Three Movies

Three movies that got bad reviews that I more or less liked: The Green Hornet (Michel Gondry, 2011), The Dilemma (Ron Howard, 2011), and (especially) How Do You Know (James L. Brooks, 2010):

THE GREEN HORNET: Aside from not having Robert Downey Jr.in it (granted, a big aside from) this is superior to Iron Man in just about every way. Clever action sequences, good chemistry between Rogen and Jay Chou, imaginative visual touches, great 'scope framing throughout, good twists on both the bad guy character and the girl Friday character are the positives. Main negative is the clumsy (lazy?) plotting, but, to be fair, I can't think of many super-hero movies that have really sharp plotting.

THE DILEMMA: Not a great movie, but interesting and engaging for how far it follows its premise into darker territory than expected (not unlike The Break-Up in that sense). The cast is good (esp. liked Channing Tatum: endearingly dopey). Ultimately suffers from clumsy plotting, too: there's a whole B plot (will they get the deal with Chrysler?) that's just there to put the A plot (the stuff about Vince Vaughn not knowing whether to tell Kevin James about his cheating wife) under some pressure, and I could have done without it. It seems like it's there because it's the kind of thing screenplays are supposed to need (per Robert McKee or whomever) rather than something that grows out of the characters/situation. In general, there's a struggle between the way the movie wants to/tries to deal with issues of honesty and betrayal and the narrative conventions of the 21st Century Hollywood comedy that requires certain kinds of closure and certain kinds of characters. The struggle is not resolved satisfactorily.

Which brings me to:

HOW DO YOU KNOW: Again, I could quibble with some plot stuff, but I won't because (a) overall I liked this and (b) I think Brooks is trying to (and mostly succeeds at) making a kind of movie that for the most part doesn't exist anymore. Back in the Hollywood comedies of the 1930s there was a unity of narrative convention, character, genre convention, and acting style that went hand in hand with these movie's unity of space. That is, even if the situations were exaggerated and the plots were more elaborate than what we'd see in real life, the characters and the places they lived in/moved through were recognizable. But that unity was chipped away at by stuff like Mad Magazine, the genre revisionism of the 60s/70s, the rise of irony, etc. Actually, this applies to all genres, probably, not just comedies, but it seems to me that comedies were particularly hard hit. That is, the Hollywood comedy, aimed at a mass audience of adults was particularly hard hit. But I think HOW DO YOU KNOW is that kind of "old fashioned" comedy, that still manages to speak to contemporary audiences, without dealing in irony and without feeling like its struggling against its narrative conventions: rather, it seems to unfold naturally.

I'm not sure why these movies got drubbed by the critics, but I do suspect it has to do with the movie critic herd mind deciding what the "story" of these movies was going to be before many people had actually seen these movies.

Inspiration message of the day...

From Tom Spurgeon:

By the way, the thought that no one will have anything funny to say about a new president is deeply stupid, in comics or in other media. Not only do opportunities reveal themselves, you don't have to mock somebody to make them the focal point of humor. That SNL sketch from the 1970s where Jimmy Carter talks someone down from a bad acid trip is worth every single piece of easy savagery in which that show's wallowed in the last several years. The heart of comedy is revealing truth, not expressing contempt.

Plastic Man Vol. 2: Rubber Bandits by Kyle Baker

The second volume of Kyle Baker's Plastic Man series isn't as consistent as the first. I got the sense from this interview that Baker was trying out different approaches to see if he could find some way to (a) connect with the existing super-hero comics-buying crowd and/or (b) find (perhaps create) an audience for his own kind of humor comic. And this experimentation shows in the book itself. Not that it ever feels like he's flailing around, but he doesn't always seem as comfortable with the material. For example, the two-part "Continuity Bandits" story feels forced in a way that the collection-ending Tom & Jerry tribute doesn't.

I think "Continuity Bandits" - in which Baker expresses his skepticism towards DC's going-on-30-years trend away from making super-hero comics for kids - falls into the same kind of in-between zone as those Nextwave comics I wrote about. It's like a MAD Magazine version of a DC comic, but the satire is blunted because it relies on a bunch of in-jokes. Like Nextwave, this seems to be pitched to people who read contemporary super-hero comics, but think most contemporary super-hero comics are kind of silly. I think this is a limited audience, which is not really a problem, but it's also a limited target. The best MAD Magazine parodies go beyond making jokes at the expense of the target and end up making more expansive cultural criticism. "Continuity Bandits" plays to its (imagined) audience, but that's all it plays to.

That said, Baker's cartooning is great throughout the book and he varies his technique and style on a story-by-story basis. "Continuity Bandits" really looks like classic MAD Magazine, while the Tom & Jerry story is done in a stripped down version of the animation storyboard style of On the Lam. That variety is part of what makes Baker's self-reflexive take on this character work so well: I could imagine him transforming the entire history of cartooning into a bunch of Plastic Man stories.

Plastic Man: On the Lam by Kyle Baker

Let me start by talking about how I learned to love Blake Edwards' movies:

For most of my movie-buff career, I didn't feel too strongly one way or the other about Blake Edwards and his movies. I didn't dislike them, really, but I didn't see too much in them to get me that excited, either. I had a fondness for The Party and A Shot In the Dark, but I attributed that mostly to my enjoyment of Peter Sellars' performances.

In fact, if I thought of Edwards at all, it was usually as "a guy who made Peter Sellars vehicles".

Anyway, back in April of this year, I started watching a letter-boxed version of The Pink Panther and it blew my mind. All of sudden, I was seeing Blake Edwards as a Great Filmmaker.
What had changed was that I had already come to love Jacques Tati's films and watching The Pink Panther I got the sense that Edwards was doing something similar to Tati. It was "getting" the artsier, more rigorous Tati that allowed me to appreciate what Edwards was doing.

I had had the same kind of experience with Kyle Baker's work. I'd always been aware of it: I'd read Why I Hate Saturn and I picked up some individual issues of his Plastic Man series when they were first out, but I hadn't had a strong reaction to it (in either direction).

But, after immersing myself in some of the artsier comics out there - PictureBox/Kramer's Ergot-style stuff - I started seeing Baker's work in a new light. Watching Tati's movies helped me to see that Edwards' are often about the frame (or about the way he uses the frame): reading these art comics helped me see that Baker's work is really about the drawing.

This Plastic Man book makes that pretty apparent. In Baker's hands, the series is about cartooning and about being a cartoon character. It's an approach that is ideally suited for a character like Plastic Man, because it fits perfectly with his concept - actually, it almost is his concept.

One of my major complaints about contemporary super-hero comics is that they suck all of the visual excitement out of what is, at its heart, an extremely visual genre. IMO, in too many of these books, there's too much reliance on dialogue and narration to carry the story. And when artists are praised, it's often for the style/skill of their illustrations, not for their "comics making"* ability. Anyway, the appeal of Baker's Plastic Man is almost completely in the cartooning. Not that his dialogue is bad or anything: it's perfectly fine, with just the right amount of "groaners" for a tongue-in-cheek comic super-hero comic book, but the best gags here are the sight gags.

Though Baker's use of computers is something that made me lukewarm to his work in the past, I've come to appreciate the fact that he owns it. He isn't trying to obfuscate the technology he uses: its right out there - his process inscribed in the product.

*I know the comics equivalent of "good filmmaker" is supposed to be "good cartoonist", but "cartoonist" doesn't quite fit what I'm trying to get at here.

The first shot of Blind Date (Blake Edwards, 1987) is worth more than all of the frames of every Judd Apatow movie, ever.

I.

First a quote:

Here's a highly speculative thesis, and one I'm not especially prepared to defend, though I've long suspected it has some truth. Starting in the late 1960s audiences became more self-conscious that they were going to the cinemah. They became more conscious viewers, more appreciative of distinctly cinematic flourishes. Even highly commercial films began to project their "style" -- flashy cutting, nice decor, self-conscious acting -- in a way that got viewers' attention, because viewers now were a little bit more demanding than the average viewer of "Red River" or "All That Heaven Allows." Superficially, this new situation might seem to encourage creative and "artistic" film directing. But the great masterpieces of classical Hollywood always worked on two levels: "Red River" was an "oater," a standard Western that fulfilled naive entertainment functions, as well as a film about the interrelationship of landscape to character. On the genre level Hawks or Sirk had to do certain things, whereas on a sub-rosa level (and in Hawks's case, perhaps without even being consciously aware of it) they could do something quite different. And since no one in the studios was really able to see or understand the "sub-rosa level" (if there were such people, then perhaps Harry Cohn could have written "The American Cinema" a decade before Sarris), there were no Harveys who know they understand "cinema" because they cut their teeth viewing a Truffaut movie telling Sirk to cut down on the weirdly-positioned flowers at the sides of the frame, and he had almost total freedom.

But as audiences became more demanding, their demands were not so much for the profundity of Sirk but for the self-conscious and simpler stylizations, of, say, "Far From Heaven," to choose a film that I quite liked. This, paradoxically, encouraged directorial stylists whose flourishes were more obvious, and in which the two levels are collapsed into one, one that because it needs to be able to appeal to mass tastes is almost by definition less profound. Hence we got more "style" but less real art. This is a shift that may have helped Tarantino, but it sure hurt Monte Hellman.

This is one of Fred Camper's posts to the A_film_by discussion group which links up with some of my own observations/speculations inspired by watching The River's Edge (Allan Dwan, 1957) and Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941).

Both of these movies are what I'd describe as Men's Adventure Movies. "Men's Adventure Movie" is also the phrase I used to describe parts of No Country for Old Men.

To what extent this is a real genre - using my definition of genre as dynamic conversations between audiences and artists - rather than a category that makes sense just to me is open for debate, although I'm not sure that I feel too strongly one way or the other and, more importantly, I'm not sure that it matters much. However, I think I should point out the main reason why I'd link these three movies under that heading: they present a male hero, accomplished at manly pursuits (hunting, tracking, wilderness survival), up against a dangerous antagonist, and trapped - by choice or chance - outside of the protective circle of civilization.

(Incidentally, this links into why I don't think the movie version of No Country for Old Men is really much of a Western. That is: it seems to take part in the Western Movie conversation on a fairly superficial level, while jumping right into the center of Men's Adventure Movie concerns).

Using Fred's language Man Hunt and The River's Edge are examples of movies that are working on "two levels", although I tend to think of them as "movies with a wealth of subterranean interest". That is: simply parsing what's on screen in these movies for story stuff - plot, character, literary themes - is going to leave out a lot of what is interesting about these movies - i.e., the way that their directors use design, staging, and composition to create a thematically and aesthetically coherent vision. To put it another way: it isn't exactly that "what they mean" is less important than "how they mean", but that the what's importance is subordinate to, because organized by, the how's.

Watching and thinking about these movies (and then coming across Fred's quote) has helped to me get a clearer understanding of the problems I had with No Country for Old Men.

In these terms:

The Josh Brolin sections of No Country for Old Men mimic this kind of Lang/Dwan "two-level"/"subterranean" movie, but his abrupt exit collapses everything into one level, at which point all of the built up underground meaning is thrown away in favor of an on-the-surface meaning derived from contemporary literary fiction. The problem isn't so much that it's too literary, though, but rather that's it's too literal: that it is on the surface and so comes across like a gambit on the part of the Coen Brothers.

(Comparing/contrasting with Psycho would be an interesting exercise: Hitchcock doesn't back away from playing games with the audience and these games are certainly sites of deeper formal/thematic/aesthetic meaning. What the Coen Brothers are doing is the sledgehammer approach and seems, to me at least, to come out of a certain strain of literary fiction (see Mao II, where the lack of narrative closure is meant to stand in, symbolically, for - broadly speaking - the unknowability of the world).

Anyway, I recommend checking out both Man Hunt and The River's Edge if you get a chance.

II.

I'm always at least a little bit skeptical of critics who use a set of "essentialist" criteria to evaluate art. In popular/folk/semi-popular music, this is often tied into the idea of "authenticity". In movies, we get the people beating the media-specificity drum.

Maybe I should have said I'm only a little bit skeptical, though. I've gone back and forth about this since I started getting seriously into movies when I was in high school, but over the last year I've seen so much praise being heaped on films made by people who are barely filmmakers that I'm becoming less and less skeptical.

The Coen Brothers are certainly not "barely" filmmakers, but I'd like to use them to help tease out some ideas not so much about the decline of filmmaking qua filmmaking but the short shrift it continues to get in lots of discussions about movies as art.

Since re-seeing The Pink Panther last month, I've watched a number of Blake Edwards's other movies that I hadn't seen (Operation Petticoat, Breakfast at Tiffany's) or hadn't seen in a while (The Party, A Fine Mess, The Great Race, Blind Date). Although I loved The Party when I was in high school (I owned a tape that I watched over and over again), I never really thought of it as a particularly well-directed film: I was mainly into Sellers's performance. (I can only guess at how much this had to do with watching a pan-and-scan copy). As with The Pink Panther, seeing these movies in the light of Play Time - see my comments here for an explanation - was a revelation.



One thing I started to think about while watching these movies: if you turned these stories into novels, you would lose what is great about them as movies. And it strikes me that that really isn't the case with the movies made by the Coen Brothers. There are a lot of nice things in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? that a hypothetical "novel version" would have to leave out - the music, for example, or George Clooney's line delivery - but a lot of the "meat" would remain: the way the movie links folk culture, pop culture, and politics and the way it draws on archetypes from "classical" literature, tall tales, and folk songs could make its way unscathed into the O Brother book.

Now, while I can imagine a great short story on the same subject as The Party, I think that the things that are great about that movie (which mostly have to do with a Tati-like milking of the set for thematically apt gags) would simply not make the transition. In other words, the novel of Oh Brother would resemble the movie of Oh Brother more than the short story of The Party would resemble that movie.

I'm not sure that this means that The Party is a greater movie than Oh Brother, but I do think the likelihood that such a claim would provoke derision or (more realistically) that such a claim (or the reasons underlying such a claim) would be dismissed out of hand by a large portion of contempo film buffs/critics/etc. is worth thinking about. (I could be exaggerating this "likely derision", but it is based on my own experiences talking with other film buffs.)

III.

For more insight on the title of this post, see here and here.

Not quite a movie recommendation...

Not quite a movie recommendation this time, but rather some thoughts about contemporary filmmaking practice (esp. with regards to comedies) and a link to a clip.

I'm reluctant to simply lead with the clip - from the original The Pink Panther (Blake Edwards, 1963) - because the only version I could find on the internet isn't all that great. The scene - a complex car chase around a fountain in a small Swiss town, involving crooks and police officers, all in "fancy dress" costumes - needs widescreen presentation to really do it justice. Unfortunately, the internet clip crops the image and doesn't even show the entire scene: the rhythms of the editing and the camera movement seem a lot choppier than they should and the climax is missing. Still: there's enough there that what I'm saying shouldn't seem completely unfounded.

Here's the link.

What strikes me about this scene is not only how good it is as a gag, but also how its "goodness" (i.e. what makes it funny, what makes it interesting, what makes it work) is tied up with a number of (related) elements that are nowhere to be seen in contemporary Hollywood/Indiewood/Eurowood comedies (or movies in general).

They are:

(1) Longer takes/fewer cuts/camera farther away from the action. Everything here is accomplished with very little fuss in terms of camera placement, camera movement, and editing. Edwards stays (mostly) in long shots and doesn't do too much to "energize" or "push" the sequence. He achieves his effects through: the choreography of the driving, the silliness of the drivers, the reaction of the silent witness.

(2) It is primarily a visual gag, although by no means a "silent" one (the sound/image choreography is very important). It relies on a very inventive use of the location, precisely coordinated stunt driving, moments of visual rhyming, a playfulness regarding off-screen space and the edge of the frame (for instance: the "climax" - not seen in the clip - happens off screen - anticipating JLG's Weekend(?)), and a few basic camera movements (most noticeably the pans from one side of the circle to the other and the dollying in and out).

(3) Builds as a gag/built to as a sequence. Edwards takes some time to set things up and then goes through a few variations, which get more complicated (and funnier) until the final, capping moment. But more importantly: the entire car chase itself builds on some of the movie's earlier gags. The two gorillas meeting echoes their earlier interaction in an homage to the Marx Bros. "mirror" sequence and throughout the movie Edwards has built gags around the edges of the frame - for instance, Sellars's stymied romancing of Capucine in the hotel room. That means that the sequence can't be completely appreciated divorced from the movie as a whole, not just in terms of plot and character (i.e., why that guy is doing that thing and what it means in the big picture of the story) but also in terms of filmmaking choices. We're still (somewhat) used to seeing that kind of deliberateness in Hollywood action movies (e.g. 300), even if it is not always appreciated, but it is virtually absent from most comedies. And when we do come across a comedy with this kind of elaborateness/deliberateness, it is usually carried by the dialogue (e.g. The Big Lebowski) or the set design (e.g. Dick and Down with Love) or both (e.g. Wes Anderson's movies).

(4) The whole scene is presented from the POV of a "background" character. This seems like a little detail, but it might be one of the biggest differences between this sequence and the kind we're most likely to run into today. It isn't just that we spend the whole scene without ever seeing the faces of the stars, but adding another pov helps to open up the movie. That is: the movie doesn't limit itself to the povs of the stars. This kind of choice is digressive from a stylistic standpoint (although not a narrative one): these kinds of digressions are rare in contemporary Hollywood-style movies.

(In David Bordwell's terms, these are all things that have been lost because of the move towards "Intensified Continuity" as the default style for popular narrative filmmaking).

So what does this all mean? Well, to get back to Judd Apatow...

As much as I like Superbad and as funny as I think it is, it doesn't come close to The Hollywood Knights. My somewhat glib reason: unlike Superbad, The Hollywood Knights was made by a filmmaker, not just someone who (to borrow from my friend Nick) turns on the camera and lets the actors be funny.

To be fair to Mottola/Apatow/Rogen/et al.: they are near the top of this school of moviemaking, but their main gift - nailing down a certain kind of post-slacker dude banter - manifests itself on a scene-by-scene basis, without ever coalescing into something bigger.

Still: Superbad and Knocked Up were two of the best-reviewed and best-received comedies of last year and I can't help thinking: "Is this all we expect of a 'great' comedy?" Not that they aren't funny or that they don't have some memorable/rewatchable moments/scenes/etc. - they made me laugh, they presented some very true-to-life characters, they capture the dynamic of guys engaging in that kind pop culture one-upsmanship that is a substitute for conversation - but they're scrawny when compared to The Pink Panther or The Hollywood Knights.

Placed next to The Pink Panther, we can see how limited their repertoire is: with only a few exceptions, the humor is either verbal or based on facial expressions. And it's not only that there's no physical humor or what I'd call cinematic humor (like the car chase from Pink Panther: gags that rely on staging, composition, choreography, etc.), the verbal, dialogue exchange-based humor is all of the same type and pitched at the same level.

Placing Superbad next to The Hollywood Knights or Knocked Up next to (say) The Apartment (because Andrew Sarris has suggested that Apatow has received the same kind of critical acclaim as "Billy Wilder"), we can see how limited the Apatow movies are in terms of range of insight and experience. By which I mean: the women characters in Superbad seem to exist mainly as props - they are important as characters only in terms of their relationships to the leading guys; the women characters in The Hollywood Knights (I'm thinking especially of Fran Drescher's character), though they may not have as much screen time as the guys, have their own motivations, desires, and integrity.

Both Knocked Up and The Apartment document shifting social mores. But though Knocked Up does a good job describing/depicting the contemporary phenomenon of extended male adolescence, it does so in a vacuum (how exactly any of those guys really maintain that lifestyle is never addressed, the women characters are only sporadically believable). The Apartment's take on alienated, urban office workers is grounded in a well-realized social context.

Movie Chat: Superbad

Superbad

Sweeter than Knocked Up and, more importantly, shorter: it's also better made and at least as funny. But though the general M.O. is the same here as it is throughout the Apatow-Rogen-et al. ouevre - celebrating the contemporary male adolescent lifestyle while at the same time pointing out its limits - the specifics aren't quite as relevant as those in Knocked Up. That is: Knocked Up, despite being made just well enough to get over and despite running at least a half an hour too long, gets a lot of points for trying to deal with an interesting cultural question - what the hell does adulthood look like nowadays? - while Superbad is only a movie about high school kids trying to get laid.

That "only" isn't meant to be damning: minute-for-minute, scene-for-scene, this is probably the funniest movie I've seen all year and, apart from watching Grindhouse late at night in a packed theater, the most fun I've had watching a movie all year.

Still, its focus on (nerdy) guys being guys make it a little more narrow than, say, Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Freaks and Geeks. And its setting - American Suburbia Circa Now - makes it feel more generic and less realized than, say, Hollywood Knights or Dazed & Confused (or even John Hughes's Chicago or Kevin Smith's New Jersey), where the strong sense of time and place gives the movie an added emotional/thematic heft.

Go ahead and accuse me of being a bit of a stiff, but, at this point, I can't help but feel that the Apatow Crew could do better. Moreover, that they should do better, and not because I'm some kind of killjoy who thinks that dumb comedies should strive to be high art or anything, but because they actually have done better - see Freaks and Geeks. They set the standard that they're not living up to. They've gotten funnier and they've built up an impressive "stock company" of (male) comic performers, but the scope of what they're interested in has narrowed. (Maybe because making a TV show requires you to reach out for a broader audience? Maybe it was just Paul Feig?)

So, as good as I think Superbad is for what it is, I hope that their next effort isn't just more of the same.

Laughing at them...

Commenting on , which deals with Mike White's characterization of Judd Apatow's recent work as "comedy of the bullies, rather than the bullied", Reihan writes:

"You can't dismiss Mike White, a major comedy innovator, as a humorless prig."

I dunno:

I think it's possibly to be really funny in terms of your creative output and still be kind of a humorless prig when it comes to talking about comedy - especially other people's comedy. Isn't this kind of the case when, say, Bill Cosby - who is, without question, more of a comedy innovator than White - chides comedians for going blue?

Movie Chat: Borat

Borat

I can't think of such a critically and commercially successful movie since Pulp Fiction where there has been a bigger difference between the movie that the critics were gushing about and the movie that I actually saw on the screen.

I admit: I had been avoiding the movie because I found the idea of Sacha Baron Cohen using his comedy skillz to expose the hidden anti-Semitism of Americans to be on the borderline between insulting and irrelevant. I mean, there's so many things about us that actually deserve ruthless satire that to take on something that hasn't really been a major issue for years.

And, I should also admit that Borat was my least favorite character on Da Ali G Show, partly because it targets people-on-the-street like those awful Jay Leno "Jaywalking" bits. Cohen says that the Borat sketches are "dramatic demonstration of how racism feeds on dumb conformity, as much as rabid bigotry"*, but because he and his producers have complete control over the staging, filming, and editing of these encounters, it's always seemed to me to be dirty pool. That is, while I've laughed at the Borat sketches on Da Ali G Show, I've never been able to take them seriously as high-minded satire.

Anyway, my fiance and I kept hearing how funny the Borat movie was from all of our friends and she had listened to a big NPR piece about it (she'll watch almost any movie that gets praise from NPR).

First, let me get this out of the way: I laughed all the way through - it is pretty hilarious.

But I what surprised me was how little "satire" there actually was. Despite Cohen's interviews and the spin critics had put on the movie, there were only (I think) three or four moments where a someone revealed their inner anti-Semite. And even those instances are pretty weak cases: there's the two salesmen who go along with Borat's comments about killing Jews because they're (a) being polite, (b) are a little befuddled by his behavior, and (c) probably want to make a sale. And then there's the frat guys. In that case, if all that Cohen could get a bunch of drunken frat guys to do is bring up a Jewish stereotype than either he wasn't trying hard enough or the virulent racism that he was looking for just doesn't exist to the extent he thinks it does.**

Regardless, the "exposing racism" parts of the movie make up (I'd guess) less than 10% of its running time. The rest of the movie is one big "backwards foreigner" joke. I'd agree with Steve Sailer's suggestion that Cohen's schtick is an updated version of the Polish Joke. So, if you've made a movie that spends most of its time making fun of ignorant East Europeans***, it's better, in this PC day and age, to emphasize its anti-American parts, even if (or maybe especially if) those aren't actually that prevalent in the movie.

Remember I brought up Pulp Fiction back at the beginning of this post? Here's Alan Dale on the critics' take on that movie (you should really read the whole piece):

Pulp Fiction’s attitude was shrewdly presold to Americans from the Cannes Film Festival on, and it would have seemed impossibly square to make the usual objections to the violence since quotation marks hover around the action. Much of the press proved themselves squares in another way, by praising the movie for picturing the state of our souls. Educated audiences and critics, especially, don’t want to think that actions that are hard to watch could be enjoyable to them in a superficial way. So they read Tarantino’s good-time treatment of sketches on pulp fiction motifs as a statement about how dissociated people have become. The idea that Pulp Fiction is an X-ray of American culture is a reading for people who believe in things like Post-Modernism and Generation X and other ways we have of selling ourselves our own intellectual and editorial ponderousness. Pulp Fiction is relentlessly superficial. The situations have no existential edge, and even the ironic self-consciousness about moviemaking is unfocused (clearest in the diner sequence in which the waiters are made up to look like ’50s rock-n-roll and movie stars).****

This relates back to some things Sean Collins brought up a few weeks ago about the way critics respond to horror movies: "For many mainstream film critics, the slightest display of political awareness automatically enables a horror film to transcend the genre, regardless of what else is going on, or whether anything else is going on."

So, I'd enlarge all of this to a more general point:

When critics and "educated" audience members find themselves enjoying something that is disreputable (nihilistic black comedy, backwards foreigner ethnic jokes, horror movies), they need to rationalize it by attributing to the movie some kind of redeeming social message.

This isn't a huge problem, I guess: I mean, we all expect critics to act like gasbags on occasion (I'm certainly not immune), but I think it would be more interesting if we could talk about why we enjoy these kinds of disreputable entertainments without having to invoke platitudes about how they teach us all an important lesson about ourselves.

I laughed at Borat because it's funny to watch a character who doesn't get contemporary America's (and/or Western Europe's?) rules of civility and politeness blunder his way through encounters with people who are bound by those rules. This is like one of the all-time standard jokes: foreigners just don't get it!It's funny to see Borat piss off a bunch of feminists because he can't help expressing his primitive ideas about male-female relations or for him to make fun of a woman's looks in front of her and her husband or for him to be from such a backwards country that a regular hotel room seems like it must be reserved for royalty.

Did I learn anything from the movie? Umm, not really. I mean, the people in the movie more or less live up to their stereotypes: the NYC commuters are in a hurry and don't have time for Borat's bullshit, the car salesman seems willing to agree to anything in order to make a sale, the genteel Southerners are polite to the point of absurdity, the feminists are humorless, the rodeo crowd seems happy to cheer jingoism, the frat boys drink a lot and like to party.

So, yeah, I don't think the movie has much to offer in the way of messages about the state of contemporary America. And I'm pretty grateful for that. Messages are easy, comedy is hard.

*I disagree with this premise, too. I know a guy who will always "confront bigotry" whenever he hears it. I.e., he'll start berating his cab driver if the driver says something bad about a different ethnic group. Personally, I think this is kind of silly (not to mention potentially dangerous). For example, there are some women in my office who happen to be Puerto Rican and one of their favorite topics of conversation are the differences between Puerto Rican men, Dominican Men, Arab men, African-American men, Mexican men, WASP men, etc. Now, when they start into one of these discussions, I could speak up and tell them to stop spreading stereotypes and talking like bigots, but, honestly, I think that would be pretty crazy.

**The frat guys also talk about never letting yourself be ruled by a woman. But that's what all guys say to each other when they've had a few too many. It's a kind of generic expression of guy solidarity, which fades as you sober up.

***Though Kazakhstan is in Central Asia, the Borat character is pretty obviously Eastern European/Slavic. I wonder if, like Children of Men, Borat reads differently to an American audience than to a British one. The Brits are having more trouble dealing with Eastern European immigration than we are in the States, so my guess is that Borat's ethnicity comes across more clearly to them.

****I think this is also why Eli Roth talked about Hostel in terms of its anti-American message. The movie paints a pretty dismal picture of Eastern Europe (which, admittedly, many critics pointed out), so it's probably better for the American filmmaker to go out of his way to show that the movie is really a criticism of America.

Keaton Redux

Yesterday's post was pretty cranky. I mean, whining about Buster Keaton - what's my problem?

A more cheerful take on Three Ages, Keaton's first feature as writer, (co-)director, star:

So, Keaton made this movie in 1923 and over the next five years would go on to make Our Hospitality, Sherlock Jr., The Navigator, Seven Chances, Go West, Battling Butler, The General, College, Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The Cameraman. What other filmmakers have had this kind of hot streak? Eleven good-to-among-the-greatest-ever films in a five year period? Godard from Breathless to Weekend comes close, but still isn't quite as consistent.

In other words: pretty impressive.

Movie Chat: Three Ages

Three Ages

Keaton's first feature (as a writer/director, at least) doesn't quite live up to the promise of his shorts, probably because he hedges his bets when it comes to really spoofing Intolerance. That is, what makes Intolerance such an amazing experience is the way that as the movie goes on not only do each of the three major threads pick up pace, but the inter-cutting between them becomes more and more frequent, until all the stories are climaxing at the same time (fitting for a movie with one of the most famous orgy scenes in film history). But Three Ages never really comes together like that: you get a chunk of the Stone Age story, then a chunk of the Roman story, and then a chunk of the Modern Story, repeat. And it doesn't help that each of these "chunks" is essentially the same: that's part of the joke (Buster faces the same problem in every Age) and it makes sense thematically ("Love" is a constant throughout history), but, dramatically, it's a little dull. I can't help but imagine what it could have been: cutting between three slapstick set pieces, so that, through editing, they all come together in some way.

It's also a bit of a problem that the three individual stories aren't great, either. They're not bad by any means, but Keaton's other shorts were mostly better than them. Part of my problem may result from how Three Ages is packaged on the Kino DVD: it's followed by The Goat, which may be one of the greatest short movies ever made. The Goat is so inventive that it makes Three Ages seem a lot less impressive. The gags in The Goat are brilliant and (often) laugh-out-loud funny, but the gags in Three Ages are clever and amusing.

Still, it's nice to see a movie comedy that's made on a relatively large scale (the Roman sets could have been used (were used?) for a genuine historical epic) that actually deserves that scale and knows how to make use of it. It's a nice change from today's big comedies, like Talladega Nights, where the huge Nascar set-pieces are handled with the minimum of wit and invention and the hugeness production (not to mention the budget) undermines the goofier, no-big-deal charms of its stars.

I think there are quite a few really good comic actors working in movies right now - Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly and Sacha Baron Cohen among them - but most of them seem more suited for "tossed-off" productions, like the Martin & Lewis movies or 1930s Paramount comedies, or, I guess, like Borat. But there doesn't seem to be anyone in Hollywood anymore who can make a truly "through-composed" comedy (especially since the Farrelly Brothers seem to have lost their way).

Movie Chat: Egged On

"Egged On"

Wow.

Or, even better, "Holy shit!"

Sometimes when I put a movie on, I expect to be wowed. For instance, I really loved A Tale of Floating Weeds, which I watched last week, but liking it or thinking it's a little masterpiece wasn't surprising to me. After all, it's an Ozu movie, Ozu's one of the greats, so, yeah, no duh that it impressed.

But for a movie to be a revelation it has to catch me unaware (which has gotten harder over the years as I've seen more movies and read more about film history).

Which brings me to "Egged Up", a short from Charley Bowers, a silent film comedian and animator whom I had never heard of before reading about him in this primer on the Green Cine site. (Just as a note: Bowers never came up in any of the silent film or general film history classes that I took during the 6 years I spent studying film as an undergrad and a grad student).

Well, I watched it last week and I thought it was pretty terrific. I can't believe I'd been in the dark about this guy for so long, but I'm kind of glad that there are still surprises like this out there for me.

After watching "Egged Up", I looked around on the internet for more info on Bowers. And I noticed that a bunch of articles kept giving the same reason for Bowers's obscurity: he wasn't as strong a performer (both as a physical comedian and as an "actor") as Buster Keaton. That explanation seems kind of bogus to me: while it's true enough - Bowers can't match Keaton when it comes to physical comedy and he doesn't seem to be much of an "actor" - there are so many other possible reasons that quoting this as the primary one seems a little lazy. (And, you know, no one can match Keaton, so it's kind of a weird bar to set, as if, in something that is at least kinda/sorta "art", you have to be the best to be remembered. In reality, lots of "second rate"/"minor" artists have staying power, for lots of different reasons).

It's the way that these judgments get passed down and repeated that bugs me. I mean, reading more about silent comedy, I kept coming across articles that talk about, say, Larry Semon's current obscurity having to do with his "failure to create a comic character" (sort of like this one). I wonder, though, if luck, and, maybe even the tastes and memories of influential critics and film preservationists, have a little more to do with it. The preservation and rediscovery of these films has been something of a chancy matter. For instance, this article suggests that Larry Semon had a better reputation in Europe than in the U.S. because the only films that survived here were from later in his career when he had fallen into formula. I have no idea how accurate this assessment is, but I buy the underlying concept.

This gets into a tricky area:

On the one hand, there are simply too many movies out there not to do some reducing - it can be useful to talk about "the greats" of silent comedy (Chaplin and Keaton) or Japanese film (Ozu and Kurosawa) or Westerns (Ford and Peckinpah) simply because we don't always have the time or the need to deal with subjects in great depth. On the other hand, sometimes we do need to step back and take note of the way focusing on the greats neglects other work that can be just as vital and rewarding.

There's a dilemma that I keep coming up against: now, thanks to Netflix and YouTube and similar sites, we can experience more movies and other pop culture performances more easily than ever before. And my guess is the quantity of content and the ease of accessibility will keep increasing. At the same time, faced with all of this stuff to watch, where are you supposed to begin and how can you know that your not missing things like these Charley Bowers disks? The answer I've come up with, for now, at least: watch whatever seems interesting at the moment, keep poking around the internet for more finds, and realize that I'm not going to get around to seeing everything that I might like to.

I don't know: I try to be generous and charitable when it comes to other people's responses to movie, but, honestly, if you watched "Egged Up" and your reaction is: "Eh, pretty good but Bowers is no Keaton" then I have serious doubts about your love of actual movies (as opposed to, heh, "cinema in general"). I'm not saying that it's a masterpiece or that we need to start teaching it in Cinema Studies programs: I am saying that if you can't enjoy it for what it is - a playful short comedy full of inventive sequences - then you might want to reassess why you were drawn to watch a movie like this in the first place.

Tim and Eric, "Not Film", and YouTube

I had originally planned to write more on Tim and Eric here, but I came down with a cold last week, fell behind in my blogging, and decided to post what I had.

Anyway, I commented a little bit about the Tim and Eric show on a message board and I wanted to use one of the responses from there to anchor this post. "The Atlas Boy" wrote:

I like their live performances, but to be honest, I've never been very fond of any of their recorded material -- I see it as kind of like Napoleon Dynamite or that sort of thing without characters, structure, or (for the most part) punchlines. And you know how I am about punchlines. I think they do a good job creating an atmosphere, but either fail to or aren't interested in doing anything with that atmosphere. (They're better in this regard live, obviously.)

And they have a bit of that deliberately-grotesque-and-unpleasant edge that I've never been able to endure.

But as I said, I do like their live work for the most part (though I don't know what they're doing on this tour, or if it has any relation to anything I've seen), and Tim is a really nice guy. (I don't mean Eric isn't. I don't know Eric.)

First, Tim certainly seemed like a nice guy at the show. Towards the end of their act, Tim and Eric come out on stage in bathrobes and show a super secret behind-the-scenes clip from their first Cartoon Network series Tom Goes to the Mayor. I was impressed by how "off" they were: that is, they didn't seem to be performing and it was a weirdly comforting, in a "these are just regular guys" kind of way. That's not a feeling I generally get watching comedians.

Of course, Tim and Eric aren't really comedians. "The Atlas Boy" is right that their bits either don't have or don't emphasize punchlines. There wasn't a memorable one all evening, and, on their Adult Swim shows, any that are there seem like throw-aways or head-scratchers.

And he's also right that there is something like an unpleasant edge to a lot of their stuff. I'm not sure if I would use the word "unpleasant", but there's something willfully off-putting about a sketch like Uncle Muscles, where Tim plays an incompetent singer, sweating buckets under the lights, and the poorly lit video emphasizes the character's bad make-up job. ("Bad make-up" is a recurring Tim and Eric motif.)

What's interesting to me, though (this week at least), is the way Tim and Eric (who met in college and made their first videos for film classes) ransack the realm of performance/video art in order to find material and techniques for their comedy. And I was thinking about Tim and Eric when I read this post about "not films" on Andy Horbal's blog.

There, Andy gives as an example of a "not film" a broadcast of a basketball game that made heavy use of the instant replay in order to figure out a close call. The producers of the broadcast keep replaying - from different angles, at different speeds - a key moment of play. Andy argues that the effect - the way it calls attention to the technique of TV broadcast production - is similar enough to the effect that some avant-garde films aim at - calling attention to what is normally "invisible" in conventional, narrative cinema - so that it would make a useful teaching tool.

There's always going to be a very select audience for long-form, non-narrative films. They ask a lot out of a viewer (in time, attention, etc.) and what they deliver (an abstract, aesthetic experience) is not what most people go to the movies for.

I think the problem facing a lot of long-form avant-garde films is the same problem that Spengler diagnoses for modernist music in this article. That is, modernist painting/sculpture is more accessible (or at least bearable) than its film/video equivalent partly because you aren't trapped in the experience.

(One of my own issues with existing avant-garde films is that they're often in danger of being more interesting to think about/write about/read about than they are to actually watch. It's almost like you have to sit through them in order to earn the right to talk about them afterwards, like some kind of weird, intellectual hazing.)

But, and here I'll go back once again to this recent post from 2Blowhards and connect this seeming digression to what I was talking about at the beginning of this post, I think that the kind of "accidental" avant-garde videos that Michael Blowhard points to on YouTube and the little movies on Tim and Eric's website seem to suggest the emergence of avant-garde-ish video making as a "lively" art, one that not only Andy's hypothetical film students but actual everyday people will find (relatively) accessible.

Tim and Eric Live!

My girlfriend and I don't do much nightlife-wise here in NYC, so going to see Tim and Eric at the Knitting Factory last Monday was a momentous occasion. In cases like this, there's always the lingering danger of the "I Came All the Way in From Jersey for This, So Of Course It's Good"-effect which can be observed after just about any crappy Broadway matinee: people trying to convince themselves that the show was good because they had already put so much effort (not to mention spent so much money) to see it. Well, I think the show was genuinely good, but if you want to see for yourself, they're doing a live webcast tomorrow night at 9:30.

The show was a mix of live skits and videos from their new Adult Swim series Tim & Eric Awesome Show Great Job! As good as the live stuff was, I laughed the most (to the point of tears) at a scene from the show featuring John C. Reilly as Dr. Steve Brule, my current favorite sketch comedy character. (You can check out some Dr. Steve Brule clips here).

Most of the Adult Swim series (Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021) fit into what I call "stoner/slacker/nostalgia comedy" - slacker versions of Saturday morning cartoon characters engaged in wacky situations. Tim and Eric's work, on the other hand, owes more to sketch comedy like Mr. Show by way of film-school goofing around. Most of the bits on their show revolve in some way around cheesy, amateurish video effects: the visual style is right out of public access TV, locally produced TV commercials, employee training videos, and low-end business seminar presentations.

Here's their website and here's a page featuring lots of their shorts. I recommend "Humpers", which is a truly inspired (IMO) film-school film parody.

Movie Chat: Idiocracy

Idiocracy

The premise is a killer and though the follow through doesn't quite do it justice, I enjoyed the movie overall. I had a similar feeling when I first watched Office Space though: I like Mike Judge as a writer, but as a filmmaker he's just barely adequate. I mean, he's a step above Kevin Smith in terms of staging and pacing, but his gags and his, dare I say it, comic vision deserve a little better.

Idiocracy is not as uneven as Office Space, but it generally feels more forced and lacks Office Space's laid back charm.

Still, I think Idiocracy compares favorably to most contemporary comedies, which says more about the low quality of most contemporary comedies than it does about Idiocracy.

My favorite Hollywood comedy of the last few years was The 40-Year Old Virgin, which was well-written and had a great cast, but the best thing I can say about the filmmaking is that it's professional and doesn't look like a half-assed job.

But none of the movies I've seen have compared to some TV comedies from the last few years: Arrested Development, anything with or having to do with Ricky Gervais, or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Maybe I'm being a little too vague, but what I'd like to see more of are movie comedies that build gags through their moviemaking and not only through their stars' clowning. Not that there's anything wrong with the clowning, but I want the more elaborate gags of a movie like Used Cars or comedies get part of their humor from a unique visual style like Dick.

Movie Chat: Talladega Nights

Talladega Nights

I considered not writing about this movie, but I realized that was because I'm not very good at writing about comedies (which is ironic, in a way, since I wrote my thesis on "comedy", but that's a little different). But this is just a blog, so why not practice?

I didn't like this as much as I liked Anchorman, which I thought had a unique vibe for a big dumb comedy. Anchorman seemed loose and quirky with the best gags coming out of left field.
Talladega was funny enough, but the only thing that really got me laughing (as opposed to chuckling or snickering) was the "Baby Jesus" routine. I liked the cast, for the most part, but I thought Sacha Baron Cohen's entire role was misconceived.

And I suppose it is unfair to criticize a big dumb comedy on the merits of how well it deals with its subject matter, but I think it misses out by centering on a feud between a redneck and a Frenchman rather than dealing with a conflict actually drawn from the NASCAR world - like rednecks vs. those mid-western and west coast pretty boys that advertisers and sponsors love so much (Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, for example). Maybe that would have been too much like Days of Thunder, though.

Art School Confidential

Before I talk about Art School Confidential, I have to explain what I mean when I use the phrase "Fake Plot".

Most movie comedies are driven by gags and jokes. But gags and jokes alone do not make a story.

Now, in many of the greatest, most well-respected comedies, the gags and jokes are fully integrated into the story: the situation the characters are in fuels the gags, which in turn push the story along. When this is the case, I say that the comedy has a "Real Plot". Some examples of "Real Plot" comedies: Seven Chances, Bringing Up Baby, Passport to Pimlico, Some Like it Hot, Dick, The 40 Year Old Virgin.

However, in many other comedies, the gags do not necessarily have any relation to the actual plot. The story is essentially arbitrary: the gags would work just as well in any number of different situations. In these cases, I say that the movie has a "Fake Plot": there's a story and a three act structure, but the story and the structure seem to be there just because. My go to example of a "Fake Plot" comedy is Dumb and Dumber: there are a lot of great gags in the movie, but they really have nothing to do with the ostensible plot of the movie, which involves a kidnapping and some kind of financial real estate shenanigans or something. At least I think it does: even though I've seen Dumb and Dumber four or five times and I generally have a really good memory for this stuff, I really can't remember any of the story details.

"Fake Plot" isn't necessarily a bad thing. It doesn't ruin my enjoyment of Dumb and Dumber or Animal Crackers or It's a Gift, for example. But it can be a real burden on a comedy, sucking the life out of the gags, and it's usually a sign of a lack of inventiveness or plain old laziness on the part of the filmmakers.

Take Happy Gilmore, for instance. Now, it gets a lot of funny gags out of its one idea: Adam Sandler as a tantrum-throwing, goonish golfer. But the plot, which involves him trying to win enough money to save his grandmother's home, is really beneath contempt. It has nothing to do with any of the gags: its only function is to provide an essentially arbitrary motivation for Sandler's character. What is particularly bad is that the hackneyed grandmother plot was obviously chosen out of sheer laziness: it is simply the easiest choice the screenwriters could make. From my p.o.v., what makes Happy Gilmore guilty of pandering to the lowest common denominator is not its sophomoric gags (which are actually funny) but the fact that the filmmakers get away with putting so little thought into the movie's story.

"Fake Plots" show up a lot in vehicles for comedians like Sandler, Jim Carrey, Jerry Lewis, and the Marx Brothers, because it is a lot easier to simply tack on a bunch of gags to some kind of generic three-act storyline than to come up with a fully integrated comedy. (Jerry Lewis experimented with "No Plot" comedies - like The Bellboy - but I guess audiences really didn't go for that. Film snob that I am, I prefer "No Plot" to "Fake Plot" most of the time).

I should note at this point that my "Real Plot"/"Fake Plot" classifications are pretty casual and subjective. For me, making this distinction has been useful, but you shouldn't mistake this for some kind of big theory.

So what does this have to do with Art School Confidential?

Well, for much of the movie, Art School Confidential functions as an almost perfect, almost "No Plot" comedy. Dan Clowes, the movie's screenwriter, is not only one of the premier graphic novelists of the last twenty years, he's an accomplished gag cartoonist and it comes through here. The best bits in the movie are like nastier versions of New Yorker-style cartoons.

The gags bounce off each other and the movie meanders along rather nicely, more-or-less following an unobtrusive plotline involving the main character's attempt to woo a beautiful artists' model. It doesn't really build up any comic momentum, but I think that's okay for a movie of this type.

Then about 2/3rds of the way into the movie, all-of-a-sudden-like, a subplot about a serial killer takes over the movie. And it does so in a way that not only does not work, but also pretty much ruins the whole movie.

By bringing the serial killer storyline to the foreground, Dan Clowes and Terry Zwigoff have given Art School Confidential what is not exactly a "Fake Plot" but comes pretty close. It is meant to sum up the movie's take on the art world, operating on a larger scale than the individual gags, but it still seems tacked on and arbitrary for two major reasons:

Reason #1 is that the entire serial killer plot feels like it was cobbled together from bits and pieces of various storylines in Clowes's Eightball comic book. (I'm thinking specifically of "Gynecology", David Boring, and Ice Haven.)

Reason #2 follows from Reason #1: it isn't intrinsically a bad thing for Clowes to re-use his old material - especially in a different medium that has a larger audience. However, the way these stories work in Eightball, in terms of their tone and style, is at odds with Terry Zwigoff's sensibilities as a filmmaker.

I'm going to spoil the end of the movie now.

The ironic twist endings of Clowes's comics work because of his dispassionate, cold, almost clinical point-of-view towards his characters. It is apt that he references Sherwood Anderson in Ice Haven, which is perhaps his masterpiece, because he shares Anderson's skepticism towards humanity that borders on misanthropy. David Boring, my favorite of his longer works, gets a lot of its oomph by seducing us into identifying in some way with the title character and then pulling the rug out from under us with revelations that make us question our understanding of him: a single panel will suddenly up-end everything we thought we knew about the character.

But Zwigoff doesn't work that way. Like Clowes, he's an ironist, but he's not as clinical and distanced as Clowes is in his comics. He's not as harsh. And, working in film, where we respond to characters more directly than in comics, he's unable to pull off the p.o.v. bait-and-switch that drive stories like Ice Haven and David Boring.

We can't help but identify with Jerome, the protagonist of Art School Confidential, partly because we're meant to see the absurdities of the art world through his eyes and partly because he's played by an appealing actor in a low-key appealing way. Apart from a little bit of whininess and mopiness, there's nothing about the character that inspires anything but sympathy.

When Jerome is suddenly revealed as an awful, shallow, heartless, opportunistic, near-sociopathic cheat, the movie begins to fall apart.

Zwigoff is not as cold and calculating as Clowes and, as Jerome, Max Minghella is too genial, so instead of the kind of clear, dramatic, shocking reversals that we see in David Boring and Ice Haven we get something muddled and confused. It is not ambiguous: it's just not very clear.

I can imagine that this would work better with an actor who had a more hostile, confrontational persona (my friend Nick smartly suggested Jason Schwartzman would have been perfect for this role a few years ago). Also, I think Ryan Gosling, who's not only talented but has greater technical acting chops than anyone else in his age group, could have pulled off the shift from nice guy to borderline sociopath on his own. But while Minghella is perfectly fine, he doesn't know what to do with the character once this change in perspective occurs and Zwigoff is unable to give him any help.

There's a number of ironic twists in Clowes's screenplay that Zwigoff does not (or cannot) play up, so the movie gives off the impression that it doesn't quite understand its screenplay. For example, Jonah, a police officer pretending to be an artist, honestly attempts to make good paintings, even though we're meant to laugh at the limitations of his skills and sensibility and at the pompous art scenesters who take him seriously. On the other hand, Jerome, supposedly the "true" artist, passes off someone else's paintings as his own and is perfectly happy to continue this deception as long as it helps his career.

But Zwigoff never clarifies this distinction or even gives any suggestion that he sees it.

And it's confusing when Audrey, Jerome's love interest, who has been the most level-headed character in the movie, unambiguously accepts Jerome not only as a romantic partner but also as a great artist. Part of me thinks that Clowes means us to have the same kind of shift in perspective towards her that we did towards Jerome: she's not as perceptive and/or much more mercenary than we were led to believe.

Terry Zwigoff's film of Ghost World worked so well because Zwigoff was able to criticize the alienated, ironic sensibility of Clowes's graphic novel. To paraphrase film critic Charles Taylor, it's an ironic movie about the limits of irony. But the screenplay for Art School Confidential ends up being darker, more bitterly ironic, than Ghost World's, and Zwigoff's inability to get on its wavelength results in a kind of half-baked, play-acted misanthropy: too dark to enjoy as comedy and not nearly cutting enough to work as satire.

The 25 Comics I Like Best

#19 Eightball

by Dan Clowes

When I'm in the mood to play "Devil's Advocate", I like to use Eightball as Exhibit A in the case against the Comics Are Art movement.

Don't get me wrong: I think Ghost World and David Boring and Ice Haven, which all first appeared in the pages of Eightball, are as serious, thoughtful, and analysis-worthy as any of the critically acclaimed lit-fic novels that have been published since Eightball began in 1989.

But Eightball isn't just the place where Dan Clowes published these important "comic strip novels": it's also the place where Clowes published his not-quite-so-important gag strips, like "A Message to the People of the Future" and "I Hate You Deeply". If Dan Clowes had simply been interested in making "art comics", I'm not sure that we would have been treated to his thoughts about sports or Christians. And it's these strips that earned Clowes a place in the satirical tradition of Harvey Kurtzman and Robert Crumb. By not trying to make every issue of Eightball a work of art, he was free to be as disreputable as he wanted.

I'd also argue that Clowes's "serious" lit-fic-like comic strip novels owe part of their sensibility and effectiveness to having come out of this satirical/underground gag tradition. The earlier, "funnier" Eightball provided a necessary foundation for the later, more "serious" Eightball.

Some autobiography:

I first discovered Eightball when I was 13. My family had just moved to Montreal after living (for most of my life) in a very small border town in upstate New York. I had always gotten most of my comics through the mail. The closest comic book store was an hour away, and it was always a special occasion whenever I got a chance to go to it. (I also used to look forward to our summer vacations at the New Jersey shore, because I knew I could talk my parents into stopping at a comic store on the way home from the beach). The most "sophisticated" comics that I read--or was even really aware of--were Grant Morrison's Animal Man and Doom Patrol and Neil Gaiman's Sandman. I had tried out some black & white independent comics, but hadn't been very impressed.

When I got to Montreal, things changed. All of a sudden I lived in walking distance of a major, urban downtown area. It wasn't long before I discovered Nebula, a sci-fi bookstore that had a low quantity, high quality comic book section. They didn't stock any comics by Marvel or DC, but they must have had just about everything from Fantagraphics and Kitchen Sink.

I really had no idea what most of these comics were, but something about Eightball grabbed me. Thinking back on it, I'm not sure what exactly made me go for Eightball before, say, Cerebus--which was probably more in line with the type of genre stuff I was used to--or Hate--which actually turned out to be more in line with my sense of humour. My guess would be that Dan Clowes's confident, polished retro cartooning looked a lot more stylish--slicker even--than anything else on the Nebula racks.

I've read a lot about the mind-opening experience kids had when they first read the Harvey Kurtzman issues of Mad: all I can say is that, at 13, Eightball was my Mad. It was one of the first examples of "transgressive" art that I ever came into contact with: I found it offensive, entertaining, funny, thought-provoking, and, often, confusing.

Nowadays, though I've grown away from Eightball's somewhat alienated sensibility, I still look forward to each new issue, primarily because Clowes is such an inventive, constantly advancing cartoonist. (Ice Haven is one of the most technically brilliant and innovative comics I've ever read.) He's also able to populate his books with varied and interesting characters, which is, unfortunately, becoming a lost art in the art comics scene.

Ealier entries in this series:

#25 on RAW. I started this out with the intention of doing one entry a week... Oh well... This one is short and sweet. I'd only add that RAW has really spoiled me when it comes to art comics anthologies.

#24 on Hate!, which features one of my earliest attempts to write about the backlash phenomenon. Also, I seem to have been reading too much Donald Phelps at the time.

#23 on Dick Tracy. Still too much Phelps and too much Manny Farber, but this one reads pretty nicely, if I do say so myself.

#22 on Ditko and Lee's Dr. Strange stories. This is the first entry where my own "voice" really comes through. I also bring up a lot of issues that I continue to deal with on the blog.

#21 on Calvin & Hobbes. This piece might be the most interesting for casual comics fans, since most people are pretty familiar with this strip.

#20 on The Dark Knight Returns. Sums up a lot of my feelings on "revisionist" super-hero books.