March 15, 2004
Rock Star Quote of the Week:
"Guitars look good. That's all we really care about. They look good, they make good sounds. You don't really need to sit down and learn to play the fuckin' thing. That would be three or four years of your life wasted. You should be doing a gig the day you get your first guitar."
- Jim Reid of THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN
Tongue-Numb-A-Thon: How To Program A 24-Hour Talkfest and experience some of the best dialogue-driven movies ever made (excluding CLERKS, because, hey—the boss already knows how good it is)...
ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)
Margo: Remind me to tell you about when I looked into the heart of an artichoke.
Eve: I'd like to hear it.
Margo: Some snowy night in front of the fire…
George Sanders is a bitch! Bette Davis is a bitch! Anne Baxter is a bitch! And they all talk non-stop for two-and-a-half hours! In glorious black-and-white! [Hmm…]
Seriously: if you've never seen it, pick it up and feel the blistering wit and cocktail onions. If you have, watch it again, then watch CLERKS, then come back to PoopShoot, and—okay, I admit it. I haven't watched this feisty strumpet of a film in a while, but I've never forgotten that artichoke quip. Or the 'snowy night' rejoinder. And these alone are recommendation enough.
Once you're done with Bette Davis informing everyone around her that they are the ball-lickers, consider a move to…
MANHATTAN (1979)
Yale: You are so self-righteous, you know. I mean we're just people. We're just human beings, you know? You think you're God.
Isaac: I... I gotta model myself after someone.
I am a snivelling Woody geek. I've watched MANHATTAN in a dilapidated tin-roof revival house during a rainstorm so vicious that the dialogue was drowned out. I've been consoled by my NTSC DVD on a non-NTSC television, at two frames per second. I've worshipped my way through the Whiny One's entire back-catalogue, and this is still, essentially, where it's at.
This dialogue is so good that soul-destroying melancholia becomes funny, flippant one-liners elicit tears, and the ridiculousness of being human is elevated—in the world of MANHATTAN we all trade witticisms beneath fireworks to 'Rhapsody In Blue', and all screenwriters rage with this kind of exuberance for language.
And now, fellow philosophers: continue pumping your nads to…
THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985)
Bender: Excuse me, Dick... I mean, Rich – will milk be made available to us?
Claire: I have a really low tolerance for dehydration.
Andrew: I've seen her dehydrate, sir. It's pretty gross.
Not another teen movie: John Hughes's opus isn't about underwear-on-head sight gags, choreographed prom dance numbers and football-stadium sets. It's about dialogue—the delicate electricity between words, the hum of the well-timed riposte, the loaded query, the cheap Barry Manilow shot. Five teenagers locked in a room, and the result is more 12 ANGRY MEN than SHE'S ALL THAT.
Don't underrate this flick as day-glo nostalgia—it's still one of the snappiest scripts I've ever had the pleasure to see played out. Amazingly, beneath the eightiesploitation exoskeleton, Bender and Co. have lost none of their linguistic zing after nineteen years.
Out of the classroom and into the, erm… modern NYC drawing-room, then…
METROPOLITAN (1990)
Audrey: What Jane Austen novels have you read?
Tom: None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.
While shot through with adoring Woody-isms, American indie auteur Whit Stillman's first feature fairly sparkles with literary invention, obsessed as it is with a bevy of rich, bored twenty-somethings in the Big Apple. Their eloquent narcissism alone forms the picture's subject-matter; while some kind of 'plot' exists to connect a cornucopia of snarky remarks, the camera is really concerned with nothing more than being switched on and present in its own velvet armchair at one of their gatherings, stony-eyed in the face of such vitriolic glitter.
Stillman formed a trilogy of self-indulgent verbosity by adding 1994's somewhat half-baked BARCELONA and 1998's positively luminescent THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO, and by virtue of the two book-ending films, exists simultaneously as one of the tangiest and most bookishly ornate screenwriters of the last decade or so.
A little less conversation, a little more screaming? Sign up with…
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS (1992)
Dave: Who are you? What's your name?
Blake: You see this watch? You see this watch?
Dave: Yeah.
Blake: That watch costs more than you car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal—that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy—I don't give a shit. Good father—fuck you. Go home and play with your kids. You wanna work here—close. You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker?
That's one of the calmer, more sugar-in-your-tea?-polite exchanges from David Mamet's brimstone-fest in which the real estate business accomplishes the double feat of a) being interesting at all; and b) taking on the apocalyptic gravitas of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Everyone shouts, everyone says 'fuck' a lot, everyone doubts the significance of their existence, steals, cheats, lies, poses, drinks, despairs, says 'fuck' some more, tries to come up with new ways to say 'three bedrooms, great views', and then shouts. While saying 'fuck'. If real estate was this exciting, Keith Moon would have been a sales rep. And he still would've been dead at 31.
It's all so intense, so testosterone-dripping-from-the-corner-of-the-mouth rabid, so 'Someone shut up already!' adrenalizing that you'll need either a hip-flask of liquid morphine or SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS to reintegrate into society when it's all over.
Then again, you could simply suck up that momentum and perforate the stratosphere with…
SIMPLE MEN (1993)
Martin: I gotta go.
Bill: No.
Martin: I get too emotional when I drink.
Bill: Have another beer.
Martin: I gotta get up early.
Bill: No, you don't. Sit down.
Martin: I get too emotional when I drink.
Bill: Will you have another beer?
Martin: I gotta go!
Bill: Why?
Martin: I gotta get up early in the morning.
Bill: Martin, you're drunk.
Martin: And emotional.
Bill: You gotta go.
Martin: Why?
Bill: You gotta get up early in the morning.
Martin: Yeah, you're right. Here, have another drink.
Bill: No. I gotta get up early in the morning too.
Martin: No, you don't. Sit down. Have another drink.
This stage-y, clipped, deadpan style is writer/director Hal Hartley's trademark, yet SIMPLE MEN somehow manages to dovetail exchanges such as the above with verbose, romantic soliloquies, a gas-station attendant playing 'Greensleeves' on an electric guitar at work, the entire cast dancing with drunken sincerity to SONIC YOUTH's 'Kool Thing' in a redneck bar, terrorism, baseball, a dissection of MADONNA's contribution to sexual exploitation in pop music, YO LA TENGO soundtrack gems, crime, nuns, a broken motorcycle, and a love story quite unlike any seen outside of, well… Hartley's earlier two (equally magical) films, THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and TRUST.
So driven by dialogue that it could potentially be a stageplay, and also – as if setting out to be deliciously contrary – beautifully shot, SIMPLE MEN (along with AMATEUR and the two pics mentioned above) places Hartley, with David Lynch, at the second tier in my Favourite Filmmakers of All-Time pyramid, just below the bespectacled Manhattanite.
Dazzled? Breathless? Sit down, have another drink, and ease into…
KICKING & SCREAMING (1995)
Jane: You've never even been to Prague.
Grover: Oh, I've been to Prague. Well, I haven't been-to-Prague been to Prague, but I know that thing. I know that 'stop shaving your armpits, read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, fall in love with a sculptor, now I realise how bad American coffee is' thing.
Jane: Beer. They have good beer.
Grover: 'How bad American beer is' thing. (pause) 'How bad American beer is' thing.
Jane: Yeah—I heard you the first time.
Simply the best dialogue-driven American indie of the '90s that isn't Hartley, Stillman, Linklater, SWINGERS, or that one with the dudes in bloody suits and thin ties. Okay, so no-one knows who Noah Baumbach is, but the words he puts in the mouths of these ennui-drunk twenty-somethings are among the most quotable since HEATHERS.
Sure, he poaches acid-tongued actor Chris Eigeman from the Stillman stable, and much of the substance here does seem like 'Woody Goes To College', but Baumbach's film exudes a genuine air of aimlessness and disaffection that is not only light-years ahead of the whoa-dude-everything-sucks ontology of RULES OF ATTRACTION, but actually! laugh-out-loud funny. Even though, as in Stillman, people 'in real life' never talk like this, the dialogue's artifice only serves (as in Stillman) to sharpen the abstract emotion behind it. Of course, a ninety-minute reel of a character nonsensically vocalizing in agony might convey 'angst' in some kind of non-artificial, true-to-life fashion, but would it be a) entertaining; and b) erudite in its conveyance of that character's mindset?
God, I don't care. I just want 'turkey-fucker' jokes, which KICKING & SCREAMING offers with glee.
Now: cue up a power-ballad—it's…
BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)
Jesse: It's all these people talking about how great technology is, and how it saves all this time. But what good is saved time, if nobody uses it? If it just turns into more busy work?
Selene: Yeah.
Jesse: Right. I mean, you never hear somebody say, "Well, y'know, with, uh... the time I've saved by using my word processor, I'm gonna go to a Zen monastery and hang out." I mean, you never hear that.
Richard Linklater's hypnotic paean to the art of chatting-someone-up sees Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet, walk around Vienna for 90 minutes, and essentially never shut up. It's idealistic, it's cynical, it's gorgeous, it's vulgar, it's made for fans of Kevin's work and indeed anyone interested in the high-definition glorification of that which is, to some degree, behind almost all good movies—the beauty of words. Plus, you know—Delpy's hot.
The sequel, BEFORE SUNSET, is due to bow this year, and there is no 2004 film I am anticipating with greater fervour. Well, out of those not including the words 'sorority', 'wrestling', 'bicycle grease' and 'Volume 26' in the title, anyway.
But… wait! Don't discard your Ethan-inspired beret and goatee yet!! You'll need them for…
CONTE D'ÉTÉ [A SUMMER'S TALE] (1996)
[No, I don't have a quote, due to this flick being criminally difficult to find and my copy being taped over and converted into an archive of daytime TV, but honestly—something incredibly witty could have regally reclined between inverted commas here.]
Much like BEFORE SUNRISE, only French, and therefore involving one guy and three girls with whom he roams ridiculously picturesque coastlines, fidgets, and enjoys awkward young-love conversation. In French. With three girls—okay, I'm done.
This really is one of the most beautiful pieces of film I have had the hedonistic thrill of experiencing. Nothing much happens. Young, cute people philosophise by the beach. More of nothing much happens. Young, cute people philosophise by the beach some more. It really is as good as that. And no, I am not being sarcastic. Cool-as-fuck auteur Eric Rohmer was 76 when he made this, and is, obviously, God.
Forget all this frog-sucking bullshit. Where's my fuckin' blow? Hey, hey, it's…
HURLY BURLY (1998)
Mickey: What kind of tone is that?
Eddie: What kind of tone is that? That's my tone.
Mickey: Yeah, but what does it mean?
Eddie: My tone? What does my tone mean? I don't have to interpret my fucking tone for you, Mickey. I don't know what it means.
David Rabe's stageplay hits the screen in two hours of motor-mouthed sordidity which make the preceding playlist look like an Amish silent picture festival. Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey are mid-level Hollywood executives who lie, cheat, fuck, snort, flail at the emptiness of everything, and who can. not. stop. talking. Ardent, profanity-heavy conversations ricochet between cell-phone trysts and face-to-face exchanges in that absurd CLUELESS style, booze and broads are catalysts for dissertations on the meaning of the universe, Penn is consummately robbed of an Oscar, and you'll come to as the closing credits roll, reaching to lean on the rim of the bowl as you regain your footing.
Quaintly enough, the blow is, in fact, all over the toilet-cubicle floor in…
MADE (2001)
Ricky: And now I've got Ruiz calling me fucking Fruit-Pie the fucking magician! Tellin' me that I can't fucking call my main man Max, who fucking sent me out on the fucking operation? And what about the Welsh guy? He's fucking scat all over, they fucking disappear and talk! And you haven't noticed this either but when he's not fucking looking at me or you're fucking doing whatever, I've got fucking Jimmy in the mirror with his shit too. It's fucking coming at me from here, I don't know where it is! It might be coming this way, it might be coming that way, but the fucking shit's coming and I'm not gonna be late for the fucking dance man, I'm not gonna be fucking late for the dance on this one.
Bobby: You're not getting a gun.
You've probably already seen SWINGERS, but I feel as if this quasi-sequel is (unjustly) not quite as well-circulated. It is what it is advertised as: the guys from SWINGERS join the mob, screw up, have a laugh, get drunk, drive off. MADE is so snappily written, so laden with cringing, biting, stuttering nuance, that I watched it twice back-to-back on initial exposure, and laughed even harder the second time.
Jon Favreau sulks; Vince Vaughn minces; P. Diddy somewhat surprisingly owns his role (as a blinged-up, too-cool-for-school black dude—a stretch?), and even Screech from SAVED BY THE BELL shows up to be laughed at. But, seriously: this is the best buddy comedy (excluding, pointedly, SWINGERS) that I have ever witnessed. BOTTLE ROCKET? Not even close. Stiller and Wilson? Forget it. Some silver-screen duo you boned up on in night-school? Okay, maybe. Prove me wrong: let me know of a funnier buddy comedy.
Also: I haven't been able to verify this satisfactorily, but I have an idea that MADE may play host to one of the highest concentrations of 'fuck' and its variants in film history: 3.03 times/minute. That's higher than CASINO, GOODFELLAS, or RESERVOIR DOGS. If you'd like to put forward any challengers in this King of Profanity title-bout, drop VELVET a line.
So: you've failed, like everyone else, to locate a copy of SLACKER. You're too tired and too drunk for WAKING LIFE. You don't feel sexy enough for a paddle-wielding Affleck in DAZED AND CONFUSED. You still believe that THE NEWTON BOYS was a Joel Schumacher film. But you need more Linklater. Not only do you need more Linklater, you need him at his most irritatingly kind-of-compelling. It's time to insert…
TAPE (2001)
Vin: Do you have any idea how much those drugs cost?
Amy: You can get more drugs.
Vin: I know. But I really liked those ones.
Wow. Mixed feelings on this puppy. Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, and Robert Sean Leonard sit in a (very small) hotel room and bicker for 90 minutes [Stageplay, huh? Well, yeah]. In my original review upon its theatrical release, I recall likening it to Tyler Durden's 'little scratch on the roof of your mouth that would heal if only you could stop tonguing it.' These three characters nag and prod and tease and coo, talk each other in circles, peace-signs, pentagrams, and their audience never seems to quite know who's playing who with what verbal cards.
It's intensely disorienting, almost itchy, and frankly annoying. But you will watch.
If the beer is still flowing like wine, head into extra-time with THE LAST DAYS OF DISCO (more superlative Stillman; possibly even better than his debut), SWINGERS ('Make somebody's head bleed!'), RESERVOIR DOGS (well, duh...), CHASING AMY (a cute segue into the handing-out of PoopShoot flyers to your drunken, pliable friends), TRUST (Hartley is God), THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH (in the beginning was Hartley), ROGER DODGER (new Kidd attempts Stillman/Favreau/Tarantino dialogue, and generally pulls it off), Almodovar gems HIGH HEELS, THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET and ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (exquisite, head-fucking tragicomedies), EVERYONE SAYS I LOVE YOU (the best Woody flick that isn't MANHATTAN), and HUSBANDS AND WIVES (not so much in-your-face as up-your-fuckin'-nostrils early-nineties Woody that will floor you if you're into this dialogue thing), and—okay… a dedicated Woody column may be necessary…
Any talky additions? Send 'em in.
Also send more beer.
Next week! VELVET attempts to be vaguely music-related!
© Reuben Ham
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