Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008)

Heart of dankness

Hollywood comedy isn't exactly doing well when the most commercially successful is a Disney pirate franchise and the most critically praised are the tepid, safe-as-houses fantasies of Judd Apatow (40 Year Old Virgin; Knocked Up). Hats off to Ben Stiller then, for making what easily zooms to the head of the mainstream class as the funniest American-made movie of the year (I know I know, year's not over yet--but these are the "ber" months, when solemn fare hopeful of winning The Annual Golden Doorstop are being released For Your Consideration). In a time when people are craving gigantic CGI effects or digital animation or pictures catering to the so-called sensitive side of fortysomething slackers, Stiller still knows the apparently lost art of going for the jugular, at least when it comes to that ridiculous, self-centered, wholly overpaid activity we know of as moviemaking.

Tropic Thunder--about a group of filmmakers who lose themselves in the jungle, then encounter a band of real-life, fully armed heroin growers--peaks early, which may or may not be unfortunate; truth to tell, nowadays you can't expect a sense of control and timing from directors. You can't, for example, expect the kind of perfectly calibrated sense of mounting hilarity Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin used to orchestrate with easy mastery, from titter to yowl to belly laugh to boffo; you can't expect (unlike with Keaton) a distinctive visual style, much less an eye for beauty, in today's comedies. At most you're thankful for the occasional belly laugh, and here you get it when star and actor wannabe Tugg Speedman (Stiller) uses his outstretched tongue to catch the drippings off of movie director Damien Cockburn's (Steve Coogan) severed head (long story). People will squirm in their seats; others will howl (or at least chortle) with glee; suffice to say, the image is a declaration of principles of sorts: it's an announcement to the general public that this will not be a safe movie, it will not for the most part play nice.

Stiller may have shot his load early, but there's enough in this shaggy vet story to make one want to sit it through to the end, more or less--basically what keeps you watching is the subtext that all this is a willed illusion, put together by the filmmakers, and that each of the characters must deal with the fragile nature of that illusion according to their own special circumstances. Hence: Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) must face his ambivalence about his own sexuality; Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black, blessed with the single funniest line in the picture--won't say what it is, only that he delivers it while tied to a tree) must learn to function despite a massive drug addiction; Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr., lampooning his own Method intensity) has to pick out, from all the roles he's immersed himself in, his own true identity (not to mention his native accent); and Speedman must learn how to distinguish everyday reality from the hyperreality of movies. Each lunatic is lost in a literal and metaphorical jungle; each has woven his own silken cocoon about him from which he must extricate himself if he's to survive, and each is too mired in his own obsessions and needs--at least at first--to ever want to do so.

Only three characters have enough sense of self to totally avoid the movie's entangling web of confusion: Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey, for once more charming than creepy), Speedman's heroically loyal talent agent (he insists come hell or high water that Speedman is contractually guaranteed his own TiVo); Four Leaf Tayback (A sneaky-as-usual Nick Nolte), whose novel was, if you like, the initiating catalyst that prompted a major Hollywood studio into investing millions into the project (in effect turning his personal illusion into a gigantic hyperreal construction (in short, a studio set)); and Les Grossman (Tom Cruise, giving an unreservedly comic turn here--will wonders never cease?), an unspeakable monster of a studio executive with the power to make his slightest whim come true (speaking, for example, over a wide-screen satellite video link, Grossman demands that someone smack the hapless Cockburn for wasting four million dollars on an explosion none of the cameras recorded--upon which someone immediately complies). If these three compared to everyone else in the movie seem relatively stable and focused, that may be because they have something besides themselves to live for: Peck has Speedman, Tayback his novel, and Grossman--well, Grossman's just too damned powerful to care.

As movie satires about moviemaking go, it's not quite as withering as Terry Southern's Blue Movie (I'm still waiting for the filmmaker with cojones big enough to tackle that impossible project); it's not even Blake Edward's S.O.B. where some of the funniest lines are taken verbatim from actual dialogue spoken in Hollywood. But its take-no-prisoners, anything-for-a-laugh spirit is infectious, and Stiller has imagination enough to take his scorched-earth approach as far as he can, which as it turns out is a fairly impressive distance.

Stiller is not an unskillful filmmaker; he's able to evoke the look of various films (Platoon; Apocalypse Now; Deer Hunter; the climactic moment in Bridge on the River Kwai) on the relative cheap. He gives Grossman's office a vast, cavernous quality reminiscent of the War Room in Dr. Strangelove (he even grants Cruise's Grossman a revealing private moment comparable to Chaplin's Hitler figure in The Great Dictator (sans a prop as eloquent as giant globe atlas, alas)). And in Speedman's climactic self-confrontation, he miraculously evokes the creepy, dust-moted light Vittorio Storaro used to illuminate Marlon Brando's insanity during the latter part of Apocalypse Now.

A final note: the heroin growers, members of the Flaming Dragon gang, are no mere cardboard Oriental villains; if anything, they seem to be the most grounded people in the entire picture, with no delusions as to what they're doing and why they're doing it (if they've misunderstood anything, it's the true status of Simple Jack, a gigantic flop of a Speedman movie which they play over and over again on an old VHS tape, and worship unreservedly). Their reaction to the actors and filmmaking crew that have landed suddenly in their midst seem less comical than sensible: they regard the intruders as annoying, possibly dangerous distractions. Rightly so--there's nothing more unlikely, chaotic, and corrosive to one's sense of reality and morality and proportion, Stiller seems to be saying, than a movie crew out to make a movie.

First published in Businessworld 10.10.08

Burn After Reading (Coen Brothers, 2008)

The Coens' Burn After Reading (2008) by any standard is a letdown from their previous film, their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (2007)--it's more shallow, more cynical, more a regression than a step forward.

And yet for some reason I prefer it to the latter. Not a big fan of No Country (as I think I made clear); I understand it as the Coens' attempt to stretch, to reach out for a more mainstream audience, but on their own terms, and to the extent that they did reach people it's successful (successful enough to win them a gold doorstop or two)--at the expense, I submit, of aforementioned terms.

Now that they've shrunk back into their shell, so to speak, I'd say it's freed them to be really subversive (think Keaton who, after trying out a smile in one of his films, found the gesture so deafeningly off-key he never tried it again). On the surface these are the shenanigans of a handful of not very bright people, with the true CIA agents watching from their little cubbyhole office like cherubim shaking their heads at the folly of mortals (love that shot of McDormand looking up at the helicopter--she in effect's been granted a brief vision of the real order of things).

Beneath that bright surface you sense troubling currents--the pathos of creatures of limited ability and knowledge, struggling and striking out in the dark, succeeding only in drawing the net tighter about them. The whisper of sympathy one finds in an outright Coen comedy seems sublter, more persuasive, and less hypocritical, I thin, than the full wind of professed humanity that blows when they're channeling another writer (in this case a novel that's far from being McCarthy's best, I think). In other words, I prefer them when they underachieve than when they overreach, at least in this case, anyway.

And is it too heretical to say I enjoyed Tropic Thunder (Ben Stiller, 2008) more? Stiller's far as I'm concerned comedic--scratch that; would love to parody people who use that word, but can't muster the energy to bother-- comic masterpiece (the set bar isn't very high) is possibly the best movie about a movie movie since, oh, Richard Rush's The Stunt Man (1980) (I'd mention Mario O'Hara's Babae sa Bubungang Lata (Woman on a Tin Roof, 1998), but that film's so clearly above mere comedy--or for that matter either movie--that I couldn't muster the effrontery). The picture peaks early, with the image of Stiller sucking the drippings off of Steve Coogan's severed neck, but manages to go on to be arguably the definitive satire on actorly ego, obsession and sense of inferiority, something Stiller apparently knows from bitter personal experience. Nothing visually interesting--Stiller I assume is from the school of not caring how a comedy looks, more's the pity--but I do enjoy some of the more disparate references he manages to insert, a low-status artform he's some kind of default master of (to whit, Bridge on the River Kwai and Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

Downey is dependably good; Cruise surprisingly so (what is it with him and Pitt (who was memorable in Burn?). Are the overrated stars of the '90s trying to pull their respective careers out of the Doghouse of the Forgotten by actually, y'now, acting?).

Stardust (Matthew Vaughn, 2007), Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2007)

Stardust is not (to get that out of the way) great fantasy filmmaking. Too much CGI for my taste, some of the action scenes seem clearly modeled after the Peter Jackson house style (lots of circling shots and mismatched landscapes), and the music could be more original. I hear Gilliam was first offered this, and I wish he did take it; for first half hour I kept thinking he could do wonders with the material. But then 1) Gilliam's done this before, and 2) I can see where it doesn't present too many sides to capture his interest.

Then I learn it's Neil Gaiman, which explains a lot. The script has a macabre humor all its own (seven fratricidal brothers; three witches out to cut out and eat a girl's heart; a sky pirate with a deep, dark secret), and the kind of inventive, tightly paced plotting that betrays Gaiman's comic-book background (writing for comics isn't completely without its virtues--Alfred Bester learned how to tell a story this way, for one). The cast certainly agrees, because they throw body and soul into the project (at the very least it's obvious they're having a great time). Easily outdoes the past two Harry Potter movies in the enchantment (the emotional kind) department.

Herzog's Rescue Dawn--did someone say The Bourne Ultimatum was the best action film of the year, of several years? Beg to differ; there's this film, and Michael Mann's Miami Vice, just off the top of my head.

This is more of an escape picture than an action film, I suppose, but the pleasure here is in Herzog being granted the giant toy train set that's a Hollywood production, and seeing how far he runs with it. I think he can play with the best of them--unlike, say, Greengrass, he knows when to do a shaky-cam (immersive shots where the camera takes on the character's point of view, emphasizing his helplessness) and when to go for smooth crane shots (objective POV, where the point is to create suspense, or a sense of approaching menace). The plane crash--the single most spectacular sequence in the film--glides by with a touch of unrealism: the plane comes down, flames and smoke, breaks apart, and hatches Dieter into the rice fields, like some kind of mosquito larva, all in what almost seems like a single smooth motion. I can imagine Herzog playing with our notion of emergency landings, turning it into some kind of unstated joke, a quick wink at what Hollywood plane crashes are supposed to look like (at the same time outdoing the standard-issue crash with careless grace and skill).

Then there are the touches uniquely his--the great, slow, downward pans from the tips of mountains to their base, filling the whole screen, showing us the immensity of nature; the little cameos of insects, from a beetle whirling on string to a huge butterfly on someone's limb, wings flapping lazily to a caterpillar on a leaf, doing its level best to clamber onto Steve Zahn's face.

There's the sense of heat, humidity, of sheer mass of foliage pressing all around; sometimes the jungle seems like a thousand-fingered hand, reluctant to release Deiter (Christian Bale) and Duane (Zahn), the two Vietcong prisoners making their bid for freedom.

And I love some of the lines, which are pure Herzog. "This is not a village;" "no, it is a village." "I dreamed there was a fire." Herzog's heroes struggle under extreme conditions, and as a result of all that suffering they've lost their grasp of reality, must assert or debate it out loud; Zahn is so unsure of what happened he has to tentatively suggest he only dreamed there was a fire, there, of course, was--yet another of Herzog's sly pranks on his characters.

The American flag-waving seems a tad much, but for some reason I can actually see Herzog buying into that; it's just something I sense in him, a need to want approval from a country whose commercial cinema has had little use for his own work, save for the occasional plagiarism (see Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now with reference to Aguirre the Wrath of God). He seems to want to take the relationship to a whole other level. 

That said, he does give one a sense that the Laotians aren't stereotypical Asian tormentors or merely sadistic prison guards (check out Cimino's odious The Deer Hunter, or even interestingly enough John Woo's Bullet in the Head). They're people with a sense of real anger (not unjustified) at the United State's unadmitted bombings of their country.

And I love the little details--the question of toilets and defecation in a jungle prison (always an important question, but one you never hear from Rambo), of food and water, and laundry (I love it that they're shown actually doing their laundry). I love the dynamic between prisoners, how emotions of trust and affection and anger flow freely between them, intense and open like irrigation canals. I love how physically expressive Herzog makes Bale and Zahn, always touching each other, putting head on shoulder, cuddling against each other for warmth. That's how people who've spent time--months and years--in prison behave, even stay sane.

It's not Herzog's best, and I can see where the argument that he's sold out might stick, but if he is selling out, I wish he'd done so decades ago; it's head and shoulders better than anything from Hollywood nowadays.

8.28.07