Poor Owen Wilson

It is by now old news that blond, crooked nosed, cutie Owen Wilson tried to take his own life yesterday. The only reason I mention it is to see if I get a million hits.

ps: I hope he feels better. We like him.

Superbad

With very high expectations, given the glowing reviews and the box office success, I went to see Superbad, the new Judd Apatow production. I'm a huge fan of the 40 Year Old Virgin, less so of Knocked Up, but still I consider Apatow a phenomenon in recent film comedy history.
For a teenage buddy comedy, I noticed that around me was the most diverse film audience I have ever seen in a theater. There were plenty of women, young and older, plenty of young males, but also older males, black and white, and plenty of diverse people. Alarmingly, there were a couple of children. This movie should be x-rated. You don't see it, but boy do you hear it, and it is unbelievably filthy.
Superbad is an unlikely love story between two mega nerds, Evan and Seth, played by the fantastic Michael Cera, who is a young master of the excruciatingly gentle deadpan, and by Jonah Hill; physically, the only true heir to the great Zero Mostel, and in this movie an unbridled monster of male teenage need. The filth that comes from this young man's mind, let alone his lips, is heart-stopping. I'm all for freedom of expression and particularly freedom of sexual expression, and freedom in comedy, where nothing is sacred, and long live Lenny Bruce and all that, but the obscenity in this movie becomes a bit tiresome after a while. There are the seeds of subversion in this extremely explicit, and sometimes funny, talk of sex, but how effective can subversion be if it becomes monotonous? I wonder whether Superbad does in fact reflect the culture or is it just that the writers have dirty minds? Are kids today so truly influenced by porn and so obsessed with sex? Or is Superbad setting the pace?
Still, even though I confess that I found the relentless barrage of vulgarity a bit off-putting, I welcome that a mainstream hit movie will make all those Bible thumpers call for the apocalypse. Now they will have even more reason to blame the Jews in Hollywood for the evils in this world. The obscenity is a slap in the face to the hypocritical virtuousness of an immoral God-fearing president, and as such, bring it on!
What Superbad makes clear is that the culture in America is permissive in everything but in deed. For a teenager, it is faux liberty. Porn is abundant, but real sex is not. Booze is abundant, but it can't be had if you are a teen, (and still they do get sloshed); adulthood is thrown right in front of your face, and it is a scary thing. Superbad explores the dark side of the nerd's angst, and by God, this is the angsiest trip since Gregor Samsa turned into a roach.
I read somewhere that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote this script when they were teenagers, and it shows, even though it has been massaged into something more substantial. The movie is great and most funny at exploring the tribulations of the teen mind. In the surprisingly tender coupling of Seth and Evan you have the division between civilization and barbarity. Evan, the one with the moral conscience, is a sweet bumbling loser with genuine decency. There is quite a disturbing scene of a sloshed young girl being extremely sexually aggresive with him. The moment of truth has arrived, and Evan is mortified and terrified, not only because of the act itself but because of the moral implications of taking advantage.
The lust and fear verging on panic of women is a constant in Apatow's male buddy comedy as is his insistence that real sex and intimacy make men very afraid.
Seth, on the other hand, is a monster of selfishness and his hysteria is palpable, as is his hurt at being abandoned by his friend. The best parts of the movie are when you see these two in action, whether they are parsing the mysteries of sex as if they were Talmudic scholars and particularly when they have a spat. They have a true relationship, a dependency that staves off loneliness and fear, and Hill is wonderful when he is wounded. Most reviews I read talked about the sweetness of the movie, so I was rather taken aback by its depiction of bully behavior, which is a constant in teenage life, and in this movie, practiced by adults as well, since in the Apatow universe (and therefore possibly in America) no man is ever really a mature adult.
The more puerile parts, like a too long subplot involving two irresponsible, childish cops and Fogel (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), the biggest nerd ever to hit a movie screen, are intermittently funny but they distract from the meatier conceit of male bonding in the time of hysteria.
I love that this motley bunch of Jews, white nerds in a totally white universe, sway and jive, or try their best, like superbad black guys. That's another subtle dig at a culture that is desperately in need of macho cred. Apparently, nowadays only ghetto talk provides that and the actors and writers know there is nothing funnier than a white nerd trying to pass off for a badass motherfucker. The funky music score, by the way, is excellent.
The movie redeems itself by ending like a love story, with a tender (platonic) love scene between the two friends, who go on to face their respective rites of passage on their own, lost in a mall, as befits the new romantic comedy in America.

French Class

Now that I'm back from France, I'm forgetting the French I learned. So I'm watching lots of movies in French, both at theatres and at home, to see if somehow something sticks.
So far, I've seen Blame it on Fidel, by the daughter of Costa Gavras, which is a diverting but kinda lukewarm coming of age story about a snotty little rich girl who grows up with very lefty, albeit bourgeois, parents. I wasn't as taken with the film as I expected, although the little girl is appropriately snotty and it is interesting to see an unsympathetic little girl for whom you do muster some sympathy. The politics of the parents may be virtuous, but in the highly hierarchical, unforgiving world of childhood, they may wreak havoc while you are growing up and finding out who you are. It's a wonderful subject for a film yet one watches this movie thinking that there is a better movie buried in there somewhere.
Dans Paris is a terribly obnoxious film starring my darling Romain Duris. The film tries to be now like the films of the nouvelle vague were in the sixties, except that what was fresh and new and bracingly disorienting then seems painfully embarrassing done today, even if it's an homage. The only reason I sat through it was because it was French Class. Otherwise, I'd have seriously considered leaving after five minutes. Which was good, because it gets slightly better as it progresses. Dans Paris is a melange of French directorial styles (early Truffaut and Godard), including an actually lovely musical number over the phone, a la Jacques Demy. It starts out in a completely maddening, pretentious way, but somehow it grabs you. Some of it is relatively charming, most of it is just very proud of itself. It's interesting to watch French people trying too hard to lay on the charm. Ces't ne marche pas, like they say.
At home I saw the very scary horror movie by the Fréres Dardenne, L'Enfant, which won a Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2005. As a French lesson it wasn't very helpful, because the characters are barely literate themselves. But it is a tense, chilling film, in which the horror (no blood spilled, minimal violence) is that of total human detachment and a lack of moral consciousness. It is a fantastic movie, with an amazing story that keeps you at the edge of your seat, (including even a scooter chase) but it is intelligent and chilling and ultimately heartbreaking and the kind of movie you will never see done in America, land of the formula.

Coopted by Hollywood

I see the talented German director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who gave us the excellent Hitler tearjerker Downfall (actually one of the scariest movies I've ever seen), was sadly coopted by Hollywood to do a completely unnecessary remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a film that has already had one remake by Philip Kaufman (I liked it). I have yet to see the original, by Don Siegel, which is probably the best. Apparently, this being Hollywood, and even though Mr. Hirschbiegel retains director credit (and to judge from the reviews, rather unwisely) three other directors were brought in "to amp up the action", including the monstrously overrated Wachowski Bros, from the Matrix, and one of their collaborators, from V is for Vendetta.
I feel sorry and angry at the poor German film director for following the money, thinking that he could retain in Hollywood the illustrious success and the independence of mind of his first film. Perhaps he thought that he could turn the great parable of the body snatchers into another tour de force of claustrophobia and mass deception. Sounds like a very interesting premise, provided you let him do it his way.
Why hire the guy if you are going to turn whatever he does into crap? It's like you hire Ozu, but what you actually want is Johnnie To. Why waste so much money, time and effort? Why pretend you want something artistic? Why waste everybody's time jerking off to pretension when all you want is farts, because the audiences, according to you, love farts and nothing but? It would save everybody involved a lot of misery just to fart it out as planned.
3. And if it turns out that it is not the big fart you imagined, have the decency to own it. It may not make you so much money, but it may actually be good.

On DVD: Shortbus

Since I meant to stay up to watch the Perseids, I finally got around to see what was collecting dust in my Netflix for months. I had two choices. Edmond, by David Mamet and Shortbus, by John Cameron Mitchell. We chose the second one, thinking a little explicit sex would be highly diverting. Boy oh boy, were we wrong.
There are two things that are routinely confused with art:
1. Good intentions. (In which the auteur wishes to inform the audience that his soul is pure, wise, tolerant, and ecumenical and he has the benefit of mankind at heart). This is the most pernicious of the two. When confronted with this one, run for your life.
2. Shock value. (In which the auteur has not outgrown his/her childish need to get attention by any means necessary, except he/she now thinks that by doing something deliberately outrageous he/she are in fact doing something original and brave).
Both together are a recipe not for art, but for kitsch, which is the opposite of art.
Shortbus is one such example.
It is a capital, unforgivable sin for a movie to promise to be erotic and then not deliver. Shortbus is awash in explicit sex, but it is absolutely, resolutely not sexy. Why? Either because the sex is joyless and selfish (as in the gay couple who struggles with monogamy and one of them is really depressed because he was abused, or as in the sex therapist, that, surprise, surprise, can't have an orgasm and spends an entire movie humorlessly trying to force one out); or sex is too joyful, as in an orgy room full of loving-caring people who look like a million bucks and who seem to be having a moderately nice time in fantasyland, and I mean the Disney one.
The sex in Shortbus wants to be both well intentioned and shocking and thus it is reduced to absolute corn. It's like watching a visual version of sex therapy (like that Canadian woman, Sue Something, and what could be less sexy?). Then Mitchell thinks he is brave for using very explicit real sex scenes, one homosexual one involving the blowing of the Star Spangled Banner into someone's rear orifice, for instance. This, because of its transparent need to shock, has quite the opposite effect. It is puerile and completely devoid of real shock value. Borat's rendition of the national anthem in that rodeo in Hicksville -- now, that was truly transgressive and much braver.
To cap it all off, there is a garishly hideous animated travelling shot over Manhattan I guess meant to connect the stories of the sex crazed New Yorkers that inhabit this particularly unrealistic universe, that makes this town look like a toy you buy at K-Mart. The movie feels long, the humor forced, the bathos unbearable. Unwitting kitsch may be fun once in a while, but kitsch that thinks it has something important to say is a fake and a waste of time.