Joshua Malbin

Jason Reitman was asked at a WGA event to give the aspiring writers in the audience something to keep them going through their darkest hours.

He said that he had hit a wall after working on Up In The Air for five years (this was part of a no-longer-subtle series of digs at writer Sheldon Turner, with whom he’s been forced to share credit and stage time by a WGA arbitration panel). He ran into Judd Apatow at the Santa Barbara Film Festival and asked him for advice.

Apatow said, “Write the ending. Because, then, theoretically, you’re done.”

And that was how Reitman did it (though pace Apatow he wasn’t immediately done.) He figured out the ending, and that let him go back and charge through things like the 20-page wedding scene. He knew where he had to go.

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We live in a Golden Age of sports revisionism movies. 2008 brought Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck’s Sugar, a tender hymn to washouts, and Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler, the athlete as sex worker, a body for sale. 2009 brought Wrestler writer Robert Siegel’s Big Fan (which the former Onion writer–who claims responsibility for the ‘Area Man’ trope–wrote and directed), which finds the serious fan on a perpetual seesaw of striving and emasculation. Some spoilers after the jump.

(continue reading…)

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In a gesture towards a clean slate, a fresh start, and a healthy digestive reaction to the upcoming bowl of black-eyed peas, here are four quick sketches for blog posts that I started to draft but never completed. Fly free, little half-born angels.

• Great Daves of the 90’s. I read Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer challenge, and David Foster Wallace’s twisting, reflexive, ouroborean self-consciousness took me back to the early 90’s. The middle year of my college career was marked by emerging consciousness of the fictions involved in pronouncements about Generation X, and the same kinds of impossibility around newness and protest that Kurt Cobain seemed to reel from in his final famous years. When Dave Eggers (whose Might magazine I had enjoyed) published A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, its hysterically self-aware style felt immediately familiar, and I put off reading it until a few years ago, when I devoured it quickly, enjoyably, and without surprise. Wallace, however, resonates with the maddening headaches of that young consciousness that everything you think is already always being said, programmed by a machine you may operate but never master. But by approaching these struggles through the character of Don Gately, a recovering alcoholic, and showing us his experience grappling with the seemingly empty but vitally true dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wallace validated this familiar and vertiginous self-reflexivity while challenging and expanding it, using a feature of my upper-middle-class overeducated habits of mind to create sympathy for a broken, giant ex-con. Also noted: while I was obsessing over the meanings and traps of “Generation X” I bought a Malcolm X hat (purple X on white baseball cap) and Sharpied “Gen-” in front of the X, and added “Generation Next” to the back, a gesture which in retrospect was a bizarre fashion error.
• Where The Wild Things Are. Where The Fantastic Mr. Fox presented a fetishization of material goods behind its trumpeted wildness, the Jonzes’ Eggers’s Sendak’s wild things are figurines in staging a Oedipal passage to adulthood. Lauren Ambrose’s monster KJ is a cool babysitter, providing a mother-figure who is also a safe object for the early stirrings of sexual desire (she swallows Max whole to protect him at one point, keeping him safe in a sticky cavernous interior). The movie’s exploration of childhood sets sail from the therapist’s couch, turning Max’s inchoate childhood rages (very well represented) into figures with names before the journey home — and into healthy adulthood — can start. A delightful adaptation of a childhood story to a therapy generation, Where The Wild Things Are was good but both HJ and I wished it wasn’t the definitive take. We wanted the magnificent sets and costumes put in the hands of two or three more writers, so they could play out their own versions of WTWTA against their own idiosyncracies.
• Interzone. At the time, the Los Angeles City Council was considering the prohibition of medical marijuana dispensaries within 1,000 feet of any residence. More typically, restricted uses will be prohibited close to schools, churches, parks and playgrounds–y’know, because the children are the future– but someone went and threw residences in there as well, leaving about two or three industrial districts where dispensaries could fill prescriptions. My proposal was for the creation of an L.A. Interzone, a la the portrayal of Tunis (?) in Naked Lunch, where head shops, dispensaries, sex offenders and strip clubs could all profitably locate.
• Road Not Taken. I noticed that the people running to replace Paul Krekorian in the special election for California’s 43rd assembly district were all people that I knew and had come up with in L.A. politics. When I started working in City Hall I toyed with the idea of one day running for office, and if I had, it would be that election today. I made the choice not to seek elective office a long time before I got out of local politics entirely, but if I hadn’t, I could be out there today. Mutatis mutandis, I would have stacked up well. They’re a talented and friendly lot, and it should be an interesting race, but the Assembly today is no place for someone who wants to make a difference in California politics, sadly.

There. No more ideas! I’ll have to go see a movie or something. Big Josh, you back yet?

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Earlier this week, with the assistance of the gentleman from the last post, HJ and I rode into the Grand Canyon on the backs of mules. It’s neither entirely wrong nor entirely right to call it more luxurious than hiking the canyon, but relieved of watching your footfalls, you certainly have a much better chance to watch the landscape change than do the hikers.

And change it does. From the piñon forest at the top, you descend through full-on deserts and semi-arid scrub.The Colorado River at the canyon’s bottom leads through varied environments, from red rocks naked and Martian to lush riparian habitats. The uncanny effect of moving vertically through these zones*, finding them nested one right atop the other, put me in mind of Gus van Sant’s 2002 film Gerry, in which Casey Affleck and Matt Damon do little else but go for a walk, get lost, and nearly both die. One of the most unsettling elements of the film is that though the two men remain on foot the entire time, the location shifts dramatically over the course of their hundred minutes, from sand dunes to salt flats, from Utah to Jordan to Argentina. The shifts aren’t subtle, visually, but they go unremarked upon; the effect amplifies the characters’ dangerous inattention to their path,  and heightens the feeling that they’ve come unmoored from their world and their lives.

the landscape changes

This, in turn, put me in mind of another movie in which a critical element changes without comment (save, perhaps, the film’s title):

Luis Bunuel’s That Obscure Object of Desire gives us a sexual battle between a couple that is really a triangle: Mathieu must content with the temperamental nature of his elusive Conchita, made more so by her portrayal by the Betty-and-Veronica pairing of Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina. As with the landscape in Gerry, the character of Conchita appears played by two different actresses with neither comment nor easily comprehensible logic.

This episode of Things That Look Like Other Things has been brought to you by things that do not look like themselves.

Extra credit, Gerry: “Nothing Happens To No One, The Death Trilogy of Gus Van Sant” by Holly Myers at n+1

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Beyond their compatible tones and themes, though, Salinger’s and Anderson’s work display a similar approach to characterization—a kind of ornamental realism that suggests Gustave Flaubert’s journalistic romanticism, with its obsessive worrying over the rightness of each word and phrase, only updated and pushed to the brink of caricature, sometimes beyond. The style is rooted in the notion that character can be signified, revealed, perhaps even distilled, through observable details.

–Matt Zoller Seitz, The Substance of Style Pt 4

Margot Tenenbaum’s fur coat shimmies in slow-motion as she gets off a bus, recalling Franny Glass’s sheared-raccoon coat. Anderson’s objective correlatives evoke nostalgia for a bourgeois childhood as enveloping as a hot bubble bath. He personifies things and objectifies people, aiming always for a pleasantly underwhelming sumptuousness. So it’s hard not to see the lovingly manufactured puppets in The Fantastic Mr. Fox as the epitome of this process.

The story Anderson tells reinforces this sense of unecstatic pleasure rooted in precision and thinginess. “I’m a wild animal,” protests George Clooney’s fox at every turn, but the joys of Mr. Fox aren’t rooted in wildness at all. For the characters, pleasure comes via real estate, dinner parties, a supermarket smorgasborg laid out like a gridded city, and, somewhere in there, the wild-but-careful thieveries and acts of cunning. For the audience, the pleasure is in the superfine textures of the characters and their world: ornamental realism, a celebration of the finer things. These are the teddy bears that rich children miss.

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Below the jump, movies from other people’s Best of the Decade lists that I have not seen and would like to see. To be edited repeatedly. This includes neither films I have already seen, nor films I do not wish to see.

I’m quite pleased that I have yet to find a list that includes Crash.

Richard Brody, The New Yorker

• In Praise of Love
• The Darjeeling Limited – I didn’t like The Life Aquatic very much, and Darjeeling got mixed reviews. Still, people I respect loved it deeply, and after Matt Zoller Seitz’s five-part video essay on Wes Anderson, I’m compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt, or at least the benefit of importance.
• The World
• Mooladé

Paste Magazine

• Iraq in Fragments
• L’Enfant or The Son
• Ratatouille – HJ gets easily squicked by rodents, so I missed this one in theatres.
• O Brother Where Art Thou?
• Dogville – Mixed feelings here — The Idiots is the only Lars von Trier film I can really get behind, because the staged idiocy of the main characters so perfectly recapitulates the Dogme 95 project. Reviewers disagree on whether Dogville’s critique of America is shock-the-squares or incisive. I suppose I could see for myself.
• Syndromes and a Century
• Half Nelson

Time Out New York

• Silent Light
• Trouble Every Day and Friday Night
  
• Inland Empire
• Kings and Queen or A Christmas Tale
• Dogville
• Man Push Cart
  

AV Club

• Oldboy – I think it was on a couple of the previous lists, and it just wore me down. At least the hammer scene.
• United 93
• L’Enfant
• The New World – this is another one where I’ve heard both good and horrific things, but the experience of watching Malick is so luscious and unlike anyone else that I’m persuaded to give it a try.

AV Club isn’t as outer-limits as the other three–I think I’d seen more than 40 of their top 50. And they got #1 right, as did…

The Auteurs

• Let the Right One In
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
• O Brother Where Art Thou? Especially considering that its source movie is one of my all-time favorites.

Preview of Coming Attractions: my own movie of the decade was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Nothing else comes close.

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I finally got around to watching Watchmen, and as expected it was terrible. I expected to hate the changed ending, though, and I didn’t. It was a reasonable kludge to deal with the fact that Moore’s plot point of faking an alien invasion depended on a bunch of the intertextual insertions that couldn’t be reproduced in the movie, especially the pirate comics.

It was bizarre how needlessly graphic the violence was, though, and by god it was sloooooooow. Frankly the movie version needed to be far less faithful to the graphic novel, which reenacted and twisted the history of Golden and Silver Age comics. That history took forever on screen and probably made no sense to most viewers. Far better would have been to retain the core premise—villain wins in the end because he is right—and figure out some way to send up the recent history of comic-book-based movies.

Plus the acting was mostly crap.

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In honor of Guy Fawkes Day, I present my biggest problem with the ill-fated Alan Moore film adaptation V for Vendetta:

For starters, the titular terrorist V wears a Guy Fawkes mask through the whole movie. On the page, the frozen smile of the mask is iconic and haunting, depersonalizing the revolutionary ardor of V into a free-floating cloud of question and dissent that gets inside Evey and fuels her transformation. On the screen, however, it’s as if Natalie Portman has to fight, love, and hide alongside King Friday from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood for two hours. He doesn’t really give a lot back, and he’s a bad kisser.

The rest of the review can be found at the Sky K Studios Movie Blog, where I posted for a few years under the name “Phoebe Evergreen.” I may put up a couple other greatest hits as a substitute for writing new things.

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I’ve been watching the video for Miles Fisher’s cover of Talking Heads’ 1983 song This Must Be The Place:

In the video, Fisher plays Patrick Bateman and restages several scenes from American Psycho. (Fisher also does a mean Tom Cruise and appeared as Paul Kinsey’s Princeton classmate and dope dealer in Mad Men.) The prostitute sequence in American Psycho was originally set to Phil Collins’ Sussudio (1985); I don’t think Fisher’s use of American Psycho to hold his song is arbitrary.

Home is where I want to be
Pick me up and turn me round
I feel numb – born with a weak heart
I guess I must be having fun

I saw American Psycho in the theatre in 2000, when it came out. It resonated with me deeply, not so much for the yuppie satire or the narratively suspect rampage of misogynistic violence, but for this seeming truth: this was the story of a man who hates his job. His life, really, but it’s life in an all-encompassing job, a job of a life.

To me, the song, sung from alienation yearning towards warm oblivion, feels exactly like what Bateman’s character seemed to me to feel. Who do I have to murder to get fired around here?

Miles Fisher EP for free download at Amie Street. The other songs are good too.

UPDATE: I should note that I found this via Jim Emerson, who has other connections to make.

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Those of you who show up for the comic book reviews, political pique and local electoral guidance may be surprised to learn that the single biggest driver of websurfers to joshuamalbin.com is the thirst to know vampire dental anatomy. Go ahead, search it and see where you land.

In that spirit, we are proud to present friend of the blog Jake Fleisher — who, as discussed previously, believes the camera favors incisor fangs over canines — in “Intercourse With A Vampire”, produced for atom.com.

Intercourse With A Vampire, Episode 1

Happy Halloween an all that. More Fleisher flicks here.

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