Category: Arts & Entertainment

Tonight I saw the live RiffTrax show at the San Rafael theater. It was the awesomest, which is lucky for me, since I’m going to be seeing it again tomorrow night in the city.

A year or so after I graduated college, the MST3K guys did a Comedy Central-sponsored tour where they’d show one of their episodes (“Zombie Nightmare”) to a live audience. It was a blast; watching the show was always funnier with other people around, even if it’s just one other person.

This show is even better, because the guys do the whole show live, sitting on stage in front of the movie. Even though they were reading from scripts, the whole thing felt spontaneous, and they did a great job of gauging the audience’s reaction (and recovering from missed cues). And there wasn’t a single joke in the entire movie that didn’t work; there was no reference too obscure for at least a couple of people in the audience to get. For a long-time MST3K fan, there’s just no better way to see the show.

The guys (Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Mike Nelson) did a Q&A session after the show. Not too much of interest was revealed, but it was just a relief the fawning crowd didn’t get out of hand. I’ve been to plenty of comic book convention panels and other forums where obsessive geeks (like myself) are given free rein to make everyone wince and cringe uncomfortably, but the gang did a good job of fielding questions.

Now I’m going to go to Netflix and move Roadhouse higher up in my queue…

You’ve got to be in the right frame of mind to watch Pan’s Labyrinth and enjoy it. I’m not sure what that frame of mind would be, exactly, but I wasn’t in it.

I want to make it clear up front that it’s a very good movie. The story is very well told, imaginative but grounded in a real-world setting that makes it relevant. All the performances are excellent, the effects and costume design and set design are perfectly balanced between fantasy and reality. There are several scenes that are masterfully done and literally unforgettable. So I acknowledge that my failure to enjoy it is exactly that — a failure on my part.

My theory is that a big part of it is knowing what you’re getting into. Yes, I’d read up on it a little bit, and I was aware that it was rated R. But I purposefully avoided reading or seeing too much about it, because so much of the enjoyment of a fantasy movie depends on being surprised. I only read one review, from Stephanie Zacharek of Salon.com, because we’ve got a 90% solid track record of agreeing 100% about movies. She usually can perfectly describe my reaction to a movie in just a few paragraphs what I can ramble on about for pages and still not quite get right.

So if you read her review, you’ll see lots of talk about fairy tales and imagery and fantasy and you might take away the idea, as I did, that it’s like a more adult version of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth. Be aware that it’s not. I was even prepared for that to some extent; the faun as shown in the promotional pictures is clearly much creepier even than David Bowie, and a movie with a guy with eyes in his hands is clearly going to be darker than the Muppets.

I did notice that most reviews of Pan’s Labyrinth classify it as “horror/suspense,” but I didn’t put much stock in that, and I still don’t. It’s not a horror movie; it’s definitely a fantasy. But you have to watch it as if it were a horror movie. For me, as someone who really doesn’t do well with horror movies but is still convinced I’ve got some kind of manly image to maintain, that means being hunched over uncomfortably-but-trying-to-look-casual in the seat, head averted, trying to see just enough through peripheral vision to be able to follow what’s going on.

But despite my squeamishness, I realize it was essential for the movie. Because it isn’t horror movie gore, or over-the-top effects-driven fantasy violence, but sudden brutality, and torture, and emergency field medical procedures. The kind of stuff that goes on during a war, and the movie is set during (or immediately after?) the Spanish civil war. And almost all of it is necessary; there are only a couple of sequences towards the end that I thought were gratuitous. (And I wrote those off as being an after effect of Guillermo del Toro’s horror movie background, not quite as well-integrated as the B-horror-movie sections of the Lord of the Rings movies).

The gore and violence perfectly sets up the mood. This isn’t a story that starts in the real world and then escapes to a fantasy land; it’s a war story told from a child’s perspective, where fairies and fauns and nightmare monsters exist in the shadows. And it’s because of the horror movie elements that the movie just feels right throughout — in the real world, violence and horror can come at any moment, so you’re waiting for the moment when the good guys will be found out, and something terrible is going to happen to them.

The relatively few fantasy sequences feel like genuine escape; there’s plenty of gross stuff to see, but it’s all child-level gross. The feeling isn’t one of horror or impending disaster, but of adventure — you’re tense not because you’re thinking someone’s gonna die! as much as oh, she’s going to get in a lot of trouble! It conveys the mood and transition so much more effectively than going through some magic doorway to a sparkling fairy world.

And the more I think about the movie, the more I appreciate it. If nothing else, that’s the surest sign of a classic. There’s one scene in particular, where Ofelia looks into her magic book for guidance only to see swirls of red, that I could only describe as a master work. (Obviously, there’s more to it, but I don’t want to ruin the scene for anyone).

Until now, my opinion of Guillermo del Toro was based only on the few movies of his I’d seen — Mimic, Blade 2, and Hellboy — and a ton of promotional interviews for Hellboy. And I dismissed him as being a smart guy who has a great sense for what’s cool, what makes a cool story, and can articulate why it’s cool, but still somehow ends up making average genre movies salvaged only by one or two memorable images.

Pan’s Labyrinth isn’t just a good movie. It might even lend a little credence to the auteur theory and show what can happen when an imaginative moviemaker isn’t hobbled by the archetypal Hollywood Machine. And even though I didn’t enjoy watching it, I’m glad I saw it.

I think it’s every blogger’s duty to make sure as many people see this as possible. The best scenes from Wicker Man.

I haven’t seen the movie, but by the looks of it he was just asking for the bees. What a dick.

I finally got around to watching Super Size Me, good timing for someone, like I am, who’s taking renewed steps to become less of a fat-ass.

For the record, I am aware that the movie came out more than two years ago. And that it got a ton of press and plenty of favorable reviews, it went through the awards circuit, it got a response from McDonald’s, and it spawned a mini-industry, including books from Morgan Spurlock and his fiancee and a spin-off series (which I haven’t seen).

But I avoided watching it all this time, because I knew exactly what it was — another biased, muckraking, manipulative documentary about how big corporations are evil. The kind that always rails against The Man in defense of honest, hard-working American citizens, while at the same time having the thinly-veiled undercurrent that Americans are fat, lazy and stupid. Besides, McDonald’s brief public rebuttal was kind of a no-brainer — in brief, “No shit, Spurlock! You’re not supposed to eat it all the time.”

So I was surprised that the movie addressed this before the fact, and that it turned out to be a damn fine documentary. Easily one of the best I’ve ever seen. Most surprising to me was that it works so well not because of its objectivity, but its tone. It’s not objective in the least; it’s completely manipulative. But it wins because it’s a) transparently manipulative, and b) gleefully manipulative.

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at the transitions, with paintings of McDonald’s advertising portrayed as religious imagery. And especially the genius sequence that shows McDonald’s TV commercials set to the tune of “Pusherman.” It’s all disarming enough so you never feel that you’re being preached to, but you’re still reminded throughout that this is a serious subject. It’s just not the end of the world.

And he states up front exactly what his objective is, to provide evidence that was missing in the lawsuit against McDonald’s, that the food can be directly linked to obesity and health problems. And he acknowledges that eating nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days straight is an extreme case done in order to prove a point, but also explains that the experiment isn’t that far off the mark. The company directly targets children, and then encourages customers to overeat and to keep coming back. McDonald’s may say in official statements that you’re not supposed to eat there all the time, but it’s clear that they’d be really, really happy if you did.

And the most important thing is the tone; he somehow manages to stay just left of preachy throughout the whole thing. He acknowledges that the food tastes good, because it’s designed to taste good. He doesn’t condescend to his interview subjects, and never brow-beats anyone, even those he doesn’t agree with. The tone never (okay, rarely) gets to finger-pointing or lecturing; he simply comes across as being an earnest guy in the middle of things with everybody else, trying to figure out what’s going on.

Most interesting to me are the scenes with his fiancee. She comes the closest to representing what I originally thought the film was going to be — militant vegan propaganda, criticizing Big Corporate America for killing us all and destroying the Earth and all that. And he laughs at her attempt to convert him to a vegan diet, and still somehow manages not to be insulting. It’s a great way to show that it’s not all about empty stereotypes and good guys vs. bad guys; it’s people living a lifestyle that suits them and trying to find a practical common ground.

I think here in the bay area, that’s the most important part. San Francisco’s abundance of restaurants makes it easy to eat like crap without ever visiting a chain, so McDonald’s isn’t the only enemy. Consuming without being conscious of what you’re doing to yourself and to the environment is the enemy. And so is making quick-and-easy judgements, even if you’re absolutely convinced that you’re being noble and compassionate about it.

And after a quick google search: Stephanie Zacharek’s review of the movie on salon.com is another of her reviews that I agree with almost 100%. (I didn’t think the gastric bypass segment was as cutesy as she did; I thought it was another great example of how he could show someone with compassion instead of judgement, not pointing fingers at the pathetic fat guy but really taking a look and trying to figure out what’s going on.) Her best phrase: “lazy righteousness.” I must’ve written at least 1000 words on this blog just trying to describe a phenomenon she perfectly sums up in two words.

I’m not sure why I’ve been going around for years with the impression that The Handmaid’s Tale was a movie I needed to see. Maybe I was confusing it with the book (which I can guarantee I won’t be reading), or because I had a crush on Natasha Richardson. Whatever the reason, the damage is done now. I rented it and watched it, more to get it out of my queue than any real desire to see it.

Rain suggested that if you watch it as a comedy, it’s hilarious. I wouldn’t go that far. While there were plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, there was too much dead time.

The way I got through it was by imagining what it was like watching the dailies for each scene as the movie was being made. I pictured a militant feminist producer (I’m thinking Rachel Dratch’s character from “30 Rock”) sitting in the screening room, smoking a big stogie and wearing a “US Out of My Uterus” T-shirt. Her crew — assembled in equal parts from the makers of Sci Fi channel original movies and Cinemax softcore porn — would watch in anticipation for her reaction. After each scene she’d sit and think a moment, then start doing the golf clap that builds in intensity as she barks in a husky, Amy Ray voice, “Oh yeah, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!”

(It’s also kind of amusing to imagine that it was made by the Trinity Broadcasting Network as a Left Behind-style cautionary tale, and they just can’t understand why people are interpreting it as satire of a dystopian future.)

Seriously, The Handmaid’s Tale is even less subtle than a Michael Moore movie. The message is pounded into you so hard and so clumsily you feel like you should be watching the movie wearing a red veil and lying in Faye Dunaway’s lap. (Which, coincidentally, is how I was watching the movie.)

Even though I didn’t expect to like it, I was still trying to be halfway receptive to the message, seeing as how I’m mostly liberal and all. But it was like riding a bucking bronco, the movie was trying so hard to lose me. I can’t pinpoint the exact moment they lost me for good, but it came down to one of four scenes:

1. Natasha Richardson’s reaction to Robert Duvall’s suggestion that they play Scrabble. She actually rolls her eyes, sitcom style. I expected her to do the Wilma Flintstone double-take, complete with accompanying sound effect.
2. When they go to the racy nightclub, and a cheerleading squad is dancing to a Fine Young Cannibals song. It was just comically dated and gross. Even Eyes Wide Shut did a better job suggesting a sexy, decadent party.
3. When Elizabeth McGovern’s character explains that they cut off (or just ruined? it was hard to tell) her hands because you don’t need hands for her job, as a sex worker. I’ll repeat that: don’t need your hands, as a sex worker.
4. When the heroine of our strong-woman feminist tale goes absolutely apeshit when she hears she’ll have to leave without her f-buddy, I mean the man she loves deeply after talking to for about 10 minutes and having arranged sex with.

The unsettling part is that we’re actually closer to a real theocracy in America than we were in the Thatcher/Reagan years in which the book was published, and still the movie seems completely ludicrous.

Apparently I’m zero for two on my quest to become movie literate. Tonight’s entry: Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard, which leaves a viewer in 2006 feeling as jaded and disillusioned as its main characters.

Cinema studies professors and students like to write about Breathless almost as much as French people like to be smug. For me to try to come up with anything new to say about the movie would be like a high school English student trying to find some untapped vein in The Scarlet Letter. I imagine there’s even a template for writing cinema studies term papers about Breathless: mention the birth of French New Wave, jump cuts, breaking the Hollywood establishment while paying homage to it, the combination of high art and pop art, artifice vs sincerity, emphasis on disillusioned youth culture, post-film noir, etc. As you’re waiting the hour and a half for the movie to end, the points just fly up at you. Hand it in, get a B+.

That’s not to say that all that isn’t there, or that it wasn’t important at the time. It’s just that watching this movie in 2006 is a little like going to see the Mona Lisa in person; you’re seeing it because it’s an Important Work of Art, not because of what made it an important work of art.

At this point, though, I can’t even conceive of a world in which Breathless would be shocking or groundbreaking. Whether it’s because it was so influential that every movie I’ve seen has picked everything innovative out of its carcass, or because its influence has been overstated by years of film reviewers, I can’t say. Either way, the end result is the same: you feel as if you’ve seen it all before, and done much better.

Back when I was being forced to watch Important Films, the example of French New Wave we were shown was Le Week-end by Jean-Luc Godard. At the time, it really was mind-altering. It was completely unlike anything I’d ever seen before, it showed new things possible in movies that I may never have considered before, and it was entertaining. If you read up on that movie, you see tons of criticism that it was insufferably pretentious and overly political, and that it exists at this point only as a historical document.

The lesson to be learned, as far as I can make out, is this: making a set of Important Films that everyone must see to be culturally (or at least cinematically) literate, is as misguided as, well, making high school students read The Scarlet Letter. Self-obsessed thugs in 60s Paris are as irrelevant to me as dockworkers and communists in the 50s (On the Waterfront), or William Randolph Hearst and the politics of the 30s (Citizen Kane), or social conventions in pre-WWII France (The Rules of the Game). And the filmmaking techniques that each of those movies revolutionized have been adapted and modified into hundreds of movies with more relevance, even if not as much innovation.

I’ve got no doubt that there’s some group who’s coined a simple term to describe everything I’ve written in this post — it’s probably something like “anti-post-structuralist modernism” or some such. It could all be really discouraging, convincing you that you’ve seen everything there is to see. But instead, it’s a sign that movies are evolving. There are still some truly timeless movies — His Girl Friday stands out for me as one that still seems even more contemporary than 99% of the movies Nora Ephron makes, and definitely more relevant than any of its remakes. But more often than not, going back to the well of Important Films means seeing something whose subject matter is lost without the right context, and whose style, the truly relevant part, has already been appropriated 100 times over.

I should point out that as I was writing this, the movie Raptor was playing on TV, and green berets and Corbin Bernsen were being killed by a rubber dinosaur puppet. That made me rethink my theory on the evolution of movies, but not abandon it.

I was surprised that For Your Consideration had such a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes until I started following the links. Some of the reviews, like the one from The Onion’s AV Club are critical of the movie but still give it a recommendation. I guess that’s a sign that a pass/fail rating isn’t suitable for a Serious Art Medium like The Cinema.

The AV Club gives it a B-, which is about accurate. The people who are going to see it anyway (fans of Best in Show and A Mighty Wind) are probably going to like it, even if it doesn’t attract any new fans. The performances are great as usual, but a lot of the cast is under-used. And the movie has enough laughs to warrant a recommendation, but as a whole the movie feels dated and off-center.

It feels like the usual Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy cast getting together to do an old SCTV sketch, without updating it from the original. One of the reasons A Mighty Wind seemed “off” was that it was stuck between character story and comedy/satire; they liked the characters too much to really make fun of them. The same is true here, but the result is that the movie feels as outdated and out-of-touch as its characters are intended to be. In 2006, who really doesn’t know what the “interweb” is?

And a lot of it is so subtle that you know it seemed brilliant when they were coming up with it, but it doesn’t have enough weight in the final movie. The biggest example is the movie-within-a-movie, a story about a Jewish family in the south in the 40’s which one review calls “Tennessee Williams meets Neil Simon,” a great description. So the characters switch between Yiddish and southern accents, “Oy gevalt! What have I done?” and comedy ensues. They take it a step further in an interview with the screenwriters, played by Michael McKean and Bob Balaban, where McKean admits he’d never heard of the Purim holiday before working on the screenplay. And then that goes a step further later, when a producer suggests they tone down the Jewishness of the movie, and McKean goes off on an indignant tirade about how they’re compromising the integrity of his work. It’s a clever concept, material for great satire, but it just doesn’t come across as funny.

So you end up watching the movie for the cast. As you’d expect, Catherine O’Hara is great, John Michael Higgins is great, and everybody else is good but underused. Fred Willard always stands out in these movies, and in this one he’s doing basically the same so-clueless-he’s-cruel schtick from Best in Show, this time with a faux-hawk and fake earring.

But I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Jane Lynch. She steals every movie she’s in, and she always does it with the littlest gesture or best-delievered line. In A Mighty Wind, it was her winking description of her past in adult movies. In The 40-Year Old Virgin, it was her unbelievably creepy seduction of Steve Carrell. In For Your Consideration, she plays a Mary Hart-style co-host to Fred Willard’s character, and she steals the scene just in the way she stands and walks. It’s just brilliant, and one of the few laugh-out-loud moments in the movie is just her standing there. I’ll go see any future Christopher Guest movies as long as she keeps appearing in them.