true stories

Instead of writing a review of David Byrne’s extraorindary “staged documentary” of the town of Virgil, Texas, which stars a woman who can’t get out of bed, a weary bachelor named Louis who describes himself in a classified as “panda-bear shaped” (played by Tom Arnold), and a forty minute mall fashion show/song and dance number flaunting suits tailored of astro turf, I shall list my favorite beginnings of films, because the first ten minutes of this film are my favorite first ten minutes of all time. The beginning of True Stories is as near to indescribable as any writer can come: first there’s a seven-year-old in a white dress walking down a strip of unworn highway. The crane shot swoops in, and cuts to an image of pure ocean, recorded on old, grainy film. Byrne’s voiceover recounts the history of the physical land of Texas as if he’s lecturing to a crowd, but with the simultaneous enthusiasm of a third-grader recounting to his parents what he picked up in school that day. This history is edited from stockpile news reel file footage of dinosaurs and cavemen and everything seems to mock Ken Burns: it’s all historical inaccuracy, edited ironically. If you stop the film after ten minutes, that’s fine. They’re what counts. Anyway, as promised, my favorite beginnings

1. True Stories
2. Magnolia
3. The Royal Tenenbaums
4. Back to the Future
5. His Girl Friday
6. Me You and Everyone We Know
7. Cliffhanger!

I am trying to make myself look foolish.

the last american virgin

The trio of teenage hormones the film unfolds around pick up a couple of girls at a soda fountain. Two are hot, one is not. All are invited back to their place, where sex is anticipated, but before the three self-righteous chicks agree to anything, they have one demand: “Do you guys have any drugs?” These kids are 14. “Drugs?” the boys ask.
“Like cocaine?”
“In the kitchen,” a breathless genius improvises.
[One minute elapse on dorky suburban 14 year old girls].
“Here you go.” A mirrored platter, six lines, cut straws. Perfect.
“This is the best coke we’ve ever had,” the girls agree.
It’s baking soda. That’s the joke. It’s baking soda.

The film is like a mashup of that movie about losing your virginity at camp and Animal House, except it's not good at all, and is painful to watch, and breaks every rule of continuity, and the acting is strained, and I would rather have actually snorted baking soda than watched them do it.

how to deal

Wheat-pasted all over town, How to Deal’s cerulean poster injected a bashful, smirking Mandy Moore into the smog-clogged hearts of millions. There she was, leaning against an absent pole, or something—happy.

Fortunately, the only truth proclaimed by the smiley poster is its color: a seeping, melancholy blue. A blue of oceans—the cobalt ice of a frightful distance sinking through the silences of fraught relationships, the turquoise of tragedy!

Because How to Deal is closer to Heathers than Heathcliff. This is dark, watery stuff. It starts out systematic: Mandy’s BFF has a new BF, and they’re all smoochy smooch around town, and Mandy’s sort of jealous, but then it turns out the BFF gets knocked up, and she’s thinking of the right time to tell him, and Mandy and her BFF go to the soccer game, because they love team sports and stuff, and they’re there to watch the BFF’s BF kick the ball around, and ALL OF A SUDDEN HE FUCKING COLLAPSES IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FIELD AND HE’S BREATHING HARD AND HE HAS A HEART ATTACK AND DIES. So, yeah, there’s a death within the first fifteen minutes, and then there’s a funeral and car crashes, and divorces and drugs, and basically, the whole plot of the film, which is not apparent at all from any sort of advertising, is that this is a clean family film about how a good Christian girl Deals with these sort of things.

OK. So, it doesn’t make a fine film when you just expect it to be a teen snogfest and it turns out to be a teen sobfest—it’s dark, but not stylized enough to be actually good. What makes this movie immensely enjoyable is that me and Rachel Khong and Maggie Murphy and Becca Who Works at Magnolia Bakery and Mina Kimes all totally had legitimate crushes on the boy who stalks Mandy around, before she finally gives in and “learns to love.”

I am not a film critic. This is soft porn.

sleeping with strangers

bad, bad movie.

pumping iron

The 1977 documentary is fringed with failings: theme music like the background polka of a bad porn, careening cameras that never let you become really sure of your footing, and a film with the rosy red sheen of 1970s television—or a chunk of hunky flesh. It’s probably the flesh—that’s all the movie is really, ostensibly, about. This is a documentary about musclemen, a breed as rare as mermen, a breed which expunges semen like seamen, a breed which toys about gyms and slaps each other on the ass with wet little white towels. Watch them as they loop spaghetti around forks as thick as fists, as they wait around the water cooler watching bubbles pop, as they bench 452 pounds and check out each other’s pecs as they squat! Follow them to the Mr. Olympiad contest, where one of the contestants stressed by the camera is about to make history as a six-time winner. Describing the state of elation he gains from weight-lifting, the heavy-weight shrugs: “It’s like coming. When I’m lifting it’s this sexual sigh, it’s like every time I lift a weight I come, I’m coming all day in the gym, and then I go home and make love to my woman, I am also coming. So imagine how happy I am—coming all day.” The speaker’s name is Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This isn’t so much a “movie” as a shred of historical evidence. His eyes glint as he tells the camera how he goes about “psyching-out” his competition. When he wins, as per usual, it’s no surprise. Bench that: It’ll be no surprise.

henry fool

The village idiot, stutter-toed, shock-eyed, baby-faced, would rent this film on the plot summary alone, so it is to that end which I will attend. (The village idiot is a genius).

The hard-working garbage-man, Simon Grim (the hipster-sexy James Urbaniak) is one of those lonely souls who trudges to work with a lunchbox and the requisite Budweiser, just, really, to avoid coming home. The home to which he does, eventually, everyday, come, houses a couch cradling his sprawling, depressed mother (Maria Porte), and a closed door, behind which the moanful groans of his slutty sister (the perfect Parker Posy) as she entertains another male friend.

The sitcom of Fool’s life jumps the shark when he rents out the basement room to ex-con Henry Fool (Thomas Jay Ryan), who turns everything honky-tonky! Gobbeldy-goo! Henry dons a goatee, a woolen vest, and has literary ambitions—he’s a complete alien to this one-horse, garbage-factory town. Nestled by the woodstove, the cracked volumes of his grand Confessions speak to Grim of an otherworldly genius, but the texts remain sacrosanct, and frustrated by Fool's secret, the simple garbageman is inspired to create a work of his own to harbor from Henry's penetrating stare. Pulling an all nighter through two ballpoints and a grade-school Composition notebook, Grim's final book-length “POEM” is picked over by a condescending Henry Fool, who’s got no incentive to like the stuff.

Still, he’s moved to tears, and tears through the rest of the volume. As does Posey. As do the customers of the local 7-11, where Fool posts a single page for community perusal. A woman sings for the first time in twenty years, the high school newspaper enters court proceedings to defend their publication of the “lurid filth.” Like the warbling voices of Charlie Brown’s teachstaff, Grim's “POEM” retains its draw simply because we never get to read it. Described over and over again as “the most beautiful,” “the most life-changing,” “the most perfect” work of literature ever conceived, as the only possible description of our present culture, there’s no way Hal Hartley can show us this. Grim's poem is beautiful both because we cannot see it, and because the film presumes a world where such a document could exist.

Today, it’s too easy to blame failure on the plethora of other successes. That ol’ Harold Bloom schlock about the anxiety of genius, which is true, in a sense, seems to become less and less true as more and more absolute crap hits the airwaves. It is easy to feel—no, let me rephrase—Easy for people like me to feel as though nothing we could ever write could make any impact. Fool is a film which vigorously denies this anxiety, which shows a world crumble around a work of art, which shows how one Composition notebook can change a life—Grim moves out of the dump, beds a lit agent, and lives a snarky Greenwich village life as different as it could be from the shared future of Posey and Henry Fool, whose love has burned in the same flame which caught Confessions on its final page.

My god, this is a good movie. Not only because it’s the sort of plot failing writers (read: bloggers) swoon over, but because the film itself is gorgeous—keeping the camera long on scenes of lameness, cutting quickly over jarring dialogue, pointing out to us the landmarks (Budweiser can, bathrobe) that mark out a territory in which a heady garbageman could really compose a final opus.

A good poem, I have been told, should make you suck in your breath at the last line. A good movie is the same.

primary

The famed documentary shot by Pennebaker and Leacock, it’s the first of the sort to show just about everything. It’s not an illustrated lecture, it’s got nothing to prove that it won’t from the evidence directly. The camera lingers on Jackie, nervously tugging at her white gloves behind her sharp little suit, behind the cute little podium, behind the sea of people watching her husband’s lips as he spoke toward an image—an image this film flips to reveal the underside. Humphrey and Kennedy are head to head in the Wisconsin democratic primary, when my father was six years old, and it’s suddenly strange to me that these women in the street are actually wearing these dresses, are actually enjoying these hats and scarves, and petting Kennedy on the sleeves, and these men in the coffee shops are actually sitting there sipping as Humphrey scrambles toward them, are actually wearing overalls and talking about extra hands. It speaks toward some sort of realism attained, then, when what I’ve been constantly taught is true seems absurd and surprising. Perhaps, in forty years then, my children will watch Real World Boston, from when I, too, was six years old, and guffaw when they see Heather wearing overalls. I mean, gosh mom, did they really wear overalls back then? It’s the same thing. That’s what I wanted to say. It makes you feel like everything you learned was stupid.

the paper

The definitive feature on newspaper reporting has me scrubbing the floor of its dramatic sheen.

where the buffalo roam

a. Take the portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson as sashayed by swashbuckling Johnny Depp, and graph it in a perfect circle—composed by compass upon a blank sheet of paper. The coloration should be a pattern of vertical lines.

b. Take the portrayal of Hunter S. Thompson as hopped by hopped-up Bill Murray ten years earlier, and graph it in a perfect circle—composed by compass upon the other circle, so that a sliver of the first circle meshes, composing a vertical smile. The coloration of this circle should be a pattern of horizontal lines.

--> The resultant sliver is a checkerboard. This board represents Hunter S. Thompson’s translatable mannerisms, the every-other-square-filled step to color the life of Thompson can be provided by the man himself. But both actors studied with him, studied him, read his genius, etc.

q. And it’s really something, even if only half the lines are there, to see Bill Murray shoot a fax machine with a gun, cradle a dog named Bronco, and send away munchkin bellhops so he can do his mescaline in private.

mr. blandings builds his dreamhouse

“And I’ve thought
how like your name this house is—
With me outside of it,
And nobody watching.”
--The Veil, Denis Johnson

And I’ve thought, how like Carey Grant’s smile this chair is,
how like the scrub-brush his chesthair grows beneath his smoking jacket,
how like a birdbeak his sharp New York wife clucks,
how like The Money Pit this movie is *(or the other way around—
they’re both laugh-out-loud, ‘How could such a simple change have gone so wrong?!’), how I read this book in the eighth grade because of its James Thurber illustrations,
how like the twin daughters my needs are (Architect: “Surely they don’t each need
a closet and a private bathroom?” Grant: “Surely they do!”),
how like a pot of spilt nails my heart is—
watching interior decorating gone wrong,
like an elongated episode of Trading Spaces
with the hoohaw in sharp black and white. The tragedy is that this was just a film set.
They didn’t really build this house. Didn’t really build anything.
Grant’s no Bob Villa. I’m no wretched concubine in a cummerbund
canoodling around asking where the dishes go. I want a real house.
I want you inside of it.

multiplicity

Herr Doktor,
My mind is running circles again, it’s déjà vu in every nook and cranny, and everything I’m seeing is in (gasp) multiple! It’s not just that there are four cleverly blue-screened Batmans, all engaging in furiously un-dated (I’m serious) comedic quibbles. It’s that I feel that I’ve seen this plot before—poking out from behind some vase…If you don’t recall, Doktor, from your fourth grade outing to see your first PG film, protagonist Doug is the male embodiment of the chic lit How Does She Do It? He works long hours as a contractor overseer, shuttling between several jobs on any given day, which doesn’t leave much time to the remodeling of his own soon-to-be dream home, or the restructuring of his loopy family life—headed by lovelorn Captain Andie MacDowell (my own personal Satan in a movie star’s body. I swear to Jesus MacDowell’s in more Japanese advertisements than any “star” “alive” today). What I’m trying to say, herr Doktor, is, remodeling of family home as symbol of success? That recalls Blandings, or perhaps—The Money Pit, or, perhaps House Sitter! To get everything done for the grand climax wherein his dream home is unveiled alongside his job promotion and his newly re-won love life, Doug enlists the help of a Clone “What is it you do here Doctor?” Scientist, whose interest in Doug is purely experimental/gay.

Don’t get me wrong, Doktor, this movie is completely utterly great. Whenever MacDowell is out of the shot, the shit is funny. The fourth clone is a copy of a copy of a copy, a retarded boy with an inkling for pizza who asks innocently, when the original Doug returns from a sailing trip, “Did you bring me a monkey?” The noun “monkey” is still fourth-grade hilarious, as is the homosexual copy’s (#3’s) ability to perfectly bed a sandwich in tin foil and imperfectly avoid sexual relations with Doug’s wife. Then there’s Copy #2, who’s better at construction than Doug #1, giving a lovely improvement arc to this rotund script, letting us all breathe sighs of relief as he renegotiates contracts with the gracious aplomb of a contracted 1600s slave laborer.

But the real strength here is in the kind of Junior-esque humour the film is willing to provoke. Movies like Attack of the Clones! , Minority Report, those ones with Jon Travolta, or other total shit “future” movies based on mediocre Phillip K. Dick stories give technology a dystopian name. Sure, clones are fucking weird. But they’re also totally hilarious! I’d like to see a sitcom that deals with stem-cell research on a cabbage catch kids ranch, a musical about aborted babies living in paradise, a comedy about death row inmates itching to get by, because movies are not all either POLITICAL STATEMENT or ESCAPE, they can be both, or, in this case—neither.

the razor's edge

There’s a scene in Pee Wee’s Great Adventure where the gregarious “Pee-Wee” is lost. He’s in the backlot of the studio that’s set to produce the feature-film of his life, but, still embroiled in the drama that is his life, and not in the image of it, he’s also trying to evade the police, win back Dotty, and careen out of the film so he can watch it himself. Plot aside, grey-suited Pee-Wee flits in and out of film sets, jiggling his hips as a beach-blanket-bingo girl, nudging aviators over the bridge of his nose as a stoic bodyguard, and generally playing each role perfectly, before something minor goes wrong, and his momentary presence wastes reels, wreaks havoc, and propels him to the next self-contained candy-colored world.

Like the fictional character Pee-Wee within his own film, Bill Murray, the actor, is treated by filmgoers as something more than an actor, fitting his body into the shapes of other characters, flitting among sets, but always retaining that essential Bill Murray spike. He’s box-office-irrresistable as an actor because he fills only ostensibly the cardboard names of characters he’s been assigned to fill: Phils and Larrys and Bobs, whose cutout words are the flat terrain upon which the cities of Murray’s improvisation are destined to rise. Simply put, despite the changing marquees, the rotating painted sets, the costume changes, Mr. Murray, like Pee-Wee, always plays himself. If we laugh at Pee-Wee fumbling with a sandy hula hoop, we laugh at the absurdity of the scenario: a suited lunatic, playing the part of a beauty queen! It’s the same chuckle moviegoers could have gleaned from a screening of The Razor’s Edge if they hadn’t been so snooty.

Instead, the period drama, co-written and co-directed by the muse himself, in which Mr. Murray plays “Larry,” a World War 1 ambulance driver caught up in an affair with a wealthy Chicago maiden that’s leading him straight to where he doesn’t want to go—a predictable marriage in a predictable world. Murray is as miscast as anyone ever was: sallow smoker’s cheeks speckle a boy supposedly straight out of college. An older woman grasps the slightly-balding jokester’s face before he sets out for war, feeling the skin like Braille: “Don’t hurt your pretty little face, my dear.” After the war, Murray seeks out adventure as a fisherman in France, a coal miner in Britain, and a monk in Tibet. Now, pause. Please imagine the hound-dog SNL actor in these three scenarios.

1. As a fisherman in France, he lounges in suspenders in his cramped apartment straight out of Moulin Rouge, wherein he reads books constantly, and frequents diseased prostitutes.

2. As a coal-miner, he dines with a mining family, his face covered in obviously-makeuped “soot,” as he rubs a rag upon his head, speaking of adventure.

3. As a Tibetan monk, Murray climbs the tallest peak, led there by a squire, and jostles the locals in a marketplace, picking up the melons they’re selling, holding them to his chest, and squeezing them like fictional breasts. Oh, that seems like the Murray we recognize!

Murray, unlike the majority of actors working today, has a character so suited to our contemporary conscience, so tuned in to the radio dial of modernity, that he seems completely unfitting to live life in any other period. He reeks of a disillusionment that seems out of place anywhere outside the 80s. This movie was a complete flop because the acting is objectively terrible. But if one were to step outside the idea of a movie, to see Murray as what he is—the pure embodiment of the disillusioned modern conscience—then we might be able to see this film as just another painted set in his twist with cinema, in his motorcyle chase out of here. See Murray as a Pee Wee, scrambling over wet rocks, aching in a world that is not his own, and you will not only understand what it is to love this movie—you will understand what it is to be a movie.

p.s.

It's not that I didn't love the exquisitely awkward sex scene between Columbia admissions officer Louise (Laura Linney) and artstar F. Scott (Topher Grace), it's that the rest of the movie did nothing to live up to that realism. Dialogue like "I'm the one who's in shock--waking up next to your brililant face!" recalled the failings of Star Wars more closely than the awkwardness of reality as captured in all these postmodern zoom outs a la the films of Todd Solondz.

Yet this film does a lot for the canon of chick flicks, for once there's a woman in complete control, and a guy who's not not that into her. He's really really really into her. And perhaps that's what's unrealistic: she says nothing to him, she does nothing to charm young Toph, she's all blonde hair and tumbling breasts. What does this woman do that's so lovable? And besides the whole Birth vibe of F. Scott (he shares a name, a passion, and a face with her old flame), he does nothing but parade naked around the apartment to win her--if, in fact, he does. I would accept the shallowness at face value if the film addmitted it, but something here smirks of a grand love affair, a weight given to the whole thing that it doesn't deserve. Topher must be up to his arms in Rosalinds, and this Columbia admissions officer seems just another girl.

Still—please catch that third scene.

less than zero

Monsieur Easton Ellis should have been an interior designer: the icebergs in the LA pool were inspired! Martha would have dug the television sets spotting a back wall, the flounced pink skirts, the cokeheads in penguin tuxes! The movie totally sucks: it's watching a soap opera on spin cycle--there's an especially disgusting sex scene that recalls the tootsie-roll commercial with the cooing owl! This is Party Monster without understanding it's capturing an era: totally dated, dead. But I went into a Soho bed store today because I was totally inspired to get a circular mattress next year! Spin me round round round, like a record, baby.

love story

is not.

What makes this film entirely unbelievable is not the tragically stern father, not the blood disease with christmas-gift timing, not the sharp anger of the lovers' dialogue: it is that they love each other at all, despite their hideous haircuts. I cannot fathom it.

Still, it made me want to play in the snow with someone. But then, perhaps the desire for the outdoors was just that I wanted to get the hell away from the screen.

before sunrise

I spent the last three weeks of last summer aimlessly criss-crossing a soupy-hot europe on a eurorail pass that showed me most of everything through the window of trains. I was as sad as I was not very sad. I didn't really feel anything: disappointed in the world, maybe? In myself, definitely. As bored as I was overstimulated. Ethan Hawke Understands. Especially when he's wearing his turtleneck and making lewd hand gestures to sculpt an image of his childhood for some pretty actress. He's discontent. His Reality Bites. And the girl across the table is pretty. The wandering American meets the Sorbonne-educated hot french chick who's as unhappy with the stereotype of the french girl fling as she is perfectly fulfilling of this image.

This film is good. If you Understand, that is. If you've been on the whole European train journey rite-of-passage for America's Teen Force thing and you felt really fucking bored the whole time. I mean, the love scenes are goodish. Everything's bella. And yet, the meat of what this film gets right is the flittering, watery attention span of a jerk like Hawke. A jerk like me.

Yet the strongest flash is a series of shots wherein the camera reveals the spaces these characters inhabited, only this time, shows them empty, the next day. It recalls that photographer who edited the actors out of porn interiors, showing in the empty space the implied meaning of two bodies—showing, with the absence of those two bodies, the possibility for so many other unknown pairings.

To identify with this film, it is not so much that we could be those two characters, could sit on that railing the next day, could reinterpret, relive the weary tragedy, although we could. It is to understand the feeling of seeing these empty places, of feeling the need to fill our experience not with a wandering tourism, but with something inside our own life. If we identify with this film, it is with the empty spaces.

arrested development on dvd has ruined this blog. when i finish the entire two seasons, i will recommence.

sisterhood of the traveling pants

this movie ruined my life. i cried, inexplicably, for 46 minutes afterwards.