Author: reynolds

Me & Mr. Jones (and a special guest)

The latest Indiana is exactly what you’d expect, for better and … well, maybe not “for worse” but certainly not for the best. The film hews exactly to its boilerplate, and it was never less than diverting, amusing. But only once–one glorious, extended, escalating car-chase in the jungle–is it enormous fun. If I really sat down to rewatch the first film, I might find that its flaws have been recreated each go-’round: a slew of great set-pieces, sewn together with Ford’s creaky charisma and hoping for a supporting cast that is equally lively. That latter element is true, I think, in Indy 1 and 3, and mostly true in 4. (Cate Blanchett, tongue circling around her “wowels” in a gloriously loony accent, clearly is having great fun; LaBoeuf, Winstone, and Hurt get saddled with less interesting characters, and do less interesting things.) So… sure, why not? It’s summer. And did I tell you about that chase?

But now that I have your attention, let me direct you to the far better, far more challenging, really damn interesting Aussie film Noise. Matthew Saville’s 2007 film attends to the aftermath of a massacre on a train, which left one survivor; we follow her, a low-level cop suffering from vaguely-sourced tinnitus (and maybe psychological problems?), and an assortment of well-drawn supporting characters, the importance of whom we are always trying to untangle. A note: any summary does injustice, fools you into certain expectations, when the film was dazzling in its confident refusal to collapse into a particular kind of story. Continue reading Me & Mr. Jones (and a special guest)

Grace is Gone

Very, very funny. I was surprised; the plot centers on a sad-sack Stanley (John Cusack, shoulders appropriately slumped throughout) with two daughters and a soldier-in-Iraq wife. Wife dies, husband frets over what to do, unsure how to break the news to his kids let alone how to grapple with his own grief and shame, and decides to take the kids to Enchanted Gardens. It’s like National Lampoon’s Mourning Vacation. Or maybe Little Miss Cloud Cover.

Okay, I kid. This movie made me cry, from sheer boredom. I should be polite, because intentions are so pure, so noble, so right-minded. But good lord what a drain. Call me insensitive (and if you do I’ll cry again), but Grace couldn’t be goned quickly enough for me. As Kris pointed out to me while watching, the whole film is one big long interrogation of Stanley’s inability to surface his emotions, and when we finally get the grief money-shot, the big moment of revelation and mourning with the daughters, the hammer-to-the-forehead-soulful soundtrack kicks up and we see the actors pantomime the scene — the moment of disclosure is literally repressed. I would love to see that as irony, but I doubt it.

Men living by their code

I got out to see Mamet’s latest, Redbelt, which he refers to as an update of the classic fight flick, and it’s a strong homage, for better and worse. We follow a scraping-by, virtuous jujitsu master/instructor Mike Terry (the reliably great Chiwetel Ejiofor) who’s trapped–by some scheming and unreliable Hollywood types, an ambitious wife, mounting debts, and his own bullheaded determination to follow a fighter’s code–into a choice between competition or the loss of everything he holds dear. Besides Ejiofor, there’s a great cast (particularly regulars Ricky Jay and Joe Mantegna, clearly delighted to be foul-mouthed lowlifes throwing their weight around), and for about 2/3 of the picture the dialogue and plotting are knotty and delightful, allowing us plenty of time to chew on what’s happening, and to read Terry against the grain: he’s calm, determined, likable, “perfect”–and perhaps misguided, foolish, selfish, and so on. For a good long while, the idea of living by a code seems both virtue and vice, and the film buzzes on that tension.

Then, in its last third, people do a lot less talking and start throwing fists and feet instead of four-letter words and opaque aphorisms, and I don’t think that’s necessarily what I want from a Mamet film. It becomes a fight flick, not entirely predictable but tonally, thematically, and (alas) ideologically in line with the kinds of sentimental affirmations of the “loser” whose code (backed up by his real talent) is worth sticking to.

Meh. But great fun for a good portion of its running time, and so I’d suggest a rental, for sure. But a far, far, far more interesting (although admittedly very different) take on the foolish virtue of sticking to one’s idealism can be found in the ink-black Danish comedy Adam’s Apples, which follows the religious Ivan (Mads Mikkelsen), a man impervious to any disruptions in his belief in the goodness of humanity, in the inevitable success of turning the other cheek, in the power of meek acceptance and affirmation of everyone around him. Ivan bedevils one of his ex-con wards Adam (Ulrich Thomsen), a neo-Nazi who puts up a photo of Hitler in his small room, who stares dumbfounded as Ivan blithely misreads or just plain misses the malice in the actions all around him, who develops a seething passion aimed at breaking Ivan’s belief. It’d be entirely worth seeing for its casual, almost joyful misanthropy, and it is often laugh-out-loud funny. But I was even more taken by its unwillingness to affirm or flatly refute Ivan’s beliefs; rather, the film draws even more pointed laughs from the possibility that a buffoonish faith might actually have force in one’s life, even if it’s never anything but buffoonish. What starts as a vicious parody in the end seems a far more complicated, still very funny and biting investigation of faith.

Chim Chim

I’m amazed to say this, but a film based on a television cartoon, a film with an excess of production energy and an equally-excessive layer of dipshit dialogue, a film edited with an eye toward epileptic shock, a film with a lot of jokes predicated on a hammy fat kid, a film with about fifty chimpanzee reaction shots …. it isn’t half-bad. In fact, it’s maybe three-quarters-good. I had steeled myself for teeth-gritting ennui as Max stared with empty goggle eyes through the 2+ hours of frantic Speed Racer nonsense. But this film was incessantly pleasing to the eye, a candy-store of colors, clever anime-inspired and/or loopily-inventive cinematic tricks, and uncampy affectionate recreation of mediocre-cartoon tropes. I hereby nominate Spritl and Chim as easily the most entertaining “irritating-kid-and-animal sidekicks” in the history of cinema, by which I mean the only irritating-kid-and-animal sidekicks one would even want to see. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker repeats an old Groucho Marx joke as a way of criticizing the film’s primary audience as four-year-olds — I guess I’m in touch with my inner four-year-old, ’cause this was way more fun than anyone has a right to expect.

Oh, and the central notion that corporations are evil was a pleasant ‘though (see Iron Man discussion) self-contradicting message for a big-budget technospectacle to embrace. There was surprisingly little (if any?) product-placement in the film (‘though the ramped-up pitch to kids for all things Speed began at the ticket counter, where we all got “Pit Passes” with coupons for Target and Hot Wheels).

Bernard and Doris

This HBO flick, directed by Bob Balaban, has some just astonishing, low-key acting — Ralph Fiennes seems to disappear into so many different kinds of roles, despite his rather singular looks. Here he’s a slightly-campy butler hired on by the lonely harridan tycoon Doris Dukes (an equally great Susan Sarandon). The movie is perversely unstructured, in ways that I like; it resists the beats and tempo of the three-acts we’re so used to in movies, it jumps from time to time, there are rarely big moments of crisis or conflict or catharsis. Instead, it burrows under the skin of each character through the prism of their strange, hard-to-categorize relationship.

This isn’t going to keep you on the edge of your seat, but the acting alone kept me engrossed. There’s a scene about mid-film in a hothouse, as the two late at night repot some orchids, where not much is really said and nothing truly plot-shifting happens, that is about the finest acting I’ve seen in some time. After seeing Fiennes tear off a hock of ham with glorious pleasure in Bruges, it was amazing to see him take the same techniques (a shifting of his physical carriage, precise and intimate movements of hands and eyes, a use of his voice that in pitch and rhythm gives us more information about the character) for a wholly different kind of act.

Pain is funny. Or funnyish.

We recently saw two very good films that zero in on people in pain. In The Savages, there’s a scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman, having wrenched his neck during a game of tennis (and an argument with his sister Laura Linney about his idiocy in his relationship with a woman), stands with his head bound up in an absurd weighted contraption, meant to “balance” him. Linney looks on and laughs, and he can’t help it–bursts into giggles, too. And ‘though the pain doesn’t go away, not the nerve in his neck nor the loneliness of their lives nor the anguish of their family history and current reality (dad sinking into dementia, and needing to be put in a home), the laugh reframes the pain as less a personal blight than something the two share. Continue reading Pain is funny. Or funnyish.

Fuck you, Gravy Robbers!

Adult Swim keeps upping the absurdist ante.

Walt Whitman’s review:
Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! is often aggravating,
but it’s never boring,
is never complacent,
and I sing of
its cascade of chubby men in thongs,
its fluids dribbling or spewing or squirting from mouths (and elsewhere),
its unibrowed whore-milk-drinking baby Chippy,
its frenetic love of (don’t we all) synthesizer dancing,
and its video tomfoolery circa 1982,
oh Zach Galifiniakis
Galifaniakis,
Kiss Zach,
drinking your gravy caught in your thick thick burly beard,
I-I-I-I-I watch in slackjawed wonder.

Inside

HOT DAMN. Another great, vicious French horror film–not quite as smart, polished, and riveting as Ils/Them which I reviewed a little while back, but it is still sharply-shot, often unnerving, and about 10,000 times gorier.

The plot: a pregnant woman who recently lost her husband (how careless!) is being assaulted in her home late one Christmas eve by a profoundly freaky Beatrice Dalle (the Betty Blue), who wants to give her a Caesarean. Or, more precisely, wants the baby for herself, and plans to get it expeditiously, using whatever comes to hand.

I’m likely the only person who posts here who would love a film so unrepentantly gory, but maybe it might attract fans of stylish, audacious filmmaking; its qualities are not merely the repulsive but the perverse seductive beauties of such gore, and every shot is lovingly framed, the colors are vibrant, the use of shadow and haze outstanding. The directors rival Takashi Miike in their ability to yoke a vibrant, joyous aesthetic sensibility to such literally pulpy, vigorously vicious material.

Toilet Scissors

I can’t compete with Arnab’s Kids’ erotophilia. (I’m tempted to simply write: “Arnab Chakladar has an unhealthy love for Kids.” Let’s see that come up on google.)

But the Upright Citizens Brigade long-ago earned a place in my pantheon of great comedy shows. Their work comes out of a dedicated improv set-up, sketches developed live and on the fly, tweaked but still very free-form — and displaying an often-dizzyingly wonderful talent for absurd synchronicity. (I also have this huge love for depictions of people singularly, obsessively, aggressively focused on a plan of action. Whether promoting the use of ass pennies, teasing others at an ugly club, or trying to get a group of Christian-camp kids to confess to wrong-doing, the slow-burn build to angry exasperation always makes me laugh.)

Their concert film Upright Citizens Brigade: ASSSSSCAT illustrates the improv in action; following a monologue from a guest-speaker, on a topic thrown from the audience, the UCB troupe (supplemented by a few other guys, including a very very funny Horatio Sanz and Andrew Daly) riffs on elements of the story. The filmed show is grand; the extras include clips and scenes from a number of other shows, and they’re all great.

Walk Hard

I would provide a mild recommendation for Jake Kasdan (& co-writer/comedyimpresario/medialovechild Judd Apatow)’s biopic shenanigans. As it began, I was sucked into its pitch-perfect mimicry and its generally sly and absurdist approach to parody — Apatow learned some of these chops on the old “Ben Stiller Show,” which offered up some of the greatest, sharpest showbiz satires ever made. (My favorite was the Behind the Music documentary about the rise of U2, who were managed early on by Reuben Kincaid.)

Alas, those bits were 10 minutes long, and this is almost 90, and … well, it is never more than a sly absurdist parody. John Reilly remains one of my favorite comic actors, unrivalled in the portrayal of earnest dimwit intensity. But Dewey Cox–and every character–remain sharp but shallow caricatures, and the film doesn’t develop the sense of character the way other Apatow films (or even the best Will Ferrell vehicles) do. Watching Anchorman I felt like I was inside Ron Burgundy’s head, and it was a wonderful strange place, but Dewey’s all too familiar. Walk also avoids the scattershot quantity-theory of parody (a la Airplane), which allows it to be much smarter but also less frequently funny. I admired the craft of the jokes, and I’m not sure a general intellectual appreciation ought to be the primary outcome for a comedy like this.

I did enjoy the full-frontal male nudity. Penises are funny.