In a World and The American Astronaut

It wasn't my intention when I went in to the video store, but I ended up with two Citizen Kanes. A "Citizen Kane" is when the same person writes, directs, and stars in a movie, as in "Shakes the Clown is the Citizen Kane of alcoholic clown movies."

In a World

In a World was exactly the movie I expected it to be but was somehow still surprising. I mainly knew about Lake Bell from Childrens Hospital and Wainy Days, and I thought she was a really good comic actor, so I was excited to see that she had written and directed a movie. I'm always happy to see women making comedies, and it's always cool to see an actor you like turn out to be a triple threat.

Even without the Lake Bell bona fides, In a World would have caught my eye because it's about the world of voice-over artists. Having spent years as a hack voice-over actor in various Foleyvision shows, I have a special affinity for the field. I've been hearing a lot lately about how you should zero in on a subculture to write about, and I'm glad Bell is the one to have made a go of this one.

The movie is great. Light-hearted comedy with a solid cast of comedy pros (Ken Marino, Demetri Martin, Tig Notaro) and a tight script that hits all its marks. What surprised me though was how Bell produced some real strangeness as well as real emotional depth. Rob Corddry gets to bust out of his smarmy dickhead persona to play a really interesting put-upon husband. It's his arc with his wife (Michaela Watkins) that provides some real adult humanity to a pretty typical lovable loser story. But what's great about how Bell navigates these scenes is how she allows incompatibility and inarticulacy and disconnectedness to just hang there without underscoring them for big, obvious laughs. There's a great almost-monologue that Corddry goes into about wishing there was some sort of bubble with no future and no past or something--it doesn't really make any sense--but the emotion behind it is sincere and evident. Bell mirrors the audience's confusion, but it's clear she really wants to get it and to be there for him.

Even better is a moment when Ken Marino finds Bell in his secret hideaway lair and, as a pretty off-target seduction gambit, tells her that he likes to go in there and take off all his clothes and just remember what's it's like to be uncomfortable. It's a great moment because it subverts your expectations. Usually people get naked to feel more comfortable. It also is such a lame come-on, but it works because the strangeness of it registers as a kind of innocence. There are a lot of moments like this in the film: lines that could have been exploited for cheap laughs, but instead, the characters just kind of roll with them because that's the way life is: You rarely say the right thing, and instead of really connecting, you end up just half-assing it the best that you can. Every once in a while, you get past all the misfires and get a chance to really jibe. Or maybe you don't. Corddry and Watkins never quite get there, but their love is built on the strength of their emotional magnetism. Not everybody needs to line up just so. Bell seems to get this in a way that a lot of writers gloss over.

I hope she directs more films because it's really nice to see some humor that doesn't depend on obnoxious boors or gross-out gags. The world could use a lot more of that.

The American Astronaut

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this movie. It is easily the strangest movie I've seen in a long time, Computer Chess notwithstanding. I had no idea what to expect when I put it in. The box advertised it as "A Laurel and Hardy skit directed by Salvador Dalí," but I'm not sure that even scratches the surface.

The film was entirely conceived and executed by members of a band called The Billy Nayer Show with whom I was not familiar. The band's singer Cory McAbee wrote, directed, and starred, and the drummer, Bobby Lurie, was the music director, not a small task considering the film was a space-western rock opera. I've recently been circling around the idea of watching Zachariah, which looks insane, but I'm sure it can't even come close to how unbelievable this movie was. I say "unbelievable" because the film constantly provoked a feeling of "It is impossible that that just happened, that someone thought of that and then actually rehearsed and filmed it. No way." There were definitely some Lynchian moments: sequences that seemed to be more interested in off-kilter tonal surges or performative recalibrations than any kind of narrative flow ( This one's a shoo-in for Bordwell's "parametric narration.").

McAbee resembles a Rumble-Fish-era Dennis Hopper, and a lot of the population and look of the film has that early-Jarmusch, NYC-music-scene hipster kind of feel but coming out of a much stranger subcultural niche. Maybe a twinge of Kaurismäki in there, too. The closest comparison I can come up with is if Three Day Stubble executed a remake of A Boy and His Dog. The plot is negligible to such an extent that McAbee delineates the whole thing in a short speech featured prominently in the trailer. And, right on schedule, the film follows the map he lays out beat by beat. McAbee isn't interested in plot twists or big reveals. Even so, the film constantly manages to surprise and confound expectations largely because it doesn't conform to any known conventions of mainstream filmmaking.

The main formal device here is the songs, which the story links like the projected lines of a constellation and which almost always are both unexpected and disorienting. Witness:



This is easily the best scene in the film, if not the most unusual. I feel bad taking some of the sucker out of its punch by posting it here, but it does an exemplary job of showing how the film functions. Our assumption when the men enter the restroom is that we're headed toward a confrontation and toward violence. And even when the men start singing and pacing the floor, that menace abides. As the dance gets stranger and less likely, constantly expanding and reconfiguring our expectations, it maintains that sense of danger and malice all the way up to the snap of the Polaroid, a final and abrupt veering from the payoff that the scene has taken such pains to set up.

Not that the movie is always this good. It definitely ventures into Ed Wood territory at times (though in this instance, the filmmakers are in on the joke), and one has to have a very specific cluster of predilections to appreciate some of the more jarring stylistic choices. I thought it was incredible, but I know this is one of those movies that, even given someone whose Venn diagram of cinematic tastes overlaps so overwhelmingly with mine as to appear more like an eclipse than the usual cell-in-the-final-stages-of-mitosis figure eight, would remain in that little sliver of corona that belongs to just me. Maybe this sums it up best: My wife was in the next room while I was watching, and after about 15 minutes, she got up and went to another part of the house. The next day, I made her watch the "Hey Boy" scene, and she said "Wow. That was amazing. When you were watching it last night, it sounded horrible." She was probably right in both declarations. I think I'm going to try to get the other Billy Nayer Show film collections. Check 'em out here.

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

Finally got around to watching Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. Such a strange movie. I thought it was really interesting that it used a tragic structure rather than a classic quest structure. At least that's how I see it. It seems like the climax comes about halfway through. After that, it turns from a quest story to a revenge story, and everything after the midpoint is just fallout from the climactic event. (I'm trying not to give any spoilers.) It's not so much a question of getting what he wants because he's already lost everything.

I kept expecting the movie to end abruptly, but it just keeps piling on climactic confrontations. I guess in that sense, it has a lot in common with Point Blank, but Alfredo Garcia does in its second half what Point Blank takes the whole movie to do. Come to think of it, Point Blank starts after the triggering action has already taken place. He's already made his decision. It's like it starts in Act II and unfolds straight toward the climax. Man, I'm going to have to watch Point Blank again now.

What happened to the days when dudes like Lee Marvin and Warren Oates could be the lead in a movie? No offense to Channing Tatum or Chris Hemsworth or these other roided up pretty boys (I shouldn't say that. I'm sure the bulk is all natural), but those dudes were tough without the pumped-up physiques. But they were also weird and brutal and definitely not bros. What actors like that are there now? Mike Shannon? Anyone else?

Final thing about Alfredo Garcia: Dude, Peckinpah is not kind to women. This is no revelation, but I was really struck by it in this film. The misogyny was almost sociopathic. I felt like he was living out some sick fantasies. That said, it was surprising to see a Mexican woman cast as a lead in an American film, and it gave the film a kind of authenticity that was really fascinating. This was a long way from the Charlton Heston as a Mexican stunt of Touch of Evil. I also appreciated that a lot of the Spanish wasn't subtitled, to really put the viewer in Oates's position. I'm going to have to watch this movie again now that I know how it turns out, but it's going to be a while. Ugly stuff expertly done.

Woyzeck and The Limey

Woyzeck

Here is the main reason I rented Woyzeck: I'd been sick in bed for about a week, and by the time I got back up on my feet, I had a pretty grizzly beard with huge shocks of white all through it. I'd also lost about 15 pounds, and I joked that I looked like a soldier on the Russian front (pick a war). I read the play Woyzeck in college for a class called "Civilization and Its Discontents." I was 18 when I took the class, and it precisely catered to all my late-teen-age angst. Arnold Weinstein was the professor, and he used as the premise an essay by Sigmund Freud with the aforementioned title. The reading list included (in no particular order) The Wasteland, Woyzeck, The Flanders Road, Naked Lunch, Phedre, Spring Awakening, Beloved, and a bunch of other texts about really messed up people.

All that aside, with the beard and gaunt face I was reminding myself of a particularly grizzly looking cover photo of Woyzeck that I remembered from the class. Also, I'd recently finished The Rest Is Noise and Ross talks a lot about Alban Berg and his opera of Woyzeck, Wozzeck, so I'd been wanting to revisit the text. The last thing was that I'd managed to make it almost 40 years without seeing any of the (in)famous Herzog/Kinski films, and I thought it was about time.

Turns out, Woyzeck doesn't have a beard at all. In fact, one of the first scenes is of him shaving someone with a straight razor. He's one of the most clean shaven characters in memory. I must have been thinking about someone else. If memory serves, the film is true to the play. What struck me most is the subtlety of Kinski's performance. I was expecting a real lion, but he gives one of the most understated portraits of mental duress I've ever seen. Likewise, Herzog uses a light touch and resists the urge to overdramatize Woyzeck's anguish. It's a very strange film, mean-spirited and relentless but also matter-of-fact. Eva Mattes turns in a fantastic performance (apparently she was awarded Best Actress at Cannes), but Kinski's impotence turned to psychosis is obviously the point. It's a slow film and mostly a quiet one. Ultimately it left me a little nonplussed, but if you're interested in seeing a decidedly non-Hollywood portrayal of mental calamity, I'd highly recommend it.


The Limey

I decided to rent The Limey when I came across this feature at the AV Club. Apparently, the commentary track on this film is legendary in film circles for the undisguised malhomie between screenwriter Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh. I've never much delved into commentary tracks, I think partially because I've always rented from shops and have run out of time. Now that I'm going to be studying screenwriting though, I've become a lot more interested in the particulars of how certain films were made. That's one thing I'm looking forward to with Netflix is having the time to really delve into the extras on the film if it warrants it. A notable exception to this was about a week I spent with Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas, when I was working on my short film "Sonny's Gambit." I would recommend that commentary for anyone who's interested in process, if not for the insane logistics behind that production, at least for the sonorousness of Wenders' voice.

It had been a while since I'd seen The Limey, so I watched it without the commentary first to refresh my memory. I got a lot more out of it this time around, and it was especially interesting to place it in the trajectory from Out of Sight to Oceans Eleven to Traffic. You could really see Soderbergh experimenting with a lot of the stuff that he would perfect in Traffic: the color palettes, the fragmented editing, the breaking up of the timeline. There was one scene where one continuous conversation takes place in three different settings, with the film cutting back and forth among them. I hadn't even noticed that the first time I saw it because the dialogue is continuous.

The commentary track definitely delivers. There are times that are hilarious and some that are truly uncomfortable, but if you've ever worked on a collaborative project, you know exactly where they're coming from. What's actually more interesting than the conflict is seeing how much common ground the two share. And it's thrilling just to hear the scope of knowledge that these two have about cinema. Ultimately, for reasons I can't quite pin down, The Limey is a flawed film. All the scenes with Nicky Katt seem like they're from a different movie. He's funny, but his scenes distract from the hard-boiled nature of the Terence Stamp story. Tonally, the film lies exactly between the sort of charming, jokey Elmore Leonard adaptation Out of Sight and the more ambitious but also more consistent Traffic. But The Limey goes much farther than either in its use of oblique, abstract devices to convey story and character. It's frankly a miracle that Soderbergh got to turn in a film this hostile to convention. But for all the experimenting, there's a sense that ultimately he didn't take it far enough. Ultimately, the film feels pretty safe. Once you boil it down, it's a story about gangsters and screw-ups, a little comic, a little violent, with just enough emotional depth to give it life.

Again, for anyone thinking about studying or making film, I'd definitely recommend the commentary here. It really lays it out there.

Netflix

So, when I signed up for Netflix, I signed up for the version where you can get two movies at once. It also includes streaming, but unless I get that Roku box, I'm not going to post about the movies/shows I stream so much. I decided to try to use the two-at-a-time format to schedule little theme-based double features for myself. We'll see how long this lasts, but so far it's been pretty fun. These posts aren't really going to be reviews so much as a chronicle of my experiences with the films. The first two movies I ordered were Woyzeck and The Limey. I guess loosely the theme is crazy old dudes, though I think Woyzeck is only supposed to be like 40. Thoughts comin' up.

Extract (teaser)

I watched Extract last night. Pretty good. I'll write it up after I finish Runaway. That's right. Runaway. I'm excited partially because I'm working on a robot story right now. By the way, what was up with Ben Affleck's mouth in that movie? Kinda gross.

Conception

So, the idea behind making a blog really came from starting up on Netflix. Well, it was--that was part of it. I had been keeping track of the books I read on this site Goodreads, and I thought it would be cool to keep track of the movies I get from Netflix in the same way.

So that's mostly the point. I also had this idea that I would write about cool sandwiches I came across. We'll see.