Fuuuuuck. OK, Hollywood is teasing us now. This is actually a fake trailer from Funny People, right?
"Haha, look at your face!"
--Hollywood's Tombstone
Don't get me wrong. I'm not some John Conner over here. I have a human heart, not some Communist robot heart. I'm perfectly open to the touching, based-on-a-true story about a noble, rich, white woman taking in an impoverished, oversized black child and raising him as one of her own. The Jerk came out 30 years ago, I think America is ready for all the roles to be reversed. And I love a bruising good high school football game against all the odds just as much as anybody. Clear eyes, full hearts, can't not love it! But when Sandra Bullock actually says, out loud, in a movie, on which millions of dollars have been spent, in 2009, in response to "you're changing that boy's life," "no, he's changing mine," I changed my life by ending it. Also. (Thanks for the tip, Josh.)
OK, first let me say that this actually looks pretty good. Sure, it's a little film-grad-with-a-minor-in-mid-century-French-philosophy's-senior-thesis, but it's Francis Ford Coppola, he is often very good at making movies. And sure, it is a little funny that this looks more like a Sophia Coppola film, as if her recent success has forced her father to reconsider his life's work and grab onto that moody, twee zeitgeist. But whatever! And I like Vincent Gallo. There I said it.
But the real danger with this film is now that we live in the post-ironic age, whatever THAT means, when you get the tone of something so right, it starts to look like you're making a joke. Which is why Tetro basically looks like the sequel to Louis C.K.'s Persona Ne'll Aqua:
Oh man. In a press interview for his new movie Fighting, Terrence Howard kept it a little too real. Via FilmDrunk:
I ride life like it's a beautiful go-cart. Me and my friends, we'll get out there and make a go-cart. You spend so much time finding pieces to make the go-cart, and sometimes it don't work. But then, all of a sudden, you've got a go-cart that's working. And right when you start riding down the hill, your mother calls you and tells you that you gotta come in. The little boy has to stop, right then and there. So, he comes in and he's angry and sullen in the face. I'm having such a great time in my life right now. I'm making go-carts, you know? And then, when they call me and make me come to work, I walk in there, I slam doors and I do all those things that a little bad kid would do.
There is nothing funnier than people using crazy metaphors they just made up as if they're a common thing everyone knows about. "You know, beautiful life go-carts." Um, Mr. Howard, that's not a thing. "Yeah, you go into your emotions workshop and you build a go-cart of experience and when that go-cart is working you take it down the hill of love because you're a little boy." Perfect. I hope he expands this into a whole chapter for his upcoming self-motivation book, Tuesdays with Terrence. And then I hope I put that book in my bathroom.
I don't want to talk about how heavy-handed this is. I don't want to point out the Juno-like hand-drawn graphics, or the Garden State-reminiscent scene on the Zooey Deschanel clone bus. It goes without saying that being in love, even being young and in love, doesn't involve running through an IKEA, ever. IKEA is a place of sadness. And you don't need me to tell you that a trailer in which not a single line of dialog is shown, but just a bunch of voiced-over empty aphorisms that are wordplays on the title, which is itself a wordplay on a character in the movie's name, is a bad sign. Like, real bad. What I want to talk about is the new announcer's voice. Has anyone heard this guy before? This new "in a world" guy? He's going to take some getting used to, huh? Huh guys? Guys? Where is everyone? It's not like there's anything more important to be thinking about.
I like Manohla Dargis. She's one of my favorite film critics. She's funny and smart (I'm good at describing people in an illuminating way) and she can elevate the Hollywood blockbuster into the rareified air of high art. Oh gross. I just won the Pulitzer Prize for Being The Worst. Anyway, I like Manohla Dargis a lot. But sometimes she goes a little overboard with the film critic-y thing, and elevates herself into the rarefied air of being ridiculous. Like in this opening paragraph from her review of the new Woody Allen movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona:
Bathed in light so lusciously golden and honeyed that you might be tempted to lick the screen, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" is a rueful comedy about two young American women who, during a summertime European idyll, savor many of the Continental delicacies that such travelers often take pleasure in: art, music, culture, yes, but also strange bodies and unexpected dreams. These bodies and dreams open possibilities for the women, intimating freer, somehow different lives, despite the persistent tugging of a voice that hovers at the edge of this story trying to pull it and its characters down to earth, where desire can fade quickly.
Lick the screen? Strange bodies and unexpected dreams? Well that sounds like the worst movie on Earth. (Admittedly, Strange Bodies and Unexpected Dreams is the name of my New Age album. I recorded it in Sedona. It's spiritually intense.) This review reads like a review of Rochelle, Rochelle, the fake movie from Seinfeld about "a young girl's strange, erotic journey from Milan to Minsk." But Rochelle, Rochelle was a joke about a terrible movie. What's Vicky Cristina Barcelona's excuse?
When I was in high school, my friend Jason and I were at the movies when a trailer came on for some foreign film that centered on a bourgeois family and, like, maybe a car crash, or a pregnancy? No offense, NATO, but who cares. I'm all for the quiet depiction of human complexity, but bore me a river. Anyway, at one point, the matriarch of the family is on the phone giving some poignant life lessons to someone younger than her who was struggling with how hard it is being white and middle class, and she advised "It's life, jump into life." We LOL'ed before that was even a thing. Classic. Film is dead. Anyway, that's the categorization I'm going to use for films like the upcoming Winged Creatures. Because woof. Trailer after the jump.
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