A new column was posted yesterday, but it was the wrong one. What appeared on the website yesterday will, I think, be published at a later date. Fortunately, the error has been fixed, and this week's column ("A Brief History of Our Great Nation," apparently retitled "A Satirical History of Our Great Nation") is now online. I hope there won't be any more problems.
A strange thing about superhero movies is that nearly all them try to be funny, but very few them are comedies. Iron Man had enough laughs, but its amiable, smart-alecky humor seemed to have been injected, as if as an afterthought, into a sci-fi actioner. The real comedies in the superhero genre -- Mystery Men, Meteor Man, My Super Ex-Girlfriend -- have been largely unsuccessful.
For the first half of Will Smith's new movie, Hancock looks to be an exception to the rule. Like Superman, Hancock has been blessed with super strength, super speed, and flight, but he has not been blessed with Superman's stalwart character, toothpaste-commercial smile, tenderness toward humanity, or grandness of speech. The difference between the two is roughly that between Edmund Gwenn in Miracle on 34th Street and Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa. And Hancock really should be the Bad Santa of the superhero genre -- a nasty, mean comedy that cuts through all the noble sentiments that even a good-humored franchise like Spider-Man exhibits when, for example, Aunt May takes the podium and gives a lecture about the importance of heroes.
Hancock never had a chance to be as raunchy as Bad Santa; naturally, studios are hesitant to waste Will Smith's profitability on an R-rated movie. But, within its limitations, it does just about everything right for the first 45 minutes or so. Hancock, an L.A.-based crime-stopper, drinks and curses; his rescues are haphazard, and he seems entirely indifferent to the collateral damage (we see him wreck roads, cars, trains and buildings, all spectacularly) and to the resultant scorn of the public. When they heckle him, he eggs them on, eager to show that he's no fonder of them than they are of him. We, of course, like him, partly because he's played by Will Smith, who's always likable, and partly because he is not destroying our cars. After each job, he retires to a lonesome bar or to his home, a secluded trailer in the mountains, when he's not in prison for destroying property.
The best scenes are those that follow him as he flies through the air with the grace of a badly tossed football, tumbling over geese and barely avoiding jets. It's a headlong rush, and it makes me think how unnecessarily dreary the gift of flight was in Superman Returns (for example), which was full of dully majestic shots of Superman gliding through the sky like an airborne ballerina, face placid as if contemplating the sunset. Iron Man and Hancock remind us that, when a man can fly, this should be exciting. Hancock is, I think, the first to show us how truly difficult landing on feet would be at a superhero's speed, and it makes me wonder why so few superheroes have had this tendency to skid or crash.
Despite Hancock's blunders, he does save lives, and early in the movie we see him rescue Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), a PR man who wants to return the favor: He wants to rehabilitate Hancock's image and make Los Angeles like him. His wife (Charlize Theron), on the other hand, is less than thrilled when he brings Hancock home to dinner. But Hancock opens up to Ray, admitting that he knows little of his own history: He woke up in a hospital in 1931 after a blow to the head with no memory of his life or even his name, and no one claimed him. He does not age. We begin to see his damaged soul in a less comic light, but the movie remains funny.
Then something happens, which I cannot reveal here without spoiling an important surprise, and the movie's not funny anymore. It's no longer a comedy. I wish I could say more about it. I will say that Charlize Theron's character is very grim indeed, and, though her behavior, once explained, is understandable, she hasn't much personality aside from her grimness. Ray, the peppy, optimistic PR man, who has an amusing relationship with the laconic, caustic Hancock, abruptly becomes rather useless and is pushed to the side. The finale is brutal, juiced-up drama, a hyperreal concoction of gunshots, shattered glass, pouring rain, severed limbs, and movie stars writhing in agony. It does not seem suited to the movie that preceded it. The transition from fun to gravitas takes places too quickly, I think. The movie is only 92 minutes; it should be longer. If Peter Berg, the director, wants to take Hancock in this direction, he should first let us have the fun that the previews promise; here, the fun ends too soon, and the drama starts with an unpleasant jolt, where there should be a gradual build. If Hancock is destined to become as loftily mythic as Superman Returns, we might at least have some warning.
For its first half, I recommend it anyway, but that is sort of beside the point: It is a Will Smith summer movie, and as such it demands to be seen. Smith has a better track record as a star of blockbusters than anyone else working, and Hancock is another modest success (though its take at the box office will, I suppose, be anything but modest), on the approximate level of I, Robot. Still, I think it might be nice, for a change, to see Smith in something else, in the kind of movie that asks neither for a big opening weekend nor for an Oscar nomination for Best Actor -- a low-key drama or a really dirty comedy or a small production to which he might lend the kind of shimmer, that peculiar incandescence, that low-budget movies, even when intelligent and entertaining, usually lack. Smith hasn't played a nonhero since 1993, with Six Degrees of Separation, still his most interesting movie, no matter how fond I am of Independence Day. Here he comes close to being a real guy, despite the superpowers. But Hancock cost $132 million more than Bad Santa did: It had to compromise.
My column's page was, unfortunately, overlooked when The Mountain Times' site was updated on Wednesday. But that's OK. I notified them, and now last week's column has finally appeared online. "Generation Y" is due for another update tomorrow, so you'd better read it now, before the switch to this week's column, which, again, should be available in about 24 hours. After this, I hope, my page at the newspaper's site will be updated every Wednesday, and I won't have to post reminders that you should read it here.
Hancock is due to arrive in theaters tomorrow, a Tuesday, which is weird, but I don't mind that. If it's going to come out tomorrow, there ought to be a showing at 12 tonight. But there is no midnight showing because, as it turns out, the movie does not arrive in theaters until 7 p.m. tomorrow. This really sucks. For months, I've expected to see Hancock at midnight. It's that kind of movie, goddamnit. What kind of excitement can there be at a 7 p.m. showing, when any normal person can stroll into the theater?
To add to yesterday's list, I've written a similar post, this time addressing nonexistent movies, another form of fiction within fiction. I've come up with five favorites, described below in no particular order.
1. Firestorm (from Seinfeld) - Apparently, this actioner contains a helicopter landing on top of a car, an "underwater escape," and a scene in which "Harrison Ford jumped out of that plane, and he was shooting back at them as he was falling." What more can you want? (A movie called Firestorm was made in real life in 1998, but it starred Howie Long and was not, I gather, the movie that Jerry and his friends described.)
2. The Old Mill, aka The Fires of Home (from State and Main) - Directed by Walt Price, the maker of Gandhi 2, and written by acclaimed playwright Joseph Turner White, The Old Mill is the "tale of a passionate fireman's quest for purity." I know because it actually has its own website, oldmillmovie.com, which earns extra points with me: It may be the only site on the web devoted to a movie that doesn't exist. The Old Mill may not have a mill in it, but I like its signature line, spoken by Alec Baldwin: "The only second chance I know is the chance to make the same mistake twice."
3. Hail to the Chimp (from The Simpsons) - Homer Simpson watches this movie at a drive-in and enjoys it immensely. It is the story of a chimp who has been elected president of the United States, a plot similar to one that Kilgore Trout is purported to have used in Breakfast of Champions. Here, the chimp, who seems a rather dictatorial leader, does not hesitate to slap and scream at any advisor possessing the temerity to dispute his decisions. "That's what you get for not hailing to the chimp!" Homer asserts.
4. Good Will Hunting 2: Hunting Season (from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) - The first Good Will Hunting was utter pap; the sequel looks much better. Just watch this clip.
5. Chubby Rain (from Bowfinger) - In accountant-turned-screenwriter Afrim's script, "when the aliens come down to earth, they come inside raindrops, making the rain chubby" -- hence, Chubby Rain, Bobby Bowfinger's sci-fi extravaganza starring Kit Ramsey. Having watched Bowfinger many times, I feel I know Chubby Rain better than a lot of real movies I've seen; I only wish I could view the full version.
It's a funny thing: I've realized that I regard a couple of these as minor classics of the cinema.
Lately I've been thinking a little about works of fiction that exist only within works of fiction. There are many. Writers naturally enjoy writing about writers -- if not as their protagonists, like Lucien de Rubempre of Balzac's Lost Illusions, then as supporting characters, like Dick Caramel of Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned -- and, to establish a sense of authenticity, must attribute a few made-up works to their characters.
If the writer is a really good character and his nonexistent books are well-titled, then they, too, take on a curious authenticity -- I can't help but imagine that the novels really were written in some alternate universe, and I begin to speculate about their contents. One can even begin to think that they might sometimes be better than the works that contain their fictitious authors.
The other day, I took a moment to think about which nonexistent novels I'd most like to read if they weren't, you know, nonexistent. I came up with a list of five, in no particular order:
1. The Manoeuvres of Arthur by Jeremy Garnet (from P.G. Wodehouse's Love Among the Chickens) - Wodehouse doesn't give us very many details about Garnet's semi-autobiographical novel. We know that it didn't sell very well: Garnet is forced to visit bookstores anonymously to suggest that they start carrying his book. We encounter in Love Among the Chickens only one person, aside from Garnet, who has read The Manoeuvres of Arthur beyond the third page, and, though she praises Garnet's cleverness, she believes the heroine to be the creation of someone who "didn't know very many girls." Still, Garnet narrates Love Among the Chickens so amiably that one must suppose that his own novel would be a pleasure as well. Just look at his description of a dog that has been outrun by the hen it's been chasing: "After the first field Bob, like the dilettante and unstable dog he was, gave it up, and sauntered off to scratch at a rabbit-hole with an insufferable air of suggesting that that was what he had come out for all the time." I love it.
2. A Match Made in Space by George McFly (from Back to the Future) - We never get a glimpse inside George McFly's thick opus, but we can guess what sort of book it is. According to George himself, he tends to write "stories! . . . science fiction stories! . . . about visitors coming down to Earth from another planet." The title and cover of A Match Made in Space suggest that it is a love story about a boy and a girl united by an alien named Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan, who looks suspiciously like Marty McFly in a radiation suit. (You can even see his portable tape deck.) Presumably the novel illustrates that, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.
3. Avalon Landing by William Forrester (from Finding Forrester) - Don't get me wrong: Finding Forrester is not a great movie, and not only because the white-mentor-teaches-impoverished-black-teen-the-power-of-the-mind angle is trite. The biggest problem is that the young hero, Jamal Wallace, though touted as a writing prodigy, is so totally bereft of personality that one cannot imagine him writing anything remotely interesting. But one can imagine that William Forrester, the stock Salinger-inspired recluse, famous for his one novel and his silence thereafter, has written something good. The reason, I think, is Sean Connery's performance, which invests the character with intelligence and charm. We know, at least, that his Forrester is a master of urban slang, which doubtless aids him in writing dialogue.
4. The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank by Kilgore Trout (from Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions) - Kilgore Trout probably is the world's best-known fictional sci-fi novelist. He is almost certainly its most prolific, so here I had many titles from which to choose. Of the several mentioned in my favorite of Vonnegut's books, Breakfast of Champions, I picked The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, which Vonnegut briefly discusses on page 286: "I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a spaceship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, 'I already know about human beings.'"
5. Eloise and Abelard by Katrina Van Tassel Grant (from Philip Roth's I Married a Communist) - Roth's most famous character, Nathan Zuckerman, is a novelist, and he figures prominently in I Married a Communist; however, in the same book, another fictional novelist makes an appearance. She is Katrina Van Tassel Grant, famous for her historical romances, her radio show, and her husband, a columnist and critic supposedly descended from Ulysses S. Grant. She is described "the most pretentious of all the rich, pretentious river folk up in Staatsburg," and it is her hilariously purple prose that entices me. A minor personage in Roth's work, Katrina Grant appears as a major character, under the name Amanda Keeler Evans, in Dawn Powell's 1942 novel A Time to Be Born, but only in I Married a Communist do we catch a glimpse of her writing. Here is the passage that Roth offers: "His hands clasped about her waist, drawing her to him, and she felt the powerful muscles of his legs. Her head fell back. Her mouth parted to receive his kiss. One day he would suffer castration as a brutal and vengeful punishment for this passion for Eloise, but for now he was far from mutilated. The harder he grasped, the harder was the pressure on her sensitive areas. How aroused he was, this man whose genius would revamp and revitalize the traditional teaching of Christian theology. Her nipples were drawn hard and sharp, and her gut tightened as she thought, 'I am kissing the greatest writer and thinker of the twelfth century!' 'Your figure is magnificent,' he whispered in her ear, 'swelling breasts, small waist! And not even the full satin skirts of your gown can conceal from view your loveliness of hip and thigh.' Best known for his solution of the problem of universals and for his original use of dialectics, he knew no less well, even now, at the height of his fame, how to melt a woman's heart. . . . By morning, they were sated. At last it was her chance to say to the canon and master of Notre Dame, 'Now teach me, please. Teach me, Pierre! Explain to me your dialectical analysis of the mystery of God and the Trinity.' This he did, patiently going into the ins and outs of his rationalistic interpretation of the Trinitarian dogma, and then he took her as a woman for the eleventh time."
Can you think of any other good ones?
When I heard the Three 6 Mafia's latest single, "Lolli Lolli (Pop That Body)," I overreacted. The situation is, as it turns out, not so dire: The song's anonymous banality is atypical of their new album, Last 2 Walk, which, though not the group's best work, is a hard-hitting, engrossing CD.
It now seems rather silly that I was so sure they'd fail. They'd never seriously failed in the past. DJ Paul and Juicy J have been two of the best producers in hip-hop since 1995 (or, to some Tennesseans, earlier), and I don't know why they shouldn't remain so: Their consistency has been unmatched, and, if you discount the aforementioned atrocity, which, after all, is only one song, they've shown no signs of decline. Last 2 Walk provides fans with more of the Mafia's classic sound: heavy, ominous crunk, simultaneously keyed-up and trancelike. Complete with the usual advertisements for the group's side projects, Last 2 Walk plays as a Three 6 Mafia album should; it's not the last-ditch sellout effort I expected. Even "My Own Way," the group's collaboration with Good Charlotte, which I assumed would abandon the group's hardcore aesthetic, has a powerful, desolate anger; it is, in fact, one of Last 2 Walk's triumphs. "Lolli Lolli (Pop that Body)" is conveniently tacked on to the end, after the "Outro," where it cannot interrupt the aggressive, no-bullshit swagger of the rest of the album; it seems to have been placed here precisely to make it easy for fans to skip it.
The only major issue is the group's dwindling size, which even Juicy J and DJ Paul felt obliged to address in the album's title: The 2 is not merely AIM-speak. The group's two founders, who also are its two most crucial members, remain, but the rest have jumped ship, and, though the Three 6 Mafia can function without the extra emcees, it cannot run at full speed. The departures of Lord Infamous, Koopsta Knicca, and Crunchy Black have been especially deleterious. Juicy J and DJ Paul are proficient enough on the microphone: Their guttural voices and the unforgiving, bellicose tenor of their words lend their simple rhymes and chants a gripping ferocity. But, as they aren't multidimensional emcees, they need help to sustain a whole album. Last 2 Walk's guest appearances do not quite do the job: Project Pat is always a welcome visitor, but Pimp C's two posthumous appearances, one with Bun B and one without, are far too brief. "I'd Rather," a misfire of the sort that appears once on every Three 6 album, when puerile sexual humor collides with eerie, austere music, seems designed to highlight Gangsta Boo, whose disappearance never to me seemed remotely problematic till now.
It's clear that DJ Paul and Juicy J will continue to create excellent music; the trouble is that they no longer have enough friends to share it with. I wonder what Lord Infamous is doing these days.
I have seen You Don't Mess with the Zohan, just as I threatened I would, and it's bad, just as I expected it would be. It's idiotic, coarse, and, on the whole, unfunny. Some critics have decided to pretend that it's really a bold political statement, perhaps because it's more exciting to write such stuff than to describe another dumb Adam Sandler comedy, but if this movie is an examination of Israeli-Palestinian relations, then Billy Madison is an unflinching exposé of the American educational system. Since You Don't Mess with the Zohan takes place in a Middle Eastern community in New York City, it naturally contains a few pacifist sentiments, but they're merely a part of the Hollywood tradition of concluding every raunchy farce on a sappy, sanctimonious note.
Adam Sandler, in a performance that consists mostly of an accent and a lot of air-humping, stars as the superhuman Israeli counterterrorist Zohan, who fakes his own death in order to start over in America, where he hopes to live his dream: being a hair stylist. Having changed his name to Scrappy Coco, he gets a job at a salon owned by a gorgeous Palestinian woman, Dalia, He quickly becomes her most popular hairdresser -- in part for the extra services he provides his female customers after he has finished cutting their hair. That most of his customers appear to be twenty or thirty years older than he does not bother him in the slightest.
Two unfortunate developments then take place: First, an immigrant taxi driver (Rob Schneider, giving roughly the same performance in roughly the same role that he had in Sandler's Big Daddy) recognizes Zohan, snaps a picture on his cell phone, and sends it to Zohan's nemesis, a terrorist called the Phantom (John Turturro), who comes to New York to settle the score with his rival, though Zohan no longer wants any part of their conflict. Second, a heartless real estate developer, who wishes to build a mall where Dalia's salon and a few other small stores stand, schemes to destroy the neighborhood, inciting enmity between the Israeli and Palestinian store owners in the area by hiring goons to spray-paint racial slurs on their businesses.
It's a flimsy plot, but it's enough to support some amusing gags. The trouble is that Sandler, co-writers Judd Apatow and Robert Smigel, and director Dennis Dugan haven't thought of any. I laughed quietly once or twice, but You Don't Mess with the Zohan is an unrelenting parade of wackiness, and if it cannot produce a few side-splitters, it really has no reason to exist: Ribald absurdity does not lend itself to staid appreciation. Zohan's overuse of hummus, which to him functions not only as food but also as toothpaste and hair gel, made me smile at first, but Sandler never lets it go: An hour and a half after the joke's introduction, Zohan sprays hummus from a hose to quell a fire, and I could only roll my eyes.
At times, it seems that the movie is being sustained solely by celebrity cameos: Mariah Carey, Kevin James, John McEnroe, George Takei, and Dom DeLuise all make brief appearances. Chris Rock delivers a couple lines in a truly bad Caribbean accent. Henry Winkler's scene is a baffling non sequitur: Zohan appears at his doorstep as a limo driver to take him to a party, after which the movie makes no further mention of Zohan's job as a chauffeur (the job's origin, too, is unexplained) and gives no further screen time to Winkler.
I gave You Don't Mess with the Zohan a chance because I hoped to see Sandler return to the nutty, irrepressible style of comedy that his earlier movies had. Ebert's review portrays it as such a picture. (Happy Gilmore, Sandler's comic pinnacle, he did not particularly like.) But there's nothing really mad about You Don't Mess with the Zohan; it's zaniness by numbers, an assortment of sexual and ethnic jests and physical hijinks that we've seen many times before. It's crude, but its crudity is nothing that will make you sit up and take notice; it's crude merely because earlier Sandler successes were. It's entirely uninspired.
• In the new Dragonball poster, Goku looks a lot whiter than the other characters. Also, he sort of looks like a wimp.
• There are Big Lebowski action figures.
• You may have forgotten that, in earlier years, Shaquille O'Neal pursued a career in hip-hop. Once his latest rap has reminded you, you will not forget again. "Kobe, tell me how my ass tastes" is a surprisingly catchy hook. Unfortunately, Shaq's off-color lyrics will cause him to lose his "special deputy's badge" in Arizona's Maricopa County, where, apparently, the sheriff's gross mistreatment of prisoners is considered A-OK.
Credit goes to Shelly for the second and third items.
Kazakhstan's entry for the Best Foreign Language Film of the Year category at the 2008 Oscars, Mongol, one of six nominees, was beaten out by Austria's The Counterfeiters. On Oscar night, few Americans had seen it -- perhaps roughly as many as were aware that Kazakhstan was a real country, not an invention of Sacha Baron Cohen's. Now, in June, Mongol has turned up at a number of theaters in the United States.
Mongol is the story of Genghis Khan. It runs only 126 minutes, but it is unmistakably an epic: Its timespan is three and a half decades; its setting is a continent; its subject is the stuff of legends. It concerns itself chiefly with Genghis Khan's early years, when he was called Temudgin. We see him first as the son of a tribal leader; we see his first love; we see him become an orphan, a slave, and, finally, a warlord.
If the epic is a genre, as the AFI has recently claimed, then, after the musical, it may be my least favorite genre. The trouble with epics is that they must simultaneously be human-sized and larger-than-life, and most only get the second part right, so they stand remote, like mountains too big to scale. Mongol has much of the good stuff that a lot of epics have. There is, for example, a great deal of horseback riding, which can look quite good on film; in fact, it was the chief attraction of Dances with Wolves. Here, the scenery, too, is very nice. There is an excellent variety of landscapes. We see sandy deserts, tree-covered mountains, snowy fields, and grassy, rolling plains, speckled with lakes that look like gargantuan rain puddles, from which rivers extend like stray strands of hair. Furthermore, we see a number of fine, bloody battles -- skirmishes that play as a cross between Gladiator and chopsocky and, later, large-scale wars that boast a satisfying combination of grace and messiness, even as, from a bird's eye view, the troops sometimes turn into a dusty smudge that reminded me of the battle scenes in Alexander. The CGI armies here often look considerably less real than the ones in Troy.
It is, however, on the human level that Mongol falls short. Director Sergei Bodrov, who also co-wrote the script, chooses not to portray Genghis Khan merely as an evil, bloodthirsty tyrant, but Bodrov does not place a new character in the spot vacated by the common perception of the Mongol. At times, Tadanobu Asano, the lead, is able to convince us that he is a man with a vision, but the screenplay doesn't give him enough to work with to create the powerful personality that we expect of a historical giant like Khan. The hero's relationship with his chief rival, moreover, is a hazy cliche: There is nothing in the rapport of the childhood friends, sworn brothers, turned against one another in adulthood, to elevate their connection above stock conflict, nothing to make it stand on its own as a specific strife instead of drifting into a memory-mosaic of similar strifes from other movies about bitterness between best pals.
I cannot exactly call Mongol a bad movie. In fact, I can think of only a few bad moments. There is scene in which Khan (or Temudgin) is sold as a slave to some aristocrat, who, before buying Temudgin, is warned by an old, long-bearded, bald-headed monk that the purchase will only cause havoc, and when the buyer ignores him, it is like watching the horror-movie teens decide to have sex while the killer is on the loose; it should be clear to anyone that the monk is a sage whose premonitions are to be heeded -- that, in fact, the monk exists for no reason other than to voice grave, accurate premonitions. The use of the purchase is unclear, anyway, since Temudgin is not put to work; rather, he is locked in a cell, where his epidermis becomes a dry, flaky crust, the result of the kind of shoddy, excessive makeup that Clint Eastwood wore after he'd been dragged through the desert in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. I must also mention a scene in which Temudgin praises the aural beauty of the Mongolian language, citing its word for "meat," which he pronounces as if coughing up a chunk of phlegm; I do not know that Bodrov intends the scene to be humorous.
Nevertheless, I cannot deny that Mongol generally looks good, tells a story that deserves to be told with someone other than John Wayne (or Omar Sharif) as the lead, seems interested in its topic, and makes a valiant attempt to bring it to life on the screen. But it isn't very compelling. The middle section is disjointed and sometimes hard to follow. The end is rushed, and it doesn't explain very well how Temudgin became the conqueror who emerged in 1206; the question of how Temudgin, the slave, transformed himself into Genghis Khan, the emperor, is probably the most interesting one that the movie could address, but Mongol nearly skips over it. It focuses, perhaps, too much on Temudgin's childhood and early adulthood, which, even as Bodrov mixes fiction with the facts, aren't particularly fascinating. Obviously, Bodrov withholds Khan's notable achievements for a reason: Reports indicate that Mongol is the first part of a planned trilogy.
That's the trouble with keeping everything in reserve. If you start too slowly, it doesn't matter how well you finish.
