| Little Miss Sunshine... |
[Aug. 19th, 2006|07:43 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  chipper | ] |
So again I'm torn over a film, one that pretty much everyone likes this time around. The funny thing is, I usually love this sort of movie: it's very reminiscent, on the surface, of movies like Sideways and The Squid and the Whale. The cast is superb - the little girl, Abigail Breslin, is particularly excellent, giving a funny, cute, ultimately heartbreaking performance beyond her years. There is certainly the occasional moment that rings hilariously true along the way, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't laugh. Oh, and according to rottentomatoes.com, there are exactly nine critics in the United States who did not like it.
So why did it fail so disastrously for me?
Lajos Egri states in the first chapter of his The Art of Dramatic Writing that a story is nothing without a strong premise, the overall statement that it makes about life. I suppose Little Miss Sunshine has a premise: it's OK to be a loser, winning isn't everything, being a family means supporting each other no matter what... None of these is a strong or ultimately satisfying premise. For all the characters' disastrous emotional, social, mental, and financial problems, driven by the script's mean-spirited, edgy sarcasm, the final message is basically, "All you can do with your life is endure your horrible, soul-crushing, repeated failures, which will only get worse, while you kiss your pathetic personal dream, which you should never have hoped for in the first place, goodbye for no better reason than the unfairness of other people. But you know, it's okay, because your suffering makes you quirky and weird!"
Each of the main characters in this film has a heartfelt, all-consuming dream. Richard wants to become a successful entrepreneur, selling his 9-step program and thus showing his family that he lives up to his own intolerance for failure. Olive doesn't even necessarily want to win the Little Miss Sunshine competition; she just wants to be like her beauty-queen idols and make a decent showing onstage. Frank's dream is already dust and ash by the start of the film - he's in love with someone, whom he lost to an academic competitor. Grandpa wants to live out his last days making up for his regret that he didn't enjoy his life as much as he could have. Dwayne... wants to be a fighter pilot, God knows why, but he wants it with all of his soul. And Sheryl just wants to keep her family's encroaching despair and unhappiness at bay.
The movie mercilessly and systematically smashes each of these dreams into bits. Richard's inspirational plan fails to sell, and his "heroic" effort to make things right proves utterly ineffectual. Olive turns out to be disastrously inadequate in every way for the beauty competition; sure, her family is there to support her and keep her blissfully ignorant of her complete failure and humiliation, but it's painfully obvious that her one desire in the whole wide world is completely beyond her reach. Frank not only tried to kill himself, but, out of the blue, he runs into his former lover, accompanied by the man Frank lost him to, at a gas station; he's also clinically depressed, a condition that shows no signs of letting up, even a little, by the end of the film. Grandpa spends his last days on some stupid-ass road trip with his miserable family and dies in a shitty hotel; even worse, his own son doesn't seem to shed a tear for him: he just sneaks his body out of the hospital, stuffs it in the back of the van, and keeps on truckin'. Dwayne, in the movie's most randomly mean-spirited turn, discovers he's color-blind and thus unable to realize his dream of flying. And... well, clearly Sheryl doesn't exactly do a great job of making her family happy (who could?), but she's not even able to keep up her own superficially optimistic facade when faced with total financial ruin for her family.
I think Sideways is an apt comparison with this film. Sideways is about a character, Paul Giamatti's Miles, who is failing at his one calling, writing: nobody wants to publish his book. He's basically a hopeless alcoholic, he's horribly distraught over his recent divorce, and his insecurity and depression make it nearly impossible for him to get close to a woman. He's on vacation to do the one thing he really enjoys, the one thing he's really good at: drink. His friend Jack has other ideas. Jack is Miles' polar opposite, irresponsible and immature, good at all the things Miles is terrible at, and thus he's in the perfect position to (sort of) know what Miles really needs, as much as Miles is afraid to admit it. Miles needs someone in his life to fill the cavernous, gaping hole, and because we can see that, underneath the bitterness and the ugly alcoholism, Miles is a good person, complex and fragile and sensitive as an exposed nerve, we want to see him get what he needs to be a whole person. He eventually gets over his insecurity and manages to connect with the object of his affection, finding the resilience to help Jack through his own issues along the way. The comic pairing of shiftless Miles and horndog Jack - a classic odd couple - generates no shortage of laughs both sophisticated and lowbrow, and the movie's final shot is the very picture of optimism, a close-up of Miles opening the door to a potentially beautiful future with Maya.
I guess my biggest problem with Little Miss Sunshine is that at a certain point, its worldview becomes so cruelly hopeless that it ceases to be funny. In its opening scenes it seems to be telling us that these characters are deserving of our scorn, or at least our derisive laughter, and that would be fine, sort of, but then how are we supposed to react to moments like Dwayne's primal screams of grief at losing the one dream that keeps him going? "Hardy-har?" "What brilliant satire?" This movie is sour and pessimistic in the worst way, a slow, aimless journey into each character's personal hell, culminating in a ridiculously over-the-top climactic display of family solidarity that seems to come out of nowhere. So, what, everything is better now because they don't care about what other people think and are willing to make fools out of themselves? Most of them don't seem to care what others think at the start of the movie. I don't see how anything's changed for the better, especially considering the movie ends rather abruptly after the beauty pageant scene. Sideways, similarly, does become something of a descent into hopelessness for a time, as Miles learns of the failure of his novel and Jack's dishonesty and infidelity comes between Miles and Maya. But if the story had continued in that downward direction it would have ended up in exactly the same place it had started, which is what Little Miss Sunshine does: nothing really substantial changes in these characters' lives; maybe if we had seen a glimpse of their newfound family happiness at the end, it would be more satisfying, but we don't. The over-the-top climax ends up coming off as just another crazy, random event in their miserable lives.
Without a doubt, the fact that I'm so disappointed with the way the film ends up speaks to my investment in the characters. As I said before, the actors are simply fantastic, even when the script wants us to despise the characters (which, at times, I did) and makes them behave in hugely unrealistic ways (who the fuck sneaks a dead body out of a hospital and stashes it in the back of their VW bus when there are quite obviously much better options, like having Richard stay with the body and letting everyone else take Olive to the pageant??). Ultimately, the film was just too mean-spirited and pessimistic for me, which is an odd thing to say... there are many deeply depressing films among my favorites. I guess the problem here is that in the end, not enough has changed one way or the other.
Or maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for it. Entirely possible. |
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| movies |
[Jul. 23rd, 2006|12:50 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | my room | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | chipper | ] |
| [ | music |
| | my worthless air conditioner | ] |
Ok, just to get it out of my system, my brief thoughts on the 2 movies I saw today - OK, maybe not so brief. Sorry.
Lady in the Water... Every time I hear some critic call Unbreakable or The Village a "deeply flawed" or "minor" effort, or a "full-length Twilight Zone episode," I feel like doing violence to somebody. Because M. Night Shyamalan is an enormously talented, original, adventurous filmmaker in a time when the mainstream movie market is really dominated by, at best, the dissapointing efforts of once-great old hands, and at worst, moneymaking swill from outright hacks. And if we don't respect that, then what the hell is cinema coming to? There is a lot to like in his latest movie - it's certainly full of ideas about modern life, the power of fairy tales, and the importance of the inner child. About halfway or maybe 2/3 of the way through I started to realize... this is just like those crazy tales I would make up in my head when I was a kid, playing in the yard or in the forest, hitting trees with sticks and pretending they were great big monsters. And that is a fantastic idea for a film. I guess plenty of films are like those childhood fantasies: ET, to which this film has been compared, comes to mind. What little kid doesn't want to find an alien in his tool shed? This film, on the other hand, seems to be trying to say something about those made-up stories, by bringing one to life in all of its flawed, nonsensical glory and mercilessly tossing it, unabridged, into the mundane world of adults. In real life, when the kid tries to explain the great battle he just fought with a tree monster out in the forest, his parents laugh and shake their heads, or perhaps they humor him for a little while, delighting in the wonderful imaginings of childhood. But the adult mind just does not have the capacity to truly buy into the fantasy. And herein lies my major problem with the film: all these grown men and women just go along with this utterly insane plot to help Story get back to the blue world. They just kind of band together and act like a bunch of kids following after a popular, charismatic, imaginative, and rather manipulative 7-year-old who's leading them into the forest telling them he can talk to raccoons. There's nothing at stake here. A little kid doesn't care because he wants to go on an adventure. But an adult needs a pretty goddamn good reason to go take a look at the milky-skinned, half-naked waif in the Indian guy's shower and then patiently listen to the normally unassuming, kindly, stuttering super as he explains that they need to figure out which tenants in this hotel fulfill the bizarrely named roles in an ancient fairy tale. Every single character pretty much takes that leap, for no good reason, despite the sulky guy who watches war footage in his room all day saying that they "all want to feel like children again." So that's my main problem with the film - I never bought that it was happening in real life. It's more like something happening inside a kindergartener's brain ("Wouldn't it be cool if everybody believed in my story and we had an adventure together?"), which is kind of a cool concept in its own right, but the trouble is that kindergarteners don't write very good stories. Again, there's a lot to enjoy... the cinematography is fantastic and there's always some level of joy to be had in M. Night's eccentric, passionate, unconventional direction of actors and the camera. And I did find the final couple of scenes rather beautiful - they finally clicked with that 7-year-old's sense of adventure. On the whole, though, all I can really say is that I'm glad I saw the film; it's not great but it has its moments; and I think Shyamalan will make more great, or at least very good, movies in the future.
Clerks 2... I love Clerks; I think it is a genuinely great film, no matter what anyone says. In my mind, all of its flaws only add to its greatness: stilted reading of unwieldy lines, deeply unprofessional cinematography, episodic plot. In its editing, its shooting style, its acting, its writing, it effortlessly captures what it's like to sit in a fucking shit job all fucking day and just talk about absolutely nothing, and somehow it makes that seem like the most noble aspiration in the world, the site of philosophical debate, hedonism, good and evil, right and wrong, the monumentally important choices that take place on a typical day in a typical life. And of couse it's wise and irreverent enough to thumb its nose at the preceding sentence and just make raunchy jokes. Now, Clerks 2 is entirely different. It's easier to look at, sure, which is actually part of the problem - it's visually designed and covered in a completely conventional Hollywood-comedy style that over-complicates the editing, bears absolutely no resemblance to the original, and undermines potentially funny dialogue by over-emphasizing outrageous lines that should just sort of happen, ya know, like in a 5-minute static two-shot, a la the original. Wow, that was a ridiculous sentence. The real problem, though - I shouldn't say problem, it's really more "the real reason this movie is the way it is" - is that Kevin Smith is an entirely different writer, directer, and person than he was 12 years ago. This is one of the saddest, most wistful films I've seen in a very long time. From the very start, it's clear that Dante and Randal have aged significantly, and time has not been kind to either of them. They've filled out, put on some pounds; they look like they should be at least working boring desk jobs and on the road to starting families and taking out mortgages on cute suburban homes. They work in a damn fast food restaurant. Randal is still the potty-mouthed adolescent, and Dante is still the whiny scold. Now that I think about it, it's heartbreaking. There's a scene where the pair get so depressed over running into a rich, successful former classmate from high school that they need to go cheer themselves up by riding go-karts. It's scored to "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head" and shot in the nostalgic glow of the afternoon sun, and it is one of the most genuinely heartbreaking things I think I've ever seen. At times like this, the film comes close to achieving a truly affecting portrait of thirtysomething New Jerseyites stuck in first gear, holding court in a quiet fast food restaurant with someone with whom they've been best - close to only - friends for a stretch of time that's verging on decades. And I honestly wish Smith had just gone all-out and made that film, because I think he has it in him. What we get, though, is a film dominated by attempts at the same style of irreverent comedy as the first Clerks. And there are lots of great jokes here, jokes that made me laugh out loud, and occasionally Smith really hits it on the head. Pretty much everything to do with Elias just rings so painfully true that it nearly saves the film. He's one of the best-written geeks in all of film history, utterly convincing in the awkwardness of his manner and the strength of his convictions. Randal's offensive behavior and speech is still quite funny just because of how ludicriously offensive it is ("I'm taking back 'porch monkeys'!") and there are a few exhilarating moments of play - the dance sequence and Jay's into-camera Silence of the Lambs riff, for example - that establish a stand-alone comedic tone for the film. And the central romance between Randal and Becky, however implausible, is ultimately touching. In the end, though, the film is a hodgepodge: early mid-life crisis drama, delightfully crude fanboy comedy, John Hughes-ish romance. Each element is solid in and of itself, and there are enough brilliant moments that I'll probably see the movie again, but it's ultimately less than the sum of its admittedly worthwhile parts, whereas the exact opposite was true of the original - it was far greater than the sum of its individually slight parts. |
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| 5-minute entry |
[Jul. 20th, 2006|10:52 pm] |
OK so I don't have long to write as I'm going to be leaving work soon. So I'm sorry.
Started an "I Hate RCN" group on Facebook. Very proud of that. Already has 3 members, including me.
Gave blood. Made me tired and irritable. Still am today plus I could barely work out for 10 minutes. It sucked.
Got my paycheck. Enough to live on until the next one.
Seeing movies this weekend. Hope they don't suck.
Work is soul-crushingly dull and depressing. Dungeon-like atmosphere and hyper supervisor. Have fallen into a wicked addiction to Java games.
OK that's it for now. Good night. |
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| la la laaaa la la laaaa |
[Jun. 19th, 2006|01:29 am] |
| [ | Current Location |
| | my brain | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | chipper | ] |
| [ | music |
| | my brain | ] |
Hello to my only two friends in the whole wide (cyber)world. "Chipper" is a fucking GREAT mood designation. I think I'll use it all the time: "Hey, look, it's a new entry from Alan. AND LOOK! HE'S CHIPPER!!!"
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
sorry do people get like kicked off or something who make entries like this? I feel this urge to unleash my inner angst... in some deep and meaningful fashion... but right now it's just kind of coming out as gibberish and ramblings.
foooooooood is good............ and so are good movies....... i really like the music from the first Superman movie............ and sigur ros makes me feel nice............ "sunsets over the city" is an interest not shared by anyone else.... so it's not all blue and underliny......
Take comfort in whatever makes you feel good because there's nothing wrong with making yourself comfortable! for as the buddhists say, all life is suffering... |
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| First entry |
[May. 27th, 2006|02:03 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  crappy | ] |
OK so first entry 'n shit. This will probably serve mostly as an outlet for my stupid depressive rants, but honestly I don't even know why I'm putting them here, I could just put them on my computer or in a notebook or something, it's not like I'm planning to share them with the world. Honestly I think Livejournal entries are often passive-agressive and sort of pointless, like why not just talk to people if you want to say something to them? Because you'd be afraid of saying it in real life? Whatever. Maybe it'll serve some purpose eventually. |
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