Zack and Miri Make a Porno

My wife recently got a stack of Mills & Boon novels from a friend and basically devoured them over a couple of sessions. Seeing them reminded me of the problem I’d always had with M&B — neither is it good writing in service of a love story, nor is it sufficiently raunchy to fit in the other category. So what exactly is the appeal? Don’t bother, I probably just have the wrong plumbing to understand it.

Anyway, when I see M&Bs, I am usually reminded of Kevin Smith. Why? Because he’s a bleeping good writer of both romance and raunch. Most of the time, he’s expounding on Star Wars, the more arcane causes of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and the gayness of popular fictional characters (Archie & Jughead, Frodo & Sam etc.), all of it interspersed with more f-words than you can shake a bleeping stick at. But while you’re reeling under the profane verbiage, he manages to sneak in moments of true romance that remain in memory long after everything else has faded.

On top of which, he seems to have an uncanny knack of making his women unforgettable. I don’t think I’ve ever been impressed with Joey Lauren Adams in any movie other than Chasing Amy. Even if all the world recognizes her as either Arwen or as the girl who romped around with Alicia Silverstone in Aerosmith’s Crazy video, I will always remember Liv Tyler as the video shop girl in Jersey Girl who got bored easily. Heck, he got J-Lo and Ben Affleck together on screen for 5 minutes and they were luminous. Tell me, who else has managed that?

And now, Elizabeth Banks as Miri. The woman is gorgeous, has an absolutely wonderful laugh and does justice to the profanity-laced dialogues that Kevin Smith comes up with. After having languished on the fringes for a number of years now, Banks is finally coming into her own as a leading lady to watch out for. I’d love to see how well she does in more serious roles. But when it comes to playing women in the Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow universe, in her own words, she can “Meryl Streep the s*** out of this thing”.

Seth Rogen, that pudgy actor who has pretty much made a career out of playing lovable losers, plays her best friend and housemate Zack. When the two of them find themselves flat out broke, he hits upon the idea of making a porno with the two of them in it. The fly in the ointment — apart from all the obvious ones you might think of, and a few you didn’t have the imagination to come up with — their friendship has been platonic thus far. They manage to convince themselveas that they can convince their genitals to do the deed without their heads and hearts making a big deal out of it. But of course that doesn’t happen. When does it ever?

Outside of the rather unique way in which these complications arise, this is standard rom-com material. Other than the lesbian angle in Chasing Amy, I’d say that Smith has hardly ever been imaginative when it comes to his love stories. A big reason why they work is that his leads are usually very articulate and evenly matched. You want them to end up together if only so that they could keep talking.

While the plot chugs along to its predictable conclusion, Smith has plenty else to keep us distracted. Craig Robinson plays the financier of this little enterprise and finds among the best reasons to say “I love the movies”. Erstwhile porn star Traci Lords plays a character called Bubbles — rarely do people have a better introduction scene in the movies. Jeff Anderson (Randal from Clerks) plays the cameraman who finds that there are occupational hazards he might not have ever dreamed of. Justin Long and Brandon Routh make a cameo appearance that absolutely had me in splits — I don’t think Long has ever been funnier in any of his past work. But topping them all is Jason Mewes (Jay to Smith’s Silent Bob in the earlier movies) who manages, right at the end, to teach us that one can never presume to know everything there is to know about sex. Smith ought to file a patent for the Dutch Rudder — it’s unique, useful and non-obvious. Even to Traci Lords, I suspect.

ps: No, I’m not telling you what it is.

 

Weekend watch: Julie & Julia, All the Best

Just in case anyone ever accuses me of not having enough variety in my diet. Now, on with the reviews:

Julie & Julia

Imagine you’re a guy, and a vegetarian to boot. And someone told you that there’s this movie, about two hours long, featuring two women (and a couple of men by way of supporting cast) cooking for most of its running length. That there’s no plot to speak of really, and no major emotional upheavals. And that the climactic moment involves cutting open a duck and stuffing food in it. How likely is it that you’d drop everything to go watch this movie?

Let me sweeten the deal for you a bit. It stars Meryl Streep, who manages to keep her lead over Kate Winslet in the Oscar nominations race by the simple expedient of doing something brilliant enough to get nominated every year. It also stars Amy Adams, who seems to be closing in on Ms Winslet froom the other end. On top of which, it has Stanley Tucci, who is constitutionally incapable of disappointing.

Still, it’s a lot of cooking and very little plot to cram into two hours. Most people would give it a miss. Most did, if the box office receipts are any indication. I didn’t. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, I found myself engrossed in this simple tale of two women — one who blazed a trail by introducing French cuisine to servant-less Americans in the 1950s, and another who followed it half a century later by cooking her way through the former’s cookbook in a year.

Since I saw it on Sunday evening, I have been trying to figure out why I enjoyed this little movie so much. All I can come up with is this: the movie correctly identifies the secret to good food. It’s butter. Lots of it. Bon appetit!

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All the Best

All the Best takes the zany plot of Kaadhala Kaadhala (or Right Bed Wrong Husband, depending on who the makers want to give credit to), adds a bit, subtracts a bit and eventually comes up with a comedy with roughly the same hit rate. Much of it is due to the fact that the plot is madcap enough to cover a number of flaws.

The leads aren’t really in top form: Ajay Devgan (if he wants to stick that extra vowel where the sun don’t shine, that’s his business — I’m keeping it where it is) is just about okay, and needs to progress beyond the silly smile at some point if he wants to become a good comedian. Fardeen Khan seems, inexplicably enough, to survive in comedies despite the fact that he has the comic timing and voice modulation of the average dead bacterium. Bipasha Basu shows less cleavage than Ajay, but looks gorgeous nonetheless. Mughda Godse takes all the brownie points she earned for Fashion and blows them up here — if there is anything worse than how her role is written, it is how she plays it. Sanjay Butt looks like he ate a whole shark on the sets of Blue and hasn’t crapped it out yet.

But making up for all of this is a comedian who I confess I have never been a huge fan of: Johnny Lever. Playing a mute loan shark named Tobu, he brings the house down every time he appears on screen. How he communicates through his sidekicks is funny enough. But how one of them has trouble with “translating” what he “says” after having sustained an ear injury — that bit is almost Pythonesque in its mix of logic and wierdness. If the rest of the movie had managed to live up to that standard, I’d have been grabbing random strangers on the road and buying them tickets to this movie. As it stands, I can only suggest that you go watch it for Johnny Lever and forgive the rest.

ps: If you do watch it, look out for the reference to Slumdog Millionaire — it’s priceless!

 

Freeze Frame #140: The Shawshank Redemption

First things first. If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption so far, please do the following:

1. Compulsory: Find a DVD of the movie and watch it. If you happen to live in a small town where the only available copy of the DVD is with a curmudgeonly octagenarian neighbour of yours who insists on watching it every night and wouldn’t even dream of giving it to you, even for a few hours, go online and order yourself a copy. I know you were expecting me to suggest that you kill that cranky old coot, but remember: any man who would watch this movie every night deserves to live, whatever his other qualities.
2. Optional: Once you’ve finished Step 1, consider reading the rest of this post. I plan to discuss a big spoiler here, so don’t tell me you haven’t been warned.

I’m serious about this, okay? Really, don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.

Now that the formalities have been dispensed with, let me get on with it.

The Shawshank Redemption spends most of its running time in establishing the steady rhythm of prison life. Even the establishment of Andy’s innocence and the jailer’s subsequent cover-up is done without unseemly haste. By giving itself space to breathe, the movie draws us in so surely that we find ourselves as “institutionalized” as the inmates themselves.

Apart from the pacing, which is a brave choice for a Hollywood movie, the other interesting choice is the use of a voiceover narrative. That the voice is that of Morgan Freeman, who plays one of the inmates and Andy’s closest friend, is definitely a plus. But narratives in general are tricky: if you don’t do it right, it would just seem like you just didn’t write the scenes well enough and needed the help of a narrator to explain things.

If you’ve read the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), you will notice that the narrative follows the novel’s text to a good extent. A lot of it is in terms of commentary on a particular scene. In the one where Andy locks himself up in the room with the public address system and plays a Mozart opera on the loudspeakers, Red (Freeman) says:

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Now, this is beautiful prose, but it doesn’t add anything to what you already realize when you see what happens. Like I said, redundancy. But then, a curious thing happens. Maybe it’s the timbre of Freeman’s voice, but you grow used to hearing it in the background. You begin to look forward to it, even if all it provides is a postscript to the events unfolding on screen.

I didn’t notice this on my initial viewing. Not even in the next couple of times after that. But there was this moment recently, when I was watching the movie on TV, that it struck me. There is a scene where Andy seems to have lost all hope, after the warden ensures that the only man who could’ve helped exonerate him is silenced. Red learns that Andy is now is possession of a stout length of rope, and lies awake all night worrying about whether his friend might have been pushed too far. And sure enough, the next morning at roll call, Andy doesn’t step out of his cell.

Darabont paces this scene deliberately, drawing out the suspense until we finally see the inside of Andy’s cell and find nobody there. It is a nice little moment of surprise, because nothing has really prepared us for it. But that is all I felt at that moment: a bit of surprise. A little later, you hear Red’s voice, over a montage of shots of the subsequent manhunt:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison.

Even today when I watch The Shawshank Redemption, I find that Andy’s escape really registers emotionally only after Red has said spoken of it. I guess in some ways, it’s another form of institutionalization.

 

Inglourious Basterds

On the way back from watching Inglourious Basterds yesterday, I had a conversation with my wife that made me realize something. There’s no way you can actually convert someone to the Church of Tarantino. His style of filmmaking doesn’t lend itself to persuasive argument.

Consider the opening scene of Basterds, for instance. Set somewhere in Nazi-occupied France, it involves a protracted conversation between an SS officer named Hans Landa who is tasked with the job of rounding up all the Jews in France, and a French farmer who happens to be harbouring some Jews. You know, even if you haven’t read a word about the movie, that this scene will end in violence. Tarantino knows that you know. So he stretches out the dialogue — Landa takes his time to make his point. By the time the action eventually comes, like an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, you are primed for it.

This, the best written scene in the movie, is as good an illustration of Tarantino’s method as any other. His killers enjoy talking while they hold a loaded gun; they enjoy it so much and are so good at it that you don’t really want them to pull the trigger until they’re done.

I wrote the two paragraphs above in second person. Now, if it has occurred to you while reading these paragraphs that you aren’t really the “you” that they refer to, then go no further. If, on the other hand, the opposite has occurred to you, then again, go no further and watch the movie instead of reading an unabashed Tarantino fan ramble on about the joys of watching yet another of his movies.

You still here? Okay. Instead of speaking of the movie itself, which I will leave for you to discover, let me talk about Christoph Waltz, who plays Landa. Prior to this movie, I hadn’t even heard of the man. A Jewish actor (oh, the irony!) of Austrian origin, he hasn’t appeared in too many movies — the only one I’ve seen is Ordinary Decent Criminal, but I don’t remember it or him too well. This is not surprising — I hadn’t heard of Pam Grier before Jackie Brown, nor of David Carradine before Kill Bill. What will also not be surprising is that, every time I come across the man in the future, my first and fondest recollection will be of him playing Hans Landa. Tarantino is reported to have said that, had he not gotten anyone like Waltz to play Landa, he might not have made the movie at all. This may be an exaggeration, but this much is true: had he not gotten anyone like Waltz to play Landa, he ought not to have made the movie at all.

Watch how he chews his food before speaking, as if to indicate that he has all the time in the world before getting his job done. How he slips from cheerful bonhomie to cold steel almost in the middle of a sentence. His interaction with Shoshanna, the heroine of this tale. She survives the massacre at the farmer’s house and grows to become the proprietor of a cinema in Paris. There is a moment where she encounters Landa again — watch how Landa plays that scene. You always get the feeling, when he is dealing with an adversary, that he knows exactly what cards his opponent is holding. He doesn’t play with them, he toys with them. Now think about what a suitable comeuppance for a man like this would be and watch how the movie ends with him getting exactly what he deserves.

Pitted against him is an array of actors — Melanie Laurent is perfect as Shoshanna, and Diane Kruger does pretty much her best work in this movie as Bridget von Hammersmark. But by far the most delicious supporting performance comes from Brad Pitt, who plays Lt. Aldo Raine, chief of the Basterds. Pitt has done a variety of roles in his career, but his chief talent seems to be  a flair for comedy. Eli Roth takes all the dementia he puts into his slasher movies and brings it to his character of the Bear Jew. Mike Myers pops in for a little cameo but doesn’t seem to accomplish much other than make us exclaim, “Wait a minute, Austin Powers is the British general?”

My wife commented, after the movie was over, that Tarantino’s style was way too look-at-me-I’m-making-a-big-movie for her taste. She is absolutely right. Tarantino’s movies are seldom about their subject — they are primarily about themselves, and about his love for the movies. However, to quote Hans Landa:

Where our conclusions differ, is I don’t consider the comparison an insult.

 

The Reader

After having watched The Reader I realized something interesting: It is a movie about guilt and involves a former guard at Auswicz, but this description simultaneously tells you everything and nothing.

I will not spend much time on the plot, which is beautiful. Or on the writing, which feels like a punch to the gut. Or on the direction, which is unquestionably splendid.I will speak, instead, of the experience of watching Kate Winslet playing Hanna Schmitz.

When you first see her, she is a middle-aged woman, still beautiful, still vibrant, but possessed of demons that we can only guess at. She can be brusque, almost cruel, and yet is capable of tenderness and joy. You can understand the fifteen year-old Michael’s fascination with her. There is a scene in a church where she is moved to tears by the choir, and Michael observes her, smiling. Winslet is so radiant in that scene that you can understand what he feels like to bask in it.

When we see her next, she is on trial for being complicit in the murder of Jews at Auswicz. I cannot overstate how much heavy lifting Winslet does in this segment. The trial itself has some of the most interesting dialogue I have heard in the movies. Consider how difficult it might be to try and humanize someone like that. Oh, I don’t mean “humanize” in the sense of excusing her guilt with any kind of pop psychology. But think about how the only faces of the perpetrators of the Holocaust that we encounter in the history books and in fiction are the ones who are shown as obviously evil. Eight thousand people worked at Auswicz, yet only a handful were convicted of murder. Did the rest of them not know what they were involved in?

The third act shows Hanna as an old woman. It shows how a haggard, almost zombie-like prisoner suddenly finds herself rejuvenated when she begins to receive tapes of Michael reading out loud to her, as he used to during that summer years ago when they were lovers. From Hanna’s standpoint, she had two lives: one involving her job as an SS guard, and another involving her affair with the young Michael. It is in this segment that these two lives collide. It all culminates in a scene of surprising power between Hanna and Michael, where little is said but much is resolved. Watch Winslet’s eyes and body language in this scene. Watch how she tries to reach out from the world she lives in to the world she once had, and how she reacts to him as the scene progresses.

The counterpoint to her performance is provided by a pair of actors – David Kross playing the younger Michael and Ralph Fiennes playing the older one. While Kross has done an absolutely fabulous job, his role is more of a foil to Winslet’s character in the first two acts. It is Fiennes who really brings home how much these experiences have affected him. Watch how he struggles with his own guilt in the scene with a Holocaust survivor (played by Lena Olin) who testified against Hanna at the trial. It is amazing how much the man conveys while playing such an emotionally closed-off character.

As good as they both are, the movie belongs to Kate Winslet. The Oscars have had a dubious tradition of honouring the person rather than his/her work in a movie. What with Winslet being nominated so many times without winning anything, I always feared that she might finally end up winning for a decent performance in a weak year. The good news is, The Reader features her best performance to date — if she hadn’t won for this one, she might as well not have won at all. The even better news is, she’s still working.

 

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Beware! There be spoilers.

The sixth movie installment in the Harry Potter series is, to be honest, a bit of a disappointment.When I think about it, it seems like a Herculean task for it not to be. But I ask myself, should that really be my problem?

Writing the screenplay for the sixth movie in a series can hardly be a picnic. There is so much exposition that you simply do not have time to cover if you wish to keep the running length reasonable. With a series like this — so rich in detail, its conclusions built on so many little facts accumulated over multiple books…

The sixth book is especially tough because, fascinating as it is to followers of the series, its major driving force is an examination of Voldemort’s childhood and youth, and the clues it provides to his destruction. Not exactly the stuff gripping celluloid is made of, although it is fascinating to the reader.

In the interest of narrative economy, this plot strand has been condensed into two key memories — one where Dumbledore meets young Tom Riddle for the first time, and one where Riddle finds out about Horcruxes from Slughorn. If one had to condense the book into its plot essence, this would be about right — they tell you that Voldemort was a bad penny right from the start, and that he split his soul and stored it in some objects as a way of staying alive.

Not unlike those wonderful B&W fantasy movies we used to have where the evil magician put his life in a parrot or something equally vulnerable. I can almost imagine Ron doing a Dead Parrot sketch with Harry while Voldemort lay dead in the corner of a pet store. But I digress…

The rest of the running time is taken principally by the love lives of the principal characters, and the mysterious doings of Draco Malfoy. The result is a curious mixture. Half the time, you aren’t sure if Harry is more worried about what Voldemort will do to him or about what Ron will do to him if he kisses Ginny. But despite its two-faced nature, this is a uniformly sombre movie. It is dark, grey and moody, even when it deals with the hormonally addled life of Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny.

While all these people have slowly grown into their roles and are fairly comfortable with them, two people get to do more interesting things this time. First up is Horace Slughorn, played by Jim Broadbent with a lot more comic edge than the character seemed to have in the book. The other is Tom Felton — Draco Malfoy faces a test of character in this episode and… succeeds, after a fashion. Although Felton gets very little dialogue, he manages to convey a heck of a lot while just appearing to be skulking around and playing Scotty with a magical cabinet.

Trouble is, the movie never really takes off. Other than for one brief moment when Dumbledore and Harry stand on a rock in the sea while the waves crash all around them, there is never really a sense of exhilaration. Even the Quidditch matches seem obligatory. Maybe the series is just taking a breather before the final rush. I certainly hope so. It would be a pity if we had to poke ourselves with our wands to stay awake when Harry finally faced down Voldemort.

 

Freeze Frame #139: Quiz Show

I watched Quiz Show on TV eons ago and thought it was a wonderful film. But over the years, my memory of it faded to the point where I could only remember one scene with clarity. Recently, when it came on TV again, I stuck around to watch that scene and then zapped on to other stuff.

The movie tells the story of the rise and fall of a quiz show named 21 which, it turns out, was rigged by its producers in order to get higher ratings. In the third act, when things slowly unravel for everyone involved in the show, there is a meeting between Richard Goodwin, the Congressional investigator probing the scam and Martin Rittenhome, the head of a pharmaceutical company which sponsored the show. The conversation features the sort of cynical truth-telling that we are probably quite used to by now:

You see, the audience didn’t tune in to watch some amazing display of intellectual ability. They just wanted to watch the money.

That Rittenhome is played by Martin Scorsese might have much to do with why I love this scene. Listening to Scorsese’s voice is almost as pleasurable as watching one of his best movies. But this isn’t just me being in love with how the man speaks.

To understand why this scene works so well, you have to listen to the movie rather than just see it. For two acts, the movie seduces you with softly spoken voices of well-mannered people. When you hear Herbert Stempel, the deposed quiz show champion, complain about the show being rigged, it seems like so much whining even though you realize that he is probably speaking the truth. John Turturro does a wonderful job with this character, and a big part of how his character is seen in the movie has to do with how he speaks with a rough, unpolished accent.

Goodwin, on the other hand, befriends the current champion Charles Van Doren — erudite, charming, born to a life of privilege. The movie is seen through Goodwin’s eyes, and his relationship with Van Doren is central to the movie. We, along with Goodwin, are charmed by the other man. We share his illusions about how the television business seems to work, even though we ought to know better. And when the illusion finally shatters, we share in his disillusionment. Again, even though we ought to know better.

Therefore, when the Scorsese character talks about what the show really meeant to the audiences, and when the Kevin Pollak character (who produces the show) talks about how they viewed the quiz show as entertainment and not an actual contest, the tone of these scenes is in stark contrast with the rest of the proceedings.

Rittenhome doesn’t tell us something we don’t know. He just reminds us of something we allowed ourselves to forget for the past 90 minutes.

 

Freeze Frame #136: Pineapple Express

Right at the end of Pineapple Express — which follows Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle into the annals of the Improbably Good Stoner Movies — the three heroes have breakfast at a diner and unwind. I am no homophobe, but I believe that the only plausible human reaction to their conversation would be to laugh and say: “How gay!” I also believe that this is precisely the reaction the makers wanted to elicit.

What is interesting, though, is how David Gordon Green frames his shots. The guys are sitting at a table in a diner, two to one side and one to the other. Right behind their back is another customer eating breakfast at his table. In a number of frames, this guy is visible. It is obvious that he can hear the entire conversation. He has not appeared in any of the earlier scenes. So you expect one of the following things to happen:

1. The guy would turn out to have something to do with the plot, and would announce his presence and function at the appropriate moment.
2. He has nothing to do with the story, but is there simply to provide a reaction shot to the conversation.

Throughout the scene, I kept looking at the guy, wondering which of these it would be. I expected him to do something, anything. But he just sat there, eating his breakfast with nary an expression flitting across his features.

It was only after the scene got over that I realized how skilfully the director had been eliciting my reactions while keeping this seeming nonentity in the frame. There are times when you just gotta love being f***ed with like that.

 

Diamonds in the rough

Every so often, you’ll stop to watch some movie you haven’t heard of just because you want to rest your finger a bit. And it will surprise you with a line that you just know will stay with you forever. Today morning’s line is from a movie called Summer Catch, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. (I sincerely hope he strangled his parents for giving him a name like that) and Jessica Biel. Freddie’s dad’s character says at one point:

The reason the Indian rain dance works is because they wouldn’t stop dancing until it rained.

Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere.

Do you guys have any such lines that came out unexpectedly in the middle of a not-so-great movie?

 

Freeze Frame #130: Juno

Most people, when they think about Juno, automatically smile because they remember some witty one-liner or the other. Me, I always end up remembering the scene that moved me to tears when I first saw it, and still manages to make my eyes glisten when I catch it on TV.

No, not the scene in the mall with Jennifer Garner, although it’s quite beautifully done. Especially by Garner, who in those three minutes manages to give a better account of her acting skills than she has in her entire career prior to that.

The one that always gets to me comes pretty much at the end, when Juno is lying in a hospital bed recuperating after her delivery. Her dad is by her side, stroking her hair. And he looks at her and says:

Someday you’ll be here, honey. On your terms.

A very dear friend of mine who wasn’t as crazy about the movie as I was, commented that it seemed to trivialize the whole teenage pregnancy issue. She had a valid point in some ways. Here’s a girl who had unprotected sex, got herself pregnant, decided to have the baby and gave it up for adoption when it was born. Where’s the joke in that?

I contend, however, that the process couldn’t have been painless for her. At some level she must’ve felt like she was making much bigger choices than she ought to have been making at that age, thanks to one decision in the beginning. Which is why the phrase On your terms feels so right.