"John Cassavetes, who was more or less my age, now he was a great director. I can’t imagine myself as his equal in cinema. For me he represents a certain cinema that’s way up above." –Jean-Luc Godard
It's always cool to see a good film that's been chugging along in the background finally get some recognition (Blu-ray is sort of the standard for validating a movie now I guess). I'm glad we could help keep it alive—PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE played in our Brian De Palma series, Winter 2014.
Coming at you August 9 at 7 and 9:15. Don't miss it.
“Being honest makes you feel better”, says a talking can of vegetables/Wet Hot American Summer’s voice of reason about two thirds of the way through the film. It serves more or less as the film’s coda, not just about how people should relate to each other, but in how the basic comic rules of WHAS’s universe function.
However, it would be detrimental to the achievement that is Wet Hot American Summer to look at it only as a ‘80s pastiche. Instead of coasting by on scattered references and borrowed cliché (which, undeniably, provide the film a needed structure and hook), Wain satisfyingly creates a universe of legitimate chaos, founded under that commitment to honesty. WHAS starts strong, with an opening credit sequence laying out many of the film’s key motifs, specifically bare skin and making out, as all of the film’s camp counselors goof around, smoke and kiss around a large bonfire, set to the undeniably ‘80s licks of Jefferson Starship’s “Jane”. For a brief, telling, moment the film hints at being the next Dazed and Confused. The interaction between the teenagers briefly evokes Linklater’s eye for an un-showy, weird, sense of teen sexuality, and general, care-free, adolescent, goofiness. It’s a moment of unadulterated honesty much of the rest of the film feeds off of, however indirectly.
For if the opening sequence of the film suggests Linklater, and his beautifully cultivated sense of vaguely stilted, yet painfully profound, realism, the scenes that follow don’t quite destroy it as much as hilariously mutate it. After the title card announcing the beginning of the final day of camp, it cuts immediately to groups of 10 and 11 year olds fiercely making out in their beds. As perfectly depicted by that first moment, nearly every moment to come in the film will gleefully take those shreds of truth and mine them for maximum absurdity. Roughly a scene later, Janeane Garofalo, as the camp’s director, raises her coffee mug to her crush David Hyde Pierce. It’s a small, sweet, moment, instantly heightened and curdled, as Garofalo over plays her confused emotion, ending with her strangely cuddling with her mug. It’s a very quick, very funny moment, which takes the small, and the truthful, to the big and the goofy. In the process the film is brilliantly transformed from a simple romantic or Ivan Reitman style comedy (two genres it frequently ducks between), to a gag comedy of epic proportions.
For from that point forward, nothing is to be taken seriously. Every kiss is hilariously over done (Paul Rudd masters the all-tongue-no-lips-all-hilarity style of making out perfectly), every tumble a Wilhelm Scream. Wain’s heightening of reality is both beautifully subtle, like the aforementioned kisses, and hilariously over the top, like Rudd’s laziness being the cause of multiple children’s deaths. The jokes, and the insanity, come fast and loud, heightened by Wain’s subtle, yet incredibly visceral style, fitting room for as many little jokes and as much action as possible.
The actors play this beautifully, recognizing their universe takes place in a state of constant flux, and performing accordingly. No one character is static, able to intensely shift moods or their most basic characteristics, from scene to scene. In one of the film’s funniest visual jokes, Amy Poehler, the uptight, theater girl, becomes a flute playing maiden instantly during an impromptu wedding. Each performance accepts these changes, and goes with it. It’s these performances that keep the film’s sense of chaos afloat (most notable is the little seen since Zac Orth whose state of constant enthusiasm is a joy to behold).
However, that heightening only works because of that honesty (albeit in another form). The film’s sense of humor, coming from that heightened reality, doesn’t require a straight man or a stable foot in reality. It’s not unlike Adam McKay’s (excellent) work with Will Ferrell, where often the joke comes from that same chaotic reality, followed by, more or less, an explanation of just how crazy something was. It’s a form that works, but Wain doesn’t feel the need to use it. He is content to simply play that strangeness honestly, allowing something bizarre to happen, be it David Hyde Pierce’s intense lack of mental stability or Rudd’s aforementioned child murder, and have the characters simply act as if it’s business as usual. The seemingly major exception of that is, of course, Chris Meloni’s seemingly unstable chef, however his arc (which is imperative to the film’s sense that no one person is insane, the world simply is) more or less undoes the basis of the previous jokes (although it doesn’t make them any less hilarious).
Wain’s genius is that not just the characters, but the film itself, treat the obviously silly and goofy goings on of the film as business as usual. The film captures this strangeness, but never forces attention to it. Lines like David Hyde Pierces annoyed “Oh, fuck my cock”, or Artie’s rabbi joke, are shown, then immediately moved pass, with hardly a room for a giggle before the next joke. Wain never feels as if he has to look down at his audience and go “ISN’T THIS FUNNY?!?!?!?!”.
And such is Wet Hot American Summer. There is truth to every line in the film for no character is ever making a joke. Every petty fight, to its characters, is never simply a bit, it’s a major conflict. Wain works tirelessly to make sure that the audience buys into this universe no sane person should ever by into, by simply making it our own…but more.
This sense of a logical next step makes Wain’s actual thematic, real world, interests about teens and sexuality all the more poignant. His genuinely interesting and poignant thoughts and observances about these issues are subtlety placed throughout the film, but never focused on long enough, or made truly melodramatic enough, to seem maudlin. Moments like Coop confessing his love or girls putting on their make up before the day, or even sillier ones, like Michael Ian Black and Bradley Cooper’s weirdly closeted/un-closeted romance, are very neatly observed, however their juxtaposition with WHAS’s general insanity reduces them to just part of the background. And that’s fine! For WHAS is first and foremost about making its audience laugh. But there’s a genuine undercurrent about the difficulty of adolescence, and its heightened woes, that, when placed in this context, rings truer than any John Hughes movie ever would.
After recent rumors of Studio Ghibli closing their animation department and the low box office numbers for When Marnie Was There, it was time to make an appreciation post for a company that has created true movie magic again and again. So, thank you, Studio Ghibli. Hopefully it isn’t good-bye just yet. Studio Ghibli is no longer producing animated films. So here’s to you, Ghibli, and everything you’ve given us.
Why Doc Films Is Where You Should See Jodorowsky’s Dune
Why see a movie in a theater?
Since Alejandro Jodorowsky set out to make Dune in the mid ‘70s and now, this has become a much bigger question, both in the advent and expansion of home video and today’s dissolution from physical film to digital. Previous arguments that lean on the technical status of a movie theater (it’s superior sound, it’s a larger screen) fade away as home equipment rushes to meet (and in some cases exceed) the standards provided by the basic multiplex.
So…why see a movie in a theater? Let’s get more specific. Why see Jodorowsky’s Dune in a theater? Let’s go one more step, why see Jodorowsky’s Dune at Doc Films?
Jodorowsky’s Dune’s thesis seems to broadly state that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune was the catalyst for several great minds to come together, and that that union would go on to lead to other, bigger collaborations down the line. That, in other words, much of modern Hollywood owes a great credit to Jodorowsky’s failed wacked out vision. And wacked out that vision was. From Orson Welles, to Salvador Dali, to Dan O’ Bannon, to terrifying little HR Giger this movie was going to have everybody doing interesting, creative, work in 1975. Seeing these pieces come together is a delight in its own sense, and in an immediate way the film becomes fun as you slip The Kid Stays In The Picture style into the deeply crazy lives of these somebodies, specifically through the unfiltered lens of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the world’s best interview subject, given the beautifully hyperbolic gift of seeing only the very best and the very worst in people and situations.
And that is fun. But why see this, admittedly un-cinematic, little talking head documentary at Doc Films? Because the subtext to “Jodorowsky made Hollywood” thesis is that film is an inherently communal medium. More than any other form of art, film is defined by the many cooks in its kitchen; the continuous merging and clashing of 100 different forces, both internal and external, to make a final product. In even the hollowest Hollywood production, years of re-writes, actions of producers, commitment of stars and politics of a director can impact the outcome of a film in a million different ways. In Jodorowsky’s failed Dune, we are given, if not a complete film, a perfect and ageless example of this notion. As Jodorowsky’s Dune tells it, the ideas from every side of this film were so palpable it literally changed the second biggest film related entity in the known universe (the great documentary about Bollywood is yet to be made). Even better, not only is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune a perfect representation of this concept, Jodorowsky’s Dune does it justice. The filmmakers perfectly capture the moments that define the personalities of the geniuses involved, allowing the bombast of the failed project, in all its communal glory, to come through intact.
Film is about that community, that sense of togetherness that making this one 120 minute product can cause, and that was what movie theaters were made to exemplify. What better way to view something made from 100 competing points of view, than in a theater with 100 eager viewers? That was the beauty of physical film, that something so figuratively passed through so many hands would then literally be passed through the hands of the projectionists and then through the hundreds of little gears and sprockets that it would collectively go through in its time on earth. Unfortunately, as we lose that perfectly kinetic aspect of the medium we must hold on to the remnants of cinema past: Movie theaters.
And it’s hard to deny the pure communal power of Doc Films, a theater built on the blood sweat and tears of people who volunteer their time and energy because they simply love film too much not to. Between the volunteers who keep Doc from falling apart, meticulously programming and collecting physical film, as well as keeping tickets sold and the lights on, and the patrons who committed patronage who populate the theater talking far after it is over about the movie they just saw, Doc is about as movie theater as a movie theater can get. It’s truly a grand, unique, place, built on Max Fischer-ian can do spirit.
So please. Let this be seen not so much as a proper review of the film but as an open plea to see it here. Jodorowsky is in every way a celebration of film, without ever coming out and saying “Boy, wadda bizness! Sure brings us together!”. For like Corman’s World, a similarly kinetic and subtle filmmaking doc before it, Jodorowsky recognizes that the best argument for why filmmaking is about as universal, collective, a medium as they come is showing that community unfolding in a way that makes it seem like, genuinely, just about the most fun, crazy, thing in the world. This isn’t a film meant to be seen at home, separated totally from the environment that raised it. It’s not a film that should be lazily flipped on during a Netflix binge on a lazy afternoon. It asks to be placed in the proper context, to be projected on the same screen that held many of its brethren over time. Can you really not do it this simple service?
"We’re two of a kind, my brother and I. One day, he’ll open his eyes and see that what he’s been looking for is right in front of him. Then he’ll stop looking for what he already has."
"And Cage. There are often lists of the great living male movie stars: De Niro, Nicholson and Pacino, usually. How often do you see the name of Nicolas Cage? He should always be up there. He’s daring and fearless in his choice of roles, and unafraid to crawl out on a limb, saw it off and remain suspended in air. No one else can project inner trembling so effectively. Recall the opening scenes in Leaving Las Vegas. See him in Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead. Think of the title character in The Weather Man. Watch him melting down in Adaptation. And then remember that he can also do a parachuting Elvis impersonator (Honeymoon in Vegas), a wild rock ‘n’ roller (Wild at Heart), a lovesick one-handed baker (Moonstruck), a straight-arrow Secret Service agent (Guarding Tess) and on and on."
Roger Ebert, one of the seemingly few critics to really get Nicolas Cage. (via slantedandenchanted)
TOMORROW NIGHT: The Chicago Center for Jewish Studies is sponsoring a FREE screening of HANNAH ARENDT with an introduction from Comparative Literature professor Haun Saussy.
In honor of the late and great Philip Seymour Hoffman, we will be holding a free DVD or Blu-ray screening of one of his films next Tuesday (2/11) at 9:30 pm.
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