directed by Paul Provenza

A movie where a lot of different comedians tell the same joke is a good idea – seeing people trying to make entertainment work is always interesting. Seeing multiple attempts at the same material, in parallel, can call both the craft and value of art into focus and can offer a chance to really appreciate the skill and effort of each artist. I still think a great movie could be made that would just be a simple document of many different actors performing the same short scene, as in an audition. Whenever I’ve found myself as one of the people “behind the table” at acting auditions where everyone reads the same scene, I end up feeling that I’ve watched a fascinating study of the scene itself and of the individual actors – and through them, of big issues like art and human nature as a whole. Really.

The Aristocrats, at least in theory, had the potential to offer that sort of insight, and some of the reviews I read suggested that it would. (A.O. Scott, attempting to demonstrate that he had seen beyond the veneer of potty-humor, called it several silly things including “one of the most original and rigorous pieces of criticism in any medium I have encountered in quite some time.”) But it fails. This is not to say that it is not amusing and/or worth seeing (it’s a bit long and fairly monotonous, but I generally enjoyed myself), just to say that despite its pretentions of being a window onto wider issues, it actually offers little insight into comedy or comedians, or even, ultimately, into the particular joke that it’s all about.

The movie is doomed to fail, really, by the choice of material. The joke (Guy goes into a talent agent to pitch his family’s act, says, “[elaborate pitch for surreal stage routine so repellent that it shocks those listening to the joke],” talent agent says “and what do you call yourselves?,” guy says, “The Aristocrats.”) is not a true joke, and is thus unsuitable for this documentary’s purposes.

Yes, it has a punchline, but the punchline is only funny in that it defies expectations – specifically, the expectations that are held for the JOKE, rather than for the situation. It is only a meta-joke*, a joke that toys with audiences grown accustomed to standard joke formats. This seems like a blatantly obvious thing to point out, but several people in the film talk about how the point of the joke is that the name of the act is so absurdly misguided and quaint after all the vulgarity, and some of the comedians who tell the joke seem really to believe this.** They are wrong. The humor is in fact that the joke-teller has gone to such indefensibly offensive ends for this shaggy-dog punchline. It’s just anti-icing on the cake that the punchline is, in an incredibly faint way, identifiable as a garden-variety “high/low joke.”

On a related note, I have long felt that it is a significant cultural error to have made “Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side!” our all-purpose archetypal “joke,” since it’s only funny because it’s an ill-formed joke – i.e. it has a question and answer but the content is unfunny. Watching this movie I felt like the same mistake was being made – the movie was all about comedy and yet had this un-joke at its center.

The movie recognizes that the joke is all about shocking the audience, but the shock is only in response to the fact that the joke-teller is being so tasteless as to think it is acceptable to tell this joke. Certainly nobody is shocked that the man in the act eats his own poop or whatever; we’ve already written off his reality as being ridiculous***. Since the humor, therefore, results from the dynamic between the comedian and his audience, it is a joke that can hardly work out of context (the context is, as acknowledged in the film, the only reason that Gilbert Gottfried’s much-praised telling of the joke at the Hugh Hefner roast was so apt and successful), a joke that can hardly work in a staged performance situation (such things are meant to be told one-on-one, like scary stories), a joke that really can’t work in a movie (where the performers are nowhere near their audiences in space or time), and a joke that absolutely cannot work more than once, no matter how different the telling. All we can enjoy about seeing different people play with the joke is see what their imagination does to fill a space where there is no viable comedy goal, nothing left to accomplish. We see comedians falling back on their generic tricks, on their other material, because they have been asked to tell a non-joke to people who already know that it’s a waste of their time.

Alternately, we see less lazy comedians giving their best shot to writing new material “inspired by” the original non-joke, which has the potential to be an interesting exercise in its own way, I suppose, but I didn’t think any of the results were all that great. Sarah Silverman’s “I was an Aristocrat” routine, which gets singled out for praise in many reviews I’ve read, seemed to me like just an application of a typical deadpan formula (perhaps one of semi-recent vintage, but I’ve certainly seen it many times before). The movie also features applications of useful inversion formulas, anti-climax formulas, etc. Could have been interesting if they’d broken that down.

Anyway, the comedians in the movie are generally smart about all this stuff, and there is a fair amount of acknowledgement that a singularly unenlightening subject has been chosen for the movie. The implication of the filmmaking, though, is that the filmmakers, by perversely choosing the “wrong” joke, have actually gotten at something revealing. But every time one of the subjects said, “Why’d you have to pick this joke? This is a terrible joke and I don’t think it’s very interesting,” I tended to agree with them. The fact that the excessive gross-out riff is an undeniable element of American humor – pathetic, childish, and generally unfunny, but valuable in its way, as such – is something I’ve known since elementary school recess, and this movie didn’t add depth or breadth to that knowledge.

At the very least, given the concept and the interviewees, there was a fascinating movie that could have been made about the art, craft, and philosophy of humor, and these filmmakers willingly threw away that opportunity. What they actually made is just a good-natured, long, repetitive montage of occasionally-funny dead-baby-joke “jamming.” Seems like a waste. Still worth seeing though, for all the famous people joking around informally. I enjoyed the movie, I would say, in the same way I enjoy all behind-the-scenes footage.

Oh, also, I know this was a zero-budget casual movie, but of the few actual cinematographic choices involved, several struck me as dumb. Why did they shoot some people with two newsroom-style perpendicular cameras and have them look into both? That was awful.

* Wikipedia currently has separate but overlapping articles on Anti-humor, Meta-joke, and (soon to be deleted) Non-joke.

** Paul Reiser, in particular, makes a game effort to make the joke work as a joke about the extreme misguidedness of the eager Aristocrat. I respected him for trying – at least he, unlike most of the comedians in the movie, was trying to actually sell the joke – but there’s just no way. It’s like trying to sell the idea that, no, there really is something kind of funny (and sad!) about this dog not actually being as shaggy as everyone says, after all that…

*** Which is why comedians in the movie get laughs talking about how in reality, the man with the act would have been jailed and the talent agent would certainly have tried to prevent the horrible act from happening – it’s all absurd, because of course these stick figures have never come anywhere near reality, where they could do anything actually offensive. It’s only the comedian drawing the stick figures who can be held responsible for their actions.

directed by Harry Winer
screenplay by W.W. Wicket (pseud. for Clifford Green) and Casey T. Mitchell
after a story by Patrick Bailey and Larry B. Williams

When SpaceCamp came out in 1986, my mother suggested that we go see it, but I refused. Later, when it was available on video, she suggested that we rent it, but I again refused. I remember telling her why: because I already knew what was going to happen. Kids were going to accidentally get sent into space and then come back. I didn’t need to see that. Her response was that maybe it would be exciting to see how they managed to get back. But I knew that it wouldn’t.

I was correct. It is now 19 years later and I have seen SpaceCamp and can report to the world that it is indeed not worth seeing.

Beth has a story about SpaceCamp that I have been given permission to tell here. She really liked SpaceCamp, as a kid, and rented the video repeatedly. One day she saw that the local newspaper’s TV schedule listed SpaceCamp as a two-star movie. Disturbed, she asked her mother how it was possible that the newspaper only gave it two stars. Her mother replied that it was probably because newspapers cared about things like lighting and sound quality. Good answer.

The laziness of the screenplay is severe. No thought seems to have been given to the question of making the characters appealing rather than annoying. Nor does any of the attempted character interest (or humor) make any sense; it’s all just copied out of the mid-80s “a-bunch-of-kids” playbook. Kate Capshaw’s character, ostensibly the authority figure, follows exactly the same cues, which is an actual error in hack-work. Frequent and extended references to Star Wars are, as with Kevin Smith, a good indicator of complete creative bankruptcy.

That one of the screenwriters chose to duck out under a pseudonym suggests that either a) It wasn’t this bad the way he wrote it, or b) he was only getting a paycheck – the story-writers had already doomed this to trash. Frankly, it’s hard for me to imagine that the fault is actually the director’s (or the actors’) – though it is indeed poorly directed and acted. And edited.

I wish I had known in advance that Leaf Phoenix and Joaquin Phoenix are the same person.

The movie is both a Happy-Meal-cutout version of NASA (staffed by clueless technicians and a crazy talking robot!) and a thoroughly branded advertisement for the real NASA, which doesn’t sit well. I assume that the crucial negligence and rocket booster malfunction were even less delightful to audiences in 1986. The movie plays like one of those embarrassing promotional or instructional videos that add “Hey, Joe, what’s that you’ve got there?” characters and dialogue to what would otherwise be dry content… except that the movie consists only of those characters, and the real NASA has been driven entirely offscreen. But the movie maintains that same sense of having been created by enthusiastic businessmen who possess only a distracted amateur’s understanding of what will be entertaining. Occasional footage of the real shuttle, taken from different film stock and poorly integrated, serves to remind us of the extremely remote connection to reality that is nonetheless the only reason that the movie exists.

The movie does contain, however, a sequence in which a kid floats off helplessly into the void. It’s not very well written or shot, but it doesn’t matter – that’s a death that kids actually fantasize nervously about, and there it is being played out on the screen. I’m not going to say it redeemed the movie, but it was certainly a high point.

Music was once again by Mr. John Williams, in his trademark 80s-patriotism mode. It was no “NBC News Theme,” but it was certainly professional, which put it so far beyond the rest of the production that I was almost embarrassed for it. “Don’t get so heroic!” I wanted to tell the music, “that’s obviously a model and nobody cares anyway!”

This is actually a real mistake made by a lot of movie music – wherein the music attains a level of sweep and impact to which the movie cannot rise. I think a lot of directors, and perhaps composers, think that they can redeem weak-blooded filmmaking with strong music, but it never works that way. At least not for me. Music’s best bet is to match the level of the visual and thereby endorse it, rather than be caught leaving it in the dust as it goes on to greater things; that looks bad for everyone. I think John Williams frequently makes the mistake of thinking that he can save movies from themselves – when there is a dramatic gap in the movie, he tries to fill it. I recently listened to some of his Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone music independent of the film, and was surprised to find that I thought it was pretty apt and well done – because during the movie, I had thought it was noisy and uninspired. I think that I was actually responding to the movie’s being unbearably flat and dead – and so was he, by writing a lot of music meant to convey things that the image didn’t (like fun and excitement, for example). Unfortunately, in the context of a movie, that generally doesn’t work, and the independent value of the music gets lost – it just sounds like it’s watching some other movie or is insensitive to this one. The image always precedes, no matter how crappy.

On the other hand, in this case, the composer’s characteristically awkward comments about the film on the score LP suggest that he was indeed watching some other movie. Maybe John Williams’ problem is that he genuinely isn’t sensitive enough to movie-quality:

In the creation of SpaceCamp, Director Harry Winer and Executive Producer Leonard Goldberg have given us a marvelous movie! The film succeeds as pure entertainment while simultaneously succeeding on several other levels… I feel honored to have been asked to compose this score, and I feel particularly proud of my association with SpaceCamp and its creators.

The ellipsis elides some patriotic effusions about the space program. How embarrassing!

I think I’ve used the word “embarrassing” five or six times in talking about this movie.* I have no regrets there.

* Depending on how you count: two, three, or four times.

directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by Michael Crichton and David Koepp
after the novel by Michael Crichton (1990)

I grew up thinking of Steven Spielberg as one of the basic brands. I didn’t just like his movies; he was, like Disney, a cultural axiom. I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the extreme foreignness of people my age who were brought up to have reservations (or worse) about the old Disney properties. On the other hand, I never felt any particular loyalty to Warner Brothers cartoons, though I enjoyed watching them, and childhoods that embraced those as being culturally fundamental strike me as similarly alien. There must be a name in marketing for that kind of acceptance, acceptance that goes beyond mere critical opinion to being part of one’s cultural cosmology. In fact, it can be quite independent of opinion: as a kid I never really thought “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was any good, but I watched it anyway because it was, for want of a better word, undeniable.

Anyway, Steven Spielberg was undeniable in my childhood, and furthermore, I actually liked watching our video copies of E.T., Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Duel, and, eventually, Raiders of the Lost Ark. But at the time that I was reaching the age of general movie-readiness at 11 or 12, the Spielberg brand had gotten weirdly sidetracked by stuff like Always and Hook, and when Jurassic Park was announced, there was a sense that this was my first chance to be present for the unveiling of one of these momentous things. For all intents and purposes, those other movies had come out before my time, alive though I may have been. I guess there must also have been some sort of unprecedented all-around hype for the release, since my grandmother felt compelled to come out of moviegoing retirement, for the one and only time, to accompany us to see this dinosaur action movie, of all things.

Upon returning from this historic occasion there was the sense, in my family, that it had been both thrilling and fun and, simultaneously, all-around not very good. I remember feeling, during the opening scenes, the grown-up-flavored disappointment of recognizing that despite the brand, the dinosaurs, and the hype, “Steven Spielberg” had made something was not, in fact, undeniable.

Huge swaths of this movie are eminently deniable; most of the non-special-effects time is, to one degree or another, clunky and unconvincing. Spielberg has a very strong sense of pacing and of visual storytelling, but in his movies of the past 15 years, he has done a frustratingly uneven job of actually delivering screenplays, line-for-line, to the audience. In Jurassic Park, it frequently seems like he made production design choices for each scene as a whole and storyboard-style choices for the shot compositions, but didn’t have any particular strategy for conveying the actual individual lines and stage directions in the script. As a result, a lot of sequences play as annoyingly artificial – almost condescendingly so – because the writing, never quite integrated into the filmmaking, hangs apart from it in a dumb, transparent way.

For example, an early scene, wherein Sam Neill describes death by velociraptor to intimidate an annoying kid, falls completely flat. It’s downright embarrassing. But despite what it might seem, the scene as written is reasonable enough, and watching it again, I think that Sam and, yes, that unpleasantly cast kid each do a perfectly serviceable job. So why does the scene feel like such garbage? I blame Spielberg. He shoots it like he knows that it’s cute (“when you see that claw, I want you to bug your eyes out, okay?”) but doesn’t expect us to really care about what’s being said, only the overall gist of the intimidation – the actual dialogue gets hung out to dry. The audience (and the director) are just waiting it out so we can get a cheap punchline when the kid whimpers at the end, defeated. Spielberg sells the broader cliché and deals with the specifics impatiently, and as a result, the specifics end up seeming like a charmless burden on the scene, an inefficient and annoying way of accomplishing something that, as Spielberg sees it, is fundamentally crude and simple.

Put another way, in actors’ terms: Spielberg doesn’t help try to “find the truth” in the scene as written – he approaches the scene in terms of its function, and lets the actors worry about making what they’re doing seem likely. But since he’s using his camera to sell something else, they don’t really stand a chance.

This happens again and again. In the awed moment of seeing the dinosaurs for the first time, Neill’s character tosses off a whole bunch of “scientist” dialogue, like “We could tear up the rule book on cold-bloodedness. It doesn’t apply.” The scene tries to swallow this up because it doesn’t really want him to be having this kind of reaction in the midst of all that awe – but he says it all the same, and we in the audience squirm and think, “That’s so lame that he’s saying that! This script is so dumb!” Or the scenes at headquarters, with Wayne Knight spouting tech talk and Samuel L. Jackson sucking absurdly on a cigarette. Koepp and Crichton put this stuff in the script to be heard, but Spielberg decides to shoot it like it’s just background noise, and it ends up seeming gratingly phony. He should either have shot to the dialogue and made a slightly more Crichton-esque movie, or have said, “sorry guys, but I’m cutting this script down to a little comic book dialogue and that’s it, because that’s all I want this movie to be.” The “Mr. DNA” cartoon as technical explanation seems exactly on the level that Spielberg was willing to care about, whereas the “frog DNA somehow made it possible for the dinosaurs to reproduce” thing is obviously way over the sci-fi head of this basically scienceless monster movie, and should have been excised completely, rather than being pared down to a worthless nub.

In retrospect, I think this sort of problem was the reason that Amistad was so unpleasant and ineffective. It’s not so much that it was sanctimonious – it was that it used the specifics of the script as a mere means of getting at the big clichés. Spielberg does his best work when he actually cares about getting the details across, when he thinks that what is happening in a given line or in a given moment could, in and of itself, be interesting to the audience. I think this is probably how he managed to make something worthy out of Schindler’s List – because he was unable to fall back on seeing any given event as being just a mechanism for creating some larger effect; he had to address each point as though it mattered. He certainly has the skill to do something strong with anything that matters to him.

In Jurassic Park, clearly what matters to him is the action sequences. The bit with the tyrannosaurus and the minivans is far and away the best thing in the movie, and holds up well. The bit with the kids being stalked around the kitchen by velociraptors is also pretty satisfying. The scenes where people are talking to each other are as boring to us as they must have been to Steven.

Let me however mention that despite Spielberg’s apparent disinterest, Bob Peck manages to eke some appeal out of the absolutely bone-thin non-character of Muldoon. I also feel warmly toward him because he was the lead in the excellent Jim Henson short The Soldier and Death.*

I ended up watching this again recently because I suddenly found myself with the opportunity to study the actual orchestral score to John Williams’ incidental music – something one generally cannot do. More on that later. I didn’t have a very clear memory of it, apart from the two main themes, which on first viewing, I remember, seemed overblown and unappealing, as though John Williams were making a clumsy attempt to sound like himself. (There’s also a very short motive signifying dino-danger – comparable to the “Jaws” motive in function, really – which is fairly effective though it’s never quite isolated clearly enough for the audience to really “learn” it.) Now, with benefit of the score, I can say that the two big melodies** are indeed rather weak as tunes, though thinking of them as solutions to specific expressive film-scoring problems has given me slightly more respect for them. I think that’s my review of the music as a whole – it doesn’t really add up to anything musically satisfying or even particularly coherent, but every problem posed by the movie is solved cleverly, expertly. Watching the movie with the score in hand makes it that much clearer to me just how many problems there are to solve in a movie like this. In a little interview I found online, the composer says

Jurassic Park has a 95-minute score. It pumps away all the time. It’s a rugged, noisy effort – a massive job of symphonic cartooning. You have to match the rhythmic gyrations of the dinosaurs and create these kind of funny ballets.

Like the man says, it’s a huge heap of disjointed cartoon music that plays as a very literal accompaniment to almost every shot. I suspect that my criticism of the directing might apply here as well; the best scene in the movie is unscored, and it seems like maybe the whole thing would have been scarier and more involving if the music had taken a less balletic, more dramatic approach, playing the content rather than the kinetics. But that’s obviously not how Spielberg saw it or wanted it. The movie as a whole is a ballet of cars falling down trees and dinosaurs jumping through ceiling panels – a ballet where half the time, people aren’t dancing much, and are instead reading lines out of a Michael Crichton novel. Oh well. We all managed to sit through it; it may be lame but it’s all perfectly cheery and inoffensive. There’s hardly anything left in the movie that makes me cringe. Hook will take me longer, I’m afraid. Amistad isn’t going to happen.

* Not to be confused with this.

** An acquaintance in college offered, for the climax of the hymn-like theme, the lyrics “We are dinosaurs, we are dinosaurs, we like to-o roar” and for the heroic main theme, the lyrics “We’re so amazing; we are made from DNA.” These are funny.

directed by Brian De Palma
screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen
after the novel by Stephen King (1974)

I’ve got a backlog of nearly a month’s movie-watching to address. Luckily, a lot of it was pretty trashy stuff, so I’m hoping to zip through it quickly.

Carrie is pretty trashy stuff. Actually, the word I want to use is “sleazy.” This is the word that has come to mind for every Brian De Palma movie I have seen. Granted, I’ve only seen a few, and they didn’t include Scarface or The Untouchables, his “good” movies. But having seen The Fury (1978) and Snake Eyes (1998) to completion, and, on TV, most of Body Double (1984), Mission to Mars (2000) and Femme Fatale (2002), and some of Mission: Impossible (1996)… and now, of course, Carrie… I can say with some confidence that the man’s oeuvre is, on average, totally sleazy.

Or wait, is it “trashy” after all? What is the difference between sleaze and trash? To me, “trash” is something that aims shamefully low because it doesn’t care, or doesn’t know any better, whereas “sleaze” is something that aims shamefully low because its value system is actually inverted. Someone is sleazy if he does something low knowingly, and likes it. Sleazy movies are the ones that proudly say “some fuddy-duddies out there might think that it’s not right for us to put this in a movie – well, sorry, grandma, ’cause that’s the way it is!” The archetypal example would be onscreen nudity that the filmmakers dare you to write off as prurient, which is, in fact, blatantly prurient. That’s the first shot of Carrie, and the rest of the movie lives up to it nicely.

People who defend Brian De Palma will say that in his movies he “plays” with exploitation, “refers” to it, and that part of that “play” is dipping down into it a bit, which, yes, is a little bit sleazy, but knowingly so. That’s some pretty darn generous benefit-of-the-doubt. When I watched The Fury, a real live proponent of De Palma was present, and afterwards said that the movie had clearly been intended as a parody-criticism of action movies. When asked about John Cassavetes COMPLETELY EXPLODING INTO GORE at the very end of the movie, he said that it had obviously been a joke because it had been so outrageously tasteless. “Come on,” he said, “he showed it from six different angles. That’s not moviemaking, and of course De Palma knows that. There’s no other explanation.” But I think there is: sleaze.

My main thought while watching Carrie was that the flamboyant “Hitchcock Rulez!!” visual style managed to render trash out of the images themselves. You can call it “over-the-top” if you want, but that suggests someone who has taken good aim and gone too far in an otherwise reasonable direction. Whereas I didn’t feel like this movie took particularly good aim to begin with. The odd compositions and split screens and excessive camera movement didn’t seem like they were motivated by any kind of respectable impulse – they were directorial quirks that didn’t serve the material – something that could never be said of Hitchcock. The movie just seemed like a collection of seriously junky details that the filmmakers happened to think were cool. The story as filmed, which is pretty sparse to begin with, just felt like an excuse to show a girl get blood poured all over her. Stephen King obviously had some sexual repression/awakening/coming-of-age schlock in mind when he wrote it, and De Palma was certainly happy to put that stuff in the movie, film-school style, but it seemed extremely clear what his real interest was.

Umberto Eco has a little essay where he says that pornographic films are characterized by the need to waste our time with incredibly boring stuff, so as to set off and heighten the porn itself. He sums up: “If you are in a movie theater, and the time it takes the protagonists to go from A to B is longer than what you would like it to be, then it means the film is a porno.” I would add the more obvious reason that pornography is full of mindless tedium: filmmakers know they need a certain amount of material to create the sense of involvement that comes from a full-length form – this goes for romance novels too – and because they really don’t care that much, they do it in the laziest possible way. This movie felt like porn – a lot of time-killing and then something sleazy. Or trashy.

And it sounded like porn, too – a really astoundingly bad score by Pino Donaggio.

That the high school in the movie is called “Bates High School” is a good indication of both De Palma’s self-indulgence and level of sophistication.

I intended going to talk about the specifics of the movie, and also about apocalyptic endings in general, but I seem to have spent most of my time here complaining that Brian De Palma is sleazy and/or trashy. Hey, did you know he had a daughter named Lolita with James Cameron’s ex-wife? Seriously.

I still want to see Scarface.

Given that I still have SpaceCamp to write about, I think this has been plenty.

Oh but of course first: the pre-movie book covers. From left to right: first edition, first paperback edition, crazy first UK edition.