The Asphalt Jungle

Viewing Log [6/6 - 6/13]

June 12th, 2010 by Raj Ranade

Playtime (1967, dir. by Jacques Tati)

I’ve harped on in the past about movies that attempt to explain the workings of the entire world in two hours, but if anyone could do it, it’s Jacques Tati. And “Playtime” does seem to contain nearly everything - potent thoughts on urban disconnection and alienation, globalization and world homogenization, the entropic triumph of anarchy over order, and most gloriously, the power of optimism to shape the world. Everything, that is, except a plot or even a real main character. But who needs the whole song when the individual riffs are so arresting? And, to overextend the metaphor, riffs that are so gorgeously played - the magisterial dystopian terrors in glass and blue-gray metal here are worth every bankrupting penny that Tati infamously overspent on them. And while the intricate mise-en-scene arrangements are loaded with so many sight gags that they require second or third or twelfth viewings to spot, what’s particularly unique here is Tati’s continual emphasis on depth in the image. Not content with just layering two or three things in an image foreground and background, Tati continually lets his camera gaze into spatial abysses, as in the scene where a rude airline employee is seen slowly walking what seems like a quarter mile down a hallway towards Tati. That’s some real three-dimensional cinema.

Splice (2010, dir. by Vincenzo Natali)

I went into this with expectations that were far too high, mainly because the last Sundance science-fiction entry to make it to theatres was none other than Shane Carruth’s mind-bending “Primer” (what the hell happened to Carruth, anyway?). The wake-up call came soon enough - instead of the pitch-perfect depiction of engineering culture found in “Primer”, we get too-attractive and too-openly-conversational folks whose only resemblance to actual engineers (speaking as one, natch) is in their penchant for ironic-sloganed t-shirts. “Splice” is still an above-average sci-fi horror piece, mainly because of its array of nasty plot twists. There are some real freak-kink doozies here, cleverly showing that the gene-spliced abomination at the center of the film is often less monstrous than the lab-coated abominations standing around her. But (as every director and their mother have pointed out) David Cronenberg would have had a field day with this stuff, while Natali struggles with the basics of this kind of film - sustaining any sort of cohesive tension, teasing out deeper implications in the material, and most egregiously, avoiding the kind of heavy-handed foreshadowing that makes actually watching the ending here almost a foregone conclusion.

Get Him to the Greek (2010, dir. by Nicholas Stoller)

There have been sharper satires of rock stars and the music industry, but this is fun enough when it stays in wacky drugged-out farce mode - I’m almost tempted to say that Diddy’s unhinged performance here is enough to make up for his aggressively mediocre post-Biggie music career. But the film missteps badly in its pretentious “Funny People”-inspired third-act gloom. Set aside for a moment the fact that “Funny People”’s soul-searching didn’t even work that well - “Funny People” spent a whole movie setting its drama up. Here, on the other hand, we’re supposed to take Aldous Snow’s stature for granted when the only proof the film presents us is Russell Brand’s unconvincing aping of actual stage presence and stupid joke songs like “The Clap”, which is, of course, about that clap. And then this clown is supposed to be some kind of tragic rock icon - leave it to Cameron Crowe, man. The nadir is that “Chasing Amy”-inspired threesome, which fails even at being awkward enough to elicit any affect. All that said, major props to Rose Byrne, who underplays her satirical pop tart as much as Russell Brand overplays his punk buffoon, and is all the funnier for it.

Twilight and Twilight: New Moon Rifftrax (2008 + 2009, commentary by Michael J. Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett)

OK, obviously, the movies themselves are bullshit, but the Rifftrax enhancement made these two the funniest viewing experiences I’ve had in ages. Largely it’s just a matter of sheer volume - these guys have clearly gone through these films frame by frame and line by line in order to have a gag flying at you every second, and their comic timing is precise enough that it’s worth fussing with the file syncing at length. But the insights are sharper than they have to be, shredding up everything from the demographic-catering (and thoroughly-mismatched) soundtrack to Kristen Stewart’s method of acting primarily through lip-biting and hair-brushing.

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