A strange calling card

The following post contains spoilers about Alex Ross Perry's The Color Wheel. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

I tried really hard to find out online whether Alex Ross Perry has a sister. Ultimately, I failed.

But I sure hope he doesn't, because The Color Wheel is a really weird way to introduce yourself to the world.

Since I can't be sure you've heeded my spoiler warning, I'll prattle on a bit further before getting to my point.

This was not technically the first introduction of the former Kim's Video clerk to the world, as The Color Wheel is actually his second feature, the first being something I'd never even heard of called Impolex. For the sake of simplicity, let's say that movie I'd never heard of doesn't exist.

Pretty bold, then, to make your first movie about brother-sister incest.

To say The Color Wheel is about that is not really accurate, as it doesn't happen until the final ten minutes. Of course, once you've seen it all the way through, you can't help thinking that this is the movie's theme, and the last ten minutes just bring to a culmination something that had been building the whole time, only you didn't notice it.

Speaking of building up to things, you'd figured you'd build to the movie about brother-sister incest, not go to it right out of the gate.

For those of you who haven't seen this movie but didn't care about having it spoiled, I'll tell you a little bit about it. Although it was made in 2011, it's got the grainy, DIY quality of an early 1990s indie movie, complete with the black and white and the use of supporting actors who were actors in name only. I won't say the filmmaking itself is amateurish, as there are some nice long takes and details in the writing that I thought were quite good. I will say that Perry has refined his craft over the years in films like Listen Up Phillip, Queen of Earth and Golden Exits. (In fact, that's the entire Perry filmography to date, though Her Smell is set to debut next month.)

The story concerns a mid-20s brother who has agreed to go on a road trip to help his black sheep sister (also mid-20s) move her stuff out of the house of her most recent ex, a university professor she was sleeping with. There's not much more to the story than that, though they do attend a party thrown by his sister's frenemy from childhood. Carlen Altman plays the sister and Perry himself plays the brother.

Oh, and in the last ten minutes, while lying on the couch together in increasingly suggestive proximity, they start making out, and it's implied that they have sex.

Huh?

I knew something oddball was going to occur in the last ten minutes because the film's reputation preceded it, and I was fairly sure this was what it would be, though my second bet was on a random murder occurring if it wasn't incest. Well, it was incest. And I was surprised even though I guessed it, just because that type of thing usually takes you by surprise. It's just so taboo that you only include it in a movie as a sign that the characters are really damaged and this is what they've been reduced to.

Except I don't really think that JR and Colin are all that damaged. They've got tendencies toward narcissism, sure, and are a bit insufferable. A couple reviews quoted on Wikipedia characterize them as "unpleasant." Weirdly, Colin is also a bit racist (another randomly provocative thing for Perry to include in his "first" (not really his first) film). But damaged? No more than any of us.

Yet there they are, making out, having the type of sex that could result in severely deformed offspring, like it was nothing.

I'm not even actually being critical of it, because I did find it interesting. It's about a five-minute take of mostly her talking that ends in this, which would be impressive in terms of the staging if nothing else. I just find it a very strange thing to include in the film you hope will get you noticed, because it could get you noticed for all the wrong reasons.

And really skeeve out your sister if you have one.

Then again, this kind of thing is not actually unprecedented. Ever heard of a guy named David O. Russell? His first feature was called Spanking the Monkey, and it ends with an act of incest between a mother and a son. And I know David O. Russell has, or at least had, a mother.

I suppose the argument could be made that it's better to start with the brother-sister incest movie than to make it only once you've gotten a certain measure of creative control. (Many indie directors do have creative control of their minuscule-budgeted films, but you know what I mean.) If you build up to it, I suppose that could be interpreted as you finally getting to make your passion project after cutting your teeth on things that only paid the bills. Better maybe to toss off your incest movie randomly. Perry hasn't returned to that topic in his films, anyway.

I guess it did get Perry the right kind of attention, because like Russell, he has been regularly releasing films every couple years since The Color Wheel. Though maybe the disastrous 2015 pairing of Accidental Love, which was directed under a pseudonym, and Joy finally knocked Russell off that pace, because I don't see anything for him in the pipeline.

Posts like this, I suppose, demonstrate how much bravery it takes for an artist to make something truly provocative. I and at least half the people who saw The Color Wheel wondered if Alex Ross Perry was a sister fucker. He's probably not, but to his credit, he's not really worried about people thinking he is. If he were an actual sister fucker, he'd probably keep that a secret, just as if he were an actual racist he probably wouldn't make a movie in which a character played by him is a racist.

You do write what you know, though, so on some level, this is something Perry "knows" -- even if it's being transmogrified in order to appear in this form.

I've thought about writing stories about provocative topics, but shied away from them because I thought they revealed something about me that I didn't want revealed -- something shameful. A true artist does not feel the shame that would prevent them from sharing their art with the world, and so I guess, at least in that sense if not others, Perry is a true artist.

David O. Russell through a Stephen Greene filter

When a director walks away from a movie mid-production -- in other words, after some of the filming has been completed -- you expect his or her mark to actually appear on the movie.

That makes Accidental Love even more of a head scratcher than it already is.

David O. Russell was making this movie as long ago as 2008, under the title Nailed -- which, let's be honest, was probably never going to last. (The new title, though, is a blatant example of this trend.) He actually co-wrote it with Kristin Gore, Al's daughter. It was a movie those of us who followed Russell's career always knew about, and distantly wondered when or if it would ever materialize.

Then in the past six months or so we learned that it did indeed still exist, but that the production kept on getting stopped because of financial difficulties, and Russell actually left the project years ago. In fact, he has so distanced himself from it that it is being directed by Alan Smithee -- though Alan Smithee happens to be going by the name Stephen Greene in this case. Russell's name does not appear anywhere in the credits, and indeed, Stephen Greene is listed as its director. The movie was completed without him and dumped earlier this year as more or less straight-to-video -- VOD, with a limited theatrical release a month later.

Russell enthusiasts such as myself were undeniably curious about it, though. If it had attracted him in the first place, and if he had worked on it for a while, there had to be interesting things about it, right?

No, there aren't. Not really even one. In fact, I considered giving it the lowest star rating possible on Letterboxd, a half star, before ultimately deciding it wasn't that level of an abomination and generously awarding it one star.

But what's weird about it is how little there is of Russell in it. Not very much in the subject matter, but even less in the production values.

If you aren't familiar with the story, its the tale of a small-town Indiana girl (Jessica Biel) who works as one of those rollerskating waitresses at a diner, and gets a nail from a nail gun embedded in her head. (How is not important, but it's one of the movie's least credible elements.) Because she doesn't have health insurance, surgeons at the local hospital refuse to remove the nail, as it's not considered life-threatening at the moment, and in the short term only figures to scramble her personality a bit. Anyway, Biel's character sees an ad on TV for her local freshman congressman (Jake Gyllenhaal) in which he extends an open offer to his constituents to come to Washington so he can help them with their problems. Biel does just that, trying to get the congressman to pass health legislation that allows coverage for catastrophic injuries to the uninsured. In the meantime, they fall for each other.

Although it certainly sounds like a bit of a tough sell, it's not outrageous subject matter for a movie. What's outrageous is the tone and the way the actors go so over-the-top in their performances -- an obvious consequence of the lack of a strong directorial hand.

In considering the likelihood of this material as something Russell would be interested in, we have to remember that at the time he started working on it, he was coming off his broadest and most ridiculous film, I Heart Huckabees. Considering Accidental Love as a follow-up to Huckabees, the over-the-top performances and absurdist tone make a bit more sense. And after I so loathed Huckabees, I wouldn't have been surprised at anything Russell did next.

But what's shocking about Accidental Love is how shoddy it looks. I mean, kooky as it was (and not in a good way), Huckabees at least had good production values. This movie, on the other hand, is just awful looking. The lighting is the thing you notice the most. It's terrible in almost every scene. Then you notice the little things, like the fact that the handheld camera is distracting (especially since it isn't being used for any particular purpose) and that it is failing at the most basic level to do things like place its subjects in the middle of the frame. The editing is also terrible, but that's something that obviously would have taken place after Russell was no longer with the project.

I could understand some scenes looking terrible because obviously they were directed by somebody else (or maybe nobody), but what about the scenes Russell did direct? Not having much money cannot alone be an explanation for the film's fundamental inability to look appealing. Yet the film is consistent in its terrible appearance, meaning that even the Russell scenes looked like shit.

It did almost seem like the film was being shown through some kind of terrible filter, a filter that made even Russell's scenes look yellow and washed out, a filter that made every shot look like it was lit by someone holding a desk lamp just above the heads of the actors.

I guess we can at least credit Russell with having the good sense to recognize this as a disaster and do everything within his contractual power to disavow it as the product of his own creative impulses. But the terribleness of Accidental Love can't all be attributed to some other person taking the job he started and finishing it on the cheap. He was the one who set the ball rolling on this path to oblivion, and just because he jumped out if its way doesn't mean he's in the clear.

Just add another episode in the "David O. Russell is difficult" file. At least he's proven his smarter instincts ultimately prevailed in movies like Silver Linings Playbook (big time) and American Hustle (to a lesser extent). And he'll get his next crack at audiences this Christmas with another Jennifer Lawrence starrer, a drama this time, called Joy.

But those awful instincts are still in there, somewhere, and I'm betting we'll get at least one more Accidental Love from Russell before he yells "Cut!" for the last time.

An awards season movie, at last

One of the things I always loved in LA was seeing which movie was going to appear on the billboard closest to my house. I kind of loved the idea of a movie being sold specifically to me, to my neighborhood. The resulting sense of ownership actually made me more interested in seeing the film, in some cases.

Now that the Green party in Melbourne has finally turned over the advertising space that it was using for a full two months after the most recent election, I've got a movie billboard in my neighborhood here, too. Something about this one feels a bit more intimate, though. Sure, it's also off a main road, like the one in LA. But it's turned inward, toward the neighborhood, so that only those coming from within the neighborhood to the main road can really get a good look at it. As there are a lot fewer movie billboards in Australia in general, it feels all the more special.

Adding one degree of specialness: It signals that an end-of-year movie getting substantial awards buzz is finally being released in Australia.

Oh, we're getting your Hunger Gameses and your Anchormen and your Hobbits on time -- Hobbits two weeks late, but that's hardly worth quibbling over. It's the movies garnering all the Oscar talk that are really delayed, as I have written about a couple times before.

But not American Hustle. American Hustle is like Gravity in that it came out one day before its release in the U.S. Actually, it came out eight days before its wide release, which I believe is your tomorrow (though my today). Throw in the time change and those lead times stretch out to two and nine days, respectively.

Breathing a tremendous sigh of relief, I saw American Hustle this past Monday, and for only $6 at that.

Well, it won't be getting any year-end awards from me, though I appear to be the only one, assuming its 89 on Metacritic is more than just hot air.

I did like David O. Russell's latest, but it's dueling The Fighter for his second-worst film to date. The Fighter is another pretty good to very good movie, which tells you something about Russell's career. He's had only one turd, that being I Heart Huckabees. Everything else has been gold, up to and including last year's Silver Linings Playbook, which I rated as my third favorite movie of the year.

This one does a lot of things. Did you think I was going to say "does a lot of things right"? It does, but it's more accurate to just say that it does a lot of things. American Hustle is an overload of ideas, tones and quirky characters. I'd say that it has attention deficit disorder if it weren't such a cliched way to discuss the all-over-the-placeness of a movie.

The parts that are good are really good. The opening scene, in which we witness what goes into Christian Bale's elaborate combover, had me ready to immediately thrust the movie into contention as one of my favorites of the year. It does get some other big laughs, too.

But "sprawling" is too tame a word for this movie, and it can rarely find its center. I've read reviews in which it has been called a variety hour, and that's a good way of describing what you're getting here. Russell is certainly going for that, but he wants to have it both ways -- he wants the lighter moments of Goodfellas as well as some of its darker moments (though certainly not as dark). (If you're wondering about the Goodfellas comparisons, they're inescapable, most notably in the use of voiceover and the wall-to-wall contemporaneous pop music soundtrack.)

There's no doubt I was entertained by this movie, but I was also perplexed. It's the ultimate spaghetti-against-the-wall 70s movie romantic comedy heist movie drama. With bad hair.

However, just seeing this movie gave me a certain delight. For months now I have been feeling behind the U.S. in terms of new movies, and the feeling has only become more acute with the annual onslaught of holiday prestige pictures. At least here's one I wouldn't have to wait until February to see.

The movie I saw last Monday -- The Spectacular Now -- was released back in August in the U.S. But this week, it handed off the baton to something that hadn't even been released everywhere in the very country whose name appears in its title.

One step forward, two steps back ... and those two steps are Drinking Buddies and Short Term 12, next in my sights upon finally getting their release next week.

You can't have everything, I guess. Unless you're Russell in American Hustle, and then I guess you can.

A silver lining

The surest way to jinx your plans? Give voice to them.

In Wednesday's post, I announced my likelihood of being able to attend a 1:50 3D showing of Life of Pi. Then I didn't make it in time.

But really, is it a jinx if something was simply never realistic in the first place? First off, I was getting off work at 1:30, and you never leave at the exact minute you're supposed to clock out. Secondly, the drive to the theater would have taken the better part of 15 minutes even in normal traffic. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving is most decidedly not normal traffic, and you should probably at least double your expected travel times. But even if it had taken only slightly longer than normal to drive there, there's still a parking garage you have to navigate, and a walk of three minutes or so to the theater, even if you are moving quickly. Never mind the fact that a large popcorn was going to be my lunch, and there's always at least one person ahead of you in the snack bar line.

Fortunately, it wasn't one of those situations where I was close enough to even chance it, making me commit a lot of time and energy to a fool's errand. At 1:48, when I was still more than a mile from the theater, I pulled over and jumped on my phone's web browser to figure out other options. I knew there were no more Pi showings that were at a convenient time, so now I was looking for something else.

And so, the silver lining to missing Life of Pi? Silver Linings Playbook.

Which was playing at 2:35 in downtown Culver City, about three miles from the theater where I meant to see Pi. 

I love the work of director David O. Russell, but until now, that had been based primarily on the strength of three movies that were all released in the 1990s: Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings. I hated I Heart Huckabees and ended up thinking The Fighter was good but not great.

Suffice it to say that Silver Linings Playbook had me wondering if it might rank up there with his two masterpieces, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings.

The interesting thing about Russell as a filmmaker isn't that he consistently breaks new ground or blows your mind with some kind of unique technique. After his debut, which you could say was pretty unusual as it dealt with mother-son incest and featured a euphemism for masturbation as its title, I'd argue that Russell has mostly just been giving us really fresh takes on genres we're familiar with. Flirting with Disaster was a fresh take on a screwball comedy, while Three Kings was a fresh take on the war movie (albeit with some genuinely innovative camera and narrative techniques). Has there been a genre that's been more worked over throughout the history of cinema than the boxing movie? Yet most people felt that The Fighter was a really fresh take on that genre.

You could say that the only time Russell really gets himself into trouble is when he tries to indulge his more off-the-wall impulses. Enter I Heart Huckabees, a disaster that was much more than flirted with. A satire about commercialism featuring a pair of existential detectives, Huckabees was a misstep from minute one. It may be no coincidence that this shoot featured the short-fused director's most famous blow-up, a verbal scrum with Lily Tomlin that developed a life of its own on the internet. (He also reportedly nearly or actually came to blows with George Clooney on Three Kings, though that didn't hamper the brilliance of that film one bit.)

In fact, I considered calling this post (and wouldn't it have been clever) "Burning Bridges Playbook," because I realized that the director rarely works with the same actor twice. But then I recalled that not only was Huckabees his second (and obviously last) collaboration with Tomlin, after Flirting with Disaster, but Mark Wahlberg has worked with him three times: Three Kings, Huckabees and The Fighter. The last two were the important ones for this discussion, because Wahlberg continued on with him even after the famous Tomlin incident and his weakest film on a relatively short resume.

Besides, I didn't want to concentrate on the negative in a post about a film I liked as much as I liked this one.

Silver Linings Playbook finds Russell returning again to his success with reinvigorated genre films. In fact, as I was watching this movie, I was reminded most of last year's Crazy, Stupid, Love. Like that film, Playbook reminds us that a romantic comedy can really stick with you just by being cast and written well. And it doesn't even need to do anything particularly unconventional.

The difference is that Russell is a much better (or at least more established) filmmaker than Crazy's Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, and he brings elements of his best work into elevating his own script for Playbook. Watching the film, I was also reminded how well the director does chaotic scenes with multiple people arguing, which have been prominent components of especially Disaster and The Fighter. And the arguers have been cast perfectly here. Bradley Cooper won't get an Oscar nomination, but should -- Robert DeNiro and Jennifer Lawrence probably will, and Lawrence might even win. They're all that good. Heck, even Chris Tucker is really good in a small part. Cooper and Lawrence also succeed at something you rarely see these days -- a smoldering, undeniable chemistry.

But I have to wonder if part of what makes Silver Linings Playbook so satisfying is that it may be Russell's most personal film. At least in terms of what we've already discussed about him. A guy with bipolar disorder given to fits of rage and occasional violence? That could probably describe Russell himself just as well as it could describe Cooper's Pat Solitano. Which means Russell is uniquely qualified to dramatize that fugue that takes over during a panic attack, where sounds fade to the background and a ringing of the ears surfaces to the front.

What's amazing is that Russell tackles such serious issues and gives us several scenes that are intense to the point of disturbing, while still keeping the movie essentially light and "feel good" (in the best sense of that phrase).

Only the guy who brought us Spanking the Monkey, Flirting with Disaster and Three Kings, right?

Here's hoping that the director has found his own silver lining in a sometimes troubled career, and the plays he draws up in the future will be more masterpieces like this one.