southern accents

no, not the tom petty album. i watched a time to kill last night on ondemand. this was the movie that was supposed to make mathew mcconaughey into a gigantic star. the less said about the film the better, probably (though i am confounded by the fact that janet maslin gave it a rave review in the ny times when it came out)–but it made me wonder: which are the worst, most laughable southern accents ever committed to film? now, i’m not even from south india so i clearly am no authority on speech patterns from the american south but i think i can tell the presence of a bad dialect coach when i hear it. this film has a few bad ones–kevin spacey, for example–but only one (actual southerners may differ) truly laughable one: oliver platt. donald sutherland doesn’t seem like he’s trying particularly hard. however, platt’s doesn’t even approach what i think is the absolute pinnacle of faux-southern elocution: nicholas cage in con air, especially in the voice-over section that plays over the opening credits.

please add your own nominations.

Strictly Ballroom

Because we’ve become entranced by that dance show on TV–how could they get rid of Lisa Rinna? Jerry Rice sucks!–I decided to (re)watch Strictly Ballroom. Pete swears we watched it before, but I don’t remember it. I think I might have started watching then went to bed. Because it is just that dull. I forced my way to the end this time. There’s too much love story and too much earnestness for it to be a mockumentary, but some scenes just don’t play any other way. In fact, I think the cartoonishness undermines Fran’s transformation. We’re supposed to like her, to root for her, but she’s surrounded by these women in crazy make-up with stupid hairdos–it’s too easy to come out on top. And why would anyone want to be on top of that? The more realistic stuff (the contemporary dance scenes, the Paso Doble “the dance for the man!”) just seems out of place in the garishness of the father’s story.

Time again for short takes: the why bother? version

To save others from what I endured:

Don’t Meet the Fockers. Even with Dustin Hoffman’s enthusiasm, an exercise in apathy. Imagine if Bresson made a Hollywood comedy, then got drunk and let his monkey direct.

Stay away from R-Point, which is a war-slash-ghost movie from Korea. A troop ends up in the middle of no-man’s-land, and so do viewers. There’s no good violence–nothing lopped off, only a few stray bullets and carefully-sprinkled blood (yawn)–and the pallid female ghost with long unwashed hair, required for all horror films made in Asia these days, doesn’t even hunch over or crawl on the floor.

Savages (1975)

I’d always looked at the DVD sitting there, especially with Michael O’Donoghue’s name on it. So odd. I mean, it’s a Merchant-Ivory film, co-written by O’Donoghue (!), that refers to the said Savages – on the DVD box yet, as “the Mud People.” So it’s intriguing if nothing else.

After the outcries of the indignities in King Kong and stuff about the Noble Natives, I thought this just might be the antidote. For those who don’t know, O’Donoghue was part of National Lampoon as its regulars morphed into SNL and SCTV. He was a main writer on SNL and sometimes performer (Wolverine, Steel Needles in the Eyes), but other than Scrooged, he had precious few screenplays to his credit. Continue reading Savages (1975)

Wholpin DVD

From the McSweeney’s people, who had already launched a rather good monthly magazine that used to be about books and writers called The Believer (It’s not so much about that anymore, and while still good, I no longer get it because I can read about politics, music and films in a dozen other places).

Their latest venture is a quarterly DVD, made up of “shorts.” People continue to make short films even with almost no outlet for them. One would have thought the web would have given more light to this kind of film, but other than the occasional re-cut trailer (Shining, Passion of the Christ) or a photoshopped scene of a jet landing on the 405, it hasn’t really been so. The other possible outlet for this stuff is straight to DVD which again has been tried by various DVD “magazines” with not too much success.

So enter Wholpin from McSweeney’s with an impressive bunch of names on the cover, and actually an impressive bunch of films as well. The variety between the films is impressive; there’s no attempt to create a “theme” thankfully, and the unexpectedness of what you’re getting in each new chapter is really a big part of the fun. Continue reading Wholpin DVD

Cache/Hidden

Jeff and I saw this together last night. We walked in as fans of director Michael Haneke, and walked out with that adoration confirmed, if not exuberantly so–I think it was a strong, smart, challenging film, if not quite the equal of his finest (Time of the Wolf). So it is highly recommended, and I think we both want to puzzle over its objectives and accomplishments.

That said, it is also a film best discussed after viewing, and I don’t want to disrupt any of the pleasures of the text by giving away this or that–you can’t really start addressing without naming, so I’ll avoid explicit spoilers but can’t sidestep certain specifics. Continue reading Cache/Hidden

13 Short Films about Arnab and Jeff

Perhaps, like me, you’ve noticed an underlying–sometimes surfacing–tension between Jeff and Arnab in posts on this site. As I have learned from the movies, such tensions inevitably signal a future moment of intense connection and union. I have been trying to imagine how that future union may occur…. (air gets all wavy and fuzzy:) Continue reading 13 Short Films about Arnab and Jeff

The Wild Bunch

Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is being remade. This angers me not because I’m against remakes, but because I have always claimed that I am not against remakes. I may say that there’s nothing wrong with Soderbergh recasting Ocean’s 11, or Van Sant re-shooting Psycho. I’m amused by the idea that someone feels that it is worth the money and effort to remake The Fog and The Pink Panther.

But now there’s a part of me that is bristling–not just because I don’t want anyone to dare even to think of redoing Peckinpah’s masterpiece, but also because I’ve flattered myself into thinking that I’d never write somthing like this (which I’ve taken from Victoria Lindrea’s review of the remake of The Italian Job): “A homage, rather than a remake, it moved the action to Los Angeles and gave the traffic jam a hi-tech spin. But in aping a classic, it could not help but disappoint fans of the original.” Is there anything more predictable than “it could not help but disappoint the fans of the original”? Hollywood must know that “fans of the original” do not, by rule, constitute the majority of ticket sales of remakes. Of course “fans of the original” will be disappointed. Why? Because (I’ve always told myself) they’re idiots. Continue reading The Wild Bunch

In Search of…

In light of recent events in Afghanastan in particular and throughout the Muslim world in general, I thought we might revisit a post from several weeks back regarding Albert Brooks’s In Search of Comedy in the Muslim World. I’m worried that against the background of protests over cartoons published in the Danish press, the natural response to Brooks’s film will be “see? there is no sense of humor in the Muslim world.”

My fear is that recent events will be used to either misconstrue and misunderstand Islam (even more), or to misconstrue and misunderstand comedy (as always hostile, antagonistic) and define it strictly from a sociological point of view (the social function of humor is to indentify, differentiate, control). Continue reading In Search of…