Monthly Archives: October 2008

Synecdoche, New York

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Synecdoche, New York movie poster

 

Whether it actu­ally is or not, Synec­doche, New York has the feel of a very, very per­sonal work of art. I know next to noth­ing about writer/director Char­lie Kauf­man, and don’t even nec­es­sar­ily feel like I do now. Then again, few peo­ple do know Kauf­man, as he has famously man­aged to side­step much pub­lic­ity despite per­pe­trat­ing a suc­cess­ful screen­writ­ing career in an indus­try in which the cult of per­son­al­ity applies to everyone.

Synec­doche, New York is Kaufman’s first film as direc­tor, after a string of play­ful yet brainy screen­plays. The best antecedents I can name would be the sur­real satires of Lind­say Ander­son (like O Lucky Man! — read The Dork Report Review) and the Post­mod­ern decon­struc­tion of Tom Stop­pard (espe­cially Rosen­crantz and Guilden­stern are Dead, which wreaks hilar­i­ous havok with no less a holy relic than Ham­let). Kaufman’s hit parade so far includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature (under­rated! see it!), Con­fes­sions of a Dan­ger­ous Mind, Adap­ta­tion, and Dork Report favorite The Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. Being John Malkovich and Eter­nal Sun­shine are both pure plea­sures to watch, but Adap­ta­tion showed the darker side of Kaufman’s bril­liance. As I under­stood the film, the very life itself of screen­writer “Char­lie Kauf­man” (Nico­las Cage) slowly becomes the vio­lent, sexed-up Hol­ly­wood melo­drama he loathes to write. To describe Synec­doche, New York in short­hand, it’s as if the cyn­i­cal, chal­leng­ing nar­ra­tive nature of Adap­ta­tion were crossed with the deep emo­tional impact of Eter­nal Sunshine.

Samantha Morton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New YorkHere’s The Dork Report’s the­ory to explain Hazel’s enig­matic burn­ing house: could it be an allu­sion to the Talk­ing Heads song “Love -> Build­ing on Fire”? I’m being seri­ous here…

But what it’s actu­ally “about” would take a lot of analy­sis to fig­ure out, and my sin­gle view­ing is not enough to unpack it (assum­ing my IQ would be up to the task any­way). Like Adap­ta­tion, it’s actu­ally a lit­tle frus­trat­ing to watch, but in a good sense, in that the audi­ence is con­stantly being chal­lenged. I have to admit that I don’t fully “get” it, but I also think it’s clear there’s no sin­gle key to unlock­ing any one mean­ing of the film. I’m giv­ing it the full five-star Dork Report rat­ing because I have enor­mous respect for any such uncom­pro­mis­ing, chal­leng­ing, affect­ing, and frus­trat­ing work of art in cin­ema. That it was pro­duced as a major motion pic­ture star­ring numer­ous famous faces and released in mul­ti­plexes nation­ally along­side the more typ­i­cal fare Saw V and High School Musi­cal 3 is noth­ing less than a mir­a­cle, and gives one hope for the future of the film indus­try. At least four peo­ple walked out of the screen­ing I attended, some dur­ing an uncom­fort­able nude scene fea­tur­ing Emily Wat­son (not uncom­fort­able in that she isn’t beau­ti­ful, because she is, but because the sex scene is so utterly frank). It’s a pity they did, for they missed one of the most weirdly mov­ing last moments of a film I’ve ever seen (although it did have prece­dent in Peter Weir’s The Tru­man Show, which also sug­gested the voice of God towards his sup­pli­cant is akin to that of a film/theater/television director’s towards his actor).

The clos­est thing I’ve seen to Synec­doche, New York is Spike Jonze’s Michel Gondry’s bril­liant music video for Björk’s Bach­e­lorette (Jonze Gondry is a long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor of Kaufman’s, and co-produced Synec­doche, New York). (UPDATE: cor­rec­tions thanks to com­menter Greg. I can’t believe I mixed up two of my favorite direc­tors!) Less a pop music promo than a short film that stands on its own mer­its, Bach­e­lorette recounts the tale of a young coun­try girl who writes her auto­bi­og­ra­phy and moves to the big city, where she falls in love with her pub­lisher. A hit, her book spawns a the­atri­cal adap­ta­tion, in which a young coun­try girl writes her auto­bi­og­ra­phy, moves to the big city, and falls in love with her pub­lisher. A hit, it too spawns a the­atri­cal play. You get the idea: the tale is infi­nitely recur­sive. But each copy is a copy within a copy, each more dis­torted, flimsy, and sad than its source mate­r­ial. Entropy and decay set in, and the world(s) col­lapse in upon them­selves. Her life basi­cally ends at the point she fin­ishes her auto­bi­og­ra­phy and looks only back­wards instead of liv­ing for the future. Watch the video here:

Synec­doche, New York is a pun on the New York city Sch­enec­tady (the loca­tion of Caden’s orig­i­nal the­ater com­pany) and the lit­er­ary term for a fig­ure of speech in which a part stands in for the whole (for exam­ple, “The White House said today…” as used by news­cast­ers rather than spec­i­fy­ing the admin­is­tra­tion, or even more specif­i­cally, the Press Sec­re­tary). The­ater direc­tor Caden Cotard’s (Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man) artist wife Adele (Cather­ine Keener) divorces him and moves to Ger­many with their daugh­ter and Maria (Jen­nifer Jason Leigh), who may be her lover (guest Dork Reporter Snark­bait points out that this is Keener’s sec­ond sex­u­ally ambigu­ous role in a Kauf­man film, here and in Being John Malkovich). Caden wor­ries for the rest of his life that Maria is a bet­ter replace­ment for him­self as hus­band and father.

Caden wins a MacArthur Foun­da­tion Genius Grant, and uses the funds to move to Man­hat­tan and craft an epic play housed in a dis­used the­ater illog­i­cally large enough to hold a scale model of New York City as his set. Out­side, the real Man­hat­tan descends into chaos and war­fare. At one point, the char­ac­ters leave the the­ater and walk past mys­te­ri­ous civil rights atroc­i­ties such as clown-costume-clad sol­diers herd­ing cit­i­zens onto armored busses at gunpoint.

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Hope Davis in Synecdoche, New YorkHope Davis, as the shrink­est with the mostest, offers to shrink Philip Sey­mour Hoffman’s head

Caden’s can­vas is infi­nite, there is no script, and he hopes to find his story as he goes along. The play is in per­pet­ual rehearsal for decades, and remains for­ever unti­tled. I hate to use this kind of cop-out phrase pop­u­lar in col­lege lit­er­a­ture classes, but it truly is “a metaphor for life.” As Caden tries to find mean­ing for the trau­matic events in his life, and to ratio­nal­ize his deci­sions, he casts actors to play him­self and the sig­nif­i­cant peo­ple in his life. Like mem­o­ries being processed by the human brain, he is now able to replay recent painful events in his life over and over, giv­ing direc­tion to his actors on how to express their (his) pain, all with the emo­tional safety of know­ing that it’s all just playacting.

Soon, he takes even another step back, and casts another set of actors to play the first. Real­ity itself begins to break down as in Björk’s Bach­e­lorette, also fea­tur­ing a play within a play within a play, cast with sev­eral pairs of other actors play­ing her­self and her lover as their affair, and entire world, dis­in­te­grates. A sim­i­lar theme of copies and dou­bles also fig­ures into Adap­ta­tion: writer “Char­lie” may or may not have an iden­ti­cal twin brother, shame­lessly able to make the kinds of com­pro­mises nec­es­sary for suc­cess in the movie biz and life itself that he is too weak or too ashamed to do him­self. Is it sig­nif­i­cant, as Kauf­man moves from writer to writer/director, that the cen­tral char­ac­ter of Adap­ta­tion is a writer, and that of Synec­doche, New York is a director?

Samantha Morton, Emily Watson, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Noonan in Synecdoche, New YorkA scene from Synec­doche, New York, star­ring Saman­tha Mor­ton as Hazel, Emily Wat­son as Tammy as Hazel, Philip Sey­mour Hoff­man as Caden, and Tom Noo­nan as Sammy as Caden. Got that?

Caden is beset through­out with a host of mys­tery ill­nesses that for­ever threaten to kill him but never carry through their promise. I caught at least two hints that he may in fact already be dead: his shrink Madeleine Gravis (Hope Davis) makes a seem­ing slip of the tongue and asks why he killed him­self, and later, one of his dop­pel­gängers (Tom Noo­nan) com­mits suicide.

The walls between Caden’s life and his play blur; which is real and which is the play? The dis­pas­sion­ate direc­tor watches from a dis­tance as oth­ers do the dirty work of liv­ing his life for him, such as con­duct his love affairs and breakups with Claire (Michele Williams), Hazel (Saman­tha Mor­ton), and Tammy (Emily Wat­son), that he may not have the emo­tional strength or sex­ual potency to do him­self. Caden even­tu­ally replaces him­self and takes the sim­pler, less demand­ing role of one of the most fleet­ingly minor back­ground fig­ures in his life. Is he an actor in his own play, fol­low­ing the script and direc­tion from some­one else, an invis­i­ble exter­nal force… God? He essen­tially abdi­cates respon­si­bil­ity for his own life, and dies on cue.

Must read: exhaus­tive fan site BeingCharlieKaufman.com

Offi­cial movie site: www.sonyclassics.com/synecdocheny

Buy the DVD and Schoot­ing Script from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Recount

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Recount

 

The 2008 HBO tele­vi­sion movie Recount dra­ma­tizes the trau­matic few weeks at the close of the 2000 Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion. That hec­tic time brings back three dis­tinct feel­ings for this Dork Reporter: bewil­der­ment at the found­ing fathers’ pur­pose for the Elec­toral Col­lege (as every­one no doubt remem­bers, it was never in doubt that Al Gore won the pop­u­lar vote), nau­sea at the Supreme Court and Bush Campaign’s abrupt cir­cum­ven­tion of our democ­racy, and finally, the sud­den omnipres­ence of my name: Chad (defined as “a piece of waste mate­r­ial cre­ated by punch­ing cards or tape”). I’ve heard all the jokes, but Recount was able to teach me one new fac­toid: the “plural of chad is chad.”

Although a thriller involv­ing pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics, its tone is noth­ing like that of All the President’s Men; no least, every­thing takes place in sun­light and no one smokes. Direc­tor Jay Roach (yes, him, of the Austin Pow­ers movies) car­ries things along at a break­neck pace. This is how it prob­a­bly felt to those on the inside of the Florida hur­ri­cane (involv­ing even lit­tle a lit­tle boy from Cuba you might recall was named Elian Gon­za­les). But for a viewer, it feels like a 2-hour bar­rage of facts, fig­ures, and dra­matic recre­ations of key events. Per­haps unavoid­ably, much of the story is told through reams of his­tory and expo­si­tion placed into the char­ac­ters’ mouths.

RecountLaura Dern as Kather­ine Har­ris dur­ing her 15 min­utes of fame

Like Oliver Stone’s W. (read The Dork Report review), this drama­ti­za­tion of real events pro­vides ample oppor­tu­nity for famous actors to exer­cise their skills as imper­son­ators. Most notably, Laura Dern embod­ies Florida Sec­re­tary of State Kather­ine Har­ris in all her tacky glory. Har­ris is unflat­ter­ingly depicted as caught in over her head by cir­cum­stances. She is vain about her appear­ance, yet blind to how she is per­ceived. Baker orders the Repub­li­can lob­by­ist Mac Sti­panovich (Bruce McGill) to attach him­self to her, to cir­cum­vent laws that pro­hibit the admin­is­tra­tion from inter­fer­ing in Florida state mat­ters. It’s an easy task; using flat­tery, he implies Har­ris is in con­trol while he’s actu­ally feed­ing her direc­tives directly from the Bush campaign.

The early part of the film con­cerns the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ence of approach between War­ren (“Chris”) Christo­pher (John Hurt) and James Baker (Tom Wilkin­son) — both actors affect­ing con­vinc­ing Amer­i­can accents. Christo­pher is a gen­tle­man of the old school, obe­di­ent to pro­pri­ety. Baker, on the other hand, is a ruth­less shark will­ing to play dirty. Christo­pher is forced to leave the effort due to fam­ily mat­ters, and the weight of respon­si­bil­ity falls upon pro­tag­o­nist Ron Klain (Kevin Spacey), Gen­eral Coun­sel for the Gore Campaign.

If true, here’s some­thing I didn’t know: one of the final nails in the cof­fin of the recount came from no less than Joe Lieber­man. In the ver­sion of events pre­sented by the film, Lieber­man directly inter­fered in the mat­ter of ques­tion­able absen­tee bal­lots filed by mil­i­tary ser­vice mem­bers. The Gore cam­paign argued that accord­ing to the Bush team’s own stan­dards, any improp­erly sub­mit­ted bal­lots shouldn’t be valid. Lieber­man ini­tially agreed with the tac­tic, then wimped out on national tele­vi­sion and spoke out against his own cam­paign, mak­ing it seem as if his own peo­ple were the ones stoop­ing to under­handed tac­tics to win.

RecountKevin Spacey and Denis Leary as Ron Klain and Michael Whouley

As a staunch Demo­c­rat still sim­mer­ing over what hap­pened eight years ago, Recount reads to me as very pro-Gore. But I’m curi­ous as to what Bush sup­port­ers think of the film. Does it look fair to them? I sup­pose they might look at Bush Cam­paign National Coun­sel Ben Gins­berg (Bob Bal­a­ban) and Baker and see two men doing every­thing they can to sup­port the can­di­date they believe legally won the elec­tion. But when Gins­berg is quoted sneer­ing at Democ­rats being will­ing to cheat and steal elec­tions, I wanted to find the real man and spit on his shoe.

Watch­ing this film brings back all my dis­gust at the real vil­lain, of course, The Supreme Court. The movie illus­trates the heart­break­ing catch-22: The Supreme Court paused the recount, caus­ing most Florida coun­ties to miss the dead­line, and then say­ing the recount could not con­tinue because the dead­line had passed. And then to rub it in, The Court stated that this par­tic­u­lar rul­ing applied to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion only, and could not be applied to any future sce­nario. As Gore Cam­paign strate­gist Michael Whouley (Denis Leary) points out for the audi­ence, this is some­thing The Court had never done before in his­tory. I recall from the time that one the­ory was that the Court per­haps fan­cied were sav­ing the nation from a bru­tal blow to its foun­da­tions, in the same way that Ford did by par­don­ing Nixon in 1974. Regard­less, the whole sit­u­a­tion still smells eight years later.

The great tragedy is that the more the Gore cam­paign dug into the sys­tem, the more dirt they found. For instance, they uncover irrefutable evi­dence that thou­sands of legit­i­mate African Amer­i­can vot­ers were dis­en­fran­chised in Florida, but were pow­er­less to do any­thing about it except weakly hope that it wouldn’t hap­pen again next time. Now, in 2008, when racism mat­ters more than ever, let’s cer­tainly hope it doesn’t.

Offi­cial movie site: www.hbo.com/films/recount

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

W.

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W. movie poster

 

I had the same issues with Oliver Stone’s W. that I do with every biopic. As vir­tu­ally every fea­ture film biog­ra­phy attempts to do the job of a book, they inevitably fall into the same trap: they become high­lights reels that merely illus­trate key moments in a real-life figure’s life, span­ning decades. With a few excep­tions (Amer­i­can Splen­dor, Con­trol), any nar­ra­tive through­line is impos­si­ble; mean­ing, there is no story. Stone attempts to tie together his frag­mented exam­i­na­tion of the life of George W. Bush with the theme of his rela­tion­ship with his father, George H.W. Bush. In this view, Junior both loved and hated his father, and both wanted to impress him and to pre­vail where he per­ceived that he failed (it’s clear now even to this staunch paci­fist and Demo­c­rat that Bush the elder was wise to not extend the first Gulf War into a nation­build­ing exer­cise in Iraq).

Oliver Stone W.Gen­tle­men! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!

Screen­writer Stan­ley Weiser chooses the con­cep­tion of the phrase “Axis of Evil” as the start­ing point, and ends the film with the infa­mous press con­fer­ence in which the arro­gant Bush was unable to name any mis­takes he may have made in office. Stone flashes back many times to Bush’s prior life as a trust fund wastrel, but skips almost every­thing that I would define as defin­ing moments: becom­ing a born again Chris­t­ian, decid­ing to run for pres­i­dent, announc­ing to his staff that they are going to war in Iraq (it’s a mat­ter of record Bush said “Fuck Sad­dam. We’re tak­ing him out.”) and of course, Sep­tem­ber 11 itself.

John Brolin in W.I’m George W. Bush, bitches!

The most obvi­ous fail­ure of biopics is that they typ­i­cally become oppor­tu­ni­ties for famous actors to do impres­sions of his­tor­i­cal fig­ures. In this case, the sub­jects are so fresh that many of them are still in office and on tele­vi­sion every night now, so the dan­ger is that W. could come too close to the easy satire of Sat­ur­day Night Live Week­end Update. That said, Josh Brolin is excel­lent as George W. Bush, in a per­for­mance that cap­tures many of the man’s pecu­liar tics but doesn’t come across as a forced car­i­ca­ture. Sim­i­larly, Richard Drey­fus is remark­ably restrained as Dick Cheney, a role that many other actors would have been tempted to use as an excuse to chew the Oval Office scenery. But unfor­tu­nately, Thandie New­ton (as Con­doleezza Rice) struck me as the only cast mem­ber doing a forced impression.

Offi­cial movie site: www.wthefilm.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Happening

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The Happening movie poster

 

The Hap­pen­ing is the lat­est in a long line of Hol­ly­wood movies that depict attacks of one sort (ter­ror­ist) or another (alien) upon New York City. A mys­te­ri­ous mass hys­te­ria strikes the idyl­lic Bethesda Ter­race (a place I walk through sev­eral times a week) in Manhattan’s Cen­tral Park, and quickly fans out to the entire city. What is later referred to as “the event” or “the hap­pen­ing” (the lat­ter a term pop­u­lar­ized by hip­pies, I believe) appears to be some kind of air­borne toxin that causes every human being within range to calmly and pas­sively com­mit sui­cide. Speak­ing as a New Yorker that lived through 9/11, this open­ing sequence pushes fewer emo­tional but­tons than, say Clover­field (read The Dork Report review), which was explic­itly anal­o­gous to post-9/11 New York as Godzilla was to post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan. But it’s impos­si­ble to not be shaken by the charged image of office work­ers will­ingly jump­ing to their deaths from skyscrapers.

Hav­ing ticked the dis­as­ter movie genre box of “whole­sale mas­sacre in Man­hat­tan,” writer/director/producer M. Night Shya­malan aban­dons New York for the remain­der of the movie and trans­fers the action to his old stomp­ing grounds of Philadel­phia, PA. High school teach­ers Eliot (“Marky” Mark Wahlberg) and Julian (John Leguizamo) catch wind (so to speak) of the event, and pre­sciently make plans to take the next Amtrak train out of 30th Street Sta­tion with their fam­i­lies. Eliot is expe­ri­enc­ing some fric­tion in his mar­riage with Alma (Zooey Deschanel), and warns Julian that she may be act­ing “weird.” It’s up to the viewer to decide if he’s talk­ing about the char­ac­ter Alma or the actress Zooey, whose eyes and face were truly made for the movies but whose eccen­tric line read­ings are indeed “weird.”

Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel in The HappeningBeau­ti­ful down­town Fil­bert, PA

The train halts on the way from Philly to Har­ris­burg, strand­ing the occu­pants in the mid­dle of nowhere — which is to say, the real-life small town Fil­bert, PA. Sci­ence teacher Eliot berates him­self “be sci­en­tific, douchebag!” and uses logic to deduce the facts from the bits of evi­dence he’s picked up along the way: his hunch is that they are not expe­ri­enc­ing a ter­ror­ist chem­i­cal attack, but rather that the earth’s bios­phere is releas­ing a fatal toxin tar­geted to areas heav­ily pop­u­lated by humans. They set off on foot in small groups into the kind of beau­ti­ful rolling fields where Shya­malan set his ear­lier para­ble The Vil­lage (read The Dork Report review).

They come across a for-sale “Model Home”, a giant McMan­sion full of arti­fi­cial good­ies. The per­fect dream home is actu­ally in no way a refuge: there is no food or shel­ter, and it only serves as a lure to other groups less enlight­ened than they; the mere arrival of even one more fel­low trav­eller could boost the local pop­u­la­tion to a point where the plants may attack. Here The film’s first hint of humor appears: Eliot notices a giant indoor plant eerily loom­ing in a cor­ner. He attempts to nego­ti­ate with it for the future of human­ity, until he real­izes that it too is plas­tic. The arti­fi­cial model home is a blunt metaphor for humanity’s dis­pos­able con­sumerism and impact upon the environment.

The HappeningMan­hat­tan is destroyed for the 4,937th time by Hollywood

At this point, The Hap­pen­ing becomes a dif­fer­ent movie, a bet­ter one, receiv­ing a much-needed injec­tion of Shyamalan’s char­ac­ter­is­tic wit and mas­ter­ful use of hor­ror and sus­pense tropes: creepy shad­ows half glimpsed through win­dow slats, batty old lady (Betty Buck­ley) with creepy dolls in her bed, etc. But over­all it’s unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally clumsy. His best films (for my money: The Sixth Sense, Unbreak­able, and Signs) are plot­ted so tight you couldn’t remove a sin­gle frame with­out harm­ing them.

It’s unfor­tu­nately over­writ­ten with pages and pages of poor dia­logue, includ­ing this unin­ten­tional howler fea­tured in the trailer: note Marky Mark’s impec­ca­ble gram­mar upon being told his Amtrak train has lost con­tact: “With whom?” Julian also states with odd for­mal­ity that his wife is trav­el­ling sep­a­rately to “the town of Prince­ton.” To be char­i­ta­ble, per­haps Shya­malan fig­ured high school teach­ers might habit­u­ally speak clearly with cor­rect grammar.

John Leguizamo and Mark Wahlberg in The HappeningDo we have time for a cheeses­teak and some Antie Anne’s before our train to nowhere?

There’s too strong a reliance on fake tele­vi­sion news broad­casts to con­vey expo­si­tion (a device only resorted to once or twice in Signs), even con­clud­ing the film with a talk­ing head sci­en­tist explain­ing the take­away mes­sage for the slower mem­bers of the audi­ence: “we’re threat­en­ing the planet.” Watch The Sixth Sense and Unbreak­able again and see how much Shya­malan at his best is able to com­mu­ni­cate with­out dia­logue. How much would Unbreak­able have sucked if Bruce Willis’ char­ac­ter had openly mused about how he was turn­ing into Superman?

Sig­nif­i­cantly for a direc­tor known for work­ing in the hor­ror & sus­pense gen­res (fan­tasy, too, if you count the exe­crable mis­step The Lady in the Water — read The Dork Report review), The Hap­pen­ing is Shyamalan’s first R-rated movie. As if to live up to its hor­ror film billing, the nar­ra­tive fre­quently pauses for con­spic­u­ously gory set-pieces: a woman stabs her­self with a knit­ting nee­dle, a man sets a lawn mower to run over him­self, etc. The brief episodes of gore con­trast with what must have been the major chal­lenge for his story: to visu­al­ize some­thing inher­ently invis­i­ble: a wind-born toxin. Shya­malan sig­nals an oncom­ing attack with gusts of wind. Which is, of course, pre­pos­ter­ous because plants don’t cause wind (if my mem­ory of ele­men­tary school sci­ence is cor­rect, the wind starts from the motions of the tides). The char­ac­ters out­run­ning wind is about as pre­pos­ter­ous as the advanc­ing killer frost in Roland Emmerich’s envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ter movie The Day After Tomorrow.

Zooey Deschanel and Marky Mark Wahlberg in The HappeningZooey Deschanel and Marky Mark Wahlberg peek around the cor­ner for the next plot twist

The film’s envi­ron­men­tal issues first appear with a faint fla­vor of cre­ation­ism in an early scene set in Eliot’s class­room. He believes there are aspects of nature we may never truly under­stand, although sci­ence may slap an expla­na­tion on them in ret­ro­spect. But “just a the­ory” is the lan­guage of anti-intellectual cre­ation­ists who wish to dis­count evo­lu­tion. In Shyamalan’s hindu world­view, does an act of nature equal an act of god? Is the earth being mali­cious, defen­sive, or both? The planet may not be act­ing with con­scious intel­li­gence, but rather as a mere reac­tion to stim­uli; a kind of thin­ning of the herds.

As was the case with the 2003 black­out in the north­east, Shya­malan was cor­rect in observ­ing that everyone’s first the­ory in any post 9/11 calamity would be that it’s a ter­ror­ist attack. But it’s pretty much estab­lished very early that the cul­prits are the plants. This pretty much drains the sus­pense out of the pic­ture, and I actu­ally wished for one of Shyamalan’s patented twist end­ings. It does seem hugely wimpy com­pared the ruth­less and unspar­ing The Mist (read The Dork Report review). If Shya­malan had had the guts to go for a bleak end­ing like writer/director Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adap­ta­tion, The Hap­pen­ing might have been bet­ter received and per­haps remem­bered as one of his best.

Offi­cial movie site: www.thehappeningmovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Mist

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The Mist

 

Has writer/director Frank Darabont been weighed down by the heavy legacy of his first fea­ture film? The Shaw­shank Redemp­tion remains one of the most pop­u­lar movies ever made, if not quite (yet?) accepted into the canon (read The Dork Report review). The Mist, after The Green Mile, is Darabont’s third Stephen King adap­ta­tion, so far only hav­ing made only one fea­ture not derived from a King work. After two prison yarns (one set very much in the real world, the other with a dash of the super­nat­ural), Darabont now turns to one of King’s more char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally grue­some hor­ror tales.

King writes at great length about clas­sic hor­ror movies in his non­fic­tion book Danse Macabre, and The Mist squarely fits into one kind of clas­sic b-movie struc­ture. We open in a seem­ingly bucolic lake­side town with sim­mer­ing ten­sions between local res­i­dents and wealth­ier week­enders sum­mer­ing in lovely lake­side homes. A mys­te­ri­ous, mostly unseen, and def­i­nitely hos­tile alien force traps a ran­dom assort­ment of local per­son­al­i­ties in a super­mar­ket. The hor­ror works best before we actu­ally see any evi­dence of the super­nat­ural; for exam­ple, a char­ac­ter bolts into the store, full of ner­vous but not yet ter­ri­fied cit­i­zens, cry­ing the simul­ta­ne­ously eerie and hilar­i­ous line “There’s some­thing in the mist!” For home view­ers, a big reveal was spoiled right in the DVD menus: one of the adver­saries is a very bib­li­cal swarm of giant beastly locusts.

The MistThey’re heeeeeeere…

Like vir­tu­ally every zom­bie movie ever made, a cross-section of soci­ety is trapped in a con­fined loca­tion, under siege by unstop­pable forces. The micro­cosm includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives of all the usual sus­pects, includ­ing a top New York City lawyer (because we all know NYC sharks are more venal than the reg­u­lar kind) Brent Nor­ton (Andre Braugher), a cou­ple of good ol’ boys, the town cutie pie, a few hand­some young lads from the nearby mil­i­tary base, and the res­i­dent looney fun­da­men­tal­ist Mrs. Car­mody (Mar­cia Gay Harden). The Mist is not above another clas­sic hor­ror movie cliché: the vir­ginal good girl kisses a boy and dies hor­ri­bly in the very next scene. The heroes that arise are, of course, unlikely: a gro­cery bag­ger (an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter with a lot left up to us to fill in: he’s not a young man, and he’s got brains and skills, so how did he end up in such a dead-end job?) and a rel­a­tively wealthy artist David (an out­sider to the town, viewed as elitist).

We first see “our hero” (more on that later) David (Thomas Jane) in the very first shot. He’s an illus­tra­tor of movie posters: I spot­ted three shout-outs to genre movies both actual and poten­tial: Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing, and Stephen King’s own Dark Tower. He’s a macho, badass painter, using the back of his own hand as a palette, and bitch­ing about stu­dios cob­bling together cheap posters in Photoshop.

Speak­ing of craven movie stu­dios, some­times stu­dios white­wash action and hor­ror movies to cater to more lucra­tive PG-13 audi­ences (like Blade III: Trin­ity, extra­or­di­nar­ily lame & tame com­pared to Guillermo Del Toro’s out­ra­geously gory Blade II — vam­pire autopsy, any­one?). The Mist is one of the few R-rated hor­ror movies I’ve seen that might have been bet­ter with less gore and pro­fan­ity. Most espe­cially the pro­fan­ity — I’m cer­tainly guilty of salty lan­guage in my own vocab­u­lary, but the over­all F-bomb count in The Mist is so absurdly high that it almost seems as if the film­mak­ers were delib­er­ately striv­ing for a record.

The MistPlay misty for me?

Over­all, I’d have to say I really did not care for the movie, find­ing it over­writ­ten. At numer­ous points, char­ac­ters expli­cate the plot, elapsed time, and char­ac­ter arcs — to para­phrase an exam­ple: “It’s only been two days, and Mrs. Car­mody has already turned every­body against us… in only two days!” It’s also too reliant on CG gore for a story than depends on the hor­ror of the unseen (also where M. Night Shyamalan’s oth­er­wise great Signs falls down). But the best bits of the movie are squeezed between the CG set pieces, and the entire affair is redeemed by an utterly aston­ish­ing end­ing. Although I nor­mally don’t con­cern myself with spoil­ers on The Dork Report, it would be cruel of me to reveal the end­ing here. Suf­fice to say, it’s impos­si­ble to imag­ine how a script this bleak was financed and dis­trib­uted (by Dimen­sion Films). I also wish I had seen the movie in the­aters so I could see first­hand how an aver­age audi­ence would react to such an end­ing. The big downer at the end of Clover­field (read The Dork Report review) did not go over well, to say the least, and The Mist makes that one look pos­i­tively wimpy.

Like Signs and Stephen Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, The Mist depicts a mas­sive alien inva­sion from the per­spec­tive of reg­u­lar folk, as opposed to the global view taken by movies such as The Day The Earth Stood Still and Inde­pen­dence Day. But The Mist has a truer end­ing than any of these exam­ples. The core theme is of the roles peo­ple assume under extreme duress. Their illu­sions about them­selves are ampli­fied and they believe their own myth. Just as the fun­da­men­tal­ist Mrs. Car­mody com­pen­sates for a life­time of exile from healthy human inter­ac­tion by ele­vat­ing her­self into a dem­a­gogue (I’m reminded of the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the young Adolf Hitler in the movie Max, as he first finds the mass adu­la­tion he desires as he ral­lies a crowd into a racist frenzy), David falls all too well into the role of hero; he never com­plains when peo­ple turn to him for strength and lead­er­ship. The so-called “hicks” that fight him in the begin­ning of the film were right; he does think he’s smarter than every­body else. In movies, he’s exactly the kind of guy other char­ac­ters auto­mat­i­cally defer to in dire sit­u­a­tions: So-and-so’s dying of third degree burns? Tell David! What do we do next? Ask David!

The utter demo­li­tion of the stock hero char­ac­ter type is so sur­pris­ingly strong that it’s prac­ti­cally sub­ver­sive. I had thought Post­mod­ern genre films had petered out after their late-90s golden age of Scream, Star­ship Troop­ers, and Wild Things. But The Mist is a new entry in the Post­mod­ern genre cycle, in the sense that it com­ments crit­i­cally upon the hor­ror movie genre, and yet still actu­ally is a hor­ror movie. The Mist may be a mon­ster movie, but it’s not about a Thing, an Alien, or a Crea­ture from the Black Lagoon; it reveals the stan­dard hero char­ac­ter to be a kind of mon­ster himself.

Offi­cial movie site: www.themist-movie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Burn After Reading

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Burn After Reading

 

Although every Coen Broth­ers film is unmis­tak­ably theirs alone (can the Auteur The­ory apply to more than one per­son at once?), Joel and Ethan have a rep­u­ta­tion for rarely mak­ing the films audi­ences want or expect from them at any given time. After Fargo, when every­body wanted another snowy mid­west­ern noir, Joel and Ethan gave the world The Big Lebowski instead (read The Dork Report Review). After a recent string of genre exper­i­ments like the Hep­burn & Tracy-esque roman­tic com­edy Intol­er­a­ble Cru­elty and a remake of Eal­ing com­edy The Ladykillers, the Coens sur­prised every­body yet again with the dead-serious nail­biter No Coun­try for Old Men. And, per­haps because they just can’t help them­selves, they give us whiplash all over again with Burn After Reading.

George Clooney and Francis McDormand in Burn After ReadingClooney and McDor­mand give this movie two thumbs up

Osten­si­bly another caper com­edy like The Big Lebowsi, Burn After Read­ing is actu­ally more amus­ing than hilar­i­ous. The char­ac­ters are a pecu­liar kind of stu­pid com­mon in Coen films: unaware of their lim­i­ta­tions, yet mani­a­cally dri­ven. But the mis­chie­vous Coens under­mine the light enter­tain­ment value of the film by punc­tu­at­ing the con­vo­luted noirish plot and seem­ingly light tone with scenes of extreme violence.

Burn After ReadingJohn Mal­covich being John Malcovich

At the time, The Big Lebowski fea­tured many of the Coens’ reper­tory play­ers (John Good­man, Steve Buscemi, John Tur­turro). In con­trast, Burn After Read­ing sports the mar­quee names Clooney and Pitt, per­haps giv­ing it more atten­tion than it can hold. But its biggest hin­drance to join­ing the ranks of the best of the Coen Broth­ers is that it lacks a highly mem­o­rable (and quotable) char­ac­ter like H.I, Marge, or The Dude.

Burn After ReadingBrad Pitt is in pos­ses­sion of, as they say in movies like this, cer­tain documents

Offi­cial movie site: www.burnafterreading.com

The Big Lebowski

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big_lebowski.jpg

 

In 1998, when all the world wanted from Joel Coen and Ethan Coen was another Fargo, they got The Big Lebowski instead. The Coens recently repeated this trick by fol­low­ing up another mas­ter­piece, No Coun­try for Old Men, with the happy-go-lucky Burn After Read­ing. The Dork Report won­ders if this com­pul­sion is by design or if the Coens just can’t help themselves.

Viewed with some puz­zle­ment upon release, The Big Lebowski is now the sub­ject of pop art, annual con­ven­tions, and action fig­ures. The far­ci­cal film noir is ulti­mately an extended “wrong man accused” pas­tiche in the spirit of Alfred Hitch­cock and Ray­mond Chan­dler, but The Coen Broth­ers infuse it with their trade­mark anar­chic spirit and pop­u­late it with char­ac­ters with low (or oth­er­wise chem­i­cally impaired) I.Q.

big_lebowski1.jpgWe don’t roll on Shabbos

The film’s 10th anniver­sary was recently cel­e­brated in a Rolling Stone fea­ture arti­cle, The Decade of the Dude by Andy Greene. John Good­man, Julianne Moore, Steve Buscemi, and Sam Elliott reveal a wealth of anec­dotes and all seem gen­uinely delighted at the film’s cult sta­tus. Good­man, how­ever, alludes to hav­ing had a kind of falling out with the Coens after Oh Brother Where Art Thou. The arti­cle also states that The Coen Broth­ers decline to dis­cuss the The Big Lebowski at all any­more, for unspec­i­fied rea­sons. How­ever, the DVD edi­tion screened by The Dork Report includes the orig­i­nal 1998 con­tem­po­rary elec­tronic press kit includ­ing an inter­view with the Coen Broth­ers in which they gamely dis­cuss the pro­duc­tion (Joel is cred­ited as direc­tor and Ethan as writer, but in truth they have always shared the duties equally). The DVD also pro­vides a peek at cin­e­matog­ra­pher Roger Deakins’ spec­tac­u­lar fan­tasy sequences and unique bowl­ing footage actu­al­ized with a motor­ized cam­era capa­ble of run­ning up to 20 M.P.H.

Jeff Bridges reveals the extent of his actorly craft in prepar­ing for each scene: he would sim­ply ask The Coens, “Did the Dude burn one on the way over?” Most often, the answer was yes, so he would rub his eyes to approx­i­mate the degree of red­ness appro­pri­ate, and pro­ceed. The Dude copes with the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of life with the motto “The Dude abides,” but the cir­cum­stances in which he finds him­self dur­ing this mis­ad­ven­ture leave him less in a state of zen than one of para­noia. No doubt a life­time of pot abuse has harshed his mel­low somewhat.

big_lebowski2.jpgYou don’t &$%# with the Jesus!

Despite hav­ing only barely more than a cameo appear­ance, John Tur­turro nearly steals the movie with the unfor­get­table char­ac­ter Jesus Quin­tana (that’s “Jesus” with a hard “J”), a sex­ual preda­tor and cock­sure bowler. The Coens speak about want­ing to write a Latino char­ac­ter for Tur­turro, but where did the rest of his out­ra­geous char­ac­ter­i­za­tion come from? Did they just wind Tur­turro up and let him go? Other notable cameos include David Thewlis (Naked, Harry Pot­ter) as a gig­gling asso­ciate of Maude (Moore), and musi­cians Aimee Mann and Flea as hap­less nihilists.

Offi­cial movie site: www.biglebowskidvd.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Midnight Run

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Midnight Run

 

Mar­tin Brest’s Mid­night Run is an appeal­ingly loose com­edy built on a solid premise. It’s a clas­sic, almost clichéd Hol­ly­wood sce­nario: Jack Walsh (Robert De Niro) is one of the world’s last hon­est cops, rewarded for his integrity by divorce and demo­tion to the humil­i­at­ing (and dan­ger­ous) level of bounty hunter. His han­dler Eddie Moscone (Joe “Joey Pants” Pan­to­liano) raises the lucra­tive prospect of One Last Job: to escort chief wit­ness Jonathan Mar­dukas (Charles Grodin) in a fed­eral mob case across the coun­try, pur­sued both by the feds (led by the impos­ing and per­pet­u­ally aggrieved Yaphet Kotto) and the mob (the age­less Den­nis Farina) alike.

Midnight RunIt’s for you

Walsh has per­sonal busi­ness with mob boss Ser­rano, and so the task quickly becomes a jour­ney of the soul for him. The tem­plate is 3:10 to Yuma: an intel­li­gent, artic­u­late “bad guy” trav­els with gruff and seri­ous “good guy” with money prob­lems and deep-seated resent­ment for being pun­ished for his hon­esty. But all this is beside the point. The true plea­sure of the movie, and the cause of its con­tin­ued cult appeal, is all in the actors’ inter­play. Grodin has all the hilar­i­ous dia­log, much of it with the feel of impro­vi­sa­tion. In con­trast, De Niro seems only equipped to con­tin­u­ally retort with “Shut the fuck up,” per­haps by choice to be true to his char­ac­ter as opposed to a fail­ure of cre­ativ­ity. Why has Grodin been in so few movies?

Midnight RunYaphet Kotto does not suf­fer fools lightly

Also of inter­est is an early score by Danny Elf­man, later to gain a rep­u­ta­tion for whim­si­cal fan­tasy music for Tim Bur­ton and The Simp­sons. Brest, the direc­tor of Bev­erly Hills Cop, stages a mas­sive multi-car chase approach­ing the absurdly funny lev­els of The Blues Brothers.

Mid­night Run is actu­ally not all that funny a com­edy, not that thrilling a thriller, nor that pen­e­trat­ing a char­ac­ter study. But it is nev­er­the­less great fun to watch, and cry­ing out for a sequel.

Must read: the orig­i­nal Mid­night Run shoot­ing script

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Magnificent Seven

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The Magnificent Seven

 

John Sturges’ The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven is Hollywood’s answer to Akira Kurosawa’s hugely pop­u­lar Seven Samu­rai (read The Dork Report review). It suf­fers in com­par­i­son, espe­cially if, like this Dork Reporter, one watches them in suc­ces­sion. The remake is quaint, chaste, and dated in ways the fairly frank orig­i­nal isn’t. To put it another way, Seven Samu­rai is a period piece of its 16th Cen­tury set­ting, while The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven is a period piece both of its 19th Cen­tury set­ting and its 1960 production.

A remake was inevitable con­sid­er­ing the dizzy­ing cir­cle of influ­ence. Kuro­sawa was a fan of the Hol­ly­wood west­ern and espe­cially of direc­tor John Ford, all of which directly informed Seven Samu­rai. Hollywood’s trans­po­si­tion of the story to the Amer­i­can West for The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven was fairly straight­for­ward. Its great suc­cess led to three motion pic­ture sequels, a tele­vi­sion series, and is to be remade again in 2009.

The orig­i­nal epony­mous seven samu­rai were actu­ally ronin, mas­ter­less mer­ce­nar­ies akin to the West­ern out­law: morally ambiva­lent drifters, killers with a per­sonal code of honor. The West­ern genre is usu­ally about out­laws, for the sim­ple rea­son that they’re more dra­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing than reg­u­lar plain folk. In both ver­sions of 3:10 to Yuma (1957 and 2007), for exam­ple, the vil­lain Ben Wade (Glen Ford and Rus­sell Crowe) is a far more appeal­ing and seduc­tive char­ac­ter than the good guy Dan Evans (Can Heflin and Chris­t­ian Bale). An excep­tion to the rule is the clas­sic High Noon, in which Gary Cooper plays an hon­est law­man who pre­vails under extreme duress. The biggest clue the mag­nif­i­cent seven are not clas­sic good guys: Yul Bryn­ner appro­pri­ately sports his trade­mark black hat. Upping the badass quo­tient and testos­terone lev­els are no less than Steve McQueen (here get­ting to drive a real mus­tang on screen), Charles Bron­son, and the very lanky James Coburn.

The Magnificent SevenThe meet­ing of the Badass Soci­ety is adjourned

The basic sce­nario is sim­i­lar: seven Amer­i­can gun­slingers accept a pit­tance in order to defend a Mex­i­can vil­lage besieged by ban­dits. But the many alter­ations beyond this all reflect some very “Hol­ly­wood” think­ing. In the orig­i­nal, it is enough for the samu­rai that there be an injus­tice they are capa­ble of address­ing. But in a Hol­ly­wood film, there must be indi­vid­ual moti­va­tions, which inter­est­ingly have the side effect of ren­der­ing some char­ac­ters less heroic. Harry Luck (Brad Dex­ter) is con­vinced Chris (Bryn­ner) has an ulte­rior motive, such as pil­fer­ing a non-existent gold mine. The dandy bounty hunter Lee (Robert Vaughn) is also along for self­ish rea­sons; he’s on the lam for an unspec­i­fied trans­gres­sion, and needs to dis­ap­pear for a while.

The orig­i­nal Seven Samu­rai is actu­ally tech­ni­cally com­prised of only five actual samu­rai and two pre­tenders. Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is a peas­ant pos­ing as a samu­rai, and Kat­sushiro (Isao Kimura) is an earnestly roman­tic young boy seek­ing samu­rai train­ing and adven­ture. Per­haps to econ­o­mize the story, The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven com­bines these two char­ac­ters into Chico (Horst Buch­holz), a for­mer farmer that wor­ships the out­laws and attaches him­self to them in order to become one.

So that leaves Chris, Bernardo (Bron­son), and Vin (McQueen). In this remake’s best sleight-of-hand, we’re in the dark as to their moti­va­tions until near the very end. None of them are young men, and what dri­ves them turns out to be the fan­tasy of set­tling down into an agri­cul­tural lifestyle. The gruff Bernardo befriends a batch of scrappy kids, becom­ing a kind of pro­tec­tive older brother if not a father fig­ure. Chris and Vin seal their friend­ship with the mutual con­fes­sion that they both han­ker for a sim­pler life (a sort of admis­sion very dif­fi­cult for two very macho men).

The Magnificent SevenGo ahead and make our day

But many poor changes out­weigh these afore­men­tioned inter­est­ing ones. Being a prod­uct of Hol­ly­wood, it’s actu­ally less vio­lent, pro­fane, and sexy than the orig­i­nal Japan­ese film. The Mex­i­can vil­lagers are wise and saintly, com­pared to the more real­is­ti­cally flawed farm­ers in Seven Samu­rai. The threat of sex­ual vio­lence is white­washed away; the ban­dits are not inter­ested in the Mex­i­can women. We see too much of the vil­lains, and the chief ban­dit Calvera (Eli Wal­lach) is prac­ti­cally a fea­tured character.

But just as I was begin­ning to dis­miss the remake as infe­rior to the orig­i­nal in every way, and of his­tor­i­cal inter­est only, the movie dark­ens and becomes inter­est­ing again. The Mex­i­can vil­lagers, like their ancient Japan­ese coun­ter­parts, do reveal a dark side after all. Despite their ini­tial suc­cess in beat­ing back the ban­dits with the out­laws’ help, they have a cri­sis of faith and betray the out­laws in order to return to the com­fort zone of their par­a­sitic rela­tion­ship with the bandits.

In the old west, an out­law may very well find a home in a fron­tier town where no one knows his past deeds (a core theme of the HBO series Dead­wood and the sit­u­a­tion in which Clint Eastwood’s The Unfor­given opens). But in ancient feu­dal Japan’s caste sys­tem, a ronin could never take a step down and live among farm­ers. This also proves to be the case in The Mag­nif­i­cent Seven: Chris and Vin mosey on out of town and Chico stays behind, reject­ing his pre­ten­sions to being a rebel out­law, and revert­ing to his des­tined life as a farmer.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.