Brick
Friday, April 28, 2006
Brick
A high school kid, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, goes in search of his ex-girlfriend and finds she's started hanging out with the wrong crowd, kids who huff gas behind the local diner and deal small amounts of heavy drugs from their parent's basement rec-room. The kids all speak an amalgam of teenaged slang and gangster patois, i.e, "it's duck soup for you yegs," meaning, "it's going to be easy." Things spiral out of control, and early on, someone winds up dead. There are pictograms and odd clues. Fists fly. A gun is drawn.
You should see Brick, even if the trailer makes it look like it was made for French babies, because it promises a service which it then supplies generously. It combines the best elements of a John Hughes film with the best elements of a particular type of Film Noir, the plot-driven atmospheric spiral of The Big Sleep, Chinatown and Blue Velvet. It smartly recognizes those places where the push and pull of authority and helplessness, the rigorously formal ranking system, fits just as well with teenagers as with cops and criminals.
In Blue Velvet the teenaged protagonist is awakened to sexual experience past the point of mania. Brick represents the day after, that feeling of the first day in a long, bleak tally of days after the apocalypse. That is to say, it's a teen breakup movie. If both Blue Velvet and Brick finally lead to a little far-fetched gunplay and murder it's only because crime films are as close as we like to get to operatic emotion: instead of the soprano bellowing into the rafters with clenched fists we prefer the hero muttering over the body of a dead lover. This sort of operatic emotion is what teens do.
Once things start clicking with this movie, and you see that it's going to play it dead straight to the end, it's a real head slapping moment. It seems like someone should have thought of this before. When the Vice Principle stands up regally and tells our protagonist "I could bust you right now for talking back to a VP," it only occurs to you a few seconds later that it's a funny line. The lead bad guy is particularly mysterious not just because he deals drugs but because he is all of 26. The point is, we've been with the Gordon-Lewis too long not to take the stakes absolutely seriously. He holds on to the role chin forward, like gravity itself. The whole cast act like perfect teenagers, which is to say that they act as if they had invented adulthood, or were inventing it.
A second realization follows after seeing Brick, that is, there's nothing more adult than a screen detective. Humphrey Bogart hurling some skinny hood against the wall. That's because he's unreal, the invention of a teenaged self which demands more drama and more life than adult life can provide. We're all thrown back to adolescence when we watch crime movies. Any hero flickering up there, any loser, backstabber, cop, millionaire, boss, con artist or prostitute, would deflate if not for that idea of a future self, shaped by that thing in the audience which once felt like half-a-thing and knew what it was like to be a virgin and to want knowledge and control to the point of bursting. In this way Brick shines a light backwards into the films that came before it, and stands pretty confidently among them.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:29 AM, ,
On the Waterfront
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
On the Waterfront
The more I see Elia Kazan's movies the more I'm comforted and stroked by a Hollywood that always takes good care of its pictures. On the Waterfront is like a dog show, except instead of dogs it's labor unions, and instead of Alpo it's acting, and still the coats are all glossy and shining. Joan Didion, from "Good Citizens":
Social problems present themselves to many of these people in terms of a scenario, in which, once certain key scenes are licked...the plot will proceed inexorably to an upbeat fade.
The scene with Rod Steiger, in the car, "I coulda been somebody," is nice, though.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 6:09 PM, ,
Belle du Jour
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Belle de Jour
I like this movie, but not for the reasons I'm supposed to. That is, I'm not really supposed to like Catherine Denueve. For Bunuel the Marxist, debasement, the desire to become a prostitute, is all a rich bourgeois like Denueve has to look forward to when she's not wondering, all glassy eyed, about what's for dinner. So, boink, I guess I'm a Marxist! The route of all meaningful art, which is, thankfully, not all Bunuel wants. Or else you've got the updated assessment circa 2006 in which even a baby girl could see that the patriarchy is forcing Catherine Denueve to act against her will and undermine her domestic role. Or the notion that, structurally, the once frighteningly jarring style of Bunuel has culminated, in this film, into something smoother and far more menacing.
Maybe I'm dumb but all that just slides off my back when I'm in the theater. I'm entranced with the way the snake-like gangster (Peirre Clementi) rolls his cane around, or by Deneuve's face as it slowly thaws from bourgeois frigidity to sexual warmth, or appalled by whatever it is that burly, shirtless Japanese businessman has in his box (it buzzes like--yuck--a fly), and in general my mind is reassured by this movie in just the same way as it demands it be unsettled. The only way I wouldn't have enjoyed this film is if it had been a quality experience. Instead, it is surprising and interesting and rolls through emotional triggers like Clementi's gangster with his cane. And for dinner, I guess I'll have the Pad Thai.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:16 PM, ,
Deathdream/Slither
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Deathdream / 9-11 / Slither
The final scene of Deathdream is a killer and makes up for all the goofy low-budget stuff that goes on before. The returned Vietnam vet, his face falling off in clumps, finally admits to himself and everyone else that he's dead, and in the light of the flaming car he used to drive himself to the graveyard, before his mother and the authorities and everyone, he proceeds to clumsily bury himself beneath a hastily scratched headstone. To call this scene political is to bury the fine work of politics under a lot of rubber makeup. But next to the passionate car crashes and kisses of the movies, it looks shocking: an snapshot of the year 1972 and what was happening in the dark corners of the nation's drive-ins.
Having seen Deathdream in the morning I went to see Slither in the afternoon to see how it stacked up. I was met first by the spectacle of the United Flight 93 promo. There are no rubber fright masks to contend with here, and apparently no pleasure to be had from the advertised film, nor nothing to be learned which couldn't better be answered by the available literature, but the presence of blipping radar screens and strategically blurred faces indicates that the film, when it is released, will display a tastefully constructed reality answerable only to the dull buzz of political confusion which may yet take us to war with Iran next.
Don't blame Hollywood. The dumptruck of 9/11 culture is wheeling back and it doesn't just contain celluloid. This week's New Yorker features a story by Martin Amis, who has long been ululating about the significance of fiction in the post 9/11 world, something about how it should be less fictional, or something. The story is called "The Last Days of Mohammed Atta" and it's as portentious and mechanically produced as a football-stadium scoreboard. We're to be reminded that terrorists are human, too. So it turns out that Atta, along with many of his cohorts, not to mention the generally devout among those of the Islamic faith, were a fastiduous bunch, or at least fastiduous compared to Western tastes. Thus some comical business with a motel shower: "He stepped within, submitting to the cold and clammy caress of the plastic curtain on his calf and thigh. Then he spent an unbelievably long time trying to remove a hair from the bar of soap." Also, he's backed up. He's like a Neil Simon character, except Islamic. Cue the New Yorker readership: How right and how terrible and it's funny because it's true, etc. This is weak stuff compared to the Semour Hersh reportage that appears in the front of the magazine, and it isn't going to end here or with United Flight 93. We're probably going to have five more years of this stuff, a fulfillment of every purist/modernist's nightmare: that kitcsh (and that's exactly what all this "relevance" amounts to) will have an armada of United States weaponry behind it, ready to attack at the drop of a wry smile. The result will be more purism and firmer modernism, not to mention more irrelevance and more dumb movies.
Anyway, it occured to me that that a movie about 9/11 should be a comedy, neither smart nor stupid but engaged, maybe a musical, and it should likewise involve body horror and comically horrific pregnancies and zombies and a chorus line and bugs that take over your brain and make you an asshole and then abruptly truncate your life, and should include every other horrible buried image from the last five years, of crashed planes and body armor and suicide/murder, and should in short be as free of tasteful judgement as the event itself or anything in its aftermath. Then it occured to me that I was watching Slither, and that Slither would do just nicely, except no dancing. Maybe next time.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:23 AM, ,
Gold Diggers of 1933
Sunday, April 09, 2006
The "Pettin' in the Park" sequence from Gold Diggers of 1933, directed by Busbey Berkley, begins innocuously enough. ADVICE FOR YOUNG LOVERS in gilt on the cover of an oversized book, held in the hand of a young man, as a young women looks over his shoulder. He wears a straw hat. They sit on a bench in front of some pasteboard bushes. The cloying title song begins, in which the man and women admonish each other for being "bad boys" and "bad girls." He squeezes the girl tightly and they rock back and forth. She breaks into a tapdance number.
Reveal the chimps, imitating the young lover's behavior in a zoo. A gaggle of cops nod and point. Pan to a myriad of lovers, some of them elderly, rocking on their own benches. A baby peers out of a baby carriage. The baby is "cute," not microenchephalic--this has to be mentioned, because when the camera closes on him we see that he leers with a preternaturally adult face. In fact, he looks a little like Dick Powell, the young man from the opening. The man-baby gets involved with a bit of business with a pea shooter and some cops, the upshot of which is he passes through a canal of cop legs gliding on rollerskates. Suddenly, winter happens.
Blonde girls throw snowballs at big, fit men. They dance and coalesce, forming a giant white O, and undulate together like a hot, fat sea anemone in the snow. The man-baby from the last bit pops out of it, if you can believe that, and crawls into a set representing springtime. From there he crawls into a woman's dress. Her naked legs are exposed down to the hip. More leering. The camera pulls back and finds lots of similar women rocking back and forth with the big, fit men. The rain starts and the women get behind a scrim to strip. The man-boy emerges in a raincoat. He winks at us and raises the scrim. The women emerge with tin corsets on. Dick Powell, back again, knocks on a corset and looks bemused. His woman is wet. The man-boy emerges with a can opener. Big wink. On and on, until you begin to think, christ, did they involve chimps in this thing?
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:50 PM, ,
Performance
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Of a party in my hometown over a decade back, my memory is fractured in two. In the first memory, so many people attended this party that a low-slung porch caved in and sent a lot of intertwined legs and arms crashing into the yard. The victims were all laughing and enjoying themselves, yet all I really thought was now I'd have to go around to the back of the house to use the bathroom and it was probably time for me to get home anyway. In this memory I was too hot and everyone looked a little stupid. In the second memory, however, I remember seeing the porch cave in and all the smiling faces coming down, all of it, and think sadly that I no longer see sights like that anymore. In this memory I must have been having all sorts of fun because now all the parties are tasteful affairs where people wonder if they're being insulted or inauthentically praised.
In the same way, I squirmed in my seat during most of Nikolas Roeg's and Donald Cammell's Performance. Questions assualted my mind as the images played: why is the head gangster so badly dubbed in? Why are these seats so uncomfortable?Doesn't not having a job make it easier to find your "spirit demon?" And what is a picture of Jorge Luis Borges doing there spinning around inside of Mick Jagger's skull? Yet in the past week I have started to play Performance back in my mind and I think I enjoy it. It looks good, if unusual, filed into the gangster genre, especially if you see the lead gangster's transformation into Mick Jagger's spirit demon instead as the homely retribunal death all gangsters face in the movies. I have even been able to think of its naked landscapes of freckled white skin as really erotic instead of as one of those privileges of the rockstar-wealthy. The push and pull of the image remains and becomes real, and in this way Performance seems designed to be recollected years later but not discussed. Compare, please, to our generation's alternative to the straight gangster picture: goateed-film-student snuffle-truffling from the decades-long Quentin Tarantino school, Lucky Number Slevin, or whatever it's called. Which is to say that no one really throws parties like Performance anymore.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:21 PM, ,
