cinema

Money, Madness, and Munchausen

So you go to the vending machine to buy a candy bar. And as you’re deciding what to pick, you notice that the candy bar in slot B5 is hanging there by the edge of the wrapper. Do you run and tell management? Do you call the service 800 number on the side of the machine? Hell no. You put in your money, press B5, you get two candy bars for the price of one, and you walk out of there quickly with a stupid grin on your face hoping nobody else sees you. Congratulations, son — you just pulled one over on the Man.

'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' posterI felt like that in 1989 when I saw Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

My friends and I had been weaned on Monty Python, we could recite long passages from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, we worshiped both Time Bandits and Brazil. So we had some idea of what to expect from a new Terry Gilliam film: visual surrealism, distrust of authority, antipathy to soulless reason, and a skewed sense of humor, among (many) other things. Pure chocolate-covered chaos covered in shiny tinfoil and encased in a neat plastic wrapper.

But Baron Munchausen was something else altogether. Imagine if someone tried to film Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King — without the benefit of CGI. It’s that grand of a scale. Gilliam gives us real armored elephants, ornately carved cannons, and hundreds upon hundreds of fully costumed soldiers engaging in mock battle. He gives us baroque, lovingly crafted setpieces and clockwork monsters that look like Muppets. He gives us cameos from Sting and Robin Williams, not to mention a stark naked Uma Thurman. There’s a story within a story within a story, with allusions to everything from Greek mythology to 1001 Nights.

My friends and I watched Munchausen with jaws dropped. Some Hollywood assholes had paid tens and tens of millions of dollars to make this movie. It was, at the time, one of the most expensive films ever made. And here we sat, on a Saturday afternoon, the day after opening — in Southern California, no less, the movie capital of the world — and there were less than 20 people in the audience.

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No Country for the Coen Brothers

An ordinary guy finds a suitcase full of thousand dollar bills. There’s no one around. Instead of going to the cops, the guy figures it’s his lucky day and takes the money. Which works just dandy until the big bad motherfuckers who own the suitcase decide to come looking for it.

'No Country for Old Men' posterYou’ve seen that film a thousand times before, and it’s essentially the plot of Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant new film, No Country for Old Men (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name). It’s one of the standard thriller plots that crawls out of Hollywood every five years dressed up in a slick suit of violence with a little flower of moral conundrum stuck to its lapel. The Coens have entertained a few variations on the suitcase-of-money scenario themselves (see Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and The Ladykillers).

Here’s the thing. No Country for Old Men took that dandy little thriller behind the woodshed and beat its ass bloody.

That No Country for Old Men is fiercely entertaining is not really the point. Some audiences can’t see past the offbeat humor and treat the Coen Brothers’ films like hip Quentin Tarantino trifles. Critics often fail to see the point too. They’ve labeled the work of the Coens nihilistic, or misanthropic, or just plain vicious. They call the Coens’ films empty exercises in technical virtuosity without soul or subject.

These critics couldn’t be more wrong. Joel and Ethan Coen have an ongoing subject, and it’s a subject that they discuss intelligently and with compassion. Their subject? The American Dream.

You know, the American Dream: the idea that any penniless schlub born in a broken-down shack can, through grit and hard work, one day become Andrew Carnegie, or Sam Walton, or Bill Gates. It’s a free country! Opportunities unlimited! There’s supposed to be a proper moral framework propping up the whole thing, but somehow in the latter half of the twentieth century it became all about the money. Americans are obsessed with the stuff, whether in the affirmative sense (money enables you to follow your hopes and dreams) or in the negative sense (money can’t buy you happiness). Either way, material wealth always seems to be the fulcrum around which the whole American moral universe teeters. Rather appropriate when you think about it, considering that the United States was largely founded by a bunch of rich white landowners who were pissed off at the King of England because their taxes were too high.

Regardless, the American Dream is what it is, and for whatever reason Joel and Ethan Coen seem to have chosen it as their topic. In film after film, ever since 1984’s Blood Simple, the Coens have been steadily dissecting this Dream. Analyzing it, tearing it up, and stitching it back together. Charting out the ways it can corrupt us and demean us.

Witness Fargo, the story of a dumbass car salesman whose shame about his inability to provide a better life for his family leads him to fraud, extortion, and ultimately murder. Witness The Hudsucker Proxy, a cartoony take on Frank Capra in which a naive dimwit strives to reach the top of a major corporation only to find himself the puppet of his corporate masters. Or The Big Lebowski, featuring a ’60s reject with no ambition higher than getting his rug back, who is nonetheless sucked into the scheme of a corrupt self-styled philanthropist to steal a million dollars. Or The Man Who Wasn’t There, starring yet another dim bulb who’s thrust unprepared into a world of ambition by his wife’s philandering and is ultimately undone by it.

What do all the Coen protagonists have in common? They’re all ambitious schemers dissatisfied with the status quo, looking for unorthodox ways to achieve that American Dream.

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“Full Metal Jacket”: The Jungian Thing

Nobody seems to be paying attention to the fact that 2007 marks the 20th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Warner Home Video finally released a deluxe 2-DVD edition just last week, along with remastered editions of The Shining, 2001, A Clockwork Orange, and a few others.

Why is it a shame that nobody’s marking the occasion? Because Full Metal Jacket is one of the most meticulously crafted films of the past 20 years. I think it’s damn near perfect.

'Full Metal Jacket' movie poster(Interesting side note: Believe it or not, this will be Full Metal Jacket‘s first home video release in widescreen. The film was originally shot in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, what you and I call “widescreen.” But if you’re an eccentric genius like Stanley Kubrick, you get to make unconventional decisions. Before his death Kubrick decided that, since 98% of the world’s TV sets back then had a 4:3 aspect ratio — i.e. “fullscreen” — henceforth and forevermore his films would be released in a 4:3 aspect ratio. None of that devil letterboxing for Stanley! It’s only now that Warner Home Video, with the collaboration of the Kubrick estate, is restoring the films to their original specs.)

Audiences have had a peculiar relationship with Full Metal Jacket since its debut on July 26, 1987. It’s much loved in some quarters, but it’s equally despised in others. Everyone seems to appreciate the taut first act set in a Parris Island Marine boot camp, yet many never get over the film’s sudden shift to Vietnam in its second half. Even so perceptive a critic as Roger Ebert famously called the latter half of Full Metal Jacket “a series of self-contained set pieces, none of them quite satisfying.”

But Full Metal Jacket is designed to be a two-part story; just about everything you see in the first half of the film has a parallel in the second. It’s a structure Kubrick has used before (cf. the apes/the astronauts in 2001, and Alex’s life before/after his treatment in A Clockwork Orange).

More than that, the film is full of dualities: Joker’s helmet with the peace symbol and “Born to Kill” inscribed on the side (“I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man… The Jungian thing, sir”). The two dramatic deaths at the end of each section. The two-mindedness of the American public about the war. Joker’s own conflicting desires to “get into the shit” and to get out of there as quickly as possible. His dual nature as Leonard’s teacher and as the one who beats Leonard the hardest. And so on.

Of course, most of the moviegoing public doesn’t want to see films about Jungian dualities, and so people often go into Full Metal Jacket with false expectations. Hollywood generally only gives us three categories of war films: (1) the anti-war film (Platoon, Kubrick’s own Paths of Glory) (2) the war-is-sordid-but-necessary-and-sometimes-ennobling film (Saving Private Ryan), and (3) the out-and-out propaganda film (John Wayne’s The Green Berets, 300). But what do you do with a Vietnam movie that not only refuses to take a stand on the Vietnam War, but actually embraces its contradictions? “Do I think America belongs in Vietnam?” Crazy Earl says in response to a question from the television interviewers in FMJ. He looks totally perplexed, like he’s never even considered the question before. “I don’t know. I belong in Vietnam, I’ll tell you that.”

So if you’re going to get the most out of Full Metal Jacket, be prepared to take the long view. The way long view, the view of an alien civilization dispassionately studying humanity under a microscope. Like those hypothetical aliens, Kubrick rarely makes moral judgments; he simply observes. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, Joker, Animal Mother, the Vietnamese sniper, even the crazy gunner gleefully shooting down fleeing Vietnamese civilians from a moving helicopter — the film doesn’t really take anybody’s side. It doesn’t give you convenient moral labels to tell you who the good guys and who the bad guys are.

Take Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, played with vicious brio by R. Lee Ermey (you know, the guy who’s played the military drill sergeant in every fucking movie since 1987). At first blush, he seems like as good a candidate as any for a villain in this movie. A manipulative brainwasher, a callous tool of the U.S. government. But on repeated viewings, you realize that he’s not the villain at all — quite the opposite. He’s doing his best to prepare these soldiers to survive out in the field. He’s a father figure. He’s a protector and teacher. He’s Obi-wan Kenobi, if Obi-wan Kenobi called his Padawan learners “unorganized grabastic pieces of amphibian shit.”

“Because I am hard you will not like me,” says Hartman. “But the more you hate me, the more you will learn.” Didn’t Mr. Miyagi say something similar to the Karate Kid when making him paint the fence?

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The Bourne Paranoia

Here are a few things that every American knows.

  • The world is a vile and dangerous place.
  • America is blindly and irrationally hated by just about everybody outside of our borders.
  • If we left our security up to the peaceniks, bureaucrats, and Boy Scouts we elect to national office, the United States would be a smoldering ruin in a matter of months.
  • Therefore it’s necessary that we fund a zillion intelligence agencies and black ops teams who routinely conduct secret assassinations in the name of defending our country.
  • Nevertheless, despite our massive economic and military power, the United States is drastically outnumbered and constantly on the verge of apocalypse.

The Bourne Identity posterAt least, these are the assumptions behind just about every spy thriller ever made. Now I find myself wondering: When the hell did these assumptions become so ingrained in our psyche? When did we blithely start accepting this worldview? Who says the United States should behave this way — and, for that matter, when did we all decide that the United States actually does behave this way? What the fuck happened to my country?

These assumptions are also the ones that underline 2002’s The Bourne Identity. It’s a nice little popcorn flick with a plot so familiar you can slip into it like an old bathrobe. Matt Damon plays Matt Damon, playing a CIA-funded black ops assassin who has a change of heart because the agency has Gone Too Far. Now after a bout of amnesia, he finds himself on the run from the very organization that funded him. Car chases and dead bodies ensue. Spoiler alert: the heroic Matt Damon gets the girl, and the villainous Chris Cooper gets shot in the head. (Oh, and FYI, there are more spoilers below.)

And then someone had the inspired idea of hiring Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93) to take over the franchise. To call The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum better films than their predecessor is kind of like calling a fine aged pinot grigio better than a Zima. They’re among the most intelligent, well-crafted, thoughtful thrillers about American paranoia that I’ve ever seen. (And holy crap, did you realize Matt Damon could act?)

Suddenly our protagonist is no longer just a youthful maverick spy fleeing across Europe with a spunky German chick in tow. Jason Bourne is not so much a character in Supremacy and Ultimatum as he is a manifestation of the American subconscious. He’s an unstoppable force who never tires, who never gives up, who can never be killed. Imagine a cross between Batman and Patrick Henry who knows how to kill people with a plastic pen.

Richard Corliss clearly noticed the transformation in his Time magazine review of The Bourne Ultimatum:

That’s the secret of this character, and Bond and John McClane and all the other action-movie studs. They are a projection of American power — or a memory of it, and the poignant wish it could somehow return. In real life, as a nation these days, we can achieve next to nothing. But in the Bourne movies just one of us, grim, muscular and photogenic, can take on all villains, all at once, and leave them outwitted, dead, disgraced. That’s a macho fantasy of the highest, purest, most lunatic order.

Corliss is on to something here, but I think he’s got it exactly backwards. Jason Bourne isn’t just an action stud in the James Bond mold; Bourne is, in fact, a calculated response to James Bond, or more than that, he’s the anti-James Bond. James Bond on the Bizarro planet. Is it an accident that Jason Bourne and James Bond have the same initials? (Well, actually it probably is. But you’d have to ask Robert Ludlum, who created the character, and he’s dead. But apparently Greengrass didn’t read the Ludlum novels anyway.)

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The End of Hollywood

If you’re the type of person who felt inclined to watch the Academy Awards last night, I hope you enjoyed the show while it’s still around. I tuned in for about an hour — mostly to see how Ellen Degeneres was handling her job as host — and found that I could predict about every award based on the politics and the pre-show scuttlebutt alone. Martin Scorsese holding an OscarIn fact, I correctly predicted the winner of every major award — including Best Picture — despite the fact that just about the only film nominated in any category that I saw this year was Little Miss Sunshine.

This speaks less to my amazing prophetic powers than the rote predictability of the Oscars themselves. They’re growing less and less relevant, and it’s only a matter of time before they become so irrelevant that people stop paying attention. I give the Oscars fifteen more years.

In fact, in case you’ve missed this decade altogether, it’s no secret that the entire Hollywood movie industry is dying. Why? Actually, the reasons are well-documented in any number of places, but I’ll repeat them here because I’m just that way.

  1. High definition television and DVDs. The obvious scapegoats. The movie theater chains made a huge tactical mistake in the ’80s and ’90s by putting an emphasis on building lots of multiplexes with smaller screens. The end result is that I’ve got a high-def TV and Surround Sound setup in my basement that rivals many of these lower end venues. It’s certainly good enough for your garden variety comedy/drama, and does a damn fine job on the mega-blockbusters too.
  2. Actors’ and directors’ exorbitant salaries. It’s an interesting phenomenon that now Hollywood’s profits are teetering, the A-list stars are commanding higher prices than ever. Why? Well, the less certain you are of making back your investment on a film, the more you’re willing to spend to make sure you can get that return. Ben Stiller might not bring in nearly as large a crowd as, say, Robin Williams did back in the day, but at least he’s still bringing in a crowd.
  3. Hollywood regulation. Robert Rodriguez wanted to give artist Frank Miller co-directing credit for his (brilliant, bloody) Sin City. The Director’s Guild of America wouldn’t let him. So, figured Rodriguez, who the fuck needs to be part of the Director’s Guild of America? He quit. It’s this kind of rigid bullshit that causes A-listers like George Lucas, Peter Jackson, and James Cameron to snub the system and work outside it. Look for more defectors from the Hollywood unions as their relevance plummets.
  4. A globalized workforce. Similarly, who wants to deal with expensive union workers in Hollywood when you can hire some non-union worker in Fargo, or Tallahassee, or Mexico City for that matter? The spotlight creative jobs in Hollywood will stay local (for a while, at least), but filmmakers will discover that you can outsource almost everything else. Why pay x for postproduction in Hollywood when you can get the same quality for 10% of x in Bollywood?
  5. Lack of edge. More multiplexes + higher salaries + union costs = more expensive films. What happens to movie studios when they need to get more and more butts in the seats to make back their investment? The same thing that happens to U.S. Presidential candidates once they make it through the primary season — they go scurrying for the middle. The studios and the movie chains start falling back on “sure bets” — sequels, popular franchises, formulaic comedies with bankable stars. Quality (which was never all that high to begin with) dips precipitously.

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Christopher Nolan’s “The Prestige”

If Christopher Nolan continues to mine the vein of tortured protagonists with such rich results as he does in “The Prestige,” he just might become our foremost cinematic chronicler of obsession. But then again… wasn’t everyone saying something very similar about M. Night Shyamalan?

“Return of the Jedi”: A Postscript

My tale of seeing Return of the Jedi for the first time in 1983 is not nearly as interesting as my tale of seeing The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. I spent three summers waiting and imagining. The events of Empire were carefully parsed and dissected with my brother and all of my friends. I wrote several episodes of fan fiction in which I actually predicted Luke and Leia’s siblinghood and the return of the … Read more

The Day “The Empire Strikes Back” Changed Everything

Saturday, May 24, 1980.

It’s a sunny morning in Orange County, California. Jimmy Carter is president of the United States, Mount St. Helens has just erupted, Richard Pryor will be setting himself on fire any day now. The Iranians have taken a number of Americans hostage in Tehran. Lots of people seem to be singing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” though I’m not quite sure why.

Empire Strikes Back posterMy mother takes my brother, my sisters, and me to see The Empire Strikes Back. I’m nine years old.

Star Wars has become my passion, as it is my older brother’s passion, as it is the passion of just about every boy I’ve ever met or heard of. I’m a late convert to the Church of Lucas, having stubbornly insisted for many months that Battlestar Galactica was the superior fictional universe.

Now I’m making up for lost time with a vengeance. I’ve got the first dozen issues of the Marvel Star Wars comic book series, I’ve got a TIE fighter, an X-wing fighter, a landspeeder, a Millennium Falcon, an interior set from the Death Star, every action figure from Greedo to Chewbacca to Hammerhead. My brother and I have worn the plastic light sabers of our Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader figurines down to nubs from fighting with them. (Our life-size plastic light sabers, however, are still in good shape.)

A few weeks ago, I have given in to sweet temptation and bought the Empire Strikes Back comic book published in mass-market paperback form. The cover is white and red. Even though I promise myself I won’t read it all the way through, I take several tantalizing peeks at the opening pages. There’s an ice planet. Luke and Han and Chewie are there.

There’s a TV special showing a behind-the-scenes look at the battle scene on Hoth, the painstaking art of stop-motion animation. I hear something about a new character being performed by Frank Oz.

Then finally, the day arrives. Saturday, May 24th or possibly May 25th — definitely a few days after opening day. The longest days of my life.

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It’s Time for James Bond to Retire

Yahoo News in its infinite wisdom decided that its top story yesterday was an online petition to fire actor Daniel Craig as James Bond. Let us set aside the editorial nincompoopery that causes Yahoo to deem Hollywood casting as more important than, say, a threatened presidential veto, and skip to the real question: When will this idiotic franchise finally die? I am gobsmacked and thunderstruck that a character with so little depth as James Bond … Read more