(Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2004)
My second experience with the cinema of Mz. Martel. Like The Headless Woman, it's a tremendously well-crafted work, with a visual and aural precision that is evident in every painstakingly-composed shot. This was a somewhat distracted screening for me, so a re-view will be necessary, but overall I'm very impressed. Once again, it seems that the heart of the film is miles away from the socio-religio-political dimension, and resides instead with the lives of the characters. Martel prefers to sketch these lives (inner and outer) obliquely, relying on nuances and just-captured flickers of behavior rather than conventional drama. This is the crux of her particular slant on minimalism - she is a filmmaker interested in borders -the borders of the frame, but also the borders of our lives, the secret things that exist in the periphery of consciousness.
It's fitting, then, that watching The Holy Girl feels exceptionally voyeuristic, like reading someone's diary, or, better yet, watching them on a hidden camera. The film abounds with secrets, from the banal to the brutal. It has two main focal points: the wonder and abandon of adolescence, as seen through Amalia's romantic and spiritual endeavors, and the crushing weight of middle age, exemplified by the hapless Dr. Jano. Looked at from youth, the secrets of the world are great and seductive, but to the older characters they are a burden and a curse. Martel manages to squeeze a lot from this dynamic, and there are some wonderfully incisive moments to show for it, even if they are tantalizingly brief.
Still, the overall effect of the film is underwhelming. The risk of such a detached style is a lack of emotional investment, which is often at odds with the basic melodrama that provides the film's skeleton. It's hard to fault Martel for being so visually sophistocated, but there are times when the design chafes against the content, and not in a productive way. The Holy Girl is a film that is content to exist in the elusive zone between mainstream and art cinema - it eschews the intimations of transcendence and the mythic proportions of other contemporary works of cinematic minimalism, such as the work of Pedro Costa and Lisandro Alonso (and for that matter, Apichatpong and the venerable master Hou Hsiao Hsien), but its modest aspirations feel strangely inadequate. Mostly realistic (with a few impish nods at surrealism), the film is not quite satire, and yet it isn't sincere enough to be melodrama. The aura of ambivalence is effective at creating uneasiness, but eventually this quality becomes irritating. I would never be one to say that emotional substance and serious ideas are mutually exclusive, but
The Holy Girl, for all of its subtlety, seems not to have enough of either.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Woman is the Future of Man
(Hong Sang-soo, South Korea, 2006)
After only recently hearing about Hong's work and its high status international cinema, I hurried to see what I could ASAP, finding WITFOM available to watch Instant on Netflix. Sadly, my enthusiasm for a contemporary auteur to steal ideas from has mostly evaporated - this film left me disappointed and perplexed. At first glance, it's a jumbled-up sex dramedy, consisting of a series of vignettes in which characters come together and fall apart. The tone is mostly detached and the scenes are disconnected, and so the title kept coming to mind as a potential Rosetta stone. But I was never able to unlock it's overriding significance - is it ironic, hopeful, pessimistic, or merely convenient?
Part of my confusion, I have to think, has to do with problems of cultural translation. Much in the film seems to hinge on manners and other norms of behavior, and my unfamiliarity with South Korean sexual mores exacerbated by puzzlement over much of the action. Which shouldn't be taken to mean that I couldn't relate - there is plenty of stuff that bridges the cultural divide easily, such as male insecurity and rivalry over women, not to mention general nostalgia over lost love and the past. The women seem to fare a bit better - they at least have some sense of what they want, whereas the men appear to be totally at sea.
The problem is that none of this is particularly striking or new. What doesn't translate seems stilted and phony, and the dialogue is occasionally so clunky that it offends the ear (or the eye, as it were, as one reads lines such as "I'm making love with you to cleanse you - do you understand?" with mortification.) Neither is there anything special about the visual style, which recalls late- Woody Allen in it's pragmatic simplicity. The dimension that seems to accrete favor in terms of the festival circuit would have to be Hong's deft manipulation of time - the vignettes flash forward and backward, and the audience plays catch-up with the narrative, piecing together the frayed strands of relationships. The problem is, the characters never become interesting enough to really care about, and so the story's momentum frequently stalls.
It seems that the central subject is disillusionment, and the irretrivability of the past - ripe subjects that aren't given much illumination. It's a neat, occasionally funky film, but it regrettably errs on the side of neatness, and winds up feeling minor and uninspired.
*It should be mentioned, though, that Hong does have a good sense of rhythm, both inter- and intra-shot, and there are some wonderfully odd (and thus truthful) cinematic juxtapositions . I'm thinking in particular of the scene in the car, which is punctuated with one character chewing on his breath mint, and the scene in which the same character, as he begins to receive a friendly blowjob - all he had to do was ask nicely - barely notices the dog as it wakes up and exits the frame as if embarrassed. Good stuff like this, however, isn't frequent enough to compensate for the other instances of contrived dialogue and direction.
After only recently hearing about Hong's work and its high status international cinema, I hurried to see what I could ASAP, finding WITFOM available to watch Instant on Netflix. Sadly, my enthusiasm for a contemporary auteur to steal ideas from has mostly evaporated - this film left me disappointed and perplexed. At first glance, it's a jumbled-up sex dramedy, consisting of a series of vignettes in which characters come together and fall apart. The tone is mostly detached and the scenes are disconnected, and so the title kept coming to mind as a potential Rosetta stone. But I was never able to unlock it's overriding significance - is it ironic, hopeful, pessimistic, or merely convenient?
Part of my confusion, I have to think, has to do with problems of cultural translation. Much in the film seems to hinge on manners and other norms of behavior, and my unfamiliarity with South Korean sexual mores exacerbated by puzzlement over much of the action. Which shouldn't be taken to mean that I couldn't relate - there is plenty of stuff that bridges the cultural divide easily, such as male insecurity and rivalry over women, not to mention general nostalgia over lost love and the past. The women seem to fare a bit better - they at least have some sense of what they want, whereas the men appear to be totally at sea.
The problem is that none of this is particularly striking or new. What doesn't translate seems stilted and phony, and the dialogue is occasionally so clunky that it offends the ear (or the eye, as it were, as one reads lines such as "I'm making love with you to cleanse you - do you understand?" with mortification.) Neither is there anything special about the visual style, which recalls late- Woody Allen in it's pragmatic simplicity. The dimension that seems to accrete favor in terms of the festival circuit would have to be Hong's deft manipulation of time - the vignettes flash forward and backward, and the audience plays catch-up with the narrative, piecing together the frayed strands of relationships. The problem is, the characters never become interesting enough to really care about, and so the story's momentum frequently stalls.
It seems that the central subject is disillusionment, and the irretrivability of the past - ripe subjects that aren't given much illumination. It's a neat, occasionally funky film, but it regrettably errs on the side of neatness, and winds up feeling minor and uninspired.
*It should be mentioned, though, that Hong does have a good sense of rhythm, both inter- and intra-shot, and there are some wonderfully odd (and thus truthful) cinematic juxtapositions . I'm thinking in particular of the scene in the car, which is punctuated with one character chewing on his breath mint, and the scene in which the same character, as he begins to receive a friendly blowjob - all he had to do was ask nicely - barely notices the dog as it wakes up and exits the frame as if embarrassed. Good stuff like this, however, isn't frequent enough to compensate for the other instances of contrived dialogue and direction.
Liverpool
(Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2009)
My previous experience with Alonso's filmmaking, 2004's Los Muertos, left me intrigued but also bemused. There was something elemental about the film, informing the currently au courant cinematic minimalism with an almost primeval weight, but overall it felt incomplete and not fully committed.
Here, Alonso's project is somewhat different, although the broader concerns are still intact. A solitary man travels back to a world he left behind - in this case, our hero is Farrel, a merchant seaman and a drunk, who goes ashore in Tierra del Fulgo to see if his ailing mother is still alive. Farrel is appropriately laconic (as are most of the other characters); what little we learn about him is revealed through his awkward comportment and appearance - greasy hair, angular features, lack of worldly possessions save a small duffel bag and a bottle of Stoli.
The first third of the film is almost perfect: we see hints of Farrel's emotional life, both in his tentative movements as he emerges from the noisy, oppressive bowels of the ship, and writ large on the bleak but achingly beautiful landscapes - the blazing horizon line over the ocean, the desolate peaks of southern Argentina, swirling snow over the massive stacks of shipping containers.
After he arrives at his home village, however, the film's majestic inertia begins to ebb. There's still plenty to admire - the way that Alonso can make everyday minutiae into something weird and vaguely allusive - but the human reality, presented by Farrel's encounter with his father, ailing mother, and vaguely autistic mother, becomes somewhat stifled by the formalism. Unlike the mythic intimations of Muertos, Liverpool is a gentler, more intimate story with undertones of familial redemption and discord. The insistent sparseness of the form begins to feel arbitrary when the story incorporates human relationships; it's as if Alonso is willfully suppressing his characters.
It may be that I'm misreading Alonso's intentions, but the dominant mode of Liverpool seems, more than anything else, to be humanism. More than once I was reminded of Five Easy Pieces, a similar story about a wandering man who seemed bound for oblivion, and whose last resort and potential salvation - family - wasn't enough to keep him rooted in the world.
Overall, Liverpool's virtues outweigh its faults, and it remains a powerful and enigmatic film. But it still seems to be stuck in some kind of limbo between greater expressionism and more rigorous formalism. The opening credits and initial sequence seem almost comic, and I had a fleeting moment where I was sure Alonso was fucking with the audience. But the formal restraint on display, as well as the tender (but still mysterious) ending, testify to his seriousness as a maker of Art cinema. I think he still has some ways to go, but the journey thus far has been worthwhile.
My previous experience with Alonso's filmmaking, 2004's Los Muertos, left me intrigued but also bemused. There was something elemental about the film, informing the currently au courant cinematic minimalism with an almost primeval weight, but overall it felt incomplete and not fully committed.
Here, Alonso's project is somewhat different, although the broader concerns are still intact. A solitary man travels back to a world he left behind - in this case, our hero is Farrel, a merchant seaman and a drunk, who goes ashore in Tierra del Fulgo to see if his ailing mother is still alive. Farrel is appropriately laconic (as are most of the other characters); what little we learn about him is revealed through his awkward comportment and appearance - greasy hair, angular features, lack of worldly possessions save a small duffel bag and a bottle of Stoli.
The first third of the film is almost perfect: we see hints of Farrel's emotional life, both in his tentative movements as he emerges from the noisy, oppressive bowels of the ship, and writ large on the bleak but achingly beautiful landscapes - the blazing horizon line over the ocean, the desolate peaks of southern Argentina, swirling snow over the massive stacks of shipping containers.
After he arrives at his home village, however, the film's majestic inertia begins to ebb. There's still plenty to admire - the way that Alonso can make everyday minutiae into something weird and vaguely allusive - but the human reality, presented by Farrel's encounter with his father, ailing mother, and vaguely autistic mother, becomes somewhat stifled by the formalism. Unlike the mythic intimations of Muertos, Liverpool is a gentler, more intimate story with undertones of familial redemption and discord. The insistent sparseness of the form begins to feel arbitrary when the story incorporates human relationships; it's as if Alonso is willfully suppressing his characters.
It may be that I'm misreading Alonso's intentions, but the dominant mode of Liverpool seems, more than anything else, to be humanism. More than once I was reminded of Five Easy Pieces, a similar story about a wandering man who seemed bound for oblivion, and whose last resort and potential salvation - family - wasn't enough to keep him rooted in the world.
Overall, Liverpool's virtues outweigh its faults, and it remains a powerful and enigmatic film. But it still seems to be stuck in some kind of limbo between greater expressionism and more rigorous formalism. The opening credits and initial sequence seem almost comic, and I had a fleeting moment where I was sure Alonso was fucking with the audience. But the formal restraint on display, as well as the tender (but still mysterious) ending, testify to his seriousness as a maker of Art cinema. I think he still has some ways to go, but the journey thus far has been worthwhile.
Friday, September 4, 2009
District 9, or The SlumPrawn Millionaires
(Neill Blomkamp, US, 2009)
Okay, it's a neat mixture of high-concept and low-fidelity. It's a gonzo faux-blockbuster, a hyper-VFX'd movie done (relatively) on the cheap. It has this cute little mockumentary narrative device and it's political allusions are present-but-not-in-your-face.
These things alone, however, do not a good film make. D9 is only barely watchable, consisting of rote, psuedo-verite camerawork, silly acting, and uninspired special effects, with only the most cursory nods toward the themes it touches upon. It's basically an action film dressed up as a sci-film dressed up as a semi-serious sci-fi film. This isn't to say that the film has any real pretenses - it's well aware of it's lack of depth, and makes no bones about it. If only the film were more enjoyable...
But it just isn't. None of the interesting questions posed at the outset (Who are the aliens? Why have they come here? Why, despite their clearly superior technology, strength, intelligence, are they not kicking serious terrestrial ass?) are ever answered. Instead, it becomes a tiresome chronicle of the misadventures of Wikus Van De Merwe, the lead character. A genial dumbass, Wikus does provide a bit of slapstick humor, but he's little more than a human face to anchor the long procession of action scenes. The real protagonists are the visual effects, and they're not much more interesting than poor old two-dimensional Wikus. (The one cool FX concept, well exploited in the ads, is the massive, hovering mothership. Blomkamp squeezes this for as much juice as he can, but it doesn't cover up the lame, cheap looking aliens.)
About half way through the picture, I yawned for the seventh time and realized how bored I was. The action, which is the only potential saving grace, is poorly executed, with everything shot super-close and jittery. The grimy camerawork feels more affected than authentically gritty, and the editing is jagged, sub-Bourne mania. There's nothing original on display here - more than anything, it's a project that feels like it was made because it could be - fresh blood (Blomkamp), a star producer (Jackson) and a bargain of a price tag (reputedly in the $30 million range, a steal for a potential action hit, which D9 has handily become.) It might as well be a long trailer for the sequel, which will surely have more money behind it, but will likely be just as impoverished when it comes to ideas.
Okay, it's a neat mixture of high-concept and low-fidelity. It's a gonzo faux-blockbuster, a hyper-VFX'd movie done (relatively) on the cheap. It has this cute little mockumentary narrative device and it's political allusions are present-but-not-in-your-face.
These things alone, however, do not a good film make. D9 is only barely watchable, consisting of rote, psuedo-verite camerawork, silly acting, and uninspired special effects, with only the most cursory nods toward the themes it touches upon. It's basically an action film dressed up as a sci-film dressed up as a semi-serious sci-fi film. This isn't to say that the film has any real pretenses - it's well aware of it's lack of depth, and makes no bones about it. If only the film were more enjoyable...
But it just isn't. None of the interesting questions posed at the outset (Who are the aliens? Why have they come here? Why, despite their clearly superior technology, strength, intelligence, are they not kicking serious terrestrial ass?) are ever answered. Instead, it becomes a tiresome chronicle of the misadventures of Wikus Van De Merwe, the lead character. A genial dumbass, Wikus does provide a bit of slapstick humor, but he's little more than a human face to anchor the long procession of action scenes. The real protagonists are the visual effects, and they're not much more interesting than poor old two-dimensional Wikus. (The one cool FX concept, well exploited in the ads, is the massive, hovering mothership. Blomkamp squeezes this for as much juice as he can, but it doesn't cover up the lame, cheap looking aliens.)
About half way through the picture, I yawned for the seventh time and realized how bored I was. The action, which is the only potential saving grace, is poorly executed, with everything shot super-close and jittery. The grimy camerawork feels more affected than authentically gritty, and the editing is jagged, sub-Bourne mania. There's nothing original on display here - more than anything, it's a project that feels like it was made because it could be - fresh blood (Blomkamp), a star producer (Jackson) and a bargain of a price tag (reputedly in the $30 million range, a steal for a potential action hit, which D9 has handily become.) It might as well be a long trailer for the sequel, which will surely have more money behind it, but will likely be just as impoverished when it comes to ideas.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
The Headless Woman
(Lucrecia Martel, Argentina, 2009)
It might be a bizarre echo of Marlene Dietrich's final words in Touch of Evil, but this film is some kind of masterpiece. Whence the qualification of "some kind?" Because (I think) it's a film that demands to be processed slowly, savored upon reflection and re-viewed. It's of that lovely variety of cinema that is at once both mystifying and stimulating - the primary effect is a weird and yet wholly satisfying kind of puzzlement. As they exist now, my impressions of the film are largely visceral, and it will take some time and head-scratching to get a sense of just how many layers exist in this delicacy.
But make no mistake, THW is absolutely a delicacy. Martel is, I'm certain, a true master of the medium, and I say this as someone who has yet to see her two previous features. As far as I'm concerned, if she can make this good of a film on her third time out, she's got the goods.
THW is, first and foremost, a very elegant film - every decision, from the framing to the cut (and especially the magnificently detailed and frequently unnerving sound design) is made with care and precision. Martel never advertises her high attention to detail - she is a filmmaker who is admirably confident in her abilities and interests. In the end, the film manages to cover a remarkable amount of aesthetic ground; it is allusive, realistic, evocative of a specific place and mood, yet gently surreal. All (and I do mean all) of the performances are virtuosic in their lack of affect, their honesty, and while the characters are, traditionally speaking, quite thin, the range of human emotion and nuance on display is often breathtaking.
When we reflect on the "meaning" of what we're watching in THW, what draws the most attention is the political subtext. There's a few overlapping layers of class oppression being examined; the bourgeois oppress the working class, who are of indigenous descent and visibly poor, and the (more subtle) subjugation of women. This deserves copious unpacking by itself, but I would pause here and contend that this is not the beating heart of this truly vital work of cinema.
Rather, the film is an existential/spiritual hall of mirrors, too focused on human idiosyncrasy and the burden of consiousness to be reduced to some kind of artful, stylized polemic (as some have suggested.) It's true - Martel is occasionally deterministic, and there are times when the strands of thematic import show a bit too much; the film wants to, and could be, a magnificent treatise on the human condition but settles for something smaller in scope.
And yet this is no less a victory - a deeply human film that flaunts its politics and beguiles the senses at the same time, leading one to ponder and delight and puzzle over its sensual strangeness even while recognizing its political dimension. But not once is THW shrill or preachy or puffed-up. It's a film that invites you inside, and if you, discovers a wondrous and maddening world quite like our own, yet wholly different - a true dream world. Martel's work of art is the most seductive alternate universe this side of David Lynch.
More to come, certainly...
It might be a bizarre echo of Marlene Dietrich's final words in Touch of Evil, but this film is some kind of masterpiece. Whence the qualification of "some kind?" Because (I think) it's a film that demands to be processed slowly, savored upon reflection and re-viewed. It's of that lovely variety of cinema that is at once both mystifying and stimulating - the primary effect is a weird and yet wholly satisfying kind of puzzlement. As they exist now, my impressions of the film are largely visceral, and it will take some time and head-scratching to get a sense of just how many layers exist in this delicacy.
But make no mistake, THW is absolutely a delicacy. Martel is, I'm certain, a true master of the medium, and I say this as someone who has yet to see her two previous features. As far as I'm concerned, if she can make this good of a film on her third time out, she's got the goods.
THW is, first and foremost, a very elegant film - every decision, from the framing to the cut (and especially the magnificently detailed and frequently unnerving sound design) is made with care and precision. Martel never advertises her high attention to detail - she is a filmmaker who is admirably confident in her abilities and interests. In the end, the film manages to cover a remarkable amount of aesthetic ground; it is allusive, realistic, evocative of a specific place and mood, yet gently surreal. All (and I do mean all) of the performances are virtuosic in their lack of affect, their honesty, and while the characters are, traditionally speaking, quite thin, the range of human emotion and nuance on display is often breathtaking.
When we reflect on the "meaning" of what we're watching in THW, what draws the most attention is the political subtext. There's a few overlapping layers of class oppression being examined; the bourgeois oppress the working class, who are of indigenous descent and visibly poor, and the (more subtle) subjugation of women. This deserves copious unpacking by itself, but I would pause here and contend that this is not the beating heart of this truly vital work of cinema.
Rather, the film is an existential/spiritual hall of mirrors, too focused on human idiosyncrasy and the burden of consiousness to be reduced to some kind of artful, stylized polemic (as some have suggested.) It's true - Martel is occasionally deterministic, and there are times when the strands of thematic import show a bit too much; the film wants to, and could be, a magnificent treatise on the human condition but settles for something smaller in scope.
And yet this is no less a victory - a deeply human film that flaunts its politics and beguiles the senses at the same time, leading one to ponder and delight and puzzle over its sensual strangeness even while recognizing its political dimension. But not once is THW shrill or preachy or puffed-up. It's a film that invites you inside, and if you, discovers a wondrous and maddening world quite like our own, yet wholly different - a true dream world. Martel's work of art is the most seductive alternate universe this side of David Lynch.
More to come, certainly...
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Funnier People
And they are, in no particular order: Alexander Payne, James L. Brooks, David Wain, Adam McKay, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, Woody Allen.
These fellows, and a few others I'm forgetting at the moment, are all working American directors who are better and funnier writer/directors than Judd Apatow. I haven't seen Funny People yet, and I don't really care to, because I've seen Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin and they both left me largely unimpressed. Not because they were terrible movies, per se, but because of the glaring disparity between my viewing experience and the hype that surrounded them.
This critical brouhaha has achieved something of a fever pitch with the recent release of FP, and, predictably, there is a sizable contingent of dissenting opinions. Being opportunistic, I'll now join the fray with both feet planted firmly on the side of the naysayers. To situate my opinions a little more precisely, let me point out that this isn't a direct reaction to Funny People - like I said, I haven't seen it yet. This is regarding Apatow's previous work. Furthermore, this doesn't have anything to do with the imputed politics of Apatow's movies. Let me be clear: I don't object to Apatow's films because they're socially conservative; as far as I can tell, they aren't any more or less conservative than most other mainstream movies. I object to his movies because I don't find them either A) very funny or B) emotionally credible. I find them, in practically all respects, to be exeedingly mediocre.
Apatow is, I think, a very skilled writer of jokes. His movies are at their absolute best (and funniest) when he has his male characters sit around and trade jibes. And he knows how to direct the hell out of these scenes - have the characters sit around a table, or on a couch, or in a car, and then film them trading jibes.
When things get more complex, emotionally or physically, he falters, both as a writer and as a director. His characters aren't entirely implausible, nor are their choices or the fictional world they inhabit. But neither are they entirely plausible. The point here, again, is that they're mediocre - never better than just okay, and sometimes very lame. This quality is often personified in his characters: they don't have much in the way of nuance. They're not particularly interesting. They're often not very likable, but this in itself isn't really a problem. As a concept, likability is a red herring of critical assessment - successful characters in fiction can be admirable or despicable. In order to function dramatically, they need only to be compelling. Compelling, when referring to characters, is a tricky concept to define, exactly; certainly not as easy as "likeable." It's an ineffable quality, capable of being described in particular circumstances but difficult to articulate in any general or schematic way. For a positive example, take Paul Giamatti's Miles in Sideways - a fantastic character, full of humor and pathos, brilliantly portrayed by Paul Giamatti. Miles is compelling, he's interesting, he's highly watchable - call it what you will. Then compare him to Seth Rogen's guffawing boor in KU, and the distinction should be clear.
The occasion for my voicing these opinions is not because I care much about Apatow's films one way or the other, but because right now there are some very smart people who seem convinced he's the best thing since buttered toast. Smart, usually perspicacious critics who are making nuanced arguments in favor of the films in question. I read these things and can't help but get a little peeved; it's a personal weakness that I find is best ameliorated through writing my own criticism. I know and fear the temptation to criticize criticism, but sometimes that's a worthy exercise, if only to better understand one's own emotional reactions and the attitudes of others.
And as far as the attitudes of others go, I'm not sure I ever will understand. Why all the hype over Apatow? Why the rush to inaugurate him as the Great White Hope of American Comedy? As far as I can tell, he's done exactly two significant things, neither of which are very special or interesting on their own, but are worth mentioning: he has focused on the latent homoerotic aspect of male relationships, and shown more male nudity. These are fine things, as far as they go. Count me as among those glad to see more dicks in movies - dicks, in many circumstances, are funny. They are currently more funny than boobs, if only because we're more accustomed to seeing boobs in movies. Homoeroticism is also funny, again based upon circumstance (this should be obvious, I'm merely tipping my hat to the truism that comedy is all about friction within a set context - expected vs. actual behavior and imagery.)
But here's the thing that many critics seemed to be missing. Other comedians and comic directors have been doing this for a long time now, with much better results. I'm thinking, in particular, of much of Stella, which orginated as a live sketch show that was frequently centered around absurd homoerotic situations (when Stella became a bonafide Comedy Central series, the dildos and man-on-man humping all but disappeared from their repertoire, and the comedy suffered for it). I'm also thinking of Adam McKay's Anchorman, a movie that featured maturity-resistant males who were hilariously oblivious to the homoeroticism of their relationships.
But on that second example, surely, it can be countered that Apatow centers his movies, almost exclusively, on such a theme. He puts arrested male development and psuedo-homosexuality at the forefront. Well, that's sort of true. But several of the movies often discussed appear on his c.v. as Producer credits, and although we can have no way of knowing his level of creative input, it is assuredly more slight than with the movies he himself directed and wrote.
Thus, the film which most poignantly and explicitly deals with young males in platonic love is Superbad, which he neither wrote nor directed. It was written by Rogan and Evan Goldberg, and it was directed by Greg Mottola, who, for his previous feature credit alone, The Daytrippers, deserves to be added to the list of directors who are better than Apatow. Superbad isn't as good a film as Mattola's previous effort, but it is still better (and funnier) than anything Apatow has directed.
So much, then, for envelope-pushing, or irreverence, or any other such doggerel heaped on Apatow's oeuvre. But what of the other side of Apatow, the tender side, the side with feelings, where the man-children have to grow up and the women learn to love them in their sloven bumbling towards maturity?
Here's where my confusion really thickens. With a couple of minor exceptions, every single moment in Apatows films (the ones he directed and wrote) that strives for emotional seriousness falls miserably on its ass. It is true that they go down swinging; the Serious Moment scenes are practically uniform in their blatant advertising of their intentions, missing only the bright neon sign that reads "EMOTIONAL MOMENT, PLS TAKE CHARACTERS SERIOUSLY."
I'm thinking, in particular, of an especially egregious scene in Knocked Up where Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl are arguing in the bedroom. I don't remember the context exactly, except that she is seated and he is standing, and the whole thing is so false and dumb and poorly staged and cut and acted that I had to laugh. Well, that's not true - I didn't laugh, but I did make a mental note of how bad the scene was, if only to mention it later when someone professed admiration for Apatow's abilities as a director. Go back and watch the scene - it's atrocious.
Sometimes sincere emotion doesn't have a place in comedies. Farces, like Anchorman, have little use for it. Emotion can work wonders in comedy, but it won't work at all if you don't have credible characters, and Apatow's characters, while they are credible, are often only marginally so. (They are occasionally entirely in-credible, but that's not the central point.) Here the counterexamples are so radically divergent that I hesitate to make them, but I must soldier on: Consider the authenticity of some of James L. Brooks' characters, such as Melvin in As Good As It Gets and Albert Brooks' Aaron Altman in Broadcast News. The Serious Moments in these films are just as credible as the Comedic ones, and they aren't nearly as obvious or obtuse or tonally dissonant. Sometimes they even overlap, a skill of which Payne is the current Greatest Practitioner. When Brooks (or Payne, or Baumbach, or Anderson, or even, although lately this has been rarer, Allen) want a scene to play poignantly, they have a pretty good idea about how to go about it. Occasionally, they create something inspired. Apatow's record is infinitely weaker by comparison, and when poignance does appear, it seems only to show in material that he doesn't personally craft.
Perhaps, as some critics have suggested, this is all made irrelevant by the Major Creative Step Apatow has taken with Funny People. I'll have to see the movie eventually, I suppose, at least to see if the man truly does have room for growth. But it doesn't change the situation of his earlier films, which are exceptional only in their perfect mediocrity.
I could go on with the comparative browbeating, but before this devolves into a virtual pissing match, I'll wrap up with a backhanded compliment or two. Apatow may well be a commercial genius. He certainly knows how to court popular taste, and he knows how to mold it, slightly, and (perhaps most importantly) just how much plasticity it has. He has consistently shown a virtuosity in his ability to push things just so far - high school kids with a propensity for swearing that verges on the Tourettic, men showing and obsessing over their wieners, very unlikely but not unthinkable male-female couples and couplings - but not far enough to truly offend or challenge the mainstream. This, I guess, entitles him to some kind of commendation - the same, in my book, that is to be reserved for great entertainers like P.T. Barnum. What is frustrating is when the critics endorse it, and in their self-deception, side against the suckers when they think they're siding with them.
These fellows, and a few others I'm forgetting at the moment, are all working American directors who are better and funnier writer/directors than Judd Apatow. I haven't seen Funny People yet, and I don't really care to, because I've seen Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin and they both left me largely unimpressed. Not because they were terrible movies, per se, but because of the glaring disparity between my viewing experience and the hype that surrounded them.
This critical brouhaha has achieved something of a fever pitch with the recent release of FP, and, predictably, there is a sizable contingent of dissenting opinions. Being opportunistic, I'll now join the fray with both feet planted firmly on the side of the naysayers. To situate my opinions a little more precisely, let me point out that this isn't a direct reaction to Funny People - like I said, I haven't seen it yet. This is regarding Apatow's previous work. Furthermore, this doesn't have anything to do with the imputed politics of Apatow's movies. Let me be clear: I don't object to Apatow's films because they're socially conservative; as far as I can tell, they aren't any more or less conservative than most other mainstream movies. I object to his movies because I don't find them either A) very funny or B) emotionally credible. I find them, in practically all respects, to be exeedingly mediocre.
Apatow is, I think, a very skilled writer of jokes. His movies are at their absolute best (and funniest) when he has his male characters sit around and trade jibes. And he knows how to direct the hell out of these scenes - have the characters sit around a table, or on a couch, or in a car, and then film them trading jibes.
When things get more complex, emotionally or physically, he falters, both as a writer and as a director. His characters aren't entirely implausible, nor are their choices or the fictional world they inhabit. But neither are they entirely plausible. The point here, again, is that they're mediocre - never better than just okay, and sometimes very lame. This quality is often personified in his characters: they don't have much in the way of nuance. They're not particularly interesting. They're often not very likable, but this in itself isn't really a problem. As a concept, likability is a red herring of critical assessment - successful characters in fiction can be admirable or despicable. In order to function dramatically, they need only to be compelling. Compelling, when referring to characters, is a tricky concept to define, exactly; certainly not as easy as "likeable." It's an ineffable quality, capable of being described in particular circumstances but difficult to articulate in any general or schematic way. For a positive example, take Paul Giamatti's Miles in Sideways - a fantastic character, full of humor and pathos, brilliantly portrayed by Paul Giamatti. Miles is compelling, he's interesting, he's highly watchable - call it what you will. Then compare him to Seth Rogen's guffawing boor in KU, and the distinction should be clear.
The occasion for my voicing these opinions is not because I care much about Apatow's films one way or the other, but because right now there are some very smart people who seem convinced he's the best thing since buttered toast. Smart, usually perspicacious critics who are making nuanced arguments in favor of the films in question. I read these things and can't help but get a little peeved; it's a personal weakness that I find is best ameliorated through writing my own criticism. I know and fear the temptation to criticize criticism, but sometimes that's a worthy exercise, if only to better understand one's own emotional reactions and the attitudes of others.
And as far as the attitudes of others go, I'm not sure I ever will understand. Why all the hype over Apatow? Why the rush to inaugurate him as the Great White Hope of American Comedy? As far as I can tell, he's done exactly two significant things, neither of which are very special or interesting on their own, but are worth mentioning: he has focused on the latent homoerotic aspect of male relationships, and shown more male nudity. These are fine things, as far as they go. Count me as among those glad to see more dicks in movies - dicks, in many circumstances, are funny. They are currently more funny than boobs, if only because we're more accustomed to seeing boobs in movies. Homoeroticism is also funny, again based upon circumstance (this should be obvious, I'm merely tipping my hat to the truism that comedy is all about friction within a set context - expected vs. actual behavior and imagery.)
But here's the thing that many critics seemed to be missing. Other comedians and comic directors have been doing this for a long time now, with much better results. I'm thinking, in particular, of much of Stella, which orginated as a live sketch show that was frequently centered around absurd homoerotic situations (when Stella became a bonafide Comedy Central series, the dildos and man-on-man humping all but disappeared from their repertoire, and the comedy suffered for it). I'm also thinking of Adam McKay's Anchorman, a movie that featured maturity-resistant males who were hilariously oblivious to the homoeroticism of their relationships.
But on that second example, surely, it can be countered that Apatow centers his movies, almost exclusively, on such a theme. He puts arrested male development and psuedo-homosexuality at the forefront. Well, that's sort of true. But several of the movies often discussed appear on his c.v. as Producer credits, and although we can have no way of knowing his level of creative input, it is assuredly more slight than with the movies he himself directed and wrote.
Thus, the film which most poignantly and explicitly deals with young males in platonic love is Superbad, which he neither wrote nor directed. It was written by Rogan and Evan Goldberg, and it was directed by Greg Mottola, who, for his previous feature credit alone, The Daytrippers, deserves to be added to the list of directors who are better than Apatow. Superbad isn't as good a film as Mattola's previous effort, but it is still better (and funnier) than anything Apatow has directed.
So much, then, for envelope-pushing, or irreverence, or any other such doggerel heaped on Apatow's oeuvre. But what of the other side of Apatow, the tender side, the side with feelings, where the man-children have to grow up and the women learn to love them in their sloven bumbling towards maturity?
Here's where my confusion really thickens. With a couple of minor exceptions, every single moment in Apatows films (the ones he directed and wrote) that strives for emotional seriousness falls miserably on its ass. It is true that they go down swinging; the Serious Moment scenes are practically uniform in their blatant advertising of their intentions, missing only the bright neon sign that reads "EMOTIONAL MOMENT, PLS TAKE CHARACTERS SERIOUSLY."
I'm thinking, in particular, of an especially egregious scene in Knocked Up where Seth Rogan and Katherine Heigl are arguing in the bedroom. I don't remember the context exactly, except that she is seated and he is standing, and the whole thing is so false and dumb and poorly staged and cut and acted that I had to laugh. Well, that's not true - I didn't laugh, but I did make a mental note of how bad the scene was, if only to mention it later when someone professed admiration for Apatow's abilities as a director. Go back and watch the scene - it's atrocious.
Sometimes sincere emotion doesn't have a place in comedies. Farces, like Anchorman, have little use for it. Emotion can work wonders in comedy, but it won't work at all if you don't have credible characters, and Apatow's characters, while they are credible, are often only marginally so. (They are occasionally entirely in-credible, but that's not the central point.) Here the counterexamples are so radically divergent that I hesitate to make them, but I must soldier on: Consider the authenticity of some of James L. Brooks' characters, such as Melvin in As Good As It Gets and Albert Brooks' Aaron Altman in Broadcast News. The Serious Moments in these films are just as credible as the Comedic ones, and they aren't nearly as obvious or obtuse or tonally dissonant. Sometimes they even overlap, a skill of which Payne is the current Greatest Practitioner. When Brooks (or Payne, or Baumbach, or Anderson, or even, although lately this has been rarer, Allen) want a scene to play poignantly, they have a pretty good idea about how to go about it. Occasionally, they create something inspired. Apatow's record is infinitely weaker by comparison, and when poignance does appear, it seems only to show in material that he doesn't personally craft.
Perhaps, as some critics have suggested, this is all made irrelevant by the Major Creative Step Apatow has taken with Funny People. I'll have to see the movie eventually, I suppose, at least to see if the man truly does have room for growth. But it doesn't change the situation of his earlier films, which are exceptional only in their perfect mediocrity.
I could go on with the comparative browbeating, but before this devolves into a virtual pissing match, I'll wrap up with a backhanded compliment or two. Apatow may well be a commercial genius. He certainly knows how to court popular taste, and he knows how to mold it, slightly, and (perhaps most importantly) just how much plasticity it has. He has consistently shown a virtuosity in his ability to push things just so far - high school kids with a propensity for swearing that verges on the Tourettic, men showing and obsessing over their wieners, very unlikely but not unthinkable male-female couples and couplings - but not far enough to truly offend or challenge the mainstream. This, I guess, entitles him to some kind of commendation - the same, in my book, that is to be reserved for great entertainers like P.T. Barnum. What is frustrating is when the critics endorse it, and in their self-deception, side against the suckers when they think they're siding with them.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Wha Happened?
Burn After Reading (Joel & Ethan Coen, US, 2008) 2nd viewing
Not much better than my intial viewing experience, which was satisfactory but nothing to write home about. Granted, it has some hilarious moments, and there's a witty little dash of socio-political satire thrown into the mix, but the film is predominantly flat and cold. Okay, screwball is funny, but shouldn't it also be charming, a bit lighthearted? Here, there's major tonal static - we're going along our merry, wacky way through a cartoonified D.C., but then Brat Pitt's Chad gets his brain splatter-painted all over a closet. Are we supposed to laugh off the movie's grim moments as easily as we laugh off Pitt's hair, or Clooney's bug-eyed mugging? This would be an easy question to answer if the film were funnier, more clever, more just plain fun. But it isn't - at least it isn't as funny or clever or fun as it could be - as any true-blue fan of the Coens wants to believe it should be.
Like so much of the Coens' ouevre, it's a gently subversive genre romp, but unlike their earlier work, there's no invention, nothing that feels really vital or sharp. This is becoming a major bummer, since the Coen boys have proved over and over that they've got the goods, seemingly capable of anything when they're in the zone. Who knows what's ailing them - are they tired, lazy, bored, totally out of juice? I'm tempted to make the diagnosis that while they certainly aren't out of ideas, they do seem to be running low on emotional energy to invest in those ideas. That would explain the nagging sense of emptiness one experiences while watching many of their recent movies. But who knows - their next film, which is being billed as their Most Personal (a phrase that, in this context, should itself set off alarm bells), looks as if it has potential.
Not much better than my intial viewing experience, which was satisfactory but nothing to write home about. Granted, it has some hilarious moments, and there's a witty little dash of socio-political satire thrown into the mix, but the film is predominantly flat and cold. Okay, screwball is funny, but shouldn't it also be charming, a bit lighthearted? Here, there's major tonal static - we're going along our merry, wacky way through a cartoonified D.C., but then Brat Pitt's Chad gets his brain splatter-painted all over a closet. Are we supposed to laugh off the movie's grim moments as easily as we laugh off Pitt's hair, or Clooney's bug-eyed mugging? This would be an easy question to answer if the film were funnier, more clever, more just plain fun. But it isn't - at least it isn't as funny or clever or fun as it could be - as any true-blue fan of the Coens wants to believe it should be.
Like so much of the Coens' ouevre, it's a gently subversive genre romp, but unlike their earlier work, there's no invention, nothing that feels really vital or sharp. This is becoming a major bummer, since the Coen boys have proved over and over that they've got the goods, seemingly capable of anything when they're in the zone. Who knows what's ailing them - are they tired, lazy, bored, totally out of juice? I'm tempted to make the diagnosis that while they certainly aren't out of ideas, they do seem to be running low on emotional energy to invest in those ideas. That would explain the nagging sense of emptiness one experiences while watching many of their recent movies. But who knows - their next film, which is being billed as their Most Personal (a phrase that, in this context, should itself set off alarm bells), looks as if it has potential.
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