Bright Young Things
That artists are better at making their work than talking about it, I find a reliable rule of thumb. Stephen Fry's exception may or may not prove the rule, but it's worth it to hear him
talk to the Onion A.V. Club about Bright Young Things, even if you haven't seen the movie. I may add my own take later.
Cellular
A. warned me about
The Clearing. "Robert Redford and Willem DeFoe talking in the forest for hours ... I wanted to shoot myself." It was a deeply sucky movie, not least because Redford was inexplicably playing Michael Douglas's
Aggrieved Rich White Man® character. And we had to sit through hours of Redford doing deep schtick about how he was Strong and DeFoe was Pathetic. I agreed with A.
Cellular got what was more-or-less the same setup (OK, not exactly the same) perfectly right. You can't really believe Kim Basinger, on the phone to the surfer dude who's going to help save her family, when he asks why she's been kidnapped. "Do you have money?" he asks. "No!" she cries. Well, they're not after the money, but lady, look at your house and your dead housekeeper. You've got money. More importantly, you can kill two kidnappers in close hand combat, and you don't shy away from using your special seventh-grade biology-teacher knowledge of the circulatory system to do it.
Kidnapper, rich kidnapee, have at it. Spare me the drama and bring on the hurt. And the dopey surfer-boy.
Silver City
I got in trouble with H. (formerly known as Minky) about
John Sayles. On a weekend high-desert ramble with her and some friends, I made the point that Sayles' signal accomplishment as a filmmaker is the way communities figure in his movies.
Romances, actioners and procedurals usually invest the audience into one or two main characters, and while there are certainly inspired ensemble pieces from time to time, even the best (Magnolia comes to mind) rarely go beyond establishing several compelling stories at once. And that's no mean feat in itself.
But in Sayles' work, the relationships among people have as great a part to play as the individuals themselves, and we are often invested in some sort of social system. It can be as small as three people on a desert island in Limbo, or it can be the small town in Matewan, or it can be the small town plus the two countries on either side of its border in Lone Star. But , pace Margaret Thatcher, there is such a thing as society. There is a forest of human trees in Sayles' work, and it can be seen.
The reason I got in trouble with H. was that she had made the exact same point in an earlier conversation with me, and then I blithely made it to my friends without giving her any credit. So without tipping a hat to either of us, I introduced the same point into the text of a resolution passed by the City Council earlier this week declaring it John Sayles Day in the City of Los Angeles. It may be the most quasi-official statement of film criticism in California.
The same night as the Council proclamation, I got to see Silver City. It had a certain didactic clunkiness feeling to it, but by the end I didn't mind at all. It doesn't threaten Matewan or Lone Star as my favorite Sayles, but it accomplished one thing extraordinarily well: it presented its politics complexly without being conspiratorial about them.
It's not at all hard to tell that Chris Cooper's Dickie Pilager is a W. stand-in, but rather than play to the crowd with some dopey W. schtick, Sayles only uses that as a point of departure. Pilager lines up with W. on much more than the dyslexicon. He is the prodigal son of a political dynasty. He has a rich business patron who has bailed him out of a bad business decision. And he has a talented advisor who made his bones playing hardball for a leadership position in the College Republicans.
Those Bush parallels are well documented but rarely narrated. And after building a half-familiar Bush biography on top of a familiar Bush caricature, Sayles goes on to show how that kind of character functions in one kind of society—but here, it's a whole political economy, much broader than a single town or island. He shows how useful such a politician can be to Kris Kristofferson's Wise Use capitalist, or to David Clennon's small-bore developer. And how each of them has relationships with newspapers and labor contractors that tie up just about everything they need to mow down obstacles to profit before they crop up. So I disagree with David Edelstein's take in Slate:
I thought we'd long ago moved past the notion that W. is just a "user-friendly" boob and begun to look for larger and more labyrinthine explanations for the poison that now gushes through our political discourse and our culture.
Sayles does a fine job showing how the boob gets steered through the labyrinth.
I'm also surprised at how reviewers have responded poorly to Danny Huston's shuffling, hesitant protagonist. I actually loved the way that Huston slows down the movie's pace. In the end, Huston walks away from the action; there is no third-act steeplechase set-piece in which the whole web of corruption unravels. Huston passes the ball and walks off into the sunset with (or at least near) the girl. In Matewan, Chris Cooper's union organizer wasn't able to win, but he was able to instill the fight in the next generation. In Silver City, no one can even do that much, and the lake is poisoned. This happens too.
Addendum: Sayles comments on community narratives and other things in the Onion AV Club.
Link.
Criminal
Diego Luna, from Y Tu Mamá También, is in two movies currently in the theaters. (I could probably find The Terminal still playing somewhere, too, but odds aren't good that you'd get me to see it.)
Nicotina stayed at the Vista for all of a week, which was seven days longer than it should have played such a great venue. Let this film put to rest any doubts that anyone might have about the post-Pulp Fiction genre. If Guy Ritchie didn't kill the genre with his violent, soulless bludgeoning of it, then surely Hugo Rodriguez has finished it off with this cold and humorless piece of crap. People die in this film: some randomly, some deservedly, some unfortunately, most meaninglessly. But they sure do die. Maybe I missed something, but I couldn't figure out why I should care about any of them. A movie has to be pretty damn unengaging for all that cigarette smoking not to hook me.
(Speaking of this, I keep meaning to write substantively about the post-Pulp Fiction genre-- both the good and the bad. I recently re-watched Go and remembered all the wonderful things that can be said on the genre in general and on that film in particular. Taking the time to write all this down is the hard part. Besides, I'm sure someone already has, and better.)
Criminal is also a genre pic, but this one works. Here, Luna plays a sweet, searching, young Mexican immigrant in LA. He's doing some small-time grifting when John C. Reilly takes him under his more experienced wing. Obviously, the prospect of a big score soon emerges. The 24 hours that follow unfold with a tone that you'd expect of a con film and with all the requisite plot twists -- there are zigs and zags and then back again -- that you'd expect also. The two travel the city from East LA to Beverly Hills to Venice Beach and the Biltmore, playing the game while we figure out how all the pieces fall into place; obviously we know the rules already from Mamet. While Criminal never rises to the level of Mamet's genius with characters and dialogue, the grifts are fun and -- here's the hard part with the genre -- don't overly strain credulity.
Reilly should really settle into his role as one of the best character actors of our time, and not try to stretch it, though. Having essentially built his acting character as someone lacking confidence, it's hard to see him as someone who has mastered the confidence game, and he doesn't make it easy for us to go with it: he is never fully convincing as someone totally in control of every move (Joe Mantegna in House of Games is the gold standard, to keep harping on Mamet). Luna, as the pupil, really carries it off with his untucked shirt and his disarming smile. The final twist left me a little unsatisfied, but perhaps I was just disappointed in myself for not having seen it coming. But when the ending of a con genre film
isn't totally telegraphed, that alone gets it a lot of points. (I'll give a shout out here to Matchstick Men, the absolute worst recent example of the genre, on this and many other scores.)
So Luna, who was just a boy in Y Tu Mamá, has now grown into a man-- a poor man. Nicotina is a poor man's Guy Ritchie (god forbid), and Criminal is a poor man's Mamet. A thoroughly great use of 95 minutes, and if it doesn't hold up to Mamet, it's only because the bar is so high.
The Brown Bunny
Buffalo 66 ranks as one of the best movies ever, with its simple story of Billy Brown (Vincent Gallo), a confused and pathetic loser filled by and fueled by bitterness and loneliness. Billy stumbles through the film, seeking friendship, justice, acceptance and, more than anything, to only connect. He is sad, honest and heartbreaking. The film is too, with its flights of fancy, powerful visuals and innovative camera and editing techniques. Though criticized as yet another male fantasy movie (Billy kidnaps the doe-eyed and be-cleaveged Christina Ricci, and as the film unfolds the main thread concerns his ability -- or lack thereof -- to have even the most basic connection with another human being), Buffalo 66 is really about how any two human beings manage to look through all the shit and see one another as people.
But if Buffalo 66 is the story about Billy trying to find a connection with another person, The Brown Bunny is the story of Bud (also, of course, Gallo) refusing a connection with anyone. Sadly, Gallo's sophomore effort is a total rehashing of every theme and facet of Buffalo 66, only less interestingly rendered, absent any ability for the audience to connect with our antihero, and, simply, more boring.
Gallo stumbles through this film also, alternately reaching out to -- and pushing away -- every woman he meets (he's working through some stuff, as we find out). But rather than ultimately finding that there is an actual person out there with whom to connect, here all the women are just balls of dough for him to bounce off of. Buffalo 66 uses Billy's cringe-inducing immaturity and arrested development to propel his own growth. The Brown Bunny just makes us cringe.
Given the almost total lack of dialogue, the script must have run to about ten pages; camera notes on every page must have read "steal shot from Buffalo 66."
When a director's second film is a much, much worse version of his first film, does he get to make a third film? Given Gallo's truly wonderous narcissism (which I found easy to overlook in Buffalo 66, but impossible to overlook in The Brown Bunny), its hard to imagine him not finding a way.
