Come back out of your shell, Lynn

I don't know if my examples are plentiful enough to truly prove the point, but I'd say a warning flag should go off when a writer-director names a character after themselves.

I most recently experienced this in Gaspar Noe's Love, which I suppose was intended to have some autobiographical elements. As would figure to be the case, Noe applies those elements in an unpredictable and haphazard way. Although it would seem that the movie's main character is based on him, as both are (or were) aspiring filmmakers who grew up in a different country than where the action is set, it's this character who at one point talks about naming his child Gaspar. As I never actually got what the connection was, my groan was delayed until the end of the movie, when I finally learned there was no explicit one.

Lynn Shelton's example in Laggies is a bit more whimsical, but no better. That turtle you see in the poster is named Lynn. There's as little ultimate explanation for it as there is for much of anything in this scattershot and highly disappointing movie.

I can sort of imagine how the bit came together, though. Shelton's last name is actually kind of a joke name you might give to a turtle. If you were into giving turtles comical names, you'd probably go with something more odd than "Lynn" as a first name, but "Shelton" would be a perfect last name, for sort of the same reason that one of the characters on Octonauts is called Shellington. So this theoretical whimsical turtle might be named something like Bartholomew Shelton, and he might also be a professor of turtleology. But the director abstracted the joke, got rid of all turtle-related references to her last name and just went with Lynn.

I think you can get away with something like this if it's less obvious who the director is, or if the person is someone you've never heard of. But Lynn Shelton has made a name for herself, and as much as they try to neuter all the interesting parts out of her, many of the people watching Laggies would have known that she directed it, making the groan upon hearing the turtle's name all the more immediate.

Of course, there's something more metaphorical at play here in terms of Shelton's career. A few years ago, I thought she was the tough side of the turtle, the shell side that made only solid contributions to the world of cinema. But in the last few years, her squishy turtle underbelly has been revealed, and she's vulnerable to criticism the way I would have never guessed or hoped. Maybe now she's hiding in that shell rather than using it to show her strength.

From the years 2009 to 2012, Lynn Shelton could do no wrong. Now granted, that only covers two films in her career, but they were the first two films of hers I saw, and they knocked my socks off.

The first was Humpday, co-starring Mark Duplass and Joshua Leonard (from The Blair Witch Project), and it completely took me by surprise with its honest and unflinching look at the dynamics of a male friendship pushed into uncomfortable territory. Two friends kind of dare each other to make a porn video with each other, which sounds pretty high concept but is actually one of the finest examples of the mumblecore film movement out of which Shelton came. (And also, arguably, her last such film.) I ranked it as my # 12 film of 2009, though today it would easily make my top ten.

Then in 2012 she made Your Sister's Sister, a contender for my #1 film of the year right up until I confirmed Ruby Sparks as the winner on the night before I closed my rankings. The production values took a big bump up with this one as Duplass was joined by Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt, but the keen observational eye of mumblecore was still present as two sisters and one of their best friends/secret crushes navigate a weekend in a mountain cabin where things go to unexpected places. It touched me and moved me and ended perfectly.

Since then, though, it's been two features taking two steps in the wrong direction.

I thought 2013's Touchy Feely was okay. It was about a massage therapist (DeWitt again) who develops a phobia about being touched. High concept again, but this time the production values are in some weird no man's land between the good-looking Your Sister's Sister and the intentionally grungy aesthetic of Humpday. Nothing about the look of this film feels intentional, and it has a lot of flat and dead spots. I think I was kinder to it than it deserved simply because of the way I adored Shelton's two previous films.

That kindness had left me by the time I watched Laggies Sunday night. The movie is sort of more agreeable than Touchy Feely in ways, as it has a cheeriness to it, not to mention the luminescent Keira Knightley and the always funny Sam Rockwell. But this story of a stunted late twentysomething who starts hanging out with teenagers as a means of avoiding her search for a career and her impending wedding is also dead on arrival. It involves countless odd plot contrivances and clumsy moments, and never generates any viewer sympathies for its characters. I guess I'm not much of a fan of Chloe Moretz lately, but Knightley and Rockwell are both in fine form here, yet nothing they do can save a movie that is juvenile, boring, and strangely icky in ways that are not immediately evident, or not in the ways it wants you to find it icky. I could go off more on this movie in a full review, but I'll just leave it at that for now.

So what I can't figure out is how the insight that Shelton displayed in those first two films I saw -- and, as I understand it, earlier in her career -- could have abandoned her so much in the two films since then.

It seems pretty likely that a familiar old story is being told here. Make a good movie, gain wider recognition, get a little more money, get a lot more money, get a much more famous cast, put yourself in a position where a studio can and will give you notes. Come out the other end and no longer have a clear image of yourself, of the filmmaker you used to be.

But it could be argued that Shelton already passed that test when she made Your Sister's Sister with a genuinely hot commodity (Blunt) and two others who were starting to blow up (Duplass and DeWitt). Why was the decrease in quality delayed by one film?

I suppose these are unanswerable questions. Sometimes you just get an idea you think will work, and it doesn't work. And if anything, I suppose the involvement of financiers would make these movies seem more like neat packages, tighter but soulless, where the problems with Touchy Feely and Laggies seem to be that they meander and flop all over the place.

I suppose if I'm not having much luck going forward with Shelton, I should go back. She's made three films which I haven't seen, all of which promise the truer version of Shelton I'm hoping for: We Go Way Back (2006), What the Funny (2008) and My Effortless Brilliance (2008).

Maybe those earlier efforts will seem both effortless and brilliant.

The three thirds of Your Sister's Sister

There are a ton of titles on my list of movies to rewatch, but Your Sister's Sister made it to the top Tuesday night because a) I'd found it in the library and been unable to resist picking it up, and b) after I closed off my 2012 rankings, I secretly doubted that I really liked Lynn Shelton's movie enough to rank it #2 for the year.

Part of that doubt crept in because I started to hear people say they didn't like where it goes in the final half-hour. That's when things become quite complicated and emotional, and it's apparently the point that the movie lost some of its previously contented audience.

First off, I'll end the suspense and say that I liked Your Sister's Sister pretty much the same amount the second time as I did the first. Good on me for seeing things straight the first time.

Secondly, I think I figured out an unconventional way to spin Your Sister's Sister, one that may help that problematic third portion sit better with people. So now it's time for my third SPOILER ALERT in as many posts.

Instead of balking at the tonal shift of the third act, people should realize that Your Sister's Sister is actually three movies in one, divided almost evenly in 30-minute chunks for a total running time of 90 minutes. Which is a pretty nimble bit of filmmaking for an intimate three-person character study.

The first 30 minutes are a conventional romantic comedy -- if you discount the first 10 minutes or so. Those first 10 minutes contain a ceremony to remember a character who died a year earlier, so that's not your typical lead-in for a romantic comedy. However, many romantic comedies do begin with a character who is challenged in life or love, which sets the stage for his/her romantic redemption. But forget those 10 minutes and concentrate on what comes next. There's a very conventional meet cute as Hannah (Rosemarie DeWitt) mistakes Jack (Mark Duplass) for a prowler outside her remote island cabin, nearly smashing him over the head with an oar. As is often the case with love interests in a romantic comedy, Jack and Hannah initially despise one another, recovering only slowly from the awkwardness of the oar incident and only reluctantly sharing each other's company. Once they start putting back shots of tequila, however, a mutual attraction -- both personal and physical -- sets in, even though Hannah is a lesbian and her sister is Jack's best friend. (I didn't say it was a conventional romance in every respect, just in its structure.)

At about exactly the 30-minute mark -- just after Jack and Hannah engage in an impulsive act of drunken intercourse -- the type of movie it is shifts again. Now it's a comedy of manners. As you probably know, comedies of manners often hinge on characters keeping secrets from one another, only just barely; on overt and covert meanings of conversations; and even on a little bit of physical comedy. All of these are present as Jack's best friend and Hannah's sister, Iris (Emily Blunt), makes a surprise visit to the cabin, where she is expecting Jack but not Hannah. Nearly caught in bed together, Jack and Hannah have no time to get a story straight about what happened between them the night before, and Jack is saddled with the extra burden of quickly conveying to Hannah that they must lie to Iris (because he's in love with her, though he doesn't admit it at this point). What follows is Jack trying to get Hannah alone before she blurts anything out, without revealing to Iris that this is what he's trying to do, and then both of them keeping it cool as the conversation naturally flirts with dangerous subject matter. There's even a scene where Jack and Iris are both secretly pantomiming to Hannah, at the same time, that they need to get her alone.

Wouldn't you know it? It's pretty much exactly at the 60-minute mark that the movie makes its fateful turn towards tragedy. Again this is not tragedy in the traditional sense of killing their own fathers and sleeping with their own mothers, though there is something vaguely Oedipal about the whole scenario, as Jack has slept with the sister of the woman he loves (and she used to sleep with his dead brother). Jack and Hannah even have an earlier discussion about how their relationship to each other through Iris makes them kind of like in-laws. Of course, it's not just Jack coming between Hannah and Iris or Hannah coming between Iris and Jack, but it's also revealed that Hannah has wanted to have a baby -- and Jack has discovered that she poked holes in the condom they used while having sex. So she may be pregnant with his child as well.

I suppose it was this radical shift into melodrama that threw some people, but I prefer to think of it as the reason the story was worth telling in the first place. There has to be a complicating event or three to stimulate the drama in this scenario, and I'm okay with it being of a vaguely soap opera-ish nature, because the actors pull it off with such enviable naturalism. This is kind of an acting master class, actually, and it's not just the two pros (Blunt and DeWitt). Duplass, whose acting was always assumed to be secondary to his writing and directing, shares an equal part of the heavy lifting in these scenes.

I'm not sure if my division of Your Sister's Sister into three parts is actually helpful for giving any doubters a new perspective on it. But it certainly provides a challenge for the actors, and it's their performances that make this movie the unqualified triumph that it is.

I must admit that the first time I saw it, I was most drawn to Blunt, perhaps because I have a soft spot for her as an actress. However, I want to close this piece by singling out DeWitt. Perhaps my favorite scene is one where Hannah and Iris are lying in Hannah's bed, which Iris has invaded because she can't sleep. At first Hannah is barely awake, just trying to dismiss her insomniac sister and get back to sleep herself. She answers in monosyllables and hopes the other will just go away. But as the stakes raise, and she realizes Iris is confessing that she loves the man Hannah slept with last night, Hannah becomes fully present in the conversation -- while still trying to convince Iris that she's deep in the throes of near sleep. As DeWitt lies facing away from Blunt, as to face her would give up the whole charade, you can see her eyes register the new information, heavy with the knowledge of the damage she's done, but only in a barely perceptible way. She stiffens just slightly, responding to Iris in carefully modulated language that doesn't reveal the increasing emotional weight of the situation, indulging in again barely perceptible dawning horror that she can only get away with because she is not facing her bedmate. Once she's decided she has fully composed herself, she does turn to meet her sister's gaze, and continues to keep the charade up until Iris finally dismisses herself and heads back toward her own bedroom. Only once she's sure Iris has gone does she cover her head with her bed sheet, exasperated by the depth of her own miscalculation and inadvertent betrayal.

Great scene, and great movie -- all three thirds of it.

... and a Duplass new year

Last year on New Year's Day, we watched movies according to an inadvertent theme: Step Brothers and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, our two favorite comedies from 2008 that both happened to be movies I was seeing for the fourth time. (We'll ignore the fact that we closed the day with probably the worst comedy of 2011, The Hangover Part II.)

This year's theme was no more advertent, but it was more objective. This year, we watched Mark Duplass movies.

We probably could have seen this coming for a couple days if we'd looked. We'd postponed watching The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, which Duplass directed with his brother Jay and which had been a candidate for last Friday night's viewing, when we decided that its 76-minute length made it perfect for one of our son's naps. And since I may be working both days this weekend, yesterday could have been our last nap before I need to finalize my list next Thursday. In fact, it ended up being more than perfect -- not only did we watch the whole movie, but I got in an hour nap before my son awoke from his. Score.

We didn't discuss our second viewing, Your Sister's Sister, until right before we popped it in. Duplass only acts in this one, though I wouldn't be surprised if he had plenty of informal roles advising director Lynn Shelton since they are both founding parents of the mumblecore movement. Since it was the only disc I had at home from Netflix and there's a premium placed on turning around movies quickly this time of year, I was rooting for that choice, and my wife jumped at it.

And since Duplass appeared in the last movie she'd seen before that, Zero Dark Thirty, that made three straight Duplass movies for my wife. Crazy person that I am, I squeezed in two non-Duplass movies on the 31st (Sparkle and Amour) that she did not see.

I'd love to tell you what I thought of these movies, but remember: cone of silence.

So instead let me take this opportunity to praise an unusual part of the Duplass brothers' movie-making technique that pays untold dividends in the final film.

It was probably in conjunction with the release of Jeff, Who Lives at Home that I heard Mark Duplass being interviewed. (Mark seems to do pretty much all the public stuff -- in fact, I don't even know what Jay looks like.) In that interview, Mark talked about an approach they favor that would not be possible on a larger film with a bigger budget and more locations. With the films they make, though, they can afford to do it: film the scenes in the same order as they appear in the script.

There are all kinds of reasons this is not possible with most movies. The process of making movies is so dependent on maximizing your opportunities to get your cast in place according to their schedules, or shoot at a particular location when it's available, that there's almost no way you can film the scenes in sequence. In fact, I doubt that this is even something filmmakers subconsciously shoot for. Logistics are first and foremost, and it's probably not that unusual to shoot the last scene of the film first.

The sequence the scenes are shot shouldn't matter one iota to the audience, because they will be edited together in the correct order. Yet I think on some level, the sequence does matter to the audience -- because on some level it matters to the actors.

Even though these guys are professionals (though that's not necessarily the case with mumblecore movies), I think an actor can't help but have a slightly better grasp on his/her character's emotional state if he/she has already acted out the scenes that brought his/her character to this point in the story. And I think this is why almost every Duplass movie I've seen has a satisfying emotional payoff in the final five or ten minutes. Consistent with these movies' naturalism, the actors themselves have lived in these characters' shoes. When they have the big final reconciliation, or whatever occurs in the final act, the actors have already experienced the arguments (there's always an argument) that have gotten them to this point. They don't need to ask what their character's motivation is -- they've lived through it.

It only stands to reason that an actor who shoots the film's climax first has to do a lot more work to get him/herself into that character's head space. Even if the actor has read the script five or six times, he/she can't help but be at some kind of disadvantage over actors who have already done the emotional processing of those scenes in front of the camera.

This unusual though completely understandable technique also has the benefit of the Duplass brothers already working through script problems that may come up in earlier scenes. If something just isn't working and they have to change it up -- this interview also revealed that the brothers will just wander off together to discuss a scene, leaving the cast and crew waiting for them to return -- those changes will already be incorporated before they have to shoot the finale. There'll be no going back to reshoot or make adjustments based on problems that came up along the way.

What's funny is that this seemingly revolutionary method may have been born out of sheer laziness, a sheer unwillingness to conform to the hard conventions of making movies. Clearly, the "harder" thing to do is to shoot a movie out of sequence. It involves juggling all sorts of logistics based on availability and schedules, and is perhaps a skill that's better suited to an efficiency expert than a creative talent like a writer or director. And indeed, I'm quite sure that someone other than the director handles this on most films, though I couldn't tell you exactly who (the producer or someone on the producer's team, most likely). With the Duplasses, who have a huge amount of creative control, they may have just said "Eff that. That's not how we can understand this process or thrive within it." And it may have just been because the other way seemed "too hard."

But the proof is in the pudding. When a Duplass character experiences his/her third-act catharsis -- a catharsis that always has plenty of heart -- I always buy it, and I always find that it's coming from somewhere. Now I know where.

It also helps that the Duplasses have a knack for casting actors (such as mumblecore regular Steve Zissis, who starred in The Do-Deca Pentathlon) who have an innate understanding of the human condition. Remember, adding to the amazing work these actors are doing is the fact that they are frequently improvising their dialogue. You can only improvise dialogue if you truly understand a character and what he/she would do in any situation. Another benefit of already having "lived their lives" chronologically.

And now that I believe I've seen every 2012 project that involved Mark Duplass, I'll tackle the remaining field of non-Duplass movies. Just eight more days before I close my 2012 list.

Ha, IMDB tells me that I haven't seen two Duplass movies from 2012, Darling Companion and People Like Us. That's with already seeing the other movie he directed (Jeff, Who Lives at Home) and the other one he starred in (Safety Not Guaranteed). That's in addition to his regular work on the TV show The League, which we also watch.

If he keeps up this busy pace, then 2013 really will be a Duplass New Year.