Kingpin (The Farrelly Brothers, 1996)

This week, The Vulgar Cinema is focusing on the work of the Farrelly brothers, some of the finest comic filmmakers of the last 20 years. I'm first up with a post on one of my favorite broad (but deceptively smart) comedies, Kingpin. I've seen the film a half dozen times and laugh at every gag every time, but I also gain more and more appreciation for its solid visual craft, which backs up grotesque sight jokes with exceptional timing and blocking that at times has the touch of a well-assembled silent. I also find more and more to love about the subtext hidden in plain sight, which uses the broader joke of bowling being the central sport to dig into how we as a society place a value on sports achievement for the stardom it provides. Bowling is merely a quick path to riches in this film, but the joke is less funny when one swaps the game back to "baseball" or "basketball." Dumb and Dumber was funny but surface-level, but Kingpin points to how deep the Farrellys could go when they pleased, laying the groundwork for There's Something About Mary and The Heartbreak Kid. But Kingpin remains my favorite.

Fuller thoughts can be found at The Vulgar Cinema.

The Hunger Games (Gary Ross, 2012)

The characters of The Hunger Games all have dirty fingernails. This is the primary insight to be intuited from director Gary Ross' incessant close-ups on the dirtied children culled from futuristic districts to fight each other to the death in a lasting reminder of the cost of rebellion. Sadly, fingernails are about the only thing I could make out in frenzied maelstrom of splintered images Ross assembles in sub-Bourne fashion. He's dealing with tricky material—the grisly killing of adolescents for sport—and forced to deliver a PG-13 rating to boot. He responds with a form of compromise: he gets to show teenagers dying horribly by making their demises so utterly incoherent that one cannot be sure anything's happened at all until the camera shows the tiniest splash of blood.

The shakycam mania of Ross' direction frustrated me more than usual because, to my surprise, I found myself engaged by the material. I haven't yet read Suzanne Collins' source novel, though I went straight to the nearest bookstore afterward to pick up a copy. Perhaps in her prose I'll find a more nuanced treatment of the themes, one that gives any kind of space to the material and lets the true horror of the titular games sink in rather than be roughly pushed along with all haste. And if nothing else, I'd like to get a fuller portrait of Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence), the insipidly named but instantly memorable protagonist who seems to be locked into opposition with certain sexist trends in young female characters as much as she is 23 other teenagers.

Natural Born Killers

Before a young, hyperactive video clerk by the name of Quentin Tarantino became, for better or worse, the icon of American independent cinema in the '90s, he toted around a couple of scripts around Hollywood hoping to direct them but at the very least looking to sell one. He managed, of course, to hold onto Reservoir Dogs for himself, his script for True Romance was optioned and eventually given to Tony Scott. His other screenplay, though, is what set the ball rolling for QT in the first place. Tarantino shopped the screenplay for Natural Born Killers around Hollywood in '91, caused a bit of a stir that helped him secure the capital for Reservoir Dogs, then he set aside the script as an immature work full of good ideas and dialogue but bursting with unfulfilled potential -- and he's very much right; his NBK starts incredibly but it loses steam in the second half.

Again, this was before the persona known as "QT" hit big, so this display of humility did not elicit the proper amount of gravity for Warner Bros., who bought the thing anyway and gave it to Oliver Stone. Now, if Tony Scott was a fun fit for Tarantino, Oliver Stone was a sign from God that this kid was going to ride Fortune's wheel to the top. You can argue for a certain degree of subtlety in Tarantino's scripts -- the utter genius of the "Eggplant" scene in True Romance, how Inglourious Basterds, for all its "badassery," shows a group of characters consumed by their quest for revenge, not validated by it -- but even the most cynical of haters would admit that QT is Voltaire compared to Oliver Stone. Indeed, even Tarantino's script was a bit too satirical and not not direct enough, so Stone and his writers kept most of the dialogue and reworked the story around it. The original writer disowned it, but eventually he divorced himself from his personal feelings on the tampering and admitted an admiration for Stone's choices.

That seems to be the appropriate response to this movie, regardless of how you feel about it: at least some level of admiration for it. Stone was coming off the more low-profile Heaven & Earth at the time, but he was still the man who was enjoying one of the most notable runs of any director of the last 25 years: Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, JFK. It was Stone's world, and we all just lived in it. By the time this story of sensationalized mass murderers entered post-production, the country had been positively inundated with ghastly reflections of this erstwhile piece of satire: O.J. Simpson, the Menendez brothers, hell, even Tanya Harding. That Stone could put out this damning piece of social commentary, particularly one so openly avant-garde, deserves recognition in its own right.

For my money, it deserves the attention. In some respects, no other American film of the decade was as important. Just as America's fascination with crime and violence began to openly assert itself, Stone's Killers wasn't so much a splash of cold water to the face as a sledgehammer. Its dizzying use of edits, different film stocks, color tinting and host of other tricks (including animation and flickering between images as if changing channels) reflect the stupefying disorientation of television. Much of the film's violence, so virulently debated and decried, is presented as captured footage or dramatic reenactments of Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis) Knox's crimes, all of which are just as violent and exploitative as the moments where we witness them in real time.

The presentation of the film as television is a retooling of Tarantino's original verité-like documentary footage, which he abandoned in the second half anyway. Stone's choice is funnier and more relevant, and it allows him to inject some of the most ingenious flourishes of his career. The original screenplay, centered on media personality Wayne Gale (Robert Downey, Jr.) and gave little background to the serial killers, which Stone rectified by making the warped lovebirds the full focus; his framing of Mallory's abusive childhood as an "aw-shucks" sitcom is possibly the singly most brilliant thing he's ever done. With Rodney Dangerfield playing the physically and sexually abusive father and an accompaniment of canned laughter, its easy to fall into the rhythm of a typical sitcom, until you realize that Dangerfield's punchlines are horrific descriptions of rape and beatings, all the more frightening in how Stone juxtaposes them with the laugh track, underlining how sitcoms in general milk laughs from some form of abuse and positing that violence is so ingrained in our culture that we find it inoffensively funny (how many of all the actions films made each year feature some death played for laughs?).

Mickey has his own childhood demons, and in this way Stone presents these characters as products of a violent society that matures into freewheeling madness just as Mickey and Mallory mature into their own. As such, society venerates them, chiefly through Wayne Gale, a Geraldo Rivera with Robin Leach's accent, whose program American Maniacs has never been more popular. His appearance is broadly satiric in the first half, where Gale plays in the background of Mickey and Mallory's rampage, gently inciting the public into accepting these two as heroes of some sort.

The third act, which actually lasts half the movie, takes place in prison following Mickey and Mallory's capture -- hilariously, Stone set their shootout with the cops to the Carmina Burana, further emphasizing it as a piece of operatic television. Many point to the second half as a letdown following the impressionistic, madcap murder spree, but just as Full Metal Jacket before it, Natural Born Killers needs the sudden shift in gear to flesh out its striking opening into a concrete message. Moving the pair to prison allows a juxtaposition against two cops: Detective Jack Scagnetti (Tom Sizemore), a warped, misogynistic sadist obsessed with murderers after Charles Whitman shot his mother during his rampage at the University of Texas; and Dwight McClusky (Tommy Lee Jones), an equally brutal warden who deals with the increasing overpopulation of his prison with violent offenders by physically asserting himself over those who dare step out of line. Scagnetti attempts to force himself on Mallory, who responds to his offer of a cigarette by stomping it out with her bare foot. McClusky, unlike the showboat Scagnetti, doesn't like the publicity coming his way and wants Mickey and Mallory simply and quietly killed. Yet he clearly works on his image, and he's too busy preening his devilish look to contemplate the full truth of his statement, "This place isn't a prison; it's a time bomb."

Gale's interview with Mickey is appropriately histrionic (on the presenter's part, at least), but the killer's cold rationality for his actions sparks a riot. Suddenly, television's role as a passive propagandist becomes an active character as Gale's ever-dwindling crew is forced to follow Mickey as he rescues Mallory and navigates through the horrific bloodbath that is the direct result of television. Up until this point, Natural Born Killers does not fully qualify as satire, as Stone leaps so fervently into the heart of the beast that the film's extreme violence is largely inseparable from the sort that it seeks to condemn. At last, though, it emerges as a piece of genius, as Gale is so consumed in his own hype that he too begins to gun down prison guards in a frenzy. As TV destroys itself in rapid montage, Mickey and Mallory emerge the evolved "natural born killers," the idols of a world that has finally come to celebrate its evil side, and they re-establish the "purity" of violence by killing the representative of that which turned it into a a product.

People always like to say of performances they love, even in films they might dislike, "Oh, if so-and-so wasn't in it the movie wouldn't have been half as good." I don't know why people say this, as it is so asinine as to warrant nothing but mockery -- The Godfather wouldn't be the same without Al Pacino; is it a bad film?. However the casting of Woody Harrelson, then known (fittingly, given the context of the film) only as dopey Woody from Cheers, and Juliette Lewis as two psychotic yet perversely endearing serial killers should remain an example until the end of cinema as an example of absolutely perfect casting. Downey, Sizemore and Jones also give incredible performances, all of them wildly exaggerated yet perfectly plausible in this disgusting world. But the real star here is Stone, whose techniques are utterly distracting, yet intentionally so. By the end of the film's two hours, he's destroyed the exploitative medium of television through sheer sensory overload, and his final blow is to the audience itself, as he ends with channel surfing through the sensationalizes murder trials of the day. In a career distinguished by visual inventiveness, even mastery, Natural Born Killers stands as his finest technical achievement. Upon seeing it a second time, I'm tempted to call it his greatest film, period; has any other mainstream film so trashed our cultural acceptance, even infatuation, with violence without resorting to preaching?

Zombieland

Budget issues clearly affected Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland: for all the talk of a worldwide plague of infected, the streets and cities that characters move through look surprisingly vacant, with only a small portion of zombies in each location, if at all. It's a noticeable flaw, but a slew of gory gags and absurd one-liners make Zombieland a terrific piece of popcorn entertainment, one with more "turn off your brain" fun than almost every blockbuster that came out this summer.

Jesse Eisenberg plays the unnamed protagonist, a virginal college student who survived the mass panic and death by virtue of having no strong ties with anyone, thus preventing him from being tied down. Now that the infection has consumed seemingly everyone else, though, he decides to head to his hometown of Columbus, Ohio to see if his parents survived. Eisenberg dryly narrates the film, ticking off his list of do's-and-don'ts for living in Zombieland like a DIY version of Max Brooks' The Zombie Survival Guide.

Before long he meets "Tallahassee" (Woody Harrelson), a loopy, shotgun-totin' madman scouring the country in search of a Twinkie. Columbus and Tallahassee band together out of an unspoken euphoria at meeting another uninfected human being, though each thoroughly irritates the other. Harrelson is a terrific character actor who excels in off-center roles, and without him Zombieland would be half as fun, if that. He drives his modified SUV on wrecked highways, taking out zombies with relish and finding only the lesser Hostess treats in cleaned-out grocery stores and food trucks.

Eventually, the lads stumble upon a duo of con artist sisters (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) who trick them out of their guns and ride. Through a series of predictable events, the quartet winds up together headed to California so Wichita can take her little sister to the amusement park they used to love. Is it a stupid plan? Well, yeah, but there's something delightful about some of the last remaining humans on the planet getting away from their daily struggle for survival in order to ride roller coasters that give the sensation of cheating death.

As with most zombie movies, Zombieland focuses more on the survivors than the undead, but here it works to the film's detriment. Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese's script generally avoids any sense of peril and displays only a scant few moments of reflection and coping; combined with the overall lack of zombie extras, there's a distinct lack of danger in most scenes. In fact, a good portion of the film takes place in a lush Hollywood mansion totally free of a zombie threat.

But the film works, and it works well, because the writers manage to make a post-apocalyptic hellscape into an absurd road movie. When infected do show up, the living dispatch them in creative, over-the-top ways that make for some of the best gory physical comedy this side of Sam Raimi. The fourth wall-breaking narration adds a wry commentary on these grisly dispatches and numerous on-screen cues remind us of Columbus' survival rules as they are put into practice. Furthermore, that extended time in the mansion doesn't kill the momentum like it should as it's predicated on a cameo appearance so unexpected and wild that the scene actually bolsters the movie's energy rather than sap it. And that's nothing compared to the final sequence involving a massive battle at the Californian amusement park, when an appropriate amount of zombies finally show up and the wheels come of the logic train for a bloodbath that plays like a mix of Dawn of the Dead and Looney Tunes.

Zombieland is not a film that will stay with you and make you ask questions. It's as brainless as a zombie victim, and you can see just about every plot point coming a mile away (the people in my audience all joined in loudly whispering what they thought would happen next, and I confess I didn't mind since we were all batted about a .800). But it's buoyed by its sense of peevishness and its fantastic cast, all of whom know what notes to hit and where to alleviate any moment of seriousness with a quick one-liner. An odd entry into the modern slacker canon, Zombieland ultimately posits that, in the event of an apocalypse, the meek shall inherit the earth not because of patience and humility but because the loners, outsiders and slackers won't have to deal with "normal" people anymore.

No Country for Old Men

Though I'm not exactly going out on a limb taste-wise, it's prudent that I admit my biases: I love the Coen brothers. Out of 13 films from 1984's Blood Simple to last year's Burn After Reading, I've loved all but two, and only disliked one (The Ladykillers). I consider several to be classics if not masterpieces, and a number of them would easily end up on my list of favorite films. Yet one film stands above them all. No Country for Old Men, the Coens' adaptation of the brilliant author Cormac McCarthy's bestseller, is the finest film in the brothers' brilliant oeuvre, and quite possibly the greatest film of the decade.

Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell drawls over the opening shots of the beautifully desolate Texas landscape as he describes a child killer he sent to death row. "I don't know what to make of that," he wearily sighs, "I surely don't." This monologue, seemingly disconnected from the events about to unfold, forms the backbone of the film. Though we watch the killer Anton Chigurh chase Llewelyn Moss over West Texas, the real story is Bell's inability to cope with evil in this world, and his difficulty comprehending a creature as sadistic as Chigurh.

Chigurh wastes no time establishing himself as something to be feared. An officer arrests him at the start, brings him back to the station, and promptly gets strangled by Chigurh's handcuffs. Then he takes some sort of air cannon and heads back out onto the road. Javier Bardem plays Chigurh as an undefinable evil: his name connotes no nationality, nor his accent.

Meanwhile, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) goes hunting and stumbles upon a botched drug deal. He finds one barely alive Mexican and a satchel full of $2 million. He returns home to his wife, stashes the money, and goes to sleep. Then his conscience gets the better of him, and he grabs a jug of water to take to the dying man. A noble gesture, but a terrible mistake.

The result is a taut thriller, almost entirely unaided by music. Chigurh arrives at the site of the deal looking for his money, and sets about tracking down Moss. It's a deceptively simple story with a decidedly Coens bent. Apart from the three leads, we meet Moss' wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald, sporting an accent so authentic you'd swear she was born and raised in Texas), a sleazy businessman who has a stake in the drug deal (Stephen Root) and Carson Wells (woody Harrelson), a bounty hunter who knows all too well about Chigurh but apparently not enough to be genuinely afraid.

Most Coen brothers films involve money, and in most that money serves as a MacGuffin. No Country is no different; at one point Moss meets Wells, who offers protection from Chigurh. Wells tells him that he cannot make deals with Chigurh, because "he has a set of principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that." Chigurh is out for blood simply because he is.

The dialogue of the brothers' films oscillates between sparse and loquacious, from the silent suffering of Billy Bob Thornton's Ed Crane in The Man Who Wasn't There to the nonstop stream of profanities in The Big Lebowski. No Country belongs firmly in the former category; it may be the least dialogue they've ever written. Yet it still, in spots, runs over with their endlessly dark, Flannery O'Connor-influenced wit. The best example of this is the memorable scene in which Chigurh speaks with a gas station attendant who annoys him. It leads to a coin toss and a tense buildup in which both the attendant and the audience slowly come to realize that the man's life is at stake. Not only is it incredibly tense, but it rather slyly sets up Chigurh's total madness.

It's difficult to talk about the film without spoiling everything, so let me pull back and mention the actual craft of the film. As someone without even a semseter of "Introduction to Film Studies" under his belt, I confess I know precious little about the craft of film. Now, I can look at a film and tell you what it's trying to say, and I've pored over Expressionist and Expressionist-influenced cinema to look for symbolism, but the mis-en-scène still eludes me. Yet this film so positively overflows with technical brilliance that even a neophyte like myself must sit in awe.

Earlier I mentioned an almost total lack of music. Normally, thrillers rely on a tense score to help things along, but the Coens subvert the notion. Instead, they have to rely on the sheer power of editing. The Coens, who edit their films themselves under the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes, manage to pace a series of bleak landscapes into a gradually mounting nail-biter. To fill the aural void, sound designer Craig Berkey and editor (and longtime collaborator) Skip Levsey pump up every noise in the film. Wind becomes the score, and silence is deafening. They use sound so expertly that you're always expecting something bad to happen, and the dull thud of Chigurh's cattlegun pierces the air like a thundercrack. It's so good that even now, after a half-dozen viewings of the film, I still jump when Chigurh blows the lock off a door.

But as much as the editing and sound make this a technical marvel, Roger Deakins' pristine cinematography pushes it over the top. Deakins is one of the few cinematographers that even film neophytes could name, and the man is certainly the best working in the business today. Of all his work however, No Country might be his best. While the lighting department surely deserves a lot of credit for this, Deakins' ability to capture gallery-worthy shots at every turn with the absolute perfect amount of light burns the film into your brain. After all, something's got to fill the gap between dialogue, and even those moments of chilling silence courtesy of Berkey and Livsey, and Deakins rises to the challenge magnificently. I have a hard time picking between this and The Assassination of Jesse James as his finest work, but who cares? The winner is all of us.

The film ends as it begins, with a monologue from Jones, which sums up the themes as much as the opening speech presented them: evil in this world cannot be defeated, and to even understand evil one would have to immerse himself into it. Yet it also runs deeper than that: as the title suggests, Sheriff Bell laments through his narrations and conversations with other characters that something fundamental has changed in society for the worst. Near the end of the film, as Bell plans to retire after the Chigurh case takes it toll, his uncle, wheelchair-bound as a result of a shooting, chastises Bell. He relates a story of one of their relatives who was shot in the head and left to slowly bleed to death at the turn of the century over 75 years ago, and the uncle's very existence proves that horrible violence has always existed. He passively derides the notion that things used to be grand until the teenagers started listening to the Clash. Bell still retires, but in his final speech, concerning a dream he had, he clearly demonstrates that he finally understands this: he tells his wife of dreaming of his father. "And in the dream I knew that he was goin' on ahead and he was fixin' to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there." Here he's placing his father, along with his perception's of the simpler time his dad represents, on a pedestal. As he wanders this foul wilderness, he can see his father up ahead preparing a fire to light the way and to warm him when he gets there. Then Bell concludes, "And then I woke up." You can read into this a deep cynicism, even nihilism, but I interpret this as Bell's self-awareness at his foolishness. Yes, he realizes that his idealistic view of the past was a dream, but now he can accept that and perhaps come to cope with the world around him. It's not much cheerier, I'll grant, but it's a fascinating way to address contemporary concerns of the direction we've taken.

Many take issue to the ending as an anti-climax or hopeless, which makes me wonder where they've been for the past 20 years of the Coen brothers' careers. I won't waste words, especially in discussing such a brutally direct film as this: I think it's a perfect end to a perfect film. If you still haven't seen No Country for Old Men, go buy it now.