This week, Joe McCulloch plugs in to Source Code, Tim O'Neil takes issue with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell, and Tucker dives deep into the past, with Samurai 1, Lonely Are The Brave, Blackmail & Michael.
Source Code
I dunno, probably spoilers - yeah, spoilers, let’s be safe here, 2011
Joe McCulloch
The title here probably affected me on some half-conscious level, but while this new stripped-down sci- fi/suspense thing is easy enough to trace in non-interactive conceptual lineage -- it’s Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day, versus Terrorism -- I mostly registered it as the latest among feature films to grapple with gaming devices in a visible manner, picking up from last week’s Sucker Punch and following 2010’s prolific crop of Inception, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Enter the Void, etc. Jake Gyllenhaal is a hero pilot whisked away from his Afghanistan service to a strange, chilly capsule, where his “Al” -- Vera Farmiga, whom I will always remember triumphantly kicking pre-teen Isabelle Fuhrman in the head, because cinema can be immortal -- cryptically instructs him as to an odd mission: leaping into essentially a parallel dimension to occupy the body of one Sean Fentress, hapless traveler on a commuter train that exploded a little while ago on Earth Prime, and puzzle out what was really going on before a subsequent, imminent terrorist threat from the same source can eradicate Chicago. If he fails -- and, from the point of leap, Gyllenhaal has only eight minutes of space before the train blows up -- it’s back to the capsule and then back to the stage from the beginning, knowing the layout of a little better, dying and trying, and hoping, initially, that continues don’t run out.
It’s an effective little piece, making good use of its somewhat limited locations -- director Duncan Jones has a good reputation for this, going by reactions to his prior, debut feature, 2009’s Moon, which I haven’t seen -- with a tight little script worked over so that the ‘starting over’ theme recurs in just the right places, from the mystery villain’s wicked scheme to the extremely apt small talk initiated at the start of every life by Michelle Monaghan, an acquaintance of the obliterated host form that was Sean Fentress whom Gyllenhaal gloms onto as a living beacon of everything in space-time worth living for, intuiting that she’s a splendid, altogether decent person from the fact over the course of many eight minutes - and naturally she fancies him in secret! Er, Sean she fancies, although clearly not enough to act on it until Jake Gyllenhaal hits the physiological scene, all flawed but stout-hearted -- there’s even a little action vignette warning about the perils of racial profiling, but, y’know, not too hard, since structurally these little boo-boos are shown to be for the greater good -- and hurting from unresolved issues with his father, voiced by special guest Scott Bakula, because seriously: this thing’s a lot like Quantum Leap.
Except, eh - part of the fun of that show was the idea of some goofy/heroic adventure guy popping into your head like a Super Guide to sort your important shit out for a while, the long-game being the hope that the hero would eventually find his way back to his real body. With Source Code, the very slick, smooth, economic storytelling prods you firmly toward hoping that poor hero Jake Gyllenhaal will get to stay in one of those parallel worlds and smooch Michelle Monaghan without their bones burning dry. Since the main suspense plot resolves with a solid reel of footage left to go, we’re inundated with theme-completing bromides, urging us to seize the day and live life to the fullest, and appreciate the life-affirming magic of stand-up comedy.
Me, I kept thinking about Sean Fentress, who’s like the bland dude who gets dumped by the heroine in formula romantic comedies, but on a cosmic scale. This guy not only gets replaced, his very consciousness is extinguished. I mean, I hope he doesn’t have a wife or anything, and he really wasn’t just platonic chums with an unrealistically hopeful Michelle Monaghan, ‘cause Jake Gyllenhaal sure as hell doesn’t stop to check! Ah, fuck it. That’s the kind of stuff that gets cut as ‘unnecessary’ in screenplay revisions or after test screenings. Stuff’s not thrilling, and this is a thriller. No, even better - this is a video game! A real video game, a dip-your-virtual-balls-in-a-felled-opponent’s-mouth red meat video game! Yeah! Not some fucking two-bit indie browser freeware art project or frou-frou Love-de-Lic bullshit! Fuck you, crytard! This is GAMING, this is fucking smash-mouth winners-fuck-the-prom-queen end of stage VICTORY, this is HEROES, and HEROES TAKE whatever the FUCK they want! In a SENSITIVE way!!
I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell
Does it Matter In The Least?, 2009
Tim O'Neil
Sometimes it's late at night and you're too tired to pay attention to a real movie and yet still awake enough to be game for another. Sometimes you end up picking a movie almost at random, the worse the better, simply a way to kill an hour and a half in pleasant company. And when it's over, sometimes you find yourself wondering, "why did I do this? I think the time would have been better spent watching violent pornography, al Qaeda recruitment videos, or even How I Met Your Mother."
But I have long operated under the guiding principle that you can learn as much or more from bad art as from good or great art. What, really, can the average commercial filmmaker learn from Citizen Kane or Seven Samurai? Maybe something or other, but the actual level of craft and attention to detail is simply beyond the capabilities of all but the most talented artists. You can learn a lot more by watching mediocre to bad movies with a critical eye. In terms of practical knowledge, you learn a lot more by correcting and learning from the mistakes of others than by attempting to emulate the masters. This may not be a truth universally acknowledged - until recently fine art education was always predicated on painstakingly learning to copy the work and techniques of the masters. But the most valuable experience I ever had as a writer was spending two years as a copyeditor for Popmatters. Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald can certainly inspire you to want to be a writer, but it's not until you spend a few years wading knee-deep through shit that you can actually begin to pierce the veil of style by relearning the essential fundamentals of technique over and over again until they are completely reflexive.
Watching I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is a bit like smearing your face with bacon grease in the hopes of raising up a fine bumper crop of carbuncles. You certainly get everything you bargained for, but it ends up as far more of a mess than you could ever have hoped for in your wildest dreams. By which I mean: this movie was terrible, but it was terrible in such an awesomely awkward way that I can't help but think that the experience was nonetheless enriching.
The problem with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is simple and central. To wit: the movie is based on the 2006 book of the same name, written by a man named Tucker Max. Before I sat down to enjoy his cinematic masterpiece, I knew almost nothing of Max besides the fact that he was apparently a repulsive human being. This presents a huge obstacle for any screenwriter unlucky enough to land the gig of adapting this material. Popular books have always been and will always be fertile territory for Hollywood for the reason that they offer fully-developed story concepts that have already proven their popularity and appeal in the marketplace. A best-selling book has already proven its value as a commercial property. The problem with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is that the book itself is, from everything I have seen, fairly reprehensible. Everything Max does meets with condemnation and protests from NOW and any number of like-minded organizations. A Hollywood accountant with no understanding of the greater cultural context might be excited at the prospect of optioning a bestseller with a proven track record by a highly charismatic semi-celebrity author. But then the studio reads the book and realizes they would have to somehow sell a story that does for gender relations what The Turner Diaries did for fertilizer sales.
I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell was independently financed in part by Max himself, and produced by Richard Kelly, the brainchild behind Donnie Darko. Credit to Hollywood for realizing that this was a non-starter. The screenplay is credited to Max himself along with a man named Nils Parker, who according to IMDB possesses no other film credits. So we are left with a movie that was partly financed by the author, produced by the auteur behind Southland Tales, and written by the author and some other dude with - I repeat for good emphasis - no other film credit. Somewhere along the line maybe one of these people should have stepped back from the precipice and realized that the world didn't really want this movie to be made.
Making movies is hard, I do not doubt. I've never made one, but I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it off the top of my head. And yet somehow Max decided that this was a film that needed to be made, and needed to be made so badly that he was willing to do it himself. I guess if you put your own money behind your vanity projects there's something at least vaguely respectable about that, but at the end of the day it's still a vanity project.
The central problem behind the movie is Tucker Max himself. Building a story around a reprehensible character is very difficult, and Tucker Max is no Humbert Humbert. He barely qualifies as sentient, to judge by the evidence of this movie. My guess, from watching this film, is that the actual content of this movie has been slightly bowdlerized. (I'm not going to go back and do the research necessary to verify this assumption, and I hope your'e OK with that.) The reason why I make this assumption is that, during the course of the film, nothing particularly reprehensible actually happens. Don't get me wrong: lots of stupid things happen. But anyone watching this film in hopes of finding in Tucker Max some sort of role model will come away sorely disappointed, or will dedicate themselves to a lifetime of idiocy. The filmic Max is no predatory avatar of "rape culture," he's a moron who insults women and gets slapped for his troubles.
In fairness, if you were charged with the task of making a film version of your life you would probably iron over some of the more regrettable details in favor of presenting a more attractive and appealing version of reality - especially if you wanted to make a movie that would conceivably appeal to a larger audience than the few hundred thousand people who read your blog and bought your books. Perhaps I'm at something of a disadvantage, not having read the book on which these stories are based, but I just can't believe that the Max in the book is anywhere near as ineffectual and boneheaded as movie Max. We hear about Max's great sexual conquests throughout the film, but all we actually see is Max repeatedly trying to pick up women and bars through by insulting them. That's a strange tactic. Does it work in the real world? I don't know, I've never really been able to pick up women in bars using flattery and conversation, so I have no clue how successful insults and hectoring would be. Is that what his books are about? Picking up women by making them hate you? I thought the whole idea was to make the women hate themselves so much that they can set aside whatever pitiful shreds of self-respect their child-molesting stepdads left them with and spread their legs like they swallowed a quaalude factory?
Tucker Max is, basically, a fool, and what is all the more puzzling is that the real Tucker Max decided that the best way to portray himself on film was as a fool. Howard Stern, in Private Parts did a good job of making himself seem like a regular family man who just happened to luck into a career doing raunchy radio. (The fact that his family dissolved a few years after the book and film is neither here nor there - Private Parts did a fairly decent job of burnishing the reputation of someone who was frequently characterized, like Max, as hopelessly reprehensible.) Max, however, isn't likeable at any point in the film. Put aside the constant string of insults leveled at the women he encounters, he is just plain mean to his supposed friends. The plot - such as it is - revolves around Max hijacking two of his friends on a road trip to a famous strip club whose main attraction is a promiscuous midget. One of the friends is still suffering the aftereffects of a bad breakup and the other is about to get married. You can probably guess how this unfolds: the first friend finds lasting love in the unlikely context of a strip joint, while the second friend finds the strength to resist a shrewish fiancee through the power of male bonding.
You'd be right in the first case but, shockingly, not so much in the second instance. (I'm not even bothering to try and remember these characters names, again, I hope you're all OK with that.) The second dude's fiancee is remarkably reasonable, in that she does not actually object to her man visiting a strip joint - what she objects to is him spending time with Tucker Max. She perceives with no trouble whatsoever that Max is a toxic person who nevertheless consistently manages to convince the people around him to do monstrously stupid and self-destructives things. The real erotic axis in this film is not Tucker Max and the women with whom he sleeps - he only has sex on-screen with a single person, the aforementioned midget. It's between Max and his friends, who are completely devoted to their friend and entirely unable to say no to him about anything.
There is, I believe, a certain age group for whom this story might hold some resonance: early-to-mid-twentysomething males who have moved away from their parents and family but have not yet begun to seriously pair with members of the opposite sex. They are extremely insecure about their place in the world and very much intimidated by women in their peer group, particularly those women who appear to be far more confident and professionally secure than the men they date. Men in this situation cluster together like packs of bachelor dogs, held by common insecurities and usually easily manipulated by alpha males who have figured out the art of exploiting the vulnerabilities of the weaker members of their peer group. None of these people have grown up: they may have jobs and they may even have girlfriends but they still play video games and organize their social lives around sports and drinking. The problem with I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell is that while we're supposed to believe Tucker Max is some manner of master Svengali, he's just a self-destructive idiot who's going to be left in the cold when all his other male friends get into serious long term romantic relationships with mortgages and car payments. In this context, while (movie) Max may have a fairly enjoyable ride in his twenties, things will be pretty desperate by the time he reaches thirty and all of his former sycophants have married and he is not welcome in their homes because he always leaves a greasy film of silt on the toilet seat.
All of which is to say: I don't think the real Max is an idiot, because he's managed to wring two successful books out of elaborate dick stories. That takes a bit of ingenuity. Based on the movie, though, he's hardly a threat to the republic: he's an idiot without a shred of self-awareness. (There's a tacked-on epiphany moment at the end of the film that is supposedly about Max growing up a little bit but is actually just about him being even more of a narcissistic ass than before by upstaging his friend at his friend's wedding.) I wonder, does the real Tucker Max understand just how stupid he looks in this film? Ir would be one thing if he were actually some kind of credible rogue: assholes are always appealing, which is why Samuel Richardson had to repeatedly admonish his readers against sympathizing with Lovelace even though he was a kidnapper and a rapist. Asshole are charismatic. But Max isn't really an asshole, he's just an ass. There's a big difference. Again: it's really hard to build a story around a truly reprehensible person. At least Humbert Humbert has a strong personality. Max is just a douche.
This movie was ill-conceived in every conceivable way. It's a vanity project from a person who apparently needed to neuter himself in order to come off as not completely reprehensible, but ultimately succeeded only in rendering himself an idiot. I don't deny the possibility that Max may actually be an idiot in real life, but I seriously doubt he's the holy fool his movie paints him. But this was actually quite an educational experience: it's hard to write a story. It's hard to write convincing non-cliched characters and have their actions dictate the plot and not the other way around. There is a brief hint of picaresque charm at the core of the story that might, under a more experienced hand, have been shaped into a convincing raunchy comedy. But of course, no one with a shred of talent would have had anything to do with this story or (real life) Tucker Max. Although these are supposedly true stories from Max's own life, the events are themselves unconvincing, strung together with coincidence and convenience. They've been pasted together for the purpose of shaping Max's stories into the rough shape of a romantic comedy - it even ends with a wedding, for goodness' sake. But the movie is just a flabby mess, and I don't believe a word of it.
If I taught screenwriting, I think I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell would be a fantastic pedagogical tool. It's the product of such patent incompetence that it should be mandatory viewing for all up-and-coming filmmakers. Seriously, if you want to make movies, watch this movie. Ask yourself how they could have made a better movie. Watch this movie with a notebook and make a note of every stupid thing that happens in this movie. Task yourself to never make any of these mistakes yourself. Go forth, and do better. As hard as it must be to make a movie, it can't be that hard to make a better movie than this.
Lonely Are The Brave It's a great movie, actually. Sad, funny, terminally hip and weirdly ignored, there's more than enough reasons to be familiar with it beyond wanting to play the anti-western western trivia game with this as trump card, but the most fascinating moment--the one that stood out for this guy--was when the movie ended with the final half still left to go. There, right in the middle, in a carefully framed sequence from a movie that was clearly filmed with one eye on the clock and the other on the budget, Douglas says goodbye to Rowlands. It's layered onto the screen like a hotel painting, a storybook's conclusion to a prideful cowpoke fairy tale, and even the music spells it out: this is where these stories usually end. But then it keeps going, because it's not that kind of story. It's a nastier kind, no more honest but far more cruel, and with wits to match between two powerhouses, dark violence and George Kennedy's bared rodent teeth left to go, there's much more movie to come. The wheels that crush, the screaming of a horse: your favorite American myth, blasted to extinction in the rain under the bored eyes of housewives. All that's missing is an American flag, ritualistically gobbled to shreds by obese children.
Where's That Sumbitch George Kennedy, 1962
Edward Abbey was a mean son of a bitch, but he was an interesting son of a bitch. His plodding, ungainly books--most of which consist of rage-against-the-machine anger delivered in polemic by pro-environmental/anti-government men--don't scream for a movie the way so many other authors do, and that's maybe because Abbey was a sort of anti-hippie hippie, a guy who lived outside the margins while still hating most of what was around him. His books don't appeal to mass audiences--the misogynism is too naked, the contempt too crude, the nihilism too loud. The Brave Cowboy--the book Dalton Trumbo adapted for the studio-named Lonely Are The Brave--is a little softer around the edges, but not as much as one might expect. That truck of doom, carrying death and toilets? It's in there. The matching personalities, worn classic-style by Kirk Douglas and the always brilliant Walter Matthau? That too. The most pointed change is (unsurprisingly) the one delivered by Gena Rowlands, who adds a layer of much-needed ravenous depth to Abbey's carbon copy bitch-goddess.
Samurai 1: Musashi Miyamoto
You Know, For Kids, 1954
Being the first of a trilogy; being one of the many spokes of the wheel of fictional Miyamoto depictions: this is the one kissed with the touch of American acceptance, in the form of a 50's Academy Award and an eventual Criterion release. While it stars Toshiro Mifune, who would cement his immortality through the many films he made with Akira Kurosawa, Samurai is also populated with a healthy backbench of Japanese acting talent, including some who would leave this set to go across the street and film another competing Musashi film, released around the same time. This one is pleasant, a little slow in parts, but if you're the type of person who likes your Gone With The Wind type of movies to have a bit of snob cred, Samurai 1 is a great place to plant a flag. The second part is reportedly about a duel, and if it's anything like the hillside-to-river battle that sees Miyamoto send a solid 20 to a screaming end in this one, then consider me committed. I like violence.
Blackmail Michael
Hitchcock, Motherfucker, 1929
It's been called Hitchcock's first sound film, which is technically true, but one has to wonder how important that sound can be if the film in question was made to play in both theaters-with-speakers as well as those without, which is what Blackmail also happens to be. It's also a bizarrely acted movie--the female lead's accent was so incomprehensible that what you actually see in Blackmail is a woman pantomiming speech while an off-screen actress yelled the lines. That's all paper tiger shit though. Blackmail's great, a nasty mindfuck of a movie with a no-bullshit brilliant conclusion that succeeds in making any of Hitchcock's future happy endings look like an artistic compromise. And while she doesn't speak up--not really, at least--our happy lead delivers a nice near-her-career's-end performance that proves how good she'd gotten at doing it without words, right there at the beginning, when she grabs a knife and takes a lecherous painter down to a new fresh hell. "Death to artists" is what it says on this one, and brother, it says it loud.
It's That Sumbitch Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1924
Michael is one of Dreyer's earliest movies, and based off a viewing of it and what the world's film library has to offer for comparison, it's one of his best. A somewhat melodramatic take on betrayal and stubbornness, the movie follows the growing distance between an aging painter (the "Master") and his prized model and erstwhile student Michael. In keeping with the period tendency towards explaining every aspect of a movie's plot on the lobby cards before the film began, try this: The Master dies of a broken heart, and Michael comes across as an ungrateful cad. There is a woman, and she's a horrible beast of vindictive greed.
The film itself doesn't explicitly push either of these things--the woman in particular never seems as selfish as the film's own textual history claims she is, and the obvious homosexual component of the relationship goes unacknowledged--but they're inescapably obvious to any viewer, and 1924 couldn't have been any different. But how cares? If lots of plot were the high water mark of quality, people would study Luc Besson's The Messenger instead of Dreyer's letter-best take on the same material, and this one's no different. You come here to see a terrifying close up on eyeballs made by dropping black bars on the lens, and you stick around for what might be the first example of that classic show-the-eyes/show-the-screaming-audience's-mouth/now we know he's losing it montage. This is the beginning of film, the first signs of dawn, historic. There can be no substitute.
-Joe McCulloch, Tim O'Neil, Tucker Stone, 2011
I remember producing a promo for documentary about Kirk Douglas for HBO, and he said that "Lonely Are the Brave" was his favorite film he starred in. It's excellent.
And if you like pre-Odd Couple Matthau, I've enjoyed Charade and Fail Safe.
Posted by: Jonathan Baylis | 2011.04.05 at 22:41
Yeah, Charade/Fail Safe kick ass. Hopscotch though--oh man. You see that one? Him versus Ned Beatty? That's one for the time capsule.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2011.04.05 at 22:57
With Source Code, I kept thinking it was really lucky that Sean Fentress was white, because otherwise the movie might have had to be about something, which would obviously have ruined everything.
Posted by: NoahB | 2011.04.06 at 12:07
I don't know-- the fact that Sean Fentress's soul got obliterated by Bubble Boy was one of the more interesting things about what was otherwise a really mediocre movie. It's kind of only acceptable if you don't believe there's any such thing as a soul to begin with. Otherwise, he just stole some guy's life-- like, if that guy has parents, he's going to have fake loving them, which... is the movie I'd rather have seen...
I was more confused why he took Michelle Monaghan on a first date to that big mirror thing in Chicago. Isn't that just some tourist thing? Do people in Chicago just normally go to that, for romance? "I want to take you to the Sears Tower, girl, and then a nightcap at Shedd Aquarium." That might get a 15-year old to second base, but those characters seem a little old to be that impressed by the big mirror thing.
Also: if they're both teachers, and they just decided to take the day off-- for no reason since the girl is oblivious to the near-bombing-- was there just a school full of unsupervised children wondering what the hell is going on somewhere off-screen?
Posted by: Abhay | 2011.04.06 at 15:25
Is that the only movie Edward Abbey has ever written? Even if not I have to get on that shit pronto-"The Monkey Wrench Gang" is one of my favorite books.
Posted by: Chris Jones | 2011.04.07 at 15:21
I'm not totally confident, but I believe this is the only movie based off of one of his books.
Posted by: Tucker Stone | 2011.04.08 at 00:59
There was also a Fire on the Mountain TV-movie made in 1981... But that would be it.
Posted by: AComment | 2011.04.08 at 08:43
Also, the people in that Michael picture are very, very pretty. Who are they? I've found zero pictures of the actors involved...
Posted by: AComment | 2011.04.08 at 17:53
Yeah, the Bean is pretty much just a tourist thing. It's a cool thing to check out, but not exactly a romantic night-spot. I haven't seen the movie; I'll have to watch it just to spot the Chicago sights. The Chicago version of the AV Club had a neat article where they nitpicked the accuracy of the train routes and other local details. That's fun, at least for those of us outside of New York or LA, where that sort of thing is probably pretty tiresome by now.
Posted by: Matthew J. Brady | 2011.04.11 at 11:35