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.

Boxing as metaphor

I'm not a big fan of boxing movies.

I'm not a big fan of sports movies in general, which is a paradox that deserves fuller consideration at some point. See, I am a big sports fan. I just don't particularly like the portrayal of sports in movies, for reasons I won't get into right now.

What I will get into, today, is boxing movies, and how I'm not a big fan of them. If you want to know just how not-a-big-fan of boxing movies I am, I'll tell you that my favorite boxing movie is Rocky III. Yes, that means I like it more than Raging Bull. (That sound you hear is the sound of several people no longer following my blog. I do owe Raging Bull another viewing, and it's certainly more than merely a boxing movie.) It would also mean I like it more than the original Rocky, but that's because I haven't seen the original Rocky. That tells you a little something about my feeling toward the boxing genre in general. I love Rocky III because I watched it about ten times when I was a kid, and I think we disavow our childhood movie loves at the peril of the integrity of our souls.

So anyway, I'm not going to be first in line when Warrior comes out this weekend.

But I want to use Warrior as a jumping off point to consider boxing movies in general. I don't even have a prediction about whether Warrior will be good or bad, because I haven't seen more than a short trailer for it, and I just don't gravitate toward that type of movie in general.

But a lot of people do, and I think this is strange, because not a lot of people are really boxing fans.

Your experience may be different than mine, but I only know two people who I consider to be big boxing fans. Your average sports fan doesn't really like boxing, and your average non-sports fan doesn't really like boxing. Some people must really like boxing because they used to sell those fights on Saturday nights for big bucks on Pay-Per-View, but few people I knew would ever pony up the bucks.

I think boxing used to have more fans when it had bigger names. Boxing is a bit like tennis and golf, in the sense that there's currently a star outage at the highest level of the game. As I type this, for example, I could not even tell you who's the current heavyweight champion of the world. I used to know this automatically when it was Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield or (very briefly) Buster Douglas. Now, I could only guess, and part of the problem is that the belt is potentially divided between three people, so it's very rare anymore that there is one unified champion. (If I'm reading this correctly on wikipedia, the belts are almost unified right now under Wladimir Klitschko, but he is the WBA "super champion" while another guy named Alexander Povetkin is the WBA "regular champion." It's all very confusing. And yes, I'm realizing right now that we Americans probably stopped knowing who the boxing champion was when it stopped being an American.)

Anyway, the point is, there are a disproportionate number of boxing movies made, considering the number of boxing fans out there. This must mean that people who don't really care for boxing do care for boxing movies.

Part of this is that there is something classic about boxing as a sport. It's the kind of sport that's romanticized in the annals of sportswriting history. I tend to imagine that the same grizzled sportswriters who spent their careers waxing poetic about horse racing (another not-especially-popular sport) would also wax poetic about boxing. These theoretical sportswriters all lived in the 1920s, wore a rumpled gray fedora and a matching sport jacket, smoked big cigars and carried bottles of whiskey in their back pockets. And man could they write.

But part of this also has to do with the fact that boxing is relatable to us as a metaphor. Few other sports telegraph what's at stake in such a visual way with such a clear understanding of the outcomes. Two men are standing in a ring. The goal of each is to knock the other off his feet, for at least ten seconds. No punching below the belt. No biting. No kicking. Ding ding! There's the bell. Go at it.

Because boxing is so essentially simple, it works easily as a metaphor. (Better than, say, cricket.) Many movies deal in some way or another with a person facing his/her demons, or struggling to overcome an obstacle. In fact, almost every film deals with struggling to overcome an obstacle, and boxing as a sport provides a good visual for the completion of that objective -- your opponent is on the mat, and someone raises your hands in victory, at which point, the crowd cheers.

I guess the reason I'm not that interested in it, myself, is because I find that the possible outcomes of a boxing match -- especially a cinematic boxing match -- are somewhat banal. If you are following the most obvious narrative for a climactic boxing match in a movie, it features the protagonist getting pummeled by his opponent, then somehow finding the inner strength to come back and turn the tables. Suddenly, in a flurry of punches, he's bested his physically superior foe, and David has beaten Goliath, quite improbably. And yes, even the great Rocky III features this same dramatic arc at the climax, as Rocky rises up to overcome the ferocious Clubber Lang (as played by Mr. T).

I said I wasn't going to talk about why I don't like sports movies in general, but maybe I actually will. See, the boxing movie epitomizes what I don't like about most sport movies, particularly most fictitious sports movies: It has an extremely predictable outcome. You could say that most movies in general have an outcome you can predict, but something about sports movies makes the predictable outcome all the worse. You see, one of my favorite things about sports -- real sports -- is witnessing an amazing athletic feat, a comeback you would have to see to believe. The reason these comebacks resonate to us, in real life, is because they really happened. They need the ring of truth that a screenwriter can't create.

Let's take an extreme example. It's Game 7 of the World Series and the team we're rooting for is down 11-1 going into the ninth inning. If this happened in real life and they scored 11 runs to come back and win, it would be the most amazing thing we'd ever seen, and all the more exhilarating for that fact. If it happened in a movie, however, it would seem totally bogus. We would consider it a flight of fancy dreamed up by a screenwriter, and it would not seem like something that could really happen.

But back to boxing. Boxing movies depict the underdog coming back from the equivalent of a 10-run deficit and winning. When this happens in real life, it's scintillating. When it happens in a movie, it's incredibly familiar and ultimately disappointing.

The thing is, the boxing movies that are really worth their salt are not directly about the outcome of a particular match. Like Raging Bull, they find their dramatic punch (if you will) in other events in the boxer's life, not his performance in the ring. So I guess that begs the question -- are these "boxing movies," in the traditional sense we're imagining them, or are they dramas in which the main character happens to be a boxer?

It's probably worth it at this point to bring into the discussion last year's big entry in the boxing genre, David O. Russell's The Fighter. I think part of the reason I was not as interested in this movie as I would have been, or thought I should have been, was that I expected a more non-traditional boxing movie, and got a pretty traditional boxing movie. Sure, Russell gets in some good grit and some good details from the boxer's life, and a significant amount of the drama surrounds his relationship with his brother and mother. But it does climax with one of those trite come-from-behind matches where our protagonist wins in the end.

Then the question becomes, "Does the fact that Mickey Ward is a real person, and this is really how that fight went, matter?"

If I haven't already been rambling from topic to topic and discussion point to discussion point, I certainly am now. So let me try to get back on track as I wrap up.

It's clear that there is something essential about boxing that works as a metaphor for life's struggles, to which a wide range of movie viewers respond.

Or perhaps there's just something viscerally satisfying about seeing a guy get repeatedly punched in the face.

Oscar O'Sullivan

On one of the film podcasts I listen to, one of the podcasters recently came up with a quip that made me laugh:

"One of my least favorite film genres is ... Boston."

I immediately got what he was talking about. I'm from Boston, and I still got it.

Yeah, there have been a lot of movies set in Boston in the last couple years. I guess there are always a lot of movies set in a lot of prominent American cities -- as Boston is probably among the ten biggest cities in the U.S., we should not be surprised to see a fair number of movies set in Boston.

But there's something about Boston movies that seem to assert their Boston-ness, maybe more than Atlanta movies assert their Atlanta-ness, or Chicago movies assert their Chicago-ness.

And that's the point of the following hilarious little video, which I thought would be appropriate to post on Oscar day, when movies like The Town and The Fighter have both been nominated for Oscars ... and are "Bah-stin" to their core.

Here's the link ... enjoy, and enjoy the ceremony tonight.

The dog ate my homework

My friend Phil was kind enough to have a couple of us over last night to watch one of his 2010 screeners. Phil (not his real name) is in the Writer's Guild, and each year he gets a dozen or so screeners that are likely to get award buzz for their scripts. Because he's a sharing guy, he shared one with us last night, as he does every year -- even though it's probably against the rules.

Of course, he shared one with his dog first, before we arrived.

I just had to get a picture of this. He'd told me in a phone call the previous day that their dog, a new arrival in their home within the past year, had gone through a stack of screeners that had been piled on their table, and literally left some of them in shreds. It's clear no one is going to be watching I Love You Phillip Morris anytime soon. They actually already watched it, meaning I might have been able to borrow it -- but the dog removed any question of that. The dog also ate one of the ones they hadn't seen, Get Low, but no physical evidence of this was offered.

We had been scheduled to watch True Grit, which Phil and his fiancee had also already watched just two nights earlier. The reason given for their immediate repeat viewing is that they liked it very much, but had not been able to understand half of what Jeff Bridges (whom my friend calls "Old Marble Mouth") was saying. Okay, got it -- good movie, need to pay close attention.

But it never got to that. Much to his dismay, Phil's Playstation would not fire up True Grit a second time. It just wasn't recognizing the disc. Which is strange, because it played successfully on Saturday, and would play in his laptop right now. And other discs would play in the Playstation. Just not True Grit. Jokes were immediately made about the disc having orders to self-destruct after its first viewing. They're serious about screeners being watched only by the Guild members, who are actually asked to destroy these discs after viewing. But they haven't figured out the self-destruction yet. Good thing Phil's dog is available to lend a helping hand. Or, a helping tooth.

Phil tried his damnedest, but eventually had to give up. To salvage something to watch, we watched The Fighter, even though it was probably against various better judgments to start watching a 116-minute movie at ten of 10. Shorter movies were discussed, for example, The Company Men (104 minutes) and Please Give (90 minutes, and I'd already seen Please Give). Somewhere was not discussed, as it did not receive a second after I firsted it. But The Fighter was ultimately chosen, just barely, despite the fact that the consensus seemed to be moving irrevocably toward not watching any screener at all. But we made it through, and it actually seemed to be shorter than 116 minutes. Good performances all around.

That's the screener report for 2010 ... I'm Vance Tastic.