Apologies

            Hundreds of movies are released every year (probably thousands if you include the adult film industry), and only a select few of them ever make it to theaters. The most unfortunate thing is that the vast majority of movies that achieve wide theatrical release do not do so based on their artistic quality. It simply depends on how much the filmmakers want to pay for distribution.

            Because of this, many excellent pieces of work frequently go nearly unnoticed. Johnson City rarely shows any limited release movies, and the Sundance Festival in Utah is a bit of a drive. Luckily, however, once a film is released on DVD it can be easily accessed by those of us who might otherwise be limited by geography.

            One relatively independent movie that generated quite a buzz over the past few months was Noah Baumbach’s semi-autiobiographical piece, The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach, who most recently is remembered for co-writing The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Wes Anderson, has teamed up with Anderson again to produce an extremely dark comedy about a Reagan-era family going through a divorce, focusing strongly on the experiences of the family’s two sons.

            Jeff Daniels (Because of Winn-Dixie) stars alongside Laura Linney (Love Actually) as a once-accomplished novelist who has been in a dry spell for many years. His glacial personality and pompously doctrinaire stance on specific writer, novels, magazines, hair colors on women, et cetera eventually drove his wife (Linney), an aspiring writer, to infidelity. The family’s total dysfunction is made all the more apparent throughout the film as each member, with the exception of the mother, retreats selfishly and sometimes violently into his own experiences and thoughts.

            The movie is strange—there is no way around that. The dialogue is bizarrely written, and the interactions between characters are often inexplicable and unresolved. There are many scenes which depict things so far removed from what an audience might consider to be normal that the action is almost painful to watch. The film is undeniably well-crafted, however, which is precisely why the deviance is so poignant.

            Even the characters themselves do not lend themselves to any sort of easy judgement. The father is both pitiful and despicable, while the mother is both noble and deceitful. The children are both obviously hurt and angry while simultaneously feeling confused regarding how to handle the powerful, foreign emotions that they are harboring towards their parents. With no individual being depicted in the film as a benevolent and glorified hero, the film cannot really be spoken of in terms of good guys and bad guys. Instead, The Squid and the Whale effective tells the story of four people, all equally flawed, each sharing his or her part in the mess they have made for themselves.

            Uncomfortable to watch and even more difficult to think about, The Squid and the Whale makes a valiant effort to communicate the pain, confusion, and acute untreatable loneliness that accompanies the breakup of a family. Despite all odds, however, the film manages to end optimistically, and the audience will take away from the experience the impression that, even in the bleakest of situations, there can be hope of recovery.

            The Squid and the Whale is rated a deserved R for strong sexual situations and rampant adult language. It is currently available on DVD.

V for Vendetta

2006

            “If only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, [they] would have no need to conspire.  They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies.  If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning.  Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it.”

            George Orwell, a British writer, wrote those words in 1948. His novel 1984 was a precautionary illustration of the dangers of allowing one’s life to be dictated by a corrupt government. In the year 1984, British graphic novelists Alan Moore and David Lloyd were midway through their comic book series which explored the same ideas: V for Vendetta.

            Originally published as an unfinished black and white comic series, part of the larger Warrior anthology, V for Vendetta was released as a completed color series in 1988 by DC Comics. Now, in 2006, screenwriters Andy and Larry Wachowski, the individuals responsible for The Matrix trilogy, have put the story on the big screen.

            The film, a directorial debut by Matrix collaborator James McTeigue, is set in dystopian London somewhere in the 2020’s. V, a masked vigilante dressed as Guy Fawkes, a 16^th century conspirator against the king of England, has taken it upon himself to educate the citizens of England regarding the true nature of their government and their enslavement thereby. Employing terrorist tactics and poetic philosophy to convince the public as well as his would-be protégé, Evey (Natalie Portman) of his justification, V over the course of the film carries out his master plan for a total reconstruction of English government.

            The film version is a largely faithful, albeit condensed adaptation of the graphic novels, with the exception of a few temporal rearrangement of events and some rewriting of a few select characters. The changes serve only to aid the coherency of the condensed version, however, thus they do not feel forced nor do they ultimately alter the spirit or message of the story.

            The application of philosophy and symbolism in the film is impressive, and it obviously required a great deal of both grace and education to be able write those elements into the script with the amount of fluidity that the movie exhibits. The characters are given just enough subtle exposition to facilitate an understanding of their actions without indulging in superfluous backstory, and the recurring themes and allusions are both subtle and effective. The dialogue is poetic, the violence is graphic, and the visual impressions left by the film as a whole are absurdist and painful as well as beautiful.

            Although the story is overtly political, it does not come across as an attempt to offer direct commentary on the political situation currently at work in the world. It does, however, function as a blatant warning against complacency as well as a call to arms against any institution that believes that it has the right to tell its citizens how to think.

            V for Vendetta is undeniably one of the most intelligent films that has emerged in a long time, and a proper discussion of all of the exquisitely executed elements present in the film far exceeds the space provided by this humble publication. The holistic artistic and literary brilliance of the piece is both staggering and humbling, to say nothing of the sheer entertainment value of the film. While many of you were possibly unhappy with the last installment or two of The Matrix trilogy, let me just say that any doubts you might have had about V for Vendetta can safely be laid to rest.

            Comedic satire has long been an important part of the literary canon. Ancient civilizations gave us Aristophanes, Menippus, and Ovid. Voltaire, in the mid-18^th century composed Candide, a stinging portrait of the political religious atmosphere of the times, and centuries later Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest continues to thrill and entertain.  

            The cinema, too, has not gone without contributions from various satires. Classics such as Young Frankenstein, The Princess Bride, Army of Darkness, and Men in Tights have been lending important commentary to their perspective genres for decades. More recently, the Scary Movie dynasty has offered its own observations on the current state of the horror film category. Though the first two films of the increasingly inaccurately named Scary Movie trilogy (Scary Movie 4 is slated for release on April 14^th) are pitifully flawed, the third installment was an impressively entertaining and insightful caricature of the modern horror film, thanks in large to the addition of Leslie Nielsen (2001: A Space Travesty). Undoubtedly due to the film’s success, two of its six writers decided, for their next project, to try their hands at satirizing the romantic comedy.

            It was, apparently, a really bad decision.

            Writers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who collaborated on the Scary Movies as well Spy Hard, the 1996 spoof of assorted spy/heist/crime/et cetera films, make their directorial debut with Date Movie. Date Movie, which was released on the 17^th of this month, operated within the basic framework of some combination of Meet the Fockers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Shallow Hal in order to tell the story of Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan, American Pie 1/2/Wedding), an ogre of a girl who sets out to find her true love. With a little help from Hitch and the boys from “Pimp My Ride,” Julia is able to snag her man. Now she just needs to plan her wedding and make both families get along.

            The saddest part of the film’s utter and dismal failure as any sort of entertainment is that it started out with some potential for enjoyability. Unfortunately, the parts that might have been funny were very simply overdone to the point of being either boring or repulsive. Gross-out humor has its value, of course, but the viewer needs to be physiologically able and willing to watch the scene in order to appreciate it. While I suppose some people might think otherwise, bestial necrophilia is not my idea of a good time.

            The story is predictable. The writing is less than clever. The filmmaking is amateurish, and the directors definitely need to rethink their strategies before stepping behind the camera again. Despite all odds, Date Movie somehow succeeded at being worse than the films that it attempted to mock. Save your money and go rent Saw II. It’s funnier.