For the Record: Hall Pass (Review)

There is a scene in Hall Pass about halfway through that sums up my problems with the movie. Owen Wilson’s character Rick – a happily married man with three kids – has been advised by his friend Fred (Jason Sudekis) that the local coffee shop has a hot barista (Nicky Whelan), and so he asks the male coffee guy Brent (Derek Waters) to let him be helped by the lady – suggesting he has a complicated order that turns out to be “Iced coffee with one Splenda.” Brent mocks Rick for doing so, and Rick then dresses him down. He says (and I’m summarizing) “You may mock me for being a middle age guy, but when your failed art projects don’t work out, you’re going to be coming to me for a job.” It’s an effective insult because of the shorthand, and likely most people’s first-hand experience with coffee shop employees, but it’s the most telling scene in the film.
In this moment, the film has sided with the affluent middle age man over the struggling coffee shop employee with dreams of success. It’s also defending a middle age guy’s desire to lecherously ogle a female. Without getting into the socio-economic realities of being attractive help, this shows you every problem inherent in both the material and the filmmakers. Bobby and Peter Farrelly have been rich and successful long enough to become smug and oblivious.
The premise of Hall Pass is too labored to be worth much. Rick is married to Maggie (Jenna Fischer, who should have insisted the film be reshot as she looks like she made the entire film while hungover) and Fred is married to Maggie (Christina Applegate). Rick is passive in his interest in other women – though it flares up – and in the first sequence of the movie Maggie feigns sleep instead of having sex. Fred and Maggie have no kids, and so their unhappiness with each other is kept under the surface when together, and discussed ad nauseum with friends. On some level – partly because they don’t have kids – it feels like this should be a slightly younger couple in terms of the dynamic. And when the boys’ behavior discussing their friend’s wives’ attractiveness is made public – in one of the dumbest gags in the film – their spouses come to take the advice of plot-point friend Dr. Lucy (Joy Behar), who suggests they give their husbands a “hall pass.”
Let me freeze the frame here for a second. Call time out. A hall pass? Has anyone in the history of marriage ever done this, and then if so did they ever call it that? What stupid bullshit is this?
Okay, so the girls go off to the country for a week. Let me stop again for a second. These guys are really well off if Rick can have three kids and his wife doesn’t seem to work, and Fred’s wife also is not working (what is she doing with her time). The film would have done itself some favors by making the characters incredibly wealthy because then one can view their behavior with a little distance – the problem is that they’re way too cushy to be an audience surrogate. Again, it feels like the filmmakers don’t understand that their characters are dicks, but especially in the current economic crises, these guys come across as even more schmucky if their biggest problem is wanting side trim.
The rest of the film is about the week where the boys have the chance to go hog wild. This starts well as they’re grouped with their poker buddies (including Stephen Merchant, the funniest player in the movie, and J B Smoove) and end up at a Appleby’s on the first night of the film’s hideous amount of product placement. They are completely incompetent to start, and I think the film would have been better had it picked a gear for these guys to be in, but I found the escalation works against the film – had they been coked out from day one, that’s way more fun to come to the realization that they love their wives, or had the whole thing been mostly botched opportunities I could see it being charming. The next night they try harder, and by the last night, both are put in a position to finally use their pass. But as the men have been questioning their commitment to both their wives and OPP, their wives have come to understand the hall pass works both ways.
Few cinematic conceits are so fraught with peril as comedies based around infidelity. It takes a nice balancing act to have both heart and raunch in films like this, and with There’s Something About Mary, the Farrelly’s balanced that appropriately (though that didn’t have to deal with cheating). Here – from the opening sequence – you get a labored set up that leads to a solution (the hall pass) that’s totally ridiculous. And though the sentiment of wanting to be wanted during a long term relationship is understandable, the way the filmmakers go about capturing it is not. And when the film moves into its final act, you feel conflicted about the characters and what they should do in ways that are antithetical to the narrative. I didn’t give a shit if taking advantage of the hall pass would change their marriages. Also, The Farrelly’s don’t seem to have the cojones to take this any place uncomfortable – I felt the only option for a conclusion was to affirm traditional values. And for comedy to work it has to have some edge.
Ultimately the roles should have been reversed: Owen Wilson used to be known as the Butterscotch Stallion, and it would have been funnier for him to be the supposed “nice guy” with P on the brain and a potty mouth. Instead he’s supposed to be the family guy, and he does it well, but he doesn’t bring any of his big guns to bear. Jason Sudekis has the comic ringer role as the more asshole of the two, and he has to deliver some slang that feels exceptionally forced… much like the character. Good comic tropes are developed when you have an honest to goodness asshole, and this feels way too halfway about it. It’s hard to say how Fischer’s performance is because cinematographer Mathew F. Leonetti and her make-up people did such a bad job in this movie that I just winced whenever she was on screen. Applegate has a slightly more fun role, but the writing for the female half of the narrative is limited, but that would suggest the male characters are more rounded. Having a raging hard-on would be a good character trait for these guys, but the film blanches from it in all the wrong ways.
There are a couple moments here and there, and the film isn’t a total wash. These are funny and talented people, and small roles from people like Richard Jenkins (albeit way too forced) don’t make this a complete waste of time, but by the time the film comes to the end, I would have preferred if the filmmakers had let us make up our minds if the characters cheated or not instead giving us extended monologues about why they love their partner. Comic talents usually have a sell-by date: their material becomes hackneyed, or they embrace their inner problems and demons – as Marc Maron’s podcast points out. Comfort appears to be the enemy of good comedy, and the Farrelly’s come off as altogether too comfortable to understand the dilemma of their narrative. Shouldn’t this have been the comeback from the terribleness of The Heartbreak Kid remake? Alas, no lessons were learned.

For the Record: SHE ALSO HAD PRETTY EYES: JANE RUSSELL 1921-2011

Jane Russell could never be a star today, and more’s the pity. Though her start was shaky, and she was of limited range, Russell had a certain ironic detachment that made her a delight to watch. She knew why she became a star and why people liked her. It was simple: Jane Russell (born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell) had big tits.
Howard Hughes – partly a boob man, but more than anything a capitalist – saw something he could make famous: large breasts on a small frame. In a time when pornography was a crime, and the best that could be found were soundless one-reelers (that history has taught us were mostly viewed at Elk’s club), and the Hays code restricting any film that suggested the romantic leads were going to do something about it, Russell’s physique could do what less endowed women like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich or Veronica Lake had to act to sell and might be censored for. Russell – with her ridiculous cleavage – was walking sex. Hughes knew it, and designed bras and outfits to highlight her mammaries. As The Aviator attests, he had to fight tooth and nail for each blessed millimeter of skin he could.
His film (originally started by Howard Hawks) The Outlaw was a western that had characters called Billy The Kid, Pat Garrett, and Doc Holiday, but no one talks about the film for its melding and commentary on Western legends. What they talk about is the image above. Russell – dress off the shoulder, bra-less (or with non-period bra technology), cradling a gun in her hands (symbolism) as her legs are lightly askew, laying in the hay looking like she just got fucked by someone with evident skill, though perhaps not entirely sated – could do more by being more where it counted. The Hays code saw red, Hughes saw green, and boys became men (and men became wolves).
It’s also true that this above image is more famous than the film itself. Considering it has a script by the always dependable Jules Furthman (with uncredited work from Hawks and Ben Hecht), the movie itself is a mishmash, and Hughes was a modest director. It was made in 1941, got a limited theatrical showing in 1943 for a week, and then finally went into general release in 1946 – the censorship struggles went on that long – to become a smash hit. Even so there were still regional censors, which is why the film has run from its current “full” 115 minute version to as short as 95 minutes (some of which had to have been happy projectionists taking home souvenirs). There are a lot of things to like about the film, but it’s no great work – like Veronica Lake, Jane Russell is more famous for being an image than star. Russell trained to be an actress, but she got better with age and was always best with directors who knew how to use her.
When a director had her number she showed that she could hold her own. Paired with Bob Hope in the two Paleface movies, she was a proficient straight-man, and was a perfect foil with her amazon frame an appealing comic contrast to Hope’s cowardly gun-slinger. Frank Tashlin took over for the sequel and did her right (and also prepared himself for The Girl Can’t Help It). One of my favorites is the delightfully weird Macao, which partnered her with Robert Mitchum under the eyes of director Joseph Von Sternberg (though the film has three uncredited directors, including Nicholas Ray). Regardless of who the auteur is – though it’s a gorgeous film – Russell gets to sing (she was okay, pretty good), and do what she did best: Sarcasm. Never lost on Russell was why she became famous, and that sense of annoyance at being just eye candy came out. It seemed to bore her that men viewed her as a lust object, and it only added to her charm.
And if such is why she’s fondly remembered, Howard Hawks (her first director) easily gave her the best on-screen role she’d ever have, and saw the genius of pairing her with equally bosomy Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Monroe plays the dingbat, while Russell is the anchor. For my money I’ve always been a Russell man, partly because Hawks understands that being jaded and rude was part of her charm. She’d been around the block, and though she might still be at the bar at last call, she wasn’t going to suffer fools gladly even if she still might sleep with them. In that way I’ve always seen her as a model for the Marion Ravenwood character in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Howard Hawks is my favorite director (well, him or Jean Renoir), and Russell was playing the sort of woman that Hawks was in love with: the intelligent, sassy, a sexual aggressor. Lauren Bacall is the poster child of this type, but Russell did it as well as anyone.
Though she had some box office successes, Russell – like many of her type – moved into television, with some final and mostly uneventful big screen appearances in films like The Born Losers and Darker than Amber – the Travis McGee film. But by the 1980’s she was mostly courted by the occasional press, who always got great stories out of her. Russell’s films may have sold her short, but her image looms large over Hollywood. One could even say it heaves.

For the Record: RANGO (Review)

Early on while watching Rango, I thought might be watching a masterpiece. It didn’t last, though. The film begins brilliantly with a group of Mariachi owls presaging the main character’s death, and then we meet our hero (Johnny Depp). He’s in a fish tank, performing with the inanimate objects around him, and desperately lonely. More than anything he’s hungry for a role and an audience. It’s a great set up to the character, and a smart character stroke for a chameleon (acting is blending). But then his life and worldview are literally shattered when it’s revealed he’s in the back of a car that accidentally drops his container off into freeway traffic. He’s whipped around, and such leads to a moment where he flies on the window of Hunter S. Thompson’s car. The lizard is already wearing a Hawaiian shirt and played by Depp, so the allusion has been made, but the reference is then made thuddingly obvious. In this case the reference seems to be the point, though arguably (though it’s made concrete later on), it does establish location – which is near Fear and Loathing.
While stranded and freaked out, an armadillo (Alfredo Molina) shows up and talks about the existential crisis of crossing the street. The armadillo attempts to get to the other side and is made road kill, but lives long enough to suggest that Rango is on a similar existential journey. It’s too much for our lizard – he’s not ready to understand. And such sends him into the desert, only to find that birds are his natural enemy. He barely escapes an attack and falls deep into the desert, where he finds respite in an empty tunnel. In the morning he is sluiced out, only for the water around him to quickly evaporate. There he meets Beans (Isla Fisher), who mentioned that water’s scarce, and the townsfolk think she’s imaging the sluicing. She points him to her town of Dirt.
There the narrative comes into focus. The town is lacking water, and Depp’s character enters a saloon and pretends to be a big shot to impress the locals where he adopts the name Rango, only for a gang of baddies to see through his lies. He’s about to be gunned down when a bird appears. Rango defeats it by accident – to which the mayor (Ned Beatty) and town make Rango their sheriff. Such begins his hero’s journey, and as the town’s hero, his greatest responsibility is to preserve their water (which is kept in a bank). Some moles (headed up by Harry Dean Stanton) want to steal it, and the next day the town’s last bit of water is missing. Such forces Rango to get a posse together and find the moles – not acknowledging he unintentionally helped them. But the town’s water is not just threatened by the thieves, it becomes apparent that other forces – including the venomous Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy) – want to do the town and Rango in.
Rango’s a good-not-great film, though I’m sure it will play stronger to children, and is far and away better than – say – Gnomeo and Juliet. I’m also happy to see a film that embraces adventure and western as the narrative for an animated film; it’s never forced kids-y or cutesy. It’s sufficiently entertaining enough, though it does have a second act that goes on too long with a quest that is readily apparent not the final goal, and leads to a situation that puts people in peril stupidly. Or, semi-spoilers, Rango arrests and puts someone in the position of being lynched where Rango knows that it wouldn’t be said person’s fault.
The film’s greatest asset is its visual sense. Whatever criticisms that might be leveled at Verbisnki as a narrative storyteller, there’s no denying he’s got an eye and the animation provided by ILM is breathtaking and thankfully 2-D. As novices to the world of animation, ILM bring something new and exciting to the world of animation – it feels like a new voice, and doesn’t seem as limited to some of the core conceits of the genre. They never feel like they’re just making an animated film. Where Pixar, et al are aping Disney, this is aping Leone and There Will Be Blood, and as a purely visual experience the film is a winner.
On exit, my immediate response was that this was Verbinski’s Kill Bill in the sense that film isn’t just a movie – it’s a movie-movie. To be fair, children will likely not have seen many of the film’s numerous reference points – though perhaps later in life they will be struck by the film’s similarities – but for the cinema fan the references can drown the film. So much of Rango seems borrowed or stolen from other films, and it doesn’t feel like Verbisnki used those quotes as anything but familiarity. With the sluicing and early water issues I found myself thinking “oh, this is like Chinatown,” but the further the film goes on the more the narrative hook seems drawn from the Polanski masterpiece, to which the film makes so explicit I thought two characters might be related as daughter and sister. And where early on a music cue seems a riff on Carter Burwell’s score for Raising Arizona I thought it might a case of Hans Zimmer relying too heavily on the temp track, when the end credits riff on Miserlou it’s undeniable that the film is a homage-a-palooza from the top down. Verbinski even makes room to homage himself. Rango is by nature a poseur and actor, and his unmasking is a necessary plot point (which recalls A Bug’s Life) where the only way for Rango to succeed to is to be himself. But the character has no real name, and there’s no there there. The film – like the character – suggests the mask is just as meaningful as any truth, which is interesting but calorically unsatisfying because the machinations become so labored.
Because – even if it weren’t referential – when the film enters its third act, the road it’s on and the beats that must be hit before the film can end get ticked off in a more perfunctory way than necessary. That’s not to say the oddness doesn’t continue – one of the best and weirdest sequences in the film makes plain the film’s references while also seeming to be a callback to Vincent D’Onfrio’s cameo in Ed Wood. But with such obvious narrative devices it raises a question if whatever oddness and originality there was may be a leftover byproduct of not catching where it all came from.
And the film – while still remaining entertaining all things – is no more or less than a homage piece. Ranking Verbinski’s body of work, it’s fair to say this is a stronger narrative and better than any of the Pirates sequels. But it’s also a kitchen sink “I like this” approach that approximates a lot, but doesn’t do so to become something new – ala the Talking Heads – or offer commentary on the things it’s stealing from – ala Girl Talk. The film is good enough to be frustrated with its evident shortcomings, which will probably be less offensive on multiple viewings.  I thought Verbisnki’s The Weather Man showed someone who had some edge and knew how to at least work with good material. Left to his own devices, Verbinski is clever but appears to be standing on the shoulders of giants. Hopefully this is a goof – a talented goof at that – to shake off the burdens of the Pirates sequels, which seem to lose what made the first so appealing. I have no doubt that Verbisnki is a solid commercial director, but I also get the impression that – like Rango – there may be no “there” there.

For the Record: NEVER LET ME GO, BRICK AND MORTAR

A couple weeks back I went to Best Buy. I still do this, but just from time to time. Generally if I go it’s on Tuesdays, and I know what I want – I’m more likely to go to Amoeba here in Los Angeles because I write reviews of DVD’s and such, so I’m often trading stuff in. Recently Best Buy had some exclusive Blu’s of Out of Sight and The Long Kiss Goodnight and I stopped in to get them. I don’t know why I still re-purchase movies. Maybe habit. It’s weird watching myself build a Blu-ray collection as so much of what I buy replaces standard definition titles, but because I write about it, I feel it’s worth collecting. And I still like the tangible.
I bought those two, but also William Lustig’s film Maniac. It was a little less than $20, and I had been eyeing it for a while. It’s a two disc set. Well, that’s not really a selling point to me these days, but I’ll get to that. The price was more the selling point, and then the absurdity of owning fucking Maniac on Blu-ray.
I had first heard about the film around the age of eight. My brother was two years older, and a number of my friends fit a similar pattern of close grouping (I think it makes it easier for parents), but there were always the neighborhood kids who had the much older brothers. And while we were moonwalking (or – to be more accurate – trying to), and enjoying the basics of pop culture (I, for one, thought Huey Lewis was cool), the older kids were the ones who were listening to heavy metal (rap really wasn’t on a lot of Portland’s FM  stations it seems – or at least in my life – until Run DMC changed everything) and they were the ones renting R rated horror films. I don’t know why they liked telling us the plots of these films, but they did, and so you’d get second hand impressions of terrible shit.
As a kid it was both endlessly fascinating, and nightmare material. I could see fragments in my imagination of the thing. Maniac was one of those films, and I know this because the killer’s need to scalp was burned into my brain. Another is the film with the meat-hook, but that’s a little more obvious. Later on, other friends would talk about a finger in the French fries, or other ghoulish episodes from movies I was either too afraid or not allowed to watch. Friends would dare me to rent Faces of Death. I’ve still never seen it.
I think I was drawn to hearing about this, but generally – and we weren’t particularly well off at the time – these older kids turned me off. It was a lot of posture and anger, and generally their families were fucked up. Also their rooms – as I would understand later – would often stink of weed. It’s weird to not know what something is at the time, but then have that moment later in life when you get it. What’s also weird is now that I’m in LA, most of the marijuana is medicinal, or at least medicinal quality. I don’t know weed that well, but there seems to be a difference in odor from the stuff that was around back then and in my college experiences. Or maybe that smell I separate through some form of nostalgia.
The other part of this was the video covers. And, brother, Maniac’s cover was nightmare inducing. We didn’t get a Betamax until around 1984, and going to the video store was always some kind of treat. They too had distinctive odors. There was one – I want to say – up around NW 23^rd and Burnside where my grade school friends and sometimes my father would rent. There was another in downtown Portland – I want to say off of Glisan – that we went to as well because they had Beta. I would go look around at the new videos, and my father would go to the back to rent porn. But the boxes always made a strong impression, and something as goofy as the cover and back for Psychos in Love was enough to scar. When I finally saw the film it could never live up to what I imagined as it’s mostly a comedy. And then there was the weird feverish anticipation of seeing anything from the adult section. As a kid, I just wanted to watch anything funny, and my parents found no harm in me watching – say – Cheech and Chong. Horror was not my scene. I mention the locations because all these places are gone now. Partly because of Beta’s death, but mostly because the mom and pop stores didn’t weather the chain stores.
I wasn’t a horror guy in high school, I had a laserdisc player, and I was watching anything I could that was widescreen. It wasn’t until college and with the help of the nearby video stores that I made a concerted effort to watch the classics, be they Universal monster films or the Friday the 13^th series. Living on campus the local $2 rentals (and Monday dollar older titles)meant I could breeze through a film or two a night. In Eugene, there were two places that were walking distance (one right behind campus), and then there was another a little further away that had laserdiscs. That though was a bike ride, and I didn’t have a car until my junior year in college. But I would sometimes bike when I had a bike, and I would sometimes bum rides. But there were few days where I wasn’t renting, and toward the end I had a friend at one store who would give me unlimited rentals if I made copies of films on laserdisc for him. Fair trade.
I don’t think I watched Maniac until I found it on Laserdisc at Movie Madness (where I would later work, and is thankfully still around). Laserdiscs were defined by The Criterion Collection, and the work they did like get Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader to record a commentary track for Taxi Driver. But then there were the Elite guys. They put a special edition of Night of the Living Dead, and it was the first time that film looked awesome on home video. The disc was a smash (for Laserdiscs) and led to Elite being the company for cult films. Such meant there were great special editions of The Re-Animator, Evil Dead 2, Dawn of the Dead, A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Evil Dead with commentaries. But also looked after were – strangely –the films of William Lustig. Lustig is a big preservationist, and he was one of the guys who made Anchor Bay the DVD titans of horror for a while until Anchor Bay became what it is now. Lustig’s now handling Blue Underground, which explains why both Maniac and Vigilante are on Blu. But his love for Italian horror is one of the best reasons why Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci’s best works are available in such clean transfers stateside. To say little of what his company has done for Joe D’Amato.
The feeling of watching Maniac can be summed up by looking at Joe Spinell’s sweaty post-orgasmic face after each kill – it’s a film that makes you queasy, and feels rot-gut. Covered in pock marks and heavy lidded, Joe Spinell made a career out of playing thugs and hoods (as in The Godfather and Rocky), but like all actors wanted to do meatier parts, and the only place he’d get above fifth billing were exploitation films. The man worked with Coppola, Scorsese, Freidkin, Demme, Raeflson and Milius – he seemed loved – but he also trafficked in low budget sleaze.
Watching it the first time, the main sensation I had got from Maniac was that wave of realization that the film somehow played a seminal role in my life without ever having seen it. The second was just a sense that this was one of the grimiest films I had ever seen. Shot in 16mm with effects by Tom Savini, it didn’t have the artfulness of Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its documentary approach. No, this had a stronger “family home movie” quality that was even harder to shake. It also has a blunt inelegance that is nearly suffocating. If you’re with a character who’s not Spinell, the likelihood of them being killed by his character Frank Zito is about 99%. And so maybe you could call them cat and mouse games, but the end product is going to be Savini’s handiwork. But where there’s a certain audacity and beauty to the violence in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and some camp fun (literally?) to Savini’s kills in the Friday the 13^th films (that he worked on), here you’re just watching people be murdered, and it’s painful.
But I’ve seen films that traffic in gore before, and though I can’t recommend the movie per se, there’s a real quality that Lustig captures. It’s not one that I particularly enjoy, but I’ve seen enough of these sorts of films done incompetently to deny that the film doesn’t have an odd power – even if it gets into trouble trying to stretch the film into a narrative (Zito gets involved with a fashion shoot and has dinner with Caroline Munro’s photographer character – stiff that seems beyond the character). The film works on its own terms, and is absolutely effective, but it makes you feel dirty – which is saying something.
When the film hit DVD, Anchor Bay put it out in a tin with new supplements and a second disc – I think I got it through Buy.com, who tended to deliver all Tuesday titles (if ordered early enough) on the Saturday before. I bought it then – at the time I was buying a lot of their tins sight unseen, like Let Sleeping Corpses Lie – because I was excited about the format and what they were doing. I made my then-girlfriend sit through it, and it worked its mad-dog magic. We both latched on the film’s “musical number” because the lyrics are something like “going to the show now.” But it also sounds like “going to the shower” or any number of variations. After DVD’s and their packaging lost their luster I sold the film – partly because the packaging never caught on, but also I figured I’d never want to watch it again. And now I own the Blu-ray.
I put the film on this Sunday with the house to myself. The new transfer is so clean and perfect, and after about four minutes I was good. When the laserdisc came out I watched all the supplements, and I did so for the DVD, but at this point, I don’t care anymore about what people have to say about the movie, and frankly I’m not really interested in commentaries for most films unless I know they’re going to be somewhat interesting. Contractual obligation and bad memories have ruined it, and even something like a reunion show where a bunch of the cast get together often turn into watching parties, and it’s rarely useful to be honest about your working relationships with other performers and behind the scenes people. I’m sure all the supplements on it are excellent and the doc is great, but if I keep the film (and I’m not sure that I will) it’ll be more out of nostalgia than ever wanting to pore through it.
Will future generations be terrified by a poster image they stumbled across on Netflix or the internet? I can only relate to my primal terror. As we watch rental stores close up and go away across the country, how children consume media will change, though I’m sure all new formats offer the possibility of browsing. As a film fan I know this: instant access makes it that much easier to watch a number of films heretofore hard to get a hold of without a video store like Movie Madness. But without those looming video covers, and without the specialness that comes from a real special edition release, I don’t know if people will stumble across films like Maniac. Perhaps in that sense the general availability will drive people to greatness (which to be fair, this isn’t)  just as it will drive some to Major League II. I have no idea what the future brings with this, but it’s weird to have a twinge of regret watching video stores close around my neighborhood, stores that I don’t support. Just as I find it hard to stop buying movies, even though I can see how this too shall pass.

For the Record: IMPORTANT CLASSIC AND CONTEMPORARY FILMS…

Everyone on the internet lives in different worlds. For me, on Tuesday morning, I woke up to a number of people I follow on Twitter freaking out to the latest Criterion Collection news. Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture would be included in the collection. At first this was speculation, but Dunham confirmed it later in the day.

For those who are asking, the one on the left is Dunham

Some people may have no idea that this is happening, others (many I’m guessing) will have never heard of the film. Though it won an award at SXSW, its Metacritic score isn’t outstanding, and even Roger Ebert gave it three stars. But Dunham has taken Hollywood by storm, and now has a TV movie/show going with Judd Apatow behind her. The LA film critics association also gave her the “New Generation Award.” She’s poised to be the next big thing.
But the response I saw reminded me of when Criterion put out The Rock on laserdisc. Fans could not believe that Criterion – whose imprint remains the seal of excellence for many – would stoop so fucking low. Even today, someone was playfully trying to justify Bay’s inclusion above Dunham’s. Let’s unpack, shall we?
“The Criterion Collection, a continuing series of important classic and contemporary films”
Okay, I’ve read that hundreds of times. And that label includes films as diverse as (from the laserdisc era on) Taxi Driver, Silverado, The Rock, The Killer, Ugestu, Tokyo Story, Trainspotting, The Darjeeling Limited, Videodrome, and Armageddon. Not to mention Citizen Kane, The Blob, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, and Rules of the Game. When I look at this list the two that come across to me as least important are Silverado (by not being a paradigm shift in the Western, but simply a throwback) and The Darjeeling Limited (a likeable but arguably minor work). I say that because I know that some of you will disagree with me. “How could he say Silverado is less essential than Robinson Crusoe on Mars!” People shit on one title or another for its supposed importance, so let’s note that Criterion – by deigning a film worthy of inclusion – provokes cineastes to understand and define what they think is important. And let’s also note Criterion’s partnership with IFC has led to more recent films being included, but some that may not deserve the moniker.
But on a definitional level I have no problem with the inclusion of Tiny Furniture. Whether Dunham becomes a major artist or hack, Tiny Furniture provoked discussion, but likely not for the reasons it was meant to. And considering all the minor key low budget (typed “Mumblecore”) movies, this makes more sense than – say The Puffy Chair or the early works of Greta Gerwig. If the intelligentsia dismissed mumblecore as a copy of a copy of a copy (of Cassavettes), Dunham’s film provoked a thunderous response (again, among a circle of critics). It was a polarizing film – but (again) for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with the movie.
Inside/Outside
The problem (and it is a problem) with female filmmakers for male writers such as myself is that the internet (and life) is filled with misogyny. It makes me defensive of things that may not deserve great defense because often the reasons given for attacking it are wrong. And for the most part if a film costs less than $20 Million, it’s a fragile thing. But, to the point, Roman and Sofia Coppola both made films, and both were children of a famous director. The Virgin Suicides got more attention, and attracted more negative responses than Roman’s work CQ – which got lost in the shuffle, but has a devoted following. It’s hard not to view the reviews of the female Coppola without trying to figure out what biases go into reviewing her works as she is that divisive a figure. But then also Coppola failed publically as an actress, and flittered around for a decade before directing. But she’s got an eye. Though is her eye any greater than Roman’s? And – speaking of polarizing figures – it’s impossible to mention Diablo Cody without someone saying she’s a hack, often by someone who may give Kevin Smith a pass.
The problem is also that there’s a weird cultural shift that has led to biases being explained by a sense of victimization. Filmmakers like Diablo Cody and Sofia Coppola can be seen as threatening for whatever reason. Then again, I’ve known women who are their harshest critics. And yet a filmmaker like Kathryn Bigelow gets a pass from almost everyone, but also partly because her films are coded very masculine. She plays with the boys, which may be the reason why she’s the first female to win a best directing Oscar. Then again, she’s a great director.
Part of the problem with Lena Dunham is that she comes from a privileged background. Arguably this wouldn’t be a problem if her film didn’t star her famous mother. But then to know that is to know who the filmmaker is… Which leads me to my biggest problem with Tiny Furniture.
Self/Identity
It’s possible to view Tiny Furniture with no baggage. Alas, Criterion is going to make this worse. And I don’t trust a filmmaker who doesn’t understand how publicity works. Not to get to semiotic about it, but… signs and meanings.
Tiny Furniture is the portrait of a young woman having recently graduated from college, and who lives with her mother and sister who would be happy for her to find her own way and out of their place. She’s a Jan Brady who both fucks up a lot, but feels unloved and ignored in a cycle that such behavior exacerbates. Having just graduated from college, she’s also the slightly less attractive friend who’s a loser and can’t get laid. She gets a job seating people at a restaurant, and hangs out with boys who won’t sleep with her. Her family go out of town, and she’s a mess-maker, emotionally and literally. The main character is played by writer/director Lena Dunham. Her mother is played by Dunham’s mother, and her sister is played by Dunham’s sister.
I wouldn’t say Dunham’s got a great eye yet, but she does have an ideology of camera, so the placement and movement is very deliberate and it keeps to that aesthetic throughout. It looks good. And there are funny and well observed things in the film.
Noting this, my problem was being unable to separate the artist and the artist. Dunham wrote, directed and starred in the film, and for me – when playing a character surrounded by her family in a no budget feature where the family of non-actors is called on to act  – it complicates the truth. If your mother is a self-aware individual than likely she isn’t playing herself, because why would she allow herself to be caught? There’s a certain sort of “honesty” that becomes less honest by the very fact that it’s presented, and there’s a level of voyeurism that ultimately proves distracting.
If someone lets you in to their home, or lets a camera crew into their homes, then it takes a while for the camera to be forgotten (if ever). Films are always a balance between fantasy and truth by the nature of narratives. And I find this sort of blending ultimately distracting. For Dunham’s mother to be playing herself being mean to her own daughter on film, there’s a level to which it’s not cinema we’re watching, but then if it is a performance it makes the reality of the narrative shake and shimmy, because we know it is the mother. Sure, Martin Sheen or Jon Voight have played on-screen fathers to their children, but in films that had more distance than this. If Dunham is presenting a version of herself, could her family play themselves honestly?  With a film like this it’s not as if Dunham’s appropriating a period or a character or tropes or etc. She’s playing a character who seems modeled on her own life, with her mother playing an artist. If you know these things, it becomes atonal, partly because the narrative is lesser.
One of the great films that Criterion put out on laserdisc is David Holzman’s Diary, which paints a young filmmaker as a serial narcisist who ends up recording his life – but has nothing to say. There is no level to the director commenting on the actor in that way, as this sort of film is part and parcel with the student/low budget film set. Or does it? Is the limited camera supposed to give us some ironic distance? But what does that achieve but a sense that the filmmaker knows that her character is unpleasant?
“But she’s mean to her character!” Yeah, I get that, but I also get that there’s nothing more narcissistic than flagellating yourself in a feature length narrative. This week The Lonely Island released a song called “We’re Back” where everyone in the band talked about having small, limp dicks. It wouldn’t be funny if they said they had large penises. All stories or comedy have to create some level of empathy or conflict. Comic characters usually start from a place of underdog, so I see no honesty in portraying a main character as – say – having a hard time having sex. You don’t have a film without it. It’s a default setting. Dunham’s character comes from a house of privilege inherent in where she lives and her attitude toward work. It’s too bad she can’t get laid, and she may express a truth of the upper class, but as it comes from a place of options, it does not offer empathy. This may be an honest portrait of this world, but then it’s showcases a generation of wastrels nearly two decades after Slacker, etc. Director Todd Solonz made his first feature in a similar fashion. Of course, very few people have heard of it or seen it. This doesn’t seem penetrating enough to forgive these faults, or its truths don’t speak in such a fashion that isn’t self-evident early on. The novel twist is that it’s a woman who’s the loser, which is a sort loser we haven’t seen on screen played by women who don’t eventually turn into Rachel Leigh Cook.
Who/You
And because we don’t know Dunham – again – the idea of her playing this character is troubling because there’s no distance. Some have called it a naked performance (and she does have a shower scene), but I don’t know Dunham, so I have no idea how revealing it is, but then she cast her family. Perhaps future projects will make this more or less revealing. Which brings up the Woody Allen defense. “But Woody did it!” But Woody did it (if you’re going to say Annie Hall) after having established himself as a comic persona. You can say that about a number of films by the likes of Albert Brooks etc. These were also people too well known to play much else. Welles was not playing Kane as an extension of himself, even if there are some interesting parallels (but those parallels are interesting because he wasn’t playing a variation on himself).
Low budget filmmaking is terribly difficult. And perhaps Dunham could only count on people she knew. But it makes it terribly hard to judge what she’s doing when it’s couched in a truth that is confused by the author’s presence. But more than that, I’ve seen the film, and regardless of how deep the rabbit hole goes, I didn’t find her narrative compelling, or all that different from a lot of films like it. But the very act of filming herself and her family as characters makes it less real, and yet way more fascinating. I feel like I know the character, but I don’t see the storyteller, nor the point. Perhaps the point was to get noticed. If so, it worked. Noah Baumbach is supposedly mentoring Joe Swanberg, Steven Spielberg took a number of filmmakers under his wing, like (Bring it home) Michael Bay.  She’s got Judd Apatow.
There are funny and well observed things in the movie, but it comes across like a number of films championed because it represents a minority viewpoint that are obviously flawed. It is a complete work, and a competent work.  But it also raises the question: is it patronizing to be nice to this film? Tiny Furniture covers similar ground to The Graduate, but that dealt with a certain ennui that had to do with the upper class as well. But it had a much more challenging and transgressive central premise. Would anyone like Tiny Furniture if it was written, directed and starred a male? And is that a fair comparison? I would say yes, and I would say the film would be completely insufferable. And that’s the problem with identity politics – if the art offers a viewpoint (however banal) that seems on the outside, it does deserve a greater discussion, but one that acknowledges the flaws. It’s troubling to think of females as having a minority viewpoint, but in cinema that is inarguable. Male directors are legion. Between Penny Marshall and Sofia Coppola, there’s slim fucking pickings.
End/Game
I’ve heard that Dunham is a hit with women in Hollywood because she writes for women, and I get that. And there may be a truth expressed in having a film starring a woman who both wants sex, but is made completely unattractive by the film-making that is rare. It’s also important to cultivate different voices in the system, and perhaps this will be viewed differently when she has a body of work. Can a male give this a feminist or post-feminist treatment without opening themselves up to questions of understanding/not understanding women or women’s cinema or different viewpoints? I think it’s a minor work. But there’s undeniably a lack of female voices behind the camera. Yet we’ve seen in minority cinema for every Spike Lee there’s a Matty Rich (and maybe more Matty Riches than Lee’s). For every Todd Haynes or Gus Van Sant there’s a film like Better than Chocolate.
At the same time Dunham’s ascendency has mostly been inside baseball. Middle America got little chance to give her work a look. Criterion giving her film a release will expose her work to more people. The question is if that’s good or bad for her career. I feel that it’s a bad thing. It’s one thing if your first film is Bottle Rocket, it’s another if it’s the work of an undefined voice that may yet prove great or hacky.

For the Record: THE PRINCE OF NEW YORK: SIDNEY LUMET (1924-2011)

If you have ever wanted to go to film school, read Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. There is one of the greatest film books by one of the great working directors. It walks you through the process of how people make and made films better than any book I think I’ve ever read. Lumet was a great talker, and knew what he was doing every step of the way. Sidney Lumet, like his transition-generation peers (John Frankenheimer, Arthur Penn, both sadly no longer with us) began in television. But for that generation it was more akin to starting with the theater. He transitioned to the big screen with one of the greatest first films in cinema history. 1957’s 12 Angry Men is a director’s nightmare. For roughly 85% of the movie you are shooting in one room, and shooting coverage of twelve actors. It’s all you’ve got. In some ways it sums up a lot of Lumet’s work. It’s both subtle and obvious at the same time. But you have no film without the obvious, so it’s the subtle that stands out. How he manages to place the characters around the table, knowing when to trust the performers to carry a shot, knowing how to use the angle and depth of field to change the familiar. If it’s self-evident that Lee J. Cobb has emotional baggage, and you have no film if they can’t steer course on the verdict, then my only defense is that every single movie poster for a romantic comedy tells you how it’s going to end.The majority of films have obvious ending, it’s how you get there that matter. Lumet knew that better than most.
Cinema – for better or worse – favors the bold and personal over the workmanlike. And Lumet was a worker. He was a craftsman. He had a solid viewpoint, and knew how to shoot. He also was smart to work with strong material. His film The Verdict is one of the best uses of Mamet for the big screen. And The Verdict is kind of a perfect movie. It does everything right, it has great performances, there’s nothing bad you can say about the film. As a worker, it meant that he could follow 1973’s Serpico - which is very much in the new school tradition, and features one of the great Al Pacino performances – with 1974’s The Murder on the Orient Express, which is very much an old-school big-cast, “put on a show” sort of film. In 1975 he made Dog Day Afternoon, and in 1976 Network. Two years later he made The Wiz. It’s not to say that Lumet wasn’t an auteur, but looking at his filmography he had no interest in telling the same stories over and over again. And he would rather be working, which means he could deliver a great script perfectly. But unlike a passionate director like – say, Sam Peckinpah – when Lumet failed there was less to sift through.
He made That Kind of Woman in 1959 with Sophia Loren and Tab Hunter, and a year later was adapting Tennessee Williams with a starring performance by Marlon Brando. In The Fugitive Kind, Brando seems to have invented a trick that other actors have borrowed. He’d give the director one take of the good, and another take of the bad. If the director didn’t know the difference, Brando gauged his performance accordingly. Lumet passed.
Lumet is also what is known as an actor’s director. Rod Stieger was often used for his ability to not just chew scenery but choke-hold it in one look or gesture. And yet his work in The Pawnbrokers shows that Stieger could give a controlled performance if working with the right person. By the nature of Stieger it comes across as animal training – and from Lumet’s own words Stieger had a huge ego – but it also had to do with finding the right material and director to shine. Lumet was also one of the first directors to believe that Sean Connery was an actor, not just James Bond, and so you get films like The Hill and The Anderson Tapes. He also got one of the best performances out of River Phoenix.
For most, the best Lumet is in that heady 70’s period. Network is one of his most defining films, but a film owned by Paddy Chayefsky. Network has been trotted out since its release as one of the great satires and satires on media (up there with Ace in the Hole and A Face in the Crowd). It is the work of a bitter and angry man, and it’s screed on television journalism resonates today as it did at the time. A network causing an assassination of their own figure is probably a bridge too far for Fox News (and we hope that Fox isn’t giving the New Black Panthers money), but everything else seems to fit with the national discourse, and it’s hard not to look at Glenn beck and think Howard Beale – even Beck himself has said it. The power of “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more!” is that it can be adopted and subsumed by just about anyone.  But – that said – people have been using Network to beat up on network news since it was released. The ability to sink lower is evergreen.
But if two things define Lumet it’s his love and use of New York, and the crime film. He moved into the latter the further his career went along. One of my favorite films of his is the flawed but unmissable Prince in the City. I don’t think we’d have The Wire or The Shield as we do without films like Prince and Serpico.
All directors like Lumet (the skilled craftsman) are going to work to work, and the 90’s – after his “return to form” with Q&A (I put return to form in quotations because I don’t think his form left) – led to a series of studio films that were laughable at the time and likely forgotten to hisory, with one leading Melanie Griffith to pose as a hasidic Jew in an attempt to capture that Witness/Amish magic. It also led to a remake of the John Cassavettes film Gloria with Sharon Stone.
By the time Sidney Lumet – like so many great directors who were nominated but not Ron Howard/Tom Hooper/Mel Gibson good – received his honorary Academy award he was in the middle of post-production on Find Me Guilty with Vin Diesel. The academy honored that by including a clip of it in the middle of his tribute reel (well, it was toward the end) and effectively killed the film’s theatrical chances. It looked ghastly. And yet the film is rather great. It’s a slow burn, much like The Verdict, a character study and a courtroom drama. Lumet did it right, and Diesel was excellent. He got to follow it with Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, where he had a great cast and pretty much great everything. If we must lose Lumet, it’s good that he went out on that note.
Every decade of Lumet offers treasures, and films that bear the mark of someone with good taste. Lumet also represents a dying if not dead breed of directors who were hired for their craft with actors. And the thought of that is sadder than the loss of an old man with a long and fascinating career.

For the Record: The Final DELLAMORTE DOES BOX OFFICE

I guess the rumors of my demise have not been exaggerated…

SO, GOODBYE AND SHIT…
About ten years ago, Nick Nunziata had a contest on Chud. I can’t remember how I found the site, but there was a contest where people had to come up with taglines for movies that involved being clever. Mine weren’t that great, but I entered anyway, and got an honorable mention. That was the first time my name – my real name – was to appear on the front page of the site for almost a decade. I started here as message board poster Andre Dellamorte while the real me, Damon Houx, worked in film exhibition at a cushy desk job that gave me the free time to post on message boards. There I met people I still call friends today. One of whom has since passed away (I still miss Paul Prischman).
I didn’t write anything for the front page until 2005, when Devin Faraci had to leave town quickly after Comic-con, and asked if I’d do a set visit for the Tenacious D movie. How could I say no? I didn’t. And so I went, and met Todd Gilchrist and Eric “Quint” Vespe to talk with the D and – eventually – got put in the movie as an extra. You can see me if you know where to look. It was thrilling to be on set for the first time, and back then the idea of the movie and Jack Black were pretty fucking cool. I was green, I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was unintentionally hungover. But I don’t think I embarrassed myself. I think the next thing I did for the site was a Knocked Up set visit a year later. Going with Jeremy Smith, it was an easier time – though I did have a Chris Farley moment with Paul Rudd (I love Wet Hot American Summer, so I geeked). But for me this was just a goof. It was something to do if it came up, which at that point was once a year or so. But when Jeremy left Collider, I would get invites from Steve Weintraub to do set visits for that site and eventually I got better at it.
But by that point I had been writing online for years, though mostly reviews. I was comfortable writing, talking to famous people less so . Both Nick and Devin had floated the idea of me doing a box office column, and when Nick invited me to do this column, it was at the point when Russ Fischer, Nick, Devin and Jeremy were all writing for the site. I felt like I was joining a supergroup, if only to play the violin solo. I had previously made a lot of comments in the box office threads on the boards, but mostly because I felt (having worked in the industry) there were things I knew that were slightly more informed. When Dave Davis left – who used to do Box Office before me – it seemed a natural fit. I started in April of 2007, finding my way into the column. I was also happy to find myself helping with anything I could, including the “You’ve Got it All Wrong” list we did.
Of course, things changed over the years since then, and a number of people went in and out but my column was – for the most part – consistent. Weddings, funerals, trips abroad, I tried to be regular, but as a writer having a deadline and a schedule can be good. Some weeks I had nothing, some weeks I had too much. Sometimes I went deep into left field, sometimes I felt like I was a laser. Such is writing. Every once in a while a real fire would get under my ass. But the thing that always kept me going was that feedback was almosst always positive, which is good when you do things on a lark. As I’ve said before a filmmaker told me that he knew everything about box office from reading my column. That’s a moment I’ll hold on to long after this column has stopped.
But doing more writing for the site also led to one of my most favorite moments for the site, which surprisingly isn’t interviewing David Lynch. It was talking with Wong Kar-Wai. I was introduced to his work by the woman I first fell truly, madly and deeply in love with. She was a French girl I met who stayed in Portland for a month, and we shared a love of cinema. I was so awestruck by her that our courtship was passionate, but couched in my then-inexperience. That she led me to WKW’s films only served to illustrate why I love his work, and I why I loved her, our relationship – even when immediate – was filled with longing. But more than that, I still think it’s a great interview. And for me that was a turning point. If I could have a good interview with Wong Kar-Wai, if I could get him engaged in a conversation, maybe I could do this.
When Devin left Chud, I was given the opportunity to do more, and so I bumped up my involvement with the site, and through that I’ve had some good interviews. Of course, I’m especially proud of my talk with Roger Deakins, and with Marti Noxon. Having done more interviews, from sitting in the corner saying nothing to doing all the heavy lifting, when you’re curious about something often you get the most interesting answers. And though I can fall back on the tired “how was it working with so and so,” sometimes you need that, and sometimes you find a thread and the discussion gets heated. Mostly still all I’m looking to do is not embarrass myself.
Of course, things are changing at Chud, and recently two things have happened. One is that Chud has had to make some cuts in these hard times, and the other is that I’ve been able to turn writing here, doing my web-show First Dollar Gross with Todd Ghilchrist and Amy Nicholson and my other writings into a living. As someone who’s been writing online since the last century, I can’t say this is much of a change in orientation, but I’ve managed to turn a hobby into – nearly – a profession. I’ve been doing a lot of writing over at Screencrave, and there is where you will likely be finding me for the next couple. The site is currently not at full speed – we’ve been dealing with some technical issues – but I should be a nearly daily presence there, and currently I’ve got some interesting things up, including a fun interview with Takashi Miike.
Though I owe my life in Los Angeles to the late Paul Prischman, none of this would be possible without people like Devin Faraci, Jeremy Smith and – of course – papa bear Nick Nunziata. I’d especially like to thank Nick for letting me hone my craft, and letting me go on the learning curve of writing for the internet with a comment section. You learn a lot from that. But I owe a lot to everyone who writes here, and so many of the board members I’ve come to call as friends. I would list them, except in fear of forgetting someone. I’ve enjoyed the camaraderie of the site, even when I don’t or can’t do certain things. Even when I simply ghost the boards.
Ironically, I’ve always hated the box office, which I think my columns have always shown. Or – if not hate – had a zen-like approach to it all. I can’t control that Transformers 2 made $400 Million at the box office. The numbers are the numbers. They do not lie that much, and they are cold, but from them we can see when things work or not. Ultimately the United States is having a hard time economically, and the paradigm shifts of how people get home entertainment has changed the landscape for film-making in both good and bad ways. In the near future we will likely see the death of 35mm film, for better or ill. How audiences take in films, from theatrical and through on demand is still not yet determined, and something like Netflix could just as easily be the next Blockbuster. And though there are ways that cinema is changing that I find disheartening, there are a number of things that keep me cheery.
One is that you truly never know. Though I think it’s best to be pragmatic to cynical about box office, that’s a terrible approach to film going. In a million years I would have never thought the fifth entry in a franchise that’s existence seemed preposterous to begin with would deliver one of the most entertaining Hollywood films in years, but Fast Five is one of the best summer action films in the last decade. I never thought I would type those words, but I hope I have as much fun with another movie in the near future, because that film is kind of perfect.
Another is that when you talk about any period of cinema history, there are always good and bad films. The nineties – at the time – seemed so refreshing, but the independent movement gave us some great directors, but it’s a very overrated decade for American cinema. And the 1980’s were considered something of a wasteland, but – as tastes and time has passed – what was great has proved to be truly ingenious. Yes, they are back to making movies about board games, but with such non-existent narratives those films can be anything. And the video game genre of films may yet achieve something approaching quality with the upcoming Uncharted film.
Thirty years ago Pauline Kael wrote about how the numbers are ruining cinema, and they have and do, but superheroes and reboots and bad sequels add up. It cannot last, and ten years from now, it’s hard to suggest that these films will still rule the roost. And we may all wish for more Christopher Nolan’s, but that’s the nature of modern cinema. Nolan is a genius, and we are not seeing plays and novelists being brought to Hollywood as we were so many ages ago. But 2007 is one of the single greatest years of cinema we’ve seen in my lifetime, and I would stack it against any year I’ve lived through. And 2011, with Fast Five, 13 Assassins, Meek’s Cutoff, and some of the upcoming films like Bridesmaids and Tree of Life mean this is going to be a fairly solid year of cinema. Just as 1939 was loaded with terrible films no one talks about. We’ve yet to see a year that hasn’t produced at least a handful of great films, and as we’ve changed how we perceive movies, we may yet see archeologists discover lost treasures from the last two decades. Films that grow because of what they are, not what they were thought to be at the time. It’s happened throughout cinema’s history, why not now?
Instant access has changed how we watch movies, and the democracy of the internet gives a great voice to people who are insanely passionate about the things they love – which often aren’t movies. And so you’re going to continually see films like Serenity championed as great art. But as long as The Criterion Collection keeps going, there will be numbers of titles of great films that you should watch. And if I am to leave with a piece of advice, allow me to say that if something excites you, please follow through. Understand that not every film by a director or actor is going to be a winner, but watching the body of someone’s work – like Sam Fuller, Jean Renoir, Howard Hawks, Akira Kurosawa or Christopher Nolan – can be educational. And if you can, watch them in as much order as you can to see how they grow and regress and regroup and rethink. I’ve learned a lot in life from watching as many films as I can get my hands on, and being passionate means there are tidal movements – you can’t maintain constant enthusiasm, not every film or meal is going to be a winner, but you have to keep eating, and cinema has nourished me at my highest and lowest points. Because that’s what what art does, or can do.
And never be afraid of being a novice. Never be afraid of not knowing. Because you can always learn, you can always see something through different perspectives, and appreciate things. There are still films I’ve yet to see, and that excites me. And though I go through periods of being less excited about – say – going to the New Beverly, or watching a Bergman film that’s still unseen, it’s always worth something to me to go. As I get older, I get less interested in some new experiences, but it’s always worth fighting against that. To tie this to all my passions, I never thought I would be a good dancer, but whether or not I’m good, I love dancing, and so I dance. It makes me happy. And if you love films, and you keep watching films you’ve never seen before, you’re going to find something you love. And I did this out of love, and I watch movies out of love, and I try – even though sometimes it’s hard – to never forget that. I try to never forget the seven year old me who saw Jaws and eventually came to understand it wasn’t sharks that gave him that adrenaline rush, it was cinema.
OH YEAH
Fast Five is going to open to over $70 Million, I would peg it to go mid eighties, and everything else is weak. I guess I’ll be back Sunday to say goodbye-goodbye.

For the Record: So... Sucker Punch

Note to readers: This is a long, long review of Sucker Punch that covers many of the main beats of the film. I have spent a couple of days digesting the film, and have found it to be thoroughly fascinating and discussion-worthy, even if I don’t think it works. The short version is: I think it’s worth talking about and watching, but as a film I think it’s a failure – but hey, if you don’t want to know anything, you can read the first few paragraphed to get a better sense. You’ve been warned.
There are few films that are as misguided as Sucker Punch that they not only make you actively frustrated with the movie you’re watching, but also make you reconsider their director’s entire filmography. Granted, some films can be reconsidered for the better, like when someone who’s been working in the system finally gets a chance to show what they’re really after. And I think directors should be judged by their films, not what they say, and films can reflect on earlier work or later works. I don’t know if I would hold Alien 3 in as high regard as I do if David Fincher turned into a hack. That film has its problems, but now that we know Fincher as a director, you can see what he was going for in a much clearer light. But sometimes a filmmaker flops so hard that some of the credit you gave them before evaporates.
It’s worth noting there’s a difference between Tim Burton remaking Planet of the Apes and these sorts of films. It’s easier when a filmmaker has a hot period, and when there are films that are obviously closer to them that work, while their work for hire is lacking. Watching John Carpenter direct something like Village of the Damned… yes it’s a terrible movie, but he seems asleep at the wheel, not steering the film directly into a wall thinking he’s going to get to California.
Nathan Rabin, in his column and book My Year of the Flops has broke flops into three categories based on some dialogue from Elizabethtown. There are the failures, which are just bad things, and then fiascos, which are tremendous failures of such total flame-outs that you can only stand back and watch (the third category is secret successes, failures that are actually great, it’s just that no one knows it). But true fiascos are few and far between. And make no mistake about it, Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch is one of the biggest fiascos a studio has released in a very long time. There are too may failures from Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull, to – say – the Nightmare on Elm St. remake, but most failures are indifferent. Even Transformers 2 – which was terribly misguided – is misguided in a commercial sense. There’s no personality there. Sucker Punch is full of personality. What it’s missing is a solid script.
The film that I was most reminded of watching Sucker Punch was Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor. Like anything both films will have fans, and both will have passionate defenders. Good for them. And in both cases, the filmmakers obviously have an eye and intent. It’s just they have no idea what to do with it, and it’s going to be impossible for me to watch 300 or Watchmen again and think that the director had his eye on everything he accomplished. With 300 – because it was a narrative that had a narrator – there was always the sense that it could be heightened reality and that the film knew that it was propagandistic. 300 can function as brainless action, but it can also be seen as a rah-rah war film or just as easily a parody of that mindset and the pursuit of perfection, etc.
Much as before I saw Pearl Harbor, there was a sense that Michael Bay might actually know that his films (to that point) were ridiculous second generation copies of the sort of summer movies that came before.  The films were absurd, but that doesn’t mean it’s makers didn’t know that as well. Both Bya and Snyder are so stylized that you can argue there may be a little Douglas Sirk in them. The Rock is a very strange movie with an odd sense of humor, and much of that humor comes from being a very left-leaning movie with a very right-leaning visual style. There is a joke being made on the nature of action movies, but after Pearl Harbor, it was hard to say if Michael Bay got what he made. And in watching Sucker Punch, it’s hard not to define Snyder as a visualist with no sense of how to tell a story. And yet there are things about the movie that feel like he’s trying to say something or be deeply felt –the same could be said of Bay with his Pearl Harbor. Snyder made a more personal vision, but in both cases neither seem all that aware of how they are failing. Snyder has revealed himself, but not in the ways that he meant to.
So, Sucker Punch. It starts with the curtain being raised, and within five minutes you know you’re watching something that is tone deaf. The film begins to the music of “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” as sung by Emily Browning, who also stars as Baby Doll and whose mother passes away and leaves Baby Doll and her sister with an evil stepfather (Gerald Plunkett). The Stepfather finds out that the kids will get their mother’s inheritance, and it enrages him. So much so that he goes to Baby Doll’s bedroom to rape her.
The whole opening sequence is done sans dialogue and it’s a very bold choice, but the problem is the song – done in the Marilyn Manson “selling the creep” style. The mood is set in such a way that there’s no real tension (everything is so glum that you know what’s going down), and then when the stepfather changes his interest from Baby Doll to her younger sister, the film enters action mode as Baby Doll goes outside the house in the pouring rain to get a weapon to protect herself, and Snyder seems to be paying homage to himself (it mirrors the opening of Watchmen, which also turned an action sequence into something of a musical number). But Baby Doll’s sister is being threatened with rape, and yet everything is at the pitch of an action sequence with music that smothers the film in such a way that is numbing. You can sense what emotion Snyder is trying to get across but everything is so slick that it becomes a wash because it’s all so heightened. You don’t feel you’re seeing real horror, and the threat feels (as Drew McWeeney said) like you’re watching a new version of the “Janie’s Got a Gun” video. I never felt inside of the story, because Snyder’s technique kept me removed. The whole film in a nutshell.
Baby Doll then goes to that asylum where she overhears an orderly (Oscar Isaac) have a discussion with her stepfather. The orderly will get her lobotomized – but only for a price. Baby Doll is at this point mute, but when she finally talks you wonder why she doesn’t say anything about this. Or why the two would have the conversation about her. Perhaps in all the fluster I missed the part where they say she’s catatonic or something, but she isn’t, and is proved not to be. This actually makes sense in the narrative eventually, but when Baby Doll starts taking it feels like it should be a reveal. Her first line doesn’t suggests that she was not talking on purpose, and in that Snyder has no idea what he’s doing as a narrative storyteller. It doesn’t pop – it’s like he fumbled a classic opening, as if he introduced Orson Welles too early in The Third Man.
The beginning in this world is kept short – less than fifteen minutes, most of which is the musical opening – until the film plunges into the first fantasy world. Or it seems to be a fantasy world, because the whole opening section is so hyper-stylized that the difference between the two is never tangible – which makes this a lesser Wizard of Oz rif. But more on that later. In the asylum it sets up that there’s a doctor Vera Gorski (Carla Gugino), who works out therapy on stage with the inmates. We also get flashes of the girls inside, including Sweat Pea (Abbie Cornish), her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens) and Amber (Jamie Chung). But other than flashes and a wee bit of dialogue that’s it. Then Jon Hamm shows up to give Baby Doll her lobotomy, but before it’s finished we enter the fantasy world.
In the fantasy world Dr. Gorski is a ex-whore turned dance instructor, the evil orderly is running the dance club where the inmates are now prostitutes who also dance for show, and Baby Doll is to be sold at the end of the week to the “High Roller.” There we get to meet the ladies in greater depth (versus none). Rocket is feisty, Sweat Pea is a curmudgeon, and the other two are comic relief-ish. Unfortunately Hudgens has no business being in a movie where she’s asked to act. Her performance reminds of a Shih-Tzu.
Okay, so the film starts with rape, and it’s about women being abused, and then in the whorehouse/dance saloon there’s all sort of terrible sexual things going on, but then also the film dresses the girls in fetish outfits and skimpy attire. If the film was meant to have underpinnings about sexual abuse (which connecting troubled girls with sex workers isn’t a terrible idea, etc.) these ideas would be great if they had any coherence in the film. Your main character’s name is Baby Doll – and it doesn’t seem to be a reference to the Elia Kazan film… The identity politics in the film are messy, they may be there but there’s no through-line. The film might be empowering, but it feels no more so than Barb Wire. Perhaps this speaks to men and their ability to turn any aspect of a woman into a fetish object, but again, it doesn’t seem to gel.
Before Baby Doll is given to the high roller, the club wants to see if she can dance. She gets up and has music played for her – which stops in such a way that you know it’s going to start over soon – and after the inspirational words that will get Baby Doll to move her body, she finally does. And right when she’s about to start dancing, boom, the film cuts to the third level, a complete fantasy world.
Okay, the first level – if we’re going all Inception – seems to be the real world, but we have no real bearings to suggest that’s necessarily true. Then there’s the whorehouse level, where it seems to be mapping to the insane asylum level, but again, there’s so little sense of the real. Then there’s a third level that seems to be Baby Doll’s fantasy world when her dancing is communicated as violence. So we never get to see her dance – and as someone who loves dancing, it feels like a cheat- though it’s understandable that  if you’re going to have someone have magical powers while they’re dancing it’s near impossible to show.. Anyway, it’s in this world that Baby Doll meets Wise Man (Scott Glenn), who tells her that she needs five things. One is a map, the other is fire, the third is a knife, and the fourth is a key. The fifth is to be revealed when the plot demands it. This then also flashes back to the first level, so we can see there’s some connective tissue.
Then the Wise Man gives her a gun and a sword, and she goes to fight with three gigantic wooden Samurai figures. They throw her around, but then she takes them out…Okay, wait, got to stop again. We’re in a level of fantasy that’s so obviously fantasy there’s absolute no weight to what’s going on when she’s fighting these guys who seem to represent nothing specific to start with – except maybe the violence she would inflict given the chance. When you watch these fights it is simply all technique (masterful technique at that) but because it doesn’t seem to have connective tissue to anything that’s happening in the film, it’s becomes meaningless. I don’t care about reality, I care about dream logic, and it’s nice for an action sequence to have a character purpose. At no point does anything that could happen in her mind’s eye reflect on those around her (though she may incorporate some reality), nor does it deepen or strengthen her character or the storyline. It’s just how Snyder visualizes her dancing: As stylized fighting that has little relationship to the narrative. And it’s weird to be bored by such great proficiency. Without having her battles anchored, it just feels like showing off. Perhaps it’s meant to show how her sexuality empowers her character, but then to what purpose? And if this is a tale of empowerment, why is Baby Doll empowered by a man?
From there the film actually finds its narrative thrust. Baby Doll organizes the girls to escape. They need the five things from her dream, and they are the same five things as in her dream. To get them, Baby Doll is going to have to keep doing her magical dancing. At first they get the map by having Baby Doll perform again, and in this dream sequence she’s fighting Nazi zombies that she and her team kill with great enthusiasm.
Oh, wait, before I go any further let me note that the film has scant character development. Blondie and Amber in this level or the dream level are either tough bad ass chicks, or ditzy. Sweat Pea is always complaining in that way that reminds you of Ernest Borgnine (she’s a papa bear, but mostly she comes across as a wet bag), and Rocket is feisty. As the two are sisters, Rocket gives a speech that suggests that it’s her fault that Sweat Pea is in a house of prostitution. Which makes her the most rounded all things. But – and no spoilers – because the top level is so poorly drawn (though it does seem to be the film’s reality) it’s hard to know if anything at all that happens on the second level is reflected in the “real world” of the film. Even if you take what happens in the whorehouse world as a commentary on the real world in the asylum, at that point you don’t really know the girls enough to see the ending as meaningful. Perhaps they exist as archetypes, but even then…  The film was shortened, the thing that would seem to right the movie is if we had more time to start with these characters, but as is, it’s in too much of a rush to give the audience its bearings.
Next up the team have to steal a lighter, and in the dream world, Baby Doll and team are fighting Orcs and Dragons. And Baby Doll must kill a baby dragon for their mission to be a success. This is interesting because it connects to the top level, and some of the thematic elements of the film. Baby Doll has no empathy for the baby, and then has to fight the mother along with the other girls. By this point the action was such that I was beginning to tune out. If Jamie Chung’s character gets hurt in the dream, does that reflect on the real-fake world? Sadly, you could put any of these set pieces in another movie, and if it had drawn the characters out, there might be a vested interest in stakes. In that way, the film feels like a jumble of eight films, all of which would be more interesting if they were their own thing. I am fully willing to admit there may be a good reading on this stuff, but I did not see it in the text. And my math on this is: If I have no real rooting interest, what does it mean to show it? I couldn’t find an answer other than “it looks cool.” I wanted more to latch on to than visuals that didn’t advance the narrative. I guess these sequences are “fun” – like an action movie version of Pennies From Heaven – but I wasn’t having fun watching it. It’s so leaden for dreaming.
When the film finally finishes its big finale in the second world where the girls try to escape, we finally cut back to the real world and learn that some of what happened in the dream world happened in the real world, and why Baby Doll might not say anything about the scheming. But it then leads to a conclusion where what happens makes no sense as a happy ending because we have no context of how all three levels truly map out, and to which the narration of the film leaves you with a “huh?” Perhaps the film will reveal more on multiple viewings, but it seems doubtful.
When David Lynch did this sort of thing with Mulholland Dr. part of that was a found art project of turning a TV pilot into a movie, but he also provided the connective tissue to explain the reality versus the fantasy world and how those two connected. Just as Oz also connects Dorothy’s troubles and friends and family to characters in her fantasy, which tell us something about how we fantasize. Here I kept waiting for things to play out in a way that made what I had seen come before have a greater purpose. I never found it, I think partly because Snyder didn’t do a good job as the screenwriter to connect things. I can see the film I think he wanted to make, and see the things I think he wanted to say, but the text itself doesn’t give me enough pieces to want to do that heavy lifting.
This isn’t the worst film ever made or anything like that, though watching it is nothing if not frustrating. Perhaps Snyder couldn’t leave his own head on this one, but by not really creating different styles for those levels – I guess the third level is more hyper-stylized, but you never get the sense of a good transition. Word around the campfire is that all of the girls sans Browning had dance numbers, and the end credits have a big number, which was easily my favorite part of the film. But where Snyder may have had a point to all this, he doesn’t seem to have any control. Snyder is still a master at blending CGI and humans in the most seamless of ways, but in the context of this narrative it’s dull.
Ultimately, this film needed a writer to see its themes and concerns and nuance the narrative so the characters felt better drawn, and actions had more weight. Previously, Snyder has had better or stronger material to draw on, so perhaps his narrative deficiencies could be masked by that structure to fall back on. Here there’s no net. And like Pearl Harbor or Elizabethtown, you get the sense you’re seeing the naked machinations of a director. All the pieces are there, but they don’t fit together right.
I’ve only seen Sucker Punch once, and maybe now that I know what it is, I might be able to enjoy it more. But the aspirations of the film surely exceed its grasp, and there seems to be a confidence in the visual telling that is missing on a story level. Icarus flew too high, and watching that lesson is both educational and painful to watch.

For The Record: Knocked Up Set Visit

When you’re on a set it’s in your blood – if you know dick all about filmmaking – not to make a peep. As a guest of the filmmakers, you want to ingratiate yourself by trying to be as invisible as possible. It’s just a simple courtesy to not screw things up when "the magic" happens. But if you’re on the set of Judd Apatow’s movie Knocked Up, that’s a tricky situation. In the sequence I witnessed Seth Rogen’s character is flipping through records with Paul Rudd’s character, and as exposition is meted out, the boys crack wise about some of the albums they discover in their thumbing. As I stood with some internet journalists in the country and western section – a few feet from Apatow and his monitors – the boys would begin each take by riffing on an album by Pure Prairie League, and then move on to an album by Cheryl Ladd.

After about the third go-around of jokes about the package on one of the artists, I became too cocky about stifling my laughs. And when Seth Rogen said "Nice Cock!" (as we were informed later, the package in question was not all that impressive; the attention was paid as the victim of their penile flattery was a grip standing as an extra in the background), Rogen’s timing on the word "cock" caught me by surprise. I snorted the sort of laugh where you’re trying to hide the fact that you made a sound but a bubble of noise pops out of your mouth (I learned quickly the only thing to do is hold your face open like a mouth breather and just try and laugh as quietly as possible). I was filled with abject terror that I might have ruined a take. Killed a great a laugh. I immediately looked over at Judd Apatow, who I’ve grown to love and respect through his work on Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and was worried that I might have fucked up big time.

Judd Apatow looked over in my direction. I think I felt sweat beading (though that might have been the Santa Monica weather or the lighting). I mean, it’s not like I do this every day. He looked over (though not directly at me), and smiled, and turned back to his bay. My worst fear became (hopefully) a validation of the promise of this material.

It turns out I wasn’t the only one laughing. During their runs, one of the grips in front of me would often audibly laugh, and at one point the camera operator had to get off his rig because he was shaking the camera. The grip whose package was flattered was told to stop smiling in the background as well (though no one could blame him). When you’re dealing with people who can riff as well as Rudd and Rogen, well, I guess shit happens. I talked briefly to the cinematographer Eric Edwards and he told me that it was one of the funniest shoots he’d ever been on. In fact, for the fact that the movie was set to wrap in a couple of days, no one looked stressed, and it might have been possible (without knowing the gossip) that everyone was actually having a good time on the shoot. At some points Apatow would be directing with one of his daughters on his lap, as he’d try and get the guys to do a bit they’d thrown out earlier, or riff on Steely Dan, or make sure that they hit their marks.

The premise of the film is that Seth Rogen’s character Ben has casual sex with Alison (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant (hence the title). She works for the E Channel, and lives with her sister Debbie (Leslie Mann) and Debbie’s husband Pete (Rudd), and their two children. And it seems one of Apatow’s secrets is to let his actors just go (in some ways, from his descriptions, Apatow’s process is like the comic version of a Mike Leigh film). I was informed that they had shot over a million feet of film by that point, in fact nearer to 1.3 mil (a reel, a thousand feet, runs approximately ten minutes. If you do the math, that comes up as a fucking shit load of footage, or – to be more precise – about ten days worth), but in the eight rolls we saw them go through, every single one had quite a bit of gold. That may be why Apatow told us later (as has been mentioned previously) that they’re thinking about doing a Randomizer version on DVD that will supply different takes for just about every scene.

But this spirit of playfulness crossed over as between takes almost everyone near us would flip through the records nearby, realizing the inherent comic value of the fashion senses and bravado of stars who have since faded into obscurity. The crew of journalists (though, admittedly, some of these guys were friends) would flip through the records, looking for the most outrageous of offenders.
Paul Rudd stopped by first, and his character Pete is married to Debbie, who’s played by Leslie Mann, who also happens to be Apatow’s wife (Mann may be best remembered for breaking it down to Missy Elliot in Virgin), and his character’s kids and played by Mann’s and Apatow’s children. When Rudd came over (we were told he had only a couple of minutes though he made his way back to us), we all began showing each other albums. I grabbed a Mac Davis album, It’s Hard to be Humble, which he said he owned, it or Stop and Smell the Roses (Ironically, the Humble cover has roses on it, while the Roses cover has Davis smoking). It turned out to be Roses that he used to own.

Paul Rudd: I had this record as a kid I loved it. "Lucas was a Redneck."
(I should note that I’m not going to include such comments as (laughs) from either the journalists or the interviewees. Frankly, that’s half of the interview)

Is it weird playing married to the director’s wife?

Rudd: I’ve done that before, the girlfriend of the director, that kind of thing. So not really, we all know each other pretty well. We have two kids in the movie, and those are also Judd’s kids, so that’s kinda weird. We have a very… it’s the worst relationship in the movie, so we’ll talk about situations, but also because we go off book a lot it can become a little uncomfortable because all of sudden you’re thinking "wow, this might be a real sore subject in real life." So hopefully it’s not too damaging.

How much of what we saw was in the script?

Rudd: Almost nothing. Well, no, he says he bought a crib – that was in the script, and some other things, but Pure Prairie League, that came this morning when we found out that one of our guys was in the band, and we just put it in the scene, and it became "let’s just start this way and put it in the scene." And all the stuff with the records, that’s all, that’s all…

Has the whole shoot been like that?

Rudd: Yeah. (A baby cries). Awww. (back to us) They tend to be the most fun to work on. You know, every day is different, it’s fun to watch everyone work, it’s really creative, it’s a real team effort and when it works, it’s really exciting. And a lot of times it doesn’t, so we just burn through a lot of film, and hope to catch the right moment. But we’ve also worked together before so that makes it, in a way, a little easier, cause Seth and I know each other’s rhythms, and we both have a weird fascination for random references. And hopefully it doesn’t come across "Oh look, these guys are pulling out some obscure references!" but we know that if we say some the other guy will know what we’re talking about.

On the commentary for Virgin, Judd mentioned he wasn’t sure people would get "Yah Mo b There." Have you had any moments like that?

Rudd: Probably. Sometimes he won’t say it, but I know he won’t use that. But I just made a reference to Nicolette Larson and I didn’t know that she died, so I don’t think that’s going to make the movie. And I wouldn’t have said that had I known. But that’s a random one. But I know that there are a lot of people who might see the film and have no idea who that was. Which I don’t think hurts it, but that 10% who does will really get a kick out of it.

What about the pure Prairie League guy, how’d that come about?

Rudd: He was just like "Check it out." And then we put it in the scene, so they put him in the background, and we just started insulting him so much, with like "Nice Camel Toe" and "Hey man, what a sweet dick on that guy." And he’s behind us trying not to laugh.

And was his member that impressive on the cover?

Rudd: Not really. He looked completely normal. Some of the other guys were in questionable sitting positions, but he was pretty normal.

Is hard to keep it within character?

Rudd: I don’t know. I have a feeling that the people we play in these movies are so like us that whatever we say can be in the realm of possibility, but sometimes it’s way too harsh, or it doesn’t seem like what we’re going for, but then we don’t use those takes. He (Judd) doesn’t often say stop. This is what he does.

(At this point Judd wanders over and shows Paul a Jack Benny record and joins the interview)

Rudd: And he’ll say "I learned a lot from Jack Benny" and then he’ll come over and say "I’ve made you a cassette of this, I want you to go home and listen to this."

Judd Apatow: "Fred Allen. Listen to the rhythms."

Rudd: "Check out this Lanie Kazan record while you’re at it. Because, see, she’s free, and that’s the way I want you to be while you’re performing."

Apatow: My grandfather produced this album.

Rudd: Really?

Apatow: Patty Page. "How much is that Doggie in the Window?"

What the editing process like with all this extra footage?

Apatow: Well, we always have the DVD in mind, so even when we know a scene should be thirty seconds we often let it go eight minutes. You never which one will play out, so it never hurts to get more stuff. Now that people like seeing all the extra stuff, and want to see the extended cut, we know people want to see the five hour version of the movie, there’s no doubt about that.
Rudd: It’s like SHOAH. With Laughs.

Apatow: Like BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ.

Do you ever feel the bits grow stale?

Apatow: Sometimes it does lose its snap pretty fast, but I still laugh anyway.

Rudd: And we change them around a lot. I should have referenced Melissa Manchester, or Maria Muldaur. But we’ll change it enough.

Apatow: We don’t get bored if that’s what you’re asking, we might get bored if we were doing a scripted scene, but that doesn’t happen often. There are certain scenes where we know exactly what’s going to happen and we’ll veer off by about five percent. That’s true for a lot of the movie. But there’s certain scenes, where there’s two guys hanging out in a record store, and we shoot all the jokes that two guys might make here.

Does that change the way you write the screenplay?

Apatow: It does. I try to write the screenplay with a lot of these options in mind, so although they’re not in the script I’ll have these notes about what else I’ll do in the scene, so it’s not always spur of the moment. I’ll go "This scene is a vicious fight, maybe we’ll do one where they’re angry and they’ll cry instead of yell" Cause I’ve edited a lot, I’m usually just scared of winding up in an editing room and hating my footage, so it’s really just a fear of being stuck that makes me want to get that extra stuff. And as a fan of comedy I wish I could see an hour of outtakes from one of the great Bill Murray comedies, so I think of it as a fun thing to have and put out there.

Have you thought of giving Paul a vehicle?

Apatow: I thought this was the vehicle. Of course we have "the wheel," we call it "the wheel," and we turn the wheel to find out "whose turn is it on the wheel?"

Rudd: It’s like rotating in a volleyball game.

Apatow: You know you’re going to get your shot to serve at some point.

Do you know your spot in the rotation?

Rudd: Right now, I don’t know, Judd’s the coach. I think I set up the ball to get it over the net, that’s all I do. I’m just happy to be on the team.
(Rudd then is called away by the second unit, and Martin Starr walks by, and we’re all a bit starstruck by such a god.)

I noticed you’ve done some takes without swearing, is this film an R?

Apatow: Oh yes. It’s no question "will it be R?" There’s just a cumulative effect of cursing that it becomes unfunny if you do it too much and not at the right moment. And then that’s the curse, and they will add curses when there aren’t any, and they’ll go so far, so I’m constantly saying "can you please say that without this or that word." This is really as dirty as it gets in certain scenes – it may be unquotable even for the internet. But that’s what I find funny about it, half the movie is a sophisticated romantic comedy, but then Seth Rogen lives with Jason Segal and Jay Baruschell and Martin Star and Jonah Hill and his life is so immature and so stupid. And so dirty, so it’s almost a different movie. But that’s the world he’s growing up and out of. He can’t be that guy anymore.

Do you feel you’re ahead of your time, now that these actors from Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared are becoming so popular?

Apatow: I don’t know if it’s so much being ahead of my time, as much as it’s that I refuse to admit that they shouldn’t be popular. I feel a responsibility for having pulled them out of high school, and that they don’t end up on E TRUE HOLLYWOOD STORIES. So I would give them work to assuage my guilt of having screwed of their lives.

The DVD’s of those shows are incredible.

Apatow: Those commentaries are incredible, there’s one of me and Jay Baruschel (on UNDECLARED) that’s pretty funny… the one with Fred Willard.

Are we going to see anyone perform an Alligator Fuckhouse in the movie?

Apatow: There are certainly scenes with language as far as that, and certainly much farther, so there’s a lot of that. But we didn’t get to that.

Did Gerry (Bednob) ever explain what that was?

Apatow: Seth might know… Gerry just repeated the list that Seth gave me.

So if they didn’t have a definition before, they do now.

Apatow: Gerry is now known "that guy." He’s got to live with that.

"Hey Alligator Fuckhouse!"

Apatow: Exactly.

Is there any nudity in the flick?

Apatow: There’s a little bit of nudity, I mean, we’ll see if it survives… It’s always nice to sprinkle it in a little bit, and it’s an adult move and some times it becomes silly that there wouldn’t be. You know when you show it to an audience if they like it or they’re disgusted. I was really surprised when we were doing screening of 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN when we showed a scene where he was watching a porno, and they were really disgusted quickly, they didn’t want to see any of it, and I thought it was a funny idea that he kept fast forwarding past the sex to when they would have conversation, and the audience was like "we get this in two seconds" so you never know what the tolerance is.

But the "Hello" music cue…

Apatow: Exactly! That was always a big debate when we were about to start shooting, does he masturbate? People were like "you have to address this, people will want to know!" I don’t know why they’d want to know, and it was a big logic debate: "Is he sexual at all?" Not much.

Is Seth’s role as humane as the 40-Year-Old Virgin was for Steve Carrell?

Apatow: I think even more so, having a baby, and the story goes all the way through that, I think it could be just as funny, but even more realistic and touching, and hopefully it earns the emotional reaction from people. Because it is about some powerful and important and having a baby is so important, and I don’t really make light of those issues, it’s more about the struggle to adjust to the fact that you have to grow and deal with something you didn’t plan.

You’re entire family is in the movie, how much do feel this comes from you?

Apatow: What I like to do is cast early and have everyone involved in the process. We rehearsed this movie in December, and it’s almost August now, and that – how early everyone’s involved in kicking around ideas, I think that the closer it gets for all the actors, not just me, the more alive the scenes are. So Paul tells me about what his marriage is like, and Seth tells me what his relationships are like, or what he’d do if he got a girl pregnant. And I just thought it would be interesting to have my kids play the kids in the movie. Because in most movies kids are scripted, and you can tell they sat there until they got that one sentence right, and it always feels like the Olsen twins on FULL HOUSE, so I had this idea that if it was my wife, Leslie Mann, played Paul’s wife, and the children were played by my children, I could just put them in the scene, and they’d just talk to my wife the way they normally do, and just behave the way they normally do, and that would be something you haven’t seen on screen very often, actual honest behavior from small children. And it really did come out well, and they actually got a kick out of it. It’s not that they want to be actors, it’s just if I had to do a breakfast scene, and we’ve got a couple cameras, and Paul and Leslie will be talking and they’ll just start chiming in, which is what happens.

So they have good timing?

Apatow: I have to say there’s something in the genes. They were better than one would expect, it’s almost depressing how good they were at it. Cause you see the way we work, I’ll just throw out alternate lines, and I was able to do that with my three year old. I’d say "He looks like Winnie the Pooh" and she’d say "He looks like Winnie the Pooh" and it was perfect, it was kinda crazy.

Are you surprised at the length you can run on these?

Apatow: It’s hard to tell what length these movies should. It’s funny, I had a meeting with David Dobkin (the director of THE WEDDING CRASHERS) while I was editing the movie. And we would talk about how long the movie should be. And he told me he had done a lot of research that romantic comedies are anywhere from an hour and fifteen minutes to two hours and five minutes. And he had a list of some great romantic comedies, and how long they were. And so I thought "I guess I don’t have to be ninety minutes, I can be an hour and fifty three minutes." And then when it came to the DVD, I thought if I should add five minutes or everything I liked, and I said to Seth "What do you think" and he said "Well my dad says no one’s unhappy that they get more free shit" so I said "let’s just chuck it in." But then you quickly find out that nobody buys the theatrical version, everyone buys the extended version, so it can’t be some sloppy indulgent version of the movie. And there’s an argument to be made that a two hour and ten minute version of VIRGIN is self indulgent, but I haven’t heard any complaints, and I think some people watch these films over two days, and it doesn’t matter. I just want to make sure the theatrical’s out there, and the theatrical’s on HBO every five seconds, so it’s not like people don’t see it.

But if you care about the characters, then you’ll go with them as long as it goes.

Apatow: That’s what I hope. I hope that people would think they don’t want the characters to go away, and I would think we would earn the time. This movie’s will be a challenge to decide how long it should be, it’s certainly not going to be short, it’s clearly a two hour movie.

The pain of seeing Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared when they finish, it’s like (pained sigh), and then with these movies I’m so grateful for the extra time

Apatow: Well, we’re excited about this thing we’re going to do with the DVD they call the Randomizer, where we can create literally hundreds of variations of the movie by adding a computer program that will randomly put in deleted moments or different lines, and they say no one’s ever bothered to do it, cause why would anyone bother to do it – it’s so much work, but we’re just crazy enough to spent the next eight months cutting a hundred version of the movie. We just think it’s a funny idea that every time you turn it on you get a completely different movie, so we’re working on that as we speak.

When 40-Year-Old Virgin came out on DVD, it was only a widescreen version of the unrated version, and then a couple months later they put out the theatrical, were you insistent on that?

Apatow: Yeah, I didn’t realize they didn’t put it out, I got upset, I said "You can’t not have the movie out in it’s best possible format, even if we only sell one percent of that version, it has to exist and be available." They were fine about it, it actually just slipped through the cracks. I thought they were doing it.

How do you feel about the director’s cuts?

Apatow: I haven’t watched a lot of them, I haven’t watched a lot of other people’s directors cuts to have an opinion whether or not APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX is better, but I think it’s great directors are allowed to do it, because sometimes the process of testing or the pace of your post forces you to make certain concessions, and if someone says "now you can have the time to finesse it some more, or put more things in" it’s interesting to see what that would be.

Do you have a preferred version of Virgin?

Apatow: I don’t think I’ve watched the long version all the way through. I’ve thought about it intellectually, what the changes were, but I never sat and watched it, which may something about me.

Any role for Jane Lynch?

Apatow: No but she’s in TALADEGA NIGHTS, she has a great part in that.

Is Knocked Up the working title?

Apatow: No, that’s it. I’m a big fan of titles that could not be more obvious. It helps people.

Seth Rogen: It’s helpful for consumers. I’ll take it from here… (Seth laughs his inimitable laugh)

Apatow: Thanks, Seth. Thanks, guys.

Hey Seth

Rogen: How’s it going?

Good. Have you allowed yourself to indulge in any diva behavior?

Rogen: Oh yes, nothing but rose petals. No, not really. No fresh grapes, none of the finest oils rubbed on my feet.

How early before this was announced did you know that Judd wanted you to star in a movie?

Rogen: It’s something that we’ve talked about, this movie SUPERBAD, which is just getting made with Jonah Hill and Michael Sera was something that original I should star in, but as the years went on I kinda outgrew it, but the notion of having a big role, in my mind, was always out there. And Judd seemed pretty on-board from pretty early on in our relations, it was just convincing the people who actually pay for all this shit also that it’s a good idea.

Did you write the script with him?

Rogen: I was definitely around. He had a pretty clear vision of what the story should be, and a lot of it is based on his own personal experiences, I mean, I haven’t ever had a fuckin’ kid, so I have no idea, but I do know how I would react to that, and the roommates, and what guys do when left to their own devices, so I was definitely there for a lot of the writing process, but the general flow of the story was not my doing.

But then you know when you get on set…

Rogen: Then you throw it anyway, so it doesn’t even matter. Whoever’s saying any given line is the person who wrote it. (Seth really laughs over this one)

Do you have an idea ahead of time what you’re going to say?

Rogen: I don’t think of it at all, I’ve got to try not to. Sometimes actors will want to run by me what they want to do, and I discourage that as much as possible. It just seems funnier if I don’t know what the hell the other person’s going to say, and it just seems like it makes for more organic looking scenes, and it just makes it more fun if I don’t know what the other guys are planning, and I can just roll with it, so I like to be as unprepared as humanly possible. But that’s all under of the umbrella of being very familiar with the script and the story, and I’ve been around the material for almost a year now, so what the lines are in any given scene are the least important part of it, it’s just knowing what purpose the scene is supposed to serve.

Katherine Heigl came in late, replacing Anne Hathaway…

Rogen: Yeah, it wasn’t that late. I think technically Anne Hathaway was only on board for like a day or two before it all went down the toilet, so it wasn’t all that eleventh hour.

So Heigl was there at the rehearsals?

Rogen: She was there, and she was one of the only girls who seem genuinely amused by me. A very big piece of the puzzle. Either a lot of them were great actresses, or genuinely hated me. She seemed to get my humor more than most. And the fact that she’s almost as tall as I am, and the fact that she’s a commanding statuesque presence helps me in a lot ways, because I can go at her a lot harder than if I’m with some frail little tiny actress. She’s louder than I am. Which cause we’re yelling at each other for most of the movie, we needed someone where we could go at each other, but it wouldn’t seem too harsh on either of our sides. She tears me a new one.

(Paul Rudd comes back and starts showing us some records, including one by Sissy Spacek, and Telly Savalas.)

What’s it like playing more of a dramatic role?

Rogen: It’s interesting, I kind of approach it like any other scene, but I have to think of less jokes. It’s kind of a nice break some times, cause no one’s expecting me to be funny if I’m getting my heart ripped out of my chest, I mean the fact that when I watch it I want to slap myself in the face for being a pussy I think is a good thing, ultimately, it means I’m showing a new side of myself.

The face slapping side.

Rogen: Exactly.

You were in YOU, ME, AND DUPREE this summer.

Rogen: I was

Are you getting calls now to be a comic ringer?

Rogen: I guess so, that’s kind of what that felt like a little bit.

"Show up and be funny!"

Rogen: Yeah, it’s interesting, it was an interesting experience to see what that is, to be brought in as the guy expected to kill, and I hope I did a good job.

And those set are run differently than what Judd does.

Rogen: Those sets are run much, much differently. This is really as far from that, actually most movies, it’s weird to think that they’re both acting, you know, it could not feel like a more different job when you’re on a normal set.

Tell us about Jonah Hill, who played the shoe buyer in Virgin?

Rogen: He plays one of my roommates in this movie, and he’s the lead in SUPERBAD, which I wrote as well that we’re shooting next month. He had come in an auditioned for 40-YEAR-OLD-VIRGIN, and I was in the theater seeing THE LIFE AQUATIC, and I hear a voice saying "Are you Seth Rogen?" and it was Jonah sitting behind me, and I’d never seen him, and he’s very weird, but we went to the same high school, Crossroads, which every fuckin’ famous person in the universe went to, so he kind of knew some people I kinda knew, and he mentioned he was coming in. And then when he came in I was like "that guy’s a really cool guy talked to him in a movie theater," and he got the part, and he was just so funny, and it was literally a one line scene in the script but Judd lets his actors go off a little bit, and he was hilarious, and then we started hanging out with him, and he became one of our friends, and when we were casting this movie, we cast him and he’s just murdering, he’s hilarious. And when SUPER BAD came along, and we found out that was getting made, we were looking for an 18 year version of me, and Jonah seemed like that, and we got him.

What’s Super Bad about?

Rogen: It’s about two guys in high school trying to buy liquor.

What’s it like having a stand in?

Rogen: My stand-in has to wear a wig that makes him look like me, which I feel terrible about. This serves no actual technical purpose other than amusing people. Every time someone comes to visit they say "Hey, your stand in, does he have to wear that ridiculous wig all day long?" He does?"

Rudd: My stand-in was actually my stand in on ANCHORMAN

Rogen: Well that’s funny. They’re good guys, and they occupy the exact amount of light that we do.

Rudd: And wear exactly the same clothes.

Do you guys get the sense that you’re making the Caddyshack’s and the Animal House’s of your generation?

Rudd: I don’t know if ours are as good as those are.

Rogen: I don’t think so.

Rudd: I don’t know if ours will stand the test of time, and those movies are amazing.

Rogen: ANIMAL HOUSE holds up so well, it’s crazy, that movie hasn’t lost a thing over the last thirty years. And CADDYSHACK makes you forget that those nameless kids are the stars of the movie. Bill Murray’s like in ten minutes of it, that’s what I realized rewatching it. "Oh it’s about these guys that I’ve never fucking seen before"

(Rudd does an impression of the female lead of Caddyshack)

Rogen: But you always hope, I mean I’m always amused by the movies we make. You just have to hope other people are as amused as you are. But it’s really hard to judge when you’re in the middle of it, and you’re making up your lines like… I know Rudd will laugh his fucking ass off at an Al Jarreau reference, will a theater full of people? Who the fuck knows, but you kinda gotta have faith in it.

Rudd: Some of the funniest stuff ever is the stuff that makes only five people laugh.

But when you say stuff like "Be like David Caruso in Jade"

Rogen: Yeah! Exactly! Is it kinda stacking the deck a little bit when it comes to critics, because as I’m saying that I’m thinking "well, obviously movie critics will like that." They’ve seen JADE. 99% of the world hasn’t. That has been a question of what amuses me and what amuses you and what amuses everyone.

Rudd: It’s always best to stick to what you think is funny.

Rogen: Exactly. You don’t know what other people think is funny. But if you laugh you know at least one guy thinks it’s funny.

Then came the obligatory Wet Hot American Summer reference, which had to happen as Loverboy’s "Turn Me Loose" had been playing as we waited to head in, as we all said how much we loved that film.

Rudd: That’s a movie that builds a following because of DVD’s. Whenever I hear songs from it… We’re doing another movie right now that David Wain’s directing, it’s called THE TEN. It’s even weirder than WET HOT AMERICAN SUMMER. Even less people will see it. .

Rogen: Which means you like it that much more.

Rudd: Kerri Kenney and Tom Lennon and a lot of THE STATE are in it. And a lot of the people who love STELLA. The shorts that they make.

It’s interesting how these groups cross over.

Rogen: I was supposed to be in THE TEN, but unfortunately my schedule conflicted, I don’t think I can.

Rudd: It’s a really incestuous group, we’re all friends, we all live close to each other. But we’re all crossing over, because we all find the same things funny.

Rogen: You realize "I can talk to David Wain on the phone?" That’s possible? And as soon as you realize that’s possible you realize "I can work with these people who I’m a fan of through weird circumstance!" And I think that everyone gets that feeling of "We can work together?"

Trying to get to the bottom of this… Judd said you (Seth) discovered the Alligator Fuckhouse.

Rogen: Did I? I think Gerry just said that, I don’t think the Alligator Fuckhouse is anything. I did create the master list of filthy terms that Gerry spouted off in that. But some of them were Gerry just getting some confused.

This led to a quick discussion of sexual euphemisms for things that mostly likely have rarely (if ever) been performed, like a Donkey Punch

Rogen: They’re sort of terms for date rape, these sexual positions.

Who thought of something like the Rusty Fishook?

Rogen: College kids. Dane Cook. I blame him.

These projects reunite a lot of the stars from Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared. Do you feel vindicated?

Rogen: I do. Jay went on to do MILLION DOLLAR BABY, Linda Cardelini’s on ER, and James Franco’s a fucking movie star now, but we’re all still friends with each other, and communicate with each other, it is really validating, and I’m sure the execs are hanging their heads knowing they could have had us. I still would have been under my FREAKS AND GEEKS contract had the show not been cancelled.

But how many shows last five or ten years and are still good?

Rogen: That’s a good point, I mean the writers on FREAKS AND GEEKS kinda knew we might be cancelled, and they had the same inklings on UNDECLARED. It’s not like we saved anything, every good idea went into the show, cause we knew we wouldn’t have to sustain it for five years. It was like "We’ve got five more, do every thing you’ve ever thought of." But it’s awesome just to work with them again, that’s the most fun of. I mean, Franco did a little thing, and Jason Segal and Jay and Martin, and you know, it’s just a blast to act with them again. I mean the first acting I did in my life I did with them, and so it’s awesome all these years later to make a real movie with them. It’s pretty awesome.


And that was that. Look for Knocked Up in August of 2007