Live From New Orleans: Movie Journal, 3/13-3/20

(from March 2007.)


We had originally planned to plunge into an Alain Delon Film Festival while my girlfriend and best friend were visiting me in New Orleans last week (films like Rocco and His Brothers, Purple Noon, L'Eclisse, The Leopard, Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge, and Un Flic), but things took a decidedly different turn. Here are some notes about this weekend's cinematic offerings.




ZODIAC (David Fincher, 2007)

In many respects, Zodiac is the opposite side of the same coin as Fincher's breakthrough, Se7en. Both are serial killer procedurals, but whereas Se7en was all philosophical doom, Zodiac plunges into a labyrinth of quotidian details, adding up to something and nothing at the exact same time. Facts overlap, contradict each other, converge and split apart, until no matter how long you've been staring at them, they refuse to bring you any closer to unmasking the man who murdered five people between 1969 and 1970 in northern California. Police are able to generate a rough sketch of what he looks like, but in one letter, he says he wears a disguise. He seems to be psychotic, but always sounds calm. Moreover, he ceases to kill for no apparent reason--hardly the standard reaction for a psychotic murderer. Three men commit themselves so deeply to the case that it ultimately wrecks them: for Gyllenhaal's cartoonist, his marriage disintegrates. For Downey's reporter, he crawls to the bottom of a bottle and loses his job. For Ruffalo's cop, he nearly puts away a man he is convinced is guilty, but can't prove. Questions of obsession, the media, and the potentially inherent falsity of facts leaves us with nothing to grasp onto, which is exactly how Fincher wants to leave us.




JUST FRIENDS (Roger Kumble, 2005)

I was convinced by my friend Akiva that this was worth it, but it wasn't until I actually sat down and watched the thing that I realized that he was right. The narrative exists only to hold together outstanding comedic performances from Ryan Reynolds, Anna Feris, Chris Klein, Christopher Marquette, and Julie Hagerty. The repartee that all of these actors have with each other--along with very crisp editing--allow for expert timing, gleeful anarchy, and wall-to-wall laughs. Just Friends is a comedy for the sake of comedy, a form rarely seen in theaters or on television or DVD anymore.




BEERFEST (Jay Chandrasekhar, 2006)

The Broken Lizard troupe is not naturally funny. Their first film, Super Troopers, was brilliant. Since, they've delivered two duds: Club Dread and Beerfest. Their latest has the occasional joke that hits its mark, but overall, it's a film which tries too hard to make us laugh. It's as if Broken Lizard know that, so they throw a bunch of tits in to spice things up (also to no avail). I guess Super Troopers is the exception which proves the rule.




BEER LEAGUE (Frank Sebastiano/Artie Lange, 2006)

I missed the first twenty minutes of this 84-minute film, but my friends told me that those twenty were the best in the whole thing. I hope they were right. The idea of Beer League is actually more appealing than Beer League itself. It's crass, proudly un-PC, and in a strange way, is a commentary on northern 'Jersey culture. However, too many of its jokes just left me not laughing. Granted, there are some real gems (Jerry Minor telling Artie Lange that he actually likes black jokes because they reveal the shortcomings of white guys in comparison to their black counterparts stands out). But there isn't enough comedy or narrative to hold the rest of the film up. Then again, now that I think about it, Lange and Sebastiano don't care, and neither does their film. And I guess that "fuck you" insouciance must be respected.




WAITING... (Rob McKittrick, 2005)

My friend Jon swears by this movie. He is not correct in doing so. I turned it off an hour in, and I should have long before that. Ryan Reynolds's young-W.C. Fields schtick holds him back rather than liberates him, as it did in Just Friends. McKittrick thinks he's got some new insight into the day-in-the-life workplace comedy, but none of his jokes work, his characters are two-dimensional at best, and his follow-your-dream moral comes off as petty. I haven't been that bored at a movie in a while, at least since Are We Done Yet?