The Funny Things People See in Funny People

The Funny Things People See in Funny People

I got a copy of Funny People this week off of my Netflix cue. Funny People was the Judd Apatow movie (Apatow directed mega-hits The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) released about a year ago in theaters, starring Adam Sandler as a comedian who, like Adam Sandler, made some movies many regard as terrible, and used to do stand-up comedy. It didn’t do very well in theaters, and currently has a slightly-above-average critical rating on Metacritic.com and Rottentomatoes.com. It made slightly less money in worldwide box office ($71 million) than it cost to make ($75 million), so is probably considered a bit of a failure.

I’ll get the obvious out of the way – I loved Funny People. Although you could rightly call The 40 Year Old Virgin one of the best, most important movies of the 2000s, Funny People is certainly as good, a more thoughtful and more ambitious movie that is, completely, about the depth of the people who try and make a career of being funny. That the movie is quite funny on occasion is also quite the bonus, though judging from reviews you’ve read, the movie is the height of floppy melodrama.

It’s not even that I loved Funny People or found it surprisingly funny. I’m fascinated by it. To me, this is the height of terrific filmmaking – of superb acting, excellent direction and staging, but most of all, amazing writing.

For a movie that seems so endlessly casual and off-the-cuff – it follows a world of stand-up comedians almost obsessively belittling each other’s insecurities – it would make sense that much of the dialogue wound up being improvised. I have no idea if that’s true or not. What I do know is this is still extraordinary writing. You can tell from the details.

Each character is a master of complexities. Its main character, George Simmons (Adam Sandler), is a popular movie star, but is sad and lonely… and also caustic, horny, unsympathetic…and charming, and hopeful, and occasionally very wise. That he’s played by Adam Sandler is its own stroke of meta-genius, but there are also his “movies” that have made him a star – Re-Do, where a grown man is re-incarnated into a baby (or something), and Merman, where a man turns into a mermaid. Are these movies meant to appear as “terrible”? Sure, and they do appear that way, but they also appear as important to fans, and children, who obsessively mimic the voices he made famous in this mirror-version of Hollywood.

Even the phrase “appear as terrible” is misleading, because truly, I don’t know what those movies are. They’re meant to be, I suppose, about as good as a Rob Schneider movie (he “turns into” things all the time. I’m mostly reminded, though, of the South Park parody in which Schneider turned into a stapler, in The Stapler). They are merely choices in Simmons’ career, something which has been undeniably successful, and which starred an undeniable comedic force.

As a man, his humor bites. His assistant Ira (Seth Rogen) is constantly, mercilessly belittled by George – but then, so is George, and everyone else. George hires Ira to help him write jokes and be his personal assistant as he attempts to “do more stand-up.” Some of his stand-up involves George on a piano singing something that isn’t at all funny, despite a couple of laughs, and the scene is revelatory in its conflicting interests – a need for an audience he can’t stand, an ability to fuck endless women who always leave him.

Like George and the movies he’s appeared in, the stand-up feels real too. It turns out, according to the Funny People Wikipedia page, it was all filmed in front of a live audience as actual stand-up would be. They feel like real jokes with real reactions by real audiences. That isn’t to say it’s all funny (some of it certainly is very funny), but it is, certainly, full of things you’d laugh at on a night out with drinks. The awkward moments play like awkward moments. The characters too seem like the types of people who would tell these jokes. Rogen’s Ira, towards the end, has a bit about how his friends watch beautiful women on television and say “I want to fuck her,” whereas he feels tempted to say something more apt to his own personality, “I want to pick her up from the airport.” As George says to him, “you seem more like the Ira I like in real life on stage” doing this act, and you’re apt to agree.

Ah, but that’s the beauty of these characters. There’s another lead I haven’t mentioned yet, which is the character of Laura, played by Leslie Mann. Laura was the girl that got away from George, and when she finds out he’s sick, it rekindles something in her. In fact, we expect this plot line from the moment we see her, but we don’t expect the turns it takes, the swiftness with which it gets there. The scene in which the two see each other again initially is full of tears and honesty, and anger, and absolutely ignites the movie around it with barely-hidden emotions. If this was supposed to be a conventional comedy arc, a scene like this shouldn’t happen until at least the 2/3 mark.

I realize I got this far without saying the main plot of the movie – which is about George discovering he has cancer, responding to an experimental treatment, and actually changing his life, but not really in a manner you’d expect. Interviews I’d read of the movie in which Apatow described the movie as about a person who gets shaken by this incident, but doesn’t really change. In fact, George does change, but also stays his cantankerous, sometimes awful, cutting, lonely self.

That’s true of Laura too, who has passion re-ignited, but finds its practicality harder to deal with. There is one scene that is truly hilarious, and is also deeply moving. In it, a lie propelling the action is exposed, and Laura must keep up the lie, or not, and in the meantime justify her actions to her aussie-himbo husband, Craig (Eric Bana)… by imitating his paltry justifications in an Aussie accent. What an extraordinary scene. The accent is terrible, and shifting, and so so sad. Watching it from the sidelines, George and Ira are as fixated on its lack of quality as they are on its content, and so are we. That the scene gives you both is a marvel, but it gives you a third layer of civility that’s finally being ripped between its characters, and, truly, it’s a scene of accomplished characterization, deft timing, and many many layers to the people at its center.

But why did people object to Funny People so much when I found endless things to rave about? First on the list of complaints was that it wasn’t funny. Well, I suppose there are less gross-out belly laughs than in The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, but actually, I laughed in Funny People all the time. I don’t know if I’d ultimately call it a “comedy,” but that’s a problem of the limits of genre categorization, not the movie. To quote Roger Ebert’s review of a movie that was neither funny nor interesting, Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited, “why do we have to be the cops enforcing these narrow rules of movie making?” Why indeed? Funny People is quite funny, and it has the power to be quite upsetting too. I’m not sure I even understand what benchmark it’s not living up to.

Because its humor often comes from the same place it did in Apatow’s previous two movies – from his same fey, monotone sarcasm as spoken between jovial friends trying to out-blasé each other. And also from the every day nature of the circumstances. The truth is, three years after seeing Knocked Up, the scene I remember laughing the hardest at was the one in which Kristen Wiig tells Katherine Heigl, in total monotone, that they should “hang out” sometime. The truth is, though the movie is less intended for big gutter laughs, I found the humor truer in Funny People than Knocked Up.

As for the other complaints? Reviewers have seized on the movie’s bleak outlook on life, its running time, and the length of time it devotes to its characters visit to Laura’s home in Marin County. Yes, it’s a long movie of characters often trounced by their choices in life, but I don’t know where I’d tell Judd Apatow to edit. I never found Funny People sluggish and found something to admire in every scene. From a screenwriting perspective, bits of plot dropped into a previous scene come up by slight reference in later scenes, so again, I don’t know that I’d have any practical editing suggestions. And the Marin County scenes – besides comprising nearly an hour of screen time – are the guts of the movie.

Those were the scenes in which I saw and believed that George could regret much of his life, wish for a better one, and still react the way a sometimes-scumbag does. Those were the scenes in which I could believe that Laura could be swept up in passion again only to reconsider her life, for better or for worse. Katherine Heigl complained of Knocked Up that the women were killjoys, painfully practical worrywarts while the men got to have all the fun and wish for more with their lives. Perhaps she’d find the same issue with Mann’s character here, except that I completely believed this person I saw on the screen.

Completely believed it, every second. This is the ultimate testament to the great writing and staging and acting I saw in Funny People. I believed that Laura was a person who used to be a sorta b-rate actress, perhaps appearing on Party of Five and commercials, that she was getting somewhere playing “the bitch” and that it never really went anywhere. I believed her husband could be casually cruel to her but actually be a horrible human being. And I believed that she believed she was getting someone different from George with him, and wound up with someone who’s the same. Sandler got very good press for his performance here (and he deserved even more better press, if not an Oscar nomination, but that’s a different conversation), but Mann too is outstanding. In life, you can look at a person and wonder if you understand what they’re thinking, and perhaps still feel hopelessly lost on the baffling complexities of their lives. The truest compliment of her work here is that I got it all – what she was thinking and what she wasn’t, what she told herself, and George, and Craig, and why she chooses what she chooses.

Is that bleakness on the moviemakers’ part? I don’t think so. Unlike, say, Revolutionary Road, I don’t think the movie is “saying” anything so bleak and angry about modernity, or our social world. If it “says” anything beyond its embodiment of character, it’s a sweet and only somewhat acidic moment at the Thanksgiving table, where George gives a cheers to everyone, saying that being with your friends, and being young are things to savor and love while you have them, and that getting old “kind of sucks.” Yet you look at him and think, he looks just as good as the 20-somethings he’s sitting with, he’s done things to remind him of how great life can be, and that life can be enjoyed by anyone willing.

Or to put it differently. One of George’s stand-up bits: “In your 20s, you look at old people and think, ‘I hate that, I don’t want to be like that.’ In your 30’s you think, ‘I hate the government! I hate politics!’ In your 40s, you think, ‘…I’m hungry.’” The triumph of Funny People is saying “I’m hungry.”

Oscars 2010: Good and Good For You!

The Oscars will be handed out this year on Sunday, March 7th. Among the winners will be a daytime talk show host, one evil motherfucker, the chick from Speed and The Net, and The Dude.

I think. After a busy year in which I started law school, I thought I’d managed to see most of the “big awards” movies, or at least movies during the year that got a great deal of press. I was impressed with myself, really. I mean, I love great movies and love nothing more than seeing something unexpected and honest and surprising.

But then I saw the Acting nominees. This year, they feature performances from 14 movies, 6 of which I’ve seen. So be it. I think I’m far above the national average, and the American population will be watching clips of movies they’ve absolutely never heard of later this year.

This is true even in a year with 10 Best Picture nominees. This move by the Academy – to move from 5 to 10 nominees – has been widely derided as a cheap ploy by the Oscars to lure in more voters by featuring more Blockbusters people care about. Well, the haters are right, but so what? Can you think of another way in which movies like District 9 and Up would be Best Picture nominees? The “Second 5” of the Best Picture race truly had no script, and the nominees were as unpredictable, wide-ranging and occasionally-very-good as the world of movies in 2010.

In any case, my picks for the races:

Best Supporting Actor:
Will and Should Wind: Christoph Waltz Inglourious Basterds
Great performances not nominated: Zachary Quinto Star Trek
I really don’t have much to add to this category besides Zachary Quinto’s complicated, short-fused Spock in Star Trek that, I think, was the real acting surprise in a terrific movie that featured many. This is the category I know the least about – I’ve not seen The Messenger, The Lovely Bones, The Last Station, or Invictus. Have you? I’m willing to guess the combined grosses of those movies pale next to the gross of Inglourious Basterds. And, in any case, Waltz’s Hans Landa - who seems, at times, a sharper Hannibal Lecter – clearly gives the performance least likely to leave your brain. If only because you’ve actually seen the movie.

Furthermore, the other “passed over” actors discussed in this category were as uninspiring as the other nominees. Alfred Molina in An Education was a competently acted saint-parent role in a movie that can only surprise you with how many times you feel like you’ve seen it in other movies without quite being able to name which movie it most reminds you of. That’s true also of Peter Sarsgaard in that movie, whose lot in life seems to be being passed over each year for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. I heard Christian McKay was supposed to be nominated for a movie I’ve barely heard of called Me and Orson Welles, but I wouldn’t know Christian McKay if he slapped me in the fact right now.

Best Supporting Actress:
Will and Should Win: Mo’Nique Precious
Great Performances Not Nominated: Diane Kruger and Melanie Laurent Inglourious Basterds, Paula Patton Precious
Up In The Air scored that rare double feat of having two Supporting Actress nominees for Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga. I’ve been a fan of Farmiga for some time now, as, it sounds like, much of the acting community has, since her heralded, underseen performance in Down To The Bone as a small-town cokehead. The woman is fearless, and actually that fearlessness truly did underscore the tougher parts of her charming Up In The Air performance. Anna Kendrick, with her mouthy, fast, deluded, sweet performance in Up In The Air, as well, more than earned her nomination. By this point in the Oscar season, though, you’re aware of the power of Mo’Nique’s performance, right? It’s fine to let this part of the Precious praise-wagon run its course. I truly believe the performance will inspire others to truly go into their characters, no matter how dark or upsetting they are, and even more – to love them for their humanity.

On the other side, I would’ve loved if Precious was a double nominee here too, as Paula Patton’s do-gooder teacher here probably elicited the most tears of anyone in the movie (and that’s saying a lot – I cried several times in Precious, but more about that later). Same goes for Inglourious Basterds’ two powerful, central women. In my praise here, I think that would lead to a category of 6 nominated women for 3 movies, none of whom are Penelope Cruz (nominated for Nine). So be it. Did anyone actually go see Nine? I hear it’s terrible, but I’d like to see how 8 ½ becomes a musical. Plus Cruz’s legs looked fantastic in the trailer. Also, I’ve heard from several people that Maggie Gyllenhaal is actually distractingly bad in Crazy Heart, which I regret I haven’t seen, though from afar it reminds me of a less interesting version of Tender Mercies.

Best Actor:
Will and Should (?) Win: Jeff Bridges Crazy Heart
Great Performances Not Nominated: Algenes Perez Soto Sugar, Souleymane Sy Savane and Red West Goodbye Solo
As I said, I haven’t seen Crazy Heart, but I think Jeff Bridges is an extraordinary actor great in everything, so I’ll trust the consensus that he’s terrific. May I recommend seeing 2004’s The Door In The Floor, which I likely would have voted him for Best Actor were I an Oscar voter, and were he nominated… and were he nominated in that fantasy scenario against Jamie Foxx in Ray. In any case, I’m willing to assume that Bridges is more deserving than the two performances I have seen – George Clooney in Up In The Air and Jeremy Renner in The Hurt Locker.

From the press I’ve read, Morgan Freeman sounds interesting in Invictus and Colin Firth “heartbreaking” in A Single Man. I’m sure this is true, we have very talented actors in movies nowadays. Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that we seem to reward only known-named actors for slumming it and playing “ordinary,” yet when indie movies use non-professional actors who effortlessly play “ordinary” people, we assume they’re just going about their daily routine. Yet if you were to watch Perez in Sugar or the two stars of Goodbye Solo, your hearts would ache for them, you’d be fascinated by their every smile, facial gesture, choice, and movement. In fact, it is their lack of apparent effort that is the mark of their amazing gifts. Their movies are both extraordinarily moving and communicative – better, I dare say, than Up In The Air and The Hurt Locker, which are both very good movies. Would it be so wrong for such performances to earn Oscar nominations?

Best Actress:
Will Win: Sandra Bullock The Blind Side
Should Win: Meryl Streep Julie and Julia
Great Performances Not Nominated: Tilda Swinton Julia, Zooey Deschanel 500 Days of Summer
Well, this is to be the year of Bullock’s coronation, joining the ranks of Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, and Renee Zellweger as actors who formerly did serviceable junk, proved their capabilities in more serious work, won Oscars, and can return to making, largely, serviceable junk. Well perhaps that’s unfair – Witherspoon was a great talent in much of her junk, as was Zellweger prior to winning her Oscar for Cold Mountain, which, frankly, she deserved, despite revisionist questioning from a weird legion of undying Shohreh Agdalshoo fans. I haven’t seen The Blind Side, and unless it’s on at my grandparents’ house 20 minutes in (so I can’t convince them to change the channel), I’ll probably never see it.

Streep, of course, deserves an Oscar every year. I loved her in Julie and Julia, perhaps slightly less than I loved her a year earlier in Doubt and wish she’d kept Kate Winslett at bay for another year, but Winslett is truly a gift to all acting, so it’s hard to whine too much about that. Their competition is interesting, I suppose. Gabourey Sidibe in Precious provides exactly what I described a moment ago as wanting to see – a refreshing, lived-in performance that is the definition of effortless acting. I hope she continues to act for years, but fear that this may be it for her. Carey Mulligan, on the other hand, is likely to have people begging to cast her. It’s strange, because An Education seems to me as though it might have been called A Movie We Want To Be Nominated For Oscars. When it ended, I felt one emotion – anger for seeing movies so supposedly “good for me” that are about themes handled better elsewhere for decades.

Not nominated, I think, is truly the best performance of the year – Tilda Swinton in Julia. This is a woman that can do anything, and unfortunately, her indie movie was seen by even less people than have seen The Last Station (which is also nominated in this category, for its performance by Hellen Mirren, who I’m sure is dignified and captivating). Julia is a truly gripping character-driven thriller in which one train wreck of a woman becomes all there is that we can trust. I don’t want to say too much about the plot because I truly wish that you would see it and get hooked on its surprises and turns. I’ll just say that she is an alcoholic in the movie, and a deeply selfish person, and that you have hopes for her that are as real as they would be for any character you’ll remember rooting for.

Best Director:
Will Win: Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker
Should Win: Quentin Tarantino Inglourious Basterds
Should be nominated: Rahman Bahrani Goodbye Solo, Neil Blomkamp District 9, Wes Anderson Fantastic Mr. Fox, J.J. Abrams Star Trek
Look, I want to not shit on the Oscars the year that they’re about to give the first female an Oscar for directing. Good for them. I wish, of course, they’d extended diversity in a different direction this year and rewarded a true visionary, Bahrani, who evokes poetry out of what appears to be DV, hand-held simplicity. I wish they looked to people with voices, like Blomkamp and Anderson, and – and I’ll get to Avatar in a minute – big style action that truly blows you away, by which I mean Star Trek.

The Hurt Locker is very good. Avatar is very good, and truly is the first movie designed be soaked in using the 3D format, for which, if it should win any category, it’s this one. What a vision to pull off, James Cameron is truly a distinguished director. I also very much enjoyed Up In The Air and cried a lot at Precious, which sort of makes me resent it. Tarantino, to me, is the filmmaker with a voice, the real deal who – like we allege of Cameron – keeps proving himself by delivering top quality movies. No one expected Inglourious Basterds to be as extraordinarily compelling as it is, a tense tête-à-tête in one fiery conversation after another. Funny, deeply entertaining, entirely gripping. This is Tarantino at his finest, and – to invoke an age-old Oscar argument – he’s a deeply important director who has affected movies and never won. Let’s give him one while he still deserves it.

Best Picture:
Will Win: The Hurt Locker
Should Win: District 9
Should be nominated: Star Trek, Julia, Goodbye Solo, Paranormal Activity, Fantastic Mr. Fox
Yup, those are the nominees I would choose if I had to get up to 10, along with some group of the ones nominated. Still, given all of that, I would pick District 9, my best argument for why the 10-nominees thing is a great idea. What an original, gripping, completely innovative movie. I remember looking at my friend 20 to 30 minutes in the movie and saying “I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen in this movie.” None. I didn’t know if the aliens were going to break out in a musical number. You spend so much of the movie wondering what kind of movie you were even in – is this satire? A mockumentary? Sci-fi? A zombie movie?

The point is that District 9 to me proves how great we are at making movies. All of those expectations only make the real unpredictability of the movie more satisfying. You find yourself invested in aliens, in the people hunting the aliens, believing in places you’d never find yourself believing. For a while the movie seems ridiculous, but then you think, well these things happen in the world all the time – why wouldn’t we react this way if there were aliens? I’ve heard people say to me, whining, that it’s just a movie telling us to be nice to other cultures. I disagree, it simply chronicles the many ways humans react to things that are unknown to them. It chronicles our responses and behaviors, yet uses them to tell a taut, mesmerizing thriller. There’s absolutely nothing like it, and it towers above some very very good movies it’s nominated against.

Should I talk about those? I suppose my opinions on Precious, Avatar, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, and The Hurt Locker are up in this list somewhere. They’re all quite good. I could be a little more explicit about Up In The Air, which is very timely and competent, though I admit I know I was supposed to fall in love with it and never quite got there. Up is wonderful… but also gets a little “so what” as it keeps going, though I love its creativity and emotion. I haven’t seen A Simple Man but probably will at some point. The Blind Side is a likely terrible movie I’m glad is nominated – my grandmother loved it, and some movie should represent the Grandmothers of the world if movie geeks like me get District 9 listed in the Top 10.

So there are my picks for this year. We made a lot of great movies in 2009 and have a lot of great talent who will pick up Oscars. At the end of the day, that means there is probably less to whine about than you’d think.

Note: One category I have to put in another word about is Best Animated Short Film. A great, great 17 minute movie called "Logorama" is nominated, and I’ll cheer very loudly if it wins.

The Synecdoche Syndrome

The Synecdoche Syndrome

It took Roger Ebert declaring it the best movie of the 2000s, but I have finally seen Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York. Have you heard of it? It made around $4 million domestically, which doesn’t quite recoup its $20 million budget, or even properly pay for the massive set-within-a-set that creates the movies meta-textual centerpiece.

While Ebert and other critics are certainly big fans, that gross suggests it didn’t connect elsewhere. My beloved film critic sage Owen Gleiberman led the brigade of Synecdoche haters on its release, giving the movie a D+, stating, essentially, he wanted to give up on the movie and declare the whole thing “the structure of psychosis.”

More than that, though, Gleiberman – an extraordinary writer always beholden to his viewpoint – seemingly reacted this strongly based on what he perceived others’ responses to be, and accurately predicted (not that anyone would really do otherwise) that a cadre of “eggheads” would declare the movie a masterpiece. Certainly Ebert believes so. Humble as ever, Ebert stated that he saw the movie a first time, “believed it to be a great movie, and that I had not mastered it.” Interesting viewpoint.

Ebert’s sense of the movie has more of a grasp of contemporary standards over all. When is a movie allowed to be a confusing masterpiece, rather than just confusing? We all know 2001 was released to baffles in 1969, but enough people were able to get behind that to make it now considered a classic. What about the career of Ingmar Bergmann, who essentially popularized the pretentious, challenging film? Reading Ebert’s comments, I was reminded that so many of these artists of difficult, important movies were not always considered to be such forward-thinking geniuses – those movies too had to be released and reacted to. Likely that initial reaction was bafflement.

My reaction to Synecdoche is sort of bafflement, but sort of that it wasn’t quite worth the bother. As a declared “love it or hate it” movie, it gives an ample amount of ammunition to each side. There are scenes that are cracklingly fun in Synecdoche, and touches of absurdity that make you appreciate the ability of a movie to travel in its own weirdness. There’s the house Samantha Morton’s Hazel lives in, which is always on fire, prompting Hazel to voice concern, like 20 years before her death (who can keep track of this timeline anyway), that she’s concerned about “dying in the fire.” Instead, the house feels cozy, and ridiculous. There are the hilarious scenes with Hope Davis as a rather terrible psychologist who attempts to sell her book Getting Better to her clients for $40 and writes in one unrelated bit of pep vagueness after another – a run in between her and protagonist Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) on a plane is memorably demented and puzzling. I also loved its time-keeps-on-rapidly-ticking-away pace that makes the years sweep by, which reminded me, in its way, of the David Chase-directed final episode of The Sopranos. Then too monumental events seemed to be going by, like life does, before we could even get a good grasp of them.

There are moments too, through the nuttiness, that something interesting and deeply true is hit upon. Caden asks Hazel, somewhere 10ish years past their failed romance, to look at him as she once did, with love and awe. It’s a theme of the movie that people are adept at ruining each other’s pristine images of one another. That idea is ripe for a movie, and actually, despite its logical jumping jacks, Synecdoche comes at that theme with admirable clarity.

But then, there are also scenes that seem rather obsessed with saying something, I don’t know what it is, about obsessing over a few characters’ sexuality. Or the stuff about Jungian psychology. There’s that play within the play and the set within the set and the play within the play within the play. I have to list some of these things out to make sure they were there at all. Plus I have to think no one would write a character named Millicent Weems without that name signifying… something. In describing the movie, Kaufmann said he wanted to move away from gimmicks like "mind portals and memory erasing" - describing, of course, his deeply-accessible-by-comparison scripts of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Well, I hate to point out to him that his "gimmicks" are what work best for him - the burning house is a gimmick, so is Davis's wacky psychology book. In effect, his "play," given more attention, might be a great gimmick in itself.

Watching Synecdoche and trying to describe it with the same approach as other movies is rather tiring and unwise. Yet most movie reviews stick to just that, strangely. Says Emily Rems of Premiere: “At turns as neurotic and nebbishy as any Woody Allen flick, as creepy and disorienting as your favorite "Twilight Zone" episode, and as steeped in magical realism as the most moving Márquez novel, Synecdoche may not be the feel-good date movie of the year.” Ok then. Or Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune, “As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.” Well that’s clear then. This is like a disorienting Woody Allen movie with a good cast. So, it’s like Melinda & Melinda then?

Well, actually, I guess it sort of is like Deconstructing Harry, which I assume is the “Woody Allen flick” that Rems attempts to make a trend out of in that sentence by adding the word “any.” In that movie, characters drift in and out of a characters’ mind and are replaced by their fictional counterparts. What he dreams comes true. Actually, now that I think about it, I should buy me a copy of Deconstructing Harry; what a terrific movie.

There is a scale of what these movies that are “difficult” and “puzzling” must sit on. On one end, you have the junk – the Ranaldo and Claras or Inland Empires, bits of brain-scrambling randomness that pretend an overriding concept unifies its spasticness and makes up for how numbing the experience of watching it is (both mentally and physically – I can’t remember when my ass fell asleep in Inland Empire). On the other end, you have Wild Strawberries and Mulholland Drive and 8 ½ and Robert Altman’s 3 Women – movies that are strange and exciting and unusual and reveal beautiful, well crafted layers underneath their prickliness.

Synecdoche, I think, is somewhere shy of the middle there, meandering ever slightly to the junk side of the scale. Or so I thought. I suppose I like the opportunity to think about life and what happens in our world, and like a movie speaking in its images and ideas and not worrying about what “sense” it makes. Altman says he wrote 3 Women transcribing a dream he’d had the night before. What’s that movie about? Why, a woman who infiltrates another woman’s life, or a painted swimming pool, or maybe the delusions and shifting alliances shared by women, who are all acting out roles in each other’s worlds. Something like that. Actually, I rewatched 8 ½ the day after I saw Synecdoche, and I think it launches the best defense for that movie. In a spa, Guido, 8 ½’s main character, gets spoken to by a fat writer he walks down a set of stairs with. “You’re dealing with the complexities of the human mind, you should at least be clear about it.” Fellini clearly has little patience for this mindset.

And why should he? Life, our minds, are a mess, after all. Movies and writing can get at a portion of it. The brilliance of 8 ½ is that it is, in fact, so lucid and well conceived an evocation of the difficulty to reflect life and wonder in art, to express what is actually true. The calling card (or, my favorite quote) of that movie is a line by its wandering critic: “It is better to destroy than to create what is inessential.” Fellini no longer wanted to tell a boy-meets-girl story and instead wanted to focus on what really drives us and exists in our minds.

Synecdoche has probably received more comparison to 8 ½ than any other movie. If so, Charlie Kaufmann should be very flattered. 8 ½, derided by its detractors as a movie which flailingly tells the story of a director flailing, is actually the most lucid movie ever conceived about writers block, or artistic stagnation, or why we do what we do. Synecdoche, by never quite giving limits or sense to its central play, is never really about art, or at least it has very little interest in the “art” concept except as something marginal, like that burning house.

But again, here I go trying to define the rules that Synecdoche broke in order to prove it as a less than worthy movie. It’s just too damn much work for the thoughts you get out of it. Now, I love movies that make me work. I’m up for the job. But for this? Synecdoche is sort of like a long conversation with your very smart, sad friend over drinks – which is to say like any drunken ramble, it hits home once in a while. But have you really not had these thoughts before? Which ones can Synecdoche claim as its own?

These are the questions Synecdoche really makes me ask. I love movies that make me question my world, our approach to seeing it, movies whose ideas and approaches make me want to experience them over and over again. Yet is it doing nothing but using themes of man’s ultimate unhappiness in the world as a justification for a rambling incoherent movie, or the other way around? I guess I simply mean that these senses, as any good writing professor would tell you, need to be reined in a little. And thinking so doesn’t make you incapable of deep thought.

Green Day: Know Your Enemy

I had a thought about Green Day winning a Grammy yesterday for Best Rock Album for 21^st Century Breakdown. In a way, this is unsurprising – Green Day won their first Grammy for Dookie back sometime in the mid-90s (some things in my pop culture sponge mind stay put – I can say with certainty that they won the Best Alternative Album there in 1996, announced on stage by Melissa Etheridge), and the Grammy win this week merely cements the band’s incredible ability to have managed sustaining life in the pop-punk form.

One only needs to look at the past 15 years or so in music since Dookie – from Blink 182’s dumbasses-with-tattoos-and-shimmying-pop-melodies to the no-jet-black-hair-out-of-place emergence of emo bands 5 years ago, Green Day, all of whom are now in their 40s, clearly have done what they do very successfully.

But I feel the need to voice my sort of objection to 21^st Century Breakdown and also reaffirm my love for it. A couple of months ago, I named Green Day’s American Idiot the best album of the 2000s, a judgment I very much stand by. Actually it was an album only a Green Day could pull off. It was a last stand for albums that absolutely must be heard straight through, from beginning to end. It was full of righteous, compelling, intoxicating anger, and in anthems like “Holiday,” no rational person could possibly hear the song and argue that their defiance wasn’t totally compelling. Yet the album was also pop shined to perfection, its biggest hit, “Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” featured not a yell or grunt in sight and succeeded on the very solemn nature of its melody. Hearing that American Idiot was being adapted into a Broadway musical then (the performers of which joined Green Day on stage at the Grammy’s for “21 Guns”) should not be a bit surprising – the band even spoke of West Side Story as one of their key influences.

Well, 21^st Century Breakdown seems to be a massive success, showing the success of American Idiot to be far from a fluke. But 21^st Century Breakdown, I know American Idiot, I’ve loved American Idiot, and you, sir, are no American Idiot.

Which isn’t to say 21^st Century Breakdown is without charm. Actually, it suffers from an overabundance of the ambition of American Idiot. American Idiot, an old-school concept album a la Tommy succeeded in spite of its tendency towards grandiloquence. If anything flagged in the album, it was the plot-heavy songs the like of “Extraordinary Girl” that purported to “tell” us something about its “characters.” Still, considering the energy around it, the song was never such a drag as to hurt the album, and indeed, some of these “plot” songs yielded moments of spitfire triumph, like the speed-metal “St. Jimmy” and the transporting “Letterbomb.”

21^st Century Breakdown is absolutely, deadeningly weighed down by its sense of story. Is there a story? It alleges to take place in three parts, introduces a chick named Gloria, calls her the “last of the American girls,” rallies against a Christian’s inferno, and winds up, I don’t know, giving a eulogy to America or something. Yet I just described the 4 or 5 worst songs on the record, which already has 15 damn songs. And try as it might, not a one of them is as good as “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” or “Holiday.”

Let me pause for a second to talk about “21 Guns” and my sadness at how much I hate “21 Guns.” I cannot, still, every time I hear this song not think about another song it reminds me of – Heart’s “What About Love.” That song, full of theatrical keyboard bombast, is the type of song only someone who, like me, was a child in the late 80s and early 90s could love. It’s fun and cheesy and ridiculous and impossible not to sing along to. Heart, remade in the 80s, is everything to love about the 80s. “21 Guns” pretends to be a punk ballad, which should be a form Green Day knows a lot about as they basically perfected the form on their last album with “Wake Me Up When September Ends.” “21 Guns” sucks. I understand that Billie Joe Armstrong wanted to put in a song about when to give up, wanted to fill it with bombastic resignation, and wanted it to be resonant in spite of itself. It is, however, not especially good at that.

Actually bombastic resignation is not Armstrong’s strong suit. This is what I mean about the part o f21st Century Breakdown that I love. I think there’s a good album hiding inside of it, one full of the type of pissy, easy to swallow anger the band has always made its strong suit, and it would’ve been a terrific record if he’d ignored absolutely everything else. Let me start with that other single of Green Day’s from the record that everyone maligns – “Know Your Enemy.” Try as I might to listen to why this song is terrible, I think it’s extraordinary. Two chords, firingly loud, not overly complicated, ridiculously catchy – this is a pop-punk masterpiece. This is, in fact, the album’s best contender to stack up to “Holiday.” Or maybe that’s “East Jesus Nowhere,” or “The Static Age,” or “Horseshoes and Hand Grenades,” despite that song getting bogged down in a plot-bound chanting of “G-L-O-R-I-A” that’s pretty annoying.

There’s one other very good song on the record, and it is, in fact, the exact type of power ballad that “21 Guns” shoots the moon on becoming. The song, “Last Night On Earth,” is tuneful and pretty, but actually it’s the exact opposite of “21 Guns” – thematically at least. “If I lose everything in the fire,” Armstrong sings, “I’m sending all my love to you.” Or so I think of it at least. Ones song is about knowing when resignation is appropriate, the other about refusing to resign. I hope it surprises no one to learn that the Green Day I love is much better at the latter.