Amber Tamblyn and W.B. Yeats

"Book Inscription for 1/2 of the Coen Brothers"

Dear Mr. Ethan Coen,

In the interest of time and saving paper
here's something to read while you're on the crapper--

You're the shit.

Up yours truly,
Amber Tamblyn

From "Sailing to Byzantium"

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

The Singles Ward

Because "Mormon" is already a tag, I figured I might as well review The Singles Ward, which I watched with no small amount of fascination. The Singles Ward is one in a series of Mormon comedies made by two members of the Church of Latter Day Saints. The plot follows Johnathan Jordon, idealistic young Mormon who come home one day to find his wife with beer in the fridge, rock on the radio, and a cigarette in her mouth. She leaves him that day, and Jordon is reassigned to his local singles ward (as opposed to the family ward), a humiliation he can't take. He leaves the church and becomes a stand up comedian, which he pursues until he meets another young Mormon woman who brings him back to faith and good behavior.

The movie charts Johnathan's plunge into sin as only a movie made by the devote could. It starts perilously with his purchase of soda, follows him to a blockbuster where he rents all the Die Hard movies, and ends with him flirting at a bar with a woman who is definitely interested in having sex with him (they don't, but...the offer was there). Requiem for a Dream this is not. The filmmakers are sort of like my Amish family. They definitely know sin is out there, but they've definitely never seen it. They describe it with innocence and in hushed tones.

The movie makes a bizarre attempt to emulate the colorful youth / college films of the 80s. We have all the stereotypes: the great looking stars, the crazed goofball who can't stop mentioning how he dropped his car off a cliff, the inseparable band of lovable geeks, etc. etc. etc., all the way down to the final text snippets revealing what shocking/touching/humorous futures await our characters beyond the movie's plot. It takes a truly kind heart to tell oneself that there can be any jokes or surprises here. Everyone marries. Everyone has children. Everyone serves with honor at whatever mission site the church designates.

There is one sort of sad scene in the movie, where Johnathan realizes that his new squeaky clean act won't serve him on the college stand-up circuit. In fact, faith renders his professional life pretty much impossible. I'm not sure the filmmakers ever really took this moment to heart, as the movie ends somewhat optimistically "John and Cammie moved to California, where she became a mother, and he became a screenwriter." I assume John is the author of this very film, and it's hard to imagine that the Mormon movie market can support a family. In a way, it explains why there is a need for distinctly Mormon cinema when we already have a G rating system. If Mormons don't support Mormon screenwriters, who will? Even G movie stars drink Mr. Pibb, a much maligned figure in the singles ward. [Photo: Oh how zany! Has ever such a motley crew been so pious?]

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

It's a Wes Anderson movie all the way: quirky, mid-life-crisis-y, a fable. It doesn't really feel like a movie, and it has some charming moments. The adaptation is not terribly faithful, but if you can get past that and the emphasis on Man Malaise I think it's pretty fun. Plus, it's not computer animation.

I know we said Bright Star was the clear craft Oscar for this year, but I need a nod to The Fantastic Mr. Fox. There are some cute little knits on those animals:

Yup. Pretty cute. Also, don't you want to pet their small heads? I do. And also, there's a pretty funny bit with a wolf.*

I have a theory that a midlife crisis movie, plus a book adaptation, plus the unexpected use of George Clooney can only mean one thing: Wes Anderson wants to be a Coen. What could this mean for hipster film? We'll have to wait and see.

*A lot of bloggers have been calling the wolf gag racist. I'm normally the first to shriek "racism!" at movies, but I didn't get that at all here. I vote not racist, but if it is, then it only further supports my Coen theory.

A Serious Man

Kristin and I just watched A Serious Man with some degree of enjoyment. I equivocate because I still haven't really thought the film through (I'm somewhere about the first time Larry Gopnick calls Columbia Records Album of the Month Club). However, most of the film is what I've come to expect from the Coen Brothers, but it did get Kristin and I thinking about putting together a film retrospective. Here's my tentative line-up. If you notice something clever about a combination, of course it was my first thought.

1. Burn After Reading and A Serious Man
2. Intolerable Cruelty and Raising Arizona
3. Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men
4. Barton Fink and O Brother, Where Art Thou?
5. The Hudsucker Proxy and The Man Who Wasn't There
6. Blood Simple and Fargo
7. Miller's Crossing

I hope Kristin will not be upset that I broke up the big night featuring our favorite films back to back (Fargo, Miller's Crossing). I thought it was important to remember that the Coens are relevant (and still making movies) in large part because of Frances McDormand. Forgive me.

On to the list. The first night consists of the latest films, which I think are the same film or at least the same ending. The second night will be a date night, third night - westerns, the fourth night - a battle of Johns (Turturro and Goodman), and the fifth night on the dangers of industry. The sixth night will be all about Frances and the final night will be my favorite of bunch.

Submit your restrospective and let the 'dualing' begin...


Oh, and in honor of having finished teaching Russian film for the quarter, I will include a review for A Serious Man: Many movies deal with problems of society and families and this is interesting in A Serious Man.

Zombieland

The walking dead should walk slowly. They should not run. Think of these corpses, raised from slumber by some unknown and incomprehensible force. They are new to this form of locomotion, and their muscles do not respond as expected. Wanton disregard for their own well-being has, in many if not most cases, caused them to sustain multiple injuries. Even if they feel no pain (and “zombies” do not feel pain in the way we do, although they may feel something), they cannot run on a broken ankle, or a torn achilles. Poor zombies.

But it seems zombies have been working out. More and more, the undead are portrayed as faster and stronger than the living humans they subsist on. These fast-moving flesh eaters can be scary in their own way, but they are more like the old monsters: werewolves, or yetis, or lions and tigers and bears. They are predators, and we can escape them through our superior wits and technology, but we cannot outrun them, because they are essentially the same beasts we have feared since we first stood up on two legs. Zombieland’s undead are decidedly in this latter category, the athletic undead.

What makes the living dead of the classic Night of the Living Dead scary is not simply the fact that have been reanimated. Nor is it their modified cannibalism (Question: is it technically cannibalism when they eat only the flesh of living humans and never each other?), although the images of vacant-eyed undead masticating arm muscle certainly produce some visceral reaction. The truly frightening—and new—thing about Romero’s undead comes from their weakness, the fact that individual zombies are so easily eluded or defeated. It does not matter that you can outrun the shambling corpse in the graveyard—and you certainly can—because there will be another near the car, or behind a tree, or looming up out of the darkness in your front yard. There will always be another.

That Zombieland features zombies who run is a failure not of Zombieland itself, but of the entire zombie genre to which it is a response. Zombieland is a movie about zombie movies, and in the cultural contest between high-speed, Danny-Boyle—style undead flesh-eaters and the lumbering living dead of Night etc, it is pretty clear that the scarier and more interesting slow zombies have already lost. Zombieland is the proof, because Zombieland exists in a cultural setting where an explanation of the plague—what caused it, how it spread, where it started—is almost irrelevant, and certainly unnecessary. Everyone knows what a zombie is.

Zombieland is not a bad movie. Every aspect of the film does what it means to do; it is funny, romantic, gory, smart. The performances are strong, especially one awesome (and often spoiled, but far be it from me…) cameo. Here is Jesse Eisenberg, still playing the same thoughtful, neurotic descendant of some hybrid of Woody Allen and Holden Caulfield that he has been playing since he was tiny (and here I am again, sort of liking him in spite of the fact that I was sure I had heard enough stories about how hard it is to be a smart, introspective, adolescent white boy growing up in middle America). And here is Abigail Breslin, who no longer looks like a little girl, trading one-liners with Woody Harrelson.

Like in the superior Shaun of the Dead, the zombies in Zombieland are mere background, in this case for a family road-trip action comedy (sort of like a National Lampoon’s Summer Vacation, with automatic weapons). Unlike Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland has no rough edges. It is slick and fast and full of self-confidence. Maybe that is the difference between the zombie movies Zombieland is responding to and the Romero family of zombie movies (which SotD is about); Romero gleefully explores a crazy idea, while the fast-zombie movies are sardonic and a little smug, and their underlying idea is ultimately safe.

For lovers of Night of the Living Dead, there is something sad about Zombieland. It feels like a nail in the coffin of the thing Romero invented, which was maybe the first new thing in horror in a century. The shambling, slack-jawed, vacant-eyed animated corpse that feeds on the flesh of the living, that can be killed with a shotgun blast or a good solid blow to the head, that can be outrun by any child, but can never be defeated because the one thing this threat requires to keep coming is the one thing we will never stop providing: more corpses.

Double Feature: Cache and Big Bang Love Juvenile A

We paired these two coincidentally, but the pairing really worked for me (it worked even more so for BBLJA, the far superior film).

Cache

Cache follows an upper class French couple and their son as some unnamed person sends them hours of video tape of their house and then menacing drawings of a child vomiting blood and a decapitated chicken. The movie’s main gimmick happens immediately: it’s never clear whether you watching the movie, or the taped footage the couple receives in the mail. This narrative trick has two fatal flaws:

1. This is a surprising and unsettling device, drawing attention to the voyeuristic nature of both fictional and documentary film footage, exactly once. Not repeatedly.

2. In order to achieve this ambiguity the director was forced to fill the film with endless boring street scenes.

After the first unexpected rewind, the director did nothing interesting with the device. There was no moment where this drastically affected the plot, my sense of time, or my urgent desire to see an event unfold in real time, as opposed to second hand footage. This might be a great approach to a horror film, where revealing a scene to be previously shot and in the process of replay might mean something devastating for my ability to observe something horrifying as it unfolds (or thwart my hope for a better ending). Here it’s boring. Endless hours of film of a man’s home and life are mind numbing, no matter how dysfunctional you write his family. And the unsettling sin in the man’s past that the footage finally points to? It incriminates his parents more than it does him. Who gives up an adopted child because another kid accuses him of killing a chicken? Seriously? Also, the drawings so clearly implicate Majid, why bother with the ambiguity of not confirming this? There is one excellent visual shot, in an elevator. It was worth the 2 hours. [Photo: Even the Laurent family often jumps at the chance to fast forward through this tedious documentation of their entirely uninteresting lives]

Big Bang Love Juvenile A

Another movie about movies, but this time from Miike. I don’t know how to explain this, except to say:

It's like the title: a jumble of unrelated bits that add up to something compelling. Or, it’s what you would get if Sarah Kane directed a prison sexploitation film set physically between a rocket to the moon and an ancient pyramid, the three of which exist in a remote field (of dirt? Concrete?) so far removed from the world that there appears to be no real reason to lock up the prisoners. Inside the prison life transitions inexplicably between a gritty noir detective movie, an action film, a tender coming of age romance, and a desolate Beckett play. The physical environment of the prison shifts to epitomize the genre of the moment. Butterflies fly throughout.

It’s…great? The cinematography is beautiful, the love story is touching, the noir is fun, the kung fu is exciting, the sexploitation is unsettling, and Beckett is the only thing that could possibly tie all this together. I say it’s also a movie about movies first because it’s such a motley crew of genres, settings, characters, and aesthetics, but mostly because structurally it’s all about revealing narrative through repetition and slight revision. I think it’s an excellent non-musical example of a fugue. Miike filmed maybe 35 minutes worth of plot, but replays it from various perspectives and angles until the viewer finally has the whole story. [photo: Don't be fooled by the existential despair evoked in the theatrical space. 20 police ninjas are about to jump that guy.]