Kennelco Film Diary

(2008) dir. Ben Stiller
viewed: 08/16/08 at at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA

The question of the day may be which is funnier, Tropic Thunder or Pineapple Express (2008), the two big comedies that have hit theaters in the last two weeks.  For me, it’s hands-down Pineapple Express, and you know, I don’t care if you disagree.  This is an opinion for crissakes!!  I doubt seriously that there is a true measurement of humor, no matter how scientific you want to make it.

That said: here is some formulaic issues for Tropic Thunder.

Jack Black.  Somebody, please, stop this man from making movies.  He flails like a parody of himself while he tries to parody others.  Jack Black is self-parody.  He should open a bike shop or something.

Ben Stiller.  After his previous directoral/writing efforts (Reality Bites (1994), Zoolander (2001)), we already know that he thinks that he is far funnier than he really is.  Why other people may be under this illusion, I cannot say.  He’s always the same dude in his films, this smart, yet loserish fellow with varying degrees of self-awareness.  He’s highly tiresome and not clever.  I am sorry.

Tom Cruise.  In a “made to make me cool again by being crude and acting like a doofus in a fat suit” role, Cruise is not nearly as amusing as others might make you think.  His dancing hip-hop style as a balding, hirsute executive is akin to white people trying to rap for comedy effect.  It’s obvious, not funny, and still painful.

What the film does get right: Robert Downey, Jr.

With Iron Man (2008) under his belt for the year, Robert Downey, Jr. completes his comeback here in Tropic Thunder with one of the most outrageously funny and completely compelling roles to come out of Hollywood all year.  Playing a multiple-Oscar winner, method actor extroirdinaire, Downey’s character, a blonde, blue-eyed Australian has his skin dyed and hairpieces fitted to play an African-American soldier in this would-be Vietnam film.

Downey is extremely funny.  His character has charm, wit, the best lines…  Given the most to work with, he takes it to the wall and through it.  His character is a stroke of genius, playing up stereotypes, perceived stereotypes, positive racism and yet some intensive level of integrity and humanism that it’s absolutely stunning.  He’s worth the film alone.  He redeems it beyond its deserved redemption and makes all the muddling worthwhile.

The film has its flares of humor: witty parodies of Hollywood types and garbage, including fake trailers at the beginning that promote the fake characters’ previous film roles.  And there are some clever and surprising cameos that make for good fun.  It’s not that the film is awful.  It’s okay.  But without Downey, Jr., it’s nothing.

It’s worth seeing for Robert Downey, Jr. alone.  There are plenty of laughs, and it’s a good time.  But Pineapple Express has better comedy throughout.  It itself is not Superbad (2007), but it does have James Franco, whose stoner character may not reach the heights of Downey, Jr.’s character, but is quite amusing.  They are both good films.  Good enough.

But since I started this as an argument of which is the better comedy of the moment, I have to say that it’s Pineapple Express.  But Robert Downey, Jr.  He’s more the man than ever.

(2007) dir. Claude Lelouch
viewed: 08/15/08 at Opera Plaza Cinemas, SF, CA

Roman de gare, a French thriller/mystery that has lingered in San Francisco cinemas for a few months, turns out to be not nearly as compelling as I had hoped.  There seemed to be a small handful of French thrillers.  I guess that I’d assumed that this one was the best of the bunch.  I actually think I liked Tell No One (2006) better.

According to Wikipedia, the title translates: “The title is French slang for “trashy novel one reads in a train or train station” similar to the English phrase “beach book,”" which kind of makes sense.  The film is about an author of such works, a trashy thriller novelist whose story for her latest novel is not only lifted from real life, but conflated with it throughout much of the film.

Really, the film is at its best when the audience is unsure of who the characters are, being led down one alley of belief and then another about the characters.  Are they killers, writers, ghost-writers, prostitutes, hairdressers, lovers, runaway husbands?  Quite a while, this illusion carries on, with the “story within a story” conflating as well: Are we seeing the story of the book or the story the book was lifted from?

This conflation is highly self-reflexive and really embodies the mystery of the film.  And as the narrative unwinds, knowledge and concern mix with the surprises of the characters and their hidden “lives,” their pretenses initially displayed, to which the audience follows as well.  We only know what we are shown, right?

This would all be well and good if at the end (and I don’t think I am ruining the surprises here), like so many a mystery story, someone pops up to explain each circumstance, which was the “real” story, the actual, uncovering the lies and exposing the imposters.  It’s a weakness of the genre, and in this case, really seemed to deflate the film’s clever conflations.  See, in the end there was only one story, the real story, and now we know.

I guess that the ending has one open-ended question of motive, but the finale, the final scene, seems to indicate that there indeed is only one story, not another lie, not another trick, but a closure that sucks out the confusion and cleverness of the story before.

(2008) dir. James Marsh
viewed: 08/08/08 at Embarcadero Cinemas, SF, CA

The title of the film “Man on Wire” comes from the police report that detailed the arrest and description of the public nuisance charge perpetrated by Philippe Petit in August of 1974.  Simply descriptive but cannot begin to capture the enormity of the feat that Petit executed with the help of friends and collaborators.  Petit and his team snuck into the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City, strung a high wire across between the buildings, and Petit crossed the wire, at the insane heights of the then tallest buildings in the world, performing his simple and elegant highwire act, even laying upon the wire, hanging above the world.

It must be said that it doesn’t sound like the most compelling topic for a feature-length documentary, but the film is constructed with the power of the narrative, from Petit’s earlier highwire stunts to the collaborative adventure that drove his friends and colleagues to help attempt one of the most amazing stunts of such sort ever perpetrated.  The narrative grows, particularly through the vivid storytelling of Petit, and the beauty of the idea and the passion and the execution eventually becomes quite palpable.

The act, which is compared a few times in the film to that of a bank heist, is acknowledged as criminal by the crew, but recognized as also one in which no one is harmed, rather an act of performance and grandeur is perpetrated.  Which again sounds potentially insignificant, but the immensity of the act and the artistry of Petit’s athleticism is strong.

But what makes the film resonant beyond the history and the grandeur of the achievements is the very backdrop of the event.  The now long-gone, and far from forgotten towers loom throughout the film.  It is when Petit first hears of their construction, when the work is just initiated on the structures, that Petit is inspired to accomplish his strange goal.  The builidings speak to him, even from before they existed.

But the invasion of the building, the infiltration with all the equipment, while the building was being utilized yet still under construction echoes of the ultimate events perpetrated on the same structures.  Petit and his team run against harrowing odds to accomplish their infiltration and execution of the stunt, but yet they run into far fewer, smaller problems than one could imagine.  It’s not just the invasion and vulnerability, the heist of sorts, but the contrast in human aspiration behind the invasion.

Petit is not merely an artist.  It’s not merely performance.  While the cops and media keep wondering aloud to him as to “why” he did what he did, he has no answer.  It is someting, something of human achievement and artistry, something bizarre and dangerous, radical and risky, something that is in a sense indescribable.

(2008) dir. David Gordon Green
viewed: 08/08/08 at Century San Francisco Centre, SF, CA

The latest comedy (and this seems to be measured by almost every week) from producer Judd Apatow, he of Superbad (2007), Knocked Up (2007), and The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005) among many others, is probably the funniest of the films with his name attached to it since Superbad.  Pineapple Express is a stoner comedy, a buddy film, and an action film, though most successfully, a comedy.

Perhaps most strangely, the film is directed by David Gordon Green, who is best known for indie American films like George Washington (2000) and more recently, Snow Angels (2007), whose work I have only once ventured into, his 2003 film All the Real Girls, which I think I am still scarred by, these many years later.  What he is doing, helming a mainstream comedy for Apatow, well, who knows?  It’s certainly better than his other film.

Written by star Seth Rogan and his Superbad co-scribe Evan Goldberg, Pineapple Express is a romping, rolling, goofball run at the stoner film.  It’s funnier than not most of the time, sometimes for quite long sequences.  And beyond the script, which keeps up the gags and physical comedy, Rogan himself and co-star James Franco, with The Foot Fist Way (2006)’s Danny R. McBride, along with a number of other characters, make for a pretty solidly riotous time in the theater.

James Franco is perhaps the biggest surprise, and the film’s best performance.  Well, I guess that I’m not really surprised by Franco anymore.   My introduction to him was from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002) and its sequels, playing Harry Osborn, son of the Green Goblin, and straight-laced best pal to Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker.  But after my brother-in-law loaned me the DVD collection of Judd Apatow’s tv series, Freaks and Geeks, in which he and much of his catalogue of colleagues got their starts, I saw Franco as the cute bad boy character and realized that he had a lot more going for him than Sam Raimi had allowed for.  He’s hysterical as Saul, the pajama bottom-clad pot dealer who becomes Rogan’s best pal after their adventures on the run from the murderous drug dealers.

The film’s biggest problem is its action side, which works to create the narrative construct, but in the end just winds up being pretty violent and extraneous in a lot of ways.  It seems silly to criticize it, but it really drew away from the rest of the movie.  And Rogan’s high school-aged girlfriend, an amusing characteristic of his immature process server pothead, ends up being a sort of unnecessary track as well.

That said, it’s funny and a lot of fun.  It characterizes a consistent theme often cited in Apatow’s work, these sweet-natured but languishing “man-children”, who are not capable of romantic relationships, but oddly, find their emotional centers in what popular culture has recently coined as “bromances”, two best buds who find their way to communicating their humorously and occasionally ironically inflected homoerotic relationship, dude to dude.

It works though because there is a sweetness to their friendship and the characters, for their flaws, come across, and are enjoyable. 

It’s funny stuff.  Really it is.

(2006) dir. Guillaume Canet
viewed: 08/02/08 at the UA Stonestown Twin, San Francisco, CA

There have been a couple of French “thrillers” out in the theaters, all got good reviews, all moderately enticing.  So, when the opportunity arose to catch Tell No One at the Stonestown Twin cinema, which is conveniently close to my house, I thought I would go ahead and go for it.

Adapted from an American crime novel by Harlan Coban with which I was unfamiliar, this is more of one of those crime novels that is a little bit Hitchcockian.  A man’s wife is murdered, and though he isn’t found to be guilty of the crime, he is still under suspicion, even years and years later.  And when a couple more bodies are recovered near the scene of that crime, the police start looking at him harder and harder.

Actually, it’s quite convoluted.  There were points when I was having a hard time keeping up with all the characters.  Who’s doing what?  Her?  Him?  Huh?  Okay, it’s not that bad, but it’s a complicated story, one that unravels quite slowly at first and then speeds up to the point at the end, when the story becomes elucidated in one of those genre quirks, the killer sits the protagonist down and spells out the whole story for him and the audience.  Does that ever happen in real life?

It’s a decent thriller, but not amazing.  However, I can easily see this being re-made in the U.S. with someone like Nicolas Cage (if you can imagine him as a pediatrician) or maybe with Matt Damon or something.  You read it here first!

I probably should have seen the other one that is out there, Roman de gare (2007), which I think has gotten better press.  It’s playing at the Opera Plaza, so who knows?

(2008) dir. Chris Carter
viewed: 07/25/08 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA

Dude.  Was the last X-Files (1998) movie really 10 years ago?

Jeez.  No wonder I couldn’t find my last post on this.  I started in 2002.

I wasn’t a regular viewer of the show, even though I could tell it was the kind of thing that I would have loved if I was younger, having grown up on Kolchak: The Night Stalker and The Twilight Zone.  It just never clicked with me, though I wasn’t unappreciative of it, not an anti-fan.  I only saw the other movie when it hit DVD, and quite frankly, I didn’t really even have plans to see this one.  It was just a whim.

I only give those disclaimers since I managed to see this film the day it premiered and want to clarify that I am definitely not a fanatic.  Expectations were reasonably low, even with decent reviews.

The bottom line: I actually enjoyed it.

I don’t think it’s great stuff.  I don’t even think, necessarily, that it’s out and out cinematic.  But it’s enjoyable.  David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are likeable and fine, carrying less baggage than some former television shows that try to convert to film.  In fact, probably less baggage than in the last one.

The question is “The X-Files: Why?”.  It feels like culture has left this once relatively relevant show behind.  The movie is fairly clever, has its creepy and outlandish elements, but isn’t big by any means.  It’s no The Dark Knight (2008) nor Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) nor Iron Man (2008).  Heck, it’s not Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) for that matter.  It’s not the stuff of “man, I gotta get to the theater and see that movie!”

But it’s still good.  Or decent.  Respectable.  It’s no big film.  It’s got a good idea, a decent narrative, is entertaining enough, hardly reaches for the sky.  Is that a recommendation?  I don’t know.

I liked it well enough.

(2008) dir. Guillermo del Toro
viewed: 07/25/08 at AMC Loews Metreon 16 with IMAX, SF, CA

Back in 2004, I ventured to the theater to see the “original” Hellboy, which was also directed by Guillermo del Toro, a director who has moved out of the moderate obscurity into the relative mainstream with the success of his last film, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which gave him his alternate art house cred to match his action film cred.  Del Toro’s career can be seen as two pronged, even though those prongs share similarities and aesthetic characteristics.  His first side is his oldest side, in a sense, starting with his 1993 film Cronos, an odd vampire film from Mexico, with objects of blood extraction embodied in mechanical insects.  Again in this vein, he made the very fine, The Devil’s Backbone (2001), which in many ways reflects his later work in Pan’s Labyrinth.

But del Toro also has his films that “pay the bills”.  These are the action films, horror films, genre crap that in other hands is easily forgettable dreck.  But for del Toro, being somewhat of an auteur, his films from both the “highbrow” and the “lowbrow” seem to fit reasonably well together, and they share his keen design aesthetic, not just as a filmmaker but as an art designer.  His first of these was 1997’s Mimic, a sci-fi film with Mira Sorvino and giant cockroaches in the NY subway system.  He later made Blade II (2002), a sequel to another genre action film and then the moderate failure of Hellboy, which was pretty lame (I saw it in the brief period that I was not updating this thing).

I’d heard that Hellboy II: The Golden Army was an improvement on the first, which was fine but forgettable.  I’d even heard decent buzz about it.

But you know, it’s not really a whole lot better.

At its best, Hellboy II features a calvalcade of designs of del Toro’s monster notebook, which is actually really kind of neat.  Lots of interestingly designed monsters and landscapes, which are pretty fun.  And I like Ron Perlman as Hellboy.  The design of the character is both cartoony and plastic, yet visually appealing.  And his oddball cast of characters, creatures and weirdities.  I’ve never read the comic from which it was adapted so I can’t comment back on that.  But it’s fine.

But the movie was only decent at best, which are its action pieces and broader comedy.

When it strives toward emotion, the sentiment of romance, soppy friendship, love, significance…well it’s even crappier than the Barry Manilow song that it utilizes ironically in one of its more comic sequences.  Even though the film makes fun of itself and its characters in points, there are other points of genuine attempts at true heartstring-plucking.  And there, it’s just downright embarrassing.  It makes you feel foolish for sitting there.

In the end, it was not that good of a movie.  It’s entertaining enough, but it makes you wonder how deep is the depth of the stronger work of Guillermo del Toro.  If he is truly an auteur, not just a stylist, then there should be more to mine and fewer grimaces to bear.

(2008) dir. Christopher Nolan
viewed: 07/18/08 at CineArts @ the Empire Theater, SF, CA

After re-working the Batman franchise with 2005’s Batman Begins, director Christopher Nolan’s follow-up, The Dark Knight (pleasantly simply titled sans colons and so forth), has been hotly anticipated.  Of course, that anticipation only skyrocketed with the death of actor Heath Ledger, whose performance in this film of the Joker is bound to become one of the iconic images of not just the genre, but of film characters in general.  And the film has taken on an added darkness and interest, morbid as it is, that has people lining up around the blocks as I write.  It only premiered last night at midnight.

Ledger’s performance is by and far the most stand-out thing in the film, which is saying something because the film is a pretty solid action film, pleasantly much more grounded in physical special effects and relying far less on digital than any other of its superhero bretheren of 2008 summer entertainment.  There is something much more tangible in the setting and characters, even with some pretty big set pieces and some flashy action (I can only imagine the gushing excitement many fellows probably feel when they see the emergence of the bat-motorcycle, which is pretty damn slick).

The character of the Joker pervades the film with a maniacal, anarchic villainy, a detached sense of evil, an evil that isn’t anything more than chaos, a destructive, unflappable villain who simply acts to act. 

The film plays up some dualities, leading up to the creation of the other villain of the film, Harvey Dent (a.k.a. Two-Face), who is the literalization of the goals of good versus evil, the “white knight” versus “the dark knight”, who in the end mirrors the image of his scarified two headed coin, in whose randomness he seeks direction in meting out justice and punishment.  The Joker, who sends Dent on his merry way into madness and villainy, is far more interesting, lacking either side of the coin, who is all about the flip and not about the results.

While this dualism or duality plays significantly throughout and can probably be traced throughout Batman/Bruce Wayne’s narrative trajectory in the film as well, it’s not so overdone that you’re choking on it.  While the film is not exactly subtle, it embeds its strength the the chaos and unexplained character of the Joker.  He offers more than one little faux backstory about how his face became mutilated into a permanent smile, indicating that nothing is really true that he says.

It’s clear from the arc of the story that there were plans for a follow-up film with Heath Ledger as the Joker, carrying forth the chaos that he ignited in this film.  And with Ledger’s sad and untimely death, there will be a severe challenge to any reimagining of this character again anytime soon.  From the art design of the splotchy make-up and stringy, barely green hair to the dapper yet slummish suits, he’s a well-created figure, an image that we’ll be living with for some time to come.

Overall, the film is good stuff.  It’s dark.  It’s heavy.  It’s not the peppiest of the summer action films, but I think anyone could have seen that coming.

It will be interesting to see what they do with the next one.

(1926) dir. Lotte Reiniger
viewed: 07/13/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

My final film of the Silent Film Festival is the classic, brilliant, wonderful animated film by Lotte Reiniger, The Adventures of Prince Achmed.  It is truly an amazing film, something I doubt that most people have seen the likes of.

Reiniger used an unusual format for her animations.  She cut out cardboard figures of great detail, jointed them, and pixilated their movement by shooting the film frame by frame (the latter part is the definition of animation, frame by frame manipulation/image creation).  So, the film is a shadow puppet show, a visual form of storytelling steeped in history throughout many cultures, but not something many modern audiences would be familiar with, I would expect.  The animation is sublime, moving the figures and the narrative along in a strange ever-morphing pace, while the backgrounds, designed in color, contrast with the figures and landscape.  It’s indescribable.

Reiniger was friendly with other artists working in non-representational animation like Hans Richter and Oskar Fischinger, and her style and designs show this.  The film is far more close to their avant-garde works than it is to the films the Walt Disney would become famous for.

This film is the oldest known surviving feature-length animated film and it’s one of the most beautiful and amazing films that I have ever seen.  It was tremendous to see it on the big screen.  The kids, my son and his friend, Samantha, both enjoyed it, though Felix seemed to lag part of the way through.  This might have been due to his tiredness.  But since seeing it, they have both expressed having liked it very well.  It’s not an easy film for kids who are used to more traditional “cartoon” animation, but if they can, it is well worth their time.  It is well worth anyone’s time.  It’s totally amazing.

(1927) dir. Tod Browning
viewed: 07/12/08 at the Castro Theatre, SF, CA

The second film in my Silent Film Festival double feature was another great film from director Tod Browning and Star Lon Chaney, Sr.  The director and star made 10 films together in total.  A couple of years back I caught The Unholy Three (1925) in my first Silent Film Festival attendence, which was good, but The Unknown was considerably more impressive in its outlandish, outre weirdness, all part of the appeal of Browning’s work, as well as Chaney’s.

The Unknown is set in a small circus, featuring Chaney as an armless knife thrower and sharp-shooter and a young a beautiful Joan Crawford as his scantily-clad assistant.  In the first of many amazing sequences, Chaney not only throws knives at her with his feet, but uses a rifle to shoot off her clothing!  Chaney is in love with Crawford, the daughter of the circus master, but Crawford, in another huge element of Freudian craziness, is pathologically afraid of men’s hands.  Chaney tricks her other pursuer, the circus strongman into trying to get fresh with her, causing him to be violently shunned.

But, as it turns out, Chaney is faking his armlessness.  He’s a wanted man, hiding out in the circus.  But his armlessness is the thing that attracts Crawford to him, the only man who she does not fear.  Chaney, mad with love and realizing that if she found out that he actually had upper limbs would reject him, decides to actually become armless.  No hands, no pathological fear.  No groping!  No pawing!

The film’s bizarreness is its charm.  It’s a massively Freudian literalization of sexual fears, prowess, and negation.  And it’s totally entertaining as well.  Chaney sneers like no one else.  Some of his facial reactions to turns of events are totally alive and powerful.  And some of the footwork he does (though I have read that he had a truly armless stand-in for some shots) is amazing.  You can see the direction that Browning is moving in, toward his masterpiece, Freaks (1932).  He’s wild.

It was great to see this film with a huge audience, riding the reactions to the innuendos and plot twists.  Long live the Silent Film Festival!