Parabasis

A Serious Man

Just saw A Serious Man at the Cobble Hill Cinemas.  I just wanted to quickly offer a corrective to a meme that's floating around most of the reviews of this film most likely because it's embedded in press materials somewhere... A Serious Man really has almost nothing to do with the Book of Job in the Bible. Claiming it does is like claiming that any revenge story involving a son avenging his father's murder is an adaptation of Hamlet.

In The Book of Job, Satan and God make a bet that the Devil cannot turn one of God's most devout followers against him.  Satan chooses Job, a wealthy landowner with a large family. God says, essentially, "don't physically hurt him". So Job's land and livelihood and children are taken from him in a series of disasters. He remains devout. Satan asks God for permission to cause Job bodily harm, claiming the game isn't fair.  God assents and Job is afflicted with boils.  At this point, Job's wife loses faith, tells Job to "curse God and die" and leaves him. 

Although Job doesn't lose his faith in God, he loses his faith in the idea of divine justice. He is then visited by three friends who try to convince him that Divine Justice exists and that he must've done something wrong to piss God off.  Job rejects this and rails against God.  This goes on for awhile. Eventually, God appears in a whirlwind, basically calls Job one presumptuous SOB and says that Job has no right to judge that which he does not understand.  Job repents. God restores Job's prosperity and gives him a new family and then goes to Job's friends and says, essentially, "Job was right, there is no divine justice, bad things happen to good people" and fucks off back to heaven.

In A Serious Man, Larry Gopnik (perhaps named after the author of A Cartoon History of the Universe) is a not-particularly-devout-nor-prosperous Jew who goes through some bad stuff (but nothing really on the Job scale), and wants to understand not why the bad stuff is happening to him but rather what he should do about it. These are very different questions. Job knows what he wants to do about it, he becomes a ranting homeless man on a pile of shit and yells about how there's no divine justice.  Larry doesn't seek answers so much as guidance.  The visit of Job's three friends is unwelcome. Larry seeks out three (not very helpful) rabbis. God appears to Job and restores him. Life just kinda goes on for Larry.  There's a couple of references to Job (particularly in the film's final shot) but, other than some thematic similarities, they don't have much to do with each other.

As for the film... I'm not totally sure how I feel about it. It's well made, well shot, well acted, and a movie that no other filmmakers could've delivered.  Like all of the Coen's serious films (with the possible exception of No Country for Old Men, due to it being an adaptation) it's a donut, with a giant hole in the middle where things like Meaning and Significance normally are, and in their place is the Coen's nihilism and misanthropy. 

What makes A Serious Man a little different is that the movie itself is about a pointless quest for meaning. So, in a way, they've created a structure in which their nihilism and misanthropy are essential to the film.

I have to admit, after two decades of really deeply loving the Coen's films... I'm a bit bored by them now. There's a strange sameness between their movies, not only in the way the camera and (particularly) music are used, but also in world view.  It seems that the Coens have on some level not grown as artists or human beings from Blood Simple to A Serious Man. It's a bit like being friends with someone who never changes; eventually, you grow a little tired of their company.

No Country had given me some hope that this had changed. The cutting of all underscoring, the adaptation of someone else's material, the masterful suspense sequences all felt like steps in the right direction. And i still have high hopes for The Yiddish Policeman's Union (in many ways A Serious Man feels like a warm-up for that forthcoming venture), and if I hadn't seen all of the Coen's other movies (except for The Ladykillers)  I think I probably would think A Serious Man is a really good movie. And I would've found its nihilism and misanthropy bracing, the way I did the first time I saw Fargo. But honestly, the whole thing left me kinda cold.

What did you all think about it?

DVD Giveaway Contest Winner!; Plus, Thanks, Parabasis Readers!

by Guest Blogger Prince Gomolvilas of Bamboo Nation

Oh, what joy free stuff brings! The winner of Parabasis' DVD Giveaway Contest is "Lucy," who will be receiving a copy of Mad Hot Ballroom. Congratulations! E-mail me your mailing address, and your DVD will be on its way shortly.

For all you non-winners (I would never use a term as crass as "losers"), you should check out this engaging documentary anyway. Watch the trailer, and put it in your Netflix queue:

Thanks for letting me post here this week, Isaac! And thanks for your time and attention, Parabasis readers! See you in the future in the comments section.

A Surprising Act of Cinematic Subversion: "The Invention of Lying's" Sacrilegious Secret

by Guest Blogger Prince Gomolvilas of Bamboo Nation

The print ads, commercials, and trailer for the new Ricky Gervais comedy, The Invention of Lying, conveniently omit one of the film's major plot lines. It's a story thread that makes this wide-release movie—which is being marketed to middle America and beyond as a harmless romantic comedy with a fantastical twist—a true act of subversion. It's the kind of subversion that regular readers of Parabasis will recognize as something that Isaac Butler would really dig.

Gervais's character, a pudgy loser named Mark Bellison, lives in a world where people tell the truth to each other all the time—no one is able to even comprehend what lying is. Everyone's brutal honesty in the first act—calling Bellison "fat" to his face, etc.—is the film's primary source of humor.

But soon Bellison "invents" lying and discovers that he can manipulate the world around him for personal and financial gain. For example, when he tells a bank teller that he has more money in his account than he actually does, she believes him and hands him all the money he wants because she simply does not have the ability to understand that he's not telling the truth.

The Invention of Lying is moderately funny and sags in parts, but a remarkable thing happens about halfway through the movie.

[POSSIBLE

SPOILERS

AHEAD]

To comfort his dying mother, who like everyone else is afraid of death because they don't know what comes after, Bellison begins to describe an afterlife to her, one that sounds an awful lot like our concept of "heaven."

The world catches wind of Bellison's vision of life after death and demands more information, which leads to him creating religion (not a religion, but all religion). Aside from inventing "the man in the sky," he presents the rest of his religious rules on the back of two Pizza Hut boxes.

Yup, folks, Gervais, a known atheist, has created a picture about a world in which atheism is a matter of fact and about how God and religion is nothing more than a sham created by man.

How will the God-fearing public, duped into seeing what they think is a light comedy, react when those inflammatory messages smack them in the face? I really don't know.

But I do know that Isaac, who's made made his "lack of faith" known here time and again, is likely to rally around this movie despite its shortcomings. It's difficult to fault a film that's so delightfully daring.

(Admittedly, though, I do wonder how daring Gervais really is. After all, in the movie, lying makes the world a much more interesting place to live in.)

DVD Giveaway Contest! Leave a Comment to Win "Mad Hot Ballroom!"

by Guest Blogger Prince Gomolvilas of Bamboo Nation

If you've followed me around the Internet for a while, you probably know that I have an inexplicable affinity for dancing films. I mean, do you know anyone else who's seen Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights AND Step Up 2? IN THE THEATER?!

Anyway, I hold a lot of contests on my own blog, so I thought I'd bring some of that magic to Parabasis this week.

THE PRIZE: A brand new copy of one of my favorite dancing movies, Mad Hot Ballroom, a rousing documentary about elementary school students who compete in New York City. It does for ballroom dancing what Spellbound did for spelling bees.

 

THE RULES: Leave a comment—any comment—by Thursday, October 8, 2009, 11:59 p.m. Be sure to leave your name or your initials; when I announce the winner on October 9, you'll know if you won and all you have to do is e-mail me to claim your prize. One winner will be chosen at random. Anyone in the world can enter (but please note that those of you not in the U.S. or Canada must have a DVD player that plays Region 1 DVDs).

Yay! Free stuff!

Things I Agree With

Let's not forget that Roman Polanski is, actually, you know, a rapist edition.

Independent vs. Indie Films

StrongBad is, as always, right. And hilarious. Check it out here. 

Inglurious However-You-Spell-It

If you've seen the previews, I don't think anything I'm writing here is a spoiler, but if you're sensitive about such things, don't read this post.

I saw it this weekend and quite liked it. Didn't love it. Didn't think it was awesome. But I really really liked it. The slow suspenseful music-less moments (the first scene and the scene at the basement bar) are, for my money, the best parts of the film and show what a master of film language Tarantino is.  I was grateful, after Kill Bill's mannered deployment of the "Quentin Tarantino Explains the Dual Meanings of Pop Culture Signifiers" monologue every fifteen minutes to have a period piece that forced him out of it. I was also happy that he shot a film in three languages, which forced him to work in somewhat different dialogue styles. I was finding his writing a bit pat by the end of KB2, so it was nice to see that he can break out of that when he wants to.

To me, what's most interesting about QT's post-Pulp Fiction work is the weird subtextual airing of conflicts and ambiguities about his own films, filmmaking and his audience. He followed Pulp Fiction up with Jackie Brown, a purported heist thriller/comedy that is pointedly, deliberately unthrilling and character-based (not that that's a bad thing) and then follows that up with a two-part meditation on violence which is really a meditation on violence-as-entertainment, much of which is filled with decidedly unentertaining, excruciating to watch and listen to sequences. 

And now we have Inglurious Basterds, QT's answer (if interviews are to be believed)  to There Will Be Blood in which the climactic sequence is a bunch of Nazis laughing at a film showing a massacre of American Soldiers, followed by a laugh-out-loud funny massacre of the same Nazis in a movie theater where the central image is a burning movie screen.  QT shows Hitler laughing and cheering the slaughter, and then gives us a slaughter programmed to make us laugh and cheer.  It's kind of breathtaking, really.  Roland Barthes would've had a field day with this movie. 

District 9 And Race

I've seen a lot of blog posts in various places in the leftoverse dedicated to the twin assertions that District 9 is awesome and that it's hella racist.  I'm inclined to agree with both of them, but I think on the second point it's a little more complicated.

The film's relationship to apartheid is very very strange. Much publicity has been generated by District 9's gritty realism and apartheid allegory... it's inspired by a real event-- the clearing out of a ghetto in the twilight of the apartheid years-- that the film's writer and director lived through. But at the same time, the film never mentions apartheid. it takes place in present day South Africa in a world that is basically exactly like ours except for the fact that there's a huge fucking UFO that's been floating of J-Burg since the early 1980s and a ghetto filled with grasshopper like aliens.  And yet, despite the fact that it exists in a post-apartheid South Africa rife with class and race strife, it never mentions apartheid. I have no idea what to make of this other than I think it was a curious narrative choice. I don't find it racist, just weird.

Where there's little doubt in my mind that the film traffics in some really seriously offensive stereotypes is in its portrait of "The Nigerians" who, besides being gangsters, are cannibal witch doctor primitive idiot bloodthirsty gangsters. Universally.  They're just collectively called "The Nigerians". It's pretty loathsome stuff.

It's worth noting, of course, that the movie is also just in general downright misanthropic, and traffics in a blanket hatred of humanity. White people in the film are officious, greedy amoral thugs in power suits. Which is what makes this all more complicated. The movie has a very very dim view of human nature and an expansive view of human possibility and of the potential for redemption through suffering. Still, the view of whites in the film doesn't rely on (or traffic in) hundreds-of-years-old stereotypes of Africans that have been used to justify hundreds of years of oppression.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the movie, can't wait for the inevitable sequel. It's a smart, relevant thematically rich shoot-em-up, the kind of movie that summer movies should be.  It's just both that and kinda racist at the same time. 

The oddest racial critique I read of the film had to have been this one in Racialicious, which disliked that the aliens in the film aren't represented positively (to be fair as this quote will hopefully show, this isn't the substance of the racial critique in the post, just an issue the writer had with the film on a substantive level):

If you look at the film as an apartheid allegory, it has problems right off the bat. The aliens are loathsome, trash-eating vermin who fight endlessly, destroy property for no reason, and piss on their own homes, which isn’t a truthful or flattering allegorical comparison for actual black South Africans under apartheid. Apartheid is terrible because humans were denied rights. The “apartheid” of these aliens isn’t that terrible - it’s kind of justifiable, because they’re actually dangerous, violent and destructive. I think it would be a better allegory, and a more sophisticated movie, if the aliens weren’t unpleasant. If they were peaceful and kind, but the humans still demonized them, the film would be much more chilling; the horror would be “man’s inhumanity to lobster-man”, not “eew gross they eat pig heads!”

But to my knowledge, District 9 does not explicitly present itself as an apartheid allegory, and changing the nature of the aliens basically makes it a different movie, so I’m gonna give it a pass in this post (although I’m very open to hearing other people’s thoughts about the allegorical angle). I think the choice to make the aliens disgusting was mostly artistic license, designed to make the film’s tone and visuals more gritty and scary, rather than any attempt to actually be representative of black people oppressed by apartheid. So that wasn’t my problem with this film.

On simply a movie-watching level, the writer is dead wrong on this point. That the aliens are dangerous, violent, destructive and vulgar and yet deserving of rights and to be well-treated because they are sentient makes the movie far far far more interesting and far far far more radical in its war-on-terror era politics. Given that oppressive regimes such as Jim Crow in America, Apartheid in South Africa and the occupation in Palestine are all predicated on the "dangerous violent and destructive" stereotype of their inhabitants (blacks will rape white women, all Palestinians are rabid killers who want to slaughter Israeli civilians and push the Jews into the sea etc.) .  What the film is doing is saying, "Okay, let's make all of those stereotypes true. Now what?" And where it ends up is "They're still deserving of rights." it's far more sophisticated than a film that pitted saintly oppressed victims against evil  uni-dimensional oppressors.  That to me is part of what makes the film so worthwhile. I will admit I was totally taken aback and how terrifying, strange, and unsympathetic (and yet how worth of decent treatment!) the aliens in the film are.

Is It Just Me...

Or is AO Scott getting better and better as a film reviewer? I seriously have a man-crush on his talent and writing skills. Example (from an otherwise glowing review):

Julia Child could whip up a navarin of lamb for lunch, but Meryl Streep eats young actresses for breakfast. Remember Anne Hathaway in “The Devil Wears Prada”? Amanda Seyfried in “Mamma Mia!”? Neither do I.

The deck is further stacked against Ms. Adams by the discrepancy between Ms. Powell’s achievement and Ms. Child’s, and by a corresponding imbalance in Ms. Ephron’s interest in the characters. The conceit of parallel lives is undone by the movie’s condescending treatment of Julie and also by its ardent embrace of the past at the expense of the present.

From the very start, Paris in the late ’40s and early ’50s is — well, it’s postwar Paris, a dream world of fabulous clothes, architecture, sex, food, cigarettes and political intrigue. And New York in 2002 is made, a little unfairly, to seem drab and soulless by comparison. Queens, demographically the most cosmopolitan of the five boroughs and something of a foodie mecca, is treated with easy Manhattanite disdain, as a punch line and punching bag.

The unevenness of “Julie and Julia” is nobody’s fault, really. It arises from an inherent flaw in the film’s premise. Julie is an insecure, enterprising young woman who found a gimmick and scored a book contract. Julia is a figure of such imposing cultural stature that her pots and pans are displayed at the Smithsonian. The fact that Ms. Ephron, like Julie herself, is well aware of this gap does not prevent the film from falling into it. All the filmmaker’s artful whisking can’t quite achieve the light, fluffy emulsion she is trying for.

Look at everything packed into those tight few paragraphs.... a little bit of discussion of Postwar Paris, the film's inaccurate (and meanspirited) treatment of Queens, a few well placed puns that actually relate to the material instead of his own cleverness... use of trivial information (the Smithsonian) to make a broader point about the film, etc.  There's not a lot of wasted space in the review, and all of it is perceptive and illuminating.

I know Scott wrote that kinda stupid "neo-neo realist" thing awhile back, but still. Can't help but admire the guy.

Of course, while I'm reading reviews at the Times, it's worth noting this from Manohla Darghis:

Of course Paramount Pictures opted not to show “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” to critics before releasing its latest gaseous emission. The people who work at the studio might be guilty of many things, including hypocrisy (they did show it to select fanboy types), but they’re also pragmatists and must have smelled the stench long ago. Then again, with its gagging laughs, discount special effects, hoo-ha din and interchangeable action figures with names like Lobotomaniac and Enemaicon, or some such, this pricey, juiceless pulp could never have been killed by critics, simply because it was already dead.

And asking... Why did you go review it then? I actually don't understand the practice of film critics seeing films studios aren't screening in advance. It's not like anyone is going to be dissuaded from seeing G.I. Joe (whose discount special effects, hoo-had din and interchangeable action figures are well on display in its ads) because of a review in the Times. I mean, I enjoyed this review. It's pretty hilarious. But I just wonder why reviewers go to things that everyone in the game knows they're going to rip apart. 

But then again, there's a very long list of extremely unpleasant things I'd probably rather do than see Transformers 2 or GI Joe.

John Hughes is dead

by Mr. Excitement

John Hughes has died at 59. For the generations before and after mine, that may hold less interest, but, perhaps more than anyone else, Hughes shaped our vision of what 1980s teenage life was like. It's funny: only last week, I discovered that Hughes had kept writing and doctoring screenplays under a pseudonym all these years; among others, he worked on Maid in Manhattan and Drillbit Taylor. 

Much of Hughes' oeuvre remains problematic for me: in Sixteen Candles, Farmer Ted is derided as a "fag", but gets his revenge in the end by sexually assaulting an unconscious drunk girl (who them awakens to a vague sense that she loves him!), Ferris Bueller is full of class claustrophobia, Some Kind of Wonderful has a lame, materialistic ending and, although I haven't seen it in a while, I always thought Duckie was twice the man that Blaine was.

Still, I can't deny the impression that those movies made on me. Actually, I love to debate and critique those movies so much that I own this book. And, whenever they come on basic cable, I will watch them, edited language and all. Rest in peace, John Hughes.