Day 5: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

"Dogs fucked the Pope, no fault of mine."

Terry Gilliam is one of those directors that you can almost always be assured that no matter what the story, topic or subject matter of his films is, you'll be seeing a unique and visually distinctive film every time out of the gate. His films are also notoriously plagued by production delays, studio heads blocking release, and even the death of one of his stars mid-production. The Onion brilliantly parodied him with their article "Terry Gilliam Barbeque Plagued By Production Delays."

One thing that almost all of his films share as well is an almost unrelenting pessimism in regards to humanity and it's ability to redeem itself for several thousand years worth of selfishness. This makes his first and only partnership with Hunter S. Thompson a match made in heaven. Their shared hopelessness at mankind's irredeemability would seem to make this one hell of a downer, but I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that this is Gilliam's most wildly fun movie since Baron Munchausen (far and away my favorite Gilliam film). Johnny Depp stars as Thompson, here using the alias Raoul Duke. This is Depp the actor unhinged, one of those go-for-broke performances that make him an endlessly watchable and enjoyable actor. It's 1971 and Duke is traveling to Las Vegas for a dirtbike race called the Mint 400 with his lawyer Dr. Gonzo (Benicio DelToro) who may or may not be Samoan.

The plot is almost incidental, and Gilliam's desire to ensure that the film was not marketed as "two guys on a wacky weekend in Vegas" movie was undermined by Universal and ultimately hurt the movie's word of mouth on its release. It has since gained a considerable following, an almost tell-tale sign that a film is ahead of it's time. Considering that Las Vegas is part of the title, it's strange that they are only there for about 45 minutes of the film's two hour run time, but here Vegas is used as a metaphor for the excess and gaudiness that America adopted in the latter half of the twentieth century. This isn't so much a movie about any one thing as it is a movie about everything.

The opening of the film is a total bait-and-switch. I was in college when the film first came out and I mistakenly thought it was a film about drugs, but, as in most of Thompson's work, drugs are just his way of bucking the establishment and scaring off the squares who wouldn't get what his work was really about. America has sold out and Depp as Thompson as Duke is the only voice of reason in this crazy world. You almost get lulled into a false sense of this film being the exact thing Gilliam was trying to ensure people didn't think it was. Within 30 minutes though, the film will have weeded out the element in the audience that is thoroughly unprepared for what the film is going to be.

The two main actors' commitment to their roles is indicative of their level of talent, and they match one another every beat along the way. DelToro's performance reaches heights of comic absurdity in his White Rabbit, bathtub, acid-freakout scene, and then plunges the depths of true scariness in his encounter with Ellen Barkin late in the film, when he turns all of his previous wackiness into something genuinely frightening. Depp also goes for broke here and his scene with Gary Busey as a highway patrol officer is transcendent in its comical heights and desperate lows.

Gilliam is a director forever doomed to be under-appreciated by the masses, but I don't think he'd have it any other way. His highest grossing movie is 12 Monkeys, and it's success is probably more attributable to it's stars Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, but even that one scared off audiences after it's first weekend. Gilliam fits the definition of a director who is not for everyone, but those that get him and what he does, love it (I will point to Brothers Grimm as an example of him trying to make a movie for a mass audience and failing miserably). Fear and Loathing fits firmly in his filmography as a film that couldn't have been made by any other director, which I think is the highest compliment you can pay any of his films.

Tomorrow I'll be reviewing Brian DePalma's 1981 paranoia thriller Blow Out with John Travolta, Nancy Allen & John Lithgow.

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Day 4: Sleeping Dogs Lie

"It's important to lie. It's trying to live up to the lies we tell that makes us better people."

Bobcat Goldthwait has had one of the more interesting careers in the history of entertainment. He started as a stand-up, became a substantially successful character actor, wrote and directed one of the funniest movies of the 90's (Shakes the Clown), set Jay Leno's couch on fire (which I was watching when it happened), then re-invented himself as a television writer and director, returning to features with Sleeping Dogs Lie (originally titled Stay).

I am not exaggerating when I say that anyone who's ever kept a secret in a relationship should see this movie. It's one of the most honest movies I've seen and it deals with somewhat outlandish subject matter in a way that doesn't make it feel forced or absurd. The plot centers around Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton) who has just gotten engaged to John (Bryce Johnson). On the night of their engagement, John confesses to something embarrassing and encourages Amy to do the same. She scoffs at first, then is about to admit to her most embarrassing secret when she makes something else up. Her real secret is that on a boring and desperate night in college, she gave her dog a blow job. While this sounds outrageous and borderline nonsensical, the movie never treats it that way, and actually gets the audience on her side immediately, so that when the time comes for her to reveal the secret to her fiance, we're firmly on her side in the ensuing meltdown.

On a trip to meet Amy's parents, she reveals her secret to John, but unbeknownst to them, her meth addict brother (Jack Plotnick) overhears, eventually telling everyone in the family. Moments before she tells John her secret, he tells her that when he was in camp as a kid, he played toss the cookie, one of those urban legend games that I grew up hearing about as soggy biscuit, where a bunch of dudes in a circle jerk off onto a cookie (or biscuit) and the last guy to finish has to eat said baked good, and surprise, surprise, John was the one who had to eat it. This revelation of a disgusting secret leads Amy to feel safe enough to tell John hers, and he is immediately repulsed by it and holds it against her, eventually leading to the end of their relationship. And all that's just the first half of the movie. Seeing as how it's unlikely that anyone reading this will have seen the movie, I won't go any further into the plot, but it's very good and has an extremely satisfying conclusion.

Goldthwait has a keen ear as a writer and infuses each of his characters with real neuroses, making them that much more well-rounded. He is very much in the vein of John Waters, twisted subject matter, sympathetic characters, and love almost always conquers all in the end. His next film, God Bless America, sounds like he'll be continuing in this same manner as he did for his subsequent film World's Greatest Dad with Robin Williams. Robin Williams is actually the perfect actor for films of this ilk as he is able to infuse demented and even deranged characters with enough empathy that it makes them real people (see Insomnia, One Hour Photo, and The Fisher King for further examples of this).

I look forward to Goldthwait's work now having seen all three of his features that he's released and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. His interview on Marc Maron's WTF podcast is also very good, and I would recommend it to anyone who is maybe not sold on him as someone with discernible talent. Sleeping Dogs Lie is a movie for anyone who's ever known the value of keeping something secret in a relationship, and if that isn't you, you probably shouldn't be in a relationship to begin with.

Tomorrow's film will be Terry Gilliam's 1998 adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with Johnny Depp and Benicio DelToro.

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Day 3: Drive Angry (Shot in 3-D)

"Nobody ever reaches the end of their lives and says, 'damn, I wish I hadn't fucked so much.'"

If there's a more enigmatic actor than Nicolas Cage working today, I'd honestly like to hear about that person. I would wager to say that up until maybe five years ago, he was considered one of the elite, top-tier movie stars working in Hollywood. I think that's pretty indisputable. He had always done strange movies and made strange choices in the movies he was in, but they used to be interspersed with the more mainstream stuff. Lately he just seems to be immersing himself in nonsense, and on the surface, Drive Angry is no exception. But odd as it may sound, there's actually a lot more going on in this movie than you might think at first glance.

Cage plays John Milton (groan), an escaped convict trying to track down cult leader Jonah King (Billy Burke) who has murdered Cage's daughter and stolen his granddaughter to sacrifice in the next 48 hours to unleash a new hell on earth. Still with me? Good. Now, it's not just any prison that Milton has broken out of, it's the biggest prison of all, Hell, run by the baddest warden of all, Satan, who has sent The Accountant (the undeniably brilliant William Fichtner) to retrieve Milton and a "godkiller" gun that he has stolen. Milton has also teamed up with ass-kicking, muscle car owning, former waitress Piper (Amber Heard) in order to track King down, retrieve his granddaughter, and prevent the apocalypse. Fairly by-the-numbers stuff here, right?

The movie is sheer, utter, pure ridiculousness and thankfully it knows it. From minute one, you know exactly what you're in for. The director & screenwriter have lodged their tongues firmly in their respective cheeks, and hopefully you have no pretense of taking anything that's about to unfold seriously. I could go scene by scene and talk about how ridiculous everything in this movie is, but that would be an exhaustive waste of time. Everything is absurd and everyone in the cast is playing it seriously, taking the old Zucker-Abrahams parody strategy to new heights by adding explosions, decapitations, genital mutilation & a general disregard for the law of physics into the mix.

I am sad to report that on home video, the film loses it's luster. In the theater, in 3-D, the film had a newness to it, but after a third viewing on a television set, it's still great for the most part, but it's a bit bloated and ultimately just not as great as some other films that go equally for broke (Shoot 'em Up and Hobo with a Shotgun come immediately to mind as films that hold up better on repeat viewings). There is a certain joy in watching an Academy Award-winning actor appear to be slumming, only to discover he's actually smarter than you're giving him credit for, but it fades with time.

The one element of the film that holds up gloriously is William Fichtner's performance as The Accountant. Fichtner is an incredibly reliable character actor who can show up in films as varied as Go, Armageddon, Drowning Mona, Crash, Date Night & The Dark Knight, and lend them instant credibility. Here, he gives a performance so deliriously over-the-top, that he ends up stealing the film, wholesale, from everyone else on screen with him at any given moment. You wait anxiously for him to come back on-screen every time a scene with him ends. He deserves serious Oscar consideration for his performance, and I say that without a hint of irony.

If you haven't seen Drive Angry, see it. Know that it's going to be absurd and ridiculous, and just try not to be won over by it's charm. However, I caution you that in watching it, you must know, understand and accept the fact that it will never be as good as it is right then and there, the first time you're watching it. In the age of dvds, blu-rays, digital streaming, and movie downloads, it's the goal of any film that it must be good enough to hold up on multiple viewings, and sadly, Drive Angry falls woefully short of this goal. But I defy you to not have an absolute blast while watching it for the first time.

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Day 2: Life During Wartime

"Your father may have been a pedophile, but he was still a father and a man."

What can you say about a Todd Solondz movie? By now, there are certain expectations that one has when watching one of his films, and it's virtually impossible to be shocked or surprised by anything that happens even though that still seems to be his main goal at any given moment. I rather enjoyed his last film Palindromes which was an unofficial follow-up to his first feature Welcome to the Dollhouse. Life During Wartime is an official follow-up to his second feature (and my favorite film of his) Happiness. 

Picking up some ten years after, and virtually every character that survived that film (and one that didn't) are in this film. The gimmick this time around is that they've all been re-cast with new actors. Joy, played by Jane Adams in Happiness is replaced here by Shirley Henderson (Moaning Myrtle from the Harry Potter series). Her sisters Helen and Trish are played here by Ally Sheedy and Allison Janney respectively. Trish's ex-husband Bill, played so expertly by Dylan Baker in Happiness, is played by Ciaran Hinds. Joy is now married to Alan, the role originated by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, played here by Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar from The Wire), but she still communicates with her dead ex-boyfriend, memorably played by John Lovitz in Happiness, replaced here by Paul Reubens.

In addition, while it's never explicitly stated, I suspect that Michael Lerner's character Harvey Weiner is supposed to be Dawn Weiner's father from Welcome to the Dollhouse, as evidenced by the character of his son Mark, played here by Rich Pecci, very obviously playing the same character that Matthew Faber played in that film and Palindromes.

All of this goes a long way towards saying that the film is not a good starting point for someone who hasn't seen at the very least Happiness but more likely his entire canon (the awful Storytelling exempted). This is a direct sequel for the most part, and it opens with an almost exact parallel to the opening of Happiness with Joy and a significant other dining out and him giving her an ashtray with her name on it. It filled me with dread that Solondz was going to continue this pattern of just mimicking scenes from the earlier film, but he proves to be smarter than that and flips your expectations for that immediately.

My overall feeling watching this is that he has improved significantly as a visual storyteller since his early days, and this is key. In Dollhouse and Happiness, he could rely on the value of his dialogue, script and actors to do the heavy lifting, but now that we're accustomed to his style, this is no longer enough to sustain an audience, and so he has created some very visually intriguing mise en scene. For example, an early scene with Trish and Harvey Weiner in a parking garage frames them off-center and in the bottom part of the screen. He apes this shot again with Bill when he arrives in Florida. It's as if he's letting us know how small these people are visually, rather than letting their dialogue do that job for him as he would have previously.

The theme of the film seems to be forgiveness. Whereas Happiness was about people trying to find, well, happiness, this film is about those same people looking for forgiveness. Bill has been released from prison and is trying to track down his eldest son at college, for reasons that are unclear until their climactic meeting. His ex-wife Trish has told her two younger children that their father is dead in an effort to protect them. Her middle child Timmy is preparing for his bar mitzvah and has decided his speech will be on the theme of forgiveness and whether it's better to forgive and forget, or if that is even possible. His subplot tended for me to be the most overwrought and reaching, as if Solondz didn't trust his audience enough to glean these themes from everything else going on.

The much more interesting plot line for me was following Joy. In Happiness Joy was definitely put-upon in spite of her seemingly good intentions. Nothing ever seemed to work out for her. Solondz clearly has it in for middle children. I looked but couldn't find any evidence as to whether or not he has siblings, but I wonder what his proclivity toward tortured middle children is. From Dawn Weiner, to Joy, to Timmy, his middle children seem to bear the brunt of his wrath in his films. Here, Joy is tormented by her failing marriage to Alan who she thought to be reformed from his sexually devious phone calls, but it turns out he isn't at all. She goes to Florida to get away for a while and is harangued by her mother and older sister Trish. She is also being plagued by the ghost of Andy, her ex who committed suicide in Happiness. Here, played wonderfully by Paul Reubens (although I would love to have seen what Lovitz would have done with this), he seems to be seeking forgiveness from her, but his ulterior motive seems to be to try and sleep with her, even though he's a ghost.

This is all pretty off-center, as should be expected, and ultimately I think it's one of his least successful films. His aim seems to be people seeking a goal that he makes forever unattainable to them, in this case forgiveness. Perhaps if he hadn't rehashed this same essential plot device from Happiness, I would have found the film more successful, but because it worked so well in that film, I don't see what more he's adding to that equation here, other than the notion that maybe these characters don't deserve any of the myriad carrots he dangles endlessly in front of them.

The best scene by far involved Bill and a strange woman at a hotel bar played by Charlotte Rampling. Does anyone in the history of cinema play sexually damaged better than her? Honestly? Their dialogue was the freshest, boldest, most interesting thing in the entire film, and the conclusion of their scene together was so odd that it almost undercut the entire preceding scene. I guess in the end, by biggest issue with the film was that it undercut itself any time it had the opportunity. Whereas his earlier films would build and build to an almost unbearable climax, this film peaked and climaxed so many times that when we reach the actual climax, it doesn't have the same impact as it should.

In the end, Todd Solondz is still doing more interesting work than 90% of the other filmmakers in Hollywood, and I will watch anything he does. I only hope he continues to challenge himself to try new things rather than rehashing these same characters and themes. Ultimately, he'll end up a better and more complete filmmaker as a result.

I'll be back tomorrow with the previously promised Drive Angry with Nicolas Cage…

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Day 1: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

"I had you pegged, didn't I?"
"You had the whole human race pegged."

It's hard for me to objectively review a movie with a character after whom I named my daughter. I have a long history with this movie. I saw it the night it opened and I wasn't entirely sure what I thought of it immediately afterwards. 24 hours later, I couldn't stop thinking about it and wanted to see it again. This time I brought Rachel and Jon Taylor with me. We all went again the next night and brought Sarah Drinkard with us. I subsequently saw it 4 more times in the theaters. Love is not a strong enough word for what I feel for this film. I think it is brilliant. In fact, in re-watching it to write this review, I took very few notes and found myself just getting lost in it all over again.

The first thing I noticed this time was the cover art. There's a quote from Peter Travers of Rolling Stone who dubbed the film "A Smart, Sexy and Seriously Funny Comedy." Alliteration aside, I agree with all of that except the last word. I have always had a hard time classifying this film, but it is most certainly not a comedy. Yes, it is funny and has a lot of comedy in it, but this film is not a comedy. It's a tragedy of the highest order, and you need look no further than the very last image of the film which is a repeated loop of Joel and Clementine running on the beach. To me, this signifies that perhaps it's not the hopeful, happy ending we had just seen with the two of them deciding to give their relationship another go. They're stuck in a vicious cycle, and will likely go through this same thing multiple times.

The plot is fairly straight-forward, boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl fall out of love, girl has procedure to erase boy from her memory, boy finds out, has same procedure, boy and girl meet again, and the whole thing starts all over again. Jim Carrey plays Joel, the boy in this scenario, and he is unbelievably effective as an actor when playing a normal schmoe. This isn't just his best performance, it's the best performance by a famous actor playing an average joe ever. There's a very simple reason for this; Jim Carrey the person has been very unlucky in love in his real life. He's been through several very public relationships and is someone who very clearly has known both love and loss, and the heights and depths that those two emotions bring with them. He lays this all bare on screen and the film and his performance are so much the better for it.

The girl is Clementine, played by Kate Winslet. I've always been a fan of hers, mainly because she has a history of making otherwise unwatchable films entertaining by her thorough commitment to playing her purpose, and there's no lack of that here. She is endlessly watchable as a damaged soul who puts up a strong front, but is just as scared of having her heart broken as the much more meager Joel. Kate is another actor who has had some very public relationships end badly, and she too brings that baggage with her to this character, and this makes her Carrey's equal in every way on screen. The second glance she gives Patrick after he gives her the necklace he pilfered from Joel's stuff is one example of her doing something with next to nothing.

Among the supporting cast, everyone is uniformly good, among them Tom Wilkinson as Howard, the doctor who pioneered the memory erasure technique, Kirsten Dunst as Mary, his secretary with a crush on her boss, Elijah Wood as Patrick, a kid working at the lab who is obsessed with Clementine, Jane Adams and David Cross as Joel's friends Carrie and Rob & especially Mark Ruffalo as Stan, the technician doing the erasing. Ruffalo is so good in what could have easily been a thankless write-off of a character, but he infuses him with so many tics and character traits that he's eminently watchable and the driving force of the scenes that don't involve Clementine and Joel.

Charlie Kaufman's script is unbelievably good. It's the kind of script that, as a writer, makes me want to throw my hands up in the air and give up writing altogether because I'll never create anything so honest and groundbreaking. With this being only his second feature, director Michel Gondry has yet to equal this film in anything he's done subsequently, although I have enjoyed all of his films, particularly The Science of Sleep and Be Kind, Rewind. His technique is exemplary and he uses such low-tech post-production effects and ancient in-camera effects in a way that makes them seem revolutionary and new. His scene transitions are great (particularly Joel leaving the bookstore and ending up in his friend's living room), and the use of the erasure sound effect to transition from memory to memory is also a subtle but effective storytelling device.

I have read the script to this and it's easy to see Gondry's contributions to the story on screen, but the framework Kaufman provided him with is so solid, seemingly nothing could detract from it's overall impact. For a film that relies so heavily on handheld camera, Gondry manages to brilliantly capture small moments like the aforementioned look that Clementine gives Patrick, and the looks Howard gives Stan anytime Mary pays him a compliment. This gives the film an immediacy, but it's clearly not accidental and must have been meticulously choreographed, making it just that much better.

The use of music, both songs and the score, is also notable. In particular the scene on the train at the beginning with Joel and Clementine meeting again for the first time, the way that Jon Brion's score is used under all of their dialogue, and then taken out entirely when they're not speaking, is pure genius. The score is so emotional because of its simplicity. A simple piano melody used in the scenes from Joel's childhood and the last memory we see from the day Joel and Clementine actually met, is infinitely more effective than a swelling orchestra. I'm including a link to the last memory he has of Clementine. Out of context it still manages to pack a pretty emotional punch, particularly the way Joel says "I love you" at the very end of the clip. This scene makes me bawl and I'm not ashamed to admit it. It's a perfect example of writing, directing, acting and scoring all working together to elicit an emotional response from the viewer and hell if it isn't effective.

If I have one complaint about the film, it's a small one, but one that I actually held against the film after my first viewing. It's the tapes that are made by the people having the erasure procedure and are then kept on file. This is a plot device at it's most basic and it literally serves no other purpose than to let Mary, Joel & Clementine in on their past lives. It bugged me a lot the first time I saw the film, and it still kind of bothers me to some extent, but I'm not going to presume to be smarter than Charlie Kaufman and say that there's a better way to have done it. Part of loving something or someone is acknowledging their flaws, no matter how big or small, and loving them through them, not in spite of them.

Overall, this is not really a review, because I can't be partial. I am unabashedly in love with this movie. In the future, I will balance reviews like this with more critical ones. What are your thoughts? I open the floor to anyone who has an opinion good or bad about the movie or my review. My next film will be Life During Wartime, Todd Solondz' 2009 follow-up to Happiness. Also, see below for the link to the clip I mentioned before. I also welcome your comments and suggestions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy7YnrVXudg

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Mission Statement

So I have somewhere around 1500 dvds and blu-rays. I've decided that I have to do something every day so I'm going to watch and review a movie a day for the next year, starting December 1, 2011 and ending November 30, 2012. This will be 366 movie reviews. It will include theatrical releases, movies I own and haven't watched, and some revisiting of old favorites or even movies I hated on first viewing and can watch anew. I will announce the next day's movie at the end of every review. The most important thing I have to say is that I will have no spoiler embargo, so only read my review/discussion if you've seen the movie or don't give a shit about spoilers. So that's about it. Any other ground rules anyone can think of? Let me know, and we'll kick it off on December 1st with my favorite movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.