Step Brothers (2008)

The first 15 minutes of Step Brothers had me sweating up the lenses of my glasses I was laughing so hard. I was laughing so hard and so loud that when I paused to wipe the steam off my glasses, I felt like one of those boorish dolts who bray like asses behind me in the theater during comedies that leave me stone-faced. I guess that makes Step Brothers what is commonly referred to as a “guilty pleasure.”

The man-child has become his own genre and multi-million dollar enterprise, but not because of Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. This is a character that has been around as long as Benjamin Braddock, maybe longer. In Step Brothers, it has been taken to its most grotesque extreme: Will Ferrell, dressed slovenly in pajama bottoms and a long-sleeve YMCA shirt is introduced dumping shredded cheese on Dorito’s corn chips to create makeshift nachos. When the microwave has melted the cheese to his satisfaction, he plops a bowl of chocolate donuts on top of the plate of nachos, grabs a cup containing some sort of blue beverage, and sits down in front of the television in a well-furnished and tastefully decorated living room that clearly would not look the way it looks if he was the sole resident. This is Brennan. He is 39(!) and lives with his mother (Mary Steenburgen), who on her way out to work, checks in on this sloth without pausing to gawk at the shameful absurdity of it, and asks what he’s watching. Brennan, preoccupied with the show, mumbles, “Oh…just the show…with the lady…” He is watching a Jane-Fonda type work-out show. She leaves. He munches on his nachos, wipes his orange fingers off on his pajama pants, and then proceeds to lift the waistband of them, slide the other hand down, to begin the masturbation process (Dale Doback (John C. Reilly), another man-child, later refers to one of the rooms in his Dad’s house as his “office” and “Beat-Laboratory;” because his drum set is in there, perhaps it has two meanings).

Now depending on who you are, you might find all of this shaggy slothfulness wretched and maybe even disturbing (Roger Ebert sure did), but me, I’ll be honest, as a homebody who often finds himself in supine torpor on a couch in front of a television with crumbs on his T-shirt and juiceboxes, soda cans, and wrappers lying on a table nearby, I found this opening moment with Brennan to be rather sadly accurate, and I think most single adult males would: even normally productive ones must find themselves reclining in a sort of mild squalor now and then on the weekends or on holiday.

I used to love Will Ferrell back in 2000 and 2001 when every single breath and gesture from him on any of the various skits in which he was involved on Saturday Night Live had me in hysterics. I thought Anchorman (the first film by Step Brothers director Adam McKay) was pretty goddamn funny, but then Ferrell got overexposed, became a huge movie star and produced one comedy after another, usually revolving the story around some sort of sporting event, that just put him off to me until I actively disliked him. I disliked him going into Step Brothers, but I’m pleased to say he is rather adorable in Step Brothers, as is John C. Reilly, who also has a puppyish pillow-face. These puppy faces of both men are all the funnier when they are being fashioned into mean looks of resentment, as when the two first lay eyes on the other on opposite ends of Dale’s front yard, framed to evoke two dueling gunslingers, except both are dressed like children (Reilly is wearing a Yoda T-shirt), and reluctantly offer hellos. The combination of childish accoutrements with the fully-grown libidos of 40 year old men is an incongruity that often provides laughs, though the film never considers the plausible social commentary of this contradiction.

Don Draper of Mad Men Dale and Brennan are not, but their obscenity-spewing infantilism is often taken to delirious heights of feverish hysterics that left me giddy. The movie has no pretenses about itself and doesn’t stretch the running time to the mind-numbing and wholly unnecessary 2 hour and 30 minutes of Judd Apatow’s second film, Knocked Up. At 90 minutes, Step Brothers does feel a tad long, and it groans under the tiresome obligation of a five act structure with perfunctory crisis, predictable dilemma (Dale and Brennan’s antics drive a wedge into the marriage between Brennan’s mother and Dale’s dad (Richard Jenkins) and they announce that they’ll be divorcing), and routine fixing of the problem by the two incorrigible slackers who must face reality, learn to grow up, try and get their parents back together again, etc. etc. The second half of the movie’s plot mechanics are as rote as a Sandler vehicle hand-me-down. But the vivid depiction of slothfulness is inspired, as is the squinting, slack-jawed stare-downs between Reilly and Ferrell. The attention to little-boy/adolescent male minutiae (their wardrobe, toys, the way Reilly lies under the covers of his bed) is meticulous, and reminiscent of the bric-a-brac in Steve Carell’s apartment in Apatow's first film, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (a film I plan on revisiting soon because of my enjoyment of this). Except Steve Carell plays a sweet man-child. Brennan and Dale are pug-faced vulgarians, but their rude behavior is hilarious because it is undercut at every turn by their pajama pants, bed head, and potato chips.


Grade: B-

Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989)

Back in May, at the Cannes Film Festival, both Spike Lee and Clint Eastwood had new films being exhibited: Eastwood, The Changeling, Lee’s a WWII drama about black infantrymen called The Miracle at St. Anna. Lee mentioned being dismayed at the absence of black soldiers in Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, telling the press, “If you reporters had any balls you'd ask him why. There's no way I know why he did that -- that was his vision, not mine. But I know it was pointed out to him and that he could have changed it. It's not like he didn't know." When word got to Eastwood, he replied, “The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn't do that. If I go ahead and put an African-American actor in there, people'd go: ‘This guy's lost his mind.’ I mean, it's not accurate.” Referring to Spike Lee, Eastwood concluded, “A guy like him should shut his face.” When Lee heard the “shut his face” comment, he responded by saying, “First of all, the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either.”

No one said anything about a plantation, Spike. He wasn’t inferring anything about a plantation, he wasn’t suggesting it, he was angrily telling you to “F--- off” like he would to any other non-ludicrously-paranoid person. Spike Lee’s conclusion jumping and exhausting race-centered defensiveness should have, by now, convinced most reasonable observers that the man has got a chip on his shoulder that’s bigger than he is, and renders his thoughts, views, and opinions highly suspect.

I believe Spike Lee’s third film to be a flawed masterwork, but, in admitting that, I feel like I’m letting Lee get away with murder. That Do the Right Thing claims to be ambivalent and impartial is a bald-faced lie and the fact that few critics second-guessed its intentions, is sadly, all too predictable. A small handful of critics, however, did, but for the wrong reasons, foolishly proclaiming that the movie was a call to arms. In response to these extreme accusations, Lee felt compelled to step forward:

Am I advocating violence? No, but goddamn, the days of 25 million Blacks being silent while our fellow brothers [sic] and sisters are exploited, oppressed, and murdered, have to come to an end. Racial persecution, not only in the United States, but all over the world is not gonna go away: it seems it's getting worse (four years of Bush won't help). And if Crazy Eddie Koch gets reelected for a fourth term as mayor of New York, what you see in Do The Right Thing will be light stuff. Yep, we have a choice, Malcolm or King. I know who I'm down with.

He was fortunate enough to parade Do the Right Thing down a street lined with eggshells; he has the pomposity to step forward as the self-appointed voice for not only his generation, but as the voice and veritable deliverer of all the generations of black men and women who lived, suffered, and died from the birth of American slavery to the present day, though it is highly unlikely he has a tangible conception of even a fraction of the disadvantages he proposes to serve as avatar. He is the clichéd angry black man: the knee-jerk suspicion? Check; the advocacy of double standards, even at the cost of his own credibility? Check; irrational combativeness? Check; carrying an air of being put-upon, even when being treated fairly? Check; being treated fairly and resenting it for being so cruelly patronizing? Check. Add to that a Napoleon complex, delusions of grandeur, and a medium being used as a soapbox, and you have a first-rate demagogue. Surrounded by eggshells.

Spike Lee takes to that medium like a prodigy, but once seized, he uses it to dubious ends. At the heart of the hypocrisy is the answer to the titular question. Well, Mookie (Lee) gets along with Vito and Sal? Yes, and Mookie also tells Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito) to cool it when he becomes hostile towards Vito unprovoked. Mookie, being decidedly enterprising, strikes a cunning harmony between both the militant blacks and the resented Italians. By the end of the film, Mookie deliberately shatters that harmony with a well-placed trash can, announcing to the neighborhood that he’s finally hopped off the fence.

Firstly, I found it contrived that Sal (the great Danny Aiello) could be so profoundly abiding at one moment, even going so far as to remind his racist son, Pino (John Turturro) again and again and again to be tolerant and calm, but can then be provoked into a volcanic fury when the screenplay calls for it. Secondly, though it makes perfect sense to wonder why Sal hasn’t considered that his clientele being primarily black should compel him to meet their demands a little better (e.g. fashion the interior of his Pizzeria to be more suitable to their desires), it is not A-okay to invade him in his own place of business with bullying impositions. Lee, I fear, thinks that such combative behavior is a necessity.

The most preposterous element of the film is Spike Lee’s propounding of Radio Raheem as admirable or heroic. Radio Raheem is a menace and a bully. He presumptuously struts around Bed-Stuy blasting Public Enemy into any and alls’ faces, a tyrant who Spike Lee submits as a natural pathology of the age-old mistreatment and subjugation of the black man. Sure, it’s inevitable that such injustice will breed a subculture of men like Radio Raheem, but to argue, as Lee does, that those who are not directly responsible for the injustice should suffer under the tyranny of Raheem’s angry cloud of righteous indignation is to impose the very same oppression on them that Lee is so adamant in crying out against. The movie unknowingly contradicts itself as soon as Lee neglects to suggest that Radio Raheem is in the wrong or that, God forbid, he should turn his music down or, at the cost of the revolution, off.

The chronology goes like this:

1. Radio Raheem walks into Sal’s playing his Public Enemy as loud as possible. Spike Lee (with rather sophisticated cinematic subtext) cuts to a fisheye lens close-up of RR staring Sal down, a whole subculture of simmering resentment challenging him to put up with it. Sal doesn’t. He shouts over the din to turn it off. RR, as if he’s been told to compromise the very foundation of his belief system (maybe he has), grudgingly turns the volume down. He is now pissed beyond all reason at Sal.



2. RR bumps into Buggin’ Out, who, apoplectic at the absence of black national figures pictured on the "Wall of Fame" at the Pizzeria (“Hey Sal! How come there ain’t no brothas on the wall?!”) next to the ones of Sinatra, Pacino, and other Italian icons, convinces RR to confront Sal forcefully and together.



3. RR and Buggin’ Out ferociously face-off against Sal at the counter of the Pizzeria, RR’s Public Enemy blasting at top volume. Sal screams in close-up. Buggin’ Out screams in close-up. RR refuses to turn down his music or leave. Customers are watching in horror. Sal smashes RR’s beloved boombox (a huge beast of a machine) with a baseball bat. Silence. RR leaps over the counter and begins to thrash Sal. He drags Sal outside and begins to strangle him with no apparent intention of stopping. He is going to kill Sal. A mob gathers as do the two policemen who have already been established as unsympathetic and contemptuous of certain black residents in the neighborhood. The hulking RR is pulled off Sal by the even more hulking cop, and is gripped with a horizontally applied billy club that has been violently tightened against the boy’s windpipe. During this struggle, the cop's face is seen briefly with a look that can be recognized as nothing other than malevolence. He holds the club against RR’s windpipe longer than is necessary, even after individuals in the mob tell him to stop. RR is, accidentally, or not so accidentally, strangled or has his windpipe crushed. He falls to the pavement dead.



4. In response to this, Mookie throws the garbage can through the big front window of the Pizzeria, inviting the volatile mob to elaborate on the destruction until the Pizzeria is in ruins and all that is left is the mentally retarded black man Smiley pinning a small photo of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. on the wall in question while a geyser of flame flutters behind his head. It is a frightening and powerful shot, a brilliant moment.

Now, according to Roger Ebert and other sources, “Lee says he has been asked many times over the years if Mookie did the right thing. Then Lee observes: ‘Not one person of color has ever asked me that question.’”

The problem is not whether or not Mookie should have thrown the trash can through the window. That sort of anger seems reasonable considering the murder of RR by the cops. The problem is that RR was in the middle of committing murder himself. Is it also not unreasonable for cops, seeing a man being strangled by another, bigger man who is out of control with anger, to perhaps be more aggressive and panicked in intervening? In Lee’s defense, the whole situation is messy and complicated, but Lee’s remarks about the film’s detractors are self-righteous and smug in the most egregiously hypocritical way: in Roger Ebert’s Great Movie review, he notes, “On the Criterion DVD of the film, Lee reads from his reviews, noting that Joe Klein, in New York magazine, laments the burning of Sal’s Pizzeria but fails to even note that it follows the death of a young black man at the hands of the police.” Oh, sort of like how Mookie laments the death of a young black man at the hands of the police, but fails to even note that the young black man was in the process of strangling to death an older Italian man? Strangling him to death over a smashed boombox.

At the very end of the film, Sal sits in the rubble of his former place of business, and Mookie comes to ask him for his paycheck. Sal, shocked and offended that Mookie would have the audacity to ask for a paycheck after inciting the destruction of his Pizzeria, reproaches him angrily about the hurling of the trash can. Mookie yells back, “Motherfuck a window. Radio Raheem is dead.” Well, what if Radio Raheem had not been pulled off Sal? He most certainly would have killed him. Would Mookie have been upset with Radio Raheem for killing Sal, who he spent so many days with at the Pizzeria, who once told Mookie, “…there wil always be a place for you here, because you’ve always been like a son to me…” I think he would have. And when Radio Raheem, perhaps through a glass partition, talking to Mookie on a telephone, tried to explain or quarreled with him, would Mookie have told him, “Motherfuck a boombox. Sal is dead.”?

That’s the question I would ask Spike Lee.

Do the Right Thing is a visionary work of art if you don’t linger too much on the troubling ideology at the heart of it. I have written on the artistic merits of the film before without addressing Spike Lee’s message, which I see as being muddled at best, hypocritical at worst, and thoroughly disingenuous, as Lee puts forth two contradictory quotes at the end of the film, one from Martin Luther King Jr. condemning violence, and a second from Malcolm X:

I think there are plenty of good people in America, but there are also plenty of bad people in America and the bad ones are the ones who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need. Because this is the situation, you and I have to preserve the right to do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation, and it doesn't mean that I advocate violence, but at the same time I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence.

Well, it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about physical, individual-on-individual violence, but more of an abstract violence. “Do what is necessary to bring an end to that situation,” “that situation” being “bad people in America…who seem to have all the power and be in these positions to block things that you and I need.” That is not physical violence he is describing. He is describing abuse and maltreatment through neglect. I think of the poor man whose children are starving who steals a loaf of bread. I think of a scene from Do the Right Thing when Ossie Davis’s character, Da Mayor is ridiculed by a quartet of black youths for being an old drunk. They drop withering judgments on him, and he tells them, “What you know about me?...Until you’ve stood in the doorway and listened to your five hungry children crying for bread, you don’t know shit!”

Heartbreaking and moving though this may be, does it count as violence, the only thing against which self-defense remains self-defense and not simply ruthless self-preservation? I suppose it does, if you play fast and loose with the definition. Lee seems to enjoy doing that, without realizing how easy it would be to do it right back at his film. Couldn’t Radio Raheem’s reign of noise pollution or his breaking of the rules of a privately owned establishment (i.e. trespassing) be considered terrorizing the community? Does Sal not have a right to defend himself from Raheem’s oppressive boombox? Or are only black people allowed to be intelligent? Can white people be down with Malcolm X's philosophy? It's obvious from the film, from "Yep, we have a choice, Malcolm or King. I know who I'm down with" and from the fact that the second quote is the X quote, giving him the veritable last word, that Lee prefers the boxing over the velvet variety of glove. Nothing wrong with that. What I find disturbing is that he wants to box with people not wearing any gloves. Indiscriminate revolution, revenge, fire with fire, etc. I get the feeling that Spike Lee put that Martin Luther King Jr. quote in merely out of obligation.


Bottom line is, despite all of these issues, I still find the film to be a feast for the eyes and the senses. The colors, the heatwave motif, the sheer originality of the story; it’s all simultaneously intoxicating, sumptuous, and provocative. It’s everything cinema should be on the outside, and one would hardly guess that it’s all being held together on the inside by chewing gum and band-aids.



Grade: A-

Christopher Nolan's Following (1998)

“I’d been on my own for a while and been getting kind of lonely…and bored…How can I explain?...”

-“The Young Man”

Following was written by Christopher Nolan and I cannot deny that, here, the man has a curiosity about human behavior that is no doubt sophisticated and that has inspired him to contrive a compact little thriller of singular inventiveness and unpretentious cynicism.

The film is aesthetically interesting, but mostly because it was shot in suitably grainy black and white, which gives it a gritty, bleak noir quality. Nolan continues to confirm that he is sloppy in framing his shots, generally paying little to no attention to composition. When I have said in my past two reviews of Nolan films that his direction is merely functional I mean that he is concerned more with telling a story through dialogue than through images. Films like Memento and this are compelling because of the story, and not so much the images, though he does show evidence of an artistic eye here and there. I’d recommend that if he wishes to achieve the sort of painterly craftsmanship of peers like Guillermo Del Toro or Darren Aronofsky, that he should try storyboarding before just going in and roughly shooting.

Perhaps I am being overly critical in expecting him to do more than tell an interesting story, which he usually does, especially here, but if he simply wished to do that, he could work in a different field, perhaps as a novelist or screenwriter. A filmmaker must provide indelible images, strong, layered images precisely framed and calibrated. There are only a few images in Following that could be paused to admire for purposes of mise-en-scène study. I would say I found this film to be very promising except I know that five films and ten years later he has hardly delivered on it. Nonetheless, he is a clever and skilled scenarist.

Following tells the brief but ingenious story of a young man (Jeremy Theobald), credited simply as “The Young Man,” who has aspirations of being a writer. He has time to kill, and begins indulging in the peculiar habit of following strangers he notices on the street:

“You ever, um, been to a football match, just let your eyes, um, go over, drift across a crowd of people and then they slowly stop and fix on one person and…all of a sudden that person isn’t part of the crowd anymore. They’ve become an individual, just like that.”

He explains this to an older man who is insinuated to be a therapist (if this was intentionally insinuated, then Nolan must be commended for having his uncle, John Nolan, play the part, as he looks and sounds like a therapist).

That sample of dialogue offers a tantalizing peek into a mind that is not morbidly curious so much as lonesome and hungry for a connection. The tragedy of his story is that this very poignant yearning is taken advantage of and cruelly manipulated to quietly devastating results. One of the people he eventually starts to “shadow” is a tall young man with deep-set eyes and a cunning demeanor. The man is Cobb, and the actor who plays him, Alex Haw, has the height and commanding presence of Vince Vaughn with the suave handsomeness of Jude Law and the cold malice of Arno Frisch. The man is fascinating, but also very likely trouble of an uncertain nature.

The scenes with Cobb are involving – his motives are unknown, his past is unknown, and he is prodigiously capable not only in his chosen profession (as a burglar and con artist) but also in navigating sticky situations to extricate himself. One of the best scenes finds the young man caught by his latest pursuit in a coffee shop. The stranger abruptly confronts him and asks if he knows him, what he wants, if he’s “a faggot” and upon receiving the bizarre but innocent explanation, reveals his name to be Cobb, and invites our protagonist to tag along for one of his break-ins. Things become considerably more sinister here, as the young man, once content merely to observe strangers coming to and from, now is inside their homes, examining their personal belongings.

While also compelling on a purely superficial level, there is interest within deeper levels: a normal, law-abiding young man who does not do wicked things but whose curiosity about them leads him into dark circles that threaten his character; out of the frying pan of loneliness and boredom and into the fire of crime and sociopathy. The premise is ingenious in its simplicity, and in that simplicity, Nolan finds a very novel idea. The film does expand into a crime thriller with intricate set-ups and double-crosses, as the story cleverly folds back in on itself, sort of like Memento, only without the logic holes.

Nolan has shrewdly produced a tragic little noir that might have very well been a minor masterpiece if he were a more gifted director, but I must admire him for seeing such vast potential in such a curious little premise and mining a sturdy foothold for himself out of it upon which to advance a career.




Grade: B+

Natural Born Killers (1994)

If there is one element of the film that could be called genius, then it would have to be Oliver Stone’s ability to make it appear to be so much more lurid, so much more audaciously XXX-hardcore than it really is. The film is actually quite funny and the violence is not unusually explicit. But back in 1994, when I was considerably younger, I distinctly remember browsing in Blockbuster with my Dad; I was always told to remain in the family films and kids’ section due to the horrible possibility of seeing a groped Shannon Tweed in the throes of ecstasy or the freakishly scarred face of Freddie Krueger scowling next to a close-up of shining razor blades. As I often did, I found myself losing my way in the video store and accidentally wandering into the drama section. It was just a black-and-white image of a man with a shaved head wearing those cool retro hippie/Lennon sunglasses. What is it about that image combined with the title that screamed “Violation! Obscenity!” I don’t know what it was exactly, but the film seemed oozing with unspeakable offenses against wholesomeness and decency. Of course, I was a kid, but even looking at stills from the film today, it strikes me at how much sleazier and transgressive it seems compared to how it really is when you watch it and realize it’s just a bunch of silliness.

Flash forward a decade or so, and I’d now seen 3 or 4 of Mr. Stone’s films. I was not predisposed to like Natural Born Killers because he was a director I’d never been much fond of, and my suspicions were verified when I watched it, and found it loud, shrill, and messy. I hated it. That was a few years ago. I watched it again recently, and came away much more tolerant. Assuming one’s hatred for Stone’s film does not spring from fear that its irony will be misinterpreted by criminally-inclined youths, a, admittedly, valid source of worry, I believe hatred for Stone’s movie is too serious an emotion to harbor for a movie that never really takes itself seriously in the first place.

A year before NBK, Juliette Lewis played the girlfriend of Brad Pitt's cross-country mass murderer in Kalifornia. In that film she was only along for the ride, essentially a sweet innocent duped into being the traveling companion of a hillbilly psycho. Mallory Knox is also the girlfriend (and later, wife) of a cross-country mass murderer, Mickey Knox (Woody Harrelson, as game as they come), but this time, she gleefully participates in the string of murders, with relish. Stone, himself, also seems to relish the narrative anarchy as an opportunity to indulge in aesthetic anarchy. He switches between color and monochrome, seemingly indiscriminately; frightening, sometimes out of place images are projected obnoxiously onto the back wall of a motel room where Mickey and Mallory stay; the film changes tones so often and sometimes so discordantly that it appears to be suffering from schizophrenia; news reels, animation, movie clips, interviews, extreme angles, Coca-Cola commercials (y’remember – the ones with the polar bears) are all incorporated at varying intervals. But it is not as arbitrarily berserk as it seems. Upon more careful viewing (some would argue NBK merits none), one might see that the film is not completely running away with itself - there is some semblance of control over the proceedings, though it is arguable.

The film is divided into two acts: 1. On the Road, and 2. Superbowl Sunday. Even back when I despised this film, I still begrudgingly admired the second act: several tension-building moments confined to the Batongaville Maximum Security Penitentiary that feature placid inmates and a TV interview with the notorious mass murderer, a fiendish Woody Harrelson.

Everything is unfolding with relative calm, until things erupt, with a vengeance, into a prison riot of unparalleled madness.


Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Downey, Jr. both chomp down hard on the scenery, Robert Downey Jr. satirizing morbidly overzealous News Reporters as Wayne Gale (a spoof of Geraldo), and Tommy Lee Jones satirizing I don’t know what (evil prison wardens with pencil mustaches?). Jones gesticulates and spasms while Downey’s face constricts purple and his eyes bulge out of his skull, and I'm picturing Oliver Stone’s madly grinning face hanging over this heaping tray of ripe ham he has offered forth.

There is a moment where Downey and Jones get into a dispute: Downey lunges into Jones’s face commanding him to let him continue his televised prison interview with Mickey, and Jones screams right back, their faces almost touching, spittle flying, forehead veins bursting, as the two shout each other down. It was all very amusing to me. Not subtle, but Stone wasn’t aiming for subtle. In fact, he seems to have painted a target big enough to cover the broad side of a barn and then stood back to blast it with a shotgun. He’s angry at the media, television, consumer culture, American culture in general, but instead of neatly arranging a coherent outline and sifting through all the disparate items, he just throws all of it at the wall, hoping 75% of it will stick.

NBK is sort of like shotgun art on a piece of plywood: broad, scattershot, unfocused; but a fair portion of the canvas has some fantastic multi-colored splatters.


There’s a neon green snowflake shape (Drug Zone) that streaks down into a vomited configuration of hot pink, a tantalizing orange blot speckled with black drips (the I ♥ Mallory show) from a burst of paint that partially slammed into the corner. The oppressive green lighting in the Drug Zone sequence, one of my favorite in the film, carries a psychedelic nastiness that’s like a bad acid trip, the perfect feeling for a scene where two killers hopped up on murder and mayhem are finally forced to suffer the consequences of their addiction.

As satire, it could never be considered particularly incisive as the target has been punctured here and there, but certainly not with any real accuracy or precision. Basically, as satire, the film is a failure, but as a phantasmagoric cry of bewilderment and outrage, it has a forcefulness that is hard to match and a garish sense of humor that I found alternatively pleasurable and crass.

I’d be tempted to compare it to Bonnie & Clyde: Mickey and Mallory Knox are a Clinton-era Bonnie and Clyde on PCP.

But Bonnie & Clyde told a straightforward tragedy elegantly and with wit, whereas NBK is always in character, a grotesque stream-of-consciousness huffing and puffing (ironically) around a color wheel.


Grade: B-

My 7 Favorite Stand-Up Comics

I've been going through all of George Carlin's 14 HBO specials one at a time, and backwards too, starting with It's Bad For Ya! (2008) and just finished watching Playin' with Your Head (1986). I was not a fair-weather fan, either. I like all of his stuff, some of it less than others, and had seen 4 or 5 of his specials and downloaded various audio tracks of bits he did long before the evening of June 22, 2008. I had not been so torn up about a stranger's death since I learned that the brilliant Phil Hartman had been killed in a lurid murder-suicide, courtesy of his wife, Brynn Hartman. One could say that these people were not strangers, that they touched our lives without ever meeting us face to face, or some sentimental bullshit like that. Maybe there's some truth to it; I dunno. I loved George Carlin. He said things occasionally that I found despicable, but the worst comedians are the ones who are reluctant to probe the dregs, that is, the basest or least desirable aspects of the human condition. Some comedians can be profoundly hilarious discussing nothing but trivialities. One common theme in the following 6 comedians' acts is finding newfound layers of meaning/points of interest/absurdity in tiny, mundane things that people take for granted. Seinfeld popularized talking about nothing, with often amusing results, but George Carlin was doing it back in '86. I'm not sure if Carlin is the best, or Pryor is the best, or Lenny Bruce, or Bill Hicks. I hate arbitrary "Best of _________" lists, unless they're my arbitrary lists, which are good, unlike the other ones.


7.




6.




5.




4.




3.




2.




1.

“At first, I didn’t believe it, that this woman who looked as fertile as the Tennessee Valley could not bear children.


But the doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”

Batman: The Dark Knight (2008)

In my humble opinion (and I’m no comic-book scholar), the Joker might be the single greatest villain in the paneled world. I love Jack Nicholson’s take on the character, but sorry, it’s not the least bit frightening. Sure, he puts strychnine into make-up, shampoo, and cologne, and drops lethal nerve gas onto Gotham city, but the man himself? He’s little more than an overweight Pan-Caked doofus. He’s entertaining to watch, but the character was served very poorly. The Joker must create the same feeling that, say, Anthony Hopkins did, in The Silence of the Lambs: he’s all feral, ungovernable teeth and nails, and the pane of glass blocking him off from your fingers and toes is the most precious thing in the world to you when you’re standing before him. I can’t tell you how pleased I was when I saw the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s sequel to his sober reimagining of the Batman frachise, Batman Begins (2005), “The only thing we found in his pockets were knives and lint.” Yes!! The Joker, himself, is a flailing knife, and a prodigiously sharpened one, waving back and forth in the air, aiming for no one in particular, but saving no one a slice through the jugular.

Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) didn’t take the comic book character seriously (whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know) and his two films were silly, tongue-in-cheek affairs much closer to resembling the campy 1966 television series starring Adam West

...than to the hard-edged comics by Frank Miller (1986) (left) or Alan Moore (1988) (right).



Personally I found the Adam West television show to be insufferable. I think Tim Burton’s Batman Returns (1992) is irredeemably silly and his Batman (1989) is tolerable because I enjoy watching Nicholson, even though he’s only scary very briefly and the rest of the time prances like a peacock and looks like one of those clowns who show up to children’s birthday parties to fashion balloon animals.

As for Christopher Nolan’s offering of the character, much has been said about Heath Ledger’s Joker, but not all the credit must go to him: 35% of the success must go to the make-up and wardrobe department, for avoiding Nicholson’s flamboyant, camp getup and going with dark purple murderer chic.

The other masterstroke is smudging Ledger’s face paint so that it streaks, splotches, and runs, a deliberate mess which brilliantly radiates the warped sloppy dissonance reverberating in the Joker’s brain cavity.

And of course, there is Ledger himself, who displays a gift for a giggling array of facial tics and ghoulish idiosyncrasies that turn him into a walking magnet. When Ledger enters a room, the air bristles as if receiving an animal that escaped from the zoo; he skips around hostages like a demented jackal, as wild and capricious as a starving wolf. It’s the Joker as plausible mass murderer, which makes him arrestingly, urgently scary.

Even the harshest critics of this film will be hard-pressed to find a boring breath or gesture from Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Joker, a portrayal that makes Jack Nicholson’s look as silly and unthreatening as a Cirque du Soleil mime on a bender.

However, like Batman Begins, the story is often tediously by the numbers, and Nolan persists in his underwhelming artistry, being merely functional as a director rather than the virtuoso showstopper that jubilant fans seem to be confusing with the performance of an actor that deserved a much greater film to surround it. The film is 2 hours and 35 minutes, and it feels like it. It took about an hour and a half for me to actually start to care. Part of this comes from the fact that the Joker only makes two or three all too brief appearances during the First Act, one of which has him threatening a powerful gangster with a forcible widening of the mouth via knife blade. The Joker tells a macabre little story to the man about his abusive upbringing all the while holding the knife to the corner of the man’s mouth. The anticipation builds for a bizarre face mutilation, a demonstration of the mysterious Joker’s sadistic glee, and, and, there’s a loud noise of some sort, and the man falls dead. What? Did he stab him? Did he slice his throat? Did one of the Joker’s thugs shoot the man dead? Nolan fumbles this moment so badly that it practically invalidates the entire scene. There are many inept choices made by the director throughout the film. He shoots one or two action scenes rather competently, but others are just close-ups of blurs. You’d think by now Nolan would have learned to be liberal with the establishing shots and concerned with delivering coherent fight sequences. He has improved since Batman Begins, though, as seen during a spectacular long-distance shot of an 18-wheeler exploding from the base and catapulting vertically through the air. The action scenes are moderately thrilling when they are done well, two especially. The first is an awesome chase of a police van through a tunnel by a truck housing the Joker’s henchmen. The awesomeness comes in when the speeding truck pulls up alongside the van, and a side compartment of the truck opens to reveal the Joker himself, who proceeds to fire at the van with a fully automatic machine pistol, a shotgun, and finally, a bazooka.

He does most of this while giggling.

The second occurs just after the 18-wheeler has landed upside down at the end of a Gotham City street which has been turned into an impromptu war zone by the Joker. He pulls himself out of the 18-wheeler, and walks into cars driving in his direction, firing a submachine gun at them to clear his path. At the opposite end of the street is Batman on his Batpod. The urban mayhem and the street duel are shot very well so as to accentuate the city buildings towering around the Joker and Batman, as if to underline the power these two men have over the city, reminding us that the one who wins the city is the one who doesn’t back down.


A game of chicken commences as Batman speeds his Batpod towards the Joker, who refuses to move, inviting the collision. Of course Batman must swerve out of the way of the madman, and the motorcycle skids and crashes. This is basically the showdown to end all showdowns. As Joker says later, “This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.”

The reason the film appears to reach such newfound heights is the way the Joker character has unleashed everyone’s inhibitions about what’s safe or not. Hearing negative reviews criticizing the film for being, among other things, “sadistic,” was reassuring. I wanted my Joker served up hideous, uncompromising, as twisted as possible.

Unfortunately, hyperbolic reports of uber-darkness inflated my conception of what was to come. The murder and mayhem Nolan serves up is considerably less transgressive than what I wanted: Joker blows some shit up, cold-bloodedly guns down some henchmen, threatens people with malevolent behavior, nothing unusually envelope-pushing. A major character is killed in an explosion, but my reaction was more akin to, “Didn’t expect that person to die. Huh.” than, “Truly Gotham city, nay, the world seems to now be shrouded in pitiless tragedy! This is R-rated levels of cynicism and brutality!” These cries of sadism are coming from some really soft film reviewers. The most freakish, subversive thing is an instance where Nolan has the Joker dress up in a nurse’s outfit.

The only thing the film does that could be considered really upsetting to anyone older than maybe 12 is to show the Joker videotaping himself with a duct-taped hostage and then cackling madly while we hear cries of distress or pain from the hostage and then the video feed cuts to static.

About the scene with the nurse’s outfit, Nolan did impress with his managing a wide shot of the Joker (in nurse’s outfit) ambling out of a hospital (evacuated to preserve the children’s tears) as it erupts into fireballs behind him. Within the same single take, the Joker turns to his handiwork and I held my breath that Ledger wouldn’t fuck anything up for fear that all those very expensive detonations and freshly exploded building would have been wasted, or that Nolan would have to abandon his desired edit-free shot. Thankfully, Ledger is a consummate pro and the already impressive sequence is made even more impressive by virtue of its being a virtuoso long take.

I’ll probably see it again simply to revel in Ledger’s maniacal performance, a performance which is too entertaining and too iconic to merit anything less than a posthumous Academy Award.



Grade: B+