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Reviews
Pineapple Express (2008)
Pineapple Express and Tarantino's Peak
Of course "Pineapple Express" was an entertaining movie. How could it not have been? You take talented comic actors, one of whom has a fairly decent knack for writing dialog, throw in a seasoned producer and top it all off with a big budget, and voilá! Mission accomplished. But honestly...I'm beginning to get a little tired of movies that aren't about anything more than their creators' love for the movies that preceded them. And you have to admit that's exactly what "Pineapple Express" is.
Imagine Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg sitting on Judd Apatow's couch watching action flicks for about eight or nine hours straight. Imagine the jokes they would tell each other while watching the movies, describing events that would make the scenes funnier and speaking in the voice of the characters. Take about an hour of jokes out of those eight or nine hours and tack them on to a boiler plate flick. Bingo, you've got the screenplay for "Pineapple Express." And I guess that's fine. But it's not special. "Kill Bill" was infinitely more inter-textual. "The Big Lebowski"'s protagonist was even more hilariously ill-suited to the cinematic situation at hand. Kevin Smith's New Jersey chronicles re-contextualized classic mise en scenes in a much more sophisticated and often ironic way. "Pineapple Express" is a late arrival to the tired trend of movies idolizing and gently mocking other movies. And maybe that's a little unfair, given that Rogen wrote the script years earlier, but that's just how it goes.
Maybe I'm a snob. Maybe I'm just sour. But I honestly think that we've hit the point where worshiping movies is, well, lame. It goes without saying that filmmakers are going to love other people's movies and that those movies will influence them both consciously and unconsciously, But we're making these kind of movies too quickly and too plentifully. Is this really the contribution we want to make? Where are the Charlie Kaufman? Where are the Hal Hartley's? Why can't we "make it new?" as Ezra Pound would say?
Rent (2005)
Past Due
If you ever see the film "Hedwig And the Angry Inch" you'll see "Rent" being made the butt of some of their jokes. Not the original "Rent", but the phenomenon of Rent's success. Precisely because it became popular in the context of Broadway "Rent"'s dissemination became its downfall. Everyone wants to see "Rent" and so many different cast members and directors are needed to span the number of tours and the long run the show's enjoyed. Which works fine for other shows, but it seems to just throw a monkey wrench into Rent. But maybe the problem isn't that you can't take "Rent" out of the village so much as taking the village out of "Rent" just guts the show. Can you imagine a successful band like, say, the Rolling Stones, hiring a dozen cover bands to tour the country and play their hits? Who would go see them? Well, a lot of people would, but who among them wouldn't be bitterly disappointed? Rent is a cult of personality. We always hear that Roger's voice wasn't rough enough or that Angel didn't know how to play the drums right or Maureen wasn't appropriately sex-crazed. Would we have such strict standards if we were watching "Sweeney Todd" or "The Tempest"? We'd understand without a second thought that there are a thousand ways to play a character and that one production of a play should actually try to distinguish itself from other productions of the same play. But we see these new actors and we react as if they'd replaced the cast of "Friends" with a group of unknowns who have no right to the roles they've usurped. So are the die-hard fans really so shallow that they want to see the exact same show over and over again? Maybe not. I'm beginning to think that the crowds clamoring to see "Rent" for the second, third, and fourth time are subconsciously expecting new songs and new plot twists. They can't get enough, but there's only so much to be gotten. They want to see growth but a play, by its very nature, is a static thing. "Rent" flies on the wings of a rock band but a rock band that composes one album and then tours the same tired songs for fifteen years without writing anything new is going to start becoming stale. Just look at Guns 'n Roses. The adjunct tragedy of Jonathan Larson's death is that "Rent" should have been a breakthrough piece and is instead of the body of his work. And yes, I do know "Rent" is not the only musical or play that Larson had written, but there hasn't been a Dan Brown-style retroactive canonization of his earlier works (who'd have thought "Angels and Demons" would have gone on the bestseller list four years after it was published?) and so my point still stands. To my mind, the film adaptation of "Rent" seems to be another desperate attempt something new from one single play. If you want to honor the legacy of Jonathan Larson, take a gander at new cutting-edge fringe musicals. Go hear the band that's playing for tips and beer. Sit down and write a play about your own friends. But in the name of God, stop subsidizing this machine that puts on the same show over and over and over again.
Flypaper (1999)
Underrated?
Okay, I'm pretty sure I am the only person in the entire world who liked that movie. And no, before you ask, I'm not a die-hard Lucy Liu fan. Admittedly, this movie was riddled with problems, but I think Quentin Tarantino said it best when he commented on Brian DePalma's "Bonfire of the Vanities" that it takes a director of quality to make a truly disastrous film. A hack wouldn't doesn't take the risks that failed to pay off in Flypaper. That being said, I have to wonder why a film like Flypaper falls so hard when films like "The Unbelievable Truth" launch a prolific career and a borderline cult following. Though the two films are as different as night and day, they both spring from the same impulse: stepping outside a genre and examining it outside the confines of illusionism. For all the griping that goes on about unoriginal, cookie-cutter genre pieces, shouldn't we have just a little generosity when a director has the guts to break the mold? Personally, I was hooked after the very first scene. Anyone can be outrageous. Anyone can be true-to-life. Combining the two takes brass balls, and Klaus Hoch has got him. For sure he's willing to throw a bucket of gratuitous sex and violence in our face, but, believe it or not, there is something rustling behind the curtains in Flypaper. No, we are not supposed to take anything anyone says in the film without a whopping grain of salt. That's part of the point. Every single character is a walking contradiction, a grotesque hybrid of celluloid and flesh. But -God help me, I know this is where I'll lose you- isn't that what it's always been about? We go to the movies. We rent DVDs. We sit back and watch human beings transformed (at best) into morons and (at worst) objects. It's a twisted zero-sum game, and it mirrors real life in ways we don't even want to think about. Flypaper is compared unfavorably with Pulp Fiction and various Cohen Brother films, perhaps because there is no warmth or adulation, no well-thought-out view from nowhere. Essence absolutely refuses to precede existence. These characters are going to do some very stupid, pointless things, and there is no redemption, no "correct" path for them to return to, not even a solid realization of their sad, silly condition.