Backlash and Congratu-lash

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.:

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:

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.

The Gauntlet Has Been Thrown Down

On the first day of school, one of my students shared with the class that one of his favorite movies was Patton, starring George C. Scott. I mentioned that I hadn't seen it but that I wanted do, and the student answered incredulously, "You haven't seen Patton? You are NOT a man!" Maybe it was "YOU are not a man!" Or maybe "You are not a MAN!" Regardless, the implication was clear. So I threw a stapler at him. No, actually, I made some remark that included the phrase in the title of this post, and consoled myself with the knowledge that of the 20 or so movie posters displayed in my room, I would guess about seven of them include a character brandishing a gun or samurai sword. That'll show them. Wait, will they think I'm overcompensating? Dammit!

Actually, though, the movie that I hadn't seen that was causing me to question my manhood -- indeed, my qualities as a sentient being on this earth -- was Borat. Somehow, I hadn't seen it, though I'd heard enough references to "hand relief" on my Great Baseball Road Trip this summer to make me feel as though I had. Anyway, my wife and I finally caught up with it on DVD this weekend, and though we didn't laugh as hard as we would have had we saw it in a theater when it was still fresh, it was still pretty damn funny. Because I'm a dork, I was also thinking about how the makers of the film, even though they had their hands full creating a documentary/mockumentary hybrid, still made sure the film adhered to what David Bordwell calls "The Classical Hollywood Cinema" (a pattern that includes an active protagonist who undergoes change after overcoming obstacles, and closure at the end of the film). This was a concept we went over in class Friday, and I kind of rushed through it. I think tomorrow I'll talk about how Borat, despite how ridiculous much of it seems, still conforms to it. For example, the whole pursuit of Pamela Anderson to marry/make a sexy time with her gives our protagonist a goal. His obstacles include his only friend deserting him and taking his money, and finding out that Pamela is not, in fact, a maiden. Toward the end of the movie Borat even says he has changed, in part because of his "awakening" at a Pentecostal camp meeting (I thought of The Blues Brothers) here. Lastly, all loose ends are tied up, as Borat lives happily ever after with the prostitute he met in America. Anyway, as revolutionary as the movie was in terms of the outrageousness and nature of its humor, I wonder if part of its popularity is due to it giving the audience a story it was already familiar with -- the underdog coming out on top.

Summer School, Part II

I only used that as a title for this post since I would look like more of a jackass than I already do if I didn't tack on at least one more Roman numeral to this "series" before summer officially ends (tomorrow, when I go back to school). Although it sounds counterintuitive to say I will update this thing more often during the school year, it's pretty hard to do worse than once every two and a half months.

I'm starting a classroom blog with my five film class sections, and I recently read a book (OK, part of a book) that said if you want your students to actually enjoy posting in their blogs for class assignments, then the teacher better enjoy it, too. So I'm enjoying this, dammit.

I think I set my bar too high when I started out. I was hoping this would turn into something like one of the film blogs listed to my right, but I realize that's unrealistic. The truth is, I don't know what I want this space to look like yet -- observations about teaching? Flm? Pop culture? Rustic French hounds? All of the above? -- so I'll just keep doodling periodically until I figure it out. I always thought I liked writing, but the facts are that I've pretty much always written on deadline, whether it was for the newspapers I worked for or for the term papers I wrote. The only other significant piece of writing I've produced that hasn't been motivated by fear of loss of employment or academic standing was one short story, and that was something like five or six years ago. Will someone who reads this threaten to fire me from the blogosphere if I don't post within a week?

Summer School, Part I

I've been lucky enough to teach a semester-long high school film class for the last four years, and next year I'll be lucky enough to start teaching a second semester. That means a big part of my "job" this summer is to watch scads of movies -- not a bad gig.

The new class will focus on six directors, and we'll be watching three films from each director, looking for a unity of theme and style within each director's body of work. Essentially, that mean's we'll be applying the auteur theory throughout the semester. However, I also plan to talk about the limits of the auteur theory -- I don't want to leave students with the notion that all of a director's films are the same, and that there's always a coherent and logical progression throughout a career. I'm envisioning the class as a series of snapshots -- here's this director early in his career, here he is later -- what's the same? What's changed? Like snapshots, these films might or might not be representative of the dominant theme or style a director has employed throughout his career. I'm sure there are pictures of Lindsay Lohan somewhere in which she doesn't look coked up, for example.

Speaking of Lindsay, she starred in Robert Altman's last film, A Prairie Home Companion, one of many of Altman's films that employs a large, ensemble cast. This is the first thing many people think of when they think of Altman, but earlier in his career Altman spent most of his time deconstructing genres in films with smaller casts, like McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and Thieves Like Us.

Anyway.

So I've been thinking about which Hitchcock films to use with my class. Two of them are gimmes (for me, anyway) -- Rear Window and Vertigo. They're acknowledged masterpieces, plus I taught them in the existing class for four years, so I'll be on some solid ground when I'm starting out. Both employ the same lead actor (Jimmy Stewart) as a physically and/or psychologically wounded protagonist who can no longer work at his action-filled job, and ends up filling his time by spying on people. A lot of subjective point-of-view shots and long, voyeuristic sequences without dialogue ensue. Eventually, the female protagonist puts herself in danger in order to please the man -- results vary. None of Hitchcock's other films are as similar to these two as these two are to each other, but that's OK (Notorious and Psycho probably come closest). It frees me up to pick a snapshot from earlier in his career, his often-overlooked British period. I'm thinking of going with The 39 Steps, a 1935 gem that is the best early example of his "wrong man" films, movies in which a man is picked seemingly at random and accused of a crime he didn't commit, and a double-chase ensues -- the police and/or bad guys after the wrong man, and the wrong man after the truth to clear his name. It's very different than Rear Window and Vertigo, but the more I think (and read) about it, the more I think that's OK. There's still enough there to connect the dots from 1935 to '54 and '58 (critical looks at male/female relationships, the woman risking herself for the man, telling stories with images, ineffectuality or oppressiveness of police, etc.), and I think the students will benefit from seeing a different-looking snapshot. It's as important to look at the differences between a director's films as it is the similarities.

The Bastard-in-Chief

The guy pictured in the center used to be the editor-in-chief of The Minnesota Daily, one of the best college newspapers in the country; he composes the frequently hilarious Red Hot Shop prose for target.com; he's the commissioner of our fantasy football league, and yet, despite this pedigree and these time constraints, he still finds time to Photoshop his head on to the body of an even bigger jackass for the purpose of a fantasy football league "news" story.

It should come as no surprise, then, that he is also the tournament director for an annual golf get-together known as The Bastards (sounds kinda like The Masters, get it?). The event, in its seventh year, entails a bunch of the Bastard-in-Chief's friends descending upon a local golf course for two-man, best-ball scramble. Heckling, drunkenness, and witty T-shirts ensue (this year's slogan was taken from Anchorman: "We've been coming to the same party for seven years. And in no way is that depressing"). This year marked just my fourth appearance in The Bastards, and for the third time my playing partner was the proprietor of this blog. Somehow, we actually won this event a few years ago -- it remains infamous because Rand wore black soccer shoes, while the rest of the competitors dressed, well, less Ragstock-y. Our chief prize for the victory was a pair of red smoking jackets. If you know anything about The Masters, that's funny. Unlike The Masters, however, we had to give the jackets back when we didn't win the following year.

Anyway, this year we got our asses handed to us because, as it turns out, neither Rand nor I can hit an iron. Whenever one of us would start to go down the drain by hitting another execrable approach shot, the other would be swirling right behind him by hitting something even worse. In the end, one of the highlights of the day would turn out to be listening to a loud, profane tirade against NBC golf commentator Jimmy Roberts while we were watching the U.S. Open in the clubhouse after our round. One of our opponents took great offense to Roberts' penchant for melodramatic human interest stories, calling him a "syrupy motherfucker." He continued to torture this metaphor with references to waffles, pancakes and, for some reason, pizza. Watching the final round of the U.S. Open on Sunday, I had to agree with this assessment of Roberts, who I will now call Jemimah Roberts. Toward the end of the round, Roberts did a kind of on-air essay, pontificating on the career of leader Angel Cabrera. Apparently, his nickname is "The Duck," leading to Roberts using the cliche -- not once, but twice -- "water off a duck's back" to describe how the portly, chain-smoking Argentine was shrugging off the pressure of leading the final round of a major.

Cabrera, of course, went on to hold off Tiger Woods and Jim Furyk to win the U.S. Open. It was hilarious to see him smoking as he walked (waddled) down every fairway to try to calm himself down, while behind him, Tiger, whose biceps kick the hell out of his red Nike shirts, couldn't make up ground. In addition to the money, fame, and trophy Cabrera received, he also deserves a red smoking jacket.