Too Many Movies Tuesdays: Yeah, So The Name Doesn't Really Work

This week, Joe watched Avatar & The Bride of Macon, Witzke watched House of the Devil, 44 Inch Chest & Bad Timing, and Tucker sat through Jumper & Wall Street.

Avatar
Directed by 3-D, 2009
By Joe McCulloch

God, you make me want to puke you dirty blue sleaze. That’s right: YOU. Star of the biggest money movie ever, a nice populist back-patter of a hegemonic apologia, sedition-scented and mush-mouthed to ensure zero offense and maximum return from the time-tested formula of revolution, applicable anywhere. It must be pretty fun getting the girl and saving the day, wonderful subversion of paternalistic narratives, that, but I think there’s something you forgot, scumfuck - what about the pterodactyl thing you left behind?

Oh come on, asshole, you recall that whole becoming a man business where you pick a bird and the bird picks you and then you have hair sex and you’re joined for life? The pterodactyl thing that came to your aid when nobody was your friend?! Sure, it’s the bird you THREW ASIDE like GARBAGE after SHARING HAIR SEX and PROMISING, PROMISING you’d be together for life. Maybe “life” means until you need a wilder, sexier RED flying pterodactyl thing to prove to all the tribes you’re a scary conquering man -- and by the way, congrats on becoming literally the sixth entity in Pandora history to unravel the “jump on the large bird from above” enigma, I presume Mario and Luigi were the third and fourth -- never mind the prayers you say when shank a land beast in honor of the unbroken circle jerk of life-sharing energies, you pompous twit. I suppose raising beasts to the level of Na’vi as riding partners and cannon fodder god pawns doesn’t involve caring at all about their feelings!

Well I saw everything, litterbox, and by the end I wished I was seeing A Man Called Horse, but damn if you wouldn’t even feel those hooks - you don’t feel anything outside of your braid penis, you mighty warrior king messiah, I saw how the evil corporate guy played by Spike Jonze from Lost in Translation was just walking along with the rabble en route to exile at the end, because yeah, you don’t observe class and shit, sure, it’s a metaphor, but what about reality? What about the tears, dirty blue sleaze, and I don’t mean in the big 9/11-by-way-of-Ax Men climax. I mean pterodactyl thing tears, you monster, a shamed, weeping pterodactyl, watering the cold wood ash in isolation, searching, praying to Eywa for the soft flicker of a blue tail on its bare and battered back and the recollected taste of that first, brutish flight. Well I guess you’re really a man now. Fuck you, Jakesully. FUCK YOU.

44 Inch Chest
Starring Every English Gangster Character Actor That Was Available The week They Shot This, 2009
Review by Sean Witkze

Basically the Hit part two: Middle Age. Consisting of Ray Winstone giving yet another jaw-dropping performance but still being shown up by Tom Wilkinson and John Hurt talking about screwing bitches and how guys are fucking cunts. Like a stage play about love and marriage, but kept from being fucking pablum by having John Hurt utter the line "Nah, its not that cunt I'm thinking of, its that other cunt, cunt that he is" and you see the other actors struggling to keep a straight face.

Jumper
Can't Imagine Anybody Gives A Shit, 2008

The most redemptive thing about this arduous piece of garbage is undoubtably the chance to watch Michael Rooker get back to that thing he does so well, which is wear filthy clothing and look like a drunk. There's absolutely nobody--not even Harry Dean Stanton--who can look as horribly shitty as Michael Rooker, he's the king. It's partly the face that he has, a marbleized structure that looks like its been hammered onto a lopsided bathtub--looking at him for longer than a second, it's impossible to believe that his skin is anything but painted on. He's a giant Lego person, made out of rocks. According to an old article that the AV Club ran, Jumper is based on a YA novel that was apparently designed as a parable about the evils of child abuse, a piece of trivia so odd it's got to be true. In one of the film's many idiotic decisions, this aspect of the story is almost completely abandoned (despite casting the one guy who was born to play that role), supposedly because the filmmakers believed that American audiences still hadn't figured out if they liked Hayden Christensen or not.

House of the Devil
Starring Tom Noonan For Like 3 Minutes, 2005
Review by Sean Witzke

1982-throwback horror movie with Tom Noonan. It’s pretty okay, but I watched it two days ago and all I can remember of it is that the Jamie Lee Curtis-circa-Halloween look of feathered hair, plaid, tight jeans is still pretty hot. Or my video store frequenting high school years completely fucked me up on determining what things are sexually attractive.

The Baby of Mâcon
Directed by Peter Greenaway, 1993
Review by Joe McCulloch

Simple pleasures are important to me, like the scent of a freshly mowed lawn, or the crackle of hot oil at the local sandwich shop, or knowing that Ralph Fiennes went full frontal and got disemboweled by a divinely inspired bull the same year as Schindler’s List. Not that the Academy could have taken much note; to this very day, The Baby of Mâcon has never been officially released in North America, not to cable, not on vhs, and just forget about dvd - distribution woes purportedly related to an exceedingly brief stint of Miramax success have frozen several of painter/novelist/filmmaker/confirmed RanXerox admirer Greenaway’s most popular works in prior generation purgatory, which is awfully ironic considering that I only came to know the man’s works via The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover making the rounds in high school as one of those weird, excessive tapes kids would pass around. I suspect the bit with a nude Julia Ormond wielding a giant scythe and staggering around a bloody manger would have gone over well.

Being a Peter Greenaway joint, it is of course wildly allusive, conceptually tangled, self-referential as holy fuck-all, and calculatedly excessive in a manner that luckily suggests a logical enough extension of an entirely calculated world. This isn’t much of a leave-it-to-chance feature, adopting a formal three-act structure to present a type of mystery play, in which a miraculous and godly child is born to barren, hopeless 15th century Mâcon, prompting older sister Ormond to declare herself a virgin mother, which rouses the attentions of the exploitive Church. But the play is also taking place in a different historical period, 1659, during a formal visit by the person and extended court of Cosimo III de' Medici, a powerful, thoroughly feckless manchild who cannot distinguish reality from drama, transforming the show into more of a masque, with actors portraying (satirically contemporary) virtues and vices (such as Fiennes boorishly enlightened science-savvy Bishop‘s son) enveloping the ‘modern’ characters in a show, which I must say alludes crisply to Greenaway’s own oft-stated dreams for a wakened, engaging cinema, even as he draws procession/call-and-response parallels to Catholic Mass. Could this be… religious fervor?!

Of course, Greenaway is an avowed atheist -- and I think I just sinned in bringing the artist’s personal disposition into consideration, to say nothing of favoring mere content over enduring form! -- fixated as usual on elaborated metaphor and allusive aesthetics at the cost of terribly clear character motivations or whip crack plotting; coupled with the anti-clerical bent of the drama, it’s a bit like Buñuel with the cleverness replaced by Cleverness and a whole bottle of vinegar poured on top. Amusingly, the entire project can be taken as a massive repudiation of Greenaway’s own prior feature, the maximalist Shakespeare exploration Prospero’s Books, going so far as to cast a John Gielgud-looking guy as the drama’s prompter and dressing him in Prospero’s garments and having him speak the holy babe’s words for him, but there is no overwhelming scenes-in-scenes or joy of surrendering enmity anymore - a second irony is that the picture’s disposition recalls the long-tracking stylized interiors of that money-making Cook, complete with atrocious scenes of revenge and bile-dripping social commentary.

And by “social” I mean the tenuous at-least-we’re-all-in-one-room ‘society’ of an audience. I cannot believe Greenaway wasn’t aware of his reputation in some circles by that point as a rotten old misogynist, which drops an extra hammer into the eventual cacophony of Ormond murdering the child and being sentenced, with much gleeful pomp, to be put to death after her chastity is stripped by being raped thirteen atop thirteen and thirteen plus thirteen times thirteen times, 208 rapes in total, just after we’re gleefully informed that the actress ‘playing’ the sister is, in fact, really going to be raped, there in the present of the 17th century, much in the way Ralph Fiennes really was apparently gored to death in the manger. Why this happens is never 100% believable, or even clear, but that’s never the point with Peter Greenaway - it’s only the most painful explication of his ideas, as Ormond is raped over and over and screams and screams for minutes and minutes, off-screen, the camera touring the expressions of the audience and detailing the gruesome fates of other characters, and eventually backing away from forcing us to sit through the entire count to 208 - counting, naturally, is one of the director’s beloved modes of categorization, structure, the form that survives content in spite of its futility at capturing the mess of human experience.

But is it all just a horrible, hateful, intellectual shock show? That’s where its untouchable reputation comes from, but Greenaway, no doubt, has thought that through. The rape is the only violence of the film that is not shown; what is instead shown is the expressions of various characters, aware or unaware of various levels of reality, often accordant to their social position, noble and blithe or religious and forgiven of anything. The implication is that explicit onscreen violence can be ably imagined, through what it represents is power imbalances accordant to religious faith and the position to dictate the details of said faith.

It’s a despairing work - Helen Mirren doesn’t shoot anyone at the end. Instead, the townfolk of the 15th century carve the dead child’s body to gory bits for veneration and Eucharistic consumption, while the 17th century nobles remain clueless or forgiven of anything they might have done. The only answer, fittingly, is in form, in recognizing the allusion and suggestion of religious mystery, and becoming powerful from that. Really, if The Baby of Mâcon is anything, it’s almost (gasp!) irrationally emotional, a seated-position, hands-on-the-back-of-the-head scream into the legs over the inability of people to process metaphor, be it usage of violence or religious observation, and it is therefore the subject matter perhaps most flattered by Peter Greenaway’s specific cinematic approach. In the end our knockoff Prospero once more bids the audience to clap, and the camera pulls back to allow the 15th century cast to bow, then pulls back more as the 17th century cast also bows, to us, though Ralph Fiennes is still in religious vestments and Julia Ormond is dead and bloody, and the head of the child is suspended over this whole gathering of saints and patrons in the manner of the miraculous, fertile egg hanging in Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna, unless there’s a higher quality allusion I’m missing. Liberatore, perhaps?

Wall Street
Directed by Oliver Stone, 1987

The best piece of film criticism that was ever written about Wall Street was when Ben Younger included a scene in Boiler Room where a bunch of wanna-be Gekkos sat around watching the film like it was some kind of lodestone of brilliant thought, screaming along with every one of its lines. Sure, Wall Street was, boiled down, another ode to the working class and their estimable ethical stance, another chapter in the way Hollywood filmmakers like to praise a group they've never been a part of by waving their fingers at the revolting behavior of the rich, but that was Younger's point: you can tell a bunch of day-traders that they'll never make it to the top unless they sell out their own father, you can show them the bad guy getting caught, but if the only thing in your movie that's alluring is the sight of Michael Douglas chewing his way through brick and mortar, then that's what'll get everybody's cock to stand at attention.

(The same thing happened--immediately--with Tony Kaye's American History X, a film whose first hour or so has become ritualistic viewing for creepy Neo-Nazis. As long as you shut it off before it gets to the whole "I got raped" and "Let's tear down our posters", Kaye's main accomplishment, and Norton's best scenes, are all about how being a psychopathic Nazi is a Totally Outrageous way to impress the fuck out of most of your family while making Eliott Gould feel bad.)

That isn't to say that Wall Street is without its moments, just because all the moralistic bullshit in it is depicted with the hackneyed predictability. Oliver Stone's movies are always worth something, if only because Oliver Stone actually uses drugs that are more interesting than alcohol and weed while creating movies to make up for the fact that he's basically a fucking loudmouth with no real ethical stance on any issue whatsoever. (And while having an ethical point of view isn't usually a requirement for any type of creative act, it's pretty damn useful if the only subjects that interest you are the controversial ones.) The film plays with all kinds of weird split screen cuts, it's up-to-the-minute style choices (now dated) are remarkably on point, with the vagaries of suit choices tied directly into where each character exists on the film's financial ladder, and the film's basic truths--that being successful at that level of finance is tied up into looking good, being a man, and being incredibly dishonest--remain on point now as they ever were, only we've exchanged raiders for bankers. Every "good" aspect of the character's is attributed to stupidity or the backwardsness of age, with all moral choices predicated on a financial success that will hopefully destroy whatever it robs.

In the end, the most surprising aspect of the film, the thing that was once a sign of Stone's storied inability to see the busted trees in his giant forest, is near its end. There, Michael Douglas meets Charlie Sheen in Central Park, implicates himself in hilariously stupid fashion (to someone he knows has been arrested and no longer has any reason to protect him). In the past, the scene read only as another case of bad writing--but now, with the continued evidence mounting up to show how stupidly corporate money whores (and their pet politicians) have provided and chased ever dwindling bribes in the pursuit of ever crashing profits, the pathetic truth has emerged: they're certainly greedy, and they're certainly thieves, but they're also bone-wrenchingly dumb motherfuckers. Their defense--that they didn't know, that they never really understood what they were doing in the first place--it isn't a lie. They would walk into a field, in the middle of a Desperately Meaningful Rainstorm, and they would tell you whatever they could, any story they had. It's all they have to share. Stupidity is the only thing they have left to claim.

Bad Timing
Directed by Nic Roeg, Starring The Other Guy From Simon and Garfunkel, 1980
Review by Sean Witzke

Nic Roeg’s editing style is completely designed to fuck with you, the viewer. In The Man Who Fell To Earth and Don’t Look Now, it was an effect to heighten the films, which had actual plots. Bad Timing plays at being the story of a doomed romance and a spy thriller, and even a detective story, but all of those things are dodges on Roeg’s part. This is actually a dissection of a relationship gone, all turned inside out and broken. The movie stars Roeg’s real-life wife Theresa Russell and Art Garfunkel as the couple, and an incredibly-on-his-game Harvey Keitel as a detective sent to investigate Russell’s suicide attempt. The way Roeg lays the story out, that we already know the ending in the first minute of the film, watching Russell and Garfunkel in an ambulance, him apparently shellshocked and her close to death. This story’s going to be about how Garfunkel drove her to this, how he didn’t stop her. The story follows along that line most of the way, and gets more and more complicated as to who’s fault it was or what either person’s intentions were – Garfunkel is a psychologist doing psych ops on the side for the US army, Russell’s estranged husband is a soviet diplomat. Theres even an explicit callback to The Third Man that is just there to mess with the film fans in the audience, all sorts of stuff. Keitel’s character is just there to provoke and ask questions as Roeg freestyles on cutting – memory flashes, non-sequiter segues – until Keitel drops the bomb on Garfunkel and the viewer, that this isn’t a rote investigation on a suicide, it’s a rape investigation. Garfunkel’s the perfect lead for this – nice face but creepy, emotionally detatched intellectual look, sensitive modern man of the 70s. And, when it gets into it, exceedingly nasty. Roeg knew what he was doing, splaying open how twisted something simple as two people getting together can be, and Keitel getting worked up at the end is sight to behold for how small he plays it. And if we didn’t get the point of the film, Denholm Elliot walks in and gives us a one-sentence Psycho-stlye moral at the end saying that it’s hard to love a difficult woman. Music is pretty great too.

-Joe McCulloch, Sean Witzke & Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Tucker Stone]

I laughed pretty hard at that Mario & Luigi joke.

[TimCallahan]

Surely everyone now agrees that Stone is at his best in Natural Born Killers precisely because he doesn't even have to pretend to take an ethical stance in that movie and he can just go berserk in love with cinema itself.

It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when everyone thought Platoon + Wall Street = Great Stone and NBK = Terrible Stone. Those people were always wrong.

[Jordjevic]

So yeah, I don't know if anything else held the title before, but Joe's bit on Avatar? Favorite piece of writing on the movie, ever. Because seriously, that lizard! That's like just leaving the robot in the spaceship to die because Oh, He's Just a Machine even though he is like totally a character, but nope, only the empty sack of a protagonist and his token boob-haver get to leave.

[sean witzke]

Tim - Killers, the second half yeah, you're right. The first half is way too on the nose, but once Tommy Lee Jones shows up that movie becomes something else.

[Nathan]

Height of Oliver Stone hilarity for me was on the DVD for Patton where he essentially blamed the movie for Cambodia cause Nixon saw it to raise his spirits. So stupid you can't make it up.

on WS, writing wasn't that great but the performances justified me not breaking it when I finished it

[Nathan]

Wasn't SLJ in Jumper? I vaguely remember him using a cane or something to hit Hayden in the trailer.

Also agree on Stone's movies being overall interesting even if they shouldn't be. I mean JFK is just one huge clusterfuck but it's well made. But yeah Water Bottle Jesus was pretty bad.

but on the plus side he made Salvador which I think is the only movie that has ever been made in the land of forefathers.

[Deco]

W was good; best thing to come from the Bush II years.

[nrh]

This may well be apocryphal (it's hard to tell true from false where Greenaway is concerned), but story has it that "Baby of Macon" was actually supposed to be a full opera, somewhat in the style of the batshit crazy "Rosa: A Horse Drama" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2whTYfK_dM), with a full libretto by Michael Nyman. Of course, around this time the two had a massive falling out and they never worked together again (Nyman has basically said they never will), and thus that weird sense of void at the heart of "Baby" -- there really is a sense that the piece comes together completely in the few scenes where music starts playing.

Great review though, makes me long for that never made film Greenaway was planning, about a medieval surgeon traveling Britain, dissecting corpses in an attempt to find the anatomical resting point of the soul. He scrapped it due to a combination of necrophilia and heavy prosthetic make-up with a low budget leading to necessarily low-lighting and therefore diminished commercial prospects...

[James]

That Jakesooly sure has some puss on him.

[Nick]

Didn't the red bird fly off at the end of Avatar, leaving Jakesully to go back to his scorned blue bird?

[Nathan]

Avatar needed more Quaritch

[Jog]

Nick - Yeah, they always come slinking back.

nrh - I always liked that Rosa excerpt; it makes the whole thing seem like total bedlam, which isn't Greenaway's posture at all - even when the plots don't make a lot of sense, I've always found everything he does to proceed with rigorous sense. If you haven't heard it, the whole opera is available on iTunes (as is a later Greenaway/Louis Andriessen collaboration, Writing to Vermeer) but I'd advise tracking down Greenaway's 1993 book version - it served as the basis for the opera's libretto (I think it was written concurrently with the show's development), but it's actually a you-are-there novella in which Greenaway describes the opera's performance as he envisions it, complete with running thematic commentary and momentary leaps into the minds of other members of the audience. It's a little like reading his screenplays, which tend to be very narrative -- especially Prospero's Books, since it's SO visual, and the speaking text isn't his -- but to a much greater extent.

I've never actually seen that tv movie of Rosa, though; I don't even think it was ever released to home video. A bunch of Greenaway's made-for-tv works have fallen through the cracks, like his potentially amazing one-hour Charles Darwin movie:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVgqVxPsQ14

And yeah, I also read that Baby of Mâcon was going to be a Greenaway/Nyman opera (in the University Press of Mississippi's Peter Greenaway: Interviews collection), although Greenaway describes it as kind of a passing notion he had in the '80s, which he later brought up with Andriessen, though he eventually decided it'd be overcomplicated for the medium... I imagine the differing layers of reality could get really tricky on stage. I actually think the decision to go with diegetic period music was a very clever way to divert attention from him and Nyman breaking up after Prospero's Books... totally fitting with the style of the movie too. (It's only a play... with music!)

[nrh]

As far as TV Greenaway goes, "Act of God" is the one to watch; "Darwin" is good but over-extended at an hour. "Death in the Seine" is a disaster, as is TV Dante (even Raul Rouiz's installment is a disaster, though, so the whole project might have just been misbegotten). The last is at http://www.ubu.com/film/greenaway.html , along with "4 American Composers" (Robert Ashely!), though you all have probably found that already. For the rest let's just hope that Zeitgesist made money hand over fist on that dvd of "The Falls"...

[mateo]

Platoon was so boring it hurt to watch. revisit that movie sometime, for real, it dies a million cowardly deaths, with ne'er a heroic exec to simply kill it once, before it ever was born.

Avatar must have really gotten your dander up, joe. Usually I like to come across your requisite f-bomb and simply note it mentally, like a one cuss word search, but you really lay the lumber in that review. I thought you had a quota, and once you drop the bomb, it was back to "diegetic" and ironic nods to Barthes. Who knew James Cameron would be the one to open the carnal flood gates in our staid "critic laureate"?

enlightening as always, even if I have almost never read or saw anything you choose to write about.