GUY PEARCE SURE CAN TAKE A PUNCH

A EuropaCorp SF movie starring Guy Pearce, Shannon from Lost, and Peter Stormare as the Evil White Guy In A Suit? FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YES.

5 DIRECTORS REMAKE BEVERLY HILLS COP

The other day I was on the subway, in the midst of a longish journey, and serendipitously decided to listen to the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack on my iPod. Whence the serendipity? I'm glad you asked. As all reliable determinant metrics show, Beverly Hills Cop is the perfect pop movie. It has Eddie Murphy at the height of his powers, a great supporting cast, a script that balanced action and comedy better than any other, and (per the inspiration for this musing) one of the best soundtracks ever. It was enormously popular, and despite both sequels sucking polar bear dick its memory is un-fuck-with-able.

Still, with the apparent mission in Hollywood to remake every movie released in the 1980s, there remains a possibility, however slim, that Beverly Hills Cop might join the parade. This is something I would prefer not to happen. I mean, I'm not climbing the walls in existential dread and hissing jeremiads in Latin at passersby (that's Wednesday night) but it is a fear. In the interests of making the best of a bad situation, I propose that rather than try—and fail—to recapture the original's perfection as pop, that we go a different direction. As the good doctor said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get weird.” In that vein, here is Beverly Hills Cop as remade by five international directors of varying degrees of renown:


Catherine Breillat's Beverly Hills Cop (international title: Un baise cochon va a Californie), dir. Catherine Breillat

Rocco Siffredi stars as a Marseille gendarme who pursues the murderer of a criminal pal to Beverly Hills. He talks only with his dick, which is a metaphor for his gun, which is in turn reciprocally a metaphor for his dick. His pursuit of the villains, punctuated by frequent unsimulated sex, serves as a critique of the male gaze. All the Americans are played by French people doing American accents (a la Heavy Rain). Ends up having almost nothing to do with the original, but hey. Hire an auteur, get an auteur picture.


Beverly Hills Cop, dir. Lars von Trier

In a massive surprise, a shot-for-shot remake of the original with the same music, same script (with all Eddie's ad-libbing transcribed and created precisely down to the syllable), but with the one inexplicable choice of having Charlotte Gainsbourg play Axel Foley, with none of the gender pronouns changed. Lars will be Lars.


बेवर्ली हिल्स के एक पुलिस: हीट पर फिर से है. (trans. Beverly Hills Cop: The Heat Is On Again) dir. Farhan Akhtar

Having remade Don (and done a sequel of that remake), Shahrukh Khan goes “fuck this, if I can remake an Amitabh Bachchan movie, Eddie Murphy ain't a thing.” After deciding against (and thus deeply wounding) Karan Johar as director, Shahrukh hires Don: The Chase Begins Again helmer Farhan Akhtar to lend it that snazzy, pizazzy, slick Hollywood feel. Arjun Rampal is cast in the Steven Berkoff role because one of the little-known pieces of cinematic wisdom, in the West at any rate, is that any movie that climaxes with Shahrukh Khan and Arjun Rampal beating the shit out of each other is going to be good. In spite of the jokes about all Bollywood movies being three-plus hours long, this is not the longest remake of the five (more on that in a bit, and the Bollywood overlength jokes are dated anyway), though there are plenty of songs; in a massive coup, SRK lands Beyonce for an item song, which leads America as one to embrace Bollywood. SRK then promptly converts to Scientology and fucks everything up. But, in spite of that, we'll always have this movie, where he pulls off his usual “How the fuck is this guy going to own? Whoa . . . holy shit, he does kind of own. Damn, he actually really owns. Wonders never cease” three-act high-wire act.


Az élet egy amerikai rendőr (trans. The life of an American police officer) dir. Béla Tarr.

The longest of the bunch, consisting of one eight-hour single take of Axel Foley (played by Donald Glover, thus making Tarr, bizarrely, the only director who thought to make the picture with a 20-something black comedian) at his desk, doing paperwork and making phone calls, for a whole shift; when Axel gets up to take a piss or get a cup of coffee, Tarr's camera stays on his desk, speaking to the grim nature of day-to-day reality as a policeman. The business of the dead friend and the Beverly Hills police investigation of Victor Maitland is handled entirely over the phone, with Axel's side of the conversation the only one we get to observe. The film ends with Axel receiving one final call from BHPD from which one can either infer that they'll be investigating Maitland or that they're just humoring Axel. The credits roll in silence.


Laurel Canyon Cop, dir. Lisa Cholodenko

Still smarting from the eight or nine years it took her to get financing for her third feature, 2010's The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko accepts a massive goddamn pile of money from Paramount to direct a Beverly Hills Cop remake. After a careful series of negotiations that end with her getting final cut, Cholodenko raises the “fuck you” flag to full mast and casts Gina Gershon as Axel Foley, turning the original's gay subtext (a byproduct of the perfect storm of Eddie's “the lady doth protest too much”ism on The Gay and the fact that they had to cut the fuck scene between him and Jenny Summers because a black guy couldn't shtup a white lady in a move in 1984, one of the thousands of reasons you can blow 80s nostalgia out your fuckin ass) into text.

So, basically, what we're talking about here is a leisurely-paced (maybe a little too leisurely-paced, but hey, ya can't win 'em all) movie where Gina Gershon flies in from Detroit and swaggers around in a leather jacket owning bad guys and having sex with Jenny Summers (Carla Gugino). And, although everyone spends an hour laughing their asses off at how dumb it is, they keep in the line “I wish they all could be California girls,” uttered by Gina immediately before going to town on Carla Gugino. This picture ends up grossing a billion dollars, sweeping the Oscars, and ushering in an era of world peace.

The banana in the tailpipe scene is handled a little differently in this one.

I don't believe in jinxes, so if you see in Variety that they've announced a Beverly Hills Cop remake, don't blame me. Just repost the shit out of this so I can walk around with my zipper down fulminating about how fuckin prescient I am. Which I do anyway, but it's always nice to have supporting texts. Now let's all do the Neutron Dance.

WHY SHAME BOTH IS AND ISN'T EVERYTHING YOU'VE HEARD IT IS

First unveiled at the Venice Film Festival and then at Toronto, where it was acquired for distribution by Fox Searchlight, Shame arrived in theaters this month the subject of a great deal of conversation. As the followup feature to British director Steve McQueen's Hunger, where Michael Fassbender—who also stars in Shame—turned in an eye-opening performance as Bobby Sands on his hunger strike, Shame had people going, “oh, yeah, far out, those guys, cool.” But mainly, the thing people were talking about was the sex.

Anytime anyone makes a picture with sex in it America freaks the fuck out. And Shame not only had nudity but dudity: Michael Fassbender's penis was apparently all over this motherfucker, and it was big, too. When McQueen sold the picture to Fox Searchlight, apparently one of the terms was they had to release it as an NC-17 if necessary, and Fox Searchlight, to their credit, not only did but did a bit of dick-swinging of their own about how they were going to wear the NC-17 as a badge of honor and fuck y'all and all kinds of nice, swaggery stuff. Of course, with all this talk about the NC-17, people who hadn't seen it yet started getting the sense that Michael Fassbender's 14-inch throbbing erect member was the entire subject of the movie, if all the talk was to be believed (Ed. Note: it's not 14 inches, nor is it throbbing or erect, and really isn't on display all that much). And, inevitably, despite the best attempts of many to maintain and not bug out about all the sex, Shame ended up becoming either the “Michael Fassbender's penis” movie or “the NC-17 movie.”

What I found, when I finally saw it yesterday, is that it actually is both of things. And isn't. McQueen and co-writer Abi Morgan present the audience with very few specific details, which would be maddening if it was an accident, but not very long into the picture I started getting the sense—reinforced by everything that happened for the rest of its running time—that what they were up to was creating something whose meaning would be provided by each audience member's individual interpretation of it, kind of a cinematic BYOB party. So, what follows may say more about me than it does the picture. Or not. If your interpretation of the picture is that everything is spelled out and so forth, then I'm wrong. (Ed. Note: I'm never wrong. Fucker.) (Further Ed. Note: past this point be mild spoilers, be thou warned.)

Michael Fassbender stars as Brandon, a really good-looking guy with a (surprisingly realistically) really nice (if a bit cold) apartment with some kind of unspecified yuppie day job that keeps him in reasonably though not ridiculously luxurious creature comforts. His boss, David (James Badge Dale, who's secretly becoming one of the best character actors alive), is married but tries incessantly (and ineptly) to fuck every attractive woman in sight; Brandon doesn't even try and all the women his boss tries to fuck approach him. But, because he's not terribly proactive, Brandon relies mostly on porn, hookers, and webcam girls for sexual gratification. Mostly on porn, though: dude's got a fucking ton of it.

Still, whatever, don't knock a dude's hustle (as I'm sure Gautama Buddha would have said). His life's going okay. He charms some random suits into doing some random deal that his non-specified company is up to (it doesn't matter what the company does, because it doesn't matter to Brandon, it's just his job). He may need to go to the office men's room to fap multiple times a day, but who among us is without our quirk(s)? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If fapping three times a day at work and getting picked up by women in Audis who have you fuck them against a pillar under the FDR drive and maintaining the porn library of Congress isn't getting in the way of your everyday existence, it's not a problem.

But then, his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) shows up. And literally everything that can go wrong does. I'll leave the story, such as it is, here, because the whole rest of it is Brandon's shame spiral anyway. His carefully ordered existence comes apart, and he's led to question whether any of it has meaning. You know, no biggie, just all that shit.

The main thing I think a lot of people missed with this picture is that Brandon's shame thing doesn't originate from sex. The way he relates to people (gender ambiguity intentional) sexually stems, as I read it, from his inability or unwillingness (or unwillingness that begets inability) to relate to other human beings besides himself. The initial sequence in the picture, a series of shots of Brandon either alone on the subway or alone at his apartment or at the office or out drinking with co-workers but at arm's length physically (and certainly emotionally) from them show us: this is what he wants. He's won. He has a spiffy high-rise apartment with his vinyl records and his porn-glutted computers and hookers to come over and shtup him (notably, the one non-hooker he connects sexually with in this sequence is driven, successful, and is aspiring to be all that Brandon outwardly is, naturally making her be like, “I want to fuck that guy.” While we're on the theme of projecting one's own interpretations onto blank slates and shit.)

Sissy's arrival throws this all into disarray precisely because what she represents is a connection and obligation to something other than Brandon's self. She's everything he's tried to leave behind: vulnerability, disorder, emotion. She makes out with and then fucks David, for whom Brandon feels contempt for his ineptitude with women, for his having “fallen victim” to marriage/kids, and yet somehow being the boss in spite of all this. So on top of everything else she's attracted to things Brandon loathes. And he envies her, as well, quietly: she's a singer, and while no Maria Callas or anything she does a slow, mournful cover of “New York, New York” that harmonizes with the movie's emotional tone and outsider's perspective on New York City quite nicely, as well as evoking the kind of unrehearsed emotional response from another human being that Brandon either can't or doesn't know how to. The end provides a (very) faint glimmer of hope that Brandon at least recognizes the cause of his anhedonia, and that having so recognized he may find some kind of fulfillment. But, again, that's what I read into it. It could have been an affirmation that he's fucking doomed.

As for the fucking, there is a bit. Michael Fassbender's penis makes an early and prominent appearance in the picture, and while big is nonetheless not noteworthy for anything other than being a penis, which about half humanity has. For the most part the sex is shot in a way that highlights the impersonality of the act for Brandon. Either all we can see is a tit or a belly button or the side of a hip or the back of a head or an ass, rather than a whole human being he's connecting to (with the one notable exception of the one encounter when he can't get off; in that instance it's not even necessarily that he can't get it up, because he doesn't really try, it's that he's afraid of what'll happen if he does: I mean, fuck, it could lead to a relationship and an emotional obligation.) Carey Mulligan's much-discussed—and, frankly, rather lovely, despite the awkwardness of the scene—nude scene is shot through a mirror; Sissy, as Brandon's sister, is verboten to him sexually, so there's that added level of remove, but she still does look good naked, so he doesn't leave right away either. It's all a giant goddamn fucking mess.

The movie itself is not. Steve McQueen knows what to do with a camera. On a budget of about $8 mil, he makes New York come alive. The geography makes sense except for when it deliberately doesn't (something only a New Yorker would give a shit about, but take my word for it, it's good.) The acting is all terrific in an ever-so-slightly-heightened naturalistic mode, which is the best thing about the movie as a whole: it's about a guy whose sex life is on a scale few civilians are even capable of contemplating and fucked up in a way that requires a bit of abyss-gazing experience to process without shutting down, and yet it never rings false. The movie is not, as many reviews have said, about sex addiction. Brandon's not an addict. It's not his compulsive pornography and one-night-stand habits that are at the root of his problem, it's that those habits come out of his inability to process anyone else's worth as equaling his. That is his shame: his complete, hermetically-sealed, absorption with self.

Being a picture whose apparent point is to challenge the audience to determine what is actually in the movie and what is their own projection onto it, and being that the notion of reciprocal projection takes a fairly bright synaptic spark to sort out, Shame is not a popcorn picture (Ed. Note: keep in mind, the dude telling you this happily noshes away and periodically goes “Ha ha! Fuck yeah Delphine Seyrig, get it girl” while watching Last Year at Marienbad) but that shouldn't be taken to mean that it's “too difficult” or intimidating or any of that horse pucky. Shame is a challenge, but it's a challenge well worth meeting. The fact that by the end of the movie, I was deeply empathetic toward a rich guy with a big dick who gets laid effortlessly and is a brutal asshole without cause to the one person who loves him should be taken as a sign that this is a very good movie indeed.

Carey Mulligan: the loveliest fifth business in the history of narrative

R.I.P. BERT SCHNEIDER

Bert Schneider, (c) Los Angeles Times

Bert Schneider died last night. He was an enormously important figure in Hollywood in the 1960s and 70s, contributing to what has variously been called the "New Hollywood" and the American New Wave, producing landmark pictures like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, and The Last Picture Show. Due to the circumstances under which he found himself in the middle-late 60s, Schneider had to bet pretty much everything he had in the world on every picture he produced. That kind of thing is unsustainable because it's so draining, but it takes balls. And whatever else you can say about the cat, he had massive ones. So raise a glass, and salute one of the singular figures in the American cinema.

GOD SAVE FU MANCHU, MORIARTY, AND DRACULA

xkcd, reminding us that even goatse is going to get the fucking  "remember when" treatment

Any number of movie writers have already given forth their “2011 is the year of nostalgia” thinkpieces, so rather than either pile on or write one of those dumb attention whoring “those other movie writers are retards” posts I'm going to tell y'all why it's natural at this point in the great human experiment that the past be on people's minds, and why the three foremost examples in what is now fashionable in some circles to call the “nostalgia porn” genre aren't really nostalgic.

As to that first point, shit's changing. From the Arab Spring to the Occupied Autumn, the great lurching shift toward a fully 21st century reality is underway in many parts of the world, right on schedule. A hundred years ago it was Europe going bugfuck and going “YO IT'S TIME FOR WORLD WAR ONE, BYETCHES,” two hundred years ago it was Napoleon flexing his nuts and acting like such a dick everyone thought he was shorter than he was because overcompensation was the only possible explanation. Hopefully this time around we can avoid as many people getting killed. But, anyway, major shifts that change everything frequently happen right at the beginning of the second decade of the century. And, when Everything Changes Forever, it's only natural that people start looking back at the world that was, and because the future is uncertain and—to some—scary, a certain glow of fondness is going to illuminate those looks back.

These aren't the only times when people look to the past, of course, but times like these there's more in the noosphere than usual, to the point where it's the prevailing theme in American cinema this year. Three pictures come to mind along with the subject, all very well received, all factoring heavily in awards-season speculation. They are:


Midnight In Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

I absolutely loved this movie, in spite of the one—not insignificant—flaw of Rachel McAdams being such an asshole it's almost like she's a revenge character. All she does the whole picture is, along with her mother, bust Owen Wilson's balls without motivation and to operatic excess. While she's intended to be a function of Owen Wilson's dissatisfaction with the venal, ignorant modern world (and while she seems totally unrealistic, someone—a relative, though I won't say which one—actually did say something as shitty to me once as Rachel McAdams does when she shushes Owen Wilson because Michael Sheen is talking) Woody kind of overdoes it with her, to the point where you're like, “If she really thought Owen Wilson was such a choad, why'd she get engaged to him?” His motivation's a little easier to understand; weak and shallow though it makes dudes look, there's an awful lot of mean dumbness we'll accept from someone as good-looking as she is. Yeah, go ahead, roll your eyes. Truth is truth. Anyway, enough of that shit, let's get on with the 90% of Midnight In Paris that totally fucking rocks:

Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter who's trying to write a novel, and somehow manages to convince his asshole fiancee (Rachel McAdams, see above) to come to Paris with him while he works on it. She keeps dragging him around to tourist-y shit, often with her “friend” whom she's (a little too) obviously fucking (Michael Sheen, in the greatest portrayal of that guy who dominates every conversation with his copious and frequently inaccurate triviata on any given subject OF ALL TIME). So one night Owen Wilson's out walking the streets while Rachel McAdams is doing something to make the audience hate her, and he has a seat to catch his breath and have one of those “holy fuck I'm in Paris” moments when, as a clock strikes midnight, a 1920s car pulls up and F. Scott Fitzgerald offers him a ride. Fuck. Yes.

Woody does some of the best work he's ever done with the 20s sequences, capturing both the allure and the parts about it where you're like “uhhh . . . yeah, not so much” (i.e. keeping Zelda Fitzgerald from jumping into the Seine every five minutes.) Owen Wilson's open-minded, open-hearted, open-mouthed wanderings through this vividly rendered world rubs off after not much time at all, and it's tempting to just quote the whole thing, but if you haven't seen it yet that's not fair, and anyway, isn't the point. Nor is the fact that the guy who plays Hemingway is fucking amaaaaaaaaaaaazing (Corey Stoll. Remember that name.)

What is, is a scene right at the end of the second act, where Woody (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it yet) gets his Inception on and goes for a fantasy dreamworld within a dreamworld, taking Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard, with whom he's fallen in some pretty apparently genuine love, to her favorite time in history, La Belle Époque. By this point in the movie I was enjoying Woody's little fluffy ode to every college freshman's first time machine destination and admiring the craft behind it, but once Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard hit Belle Époque and kick it with Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin and the three of them start talking about how the Renaissance must have been the best time to be alive I went “ohhhhhh shit . . . bravo, Woody. Bravo.”

Cuz if anyone's earned the right to be a little nostalgic, it's Woody. Between everybody busting his balls about how his movies aren't funny anymore (which they've been doing literally almost as long as I've been alive; he made that joke himself in Stardust Memories, which came out the month before I turned 2) and his well-documented and controversial marital habits—not to mention the fact that he's 76 now—you could hardly blame Woody for being like, “Man, remember the past? Wasn't it better, without all the ball-busting?” But no, he looks back, sees that it's awesome, and still comes firmly down on the side of “Live in the moment. Resist nostalgia. Now is all you really have.” I could hug Woody for that, if I wasn't worried that he'd break. The picture ends perfectly. If anything was going to be his highest grossing picture of all time, it should be one this good.

Sticking with New York filmmakers, next up:


Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

I've documented my dislike of most 3D movies, and my position about it being more a commercial than artistic innovation, a number of times. That being said, I'd be a fucking idiot if I didn't trust that Martin Scorsese would do something worthwhile with it. Not everything he's directed has been good, but you know if you see his name on something, you know his burning passion for cinema is going to show through, and there's going to be at least one thing in the movie where you're like “damn, okay, I haven't seen that before.” Even something like The Color Of Money, which he admitted to making (fittingly enough) for the money, still has something (The Color Of Money itself, in the right mood, is awesome.)

Hugo, as one would hope from Marty S., has by far—it's really not even close—the greatest 3D visuals to date. (Speaking of things I've said a number of times but can't say enough, fuck Avatar right under its blue fucking tail.) Marty and production designers Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo create a magical storybook Paris through which DP Robert Richardson's camera zooms, swoops, and hides right on the other side of a wall or window peaking in. There are some of the most gorgeous blues I've ever seen. It's got every last bit of visual grandeur $150 million can buy, and a bunch extra that you can only get when your director fucking means it, and Marty S. fucking means it.

The story, adapted from the Caldecott-medal winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is, on one level, about a boy named Hugo who lives in a train station who gradually befriends an elderly man who turns out to be pioneering filmmaker George Méliès. On another level, it's about the transformative power of movies, and how they're the stuff dreams are made of. On a lower but no less important level, it's about trust, friendship, purpose, and love. All things I'm totally on board with.

Only problem is, Hugo's got about an hour and a half of story stretched out over about two hours and ten minutes. The distension of the running time is largely due to the fact that Hugo and Méliès go through the motions of being, respectively, a mute and an evil old bastard for about a half hour, when in fact Hugo has plenty to say (kid's a borderline genius) and Méliès is a really nice guy who's a little down on his luck. The problem with the beginning being so interminable is that at no point in any of it are we given any insight into why Hugo can't just talk to the old guy and why Méliès is such a prick to the kid. Then, all of a sudden, as if the first half hour of the movie didn't exist, boom, we have the actual story. From there, the story is . . . okay. I feel slightly like an asshole bitching about it because the movie's heart is in a very good place, and a certain amount of simplicity and heavy-handedness can be written off to Marty aiming the picture at kids. But withholding the reasons to care about the main character and the character who ends up being the picture's moral center for over a quarter of its running time keeps Hugo from being a complete success.

That said, Hugo's absolutely worth seeing, and worth seeing on a big screen in 3D, because you absolutely positively for real reals haven't ever seen nothing like this. Even if it fails as narrative it succeeds absolutely in being a lecture on cinematic epistemology with professor Scorsese. In making a picture in digital 3D about the very earliest silent movies, Marty telescopes the entire history of cinema into one movie, a linkage made all the more explicit with some shockingly brilliant post-converted footage from Méliès' own films, which simply and beautifully makes the point that one movie is every movie. Even if Marty doesn't make little kids want to run out and see a bunch of silent movies, he makes a pretty good case that the little fuckers are shitheads for not wanting to.

Even the fact that the writing drove me insane but I loved everything else ends up being a testament to the power of the director and crew of a movie. Also, if you told me that Marty S. had pulled you aside and said, “Look, if you repeat this I'll deny it but this whole fucking picture is a massive memetic experiment to program little kids so that they become devotees of the theory that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true author of a movie, and a number of things you as an adult don't get but that are going to be little semiotic time bombs for anyone under 12 that result inevitably with their ability to write 500 page exegeses of G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, and D.W. Griffith by the time they're 15,” I'd slap my forehead and go, “IT ALL SEEMS SO CLEAR NOW.” Plenty of people I trust and respect were transported by Hugo. Something about it kept me at arm's length the whole night. I thought it was a little clunky, though I can't front on its sincerity. C'est la vie.

Speaking of French, our last picture:


The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius)

Now, this, my friends, is what the fuck I'm talkin' about. It deals with a lot of the same themes as Hugo—silent cinema and the appreciation thereof, most prominently—and also has a scene-stealing dog (much like the two pictures themselves, I suspect one will either prefer the alternation between stoic contemplation and feverish, sloppy pursuit of the dog from Hugo or the zany mugging and pluckiness of the dog in The Artist; both dogs are microcosms of their respective movies.) And they're formal mirror images of each other: Hugo used all the modern technology money can buy to pay homage to the earliest movies, where The Artist uses the visual style and techniques of 20s and 30s cinema to tell the always-relevant (especially today) story about how time marches on, and marches past whoever can't keep up.

With a couple notable (and stunning) exceptions, The Artist is done totally straight as a late-period silent movie. Its protagonist, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is a massive star in 1927 Hollywood, with charisma for days, and broad mugging for weeks. After the opening of his latest hit picture, George literally bumps into a young woman named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, whose beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe), who, as it turns out, is an aspiring actress. And does quite well, seeing as how her beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe. IT'S AS IF YOU'D NEED TO FILM HER TO GET THE POINT ACROSS.

Good thing The Artist is a movie, then, that's what I'm saying. The story gets going once sound is introduced, as muckety-muck John Goodman and a bunch of the standard evil white guys in suits you get hanging around any movie company (though John Goodman is, as his name implies when you bifurcate it, one of the good ones) inform George that it's either start talkin' or start walkin'. George, pissed, bankrolls his own epic silent melodrama, that ends up opening the same say as Peppy's latest. You know which one wins and which one goes down in flames. I ain't gotta spoil it.

The movie doesn't end there, though. It continues through a bunch of capital M Melodrama to an ending that's at once triumphant, wistful, and even a bit sad. But every second of it hums with a love of movies and an uncanny skill in recreating the cinema of early Hollywood. It succeeds in a way a picture like Far From Heaven (which I, by the way, really liked) doesn't in managing to make the recreation more than an academic exercise; The Artist actually is a “you'll laugh, you'll cry” movie exactly like the ones to which it pays homage. The dance sequences are killer, the leads are perfect in both look and demeanor, and the dog is just the best.

As much as it would appear, in a thousand different ways, like The Artist is the most nostalgic of the three, when Jean Dujardin's smiled his last smile, Bérénice Bejo is done being like “there isn't another actress alive who could have done this as perfectly as I just did. Bask” and the dog has pulled his last pratfall, The Artist is really a movie about the importance of adapting to changing times. The inability to do so nearly breaks George. It is, of course, still very much about respecting the past—Peppy's efforts to pay respect to those who've come before verge on saintly—but since the embodiment of the importance of that respect also fits flawlessly with the modern age, it's clear that the message is not to live in the past, merely to just remember, every now and then, how awesome it was.


Since I clearly have a lot of work to do founding this religion based on Bérénice Bejo (and since she's Hazanavicius' wife, keeping one step ahead of his jealous wrath if he thinks I'm crushing on her too hard) it would probably help to define nostalgia, and why none of these pictures succumb to the temptations thereof. There's a difference between looking back and being like, “Yeah, that was nice,” and yearning painfully to live in the past. Midnight In Paris looked like it was going to be the latter before Woody, at the perfect moment and in the perfect way, revealed nope. He even has Owen Wilson (did I mention he was terrific in that? I probably should: he was terrific in that) quote Faulkner's famous line “The past ain't dead. It ain't even past” in a context that suggests that the past not being past is a sign that it's always with us in our memories, but that life is lived in the world itself, not in our heads. Hugo isn't nostalgia, it's a history lesson about the primacy of film conversation. And The Artist, the sneakiest of the three, employs about as many nostalgia-inciting elements as there are stars in the sky to tell a story about changing with the times.

So, if in the Year of Nostalgia, none of the most “nostalgic” movies really are that thing, what are they? Three movies that came out the same year as each other; a year where people have been tending to reflect on the past a bit, to be sure, but a meditation on a thing is not the same as the thing itself, just as depiction is not endorsement. Even if my enjoyment was variable with the three movies under question, all deserve better than to be dismissed with one adjective, most especially if it doesn't apply.

PLAYING INTO THE HANDS OF CORPORATE AMERICA DOESN'T ALWAYS SUCK

Case in point, this wonderful site. Yeah, it's an Old Spice ad, but it's also a perfect summation of the aesthetic mission of this blog. So there's that.

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

I was told by a creative writing professor in college that one should not write road novels, because she thought they betrayed the writer's inability to think of a proper plot. I was told by another creative writing professor that all good writing originates from a sense of place (though she implied that the only legitimate kind of writing was short autobiographical fiction by women in New Mexico about deceased parents and guilt about the Native American genocide, which is weird because she wasn't from New Mexico; as you might imagine, she and I got along so famously that she tried to have me expelled.) Although I disagreed with them on both these points (respectfully and disrespectfully, respectively) it's through having studied with both of them that I figured out how road narratives work when they work. It's when place contributes to the evocation of character, and the journey of the lead character(s) from A to B is the entire point of the narrative. Yes, 19 year old creative writing students deciding “I'm going to write a novel about a bunch of us in a car to California smoking weed” should be discouraged from actually writing that novel. But for stories involving an actual intellectual/emotional/other journey, of import to anyone other than the protagonist him/herself, literalizing that by having the character make a physical journey works just fine, and can be a nice lil ol metaphor there. Thus, today I'm going to write about The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Motorcycle Diaries, and The Trip. (Note: the following contains a few random spoilers here and there, but only for movies that are old enough to buy cigarettes.)

Obviously there have been other road movies. I've seen many of them, just as I've read many road novels (the enduring popularity of which can be blamed entirely on On The Road, which is the most important book in the world when you're 15 but is completely unique and impossible to emulate, even by its own author). There's Easy Rider, but Easy Rider was about Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda looking cool on motorcycles, not character development; Billy and Captain America don't change at all, unless you count when they get lit the fuck up by those dudes in the truck at the end (which sort of counts, death being a change). And there's Thelma & Louise, as Isaac Butler pointed out, which has character development, and does involve a road trip, but belongs to a separate genre, the “outlaws on the run” movie (see also Bonnie and Clyde, True Romance, Thieves Like Us, etc etc.) With those pictures, having The Man (in more ways than one, in Thelma & Louise's case) on one's ass means that the leisurely, unhurried pace necessary for characters to realize shit or mature or what have you on their own schedule is obviated, and that “take your time, we're in no rush” element is a very key element to the three movies I want to talk about.

The least of the three, in terms of heft and cinematic adventurousness, is The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

Which is not to say that it's not a delightful movie, because it is. It's also a movie that history has had a few drinks with, because now we can say that it stars Agent Smith, Leonard Shelby, and General Zod (Ed. Note: government names—Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce, and Terence Stamp) as the most fabulous cabaret act in all of Sydney, Australia. Weaving and Pearce are industry-standard drag queens, though Stamp is a trans woman, as a wrinkle. The story is set in motion when an old friend of Weaving's offers them a gig out in Alice Springs (for those of y'all not up on your 'Strayan geography, Sydney's way in the east and is one of the world's cultural capitals and Alice Springs is a couple thousand clicks inland in the Northern Territory, which is basically Crocodile Dundee's turf) and the girls hop on a bus called Priscilla and go have themselves a road trip.

The journey inland clearly parallels Weaving's and Stamp's attempts to make sense of their respective pasts; Pearce's job is more to be comic relief, which he handles brilliantly, but his character isn't given as much depth as the other two. By the time they, and the story, reach(es) their/its destination (fuck you, pronouns) a lot of positive change has taken place, and life can move forward, in brainmeltingly awesome costumes. A large element in everything turning out okay is represented, symbolically, by our protagonists managing to transcend their otherness (which is manifest) and connect with their country and its people. Stamp plays a recent widow who—mild spoiler alert—meets a really nice small town guy who doesn't give two fucks what kinda genitals s/he was born with, he's just mad into Terence Stamp. Hugo Weaving—slightly spicier spoiler—reunites with his not-yet-divorced wife (the old friend who gives them the gig, no less) and young son, with whom he finally forms a father-son relationship amidst the central Australian countryside. One could even make the argument that given Alice Springs' geographical centrality, he journeyed to the heart of Australia, and in bringing his son back with him to Sydney at the end, he brings his rediscovered heart back with him. Oh, yeah, that's right, there's more to that movie than a bunch of ABBA, CeCe Peniston, and Alicia Bridges. Recognize.


Next, a radically different movie (that I stupidly left off my top 10 of the last decade, when it really should clock in at #2), The Motorcycle Diaries:

Get it? RADICAL? See, it's funny because it's Che Guevara.

The Motorcycle Diaries, of course, is the story of a very young, not-yet-Che (Gael Garcia Bernal, fucking awesome), who hops on a bike with his pal (Rodrigo de la Serna, just as fucking awesome) for a roundabout tour of South America on their way from Buenos Aires to a leper colony in Peru where they're volunteering and eventually to Caracas. Of course nothing goes the way they plan it, and by the time they get to the end of their journey, proto-Che is at the beginning of the journey that leads to becoming Che, and achieving dorm-room-wall immortality.

It's a story that underscores the principle that a story being happy or sad depends on when you call “cut.” Had it gone on—like Steven Soderbergh's two-part biopic—it would have gotten to the years when Che's good intentions confronted uncooperative realities (to be kind) and he started killing people and fucking shit up (to be less kind). The Motorcycle Diaries stops at a point when young Ernesto still has his whole life ahead of him, yet it's still a complete journey. Going from a liberal but sheltered medical student to a passionate advocate for social justice is quite a leap.

Like Priscilla (Ed. Note: I know this is the first time you ever saw anyone compare these two pictures. I know I'm awesome, you don't have to say it), the characters' journey in The Motorcycle Diaries is paralleled by the massive geographical distance traversed. In this case, the variety of geography is also vast, from snowcapped mountains to deserts to jungles. And, like the journey itself does, proto-Che connects all of these terrains, and the people who inhabit them, coming to regard South America as a continent rather than a group of discrete nation-states, and South Americans similarly as one people. From there, the obvious next step is that the world and all its people are as one.

Director Walter Salles and writer Jose Rivera do a good job in The Motorcycle Diaries of not judging proto-Che either way, instead letting the events unfold and simply pointing a camera at them. The way those events unfold make it seem inevitable, in the sense of the natural world to which the picture is so indelibly linked, that proto-Che would undergo the moral and intellectual journey he does. But, rather than the movie suggesting that anyone would have this reaction, it restricts itself to its observation on its particular characters. Proto-Che is proto-Che. You are you.


Fuckin' hell The Motorcycle Diaries was good. Anyway, moving on:

The Trip

This right here is a road picture as only Michael Winterbottom could make, and only in England. Edited down from a BAFTA-winning six-episode TV show about Steve Coogan (Steve Coogan), having been talked into a tour of restaurants in the North of England by his girlfriend (Margo Stilley), who's gone back to America because things aren't going so well, being “forced” to ask his friend Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon) to accompany him on the trip because he “can't do it alone.” And so they spend five days driving around England, eating in restaurants, and talking. And talking. And talking. And talking.

The Trip contains more references to other Michael Winterbottom movies than anyone could possibly be expected to catch without an annotated edition. Catching them all, thankfully, isn't the point, but it does well to note that Michael Winterbottom is a total fucking wiseass, always fucking with audience expectations, throwing change-ups (googlies?), keeping us on our toes.

For this reason, it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that a Michael Winterbottom road movie takes place in England, a country you can drive across in one day (provided you don't hit traffic). It's also a place that gives the sense of always having been there, and that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. The same goes, more or less, speaking very generally, for the people as well. While this may not be true in every case, it's still true that there's a prevailing sense of England and its people being this way.

So a road movie where Steve Coogan doesn't really go anywhere or do anything, beginning and ending with him alone moping in his apartment, just trucking along in an anhedonic funk, occasionally sniping at Rob Brydon to hide his secret jealousy of Brydon's relative happiness (and extremely loving marriage), is kind of the perfect English road movie.

I give Winterbottom, Coogan, and Brydon a lot of credit for making the fact that The Trip is almost casually perfect of secondary importance to it being one of the funniest and most quotable pictures in like ever. I'm not even going to embarrass myself trying to describe how awesome the jokes are, so I'm going to let the movie speak for itself. Also, bear in mind, when you watch a whole hour and forty-five minutes of this, the cumulative effect just makes it funnier and funnier:



This one I posted last November before I even knew what The Trip was:



Finally, maybe you have to be an actor to think this is the funniest thing in the fucking universe but I am so it is:



I mean holy shit this movie is so fucking good. The fact that it speaks that perfectly to what it's like being an actor AND has a deeply considered and holistically perfect sense of place AND is a mirror image of the classic road movie AND in so being ends up being one of the best extant examples thereof is . . . well, unlike Messrs. Coogan and Brydon, I have no words. (Also, footnote: Rob Brydon is amazing in this, and Rob Brydon the character is one of my favorites in any movie in years. And, second footnote: I love how Steve Coogan is so willing, in this, Tristram Shandy, 24 Hour Party People—kind of, as that was Steve Coogan as Tony Wilson as Steve Coogan—and Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes, how Coogs is willing to the point of eagerness to portray himself as such a raging twat. He always gets it juuuust right before he alienates everyone. It's quite the balancing act.)

Okay, since it's getting to time to say QED and drop the mic, to recap: a successful road narrative in its given medium is dependent on the relationship between character and place, with the place being the progenitor of the character(s), and the change in place paralleling the change, and hopefully evolution, of character. It's not the subtlest metaphor in the world, but there are certain stories—like the three discussed above, and a number of others, I'm sure—that need to be told that way. That's right, motherfucker. Q. E. D.

[drops mic]