First Showing is speculating that Torso will be David Fincher’s next project. I’m a huge Fincher fan. I’ve seen all of his films and I love his style. Torso is based on a graphic novel about a real-life string of murders in Cleveland in the 1930s. I’m very excited by the prospect of Fincher going back to true crime, since he did such an amazing job with Zodiac. Matt Damon is rumored to be playing the lead. It’ll be his first collaboration with Fincher.
Someone who has already had a very successful collaboration with the good director is, yes, Edward Norton. I pinky-swear I’ll stop posting EN stuff after this. It’s just that First Showing has an excellent interview with him and I had to share it with you.
Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?: I was going to get all fancy here and try to parallel the events in The Odyssey to the ones in movie. Upon further research, I learned that not even Ethan and Joel Coen did that much. They said it is very loosely based on Homer’s poem so I’m not going to worry about being literary. The movie is just wonderful. It completely holds up without all the hype that surrounded it originally. The soundtrack, actually, was the thing that got all the attention. It’s excellent but the storytelling and performances are equally worthy. I especially like George Clooney and Tim Blake Nelson. They play so well off each other - the idiot and the fool. What’s the difference? The idiot thinks he knows it all and is inevitably wrong. The fool is pleasantly surprised by everything. Nelson is sublime as Delmar, just radiating innocence and good humor. Clooney, as Ulysses Everett McGill, is one hell of a clown. The motor-mouth, the hair thing, at one point he even cocks his head like a spaniel. So good, both of them. The time and place of the story are portrayed very well, too, by the Coens. With the exception of Everett’s diagnosis of Babyface Nelson as a manic depressive, there aren’t the usual gratingly anachronistic flourishes that distract from other period farces like this. It seems, I don’t know, respectful, and the story as a whole is more generous toward people than the Coens’ films are typically. I thoroughly enjoy Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? every time I see it.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story: Here’s a good example of the opposite of such an on-point period farce. Walk Hard has it’s moments that are very funny. It also has long stretches when it’s not even mildly entertaining. I get that they were trying to puncture the sanctimoniousness of biopics like Ray and, of course, Walk the Line. I appreciate the effort, I really do. The thing is that Ray Charles and Johnny Cash were truly great artists and it’s a tricky thing to make fun of their life stories. Again, I know that the intention here was to make fun of the cliches, the stereotypes, that tend to pile up in these kind of movies. Again, though, Walk Hard fails to clear the bar with this. It tries way too hard to be cutting satire and kind of loops back around to being almost offensive. Take the scene in the black nightclub, where Dewey is a janitor. It shows dancers on the dance floor doing all manner of extremely graphic, “erotic” moves. In a better movie, they would have done it in a way to where we immediately recognize that this is making fun of the stereotypical belief that the so-called “race” music back then was overly sexualized. Ha ha, silly paranoid white people and their fear of black sexuality. In this movie, though, that point is entirely lost and we just see a room full of African-American dancers grinding in the most egregious ways possible. It’s tacky, is what. The whole movie has the problem of trying to accomplish sharp satire with a bludgeon. It doesn’t work. There are some supporting performances that get through the mire - Kristin Wiig, John Michael Higgins, Jane Lynch, always a pleasure to see you. Also, I will admit I love the scene in India with The Beatles. Jack Black and Paul Rudd bitching at each other as McCartney and Lennon (”I wonder if your songs will still suck when I’m 64?”) and The Mac Guy as George Harrison, mumbling his discontent, are the highlight of the movie. One more thing: I wish whoever had written the lyrics to the Bob Dylan spoof song had written the rest of the script. “The mouse with the overbite explained/how the rabbits were ensnared” is pure poetry. I sat next to a middle-aged guy when we saw this in the theatre and he was laughing his ass off during that song. If only the rest of the movie had lived up to that moment.
Steel Magnolias: This is an oldie but a goodie. Speaking of cliches, but, really, this movie is much deeper than people give it credit for. It was based on a play written by a man who grew up in Louisiana. He got so many of the details right (I’ve lived in Texas for 15 years, so I can speak to this) that it transcends dismissive jokes. If you have never lived in the South, you might believe that women like M’Lynn and Truvy and Clairee don’t exist. Trust me, they do. The woman who is a godmother to me more or less is Clairee. Speaking of, Olympia Dukakis gives such a wonderful performance. She is only out-done by Shirley McClaine as Ouisa, who is the most fabulous old crank in movies. I’ll never get tired of watching those two marvelous old broads go at each other. The scene at the cemetary - the one where Sally Field flips out - is maybe a little over the top. Admit it, though, you are tearing up by the time she says “I can jog all the way to Texas and back but my daughter can’t!” Steel Magnolias is a lovely portrait of a certain community of women - the friends, the mothers, the daughters. It’s also endlessly quotable. “You are evil and you must be destroyed”, “I love you more than my luggage”, you’ve heard them all. This will always be one of my favorites.
