"Now This Is What The Music Industry Is All About!"

Just a quick review of "Get Him To The Greek," while it's all fresh in my contemplative little head: in the Apatow-associated-but-not-produced pantheon, better than "I Love You Man," but not quite "Forgetting Sarah Marshall." Definitely worth an evening's attention and diversion though. That was the super-short wrap-up I composed in my head earlier today; now here's my reasoning. "Greek" may tread in the same character footsteps as "Sarah Marshall," but I found "Greek" to be somehow less personable and relatable. Maybe it was the fact that the people's problems seem somehow more abstract/contrived: Jonah Hill, we can immediately tell, has relationship issues lurking just below the surface, but at the same time he's nearly completely blameless; Russell Brand, returning as Aldous Snow, has deeply ingrained personal problems that are messing up his life. These problems will somehow be solved, as in all Apatow-affiliated productions, with some deep soul-searching scenes and awkward humor, and we know this when we buy the ticket in the first place. Yet there was a complexity to "Sarah Marshall," the closest relation, that I could really dig on. Jason Segel must have really had his heart destroyed at some point, because it shows in his writing, but being a funny dude he can convey the situation of wanting to be with/semi-stalk the woman who dumped you, then finding someone else who's cool, but not being entirely sure of what anyone wants, least of all yourself, and then the first girl ends up wanting to get back together, and you don't want to hurt anyone, and BOOM! You've used too many commas in a sentence describing the total mess that is the essence of the "Sarah Marshall" relationship diagram. Of course, Jason then went and abstracted the whole thing to a degree for humor, and then glamorized everything by making Sarah Marshall a Kristen Bell-played TV superstar who runs off to Hawai'i, but that heart of confusion is still there, and that's what makes "Sarah Marshall" realer for me. I just preferred Aldous as a two-dimensional sex machine, an ego with a libido, who could spout off and be funny. Sure, even Rockstars have feelings, but the movie simplifies things a bit to accommodate the dual focus of Jonah and Russell (and sorry for switching between actor names and character names so freely this evening), leaving us only with empathy. Sure, they're likable enough dudes, but there's not the same question of "should Peter get back together with Sarah or stay with cool new girl whose name escapes me right now?" Maybe it's because "Sarah Marshall" has become what Tarantino would call a hang-out movie, where I watch it to chill with the characters. I'm invested in Peter's life for those two-ish hours, and get caught up in his psyche. With "Greek," I kind of just pitied Aldous and Jonah Hill's character for having to deal with him.

Anyways, that's my long-winded explanation for why I like "Sarah Marshall," cleverly disguised as comparative review. For all that, though, "Greek" was still pretty good, because even if I didn't click with is as emotionally as a certain other movie we've discussed at length today, it had the benefit of more Aldous Snow and an excellent Sean Combs as Sergio, music producer and batshit insane dude. Seriously, without Diddy to balance everything out, I would have written things off as Sarah Marshall-sploitation. But Diddy we have, so Diddy we shall enjoy. Every scene with him is wonderful, and the other actors do a fine job in their own rights. Some inspired sequences, more Infant Sorrow songs (always a plus), and a good-time vibe, what's not to like in an evening's entertainment?

Up next: a hopefully thoughtful review of the Banksy movie.

On the Perils of Self-Induced Overhyping

Well, I seem to have done too much heavy duty thinking and pondering this evening, as I've reached one of those states of extreme philosophical introspection. Let's see what it does for a complex movie review, that of "Winter's Bone." I think I closed my last review mentioning that I was really excited for this movie; that's a bit of an understatement. Ever since I read about it in the Cannes reviews, I've been getting little-kid-before-Christmas excited for this movie. I tried to sell it to all my friends, I raved about it to my family, I criticized the trailer for being overly sensational without having ever seen the movie, and in general I developed a few too many expectations. So it was too late for me when I tried to take a more reasonable stance the evening of the movie, as I had already overhyped "Winter's Bone" to a point where I wasn't sure exactly how I'd feel about it. And I'm still not sure how I feel, in spite of certainty that it was a good movie.

I suppose it didn't help that I missed the first ten minutes, which led to a nagging feeling of having missed a good chunk of initial pacing. But my knowledge of the plot helped see me through the rest of the movie: Ree, a girl of about seventeen, looks after her two younger siblings in the chilly meth-cooking district of the Ozarks while her mother languishes with some kind of mental illness. Trouble (always trouble!) shows up in the form of a sheriff (or someone, this is the part I missed), informing Ree that her long-gone father was arrested and put their property up for bail. Long-gone meth-cooking fathers being what they are, Ree places little faith in the idea of him showing up for his court date, so she sets off through the neighborhood to try and find word of her daddy, so she can force him into showing up, thereby saving the house and her ability to care for the family. Another critic referred to her journey as a kind of Odyssey, and that's really stuck with me, so I'm pirating it right now: Ree's quest and the slightly creepy half-relative folks she has to deal with are... Odyssey-like? I really wanted to say Odysseus, but that hardly sounds right.

Cutting past that rambling, the story now takes off in the slow and subtle way of atmospheric mysterious journeys. Things unfold steadily, side-characters come and go regularly with their various agendas, and gradually everything takes the form of a world where life is a struggle and folks get by as best they can, which means keeping secrets and family ties equally strong. Danger abounds, of course, but Ree acquits herself admirably: she is played with a kind of matter-of-fact courage by Jennifer Lawrence, doing a fine job. But she does have a little help along the way, most notably from her Uncle Teardrop, played by John Hawkes. Teardrop was one of the better characters, in my humble opinion, an enigmatic man who seems to have mastered this cruel Ozark world through a combination of toughness and slight insanity. I'm starting to find it hard to describe things to y'all without possibly ruining anything, so let's cut the professionalism and get down to subjectivity. I thought this was a good movie; it moved at the slower pace that I like, especially when there are as many details and relationships floating around as there are here. Ultimately, I thought it all got down to be about the journey instead of the exact details of Ree's father (surprise!). It all boiled down to her ability to ultimately deal with the pressures of raising her siblings entirely alone and in the face of extreme adversity, and that took iron courage, something that you don't see relayed this convincingly much at all, especially not these days. And then there was the counterpart of Teardrop, who had already survived to the point of becoming entirely enmeshed in the adversity, something that I thought was especially moving in the closing scenes. Ree has to learn to rise above it all and deal, and Teardrop rose to the point where he had to come crashing back down.

But those are just my thoughts. What I really came here to try and talk about today is the idea of self overhyping, which is really what I think happened here with "Winter's Bone." Part of it is that I really wanted this movie to floor me, yet I walked out contemplative. Another part is that I found myself almost forcing joy and engagement to the point where I'm still not sure whether or not this was the movie or the idea of what I thought the movie was going to be. And this is tricky, especially for your run-of-the-mill aspiring movie critic. I want the truthful objectivity I had for "Micmacs," a movie I had heard was good from someone I trust. When you walk in with no expectations, you have a blank slate to chart your opinions on. But what of my marred slate for "Winter's Bone?" Truth is, I probably won't be able to figure it out until I end up re-watching it in a year or so, and hopefully then I won't be watching with an eye to please myself again. What I think we must do in this case is chalk the experience up with an asterisk: it was good, but a disappointment for strange internal reasons that have nothing to do with the film. The peril of self-induced overhyping is the excitement of anticipation, which contrasts sharply with the contemplative pleasure of a movie like "Winter's Bone."

I have rambled but good at this point, so I'm going to cut off abruptly and leave that last sentence as my last sentence. Movie review backlog has already developed, so expect one of "Exit Through the Gift Shop" as soon as I can motivate to do a decent job.

Micmacs is probably French for Joy

Actually it's supposed to translate to "shenanigans" or "shady dealings" or something loose and slangy like that (say other reviews/synopses; any French-speakers in the audience today?), but I kind of like my interpretation better. After all, how often can you walk into a movie theater and then leave absolutely sure that your eleven bucks went to the pursuit of pure joy and happiness? 'Cause that's kind of what seeing "Micmacs" was like for me. Here's the lowdown: director of "Amelie" has done himself an action movie, but a light/quirky/"Amelie"-esque action movie (his name is Jean-Pierre Jeunet for the curious). Danny Boon, the French comic actor, stars as a kind of aimless young dude who lost his father to a land mine explosion, and then suffers an accidental brain injury when a bullet from a drive-by ricochets and lodges itself in his skull, leaving him susceptible to sudden instant death. All of this goes down within minutes. After coming out of the injury-coma, our young dude, whose name is Bazil, finds himself without a home or possessions or really much of anything. His post-discovering-my-life-as-I-knew-it-is-gone walk of sadness leads him do a quirky old dude who lives in a junkyard and presides over a big and happy family of other oddballs, all of whom have special abilities (one makes mechanical contraptions, another is a contortionist). For a few minutes they live happily in their junkyard house, salvaging stuff and being pleasantly odd, until Bazil stumbles upon the offices of the corporations that made both the land mine AND the bullet in his skull, conveniently across the street from each other. Righteous anger brewing, Bazil kind of blindly strikes out to do something about the grave psycho-emotional injuries he's suffered from these corporations, each headed by a Bad Dude, and before you know it he's planning, with a little help from his friends, how to best set these two corporations/Bad Dudes against each other, to show them a lesson.

All of that isn't just me being weird with my storytelling or even taking creative editing liberties. All of that exposition really does happen in the first twenty-odd minutes, and at roughly that pace. Events slide smoothly into each other; long sequences of Bazil raging at his losses in a pouring rain as dramatic music plays (possibly over a hazy montage of remembrances of his life pre-bullet and land mine) are blissfully absent. We get a shot of Bazil, comprehending that THESE are the very corporations responsible for his discontent, and then boom! He's wandering the halls, looking for trouble. This energy, this pulse of life is what makes and sustains the film. It's a bit of a conceit, but the movie has this magical aura about it from the very first minute. Chalk it up to the score and art direction and all that stuff; this is magical realism in the Franco-"Amelie" style. And the beauty is that, because we can see that it's a fanciful story, we buy into it willingly and immediately. It creates the same kind of joy that I felt as a kid watching old Chaplin or Keaton movies-- yeah, dudes in real life don't actually do stuff like turn with the board on their shoulder and hit the other two dudes in the face, but it could happen, and perhaps the world would be a more wonderful place if it did, so of course I'll laugh and enjoy it. The silent movie comparison is probably the most apt, as the jokes in addition to the atmosphere of enthrallment with film as a medium share a whole lot with a less cynical era of moviemaking.

I'm waxing, but deservedly so. This movie is awesome, a delight in basically every way, and comes highly recommended. For our moment of universality and semi-academic thought, let's stop and think for a moment as to why on earth there aren't more action movies that are this fun and pleasing. It probably has something to do with this feeling I've been trying to describe through all of this rambling, the fact that this is whimsy of the inner-child-pleasing variety; none of your self-conscious adolescent whimsey, tinged with feelings of unrequited love (the worst kind, yet somehow quite pervasive) and insecurity, and none of your slightly cynical hipster-and-older whimsey, which comes off as slightly creepy. Another reviewer likened "Micmacs" to a Rube Goldberg machine, which is right on the money. The sum of the parts comes together completely to do something that wasn't precisely necessary, but with such flair and good nature that it instantly becomes necessary. Sure, parts of the machine are just there for show, and it could all have been a whole lot simpler, but it is what it is, and we love it. Contrast this with the machinery of your conventional summer action movie: big stars, enhanced explosions, otherworldly locations, all put together with the cold efficiency of economics. The sum of the parts is designed to appeal to as many moviegoers as possible in some very complex way, but the complexity really only relates to the equations involved, as the story is usually creatively and emotionally shallow. Let's not even get into the other realm of action movies, where things seem to continue to get grittier and darker as time goes on. That machinery is definitely militaristic, in the mean way of weapons favored by warlords in dangerous parts of the globe. I think the metaphor is pretty much played out by this point, but let's spell it out anyways: action movies, you don't need explosions and sex and violence and one-liners to be fun. In fact, I think that if you put some of that stuff aside for a while and instead chose to focus on the other things that make a movie fun, then we might get something spectacular on a regular basis. So go ahead, just try it out for a bit. Maybe you'll realize that being cool isn't about slick appearances, but instead relates to something that comes from within.

Some pretty wild sentence construction going on there, but it's okay, I'm not picky. I also saw "Babies" a while ago, but don't have much to say about it that you can't already intuit from the trailer. It's entertaining and cute. It features a lot of babies. It probably would make an awkward date movie. The end. Now, onwards to seeing a movie that has had me all worked up for a while now, "Winter's Bone."