MONDOmagazine

Stranger Than Fiction
Directed by Marc Forster
Columbia Pictures, 2006

By Doug Naylor

All comedians secretly want to be serious. Or, perhaps more accurately, they want to be taken seriously. What is it about comedy that breeds so much insecurity in its practitioners? Does it not get enough respect? Is it still considered to be low brow ilk? I should hope not. The argument can easily be made that just as much of the human condition can be found in The Office as in Six Feet Under. Or that the snide observations of Bill Hicks are just as valid as those of any great writer. One can really put it all to rest just by saying that life itself is filled with enough absurdity and tragedy to be observed truthfully through either lens. On the other hand, one can only be on the same shelf as American Pie Presents Band Camp and Scary Movie 4 for so long before they begin to question their worth.

Some comedians’ forays into more ‘dramatic’ fair have proven to be all the more powerful for their unexpectedness. Peter Sellars in Being There. Bill Murray in Lost in Translation. Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Some have proven to be all the more useless for their ineptitude. I’m sorry, but I don’t care how many times you put Robin Williams in the Holocaust, or make him a sociopath, or make him investigate some tense situation where things aren’t as they seem: all I see is the goddamn genie from Aladdin. Now, it’s Will Ferrell’s turn to enter the foray.

Stranger Than Fiction tells the tale of Harold Crick, a remarkably unremarkable IRS agent who one day begins hearing a voice narrating his every move. The voice is that of Emma Thompson, a frustrated author writing a novel in which Crick is the main character, though she’s completely unaware of Crick’s existence or their connection. A literary professor (Dustin Hoffman) becomes intrigued by Crick’s affliction, and the two endeavour to sort out what is happening to Crick. Oh, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is in there too. She owns a bakery or something. To be honest, the woman is so stunning that her presence in the film requires no justification whatsoever in my books. Just as long as she’s there to be seen and heard.

The film indeed has a very eccentric and unique premise. One could see an idiosyncratic director such as Spike Jonze or Terry Gilliam do something exciting and strange with such an idea. That is not what happens here. Indeed, the film is extremely faithful to Hollywood norms. Harold Crick, adrift and incomplete, faces a series of strange events that change his life. He is seriously challenged, but his newfound zest for life and the power of love overcome the blah blah blah. With such a strange and self-aware premise, I was disappointed that the film didn’t take advantage of its own possibilities.

One thing I was surprised with, however, was how engrossing the film was despite its narrative blandness. Crick and the other characters seem to be fascinating and human almost in spite of the cookie cutter plot arc they’re stuck in. Too bad none of the characters become aware of that, and send the script off in a different direction.

Inland Empire
Directed By David Lynch
Studio Canal, 2006

By Matthew Hurwitz

“There’s no way back to film. I’m done with it… Some would say it looks bad. But [digital video] reminds me of early 35mm, that didn’t have that tight grain. When you have a poor image, there’s lots more room to dream.”
- David Lynch, Variety 2005

David Lynch has done every film student in the world a tremendous favor: a world-renowned director, famous for his cinematography, has committed the rest of his career to digital video. Every young aspiring movie-maker (the term film-maker, ideally, should no longer apply) has dreamt of finally cobbling together those funds to produce their own feature. But when push comes to shove, the final cost of 35mm film stock and development kills any chance of not losing their house in the process. Whereas Jean-Luc Goddard has similarly dabbled in the medium, Lynch’s bold declaration of purpose comes as far more of a surprise after a long history of decidedly non-verite camerawork. We are all in his debt for having pushed video that much closer towards mainstream legitimacy. On the other hand, there was never anything remotely mainstream about his films. There sure as hell isn’t anything mainstream about his first video.

Inland Empire is –– without exaggeration –– the least accessible and coherent movie he’s ever made, if only by the sheer volume of its three-hour runtime. Since only the first hour contains any semblance of linear plot, there’s no harm done in summarizing: Hollywood actress Nikki (Laura Dern) is visited by a Romanian gypsy at her home, who warns that her next film will place her life in danger. The film is a romance about an extramarital love affair, which she finds herself replicating in real life with attractive co-star Devon (Justin Theroux). Not only that, this film is actually a remake of a Romanian film never completed due to the double murder of it’s two lead actresses and Nikki’s real life husband seems prepared to kill Devon for any suspicion of adultery. The other half of the film, for lack of a more informed analysis, takes place within Nikki’s subconscious imagination. She does not know if she is really herself, or her character. Perhaps she is simply Laura Dern.

Nightmare time. What makes this video a full-bodied experience and not merely a movie-style funhouse carnival (ie, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or Requiem for a Dream) is that in the hands of an experienced master director, the video medium subverts your every chance to anticipate what comes next. This is a new rhythm of editing and it’s scary as hell. In an age when every summer blockbuster seems at least two hours and we have grown more and more accustomed to the gratuitously bloated lengths of massive budgeted epics, Inland devotes the bulk of it’s epic length to a first person psychological breakdown. The theater around you swallows you in darkness. The darkness on the screen is an organic, breathing monster, it’s digital blackness swirling with millions bacterial pixels. The video eye also reflects the dream qualities of white, sometimes letting the blank opacity of the sun pour in to blanket scenery and faces like freshly fallen snow, or to blaze blindingly forth like the pure rapture from heaven on high. Where the monochromatic industrialism of Lynch’s first film Eraserhead similarly uses long bouts of ominous, rumbling near-silence to help induce the dream state upon the audience, here that movie-as-shared-unconsciousness becomes something not just intoxicating but overtly hostile. I have rarely seen anything in which the characters onscreen seem so simultaneously aware and unaware of their status as characters in a movie, but more importantly and more frighteningly, they don’t care. We are their guests and their captives, accompanying Dern through seven levels of video hell.

Factotum
Directed by Bent Hamer
IFC Films, 2005

By Doug Nayler

Charles Bukowski lead an interesting and very unconventional life as an author. Living most of his life in total obscurity, his poetry and prose became recognized very late. Bukowski wrote reams and reams of observations about the world in which he existed without ever becoming isolated from it. He took the banal, dirty world of mid-century blue collar America and made it into something fragile, noble and dignified with his words. Bukowski was in the real shit, and could express what it was like with such acuity that it becomes hopelessly fascinating.

In Factotum, a surprisingly surly (and beefy, might I add) Matt Dillon plays Bukowski’s literary alter-ego, Henry Chinaski. Chinaski stumbles from job to job, and from woman to woman. The only constants in his life are that he keeps losing them, he keeps writing about them, and he drinks like a fish the entire time. And somehow he makes himself into some sort of hero because of it. While trying to get a paycheque for a half-day’s work from an ex-employer Chinaski remarks that he wants his money so that he can go and get drunk: “It may not be noble, but it’s my choice.” Nobody can tell him that he’s living his life any way other than how he wants to. He is uncompromising in a way most people could really only hope or fear to be. And he writes it all down.

However, writing is a very different medium than film. In writing one can take the simple act of drinking from a bottle and expound for pages about the significance, the history, the beauty of what it represents. On celluloid all you see is some guy taking a drink. So, what happens when you try to make a movie about a guy who thought great things about a boring, wasted life? Well, you see him living his boring, wasted life without being able to see what he thought about it. Watching someone work a minimum wage job has the same effect on me as working one. I notice some strange and interesting things along the way that I’ll probably think about later, but really I just keep checking the clock to see when I can get the hell out of there.