…more seeings…
WHAT HAPPENED WAS (1994, Tom Noonan). Like his very occasional collaborator Wallace Shawn, Noonan writes characters that reveal their hidden ferocity to one another by tedious degrees. But Noonan’s got a sense of cultural despondency that eludes Shawn, even at his most fervidly futile (The Fever) — in What Happened Was, Noonan’s directorial debut, television becomes a kind of oracle whose prophecies of comfort and illumination refuse to yield anything humanly useful. The movie was adapted by the director/writer himself, from his stageplay; the camera is perhaps predictably a bit too aware of itself throughout. (The lens flits between the windows of a dollhouse and Noonan’s own sunken, horrified eyes at the climax.) But Noonan and Karen Sillas, portraying work acquaintances on a hesitant dinner date at the latter’s apartment, rise to the occasion with explicitly cinematic performances–the former especially, offering an above-average manifestation of his middle-aged creeper shtick, emotes with minuscule gestures that evince his inner anxiety. (When his date serves a microwaved scallop dish, he lifts a piece on his fork, sniffs daintily, and bites down, his eyebrows rising.) When the script turns to the couple’s hobbies the drama derails almost like a Sherwood Anderson short story and spirals off, albeit with mesmerizing patience, into Greek grotesquerie. Still, my girlfriend Rachel couldn’t get through the first 20 minutes: “The characters are talking like they’re in a shitty play,” she commented. I imagine, however, that this is part of Noonan’s point. We’re all playing parts in shitty plays, and only by luck or confidence do we get to write our own dialog. (Next stop: Noonan’s The Wife.)
LAMBERT THE SHEEPISH LION (1951, Jack Hannah). I confess a weakness for the shorts collected in Disney’s “Rarities” tin–uncategorizable now, in my childhood they were often found along with more standard Mickey and Donald fare as bonus, VHS-padding features. Among them, Lambert the Sheepish Lion feels surprisingly contemporary, aside from Sterling Holloway’s “well, gee!” narration and the ersatz-Andrews Sisters theme song. The story of a lion cub mistakenly delivered to a sheep’s maternal care, the plot’s essentially The Ugly Duckling jacked up with the life-and-death drama of a wolf’s visitation. (Lambert finds himself alienated from his herd until post-adolescence, where his carnivorousness proves useful.) But the character design of the dopey, older Lambert bests, probably intentionally, the shagginess of Chuck Jones’ similar creature in Inky and the Myna Bird, and against the satyr-like pastels of the sheep he’s quite effectively more Alfred E. Newman than Frank L. Baum’s skittish Leo. (Lambert doesn’t want to be king of the forest–he just wants FRIENDS, for fuck’s sake.) I could fault the film for initiating a narrative key to my self-loathing–namely, that’s it’s not only “cool” to be different but necessary, and that social acceptance must follow periods of intense alienation through which one discovers his or her utilitarian value. But why spoil it?
KABOOM (2011, Greg Araki). Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather was more a riff on mumblecore than noir; the film prevails most indelibly as a kind of listless love letter to a slacker ethos so dedicated it can withstand the agency of the mystery genre. Greg Araki’s KABOOM similarly infuses sci-fi and psychedelic thriller elements to test the meditative queerness of the “Doom Generation” rather than the other way around. (Guess who wins.) It’s a mostly bright and bushy (in all senses) affair; Araki giddily captures these few rather eventful days in the life of a loose group of ambiguously sexual art school students with crisply flamboyant digital colors, and protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker) is likably calm and inquisitive whether confronted with dangerously potent edibles, a possible cult murder, or his own amorphous lust. (He’s less “bisexual” than an egalitarian nymphomaniac; he’d probably make a bumper sticker out of David Geffen’s quip that, whatever else can be said about the lifestyle, swinging both ways doubles one’s chances of getting laid.) As with John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, however, the heady sensitivity of the ubiquitous humping and its adjacent fuck-philosophizing make everything else seem perfunctory, a dramatic dilemma Araki occasionally revels in. (Smith’s lesbian friend dates a straight-up sorceress without much tangible conflict; Smith’s far too busy deciphering the desultory nature of his allegedly hetero roommate’s masculinity to bother doubting magic.) But the director/writer just as occasionally allows the plot to dither into flippancy, and by the awkwardly expository third act his narrative permissiveness has grown just as broad as his characters’ promiscuity. If only those intoxicating few final frames had an inch more of context, KABOOM might deserve more than the cult audience its divisiveness portends. Still, one has to adore an eschatology this full of bangs, whimpers, and animal masks.
BRIEFLY
- The Sunset Limited (2011, Tommy Lee Jones). I really have to wonder if McCarthy approves of this rather planate reading, or of Jones’s nearly religious intoning in No Country. (I always read McCarthy’s novels with a deadened, twisted voice in my head that can only communicate emotion through syntax.) There’s an editorializing heft to the delivery here that smacks of authorial adulation and audience condescension — Jones and Jackson shepherd our attention through multiple utterances of the “n” word and social criticisms that they likely believe aren’t really meant to be so cynical…are they? As far as an item for a book tour press kit this is solid material, but for anyone who’s actually teetered on the edge of a train station platform and felt the cold eyes of an oncoming car judging his despair, this is a plastic product.
…It’s this, and the striking modernity of the gags, that have preserved The Mikado‘s glory in spite of its now-esoteric satirical content. (The easy laughs are often the deepest and most familiar: When the jilted betrothed Katisha attempts to expose the protagonist’s secret royal heritage, the crowd continually interrupts her with Monty Python-like nonsense.) And so the disappointment of the 1939 film adaptation of the opera by director Victor Schertzinger and producer/composer Geoffrey Toye, now out on Blu-ray, rests less on the clumsy hacking received by the already convoluted libretto and more on the awkwardness with which the play’s usually sharp comedy is rendered. To be sure, the fusillade of exposition provided by the introductory title cards makes David Lynch’s Dune appear narratively competent. But one feels as though he isn’t supposed to follow the story too doggedly here anyhow. What we truly miss is the half-smirking pomposity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s élan; the simplicity of the camera angles and by-the-book editing pace can’t quite keep up with the deftness of the music or lyrics.
