Tag Archives: Emile Hirsch

A Tall Tale: Taking Woodstock

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Taking Woodstock movie poster

 

Ang Lee’s Tak­ing Wood­stock is based on Elliot Tiber’s mem­oir Tak­ing Wood­stock: A True Story of a Riot, a Con­cert, and a Life, that pur­ports to be the untold story of how the Wood­stock music fes­ti­val came to Bethel, NY, in August 1969. Tiber claims he was the cru­cial go-between that intro­duced the festival’s orga­niz­ers to Max Yas­gur, owner of the farm that became the site of the famous three days of music, peace, love, mud, brown acid, and traf­fic jams.

Even if only a por­tion of Elliot’s tall tale is true, it’s incred­i­ble that it has not been dra­ma­tized before now. In his ver­sion of events, an ordi­nary, meek kid becomes the acci­den­tal mid­wife of one of the biggest cul­tural events in mod­ern his­tory. Mix in most of the hot-button issues of the time — the hip­pie vs. square cul­ture clash, gay awak­en­ing, anti-semitism, the mafia, and fall­out from the Korean and Viet­nam Wars — and you end up with what should have been a richly defin­i­tive movie deal­ing with the era.

Demetri Martin and Paul Dano in Taking WoodstockTrip­ping the light fan­tas­tic in the magic bus

That Tiber’s account of the fes­ti­val is vig­or­ously dis­puted by almost every­one involved (and sober enough to recall events now) is beside the point. The story is a good one, but the film never seems to cap­ture the joy, anx­i­ety, or excite­ment of the moment. So what if it isn’t true? We already have a sup­pos­edly objec­tive doc­u­men­tary on the fes­ti­val (but more on that below).

The biggest prob­lem is Demetri Mar­tin, who despite his suc­cess as a come­dian and con­trib­u­tor to The Daily Show, pos­sesses approx­i­mately as much star charisma as a plank. To be fair, his char­ac­ter is writ­ten to be repressed and buttoned-up, but the kid remains bor­ing even after what ought to have been a trans­for­ma­tive num­ber of enlight­en­ing expe­ri­ences, includ­ing his first gay kiss, first acid trip, and betrayal by his mother. Emile Hirsch appears in a small role as a psy­cho­log­i­cally scarred vet, and clearly would have been bet­ter in the lead role. Even Elliot’s par­ents are both more com­pelling char­ac­ters than he. His father’s (Henry Good­man) inter­ac­tions with the bur­geon­ing coun­ter­cul­ture awaken him from the vir­tual coma his life had become, and his mother (Imelda Staunton) is a self-destructive hoarder, which the film links to Holo­caust survivor’s guilt.

Demetri Martin and Liev Schreiber in Taking WoodstockThat’s a man, baby!

Lee’s visu­als are fairly straight­for­ward, mak­ing it rather jar­ring when split-screen sequences visu­ally allude to Michael Wedleigh’s doc­u­men­tary Wood­stock (1970). Tak­ing Wood­stock sup­ports Wedleigh’s the­sis that the mostly harm­less hip­pies that sought a week­end of peace and music instead found hos­tile locals and a com­bat­ive, con­de­scend­ing press. But other moments in Tak­ing Wood­stock serve to under­cut the orig­i­nal doc­u­men­tary, such as when Wedleigh is seen coach­ing a trio of nuns to flash the peace sign. If that iconic image was staged, what else might have been false or exag­ger­ated? Tak­ing Wood­stock may be a tall tale, but it also makes clear that Wedleigh’s film isn’t nec­es­sar­ily reli­able either.

Tak­ing Wood­stock ends with orga­nizer Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) about to mount another free con­cert fea­tur­ing the Rolling Stones. The Wood­stock fes­ti­val may have been chaotic, but it was suc­cess­ful inso­far that it proved peo­ple could gather in mas­sive num­bers and cel­e­brate pos­i­tively and peace­fully. Lang is ener­gized by what he achieved, but the mood is not so opti­mistic for those of us that know how it all turned out. The chaos and mur­der of the Alta­mount débâ­cle that marked the end of the Sum­mer of Love would be doc­u­mented by The Maysles Broth­ers in Gimme Shel­ter (read Matthew Dessem’s excel­lent take on the film at The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion).

Demetri Martin in Taking WoodstockOne of the most famous traf­fic jams in history

Just as Tak­ing Wood­stock never quite takes off, Elliot never actu­ally makes it to the con­cert. The fact that we never see it, and barely even hear it, is part of the point. Many of the 400,000 atten­dees prob­a­bly never got any closer, either. And even those that did may have been too altered to recall much.

Ran­dom observations:

  • There are puz­zling hints that Lang’s assis­tant Tisha (Mamie Gum­mer, Meryl Streep’s daugh­ter) is sig­nif­i­cant, but her char­ac­ter is ulti­mately super­flu­ous. The role is not sig­nif­i­cant enough to match the notable casting.
  • Like con­tem­po­raries Michael Win­ter­bot­tom and Danny Boyle, Ang Lee seems deter­mined to never make the same film twice. Seen in that light, Tak­ing Wood­stock is a refresh­ing break in tone from his grim, thor­oughly nonerotic Lust, Cau­tion.
  • Fur­ther, it’s also worth not­ing that Eliot’s homo­sex­ual awak­en­ing is much more suc­cess­ful and ful­fill­ing than that of the tor­tured cow­boys in Broke­back Mountain.

Offi­cial movie site: www.takingwoodstockthemovie.com

Buy the book, Blu-ray, or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Milk

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Milk movie poster

 

Any friend of The Dork Report will know that I almost uni­ver­sally hate biopics. As I’ve com­plained in my reviews of Con­trol, The Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly, and even Walk Hard, I believe that the fea­ture film is fun­da­men­tally ill suited for biog­ra­phy. One seem­ingly minor les­son from col­lege that wound up stick­ing with me is Edgar Allen Poe’s def­i­n­i­tion of the short story as a prose piece that can be expe­ri­enced in a sin­gle sit­ting (The Phi­los­o­phy of Com­po­si­tion, 1846). No one expects a seri­ous por­trait of a person’s entire life in a few pages, so why should we applaud a movie? The fea­ture film’s two-hour run­ning time is more akin to a short story than to a book-length novel or biog­ra­phy, and yet the biopic is a dom­i­nant genre in movies. I would argue the pri­mary rea­son is that they give ambi­tious actors the oppor­tu­nity to exer­cise their imi­ta­tion skills. It pleases audi­ences who per­ceive “true sto­ries” as being of greater merit than fic­tion (mere make-believe!), and pan­der­ing to the Acad­emy, who love noth­ing bet­ter than a tech­ni­cally impres­sive mim­icry of an addict or hand­i­capped per­son. I actu­ally wel­comed Walk Hard, for although a ter­ri­ble movie itself, it finally mocked the for­mu­laic drug-addicted musi­cian biopics Ray, Walk the Line, La Vie En Rose, and El Cantante.

Sean Penn in Milk

Direc­tor Gus Van Sant and writer Dustin Lance Black’s Milk, on the other hand, strikes me as less insin­cere than its peers. For one thing, it exam­ines only a ten-year span of a man’s life, avoid­ing the genre’s usual Cliff’s Notes-like approach to sum­ma­riz­ing a famous figure’s life into a series of high­lights. And yes, Sean Penn did win an Oscar for a lively, spir­ited per­for­mance worlds apart from his nat­ural demeanor. But I believe he, like every­one else involved, approached the project with noth­ing but the high­est integrity, and truly hoped the timely project could affect pub­lic opinion.

Milk was in the­aters dur­ing shortly after the national debate over California’s Propo­si­tion 8, which denied the right to marry to a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the pop­u­la­tion (thanks to com­menter Sap­pho­crat below for the cor­rec­tion). It’s impos­si­ble to miss the par­al­lels to Har­vey Milk’s strug­gle in 1978 against Propo­si­tion 6, which would have enabled the fir­ing of homo­sex­ual teach­ers and (this is the truly amaz­ing part) any­one that sup­ported them. One of the movie’s biggest achieve­ments is that it empha­sized the sheer urgency of the gay rights move­ment. Equal­ity was not just some­thing that’s time had come. Gays were not only fight­ing for rights they hoped some day to have; they were fight­ing to keep the what rights they did have from being taken away.

Josh Brolin in Milk

I must admit that all I knew about Har­vey Milk was the tan­gen­tial bit of trivia that his assas­sin Dan White (Josh Brolin) was the first to employ the infa­mous “Twinkie Defense” in court, claim­ing that a diet of junk food altered his body chem­istry and cre­ated a tem­po­rary state of insan­ity. Har­vey was orig­i­nally a New York insur­ance man, clos­eted from cowork­ers and fam­ily, but not so much so that he couldn’t brazenly pick up a stranger on the sub­way (with gay­dar so fine-tuned that he could imme­di­ately tell that what I would assume to a normal-looking dude in 70s fash­ions was a fel­low Friend of Dorothy). Scott Smith (James Franco) urges him to move to Cal­i­for­nia where he can live more hon­estly. Har­vey ini­tially is happy to just live his new life, but becomes politi­cized as he faces prej­u­di­cial oppo­si­tion to his small business.

Although it may seem to con­tra­dict part of my tirade against biopics at the begin­ning on this post, it might have been illu­mi­nat­ing to see a lit­tle more of Har­vey as a younger man, before he blos­somed into a polit­i­cally aware, out man. We only learn through pass­ing dia­logue that he hid not only his sex­u­al­ity but even Scott’s very exis­tence from his fam­ily. If the aim was to com­press the essence of Har­vey Milk into a short-form nar­ra­tive, it strikes me that the major dra­matic arc would be his trans­for­ma­tion from a clos­eted man into some­one that would later ask an entire com­mu­nity to come out at once.

Offi­cial movie site: www.milkthemovie.com

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

Speed Racer

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Speed Racer movie poster

 

The good news is that Andy & Larry Wachowski’s Speed Racer is fun and eye-poppingly extra­or­di­nary to watch. As with their break­through The Matrix (1999), there’s the strong feel­ing that you’re see­ing some­thing new; not just emer­gent tech­nolo­gies but a whole new style of moviemak­ing. But the bad news is that it’s all… too much. Why under­take such huge effort and expense just to repli­cate the essence of a poorly writ­ten and cheaply ani­mated TV series that no one, not even the geeki­est Japan­ese animé otaku (fan­boy), really misses? This film might have been so much bet­ter if they had jet­ti­soned the bag­gage of the intel­lec­tual prop­erty (a mis­nomer in this case) and told an orig­i­nal story in this rad­i­cal new style.

The movie incar­na­tion of Speed Racer has inher­ited the visual quirks of the orig­i­nal 1960s car­toon, cross-bred with the information-rich com­put­er­ized motion graph­ics of mod­ern tele­vised sports. The color scheme is dom­i­nated by bright, pri­mary col­ors like War­ren Beatty’s Dick Tracy (made in a era before com­puter graph­ics and dig­i­tal color grad­ing). Talk­ing heads lat­er­ally pan across the screen, usu­ally redun­dantly nar­rat­ing the onscreen events for us. The effect is like watch­ing ESPN; when two cars crash, an announcer promptly tells us that two cars have crashed.

Christina Ricci in Speed RacerChristina Ricci can see for miles and miles

The film is also mod­eled after video games and Japan­ese animé in gen­eral. Huge sequences are entirely com­puter gen­er­ated, with what lit­tle live action pho­tog­ra­phy there is most likely shot against green­screen sound­stages. The Wachowskis’ res­i­dent spe­cial effects mad sci­en­tist John Gaeta metic­u­lously stages the many incred­i­ble car chases like bat­tles in a war movie from an alter­nate uni­verse. Like Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and George Lucas’ Star Wars pre­quel trilo­gies, the movie prac­ti­cally is ani­mated. Just watch­ing it, it’s pos­si­ble to imag­ine what the tie-in video game must be like.

Every sin­gle line of dia­log is a cliché, and so too is the plot. Speed (Emile Hirsch) is a young race car dri­ver, a lone hon­est man in a cor­rupt indus­try. Yes, his name is actu­ally Mr… Speed… Racer. His dis­graced older brother Rex died a mys­ti­fy­ing death years before, pro­vid­ing Speed with the moti­va­tion to prove him­self both as a dri­ver and as an hon­est man. Pops and Mom Racer (Susan Saran­don and John Good­man) some­times appear in the same shot but hardly ever exchange words. Speed also has an insanely annoy­ing lit­tle brother with a Brook­lyn accent and, god help us all, a mon­key. The odd­ball extended Racer fam­ily also includes the Aus­tralian mechanic Sparky and Speed’s heli­copter pilot-slash-girlfriend Trixie (Christina Ricci, whom at some point has lost her endear­ing baby fat and now seems star­tlingly skinny). The whole gang appar­ently lives together in the same house, with Speed’s car parked in the liv­ing room like an extra sibling.

Lest all the action be of the vehic­u­lar vari­ety, the Wachowskis wisely scat­ter about a few awe­some wire-fu fight sequences designed (appar­ently not designed by The Matrix’s genius chore­o­g­ra­pher Woo-ping Yuen). The most excit­ing and visu­ally impres­sive fight takes place on a snowy plain, with the falling snow pro­vid­ing manga–like motion lines (a char­ac­ter­is­tic of Japan­ese comic books). The fights are even more fun when John Good­man gets in on the act, and one under­stands why he might have signed on to such a project (if for rea­sons other than a big stu­dio paycheck).

Emile Hirsch in Speed RacerLike audi­ences world­wide, Emile Hirsch is a lit­tle over­whelmed by the visuals

If I were to sin­gle out one tragic flaw, I would say that Speed Racer suf­fers, like Richard Kelly’s South­land Tales (read The Dork Report review), with too much back­story. Over­long for a kids movie, it’s almost one full hour before we get to the main plot: Speed Racer must join forces with adver­saries Racer X (Matthew Fox) and Taejo Togokhan (Korean pop­star Rain) to accom­plish something-or-other and defeat some kind of injus­tice that I can’t quite recall, all of which has some­thing to do with vet­eran racer Ben Burns (Richard “Shaft” Roundtree). Who can remem­ber details after two-plus hours of sheer sen­sory over­load? Speed Racer feels like a sequel to a movie we haven’t seen, with enough threads left dan­gling (mostly involv­ing the true story of Speed’s brother) to set up a hypo­thet­i­cal third episode.

For any num­ber of pos­si­ble rea­sons, this very expen­sive folly bombed and we almost cer­tainly won’t see that tril­ogy. The Wachowski broth­ers were per­ceived to have fum­bled the wildly pop­u­lar Matrix fran­chise with two obtuse sequels (although this Dork Reporter would argue in favor of the minor­ity opin­ion that the sec­ond, The Matrix Reloaded, is actu­ally their mas­ter­piece), they pro­duced the thick­headed V for Vendetta (mud­dy­ing up and widely miss­ing the point of the pow­er­ful anar­chist graphic novel by Alan Moore and David Lloyd), and one is rumored to have had a sex change. With such a track record it’s not sur­pris­ing that the moviego­ing pub­lic, even the genre-loving fan­boys that make up Chud.com and Ain’t It Cool News might have soured on them. Plus, the orig­i­nal Speed Racer car­toon is excep­tion­ally cheap and lame, so much so that even myself as a child could tell it was crap.

Warner Bros. revealed their embar­rass­ment by issu­ing the DVD as a bare-bones single-disc release, at time when even the crap­pi­est movie seems to merit a deluxe multi-disc pack­age padded out with hours of self-congratulatory value-added mate­r­ial. There’s noth­ing at all on the DVD about the obvi­ously ground­break­ing spe­cial effects. Instead, the film­mak­ers decided that what audi­ences wanted was more mon­key (the vile beastie stars in the clos­ing cred­its sequence) and more annoy­ing kid brother (who costars in a mock­men­tary fea­ture with an embar­rass­ingly poorly acted appear­ance by pro­ducer Joel Silver).

Offi­cial movie site: speedracerthemovie.warnerbros.com

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

Into the Wild

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Into the Wild

 

Like many young men cursed with a priv­i­leged life of edu­ca­tion and time to think for them­selves, Chris McCan­d­less (Emile Hirsch) wanted only a vaguely defined “truth” and to not have to rely on any­one. Syn­the­siz­ing his read­ing of Henry Thoreau and Jack Lon­don, he imag­ined for him­self a life of self-sufficiency in the wilder­ness. So McCan­d­less dropped out of soci­ety in the sum­mer of 1990, leav­ing behind all con­nec­tions what­so­ever, includ­ing his legal name and iden­tity. Despite his absolutely clean break, he never seemed to view this trans­for­ma­tion as per­ma­nent; he men­tions more than once that he may write a book when he “comes back.”

Inter­est­ingly for a young man, he also seems to make a point of avoid­ing even tem­po­rary female com­pan­ion­ship. He rejects the friend­ship of Jan (Kather­ine Keener), and aban­dons his younger sis­ter Carine (Jena Mal­one), the per­son with whom he appar­ently had the clos­est bond. Carine nar­rates the film, with total sym­pa­thy for his beliefs and actions. But even she points out that he acted with “char­ac­ter­is­tic immoderation.”

Into the WildThe Rough Guide to Self-Actualization

McCan­d­less died alone in August 1992. He remains a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure (should his asceti­cism be admired, or was he a fool?), and his soli­tary death the sub­ject of an intrigu­ing mys­tery (was he really trapped with food poi­son­ing, or did he allow him­self to die slowly as a form of pas­sive sui­cide?). This film inter­pre­ta­tion of his story does make it clear that he was a priv­i­leged kid who hadn’t truly suf­fered. While drink­ing with new buddy Wayne (Vince Vaughn), he lets slip his ado­les­cent belief that one of the worst forms of tyranny in the world is “par­ents.” As we see, his par­ents (Mar­cia Gay Harden and William Hurt) are all too human and not half as mon­strous as he imag­ines. So per­haps his adven­ture was more than an ide­al­is­tic reac­tion to mere money, soci­ety, and mate­ri­al­ism. He was also run­ning away from the “free” things that liv­ing in soci­ety affords, what every­one craves in life: fam­ily, friends, and lovers.

Into the WildHence the title

A note on the music: just as McCan­d­less looks back­wards for lit­er­ary inspi­ra­tion, he also has anti­quated taste in music for a kid liv­ing in the early 90s. His new name for him­self, “Super­tramp” puns on the clas­sic rock band and his new lifestyle. He chris­tens his new and final home, an aban­doned bus, after The Who’s “Magic Bus.” For the music of the film itself, direc­tor Sean Penn drew upon two musi­cians that made names for them­selves in the early 90s: Pearl Jam’s Eddie Ved­der (who con­tributed songs to Dead Man Walk­ing), and guitarist/composer Michael Brook. Vedder’s songs for the film were released as an album, but Brook’s excel­lent score is also avail­able dig­i­tally.

Into the Wild is yet another in a long series of films I’ve seen recently that are based on books I haven’t read (The Kite Run­ner, No Coun­try for Old Men, The Name­sake, The Assas­si­na­tion of Jesse James, etc.). But even so, I believe I can detect a few rem­nants of the film’s prose ori­gins as John Krakauer’s book:

  • the film is bro­ken into “Chap­ters” with onscreen titles
  • voiceover nar­ra­tion
  • the visual device of super­im­posed text from McCan­d­less’ own jour­nals pro­vides a sec­ond “voice”
  • episodic feel — but that’s jus­ti­fied by the events/phases of his jour­ney — he keeps mak­ing clean breaks every time he comes close to set­tling in somewhere

Offi­cial movie site: www.intothewild.com

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