Meeting of the Minds

Just over a week ago, the 2009 Academy Award nominations were announced. Many things went as expected: Mickey Rourke is nominated for Best Actor for The Wrestler, Heath Ledger is nominated for Best Supporting actor for The Dark Knight and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is nominated for Best Picture. Still, there were some surprises. Chief among them: the lack of a Best Actress nomination for Sally Hawkins, whose magnificently committed performance powered one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, Happy-Go-Lucky, and the exclusion of Clint Eastwood from the Best Actor category for what might be the Academy darling’s swansong performance in Gran Torino.

In light of the mutual Oscar snubbage, Happy-Go-Lucky’s Poppy stopped by the Detroit home of Gran Torino’s Walt to try and raise his spirits. Here’s how it went:

Walt: Get off my lawn!

Poppy: Well, someone’s a little grumpy isn’t he?

Walt: I said, get off my lawn!

Poppy: Get off in your lawn? I’d rather wank in the shower, thank you. But whatever turns you on, Walt.

Walt: What do you want?

Poppy: I want you, big man. Y’up to it?

Walt: Get the fuck out of here, you limey dipshit.

Poppy: Blimey, you called me a limey.

Walt: Yeah, what should I call you?

Poppy: Name’s Poppy.

Walt: Well, Poopy, why don’t you go have some spotted dick and leave me alone.

Poppy: Had some spotted dick this morning, actually. My boyfriend’s a freckly bugger.

Walt: (snarls)

Poppy: Truth is I’m here to talk to you about the whatchamacallit-ding-dang-dilly-dally-da-da-hoo-hoo …

Walt: The ding-dangs live next door. No gooks in my house.

Poppy: I mean the little golden statuettes, gigolo.

Walt: (growls) You know the Academy Awards are one of the few things we still manufacture in this country. Would be nice if you’d call them by their name.

Poppy: Hmm. Can’t call them. My celly doesn’t work here in the States.

Walt: (grunts) You make about as much sense as those babbling zipperheads.

Poppy: Oh, me. I’d undo a zipper to babble a head, I would.

Walt: Well, why don’t you run along then and go back to your tea-sipping boyfriend. You know, we used to stack lobsterbacks like him 5 feet high during the war, use ‘em for sandbags.

Poppy: Ah, truth is the only date I’ve had was with a guy named Oscar, and he stood me up. I haven’t got any action in a while. I’m all pent up.

Walt: Go into my garage, take some WD-40, a vice grip and a roll of duct tape. That’ll fix almost any problem.

Poppy: Walt, you cheeky bugger.

Walt: I’ve been called a lot of things before, but never cheeky.

Poppy: Blimey O’Reilly!

Walt: O'Reilly? Never been called a Mick either.

Poppy: Only Mick I know sings for the Stones.

Walt: Bunch of pusscakes.

Poppy: Did you just call the Rolling Stones vagina pastries?

Walt: (sneers) Poopy, have you ever come across someone you shouldn’t have fucked with? That’s me.

Poppy: Walt, you stick your finger out at me and you’d better be prepared to use it.

Walt: (grumbles)

Poppy: You moaning for me, gigolo?

Walt: Why don’t you go eat some bangers and mash and leave me alone. (crumples beer can)

Poppy: You pissed, Walt?

Walt: That the Academy nominated two spooks for Best Supporting Actress and a white guy pretending to be a colored guy for Best Supporting Actor? Yeah, I’m pissed.

Poppy: I meant drunk, gigolo. Besides the only thing that’s worse than seeing Angelina Jolie nominated for Changeling is taking driver’s education classes from a spit-spewing psychopath named Scott (who, incidentally, if played by Eddie Marsan should have been nominated for Best Supporting Actor).

Walt: (squints) Gook.

Poppy: Did you just call me a gook?

Walt: Yeah, I hadn't used it in 30 seconds and American audiences think it’s charming.

Poppy: Not as charming as my inability to take things seriously, which has been mistaken for brave optimism.

Walt: (coughs blood)

Poppy: You know, what was truly brave was the performance by that Sally Hawkins. Too bad she’ll probably never be heard from again. Walt, what’s it like to win an Oscar?

Walt: You don’t wanna know.

Poppy: Probably right. Because this whole getting snubbed thing kind of feels like getting pummeled by a bully at school for no reason whatsoever and then having my teacher feel worse for the kid beating the shit out of me than for me and my battered face.

Walt: Dragon lady.

Poppy: Dragons! Now wouldn’t those be fun to make out of brown paper bags!

Walt: You mean spook paper bags.

Poppy: Oh, Walt. You keep on snarlin’ and slurin’, and I’ll keep on smilin’.

Queue It Up: Brick

[For no timely reason whatsoever, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

One of the cleverest films in years begins with the dead body of a teenage girl lying in an irrigation ditch. Her ex-boyfriend crouches beside the corpse, taking in the scene. And if this were most movies, what would come next would be a cell phone call to the police and the unrolling of a lot of yellow tape. But this isn’t most movies, not by a long shot. This is Brick, the feature film debut of writer/director Rian Johnson. And so, without thinking twice, the ex-boyfriend picks up the body and hides it. Not because he’s trying to cover up the girl’s death. Because he’s trying to solve it.

The ex-boyfriend is Brendan. Played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, he has moppish hair that falls over the top of his glasses and he wears a white T-shirt that’s often covered up by an equally featureless gray jacket. Brendan appears completely unremarkable, but look closer and you’ll notice that he casts a shadow reminiscent of guys like Sam Spade and Jake Gittes. Guys who have tight hairdos topped by fedoras. Guys with crisp clean suits and rough knuckles. Guys with a cigarette ever-dangling from their lips. Cool guys.

The difference is that Spade and Gittes operated in the 1930s, an era in which we imagine that all gumshoes walked and talked like Humphrey Bogart. Brendan is a typical teen in the concrete jungle of modern day Southern California. In such an unromantic time and place, we hardly expect Brendan to finish his sentences, let alone keep from punctuating every other fragment with the word “dude.” Yet Brendan fires off paragraphs of dialogue with the speed and pop of a machine gun, just like fast-talking Sam Spade. And he mixes it up with hoodlums just like Spade. And he draws dangerous women to him just like Spade. And all of a sudden it hits us that he is Sam Spade, or at least what Sam Spade would have been as a 21st Century teenager in San Clemente, Calif.

Don’t misread this. This isn’t a movie where Gordon-Levitt hams it up with silly Bogart impressions. Not at all. Instead, Gordon-Levitt becomes Bogart. And it makes sense that Brendan should live and breathe this film noir existence, because he’s surrounded by characters who drink from the same punch bowl. His nerdy friend with the knowledge and the plastic-rimmed glasses is “The Brain” (Matt O’Leary). The twentysomething drug dealer who might be behind the death of the girl in the ditch is “The Pin” (Lukas Haas). And there’s a heavy named Tug (Noah Fleiss), a shifty outsider named Dode (Noah Segan), a femme fatale named Laura (Nora Zehetner) and of course the dead girl – who comes alive in flashbacks as the damsel in distress – named Emily (Emilie de Ravin).

All of these characters are played with complete conviction, which is a tribute to the actors and to Johnson, who led his pledges through this tricky terrain. Brick operates at the very edge of credibility. One false step and Brendan isn’t the teenage incarnation of Sam Spade, he’s a teen actor mimicking Spade like a prep student playing dress-up for the high school play. The latter is fine and good, but this is shrewd. Drama teachers everywhere will leave this movie with bruised shins from kicking themselves for not coming up with this idea first, because at no time do these teens stop being teens. To the contrary, they exist in a world where all these iconic film noir theatrics are perfectly normal. Just like singing and dancing is natural to West Side Story. Just like iambic pentameter is natural to Romeo & Juliet.

And it works. Oh, how it works! One of the wittiest scenes takes place between Brendan and the assistant vice principal, played by Richard Roundtree. The assistant VP knows that Brendan is involved in something unseemly, and that he’s working out of bounds of the law (school and city). So in the real world Brendan would be suspended on the spot. But in this film noir translation, Brendan is the private dick laughing at empty threats from a lame duck police chief who knows he’s better off with a contact in the underworld rather than behind bars. Thus Brendan takes control of the meeting and tells the assistant VP how things are going to break down. Then leaves his interrogation before he’s dismissed – the old “either arrest me or watch me walk out of here” bit – topped with a “See you at the parent-teacher conference.”

Such references to actual teenage life are few – because do you imagine that Sam Spade did all his homework and ran home to mommy when he was 16? – but they are bright. Notes are slipped into lockers instead of office-door mail slots. Brendan can’t be tracked down at his favorite bar, but everyone knows that he eats lunch behind the school. And The Pin still lives at home with his mom, who doesn’t seem to have a clue that drugs and thugs go in and out her front door. This isn’t average high school life, clearly. But it’s closer to authentic than Jerry Bruckheimer ever gets.

The mystery of Emily’s death injects the film with consistent urgency. Brendan won’t stop until he finds out what happened to his old flame, and to solve the crime he’ll have to take significant risks. But the dense layering of the plot is only a fraction of the fun. Most of the enjoyment comes from watching Brick play with its form, and from picking out its influences. The Sam Spade spirit obviously reminds of The Maltese Falcon and crime writer Dashiell Hammett in general. Meanwhile, the setting evokes Chinatown, as do significant portions of the score and the fact that Brendan finds a body in an irrigation ditch and spends part of the film with a wounded nose.

Johnson adds some visual treats as well, highlighted by a scene in which Brendan reflects light off a mirror to examine the contents of a dark basement. But the dialogue is the brightest star. The film is 110 minutes long and it throbs with words, words, words. Sadly, some of them go by too quickly for our ears and brain to register, but no bother. You don’t go to the symphony to hear individual notes. You go to be moved by the crescendo. Brick plays songs we know by heart with such youthful sincerity that they feel new again.

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

Scenes From Inauguration Day

Someday they’ll make a movie about this. Here’s what it should look like ...

Getting Dirty in The Game

As Ed Howard and I reviewed the films of David Fincher for our first installment of The Conversations, a theme surfaced: Fincher likes characters who get dirty. Why? Because if you’re staying clean, you’re not engaging in life. For examples, think of Se7en, where the ever-determined Mills (Brad Pitt) gets rained on, beaten and cut in his hunt for a serial killer, or think of Fight Club, where Jack (Edward Norton) trades in his IKEA-ideal apartment for a condemned ramshackle abode, and then trades punches with friends for a good time.

The best example, however, can be found in The Game. Michael Douglas’ Nicholas Van Orton begins the story with wealth, extravagance and cleanliness (he even has a shower in his office), but he isn’t living. He’s haunted by the memory of his father’s suicide, and he’s lonely. In terms of material possessions, he lacks nothing. In terms of emotional possessions, he’s flat broke. Over the course of the film, Nicholas learns to live again by breaking out of his hermetically sealed existence.

As an addendum to my discussion with Ed, I wanted to provide highlights of Nicholas’ long, slow crawl through the muck – his reengagement with the world. The images below highlight that transformation, but they also do something else: demonstrate Fincher’s knack for embedding deeper meaning and social commentary into the margins of otherwise streamlined, crowd-pleasing thrillers.

Before the game ...







The game begins ...













Is that a Mona Lisa smile there at the end?

The Conversations: David Fincher

Readers: I bring you exciting news. Today at the well respected, well run and well read blog The House Next Door, a new series has debuted. It’s called The Conversations, and it features talented movie blogger Ed Howard, of Only The Cinema, and me. It works just like it sounds: Ed and I pick a film topic and have a conversation about it. The result, we hope, will be entertaining and thought-provoking, because we’ll be coming out with a new installment each month.

Our first discussion focuses on the films of director David Fincher. It starts with Fincher’s most recent work, The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, and then it goes into his previous films: Se7en, The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room and Zodiac. (Sorry, Alien3 fans. That one gets left out.) Given the breadth of this topic, this initial exchange is lengthy. Trust me, you won’t finish it during your morning coffee. But I hope you’ll head over to The House this weekend as many times as it takes to finish it.

Whenever a new edition of The Conversations drops at The House Next Door, you’ll see it spotlighted here. With that said, I point you away. Ed and I hope that our own conversation will lead to a much larger one with our readers. If you are so inspired, please leave your comments at The House Next Door.

The Conversations: David Fincher