What’s intriguing about this plot is, actually, the fact that it’s the apotheosis of predictability, packed with tropes so broadly drawn, they seem to be fighting each other to the death. Indeed, Hugh Grant’s character is basically a boxing ring where the two great misogynist female caricatures of our generation, typified by Aniston and Deschanel, are meant to battle it out with each other, and perhaps it’s a fortunate commentary on the future of cinema that neither of them win.
A sequel (titled either A Bird in the Hand 2 In the Bush or A Bird in the Hand Two: In the Bush) has been green-lit, this time, apparently, with Jennifer Aniston’s character choosing between two suitors; one who’s bad for her whom she lusts for, and one who’s good for her whom she ignores. With the assumption that this sequel will meet expectations at the box office, and merely pass two hours of unmarked time on future international flights for years to come, they may use the studio’s production budget to write everybody royalty checks in advance, and skip making the actual film.
Perhaps they’re right to not do and say they did. Walking out of A Bird in the Hand, I was convinced that I never needed to see another movie again. So absolutely is this film about recycling—even codifying—a bland familiarity, it literally breaks one’s unconscious desire to experience cinema, the way that the pureed meatloaf of a senior home dinner might make an octogenarian lose her memory of how to use a fork. In having neither Deschanel nor Aniston end up with Grant, it’s a bit like telling the audience that you are not the winner here, that the film industry has been playing us for fools, and we like it. I was mildly disappointed, the way I used to be disappointed by airplane food or office Christmas parties—a disappointment mitigated by the understood quality of the holistic experience.
Then, less than a week later, I passed the poster at my bus stop and realized that I couldn’t remember a single detail from the film. Within a day, were it not for the ticket stub I’d kept in my wallet, anyone could convince me that I never saw this movie at all. I actually had to see it again to write this review, and to my amazement, the theatre was packed, just like it was on opening weekend, and, I could swear, with many of the same people, and once again, all us walked in with mild anticipation and left with mild disappointment. I thought I was either batshit crazy or they were.
As it turns out, neither is true. My complete amnesia in regards to seeing this film turns out to be a widely experienced phenomenon across America. The film has been near the top of the box office for six weeks, and reason is that people are seeing the movie two, three, or even four times, forgetting they’ve seen it already.
So if you’re still compelled to see A Bird in the Hand, fine. But for all of us who want to see an original movie again in our lifetimes, please keep your ticket stub in a place you see every day, or in your wallet, or on your dashboard, or stapled to the sleeve of your coat—whatever it takes. I, and the greater moviegoing public, thank you in advance, because we won’t remember why.
Directed by Alexander Payne. Written by Alexander Payne and Bob Nelson. Starring: Bryan Cranston, Naomi Watts, Ryan Gosling, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dakota Fanning, and Benicio Del Toro.
“Family is not an important thing, it’s everything,” once said that great cultural heavyweight, Michael J. Fox. He ought to know, having nursed his career at the bosom of two of the eighties’ most iconic families: the McFlys of the popular Back to the Future franchise, and the Keaton clan of the beloved sitcom Family Ties. Perhaps no director would agree with this sentiment more these days than Alexander Payne. He has expanded his range of late by digging into the humor and pathos that is the chocolate and peanut butter of the dysfunctional family in several films about eccentric tribes and their relationships to their homelands, from Hawaii in The Descendants to his own home state of Nebraska in, well, Nebraska.
With pop-culture nostalgia at an all-time high (and studio creativity at an all time meh), it can seem like the truly landmark source material has already been plumbed for the big screen, from toys (The Lego Movie) and television shows (The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team) to commercials (while some felt the film adaptation of the iconic “Where’s the Beef” TV ad was a bit thin, it must be acknowledged for its abundant laughs, thanks to a punchline that never gets old, and some surprisingly dark character work on the backstory of the “Where’s the Beef” lady). So it’s no surprise that not only the late, great action shows have made the leap to the big screen. The Wayans recently found abundant comic inspiration in Family Matters, while Wes Anderson discovered his own creative and aesthetic wellspring in ALF.
At a moment when our country’s inflated higher educational system, limping economy, and high school population of aspiring porn stars mean it’s no longer guaranteed that the current up-and-coming generation will do better than their parents, or even move out of their basements, this is the perfect moment to resurrect a TV family who found humor and drama in just such a generational divide. As originally conceived when the show first aired in 1982, at the family’s head were former hippies Steven Keaton (Michael Gross) and Elyse Keaton (Meredith Baxter) whose children eschewed their liberal values in favor of Reaganomics, in the case of their young titan of industry Alex P. (Michael J. Fox), and in favor of image, in the case of their fashion-obsessed daughter Mallory (Justine Bateman), with younger daughter Jennifer (Tina Yothers) and son Andrew (Brian Bonsall) just wanting everyone to get along, which of course, in order to create sitcom gold, they did not, even if they always loved each other.
In his big screen adaptation, Payne was wise to focus less on the political specifics of the time, which would have risked turning the film into a historic set piece, and instead focus on the almost limitless potential for comic strife and ultimate familial redemption in the philosophical divide between liberals and conservatives. (What could be more of a hoot than your average session of Congress these days, right?) Tensions arise in the house when the local public television station run by Dad Steven (played by Bryan Cranston with remarkably understated charm in the style of the part’s originator, nary a meth lab in sight) is threatened with the loss of NEA funding if it goes forward with plans to run a documentary about controversial artist Andres Serrano. As some will remember, Serrano’s real-life work “Piss Christ” was at the center of a late-eighties cultural maelstrom over artistic and religious freedom, censorship, and what constitutes art. Of course, Alex (Ryan Gosling) does not believe the government should fund such “mumbo jumbo,” not realizing his outspoken protest will ultimately cost his father his job. Fear not: conflict, and hilarity, ensue.
As with the original television show, much of the adaptation’s success rests on the shoulders of its young star, who is given the best jokes and the most room to evolve as a character, showing as he does that there’s more to a man than the way he fills out his sweater-vest. Unnamed sources have said that Gosling had to petition hard for the part, as Payne originally dismissed him as too “cool” to play Alex and was only wooed when Gosling sent the director a hand-shot audition of him decked out in a period Polo shirt, giving a believably chilling rendition of Reagan’s infamous “Evil Empire” speech in support of armament against Godless Communism. For his part, Gosling has been quoted as saying of the role of Alex, “I’ve played alcoholics, sociopaths, and womanizers, but I wanted to challenge myself with a part that was the least like me and the most bleak: a Reagan-era conservative.” Gosling has also said in multiple interviews that as a fellow Canadian, Michael J. Fox has long been a hero and a major inspiration behind his career, as well as the occasional haircut.
With no disrespect to the original source material, which managed to sneak in some smart social commentary amid running gags about who in the household was hogging the telephone and Alex’s love of money, the script here, cowritten by Payne and his Nebraska collaborator, Bob Nelson, goes deeper and darker. Their adaptation gets inside the angst of father-son discord as it dates back to “Death of a Salesman” and even further to Psalm 153: �
��Fear not, father, for I can milk that camel on my own, and now I am a man.” The story is not so much about the specifics of plot and its resolution but more about how each individual character grows during that necessary moment at which parents must be pushed off their pedestals in order for children to grow into their own people, and the specific ways in which respect and love are engendered within a family (i.e., guilt).
Other cinematic bonbons worth mentioning include Naomi Watts’ wig, which gives her just the lustrous mop once sported by Baxter. Benicio Del Toro’s delightfully derelict turn as Mallory’s much-dissed, lug-headed boyfriend, Nick, who suggests he’s got more brains than he’d dare to let on amid this group of wannabe eggheads. And Gyllenhaal as Mallory, who, much like Bateman’s original portrayal shows that sometimes ignorance is its own form of grace. But in the end, the film is an ensemble piece, and its best moments, as in real life, are when the whole family is together, scrapping and soothing, threatening to almost veer into the sentimental, but always saved at the last minute by Payne’s deft observation of the truest truth there is: family is about more than just blood, it’s about guts. If Payne doesn’t win an Academy Award for this film, it’ll be the greatest Oscar travesty since Dame Judi Dench’s “Where’s the Beef” lady lost to Fran Drescher in The Nanny Takes Reno.
Directed by Martin Scorsese. Narrated by Bill Cosby.
A week before the iconic film and camera company received the dire warning from Wall Street, threatening the delisting of its shares from the New York Stock Exchange, Kodak: The Film opened a limited run to a disappointing box office in select theaters in Los Angeles and Rochester, New York. The film, Kodak: The Film was filmed on what is thought to be the last remaining film stock of Kodak’s VISION3 200T Color Negative Film 5213/7213, a formulation the company had hoped would compete with the evolving and less expensive tape and digital recording formats. Found stored in what was once the RKO Radio Pictures Studio building in Culver City, later purchased by Desilu Productions and now an independent postproduction facility, the Kodak film of Kodak: The Film is iridescent and shockingly vivid in the visual and sonic information it conveys.
Kodak: The Film stars no one really but the material means of production of photographic reproduction—cameras, chemicals, emulsifiers, negatives, filters, film—exposed and not. Narrated by the comedian and educator Bill Cosby, who was at one time the company’s commercial spokesman, Kodak: The Film might be thought of as a documentary docudrama hybrid. It is a 3-D, super-color-saturated version of March of the Penguins spliced with the sixteen-millimeter coarsely grained black-and-white capitalist-socialist realistic propagandistic shorts made during the Cold War by the AFL-CIO called Industry on Parade.
Though these primogenitors suggest movement, what is most striking about Kodak: The Film is that it is a movie that does not move shot, as it is a series of stills. The static motion technique of Kodak: The Film harkens back to the haunting 1962 film, La Jetee, by Chris Marker who acted, at ninety-two, as a consultant to Kodak: The Film’s director Martin Scorsese. The technique teaches the viewer, as the slide show slides by, the filmstrip nature of the film as the film is stripped of its essential illusion of movement. We are asked to appreciate the apparent invisible vibrant and constant nature of light itself, both wave and particle.
Kodak: The Film is itself haunting as it haunts itself, opening as it does with a photomontage of superimposed “found” images salvaged from dumpsters near photo processing labs where snapshots were discarded by their owners. Thousands of pictures of random people posing (one after the other), waving, dissolving into pictures of people in costume—for Halloween, the prom, weddings, first communions—fading into one hundred years of birthdays—the cakes on the tables, the air made madly solid by the spent candle smoke caught drifting, illuminated by Instamatic flash cubes that are themselves pictured flashing and turning and revealing, in the red afterglow of the flash, picture after picture of people taking pictures of people taking pictures, the floating pinpoints of light coming to light on the contracted irises of red-eyed starry-eyed startled pets that bleed into the overexposed nebula of nebulous social gatherings, graduations, gardens, grandstands, gratuitous sexual organs.
Kodak: The Film is a paean to point-of-view, to point-and-shoot, as the camera pans and pulls, tracks and racks. One is submerged in this new sublime subliminal atmosphere of aperture and f-stop. The light here is a liquid ceaselessly flowing, arranging itself in pixelated patterns that sort themselves into image after image of images of images of actual water of light falling over the High Falls of the Genesee River in headwaters of the river of film, Rochester, NY.
Finally, there is finally, no finality to Kodak: The Film. It is all collage and cutting. One jumps over the chasm of invisible darkness between the frames, the stutter steps over the stepping-stones, the endless loops, the speeds of stillness going nowhere fast. Kodak: The Film is the filmiest film school film filmed. Another section of the film highlights film leaders. It becomes a kind of film-within-a-film film. A number of film leaders, their numbers counting down, lead to a film of numbers counting down. There is a poignant collection of hand-scratched changeover cue marks that promise reels of film that never arrive. The somber Kodak: The Film is both record and method of the annihilation of space and time before our eyes. It ends not as a consequence of consequence, nor through the machinations of plot or narrative of cause and effect or character drive or growth or change. Kodak: The Film ends in entropy; its final montage sequence pitted against our perceived notion of sequential time.
The movie’s whole and wholly on-message message has been this stunning relentless resistance. No beginning. No middle. No end. The final sequence consumes itself, a rapid-fire firing of the artifact of plastic time catching fire. Pictured are frames after frames of frames spontaneously combusting, melting, literally dissolving, evaporating, jammed and jellied, reduced and rendered, boiled and fried, warped and scorched, effaced, vaporized before your eyes. The sprocket holes gape open like the scream in The Scream. This goes on for hours. I mean for hours literally, in homage to Andy Warhol’s 1964 film Empire, the camera does not look away from this serial sizzling stasis. You are steeped in the banality of boredom, of the repeating images of images of time-lapsed explosion, implosion, of the deep breathing and frustrated sighing of Bill Cosby on the frayed and fraying soundtrack. But you do not want to look away because (spoiler alert!) the next frozen image of decay might actually be the actual animation of Kodak: The Film’s self-destruction as all of the prints (and now there are so few left to see) are treated to ignite of their own volition, sooner or later, and disappear completely into volatile vapors and very little ash.
Directed by Bennett Miller. Starring: Ryan Gosling, John Hawkes, Joel Edgerton, Tom Berenger, James McAvoy, Walton Goggins, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Johnny Cash.
The question is not, what is Outlaw Country? For those unfamiliar with the term, it’s a genre of country music created by country legends Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, Kris Kristofferson, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Waylon Jennings in the late 1960’s as a reaction to the softening of Nashville honky-tonk and an exploration into the purity of free living men. The film Outlaw Country is also that sort of exploration, and, like the musical style from which its name derives, it exists outside of the system, while remaining an intrinsic part of it. Much like the irony of a movie like Fight Club being made by Fox, when you watch Outlaw Country, you’ll wonder how the hell Paramount ever agreed to make it, but you’ll give thanks to God that they did.
This isn’t just the study of a largely unknown offshoot of country music. It’s the celebration of a man: the late great Waylon Jennings.
The film opens on a dark airstrip in 1959, outside a single-engine plane, as young Waylon gives his seat away to The Big Bopper (Jason Segel, who put on forty pounds for this one scene). Ritchie Valens (Michael Peña) boards the plane and Buddy Holly (Ja
y Baruchel) tells Waylon, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Waylon replies, “Well, Buddy, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” Then Holly offers the slightest of smirks to Waylon, who was Holly’s bass player on the “Winter Dance Party” tour, and Waylon watches the plane move down the jet way.
Then we see Waylon’s face for the first time as a single tear falls down his cheek. This version of Waylon is portrayed by actor Ryan Gosling. It’s worth a mention because it’s also the last time we’ll see Gosling.
Director Bennett Miller explains: “A lot of people are comparing this to Todd’s (Haynes) movie I’m Not There. I just don’t think that’s a fair comparison.”
Miller is referring to Haynes casting six radically different actors in his interpretation of the life and work of Bob Dylan. Miller took it a step further in his choice of recasting Waylon in every scene. That’s right. In the Waylon Jennings biopic, the legendary country music star is portrayed by no fewer than forty-seven actors, most notably Gosling, Marlon Wayans, Michael Fassbender, Judy Davis, John Hawkes, Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn, and Christopher Walken.
Walken said in a recent article in EW, “Guys, when I was a boy, all I wanted was to be Waylon Jennings. I was a song and dance man. Country boy deep down. Inside.”
Which, okay, makes no sense since a) Jennings was only six years older than Walken and wasn’t performing until Walken was a grown man, and b) Mr. Walken is from Queens.
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