The Land of Make Believe, on DVD

One reason this blog has been as inactive as is has is that I have not been watching all that many films lately. That's finally started to change, back to the normal pile of films I watch. Partly because of the Vampire class I mentioned in my quiz post - anticipation of that sent me through a bunch of DVDs, old horror films mostly - The Golem, Frankenstein, Nosferatu, Dracula, Vampyre, some Lewton films, Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher - an edifying bunch of films, to be sure, though I don't have much to say about them, not at the moment anyway.

Instead - maybe inspired by Dinner for Schmucks (of all things), I have been looking at another type of film lately - these have also been very edifying, and bit more inspiring. What should I call these films? Making-it-up-as-you-go-along films? There's a theme - I'll try to get there through the films thesmelves...

Gentlemen Broncos - Jared Hess' second film since Napoleon Dynamite. Here, a kid goes to a homeschool camp where a famous writer ("Dr. Ronald Chevalier") is speaking; the kid submits a (science fiction) story to a contest - the story doesn't win, but the writer steals it. Meanwhile, Benji (the kid) meets Tabitha and Lonnie, two fellow home schooled nerds - Lonnie makes films, and when they get back home, Lonnie adapts Benji's Gentlemen Broncos story. When this comes out - not only is the film horrible, but everyone thinks they stole the story from Chevalier - but Benji's mom had been submitting his stories to the copyright office all along, so everything comes out all right in the end.

All of this is rather crude, and a bit inept, but proves to be deceptively appealing. It's redeemed (like Dinner for Schmucks, and Nacho Libre, to some extent), by its unabashed embrace of trash culture. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly, as Chesterton (it turns out - I always wondered where that came from) put it. I like this kind of work - films that celebrate cheap art making. And I like this film for not trying to pretend to be about anything else - Benji's story is silly indeed; the Famous Writer is a hack (and much fun is made of him), his adaptation of Benji's story is crap; Lonnie the filmmaker is a joke, and his adaptation of Yeast Lords (the name of the story) is junk as well, and none of them get a pass. Hess doesn't pretend any of them are particularly talented - he makes more fun of the insincere ones, but even that is rather tame - it's their willingness to mistreat other people that gets hammered, not their incompetence. (Chevalier's plagiarism; Lonnie's tricks - ripping off Benji; redubbing his star's voice...) Now - all of this is conveyed by a film that is borderline incompetent itself, though a mitigated form of incompetence. Much of the visual incompetence is explicitly, and comically, intentional (both in the inset parodies of bad sci-fi films and in quite a few of the incidents in the frame story) - and the the writing and acting are another matter. Again, it's deliberately underplayed, and only seems underwritten - in fact, most of it is pretty carefully put together. The film adopts a plain spoken posture that hides some of its strengths - clever turns of phrase underplayed; a certain deliberate awkwardness in the timing of the lines and jokes - which are pretty clearly aimed at creating the sense of confusion and teenaged angst the film is about. Hess is quite a good writer, I think - his films creep up on you, even when the jokes aren't as plain and sharp as in Napoleon Dynamite. But he isn't much of a director. Even giving him the benefit of his clear intention to create an understated, almost schlocky look, the results are dull to look at, and less effective than they should be. He is not the first director to try to make films that look (and possibly are) made from poverty - but he does not have the eye of a Michel Gondry or Luc Moullet, or even a Mark Borchardt. Napoleon Dynamite did look surprisingly good, but I think that;s mostly because he was consistently aping Wes Anderson. Everything centered, frontal shots, wide angles - since then, he seems to have stopped trying to imitate Anderson, but that leaves him without much to look at. And I suppose I need to note that this film is not, really, from poverty - he has a cast of minor stars (Sam Rockwell and Mike White and Jennifer Coolidge and - stealing the show like he does Dinner for Schmucks - Jemaine Clement...), he seems to have a decent budget. Somehow, these conventional productions of do-it-yourself film (Be Kind, Rewind is guilty of this too) never seem as interesting as either real cheapie films of the past (Ed Wood, say), or no-budget art films like Moullet's... Oddly, films about cheap artmaking seem less interesting than actual cheap art.

On the other hand, there is The Fall - Tarsem's folly, and an almost shockingly wonderful film. There have been hints that there was something going on here - Ebert adored it, for instance - but it still took me completely by surprise. For story you have - a little girl in a hospital with a broken arm meets a stunt man who has apparently broken his back. They become friends, and he starts telling her stories - and then starts steering them toward an end. She steals a eucharest, and he tries to get her to steal morphine for him, so he can kill himself. She does, though continued misunderstandings cause him to continue to need her help, which he gets by continuing the story he's telling. It's an elaborate tale of vengeance and adventure - a bandit, an Indian (he says with a squaw and wigwam, she thinks, from India, like an orange picker she knows), an Italian bombmaker, Charles Darwin, a freed slave and a mystic who emerges from a tree, all unite to wage war on the evil governor Odious who has taken what they all love. This passes through a series of inventive adventures, but as Roy the stuntman's story is not ending well, neither does the story he tells - but... We end, finally, with, first, a screening in the hospital of the movie the stuntman seems to have been working on when he got hurt - and then a perfectly glorious montage of 20s stunts, narrated by the kid....

All right. First up - all this is very much like a high ticket version of Gentleman Broncos. It's quite close - the way we see an embedded story coming to life inside the frame story - the way the inner story evolves to reflect the outer story, the way it slips back and forth between the control of the people telling it. One of the joys of Gentlemen Broncos is watching the way the embedded story changes depending on who is telling it - Benji's version looks one way; the writer's version looks different - the hero turns into Kerry Livgren, with a wolf in place of a lynx (Benji's hero looks like Robby Steinhardt - I'm guessing these are not coincidences, since Kansas is on the soundtrack); Lonnie's film another version (Mike White as the hero, not looking like any member of Kansas, really.) It's similar in The Fall - Roy tells the story - Alexandria imagines it - bits of plot and characters and such shift around as they move through the story.... It's a shared world, and one that celebrates imagination, stories, story telling, the act of telling stories - not to mention the mechanics of telling stories, especially on film - the stunts, costumes, gloriously over the top locations.... It's fascinating too in the ways it goes beyond the imaginations of the characters - the commentary tracks make much of the ways the story is Roy's plot filtered through Alexandria's imagination - but the sheer hyperbole of the film goes well beyond what can be ascribed to her imagination. That grandiose and impossible look can only come from Tarsem - but I think that's a big part of why it works. The plot would probably be too maudlin to sustain the low rent style of something like Gentlemen Broncos - it needs operatice excess, and makes good use of it.

All that is enough to give the film appeal, but there is more. There is more to what is there on screen, for instance - there is the strange and rather wonderful interplay of that mad vision of the world, the eye popping locations and costumes and photography, with the extreme intimacy of the frame story, the stunt man talking to the little girl. You have this mad spectacle combined with a wonderful little two hander between the actors. And while the spectacle is convincing enough on its own, the film is just as inventive, just as surprising and glorious looking up close. The kid - Catrina Untaru by name - is marvelous. She is perfect for this - surprising, strange, unique, effortlessly funny, plain wonderful. Lee Pace also gives an excellent performance, playing off the kid, while getting the story across... And the story itself holds up pretty well - the plot is fairly simply (Roy telling the stories to get the kid to steal morphine so he can kill himself), but it has depths. Particularly in the way both the embedded story and the frame rather subtly work through Alexandria's loss of her father - Roy the stuntman comes to replace her father - in the Spectacle, in the frame as well. That - for what it's worth - is another similarity to Gentlemen Broncos - Benji's stories also tend to be about his lost father, and a good amount of the frame story there could be said to be about his lack of a father figure...

All right. That's a lot about this film. But - it's a wonderful film - and I suppose as much as that, there's the joy of being surprised by a film. I've had Th Fall out from Netflix for ages - I got it last year when I was hepped up on Fritz Lang films, thinking it would refer to the kinds of silent adventures he started out making. But I didn't expect much more, so it's been sitting there a long time. To find that it is, in fact, something like a great film - the surprise is almost as gratifying as the fact that it is so good. And - I can't deny that it fits in with my fascination with films that have this quality of make believe, this fascination with the act of telling stories. I love that - I tend to love even bad films that play around with the idea - so when I find a film that does it, and works as a good film as well - ah... that is bliss. And - looking like it looks - it is almost as arbitrarily beautifully strange as Princess Raccoon, which is damned high praise indeed.

Oh - one more: Richard Lester's Three Musketeers... I hate to make this seem like an afterthought - but, I admit, it's neither as good as The Fall nor as interesting as Gentlemen Broncos, though I think it fall somewhere not far from their land of make believe concerns. It should be a better film than it is, I think - it's an odd mix of slapstick, derring-do and realism (though a feigned realism), with a great cast, all seemingly well committed to the material, a nice script, but... I'm afraid Lester might be the problem, he can't quite pull it off somehow. The gags are telegraphed, the actors are, in the end, more or less on their own - Spike Milligan seems to be acting in a different film from the rest of them, to name one. I suspect this is the problem, really - what I've seen of Lester, he's always close, and certainly can make great films - but only when he doesn't really have to do much. The Beatles films work because they are inherently anarchic - they are like the Marx Brothers, their films like the Marx Brothers, where the plot and action isn't very important, just there to keep moving them from gag to gag.... This is too intricate for that kind of work - it's too complicated a story, the action and plot is too intricate for the actors to carry it without the right kind of guidance. This isn't the Marx Brothers, this is Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn, and Lester can't seem to carry it.

And so... I have The Four Musketeers sitting here, ready to go though - don't think from the pan above that I would not watch this film again, any chance I had. It's a lot of fun, if not that satisfying. And - I also have, sitting next tp the DVD player, another film, that might be able to combine anarchic comedy and Vampires - The Fearless Vampire Slayers. I tried it once before, and didn't get very far - I don't remember why - a bad tape? faulty expectations? who knows - I think I will be more primed for it now....