Musical Wednesdays: We Are Sex Bob-Omb!

The bands that populate Brian Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim books, like all great fictional bands, are so well realized that you can hear them through their lyrics, through the way the sound is drawn coming out of their instruments, through the way the other characters react to the music.  Sex Bob-Omb is a noisy garage rock band, Crash and the Boys are an even noisier, surlier band (their songs are only seconds long). Every band has its own personality, and the music is essential to the story.

For a film adaptation, translating the experience of "reading the band" into hearing it can be a tough trick to pull off.  The worst reaction, I would imagine, would be for the fans to say "that doesn't sound like Sex Bob-Omb." Luckily, Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. the World sounds exactly like Scott Pilgrim, with the help of Beck and Broken Social Scene.  The soundtrack is pretty exuberant (much like the movie--full review coming Friday), and the songs written specifically for the movie are the strongest parts.  I particularly love Sex Bob-Omb's Garbage Truck.

If there's one criticism I have, it's that the soundtrack is missing some songs, like a few Legend of Zelda themes that are only in the movie (at one point, when Scott sees Ramona in the subspace highway inside his head, the Zelda "Great Fairy" music plays.  There, that's the geekiest sentence you will ever see on this blog.  At least until Friday).  But the songs that are on here more than make up for what's not.  This is one of those soundtracks that is much, much more than a collection of songs featured in the movie: it's a stand-alone album, like Karen O's soundtrack for Where the Wild Things Are, or one of Wes Anderson's. 

The one song I really wish they had included (and this is true for both the movie and the soundtrack) is one of my favorite jokes in the first comic book, when Crash and the Boys introduce a song: "This song is called 'Last Song Kills Audience,' and it'll be our last song tonight."  But as a whole, this album is so carefully put-together, and so much fun to listen to, that it's hard to dwell on any complaints.

Friday Films: "In Bruges," or, The Importance of Knowing What Kind of Movie You're Making

This week, I watched In Bruges, a movie that failed because it didn't know what kind of movie it wanted to be.  It begins as a kind of crime-comedy, but at some point turns into a tragic bloodbath that finds each of the major characters dead (well, one is unclear, but still).  And it doesn't fuse these halves together well enough to work.   

I enjoy dark comedy, and I think crime comedy is a great niche that hasn't been done to death.  Big Deal on Madonna Street, Pulp Fiction, even Guy Richie's first two movies, Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.  These are movies that manage to have the criminal elements and the comedic elements at somewhat of a balance: the trick is that they are primarily comedies, I think.  The violence and the crime are played for laughs.  Half of the Coen Brothers' movies run on this concept.

In Bruges focuses on Ray and Ken, two hit men sent to Belgium to wait for further instructions after a botched job.  They're supposed to act like tourists and try not to draw attention, but Ray is impulsive and bored and quickly finds himself mixed up with a drug dealer, her boyfriend, and a dwarf named Jimmy.  There's a great scene where Jimmy goes on a racist rant, leading Ray to karate chop his neck. Ken drags Ray around the city, sightseeing, and finally, their boss Harry calls Ken and orders him to shoot Ray.

In alternating scenes, Ken and Ray get philosophical about heaven and hell, and in a brutal flashback, the job that went wrong is revealed: Ray was assassinating a priest and shot an altar boy in the head on accident.  He is consumed by guilt, which Ken tries to assuage by telling him that he too has accidentally killed an innocent bystander.  Ray has increasing thoughts of suicide, eventually stealing a gun to kill himself.  It's almost like getting a glimpse into another, more dramatic movie.

Up until this point, the movie maintains something of a balance, although the flashback to Ray killing a child is so jarring that the movie loses its comedic momentum.  When Ken decides he can't kill Ray, he sends him away on a train and the movie really falls apart.  Ray gets sent back to Bruges by a credibility-destroying deus ex machina, just as Harry arrives to dispatch Ken.  From there, the movie gets a lot louder and bloodier, and the characters are kind of thrown aside in favor of a gunfight.  Harry even says "This is the gunfight," which felt so inorganic and outside of the movie itself that it almost didn't register in my mind as being an actual line of dialogue.  Everybody--minor characters included--get swept up, and some meet violent and pointless ends. 

The fact that the end of the movie is pretty much an action movie bloodbath isn't my big complaint, though.  There are many movies that end with (or contain) a huge bloodbath that I really enjoy.  Almost anything by Tarantino, for example.  Shakespearean tragedies.  Fargo.  But these movies seem to arrive at it more organically, and I think that's why they work.  And they know what they are.  Kill Bill is a revenge-action-comedy, where things are so over-the-top that the director's intentions are very clear.  Same thing with Fargo, which is a dark and violent comedy all along.  But In Bruges just didn't work, because it didn't pick a side in any clear enough way.

I think a better movie would have focused more on Ken and Ray, without ever showing Harry.  As a voice over the phone, or a profanity-laced note left with the hotel owner, he was a much stronger presence than he was as a character.  It could have been a kind of criminal Waiting for Godot, instead of an uneven, patched together mess.  Or it could have gone the opposite direction and been a violent action movie all the way through.  But I never got the sense that anyone knew which movie they wanted it to be.

Friday Films: The Kids Are All Right

Last Friday, I saw The Kids Are All Right, the breakout hit of the Sundance Film Festival.  It's about a lesbian couple whose kids decide they would like to meet the sperm donor responsible for their existence.  The donor is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), who owns an organic restaurant and rides a motorcycle, two facts that cause Nic (Annette Bening), the more practical of the moms, a lot of worry.  The characters slowly let Paul into their lives, where his presence starts to widen cracks in the family's foundation even as he becomes closer to individual members.

At first I was worried that the movie was painting its characters and its situations a little too broadly: Ruffalo's character seems at times like a caricature, and Jules (Julianne Moore) is a hippie type without steady employment, starting up a few businesses without any success.  Nic is a physician and uptight.  But as the movie went along, I realized that it was probably the director's intention to set things up in familiar patterns in order to destabilize them down the line.  But more on that later.

The kids are Joni, who is preparing to go to college, and Laser, her younger brother.  While Laser initially wants to meet Paul, Joni has an easier time befriending him.  When they tell their moms that they met their biological father, Nic and Jules decide to have him over for dinner.  He hires Jules to landscape his yard.  And then things get weird when Paul and Jules start sleeping together.  And there's the moment where the director, Lisa Cholodenko, starts derailing things.

There are a lot of touches in the movie that I really enjoyed, and a lot of messiness-as-directorial-choice that I loved.  Every time someone hooked up in the movie, there was this awkwardness about it that felt so authentic, and I thought the fact that there was a sense of unstaged awkwardness was a strong point of the movie.  It's not contained to characters getting together, either: the fights, the break-ups, even the dialogue: they seem completely authentic.  I've said before that I prefer the messy and honest, and that's why I liked this movie.  There were some things that could have been better-developed (Laser is under-utilized, maybe--he has a subplot that doesn't do much other than establish the fact that he kind of gets along with Paul, but most of the time he just delivers moody teenager one-liners), but as a whole I think it's an accessible, appealing film.

I think this movie comes along at an interesting point, politically, because it's about gay couples raising kids, and it takes place in California, and it's being released into a polarized climate.  And it's making a political statement through comedy, in a way that almost distracts you from the fact that it's making a political point.  The characters aren't just mouthpieces for an opinion.  I'm glad to see it's doing so well ($15 million in ticket sales so far), and I think we'll hear much more about it during Oscar season (I'm thinking Best Original Screenplay). 

What stuck with me the most, though, was the fact that so many pivotal scenes took place around the dinner table.  The first scene with all of the major characters together, the scene where Nic learns of Jules' affair, the scene leading up to a conflict between Nic and Paul: these are all around the table.  Even the poster is an image of the characters having dinner together.  I think it's the director's statement on her family values: the kids are all right, like the title says, because they have a functional family and support and they, you know, eat dinner together like a family, and I think she's saying that these things are more important than the gender or sexual orientation of the parents.

Friday Films: The Casablanca Effect

This week, a pair of interesting columns popped up in the New York Times and the Washington Post talking about the current cinematic landscape, particularly in terms of romantic comedies.  Over at the NYT, Maureen Dowd has a conversation with author Sam Wasson, wondering how romantic comedies went from Bringing up Baby to The Bounty Hunter.  A valid concern, I'd say.  In the past ten years, romantic comedies tend to be the same old thing, reheated and reconstituted to pretend they're not the same old thing.

In the Post, Jen Chaney argues that there have been a few romantic comedies in the past that break the mold and end up changing the genre enough to be interesting and enjoyable.  She cites (500) Days of Summer and Up in the Air, both of which I really enjoyed.  To that list I would add one of my favorite movies, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  I don't know if that really counts as a romantic comedy, but it's a movie about two people falling in love, told in reverse.  But what don't these movies have?

Happy endings.

Spoilers ahead, if you haven't seen these movies.

In "(500) Days of Summer," we are warned right up front: "this is not a love story."  It's about a relationship, about the course of falling in and out of love.  Sure, the ending has Joseph Gordon Levitt meeting a girl and the possibility of another story (visualized by resetting the "day count" back to "1"), but the real plot is about getting together and falling apart.  "Up in the Air" is about a closed-off man opening up and getting hurt by a woman he falls for.  And even though the two characters get together at the end of "Eternal Sunshine," we all know it could be a very turbulent path.  I believe an alternate ending had them erasing each other and meeting, over and over.

What does it mean that the better romantic comedies have a streak of cynicism, of admitting that things just don't work out like they do (for lack of a better phrase) in the movies?  Maybe they're a reflection of their time, or maybe it's just a way of going against the crop of lame and boring romantic comedies that keep on popping up, year after year.  I really don't know for sure.  But I know it's not the first time there have been a lot of romantic comedies where people don't get together: the 1960s had a ton.  Sam Wasson even talks about Annie Hall, a movie that works so well because they don't end up together. 

I'm not trying to figure out why these movies tend to be better--I guess I'll just sum it up as "The Casablanca Effect," where there's something more honest and more identifiable without that happy ending.  The idea is that the story continues offscreen, which somehow becomes more romantic.

Friday Films: Some Thoughts on "Repulsion"

This week, I watched Roman Polanski's Repulsion, a horror movie about a young woman left alone who loses her mind.  I would never argue that Polanski isn't a great director, and I think he excels at horror.  Whether it's Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby or Knife in the Water, he is able to isolate his characters and create a slow-building sense of paranoia that overwhelms and causes them to see monsters.  Sometimes they're there, and sometimes they're not. 

In this film, an unstable young woman named Carol, who is terrified of men for a reason that is never explicitly explained (more on this later) finds herself alone in her apartment when her older sister goes on vacation.  She starts to have delusions of break-ins and sexual assaults, which jumble together with reality, causing her to attack a suitor and barricade herself in the apartment.  Her grasp on reality deteriorates, and she begins to see hands coming through the walls to grab her and phantom-men who assault her in her bed.  It is suggested, at least how I read it, that she was sexually assaulted as a child and had never confronted this fact.

While I was watching the film, though, I have to admit I had a hard time separating the film from its director.  Isolation, madness, and horror: these have some resonance in Polanski's life.  There's also his recurring theme of the young, innocent woman with sexual demons following her.  If you know about Polanski's life (and I think most everyone knows something about it), this might strike you as a little uncomfortable.

But regardless, Repulsion is an excellent art house horror film.  The cinematography is really impressive, as are the special effects (creepy hands coming out of the walls in particular)  The depiction of the descent into madness is really believable and terrifying.  For the first half, things move slowly and methodically, subtly ratcheting up the tension, until finally there is a moment where everything comes unhinged.

Friday Films: Inception

Last Friday, as the heat index crept upward, I went to a matinee of Christopher Nolan's new film, Inception.  It seemed like the perfect way to beat the heat for a few hours, to duck into an air-conditioned theater and watch an action movie.  I expected a good movie, a summer action movie, but I had no idea I would emerge from the theater, two-and-a-half hours later, with my mind completely blown.  I couldn't stop talking about the movie all weekend, telling anyone who would listen that they had to see it.  Like The Dark Knight, Nolan takes the idea of "summer action movie" and turns it to his purposes, producing one of the smartest action movies I have ever seen.

The plot revolves around Dominic Cobb, a dream-thief who is able to steal information from his subjects' subconscious.  He has been exiled from his home and kept away from his children, and he's offered a chance to go home if he can accomplish "inception": planting an idea in a subject's mind.  He assembles his team, which includes a chemist, a forger, and an architect, to go into the mind of a corporate heir and convince him to break up his father's company.  Their plan involves a dream within a dream within a dream, which will allow them to plant the idea deep in the subconscious.  It also allows Nolan to toggle between several layers of reality, each with their own rules of physics and time.

This aspect of the movie was one of my favorite parts: Nolan made the rules, and then he told his story within them, and I love when a science fiction movie does this.  He explains, enough that no one should be lost, how time works within a dream, and how going deeper into the dream-world (another "level" down) affects the movement of time.  Physical effects are also felt at deeper levels.  So in the first level of the dream, as a van falls off of a bridge, the gravity in the second level kicks off.  And this fall, which takes only a few seconds in real-time, takes significantly longer to get to the next levels, allowing the characters to do what they need to at the lower levels.

Through the film, Cobb's dead wife, Mal, keeps showing up in the dreams.  She operates as something of a wild card through the film, with Cobb's guilt over her death making her into a vengeful specter throughout the dreams.  She arrives just in time to cause chaos during Cobb's missions, and the movie lets us know, through Ellen Page's character Ariadne, that the success of the inception mission depends on Cobb confronting Mal in the lower levels of the subconscious.  I love that I just got to write that sentence in a review of a summer blockbuster.

This is a movie that could have very easily been a confusing, sloppy mess.  When you're dealing with dreams and actions that take place largely in the imagination, and a plot that warps notions of time and space, it's pretty simple to let the fact that it is all a dream allow you to dismiss logic and order and have some sloppy writing.  Instead, Nolan set the rules, and he played within them.  The movie made perfect sense according to its own logic, and that's really what I want out of a science fiction film like this one.  I've heard there are some critics who think that the dreams in the films were too orderly, but I think that was a choice Nolan made to have a really cohesive film, and I prefer it to the latter, something that could have turned out really navel-gazing and dull.

I believe Inception will be a movie worth watching again, because the director's other movies become more layered and complex the more you watch them.  Once you know the twist in The Prestige, you notice all of the clues scattered throughout the movie.  I'm interested to see what kinds of surprises the director tucked into the dreams onscreen here, and what other layers we'll see on the next viewing.  Maybe he intends it to work like a recurring dream, where you remember just a little more each time.  I wouldn't put it past him.

Friday Films: City Island

The theater I work for recently started showing City Island, a new comedy starring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, and Emily Mortimer (also Alan Arkin).  It's a hit, as far as small, limited-release independent films go, and despite the very small ad campaign--I've seen one commercial and one print ad--people are coming from miles away to see it based on recommendations from friends and family.  I saw it a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it; it's a short, light comedy with a lot of exaggerated yelling between family members and Andy Garcia playing a type that I don't think he gets to play much, the working-class family man.  In its first weekend here, it made more money on Saturday night than "Sex and the City 2." 

The plot revolves around a corrections officer who is secretly taking an acting class; he tells his wife that he goes to a poker game every week, and she thinks he's having an affair.  He brings home a prisoner for a month as part of an acting exercise, to tell your deepest secret.  The prisoner is his son, who he has never met.  Things start to escalate towards the ridiculous as the film progresses, and the end of the movie culminates in all of the plot points coming together right as Garcia's character lands his first acting gig, in a Scorcese film. 

It's just over an hour and a half long, and I think the script is incredibly efficient at fitting a lot into this running time.  At times it borders on too much, and I think I could have done without the character of Andy Garcia's youngest son (not the prisoner) and it would not have changed the movie all that much.  The kid himself is really annoying, and his plot has no relation to the rest of the narrative.  It's almost like the director realized this, too, because during the climactic scene he is set apart from the action and doesn't participate.  The rest of the plots wrap up in a scene that occurs in the family's house on City Island and just outside of it, which is the funniest point in the movie. 

Because it's a small movie, it's going to be on DVD in August, and for some reason I find that a little disappointing.  It just seems too soon, and I think that this could have been one of those small movies that continues to grow its audience over a longer run.  If a theater near you has it, go check it out while it's still there. 

Friday Films: RIP Dennis Hopper

I meant to post this last week, so it's not exactly timely, but this video, from the DVD quarterly Wholphin, is how I'd like to remember Dennis Hopper. Sure, Easy Rider is an American classic and Apocalypse Now is a work of art...but this video, filmed in 1983, is Dennis Hopper strapping himself to the "Russian Suicide Chair" and igniting it. Here's a description by Hopper himself.

"You sit inside a circle of 20 sticks of dynamite. The explosion creates a vacuum, like the eye of a hurricane, inside. Dynamite won't blow in on itself. But if three in a row don't go off, you'll be sucked out and killed. Also, you can't raise your head above a certain level or it will be blown off. I asked a stunt daredevil named Ollie Anderson to set up my experience. I got into the middle and hoped like hell it worked. I had to hold my ears. I felt a little disoriented afterwards, but besides that I felt fine. I was alive."

Friday Films: Why Not a Black Spider-Man?

I saw something on Twitter this week about the campaign for Donald Glover (Troy on NBC's "Community") to play Spider-Man, and I have to say: I really hope he gets to audition. The whole discussion started out with this post on io9, and ignoring the Twitter and Facebook campaign for a minute, I think the article raises some great points about adaptation and long-running characters shifting to reflect their eras and cultural values.

I mean, the last forty years in comic books is a story of reinvention and revision to remain relevant about society, from the X-Men commenting on racial prejudice to the movie The Dark Knight being, at its core, about terrorism and the potential for a "protector" to overstep boundaries in pursuit of justice. There have been plot lines in comics dealing with AIDS, with civil liberties. And those are just the superhero comics.

The version of the Green Lantern on the television show "Justice League of America" is black; the part of Kingpin, depicted in the comics as a fat white guy, was played by Michael Clarke Duncan in the movie Daredevil. And then there's Nick Fury, a character played by Samuel L. Jackson in the recent Iron Man movies. He isn't an African-American character in the comic books, but he is a badass, and that's Samuel L. Jackson's brand. The casting is determined by what would best represent the character's personality, rather than hewing too close to what's on the page.

So what I'm saying is, this switch would not be unprecedented, and it might actually be a way to enliven the franchise. And honestly, I think Donald Glover would emphasize the characteristics that make the Peter Parker of the comics so memorable: funny, self-depreciating, trying to navigate both real life and the powers that he has been given. And more than anything, I think these aspects of the character (yes, along with the spider powers) are what make him an enduring and popular hero several decades after his creation, and they define him much more than his race.

Friday Films: Roger Ebert Hates 3-D

Working at a movie theater, I've had a few customers ask when we're installing 3-D projectors. The answer is "probably never." When they ask why not, I tell them that it's a fad, which I truly believe. It's just the current iteration of Hollywood trying to give you a reason to go to the theater, and right now it's working. But it's not going to last. It never has before. At the advent of television, they brought out Smell-O-Vision, the Thriller and...3-D. And then in the 70s, as home video rental emerged, they brought out...3-D. Now that the home theater is so popular, and movie rentals are so cheap (not at Blockbuster, but that's another dying breed), they're feeling a little bit pinched and desperate. Save us, James Cameron!

Roger Ebert has a well-reasoned, intelligent rant over at Newsweek on the current version of 3-D. Definitely check it out. Here's a preview:

"3-D is a waste of a perfectly good dimension. Hollywood's current crazy stampede toward it is suicidal. It adds nothing essential to the moviegoing experience. For some, it is an annoying distraction. For others, it creates nausea and headaches. It is driven largely to sell expensive projection equipment and add a $5 to $7.50 surcharge on already expensive movie tickets. Its image is noticeably darker than standard 2-D. It is unsuitable for grown-up films of any seriousness. It limits the freedom of directors to make films as they choose. For moviegoers in the PG-13 and R ranges, it only rarely provides an experience worth paying a premium for."

Friday Films: An Education

My biggest problem with the film An Education was that there just wasn’t enough there. It was only an hour and a half long, which is fine if there seems to be a complete story told in those 90 minutes, but I felt like the movie was…I don’t know, inconsequential? I didn’t feel particularly invested in the characters, even though the film was well acted, and when it ended I found myself asking, “that’s it?” And it was a different kind of “that’s it?” than I experienced watching A Serious Man, which at least had some narrative shape.

The film follows Jenny, a young suburban British girl who begins a relationship with an older man who turns out to be a con artist. And then she finds out he’s married, but not before she quits school and gets engaged to him. That’s it. The film ends with a cheesy voice-over about how she moved on with her life and started acting her age. There didn't seem to be anything at stake, really, so I didn't feel at all engaged with the story or characters.

The screenplay was written by Nick Hornby, a writer I really admire, and I found myself wondering if there just wasn’t enough source material. The movie was adapted from an essay that appeared in Granta, and it seems to me there wasn’t enough to fill an entire movie. Maybe it would have made a great short film. Or it’s possible that Nick Hornby would have been better-utilized if the movie was taken in a different direction. What if the protagonist was the older, restless and philandering married man? That’s a Nick Hornby character, isn’t it?

Like I said earlier, the acting was very solid throughout. Carey Mulligan, as Jenny, really embodied that feeling of being young and afraid you’re missing out on everything fun going on elsewhere (even if she became a less sympathetic character as the movie went on), and Peter Sarsgaard was surprising as David, the man Jenny dates; it looked like he put on some weight to play this part, and he looked like a pale, doughy British man. And Alfred Molina was excellent as always, playing Jenny’s father. He had some of the best lines in the movie, even though the fact that his character would stand back and let his daughter go around with a man twice her age without any real protest seemed to strain believability for me.

Oh, and Olivia Williams, also known as Rosemary Cross from Rushmore, appeared in the movie as Jenny’s teacher. Which only served to remind me that I liked Rushmore a lot more than An Education.

Friday Films: When the Truth is Found to Be Lies

I finally saw the Coen brothers’ A Serious Man, and I have to say: right after I watched it, I hated the ending. If you haven’t seen it, don’t read ahead—I can’t talk about the movie without spoiling the ending. As disappointed as I initially was with how the movie ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and the more I did, the more I understood what they were trying to accomplish with it; but more on that later.

The movie follows Larry Gopnik, a college physics professor going through a “rough patch,” which I would say is an understatement. His wife wants a divorce, someone has written letters that threaten to keep him from receiving tenure, his kids are awful, and people around him keep dying. Larry is facing a crisis, so he begins to visit with his rabbis to try to get some kind of explanation.

The first rabbi, actually a junior rabbi, suggests that Larry has forgotten the presence of God in everything around him. “Look at the parking lot,” he says, “as if you’ve never seen it before.” The second rabbi relates the story of a Jewish dentist who saw words written in Hebrew on the back of a goyim patient’s teeth and almost drove himself crazy trying to understand the meaning. The third rabbi won’t even see Larry—he’s busy contemplating the lyrics to Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”

The movie ends abruptly, with Larry’s doctor calling him about something they found in an x-ray early in the movie and a looming tornado. That’s it. Like I said, at first I hated it, and then the entire next day, I was thinking about how the whole movie seemed like a riff on the book of Job. And then I realized: it’s not just based on the book of Job, it’s adapted from it. The three rabbis are Job’s friends, the kids being awful and out-of-touch stand in for Job’s kids being taken from him, denying Larry tenure is the equivalent of taking away his livestock. The Coens took the book and transplanted it to the Midwest in the 1960s, and by looking at it this way the ending makes perfect sense. Toward the end of Job, God appears as a whirlwind and pretty much chastises everyone for thinking they can actually understand his reasons. Only here, we don't see the ending in which Job gets everything back.

On the whole, this was a much better movie than No Country for Old Men, which I didn't even care for after a full day of puzzling over it. The Coen brothers are really talented filmmakers, and their attention to detail in recreating a suburb in the 1960s was really impressive. I had never considered the idea of Job being a black comedy, but I think it worked. My only question--and I guess the part that I'm kind of unsatisfied about--is the opening of the movie. Does anyone have an explanation for the part with the old man and the dybbuk?

Musical Wednesdays: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

"Now, the making of a good mixtape is a very subtle art. Many do's and don'ts. First of all, you're using someone else's poetry to express how you feel. This is a delicate thing."

-High Fidelity

Talking about Crazy Heart last week really set me thinking about soundtracks, and what makes one really memorable or perfect for a movie. Like a mixtape, there's an art to it, and it goes beyond just picking good songs. Anyone can pick twelve good songs (okay, not anyone, but most people) and put them all into their movie, but at its best, the soundtrack should convey a time and a place, a mood, the mental state of the characters involved. It can be used ironically, playing a happy song as everything goes wrong, or to underscore what's happening inside of a character. A soundtrack has the power to take a song that isn't great and transform it (I'm thinking of the jukebox scene in Say Anything) or to take a song that's already great and give you an entirely new association with it ("Tiny Dancer" in Almost Famous).

For me, Almost Famous has the ultimate soundtrack. You can probably say that about any of Cameron Crowe’s movies, which use forty years of pop music in every scene, but this one is the best pairing of music to image. From that scene with “Tiny Dancer” on the bus to the clip of “Misty Mountain Hop” as the car rolls into New York City, the music choices work on every level. There’s a sense of time, a sense of the shifting musical scene in the early 70s, and the feeling of an impending crash. At times, the soundtrack almost seems to be in conversation with the movie: there’s a part early on where two characters discuss Lou Reed sounding like David Bowie, and much later in the movie, a Bowie cover of “Waiting for the Man” plays over the action of the story. It’s just this little moment that shows how much care went into connecting the soundtrack to the plot.

I could probably go on for 2000 words about what makes a good soundtrack and what completely ruins it for me (but I won’t). Sometimes what works in one movie is horrible in another. An example: I love the way the soundtrack of 500 Days of Summer works, and the way the characters interact with the songs. The repeated use of the Smiths that initially connects the characters works really well, and the point where “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want” moves from Joseph-Gordon Leavitt’s computer speakers to being played over the action is a well-crafted moment. They call attention to the music in the soundtrack, but it’s in such a character-defining and relevant way that it seems natural to do so. Contrast this with the moment in the movie Garden State when the characters call attention to the Shins’ “New Slang,” a moment that I think completely takes the audience out of the narrative.

What are your favorite soundtracks? I’m a personal fan of Wes Anderson’s because I think in addition to using great songs he utilizes them really well. Cameron Crowe always has really great music in his movies as well—I would argue that the soundtrack in Elizabethtown is its own character. What are the best? What are the worst?

Friday Films: Crazy Heart

This week, I went to see “Crazy Heart,” which is pretty late in its run, but only came to East Stroudsburg about two weeks ago. It’s a really excellent movie, and Jeff Bridges is as great in it as they say he is. I feel like a lot has already been said about it, but I still want to toss some of my thoughts out there.

I was especially impressed with Jeff Bridges’ singing voice and his complete embodiment of the character. I guess you can make comparisons between Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler and Jeff Bridges in this film—they’re both characters past their prime, weary from living too hard and trying to survive on their earlier success. But Mickey Rourke as “Randy the Ram” was (even though he was great in the role) still Mickey Rourke: he brought a lot of his own story into the character so much that you couldn’t see it just as a story about a wrestler. It was instead about the actor playing him, also out of chances, also weary, looking for a comeback. Jeff Bridges, though, took on the role of a broken old country singer so well that you kind of forgot he was Jeff Bridges; instead, he was this Kristofferson kind of character, trying to find one more hit song before slipping into obscurity.

Of course, the music is the highlight of the movie. The songs, particularly the Oscar-winning “The Weary Kind,” are more than just good songs from movies. They’re great songs. There’s a scene about halfway through the movie where Bad Blake is lying in bed, writing the song, and he asks Maggie Gyllenhal’s character if she knows that one. When she tells him she can’t remember who first sang it, he replies, “That’s how you know it’s a good one. It feels like you already know it.” It was a really interesting window into the songwriting process, which was kind of a theme that carried through the whole movie.

There’s a discussion early in the movie about who is “real country.” Bad Blake talks about his protégé, now a huge country star, and about how he has to try to hide it, “to compete with what’s coming out of Nashville.” Later on, the two men have a show together and Tommy Sweet, played by Colin Farrell, is living the life of one of those overblown country stars, with three tour buses and a big-shot tour manager and a full staff. The song “Hank Didn’t Do it Like This” is playing as Bad Blake pulls in next to the buses and walks backstage, and I think it would have been really easy at this point for the movie to make Tommy Sweet into a parody, a punching bag for all of the Brad Paisleys currently making millions of dollars, but they didn’t, and I think that ended up being much more powerful. Instead, he was this minor character trying to navigate superstardom without abandoning his roots, and it made him really sympathetic. He’s also the character who gives Bad Blake a chance to write new material, to break out of playing the same old songs over and over.

It’s not a perfect movie—it feels a little long at parts, and the montage of Bad Blake trying to get himself together seemed a little too familiar—but on the whole, it's worth seeing. I’ve heard a lot of comparisons to "Tender Mercies," a Robert Duvall movie about a touring country singer, which I haven’t seen yet. I think the producers of the movie wanted to pay tribute to where their movie came from: Duvall has a small part in the movie, as Bad Blake’s friend and bartender, a man who seems to have gone through this before. Like the country singers in the film, they acknowledge their roots while moving forward, and this struck me as a really admirable way to make a movie.

Friday Films: Inglourious Basterds

I’ve been a Tarantino fan for a long time, ever since I saw “Reservoir Dogs” when I was probably way too young to watch it. “Pulp Fiction” came next, and then “Jackie Brown” and “Kill Bill” when I got to college. There has always been something so appealing about his style, the aesthetic of grabbing disparate parts from a lifelong immersion in popular culture and shaping them into something coherent and over-the-top and referential that they become so much greater than the sum of their parts. The combination in “Kill Bill” of kung fu, samurai, and western films produces something completely unrecognizable because it is such a loving and meticulous pastiche. So I was pretty intrigued to watch “Inglourious Basterds,” Tarantino’s World War II epic, to see how his style translated.

The movie is, like all of Tarantino’s films on some level, about the movies it draws from. But where Tarantino’s interests in film are more obliquely referenced in his other movies, here the film is used very literally as a weapon against fascists. There’s a moment relatively early in the movie where Brad Pitt, as the leader of the “Basterds,” tells a Nazi officer that “watching the Bear Jew beat Nazis to death is the closest these boys get to going to the movies,” and this link between violent entertainment and movies just grows throughout the film.

“Inglourious Basterds,” like a lot of Tarantino’s movies, is told in chapters; it opens in the French countryside, with a Nazi known as “the Jew Hunter” (nicknames are big in this movie) seeking a family that has gone into hiding. The opening minutes of the movie are so tense, with such a sense of mounting dread, that it’s completely engrossing. It was like the first few minutes of “Kill Bill,” where you knew exactly what was going to happen, and that makes it worse. You’re waiting for the gunshot. Christophe Waltz, who won the Academy Award for his portrayal of “the Jew Hunter,” earned it based on this scene alone: he plays it so sane, so methodical, but with this undercurrent of psychosis that is completely convincing. At the end of the opening chapter, the family’s daughter escapes to Paris, where she opens a cinema.

Meanwhile, the Basterds, an all-Jewish squadron led by a redneck named Aldo Raine, work their way across occupied France, killing and scalping Nazis. Their ultimate goal? Well, Hitler of course. But along the way, they inspire fear and become legends; there’s the “Bear Jew,” who beats Nazis to death with a baseball bat, and a German who enlisted in the Nazi army solely to kill his commanding officers. They eventually become involved in “Operation Kino,” a plot to destroy the Nazi leaders during a film screening, and work their way to Paris. They don’t know, however, that the cinema’s owner, hell-bent on revenge, is planning to do the same thing during the high-profile premiere of “The Nation’s Pride,” a film celebrating a Nazi sniper who killed two hundred enemy soldiers.

I won’t spoil anything of the film’s climax in case you haven’t seen it, but this write-up would be incomplete if I didn’t mention the last lines. Brad Pitt’s character, after carving a swastika into a Nazi character’s head (a way to make sure his past will always stay with him), looks down and says, “I think this may be my masterpiece.” It’s difficult to not hear Tarantino in that line, commenting on this movie. It’s the culmination of years of movies about violence and revenge and movies, and I can see how the director would consider this his finest work. And you know, I just might agree with him.

Friday Films: Shutter Island

Last Monday, I went to see "Shutter Island," the new Scorcese movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. I was a little wary, because some of the reviews were less than stellar, but everyone I personally know (the opinions that matter a lot more to me) said it was fantastic, so I went into the movie cautiously optimistic. I was not disappointed.

From the first scene, with the two US Marshalls on a ferry to the titular island, the aesthetic of the movie is unlike most modern movies. There's a fantastic use of rear-projection that gives the movie--set in 1954--the look and feel of a movie of that time. There's a little bit of backstory, where we learn DiCaprio's wife died in a fire and that he's never worked with his partner before, and then they arrive at the island, which houses the mental institution where the protagonists are going to investigate a missing person. The music at this point gets a little overwhelming, which might be my only complaint. I think I understand what he was doing, though--with the music blaring, it's easier for the movie to disorient the audience.

There's a lot going on in the movie, with DiCaprio's character flashing back frequently to the liberation of Dachau, as well as imagining his deceased wife, who was killed in a fire, giving him instructions. Scorcese seems to want to fully explore every possibility for the movie to take before revealing the ending, so there are many diversions and discussions into the possibility that the mental hospital is serving as a site for medical experimentation, that the arsonist who killed DiCaprio's wife is a secret prisoner on the island, and that the hospital's administrators have brought DiCaprio onto the island because they know he's on to them. There's a storm, the power cuts out, and DiCaprio starts to question reality. I won't spoil anything of the ending, but I will say that Scorcese's ability to constantly increase the tension until the film reaches a breaking point is really incredible. By the time the Marshals find themselves in "Ward C," home of the most dangerous criminals, the tension and unease makes the slightest movement onscreen shocking.

I love watching a movie by a director clearly knows a lot about film history and is not afraid to show their love of classic movies in a new work. This movie, while definitely a Scorcese film, has the feel of many Hitchcock movies, and seems to drop little references to many of them. There's a scene that reminded me a lot of "Vertigo," while another reminded me of "Spellbound," and I like that Scorcese can pull of those references without using them as a crutch. I will give you one word of advice if you're going into the movie: pay careful attention to the editing, and watch the scene where they're interviewing patients very closely.

Friday Films: Filling in the Blanks

Since I got Netflix, I've been trying to fill in the blanks in my film education by watching classic movies, both foreign and American, that I have somehow managed to miss up until now. So far, there have been some misses ("Le Samourai" in particular), but on the whole, it's been a great project.

Last weekend, I watched Jean-Luc Godard's "Band of Outsiders," a movie that lends its name to a clothing company, Quentin Tarantino's production company, and an album by Nouvelle Vague. It's Godard at (I think) his best, a movie about would-be criminals undone by betrayal, featuring some romantic tension and a little bit of dancing. I really love "Breathless," and the movies seem to share the same DNA. The criminals are not very tough; in fact, they seem to be more inspired by movie gangsters than anything based in reality. It makes sense, considering the French New Wave's fascination with American film noir, that the characters who populate these movies would be similarly inspired.

The film revolves around two small-time crooks, Arthur and Franz, who decide to rob a man who lives in the same house as Odile (Anna Karina), who they meet in their English class. They plan the robbery, but of course everything goes wrong. The best scenes, though, have little to do with the heist itself. There's the run through the Louvre to break a record set by an American tourist, a "minute of silence," where Godard cuts the sound for a half a minute, and my favorite (which I mentioned earlier) the dance scene. I will not lie: I tried to learn the choreography in my living room. This scene was apparently a huge influence on the Travolta-Thurman dance scene in "Pulp Fiction":



One of the strangest things about "Band of Outsiders," for me at least, was the striking similarity between one of the characters, Arthur, and the lead singer of the Magnetic Fields, Stephin Merritt. They look like they could be related. It's kind of eerie.

Well, I will keep posting about my ongoing project to fill in the gaps, but for now, I want to share a really awesome project my friend Darren is trying to get together: over on his blog, he is asking everyone and anyone to send him birthday wishes for his grandmother, turning 80 this Valentine's Day. Send him a message for her!

Friday Films: I Really Hope "Avatar" Doesn't Sweep the Oscars

This week, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the nominees for this year's Oscars. There were a few surprises, and one big twist: ten nominees in the "Best Picture" category. Now, before I share my opinions on this wide category (and the resulting four-hour ceremony), I want to say: I really hope "Avatar" does not sweep the nine categories it's nominated in.

I don't begrudge James Cameron for making his epic and his two billion dollars, not at all. I think technological innovation in movies provides a lot of space for directors to try new techniques, etc. But I don't want a future of bloated 3-D space epics. I don't want to see a rash of 3-D movies, where acting and story and characters are less important than rendering. Let those movies win visual effects, let them win every technical award. But don't let them win Best Picture.

As you may know, I read a book a few months ago called "Pictures at a Revolution," about the 1968 Academy Awards. What happened in the 60s was this: "The Sound of Music" made a lot of money and all of the studios rushed bloated musicals to theaters. "Paint Your Wagon." "Doctor Doolittle." And you know what these movies did? They bombed. They nearly bankrupted the studios. They broke the studio system, in place since the dawn of the film industry. And I don't think they learned a damned thing. If "Avatar" wins, we're going to see half a decade of utter shit, cranked out with the newest technologies and completely lacking anything resembling a soul. We're going to see young, educated viewers flocking away from Hollywood.

That said, some of the nominees do give me hope. "Up in the Air" was a really great movie about characters who I felt invested in, completely lacking in tech-wizardry (actually, a major theme was the danger of machines replacing human interaction) and with a great deal of relevance to the current economic crisis. "Up," nominated in both Best Animated Feature and Best Picture, was incredibly moving and engaging--a bold departure from the celebrity-voiced animated films that we've been seeing so much lately. But ten nominees is just too many. "The Blind Side"? I will quote author Colson Whitehead: "Is that one of those movies where a white person teaches a black person how to use a fork?"

Finally, I'm glad to see Kathryn Bigelow nominated for Best Director. In a year where all of the major book awards seemed to snub women, it's good to see a female nominated in such a typically male-dominated category. I haven't seen "The Hurt Locker" yet, but I've heard great things and it would be interesting to see her win some Oscars for it.

I'll be watching the ceremony, however long it stretches into the next day. The theme this year seems to be bloat: two hosts, twice the Best Picture nominees...If that's the narrative they've chosen to present (and let's not kid ourselves: what wins is determined by what kind of story Hollywood wants to tell about itself, whether it's "We Care About Poor People," "We Don't Support Proposition 8," or "We Feel Really Guilty About Never Giving an Award to Scorcese"), "Avatar" should have a great night.

Friday Films: Man on Wire

Like I mentioned on Monday, I recently watched the documentary "Man on Wire," about Phillippe Petit's tightrope walk between the Twin Towers. I didn't realize until later this week that it won the Oscar for Best Documentary, but now that I know that, I'm almost even more impressed. Not because it won the Oscar, but because as far as documentaries go, it's different from most that I've seen. What distinguishes it from other documentaries is its format: it's presented like a caper film.

The film opens with a shot of a calendar showing the date of "Le Coup," followed by a reenactment of Petit and his crew loading their vehicles, setting out toward the towers. It's all very fast-moving, the reenactments filmed like French New Wave films, cutting quickly to interviews with the participants looking back on the event. As soon as the filmmakers set up the central event, they jump back to its conception, Philippe Petit reading about the towers in a doctor's office in 1968, and then to his first major walk, between the towers of the Notre Dame cathedral.

It's really interesting to see the participants, now in their 50s or 60s, look back at their youths. They talk about how they knew what they were doing was illegal, but it wasn't mean, wasn't hurting anyone or doing any damage. It's all extremely innocent, and I think that's what the filmmakers intended. There's never a mention of the 9/11 attacks, but they're kind of in the subtext during the whole movie. From the moment they show the crew get into their vans to sneak into the building, your mind can't help but contrast it with the months of preparation and falsifying documents and training that would go into perpetuating a terror attack. It's strange that it makes you think about that, but I don't believe for a minute that it's accidental.

In the interviews with the participants, they talk about how Petit, when he saw the towers, knew that they were meant for him. They were built for him to walk between. So in their memories of the event, there's this undercurrent of sadness, which I took as some combination of nostalgia and a sense of loss for the towers themselves. The walk between was accomplished just once, and can never be done again. One of the co-conspirators actually begins to cry as he talks about it, and the effect is really moving and sets a tone for the rest of the fim.

The movie ends with a shot of Petit practicing walking in his backyard in Woodstock, NY. He's older now, but still incredibly talented. The rope across the yard is a long walk only a few feet off of the ground, and the final image is a kind of mix of memories: it's simultaneously the meadow Petit practiced in through his youth and the wire between the towers. The image of his feet on that wire lingers for a long time after the film ends.

Friday Films: Up in the Air

Last weekend, I finally got to see Up in the Air, the new movie by Jason Reitman, director of "Juno" and "Thank You for Smoking." It stars George Clooney as Ryan Bingham, a man who flies from city to city firing people. He spends the vast majority of every year in transit, working toward his ultimate goal: 10 million frequent flier miles. When his company decides to switch to an online-only firing system developed by a new employee, he decides to show her how he does his job, and why her system doesn't work. Along the way, he falls for another traveler and goes to his sister's wedding.

The timing of this movie, released in the middle of a horrible recession and double-digit unemployment, has gotten a lot of attention. Reviews have talked about how it takes a lot of nerve (in a good way) to release a movie about a moment that is still occurring, and I have to say I agree. When the vast majority of new releases are escapist, whether it's onto another planet or into a light romantic comedy, this is a movie that instead tells a story that is contemporary, rooted to right now. It's a different angle on the situation, though, and it's a challenge to make an unsympathetic figure like a layoff specialist into a likable protagonist. Of course, having Clooney never hurts. The man brings acting with his eyebrows to previously unimaginable levels.

It's also really interesting to see Reitman come into his own as a director. There are already habits that he has in his films that mark them as his own--the opening credit sequences in all three of his movies are excellent, and the way he divides to movies into chapters (in "Juno" it was seasons, in "Up in the Air," cities and their airports. He also uses a lot of excellent character actors (Simmons and Jason Bateman) to great effect. I would be interested to see if he could write a character for Bateman where he's not a terrible guy. I think they could pull it off. I've started to think there are two kinds of directors, the ones who are technically brilliant (Orson Welles) and the ones that get the best performances out of actors (Mike Nichols). There are some that are clearly both, like Scorcese, but for the most part I'd say there is a division. I started thinking about where Reitman falls, and I think it's the Nichols school: I didn't come out of the theater dazzled by technical achievement, but instead by the acting, from the lead characters and even from the supporting cast. Even Danny McBride, who has made his career so far in being insane and over the top, had a really restrained performance, and it was clear that he had thought a lot about what made his character work, how not to make him a caricature.

One of the most affecting parts of the movie was the use of non-actors in some of the firing sequences, as well as in the beginning and ending of the film--the director apparently placed ads where they were filming, asking recently laid-off people to talk about their experience on camera. The anger and frustration they captured was more interesting, and more compelling, than anything they could have accomplished using only actors. I was thinking about this after I left the movie theater, and I started wondering if this was the case because the stakes were higher for non-actors. There were actors as well, including Zach Galifianakis and J.K. Simmons, but for the people who were answering the ad, this wasn't just another day of work, but a chance to tell their stories, to be heard.

I definitely understand all of the buzz around this movie--it would be great to see it win the Oscar because of its relevance, its timeliness, but most of all, because it's a really good movie. It got me thinking about character arcs, about dramatic structure. It's not about redemption, I don't think (a character can't be redeemed unless they realize they've fallen), but it is about characters changing. The ending leaves a lot up to interpretation regarding Clooney's character, but I think the rest of the movie builds up to the moment and lets you decide his path.