all over the place. After all, it’s a lot easier to suspend disbelief when a city-destroying threat induces even tough guys to crap their pants, rather than ham it up with jokey false bravado like James Bond whipping out  puns. Still, if some people take offense at this latest exploitaton of our long national nightmare, I'll understand. Because in these stories, in the end, we always win. The outcome in real life is much less assured.

• More Legend reviews
• I Am Legend Freaked Me Out (Sara Vilkomerson, NY Observer)
• Will Smith (Richard Schickel, Time)

p.s. - Next up in the destroy-all-boroughs genre -- Cloverfield.

Juno

Whether or not it means to, any film that portrays an unwanted pregnancy inherently takes sides in the abortion debate. Thus, I view Juno, in which a preternaturally mature, albeit snarky, 16-year-old pregnant girl opts to become a surrogate for an infertile couple, as carrying water for the pro-life side. I mean, as I watched the film, I could only think: Well having a baby isn't that big a deal. And look how she's making someone else happy. So why not make that choice?

According to the CDC, there were 854,000 legal abortions performed in the United States in 2003, so this option should register as a common enough experience. But TV shows and films never show anyone actually going through with a termination. Even hip shows like "Sex and the City" go up to the brink of the actual procedure, until a wave of maternal instinct overcomes the character in the waiting room.  That way, the show can side-step any judgments an audience might make, while also paving the way for a plethora of motherhood-driven plots.

And it's true -- one can make the argument: no baby, no story. But anyone who’s had an abortion or knows someone who’s had an abortion understands it’s not a routine event. No matter how pro-choice you are, the decision and the process itself can be wrenching. Just once I’d like to see an American production forego the last-moment in-the-clinic-conversion and actually explore the emotional strain of what it’s like to actually go through with the procedure. By allowing characters to seriously consider but never opt for this frequent (in real life) choice, the movie and TV industry has relegated those who have had an abortion to second-class status.

Of course, the producers of Juno have the right to tell whatever story they want. If they want their little teenage Joan Rivers to have a kid – mazel tov! But I hope those teenage girls I saw yukking it up in the audience at each nasty bon mot Juno hurled at the lesser wits populating the film understand that the maternal deck has been stacked in her favor. In this film, Juno is the most together character, the wisest wiseass in town. She generally knows what she wants and can  sniff out hypocrisy and fatuous posturing, rendering them inoperable with her acid tongue. She walks the halls of her high school carrying eight months worth of baby and feels nothing more than irritation at the attention of her peers. The baby’s father, the charmingly diffident Michael Cera, thoughtfully if somewhat gloomily leaves Juno to cope without any annoyingly misplaced concern, and her father and step-mother wax progressively enlightened at strategic moments. And when Juno draws the attention of the husband half of the couple she’s hauling flesh for (Justin Bateman in a very good performance), she’s the one who realizes it’s just all-in-good fun flirting and has to put the breaks on.

In other words: This is an idealized portrait of a young woman in a tough spot. Ellen Page as Juno is terrific at portraying hyper-precocity, but her character enjoys so much control it’s hard to work up a good head of sympathy.  The crisis given the most weight is not the pregnancy itself, but the husband's feckless pass at our heroine. This leads to, in a belated attempt at humanization, some trite musings on the meaning of love and the impermanence of relationships. Given Juno's ability to seamlessly assimilate everything else the script has thrown at her, these sophomoric sentiments don’t ring true, even from a sophomore.

I also took issue with the treacly little ditties that oil the musical interludes, and the animated opening sequence: both indie non-chalance overkill. Still, I can’t say I didn't enjoy the film, overall –  there are  some genuinely funny moments and some very good acting. And why shouldn’t young girls get their very own too-cool-for-school anti-role model?

But as far as a serious or heart-warming or subversive look at the situation of teen pregnancy -- nice try.

Linkateria:

• More Juno reviews
• Bloggingheads: The Politics of Juno (NY Times)
• Abortion at the movies (Salon, 2000)
• Wikipedia: Abortion

No Country For Old Men

The Coen Brothers have abandoned their usual satirical bent to depict a grim duel between a misanthpropic hardass and a sociopath, set against Cormac McCarthy’s unforgiving southwest. I haven’t read the book, but the boys have created an impressive work in its own right -- a tale told in grand fashion. Despite political and metaphysical inklings (a vision of Americans as venal and violent, and of fate as immutable) it's the kick-ass battle between the two principals that drives the film. While Javier Bardem has drawn particular notice for his performance as a murderous drug kingpin, Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn is the more  interesting character, a man who walks that fine line between admirable perseverance and disastrous hardheadedness. Or, one might say, a quintessential American. He's also a Texan. George W, anyone?

The film's structure, though, is what really leaves a mark. My father, a professional cinematographer who has digested thousands upon thousands of story lines, could not see any rationale for the plotting in No Country For Old Men. In particular, he objected to the off-screen resolution of the escalating battle between the two main characters, a conflict that had been expertly built by piling on layers of nuanced aggression. The demands of a conventional narrative arc should have produced a quarter-hour slam-bang mano-a-mano finale. But instead the film treats this critical event like a throwaway and switches focus to the tertiary, philosophizing Tommy Lee Jones character. For a voracious consumer of movie plots like my father, this does not compute. “Maybe a reel of film got destroyed and they had to rush this version out,” he speculated. Because for him, and many others, narrative build-up, as in sexual build-up, demands release, and the Coen Brothers facile dispatch of climax becomes tantamount to progessively heavier petting topped off by a handshake.

Tinkering with the entrenched rules of story structure is of course not new. Some of Robert Altman's earlier work comes immediately to mind. In McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Warren Beatty dies alone in the snow while his ostensible romantic lead, Julie Christie, sits out the climax, lost in an opium reverie. In California Split, a gambling film, George Segal wins it all only to lapse into depression. And in The Long Goodbye, Eliot Gould as Philip Marlowe can't find his cat let alone solve a murder. 

Of course, for Altman, toiling in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era, old models in both form and content must have seemed particularly beside the point, even deleterious. In that era, deflating expectations was the name of the game. The ascent of Spielberg and Lucas, masters of new technology and old conventions, heralded the end of the golden age of the iconoclast. Create an inhumanly evil threat, charge an unlikely hero or two with battling it, and churn out a never-in-doubt triumph. Whether it’s a giant shark, a  black-masked inter-stellar psycopath, or a vicious tyrant, the formula’s not only simple, but tried and true. The box office doesn't lie.

The most recent and notorious practitioner of anti-plotting is David Chase of "The Sopranos." I first knew something was going on with this series' structure after the character of Doctor Melfie was raped and her assailant was released due to a legal technicality, at which point he disappeared from the show. This sub-plot then eschews any external resolution, turning its attention to Melfie's internal struggle with her desire -- since the legitimate system has failed her -- to approach Tony for justice. At the time, it seemed like a particularly unusual gambit, and it still does. Subsequent storylines raised all sorts of issues around the characters that are either resolved off-screen or never at all. (Meadow’s broken engagement with Finn and the famous Russian in-the-woods episode stand out.) The last episode notwithstanding, I can think of about 10 different ways I would have liked the series to wind down, all of which followed a more conventional start-to-finish route. There's no doubt the fundamental raise-a-point, resolve-a-point model is lodged deep within our narrative selves . Deviate from it, and a storyteller risks his boldness looking like a mistake – as my father assumed the fizzled duel in No Country for Old Men was.  I can’t say I enjoyed every deviation from form in "The Sopranos," but the question remains, is that because of the way I’ve been conditioned, or have the conventions so developed because of immutable rules of narrative effectiveness, borne out of the way we perceive our own experience? Personally, my entire past sometimes seems like a red herring; years of plot all leading to an unresolved present. Do I yearn for neatly unfolding fiction as a tonic to my own confusion? Imagine Citizen Kane ending without the last close-up of the sleigh. Is that a better film or worse? Perhaps we all need a last-minute Rosebud to weave meaning out of previous strands.

Linkateria:

• More "No Country" reviews
• Coenesque - all things Coen Bros.
• Google Books: No Country for Old Men
• The Sopranos final scene (YouTube)
• Senses of Cinema: Robert Altman