While a decent way to pass 106 minutes of an eight hour transatlantic flight in the opposite direction of your fiancé , The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 is little more, and certainly nothing approaching the tightly-orchestrated adagio of Joseph Sargent's 1974 version, in which the hijackers wear trench coats, tortoise-rimmed glasses, and fake moustaches, and call each other Mr. Brown, Mr. Gray, and Mr. Green. Instead, we are given a disgruntled hedge fund manager (John Travolta, who is looking more and more like a trailer park child molester these days) out to get back at New York City by crashing the stock market and making good on gold, and a few not-so-bright Latino henchmen he picked up in prison (where he was sent for some kind of white-collar scheme). Instead of Walter Matthau at headquarters, we are offered Denzel Washington. Ten years ago, Travolta v. Washington could be almost as promising as Pacino v. DeNiro in Heat, but these days, both are pretty washed up.
Washington has some kind of dark secret which comes out during his cat-and-mousing with Travolta. It turns out he accepted a bribe while overseas negotiating a contract for the purchase of new trains—so that he could pay his daughters' college tuition. Luckily, Mayor James Gandolfini is more than willing to erase that from his permanent record after Washington risks his life chasing Travolta through the city, both underground in the subway tunnels, through traffic-filled streets (obligatory car chase!)*, and on foot across the Manhattan bridge, eventually shooting the man dead (somewhat against his will, of course, as he is a good citizen who has never before shot a gun). Gone is the 1974 mayor, who was sick in bed with the flu when the ransom order came in, and his griping about the filth that is (was) New York—which was the funniest part of the movie.
This film could have been so much more than a B-level action flick people watched on the plane, but the screenplay is so lazy (why?! More than half the work was done in '74!) and reliant on stereotypes that the competent cast can't get it off the ground. The original film does typecast the hostages (even in the credits, they are listed as The Mother, The Homosexual, The Hooker, The Pimp), but they are just hostages—the story is not theirs. Tony Scott's version, perhaps stabbing at egalitarianism, lets each hostage shine for a moment—the soldier who dies so that a mother's child can live, the undercover cop who tries to save the day but is shot dead, and the college kid whose girlfriend witnesses the entire takeover via skype on his laptop (ugh). Meanwhile, we never get a clear understanding of our hero.
*The movie also includes an obligatory rat bite.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Movies: A Serious Man
The Coens get back to what works in A Serious Man—a kind of 1960s version of The Big Lebowski, more tightly focused, steeped in Judaism and wreathed in wisps of marijuana smoke. A contemporary Job, small-potatoes physics professor Larry Gopnik finds his orderly word to be suddenly out of order. It begins with a Korean exchange student attempting to bribe him for a passing grade, and swiftly progresses to a proposed incursion on his rancher’s property line by the too-American neighbors, a request for divorce from his wife, a car accident, an urgent call from his doctor to discuss test results, and certain financial ruin, not to mention extreme emotional strain. Swirling around him are other such peripheral troubles as a jobless brother with a gambling problem and a cyst that needs constant draining, the warm-mouthed, paunch-bellied widower who is courting his wife, and a son too busy getting high and running from the neighborhood bully to prepare for his bar mitzvah.
The trajectory of the film is preëstablished by a sepia-toned short in which a 19th century Russian Jewish couple argue in their home in front of a guest as to whether the old man is or is not an evil spirit; the husband, who has befriended the bearded stranger after an accident on the road, thinks his appearance is a blessing, for he is a family friend of his wife’s. The wife, who heard that the man died three years ago of typhus, thinks that his appearance is a curse, and stabs him in the chest with an ice pick. The bright-eyed visitor is slow to show signs of pain, but eventually bleeds, then wanders back out into the snow. The husband cries that they are ruined because of her murder; she closes the door, certain that they are saved because of her vigilance.
During the movie proper, Gopnik’s car wreck is mirrored by another, but fatal car wreck: that of Sy Ableman, the widower-lover of Gopnik’s wife, who is called at his funeral (for which somehow Gopnik finds himself paying) “a serious man,” by the Rabbi Nachtner. After Gopnik has visited the over-zealous Junior Rabbi Scott, and the more senior but equally useless Rabbi Nachtner, asking, as a good Jew must, why it is that God is forsaking him, he tries to see the aged and wise Rabbi Marshak, stammering to his secretary that he is—that he has tried to be—a serious man. Marshak, who is busy thinking, refuses to see him, but towards the end of the film, does see Gopnik’s son, for the only work he still does is converse on the Sabbath wit the boy being bar mitzvahed. To this boy, he slowly and sagely says, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies,” and then pulls from his drawer the boy’s transistor radio, confiscated from him at Hebrew school at the film’s start.
He is quoting, of course, the Jefferson Airplane song that has become the film’s theme, and this is the film’s most brilliant and hysterical moments. Gopnik senior so desperately wants the old man’s wisdom, but it’s given instead to his jejune boy. And yet, it promises to address the man’s crisis—his job, his marriage, and his entire reality are not what he thought they were. But just as that song asks questions without offering answers, the Rabbi Marshak offers no actual answers (“be a good boy,” he says)—and neither does the film. Though the bar mitzvah goes off without a hitch and husband and wife are brought closer by their child’s achievement, and though a colleague from the tenure committee drops by Gopnik’s office to tell him that the news will likely be good, the film ends before we’re given confirmation, before the divorce is called off, and while a tornado is visible on the horizon, and the doctor’s office is on the phone. We are a little disgruntled, but what else could we expect? The film is about uncertainty itself, so cannot offer any certain conclusion.
*Even if everyone else liked No Country For Old Men, I considered it a failure.
The trajectory of the film is preëstablished by a sepia-toned short in which a 19th century Russian Jewish couple argue in their home in front of a guest as to whether the old man is or is not an evil spirit; the husband, who has befriended the bearded stranger after an accident on the road, thinks his appearance is a blessing, for he is a family friend of his wife’s. The wife, who heard that the man died three years ago of typhus, thinks that his appearance is a curse, and stabs him in the chest with an ice pick. The bright-eyed visitor is slow to show signs of pain, but eventually bleeds, then wanders back out into the snow. The husband cries that they are ruined because of her murder; she closes the door, certain that they are saved because of her vigilance.
During the movie proper, Gopnik’s car wreck is mirrored by another, but fatal car wreck: that of Sy Ableman, the widower-lover of Gopnik’s wife, who is called at his funeral (for which somehow Gopnik finds himself paying) “a serious man,” by the Rabbi Nachtner. After Gopnik has visited the over-zealous Junior Rabbi Scott, and the more senior but equally useless Rabbi Nachtner, asking, as a good Jew must, why it is that God is forsaking him, he tries to see the aged and wise Rabbi Marshak, stammering to his secretary that he is—that he has tried to be—a serious man. Marshak, who is busy thinking, refuses to see him, but towards the end of the film, does see Gopnik’s son, for the only work he still does is converse on the Sabbath wit the boy being bar mitzvahed. To this boy, he slowly and sagely says, “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies,” and then pulls from his drawer the boy’s transistor radio, confiscated from him at Hebrew school at the film’s start.
He is quoting, of course, the Jefferson Airplane song that has become the film’s theme, and this is the film’s most brilliant and hysterical moments. Gopnik senior so desperately wants the old man’s wisdom, but it’s given instead to his jejune boy. And yet, it promises to address the man’s crisis—his job, his marriage, and his entire reality are not what he thought they were. But just as that song asks questions without offering answers, the Rabbi Marshak offers no actual answers (“be a good boy,” he says)—and neither does the film. Though the bar mitzvah goes off without a hitch and husband and wife are brought closer by their child’s achievement, and though a colleague from the tenure committee drops by Gopnik’s office to tell him that the news will likely be good, the film ends before we’re given confirmation, before the divorce is called off, and while a tornado is visible on the horizon, and the doctor’s office is on the phone. We are a little disgruntled, but what else could we expect? The film is about uncertainty itself, so cannot offer any certain conclusion.
*Even if everyone else liked No Country For Old Men, I considered it a failure.
Movies: Up in the Air
There is something disconcerting about George Clooney, and Up in the Air crystallizes this thing. The ideal icon of contemporary consumer culture, Clooney is a very fine product. He is well-cut, of a nice weight with double-stitched seams. He has fruit in the nose, spicy overtones, and a balanced structure. He presents well, and he has a smooth finish. He is casually warm, and happy to appear at your benefit for Cause X and be photographed. But what does he actually stand for? What are his passions? What is under the worsted wool, the Egyptian cotton, the clean linens, and the sun-toasted, precor-toned skin? Brad Pitt undoubtedly poops. George Clooney? I’m not as certain. He may not have any viscera.
And Up in the Air embraces, however ironically, that hollow Clooneyan panache. Here is the American dream gone wrong, where corporations are our closest friends, and we are more loyal to them than our lovers. As Ryan Bingham, Clooney flies American Airlines between the country’s armpit outposts—Omaha to Houston to Detroit—laying people off (imagine a fin de siecle capitalist structure so bloated and necrotic that it outsources its termination processes). The tragedy of the working American is his boon; the worse the country’s economy get, the more miles he accrues. This is not-so-subtle social criticism from writer/director Jason Reitman, also responsible for Thank You For Smoking and the less-toothy Juno, but in our irony-saturated state, we need a stronger shake, a sharper stick in the eye, than this cotton-swabbed swipe.
Bingham’s stint in the sky isn’t unlike Ed Norton’s character’s at the beginning of Fight Club—single-serving coffee, single-serving cream, single-serving friend. But Fight Club rages against this empty husk of a life, and tears shit up. Tyler Durden’s disorder is a direct and violent engagement with his depression and disconnection. That was 10 years ago. Up in the Air, however ironic or sly, never breaks the circuit of escape. When the taste of what Bingham thought he wanted sticks in his throat, he runs. When the human connection he thinks he’s found turns out to be false, he runs. And as the film concludes, he’s on the plane again, going we don’t know where.
And Up in the Air embraces, however ironically, that hollow Clooneyan panache. Here is the American dream gone wrong, where corporations are our closest friends, and we are more loyal to them than our lovers. As Ryan Bingham, Clooney flies American Airlines between the country’s armpit outposts—Omaha to Houston to Detroit—laying people off (imagine a fin de siecle capitalist structure so bloated and necrotic that it outsources its termination processes). The tragedy of the working American is his boon; the worse the country’s economy get, the more miles he accrues. This is not-so-subtle social criticism from writer/director Jason Reitman, also responsible for Thank You For Smoking and the less-toothy Juno, but in our irony-saturated state, we need a stronger shake, a sharper stick in the eye, than this cotton-swabbed swipe.
Bingham’s stint in the sky isn’t unlike Ed Norton’s character’s at the beginning of Fight Club—single-serving coffee, single-serving cream, single-serving friend. But Fight Club rages against this empty husk of a life, and tears shit up. Tyler Durden’s disorder is a direct and violent engagement with his depression and disconnection. That was 10 years ago. Up in the Air, however ironic or sly, never breaks the circuit of escape. When the taste of what Bingham thought he wanted sticks in his throat, he runs. When the human connection he thinks he’s found turns out to be false, he runs. And as the film concludes, he’s on the plane again, going we don’t know where.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Movies: Road House
Because I watched this movie on VH1 on the plane, missing the first five minutes, the last ten minutes, and all the good parts in between that were replaced by commercials, I’m not sure that I should be reviewing it here. But I’m so fascinated by its extreme 80s-ness that I can’t help it. Everyone fell in love with Patrick Swayze’s moves in Dirty Dancing, but it’s in Road House that he shows his real moves, doing shirtless tai chi in front of his rented bungalow (no phone, no tv, no air conditioning—my kind of man!) while the next door neighbors—an all-male family of rich boors who, it turns out, have garnished their wealth by terrorizing the town’s small business owners—drive by in helicopters and monster-trucks. At one point, papa rich boor insists to Swayze that he’s done the town good—it’s because of him that they have a JC Penney. Oh, the 80s!
Only in the 80s could a movie with a plot this thin even be made—Swayze’s Dalton is the best cooler in the business (except for his gray-haired mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott in a fit of casting brilliance)), and he’s paid a pretty sum to leave his big-city digs and help revamp a rowdy roadhouse where brawls rage every night, so violent that the band—led by a blind blues guitar player—plays inside a chicken-wire cage. Dalton cleans up not only the bar, but the whole town, taking out the rich bad guys, and hooks up with a babelicious nerdy girl-doctor along the way (she staples shut a huge knife wound in his torso after he refuses any anesthetic, drives a red jeep, and looks ultra-hot when she takes off her glasses and unbraids her hair). I don’t know what happens in the end, but I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing through again to find out.
Only in the 80s could a movie with a plot this thin even be made—Swayze’s Dalton is the best cooler in the business (except for his gray-haired mentor, Wade Garrett (Sam Elliott in a fit of casting brilliance)), and he’s paid a pretty sum to leave his big-city digs and help revamp a rowdy roadhouse where brawls rage every night, so violent that the band—led by a blind blues guitar player—plays inside a chicken-wire cage. Dalton cleans up not only the bar, but the whole town, taking out the rich bad guys, and hooks up with a babelicious nerdy girl-doctor along the way (she staples shut a huge knife wound in his torso after he refuses any anesthetic, drives a red jeep, and looks ultra-hot when she takes off her glasses and unbraids her hair). I don’t know what happens in the end, but I wouldn’t mind watching the whole thing through again to find out.
Books: Fathers and Sons, by Ivan Turgenev
Once I left school, I started reading the introductions to novels, when they had them, since no one was around to spoon feed me context (which in the past I disdained to consider relevant, but I come to appreciate more and more as I create my own contextual database, reading more and more). Unfortunately, reading introductions first often colors one’s reading of the novel, such that during my reading of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, I was constantly seeking the development of the early image of the “nihilist”—a figure with which I’ve been long fascinated, and which the introduction of my moldy, hardcover copy of this book (left, now, in some airplane’s seat-pocket) posits was first established in this very book. I’d always considered nihilism a particularly French sensation, and known the Russians to be Francophiles (if not Francofetishists), so was somewhat surprised that the concept might have Russian origin (for I expect communist Russians to be nihilists, of course, but Turgenev published Fathers and Sons in 1862).
But to be honest, I found Bazarov a rather disappointing nihilist—rather a romantic, in fact—and his compatriot (and the novel’s true hero) Arcadii a rather dry, typical hero of the Russian gentry, sweetly naïve and achieving fulfillment only in finding a woman even more sweetly naïve to marry and set up farm (Arcadii and Katya reappear almost in carbon copy in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as Levin and Kitty, except that each is a bit older and more tired—though no less naïve and traditional). Bazarov, a naturalist with little patience for the affection of his parents, falls hopelessly in love with the widow Odintsova. When she rejects him, he (arguably purposely) contracts the quick-killing typhus (by touching an infected person’s wound with his own open wound—an experiment someone with his scientific knowledge would know would lead to infection).
As also discovered in reading the introduction, Turgenev lost most of his readership with the publication of this novel; older readers were offended, as they thought he was siding with the young nihilists, and younger readers thought that he was caricaturizing them, and siding with the “Fathers.” Having only read one other of Turgenev’s works, I would posit that he sides with no one, only observing people and the silly games they play with their minds, with a fascination much more pure than that of those who would follow—those writers like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who had much clearer agendas. Turgenev, rather than trying to alight on the ideal way to live, simply sees the way we do live, a bemused smile on his face and a poignant chuckle in his throat.
But to be honest, I found Bazarov a rather disappointing nihilist—rather a romantic, in fact—and his compatriot (and the novel’s true hero) Arcadii a rather dry, typical hero of the Russian gentry, sweetly naïve and achieving fulfillment only in finding a woman even more sweetly naïve to marry and set up farm (Arcadii and Katya reappear almost in carbon copy in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as Levin and Kitty, except that each is a bit older and more tired—though no less naïve and traditional). Bazarov, a naturalist with little patience for the affection of his parents, falls hopelessly in love with the widow Odintsova. When she rejects him, he (arguably purposely) contracts the quick-killing typhus (by touching an infected person’s wound with his own open wound—an experiment someone with his scientific knowledge would know would lead to infection).
As also discovered in reading the introduction, Turgenev lost most of his readership with the publication of this novel; older readers were offended, as they thought he was siding with the young nihilists, and younger readers thought that he was caricaturizing them, and siding with the “Fathers.” Having only read one other of Turgenev’s works, I would posit that he sides with no one, only observing people and the silly games they play with their minds, with a fascination much more pure than that of those who would follow—those writers like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who had much clearer agendas. Turgenev, rather than trying to alight on the ideal way to live, simply sees the way we do live, a bemused smile on his face and a poignant chuckle in his throat.
Movies: The Bad Lieutenant
I walked into Werner Herzog’s new movie knowing nothing else about it—not that it was a “remake” of a 1992 Ferrara film, not that it starred Nick Cage, not that it would be filled with pulpy drug use, sex, and violence. Each of those facts may have turned me away from the theater (isn’t it a bit soon to be remaking a film from the 90s?), but Herzog’s directorship turned out to be the only essential fact. For while this is an obscenely over-the-top, Tarantino-meets-Lynch parade of human filth—the waxy-faced crooked cop, the soft-focus prostitute with two black eyes, the bombastic black drug king—the irony is constantly interrupted by Herzog’s tenderness for the true human types that circulate in that world—the African family shot dead in their home, the beer-soaked skin of a sad country girl who can’t understand why her lover goes to AA, the bone-thin black teenage mothers who come to the door when Cage’s McDonagh comes knocking at their shack looking for drug-dealing boyfriends hiding in the chiffarobe.
But aside from the constant play between pulp’s crass, cold hyperbole and documentary’s careful, compassionate honesty, there is the Herzog wildcard: a sudden shift out of plot and into a strange existential meditation on the beautiful absurdity and madness of life. In Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about a scientific encampment in the Arctic, this meant following a suicidal penguin as he scuttled away from the flock and into the frame’s vanishing point, inland, away from the shore’s feeding grounds. In Lieutenant, breaks in McDonagh’s consciousness come with shots of iguanas that no one else sees. Herzog films these strange, scaly creatures with his National Geographic-style love of the wild; surrounded by prismatic light, their bulging eyes pulse, their horny skin still. Herzog uses a kind of lizard-cam so that we see the room from the iguana’s eyes, or, once, from the eyes of a crocodile slithering away from the site of a car wreck on the side of the road (where another croc’s insides are strewn across the street).
And the film’s “happy ending,” which sees the murder of the African family solved, the drug king pinned to the crime thanks to a (planted) DNA-kissed “lucky crack pipe”, the prostitute clean, married, and pregnant with McDonagh’s child, and the bad Lieutenant promoted to Corporal, doesn’t leave us with the couple kissing at the door (too soft and bright), or McDonaugh then snorting a pile of cocaine in a hotel room immediately after (too dark and harsh), but with another curious, elegiac interlude: McDonagh sitting on the floor in the dim blue of an aquarium, next to the Hispanic thug he saved from a Katrina-flooded prison at the film’s start, who has since changed his life and been clean a whole year—the entire year McDonagh slipped into deeper and deeper drug abuse, initially because of back pain caused by a disc injury sustained in saving this man. This Herzog moment is gratifying for almost no one—not the filmgoer who’s never heard of Herzog and came to see a Nick Cage action flick, not the romantic who wants to see every film tied up with the red ribbon of resurrection and resolution—but for the director’s humanist-compatriots, it is the ideal finish: open, quiet, unresolved, without judgment, without promise, without despair.
But aside from the constant play between pulp’s crass, cold hyperbole and documentary’s careful, compassionate honesty, there is the Herzog wildcard: a sudden shift out of plot and into a strange existential meditation on the beautiful absurdity and madness of life. In Encounters at the End of the World, a documentary about a scientific encampment in the Arctic, this meant following a suicidal penguin as he scuttled away from the flock and into the frame’s vanishing point, inland, away from the shore’s feeding grounds. In Lieutenant, breaks in McDonagh’s consciousness come with shots of iguanas that no one else sees. Herzog films these strange, scaly creatures with his National Geographic-style love of the wild; surrounded by prismatic light, their bulging eyes pulse, their horny skin still. Herzog uses a kind of lizard-cam so that we see the room from the iguana’s eyes, or, once, from the eyes of a crocodile slithering away from the site of a car wreck on the side of the road (where another croc’s insides are strewn across the street).
And the film’s “happy ending,” which sees the murder of the African family solved, the drug king pinned to the crime thanks to a (planted) DNA-kissed “lucky crack pipe”, the prostitute clean, married, and pregnant with McDonagh’s child, and the bad Lieutenant promoted to Corporal, doesn’t leave us with the couple kissing at the door (too soft and bright), or McDonaugh then snorting a pile of cocaine in a hotel room immediately after (too dark and harsh), but with another curious, elegiac interlude: McDonagh sitting on the floor in the dim blue of an aquarium, next to the Hispanic thug he saved from a Katrina-flooded prison at the film’s start, who has since changed his life and been clean a whole year—the entire year McDonagh slipped into deeper and deeper drug abuse, initially because of back pain caused by a disc injury sustained in saving this man. This Herzog moment is gratifying for almost no one—not the filmgoer who’s never heard of Herzog and came to see a Nick Cage action flick, not the romantic who wants to see every film tied up with the red ribbon of resurrection and resolution—but for the director’s humanist-compatriots, it is the ideal finish: open, quiet, unresolved, without judgment, without promise, without despair.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Movies: Where the Wild Things Are
Where the Wild Things Are is my favorite children’s book. I love it so much that, not only do I have the tale committed to memory (“That night, Max wore his wolf suit, and made mischief. . . of one kind and another; his mother called him Wild Thing, and Max said, “I’ll eat you up!” so he was sent to bed, without eating anything. . .”), but I consider it one of my favorite books period, placing Sendak in the pantheon with Foster Wallace and Barthes, who write for adults (very smart adults, at that). As a child, I didn’t like monsters or adventure stories, and I didn’t identify with Max the way most children probably do; my attachment to the book was perhaps precocious—I loved it for its poetry—it’s tempo and its tone.
Generally, movies made about our favorite childhood things are destructive forces—nothing so materially realized can compete with the melting edges of our nostalgic dreamscape. But Jonze and Eggers nailed it, fleshing out the story only as much as needed to make a 101-minute movie out of a book comprising less than ten sentences. And by some trick of masterful art direction, watching a handful of giant, live-action furry monsters tenderly hugging a little boy seemed perfectly real and natural; not once did I feel that spark of critical distance that so often strikes me at the movies—even when watching actual actors not dressed as giant, furry monsters.
Max of the movie is a bit more sensitive (dare I say “twee”?) than Max of the book; his anger is grounded in frustration, with an older sister who ignores him for her friends, and a mother (the sweet, scratchy-voiced Catherine Keenar, who appears in the top-five of every hipster’s MILFs list) who ignores him (briefly) for a wine-swilling Mark Ruffalo-as-boyfriend. The Wild Things, rather than simply “rolling their terrible eyes and gnashing their terrible teeth and showing their terrible claws” also express a fully human range of emotions, with particular attention to the darker feelings of loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, and anger. They are, thus, able to move us as much as Max does, often bringing us to tears.
Characters aside, where the magic of the book lies in the pacing of the page turn (during the wild rumpus, there is no text at all, but the swinging bodies of the wild things propel the story forward nonetheless), the magic of the movie resides in the art direction. This begins when Max climbs into his private boat, something just tattered enough to belie the dreamscape, but solid enough to carry a small boy in and out of a day, and a week, and a year. The sloshing sea, the driving rain, and the huddled boy in his filthy, bedraggled wolf suit set us up for the craggy cliffs, endless dunes, and enchanted caves that Max discovers in the land where the wild things are. The Andy Goldsworthy-like palaces of twigs—huge, swooping organic gestures tumbled across a clearing in the wood and surrounded by a network of tunnels, a fort “to keep the sadness out,”—add another element to the movie—the human compulsion to build—not actually in the book, but in perfect keeping with Max’s psyche (for the land where the wild things are is, of course, something that Max has built in the first place, even if it is fully natural and uncontrolled, without technical structure).
And so, even if detractors will say that this is another hipster puff-piece (the Karen O. soundtrack is neither for children nor adults, for example) made by and for overgrown children, its values (creativity and friendship) are valid. Rarely does movie by the hipsters for the hipsters wear its heart so openly on its sleeve; there is nothing here that is coy or disaffected or too-cool-for-school. Jonze proved himself as tender as he is clever ten years ago with Being John Malkovich, probably one of the smartest and saddest movies ever made, and it’s a bit shocking that he hasn’t done a feature other than Adaptation since then. The man is a genius of humanity and should be making a movie every year, like Steven Soderbergh or the Coen machine. Eggers, further, has proven that he is a worthy screenwriter, and that the travesty that was Away We Go can be blamed fully on wife and co-writer Vendela Vida.
Generally, movies made about our favorite childhood things are destructive forces—nothing so materially realized can compete with the melting edges of our nostalgic dreamscape. But Jonze and Eggers nailed it, fleshing out the story only as much as needed to make a 101-minute movie out of a book comprising less than ten sentences. And by some trick of masterful art direction, watching a handful of giant, live-action furry monsters tenderly hugging a little boy seemed perfectly real and natural; not once did I feel that spark of critical distance that so often strikes me at the movies—even when watching actual actors not dressed as giant, furry monsters.
Max of the movie is a bit more sensitive (dare I say “twee”?) than Max of the book; his anger is grounded in frustration, with an older sister who ignores him for her friends, and a mother (the sweet, scratchy-voiced Catherine Keenar, who appears in the top-five of every hipster’s MILFs list) who ignores him (briefly) for a wine-swilling Mark Ruffalo-as-boyfriend. The Wild Things, rather than simply “rolling their terrible eyes and gnashing their terrible teeth and showing their terrible claws” also express a fully human range of emotions, with particular attention to the darker feelings of loneliness, insecurity, jealousy, and anger. They are, thus, able to move us as much as Max does, often bringing us to tears.
Characters aside, where the magic of the book lies in the pacing of the page turn (during the wild rumpus, there is no text at all, but the swinging bodies of the wild things propel the story forward nonetheless), the magic of the movie resides in the art direction. This begins when Max climbs into his private boat, something just tattered enough to belie the dreamscape, but solid enough to carry a small boy in and out of a day, and a week, and a year. The sloshing sea, the driving rain, and the huddled boy in his filthy, bedraggled wolf suit set us up for the craggy cliffs, endless dunes, and enchanted caves that Max discovers in the land where the wild things are. The Andy Goldsworthy-like palaces of twigs—huge, swooping organic gestures tumbled across a clearing in the wood and surrounded by a network of tunnels, a fort “to keep the sadness out,”—add another element to the movie—the human compulsion to build—not actually in the book, but in perfect keeping with Max’s psyche (for the land where the wild things are is, of course, something that Max has built in the first place, even if it is fully natural and uncontrolled, without technical structure).
And so, even if detractors will say that this is another hipster puff-piece (the Karen O. soundtrack is neither for children nor adults, for example) made by and for overgrown children, its values (creativity and friendship) are valid. Rarely does movie by the hipsters for the hipsters wear its heart so openly on its sleeve; there is nothing here that is coy or disaffected or too-cool-for-school. Jonze proved himself as tender as he is clever ten years ago with Being John Malkovich, probably one of the smartest and saddest movies ever made, and it’s a bit shocking that he hasn’t done a feature other than Adaptation since then. The man is a genius of humanity and should be making a movie every year, like Steven Soderbergh or the Coen machine. Eggers, further, has proven that he is a worthy screenwriter, and that the travesty that was Away We Go can be blamed fully on wife and co-writer Vendela Vida.
Books: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
A truly American epic, All the King’s Men, though written 60 years ago and set even farther back, is a coming-of-age tale for today’s young men, who don’t actually become men until their mid-30s, just like protagonist Jack Burden. Simple but heavy, Burden is a man with few convictions of his own, torn between the memories of an intellectual father turned religious madman, an emotional debt to the elderly judge who took his father’s place as a role model, and the demands of “the boss”—Governor Willie Stark, a power-drunk but service-minded politician, a self-made man made fully from piss and vinegar, and nights up late studying law. Burden has detached himself emotionally from his work (he’s a kind of guy-Friday cum-fixer, an underground PR man) and, in fact, from most of his life. The only thing in which he maintains any emotional investment is the elusive Anne Stanton, a childhood friend (actually the younger sister of his childhood friend Adam, who as an adult has withdrawn in his own way, a neurosurgeon of Ayn Randian proportions). Anne and Jack were high school lovers, but did not marry.
As Burden does his work, trying to wear blinders, the interconnected underbelly of his network slowly emerges; hands deep in the dirt, he discovers that the elderly judge was not always so ethical as he seemed—but furthermore that the elderly judge, and not the intellectual madman, was his actual father (was rather than is, as the confrontation over the ethical lapse drives the old man to suicide before the second discovery is made). Worse, Burden discovers that Anne and Stark are having an affair. He drives all the way west, spends a few nights drunk in a California hotel room, then drives back to work. It’s the affair, though, that brings the end of Willie Stark—brother Adam Stanton gets a secret tip-off about the affair, and in true no-compromises fashion, shoots Stark dead (Stark’s driver and bodyguard Sugarboy shoots Adam dead in turn).
With the deaths of all these fathers, Burden is at last able to become a man. He marries Anne Stanton, and with this epilogue, the novel’s throbbing pulse peters out. The story is Burden’s, though it ends with Stark’s death, because Stark’s life enables Burden’s repression. “All the king’s men” refers, of course, to the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, where Stark is the big egg on the wall, and Burden one of the men (along with a well-styled cast of supporting characters including the stuttering Sugarboy and the over-fed Tiny Duffy) who can’t put him back together after his fall. And yet, the breaking of an egg in most natural cases leads to the birthing of a chick. Stark’s life, career, and concomitant assignments generate the tasks that enable Burden to seal himself inside the shell, blindly rolling through the world, still an infant. It is truth of his heroes’ infidelities that lead to the deaths that break the shell, and so of course the egg can’t be put “together again”—nor would we want it so.
As Burden does his work, trying to wear blinders, the interconnected underbelly of his network slowly emerges; hands deep in the dirt, he discovers that the elderly judge was not always so ethical as he seemed—but furthermore that the elderly judge, and not the intellectual madman, was his actual father (was rather than is, as the confrontation over the ethical lapse drives the old man to suicide before the second discovery is made). Worse, Burden discovers that Anne and Stark are having an affair. He drives all the way west, spends a few nights drunk in a California hotel room, then drives back to work. It’s the affair, though, that brings the end of Willie Stark—brother Adam Stanton gets a secret tip-off about the affair, and in true no-compromises fashion, shoots Stark dead (Stark’s driver and bodyguard Sugarboy shoots Adam dead in turn).
With the deaths of all these fathers, Burden is at last able to become a man. He marries Anne Stanton, and with this epilogue, the novel’s throbbing pulse peters out. The story is Burden’s, though it ends with Stark’s death, because Stark’s life enables Burden’s repression. “All the king’s men” refers, of course, to the Humpty Dumpty nursery rhyme, where Stark is the big egg on the wall, and Burden one of the men (along with a well-styled cast of supporting characters including the stuttering Sugarboy and the over-fed Tiny Duffy) who can’t put him back together after his fall. And yet, the breaking of an egg in most natural cases leads to the birthing of a chick. Stark’s life, career, and concomitant assignments generate the tasks that enable Burden to seal himself inside the shell, blindly rolling through the world, still an infant. It is truth of his heroes’ infidelities that lead to the deaths that break the shell, and so of course the egg can’t be put “together again”—nor would we want it so.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Books: In the Labyrinth, by Alain Robbe-Grillet
This is another of Robbe-Grillet's clean circles, spare but not sparse, spiraling almost imperceptably away from it's beginning before neatly coming back around. Everything is blown with snow. We follow a soldier through blanketed, blankened strets, lined with anonymous buildings that slowly become familiar-either because we're walking in circles, or because, like the soldier, we are exhausted—sick, wet, and delusional.
Grillet lodges the reader more firmly in the protagnonist here than in some of his other novels. In Jealousy, the reader is a locked-out onlooker, fascinated by the long-haired A, but trapped behind the eyes of her nameless husband, who is never described, who never describes himself, and who gives little of himself away in his descriptions of his wife and their plantation. But in Labyrinth, the narration comes from some third party. Nevertheless, we identify with the lost and woozy soldier as we navigate the text—where phrases and images and entire scenes repeat. Our textual déjà vu is the soldier's physical déjà vu.
And then, there is the matter of the box. The soldier walks in circles because he has a box that belonged to another soldier-one he did not know-and is trying to bring that box to a man-whom he does not know. Nor do we know whether he knows the contents of the box; we certainly do not, for whenever somebody asks him, he only answers, "things," or, when further pressed ("what kind of things?"), "my things" (an untruth, in fact). But the need to be rid of this box is strong, strong enough to push him forward through the snow, following a taunting child who wears a cape and may or may not know the way to the street whose name the soldier cannot remember. And yet, when he tries to be rid of it—to just shove it through the grate into the sewer, he cannot. Nor can we cast aside the book/box, until we have seen it delivered/finished, even though that delivery will not give us access to what is locked inside: who this man is, where he has come from, why he has nowhere to go. When the box's delivery is frustrated, his only remaining task is to die, which he does, from a gunshot unintended for him, in the bed in the home of the sprightly boy, tended by the kind woman, who doubles as a waitress in a painting of a cafe to which we are often drawn—for the soldier and his box are in the painting, as is the boy, and the soldier stops into the cafe as he walks, following the boy.
It is possible, in fact, that the soldier is not walking deliriously through the snowy streets of an unnamed French city, but is a phantom circling the illusory city dreamed by an old, delusional man, in whose dusty one-room apartment the painting of the cafe scene hangs. This man appears in the dream as the doctor, who carries an umbrella, tries to give the soldier directions, and ultimately presides at his death.
Grillet lodges the reader more firmly in the protagnonist here than in some of his other novels. In Jealousy, the reader is a locked-out onlooker, fascinated by the long-haired A, but trapped behind the eyes of her nameless husband, who is never described, who never describes himself, and who gives little of himself away in his descriptions of his wife and their plantation. But in Labyrinth, the narration comes from some third party. Nevertheless, we identify with the lost and woozy soldier as we navigate the text—where phrases and images and entire scenes repeat. Our textual déjà vu is the soldier's physical déjà vu.
And then, there is the matter of the box. The soldier walks in circles because he has a box that belonged to another soldier-one he did not know-and is trying to bring that box to a man-whom he does not know. Nor do we know whether he knows the contents of the box; we certainly do not, for whenever somebody asks him, he only answers, "things," or, when further pressed ("what kind of things?"), "my things" (an untruth, in fact). But the need to be rid of this box is strong, strong enough to push him forward through the snow, following a taunting child who wears a cape and may or may not know the way to the street whose name the soldier cannot remember. And yet, when he tries to be rid of it—to just shove it through the grate into the sewer, he cannot. Nor can we cast aside the book/box, until we have seen it delivered/finished, even though that delivery will not give us access to what is locked inside: who this man is, where he has come from, why he has nowhere to go. When the box's delivery is frustrated, his only remaining task is to die, which he does, from a gunshot unintended for him, in the bed in the home of the sprightly boy, tended by the kind woman, who doubles as a waitress in a painting of a cafe to which we are often drawn—for the soldier and his box are in the painting, as is the boy, and the soldier stops into the cafe as he walks, following the boy.
It is possible, in fact, that the soldier is not walking deliriously through the snowy streets of an unnamed French city, but is a phantom circling the illusory city dreamed by an old, delusional man, in whose dusty one-room apartment the painting of the cafe scene hangs. This man appears in the dream as the doctor, who carries an umbrella, tries to give the soldier directions, and ultimately presides at his death.
Movies: The Proposal
The Proposal: another embarrassing excuse for a film, so fraught with clichés that, in verbally summarizing the plot to a friend (which only required three or so sentences), he was able to preemptively identify each plot development. Of course, one knows, within the first few minutes of the film, when dragon-lady Sandra Bullock takes her Starbucks from her sweaty and apologetic male assistant, we know that, as little respect as these people have for each other, they will be in love and married by the end of the film. The deux ex machina that gets us there is the small fact that hotshot editor Bullock is Canadian, and so self-important that she never bothered to file the appropriate immigration papers. In order to avoid deportation, she blackmails her assistant, who will do anything to become an editor himself, into joining her in sham matrimony. But after a weekend with his family in small-town Alaska, condensed into 90 minutes worth of hijinks including a Hispanic male stripper, a bird of prey that steals Bulluck’s blackberry, and a native-American fire-ceremony turned booty-shaking extravaganza (offending two whole cultures in only one whole scene—brilliant!), the two have actually fallen in love (not before she runs from the altar, though, leaving him alone and ashamed). Why does Hollywood make these movies, and why do airplanes play them, when we are trapped with little choice but to watch and shudder?
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