Originally posted November 2006
These movies come and go at the Guild Cinema, and I'm beginning to think that my top-10 list for the year could come just from the local art house's '06 slate, starting with "The World" back in January.
In the past few weeks, the films "Old Joy" and "Loud Quiet Loud: A Film About the Pixies" have hit close to home, even though they are two of the most laconic, uneventful movies you'll ever see. In the manner of the recent "49 Up," they are about people my age, or nearly so, who are settling into their skin, realizing that, for better or worse, this is your life.
As I watched the Pixies movie about their 2004 reunion tour, I was reminded of the Beatles. Running hot for six years; four people outgrowing each other; creative tension between the two songwriters. And the music is that good. Few bands nailed just about every song straight on for six years like the Pixies and Beatles did.
The mini-review of "Loud Quiet Loud" we ran recently (from the band's hometown Boston Globe) faulted the film for being tedious and uneventful. But it was the movie's quietest moments that were some of the most powerful. The four of them sitting in a room without speaking. Kim Deal (or was it twin sister Kelley?) doing needlepoint on the porch of their home in Dayton, Ohio.
We see Deal struggle mightily a year into sobriety (chain-smoking and slamming nonalcoholic beers day and night). Black Francis and Joey Santiago adapt to sudden fatherhood and the separation from their new families. Drummer David Lovering deals with his ailing father. One of the four is clearly having a nervous breakdown.
The Pixies were the poster children for the explosion of diverse popular music in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time I call the Heyday of the Planet of Sound, before the co-opting of "alternative" music. I saw the Pixies live once, in 1991 at the Riviera Theater in Chicago. It was a jet ride of a show. Greg Kot, the great rock music critic of the Chicago Tribune, said the band members played as if their cars were double-parked outside. He meant that in a good way. It was a frantic show.
Apparently, though, these four people who reach sublime heights onstage don't have much in common and are all missing the communication gene. At the beginning of the film, during their first rehearsal in a dozen years, they can't remember how to start the song "Hey." Finally, Deal fetches an iPod to play the original version. Late in the movie, toward the end of the triumphant reunion tour, the band is sailing through "Hey," and the filmmakers flash back to old footage of the band as young 20-somethings. It's done in the melancholy style usually reserved for the now-dead. The boys have flowing hair. (One scene from the reunion tour shows the men shaving their heads; they all go shaved now to mask receding hairlines.) In the flashback, Deal doesn't have lines on her face — or any worries, it seems. (She and her sister, after years of substance abuse and weight gain, could easily pass for 55 now.) The old footage is poignant.
Then we return to the stage for the climax of the wildly popular tour. Black Francis hugs his bandmates as they leave the stage, but it seems like less of an emotional moment and more of a pat on the back for making their business venture a success (they all needed the money). They survived. They are flattered at the reaction from the fans. Maybe they know that that's all they should expect.
The members of the band still haven't learned how to talk to each other. Black Francis tells an interviewer for Rolling Stone magazine that he has demos ready for a Pixies album and that he's waiting for one of his bandmates to ask about booking studio time. But the passive-aggressive frontman is obviously incapable of just walking up to Joey or David or Kim and telling one of them directly.
That's just the way he is, apparently.
We find ourselves in our late 30s or early 40s and we realize we are hard-wired a certain way. This is who we are. This is who we are sharing our lives with; either mates or bandmates, songs or babies. We worship our youth and marvel at our energy and our accomplishments. We occasionally try to recapture moments, but it's easier if we just admire them from afar and write new songs.
The bleak drama "Old Joy" leaves us wondering which direction two estranged friends will head. One of them shares a memorable line: "Sorrow is nothing but worn-out joy."
And worn-out joy is joy just the same. It comes with implied hope. And it's what we pass among the people in our lives, often unspoken and unwritten.
31 July 2008
15 July 2008
"No Country for Old Men"
Originally posted Nov. 16, 2007
As I get older, I reap the benefits of getting to figure a few things out. But one of the insights I've had lately is that the more meaning-of-life epiphanies I have, the less it seems to matter.
Or the less I matter.
This past week my film world was mired in the era of my childhood, from Kennedy to Reagan eve. In Peter Bogdanovich's luscious 1968 period piece "Targets," Boris Karloff plays an autobiographical character, an actor who realizes suddenly that Hollywood and the world have passed him by.
Earlier in the day I saw the Todd Haynes film "I'm Not There," a pseudo-biopic of Vietnam-era Bob Dylan that suggests life begins and ends the moment you stake your claim to fame, and after that — well, you could just as well be a character from the old West as a rock star. I'll sort that one out next week.
And then there are the Coen Brothers and their deeply moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," a paean to the old world order.
The film is framed, both literally and figuratively, by Ed Tom Bell, the aging Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. This is 1980, and like Boris Karloff in "Targets," Sheriff Ed Tom's world just isn't the same — we're on the brink of an upheaval — and he's ready to hand things over to the type of people who just don't appreciate a "sir" or "ma'am" anymore.
And so be it.
"No Country for Old Men" is, ostensibly, about a welder named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on the aftermath of a botched drug deal in the desert, finds a bag with $2 million in it and subsequently is hunted by the devil in flesh, air-gun-wielding Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who wants that money back, with a few quarts of blood as interest.
That's the plot, but it's not what the movie is about.
Instead, Joel and Ethan Coen — shedding the froth of "Fargo" and returning to their darker roots of "Blood Simple" — have crafted a quietly apocalyptic morality play about disillusionment.
Yes, Ed Tom is old and cranky and losing his touch. But this is more than nostalgia or the churn of the generations.
He's perfectly ready to step aside, to admit that, as the title suggests, it's a young man's world and always will be. Jones captures the duality that we all slowly comprehend: On the surface, life is fleeting and shallow (a coin flip, as Chigurh demonstrates to a few of his victims), but that doesn't mean each loss we witness along the way doesn't tear us up on the inside, little by little. Those lines in Jones' face got there somehow.
And if we manage to elude the bad guys (or are too timid to take the risk that provokes them in the first place), our consolation is a slow march toward death, a dull wade through inconsequence.
The Coens don't turn their camera away from death. In fact, they linger on the bloody bodies. Death is brutal but natural. In their random universe, dogs die with as much dignity as humans do.
At a crucial point in the film — just when a traditional director would show us a clamorous climax to the underworld chase — the Coen brothers pull the rug out from under us. The death of a key character is skipped over, as if a scene is missing, and instead we see it all in a quick reaction shot, a facial expression.
It's those faces that help tell the real story here. Often the Coen brothers use reflections, another reminder of our lives receding in that rearview mirror. Two characters stare into the same blank TV screen — it's a '70s-era click-channel model — and we see them float in it like ghosts. And perhaps we wink along, conjuring up modern, 3-D plasma images of this all playing out on a reality show in 2007.
After their anticlimax, the directors take a detour. Ed Tom goes to visit Ellis (Barry Corbin), a destitute old coot who survives on stale coffee and not a little bitterness.
Suddenly this potboiler of a movie rambles to an ending — as if scenes were set to iPod shuffle. The Coen brothers put us in the boots of those old men, and we wander aimlessly, confused.
"You can't stop what's coming," Ellis tells Ed Tom at one point, and you can almost hear an "Amen" from Jones the actor.
"It ain't waiting on you," Ellis says coldly. "That's vanity."
As I get older, I reap the benefits of getting to figure a few things out. But one of the insights I've had lately is that the more meaning-of-life epiphanies I have, the less it seems to matter.
Or the less I matter.
This past week my film world was mired in the era of my childhood, from Kennedy to Reagan eve. In Peter Bogdanovich's luscious 1968 period piece "Targets," Boris Karloff plays an autobiographical character, an actor who realizes suddenly that Hollywood and the world have passed him by.
Earlier in the day I saw the Todd Haynes film "I'm Not There," a pseudo-biopic of Vietnam-era Bob Dylan that suggests life begins and ends the moment you stake your claim to fame, and after that — well, you could just as well be a character from the old West as a rock star. I'll sort that one out next week.
And then there are the Coen Brothers and their deeply moving adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men," a paean to the old world order.
The film is framed, both literally and figuratively, by Ed Tom Bell, the aging Texas sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. This is 1980, and like Boris Karloff in "Targets," Sheriff Ed Tom's world just isn't the same — we're on the brink of an upheaval — and he's ready to hand things over to the type of people who just don't appreciate a "sir" or "ma'am" anymore.
And so be it.
"No Country for Old Men" is, ostensibly, about a welder named Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbles on the aftermath of a botched drug deal in the desert, finds a bag with $2 million in it and subsequently is hunted by the devil in flesh, air-gun-wielding Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), who wants that money back, with a few quarts of blood as interest.
That's the plot, but it's not what the movie is about.
Instead, Joel and Ethan Coen — shedding the froth of "Fargo" and returning to their darker roots of "Blood Simple" — have crafted a quietly apocalyptic morality play about disillusionment.
Yes, Ed Tom is old and cranky and losing his touch. But this is more than nostalgia or the churn of the generations.
He's perfectly ready to step aside, to admit that, as the title suggests, it's a young man's world and always will be. Jones captures the duality that we all slowly comprehend: On the surface, life is fleeting and shallow (a coin flip, as Chigurh demonstrates to a few of his victims), but that doesn't mean each loss we witness along the way doesn't tear us up on the inside, little by little. Those lines in Jones' face got there somehow.
And if we manage to elude the bad guys (or are too timid to take the risk that provokes them in the first place), our consolation is a slow march toward death, a dull wade through inconsequence.
The Coens don't turn their camera away from death. In fact, they linger on the bloody bodies. Death is brutal but natural. In their random universe, dogs die with as much dignity as humans do.
At a crucial point in the film — just when a traditional director would show us a clamorous climax to the underworld chase — the Coen brothers pull the rug out from under us. The death of a key character is skipped over, as if a scene is missing, and instead we see it all in a quick reaction shot, a facial expression.
It's those faces that help tell the real story here. Often the Coen brothers use reflections, another reminder of our lives receding in that rearview mirror. Two characters stare into the same blank TV screen — it's a '70s-era click-channel model — and we see them float in it like ghosts. And perhaps we wink along, conjuring up modern, 3-D plasma images of this all playing out on a reality show in 2007.
After their anticlimax, the directors take a detour. Ed Tom goes to visit Ellis (Barry Corbin), a destitute old coot who survives on stale coffee and not a little bitterness.
Suddenly this potboiler of a movie rambles to an ending — as if scenes were set to iPod shuffle. The Coen brothers put us in the boots of those old men, and we wander aimlessly, confused.
"You can't stop what's coming," Ellis tells Ed Tom at one point, and you can almost hear an "Amen" from Jones the actor.
"It ain't waiting on you," Ellis says coldly. "That's vanity."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)