Thursday, October 23, 2008
“Well, here we are on the road.”
“Yup, that’s where we are, all right.”
A big part of my cinephilia is the search for the new and unexpected. I’ll take the bold and original over the well-crafted but trite any day. I actually watched Two-Lane Blacktop for the second time last weekend with my brother and as with my first viewing, I’m not sure what to think of it, but it really stuck with me. It’s an existential road movie starring James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as two Zen gearheads who enter their 55′ Chevy in a cross-country, winner-take-all race with Warren Oates (who’s brilliant as a garrulous phoney) and his brand-new GTO. But the race never really gets going and all three men get side-tracked by a bed-and-car-hopping hitchhiker (Laurie Bird). Turns out it’s all (spoiler alert!) just an excuse to get these four characters on the road in search of America, themselves, and the meaning of life.
It’s incredibly ambitious and feels haphazard, but somehow also clear-eyed. I still haven’t managed to wrap my head around it, but I plan to be giving it a third and fourth viewing in the not-too-distant future. What I do know is that it’s pure cinema: sound and speed and loneliness and poetry played out on the American landscape.
But if you’re still not sold, here’s Richard Linklater’s list of things to love about Two Lane Blacktop. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go look through my Pauline Kael books to find her review.
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008
You know, there was a time, in the late nineties and early aughts when it just honestly looked to me like there was nothing really new and original in quote-unquote “mainstream” movies. Not that everything was universally bad, it was just universally been-there-done-that. Even comedies. Especially comedies. But the best of the recent Judd Apatow-produced comedy mill — The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad and now Forgetting Sarah Marshall — have managed to make a whole new genre out of what should have been there all along. Comedies about awkward social/dating/sex situations in which everybody’s more-or-less a real person, and nobody’s really a “good guy” or “bad guy”, they’re all just people, who sometimes do or say the wrong thing or act at cross purposes. And are really fucking hilarious. Case in point: the douchebag rock star romantic rival. In any other movie, that’s all he would be. In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he’s a douchebag rock star romantic rival who also turns out to be a cool, likeable guy. And who gets some of the best lines.
Only problem is, movies like this make it hard to watch funny but lesser comedies like Tropic Thunder and not feel like something’s missing. But that’s a price I’m willing to pay.
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There is something so maddening about Gus Van Sant. He keeps brushing up against greatness, making you think that he’ll finally break through and make a movie that is satisfying both as art and entertainment, but inevitably, he pulls back from fully committing to either. Paranoid Park is his latest effort, and the first of two films he has coming uot this year. It’s the story of a teenaged skater in Portland, Oregon, who is involved in the accidental killing of a security guard, which lends itself well to Vn Sant’s recent obsession with youthful alienation.
The good news is that Paranoid Park is mostly a good movie and worth seeing — the cinematography (by the brilliant Christopher Doyle) effortlessly takes on a lot of the heavy lifting, capturing the damp and cold of my beloved Pacific Northwest, and his use of shallow focus is effective in isolating kids who drift through the adult world around them. And the story is smart and engaging, unfolding with a light touch when it could easily have been heavy-handed. Unfortunately, this makes the missteps all the more clunky, especially the decision to use non-professional actors, who mostly perform at a sub-school-play level.
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Thursday, September 25, 2008
HOLLYWOOD MOVIE EXECUTIVE ONE
Check it out, we have a script by hot up-and-comer Christopher Columbus, about adorable little critters who turn into monsters! And it’s loaded with small-town schmaltz. Speilberg will produce! Phoebe Cates will star!
HOLLYWOOD MOVIE EXECUTIVE TWO
Can we make the adorable critter so cute that every kid in America will want a doll based on it?
EXEC ONE
Yes. Yes, we can. High five!
EXEC TWO
Nice. Now we just need a hungry, hip young director-for-hire who can make this thing sing.
EXEC ONE
It just so happens I had lunch with this struggling Roger Corman protégé, Joe Dante. He’s been around a while but his biggest credit to date is a couple of episodes of Police Squad. The kids seem to like that show.
EXEC TWO
The kids, you say?
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Dante directs an entertaining but surpisingly nasty kiddie-horror movie. It’s violent and has some flashes of pretty black humour, but the good guys win and Gizmo is so damn cute that everybody forgets about that. It makes an ungodly amount of money. Every kid in America wants a Gizmo doll.
Six years later… |
EXEC ONE
Joe Dante, its six years later, you’re a genius and you made us all rich. Let’s make a sequel and all get richer!
JOE DANTE
Sure, but if you really want this to work, I’m going to need five times the original budget. Oh, and I get to do absolutely anything I want.
EXEC ONE
Deal!
EXEC TWO
Now, let’s sell some more dolls! High five!
JOE DANTE
evil, evil laugh
EXEC ONE
Uh-oh.
EXEC TWO
What? What’s happening? Why is he laughing like that?
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Dante assembles a nearly-plotless collection of black comedy sketches, sick jokes and cartoon violence, dripping with acid contempt for the materialistic aspirations and sterile aesthetics of the 1980s, and the original film. There are multiple scenes of Gizmo being tortured. Phoebe Cates tells a story about being flashed by an Abraham Lincoln impersonator. Dante uses the budget to cram in references to every one of his favourite old horror films, gets Rick Baker to do the special effects, and casts Christopher Lee, Tony Randall and Hulk Hogan. It’s brilliant and indulgent and loses great globs of money. |
JOE DANTE
Man, that was a blast! Who’s up for Gremlins 3?
EXEC TWO
cries
EXEC ONE
Fuck you, Joe Dante.
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I decided to suspend my Zip subscription for a few months. For those not in the know, Zip is a Canadian DVD-by-mail service, like Netflix in the US. You make a list of movies, and they are sent to your mailbox — return the DVD using the included envelope, and a new one is sent to you, ad infinitum.
The problem is, with Zip, you don’t have much say over which DVD gets sent, and lately, it seems to have gotten even worse. In theory, the higher on your list a DVD is, the sooner it will be sent to you. But lately, I’ve been getting DVDs further and further down my list. It’s been weeks since anything on my top-ten has been sent, and my mailbox has been full of things I’m really only marginally interested in. Inevitably, the discs just to sit on top of the TV until I’m in the mood to watch them. And these days, I’ve mostly been in the mood to do things other than watch my 43rd-most-anticipated movie. Like finally mastering barre chords on my guitar and replaying the brilliant 1993 PC game X-COM, which I finally managed to get running on my MacBook.
However, I’m all about not wasting money (lately), so I sat down this past week and watched the last three Zip DVDs I had collecting dust. All of which were, well, slightly disappointing, in different ways.
- buy Lyrica europe Rocket Science is an indie high-school comedy-drama about a shy stutterer who joins the debate team to be close to his unattainable crush, a cartoonish overachiever who claims she can see the potential behind his awkwardness. I was curious to see it primarily because the director also did the incredibly winning documentary Spellbound, but unfortunately, it’s yet another instance of a talented documentarian making a mediocre feature (see also, Errol Morris, Joe Berlinger, Michael Moore, etc.). It’s not an unpleasant way to pass a 100 minutes, but it’s hard to think of anything in the movie that hasn’t been done earlier and better in Rushmore, Little Miss Sunshine, Freaks & Geeks or Thumbsucker. (For starters. The quirky coming-of-age story isn’t exactly untrod ground.)
- http://snyderartdesign.com/blog/page/6/ Pickpocket is a 1959 Robert Bresson film that I was curious to see since it’s a favourite of both Paul Schrader and Roger Ebert. Unfortunately, I found the damn thing more tedious than engrossing. A lot of it comes down to a complaint I’ve had about other Robert Bresson films — as a filmmaker, he’s a brilliant novelist. Everybody speaks (or thinks, or writes) in long philosophical paragraphs laden with existential questions before taking ambiguous-but-revealing actions (well, everybody except the women, of course, who don’t get any inner life). The film’s vaunted “stylishness” is mostly in countless inserts of pickpocketing, which would be cool if they weren’t so laughably, distractingly phoney. Or maybe I’m wrong — maybe the style in France in the 1950s was for men to balance wallets precariously between their shirts and lapels, and for women to carry wads of loose cash poking out the tops of open handbags. That said, there are some powerful, brilliant moments in the film, especially the ending. I bet they were even better in the book that was originally in Robert Bresson’s head.
- Finally, Triad Election (aka Election 2) is Johnny To’s sequel to his brilliantly amoral Hong Kong gangster epic Election (not to be confused with the Reese Witherspoon-Matthew Broderick one). The sequel ups the violence and tragedy to operatic, Godfather-esque levels and shows the relationship between the HK triads and Chinese government, but it leaves behind the penetrating dissection of HK capitalism that was at the heart of the first film. Instead, we get more traditional issues of character and plot. This somehow makes the film both more and less grounded, and a bit less exiting. It’s still great to see Johnny To and Simon Lam at work, though.
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