The Zohan Cometh

This review was originally published, in slightly different form, on InterfaithFamily.com, on June 6, 2008.

Adam Sandler comedies come in two varieties: mediocre and awful. In the mediocre ones (Billy Madison, The Wedding Singer, etc.), he plays an exaggerated version of himself: bashful, sarcastic, prone to temper tantrums. In the awful ones, he attempts to stretch his range, usually adopting an unbearable accent, and fails. By all rights, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan should have a pedestal reserved for it in the pantheon of crap next to Little Nicky and The Waterboy. Yet, defying all laws of modern comedy, this silly movie about an Israeli commando who comes to America to become a hairdresser isn’t awful. In fact, it’s nearly great.

Tarantino is Wasting His Talent

Mark Harris, of Entertainment Weekly, has written a great column about how Quentin Tarantino has been making homages to bad movies not many people really liked–or watched–for going on a decade and a half now. I couldn’t agree more; Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are masterpieces but everything after (I’ll exclude Grindhouse, because I haven’t seen it yet) has been of dubious quality. The movies are too long, the dialogue needs serious editing, the storytelling isn’t remotely as tight, well-paced and inventive as his first two films. Worst of all, he seems to have completely lost the knack for creating believable characters. His movies aren’t about people anymore; they’re about B-movie cliches, and while that might be entertaining, it makes it hard to care.

My favorite line from Harris’ column?

His fixation on 1970s subgenres has now lasted longer than the 1970s themselves.

The Sopranos Season 6B Premiere

After the incredibly disappointing way that last season disintegrated, I did not have high hopes for the season premiere of The Sopranos. (Although technically this is not a new season. It is actually referred to as Season 6B. Last season was Season 6A.) If there was ever any doubt, last, um, season confirmed that David Chase is intellectually allergic to narrative closure and has a disregard for the viewer that borders on pathological. Nonetheless, few characters in fictional history are as interesting as Tony Soprano, so I was obligated to watch another torturous, frustrating, occasionally brilliant season. It’s all going to end in utter crap, of course, but I have to see this thing through to its bitter end.

All that being said, I was pleasantly surprised by Sunday’s premiere. There was little in overall plot advancement, but I’m fine with that. Seemingly major events never have much payoff on this show anyway. No, this episode was a little gem, a tangent episode in its own way, about Tony and Carmela’s trip to Bobby and Janice’s lakehouse in upstate New York. As has been demonstrated numerous times in the past, The Sopranos writers are particularly inspired when they take their characters out of their suburban milieu.

The Ending of Pan’s Labyrinth

SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT

Now that’s out of the way…

I was going to write a full review of Pan’s Labyrinth, but time constraints and laziness got in the way. Besides, what more is there to say? I agree with the other critics. It’s a masterpiece. So I thought I’d focus on the ending, which popular critics are barred from discussing.

The Best Movie of 1946?

I’d been hearing great things about The Best Years of Our Lives for years. It’s gotten a little bit of a bad rap in some circles as the movie that beat out It’s a Wonderful Life for best picture in 1947, but that shouldn’t take away from what is a classic in its own right.

Inspired by a story in Life magazine, The Best Years of Our Lives is about three veterans who return from World War II and have trouble re-adjusting to civilian life. One is a captain in the airforce (Dana Andrews), one is an older man, a sergeant in the Army (Fredric March), and the other is a young kid, a former Navy man who lost his hands in a ship fire (Harold Russell). They meet on a military plane flying them from Long Beach back home to Boon City, one of those make-believe Hollywood cities that probably was shot on the same lot as It’s A Wonderful Life. You know the kind–it has an airport, numerous bars, a bustling downtown, rich areas and poor areas, but somehow, whenever you walk down the street, you bump into somebody you know. Small-town intimacy with big-city amenities. God bless Hollywood.

Strange Magic?

It’s commonplace to refer to the magic of movies, but, as arts, movies and magic have little in common. Movies ask us to suspend our disbelief. Magic courts our disbelief. Puzzling over how a movie did what it did is, at best, a subsidiary pleasure of watching a movie. Puzzling over how a magician does his tricks is more often than not the only pleasure of watching a magic show.

Magic, in the sense of a magician’s performance art, does not hold up well when transferred from stage to fictional film. An effect that is astonishing on stage becomes pedestrian on screen. (There’s a reason nearly every kind of celebrity in America has been in the movies, except magicians. We know how the tricks are done in movies.)

The trick, so to speak, that any good movie about magic must pull off is to create a reality so believable that we’re willing to buy into the magic. We need to be so engulfed in the film’s reality that we watch the magic tricks like the spectators in the film, not the spectators in the film’s audience. Like sports movies, movies about magic must be totally convincing just to be good.

Notes on The Wire

So one of the reasons–although certainly not the biggest one–why I haven’t posted much in the last few weeks is that instead of renting or watching movies on-demand, I’ve been addictively watching The Wire. I watched all of Season 4 late last year, and since late December, I’ve almost made my way through all of Seasons 1-3.

Beyond the observation that this is probably the best TV show ever, it’s also interesting to watch the first three seasons after watching season 4. For those who watched the seasons in order, it probably never seemed that a gang could be more ruthless than the Barksdale crew: killing witnesses, mutilating their enemies, killing off people just because they’re worried they might snitch. But Marlo Stanfield and his attack dogs, Chris and Snoop, the criminals in season 4, blow Barksdale out of the water. They don’t kill for sport, exactly, but they extinguish anyone that could remotely be a leak, even soldiers who’ve shown no indication of disloyalty.

Thoughts on the Oscars

• Guillermo del Toro is the Mexican Peter Jackson. From the beard to the glasses to the paunch, he looks like him. And like Jackson, he started out making fun, unpretentious visually bizarre movies that critics didn’t pay much attention to. Eventually someone will entrust him to direct a fantasy blockbuster. The Hobbit, perhaps?
• Does anyone in Hollywood speak English any more?
• I knew Alan Arkin was going to upset Eddie Murphy. You can’t be a self-absorbed jerk for 25 years and expect your fellow actors are going to give you an Oscar. I’m surprised he didn’t get up and leave after he didn’t win.

An Inaccessible Island

I was curiously unmoved by Letters from Iwo Jima.

I went in fully expecting–wanting, really–to be awed by the power of Clint Eastwood’s vision. The conceit is certainly ingenious: turn a legendary American victory on its head by showing it exclusively from the perspective of the losers.

But he makes a wrong move right from the start. Rather than immediately jumping into the wartime action on Iwo Jima, he pans across the remaining detritus of the battle in 2007. A team of Japanese archaeologists, in white jumpsuits, with high-powered flashlights, makes their way into a bunker–a fancy word for a cave really, since neither the floors, walls nor ceilings end in smooth right angles–to search for artifacts. They come upon a cloth sack buried in the dirt. Before they open the bag, the screen fades out, and the action moves to Iwo Jima’s south-facing beach in early 1945.

She-Devil

As a professional journalist, I’m always a bit skeptical of movies about journalism. So often it’s presented as either more glamorous or more corrupt than it really is. To be vulnerable to corruption you need power, and to live glamorously you need money. Most journalists have neither. But there are exceptions.

One is Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine. She reportedly makes $5 million a year, dates wealthy older men and refused to put Oprah Winfrey on the cover until she lost weight. Her decisions launch designers and set trends. She is, by all accounts, an autocratic and impossible boss.

In The Devil Wears Prada, Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, a thinly veiled satire of Wintour. She gives orders that are either impossible to fill–procurement of the unpublished manuscript of the next Harry Potter novel by three, please–or too vague to comprehend–”Book me a table at that place that I like.” She is relentlessly critical and never smiles.