Tropic Thunder

Tropic Thunder is great. It's unbelievably good. It's, by far, the best mainstream, studio-released comedy I've seen since Anchorman, and it stands taller than that insane Will Ferrell vehicle. It's howlingly funny. And, unlike a lot of recent comedies that, while very funny, are terrible, amateurish movies (*ahem* 40 Year Old Virgin), it actually works as a good, silly movie too. Tropic Thunder has discipline, exactitude. Its plot takes surprising, inventive turns. With very few exceptions, its scenes are pitched perfectly, the comic timing is spot-on, and the movie entices with less rather than more. For once, I wanted to see more of these people riffing with one another. I was excited about seeing deleted scenes on a future DVD. And, around the time Tom Cruise, as a megalomaniacal gazillionaire financing the titular film-within-the-film, started randomly dancing, I couldn't wait to see the movie again. What a relief! What a wonder! Ben Stiller deserves an MTV movie award or a Commie (my fictional Comedy awards trophy) or something for the direction and writing here. Forget it, that's a half-measure. Let's give the script, by Stiller, Justin Theroux(!), and Etan Cohen, an Oscar nomination. It's a near-perfect example of ensemble comedy writing. Everyone has a moment, every character works, and the supporting players are interesting, well-observed, but don't overwhelm the movie. The plot is silly and earnest and perfect for the comedic characters that populate it. What sentiment exists in the film is as hyper and crazed as its characters, and, thus, the growth of its characters is earned, but never schmaltzy. When they have big revelations about themselves, it induces laughter, not eye-rolling. And the movie is paced well. It maintains its arch, manic tone for the entirety of its runtime; the laughs are good, respectable, intelligent laughs, and they happen throughout. Tropic Thunder is great, great, great.

The film is a joke on Hollywood and celebrity culture, taking potshots at Vietnam war films and the hardships of making movies, but it's not a smart, clever satire in the vein of Robert Altman's The Player. If anything, the film's plot and tone has more in common with the broad, crass brushstrokes of Airplane! or Three Amigos! (perhaps the movie should have an exclamation point at the end of its title too?); it's more spoof than satire. It focuses on a group of vain, whiny actors, during the making of a prestige Vietnam film. After their incompetence ruins an extremely expensive shot, the director takes them into the jungle in order to exert more control of them and get better performances. Soon, they become stranded in the wilderness and must find their way back to civilization. Meanwhile, they face a very real threat from a group of local drug manufacturers who've confused them with DEA agents. The line between fantasy and reality is blurry to these actors, particularly Stiller's action movie star, and some aren't sure if what's going on is real or part of the movie-making process. This, of course, owes a debt to Amigos, but this film casts a wider net. It mocks not just the clueless actors and production crew of the film, but brings in the equally clueless agents and money men of the Hollywood system. Here, it finds great comedic treasures in the negotiations between Tom Cruise's gazillionaire and Matthew McConaughey's agent character, a scene of such delightful insanity that I fear nothing in deeming it a classic. The film is loud, but shows bravery in screaming about the insanity of Hollywood. It's a world where it is perfectly logical to think a virtuoso, white actor might dye his skin to play an African American, and a world where he would thereby get the role over all the talented African American actors out there. Pointing this out is funny enough. Having this actor embrace another African American actor and lament the 400 year suffering of "their people" is gravy.

So, while the film is more broad than subtle, it works in a way that movies of this ilk rarely do. It isn't content to just deconstruct or mock the tropes of the films it targets or the behind-the-scenes archetypical characters that are its subject, though it most certainly does this. However, like Airplane!, Thunder, both mocks and celebrates the cliches it skewers. Through derision, it actually rediscovers what made these moments or these characters meaningful in the first place. When Robert Hays successfully lands the plane at the end of Airplane!, it's a joke on the many Airport films of the 70s, sure, but it's nevertheless a delight to see this very silly character triumph over adversity, a delight that another trite Airport movie could not have achieved. Here, seeing a crew of American actors making their way to a helicopter in the jungles of Asia while under enemy fire works in much the same way. Scenes of this nature are so overdone, so overused that the audience laughs when the sound effects fade out and a moaning woman wails away over depictions of violence, and yet amidst the laughter comes concern and real, honest tension. Working in this way--being both a send-up and a celebration--is a very hard line to toe. With too much silliness, you're just watching Scary Movie 4 or Meet the Spartans or Walk Hard, movies that seem to think a reference to a film, inverted somehow, is a joke. Throw in too much drama, and the comedy can float away while the film hits the important beats. Video store shelves are choked with the remains of films that failed to walk this line successfully, some directed by or starring Ben Stiller himself. And yet, with Tropic Thunder, he pulls it off masterfully.

He does not do so without faults. Stiller, the actor, is the weakest link here; he's very clearly not up to the task of acting alongside his ensemble (particularly Robert Downey Jr.); he plays his Tug Speedman with far too much jokiness to invest in the character (after the movie was over, I wished that Cruise had also played Stiller's role in the film... it would have taken the movie to even loonier heights). He's a Saturday Night Live goof on the notion of an action star, and his scenes are the most mawkish, the most obvious. He's a distraction. Stiller is protected by a brilliant ensemble (hey, Jack Black is funny again, everyone!) and his solo scenes are still sharply written, despite his lackluster execution. This is fortunate, as otherwise, he may very well have sunk his own movie in one or two scenes. The movie also nearly overwhelms at the end with one too many climaxes. But, it's undeniably wonderful to see these clowns come through for each other in a pinch, and just as it starts to seems as if the movie has no more ideas but will continue needlessly, it ends. Anyway, the rest of the movie is so maniacally entertaining, with such an enjoyable, crazed tone, that its final moments of largesse are eminently forgivable.

It is, perhaps, just as ineffable to dissect the success or failure of comedy as it is to create it. Sometimes the joy of watching a successful comedy comes solely from watching good craftsmen ply their trade--Duck Soup, for instance, isn't necessarily "about anything," but it is a treat from beginning to end. I'm not sure that Tropic Thunder has a central point or thesis other than Hollywood is made up of a collection of selfish weirdoes. And I doubt any thesis one could pull out of this confection would shed much light on the moment when Jack Black bites into a live bat in order to get his heroin back or the brilliant, understated straight-man work done by Jay Baruchel as an unknown actor forced to contend with these massively insecure superstars. The film merely takes its heightened, exaggerated characters and puts them through one hilarious grind after the next, punishing them for their arrogance and self-absorption. And, still, there's an affection for them, a sense that what they do, however self-aggrandizing it may be, has value, or is, somehow, at its core, part of everyone's experience with the world. Is that true? I don't know. I don't care. Tropic Thunder takes some very good comedic actors and puts them in some great moments at the service of a clever, funny plot. It does this extremely well, and, in so doing, it's the best Hollywood movie of the summer.

Would be a good double feature with: Blazing Saddles

Oil!

When There Will Be Blood is over, on first reflection, it feels as if it's said nothing. The film has no immediately apparent over-arching thesis that people (myself included) love to discuss at breakfast tables or on internet forums, nor does it seem like a movie which would yield treasures after applying the regular subtextual analysis that often makes sense of difficult films. Over time, it retains this impenetrability, but it ceases to matter so much. The movie is so good doing what it does, it's enough that it simply is. And, anyway, as the experience of watching this great work dissolves into memory, it becomes clear that what makes it impenetrable is not that it is saying nothing, but that it is saying so much.

The film tracks the ascension of misanthropic, super-capitalist Daniel Plainview from silver miner to hyper-wealthy oil tycoon in late 19th and early 20th century America. The main thrust of the movie's plot details how Plainview harvests the oil underneath a rustic, undeveloped California town. As the oil company infastructure moves in, a conflict brews between Plainview and Eli, the local minister who wishes to harness some of Daniel's wealth and power for his fledgling church. Through this, the film manages to explore themes of family (particularly focusing on brothers, fathers, and sons), privacy, self-deception, loyalty, greed, wealth, poverty, language, life, death, religion, and capitalism. That it manages to touch on all of these themes without feeling overwhelmed in the slightest is one of its many great achievements. The writing is as sharp, intimate, and multi-textured as any great novel.

With the film's main conflict, one might expect it to become arch or mythic--Capitialism versus Christianity, get yer tickets now!--like something found in, say, a Sergio Leone film. In this way, There Will Be Blood certainly has its moments, but it's more interested in the characters than the competing philosophies. Over and over again, Anderson teases the line of allegory, but refuses to define his two main players solely by their beliefs. These are people, not caricatures, and, as they both seethe and roil with the anger they feel for the other, they, realistically, supress their feelings and go on with their business. It's easy to spot that their business is the same--themselves--but Anderson's too clever to simply make some glib point about the commonalities between Capitalism and Christianity and think that's a movie-worthy point to hang his film on. No, he's found something much more captivating in Plainview himself.

Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis's rendition of Daniel Plainview is a stunning and, I would say, wholly new creation. At times, he's some sort-of capitalist, Frankenstein monster, a simulacrum of humanity cobbled together from competition and greed. But the portrayal goes deeper. He has an adopted son who he clearly cares for, and the anxiety he feels when his son stands in the way of his financial success makes him endearing. His indifference to the suffering of others inspires rage. But through it all, he knows what he wants and is so unflinchingly determined to get it, that the sheer force of his personality compels an unwavering attention. The movie reflects this, zeroing in on Plainview with the long-take intensity of an interrogator. And, yet, despite the fact that the movie runs for over two and a half hours and Plainview is nearly always onscreen, he remains an enigmatic character, his psychology as foreign as a Martian's. He's presented as a man who fiercely guards his privacy, but it feels like he's hiding himself against us, the audience. Or maybe Anderson's camera is bearing down on him so fervently, that he can't help but retaliate with a dogged insistence that he need not show everything there is to him.[1] Whatever the case, the creation is a terrifying mystery. And remains so.

The movie's conclusion is disorienting--there's a jump of location and many years' time between it and the portion of the film that precedes it. While debate rages over its merit and its meaning, it is undeniably powerful and would be as challenging an ending to a film as any in recent memory if No Country for Old Men hadn't also come out last year. There's a sick and perverse joy in watching the angry, disenfranchised Plainview, who has attained such wealth that he can afford to isolate himself from the rest of society, emerge as a full-blown, alcohol-fuelled monster. In isolation, he reverts to his former self as the rugged, lonely silver miner but absent the goals that drove him to form lasting relationships with other human beings or the physical trials that distracted him from his repressed rage. Daniel Day Lewis, completely unleashed, embodies this rage with a mad performance for the ages. He stomps about, drools, vigorously eats a steak with his hands, and screams his dialogue with the gusto of someone who enjoys feeling righteous indignation more than serenity. If this performance and the final scene seem to lift the movie off of the tracks, it seems better to blame the tracks than this fearless, unhinged moment of cinema.

Throughout, one can feel Anderson as a master at the top of his game. The movie's so assured in every aspect and unfolds with such density of thought, that, critical thought be damned, I couldn't help but fall in love with it. As every moment rolls by, burned into the celluoid with a single-minded ferocity that mirrors the character it's depicting, the intensity is so eminently watchable, so pleasureful to look at, that it's almost nauseating. All of Anderson's work has this energy, this joie de cinema, but it's never felt so fully earned as it does here. In their structure or their execution, his past work pointed, at times, to the past successes of Altman or Scorsese. There Will Be Blood points to only Paul Thomas Anderson and, in doing so, to the future.

Would Make a Good Double Feature With: The Wages of Fear

[1] Note that this is one of those performances that is so good, you start referring to the character as if he was really being filmed as he lived his life.

Day 84: Two Mules for Sister Sara

It's, apparently, time for a Shirley MacLaine double feature. She was the wife of a dying businessman in Being There and here she plays the titular Sister Sara. She's in Mexico, a nun on the run from the French army sometime in the cowboy days. Clint Eastwood, playing his rough, laconic loner cowboy character, shows up and saves her from some would-be rapist banditos, and thus begins the classic "I hate you while I become attracted to you" relationship story. They do the usual Amazon Queen-style sniping at one another as they head toward Mexican revolutionary headquarters. He's upset that she requires so much care. She's mad that he's so uncaring.

So, off they go into the familiar looking deserts, on horses and mules. And it's swift and paced well, with a growing uncertainty over Sister Sara's true identity that has a nice payoff. And a scene in which Eastwood, drunk, has to shoot some dynamite to blow up a bridge is funny and exciting. Plus, the ending of the film is smart in the way it doesn't labor over the ultimate fate of a stormed fort. This is a movie about two people and it cuts to the moment most important to them while a Mexican army does its thing. The movie's also nice in the way it examines Eastwood's standard character from the vantage point of him being alcoholic.

But, really, my interest in this film? Ennio Morricone scored it. Here he adds donkey sounds made by clever instrumentation to his collection of Western musical sounds, which previously included whistling, musical watches, coyote howls, and screaming. A few years ago, I thought it would be interesting to try and watch every movie that features a Morricone score. I don't take this goal seriously since the man's scored like 8,000,000 movies, but I was grateful that this movie, chosen at random from what was playing on cable television, allowed me to cross one more Morricone scored off the vast list. I was also grateful that it was so funny, well-paced, and exciting. It also features a machete to the face and a man set on fire!

Day 56: The Time of the Wolf

A lot of apocalypse movies focus on "survivors," people who size up the situation and find that there's benefit to be found in the destruction of society.  Watching these industrious folk take advantage of the freshly wiped societal slate to build their version of a utopia (Dawn of the Dead) or maybe survive through brute force and manipulation (Mad Max 2 & Beyond Thunderdome) is always pleasurable.  It allows one to project themselves into the scenario and conjure up a wistful world where survival seems, for some reason, simpler than a world where you have to go through endless loops to achieve the means to convince the guy at the store that he benefits by giving you a bag of marshmallows (this is usually done with currency, a form of communication that allows us to buy CDs without dragging a prize cow into the store).

The Time of the Wolf is an apocalypse film of a different flavor, though it contains many of the same trappings of other films of the (sub?)genre.  It reminded me of Testament at times (a movie I saw at the height of a delirious fascination with nuclear weapons and one that I could subtitle for myself: how I learned to start worrying about the bomb) with its bleak and unrelenting outlook on how humans behave as society crumbles.  And yet, though the movie contains familiar plot devices like the characters not knowing exactly what is going on, the struggle for resources, or the paradox that the safety found in numbers can be, at times, a perilous one, the movie jettisons the familiar concept surrounding "survivors" in the face of danger and instead features a group of social animals known to some as "humans."

It's well written, insightful, and naturalistic throughout, so much so, that any degree of familiarity I might have felt was replaced with anxiety.  The movie's an anxiety-laden endeavor, never ebbing enough to make one feel comfortable (and any time you might think that it's about to, it ratchets up the intensity).  This is the case from the beginning to the end.  It opens with a nuclear family arriving at a home in the country, starting to unpack the car only to be held at gunpoint by another desperate family and ends with the little boy from this family about to jump into a raging fire.  It's not, exactly, a pleasant experience, but then, in retrospect, because it's so spot-on in its observations, this is one of the few apocalypse movies I've seen that actually gives me hope for my own survival.  

The novelty of the movie is that it presents an argument that, in the absence of all the security we're used to, there is safety to be found in numbers, though it comes with a price.  Certain notions of justice and retribution must be either discarded or dealt with differently than we're used to.  Two scenes in the movie feature a person in the group of survivors (note the lack of quotes to protect myself from charges of contradiction) accused of committing a crime, a crime that offers up no external proofs and are quickly reduced to "he said/she said" argumentation.  The group, which has no de facto leaders (though some people do step into that role when they feel it's needed), decides there's nothing that can be done about these perceived crimes.  The matter is dropped out of necessity: punishment would only increase tensions, thus making it harder to complete what's needed to survive.

As more people get involved, the group of survivors evolve a social structure that reminded me of the social habits of chimpanzees (or, to be fair, my idea of the social habits of chimpanzees; I'm only glancingly familiar with chimp life).  Conflict breaks out between them, is resolved through the most resource efficient means, and on they go… busying themselves with their day-to-day necessities.  When a young boy is rightfully accused of stealing, he's ostracized.  Though the boy is given a chance at redemption, he knows he can never fit into the group again, stigmatized as he is.  And yet, he still hangs around, stealing from the main group when he has a chance because they're his only reliable source for survival.

Technically, this is a first class operation all the way.  A scene where the main characters are plunged into darkness and lit only by the quick flame of a lighter or by burning hay is particularly resonant.  And all aspects of the movie are geared toward a type of naturalism that gives it a welcome legitimacy.  The realism only adds to the underlying tension in the movie's plot, a tension so great, at times I felt like I might vomit.  And yet, the tension, the uncomfortable anxiety… they exist because of the accuracy in depicting human behavior and it's in this accuracy that the movie's hope lies.  So, even with the near-vomiting feeling, The Time of the Wolf is the most heartening, comforting movie I've ever encountered about the destruction of everything that keeps us safe from one another.

Day 52: True Stories

Short on time and, unfortunately, short on words.

Briefly put: True Stories is a weird Talking Heads musical, the enjoyment of which will depend entirely on your appreciation for their music. I'm a fan and I enjoyed this semi-narrative, semi-feature-length-music-video. John Goodman has a nice, early turn here, one that reminds me that the guy's extremely charismatic and not a bad actor. The movie follows David Byrne as he observes the goings on of people in Virgil, Texas and the film's focus seems rather prescient as it discusses the role of emergent technology on the economy, the workweek, the church, and the family. The movie's got a nice appreciation of suburbia while putting it up to scrutiny and, at times, feels like a jollier, snappier David Lynch film. My favorite part featured John Ingle as a preacher singing about computerized morality in America and I also loved David Byrne's absurd and deadpan one-liners. The movie's self indulgent to the max, but it's good hearted, patently inoffensive, and fun... if you like the Talking Heads. If you don't... boy this would be a chore to sit through at times.

Day 24: Tess

Roman Polanski’s Tess is a trying film, overlong and dry. It’s based on Thomas Hardy’s book Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I am unfamiliar with, but now know is one I won’t be reading. Most of the problems I have with this movie can probably be attributed to the source material, though that isn’t to let the makers of the film off the hook. I had a hard time caring for the main character here, a shy, retiring young woman whose naïveté is only surpassed by her capacity for self-martyrdom. The movie lacked any kind of traction in its narrative. At times I felt as if there were a checklist of plot requirements being checked off somewhere in the engine of this film. The movie has a sumptuous design and period detail to spare, but, when, twenty minutes into a two-hour and fifty minute film I am admiring the period detail, I think something’s gone wrong.

One thing that’s very wrong here is the lead performance by Nastassja Kinski as Tess. The character is withdrawn and depressed for most of the movie and Kinski plays only the surface levels of these emotions. She’s quiet, shy, withdrawn, but there’s never any indication that there’s anything motivating these character traits. Additionally, the few moments when Tess actually does make a decision and works to enact it are, for the most part, painfully confined to off-screen status. Very often, the movie abruptly cuts forward in time with little warning. At first it’s a great use of editing, but after three or four of these cuts, there’s a sense that all the developments the movie's skipping over would be more interesting to watch than the bits we do get to see.

And, so, we have a movie of inaction as Tess shuffles from job to job, is lusted after by various men and then abandoned by them. One sequence that stands out and illustrates the paucity of narrative friction in the rest of the movie is when a pious young man named Angel courts Tess. Previously, Tess had a child out of wedlock (the father was a louse and the baby died) and she decides to confess her history to him in a letter. When she discovers that, when she slid said letter under Angel’s door, she also slid it under the rug and, therefore, he never received it, the camera pans over, away from her and blinding sunlight fills the full frame. It’s a surprisingly effective evocation of her feeling, something the movie doesn’t engage in enough. Polanski has a gift for understatement, but in this movie, his stately, artful approach to filmmaking only serves to deaden the tale.

I couldn’t get over the feeling that this movie felt like a well-produced PBS version of the book. The movie’s narrative has a bit more weight when taken as a whole; Tess’s story is more moving in retrospect than during the piece. It’s the kind of feeling you have after reading a good book that is, at times, hard to get through. A book has the advantage of being an art form entirely out of time: one can set down or pick up a book at a whim, after all. Here, after the fourth or fifth time the movie depicts a character walking down long stretches of abandoned road, it becomes as plodding and dull as such a journey on foot would be. It's a feeling that the entire movie suffers from.