Stupid metaphors, second in a series: From Slate's Dana Stevens:
Noise bites off much more than it can chew—an indigestible wad of broad social satire and sincere political commentary, with one too many Hegel references for even this former grad student to endure. But it masticates that wad with admirable vigor.To masticate is to chew. If the film can masticate the wad -- with vigor, yet -- then it has not, by definition, bitten off more than it can chew.
Interpreting censorship as damage part two: Perhaps you would like to read Michael Chabon's original screenplay for Spider-Man 2, which differs significantly from the one that was filmed. Perhaps you were disappointed to find that it's no longer available at McSweeneys.net. Perhaps you are interested to know that you can download the whole thing here.
A question for RoBros video technology advisor Mr. Perkins: Approximately how much do you think was spent to produce this? Just ballpark it for me.
Y'know who got robbed at the Oscars? Skip Lievsay, the sound editor and mixer on No Country for Old Men.
I have this kind of self-important rule about not seeing movies of books I really like. (When T and her dad went to see Atonement over Christmas I saw Juno instead, which, incidentally? Schmaltz for hipsters.) But I will make an exception for the Coen brothers.
Friendblogging redux: Jake, with John C. Reilly, on Fresh Air, talking about Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which by the way is fucking hilarious.
Does Seann William Scott think it's weird that he's been typecast as the guy who someone wants to fuck his mom?
Who to trust? The NYT's Matt Zoller Seitz: "The new Halloween has sympathy for the Devil, but not enough." LA Weekly's Nathan Lee: "If anything, [Halloween director Rob] Zombie indulges too much sympathy for the devil."
Friendblogging: The trailer for Jake's new movie, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, starring John C. Reilly.
Eric Lichtenfeld in Slate performs a close reading of the Die Hard catchphrase:
When terrorist-slash-exceptional thief Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) taunts hero John McClane (Bruce Willis), "Who are you? Just another American who saw too many movies as a child?" and asks this "Mr. Cowboy" if he really thinks he stands a chance, McClane's answer—"Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker"—marks the moment that McClane, an everyman, assumes the mantle of America's archetypal heroes: Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Gunsmoke's Marshall Dillon, and others who have been so vital to American boyhood. Unlike the many action-movie one-liners that are rooted in the hero's narcissism, McClane's stems from our collective wish-fulfillment. He is not referring to himself, not suggesting an "I" or a "me" but an us.This is all valid, but I don't think Lichtenfeld gives enough time to the line's rhythmic beauty. Phyrric-spondee-trochee-trochee: a soft opening ("yippee"), a triumphant double-stressed cresting ("ki-yay"), and then the happy landing on the metrical regularity of alternating stressed/unstressed syllables ("motherfucker"). It's the rhythm that gives the phrase its playful feel and makes it more fun to say than "I'll be back" or "I'm your worst nightmare." Although the combination of gibberish and profanity doesn't hurt either.
Long piece by the Voice's J. Hoberman on the brief, weird stardom of Elliott Gould, who happens to be my ego-ideal.
My friend Jake's movie opens Friday, at least for those of us who live in big coastal metropoles. I have reason to believe that it will be awesome. (New York and Entertainment Weekly think so. UPDATE: And so does A. O. Scott in the NYT, who compares it favorably to The Player and The Larry Sanders Show. UPDATE AGAIN: Slate's Dana Stevens delivers a full-fledged rave.) In the meantime, you can listen to him talking about it with Terry Gross (iTunes, web).
David Edelstein, maybe my favorite movie critic currently working, has this to say about Altman:
On the Internet last week, I read that Altman had changed American cinema, but I’ve always been saddened by how little influence his work actually had in an era of wall-to-wall storyboarding and computer-generated imagery.This is true as far as it goes, although the current vogue for large-ensemble pileups like Crash and Babel certainly owes something to Nashville. But it may turn out that Altman's influence was most strongly felt on the small screen. Hill Street Blues, with its elaborate tracking shots and overlapping dialogue, was always described as "Altmanesque" (that's where I first heard the word). Add to that NYPD Blue, The West Wing, and most of all The Wire, which in its subtle sound mixing and its gyroscopic portrait of the connections between moments and systems is basically Altman filtered through a bunch of genius crime writers. (Altman would never have attempted The Wire's intricate and satisfying narrative setups and resolutions.) Plus remember that Tanner '88, the HBO series Altman made with Garry Trudeau, anticipated the look and feel of The Office and every other video-documentary-style sitcom. Altman left television in 1969 to make the remarkable and remarkably adult films that are his legacy. He may have done more than any other filmmaker to drag television into its adulthood too.
There's a moment in A Prairie Home Companion, the last movie Robert Altman made before he died last week, when someone says, 'The death of an old man is not a tragedy." When the movie was released last summer, before it was publicly known that Altman was dying of cancer, that was a bit of offhand philosophy. At last night's memorial screening it carried an extra charge: Hey -- he's talking to us! Altman got to speak at his own funeral.
At another point Meryl Streep says, "I just love a happy ending," and the line plays as irony, because the film makes clear that, if you keep the camera rolling long enough, there is no such thing as a happy ending. Altman was particularly good at strange, complicated endings -- A.O. Scott began his remembrance with a discussion of the shocking end of California Split, in which the mystical energy that has propelled the protagonists and powered the entire film suddenly and momentously dissipates, like the air whooshing out of a balloon, and then the credits roll.
Artists always struggle with endings, but they rarely get to struggle (in a conscious-artistic-intent way) with the ending of their careers. For some, death comes as a surprise; for others, the illness that makes it predictable also prevents them from making artistic use of it; others find their efforts thwarted by the waning of their artistic powers. Altman, it now turns out, is the rare exception; the only other serious example I can think of offhand is Shakespeare. For his last movie, Altman took a radio show whose appeal is its insistent timelessness, and he added the element of death and made it into a tragedy. At the end of the film, the show has been cancelled and the stars are sitting in a diner talking about a reunion tour the same way they sing about heaven: joyfully, sincerely, but not literally. It is, in a way, miraculous that a man who got to make so many movies and so few compromises should have been able to approach even his own ending this way: with a thorough understanding of his situation, with all his artistic faculties intact, and with a circle of brilliant collaborators to carry him out. It's almost a happy ending.
My first reaction when I saw this story was, of course, "haha, you stupid frat boys." But now that I think about it, they maybe sort of have a point. I have no idea how the law works here, but if it's true that they were told they were being filmed for a documentary that wouldn't air in the US, and that they were told that the release they were signing was about liability for being in the RV, then that is kind of deceptive and lame.
But more interesting than the legal and moral issues are the artistic ones. When Borat gets in the frat boys' RV, you assume that these are real frat boys traveling around the south in a real RV, drunk. You assume this because many aspects of Borat's encounters, both in the movie itself and in the TV shows which established our expectations for the movie, are real. Believing that this is something he just stumbled upon is pretty crucial to the humor -- not to mention to whatever merit the movie has a kind of journalistic capturing of American weirdness, which seemed to be part of the intention. That aura of fascinating authenticity, that sense that you're watching a documentary, doesn't work if you don't believe this is real, obviously.
But so now we find out that they just put those frat boys in the RV and got them drunk beforehand. Which suggests they probably staged a lot of other stuff too. So it seems like the filmmakers are using the fact that some parts of these interactions ocurred naturally, in order to make the audience assume that they all did. I don't think I'm being too literal-minded here. When much of the humor is premised on the belief that these situations occurred naturally, it's hard to laugh at it in the same way when you're now unsure of which ones did and which ones didn't.
But so now I'm questioning everything. Like, for instance, the black hooker he meets. I was wondering about this at the time. When she shows up in the movie, you're supposed to think that she too is real, in the sense that she thinks Borat is a real guy who she's going out with. That's why its both poignant and a bit cruel when he takes her home and they share kind of a sweet moment on the doorstep. You know she's being deceived a bit, and you feel bad for her. But then she shows up at the end back in Kazakhstan. So by this point you know she's in on the joke. So like, what's going on there? At what stage did she get let in on the joke? Was she in on it from the start? Was the tender scene on the porch just a conventional movie scene with two actors playing roles? Or what? I just feel like there's no conceptual framework governing the premise of the whole thing, which is in one way really interesting. But at the same time, it's only thru the existence of some kind of framework or premise or rules or something that anything can actually be funny, or interesting, or moving, or whatever. I feel like I'm not doing a very good job of explaining myself here, but I also feel strongly that I'm right. Writing is sometimes not as good for explaining these things as having a conversation, although maybe that's only if you're not very good at writing.
There seems to be something a bit odd going on with this whole Borat movie (or to give it its full title, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) business.
Maybe I'm misreading this, but it seems like here, the New York Times implicitly criticizes the movie for its failure to accurately depict Kazakhstan culture etc. Writes Steven Lee Myers: "There is almost nothing, in short, remotely truthful in the satiric depiction of Kazakhstan popularized by Sacha Baron Cohen" and "Mr. Bayen...like all ethnic Kazakhs, bears no resemblance to Borat whatsoever." But part of the point of the original Borat concept was how absurd and unbelivable Borat is (for instance, "Where is cage for woman?") and therefore how gullible and ignorant people are that they can be taken in by it. In other words, the joke's on westerners, not Kazakhs. What possible interest, when you think about it, would Sacha Baron Cohen have in sending up Kazakhs?
But this mistake seems like it's getting made because the Borat of the movie, unlike the Borat of The Ali G Show, isn't Sacha Baron Cohen going around pretending to be Borat to play jokes on the people who believe him. It's a conventional movie dynamic where an actor, in this case named Sacha Baron Cohen, plays an "outrageous" character called Borat, much like Will Ferrell plays an "outrageous" NASCAR driver called Ricky Bobby in Talladega Nights -- in which Baron Cohen co-starred (and he was totally the best thing about it). And rather than being aware the whole time that this is a setup, the audience is supposed to do the whole conventional willed-suspension-of-disbelief thing and believe in the character.
That seems to pretty clearly change the whole basis of the humor. It's still, for some reason, hilarious to hear someone say things like "Women can now travel inside of bus." But it's not as funny as hearing someone say that and then seeing a western person take them seriously. My understanding is that the movie does still make use of that same western gullibility dynamic in parts, but you can't do that nearly as successfully in the context of a conventional movie concept where you're supposed to actually believe in the protagonist as a character.
