pullquote

Oscars 2011: The Secret History

The cinetrix must've been missing the late, lamented two-buck theatre we once had in town. The Astro was what leveled the playing field: for $2 I'd see pretty much anything. House of Flying Daggers? Sure! Blades of Glory? Bring it! It also backward-engineered the category of the Astro movie, the sort of new release you had exactly $2 worth of curiosity about.

Such a movie is Date Night, which in a moment of weakness I allowed to rise to the top of the queue recently. Perhaps the funniest thing about that flick is the run time listed in the snap above.* Yeah, right. Meanwhile, imdb.com says 88 minutes. My experience was an anything but crisp 75-minute groaner with perhaps the world's slowest and most detailed end credit crawl bumping it up to 88. Maybe.

Don't worry. I haven't any intention of "reviewing" it. You are all busy people with all sorts of choices as to where and for how long you opt to dick around in my wee corner of the Internet. I'm not gonna waste your time. Hell, I don't even remember most of the fucking thing. The brain is miraculously self-healing, as we've all been reminded lately.

What I am gonna do is point out that Date Night is the unlikely connective tissue binding all sorts of folks who also appeared in or may themselves be likely 2011 Oscar nominees. Really. Who would joke about that? The big-time announcement doesn't happen until tomorrow morning, but here are some names that have crossed prognosticating wags' lips plenty this "awards season":

• 127 HOURS: James "Polymath" Franco, who made time in his busy schedule reenacting Three's Company with Kalup Fuckin' Linzy to play "Taste," the male half of the real couple going by "the Tripplehorns" [whose restaurant reservation -- you know, fuck that].
• BLACK SWAN: Unlikely to land a nomination herself for what will be Natalie's Big Night, Mila "Lily" Kunis here plays a stripper and Franco's better half, "Whippit."
• THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: Oh, hi, Mark Ruffalo. The Internets tell me your character is named Brad Sullivan. I think you play a police officer? A detective? Were you secretly corrupt? Not with those puppy-dog eyes, I'm guessing. Oh, that's right. The blink-and-you-miss-him friend being divorced by Kristen Wiig. Because that makes sense.
• THE FIGHTER: Again, an adjacent-to-likely-nominees role, but still. Say hi to yoah muthah for me, Marky Mark Wahlberg. Or should I call you improbably named shirtless security expert Holbrooke Grant?
• COUNTRY STRONG: Might get a Best Original Song nod, Leighton Meister the extortionist babysitter, but Strong won't land Gwynnie that acting nom she set all phasers to twang to get.

Terrifying, right? You're welcome.

*There was no "extended version" on the disc, either. Which, small favors, etc.

Current cinema capsule: The Fighter

A bizarre set of circumstances not worth going into here found the 'Fesser and your pal the cinetrix seeing out the old year at a "luxury" [reserved plush seats commodious enough for the humans in Wall-E; meals and drinks available, naturally] cinema in the no-there-there city of Charlotte. The untz-untz-untz and blue-light vibe of the adjacent bar/nightclub, where we watched flat upon flat of Red Bulls get loaded in, ready to play their role in revelers' final bad decisions of 2010, may have also played a part in making our choice of The Fighter seem even more discordant but also oh so right. It was wickid fahkin fancy.

So, the movie. You may not have heard, but there is a lot of ACTING all up in this film. Melissa Leo's hair, Christian Bale's teeth, Amy Adams's tits all vying for the title -- it's quite something. There is also a mise-en-scène of general oppressive cruddiness. Yeah, boxing gyms have been run down since long before Fat City, and Atlantic City warrants the full Springsteen treatment, but was every fucking house in 1993 Lowell a green triple decker with peeling vinyl shingles? Or did it just feel that way?

It sure sounded right, though. By which I mean the soundtrack toggled back and forth between indie and classic rock playlists like Adams's Charlene and Bale's Dicky aren't fighting so much over the soul of Wahlberg's Mickey Ward as they are over the radio dial in some clapped-out Datsun parked out front: Breeders' "Saints" or Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again"? Or, to keep it local, Til Tuesday or Aerosmith? 'FNX or 'AAF? Don't believe me? It only switched over to AM soft rock when it was time to salve the fury of one of the flinty ladies: Hall & Oates for Charlene, Bee Gees for Alice. Serrriously, it's a note-perfect soundtrack, kind of like you'd imagine the radio station in Grand Theft Auto: Lowell.

When we peeled ourselves from our "classy" Courvoisier-upholstered crushed velvet seats as the end credits scrolled, the 'Fesser ventured that The Fighter would make a great video game. I think he's right. Can't you just see it? Only you wouldn't play Mickey in the ring, he explained; you'd be Dicky leaping out of the crack house window into the dumpster two storeys below to avoid Alice coming in the front door, over and over and over.

The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

 

Un experto en diversiones

In my open tabs this week, most, but not all, roads led to the imposter sausage king of Chicago.

• Caleb Crain foretells Ferris's future on the Paris Review blog: "There is further misdirection in the invitation to see Ferris’s evasiveness as an achievement. Ferris has mastered a technology newly emergent in the 1980s: the combination of computers, telephones, and digital audio sampling. We see answering machines that Ferris has rigged to play false messages; we see his stereo amplifying digital samples of his coughs and snores to create the illusion that he’s at home in bed. The director Hughes has cleverly divined what this new technology will come to be used for; it is for not being there. A few years after the movie, one imagines, Ferris will start a company that designs phone trees and voicemail systems; he will be a millionaire by 1990."
• New boy in the balcony Ignatiy Vishnevetsky dismisses the poet laureate of suburban Chicago: "It’s fun. I don’t think it’s a great movie or even a very good one, but it’s a lot of fun. It has, I think, quite a bit of nostalgic value for a lot of people that leads them to overlook its flaws—which is true of all Hughes’ films."
• MROW. Jonathan Rosebaum posts a piece on Irma Vep and posts up on then-New York critic David Denby: "Indeed, if you know as little about French cinema as David Denby, you might arrive at a conclusion comparable to his in his recent rave review in New York magazine... I can’t imagine what sort of French people Denby hangs out with, because this cosmic description of “the French” excludes virtually every French filmmaker, critic, and filmgoer I know — many of whom are even more delighted by “the philistine exuberance of American entertainment” than Denby is. ...if you ignore French cinema as studiously as Denby does — and this isn’t only a matter of not attending festivals like Cannes — any sort of self-validating generalization will make sense. Many of his most prestigious New York colleagues see only one or two movies a day at Cannes — like the alienated laborer who gets driven around in a limo paid for by Miramax, and who this year happily missed the Abbas Kiarostami film that shared the Palme d’Or — and write back to their readers with the same breezy, confident expertise about the moribund state of world cinema, usually concluding that the parties were better than the movies. (And no wonder — the parties speak their kind of language, the movies don’t.)"
• Voyager founder Bob Stein talks about the origin of the Criterion Collection: "[W]ith films like Citizen Kane and King Kong, you’d add everything you could possibly get your hands on. There was only a limited number of things available. Doing a film to video transfer is an art. For Kane and Kong we recruited Ron Haver, the film curator of the LA County Museum of Art and a lovely, lovely man, to come to New York to oversee the transfer. Ron sat with us in a dark video lab and painstakingly directed a shot-by-shot color correction. There were other people in the room — Peter Crown and Jennifer Scanlon — and I think it was one of them who raised the idea of using the extra audio track on the videodisc to record some of the fantastic stories that Ron was telling about the films. King Kong was his favorite movie, so we asked Ron if he would record a second soundtrack. He didn’t particularly want to do it, but we got him very stoned, and he did it. And thus, the commentary track was born."
• It's science! Or pie charts, at least. How do movie villains break out categorically from the 80s 'til today? "I discarded categories with only one or two entries: deranged wives (“Presumed Innocent”), clones (“Blade Runner”), the IRA (“The Devil’s Own”) and split the rest into ten categories: African-Americans (light green on the graphs below), Nazis/Germans (purple), Russians (light orange), Middle Easterners (red), American military/government/law enforcement (dark blue), the mob/organized crime (brown), South/Central Americans (dark orange), North-East Asians (dark green), non-governmental white guys (light blue), and American companies (yellow). ...the overall winner of the villain tally is American military/government/law enforcement.  Our own protectors even beat out the Russians in the 80s! We are a country that distrusts government innately and that has translated to film. It’s also just fun when the bad guy is the NSA director or a dirty cop because that adds another level of paranoia and danger from within. The interesting thing is that by 2000, Middle Easterners have fallen off the chart completely (as have Nazis, but what do you expect)."

Current cinema capsule: Black Swan

More than a few eyebrows raised at the on-the-nose casting of Winona Ryder ("Perfect? I'm not perfect. I'm nothing.") as a shoved-aside star in Black Swan. But here's one lesson Nina Sayers/Natalie Portman learned from the career of decade-older Beth MacIntyre/Ryder, the woman she's replaced as ingenue of the hour: Be very careful casting your opposite number, your Black Swan.

Nina: "I had the craziest dream last night about a girl who has turned into a swan... but her prince falls for the wrong girl and she kills herself."

Talk about a cautionary tale. There's no danger of that here. Yes, Mila "Sweet Lips" Kunis is crazysexycool as Lily, but there is NO WAY Portman was gonna allow her to commandeer the spotlight on her years-in-the-making passion project the way Winona let Angelina Jolie run off with Girl, Interrupted and the Oscar. (Or the way Gwyneth Paltrow is alleged to have "stolen" Shakespeare in Love from her then-BFF Ryder.) Nat played goody and crazy both. Whereas Noni?

(Regarding) Beth: "I'm almost sure she did it on purpose....  Because everything Beth does comes from within. From some dark impulse. I guess that's what makes her so thrilling to watch. So dangerous. Even perfect at times, but also so damn destructive."

Other cygnet links:

• Steven Shaviro: "But to the extent that “seeing is believing,” and that — in the suspension of disbelief with which we watch movies — we cannot help accepting what is plainly and viscerally shown to us on screen, the sex and the murder and the body horror are as real to us as anything else in the film. They are continuous with, and as compellingly actual as, the feelings that provoke them: self-disgust, the drive towards an impossible perfectionism, sexual jealousy vis-a-vis Kunis and resentment and feeling-betrayed vis-a-vis the mother."
• Steve Erickson: "As the world’s foremost expert on the Cinema of Hysteria, given that I made it up, I can assure you that Black Swan possesses every trait of the subspecies. First, sex is the electric current that not only drives these movies dramatically and gives them their dreamy power but untethers them from the more practical obligations of storytelling. Second, at the same time that these films are imagistic to the point of being hallucinatory, they’re distinguished from the superficially trippy by riveting central performances that are naked to the point of reckless..."
• Kartina Richardson: "Lily (Mila Kunis) is only painted black. Nina is black through and through and through. By denying her shadow, Nina adds layers to it. When you hold something down that’s pushing to come up, it gains momentum."
• This Recording: "In case you haven't seen Black Swan, reading this reveals and ruin nothing. The party game is simple; all things can be paired up and divided into white swans and black swans. White swans have technique but black swans have essential style. The white swan is the brain, the black swan is the crotch."

 

Let's get small

Time to close some long-open tabs.

• My dear pal Daniel from Itsafuckingfilm.com (Quick, gritty but accessible film reviews. Like if Ebert actually had a pair.) launched the self-explanatory Not Fake Criterions.

• Hilobrow's Josh Glenn took on "authochthonic McGuffins" (a.k.a. movies that "hinge on more or less bald stipulations of metaphysically preposterous states of affairs."): "[T]hanks to what Walter Benjamin calls the “second nature” effect, it’s tricky to distinguish between laws of nature and social laws, nature and culture. I’m exaggerating when I suggest that it’s every bit as impossible to imagine Walter Matthau being hired as a little league coach, or Eddie Murphy firing a pistol, as it is to imagine the same day repeating itself endlessly… but I do so in order to draw attention to the absurdities which realistic movies ask us to take for granted. I know — The Jerk is absurdist, not realistic. My real point is that all realistic movies are absurdist."
• I really want to put together a group Halloween costume of "the end credits of Buckaroo Banzai," which may be why the most recent Film Comment Trivial Top 20 list, "The Most Indelible Songs from 1980s Films," amused me so. (That and knowing just enough of the attributed contributors to speculate about who was responsible for what.)
• 'Swonderful news: Arlene Croce's "The Fred Astaire & Ginger Rogers Book" (1972) and John Mueller's "Astaire Dancing: The Musical Films" (1985) are back in print and available bundled.
• Finally, belated kudos to Charles Taylor, for saying this on his Voice ballot: "Critics now seem far less interested in talking to an audience --in alerting them to what they might miss, warning them off overhyped stinkers, making people excited about going to the movies and helping them sort through their feelings about what they've just seen -- than they do in talking to each other. What passes for criticism now is often no more than arcane discussions of issues that have no bearing on actually watching the movie. Or else minute dissections of individual sequences at the end of which the movie is in the same state as that frog in your high-school biology class. No matter what you thought about \The Social Network,\ if all it inspires in you is a discussion about whether it's sexist; if \Carlos\ prompts a disquisition on how adherence to \realism\ has trumped the imaginative vision of directors; if you have to qualify praise for a well-made, accessible, and subtle picture like \The King's Speech\ with the patronizing adjective \middlebrow,\ you're not giving readers, present or future, anything they can actually use. This isn't inviting readers into a discussion as much as allowing them to be spectators at a preening boys' club. There may be some ways in which size does matter -- but not the size of your DVD collection."

Current cinema capsule: True Grit

Moments into the epilogue of True Grit, when the Coens finally remind us we've been watching the reminscences of the grown Mattie Ross all along, I nearly leapt out of my seat with a start and blurted the following:

Holy fuck! BUFFALO BILL!

But not just the generic Buffalo Bill of Wild West show myth. Specifically the Buffalo Bill assayed by Paul Newman in Robert Altman's superbly cynical Bicentennial western Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's Lesson. When Mattie approaches the circus workers in search of Rooster Cogburn, the Coen brothers have them framed, clothed, hued, you name it just like the fellows pictured above.

I haven't seen this, to me, overt reference mentioned in any reviews, but the Coens' admiration for Altman is well-documented. Dating back to their first collaboration with Jeff Bridges, here's an excerpt from "Strikes and Gutters -- A Year with the Coen Brothers" by Alex Belth, Projections 8:

I began thinking about The Long Goodbye again and the way Altman captured the bleached-out daylight, then added warm yellows and oranges to the night scenes. His California was sensual and mysterious. And I was beginning to see how that worked.

One night before Thanksgiving I was over at Joel's house in Santa Monica, and I told him how I thought The Long Goodbye was such an evocative depiction of the area. He smiled and said, "Curry's brand catfood."

"Yeah," he continued, "That's our favorite Altman movie."

I told him how, when I first read Lebowski, I kept thinking about Gould.

"Well, this is kind of our Long Goodbye," he confided in me.

Then there's this: Rooster Cogburn explains that he lost his eye riding with William Quantrill, the man who led the infamous Lawrence, Kan., massacre of 1863. And here's Altman's William Cody:

William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody: My daddy was killed trying to keep slavery out of Kansas.
Oswald Dart: How did he do that?
William F. 'Buffalo Bill' Cody: Well, my daddy hated slavery with such a passion that rather than let the coloreds get in as slaves, he just fought to keep 'em out of the state.

 

Town(ies)

Shortly before Christmas the 'Fesser and I ordered up The Town on pay-per-view. But I remember very little of it now save Affleck's admirable sense of place. From the opening heist set in Harvard Square to the chase sequence through the snaking, narrow streets of the North End to the ever-present snarl surrounding Fenway, you always have the sense you really are somewhere in greater Boston or Cambridge. Which is even more impressive given the distracting hodgepodge of overhead CG composites that make up the Harvard sequences in The Social Network. (Seriously, don't get me started about the wandering house towers. Although, my vague recollection of its rapturous critical reception this fall is that possession of ovaries negates any observations I might make anyway.)

Since I can't remember anything else about The Town, I leave you instead with the Good Will Hunting 2 bit from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and encourage Hulu subscribers to revisit the SNL sketch featuring Boston teens "Denise," "Sully," and Affleck called "Donnie's Wedding."

Applesauce!