Night Is Here

by Alex Carnevale

The Happening

dir. M. Night Shyamalan

99 minutes

The promise of the auteur is that each effort must attempt to top the next. In the cases of Martin Scorcese, Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, we embarked on a viewing of their next project with tremulous anticipation. I can still feel the first monologued moments of Taxi Driver, the sinking feeling of a taxicab ride to Hell in Eyes Wide Shut, following a hottie in Vertigo, and the time that kid put his penis into the apple pie.

Shyamalan burst onto the scene with 1993's Wide Awake. I still remember the buzz on him, and when I saw The Sixth Sense it was easy to see we were in the hands of a genre-freak. Our contemporary masters of suspense are so lacking that M. Night stood out. He truly knew dread of the unknown, and he was imaginative as well. He also wrote his own material, which made him even more unique.

whatever they're laughing about, it probably wasn't that funny

His second Bruce Willis vehicle, Unbreakable, was comic book fun, yet still unrelentingly dark and weird. Despite a strange turn, Unbreakable is accessible, Groundhog Day fare, and it allowed him to show off his talent for humor. Instead of going on to direct subsequent superhero movies as did sell-out peers like Bryan Singer and Sam Raimi, Night started believing his shit actually didn't stink.

Like David Mamet's mock-survival spectacle, The Edge, 2002's Signs was actually a fun Spielberg parody complete with flummoxed Daddy Mel Gibson. Its ending is so magnificently disappointing that I can't imagine any audience being satisfied by it.

"i really hope this doesn't ruin our careers"

Night's cockiness was evident in his 2006 Princess Bride-style fairy tale Lady in the Water. Entirely set in an apartment building in Philadelphia, Lady in the Water held the promise of Night's imagination even with David O. Russell trappings. LITW is a hysterical script, with a verbal inventiveness and talent for comedy none of his peers can approach. That it was destined to be a colossal bomb is besides the point. It's Night's most underrated project, and judged without expectations, it's an unmitigated triumph.

Unfortunately, the fun ends here.

you guys an oak tree over there just called me a stupid asshole

Forced to admit its premise at the beginning and divulge little more, The Happening is the reverse journey of the tantalizing scary The Village. M. Night's small masterpiece of a small Pennsylvania town is an ideal Twilight Zone episode.

The Happening documents a airborne virus, possibly originating from the planet itself, that causes people to kill themselves. As a married couple of a verge of a colossal Spitzer, Wahlberg and Zooey have a fun kind of chemistry. The plot heads towards central New Jersey, but it really has nowhere to go.

"i'm sorry i waited this long to tell you this night, but, I really don't "get" The Village"

You're resorted to basically turning the heavy-handed metaphor over in your mind. Would plants attack us? They don't have the facility to. We'll have to die some other way, like from mediocre scripts or adaptations of anime TV shows.

M. Night's next project, The Last Airbender, which he didn't write

The list of people who write and shoot their own material is small - Tarantino when he's not trying to bang underage women, PTA when he's not directed his wife in ill-timed stage plays, Woody when he's not busy dying -  so Night stands out. That he's demanded creative freedom in his quirky ventures is a thing in favor of him. Maybe he just needs a little on-set excitement to get back on track? I hear Rose McGowan is available.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

cheat on your wife night just do it

HEALTH LIFE AND FIRE

"Bucky Done Gun (DJ Marlboro's Funk Carioca remix)" – M.I.A. (mp3)

"Bucky Done Gun (¥£$ Productions's remix)" – M.I.A. (mp3)

"Bucky Done Gun (DaVinChe remix)" - M.I.A. (mp3)

"Bucky Done Gun (instrumental)" – M.I.A. (mp3)

"Bucky Done Gun (a capella)" – M.I.A. (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Rachael played where are they now with the cast of Freaks and Geeks. Danish luvs glipsters Hot Chip.

Alex girled out with Michelle Obama, the musical Once, and the weird world that is fashion.

Ready and steady yourself for the return of inimitable priestess Molly Young.

The Sweet Whisper of Romance

by Rebecca Wiener

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

1 hr 51 minutes

dir. Nicholas Stoller

First of all, I was supposed to have written this post weeks ago. I was super busy changing my life, so I apologize to those of you who were forced to form opinions about this film on your own.

love the ecstasy tattoo, i want one nowsy

The romantic comedy is in its death throes. It was once a noble form, beginning with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and onto The Philadelphia Story and Singing in the Rain, Tootsie and Annie Hall—even When Harry Met Sally elicits respectful nods from both he and she filmies. But in the past couple decades, the genre has taken some hard hits to the groin (see: Music and Lyrics and 27 Dresses). Whisper “rom com” now and a face scrunches up in disgust somewhere in the world.

So thank you, Jason Segel, for attempting to revive the romantic comedy with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (It’s probably no accident Segel is involved in the genius TV series that is currently resuscitating the situation comedy, How I Met Your Mother.)

Segel wrote the film (all by himself!) and stars in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, a movie about Peter, a sad sack who goes to Hawaii and finds his will to live in Mila Kunis’s tiny cleavage.

"Ghosts" - Laura Marling (mp3)

the look of a man hoping for implants

You remember Jason Segel, the tall, lumbering actor from Apatow golden nuggets Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared and Knocked Up—he was the one with the “I’m hot, but not so hot that I won’t talk to ugly girls” vibe. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is Segel’s first screenplay and the writer/actor steals talent from his mentor (Paul Rudd is a spaced-out surf instructor; Jonah Hill is a drooling restaurant host) and remembers the golden rule of gross-out.

There are four full-frontal penis shots which collectively confused me so much, I couldn’t figure out how to mention them before this point in the review.

"One Day You're Here" - Underground Kings (mp3)

The softer, more sensitive Segel diverges from the Apatow path a bit, sketching out some female characters that are actually humanoid and occasionally chuckle-worthy.

a scene from knocked up superbad drillbit taylor this movie

And unlike Knocked Up and Superbad, the most compelling relationship in Sarah Marshall isn’t between two dudes who totally get each other; it’s the one between old pathetic Peter (through the glassy blue eyes of his ex Sarah Marshall) and new hopeful Peter (projected by the ambiguously ethnic Mila Kunis). That’s why this is a romantic comedy that works.

In Pretty Woman, Vivian wanted Edward, a classy guy who made her feel like Silda, not Ashley Alexandra. Roberts and Gere’s later cinematic coupling, Runaway Bride, was a sad satire of the classic rom com: The ham-fisted film spelled out that Roberts’ character jumped from fiancée to fiancée because she wanted to be the kind of girl who eats bbq one day, and the kind that climbs mountains the next.

That’s not transformation; it’s the emotional equivalent of buying a new pair of shoes because you saw LC wearing them on The Hills.

paul rudd undergoing a de niro-like transformation for this important role

"Annie Let's Not Wait" - Guillemots (mp3)

In Manhattan, Isaac didn’t want to be the guy who feeds on youth anymore and left Tracey for a more challenging union with Mary. Then, of course, he realized he preferred old, competent Isaac who could tell a little girl how life is. It’s a different lesson, but you get what I’m saying.

kelso!

So in summation, pay no attention to the terribly annoying posters for this movie in the subway. It’s a charming and well-written piece of entertainment, and the first genuine romantic comedy in years. Also, for the guys: there are a lot of boobs and noisy sex. Also some physical pain, which I know you like. Enjoy!

Rebecca Wiener is the former senior editor to This Recording. She's now all like jigga what and yells at me on gchat and is a free spirit like in the 60s or something. She lives in Park Slope.

[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9podUETps8]

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

a real sarah marshall, victim of a h8 crime

Best of former TR legend Becky:

An adolescence for the ages.

Julia for beginners.

Good business is the best art.

Object of Desire

by KARINA WOLF

In a way, Audrey Hepburn is responsible for hundreds of below-par romances.

She inspired the idea that a charming single New York girl deserves good love and good fashion, and we've been suffering the after-effects of that assertion for the past 40 years. What's exceptional about Audrey Hepburn isn't her silhouette, her enunciation, or her manners.

It's the extraordinary way she elevated the perception of her co-stars. She flirted, she sighed, she pined, she even loved. But most importantly, she had faith—not delusional, I hope you will turn out to be who I want—but utter satisfaction that he was exactly right.

It was a love that was cognizant of someone's foibles and impersonal in its grace. A romantic comedy is about a pairing of equals—equals in wit or strength or passion. In the best ones—The Philadelphia Story, for example--there's a larger thematic question at play and romance is the by-product not the intended goal.

Charade has the most absurd premise: a misfit ensemble is searching for a quarter of a million dollars.

Somehow, Hepburn has the money without knowing it.

Along the way, she develops a chaste romance with Grant's multiple-identity-ed older man, exposing his insecurities in each incarnation, infuriating him with her insights, inventing her own Shakespearean dialogue. She manages to unnerve and support Cary Grant, who'd been hesitant to star with the much younger actress.

Like dozens of noir thrillers, the movie asks if it's ever possible to know the object of your desire; Charadeanswers the question affirmatively. Yes, if you're Audrey Hepburn.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

she never did wear a misfit ensemble

The Sequel Shall Be Called Moonshade

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Sunshine

dir. Danny Boyle

107 minutes

Danny Boyle has never impressed me very much as a filmmaker, and Sunshine was a typical medicore effort from the man who brought you the mental retardation of The Beach.

The Boyle formula is as follows: cast an irresponsibly handsome but credible lead actor in a major role, have him take his shirt off, add elements of genre without ever really thinking through them, rinse, repeat.

28 Days Later's only positive quality was its titular resemblance to one of the finest alcoholic films of all time, 28 Days.

during the theater scene that always gets my waterworks flowin'

Quick top five movies about alcoholics:

5) Affliction

When I read this article, I assumed the suicide machine in question was Nick Nolte.

4) Schindler's List

Why do you think Oskar saved the Jews exactly?

3) 28 Days

2) Sideways

This placement is meant to be ironic, Sideways is one of the worst films ever made.

1) The Verdict

The key to the Boyle formula is to make a completely conventional Hollywood movie - with a smidge of genre that will tease fanboys and wow the general public, most of who have slept with a standing or former New York City governor.

as much as it could be, not a scene from Breakfast on Pluto

I knew Sunshine had to be a disaster when I witnessed a murder of Brooklyn hipsters talking about how they screened a movie on their projectors.

Quick top five things Brooklyn hipsters are proud of:

5) The accomplishments of their pretend feminist hipster girlfriends who allow their minature penises inside of them

4) Projectors

3) Secret joy at hanging out with celebrities while indie cred demands they act blase

2) How long they've supported Barry and how much they really feel it's his time, or in the case of the female hipster, how Barry really weaned her from Hillary as if a pretend feminist needed a reason to vote for a man

1) Vinyl, duh

But where was I? Oh, right.

Sunshine is such an egotistical, pathetic mess of a film that it's hard to even know where to start, but I'll begin with the premise.

First of all, the sun isn't going to burn out for a very long time. If it were going to burn out, what possible effect would sending a massive bomb have on it? Do you have any idea what kind of energy the sun requires to function? We'd need to equip the bomb with Mark Cuban, and that's just for starters.

cillian murphy as a physicist...yeah, not buying it

Even if I were willing to suspend my considerable disbelief, why in the name of God would they send out another bomb, representing the last of the Earth's considerable resources, when they had no idea why the mission of the first one failed? This also happened in Aliens and Doom, at which point you have to admit the conceit itself is hackneyed.

With no sunly idea (see what I did there?) of what to do with the plot, they decide to make the cause of the previous failure Freddy from Friday the 13th. People liked this movie WHY exactly?

Quick list of deep space movies that can hardly be defined as good, but were still a good deal better than Sunshine:

5) Event Horizon

The novelization was one of my ten best books of 1997

4) Alien vs. Predator

Although this took place on earth, did it really? Great movie.

3) Pitch Black

David Twohy's classic low-budget alien planet thriller that made Vin Diesel a star

2) Enemy Mine

Wolfgang Peterson's classic low-budget alien planet thriller that made Randy Quaid a star

1) Total Recall

Next, the casting. This time out the dude from Ocean's Fifty Three was the token hottie, and may I say damn.

straight science fiction nerds have a new man to enact their fantasies

Can somebody cast this guy as the main character in Wanted and get it over with? Oh wait, James McAvoy got that part. The casting directors union prez obviously reads TR and is doing this purely to spite me, much like Paul Giamatti nabbing the role of John Adams. As my dad pointed out, "They lost me with this when they cast an Italian guy as John Adams. Also, I'm still very angry that you forced me to watch Lady in the Water." My dad hates Lady in the Water.

l in the dubya...maybe my favorite movie of 2006

Then there's this unexplainable obsession with the sun, which I suppose is a light allegory for our climate change problems. It actually works in this case because we know roughly as much about what it would take to reignite the sun as what's happening to our planet.

this is the stage before you play rainbow road in mario kart wii

I just don't think that alternative sources of power are going to significantly reduce the cumulative effect of 600 billion people on the planet (that count includes, dogs, cats and dolphins, all of whom can also be considered people), no matter how many times Phil Donahue tells me it will.

Moreover, have you seen the National Geographic special Aftermath: Population Zero about what is going to happen after our species is wiped off the planet? Hint: it's awesome. Way better than Juno.

actual scene from the national geographic special

Missions to "save" humanity are always a little misguided, a piece of Michael Bay-esque hubris we'd be better off without. I want to see someone recut Sunshine from the perspective of the planet.

From a planetary perspective, Sunshine is the story of Earth nearly surviving biggest virus of all time until the virus fires its "payload" into the Sun. It sounds like a bunch of fratboys tried to fuck their way out of this predicament.

"ok everybody: if you're white, you're probably good at least to the 80 minute mark"

Is it really necessary to have the women on the sideline and the minorities screwing up and dying? One of the major plot twists hinges on a big fuck-up by an Asian character. I had to check if I was actually watching Superhero Movie.

If you're going to mess with genre, at least do it in a fun way, like when David Mamet killed off Harrold Perrineau's character in The Edge.

Maybe this film was far more entrancing on the big screen, and that's why I think it falls on the shittier side of Pitch Black. Until then, somebody has to face up to the hard facts. Our planet is dying, and no amount of ejaculating on the sun is going to fix this problem.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

SONGS FOR YOUR MORNING COMMUTE

"A Song for the Angels" - Great Lake Swimmers (mp3)

"Fallin' " - De La Soul and Teenage Fanclub (mp3)

"Masterfade" - Andrew Bird (mp3)

"A Samba in the Snowy Rain" - Guillemots (mp3)

guillemots

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Gilmore Girls stunned and amused us all.

Some films we were looking forward to.

All fires have to burn alive for Molly to live.

We Peaked On The Phone

by Molly Lambert

Since Alex is spearheading a movement to review bad forgotten romantic comedies that are several years out of date, and since This Recording is always on a quest to understand why Hollywood has such a hard time making a decent romantic comedy, or any kind of decent romance for that matter, unless it stars The Joker and Bubble Boy as cowgays, and since often a bad film can tell you much more about the mechanics of success than a good one I have taken it upon myself to review Cameron Crowe's 2005 film Elizabethtown.

Bubble Boy: The Original WALL*E

It's a little stupifying that a silent comedy about robots packed more emotion than any of the talky rom-coms that might somewhat better mirror actual life. Also, I had dumb bone to pick with the fact that WALL*E is a junky Bender robot and his love interest is a sleek sexy iPod thing. Can we say "out of your league"?

"It's kinda like Knocked Up, but with robots"

I know it's a throwback to Chaplin in The Little Tramp. In his films sometimes actually fell in love with girls whose economic station was the same as his own, like in City Lights. In real life, he was kind of a sex addict with a thing for much younger girls.

"I'm sorry Charlie. I"m just not that into you."

I don't think ephebophilia is a direct criteria for genius, but certainly a lot of the greatest directors (and artists, musicians, etc.) have also had some of the most fucked up sex lives. There's definitely not no connection between wanting to play god with a camera and thinking it's a great idea to marry your dead wife's twenty year old sister (that would be Peter Bogdanovich)

Deadpan: good for comedy, bad for marriage

Buster Keaton married a nurse from a psychiatric hospital he stayed in. Some of my favorite directors are pederasts (Roman Polanski, Woody Allen). Even if Hitchcock never cheated once on Mrs. Hitchcock, you do not look at that guy's canon and go "now there is a dude with a healthy set of sexual standards for women."

"Do you think you could act more icy and removed?"

You could chalk all this up to an "appetite for life" if you think that's a worthy excuse for deviant behavior by geniuses, (it is not). An inability to follow The Golden Rule may satisfy in the short term but inevitably causes existential horror and terminal aloneness in the long. The common thread here is that all of these dudes are enormously narcissistic Falstaffian personalities.

Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire: "I swallowed your cum!"

For these directors, their appetite for sex is an outgrowth of their appetite for acclaim, for drink and illicit substances, for foodstuffs. Orson Welles's daily dinner during Citizen Kane included a whole pineapple, triple pistachio ice-cream and a full bottle of scotch. (Yum.) These directors are great, perhaps, precisely because they are such Caligulan figures, such Nietzschean Supermen.

"God that's hilar Lloyd. You are so dull. Let's make out."

You would never say that about Cameron Crowe. No, Cameron Crowe espouses a gentler, more insidious, shall we say more emosogynist approach to women. He wants to be both earnest and cool, populist and a cult favorite, a nice guy and a golden god of sex. If he were a band he'd be Coldplay. And when you look back at his work, it seems clear that this has always been his deal.

Alex's fave actress Kate Hudson preps to eat yr soul

Crowe's ambition to be a great American director reached a frothy boil in Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous, and then collapsed like a sad soufflé in his two tremendous misfires of followups, (science fiction abortion) Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown. Like Jersey Girl, Crowe's Elizabethtown is a film about failure that is itself a complete failure, which in its total ineptitude becomes an interesting relic of half-formed ideas and attempts.

Elizabethtown and Jersey Girl both begin with the protagonist's career collapsing in on itself. In Jersey Girl, it is a misguided assessment of Will Smith's bankability that sets off Affleck's downward spiral. In Elizabethtown, the horrifically miscast Orlando Bloom takes the blame for a failed shoe launch at a Nike-like company headed by Alec Baldwin, one of the few bright spots.

Orlando Bloom is spectacularly wrong for the part of Crowe's loserly everyman, and word on the street was that he filled in at the last minute for first two choices Jimmy Fallon and Ashton Kutcher, who both proved themselves (unsurprisingly, one might say) unable to act whatsoever in a dramatic context.

Because tiny Englishman Bloom is so miscast as Kentuckian industrial designer Drew Baylor, he adds a strange transparent quality to the film. His performance is so perfunctory and passive as to become invisible, which makes Elizabethtown seem at times like a first-person-shooter rom-com. In being so very bland, he draws attention to the central problem of Crowe's films.

Cameron Crowe's male main characters are always ciphers. Expressing a minimum of personality and a maximum burden of expectation, they seek out the company of a female who will somehow justify them and their existence. They often start the film embroiled in a relationship with an unstable Slutty Girl with a catch phrase, Kelly Preston in Jerry Maguire's "Never stop fucking me!", Jessica Biel's "It was real, and it was great, and it was really great", Cameron Diaz in Vanilla Sky's "I swallowed your cum!"

"I enjoy sex and have a personality, and so I must be destroyed"

After summarily dumping the Slutty Girl, they get to quickly plunge into a tremblingly meaningful relationship with the wispy, sometimes wayward, yet basically devoid of any bad moods or qualities whatsoever Good Girl (Kate Hudson's Penny Lane, Renee Zellweger's Dorothy, Penelope Cruz's Sofia, Ione Skye's Diane Court) who teaches them how to live/appreciate life.

"I have no personality or life, and I've never even seen a penis!"

The legacy of Say Anything, in which a totally boring guy decides he should date the most popular (and also boring, but smoking hot) girl in school in order to somehow justify his own medioctrity, can be seen at its most full blown in Zach Braff's Garden State. Other perpetrators are Wes Anderson, who generally throws the "foreign girl" wrench into the mix, Kevin Smith, who adds lots of homosocial gay subtext, and parts of Judd Apatow's oeuvre.

"Just making you a multi-volume scrapbook and mix CDs"

In Elizabethtown, all the gimmicks that worked so well in Almost Famous are trotted out only to flop around like dying fish. There are long sequences set to music that are meant to evoke emotion, and instead only evoke the cognitive dissonance of having the soundtrack and what you are seeing onscreen not match up at all with what you are actually feeling. It is truly bizarre.

The worst part of the film (and that is saying a lot) is Susan Sarandon's eulogy for her dead husband, which she delivers to a packed house of mourners. During her speech, the crowd seems to experience a cathartic release of laughter which turns into tears of joy for the whole mad business of living. And yet, nothing Sarandon says is remotely funny, touching, or true.

Watching the funeral guests collapsing in fits of tear-stained laughter as she tells a totally bizarre but never humorous anecdote about a neighbor's erection, Elizabethtown becomes like Brecht or Godard. The spectator feels utterly divorced from what the characters in the film seem to be experiencing given that they are witnessing the same exact onscreen events that you are.

"Take it from me, I love you!"

The same effect occurs throughout, as in its two overlong mix-tapey montages which are meant to demonstrate Drew falling in love with Claire, Kirsten's Dunst's "kooky" good girl, a flight attendant he met on the way there. We know they're falling in love because the soundtrack and editing tells us so, but it doesn't reflect any real feelings we get from the dull characters or choppy contextless dialogue. Josh Schwartz's TV shows also do this.

acting out Bob Dylan covers in alternate virtual realities is the height of spontaneous romance am I rite?

Crowe's fetish for quirky stewardesses seemed less weird somehow when Zooey Deschanel played one in Almost Famous. Here it feels forced, patently unreal, faker than Dunst's Southern accent. The implausible dream girl naturally has no life of her own, preferring to spend her time bonding in late night gab seshes with Bloom like a sugared up preteen who just got her first cell phone.

an entire generation of Cinderellas and no glass slipper.

When she's not showing up suddenly to encourage our incredibly passive hero with broad blank platitudes about life, she is making him creepy scrapbooks and ten volume mix-tapes to take on his road-trip through the South back to his home. She is in no way an actual human She is merely a collection of quotes and clothes and half-baked Amélie quirks. She could be a blogger persona.

"OMG NO WAI! That's MY favorite band too!"

In short, Crowe's girls are not so much people as they are a fantasy every-girl who will be utterly consumed in The Nice Guy's problems without ever presenting any conflicts of her own. They exist solely to validate his existence, and in actual life they just plain don't exist. They are as real as a Real Doll. A harmless male fantasy that is not really harmless at all, just as harmful as encouraging women to think that someday their prince will come.

Lloyd Dobler = The Original Trenchcoat Mafia

In Say Anything, the best moments (besides Jeremy Piven's) all belong to Lili Taylor's character, Lloyd's jilted misanthrope of a female best friend who wants to spend the graduation party singing all the songs she wrote about her ex. In some alternate better movie, she'd get involved with John Cusack's character instead of the bland, charismaless Diane Court.

Corey Flood = The Female Duckie

Elizabethtown also contains the seedling of a better unmade movie, one that would be about the hometown best friend character played by Paul Schneider (of disputably emosogynist classic All The Real Girls) and his father, played by Rufus-sirer/songsmith/Apatow rep player Loudon Wainwright III.

Paul Schneider: All The Real Sideburns

The relationship between these two characters, Loudon's insistence to his son that one cannot be both parent and friend to one's kids and Schneider's attempts to prove him wrong by acting as peer to his own young child, provides the few sparks that the movie manages to generate. One wishes the film were about them, instead of Bloom and Dunst, whose dialogue and soundtrack-propelled no-mance are like reading a Tumblr feed.

Some Inane Inspirational Quotes From "Claire"

"Men see things in a box, and women see them in a round room."

"I'm hard to remember, but I'm impossible to forget."

"I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that's happened."

"I'm completely cool with anything you want to say or not say."

"I mean everybody's got to take a road trip, at least once in their lives. Just you and some music."

"Sadness is easier because it's surrender. I say make time to dance alone with one hand waving free."

"Some music needs air. Roll down your window."

Claire Colburn: I think I've been asleep most of my life.
Drew Baylor: Me too.

Drew Baylor: I see you right there. I see you right there.
Claire Colburn: There you are.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Snowy Atlas Mountains" - Fionn Regan (mp3)

"Put A Penny in the Slot" - Fionn Regan (mp3)

"The Cowshed" - Fionn Regan (mp3)

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING:

The Romantic Comedy Of Equals

Annie Hall Is About Saudade

The Battle Of The Sexies

It Was So Real There For Awhile

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Watchmen

dir. Zack Snyder

American history begins in 1776, predated slightly by the discovery of barbarism. Most cultures bask in their refinement and sophistication. Americans have a love-hate affair with the idea of being brutes. Since we are ignorant of other history not our own, we tend to think of ourselves as more powerful and destructive than we really were.

This is the attitude of Alan Moore. He is never named in the 2 hours and 43 minutes that comprises Zack Snyder's film version of his graphic novel, but he is in every scene.

To the British-born Moore, as to many others of his generation, the governmental excesses of the Cold War era (specifically U.S. excesses) were just another example of how nasty and cold we could be to those who stood in our way.

The man who is murdering all the superheroes of the World War II - Vietnam period in Watchmen shares this perception. It is rare you have a film that sympathizes to some extent with its primary villain. And that is just the beginning of the things Alan Moore did that made Watchmen the finest superhero comic of all time.

Snyder has resisted altering any of the original's details, and his is a devoted portrait of a time and place in alternate American history. In this version of reality, we have won World War II and Vietnam by the virtue of these superbeings fighting in our stead, and now, in the 1980s, we have turned on those to who we owe so much. No director has had so much fun with the World Trade Center towers since Oliver Stone.

Rorschach getting his grub on

The personages of Watchmen are what burn brightest. Individual issues of the comic tended to focus on the detailed origin stories of each member of the drama, and how they got to whatever miserable post-heroic existence we found them in. Moore used a narrator, Rorschach, whose origins are maliciously recalled with great zest in the film version. With two separate unreliable narrations, Watchmen likely made Richard Roeper pee his pants and call his mommy.

Even more scandalous to our modern superhero sensibilities is the raping, killing behavior of Jeffrey Dean Morgan's The Comedian. He's not even a villain, and he's about a hundred times worse than Heath Ledger's castrated Joker. He is splendid in the role and he gets even more attention than he did in the graphic novel. The Comedian is Hunter S. Thompson and George Patton all rolled into one.

carla gugino before the worst make-up job of the modern era

Also buoyed by the limitations of film is Malin Ackerman's Silk Spectre. Her rounded ass and high breasts invade every scene, though she's more Anna Faris than Michelle Pfeiffer. At the very least she didn't have to endure the production team's horrific attempt at age makeup, as Carla Gugino did as Malin's mother. Ackerman is no great beauty, but her old school body does have a certain timelessness, and you have to admire the actress who will get naked in a movie where she's half-nude the rest of the time.

not having exposed thighs is one of the major tenets of firefighting

Then there's Dr. Manhattan. Turned into an all powerful blue superbeing by the vagaries of modern science, Dr. Manhattan is a literal Deus Ex Machina, and the most enjoyable God in comics since Galactus. Most of the New York City audience viewing Watchmen spend most of the time staring at Billy Crudup's blue, special effects addled schlong. Better to focus on that then the maudlin dialogue. We're missing the small moments of Manhattan's life, but then, something had to go from the original.

never go back to a defraction chamber to get your watch, never

A large portion of the film focuses on the history of the characters, subsuming the simple murder mystery of the present. The trick is old hat, but Alan Moore's level of detail gives it new life. For those of us who already knew these characters as well as we did ourselves, the implosion of Billy Crudup into Dr. Manhattan is like the E! True Hollywood Story reenactment of something that really occurred.

There's so much going on in the mise-en-scène of Watchmen that's hard to keep track. Director Zack Snyder was more than keen on replicating some of the most compelling images of the graphic novel (I suggested a few here); and there are four or five easter eggs in every frame. For the trained eye, the rewatch value is through the roof, but when A.O. Scott doesn't understand something, he gets grumpy.

We owe the majority of the film's criticisms to its terrible ending. They probably should have changed it from the comic book, because the rote destruction of major metropolises is now a serious cliché. That no one saves the day in Watchmen is not its only innovation, but that smart plot point gets lost in the exchange of dramatic exclamations.

Also wondrously out of place is a long sequence in which Silk Spectre and Nite Owl uses the Archimedes for firefighting and a post-rescue bang on the ship. This is a comic book excursion that puts aside the plot for the greater glory of giving the film some action. Snyder was of course damned if he did, and damned if he didn't. As it is, we may as well be watching the stop-motion comic they released before the film.

The violence, Snyder's addition to the milieu, is beautiful and attention-grabbing. As terrible as 300 was, its director's passion for bones splitting creatively impressed where the dialogue and story did not. This is the only thing that makes it a Zack Snyder movie, and while it's fun to watch, there's a problem.

Here every snap of femur is well-wrought -- the only issue I have with the proclivity for the slo-mo violence is that when the film gets quiet and serious (and it is overly so when Dr. Manhattan brings his girlfriend to Mars), you want to laugh. Violence is just as beautiful as the surface of another planet, but in a work of art it's no easy thing to put the two next to each other, and let the audience appreciate both.

This was the problem that kept Watchmen from the silver screen -- not its deep complexity of vision or helter-skelter plot. The major challenge is tone.

Watchmen is both comedy and drama. Not only that: it is melodrama, it is serious art, it is slapstick comedy, it is irony and juxtaposition, it is superhero shtick and superhero opera. In one sense it is the funniest movie of its kind, and yet you cannot imagine a superhero movie taking itself this seriously since the depressing, boring The Dark Knight. Nothing so brightly colored has been this dark since Dick Tracy, from which Watchmen the movie takes much.

For all the critics who bash Watchmen, they're missing the point. To them Alan Moore is just another superhero creator, with the same old origin stories colliding into a happy-ish ending. But for those of us whose brainflow was reversed by the complexity of Watchmen, this translation is our version of the good old days. We are watching heroes of a genre they invented, not characters in a made-up story. To those who already know the story, this version is a nostalgia rollercoaster.

Strangely, the Cold War has gone from a dark period of government distrust to a soaring period of moral clarity, where we could nobly be destroyed by a great evil instead of tearing ourselves apart.

Moore's ideas about the future and the past were what made Watchmen so exciting, and if you don't already know the story, you'll spend most of the film's 203 minutes figuring out who is who. (Better to read the comic first, in this case.) Beyond mere understanding are some wonderful futurist visions of what we might have become. The blunt lack of charm in the Nixon character obscures the more deft takes.

We see Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian winning the war in Vietnam; protesters calling for a return of the police to the streets; superheroes forcing each other into non-consensual sex, screwing up press conferences and causing collateral damage. In so many ways, still, this is not what our idealized heroes do.

Ours is a savage history, the British writer tells us, but we can be equally sure it is not the only history. We are today in a period of time in which no great number of losses on the battlefield is sustained, when fewer people go hungry than ever before, when the majority of human rights violations are seen before the world. We have already accomplished the ending of Watchmen, and we are still unhappy with the result. It sounded good in theory, but in practice it was two naked blue dudes tag-teaming us.

If a man from any century before the old twentieth saw how far we have come, he would wonder at the majesty of what his fellow beings have accomplished. Is it so quickly that we forget? Watchmen, on the page and on the screen, is the crucial reminder of what it took to get us here.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He lives in Manhattan. He tumbles here.

American Manufacturing in Disguise

by Alex Carnevale

When we look back at the achievements of this lost decade, film students will, in their infinite stupidity, miss the finest contribution of the aughts. There has never been a more subversive piece of art than Michael Bay's Transformers, and with the collapse of industry that marks each day's evening news, there may never be again.

On its surface, Transformers is the same product tie-in pablum we've all been forced to endure since Star Wars made a fortune's worth of dubloons in secondary markets. And yet the tale that was told is a wolf in sheep's clothing. On its surface we have the long war between the Autobots and the Decepticons, now staged on the battleground of Earth.

The version of the Mythos in the film is this: Shia LaBoeuf's granddad finds the Decepticon Megatron ensconsed in ice at the Artic Circle. Clad in black, Megatron resembles a Satan, or at the very least a Dark One. It never occurs to Admiral Witwicky that he has unearthed a hero in the ice.

Bred in the combat pits of Cybertron, Megatron was raised for fierceness. Essentially, he was a slave for the Autobot hierachy and was pitted against other monsters for the amusement of the Autobots. It is easy enough to see the prodigious hand of American imperialism here, when the powers-that-be were content to let so-called lesser nations fight amongst each other. Instability was profitable: it limited rebellion and it made for good business for those who supplied the weapons.

Once Megatron became too strong for the prevailing Autobot hierachy, they saw the strength of the being they'd created and began his long exile. Megatron is vulnerable, neutralized in a government facility when Michael Bay's film begins, and the Autobots are free and clear.

The prevailing assumption lent to the viewer is that the Autobots are the fighters of freedom. The film then gives the audience more than a few clues that the Autobots aren't all they seem to be. History is written by the victors, and the Autobots were the victors in the Great War, a conflict that led to the Pax Cybertronia. Under the terms of this pact, the Deceptions became second-class citizens, and little was told to a young transformer about what had happened in the past.

Our American heroes start in Revolutionary War days, and so on from there. It is clouded so that our people barely remember the real history of what happened. Yes, the states had more than a right to demand freedom from taxation. But to tell the story in that fashion omits the slave labor on which this country was built. Without the value of that labor, America would never have been wealthy enough or strong enough to fight the King. Instead of freeing its black citizens, as Great Britain did, it turned its back on the very people to which it owed its victory.

The current irony is that we are being taxed more strenuously than ever -- the very charge we levied on our colonial predecessors.

And so on, to the present, where automakers salvage billions from the taxpaying public. And for what, exactly? To keep their Autobot machines pumping vile toxins into our atmosphere, and gas confined to a racket between America's power, perched on the back of the subjugation of Arab peoples in every oil rich nation? Instead of criticizing this country, it is easier to blame Israel, as if they were the ones who led to this state of affairs. They're a victim of colonial power, not an agent of it.

Chief ally to the American military is Optimus Prime and his coalition of autobots. They are expertly trained to appeal to human emotions - shiny colors and cute noises emanate from our hero's favorite destructive robot, Bumblebee.

The fact is, humans will believe anything. Does anyone hear Megatron out? He desires the AllSpark for the power it possesses to return him to his homeworld. Is it any wonder he doesn't want his slavers accompaying him on the trip home?

I said the film was subversive, and it is. The portrait of the American military collaborating with the Autobots is of a deeply flawed, entirely helpless organization in which vindictiveness triumphs over caution, and John Turturro's skepticism towards the prevailing Autobot view of things loses out over the machinations of a hormonally charged loser who wants respect from extraterrestrials as a means of seducing an underage teen. Such intercourse would be statuatory rape, but thirst for sex wins out over wariness.

We know the automakers want nothing good for us. Their executives fly around in private jets and congressmen pretend to be chagrined. It is the chaos that the Decepticons can provide that is what we need so badly, if only our vapid president would stop granting wishes like a genie in town hall meetings and see that we need a far larger change than he called for. Anyone who buys an American car is a bigger fool than a president who bails out American carmakers. In America, business is only charity if it's big business.

All great civilizations perish on the backs of their own excess. "X is suffering," cries this way of thinking. "We must solve for X no matter the cost." The Decepticons posed a threat to a way of life on the all-metal planet, so they were banished and destroyed.

We have no need for American industry or the military as it exists. Our military strength grows still larger, to fight no enemy we can see. What should we be more afraid of? Thousands of Americans dead in the wake of mad men crashing planes into our Autobot superstructures, or the resulting war against nothing and no one that cripples the finances of the people this output was supposed to protect?

Instead of propping up companies we no longer have need for, let us have them die an appropriate death. Our new president is in hock to these fools. He cannot break free of them any more than George W. Bush could write his own name.

The planet Cybertron did not belong to the Autobots any more than it did to the Decepticons. In the resulting battle, "won" by the Autobots, the means of rebuilding Cybertron was destroyed by the Autobots' human ally. Great job - better to destroy a homeworld than lose the battle. Soon we will hear "they are just machines" and the instruments of prejudice will be once again America's, to use or put down as they like.

War contrives a reason for existing. We must fight to go on. But if the fight destroys us, too? We might be better thrown into the Laurentian Abyss, or the deepest point in the world, Challenger Deep and frozen even colder, even deader than Decepticons. Perhaps theirs is the better fate.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbles here.

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Smells return of what you ask.

We're the best you've ever had.

Make it work please.

Integrity in the Face of Apocalypse

by Karina Wolf

While waiting to see The International, I caught a trailer for its cinematic Siamese twin, that other Clive Owen thriller, directed by Tony Gilroy and co-starring Julia Roberts’ thong.  I also discovered that Tony Scott has remade The Taking of Pelham One Two Three featuring Denzel Washington in a role created by Walter Matthau and with John Travolta as the lead hijacker.  We’re in an age of covers, retreads and reblogs, so I guess it makes sense that the great films of the 1970s are being remade and purveyed to the viewing public. I’m trying to understand why so few of them work.

Sixty or seventy minutes into The International, two bloodied men (Clive Owen and Brian O’Byrne) burst from the Guggenheim, stumble across Fifth Avenue and collapse in front of the Central Park reservoir. One man says to his enemy/accomplice: “I told you they’d never let you take me in,” and then expires.

This is exactly when The International should have begun. The story’s not a mystery – a failing bank kills off enemies to protect its interests (“control the debt, control everything” says one wicked banker). But by pivoting the climax to the beginning of the film at least we’d look forward to its great set piece, the Guggenheim’s demolition by artillery. Assassins cause the spiral structure to collapse like a failed soufflé. It should’ve been legendary, along the lines of Popeye Doyle’s car chase under the West Side BMT.

I went to the movie for exactly one reason: the preposterously named villain, the IBBC or “The International Bank of Business and Credit.”  I wondered how the sloppiness of this writing – it’s like calling a food shop “the multinational grocery of edibles and potables” – found its way to screen. Admittedly, the movie is being dumped in the late winter netherworld of action and chick flicks, but there are still pleasures to be gleaned this season. Defiance works as a by the numbers tale of vengeance and redemption; in Taken, Liam Neeson breaks loose from his noble giant routine and proves pleasingly sadistic.

The International, though, aspires to more and fails harder; it’s one of those films where you can tell there’s a mind behind the misbegotten production. Director Tom Tykwer attracted acclaim by directing two films: he turned bank robbery into a breakneck version of Orpheus and Eurydice (Run, Lola, Run) and a Teutonic-style myth into a moving magical realist love story (The Princess and the Warrior).  He followed up these jewels by directing as stand-in for Kieslowski (Heaven), and now, it seems, for Sydney Lumet.  Neither role suits his operatic aesthetic.

In the 21st century, it’s Tony Gilroy, director of Michael Clayton and writer of the Bourne pictures, who seems to be the go-to guy for noir (he also directed Owen in the forthcoming Duplicity). Tykwer’s film aspires to Bourne’s relevance and multi-national reach. The movie is cast with a virtual Neapolitan of European actors:  among them, Ulrich Thomsen (Festen) as a COO wading into a sinkhole of corruption and Armin Mueller-Stahl as an ex-Stasi officer gone good.  The locations span New York to Lyon to Milan to Istanbul, although most exteriors echo the glass walled architecture of Berlin, where it was shot.

Clive Owen’s star-making performance was in a bad movie (Closer) but his iconography was formed in the ambitious Children of Men. Integrity in the face of the apocalypse – that’s his shtick.  Surely, he’s the right player for an intelligent parable about greed in the New Depression. The problem isn’t with the acting, though, but the storytelling. We never learn why Owen’s character has been ejected from Scotland Yard and spends his time at Interpol dogging the shadowy bank. Naomi Watts’ role is so hazy it wasn’t until the credits that I realized she is an assistant DA.

The plot also suffers because it relies upon the luxuries of the virtual age. Instead of risk in the face of corruption, there are video conferences, televised rallies, and rather tame behaviors on the part of the Sicilian mafia. There is exactly one action sequence. Amid all the exposition, at least something is explained:  the preposterous “IBBC” is a cover for an arms dealing Ponzi scheme—so the name is understandably fanciful. When Owen implores Mueller-Stahl, an insider, for an explanation for the bank’s corruption, he gets the answer, “that’s the difference between truth and fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”  Not always.

All thrillers today aspire to be thrillers from the 1970s. Why not? Those films boasted political relevance and characters with depth. What’s great about those older films is that they’re not aiming for the cohesive truth of fiction; they’re quite comfortable with the aberrant behaviors of real life.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls puts forth the hypothesis that after the extinction of the studio system, filmmakers were inventing storytelling all over again.  Before the business of the blockbuster and the mandated three-act script, these films were feeling out their territory, like a blind man navigating an unfamiliar room.  It’s worthwhile to consider the oddity of those films, their rough and poorly joined elements as the flaws that comprise  their genius. A kind of cinematic wabi sabi.

In the 1970s films, there’s never a sense of ineluctable conclusion. Marathon Man’s set up is personal and idiosyncratic – a grad student has a chip on his shoulder because his father was blacklisted by McCarthy. The movie works because of a few set pieces, a terrific villain and a terribly neurotic protagonist.  In fact, all those golden-age anti-heroes have some very creepy traits that inform their social do-gooding:  Stockholm Syndrome (Three Days of the Condor), stalking (Marathon Man and Taxi Driver), corrosive workaholism (All The President’s Men, The Conversation) and megalomaniacal tendencies (The French Connection). Serpico’s dress sense, enunciation and interpersonal skills anticipate the reminted Joaquin Phoenix.

The movies of the 70s feature the anti-plot as well as the anti-hero.  There are elliptical jumps and coincidences which we accept as reasonable.  These hiccups don’t alienate the audience; quite the opposite, they’re the elements that make people return to the films.

When Robert Redford meets and kidnaps Faye Dunaway in Condor, it feels exactly right for the paranoid desperation of the character and the era.  The abduction creates an uneasy crisis of conscience for the viewer:  why is a rather perverse love affair – or government corruption (Watergate) or pathological eavesdropping (The Conversation) – thrilling to watch?

Many of the players in those 70s films are peripheral to the larger conflicts suggested by their stories – even those in law enforcement or intelligence often have no experience that prepares them for the enormity of the disorder. Nonetheless, the filmmakers find a uniquely personal resolution for each.

If only The International had taken these cues and created Owen’s character as an innocent discovering the corruption at the same time as the audience does.  What’s more, there’s dramatic potential in finding sympathy for the villains.  The IBBC’s misdeeds are like those of Bernie Madoff – Shakespearean in nature – in the sense that one individual thinks he can overcome corruption with more corruption.  The bank directors aren’t evil; they’re equivocators who think another bad deal will bring everything back to black.  These missed opportunities just send me back to my favorites, the originals. Yes, there is such a thing as an original in film, and it does have an aura of authenticity which today’s filmmakers imitate but can’t duplicate.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbls here.

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Or perhaps this is her.

Fancy taking it one way.

BALLISTIC: BANS VS. LAMBERT

by Lauren Bans and Molly Lambert

He's Just Not That Into You
dir. Ken Kwapis

"I actually suffered one of those exact rotten guys only maybe two weeks ago. It was just like a scene in the movie. I was at a bar. A fellow who'd texted me promised follow-up texts. I sent follow-ups when I didn't get anything from him. And I made the excuse to myself that my phone must've been blocked. That I didn't hear it. That it had SIM card issues. I told my mother. She said, 'Call him.' People at the bar said to me, 'You're acting out from the movie. He's just not that into you.' So I reluctantly decided the hell with him." - Ginnifer Goodwin

Bans: So according to that opening montage our moms and female friends are the ones inadvertently responsible for brainwashing us into believing we're too amazing for the doods who break up with us. I never even thought of it that way. What stoopid betches. I'm going to disown my Mom.

Lambert: I was not bored for the retardedly long 2 hours and 15 minutes running time. I wasn't mad initially, but then the more I thought about it postmortem, the madder I got.

Lambert: I feel like this movie was the girl version of Sin City in some ways. Really simplistic and totally sexist but occasionally satisfying.

Bans: Love Actually is just as sexist, only more insidiously!

Lambert: definitely but it coated the misogyny with Xmas fluff.

Lambert: This movie was at least sort of "Woody Allen" themed so I expected serious discussions between white people in nice apartments and title cards and on those counts I was duly satisfied.

Bans: Very Woody Allen-esque! I think the Woody Allen Gaze is perhaps more dangerous than the regular "male" gaze, for it's coated in the kind of intellectualism that makes it seem okay to boink your 17 year old stepdaughter.

the WAG (Woody Allen Gaze), demonstrated

Bans: That said, I love him and I may have internalized WAG. My major sexual fantasy is walking into a room to see ScarJo on a table naked, covered in Lox, reading Tolstoy.

Lambert: speaking of sultry Jewesses, did you hear Ryan Gosling might be dating Natalie Portman? Fucking sad day in McGoslingville.

Bans: No!!!!!!! RACHEL AND RYAN FOREVER!!!! I thought Rachel Getting Married was the footage of their wedding mashed up with The Notebook, no?

Lambert: Unexpectedly charmed by Justin Long!

Bans: I was also unexpectedly charmed by Justin Long. So much so that I bought 4 Macbooks as soon as I got home. Though he's terrible as the narrative voice of the "He's Just Not That Into You" philosophy, his storyline is more like "He Doesn't Even Know How Into You He Is."

Lambert: Justin Long was so charming that he kind of transcended the material. In fact, so was Ginnifer Goodwin, and their scenes together seemed really adorable even though in retrospect he was written as a tremendous douchebag who changes at the very last second (just as we are warned multiple times is the exception, and not the rule, in dating.)

Bans: I actually found Ginnifer decidedly uncharming, besides for her haircut and wardrobe. She kind of made me feel uncomfortable being a woman.

Lambert: I love Jennifer Aniston. I don't even care that she always has to play opposite dogs.

Bans: I love Jennifer Aniston too. She has her sanity. Should I cut my hair like Ginnifer's?

Lambert: don't cut your hair like Ginny's. remember that she has a Mormon haircut.

Bans: Drew Barrymore's lisp gets worse with each rejection. I liked how the script accommodated her impediment by having Kevin Connolly tell her at the end, "Your face doesn't match your voice. In a good way." Thank god that girl has a face!

Lambert: I was hoping she'd be like "I hope your dick doesn't match your height." Perhaps I ask too much.

Bans: HAHAHA. That movie is called "He's Just So Way, Way Up Into You."

Bans: I also liked how the subtle undertone of the Kevin Connolly/ ScarJo plot was "Dood, she's too hot for you." That was the only unsexist thing in the movie. Enough with Apaturdian doods thinking they deserve chicks way out of their league.

Lambert: yeah I appreciated that it showed the issue from both sides. A guy stringing a girl along for sex = a woman stringing a dude along for cuddles and pep talks. Kevin Connolly was a chump, just like his character on Entourage. But who wouldn't get chumped by ScarJ and her incredibly prominent boobs.

Bans: Totes, and poor ScarJo had to pay for her soulless slut ways at the end-- what was she in the last montage, a depressed lounge singer on qualudes? Plus the movie wouldn't even run a clip of her actually singing. That's got to sting. I am so surprised she could not work at least one Tom Waits cover into the script. She needs a new agent.

Bans: But on that: I am scared for when ScarJo starts aging. She needs to go to college.

Lambert: all of ScarJo's talk about how she has to show her boobs off while she's young makes me think she's worried about aging the way of Brigitte Bardot. Then again Scarlett has Jewish genes, which might fortify her beauty.

Bans: MySpace as the "hook up" website? Hello, what is this, 2001?

Lambert: I think this movie was on the shelf for a while, hence MySpace as the hookup website.

Bans: I am annoyed they didn't confront emo-caddery at all. Basically all menfolk keep in contact nowadays, the more insidious dating types are the ones who write/txt/wax emo poetic but have no follow-through. I think it's a recession thing - words are super cheap. That's why I date T.I. who says I can call whenever I like.

Lambert: ugh yes people who have online/text game but no real life presence are the worst. that's why I think this movie was interesting, because it did bring up some of those issues. essentially it was a big budget Hollywood mumblecore.

Bans: That was Drew Barrymore's entire purpose in the movie. She totally got cast as the "new technology dater", and communicated with men over all these weird mediums like MySpace, txt msg, Blackberry, Email. That is why she had so many gay friends in the movie. She was, like, way more advanced than the other characters. Also, are real estate ad sale companies notoriously gay or did she work for the paper itself?

Lambert: how awk do you think it is between Justin Long and Drew Barrymore on the press tour? how embarrassing is it when you get your cute new younger bf a job and then the relationship implodes and you still have to promote the film?

Bans: I'm sure they slept together during production, if only to ease the tension.

Lambert: The same thing happened with Cam Diaz and Justin Timberlake with Shrek 3. Note to Charlie's Cougars: if you emasculate your boyfriend by using your Hollywood A-List status to get him a job, he will dump u. Let him book his own Alpha Dogs, k?

Bans: From what I can tell from my glossy reading, Drew seems to be the kind of girl who likes to be friend-exes. Mostly because I imagine if someone dislikes her it's a refutation of her entire being.

Lambert: none of the character's motivations made sense, like Bradley Cooper and Ben Affleck wouldn't be BFF if Brad is really such a dick and Ben's really such a good guy.

Bans: why did they show the preview for the movie All About Steve in which Sandra Bullock stalks Bradley Cooper after their 1st date until he starts to fall in love with her? mixed msgs much? I am so confused.

Lambert: Bradley Cooper does not have "an ass that makes me want to dry hump." He has hair that makes me think about getting highlights. And a body that makes me consider pilates.

Bans: Bradley Cooper does have a fantastic body, which actually makes him a little weird for rom-coms. I feel like usually rom coms are reserved for the face actors, action movies for the body actors. Bradley Cooper has an asshole face. Not that it's not cute, he just looks like an asshole. Ryan Reynolds really paved the way for hot-bodied asshole types in the leading man romcom genre, because Bradley Cooper is ALL over the place now.

Lambert: I loved Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck. We all know he has a thing for Jennifers. It was so ridiculous that this movie took place in Baltimore. I loved the Domino Sugar neon sign in their window.

Bans: They had really good chemistry. I wish one of them wouldn't have been white.

Lambert: I was waiting for actors from The Wire and there were none, but Luis Guzmán played the construction foreman and Kris Kristofferson played Jennifer Aniston's dad.

Bans: Where were all the people from The Wire? Everyone knows when you film a Baltimore movie you cast Wire actors. Hello, Step Up 1 & Step Up 2 are basically The Wire, with some dancing thrown in.

Lambert: Jennifer Connelly seemed out of place, but what better contrast to Scarlett's alternate brand of voluptuary beauty? Like, could they be more different? Aside from being beautiful high-paid Hollywood actresses married to B-List actors.

Bans: I was really touched when Jennifer Connelly broke the mirror and grew a spine. I made some tears.

Lambert: I kept comparing it to Adaptation, in that it spends the first two thirds of the movie sort of setting up these rules for itself, and then the last act breaking all of them. But joylessly!

Bans: Basically I left the theater gleefully gurgling, "IZ CAN HAS BOOYFWIEND????" and sucking my thumb.

Lambert: the underlying message of this movie was?

Bans: It's always a good idea to have a boat, as a back up.

Lauren Bans and Molly Lambert are into you, okay?

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Don't Weaken, No Matter What

by Georgia Hardstark

It wasn't until the end of the movie, during the scene where Little Edie is infuriating her mother by ignoring her pleas to stop singing, while Little Edie flirts with the camera and dances around just out of reach of her mother's cane, which is now being swung by the owner of said cane in a vane attempt to shut Ms. Beale up, that I realized that Little Edie isn't crazy.  It was at that moment that I suddenly, completely and fully, felt all the sympathy in the world for the younger Beale and realized, with a few bad decisions and enough of a psychological beat-down from the one human who's capable of delivering such, my mother, that I could end up just like her.

I knew at that moment that I had to watch Grey Gardens again.  When I initially watched it, you see, I saw both women as equally crazy, and the whole documentary as scenes from a nuthouse.  But with that scene, as Little Edie flits and twirls through the room, setting up breakfast and fetching items as her mother demands them - all the while berating her daughter for singing - I realized that Ms. Beale was doing what she could to preserve the sanity she had left in the only manner that worked: driving her mother crazy.

I learned this was an effective means of retaliation a long time ago.  Somewhere around 5th grade I stopped idolizing my mother and saw her for what she was: human...and a bit of a nutty and volatile human, to boot.

My mom is scary when she's angry.  She's a lovely woman when she wants to be, but truly terrifying when you have Wronged her.  Aside from vowing never to be like that towards my future children, I realized that it was best for my psyche to avoid fights with her at all costs. When it dawned on me that it drove her absolutely mad when I laughed as she yelled at me, or pierced my own eyebrow, or the most anger-inducing thing of all, spoke under my breath, the fighting in my household all but stopped.  She still got angry with me, of course, but reacting to being yelled at by barely look up from the TV, or putting a hardcover book down the back of my pants so that, when spanked, the spanker would hurt her hand (no, seriously, I did this), always left me with a feeling of being in control.

Edie hints at a life away from her mother, and the viewer can almost see her living a messy but exciting life in New York City.  A little apartment in a brownstone with a record player constantly on, tacky scarves draped haphazardly over lamps, and a parade of flamboyant gentlemen with pencil-thin mustaches dropping by for a drink throughout the day.  Sure her life would be in a bit of disarray - she'd probably be broke, inevitably be caught up in some drama or scandal, and, let's face it, still slowly going a bit crazy, but we can picture a different person than the one she's become at the Grey Gardens estate, a person who could even find that Libra husband.

Instead we find Edie ruminating about what could have been - the husband that never was, the trips not taken, the life that could have been if it hadn't been for the circumstances she was faced with.  Or maybe I'm taking it too personally.  As I write this I'm sitting in my little apartment, listening to the whoosh of the Hollywood freeway outside my window, perfectly content with not seeing or talking to anyone for the rest of the night, hell, probably for the rest of the week.  Happy being in the company of my Siamese cat with whom I share little conversations with, cringing every time the phone rings, hoping that I won't have to turn another friend down so that I could stay tucked away in my little corner of the world.  They'll stop bothering to call eventually.

Grey Gardens scared me, because I could see a bit of myself in Little Edie.  When the photos of her as a young girl, an intensely beautiful girl, panned across the screen, I found myself willing that Edie from the past to run away.  What could she have been, had she realized her own potential and asserted herself as that "staunch woman" she assured us she was, the one who didn't weaken, "no matter what"?  But a lot of nerve I have, ruminating over someone's lost future while I whittle away the last of my twenties at a desk job that sucks the very soul out of me - and a writing career that I'm sure would materialize, if I had the chutzpah to devote more of my precious free time to it.  Was Edie scared of the same things I am?

Failing at the thing you want so badly, despite your best effort?  Wondering if that the old adage of it being better to try and fail than not to try at all is utter bullshit, because once you fail at the thing you convince yourself you want and need, what else is there?  Little Edie's incorrect quotation of Robert Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken," speaks louder to me than the actual poem itself.

Two roads diverged in yellow woods,
and pondering one, I took the other,
and that made all the difference.

But the quote I liked more, the one I wrote down on my tattered yellow notepad the moment I heard it was one that endeared me to Little Edie from the beginning of the film: "You can always take off the skirt and use it as a cape."  Dear Readers, I always want to be the sort of person who would transform another garment into a cape.  I don't mind seeing myself in Little Edie, I just hope I take the other road.

Georgia Hardstark is the contributing editor to This Recording. She lives in Los Angeles, and tumbles here. Her blog is here.

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