A Prairie Home Companion (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | June 16, 2006
Why did I ever let my agent talk me into working with this big, dumb Scandahoovian? I wish this oaf would stop ogling my ass!
It’s Sucking My Will to Live!!!
[xrr rating=1/5]
A Prairie Home Companion. Starring Woody Harrelson, Tommy Lee Jones, Garrison Keillor, Kevin Kline, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen, John C. Reilly, Maya Rudolph, Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin. Screenplay by Garrison Keillor, based on a story by Garrison Keillor and Ken LaZebnik. Directed by Robert Altman. (Pictrehouse, 2006, Color, 105 minutes. MPAA Rating: PG-13.)
Movie buffs still hotly debate whether Don Siegel’s 1957 cult classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a cautionary allegory against McCarthyism, or against communism. I have a different take.
For years, I’ve observed button-down suburbanite neighbors zip around their gated communities in Volvos, while their urban counterparts in the subways hold half-folded copies of the New York Times in one hand and a Starbucks latte in the other as they head into the city for another day’s gray labor.
Yeah, they all seem human. But little clues tip me off that they may be the “Pod People” living among us, undetected.
Observe the truncated and polished facial mannerisms—their lips move only a few millimeters when simulating a smile, or when assuming an expression signifying displeasure. Neither do their voices modulate much—just a fraction of a decibel separates detached caution in their voices from full-throated reserve.
But, the dead-giveaways are those canvas tote bags in which they haul their daily rations of organic fruits, and the ceramic coffee mugs that dispense their designer coffees and teas. On these, embossed, you can see the secret symbol that identifies these metrosexual cyborgs to each other:
“n p r.”
A parasitic entity that feeds off the lifeblood of its hard-working, tax-paying hosts, National Public Radio broadcasts messages that can be deciphered only by such artificially engineered clones. For news reports about their unwitting dupes, they perk their ears to the calm, deceptive monotony of “All Things Considered.” So that they can be seen “listening” to music, they fill their office cubicles, at around volume level “3,” with the restrained sounds of mostly Mozart (though never anything so gauche as Don Giovanni) and Bach (though never anything so vulgar as Stokowski’s orchestration of Toccata and Fugue)
And when these bloodless creatures return in the evenings to their ethnically cleansed, gentrified lofts, they “entertain” themselves with the gentle “humor” of Garrison Keillor’s homey little corner of NPR-land, “A Prairie Home Companion.” Since it requires of its listeners very little laughter, APHC provides them with further camouflage, helping them maintain the public pretense that they are actually human beings, possessing not only a sense of humor, but even souls.
Well, anyway, that’s my conspiracy theory. How else to explain how an oafish dullard like Keillor could convince a segment of the population that he’s Mark Twain reincarnated, and that his monumentally tiresome nattering about the equally dull folk of some lake in Minnesota is fraught with “irony”?
So when I heard that Robert Altman was slated to direct this movie, I thought: “Wow! I’m sure glad they got him to breathe some friggin’ life into this dreck!” After all, Altman has graced the screen with some of its most memorable treasures, from the Burt Lancaster/Gary Cooper Western Vera Cruz (1954) to the raucous World War II flick The Dirty Dozen (1967). Two of his classics, Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and The Longest Yard (1974), have even been remade recently.
Then, I suddenly realized: “Wait a minute, dummy: that was Robert Aldrich! Robert Altman was the guy who directed M*A*S*H (1970), one of the few comedies in movie history to have to ride the coattails of the TV sitcom it spun off to get any viewers.”
Still, I decided to give this pic a chance anyhow, going in with such low expectations that I was sure to be pleasantly surprised. No dice. What I found instead was a trite, befuddled, pointless cinematic mess that made my earlier expectations seem like cockeyed optimism.
What, you may wonder, is this movie about? Well, it’s about an hour and three-quarters. Seriously, though, let’s take Keillor at his word: “It’s the kind of program that died fifty years ago, only someone forgot to tell the performers.” For sure. In reality, it’s about as authentic as the manufactured quaintness of a Cracker Barrel Restaurant: If you’re not paying too close attention, or if Alzheimer’s has set in, you might actually believe that the old-fashioned country crafts really are made by backwoods hillbillies, and not by slave labor in some Chinese factory.
A Prairie Home Companion brims with allegory. Well, to be nice, let’s call it that. The plot has Keillor’s ensemble of Hee Haw! wannabes putting on their last show at the F. Scott Fitzgerald Theatre in St. Paul, broadcast on station WLF, which the script implies is being run by Mom and Pop from their kitchen table, and not by the governmental bureaucracy at Minnesota Public Radio. However, a real greedy Texan (Get it?), subtly named “The Axeman” (Tommy Lee Jones), cometh to shut them down. Oh, if only some angel in the wings would waft in to put all this greedy, budget-cutting Evil to a halt, so that Keillor could continue to delight audiences in perpetuity…
To convince his listeners—and hopefully, the dreaded Axeman—Keillor and crew put on a show to end all shows. Truly. I’ve never seen such an ensemble of gifted and acclaimed thespians acting their hearts out: Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson, and Meryl Streep give inspired performances.
Unfortunately, they are inspired performances of an excruciatingly amateurish script. I think Keillor learned his screenwriting craft from one of those correspondence courses that they advertise on matchbook covers. The dialogue is embarrassingly stilted, the character development utterly absent. The confused staging is filmed by director of photography Edward Lachman, a one-note Johnny who appears to have learned his sole trick of moving the camera in lateral dollying—left-to-right, then right-to-left—at the Mr. Miyagi Sand the Floor School of Cinematography.
Virginia Madsen plays the movie’s pivotal role, a rather earthy, sensual Angel of Death who’s been sent to off you-know-who. She’s convincing and nuanced, but her blocking is so clumsy that if you turned off the sound, you’d swear she could be cast as a tree in one of those elementary school Thanksgiving plays that parents are forced to attend. By the end of the movie, I found myself screaming inwardly at Madsen: “Kill this movie! Drive a stake through its heart! For the love of Christ, release me from this tedium!”
So the NPR Pod People have now invaded The Cinema, too. Mercifully, though, this film was screened only at “select” venues that run independent films. And it’s still not too late to put up blockades and prevent their trucks from delivering DVDs of this life-sucking movie to video stores in your hometown. For if you don’t, Kevin McCarthy’s doomed prophesies from the original Body Snatchers may still come to pass:
“Look, you fools. You’re in danger. Can’t you see? They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our wives! Our children, everyone! They’re here already! YOU’RE NEXT!”
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Black Comedies, Comedies, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
Art School Confidential (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | May 5, 2006
Sophia Myles is the girl of Max Minghella's dreams in "Art School Confidential"
Speaking Truth to Poseurs
[xrr rating=3.5/5]
Art School Confidential. Starring Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Matt Keeslar, Jim Broadbent, Joel David Moore, and Anjelica Huston. Screenplay by Daniel Clowes. Directed by Terry Zwigoff. (United Artists/Sony Pictures Classics, 2006, Color, 102 min. MPAA Rating: R).
What does a true artist live for, deep in his soul?
Jerome Platz, artist in training, desperately wants to know. Jimmy, his mentor and drinking buddy, has the answer: “He lives only for that moment of narcotic bliss that only comes every decade, or once in a lifetime…perhaps, never at all.”
But the aging Jimmy—in a dour, virtuoso performance by British character actor Jim Broadbent—has extinguished his divine spark long ago, in a paper coffee cup of Slivovitz liquor. He is but one of many casualties strewn along the path of the cruel and unscrupulous world of postmodern art.
In this follow-up to their excellent 2001 sleeper Ghost World, director Terry Zwigoff and screenwriter Daniel Clowes (whose script for Art School Confidential is based on a feature from his comic book series, “Eightball”) follow Jerome’s ambitions and letdowns as a freshman art student. It’s a riotously dead-on satire that paints a contemptuous portrait of modern art pretensions.
Played with quiet determination by Max Minghella, Jerome is a shy, but very passionate boy who worships Picasso and aspires to become “the greatest artist of the twenty-first century.” Arriving at the venerable Strathmore Art Institute (modeled after Clowes’s alma mater, Brooklyn’s Pratt Institute), Jerome naïvely believes that all he must do to attain his dream is to hone his native talents, find his individual aesthetic style, and—voila!—his work will capture an eager audience among the tastemakers and trendsetters of the New York gallery scene.
But, he soon finds out—in a series of soul-crushing blows—that talent and vision don’t count nearly as much as creating insipidly empty pieces and latching onto the latest trite “gimmick.” Here, the movie hits its comedic stride, lampooning every bad art cliché. Jerome’s classes are peopled with a host of “rebel” caricatures: the manic-depressive beatnik chick; the “Vegan Holy Man” white Rastafarian; the shock “performance artist”; the sycophantic chameleon; and the blowhard who brags, in circular poststructuralese, that his inept art projects “have nothing to do with form or texture or color; they’re a conscious rejection of spatial dimensions…They’re more about the intimacy of the artistic process.”
His professors fare hardly better. Most are burnouts, and his drawing instructor, Professor Sandiford (played with a patronizing smirk by John Malkovich), is more concerned with his own exhibition career than in guiding students. When Jerome goes to him for help in seeking a vision, Sandiford tells him he’s too young to be so rigid as to have a style: he should experiment with all genres and media. So when Jerome follows the advice, working wildly divergent styles into his final project, he gets back the saboteur prof’s written critique: “Too experimental. Hollow and derivative. You need to be yourself.”
Jerome finds kinship only in a fellow student who keeps dropping in and out of classes (Joel David Moore), and in an art history teacher sympathetic to his predicament (Anjelica Huston). But the nascent artist discovers his true inspiration in Audrey (Sophia Myles), whose ethereal beauty and demure calm enthrall him.
The scene that intimately acquaints the viewer with Audrey, as she disrobes to model before Jerome’s drawing class, is the most sensuously evocative and graceful grand entrance I’ve seen since Kim Novak’s in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). Jerome is captivated as she slowly reveals her nude body: Set to the string introduction from the adagio movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, the music evinces Jerome’s inner emotions for Audrey—not only sexually, but as the fulfillment of his quest for an ideal muse. Desirous of her, but also in love with her classical beauty, Jerome sees the otherworldly Audrey as she could be—a real-life Venus de Milo (which, if you’ve seen Sophia Myles, is not that far a stretch).
Sadly, Audrey resists Jerome’s awkward advances. Dejected by unrequited love, he realizes that he must be content to love only the idea of her.
At this point, a subplot about a serial strangler terrorizing the Strathmore campus takes over. Almost every review I’ve seen pans the subplot as gratuitous, or as running out of steam. I think they miss the method in Clowes’s and Zwigoff’s madness. As a plot device, it works perfectly in driving home the film’s message: The “fine arts” wasteland is so corrupt that the only way for Jerome to get his big break is to take the rap for the murders. Thus, through exploiting the biggest gimmick of all, Jerome finally is free to paint his ideal projects…in the Kafkaesque world of a prison, where he is locked up for crimes he didn’t commit.
What is intended as an essentially happy ending demonstrates a fundamentally bleak worldview. Audrey, having seen the error in her fickleness, finally commits to Jerome. In an understated closing shot, the two lovers at last engage in a passionate kiss—their lips partitioned by the wire-reinforced glass of a booth in the prison’s visiting area, to the strains of the Emperor’s Adagio. To Jerome, their passion still remains not fully realized, his Audrey still not fully within reach. The message is that artistic success and love are indeed attainable, but only by alienating oneself from the larger world.
This fatalism aside, however, the film is a spot-on satire in its scathing indictment of the backbiting, pettiness, haughty elitism, and sham that is today’s art. Art School Confidential is The Fountainhead meets Catcher in the Rye, realized by Mel Brooks. Bitingly it drives home its theme that, in today’s public arena of the absurd—where “controversial” artists vie to out-shock each other—beauty is truly the most controversial message of all.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Black Comedies, Comedies, Graphic Novel Adaptations, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
The Lost City (2005) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | May 4, 2006
Andy Garcia is forced to leave lovely Inés Sastre after Castro takes power in “The Lost City”
Cuba Libre
[xrr rating=4/5]
The Lost City. Starring Andy Garcia, Inés Sastre, Tomas Milian, Nestor Carbonell, Enrique Murciano, Bill Murray, Richard Bradford, Jsu Garcia, Millie Perkins, Steven Bauer, Lorena Feijóo, Dustin Hoffman, and Juan Fernández. Screenplay by G. Cabrera Infante. Directed by Andy Garcia. (Magnolia Pictures, 2005, Color, 143 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
In his feature-film directorial debut, Andy Garcia uses the screen as his canvas to paint a vibrant and wistful picture of a Havana he never really knew firsthand. In 1961, Garcia’s parents fled the prison that Cuba had become under Fidel Castro. Alarmed at the sight of their five-year-old boy Andrés marching in their front yard and singing the communist hymn The Internationale, they decided to leave Cuba to raise their family in Miami Beach.
The Lost City represents Garcia’s quest of sixteen years to tell this epic story of a Cuban family’s struggle to grapple with the turbulent events of the communist overthrow of strong-arm dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1958—events that inevitably tear the family asunder. The film’s dramatic, moving script is the final screenplay penned by the late, legendary Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante. An early supporter of the Castro revolution, Infante’s gradual disillusionment with the communist dictator forced him to flee in 1966.
The Lost City revolves around nightclub owner Fico Fellove (Garcia), who runs the El Tropico, the ritziest cabaret in downtown Havana, and his two brothers, Ricardo (Enrique Murciano) and Luis (Nestor Carbonell). The movie opens with an elaborate dance scene onstage at the club, where Fico’s extended family celebrates his parents’ anniversary. But as soon as the camera lurks backstage, the audience discovers that all is not well in the family, nor in Havana.
Fico’s father, university professor Don Federico—played with great intelligence by Tomas Milian (one of many Cuban expatriates among the cast and crew)—holds court in Fico’s office, arguing for reasoned, democratic opposition to the brutal Batista regime. But overzealous son Ricardo predicts that a coming revolution will free the oppressed people of Cuba. Heated discussion escalates into a violent confrontation between patriarch and prodigal son, and Fico and Luis have to forcibly restrain their brother. The rift within the family ominously symbolizes the divisions that have broken out in the Fellove’s island paradise, once known as the “Pearl of the Antilles.”
In the tragic saga that chronicles the Fellove family’s dissolution, Fico loses both brothers: Luis is executed by secret police when caught as the ringleader of an assassination attempt on Batista, and Ricardo commits suicide after betraying his family to win favor with the communists. The meaning of the movie’s title emerges as we see what has been lost; the film becomes an elegiac love letter to the graceful and glamorous world in which Fico moves, but which is now slipping through his fingers as the communists impose control over every aspect of Cuban society.
Elaborate musical and dance sequences, featuring the impulsive Afro-Cuban rhythms that define Cuban music, set off the onscreen action. Rumba and mambo show-stoppers make The Lost City the kind of fusion of light entertainment and serious drama that American movie studios have forgotten how to make. But what most grabbed me were the ballet scenes, featuring the lithe agility of dancer Lorena Feijóo, who in real life is principal ballerina for the San Francisco Ballet.
This kind of filmmaking threw many critics for a loop. But for me, The Lost City comes off more like a Bollywood extravaganza than does the mostly anemic “serious” fareHollywood serves up these days. The most convincing scenes are in the love story between Fico and brother Luis’s aggrieved widow, Aurora, played by the exquisite Inés Sastre. Emmanuel Kadosh’s camera simply loves her serene, alluring beauty: as Fico falls for her, so do all the men in the audience.
Most crucially, Infante and Garcia don’t whitewash or gloss over the true history of Fidel Castro’s tyrannical rise to power: he is shown for exactly the brutal dictator he was and is. One wouldn’t think that actor Jsu Garcia’s portrayal of Ernesto “Che” Guevara as a murderous goon—rather than as the Martyred Saint of the People—would be controversial almost forty years after his death, but it has caused The Lost City to be banned in many Latin American countries.
Although uneven in a couple of scenes, the film overall is gripping and beautifully made, full of forceful, evocative performances that would make any new director proud. In a memorable cameo, Dustin Hoffman nails gangster Meyer Lansky’s quietly menacing demeanor. Fans of The Incredibles’s sultry “Mirage” character will get a glimpse of actress Elizabeth Peña playing a communist bureaucrat who threatens to shut down Fico’s nightclub, unless he removes the orchestra’s saxophone (“an instrument of imperialist oppression”). Bill Murray provides comic relief as “the Writer,” an obvious stand-in for novelist Infante. Some of his jokes fall flat, but altogether he injects a sense of uneasiness that foreshadows the beginning of the end for Fico’s fortunes.
Emmanuel Kadosh’s vibrant cinematography bathes the screen in rich hues reminiscent of Gordon Willis’ Technicolor prints of The Godfather, Part II (also filmed in the Dominican Republic). Production designer Waldemar Kalinowski and art director Carlos Menéndez re-create a rich, elegant Havana, adding first-rate production values to this low-budgeted movie.
Oddly, The Lost City was panned by most critics in the U.S., presumably for its length and uneven execution. However, after reading many of the reviews, I suspect more than just a little opposition to be rooted in politics rather than aesthetics. Typical of the reviews was Stephen Holden’s in the New YorkTimes:
The impoverished masses of Cubans who embraced Castro as a liberator appear only in grainy, black-and-white news clips, awkwardly shoehorned into the movie to fill in historical blanks, and in some buffoonish parodies of sour Communist apparatchiks barking orders once Mr. Castro takes over.
Almost fifty years after Castro seized power and turned Cuba into a death camp and a sewer, its suffering captives still risk shark-infested waters and treacherous currents to reach the freedom of America’s shores. Yet to many American Baby Boomers, nostalgic over the red “Che” t-shirts of their pampered college years, the nightmare reality just ninety miles from American shores might as well be invisible.
Earlier this summer, when the aging Castro went under the knife and, for the first time, temporarily relinquished power to his brother Raul, you could witness more accurately what Cuba’s muzzled masses probably felt: thousands of Cuban-Americans of all ages and incomes filled downtown Miami, celebrating Fidel’s impending demise, waving Cuban and American flags, literally dancing in the streets.
In The Lost City, this same spirit moves Fico Fellove, who chooses to live and work alone in poverty and freedom, as a dishwasher in New York City, rather than as a slave in the socialist “paradise” of Havana:
I can’t go back. It’s too dangerous…for my soul. I have no money. But here, I feel as though I’m worth more than I ever was.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Dramas, Epic Movies, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
United 93 (2006) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | April 28, 2006
Why We Fight: American citizens take back their flight in United 93
United, They Stood Up
[xrr rating=4.5/5]
United 93 Starring David Alan Basche, Peter Hermann, Richard Bekins, Cheyenne Jackson, Lewis Alsamari, J.J. Johnson, Trish Gates, and Polly Adams. Written and Directed by Paul Greengrass. (Universal Studios/Working Title, 2006, Color, 111 minutes. MPAA Rating: R)
Everybody remembers exactly where he was on September 11, 2001. I was taking a photojournalism course at the Defense Information School at Fort Meade, Maryland, and—ironically—taking part in an exercise on how military reporters should cover terrorist attacks. In fact, we were discussing the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and how, by the time the bombers came to trial, its significance had been buried because Americans’ attention was diverted by the O. J. Simpson “trial of the century.” At that moment, a Navy petty officer burst into the classroom and told our Air Force instructor to turn on the television—that the World Trade Center had just been struck by an airplane.
We laughed in disbelief. As Army soldiers, being suddenly thrust by cadre into “live” training scenarios was old hat. We thought we were going to cover a “terrorist event” as a practical writing exercise. But, when the projector switched from the PowerPoint slideshow to the live “Today” show broadcast, we knew from the ominous visual of smoke pouring from the North Tower that this was no exercise.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, rumors abounded that Fort Meade was next, because the National Security Agency is located there. By day’s end, I was standing outside our barracks, rifle in hand. I will never forget the emotions and thoughts that poured through me that day—revulsion, nausea, fear, anger, hatred. And finally, relief, because I had been spared the hell so cruelly inflicted on so many of my fellow Americans. As long as I live, I never want to relive that day. None of us do.
Thus, when trailers for United 93 began screening in Los Angeles theaters shortly before its release, some in the audience wailed, “Too soon! Too soon!” Too soon? From the morning Imperial Japan attacked the U.S. at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, until she surrendered in ignominious defeat on August 15, 1945, 1,348 days had passed. On April 28, 2006, United 93’s opening day, 1,689 days of the War on Terror had gone by—almost a full year longer than America’s involvement in World War II. Surely time enough has passed to allow us to reflect upon and honor those who died that day.
Although Americans were generally familiar with the events that took place on United Airlines Flight 93, most of what we knew had been the subject of dry news reportage and “what if” conjecture. Now, culling transcripts of cockpit flight recorders, 9-1-1 emergency calls, interviews with surviving family members, and eyewitness accounts, writer and director Paul Greengrass has taken the threads of innumerable and seemingly random facts, and woven them into a powerful visual narrative.
In United 93, Greengrass’s masterful direction gives us the feeling that we are reliving September 11 all over again. He takes us from the flight’s takeover by Muslim terrorists to the events on the ground as the World Trade Center and Pentagon are hit by the three other hijacked planes. He follows United 93’s doomed course, in scenes inter-cutting between the airplane and the various air traffic control towers on the East Coast; he ends with the passengers retaking control of the plane from the hijackers, and its tragic crash in a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
By transforming my theater seat into a cramped seat in coach, as the forty-first passenger alongside those who would soon die on that hijacked flight from Newark, Flight 93 thrust the events in my face with visual and aural brutality, compelling me to relive that day—and to recall its lessons.
Filming in “real time,” much like Fox TV’s popular action series “24,” cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and his crew skillfully captured the action with handheld cameras. It’s a method I usually eschew for its forced “realism,” but Ackroyd made it work by avoiding show-offish, unnecessary camera movement. By shooting mostly with telephoto lenses, he instills in viewers a sense of claustrophobia that heightens the emotional anxiety. John Powell’s dark, percussion-laden soundtrack pummels the ears at rapid-fire tempo, ratcheting up the tension to cardiac arrest levels. Throughout the film, my own heart was racing, my brow was sweaty, and I got that same nauseous feeling in my gut that I so vividly remember from that day.
When the end credits rolled, there was nothing but dead silence in the theater where I saw it. United 93 masterfully achieved its objective of re-creating onscreen the nightmare that Americans went through on September 11th.
However, despite the fact that United 93 totally connected with me emotionally as a viewer, it suffers from the primary flaw of telling much of the story from the hijackers’ point of view. The viewer learns more about what motivated them to take over the plane than he will ever find out about the private motives of the passengers, whose dialogue is rather threadbare. We know that through AirFone conversations with relatives, the passengers found out that hijacked planes had already hit New York and Washington, that their own flight therefore was doomed, and that this knowledge motivated them to wrest back control of the plane. But we never really find out what personally inspired each of them to their valorous actions. We never really get to know the Jeremy Glicks or Todd Beamers. I agree with those critics who have pointed that their dialogue should have been beefed up, and that these heroes should have been more clearly drawn.
Yet I don’t think Greengrass himself fully understands what compelled the onboard rebellion. In a recent interview, he explained his film’s depiction of the American passengers:
I suppose what I most wanted it to explore was the relationship between individual moments and collective will…You can’t lead if the group’s not there with the will, and vice versa. Where does leadership come from? It comes from the desire to be led…The order of the airplane was completely subverted…They seized control of the plane, pinned everybody in the back and they were in charge, and something happened in the course of 20-25 minutes…but you’ve always got that challenge of: what do you do when a bunch of people take over an airplane? You can’t just sit there!
While acknowledging and accurately depicting the American passengers’ courage, the British director, it seems, hasn’t begun to grasp the spirit of independence that most Americans still regard as their birthright. What induced these men and women to action could hardly be reduced simply to some group dynamic of a “desire to be led”—remember, these were American, not German, passengers—but rather, embodied the individualistic, “don’t tread on me” streak that fires us up when push comes to shove.
Fortunately, Greengrass’s detachment does not undermine the movie’s strengths. One scene in particular captures what makes the American spirit so unique and indomitable. As the passengers start attacking the hijackers to take back the plane, a frightened Swedish passenger tries to block them, standing astride the aisle like a lunch hall monitor. “Just do what they say,” he lectures. “Give in to their demands…co-operate, and we will be safe.” The Americans must shove the Swedish weenie aside in order to reach their attackers and regain control of the cockpit. I have yet to see a more succinct metaphor for European dithering and condescension as obstacles to righteous American action.
Another critique—that United 93 is Politically Correct—is, I think, mostly unfounded. The movie makes no bones about distinguishing its villains from its heroes; it just does so without heavy-handed sloganeering, which would have wrecked the taut, montage narrative structure. Composer Powell’s menacing and foreboding passages, especially while the terrorists are praying, underscore their vicious brutality, just as upbeat, martial music accompanies scenes of Americans fighting back. Nor does the film disguise the facts that the hijackers were motivated by Islamism, or that the passengers took back the airplane to prevent its striking the U.S. Capitol, and, they hoped, to allow them to return safely to their loved ones.
A year after September 11, I spotted a bumper sticker on a passing car while driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Next to an image of the American flag were printed these words: “9/11: Remember. Rebuild. Recover.” I could not help but think that there was one “R” missing in that slogan. United 93 does a brilliant job in reminding us that on a Boeing 757, a group of heroic citizens taught us the response befitting a free people in the face of wanton savagery—Revenge. And the film left me experiencing another “R” as well: Reverence for the memories of those heroes.
Every American ought to invest two hours of his life in watching United 93, because it graphically depicts the inspiring acts, courage, and hope that helped spark the flames of direct action against Islam. David Beamer, father of slain hero Todd Beamer, said of United 93: “This film is a wake-up call. And although we abhor terrorism as a tactic, we are at war with a real enemy and it is personal.”
No, it is not too soon for this movie. Rather, let us hope that it is not too late.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Docudramas, Dramas, Movie Reviews |
Thank You for Smoking (2005) – Movie Review
By Robert L. Jones | April 14, 2006
Maria Bello, David Koechner, and Aaron Eckhart represent Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Jason Reitman's debut movie, "Thank You for Smoking"
Reitman Lights Up the Screen
[xrr rating=4/5]
Thank You for Smoking. Starring Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello, Cameron Bright, William H. Macy, David Koechner, J.K. Simmons, Rob Lowe, Katie Holmes, Sam Elliott, and Robert Duvall. Screenplay by Jason Reitman. Based on the novel by Christopher Buckley. Directed by Jason Reitman. (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2005, Color, 92 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.)
“Michael Jordan plays ball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk.”
Thus are we introduced to the protagonist of Thank You for Smoking—the chisel-chinned, smooth-talking Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), who relishes the daily, daunting challenges presented by his thankless job as lobbyist for Big Tobacco.
Turning a withering eye on Washington pressure-group politics, Thank You for Smoking is an intelligent comedy whose laughs come frequently and naturally. Amidst today’s predictable, mindless comedies and manipulative PC “message” movies, director Jason Reitman’s first feature-length film is a breath of fresh air—albeit suddenly engulfed by that heavy cloud emanating from the Camel held casually between a chain-smoker’s yellowing fingertips. And thanks to Reitman’s adroit direction and insistence on faithfully adapting novelist Christopher Buckley’s black comedy to the screen, Nick Naylor has been winning over audiences with his upbeat, audacious portrayal of “the Sultan of Spin.”
The film opens with a TV segment from the syndicated Joan Lunden Show, where Naylor finds himself the lone spokesman for cigarettes, and pitted against a stacked panel of governmental and non-profit agency health officials. To make matters worse, he’s seated right next to a teenaged victim of tobacco—bald chemo head, hopeless facial expression, and all. Confronted by a bureaucrat about Cancer Boy’s impending demise, by the charge that tobacco companies are profiting off children’s deaths, and by a hostile, booing audience, Naylor appears to be painted into a corner. But instead of backing down and conceding, the supremely self-confident spokesman suavely seizes the offensive:
How on earth would Big Tobacco profit off of the loss of this young man? I hate to think in such callous terms, but if anything, we’d be losing a customer. It’s not only our hope. It’s in our best interest to keep Robin alive and smoking.
By the program’s end, Naylor not only has turned the audience in his favor, he’s even won over Cancer Boy.
An amoralist who can deftly swing any argument in his favor, Naylor tries to justify himself to his intelligent and inquisitive son, Joey (Cameron Bright). “My job requires a certain…moral flexibility.” He’s a working-class guy who loves his work and prides himself for getting ahead in life through his debating skills alone: “I don’t have an M.D. or law degree. I have a Bachelor’s in kicking ass and taking names.” His latest mission: to get smoking back into movies—and to put the sex back into smoking.
Though some viewers may regard Naylor as morally repugnant, I think they’re missing the point: This is a comedy, people, not a sermon. The scoundrel-as-hero is a time-honored device in motion pictures that deal with the theme of liberty versus repression. Think of Melvyn Douglas’s parasite playboy, Count Leon d’Algout, in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 anti-communist farce, Ninotchka—or Jimmy Cagney’s boisterous, “ugly American” Coca-Cola exec in Billy Wilder’s 1961 Berlin Wall satire, One, Two, Three —or, more recently, Laura Dern’s trailer-trash paint huffer, Ruth Stoops, inCitizen Ruth, Alexander Payne’s 1996 skewering of pro-life and pro-choice movement zealots. Nick Naylor belongs in the same august company as these celluloid rogues.
A high point in the movie’s hilarity takes place when Nick lunches at an old, oak-paneled club with a couple of fellow lobbyists: Polly Bailey (played smart and sultry by the lovely Maria Bello), who fronts for the liquor industry, and Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner, at his good-ol’-boy best), who represents an NRA-like gun group. It’s a gut-busting scene in which the three—who unofficially refer to themselves by the morbid label “the MOD squad” (Merchants Of Death)—heatedly debate whose industry can take credit for more deaths. Watching Nick beam proudly while Polly and Bobby Jay sulk, because tobacco kills more than booze and guns combined, is simply priceless.
“This movie’s libertarian,” Reitman has said of its politics, noting that college students have been particularly receptive to its message: that even though big business can often be sleazy and manipulative, the alternative—intrusive and restrictive big government—is a far greater threat.
Here, big government is personified by the meddling PC-environmentalist-liberal Senator Ortolan K. Finisterre (typical Buckley wit—“Finisterre” is a French compound word meaning “end of the world”), played priggishly puritanical by gifted character actor William H. Macy. Finisterre won’t rest until a skull-and-crossbones label is emblazoned on every pack of cigarettes sold in the U.S., because—although most Americans know smoking is bad for them by reading the Surgeon General’s warning—current labeling discriminates against the illiterate and non-English speaking!
Naylor’s appearance before the senator’s rigged subcommittee hearing is a gem that spotlights the real issue at stake: not whether cigarette smoking is harmful, but whether people have the right to choose to use that harmful product. For just a moment, the movie turns serious as Naylor summons what integrity he has left to defend his industry’s right to sell its products, and consumers’ rights to think and choose for themselves. It’s a stirring, unambiguous defense of liberty that one seldom encounters in today’s culture, especially in Hollywood.
With a light touch, Reitman draws great performances from a stellar supporting cast: Rob Lowe as pretentious and unctuous Hollywood mega-agent Jeff Megall; the kittenish Katie Holmes as ambitious investigative journalist Heather Holloway, who comes on to Nick like catnip and ends up using him as a scratching post; J.K. Simmons as Nick’s gruff boss, B.R., who barks four-letter words at his staff; Sam Elliott as the ex-Marlboro Man, now quietly, bitterly dying of emphysema; and Robert Duvall as “the Captain,” the last great Southern-gentleman tobacco baron, who takes Nick under his wing and teaches him the secret of making a perfect mint julep.
The result is that rare serious movie you don’t have to take too seriously. With this, his feature-film directorial debut, Jason Reitman has proven himself already the comedic equal of his father, director Ivan Reitman (Stripes, Ghostbusters, Kindergarten Cop). Full of dry wit and hysterical satire, intellectually stimulating and highly entertaining—but never heavy-handed—Thank You for Smoking is one of the best comedies I’ve seen in years.
Robert L. Jones is a photojournalist living and working in Minnesota. His work has appeared in Black & White Magazine, Entrepreneur, Hoy! New York, the New York Post, RCA Victor (Japan), Scene in San Antonio, Spirit Magazine (Canada), Top Producer, and the Trenton Times. Mr. Jones is a past entertainment editor of The New Individualist.
Topics: Black Comedies, Comedies, Independent Films, Movie Reviews |
