We had a nice wide-ranging chat with Bill and the doc's director, Alexia Anastasio.Topics discussed: "Plympton’s career, the making of the documentary, and the strange path to stardom Plympton took -- starting on the banks of the Clackamas, winding through illustrations for a succession of skin mags, animating bumpers for MTV, getting short films screened with Don Herzfeldt and Mike Judge, turning down a million-dollar contract from Disney, and populated with people like Terry Gilliam, Ron Jeremy, David Carradine, Matthew Modine and Kanye West."
(Also, for a few minutes at the end, I just straight-up loathed "Battleship.")
Mainstream big-screen filmmaking is in a weird, risk-averse rut right now. As detailed in Mark Harris' 2011 GQ essay "The Day the Movies Died" and elsewhere, studios are now building their major releases almost exclusively around existing, easily recognized brands instead of original stories -- and it's led to a stunning lack of variety at your local cineplex.
As Harris points out, "brands" can be book series, theme-park rides, toys, or previous hits that can be sequelized, prequelized or remade. Sometimes, as in the case of "The Avengers," the brand is a comic book and the movie is executed beautifully.
But sometimes the brand turns out to be the Hasbro board game "Battleship" -- and it results in the dopiest, least-essential summer blockbuster since "Transformers 2."
Director Peter Berg ("The Rundown") takes a game about sticking pegs in a board full of plastic boats and re-imagines it as the story of military warships trying to fight off an alien invasion while trapped inside a force-field bubble that appears over Hawaii. The original board-game dynamics make an cameo in one scene where our heroes (commanded by Taylor Kitsch) try and figure out where the alien ships are on a gridded screen and shoot missiles at their best guesses.
There's almost nothing to "Battleship" beyond its grindingly dull, digitally rendered naval warfare; the flick could easily be retitled "Flying Ordnance and Forgettable Stars: The Motion Picture." Berg directs the film like he knows how silly and glandular and sub-Michael Bay it all is -- but even the winks don't excuse the sheer insulting amount of belief suspension he asks of the audience.
This is a movie where the aliens repeatedly and conveniently choose to hold their fire when they really shouldn't; where a decommissioned battleship can be instantly re-armed and staffed by elderly sailors who seemingly turn up by magic; where nearly every character is a doofus who makes bad decisions and speaks in rudimentary questions; and where mashing up imagery from a Hasbro board game, "Halo" and the Pearl Harbor attack seemed like a fine, tasteful idea. _____
During the Friday, May 11 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about "Dark Shadows" and the critical gang-up on Tim Burton; how "Fight Club" is weirdly old-media and dated now; and a bunch of other stuff.
Last year, indie darling Brit Marling enjoyed a singular breakthrough: She co-wrote and starred in two films at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and both films were picked up for theatrical distribution. The first to hit screens was director Mike Cahill's pretty, pretentious, wildly overrated sci-fi drama "Another Earth" -- in which Marling played an artfully distressed convicted manslaughterer and the movie spent most of its time worshipping her with cinematography.
Marling's second Sundance flick, director Zal Batmanglij's "Sound of My Voice," is a vastly better and more nuanced experience.
"Voice" has a lot in common with "Earth" in that both films are lightly dusted with science fiction, flirt with enigmatic developments and create showcase roles for Marling in which she's afforded special attention. In "Voice," this feels more organic because the actress is cast as a cult leader -- an ethereal mystery woman named Maggie who tells a growing army of followers gathered in a basement that she time-traveled from the year 2054 to prepare them for an ecological civil war. Infiltrating the cult are a documentarian slumming as a substitute teacher (Christopher Denham) and his recovering-wild-child girlfriend (Nicole Vicius) who aim to expose Maggie as a fraud.
Batmanglij and co-writer Marling do a calm job of muddying the relationship waters, playing with cult logic (a scene where Maggie deals with being asked to sing a popular song from the future is a highlight) and patiently introducing side elements that cast a curious light on Maggie's claims. (You can watch the movie's first 12 minutes here; it sets the tone.) And with the exception of two technically amateurish scenes involving target practice and police work, the movie is directed with real confidence by Batmanglij -- he lets his actors breathe, builds suspense in one group-purge brainwashing scene, and lets the mystery unfold in an immersive way that's probably a bit more compelling than its actual scripted payoff deserves. _____
(85 min.; rated R; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower)Grade: B-minus
FELLOW WHIT STILLMAN NERD BECKY OHLSEN, VIA EMAIL: Well, I'm still bummed that I missed the "Damsels" screening.
ME, REPLYING A DAY OR TWO LATER: Ah, I keep forgetting to send you my pocket review of Whit Stillman's "Damsels in Distress," which is essentially: I think Stillman may have gone slightly mad while he wasn't making movies for 13 years. (NOTE: I do not actually think this.)
The Stillman-y half of the film is about what you'd expect, and it's very deadpan funny, if quite a bit weirder than previous Stillman. Greta Gerwig (who was more or less engineered in a lab to star in this guy's movies) leads a group of college girls on a ludicrous mission to (a) save depressed students with dance lessons and (b) reform the idiot frat boys that overwhelmingly populate the mid-list college the girls attend. Everyone uses elaborate language and manners as a shield in true Stillman style, but it's all MUCH stranger than in his firstthreeflicks -- Gerwig's language masks the fact that she's clinically depressed and OCD and generally batshit insane, and there's one lengthy subplot in which a guy eloquently professes Catharist beliefs to the film's young ingénue so he can try out his favorite sexual positions, &tc. It's all pretty great stuff.
But what REALLY makes the movie kind of enjoyably nuts is that Stillman tries to marry this with a bunch of cartoony slapstick at which he absolutely does not excel at directing. But I sort of loved the attempt (this is not the work of a lazy filmmaker) and how completely personal and '90s-indie-film-sloppy it made the movie feel. Like, you'll have a great bone-dry dialogue scene that's hilarious, and then there will be idiot frat boys falling off things and trying to throw square envelopes as Frisbees, none of it particularly well-executed. It's really bizarre.
Also, the movie has this completely gratuitous bit where Stillman just flat-out tries to invent a dance craze called the "Sambola," and devotes a huge chunk of the end credits to dance lessons, basically. He blames it on Gerwig's character, but you totally know he actually wants people to try it out in real life. You'll see what I mean.
So it's absolutely worth seeing, but strap in. You may be pleased to hear that Stillman has miraculously found a young actor (Zach Woods) who can convincingly play the movie's Chris Eigeman Role -- an arrogant and condescending campus-newspaper editor. You'll see what I mean. Dude's got the voice and everything.
(POSTSCRIPT: OHLSEN'S FOLLOW-UP E-MAIL, A WEEK AND CHANGE LATER: Loved "Damsels." Didn't seem all that crazy to me. Soap and dancing totally cure depression! Also, Adam Brody. Rrrrr. (I really loved the shifting sympathies, too, the way Violet magically defeats [REDACTED]. Greta Gerwig is fantastic in this.) _____
Movie review in the Friday, April 27 Oregonian....
This isn't even a criticism, exactly, but the only real charge a viewer might be able to level against the new Aardman Animations film "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" is that it's better at being droll than laugh-out-loud funny. The spirited voice work, morbid throwaway gags, inventive set-pieces, gleefully odd story, detail-choked production design and stunning marriage of stop-motion and computer animation more than compensate.
The film -- directed by Aardman vets Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt from Gideon Defoe's book series and screenplay -- was originally released in the UK as "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists." We meet the Pirate Captain (voiced wonderfully by Hugh Grant) and his tiny, weird, loyal crew in a bit of a slump. They're more interested in fun and ham dinners than actual piracy, but the Captain's gunning for the 1837 "Pirate of the Year" award, so they try to step up their game. They highjack a research vessel carrying a young Charles Darwin (David Tennant) -- who realizes the Captain's "parrot" is in fact the last dodo bird in existence, prompting Darwin to try and steal it for the perfectly awful Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton).
What's best about "Pirates!" is that you never quite know where it's heading. It starts out as a fairly easy spoof of the pirate-movie tropes resurrected by Depp and Disney -- but quickly finds humor in everything from Victorian science to awards shows to Jane Austen and Elephant Man cameos to extreme food snobbery while mostly avoiding the easy pop-culture gag. Darwin's civilized chimpanzee sidekick, who communicates exclusively through flashcards and deadpan looks, will be a big hit with kids. Be sure to stay through the end credits, in which the punny signs, silly paintings and absurd knickknacks that filled every inch of this movie's backgrounds are laid out in an endless, awe-inspiring scroll. _____
During the Friday, April 20 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about movie marketing, "Justfied," "Soul Train," "The Lucky One," "Lockout," Wolverine hair gel, "Rango," mumblecore, Will Ferrell, and Whit Stillman Day, among other things.
When it sticks to its central flirtation, the latest Nicholas Sparks Romance™ "The Lucky One" is blandly pleasant enough. In true Sparks fashion, the lead characters (played by Zac Efron and Taylor Schilling) have each suffered loss, but mostly they're just collections of desirable attributes, fated to kiss after speaking a number of unremarkable words.
He's an ex-Marine who can fix tractors and boats and reads philosophy and plays piano and takes long walks and stares meaningfully into fires and works hard and has piercing eyes and loves children and other small animals! She's a plucky single mom and former cross-country champ who works at the family dog kennel and loves her grandma (Blythe Danner) and got good grades in school and supports her kid's intellectual growth!
As long as director Scott Hicks ("Shine," "Snow Falling on Cedars") puts these two through their inevitable romantic paces -- in perfectly lit, artfully distressed environments -- the movie more or less sells its disposable soul-mate fantasy. But man, when the film tries to inject anything resembling high drama, it gets dumb in a hurry.
Efron walks from Colorado to Louisiana to meet Schilling because he found her photo in a pile of rubble in Iraq and it brought him good luck (luck it failed to bring its previous owner, it's worth noting). But for the most contrived reasons imaginable, Efron can't quite bring himself to share this simple anecdote amid all the folksy music montages. But this foolishness pales in comparison to the subplot involving Schilling's super-wicked ex-husband (Jay R. Ferguson) -- a bully hick lawman who might as well have wandered in from a very special "Dukes of Hazzard" episode. Imagine Biff from "Back to the Future" crashing a Pottery Barn catalogue spread. It's that jarring. _____
I also tried to talk about the ideas in "The Cabin in the Woods" without spoiling too much. If you're a genre nerd, you should make a special effort to see it. It's a gory, funny horror-comedy that also happens to be a carefully structured film essay on the importance of horror movies. I've never seen anything quite like it.
