New Century Of Cinema: Hot Fuzz

Stanford, England is much, much worse than Stepford, Connecticut, if you can believe it.  Both towns contain deceptions that permeate their very cores-- however, those in Stepford are based on male insecurities.  In Stanford, only civic pride.  I consider the former to be an emotion more consuming than the latter.

Alas, I read that last paragraph and realize I have done you a great disservice:  I have revealed a rather important twist that occurs in Hot Fuzz, but it shouldn't deter you from seeing the film.  

Have you even heard of it?  It was released in early 2007 and was fairly unsuccessful, which is a shame, because it is such a sublime film.  

Edgar Wright (also the director) and Simon Pegg (also the star) wrote it as a follow-up to their cult hit Shaun of the Dead, and it is more successful than that film.  Hell... it is more successful than most films.  It centers on Nick Angel (Pegg), a London police officer who is extremely devoted at his job.  His job is his life and he's damn good at it-- so good, he is transferred to the village of Stanford to get him out of the way; he makes the other London cops look bad.  Stanford comes as a shock-- from the laid back captain (Jim Broadbent) to his bumbling partner (Nick Frost, also from Shaun of the Dead), things here are just too easy.  Until a series of gruesome "accidents" starts knocking off residents.  Angel realizes immediately that there is more to this than it seems, but so accustomed to their bucolic country life, no one will listen to him. And there is always the looming fear that it all is in his head... maybe the fresh air is driving him mad.

I realize that I have made this film sound like some sort of police procedural/ action flick with a British bent.  It isn't...really.  It is an uproarious, unbearably funny satire of exactly those kinds of movies that doesn't mind getting down there and wallowing with them either.  Here, a police officer gets in trouble for driving drunk-- the punishment?  He has to buy the station ice cream for a month.  The biggest threat to the town (before the "accidents" start)?  An escaped swan.  Yes, it's very funny in that wry British way where absolute nonsense is treated with absolute sincerity. But consider the final thirty minutes, which is really just an extended gunfight, a la John Woo (minus doves).  In all honesty, these scenes could be picked up and transplanted into a B-grade action picture (with a few costume changes and a couple of altered lines) and no one would know the difference.  Earlier, it shows scenes from Point Break and Bad Boys 2 that are just as ridiculous as anything in Hot Fuzz, only those films treat their subjects with deadly seriousness.  Hot Fuzz also takes it self seriously, up to a point, but there is a self-awareness those films lack.  It's like when George Bush sincerely asked "Is our children learning?" , and then everyone else began to ask the same thing, in the same way.  We care if the childrens learns, but we know also that's not the way to approach the subject.

  Hot Fuzz knows all the cliches, knows they're ridiculous, tweaks them slightly and sends them home.  It walks a tight rope-- it has to be hard enough that we still sincerely care for the characters (at least the major ones), yet silly enough that we keep laughing.  It never falters.  Here is  a satire of action films with enough action to satisfy fans looking for gunfire and explosions but, most amazingly, it manages to transcend both action flicks and satirical comedies-- it is just a great movie. 

How?  Well, there are lots of very funny comedies and very effective action films that I enjoy, but don't consider great.  It lies in the characters, and whether they're forced to take a backseat to their jokes or their special effects.  Here, Simon Pegg takes a back seat to no one, and neither does Nick Frost.  They both give stellar performances-- they don't know they're in a comedy, they play it straight (mostly), and they keep everything afloat.  If Pegg plays the straight man to Frost, Frost and Pegg play the straight men to everyone else.  Jim Broadbent delivers impossible lines with the honest face only a great actor can possess, and the rest of the cast, including Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan and Paddy Considine (so good as the father in In America) take twisted, over the top characters and never bother to wink at the camera.  Thank God for good comedic actors not raised on mindless "___ Movie" parodies or the Dane Cook/Adam Sandler school of "scream, because the louder you are, the more people will laugh!".

The film does go on a little long, but who cares?  Sure, there may be a little too much shoot out towards the end and a little too much exposition towards the middle and the final two scenes (involving the sea mine and the cemetary) are completely superfluous, but can you have too much of a good thing, especially when it's as fun as this?  And besides, you know what they were doing right before those two superfluous scenes?  Paperwork.  When was the lst time you saw that in an action film?  That act of audacity right there buys them all the superfluous scenes they want.

Ode to Julie Christie

I've recently finished watching McCabe & Mrs. Miller which is, undoubtably, one of the greatest things I have ever experienced.  An absolutely perfect film, aided immensely by perhaps the most dazzlingly lovely, wounded, immeasurably sad, fragile, unbearable faces ever to grace the silver screen.  Julie Christie is, perhaps, the most beautiful woman to have ever lived.      

Even buried beneath the dull, slow awfulness of Francois Truffaut's dreadful Fahrenheit 451 she shines through as luminous.  She did the same more recently, in Wolfgang Peterson's equally wretched Troy, before proving that she aged about as well as anyone could in the aching Away from Her, where she gave one of the best performances of her career in one of the best films of 2007.

Helen be damned; this is the face that launched a thousand ships.  And begat revolutions.  And bewitched Warren Beatty on several occasions.  Warren Beatty was also in McCabe & Mrs. Miller... but he's another post entirely.

Ode to Lake Pontchartrain (the Metarie Shores)

Theoretically, I'm supposed to stay in Metarie until November Seventh, three more weeks...

Causeway Boulevard

Pontchartrain

Dead Catfish

Yellow Balloon on Levee

...perhaps we shouldn't count on that.

Eye Candy: Gerard Butler

So, I haven't posted one of these in a while, but lately, I just feel like Gerard Butler has been forced down my throat... and I don't particularly like it.  He just seems so... desperate.  And fame-hungry.  And he makes just awful movies (300, P.S. I Love You, Nim's Island, The Phantom of the Opera, Tomb Raider 2, Reign of Fire... seriously, I could go on and on and on.  I hate everything in this man's filmography).  And he seems more than a little stupid.  And ridiculous.  And wildly unnecessary.  

But... he looks like the bastard child of a wildly erotic union between Colin Farrell and Clive Owen.  And those are some genes.  Seriously, with a conception like that... who care if you're just terrible?

Preaching to the Choir: An Angry Rant

Hey, Oliver Stone... I'm pretty sure I dislike George W. Bush just as much as you do.  I'm willing to bet that I think he's just as stupid, and as much of a liar, and as big a war-monger, and as strung-up a puppet, and as lousy a bourgeois pig as you do Oliver... but seriously, perhaps your new movie poster is a bit tacky?  Or really, in all honesty, really really REALLY tacky?  So tacky, in fact, I think less of Josh Brolin for being part of it?  In fact, Olive, I think your whole movie is an awful, awful idea.  You say that it will be fair and balanced (like that poster, right?  Fair and balanced) but it won't.  It will be a big shouting mess of liberal propaganda, and we expect that from you.  You're not really what this post is about.  It's all those other big shouting messes of liberal propaganda I've had to suffer through in the last couple of years.

It's been said that there's nothing worse than a bad argument for an idea you hold dear.  That's very true, and if I have to see one more god-awful argument for a 'liberal' concept that I completely agree with (like, say, "The environment is good" or "I wish so many people didn't have to die in Iraq for no good cause") I'm going to... well, I'm going to gripe here on this blog. Again.

I think we can blame most of my anger on Paul Haggis, a terrible filmmaker who is responsible for three of the least subtle, most angering films I've seen in a long time:  Million Dollar Baby, Crash, and In the Valley of Elah.  All his films start out the same-- well conceived films about interesting characters doing interesting things, but always devolve into awful, awful scenes and shots that beat you over the head senselessly to make sure you GET HIS MESSAGE!!!  And these scenes always ruin the movies for me, because they annoy me in their blatant "shoutisms".  

Paul Haggis seems to have bred a follower in Gavin Hood as well, who made the simply lousy torture tome Rendition, featuring a pregnant Reese Witherspoon trying to convince folks that America shouldn't torture innocent people.  Well, no shit!  That film was bad even aside from the screaming simplicity of it's politics, poorly made and unbearably stupid.

And I recently saw Happy Feet, which started out as just an annoying children's film about penguins, but quickly devolved into an infuriating rage-fest about overfishing.  Seriously, that is a horrible, horrible film.  I think less of Nicole Kidman for being a part of it, and I thought that after Birth she was scott-free to do anything she wanted. 

Now, please, don't mistake what I'm bitching about.  I'm not complaining about political movies, or movies with political messages.  There have been recent politically-themed films about most of these issues that I found anywhere from entertaining to exceptional (The Day After Tomorrow, Stop-Loss, Lions for Lambs, There Will Be Blood) I'm complaining about these films that lack subtlety, tact, common sense and, subsequently, worth.  These movies create baseball bats out of their beliefs and hit you with them until you turn off the television or concede to them.  And I want to concede to them, I really do, because I agree whole-heartedly with everything they say.  But I hate passionately the way they say it.

New Century Of Cinema: Ocean's Eleven

     Ocean's Eleven is like a machine you buy because you heard it makes homemade cookies.  Then you get the machine home, open it, and instead of making cookies, it makes a cow.  And then that cow hops in your truck, drives to the store, and buys you a package of Chips Ahoy.  Sure, the cookies aren't homemade, but now you have a cow that can drive and use money...and that, friends, is worth far more.

Steven Soderbergh's remake of a 1960s Rat Pack classic is a lot like that (really)...you think you have a heist movie, and yes, things are stolen and vaults are busted and people avoid laser beams while gliding down ropes dressed entirely in black, but really you have a magical little film that uses the standards of the heist genre as a MacGuffin and really focuses in on more delightful things like great cinematography (also by Soderbergh, using a pseudonym), a powerfully effective jazz score and charismatic movie stars having lots of fun.  I, for one, would rather that any day.

The film follows Danny Ocean (George Clooney), just out of prison for theft, as he tries to win his wife (Julia Roberts) back from the smarmy Terry Bendict (Andy Garcia).  Benedict owns three Las Vegas casino, and Ocean decides to rob them, bringing in a crew of ten other haphazarded con-men (including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac and Casey Affleck) to get the job done.  

But, seriously, the plot?  Completely irrelevant.  If I told you that they succeeded with the robbery in the end, would you be surprised?  Would you even care?  I bet not, by the time the film is over, because the film isn't about the robbery at all, but about personality.  George Clooney plays an exaggerated version of himself.  So does Matt Damon.  And Andy Garcia.  And Bernie Mac.  Or at least they play exaggerated versions of the way their seen by the public (I'm sure Andy Garcia isn't really a vicious SOB off camera... but he sure seems like he could be one).  The only actors, actually, who seems to be doing anything even remotely similar to acting are Don Cheadle (who plays the whole film, and both sequels, with a spot-on cockney accent) and Julia Roberts.  She carries the entire weight of the plot on her shoulders-- she's the only dynamic character, and whether she goes back to her husband depends less on her personality and more on what the story requires.  

And, yes, when a film stars the four biggest caucasian movie stars in the world (had they thrown in Will Smith and Denzel Washington, the reel would have probably burst into flames) essentially playing themselves, you get a movie that is a lot of fun.  There's a great scene between Clooney and Garcia at dinner where they use tone of voice to say everything the dialogue doesn't.  And there are scenes where Matt Damon does comically earnest and naive about as well as anyone can.  And Casey Affleck and Scott Caan (as brothers) have comedic chemistry and anarchic spirit that light up the screen.  And consider a scene where Brad Pitt teaches C-List celebs (Shane West, Holly Marie Combs,  Pacey Whit...err, Joshua Jackson, among others) to play poker before effortlessly fleecing them out of their money-- with that much self-deprecating going on, you'd expect king of the hill, A-list Pitt to come out looking a bit like a jackass.  He doesn't.

So, the movie is a lot of fun.  But, just being fun, does not a great movie make.  And Steven Soderbergh (Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic, Out of Sight ), one of the best directors to emerge in the past 25 years or so, has made a virtuoso film on a technical level.  In fact, the style reminds me of that of one of my favorite of all films, Woody Allen's Manhattan, where he cast the titular borough in black and white, shot some of the most lovely widescreen compositions ever put to film, and scored the whole thing with sublime tracks by George Gershwin.   Soderbergh doesn't shoot in black and white (considering the neon gaudiness of Vegas, how inappropriate would that be?) but he does show us most of Vegas's landmarks in lovely widescreen compositions that make the city almost a character itself, a living, breathing place that these characters inhabit.  He shoots inside real casinos and catches that unbearably bright yet still somehow dim and shadowy look that real casino's have.  And he sets the whole thing to a jazz score that isn't as epic as Gershwin, but it's a lot of fun and keeps the mood bouncy and lightweight.  Actually, though, it's not all jazz-- there's also a gloriously well-used Elvis remix.

Earlier I mentioned the sequels to the film and yes, there are two, and yes, you've probably already seen both of them.  The second actually gets too bogged down in the idea of 'movie stars having fun' and almost completely abandons the plot.  I really liked it, too.  The third, however, found too much plot and explained too little of it, and, with the exception of a few sequences, wasn't very fun either.  But this one is the best, and should be the perfect template for big star vehicles in the future- never sacrifice the plot for your actors, but the actors are really all that matter.  In Ocean's Eleven, that's the way it is.  And that's the way it should be.  

In Memory: Millicent Vestal

(Note:  I didn't writ this.  This is Casie's obit, but I concede that it reaches a level of perfection that I could never duplicate.)

"Millie was found this Sunday morning, October 05, 2008, down by the road in front of our house.  Whether she was hit by a passerby or maybe killed by another dog, we don't know.  She went missing the day that we returned from our California trip and despite walking up and down the road relentlessly this week and checking the ditches, all the sudden there she is.  Our minds are now somewhat at rest for at least we know where she is and that she's not lost or scared.    

 I'm sure for most of you, this e-mail is quite dramatic.  But truth is, I know some of you got along very well with Millie and for those of you who didn't, you at least tolerated her (and for that we are eternally grateful).  There are a lot of dog lovers on both sides of mine and Jeffery's families and having to tell the details over and over will be hard on me, so this seemed a little overboard, but reasonable.   

For those of you that don't know, (and if we remember correctly), Millie was born on Ms. Jennifer's birthday, January 04, 2004.  It's kind of ridiculous to remember a dog's birthday maybe, but considering the circumstances, how could we forget it?  A little hard to when your mother-in-law shared the date with what she used to call her 'first grand-baby'.     

Jeffery had heard from one of those Moore Boys that Sandy and Philip Moore's feist had a litter of puppies with a pug and they were the cutest puppies around.  (Which is why when people asked, 'What kind of dog is she?' we answered, 'She's a FUG'!)  I had been begging Jeffery for a dog, since he was stationed in Memphis, to help with how quiet the house was while he was gone. At first he said no, but when he laid eyes on the puppies he called me and said to go ahead and get dibs on one.  We bought her at about 5 weeks old because Sandy had said the mother dog had quit feeding them and she didn't want them to starve.  The petite pup cost us 25 whole dollars, in which Sandy said  the money from the litter was going into Trevor and Colton's savings accounts.  I never thought I'd buy a dog, but adopt a mutt from an animal shelter or something, but it was a little money and went to a good place to good people and once I saw them, well, honestly, I might've paid more.  When I bent down to look into the dog house all lit up with a heat lamp, I saw all the puppies crouched in the back corner.  But this one was a little nosey and was the only one to check me out.  I scooped her up and said 'This one's mine.'  Out of all of them, she had the curliest tail and the best personality...of course I thought that-she picked ME out!    

 I took her straight over to Gail's house, which some of you know is a short distance away from Sandy and Philip's.  She fit in the palm of our hands and we gushed about how cute she was.     

That night I put her in a box beside my bed, but she cried all night.  I finally put her in bed with me thinking about how bad she must miss her mama and that's when I accidentally started the habit of her sleeping in bed with us.  And whenever she stayed at Elbert and Linda's or my mom's, she had to sleep in the bed with them, too.  Under the covers and cuddled up to either the legs or the stomach.  Everyone accepted her into their homes, their beds, and for the rest of you who liked her, your hearts.  Even Ricky, who I was unsure about Millie being in his house.  I later on found out he didn't want a dog in his house, but the next thing you know when I brought her over to visit, if she whined at the door he would jump up and say, 'Come on, Millie'.  She was almost like a first dog for JT, and maybe the fact that he liked to play with her so much may have made it OK.  

 I know she wasn't the nicest dog to some, but for those of you that she decided to love, she loved you til the day she died.  And for those of you that she took up with right away, like Kacee, JT, Troy and Josh, well, ya'll were special because it really took her a long time in most cases to warm up to people.   For all of you who loved her, who took her in, and even those of you that she may not have liked but you kept trying and trying to create a spark, for those of you who fed her peas from the dinner table and those of you that took her riding around in your cars, for those of you who endured the dog hair on your clothes and let her in your lap anyways, I wanted you to know that I remember all of it, I'm sure she did, too, and I appreciate every bit of it.  We'll miss her dearly, and I guess I'll feel a little guilty for just a little while, but my sister, Gail, said to me the other day, 'Millie had a better life in one day that what most dogs have in their whole lives.'  And that is the dog-gone truth!  We managed to spoil that little dog rotten, and maybe not so much once Amelia got here, but we still found time for her here and there, whether it was Jeffery riding her around on the farm or Amelia and I taking a ball outside to play with her.  She was loved and her life was good.  We just wanted you all to know that."

Burning Bridges

I don't work at New Orleans Boutique Hotels anymore, and for sure never again.  I left in an ungraceful way, after constructing a house of lies so large that, should it fall, would trap me beneath it like the aftermath of an earthquake.  And then, from stage left, came an unexpected wrecking ball.

There is little need for specifics, except to state that I have simply stopped going.  I ran away, like a little boy trailing kerosene and lighting matches.  And yet, I am strangely ambivalent to the whole situation.  I certainly don't regret my stopping going.  God knows (as well as any reader of this blog) that I never wanted to go to begin with and, once I started going, I was wildly unhappy the entire time I was there.  And I don't regret my awkward exit-- I've made those before and with escapes like these there's no need for decorum...

No, instead I think I feel a little wistful regret for the loss of the nostalgic glow that covered my previous time there-- back before Jeana left, and everyone changed and I changed and became cold and indifferent and they became irritating and unbearable.  In the light of this departure, even the old memories from the before time have been tainted.  That is the only downside.

And the kerosene catches and the old trestle goes up in flames...

This happens too often.  Sometimes I feel like General Sherman marching to the sea.