Joel & Ethan Coens' Burn After Reading (2008)

If for whatever reason you are looking at this review and have not seen Burn After Reading, DO NOT continue reading.

I repeat: If you have not seen this film, do NOT continue reading.

SPOILERS AHEAD. STOP NOW if you have not seen Burn After Reading. Seriously.

No one is more inclined to defend the Coen Brothers than me. No one, in the face of a flawed or unimpressive work of theirs, is more insistent on finding the silver lining. But this is the hardest it’s ever been to excuse them.

Burn After Reading is pointlessly mean-spirited. When a director is malevolent towards his characters in order to bolster thematic material, that’s wholly understandable, but here, the two most sweet and innocent characters in the film are brutally, glibly murdered, and for what? A laugh. I was shocked when George Clooney’s Harry Pfarrer, in a hilarious (not to me) misunderstanding, blows Chad’s brains out the back of his head. After that I kind of glazed over for the remainder of the film, which was why I didn’t understand the reasons for Richard Jenkin’s character’s presence in the basement of the house belonging to Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton). His presence leads to another misunderstanding and the brutal murder of Jenkins at the hands of Katie’s soon to be ex-husband, Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), whose character was disgruntled at the start of the film, and by the end, a delirious psychotic. My brother, whose attention had not been blunted from shock, told me that Jenkins had been asked by Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) in a scene I had watched but not really absorbed, to find more information on Osborne Cox for reasons too complicated and pointless to explain. The film is simply an exercise for its own sake. It has no reason for being, other than, I guess, the Coens’ fear of their movie-making skills getting rusty if they sit on their laurels for too long? For shits and giggles? I did not giggle when Chad’s brains were blown out the back of his head. He (Brad Pitt) was the most likeable character in the film; dim, yes, but his dimness was endearing, more endearing than the repellent self-absorption of the other characters. McDormand’s character points out that he was a “can-do kind of guy” or something along those lines while everyone else she knew, in reference to Clooney’s character, is “defeated.” Perhaps that's the ironic point, but...

I've seen all 12 of the Coens' previous films, and can read them about as well as one can, and when they have a serious point they want to make, no matter how caustic, they find a subtle way to infuse a little gravity into the tone of the goofball antics (an example being the strangely moving description of H.I.'s dream at the very end of Raising Arizona, or the sober manner in which they consider Norville's preparations for suicide in The Hudsucker Proxy). The only gravity in Burn After Reading are bungled moments of earnestness, such as when McDormand's character sits in her lonely living room after a profoundly unsatisfying date. This shot is framed from a distance, and is lit beautifully, diagonal pale yellow diaphanous folds of light refracted from the moon off the softly flowing drapes in the window reaching across the carpet. The music becomes serious for a moment, as does the film, but it is totally out of place here. Chad's appalling murder, on the other hand, is portrayed as a joke. So is the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins. I know "the hatcheting of Richard Jenkins" sounds funny, but to witness it is not. Frankly, this is a callousness that is beneath them. The Coens transmit an invisible disgust with just such callousness in Fargo when their camera looks upon Carl Showalter's pitiless giggles at Jean Lundegaard's pathetic attempts to run away in the snow with a bag over her head. Now, Joel & Ethan are the ones pitilessly giggling at the poor sap, Chad, as he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, and with a fountain of gore totally out of character with the effervescent goofiness that has preceded it, point at his horrifying misfortune and snort, 'What a dope.' The last expression on his stupid face is a big 'Whoops, what a pickle! Let me just explain..' smile and then that stupid face gets fired into at point-blank range.

At the end of the movie, two CIA officers congregate to discuss all that has happened. One says to the other, “So what did we learn?” The second one shrugs, and the first officer answers his own question, “Uh, I guess that we shouldn’t let it happen again.” Yeah.


Grade: C+

The Usual Suspects (1995)

I don’t see how rabid fans of The Usual Suspects can see much replay value in the film for any reason other than studying the elegant long-distance shots or the John Ottman score (it evokes a sense of conspiracy with music alone, nevermind the images). Once you know that 85% of the story is just the suspect ramblings of a liar, there’s no reason to go back and piece it all together, because there is no “it” there; more than ¾ of the film has been pulled out of Verbal Kint’s ass, some of it on the spot, from looking at random shit nailed on the bulletin board in the office of a police station where he sits explaining, and explaining, and explaining, all of it being more or less a lot of nothing; in short, a complete waste of time.

And all that exposition he pulled out of his ass (you know, the movie) is hopelessly complicated for one reason, and one reason only: if it wasn’t, you’d realize you’ve seen it all before. But because there are flashbacks, and crisscrossing timelines, and double-crosses, and false leads, and red herrings, you find yourself concluding that there was a lot there: it’s the shaggy dog story in the form of a thriller: you’re told this, and that, and how they connect and where they diverge, and this goes over here, and that goes there, and then at the end, you learn that none of it really matters. It’s sort of like the titular joke in The Aristocrats: the point is not the long-winded time-consuming set-up but the two word punch line. The problem is, once you learn the punch line, it doesn’t make up for the precious 15 minutes you stood there listening to the set-up, and if you’d known better, you’d have preferred to have not heard it all together. However, "the Aristocrats" joke reveals insight into the unique pathology and dysfunction of the individual who tells it, and the joke, while inherently of no value, becomes valuable because the procedure snowballs into a dissection of the fundamental essence of comedy, how so much of it derives from a twisted alienation, the nature of taboos, why one taboo is more severe than another, the motivation for speaking the unspeakable, and lots of interesting tributaries break off from what seemed like a stagnant little puddle. The Usual Suspects is all puddle.

Christopher McQuarrie’s screenplay seems to have been written with the end first. The premise is interesting: a meek, bullied little two-bit thief is actually a fearsome and dangerous criminal mastermind...


...and he’s right there in plain sight the whole time.


But the premise is only as good as the elaboration on it, and the elaboration on it, McQuarrie’s screenplay, is (basically) 95 minutes of pedestal built to make the 5 minutes of twist look, well, like it’s on a pedestal. And the 5 minutes is pretty cool, but not worth the 95 minutes it took to get there, 95 minutes of dialogue and situations which amount to watching the hard-boiled posturing of two insecure bullies glowering at one another in a schoolyard. The dialogue between the five Suspects of the title is especially awful when they are sizing one another up in a holding cell in which they are all being kept while being held for weapons charges:

“I’ve eaten scum like you for breakfast, chum”

“Chum rhymes with scum, tough guy.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“Oh, am I? Or are you?

“I got a big job I’m working on.”

“Why don’t you take your job and shove it up your ass?”

“This job is big, pal, real big. You want in, or am I talking to the Dean Keaton of legend?”

“What legend? I’m just a guy and you’re kitty litter.”

Et cetera, ad infinitum. I made that up of course, but you get the idea; this dialogue is such juvenile, clichéd tough-guy speak it could’ve been written by Frank Miller. There is actually a scene where two groups of criminals thump their chests in each other’s faces, and Stephen Baldwin’s character on one side sarcastically calls Peter Greene’s character on the other side, “tough guy,” to which Greene replies back with, “You know McManus, you think you’re such a tough guy.” These thugs would pick up their skirts and drop the act as soon as Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito got in their faces. According to some positive reviews, the clichéd dialogue is intended to be ironic, but that would require the film to have a certain tone which the film most definitely does not have - It tells Soze’s story in a straightforward manner, soberly. The movie, I’m afraid, actually thinks this is how “tough guys” talk. More examples of the writer’s pathetic idea of what equals “a bad dude:” Verbal Kint tells numbskulled Agent Kujan (the Neanderthal-looking Chazz Palminteri) that Keyser Soze is so bad, sooo bad that he kills his enemies, then his enemies’ parents, then their kids, then their friends. Then he kills their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends’ friends, and even their friends’ friends’ friends’ friends’ pets, the employees of the pet store who sold the pets, the employees of the pet stores’ friends, parents, pets, mailmen, that one guy they kinda knew in high school, his parents, etc. etc. If this was intended to be ironic, then it’s hilarious, but it’s not, and it’s the sort of laughable demonstration you’d see a scowling high schooler scribble in a handmade comic book: “He kills their children, and their parents, and their pets…yeah…this dude is fucking evil…”

There is a scene in the film where Pete Postlethwaite (in a chilling performance) shows up as Soze’s #2, Mr. Kobayashi, and offers the five guys a deal. Kevin Pollack’s character, Hockney, with knee-jerk overcompensating machismo, aims his gun (sideways), at Kobayashi and snarls something like, “Why don’t I kill you right now (tough guy)?”


Kobayashi talks for a while, explains himself, and Hockney, realizing he's performing a pointless action by aiming a gun he has no intention of shooting (and really had no intention of shooting in the first place), gradually, pathetically lowers his gun. That’s a perfect symbol for what The Usual Suspects does: it makes mean faces and makes sure you know it has a gun, but it doesn’t pull the trigger. It’s a movie for 15 year old boys, of which I was once, and back then I recall thinking The Usual Suspects was pretty cool.


But when I read reviews and hear fans calling it, absurdly, “smart,” I wonder if they’d be fooled by Kevin Spacey’s crooked left foot and obviously affected “I’m so timid” pantomime. Oversell it much, Verbal? See his foot? It’s crooked. And he quivers a lot. And he’s called a “stupid cripple” about 1,396 times through the course of the film. He’s a weakling, get it? No way could a weakling as weak a weakling as that could ever be a nefarious, pet-killing criminal mastermind, no sir.


Grade: C-

Barton Fink: An Appreciation, Part 2

“Barton,

May this little entertainment direct you during your sojourn among the philistines.

Bill”

Of the two major plot threads in Barton Fink, one being the Earle’s dark night of the soul, the other is not quite as overtly sinister: it details Barton’s seduction at the hands of a bombastic movie producer (Michael Lerner, delivering Coen dialogue as if born to) and his relationship with Bill Mayhew (John Mahoney), a once great highbrow writer who has essentially sold his abilities to the picture business. Mayhew, the once great Southern novelist turned screenwriter, is an overt allusion to William Faulkner.

It could also be a combination allusion to Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both highly respected novelists who, whether compelled by creative stagnation or financial issues, found themselves in Hollywood whoring their talents writing bread and circuses fluff clearly beneath them. The first time we see Mayhew, he is partially obscured in a bathroom stall, vomiting hideously from a hangover. It is no coincidence that Barton's introduction to the man is in a bathroom, and the first thing Mayhew does after washing his hands at the sink and composing himself is to retrieve a flask from his waistcoat pocket. As the film moves along, Barton’s reverence for the man diminishes as he sees what the transition from writer to hack has done to him. Mayhew is a bitter drunkard, at first briefly pretending to be proud of his work for the movie industry, but before long, voicing hateful remarks, and autographing his latest book, hilariously titled Nebuchadnezzar (a playful nod to Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom?), "Barton: May this little entertainment direct you during your sojourn among the philistines."

Barton arranges an outdoor luncheon with Mayhew through Mayhew's lady-friend, Audrey (Judy Davis). The afternoon begins calmly enough, but once Bill starts spewing acid and bitterness, the luncheon is cut short. He says writing helps him to escape, and that if he couldn't escape, he'd go mad. Drinking from a bottle of whiskey, he mentions that the bottle helps sometimes too.



Both Audrey and Barton argue the opposite.

Barton: Look, uh, maybe it’s none of my business but don’t you think a man with your talent, that your first obligation is to your gift, shouldn’t you be doing whatever you have to do to work again?
Mayhew: And what would that be, son?
Barton: I don’t know exactly, but I do know what you’re doing with that drink, you’re cutting yourself off from your gift, and from Audrey, and from your fellow man, and from everything your art is about.
Mayhew: Oh, no, son, I’m buildin’ a levee - gulp by gulp, brick by brick – puttin’ up a levee to keep that ragin’ river of manure from lappin’ at my door.

Dismayed and outraged at Mayhew’s hateful behavior, Fink, again, as with his deafness to Charlie, misses the big picture. As I said in Part 1, Barton is at the cusp of a momentous crossroads. He fails to see that Mayhew, who chose his path long ago, has turned into a man who has been wrecked by compromising his own refined sensibilities. How many steps removed from conforming art to the plainer, less cultivated tastes of a wider audience is it to just plain dumbing oneself down? Barton wants to write a picture about a common man for the common man, but he doesn't know what it means to be a common man. Should he tamper with his writing for an audience he doesn’t fully understand or identify with? If not, should he quit? Or be ashamed? Are the Coen Brothers justifying snobbery? What's the difference between being a snob and having refined tastes in film, literature, music, painting, et cetera? Does being dismissive of bad art make one a snob? Does being ignorant and dull in the face of elegance and subtlety demand scorn or even light rebuke? These are important questions with no easy answers, but questions inherent to the creation of art. That is what makes Barton Fink an essential art film, an indispensable contribution to the work of cinema.

After his encounter with Audrey and Bill, we see Barton awakened from slumber by another mosquito. He looks at the typewriter sitting on his desk with dread. Once he sits down, we are afforded a look at his progress, and find, that not only has he made none, it has regressed: Now, instead of “Early morning traffic is audible” the manuscript reads “It is too early for us to hear traffic; later, perhaps, we will.” The “cry of the fishmongers” can still be heard, but “faintly” and the “tenement building on Manhattan’s Lower East Side” is now “A tenement hotel on the Lower East Side.” Sharper viewers than I would notice that the brief allotment of text has changed ever so slightly from before on their very first screening of Barton Fink; here they are, back to back:

FADE IN

A tenement building on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side. Early morning traffic
is audible, as is the cry of the
fishmongers.

FADE IN

A tenement hotel on the Lower East
Side. We can faintly hear the cry
of the fishmongers. It is too early
for us to hear traffic; later,
perhaps, we will.

As Barton looks at his inability to write what he intended with a look of agonized concentration on his face, the camera descends below his desk to where his shoes lay in front of his socked feet. He inserts them into the shoes, and we see that the shoes are too big (they are Charlie’s shoes; he and Barton took each others’ by mistake). His feet in Charlie’s shoes, not fitting, the camera moves back up to Barton as he types: he pauses, staring at what he has written, with a look of utter defeat.

Charlie knocks on his door, and enters holding Barton's shoes. They exchange.


This is the moment where Charlie expresses his frustration with the cruelty of his customers, the first time we witness an angry outburst from the ostensibly sweet-natured man. That's nothing compared to the outburst to come.



The closer Barton comes to his deadline, the crueler his writer's block seems, until, finally, one night, he phones Audrey in desperation. She visits him at the Earle, and reveals a shocking revelation: she wrote Nebuchadnezzar, as well as the rest of Bill's recent work. She offers to assist him, but before long, they have become amorous and as they recede onto the bed, the camera drifts into the bathroom, where their sounds of lovemaking funnel ominously down the drain in the sink and begin a voyage through the plumbing of the Hotel.

The next morning, Barton awakens to a nightmare. Audrey has been murdered during the night and the mattress is soaked in her blood. Shrieking involuntarily, he alarms Charlie, who insists that he let him help. Charlie tells Barton to go about his day as planned, and he will take care of the body. When Barton returns from meeting with the movie producer, the corpse is absent, and Charlie, who a few evenings prior informed Barton that he would be leaving on a short trip this very day, arrives at Barton's room with a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with a string. He bids Barton adieu.

The true nature of the noble working man is contained within that parcel, and it is the only thing Barton takes with him from the Hotel Earle, other than his screenplay. The parcel is a grim memento, and it sits next to him on the beach as he stares at a real life recreation of the painting in his room: the beautiful woman in the bathing suit, gazing out, as if to the future, over a gently lapping surf. There is one slight difference though: a seagull. As Barton sits next to the parcel, he watches the seagull crash down into the ocean, abruptly disturbing the tranquility. Art doesn’t reflect life. We don’t need to look inside the parcel to know what’s in it.


A common complaint from detractors of Joel & Ethan Coen is that they sneer at their characters, are contemptuous of them. Upon cursory glance, one might suggest this possibility began with the polite denizens of Brainerd who seem to live and speak in an innocuous state of slow-motion incomprehension. Well, Fargo was their 6th film. In their first film, Blood Simple, you have Ray, played by John Getz. He is a drawling sort of good ol’ boy, not an intellectual by a long shot, but the Coens certainly portray him as more often cunning than not, cleaning up a bloody mess and disposing of a dead body effectively, though with suspenseful inefficiency. Then you have H.I. McDunnough (Nicolas Cage) from Raising Arizona. The Coens keenly milk Cage’s drooping, vapid expression for all its comic potential, while simultaneously making him the mouthpiece for their ornate dialogue. Seeing such grandiloquence from a hayseed produces an absurd incongruity that makes people laugh if they get the joke (Roger Ebert, the point flying twenty or so meters above his head, commented about H.I.'s language: “…that's not what you expect from a two-bit thief who lives in an Arizona trailer park.”). Even if Raising Arizona was meant to be taken seriously (aside from the poetic coda mystically scored by the great Carter Burwell), one could surmise that the Coens respect H.I. enough to reward him with such florid articulacy. There is no issue in Miller’s Crossing, as all the characters are shady inside men running in elite circles, some being more ruthless (and lucky) than others. So it was with Fargo that the Coens first dared to put their caricatures within the framework of a somber tragedy, provoking cries of “Condescension!” and “Contempt!” Barton Fink has caricatures, yes, but the film, being allegory, does not take place in reality, as Fargo claims to do. Fargo, at its outset, purports to be a true story (it is not, as we all know by now) but I think a very good case could be made that it really does not take place in reality, but is more of a fable in the tradition of David Lynch's Blue Velvet. I sincerely doubt that the depiction of the locals are intended as a hateful criticism of real-world Minnesotans. Some of them are portrayed as ignorant of duplicity and scheming (which does not mean they are portrayed as stupid) and some are portrayed as simpletons, but not in a nasty way. Quite the opposite in fact, as the Coens seem to delight in their quaint guilelessness. Fargo, in its tone with the comical asides, seems to suggest that these are people to cautiously admire, or at the very least, be thankful for.

The Coens are nuanced filmmakers, and Barton Fink is a massive turning point in the attitudes and themes of their work. Barton Fink reveals, yes, Barton (John Turturro) is, partially or more so, a representation of the bespectacled, brainy Joel & Ethan, who wrote the screenplay for it, their 4th film, while, you guessed it - struggling with desperate writer’s block over the second half of the screenplay for Miller’s Crossing. Looking at their previous work, and also looking to future work, they sensed a dilemma: there is an unavoidable elitist tendency within them that is troubling, and must be exorcised. What they, and Barton learn, by the end of Barton Fink, is that this part of them cannot be surmounted; it is as much a part of them as their childhoods, as inseparable and natural to them as their personalities, it is what makes them the Coen Brothers – it is something to be embraced, not exorcised. As the Hotel Earle burns, summoning allusions to Dante’s Inferno and the Apocalypse, Barton makes his way out of his room, suitcase in hand, departing for the exit, and I felt like the Coens had finished wrestling with their guilt, moving onto the more widely acclaimed pastures of cocky assurance that is displayed so confidently in Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O, Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, and No Country For Old Men. They found themselves in Barton Fink, after being baptized in fire.


Grade: A+

Barton Fink: An Appreciation, Part 1

Barton Fink: An Appreciation, Part 1

Barton Fink (John Turturro) wants to write a play about the working man, the guy in the streets; he voices exasperation with the fragmentary conception he has from the intellectual’s removed balcony of experience and background. How does one who never travels in such circles begin to write a comprehensive or progressive portrait of a working man based on “shopworn abstractions about drama” as Barton puts it when laying bare all these tormenting doubts that have left the paper in his typewriter with nothing, nothing but a few sentences:

FADE IN

A tenement building on Manhattan’s
Lower East Side. Early morning traffic
is audible, as is the cry of the
fishmongers.

The man who bears witness to Barton’s troubled confessional is Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) a genial traveling salesman who happens to reside on the same floor of the Hotel Earle where Barton is staying during a transitional period while trying his hand at screenwriting for the movin’ pictchas. Barton is a neurotic poindexter, highly intelligent, but devastatingly unconscious of the fact that all of the doubts, reservations, and discouragement he goes on and on about, ever preoccupied with his own thoughts of artistic inadequacy trampling his agitated screed all over Charlie’s replies, would be solved if he only listened to Charlie’s aborted attempts to join the conversation. Charlie is the very type of common man he so desperately wants to understand. Charlie barely ever gets a word in.

Barton Fink is, in many ways, as much of an agitated admission from the Coen Brothers as it is from the titular Fink: it is at once a mission statement, an artistic crossroads, and a resignation: Barton has good intentions, and his sequestered intellect has produced an idealized portrait of the working class, the noble savages, the dignified downtrodden, the real heroes as he sees it. His conception of the common man is as rosy and idealized as the painting of the woman gazing out at the ocean that hangs insinuatingly on the wall in his hotel room. By the end of the film, he will have experienced a shattering of this conception, and even the hotel itself rebels at his deluded conception – the walls the painting hangs on drips and the wallpaper peels, obstinate in its refusal to stick, even after Barton has gone to lengths to push it back against the sticky substance that seems to be sweating from the Hotel walls.


The Hotel is a living organism, perhaps a symbolic incarnation of Barton’s mind, but more likely a depiction of the human body in all its naked corruption.


The first night in the hotel, Barton’s face is descended upon by a mosquito, leaving a buzzing swollen mark where he has been fed upon/drained. One of the posters for the film depicts the mosquito prominently. What does the mosquito mean? What does any of it mean? This is one of the most secretive and brilliant films of the 90s, and never wants for contemplation. Pondering it is a rich and endlessly rewarding pleasure for me. It is my very favorite of favorite Coen films.

I don’t presume to know exactly what everything means, but I believe at the heart of the film is a pessimistic realization that the noble savage may just be a savage, the seemingly too obvious conclusion that living low is just as capable, perhaps more so, of producing irredeemable, base individuals. This is the same thought that struck me while watching Lars Von Trier’s Dogville – the fearless and potentially offending proposal that the conception of the dignified working class that so many patronizing liberals hold, is flat out naïveté. Pity for a starving dog clouds the truth that the dog is, indeed, starving, and such neglect and maltreatment inspires nasty, selfish, even violent behavior. The mangy cur is something that invites solicitous affection until its mistreatment sinks its fangs into your hand.

If you haven't seen Barton Fink, I'd strongly recommend not continuing.


As we learn to chilling ends late in Barton Fink, our lovable sad-sack Charlie is a sex-starved monster, who exploits his transient occupation as a means of gaining entry to homes and murdering scornful housewives.

Charlie: Jesus, what a day I had. You ever had one of those days?
Barton: Yeah. Seems like nothing but lately.
Charlie: Jesus, what a day. Felt like I couldn’t have sold ice water in the Sahara. Okay. So you don’t want insurance. Okay. So that’s your loss. But, God, people can be rude. Feel like I have to talk to a normal person like you just to restore a little of my…
Barton: No, it’s my pleasure. I could use a little lift myself.
Charlie: Good thing they bottle it, huh, pal? (pauses to take a swig from flask) Did I say rude? People can be goddamn cruel, especially some of these housewives. Okay. So I have a weight problem. That’s my cross to bear. I don’t know.
Barton: It’s a defense mechanism.
Charlie: (angry) Defense against what, insurance? Something they need? Something they should be grateful to me for offering? (calms) A little peace of mind.

On Barton’s second night in the Earle, a disturbing thing happens: he hears, through the thin walls, something that, at first, sounds like laughter. Mad, insane laughter. It isn’t laughter. It is the sound of a man sobbing. Barton calls down to the front desk to complain. He hears the phone ring through the wall, muffled conversation, and then heavy footsteps which sound purposefully to his door, followed by a loud knock. Turns out it’s Charlie. He is a big affable man, and his wide grin only hints at the cracked personality beneath on repeat viewings.


Charlie: Those two lovebirds next door driving you nuts?
Barton: How do you know about that?
Charlie: Know about it? I can practically see how they’re doing it. Brother, I wish I had a piece of that. Seems like I hear everything that goes on in this dump (pressing fingers against his ears and wincing in pain) – pipes or something.

His mild irritation at the wall-penetrating sounds of passion from the Hotel Earle’s resident “lovebirds” conceals a raging resentment, a dark sadness that gives way to psychotic vengeance. On his third night at the Earle, Barton hears through the walls sounds of sex, a woman moaning. Shortly thereafter, he hears it again, mingling with the muffled moans, the disquieting sobs of someone deeply distressed coming from the opposite wall. No doubt this is Charlie. You take a guess at the reasons for his crying.


Barton Fink: An Appreciation, Part 2

Tropic Thunder (2008)

After feeling like a jackass for braying a good deal through Step Brothers, I was made to feel even more defensive by my brother when we stepped foot out of the theater and he commented on how obnoxious it all was, how it had mistaken loud for funny. I involuntarily accused him of housing a stick in his posterior, the knee-jerk response to such mirthless reactions. I fear I could receive the very same accusation concerning my reaction to Ben Stiller’s bombastic assault on already thoroughly lampooned Hollywood shortfalls in his fourth undertaking as director, Tropic Thunder.

It didn’t help that I happened to seat myself directly in front of and directly to the right of a pair of howling fellow theatergoers who saw that the film was sharply in need of a running commentary for which only they could provide. And they did so, with capacious regard for the other members of the audience, bestowing such rarefied insights as “What a dumbfuck!” and “That shit’s crazy!” as well as dutifully repeating particular lines from the film that may have been inaudible due to their prior ejaculations, crucial though they might have been. Perhaps a less busy screening might improve my opinion of Tropic Thunder, but that would require a desire to see it a second time, and be assaulted a second time. Even without the refined contributions of the gentlemen behind me, I found the obnoxiousness of Tropic Thunder to fill the glass of my patience to the brim, and then continue on pouring with another hour to go, overflowing the glass, sopping the tablecloth and drenching the floor, which was then slipped on by the film. Tropic Thunder slips on itself, big time. Tom Cruise appears as a furry, bald, gold-chain-wearing creep of a movie producer, and he is hilarious. But then the movie keeps pointing at him and saying, “Funny? Eh? Huh? Huh? Funny!? Am I right?!” Cruise’s character, Les Grossman, a vile man who threatens a woman on the phone with “I will rip your tits off” and who hurls other inventive scatological threats at various underlings, is shown advising Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller)’s agent (Matthew McConaughey? Yeah, it’s him) to embrace the future, and proceeds to lift the gold dollar sign hanging on a chain around his neck, and dangling it, gyrates like a back-up dancer in a rap video. Ben Stiller, apparently being unaware of the advice, “Leave the audience wanting more” has Grossman chain-dangle and dance again at the end of the film, over the credits for Christ’s sake, and shows it and shows it, until not only is it not funny, it’s flat-out embarrassing. But by then, I was too exhausted to be that irritated by it. Exhausting would be the most concise way to describe the feeling of seeing Tropic Thunder.

The film wants to satirize loud, insanely out of control war movies, but I have about as much faith in Stiller as a director as I do Michael Jordan playing baseball. Now using an analogy like that is dated, yes? Jordan played minor league baseball, badly, back in 1994. That’s a lame analogy on my part, but is it as lame as a comedy released in 2008 making fun of Willem Dafoe’s protracted and grandiose death scene from 1986’s Platoon? Yeah, Ben Stiller does that, and it’s probably been something he’s been planning since he was 21. Yes, that scene deserved to be poked fun at, but doing it 22 years later just makes me wonder how fresh and “daring” such a comedy is that would contain such an expired jab. The hype and the word of mouth purported that Tropic Thunder would excoriate and take-no-prisoners in its quest to hand the movie industry its ass. What it does is give the movie industry a noogie.

The movie begins with 4 faux advertisements: the first a spoof of raunchy, crass rap videos, which has been done already on The Onion, on SNL, on “The Boondocks” and various other [adult swim] cartoons, on Mad TV…; the second a trailer of a dumb action movie with 5 sequels; the third a trailer spoofing The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps (2000); the fourth spoofing self-important art-house type period pieces. Only the last one is really inspired. It features Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire as two repressed monks casting suggestive looks at one another under a chorus of choir-techno. The title: “Satan’s Alley.” As for satirizing actors that play mentally handicapped roles in order to win Academy Awards, I direct you to the first episode of Extras: Season 1: been there, done that. If you find yourself utterly disengaged from the movie while watching it, just try thinking of where the hand-me-down jokes that are being presented as if they are cutting, razor-sharp attacks on the vanity and wastefulness of the movie industry originated from.

The rest of the movie hits easy targets and is about as funny and clever as a regularly scheduled episode of Saturday Night Live, only with a bigger budget, and more dirty talk. Most of these “inside jokes” had no teeth by the time they showed up on Entourage. I laughed here and there, and there were mitigating factors, but how this got a 72 on Metacritic leads me to believe that in the low standards of August, shooting fish in a barrel is welcomed more than just leaving them alone, even if they’ve already been shot dead.


Grade: C

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-