Ah, one of my favorite tropes: people behaving irresponsibly. Three very different sorts of films, each recommended as worthy if flawed:
–Ricky Gervais’ star turn in Ghost Town starts out with a misanthropic buzz that keeps the film fun even when it turns to marshmallow. Plot? Improbably-named churlish dentist Bertram Pincus, after a mishap in a minor operation, can see dead people. And he hates people, so the situation prompts more dyspepsia than unease or spirituality or any of the other ghost-related malarkey familiar to these sorts of films. Pincus is most aggressively (and adroitly) bothered by a deceased sleazeball Greg Kinnear, who is also pitch-perfect, aiming to use Pincus to disrupt former hotty-wife Tea Leoni’s serious romance with do-gooder-hotty Billy Campbell. Blah blah. The first half-hour, as we follow Pincus in his depressing mean-spirited daily agenda through the operation, is great good fun: Gervais is like a meaner Oliver Hardy, and his rudeness to other people is even funnier because so trivial, so relatively inconsequential. And, of course, it’s always fun to see someone who hates people have to deal with people. But of course the romance plot must ascend, and the film loses most of its minimal edge… but remains likable.
—Operation Filmmaker documents the do-gooder-hotty Liev Schreiber’s decision, after seeing the kid on an MTV documentary, to give a young Iraqi wannabe-filmmaker a menial job on the set of his film (Everything is Illuminated). He can learn the tricks of the trade, build up connections–and, as Schreiber says, with both somewhat shameful self-aggrandizing portent and shame-faced self-reflexive awareness of the self-aggrandizing, since his film is about cross-cultural communication maybe they could on the set enact some cross-cultural connections….
….and unsurprisingly, the impulses of the liberal anti-war filmmaker (and his producer, and the documentary’s own director, and various others) are slowly revealed in all their glory as culturally tin-eared, self-interested, and inattentive to practical consequences as the US invasion they so explicitly criticize. The guy they bring–Muthana–is not so interested in menial tasks, enjoys going out and carousing more than doing various assigned tasks, plucks at the heartstrings of the folks around him until he wears them thin (or snaps them entirely), cadges money and favors from everyone around him. A simpler film would underline a clearer message: Muthana is an irresponsible prick, who cons the folks around him, OR these do-gooders reflect the other side of the colonialist coin and produce their ward’s irresponsibility. Instead, the film kind of wiggles around in the messy uncertain middle: Muthana is clearly an egotistical jerk, many times, but then he’s also a young fucking guy given room to roam, and he has a laser-like keen eye for the self-involvement of those people trying to help him. The film goes on a bit long, its allegorical reach is always a bit too obvious, and I wish I had a bit better sense–less surface-level portrait–of Muthana, or the doc’s shooter (Nina Davenport), or Schreiber… but I did relish the film’s unflinching gaze on the small confusions and conflicts of the philanthropic impulse.
–My favorite of the lot is, like the previous doc, a bit too fuzzy in conceptual (and aesthetic) focus, allowing a lot of general rambling around about its protagonist’s exploits to serve as structure — instead of sharpening toward a stronger set of thematic concerns, or critical engagements, or… blah di blah. I read about Alan Abel in the excellent RE/Search pub on Pranks (called, I believe, Pranks!), and he’s got almost 50 years’ experience playing some kind of moral outrage against a mainstream media eager to exploit such outrage. He started with the Society for the Indecent Nudity of Animals, which was actually AGAINST such indecency, and went around (with co-conspirator Buck Henry) with drawings of horses in pants, or pointing at the shameful effrontery of chimps. His shtick is simple: either form a mock group (or act) which is morally outraged, or form a mock group (or act) meant to irritate those prone to moral outrage. The pranks are a blast, and Abel is an interesting figure. But, while he circles around some potential purposes, he seems mostly uninterested in–and less able to define–a rationale. He does it ’cause it’s fun. That said, I’d have cut through some of his commentary; either cut out the attempt to find a message or get some other people who actually care about a message to talk through it. This could have been an intriguing take on the nature of pranks… but even as simply a record of some great pranks, it’s fun.