News You Can Bruise for 2015 July

(1) Wed Jul 01 2015 07:14 June Film Roundup:

• Cowboys (2013): a.k.a. "Kauboji". Combines the highbrow downer of Eastern European film (the theater director) with the lowbrow energy of screwball comedy (every other character). Genre fiction—in this case the western—brings them together. I had a good time. There were a lot of really clever jokes, including one I think was added just for the foreign audience. During her audition the female lead starts doing her piece, and there are no subtitles. It sounds like Croatian but the subtitle says:

  [talking gibberish]

  The camera cuts to the other auditioners, all looking confused.

  [It's okay, they don't understand either.]

  Good stuff, recommended.

• Flying Deuces (1939): I thought this film would save me a lot of time by simultaneously satisfying my idle curiosity about Laurel and Hardy, and the French Foreign Legion. For the French Foreign Legion I should have gone to Beau Geste, or Wikipedia. As for Laurel and Hardy, meh. I don't like when the straight man is the funny man's punching bag, and I only found them funny when they were doing really dark material like Hardy's protracted suicide attempt.

  This film either assumes its audience is quite ignorant or demands more suspension of disbelief than a normal 1930s comedy. For instance, there's a stuffed marlin trying to pass for a man-eating shark. If I was bursting with laughter the whole time, I wouldn't care—I don't care when The Muppet Show does something cheesy like that—but despite the name of the movie L&H don't even touch an airplane until the final sequence, and that final sequence isn't too great.

• The Shining (1980): Starring Jack Nicholson as The Patriarchy! He really hams it up. Like Alien, a movie where I came in having read the book and well aware of the "spoofed in" scenes. As with Alien I loved the slow burn at the beginning, the long tour of the hotel with its glorious 1970s design. Probably not so fun on television, but that's why I wait to SEE [these films] BIG. It was intense, creepy and fun. It kind of dragged in the middle, possibly because of Hamlet cliches, but I think because none of the characters are that interesting. In the book the hotel slowly drives Jack insane, but in the movie it just gives him an excuse to let his preexisting problems run wild, meaning there's no character progression. And Shelly Duvall is still stuck in her Method acting as Olive Oyl.

  The first thing I did after seeing this movie was create a bot. I call it A Dull Bot. It's not the first movie that inspired me to create a bot, but it is the first one where I got the idea while watching the movie. My dadaist heart was touched by how much Jack's manuscript resembles a real typewritten manuscript. It's not preternaturally neat, the way a possessed person would type. It's full of typos, like when your fingers can't keep up with your ideas. Jack really thinks this is great stuff. The manuscript thing is not in the novel, but if you've read On Writing I think you'll agree it's a very Steven King sort of scare.

  My original plan was to create a full statistical model of typewriter typos, but once I abandoned this quixotic project I got the bot done in Darius time. I did copy the layout of the Adler typewriter used in the movie, so sometimes you'll see ½ in a typo.

• House Party (1990): Turns out Warrington Hudlin, film curator at the museum, also produced House Party. This was a 25th anniversary screening with a Q&A afterwards (including Play, via video chat), and the theater was packed with House Party superfans. There were a lot of good laughs, but after hearing people come up to the mic and saying they'd seen House Party over one hundred times, I wonder if it was the sort of laughter you'll hear from me watching The Big Lebowski.

  Anyway, good teen party movie, and because it takes place over a single night the action is a lot tighter and the pacing more intense than other teen movies. Minor characters show up again in different contexts, major characters move around the game board and meet each other in different combinations, creating opportunities for different types of comedy.

  Standout performances from Martin Lawrence as the un-smooth DJ, and Robin Harris as the working-class values dad, who's idealized in approximately the same way as the socialist mom in Good Bye Lenin! (2003).

• The Hudsucker Proxy (1994): Continuing my new resolution to watch only 90s movies with the initials "H.P.". I really dug this as a parody of classic 50s office movies like The Best of Everything. The main character was more complex than I expected, and it's pretty rare for the Coen brothers to do flat-out parody. And then the ending...? How, why? I don't understand it. It went from a funny parody of good 50s movies to stealing ideas from not-so-good 50s movies. What's going on? Maybe I don't get it, but I think I'm pretty good at figuring out the Coens' film-nerd tricks, and making me think something really clever is awful... not a useful trick. Still a "buy" on balance.

Tragically, this marks the end of Film Roundup, as the resolution I foolishly made late in the month means that the only movies I can see from this point on are the likes of Hocus Pocus (1993), Heaven's Prisoners (1996), Hurt Penguins (1992), and the Tagalog comedy classic Haba-baba-doo! Puti-puti-poo! (1997). We'll miss the magic, the mystery, but most of all... the movies.

Wait, I can just disregard resolutions? They're not legally binding? Amazing! See you next month! I gotta go cancel my Columbia Record Club membership.