Other than doing occasional work in heels, ex-stripper/Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody and cross-dresser/Z-movie director Ed Wood don't really have much in common, but both have been occupying the same part of my brain lately. I saw Juno a few weeks ago, and I recently plowed through three Ed Wood films in preparation for showing Tim Burton's Ed Wood in my film class.
Let's start with Cody. By now, pretty much everyone who's aware of Juno is either cognizant of, participating in, or defending it from the backlash that has honed in on Cody's dialogue, described as "hipster," "quirky," "twee," and every other term that's been used to denigrate films like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and anything Wes Anderson has ever done. This, after the film drew rapt praise at the Toronto film festival and earned an impressive 81 rating on Metacritic.
The swift contrarian reaction can be attributed to several factors, including film bloggers who didn't write about Juno until after it had been reviewed in most print publications, Internet discussion boards (which I realize get blamed for everything), and the sneaking suspicion that this was yet another "indie" film that was actually financed by a major studio, then released and marketed in such a way so that it appeared to come out of nowhere. Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has provided the most well-thought out and reasoned critique of the film, even if naming it his worst film of 2007 is not reasonable.
Juno is almost a lock to get nominated for the Oscar for best picture, and I will become a stripper if Cody isn't nominated for best screenplay; nonetheless, there are scads of people out there who are convinced that Cody is a fraud, and that she is wholly undeserving of the attention she's gotten for Juno, which has led to, among other things, a column in Entertainment Weekly. She's the best-known screenwriter who doesn't direct besides Charlie Kaufman (and his directorial debut comes out this year), and plenty of people claim (rightly, probably) that she wouldn't be getting anything close to this sort of fame if it weren't for her saucy background and her unlikely break in the movie business.
Unlike Cody, Ed Wood inspired no initial reaction to his work. He was pretty much ignored by audiences and critics in the 1950s when he wrote and directed his schlocky movies, many of them with an aging (or, in the case of Plan 9 from Outer Space, a dead) Bela Lugosi, and died a penniless porn-producing alcoholic in 1978. He wasn't resurrected as an important artist until shortly after his death, when he was named the worst director of all time (and Plan 9 the worst film of all time) in a book called The Golden Turkeys. That's where the similarity with Cody comes in -- the swift contrarian reaction (not backlash, but maybe "congratu-lash?" "acc-lash-ation?"). The Ed Wood revival was on. Suddenly, people actually wanted to see his films, which were rescued from oblivion and shown at revival houses so people could laugh at how bad they actually were. In 1994, Burton made his biopic of Wood. In it (and the film stays pretty close to the truth, according to real-life interviews of those who knew him), Wood comes across as the classic underdog, striving to get noticed doing what he loves, but constantly being repelled by more powerful forces. Wood clearly has no aptitude for filmmaking, which the film does not try to hide, but he is nonetheless likable because of his amiability and perseverance. That personality clearly shows through in his films -- if they were mean-spirted and ugly, no one would have wanted to see them, even after he became famous after his death. There wasn't anyone watching his films saying, "God, I hate Ed Wood." Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, puts it well in his review of a Wood documentary called The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.:
Let's start with Cody. By now, pretty much everyone who's aware of Juno is either cognizant of, participating in, or defending it from the backlash that has honed in on Cody's dialogue, described as "hipster," "quirky," "twee," and every other term that's been used to denigrate films like Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine, and anything Wes Anderson has ever done. This, after the film drew rapt praise at the Toronto film festival and earned an impressive 81 rating on Metacritic.
The swift contrarian reaction can be attributed to several factors, including film bloggers who didn't write about Juno until after it had been reviewed in most print publications, Internet discussion boards (which I realize get blamed for everything), and the sneaking suspicion that this was yet another "indie" film that was actually financed by a major studio, then released and marketed in such a way so that it appeared to come out of nowhere. Dennis Cozzalio of Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule has provided the most well-thought out and reasoned critique of the film, even if naming it his worst film of 2007 is not reasonable.
Juno is almost a lock to get nominated for the Oscar for best picture, and I will become a stripper if Cody isn't nominated for best screenplay; nonetheless, there are scads of people out there who are convinced that Cody is a fraud, and that she is wholly undeserving of the attention she's gotten for Juno, which has led to, among other things, a column in Entertainment Weekly. She's the best-known screenwriter who doesn't direct besides Charlie Kaufman (and his directorial debut comes out this year), and plenty of people claim (rightly, probably) that she wouldn't be getting anything close to this sort of fame if it weren't for her saucy background and her unlikely break in the movie business.
Unlike Cody, Ed Wood inspired no initial reaction to his work. He was pretty much ignored by audiences and critics in the 1950s when he wrote and directed his schlocky movies, many of them with an aging (or, in the case of Plan 9 from Outer Space, a dead) Bela Lugosi, and died a penniless porn-producing alcoholic in 1978. He wasn't resurrected as an important artist until shortly after his death, when he was named the worst director of all time (and Plan 9 the worst film of all time) in a book called The Golden Turkeys. That's where the similarity with Cody comes in -- the swift contrarian reaction (not backlash, but maybe "congratu-lash?" "acc-lash-ation?"). The Ed Wood revival was on. Suddenly, people actually wanted to see his films, which were rescued from oblivion and shown at revival houses so people could laugh at how bad they actually were. In 1994, Burton made his biopic of Wood. In it (and the film stays pretty close to the truth, according to real-life interviews of those who knew him), Wood comes across as the classic underdog, striving to get noticed doing what he loves, but constantly being repelled by more powerful forces. Wood clearly has no aptitude for filmmaking, which the film does not try to hide, but he is nonetheless likable because of his amiability and perseverance. That personality clearly shows through in his films -- if they were mean-spirted and ugly, no one would have wanted to see them, even after he became famous after his death. There wasn't anyone watching his films saying, "God, I hate Ed Wood." Glenn Erickson, the DVD Savant, puts it well in his review of a Wood documentary called The Haunted World of Edward D. Wood, Jr.:
It's been said that Ed Wood's films are too watchable to be the worst ever made, which is true. But they are still the foundation for a cult that seems to want to celebrate failure and despair.
So basically, what we have here is a recently annointed superstar generating a flood of negativity, and a hack generating oodles of goodwill. Do either of them deserve the "aftershock" effect each has gotten? For the most part, I think the answer is no.
It's true that Cody's dialogue doesn't always work. I'll be the umpteenth person to say that the scenes with Rainn Wilson ("home-skillet") and any scene involving Juno's best friend ("honest to blog," etc.) are awful and made me hear Cody's chortling as she typed them. There's also a scene where Juno's step-mom excoriates a snotty ultrasound tech well beyond the appropriate indignation level that made me uncomfortable (Cozzalio is the only other person I've read who feels this way). But here's the thing -- everything else in the screenplay works well. The dialogue does have a lot of great lines (Juno's lines about Chinese shooting babies out of T-shirt guns, "not taking a dump since Wednesday ... morning," and anything Michael Cera says). One of Cozzalio's (and he's far from alone) chief complaints is that no one, certainly not a teenager, actually talks like these characters, which I think misses the point. My friend KC made an apt comparison by saying Juno's dialogue is like that of The Gilmore Girls -- it's stylized and not for everyone. Likewise, no one in real life talks like characters written by Tarantino, David Mamet, or Raymond Chandler, either. The bottom line isn't whether anyone actually talks like these characters, it's whether anyone should talk like these characters -- the dialogue either works for you or it doesn't. As for the argument that everyone in the film talks like this, well, Hemingway didn't have any long-winded talkers and Philip Roth doesn't have any concise ones, and no one is calling them hacks because their characters tend to all sound the same.
Cody also has a deft touch with character. She subverts first impressions skillfully during the first meeting between Juno and the prospective adoptive parents. Up to this point, Juno has seemed so wise beyond her years (pregancy notwithstanding, of course) that she seems bulletproof to the audience -- we are completely behind her (and maybe annoyed that we're made to feel this is what we're supposed to feel). Likewise, the Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman characters are painted as typical yuppies. But then, as Juno is talking about the physical discomfort of her pregnancy, she says to Garner something along the lines of, "Be glad it's not you." Then we cut to (and I hope this was in Cody's script, because I'm giving her credit here) a reaction shot of Garner, who has to avert her eyes to hide her anguish. That moment establishes Juno as someone who can be incredibly insensitive because of her wiseassery, and Garner as a sympathetic figure who has a real desire to be a loving mother. That ambivalence toward the characters (and Bateman's character is more complex than he seems at first, too) made the rest of the film much more enjoyable to watch because I didn't feel like I would be talked down to. I don't agree with Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris that it's the best film of the year, but I won't be too upset when it gets nominated for an Oscar later this month. Cody is hardly deserving of the vitriol being hurled her way lately.
Which brings us to Ed Wood, who probably doesn't deserve all the attention he's gotten since his death. First of all, it's unfair to him to be labelled the worst director of all time for the reason Erickson cites -- his films are far from unwatchable. The hubcaps visibly suspended by strings, the stock footage integrated so awkwardly it looks like the characters on screen are actually looking at a different movie offscreen, the terrible acting, etc., of Plan 9 (and this is just the first 20 minutes) -- all of this makes for a film that is too surreal and good-natured to make it the worst film ever. Like a car crash -- but not Paul Haggis' Crash, which is terrible in a way Plan 9 cannot approximate -- you can't look away. Not that this makes him, necessarily, an admirable figure. Again, here's Erickson on the Wood doc:
It's true that Cody's dialogue doesn't always work. I'll be the umpteenth person to say that the scenes with Rainn Wilson ("home-skillet") and any scene involving Juno's best friend ("honest to blog," etc.) are awful and made me hear Cody's chortling as she typed them. There's also a scene where Juno's step-mom excoriates a snotty ultrasound tech well beyond the appropriate indignation level that made me uncomfortable (Cozzalio is the only other person I've read who feels this way). But here's the thing -- everything else in the screenplay works well. The dialogue does have a lot of great lines (Juno's lines about Chinese shooting babies out of T-shirt guns, "not taking a dump since Wednesday ... morning," and anything Michael Cera says). One of Cozzalio's (and he's far from alone) chief complaints is that no one, certainly not a teenager, actually talks like these characters, which I think misses the point. My friend KC made an apt comparison by saying Juno's dialogue is like that of The Gilmore Girls -- it's stylized and not for everyone. Likewise, no one in real life talks like characters written by Tarantino, David Mamet, or Raymond Chandler, either. The bottom line isn't whether anyone actually talks like these characters, it's whether anyone should talk like these characters -- the dialogue either works for you or it doesn't. As for the argument that everyone in the film talks like this, well, Hemingway didn't have any long-winded talkers and Philip Roth doesn't have any concise ones, and no one is calling them hacks because their characters tend to all sound the same.
Cody also has a deft touch with character. She subverts first impressions skillfully during the first meeting between Juno and the prospective adoptive parents. Up to this point, Juno has seemed so wise beyond her years (pregancy notwithstanding, of course) that she seems bulletproof to the audience -- we are completely behind her (and maybe annoyed that we're made to feel this is what we're supposed to feel). Likewise, the Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman characters are painted as typical yuppies. But then, as Juno is talking about the physical discomfort of her pregnancy, she says to Garner something along the lines of, "Be glad it's not you." Then we cut to (and I hope this was in Cody's script, because I'm giving her credit here) a reaction shot of Garner, who has to avert her eyes to hide her anguish. That moment establishes Juno as someone who can be incredibly insensitive because of her wiseassery, and Garner as a sympathetic figure who has a real desire to be a loving mother. That ambivalence toward the characters (and Bateman's character is more complex than he seems at first, too) made the rest of the film much more enjoyable to watch because I didn't feel like I would be talked down to. I don't agree with Roger Ebert and Andrew Sarris that it's the best film of the year, but I won't be too upset when it gets nominated for an Oscar later this month. Cody is hardly deserving of the vitriol being hurled her way lately.
Which brings us to Ed Wood, who probably doesn't deserve all the attention he's gotten since his death. First of all, it's unfair to him to be labelled the worst director of all time for the reason Erickson cites -- his films are far from unwatchable. The hubcaps visibly suspended by strings, the stock footage integrated so awkwardly it looks like the characters on screen are actually looking at a different movie offscreen, the terrible acting, etc., of Plan 9 (and this is just the first 20 minutes) -- all of this makes for a film that is too surreal and good-natured to make it the worst film ever. Like a car crash -- but not Paul Haggis' Crash, which is terrible in a way Plan 9 cannot approximate -- you can't look away. Not that this makes him, necessarily, an admirable figure. Again, here's Erickson on the Wood doc:
No matter how much the facts emphasize that Wood was a marginal nobody, or an artist without talent, the presumption here is that he was some kind of misunderstood genius who deserved the rewards Hollywood refused him. The truth is that Wood as a pitiful loser almost all of the time. He didn't deserve to do better, at least not based on the quality of his work. And the most you can say for him is that his enthusiasm and charm must have been backed up with other good qualities, or he would never have kept such a loyal group of friends for so long. That's what the Tim Burton movie communicates in spades - like George Bailey, even hopeless Ed was not a failure because he had friends.I should note that while I agree with Erickson on his feelings about Wood, I think Burton's film is terrific. It doesn't pull any punches on the essential awfulness of Wood's work, focusing more on his enthusiasm and the friendship between him and Lugosi. On the DVD commentary track, screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski said their goal was not to make fun of Wood but to give him dignity. They also said Burton fell in love with Wood's character. Burton backs up that claim on the commentary by saying he completely identified with Wood's delusional qualities -- that you have to believe you're making the best film ever while you're working on it, or you'll never get through the process.
All that being said, in a perfect world, Ed Wood wouldn't have to have been made to give Ed back his dignity. Unlike the reanimated corpses in Plan 9, he should've been allowed to rest in peace.
So what's the lesson here? I don't know if there is one since it was complete chance that I encountered these artists when I did. Maybe it's that even though sometimes the initial reaction to an artist might be slightly exaggerated, the ensuing corrective reaction is even farther off-base.
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