Paul Thomas Anderson
March 7th, 2008
“You’ve got a serious artist crush,” Marcy remarked — a statement, not a question — when I sent her a link to a gallery of adorably geeky photographs of Paul Thomas Anderson during the Hard Eight period. Guilty as charged: I’ve been rewatching and reassessing and obsessing over all five of PTA’s films, reevaluating Punch-Drunk Love (which I originally hated), rediscovering the ending of Boogie Nights (much different from what I remembered), and unable to resist the pull of Magnolia even on a matchbox-sized iPod screen.
Sez Dennis Lim:
If the Altman comparisons seem grossly reductive, it’s because Anderson is liberal when it comes to borrowing from the greats. Why not combine Altman’s panoramic outlook with Stanley Kubrick’s formal bravura with John Cassavetes’ messy candor? While Anderson fits the profile of a “hysterical realist,” to evoke the pejorative literary buzz-phrase of a few years ago, his films never indulge in excess for the sake of excess. He’s a born showman—his first three films bore the Barnumesque credit “A P.T. Anderson picture”—but his go-for-broke tendencies are tied to an expansive, humanist impulse.
Lim’s entire appreciation of Anderson is spot-on, and before I swipe his video clips, I’d just like to expand on his last point: seems to me, the unifying theme underlying all of Anderson’s films is the desperate need for human connection. Yes, that’s a cloying phrase, and perhaps that’s why it’s dressed up in such unlikely garb: the incendiary monologues, the sweeping steadycams, the assaultive music, the undulating colors. What all of Anderson’s characters really need is a family, but their real families rarely work: in Hard Eight, Jack’s father is dead, Dirk Diggler’s mom throws him out, everybody in Magnolia is messed up six different ways, Barry Egan’s seven sisters are worse than the furies, and we all know that Daniel Plainview’s an oilman, not a family man.
Instead, Anderson’s heroes create impromptu families. Jack finds a father figure in his father’s killer, porn gives Diggler not just a dad (Burt Reynolds) but a sister (Heather Graham) and a mother (Julianne Moore), too. In Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler and Emily Watson start their own family, and Magnolia ends in an orgy of characters coming home to each other. And Plainview? His salvation would have been an impromptu family with a bastard from a basket for a son and a brother who wasn’t his brother-from-another-mother. That he refused them is the tragedy of There Will Be Blood.
Can’t leave you without another word about Anderson’s breathtaking audacity, and you better believe I’m lazy enough to quote Lim again:
The prominent bursts of music—and the way the narratives rely on musical principles like rhythm, tone, and phrasing—result in a kind of delirious synesthesia. His movies set off a crazy multitude of sensory triggers, leaving the impression that Anderson is working from a larger palette than most filmmakers.
Yes indeed.
Hard Eight/Sydney. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1996. ***
Boogie Nights. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997. ****
Magnolia. Paul Thomas Anderson, 1999. ****
Punch-Drunk Love. Paul Thomas Anderson. 2002. ****
There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007. *****
More from Stu VanAirsdale, who kept notes on his marathon Anderson retrospective. After the jump, videos with choice clips from Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love.
The Straight Story
October 23rd, 2007
Walt Disney Pictures distributed this 1999 film by David Lynch, and that fact — along with G rating, a plot that centers around an old man riding a lawnmower across Iowa, and a certain amount of pigheaded snobbery on my part — are the reasons I never gave The Straight Story a chance. Surely, this couldn’t be the Lynch Lynch fans crave? Grave mistake.
First of all, the movie is marvelous to look at and really drives home what a loss it is that Lynch won’t work in 35mm again. I like INLAND EMPIRE better than most, and the low-grade DV does have its charms, but if you compare it to the pristine, every-frame-is-an-art-print visuals of this movie, you can only grumble.
Grumbling is something you won’t get from Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), the proud and stubborn 73-year-old who, after hearing that his estranged brother has suffered a stroke, decides that it’s time to reconcile. The brother’s in a hospital across the Wyoming state line, and Alvin can’t drive a car — in fact, he can barely walk or see, and he doesn’t want the help of his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek.) So he gets on his riding mower and heads east.
What follows is indeed a straight story, following the lines of the highway and the well-delineated demands of the hero’s journey (but then again, so does INLAND EMPIRE, if you know what to look for.) Alvin meets a runaway girl, a throng of bike riders zip by, and he almost gets killed going down a hill. The way the Oscar-nominated screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney manages to wring meaning and humanity from the simplest situations is a masterclass in drama: one early scene had me biting my nails because Alvin, in the slipstream of a passing 18-wheeler, lost his hat. Talk about high-stakes adventure!
How much Lynch is in all this? Apart from the absolutely beautiful cinematography by Freddie Francis, devoted Lynchians will find the master’s fingerprints all over the details: Alvin’s reckless smoking and taste for strong coffee matches Lynch’s own. The clipped but profound and folksy dialogue sounds like it could’ve come straight from his mouth, the small towns all have more than their share of small town weirdos, and in the final scene, Lynch regular Harry Dean Stanton shows his rugged face.
The Straight Story doesn’t enter any of the surreal dream spaces we’ve come to associate with Lynch’s work, but it nonetheless succeeds in taking us into a unique world that follows its own rules. The performances by Spacek and Farnsworth are top-notch. Farnsworth became the oldest actor ever to get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor; he was ill with cancer during the shoot and took his life the following year. I’ll have to rewatch this soon because I suspect it may merit a fifth star.
The Straight Story. David Lynch, 1999. ****
YouTube has a great clip in which Alvin meets the Deer Woman (Barbara Robertson):
Margot at the Wedding
October 6th, 2007
Noah Baumbach can certainly write snappy dialogue that rings true, but after about half an hour, the characters’ limitations and the improbable storyline of his new family drama had me checking my watch. And what’s up with the bleached, underlit look? Marcy is writing the review for About.com; I’ve got more photos from the press conference with Nicole Kidman, Baumbach, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John Turturro, and Jim Hoberman on flickr.
Margot at the Wedding. Noah Baumbach, 2007. **
The Lion in Winter
August 25th, 2007
“It’s 1183 and we’re barbarians!” proclaims Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn), and she’s got a point. The infighting between aging Henry II (Peter O’Toole), his jailed queen, and jealous sons vying for the crown (Anthony Hopkins, John Castle, Nigel Terry) is some of the ugliest — and most twisted — I’ve ever seen.
Based on a play by James Goldman, the dialogue reaches levels of viciousness usually reserved for Edward Albee, with many more quotable lines than you can digest on first viewing and acting that should never have lost an Oscar to Oliver! or Charly. Like The Ice Harvest, this movie belongs on our list of Top Ten Christmas Movies for Cynics. With Timothy Dalton as King Philip of France.
The Lion in Winter. Anthony Harvey, 1968. ****
The Simpsons Movie
July 24th, 2007
Just in case you somehow managed to avoid the longest-running TV sitcom in American history, do not worry: The Simpsons Movie is careful to include everybody in the fun. In the opening minutes, after Itchy and Scratchy have landed on the moon and everybody in the audience has been declared “a sucker” for paying good money to see what you can get for free on TV, the script introduces every character fresh.
Here’s Homer, the oaf, and Marge with the blue beehive. Earnest adolescent Lisa has a new cause and a new crush, baby Maggie knows how to fend for herself, and Bart–well, Bart should need as little introduction as the “evil corporate mascot” he impersonates with a black bra on his head. In the process, some of the essence that has gotten away from the characters over the years is restored: Lisa playing her saxophone, Bart riding his skateboard through town naked, Homer equal parts stupid, selfish and compassionate with a pet pig that rates its own theme song. Call it “Homer Begins,” call it “Casino Springfield”–you’re not required to know anything about the extended cosmology of the Simpsons to enjoy their movie.
But it helps. As far as I could tell, The Simpsons Movie is stuffed with enough in-jokes and references to past episodes to keep a dozen Internet forums humming for months.The supporting cast seems to include every character who’s ever appeared on the show, and many of them have lines. The animation–the familiar vast fields of flat, juicy color bounded by satisfyingly thick black lines–looks great on a movie screen. For this fair-weather fan, the laughter started during the studio logo (!) and didn’t end until far into the credits. (Make sure to stay for Maggie’s first word.)
The plot? Like most things Simpsons, it loses in the telling, so let’s just say that it’s appropriately large-scale for the movies, and each of the principal characters is tested to the breaking point — as it should be. Beyond that, it’s worth noting that the movie’s villain is the American government. Ruled by a president who’d rather “lead than read,” Springfield finds itself at the mercy of a corrupt official (voice of Albert Brooks) whose response to a natural disaster is even worse than FEMA’s. Clearly, somebody in the Simpson White House doesn’t care about yellow people.
Does The Simpsons Movie achieve the lofty heights of brilliance the show regularly scaled during its mid-nineties heyday? More than just the longest episode, is it also the Best. Episode. Ever? I’m pretty sure it’s not, and I don’t think it could have been. Try as they might, The Simpsons simply aren’t as vital now as they were during the Clinton years, when their whiplash wit, easygoing snarkiness, and compulsive pop referencing influenced an entire generation’s sense of humor. If anything, The Simpsons succeeded so completely that they faded into the fabric of our culture, and going to Springfield for an hour and a half feels a little bit like going home. No matter where you’ve been for the last 18 years, these are some very familiar characters with very familiar voices. Seeing them up on the big screen, it’s like we knew all along they had it in them to become movie stars.
The Simpsons Movie. David Silverman, 2007. ****
Dans Paris
July 20th, 2007
Christophe Honoré’s follow-up to Ma Mere is a loving homage to the French New Wave that stays true to its own emotional core. Heartthrobs Louis Garrell (The Dreamers) and Romain Duris (Moliere, The Beat My Heart Skipped) play brothers who find themselves once again in their father’s small Paris apartment, Jonathan (Garrell) as a student, Paul (Duris) in the throes of depression after his breakup with longtime girlfriend Anna (Joanna Preiss.)
Read the rest of my review on About.com. Dans Paris is scheduled for limited U.S. release on August 8.
Dans Paris. Christophe Honoré, 2006. ****
Instead of the trailer, here’s a scene where heartbroken Paul listens to Kim Wilde:
Eagle vs Shark
May 17th, 2007
An Indie comedy from New Zealand that reeks of the Sundance workshop where it was conceived by writer/director Taika Cohen — which is to say it features a road trip, a quirky dysfunctional family, and a couple of awkward lovers who dress up in silly costumes. Eagle vs. Shark tastes an awful lot like Napoleon Dynamite meets Little Miss Sunshine — with Kiwis!
Lily (Loren Horsley) is a gangly young woman who lives with her brother and has an inexplicable crush on Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), a nerdy loser who makes his own candles. They’re both awkward, they both work at the mall, they have the same upper-lip mole, and they both say “cool” a lot. Their favorite animals, respectively, provide the film’s title.
After Lily and Jarrod agree to have cool sex, the action shifts to Jarrod’s home town, where he plans to take revenge on a former high school bully–by challenging him to a fight. While Jarrod trains with cool nunchaks, Lily meets his family, among them an uncle and aunt who sell training suits out of Jerrod’s old room, which is why our lovers have to pitch a tent in the garden.
And so forth. Eagle vs. Shark may sound entirely predictable, and it’s true that it doesn’t add much to the quirky romance sub-genre, but the film does have one major asset: Loren Horsley. The face of Lily, with its big moist eyes and lopsided smile, is winning enough to make the derivative details surrounding her come alive. Opens June 22.
Eagle vs Shark. Taika Cohen, 2007. **
- The trailer:
Taxidermia
May 3rd, 2007
Yet another Tribeca dud, Taxidermia is one of the most unpleasant movies I’ve ever sat through. György Pálfi (Hukkle) directed this Hungarian Grand Guignol grotesquery that riffs on exactly three ideas: pig fucking, speed eating, and self-taxidermy. Based on short stories by Lajos Parti Nagy, the movie presents the fable-like history of a freakish family. In the first section, a harelipped country pervert who can shoot fire from his dick is looking for ever-new kicks in well-lubricated glory holes and Hans Christian Andersen tales that turn into their porno versions. Imaginative camera work and extreme close-ups create an intense physicality, but they don’t lead to a place you want to follow: by the end of the segment, butchery, adultery, and shocking acts of bestiality and necrophilia sent waves of nervous giggles through the audience. The walk-outs started.
The remainder of the movie tells the stories of the pig-fucking pervert’s offspring. His son, born with a curly tail (ha ha!), becomes one of the Eastern Bloc’s most successful “sport eaters,” an obese guy in a wrestling leotard wolfing down chunky soups and Russian horse sausage from troughs. Between rounds, the competitors power-barf and chat about the groupies in the audience. Like an SNL sketch that stretches its conceit well past the breaking point, Taxidermia milks the “sport eating” joke for more than its worth: there’s the cross-swallow, the hollowed out red star filled with caviar, the threat of lock jaw. It’s as if Pálfi had decided to take the “mint leaf” sequence from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life and turn it into a feature film. There seems to be some satirical intent, but it’s not pointed enough to sting.
The third section is the most repulsive: close-ups of taxidermy in progress were never on my must-see list, and the skinning, gutting, and sawing is made worse by the fact that the pervert’s ghoulish grandson is operating on himself. And I haven’t even told you about the gutted fetus, to be filed under “sights that cannot be unseen.” Not every movie has to be a pleasant experience, but Taxidermia struck me as a pointless gross-out, inventive but without sufficient character or story to support its grotesque excesses.
Taxidermia. György Pálfi, 2006. *
- Filmbrain finds Taxidermia “a fascinating treatise on excess, desire, and the politics of the body.”
- The trailer:
