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The Archers: Introduction and "49th Parallel"

A re-post of something I wrote for The House Next Door:

British movies are getting the shaft.

The budding movie snob often simply overlooks the output of that island nation, with a few notable exceptions. Everyone sees Lawrence of Arabia, yeah, but might it get more press simply for being (among other things) so damn epic?

More notable is the discrepancy between American and British “greatest-ever” lists. Although the British Film Institute places Carol Reed’s The Third Man, a perennial favorite with American critics, at the top of its list of the best 100 British films ever made, “Total Film” bestows the honor upon 1971’s Get Carter. Carter’s not so feted in the states. It didn’t make either of the American Film Institute’s top 100 lists (which, perplexingly, include some British movies and not others), and it clocked in at a nothing-to-scoff-at 570 on “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” (a terrifically maintained site which offers a list of the, that’s right, 1000 greatest films ever made). That Carter is so fawned upon by some and so ignored by others illustrates the ocean dividing British critics from just about everybody else.

Our neophyte snob may, then, miss out on some of the real gems that Britain has to offer until much later in his cinematic education. They don’t top the lists, so they fail to pique the attention.

So why no love for the British?

British film seems to suffer from the “reverse Goldilocks” syndrome—it’s just a little too foreign and yet not quite foreign enough. “They’re speaking English,” the American moviegoer might say when watching certain British movies. “But what the hell are they talking about?” Or maybe even, “What the hell are they saying?”

I experienced the former (with an occasional dash of the latter) when watching Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. They were indeed speaking English, but the movie itself seemed so English. Take the conceit of the film itself—to examine what transformed a normal soldier into this self-important prick:

Not exactly a well-known archetype among us Americans.

But based on the setting (World War II) and the language, we expect, when the film begins, to be familiar with the world we’re about to enter. So when this world turns out to be one we haven’t really seen before (“Why does everyone hang out in Turkish baths?”; “Who the hell is Colonel Blimp?”), it’s particularly jarring.

We Americans seem to be particularly uncomfortable with this gap between intuition and reality. Foreign-language foreign films (those real ones) are so unfamiliar that we throw our preconceptions out the window. France may not really look the way it does in Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, but it also doesn’t look like anything that we’ve seen before.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (known from 1943 onward as “The Archers”) epitomize this dichotomy. Accordingly, their work seems to have fallen through the cracks for most average moviegoers and even many film snobs.

But if the Archers typify why British films are so overlooked, they also represent how wonderful they can be. They’re so funny, so sweetly optimistic, so quintessentially British that it’s a ruddy shame to ignore them. In process, if not in tone, they recall the Coen brothers, those American iconoclasts. Like the Coens, the Archers maintained a striking degree of creative control, sharing writing, directing, and producing credits (have a look at the five-point “Archers Manifesto” to see how seriously they took their craft). And although almost none of them were contracted, Powell and Pressburger worked with a rotating cast of critically-adored collaborators on nearly all of their films.

I’ve decided to help remedy this criminal under-appreciation. I’ve cherry-picked a (hopefully) representative six selections from the twenty films the pair collaborated on.

It’s a well-worn cliché that we’re all more the same than we are different. I suppose, but the differences are much more interesting. So grow out your handlebar mustache, start dropping the “e” in either, and grab a helping of steak-and-kidney pie as I dive into the unexpectedly unfamiliar world of the Archers.

***
49th Parallel, and, thankfully, better things are yet to come

There’s a reason why cop movies often follow similar formulas.

Take Ridley Scott’s American Gangster: Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas gets his Gangster on, and Russell Crowe’s Richie Roberts tries to put him away. The dual main character structure humanizes both predator and prey and serves to raise the stakes on each side. Roberts’ attempts to put Lucas away are enriched because we know Frank. The guy’s a ruthless drug dealer, but the structure affords him at least some humanity. The formula works, even if the movie doesn’t blow us away.

So it’s a bit puzzling as to why Powell and Pressburger decided to buck convention with 49th Parallel. Maybe it wasn’t a convention yet. I hope so for their sakes, because then the solution wasn’t quite so obvious.

The film follows a group of Nazi sailors who are stranded in the Canadian wilderness during World War II after their submarine is torpedoed. They are, to the man, an irredeemable bunch of schmucks. Except for one of them, but we’ll get back to him later.

Their quest to reach the United States (not coincidentally a neutral power at the time) might be called harrowing. But, at least in the film reviewer’s lexicon, “harrowing” typically applies only when you’d like not to see the “protagonists” fail. Not so here.

Lieutenant Hirth, a portrait of Aryan handsomeness and Nazi persistence, played by an admittedly magnificent Eric Portman, is the worst of the lot. When Niall MacGinnis’ Vogel (the one redeemable non-schmuck) determines that he’ll abandon the group to become a baker in a Utopian commune they encounter during their journey, Hirth executes him. To the same Hutterite co-op, Hirth delivers a rabid exhortation to live life based on the tenets of National Socialism.

The scene typifies what a disappointment 49th Parallel is on the whole. There’s so much talent here (Portman’s wild-eyed fervor really makes me physically angry), but it’s so wasted. The script (by Rodney Ackland and Pressburger himself) is simplistic and one-sided. The Nazis, as well as the yokels they encounter along their trip (including Laurence Olivier, who must have been made bad by the badness of the movie itself) are caricatures. Powell and Pressburger set out to make a film that would lure the United States into the war by making it seem downright evil to not want to wipe out the Nazis. And that is all they did.

But while I think the idea of producing a film intended to influence international relations is adorably naïve, I resent having to actually watch what results. Divorced of its historical context, 49th Parallel has little to keep us interested: we’re aware the Nazis are bad, and we don’t much care if they accomplish their goal. In fact, we’d rather if they didn’t.

Character studies of seeming demons can be thrilling (Daniel Day-Lewis has made a cottage industry out of it), but that’s not what Powell and Pressburger wanted to do here. Unfortunately, we hate the characters so much that we’d just as soon turn off the movie they’re starring in.

** (out of four)

Everyone who likes "Crash" keeps renting it on Netflix to keep infuriating people who hate "Crash"

And it is working.

Or maybe they don't even like Crash to begin with.

Maybe it's a conspiracy. Like Scientology or that weird guy from my school who seemed like he was an alien. People could believe in Scientology, and that guy could actually be from space, but maybe it's an elaborate hoax.

Like people still renting Crash.

Should I just get a Twitter? It seems so self-absorbed. But I guess only more efficiently self-absorbed than blogging.

"Funny People" looks funny

Shortly after discovering he's been diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, George Simmons (Adam Sandler) pops up at a low-profile comedy club in his own neighborhood. You'll have a good idea how his "set" comes off if you've ever seen a routine by Bill Hicks; it's charcoal-black and yet deeply personal. But because George isn't up there to do anything but confide in the only friends he has, it isn't particularly funny.

Yet the scene had me mesmerized and not in a "trainwreck" sense. I've seen too many deplorable comedians to derive even sadistic pleasure from seeing one of them bomb. It's George's utter lack of self-consciousness and Sandler's skill as a comedian that keep the audience (onscreen and in the theater) rapt.

I'd say the same about Funny People, Judd Apatow's third directorial effort; as a producer, he's basically the Jerry Bruckheimer of dick-joke-dramedies.

I kept wanting to call this the Dark Knight of summer comedies, but then I thought of that time I tried to compare London Calling to Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die. It sounded cool, and they both have long songs and like three dozen tracks. But it was a fucking stupid analogy.

This one's only slightly less stupid: it really only works insofar as both Funny People and The Dark Knight are long (about two and a half hours) and ambitious as all get-out. Then again, the latter had ambition and cohesion. A winning combination.

As the trailers have no doubt already ruined for you, George partway through the movie discovers that he's been miraculously cured. Which is a relief for those who weren't stoked for a Judd Apatow version of Tuesdays with Morrie. Unfortunately, this is also the place where the foundation starts to crumble.

So it's not a story about a former recluse who comes to terms with death through the help of his (1) new friend (Seth Rogen). But where to next, both for the film and its characters?

Seemingly trading one cliché for another, Apatow switches gears to a story about reigniting a lost flame with ex-lover Laura (director's wife Leslie Mann). But Apatow's considerable technique undermines the temptation for cliché (fortunately) and the need for a satisfying structure (unfortunately).

George, in a flight of romantic fancy, decides to book a show in Northern California. Conventiently, Nor-Cal's also where Laura lives...with her two children (Apatow and Mann's real-life kids) and her husband (Eric Bana).

George and Laura's unadvised adulterizing doesn't change one unalterable truth that runs throughout the film: George is a self-absorbed prick. Even the concern of assistant cum only-friend (Rogen) fails to arouse anything but scorn in him. When Laura shows George a video of her daughter singing "Memory" from Cats, George can't stop checking his phone for updates on how much he's being offered to do a new movie. Laura (spoilers from here on out) sticks with the husband, and George learns nothing. Had the film ended with George's subsequent excoriating of Ira (for trying to stop Laura from breaking it off with her husband) during their ride back to L.A., we would have ended up with a comedic There Will Be Blood, a story of apocalyptic greed and egotism.

Without giving too much away, I'll just say that Apatow isn't that pessimistic. But did he at least make a good movie?

I honestly don't know. His need to eschew the cliché prevents him from crafting a satisfying character arc: does George learn anything? Are we supposed to learn that George didn't learn anything?

But like his (possibly) main character, Apatow is brilliant even when he's bombing. Funny People is bloated as hell, but it's packed to overflowing with brilliant stuff. Apatow and vaunted D.P. Janusz Kamiński (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Schindler's List) breathe life into what looks like standard Hollywood: what might sound awkward in lesser hands becomes awkwardly real in this context. Like Apatow's best, the laugh lines feel like the result of a bunch of really Funny People shooting the shit. And the moving bits echo the awkwardness of "big" confessions (I love you; I'm gay; I'm gay but not in love with you) in real life.

As always, Apatow wrings some truly magnificent performances out of his principals. Sandler and Rogen will be denied the Oscar nods they so richly deserve, but on the upside, I can begin bitching early this year. The fact that this is both Sandler's best performance and the best performance since Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood (probably not a coincidence) makes me bitch even harder.

But Funny People is ultimately a deeply frustrating film, the product of too many ideas and too little execution. The fatal flaw is how Apatow's ambition blunts his impact. I predict a bomb and a lot of pissed-off Adam Sandler fans. Oh well.

***

"Look at me! I'm an afficionado of obscure British film!"

That's what my new "posting name" says to you all.

I needed a pseudonym to post on crustcake (that great metal blog I started writing for), so I chose "Clive Candy", also known as the eponymous Colonel Blimp from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. I'll hopefully be doing a feature on Powell and Pressburger for a great blog called The House Next Door in the next few weeks, so you'll hear more about it there.

But if you have any taste for quirky British films (a funny epic?), Blimp is a must-see.

If you're wondering who Colonel Blimp is, this might explain things.

"Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen", the Rosetta Stone of Shit

I don't think anyone's ever mentioned Jean-Luc Godard and Michael Bay in the same breath, but here it goes: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (henceforth referred to as TransRevFall because it's the stupidest thing I could think of) is the Breathless of stupid movies.

Back up a minute.

I remember watching Breathless for the first time in my freshman year film class. This class, notably, featured a kid so stunningly up his own ass that he once said, "That film didn't have a plot like a painting doesn't have a plot."

Breathless effectively began the modernist tradition in moviemaking. It was (correct me if I'm wrong) the first movie to really play with the form of the film itself as a means to get the message across. It's a deconstruction of the classic noir. The Bogey character's a crook (and kind of an ugly sumbitch). There's no top-down conspiracy to be foiled; in fact, if there were, the "protagonists" would probably be perpetrating it, if they weren't so dumb.

But more importantly, the movie's form is all off. Brilliantly off, but off. There's an apocryphal story about Godard asking the script girl what the correct shot in a certain scene would be (i.e., the shot that would allow the audience to figure out what was going on in the scene visually). And then he'd do the opposite. So if he needed to place the camera on one side of the street to make it seem like Jean Seberg was walking the same direction after a cut, he'd put it on the other side of the street and confuse the audience into thinking she'd turned around.

I derive such joy from thinking there was someone on the set of TransRevFall who, instead of knowing what shot to set up in a certain scene, knew what was "tasteful" or "appropriate" or even just "not racist" in a certain scene. And then Michael Bay would do the opposite.

"Do you think it's a good idea to make the two 'black' robots talk in minstrel-level slang, be robot-illiterate, and have giant ears and buck teeth?"
"You are all that is bad about everything."
"Maybe we could make the lips big or have them eat robot watermelon."

TransRevFall is everything bad about America. It's willfully stupid, proudly simple-minded, and loud as fuck. It's also racist, xenophobic, sexist, and homophobic (but, like any good dumb summer blockbuster, kinda gay).

It is the George W. Bush of movies, if George W. Bush was actually the redneck us NPR liberals imagine him to be.

Nothing about this movie works. Nothing. Instead of wringing some real humor out of the giant talking robots on screen, they give action-movie quips and giant, clanging robot balls. The action setpieces are seizure material. The tender moments fall flat because composers LINKIN PARK wouldn't know a tender moment if it was embroidered on Marc Ecko sneakers. (Full disclosure: I own two Linkin Park CDs, one of which is a special edition, a t-shirt, and have seen them in concert. Twice.)

But that's the real magic of it. The fact that absolutely nothing about this movie works lends the proceedings a kind of self-contained voodoo logic. In the world of TransRevFall, which seems somewhere between a GM commerical (waaaay to have your priorities straight, dudes) and a recruiting ad, all women are sluts. Every time someone gets out of a car, they're seen from the lowest possible angle and the lens always flares. And there's a desert next to the air and space museum in Washington, D.C.

I could go on.

It's not simply that you must ignore logic to enjoy TransRevFall. In the words of that squat Jedi master, you must unlearn what you have learned. This movie might as well have been made by aliens trying to create a movie Earthlings would enjoy. It looks familiar (a two-and-a-half hour commercial?), but it's so out there that it seems untouched by human hands. I beg you to take this movie on its own terms, or it will rape your brain.

As Star Trek might be the finest "good" popcorn movie ever made, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen has set the floor for "bad" popcorn movies. It is the standard by which every other dumb movie will be judged (including the rest of Michael Bay's esteemed filmography).

The point is that TransRevFall is so perfectly retarded, that it must be a joke. We're talking Trapped in the Closet-level genius here. This could be the greatest artistic statement of our age.

The only indication that this isn't the greatest prank ever pulled is that it has a comprehensible story and John Turturro. And I get the feeling Michael Bay really is that stupid.

I have no fucking idea how to rate this thing. An average?

(0 stars + 4 stars)/2 =

**

(NOTE: I hope to God that's a real poster)

A Note on Dramatic Action and Clarity, Case Study on Summer Blockbusters

Wherein I reveal myself to be a drama dork.

Dramatic action is not a concept, I think, that the average moviegoer is familiar with. But it's not a hard thing to explain and is quite useful for understanding why some movies suck and other movies don't. It's especially helpful when discussing simple movies whose overarching objective is to keep you glued to your seat. Summer blockbusters fit this bill perfectly.

I won't misrepresent myself: I just earned my degree (YAY!) in political science, not drama. I am not an expert in dramatic theory and wouldn't want to offer myself as such. But just as taking a 100-level econ class can help immensely with understanding what the hell is going on with our economy, a 100-level drama class (known affectionately as "Baby Drama" at The-College-on-the-Hill) can help you understand why you love your favorite movies and hate The Da Vinci Code. Actually, it's much more helpful for understanding why you feel utterly unmoved by some movies.

And "unmoved" describes exactly how I felt about Joseph Nichol's (I hereby refuse to call him "McG") new Terminator movie. In spite of my (somewhat inexplicable) love for the franchise, Terminator Salvation is perhaps most accurately summarized by a fellow blogger (Alex Boivin of Charge-Shot) as "adequate."

Unlike most reviewers, I won't blame the films "adequacy" on poor character development, hackneyed writing, or time-travelling paradoxes. I'll blame it on a lack of clearly-delineated dramatic action.

Because plays and screenplays are composed of characters doing stuff, dramatic action can succintly be defined as the main character's objective and how he goes about accomplishing that objective. Because 95% of stories onstage and onscreen are about characters trying to accomplish something, a summary of what a production is "about" usually comes down to dramatic action.

It's a bit difficult, then, to define exactly what Terminator Salvation is about. There are lots of things going on during the movie (the "plot"), but it isn't clear what the main character actually wants. In fact, it isn't really clear who the main character is. Is it the brooding human/terminator hybrid Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington, who does wonders with an underwritten role)? Or the brooding just-human resistance fighter John Connor (Christian Bale, far less interesting here than in my favorite movie ever in the history of anything)? Or maybe the not-so-brooding future time traveller Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, much better in a big summer movie I'll talk about later)?

Considering he's been at the center of all four Terminator films (either as the main actor or the one being acted upon), I'll assume it's John Connor. But what exactly does John Connor want? Does he want to find Reese, his not-yet-friend who he'll eventually send back in time to protect and impregnate Connor's mother (as chronicled in the first film)? Does he want to unleash a mysterious radio frequency that may lead to the destruction of the machines en masse? Or does he merely want to blow up the Skynet headquarters? Or maybe he wants to figure out the true intentions of Marcus Wright, human/Terminator hybrid.

We're never really sure. Accordingly, when (spoiler alert) Connor accomplishes each of these goals (can they really be called goals if they're not laid out?), we don't really care. Is the climax of the film when Connor and Reese finally meet? Or is it when Connor manages to blow up Skynet almost off-handedly through the use of some conveniently-placed explosives?

Big summer action movies, which rely above all else on keeping you excited, misstep defiantly when they mistake explosions and (admittedly geek-drool inducing) Terminator endoskeletons for character objectives. The accomplishment of a stated objective, hard-fought and with high stakes, is what causes crowds to stand up and cheer.

Which is precisely why this summer's Star Trek reboot filled theaters with exuberant hoots and hollers.

Witness sublime simplicity:

Guy from the future wants to blow up Earth. Pointy-eared half-alien guy and improbably good-looking human want to stop him but differ on how they want to do it (Interpersonal conflict! A welcome treat!). Now those big explosions are accompanied by actual excitement.

Clear dramatic action differentiates taut summer blockbusters from flabby ones. It motivates the main character (or characters) and keeps the audience enthralled from beginning to end. And when it takes two hours for an objective to be accomplished (provided that objective is sufficiently grand), audiences are mightily excited to see the end. Case in point: me, letting out an awkward grunt-whoop as Leonard Nimoy (spoiler alert) intones the opening to the original Star Trek series near the end of the film. I had just been on a two-hour rollercoaster ride (I'm sorry, but the cliche works here), and I was beyond overjoyed to see my onscreen pals accomplish their goal (and set out on their five-year mission).

Keeping your eye on the ball is easier said than done, however, which testifies to the brilliance of the new Trek. Dramatic action clearly has little correlation with box-office receipts, however, which might explain the obesity of so many summer tentpoles.

You are now a drama-geek. And can elicit eye-rolls from your friends and acquaintances, in traditional drama-geek fashion.

NOTE 1: To clarify the picture, I'll say that Star Trek and Terminator Salvation (both Summer Blockbusters or, in this case, kinds of Spock) are good Spock and evil Spock, respectively.

NOTE 2: If you get a chance to read both the commencement address given by PBS Newshour essayist Roger Rosenblatt and the baccalaureate address delivered by retiring English professor Perry Lentz at Kenyon's recent graduation (honoring, among others, me), you won't regret it.