Film #135: Greenberg

I know, it's a generational thing--obviously a by-product of getting older. But I never thought it would happen this way. I never thought no one under 25 would know of or give a flying flip about the things I grew up with. (And here I turn into this silly curmudgeon, dammit.) When I was growing up, I totally knew about all the things my parents loved. I watched The Andy Griffith Show, Father Knows Best, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Leave It To Beaver. Even though it was the 1970s, I was part of a clan that respected the adoration of the late 50s/early 60s--my parents' teen years--through American Graffiti, Happy Days, National Lampoon's Animal House, The Hollywood Knights, The Buddy Holly Story, and Grease (most of which were huge hits, so I know it wasn't just me being a smart kid). When I watched 1974's Earthquake at eight years old, I respected the fact that greyhairs Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and Lorne Greene and were stars right alongside groovalicious Geneviève Bujold, Richard Roundtree and Victoria Principal. I couldn't get enough of Roy Orbison, The Kinks, The Platters, and The Everly Brothers; hell, I was even into classical music at that age.

So I thought, when I turned 30 (which was in 1996), that kids would be digging on 70s-era Elton John, Bee Gees, Boston and Joni Mitchell, right alongside The Fugees, Garbage, Flaming Lips and Alanis Morrisette. I was fully expecting Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino and Gene Hackman to remain box-office draws alongside Will Smith, Tom Cruise and Eddie Murphy. And I thought 15-year-olds then would be tuning into All In The Family, The Bob Newhart Show, and M.A.S.H. when they got home from school.

But it didn't go down like that. I hadn't counted on time speeding up, and new things taking over again and again, with the 24-hour-cable-channel obsession for novelty shoving the merely mature into the impossibly ancient. When I realized this was the newborn way of things, it broke my heart. When I mentioned Devo one time, some kid went "Who?" (a snobbishly faux-inquisitive response that's still used to make us "oldsters"--yeah, we're so fucking decrepit at 30--feel like outmoded dopes). I felt older at 30 than the 30-year-olds that I knew when I was 10 surely felt. And I felt cheated and angry, because I was no longer allowed to talk to most younger people--who are always, no matter the era, yes, understandably struggling to forge their own identities--without feeling like I should be walking with a goddamn cane. Thank heavens I at least was there at the Internet's outset.

Greenberg is a movie that exudes the sensation of being 40 and lost in the this now-2010-world. Ben Stiller's Roger Greenberg is a man who's sad that his reference about Albert Hammond's one-hit wonder "It Never Rains In Southern California" is lost on a new friend. When he mentions it to his brother's assistant, Florence (Greta Gerwig), she responds with an awkward silence, and you can feel that spurring him on to a bottle of whiskey (which he puts on to a to-get list, along with ice cream sandwiches, when she asks him if he wants anything from the grocery store).

I have absolutely never felt like a movie had opened up my brainbox, peered in, glopped its mits into the remains, and slathered it onscreen as I have with Noah Baumbauch's Greenberg. It's MY movie. I feel protective of it, like I did with SCTV way back in 1977 when no one else I knew got or watched it. I think it's a movie that heartbeats on where the forgotten tadpoles are coming from--you know, that tiny clan called X, smooshed in between the overwhelming Boomers and Ys. Baumbach is my age, so, given his newest movie (after The Squid and the Whale's excellence and the muddy Margot at the Wedding), I'm now even more convinced he knows abandonment intimately, and is bound to paint its details.

Now, here it is, eight months after Greenberg's quiet theatrical release, and I'm even more convinced that no one gives a good goddamn about us Xers, seeing that no one's giving the film it due. Yep. We've been thrown on the scrap heap. We don't count, because we're part of neither movement that buffets us fore and aft. And, since we grew up with Watergate, Mad Magazine, and Wacky Packages, we can't be sold to, so we can just all go and get fucked. I never thought I was going to see a movie like Greenberg. When it arrived, and was over, I was ecstatic. But everyone else--that is, the paying public--seems to see it as a complete bore, a mystery. Greenberg stands as a self-fulfilling prophecy printed in gleaming Cinemascope.

Roger Greenberg's often inert but, though he almost brags about dropping out of life, I really don't think he wants to be doing nothing. He still engaged enough to compose complaining letters to newspapers and corporations (and gets excited when one is printed in the paper; there's no sign of a computer anywhere in Greenberg). He had a band, back in his "hellraising" days, called The Magic Marker. They were on the verge of getting signed, but Roger (the band's songwriter) didn't feel that the company signing them would do them right. It was, perhaps, a punk move. Screw those guys if they can't go our way. He didn't see that selling out would become everybody's goal once the 90s landed. And so the band--including his best friend Ivan (Rhys Ifans)--withered away. Ivan went on to battle alcoholism, to get into computer programming, and to start a family with a woman with whom, when Greenberg reconnects with him in L.A., is divorcing him (even though Ivan is obviously engaged with being a father to their son Victor). And the other former band members continue to rake Roger over the coals for giving up so soon. But Roger thought he was doing the right thing; he thought there'd be other opportunities. But no other shots were imminent, so he escaped to the East Coast, retreating into a place far from media: a construction start-up based in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Baumbach's film, like many great movies, begins quite unlike you might think, though. Its first minutes center in on Greta Gerwig's Florence, a 26-year-old woman making a living tending to Roger's spoiled, awful, wealthy brother (Chris Messina). You can immediately tell the guy's an ass because of the subtly pissy way he tosses a plastic bag after Florence tells him she couldn't find those chocolate-covered rice balls he likes, even after going to two places. This is only one of her frantic duties for the family before they take off on a too-hep vacation in Vietnam. He tells Florence, as she deals so sweetly with his two kids and his obviously condescending wife, that his brother Roger will be taking care of the house and their German Shepard, Mahler, while they're gone. She takes this on as another task (even though she hasn't been paid in three weeks and later has to borrow money from her best friend; and then Mama Greenberg has the gall to gently scold her for not reminding them to pay up).

Florence, in her warm ragged clothes, is a lovely person. She adores her job, and the people she works for, and clearly likes the kids so much that she's willing to overlook all of her employers' terrible attributes (you can tell she's been unfairly chewed out by them before). Her opening exchange with the kids, who obviously dig her, makes it clear that she's good at her job now, and that she succeeds in anticipating whatever peccidillos the Greenbergs might spring on her. But somehow Florence can't find anybody who loves her.

But how could one not love her, as she tries to charm her way into traffic? (The movie's meaningful first line, as she drives, is: "Are you gonna let me in?") It tears you apart when, at a party, she tells a soon-to-be one-night-stand "I was thinking this morning that I've been out of college now for as long as I was in, and nobody cares if I get up in the morning." She gets some play, but it means nothing, even though she touches the man's back as he sleeps, as if to say "Remember me?"

We see Greenberg from behind at first, as he calls Florence, alarmed that next-door neighbors are using his brother's pool. The first time we see his face he (also significantly) tells Florence, who's wants to come by, "Yeah, I'll be here." And then, Roger and Florence have their first moments together, with Florence showing yet more of her nurturing side by fawning over Mahler (laughing, as she gives him a treat, "His tongue's so scratchy"). This is not meet cute, though. It's beautifully meet semi-ugh. (I love this one pregnant pause in the conversation, followed by Florence concluding with "Cool.") Still, though, you can feel that both are needy, nerdy and funny, and so they're intrigued with each other not without cause.

Roger very much seems uncaring later on in the film. In fact, he can be a downright a-hole. But, in these first scenes, we see he's not such a bad guy. He dutifully takes care of Mahler; he notices a door is sticking so he whittles it down, and he begins building the dog a master bedroom. He bravely tries out the pool, even though he doesn't know how to swim. And he notices there's a problem when Mahler is unresponsive to a frisbee throw. This worries him, and he calls Florence in to help. He doesn't even mind when his brother, from continents away, slaps him with the sort of abuse Roger is probably used to (and has often probably deserved).

In baby steps, Roger tries to reconnect with a past he'd discounted, even though he's seen as a solipsistic cad. He begins with Ivan, to whom he's still tenuously friendly. For Greenberg, no time has passed, because nothing important has happened to him. Or at least nothing that he wants to talk about. He's suffered a nervous breakdown, and has been hospitalized. He's had no major relationships since his breakup with an old girlfriend who hardly remembers their time together (Jennifer Jason Leigh, excellent in one key scene, who also serves as co-storywriter and co-producer with husband Baumbach here). And his construction business in Bushwick has folded ("It's political" is his only remark about that).

Meanwhile, Florence seems lost without her daily duties. She has a vague desire to sing, and does so with pluck to a nearly empty house. And she has a secret. And she seems open to starting up a strange dalliance with Greenberg that's studded with Roger's nervous outbursts and discomfort with humanity (this results in a couple of sex scenes that're absolutely without comparison; they're interrupted and ghastly). But she finds him surprising, and vulnerable, and that keeps her going. For many viewers, this seems unlikely, even unimaginable. But Gerwig makes this work, because we can tell her Florence is affectionate for those things that need affection (at the vet, she pets Mahler with her red-socked foot). I have to confess: I'm in love with Gerwig as a result of this role. I think I fell for her at first sight, as Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner" plays over the credits, and as she smiles slightly as we admire at her exquisite profile. But I think what really did it for me was seeing her alone at home, drunk after a Greenberg snub, dancing goofily to and singing along with Paul McCartney's "Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey." I wanted to hug her--or Florence--forever and ever. Make no mistake: this IS the best performance of the year. Gerwig is outstanding in every way, in every frame. She is a star, for sure.

Also, of course, there's no question that Roger Greenberg is the role that Ben Stiller was conceived to play. Greenberg's the logical outgrowth of his directorial debut, the similarly crestfallen Gen X touchstone Reality Bites. Looking underfed and slouched, with that very non-L.A. puffy vest on throughout, he's a man who doesn't know where he belongs ("I can't find a movie I wanna see at the fucking multiplex," he complains, "and when I go into Starbuck's, I hear music I actually like"). Greenberg may have grown up in Los Angeles, but he's obviously more New York-flavored (he hates that his friends consider him uber-Jewish, since his mother was not so--just like Stiller himself, whose mother is the Irish Anne Meara, but whose father's the Jewish Jerry Stiller). And, plus, there's that generational thing. Later in the film, Greenberg finds himself hosting a 20-something party, snorting his first line of coke in years, wanting to listen to perfectly suitable Duran Duran (while others scream for AC/DC or Korn) and standing as a curio to the bucks who surround him. Here we get a bald-faced punch in the gut to the group that calls itself "The Perfect Generation." It's one of the most quotable bits of dialogue in the film, and I bet Baumbach worked long and hard to condense his feelings into byte-size:

The thing about you kids is that you're all kind of insensitive. I'm glad I grew up when I did cause your parents were too perfect at parenting--all that baby Mozart and those Dan Zanes songs; you're just so sincere and interested in things. There's a confidence in you guys that's horrifying. You're all ADD and carpal tunnel. You wouldn't know agoraphobia if it bit you in the ass, and it makes you mean. You say things to someone like me who's older and smarter with this light air. I'm freaked out by you kids. I hope I die before I end up meeting one of you in a job interview.

Greenberg doesn't feel any more at home with people his own age. He breaks out into a sweat when Ivan takes him to a former band member's party, populated by the romping kids of his schoolmates. Even with Ivan--who's played with exquisite drained sadness by Ifans--Roger seems to be unaware that adulthood has crept between them. Nothing drives this home more than their get-together on Greenberg's birthday (perhaps the most baldly funny scene in the picture) or their relationship-ripping final exchange. To his credit, up to this point, Ifans' Ivan is a shaggy Superman of understanding, dolefully withstanding his friend's neurosis, thoughtlessness, meanness (which he, too, finds humorous, I think), and avoidance of talking about all things important. (The casting and photography here is outstanding; the camera has a purposefully hard time keeping the short Stiller and the towering Ifans in the same frame.)

I guess a lot of viewers out there don't like Roger Greenberg because they don't want to know him. Or maybe it's because they don't want to BE him, and often, in movies, we only wanna see people up on screen that we wanna be. But then how would one explain all these anti-heroes out there that people of all post-60s generations love--Travis Bickle, or Tony Soprano, or Michael Corleone? Of course, these are violent people--people who command power through a trigger squeeze. Greenberg has no power at all. In fact, I don't think Greenberg's ever been in the same building with a gun. The guy doesn't even drive, though he's an expert at telling other people how to do so (as a non-driver myself, I see this as a positive trait).

So I'm left to conclude that Greenberg (and Florence, too) strike some even discerning filmgoers as lethargic creations because the characters seem to have abdicated their efficacy. They're not rich; they're not even trying to be rich. And they're almost okay with not being close to happy. They're lucky to make it through each day. Maybe THIS is what offends so many people about Greenberg ("Who wants to see a movie about people who've given up?")

But not so fast. Roger and Florence, they're still in the ring, even though their punches hardly ever land. That's exactly what I love about Baumbach's movie--it follows Roger and Florence as if it were the SALT II talks between generations, and it's passionate about these flawed schnooks. This is the writer/director's most accomplished, insightful, empathetic script. It's a movie with hope, but not too much of it (it never becomes a picture Greenberg would write a snide Letter to the Editor against--by the way, Greenberg's letters are the only element of the film I don't buy). This is also Baumbach's most visually on-target film (thanks to the sharp widescreen photography by the always reliable Harris Savides, and also to the accurate, never overdone production design by Ford Wheeler). I could go on and on, scene by scene, and tell you exactly why I love about nearly everything about it--Lindsay Lohan, Creamsicles, Sealey matresses, Arnold Palmers, Gung Ho, the Flash, a shared Corona, and James Murphy's gentle score--but I think you get the idea. Greenberg is my favorite movie of 2010, and I don't think anything else is gonna come anywhere near its richness.

NYFF Review #6: Another Year

I'm convinced. Actually, I've long been convinced. There is not a better filmmaker walking the earth right now than Mike Leigh.

Why else do movies, or any other art form, exist but to make the viewer feel something? So if you want to see movies that make you emote joy or discomfort or anger followed by joy again, then see a Mike Leigh movie. I defy any attentive person to witness Life is Sweet without giggling manically throughout and then breaking into sudden tears when jolly mother Allison Steadman confronts hard-hearted daughter Jane Horrocks about her disenchantment with the world. Why wouldn't one blanch at and then agree with David Thewlis' hope-murdering rants against existence in Naked? How could you not be moved by smirking Philip Davis and nurturing Ruth Sheen looking out for while making fun of the departing, clueless Jason Watkins in High Hopes? What jerk could fail to marvel at Jim Broadbent, as W.S. Gilbert, giving precise notes to his cast while building upThe Mikado in Topsy Turvy? What human can't understand the pain of husband Tim Stern as he suffers the sharp words of Allison Steadman's callous wife Beverly during Abigail's Party? And when Imelda Staunton's Vera Drake gets visited by the police, whose heart isn't thrust throatward? I must now offer some scenes:


David Thewlis and Peter Wight in 1993's NAKED


Allison Steadman, Janine Duvitsky, Tim Stearn and John Salthouse in 1977's ABIGAIL'S PARTY


Timothy Spall and Leslie Manville in 2002's ALL OR NOTHING


Jane Horrocks and Claire Skinner in 1990's LIFE IS SWEET


Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan in 2008's HAPPY-GO-LUCKY


Shirley Henderson in 1999's TOPSY-TURVY


Imelda Staunton and cast in 2004's VERA DRAKE

Mike Leigh has been making all sorts of movies--from features to shorts to TV movies--since his incredible 1971 debut Bleak Moments. In that film, he pretty much set the stage for what we could expect from him: exacting examinations of the less fortunate, or less wise, or more gifted, among the rich and poor denizens of London. He's never deterred from his station, because he knows when he's found a good and wealthy thing. And the stance has not yet betrayed him, regardless of time period or personage.

His newest film, Another Year, doesn't disappoint. In a way, it's kind of a Mike Leigh fan film, in that it includes a cast that he's well familiar with. Jim Broadbent, as the patriarch, marks his fifth film with Leigh; Ruth Sheen, as the matriarch, notes her fifth film as well; and lead Leslie Manville notches her seventh time out with the deviser/director.

Note that I used the word "deviser." Just in case you're not aware, Mike Leigh's movies are not written like other movies are. This is what makes them so special. You can never tell where they're going because the maker, and the actors, never know where they're going, either. In short, in the beginning stages of a project, Leigh arrives at an idea for a film, then asks a set of actors to join him, and then they together organize a story based on Leigh's idea. After a series of improvisations, the director later solidifies the results into a stolid script. Leigh, who has a deep and ongoing involvement in the theater, has in this way kept his ardor of the stage's surprising qualities kicking and has transmogrified them into his passion for cinema, too. This, I submit, makes him the most original filmmaker working today.

He's never operated in any other way. He's the modern originator of this process, and you can tell that his actors love him for it. At least, I could tell this, having attended the Q&A with Broadbent, Sheen, Manville, Leigh and producer Georgina Lowe following the screening of Another Year at the 2010 New York Film Festival (Another Year is dedicated to Leigh's longtime producer, the recently passed Simon Channing Williams). I have to say, the ovation at the fest was the most fervent I'd experienced. The film got a minute of applause, and each of the participant's got 30 seconds applause a piece. That's almost five minutes of love there.

And so deserved it was. Another Year is yet another masterpiece from Leigh. It's a film about aging, yes, and it's consequently about the quickening of time (this is a very important element of the film, and one I fear might be overlooked by younger film writers). It's also a film about the limits of friendship, and how much well-adjusted mates can stand before their less well-adjusted friends drag them down. Broadbent and Sheen play a happily married couple named Tom and Gerri ("That's brilliant," says another character). He's an engineering geologist, and she's a counselor at a hospital, where she works with a troubled Mary, played by Manville. Tom and Gerri are cheery and upbeat, with only Mary's continual troubles causing them consternation. The year in question--quartered into seasons--puts their relationship to the test, as it begins with Mary's breakup with a bloke, and continues with her desperate fascination with Tom and Gerri's son Joe (Oliver Maltman). We know where this is going to go, but Mary has no idea, because she's sodden by alcohol. (Mike Leigh's movies have a lot to do with the downsides of alcohol, because they're so attuned with their U.K. place in the world.)

Manville is a marvel here. Given her seven appearances in Leigh films, you'd never recognize her as the person who played the eye-shadowed new wife in Grown Ups, the snooty next-door neighbor in High Hopes, Gilbert's powdered spouse in Topsy Turvy, or the sadly deluded, depressed mother in All or Nothing. In Another Year, she plays a recognizable Leigh type, but she makes the role absolutely her own. Mary is a lady who was once sure of herself, but who has let life pass her by. The largely lighthearted Another Year catches this character as she begins to realize the horror of the nest she's built for herself.

There are four characters who help her to this point. Imelda Staunton (an obvious Leigh veteran) is a depressed housewife appealing to Gerri, and informing Mary that marriage isn't necessarily the answer. Peter Wight, unforgettable as Tom and Gerri's hardy friend Ken, is a overweight alcoholic who's romantic advances clue Mary in about what she really desires, to her terror. Karina Fernandez, as Joe's lover Katie, gently accepts Mary's scorn as the woman Mary never could have been. And David Bradley, in the last fourth of the film, as Broadbent's newly-widowed brother Ronnie, looks perplexed as Mary asks, after his wife's funeral, whether or not he'd like a cuddle (these are among the best scenes in the film).

Does this sound complicated? It's not. Leigh's movies, save for their characters' thick brogues (not in evidence here), are never hard to understand. They might be hard to WITHSTAND, but that's a great thing. They make you feel, and feel deeply. Another Year does so not only with its terrific acting and direction, but with its gleaming widescreen photography (by valued Leigh regular Dick Pope) and its unusually gorgeous music by Gary Yershon (I always love the scores to Leigh's movies, but this one is especially emotional, and I blieve Leigh thinks so, too, according to his comments to the NYFF audience).

I couldn't believe my great fortune to be in the same big room with the makers of Another Year. After it was over, I waited patiently to see what would happen. Manville, Sheen and Broadbent hung out in the lobby of the Water Reade Theater, talking eagerly to the press. I could have asked them a million questions. But I was most interested in saying something personal to Mr. Leigh, so I had to pick my battles. I didn't want to ask Mr. Leigh for an autograph (though I had a VHS copy of Life is Sweet in my pocket). I merely wanted to tell him something.

So, I guess some would say I was stalking him. Maybe. I called to him as he opened the door to go out of the theater.

"Mr. Leigh?" I called. And he stopped, as I'd hoped, right in front of the Walter Reade.

"Hi. I just wanted to tell you something." I took my place in front of him, and looked into his impossibly blue eyes. They really struck me; they'd never seemed so blue in all the photos I'd seen.

"I just wanted to tell you. I'm so happy to talk to you, and tell you how much your movies mean to me. They make me feel so many things all at once, and that's what I go to movies for." I had to hold back tears here. "There's really nothing like them. And I just wanted to tell you how much I love them. And I wanted to thank you for them."

"Well, thank you," he softly said. "Thank you very much. What's your name?"

And I realized I didn't have my pass around my neck. "My name is Dean Treadway, and I help with a podcast called Movie Geeks United, and I do my own blog called filmicability. I know you're busy, but I have a couple of questions. I've read you've never been satisfied with the look of Abigail's Party, given that it's shot on video. Have you ever thought of remaking it on film?"

"Oh, no. It so much a piece of its time, there'd be no point in going back to it. It is exactly as it should be. It's done."

"It is very much at home in the 1970s. I can understand that. I was wondering, there's so much of your stage work that I haven't seen. Is there any chance I can see some of it here in New York?"

"Well, I'm looking to restage a play I did called Ecstacy. Are you familiar with that?"

"No, not really. I've seen the title, though."

"Well, that's in the works."

And then I couldn't resist. I pulled out my Life is Sweet VHS. "I gotta do this. Could you sign this, Mr. Leigh? I usually prefer to get people to sign one-sheets, but I couldn't find a one-sheet for this movie. It's my favorite of your works."

"Is it?" he asked, as he signed. "Oh, yeah," I said, "It makes me feel great every time I watch it."

"Well, thank you..."

"Thank you, Mr. Leigh, for everything."

"Good luck to you, Dean." We shook hands lightly, and then the best filmmaker on the planet walked away from me, looking me in the eye, and I remain, still, to this day, dumbstruck.

Film #132: An American Werewolf in London

In the early 1980s, there were few American directors whose style was as crunchy as John Landis'. It's difficult to explain what I mean by the term "crunchy"--I just know it's the correct word to describe many of the movies Landis made from 1977 to 1992. The only times he failed us were with the unbearable Spies Like Us, the equally awful Sly Stallone vehicle Oscar and his merely bland but hugely costly episode for Twilight Zone: The Movie. But the period's good stuff far outweighs the bad: Kentucky Fried Movie, National Lampoon's Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Michael Jackson's Thriller, Into the Night, Three Amigos, Coming to America, and Innocent Blood. All are primo American comedies of the 1970s and 80s. Actually, along with Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks and maybe Zucker/Abrams/Zucker (Airplane, Top Secret) and Ivan Reitman (Meatballs, Ghostbusters), he's one of the era's top comedy autuers. But, honestly, if we're to look closely at Landis' work, he's as much a director of musicals as comedies. Of course, Michael Jackson's Thriller is his purest musical, and now with the death of the King of Pop, it may be his most pored-over film. But then consider Otis Day (in real life, he's Lloyd Williams) and the Knights singing "Shama-Lama-Ding-Dong" and "Shout" in Animal House; James Brown rocking the cathedral, Aretha Franklin tearing apart her diner, and Ray Charles moving the crowds in The Blues Brothers; the tuneful Randy Newman numbers Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Chevy Chase perform in Three Amigos; and the energetic African dance number in Coming to America. With this, and the colorful music-based sequences in many of his other films (including American Werewolf), Landis is very much a musically-minded director.

I guess if I'm to look into my heart, the word "crunchy" really refers primarily to Landis' cutting methods. Whether working with editors George Folsey Jr. or Malcolm Campbell, his films always display the unmistakable branding of post-production expertise. Landis' editing, more so than that of most directors, has a palpably mathematical quality about it. It swiftly gets us in and out of scenes, often with a barely registered punchline or an extra shock to the system before we go. And it thrives on juxtaposing chaos with calm. Look at the insane ending to The Blues Brothers--that off-screen clicking of a hundred guns, and then we cut to that quiet shot of Jake and Elwood at the firing end of an impossibly well-placed number of gun barrels. Or look at Animal House, where we have all this wackiness ensuing outside and then we get a quick, calm look at Flounder (Stephen Furst) asking a store cashier "Can I have a thousand marbles, please?" Or how, right in the middle of the horrifying transformation scene in American Werewolf, Landis humorously cuts to a short insert of the scene's only witness: a grinning Mickey Mouse figurine.

There are a lot more moments like this in American Werewolf, a movie that registers as Landis' best. It's funny, but it's also extremely terrifying--often very much in the same frame. Length-wise, at 97 minutes, it's the director's most economical work (his movies tend to run a little longer than necessary). American Werewolf tells a simple story, effectively, and then gets right on out of there. With its dismaying final shot, and the bouncily-scored credit crawl that instantaneously follows it up, it's a movie that delightedly sucker-punches us and then darts laughing down the street.Perhaps American Werewolf's most surprising element is its sweetness. In fact, one could say that Landis movies often take us aback with moments of unexpected sentiment. My favorite scene in The Blues Brothers has Jake, recently released from prison, falling instantly asleep on Elwood's tenement bed. Elwood hollers "Hey, you sleaze! That's my bed." And then Elwood, glad to see his brother again, covers him up and continues cooking toast over a Sterno flame. And I'm always soothed by how much I adore the romantic elements in Animal House, Coming to America, and Trading Places. However, even within this pantheon, the connection enjoyed by the American Werewolf leads is really something special.

Former Dr. Pepper spokesman and star of ABC's disco-themed sitcom Makin' It David Naughton plays an average guy wandering through the British countryside with his best friend Jack (Griffin Dunne). They're first seen getting off a truck with a bunch of sheep on it ("Goodbye, girls!" Jack says as the truck pulls off). It's telling--thought the boys sadly don't get it--that the only establishment they spot to duck into is called The Slaughtered Lamb. Taking refuge from the cold moors, David and Jack instantly suss out that they're unwelcome outsiders here, particularly when they ask about the creepy pentagram painted on the walls. This stuns the rowdy crowd of British townies into silence, and the two friends feel prodded into escape (after they're gone, the pub's patrons argue about whether they should have insisted they stay, even though they DO warn them to keep to the roads).

It's after they start hearing pained howls underneath the light of a full moon that David and Jack notice they haven't stayed on the roads ("Oops," Jack says). In a sickening, disorienting sequence, the friends run round directionless for a few minutes before realizing they've been spotted by something (the camera eerily sets itself in front of them). And then the carnage begins. For a movie that's billed as a comedy, this scene--like many more that will follow it--is brutal and unsettling, and gamely lets the horror movie element take hold. (SPOILER ALERT!) Jack's death is sudden, bloody, and frantic. But David survives, passing out after the townies pump buckshot into this gigantic wolf that's attacked them.

David wakes up in a London hospital with Alex (Jenny Agutter) as his instantly smitten nurse. He is feverish and slashed up, and drifts in and out of fitful sleeps where he has some potent nightmares (these are some of the film's best scenes, and if you haven't seen it, I'll do you a favor by shutting up). David also starts getting visits from the dead and decaying Jack (to me, Rick Baker's oozing, meaty work on Dunne's once-pretty face is really what won him the Oscar, the first competitive one for makeup, in 1981). Jack pleads with David to off himself, to spare the lives of others he's bound to kill, because now he is a werewolf, and we all know what that means. But David thinks he's merely going crazy, and he doesn't take Jack's advise to heart. In fact, upon his release, David finds he has something more to live for when Alex saucily invites him to stay with her for a while. This sparks a relationship that's tender and sexy--we like these two people together--and this inclusion of a bit of heart in the story pays off later in unexpectedly touching ways. David Naughton only appeared in a few more forgettable movies after American Werewolf, but he makes an brave impression here as a complete innocent to whom fate has been unkind. This may be the best portrayal of a lycanthrope ever (his piercing screams during the demanding transformation scene--set incongruously to Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising"--convince us that turning into a werewolf is quite a bit more painful than the serene lap-dissolves we were once familiar with from movies like the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man of the 1940s). Of course, Baker's work here is magnificent, and inventive (the close up of the hair sprouting from David's skin was achieved by pulling on the strands from behind the patch of flesh-like latex and then running the footage backwards). But it's Naughton's performance that terrifies us (I love it when, in mid-transformation, David's human side makes a final appearance when he apologizes to the dead Jack for calling him "a walking meat loaf"). There are many amazing set pieces strewn about here: the stalking of a London businessman in a deserted tube station; the lovely, lathery shower David and Alex take together, set to Van Morrison's "Moondance"; the convention of the dead in a Leicester Square porno house (which plays a funny sex film called "See You Next Wednesday," a title phrase that's strangely appeared in numerous Landis movies); the aformentioned nightmares; the morning after, when David finds himself in the buff and penned up with a pack of wolves at the London Zoo (a scene that culminates with the immortal line "A naked American man stole my balloons"); and, perhaps most stultifying, the visceral car-crash chaos that erupts when the werewolf hits the busy British streets. These scenes, plus the perturbing, over-too-quick finale and the gorily amusing moments featuring the rapidly rotting Dunne (who should have gotten a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination), help insure An American Werewolf in London won't be sinking into obscurity any time soon.

Film #121: Smokey and the Bandit

I can still vividly remember, as a 10-year-old Atlanta kid, first seeing Smokey and the Bandit. My parents had taken me to the Northeast Expressway Drive-In Theater on opening night (if you look at the top right hand corner of this blog, you can see a torn ticket from the theater). The film's star, Burt Reynolds, was then the number one box office attraction in the country, and nowhere was this more evident than in the South. Even though he was born in Michigan but raised in Florida, Burt was pretty much adopted as a hometown boy after his breakout performance in 1972's Georgia-filmed Deliverance, he was pretty much. He returned to the state to shoot White Lightning (1973), Gator (1976) and, in 1977, Smokey and the Bandit. So seeing the latter open at an Atlanta drive-in was a big event.

My father wheeled his much-adored red-and-white '57 Chevy onto the drive-in lot way before dusk, and we sat and waited for the light to change so we could see this film we'd been hearing about for so long. The action-comedy had been in production all throughout 1976, filmed primarily in neighboring Jonesboro and McDonough, with major scenes filmed at the Atlanta's Lakewood Fairgrounds, where a gigantic racetrack and rollercoaster were situated. It was unbelievably exciting for my ten-year-old self to be at the Northeast Expressway Drive-In Theater on opening night; only Burt's very presence could have made it more so.

When darkness fell, we settled in with our snacks and waited for the joy. And so it began, and the film was just gearing up when disaster struck. The frames fluttered and then cooked brightly on the screen, and we knew what this meant: the print had been damaged. The screen lights flashed on in surprise, and I remember instantly looking out the back window and seeing the second screen at the drive-in (this was the first multi-screened drive-in in Atlanta). Smokey was going to be such a Georgia hit that the managers had booked it on the other screen as well, and there, the film was still playing fine. Now, horns on our side were honking in protest as we all waited impatiently for the situation to be fixed. When the projector powered up again, we got a shock: we weren't gonna be seeing Smokey and the Bandit; instead, the second feature, Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive flickered forth.

Now, I don't know if you've ever seen Eaten Alive, but no matter how much love gorehounds may have for it, it ain't no Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it CERTAINLY ain't no Smokey and the Bandit. It's a nasty, scuzzy, unfrightening, totally mean-spirited piece of crap that has Neville Brand as a hotel owner who chops the heads off his guests with his scythe and feeds the corpses to his pet alligator. My mother, an avid animal lover (as we all were) was particularly scarred by the filmed feeding of a guest's pooch to the 'gator (to this day, my mother won't watch scary movies where a dog or a cat appears, because she's sure they're going to be killed off, and she's almost always right; it's a trend that's thankfully almost died off). Anyway, needless to say, we were mightilly pissed. But we stayed steadfast for Smokey, because Burt was our man. Happily, we weren't disappointed.

In it, Reynolds plays Bo "Bandit" Darville, a fast-talking, fast-moving rig driver who makes a massive wager with a bizarre, cocky pair of Texas businessmen (Big Enos and Little Enos, played by Pat McCormick and Paul Williams). They challenge the Bandit to deliver of truckload of Coors beer from Texarkana, TX to Atlanta, GA--a little under 1500 miles--in 28 hours (which was a little more difficult back when the speed limit was only 55 MPH). At any rate, Bandit has no problem with this. He hops into his black Trans Am (you know--the one with the T-top and the firey eagle on the hood) and gits, enlisting the help of Cletus ("When You're Hot, You're Hot" country singer Jerry Reed), who's to drive the actual payload while the Bandit's Trans Am serves as a decoy for the po-lice.

Only problem is, Reynolds takes the time to pick up Sally Field, who's decked out in a wedding dress and is thumbing a ride on the highway, escaping her marriage to a doofus played by former football star Mike Henry (who'd played alongside Reynolds in The Longest Yard). Henry's father happens to be a foul-mouthed, over-zealous country sheriff named Buford T. Justice (a dynamic, career-reviving, Southern-fried turn for certified New Yorker Jackie Gleason), who makes it his mission to catch the Bandit and foil his delivery of that Coors beer. So then we get nearly an hour of terrific car chase stunt-work from director Hal Needham, a former stuntman himself. Drive-in audiences (and four-wall audiences, too) wouldn't see so many cars pulverized for another three years, when John Landis' The Blues Brothers hit the screen. Next to that and H.B. Halicki's Gone in 60 Seconds, there has never been more wholesale destruction of Detroit product ever recorded on film. This makes Smokey and the Bandit one of the greatest drive-in movies ever (not one of the film's scenes takes place at night, which made it great for drive-ins, as it was hard to see, under the stars, scenes filmed in darkness).

Scripted by James Lee Barrett (The Greatest Story Ever Told) and Charles Shyer (Private Benjamin), the film was tight, funny, and fast. It may seem stupid today--and it is, really. But I defy you to admit you're not entertained at least a bit by it upon first viewing. Reynolds and Fields are a searing-hot couple (they'd go on to a real-life relationship that lasted for four years; together, they'd go on to appear in Smokey 2, Hooper, and the excellent Reynolds- directed comedy The End); Gleason, with his cornpone Southern accent, is ridiculously funny as the bumbling sheriff (I love it, against my better judgment, when he lets loose with the undying catchphrase "I'm gonna barbecue your ass," but my truly favorite scene--one that still makes me giggle like a kid--occurs when Justice walks out of a restaurant with a long stream of toilet paper improbably hooked onto his treasured smokey's hat). Henry also gets laughs as his idiot-boy son, always there making sure his dad's hat is secure (even after the top's been lopped off of their patrol car). Once cast as a villain in Gator, another Reynolds vehicle, Reed is quite charming (his "boogety, boogety, boogety" has become a rallying cry at present-day NASCAR events, and his songs "Eastbound and Down" and "They Call Him The Bandit" have become country classics). And my mom even got to instantly get over her distaste at the death of that dog in Eaten Alive, because Smokey starred a yelping basset hound named Fred as Reed's sidekick.

According to Box Office Mojo's ALL TIME BOX OFFICE CHAMPS adjusted for inflation list, Smokey and the Bandit ended up making more than $408 million, and became the centerpiece for the CB craze of the 1970s. Two sequels followed--the second was just okay, and the third was one of the most hilariously bad movies ever made); it also spawned countless rip-offs. My mom and dad liked it so much they ended up shelling out for a black Trans Am in 1978; now, THAT was bitchin' (though it broke down so much my parents swore never to buy another American-made car again). So, even now, after seeing all the Bergmans, Antonionis, Kubricks and Kurosawas the world has to offer, my fondness for Smokey and the Bandit remains as indelible as my love for fried chicken, cicadas, dogwood trees, and drive-ins.

Film #109: Brazil

It was very much in character for Hollywood—and particularly, the meddlesome 70s/80s-era brass at Universal—to hold a movie like Terry Gilliam’s Brazil back from the masses. Completed in 1985, Brazil was first unspooled to the studio bosses in an infamous screening that resulted in abject anger from those who bankrolled the project; one wonders what they thought they were going to get, since we have to assume they read the film’s incendiary, ultimately Oscar-nominated script by Gilliam, Charles McKeown, and Tom Stoppard (from an uncredited idea by Jabberwocky screenwriter and former Help! writer Chuck Alverson). Or, hell, maybe they DIDN’T read it; they just didn’t have the time. At any rate, Universal’s confidence evaded Brazil from day one. Their complaints: the film was too long, and incredibly depressing, while also falling very much on the weird side. So they demanded the film be recut and the ending be changed before they’d put a penny up for distribution and marketing. Gilliam did take the movie into the editing room, excising twenty minutes from its running time. But he flat out refused to change its heartbreaking ending, which he rightfully felt was integral to the story.

So the film sat on the shelf, a victim of spite. And it sat and sat until Gilliam decided to take unprecedented action. First came a lawsuit against Universal. Then Gilliam started bankrolling embarrassment-aimed ads in the trade papers asking short-sighted then-studio-head Sid Sheinberg (the villain of this story) when he was going to release Brazil. This infuriated Sheinberg, who dug his heels in for a long-haul ruckus. “It happens with every film,” Gilliam later said. “There comes a moment where the money and the creative elements all come crashing together. Everybody's under a lot of pressure, and everybody is panicking about what works and what doesn't. And the studios and the money always have one perspective and the creative people have another one, and usually what happens is a lot of compromises get made.”

However, at the end of that metaphorical rope, and refusing to compromise, Gilliam—like Brazil’s bureaucracy-battling protagonist—heroically made a final end run around the studio, stabbing it right in its barely-beating heart. He stole a print of his movie and showed it to the members of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. And they, naturally, went nuts over it. Seeing this as their own chance to become giant-killing jacks, the organization handed this unreleased movie its year-end Best Picture award, along with Best Director and Best Screenplay. Gilliam was now in unprecedented territory. Sid Sheinberg had been vanquished; Universal then had no real choice but the release the film as is (but this didn’t stop them, maddeningly, from selling a gutted version of the movie to television; you can see this ludicrous, criminally-slashed version on Criterion’s monumental three-disc release of the film, which also includes critic Jack Mathews laudibly detailed documentary adaptation of his 1987 book The Battle of Brazil).
  Finally, and happily, justice was served. I balk at imagining what would've befallen Brazil had Gilliam not stuck to his guns. The movie is brilliantly twisted satire, brain-stimulating enough to be comparable to only a few cinematic works (2001, Donnie Darko, and Eraserhead, among them). Upon his third film as a solo director, Gilliam’s main claim to fame at Brazil’s release was as the one American among the band of Brits in the Monty Python comedy troupe. Though he performed with them sparingly, his biggest contribution had been as their master of animation for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, their legendary TV show that ran from 1969 to 1974 (to today, his Python work demands to be seen as one of film's most distinctive animation purveyances; absolutely no one can imitate it without being called out). Before then, the Minnesota-born Gilliam had been a writer/illustrator associated with the notoriously wrathful Harvey Kurtzman—the 50s-era Mad magazine mastermind—with whom he worked on Help!, Trump, and Humbug, three of Kurtzman’s short-lived 60s humor magazines (which also ran pieces by Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Jay Lynch, Skip Williamson, Frank Frazetta, Jack Davis, and many more underground/Mad comic figures). It was at Help! that Gilliam met John Cleese, and there his association with the Pythons was born.

It’s Gilliam, as the creator of the Pythons' bizarre cut-out-based animation as well as a notably enriched style of live-action, who gave the troupe their unmistakable visual character. As the co-director of 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 1979's Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and 1983's Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, he was mainly charged for each film’s unique appearance (his directing co-hort, Terry Jones, was primarily involved in directing the actor’s performances). Before Brazil, Gilliam had struck out on his own only twice, with Jabberwocky and Time Bandits. Both were wonderfully sick variations on basic myths and children’s stories, strewn with cruel jokes and strange, sometimes frightening but nevertheless forward-thinking scenes barely suited for children. Time Bandits has, since its 1981 release, become a cult movie, but in being uncategorizable as a kid’s or an adult’s film, it was at the time a box-office disappointment in spite of its stellar cast (Sean Connery, David Warner, Ralph Richardson, Michael Palin, Kenny Baker, John Cleese, and Shelley Duvall). The faintly light mood with which Time Bandits begins is always being battered by an unrelenting yet very funny grimness. However, both it and 1977’s Jabberwocky are fitting predecessors to Brazil; the gloom that hovered over those two films is securely anchored down in Gilliam’s 1985 movie, but it’s intensified by iron-clad batches of irony, symbolism, allusion, grotesquery, satire, and battalions of remarkable shot set-ups that, by themselves, make Brazil unforgettable.

Nothing is what it seems in Brazil, and that extends to the title itself. The country--itself far from Heaven--never makes an appearance, unless one wants to postulate that the puffy clouds that open the film hang somewhere above the South American coastline. The song that’s warbled over this shot ("Aquarela do Brasil" by Ary Barroso, sung here by Geoff and Maria Muldaur, the latter being synonymous with the 1974 smash hit "Midnight at the Oasis"). The 1939 composition first appeared in Disney’s 1943 animated feature Saludos Amigos (its sixth), and it's ubiquitous in Michael Kamen’s beautifully lush score; it’s a tune about a paradise eons away from the heavily-industrialized, never-named English city that serves as Brazil’s imposing “Somewhere in the 20th Century” setting. Things are run here by an oppressive hybrid of government and big business called The Ministry of Information, unstoppable in its ruthless debt-collecting, in its harsh culling of political undesirables, and in its ill-starred dehumanization of the Everyman, represented here by the passive, dreamy, unambitious Ministry rubber-stamper Sam Lowry—our hero, played impeccably by a nervous, restless Jonathan Pryce.

The movie literally explodes into life with a crew of Ministry stormtroopers ransacking the flat occupied by tough girl Jill Layton (Kim Greist). Here, they cut a pointless hole in her floor so the huns can make a more spectacular entrance into her downstairs neighbor’s apartment. It’s here that the Buttle family "lives," crammed into a small space, about to celebrate Christmas (Brazil stands with Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut as one of the most unlikely movies with a Yuletide setting). Wrongly accused of being an anti-ministry terrorist (after a “bug” falls into a Ministry machine sending out an APB out on a “Mr. Tuttle”), Buttle is fitted with a choking straight-jacket and is whisked away from his mortified wife and kids, definitely to a deathly fate.

Later, it’s Sam who discovers that a dreadful mistake has been made. Utilizing the M.O.I.’s amusingly retro-fitted technology (the computers here look like typewriters with their innards hanging out), he finds that it was Tuttle, not Buttle, who’s been targeted for termination. It’s Sam’s wimpish, outwardly intimidating boss Kurtzmann (named, of course, after Gilliam’s one-time mentor, and played with supreme comic timing by the great Ian Holm; there's another character in the film named "Mr. HELPman," played by Peter Vaughn, and I have it on good authority that Brazil is an extended homage to Harvey Kurtzman, right down to the cluttered art direction, which mirrored Kurtzman's office). The cowering Kurtzman charges Sam with the unfortunate task of consoling and reimbursing the Buttle family. In the film’s most shattering moment, Mrs. Buttle (Sheila Reid) is apoplectic with grief, with an outpouring of grief to which the almost-dead-inside Sam hardly knows how to respond. Here, Sam gets a field-trip look at the misery his all-powerful agency continually doles out to the innocent and guilty alike. And it’s here that Sam also gets his first glimpse of the woman who’s been the focus of his winged dreams: Jill Layton. However, the feeling isn't mutual. She sees him as what he is: an agent—albeit an unwitting one—of evil. Thus the breakdown of Sam's barely-held loyalties begins.

Sam is steered even further away from his blissful yet throttling ignorance when, in the middle of the night, his air conditioning conks out. After putting in a no-avail call to Central Services, the duct-working subsidiary of the MOI, he accepts the help of Tuttle—yes, that Tuttle—who doubles as a rogue heating specialist and freedom fighter. It’s notable that both Tuttle (Robert De Niro, in a welcome and rare post-Raging Bull supporting role) and Jill are the only two characters in Brazil who have American accents, whereas the most despicable (including Michael Palin as Sam's torture-happy best friend, Bob Hoskins as a by-the-books Central Services repairman, Jim Broadbent as a butchering plastic surgeon, and co-writer Charles McKeown as a nosy Ministry cohort) have impossibly thick British accents. There’s an obvious correlation to a certain 18th Century anti-Brit revolution to be had here; it's almost enough to make one wonder why, if this his view of the English, Gilliam gave up his American citizenship long ago. Anyway, it’s through both Jill and Tuttle that Sam begins to see the government he for which he toils as the monster it truly is, and thereby experiences the freedom he’s been longing for in dreamy interludes where he visions himself as a great, armored man perpetually in flight and fight against a massive metal samurai (his phantasmagoric vision of the Ministry).

As with all great films, Brazil can viewed many times before all its riches can be processed. It is clearly about the eternal battle between the oppressed and the oppressors. And while it makes us root for the freedom-fighters, it also makes us recoil at their bloody tactics (Brazil is a particularly interesting movie viewed today, in this light). Here, terrorism is seen as a long-awaited liberation from a government whose power has been woefully misused; however, it’s also portrayed as a method of rebellion that can spell out only doom--or at least an unhonorable victory--for its perpetrators and their targets. There are no winners here, and this makes Gilliam's POV brilliantly elusive. In addition, surely, Brazil is a put-down of out-of-control, circuitous technology and disgustingly egotistical higher-classed values (symbolized by Sam’s mother, the disgustingly vain and well-connected Ida Lowry, played with obvious relish by Katherine Helmond). Brazil is a condemnation of a people who’ve buried their roots, who’ve failed to see the merits of life’s basics, and are consistently being drowned in the denials provided by television, wealth, face lifts, commercialism, sexual fantasy, computers, and artificiality.

Though Gilliam and company make much comic hay of this setting, they portray a world in which one can’t breathe; as the years go by since Brazil’s release, it looks more and more precient, much like Dr. Strangelove and Network before it. It hit the Reagan-flavored mid-1980s as a political and moral warning laced with a poisonous comic timing that alludes to a long list of previous influences, including 1984, The Crowd, Potemkin, Casablanca, Duck Soup, Metropolis, Alice in Wonderland, and Mad Max, to name but a few.

However we wish to interpret Brazil (and many have been perplexed and turned off by it—almost as many, I’d bet, as have embraced it), none can deny that, at the VERY least in a technical and directorial sense, it succeeds magnificently. It builds a ridiculously complete world (and did so at the bargain price of a $9 million budget; it’s still one of the most expensive-looking movies I’ve ever seen). Its time period is unpinnable. Everyone is fabulously dressed in 1930s garb, but is surrounded by art director Norman Garwood’s Oscar-nominated and often decrepit futurism. It’s not surprising to see actors donned in vintage fedoras wandering around an apartment perfect for Blade Runner, and then to see another set of tomorrow-decked players splayed about in an environment that could've been constructed for an old Warner Brothers gangster pic. Roger Pratt’s gleaming photography--a strangling stir of realism and expressionism--meanwhile transmits more information than any boring exposition could ever unleash. And ILM's George Gibbs contributes many moments of stunning special effects work.

All of this belies an often sickening illogic that makes Brazil one of the most memorable of movies; it’s ironically sort of easy to feel sorry for those beleaguered Universal bigwigs who, in all fairness, probably didn’t know what had hit them upon seeing the film for the first time (if the film was once 20 minutes longer than it actually was, the execs probably did a good thing by making Gilliam retire once again to the editing room because, as it stands, Brazil is a steamroller at almost 2 ½ hours). With its head-splitting final 30 minutes, in which ending after ending unfolds, with Sam’s fever dreams folding in on his “reality,” Gilliam’s movie is truly unlike any other. There are few scene transitions (the director loves the shock cut); there are few people to truly like (only Jill and Tuttle remain unscathed); the film builds a suffocating uncertainty that keeps us on edge until its last moments. By the time these unfurl, the viewer’s comfort zones have been obliterated by blast after debilitating blast. The cinematic parade that is Brazil’s notorious finale is so unforgiving in its pace and intensity that one emerges feeling rather irreparably dented by it. Brazil is always pulling us in different directions. It's a place where evolution is devolution: moving forward is nothing more than stepping way back in Gilliam’s onscreen destruction--and celebration--of fascism’s warm and awful glow.

Film #105: Heaven Help Us

In the spring of 1985, it was John Hughes' The Breakfast Club that captivated all the kids. Steeped in undying high school archetypes seen through a garish 80s lens, and alternating between malcontent trans-clique discourse and annoying over-statement (did Hughes really have to include a stoned Emilio Estevez yelling so loud he shatters glass?), The Breakfast Club sucked up millions at the box office and spawned a tenacious cult following (American Teen, the 2008 documentary, cunningly aped the film's concept and poster). But there was another movie released in the spring of '85 to which I've returned umpteen times more (actually, I've only seen the Hughes film once since then and, even though I somehow own a Breakfast Club poster signed by Molly Ringwald, Anthony Michael Hall and John Hughes, I think even less of the movie than I did as a disapproving college student).

Michael Dinner's Heaven Help Us, perhaps, didn't have a prayer at the box office because (a) it was about Catholic boy's school (which, I suppose, turned some kids off, and those Catholics who did see it probably hated--or maybe adored--its anti-Catholic bent), (b) it had a terrible ad campaign (The Breakfast Club has a much cooler poster), and (c) it was set in 1965, and absolutely no one with red leather zipper jackets, poofed-up hair, and Madonna-esque lace wanted to even think about '60s squares in black ties and school uniforms. But director Dinner (who later went on to nab an Emmy for helming one of his many Wonder Years episodes) concocted a film adorned with a funnier script (by Charles Pupura), a far more enticing ambiance, and a better cast. It's a cherished sleeper of the period.

The intense Andrew McCarthy (who would go on to a superior John Hughes effort called Pretty in Pink) plays Michael Dunn, an introverted new charge whose arrival at New York's St. Basil's Boys' Prep School shakes things up for the inmates already there. From the get-go, he's on the wrong side of the school's demanding headmaster Brother Thaddeus (Donald Sutherland) and in cahoots with St. Basil's bad-boy teacher Brother Timothy (John Heard, as always superb). His first friend is high-voiced fat boy Caesar (Malcolm Danare) and his first enemy is hammerheaded bully Rooney (Entourage star Kevin Dillon, then most notable for being Matt's little brother). It's to the movie's credit that it doesn't cleave too long to this set-up: Rooney actually turns out to be vexingly amusing, and Caesar soon smacks of the supercilious dork for whom you often feel pity but whom you also enjoy seeing get the shitstick once in a while. The episodic Heaven Help Us chronicles half a year in the lives of these three boys and two more hangers-on: masturbation addict Williams (wild-haired Stephen Geoffreys) and quiet Corbett (an early role for McDreamy himself, Patrick Dempsey). Plotting is thankfully eschewed and the movie largely becomes a collection of moments sweet, funny, and harrowing.

The sweetness largely hails from Dunn's female relationships: with his death-obsessed little sister (Jennie Dundas), and with Danni (Mary Stuart Masterson), the weary teenager who runs the local dive where Catholic kids listen to jukebox 45s and smoke forbidden cigarettes. Dunn's careful relationship with Danni obliterates her tough veneer, culminating in a gorgeous, though short-lived, love affair. Their first kiss, under a rainswept Coney Island boardwalk and scored with Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long," is pure grace; we all wanna experience romantic moments like this at least once in our lives.

Right from the prankish opening credits, Dinner's film surely brings on the funny: horndog Williams rams into swooning ecstasy when, as an altar boy, he assists in communion for a visiting girl's school (the montage of pretty chicks sticking their tongues out to receive the body of Christ must have really needled devout Catholics); Caesar continually produces a doctor's note (which he eventually has laminated) to escape corporal punishment; Rooney is gratifyingly administered a nightmare night of teenage misadventure; and a memorable cameo is delivered by the lisping, always-reliable Wallace Shawn as an apoplectic brother who, as commencement to a high school dance, administers an astonishing harangue against pubescent lust.

Most surprisingly, Heaven Help Us becomes almost unbearable to watch in its cruelest moments. If the film has an all-out villain (besides the school itself), it's Jay Patterson, indelible as the sadistic Brother Constance, palpably absorbed in administering brutal humiliations to his students. Constance is a (perhaps) cliched character which Patterson slaps into life with his flared nostrils, thinning hair, and sniffing malevolence. When I first caught this movie in a half-full screening room, its raucous finale had everyone cheering with unbridled scorn for this self-righteous prick. With his roles here, in Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 84) and Street Smart (Jerry Schatzberg, 87), Jay Patterson will always be, to me, one of the most maddening of movie assholes.
All of this is photographed with with a lovely overcast sheen by Czech cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek (If..., Ragtime, Amadeus, The World According to Garp), and scored mostly with Motown and Atlantic soul shots (I guess they couldn't afford the Beatles). Dinner's unassailable cast includes veteran character actors Philip Bosco and Kate Reid as well as debuting future stars Dillon, Dempsey and a young Yeardley Smith (whom you'll recognize as the provider of Lisa Simpson's unmistakable voice). Hell, it even has a cameo by Calvert De Forrest, better known to Late Night with David Letterman fanatics as Larry "Bud" Melman! With this, Heaven Help Us runs with the best teen movies of the last 30 years, joining a pack that includes Peter Yates' Breaking Away, Hughes' Pretty in Pink, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, Greg Mottola's Superbad and Amy Heckerling's twin genre achievements Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless. Like all of those films--and like teenagers themselves--Heaven Help Us is often crude, but often lovable, too.

Film #97: Napoleon Dynamite

A reprint here of the interview Dark City Dame (of Noirish City fame) conducted with me in November 2009 regarding one of my favorite movies of the 2000s!

DarkCityDame: Let me start off by asking you this question: why did you select the film Napoleon Dynamite to be #23 on your list of the top 30 films from this decade?

Dean: It's really quite simple: no movie of the 2000s made me laugh harder. I cackled all the flippin' way through. I marveled at Jon Heder's mouthbreathing lead performance, at Aaron Ruell's whiny Kip, and at Jon Gries' way-too-confident Uncle Rico. I laughed at the bargain-basement shirts Napoleon wears, his shaded drawings of ligers and farting unicorns, and at Napoleon's obvious bliss at miming the flapping bird wings during a sign-languaged classroom performance of "The Rose." I laughed at that memorable dialogue, and those rigid camera set-ups. And I seriously almost burst a blood vessel guffawing at Napoleon's on-stage dance toward the film's end; that's a split-second in a theater where I thought I might choke from glee (it's a movie that benefits from seeing it with an audience, like any great cult film does). I mean, I could go on and on talking about all the merry details of this movie, extraordinarily well-directed by Jared Hess. Have you seen it, Dame?

DarkCityDame: Yes and no. While channel surfing I’ve stumbled upon it in the middle and watched it to the end.

Dean: It’s an easy movie to pick up on in that way. It makes for perfect television. I think one of the best things about Napoleon Dynamite is that, in its ease, it refrains from making fun of its characters. It finds them funny, yes, but it treats them as humans, not just as the butt of hateful jokes as in a movie like Welcome to the Dollhouse, for instance, which I think is quite cruel to its nerdy characters (and which is a movie I absolutely abhor--one of the meanest of all time, in my opinion, though that may be part of its point). By the end of Napoleon Dynamite, we find we've fallen in love with Napoleon, Pedro (the terrific Efren Ramirez), Kip and Deb (Tina Majorino) and even the wonderfully-named "villain" Summer Wheatly (Haylie Duff, Hillary's sister). Hell, I even loved Summer's always-incredulous-faced boyfriend Don, smartly played by Trevor Snarr (every time that guy came on screen, even as part of a huge crowd, I smiled). This is a movie that really has no villains. It's just too lovely for that. 

DarkCityDame: I liked the character portrayed by Jon Gries--Uncle Rico.

Dean: Yeah, he was nominated for an Independent Spirit award for his work, which is superb. On the DVD commentary, Gries (the son of Emmy-winning director Tom Gries, who did Helter Skelter, Will Penny and so much more distinguished work) talks about how he had to eat a lot of bloody steaks in his role as Uncle Rico. Rico is definitely a meat eater. Only problem is, the actor's a vegetarian, so he had to spit the steak out after each take. If you notice, you never see Gries swallowing anything. And that character of Rico is such a gloriously phony, lovable tough guy. I adore how he screams really high-pitched when Napoleon nails his ultra-cool van with some rotten fruit! And the goofy little fey pose he offers up when Deb takes his photo is pure genius. It make you root for him! 

DarkCityDame: Hahaha!

Dean: And that scene in the dojo with Diedrich Bader beating up on Kip is a scream (Jon Heder says that's the scene he had the hardest time keeping a straight face with during shooting--if you look closely, you can see Heder in the background trying to hide his laughter). But nothing trumps the moment where Napoleon performs on stage. It's strange to say but it's true: it's one of the most electric dance numbers since Travolta hit the floor in Saturday Night Fever! Seriously, no one in modern movies has such smooth and original moves as Heder sports in this sequence. And I absolutely adore the gentle love affair between Deb and Napoleon. Their slow dance together, to Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time," where he comments on Deb's dress sleeves, saying he likes them and that they're "real big," is something so sweet that I look forward to every time I see the film. And that final shot of them playing tetherball together, all to that transcendent closing song, with the school's water sprinklers spritzing delicately in the background, is utter cinematic perfection. It's the kind of perfection that makes me weep with joy. 

DarkCityDame: Too bad Roger Ebert wouldn't agree with you!

Dean: Really? Ebert didn't like the movie?

DarkCityDame: Nope. Check out what he thought over there on Wikipedia about this film. But Rotten Tomatoes gave it the thumbs up!

Dean: Okay, I'm reading it now. Hmmm...I see Ebert also compares it to Welcome to the Dollhouse. He writes: “Watching Napoleon Dynamite, I was reminded of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Todd Solondz's brilliant 1996 film starring Heather Matarazzo as an unpopular junior high school girl. But that film was informed by anger and passion, and the character fought back. Napoleon seems to passively invite ridicule, and his attempts to succeed have a studied indifference, as if he is mocking his own efforts.” But, like a few of the critics on Rotten Tomatoes, I don't think this is the case at all!

DarkCityDame: Why not? 

Dean: Napoleon is an individual who's perfectly happy with the world he’s set up for himself. (The film's first lines: "What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?" "Whatever I feel like doing! God!!") Look, he's always trying to improve his station in life--he could use a few more bucks and a few more friends. But he's got plenty of confidence and comfort on his own. Shit, no one could get on stage and dance like he does at the end of the movie without a lot of inherent confidence. Napoleon hears a different drummer, that's for sure, but it's no prob. He's got Deb and Pedro and his hobbies and his pride, and even without that support system, he's devised some way of coming out on top. And, contrary to what Ebert thinks, he fights back quite handily against anyone who's dumb enough to confront him (it's right there in the film). Geez, I feel like the girl in Welcome to the Dollhouse plays the victim a great deal more; she's just a boneless punching bag in that movie. I dunno. Ultimately, it sounds like Ebert wanted this to be one kind of film and it turned out to be another, and THAT'S what he's angry about. He just couldn't get into the goofy spirit of it all. It's too bad. I respect his writing tremendously, of course. However, I never agreed with him every single time. In fact, I should say that Ebert often gave the benefit of the doubt to movies I felt should've been dismissed outright. Why he couldn’t offer a kind little film like Napoleon Dynamite more of a chance is beyond me; it just does not compute. Maybe he was infuriated by the dumb yuks Hess was successful in getting, while ostensibly smarter pictures failed miserably in this effort. But, personally speaking, this sweet, doofy, well-crafted movie represents the rare instance in which I revel in essentially idiotic, but somehow smart spirits. Napoleon Dynamite is like a math conundrum that's already been solved, and yet its solution is so simple few can come close to comprehending it, except to say that it results in truth.

DarkCityDame: Was this film released through a major studio? I wonder how well it did at the box office?

Dean: Fox Searchlight picked it up after it got tremendous buzz at Sundance. They paid for the song rights to the soundtrack, and for a tony credits sequence masterminded by graphic design artist Pablo Ferro, who did the credits for Dr. Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange and special sequences for Midnight Cowboy and Being There. About the only thing I don't think really works in Napoleon Dynamite is the post-credits epilogue Fox shelled out for after it became a hit, which has Napoleon attending Kip's wedding to Lafawnda (a fun, unusually mature Shondrella Avery). This epilogue feels like what it is--a stuck-on afterthought--and it has relatively few laughs (though I do greatly enjoy Kip's lame-o wedding song, which really makes it worth watching). But this is a minor point to pick at. In the end, Napoleon Dynamite is to me the most engaging comedy of the past 15 years. It's right up there with This Is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride in its quotability. And, not that it matters, but it did tremendously well at the box office, making $46 million worldwide on a $400,000 investment, easily becoming the most profitable movie of 2004.

DarkCityDame: I know that it's quotable. You can find a ton of t-shirts decorated with lines from it.

Dean: I know! "Vote for Pablo." I'd wear that shirt anywhere. That's because the film rings so true, even if it is delivered in a highly unusual manner. "My lips hurt real bad." I like that line especially. And I swoon with laughter when an irritated Napoleon has to go out and feed his grandmother’s llama--“Tina, you fat lard, come and get your food. EAT THE FOOD!” In fact, Hess (who penned the script with his wife Jarusha) staunchly admits much of the film's moxie hails from he and his brothers' own high school experiences in Idaho, where the movie was filmed (and, yeah, that’s Hess' mother’s llama). That basis in reality shows up in surprisingly believable ways, even though this is a very stylized movie. Actually, I should note here that I find Napoleon Dynamite quite beautiful to look at, which is not something one can say for most comedies. Every cloud in the sky, every Idaho hill, every telephone wire and chain link fence seems to be just-so placed in the frame (and the camera never moves!). Amazing! And I love the way everything in this small town is fifteen years behind the times. They have the internet, but the Dynamite family still doesn’t have a cordless phone? They still look at videotapes? They still listen to '80s music and sport '80s fashions? It's all so wonderfully weird, and yet not outside the realm of possibility.

DarkCityDame: It's almost like they're caught in a time warp!

Dean: Exactly. In fact, one of the funnier moments in this rather episodic movie has Uncle Rico, who painfully longs to be back in his '80s-era football hero days, bringing home a "time machine" which Napoleon tries out. (In the DVD commentary, Hess said that he and his brothers once purchased a machine very much like this--"Wait, let me add the crystals"--and all it did was shock them!)

DarkCityDame: Hahaha!

Dean: Good stuff. The DVD has a terrific commentary and lots of nifty extras, including the 10-minute black-and-white short that inspired the film. And Napoleon Dynamite has a splendid soundtrack, bedecked with a poppy original score by John Swihart. I'm not much a fan of '80s music, but the film sports some choice picks from that era, as well as from the '90s and 2000s (a White Stripes song, "I Can Tell That We Are Gonna Be Friends," opens the film). And it closes with “The Promise,” a catchy one-hit-wonder by When In Rome that I just can’t get out of my head after the film's over. I love that song so much I think I’ve got it committed to memory. Ahh, that ending to this movie...it's majestic.

Dean: I have to say, I've found myself wishing Hess and company would mount a sequel. With so many needless continuations out there, I could see so many places for this character to go! Here's a perhaps pedestrian idea: I’d like to see Napoleon travel to a bigger city in Iowa to compete in a tetherball or dance championship or something like that (although that might be a little bit too much like those bad sports comedies that have been coming at us in the wake of Dodgeball). Still, I bet Hess could make it work (now, it's too late, though--the actors have aged out of the roles). I liked very much Hess' wrestling movie follow-up Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black, even though it wasn't half as engaging as Napoleon Dynamite (Gentleman Broncos came much closer to matching Hess' original promise, but by the time that accomplished film arrived, it certainly felt like the director's heat had diminished). Admittedly, he and his wife Jarusha (the writer of the more recent Austenland) might have to try very hard to deliver a work as good as this one. But I still maintain high hopes for them both. Napoleon Dynamite is just a really charming, uproarious movie throughout. I'm passionately rooting for the Hess team to rise again, because I believe in my heart that subsequent works could be comedy of the first order.  Actually, in my mind, Hess is already at the apex.

Dean: And I have to reiterate: That dance scene at the end. Oh my gosh. It's perhaps the greatest solo dance scene in extra-modern movie history. And the way it functions as a kind of unexpected Rocky-like ending is just like nothing one could have imagined. It's so simply filmed and, other than that strikingly zoomy A-Team scored sequence, is the only time we see any movement from the camera. Jon Heder, moving with such exquisite precision to Jamiroqui's incredible "Canned Heat," while in those moon boots that were so beat up on set, they were nearly falling apart--oh my lord...what a dynamic bit of movie making we have here. Just incredible. I have no further words for it. I'm done.

DarkCityDame: Thank you, Dean for talking to me about this incredible comedy.   

Dean: Thank you, Dame, for giving me the opportunity to go on and on. Napoleon Dynamite is a piece of film work I could gush about endlessly. Literally, every shot in this movie makes me wanna go on a rant about how moving and hysterical it is. It's strange--there's a part of me that tells my soul it's a movie made for me, and only me. That so many others love it--worship it, even--just completely devastates me with silly ecstasy.