15 July

Dexter - Season One

OK, so I haven't really been all about movies lately. I think I'm subconsciously saving all of my energy for the successive weekends of The Dark Knight and The X-Files: I Want to Believe. All hyperbole aside, I honestly don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to back-to-back theater visits as much as I have going into the last half of July. I suspect people who believe in both Santa and Jesus feel a similar sensation as Christmas morning approaches. I've got the pictures in my Batman Underoos to prove my devotion to Gotham's finest (the bidding starts at half of a Fritos chili cheese wrap from Sonic), and being that I've always been interested in anything remotely paranormal that suggests more than the painfully boring existence we all eke out on this plane, I'm a full-on X-Files devotee (I didn't even mind the last two seasons, as they had my main man and always rock solid T-1000 Robert Patrick in tow). As I anticipate those two films, I've managed to occupy myself by catching up on a show I'd heard a lot about but come to late, Dexter.

The Showtime original, based on the book Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay, sounds like a potentially cheesy premise involving a blood splatter analyst by day who gives into his homicidal urges by night in taking on the seemingly futile task of cutting down on the criminal element in Miami. Luckily for all involved, save the fictional miscreants who find themselves on the wrong end of Dexter’s roided up carving knife, the show is actually a really entertaining look at an unlikely hero, with much of its success owing to Michael C. Hall’s deadpan performance. Hall, last seen in Six Feet Under, does a great job of imbuing his character with enough wit ( I guess the writers deserve a shout-out on that front as well) to make him seem genuinely human even as he goes to great lengths to explain the myriad ways in which he differs from the opposable thumb set. Dexter is pretty unique among antiheroes in that he really does feel compelled to kill yet possesses none of the antisocial arrogance of a Patrick Bateman (who is cleverly namechecked during one episode). His motivations for “fitting in” aren’t related to reflecting the superficial aspects of his surroundings as much as they are needed in a functional sense when it comes to keeping a low profile. While Dexter decries the constant camouflaging of his inner self, he nonetheless realizes that assimilation is his ultimate means of survival. This contradiction makes for alternately hilarious and pathetic byplay with those around him, chiefly his sister (who works alongside him as a detective) and his girlfriend. Dexter has a pretty unique view of sex in particular, in that he understands its place in the realm of relationships but nonetheless places no personal value on it. While he doesn't blink at the notion of slicing and dicing an evildoer, he'll play dead himself if it gets him out of having to broach anything resembling intimacy. He does astutely remark that a "blowjob changes everything", which caused me to wonder if it really does in today's ultra skanked out world (seriously, did you see that study saying that 1 in 4 Big Applers has herpes? I rolled my 401K over into Valtrex stock, which got me a few funny looks and a knowing nod in HR). I'm married, so it's kind of a moot point for me, as the last time I saw the top of my wife's head for any prolonged amount of time I had to rely on carrier pigeons to relay the props from my homies. Still, the (a)sexual component of Dexter's being adds another prism through which his character is further developed.

For all of Dexter's legitimately homicidal impulses, he does tend to stick to somewhat of a honor code. Unlike other serial killer creations, he seems to be a legitimately decent person who actually employs that Golden Rule thing my parents failed miserably to instill in me. His backstory is fleshed out as the season progresses, but the short, non-spoiler version is that he was adopted by a policeman who ultimately helps him to funnel his tendencies in ways that can benefit society while refraining from splattering the blood of any innocents and taking proper pains to avoid arousing suspicion. Crime scenes are where Dexter makes his money, and he's put in enough work on and off the clock by the time the show begins to adequately hone his craft to the point of clinical precision. He still gets a good buzz going anytime he gets a good buzz going (see what I did there?), though, and his actions catch the eye of a fellow serial killer who has his own motivations while following a decidedly more amoral rulebook. Dexter is able to disappear behind the all-American veneer that he loathes nearly as much as his targets, but he has moments where glimpses of his inner vision emerge, and the show does a good job of ratcheting up the tension as it moves along while ostensibly putting Dexter's balancing act in steadily increasing jeopardy. One of the homicide detectives at the office has an intense dislike for his frequent crime scene collaborator, though Dexter takes his hostility as a comforting sign of the unspoken instincts that make him a valuable detective. Their confrontations provide some of the dark humor that permeates Dexter, as the detective quite memorably turns "Lab geek, my ass" into a vitriolic indictment. By the time the finale rolls around, Dexter is forced to confront the skeletons from his past and the temptations of the present while evaluating whether he even wants to engage in the masquerade act necessitated by his extracurricular activities. Dexter often leaves you with an uneasy feeling, but it's always compelling. Hall possesses the kind of slow-burning charisma necessary to lend his character the depth that requires repeated viewings, and the show is further aided by inspired writing and a talented cast of recognizable character actors. In the final analysis, Dexter probably has a little of the Dark Knight and The Joker in him, which makes him a lot more like the rest of us than we'd probably care to admit.

 

 

1 July

Southland Tales

Upon initial inspection (waaaaay initial, like before I knew this thing got crushed at Cannes), few things in the Brantverse screamed “CAN’T MISS” more than Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales. Take the creative forces behind the brilliantly mindbending and heartwrenching Donnie Darko, add in my homegirl Buffy the Vampire Slayer, bring in one of history’s best heels in The Rock, errrr, “Dwayne Johnson”, throw in a little Stiffler for good measure, and get some good old time apocalyptic juices flowing. OK, so there was a red flag thrown up along the way in the guise of that nutless wonder and manbander extraordinaire Justin Timberlake, but he was actually pretty decent in Black Snake Moan. For all intents and purposes, Southland Tales should have been a lead-pipe lock of an instant cult classic that would take its rightful place beside Donnie Darko as proof of Kelly’s inarguable talent and the kind of upwardly mobile career trajectory befitting one of Hollywood’s most daring minds. Talk about an your can’t misses….Talk about hopes dashed….Talk about dreams never realized….Talk about bitter defeat….And that was before I even picked up the Southland Tales DVD.

Southland Tales is Richard Kelly’s follow-up to 2001’s Donnie Darko, and though it technically stands as his fourth directorial effort, it’s really his second film of any note behind the acclaimed Darko. Following on the heels of Kelly’s initial breakthrough, Tales has all of the classic fucked at birth hallmarks of a sophomore jinx destined for failure upon inception: Convoluted storylines? Check. Bloated cast featuring an inordinately high number of SNL vets? Check. Sporadic narration from the Book of Revelations? Check. It’s not like Donnie Darko was some run of the mill, cinematic piece of apple pie that didn’t challenge you even as you enjoyed it. Honestly, I’m still not sure what the fuck really happened in that film, but whatever happened, it was grounded in enough humanity to make me care about the characters and feel what was taking place on some subconscious level (in other words, it made me tear up the same way I did when Andre Agassi won his first Grand Slam at Wimbledon 16 years ago). Even amid the abject and inherent weirdness of Darko, there was a somber beauty and elegance that called to mind David Lynch at his most earthbound moments. Unfortunately, Kelly failed to transpose any of those emotive qualities onto the canvas for Tales, and the film basically unravels as a result of the lack of any real center of gravity.

Southland Tales begins with a look into a not too distant future where Texas has been hit with a couple of nukes, thus plunging America into WW3. The Patriot Act has been extended to basically cover pretty much any and every inquiry the powers that be would care to make, with a new program called US-Ident serving as the central agency through which every aspect of American life is monitored on a continuous basis. As far as Byzantine plotlines go, the first five minutes or so of Tales is relatively coherent. From that point on, all apocalyptic hell breaks loose, as Johnson is introduced as a movie star suffering from amnesia on the lam (he just happens to be the son-in-law of the politico couple responsible for US-Ident) with an entrepreneurial pornstar (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Johnson’s Boxer Santaros becomes an unwitting pawn in the hands of Neo-Marxist rebel fighters looking to take down his in-laws and their hyperconservative political machinations. Johnson displays plenty of the charisma that has enabled him to make a successful jump from the squared circle to the mainstream, but he doesn’t have much to work with in the way of dialogue or character development from Kelly. Despite the manifold plot developments Tales offers, there simply isn’t a lot of meat on the bones of Kelly’s screenplay. Kelly implements allusions to tears in the time-space continuum, alternative energy sources, first world police states, disposable pop culture, and the atrocities in Fallujah, but he ties these plotlines together in ways that make any true connection to the characters in his web impossible. Never has the end of the world seemed so damn inconsequential.

Kelly undoubtedly was looking to make a strong statement about some of the political and social mores of our culture that he finds troubling, but he has succeeded only in creating another example of vacuous pretense devoid of any real heart or soul. Pretense may not be the right word in describing Southland Tales, as I don’t think Kelly is as intentionally pretentious as he is in possession of a legitimately warped worldview and wonderfully overabundant imagination, but Tales nonetheless misses its mark. Even with the SNL overkill (seriously, 4 or 5 not ready for primetime players in one film is pushing it….bigtime), Kelly should be credited for at least throwing together one of recent history’s most bizarrely eclectic casts that in addition to the central characters includes the likes of Miranda Richardson, John Larroquette, Will Sasso, and Mandy Moore (it’s almost worth the effort to hear her clearly enunciate “cockchuggers”). Some of the cinematic flourishes he uses are compelling, as the man clearly has style, but this movie just as clearly lacks the substance necessary to pull it together in a way that would warrant anything more than a cursory perusal. There are plenty of aspects of modern society that deserve to be skewered, but much in the way that Nietzsche once warned that the abyss you look into says “right back at you, man!”, Southland Tales ultimately serves as a glass house from which Kelly practices his aim.

 

 

19 June

I'm Not There and Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

There’s an old adage related to partaking of performances for which you must pay to gain admission: You’ve already wasted your money…Don’t waste your time, too. Sadly, my homey Sludge failed to impart that particular universal axiom until after I’d sat through both Todd Haynes' erstwhile Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There and Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas’ half-ass bungling of the latest Indiana Jones installment in their collectively painful and utterly pointless entirety. Each feature provided me with little more than the cinematic equivalent of blue balls, as Haynes initially appealed to my intellect with an admittedly unique vision that failed to pass muster as it left the ether of his brain and entered that whole “execution” phase through which all worthwhile projects must eventually pass while Lucas and Spielberg tugged at my extra buttered heart strings with the promise of reintroducing a seminal figure and serial in the way of the esteemed Dr. Jones. Unfortunately, neither Bob Dylan nor Indiana Jones emerges the better for his latest incarnation, as Haynes and Lucasberg both misfire while alternately demystifying and mythologizing their central figures. Haynes seems to want points for going the auteur route as he needlessly clusterfucks any idea of Dylan beyond recognition, while Lucasberg simply want to trot out something familiar in the hopes that their audience will gladly sign off on wholesale dumbing down in the name of rote nostalgia. Even if Haynes’ aim is a bit higher, the end result is two pieces of flaming shit and five hours I could have reserved for more pressing matters such as delighting in the humiliation of Kobe Bryant.

The concept behind Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There totally works, and by “works” I mean “should never have been thrust upon unassuming filmgoers looking for a coherent and thoughtful examination of Bob Dylan”. Capturing the essence of someone with as many chapters of his life as Dylan can’t be an easy task, but Haynes’ attempt at cobbling together the disjointed narratives of what feels like a cast of thousands renders any real impression of the singularly talented performer moot. Haynes can be credited for assembling a pretty killer cast (Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, other people not in the infinitely better even if I haven’t seen it yet The Dark Knight), but the ways in which he chooses to depict his central figure fall somewhere between arthouse shtick and teenage myopia. Cate Blanchett (who come to think of it is the only real connect-the-dots strand interwoven throughout this piece) received so much fucking hype for wearing an afro wig and going the vampire chic route while warbling her way through her segments depicting Dylan in his post-plugged-in, drugged-out apoplexy, but her impression of the artist as a pompous young man carries with it all the nuance and subtlety of one of Joe Piscopo’s old school Sinatra sketches. Even if her performance hadn’t grated on me to no unmerciful end, I still would have required professional medical help in returning my eyeballs to their original orbit patterns when confronted with lines like “I’m the only one with any balls, man”. Maybe Haynes, or whoever else shit this script, just thought it would be oh so ironic to have the one person portraying Dylan, errrrrrrrrr, “Jack Rollins/Jude Quinn/Billy The Kid/Arthur Rimbaud/Woody Guthrie”, without actual male genitalia give such startling commentary on the merits of testicular fortitude. Seriously, man, if Jesus Christ Himself had uttered that epithet while staring down the cross, I’m pretty sure I would have thrown in with the Romans. As it is, sitting through I’m Not There is about as close to eternal damnation (or abject boredom) as I hope I ever get. I’m tempted (ooh, another biblical reference, get it?) to make the keen observation that this film blows in the wind and any other weather condition imaginable, but unlike I’m Not There, I’m better than that.

At least Todd Haynes put some effort into fucking up Bob Dylan. I can totally imagine him feerishly and misguidedly imagining the ways in which his grandiose existentialism and experimentalism would translate to the screen in a sincere attempt at earning hipster brownie points. With Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, I think the brainstorming (being seriously generous) was more organic in nature, and by “organic”, I mean that Lucas and Spielberg ate as much ruffage as possible in the interest of seeing just how much of a five star dump they could take on their shared franchise while netting enough of a profit to justify repeated colonics in the near future. It takes some serious balls, man, to jack with a figure as beloved as Doctor Jones, but the latest Star Wars trilogy aptly demonstrated the lengths to which George Lucas will go to tarnish his own cinematic legacy. Spielberg, meanwhile, did recently threaten to make a thinking man's film in the past half decade with Munich, but it's clear that he's most comfortable when he shuts his brain off and simply tries to go the "event movie" route. Spielberg has some coolness to him, but he also has a propensity for coming off like a glorified Michael Bay, especially when joining forces with Lucas, who seems more enamored with the idea of generating business for his special effects company than actually producing stimulating fare. Whatever their motivations for reuniting and relaunching the Indy series, they obviously weren't overly worried about generating anything worthy of a two hour running time, much less the two decades of anticipation that preceded Crystal Skull. Harrison Ford is the only one who emerges unscathed from the proceedings, as he still possesses the trademark charisma that originally made him such a captivating figure throughout his partnerships with Lucas over the last 30 years. I genuinely like Shia Lebouf even if I have no clue how to accurately pronounce his name, but seeing him enter the screen as a carbon copy of Brando in The Wild One (seriously, he is dressed exactly like him) perhaps underscored his character's transparent need to seem tough and cool a little too effectively. Realism has never been the hallmark of the Indiana Jones series, but Lucasberg do their best in Crystal Skull to advance the concept of suspension of disbelief to levels that would make even the most ardent Kobe Bryant supporters cringe (kick that byatch while he's down). It's one thing to rip a man's heart out with your bare hands and then watch it catch fire on its own, but it's another thing entirely to throw a flaming heart at the screen every five minutes. Between the inexplicably hammy prairie dogs (couldn't tell if they were a nod to Youtube or Caddyshack), the ride inside an atomic bomb-resistant refrigerator, the Shia of the jungle scene, the repeated successful negotiations of megawaterfalls, et. al, Lucasberg manage to neuter their franchise while reducing the series to the kind of brain-dead, cartoonish shlock which the previous installments hovered above so strikingly. Convoluted plot developments never dulled any of the earlier Indy films, but by the time Spielberg unfurls an onanistic homage to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it's clear that the filmmakers have forsaken any semblance of classic storytelling for a neverending chance at trotting out their latest CGI-induced distractions. Whereas earlier versions in the series seemed in possession of a genuinely geographically sincere flavor related to the specific and varied locales that Indy traversed, Crystal Skull looks and feels as if it was confined in its entirety to a Hollywood backlot, or even worse, some antiseptic, anonymous bluescreen quadrant of hell.

If it wasn't for the fact that Kobe Bryant just got bitchslapped on the NBA's biggest stage and exposed as a pretender to Michael Jordan's throne, I might be convinced that I actually have been prematurely confined to my own circle of hell in the wake of the abominations that were I'm Not There and Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. If such cinematic outpourings of uselessness are what await me in the afterlife in lieu of the nonstop Monica Bellucci fuckfest I've always assumed to be my eternal birthright, then I guess I'd better start evening out the karmic ledger or at the very least delaying the inevitable as long as possible, even if it means wasting time on shitty movies. The habits borne of long contemplations of eternity....