Some Came Running

On "The End Of The Tour"

The sagacious Jeffrey Wells has informed me that word "around the campfire" (yeah, I know) is that I've "had it out" for The End of the Tour since before its shooting even wrapped, and that my opinion of it now that it's a real live film is not to be trusted. It's true; I didn't think that making David Lipsky's useful book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself into a movie was a particularly commendable idea, but once the film was a reality I tried to go into it with an open mind. And, to be honest, I ended up hating it even more than I could have reasonably anticipated. So much that I sat through it twice, just to be sure. Just like with Where The Wild Things Are. 

The results of my consideration of the film are published today at The Guardian. Getting this piece out has been a long and painful process, but, contrary to what David Poland has implicitly speculated, it's not because I feel left out of the lovefest that's now being celebrated—inexplicably, to my mind—on the film's behalf. As if I'm really that weak with respect to my own opinions. No, it's painful because David Foster Wallace is someone I still miss. And because the portrayal of him in the movie is not a "tribute." And I hope that the phrase "ghoulish self-aggrandizement" sticks like shit to the bottom of Jason Segel's shoe throughout his shitty Oscar campaign. (In case you were wondering why this post has no illustration from the movie.)

GQ, as part of the aforementioned lovefest, put up a piece called "5 David Foster Wallace Pieces You Should Read Before Seeing The End Of The Tour." For the very first time, I was actively pleased to see a Wallace recommendation list that did not include "David Lynch Keeps His Head" and "Big Red Son." I've written about Wallace before, on this blog, and was interviewed about him by Jeremiah Kipp; the Guardian piece is my first professional effort on the subject. 

Maybe "Selma" is too smart to be an Oscar movie anyway

 

When I saw Ava DuVernay’s Selma last December, I, like many other critics, was terrifically taken with it. And I was also a little surprised. I was not surprised that it was good—DuVernay’s 2012 Middle of Nowhere demonstrated she had both considerable talent and considerable perspective—but at the way it was good. DuVernay stuck to her metaphorical guns with respect to perspective and declined to deliver a Great Man biopic. Instead she wove a drama of considerable intelligence, empathy, and analytical chops. She made a film sufficiently unconventional so as to be called radical, a film whose style—or perhaps the better word for what I mean is “mode”—I thought, owed more to Steven Soderbergh’s Che than it did to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi.

Right-wing Internet gadfly John Nolte probably hit the nails on the heads of  hundreds of voting AMPAS members when he wrote, on Twitter, “Selma's biggest problem is that it just doesn't soar at the end. You wait for that emotional release. It never comes. Real failure.” This is an interesting point, for a number of reasons, one of which would arguably center around the request “Define ‘soar’.” (It would be in poor taste for me to speculate as to what kind of film with Martin Luther King as its central character would “soar” for Nolte, whose Twitter feed after the quoted observation has since, as of this writing, been dedicated to all-caps yelling at Ava DuVernay fans about how Martin Scorsese didn’t get an Oscar for Raging Bull either and how they should just shut up.) But Nolte’s not exactly wrong. I was moved by Selma, and by its ending, but that ending, which breaks away from the staged drama of the march and the speech from Martin Luther King  (David Oyelowo) to intercut actual documentary footage of the events and people. It’s a stirring moment, yes, but it’s a distinctly anti-manipulative one. Instead of using cinematic craft and guile to provide a you-are-there feel, and then perhaps to force an idea of being transported on the viewer, the movie steps back and says “this happened.” Your “emotional release” may vary—as I said, I myself was moved—but the movie’s sense of integrity eschews a particular kind of sentimentality. It won’t indulge deceit.

"I find it hilarious that most of the stuff being written about movies is how conventional they are, and then you have people [...] upset that something's not conventional," Steven Soderbergh remarked at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008, responding to some critical slings and arrows hurled at Che when it played there that May. (Soderbergh would take a form of revenge against critics later that year, hiring an actual walrus to give an unflattering portrayal of an escort-reviewer in his 2009 release The Girlfriend Experience.) I imagine that there is if not upset, at least a fair amount of discomfort concerning the unconventional aspects of Selma within the more barnacle-crusted ranks of the Academy. As for the movie’s alleged smear of  Lyndon Johnson: whether it is one or not, and its actual extent if it is one, is arguable. But I thought it was within DuVernay’s rights, as an artist and maybe particularly as a black artist, to have Johnson’s character stand in for some particular manifestations of white fear. Johnson’s mild resentment at King’s insistence, as depicted in the film, is revelatory. It’s also rather funny—a good bit—that Johnson decides to act as King has asked largely because Johnson becomes more pissed off at George Wallace than he has been, or ever gets, with King. Whether this is factually true or not is less important in this film’s scheme than not just the dramatic truth of the scenes themselves, but also the truth the scenes demonstrate. Truth about how history, or rather, what we come to see as “History,” is made; almost by accident, pivoted on the pettiest of motivations, perhaps. Similarly, DuVernay’s conception of King seems very much informed by, among other things, what for lack of a better term I’ll call her female tolerance. Clearly DuVernay and her film admire King, but Selma doesn’t quite worship him. It’s not just a matter of acknowledging his flaws and failings as a husband, or depicting him smoking a cigarette while composing a difficult letter. There’s a larger, more intellectual dynamic at work here too. It’s seen in the way DuVernay insists that King, while the most publicly prominent leader of the Civil Rights movement, was not the SOLE leader of it. DuVernay’s careful staging of tactics meetings, her vividly limned portraits of younger figures such as John Lewis, even the single scene in which Malcolm X appears, all stress the value of collective action—that is, the importance of the Civil Rights movement as a movement. And here too the movie resists sentimentality. Not only that, it suggests a continuity and sounds, implicitly, a call to action. Call-to-action movies are not the sort of thing the Academy enjoys. It likes a nice neat social justice movie that sits back and says “problem solved” after the Great Man at its center has done his work. Or, in the case of the aforementioned Gandhi, says “isn’t it a shame things went so wrong, too bad nothing really can be done.” Selma is not just a movie about getting a job done, it’s about thinking things through, and it very often depicts its characters thinking things through. There’s nothing to which Old Hollywood is more hostile than actual thought, except maybe its cinematic depiction. And yes, I know that movies about Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking also got nominated for Best Picture Oscars. But those movies are hardly concerned with thought. 

How do you think it feels

Around this time six years ago, I left a comment on the blog of the writer Emily Gould that, as I’m looking at it now, is pretty grotesque in its self-importance. It read: “Um, not to put too fine a point on it — and believe me, I know this is going to sound ‘mean,’ but there’s just no way around it — but could you do the rest of humanity the favor of, like, throwing yourself in front of a bus or something? Thanks.” The self-important part is critical, because what I wrote, I sincerely thought at the time, was a protest against that writer’s self importance—my perception of that writer’s self-importance. By responding to Gould in a cruel way, I was convinced that I was doing a favor for writing, for literature, for humanity in general. This was not true. I was just being a colossal prick.

For quite some time I thought that being a colossal prick on the Internet was great sport. I thought that everybody else was doing it, and that I could do it better than most. I also had some idea that it was my duty to call bullshit on everyone who I thought was propagating bullshit. I thought this was a form of criticism that was just as valid as anything I would do in long form. It was perhaps even more valid, because blog posts and Internet comments and Tweets are How We Communicate Now, and if I could expose the frauds and mediocrities surrounding me, and all of us (by “us” I meant “other people I deigned to approve of”), then I was performing a valuable truth-telling service.

None of this was true, of course. All of it was nonsense, in fact. What I took to be my honey-badger calling was in fact a manifestation of mental illness, an alcoholic grandiosity that only exacerbated the frustrations and deep-seated anger that I now struggle to cope with (not always successfully) in a more sane and sober way. I bring this up now not to proclaim to the world (such as it is) that I’m all better now, or that I’ve given up sarcasm once and for all. I can still be fairly intemperate, online, in person, wherever. Every day I try to be better about it, to use my wits, such as they are, for constructive purposes. But I’m in no position to pat myself on the back. I am in a position to state that my past behavior, of which my nasty baiting of Emily Gould was only a small part, cost me, and it cost me across the board, in terms of reputation, professional and personal, and other things that you can probably guess. And I earned the cost.

When you’re a drunk, and have some facility for words, and things aren’t going so great for you, you can read something and infer that the writer’s situation is better than your own, and it can throw you into a frothing bloody rage. You think, “Why is the world paying attention to this NOBODY?” or “why is this NOBODY making more money than I am?” and “why isn’t this NOBODY beset with paralyzing depression and fear like he or she deserves to be instead of me?” and so on, and then because you fancy yourself a critic or a perspicacious observer of the cultural scene, you mold these resentments into a theory that there is something VERY WRONG with the culture and that the person you hate is the one responsible for that thing being very wrong. When I was at Premiere I used to enjoy cocking a snoot at other critics in my reviews, something that my last boss there, Peter Herbst, gently insisted on forbidding. Without naming your target, one runs the risk of constructing a straw man argument. But within the confines of a magazine with an individual identity, “calling out” other writers becomes something more than the individual writer’s choice; it reflects on the entirety of the enterprise. Peter made it clear that Premiere wasn’t going to be a forum in which I could engage in any pissing matches. I understood this, but having come up as a professional writer in the early ‘80s manifestation of the Village Voice, I felt rather constrained by it. Once I was out of a job and into the web, all bets were off. But what I thought was a revival of the old-school type Voice pissing-match tradition on my part was just in fact a demented acting out of my own resentments and disappointments. Everything wrong in the culture was Emily Gould’s fault. Or David Poland’s fault. Or Jeffrey Wells’ fault. Or Karina Longworth’s fault. Or Dan Kois’s fault.It was a form of insanity. And in my blackest moods, it starts elbowing its way back into the forefront of my consciousness. It's very unpleasant. 

I am not going to link to the long attack on Emily Gould by Ed Champion, a self-styled literary arts gadfly who swats here and there (sometimes in the film realm as well) to varied effect, but here is a somewhat representative passage, in which Champion recounts an unpleasant personal encounter with Gould:

I told her that I was Publius, figuring that Gould would suss out my reference to the anonymous authors of The Federalist Papers and be on her merry way.

“Publius?” she asked.

“Jack Publius,” I replied.

Gould still didn’t get the hint. My girlfriend picked up the reference immediately.

“It’s Italian,” said my girlfriend.

“Roman origins,” I said.

“Can you spell that?” replied Gould.

I was utterly stunned that someone who wrote for a major media site, someone who had an undergraduate education in the liberal arts, could be this ignorant. I spelled out “Publius” for Gould, pointing out that I was especially concerned whenever people mispronounced and misspelled it.

Various commentators on the Internet, bristling at this long piece, have complained of its sexism, its misogyny, its attempted validation of the hegemony of the patriarchy, and all that is in there, as they say in the Prego ads of old. But the above passage, I think, tells you all you need to know: the smug shittiness of the flaunting of his oh-so-clever “Publius” reference, the commendation of the girlfriend, and then, on a dime, the “who is this NOBODY?” outrage…Champion is not so much against ignorance of Federalist Papers pen names on principle so much as he is against his perceived reality, a reality in which, yes, someone who doesn’t get his surly joke is more of a success in life than he. WHAT IS HAPPENING TO OUR WORLD when Emily Gould gets profiled in the New York Times, is flatteringly photographed by professionals for said profiles, and a bold truth-teller like Ed Champion has to relegate his trenchant insights to his own blog.

So be mad at Ed Champion all you want; he’s entitled to it. But if you can, spare a little compassion for the guy. I’ve been in his shoes, and for all his bluff and bluster, it’s pretty plain that he’s in an awful lot of pain. That’s usually one reason certain folks take to trying to inflict pain on others. 

Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity" and Ray Bradbury's "Kaleidoscope:" not the same story

George Clooney in Gravity.

N.b.: I offer the below in the spirit of nipping what I believe to be a particularly noxious meme in the bud. I've tried to keep it as spoiler-free as I can, and believe I've succeeded, but those invested in going into Gravity as total virgins might want to skip this post for the nonce. 

Now that Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity is getting rapturous reviews from the Venice Film Festival, with more no doubt to follow, I believe it’s not un-okay for me to let the cat out of the bag and report that I was able to see the movie a few months back thanks to the kind consideration of some Warner people who wanted some advance feedback from myself and a few other Internet-centric movie journalists. I would have kept the cat in the bag longer were I not a little disturbed by the mewlings of various and sundry folks who travel the digital spaceways, claiming that the movie, co-written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, is somehow an ignoble enterprise in that it does not acknowledge the Ray Bradbury short story “Kaleidoscope” as its story source.

There’s a really simple reason that Gravity doesn’t contain the credit “Based on the short story ‘Kaleidoscope’ by Ray Bradbury,” and the reason is because it isn’t. I say this with confidence, my Everyman’s Library edition of The Stories of Ray Bradbury open before me to page 184, on which “Kaleidoscope” ends. As you may know, Cuarón’s film, which star George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, is about the adventures of two astronauts who find themselves stranded in outer space after debris from an exploding satellite makes return to their own spacecraft impossible. “Kaleidoscope” concerns the inner thoughts and verbal exchanges between the crew of a “rocket” (Bradbury’s word)  that’s been shattered by a meteor storm, leaving the members of that crew drifting this way and that in their spacesuits, facing their worst fears and worst selves as they head to the death each of them knows is certain.

The specifics of the two stories are entirely different. In “Kaleidoscope,” almost half a dozen rocket crew members are named, but the main exchanges are between four: Hollis and Applegate, who had a kind of professional rivalry, and Lespere and Stone. It takes place in an unspecified future year, and is not merely science fiction but speculative science fiction; in the story Lespere alludes to having wives on several planets other than earth, which sets this story in a future when interplanatery travel is more routine and humanoid life on other planets has been shown to exist. Gravity, on the other hand, occurs in more or less the present time, so much so that one critic has opined that the movie isn’t even science fiction. I’d have to say that strictly speaking it is science fiction, not least because there are one or two technological advantages the characters have that aren’t fully-fledged practical realities for space workers at this point. That’s splitting hairs, perhaps, but it is useful to note that the realm in which Bradbury was working was necessarily much more fanciful than the one in which Gravity is set. (“Kaleidoscope” first appeared in book form as part of Bradbury’s collection The Illustrated Man, published in 1951.) 

Is the premise similar? Yes, but only insofar as Bradbury’s own premise was similar to that of a shipwreck story. As a science-fiction writer, a seer of rocketships and space travel and more, it was his innovation to set a shipwreck story in a non-terrestrial realm. Gravity, too, is a shipwreck story, but the fact that it has a smaller set of characters than “Kaleidoscope,” and the fact that one of the characters is a woman, already kind of sets it apart automatically, and throughout the movie’s brisk running time its emphases and circumstances differ from those of the Bradbury story substantially, and at nearly every turn. “Kaleidoscope” takes a premise that’s almost as old as storytelling itself and goes its own way with it; so does Gravity. And there’s more. The most finally significant difference between the two works is one of, well, theme. “Kaleidoscope” is about characters facing certain death, their anxiety over what their lives have ultimately been worth, their worries over whether their existences have ever meant anything at all. The story ends on a beautiful metaphorical/actual note that says, yes, there is a meaning, but you’re not necessarily going to be privy to it, and that is possibly the thing that makes the meaning beautiful. I haven’t given you too many specifics about the story line of Gravity but I will say that once the disaster strikes for the astronaut the crux of the matter is that their deaths are not a given. They are very likely, but not assured, and the story proceeds apace from that: these characters are going to do everything they can to get home. So it’s two completely different things at heart.

Every writer or filmmaker who endeavors in the realm of science fiction owes a debt to Ray Bradbury. I think we can all agree on that. But Ray Bradbury isn’t the secret writer of Gravity. I bet he totally would have dug the film, and I bet if had not passed away in June of last year he would have been invited to look at it well before I was. 

Fussell's law, again

Can't be repeated enough. The whole thing, in the essay " 'A Power Of Facing Unpleasant Facts' " in the collection Thank God For The Atom Bomb, is well worth reading, but below is what you might take as the gist. I should point out that none of this should be taken as an endorsement of the indignation that a reviewer who takes himself as having been wronged by the reviewed might express, though. 

"An author places himself uncalled before the tribunal of criticism," says [Samuel] Johnson, "and solicits fame at the hazard of disgrace." Or as E.M. Forster puts it: "Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along." Serious writers of all kinds—classic, romantic, ironic, even sentimental—understand the principle, and they understand it because you can't be a serious writer without deep moral awareness, even if you never let it show. Here's some perhaps unexpected wisdom from Edna St. Vincent Millay: "A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down...If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book, nothing can help him."

John Keats is exemplary because he cared more for his work than for his publcity. When an acquaintance defended him from some bad reviews, he argued that defense was unnecessary and told him, "Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic of his own works." Note the distinctly premodern ring to that. Today it is the fantasy of celebrity, hardly the love of beauty, that seems to propel most aspirant writers—a term now all but equivalent to "novelists." Thus, unfavorable notices of their work offend deeply because they seem to proclaim their ineptitude to a wide paying audience, and it's a rare second- or third-rate writer who can resist whipping off a letter to the review journal protesting the response his work has occasioned. Such a letter I have called an A.B.M., or Author's Big Mistake, since its effect is simply to reveal to an amused audience how deeply the author's feelings have been lacerated by the criticism he himself has so sedulously solicited. If the bad review has made him look like a ninny, his letter of outrage makes him look like an ass. What, then, is the author's appropriate recourse/ Silence. His appropriate action? Getting busy on the next book immediately, and resolving this time to be as little elated by public praise as downcast by public blame.

"Singin' in the Rain:" its "attitude" toward silent cinema

I understand that everyone's kind of sick of yammering on about the relative assets and liabilities of The Artist, but I have to admit that one not-unpleasant sidebar of all the yammering is that Singin' in the Rain tends to get brought up a lot. And if there's one thing I enjoy thinking about, it's the 1952 film co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. 

However. What is actually kind of weird, if not actually unpleasant, about this sidebar is that, aside from one single solitary thematic point of comparison, I'm largely convinced that the two films have, if you'll pardon the vulgar turn of phrase, sweet fuckall to do with each other. Yes, The Artist and Singin' in the Rain are "about" the transitional phase from silent to sound in Hollywood history. And. That. Is. It. I consider the point so not-open-to-debate that I don't intend to dwell on it, and anybody who wants to take issue with me might want to wait until The Artist comes out on DVD, and watch it on a double feature with Singin' in the Rain, and then report back to me on The Direct Experience of such a viewing.(My conviction is that most viewers will recognize Singin' in the Rain as the complete multifaceted masterpiece of a Composed Film that it actually is, and The Artist as, at best, "nice.")  What I will dwell on, briefly, is an odd thing I've heard from some Artist boosters, which is that the Michel Hazanavicius film is actually more "respectful" of silent cinema than was/is Singin' in the Rain.

After all—I've heard the argument go—Singin' itself depicts silent-film acting as broad, exaggerated, hammy, and the makers of the films as ego-and-revenue obsessive near-hacks, not artists.  This is in fact largely the case, and so what. There's a big aspect to Singin' in the Rain that partakes of self-parody, which is somewhat distinct from pastiche. Comden and Green, we may recall, got their start in at least semi-satirical sketch comedy; they, with Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein and others, were founders of The Revuers, a troupe that sent up the show biz of their day and before, in a tradition that was followed by outfits as diverse as the SCTVers and the creators of Forbidden Broadway. That is to say, the mockery of tradition/convention was entirely within the bounds of another, not unrelated tradition/convention. While the movie has a great deal of fun not just with silent cinema tropes but also the technical difficulties involved with the transition to sound, it also (unselfconsciously) situates itself within a particular continuum. Most of the comic stylings provided by the almost-literally-born-in-a-trunk former vaudvillean Donald O'Conner in the Kelly/Donen film would not be at all out of place in any non-talking Sennett or Roach short. The joking on silent cinema in Singin' in the Rain is "inside" in the very best sense of the term, while the condition of The Artist is one of near-complete alienation from silent cinema. 

One more thing, unfortunately. In a piece about The Artist for the L.A. Weekly, Karina Longworth writes: "​Like Singin' in the Rain, a film to which it's often compared, The Artist is an example of the kind of mythic history Hollywood tells about itself in order to promote its own survival in times of trouble." This, despite the quasi-ass-covering qualification "an example," is a bit of an overreach, I'm afraid. Singin' in the Rain came into being because Arthur Freed thought, for reasons I'm disinclined to speculate on, that it would be swell to have a bunch of songs he wrote a couple of decades before to be featured in a brand new feature film. That a masterpiece in the form of an Old Hollywood fable happened to coalesce around that notion is, I believe, merely some sort of a happy accident. "When Rain was released in 1952," Longworth continues, "studios were struggling to adapt to both a 1948 court order that forced the studios to give up ownership and management of movie theaters, and the growing lure of television." Yes, while I look for a copy editor, I shall allow that the assertion there is sort of true, but I think the movie you're thinking of is The Robe, which is a slightly different mythic history. In CinemaScope.  

"Scattered Junk"

When I was working at Video Review magazine in the mid-1980s, I and most of the other staffers had multiple occasions to look at videos made by our readers. A colleague and I noted that many of the children in the videos "related" to the video camera in a way that we intuited was decidedly different from the way we might have related to having an 8mm camera trained on us in our youths. Film cameras, in "our" day, were not as ubiquitous as camcorders were then becoming; there was also a question of process. Video didn't need processing; once shooting finished, you could just plug your device in the back of your television, and, voila, there you were. "Seeing yourself on television used to be kind of a big deal," a colleague mused. "Now we're raising a generation of kids for whom seeing themselves on television is nothing special."

This proved true, I think, but not exactly in the way that we might have envisioned. There are different degrees of television, as you will learn by comparing how the mooks from Jersey Shore behave on the actual show that bears the name as opposed to how they behave sitting across from Billy Bush and the hilariously named (if you're British) Kit Hoover on a given episode of Access Hollywood Live. But people in their twenties today DO seem to negotiate the presence of a camera in their day-to-day lives in a way that's different from that of my own generation.

In the short, shot-on-video feature Scattered Junk, described in some venues as a "documentary collage," there's a section in which the camera and cameraman (who I presume is also the film's director, Timothy Morton, intrudes on Greg Cushing while he's taking a bath. Cushing and some of his mostly male friends are in the process of mourning Greg's brother Tim Cushing (shown above), a Louisville, Kentucky-based musician who killed himself in 2004 in the wake of a depression that was surely exacerbated, if not precipitated, by ear damage that had squelched his ability to continue playing. In the bath sequence, Cushing's getting razzed by another friend, and he's responding to the razzing in a normal, unaffected way; there's nothing like a "performance" in the way he's behaving. But, the whole while, even after the friend not holding the camera has left the room, Cushing's holding on to his privates, pretty protectively. He's clearly used to being seen/recorded, clearly doesn't mind being seen/recorded, but is going to control how much of himself is going to be seen/recorded in whatever way he can, albeit without making too much of an overt big deal about it. 

I found this pretty fascinating, the most pointed such node in a work in which the people on screen often address the camera as if it is the actual person pointing the camera at them, which moments exist in very distinct contrast to those in which a subject actually "performs" for the camera. Most of the "performing" done for the camera is done by Tim, the suicide, in footage that is boxed and recessed into the larger (squareish) frame of the piece. He mugs, he narrates, he is goofily ebulliant and unkempt; his presences in this context, as it weaves in and out of the fragments showing Greg and friends dealing/not-dealing with his absence, cast him as, sort of, the overseeing visionary and/or slob—if you'll excuse the word.  Tim is the absence that the slobs he's left behind—the ones who, in a suicide note of which portions are displayed on screen, he says he loves "beyond reason"—are obliged to reckon with. 

I saw Scattered Junk on the site No Budge, which was conceived and is run by regional filmmaker Kentucker Audley and displays work by himself and his confreres. I was not particularly wowed by the last Audley work I saw, Open Five, which I found a relatively tired entry in the already too-well-worn ultra-indie subgenre of Semi-Lost-Weekends Of The Young, White, And Poorly Groomed. While the subjects of Scattered Junk, as personalities, display particular generational and regional idiosyncracies that are potentially beyond bordeline-irritating (taking pictures of themselves holding switchblades, saying things like "I want more art...immersing me," "relating" to African-American culture in the predictable patronizing way that says Gil Scott Heron=awesome while breakdancing=hilarious, and, most infuriatingly, using a toilet plunger to unclog a kitchen sink), Morton's approach does not privilege their personalities as such. And with canny editing, and a number of unexpected moments in which his camera takes a sort of flight in a way that's not what you'd call strictly "documentary" (I won't call it technique, because even when waxing lyrical the camera doesn't seem to be taxed; this is not, to say the least, what you would call a conventionally "beautiful" work), he acheives moments of near serene detachment. And it's through such moments that the film most effectively conveys its theme, which is the negotiation between the thoroughly quotidian and the nearly unimaginable that is, in a sense, a defining component of our existence. And the articulation of this theme, I would argue, successfully transcends (if you will) the rather squalid and sometimes seemingly silly circumstances of its subjects. Which isn't to say that the laughs in the film, and there are a few, are all at the subjects' expense. Yes, it's funny when the rather dreadful band Greg drums in (whose lead singer seems to envision himself as a cross between Damo Suzuki and Rasputin) set up at a dreaded "coffeshop gig" and about half a dozen people (who look to have been half of the assembled to begin with) get up and walk out. (And it's pretty effectively poignent when we put together that Tim once worked in that selfsame coffeshop.) On the other hand, another bit involving the location of a toothbrush undercuts I'm-gonna-hate-this-dude-too expectations by delivering actual comic payoff. So against a number of poor expectations, I found myself glad to have spent time with the film. 

Which I came to, incidentally, through the recommendation of critic/filmmaker/DVD producer Craig Keller, whose writing on the film, I have to admit, I read as something of a dare. I don't think that the DIY tech utopians could have predicted the particular kind of fuck-you insularity/grandiosity that certain strains of no-budget filmmaking have engendered. It's odd to see such an open-hearted work praised in tones practically choking on spite ("your sick little poll;" "the revolution is not a craft-service table;" "Everyone will be cruel to this film—let's have no illusions that the critics are anything other than animals"). I myself am familiar with the critical posture of the guy hunched over at the end of the bar muttering in a stage whisper about what assholes all the other patrons are, and while I understand its attractions, I never really considered it to be actually persuasive. 

UPDATE: On Twitter, Craig Keller has taken exception to my characterization of his piece on Scattered Junk, averring that I missed the post's "levity." I bring this up not to rally commenters to my side; rather, I'll take Keller at his word and allow that it's entirely possible I haven't kept up sufficiently with his writing to fully recognize where he's coming from, tonally. So I apologize for both the characterization and its attendant implications. 

A brief note on romantic comedy

In my below-cited-and-linked review of No Strings Attached for MSN Movies, I refer to the film as "yet another these-two-wacky-kids-belong-together-and-they're-the-last-ones-to-know-it narrative." WHich, it occurs to me now, makes it sound like I'm judging. Which I am, of course, but the problem is that there's nothing really inherently wrong with the narrative per se, or with its predictability. In fact you could go so far as to say that it is the rock upon which the church of the American cinematic romantic comedy was built. Indeed, the semiotics of stardom were such that in 1940, I imagine that you could guess exactly who was gonna end up with whom at the end of His Girl Friday just be reading the names of the leads: Cary Grant (duh), Rosalind Russell, and Ralph Bellamy. Was poor Ralph's place as the nice fellow who never gets the girl quite so firmly established at this point? Wasn't there, don't know. But I presume so. Thus, it's almost axiomatic, I suppose, that the mediocrity of No Strings Attached can't be ascribed to its predictability.

One thing that distinguishes a great romantic comedy such as His Girl Friday from a mediocre one such as No Strings Attached is perversity. No Strings Attached has none. In a way, watching the new film is like watching the ridiculous ending of Gilda stretched out to nearly two hours. For all the hot-and-heavy sort of free-loving and embarrassingly "frank" talk going on during the film's main section, the ultimate point is that Kutcher and Portman's characters, besides being human and needing to be loved just like everybody else does, are at heart just two healthy American kids who believe in monogamy and marriage and all that kind of good stuff. Things are a bit different in His Girl Friday. Walter Neff and Hildy Johnson "belong" together, all right, because at heart they're both driven neurotic messes who are in true fact married to their rather filthy profession. Hildy's betrothal to Ralph Bellamy's nice but rather boring Bruce is her last stab at a "normal," or what the college kids call "normative," life. The film's "happy" ending—the image above is from the final shot of the picture—consists of Walter winning Hildy back and, immediately upon doing so, conning her out of their honeymoon, detouring their trip to Niagara Falls to Albany so Hildy can cover a strike up there. Bliss. 

Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which I do think of as a romantic comedy, and a good one, has a similarly foreordained "gets the girl" ending, which sticks in some folks' craw, as they think that Scott's a bit of a callow jerk who doesn't deserve to get the girl, and also because he was so shitty to Knives, who's so sweet and young and so on. I wasn't particularly bothered by this aspect of the film largely because I was so delighted by its comic inventiveness and overall sense of play that, to be completely honest, the emotional content of the picture never really hooked into me. But I believe that the filmmakers were not at all unaware of all this, and I think in fact in a sense the film's final shot, seen below, addresses the issue of potential audience dissatisfaction with the happy ending...

...and Dennis Cozzalio, who was one of the people initially befuddled by Pilgrim, discusses it with director Edgar Wright in a really fun interview over at Dennis' exceptional blog, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, which is over on my blogroll, there. 

Image of the day, 9/26/10

Kelly Lin (Sue) and Asia Argento (Sandra) in Boarding Gate, Olivier Assayas, 2007

Sue: ...It's a lot of money. I don't have it. In partnership with you, it was possible.

Sandra: Wait. It was me and Lester. Not you.

Sue: Didn't he tell you? I'm the one with all the contacts in Beijing. My brother-in-law works for the Olympic Committee. Lester's from Hong Kong. He doesn't know a thing. 

I thought of this in part because I did enjoy A.O. Scott's whack, in the New York Times Magazine, at articulating an Assayas thematic omniverse of sorts. And you may, too.

Another Scene From A Marriage

Not an illustration from the scene itself, but an image from one of the films under discussion.

For a prior scene, see here.

SCENE: The Carroll Gardens apartment that the proprietor of this blog, "GK," shares with His Lovely Wife ("HLW"). Living room. 

(GK, sitting on the sofa, closes his laptop computer and sighs. HLW, who's been straightening out by the entrance to the kitchen, raises her head.)

HLW: What's wrong?

GK: Nothing...jeez, these knuckleheads over at Wells' site, complaining about The Town, how the central romance between the Rebecca Hall and Ben Affleck characters isn't "plausible." Goofy. I mean, granted, it's a genre convention, but...(shrugs)

HLW: Yeah, why go to the movies in the first place, right?

GK: Yeah, I left a comment...if these yo-yos put their money where there mouth was, they could make Frederic Wiseman as rich as George Lucas...because, you know, Frederic Wiseman movies, they're really plausible...

(GK gets up from the sofa, starts getting his gym bag packed)

GK: And of course these guys, like everybody else, only pull out the plausibility card when it suits them to...in this case, The Town is a pretty easy target, since you can nitpick from the accents down if you're so inclined. Of course you have to be so inclined, really have it in for the picture.

HLW: Right. Like you were with Notting Hill.

(GK looks up.)

GK: What?

HLW: Notting Hill. You said it was "implausible." You said no way would a famous actress ever fall for an obscure book dealer, even if he did look and speak like Hugh Grant.

GK: I said that?

HLW: You did. I think you were having some sort of Julia Roberts problem at the time.

GK: I don't think I said that. I think I said that nobody would give that stupid speech...

HLW: "I'm just a girl...looking at a boy...and asking him to love me?"

GK: Right. Which is a stupid speech. And, you know, I like a lot of Richard Curtis' writing...

HLW: I know, I know. 'He wrote 'The Skinhead Hamlet.'" Yes, that's very fair-minded of you. Anyway. You did say that. But you also did say that no way would a famous actress fall for, etcetera.

(GK clears his throat, finishes packing gym bag, zips it up.)

GK: You ready?

HLW: (smiling enigmatically) Yup. 

(They exit,and go down three flights of stairs in silence, then out the front door. On the stoop, GK pauses.)

GK: You know, there's a difference between being merely implausible, and dealing in pernicious bullshit.

(HLW considers this pronouncement.)

HLW: That may be so.

GK: And I think Notting Hill might have crossed that line. 

HLW: Perhaps.

GK: So there you have it.

HLW: Okay.

GK: But I'll admit, you almost had me there.

HLW: I could see you getting a little wobbly. The knees were going.

GK: Yes. Very nearly a TKO. 

HLW: (smiling enigmatically, again) Yeah, you really pulled a rabbit out of a hat there, sport. 

(They descend the stoop stairs. And, scene.)