Sideways makes apt comment

The first line of dialogue in Sideways is "fuck" muttered by an unseen voice in the dark. In the film's, and I guess this year's, downright funniest scene, Alexander Payne throws in a political comment that in 1 second says more than Michael Moore does in 2 hours: Bush and Rumsfeld are fucking the country like a heavy metal loving tow truck driver grudge fucking his cheating wife. At one point Paul Giamatti admits one of his clever line comes from Bukowski.
Taylor Hackford is seen talking about his Bukowski days in the current docu Bukowski: Born Into this. Not strangely enough, the end of Ray, helmed by Hackford, seems to say that heroin use is best when rehabilitated but adultery goes unpunished.

Huckabees: nihilism and nausea

I Heart Huckabees is one of several films I have seen twice this year. Unlike some of the other films that occupy a place in the double category I knew instantly that this was a film to which I would be returning. For the record here are the films I have felt compelled to view a second time on the big screen in the time frame of this year. I Heart heads the list, along with Bon Voyage, Kill Bill Vol. 2, Baadasssss!, SuperSize Me, Napoleon Dynamite, Finding Neverland, Garden State, Tarnation, and, now my moment of truth to more suspicious readers, Van Helsing.
Huckabees shows astute marketing with a web campaign that includes several mock web site related to characters in the film. Kind of like what a real web site would be like that promoted, say, an existential detective agency similar to the one in the movie run by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin.
The distributor of Huckabees, Fox Searchlight has a monster 2004 line-up that rivals the quality that Miramax displayed in years like 1992, 1993, or 1994. FS has taken the berth once dominated by Miramax now that Miramax focuses on big event pictures like The Aviator and whose future is in doubt anyway with their Disney deal about to expire. Major studio boutiques like Warner Independent, Focus or Paramount Classics, while capable of some awesome films, have yet to completely dominate a season like FS. Likewise smaller indie distributors like Newmarket and Lion’s Gate hit occasional home runs but fail to rule to roost all year. Garden State and Napoleon Dynamite have their fans and Huckabees is one of the year’s best as far as I’m concerned. The year’s not over and Fox Searchlight will also release Alexander Payne’s Sideways and Bill Condon’s biopic Kinsey. The latter concerns sexologist Alfred Kinsey and is set in the 50s. Imagine A Beautiful Mind with the emphasis on the other human organ of note. One style point that distinguishes a typical Fox Searchlight trailer from a typical Miramax trailer is the use (or not) of voice-over narration versus dialogue from the respective movie.
Meanwhile Huckabees burst on the scene with a screwball comedy template that proffers a wide range of interpretation. Some see Huckabees proposing a Buddhist tract that explores desire and reality, consumption and discipline. Other might find a level of profanity to rival Team America for nihilism.
For instance, the protagonist of Huckabees, the idealistic Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) mixes eloquent poetry about the environment with a potty mouth spewing scatological rage at the world. “Fuck shit,” is one Albert modes of expression. In Huckabees profane other, Team America, the lead puppet explains his actions thus: “But I do know that if you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're gonna have our dicks and our pussies all covered in shit.”
One local theater manager told me that his company was experiencing Huckabees walk-outs across the nation. No one walked at either of the screenings I attended. If you don’t think we live in a flip-flop topsy turvy time you will in December when Adam Sandler stars in the high-brow comedy (Spanglish) and Streisand, Hoffman and De Niro meet cute in the low-brow comedy (Meet the Fockers).
A world where nothing is sacred is the world we currently inhabit, and Huckabees only mentions 9/11 once, in context to the plight of fireman Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), but the theme of accepting loss seems to be the spine of Huckabees. For Huckabees’ director David O. Russell nausea sits on a tree limb next to altruism.
“Everything is the same” intones Hoffman’s character Bernard Jaffe. Even Jude Law (who shines in Huckabees in a way that makes his Alfie perf look like Acting 101) confirms to the nausea doctrine, actually throwing up in his hand (it’s a movie) in one pivotal scene. Natch, Team America explores nausea in what could be called the greatest vomiting scene every filmed (mind you, propelled by a puppet).
Russell takes apart the screwball premise with a sort of surgical precision. I interviewed Russell back when he made Flirting With Disaster, another screwball comedy with different stripes. He concurred that he had read books on screwball comedy technique. He knows what he’s doing, and the dialogue and editing bounces along with the kind of tempo that would not be out of place in older classics like Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby or His Girl Friday. Directors like The Coen Brothers and Francois Truffaut have been admired for the way they deconstructed genres with film comedies like Fargo and Shoot the Piano Player. Now David O. Russell has made a film that sits on that same shelf.

Tarnation

It comes as little surprise that Jonathan Caouette has a promising film career based on a debut film that was made by any means necessary. He’s been doing this kind of thing since he was a kid, growing up in Houston.
Caouette’s film Tarnation was originally made with a budget of $218.32. “The total is derived from all the video tapes and various footage I pulled and imported into iMovie, and then exported to a Hi-8 master,” Caouette tells Free Press Houston in an exclusive interview. (All told, when Tarnation is released later this month the total negative amount spent on the film including sound re-mixes, blow-ups to 35mm and song clearances by distributor Wellspring will be approximately $400,000.)
Caouette just looks like a film star, a part he has played throughout his life, as illustrated in Tarnation. His features remind one of Ewan McGregor. He has that presence which can be found in the androgynous character of the rock star in Velvet Goldmine. (Okay that part was played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyer, but McGregor was in the film and cut from the same bolt of cloth.) It’s the same look Albert Finney had from the early 60s until he stopped being a romantic lead in the 70s.
One day Caouette, transplanted to New York and working as a doorman (“Very good benefits,” Caouette nods.) auditions for a role in a movie for Hedwig and the Angry Inch creator John Cameron Mitchell. The film (a project still in production called Shortbus) becomes a moot point as Caouette gets needed encouragement to enter his working version of Tarnation into a film festival. Mitchell comes on board as producer. Soon Gus Van Sant is an Executive Producer and Tarnation has secured respective berths at the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. The rest as they say is film history as an iMovie becomes a feature release. And Caouette looks like he belongs in the midst of this maelstrom.
The word tarnation is an epithet, a euphemistic form of damnation. For Jonathan Caouette the title of his debut movie reflects the steep road he has taken, from years of obscurity shooting home-style videotape to becoming a filmmaker with the hot film du jour.
Tarnation redefines the unique movie experience. Completely made using Macintosh’s built-in film editing software iMovie, and comprised of video footage, phone messages, and Super 8 clips that basically cover his entire life, Tarnation mixes this documentary style footage with the arsenal of Mac editing effects to spin Caouette’s tale with the dizziness of a kaleidoscope.
“The first time I ever picked up a camera I had asked my grandfather to buy me a direct sound video camera. It was about $60 at a pawn shop,” recalls Caouette. Earlier in the week, Caouette had come to Houston to preview Tarnation to a full house of friends at local Microcinema, the Aurora Picture Show.
“I have always had an esthetic for video. In the 80s video was so widely available,” notes Caouette, seated at a corner table of the Lancaster Hotel restaurant. “I could go to Target to the photo section and get $10 cartridges of Super 8 film.
“I was making experimental horror films. Then I discovered underground films and repertory art films by way of the few friends I had met in the gay underground scene in Houston,” says Caouette.
Tarnation treads on Caouette’s past, a view both brash and delicate. After portraying a history of family dysfunction Caouette asks Adolph, his grandfather, point blank whether he was responsible through negligance for the abused suffered by Jonathan’s mom, Renee. Moments like this are interspaced with shots of Caouette as a teen rehearsing in an ad hoc high school production of Blue Velvet. More poignantly, one scene shows Caouette crying in front of his Mac as he searches the Internet for information on lithium. His mother has just overdosed on that medicine, used for bipolar disorders.
Caouette admits that some of Tarnation was recreated while he was putting it together; for instance, the part with him breaking down while searching on the Internet. “I was too far emotionally gone the first time,” Caouette notes. Also one sequence with a baby Jonathan lying with his grandmother is actually Jonathan's own nine year old son as a baby.
The website for Tarnation claims Caouette’s birth date as 1972, but he states: “I was born November 26 at Jefferson Davis Hospital in Houston, in 1974.” Caouette was involved with Houston’s Big Brothers & Big Sisters Association of America. There his sponsor was Jeff Millar, then the film critic for the Houston Chronicle. “That was my film school, going to see a lot of movies. The calendar for [Houston art house] the River Oaks Theater was as important as anything at school.”
Caouette reveals, if only obliquely, that for his next project: “I am going to take three films from the 1970s, huge studio films that were successful in their day.”
“They were produced between 1974 and 1977 and they all utilized the same actress. Basically she looks and breathes and feels like the same person in each film, right down to her accent, her hair length. I want to take all three of those films and re-mix them, re-augment those films into a completely different two hour film,” Caouette hints without actually naming the films. Can’t let the cat quite out of the bag, don’t want to jinx the idea. Ideally, Caouette suggests, he wants to give this project the iMovie treatment. Tarnation itself was originally three hours before he cut it down to its present length, about a half-reel short of two hours. Perhaps there’s a Tarnation 2.0 in the future.
Somewhere in the middle of the interview Caouette’s cell phone rings. As he answers you can see his face brighten, his eyebrows arch. The voice on the other end informs him that he has won the Best Documentary award at the Los Angeles Film Festival. There will be no sleep tonight as the rest of the evening will consist of preparing for a dawn flight to L.A. to receive his honors. How cool is that?
Caouette orders an espresso. “Coffee and cigarettes are my vices. I quit smoking for four years, too.
“Anyway,” he says lighting up a smoke, “I’m going to quit again.”

DiG! this

This is certainly the year of excellent documentaries and we’re not talking about political tracts. 2004 has seen several superb musical movies that place the viewer in the front row of rock and roll mayhem.
Perhaps chief among them is DiG!, a film that was shot over a period of seven years and observes the rise from obscurity to fame of The Dandy Warhols, and to a lesser extent the rise and fall of The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
DiG! director Ondi Timoner described the film as “a ride I could not get off of,” in an interview conducted last spring during DiG!’s regional premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The Brian Jonestown Massacre led by Anton Newcombe could never achieve commercial success “because success would destroy him,” noted Timoner.
Timoner started the documentary with 10 bands and eventually narrowed her focus to the two profiled in DiG! She lived with the groups on the road. “I understood their esthetic,” she affirmed.
While both bands, retro-60s sound intact, seem destined for greater awareness, The Dandy Warhols veer towards the light and The Brian Jonestown Massacre steers in darkness. Both Newcombe and Courtney Taylor are charismatic leaders, with good looks and unique insight into their own creativity.
“I sneeze and hits come out,” sneers Taylor in the movie. He continues in a mock aristocratic voice: “And the label exec replied ‘Well if that is true then Capitol will have no problem financing your handkerchiefs.’”
The band members have their own set of rules for intra-band communication. “You’ll burn in hell for pretending to be God and not being able to back it up,” Matt Hollywood an ex-BJM guitarist yells at Newcombe in a moment of clarity early in the film.
Jonestown leader Anton Newcombe has put out over a dozen recordings in less than a decade but at the same time represents the destructive narcissism inherent in rock and roll. Newcombe sabotages his career with heroin and constant egotistical outbursts and on-stage fisticuffs, both with audience and band members. One sequence, shot at the West Coast Knitting Factory, shows Newcombe kicking a rowdy audience member in the head and being arrested after the show by LAPD.
Prime examples of the each band’s karma returns as a theme of the film. The Brian Jonestown Massacre getting arrested for pot in Georgia by a tubby State Trooper and the Dandy Warhols sparking up a bowl after a French cop lets them walk on a cannabis bust are just two scenes that hammer that point like a cool blues riff blasting out of a Marshall amp. The Dandy Warhols talk their way out of the bust situation, even giving the rockstruck gendarme some free t-shirts.
On his website Newcombe (who has disowned the film) notes that cops in Georgia busted the director for pot, and his charge was for not having a valid license. Timoner concurred that that is the way the scene went down.
DiG!, from Palm Pictures and Interloper Films, and the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for a documentary, rolls out in an exclusive engagement at the River Oaks Theater starting November 5.
Another music documentary that bears mention, Jandek on Corwood, premieres on DVD in late November. This film reveals as much as is known about the reclusive Houston-based artist. The extras include a featurette that examines several Jandek LP and CD covers for greater meaning. Check it out.