Searching for Chigurh

Just one of the reasons that No Country For Old Men was my favorite movie of last year is because it was my favorite film experience of last year. The vagueness of two significant moments in the film’s final third made Joel and Ethan Coen’s Cormac McCarthy adaptation more than just a masterpiece worth savoring. It made No Country a film worth debating, unraveling, decoding and re-reading. I saw No Country three times in the theater, in part because I just plain enjoyed it, but also because my first viewing left me with questions I wanted to resolve.

One of the biggest questions, and the topic of this post, is: “Where is Chigurh?” If you’ve seen No Country, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t and thus don’t, you must stop reading this post and go rent the movie immediately, though at this point I’ll quote Jim Emerson from his recent post on this same topic: “Why you would be reading this blog if you haven’t seen (No Country) is beyond me.” Indeed! The Cooler doesn’t have anywhere near the readership numbers of Emerson’s Scanners, but we deal in movies here, friend-o. By now you’ve at least figured that out. But, presuming you’ve seen No Country, have you figured out the other part? Can you answer with confidence: “Where is Chigurh?” I can.

Before I do, I need to give credit where credit is due. This is hardly the first “Where is Chigurh?” entry in the blogosphere. In fact, the blog world has never been more exciting for me than it was in the days and weeks after my first viewing of No Country on November 22. With more and more movie fans, many of them friends and readers of The Cooler, going to the cinema less and less (instead opting to watch movies on DVD), the blogosphere provides the community conversation experience that would otherwise be hard to find. Just because I had to wait for some of my friends to see No Country didn’t mean I had to wait to discuss it.

Back in November, Emerson wrote about the Chigurh motel room mystery, and other things No Country. In December, Glenn Kenny analyzed the scene specifically. At the time, there was no better place to debate No Country’s finer points and attempt to bring some level of clarity to the Coens’ intentional fog than those two posts. I made myself part of the discussion (those hip to this blog’s title will be able to spot me in the comments section at that November Emerson post under my pre-Cooler alias). And though I reveled in the enlightenment that came from those blog discussions, even more I enjoyed the collective experience: movie fans coming together to unravel a mystery. Though Emerson and Kenny appeared to have access to screen captures from screener DVDs, the rest of us were working from memory and working together. We’d think, we’d write, we’d submit our analysis and then we’d wait to see if it would hold up to group scrutiny. If we all had DVDs to review at the time, we could have come up with answers faster and more definitively, but it wouldn’t have been as much fun. But I digress.

Over time, in multiple conversations with friends and through the posts linked above (including analysis offered in the comments sections), a few popular theories surfaced in the attempt explain Chigurh’s whereabouts in the moment late in the film when Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Ed Tom Bell throws open the door at the El Paso Desert Sands Motor Hotel (where hours earlier, in plot time, Llewelyn’s flight with the satchel came to a fatal end) and finds nothing but an empty room. Below, I take on these theories point by point. My arguments, all these months later, will seem overly exhaustive to some of you, but for others it might finally solve at least part of the riddle (feel free to write in to tell me any theories I missed).

Before we get to that, however, let me quote Emerson once more from a recent post about a Q&A at Ebertfest that inspired his latest analysis of the “Where is Chigurh?” mystery. He’s speaking of what Bell sees in the final motel room nonconfrontation (a dried pool of blood, an apparently empty room, a locked bathroom window, an open air vent, etc.) and what he (and we) don’t see (Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh). He’s speaking of what’s on screen and what isn’t.

“What more do you need to know? I'm not saying it's unreasonable to want to know. But take a moment to look before you start jumping to conclusions. What is there and what is not there. Does the movie provide the answer(s) to your questions, or does it not? If not, what does that decision tell you? That the Coens are sloppy or forgetful? That they're interested in something else, like the experience Ed Tom has just gone through? That maybe you're asking the wrong questions?”

In other words, just because we want to know where Chigurh is at that moment doesn’t mean that we need to know. His actual location may be superfluous. The Coens must think so, or else they would have been more explicit. Certainly the Coens didn’t pick the finale of a meticulously-shot movie to suddenly get lazy. Their decision to leave Chigurh’s exact whereabouts in doubt is a deliberate decision, and I happen to love it. Yet just because I’m completely content to bask in No Country’s shades of gray, just because there are a few possible interpretations of the final motel scene, doesn’t mean that all analyses are correct. When you slow down and really look, the mystery isn’t so complex after all.

And so, with the aid of DVD and all that previous debate, we proceed:

What We Can All Agree On
To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s start with the basics of the scene (a screen grab synopsis appears at the end of this post): Sheriff Bell returns to the Desert Sands motel in the dark of night. He pulls his truck up to the crime scene, where police tape stretches across rooms 114 and 112. He walks up to room 114, where Llewelyn met his death. He looks at the door. The deadbolt is missing. He pauses. Then we (but not Bell) see Chigurh in a space that is dark except for the light shining through a cylindrical space, presumably a hole in a door created when the deadbolt was blown out of it – Chigurh’s preferred method of breaking and entering.

At this point, on at least our first viewing of the film, we assume that Chigurh is on the other side of the door of room 114. Bell draws his gun, pushes the door open. We expect confrontation. Instead we get nothing. Bell searches the modest hotel room, revealing no Chigurh. Then Bell sits down on the bed and turns to see, in the light shining through the still-open motel room door, an uncovered air duct, screws on the carpet and a dime, which we assume that Chigurh used to open the vent, as he had earlier at the Regal Motel. This leads us to question: If Chigurh was just behind the door of room 114, where is he now? Where is Chigurh?

Theory 1: The Emerson Theory: Chigurh isn’t in room 114. He’s in the neighboring room 112.
Back in December, Emerson had six arguments in favor of his interpretation, which he recently restated. Since then, he’s amended one of his proofs, perhaps related to a comment I left on his latest post on the subject, though he still thinks the interpretation holds. Let me paraphrase and quote his six points and offer responses:

1) Earlier in the movie, at the Regal Motel, Chigurh took an adjacent room to Llewelyn’s.

This is the argument Emerson has amended, but I’m sticking with his original point because it underlines an easy-to-make mistake.

At the Regal Motel (where we watch Llewelyn fish for the satchel and witness Chigurh kill the Mexicans), Llewelyn’s initial room is 138. When he returns to the Regal and suspects (correctly) that someone is in his room, he asks to rent a second room and consults the motel map. Llewelyn does this because he needs to select an adjacent room on the backside of room 138, as these rooms would share the same air ducts, allowing him to fish for the satchel. If Llewelyn wanted a room next door to 138, he could have asked for room 137 (which the desk woman recommends to him) or 139. Simple enough. No map needed there. Llewelyn’s purpose is to find the room with a shared back wall, and thus shared ductwork. That’s why he requires the map.

Later, in a darkly comic shot, we see Chigurh consulting the Regal Motel map. Engrossed in all that’s going on, many moviegoers make the mistake of assuming that since Llewelyn needs to find a room directly next to room 138 that Chigurh has the same motivation for looking at the map. Not so. Chigurh consults the map in order to find a room with the same layout as 138 (and perhaps also a room where he can monitor the door of room 138). He ends up with room 130, down the corridor and just around the corner of the L-shaped complex, eight units away from 138. Chigurh enters 130, looks at it with the lights on, then turns off the lights, shuts the door and rehearses breaking into the room, imaging where the gunmen will be hiding or lounging in 138.

Thus, if Chigurh didn’t rent a room directly adjacent to Llewelyn’s room at the Regal Motel, there’s no precedent to suggest that he did so at the Desert Sands.

2) The doors of 114 and 112 are “equally emphasized” and both have police tape running across them.

This is true. Sort of. As Bell drives up to the Desert Sands, both rooms are visible in the shot. But room 114 is at the center of the frame and even appears brighter in Bell’s headlights, so the doors are not equally emphasized. Yes, room 112 is also behind police tape, but this seems to be for practical purposes: with the doors so close together it would be difficult to rope off one door and not the other.

Also, an earlier shot of the crime scene, from just before Carla Jean arrives at the Desert Sands, shows that the lights are on in room 114 (with police going in and out) while the lights are off in room 112 and the door is closed. If room 112 was part of the crime scene, it would likely be abuzz with activity, just like room 114.

3) “Chigurh is never where you expect him to be, when you expect him to be there.”

Also only sort of true. Certainly Chigurh is a man capable of surprise and adept at emerging from the shadows to wreak havoc. But Chigurh does have patterns. Whether or not Chigurh is in room 114 when Bell returns to the crime scene, it’s obvious that Chigurh did in fact return to the scene of the crime, as he has in the past, to retrieve the money. We know this because of the uncovered air duct and the coin (Chigurh’s tool; Llewelyn uses a screwdriver). Obviously Chigurh didn’t unscrew the vent amidst the earlier gunfight, and thus we can assume that the satchel was removed from the motel room after police finished investigating the shootout and left the scene. Thus Bell’s hunch is correct: Chigurh did return to the scene of the crime. Sometimes Chigurh is entirely predictable.

4) Bell is relieved not to find Chigurh in the room, and the decision to select room 114 over 112 stands as his equivalent of surviving the coin toss.

Bell is certainly relieved. But if rooms 114 and 112 were both part of the crime scene, Bell’s search wouldn’t be over the moment he was done searching room 114. Look at it this way: if you were Sheriff Bell and you thought Chigurh might be standing in the room next door (112), would you sit on the bed and breathe a sigh of relief in room 114? I sure wouldn’t. Though it’s true that Bell survives his “coin toss” with destiny, the choice isn’t over 114 or 112 (as he gets out of his truck, Bell never even looks at room 112). The choice is whether to tempt fate by entering room 114 or to play it safe and walk away. That’s his coin toss. And he survives. But that doesn’t mean that Chigurh was absent.

5) “If Chigurh wanted/needed to shoot Sheriff Bell … he would have.”

Well, that’s true. But that’s true whether Chigurh is in room 114 or on Jupiter. Chigurh’s decision whether to shoot Bell is determined by his own strange moral code (as with all his other victims and near-victims), not his geography. The rest of the film clearly demonstrates: If Chigurh wasn’t someone dead, he hunts them until they are. If he doesn’t, he lets them go, even if they’re standing right in front of him. It’s that simple.

6) There’s no indication in the movie that Chigurh has “supernatural powers,” thus Chigurh didn’t just disappear from room 114. Thus, if Bell doesn’t find Chigurh in 114, he must not be there.

True and maybe true. Though I agree with the point about supernatural powers (more on this in Theory 2), several arguments could be made for why Chigurh is in room 114 but escapes discovery. A silly though simple premise suggests that Chigurh hides under the bed and then slips out the door when Bell’s search takes him into the bathroom. I’m not endorsing that interpretation, but there’s no visual evidence to refute it. Using the visual clues available to us, that reading is irrefutably possible.

In conclusion: At best the above six arguments don’t eliminate the possibility that Chigurh was in room 112. But nothing above suggests definitively that Chigurh is anywhere other than room 114. However, evidence does exist proving that Chigurh can’t be in room 112: When we get our glimpse of Chigurh hiding in the shadows, he appears to be standing up against a wall, the door to his left (our right), as evidenced by the light shining through the missing deadbolt in the foreground. This shot suggests that Chigurh in a room with a layout identical to room 114, if not 114 itself. By contrast, if Chigurh were in room 112, we might still see light in the foreground from the missing deadbolt, but we’d also see light in the background, which would be coming through the motel window, which exterior shots demonstrate is illuminated by the headlights of Bell’s truck. Instead, Chigurh is standing in darkness. No light behind him means no window behind him, which means a definitive “no” to the theory that he’s in room 112.

Theory 2: Chigurh is a “ghost.”
Several commenters on various blogs have offered the reading that Chigurh is in fact a “ghost” and thus could magically disappear from room 114. Though it’s impossible to eliminate all possibility of this reading – if you say Chigurh is an actual angel of death, how am I to disagree? – it’s simple to create reasonable doubt. In short, Chigurh is very real throughout the entire movie, as is everything else we see. This isn’t The Sixth Sense, where our interpretation of previous events gets turned on its head in the final moments. The Coens are offering no such twist. All the people Chigurh has killed were real people who are actually dead. The car Chigurh turned into a bomb really exploded. His trail of blood after his shootout with Llewelyn is real. Thus Chigurh is real.

The ghost argument arises from people pointing out that Bell calls Chigurh a “ghost” in the scene prior to going back to the Desert Sands motel, but this is only partially accurate. His conversation with the El Paso Sheriff in the parking lot of the diner actually goes like this:

El Paso Sheriff (on Chigurh): He’s just a goddam homicidal lunatic, Ed Tom.

Bell: I’m not sure he’s a lunatic.

El Paso: Yeah, well what would you call him?

Bell: Well, sometimes I think he’s pretty much a ghost.

El Paso: He’s real, alright.

First of all there’s an enormous difference between being “pretty much a ghost” and being an actual ghost, just like there’s an enormous difference between eating a burger that tastes like shit and eating one that’s actually made of feces. Also, the El Paso Sheriff confirms that the crimes and the perpetrator are real. Thus, the “ghost” theory doesn’t hold.

Theory 3: The image of Chigurh behind the door is Bell’s imagination of what’s there. It’s a symbol of his fear.
That would explain why Bell doesn’t find anything on the other side of the door, but it doesn’t explain the following: As with Theory 2, at no time during the rest of the movie do the Coens show us something that isn’t really there. If this is a nightmare vision, it’s the only nightmare vision in the entire film. Also, Bell has never laid eyes on Chigurh. That’s precisely why Chigurh is “pretty much a ghost.” If Bell has never seen Chigurh, how can he imagine what he’d look like standing on the other side of the door?

Theory 4: Chigurh is in room 114, but he escapes by some method other than the front door, such as the air duct.
Ignoring for the moment whether Chigurh could fit through the air duct, or whether he could wiggle himself (and the money and his gun) through that tight space without Bell hearing him, or whether he could escape that way in the necessary time, here’s the problem: Once Chigurh climbs inside the ductwork, how is he planning to get out the other side? He’d be locked in, which makes it a bad escape route. Also, given all that we know of Chigurh’s nature, does shimmying away from a fight through an air duct seem Chigurh-like? I don’t think so. As silly as it is to picture Chigurh hiding under the bed, this image is sillier times twelve.

Remember: the duct is uncovered because Chigurh removed the grate to fetch the satchel of money in his return to the crime scene. Why was the money in the duct? Because as far as Llewelyn knew it was still a terrific hiding place. Earlier, at the Regal Motel, the Mexicans sit in room 138 without detecting the money, and Llewelyn has no idea that Chigurh deduced the location of the satchel after Llewelyn snagged it and fled the scene.

Also supporting the idea that Chigurh must have escaped through the open front door is the close-up of the latched bathroom window. This shot screams, “No, Chigurh didn’t escape out the back!” The Coens may be vague about how Chigurh avoids detection, but they are crystal clear that his escape route isn’t through the bathroom window, and this would seem to apply to the air duct, too.

Why would the Coens be so explicit about one thing and so vague about another? That’s the question to ponder, and that’s what Emerson is referring to when he says, “Does the movie provide the answer(s) to your questions, or does it not? If not, what does that decision tell you?” If we assume that the close-up of the door establishes that Chigurh doesn’t escape room 114 before Bell enters it, the Coens are telling us that Chigurh makes a choice about whether or not to kill Bell. It doesn’t matter how Chigurh gets away. What matters is that we know that Chigurh held Bell’s fate in his hands and let him go, per his bizarre ethics. If the Coens wanted Chigurh’s escape to be entirely vague, there wouldn’t have been a close-up of the latched window. The window shot is a smoking gun establishing Chigurh’s presence in room 114 (and it’s not the only one…keep reading).

Theory 5: Chigurh is in room 114, escapes detection via means we’ll never be able to determine conclusively and slips out the front door while Bell is in the bathroom.
This isn’t just the simplest and most logical theory – the one most consistent with the rest of the film – it’s the only theory left standing. It’s also the theory that provides the biggest punch. Ask yourself: What’s Bell’s deliberation worth if Chigurh isn’t on the other side of the door? What’s Chigurh’s pardoning of Bell worth if he flees the scene a moment before Bell enters it?

We know that Chigurh is in 114 because he’s standing behind a door with a missing deadbolt. On the interior shot of the missing deadbolt – Chigurh’s view – we can actually make out the reflection of Bell in the metal lining of the hole. A ghost cannot see this view, cannot occupy this space. The reflection of Bell cannot be seen through any other door. This shot is yet another smoking gun: Bell and Chigurh stand a door’s width away from one another. Then Bell pauses. And when he opens the door, Chigurh is nowhere to be seen.

Where exactly is Chigurh? He’s not behind the door anymore. That much can be determined by pausing the DVD (and, truth be told, I was pretty confident Chigurh was no longer standing behind the door after my second theatrical viewing, without the benefit of frame-by-frame examination). Chigurh isn’t in the bathroom. He isn’t in the ductwork. He probably isn’t in the opposite corner of the room, because Bell appears to look in that direction when he enters the room.

Could he be under the bed? Sure. Could he be in the luggage alcove to the left of the bathroom? Sure. The reality is he could be anywhere that we cannot see (before escaping through the front door). And that’s the answer: Chigurh is in the shadows. Period. Somewhere in the shadows. What, you think it’s a coincidence that Bell doesn’t flip on the lights when he enters room 114? Of course not! With the lights on in the room, there would be no dark corners for Chigurh to occupy. But with the lights off it’s easy to argue that somewhere, in some patch of darkness, Chigurh is there. Of that much I’m certain.

That’s all we know. That’s all we need to know.

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The Evidence:
Click any of the following to enlarge:

Sheriff Bell Returns to the Desert Sands:

















Initial Crime Scene


Regal Motel Map (as seen by Llewelyn)


Chigurh at the Regal Motel

Exactly As It Seems: Deception

Deception is bits and pieces of movies we’ve seen before (but can’t always identify) squeezed together to provide a familiar yet skewed vision, like the reflection in a shattered mirror; it’s less a movie than it is movie refuse repacked under a fresh sheet of cellophane. The screenplay is by Mark Bomback, who previously handled the script for Live Free Or Die Hard, but it feels like a novice effort, the kind of thing conjured up by college buddies sitting on barstools who fail to grasp the subtle difference between making something that’s like their favorite movies and making something that is a watered-down clips reel of their DVD collection.

The movie stars Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman and Michelle Williams as characters who often aren’t who they seem to be. Possessing a plot-twisty, mysterious air, Deception is one of those films that’s difficult to discuss in any depth without offering spoilers, which works to its advantage: If I protect Deception’s secrets, I’ll never get around to describing the abominable scene less than 30 minutes before the end of the picture when Jackman’s bad guy – apparently still undeveloped – spends what seems like an eternity groping the emotionally shattered blond played by Williams as he ties together loose plot threads in a Dr. Evil-esque monologue, the score adopting a high-pitched “something is wrong here” whine. It’s a scene that belonged on the cutting room floor, or that better yet would have been torn from the screenplay and never shot. And yet the movie’s cumbersome-to-develop but all-too-obvious plot structure wouldn’t work without it. There’s the rub, and it leaves a rash.

Watching Jackman working from the soap opera over-actor’s handbook as poor Williams stands there to have her breasts fondled, I couldn’t help but wonder if they had read the entire script before signing on to the project. Deception has a handful of brutal moments like that one that have “pass” written all over them. What the film lacks are scenes that explain to me why any of the lead actors opted-in. Well, maybe there’s one: McGregor, playing a nerdy numbers cruncher who through some extreme plot contrivances winds up in a “sex club,” is endearingly awkward and hopeful in a scene where his Jonathan McQuarry tries to guess the name of Williams’ reticent “S” during a sex appointment turned budding romance. Beyond that though, the film is as emotionally dark as its after-hours Manhattan setting.

Yes, after-hours. That’s where it all begins, with a joint offered to Jonathan by Jackman’s slick, cool lawyer with the slick, cool name: Wyatt Bose. The men hit it off like Richie Cunningham and Fonzie, and their marijuana date turns into tennis, clubbing and coffee in the park where, oops, their identical cell phones get swapped by mistake. Raise your hand if you think that’s going to be important? It is! Wyatt is a member of a fuck-a-night phone club. Women call, ask if Wyatt is “free tonight” and then name a hotel for a hot, steamy rendezvous with the expectation that there will be no names exchanged, only bodily fluids. Wyatt heads out of the country on business leaving Jonathan to keep up his perfect sex club attendance (beats taking in the mail), and despite having almost no experience with women Jonathan turns out to be a lean boot-knocking machine. (Had this storyline been allowed to continue, the movie might have been called The Natural.)

The idea of the sex club is that it’s for business professionals with no time for personal lives, apparently because they’re spending all their free time in the gym. Jonathan meets hard-bodied hottie after harder-bodied hottie, including a lingerie-clad Maggie Q and Williams’ “S,” the thin-necked porcelain doll he’d just happened to pass on the street a few weeks earlier and been enchanted by ever since. The only participant Jonathan meets with an ass unlike a trampoline is a 62-year-old who acts as his sex club Obi-Wan Kenobi. She’s played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), an actress who has spent recent years conditioning herself for such a sex-obsessed role in sex-obsessed movies like Swimming Pool, Heading South and Basic Instinct 2. (Helen Mirren would have been the only other acceptable choice.)

It’s a small part, but a memorable one, and Rampling radiates in it. I won’t go so far as to say that Rampling hasn’t been nipped, tucked or Botoxed over the years, but if she’s had work done it’s been subtle (unlike, say, Mia Farrow who these days looks like Helena Bonham Carter in Planet Of The Apes). The point is that Rampling is as genuinely sultry and sexy and also as genuinely aged as the role requires, a combination that’s becoming hard to find. In one brief shot, a topless Rampling, straddling McGregor, pins her partner to the bed with erotic fervor, her veteran breasts swinging up toward his schoolboy face. I spent the next 10 minutes contemplating the shooting of that scene and wondering what Rampling and McGregor chatted about between takes, which says quite a bit about Deception: its casting choices are more interesting than its characters.

I haven’t even mentioned the film’s key conflict: “S” is held hostage by Wyatt who isn’t a cool, slick lawyer after all. No shock there. The movie doesn’t hide the rubber-necked confusion demonstrated by Wyatt’s supposed coworkers, who can’t figure out why he’s pretending to know them. As a result, we’re about five steps and 45 movie minutes ahead of Jonathan. We know that after he’s done getting screwed by beautiful babies that he’s going to end up being screwed by Wyatt, leading to the inevitable scene when he shows up at Wyatt’s office and home address and finds nothing but strangers and blank stares. Likewise, late in the movie, we know that the computer operation Jonathan must perform in order to save “S” will take exactly one second less than he has to perform it. We know these things because we’ve seen them before in other movies, some of them good movies. Any of them movies we’d rather be watching than this one.

Reviving The Muppets

Sifting through the hype about Jason Segel’s full-frontal performance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I came across a piece of news from March that I’d missed: Segel is working on a new Muppet movie. Details are slim at this point, but a story on MTV’s Movies Blog suggests that the plot of the Muppet project has been outlined and that Segel “hopes to dive in to the flick after his soon-to-shoot movie I Love You, Man.” The blog also reports that Seth Rogan, Jonah Hill, Kristen Wiig and Paul Rudd have been approached about making cameos in the movie, which Segel says will attempt to conjure the magic of The Muppet Movie (1979), The Great Muppet Caper (1981) and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), while moving away from “all those weird concept movies” like the literature-inspired The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), Muppet Treasure Island (1996) and TV’s The Muppets’ Wizard Of Oz (2005), etcetera.

As a still-passionate fan of the Muppets (Season 3 of The Muppet Show can’t hit DVD fast enough), this comes as great news: not just that another Muppet movie is in the works but also that Segel will try to bring the Muppets back to heart-warming, knee-slapping basics. Then again, I’m more than a little concerned about how the R-rated-and-proud-of-it humor of the Judd Apatow clan will translate into the Muppet universe. I’d like to think that Segel & Friends have enough class and creativity to keep the Muppets G-rated, but I’m not willing to bet on it. For the moment, I’ll hesitantly give them the benefit of my massive doubt. That Segel identifies how and when the Muppets drifted off course (Jim Henson’s death had a lot to do with it) bodes well for his attempt at revitalization. But beyond the obvious requirement for the upcoming flick that Kermit shouldn’t bare his green genitalia or resort to making jokes about giving it to Miss Piggy “amphibian style,” here are 10 suggestions to make the new Muppet movie a must-see.

1) Put Kermit in the spotlight. Look, I know that Steve Whitmire’s Kermit doesn’t compare to Henson’s, but the character is iconic. After Henson’s death in 1990, the Muppet creative team (including Henson’s son Brian) wisely and respectfully tried to move away from Kermit as the focal point rather than pretend that Kermit’s heart and Henson’s weren’t one and the same. But Kermit is essential. M*A*S*H wouldn’t have worked without Hawkeye. Cheers wouldn’t have worked without Sam. The Muppets can’t work without Kermit. Henson used to be the axis upon which the Muppet world spun. Now the show must rely on Henson’s most famous character.

2) Pass on newer characters. In short, if the character was introduced to the public in the era of Muppets Tonight, the short-lived attempt at reinventing The Muppet Show in the mid-90s, don’t bother. Since only die-hard Muppet fans were watching Muppets Tonight, only die-hards could identify Clifford, Pepe, Bobo, Johnny Fiama and Sal, and most of us wouldn’t want to. Kids coming to the Muppets to the first time will fall in love with entertaining characters, period. Thus the new film would be wise to entice the nostalgia of lapsed fans by relying on the characters that powered five Muppet Show seasons and the Jim Henson-made movies, not to mention seven seasons of the animated Muppet Babies.

3) Use human actors for villains or brief cameos only. The Henson films rely on the personality of the Muppets themselves. Human actors have made great villains – Charles Durning as Doc Hopper, Charles Grodin as Nicky Holiday and even Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge – but otherwise they have been best utilized in crisp, cherishable cameos, such as Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, James Coburn and Orson Welles (among others) in Movie. Only John Cleese in Caper stands out as making a comparatively extended cameo without souring the Muppet spirit.

4) Use actual stars for the cameos. Just look at that list of names from No. 3. Sorry, but Rogan, Hill, Wiig and Rudd don’t compare, just like David Arquette, Kathy Griffin, Ray Liotta and Rob Schneider didn’t suffice in Muppets From Space (1999). If Jimmy Kimmel can draw Don Cheadle, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Robin Williams for a YouTube-minded song about fucking Ben Affleck, the Muppets should be able to draw A-listers.


5) Songs, goddammit, songs! Kermit’s mission in Movie is to sing, dance and make people happy. That’s what the Muppets do. To have them try to win over audiences doing something else is to miss the point. Movie and Caper remain the best two Muppet films because they have the best songs: “Rainbow Connection,” “Movin’ Right Along,” “I Hope That Something Better Comes Along,” “Hey, A Movie,” “Happiness Hotel,” and “The First Time It Happens,” to name a few. If you don’t have music, you don’t have Muppets.

6) Put the Muppets in the real world. Though Jim Henson’s movies put the Muppets in the spotlight, they also put the Muppets into human-dominated surroundings. It’s the juxtaposition of the Muppets against their human counterparts that makes them special. It’s the sincerity with which the Muppets are treated in these human settings that makes them real. And by putting mostly vertically-challenged Muppets next to humans, Henson shows the world though the eyes of children. Watching Kermit walk into the loud, chaotic El Sleezo at the start of Movie, we sense his vulnerability, only to be won over by his determination. This is why we love the Muppets.


7) No special effects. In Movie, Kermit rides a bicycle. At the end of Caper, Henson ups the ante by putting the entire Muppet cast on bikes. These moments are special in part because they are almost impossible to do while remaining faithful to the laws of puppetry. CGI, by making anything possible, takes the magic out of it. The classic homage to High Noon at the end of the Movie, featuring a skinny-legged Kermit in cowboy boots, would be pedestrian if done digitally. Puppetry must prevail.

8) Pay homage. How about tipping the cap back to some of the old Muppet films? I’d pay good money to see Martin back in that tie-and-shorts ensemble as the “insolent waiter” from Movie. What’s Grodin doing these days? And throw in some allusions to non-Muppets cinema. Why can’t John Cusack appear as Being John Malkovich’s Craig Schwartz? So long as Kermit isn’t drinking anyone’s milkshake, I’m for it.


9) Keep it loose. “Good grief, it’s a running gag,” Kermit says to the camera in Movie when the waitress with a lisp keeps answering to the word “myth.” “Your voice was dubbed,” Miss Piggy screams at Grodin’s Nicky in Caper. As in those moments and others, Henson was never afraid to let his characters remind us that we’re only watching a movie. No joke was ever too foolish for his pun-happy Muppets, and no one loved to revel in the foolishness more than Henson. So throw some penguins in the air and have fun with it.

10) Have Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl write it. Oh, well. Nine out of 10 ain’t bad.

Uncut But Edited

In his book of interviews with Walter Murch, The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje notes Murch’s penchant for quoting French filmmaker Robert Bresson’s observation that a film is born three times: once when it is written, once again when it is shot and once more when it is edited. That’s a natural quote for an editor to carry in his back pocket, as it suggests the power of an editor in a potentially positive light. As movies are debated and celebrated, the contributions of editors are at best overlooked: glory-hungry directors never want to share the credit, and we in the audience have no good way of figuring out if an editor made a da Vinci out of a Pollack or just followed the paint-by-number conclusions dictated by the available footage. Yet when a film fails, editors – rightfully or wrongfully – are often cast as the scapegoat.

For all the directors with “final cut,” and despite those like Alfred Hitchcock who more or less edit in camera, it’s my hunch that editors’ contributions are drastically under-appreciated. That’s why I try to be mindful of the Bresson quote before I rush to canonize a director, and that’s why I found myself thinking of Murch and Bresson last weekend as I was enjoying my second viewing of Ratatouille, last year’s Pixar sensation, which common sense suggests is an exception to the three-lives rule.

Because animated pictures are extensively storyboarded and are entirely within the control of CGI artists (there are no “happy accidents” in digital moviemaking), an editor would seem of as little use on a Pixar “set” as a stuntman or prop master. Pixar artists would no sooner painstakingly render superfluous footage than an architect would add toilets to a room without plumbing. Or would they? Once all the digital cells are drawn, what is there to edit when it comes to an animated movie’s visual construction?

These were the questions running through my head Sunday night when I caught up on my blog reading and found that, just my luck, David Bordwell covered this very topic just a few weeks ago. It’s a fascinating and fast read and I highly recommend it. But before you leave this post for that one, a quick thought on Ratatouille:

One of the joys of the movie is that it embraces the opportunities provided by its digital format without ever becoming a movie about its technology. Last year many critics went ga-ga over the long, uncut tracking shot in Atonement showing the apocalyptic panorama of Dunkirk. But while that sequence is technically impressive, it achieves little emotionally beyond stimulating the cinematic hormones of movie geeks like me. So far as I can tell, the primary motivation for the scene’s design is to draw attention to its construction.

By contrast, Ratatouille avoids the temptation to go for ooo-ahhh technical flare for flare’s sake, because there’s no camera stunt work to be performed by a movie that isn’t captured by a camera. Ostensibly, an unbroken tracking shot is no greater an achievement for CGI artists than a series of alternate digital views “spliced together.” However, that doesn’t mean a tracking shot isn’t worth doing, or that it can’t have an astonishing effect.

Which brings us to the sequence in which Remy runs through a labyrinth of studs and pipes in his ascent from a sewer to the roof of a building overlooking Paris. The sequence isn’t an unbroken tracking shot, but it does provide views that would be difficult to pull off in a typical live-action shoot. We follow Remy behind a wall, scamper with him through rat-sized holes, pass through beams and floors and watch him race toward us within a pipe. These shots bring a tingle of excitement not for their technical expertise but for their ability to let us see the world through a rat’s eyes, which of course should be the goal.

Unlike films that dazzle just to dazzle, Ratatouille has its priorities straight. C’est fantastique!

Lost: Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

The danger of falling in love with the sound of your own voice is that you might cease considering the words coming out of your mouth. This is the downfall of documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, who in his latest “investigative” film, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, seems intent on documenting his preexisting understanding of the universe rather than discovering anything new. Basing his picture around a tongue-in-cheek attempt to locate the globe’s most-wanted terrorist, Spurlock spends 95 minutes interviewing his way through the Middle East in an effort to show how inhabitants of those countries are different from Americans, except when they’re the same. Despite the titular premise, the film’s true thesis is hard to determine. The only thing that’s clear is that Spurlock wants to be in front of the camera in the event it comes across anything worth filming.

Spurlock isn’t the first documentary filmmaker to act as the star of his own show, of course. With the notable exception of Sicko, Michael Moore muckrakes his way into almost every shot of his documentaries. Yet the notable difference between the two filmmakers is that Moore knows what his presence is worth. In his films, Moore plays the guy with a beef. You can debate his expertise, his honesty and his tactics, but from opening titles to closing credits you can’t debate his relevance because Moore’s doggedness won’t allow it. Spurlock, however, has no such axe to grind. He begins his hunt for “OBL,” he says, because the upcoming birth of his first child prompts him to do some soul-searching about the world’s great dangers. But that’s bullshit, and Spurlock knows it. To Moore’s genuine finger-waving anger, Spurlock provides shrugged shoulders of ambivalence. For all his supposed daring, he’s less a man on a mission than an employee trying to justify an expense account.

The reality, it’s clear, is that Spurlock wanted to do a movie on terrorism, and so he backtracked until he found a reason why he should or could. That’s fine in theory, but the trouble with that approach is that it undermines the film’s importance: By going so far out on such a flimsy limb in order to validate all that follows, Spurlock gives the impression that his mission requires justification, as if a filmmaker can’t make a film just because. When at the end of the movie Spurlock is calling his adventure a success because he has narrowed down Osama’s location to probably-Pakistan – even though news footage used within the documentary confirms that this was already a common theory – the desperate grab at relevance turns Spurlock into the awkward punchline of a joke he forgot he was telling.

If Spurlock can’t find a compelling reason why we should watch his film, it’s only right to wonder what we’re doing staring up at the screen. All too often, Where in the World feels like nothing more than a goofy travelogue with a lame “Where’s Osama?” running gag that at one point has Spurlock yelling “Yoooo-hooooo…” into a cave in Tora Bora. The exotic locations and Spurlock’s general cheer keep the experience watchable, but that’s a far cry from making the film worthwhile. With its cornball country music ditties and CGI sequences featuring Spurlock squaring off with bin Laden as characters in a video game, this is a documentary so focused on its spoonful of sugar that it forgets the part about making the medicine go down. Spurlock doesn’t have anything to say or any logic to impart, he just wants to talk.

Occasionally, he does talk to the right people, such as when Spurlock has a fascinating non-discussion with two 18-year-old students in Saudi Arabia who profess not to have a single opinion on America, lest they give the wrong answer in front of their onlooking principal. But more often than not, Spurlock’s whims fail to bear fruit. His most common mistake is forcing everything through his expectant-father prism, as if he’s the first man about to have a child. When Spurlock walks through the wreckage of a classroom near the Gaza Strip that had been shelled only hours before, he refuses to let the images speak for themselves and instead contemplates aloud how frightening it would be to send his child to school on such hazardous terrain. Calls home to his pregnant wife, Alexandra Jamieson, come off as either pathetic attempts to justify his absence or delusions of grandeur over the significance of his mission. Usually both.

It’s a shame to see Spurlock misfire to this degree, because his debut film, Super Size Me, was a surprise hit of 2004. In that documentary, in which Spurlock acts as lab rat by eating nothing but McDonald’s cuisine for a month to test the effects of fast food, the filmmaker was no more surprised by the end result than he is here, when he fails to locate bin Laden. But whereas Super Size Me began from a small idea (30 days of Big Macs) and grew into a surprisingly diverse and in-depth analysis of the fast food industry, Where in the World has nothing beyond its premise, which – comic though it is supposed to be – still causes Spurlock to overdraw from his creative account as he tries to make good on it. Spurlock’s “decision” at the end of the film to return home to his family rather than risk his life by traveling into a Taliban-controlled area of Pakistan reveals a filmmaker who has lost his way. If pursuing bin Laden isn’t “worth it,” the entire “search” wasn’t worth it. And thus the film tastes like time wasted, for everyone.

By the Book: Smart People

When you’re watching a movie and a grown-up character is constantly reminding the people around him that his visiting brother is adopted, you can be sure of at least one of two things: either the character is a major boner or the screenwriter is sadly unimaginative when it comes to conveying the scars of fractured brotherhood. In Smart People, it’s both. The boner is a college professor of Victorian literature played by a bearded and frumpy Dennis Quaid. The unimaginative screenwriter is Mark Poirier, a novelist making his screenwriting debut. The adopted brother is a jobless drifter played by an unkempt, mustachioed Thomas Haden Church. And in this movie everything is as it seems.

The film’s cookie-cutter approach to character construction began before its actors made it into the makeup trailer: One brother is named Lawrence, the other goes by Chuck. I’ll let you guess which is which, but here’s some help: Have you ever met an uptight, unjustifiably arrogant English professor named Chuck? How about a slacker named Lawrence? Yeah, me neither. But take Quaid, stuff a lumpy pillow down his shirt and give him a limp and, wham, you’ve got yourself a Professor Lawrence Wetherhold! Then take Church and give him Ty Pennington’s hairdo and chin whiskers a porn star’s mustache and, bam, you’ve got yourself a slacking Chuck – rolled joint not necessary until Act 2. With microwave-ready clichés like these, why cook, right?

Actually, that is right. Smart People’s overall design may be uninspired, but it works to the degree that it does because it sticks to its formula. A knee-jerk knock on the film would note the characters’ lack of evolution, but that’s kind of what I like about it. To expect a Devil Wears Prada makeover within a college English department would be foolish, so it’s refreshing that Smart People stops short of providing one. This is a movie that only hints at the possibility of change, as if fully aware of how arduous change can be. And perhaps Proirier simply doesn’t know how to write metamorphosis any more than he knows how to write years of pent-up family hostility, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that, on some level, Smart People is attempting to keep it real.

In that regard, the film is more successful than it deserves to be. (Mild spoiler warning) The plot includes an unexpected pregnancy, an inappropriate kiss and an overdone yet incomplete running gag about car sickness, yet the characters remain surprisingly believable. For that, you can credit the acting. Quaid will never be confused with Daniel Day-Lewis, but his gruff performance here reminds that the main thing keeping him on the B-list is his habit of showing up in B-movies. Church, meanwhile, approaches Chuck with the ease of an actor who realizes that 95 percent of the part is to take it easy. Then there’s Ellen Page, who as Lawrence’s daughter Vanessa looks just as comfortable playing a brainy girl who always sits up straight as she did playing the whip-smart, slouching Juno MacGuff. Sarah Jessica Parker manages to convince us that her beautiful Janet, one of Lawrence’s former students, sees her former professor’s inner Dennis Quaid. And Ashton Holmes occupies space as Lawrence’s son James, which, unfortunately, is all the character is asked to do.

The similarities between this Noam Murro-directed film and Noah Baumbach’s latest dysfunctional portraits are obvious, right down to the facial-haired English department pretension and professional bitterness, and Smart People nestles somewhere between the two. It isn’t as ugly as the laxative of hopelessness that is Margot At The Wedding, yet it isn’t as entertaining (or as powerful) as The Squid And The Whale. If Squid, like an editorial cartoon, exaggerates ever so slightly in all the right places in order to find a deeper truth, Smart People is more akin to a scientific drawing in a biology textbook: realistic almost to the point of boredom. Jeff Daniels’ Bernard Berkman is so terrifically pompous that we actually enjoy spending time with him, whereas Quaid’s Lawrence is genuinely disagreeable, thanks in large part to the influence of his daughter, whose sole emotional nourishment comes from watching her father detach from the world to seek her elitist company instead.

With a plot that at best seems obligatory, Smart People doesn’t have any grand designs, but then most people don’t either. The picture merely gets by, laughing whenever the opportunity presents itself, usually thanks to Church’s enjoyable scene-stealing. These days, lots of dramedies come overstuffed with misfits, outcasts and fuck-ups, so it’s nice to find a movie that doesn’t confuse idiosyncrasy with cleverness. Then again, this is a movie that drifts in and out of its characters’ lives so effortlessly that it sometimes feels adrift. Smart People never invests our emotions enough to win us over as a drama, nor does it tickle our funny bone regularly enough to satisfy as a comedy. It just is, which is enough to hold our interest for 95 minutes, but not enough to make this a film worth holding on to.

Reason No. 919 Why I Love The Onion

What would life be like without The Onion? Oh, wait, I know the answer to that. It would be just as absurd as it is now, only not intentionally so.

When you’re done enjoying the above clip, I highly recommend this print piece from a month back. It has nothing whatsoever to do with movies – I mean, other than the fact that the author guest-starred in my favorite Bill Murray movie – but it makes me laugh.

As for the latest Iron Man trailer – the real trailer – it’s a groaner for me. Part of the problem is that I’m not a comic book fanboy, so Iron Man is just yet another dude in a funny outfit saving the world. (And Robert Downey Jr. as an ass-kicker? Really?)

The part that annoys me though comes at the end of the preview, when the crimson C-3PO fires a rocket at a tank and then does the turn-around-and-walk-away-because-I’m-too-cool-to-watch-or-flinch-at-the-explosion bit. Is it just me, or has that become totally lame? I’d go so far as to say that move has jumped the shark, but nothing is as lame as arguing about when or if things have jumped the shark. So let’s just stick to debating lameness, okay?

(Oh, and here’s the original trailer – the one examined by The Onion – in case you care.)