Ten years ago, my young, tender mind was subjected to the vulgar shenanigans of a team of Vermont highway patrol officers. It’s now ten years later, and time to revisit a modern comedy classic for the purposes of entertainment and education.

I have to say, re-viewing Super Troopers is a lot like chugging a bottle of maple syrup. For one thing, it usually begins as a dare between a group of friends, a “Hey, wouldn’t it be hilarious if…” It initially feels great, the familiar taste hits your palette and you wonder why you haven’t had it in so long. It’s all sugary hilarity as the movie takes off at its blazing comedic pace.

Unfortunately, it’s not long before the novelty wears off and you realize that you’re in it for the long haul. The comedy comes fewer and farther in between until you’ve almost reached the end and you’re wishing for the whole thing to be over because it stopped being fun a long time ago. There was nothing of any real substance here to begin with; just as a child craves pure sugar by seeking and consuming the unhealthiest sugary crap, Super Troopers satisfies the cravings of the most juvenile parts the mind. There’s masturbation, boobs, pale naked ass (and some wiener, for those with a sharp eye), insults, buffoonery, drinking, toking, bear-fucking, and moustache humor. I feel no nourishment following the experience, but I also know that a buddy is going to dare me to do it again next year and I’m probably going to say yes.

That’s because what Super Troopers does well, it does better than almost any other comedy. Most lighthearted romps are generally released and forgotten about as soon as they leave the theater, but Super Troopers’ cast of personalities are so memorable and play off each other so well that it has been elevated to that tier of comedies that obnoxious college kids quote incessantly. I know, because my friends and I were those obnoxious college kids. I’m pretty sure one of them still asks for cola by the liter. There are just so many memorable gags and quotable lines in this film that it finds a way of latching itself to your subconscious and lies just beneath the surface, waiting for the right trigger so you can spout off your favorite one-liner long after you’ve forgotten where it even originated. Farva’s passionate delivery of “I got you good, you fucker!” was a staple among my own group of friends for a long time. Okay, maybe it was just the one guy, but boy did he say it a lot.

Despite its strength as a comedy, I have to admit that Super Troopers is not a very good film. As a matter of fact, the whole thing should begin to bore you as soon as they introduce the main plot. It’s shot very plainly, no one experiences an arc or learns anything meaningful, and there isn’t even a main character.

That’s right – there is no main character in Super Troopers. It’s starting to sound more and more like one long sketch, isn’t it? Even ensemble casts generally have a main character, but for the life of me, I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be Foster because he’s trying to get the girl, or Ramathorn because he and his mustache are on screen more than anyone else.

So maybe it’s not a very good movie as far as movies go. I had even forgotten about the reveal at the end about the drug-smugglers – who really cares? We just saw them smoking the stuff and laughing merrily twenty minutes ago, I’m not exactly on the edge of my seat while they’re running around trying to arrest the guys that were kind enough to import it for their enjoyment. If they expect me to care because they need to save their department from being shut down… well, I’m not sure I want a group of lazy, immature, irresponsible hypocrites enforcing the law.

That’s why the plot falls flat for me. Then why do I enjoy watching this movie? Super Troopers shines when the Broken Lizard guys are free to play off of each other in those isolated situations like pulling over motorists or when they’re generally engaging in unprofessional behavior. If the concept had been thought up today rather than ten years ago, Super Troopers might have come into existence as a series of webisodes rather than a feature-length movie. Episode 1: The Stoners. Episode 2: The Meow Game. Episode 3: A Liter of Cola. All the hilarity in a nice, concise package and none of the boring plot to sift through. Luckily, most of the movie consists of this type of comedy and it’s only near the last half hour or so when the movie remembers that it needs to tell some kind of story and that I feel like turning it off and watching a good movie instead.

Despite its shortcomings, Super Troopers is still pretty damn funny ten years later. The comedy itself shows no signs of aging. It could have been released last year and it would still be funnier than any other movie in its genre that year by far. Would you rather see Adam Sandler in drag? Jesus. This is what I have to say to those of you that paid money to see that one:

Free-Floating Thoughts:

Snozzberries guy is married to Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks. I’m going to say that again: Snozzberries guy is married to Christina Hendricks.

The mustache is a good look for Chandrasekhar. I kind of wish he would adopt it in real life and not just for the purposes of comedy.

Womack just drank 4 shots in a row before driving off with those stoners in the backseat… shenanigans aside, drinking and driving is not funny.

I think one close-up shot of a dude’s mustachioed lips is plenty, thank you.

Fun fact about Rabbit: He’s featured in a P90X workout video. And he’s got a prosthetic leg. Does that mean it’s harder for him because he has to balance on one leg, or easier because he only has half as many muscles to work out?

Brian Cox is a poor man’s Rip Torn.

One of the cool things about revisiting movies ten years later is that you spot people who’ve become famous in between viewings. That’s Jim Gaffigan as the motorist the troopers prank.

Maybe we’ll hear the full story of how Mac got crabs in Super Troopers 2.

I just realized that you can see Johnny Chimpo’s penis in that cartoon. Super Troopers Penis Count: 2

That techno song the sex-crazy Europeans were blasting in their Porsche became a favorite driving song of mine back in college.

Farva pours .9 gallons of gasoline into a trashcan to get a free hot dog. Today, that hot dog would have cost him $3.60.

Why would a police station have the need for a voice modulator? Aside from tricking creeps into thinking they’re going to anally rape them, of course.

Farva: I want a goddamn liter of cola.

Restaurant Cashier: I don’t know what that is.

Thanks a lot, American public education system. If we were using the metric system, that kid might have avoided being tackled that day. Just a quick first lesson on conversion rates:

1 liter of cola = give me some fucking cola

I guess Lynda Carter had nothing better to do that day than to make a cameo in a low budget comedy. Mac’s right, she does have a great figure for her age.

“Lady in blue, comin’ through.” I have to actively remind myself not to say that if I ever get pulled over by a female cop.

Even more drinking and driving… maybe shutting these guys down is actually a good idea. Or did they designate Rabbit as their D.D. before they all got pissed off and shitfaced?

I’m going to say that again: Snozzberries guy is married to Christina Hendricks.

Mother of God.

Logline: Chris Klein is a hockey player who does something illegal and extreme sports-y, so he goes to Central Asia to join his friend LL Cool J in the game of Rollerball, a game in which…no. Fuck you, movie.

Another late night at the College Inn Pub, another stout Stout hangover (“Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘stout Stout hangover’ happen! It’s not going to happen!”), and now I have to write about a movie that, during the rewatch yesterday, confused me to the point of anger. I’m still not sure if I’m capable of much else other than publishing my viewing notes, but I’m also not sure if director John McTiernan’s incomprehensible science-fiction-extreme-sports-Soviet-dystopia-plus-Rebecca-Romijn-has-boobs-and-a-funny-Russian-accent-plus-silly-masks-action-thriller deserves anything more.

I’m going to stick by that logic. Don’t pretend like you wanted to see a deep, thought-provoking blog entry about John McTiernan’s Rollerball. It’s simply not worth it. Consider this an anti-review. Call it Dadaist if you want.

Is It Better Or Worse Than I Remember?

Shut up.

What’s Better About The Film?

That I’m not watching it anymore.

What’s Worse About The Film?

Your mom.

What Did I Learn From This Experience?

Why do I have a copy of this movie? “It was free” doesn’t seem to cut it anymore.

[Angry, Violent,] Free-Floating Thoughts:

Chris Klein is in a lot of terrible films, but I still refuse to call him a terrible actor. I have no real evidence for this other than Election, which in hindsight now seems less like acting and more like brilliant casting on Alexander Payne’s part.

Why is this opening San Francisco street luge scene filmed in such a dark, muddy fashion? I know that San Francisco is a very gray city (something Hollywood movies tend to get wrong), but I still need to be able to see what’s happening.

Can’t swing it in hockey? Do Rollerball in the distant future of 2005! In Kazakhstan!

LL Cool J, much like Harrison Ford, is extremely capable at inhabiting ridiculous films without looking foolish. I’ll follow this maniac anywhere.

So the citizens of Kazakhstan filed a lawsuit against Borat, but not the Rollerball remake?

Stevi on the film’s costuming, paraphrased: “This is strange. Even though they’re wearing masks and heavy clothing that obscures almost their entire bodies, they still feel the need to differentiate the genders via their outfits.”

This was held back from theatres for nine months. Oh, Dumpuary film releases. (Phrase trademarked by Grantland.com)

Jean Reno: Vodka!

Assistant: Vodka!

Did I blink and miss Pink’s cameo?

Stevi: “Oh, so Rollerball is roller derby plus Quidditch.”

Stevi on Naveen Andrews’ terrible haircut: “He looks like brown Alan Rickman.”

Why is Twiki from Buck Rogers one of the athletes?

LL Cool J warning Chris Klein about a violent competitor: “It could be PCP for all you know. That dude doesn’t feel anything.”

Rollerball is a terrible sport. I need to finally sit down and watch the original soon, because that version of the game just has to be better than this bullshit.

“Is it true your mother is a crackwhore?” LL Cool J is about to get all Naval Criminal Investigative Service: Los Angeles on your ass, Russian journalist.

This film’s portrayal of athletes’ excessive lifestyles has nothing on Oliver Stone’s Any Given Sunday.

From the IMDb goofs section: Mongolians do not speak Cantonese.

John Stamos fucked up. Apparently, Rebecca Romijn lifts weights topless.

Oh, hey Slipknot. I forgot you were a thing.

Blah blah blah bored. Time to screw around on Letterboxd.com. (Does anybody need an invite? I have three to send out right now. Give me your e-mail address.)

I can’t believe I let slip my mind the major central action sequence (at least seven minutes long) filmed entirely in night vision. Additionally, it seems that a sound designer trolled the movie by inserting a Hanna-Barbera boioioioioioiiiiing sound effect in the middle of it. This is…this is awful. This is like theKnight Rider remake. What happened to you, John McTiernan? (I’m talking purely in terms of aesthetic talent. Let’s not even get into his legal trouble with the FBI.)

I bet the writers thought that Chris Klein killing all of Jean Reno’s henchmen with a rollerball was a metaphor.

Ah yes, one of those endings where the heroes murder everybody.

Freeze frame on Chris Klein’s bloody face. Cue bad Rob Zombie song. Roll credits.

There’s no reason this should’ve cost $70 million. It looks like a TV movie on Spike.

From Keith Phipps’ review:

 Rollerball was reportedly tampered with extensively over the months since its planned release last summer, and the signs that it’s been edited past the point of comprehensibility arrive early. Before the movie’s first match, Cool J turns to Klein and asks, “You got your armadillo on?” The comment makes sense eventually, but it initially sounds jarringly bizarre.

From Ebert’s review:

The funniest line in the movie belongs to Reno, who bellows, “I’m this close to a North American cable deal!” North American cable carries Battling Bots, Iron Chefs, Howard Stern and Monster Truck Rallies. There isn’t a person in the audience who couldn’t get him that deal.

No.

 Please forgive the hastiness of this re-view. Due to unforeseen and completely understandable reasons, our original re-viewer for this week had to bow out. While under the circumstances I would normally let the week slide by without an entry in the 10YA project, I had enough time today to wander down to Scarecrow Video and pick up another movie celebrating its tenth anniversary and take over. Additionally, I was able to rope my extremely busy grad student wife into a late-morning viewing (while she graded papers, of course) on the promise of more Jason Segel and Jason Schwartzman film knowledge.

What I believe I neglected to mention to my wife, though, is that Slackers is an awkward, uncomfortable, unpleasant movie, that despite a few well-earned laughs (mostly of the WTF variety), this is a difficult movie to enjoy, even when watched ironically (which you should never do, you cynical knaves). I’m fine that she was able to quickly tune out most of the film’s tackiness, because she was still capable of engaging with its early-millennium humor. (Does anybody remember Tomcats?) This is good for me, because the best conversations I have with Stevi tend to occur while watching/discussing ugly or pointless entertainment. And nowadays, many things fall under both categories.

Slackers simply doesn’t work anymore, even less than it did in the first place. Any nostalgia I had for its crassness now seems useless in retrospect, because the point of this film’s crassness isn’t to transcend its own bad taste (e.g. the Farrelly Brothers pre-Shallow Hal) but to exist solely to shock. Gross for its own sake. And once you’ve seen Jason Schwartzman sponge bathe a nude Mamie Van Doren and call her a dirty old whore, the magic is gone, because you can only lose that part of your soul once.

I think my issue with this film, despite remembering that I once enjoyed it, is that it’s too mean to enjoy as an easygoing comedy but not gutsy enough to go the full dark comedy route. It’s a sitcom episode type of story (one of those pointless third-season-or-later B-stories only meant to carry some supporting characters along) that unintentionally stumbles into blacker, creepier territory. Part of this is the anti-charm of the central performance, which falls smack dab in the middle of Devon Sawa’s post-Little Giants-pre-Nikita career confusion, and his hero often comes off as more devious than rakish, even when the plot calls for more of the latter. (This is a romantic comedy, after all.) The other part is Schwartzman’s utter dedication to making Cool Ethan a truly despicable individual, even when he should be more bumbling than criminally sociopathic. Sawa and Schwartzman are willing to go there (Schwartzman much more so, being the better actor), but the rest of the movie isn’t. Even a game Laura Prepon, who tries desperately to play a wild and uninhibited character, can’t follow through and reverts back to the more family-friendly Donna Pinciotti whenever her character isn’t swearing.

And yet, I still like seeing Devon Sawa in anything. I was happy to see Schwartzman again before he settled into his earned indie sainthood. And hey, there’s Michael Maronna (Big Pete from The Adventures of Pete & Pete, Jeff McCallister in Home Alone) farting constantly.

Oh, to be 19 and innocent again.

Free-Floating Thoughts:

Love the opening instrumental version of “Baba O’Reilly.” The film subsequently goes straight to hell.

More in the “Hey! Good to see you in this film!” file: Jim Rash as a professor, Nat Faxon as a grad student, Retta (Parks & Recreation) as an office manager, Michael McDonald (MADtv), Joe Flaherty, Todd Giebenhain (Raising Hope)

This is the alternate universe where Marshall Eriksen never meets Ted Mosby and Lily Aldrin in college, and thus falls in with the wrong crowd. And Laura Prepon, who also had her own How I Met Your Mother arc, is a less-uppity version of Ted Mosby’s college ex-girlfriend.

Upon seeing Jason Segel in drag, Stevi expressed her interest in him playing Frank-N-Furter one day.

Dewey Nicks, the director, stages and edits these scenes in such a chaotic fashion that vital bits of dialogue (mostly those of the expository variety) are almost completely glossed over. It’s not a surprise he never helmed another film.

Iomega Zip drives!

The campus is a mixture of UC Riverside and the University of Redlands. Some of you SoCal people probably know some things about either of those campuses. I do not.

It’s a strange choice in making Schwartzman’s geek character the antagonist, when with just a few tweaks – you know, like him not being a creep in possession of a hair doll – he’s clearly the hero.

“So you fingered an old lady?”

The sub-porn film score is atrocious.

This lies in a difficult middle ground between the teen comedies that followed the John Hughes antisocial introverts and those that follow the more outgoing, clever, popular types. Its shifts in tone are too jarring to work.

Ah yes, the scene where Big Pete sings a duet with his erect and be-socked penis. How could I forget?

IMDb trivia: “Originally in the singing penis scene, Mike Maronna’s own naked penis was used with a CGI mouth added in. After being screened for the MPAA however, the filmmakers were told to put a son on it (literally).”

“Ethan, that’s a troll.”

“Gnome, it’s not.”

Being a fashion photographer and commercial director (I’m going solely off IMDb’s one fact about the director, and nothing else!), Nicks at least gives a few scenes a pretty sheen, like Devon Sawa and James King makeout session in the pool. It also allows for yeah-I’ll-do-this-as-a-favor cameos from Gina Gershon and Cameron Diaz, both of whom appear twitchingly uncomfortable when they’re on camera.

Ah. This film spent 18 months in the can before it was released, and then apparently left theatres after only two weeks. That’s okay, since it was clearly designed for those who prefer home video and mass quantities of alcohol.

I unironically love Ace of Base. That means that the three minutes sequence set to “The Sign” in this movie is absolutely perfect.

Kane Hodder? Who the hell did Kane Hodder do stuntwork for in this movie? Mamie Van Doren?

Aaaaaaand the movie ends with an outtake of Jason Schwartzman calling Cameron Diaz a bitch. Classy.

From Ebert’s review:

This film knows no shame.

Consider a scene where the heroine’s roommate, interrupted while masturbating, continues even while a man she has never met is in the room. Consider a scene where the hero’s roommate sings a duet with a sock puppet on his penis. Consider a scene where we cut away from the hero and the heroine to join two roommates just long enough for a loud fart, and then cut back to the main story again.

And consider a scene where Mamie Van Doren, who is 71 years old, plays a hooker in a hospital bed who bares her breasts so that the movie’s horny creep can give them a sponge bath. On the day when I saw “Slackers,” there were many things I expected and even wanted to see in a movie, but I confess Mamie Van Doren’s breasts were not among them.

From Mick LaSalle’s review:

The above description sounds like the basis for an unpleasant thriller. It sounds like a prelude to violence. Instead it’s the central plot line of “Slackers,” a discordant comedy that gives bad taste a bad name.

From Nathan Rabin’s review:

A nonstop assault on Schwartzman’s dignity disguised as a freewheeling college farce.

RRRRRRRRRRGH, “Cracking Up” on Fox.

Bloody Sunday

Dir. Paul Greengrass

I have to admit that I didn’t know much about the conflict in Northern Ireland as a child growing up in the U.S. In the 1980s you would hear things on the news about tensions and flare-ups, mobs and arrests, Catholics and Protestants. The word ‘Belfast’ took on an insidious and bellicose connotation I would associate for years with explosions and assassinations.  From watching movies I knew there were mass arrests and detentions without trials.  My knowledge of the conflict and its fundamental origins was unfortunately colored by its occasionally sensationalized representation in Hollywood films such as Patriot Games and Blown Away. Here rogue IRA extremists run piously rampant on U.S. soil and a centuries old colonial feud—one which seemed so out of place in the blissfully ignorant and ‘peaceful’ post-1989 era of American politics—plays out its anachronistic drama in the form of a rude intrusion into the artificial order and stability of quotidian American life. Mass culture—any culture, really—tends to stand in between oneself and the world in this way, creating frameworks which mediate and distort our experience of other people, places, and times. Thus, despite having seen more than a few nominally ‘Northern Irish’ films by my eighteenth birthday, despite having seemingly purchased temporary proximity to that world for the price of a video rental, it remained extremely distant to me.

Bloody Sunday, Paul Greengrass’s direct cinema recreation of the infamous 1972 ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre in Derry, Ireland is perhaps all the more amazing, then, for the skillful, honest, and visceral manner with which it manages to bridge that distance. Tellingly inspired by Don Mullan’s influential bookEyewitness Bloody Sunday (1997), the film deftly manipulates what is by now a fairly tired cinematic conceit—the embedded camera—to staggering effect, placing the viewer at a vantage point which manages to place the viewer both uncomfortably within the action, yet also critically outside of it. The first aspect derives unavoidably from the way the film is shot, in a dizzying handheld style, just over the shoulder or behind the person witnessing events.  It’s kind of like being invited over to a friend’s house when the family is having a fight: you find yourself inextricably involved merely by being there but nevertheless also feel like an extra, only superficially attached to an actually existing participant. You are both inside and outside, forced to confront the messiness of someone else’s house by participating in it and understanding it on its own terms, while simultaneously maintaining the critical perspective of the outsider for whom the immediate reality will never hit quite as hard.

No matter what anyone says, forms of filmmaking which attempt to disguise or transform the function or role of the camera in the storytelling process are still inherently stylistic.  It’s just that their style is a perceived absence of style, or what you might more accurately call a natural, organic style, wherein the camera follows a narrative trajectory dictated by the flow of events themselves. The aesthetic conundrum hanging over a project like this seems to be how to take a naturally dramatic situation, point a camera at it, and let it develop on its own.  On the one hand, this encourages a style of filmmaking so formless as to be anarchic.  After all, where does a camera naturally point at a moment so saturated with human drama?  Are certain types of drama more dramatic than others?  The standard trick for getting around this problem is, of course, to fix the larger moment by examining it through the prism of a single human relationship, or else through a cluster of them. However, to conjoin a complex of ideas so large—colonialism, oppression, state brutality—and with such far-ranging, systemic implications to a single relationship or plot line seems to do an equally as pernicious injustice to the broader context.

To its credit, Bloody Sunday manages to perch itself at this tense median between narrative cohesion and veracity, shifting quickly but never confusingly from individual stories to the larger, inevitable movement towards the tragic end we all know is coming. Following Mullan’s book, Greengrass generates this balance by producing a perspective that is both ‘eyewitness’ and ‘eye in the sky,’ both man on the street and omniscient narrator. The film in many ways treats the entire Bogside neighborhood as one very complex character, tinged with conflicting hopes and fears and ringed by a simmering frustration with the British military presence and the loyalist oppression it is seen to safeguard. There is latent danger in this, as the broader perspective mirrors that of the story’s colonial intruders, for whom the Catholic neighborhood is a material and psychological space that must be mapped and cordoned in the process of containing and controlling it. The film is extremely adept at producing visual representations of this production of power.  Throughout the film we see city officials and British military personnel hunched over maps or aerial diagrams, mapping and controlling space as a means of producing and enforcing the natural lawlessness of the dissident Irish marchers.

However, what saves the film from devolving into a purely Manichean struggle between oppressor and oppressed is the focus on the figure of Ivan Cooper, an Irish MP whose path we follow from the morning of the fated Civil Rights March he helped organize through the eventual confrontation with British army and paramilitary forces that would leave 13 people (mostly men and teenage boys) dead.  In doing so, the film manages to tether its subject to a key player in the unfolding drama without necessarily making it a story about Cooper himself.  Perhaps the finest example of this balance occurs just after the massacre, where we see Cooper striding dazed but purposeful through the rooms and hallways of a hospital filled with grieving, confused locals and tense, watchful soldiers.   The scene is so chaotic and full of grief that the camera—designed to follow the natural flow of events—has a difficult time clinging to Cooper as he proceeds to inform and comfort the families of the dead. The camera pans in, then out, then in again, losing focus , then regaining it, shifting left, then right, then back, as though trying to both individualize the trauma of the moment while also aggregating it. It seeks and finds humanity without needing to contrive it, emphasizing at one and the same time both the universal element of suffering and struggle, and also the exceptional difference of this suffering and this struggle.

For me, this strategy was absolutely integral to my second viewing of the film. What makes watching it as an American potentially so difficult, I think, is that the story told is presented in the form of sub-cultural faultiness and visual and audial markers that are extremely familiar. Because of this it can be easy to read the conflict as merely another iteration of a larger pattern. In a way, this is absolutely true.  I, for one, had never considered the ways that the discourse of the American civil rights movement was able to move beyond its own native confines in the process of working within and informing the development of other decolonization struggles. While this is an idea I’ve become more accustomed to in the last few years as my academic training has proceeded, I found it nonetheless jarring to watch scenes of peaceful Irish protestors marching and singing ‘We Shall Overcome.”  I was equally alarmed to see angry youth armed mostly with stones being blasted with water cannons by agents of state authority who consider them nothing more than savage, barbaric ‘yobbos’.  Upon witnessing these things it was difficult not to think to myself that I’d seen this before.  And, of course, I had, in film footage from Little Rock, Selma, and Montgomery. The intertextual drama I was watching unfold was no less authentic for being ‘borrowed ’and reworked in an Irish context, because even that ‘reworking’ was entirely unique, both in terms of the film and the event it portrayed. I suppose that the point of all this is to argue that in bringing me closer to this event while maintaining a certain degree of distance, the film has helped me recognize how this process works in my own life, and in the greater cultural processes within which I, too, am embedded.

Aw, geez, is it almost time for my high school reunion already? Ten years ago was my senior year, so it coincided pretty nicely with the release of Orange County. In the film, Colin Hanks’s Shaun Brumder is a senior anxiously trying as hard as he can to get accepted into Stanford so he can escape his life in Orange County.

Alright, let’s back up for a minute there. Shaun may be an affluent teen living in an affluent county trying to get into an affluent university, but that’s not focused on much in this movie. One could easily switch out the Orange County and Stanford locations with no impact whatsoever to the plot. The elements that do get played up have more to do with Shaun’s growing restlessness with having lived with the same group of people, like Jack Black as his big brother Lance, for eighteen years. In addition, these relationships with friends and family are becoming strained due to the potential split that will occur if he ends up going to college out of town.

Despite the wacky hijinks displayed in the trailer, Orange County distances itself from the typical high school movie/show. The class warfare (pun intended) of the various cliques is noticeably absent (alright, I’ll stop). Much like Parks and Recreation, the film’s approach to the entire cast of characters is to make them likeable. Nobody is acting out maliciously at another person. At their worst, the characters are merely annoying. For example, Carly Pope’s Tanya seems like the cliché snobbish cheerleader, but there’s enough absurdity to her backstory that you just end up laughing at her.

If there’s anything that I would fault Orange County for, it’s the oversaturation of licensed music. It feels like a new song is played with every scene change. Of course, that’s to be expected for an MTV film, which easily doubles the number of songs on the soundtrack compared to if it had been produced by another studio. And “Butterfly” by Crazy Town is so damn catchy. There are two dance sequences set to it. That’s two more than normal! If not for the music, which severely dates this movie, Orange County would have a greater sense of timelessness to it.

Despite its faults, Mike White’s writing manages to mix humor and heart in way that’s not unlike a Judd Apatow project (Leslie Mann is in it too). The humor has some wacky and awkward situations, but it never goes over the top. Same goes for the drama’s emotional beats, which never get too sappy. The film is simply a straightforward coming-of-age story, and I especially recommend Orange County as essential viewing for anyone that’s currently entertaining thoughts of going to college.

Is It Better Or Worse Than I Remember?

It’s better. Ten years ago, I was watching TV in the living room when my big brother came in and told me to check out this movie. I had nothing better to do at the time, so I did. Afterwards, he asked me what I thought about it and I replied that I liked it and thought it was an okay comedy.

That was the problem. I went expecting some type of Jack Black comedy. Sure, Orange County has its share of laughs, but it’s by no means a belly buster. Not only that, but I thought to myself, “hey, this is a movie. This is fiction. I shouldn’t really be taking the narrative too seriously.” I didn’t realize how genuine and straightforward White’s writing really was.

When I look back at my life from a decade ago, it makes me wonder if I also missed something that my brother was trying to tell me. After this most recent viewing, I think about how ashamed Shaun is of his family. I think about how Shaun makes an incredibly huge deal when he doesn’t get into the school of his choice and acts as if there are no other options left in life. I think about how the Brumder parents, though initially separated, find some way to rekindle their relationship and reconcile. Lastly, I think about how Lance, despite not having a fancy job and still living at home with his parents, still cares very much for his younger brother when all is said and done.

Then I think about Lance tumbling around in his briefs. Big brothers are fucking weird.

Free-Floating Thoughts

Although I don’t actively follow Mike White’s work, I do enjoy watching the ones I come across, like Dead Man on Campus, Dawson’s Creek, School of Rock, and Nacho Libre.

There’s something about Colin Hanks that just rubs me the wrong way. It might be a combination of his weaselly face and what I perceive to be nepotism in him landing some projects like That Thing You Do! and Band of Brothers.

Is there a more obnoxious movie shot than a character looking at the camera and talking out loud? Probably if the character isn’t breaking the fourth wall while doing it. Who talks out loud while typing like that?

Whenever I see them onscreen, I confuse Mike White, Jack McBrayer, and Ewen Bremner with each other.

I’m not sure if this was intentional, but Colin Hanks also made an appearance on The O.C. several years later. He was part of the show within the show called “The Valley.” Wow, did it just get really meta in here?

Holy crap. That dog really did bite Schuyler Fisk’s face.

And there’s a swimming pool scene as a reference to The Graduate. The protagonists of both films have plenty of angst in regards to their uncertain futures.

Best line of the film goes to John Lithgow’s Bud Brumder when he finds out about Shaun’s plans after graduation: “A writer? What do you have to write about? You’re not oppressed. You’re not gay.”

I barely recognized Harold Ramis. If that’s how he looked like ten years ago, then I’m not sure I want to see Dr. Egon Spengler in that shape in a potential Ghostbusters III.

Hey! It’s Lizzy Caplan in her pre-Party Down role of “brunette friend.”

Whatever happened to Schuyler Fisk? I would’ve figured her role in this movie would have cemented here as one of the Apatow regulars. Hollywood needs more cute redheads.

I consider Saving Private Ryan to be the definitive cinematic World War II experience. I hold Black Hawk Down in the same regard when it comes to contemporary 90s conflicts. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that feels that way. One has to look no further than the videogame industry’s many attempts to recreate the visceral experience of watching this film. There’s NovaLogic’s Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, which was based on the events of the Somali Civil War. But that game never reached the heights of popularity as 2007’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which had an action sequence leading up to its most iconic moment where the player had to rescue a downed Black Hawk helicopter pilot in a hostile urban environment. Fast forward to 2011’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and that game has a mission that takes the player through a hostile Mogadishu.

So what made the October 3-4 Battle of Mogadishu so important? The final casualty count that appears during the credits (19 American soldiers were killed, with over 1,000 Somalis dead) almost downplays the events of that day. Sure, it was high on the Somalis side, but war movies and the action genre have accustomed the movie-going audience to absurdly high kill counts. Even the results of the battle weren’t significant to the overall state of Somalia, as the credits also not that warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid would continue on with his influence until his eventual death in battle three years after the events in the movie. And to this day, Somalia remains in conflict.

It wasn’t the results of the Battle of Mogadishu, but rather the actions taken by the soldiers involved with the operation that make Black Hawk Down such a compelling watch. At its core, the film is simply the story of heroic bravery in the face of insurmountable odds. The film’s slogan is “leave no man behind” and that line is often repeated by Major General William Garrison at each unfortunate turn of events. And boy, do things go south. The Battle of Mogadishu was an operation where everything that could possibly go wrong, did go wrong. Even when the armored reinforcements arrived to rescue the encircled troops, there wasn’t enough room in the vehicles so a number of soldiers had to trek back to friendly territory on foot in what would become known as the “Mogadishu Mile.” And once the soldiers made it back to the U.N. Safe Zone, there’s the realization that Operation Gothic Serpent isn’t done and that they would have to go back into hostile territory in due time.

There are several great dichotomies going on throughout the film. One is the soldiers’ portrayals before the start of the operation compared with their state after it on the following day. The United States Army Rangers, Delta Force, and Special Operations Aviation Regiment have an extended downtime sequence at the beginning of the film. This helps establish each of the characters’ respective personalities because it does get hard to visually keep track of them on the battlefield. It also points out that a number of them haven’t been involved in direct combat, much less shot at a person. Their transformation is that much more magnified once the fighting starts.

Another dichotomy is between Josh Hartnett’s Ranger Staff Sergeant Eversmann and Eric Bana’s Delta Force Sergeant First Rank Norm Hooten. The two of them couldn’t be any more different from each other. Eversmann was unexpectedly thrown into the leadership position over the Rangers after his Lieutenant had a seizure. Throughout the operation, he’s forced to adapt quickly in order to keep his men out of danger. On the other hand, the combat hardened Hooten goes into battle situation after battle situation without a second thought. At film’s end, Hooten explains to Eversmann that he isn’t a war junkie. He does his duty because the lives of the men serving next him are all that matter on the battlefield. Eversmann realizes that he shares a similar perspective as he recalls a moment when a friend asked him if he felt he was a hero for fighting somebody else’s war. He feels that “nobody asks to be a hero. It just sometimes turns out that way.”

A third dichotomy is the portrayal of the American soldiers and the Somali militia, which leads to one of the main criticisms about Black Hawk Down. One could easily accuse this film of dehumanizing the Somali population. Despite the opening recap that described how the civil war was causing famine on a “biblical scale,” not much effort was shown in differentiating the opposing factions. Three of the four Somali characters with significant screen time were part of Mohammed Farrah Aidid’s forces. The Somali militia itself was presented as a giant hostile mob. During aerial surveillance shots, they could be seen swarming around the helicopter crash sites. From the ground force’s perspective, they were a faceless threat that would rapidly appear and disappear through the market alleys, windows, and rooftops. For better or for worse, it worked at establishing the danger that the Americans faced.

And yet, you can’t fully fault the film because Ridley Scott knows the importance of showing the other side’s perspective. Even with their limited screen time, the Somali characters call into question America’s involvement with their country. While being interrogated, warlord Osman Atto explains that Somalia isn’t inhabited by unintelligent savages. There’s a history of civil war that rages in the country and the presence of U.N. and American forces aren’t going to magically cause the conflicts to cease.

Is It Better Or Worse Than I Remember?

Better after gaining more knowledge about the Battle of Mogadishu since my initial viewing. Ridley Scott knows how to set a mood and Black Hawk Down is no exception. The film conveys Mogadishu as the very last place anybody would ever want to do battle. I’ve seen this film plenty of times and it still has the same emotional impact on repeated views. It’s shot in the gritty, shaky style as many of Scott’s newer films but it makes sense within the context of battle. And the award winning sound just immerses you in the conflict.

What really changed for me though is my viewpoint on war. When I was a teenager, I was war buff. I would spend weekday afternoons watching World War II shows on the History Channel. I went to the Van Nuys Air Show every year to check out the fighter planes. I bought every book I could find on military vehicles and operations. I could grasp the horrors of war, but not necessarily the morality. Black Hawk Down, along with Three Kings, was what started to give me a different outlook. A couple years later I finally had the opportunity to really take time to analyze warfare through a variety of college courses. I don’t consider myself a strict pacifist but I’m also not as hawkish as I used to be.

What I like best about Black Hawk Down is that it doesn’t get too heavy-handed with a message as say Oliver Stone would if given the reins. The film’s ambiguity allows for a person to enjoy it regardless of having a pro-war or anti-war stance. The number of casualties remain the same, and nothing can take away from the bravery of those involved in the conflict. U.N. and American involvement in Somalia came about from the best of intentions, yet failed to accomplish lasting beneficial effects. And really, isn’t that the unfortunate circumstance of modern warfare in general?

Free-Floating Thoughts

My favorite cinematic depictions of modern warfare are The Hurt Locker, Black Hawk Down, and Three Kings.

I was not a big fan of Josh Hartnett at the time, but the trailer sold me on seeing it. You know the one I’m talking about. The one with “Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?” by Moby.

This movie had quite the line up of actors: Ewan McGregor, Eric Bana, Nicolaj Coster-Waldau, Tom Hardy, and Orlando Bloom. Wait a minute. They’re not American. They took our jobs!

I don’t know if you’ve been keeping track of all the reviews coming out on 10YA, but 2001 was a banner year for what would become the cast of Game of Thrones. Nicolaj Coster-Waldau in Black Hawk Down, Sean Bean in The Fellowship of the Ring, Michelle Fairly in The Others, Iain Glen in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Mark Addy in A Knight’s Tale, and Jason Momoa in Baywatch.

And since this is the last 10YA post of 2011, I’d also like to mention a couple more things:

Even though I met her a couple years prior, I didn’t really get around to talking in depth about movies with Stevi until Kingdom of Heaven in 2005, which just so happens to be another Ridley Scott/Orlando Bloom picture. In that sense, Black Hawk Down seems like a fitting way to cap off this year. I started doing guest posts on Ten Years Ago back in March and I look forward to contributing more in 2012. The blog offers a great look back on cinematic history with its retrospective lens. Even though I live two states away from Marcus and Stevi, it’s nice to know that I can still keep in touch and talk movies with my friends through these posts.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you immediately that I have a tremendous amount of catching up to do when it comes to essential film viewing. Due to the fact that my parents quite strictly adhered to rating classifications when I was growing up, I simply missed many of the things so many people loved and considered classics: Jaws, Aliens, Close Encounters, The Godfather, Blade Runner — well, you get the picture. Over the past few years, I’ve made a concerted effort to try and catch up. I hear the same thing over and over from everyone I meet. “[Insert Infallible Movie Title here] is the greatest movie ever made,” and I’ll just shrug my shoulders because I’ve finally seen it and it was just “ok.” To me, it just wasn’t as good as Lord of the Rings.

When Fellowship of the Ring was unleashed upon my seventeen-year-old mind, I was in the middle of my senior year Christmas break. After the first two theater viewings, I went back again three more times just to experience the storming rage of the Balrog in the depths of Khazad-dum, to be swept away in the tragic death of Boromir, son of Denethor. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve seen it since over the last decade, but even to this day when I watched it again for this review, none of its potency has been lost.

Fellowship in particular is a bit of a curious film. Many people I talk to about the Rings trilogy always point to the first as being the best of the three. I’ll agree that it’s certainly the most focused; it’s trying to do the least of the three movies, and this has always been its greatest strength. Whenever I think about the movie, so much of it is basically just a bunch of actors running around a forest with cameras and swords role-playing, and it’s a wonder so many people were swept away by it. I remember the month of November before release being a strange time in high school. Everyone had seen me carrying around the book during lunch and in the library and when the time came closer to the film’s release, many of my classmates in school would always ask me if they would like the movie, and if they didn’t, that somehow I’d be responsible for their displeasure. Having no knowledge of the film’s actual quality beforehand, I assured them that it would indeed be awesome. I didn’t actually expect many of them to like it of course, but when school started again in January, it’s all they could talk to me about. They wanted to know what happened next. I knew then that something had changed, and it was exciting. I found myself between classes teasing them about the Battle of the Hornburg, of horrors Frodo and Sam would have to face alone, of the great battle at the Pelennor Fields. In short, I found myself sharing my excitement of tales of fantasy with people I never imagined I could hold with. I didn’t realize then how much Rings would change the landscape of movies forever. You only even have to look as far as Harry Potter to wonder whether we would have seen that film series get its proper due had it not been for what Rings achieved. As far as I was aware, fantasy movies suddenly became a new form of dramatic art.

Just look at Fellowship, and consider for a minute who the villain of the movie is. Is it Sauron? Is it the One Ring? Both are forces that everyone fears and despairs over. But what I’ve always felt was genius about Fellowship is that throughout the film, the true antagonist is the evil within all the heroes that are just waiting to be released. There’s no ultimate villain with a mask that needs to be defeated; the journey itself is a test that will break the heroes of their will and fortitude. I remember getting into arguments with a friend in high school over the character of Boromir. He hated him. He was glad to see him die. I never understood that. What happened to Boromir is a tragedy, and was one of the most moving storylines throughout the whole film. He’s always been my favorite example of a flawed hero, of a man whose hopes for the future have driven him to despair and that even the strongest of the men of Gondor could fall. His death is bittersweet, even for the audience, because you’re not really sure if you can forgive his treachery even after his valiant death. Even as he’s dying, all he wants is for his home. And while the battles with orcs and trolls and wraiths rages on throughout the rest of the tale, none are quite as heart-wrenching as seeing Frodo finally succumb to the Ring so close to the end.

To me, that’s a horrifying notion: that given the right amount of encouragement, there is in all of us the potential to become what we fear or hate the most. But that’s a subtle sort of fear that’s applied throughout the movies. And it’s one that doesn’t really begin until they reach Rivendell. I’ve only recently started noticing this, but the first half of the movie is actually kind of strange to me when compared to the rest of the film(s). It plays almost like a horror or suspense movie. From the moment Bilbo disappears, the movie essentially becomes a claustrophobic chase film until they reach Rivendell, when the movie realizes it’s actually a sprawling epic. I understand why it’s done, too; it’s the most exciting way to get them to Rivendell, but it’s always been the weakest bit of the whole series for me.

The film has a few other flaws that I’ve never been able to get over either. Throughout the whole trilogy, there was only one elf that I thought was perfectly cast, and that was Galadriel. Cate Blanchett is stunning in this movie, and when I think of what an elf should look like, her striking features and mysterious demeanor fit perfectly. I can’t say the same for any other elf in the movies. Arwen annoys me more and more with each viewing. I think the problem is in her delivery. She seems to confuse a distant mysteriousness with out-of-breath whispers and it verges on comical. I’ve never been able to take her seriously and I never will. Similarly, Hugo Weaving as Elrond is equally strange. He’s got a regal tone about him but he’s hideous as an elf. Come to think of it, I don’t think I was ever really happy with any of the male elfs cast in the Rings movies. They’re the only ones I really felt were just cosplaying their roles whenever they were on screen.

Ok, so basically the elves bothered me. I must just be dwarven at heart. It’s probably fitting then that I’m working on The Hobbit now and am responsible for making exciting things happen to thirteen different dwarves. Perhaps my year on the project has colored my affinity to favor the free-folk over the elves as a general principle.

Ten years, three Rings movies, an English degree and an animation minor later, I find myself writing this in New Zealand during my Christmas holiday from my fulltime job, which is at Weta Digital, where I’ve been working on The Hobbit movies for over a year now. In fact this very week, the world finally caught its first glimpse at footage from the first official trailer, and the majority of people weighing in has been the same: everyone feels like they’ve gone back ten years in time to when Fellowship was first released.  I’m actually friends and coworkers now with people who worked on Fellowship a decade ago. It’s a position I never thought I would actually find myself in. It’s exciting to think that maybe someday, ten years from now, someone else will watch The Hobbit multiple times over shots I crafted in previs, in the same way I kept going back just to see the Balrog. One can only hope.

And speaking of the Balrog, I’m so impressed as to how well the movie has visually held up. Sure there’s an occasional matte line that doesn’t quite look right (look at the shot of Gandalf and Bilbo in Bag End by the fireplace when talking about leaving the Ring to Frodo) or a stray digi-double that looks really animated (such as Legolas on the Troll in Moria). However, nothing really feels dated. I find that recent movies heavy on FX always have this softly-lit look to them that I didn’t notice in movies ten years ago, and to me it always makes it look too fake. Fellowship and its two successors don’t suffer the same fate, but my love for these movies may just be coloring my bias.

In the end, these films endure because of a deep earnestness in the characters that I’ve never seen replicated in subsequent fantasy films. I may be jumping ahead here, but whose heart didn’t ache when Faramir was departing Minas Tirith to certain doom at the command of his maddening father, at his words “Where does my allegiance lie if not here?” Who has forgotten Gandalf’s words to Frodo when he wishes he had never had the ring? Who didn’t wish for a different fate for Boromir when he pledges his allegiance to Aragorn as his final breaths left his body? I’ve actually watched the trilogy three times in the last year and each time these moments are only amplified with every viewing. You could feel how much every actor loved the tale they were a part in. It’s why these films aren’t just magnificent; it’s a tale worth remembering for years and years to come.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Dir. Wes Anderson

It’s taken me ten years to realize that there is a due date on The Royal Tenenbaums, Wes Anderson’s 2001 homage to faded genius, family dysfunction, pastel palettes, and a year that looks suspiciously like 1975 (but feels suspiciously like 1995). I’ve a number of reasons for making this claim, not the least of which is the one most relevant to us here at 10 Years Ago, the notion that I was due to revisit this film consciously at some point, and to adapt or revise my opinions of it, both sentimental and intellectual. But there’s more to it than that. It’s an interesting word, ‘due,’ encapsulating time and anticipation (that which is due), but also obligation and justice (to pay your dues; to give someone his or her due). Movies have due dates, as do library books, foodstuffs, beer, babies, some friends, some fashions, and, thankfully, some emotions. As the ambivalent signification of the word implies, however, these ‘due dates’ are about more than turning your DVDs in on time or polishing off that milk before it goes bad. No, there’s a kind of portent to the connotations of comeuppance and reckoning implied by the word ‘due,’ something dark and ancient, something mythical. Faust learned that the devil will get his due, as would Faust himself, as would Achilles, Oedipus, and Antigone. I’ll make my invocation of these weighty myths more relevant in a minute, but first I want to start off by saying that stories, too, must sometimes get their due. By this I mean both those we hold out at arms length as somehow different from our own, and those we tell daily about ourselves, whether in our own heads or as part of a larger composition. Stories come round, often simply as motifs, themes, and resonances, but sometimes in the form of people, behavior, and choices. The past will come around, this I can assure you. To quote a line from another auteur’s film, ‘the book says that we may be done with the past, but the past is never done with us.’

I’ve decided to break this review up into 4 parts, for the entirely arbitrary reason that I simply like parts. I think it’s also because I’ve not been able to decide on an agreeable format, only knowing that I want to do something different from the other reviews I’ve written throughout the year. Some of these parts are devoted to the notion that it’s high time I give this film — a film I’ve unselfconsciously adored for far too long — its due diligence. The rest are a potpourri of intellectual interest, critical inquiry, and random musings (and there’s plenty more of them at the end, to boot). Anyway, here we go:

1. The patriarch, the myth, and the meltdown

As we see in the opening credit sequence, Tenenbaums is, or will at some point be, due, back to the library, that is. In the first of his many auteur-ish constructions, Anderson goes out of his way to let us know that what we’re watching is a tale, a story, like one you’d check out from the local public library and lose yourself in for a few hours. At the same time, the regality of the decoration and the magical/mythical/mysterious tone of the score during this sequence tell us we’re not entering any old mundane slice of family life. No, underneath this tale’s shiny dust jacket, with its tableaux-meets-dinner invitation aesthetic and its warm candlelit table setting, we’re actually opening a dusty old tome of mythical family lore. One would assume we’d get a chronicle of the rise and fall of the Tenenbaums, a story which began under the most auspicious of pretenses and, was finally ‘erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.’

This parade of failure, it would seem, revolves around the emotional and literal abandonment of the three Tenenbaum Children, Richie (Luke Wilson), Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), and Chas (Ben Stiller), by their self-serving, rambunctious, and devilishly amusing father Royal (Gene Hackman). Richie, Royal’s favorite, has crumbled and faded from view, largely due to his forbidden love for the adopted Margot. Margot, made constantly aware of her ‘adopted’ status by Royal, withdraws and detaches from the family, seeking ephemeral comfort in a web of petty deception that includes things like hiding her smoking from the family and engaging in a blazing string of affairs. Chas, the most practically minded of the group, feels unloved and underappreciated by Royal, whose attention to Richie does not go unnoticed. He has also recently lost his wife, who, it would seem, had provided him with kind of solidity his family story had always lacked. The action of the story, then, is the mythic reversal of this litany of failure. It hinges on the turn between the tragedy that opens the story (told as prologue) and the comedy we’ll all experience as we watch the characters finally begin to change, grow, and work into the adults they’ve never been able to become. The film even ends with a wedding. It’s all very Shakespearean.

At the same time, though, there are mythical elements working on two levels here, and they don’t always work in concert. Anderson’s aesthetic, developed over a sequence of films ranging most specifically from Rushmore, through Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and The Darjeeling Limited, has a way of enclosing your viewing experience inside a very detailed, and very claustrophobic bubble. While this feeling of being stuck inside one of Anderson’s childhood dreams comes and goes in most of the other films, it is exceedingly difficult to get outside of it in Tenenbaums. While the inside of the Tenenbaum home seems exceedingly, ironically vibrant in its colors and decoration (a testament, one would think, to Etheline’s unwavering stewardship of the family in Royal’s absence), the New York City which lies outside seems entirely washed of color in many cases. All cabs are battered, desultory ‘Gypsy Cabs,’ all buses ‘Green Line’ buses, and all décor straight from the ‘70s. Certain moments seem to be not narrative action, but resuscitated memories (particularly Margot’s arrival on the Green Line Bus). Richie’s suicide wants to be as tragic as Quentin Compson’s or Seymour Glass’s (see point #4), but, while tragic, it mostly just seems sad and mundane. While the town and the story which unfolds within it seems increasingly old (as do the characters), the feeling is, ironically, exactly the opposite. The Tenenbaum family is stuck in a vacuum, a time warp which revolves, somewhat absurdly around Royal’s betrayal and their inability to get past it.

When taken in conjunction with the mythical presentation of the narrative, the epically stylized appearance of the micro-world of the Tenenbaums, and the emotionally regressive characters, this vacuum presents the audience with a bit of a conundrum. It is, on the one hand, all something to be overcome. While it’s awfully cute to see them all wearing grown-up versions of their adolescent outerwear, very few would agree that remaining trapped in the past (look up ‘nostalgia’ in the dictionary and you’ll see the poster from this film) is emotionally healthy, and it seems that at least part of the film’s denouement turns on this idea that you can get past the myths and the timelessness family often projects onto its own subject participants. At the same time, the film is obsessed with its own stylization, so much so that what seems at least partially liberating is oftentimes the very thing that brings people (myself included) back to the film again and again — and keeps them there. It’s the same reason the Tenenbaums keep coming back as well, because it’s intimate, but intimate in a solipsistic way.  The film, its myth, and even its emotional tragedies, are all very cloistered, very particular, but they nonetheless demand to be treated as some kind of universal embodiment of familial meltdown. The problem with this is that real families aren’t myths. They may contain a number of people who change and reevaluate themselves on a regular basis; they may also contain some stalwarts who refuse to ever examine the ways they’ve clung unhealthily to ideal types established long ago — even hurtful ones, no, especially hurtful ones. This all brings me to my next point.

2. Family’s not a word, it’s a sentence: family as cloister

It’s difficult to make generalizations about families, a point of order which makes endeavors like Tenenbaums troublesome from the very start. While there’s certainly a kind of generic sameness you can observe across spectrums of race, religion, geographical particularity, occupation and income distribution, families are otherwise notoriously difficult to pin down. Even the most ‘normal’ of families is bound to be hiding a skeleton or two jangling in the closet and a handful of notable eccentricities. The paradox then becomes that we are all universally unique in our familial troubles, yet all uniquely universal in the fact that we have them. This contradiction has produced a wonderfully creative tension when engaged with imaginatively: All families have problems, but problems that can only be dealt with in, and by, those families. Tenenbaums, on the other hand, seems to show us an ironic, increasingly contrapuntal take on how either side of that tension can become frozen and rigid.

On the one hand, the family is mired entirely in the wake of its own, very particular atrophy. The unit is unproductively centered on a man who, from his chauvinistic attitude to his bizarrely neo-feudal language of patrilineage, must always play the role of the patriarch in opposition to his family’s assorted minor roles (wife, children, servant, etc). It’s difficult not to see this as somewhat sui generis as families go, or at least as too heavily stylized a creation to make sense. Nevertheless, when you strip away the residual aura of uptown glam and hyperintellectualism, we are essentially just looking at a family trying to negotiate the transition from a rather immature version of itself to a more adult manifestation which takes all parts of the unit as equally as important. Royal does it at first by trying to play patriarch, as though you would a character in a play or as the centerpiece in a family portrait — Still Life with Tenenbaums. Predictably, the kids fall in line around this idea — family — as though they were being told to line up and crack a smile by some fading, penniless Velasquez. The myth, the music, the timelessness of it all has a curiously detached ring, reinforced by Royal’s incessant need to call the children (especially the boys) ‘son’ or ‘my darlings,’ words which feign emotion, but also convey an idea of people as interchangeable and ahistorical pawns in his epic life story.

On the other, the Tenenbaums’ problems seem rather ordinary. The film shows us a family stuck inside a snow globe, ostensibly because they are unable to move on.  This is hardly novel.  In fact, it’s about as mundane as drama gets.  The tag line I quote at the beginning — ‘Family’s not a word, its sentence’ — even seems so banal it could have graced any number of ‘dysfunctional family’ films. But the more I think about this phrase, the more interesting it becomes.  Ok, so ‘family’ is not simply an inert ‘word’ we can take for granted, but rather something that drags us into its clutches and detains us, like a prison ‘sentence.’  This superficial meaning, meant to be amusing, one would think, captures the mythical, cloistered sense of the word ‘family,’ the sense that would have the universal idea take precedent over the social, dynamic and unique identity of what is otherwise a fluid concept. Of course, the sentence can be read another way entirely, which is to say that ‘family,’ the ideal, the word, and the actual thing, only makes sense as part of a sentence, a larger unit with multiple interlocking parts/words, few of which make sense outside the stabilizing influence of each other.

Tenenbaums wants us to believe that it ultimately comes down on the side of the latter, that Chas gets over his bitter resentment and lets go of his past, that Margot writing a new play (that ‘ran for just under two weeks and received mixed reviews’) will signal her emergence from the bathtub in her mind, and that Richie’s anguished confession of love for Margot will free him of his demons. We are obviously meant to read Royal’s transition from egotistical deadbeat dad to loveable, caring ‘Papi’ Tenenbaum as the decision that can break the mythical cycle and reinstitute the family’s stunted growth. At the same time, I constantly wonder about what happens in the world outside mythical Tenenbaum land, where fathers don’t always do the right thing and siblings can’t always overcome their own insular views on each other, where people can’t always wait around for the fairy tale to finish out its happy ending. This is not to say that I reject the film’s ‘happy’ ending (I don’t, or I don’t want to), but more that I recognize how, by setting up this mythical ‘family as sentence’ motif, it can really go either way. The cloister/myth can be an easy place to set up shop.  It’s easy to live there, because we, as individuals, control all the rules. We can limit our engagements with those who make us feel bad, we can control the way others interact with us (to a degree) and can construct our own micro-myths about our relation to the larger unit. The problem, though, is that this makes it hard to see people as living, changing, social beings, especially parents (much of whose change, by the time you’re old enough to see it as an child-adult, is behind them). You can latch onto these frozen, timeless self-creations because they’re easier than their living counterparts, easier to apply, easier to resent, easier to mock. But to take this route is to undoubtedly lose part of the meaning of the sentence in both of its possible definitions. The only way to possibly see ourselves clearly enough to make positive change in our own lives is to see with double vision, through the lens of our own experience as subjects, but also from the vantage point provided by those who have lived with, and for us — those other parts of the sentence (who are sentenced to you just as surely as you are sentenced to them).

3. Looking up and looking in: Anderson’s Carnival of Outsiders

I once read a review of this film (probably around the time of its release) wherein the reviewer compared it to Anderson’s previous work in terms of its treatment of the figure of the outsider. This is the person, who, like Bottle Rocket’s Dignan, Rushmore’s Max, and Tenenbaums’ Eli, is always looking in at more fortunate people from lower down on a ladder (if you prefer the vertical analogy) or from the outside in. If you can move yourself past the family drama for a moment, I think it’s easy to see that this thesis has a lot of merit, and, ten years on, I want to give it its due. I’m firmly convinced that it is Eli and Henry Sherman, the characters who seem to fit least comfortably into the Tenenbaum mythos, who are the most interesting characters in the film. This is precisely because they do not fit into the familial tableaux vivant and resulting emotional stasis of the Tenenbaum family. Henry, whose confessions of love for Etheline provide the film with some of its more underappreciated and tender moments, wishes to join the family, but must always play second fiddle to the exiled Royal. His intentions and motives seem worthy and, as Royal himself points out, he’s everything that Royal isn’t — honest, loyal, loving, and kind. Whether or not Chas, Margot, and Ritchie will give him his due remains to be seen, though I’ve always read Chas’s late shared recognition of their mutual status as widowers gestures towards long-awaited developments for the both of them.  It’s one of a few tender moments near the end of the film when the seemingly impenetrable emotional fortifications built around Tenenbaum manor seem ready to crumble and let in some daylight.

Henry’s seemingly genuine concern for the family acts as a foil to Eli, the orphan neighbor friend of Richie’s, who ‘always wanted to be a Tenenbaum’ and now exists in a state of hybrid disingenuousness, clinging on to a dream of grandeur the Tenenbaum children themselves have abandoned. It’s meant to be most apt and meaningful that Eli admits this to Royal, who replies ‘me, too,’ as though he’s been systematically denied admittance on the basis of brains or class in the same way Eli has. Eli sends his press clippings to Etheline Tenenbaum, his surrogate mother, and enters into an affair with Margot, most likely in an attempt to feel at least a modicum of the connection he has always witnessed between her and Richie. Eli believes in the Tenenbaum myth so completely that his own obsessive nostalgia for the eclipsed period of family greatness comes to define his existence. Most problematically, Eli tends to be — like any other outsider — part of the Tenenbaums’ problem. By involving himself so whole-heartedly in the family mystique, he ratifies and legitimizes it, on the one hand participating in its slow, cyclical procession and, on the other, by the way in which he participates, ensuring its eventual dissolution.

Anderson’s Heart of ‘Glass’

My initial intention with this review was to fashion it along the lines of a fun meta-commentary on the film at the hands of American Literature’s most famous 20th century family of geniuses, J.D. Salinger’s Glass family. It was meant to be a way of bringing an inspiration for the film back for a self-reflexive comment on the film itself, to give the Glass family their due, as it were. The Glass mythos provides a number of key sub-textual reference points for understanding the Tenenbaums. Like the Tenenbaums, the Glass family is captained by a Jewish mother and Irish Catholic father, former vaudevillians whose savant children have provided them with a large measure of notoriety, fame, and wealth. The narrative presentation of the Glass family as a kind of modern mythical clan resonates more or less cleanly with Tenenbaums, as does the way the narrative action plays out as a long sequence of short or novella-esque ‘moments,’ rather like a chronicle (as opposed to a ‘history’). Etheline and Henry’s wedding loosely parallels that of Seymour and Muriel Glass; Margot’s day-long soaks in the tub are obviously meant to evoke Franny Glass’s nervous breakdown and subsequent parking of herself in the tub; Richie’s suicide, which immediately brings to mind Seymour Glass’s, is actually a composite of Seymour’s death wish and Zooey Glass’s shaving scene from Franny and Zooey. The Glass family narrative also provides us with our setting (NYC, and particularly the Upper East Side) and a story that, while certainly developing more than Tenenbaums, nonetheless draws on the spiritual and cultural zeitgeist of the American midcentury. Finally, and in terms of character development, the Glass stories also, in many ways, revolve around an often absent center, in this case Seymour.

However, one of the reasons I ultimately abandoned this clever little conceit is that I realized this is where the interesting comparisons stop. Transmuted into Glass family dialogue, the movie would almost necessarily have been ripped to shreds, and not simply because the film’s liberties with the Glass mythology are mostly superficial (they are), but also because it is precisely this superficiality, this overabundance of style in the absence of spirituality, emotion, or depth, that would have set the Glass family members off like fireworks. At first, I admit that the idea of Zooey Glass pontificating on the demerits of the film while standing in front of a mirror, half-shaven and exceedingly handsome, appealed to me. But then I realized that this appealed to me not because it allowed me to say anything particularly unique or interesting about the film, but rather because, like so many of the Glass-Tenenbaum hangers-on, I had let myself get sucked into the Glass family nostalgia. I wanted to yank them out of their musty and perfectly reasonable resting pages and force them to talk about a movie I was pretty sure they wouldn’t appreciate. I could hear the backlash: these kids aren’t geniuses, but what some phony kind of outsider would THINK  a genius was; there is no heart to the film, no spiritual journey, no questing after the bodhi; the plot is altogether too linear, makes too much goddamned sense…we’re supposed to be put together in pieces and chunks; and what about the quiz show? What, was he scared to take it on because Paul Thomas Anderson already did it? And on and on. In the end, it would have been a monument to Erik’s infatuation with both families rather than a fair testament to their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Loose Ends, Random Thoughts, and various minutiae

Bill Murray does about as much as he can with his character, ‘the neurologist Raleigh St. Clair,’ but it’s a pretty wasted performance for him. .

Hackman is excellent in this film.  On the DVD extras (I watched the Criterion Edition) it’s stated more than once that Anderson wrote the role of Royal specifically for Hackman, and that the latter very nearly turned it down precisely for that reason.  Thank goodness for the rest of us he didn’t.

Though I realize you can say this about nearly every Wes Anderson movie, we really ought to give an enthusiastic high five to Karen Patch, the costume designer (who also worked on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore). I’m sure she had a fair amount of input from Anderson, who drew a lot of these characters himself, but she makes the costumes a consistent (ly ridiculous) reminder of that emotionally claustrophobic coal mine they live in.

The magic of the diorama pervades the film. The ‘house on Archer Avenue’ is composed entirely of disjunctive set pieces, each of which possesses its own childish authenticity. You can almost smell the adhesive drying on the backs of each piece of toy furniture.

Best line of the entire film:  [Royal to Ari and Uzi] “I’m sorry for your loss; your mother was a terribly attractive woman.”

Second best line of the entire film: [Eli on why his first novel, Wildcat, was not a success] “Well, Wildcat was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular. Wildcat…Wild…cat!. Wooooo. I’m gonna go. I’m going.” I guess that one kind of needs the visual.

Seeing that they’re both Texans, I’ve always wondered if Anderson and Wilson, what, with their unabashed literary sensibilities, aren’t having a go at Texan transplant Cormac McCarthy via Eli Cash’s associate literature professor-cum-budding ‘Western’ novelist.  I mean, listen to this: The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. “Vámonos, amigos,” he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight. The stuffy, pedantic attention to detail (flintcraw! saddlecock!) and mestizo border diction are first indicators, that and the fact that the sentence sounds like someone channeling Faulkner through Davy Crockett. We should also consider, though, that this could be a dig at McCarthy-esque wannabes staking a claim on terrain hundreds of novelists have claimed for their own (most with significantly less success than ol’ Cormac), and which an academic would know better than to imitate (one hopes).

Elliott Smith had not yet stabbed himself to death in the chest when this film was released. It’s impossible to ignore Richie’s death scene and all the more impossible to forget because of its connection to Smith’s “Needle in the Hay,” one of the more memorable tracks from his self-titled debut. I’m not sure exactly what I’m feeling just now. I think it’s some color of sad.  Yup, it’s sad.

I have to admit that I’ve always loved ex-Devo member Mark Mothersbaugh’s score: baroque cello and harpsichord, jingling bells, tinkling piano, classical guitar and snapping fingers. With, you know, the random odd Reggae interlude (in accord with plot flashbacks, naturally).

Etheline Tenenbaum’s former suitors are The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen!

I’d never really found much to like about Nico until I saw this movie. In fact, I may still not really hold a place in my life for Nico’s music. But I find the use of ‘These Days’ and ‘The Fairest of the Seasons’ quite apt in this film at least. There’s a reason why they bookend the soundtrack (excepting Mothersbaugh’s instrumental  ‘11 Archer Avenue,’ which technically leads things off) and I like to think the leaden ambivalence of the first tends to unwind throughout until we get to a much more ethereal, but positive and open ‘Do I stay or Do I go’ moment with the latter song.

It’s never mentioned out loud in the film, but the art on Eli’s walls is awesome, if awesome for you is men with tribal masks atop four wheel ATVs.  Maybe awesome isn’t the right word. Perhaps what I’m looking for is ‘appropriately surreal.’ What if that were the real world and the Tenenbaum’s world was just a dream?  Whoa, dude…whoa.