Something To Talk About: Tropic Thunder

It’s not often that a movie inspires two separate but equal storms of controversy prior to its release, but Ben Stiller’s Tropic Thunder did just that. The blockbuster Hollywood satire that raised eyebrows and sparked debate back in the spring with news of Robert Downey Jr’s performance in brownface found itself in the eye of a whole new storm come August when groups offended by the movie’s “hateful” references to the mentally disabled called for a boycott. Over at The House Next Door, Matt Zoller Seitz nodded toward the double lightning strike by astutely comparing Stiller & Co., to “silent movie comedians who carefully back away from a growling dog and fall right off the edge of a building.” Indeed. But what were they falling toward?

If you believe the Hollywood maxim that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Tropic Thunder was falling toward success, thanks at least in part to a lot of free advertising. The R-rated comedy topped the box office charts its opening weekend, booting The Dark Knight from its four-week stay at the summit, and it maintained its position a week later (and counting). The execs at DreamWorks must be pleased. If the controversy soured some moviegoers (including many, I suspect, who were unlikely to contribute to its grosses in the first place), it almost certainly attracted others: curiosity-seekers, rubberneckers, whatever you want to call them. As business strategies go, reveling in the taboo is risky, but it has tremendous upside. A few weeks in, Tropic Thunder’s all-in gamble seems to have paid off. Still, no matter how lucrative the movie goes on to be, its hype came at a cost. The controversy may have sold tickets but it also hit the film right where it hurts: the funny bone.

See, comedy and premature exposure don’t mix. In the current environment of gossip sites and give-away-the-store trailers, it’s unrealistic to expect to walk into a comedy entirely unaware of its punchlines. Still, comedies, like mysteries, work best when they can protect some of their secrets. By the time Tropic Thunder reached theaters, its biggest and boldest gags were well documented, if not always properly contextualized. A collection of mock movie trailers leading up to the main event succeeds in providing some welcome surprises, but after that the brand new movie feels shockingly familiar, like a legendary rock band plowing through its greatest hits. Tropic Thunder still delivers laughs, to be sure, but despite giddily embracing politically incorrect scenarios it never pushes the audience to that place of enthused discomfort prized by standup comedians – the place where the humor of the joke itself is secondary to the boldness of its telling, the boldness of “going there.”

Falling in love with a comedy can be like falling in love with a person. Just like you can keep the passion alive in a relationship despite years of the same, a familiar joke can deliver genuine laughs over repeated tellings. But first impressions matter; subsequent laughs are often a nostalgic embrace of one’s initial response. If you search your mental list of favorite comedies you’re almost sure to find some that you admire as much for the way it made your friend laugh in the seat next to you as for the way it appealed to your own sense of humor. Comedies, more than other genres, inspire us to share the experience, even if we’re sharing it with complete strangers. That’s why they almost always play better to packed houses on opening weekend than to quiet living rooms after a lonely weeknight trip to Blockbuster. And so while the premature revelation of Tropic Thunder’s shock-and-awe gags won it admirers, it also snuffed the thrill of discovery. Falling for Downey Jr’s performance wasn’t like experiencing the jolt of love at first sight. It was like growing to appreciate the attractiveness of a longtime neighbor.

This matters because Tropic Thunder relies upon outrageousness more than cleverness, and its most brazen gag is the one spoiled by recent protests: In a movie that’s about actors making a war movie (or so they think), Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a Vin Diesel action-movie sort whose previous role was an against-type performance in a film called Simple Jack in which he played a mentally handicapped man who cares for horses. Jack, in Tropic Thunder’s parlance, is a “retard,” and the Stiller/Speedman embodiment of him is exaggerated and clownish and in every way politically incorrect. Is it insensitive? Sure. Is it offensive? To some it will be. But is it indefensible? No way.

Tropic Thunder, thru Simple Jack, isn’t asking us to laugh at the mentally disabled. Instead it’s exposing Hollywood’s habit of celebrating actors who don, yep, retardface and asking us what’s so special (see: Forrest Gump, Rain Main, I Am Sam, etc.). The protests surrounding Tropic Thunder actually underline the hypocrisy called into question by the satire: portraying the mentally challenged is considered acceptable if the role is uplifting or otherwise noble, but it’s considered offensive if it’s the stuff of comedy. Tropic Thunder’s problem then isn’t that it’s careless or heartless but that the boycott temporarily rendered it an ethical touchstone rather than a piece of entertainment. Instead of simply reacting to the audacity of the Simple Jack construct and letting our internal radar administer the acceptability test, the prerelease hullabaloo puts us in analytical mode from the very start.

For other films, that would be an accomplishment. But Tropic Thunder, based on a screenplay by Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, seeks reactions that are first and foremost visceral. That’s why Tugg Speedman noshes on brain matter, why Jack Black’s Jeff Portnoy ends up running around in his underwear and why Steve Coogan plays a director with the last name Cockburn. That’s also why Tom Cruise gets a latex makeover to play the balding, hairy-chested, overweight Les Grossman – a diet soda drinking, hip-hop loving producer with a temper. Grossman swears a lot and says otherwise awful things, but the laughs his rants generate are a product of the casting, not the writing. Here’s it’s not Grossman that’s funny, it’s Cruise playing Grossman that induces snickers. (If you suffered through Betty White’s foul-mouthed performance in Bringing Down The House, to cite one similar offender, you’ve been here before.) Of course, if you’ve seen Cruise in Magnolia, the effect of Grossman will be negligible. This was a role for Tom Hanks, not Tom Cruise, who has already been there and done that. Still, the Grossman character is the key to identifying Tropic Thunder’s allegiance to foolishness over commentary.

Not that there’s anything wrong with foolishness. The Cruise episodes are lazy, as are any involving Matthew McConaughey’s insincere agent and Black’s drug-addicted buffoon, yet some of Tropic Thunder’s simplest gags are surprisingly effective: one involving an animal attack in the jungle, another involving Speedman’s attempt to save his “adopted” son. But in final analysis, Tropic Thunder is at its best not when it’s testing the limits of outrageousness but when it’s sending-up Hollywood with gimmicks simple (Speedman’s habit of adding unnecessary stuntwork to any situation) and scathing (the ridiculous devotion of Downey Jr’s Kirk Lazarus to his method acting craft). At its most witty, Tropic Thunder is to Hollywood what Dr. Strangelove is to politics, alive with deliciously subtle satire. It’s a movie that demands to be discussed, not ignored. But whether Tropic Thunder will leave as much of an impression as it created prior to its arrival, only time will tell.

---

See also: Simply Bloated: Tropic Thunder

Simply Bloated: Tropic Thunder

[The Cooler is pleased to provide this guest review from Hokahey, who offers a notable perspective.]

by Hokahey

The much-anticipated blockbuster comedy by and with Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder, a parody of big Hollywood productions itself, comes with controversy. First of all, Robert Downey Jr plays Kirk Lazarus, a talented white Australian actor – his belligerence patterned after Russell Crowe, his deeply-invested method acting patterned after Daniel Day-Lewis – who undergoes a pigmentation change to totally immerse himself in the role of Sergeant Osiris, an African-American soldier in Vietnam. Second, Ben Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a down-on-his-fortune action film star who made his bid for a Best Actor Oscar nomination by taking on the risky role of a mentally retarded man who communicates with farm animals in Simple Jack, an obvious parody of Forrest Gump.

In the same way Tropic Thunder begins with wonderful parodies of movie theater commercials and previews, (the one with Downey Jr and Tobey Maguire – Satan’s Alley – is so artfully believable that it’s stunning more than hilarious), we are treated to clips from Simple Jack. In one scene his mother dies, just like in Forrest Gump, and Jack mourns in exaggeratedly Gumpish manner. Later in the film, Speedman and Lazarus discuss the role in a dialogue employing the word “retard” countless times, and Lazarus explains how Speedman didn’t win the Oscar because he was too completely retarded in his portrayal. More than being funny, this is a pointed commentary on how the Academy selects its winning performers, and Lazarus, in the character of Osiris, realistically employs the word “retard” as part of the idiom his character realistically would use.

Not being African-American, it’s irrelevant whether or not I found Downey Jr’s performance offensive, but I will tell you that I found his performance the most enjoyable part of the film. His performance was something real to hold onto – as it explores issues of racial identity (African-American Alpa Chino chides Lazarus for putting on a cornpone black dialect), lampoons method acting and reveals Lazarus’s identity crisis, which stems from the confusion of always playing someone else. When he tears off his black wig, showing his shock of blond hair in humorous contrast with his black skin (is the treatment permanent?), his shift to Aussie accent and true identity is the film’s funniest, truest, most touching moment.

Being the father of a daughter with Down syndrome, however, I can tell you from experience that Stiller’s way over-the-top portrayal of Simple Jack – and how the drug outlaws just love his performance – is so buried under the ridiculous scenarios stuffed into this film that these scenes and the use of the word “retard” had no effect on me whatsoever.

I remember being more offended by the Farrelly brothers’ portrayal of mentally retarded kids playing sports in There’s Something About Mary (1999). (Uh, interestingly, the film stars Stiller.) I found things to laugh at in the film – especially the dead dog routine – but I found its portrayal of the mentally retarded children to be cruel and it hurt me. My daughter, who has earned many medals participating in Special Olympics track and field, bowling, ice skating and, notably, swimming, displays a bravery, zeal and dogged persistence that overshadows the gimpy clumsiness and belligerent stubbornness presented by the Farrelly brothers. Admittedly, those latter traits are characteristics my daughter is apt to display – but that exaggerated approximation of reality, unmitigated by an approximation of qualities on the more positive side, hit home painfully.

Of course, There’s Something About Mary is not reality. It’s a comedy, and comedies are known for their hyperbole. Way back when, I saw The Thrill of It All with James Garner and Doris Day (yes, that’s way back), and I laughed with everyone else when Garner drives the car into the pool and angrily kicks in the displays of soap his wife has been advertising; then a rainstorm churns up the water and creates mountains of suds that sanitation workers dig into like miners. But I remember thinking, “That’s impossible. That’s ridiculous.”

Nowadays, the ridiculous elements are pushed to the limit. In keeping with the trend, Tropic Thunder is brash and bloated – too bloated for its own good – and it is all hyperbole from its lampooning of violent Vietnam War films and its allusions to Apocalypse Now and Platoon at the beginning of the film to Tom Cruise’s interesting but see-through portrayal of, sorry for the repetition, brash and bloated Hollywood producer Les Grossman.

Yes, there is cleverness here – the premise involving actors playing Hollywood actors who have been thrown into a perilous situation but still go on acting, convinced they are in the midst of a Hollywood fabrication. Anyone who loves films would love that premise. What commentary! But the cleverness, as well as anything that might be construed as offensive in isolation, is smothered under the bloat and the very Stillerian elements of the ludicrous: the dumb thing about the panda bear and all the adopted kids jokes, including the cute little kid stabbing Speedman’s neck as he runs from the outlaws. And many of the bits of parody – like running slow-mo over the bridge just ahead of multiple explosions or the gratuitous sprays of blood from head shots or the jerking body riddled with bullets – seem wasted: we’ve seen sequences like this so many times before and we already know they’re ridiculous.

And that’s the thing – the film is so outrageously overblown (yeah, okay, like the Hollywood blockbusters such as Apocalypse Now that it satirizes) – so offensive to a strained extent (Jack Black as the farting, drug-addicted actor, Jeff Portnoy, describing how he will stroke the shaft and swallow the juice or some such crudity when he offers to perform oral sex so that he can be released from forced detox), that it’s hard to be offended by any offensive reference in a film that is, ultimately, such a loud, disjointed, offensive production as to be readily forgettable.

Much of the film feels tired and strained. I laughed out loud – mostly at comments coming from Downey Jr. More often, the jokes fell flat, and I walked out of the film not remembering precisely what I had laughed at. It’s not the kind of funny movie you come out of – like Superbad – when you say, “Yeah, that was funny – remember the part when…” In addition, I didn’t come out of the film feeling offended by and depressed about people making light of something as serious as mental retardation – and I know how serious it is. I came out thinking, “What an overblown, unfunny display of Stillerian self-indulgence.”

Shermer High School Revisited: American Teen

If you’re among the generation that fell in love with The Breakfast Club, it’s almost certain that what captured your heart more than 20 years ago is the same thing that makes confronting the John Hughes classic so embarrassingly uncomfortable today: naked earnestness. With characters that include a tormented buns-taper and a straight-A student turned suicidal shop-class-flunky, The Breakfast Club is a product of its After-School Special/“Just Say No” times. In today’s era of irony and sarcasm, the film’s solemn tones are as out of fashion as a black leather fingerless glove and a sneer. By most measures, The Breakfast Club is closer to Leave It To Beaver than it is to Superbad. Still, while time hasn’t been kind to its hyperactive dance moves and glass-shattering screams, at least one aspect of The Breakfast Club endures: its depiction of high school as a clique-based popularity contest in which the specific rules are as fickle as the overall structure is indestructible.

At least, that’s the impression I get from watching American Teen, a documentary that reveals high school life through the eyes of the jock, the princess, the dork and the misfit. Directed by Nanette Burstein, the film primarily follows four students as they deal with the trials and tribulations of senior year. The players are: Colin Clemens, a good natured jock whose only hope of going to college (and thus avoiding the Army) rests on landing a basketball scholarship; Megan Krizmanich, a self-centered, bitchy achiever whose elitist ego is set to take a massive hit if she can’t get into Notre Dame; Jake Tusing, an acne-plagued, video-game playing band dork whose goal is to land himself a girlfriend; and Hannah Bailey, a free spirited, arts-loving nonconformist who has never been to San Francisco but is sure it will be her salvation. Alas, there’s no principal named Dick, nor is there a cross-cultural bonding moment in all-day detention, and Simple Minds’ “Don’t You (Forget About Me)” isn’t on the soundtrack – it just feels like it should be.

The setting is Warsaw, Indiana, a modest town that’s small enough and old fashioned enough to celebrate its basketball team in the local parade and employ both a play-by-play announcer and color analyst to broadcast the hoopsters’ games on the radio. In 1985, when The Breakfast Club hit theaters, this would have been an ideal fishbowl in which to examine our subjects. But in 2008, Anytown, USA has come to resemble Everytown, USA – and there’s a difference. The kids of Warsaw are raised on the same TV, fast-food and World Wide Web as the rest of us. Even more significantly, these kids have grown up in the era of reality television, and as anyone who followed the metamorphosis of MTV’s groundbreaking The Real World series can attest, there’s a load of difference in the behavior of those who have an inkling of what it means to have your every move documented on camera and those who can forecast the result from voyeuristic experience. The former group learns to ignore their camera-shaped shadows. The latter group never forgets them, and in some cases becomes so conscious of their onlookers that they seem to forget themselves.

Case in point: One of American Teen’s most dramatic, humorous, heartbreaking and thought-provoking situations involves the e-mailing of a topless photo of one student to two friends, one of whom forwards the photo to more friends, who pay the gossip forward by sending it to their friends until eventually the entire student body seems to have seen the student’s exposed body. As portrayed in the film, the photo topples into e-mail inboxes with the momentum and speed of falling dominoes. One of the students hitting send with machinegun rapidity is Megan, the homecoming queen without a conscious. This episode is by no means the only time that Megan behaves cruelly, but the incident marked the first time I suspected she might be playing to the camera. Why cement her status as a cold-hearted bitch? Because in high school, having a negative reputation is often better than having no reputation at all. Watching Megan maliciously forwarding the photo to everyone she knows, we are most definitely bearing witness to the shortsightedness of youth, while also getting a primer on the effect of modern technology on teen culture. But are we seeing Megan, or are we seeing a persona of Megan’s creation?

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s no difference. Image management is such a significant part of high school that it could be safely argued that Burstein’s observations of the superficial are more revealing than her attempts to search the souls of individuals who have spent very little time soul searching on their own. The drawback is this: the subjects of American Teen so perfectly meet their stereotypes that the film is hardly worth watching. It’s an enjoyable documentary to the degree that the subjects are engaging, and it provides a haunting and nostalgic trip down memory lane, but it isn’t especially revealing. American Teen is an amalgam of Breakfast Club iconography and reality-TV posturing from teens who don’t know any other way.

At 95 minutes long, the film also suffers from too large a cast or too small of one. With only four major characters, the documentary already oversimplifies the high school sociological cool chain, but it would be better off with just two subjects. Sincere as their college aspirations are, Colin and Megan are bores compared to their knowingly awkward and yet strangely confident counterparts, Jake and Hannah. Burstein could have followed only the latter two and called her film Fitting In. As it is, the high school year seems to unfold around just four or five mini plots, as if Burstein dropped in on her subjects once a month and made do with the limited footage. Jake’s determined quest to find love and Hannah’s comparatively haphazard efforts to find herself are so charming and at times heart rending that time spent away from them is time wasted. With a greater reliance on talking-head interviews, Burstein might have revealed her subjects more quickly, in the model of the Up series, but her desire to let life unfold in front of her camera is admirable if not entirely successful.

With so many teens documenting their own lives via YouTube, the blogosphere and social networks like Facebook, a filmmaker needs to have a specific goal and scintillating material in order to make a noteworthy documentary about the age group. Neither American Teen nor its cast of characters leave any indelible impression. For the moment, I wonder how Jake is doing with the ladies and whether Hannah’s spirit remains indomitable, but I also regret that I know so little else about them. In its best moments, American Teen finds high school’s overlooked. But then it looks past them once again. I wish I could say that I won’t forget about Hannah Bailey, but I will.

Taut Storytelling: Man On Wire

On the morning of August 7, 1974, New Yorkers gazed up at the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and saw … nothing special whatsoever. Most of them, that is. But a fortunate few in Lower Manhattan who were near enough and farsighted enough saw – 1,350 feet above them – a speck. That speck was Frenchman Philippe Petit, walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers, without a net, without permission and seemingly without fear, for 45 minutes. Onlookers must have thought they were seeing a stunt, a cry for publicity or the act of an insane man. They weren’t. What they were witnessing was something far more profound: the realization of an almost impossible dream.

Man On Wire, the documentary by James Marsh, chronicles the evolution of that dream with impressive awareness. It’s less about the feat of derring-do than about the almost equally astonishing degree of preparation that made it happen. Petit called the project “Le Coup,” and it was roughly six years in the making. Before he ever stepped out onto the wire he had to recruit accomplices, survey the site, determine how he could get two teams and all the necessary equipment – including 450 pounds of wire – to the tower rooftops and, oh yeah, how to get the 450 pounds of wire strung across the 200-foot gap between the towers. All of this had to be done secretively, of course, and so Le Coup unintentionally adopted the traits of a low-tech Ocean’s Eleven heist – right down to the quirky inside man.

Marsh taps into to that heist spirit with some shadowy dramatizations and a moody score by J Ralph. Mostly, though, Man On Wire takes a straightforward documentary approach with talking-head accounts from Petit and his accomplices, including his emotionally supportive then-girlfriend Annie Allix. In these interviews Petit nabs the spotlight, in large part because he’s the architect, acrobat and ringleader of the project, and also because he’s a terrific storyteller. Speaking in animated English, Petit makes Marsh’s reenactments almost unnecessary, yet the dramatic devices are welcome here just the same because, unlike Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, they are never heavy-handed. They don’t need to be.

The film’s greatest asset – even greater than Petit himself – is its wealth of archival footage, which dominates the 90-minute feature. Want to know what it looked like when Petit went out on the wire? It’s here. Wonder how it looked when Petit impersonated a journalist as a means to investigate the Twin Towers when they were still under construction? That’s here, too. And there’s video of Petit’s training camp in Europe, where he practiced his wire-walking in the same fields where his accomplices experimented with methods to string the heavy wire from one tower to the next. Like Capturing The Friedmans before it, Man On Wire is an interesting story made awe-inspiringly visceral thanks to footage put in the can by the subjects themselves, long before they realized they were documenting their exploits for anyone else to see.

Over the course of the film, as we witness Petit performing stunts on his practice wire – juggling, kneeling, lying down, rolling backward – the daredevil element of Le Coup fades from consciousness. Petit expresses an awareness of his mortality, but take note that his interviews aren’t about fear or bravery, as he seems not to register the former and thus has nothing to overcome to produce the latter. From Petit’s view, the triumph of Le Coup was the achievement of something that even on logistical grounds seemed impossible. He takes as much pleasure in describing the effect of a pair of crutches on his covert surveillance exercises as he does in detailing the wire walk itself. Now almost 60, Petit seems to appreciate all the obstacles that he refused to recognize in his singular-minded youth, and the film is better for it.

As stunts go, Petit’s World Trade Center exhibition – he performed similar feats at Notre Dame in Paris and at Sydney Harbor Bridge in Australia – is one of those curious artistic expressions that, despite all the planning, was lucky to have happened in the first place. The bittersweet element of Le Coup is the knowledge that it absolutely, positively could never happen again. Reminders of September 11, 2001, are everywhere in this film – everywhere, that is, except explicitly within the documentary. Which is another way of saying that neither the terrorist attacks nor the Twin Towers’ gruesome fate gets mentioned once during Man On Wire. No words are necessary. To see shots of the towers under construction in the 1960s is to note how eerily they mirror our memories of their deconstruction at what was then known as Ground Zero. For all the Americans who didn’t form an emotional attachment to the Twin Towers until they were gone – and I think that’s most of us – Man On Wire serves as an elegy for the grand structures themselves and for simpler times.

If there’s fault to be found in the film it’s that it’s an inch wide and a mile deep (tower-esque, you might say). Did Petit have a day job during his six years of planning? The film never mentions one. How did he finance all those globe-trotting flights, or his eight months in New York leading up to the big event? I would like to know those details, and to get the reflective observations of folks outside of Petit’s crew who were there that day. But I can live without them. Man On Wire is about what it’s about and nothing more, and there’s little fault in that. The movie is about the profoundness of the initial act, not about any lasting impact, and these days that’s refreshing.

Besides, the film provides some sense of what it was like to witness the until-then unimaginable exploit thanks to archival TV news footage. Referring to Petit as a “tightrope dancer – because you couldn’t call him a walker,” a wonderstruck New York cop, who couldn’t have predicted what was in store for him that morning, paints the scene plainly yet poetically: “Everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.” By that definition, Man On Wire is just like being there.

Cinematic Ceremonies

It was no surprise last Friday when, early into NBC’s coverage, Bob Costas compared the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympic Games to cinema. After all, the general director of the kickoff festivities in Beijing was Zhang Yimou, director of such films as Hero and House Of Flying Daggers. Thus the movie link was obvious – and there are few things TV commentators enjoy more than making obvious connections. What was surprising, however, was that the ceremonies actually achieved that easy-to-say but hard-to-live-up-to billing. Epic and panoramic by every standard, Zhang’s $300 million production was truly cinematic. Even, it turns out, truly falsely cinematic.

Confused? This weekend the London Telegraph, citing the Beijing Times, kinda-sorta broke a news story exposing that most of the fireworks explosions in the 29 “Footsteps of History” portion of the show were “faked” – filmed piece by piece more than a year ago and then digitally edited together to create an authentic-looking series of canned explosions that led up to a blast of real fireworks at the Bird’s Nest National Stadium. To some, this deception was quite a shock. To others, not so much: in NBC’s live coverage, co-host Matt Lauer noted that the footsteps were a “cinematic device.”

I watched almost all of the opening ceremonies, but I missed the “footsteps.” The fireworks I did see, though, were so plentiful and extreme in scope that I questioned their validity from the start. For the annual Independence Day fireworks show here in Washington, DC, a portion of the National Mall is closed off for the entire day. How was it then, I wondered, that fireworks could be launched from so many areas surrounding the stadium without putting attendees in danger? The ceremonies’ spectacle was almost too big to believe, and not for the first time that night. What about that official countdown to the games, executed – we’re made to believe – by 2,008 perfectly synchronized drummers? Only once did I see a mistake (a drum lighting up that shouldn’t have). Is that too good to be true? And what about the most breathtaking spectacle of the show: the moveable typeset that formed Chinese characters, mirrored the wind and reproduced the Great Wall? Yeah, I was watching when 897 smiling performers popped out of their boxes and enthusiastically waved at the end. But was that performance free of computer orchestration? And if not, does it matter?

It’s interesting that the purity of the opening ceremonies is being debated right now. You’d think that’s the one part of the Olympics in which performance enhancers wouldn’t be an issue. Last night, the U.S. men’s 4x100 relay team thrilled American audiences with a come-from-behind, world record-setting win so magical that it seemed like the stuff of cinema – which is to say almost too magical. Watching the replay was for me yet another sad reminder that we’ve reached a point in sports in which the more extraordinary something seems, the more dangerous it feels to believe in it. Now when I see a heroic feat in the pool, on the track or on the field, I think, “Please be clean.”

Performance enhancing drugs are so readily available and so high tech that some have argued that keeping them out of sports is a waste of time. Let the athletes use whatever supplements they want, they say. It’s the spectacle we come to see, they argue – the results. But baseball fans might remember that Barry Bonds’ awesome home runs immediately felt perfunctory in retrospect once it was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had been powered by steroids. What we seek in sports, it seems to me, is to witness our notion of humankind’s limits challenged naturally.

That’s why we want our athletes clean. And that’s why a film like Man On Wire, the documentary about the Frenchman who in 1974 walked on a tightrope strung between the World Trade Center towers, is so awe-inspiring. That’s also why the oh-so-simple motorcycle leap in The Great Escape has within it a raw force that all of Transformers lacks. Fantasy is fine, and sometimes fantastic – at least for a while. But what made the opening ceremonies so amazing was its reality – 15,000-plus performers beating drums, puppeting boxes, waving flags, performing karate and so on. George Lucas and others have dreamed up stuff like this and commissioned it for digital rendering, but Zhang went out and realized it. Emphasis on the real.

As I went to bed Friday night I hoped that every CGI-inclined director in the world had watched those opening ceremonies. Frosted with effects though they might have been, they served as a reminder that the truly human achievement still has no rival.

Easy On the Eyes: Brideshead Revisited

“If it could only be like this always,” laments Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, “always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.” Indeed, if only. If only life provided nothing but immaculate afternoons on the stately grounds of an English countryside castle, passion-filled moonlit nights in Venice and heartfelt conversations in tranquil gardens in Morocco. If it did, it would resemble Julian Jerrod’s rendition of Brideshead Revisited, a visually lavish film that offers more to look at than to look into. It’s a nice place to visit for a few hours, full of pristine postcard images from Jess Hall, but it’s not a movie that aches to be remembered.

It’s based, of course, on Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, and the material is known to many thanks to a 1981 miniseries that helped to launch the movie career of Jeremy Irons. But Jerrod’s film marked my introduction to a story that couldn’t help but feel familiar just the same – an England-between-the-wars period piece in which class and religion are foremost concerns, in which the weather always matches the mood and in which the characters wear elegant garments that appear to be wrinkle-proof. The film’s predictability is both a blessing and a curse, on the one hand making the flaws of unconvincingly executed plot twists almost unnoticeable, while on the other preventing the movie from etching a unique identity.

Brideshead Revisited is told from the perspective of Charles Ryder, a man of middle class upbringing who through odd circumstances finds himself swept up into the well-to-do but decidedly unwell lives of the Marchmain/Flyte family. Charles is played by Matthew Goode, who resembles Aidan Quinn circa Legends Of The Fall and whose performance strangely reminds of a cross between Jeff Bridges in Starman and Haley Joel Osment in A.I., albeit with a soothing English accent. By design, Charles is supposed to be an alien in the upper crusty circles of the Marchmain/Flytes, but this couldn’t be what Waugh had in mind. Goode’s Charles seems from another world entirely. He’s robotic. Beyond his character’s voiceover confessions, Goode gives us only the tiniest peephole into Charles’ psyche. And though an early voiceover suggests that Charles’ personality is an amalgam of Marchmain/Flyte imitation, the character hardly exhibits any personality at all. If Brideshead Revisited is meant to reveal a man assuming a new identity, ala The Talented Mr. Ripley, it fails in every respect.

The good news is that the performances around Goode make up for his blandness. Ben Whishaw’s Sebastian is convincingly needy and lonely, his reliance on extreme self pity serving to illustrate the debilitating effects of an escalating alcohol addiction just as tragically as it acts as a tool to further his abuse. Sebastian’s mostly one-sided affection for Charles is as vulnerable as it is heartfelt, and it’s within this doomed love story that Goode’s blankness actually works to the film’s advantage. When it comes to Charles’ romance with Sebastian’s sister Julia, however, only the inevitability of their affair makes it convincing. Hayley Atwell infuses Julia with as much soul as the screenplay allows. Mostly, though, Julia is a figure of the plot rather than a fleshed out character. Her perfunctory we-shouldn’t-do-this first kiss with Charles would be entirely passionless if not for the romantic reflection of the moonlight off a Venice waterway. If you had any difficulty buying into Atonement’s undying love affair, based on just one night of unleashed passion, you’ll find nothing to hold on to here.

Entirely convincing, though, is Emma Thompson’s performance as Lady Marchmain, the devoutly religious mother of Sebastian and Julia who is quick to identify the impurities of her children. All by itself, Thompson’s stardom provides the necessary weight that the matriarchic character requires, and per usual the actress avoids theatrical excessiveness. Thompson’s performance, though not the best in the film, is so perfect in pitch that it could be easily overlooked. Yet to imagine Meryl Streep, Glenn Close or Judi Dench in the part is to realize all the ways it might otherwise have been overdone. Without a single tantrum or Oscar-baiting scene, Thompson’s Lady Marchmain casts an intimidating, judgmental shadow across the film. The only pity is that Lady Marchmain’s steadfast Catholicism feels like the key to only her own existence until the end of the film when religion suddenly has a stranglehold on the entire story.

But did I mention that Brideshead Revisited is lovely to look at? Considering the medium, that’s worth quite a bit. Save two substandard (and entirely unnecessary) CGI shots of a Titanic-esque ocean liner churning through rough seas, each shot has grandeur. Does the film remain faithful to Waugh’s novel? It couldn’t. Does it live up to the PBS miniseries? I’d bet not. But Jerrod’s adaptation does provide an escape to a more decadent era. The film’s disjointed storytelling fails to deeply offend because the dramatic execution of the plot is almost irrelevant. In Brideshead Revisited love blooms, religion and class struggles loom and eventually things fall apart. Just as we expect. But at least we get to enjoy summer.

Sex & Cinema: When We Have to Watch

The best teacher I ever had in high school taught, among other things, English and literature. He was passionate about both subjects in a way that made you want to be passionate about them, too, and he had a short fuse and violent temper that made you scared to feel otherwise. His classes were alternately strict and loose, intense and hilarious. He was intimidating and sometimes cold-blooded in a way that made you want to succeed just to spite him (think: The Paper Chase), and yet there was also an authentic hipness to him that made him a real-life approximation of Howard Hesseman’s character from Head Of The Class.

One of the things I liked most about him was that he loved movies as much as books. One wall of his classroom was decorated with posters of films based on classic literature, like 1961’s The Pit And The Pendulum. Another wall was covered with posters of horror flicks. At the center of the room stood a lectern wallpapered in a black-and-white James Dean poster, and there the teacher would stand and reference modern movies in order to help his students understand themes in Hemingway or Shakespeare. In this classroom, movie chatter was always a moment away, and frequently it began with my teacher mentioning the film he’d watched the night before while grading essays. One day a student (with much better grades than I had) angrily questioned how our teacher could watch a movie and read essays at the same time. “Easy,” he replied. “I read, and then when I hear a chainsaw or bed springs I look up.”

That’s my decidedly roundabout way of getting to today’s topic, which isn’t essays or chainsaws but bed springs – sex in the movies. Over at the endlessly entertaining and thought-provoking Mystery Man on Film, the blog’s author is seeking reader input for an upcoming article about sex in screenwriting. Specifically, he seeks (1) reactions to the argument that sex in mainstream cinema no longer sells (what with the availability of free porn on the Internet), (2) examples of sex scenes that are “absolutely crucial to the story” and (3) examples of “important” characters who are “asexual.”

The first topic doesn’t interest me. Yes, I realize that what sells at the box office affects what gets made by the major studios, and therefore affects what I see. But unlike, say, comic-book fanboys or George Lucas apologists, I don’t use ticket-sales quantity as an evaluator of quality. As for the third topic: I think the overall pool is too large to provide compelling results. Mystery Man lists Johnny Depp’s Willy Wonka as an example of asexuality, and I guess that works. But then so would Anton Chigurh, or any number of villains who are so bloodthirsty by the design of the plot that they don’t have time to be anything else. These characters aren’t so much asexual as incompletely drawn – unless you decide that violence is masculine and therefore sexual. But at that point you could also argue that Willy Wonka’s Peter Pan syndrome trends toward the masculine as well.

All of that said, the second topic piques my interest.

It seems to me that mainstream movie sex most often falls into at least one of three buckets:

1) The sex scenes sell the movie. With movies of this ilk, you can’t discuss the movie in any sort of depth without mentioning its sex scenes, because they are a major component of the film’s allure. An example would be Basic Instinct. Take away the sex and you have considerably less story, as if you’d removed a character or a subplot. But do you have no story at all? Is the sex “absolutely crucial”? Well, considering that Basic Instinct has been edited for regular play on TBS, apparently not.

2) The sex scenes elevate or accentuate the movie. With movies like this, the sex scenes are the rainbow sprinkles on your ice cream. They add flavor, sure. And the movie would be different without them, no question. But they aren’t the main ingredient, and if they were substituted for or left out altogether, you’d still be left with the dessert. Maybe not quite as delicious, but mostly the same. An example of this kind of movie would be Eyes Wide Shut, an intensely sexual film that’s less about what Tom Cruise’s character witnesses than about the reaction it inspires. Is the sex “absolutely crucial to the story”? As an element of the plot, absolutely! But do we need to see it with our own eyes? No. Which is just one of the reasons the Stanley Kubrick digitally obscured some of the sex scenes in the film prior to its release in order to earn an R rating.

3) The sex scenes are just there. Let’s be honest: this is most movie sex. In these cases sex scenes are inserted into the film because they can be inserted. But as gratuitous as the scenes might be, do they achieve anything from a storytelling perspective beyond what Alfred Hitchcock accomplished in North By Northwest with a train and a tunnel? No.

That leaves us with the exception to the rule: sex scenes that are absolutely crucial to the film. As Mystery Man implies, finding movies to fill this smaller fourth bucket takes some thinking. Many films would be damaged by the removal of sex scenes: Eyes Wide Shut, Bound and Basic Instinct, for that matter. But from a plot perspective, sex scenes most often could be significantly muted or altogether axed without injuring our understanding of the characters or their story.

An interesting case study in this regard is Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. The initial act between Jack (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Ennis (Heath Ledger) is revealing, powerful and certainly worthwhile, but I’m not sure it’s essential. I’d have trouble arguing that the scene tells us decidedly more than some awkward kissing might. A later sexual episode, however, between Ennis and his wife Alma (Michelle Williams), exposes feelings from the reserved Ennis that we would have struggled to learn any other way. In this case the mechanics of the sexual act in question are the entire point of the scene. And, yes, you could argue that Brokeback Mountain would survive without it, but I challenge you to think of a way in which the film could have otherwise revealed as much as it does about Ennis as clearly as it does and as succinctly as it does in the existing scene. To me, that sex scene and its frank portrayal are crucial.

But are there cases where sex scenes are so fundamental to a film that the entire story would cease to have meaning without them? Last Tango In Paris comes to mind. For me, though, the best example is another Lee film: Lust, Caution. Off the top of my head, Lust, Caution may be the only movie I’ve ever seen in which I learned as much about the main characters by watching them have sex as I did in the non-sexual scenes. During the sex scenes the characters don’t speak but their sex acts themselves are like dialogue. Slice these scenes from Lust, Caution, which earned a deserved NC-17, and you’d have some kind of story, sure. But you wouldn’t have the same story, and that’s what sets Lust, Caution apart from so many films that exploit sex for thrills and stop short of using sex as a storytelling device.

But I want to know what you think.

So I ask you, Cooler readers, to weigh in on any of the above and to list examples of sex scenes that you think are “absolutely crucial” to their stories. While you’re at it: by any criteria, what are your favorite or least favorite sex scenes?

Don’t be shy. I’ll make the first move:

Sexiest Sex Scene: “In the Hallway at Christmas” from The English Patient: Passionate, sensual, erotic, and it doesn’t even include nudity, I don’t believe.

Favorite Sex Scene: “The Nightmare About Laura and Ray” from High Fidelity: Hilarious, and arguably crucial in its own way.

Least Effective Sex Scene: “Excising the Demons Metaphor” from Munich: I love it when Steven Spielberg apologists try to find the artistry of this ham-fisted sequence.

[Important note: When commenting on the above, including the list of crucial scenes, please leave out rape scenes. Rape, while sexual in nature, is first and foremost a crime, and thus more closely associated with torture than with what we’re discussing here. Having said that, I don’t know where that leaves the stairway episode from A History Of Violence, which is by all means a rape, though David Cronenberg disgustingly portrays it as a rape that becomes enjoyable to the female midway through. Utterly offensive.]

Queue It Up: Lust, Caution

[In relation to the “Sex & Cinema” post, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

The movie megaset has been around since D.W. Griffith ordered the replication of the Great Wall of Babylon for his 1916 epic Intolerance. But in the little more than a decade since James Cameron’s Titanic took set construction to greater heights (not to mention depths) than it had ever known, brick-and-mortar set creation has become something of a lost art, at least on the large scale. Massive sets these days are done on computer. It’s cheaper, more forgiving and, in the minds of some moviemakers, it’s more magnificent too. But in his latest film, set in Japanese-occupied China during World War II, director Ang Lee revitalizes the old-school megaset to brilliant effect. Lust, Caution frequently unfolds in the smallest of spaces, but many of its exteriors were shot amidst a full-scale reconstructed neighborhood reported to be three blocks long, with more than 180 storefronts.

I mention this not to compare Lee’s small though lengthy film with any recent or distant epics. At a reported budget of $15 million, Lust, Caution was $185 million cheaper to produce than Titanic; financially they aren’t in the same ocean. But like a designer on the home-improvement show Trading Spaces, Lee knows how to make his money count, because cinematically Lust, Caution is extravagant. The movie’s Shanghai set isn’t just big, it’s actually grand. And that’s what distinguishes Lust, Caution from so many other films these days that look expensive but not experienced. Lee’s sets feel lived-in and are the main reason his film is so transportive – because unlike shots of Manhattan’s Five Points in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 bloodbath Gangs Of New York, for example, you don’t have to squint your eyes to make believe.

The miraculous thing though isn’t the Shanghai set itself but that Lee went to such extraordinary lengths for a movie that by no means required them. Lust, Caution is based on a story by Eileen Chang that was adapted for the screen by James Schamus. It tells the tale of Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), a Chinese college girl from peasant stock who becomes an undercover agent in a revolutionist attempt to assassinate an officer named Yee (Tony Leung). To get close to Yee, Wong will assume the alias of Mrs. Mak and endure countless mah-jongg games in a gossipy circle of officers’ wives. She will also learn – the hard and unpleasant way – the art of pleasing a man (the theory being that the only way to get close enough to kill Yee is to let him get as close to Mak as he wants). A financially-strapped or lazy filmmaker would be content with these interiors and make this picture without the plot ever venturing outdoors. But to our delight, the thoughtful Lee recognizes that the relationship between Yee and Mak is as much about the world they run from as the place the run to.

Still, it’s difficult to talk about this movie any further without going indoors. The nucleus of Lust, Caution is the privacy of the bedroom, where Lee’s film earns an NC-17 rating for a collection of sex scenes that are forceful by more than one definition of the word. Long in length and short on shyness, these sweaty amorous interludes don’t show us everything, but they show so much that what we don’t see is somewhat distracting. (Put it this way: if these actors aren’t in fact having sex, Mr. Leung can teach David Copperfield a thing or two about the art of making stuff disappear.) The knee-jerk reaction to scenes like these, which if you spotted on Cinemax at midnight you’d dismiss as soft porn, is to assume their function is to shock or titillate. But here the frankness and duration of the sex sequences serves a deeper purpose: advancing the plot.

Truth be told, the sex scenes are the plot. Lust, Caution unfolds in an era where, despite what the song says, there’s no such thing as “just a kiss” and where a sigh is never just a sigh. And so, appropriately enough, this film stands in direct contrast with movies released in the era it portrays – Casablanca (1942) or Double Indemnity (1944), for example – that were all lust and no thrust. Here, Mak and Yee barely say a word to one another outside the bedroom and say even less under, or more often over, the sheets. But that doesn’t mean they don’t communicate. Far from it. In unblinking gazes, caresses, grips and moans, Mak and Yee participate in pages of wordless dialogue. And reading between the lines is rarely such a thrill.

To all those who see it, Lust, Caution will be remembered less for its eroticism than for its intensity, though admittedly those elements often overlap. Leung is brooding, mysterious, tender, dangerous and vulnerable. It’s a tremendous performance. And yet it’s eclipsed by that of Wei, who is beyond phenomenal. Hers is a role that requires a complete transformation from an uncertain child to an unusually confident young woman, and Wei makes this maturation with the utmost grace. When near the end of the film Lee flashes back from the hardened covert agent to a shot of the naïve college student she was before, the full scope of the metamorphosis is so overwhelming that I momentarily doubted that one actress had handled the entire part. But it’s Wei through and through.

Sadly, I suspect Lust, Caution will put many moviegoers through and through too much. The story spans just four years but the movie takes almost 160 minutes, and that’s a lot of mah-jongg. If you thought Brokeback Mountain was overly patient, Lust, Caution will make Lee’s previous film feel like Speed. But what’s the rush? There isn’t a single scene from the frontlines of any battleground and yet Lust, Caution immerses us into its World War II setting as well any vast historical epic, with Alexandre Desplat’s score rising and falling in all the right places. In moments, this is filmmaking at its finest and most unflinching, whether probing the psychology of its characters through sex or revealing the horror of violence through a brawl that’s as visceral as any I’ve ever seen.

It’s a shame that many who won’t see this movie will call it Lee’s “soft porn” picture, a term that’s as insultingly reductive as categorizing Brokeback Mountain as the “gay cowboy” movie. What these films have in common, beyond the outrage they instill in prudes, is an astute awareness of the emotional complexity of sex. If all you see in these sex scenes is intercourse, you’re not watching closely enough. The good news is, you get to watch again.

[“Queue It Up” is a series of sporadic recommendations of often overlooked movies for your Netflix queue.]

Belushi At The Bat

I love movies. I love baseball. And I love movies about baseball. But movies during baseball? Not so much. I’ve long felt this way, I think, but it was on a recent get-out-of-Dodge trip to Pittsburgh – to see two baseball games between two abysmal teams at one glorious ballpark – that my scattered irritations coagulated into an undeniable glob of annoyance-filled certainty.

I was sitting along the third baseline at PNC Park on a perfect summer evening. The bottom-feeding hometown Pirates were losing to the positively subterranean San Diego Padres by 1 run going into the bottom of the 9th inning in what had been an unusual game: fan whipping boy Adam LaRoche had flummoxed his critics by homering twice (though he also drew their ire by striking out with the bases loaded) while the respected Xavier Nady had been pulled from the game prior to his first at-bat due to a pending trade with the New York Yankees.

Nady’s trade hadn’t been announced over the public address, but Pirates fans – all too familiar with seeing talent traded away – deduced the situation quickly. Sure, the considerable number of Steelers jerseys on display and the roughly 14 attempts to start “The Wave” that night reminded that Pittsburgh is first and foremost a football town, but these fans knew their baseball, too. That much was clear. That’s why it was all the more irksome heading into the last half inning when PNC Park’s gameday entertainment crew called upon a tonally incongruous yet all too typical figure to deliver its last-chance rallying cry: John Belushi.

If you’ve been to a Major League stadium in the past 10 years, you can probably guess what I saw. Up there on the video board normally reserved for highlights, bloopers reels and between-innings dance-offs by fans was Belushi’s Bluto delivering his “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” speech from Animal House. Per design, the clip succeeded in capturing fans’ attention. But that’s just another way of saying that it took them out of the game at hand. Belushi’s voice at a ballpark was as out of place as a guy hawking peanuts at your local multiplex. Immediately, I thought of those AT&T commercials in which Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese promise not to interrupt our phone calls, and I wished Animal House hadn’t interrupted my baseball game.

Like movies, great ballparks have moods. PNC Park’s primary offering is intimacy: a less than 39,000-seat stadium dwarfed by the modest yet striking cityscape standing proudly just behind right field and across the Allegheny River. But Animal House broke that mood. It wasn’t just the disorienting presence of Belushi amidst the tranquil expanses of green and brown that offended, it was the way the clip made it feel as if I could be any park in any city across the country, rather than in one of the gems of professional sports. Though the Belushi clip was new to me, I’ve seen similar movie scenes used as crowd rousers at other stadiums – here in Washington, in Phoenix and in Milwaukee, to name a few. Over the years I’ve seen the rally clap scene from Hoosiers, a pep talk from Gladiator and the training sequence from Rocky – each of them on jumbo screens in massive stadiums that made the memorable cinematic moments pathetically small by comparison.

As the Animal House clip played in a suddenly stale environment, I found myself not loving baseball or movies. It was sad.

But then maybe I was just bitter. Full disclosure: A few innings earlier, Pirates centerfielder Nate McLouth had lofted a high foul ball in the general vicinity of my section that looked destined to carom off the upper deck just above me. But didn’t. The ball missed the overhang and kept traveling downward, targeting the seat just to my left. In response, I stood too late but quickly, and while the guy next to me cowered to protect his $7 beer I reached up my left hand to pluck that beautiful white orb from the sky. Down the ball came, striking just at the base of my index and middle fingers. Yet before I could squeeze it, a reaching fan behind me inadvertently bumped my hand forward and out from underneath the ball.

It was like the scene at the end of Parenthood, where the pop-up challenged kid of the coach played by Steve Martin has his glove knocked away from a sure catch by that pudgy bully of a first baseman. Almost in slow motion, I saw the ball flip up and then appear to hover in the air. Briefly I made out the blue MLB logo stamped on its leather covering. And if this had been my triumphant movie moment, I would have made good on a second chance to snag the ball, like little Kevin Buckman. Instead, the ball dropped from view. On instinct, I lunged forward, throwing my hands underneath the seat in front of me and coming up empty. That’s when I heard the surprised voice of the woman sitting there. “I’ve got it!” she squealed, having “caught” the ball between her back and the seat. I was crushed.

It was the closest I’ve ever been to catching a foul ball, the baseball fan’s equivalent of scoring a hole-in-one in golf. Instantly, I knew that I might never get that close again. At the next night’s game, the neon green parrot mascot would walk up behind me and shake his, ahem, tail feathers against the back of my head for the amusement of the dwindling crowd, but that wasn’t the low point. The low point was missing my chance to bring part of the game home with me – my failure underlined by the knowledge that the woman who caught the ball would likely feed it to the family dog the moment she got home, if she didn’t lose it on the way to her car.

As I watched her grubby kids have their pictures taken with a ball they were too young to appreciate, an older kid behind me tapped my shoulder. “Did it hurt?” he asked earnestly, trying to imagine what it must feel like to have a baseball pop into bare skin.

Only my heart, kid. Only my heart.

My chance at glory was over.