CASINO ROYALE (2006)
The theory here is that this is where they take the James Bond series back to first principles – a palpable sense of danger, a superspy who is principled to a point in that he’ll do unprincipled things out of sheer pride in professionalism and a vague and unspecified sense of “the greater good”, and that, nominally cultured and high society-friendly though he is, the guy is an unstoppable killing machine when necessary.
To do this, they’ve taken the basic guts of the original Ian Fleming novel – the first of his series, and one that had never been filmed as a ‘straight’ Bond movie before (see below *) – and tried to update it in the sense of placing it in contemporary times, with various adjustments to automobiles, furniture and evening wear, and the kind of ultra-villainy that would make some sort of sense in a modern context. Oh, and they’ve made the big Baccarat game that was the core of the original novel into a Texas Hold ‘Em poker game.
There’s no point being persnickety about most of this stuff, and it kind of works. For example, enough people are aware of Texas Hold ‘Em since its mass dissemination as the ‘official’ variety of big stakes (or any) poker in the last 10 years or so, and relatively speaking, no-one gets Baccarat, which was the big-stakes casino wah-hoo of a specific time in a previous century. I guess it kind of makes sense that the big bad guy, Le Chiffre, would be involved in some sort of vaguely terrorist king-making in African countries, as his highly villainous way of funding his gambling peccadilloes.
The only problem is that none of it makes sense in a contemporary context by definition. James Bond doesn’t make sense neither. Way back in 1979 Richard Lester made this exact point in his hilariously underrated (and unknown) movie Cuba, in which he had his super-spy character, played by your actual Sean Connery, increasingly register as a complete anachronism, and that movie was set during the fall of the Batista regime and the coming of Fidel Castro – i.e. the premise was that the James Bond type of character, and the idea of espionage it represented, was already effectively superseded by world events at the time Ian Fleming was just starting to write the first of the Bond novels, and before a single Bond picture had been made.
Basically by the time Bond and the bad guys are taking turns blowing up and sinking half of Venice in Casino Royale, anyone half awake in the audience is idly considering the post-September 11 terrorism state of play, and figuring by that point, forget clandestine espionage and one superspy saving the planet, because you’d already have the entire United Nations and half the world’s military swinging into gear.
What I’m saying here is that they might as well have forgotten about selling this as being contemporary and focus on gripping us by the goolies and a lot of irrational tension-release story mechanisms and pretty explosions, because the Bond conception (and the idea of England’s secret service as the centre of world anything) basically can’t be made ‘realistic’ or credible in a current context.
As a megaplex action movie with a vague case of the old Bonds, this is ok though. The inescapable opening action extravagutser is kind enough to eschew the usual helicopters and ski-lifts – it’s basically a huge-scale Hong Kong action movie inspired opener, which establishes the new/old Bond as a relentless and resourceful hard-nut. The big gambling set-piece pays off almost as well as it ever did. The gimmicks are less Buck Rogers and more vaguely believable as ultra-modern technology.
I have a minor problem with the new blond Bond (Daniel Craig) who mostly works in the context of this picture, but as a Bond, well he comes over more like some tough guy from an English pub who goes away for a holiday and conquers all circumstances due to his polo-shirt wearing English pub toughness. I think he comes over about as convincingly in a tux as Shane Warne or Greg Matthews. Basically I believe this guy would be a tough nut to crack on the pub dart-board, and I bet he’d be able to down plenty of pints of lager before he went to the toilet, but as a suave superspy, I’m having some problems. Well, at least they didn’t cast Ben Affleck.
This is exacerbated by the casting of the female lead, Vesper Lynd, one of those incredible knock-out evening dress-wearing Treasury officials we’re all so familiar with (Eva Green). The scene where the two of them first meet on a train and exchange supposedly cold sparkling “touché” type dialogue has all the light, sophisticated steel in the acting of two toddlers having a barney over a toy train in a kindergarten sandpit. The love-hate chemistry between the two of them throughout is as highly galvanising as any romance between Jerry Lewis and a knockout leading lady in any of his pictures from the 1950s. They probably needed someone with a lot more spark, presence and conviction than a novelty lunchbox as the female lead, and after watching this, I’m thinking that anyone from Sharon Stone to Alyssa Milano to Meg White might have been a better choice.
Also, and this might just be me, but Dame Whatserpuss, Judi Dench, as ‘M’, makes me think they might as well have cast the woman who used to play Granny Smith in the bread ads here. When they’re trying for a more realistic approach – all things being relative, but still – having Judi Dench run the secret service of Britain with her stern, finger-wagging Grandma approach – well, you kind of wonder why they didn’t just get Des O’Connor or Ernie Wise in drag, and make it officially a comedy.
But it’s a decent enough watch, and probably achieves most of what it’s trying to do. It lacks the undercurrent of darker humour of the early Bonds, or any recognisable humour for that matter, but it’s going for a more serious superhero approach, and anything’s better than Roger Moore Bond Picture Template #937. It’s got the usual contemporary movie disease of not knowing when to finish up and draw the curtain, with about 37 climaxes too many working their way through the law of diminishing returns. That one of them is basically the ending of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service doesn’t exactly help matters, not to mention that it was done quicker and with greater impact there, and that they managed to do it with the combination of George Lazenby and Diana Rigg.
It’s probably better than any of the Bonds since Sean Connery’s last half-serious run-through. Though to put it in perspective, they tried this back to basics business with exactly one of the Roger Moore pictures, For Your Eyes Only, and that was probably at least as good as this, and had a more satisfying ending (and pretty much stuck to one ending, which is never a bad idea.)
On the upside, if you’re an old Bond desperado, the title sequence will give you a satisfying tweak of the “old days” nerve, and the song that goes with it is dead-right as well, by Chris Cornell of all the grizzled grunt-rockers, not that he’ll have made Paul McCartney type money out of this one. James Bond – he’s right back where he used to be, only like he’s never been before. I didn’t even realise there could be such a thing by definition, but I guess there’s a market for updated nostalgia after all.
(7 out of 11, on the time-honoured and highly official MPHOAH scale)
* [Some people will be aware that there was an earlier movie version of Casino Royale done as kind of a bizarre swinging 60s comedy in 1967, with a once-in-a-lunchtime cast including Peter Sellers, David Niven, Orson Welles and Woody Allen. Why would I make this stuff up? I think they thought they were doing some Pink Panther meets James Bond thing. What they actually ended up doing - well there were five directors involved, and we all know what a guaranteed recipe for success that is. I’m not saying it’s entirely without “moments” and you should probably see it as a bizarre sign of the times at some point if it comes up on television again, but if you’re searching for any connection to a regular James Bond picture, you could probably save the potential strain on your eyeballs.
Probably fewer people are aware that there was an earlier, serious version of Casino Royale done for US television not that long after the Fleming novel had come out. They thoughtfully decided to make James Bond American in that one. It’s stiflingly low-budget, and slow-ish even at relatively short TV-friendly length, but does feature one bonanza bit of casting, with a presumably down-on-his-chips Peter Lorre as the villain, Le Chiffre. (Actually both earlier versions had a lot more luck casting this character - Orson Welles would have been the perfect Le Chiffre in a vaguely serious Casino Royale.) With a lot of hunting you can probably still find the 50s US TV version of Casino Royale on DVD, although you’d probably have to be the most side-mouth dribbling kind of James Bond completist to care enough to bother.]
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A QUIET LIFE IN
Recently, owing to my peculiar alternative to having a normal life, (or a life at all) – where I live in a twilight semi-retirement state wisely instigated and maintained by the folks in charge of the media here, to ensure the public is wisely protected from as much of my, ahem, ‘creativity’ as possible – I instituted my new Official Leapster’s Movie-A-Day policy, which due to poor planning and unintended but valid editorial comment, breaks down to The Official Leapster’s M.A.D. in abbreviated form.
This started off partly due to me coming down with a rampaging case of some hideous bug after attending three AFL finals matches in two days, and thus being trapped inside Leapster Towers for the ensuing week. However, it’s also partly due to the intimidating mountain of DVDs I’ve either bought or taped off TV during an insane frenzy over the last couple of years, to the point where, even if weather conditions ran to an unending series of Noah’s Ark-friendly biblical storms over the next twenty years or so, there still wouldn’t be enough rainy days left in my lifetime for me to watch all of the things.
LONG SKIP-ABLE WAFFLE-LACED INTRO
I love movies, of all kinds, and that sort of includes even a lot of the bad ones. At least I love to stick my head in the combat zone with most movies and grapple them within an inch of both of our lives. It passes the time. I figured if I’m going to be doing that once a day anyway, and I’ve got a website sitting there which is traditionally 99% antique wood-based old posts and cobwebs, I might as well combine both factors, and pass on some of the tedium to you. Thus the plan is, to write about the insanely divergent movies I’ll be catching up with on a daily basis, during my declining years, said rate of decline snowballing at a more impressive rate almost by the second.
Don’t look for any particular connection between these movies, because that way lies madness, I can assure you. The pictures will shuttle backwards and forwards all over movie history, not to mention genres, approaches, degree of inherent trashdom, ideal foodstuff to be consumed in accompaniment, aspic ratio, and any question of current availability. I’ll have grabbed them off the internet, out of JB Hi-Fi, off cable, or via some near-rusted-solid old videotape.
Whether it’s movies, music, TV or whatever, I’ve never bought the argument that the latest is necessarily the greatest, or the most worthy of being endlessly blathered about. An unconsidered popular culture leads to a puffy, foofy, bloated dead duck’s ding-dong of a popular culture, something that can be witnessed and confirmed on a daily basis in terms of the load of old rope put over as popular culture to an uncomplaining and thick-eared general public on a daily basis in newspapers, women’s toilet magazines, E! News type crap-storms, Ofrah Windsock, and the general downhill-run of network TV programming rosters. (Not to mention the aerated alfalfa that gets passed off as movie reviews in the mainstream media.)
From older movies (or albums, or whatever), and sometimes even stinky ones of a particularly arresting aroma, we can learn about where the popular culture has been, what bacterial strains of it survived, what didn’t, and why, and detect, if not an actual pattern, touchstones that trace a history of vital movie-making worth keeping, that still beats in the hearts of good, or at least galvanising, movies right now.
If all we see and talk about is the current megaplex cheese and its blue-vein ‘gourmet’ on a water-cracker art-house sidekicks, all we’re learning about there is, at most, contemporary commerce. Basically you’ll know what sells a choc-top this week. Not that that’s not an area worth keeping an eye on, but that’s business studies and nothing to do with any aesthetic of movie criticism.
Any form of pop culture criticism basically is the opposite of any code of football. The latter automatically requires air under pressure, and the former already has too much of it. Read the newspaper movie reviews and tell me I’m wrong.
No matter how many housing developments’ worth of bricks you can successfully manufacture without straw, you can’t make perspective without perspective. You got to see the movies. All kinds of movies. You got to get down in the pit and grapple with them suckers. You can’t just brush off the ones you feel inherently and mystically “above” somehow. That’s the Marge Pomerantz school of coffee-table reviewing.
It really helps if you love the idea – the medium, if you will Hortense – of movies. ‘Critics’ who think they’ve somehow become one of the cool kids just because they review movies are deluding themselves on the public’s time. They’re still the same Harry-high-pants nerdenheimers who got routinely victimised at school, proving that the whole area of bullying needs a comprehensive re-evaluation in terms of valid sociological benefits. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of them about, and they’re about as useful in the long run as the impacted movie-nerd types who write in critical jargon code to other movie nerds and leave basically the entire general public high and dry.
My movies and reviews might leave you none the wetter or the better, but I don’t just play favourites, I don’t care how old the movie is or isn’t, and I have no shame over whether the movie company I keep might inherently make me look like an idiot to some snooty espresso-breathing, black shirt buttoned to the neck, Hal Hartley jibber-jabbering horse’s patoot.
BIT WHERE HE GETS BACK TO THE POINT, MORE OR LESS
Let’s roll up the sleeves, lock in to the collar-and-elbow tie-up and wrestle a few falls with these suckers. I’ll start you off with a bulging package (f’nar) of all the movies I’ve seen since the fateful Leapster’s Movie-A-Day policy kicked off in the last week.
DEATH RACE 2000 (1975)
A drive-in classic of its day, DR 2000 is kind of a crap-plate special combination of Rollerball, The Wacky Races, all those cross-country rally pictures of the time which came in two flavours – with and without Burt Reynolds, and the general run of cheapo, black comedy-oriented 1970s New World Pictures about the end of civilisation’s sphincter as we know it.
It’s light, breezy, funny, full of thickhead violence, and is, in general, about a fascist future in which a shadowy presidential figure runs the world and the people are pacified and kept under control by the international obsession with a futuristic motor-sport in which drivers get points for running over civilians. The car designs will remind you of The Cars That Ate Paris, if not crappier, and the main characters are a bracing array of Nazis (Gopher from The Love Boat is the assistant to Matilda the Hun), 1920s style gangsters (Stallone IS Machine Gun Joe Viterbo!), a horror figure in a bondage outfit (keep that one off the CV Dave Carradine), a dominatrix type, and some kind of Roman centurion deal, from blithering memory.
Naturally there’s some sort of underground freedom fighters organisation trying to overthrow the President by destroying the big race. In its way, it’s kind of both parody and extrapolation of American history, although you wouldn’t want to lean too heavily on any of the apparatus.
Paul Bartel had a giddy, mordant kind of knack for what used to be called “camp” and/or “sick” humour, and that’s about the deal here, other than Carradine bringing a strange, world-weary, professional’s pride to his characterisation of the star driver “Frankenstein”, that just lends that extra layer of text to the overall political cartooning herein. (As opposed to Stallone, who, in evident training for later stardom, goes with a complete stick-figure outline of a performance. Although in this context, you can make a case as to why.)
Bartel’s touch is good enough that the motorhead violence has some punch, despite the balsa-wood nature of the overall construction, and the strictly-from-hunger ending can just about pass for detached irony.
If you want kind of a satirical essay on sport’s place in society, and how one distorts the other and leads us all firmly dancing up the garden path and disappearing up our own wazoos, then that picture is still the original Rollerball, and not this accelerator-pumped knot-headed knock-off. But as a speedy, light, resoundingly cheapo, cartoon take on roughly the same theme, this is worth the once-over.
(7 out of 11 Margaret Pomerantz heads on a hubcap – yes, the newly famous MPHOAH scale)
HOLLYWOODLAND (2006)
This is kind of James Ellroy-smelling territory, with an additional overbite of that movie about Bob Crane, only revisited about three years too late.
The premise got me in. It’s about George Reeves, TV’s live-action Superman, and his death, many tens of gazumping years ago, from a gunshot suicide. The tickle here is that some low-life private detective gets it into his head that George’s suicide wasn’t a suicide, and falls into a tangled netherworld, if not nethered tango-world, of ill-doings among the big cheeses of the big Hollywood studios.
That’s a barking-solid premise for an interesting picture if you’re a hopeless popular culture casualty like Unca Leapster. Unfortunately, beyond some expensively re-created period wallpaper and automobiles, anything interesting fails to ensue. The other plot-threads and potential alternative demises for George are dull and predictable. George’s various fractured romances are similarly riveting. I was convinced I was two and a half hours into this furshlugginer picture when I happened to notice the time and realised only 59 minutes had elapsed.
And they just can’t make their minds up about anything. Is it a dream sequence or did it happen? Too-hard basket. Was George gay or wasn’t he? Well, we’ll kind of imply he was, and bravely present nothing on screen to really confirm it one way or the other. Right down to the ending – so did George stick a gun in his mouth, or did some passing Samaritan give him a helping hand? Err, we’ll get back to you next picture.
This is two pictures out of two now in which sad-faced mule-guy Adrien Brody (as the detective here) has given a performance perfectly calculated to focussing my attention on his phenomenal nose. I’ve got a big nose, but this guy could run a three-legged race by himself. However as performances go, his is overshadowed by both the nose and the vintage wallpaper.
The one stroke of unlikely successful casting is Ben Affleck “Of Talent” who plays George Reeves. Let’s see, he’s playing a fairly bland, blithe, good-looking minor Hollywood star of vague unrequited ambition and vaguer ability, who was uncomfortable playing a superhero, and had no other apparent commitment to anything else, unless it was to partying. Well, maybe that’s not such an unlikely piece of casting, come to drink about it.
On the other claw, as the shadowy studio powerbroker type, they managed to dig right up the back of the “Anybody currently available” file and land Bob Hoskins. Remember him? What a great choice to play a vintage Hollywood bigshot. Maybe Davey Jones from The Monkees was unavailable.
The female co-lead is ok, and maybe could have achieved something if they’d written her a character instead of a set of knee-jerk arbitrary reactions unrolling slowly in sequence.
Actually, the only other stand-out performance in the soup is Molly Parker from Deadwood as Reeves’ abandoned first wife, and that takes up a rollicking 90 seconds of the movie.
If you get stuck with this hunk o’ clunk, take some minor masochistic pleasure from the major sub-plot – the one so big it’s used to introduce our pubic nosed private eye – in which after forgetting about it entirely for reels of slumber, they throw in a big grandstand play resolution which is so utterly, nakedly desperate and unconnected with anything else in the picture it may well be the first time you’ve ever wept at a movie not because the movie made you sad, but simply because the movie WAS so sad.
(3 out of 11 MPHOAH, all for wallpaper, nose and vintage Superman recreations)
HARVEY (1950)
Now almost forgotten, this used to be on TV enough that it was considered something of a family classic.
The reason it doesn’t get a run much now is probably partly because it’s black and white, but mostly because the hero is an alcoholic, and that’s pretty much presented as a positive thing. Just imagine trying to pitch that one to a studio today. Yep, folks, we got us a loveable kid-friendly picture for the whole family about a guy who drinks in every scene in the movie and has an imaginary buddy who’s a white rabbit over six foot tall. You’d probably land in the nuthouse on the first bounce.
Anyway, it’s a shame, because this is one of those rare mold-denying timeless Hollywood studio pictures that effortlessly maintains a blithe tone of unforced farce. It captures a kind of idealized small-town life and makes its little points about the interesting and different ways people have their heads bent by everyday life, without the slightest strain or pain on the part of either movie or audience. (In a way it’s kind of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest territory thematically, but makes the same points doing a lot less overt hard work.)
Jimmy Stewart is at his most absent-mindedly likeable as Elwood P. Dowd who apparently has blithering piles of money and lives in a huge house, but doesn’t care about any of that, he just likes to go out drinking in low-life bars where he cheers everyone up with his generosity, unfailingly gentle, accepting manner, and also confuses them with his invisible giant rabbit buddy, Harvey.
His sister is a little more concerned, mainly because Dowd’s harmless eccentricity interferes with her plans to marry off her social-climbing hatchet-faced daughter, due to everyone figuring he’s mad. Also she’s starting to see the rabbit as well, which is bothering her.
Naturally, she tries to have Elwood committed, and naturally this works out a lot easier and better on paper than it does in real life, since the staff at the fairly demented local insane asylum wrongly assumes that she’s the jittery lunatic and that Dowd is just a regular happy guy, which on the surface of things is admittedly an easy mistake to make.
The story unfolds in a leisurely amiable series of confusions, and in general Harvey kind of feels like Arsenic and Old Lace (right down to one of the same cast members, Josephine Hull, who won an Oscar in this as the sister) only with a lot less pushing and running around. Stewart probably never had a better vehicle for his most familiar screen persona than this picture. The on-screen explanation for how his character became that way comes late in the piece, and is the perfect rationale. Everything that’s done here is done well. If you’re not familiar with Harvey, or haven’t seen it in years, make the effort to catch it. It’s a real one-off.
(10 out of 11, on the MPHOAH scale)
THE HARDER THEY FALL (1956)
Brittle, hard-edged boxing picture with a sustained, off-colour air of convincing fight-biz stink to it, which is a fictionalised version of the rise to the heavyweight title of former World Champ, Primo Carnera. Humphrey Bogart plays the journo fallen on hard times who takes a press agent job from mob-connected boxing manager Rod Steiger to try and talk hapless giant fighter Toro Moreno into a world title shot. They fix fights, Moreno goes up the rankings, but the fighter is unaware that he’s fighting exclusively set-ups. Eventually, he runs into the champ.
This is supposedly Carnera’s actual story, and contains events that did supposedly occur to Carnera. At this distance it would be pretty much pure conjecture to say how much of it was actually true. The general consensus with Carnera was that he was nowhere near as good as he was big.
What you need to know is that the movie grips you by the pants-seat, throws you in whatever direction it wants and never lets go. Regardless of the specifics, some of what it says about how big money sport is conducted and manipulated behind the scenes doesn’t come off that dated at all. Bogart is perfect in one of those morally-compromised type roles that he was one of the few Hollywood leads to regularly play in those days, and as his last movie he got a worthy one.
[There’s a few interesting bits and pieces for boxing fans. The guy playing Moreno’s broken-down trainer and training partner is Jersey Joe Walcott who had only retired from boxing a few years earlier, and was a former heavyweight champion. The guy who plays the champ Moreno ultimately faces is Max Baer (Sr) who was also heavyweight champ, but roughly 22 years before this movie was released! Baer was the guy who beat Primo Carnera for the world title in real life. The guy who plays the ex-champ Gus Dundee in The Harder They Fall – and isn’t too bad at all – was a former heavyweight boxer called Pat Comiskey. Again in real life, Comiskey was knocked out by Max Baer in one round, in Baer’s second-last fight of his career (in 1940).
Baer is the guy portrayed as a complete black-hearted thug in the Ron Howard/Russell Crowe ‘biographical interpretation’ Cinderella Man, about boxer Jim Braddock, who beat a famously under-trained Baer for the title in 1935. He is also known as the father of the guy who played Jethro in The Beverley Hillbillies (Max Baer Jr). Baer has tremendous natural presence playing a somewhat nastier version of himself as ‘Buddy Brennan’ in The Harder They Fall. It makes me wonder whether that was where Howard got the idea about what he was like, although he was certainly quite a character in real life, by all reports. Incidentally, on the DVD package, it says that “The Harder They Fall was seen by many as a thinly disguised adaptation of the career of Argentinean fighter Primo Carnera.” Whether it was or it wasn’t, Carnera was Italian.]
There was a small landslide of top quality boxing movies from the mid-40s through to The Harder They Fall, with the last solid one of the run probably coming a few years after the main seam, with Rod Serling’s Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962, with Anthony Quinn and a fascinating appearance by a young chap called Cassius Clay.) That Harder They Fall’s director Mark Robson was very comfortable in this territory is confirmed by Champion (1949) which may be as mentally tough and brutal as any of them, with Kirk Douglas unforgettable as one of that period of movies’ most irredeemably horrible lead characters.
I should also mention that the movie was an adaptation of a novel by Budd Schulberg, who also co-wrote the screenplay, and that boy could write just a little bit.
Anyway The Harder They Fall stacks up in any boxing, sporting, ‘mean streets’ or general movie company you care to name. I’d say it “still packs a punch” except then the Herald-Sun’s Leigh Paatsch would either want royalties, or start badgering me on a daily basis for tips on how to come up with such scintillating critical-type prose.
(10 out of 11 on the MPHOAH scale.)
BORAT (2006)
Yeah I’m the last person on the face of the planet who finally got around to seeing it. Tankerloads of hype is pretty much a guarantee of me taking years to see anything, so I can let all the steam-driven dribble die down and make up my own mind at leisure.
Look, I think all this stunt type TV/movie stuff where you stick a character into a real life situation and they use embarrassment to let others more thoroughly embarrass themselves – whether it’s Borat or Mike Moore, or The Chaser or whatever plonkers are doing that stunt-stuff on television – is all plus or minus so many degrees Norman Gunston. It’s exactly what Gunston/Garry McDonald was doing on television back in the early 70s, only his was a character constructed to some degree on a principle, and the principle was the underlying message of the show, which is that a lot of then-popular culture was poop and that Australian journos and conventional television were entirely clueless. There was a definite satirical edge to the gate-crashing Gunston stunt appearances in the original ABC TV incarnations of the show, underscored by the other entertainment segments and styles McDonald pursued as part of that show.
On the upside, Borat is just as thoroughly constructed, although any question of principle is a lot narrower, because the people making this patently didn’t care a lot about principle. The construction here is in the sense of dizzy, light comedy based on stereotypes in and about ‘backwards’ Eastern European culture. As with all effective stereotyping, they’re not exactly playing fair, but there’s enough home truths – or truisms if more delicate constitutions prefer that usage – to bring the gags on home.
On that level, of maintaining Borat’s chopped liver “Kazakhstani” variant on English, and his warped conceptions of western culture, and his complete lack of caring about how Americans might deal with his unshakeably bizarre homespun view of the world – it’s pretty much a complete success. The movie maintains this lunkheaded, daffodil-brained, airy quality, which is a lot harder to capture and sustain successfully in a really eccentric comedy movie than apparently most reviewers scattered about the planet are even vaguely aware.
That it achieves a lot of this via material that relies on racism, groin-level comedy and pure unrefined toilet humour are where many will take their leave from the enterprise. (Although I guess if most of what you got out of Kenny was the poo jokes, that stuff would be a gold-plated invitation for Borat, so it’s one man’s meat is another man’s nut cutlet, etc.) For me the careful maintenance of character and comic tone – ie that for most of this, the Sacha Baron Cohen and the other makers seem to have total conviction in their own idiocy – takes the curse off all but the most strictly-from-hunger of this material.
For all that’s been doodled on this score, it’s not really any sort of satire on the USA, not in any recognisable way that the early Gunston TV WAS a satire of Australian television and culture. The humour in a lot of the American stuff comes from the incredibly steadfast dedication of the Americans in it to maintaining their version of the polite social contract in the face of a force of nature whose apparent innocence/ignorance of any rules of behaviour leads him to consistently, smilingly and resolutely putting his foot in it up to his thigh bone, without the slightest awareness on his part that he’s done anything wrong. It’s a surefire generator of comic tension that works almost every time, although, inevitably to the law of diminishing returns as the picture goes on. By the time Borat brings a prostitute into an etiquette lesson as his dinner date, they’ve mined the seam dry and they’re trying too hard.
There are moments of satire in Borat – one shining moment comes when he addresses a rodeo crowd and unforgettably declaims “We support your war of terror” to thunderous applause – but the guts of the mechanism here is behavioural, not political.
The one area where Borat fires on both scores is where Sacha Baron Cohen is on home base – the brutal and hilarious parodying of a very old school stripe of anti-Semitism that goes way way back in some Eastern European cultures. This stuff is once more, with feeling, and every single gag on the subject fires up like a lighter-fluid soaked barbecue. The funniest stuff in the picture by a mile, and probably also the most shocking to contemporary urban audiences.
Around all the verbal stunt set-ups, there’s enough fictional construction to turn this into a movie. On that score, there’s a subplot – which is actually pretty much all the plot – about Borat falling in love with Pamela Anderson while watching Baywatch and trying to get to Los Angeles to marry her. It’s there to give the movie shape, and it pretty much does, but it’s one note, and wears out its welcome long before the end. Borat’s TV executive travelling companion is pretty much in the movie for similar reasons, and also doesn’t end up yielding anything resembling a barrel-load of laughs.
Overall, I thought the tone made it. I didn’t get a ton of laughs other than the mock anti-Jewish stuff, but just about enough to make the trip, and Cohen’s delivery and complete submersion into the character is a treat in itself. Whatever you think about what he’s doing with the talent, he’s an incredibly talented guy. As a movie, it passed the time. It’s really a series of occasional high-spots in the vague, amiable and absent-minded search of a movie. In terms of an Eastern European character being inadvertently hilarious while trying to reconcile himself with Western/US culture, there’s an example at least as funny as this in the way-hey-hey underrated movie Everything is Illuminated, and the bonus round is, that’s a really really good movie as well, which Borat, whatever it is, isn’t.
(6 out of 11, MPHOAH scale)
WAITING FOR GUFFMAN (1997)
The first of the clever-ass comedies produced by the unit centred around the directing/conception team of Chris Guest, Eugene Levy, and various other former Spinal Tap buddies of Guest’s and Second City Television alumni of Levy’s. The others later on in the kinda/sorta series were Best in Show, A Mighty Wind and For Your Consideration.
(There are no continuing characters or plot-lines in between these pictures, but they all contain a fairly similar ensemble cast, and take a very vaguely similar approach to improvising and refining multiple character comedy over a firm, but not exactly “written” conceptual base.)
I don’t like where this kind of clever-clogs anti-conventional comedy ended up. I’m the one hold-out in the western world who got nothing out of The Office. Either version. I think Larry David’s show is more honest and conceptually pointed than Steinfeld, but I always thought Steinfeld was The Mary Tyler Moore show without the funny characters (Ed Asner, Ted Knight) and the rock-solid gags, and I don’t laugh “at” OR “with” Larry David – I just wish he’d break out a pair of hedging shears and trim his nose hairs once a year.
Whether it’s The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm (or Steinfeld), social embarrassment to me is just social embarrassment. This is not a prejudice so much against a type of comedy. I could as easily have said that to me a cream pie in the face is just a cream pie in the face, or a hit in the head is just a hit in the head. These are tools of comedy, not comedy in and of itself. In any of those cases, you have to have a “trigger” to ignite the basic concept into comedy. It needs a character, or a situation, or some happy piece of timing, or plot-building leading to a required resolution, and then you pull your cream pie out or have your tremendous moment of social embarrassment and there’s a pay-off. All this naturalistic hoodee-wah-hah about making stuff seem just like ‘real life’ in The Office, and then the pay-off is that the boss is slimy or overbearing, or that his offsider is a toady – my entire physical and mental being just chucks up the “Who Cares?!” road-block for all that stuff.
Comedy of social embarrassment? Sure, you mean Fawlty Towers. With situations, and construction, and building and timing, and comic performances to beat the band, and actual physical and verbal gags to pick the band back up and knock them over one more time. The Office – oh, yes Daphne, let’s tiptoe quietly through the Ac-TOR’s Studio ambience and admire how quietly and unassumingly nothing happens, with all the impact and comic alacrity of the proverbial mouse pissing on a blotter.
Like I said, and have now clearly demonstrated for posterity’s amusement, I just don’t get that stuff.
(I should point out that I was happily surprised by Ricky Gervais’s Extras thing, which had recognisable gags, characters, construction and even showbiz in-jokes, and while I wouldn’t risk a stubbed toe by racing across my lounge-room to throw the thing on, or even a paper-cut to consult the TV guide to see if it was on, the few episodes I stumbled across accidentally were pleasant enough. So it’s nothing against him personally, and it’s not some sort of kneejerk superstar backlash or whatever.)
So I have my reservations about the Guest-Levy new-fangled comedy thing, where we don’t want to make it all too rudely obvious that we’re actually doing a comedy movie and going for laughs or anything vulgar like that.
However. You just can’t ignore the talent of the people involved in these movies, many of whom are phenomenal at creating fairly complicated and atypical new comedy “types” in each of these movies. And although in conventional comedy terms everything – verbally, physically, and in any sense of providing gag pay-offs – is generally so heavily underplayed that you can feel like you have to drill through several metres of concrete and, even then, be carrying the world’s most sensitive pocket seismograph to detect any evidence of a comedy movie taking place – if you get the hang of the comic atmosphere they’re going for, they keep paying off again and again, not to mention through many repeat screenings, and for a change of pace, someone NOT sign-posting the killer gags by hitting you over the head with them, is (a) a relief, and (b) the point is, the killer gags are still there.
My favourite of these is probably A Mighty Wind. Lenny from Laverne and Shirley is just hilarious doing almost nothing in there. They even got a hit-in-the-head gag in there just for me, and it’s a peach. For Your Consideration goes the most for gags, in a more conventional way, and is atypical of this run of movies. It’s also underrated a lot. Best in Show was the easy-mark of the bunch – who doesn’t like cute dogs? Doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a lot of the positive attributes of the other clever-ass pics, but it does have an awful lot of “owners are just like their dogs” cutesy-poo stuff, and it probably has Chris Guest’s least funny characterisation of the four movies – where it’s all character quirks and knit-browed actorating, and not enough laughs in the role. (The guys doing the dog show commentary – Fred Willard in his most perfect lug-tongued role – were completely hilarious though. They just never miss in the entire picture.)
However – to finally get to the point – Waiting for Guffman uses a previously established (on TV) Guest character at its centre: the failed showbiz all-arounder and enormous pink-sweatered icon of sexual denial, Corky St Clair. The basic premise is that the go-nowhere, done-nothing small town of Blaine, Missouri is having its 150th anniversary, and resident Blaine showbiz guru (having fled there after failing on an off-off-off-Broadway level) Corky St Clair has to put together a musical spectacular, tracing Blaine’s history, using only the finest of local amateur talent. The premise allows for showbiz parody, satire of the pageant mentality, plenty of room for amateur dramatic “types”, and some cunning bits of business regarding the stage musical form, and they really clean most of it up. Eugene Levy completely steals the show as the local dentist with a cardboard shirt-collar personality and a yen to perform, and has a completely heart-tearing gag involving his lazy eye and a scene where he rides a cardboard horse. St Clair’s showbiz-isms – and occasional break-outs into the creepier/weirder attics of his character – are good for a lot of laughs, Willard does the same character again, and it always works.
(It’s kind of an attention-deficit oriented, non-accented Borat type characterisation – a showbiz type gone strangely awry. The character simply can’t hear anyone or anything other than the roar of its own personality. I saw him on Letterman just recently, and he played himself as the exact same character. Actually, Letterman came across as an oddly similar type, only Letterman is funny being funny, and the Willard character is funny not being funny.)
A lot of those support guys who turn up in all these pictures in smaller roles – and I don’t remember all the names, but Bob Balaban is one of them – are invaluable. Watch out early in the picture for the crop-circle expert who says that the circle’s diameter gets bigger every year, but the radius always stays the same. Great gag. First time I’d picked it up in three viewings.
Also the musical numbers in the show-within-the-movie are all written by the Spinal Tap trio, and they’re pretty funny, as is their staging. And keep an eye out for the guy in the Blaine band who plays trumpet with one hand, and percussion with the other. And swaps hands.
This might be regarded as the least of the Guest-Levy pictures, but there’s still plenty in it. If you watch it on DVD, make sure you watch the scenes they cut. Corky St Clair’s theatrical nostalgia shop is a must-visit, and the dress worn by Shirley Temple in the movie she died in (while gold-mining – the rope broke) is a little additional piece of showbiz magic.
(8 out of 11, on the official MPHOAH scale)
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