The late fifties weren’t kind to Kerouac, who suffered both physically and spiritually, finding himself a kind of joke among those that went on the road and then got off of it—opting instead to sire their children in the booming suburbs. Jack is a fossil, a remnant of the past, while Ginsberg has evolved into the icon of tomorrow, not only adopting the West’s appetite for Eastern spirituality but living it, on his sleeve. The meeting and the familiarity it spawns is a tender moment in the film where a has-been tells the soon-to-be of the troubles that come from climbing high and fast. Smith’s is a veritable bodhisattva of compassion as he watches and listens to Foxx’s pain and lamentation. The pain isn’t simply his bitterness, but that of an entire generation of second-class artists who would only be acknowledged as such many years later in their university and café canonizations. But what the audience realizes, and Foxx in all his erudition is completely aware of, is that that’s how it is, how it’s meant to be. Only rock stars find instant fame and glory in their own age; the other arts wait for death to pitch them forward to the stars. Foxx finishes with the words, “How’s a man like me to be loved who can never learn to love being a man like me?” To which Smith replies calmly and coolly, “Jack, I love you. Don’t you know that I’ve always loved you?! Jack, I’ll blow you.”
The film could end here, but Hanson takes it all the way to the deathbed of Ginsberg, who is remembering his many loves, writing his last poems, and fondling a small daisy. As his mind wanders and he recalls the summer of ’69 when the world changed into a world where Kerouac was no longer a part of it, the pain written on his face and twitching beard is not for his loss, but our loss. Smith makes us believe in a few short minutes before his own passing that his world isn’t complete without Foxx, that when he lost Foxx we all lost a piece of the true America, the diner mystic, the gas station saint, the yeoman magician, all of these magical creatures that will forever be immortalized for us, on the road.
Hanson brings down the house quietly through Ginsberg, who lived like a titan through some of the most tumultuous decades firmly rooted in America’s psyche of itself. What we are left with is neither satisfaction that we revere Kerouac nor acceptance that Ginsberg and his flawed volumes of poems are the gems of “Kaddish” and “Howl,” no; Hanson leaves us uncertain of our own surroundings and the world we inhabit. It won’t matter if you see the film in Duluth, Minnesota, New York or Bahrain: the effect is the same—this is the America of a 1950s imagination soaked in the kerosene of Eastern philosophy.
Directed by David Dobkin. Starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jason Sudeikis, Isla Fisher, and Keira Knightley.
Just when it seemed Hollywood couldn’t outdo itself with a premise devoid of any merit—save for its ability to be pitched to a movie exec with an anxiety disorder—along comes this comedy from the creators of other comedies whose names and storylines you’ve forgotten even though you’re pretty sure you saw them in the theater or on Netflix or on a movie channel like HBO.
The Boob Switch, as the title suggests, is about two men whose wives switch boob sizes. It begins with an introduction to the lives of two couples who live in a generic suburb outside of an unnamed city that is probably Chicago. Dave (Ryan Reynolds) works in advertising and is married to the voluptuous Krissy (Isla Fisher), a food critic. Steve (Jason Sudeikis) has a job in finance and is married to the lithe and flat-chested Carolyn (Keira Knightley), a yoga instructor.
In the film’s pivotal scene, Dave and Steve meet for a drink at a bar. The evening starts as a regular night between two friends, catching up and complaining. As the two become drunker, the complaining extends to their love lives. Dave, who spends his days looking at glossy advertising photos of women, wishes his wife had a more svelte figure. Steve, on the other hand, feels that his wife Carolyn is becoming thinner and thinner and her breasts have virtually disappeared. It becomes evident that each man vies for the physical body—specifically breast size—of the other’s wife. At this moment, a toothless Irish bartender mutters under his breath, “Careful what you wish for,” before crushing up a bunch of four-leaf clovers and sprinkling lucky clover dust into their next round of drinks.
After the men go home, a lightning storm strikes. Whether this lightning is induced by the four-leaf clover dust or is just a perfect coincidence (and a necessary second component to the spell that is to ensue later) is unclear. We see the respective couples asleep in bed as the lightning cascades into their bedrooms, causing them to toss and turn in the presumed discomfort of the impending physical and psychological metamorphoses.
The next morning, as was promised by the movie poster, Carolyn the yoga instructor has double Ds, and Krissy, the once-voluptuous food critic, has double As. Here, the film takes pains to clarify certain rules of this new universe. Apparently no one can see this change in breast size except for the two husbands. We learn this when Krissy, who now looks flat-chested, dresses herself and looks in a mirror completely unfazed.
She meets a friend for lunch who compliments her on her curvy figure and the fact that she can really fill out a dress.
The inherent comedy in all this is heightened when Carolyn, the day after her transformation, goes bra shopping. She walks into a Victoria’s Secret with double Ds and asks where she can find a “training bra” because As are now too big for her. The salesperson unflinchingly walks her to the teenage section of the store, and we watch as Keira Knightley hilariously holds up a training bra to her double D boobs in a mirror.
Despite the film’s exhausting effort to clarify the rules of this universe, the viewer must still make a few leaps of faith—especially in terms of spatiality. How does Knightley fit the training bra over her double Ds? When Steve is excitedly massaging the breasts of his newly voluptuous wife, does she see his hand moving at an eight-inch distance from her chest?
Dave and Steve, of course, freak out the morning they wake up to their transformed wives. They remain calm until they get into their cars going to work and call each other. “My wife has boobs!” / “My wife has no boobs!” they simultaneously exclaim. In a state of confusion and madness, Dave slams his steering wheel, “Dude, what happened?” Steve, meanwhile, tries to see the bright side: “You know, maybe this isn’t a bad thing after all?” One has to wonder if Steve’s attitude is inspired by the fact that he’s getting the better end of the deal: his wife is rail thin with enormous boobs while Dave’s wife is stout with no boobs. Regardless, he convinces Dave, and the two happily enjoy this new transformation. A series of hilarious boob-themed antics ensue from approximately minute twenty-five to minute fifty-five of the film.
Ultimately, the men realize they need to undo the spell and return to the original breast sizes of their wives. Here, we discover that behind this inane comedy is actually a heartfelt message: love is blind. Or, maybe love is irrespective of breast size. Whatever it is, it’s a compelling message that fills you with the most minimal sense of fulfillment and prevents you from asking for your money back at the end of the film (or smashing the DVD box into a wall if watching from home).
The men orchestrate a “girls’ night” for their wives so that they can meet alone in one of their homes, as it would be too easy to just meet somewhere else. They pace around a living room decorated with furniture from Pottery Barn, jotting various ideas on a paper easel with the heading “Boob Switch.” Just when it seems they’ve exhausted absolutely every idea, Steve realizes that they should just retrace their steps the night before the boob switch happened. Except instead of complaining about their wives’ breast sizes, they should praise them.
Accordingly, the two men return to the bar and execute the plan. The toothless bartender knowingly smiles, as if having taught these two men a lesson, and crushes up a reverse four-leaf clover potion and puts it into their drinks. Thunder and lightning strike, and the men wake up the following morning to their wives in their original physical states.
The last five minutes of the film are dedica
ted to a period of “happily ever after” that seems to continually outdo itself in happily-ever after-ness. The men, who wake in blissful peace next to their wives, decide to organize a “wife appreciation dinner.” It’s set up in one of their backyards, where the table is lit with candles and surrounded by paper lanterns. At dinner, each man confesses what he loves most about his wife, both physically and emotionally. The wives are touched by the display before deciding to crack a few crass and out-of-place one-liners to jolt us out of the seriousness of the conversation. The men officially declare this day as “Wife Appreciation Day,” given that such a day doesn’t exist—only Mother’s Day, which doesn’t count for couples without children. A fun song plays, as we zoom out of the Chicago suburbs and watch as this backyard becomes a tiny microcosm of a greater world with other families and marriages. Credits begin to roll as you get up from your chair and slowly begin the process of forgetting whether you ever saw this film.
Directed by Pat Sajak. Starring: Pat Sajak.
Flash forward one hundred years, five hundred years—hell, let’s turn it up to one thousand—to the archival system of our culture, viewable in the retinas of what passes for humans, the AI-infused beings that inhabit not Earth exactly but a kind of virtual landscape that contains elements of physical reality: dirt, the occasional tree, streets, structures, but really, “the world” is more of a suspended post-digital, synaptical time-space field controlled by the programming of the creators.
Or something.
What are the films of our era that will live on? There are only two options:
The most vapid of Hollywood superhero-explosion-terrorist-redemption.
The personal documentary.
Though I have to psych myself up sometimes before engaging this sometimes/often self-regarding genre, this is where I’d put my longevity money. These are the only stories that our future relatives will scour, full of artificial curiosity, why, why are these poor hairless chimpanzees trying to piece together meaning out of what they called life?
Why indeed.
As an unabashed gameshow fanatic in my fructose youth, the most repellent of all of the combed-over fiends was unquestionably The Sajak. Both smug and insipid, condescending without a shred of a reason to be, and fearless—utterly fearless—to look America straight in the eye with a joke that (he knows) contains zero value of any perceptible kind, Sajak clearly possessed the coveted personality pieces to climb Olympus, and so his rise must have felt, to him, inevitable, determined, as if he’d pulled the sword from the stone.
Wheel of Truth debuted at the 4-H Branson Film Festival this year to an audience paralyzed by a combination of shock and instant transcendence. There were no walk-outs. There were no sounds. No sniffles, popcorn crunches, chair squeaks—there was only stillness and rapt attention. What emerges from the first frame is a New Poetry, a visual immediacy and intimacy, with Sajak’s voice (now heavily weathered by a lake of Scotch and quarry of Pall Malls) ringing out in ninety-second bursts of a kind of melding between the profane and sacred that could only be wrought from a soul that had spun itself into oblivion, thinning with each turn of random commerce.
In the opening shot the camera moves achingly slow, almost indiscernibly—closer and closer to the Wheel, as the clicky thing finally stops on “Jamaica.” Sajak takes us straight to the face of a seventy-five-year-old white woman, the winner, exultant, coming out of her skin. And then… he speaks:
That trip to Jamaica, the Dunn’s River Falls all the souls squeezing into one another, palm to palm (holy palmer’s kiss)
ascending against the stream of paradise—the wheel found you, took you there
and you looked it in the eyes, haggling for a piece of shit on the street,
a boat made of shells, five dollar! she demands. And you say, no, one dollar! Because it is your money, your dollar, your world, your God.
The film references some of the visual language of Russ McElwee’s Sherman’s March and, more recently, Sarah Polley’s excellent Stories We Tell. While I believe both of those gems will live on indefinitely in the mostly horrible future, what Sajak has done here is to use these personal docs as a jumping-off point, the way Dylan began with Guthrie and Muddy Waters, only later to explode at Newport. This film is a detonator.
Imagine the beautiful Los Angeles morning, Sajak with an Americano in hand, striding in his loafers into the heart of Merv Griffin’s operation. I want to make a documentary, kind of a special really, about the Wheel. The big jackpots. The bankruptcies. The celebratory gyrating. Talk to the winners now. Vanna, of course. Rural Wisconsin. Michigan. Ohio. Kentucky. Alabama. They’d eat it up. Life on the Wheel, something like that.
Okay, Pat. Sounds like a real champ. How’s five million sound?
Sajak’s evolutionary artistic middle as a meaningful figure in right-wing punditry and fund-raising must have given the bosses every reason to believe he’d churn out a piece of puffery so undeniable it could choke a child, as if filled with a load of taffy, M&Ms, and bleach. Pure gold. What I long to see, and never will, is the pivot Sajak must have made, like a ballerina, out the doors of Griffin’s office, knowing he’d just walked away clean, with their unwitting blessing to make a film about the great, unspeakable emptiness in our credit-card hearts.
Where other personal docs might glorify the fleeting moments we spend with a very young Sajak (DJ’ing his way to early fame, then to Vietnam, his time with Armed Forces Radio), Sajak slams the door on any such maudlin inclinations. The footage of Sajak accidentally pulling the plug on Nixon’s 1969 broadcast to the troops only serves the film’s greater purpose of exposing its own subject as a mindless noise in a sea of cacophony. Again, though, Sajak refuses to stop here, with simple irony. He pushes us further down the river, to the level of reality behind what beams into our homes. Try this voiceover on for size as the camera zeroes in on his own eyes, caught mid-laugh as he fumbles with the old Army radio equipment:
Napalm and the beast that laps it up the milk of war
Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Bell, General Dynamics only now can I hear the murder in the names,
now that there are no stakes, no meaning,
names that simply float on the billions becoming trillions becoming meaningless sound
meaningless value, human life
the sound of my voice, what I mean (nothing) what I say to you now, this instant
an agent of the dream that weakens us.
In what would have to qualify as further evidence that the Jungian model of the Collective Unconscious indeed makes itself manifest at the time of a great shared experience, I could hear in the theater two hundred near whispers, all forming the same letters: V-A-N-N-A W-H-I-T-E. After the initial plunge into Sajak’s agonizing world, after he exposes us (and himself) to his fatalist poetic commentary, we are left as viewers wondering at what point in his opus will he give us the face, the hands, the legs walking the horizontal plane, as if her only purpose, her only knowledge, contained the twenty-six letters, that, when flipped, turned beggars into kings.
SPOILER ALERT
One of the truths about human nature that Sajak exploits throughout Wheel is our need to visually orient ourselves each second. Against the spiral of dollar signs and traps, we hear the legendary announcer Charly O’Donnell echo from beyond… Pat Sajak and Vanna White!
Sajak hard cuts to himself and Vanna, present day, their faces only inches apart. Our eyes scramble to make sense of them seated on two folding chairs in a women’s bathroom, a toilet in plain view. The following are snippets from the interview—or more accurately, their exchange of souls.
Vanna, remember when the fat man in suspenders fell onto the wheel, and I looked at you, and you ran over from the puzzle to get a closer look, and everyone thought you were trying to help him?
Oh yes. And I looked back at you, and I realized I’d been so blessed to have you there every da
y.
Those were the words I made you say before work, over coffee and ratings, in this bathroom.
And…
What is waking up like for you these days, Vanna? Walk me through it.
I roll right out of bed and beat a punching bag for five minutes. I drink breakfast and work out for four hours. Then it’s time for my face.
I’d like to start having you over for tea, just you and me, every Sunday. How would you like that?
The audience was brought to whatever tears they had left in their stricken faces. How I ended up on the panel of the Branson Film Festival is, perhaps, a story for another time (RIP. Ned Beatty). The Christian Vegas, though, made for a perfectly unironic setting for the unveiling of art. For a tight seventy-eight minutes, Sajak takes us down the river until we finally reach his own personal Kurtz, his ill-fated talk show, the absolute apex of vacancy beamed into American homes. But the journey to the bottom of this pit is worth every strained second—because, truly, how many times in life does one have the great fortune to bear witness to the birth of the pure artist? Especially the miraculous, rare December bloom, in the face of long odds, when the Wheel lands squarely on Bankrupt, and never before now has that felt like such a jackpot.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Jason Reitman. Starring: George Clooney, Matt Damon, Rachel Weisz, and Tilda Swinton.
Please forgive any typos that may appear in this review, but I just walked out of The Middle Man two hours ago and my hands are still shaking! How can I even begin to describe the experience of seeing The Middle Man on the big screen? Well, for starters, there was the screen. It is a big screen. Like, incredibly huge. I mean, I went into it knowing that it was going to be a big screen, bigger certainly than a cellphone screen or an iPad screen or even most average home television screens. But nothing prepared me for this! Imagine the biggest TV you’ve ever seen in your entire life—this is like a hundred times bigger than that! And if that’s not enough, it’s flanked with these gorgeous red velvet curtains with all these luxuriant drapes and folds—and you have to picture these curtains are like thirty feet long, so we’re talking about maybe ten yards of fabric here, per curtain, so that’s maybe $2,000 worth of velvet, just for the curtains. And worth every penny, trust me.
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