Notes from Underdog.

MST3K Bergman Satire: Two men stood alone on a pier...

I hope they don't take this down, but while it's up there... here's one of my favorite Mystery Science Theater segments, a priceless parody of Ingmar Bergman, ya shore you betcha.

A damned good "Lieutenant."

*** out of 5

You've probably already heard how crazy Werner Herzog's new Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is -- and it does quite often feel as if it were hopped up on crack as much as its protagonist is. The Bad Lieutenant feels like a James Ellroy novel transplanted to Nawlins and re-explored by an impish German auteur. What surprised me is how gleefully, dementedly funny it is as well. Perhaps it shouldn't, as I know what a sardonic and twisted sense of humor Herzog has from interviews. Herzog's film, from an excellent screenplay by William M. Finkelstein, and which bears no relation to the original Bad Lieutenant other than the name and being about a truly fucked up police officer, surpasses the original by being more clearly funny. Even some of the more potentially upsetting scenes are squeamishly riotous; one where Nicolas Cage's Lt. McDonagh interrogates an elderly African American grandmother about her grandson while also putting the fear of God in another old lady (even cutting off the poor woman's oxygen supply to get answers) made the elderly couple behind me uncomfortable but I giggled as I squirmed. And it also surpasses the original by having a bit more of a compelling crime mystery at the center, even if that plot is not the thing here.

Even without calling attention to it at all, Herzog captures the flavor of New Orleans without romanticizing it. In fact, au contraire -- he shows it's seediest and saddest sides, poverty-wrecked neighborhoods, post-Katrina, dilapidated plantation homes now rusting and rotting in the backwoods, alligator roadkill, depressing casinos and antiseptic high rise hotels. And the little flourishes only add to the delight here, like the shots from the point-of-view of iguanas and gators (lizard-cam, if you will), animals that it seems only the high-as-a-kite McDonagh can see (just as he can also see the dancing soul of a man who's been shot).

And of course Cage's performance is insane, and electrifies the film. It's good to have this Cage back, the Wild at Heart and Raising Arizona Cage who went off his rocker and to new heights, rather than the action-hero-Cage who started to seem like he was phoning in his performances in uninspired blockbusters. He's gleeful and it's contagious.  But miraculously, Cage also manages to tap into the pathos of his character, and the film, too, balances that line between black comedy and sadness, rarely wobbling in the wrong direction.

Besides being aimless at times, if there's any other misstep in the film, in Finkelstein's script, it may be in the final act in which things -- all the deep, dangerous holes in which the lieutenant has dug for himself -- seem to all-too-neatly tie up happily. But even then, I couldn't help but get the sense that Herzog and the screenwriter had something up their sleeve; even in that final series of fortunate events it's hard not to picture them coming at you with a wink and a nod. 

The supporting cast is excellent and chosen with care. Eva Mendes surprised me; it's not easy to find something interesting in what could be the stereotypical kind-hearted hooker role (and there were a few times where it started to feel cliched anyway), but she succeeds in making you care about the character. The boyish Shawn Hatosy is subtle but quite good as the more competent of the main trio of cops (along with Cage and Val Kilmer's less-fleshed-out cop Pruit); The Great Debaters' poker-faced Denzel Whitaker as the young witness; Brad Dourif, a long way from hanging out with Saruman, as always making an impression in very few scenes; and rapper-turned-actor Xzibit exhibiting excellent acting chops as drug kingpin Big Fate, who partners with the lieutenant and finds him as disturbing and hilarious as I do.

But it's Cage who really makes the film unforgettable. Long after the film is over, in our minds his soul is still dancing. -- craig phillips

House of the Devil

*** out of 5

Ti West's 2005 horror film The Roost, his first feature, gained him some notoriety as a throwback creature feature. It foreshadowed the path he'd go down as a filmmaker -- a B horror movie with a 70s/80s visual style, a refreshing lack of gloss - but it was uneven, a bit silly, and had one ending too many. His new film The House of the Devil finds a maturing West moving through similar terrain but more assuredly. It's again a return to old school horror but there's nothing campy here; it captures the vibe without winking at the audience. This isn't Scream.

A title card tells us we're in the 80s, with ominous words about the high number of Americans who believed then in abusive Satanic Cults, and the even more ominous words that the following is based – loosely no doubt -- on real events.  Even the opening credits are done in 80s horror movie font and freeze-frame style with a slightly cheesy synth-beat music score.  And the film’s storyline is refreshingly simple: a broke co-ed applies for babysitting gig with the wrong family, and… it doesn't go well.

Jocelin Donahue is quite appealing and natural as Samantha, the archetypal role of the feisty college student thrust into a hellish situation (she was previously seen in the odd but interesting 2008 Western-horror hybrid The Burrowers).

When she decides to take the job, offered to her by the family’s soft-spoken patriarch Mr. Ulman (Tom Noonan), her friend Megan (Greta Gerwig, best known for LOL, Baghead and other indie/mumblecore-ish films) innocently warns her that "it could be a kid from hell." But she doesn’t know the half of it. And oh by the way, there's actually no kid. That's about when most people would try to flee, but Ulman comes off as so sympathetic and persuasive (and she's desperate for money) that, well, what the hell...

And of course the Ulman's house just has to be quite a ways outside of town, surrounded by Blair Witch-ish woods. And the gig just has to coincide with a lunar eclipse, which hits, of course, at midnight, making everything even darker.

There aren’t any werewolves in this movie, but there is a cameo by Dee Wallace, of Cujo and The Howling fame, as a landlady who seems in a suspicious hurry to rent out a place to Samantha. That plot thread, by the way, seemed a bit of a red herring – West sets it up to make you think the film will unfold in the creepy house that Samantha decides to rent, but instead we never return there. While this could’ve just been sloppy storytelling, I’m inclined to think it was with a purpose, and to also foreshadow Samantha’s own fate.

It wouldn’t behoove me to reveal more of the plot, but West’s more interested in setting mood and tone, and to shock in random bursts rather than as a steady machine-gun fire. House of the Devil builds slowly, perhaps too much so for those used to non-stop action of many recent horror films, except those films often don't take the time to build tension or character. A couple of early scenes do drag on in pacing a bit, but as one scene hooks on the next the effect is chilling. The jolts, when they happen, are all the more heart-stopping, and the third act is particularly shocking in how quickly it transpires. I think the climax may even feel too rushed to some but I think it’s all the more jarring for how it unfolds.

 In some ways the film could use another twist or two to it before it's all over, but the simplicity of it is part of its spell. West knows all the conventions of the genre, the expectations of the set up, and plays with them. And the final shot could be just at home in Argento’s Phenomena, with Donahue a sub for Jennifer Connelly.

The effectively, understated music score is composed by Jeff Grace, who also did West's The Roost and the underrated chiller The Last Winter.

Tom Noonan, who played a TV horror show host who introduces the story in The Roost, and who looks more and more like the man in Grant Wood's American Gothic, is perfectly cast as the soft-spoken Ulman. His wife is played by cult favorite actress Mary Woronov, a frequent lead in many a Paul Bartel movie (and Principal Togar in Rock N Roll High School) adds a level of gothic creep to her part, looking a bit like an older version of Karen Black from Burnt Offerings (a 1976 film with which this film shares a certain amount of trappings).

One of film's precautionary morals may be: Be careful who you order pizza from. Don't get the one with mushrooms!

Brief, (semi-)serious thoughts on A Serious Man.

A SERIOUS MAN: **** out of 5.

Why is this film different than all other films?

The Coen brothers' newest is one of the most Jewish-centric American films I've seen in a long while. As a lapsed Jew who's gone through my own existential crises, I found it especially fascinating. The film, like the Jewish faith, centers on questions and doesn't provide all the answers, and like my people it is gifted with a dark sense of humor and an often bleak worldview.

A Serious Man begins with a prologue, a darkly comic Yiddish folk story whose own ending is open-ended and foreshadows everything to come, including the main film's conclusion as well.  And the Dybbuk-cursed 1960s world in which we then shift is at once dreamlike and a nightmare (and the film contains dream nightmares within the waking nightmare), as if David Lynch soaked his brain in the Talmud.  But the blandly manicured Minnesota landscape of A Serious Man is unique, to both the time and place, as well as to the Coens' unmistakable perspective.  It's every bit as distinct as their more WASP-inhabited wintertime Minnesota seen in Fargo, but also seemingly more autobiographical than any of their other films -- at least regarding the characterizations and the spot-on recreation of Synagogue Suburbia.

Michael Stuhlbarg, whom I saw on stage in New York several years ago with Billy Crudup in The Pillowman, and he was excellent even if I'd forgotten his name until this film came out, more than carries the film's burden. Neither too caricatured nor too milquetoasty, Stuhlbarg's Larry Gopnik with his black rimmed glasses and astonished-at-the-world expression seems at first a cousin to John Turturro's Barton Fink but Gopnik's exasperation is more grounded in reality. The Coen brothers of course can always be counted on for spot-on casting (it should be noted that the casting directors here are Ellen Chenoweth, who has a most impressive list of credits, and Rachel Tenner; both have cast quite of the Coens' recent films). No famous names here, just a lot of terrific character actors who look like they could be distant (or not so distant) members of my own family.  Fred Melamed, who's had a long but relatively under the radar career, stands out as the touchy-feely family friend that Larry's wife wants to run off with. I know some fellow members of the Tribe have felt that the Jews depicted here are too gargoylish and stereotypical, a viewpoint I am sympathetic to but disagree with; I'd argue that the film actually shows more compassion for the main characters here than many Coen brothers film that have preceded it -- particularly Larry and his sad, awkwardly closeted brother (played so sweetly by Richard Kind). And it's the ideas here that are meant to be provocative.

"I'm a serious man, Larry," Melamed's Sy tells the stunned Gopnik, and at his own funeral, the rabbi repeats the assertion. While in some ways the notion that someone is more serious than another is playfully mocked here as essentially meaningless -- who doesn't want to be seen as "serious"? -- the Coens are striving for something deeper here.

Larry, a physics professor, attempts to teach the Uncertainty Principle (in both reality, and even less successfully, in a dream), but has yet to come to grips with how the principle may reflect his own life.

NY Times' critic AO Scott asks in his review of the film the appropriate question: "Are the Coens mockig God, playing God or taking his side in a rigged cosmic game? What’s the difference?"

The film's unsettling ending seems so perfectly Jewish and so perfectly apt given all that leads up to it. The Jewish faith explores life as questions that we spend that life trying to get the answers to -- some are answered, some are never answered, and sometimes the parking lot outside is more fascinating than you realize. But it's also a meditation on living a life, passively versus actively, and the things that happen to Larry may be happening to him because he has been passive for too long.

While the Dark Event (or event) that take place at the end is not quite akin to the Biblical plague of frogs at the end of Magnolia -- both deus ex machina but forgivable in this case because it is in fitting with the feeling we're all part of chaos theory being played out every day.

Daiyenu.

Damned United.

Based on David Peace's novel, which is itself [loosely] based on the true story of Brian Clough's quite doomed 44-day stint as manager in 1974 of the then reigning champions of English football Leeds United, Damned United is both a sport film and a character study and succeeds pretty damned well at both.

Different audiences will have varying levels of appreciation for the film; clearly, football/soccer fans will have higher regard for it though it is not simply a film about sport but a film about male relationships, both friend and professional, and about the damage rendered by the male ego. It is a most lovingly portrayed period piece, capturing the 60s and 70s United Kingdom with bang on accuracy.

Damned United screenwriter Peter Morgan (the gifted Oscar winner behind The Queen and Frost/Nixon) also does a smart job of reducing the book's back and forth, almost subconscious (look up other ways of saying this) meandering style into a more cohesive shorthand -- while still maintaining the novel's chronological jumps.  These flashes backward and forward make the narrative more interesting than it might have been had it stayed  on a steady line through Clough's difficult, short period as Leeds manager.

Tom Hooper, who made history of an entirely different sort come alive in HBO's John Adams and Longford, does well with a more recent bit of history, capturing well the 60s and 70s culture, not just the look but the feel and mood of England at the time -- with a very able assist from cinematographer Ben Smithard (Cranford).

But what really keeps it together is the effortlessly charming Michael Sheen's performance as Clough. Sheen's continues on from his David Frost, once again displaying his talent for playing arrogance with enough charm and likability to make even a heel root-able. Clough was a talented player in his own right before segueing into coaching, though the film hints that he may not have been as good a player or coach as he believed, and Sheen is able to capture some of his playing talent as well as his strong-willed coaching style.  

It also should be noted that Timothy Spall, forever doomed to be an underrated character actor, or "that bloke from that Mike Leigh movie", more than holds his own with Sheen on screen. The droop-faced Spall plays Clough's longtime sharp-minded and level-headed right-hand man Peter Taylor, whom a lot of people considered to be a major reason that Clough got as far as he did.  Their eventual falling out due to a disagreement over their career paths forms the major spine of the film -- as important as the story of Clough's rivalry with Don Revie.  Morgan and Hooper smartly realize that the friendship is more interesting and painful than the story of the two enemies.  Where the film fudges on reality (spoiler alert of sorts: but while it has them eventually coming reconciling at the end, in real life their rift was not repaired by the time Peter Taylor passed away in 1990 -- though Clough and his family attended the funeral. Still, hard to blame the film for making that choice. Their fantasy is much more satisfying than the sadder reality.) 

Colm Meaney is quite fine as the arrogant, veteran manager whose incredibly huge shoes Clough has to fill and Jim Broadbent is at his broadbentiest playing put-upon Derby County owner Sam Longson.  Also notable is Stephen Graham, a recognizable, short-statured actor who looks about as spot-on as Leeds captain Billy Bremner as any capable actor could possibly look. And Graham captures his taciturn quiet stubborness quite well, his chippy on the field style and his cool surface with rage boiling underneath off the field.

I think even more than the Leeds years I enjoyed the period where Clough built the ramshackle Derby County team (both the stadium/pitch, and the team itself, were rotting). That part of the story is one of those getting the band/team back together sequences that I find irresistible, and the meetings between his Derby team and Revie's famous, more supported Leeds squad are memorable, indeed. (One odd sequence shows Clough unable to watch his own team playing, either out of superstition and/or nerves, and we becomes as tense and in the dark as he is. It's not your typical way of showing a climactic sports match but it works because you're in Clough's point of view.)

And the soccer -- sorry, football, for those in the UK -- scenes they do depict, whether practice scenes or actual matches, are expertly captured. From the mud and muck in a rainy Derby field to a disastrous Leeds match, you get enough of a taste of the sport to get the sense of the players and the teams' growth (or lack of it).

Something about Damned United keeps it from being an utter classic -- whether it's the the schizophrenic nature of the story that makes it hard to connect to or frustration with Clough's choices, true though they may be -- but despite that I have to say that it is quite likely one of the best soccer films ever. This may not be high praise given the lack of a wide array of choices in that arena, but it's undeniably about as good as we've gotten. As a soccer film, it's in the first division.

Withnail and you.

There's a fine little documentary on Criterion's WITHNAIL & I DVD which features marvelous, priceless home movie footage that Bruce Robinson, the film's writer/director who based the story on his own experiences, shot while living in his squalid flat with his drunken thespian roommates.

The film itself is one of absolute favorites, with Robinson's vivid, hilarious script and a bang-on cast: Richard E. Grant, unforgettable as the titular Withnail (a name, Robinson tells us on the DVD, that came from an older kid from his childhood whose name he slightly mispronounced); the underated Paul McGann as "I" (aka Marwood), Withnail's more level-headed flatmate; Richard Griffiths, as Withnail's wealthy poofter uncle who lends them his cottage (when they go "on holiday by mistake"); and just as memorable, Ralph Brown's [who's had a long career, including the new Pirate Radio] Danny, the mellow drug dealer who looks like he'd be at home in an episode of "The Young Ones" and who says clever things even while his brain is presumably melting ("You have done something to your brain. You have made it high.")

It was a flop when first released but rightly became a cult favorite pretty quickly. And it looks much better (natch) in the Criterion DVD than it ever did. It was filmed on a low budget and Robinson would be the first to tell you that the way it is shot is not the main reason to see it -- it is the script and the cast, and it's unforgettable.

Favorite scenes: The early moment in their squalid kitchen when they become terrified of their trashed sink; their first night in the cottage; Uncle Monty's home and his arrival in the cottage.

Excerpt from commentary on Criterion's The Hit DVD

The film The Hit (1984) is by Stephen Frears and remains one of my favorites of all his films. It recently came out on DVD at last, in a lovely DVD from, natch, Criterion. It's the story of two hitmen sent to retrieve a stool pigeon (they call 'em grass or supergrass in UK parlance) who fled to Spain after he turned on his gang. The hitmen (John Hurt and Tim Roth, in his first major film role, and quite charming) and their bounty (Terence Stamp, terrific as always) play mind games on each other, as they travel back toward France by car. Things are complicated when they end up with a woman rider as well. I won't say more except that you should absolutely see the film, and read the script, too, if you can find it.

At any rate, among many gems to be found in the DVD commentary, I ran across this:

I believe this is either the film's writer Peter Prince or editor Mick Audsley (they alternate so frequently it's a bit hard to tell -- Frears is also on the DVD commentary, as is Tim Roth and John Hurt) but regardless, these are excellent words of wisdom for budding filmmakers, scribes and editors:

"We were intent to always strip away the dialogue to its most boiled down form, so that the cinematic experience is complete. It's giving you the imagery and the framing and the cutting and the sizes of the images is giving you as much information as is coming from the characters' mouths. It's in our nature as filmmakers to want to boil down to the bone the dramatic spine of the movie. Get it down to its rawest form at any time is part of the editorial process, and it's certainly something that we develop later on when I'm working on scripts before they're shot -- always trying to reduce, reduce, reduce.

Because in the end audiences' minds work very quickly. They make deductions very quickly, and the cinematic image's so powerful that it communicates so rapidly. Often a look will say a great deal more than a line of dialogue."

MyPDF Scripts: New resource for screenwriters

Just wanted to give a plug to a great new resource for screenwriters looking for scripts to read:
MyPDFScripts

Which has quite an extensive selection of screenplays in pdf format, both new and older.

Okay, I love David Goyer's stuff, but I can probably skip Ghost Rider. But, Young Frankenstein?  They have it. Children of Men? Check. Juno? Check.

You can sort by ascending and descending date (or title or author) order.

So have at it. And soon, just in case someone shuts them down (not sure about the legality of all this, but hopefully it will stay around for the public good).

Observe and Report DVD review

Observe and Report

Originally published on GreenCine Guru

Reviewer: Craig Phillips
Rating (out of 5): ***

Jody Hill's Observe and Report is a tough nut to crack about a tough nut who cracks. The dark, dark comedy, which Hill wrote and directed, is a more subversive take on the bedraggled mall cop comedy than patrons watching it (ironically) in mall multiplexes probably expected, so it's little surprise it wasn't a huge box office hit. But because Observe is more challenging, in both good and bad ways, it's far more interesting because of it.

Seth Rogen plays Ronnie Barnhardt, a mall security guard with delusions of grandeur who becomes obsessed with a serial flasher accosting unsuspecting mall patrons. Ronnie is also quite taken with an airheaded, self-involved cosmetics counter girl (played unforgettably by Anna Faris, who does this better than anyone these days), seeing himself as her knight in shining armor after she is traumatized from a run-in with the flasher (Randy Gambill, now a Jody Hill regular). From there, Ronnie has to work with -- or more accurately around -- a policeman (Ray Liotta) assigned to the case, as well as deal with his own personal demons the whole case brings out of him.

Even if he still doesn't display a great amount of range, this may be Rogen's best performance, as it's not easy to make you care about a guy who behaves this reprehensibly -- he's racist, paranoid and doesn't take direction well from others, for starters -- but he gets under your skin. A scene where he does a psychological profile interview to fulfill his dream of making the police force is more heartbreaking than funny, especially given how honest Ronnie is in revealing his past transgressions. (Thankfully, too; makes you wonder how many future cops get let in if they're dishonest in answering those questions, but never mind.) A few brief scenes with Ronnie and his sweet but alcoholic mother (the ubiquitous but underrated Celia Weston) also skirt the line between funny and depressing.

The film unabashedly takes after Taxi Driver in that regard, presenting a new sort of Travis Bickle, a fully human but often contemptible character who you can't help but be fascinated by; even if Rogen's Ronnie is still more comic than Bickle and even if O&R is not as important a film as Taxi Driver, it does capture well a bi-polar character's downward spiral brought on by both paranoia and a very real feeling that society doesn't understand, or give a shit about, them.

A scene where Ronnie finally manages a pseudo-date with Faris' Brandi is like the knucklehead dining with the bubblehead, but Rogen and Faris turn it into an inspired, unforgettably pathetic date, even if it ends in disturbing fashion, an unsettling scene that is the subject of much debate. While the film doesn't pass judgment on Ronnie's behavior here, it seemed clear to me the audience isn't meant to support it. Still, it's discomfiting, and hard to find it all that funny. The film does occasionally have trouble walking the line between caring about its characters and deriding them, an issue that sometimes pop up in Hill's other projects as well.

The climax may not have the power of a Scorsese film but it's a far cry from the disposable Paul Blart Mall Cop, too. (Without getting too spoiler-ish here, I will add that I didn't quite buy the Ronnie vs. Flasher resolution, but I did respect the film's character consistency and refusal to go too maudlin.)

Besides Faris' breathlessly funny Brandi, Observe and Report's sharp supporting cast includes Liotta, bringing his best temperamental exasperation to the table; Michael Pena (World Trade Center) as Ronnie's cohort and partner-in-crime (as it were); comedian/actor Patton Oswalt as an asshole manager of a chain Cin-a-Bun knockoff; Friday Night Lights' Jesse Plemons as a more even-keeled mall cop; Parks and Rec's Aziz Ansari, very funny as a foul-mouthed, smooth salesman and arch-nemesis of Ronnie's; and a very sweet Collette Wolfe as the cashier who Ronnie should be more interested in if he could get his head out of the Charles Bronson movie landscape in which its planted.

One frustrating side-note: this DVD from Warner Brothers comes sans extras, and I particularly would've liked a commentary from Hill and Rogen over some of the more controversial scenes. I'm sure down the road they'll do a "special edition" with that included, but this one feels like a rush job. Still, for fans of very black comedy this future cult movie is worth a rental.

Looped into In the Loop

Before I could finally spit out a review of the brilliant political satire IN THE LOOP -- which is an absolute scream, see it if you haven't -- much of the critical world has already reviewed it.

But I gleaned a few interesting things from listening to the director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (a Scottish chap with an Italian name, who created The Thick of It, a TV forebear for In the Loop) interviewing with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment.

Mitchell:  We were talking about screwball comedy, and that was something I noticed when watching the film. It almost feels like something like the Front Page, one of those dialogue-driven comedies where people are really going after each other... It's like watching a play,  there has to be that kind of character doesn't there?

Iannucci:  We spent an awful lot of time not just in the shooting process, but in advance fleshing out the characters. I cast the film really early on. So that the writers know precisely who it is who is playing each part, what they look like, sound like, what their own natural verbal tics are -- so that they can then write those parts to that actor.  Actors do their own research but then we spent about 2-3 weeks rehearsing the scenes, workshopping them, improvising around the scenes. Just to get the relationships between characters going.  The shoot is very cast driven.
...   I really don't consider the final writing process  to have happened until I've watched that first take of the scene. Sometimes in the end I'm taking some of my favorite lines out, simply because I think  that though it's a funny line it destroys the atmosphere and the reality.  If it comes on a point where you can't believe that character under that load of stress at that point would ever come up with something so well thought out... And also we don't give the actors that much time to learn their lines or indeed to say them. [laughs] Because I want to capture that essence of in politics people are making things up, I want to capture that look of panic in their eyes as they say the words.

I was very much aware of those Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, those fast talking dialogue-driven films of the 30s and 40s, and I really liked that model as something to structure the script around. The plot underneath all the profanity and realism and so on, was deliberately structured along the lines of a screwball comedy, where two or 3 different things are happening in different environments, and they all start coming closer toward each other and affecting each other and then a madcap climax in the last 15 minutes. That's something I always found satisfying watching so I was very keen to get that sense of screwball comedy.

Listen to the rest here: KCRW The Treatment: Armando Iannucci