"All Creation Myths Need a Devil" : Nog Sees The Social Network!

As The Social Network begins, The Facebook (as it's originally called) is born out of drunken bitterness as Mark Zuckerberg, reeling from an unexpected break-up, brainstorms an outlet for his frustrations that will allow like-minded Harvard students to rate and keep tabs on their classmates. According to Aaron Sorkin's script, that self-absorption continues, ironically, to drive the business mentality behind a site built around community. The tale itself is a standard one--the young up-and-comer increasingly willing to betray his friends for fame and fortune--but its well told in Fincher's new film, with an efficient structure that bounces (sometimes too quickly, for my taste) between key moments of Facebook's formation and a pending lawsuit involving Zuckerman and his former friend and business partner. Fincher's cast is as sharp as Sorkin's script. Eisenberg is sometimes criticized for playing the same, stammery, neurotic in different films, but here he combines those familiar mannerisms with something more subtle that gets us further into Zuckerberg's ego: notice how he tunes out, almost narcoleptically, when the world isn't centered around his particular vision. Andrew Garfield (soon to be Spiderman) proves he's got star power as Eduardo, Zuckerberg's initially close friend and business partner, the film's most sympathic character. And Justin Timberlake, playing flashy Napster founder Sean Parker, is a scene-stealer. The line in my title is delivered late in the film by a lawyer played by Rashida Jones, who goes on to tell Zuckerberg that's he's not really an asshole, just a guy who works very hard to be thought of that way. But I'm not quite sure that line fits meshes with what the previous two hours have told us. Zuckerberg, as he's presented here, comes off looking pretty bad indeed. Whereas Fincher's last film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, led us further away from the issues of obsession and paranoia that seem to define his earlier films, we're back in familiar Fincher territory here. It's not my favorite film of the year, but I'd bet money on it claiming one of the ten slots on Oscar night.

Nog Visits Affleck's The Town!

I'm not ready to call Ben Affleck a great new American writer/director just yet, but he's certainly made two sharply written, sharply acted, crisply directed Boston crime films. I'd give his first, Gone, Baby, Gone, the edge. It might be more uneven, but it's a little darker, a little more character-driven. The Town seems designed to be a more mainstream crowd-pleaser, but the complexity of its characters is head and shoulders above most multiplex actioners. Affleck's style is never showy. He wisely makes no effort to mimic any of Scorsese's gangster-pic stylistic techniques, though one can't help think of Marty in the way his two films lead us through Boston's mean streets and the wide array of interesting characters who inhabit them. Here we're treated to memorable performances from Affleck himself (confidently taking center stage this time after turning Gone over to his brother), from Jeremy Renner (following up Hurt Lucker with another volatile performance that's arguably a little too similar to the last but still never less than riveting), from Rebecca Hall (after Vicky Christina Barcelona and Please Give, I'll watch her in almost anything), and Pete Postlethwaite (scary as hell as a criminal mastermind running his gang out of a florist shop). Faring not quite as well are Jon Hamm as an FBI agent (Affleck's good guys are a little dull) and Blake Lively as Affleck's ex (her performance exists in the shadow of Amy Ryan's ferocious bad mother from Gone: nothing can compare). Sure, some of the film's heists are fairly routine, but in between you're treated to some well-crafted dialogue in scenes such as a wonderfully tense restaurant encounter between Affleck, Hall, and Renner. Go see it and remind yourself of a time when multiplex films were actually entertaining without making you feel like an idiot.

Nog Joins The Revolution With Machete and Gets Existential with The American!

After a few late-summer films that should have been great fun but didn't fully deliver (The Expendables, Piranha 3D), Machete finally arrives and shows us how it's done (spoiler alert: it's done by ripping out your fucking intestines and using them as a rope to escape from buildings!). Rodriguez's expansion of his awesome "fake trailer" into a full-length exploitation (Mexsploitation!) flick is arguably even more successful than either his or Tarantino's Grindhouse features (Planet Terror and Death Proof, respectively), as it feels less like a gimmick and more like a true 70's exploitation flick, complete with those films' in-your-face social message of challenging "the Man" (in this case, the conservative, anti-immigration Right Wing). One could waste time (and some critics are) by pointing out its obvious Mexican stereotyping, but that too is in keeping with the genre's tendency to embrace stereotypes in the service of empowerment (have you critics never seen a Blaxsploitation picture?). For film geeks, this is pure pleasure as long as you're capable of embracing non-stop bloody mayhem. The cast is obviously having a blast: Jeff Fahey (playing it straight and awesome!); Lohan, transforming from naked druggie to pistol-packin,' ass-kickin' nun; Cheech the priest; "introducing Don Johnson"...as the vicious Von Jackson; and of course Danny Trejo, who WILL fuck you up, and hopefully return to do so again in Machete Kills!

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The American is sort of glacially paced, relying little on dialogue, and if you see it with a full house (which you won't, after this weekend, because word-of-mouth won't be great) you will hear people sigh during the silent stretches and possibly complain when it's over. A man two rows below me: "I slept through most of it and the ending stinks." Let's discount that opinion, however, and offer another. The American is pretty good, but not great. There are better--very similar in plot if very different tone--hitman movies (In Bruges, The Hit, to name two). But this is confident film-making (by Anton Corbijn, who directed the excellent, gorgeous black-and-white Joy Division film Control). It's beautifully shot, and a rare thriller that knows how to create suspense without hyper-edited action sequences. As much as I like Clooney's recent film choices, I remain unconvinced of any particular acting range. A lot of the roles he's played lately (Michael Clayton, Up in the Air, this one) are men whose careers require them to express little in the way of human emotion. He's good at that. You'll totally buy him as a hitman having a bit of an existential crisis. Is the movie a little too proud of its "artsy" pacing? Probably. Some of the slower-than-slow patches are misleading, in that there is more going on that meets the eye at first, but there are patches of the film where I'm pretty sure it's just slow and moody as a sort of rebellion against anti-Hollywood action films. And I'm okay with that. But the guy two rows below me was most definitely not.

Nog Gets Low With Duvall and Murray! / Also: Piranha 3D (Review By Request)

Felix Bush (Robert Duvall) has spent the last forty years living like a hermit and becoming, as a result, a sort of mythic small-town figure. But, as Get Low begins, Felix has begun to suspect that death is approaching, and he needs to make amends, which he organizes in an odd fashion: he'll have a pre-death "funeral party," which he will attend and everyone will be invited so long as they have a story to tell about him (and pretty much everyone in a four-county radius does). This sets us a fascinating premise which seems like it will serve as a means to examine the power of storytelling, of truth and myth. However (and somewhat unfortunately) that film doesn't materialize, though I think it might have been more interesting if it did. Soon enough, we begin to realize that Felix's intentions with the "funeral party" largely concern not anyone else's stories but rather a revelation of his own: the dark secret that sent him into hiding from society forty years ago. The secret itself isn't particularly interesting and one can guess its general outlines long before it's finally revealed (in the lengthy and beautifully acted but somewhat corny monologue near the end). But the reason to see Get Low is not ultimately plot, but character. As (almost) always, Duvall is excellent. In his scenes with Sissy Spacek and Bill Murray (playing the undertaker in charge of the funeral party), Duvall's performance gradually lets us into the kind and humorous man that Felix once was, before forty years of guilt turned him into the local "nutter." And Murray, chalking up another great performance as a "serious" actor, more than holds his own alongside the legendary Duvall. Murray's Frank Quinn, we sense, is also a man in hiding. A former sleazy used-car salesman from Chicago, Frank, unhappily divorced, has settled into a small-town, Depression-era existence where he maintains some of the old persona (he's at first desperate to get his hands on Frank's wadded-up ball of "hermit money") but has, in truth, embraced the small-town values that surround him.

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Piranha 3D! What is there to say? You will see a truly wild massacre at a wet T-shirt contest that's about as gory as anything you're going to see in the multiplex (holy shit, that's Eli Roth's head flying across the screen! did I seriously just see that girl get sliced in two by a wire and the top half of her body slowly slide down to her feet? wny has Ving Rhames been reduced to a role where he's only required to shoot piranhas with a shotgun while yelling "Pirahna this, motherfucker!"). You will also see a full-frontal naked female underwater ballet! (nice). Sadly, what you won't see is 3D fully utilized as the gimmick it should be in a film like this. I want to walk out of there feeling like I've had 90 minutes of piranhas flying into my face. But instead, I've only been treated to a piranha belching out Jerry O'Connell's penis. But I guess that's pretty cool too? It probably wouldn't have been a bad idea to include some modicum of wit or irony into the script: the opening scene involving Richard Dreyfuss suggests an insider-film buff tone that never in any way materializes after that. But ultimately, the film delivers what one wants: titties and gore. Recommended (for Matthew).

Nog Geeks Out With Scott Pilgrim vs. The World!

Edgar Wright is three for three. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz inhabit their respective genres (the zombie film, the cop film) so fully that they work not only as parody but as genre films on their own. Wright isn't the cinematic craftsman that Tarantino is, but there's something similar in the wild energy of their films, the way you can feel the love for their influences in every shot. Scott Pilgrim is something different, not inhabiting a single genre, but it's no less geeky in its effort to capture the way certain obsessions (comics, video games, rock and roll) merge with our conception of reality. With its comic-book captions and split-screens and grab-bag of other stylistic devices, one would imagine any focus on character would get lost in the shuffle, but Wright and his near-perfect cast somehow feel "real" even if their obsessions have led them, like our hero, Pilgrim, to perceive of life as a video-game where evil villains (in the form of ex-boyfriends) must be defeated in order to win the love of a beautiful princess (in the form of an effortlessly hip chick who changes her hair color every week and a half). Sure, we've seen Michael Cera's sensitive/awkward persona on display many times now, but it's just right for Pilgrim, a 22 year old Canadian in an admittedly bad rock band (Sex Bob-Omb!) who is VERY platonically dating a Japanese school girl named Knives Chau while pining for the lovely and worldy-wise (and American) Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead: you'll fall in love with her too). I smiled (geekily) through the film, even if the elaborate, well-staged battle scenes occupy perhaps a little more screentime than they really deserve. I haven't read the graphic novels, but its easy to see why these characters resonate with their audience, many of whom no doubt spend a lot of time playing video games and jamming in terrible rock bands.

Nog vs. Gleiberman on The Other Guys

I'm surprised how good some of the reviews are for The Other Guys. As a fan of the three previous Will Ferrell/Adam McKay collaborations (Anchorman; Talladega Nights; StepBrothers), I certainly wanted it to be great. But to my mind it's easily the weakest of their films. Some big laughs, yes, but with looong dead stretches.

Maybe I'm missing something? Let's see what Owen Glieberman says in EW's "A-" review:

EW: "The Other Guys is almost a recognizably gritty genre picture, complete with bullet spray, Sidney Lumet gunmetal lighting, and a Wall Street villain (Steve Coogan) who embodies the sins of our time with a relative absence of cheek. All of that grounds the movie and makes it funnier."

Even if I agreed the film works as an effective action film (which I don't), do we want a "recognizably gritty genre picture" from these guys? What I want is their tried and true approach of we'll-try-anything-to-make-you-laugh-and-if-one-joke-doesn't-stick-then-maybe-the-next-one-will. It seems petty to fault Ferrell and McKay for trying something different, but I don't fully buy that they are attempting to stretch that much besides bulking up the action-loving demographic a bit (and I also think that demographic has never heard of Sidney Lumet and therefore isn't "in" on the '70's feel of the film, which isn't particularly funny anyway). Also, not letting the hilarious Steve Coogan be funny does NOT make the movie funnier.

EW: "In The Other Guys, Ferrell cuts down on the stylized hysteria, and he doesn't run around with his belly hanging out. As an actor, he's closer here to Peter Sellers or the early Woody Allen; he does obsessive riffs on being an insanely cautious man in a culture that prizes control."

Let's not go THAT far, Glieberman! Yes, Ferrell and McKay have cleverly altered the usual persona here and there are some very funny bits involving the character's "repressed" personality (my favorite: the college flashbacks where Ferrell is completely blind to the fact that he's inadvertantly become a pimp running a "stable of whores"), but there's still plenty of the "stylized hysteria" that one expects (the bad cop/bad cop sequence, for instance).

Anyway, I stand by the fact that this has little of the repeat-viewing appeal of the previous comedies (B-, tops!). I know that on DVD I'll be skipping through the action scenes for the half-hour or so where the film honestly delivers the kind of comedy that these two can do very well.

Nog Re-Views Happiness

The dialogue exchange that most people probably remember from Todd Solondz's Happiness comes near the end (and is prominently featured in the film's trailers). After a laughing fit spurred by one of her sister Joy's recent misfortunes, Lara Flynn Boyle's Helen turns to her sister (played by Jane Adams) and says: "I'm not laughing at you, I'm laughing with you," to which Joy replies, "But I'm not laughing." The exchange also gets at the heart of critical responses to Solondz's work as well. Are we laughing at the sad and often terrible people populating these films, or are we meant to connect, to see ourselves reflected in them? The first, and logical response, to some of the characters in Happiness is to recoil. Look at Dylan Baker's psychiatrist/pedophile Bill, who daydreams of mowing down happy park-goers with an assault rifle and jerks off in the car to magazine photos of male teenage pop stars. Then there's Philip Seymour Hoffman's Allen, who works out his lust for neighbor Helen by making obscene phone calls. These are unpleasant people, as are most members of the large cast, but Solondz follows them unflinchingly and, I think, largely unjudgingly. Despite the (obviously ironic) title, these are unhappy people who still desperately want to connect yet seem oblivious to the damage they inflict. Some of the film's nastiest bits play out in a sort of jaunty, almost sitcom-like, style that is disconcerting but effective: the familiar rhythm of such scenes is maintained while replacing sitcom banality with moments of truly shocking behavior.

Unlike a lot of indie filmmakers who settle into more "mainstream" fare with each passing film, Solondz has grown more experimental since Happiness (Palindromes is just all-around odd, let's admit) and his new film, Life During Wartime, is (apparently) a sequel of sorts, with a whole new set of actors playing the same characters from Happiness. And I can't tell you how excited I am to see Paul Reubens playing the ghost of Jon Lovitz's character from the first film! Bring it on. (August 27 at Tivoli).