Cloverfield

The premise of Cloverfield is ingenious. The film is a mash-up of The Blair Witch Project and 1998's shameful remake of Godzilla, interpreted through the visual grammar of September 11th. Playing off this cultural landmark, the hoary cliches of the giant monster movie suddenly gain relevance. Every collapsing structure stands in for the Twin Towers, and every moment of heroism is a chance for the viewer to feel like one of the firefighters who risked their lives. A few reviews of Cloverfield have wondered if it's inappropriate or exploitative for this monster movie to call such specific echoes to a real-life tragedy. I don't think so, because every frame of Cloverfield indicates that this is the point. Like Spielberg's War of the Worlds, this is 9/11 porn. It zeros in on a mysterious, scary world (in this case, the irrevocable destruction of the American way of life), and, through objectification, allows the viewer to control the uncontrollable. Viewed this way, Cloverfield is hot.

As Cloverfield begins, viewers of the movie are informed, ostensibly by the military, that the footage they are about to see comes from a video camera found in a location formerly known as "Central Park." From there, the movie is composed entirely of video recorded by a group of young people (and their companions). The cameraman is an oblivious, obnoxious doofus named Hud. He's been tasked with videotaping a going-away party for his much more successful best friend, Rob. When a Godzilla-sized monster attacks New York, ending the party and forcing the youngsters to flee for their lives, Hud continues shooting, documenting the confusion, the chaos, and the destruction. "People are gonna want to know, you know, how it all went down," he boasts. That you can almost hear the cash register going off in Hud's mind is a credit to T.J. Miller's performance.

Blair Witch and its imitators all had a moment where you wanted the person holding the camera to put it down and do something rather than observe it. Cloverfield is not immune to this problem, but, because of the 9/11 echoes, most of Hud's footage actually feels important enough that recording it is doing something. What's more, the movie is the first of its ilk to make the footage accurately reflect the character holding the camera. I became enamored with Hud's dumb, well-meaning POV. He's so committed to his new identity as a documentarian, that he even records the newscasts on the television. As things grow more dire, Hud uses the camera to distance himself from the experience, shielding himself from the horror. And he's not alone. The movie glibly shows others on the street, taking pictures and video of the carnage with their cellphones.

Cloverfield never makes a comment about this behavior, but that's just as well. It's a keen observation about the way Americans experience things in this age of audio/visual gizmos, and bogging the movie down with some didactic message would only cheapen the verisimilitude with which it captures the times. Besides, the movie itself is a self-contained message about the Videodrome-like way we've begun to see reality. In 1999, Blair Witch ended with its characters storming a haunted house, their cameras aimed in front of them like weapons that could ward off the evil spirits through objective documentation. Almost ten years later, Cloverfield ends with its characters pointing the camera at themselves. Having lost their very notion of themselves in this hostile landscape, they use the camera to tell the world that they are. It's a fascinating representation of America's anxiety about its identity and this weird, ever-growing tendency to document and preserve American culture in the face of its downfall (why else would we keep seeing the release of shitty TV shows on DVD while the multiplex churns with post-apocalyptic dread?).

But cultural, shmultural. One can point to any number of terrible films to make the same points. Cloverfield is also a terrific thrill-ride. As buildings quake and infrastructure starts exploding, the young partiers are forced screaming into the streets with the rest of the city and from there, the peril doesn't let up. The plot unfolds quickly, but intelligibly. There's just enough time to register an important event before matters of survival force Hud and the viewer elsewhere. The movie continually raises the stakes and every time it seems the danger is understandable, there's something new up the movie's sleeve; you're never certain what fresh horrors await the protagonists. Since the POV is so limited, the viewer is as trapped and helpless as the characters, and the mystery at the heart of the film becomes both compelling and scary. I began obsessively scanning every frame for clues about the monster's appearance or its origin, half-wishing I could rewind it for a better look.

Cloverfield's not without some problems,[1] particularly with its main characters. They never quite gel as a believable group of people, and Michael Stahl-David, as Rob, doesn't have the charisma or the cockiness the role requires. But these issues are minute compared to the film's accomplishments. After seeing Cloverfield, telling a story through real-time footage recorded by one of its characters seems less a gimmick (as it did in Blair Witch) than a legitimate style of filmmaking in its own right. One wonders what a master of pacing and slow character studies like Polanski could do with this technique.[2] Cloverfield manages to push this exciting, emerging form of cinematic storytelling forward and make the giant monster movie new and exciting again.[3] The former accomplishment, with its observations about how we interact with media technology, makes it an important film. The latter makes it a thrilling, slight experience, unlike, say, the morning of September 11th.

[1]Complaints that Hud's camera has a longer battery life or can withstand more damage than any camcorder known to man are valid, but seem churlish; it's like complaining about how the sound effects in Star Wars shouldn't be there because there's no sound in space.

[2] I have yet to see De Palma's Redacted or Romero's Diary of the Dead which both reportedly use this same technique, but, despite liking some of their work, I hesitate to call either of these directors "masters."

[3] Michael Giacchino's end credits music suite, Roar!, makes it worth staying through the closing credits. This piece of music belies the film's true inspiration.

Day 87: Cat People

This was my first viewing of a Val Lewton project. I received the Val Lewton Horror Collection as a gift, and Cat People was a nice drink to follow the awful Rumor Has It.... Fun, kinda sexy, and genuinely creepy (the creepy/sexy aspects are surprising to me, given the age of the film and, most importantly, how jaded I am), Cat People is about a woman who fears that if she kisses a man, she will turn into a Cat Person and destroy them. This becomes a problem when she marries a well-meaning but dopey man. The film is like a werewolf tale with an interesting wrinkle of overt sexuality rather than subtextual, and notable that the "monster" is never seen.

Indeed, all the pyrotechnics and horrific monster images are gone from this film, instead it boils down the horrific aspects of its premise to the primal social aspects and exploits these to good effect; the film is primarily made up of scenes in which people talk to one another. There are absolutely fantastic suspense sequences, the standouts being a woman walking down the street, being pursued by a Cat Person and the same woman in a swimming pool in a dark room, as a large cat-thing stalks outside. The "monster," when it's seen, is clouded or shadowy, and, as a result, the creepiness quotient goes up. The solid writing doesn't hurt as all of the monsterishness could almost be seen as resultant from the characters' incompatible psyches.

I'm too tired to dig into the depths of this film. Let it be known that I enjoyed Cat People tremendously. Also let it be known that five more days of a movie a day make me happy.

Day 82: The Crush

I caught this on HBO in a hotel room in the middle of Kansas last night. About a 14 year old girl played by Alicia Silverstone who has a "crush" (in quotes because anytime someone says the word "crush" in this movie, they say it as if it is the most significant word in the English language, and I want to honor this choice) on 28 year old Cary Elwes, The Crush is a watchable, though middling, piece of tawdry fluff. When Elwes rejects Silverstone's advances, she goes a bit crazy and starts destroying his life to gain his affections. The proceedings feel alternately arbitrary, convenient, or preordained, so much so, that I thought that the movie might first have sprung to life as a trailer and extra material was then shot to pad it out to feature length. The movie also commits a cinematic crime, paying homage, I guess, to the peeping tom closet scene in Blue Velvet by ripping it off.

At the end of the movie, society's order is regained by Silverstone being committed to a looney (or, if you will, a "crushing") bin and the movie indicates that she's now replaced Elwes with a young male doctor as the object of her homicidal affections. A closeup of Silverstone smirking tells us that things are not changing. She's going to "crush" on this guy and the cycle will begin anew. I thought about how many horror movies end this way and I suddenly realized that one probable reason many teenagers get into horror movies is this aspect of them: worlds where things are fixed and permanent. An external reflection of their notion that things won't, can't, and shouldn't change, no matter how bad they may be. I'm sure that this was present during my own horror fixation as a teenager (lately I've found the genre's good/evil conflicts too based in religious ideas for my liking [seriously, can someone please do something about how frightening the prospect of NO God, NO pure good or evil is?]).

Extrapolating pedestrian and amateur insights into my teenage psche to a larger population aside, this is a movie about a 28 year old man who can't outwit a smarter-than-average 14 year old girl. Elwes's character makes so many bumbling, idiotic choices in dealing with the girl who's "crushing" on him, that I was as far from sympathetic with his character as I'm capable of being. Yeah, I mean, I get that people make dumb choices in life, but rarely do they make choices that result in such a neat and tidy narrative. The plot's leanness is one of the movie's most redeeming features, but that's a backhanded compliment. I liked that the movie went from rote plot point to rote plot point in such a clean and efficient manner, since it clearly had no insights, no new observations, no scares, nor, really, anything to say.

I kind-of forgot that movies like this one existed...

Day 55: The Celebration

Before I begin, I'd like to note that someone clicked on a link to this blog after Googling the phrase:  what general belief about pride and prejudice are the makers of this film version trying to dispel and/or what interpretation are they putting in its place?  In answer to the question without having seen the movie, I'd venture a guess that they're trying to dispel the belief that pride and prejudice are bad things and that the interpretation they're putting in its place is that Donald Sutherland is, in actuality, a mushroom.  Just a guess.

It was a deliberate, cheeky choice on my part to watch this movie with the intent on reviewing it today, Thanksgiving 2005.  I confess to finding the whole thing superbly ironic that, on a day when most Americans are gathering together with their families to make merry and consume, I've got to write a review about this particular movie.  And, while The Celebration is a movie about the nature of family and asserts the power of the family group, it's certainly not a feel-good reinforcement of the safety found in the warm embrace of one's family. If you're looking for something like that, I'd direct you to Jurassic Park or Mrs. Doubtfire.  Now leave us alone.

The Celebration is one of the Dogme films, Dogme '95 being a movement to strip the artifice from movie making in favor of filmmaking with a more direct, improvisational spirit.  It's a harsh, pointy movie in every way, from its splotchy, grotesque video, to the way it unravels the truth about the family in question.  The setup itself is confrontational: a large family gathers to celebrate the father's sixtieth birthday and the oldest son, Christian, uses this opportunity to level allegations of sexual abuse at his father.

But what happens after he speaks up is unique and honest.  The family barely bats an eye, unsure how to take the charges, whether as a joke or something serious to deal with.  They continue their gaudy meal and Christian, only slightly deterred, continues to bring the topic up.  After dealing with this for a certain amount of time, the family rises up against him, throwing him out of the birthday party so that they don't have to put up with his disturbances.  Even still, he's not done.  The movie milks the situation for bleak humor at every opportunity.  Everyone wants to enjoy the party, they want to be polite, but they're unsure how to react to Christian.

I enjoyed the way the movie depicted a family circling its wagons against a perceived threat, both at the beginning of the film and at the end.  And the style of the film is absolutely perfect for the material; jittery hand-held camera shots capture the intensity of the narrative, but the movie also knows when to be still.  Ulrich Thomsen, as Christian, is magnificent.  His blue eyes are both dewy and steely at the same time, and, accordingly, he plays the character as a man deeply hurt, but possessing enough inner strength to deal with his pain.

It's an angry movie, rife with confrontation and rage.  It's well acted and well produced, even under the strict Dogme requirements.  But, though it's so bleak, it's, really, a heartening testament to the notion that families protect themselves against anything threatening.  Even when the threat comes from within their own ranks, the movie's point is that they'll adapt in order to flush the intruder out.  As such, it feels as much an observant, character study as it does a film about biology, about the way the survival of humanity is so dependent on social structures and the safety net they provide.  For this reason, despite the rancor and screaming, it inspires far more comforting thoughts about the way families work for people than anything Chris Columbus has made.

Day 54: Cold Comfort Farm

Flora Poste's parents have just died (she wasn't close to them) and, as an aspiring writer, she wants to spend the next thirty years of her life accumulating life experiences that will enable her to write a book as good as Jane Austen's Persuasion. Her inheritance is paltry, though, and she is, thus, forced to confront the most important question all young aspiring artists face: How will I eat?

Luckily, she's offered a room on a farm owned by one of her distant relatives who, due to some mysterious goings on in the past, feels as if she owes a great debt to "Robert Poste's child". Flora, seeing this as an opportunity to gain some insight into the world, sets off to Cold Comfort Farm where she's confronted with a plethora of miserable, grimy characters living under the sway of a mysterious, traumatized matriarch. Refusing to succumb to their gloomy way of life, Flora reinvents this place, using insight and wit to inspire nearly everyone on the farm to enact a better life for themselves.

I liked Cold Comfort Farm well enough. I was pleasantly reminded of Beetlejuice throughout the film (something that would seem inexplicable on the surface) and I think it was because the two movies share a similar tone, moving from arch, gothic plot machinations to an outright parody of the same. But don't get me wrong, there's nary a severed head in Cold Comfort Farm. The tone of this film is light and breezy, broadly played, and of little consequence. Kate Beckinsale is great as Flora Poste, investing the role with intelligence and a great deal of charm. I enjoyed the way the movie poked fun at the character's literary aspirations, the movie depicting her writing with such bombast as to constantly refer to the sun as "the yellow orb". And it's wonderful that, for a movie about an upper class, urban character coming into a lower class, rural environment and changing everything so she's not quite so uncomfortable, the way Flora gets what she's looking for is to help other people with their own wishes.

But, I cannot deny, that amidst the fun, a grumpy little demon talked to me during this movie.It kept asking these questions like, "Hey, what if all the characters who lived on the farm were black? Wouldn't you say that this is just like one of those movies where the white people teach the black people how to assimilate and live properly?" And the answer to the question is, honestly, yes. As this is a story about cultural assimilation. Flora Poste brings a more "enlightened" world to the gloomy, uneducated place. She often balks at their backwardness.

But, then another demon, a happier one speaks up: "The farm is gloomy because the characters are obedient to traditions that can bring them nothing but gloom, and it's delightful to see their worlds brightened into something more aesthetically pleasing. And, you know, for the most part Flora simply gives the characters nothing more than a little education that inspires them to do things in a way that makes them happier. And everyone is much happier after she leaves. And, again, the characters really do want this change."



"Well most of them. The one who, ultimately, doesn't want the change is shipped off to an insane asylum."





"But then again, that's quite a good thing for this character and the character is pleased to be going."



"Yes, but isn't it odd that the main character affects so much change but she, herself, remains virtually untouched by them? Sure, she gives up being a writer and jumps into the arms of the guy with the coolest car around (so what if it happens to be a plane?) but, really, up until the very, very end of the movie, she never seems to gain anything from them and, in fact, this final turnaround in her character seems rather unlikely because she's been so unaffected by the other people. Don't you remember Walkabout where we agreed that the reason there was a failure for the two cultures to live peacefully was that the Colonists could take as much as they wanted from the Aborigines but had nothing to give in return? Isn't this part of the same problem?"

Then the happier demon replies by asking the grumpier demon out to dinner and they talk for all hours of the night about many, many things and eventually agree that the movie was a lot of fun to watch, regardless.

Day 51: Capote

Right, right: the acting by Philip Seymour Hoffman is phenomenal (that’s nothing new) and the movie’s got a boffo look and color palate that makes it seem like things are out of focus in a creepy, unsettling way.  But what really gives this movie its punch, what takes it beyond something for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s personal acting (and undoubtedly Oscar) reel, is the way it captures Kansas and the Midwest.  I can’t remember another movie that captured the feeling of the Midwest quite as well as this movie did.  It’s not just the romanticism of the wide open spaces or the banality thereof, but the casual, unthreatening way Chris Cooper’s KBI (Kansas Bureau of Investigation) officer threatens Truman Capote’s life while simultaneously allowing him to access investigation files.  The way Amy Ryan, as Cooper’s wife, cagily smiles at Capote, delighted to have a celebrity in her midst, but unable to fully express it.  The movie conveys not only the beauty and monotony of the landscape’s blight, but also the way the landscape inspires gentleness, even while its citizens are in the midst of overpowering emotions.

A great deal of this gentleness must be credited to Clifton Collins Jr., playing one of the killers featured in Capote’s In Cold Blood.  His Perry Smith is quietly reflective, lonely, and, very, very sad.  In this way, he’s the perfect rural foil for the flamboyant and effusively urban Capote and the actor excels at the role, holding his own against Hoffman.  He turns a confession scene late in the movie into a powerful moment about the triviality of murder.  Capote describes Smith as someone who might have, had circumstances been different, turned out much like himself and so, it’s clear that what we’re watching is Capote face part of himself.  Collins, as much as Hoffman, makes this interesting.

While noting this, it really is Hoffman’s movie all the way.  The movie faces two giant, cliché-ridden genre hurdles: the biopic and the struggling writer movie.  The movie clears both of them, mostly through the editing.  Much like the equally successful Ed Wood, the movie uses the microcosm of Capote’s research into In Cold Blood to illuminate the life of the man, rather than give us a sweeping account of his entire life.  As such, Capote is edited within an inch of its life to focus squarely on Capote’s perspective during this period in his life.  The writing is taken for granted, so there’s actually very little struggling, though events in the real-life make it impossible for him to finish his book.  Hoffman carries the film on his shoulders, disappearing into the role and capturing the essence of Truman Capote, if not pulling off an accurate impersonation.

The movie’s keenly observant about everything: from the details of a Kansas execution to the way Capote relates to his lover.  And it carries an impressive authenticity about its time and place due to the fact that all of the usual period “goods” (costuming, sets, etc.) are less interesting than the main conflict.  Still, for all its authenticity and observation, it’s a dreamy movie, languorously paced and soft on the eyes.  It’s a great biopic, finding exactly the right tone (in this case, it’s a counterpoint to Capote’s flamboyance) to elucidate the inner life of the person it’s focusing on.







Oh, and it’s always nice to see Bob Balaban.

Day 50: The Comedians of Comedy

The Comedians of Comedy is a fly-on-the wall documentary about four stand-up comedians on the road.  There's not much else to it.  Those looking for much insight into the life of a stand-up will be disappointed since the comedians seem wary of honestly examining their work or their lives without making fun of themselves for doing so (one sequence features Zach Galifianakis waxing about how comedy has gone too far toward slapstick, how he favors “the word” over falling down antics and then his chair breaks).  But that doesn’t matter because the one thing that unites all of these four comedians is their brazenly honest approach to comedy, so the acts themselves provide plenty of insight.  All four comedians are super-funny and the movie nicely conveys the feeling of spending a few days on the road with four people who are much funnier than you are.  In my case, that feeling expresses itself in a thin sheen of sweat from the exertion of laughing and a desire to take a shower.

We follow Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, Maria Bamford, and Zach Galifianakis, on a unique tour aimed at taking stand-up out of comedy clubs and into smaller, indie-rock venues.  The idea is to make the experience of watching stand-up closer to the way one watches the local music scene, away from exorbitant cover charges and two-drink minimums.  Oswalt, Posehn, and Bamford all tell horror stories about working in a traditional comedy club, some related to the awful environment and others about the types of comedians that work there.  

The movie, directed and edited by Michael Blieden, is structured well, focusing on each day of the tour in a way that allows thoughtfully mingled concert footage with backstage or on-the-road footage.  It captures the backstage feeling well with grainy, gritty video in the darkness of indie rock clubs, blown out irises in the tour bus, and dim, flat footage of generic hotel rooms.  I was particularly taken by some of the concert footage which featured odd angles on the faces of the comedians, very close and canted wildly.  It felt like the right expression for the material, often screamingly outrageous.   I also enjoyed the way the movie would often show its subjects talking about something that had happened to them earlier in the day and then flash back to the event in question.

None of this would matter if the four comedians weren’t fun to watch.  They are.  I was blown away by a bit done by Zach Galifianakis.  Dressed up in olde timey garb, he does a traditional stand-up routine as if he’d time traveled from the 18th century (“Is this thing on?  What is this thing?”).  The tense, sometimes antagonistic camaraderie is entertaining, especially when they’re riffing together, piling joke on top of joke or bear pun on top of bear pun.  It’s interesting to see Bamford, who seems somewhat shy in the backstage footage, let loose on stage with a horrifyingly funny pterodactyl shriek.  And then there’s the faux gay porn movie that Posehn and Galifianakis make, something the movie doesn’t reveal in its entirety but exists in all its shameful glory on the DVD.

Speaking of the DVD, this is a Netflix movie, financed and released by the company.  It’s unfortunate to see some Netflix banners in the concert footage, but, still, I like what they’ve done here.  The DVD contains a few deleted scenes (that puppy is fucking adorable), but more importantly, they’ve included video of some of the stand-out stand-ups Oswalt and Bamford mention during a radio interview.  Oswalt laments while naming these people that no one will have heard of them because they haven’t gotten the exposure, their innovative work aside.  Stand-up being a specialty genre anyway, it’s heartening to see these people getting this exposure through a kind-of direct marketing via Netflix.  

So, yeah, this is a lot like a concert movie and a backstage, behind the scenes tour movie got smashed together in a boating accident.  It’s not particularly ground breaking, but it’s well done and extremely funny.  These are the right comedians to document since they are honest on and off the stage.  At times, it seems like an ideology with them.  Posehn recounts a story of his early years as a comedian where a fellow comic advised him not to mention that his dad died during a joke because it was too depressing for the audience.  Posehn is repulsed at the idea of lying about his life to make everyone feel better.  The movie strays from this overt honesty in one out-of-place montage that comes way too soon, not giving us the chance to learn who these people are before glossing over details (and it’s smarmy to boot).  But, for the most part, it’s right there with the four, wisely allowing them to speak for themselves since, when they do, they kill.

Day 48: C.H.U.D.

So after all my caterwauling and gnashing of the teeth about strong female voices in cinema, fate has forced my hand, denying me Cold Comfort Farm and replacing it with C.H.U.D.  Oh, Movie Gods, you mock me so!

Before saying anything else, let me just state that, for all its weaknesses, I enjoyed C.H.U.D.  It features a god awful score, lacks any verisimilitude when it comes to its homeless characters, and contains some glaringly out of place genre moments that stick out as being motivated solely by commercial interests*.  The pace of the movie stops dead halfway through as an expositional conference room scene stretches on into infinity, repeating the same beats ad nausea.  The look of the film is also a problem.  When the characters enter the subterranean dwellings of homeless people and CHUDs alike, it’s far too bright down there and looks exactly like the set it is.  More than once as John Heard and Daniel Stern clomped about in the sewers, I wondered what could have been done with the gritty, disgusting environment given either more time for the makers of the film to exploit their setting or a more talented D.P.  And, hence, the slickness gives it a feeling of being too cheap.  

Nevertheless, the script is a fun, straight-forward horror script which also contains similarly straight-forward allegorical elements about the neglect of the homeless problem in New York City by the governing bodies.  The characters are appropriately arch, and the script uses them in interesting ways.  I was delighted when Daniel Stern’s hippy Soup Kitchen proprietor joined forces with Christopher Curry’s square police officer Captain Bosch to fight the oppressive forces of the government.  The performances are enjoyably campy; I really enjoyed most of Daniel Stern’s hammy performance and how John Heard looked rumpled all the time.  And I think there’s something inherently creepy about a monster in the sewers, the place where we flush all of our shame.

According to its page on imdb, C.H.U.D. came out in 1984 which would put it out in the same year as Ghostbusters.  I think it’s instructive to compare the movies, since they deal with an uneasy dread that, secretly, something is very wrong with New York City.  And both deal with conflicts of local control vs. national control and come to similar conclusions.

Ghostbusters, being the more mainstream of the two (by far), offers the American Dream as the solution: small business owners solve the (in this case, supernatural [but I believe the movie actually treats the supernatural as an inevitable, natural force as it would if it dealt with tornadoes or rain]) problem with industry and invention and make themselves rich (and famous) in the process.  Their biggest obstacle is the Environmental Protection Agency, represented by Walter Peck, who’s convinced that the whole thing is both phony and a danger to the public health.  When he shuts down the Ghostbusters’ containment grid, he believes he’s helping the public, but is, in fact, endangering them in his zeal to assert his governmental authority over the business.  Faced with a choice between siding with the local Ghostbusters or with the national EPA, the Mayor of New York places his faith in the local boys.  Ghostbusters posits that New York’s problems are unavoidable and can be solved through local free enterprise without interference from dickless government agents.

Entrenched in genre and, thus, outside the mainstream, C.H.U.D. has the ability to be far more cynical.  C.H.U.D. states that the problem is, in fact, a perversion of both humanity and nature and that the national government itself is responsible for the secret problem in New York City.  Indeed, the real monster in the film is the national government since the movie ignores the ultimate fate of the mutated monstrosities, choosing to focus its climax on the way the New Yorkers oust the national government from its seat of power (uniting, for instance, the square cop with the hippy liberal, both locals, against the national forces).  C.H.U.D. ultimately offers no solutions to the monster problem in favor of offering solutions to conspiracy and, as a result, is all the weaker for it.  It serves merely as a cautionary tale about the dangers of national forces meddling in local affairs with monsters representing the result.

And, so, C.H.U.D. isn’t super.  It’s, at best, a mediocre film, but there’s enough wit and cleverness on display in the writing and the acting to make it a fun dose of mediocrity.  Oh, and John Heard has one of the more hilarious freak-out scenes I’ve ever seen.  When he and Stern stumble across some mutilated bodies in the sewers, he tries to run, Stern tries to stop him, and they both fall down.  Then, the two tumble about until Heard calms down a bit.

*I’m thinking particularly about a clumsy moment when Lauren, the main female character, finds a mutilated dog in a space underneath the basement of the building in which she lives, calls the cops, and then takes a shower.  The shower drain is clogged and so she attempts to clear it with a wire coat hanger (this is actually rather interesting imagery since, prior to this scene, we’ve learned that the character is pregnant and has discussed terminating the pregnancy with her boyfriend).  A jet of blood spurts out from the drain and onto her.  I don’t object, necessarily, to the showering here (illogical as it may seem given the course of events and exploitative as it may be) but rather to the unconvincing physics behind the jet of blood and the way this scene is dismissed by the rest of the movie as if it hadn’t happened.  In Lauren’s next scene, she’s casually arranging flowers with no sign of disturbance from previously being showered by blood.  This is clearly a “shock” moment, a cheap one, capitalizing on the vulnerability inherent in bathing, and, abortion symbolism aside, adds absolutely nothing to the film.

Day 17: Corpse Bride

At once an exhilarating visual feast and a disappointing, shallow story, Corpse Bride is successful in creating an exciting world, but not in exploring it. Its main problem lies in its protagonists, passive characters who mostly wait for circumstances to revolve in their favor. The movie has a few good moments, but fails to capitalize on them. And yet, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable movie, probably because it is internally consistent. That and it’s very, very pretty.

I have a condition that is either genetically based or firmly rooted in my cultural upbringing. I like animated skeletons. It’s not something I have any control over. When I was a kid and saw an old Disney cartoon featuring dancing skeletons, I was delighted. Later, I became obsessed with the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion skeletons from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts. There are a lot of animated skeletons in this movie and they are very well designed and have just the right lighting, highlighting the texture of the bones and giving them a nice expressive color. There’s a pleasing weight to the skeletons, too, an effect that only stop motion can produce. I realize I’m spending a paragraph here talking just about the fucking skeletons, but, again, I have no control over this. There were so many dancing, singing skeletons in this movie, it was like something out of a dream I had when I was ten.

The premise is storybook simple, wonderfully so. Victor (voiced by Johnny Depp), is engaged to Victoria (who has the seemingly inevitable corset scene). It’s an arranged marriage in which the transfer of wealth benefits both of the two youngsters’ families. At the wedding rehearsal, Victor stumbles with his wedding vows to the point that the minister declares the wedding cannot go on until he can remember his words. Feeling the burden of saving these two families, Victor heads out to the woods, where, while practicing saying his vows, he inadvertently proposes to the corpse of a jilted bride. She whisks him away to the land of the dead, as she believes they are married.

The movie is clever in the way it paints the land of the living in grey, Victorian-era drabness while the land of the dead is a colorful, bawdy place. The animation is as top-notch and as inventive as it was in The Nightmare Before Christmas. But the story itself, while seeming like it should be a simple affair, is pretty stagnant. When Victor is taken to the land of the dead, he attempts one act of trickery to get him back to the land of the living, but after that, he mostly just sits around and waits for others to help him out of his predicament. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not particularly engaging here. The Corpse Bride is rendered with a striking scariness when she first rises, but her scariness disappears as quickly as Jack Nicholson goes crazy in The Shining. After a while, the rules governing the two worlds seem arbitrary and confusing (a bad step for any movie dealing in supernatural elements like this movie does) and, after we’ve revisited the same locations again and again, the two worlds feel too insular.

As much as it pains me to say this (being a huge Danny Elfman fan), the musical numbers don’t come off very well here. In fact, they’re a bit out of place. The big, bold, and brassy song that setups the back story to the Corpse Bride is the only song that seems to fit into the milieu correctly, appropriate to the New Orleans-esque land of the dead. The other numbers feel shoehorned in. The opening number suffers from this quite a bit. The characters singing are Victor & Victoria’s parents, stuffy, society people and they don’t look like characters that sing. Their song falls flat and goes on far too long. The other problem that the musical numbers have is something that has been bothering me since I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory earlier this year. I don’t believe that Tim Burton has a knack for staging musical scenes. The direction of both Charlie and Corpse Bride’s songs felt flat to me, not in tune with the music Elfman had written. The character and camera moves aren’t kinetic enough to carry the songs, and that’s too bad (particularly on the brassy one).

These problems are not to say that I dislike the movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit (see: skeletons). There’s a lot of cleverness to it. I really enjoyed the maggot character who talked like Peter Lorre and the way the dead came into the land of the living at one point in the film (though the reason they do so is, ultimately, boring). If I believed in star ratings, (I don’t) on a four star scale, this movie felt like the perfect three-star movie. Not enough to really sink your teeth into, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, but it goes through the paces enjoyably enough while you’re watching it for its running time (in this case, a paltry 82 minutes). I wish that it had connected on a simpler level with its very simple story, since many of the plot machinations served to literalize and dispel a lot of the magic. Perhaps it would have been better as a short-form film.

Day 12: Carnal Knowledge

Sandy: You can't make fucking your life's work.

While watching Carnal Knowledge, it struck me how perfect an actor Jack Nicholson is for director Mike Nichols. Both men seem to have an impeccable understanding for the comedy found in every moment of high drama and the drama found in every moment of comedy. Carnal Knowledge is full of moments where Nicholson says something that makes you laugh while it simultaneously makes you cringe. It’s a raw, nerve-jangling movie about misogyny, sexual dysfunction, and male ego that pulls no punches. It’s powerful and honest from moment to moment, but there’s something ultimately off-putting about it as a whole that keeps it from gelling into a sum greater than its parts.

The movie opens, not unlike a Woody Allen movie, with credits over a black screen. It’s hard to put the similarity out of your mind as two men talk over the credit sequence about the kind of women they would like to have in their lives. The two men are Sandy, played by Art Garfunkel, and Jonathan, played by Nicholson. At the movie’s start, Sandy is nerdy, shy around women, and virginal. Jonathan is brash, confident, and equally virginal (though he hides this quality in himself behind a false bravado). The structure of the movie presents vignettes from their lives (beginning in college and ending in middle age), during which they fall in love, pursue relationships with various women, and break up with them.

This structure is compelling, but it is also one of the problems with the movie. The jumps in time are followed by some laboring on the script’s part to bring the viewer up to speed on where the two are in their lives and what girls they’re with. At these moments, the movie’s dialogue, otherwise elegant and stylish, is too expositional. Indeed, the overall pace of the movie is interrupted at these time shifts, since the movie has to pause while we get our bearings. It’s an admirable concept, depicting the characters’ lives as defined by their relationships with women, but the execution didn’t work for me.

What really does work in the movie is Nicholson. He’s a joy to watch as he sinks his teeth into the script (and at times, the scenery), creating a character that is realistically angry at women. He’s not a two-dimensional cad, but a very, very confused man. When a woman tells him that all she wants is him, Nicholson screams, “I’m taken!..... by me!” The beat between the two lines is both absurdly funny and bitterly honest. Art Garfunkel also has a nice turn here, surprisingly convincing as Nicholson’s nebbishy foil. He is equally unjust to women, though he means well and hides his anger in sublimation.

And that’s just it, the two characters mean well, but they suffer from misogynistic tendencies; they treat women as sexual objects first, trophies second, and actual people never. This, too, is reminiscent of Woody Allen’s films, but Jules Feiffer’s script doesn’t let these two off the hook the way Allen does. Where Allen’s films surrender to the misogyny of their main characters, at best (celebrate it at worst), Carnal Knowledge examines the results of the misogyny, not just on those it hurts, but on the men who exhibit it. At one point, Nicholson launches into an angry tirade at his live-in girlfriend and then collapses and asks her to leave him. “I’d marry you if you left me,” he sighs.

Another problem in the movie has is some stylistic choices by Nichols. The script is somewhat stagy and Nichols is certainly adept at transforming stage work to film (I’ve only seen the 1st half of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but that was more than enough to impress me), but here, for every neat trick that works there’s one that doesn’t. It’s emotionally resonant when a prostitute, kneeling between Jack Nicholson’s legs while reciting a monologue, is framed in front of wallpaper that is constantly moving upward (lending the appearance that she’s going down (heh) the whole time she is speaking) but not so much when Nicholson wines and dines a woman and the restaurant revolves around their table.

At all other times, Nichols’s direction is fantastic. This is first an actor’s movie and then a writer’s movie, but Nichols is able to put his own stamp on it. The camera setups are lovely and the blocking of the actors in relation to the camera is delightful. The characters are constantly moving into the foreground, the background, off camera, into light, and out of light in accordance with their emotional state. There’s a close-up of Candice Bergen laughing and laughing as she flirts with both characters that goes on so long it crosses the line between comedy and drama at least twice.

Carnal Knowledge is a fantastic movie in fits and starts. It’s a pity that these bits couldn’t have come together, for if they had, it probably would have been one of the all-time greats. As it is, it’s worth it just to see Jack Nicholson at the top of his game and a script that never flinches. Some of its sexual politics are a bit dated in this day and age, but the emotions on display have, unfortunately, never gone out of style.