(2007, USA. Directed by Chris Rock.)
Who knew that underneath all the bluster was blandness? The same guy people called incendiary and dangerous, the one who dared to “tell it like it is,” who was bigger, blacker, and who brought the pain, now spends his Friday nights watching TV with his wife and kids.
Firebrand comedian/media-prophet Chris Rock is a killer stage presence; he’s loud, mean, and defiant. He’s funny -- that’s for sure -- but Rock has always been a little scary with a microphone in his hand. Clad in black leather, he paces the stage like a cougar spewing turbulent, spot-on bile. And though most of his material is of the “funny ‘cause it’s true” variety, he doesn’t deal in easy truths; you never feel comfortable when he’s on his game.
So it’s strange that his new movie, I Think I Love My Wife, is all about comfort. Even stranger still is its source: I Think I Love My Wife is a remake of Eric Rohmer’s French New Wave classic Chloe in the Afternoon.
Rohmer’s film was the last part of his “Six Moral Tales,” a quiet, heady cycle that dealt with, above all, resistance to temptation. Unlike his New Wave peers, Rohmer wasn’t tempestuously political -- he was a mixed-up Catholic wondering how to approach the turbulent 1960s and 70s. His movies don’t share the movement’s formal abandon either; they’re slow moving affairs, often shot under florescent lights in offices and living room. A lot of people call him boring. Even more use “conservative.” But behind his movies’ turtlenecks and bland interiors is a curious prankster. Watching Chloe in the Afternoon, you can feel Rohmer connecting to his hero’s sexual longing and repulsed by his cozy bourgeois pettiness. When Catholic guilt wins out, it’s almost -- almost -- as if Rohmer believes in it all simply because it keeps these morons in check.
Improbably, I Think I Love My Wife (which Rock wrote and directed) is a remarkably faithful remake; scenes, situations, and lines are lifted verbatim. Much of the humor stems from frustration -- Rock’s wife won’t put out, his non-sexual affair is costing him at work, Viagra is way too potent -- and if some of the situations feel like a punched-up sitcom, a lot of Chloe in the Afternoon feels like a proto romantic comedy anyway.
But Rock isn’t really suited for frothy comedy. He looks uncomfortable wearing a suit and holding a briefcase, and he looks positively mismatched against his hot young costars. When flashes of social commentary pop up -- like criticism of hip-hop culture or racial color-blindness -- it’s often followed by a lame Michael Jackson joke. Domesticity has made this one-time hothead limp. (Maybe the Viagra wasn’t really such a bad idea.)
That hothead is still there -- you can hear it in the voice-over. That growl still booms and those eyes still dart. That’s why, when Rock sighs that he needs to stop complaining about the things he doesn’t have and appreciating the things that he does, it feels like such a cop out. You expect that kind of thing from Eric Rohmer, but from Chris Rock? Maybe fidelity isn’t such a great idea after all.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Monday, March 13, 2006
300
(USA, 2007. Directed by Zach Snyder.)
The bad guys hate freedom. A fanatical cadre of blasphemous evildoers, their kingdom stretches across the Middle East. Their aim? To conquer the West -- for fathers, mothers, and sons to bow before seething turban-wearers who fancy themselves gods among infidels. Freedom’s only hope is a righteous vigilante, a leader so brave he defies a cowardly senate to lead a band of superior warriors against a sun-baked army of slaves. Oh -- this all takes place in 480 B.C.
In interviews, Zach Snyder, co-writer and director of 300, has emphatically insisted that his movie is no allegory; it’s about nothing more than the Battle of Thermopylae. But people don’t work in a vacuum. “He’s broken our laws and left without the council’s consent,” says a traitorous senator of the heoric Spartan king; when Snyder wrote those lines, what -- if anything -- was on his mind?
Intent aside, films speak for themselves; a movie made in the mid-60’s about a monstrous army from the Far East would correctly be called “about Vietnam.” And 300 should be called “about Iraq;” it isn‘t much of a stretch. When the freedom-loving Spartans vow to put an end to Persia’s reign of mysticism and tyranny, the reference flies over the heads of only the least aware.
Whatever was on Snyder’s mind, 300 is here -- with trumpets blaring. Calling 300 bombastic doesn’t do the movie justice; it’s loud, mean, and proud. It’s a shirts-off, dirty, crazy affront, and if it wasn’t such a jingoistic bully, it might be a moronic blast -- an amphetamine-fueled meeting of Herodotus and Vince McMahon. An early scene, in which the Spartan king Leonidas tells a Persian messenger to shove it, Spartan-style, is hilariously nutty. With eyes glaring and muscles twitching, Leonidas is like a supped-up, loin-cloth-wearing Travis Bickle; when he unleashes hell, it’s like B.C. Bickle has just wandered into The Matrix.
And it kind of fits. Nothing in 300 represents reality -- everything was shot against a green screen -- and I’m hard-pressed to call it much of a real movie. If movies are a compilation of images, 300 is a compilation of sustained images. It was based on a graphic novel, and that medium’s attention to the static image shows. Whenever the movie finds an image it likes -- a sword gliding through a battlefield, snow collecting on slain soldiers, blood spurting from a gaping wound -- the frame rate slows so that we can gaze. Slow motion is more common here than dialogue. That trick is usually used to accentuate something -- a clue that we’re supposed to pay attention. But 300 is so in love with itself, every swing, butt, or leap is an excuse to pause and leer. With a proper frame rate, 300 would hardly make it to feature length.
Part of me wants to applaud the style. Indeed, it works on the battlefield where the chorography transcends the choppy, frantic fights of Gladiator and Troy. And early scenes, like a climb on Delphi that feels like an assault on the Agro Crag, benefit from the visual panache. It all affords the filmmakers room to make the Oracle an writhing, red-haired hottie and to shoot a rampaging rhinoceros like it was starring in a Chanel ad.
But really the self-admiration is offensive. 300 is a cocky as it is harebrained, and the machismo pulses like the veins on Leonidas’s bicep. It off-handedly insults Athenians as “boy lovers,” substitutes the Thespian allies for Arcadians, and invents a wildly inappropriate rape out of whole cloth. That the apish Spartans are viewed as the “little guy,” those facing insurmountable odds against cowards and weaklings, is 300’s most repulsive conceit. Combine that with the political allegory and 300 becomes a vituperative Right wing vampire -- all sexy, seething venom.
That it’s also all unthinkably homoerotic is the only weapon we’ve got. I don’t want to make fun of anything for coming off a little gay, but for every lovingly-photographed bare chest and thigh, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly -- if not the war in Iraq -- was on Zach Snyder’s mind. Don’t ask -- he won’t tell.
The bad guys hate freedom. A fanatical cadre of blasphemous evildoers, their kingdom stretches across the Middle East. Their aim? To conquer the West -- for fathers, mothers, and sons to bow before seething turban-wearers who fancy themselves gods among infidels. Freedom’s only hope is a righteous vigilante, a leader so brave he defies a cowardly senate to lead a band of superior warriors against a sun-baked army of slaves. Oh -- this all takes place in 480 B.C.
In interviews, Zach Snyder, co-writer and director of 300, has emphatically insisted that his movie is no allegory; it’s about nothing more than the Battle of Thermopylae. But people don’t work in a vacuum. “He’s broken our laws and left without the council’s consent,” says a traitorous senator of the heoric Spartan king; when Snyder wrote those lines, what -- if anything -- was on his mind?
Intent aside, films speak for themselves; a movie made in the mid-60’s about a monstrous army from the Far East would correctly be called “about Vietnam.” And 300 should be called “about Iraq;” it isn‘t much of a stretch. When the freedom-loving Spartans vow to put an end to Persia’s reign of mysticism and tyranny, the reference flies over the heads of only the least aware.
Whatever was on Snyder’s mind, 300 is here -- with trumpets blaring. Calling 300 bombastic doesn’t do the movie justice; it’s loud, mean, and proud. It’s a shirts-off, dirty, crazy affront, and if it wasn’t such a jingoistic bully, it might be a moronic blast -- an amphetamine-fueled meeting of Herodotus and Vince McMahon. An early scene, in which the Spartan king Leonidas tells a Persian messenger to shove it, Spartan-style, is hilariously nutty. With eyes glaring and muscles twitching, Leonidas is like a supped-up, loin-cloth-wearing Travis Bickle; when he unleashes hell, it’s like B.C. Bickle has just wandered into The Matrix.
And it kind of fits. Nothing in 300 represents reality -- everything was shot against a green screen -- and I’m hard-pressed to call it much of a real movie. If movies are a compilation of images, 300 is a compilation of sustained images. It was based on a graphic novel, and that medium’s attention to the static image shows. Whenever the movie finds an image it likes -- a sword gliding through a battlefield, snow collecting on slain soldiers, blood spurting from a gaping wound -- the frame rate slows so that we can gaze. Slow motion is more common here than dialogue. That trick is usually used to accentuate something -- a clue that we’re supposed to pay attention. But 300 is so in love with itself, every swing, butt, or leap is an excuse to pause and leer. With a proper frame rate, 300 would hardly make it to feature length.
Part of me wants to applaud the style. Indeed, it works on the battlefield where the chorography transcends the choppy, frantic fights of Gladiator and Troy. And early scenes, like a climb on Delphi that feels like an assault on the Agro Crag, benefit from the visual panache. It all affords the filmmakers room to make the Oracle an writhing, red-haired hottie and to shoot a rampaging rhinoceros like it was starring in a Chanel ad.
But really the self-admiration is offensive. 300 is a cocky as it is harebrained, and the machismo pulses like the veins on Leonidas’s bicep. It off-handedly insults Athenians as “boy lovers,” substitutes the Thespian allies for Arcadians, and invents a wildly inappropriate rape out of whole cloth. That the apish Spartans are viewed as the “little guy,” those facing insurmountable odds against cowards and weaklings, is 300’s most repulsive conceit. Combine that with the political allegory and 300 becomes a vituperative Right wing vampire -- all sexy, seething venom.
That it’s also all unthinkably homoerotic is the only weapon we’ve got. I don’t want to make fun of anything for coming off a little gay, but for every lovingly-photographed bare chest and thigh, I couldn’t help but wonder exactly -- if not the war in Iraq -- was on Zach Snyder’s mind. Don’t ask -- he won’t tell.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
