California Split (1974)

Gambling movies tend toward fable: The Cooler, Intacto, The Cincinnati Kid, even Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the goulash that is Rounders--all tacitly accept that Fate and Chance and Luck are real, primal forces, or agents to be angered, appeased, and bullied. The struggle against fortune (good or bad) is broad and dramatic rolls/parleys/hands mark the plot like a metronome (I have convinced myself that the poker scenes in Casino Royale are acid parody). These films pair the gambler's superstition with the gambler's degeneracy: The willingness to wager everything (the only stakes worth making a film about) is the mark of an action junkie, someone eager to burn his house down if he has a bet on fire department response time. Altman's California Split puts these two parts together in a way that avoids cliche: we settle into an immersive, barely plotted character study of two degenerate gamblers and only very late in the film do we realize that they are in the middle of a gambling fable that cannot end well.

Charlie (Elliot Gould) and Bill (George Segal) meet among accusations of cheating in a chaotic LA cardroom and bond over drinks, silly prop bets, and a mugging. Bill--an actual, productive member of society and only a casual gambler--is both fascinated and horrified by Charlie's life, with his call-girl roommates, petty ripoffs, and morning beer. Soon of course he's hiding from his boss, joining Charlie at the track, and getting in bad with his bookie. Two things really carry this movie through its desultory plot: First is Gould's great Altman chemistry--he owns the screen as a colorful, slightly menacing whirlwind, playing a character that is apparently about 80% Gould. Second is the sense of euphoric claustrophobia: Altman accomplishes this in part through his blanket of dialogue (in eight-track stereo!), which captures the non-stop and even oppressive hubbub of casinos and similar places; but he also puts together some great shots (Bill, giddy as if he's calling a new crush, gets off the phone with Charlie and gets a little tangled in the cord; Bill and one of the girls try to get undressed on a couch), where excitement, cramped quarters, and slightly oppressive close-ups combine into a great representation of the discomfort and thrill of out-of-control gambling.

Eventually, Bill is in deep enough that he gives it all over to a hunch: he has a "special feeling" and hocks all his possessions, and he and Charlie head to Reno for a high-stakes poker game. Bill goes on a heater and crushes the game (including Amarillo Slim); he takes his winnings to blackjack and roulette and craps; and we find ourselves watching the fable and wondering how it will crash down around them. A comedy (less for its laughs than its temperament) about the absurdity and pathos of gamblers becomes, in a matter of seconds, an understated, tense meditation on chance, expectation, and superstition.

This is a neat film to remind you what you like about "major" Altman--the bemused horror at Americana, the crush of people and lives, the setting as character. It is also a good film to remind you about the difference between confidence and luck, and the dangers of confusing the two.

[Photo: Egyptian Femme! EGYPTIAN FEMME!]

I will see Labor Pains, no matter what you say

So Lindsay Lohan's been in the news again. I'm not here to defend her choice of words, which though odd was probably not racist in any traditional sense. I'm here to defend my fondness for her, which has not died despite her terrible behavior and her even worse movies.

First, let's take a minute to remember her charming and delightful early days.

Behold the precociousness of her in the remake of The Parent Trap:



That uppercrusty English accent is totally recognizable!

Really good child actors with few exceptions (Jodie Foster, um...I can't think of any other exceptions...Scott Baio? Dean Stockwell, I guess) grow up to be...really good child actors. Think of Macaulay Culkin in Party Monster. He is perfect in the role, but only because he is a terrible over-actor playing a terrible over-actor. Christina Ricci has carved out a fairly respectable carreer almost entirely made of camp. But speaking of Jodie Foster, the first thing I remember seeing Lindsay in was the remake of Freaky Friday, in which she plays a Rebellious Teenager (or the Disney version of one). Freaky Friday isn't an important movie, and it does nothing new, but it is exactly what it sets out to be: cute, fun, competent, predictable. This is what I want from a PG/PG-13 teen comedy.

Which brings me to Mean Girls, a movie that slightly exceeds expectations on almost every scale. It's smarter than it should be. The cast is better than it looks. The jokes are funnier than you would expect -- people often point out that Tina Fey, who wrote the screenplay, was the first woman head writer on Saturday Night Live, which is probably true, but she was the head writer during one of the show's least funny eras. And yet.

I was dragged to Mean Girls (by Anna, who is my reliable date for lame movies, from Uptown Girls to Mamma Mia. So far). Before it left the theater, I had seen it two more times. Lindsay Lohan plays Cady, a high school junior transplanted from Africa, where she was home schooled, to a public school in suburban Evanston, Illinois. She is befriended by "art freaks" Damien and Janis Ian (hm), then betrays them on a climb up the social ladder of high school. Sounds like a boring cliche, and it is a cliche, but the script is so neatly crafted, the characters just three-dimensional enough, that the movie overall succeeds where it could very easily have failed. Mean Girls isn't flawless (it could be a little less homophobic, for one, and after repeated viewings the "Asian hotties" are truly cringe-worthy) but it's close.

LL starred in a few other fine-but-forgettable teen movies (Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, Herbie the Love Bug). And she was in I Know Who Killed Me, a movie almost but not quite absurd and unsatisfying enough to be entertaining as an example of How Not to Make A Movie. Then there was Georgia Rule. Garry Marshall has directed a fair number of my least favorite movies, but Georgia Rule is in a category of its own. It feels like it was written for the Lifetime network, but it's rated R. It is sappy yet brutal, naive yet loveless. I really really hated it.

Still, on the strength of my Mean Girls affection, I decided to give Just My Luck a chance when I noticed it in the grocery store DVD rental box, and I thought it was fine. It was cute and fun and competent and predictable, just like I wanted it to be. And she was in Robert Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion. For me, the PHC movie was just like the radio show - awesome when it's people performing songs and kinda pointless otherwise.

Anyway, I guess I would just like Lindsay Lohan to ignore Roger Ebert's advice that she "move on to more challenging roles." It seems clear that she can neither choose nor carry a heavy movie. But that's okay! We need more charming fun predictable character actors, and she can totally do that.

Oh, one more thing. Kristin provided the only plausible explanation of the weird line in LL's Access Hollywood interview. Turns out, she never said "our first colored president." Turns out, she said "our first unicorn president." Go watch it again. Now. She totally says unicorn. UNICORN.

Puppy

Puppy is a weird movie in that it wasn't great, but I wanted to write about it. The narrative wasn't particularly compelling, but I'm compelled to give it more consideration than I felt it warranted after my first viewing. In its heavy handed attempt to defy expectation, the plot unfolds fairly predictably. A young woman taken hostage, Liz, finally seizes her freedom only to linger around her kidnapper's home for a while, making friends with his dogs and rummaging through his CDs. Soon she is manipulating him and everyone in his life--pushing his guilt such that he automatically trusts her, and blames everything that seems amiss on his own psychosis. By the film's conclusion, Liz is the raving lunatic--murdering her abductor's wife so that she might take her place, and forcing herself on Aiden emotionally just as he once forced himself on her physically. This shift can be seen coming early on--Liz is needy, suicidal, and Aiden is too young and good looking to be cast as a committed villain. What surprised me about Puppy is the total moral ambiguity of the film's conclusion--an ambiguity brought about by something more than a simple reversal of roles. In her final assessment of Aiden's life, Liz is correct. His wife did not love him, and most likely did abandon him hoping that his inevitable breakdown would allow her to inherit his home. Both Helen and Liz abuse and take advantage of Aiden, but unlike Helen, Liz is willing to share the space she steals, and in her desperate attempts to blame her own actions on Aiden's illness, she all but shines with the virtual of incidental forgiveness. I should have hated Liz by the film's conclusion, in which it's made clear that she is the perhaps the highest functioning form of parasite known to innocent and unsuspecting kidnappers, but by the credits I had only just grown to love her and her utterly irrational behavior. There is absolutely no need to blame Aiden for the car she crashed, the dog she murdered, or the dead doctor she's buried in the yard. Honesty about the circumstances in which she came to live with him would completely absolve her of these actions, for they were committed in her many attempts to escape. She is, however, totally uninterested in blaming or even mentioning to Aiden the time he held her hostage. Rather, her focus is entirely on nesting into her new environment and explaining away wounds that are visible rather than those that are actually significant. What anger she does express for Aiden's treatment of her is directed not at his actions but at his inability to be honest about the total lack of love between them. Ultimately, Liz can't be read as a victim--not because she herself is a criminal, but simply because she has no expectations of innocence in others.

Much has been made comparing this film to Black Snake Moan, though the only parallel I can see is the basic outline of the plot--the abduction of a young woman by a man who will quickly be revealed to possess depth and complexity that exceed our expectations for a psychopath or common criminal. But assuming two films to be linked based on their plot outlines is kind of like comparing Solaris to Solaris. It just isn't a great idea. I much prefer the comparison that Chris suggested: to Audition. As he put it: Audition begins with an intolerably trite love story, and ends with the lover shackled and fed like a dog. Puppy takes the exact opposite arc: it begins with dog collars and debasement and evolves into a love story. Despite the inverse narrative structures, Puppy brought to mind the uneasiness with which i first watched Audition and realized that something, not love, but a kind of kinship is established through violence and degradation. Puppy is, if nothing else, very well titled.
[Photo: Like Audition, Puppy has a few weird moments with feet.]

Brick

When it comes to crime novels, I'm usually for Cain over Hammett, though I love them both. Cain's greasy diners and disreputable insurance agents are the rough company I prefer to unease me into bed at night, but Hammett's novels have style, and it's style that carries Brick every step of the way. Johnson's movie is a clever and faithful adaptation of the genre; detailing its loving throw backs to noir would require all but a cut and past of the script into this text box. Every convention translates to the high school setting, so seamlessly it feels like quickly shot afterthought to 10 Things I Hate About You. The use of classic crime and horror genres to renew our metaphors of adolescence is becoming a convention itself (noir is a perfect visual fit for the teen and twenty-something love of vintage fashion that's held strong since the 90s), but somehow Brick is not Rob Thomas and it's not Joss Whedon. The thing about Brick is they play it straight, from "She knows where I eat lunch" to "don't come kicking in my homeroom door once trouble starts." Veronica and Buffy have their share of sorrow, but so deftly gauzed up in humor that even something so unrelenting as season 6 of Buffy is, at its heart, a musical. Brick doesn't break for a dance number; it's already dizzying Astaire and Rogers with its dialogue, and there's no time to recognize your audience's laughter when the joke relies entirely on a consistent game face. It's a difficult balance, jesting a genre such that every joke venerates its source material, and here the commitment pays off. Noir is funniest at its most tragic, if it's ever funny at all. Conversely, every beat of Brick is pure comedy, played so straight it feels like an honest tragedy. The tragedy, of course, is never really present. Just as we do in noir, we indulge the characters their melodrama because it flatters the stylized aspects of their personas we find pleasing: the underdog's uncanny ability to manipulate circumstance, the fatale's bewitching affectation of innocence, the victim's helpless slide into a sorrowful, yet necessary demise. Character is the most advanced stage of style, and it must be thorough to be successful. In that way, it's just like high school.
[photo: you can't see it very well here, but I'm totally knitting her scarf]

Baby Blues (a rant, not really a review)

[Photo: mommy dearest psychotically chops tomatoes while her husband pleads with her to be reasonable. God, women are so unreasonable.]

Look. No one would claim I don't like a good exploitation flick as much as the next person. And as someone who watches *a lot* of horror movies I'm pretty accustomed to rampant sexism. My rental habits cross a lot of lines, but apparently the translation of postpartum depression into a low-grade slasher in which a mother stalks, tortures, and kills all of her children, for whatever reason, strays into an area I'd prefer not to go. I don't mind seeing mothers go crazy (Psycho), I don't mind seeing them torment their children (Carrie), and I don't mind movies that assume we all know pregnancy = crazy (Rosemary's Baby). So what exactly is it that I mind about Baby Blues? If you're up for a rant, I've made a list:

1. The not-openly-stated but clearly implied moralization of Andrea Yates' story. "True Events" and "Pray these horrors don't befall your family." Tacky is fine with me; after all, I rented this movie because I thought it was about an evil baby. But this seems a bit....tacky.

2. Some vague and thinly veiled allegorization of violence and farm animals makes it clear that motherhood is a duty to protect, any action to the contrary is a perversion and indefensible. So far I'm bored, perhaps annoyed at the triteness, but not offended.

3. The emphasis on masculinity as a foundation for any family My limit for the phrase "man of the house" lowers in direct proportion to the child's age. This kid is maybe 7 or 8, so I lost patience quickly here. My nagging annoyance notes how the eldest son embodies every christ-like trait imaginable while his sister bickers over dolls and cries through the whole movie. I tell myself I'm being too sensitive.

4. The aggressive means by which the absent trucker father is set up as a hero with strong values (he wants more children, works only because he loves them so much, is deeply faithful while he's gone, sacrifices times together to bring home the literal bacon*), while the mother is petty, jealous, and neglectful (she assumes infidelity on her husband's part, envies a local weather reporter for her flattering job, barely glances at the picture her daughter draws of their happy family). Here I'm irked. It's not just trite. Do we really want to vilify mothers for wanting a job, or not wanting a fifth child? The most recent edition to the family is, after all, about 6 months old.

5. The child killing begins with the drowning of the baby in the bathtub--a scene that feels accurate, tragic, and suffocating. This scene is sad, and it leaves the viewer a little shocked and traumatized when so real a tragedy is immediately followed by a series of slasher deaths worthy of the Halloween movies. Unconventionally, the children are killed on screen, chased by wheat threshers, skewered on pitch forks, hacked with mirrors.** As I watch postpartum depression evolve from a real tragedy to a level of deranged psychosis known only to the wizened horror viewer, my annoyance morphs into real offense. This is sensational, which is fine, and manipulative, which is dangerous.

6. This is already long, so I'll jump to the end, in which the surviving child watches in horror as his pregnant ("it's a miracle!" the tearful father rejoices) mother is released from a mental institution by a villainous band of doctors ("with therapy she's cured") and lawyers ("the law protects women with mental illness") to torment and butcher her next brood. The possibility that attentive medical treatment would have helped her is presented as an outrageous lie perpetuated by anti-family organizations that worry too much about "women's health" (McCain's air quotes, not mine), and I am straining every nerve not to call up Brooke Sheilds and ask her if we can go trounce whatever Tom-Cruise-loving hack of an executive okayed this thing.

What I resent most is being driven to take Cruise seriously, even for a moment.

*In the first ten minutes Chris commented "Personification of a pig so early on does not bode well." It doesn't. For the viewer, or for the pig.
**I don't like spoilers, so I put those in the wrong order