… compiled by various writers for Sight and Sound.
Very pleased to see the Criterion release of Love Streams show up repeatedly. And how much do I appreciate the comment from someone on the Criterion page: “the excellent visual essay on Gena Rowlands’ career is worth the purchase alone.” I hoard praise like a miser. It helps me get through the darker days, so thank you, sir.
Directed by Charles Beeson
Written by Matt Witten
“Playthings” was the first episode directed by Charles Beeson, and the guy had a field day with it. What a fun episode. A director’s dream.
The “homage” episodes are pleasing on a whole different level of goofiness and association. Even if you don’t get all the references, hopefully the material is handled in such a compelling way that it will at least pique your interest. There are clear visual references in the final episode of Season 2 to “High Noon”, for example – the whole thing is basically a take-off on the desperate last stand in Western films, mixed with … The Breakfast Club. But then there are the entire episodes devoted to homage: The “monster movie” episode. The X-files episode. The Looney Tunes episode. Changing Channels. The Western episode. The homage to Groundhog Day. The recent Clue episode (which I really enjoyed. I like Supernatural best when it is goofy.) The “mannequin” episode with its moody cheesy melodramatic music-video-Dean-driving-and-thinking scene, straight out of a 1980s movie. Say, like …
That whole episode hailed from 1987, no later. The high-school-musical episode. Even the “Christmas special” episode, with its flashbacks and art-direction and shmoopy final shot. All of these represent, for me, high points of Supernatural. It’s a chance for everyone on the team to show off, for sure, but it also adds so much to the overall texture. It’s also just super-fun. (It works so well in “Playthings” that “Playthings” is one of my favorite episodes in the entire series, for reasons both clear and … somewhat mysterious. In other words, I don’t know what is going on, I don’t care, but I know I love it, and re-visit it constantly, finding the same pleasure in it. Criticism is fun, it’s fun to unpack meaning – but at a certain point, it is the overall effect that IS the most pleasurable part of it, and to pick it apart is to lessen the impact. I resist. It’s like trying to break down what is so enjoyable about a perfect piece of cheesecake. Just eat the damn thing and be thankful it exists.)
Pros
— Hugh Grant in another one of his shallow-guy-finds-a-clue performances, a character so in his wheelhouse that people may dismiss it as “just playing himself” (in other words not really acting.) In case you’re new round these parts, nothing annoys me more than the “just playing himself” observation; as a matter of fact, I tend to write off the people who use it, write them off completely, mind you, especially when they use it to describe why they do not like a particular actor: “He just keeps playing himself,” pontificates some critic, and voila, I get to write them off! It’s a great time-saver. I like to know that the person I devote precious time to reading actually knows what they are talking about and “So-and-so just plays himself” is an awesome “tell” that I get to move on to read somebody else.) I love Hugh Grant, and I love him especially when he plays clueless selfish and casually cruel men – there’s an anxiety in his eyes when a woman gets too close, or softens towards him. It’s painful to witness, and he’s wonderful at it. So anyway, in Music and Lyrics Hugh Grant, with spiky “fashionable” hair (on the border of embarrassing), open-collared shirts (also embarrassing), tight pants (ditto), plays Alex Fletcher, a 1980s Has-been, clearly modeled on “the other guy in Wham!”. Alex Fletcher was part of a huge pop-duo called Pop! (the movie opens with one of their music videos from 1984 and is so funny I could barely even process what I was seeing). Alex wanders helplessly through the decades of his post-career, playing at amusement parks and high school reunions on a strict nostalgic ticket. Hugh Grant has given his character a couple of stage-movements, hip thrusts, arms up, that clearly were what he did once upon a time when he was a star, and the middle-aged ladies go wild … but watching Hugh Grant swivel his ass for a group of screaming 40-year-olds is sublime and ridiculous. He is a ridiculous character and yet … the film has affection for him, too.
— Drew Barrymore plays Sophie Fisher, a woman Alex hires to take care of his plants, who ends up showing a gift for improvising lyrics. Sophie is not a manic-pixie-dream-girl although her entrance, adorable, chatty, and clumsy, gave me a bad feeling at first. A Manic Pixie Dream Girl would have flitted into Alex’s miserable angsty-life, with a gift for spouting off rhymes that came from out of nowhere, flitting about like Snow White, caring for the plants, helping him find the perfect rhyme. But no, as we get to know Sophie, we understand her past, we understand the damage that had been done to her gift for writing by a powerful mentor, her belief in herself shattered. She’s a real person, not just a glittery-fairy-of-helpfulness. She’s doing her best to get by, but she’s covering up a huge sense of disappointment and betrayal. Barrymore is a great screwball comedienne. Watch her try to stumble her way through a restaurant, hiding from the Love of Her Life sitting at the bar. She is terrified that he will see her, so she crawls through the tables, she holds a menu up over her face and stalks across the room, she races behind a column, peeking out like a lunatic … it’s clumsy and grand and funny and tragic, all at the same time. At one point during a fight, Alex fires an observation at her, a really low-blow, and she winces, her hands fly over her face, and she demands, “Take it back!” It’s so honest it brought tears to my eyes. She’s wonderfully warm and funny throughout.
— Like Love and Basketball (and the director’s latest, Beyond the Lights, which was on my Top 10 this year), like The Thin Man, like His Girl Friday, and many others, Music and Lyrics is about romance, sure, but it is really about WORK. It is about two people who fall in love through their work, or … their work is AS important to them as their desire to find love. The majority of Music and Lyrics involves the evolution of their working relationship, Hugh Grant as musician, Drew Barrymore as lyricist, and these scenes feel fresh, real, the two of them struggling to find the perfect metaphor or analogy that will set the particular song free. I love movies about work, movies that prioritize work as JUST as important as love. So often characters in rom-coms have “jobs” only, jobs that are metaphorical or symbolic, and involve nothing more than symbolic gestures suggesting the “work” being done. Ooh, she’s uptight, therefore she jabs at her office phone with a pencil, wearing severe retro glasses, surrounded by sleek glass tables, and that’s her ‘job’. By the end of the movie she’ll be wearing comfy sweats and will have achieved balance! Bah. To many of us, work takes on practically a sacred position. Compromising work is non-negotiable. Work is not symbolic. It is our very essence. Music and Lyrics is actually all about that in a way that takes it seriously, actually understands some of what songwriters go through (much of it lampooned, of course, but still, given its due), and gives each character a motivation to go into their songwriting project with tremendous gusto and drive. Their objectives often clash. They don’t know each other that well. They learn about one another on the job.
— Kristen Johnston as Drew Barrymore’s sister. Watch her totally freeze when her sister tells her she met “Alex Fletcher.” Her eyes go dead. Then come the screams, the manic screams of how much she still loves him.
— Haley Bennett as “Cora Corman,” the biggest pop star in the world who loves Alex Fletcher’s 1980s stuff and hires him to write a song for her, out of the blue. Cora is an amalgamation of Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, and Madonna in her Ray of Light period. Cora turns everything into a sex-romp, every ballad becoming an opportunity to writhe on the floor, pushing her ass up at the audience, and yet her overall “thing” is total Buddhist-culture appropriation: she emerges from a gigantic statue of Buddha in her Madison Square Garden concert. But there are other things going on with this character, and her love of Alex Fletcher is sincere, although her flat-affect line-reading makes you not so sure. This was Haley Bennett’s debut. A character like Cora Corman could have been like shooting fish in a barrel, and there is definitely some light mockery about pop stars who aggressively lead with their sexuality and then are shocked when their fans won’t let them do anything else. The entire Cora Corman arc resolves itself in a very satisfying way.
— I laughed. As I mentioned, I also welled up with tears. All good. I did not feel manipulated, I felt engaged. The film trucks in rom-com cliches but spins them, makes them unique, fills them with earned emotion. The film is truly funny. There is a sweetness that seems genuine. Both main characters are well-drawn and well-played. The romance is not the Greatest Love of All Time, but a source of comfort and long-deferred ease in companionship and collaboration. It feels very grown-up. At some point I realized that I cared almost more about them completing the song they were working on than them getting together romantically. And that’s just as it should be.
Cons
— None.
There was driving wet snow yesterday and I needed to walk to the post office a couple blocks from my house. I bundled up (I’ve been sick), with my big white hat, and my long down coat, put on my new water-proof boots, and tromped through the wet to do my errand. By the time I got home, I was covered in sticky snow that immediately melted in the warmth of my apartment. I took off my hat, my coat, my boots, hung up hat, coat, left boots by the door, and padded off into my toasty-warm apartment to continue on with my day. Literally two minutes later, I came back into the hallway, on my way somewhere else, and saw a tableau at the end that turned my blood to ice. I gasped in horror.
It was The Babadook.
I had let it in.
The fear subsided, the tide of it rolling out, and I started laughing at how much that image had made me jump. I moved on into my bedroom, did some chores, then came back out into the hallway maybe 10 minutes later where, once again, I saw that tableaux, and once again, JUMPED out of my skin. I scared myself again. In the 10 minutes I had been in my bedroom, I had forgotten about the Babadook.
“That’s it,” I murmured, and went and took the hat and coat down from the hooks. Damn them! Hung them in the closet, out of sight, where they belonged.
After Inherent Vice, we headed south a couple of blocks to go check out The Morrison Hotel Gallery. I had never been. He knew where it was from memory (it had been years since he visited), only now it’s no longer a storefront, but up a flight of stairs. It’s still there!
If you find yourself in Soho, I highly recommend stopping by. Just ring the bell, they’ll buzz you up. The staff is great.
And there you will be, surrounded by huge framed photos (many of them world-famous) of rock icons. It’s a gallery devoted to music photography. They have special exhibitions (the current one being of Kurt Cobain’s final photo session), books for sale, prints. The stuff hung on the walls represents only a tiny fraction of what they have in the collection.
Here are some of the images on the walls. Debbie Harry in front of the roller coaster is so wild and bad-ass that I kind of want to own it.
There were a couple of photos of the Doors hanging out at “The Morrison Hotel.” I stared at this one for a very very long time.
The Rolling Stones “Beggars Banquet” was HUGE on the wall, the sheer amount of detail was overwhelming. No wonder upstanding citizens feared the British invasion. I mean, look at these gorgeous reprobates.
There’s a freakin’ dead pig on that table.
There were framed marked-up contact sheets of Kurt Cobain’s final photo session, the one with the white plastic sunglasses. I felt nostalgic looking at him. That photo shoot, in particular, yielded some wonderful shots – really whimsical stuff, funny, a total contrast to his normally bleak demeanor. He looks playful.
This crazy iconic photo was on the wall.
There were photos of The Beatles, some famous, some I have not seen.
They had the famous and great photo of The Supremes, crammed into a tiny dressing room.
I could have spent hours there. I will definitely go back!
On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s The Redress of Poetry
In re-reading this essay, I decided to read the works of Christopher Marlowe this year (or re-read, in most cases). Marlowe has a certain kind of grip on my imagination (one of the reasons why it was so pleasing that he “showed up” in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive). There’s a magic and strangeness to Marlowe. He seems somewhat impossible. I love his stuff. So. There’s one of my reading projects for 2015, along with finishing the Aubrey/Maturin series.
Heaney’s lecture on Marlowe’s sexy sexy poem “Hero and Leander” is multi-tiered. He discusses his own discovery of Marlowe, and the irresistible pull his language had on Heaney. Because this lecture was given in 1991, and not 1941, Heaney addresses the canon again, that battleground of political correctness. Marlowe’s stuff emerged from a time of England’s expansion, and brutality against the Irish. He goes into all of that, the contemporary world from which Marlowe was writing, his branding of other people as truly “Other”, the Irish seen as complete savages, and all that. These truths have been used to try to discredit Marlowe, or other British writers writing at that time: they were members of an imperialist society and therefore we must unmask them. Heaney recognizes the ambiguities and challenges in analysis (and gives it more credence than I do – that’s why he was paid the big bucks, I guess) and understands the complaints of those who live in those “other” societies (and he was one of them), who suffered under imperialism, and can’t stand all that Marlowe symbolizes, or, at least, can’t stand the society from which he arose. But Heaney makes a plea to not allow that to be where you stop. Because figures like Marlowe – so gigantic, so influential – have much to provide those that follow, and if the work is good (as Marlowe’s is) then it can take all kinds of modern-day interpretations. He speaks of the concept of poetry’s purpose as being to “extend the alphabet.” The great writers open up new ground, they chip away at the settled alphabet, at the things one is “allowed” to say: the great ones go further. We can see that in any major figure. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Shakespeare, certainly. And after those new spaces are opened up, they can never be closed again. There is now MORE space for expression. Marlowe was one of those figures, particularly in the realm of sexuality, although it all comes down to the perfection of his verse, his command of rhythm and sound and pattern. None of the sex stuff would matter if he werent so technically proficient. He was sexually fluid, shall we say, and open about that, and you can see it in particular in “Hero and Leander,” especially in the sequence where Leander, swimming the Hellespont, is mistaken for Ganymede by Neptune. It’s pure sex, that sequence. Male-on-male sex. It’s luscious and sensuous and funny. It still remains a SPACE to be explored. A safer writer, a more cautious writer, would not have gone as far as Marlowe does in that sequence (Marlowe is clearly seeing Leander’s naked body as Neptune saw it: he gets it). I mean, here is just one section of the thing, and he goes on and on and on like this throughout:
His body was as straight as Circe’s wand;
Jove might have sipt out nectar from his hand.
Even as delicious meat is to the taste,
So was his neck in touching, and surpast
The white of Pelops’ shoulder: I could tell ye,
How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly;
And whose immortal fingers did imprint
That heavenly path with many a curious dint
That runs along his back; but my rude pen
Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men,
Much less of powerful gods: let it suffice
That my slack Muse sings of Leander’s eyes;
Those orient cheeks and lips, exceeding his
That leapt into the water for a kiss
Of his own shadow, and, despising many,
Died ere he could enjoy the love of any.
Hawt, right?
Do you need some alone time, Kit? I know I do.
While Heaney’s specific analysis of all of the different parts of “Hero and Leander” is fascinating (and will make you want to read the poem again in its entirety), I thought I’d excerpt from the earlier section of Heaney’s lecture, where he discusses Marlowe’s reputation (while he was alive and also posthumously). Heaney connects Marlowe with Sylvia Plath (whom Heaney knew personally), and he makes a really strong case. One of the problems with Marlowe is that since he died violently, and so young, it affects how we analyze his work. (This happens to anyone who dies young. We see James Dean’s movies differently because he only made three, and died young, and he’s not still out there, doing cameos in Clint Eastwood pictures. It makes us actually perceive his work differently.)
Marlowe, of course, was stabbed at a restaurant in 1593, apparently in a scuffle over who would pick up the check. But who knows what really went down. Marlowe was an intelligence agent, he had dealings with some pretty shady characters. But his life was so tempestuous that getting into a knife-fight over the check doesn’t seem beyond the pale (speaking of the English domination of Ireland). Marlowe’s untimely death has been used as a retro-active analytic tool: his works are seen in the light of his end, as though everything he wrote was merely a comment on how he would eventually die. One can see the connection with Plath there.
Excerpt from The Redress of Poetry
Both deaths [Marlowe’s and Plath’s] made sensational news and resulted in the poets becoming legendary figures: their tragic ends were seen to have been implicit in their writings all along. Preachers even rigged the Marlowe knifing so that it presented an instructive symmetry; they gave out that the dagger that killed him had been his own and that the fatal wound had been in his head, the very seat of the talent which had made him one of those damnably ‘forward wits’. It was only to be expected, therefore, that the Chorus’s lament for an overweening intellectual [in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus] cut off in his prime should have been understood afterwards as a sort of prediction. To a hot-breathed pubic, high on murder gossip that carried with it the mingled whiff of religious, sexual and political scandal, the note of doom was not only audible: it was ominous and prophetic of Marlowe’s fate.
That fate, moreover, had been predicted by others besides himself. Robert Greene’s death-bed pamphlet, Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance, had been written nine months before Marlowe was stabbed at Deptford. The pamphlet is most famous for its attack on Shakespeare, but before Greene takes his side-swipe at the ‘upstart crow,’ he has already warned a number of his peers about their own destinies, and although he does not use Marlowe’s name, there is no doubt that the ‘tragedian’ being singled out in his deeply minatory address is indeed the same scandalous, atheistical, and morally reprehensible university wit, associate of Sir Walter Raleigh, and student of the School of Night. Marlowe’s intellectual effrontery, in other words, had been enough to put the wind up a man on his death-bed, and take a repentant sinner’s mind off his own predicament – which is to say that the figure Marlowe cut in the minds of his contemporaries in the late 1580s and early 1590s was utterly exciting. The carouser who had been gaoled for a couple of weeks after being on the spot at a fatal street-fight, the university student who had tasted the thrills of espionage among the Catholic recusants of Reims, the blasphemer who seemed to be out to break every taboo and to transgress extravagantly in the realms of both religion and sex – this figure, a star in his late twenties, a kind of cross between Oscar Wilde and Jack the Ripper, moved in an aura of glamorous immorality and political danger and was so riveting and marked that the dying Greene felt free to finger him as the next to go.
And, of course, the danger was not just an aura. Atheism and blasphemy could be as fatal in late-sixteenth-century London as anti-revolutionary sympathies were in Moscow in the 1930s. Marlowe was denounced to the Privy Council, and the depositions of the informers have survived. Even if they are perused with the suspicion that such documents always warrant, they still conjure up the image of a man operating at full tilt, both exhilarated and inflammatory. The whole performance was one of great daring, and the reports of it still transmit something of its original subversive headiness, partly exhibitionistic, partly intellectually driven, but altogether inevitable and unstoppable.
In Marlowe’s case, therefore, as in Plath’s, the daring of the work and the transgressions which it encompassed were the first things to be emphasized in the aftermath of their deaths. Its ironies and complications were relatively neglected; what got highlighted were the points where it conformed to current expectations generated by the extreme behaviour of the writer. In Plath’s case, the image of victimized woman was immediately in place as a consequence of her tragic suicide; in Marlowe’s, it was the image of the sinner’s fall, of divine retribution for blasphemous presumptions. In each instance, the work was read with more regard to what the posthumously created stereotype might have been expected to produce than what the writer actually delivered. Doctor Faustus, for example, was regarded for a very long time as a casebook of humanist ‘overreaching’ before it was reconsidered as an anatomy of Christian despair. And Plath was celebrated as the author of the vindictive ‘Daddy’ and the morgue-cold ‘Edge’ whilst other more positively inspired works were ignored.
It is hardly news to be reminded of all this. Original poets can obviously sustain a variety of interpretations and answer to very different times and needs. What remains mysterious, however, is the source of that original strength, the very fact of poetic power itself, the way its unpredictability gets converted into inevitability once it has manifested itself, the way a generation recognizes that they are in the presence of one of the great unfettered events which constitute a definite stage in the history of poetry. It is the manifestation of this power in Marlowe’s verse, in the first language-life of the poetry itself, that I wish to praise. If I begin by acknowledging that the conditions of a poet’s reception and the history of subsequent responses to his or her work do indeed become a part of the work’s force and meaning, it is only to indicate that I am as aware as the next person that the import of poetry is affected by several different agencies. But I remain convinced by what my own reading experience tells me: namely, that some works transmit an immediately persuasive signal and retain a unique staying power over a lifetime. Some works continue to combine the sensation of liberation with that of consideration; having once cleared a new space on the literary and psychic ground, they go on to offer, at each re-reading, the satisfaction of a foundation being touched and the excitement of an energy being released.
Before we begin, let’s get all this out of the way:
Whether or not the hackers were from North Korea, or were a disgruntled Sony employee, or some shadowy terrorist group, is irrelevant. Sony’s decision to pull the movie was disgusting, and now the whole thing feels like a publicity stunt, which very well may be the case. Either way, whatever way: irrelevant. Nobody should be able to threaten/blackmail a company out of showing a specific movie and get away with it. The arguments about the hacking and The Interview were really disheartening to witness and for the most part I stayed out of it for my own sanity. In my mind, the issue is clear, and the issue remains clear. Sometimes something happens and honestly my feeling about it is: “There actually AREN’T two valid sides to this issue.” It’s unpopular to say such things, but that’s even more of a reason to say them.
I don’t care if it’s a Pauly Shore movie or a Martin Scorsese movie: a group who doesn’t like the message of a movie (without ever having seen it, mind you) does not get to bully the rest of us into not seeing it. People were talking about how the movie was obviously racist and offensive (again: without having seen it), and we should probably not “encourage” that kind of story being told. One idiot in a Facebook thread said, “I think we owe North Korea an apology.” That’s the kind of comment that doesn’t deserve a response. She would have thought Neville Chamberlain did a bang-up job in Munich. Scary. A quote from William Blake comes to mind: “The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow.”
I guess these people never saw Team America (which was way “meaner” than The Interview, and much funnier, too, but we’ll get to that). Or Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt, where Hitler is shown in the cross-hairs of a lone sniper’s rifle. Should we have apologized to Germany for fantasizing about a lone American trying to take Hitler out? Man Hunt was made in 1941 when Hitler was alive, and the leader of Germany. There are so many other examples of fictionalized fighting against a real enemy, in comic books, films, everything else. Whatever the case may be, good, bad, stupid, not, The Interview must be shown. Because what if, say, some wacko decided to send in an anonymous threat to any theatre showing a movie that didn’t pass the Bechdel Test? Would we cave then? Because, believe me, that is not far outside the scope of possibility, and Sony’s caving to the threats made it inevitable. It would be a go-ahead to any individual with a grievance.
It’s not about the specific movie and whether or not it is good, or perfect, or hilarious, or unfunny and bad. It’s not at all about the quality of the movie, and those who were saying, “It’s a stupid Seth Rogen movie, who cares” are the scariest of them all. It’s not even about the subject matter. The movie should be allowed to be seen. I would be arguing for this even if it were a movie made by someone I didn’t like, even if it were a movie that made light of subject matter I took seriously.
It IS “the principle of the thing.” People can certainly go on and argue otherwise, but I’m done listening. I’ve heard enough. Then there were those who did believe it should be shown, who were disheartened by Sony’s initial decision, but who then were turned off by the declarations from folks who declared they would see the movie for patriotic reasons, people who declared “if you don’t see The Interview the terrorists have won” or whatever. All of that was seen as too reactionary. My God, stop thinking so much. If I go to see something and feel patriotic about it, that’s my freakin’ business. People want to police other people’s feelings and thoughts and interior motives. … Buncha busybodies.
The controversy raged, and then, suddenly, with a poof, came the news that The Interview would be released (honestly, something about the whole thing stinks to high heaven), and (hilariously) it would be small art-houses for the most part that would play it, not the big multiplexes where such a movie would normally play. So these itsy-bitsy art-houses were on the front-lines of civilization, basically. (That’s how strongly I feel about it.) So this little art-house in the Village, that shows foreign films and documentaries, was also showing The Interview. I walked into the lobby and saw two posters side by side: one for Ida, the Polish film, and one for The Interview. In what world would these two films be shown side by side? In this glorious beautiful world, apparently.
God bless ‘Murrica.
Outside of the “principle of the thing,” (as I said, I would have gone to see it if it had starred Pauly Shore, just to assert my rights to see whatever the hell I want to see) I have such strong feelings of love for This Is the End that if I had seen it in time it would have made my Top 10 for that year. It was on Quentin Tarantino’s Top 10! One guy on Facebook said something like, “You just are bummed out that your favorite actor is being punished …” The level of discourse was appalling. No matter how many times I said, “This isn’t about me” and “This isn’t about Seth Rogen” he wasn’t getting it. He thinks “racist” stuff shouldn’t be seen at all, and he felt very righteous about it: “Good, let’s not encourage such messages.” I kept saying, “But … you haven’t even seen it yet” until I gave up.
Small tangent: In 10th grade English, we were taught Catcher in the Rye. One girl in my class didn’t want to read it (her parents had told her they didn’t want her to read it). Our great teacher made her write a paper about why she wouldn’t read it, and to do it not defensively, but offensively, in the same way that a regular term paper should be offensive: strong Thesis Statement, Back That Shit Up with examples, make your case, prove your points. (He was the one who taught me how to write a term paper. Great teacher.) He allowed her to not read the book, respecting her reasons (she gave religious reasons), but she would not be allowed to “sit out” that entire section of the class. Her participation would be about the book’s controversial reputation and how she understood it. The controversy about the book was part of what he taught us, he included it in our discussions. I loved the book so much I couldn’t understand what the problem was, and I had a lot of conversations at home with my dad about it. Why couldn’t so-and-so read it? Why didn’t she even want to see if she liked it, or if her mind would be changed? I could not understand – literally could not get my brain around – the kind of brain that refused to be challenged. Maybe she would have hated the book. That’s a possibility. But to decide beforehand? THAT I couldn’t get. It was an awakening for me of the importance of such matters. There are books I have read (not many, but they do exist) that I have wished I could un-read. There is one paragraph in Less Than Zero that haunts me, and there are times I honestly wish I had never read it. The book actually traumatized me. But whatever, I read it, and it was a vision of ugliness and heartlessness so profound that my spirit revolted from it. Good. That’s an appropriate response, yes?
The audience at the Cinema Village is made up of a regular crowd, some quite eccentric, little old people who come in with their rustling bags of lunch, they leave early, they come late, they talk to one another loudly in the back row. These are 70, 80 year old people who probably live in the neighborhood and have been coming to that theatre forever. To put it frankly: not Seth Rogen’s typical audience. I walked into the theatre and the place was packed, way more packed than it ever has been in all the years I have gone to see movies there. There were the “regulars,” you could pick them out, the little old people in their galoshes, with their umbrellas, carrying many bags, and then there were others, who maybe mostly frequent multiplexes, but came down to the Village to see The Interview (it was only playing at the Village and up at Lincoln Center, so probably every show was packed.) It was a totally mixed crowd, in other words.
An old woman sat down behind me, she had long white hair, coming out from underneath her fuzzy red beret, and she said to her friend, “This is not my type of movie at all. But I’m here for the principle of the thing.”
My ‘Murrican heart soared.
Anyway, after all that blabber, how’s the movie?
Like I said, I like this group of people, have liked their movies in the past, and like the things they have chosen to create thus far. There’s a dude-bro thing, but I don’t mind that if it’s funny. There’s also a questioning and deepening of the “dude-bro” cliche, which we really saw clearly in This Is the End. This Is the End had a sweetness to it I totally did not expect. I’ve seen it a couple of times and it holds up.
The Interview is hilarious, taking place in a wicked alternate reality, just off-center from our own, and some of it reminded me of Mel Brooks’ bold-ness. Some of the jokes don’t work, there’s a sloppiness to some of it: it feels like they might have included things that happened in rehearsal, or things they bull-shitted about in rap sessions about the script, things they all found funny but then it falls flat onscreen somehow. (James Franco’s long monologue about having “stink-dick” is what immediately comes to mind. It may have been hilarious in an improv-rehearsal, but it just couldn’t sustain itself in the context of the scene.) But, in general, it’s a bold audacious ridiculous movie, stupid as well as smart. In this context, stupid is not an insult. It’s a compliment. The movie is a comedy involving two semi-losers infiltrating the most reclusive country on earth with a cockamamie plan to poison the sitting dictator. Of course it’s stupid. I enjoy that kind of stupidity.
James Franco plays Dave Skylark, a smarmy celebrity gossip talk-show host who, along with his producer, played by Seth Rogen, suddenly decides that he is going to take an opportunity to kill Kim Jong-un. Because, yeah, that makes sense. And Seth Rogen’s character, who started out as a journalist, is in the midst of a bit of an existential crisis: Did I go to journalism school so that I could report on Kim Kardashian’s baby bump? What the hell am I doing with my life? So he’s looking to shake things up, prove himself, become “relevant.” When they hear through some random North Korean Wikipedia grapevine, that Kim Jong-un loves Dave Skylark, the duo sees an opportunity. Negotiations begin to get an exclusive interview. It is secretive cloak-and-dagger stuff, with helicopters meeting Seth Rogen in some mountainous area in China, giving him instructions from the North Korean side. At some point, a hottie from the CIA (Lizzy Caplan, whom I ADORE) gets involved and trains Dave in how to use these little poison strips that can kill Kim Jong-un. You are our only hope, Dave Skylark! pleads the CIA. Ridiculous!
Randall Park plays Kim Jong-un as a lonely guy with a Boy Band haircut, who is so overwhelmed by his fanboy appreciation of Dave Skylark that in their first meeting, he murmurs to himself, “Don’t say anything stupid, Kim.” (Tears of laughter. It’s a very funny performance.) Kim Jong-un tears up when he hears Katy Perry’s “Firework,” especially the chorus. “Not the chorus,” he pleads to Dave at one moment, because he knows he will start to cry. He parades Dave Skylark around Pyongyang, showing him fat children (see? no starvation here!) and grocery stores overflowing with food. Just as “useful idiots” (as termed by Stalin) were shown around Russia in the early 1930s, and shown essentially trompe l’oeil scenes of plenty and happy peasants working with smiles on their faces. These “useful idiots” would then go home and report to the West how great everything was in Russia. Beatrice and Sidney Webb come to mind. Stalin used these people, and they behaved according to Stalin’s script. Potemkin Village stuff. Dave Skylark is fooled. Dave Skylark is the definition of a “useful idiot” and Franco is hilarious in showing how easily he is manipulated by a master manipulator. Rogen, as producer, begs Dave to take everything with a grain of salt, to stick with the plan, stay cynical … this guy is a DICTATOR, remember.
There are a couple of romances that spring up, Franco gets a crush on the CIA agent handling their trip (the aforementioned Lizzy Caplan), and Rogen crushes on Sook (Diana Bang), their frightening North Korean tour-guide and handler. The two female characters are in positions of power, far superior in status to the idiot-men who are the leads of the film (I feel it is important to note this: they may end up being girlfriends or at least objects of sexual fantasy, but they’re each a bad-ass played by two very funny actresses. Diana Bang has a moment where she lets loose with an automatic weapon that is one of the funniest moments in the film. She looks like a MANIAC.) There are some really funny sequences. The whole film opens with a clip of Dave Skylark interviewing Eminem on his show. (Eminem went uncredited.) Franco’s behavior is perfectly Ryan Seacrest-y – sycophantic, calling Eminem “Em” (so funny). Eminem does not crack a smile. He plays it totally deadpan. The scene is effortlessly comedic and such a strongly set-up situation it plays itself. I love that Eminem agreed to do it. There’s another funny scene later, where Rob Lowe, as himself, admits on air to Dave Skylark that he is bald, and he takes off his toupee on the air, saying vulnerably, with tears in his eyes, his head bald, “I feel so free right now.” This type of humor hits my own personal sweet spot. Your mileage may vary.
There are some scenes that show more effort, but for the most part, it feels like what it should feel: a satirical comedy about a ruthless dictator getting his long-overdue comeuppance (not just in the eyes of the U.S. but in the eyes of his own people who fear and loathe him). In that way, the film is radical. The North Korean people are not made fun of at all. They are shown as underfed, cowed, terrified, trying to survive in a lunatic atmosphere. Their leader is the target of all of the jokes. It’s a fantasy: a fantasy of taking out someone who is generally agreed by anyone who knows anything to be a dictator, starving and imprisoning his own people, living in a bubble of his own delusional reality. Into that fascist world strolls two bumbling idiots from America who have learned about North Korea from the Wikipedia page and who are both in this for themselves, for career advancement, for prestige. Those motivations shift during the course of the film. Dave Skylark goes into practically a brainwashed state as he hangs out with Kim, playing basketball, listening to Katy Perry … his vanity is gratified by Kim’s hero-worship of him. Then he has to wake up and understand that everything he is seeing has been a Potemkin Village, erected solely for his benefit.
The Interview is no This Is the End (it’s more uneven in tone, the comedy a bit more ragged around the edges), but it’s funny, and I enjoyed it.
But what I enjoyed even more was hearing the laughter from the little old lady in the fuzzy red beret sitting behind me, the one who has probably never seen a Seth Rogen movie in her life. She laughed at every joke, and there was a delighted sound of surprise there, a sound of discovery.
She may have gone to see it for “the principle of the thing,” but that laughter told the most important story.
With a career as long and diverse as Edward Herrmann’s there is much to discuss, but I decided to talk about just one moment he has in Warren Beatty’s Reds, a moment that (in its small way) helps make the whole thing possible.
That’s the job of a character actor.
My handsome dad
It still seems unreal, I miss him every day, and it is still something I do not care to write about. I only wrote about it once, for, of all things, Pixar Week on The House Next Door.
“The Star” (1952). Bette Davis drunk-driving and talking to her Oscar is as good a way to start 2015 as any.
