Forgetting Sarah Marshall

With the possible exception of the genuinely moving Knocked Up and the deliciously shaggy dog of a film that is Pineapple Express, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is my favorite thing to role off the Apatow assemby line, as well as one of the few comedies I’m reasonably certain that people will still be watching a few decades from now. It’s a buoyant, quick witted farce that in true comedy tradition manages to leave everyone a little better off then they where found, and has the added benefit of making you laugh like a drain as well. There’s not much more you can ask for in a comedy.

The film follows Jason Segal as a schluby guy emotionally devastated when he is dumped by his long term girlfriend. Deciding to escape to Hawaii, things get even worse when said ex and her sex god rock star boyfriend end up at the same hotel. It sounds like sub sitcom plotting, and to a certain extent it is. But comedies unlike virtually every other genre has some leeway here. As long as its funny whatever else it is matters little.

It’s a film that lives on its cast. There is of course Russel Brand who kills from his first appearance, with the deliciously vapid would be anthem “We’ve Got To Do Something” ("How can you read if you are blind?") He reaches that perfect balance of Bono like pretensious pseudo profundity and Keith Richards libertine excess to create a comic caricature that’s equally true to life as he is absurd.

Kristen Bell elevates looking uncomfortable into a kind of art form here. She’s a gifted performer as well as a good actress and if she doesn’t start getting better films soon she’s going to end up the saddest wasted opportunity in Hollywood since Anna Faris.

Mila Kunis is one of those actresses who I’m informed I should hate. This is complicated by the fact that I’ve liked her in almost everything I have seen her in. In both this and Extract she’s proven herself to be a likable creative comedienne, and even made her, well shall we say unlikely casting in The Book Of Eli work. She’s a funny, natural presence with good taste in scripts and a uniquely sexy presence (and a voice to die for). I can’t help but like her.

Jason Segal is of course the one who anchors the film. He’s the ideal sad sack, with crack comic timing and a seemingly infinite capacity for disgrace. Able to get huge laughs both from gags as broad as him drunkenly weeping at his piano as he sings The Muppets theme song and as unlikely as “Now I have the freshest cereal.” The unexpected punch of him launching into his Dracula musical with a full Translyvanian accent is one of the most unexpected laughs I’ve had at the movies. Not to mention the scene in which he is invited to help prepare the next days dinner. A scene which nearly broke my ribs when I first saw it in theater. Like all great comics Segal knows there’s nothing funnier then someone trying desperately trying to keep their dignity.

Apatow’s films are often criticized for their bland visuals. But if such laziness is in evidence it is not in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Which possesses a bright appealing palate, a warm film stock and a keen visual wit, getting many laughs merely by contrasting the beauty of Segal’s magic hour surroundings with his abject misery.

For what it is, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is damn near perfect.

Speed

I have a confession to make. I kind of unironically like Keanue Reeves.

Lets set aside for a moment the roles he’s easy to defend in, the likes of My Own Private Idaho, Scanner Darkly and River’s Edge. Lets take a look here at your Constantines, your Lake Houses, your Point Breaks, your Day The Earth Stood Stills. Theres a reason Keanu always gets cast in this high concept shit. Mainly, because he buys it.

Take Constantine, which is for the record one of my favorite guilty pleasures of all time (lower your opinions of me accordingly). There is a scene which finds Keanu sitting in an electric chair, with his feet in a bucket of water and a cat on his lap, patiently waiting to be sent to hell. And he acts like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Presumably because he doesn’t know better. His shall we say, unique cadences, zen outlook, and unflappable demeanor all conspire to make Reeves truly one of a kind. I mean come on how can you not like him a little.

He anchors Speed. Along with Sandra Bullock one of the few women not named Carrie Ann Moss that it can be said Reeves has some genuine chemistry with. Bullock’s appeal has always been not her glamour but her normalacy, which is why she is still a movie star at forty five no matter how many actresses she kisses in public. It’s that ability to keep that Girl Next Door feel even when doing things as patently ridiculous as piloting a multi ton bus over a gorge, that keeps her likable.

Speed serves as the apex of a certain kind of pre CGI blockbuster filmmaking. There’s a purity to Speed that you have to admire it’s a two hour movie that probably has ten minutes in it not devoted to vehicles going fast, shit blowing up, and actors trading pithy bon mots. It’s the Darwinian end result of the action eighties. A movie that has (de)evolved into nothing but a goods delivery mechanism.

And in all fairness Speed does nothing but deliver the goods. Things start off with a fantastic set piece involving an elevator rigged to explode, that would serve as the climax for a lesser film. The plot develops into (white noise) mad bomber (white noise) will explode if it dro- (white noise) -illed his best friend.

Watching anything wreck that much havoc on LA’s nightmarish Freeway system during its Kakaesque rush hour is a guilty pleasure for any Angelino (Let us also take a moment to appriciate the sublime irony of a thriller built around public transporation being set in a city notorious for having the worst public transportation system of any major metropolitan area in the world). Unfortunately the film does little more then nod at the cities multi culturalism. Original director Tarantino might have turned the film into LA’s answer to The Taking Of The Pelham 123. De Bont, just lets everyone have a funny line.

And yet I’ve ended up writing about everything in this movie aside from my reason for revisiting it. Hopper of course, grounds the film. Giving his role a real sense of menace and ruthlessness. Not to mention making the idea that he can outsmart Keanu Reeves seem all too plausible. He gives the role the requisite intensity. But It’s then kind of role that Hopper was all too often saddled with, in the late stage of his career. One that the movie depended on, but gave him little room to do anything but pop his eyes, yell, and get one ker-aizy speech in. Don’t get me wrong, like everything else in the film Hopper is a lot of fun. He’s just not much else.

Red Rock West

I somehow managed to miss Red Rock West, John Dahl’s mean little Neo Noir, until now. This despite the fact that it is so far up my alley that its practically down my throat.

The film’s premise is a standard Neo Noir one. A drifter comes into town and ends up mistaken for a hitman and ordered to kill the interested party’s wife. Paid but not wanting to do the job, he skips town with his employer’s money, but not before telling his target about the plot and accepting another cash payment from her to off her husband. He skips town a several thousand dollars richer and heads for the hills.

Simple right?

You haven’t seen many Neo Noirs.

It’s worth noting that Red Rock West is one of the most relentlessly structured movies of all time. You could basically read it with a screen writer’s manual in hand and mark it off all the stuff you’re supposed to do minute by minute. You can basically hear Robert McKee weeping in delight. Its not really a positive or negative just an observation. It does however show that there is occasionally something to be said about the three act structure. Red Rock West is a relentless movie, and every complication (and there are plenty) hits with maximum impact.

Nicholas Cage plays the hapless drifter, and its from that weird pre The Rock post Wild At Heart period of his where you could say that Cage was the most subdued part of the film and actually mean it. Its safe to like Cage again, thanks to his great performances in Kick Ass and Bad Lieutanent making it OK for hipsters to retroactively praise the bug eyed crazy shtick that Cage has been trotting out for the last ten years, and pretend like they were in on the joke all the while. (Look for this to reach some kind of annoyance Nexus when The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which I’m actually looking forward to, comes out). But as much as I enjoy Cage’s “Mega Acting”. I miss these types of roles to. There’s not much too it. But he plays it well, lean and compact. An average, likable schmoe forced to survive on his limited wits in a harsh situation.

Hopper plays the real hitman, and while his role is more his “That guy in Speed.” Level of villainy rather then Frank Booth. He gives the role both a real sense of danger, and more importantly a real sense of amorality. He even gets a few moments to radiate that genuine Hopper Lunacy we all know and love. As in the scene where he forces Cage to race a speeding Freight Train.

If there’s a weak link in the chain it’s Laura Flynn Boyle as Cage’s intial target, and later partner in crime. Boyle is a fine actress given the right material, but she is convincing neither as a vulnerable victim, nor a cold blooded Femme Fatale. Dahl to his credit seems to realize this, and she spends the minimal amount of time on screen until the final thirty minutes or so.

Red Rock West, might at the end of the day be nothing but a poor man's Blood Simple. But damned if it doesn’t do a good job of it.

The 25: Part 11: Fist Of Legend

(The twenty five is an examination of the twenty five films that made me a cinephile. These aren’t necessarily what I consider best movies, nor are they necessarily my favorite. Though in some cases they are both. Instead these are the films that made the biggest most indenialable impression on me. Films that if they hadn’t hit a certain way at a certain time I would not be the same film goer that I am today. They’re the twenty five.)



If there’s a genre that I write about with a frequency that’s the complete inverse of my interest it’s the Kung Fu film. Oh I’ll get a review in every now and again. But there’s no denying that I watch a lot more of these films then I write about. I could claim that there are only so many ways you can write about people hitting each other, but that would be a lazy stupid thing to say.

The Kung Fu genre can be as rich and effective as any genre. And yet it is virtually the only one that is still okay to be ignorant of in the critical community. Despite the efforts of the like of Tarantino, Yimou, and Ang Lee, it is still more or less acceptable to think that these movies are crap and leave it at that. Try engaging in a conversation with a non believer about the artistry of the Shaw Brothers sometime. Go nuts. It’ll be fun.

When certain critics complain about people staying lazily in genre film, not exploring the films of other countries and eras, they miss that the surest ways to start exploring the films of different countries and era’s is to be a fan of genre film. Every genre fan eventually starts to run low on their drug of choice, and start going further into the outreaches of cinema. Either to the frontiers of the foreign or the recesses of the old. Genre becomes a kind of known reassuring river guiding the film fan deep into unknown territory of time and country.

I’ve linked to Devin Faraci’s excellent essay on the Horror fans before. But I think the same is just as true if not more so, for Martial Arts fans. Being a martial arts fan means you’re willing to search for the bootleg, it means your willing to go through the swap meet and dig through dealer boxes, or drive half an hour to that one video store that has your fix. It means going to the extra mile to see what you care about. Otherwise you won’t see it. It’s valuable training for any would be cinephile. And the man who made me a Martial Arts fan was Jet Li.

I had seen other martial arts movies before. But Bruce Lee’s film’s didn’t make an impression me, as his films need to be watched for their cult of personality, more then their relentless pacing and crack timing. I’d seen some of Jackie Chan’s stuff as well but his goofy streak was always too much for me. I never really liked Chan much until later, when the true implications of “Holy Shit He’s actually throwing himself through plate glass and hitting the concrete." sank in.

Li though, Li was perfect. Cool, charismatic, genuinely funny, with an astonishing unfakeable athleticism. His movies My Father Is Hero, Tai Chi Master, and especially the first Once Upon A Time In China, are films I have a great deal of affection for. But it all started with a bootleg copy of Fist Of Legend (This was before Dimension dedicated itself to releasing and fucking up as many of Li’s films as they possibly could.) The Bootleg featured a photo of Li on the cover dressed in his school uniform, hands behind his back, in front of gigantic Chinese Flag, looking for all the world as if he was about to personally enforce a new five year plan. It was kind of awesome.

Fist Of Legend proves the perfect showcase for Li’s talents. A melodramatic retelling of Bruce Lee’s Chinese Connection. It show’s Li equally adept at humor, pathos, and not unimportantly kicking yards upon yards of ass.





A career like Li’s tour in America showcases the trouble of race in modern Hollywood. Li never came close to utilizing the full range of his talents in an American film (In all fairness Forbidden Kingdom at least nodded to the fact that Li knew how to do shit other then glower).Its not as if Li ever played a character who was a racist caricature. No one ever made him put on prosthetic buck teeth and thick glasses, or had him play a house boy or a laundry man. But at the same time, Li’s entire American career is one big wasted opportunity, because in American movies Asian’s aren’t charismatic heroes but inscrutable ones. So instead of playing the fully rounded leading man roles he pulled off so easily with so much charisma in his homeland, Li got to stand around with Rappers and Jason Statham, sullenly saying as few lines of broken English as possible in dreadful movie after dreadful movie. Which is frankly not where his talents lie. When you can rank Romeo Must Die among the best of the film's Li made in America, you know things have gone terribly wrong.

It should be noted, that I think in this case it is a specifically top down problem. With executives fearful of demographics. It should be noted that both Fearless and Hero, which both showcased Li in a more rounded role, became minor hits at the American box office. The general audience seems more or less willing to watch anyone in anything. It’s the American studios, as the stupefying whitewash of The Last Airbender and Prince Of Persia show, that are out of step.

And yet it’s the kind of grass roots fandom that a film like Fist Of Legend represents to me, that can change all of that. It’s the average film fan who seeks this kind of stuff out, not just the hardened cineaste, and ultimately its they that affect the change we see in the multiplex.


(So There's not going to be much around here for the next month other then The 25 and Dennis Hopper films. So I hope you're enjoying them both. I reeeeeaaaaalllllyyyy would like to get The 25 done before starting The Christopher Nolan Blogothon. Get one albatross of from around my neck before putting another around. But then again I'd really like a pony as well. So we'll see how this goes.)

Easy Rider

One of the lines thrown around in the Hopper obits was the statement that Easy Rider could never be made today. Like so much conventional wisdom its right for the wrong reasons. Its true that today Easy Rider could never be made but not because of its libertine attitude towards sex and drugs, loose non plot driven structure and fearless attitude. Easy Rider could never be made today because any movie as earnest as it would be laughed out of the theater.

Easy Rider is about as deeply unironic as movies get. Shocking coming from the pen of perennial smart ass Terry Southren. It’s a film filled with pompous dialogue, a smug central performance by Fonda, cheap obvious symbolism, and dated editing trips. And if the film lacked a single one of these elements it would not be near so great. It’s a student film in the best sense, that its earnest enough to think it matters. There are worse faults to have.

But there’s no getting around the fact that so much of Easy Rider is so unabashedly goofy from literally beginning to end. From the shot of Peter Fonda throwing away the watch, to the soulful hippies endless prayer in the commune, and the film’s New Orlean’s climax which once seemed revolutionary and now seems like a kind of event horizen for datedness. Most spectacularly is the scene when well hell I’ll just let Ebert tell it…

One of their bikes needs work, and they borrow tools at a ranch, leading to a labored visual juxtaposition of wheel-changing and horse-shoeing. Then they have dinner with the weathered rancher and his Mexican-American brood, and Fonda delivers the first of many quasi-profound lines he will dole out during the movie: "It's not every man who can live off the land, you know. You can be proud." (The rancher, who might understandably have replied, "Who the hell asked you?" nods gratefully.

A hitchhiker leads them to a hippie commune that may have seemed inspiring in 1969, but today looks banal. A "performance troupe" sings "Does Your Hair Hang Low?" on a makeshift stage, while stoned would-be hippie farmers wander across the parched earth, scattering seed. "Uh, get any rain here?" Billy asks. "Thank you for a place to make a stand," Captain America says. The group leader gives the Captain and Billy a tab of acid and the solemn advice, "When you get to the right place, with the right people -- quarter this."

And yet incredibly. Hell damn near inexplicably Easy Rider ISN’T just a dated period piece and does keep some of its elemental power. The scene where an impossibly young Jack Nicolson solemly tells Nicholson and Hopper about the aliens, is still a blast. The shots that Hopper gets of the American landscape are as a beautiful and haunting distillation of the country as anything I’ve ever seen on film. The montage of the pairs final drive cut to “Its Alright (I’m Only Bleeding)” still conjures up a terrible dread. Hopper, Nicholson, and yes even occasionally Fonda are all charismatic as can be. And the editing and techniques are dated as hell but there audacity still impresses.

Its true that I can’t make it through a good dozen of Easy Rider’s sequences without laughing. But looking at the way the film so unabashedly mattered, both to those who made it and those who saw it; I can’t help but think the joke is on us.

(Expect a Hopper heavy week here on TTDS. I’m not doing anything formal and I certainly have other stuff I’m going to write about. But I write what I watch. And I’m watching a whooooollllleeee lot of Hopper.)

Anyone Want To Do Something For Me For Free?

How's that for a come on?

Simply put I'm looking for a banner. I'd love to do something hand drawn cartoony kind of fun and intimate. The only problem is that I draw as though I have cloven hooves for hands. Mostly cause I do. Long story.

So if any loyal TTDS reader does want to take it upon themselves to whip up something out of sheer boredom I would really appriciate it. Like I said I'm looking for something kind of fun. Something to rip off Evil On Two Legs. If you need inspiration I'd suggest checking out my massive sidebar. Otherwise I leave it up to you hypothetical person with free time.

I of course don't really have anything to offer for such services. But I am more then happy to pimp whatever deviantart/website/blog/carny show you happen to be affiliated with.

So many thanks, and lets see if this works out!

Stuff I've Been Reading: May

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakmi
Midnight’s Children, Rushdie
I’m A Stranger Here Myself, Bryson
From A Sunburned Country, Bryson
The Mother Tongue, Bryson
A Short History About Everything, Bryson
Beowulf On The Beach, Jack Murningham
Flannery O’ Conner’s Spirtual Writing, Flannery O’ Conner
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
Fury, Salman Rushdie
Cities On The Plain, Cormac McCarthy
Hero Type, Barry Lyga
Memory, Donald Westlake
Final Fantasy And Philosphy
The Turnaround, George Pelacanos

Pride And Predijuice, Jane Austen
This Side Of Paradise, Fitzgerald
The March, EL Doctrow
Tell All, Palaniuk
Our Man In Havana, Greene
Roads, Larry McMurtry
Wise Blood, Flannery O’ Conner
The Napoleon Of Notting Hill, Chesterton




Pride And Prejudice: If I may betray my philistine roots I read Pride And Prejudice mostly because I was pretty sure that reading Pride And Prejudice And Zombies first would land me a place in lit nerd hell right next to people who pretend to have read Infinite Jest and those who “don’t get” Cormac McCarthy.

Part of it is that Pride is one of those texts so thoroughly ingrained in the culture that reading it seems almost besides the point. Part of it has to do with Mark Twain’s vitriol towards Austen’s work.

(To me his prose is unreadable -- like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death
.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 18 January 1909



Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
- Following the Equator

I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 13 September 1898)

Lord knows that no one needs another analysis of Austen. So I’ll just say that while its true that four hundred pages of upperclass English people being polite to one another can be a little much. I still found Pride And Prejudice to be a rewarding experience. If nothing else invaluable for Austen's wit and for being such a comprehensive record of its time place and mindset.



This Side Of Paradise:, F. Scott Fitzgerald

If Pride And Prejudice is merely a collection of upper class English people being polite, then This Side Of Paradise can be summed up as an upper class twit learning gradually to be less of a twit. That’s right today I’m going to be dismissing all the great works of Western Canon. Ulysses? Overrated.

In all seriousness I did find This Side Of Paradise a bit disappointing if only, unlike Austen, I do have a very real affinity for Fitzgerald, and all of the “lost generation” authors. Its not as though its bad or not worthwhile, indeed it’s a fascinating look at the young Fitzgerald (who famously wrote this book to pay for his marriage to Zelda. Bad luck that.) Still despite a few iconic moments (“I don’t want my innocence back I want the pleasure of losing it again.”) and the grace and beauty of Fitzgerald’s writing, This Side Of Paradise is an unapologetically minor work.



The March, EL Doctrow

The March ended up placing very high on many best of the decade lists. And it has to be said that it earns such distinction. An ambitious multi narrative tapestry that potray’s Sherman’s March of War as the coming of modernarity itself. Its rich in both in its imagery and thematically. Written with a sure hand. And mercilessness nature, seemingly central characters die at a whim, but there’s always someone to pick up the march. It’s a kaleidoscopic view point, beautifully complex, and Doctrow makes it look easy.

The book’s not perfect the descriptions of some of the battles and sackings can come off as Cormac McCarthy light. Doctrow is too civilized an author to really get into the viscera making even a pile of severed limbs seem oddly anemic. And more problematic two main characters undergo a change of character that seems both unmotivated, and later on even unsubstantiated. More problematic is Doctrow’s disdain for quotation marks in this particular work. Which is one post modern affectation too many.

Still on the whole it’s a monumental work. Jaw dropping in both aspiration and achievement.


Tell All, Chuck Palaniuk

You know, I was going to write a detailed put down on Tell All. But really its just the same old shit. Pygmy might have been an unsuccessful work, but at least there was some effort behind it. There are some funny moments and clever turns of phrases. Of course there are it’s a Chuck Palahniuk book. But God just go back and look at Fight Club, Invisible
Monsters, Lullaby, and Choke. For all the problems those books have they’re the work of a man who cares deeply about his art and his characters. Snuff, Pygmy, and Tell All is the work of someone who just plain doesn’t give a fuck.


Our Man In Havana, Graham Greene

Our Man In Havanna is the first novel of Greene’s I’ve read and I was therefore surprised to find it a farce. Albeit with Greene being Greene an exceedingly dark one. The story follows a lowly vacuum cleaner salesman in Havanna before the revolution who is pressed into service as a spy by the British government. Virtually untrained and having no idea what he’s doing, he begins to simply make shit up. You can imagine his surprise when his “informants” actually do begin to die.

The book betrays the world of espionage far from the glamour of Flemmings, or even the downbeat professionalism of LeCarre, but instead as a nightmarish sapient Bureaucracy that is forever craving fuel, even if that fuel is bullshit. With Graham’s straightforward yet lyrical prose, dark humor and ruthlessly unsentimental sensibility, it becomes a disturbingly plausible vision



Roads, Larry McMurtry

Another month another minor Larry McMurtry work. People may justly wonder why when I bitch about him so much I read McMurtry all the damn time. The answer is simple, at his best McMurtry is among my favorite authors, with a lean evocative prose styling, great ear for dialogue, and eye for incident and imagery, he’s like the Jim Jaramusch of literature. Able to make the most mundane of people and places and make them wonderful.

I liked Roads more then the last half dozen or so McMurtry books. It consists of nothing but McMurtry documenting his trips across the country’s main interstates. It might not sound like much. And its not much. But His mind wanders agreeably as it tends to do when one drives, and McMurtry begins dropping interesting Literature criticism (perversely more then there was in Books), history both personal and natural, and vignettes about friends who he will ramble about before casually dropping the horrible manner of their demise.

Those who don’t know McMurtry probably won’t get to much out of it. But those who love him will enjoy the trip.


The Napoleon Of Notting Hill, GK Chesterton

GK Chesterton continues to be one of the most pleasurable authors I know of. The Napoleon Of Notting Hill is his usual delightful concoction of social commentary, often laugh out loud funny, fantasy, theological and philosophical musings, and ideas that have dated very badly (Boy the crusades sure were awesome huh!?!)

Still no matter how far off the rails GK flies, I never find him anything less then intrinsically loveable.



Wise Blood, Flannery O’Conner

Pound for pound, there are days that Flannery O’Conner is my favorite author. I have trouble writing about her. Dissection with O’Conner seems pointless. There are few authors who are more resistant to term papers then O’Conner. Her stories are not about what they make you think, but what they make you feel. What they bring up in the muddiest waters of the self. The way she makes you feel as though you’re reading her prose through a heavy fever. Like all great art O’Conner’s is unquantifiable.