Narrative Junkie

Review - Drag Me To Hell

I usually don’t read reviews of a film I intend to write about, but I thought Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell so ridiculous that I had the nagging suspicion I was missing something. I know Raimi’s reputation, of course, though not so much his actual films, and I hate to think I’m the only semi-literate filmgoer that didn’t get the joke.

Turns out I was. Many critics thought the movie a sly and facile romp through the gory landscape of accumulated horror-movie history.

I tend to dismiss horror films that tinker with the genre for the sheer exercise of it. I like my evil without psychological symbolism or ironic sub-text, and I'm not keen on sociological metaphors or over-the-top splatter with a Halloween-fun feel. I like the original Invasion of the Bodysnatchers not because it’s an allegory for McCarthyism, but because it’s genuinely chilling – at least the first five or six times. A fine scary movie, in my book, is one that  obliterates, not suspends, disbelief.  Maybe five films have done this well enough to genuinely set my skin crawling: Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Blair Witch Project. Each uses a different strategy in eating away that prophylactic awareness of artifice that evolution's put in place to keep you from soiling your pants at thigns happening in two dimensions. In Night of the Living Dead, it’s the running commentary on the radio cleverly mimicking the viewer’s own disbelief at the events on-screen. The Exorcist imagines perfectly realistic reactions of people witnessing a supernatural event. Rosemary’s Baby uses the trappings of modern Manhattan, the very antithesis of the remote and gothic settings of conventional horror, to depict evil hidden in plain sight. And The Blair Witch Project leverages the documentary form in achieving maximum verisimilitude. That film, which I saw in my 30s, scared me so thoroughly it reminded me of the weekly appointment my grade-school eyes kept with the palms of my hands during New York City's "Creature Features" in the early 70s. (In the lobby after one screening of The Blair Witch Project, I witnessed an usher's explaining to two shaken adolescent girls that the film they'd just seen wasn't real.) These films tap into my primitive narrative self – the one whose greatest titillation comes from pretending what’s on screen is actually occurring.

Which is all my way of saying that I'm not the best audience for the wink-and-a-nod Raimi. I either missed or ignored all the meta stuff going on in Drag Me to Hell and instead found it to be a by-the-numbers exercise in the most tired trappings of the genre: gypsies, goo, flies, poltergeist manifestations, oblique camera angles, and a hunted heroine, Christine Brown (Alison Lohman), a bank loan officer in a workplace competition with an oily toady  for a promotion. When a gypsy from the same tribe as Maria Ouspenskaya in The Wolf Man comes in asking to renegotiate a foreclosure (the gypsies really need a Hollywood anti-defamation chapter), Christine’s manager (David Paymer) treats it as a test of her management potential. It's a sign of the times that the evil unleashed in the film stems from a mortgage gone awry, and I wouldn't be surprised if the character of the avaricious bank manager heralds the supplanting of lawyers by financial industry sleazeballs as Hollywood's uber-pariahs of choice. The culture of banking takes a beating here: A big sign advertising low-rate mortgages gets a lot of screen time, there's an allusion to all the money banks make from "foreclosure fees," and Christine's boss says of her coworker competition, “he’s quite aggressive and we like that,” as if describing a budding Bernie Madoff.  CONTINUED

Film review - Sugar

An honest baseball movie

The more interesting though not necessarily better sports movies aim at revealing the cynicism behind the gloss of athletic spectacle. I'm thinking of The Harder They Fall, North Dallas 40, and let's say Rollerball, just for fun.

But most sports films, to grossly generalize, drive to the hoop by depicting an athlete wielding his love for the game to triumph over such cynicism. Here, you've got your Rocky, your Karate Kid, your Field of Dreams, and your Bull Durham (my all-time fave). Baseball in particular has proven fertile ground for such redemptive plots, in films that live in a category all by themselves: the mytho-poetic. As befits a sport that has managed to embed itself into the national consciousness as a “pastime,” connoting fields of green; and lazy, sun-dappled afternoons in which time itself seems to stand still (and if you've ever watched Steve Trachsel pitch, it actually does).

Baseball has inspired more meditative essays than all the other sports combined. "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game," wrote historian Jacques Barzun. I'm a huge baseball fan, but I'd go with football - or better yet, mixed martial arts - if you're really interested in American innards.

Still, among sports, only baseball truly merits literary treatment. Baseball has been the subject of at least two first-rate books: Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. It's the only sport that could sustain a 10-part Ken Burns documentary or anchor a George Carlin monologue.

Baseball has frequently been used by filmmakers as a proxy for Americans' self-described values. In Meet John Doe, an ex-baseball player played by Gary Cooper is the quintessentially ingenuous American. Baseball in that film becomes the natural occupation of the naif, content to spend his adult years playing a boy's game, whose innocence is exploited and turned against him and his fellow good eggs by a crypto-fascist. Pride of the Yankees is all about Gehrig's big speech, in which the dying star proclaims himself to be “the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Again, Gary Cooper stars, the laconic American who enters into a state of grace by facing death with stoical dignity.

Baseball is so embedded in our national consciousness that the myth-makers have had no trouble in adapting it to changing American mores. Post-Ball Four, Jim Bouton's groundbreaking dismantling of baseball culture as a topic suitable for fifth-grade filmstrips, the soft-spoken towers of strength in hagiographic biopics gave way to hedonistic rowdies exercising their right to pursue crasser pleasures than embodying a national idyll who also remembers to hit the cut-off man. Ted Danson's Sam Malone on "Cheers" is a recovering alcoholic and a practicing sex addict, but his jocky good nature and ability to stymie a pretentious female smartypants is both an indictment of and an homage to Americans alternative national pastime: bashing intellectuals. (CONTINUED)

Review - Watchmen

Fidelity to a Fault

Because I'd been semi-repulsed by director Zack Snyder's last film, 300, I hadn't held out much hope for Watchmen. A lot of movies stink, but I'm rarely offended by them. I thought 300, however, could have been made by Leni Riefenstahl if Leni Riefenstahl had been a self-hating, teenage, male closet-case.

Or perhaps Snyder was just being faithful to his source material, Frank Miller's graphic novel. After viewing Watchmen, that I could believe. Screenwriters David Hayter and Alex Tse make a few significant changes from writer Alan Moore's and artist Dave Gibbon's groundbreaking comic book saga, but this adaptation hews so closely to the original that its ardent fans will have no problem matching individual movie frames to their printed antecedents. The story even unfolds, chapter-by-chapter, using the same narrative devices. A handful of songs add a smattering of atmosphere, but for the most part it's as if Snyder tried to turn the graphic novel into a big flipbook.

The great and grumpy Alan Moore, famously disgusted with the film versions of his work, called "Watchmen" "unfilmable." While Snyder's attempt at loading in the book's plot, themes, and visual style may be a noble nod to cult purists, it also seems to prove Moore right. One of the great pleasures of the printed version is letting the nuances of mood and story seep in, immersing you completely in a plausible alternate universe. Integral to this process is staring at the panels and backtracking when necessary to let the details accumulate and assimilate into your system.

But such nuances come and go in a film, or this film, anyway, and it’s hard to absorb the full scope and implications of information intended to help you access the story's skewed landscape. The book did this most effectively via it's use of extra material included at the end of each chapter: textual artifacts that added depth and color to the world depicted. For example, an excerpt from a tell-all written by one of the earliest masked vigilantes grounds you in the long history of the masked avenger phenomenon and provides a glimpse of the psychology of those who feel the need to commit their acts of heroic derring do wearing a cape and mask.

This perfectly sets up the story's central conceit, which is that we live in a world where people actually go out and engage in  this kind of extra-institutional crime-fighting. The pure-text extensions of the story provide the back story; by reverse engineering them, the reader can  extrapolate the foundations of the alternate reality. (The status and history of the U.S. - Soviet Union conflict within the story, for example, is perfectly explained through a few pages from a fictional political science book.)

So the great titillating question behind "Watchmen" the book is: What would the world be like if these superhero characters were inserted into the historical stream? The answer: Thanks to the intervention of the one preternatural character, an ex-human with the ability to bend matter and experience past, present, and future as contemporaneous, the U.S. would have won in Vietnam, which would have strengthened the position of Richard Nixon, leading to a repeal of the amendment limiting a president to two terms. (The insertion of another character, the deeply cynical Comedian, explains with one economical line of dialogue the nullification of Watergate as Nixon's downfall.) (CONTINUED)

Review - Frost/Nixon

The Dandy vs. the Disgrace

Jerry Lewis, George Steinbrenner, and Richard Nixon are three personalities I could never resist when they appeared on TV. The inverted charisma of these men - their transparent and blustery attempts at concealing massive insecurities behind public personas - lent them an accident-waiting-to-happen aura I found particularly compelling. I just didn't want to avert my gaze, lest I miss that final moment when layers of obnoxiousness sloughed away to reveal the quivering mass of childhood trauma running the show. Watching Lewis's telethon clowning  Steinbrenner's obsessive firing and rehiring of managers, or Nixon declaring, "I am not a crook" - these were my precusors to today's reality shows, the main draw being a public nervous breakdown. I may be wrong, but I'm betting on Sarah Palin as the next big thing in this genre.

There are moments in Frost/Nixon in which director Ron Howard captures Frank Langella’s Nixon in just such a state of rawness. All the actors I've seen play Nixon - Anthony Hopkins, Philip Baker Hall, Dan Hedaya, Rip Torn - have delivered meritorious performances. But Langella's is the one that truly fascinates, because it so thoroughly captures the pathos and inner desolation lurking underneath the familiar mannerisms and intonation.

The film, adapted from the stage play, recounts the circumstances surrounding the 1977 series of interviews of Nixon by David Frost, three years after the president had resigned in disgrace over Watergate. Frost offered Nixon $600,000 for the gig, topping an offer from CBS and putting himself at financial risk. None of the networks would buy the program, so Frost, in an unprecedented move, was forced to syndicate it.

Because Howard does such a terrific job of setting up what's at stake for the participants, the film builds formidable tension. Frost at the time was considered a celebrity interviewer, a lightweight. "I spent yesterday afternoon watching you interview the Bee Gees," his producer, skeptical of his boss's ability to pull off the hard-news coup, admonishes him. But Frost, played by Michael Sheen (Tony Blair in The Queen) as having a keen intelligence beneath the frothy exterior, wants to use the event as a springboard for a comeback in America, where his show had been cancelled. Meanwhile, Frost's researchers, James Reston and Bob Zelnick (Sam Rockwell and Oliver Platt), see the event as a chance to put the liberal bete noire Nixon on trial, bringing him to justice in a way that Gerald Ford's pardon had precluded.

Nixon, of course, has the biggest fish to fry. He wants to exonerate himself and rehabilitate his reputation. Both the Nixon and Frost teams think Frost will be no match for Tricky Dick. “After this you can even move back east,” says his aide, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon). “Frost is not in your intellectual class,” exudes another flunkie. “It’ll be a big wet kiss.” 

(CONTINUED)

Review - Synecdoche, New York

Tedious ambiguities

I've often thought Charlie Kaufman’s biggest accomplishment has been parlaying his success into almost unprecedented status as a screenwriter whose name is recognizable to the general public. I'm a movie fanatic and I can name maybe ten individuals in that profession, past or present. His clever scripts for Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind certainly helped, but I think he accomplished the feat mainly by pulling the brilliant stunt of writing himself in as a character in Adaptation, thus leapfrogging director Spike Jonze as the more active creative hand.

Screenwriters have about as much pull in the Hollywood hierarchy as House Republicans now have in passing legislation, so that was sheer self-marketing genius. Kaufman became an actual brand, of which the cognitive dissonance created by tinkering with the varying realities inherent in movie-watching is a primary trait.

Synecdoche, New York is Kaufman's directorial debut. We went to see it in El Cerrito on Baby Brigade night, when infants are welcome and can spit up in a stranger's popcorn with impunity. When young Hildy coughed up a globule of milk before the opening credits had even finished, I thought it a premature assessment. But she turned out to be prescient.  

The film starts off fine. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a stage director married to Adele (Catherine Keener), a painter of distorted portraiture in the vein of Francis Bacon. Both seem on the verge of a nervous breakdown, or at least a nervous break-up. Caden’s unspoken obsession with death anchors a malevolent foreboding and an oppressive atmosphere of depression and decay. “Harold Pinter died,” he enthuses, glancing at the morning paper. “Oh, wait, he just won the Nobel prize.” Soon, a bathroom pipe explodes in his face and he breaks out in a rash. And among all the attributes of his shrink's shapely form, his sole focus is an ugly toe protuberance. The play he's directing, of course, is Death of a Salesman.

Everyone looks tired and sad and spent, an effect put to greatest use by Keener, who manages to augment her signature heart-of-stone persona with some genuine vulnerability. The tone is ultra grim, but the script is sharp and builds a good deal of tension, as the film careens toward what feels like some promising existential horror. The peak level of entertainment is reached in this bit of dialog, in the office of a couples therapist played by Hope Davis:

Adele: I fantasized about Caden dying.

Therapist: Caden, does that feel terrible?

Caden: Yeah.

Therapist: (brightly, denoting great progess) Good!

(CONTINUED)

Review - Milk

He was here to recruit us

I saw Milk on closing night at The Castro Theatre in San Francisco. I grew up a block away from Union Square in Manhattan, so I’m used to seeing film locations that I've actually done some living around. But this is the first time I've seen a movie in which the actual theater I was sitting in took up prominent real estate on-screen.

I lived in San Francisco's Castro district on two separate occasions, for a total of seven years, so I have a strong connection to the film's geography. During the early 90s, I mixed with cadaverous men haunting the neighborhood streets, breathing from oxygen masks, leaning on canes. I ate at Home restaurant on Castro Street, where you could score a 10% discount if you were a PWA (Persons with AIDS). I sat through 12-Step meetings in which stories of dead partners topped acknowledgments of panic over T-cell counts. Medical science had yet to wrestle the virus to the current stand-off, and a diagnosis of positive was often as good as a death sentence.

Living in the midst of the life-and-death struggle the gay community was engaged in, how could one's predjudices not fall away? How could one ever again say and actually mean the word "faggot," our most contemptuous schoolyard insult reserved for only the most ostracized in our cohort? I felt the existential questions hanging over the Castro back then as both alien and familiar. I too was experiencing feelings of loss, guilt, fear, and dread, only for reasons much less grave than those braving the AIDS epidemic.

So for some San Franciscans, Milk is more than a film, and it's more than a political statement. It's a momentous event, when a local saint so important to the city's sense of it itself is presented to the mainstream, literally larger than life. His memory made flesh by one of America's finest actors, for friendly citizens all over the world to embrace.

At the same time, the extreme localism of the story can engender odd distractions for a San Francisco audience. The crowd at The Castro cheered during the Coors boycott sequence, a minor event in the scope of such an operatic story. I myself didn't know that Cleve Jones, whom I had voted for once in a supervisors' election, had been so involved in Harvey's organization. Other San Francisco figures making appearances as characters include Dianne Feinstein, Dennis Peron, Art Agnos, and Tom Ammiano. (The true Fog City insider will note San Francisco Mime Troupe diva Velina Brown appearing as a newscaster.)

I can't say whether director Gus Van Sant got all of it right - the events, the politics, the general feeling of that time, that place. The fact is, The Times of Harvey Milk, one of the best and most affecting documentaries I’ve ever seen, is a richer, more educational experience. But Van Sant has the good sense to parallel that film's timeline, covering Milk's life from his relocation from New York to San Francisco in 1972 until his murder, in 1978. (CONTINUED)

Review - Slumdog Millionaire

Bollywood, here we come?

About 15 years ago, I went over to Berkeley a couple of times to catch a double feature of Bollywood films. One time, only one of the movies had English sub-titles, but I  diverted myself during the incomprehensible sequences with a trip to the snack bar for some chaat.

But even without a translation, it was still entertainment-squared, like someone had tossed a big genre salad on-screen, with no regard for complementary ingredients. Murder, romance, gunplay, sex, and of course, singing and dancing - all in one crazy film, and without a trace of self-consciousness, to boot. The crowd - mostly Indians but inclusive of a few arty types like me - loved it, and I wondered what influence such lively cinema would or could have on American movies.

Some time later, Hong Kong, not India, was capturing the imagination and dollars of the forward-thinking American cinephile. Quentin Tarantino was re-working Hong Kong scenarios; early adopters were lionizing far-east icons like Jet Li, Jackie Chan, and Chow Yun Fat, prompting them to cross over into the American mainstream; and action maven John Woo  brought his game to the States. A big-budget production like Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon helped make the genre palatable for American audiences, and eventually Hong Kong style crept into American actioners so that every fight looked like it was choreographed by Yuen Wo-Ping (see The Matrix, which he actually did choreograph).

As far as I can tell, no such trajectory for Indian influence exists. Is this because Hong Kong films have in part baked in American movie style that's then hybridized just enough to make them ripe for import? Is it because popular Indian storytelling, with its saturated stew of melodramatic story tropes, plays as simultaneously too exotic and too mundane for American audiences? Or is it it something more prosaic,  like demographics and/or marketing? (continued)

Review - Burn After Reading

High and dry comedy from the Coens

I could never really get a handle on the Coen Brothers, and I've always had  the nagging suspicion that they’re faking it; that their main frame of reference, and thus their interest, lies in the many multitudes of movies they’ve absorbed, not in life itself.  So I begin to see their films as mostly meta-works and not something I can really use.

For that reason, I think The Big Lebowski is their best, and the film that lies closest to their aesthetic hearts. Essentially a shaggy dog story, it's the most suitable vehicle for them to riff on movie stereotypes and plot devices, utilizing their unique and highly attuned sense of drollery. The movie's the thing, not the idea.

The misanthropic comedy Burn After Reading feels close to Lebowski in temperament. The film's jumping-off point is the paranoid American spy film –  post-Watergate thrillers like 3 Days of the Condor or The Parallax View. The joke here is that a lonely health club worker, in need of cash to pay for plastic surgeries, can spur various factions of the national security complex into action. The hypocrisy that beats at the heart of the free enterprise system is an easy but well placed target.  One of the Coens' great talents lies in the way they leverage the small indignities of daily life into sublime moments of comedy. That stock in trade is frequently evidenced in reaction shots to some particularly preposterous bit of dialogue or action. Here, we see several mercenary professionals paying lip service to ethical behavior: A plastic surgeon making a feeble attempt at objectivity during a consultation with McDormand, and a divorce lawyer doing the same in a meeting with Tilda Swinton. The Coens also eavesdrop on several of what is fast becoming the classic metaphorical American commercial experience: the customer service call.

The comedy here is both high and dry, carried smoothly by the ensemble cast: McDormand; George Clooney as a philandering G-Man; Swinton playing yet another ice queen; John Malkovich as a supericilious and on-the-verge-of-a-meltdown agent; Brad Pitt as a ditzy fitness instructor; Richard Jenkins as McDormand's lovelorn boss; and J.K. Simmons as a spy boss who delivers a a very funny plot summation then asks the question at the heart of the Coen Brothers conundrum: "What have we learned from this?"

Well, maybe nothing. But the movie's still a hoot An example of the kind of dry-witted moments that you don’t see much of in a national that treats Adam Sandler vehicles as  pure gold: Malkovich catches Jenkins burgling his house in a completely out-of-character act of lunacy, and recognizes him as the guy who works at his gym. Caught red-handed in a criminal enterprise by a man with a gun, Jenkins still finds it necessary to utter the disclaimer, “I’m not here representing Hardbodies.”

His last words, and an appropriate epitath for a character caught in the absurd machinations of another irony-laden world, courtesy of the Coens.

Linkateria:

• More Burn reviews
• Coenesque - devoted to the filmmakers
• Coen Heads (David Edelstein, New York)
• Narrative Junkie review - No Country for Old Men

Review - Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Please make him stop

Has there ever been a director who has fallen so far, so slowly, over so many attempts as Woody Allen? He's the Ralph Nader of the film world, his downward trajectory marked by an early genius tarnished by repeated folly later in life.

Many fans will have some specific film in mind when pinpointing the last straw: An entry so egregiously dull, pretentious, or derivative of earlier work that they officially ended their long-term relationship with the director's ever-expanding oeuvre, preferring to re-live better days through the magic of DVD. Maybe it goes as far back as the mean-spirited, Mia-bashing Husbands and Wives; the condescending and meretricious Mighty Aphrodite; the pointless Smalltime Crooks. For me, the irrevocable jumping of the shark came in the form of Anything Else, a film, for me, that's pretty much unwatchable. It seemed impossible that the creator of Annie Hall could have also conceived of, in the same lifetime, such a misguided project, and not just for the money. It was like Orson Welles attempting one last gift to posterity and coming up with Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.

Not that Woody was ever Orson Welles. But he was ingenious in his own way. Can we make anything of the fact that his long decline started around the same time as his very public and vicious split with Mia Farrow? I think as a case of a creative figure's arrested personal development made manifest on-screen, we can. All of a sudden this exchange from Annie Hall didn't seem that funny:

Rob: Imagine my surprise when I got your call, Max.
Alvy: Yeah. I had the feeling that I got you at a bad moment. You know, I heard high-pitched squealing.
Rob: Twins, Max! 16 years-old. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?

(review continued)

Review - Elegy

This film was adapted from the Philip Roth novella The Dying Animal, which is a close second to that author's The Human Stain as the title most likely to ensure some studio executive gets canned. Thus, the re-titled Elegy, connoting an atmosphere more bittersweet and less existentially primal, but just as Oscar-worthy.

The movie stars Ben Kingsley, who always gives an engaging performance, and Penelope Cruz, an actress once touted as the next J-Lo, back when that registered as a compliment. Kingsley plays professor David Kepesh, a sexegenerian public intellectual who appears on Charlie Rose, writes for The New Yorker, and has written a book on the Puritans' eradication of a licentious splinter group, which ensured the triumphalism of American prudery from pilgrim days to the summer of love. His regret at and rebellion against that development is expressed by his own life as an academic cocksman, and the semi-hysterics, reminiscent of the Susquehanna hat sketch, he falls into whenever someone mentions his past marriage.

Kepish's lust is set off when Consuela, a so-drop-dead gorgeous-you-wanna-kill-yourself Cuban  takes his class. At his own cocktail party, the much older teacher seduces her with a series of well-practiced moves, dazzling cocktail chatter, and ancient professorial pick-up lines like, "You have an elegant austerity.” review continued