Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story

Jenna Fischer and John C. Reilly in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (dir. Jake Kasdan, 2007).

"Fuck Nobility. Fuck ancient Egypt. Fuck cats."

Airheads

Amy Locane and Brendan Fraser in Airheads (dir. Michael Lehmann, 1994).



Nina Siemaszko and Adam Sandler.



Steve Buscemi and Michael McKean.

Trapped--nay, scuttled--in this genially lame farce about three rockers who hold a radio station hostage is a thoughtful group character study imagined through the chromatic and compositional visual sensibility of a Bellini or a Veronese, were those artists forced to work in cheap temperas and deprived of their usual dignified subject matter.

One thing that's nice is that everyone is played just slightly against type, at least at times. Adam Sandler has not yet crystallized into his more manically rageaholic persona, so he comes off as a sleepy, addled baby. Steve Buscemi is a steroidal satyr, all venom and cockiness (check out his Thor tattoo). Brendan Fraser simmers with an almost believable anger, albeit an anger of vague and risible origin. Chris Farley has some shining (almost dignified!) moments.

Wanted

Angelina Jolie and James McAvoy in Wanted (dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2008).

Angelina Jolie's body is now its own product placement, so that the more naked she becomes, the more she recedes behind the abstracted symbols of her always once-removed identity. Isn't one of the tattoos actually a bar code? Maybe not, but all the same.

Perfect, then, for this sleek, brutish cyborg of a movie, in which each glistening image, each bit of aggressive voiceover, each digitized syntactical bitchslap is calibrated so as to afflict the viewer in some domineering, vaguely contemptuous way. The special effects have more personality than the human characters, though, to be fair, they have quite a lot of it (the effects, not the characters). How are we supposed to feel about seeing someone get his face mashed to pulp as he's pushed backward across the room in slow motion by the barrel of the gun doing the mashing? Elated, I think. And transfixed by the complex mechanics of the maneuver, both as a concept and a CGI rendering. And (especially) exonerated of any bothersome responsibility toward any residual respect for life we might have been harboring.

The movie ends with the line "What the fuck have you done lately?" (oh, quit your whining, that doesn't give anything away, and even if it does, live with it). One implication here is that I, like the rest of the audience, am a passive consumer of mass entertainment, safely cushioned in my cocoon of vicarious mindlessness. Fair enough. I even pay for the privilege of having this pointed out to me in the course of said entertainment. But the other implication is that the character speaking has ascended to a higher level of animal vitality and existential immediacy by mastering the art of assassinating persons whose names are randomly assigned by a big weird sewing machine. Sure, pal. By those standards, you win.

The Aristocrats

Sarah Silverman in The Aristocrats (dir. Paul Provenza, 2005).

Uneven but frequently hilarious "documentary" about the stupidest joke of all time. I put "documentary" in quotes because much of what is treated in it is pretty hard to take seriously as something that could be intelligibly considered documentable. There's this long, pointless, dirty joke that all comedians know and occasionally tell to each other (but rarely to an actual audience). End of premise. We don't really learn anything about the joke's origins, or how it became a familiar comedic meme, or why it maintains such a foothold in the profession; we're just treated to comedian after comedian talking about how foul and silly it is, and giving their own renditions (which, again, are sometimes flat, sometimes inspired).

The fascinating thing about the joke is the way in which its fundamental conceit causes all the obscenity in it to become emptied of signifying power. Since we know in advance that the point of the joke is to include as much filth and atrocity as possible, we never experience it as actually referring to any of the unspeakable acts involved. Everything is leveled into a purely prosodic or phatic device. The basic outline of the joke is as follows:

A man walks into a talent agency and says, "Have I got an act for you. It's a family act. My wife and I and our son and daughter and dog come out on stage and ... [insert long recounting of over-the-top pornographic, incestuous, pedophiliac, scatological, violent, and otherwise immoral actions the family is said to perform]."

Talent agent: "That's quite an act. What do you call it?"

Man: "The Aristocrats!"

The spectacular unfunniness of this skeletal set-up is what puts all the burden of the joke on whatever sick abominations the comedian can come up with to fill in the middle section. The movie itself takes on some of the structure of the joke in treating the joke as a subject worthy of having a whole documentary devoted to it, and filling ninety minutes mostly with examples of the depravity one is required to imagine in order to tell the joke.

So it's all pretty interesting and amusing. Some viewers have complained about the disgustingness. Like I said, the language itself gets entirely neutralized for me by the conceptual apparatus. I just wish I didn't have to see Carrot Top's butt.

Or the rest of him either.

The Happening

A dead cop in The Happening (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 2008).

Anne Boyer writes:

I have no idea why you thought this was a bad movie. Perhaps there are two movies with this name and Roger Ebert and I and a few others have seen one which is quite good, and you are seeing something else?

I had to get online to see why people hated the film so much. Apparently American consumers do not like things that move slowly and do not consider nature a threat. But why would you hate this film?

Certainly an improvement on other recent apocalyptic films, esp. Children of Men. The only weak part was Zooey D. making moon faces and insipid sounds at the camera, but even that worked thematically.

K. Silem Mohammad replies:

I love slowness (I'm one of those "slow poets"). And I'm extremely scared of nature.

I'm even willing to grant that the bad acting (on both Wahlberg and Deschanel's parts) fit the overall "aesthetic" of the film somehow, as did the Monty Pythonesque absurdity of some of the gore (the guy in the lion cage, the guy who lies down in front of the riding mower). I'm just not sure if it was intentional, or if it was, what exactly the intention was, or if it wasn't, why exactly it's as interesting as it admittedly sort of is.

My favorite moment:

WAHLBERG: Close the windows and doors!
DESCHANEL: Why?

Phone conversation ensues in which Boyer points out that the riding mower scene is a visual quote of Tienanmen Square, along with other astute observations. Conversation ends with Mohammad provisionally assenting to proposal that Shyamalan's film is a minor antihumanist milestone in mainstream cinema.

Le Samouraï

Alain Delon in Le Samouraï (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville, 1967).

Melville's icy fantasia on This Gun for Hire unfolds with the pristine hyperelegance of a classical ballet or an MGM musical, only quieter. John Boorman's Point Blank came out the same year, and there are some striking similarities in color palette and general composition of shots. Someone can probably tell me if one film was an influence on the other.

Simultaneously more sentimental and more unemotional than Melville's earlier Bob le flambeur, Le Samouraï is nevertheless an exhilarating piece of cinema. It's among the very best of that play-of-cool-postmodern-surfaces neonoir subgenre to which it helped give birth, and within which we are still seeing countless newer directors find material for giddy invention, as drunk on its conventions as though they had emerged for the first time last week.

Diary of the Dead

Amy Lalonde and Chris Violette in Diary of the Dead (dir. George Romero, 2007).

For the first third or so of Diary of the Dead,, I was having a really hard time getting past Romero's determinedly low-budget mentality. I don't think we're talking entirely about an "aesthetic" here: the man is just plain not very sophisticated in about ninety percent of the ways one must be sophisticated in order to create a competent film. But then there's that other ten percent, which he owns.

Land of the Dead (2005) was a disappointment, in part because Romero's DIY ethic (that's what it is--an ethic rather than, or above and beyond, an aesthetic) got spludged up kerplunk against a slightly larger budget and some name actors (Dennis Hopper, John Leguizamo). Also, the story was overly ambitious: a dystopic future Road Warrior style city-fortress premise that couldn't sustain its would-be epic weight. In Diary, we go back to square one, when the dead first start coming back to life, and everything is seen through the lens of a camera in the hands of a group of student filmmakers (who are trying to shoot a mummy movie[!] when the catastrophe starts).

The first hurdle is to accept that the film is not very scary. If you can live with that, it's fascinating to watch Romero fiddle with his topos like an equation he can't quite bring to solution, revisiting the old parts of the formula almost obsessively: the newscasts declaring that the dead have returned to life and are devouring the bodies of the living; the nightmarish encounters with undead family members; the bands of trigger-happy rednecks making sport out of the crisis, and so on. As commentary on national and global unrest, it's bald, blatant stuff, ground that has been more effectively covered countless times in the last few years by younger, fiercer filmmakers. In fact, all Romero really has going for him is a type of ramshackle soul, a faith in character (even in the absence of little things like believable dialogue), and a knack for isolated images of shocking eeriness--like the "human goldfish bowl."

Identity

Identity (dir. James Mangold, 2003).

Like David Fincher's Se7en or Robert Rodriguez' Sin City, James Mangold's Identity is neon bubble-gum horror noir that thumbs its nose at the very notion of textual depth or subtlety. Identity, however, has a cast that apparently believes they're acting in a real movie, so it's at least fun to watch them wasting their time. In particular, Ray Liotta is maybe the closest thing we've got to a modern-day John Garfield or the like: playing a man, not a good man, trying to pass as an upstanding citizen and constantly betraying his thug's heart through little shrugs and guilty glances, he is a marvel to behold. John Hawkes is good too, and John Cusack ... well, you know, he's always the same, but it works. John McGinley is squandered on any role where he doesn't play a jerk. Amanda Peet is all over the map, as usual, but she has so much gusto. Alfred Molina is practically an extra. Then there's poor Rebecca De Mornay, who is cast, it seems, chiefly as a cruel joke at her expense. John Hawkes, behind the motel desk, looks at her ID and says with a look of delighted recognition, "Didn't you used to be that actress"?

As for the story, it's a colossal cheat, not quite as clever as it tries to be, and therefore unable fully to compensate for its root inanity. Visually, it's terrific. The motel set they built for the film is almost too perfect. The color balance and meticulously arranged iconic retro elements (flickering sign, etc.) are so stunning that you can never quite forget you're looking at a simulacrum. Which, in a way, is appropriate.

The Truth About Cats & Dogs

Ben Chaplin in The Truth About Cats & Dogs (dir. Michael Lehmann, 1996).



Janeane Garafolo and Lisa Marie Russell.



Ben Chaplin and Uma Thurman (in medieval saint's pose).

Upon watching The Truth About Cats & Dogs, my left brain automatically sets up a right-hand column of cons in opposition to the left-hand column of pros set up by my right brain, and neither ever emerges as the dominant column. There are some premises that are hard to get past, the most unbuyable being that a guy falls in love with a gal on the basis of her radio personality, then can't recognize her voice when talking to her in person. There's also the cop-out around the issue of beauty: Janeane Garafolo's character Abby is presented as a plain jane (or at least she perceives herself that way), but there's no getting around the fact that Garafolo is hot. The point is supposed to be that she overcomes her own insecurities, etc. etc. But what if Abby were actually homely? How would that affect the reaction of the male lead upon finding out that she's not actually Uma Thurman? The message seems to be that physical beauty is unimportant--as long as you've got some on reserve.

There are also some unsatisfyingly unresolved plot strands. What happens to Uma Thurman's asshole boyfriend? She realizes he's a loser at one point, but we never get to see his dismissal. He's set up as such an ogre that it seems unfair to deprive us of a comeuppance scene. Jamie Foxx is given almost nothing to do--a big waste. And maybe I blinked and missed it, but what was the job Garafolo sets Thurman up for at her station towards the end of the movie? The way the scene plays, it seems like we're supposed to wonder what's written on the little slip of paper Garafolo hands Thurman, as though it's going to be a big funny surprise when we find out. But nothing.

On the other hand, there's something interesting in nearly every scene (well, maybe every other scene). How many Hollywood romantic comedies are there where one of the couple reads Roland Barthes to the other as a prelude to phone sex? And the scene where Ben Chaplin feeds Thurman cheesecake is both funny and grotesquely erotic. The relationship between Garafolo and Thurman is the other, perhaps more believable love story in the film (though of course this remains at a commercially safe level). Same-gender friendship is, I suggest, the key component of the "chick flick," or its flip side, the "dick flick" if you will, which usually involves some guy trying to get laid, receiving extended counsel from his male cohort, and/but inevitably finding out he really wants intimacy. This is Lehmann's metier, on both counts: he directed last year's Because I Said So with Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore, as well as 2002's 40 Days and 40 Nights (perhaps the purest example ever of how dick flicks are actually chick flicks in drag) and 1994's Airheads. Most notably, he directed Heathers (1989), which hinted at a future career of dark satire and trenchant cultural critique. But like I said, Airheads.

Castle Keep

Burt Lancaster in Castle Keep (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1969).

For a couple of years in the late sixties, movies were more postmodern than they have been at any time since. I don't mean postmodern in the sense of Baudrillardian simulacral sci-fi stuff, I mean in the sense of narrative, dialogue, and dramatic structure, a la Albee or Stoppard or Barthelme. Those only familiar with Sydney Pollack's later work, which typically perceives the world itself as a resolutely quotidian expanse peopled with the occasional reluctantly anomalous obstacles to the smooth functioning of its banal evils and repressions, would likely never guess he'd had a penchant for this sort of thing: half Dirty Dozen, half Putney Swope.

A troop of American soldiers, whose company includes a prominent art critic (Patrick O'Neal), a baker (Peter Falk), and a would-be novelist (Al Freeman Jr.), occupies the medieval French castle Maldorais. Maldorais contains an impossible cache of priceless European art, as well as an effete duke (Jean-Pierre Aumont) and his nubile young wife (Astrid Heeren). The eyepatched Major Falconer (Burt Lancaster) takes up with the wife, and the critic takes up with the art. Young Corporal Clearboy (Scott Wilson) takes up with a Volkswagen. Nearly all the men take up with the whores in the nearby village, where conscientious objector Bruce Dern wanders around with his makeshift Salvation Army band decrying war and fornication.

As the film "progresses," its elliptical lyricism gets more and more hallucinogenically pessimistic. As the derangement escalates, the story undoes its own narrative premises, violating its implied contract with the viewer in a formally radical way that's nevertheless so subtle it doesn't fully sink in until the credits are in mid-roll.

Spider

Bradley Hall and Ralph Fiennes in Spider (dir. David Cronenberg, 2002).



Miranda Richardson.



Ralph Fiennes.

Spider alienated many Cronenberg fans, who felt their beloved creepmaster was straying too far into "respectable" cinematic territory. The same critique was made, with somewhat more justice, of M. Butterfly (1993), but Spider is completely true to vintage Cronenbergian form. It doesn't have the usual level of blood or mangled flesh (though there are a couple of brief gory scenes), but all the trademark obsessions are there: the dread of sexuality, the encasement of the body, and most of all the dark fantasy of narrative and text assuming the power to corrupt one's sense of reality at a deep pychological, perhaps even cellular level.

I can't help but think that Cronenberg derived some cruel ironic pleasure from granting Ralph Fiennes his longtime wish of playing the role of the schizophrenic Dennis "Spider" Clegg--and then having author Patrick McGrath rework the script to remove nearly all of Spider's lines (originally planned as voiceover). Fiennes says maybe twelve intelligible words in the whole picture, and it lends considerably to the pervading sense of anxiety and isolation, as do all the shots where Spider is the only person in the frame.

Much of the story is presented as flashback, with Fiennes sharing filmic space with his younger self--and sometimes revisiting scenes he could not physically have witnessed in the first place. This is another of Cronenberg's familiar unnerving maneuvers: to put both us and his characters through vertiginous sequences of events that complicate and contradict each other. Miranda Richardson adds to the disorientation by playing multiple roles (I didn't realize this till the movie was almost over, but I'm hopeless with facial recognition). The final "twist" is predictable, but this doesn't lessen the emotional impact that much.

My favorite moment is the opening scene, where we watch what seems like half of Britain (actually the entire crew of the film) getting off a train and streaming past us, and we know that eventually we will be introduced to Spider as part of the stream--and the moment keeps getting deferred, until when we do finally see him, we are so relieved that our defenses are down, and we register his agonized presence like a sudden shock to the system. He crawls slowly off the train and onto the platform as though unsure of his footing, and our next impulse is one of protectiveness and sympathy. For the rest of the film, we feel bound to him, even responsible for him.

Spartan

Val Kilmer and Derek Luke in Spartan (dir. David Mamet, 2004).

Remember what I said about Mamet's films never threatening to turn into real movies? Spartan comes close to jumping the shark in that regard. There's just too much big governmental top-security danger danger action, creating the feel of one of those low-budget knock-offs of big-budget pictures like Patriot Games. The plot, if you can follow it, is preposterous in the extreme. But that's all right, because Val Kilmer brings his freaky intensity down hard on nearly every scene (does anyone besides me think he has a lot of talent?). He's the scariest character in the film, and he's the good guy.

Why is it called Spartan? Did I miss something? Is it a Marine thing?

Heist

Gene Hackman in a very Bergmanesque shot from Heist (dir. David Mamet, 2001).

I admit it, I'll always watch a Mamet film. I would say that this is one of his most minor directorial efforts, but they're all minor. Their brittle miniature quality is part of what makes them enjoyable: you're never worried that they're going to balloon into actual real life movies and draw attention away from all the fussy plotting and mannered dialogue. There is, however, probably less going on than average in Heist. I don't just mean that the heist itself is nearly an abstraction, and happens in the middle of the film; I liked that part. Actually I liked all of it. In a subdued manner of liking.

The Cooler

William H. Macy in The Cooler (dir. Wayne Kramer, 2003).

Bernie Lootz, played by William H. Macy, is a "cooler": a guy who goes to the gaming table in the casino to make customers lose, like just by emitting bad vibes or something. Do they really have those? Things get screwed up when he falls in love with Maria Bello and starts to bring good luck instead of bad. That's the dumbest part, that romantic fantasy element. The rest is fairly engaging, thanks to the production design (which is at once gaudy and noirish) and the chemistry between Macy and Bello (I know, bizarre, right?). The first sex scene is convincingly intimate enough to be a little embarrassing. In a "sweet" way, which is I guess what makes it embarrassing.

The Hidden

Kyle MacLachlan in The Hidden (dir. Jack Sholder, 1987).

I think I fell asleep when I watched this on late-night cable over fifteen years ago. I've always remembered that I liked it, but seeing it again, I remembered almost nothing. Which is nice, because I didn't know how it was going to turn out, so it was like seeing it for the first time. Anyway, it's a load of fun--it has some of that weirdo late-eighties sci-fi energy that say, Repo Man has (though not quite that much). The basic premise is that an alien life form takes over normal people and makes them want to do violent crimes and listen to terrible hard rock. Kyle MacLachlan, in his third screen role, plays an FBI agent, four years before Twin Peaks (did Lynch get the idea of casting him as Dale Cooper from this?).

Ms .45

Zoë Lund [as Zoë Tamerlis] in Ms .45 (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1981).

Abel Ferrara's sublimely tasteless splatter-drama about a young mute seamstress who gets raped twice in one day and goes on a man-shooting spree (her name is "Thana"--get it?). The main obstacle to her rampage is her nosy landlady, who has an equally nosy obnoxious little dog, and also happens to be a very, very bad actress. The big climax occurs when Thana attends a work Halloween party dressed as a nun and goes totally Carrie on the joint. It would all be contemptible if it didn't have so much sleazy New York soul. The very last shot combines black humor and cheap sentiment in a way I don't even know how to process.

Bob le flambeur

Roger Duchesne in Bob le flambeur (dir. Jean-Piere Melville, 1956).



Isabelle Corey.



Montmartre after dark.

Melville's classic anti-heist film is so wonderful on so many levels that I don't know what to say. It's a flawless piece of construction that never feels mechanically contrived; a celebration of human singularity that never stoops to maudlin psychologizing. To say that the movie is all style is no slight to its depth. Soul and wit, compassion and irony are made indistinguishable.

If I could be beamed back to any point in history, possibly to stay, it might be Melville's Montmartre of the fifties (who knew street cleaners ever looked like that, anywhere?). And if that Montmartre is merely imaginary, I would gladly dwell in its phantasm.

And if Isabelle Corey were there as well, that would seal the deal.

What Happens in Vegas...

Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas... (dir. Tom Vaughan, 2008).

1     What happens in Vegas is everything that is the case.

1.1     What happens in Vegas is the totality of facts, not of things.

2.01231     In order to know what happens in Vegas, I must know not its external but all its internal qualities.

2.2     What happens in Vegas has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures.

3.221     What happens in Vegas I can only name. Signs represent it. I can only speak of it. I cannot assert it. A proposition can only say how what happens in Vegas is, not what it is.

4.112     What happens in Vegas is not a theory but an activity.

5.6     The limits of what happens in Vegas represent the limits of my world.

6.41     The sense of what happens in Vegas must lie outside what happens in Vegas. In Vegas everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value--and if there were, it would be of no value.

If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening in Vegas and being-so. For all happening in Vegas and being-so is accidental.

6.43     The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

6.44     Not how what happens in Vegas is, is the mystical, but that it is.

7     What happens in Vegas, thereof one must be silent.

Play Dirty

Nigel Davenport and Michael Caine in Play Dirty (dir. André De Toth, 1968).



Nigel Green.



Mohsen Ben Abdallah and Mohamed Kouka: "All they ask is kif and each other."

Another tough little movie from De Toth--maybe his toughest ever. Superficially, it's a Dirty Dozen knock-off, but really it's a brilliant deconstruction of the colorful-gang-of-wartime-scoundrels genre, with its stock theme of camaraderie under fire. As in Aldrich's film, a troop composed mainly of criminals is sent on a secret mission against the Nazis. The one non-reprobate is Michael Caine, an officer who's drafted from his safe duties as a port inspector to lead the group in question across the Egyptian desert to find Rommel's fuel depot and blow it up. Sent along with him to make sure he gets back alive is Nigel Davenport, an arrogant, cynical mercenary.

What you gradually realize as the film goes on is that none of these guys are ever going to bond. All the plot mechanisms are in place for it, but they just spin and whir to no effect as though the script were mocking itself. Nor does Caine ever come down off his high horse and examine the hypocrisy of his anachronistic British investment in decorum. The closest he comes is, in a pinch, to adopt the same disregard for the sanctity of human life as the rest of his outfit ("You're learning," says Davenport when Caine blows away some German ambulance attendants--and that's the closest thing we see to bonding). As for the supporting cast, you think at first they're going to be "colorful"; no, they're just soulless thugs. The two most likeable of the bunch are Hassan and Assine, a couple of gay Arabs. When three of the other men try to rape the German nurse who treated Hassan's injuries, Hassan gallantly shoots one of them in the ass from his stretcher. But even this small moment of decency is subject to an ironic recontextualization as events unfold.

Nigel Green plays the colonel who sends all these guys on their quest, and he is perhaps the movie's most complex, merciless joke. His endearingly dotty eccentricities (wearing sandals, planning attacks by consulting ancient battle maps) eventually give way to a revelation of his true character that is devastating in its offhandedness. In this way he is a microcosm of the film as a whole.

Day of the Outlaw

Robert Ryan in Day of the Outlaw (dir. André De Toth, 1959).



Mike McGreevey and Burl Ives.



Tina Louise.



Robert Ryan.



Frank DeKova as "Denver": "I want to look at you."

Robert Ryan sneers at old flame Tina Louise, who's contemptuous of his lack of mercy: "You won't find much mercy anywhere in Wyoming." De Toth's version of Wyoming (I have no idea where it was filmed) is bleak indeed: with all its snow and long shots and low-contrast black-and-white it looks a lot like Peter Brook's King Lear. That is to say, it looks great.

Ryan looks great too: grizzled, cool, and surly. Tina Louise has not yet surrendered her identity to become Ginger on Gilligan's Island, and at times she takes on the delicate gravity of a Sargent painting. Elisha Cook graces us with his presence for about ten seconds. David Nelson, son of Ozzie and Harriet, plays a clean-cut young outlaw you don't believe could have lasted five minutes among the gang of ruffians he rides into town with on the run from the cavalry. That scurvy crew includes Jack Lambert, who played "The Claw" in Dick Tracy's Dilemma and "Dum Dum Clarke" in Siodmak's The Killers; Lance Fuller, from This Island Earth and Slightly Scarlet; and Frank DeKova, as a grotesque (I think he's supposed to be an Indian) named Denver, who's oddly sensitive in a psychotic way. And, yes, Burl Ives as a renegade Union officer in charge of them all! All we ever find out about Ives' character, Jack Bruhn, is that he led a massacre of Mormon settlers in Utah. We don't learn why, and we're not let very far into the dark chamber of Bruhn's troubled conscience. His men are clamoring for alcohol and rough sex with the local wives and daughters of the townfolk, but he holds them tightly in check, even as he's suffering from a serious bullet wound. This power he has over them isn't really explained either, beyond the casual observation that they "need" him," but he makes it believable. He's a very reasonable outlaw, and scarier for it.