Some Came Running

A certain tendency in the American cinema...

...is perhaps too-well exemplified in Identity Thief, a rather remarkably terrible picture I review for MSN Movies. 

Also out this week, and somewhat less terrible, but not that great alas, is A Glimpse Inside The Mind Of Charles Swan III. 

Gun culture? What gun culture?

'Cause they're fighting with axes, get it? No?

Anyway. Bullet To The Head, Walter Hill's first feature in way too long, is out today, and reviewed here. Warm Bodies is not without interest. I should have posted my reviews of Parker and John Dies At The End when they opened last week (all for MSN Movies), but, to once again quote Kim Jong-Il in Team America: World Police, do you have any idea of how fucking busy I am? 

I still have a mind to write more about Parker in relation to its source material and other film adaptations of Richard Stark novels, and I hope to get around to that soon. But the Disgusting Novel I have been working on is in its home stretch, and to tell the truth it's been a disturbingly consuming process.

Not a tumor

The Last Stand, reviewed for MSN Movies.

Also out this week, the not-bad Broken City. 

Hell/Carax/Tosches

There's nothing to win by
this sort of an outcry
Oh yeah we all know why

Cuz the world a person lives in
is his brain. Well mine just gives in...

—Richard Hell, "Who Says? (It's Good To Be Alive?)," from Blank Generation, Richard Hell And The Voidoids, SIre Records, 1977

Michel Piccoli, Juliette Binoche, Denis Lavant, Mauvais sang, Leos Carax, 1986.

Denis Lavant, Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2012.

In a recent comment the reader calling himself "That Fuzzy Bastard" expressed surprise/curiosity that Holy Motors was ranked so highly on my best-of-the-year list given the skepticism I expressed about it on first seeing it. As I mentioned in my first writeup, some of that skepticism was fueled in a reactive mode relative to Carax's Cannes 2012 status as the Approved-Creative-Fireworks-Wackadoodle of the Know-Somethingish American contingent of the festival attendees. Also there was some subsequent annoyance at self-satisfied predictions concerning a shift in the film's reception. 

A second viewing was, for me, more demonstrative of the movie's not just melancholy but its anger, its futile regret over a life badly lived because, in the immortal words of Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, "I got no choice!" As the ultimately nameless (I believe) actor played by Denis Lavant, once more I think acting for/as both himself and his director, goes through a day of demands and insults and winds up having to spend the evening with (spoiler alert) a family of chimps, if I'm not mistaken, the movie drives any number of sad and pissed-off stakes through The Imaginative Life As It Is Lived In These Times, but avoids (to use David Thomas' phrase) "I'm a miserable artiste, pity me!" special pleading, in part via a genuine empathy expressed through certain of the roles Lavant enacts. The imaginative life is not so far removed from what's referred to a the life of the mind after all. Unlike That Fuzzy Bastard, I came out not seeing "light, context-less emotion-tweaking" so much as a melange of modes and of alienated reactions to those modes, those reactions not making much of a dent in "reality" along the way. Yes, the green-suited "Merde" monster does succeed in disrupting a fashion photo shoot, but aside from a hard-on and a cigarette, what does it get him? 

Nick Tosches' latest novel, Me And The Devil, is a pretty problematic piece of work, but in the aggregate I have to say it left a mark, one that's not entirely segregated from the local anger that Tosches often expresses therein in a fashion many will take not unreasonable exception to. It's that kind of book, one where the acheivement seems in too-uncomfortable proximity to the things that make it objectionable. Where Holy Motors stumbles, it's in the realm of sentimentality (forgivable with respect to the movie's treatment of Edith Scob, less so in the It's A Wonderful Life-inspired talking-limos coda); Me And The Devil errs, as regular Tosches readers should not be surprised to learn, in the area of sort-of nihilist-tough-guy posturing. But it's not entirely purposeless. For instance:

Only an utter fool would rather express himself than simply be himself. To live was a beautiful thing. To write about it was a labor. And the pay had given way to pay cuts. 

Writing was not an act of imagination or, may the Devil take me for even using the word, creativity. (How I cringed when people used the word 'creative" in referring to me in my presence. I knew then and there that they did not know what work was. I knew then and there that they lived in a dream world. Often they themselves were make-believe "artists," living the "creative" life under the shelter of trust funds, inheritances, or family money of some kind. Often they were trying to imply an intimacy that did not, could not exist with me or what I did.) There was nothing to be romanticized in what I did. If flower garlands of words and phantoms of imagery had come to me in visions, so had some of the stupidest ideas I have ever had: ideas that landed me in jail, emergency rooms, or hock.

While Carax's film is a fantasy depiction of the working life of the artist, it is relatively unsparing in its depiction not just of toil but of emotional deprivation and loss. If it is a work of "creative" "exuberance" that exuberance is in a certain sense a gob of spit from the bowels of hell. 

Tosches again:

When I was young, I thought it would get easier. But as it turned out, each novel got harder. Maybe this was because, with each one, I was flaying a further layer from inside me, exposing yet another, deeper layer. Maybe this was what made it harder. When I was young and thought it woudl get easier—the days when I was thrilled to see my name or my picture on a book—I hid. I did not even dare to write in the first person. Then all that changed, and when it did, it reminded me of that sixteenth-century anatomical engraving by Amusco something-or-other, or something-or-other Amusco, the one of a guy stripped to his inner anatomy holding a knife in one hand and the drooping entirety of his body's own freshly removed skin in the other. 

The special knife, I thought as I recalled this: the special knife. Maybe I needed to write. Maybe, even with all the illness it brought, it was the least destructive, least dangerous alternative that I had. And I should be thankful that I had it. 

Every gift a curse, every curse a gift.

The current cinema, remainder of 2012 edition

The Guilt Trip, On The Road, and This Is 40, reviewed for MSN Movies.

There's supposed to be a Promised Land review in there too but at the moment the link is wonky. Once that's fixed I will update this post Wells-style so it looked like this caveat never happened. 

The current cinema, bitter disappointment edition

Django Unchained, for MSN Movies. 

But not me, baby, I'm too precious

See what I did there? You thought I was gonna go for the Zeppelin reference, and then I went, zing...!

Yeah, I know, all right, not that impressive. Anyway, my review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey for MSN Movies is up. And that's got the Zep reference. 

"And now Eleanor and I would like to join you in the thrilling conclusion to 'Nick Danger'"

If only the bizarre, leaden, muddled Hyde Park On Hudson had a single line that funny. If only. I review for MSN Movies. 

The big ones—The Hobbit, Zero Dark Thirty, that "Master of the House" thing—are on their way. And more after those. Some of these are quite good. 

The current cinema

Sure, Killing Them Softly has it's problems, but what/who doesn't? But then again and come to think of it, Cogan's Trade, the George V. Higgins novel on which the movie is based, has no problems; it's about as perfect as a crime novel not written by Donald E. Westlake could ever be, and perhaps more so. So the fact that the movie has problems is possibly lamentable...but for my money the thing gets quite a lot of Trade just right, and the missteps writer/director Andrew Dominik makes are at least kind of, um, interesting. My review is at MSN Movies. 

KITTIE

Life of Pi reviewed for MSN Movies.

Also out for the holiday: Rise of the Guardians, which is better than you might think. Or not.