The Face Knife

(just a short squib, even though everything here is still not 100%. For more ephemeral stuff, visit How’s Yr Face? until stuff gets reorganized here.

The 800+ Year-Old Virgin, or, We are all idiot man-children now, even the robots.

Even though I really liked Wall-E, and though it was adorable and clever and fun, I have this irresistable urge to start cutting on it. Basically, my problem with Wall-E is that the heteronormative romance projected onto the robot protagonists is just another variation on the schlub/hottie dynamic that has been ruling romantic comedies in TV and movie formats for years. I mean, think about it:

(trying not to really SPOIL anything by spelling it out).

1.) Lonely male robot living by himself with a collection of odd pop culture ephemera.

2.) Lonely male robot has a menial job obviously beneath his skills.

3.) Meets cute with a much more put-together, driven and dynamic (not to mention more aerodynamically designed) female.

4.) Who somehow unaccountably falls for him, even though he is capable of communicating his feelings on the most basic and primal level.

5.) Then, he puts his seed in her.

6.) They’re separated by her career

7.) He has to win her back through haphazard though valiant effort.

8.) Which of course works, but only because:

9.) he gains a supporting cast of even more schlubby defectives who help him , and:

10.) the love of a hot chick inspires a loser man-child to face up to it, and do great deeds.

11.) She gives up her career for him.

This begs for a chart of some sort. Sigh. Too bad I gave up on doing that.

My review of the zombie satire Fido (2007) has been posted on The Movie Binge. Do check it out. I’ve referenced American Beauty and Tim Burton as signposts for the mediocrity of this film (which is not to unequivocably praise either of those two entities, particularly the former, which I despise).

Due to a technical hiccup, you’ll have to wait til tomorrow for The Summer Movie Comparison Chart 2007 update featuring Michael Moore’s Sicko. Do come back!

Although I object to his utterances on women, Jews, blacks and just about everything else, I do feel a certain amount of empathy for Borat. It’s not because I have an arsenal of annoying, widely imitated catchphrases or that I can grow a mustache* with enough volume to qualify for a job as an assistant janitor, but because, I too, have embarked upon several crash-courses in self-improvement in order to conquer my ignorance, and I too, have made a mess of every single opportunity. Including college. Especially college. The fact that Borat is way funnier than any of my tales of dumbassery is testament to the fact that nothing is so hilarious as ignorance. Except when it’s morally and/or physically terrifying. But even then. Still funny.

I have omitted the sub-title of the film from my heading as it is certain to mess up my fragile style sheets, but (as you probably know) it’s “Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” or something to that affect. My attempts at acquiring ‘learnings’ have never served a patriotic purpose but I’ve been guilty of pidgin in about as many languages as I have fingers on my non-wiping hand. As my unwieldy and largely unread (but still impressive) library can attest, my quest for Knowledge have ranged quixotically across branches of the Tree that I have no business crawling out on, given the limited dexterity of my brain. I should stick to the low-hanging fruit, like television or psychology.

Borat’s mission in the film is a little narrower, as the venue is not political or industrial or scientific or artistic, but social in nature. The “Cultural Learnings” of the titles are really the values of the citizens of the U.S. that enable the country to be the world leader in areas other than the export of Potassium, which is all that Kazakhstan is good for.

Of course, I mean the “Kazakhstan” of the film, which famously is a debased, medieval culture nothing like that country in reality. The main joke of the film is that the U.S. turns out to have just as disgusting values when you throw a mirror up to it. But let me return circle back to that point later, as in order to get to a discussion of values it is necessary to relate how they are transmitted, and the demonically clever way Borat parodies the learning process.

Despite the best efforts of trainers in formal seminars on such subjects as What is Funny, What is Feminism, What are Good Social Manners, and How to Talk Like a Black Person, Borat misses the point on every occasion, managing in nearly every case to spectacularly offend the person trying to educate him. “Missing the point” means that Borat has been unable to grasp the intention behind an utterance, even if he thinks he has a grasp of the form.

The best and funniest example of this is when Borat is talking with former Republican presidential case and noted nutbag (also a “real chocolate face”) Alan Keyes. Borat was describes the previous scene, which was the very fun time he had with some guys he met at a festive parade, whom he took back to his hotel for a scene that very prominently featured a rubber fist. Keyes tells Borat that his new friends were homosexuals, and Borat becomes first confused then enraged, even though there had been a prominent scene of intramural basket-cupping and implied more strenuous activity. That sequence is like The History of Sexuality combusting before our eyes. Borat’s actions are completely divorced of the codes he has available to describe them, and thus his values are totally dissonant and ridiculous.

The only time he gets the actions-codes-values equation right is when, towards the end of the film, as a penniless tramp, he “stumbles” on a Christian Revival meeting and manages to Speak in Tongues properly, reducing the babble of the film to its ultimate zero point, where empty values meet empty form meet empty intentions in the body of a diabolic imposter.

I can’t deny that it’s fun to watch the codes of ignorance and hypocrisy detonate like TNT in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, but playing with loaded signifiers (e.g. the aforementioned “chocolate face” and numerous other less ludicrous locutions) in order to entertain a mass audience is a questionable choice, particularly because a huge part of the audience is the people you’re parodying in the first place. Maybe this questioning of values will fuck people’s Reality Tunnels so that they’re loose like a wizard’s sleeve, but is the fun he makes of people - real people with real lives - justified morally or ethically?

In a recent interview, Adam McKay, who directed Borat in this summer’s Talladega Nights, mentions that a favorite movie among this coterie of comics is Luis Bunuel’s The Phantom of Liberty. The Phantom of Liberty is not one of my favorite Bunuels, precisely because I think the premise is childish compared to other Bunuel films, and that premise is pretty much the same thing as Borat’s - values and the rituals we use to sustain them are arbitrary and oh hey here’s some short-circuited vignettes like people pooping around a table. The main difference is that Bunuel, in my opinion, was at his core a humanist, in that he loves humanity in all its flawed glory, whereas Borat, despite the “happy” ending with the prostitute (who is a figure of fun, not of any real respect) does not. There is no sense in Borat that humanity has any capacity for anything greater than what it is, or that it should even bother trying, and even the crappy Talladega Nights, which tackles the same crass culture as Borat, has that. Borat’s inability to learn and Borat’s suggestion that ignorance make it impossible to take any larger political points about the U.S. as seriously as they could be taken.

*Without a doubt, “Best Facial Hair” is going to be the most competitive category at this year’s Knifies Biennial .

Please refer to my exhaustive lab report on Jackass Number Two at The Movie Binge

The Face Knife uses too many Capital Letters
Towards the end of Scoop the pleasantly ditsy journalist played by Scarlett Johannson asks the apparently rhetorical question “Who wants to get caught?”, and although the reference is to a prostitute-slaying serial killer, applying the question in a more general way provides the key to understanding Woody Allen’s last three films (this one, Match Point and Melinda and Melinda), if not the overriding concern of his art.

Taken together, Match Point and Scoop are sort of Melinda and Melinda redux - the same basic story told in two different modes, tragedy and comedy, and the difference between tragedy and comedy in Allen is that someone gets caught in the world of comedy, whereas the apparatus for apprehension and punishment is absent or ineffective in the tragedy.

Scoop is a detective story, which means it’s about the accumulation and application of knowledge about the world. Detective stories are epistemology in action - either knowledge of the world is possible or problematic or anywhere in between (or “the world” is the sum total of all possible knowledge - whatever, there’s a lot of interesting things you can do with the detective mode - see The Crying of Lot 49 or Memento or The Big Lebowski or even Broken Flowers).

Right off the b(o)at, though, it becomes apparent that Scoop is not the typical detective story, because the impetus for the investigation comes from the great beyond - the Ghost of a dogged and effective journalist (Ian McShane), who delivers his lead to a somewhat ditzy American journalism student (Scarlett Johansson) while she’s locked in the cabinet of curiosities of a hammy stage magician (Woody Allen). Now, Woody Allen, director and writer of the film is a professed non-believer, so the presence of a Ghost certainly signals that the world in which the movie takes place is not the “real” world, but in the world of Comedy, the world where people get Caught and Punished. Only in a world where metaphysics are real can such a thing reliably happen - but - and here’s the thing that reviewers have seemed to miss¹ - upon the end of the story, it becomes apparent that the investigation had been preceding along FALSE pretenses. The investigation began based on some red herrings, and only coincidentally (like the coincidences that keep the sociopath safe in Match Point) does the villain become apprehended. To spell this out completely, here is a paragraph of SPOILERS:

Ghost gets his lead from a secretary who claims she might have been poisoned because she noticed a missing cufflink that might be connected to the murder. This is the information the Ghost provides to the Reporter, which is more or less wrong in all particulars - the cufflink was NOT lost during a murder, and there is no confirmation that the secretary was actually murdered in the film (she probably was not). The Murderer only actually becomes a murderer AFTER the investigation has been launched, and -arguably- only becomes a Murderer because of the investigation - because he falls in love with the Reporter. Wait, did Philip K. Dick write the script for this?

What seemed like a goofball detective story is actually a metaphysical black comedy. There’s no other real reason for Woody’s chance death at the end. I myself am not so sure whether or not it as an effective an exposition of Woody’s themes as Match Point - the plot points that are key to understanding what the film is really about are completely absent from the text of the movie itself - e.g., no one spells out what I spell out above. But maybe that makes the viewer into a detective him or herself, who can stumble on the correct solution, or maybe get a hint from someone else and follow where it leads….

The bigger question, about Why Woody Wants to Get Caught, I will leave for the time being, but using the Muntian hypotheses of films as wish fulfilment might give you some good ideas.

¹Unless this is just incredibly shoddy plotting.

Recently, I read Sharon Waxman’s Rebels on the Backlot, one of the many recently published industry-heavy accounts of the ascent of the “indie” film/aesthetic in the 1990s. Unlike other books about the “biz”, Waxman’s book made me want to go and rewatch some of the films by her chosen directors (and others in their circle), films that I liked a lot at the time and still think are pretty great. The 1990s were when my own aesthetic tastes were established, and I still have a great affinity for the styles of that time - whether in film, music or fashion. And a large portion of those films and directors still hold up to scrutiny. Of course, the best of the 90s was rapidly recuperated into the worst of the 90s, when every self-consciously quirky film was released in an attempt to squeeze cash out of the indie aesthetic. Although we are still beset by Fincherisms (Chan-wook Park, take a bow), and Sofia Coppola threatens to release a new movie in the fall, 90s-style filmmaking thankfully seems to have died off except for the all too rare Anderson, Anderson, Jonze or Russell film.

Except, Little Miss Sunshine which could have been sitting around in the can since 1996. It’s a compendium of every shitty film tic of the 1990s - characteristics instead of characterization, aggressively ugly/retro production design (the FUCKING VW BUS), spectacular familial dysfunction, profanity substituting for wit, heroin snorting. The directors of the film, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris, were previously most famous for their Melies inspired video for the Smashing Pumpkin’s Tonight, Tonight¹, but the emblematic 90s music video this film most recalls is the excreble Blind Melon’s No Rain, a horror to which I will not even provide a YouTube link, because I’m sure that as soon as you read the phrase “Bee Girl” it will all come rushing back to you. Sorry!

Aside from the bedsheet Nietzsche, which they should immediate start selling in the housewares department of Urban Outfitters, there’s not much to recommend about this film. Resoundingly unfunny, I nearly walked out of the film when it threatened to become As I Lay Dying (or Weekend at Bernies: The 90s). The hilarious Steve Carrell is utterly wasted as character who can be summed up (and probably was during the “writing” process of this film) as (a)Gay (b)Proust Scholar (c) Beard. Greg Kinnear can, as always, do unctious well but the script gives him nothing to work with in terms of depth of character. And the parade of beauty contest twerps at the end, well, they are definitely horrifying, but - this is actually what bothers me most about the film (and the part of the film that has the most 90s philosophy) - is it, um, ethical, for the filmmakers to film and edit these little girls as more or less freakish spawn of the capitalist beauty system when perhaps these little girls are doing exactly what they want to with their lives, unself-consciously, just like the fucking Bee Girl? These Jon Benets (shit, another 90s icon - god, how long were they trying to get this piece of crap made?) are definitely potential if not actual “villains”, and aside from them being kids and, you know, having little consciousness that what they’re doing might be fucking creepy, these filmmakers obviously hired ACTUAL PAGEANT GIRLS to participate in a film about how twisted their lifestyle choices are. That’s not exactly evidence of the gentleness or bigness of spirit this film has been praised for, is it?

¹ And speaking of films by Melies-inspired former music video directors, The Science of Sleep looks like it could possibly be pretty shitty. quel dommage. I like Gondry’s films but after seeing the trailer I have a bad feeling about this.

Bloggers be talking about last Saturday’s “Lazy Sunday/Chronicles of Narnia” mini film/rap on Saturday Night Live like it was the second coming of the “The H is O,” but I don’t think it’s a patch on, say, anything Andy Dick has done for a Viacom special in the last half-decade. Apparently, compared to the SNL of recent years, which i haven’t watched because I absolutely loath Jimmy Fallon (i know he’s no longer on it) and the incredibly over-rated Tina Fey, as well as the rest of the no-names, it’s quite good, but, my feeling is like, if the Sigma Chi Frat performed this for Spring Fling I would be impressed but then I would go back to the beer-bong, you know?
The only thing the rap has done for me is to inspire me to perpetuate the term “Hambones” as slang for 10 dollar bills. Yeah, I made that up. And cupcakes, yeah, I love me some cupcakes.

ETA: Okay, now it’s hit the Times and even my MOM has sent me a link to it. Friends, it’s just making me think about cupcakes, and with Buttercup a mere 3 blocks away, that’s just torture.

This is probably a horrendous personality defect, and it may just be the result of congenital shyness, but I’m always incredibly uncomfortable around “scenes.” In addition to sullenness, this often manifests itself in the activation of my fight or flight instincts, which happened Saturday Night as I waited in the lobby of Anthology Film Archives in a sea of hipsters to be let into a screening of Andrew Bujalski’s (Funny Ha Ha) new film Mutual Appreciation. This is particularly ironic because that audience is more or less the same demographic that the film is about , which I guess I must be part of because I liked it as much as I did Funny Ha Ha.

Alan (Justin Rice), like so many of his kind, has recently emigrated to Brooklyn where’s he temporarily crashing in the circle of Laurence (Andrew Bujalski) and his girlfriend Ellie (Rachel Clift) while he tries to get his music career together. Alan is immediately struck by how much people in New York have to strive to get things done, and how everyone here seems to have a project which they are acting on. While the idea that everyone wearing a pair of hornrims and holding a messenger bag is some sort of artist on the make is ennervating in the extreme to me, Alan is inspired, so much so that he jokingly suggests forming a club of like-minded artists, the name of which I regretfully forget because it sums up a LOT about this movie, but goes something like “The inclusive, cool people helping each other out” club.

It seems odd that such an independent production would have such ambivalence towards community, as it seems most of the actors worked gratis the same circle of friends participated in making both of Bujalski’s films. Alan is more or less immediately accepted by New York Hipster society - for instance, a randy college radio DJ straddles him in her kitchen, and his “band” receives raves the first time they play out. But Alan remains at a remove. I think there’s something about all the things that are happening to him that feel at a distance, feel mediated, and when someone comes along and seems to not want anything from him he takes that appreciation of himself as something deeper - perhaps love.

The bohemians of Mutual Appreciation hedge their bets too much for the pseudo Jules et Jim triangle that develops to really scorch any of them, but I don’t think that Bujalski is necessarily mocking anyone for their lack of conviction. While the characters may say things or do things that may be the object of fun, it’s never as if we’re laughing at what the character represents - there’s no belittling of anyone’s life, which is certainly not the norm for comedies, particularly about marginally employed ‘creative’ young people.

I think Mutual Appreciation is a little less successful than Funny Ha Ha for a few reasons - one, the lead is nowhere near as charming and likable (though my impression may be colored by the fact that I would rather sleep with awkward girls than awkward boys). Two, the structure of Mutual Appreciation is more diffuse. I really like the way Bujalski has ended both of his films - there’s a real rythym to the interactions between the characters that signal the end of the film even if the story is not quite finished, but in this case, the interactions are not as strong as Funny Ha Ha. Perhaps that’s part of the problem that Bujalski is trying to examine with regard to the communities his films take place within - appreciation takes the place of or can be confused for deeper passions, but while we leave Marnie on the cusp of an emotional breakthrough in Funny Ha Ha, Allan, Laurence and Ellie seem determined not to upset the status quo.

It occurs to me that the talents of Bujalski and his casts, as well as the concerns of his milieu, might work out very well as a serial or TV show. Sundance channel? IFC channel?

Mutual Appreciation is available for purchase at the web site. A limited theatrical release is likely in late Spring/Early Summer 2006

One of the most unfair things about this world is that other people seldom act the way we want them to, and that can make life just plain difficult. If they could only see what you see, grasp the facts of the situations the way you can, surely - surely - a positive outcome for all could be reached. But most of the time, other people just don’t seem to get it. Are they all just fucking jerks, or is something else going on?

Gradually, it seems, the American independent filmmaker is emerging from a solipsistic cocoon and making movies that deal honestly with what I like to call “the problem of other people.” That problem is essentially that a part of everyone who is not you will remain forever inaccessible and in reserve, no matter how hard you try to break down the barriers. An inability to work around this fact results in neuroses, which often have debilitating, but quite possibly entertaining for the rest of us, symptoms.

I myself happen to take it for granted that you, dear reader, are an autonomous individual capable of some, to be sure, spectacularly wrong-headed opinions but ones that are probably based on the available facts as you see them. I’m willing to give you that doubt, not because I am particularly magnanimous but because all evidence seems to indicate that there is, not, in fact, a cosmic conspiracy to frustrate my ambitions, with various government officials, family members and even, at times, “inanimate” objects acting in concert.

The (giant) Squid and the Whale engage in a deep sea combat that until very, very recently (after the production of this film) had not been witnessed by human beings. Yet it was more or less taken for granted by biologists and animal death match enthusiasts that this combat did take place, although we couldn’t really see it. Despite our best cogito-ing, phenomenological bracketing and what not, a bulletproof proof of the autonomy of the “other” is not forthcoming. Heck, half the time the so-called experts even have trouble proving that they themselves exist, much the less the rest of us.

What to do, what to do? Well, one way to tackle the problem is to interpret the actions of all and sundry as accidental or on-purposeful attempts to make your life difficult. And indeed, in addition to praising his favorite texts as “very dense and interesting,” Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is inclined to plead for his family members to “stop being difficult,” whenever he doesn’t get his way.

Another way to tackle the problem is to retreat so far inside yourself that you become incredibly alienated. The younger brother acts how I would imagine a shell-shocked Danny Torrance from The Shining would, chugging beers and marking his territory at school in squirm inducing ways.

At one point, the older brother, when confronted with his limitations, says to his mom that he “doesn’t see himself that way,” and indeed, being alienated from other people also leads to self-alienation.

Noah Baumbach is unflinching in detailing how that sometimes relationships, be it with a family member or potential love interest can be based largely on projection. In this year’s Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July deals with similar themes but seems to posit a solution that everyone has similar doubts and insecurities, and therefore it is not necessary to be afraid of intimacy. Baumbach’s film shows that this solution is, while appealing, ultimately facile, and that other people are really capable of inflicting terrible damage on you, without you ever being able to explain why, except with empty words like “difficult.”

To be continued in a review of Talk to Her(2002).

I like to think of myself as a charitable person. I’ve given change to the homeless, donated my blood (and refused the complimentary cookie), shopped at the Salvation Army for cool clothes and every Thanksgiving I have every intention of bringing in some canned goods for my office’s food drive. But even though I am by all evidence bursting with love for the unfortunate, if I ever see a tramp in mortal danger I’m going to mind my own business. Call me a hobophobe if you’d like, but if fiction is any indication, saving a tramp will totally fuck up your life.

Still, although my heart has been thus hardened, I can’t help feel pity for the poor and weak. But is “pity” a good reason to be charitable, or even the right reason? Is the “right” reason different if you’re (even nominally) a Christian or secular humanist?

The great part about the humanism of Renoir or Bresson is that it never champions asceticism - any moral or ethical message is always grounded in the inescapable facts of our corporal bodies and their needs and limitations. I think a lot of “spiritual” or “philosophical” artwork has the tendency to elide the realities of the body, though those realities are always present (and almost by definition, necessary) in the very highest art.

The body of Boudu is mostly whiskers and rags covering the great Michel Simon. Boudu has a companion, a dog, who runs away in the first scene. This is apparently the last straw, and Boudu throws himself in the Seine.

There’s a cliche that killing yourself by hanging is a unconscious wish to punish yourself for a crime and the metaphorical implications of, say, blowing your head off with a shotgun are pretty apparent. As far as tossing yourself in a body of water with the intention of not surfacing until you’re blue and bloated, my best guess is that it’s tantamount to a baptism, a desire to be close to God. Perhaps, though, it is an anti-baptism…

In any case, Boudu certainly thinks Paradise can be found on the riverbed and is justly peeved at the bourgeois bookseller, Lestingois, who pulls him from the Seine. I like Lestingois, and it’s harder to fault him as a benefactor than it is some other more supercilious would-be literary saints. When we are introduced to him, we are made immediately aware of his affair with his maid, and although he is in love with books and the literary life he doesn’t seem to be a snob. He’s aware of his faults and doesn’t seem to think he’s better than anyone else (except perhaps his wife). Thus it’s hard to see the effect that Boudu has on his life as any sort of ‘comeuppance,’ unless we see it as comeuppance for the ’sins’ of a class of people rather than any individuals within a class.

Boudu totally screws up the social order by failing to keep his bodily impulses constrained within the rules of a household. He spits everywhere, chases the maid and woman of the house around, and generally messes up the place. He’s the one-man version of the hobo wrecking crew/last supper in Viridiana.

Ultimately, instead of throwing Boudu out on his muttonchops, Lestingois attempts to “normalize” the odd relationships that develop between the 4 people living in the house, but Boudu will have none of it. He capsizes the whole enterprises and floats away, reclaiming some rags from a scarecrow upon his liberation.

Has charity, in this case, failed, and if so, who has it failed? Is Boudu’s intransigence a rebellion against those who (arguably, I would say) patronize him, or is it just that some people can’t be “saved”?

To be continued Monday in a review of Mouchette (1967)

Boudu Saved from Drowning is available on Region 1 DVD