Q: How many Coen brothers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: They wouldn’t. It would be funnier to film Francis McDormand
and George Clooney do that.
A few months shy of a year, right after winning Academy Awards for best written, produced and directed film of 2007, Joel and Ethan Coen breathlessly churn out something completely different. Such confident, heady, speedy workmanship that is Burn After Reading makes me wonder if the Coens realize No Country For Old Men – a film full of Chigurh – actually won the Best Picture. For a comedy about government intelligence, it is curiously, though appropriately ominous. This coming from the Coen Brothers, I am not surprised. I am overjoyed.
Burn After Reading is not as broad and eccentric as Raising Arizona (1987) and O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000). Don’t get me wrong, it’s still eccentric. The comedy is more subdued like Barton Fink (1991) where the stuck up title character (John Tuturro) proclaims himself a writer of the common man (“The life of the mind. There’s no road map for that territory”.) while ignoring a bumbling insurance salesman (John Goodman) who often says “I could tell you some stories”.
Osborne Cox (John Malkovich from Being John Malkovich), an intelligent analyst for the CIA, is demoted due to his alcoholism. He doesn’t believe that’s the case because he personally examines how much liquor is in his first glass and then pours just a little bit back into the bottle. Such a conscientious act would never be perform by an alcoholic. Osborne quits to the immediate displeasure of his forever exasperated working-wife Katie (Tilda Swinston, who is having a ball here). Fed up with pointless bureaucracy, Osborne decides to write a book detailing his work history and Katie plots to divorce and bleed him dry.
Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) is cheating on his wife Sally (Elizabeth Marvel) with Katie. Both women separately confide to Harry that the other is a “cold-hearted bitch”. He must be attracted to that type. Considering this, it’s funny which target audience both women’s careers aim towards. Being a notorious sexaholic, Harry is flexible toward the other women he meets online and eventually beds. He makes good company. What an adorable adulterer; he schemes rather lightheartedly and is genuinely surprised (and hurt) when those he trusts turn on him. (more…)
The new Nanette Burstein documentary American Teen observes and even tampers with a senior class’ transcendence through a high school (“Total caste system”) in Warsaw, Indiana, a small American town that’s labeled “Red State all the way”. To set the stage, the filmmakers all but steal the compact and diverse grouping of stereotypes from the influential John Hughes cult film The Breakfast Club (1985). We are introduced to five main players attending Warsaw Community High School: Colin Clemens (The Jock), Megan Krizmanich (The Princess), Jake Tusing (The Geek), Mitch Reinholt (The Heartthrob in place of The Criminal), and Hannah Bailey (The Recluse — that’s the trailer’s version — The Rebel). Any moment in American Teen would have been appropriate to play ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ by Simple Minds.
This film is really about the fear that stems in adolescence and stirs into oncoming adulthood. The fear of being defined by your vices and insecurities brought up by those vicious, maddening years of being a teenager. The fear of realizing your idealistic youth spent in middling, regretful pastimes that are glibly called ‘the best years of your life’. It is dominated by the fear that things will not get better while the present is eaten up by internal bitterness. High school can really suck. Thankfully the clouds clear and the sun comes out on graduation day.
Colin, a self-described jock, is a nice enough guy. He plays High School Basketball, which in this town is a populist blood sport. Adults actually wear all-body painted team colors in the gym stands. Its citizens are about as obsessed as the Massillon, Ohio populace was with high school football in the Ken Carlson documentary Go Tigers! (2001) where it is customary to hold back boys to repeat the eighth grade because they’ll be older and bigger as football players in senior year.
The stakes are considerably higher for poor Colin. If he does not get a scholarship to play basketball for a college, he will have to join the army and go to Iraq. His dad says “get the rebounds or it’s the army with a smile”. That’s like when the Romans threw Christians to the tigers! However engaging this subplot is, it pales in comparison with Steve James’ masterful Hoop Dreams (1993), the pedestal of documentary filmmaking that showed us the hardships and brimming humanity of two inner-city Chicago teens playing high school basketball and dreaming of making the NBA. There were scenarios in that three-hour movie that were laced with deep ironies and great joys.
Samantha stands in as the princess who many speculate in awe over her dulled beauty. Her personality is as lazy as Paris Hilton’s facial features. Samantha, for the most part, teeters between indifference and vindictiveness. A scene of her using a firearm in target practice is an appropriate metaphor for her lethality. Early in the school term, she displays a sociopathic mean streak. First she is instrumental in sending an image of a female classmate topless to every other student and then leaves cruel remarks in the victim’s voice-mail. After laughing hysterically, Samantha comes to her senses long enough to suggest “…leav(ing) her a message not to kill herself”. She has the makings of a Sgt. Charles Graner.
Samantha’s repugnant acts escalate until she gets caught, which is her only regret: “It’s horrible to be backstabbed at the last minute”. Very late in the film, a tragic event revealed around Samantha’s troubled family history isn’t enough to garner her sympathy. Finally, Samantha pines for a future where she will be surrounded by healthy, like-minded people. She simply exhausts my versatile ability to empathize. I make it a point to keep away from people like her.
Justin chastises himself harshly for his band participation, his awkwardness, his monotone, his acne-riddled cheeks, and the fact that he plays Warcraft. With the upcoming student dance approaching, he bemoans, “I wish I had a girl to dance with”. He has a pixelated dream sequence where he is virtual warrior who battles monsters and saves the damsel-hobbit in distress. The short remains faithful to that most irritating cliché where the pretty girl’s smile reveals, of all horrors, braces.
Rising above his insecurity, Justin occasionally gets girlfriends who don’t stay for very long and for good reason. Perhaps being the subject of a documentary is a likely attraction considering the YouTube-posting, fifteen-seconds-of-fame mentality. When Justin is dumped in a food court, his ex’s eyes never rise away from her Blackberry. Justin becomes downright pitiful as he lays his cheek against the table and remarks how much grease he has left. Much of Justin’s antics and eventual spiral into excess drinking and kissing strangers in Mexico is off-putting. Justin gives geeks a bad name.
Hanna, the brightest star here, is a rebellious and funky artist who aspires to become a filmmaker: “I want people to remember me. Not work nine to five and die”. It’s a no-brainer. She inspires guys who developed crushes for Juno – that snarky, pregnant goddess immortalized by Ellen Page. Despite her eccentric and lively demeanor, she has taken some very hard blows. After being emotionally pulverized by her then-boyfriend in a very vulnerable position, she is so devastated that she cannot go back to school with him there. Her lengthy absence is called on by the uncaring school administration threatening to deny her graduation if she avoids another day at school.
Exasperated with living in this suffocating town, she talks to her parents about moving to California and is told coldly told by her conservative mother that “(she) is not special”. Hanna is the most likable and most sympathetic and deserving of a better future. She has a stand-off near the end of the film that inspired cheers from the audience and yours truly. Hanna redeems and glorifies the geek title.
Mitch is a guy who plays basketball, likes to socialize, yet isn’t a very interesting person. Midway he has an epiphany about his feelings for Hanna, a girl outside his social circle. She is struck by the surface. After her previous break-up, Hanna embraces her good fortune that a popular hunk would even consider her. While “Love Is In The Air” is sung by John Paul Young on the soundtrack, the two even hold hands while driving in her car. In my notes, I referred to Mitch as a “lucky bastard” and the next page reads “worthless anus-scum” for what he does later. Forget being a heartthrob — Mitch is a criminal.
While watching American Teen, you might find yourself tempted to hum Mountain Town by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. There are some keen details depicting the routine of a middle American high school. There are updates from lame student news videos that are broadcast on thirteen-inch televisions in each classroom. The National Anthem is uniformly pledged every morning. From a Canadian point of view, this seems rather excessive. The parking lot in front of the school building looks more like a shopping mall. Would it be rude to observe that the all-white basketball team has a token black guy? The most chilling observation is a marine and army memorial shrine dedicated to past students who were killed fighting in Iraq.
Director Nanette Burstein has made a moderately entertaining documentary that doesn’t measure up to her previous works On The Ropes (1999), a powerful account about a group of boxers that follows one innocent, Tyrene Manson, into an unjust criminal trial, and The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002), a fascinating memoir depicting the rise and fall and semi-rise of Hollywood producer Robert Evans (The Godfather, Chinatown). The visual flair that drive these stories is well exercised by Burstein; however, The Jeff Danna score for The Kid Stays in the Picture is infinitely more memorable and effective than anything music editors Chris Douridas and Jim Schultz have contributed to American Teen.
Frankly, the material in American Teen isn’t as consistently compelling, but despite a few lags, is rarely dull. Much of it looks as if it were shot like a fictional film with conversation set pieces and double-takes that seem too good to be true. There is a contrivance mostly throughout that feels staged rather than spontaneously captured. I doubt that montage depicting each of everyone’s reaction to a scandalizing image by computer and cell-phone was not rehearsed. Though there are moments I am tempted to forgive, such as Colin’s father sending off his son in a get-up I would never reveal here. Each of the main characters has an animated sequence that visualizes their deepest thoughts. My personal favorite was a piece of stop-motion depicting “Hanna’s Depression” that is like a cross between Caroline and Clive Barker.
American Teen is worth seeing at least once; however, it is not in the same league as this year’s most prestige documentaries Standard Operating Procedure and Man On Wire. Watching these teenagers graduate, I wonder if Burstein would revisit them in ten years in time for the reunion. The update could be in the same vein as Michael Apted’s Up documentary series. American Teen may not be Oscar worthy, but it obliterates any fond nostalgia from your own high school experience. Outside the theatre on my way out, there were ushers giving out buttons depicting whose team of the five one would like to belong to. Given a choice, I’d have jumped on the Hanna bandwagon in a second. I hope to see a film of hers one day.
Once Upon A Time, Six-year-old Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), one of the injured patients in a Los Angeles hospital circa 1920, wanders the limey and creamy walls looking for something to help pass the time. She has a doughy and lovable face that is genuine, animated, and suggests a definite sharpness of thought. She comes across Roy Walker (Lee Pace), an American stuntman working in the Hollywood “flickers”, who is now being treated for his paralyzed legs from an occupational hazard. He is welcoming and befriends the little Romanian girl. Her presence distracts him from an inky cloud of depression.
Their bond grows when he tells her an epic story that is silly yet strong, perplexing yet straight-forward, fantastical yet damned. Her own imagination manifests, reinterprets, and even edits his words into a hodgepodge of visually radical planes, structures, and characters. A whole new universe takes us away from the confines of the hospital and into a land of eye candy.
The Fall is not the best film of the year, but it is one of the most special. While watching it, I realized that I have never seen this movie before. What I mean is that most of the movies I’ve seen are a variation on other films I have seen. Out of the cookie-cutter machine a la Edward Scissorhands, a strange butterfly-shaped cookie has escaped the line: The Fall is a genuine original. What a fresh breeze it is to have a filmmaker throw out that unwritten book that rules out exploration and approaches deemed too strange and melodramatic for mainstream expectations. Here is a work by an artist who exercises his liberties selfishly in the best sense of the word, but not without purpose.
September 05, 2008 |News, Trailers|By Christopher Beaubien
Bias Alert: This news comes just I have recently finished Michael Moore’s Election Guide 2008, thus having read every published word he has ever written including those from the obscureAdventures in a TV Nation.
That waskly old Liberal Michael Moore is rocking the vote (and the boat) with his new film Slackers Uprising. Much like in The Big One (1997) which chronicled Moore’s book tour for Downsize This!, this documentary follows Moore across the country’s universities and colleges. With young adults in attendance months before the Presidential Election of 2004, Moore beseeched the Slackers of America to find their shorts, scarf down their Fruit Loops sans milk and VOTE! The race was between Bush and Kerry and arguably over half the country felt the stakes were near-apocalyptic over four more years of the Sitting Duck in Office.
This caused some ridiculous controversy by the right-wing pundits who spoke out against Moore’s tactic. Now Moore didn’t outright demand to the twenty-somethings which candidate’s name they had to puncture in the ballot. What did Bill O’ “DO IT LIVE!” Reilly and the gang have to fear of young voters participating in their right to democracy. They could very well have stuck it to old man Kerry and gone back to suckling the warm, freedom-flavored teat of Dubya.
Starting September 23rd, Michael Moore is generously releasing his new film Slackers Uprising as a free download for three weeks in North America. As a Canadian, this cheers me greatly. Usually downloadable media from the US is unavailable to your Neighbor of the North – I’m looking at you NBC (30 ROCK), CBS (Swing Town) and Comedy Central (The Daily Show + Colbert Report)! Being the first mainstream film to reach personal computer screens for the admission of bupkis, Michael Moore is not only a pioneer but truly appreciates his fortune in turn by his audience: “This is being done entirely as a gift to my fans. The only return any of us are hoping for is the largest turnout of young voters ever at the polls in November.”
This may very well tip a close presidential race away from the Republican Party’s John ‘Hot Head’ McCain and that media-trashing, earmark-embracing hockey mom Sarah Palin.
A DVD of the said film will also be released. It’s Special Features include:
Special Guest Joan Baez — America the Beautiful
Diplomats and Military Commanders for Change
Why People Like George Bush?
My Pet Goat
The O’Reilly Factor for Kids
Oh, Canada (Oh, My!)
Just Add Water and Heat – More Ramen and Clean Underwear
A Letter from a Soldier in Iraq
MM Dance Machine
Last week, Michael Moore guest starred on the web-based show “Meet the Bloggers”.
Two years ago, Hungarian filmmaker György Pálfi made a darkly comic familial splatter film based on the short stories of absurdist writer Lajos Parti Nagy. A vomtorium that dissects the inner workings, obsessions, and gluttonous fetishes of the Kálmán’s past three generations. A timeline laced and dripped into the warm, spent human ooze from Dante’s Circles of Hell. This film Taxidermia (2006) sounds like John “Se7en” Doe’s cup of tea.
The three generations syndrome by German novelist Thomas Mann follows the scheme that the grandfather starts the family on its course, then his son, the father, raises the family to the pinnacle of success so that the last generation’s son would waste it and start anew.
Dutch, once upon a time English, filmmaker Peter Greenaway applied this three generation scheme to filmmaking and concluded that the bold grandfather of the cinema was Sergei Eisenstein, the revolutionary Russian Soviet director who fashioned the immutable and much imitated Battleship Potemkin (1925)*. The renegade father of the cinema was Orson Welles who perfected the medium with the towering Citizen Kane (1939). Then the mutinousson of the cinema being Jean-Luc Godard broke and rearranged cinematic conventions by way of the French New Wave Breathless (1960).
“Taxidermia” Trailer
Fair Warning: This One Gets Pretty Freaky.
I really dig that smash cut with the crying rooster.
“Taxidermia” International Trailer
A round of applause for the sickly fascinating website with the droning music and the decadently gruesome images. When you get to the spinning pin wheel, click on the same image twice to navigate to a new link in the site. Montreal-based Brazilian musician/DJ Amon Tobin scores the film and it sounds subterranean.
I have not seen this film just yet, not for a lack of stomach mind you. I’d have gladly bought a DVD released by Tartan outside of North America had I not found out about the Hungarian produced two-disc special edition. It is packaged like a slab of meat wrapped in cellophane — “Cause you can look right through me. Walk right by me” (couldn’t help myself!) — sold in supermarket.
Disc One features the film in an anamorphic widescreen transfer with Dolby 2.0, Dolby 5.1 and DTS 5.1 soundtracks. Optional English subtitles are included. Supposedly there is a DVD version that includes a director’s commentary but is not included here.
Disc Two has a 42 minute production, 30 minutes of deleted scenes, with optional director’s commentary, 8-minute visual design and concept gallery, 3 minute stills gallery, Hungarian and International trailers, two music videos by the band Hollywoodoo, Taltosember vs Ikarus—a 20 minute short film by György Pálfi, storyboards, and an interactive game.
Unfortunately, the Hungarian retailers are keeping this DVD edition a secret from the rest of the world. Anyone who knows how I can get a copy of this special edition would be greatly appreciated.
*I originally wrote “…the bold grandfather of the cinema wasD.W. Griffithswho made the first narrative-sophisticated feature filmBirth of a Nation(1915) – a pity it is irredeemably racist.” Whether Eisenstein or Griffiths is the real grandfather of cinema has the makings of a blood-on-the-walls debate between cinites.
I am a filmmaker, illustrator, designer and writer living in Vancouver, BC. I also manage Rainbeau Creative, a company that develops art and multimedia.
CINELATION is a forum where I speculate on aspects of filmmaking that intrigue me.
and George Clooney do that.
Osborne Cox (John Malkovich from Being John Malkovich), an intelligent analyst for the CIA, is demoted due to his alcoholism. He doesn’t believe that’s the case because he personally examines how much liquor is in his first glass and then pours just a little bit back into the bottle. Such a conscientious act would never be perform by an alcoholic. Osborne quits to the immediate displeasure of his forever exasperated working-wife Katie (Tilda Swinston, who is having a ball here). Fed up with pointless bureaucracy, Osborne decides to write a book detailing his work history and Katie plots to divorce and bleed him dry.
The stakes are considerably higher for poor Colin. If he does not get a scholarship to play basketball for a college, he will have to join the army and go to Iraq. His dad says “get the rebounds or it’s the army with a smile”. That’s like when the Romans threw Christians to the tigers! However engaging this subplot is, it pales in comparison with Steve James’ masterful Hoop Dreams (1993), the pedestal of documentary filmmaking that showed us the hardships and brimming humanity of two inner-city Chicago teens playing high school basketball and dreaming of making the NBA. There were scenarios in that three-hour movie that were laced with deep ironies and great joys.
Justin chastises himself harshly for his band participation, his awkwardness, his monotone, his acne-riddled cheeks, and the fact that he plays 
Hanna, the brightest star here, is a rebellious and funky artist who aspires to become a filmmaker: “I want people to remember me. Not work nine to five and die”. It’s a no-brainer. She inspires guys who developed crushes for Juno – that snarky, pregnant goddess immortalized by Ellen Page. Despite her eccentric and lively demeanor, she has taken some very hard blows. After being emotionally pulverized by her then-boyfriend in a very vulnerable position, she is so devastated that she cannot go back to school with him there. Her lengthy absence is called on by the uncaring school administration threatening to deny her graduation if she avoids another day at school.
Frankly, the material in American Teen isn’t as consistently compelling, but despite a few lags, is rarely dull. Much of it looks as if it were shot like a fictional film with conversation set pieces and double-takes that seem too good to be true. There is a contrivance mostly throughout that feels staged rather than spontaneously captured. I doubt that montage depicting each of everyone’s reaction to a scandalizing image by computer and cell-phone was not rehearsed. Though there are moments I am tempted to forgive, such as Colin’s father sending off his son in a get-up I would never reveal here. Each of the main characters has an animated sequence that visualizes their deepest thoughts. My personal favorite was a piece of stop-motion depicting “Hanna’s Depression” that is like a cross between Caroline and Clive Barker.
