Say It Ain’t So

A movie I won’t be seeing this weekend: Righteous Kill. I can’t bring myself to purchase a ticket for something with such a lame title, first of all. More so, I of course can’t stand to watch Al Pacino and especially Robert De Niro as they soil their legacies. I mean, really, what are these guys thinking? And, assuming they’re not, what are their agents thinking?

Pacino has been a bit of a clown for a while now. As for De Niro, I’ve heard people say he officially sold out when he appeared in the 2000 bomb that was The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle. I didn’t see the movie, but I have to disagree. Rocky & Bullwinkle was a film for kids in which De Niro played a colorful and (for many) iconic character: Fearless Leader. It didn’t work, fine, but the cartoon was beloved, so it wasn’t crazy to think that it might have. Besides: Travis Bickle and Jake La Motta don’t come around every year, and an actor’s gotta work, right?

The bigger offense is when you enter a genre for which you are known, and play the kind of tough guy character with which you are familiar, and do so opposite an actor to whom you have been compared throughout your career who is working on equally familiar turf. Under those circumstances, the product can’t just be good. It has to be fantastic, or else you disappoint your fans and taint your legacy (or what’s left of it) in the process.

Who knows, maybe Righteous Kill is terrific, but it’s painful just to watch its trailers. And De Niro and Pacino aren’t helping the film or themselves by making appearances like this on The Late Show. (Watch this Top 10 at your own risk, and marvel at Pacino, who reads the cue cards like English is a foreign language. So sad.)



What makes the Righteous Kill situation worse is that De Niro and Pacino did it right with Heat. Until then, as you most certainly know, the actors had never played opposite one another on screen. Michael Mann used that real-world anticipation to increase the fictional suspense. It was both thrilling and cathartic.



But this? This is pathetic.

Queue It Up: United 93

[In recognition of today’s anniversary, The Cooler offers the following review, written upon the film’s release in the author’s pre-blog era.]

Writer/director Paul Greengrass can talk all he wants about the importance of his latest film, and about how it comes with the support of its subjects’ families. But the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about the first Hollywood feature based around the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the movie’s timing – hitting theaters just over four-and-a-half years after the tragic events it chronicles – is only one of them.

Given the unusually fast turnaround from suffering to screen, United 93 brings with it an odor of shameless profiteering – the sense that it’s trying to capitalize on one of the saddest days in our nation’s history. If your gut resembles mine, it’s telling you that this is too much too soon. Especially considering that we spent the first year after 9/11 inundated by its devastating imagery. Especially considering that our president still refers to the attacks on an almost weekly basis. Especially since so many wounds are still healing, even those of Americans like me who were about as removed from the tragedy as possible.

To be sure, United 93 is being released now not because audiences are clamoring for the dramatization of real-life events they haven’t had time to forget but because the filmmakers (including Universal Pictures) want to benefit from being first: either artistically or financially, or both. But if your stomach turns with cynicism, your brain should remind you that if it wasn’t United 93 in late April 2006, it would have been Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center in August, or who knows what else after that. Eventually someone would go here, and here we are.

So for a moment let’s ignore all that surrounds the film and concentrate on what’s inside it. Any movie deserves that, but this one more than most. Because while I have many objections about when United 93 was made, I have few criticisms about how it was made. Gripping, touching, honest and fair, Greengrass’ film is a triumph, almost more because of what it doesn’t do than what it does. Wearing fragile wings of wax, United 93 learns from Icarus and opts for reserve in all the places that Hollywood usually shoots for the stratosphere.

It starts with star power. In this film, there is none. Just about wherever possible, characters are played by their real-life inspirations: air-traffic controllers, military personnel, airline employees. The rest of the time United 93 looks to have been cast using castoffs from History Channel reenactments. There isn’t a single big-name actor to be found, and nothing happens in this movie that suggests that it will launch careers. That’s significant, because it’s one thing for a studio to back a picture that’s without celebrities, but it’s another thing to greenlight a script that doesn’t create any stars either.

With astounding consistency, Greengrass selects nearly-anonymous group storytelling over individual exaltation. Naturally, some characters get a little more face time than others, but Greengrass patently refuses to perpetuate the mainstream media mythmaking that made Todd “Let’s roll” Beamer posthumously famous. United 93 has no handsome superman, no wise guru, no quirky sidekick who delivers witty one-liners. There are no flashbacks or even back-stories to flash back to. Instead, Greengrass treats all the players as equals: no one any more important than the rest, which is as it should be.

That treatment is even extended to the movie’s villains, the four al Qaeda terrorists who highjack the titular flight destined for San Francisco and redirect it toward Washington, DC, with the intent to crash the Boeing 757 into the US Capitol. It might be going a bit too far to suggest that the terrorists are treated sympathetically in this picture, but they are certainly portrayed sincerely: as individuals who firmly believe they are glorifying their god, even if their bloodthirsty methods suggest a more demonic inspiration.

Judging these characters would have been easy. Greengrass resists at every opportunity. Before the terrorists take control of the plane, their leader is shown to be reluctant to begin the assault. Is he scared? Questioning his decision to take the lives of others? Doubting his decision to sacrifice himself? Or merely waiting for the opportune moment? It’s one of many mysteries that the film doesn’t attempt to answer. The in-air events of Flight 93 – which crashed short of its goal in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after a passenger uprising – were written based on in-flight phone calls and cockpit recordings, so Greengrass is forced to approximate quite a bit. But this film succeeds where other historical pictures before it have failed because Greengrass approximates as minimally as possible and as understatedly as possible.

While the media made a hero out of Beamer, Greengrass makes him just another passenger: a guy named Todd, who acts no more heroically than at least half a dozen others. Beamer’s famous “Let’s roll” urging isn’t even issued as some climactic “Remember the Alamo” war cry, just as a snippet of one rambling urging – “Come on, let’s roll, let’s go” – that’s uttered just a bit louder than a whisper to passengers already poised to strike. Whether Beamer actually delivered it that way, I haven’t a clue. Nor does Greengrass. But appreciate that United 93 doesn’t make Beamer any braver an individual – simply because he had a wife to call and a phone with which to call her – than the other 39 people who died unjustly on that flight and might have done as much or more in the fracas to assume control of the plane. (That Beamer’s name appears first among the passengers in the closing credits, I’ll attribute to a boneheaded studio blunder.)

Equally refreshing is the film’s lack of jingoism. You would have allowed a degree of flag-waving, but United 93 engages in almost none. Greengrass recognizes that even though the 9/11 strikes did indeed target Americans, the attacks were, first and foremost, crimes against humanity. That said, it was the triumph of the human spirit rather than anything American that willed passengers and crew on Flight 93 to revolt. However, my pleasure in seeing that recognized is offset by my disappointment that the one dissenting passenger urging nonviolence happens to have a European accent.

But few movies are perfect and this one certainly isn’t. Greengrass’ script is strong but his direction leaves something to be desired. Much of the film looks like it was lit with a flashlight and most of the scenes are shot from behind the heads and over the shoulders of the actors, making it appear that Greengrass is promoting dandruff shampoo when actually he’s trying to keep from glamorizing his subjects. He succeeds at the latter, perhaps all too well: the film works best in its moments of chaos, but it limps in the few occasions when the actors are required to, you know, act.

Still, the collective whole of this movie’s high-powered engine is far greater than the sum of its parts. United 93 works mostly without a score, and it doesn’t need one. The events are heart-pounding enough on their own. Just like a good reporter knows when to get out of the way and let a subject’s quotes tell the story, Greengrass steps back and plays the roll of observer. There are no surprises here. No cliffhanger scenes. No memorable lines of dialogue. No never-before-seen authentic footage. The September 11 that you see here is the one you probably remember. Yet it still feels new.

Or maybe the better word would be fresh. Perhaps it was in part due to seeing the movie on a Friday evening at the end of a long week, but United 93 took every bit of energy I had. The film isn’t bloody or especially violent. It isn’t even all that horrific, considering all the carnage that could have been put to screen and wasn’t. Yet I can’t think of any moviegoing experience that was so difficult for me. Not one. For example, when I walked out of Schindler’s List with tear-stained cheeks in 1993, I was spent. But I admired the filmmaking so much that I knew I’d want to see it again, and I have since, a handful of times. In this case, I’m not so sure. United 93 made me so nauseous that midway through, and for more than 30 minutes afterward, I was craving an air-sickness bag.

It wasn’t even the plane footage that got to me. It was the scenes set in dark rooms illuminated by green flashing lights where air-traffic controllers try desperately to determine why four flights suddenly break radio contact and divert from their original course. At first there is confusion, which is followed by dismay, then panic, then sickening realization and then overwhelming helplessness as one by one the flights just disappear from the radar. Gone. Just like that.

What comes next is shock. And if you’ve moved on with your life since 9/11, this film will make you feel like you haven’t left the events too far behind. Nor should you. Better than anything else, United 93 captures our country’s lack of preparedness for such attacks, not from a military standpoint (although, that too) but an emotional one. We just never thought such large-scale attacks could happen to us. Not here. But in just a few hours, our world image changed. United 93 records history happening.

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

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Addendum: I have seen United 93 again. Once. It was equally powerful. And, curiously enough, surprisingly so. I’d already written the above review, but somehow I didn’t believe it. Soured by the way 9/11 became a political tool for fear and warmongering, I felt I’d built a wall around myself that would preclude me from emotional investment in a 9/11-based film. The barrier is probably there, but United 93 overcomes it. It was and remains my pick for 2006’s best film.

Spanhattan: Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Woody Allen’s latest film, is a pig in lipstick. It’s still a pig, as the saying goes, which is to say it’s very much a Woody Allen movie, accented with the flourishes we have come to expect from the director through four decades of indefatigable output. The familiar font of the opening credits, the storybook narration, the use of dialogue that’s both meticulously drawn and awkwardly improvised, plus the storyline that’s full of love, self-absorption and self-doubt – it’s all here. But these aren’t the things that draw our attention, because it turns out that a pig in lipstick isn’t just a pig after all. It’s a spectacle. And so it is that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is notable for all the ways it isn’t your typical Allen fare.

The differences begin, most obviously, with the setting: Barcelona and its reds, yellows and stucco in lieu of Manhattan and its gray and more gray and steel. VCB is a travelogue disguised as a meditation on love. The cinematographer is Javier Aguirresarobe, who goes down as one of the few individuals to ever leave a deeper mark on an Allen film than Allen himself. In this movie, the subplots come and go, but what remains is our sense of place. VCB is about a pair of young American women who set out to share one of those unforgettable summers overseas, and so Aguirresarobe devours Spain as if he wants their journey to be ours. He captures art and architecture, musicians and museums. And yet the most stunning treasures to come before Aguirresarobe’s camera are Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz, who flap into an Allen film like a pair of exotic parrots who don’t know that the director usually works with parakeets.

Cruz plays an erratic dabbling artist named Maria Elena, the hot-tempered ex of Javier Bardem’s Juan Antonio, a successful painter. Of all the key players, Maria Elena is the last to arrive, but she makes an instantly indelible impression. Rumored to have attempted killing Juan Antonio in a jealous rage, Maria Elena is a concept before she is a flesh-and-blood character, and Cruz makes sure she lives up to her reputation (the Harry Lime trick, on a considerably lesser scale). Maria Elena is fragile, angry, passionate, sexy and conniving, all at once, and she convincingly drifts from Spanish to English and back again, much to Juan Antonio’s frustration, as her temper infiltrates any hint of demureness like waves crawling up the shore. Allen’s screenplay never allows us to have a private moment with Maria Elena, but her sheer force demands (and receives) a share of the spotlight.

Comparatively, Bardem’s Juan Antonio is forgettable, though his introduction is anything but: At a Barcelona restaurant, Juan Antonio approaches the table of Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) and – without even sitting down – offers an invitation to join him on a trip to Oviedo for sightseeing and lovemaking. The invitation isn’t meant for one of them specifically, or for either of them. It’s for both of them. Cristina, a lamb to the bad-boy wolf if there ever was one, is intrigued. Vicky, in love with her polished, polite and wealthy husband-to-be back home in New York, is insulted. Thus, while Cristina looks on in hormonal paralysis, Vicky and Juan Antonio debate the nature of his bold invitation. And as quickly as it becomes clear that Juan Antonio doesn’t see anything bold about it, we know all about his character that we need to.

From this, a love trapezoid will spawn, leaving Juan Antonio to be a straight man overshadowed by the theatrics of the spirited women around him. That said: Vicky doesn’t acquiesce to his request for a threesome, which is a shame. Because while the only thing Juan Antonio has in common with Anton Chigurh is unflinching confidence, I was aching for a moment in which Vicky and Cristina would argue over the rights to Juan Antonio, forcing him to settle the debate by throwing a coin in the air and having them call it. No such luck, although Allen makes up for the omission with an enjoyable mutual seduction between Juan Antonio and Cristina that turns hilarious just when the characters are ready to get down to serious business.

Surprisingly, that gag is a rarity in a film that’s determined to be taken seriously. You might have noticed that Allen’s name was absent from VCB’s trailers, as if trying to avoid audience preconceptions. Equally unusual then is Allen’s decision not to act as narrator, passing on the duties to Christopher Evan Welch, even though the commentary is so intrinsically Woodman that we hear his nasally voice just the same. Welch’s pale drone is so uninspired that, given the frequency with which he states the obvious, it’s tempting to think that the film could do without him. Yet the sad truth is that minus the narrator’s omniscience, several of these characters would be empty shells. (Not to mention that the narrator keeps the train moving forward through several moments when sudden time lapses or character mood swings might otherwise derail it.)

The least developed character, save Patricia Clarkson’s Judy, who is so inconsequential she should be cut entirely, is Johansson’s Cristina. This in spite of the fact that Cristina might be the easiest character to find in real life: a young woman hung up on the idea that love is so profound that it defies description, convention and perhaps even understanding. She’s an emotional drifter, forever determined to become the kind of elusive but deep soul that she romanticizes. In Johansson’s winsome gazes, this much is obvious, and yet not obvious. In a few instances it isn’t clear if Cristina is lying to herself, or if Allen merely has the character bending to his dramatic arc’s every whim. If not for the narration instructing us on Cristina’s emotions, she’d seem schizophrenic.

In fairness to Johansson, who does little more than look the part, a mediocre Allen screenplay gives her little to work with. On the other hand, Hall’s character is equally incomplete. And yet by the end of the film Vicky’s emotions are the only ones that resonate, even though she begins the picture as nothing more than a caricature of female rigidness. Hall’s performance is the next best thing to watch in this film, behind only the spicy chemistry of Cruz and Bardem. And, well, behind the Barcelona setting, too. Underneath it all, VCB provides us with the same erotic and neurotic la-la land that Allen films have inhabited time and time again over the years. All too often in recent decades it’s made for an uninteresting stop. This time, the façade that is Barcelona makes tired-old at least feel tired-new. A little lipstick, it turns out, can go a long way.

Not-Thin To Win?

The next President of the United States is still in doubt, but thankfully there are some things we can count on. Hilary Swank’s third Oscar win for Best Actress, for example. Swank, the Academy Award winner for Boys Don’t Cry and Million Dollar Baby, isn’t hyped to be a contender in this year’s race, but recently she signed on to a project that’s almost certain to provide her with another golden statuette – the film adaptation of Mireille Guiliano’s French Women Don’t Get Fat. True, the movie is still in development, and thus not a single frame of footage has been shot, but at this point it looks as if the only thing standing between Swank and Katharine Hepburn’s doorstep are a few boxes of Krispy Kremes.

Confused? According to reports first generated by E! Online, Swank is planning to gain 20 to 30 pounds for her performance in French Women in an effort to look, well, more American, I suppose. Whether the added weight will simply add some curve to her “alarmingly thin frame” or actually make her appear fat remains to be seen. But what’s been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is that every trip Swank makes to Cold Stone from now until shooting begins only enhances her chances of taking home Best Actress gold.

See, physical transformation plays big in Hollywood, especially where women are concerned. Of the past 10 Best Actress Oscars, only two have gone to actresses for roles that allowed them to look nearly as sexy onscreen as they can appear off: Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich and Reese Witherspoon in Walk The Line. The other eight have gone to actresses who muted their beauty and/or made other significant physical transformations: Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare In Love (wears a mustache); Swank in Boys Don’t Cry (morphs Teena Brandon into Brandon Teena); Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball (sheds her Revlon); Nicole Kidman in The Hours (adds Virginia Woolf’s shnozz); Charlize Theron in Monster (two words: Aileen Wuornos); Swank in Million Dollar Baby (bulked up into a boxer’s body); Helen Mirren in The Queen (two more words: Queen Elizabeth); and Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose (her aging Edith Piaf looks like the ghastly vision of Large Marge in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure).

The above list isn’t meant to outright discount or otherwise diminish any specific performances. It’s meant to point out a trend. Since 2000, the Oscar for Best Actress has gone to the performer who – in comparison to her fellow nominees – most altered her physical appearance every time but once: Witherspoon’s win against Felicity Huffman’s performance in Transamerica. (The only other year it’s debatable is when Berry’s haggard look trumped Renee Zellweger’s plump personification of Bridget Jones.)

Which brings us to today’s Question For Which There Isn’t One Correct Answer: What’s the best way to measure great acting? Transformation, no doubt, is a key component, as it’s essential that we lose sight of the actor and believe in the character in front of us. But in many of the above cases, the most remarkable transformation was a product of excellence in the makeup trailer, not in front of the camera. Then again, it would be unfair to dismiss the responsibility of the actress to fill out her appearance. Acted poorly, Kidman’s credibility in The Hours is hindered by the Virginia Woolf proboscis instead of helped, for example.

Thus we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that those aforementioned winning performances have something else in common: an unusual complexity of character (actresses so often being unfortunately reduced to scenery). Still, when an actress is awarded for a relatively unglamorous portrayal, it’s difficult to keep from wondering if it’s the performance that’s being honored or if in actuality what’s being rewarded is the daring of the actress in shedding the very thing that Hollywood most appreciates: external beauty.

That news of Swank’s forthcoming weight gain should bring this hardly-original debate to the surface right now is serendipitous, because from here it’s only a tiny hop to the biting commentary of Tropic Thunder’s controversial Simple Jack construct, which has also been on my mind. Though that film explicitly mocks actors who play handicapped characters in an effort to get some awards-season recognition, Tropic Thunder perhaps also implicitly mocks any of us who reward such overly affected performances with equally over-the-top praise.

Which brings me to these questions: Sean Penn’s performance in I Am Sam is often considered repugnant, but not Tom Hanks’ turn in Forrest Gump. Why? Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance in My Left Foot is considered one of the best of all time, yet Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-winning turn in Rain Man is now often met with disdain. Why? If the previous statements are true, is the fault actually found in Penn or Hoffman’s performances? Or did Hanks and Day-Lewis simply have more respectable (and more respectful) material to work with?

But let’s get back to Swank. That she’s a two-time Academy Award winner (based on as many nominations) is hard to fathom, in part because – despite her hardware – she doesn’t appear to be coveted by moviegoers or moviemakers. Yet her victorious performances were hardly undeserving of acclaim: in Boys Don’t Cry she’s as emotionally convincing as physically so, and while her win for Million Dollar Baby was almost certainly boosted by a respect for the tremendous dedication required to build a boxer’s body, her acting was equally determined. You can debate her Oscar wins, but she’s a fine actress, certainly, with a long career left.

Then again, if the above prediction proves true and Swank becomes only the second three-time Best Actress winner (Hepburn won it four times), her Oscar collection will suggest a level of legendary excellence among her era that would be misleading. And that’s why I hope the only way Swank gets recognized for French Women Don’t Get Fat is if her acting carries more weight than her In-N-Out augmented hips.

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.

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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.