Obligatory Oscars Dream Roundup 2011

So the 83rd Academy Awards – the only awards show that still kind of matters! – is tomorrow night.  Sadly, I will be unable to watch unless I stumble across a television.  But that won’t stop me from making a list of the nominees I’d like to see win.  I don’t care about who actually has the best chance of going home with the Oscar.  These are simply who I’d vote for if I were a member of the Academy.

BEST PICTURE
Seen ‘em all
In terms of sheer enjoyment, my favorites were True Grit, Black Swan and Toy Story 3.  But The Social Network strikes the ideal balance for a Best Picture winner: it speaks to the times it was released, but I could also see people studying it in film school 30 years from now.  Besides, I’m not going to hand it an award in another category anyway.

BEST ACTOR
Not seen: Biutiful
Truly, 2010 was the year of THE FRANCO.  He was great in 127 Hours, great in Howl, great (I assume) in General Hospital and great at playing “James Franco” in “real life” (or is it???). I can’t hate on any of the nominees in this category, though. Biutiful looks kind of terrible, but I could buy that Javier Bardem brought the goods.  I’m sort of getting Mickey-Rourke-in-The–Wrestler vibes for Colin Firth, by which I mean he’s a talented actor who’s unlikely to get another fighting chance at a Best Actor win, at least until he ages into an elder statesman.  And it would be kind of cool if Jesse Eisenberg won – but still not as cool as FRANCO.

BEST ACTRESS
Not seen: Blue Valentine, Rabbit Hole
Consensus pick! I never had any particular affection for Natalie Portman, but she somehow manages to go balls-to-the-wall cuh-RAZY while still being vulnerable enough to invoke sympathy.  Kudos to Darren Aronofsky for following The Wrestler with another brilliant stroke of meta casting.  PS: Did Rabbit Hole ever actually come out?

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Seen ‘em all
This is a toughie.  I guess Jeremy Renner’s just getting automatic nominations now post-The Hurt Locker.  I like him fine, but his work in The Town wasn’t his best.  John Hawkes was an interesting baddie in Winter’s Bone, but his performance wasn’t as memorable as Jennifer Lawrence’s.  I’d be happy with any of the other three, but I have to give special props to Christian Bale for actually being less over-the-top than the real Dicky Eklund.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Seen ‘em all
In contrast, this category is pretty humdrum.  Melissa Leo and Jacki Weaver are basically playing variations on the same Supporting-Actress-Oscar-Bait-role-for-women-of-a-certain-age (Leo the comic version, Weaver the creepy version).  Helena Bonham Carter’s barely a blip in The King’s Speech.  Amy Adams got nominated because her character swears and wears low-cut blouses, which is completely not what her persona is in real life! So we’re left with Hailee Steinfeld, who shouldn’t even be winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  She should be busy winning the Best Actress Oscar instead.

BEST DIRECTOR
Seen ‘em all
David O. Russell and Tom Hooper made pretty conventional directorial decisions, which is especially shocking because Russell fashions himself an auteur (though I only really liked Three Kings; admittedly I still haven’t seen his first two).  The Coens are my favorite working directors, so I’m kind of always rooting for them, but I’ll save up my wishing dust for another day.  I’ll instead give Darren Aronofsky a slight nudge over David Fincher, mainly because I already picked The Social Network over Black Swan for Best Picture.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Not seen: Another Year
Inception, of course.  Haters gonna whine that it was all exposition.  But if the exposition is entertaining, then what’s the problem?

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Seen ‘em all
Here I’ll give it to the Coens, for somehow improving on a film that was already great.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Seen ‘em all
If you saw Toy Story 3 in theaters, then you remember Day and Night.  Even after watching all of the nominees, it stood out as the most visually inventive and had a satisfying story arc.  Second place goes to Madagascar, a Journey Diary for its beautiful and clever use of mixed media.  Special bonus points to Bill Plympton’s short-listed (but not nominated) The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger, which was unfortunately shut out in favor of the one-note Let’s Pollute and the overlong The Gruffalo.

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
Seen ‘em all
God of Love, God of Love, God of Love. God of Love? God of Love! Not only was the short itself totally charming and funny, but it was the only one that made me excited to see a feature by the director.  Sadly, I doubt it’ll win, precisely because it is charming and funny.  It’s also the only nominee that’s not about Bad Things Involving Children.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM
Seen ‘em all
This was the strongest of the short film categories, but the two that stood out the most were Killing in the Name, in which a Jordanian Muslim whose wedding was bombed confronts the extremist group responsible, and Poster Girl, about a female Army sergeant who was trouble adjusting to life after Iraq.  I just slightly connected with Poster Girl more, but both are worthy contenders.  This category is also one of the few where I suspect my favorites will be the Academy’s as well.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Not seen: GasLand, Inside Job, Waste Land
This may be the most frustrating category because of all the films that aren’t nominated.  Then again, maybe the three I haven’t seen are works of genius: Inside Job and Waste Land aren’t out on DVD yet, and GasLand has been a “Very Long Wait” since I pushed it to the top of my Netflix queue.  I’m split on the two I have seen.  Restrepo contains some astonishing, invaluable footage that in itself probably deserves the Oscar, but it could have used a real filmmaker to give it shape. Exit Through the Gift Shop, on the other hand, is highly entertaining.  It sure would be fun for it to win, especially since Banksy is bound to have some delightful prank cooked up – but it also feels kind of unfair to have it compete in the documentary category.  And really, Amir Bar-Lev’s 2007 doc My Kid Could Paint That is a more incisive examination of the modern art scene. (Bar-Lev also directed The Tillman Story, the film that should have won this category.)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEATURE
Not seen: Biutiful, In a Better World, Incendies, Outside the Law
OK, so the only nominee I’ve actually seen is Dogtooth.  And if the Academy gives the award to Dogtooth, then it would mean everything I thought I knew about the Oscars is wrong, and also I’m trapped in the wrong Fringe universe with Faux-livia.  The Academy will either give it to Biutiful (name recognition) or one of the three unknown picks (whichever is the most heartwarming).  But a morbidly dark comedy with a disturbing premise and several cringe-inducing scenes? Even if it is brilliant? Whatever’s Greek for “not a chance.”

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Not seen: How to Train Your Dragon, The Illusionist
Again, I’ve only seen Toy Story 3, but I have a hard time believing the other two could possibly be better.  It’s a wise rule to never bet against Pixar, and Toy Story 3 is in my (probably unpopular) opinion the studio’s best movie since Toy Story 2.

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Mailbox Film Festival #9: The Tillman Story (Bar-Lev, 2010)

Director Amir Bar-Lev’s wanted to name this documentary “I’m Pat F—ing Tillman,” after the Army Ranger’s last words before dying. For obvious reasons, the title was changed to the more neutral The Tillman Story.  But the replacement title, seemingly anodyne and generic, actually reveals more about the documentary’s subject.  The film explores three definitions of the word “story” in regards to Tillman’s death: first, a biography or history; second, a constructed narrative, often with the intent of supporting a moral or ideology; and third, a lie.

Arizona Cardinals safety Pat Tillman was arguably the most famous person to enlist in the U.S. Army after September 11, turning down a multimillion-dollar football contract in the process.  After completing a tour of duty in Iraq, he was redeployed to Afghanistan in 2004.  There, Tillman was killed in what the Army initially claimed was an ambush by enemy forces.  The military posthumously awarded him the Silver Star, allegedly for saving the lives of his fellow Rangers during the attack.  Only later was it revealed that the Army had covered up the truth: Tillman was killed by friendly fire (aka fratricide), attacked by men from his own unit.

Much of Bar-Lev’s documentary is devoted to the Tillman family’s struggle uncover the truth about Pat’s death against the military’s resistance and outright lies.  Tillman’s mother Mary sifted through over 3000 pages of documents relating to her son’s death, piecing together the redacted parts with the help of writer and Army special-ops veteran Stan Goff.  Frustrated by the military’s caginess, the Tillmans pressured Congress to launch an investigation into the conspiracy.  The results were somewhat unsatisfying: lower-level members of the military hierarchy received the brunt of the punishment, even though the evidence suggested the cover-up extended to the top reaches of the government.  

The Tillman Story also delves into how Pat Tillman became appropriated after his death by right-wing politicians and the media, people who never knew him yet made assumptions about who he was and what he believed.  Tillman had suspected that his celebrity would make him attractive as a symbol, particularly if he were to die in combat.  As a result, he resisted drawing attention to his Army career.  Publically, he refused to discuss his reasons for enlisting and asked to be treated like any other soldier; privately, he requested a civilian burial instead of a military one.  After his death, these requests were ignored.  He became a poster child for the pro-war movement, an all-American super-soldier.  Never mind that the real Pat Tillman wasn’t so easy to pin down.  In contrast with the “meathead” football player stereotype, Tillman read widely, admired Noam Chomsky and earned a 3.8 GPA at Arizona State.  Despite his enlistment, he disagreed with President Bush and opposed the war in Iraq – but he also turned down an arrangement between the military and the NFL that would have let him out of his Army commitment early.  When strangers lined up at the memorial service to assure the Tillmans that Pat was with God, his brother Richard’s eulogy bluntly informed them that Pat was an atheist.

As Tillman brother Kevin states in the film, “a terrible tragedy was transformed into an inspirational message that served instead to support the nation’s foreign policy wars.” But Bar-Lev refrains from taking the opposite tack and making Pat Tillman into a liberal martyr.  Only Pat and his closest friends and family can understand the person he really was and why he chose to fight.  Bar-Lev instead focuses on how the Tillman family had to deal with the fallout of his death.  All families suffer when they lose a member to war; the Tillmans also had to confront a government conspiracy and a constant barrage of propaganda asserting Pat was something he wasn’t.  “He was a human being,” Mary Tillman says in the film. “And by putting this kind of heroic, saintly quality to him, you’re taking away the struggle of being a human being.”  With The Tillman Story, Pat’s family and fellow Rangers at least have the chance to set the record straight and reclaim his life.

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Mailbox Film Festival #8: Waiting for “Superman” (Guggenheim, 2010)

Perhaps I’m just defensive of the public school system.  I attended public schools for entirety of my educational career, and I think I turned out OK (at least fine enough to get admitted to a public university!).  Growing up in Louisiana, I knew a lot of people who went to Catholic schools, and I certainly didn’t find them smarter, better educated or more intellectually curious than my classmates. Then again, I was fortunate enough to have a number of advantages: the Gifted and Talented program, a magnet high school, and college-educated parents.  But what about all those kids who aren’t so lucky?

Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for “Superman” explores why bad schools become “dropout factories” and what can be done to ensure all American kids are sufficiently educated to compete in the global job market. The film cuts between interviews with experts like activist Geoffrey Canada and controversial DC public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, and with stories about five cute kids and their families hoping to be admitted into the limited-capacity charter schools they believe will give them a running start in life.

Guggenheim largely places the blame for underperforming students on bad teachers and the unions that protect them.  True, the film illuminates some unsavory aspects of union contracts, including automatic tenure and bans on merit-based pay, that seem to remove much incentive for teachers to do their jobs well.  But Guggenheim ignores all of the other factors that contribute to why a student may do poorly in school.  The film’s stars are children with a drive to learn and supportive parents who value education – otherwise, they wouldn’t be trying to get their kids into charter schools or paying private school tuition they can’t afford.  But frankly, many if not most of the kids who do poorly in school and drop out just don’t care.  Even the most inspiring teacher faces an uphill battle against apathetic parents, crime-ridden neighborhoods and a peer group that looks down on anyone who studies too much.  And just as there are teachers who shouldn’t be teaching, there are also students who just aren’t wired to do well in school.  Guggenheim shows how American students’ test scores rank toward the bottom of the developed world, ignoring the fact that in many of the other countries, the less academically-minded kids get tracked off into technical school, agriculture or blue collar jobs much earlier on.  America is the exception for pressing the same academically-focused curriculum on all students, and for perceiving college as a universal necessity.

Which isn’t to say that the American educational system doesn’t have serious problems.  It takes a stony heart to watch Waiting for “Superman” and not feel for the children left behind (Acts of Congress notwithstanding).  Guggenheim positions charter schools as a possible answer, but even he acknowledges that only one in five charter schools outperform neighborhood public schools.  The documentary’s message seems to be the near-impossibility of changing the school system on a grand scale, due to both political and sociological factors.  As the film’s title indicates, only a superhero would have the power to swoop in and save the day.  But at the same time, Guggenheim tries to put an idealistic spin on an overwhelming situation, imploring viewers over the end credits to visit a particular website or send an SMS text to a dedicated number. Waiting for “Superman” succeeds as a call to action to change America’s failing educational system.  However, it also frustrates by not offering viable solutions to such a crushing, overarching problem.

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Mailbox Film Festival #7: The Merchant of Four Seasons (Fassbinder, 1971)

It wouldn’t feel right to call Rainer Werner Fassbinder one of my favorite directors, for the same reason I couldn’t call The Fall one of my favorite bands, no matter how much I adore them both. When Fassbinder died just days after his 37^th birthday, he had completed nearly 50 movies, two dozen plays and myriad other works for TV, radio and stage.  When you’re dealing with that sizable a body of work, it’s inevitable that there’s a lot out there, even some major works, that you haven’t gotten around to yet.  I could love a dozen of Fassbinder’s movies or Mark E. Smith’s albums – more, indeed, than most directors or bands ever produce – and still only scratch the surface.

One of the very first things I did when I got my Netflix account a few months ago was add in bulk every Fassbinder DVD available on the site.  But new releases surged to the top, his movies began sliding down the queue.  When I saw that Film Comment will be screening Fassbinder’s 1976 made-for-German-TV I Only Want You to Love Me this month at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, I was intrigued by the note that the film is “a clear follow-up to The Merchant of Four Seasons.”  I knew Merchant was the film that broke Fassbinder internationally, but I’d never seen it.  Now I had a good excuse to bump it to the top of the queue.

The film tells the story of Hans (Hans Hirschmüller), a fruit seller whose choice of occupation is just one of many factors that leads him to be derided by his appearances-fixated mother.  After he hits his wife Irmgard (Irm Hermann), she flees with their daughter to his mother’s house and calls her lawyer to request a divorce.  When Hans abruptly has a heart attack, Irmgard returns to him and assists his recovery.  They hire an employee, allowing them to sell more fruit and increase their profits.  While Hans’s increased financial success somewhat impresses his family, he continues to be scorned by his mother, sister Heide and brother-in-law Kurt in more subtle ways.  Only his younger sister Anna (Hanna Schygulla) seems to have any respect for Hans. Meanwhile, Hans mentally escapes to fantasies of what his life should have been: either married to the love of his life (Ingrid Caven, Fassbinder’s then-wife) or killed by a North African (El Hedi ben Salem, Fassbinder’s then-lover).

The Merchant of Four Seasons is the first of Fassbinder’s many films to be modeled on the Douglas Sirk-style Hollywood melodrama. While neither as campy as The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant nor as heartbreaking as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, The Merchant of Four Seasons is a clear starting point for some of the themes and stylistic choices that would become Fassbinder’s signature: namely, the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.  To illustrate this artificiality, Fassbinder pushes melodrama’s heightened emotions to extremes.  The characters in Merchant either overplay the emotions – laughing a little too loudly, a few beats too long – or they recite their lines flatly. The film also exaggerates the stylized acting found in many pre-Method Hollywood pictures.  Characters move stiffly and slowly, and scenes end in formal tableaux.  When Hans has his heart attack, he dramatically swoons and crashes to the floor.

Although Hans is the film’s protagonist, his sister Anna acts as the film’s philosophical mouthpiece.  When she tells Hans’s daughter Renate that “people haven’t always treated your father well,” she isn’t just speaking about Hans, but about everyone dismissed by the middle class.  His family only deems Hans worthy of token respect once he hires an employee to do the physical labor.  His life before that, Kurt tells him, “wasn’t much of a life, if you think about it.” Amid the backhanded compliments, Anna reminds her family of how poorly they regard Hans just a few months before.  When Heide accuses her of being aggressive, Anna coolly speaks the truth: “You did despise him, and at the bottom of your hearts, you still do.”

Anna’s words are backed up by the family’s apathy (at best) toward Hans’s very existence.  On his return from the Foreign Legion, his mother greets him with harsh words: “The good die young, and the people like you come back.” When he collapses from his heart attack, Anna is the only one who makes the effort to call emergency services.  And at the end of the film, as Hans decides to publicly drink himself to death, the bar patrons look on with blank expressions as he downs dozens of shots.  Clean strands of glycerine tears line Irmgard’s cheeks, but her face bears no emotion.  She makes no effort to stop him.  Riding home from the funeral with Hans’s employee Harry (Klaus Löwitsch), Irmgard proposes a business transaction: marriage.  “If we were to team up,” she tells him, “it’d be the best for everyone, I think: for you, for me, and especially for Renate.”  Harry responds with a simple “OK,” with no more emotion than if Irmgard had asked to buy a plum.

The Merchant of Four Seasons isn’t subtle about its politics.  But like Douglas Sirk before him, Fassbinder wraps his subversive themes in the traditional cathartic medium of melodrama.  The movie appeals first on a visceral emotional level; viewers can sail past any intellectual current if they so choose.  Fassbinder was a master of visual composition, and the film’s beautifully stylized images also help to soften the film’s message.  Still, The Merchant of Four Seasons is a little too distant and static to rank in the very top tier of the director’s canon (at least what I’ve seen of it).  But as the film that set the template for much of his best work, Merchant is an important entry in Fassbinder’s filmography.

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Fresh Celluloid #2: The Adjustment Bureau (Nolfi, 2011)

Misleading film trailers are sometimes called the movie the studio wish it made, not the one it actually did.  Based on The Adjustment Bureau’s marketing campaign, I suspect that someone at Universal wanted a conceptual sci-fi paranoid action thriller – in other words, The Bourne Inception.  At its heart, though, The Adjustment Bureau’s reference points are as retro as its villains’ gray flannel suits. Screen it in a triple feature with A Matter of Life and Death and It’s a Wonderful Life, and, aside from superficial exceptions like modern technology and fashions, you’d hardly know it wasn’t made in 1946. The Adjustment Bureau shares with those films a matter-of-fact approach to divine intervention and the earnest belief that true love conquers all.

The Adjustment Bureau borrows its premise from Philip K. Dick’s “Adjustment Team,” in which a mysterious cadre covertly alters humans’ reasoning and physiology to force them to choose certain options that affect the fate of the world.  Like Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly, “Adjustment Team” is ambiguous as to whether the conspiracy actually exists or is just the product of the protagonist’s mental breakdown.  There’s no such room for interpretation in The Adjustment Bureau, though: Emily Blunt scarcely has time to question Matt Damon’s far-fetched claims before they’re diving through space-bending doorways and fleeing fedora-clad agents.  (There’s also a lot more running in the movie.)

Damon stars as David Norris, an up-and-coming New York politician who loses his US Senate race after a scandal reveals he got in a fight while in college.  (In other words, nothing that might turn the audience against him or be a scandal in real life.)  As he rehearses his concession speech in the men’s restroom, he discovers modern dancer Elise Sellas (Blunt) hiding from security after crashing a nearby wedding.  The next day, while commuting to his new job at his friend Charlie’s (Michael Kelly) office, David runs into Elise again on the M6 bus.  They strike up a conversation, and she hands him his phone number.  Elated, David steps into his new office, only to find himself in the middle of a bizarre scenario: his coworkers have been frozen in time, and a group of anachronistically-dressed men are scanning Charlie with strange antennaed devices.  David tries to escape, but the agents trap him in a secret room, where Richardson (John Slattery) informs David that he wasn’t supposed to see the adjustment or meet Elise again.  If David reveals to anyone what he witnessed, the agents will make sure his mind is wiped completely clean – not just of the adjustment he saw, but of all his memories.

The affable Damon is ideal as the film’s center, equally capable as action star and romantic hero.  He shares good chemistry with his co-stars, not just with Blunt but also Kelly as his best friend and Anthony Mackie as a sympathetic bureau agent.  The film is at its best in the smaller scenes that focus on these relationships.  David and Elise fall believably into love, and it only takes a few lines exchanged between David and Charlie to get a handle on their friendship. Writer/director George Nolfi has a good ear for scripting snappy yet natural-sounding dialogue, perfect for razzing on a buddy or flirting with a stranger.  Even the requisite throwing-out-the-speech-and-straight-talking-to-the-constituents scene acquits itself relatively well.  These human moments are so well-crafted, however, that they only emphasize the ridiculousness of the Adjustment Bureau scenes, which only get worse the more the agents reveal of their origins.  The exception is the encounters between David and senior agent Thompson, played by Terence Stamp with his signature blend of refined Cockney menace.  Those scenes stand out for being the only moments in the film that generate a real sense of danger.

The main problem with The Adjustment Bureau is its inability to settle on a proper tone.  The film is so fixated on the romance between David and Elise that it’s too soft-hearted to work as a conspiracy thriller.  David attempts to overthrow the Adjustment Bureau not because he has to save the world, but because he wants to be reunited with his true love.  As a result, the stakes are low, and it’s a safe bet that David and Elise will end up together, even if it means they have to break the bonds of fate. There’s also a strong spiritual current that’s unexpected in this type of modern big-budget Hollywood movie.  On the one hand, it adds to the film’s old-fashioned appeal.  On the other, it’s very hard to carry off if the filmmakers don’t commit to the idea completely, and I’m not so sure they do.

I’m curious to see how the audience will respond to The Adjustment Bureau. Will they be disappointed by the misleading ads? Unimpressed with the “conspiracy”? Too cynical for the mystical love story? While I don’t think The Adjustment Bureau is entirely successful in carrying out its ambitions, it’s still the kind of movie I wouldn’t mind becoming a hit.  The world could use a few more romantic dramas with such likeable leads and an endearingly earnest message.

 

The Adjustment Team opens in theaters March 4.

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Mailbox Film Festival #6: Tamara Drewe (Frears, 2010)

There are few things more appealing to Hollywood than the loose, modernized adaptation.  Dust off an old (public domain!) Shakespeare play or Austen novel your audience might’ve read in high school, but cut out the iambic pentameter and Regency costumes that scream “BORING!” You get the name recognition and the vaguely educational sheen of the original literature, but without making the viewers do any extra work.  If you’re lucky, it might even be screened by substitute English teachers for decades.

With Tamara Drewe, Thomas Hardy finally gets a Clueless or 10 Things I Hate About You of his own.  The film is adapted from Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel of the same name, which in turn was inspired by Far From the Madding Crowd.  Now, I don’t know how widely read Hardy is in Britain.  He’s certainly not as popular in American schools as William Shakespeare or Jane Austen.  (We did study The Mayor of Casterbridge in my 10th grade English class.  It was my least favorite book I read in high school.) I suspect, though, that Far From the Madding Crowd still has only a fraction of the readers of Pride and Prejudice or Hamlet, which makes it an unexpected candidate for modernization – much less reworked as a light comedy.

Of course, the fact that Tamara Drewe originated as a comic strip in The Guardian probably gives it some extra popular appeal in the UK.  Indeed, that format is ideal for adapting the serially-published Hardy: all the insane plot twists, none of the dull descriptive detail.  But in a film, that’s a lot of story to cram into under two hours.  Even for a whirlwind romance, Tamara (Gemma Arterton) and Ben’s (Dominic Cooper) relationship progresses at a dizzying rate.  Title cards inform you that the seasons have changed, but it doesn’t feel like much time has passed.  Director Stephen Frears has also increased the roles of Jody and Casey (Jessica Barden and Charlotte Christie), two teenage girls who observe and comment on the main action, making the adults’ stories seem even more rushed.

Pacing problems aside, though, Tamara Drewe is enjoyable if somewhat forgettable. It’s never really laugh-out-loud funny (despite what the poster above says), but it’s a solid example of rustic farce.  Arterton is particularly good at portraying the title character, a clever journalist whose surgery-enhanced looks lead her to either being underestimated or viewed with suspicion by the other characters. Bill Camp gets to play the rare American character in British film who isn’t either an idiot or a jerk, and it’s always pleasant to see Tamsin Greig, even if her role’s not particularly funny. Frears takes advantage of the film’s graphic novel origins, using split screens, insets and thought bubbles, to create a style whimsical enough to be fresh but restrained enough that it isn’t distracting.  I wouldn’t call Tamara Drewe a must-see by any means, but it sure is a lot breezier than spending your day curled up with Far From the Madding Crowd.

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Mailbox Film Festival #5: Catfish (Schulman & Joost, 2010)

(Note: I typically don’t fret over revealing minor spoilers for movies that have already come out on DVD.  But given the nature of the films below, I probably should warn that this post includes spoilers for both Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop.)

2010 was the year of the fake-or-not documentary, some more believable (Exit Through the Gift Shop) than others (I’m Still Here).  One of the most successful was Catfish, the story of a young photographer (Yaniv “Nev” Schulman) who begins to suspect that the Michigan family he’s befriended on Facebook may not be exactly who they say they claim to be.  While there has been some lively discussion over Exit Through the Gift Shop’s veracity, even those who doubt everything happened exactly as shown still can appreciate it as a satire on the business of modern art.  Catfish, on the other hand, has drawn much harsher rebuttals.  The internet’s full of people who feel cheated by the film and have drawn up lists of reasons why they think it’s a hoax.  Maybe it’s because the story of being defrauded by a Facebook “friend” hits a lot closer to home than being defrauded by a street artist.  Or maybe it’s because Catfish has a lot more holes in its story.

Even if you believe that Banksy and/or Shepard Fairey created the character of Mr. Brainwash, Exit Through the Gift Shop still documented events that really happened.  There’s footage of street artists in action – some dating back over a decade – that is unquestionably real.  An artist using the name Mr. Brainwash has actually held art shows in LA and New York and sold pieces for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction.  So the question of whether or not Thierry Guetta is an actual person (or if he is, whether he’s the brains behind Mr. Brainwash) is immaterial.  Banksy’s point, that the modern art community often values hype over quality, still stands.

Catfish‘s themes are more personal: how the internet is a forum where people can create the best versions of themselves, and how lonely people can ignore their suspicions in pursuit of finding a connection.  There’s something delightfully perverse in a documentary about falling for other people’s lies that may not actually be telling the whole truth.  Even if you buy the film’s concept wholesale, some scenes have clearly been staged or recreated.  Nev isn’t the best actor, and some of the dialogue between him and the film’s directors (brother Ariel Schulman and friend Henry Joost) sound like self-conscious attempts at naturalistic speech.  The scene that gives Catfish its title feels overly scripted; it’s difficult to imagine the character (a minor one, at that) giving a monologue that so neatly and poetically stitches up the film’s themes.  Then again, the mother of the Facebook family is an utterly convincing character, and there are some aspects of her life that would be crass if they’re not genuine.

After finishing Catfish, I spent a couple of hours reading up on the film and watching the DVD’s bonus interview with Joost and the Schulman brothers.  I’ve landed at roughly the same conclusion I came to while watching the movie: the filmmakers captured some real events, but they also coached some of the characters and disguised their motives for pursuing the family.  But even if there are some doubts as to the veracity of the plot, it’s still a fascinating look at how the intersection between self-absorption and the need to reach out to someone can pull you down a rabbit hole, whether you’re the trickster or the one being tricked.  (And as much as the family’s mother was hosing Nev, Nev and the filmmakers were hosing her right back.)

But there’s at least one area in which Catfish is incontrovertibly a documentary: its portrayal of how ingrained the internet, and social networking in particular, has become in modern American society.  The film relies on Google Maps, YouTube, MySpace Music and, of course, Facebook, not only for plot twists, but for its visual language.  The Social Network got labeled as “Facebook: The Movie” before its release, only to be revealed as a creation story that just happened to be about one of the world’s most popular websites.  But Catfish is the film that actually explores what it means to distill yourself down to a few fill-in-the-blanks, and how easy it is to become intimate with people you’ve never met.

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Fresh Celluloid #1: Rubber (Dupieux, 2010)

One of the benefits of being a film buff in New York is that sometimes I get to see movies in advance of their US release date.  To cover these movies, I’m starting a new occasional series called Fresh Celluloid.

How to begin to describe Rubber? I could ask you to picture David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman remaking Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer as a comedy.  Except the killer uses psychokinesis to make his victims’ heads explode, like in Scanners.  Oh, and the killer isn’t actually a person – he’s a sentient automobile tire named Robert.  Now take whatever you’re imagining, but make it funnier, weirder and smarter.  You’re about a third of the way to understanding Rubber.

Try to look up information about Rubber online – or just go straight to IMDb – and you’ll get pages of people who balk at the very idea of the film.  (The Hater ranted about it a year ago today.)  There’re even people who claim the whole thing’s a hoax, pointing to the April 1 US release date as proof.  But friends, I have seen Rubber, and I’m here to tell you that it’s the best movie I’ve seen this year.  Yes, we’re only 35 days into 2011, and there hasn’t been much competition.  And Rubber is certainly a film the vast majority of the public will reject faster than a baboon heart without Prednisone.  Just check out those reviews. Try to count the number of times the word “boring” comes up.  A film about a tire coming to life and killing people?  If I thought that was boring, then I’d kill myself to escape life’s endless cycle of ennui.  Then there’re those who argue that the film’s too long.  Wrong.  It’s 84 minutes, each one of which is packed with a brilliant sight gag or an unexpected line.  I won’t even begin to discuss the reviewers who claim the film’s only watchable while on drugs.  I only weep for their lack of imagination.

But even if Rubber doesn’t end up being the year’s best film, it’s still the most original horror movie to come out in years.  In fact, I’m trying to think of another that could rival it (maybe eXistenZ?).  Best of all, it’s a future midnight movie staple that doesn’t require audiences to gulp it down with a heaping tablespoon of irony, like The Room or Birdemic: Shock and Terror. I referenced Lynch, Kaufman and Cronenberg, but director Quentin Dupieux (aka French house musician Mr. Oizo) is no imitator.  His is a wholly original vision.

Rubber, as Stephen Spinella’s character informs us in the prologue, is “an homage to the ‘no reason.’” Why is the alien in ET brown?  Why do the main characters fall in love in Love Story? Why does a tire come to life and start killing people? No reason.  (In that way, it reminds me a bit of the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man: “accept the mystery.”)  Dupieux pairs the existentialist premise with a riff on the tropes of the serial killer picture.  There’re the scenes of Robert working up to his first kills.  He first explodes a beer bottle, then a rabbit, then a bird before taking out his first human.  He becomes infatuated with a beautiful French traveler and stalks her around the motel where they’re both staying.  There’s even a scene where Robert confronts his reflection in a mirror, his mind (?) abuzz with scenes from his previous murders. But as bizarre the story of a serial killing tire is, even stranger is the parallel metafictional plotline.  I’m hesitant to elaborate on that part, as that was one of the great surprises of the film and the source of much of its humor.  It also helps prevent Rubber from being a one-joke exercise.

What also keeps Rubber from being just another killer tire movie is the attention to detail.  The film looks great, shot in the California desert in a style that suggests late ‘70s-early ‘80s grindhouse, but with better production values and an eye for mise-en-scène.  The score – composed by Dupieux and Gaspard Augé of Justice – adds to the retro feel without coming off as pastiche, and is striking enough that it could stand on its own.  Stephen Spinella, Jack Plotnick and Wings Hauser, the humans who carry most of the film, strike just the right tone of perverse sincerity that keeps Rubber from collapsing into either a cheesy Z-picture or a dull parody.  But the true hero of the film is Robert himself, or rather puppeteer Valek Sykes, who gives the tire the subtle movements that make him seem almost human. When Robert first begins to roll on his own, he teeters like a baby learning taking its first tentative steps.  When he sleeps (as sentient murderous tires do), his rubber flesh rises and falls so evenly, you half-expect to hear him snoring.  Sometimes it’s just the way Robert turns to see what’s following him, or how he numbly channel-surfs.  You will believe a tire could kill!

As I said earlier, this is not a film for everyone, or really hardly anyone.  Even if you’re reading this right now and thinking, “Hey! This sounds like a movie I’d like,” there’s still a good chance you’d hate it.  I point this out not to knock those who dislike it as not able to “get it,” but to acknowledge that Rubber’s wavelength is a narrow one.  But if you’re the type of person who likes your horror movies funny and philosophical, and you don’t need a thrill every second or a head exploding every minute, then Rubber might just be the killer tire movie you never knew you wanted.

Rubber premieres On Demand February 25.  It opens in theaters April 1.

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Mailbox Film Festival #4: Nowhere Boy (Taylor-Wood, 2009)

Would a viewer who doesn’t know anything about The Beatles like Nowhere Boy? I’m not entirely sure.  But putting aside the notion that anyone watching a film about John Lennon’s adolescence would not have at least a passing familiarity with the most popular rock band ever, Nowhere Boy does a better job than most of creating a compelling story that only partially hinges on the audience’s knowledge of what would become of the main character’s little skiffle band.

A large part of the credit for pulling this off belongs, I think, to screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh.  His first film, the Ian Curtis biography Control, earned well-deserved praise even from critics who’d never listened to Joy Division.*  Like Control, Nowhere Boy manages the trick of outlining the life of a cultishly revered musician while avoiding the hazards plaguing most rock biopics.  There are few pandering shout-outs to Lennon’s future output (i.e., no shoehorned-in dialogue à la “Ya’ll cain’t walk no line!”), and what references that are present are low-key enough to be charming.  The beginning of the film, which puns on the opening sequence of A Hard Day’s Night, works as a glimpse into John’s (Aaron Johnson) early ambition, not just an easy reference pandering to Beatles fans.

Another element Greenhalgh gets right is Lennon’s attitude, how he could be creative and charismatic but also narcissistic, controlling and quick with a cutting remark.  When his bandmates in The Quarrymen recommend 15-year-old Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sangster) join the group, John dismisses him because he recognizes that Paul’s a better guitarist and singer than he is.  (“You don’t seem like a rock’n’roll kinda guy,” John sneers. “What,” Paul replies, “’cause you mean I don’t go smashing things up and acting like a dick?”)  Ultimately, though, John’s possessiveness gets Paul into his band, if only to prevent him from joining someone else’s.

But the formation of The Beatles is really only a sub-plot.  The majority of Nowhere Boy hinges on John’s uncertainty as to where he belongs.  Is it with his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), the disciplinarian and classic stiff-upper-lip Briton, who’s raised him for as long as he can remember? Or is it with his mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff), a free spirit who’s secretly been living just a few blocks away with a new family? On the surface, John seems to share more in common with Julia: she plays rock and roll records and teaches him banjo.  But her relationship with her son is uncomfortably unmaternal.  Julia treats John more like a boyfriend she can run away with to Blackpool for the day, or ignore when he starts getting clingy. Her kisses are too frequent, her manner too indulgent, her feelings too easily hurt.  Julia is eternally stuck in adolescence.  It’s only a matter of time before John outgrows her.

By the film’s end, John recognizes Mimi as his true mother, and not just because she’s done all the duties that his real mother should have done.  Greenhalgh’s dialogue brilliantly captures John and Mimi’s shared language, thick with wordplay and witty sarcasm.  John’s controlling nature is mirrored throughout by Mimi’s attempts to establish a respectable middle class household, despite John’s and her husband George’s rebellions.  Even though she doesn’t get rock and roll, Mimi’s the one who buys John his two guitars, first the acoustic he begs for, then the electric she intuits he’d want.  It’s this story of discovering one’s true family that gives Nowhere Boy a more universal appeal beyond the before-he-was-famous look into John Lennon’s adolescence.  It’s fitting that when the film ends, the closing titles don’t tell us about John’s future artistic or commercial success.  Instead, the film closes simply with these words: “John called Mimi as soon as he arrived in Hamburg … and every week thereafter for the rest of his life.”

 

(*Fun coincidence: Control was also the first feature directed by Anton Corbijn, who helmed MFF #3 pick The American.)

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