The General

Just a quickie review today. I saw The General yesterday and it is, of course, fantastic. It’s kind of amazing to watch Buster Keaton act, since he actually has a really dour, long face, huge, soulful eyes, and he naturally wears a rather serious expression. Check him out in this close-up for example:

He looks more like a poet than a virtuosic, daredevil comedian. But when I really think about it,  I guess this deadpan is actually part of what makes him funny. The true magic of The General comes from the way Buster Keaton floats through the obstacles around him half-unaware, half-blase. Just like his other famed contemporary, Charlie Chaplin, the real dynamite quality of his performance is how effortless he makes pretty unbelievable stunts look. His odd, sullen face sets this off all the more. The other thing I like about The General is how it is a perfect marriage between action and comedy and, as I’d already mentioned in an earlier review, these genres come together all too rarely these days. This one is definitely worth checking out. Particularly, if you are lucky enough to live in a city with an amazing silent movie house with a real working organ like I used to.

500 Days of Summer

So, I wanted to review a more mainstream movie for the blog finally, so I went and saw 500 Days of Summer this weekend. A couple of the reviews I read on Metacritic made some sweeping claims about this movie being the Annie Hall of the younger generation and I will say such claims are wildly exaggerated, or at least I would hope that they are. There is a very similar tone and narrative structure in this movie to that in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few years ago, with much of the movie being flashes forward and backwards in time with some stylistic, music video-esque touches here and there. I’m not sure if this was an intentional knock-off or what, but I have to say Michel Gondry is better at playing with the visuals, Charlie Kaufman wrote a much more interesting, meaningful script, and Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet imbued their characters with a lot more humanity.

With that said, I think the script is probably the biggest culprit here. Zooey Deschanel was doing her quirky charming thing full force and Joseph Gordon-Levitt did such a fabulous job in Brick and The Lookout recently, I feel like he probably did what he could with the material. Many critics have been talking about how Deschanel’s character, Summer, is too much of a blank slate, but I would say both characters are underdeveloped. Due to the clever/gimmicky structuring of the narrative, I think it was an extra challenge to make the characters feel like real people and to make the interaction between the characters feel real. We don’t see a lot of personality flaws in either character and we see a lot of cutesy dates (including a weird scene almost entirely built around a product-placement that made me pretty queasy), but very few awkward moments or arguments so that you don’t really understand the sour side of the relationship. Without a fully developed negative side to the relationship, it feels like a shallow, glossy magazine version of romance and unfairly suckers the audience in a contrived way.

Additionally, SPOILER ALERT, the movie could have at least had a more realistic, powerful ending if they had left it at the scene where the movie begins, but instead they add this cheesy, ridiculous ending on that feels like a total cop-out for whatever emotional truth it was trying to dredge up. In Eternal Sunshine, you really understand both sides of the characters and their relationship with each other. You see the attraction, but also the boredom and annoyance, which are the familiar accoutrements of most long-term romantic relationships. The ending is full of pathos because you understand that the main characters can’t escape either the attraction or the inevitable discontent that develops between them and you feel the full poignancy of the can’t live with them or without them nature of love. By comparison, 500 Days of Summer doesn’t hold much water.

What really bothers me about 500 Days of Summer though has more to do with a certain type of quirky, indie-lite female character which seems to be coming up more and more in the mainstream movie business these days who is sometimes charming and sometimes cloying. She seems to be a recurring phenomena, arguably starting with Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn and morphing into the kind of character Winona Ryder used to play all the time, that Natalie Portman played in Garden State, Ellen Page played in Juno, and that Zooey Deschanel now plays all the time. I have mixed feelings about this recurring character, who on the one hand avoids the sex-bomb airhead female stereotype which so dominates the movie business and who can often be funnier and more intelligent than the traditional female lead.

I think the big difference between the versions I like and the ones I don’t is who is doing the writing. Namely, I think when there is a woman writing these characters, they often hold up a lot better than when men are writing them. For example, I think Juno was good, because for once you could see how the quirky, pluckiness was actually just the surface of a three-dimensional, though very young woman and not her whole personality. For another, she wasn’t just some fantasy girl of endless charm, she was sarcastic, self-deprecating, and whip-smart. I felt the same way about another movie, which fits the quirky label, The Waitress by Adrienne Shelly which has a black humor and sensitivity that adds up to a brilliant screenplay and a fantastic protagonist. Interestingly, the Winona Ryder characters that I liked so much when I was younger from Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, Mermaids, and Reality Bites were also all written by women.

In contrast, Zooey Deschanel’s characters are often written by men and are so fucking sunny and one-dimensional it kind of makes you want to murder somebody. And Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State, written by leading man Zach Braff, has to be one of my least favorite female characters of all time. It will be interesting to see if this trend continues in some upcoming quirky movies whose trailers were of course shown before the screening of 500 Days of Summer that I went to, Paper Heart and Whip It.

After Hours

Martin Scorsese ended up directing After Hours when his first attempt to film The Last Temptation of Christ totally imploded and the future of his career was uncertain. Tim Burton had signed on to do the project earlier on, but bowed out when he learned Scorsese wanted it, which is almost a shame when you think about what his take on this dark, frenetic material might have been. It is a nice little movie as is though, which involves a long series of nightmarish twists and turns over the course of one endless night in New York City.  Admittedly, there are a few slow patches and it is very much a minor work from a major director, but it’s interesting to see a different kind of movie from Scorsese. What surprised me most while I was watching it though was how much it reminded me of Jim Jarmusch (particularly Night on Earth) who I wouldn’t have connected to Scorsese before. This movie has the same spontaneity, the multiple cameo performances, the sense of place, and even the particular brand of black humor that have become Jarmusch hallmarks. It would be interesting to know if the movie influenced him at all since it came out a little before he truly got started.

Burn After Reading

The fairly recent Cohen brothers’ movie, Burn After Reading is quite a strange one. Characters are introduced at a rapid-fire pace, each managing to be hilariously quirky without seeming quite real. John Malkovich plays an extremely irritable ex-CIA employee who quits in a huff after being moved to a less important department. Tilda Swenson plays his coldly deceptive wife, who is engaged in an affair with George Clooney, another CIA employee who is about equally obsessed with jogging and sex. Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt play two workers at a fitness club who stumble upon a CD full of what appears to be classified government “shit.” If these descriptions of the characters seem to you more like humorous sketches than people, you might just be a redneck. Or you might just be right. They are characters in the most basic sense of the word, possessing certain characteristics and quirks, but no real depth or history. It’s not really possible to empathize with a single one. This is tolerable partly because it seems intentional, and partly because the actors playing these characters do such an entertaining job. The movie itself is sort of like the Big Lebowski in its meandering plotline, one so unpredictable that it makes little sense to say that it has “twists.” The difference is that this film picks up where “No Country for Old Men” left off in its unadorned and often unexpected displays of graphic violence that seem to be the Coen Brothers’ calling card. The stark violence doesn’t really add to the comedy of the film, but it manages not to take away from it either. It’s kind of just there. Ultimately the problem lies not with the comedy or the violence, but the shallowness of the story these elements are used to express. Burn After Reading doesn’t have the joyous, dreamlike quality of The Big Lebowski nor the excruciating suspense of No Country for Old Men. In fact, without a central engrossing character or message, Burn After Reading doesn’t seem like a movie so much as a writing exercise that accidentally made it to the screen.

All this makes the film seem bad, but it wasn’t really bad at all, just disappointing. At the end of the movie, the director of the CIA advises the assistant who has been reporting all the crazy goings-on to just “try and forget all this ever happened.” This advice is clearly meant for the audience as well, to assure them that the directors knew this film was utterly mediocre and it’s ok to forget it. As much as I appreciate the gesture, I’d appreciate it more if they’d said that to themselves earlier, and burnt after writing.

-gleicherd

The Ten

Last weekend, I finally rented the movie, The Ten,  by David Wain who also brought us Wet Hot American Summer,  Stella Shorts, and the 90′s era obscure, but brilliant sketch comedy TV show, The State, which I was introduced to by our own Gleicherd. In college, Gleicherd and our friends used to watch and quote from old episodes of The State all the time. The best thing about the sense of humor of The State is their willingness to take absurdity to the extreme, until it borders on the surreal and purgatory-esque. The best sketches in The Ten, which is built around 10 skits that are loosely based on each of the ten commandments,  go off the same principles of humor that made The State a great show and there is definitely some funny stuff in the movie. Admittedly, it does not really capture the pure lovable goofiness that makes Wet Hot American Summer amazing and it is probably more on the level of a mediocre episode of The State, without nearly enough Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter and way too much Jessica Alba. With that said, since you still can’t get episodes of The State on DVD, The Ten is probably worth watching instead.

–Vicky Vengeance