Colin Marshall

Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen, 2008)

The prospect of doing a complete Woody Allen watch-through is never far from my mind, but a series of reservations keeps it at a slight distance. Given my unquenchable thirst for cinematic knowledge, I accept that such a marathon must happen, and I'm not exactly dreading it, but I'm not chomping at the bit, either. One Allen quality in particular holds me back: whenever I view a film of his, and it's kind of a rarity that I do, I notice that he never fails to follow the characters I least want to know about. Anyone in whom I'm interested is destined for the background, at best.

No great shock, then, that he pulls the same move in his newest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which drops the two title characters into the title location and watches with great interest. It's the narrative's great interest, though, not necessarily the viewer's; specifically, it's not necessarily mine. Said title characters are a pair of twentysomething ladies, one an engaged grad student in Catalan Studies, the other a flighty flake who bounces from boyfriend to boyfriend, pursuit to pursuit. (Her most recent project was a twelve-minute experimental film. I'm thinking 16mm. Maybe 8mm?) The two are approached at a restaurant by a troubled-looking abstract artist who suddenly offers to fly them over to Oviedo, where they may or may not partake in fabulous sightseeing, fine food, rare culture and, of course, teh secks. Vicky (the grown preppie) is aghast, while Cristina (the "free spirit") is down. Cristina wins.

The film's middle is essentially a dramatization of the well-observed Onion point/counterpoint, "European Men Are So Much More Romantic Than American Men/American Women Studying In Europe Are Unbelievably Easy":

Being European gives me a hell of an advantage. I'm not sure why, but there's something about the accent that opens a lot of doors. All you have to do is go up to them, act a little shy and say, "Whould hyou like to go with me, Signorina, for a café?" I actually have to thicken up my accent a little, but they never, ever catch on.

After a cheap coffee, which to them always tastes better than anything they've ever had, because they're in Europe, it's time to walk them. Now, all they know about Rome is what they've read in Let's Go, so you can pretty much just make up a whole bunch of shit. It's fun to see how much they'll swallow: As long as I refer to Italy as "my homeland" and other Italians as "my people," they'll believe pretty much anything.

Juan Antiono, painter and all-around passionate Eurodude, winds up bedding the both of them. The twist is that he gets the reticent Vicky (whose fiancée back home isn't so much a character as a cartoon doof, a David Brooks bobo with one-third the depth) first, but then goes for the up-for-anything Cristina in earnest. So earnest, in fact, that she moves into his implausibly grand house. (But it's not as grand as his father's; the man somehow managed to purchase a luxuriously-appointed rustic estate while being only a poet who deliberately refuses to publish and a caricature of "earthy" old-Europe senior citizenry.) But then comes the screenplay's big complication: Juan Antonio's emotionally unstable ex-wife María Elena, also an unconventional visual artist, comes back to live as well.

What emerges from this is, at the very least, not a typical movie love triangle. Instead of rivalry, the three settle into a sort of triangluar relationship: you've got Juan Antonio/Cristina, Juan Antonio/María Elena and even Cristina/María Elena. (Vicky's square husband to be, who has by this point shown up in Spain, approves of none of this, but especially not that last pairing.) Unfortunately, the film paints itself into a bit of a corner in constructing this situation. In order to credibly maneuver three characters into this arrangement, it first takes a chunk out of each of them: Cristina, as we've discussed, is a human plastic bag in the wind, while both Juan Antonio and María Elena are more than a little nutty. (The two are subject to serial outbreaks of armed conflict.) This creates something of an idiot plot:

In literary and film criticism, an idiot plot is a plot which (in the words of the Turkey City Lexicon), "functions only because all the characters involved are idiots: They behave in a way that suits the author's convenience, rather than through any rational motivation of their own."

The artists are built to be irrational enough to get into this, and Cristina is built to be dumb enough to believe it will end well. I actually applaud a bit where Cristina, summoning all the faux confidence in her power, righteously announces to Vicky and the dopey beau that, hey, if people are happy livin' in a house and doin' one another, what's wrong with that? It's a fine illustration of a two common confusions: (a) mistaking normative suggestions for normative absolutes, and thus misdirecting one's rebellion and (b) mistaking a momentary state for a steady one. Yes, her attitude unsubtly insists, I know you petit bourgeois think it's a sin to stand around this live grenade, but it's exciting to do so, and besides, it's not going off right now.

The scenario turns predictably messy — shots are even fired — Cristina's flake gene expresses itself hard, and soon the Americans are on the plane back to NYC, surely worse for wear. Pretty light stuff, and I haven't even mentioned the narration that violates "show, don't tell" with an almost perverse intensity. As little as I admire film's execution, I do feel it harbors themes worth exploring — the inner desolation of the alleged free spirit, the destructive social follies that attract those made desperate by their otherwise prosaic lives — but, for whatever reason, Allen was unwilling or unable to probe them this time. If this was the first of his works I'd ever seen, the notion of a trek through his entire filmography would never even occur to me. But I know for a fact that he can be a masterful theme prober. I'll take an Allen film like Crimes and Misdemeanors with me to the grave. I won't remember Vicky Cristina Barcelona three months from now.

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2008

1. James Marsh's Man on Wire
2. Tarsem's The Fall
3. Gus van Sant's Milk
4. Alex Gibney's Gonzo
5. Mabrouk El Mechri's JCVD
6. Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind
7. Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona
8. Randall Miller's Bottle Shock

Howard the Duck (Willard Huyck, 1986)

Howard the Duck gets held up as a cinematic trainwreck of such legendary proportions that I fear I'll come off as on its side when I claim that the movie is not quite that bad. That's not to say that the movie is good; it just isn't the incompetent juggernaut of active hostility toward the viewer that it's rumored to be. (It hasn't had a US DVD release yet, so, absent a convenient check, these whispers tend to inflate.) Do rest assured; Howard the Duck is not a good film. Even the kids who filled its theaters back in 1986, now in their thirties, were probably able to call out its badness at the time. But its sins lie less in its out-and-out folly than in its complete and total lack of imagination. There's nothing notable in its concept or execution. Frankly, I'd have preferred the mythical disaster.

Comics people reading this are no doubt poised and ready to fire off an e-mail about how the source material for Howard the Duck is really this 70s comic book that's all Biting and Edgy and Dark and Satirical, and that's all well and good, but separate works is separate works. My patience for Edgy, Satirical, etc. comic books has, in any case, worn thin in recent years, but it's not half as ragged as my patience for effects-y movies where a wisecracking non-human saves the world. Which is what Howard the Duck, the film, is.

Permit me, at this point, to call for a desperately-needed moratorium on movies where animals, aliens, robots, alien animals, alien robots and robot animals — or humans, for that matter — prevent Earth's destruction. Howard happens to be an alien animal, but he acts just like a human and I'm sure some degree of mechanics (in this pre-convincing-CGI era) attended his depiction, so he's a little of everything. But whatever Howard is, he's much more interesting than the story he stars in, which is featureless, a stone smoothed down by the tides of millennia.

Reviewing Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, Anthony Lane addressed one of my major quibbles with that film thusly:

To take the most basic of objections: how many video-only stores do you know? It would hardly have stretched the budget to set the action in the late nineteen-eighties, when video was rampant; in fact, the new movie has the flimsiness of a comedy from that era (remember the robot in “Short Circuit,” touched off by a lightning strike?)

Yes, flimsy, that's the word; for Be Kind Rewind, for Short Circuit, and for oh so many of the cultural products of the late 1980s. (I do not, as a rule, rag on discrete eras, but I'm sure that, had I been an adult at the time, the promise of the decade's earlier first would have been tragically quashed by the appalling chintziness of second one.) For 1985 through 1989's proliferation of poorly thought-out, cynically executed supernatural comedies, I blame Ghostbusters. Though Reitman's film remains one of my very favorites — within the limitations of comedy-as-deliberate-genre, anyway — it spawned countless empty imitators, apparently helmed by producers who mistakenly attributed Ghostbusters' boffo BO to the mere presences of (a) one-liners and (b) creatures foreign to human experience. (This is a little like adamcadre's evocation of comic book company execs preparing to loose wave after deadening wave of "grittily realistic" superhero books in the wake of Watchmen as an echo of record execs' rush to groom goofy proto-boy-bands in the early 1960s: "The Beatles have revolutionized popular music! We must copy their haircuts!")

All available evidence suggests Howard the Duck is one such spawn. It certainly bears the family resemblance: where Ghostbusters successfully integrates its comedy, its supernatural themes and its visuals, its shoddy knockoffs unfailingly unite these elements like a pack of wandering cats lashed together with yarn. No two people on the production team appear to have had the same goal, or even the same idea of what sort of a film they were making. Too many cooks can ruin a broth, but imagine if none of the cooks know for sure what broth they're making, but they've heard that duck broth seems to be selling briskly.

Here is the picture's Johnny-Five-struck-by-lightning premise: Howard, a duck, lives on his home planet, which appears to be exactly like Earth except that it has two moons and is populated entirely by anthropomorphic ducks. One night, he comes home after a hard day at the office to relax in front of a few duck-related infomercials. But a giant ray puts an end to it, blasting through Howard's walls and yanking him all the way back to regular Earth, the one staffed by Homo sapiens. From that point on, he is, as the comic and film's tagline states, trapped in a world he never made (a line, by the by, that I've never quite understood).

So this would be a standard Fish out of Water (not dropping the phrase "duck out of water" must have sapped all the movie's restraint) but for the fact that, for most intents and purposes, Howard is a human. His character is very nearly equal to what, in most shots, portrays his character: a very short man with the outward appearance of a duck who is disproportionately given to duck puns, most of which are too groan-inducing for decent contemplation. (Just to clear up any confusion: yes, Howard utters the phrase "No more mister nice duck," and you don't have to wait even ten minutes to get it.) Howard's humanness and knowledge of most things human don't, surprisingly, go unexplained. As it turns out, just as we humans on Earth evolved from proto-ape thingies, the ducks of Howard's planet ("Duckworld") evolved from... ducks. So they're supposed to be just like humans, except that they descended down a different line and thus retain the bill and the feathers and all that. (This information is delivered by Tim Robbins in science glasses.) I realize that this holds no water at all, but still, it's more than I expected.

Playing up the non-humanness of a main character who's essentially a human is unproductive, sure, but the film is consistent enough about it that I got angry when it broke the pattern. Perhaps an example. Howard is depicted as familiar with cigars, racquetball, the six-string guitar, martial arts, firearms and biplane flight controls, and yet, having stumbled upon a pizza box, he asks, "What's a pizza?" Seriously? Never evolved the ability to make those?

By the same token, the majority of Cleveland's humans react as one would expect to a three foot, bipedal, English-speaking duck: shock and revulsion. Except when they don't. Some people regard him as simply an unusual-looking fellow, while others barely seem to notice anything's different about him. Look, I don't expect Howard the Duck to hew to realism — nobody flips it on expecting a slice of life — but it exemplifies the worst possible temptation to which a narrative can fall victim: it keeps changing the rules, and worse, it does it in the service of lame gags. Does Howard know about the stuff of civilization, or does he not? Is he regarded as an appalling freak, or is he not? I don't care which; just decide, and be prepared to leave a few puns on the cutting room floor as a consequence.

Howard tries to get along in Cleveland for a while, shopping for clothes in the Goodwill children's section, working in one of those sex spas, nearly engaging in interspecies coitus with Lea Thompson (the scene's awkwardness is legend, deservedly) and queueing up at the unemployment agency. (How he produces the paperwork necessary to receive social services remains an open question, but then again, the Cleveland city government has no reputation as a well-oiled machine.) None of this pans out particularly well, so the movie drops a gigantic villain in Howard's path and gradually peters out while waiting for him to defeat it.

It turns out that the experimental ray that brought Howard to earth also happened to beam down something called the Dark Overlord of the Universe. PROTIP: If, in your screenplay, you find yourself required to conjure a Dark Overlord of the Universe, it's time for a severe rewrite, or maybe even a teardown-rebuild. There's water in the foundation. This unexplained Dark Overlord, etc., inhabits a scientist. When Howard, his rock-grrl ladyfriend and said scientist arrive at a Cajun sushi joint — at which they disappointingly order eggs-and-bacon breakfasts, possibly just to enable Howard to crack a few "cannibalism" jokes — the Overlord completes his bodily takeover, transforming the guy into a grunting, scaly shooter of explosive blasts from of his hands who proceeds to blow the place apart.

This is only one of Howard the Duck's ludicrous, interminable action sequences. (Howard is said to be a black belt in "quack fu," and boy, is he given opportunities to demonstrate that.) I suppose The Matrix had the same problem, though that film, when tired of dicking around with "bullet-time," at least had its flaky philosophical meanderings to come home to. Howard the Duck's house contains only more duck jokes, which aren't much better than battles as chaotic as they are over-choreographed. In the final confrontation, the Dark Overlord materializes in his natural form, which is a sort of stop-motion spider-lobster. Overjoyed as I was to see a non-CGI monster in action, evidently $39 million wasn't enough to integrate it properly with the background.

At this point, you're probably under the impression that I truly loathe the movie, but it doesn't inspire quite that degree of emotion in me. Unlike, say, Mindwalk, Howard the Duck bears no evident contempt for the audience (though perhaps there's some underestimation going on), nor is it dishonest in any way. If anything, it's utterly guileless, but it's also utterly featureless. Like the out-of-time airport in Stephen King's "The Langoliers", everything that enters the film is stripped of essence, flavor and vitality (and then a swarm of sharp-toothed spheres come to eat you). Even the Thomas Dolby soundtrack — I reiterate, Thomas Dolby soundtrack — comes out sounding like nothing. (The triumphantc closing song is especially uninspired, consisting of little more than the chant "Howard... the Duck!" Me, I'd have gone with "Howard is a Duck", set to the melody of Ashford and Simpson's "Solid".)

I confess to having laughed a few times, though not always at intentional comedy. And despite Howard's 100% recycled personality and clunkily realized design — some, I should note, find the combined effect of his puppet face and dwarf-in-a-suit body truly loathsome — I couldn't find it in my heart to hate the little guy. But damned if his movie isn't an object lesson in the value of creative risk-taking. Sometimes the negative examples teach more than the positive ones.

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19. Saying the stakes are high does not automatically make the stakes high. Put words in a character's mouth to the effect that the world is on the line, and you have not necessarily put the world on the line. Nearly all large-scale action or disaster stories, with their invincible heroes and deus ex machina aversions of final destruction, suffer from this syndrome. Whether a threat is major or minor, it's meaningless unless the narrative displays a willingness to take any possible path; though the journey is predetermined, it must seem as though it's not to remain at all engaging. Often, it simply telegraphs from the very beginning the fact that everything's going to be all right in the end, rendering meaningless all action between those two points.

Palindromes (Todd Solondz, 2004)

Although Todd Solondz is not, by anyone's definition, a mainstream filmmaker, this is the first time I've seen him make a radical stylistic choice. Perhaps "radical" is too strong a word for it, but in the role of Palindromes' protagonist, the wandering young teen (tween?) Aviva, he has cast no fewer than eight actresses. And they're not similar actresses, either: some are white, some are black; some are young, some are less young; some are skinny, some are obese; some are girls, one's a boy. A churl might argue that this takes the Everyman (Everygirl?) thing too literally, but hey.

Aviva is, in most of her incarnations, passive in the extreme. In her earliest, youngest representation, she announces to her squirm-inducingly facelifted mom that she plans to have as many kids of her own as possible. In her more sullen, early-adolescent version, she simply lies there hoping for the best while the chunky son of her parents' friends desperately attempts to impregnate her. But then that same mom demands she get an abortion, which is botched and winds up as a hysterectomy, which prompts Aviva to take off, wandering wherever the roads, creeks and randy truck drivers may take her.

The film's major destination for her is something called the Sunshine House, a collective of disabled and/or runaway kids — one without arms, one with Down's syndrome, one who was "born a heathen", one blind and albino (?), one clearly in the middle of an unsuccessful process meant to turn him straight, one deaf, one with a lung disease, etc. — overseen by the squarish, middle-aged Mama Sunshine and her husband Bo. Unbeknownst, it seems, to Mama Sunshine, Bo and his cronies — including Aviva's onetime trucker "boyfriend" — are running an anti-abortion racket out of the house's basement, sending guys out to bomb clinics, shoot doctors and whatnot. Having examined her while she was unconscious, one of the ringleaders, a doctor himself, claims to have discovered Aviva's "child whore" status, and so, oh crap.

What he have here is a bit of a Hero's Journey, Solondz style, which means the hero is totally ineffectual, the journey features unconventional sex and the path is littered with more-or-less-humanized eccentrics. Blessedly for a story in which The Abortion Debate^TM features heavily, there's no take-home moral, but Solondz has never gone in for that kind of thing. Ebert said it best, so I'll quote Ebert:

The plot circles relentlessly, setting up moral situations and then pulling the moral ground out from under them. The movie is almost reckless in the way it refuses to provide us with a place to stand. It is all made of paradoxes. Pregnancy is pregnancy, rape is rape, abortion is abortion, murder is murder, and yet in the world of Palindromes the facts and categories shift under the pressure of human motives — some good, some bad, some misguided, some well-intentioned but disastrous.

That's what's good about the film. What's bad about the film is that it's a mess; from any angle I take, it's just a big jumble of (often less than three-dimensional) people and (kinda blocky) themes. What's good about the mess is that many of the individuals within it are amusing in their own right: Peter Paul, the Sunshine Family member who stumbles upon Aviva when she washes up on a river bank, is inexplicably amusing in mannerism; Joe, Earl, or Bob — the man's got aliases — the lusty long-hauler who picks our protagonist up in more ways than one, is a similarly entertaining flawed character. ("How many times can you be born again?" he cries as the cops encircle his motel room.)

But this is another Solondz film that makes me think Solondz can't, or at least shouldn't, do satire. Satirists by trade continue to have all kinds of fun with the frothy-mouthed anti-abortion movement, but Solondz can't seem to bring himself to sharpen his blade enough do the same. Nor, significantly, can he bring himself to love his particularly crusading characters as he seemed to love, in his own idiosyncratic way, everyone in Welcome to the Dollhouse. He's thus stuck on a middle path that leads straight to the badlands of broad caricature. At more one point, the array of damaged Sunshine children don headset mics and sing (and dance) pop songs for Jesus. Yeah. The anti-abortioneers, with their wall of mangled-fetus imagery like the stuff you see similar groups put up on college campuses, aren't sketched much more subtly. I wanted Solondz to either embrace these people or twist the knife, but he waffles.

Notably, I am now caught up on the current Solondz oeuvre and have, in the process, become enough of a Solondz fan to delight in the presence of Mark Weiner, brother of Dollhouse's protagonist Dawn Wiener, in Palindromes. (Dawn herself "appears" as well, though she's dead before the action starts.) He's now, with thinning hair and an odd-looking tan, even more awkward-looking than before, though he makes a priceless appearance at Aviva's coming-home party. Word has it that Solondz is now working on a sequel to Happiness; I hope for a crossover between its universe and Dollhouse/Palindromes'. There are some endearing weirdos running around them that, quite frankly, I'd like to see interact.

The Humanists: Equinox Flower (Yasujirō Ozu, 1958)

The latest installment of "The Humanists", my film column for 3Quarksdaily, is now up. It's on Yasujirō Ozu's Equinox Flower.

Milk (Gus van Sant, 2008) and The Times of Harvey Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984)

I go back and forth on Gus van Sant, and the existence of what must be at least two Gus van Sants doesn't help me untangle the matter. One Gus van Sant is the visionary behind such bold, aesthetically distinctive films as Gerry, Elephant (my second-favorite of 2003, after Lost in Translation) and, so I've heard, last year's Paranoid Park. The other Gus van Sant is the hack, he of such non-notables as Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester and To Die For. (There's probably a nuttier third clone running around somewhere; you know, the one who made Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and then remade Psycho shot-for shot.)

All my fingers were crossed in hopes that Good van Sant would land Milk and bring a much-needed stylistic shakeup to the staid semi-biopic genre, but Bad van Sant must have made the more convincing pitch, as, alas, he's clearly in the driver's seat. Would that it could at least have been a joint venture between Good van Sant and Bad van Sant, but no. At least Good van Sant wasn't barred entirely from the production; there are certain scenes and shots for which I'd swear he was riding shotgun. Should've jumped the console, though. Should've grabbed the wheel when Bad van Sant was busy foreshadowing.

Not that Milk falls victim to all — or even most — of the usual pitfalls of the recent-history dramatization. It doesn't suffer the obligation to grind through Harvey Milk's entire life — though, on the blade's other side, it does suffer from a conspicuous lack of the man in full — and it doesn't succumb to much of the classic temptation to wedge real events into a community-college-screenwriting-class story framework. The film does indulge in such vices as groan-inducingly unsubtle musical cues, repeated shots of a glowering Dan White and a structure like a life's "Greatest Hits" compilation, though, so there's a bit of a Janus act going on nonetheless.

But it's not a shoddy product. I just couldn't shake the notion that disturbed me throughout: what could the movie have been had the Gus van Sant who helmed Elephant taken control? I can't imagine any result that isn't stunning: no matter what, it'd be an extraordinary story told with an extraordinary look and feel. As it is, Bad van Sant's Milk swerves well around crappiness, but the what-could've-been factor saddens.

(You've surely heard this by now, but I suppose journalistic integrity demands I note that Sean Penn does a near-flawless job portraying Milk. They're not dead ringers, but he certainly does the voice right. The appearance-matching is actually pretty striking across the board; Josh Brolin looks more like Dan White than Dan White did. And, in one of the most inspired casting choices I've seen in a very long time indeed, Art Agnos is portrayed by none other than Jeff Koons.)

Watching the feature version of Harvey Milk's political career gave me the impetus to do the same to the documentary version, Rob Epstein's 1984 The Times of Harvey Milk. Viewing the two films in this atypical order, I was surprised to notice how much of the documentary's footage was recreated to the detail in van Sant's movie, right down to an unusual font on a parade banner that, as a production element in Milk, I suspected of anachronism.

I came away from Epstein's documentary with the same feeling I had after van Sant's feature: broad satisfaction with small, irritating sprinkles of disappointment. Having been recommended the documentary so frequently and so strongly by various cinéaste pals, I suppose I expected more, stylistically, from it as well. It's a thoroughly-researched, solidly-constructed piece of non-fiction film and it benefits from the additional immediacy of having been made six years, rather than three decades, after the events in question. But it's bolted together out of factory doc components — interviews, contemporary footage, narration (by the nonstandard Harvey Fierstein) — and they're not bolted in a particularly distinctive arrangement, either.

It's just occurred to me that I've said a bit about form and style, but next to nothing about content of these films. Since they're based on real events, I figure discussing said events would be superfluous. (I've actually heard a few people assert that they "don't need" to see Milk because they "already know what happened," an excuse that doesn't even hold water for fiction films, but c'mon, nobody's in the theater to find out what happened to Harvey Milk.) But if you don't know and have, for some reason, read this far, allow me to introduce you to my good friend Wikipedia.

The movie did bring out two elements of the story to which I'd never given much thought before. First, Milk's earlyish scenes show the man's first few failed bids for public office. He's met with a lot of dismissive upward puffs of air, even from his neighbors in the Castro: many don't understand why he'd run with hardly a chance of winning, and when he focuses on the Castro itself, they assume the area's inconsequentially small and thus worthless political terrain. But Milk holds his line: maybe the Castro's small, he grants, and maybe I'm not well known, but the Castro is a place to start and a even a lost election is a place — the place, really — to begin a political career. The sentiment resonates with my own developing thoughts on how to get things done. (As with many hoary aphorisms, "You gotta start somewhere" hides a valuable truth under all that dust.)

Second: damn, how times have changed. A large chunk of Milk recreates the fight against the Briggs Initiative — a section that works in more than one of Milk's well-known one-liners — and the attempts of Milk and co. to sway public opinion against it. The lightbulb all but materializes over Milk's head: why not inform voters that gays aren't aberrations huddled in the shadows, but actual people that they personally know? Evidently knowing a homosexual was a total and utter novelty to many back then, but nowadays I can go through a day interacting, if I so choose, mostly with out gay people. I suppose Milk was right; that bullet really did destroy a lot of closet doors.

Storytelling (Todd Solondz, 2001)

Solondz crafted Storytelling as a triptych, but, at the eleventh hour, jettisoned the film's third segment. So that makes the film, what, a diptych? That doesn't sound nearly as cool. Too close to "dipstick."

In any case, the first half of the dipstick, titled "Fiction", is a close-to-killer satire of the academic writing workshop. As so many semiautobiographical literary novels have taught me, a writing workshop is when, on a regular schedule, a group of creative writing students sit at a big table presided over by a stern professor (who's possibly a bigshot novelist himself). One student reads a piece of fiction they've written out loud. Then all the other students comment on it, siezing the opportunity for either passive aggression, stealth self-aggrandizement or blatant professorial brown-nosing. Then it's the next student's turn to read.

Initially, Solondz's workshop lineup contains many of the usual suspects: the catty teacher's pet, the P.C. rebel grrl with bad pink dye job, the disabled guy who writes exclusively about his disability, the dismissive instructor whose books have names like A Sunday Lynching. However, since this is a Solondz movie, the brittle, bad-haired iconoclast is having sex with the unsubtle, cerebral palsy-afflicted scribbler. And the bespectacled suck-up is having sex with the professor. And the professor is having sex with, evidently, as many of his students as he can lure, which includes the P.C. rebel, whose primary, all-consuming concern, even as she's drawn inexorably into the (black) teacher's bedroom, is not being racist.

I've talked to friends about how, for all his strengths, Solondz ain't great at satire. More on that in a moment, but as I reflect on this film, it's come to resemble the exception to the rule, at least in many respects. It's hard to watch the main girl return to the writing workshop and read out her not-even-really-veiled-at-all "fictional" account of her assignation with the professor — I won't even spoil for you what the guy makes her say, repeatedly — and not think that the film's effectively keying in to several ridiculous human (and especially academic human) tendencies at once.

Nor is it possible to write that off as a fluke; Solondz showcases satirical perspective nearly as sound in the second segment, "Non-Fiction". The object of this round of satire is a not-particularly-competent documentary filmmaker played, it seems pertinent to note, by Paul Giamatti; imagine if his Sideways character attempted to compensate for his loserhood by becoming a documentarian rather than an oenophile. (His cameraman is, as seen above, American Movie's Mike Schank. References of any kind to American Movie are sure bets to win points from me.) After a truly pathetic phone call to a long-lost high school girlfriend, he launches into a high-flown project meant to examine the Condition of the Modern American Teen: packed extracurricular schedules, college application deadlines, peer pressure closing in, that sort of deal. He walks the halls of the local high school, shooting jittery meanderings down locker-lined hallways. His voiceovers on the footage ruminate, ponderously and emptily, about the high schooler's plight. Sloppy cuts step on already-dead aesthetic choices.

In an age that produces more and thus more poorly thought-out documentaries than any before it — the best of times and the worst of times for a documentary lover like myself — Solondz's satirical charges stick. Fascinatingly, though, he also seems to have imbued the hapless Giamatti character with more than a few of his own qualities. When his editor accuses him of ridiculing his subjects, the filmmaker shouts in his own defense: "I love them! I love them!" If memory serves, Solondz has faced similar charges and marshaled similar rebuttals. Perhaps that's why he's less than masterful as a satirist; he likes the people he would be satirizing a bit too much, no matter how horrible, lame or strident they might be. This keeps his jokes at their expense a bit broad, a bit toothless — even the worst low-rent documentaries on the market don't show quite as much ineptitude as the one within Storytelling — but at the root of the flaw is, I suppose, a virtue.

Stroszek (Werner Herzog, 1977)

Following the success of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog decided to employ Bruno S., his hand-picked street-musician star, in the title role of a film adaptation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck. At the eleventh hour, though, Herzog freaked upon realizing that this vision could only be realized with Klaus Kinski, another partner in an unconventional (to say the least) actor-director relationship, as Franz Woyzeck. But Bruno had already arranged time off from his forklift-driving job to act role he'd now lost, so Herzog rapidly penned a new script, the story of Bruno Stroszek, a title character written just for Bruno S.

Stroszek, like the actor portraying him, is released into modern society after a prolonged period of institutionalization. A runty outsider with iconoclastic habits, myriad odd possessions and a penchant for busking, he promptly returns to his old apartment. The place had been looked after, in Stroszek's absence, by the elderly Scheitz, a neighbor even more eccentric than the protagonist himself. (Scheitz, played by a man of the same name, is another product of Herzog's 70s casting habits: if you know a little old-timer with grand, bizarre conspiracy theories and a head full of outsider science, you hire him to play a little old-timer with grand, bizarre conspiracy theories and a head full of outsider science.) On his way to move in with his Wisconsonian nephew, the old man suggests to Stroszek that he might be happier making a new life in America, away from Berlin's cramped confines and menacing thugs. Taking his bird Beo and his prostitute friend Eva, Stroszek joins Scheitz's big move.

Things initially go well for Stroszek and company. He finds employment in auto mechanics, Eva starts work at a truck stop diner and Scheitz gains unlimited freedom to perform his crackpot research. (Beo gets confiscated at customs, a case of art made to imitate life when Herzog and his crew tried to bring the bird in.) But matters go south in a hurry: unable to pay the bills on their new mobile home (which, today, would be rejected as far too exaggeratedly 70s for even a 70s period piece), Eva turns back to the oldest profession and Stroszek sinks into a reverie of self-hatred. The spiral continues: one pathetic robbery, one purchased frozen turkey and one stolen tow truck later, poor Stroszek winds up at a deserted North Carolina Indian reservation, ceaselessly riding a chairlift, shotgun in hand, after pumping dozens of quarters into a "dancing chicken" machine.

This reads like a standard "heartless America chews up, spits out hopeful, innocent immigrants" story, though Herzog would seem to be too sharp to reheat that thin a gruel, even in 1977. And there's not much in the film to specifically indict America or its values; Germany, Herzog's semi-forsaken homeland, comes off even worse. It's unclear what goes wrong, exactly, in Stroszek's new American life: one day they're rejoicing amidst new wood grain and shag carpeting, and seemingly the next the bank is auctioning off all their stuff. At one point, Stroszek grumbles about having been misinformed that it's the norm to get rich quick in America, and indeed, the immigrant's wretched lament that "they promised streets paved with gold" is the stuff of a thousand interminable PBS specials. But isn't that about as likely to raise sympathy as someone telling you how crestfallen they were to find that, contrary to what they'd been assured, a kindgom made entirely of gumdrops does not lie just beyond the horizon?

But Stroszek isn't a simple story of failure, at least not primarily. It's more about the interaction between three outsiders in their own society transplanted to an even more foreign environment, and it's a senario out of which more than a few fascinating moments arise. Consider how Scheitz stops a few passing hunters — and they were genuine passing hunters off camera, flagged down by Herzog himself — in order to perform a little "animal magnetism" research with an electrometer on the bewildered men's freshly-shot deer. Or how the now-slovenly Eva and uncomprehending Stroszek sprawl on the couch across from the bank's awkward young loan officer as he tries his roundabout hardest to demand payment. Or how the desperate Scheitz and Stroszek, armed with a single shotgun, attempt to knock over a bank but take on a basement barber shop instead, running to the market across the street to buy a turkey with their appropriated lucre and immediately being spotted by the cops. Or — and none could neglect to mention this — the Indian policeman barking to his dispatcher that they're gonna need an electrician, because nobody can stop the dancing chicken.

(Like Kaspar Hauser in German, Stroszek has a better title in French: La Ballade de Bruno, if you can believe it.)