Kelly Stitzel takes us home for the holidays with this week’s Soundtrack Saturday, and serves helpings of Rufus Wainwright, Bing Crosby, and Luna to go with the gloomy late-’90s ensemble drama The Myth of Fingerprints.
I love movies about dysfunctional families, though I’m not entirely sure why — while my family has its moments, we’re really not all that dysfunctional. At least I don’t think we are. But what better time of year than the holidays to indulge in films about families who need magazine racks for their issues? (I totally stole that line from Janeane Garofalo.)
I think every family gets a little crazy during the holiday season. The (mostly) forced family interaction and all the pressure to have fun can make even the most fun-loving, well-adjusted person a sniveling mess of frustration and unmet expectations.
I first saw The Myth of Fingerprints (1997) not long after it was released on video. I sought it out because a) I was a big ER fan and loved Noah Wyle, b) I was a big Julianne Moore fan (still am), and c) a good friend of mine who knew about my penchant for dysfunctional-family films told me I needed to watch it after he saw it in the theater.
I anxiously awaited its video release and rented it the weekend after it came out. I was blown away.
Named after “All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints,” a track on Paul Simon’s 1986 album Graceland, writer-directer Bart Freundlich’s feature-film debut tells the tale of an estranged, dysfunctional family reuniting for an uncomfortable and somewhat heartbreaking Thanksgiving.
Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats had the makings of a good movie. The journalist got hold of an interesting strange-but-true subject: the story of the First Earth Battalion, an Army/CIA initiative that, from the ’60s to the ’80s, explored “psychic warfare.” That is, training soldiers to read minds, walk through walls, and stare at hamsters and goats so long and hard they keeled over dead. I can see a documentary in the coming together of the New Age and the New World Order, or, fictionalized, a sci-fi epic. What we have, instead, is a just-for-the-hell-of-it military satire, so shapeless it just sort of flops around for an hour-and-a-half, oblivious to attention spans and entertainment value.
This is the feature directing debut of Grant Heslov, who, with George Clooney, co-wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay of Good Night, and Good Luck. Clooney co-stars as Lyn Cassady, whose eyebrow-raising tales of being the army’s prized goat whisperer attract flailing reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor). Wilton, whose life and career are in tatters after his wife dumped him for an editor, wants to be embedded in Iraq, but instead winds up entwined with Cassady, who claims to be a member of the “New Earth Army” that is training “warrior monks” to literally brainstorm America’s enemies. But the program’s founder, uber-hippie Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) has gone missing, and the whole agenda is floundering due to petty grievances between the New Earth Army and a rival camp run by rebel psychic Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), who is training his own elite squad. Hooper is wildly envious of Cassady, who is bent on finding his mentor, as Wilton ultimately finds himself. (more…)
Quick—what won Best Foreign Film at this year’s Academy Awards? If you recalled Departures, from Japan, take a bow. Like most foreign film winners, the movie was pretty much forgotten two minutes after host Hugh Jackman signed off. Where quality is concerned, Foreign Film ties with Best Song in the race to the bottom of the Oscar pile.
But sometimes the Academy gets it right. Not only did Costa-Gavras’ enthralling “Z” co-win Best Foreign Film in 1969 (along with an obscure Russian production of The Brothers Karamazov), it was also nominated for Best Picture, the first time that had happened. If it had somehow beaten Midnight Cowboy for Best Picture, I think even that film’s creative team would have understood. (What a year for winners—the only X-rated Best Picture, “Z,” John Wayne, and Goldie Hawn, too.) “Z” is one of those template movies, a fact-based political thriller that set the standard; you can see its influence from All the President’s Men (1976) to Syriana (2005). (more…)
The summer of 1977 gave us Star Wars, but later that year TV ads started cropping up for something else entirely — something involving UFOs, with a “first,” “second,” and “third kind” terminology I wasn’t familiar with. What the hell is this? I wondered. A documentary? Or one of those cheesy “Schick Sunn Classic Pictures” pseudo-documentaries about Noah’s Ark or Bigfoot?
It turned out that in the realm of 1977 sci-fi blockbusters, Star Wars was not alone.
What exactly is a “guilty pleasure”? I know it’s supposed to be a movie, TV show, or band that one really enjoys in spite of its dubious value. For whatever reason, even if the thing itself is lame, poorly conceived, or utterly wretched, there’s something about it that pleases or satisfies us, even as it’s eating away at our souls. I have a few such pleasures — the Meg Ryan alcoholism weepie When a Man Loves a Woman (1994), for example, which has been shown approximately 10,000 times on basic cable — but for the most part, I don’t feel guilty about the movies I love, even when no one else seems to appreciate them or even remember that they exist. Case in point: the 1984 Hollywood divorce classic Irreconcilable Differences. Yes, I called it a classic, and here’s why:
1. Drew Barrymore. Just a year and a half after becoming the breakout star of E.T. (um, Henry Thomas, anyone?), nine-year-old Drew was in demand. In her other film that came out in ‘84, Firestarter, she plays a creepy Carrie White Jr. who’s on the run from evil government agents. Irreconcilable Differences finds her playing a role that was, no doubt, all too familiar to her: a child whose life is ruined by her self-absorbed showbiz parents. A scene in which her character, left unattended at a New Year’s Eve party, chugs a glass of champagne and enjoys it just a tad too much is uncomfortably — and deliciously — prescient. Indeed, this movie may have actually saved Barrymore’s life: it taught her the definition of “emancipated minor,” which she herself became at age 15. (more…)
Not long ago, buying food was a much more involved process — people had relationships with their butchers and grocers, they had a sense of which foods were in season during different times of the year, and no one celebrated their birthday by going to On the Border and eating a burrito as big as their head. Thanks to a number of factors I won’t bore you with here (including anti-poverty initiatives, developments in food technology, and the ever-more-tangled American farm subsidies program), all that’s changed in the last 35 years; these days, for more than a few of us, getting food is as automatic and thoughtless as the folks who dreamed up The Jetsons imagined it would be. And one of the results, for far more than a few of us, is an obesity epidemic that has made tons of money for Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, not to mention pharmaceutical companies, Big & Tall franchise owners, and funeral homes.
We’ve reached the point where, as a culture, we no longer have a real relationship with our food. We haphazardly react to the conflicting streams of data we receive — eggs are good for you! Eggs are bad for you! Holy shit, there’s e. coli in the spinach! Get whole grains in your Wonder Bread without sacrificing that gummy white flavor! — without really developing an understanding of what it means. But here’s the thing: Food really isn’t any more complicated than it’s ever been. And thanks to a number of authors, including Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food), people have slowly started to take a more active role in what they eat. But book sales being what they are, a movie about the ugly underbelly of agribusiness is probably a more effective educational tool. Enter Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc., which wowed critics during its limited theatrical run earlier this year, and reaches DVD and Blu-ray today. (more…)
As anyone who takes spirituality seriously knows, it’s only natural for a person to experience ebbs and flows in his relationship with whatever higher power he believes in. But what if your career was founded on that relationship? What if you were famous for it? And what if…it ended? Badly, even?
That’s the premise at the heart of writer/director John Hindman’s The Answer Man, which stars Jeff Daniels as Arlen Faber, a sort of cranky cross between Neale Donald Walsch and J.D. Salinger whose 20-year-old book, God & Me, became the kind of hit that enables an author to take the rest of his career off — which is a good thing, because even though God & Me was inspired by a supposedly personal connection with the Almighty, Faber doesn’t have another book in him; he hasn’t felt anything but anger toward God, and contempt for his fellow human beings, in many years. It’s really a pretty interesting idea for a movie, which is why it’s such a pisser that Hindman decided to turn it into a thuddingly obvious romantic comedy.
The Answer Man is the kind of movie that tells you almost everything you need to know — about its characters, about its various plot arcs, and about the likelihood of tripping over the movie on Lifetime six months from now — in its first 15 minutes. And even worse, it tells you even before it tells you: Watching Lauren Graham in her opening scenes as an overprotective mother who feeds her son soy bacon and plays classical music as she drops him off at school in her Saab, you just know she’s going to rev the engine and crank up some rock & roll as soon as the kid is in the building. And lo, she does. Hindman makes it clear from the beginning that he doesn’t trust his audience to draw its own conclusions, drawing with the kind of broad, dumb strokes you’d expect from a Matthew McConaughey movie. How do we know the struggling bookstore owner played by Thumbsucker’s Lou Taylor Pucci is an alcoholic? Because he tells us with his very first lines. So on and so forth. (more…)
During its brief lifespan, Blu-ray has been helped along by the usual early adopters, but now that the format has beaten out HD DVD for next-gen dominance, if it’s really going to assert itself as a genuine successor for DVD, it’ll have to appeal to the market that really matters. I’m talking about film buffs — the folks who feel the sting of shame every time a movie is given the deluxe reissue treatment because, even though they’ve already paid to own it on at least one format, they can’t help wanting to own it all over again. If you’re one of those people, you’ve hated yourself a little for owning more than one copy of Spinal Tap, or Terminator 2, or The Wizard of Oz — and now you can add North by Northwest to the list, because as part of its 50th birthday celebration, Warners is rolling out a newly remastered version of the Hitchcock classic to replace the one it released less than a decade ago.
And you know what? From where I’m sitting, it’s actually worth buying again — at least on Blu-ray, where Northwest is the first of Hitchcock’s films to receive the hi-def upgrade. Warner Bros., which has been busily schooling its competitors with lovingly assembled Blu-ray transfers for months, has come close to outdoing itself here; I think only its Wizard of Oz reissue is better, and that’s at least partly due to the fact that the Oz Blu-ray comes in a giant box with reams of bonus material and a watch my daughter is wearing right now. (more…)
Can you remember 1992? I certainly can, and what I remember is that trash TV — and to some extent, even the mainstream media — was filled with stories about Kurt Cobain and his bride, Courtney Love. They had been married in Hawaii in February of that year, and already there were lurid tales of addiction, arrest, and marital discord. In the midst of it all a daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, was born in August.
A lot of the stories questioned Cobain’s “health,” by which they meant drug addiction, but there were also rumors that Nirvana might be breaking up. It didn’t help things when the band decided not to undertake another U.S. tour to promote their major label debut, Nevermind, instead opting for select dates here and there. The reason given at the time was “exhaustion,” and everyone knew, or thought they knew, what that meant.
The band’s answer to all the rumors came at England’s legendary Reading Festival on August 30, 1992. Nirvana had played Reading the previous year, but at that time, they were halfway down the bill. When they returned in 1992, it was as the headliners. That night Nirvana played what Kerrang magazine called one #1 of the “100 Gigs That Shook the World,” and Nirvana fans voted the show “Nirvana’s #1 Greatest Moment” in a NME poll. (more…)
So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying to stick to a Halloween-ish theme with this month’s movies: we’ve had teenage serial killers, an evil automobile, vampires, and now witches. I hope you’ve enjoyed the themed posts, because they’re going to continue through the holidays. I promise, though, not to be too obvious in my choices. In fact I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the Thanksgiving-themed films I’ve chosen for November. But enough about the future — let’s talk about this post.
Now, I didn’t originally set out to bookend October’s posts with mid-’90s Neve Campbell/Skeet Ulrich movies, but that’s how it turned out — I watched The Craft (1996) on cable a few weeks ago and just thought it’d be fun to write about.
The first time I saw this movie was with my dad. Yeah, you read that correctly. He really likes The Craft, which kind of surprised me at first, but this is the man who told me, after reading my post on Adventures in Babysitting, that Elisabeth Shue is one of his “ultimate hotties.” So nothing he tells me should surprise me. (Love you, Dad.)
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