The Man Who Wasn’t There
Continuing in a Coen mode.
Not much to say about this movie. It is simply the Coen’s most heartfelt, most straightforward, least ironic, most elegant, most gorgeous movie. Another terrific script, approaching the noir genre from the simplest, most ordinary point of view possible, finding a lyrical, poetic, absurd, tragic story about a man whose ambition is to stop cutting hair and go into dry cleaning. Billy Bob Thorton’s greatest performance in a long line of great performances, everyone’s work here is subtle, humanist and deeply felt. I have no great discoveries to announce or witty remarks to make about this one.
Now, if only the Kaminoans were in it.
Wait, maybe they ARE.
UPDATE: This movie has the most accomplished actors in the smallest parts. John Michael Higgins shows up for one scene as a doctor, Christopher McDonald shows up as a tarmacadam salesman, and most incredibly, Brooke Smith is wordless and unrecognizable as a sobbing prisoner in the women’s prison.
Man, and Scarlett Johansen is great in this too.
The Hudsucker Proxy
To follow Seven, another movie that features a guy scraping a name off a glass door.
Perhaps Mr. Urbaniak can supply a list of other movies featuring this character and Film Forum could devote a festival to him. “The Guy Scraping The Name Off The Glass Door Fest.”
Some Coen Bros movies you like right away, some disappoint you at first, some irritate the hell out of you. But all of them have enough going on in them to warrant more than one viewing.
Intolerable Cruelty, for instance, I found slight and superficial at first. Now I love it, watched it twice in one week not long ago.
The Big Lebowski I found a definite disappointment after Fargo. Now it’s one of my favorite movies of all time.
The Hudsucker Proxy, for a long time, I found to be cold, dense and impenetrable. Starting with the title, which virtually implores an audience to stay away. Richly detailed and beautifully mounted as it is, with a career-best performance from the brilliant Jennifer Jason Leigh, I still found the movie soulless and mechanical, which mystified me because I had read the script before seeing the movie, and the script was one of the best I’d ever read, overflowing with warmth, wit, great characters and sharply observed detail.
Now, I still feel like that script is still in there somewhere, but, like every other Coen Bros movie, there’s something else there that I didn’t see before.
The Coen Bros have an interesting problem. They want to tell relatively conventional stories, genre pictures even, but their approach is so unusual that it sometimes blinds the audience to their true purpose. They often will take small character beats or incidental props and blow them up to monumental importance, confusing us as to what is important in the movie.
For instance, in Intolerable Cruelty there is so much weight given to George Clooney’s teeth that one gets distracted from his character, a rather stock Hollywood type, an aging boy who needs to grow a soul. We see this character so often in Hollywood pictures (Jim Carrey in Liar, Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, Tim Allen in almost anything), of course you need a fresh take on him, but only the Coen Bros would say “what if he’s obsessed with his teeth?” (In O Brother it’s Clooney again, but this time it’s his hair.) The accents in Fargo, the rug in Lebowski, the mosquito (and the wallpaper) in Barton Fink, the hat in Millar’s Crossing, etc.
The point is, the hair and the teeth and The Dude’s rug and all that stuff is beside the point. The first time one watches a Coen Bros movie, a lot of time it seems to be a pointless comedy about people acting really weird. But it’s like they point their camera like a magnifying glass at some tiny detail in order to get a new take on an old idea.
And this philosophy extends to their whole directoral stance, and in Hudsucker threatens to capsize the whole ship. The production design, the dense, sparkling dialogue, scenes operating on many different levels at once, the complex montages and camera moves, the elaborate physical gags, and especially the hyper-intellectualized performance by Tim Robbins, all conspire to make a movie so rich on a scene-by-scene level that it’s sometimes hard to even take it all in, much less be warmed by the simple human comedy that lies at the center of the script.
But it’s in there.
Maybe for some people the idea of watching a movie you don’t like over and over until it reveals itself sounds like a chore, but for some reason that’s not the case with the Coen Bros. I can’t think of a movie of theirs I never want to see again.
On another Coen-related topic, oftentimes their slightest movies, on a second or third viewing, take on deep, even profound philosophical, religious or socialogical overtones. Obviously the ideas are in the script, but they never, ever talk about them in interviews. They always talk as if they are making the silliest, most superficial movies in the world. I wonder what, if anything, they tell their actors. I can’t believe that someone like Tim Robbins or Paul Newman or Jeff Bridges is willing to just hit their mark and do what the Coens tell them to. Or maybe they do, maybe when one works with the Coens one is happy to know that the directors know what they’re doing, and not think too much. Although I can’t think of a performance in a Coen Bros movie that looks effortless.
Anyone out there have any Coen stories?
Seven
Sorry, I just can’t call it Se7en, even though that is apparently its actual title.
I worked long and hard to put the ’90s behind me, I’m not going back there now.
First, let me say that this has one of the greatest title sequences of all time (by R/Greenberg, I believe). I think you have to go back to Return of the Pink Panther to find a better one.
The script, by Andrew Kevin Walker, could have been shot in a flashy, superficial manner to match its sensational subject matter, but David Fincher (and his great DP, Darius Khonji) shoot the hell out of this thing, giving grace, subtlety and gravitas to what might have otherwise been a standard-issue thriller.
The conceit of the plot, which imagines a killer of superhuman cruelty and deviousness, sometimes distracts one from the wonderful character work by all the cast. These stock characters (the world-weary detective on the verge of retirement, his hothead new partner, their blustering superior, the guy guy scraping the name off the office door, so forth) are re-imagined and given new life by Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, R. Lee Ermey and the rest. Their interplay is terrific, they make these guys seem real somehow.
As an added bonus, this is, to my knowledge, the only movie to feature Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box.
Another excellent transfer of a most handsomely shot movie. And a triumph of production design by Arthur Max.
And, for those playing along at the “Voucher Ankles” site, there is, of course, a “Merchant of Venice” tie-in in Seven. A lawyer is forced to cut off, yes, a pound of flesh. He (of course) dies from his self-inflicted wounds, and the killer leaves a (completely bogus) quote from “Merchant” at the crime scene. Imagine my dismay when, in 1995, having written and directed my own adaptation of Merchant, hearing Morgan Freeman (himself a great Shakespearean actor) recite this bit of invented poesy and then intone “Merchant of Venice.”
Come to think of it, I’d love to see Freeman play Antonio some time. Now there’s some subtext.
Return of the Jedi
Some observations:
1. The Empire is back. With a new, formidable weapon. A weapon so powerful that it will finally crush the rebellion and make the Empire the reigning power for a thousand years.
This new weapon is —
THE DEATH STAR.
And THIS time — it’s UNDER CONSTRUCTION.
NOTHING will penetrate the defenses of this awesome, under-construction weapon.
Except, perhaps, a fleet of rebel fighters.
2. Jabba the Hutt: why doesn’t he wipe his chin? It’s disgusting.
I mean, apparently he NEVER wipes it. Because the spittle on his chin is in multiple layears, and it’s caked dry. He’s a wealthy slug, he’s got dozens of employees, flunkies and hangers-on. Why isn’t it someone’s job to wipe his chin? If it’s spilling down onto his chest, obviously it’s a chronic problem.
I understand he doesn’t need clothes, that’s fine. He’s a slug, he would find them constricting. And I understand that constant secretion of mucus comes part-and-parcel with being a giant slug. But then why would he allow it to dry and cake on his non-slimy skin? For that matter, why would a giant slug choose to live on a desert planet? Why doesn’t the giant slug do a property swap with Yoda? Jabba would have done very well on Dagobah and Yoda could have added years to his life in the dry heat of Tatooine. But no, the giant slug lives on a desert planet in a palace filled with stairs and narrow hallways far too small to accommodate his bulk. No wonder he spends all his time in his lair, he’s outgrown his hallway. How unhappy he must be.
3. How exactly does Leia manage to strangle a giant slug to death? He has a trachea? Lungs? Why not just dump a vat of salt onto him?
4. My favorite moment in the movie: Lando Calrissian enters Jabba’s lair and adjusts his mask. His eyes are already plainly visible, so obviously he can see, but he adjusts his mask, apparently so that his mustache can see.
5. There’s a scene between Vader and Sidious that goes something like this:
VADER: Those rebels that landed on Endor? My son is among them.
SIDIOUS: Really? How do you know?
VADER: I’ve felt his presence.
SIDIOUS: Really? That’s weird, I haven’t, and I’m ten times more psychic than you are. Oh well, what do you want to do about it?
VADER: Let me go find him.
SIDIOUS: No, I’ve got a better I idea. You stay put and let him come to you.
VADER: You think he’ll do that?
SIDIOUS: Yes. I have forseen it.
Now, I know ROTJ is a sitting duck, and I love these movies as much as anyone, but Huh? Sidious didn’t know Luke was there, but he has already forseen what Luke would do after he got there?
My guess is that there was another half-page of dialogue that got cut.
VADER: You — what — what do you mean?
SIDIOUS: I have FORSEEN it.
VADER: But — a minute ago —
SIDIOUS: Young Skywalker will seek you out and together we will DESTROY him.
VADER: But —
SIDIOUS: I have SPOKEN.
VADER: Well — okay —
SIDIOUS: You doubt my word?
VADER: I — well, your excellency, look, I know you’re the boss and all, but — I just, I gotta say, sometimes I think you’re just fucking with my head.
6. Now, as you all know, in the DVD edition os ROTJ, at the end of the movie (SPOILER ALERT) Darth Vader dies and Luke pries off his helmet, and there’s kindly old Humpty Du — er, Anakin Skywalker, and he and Luke have a moving little scene. Then, later, the teddy bears set Darth Vader’s body on fire and Luke looks over and hey, there’s Alec Guiness and — and — Hayden Christensen.
This isn’t a complaint against Mr. Christensen. He’s proven himself to be an actor of depth and range elsewhere and I’d work with him in a heartbeat. What I don’t understand is, how on earth does Old Anakin Skywalker suddenly get turned into Young Anakin Skywalker for the end of ROTJ? Oh, I suppose one could say that Hayden is the image of Anakin before he turned into Darth Vader, but, but, but —
Okay, I know I shouldn’t even spend my time worrying about this. But one day soon, I’ll be showing these movies I love to my children. And I will be the first to say that I prefer the DVD editions to the versions shown in theaters back in the day. I don’t miss the clunky special effects, the added sequences don’t bother me (well, one of them does) and the transfers are all jaw-droppingly beautiful.
But listen. When I show these movies to my kids, I will, obviously, show them Star Wars (that is, ANH) first. Not because it was the first one made, but because if a child is going to connect to these movies, they’re going to connect to the swift, involving, swashbuckling Episode 4, not the clunky, dense, confusing Episode 1. Besides which, it’s going to be a long time before they’re old enough to watch Revenge of the Sith.
So they’ll watch ANH, then they’ll watch TESB, then they’ll watch ROTJ, and at the end of ROTJ, right when they’re supposed to be learning what this whole thing all means, they’re going to see a funeral for Darth Vader, and Luke looking over and seeing ghosts of Good Old Obi-Wan Kenobi, who turns and smiles at — some guy with long hair. Oh, I get it, everything’s okay because Obi-Wan’s not really dead and in the afterlife he’s reunited with, with some guy with long hair. Who is that? We’ve never seen him before. What was wrong with the scene before? Why does Obi-Wan get to come back as himself, but Anakin only appears as his young self? Why doesn’t Ewan McGregor appear next to Hayden Christensen? Why does Obi-Wan get stuck spending eternity as a seventy-year-old, but Anakin is eighteen forever?
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Quite a step up from The Money Pit, Roger Rabbit is a masterpiece of theme.
It asks one question: what if toons existed in our world? And every scene revolves around this question, with expertly rendered results.
This is what I expect from an eighties Spielberg production: a fountain of imagination and a generosity of spirit that makes other movies seem dull and uninpired in comparison.
The plot, no one here need be reminded, is a direct lift from Chinatown. But look what happens when you change one plot point. Take out the San Fernando Valley, put in Toontown, and you’ve got a whole different movie.
The special effects, while of their time, are so intricately interwoven with the live action you have no trouble believing any of it. And yet somehow, somehow they don’t call attention to themselves. The real-life props are chosen to be perfectly ordinary, keeping the tension between toon and real constant, so that when we get to Toontown (surely one of the most surreal and disorienting sequences in film history) the difference is completely jarring.
Walking the line is Christopher Lloyd, always and still one of the great actors of our day.
And just think! Bob Hoskins used to be a movie star!
Studio Executive: We need a million-dollar peg to hang this movie on. Get me Bob Hoskins!
D-Girl: But boss! He’s a gold-plated movie star! And he’ll only work with Joanna Cassidy!
SE: Do whatever it takes, but GET ME HOSKINS!
And you know, I went looking for this in the Family section of my local video store, and it wasn’t there. I wondered why. And my goodness, how adult this movie is! Toons swear like sailors, meet violent deaths, smoke and drink and have sex.
And then I remembered: the cartoons that Spielberg and Zemeckis are saluting were not always intended for a juvenile audience, they were simply popular entertainments. And when this movie came out, there was no Cartoon Network, these things weren’t being broadcast 24 hours a day, there was barely even a home-video market. The movie was intended to prod the memories of an audience old enough to remember seeing those characters on a movie screen.
And my goodness, when the wall at the end of the picture comes down (oops, spoiler alert) and all those characters come spilling out, it’s almost too much for an animation fan to take.
Can anyone imagine any filmmaker today, even someone with the power of Spielberg, managing to get all those characters into one movie together? The liscensing battles alone would cripple the production, now that all of those characters are worth millions to the studios that own them.
If Mr. R. Sikoryak is out there, can you tell me why Mel Blanc is credited for the voice of Tweety Bird, Bugs Bunny, etc, but someone else is credited for Yosemite Sam?
The Money Pit
Yes, it’s Richard Benjamin’s 1986 comedy, starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long.
And look at this supporting cast: Josh Mostel, Joe Mantegna, Philip Bosco, Maureen Stapleton, Yakov Smirnoff, Mary Louise Wilson, Mike Starr (much younger and lighter), Jake Steinfeld (before he became known only as “Body By Jake”), Frankie Faison and, somewhere in there, invisible, Michael Jeter (that’s Mr. Noodles’ brother Mr. Noodles, for those of you who are preschoolers).
But most strikingly, Alexander Godunov as Tom Hanks’s romantic foil.
Yes, Tom Hanks and Alexander Godunov fight over Shelley Long. Now that’s ’80s.
Alexander Godunov: star of the Bolshoi, when he retired he came to Hollywood and, like his friend Barishnakov, decided, what the heck, to become a movie star. Why not?
He had a near-wordless part in Peter Weir’s Witness as, yes, Harrison Ford’s romantic foil. Alexander Godunov and Harrison Ford fight over Kelly McGillis. If only they knew.
For The Money Pit, Godunov decided “Well, I’ve proven that my image actually registers on film. Why not try comedy?” And you know, he really gets it. He really understands that comedy means bugging your eyes and exaggerating your line readings.
Or maybe he was directed to do those things. Because that’s what everyone in the movie does. Only problem is that Godunov does it while also trying to wrap fizzy lingo-centric comedy lines around his thick Russian accent.
What’s the problem? Russians are funny people. Why can’t they have him say things a Russian might say?
He made one more Hollywood movie, 1988’s classic Die Hard, where he menaces Bruce Willis, back to almost wordlessness.
By 1995, he was dead from acute alcohol syndrome.
A lot of things don’t work in this movie. There’s some over-produced physical comedy of the 1941 variety, which kind of comes out of nowhere. There’s some real comedy about the hazards that beset any couple trying to fix up an old house, which promises development but ends up toothless, and then, in act III, a romantic storm kind of whips up out of nowhere. Scene by scene the movie is perfectly enjoyable. Put all together, it doesn’t really add up.
The screenplay is from David Giler, who earlier wrote the searing, violent Walter Hill picture Southern Comfort and later wrote James Cameron’s Aliens.
Well, that’s the life of the screenwriter.
This souffle was shot by none other than Gordon Willis, certainly the greatest DP of his generation. That might explain the occasional artsiness of the compositions. Willis worked lighter than this (his work on Woody Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy is some of the best of his career), but it doesn’t come to much this time around.
Attack of the Clones
For no particular reason, I threw on Attack of the Clones tonight.
Unsurprisingly, the best transfer to DVD of any movie I’ve seen, with the exception of, perhaps, Finding Nemo (which was, of course, created entirely on computers and not in need of transfer in the traditional sense.
For Clones, the same joys and disappointments as before. You could name them as well as I could.
But I found myself thinking about the tall, skinny aliens from the Camino system (Caminans?). They have a whole planet, covered in water and dotted with clone factories. “Cloners, these people are” says the crusty cook from the ’50s diner to Obi-Wan.
Well, I’ve never heard of a whole planet’s population identified by their profession, and it stuck out weird. Really, is the entire population of Camino involved in the production of clones? Are there no truck drivers, no bricklayers, no doctors, lawyers, bookkeepers on Camino, except those connected to the cloning industry?
It’s sort of like someone saying “Los Angeles, filmmakers those people are.” I mean sure, LA is a company town, but I often go weeks on end without running into a single filmmaker. I meet housewives and grocery clerks and doctors and accountants and locksmiths and librarians and swim coaches and short-order cooks and all kinds of things. But no, apparently on Camino all they do is make clones.
But wait: in all the Camino scenes, we meet a grand total of — well, let’s see — two Caminans (Caminists? Camisoles?). One is a female greeter of some sort and the other is identified as the Prime Minister. Now, Prime Minister implies that there are quite a few Caminans running around, but where are they? And where are their belongings? The rooms we enter into are completely uncluttered and sparkling clean. No piles of magazines or half-eaten doughnuts sitting around. I know that we never get inside the living quarters of a genuine Caminan, but they must eat and sleep somewhere, something. They have clothes, which they must keep somewhere, but what do they eat? Fish? Plankton? Where do they go to the bathroom? And where are they all?
Who built those factories? It must have been contract work from another planet, because the only things the Caminans do is clone. Cloners, those people are.
And then it struck me: maybe the female greeter and the Prime Minister are the only two Caminans on the planet. Maybe that’s all there are, and all the cloning and clone-training is done by machines.
But wait — if there are only two Caminans on the planet, why is one Prime Minister?
And suddenly the whole movie turned into some sick charade. There are two creatures on a planet, and they’re surrounded by these artificial people that they make, and there are so many of them that they start to think that they are actually the leaders of some great society, instead of just a couple of cloners running an automated factory. And in the extremity of their isolation and loneliness, they start to refer to each other as Prime Minister and, who knows, Vice-Prime-Minister or something.
Maybe they trade off from week to week, calling each other Prime Minister.
They’re smart, that’s for sure. They built those factories and they figured out how to clone hundreds of thousands of clones, so they must be pretty sharp. But no one visits, no one “drops by,” even the Jedi who ordered the clones never stopped back to check their progress. Little do they know their planet has been erased from the Archives on Coruscant.
I can imagine the two of them sitting around wondering what happened to tourism on Camino.
MALE CAMINAN: “We put up the billboards, we sent out the emails, how come no one comes to rainy, water-covered, windswept clone-factory-town Camino?”
FEMALE CAMINAN: “People just aren’t interested in cloning any more. Hey, can I be queen next week?”
Oscar Special
My thoughts on the Oscar ™ show:
This was the first Oscars that my son Sam watched. He’s 4.5 years old, but he made it through the whole show. Of course, we’re in Santa Monica so the show ended only at 8:30.
I had to explain the whole idea of the Oscars to Sam, but he caught on pretty fast. I don’t think he understands how many people it takes to make a movie, and he was unfamiliar with most of the nominees this year, but George Clooney got his attention early in the evening when Clooney mentioned Batman twice in his acceptance speech.
SAM: You mean, he made a Batman movie?
DAD: Yeah, a few yeas ago, he made a Batman movie.
SAM: What’s it called?
DAD: It’s called Batman and Robin. We’ll rent it sometime.
Sam, of course, was familiar with March of the Penguins, which I think was the only nominated film he saw this year.
He was glad that Crash won best picture, because Crash had the song with the burning car in it, and he liked that part of the show.
However, it seemed unfair to him that Crash won two prizes and King Kong (which he hasn’t seen) didn’t win any.
In the middle part of the show he went off to his own room to watch The Spongebob Squarepants Movie, then he came back for the end. But he remembered who everyone was and what movies were competing.
As for me, all I can say is that, for the first time in memory, I liked the set.
I noticed that Loreal was a “proud sponsor” of the Academy Awards. It made me wonder how many reluctant sponsors there were, or perhaps sponsors who were downright ashamed.
I’m sure there are many political things to be read into the competition, but it’s late.
Matchstick Men
Tonight’s film: Matchstick Men, Ridley Scott’s 2003 comedy/drama/caper movie.
He’s a genre-buster, that Ridley Scott.
In the past month I’ve watched every movie he’s made except for 1492, which for some reason is not available on DVD in the US.
Usually in a Ridley Scott movie, the stakes are pretty damn high for the protagonist. Usually lots of people will die if the protagonist screws up. This time, the stakes are smaller but more personal.
You know it’s funny, Ridley Scott’s movies often have a “happy ending,” but he seems to define “happy” differently than most Hollywood directors.
***SPOILER ALERT***
For instance, the happy ending of Thelma and Louise is that they drive into the Grand Canyon.
The happy ending of Gladiator is that Russell Crowe dies, and so finally gets to join his family in the next life. Lucky thing, there being a next life.
The happy ending of Kingdom of Heaven is that after a fierce battle, the protagonist surrenders Jerusalem to the Muslims and prevents further bloodshed.
The happy ending of Hannibal is that the cannibalistic maniac gets away and the wheelchair-bound sicko gets eaten alive by ravenous boars.
The happy ending of Blade Runner is that Harrison Ford and Sean Young make it out of the apartment alive.
Anyway, you get the point.
***END SPOILERS***
Ridley Scott, it should be obvious to most, loves to explore a world, usually a world that isn’t often presented to us. And the thing that he seems to love the most is The Rules. The protagonist of the Ridley Scott movie is often thrust into a strange world with peculiar Rules that he or she must learn to follow, or else, more often than not, people die. When the protagonist learns to bend the rules to his or her advantage, he or she triumphs, even when the triumph involves their own death.
Well, enough of that.
Alison Lohman is terrific in Matchstick Men.
Also tonight, the first 30 minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I miss Karen Allen.
Empire of the Sun update
ps: I had forgotten that Ben Stiller was in this movie. How strange it is to see him show up.
Production design on the picture is staggering, as is Christian Bale’s performance
And now he’s Batman.
Does that mean in 10 years Haley Joel Osment will play Batman?