My goodness there’s some disagreement over THE HUNGER GAMES Dear Listener and some agreement, kind of, regarding 21 JUMP STREET.  Plus a frankly odd tangent of discussion into the filmography of Tony Scott.  You’ve been warned.

Running time:  44 minutes and 17 seconds – 40.7mb

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Cough, cough.  Eck.  Cough, it’s CONTAGION folks and Gareth’s Film of the Year THE GUARD.  All that plus Jett’s thoughts on the films of TIFF 2011 including THE BROOKLYN BROTHERS BEAT THE BEST, THE HUNTER and THE WOMAN IN THE FIFTH and a brief mention of the new Criterion Jean Vigo Collection.

Running time: 35 minutes and 58 seconds – 34.6mb

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Of course the film doesn’t argue that explicitly, and Taylor’s direction is so generic there’s only one coherent purpose anyway. Taylor’s mission from God is certainly not to make cinema or even to tell a story well but to make us laugh and cry about the plight of black women in the ‘60s, not so it spurs us to any Stanley Kramer-style social action, because the film is so alien that it wouldn’t matter if it did offer advice beyond loving your enemies, and it doesn’t even dramatize that beautiful ideal, but so we experience catharsis, and having cried in a dark room of strangers and chatted with people of all races on the way out, we can look in the mirror and feel proud about how far we’ve come as the cast and crew, black and white alike, take the stage and grip that gold and thank Hattie McDaniel in heaven above for enduring so much for them, and everyone cheers, and who’s James Byrd again?

Saying Viola Davis was magnificent in her performance is something like saying she did a spectacular job riding that nuke into Moscow, which I guess she did, but how can you tell with such a shallow role? Jessica Chastain was the only one capable of summoning some inner richness in spite of her stereotype, and it helps that she knows exactly what movie she’s in, a broad melodrama that wants to be MAD MEN but winds up THE BLIND SIDE. You can tell by how Taylor bowdlerizes Matthew Weiner right down to his soundtrack choices, and for all the flak MAD MEN catches for supposedly sidelining race, when black maid Carla sits down next to white snob Betty just as JFK is assassinated, it’s an image years in the making tossed away by Taylor like an adolescent writing a fan fiction homage to his favorite show. Segregation is not some historical anomaly confined to an alien country with enough fried chicken to feed Precious for a month. In Margaret Brown’s 2008 documentary THE ORDER OF MYTHS about the racially segregated Mardi Gras parades in Mobile, Alabama, one black girl says to another, “You know, the whites, they probably gonna be better than us.” That’s the truth of institutional prejudice, the misshapen mole on the American experiment. THE HELP is just a big, fat zit.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

The great joke of the title CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP is that I was wondering the whole time when he was going to start. It takes fifteen minutes for Rodman Flender’s topical documentary to find a funny scene, this one a staff meeting for the upcoming, taxonomically misfiled comedy tour, when after making his minions speak into a banana Conan O’Brien jokingly says, “I’m sick of people saying I’m drunk with power and I’ve lost perspective.” Thing is, the film presents a guy who’s just this side of a Lucasian moat of yes-men, constantly joke-punching his staff in a display of humor unmatched by anyone since Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and as for perspective, everyone signs off on Conan parodying Willie Nelson with the pity party hit of summer “My Own Show Again.” It’s that kind of scintillating wit you expect from the staid late night variety trust Conan O’Brien is perceived to have busted. “I’m the least entitled person you’ll meet in the world,” he says with brass ball humility. Speaking of people who no longer have television shows, Andy Richter may as well have an applause button because his sparing appearances are very funny, and somehow he never once frames himself as a recession-era victim.

It’s an undistinguished film if not a bad one, more a straightforward compilation of home video footage—and a well-placed snippet of the Taiwanese animation describing Lenogate, Conan’s unemployment being somewhat more glamorous than ours—than an illuminating pop culture personality portrait, and it pales next to the recent entries in the genre like JOAN RIVERS: PIECE OF WORK, JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER, THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE and especially I’M STILL HERE, which is like if CONAN O’BRIEN CAN’T STOP were in on the joke of its own narcissism. Without a point of view, the film rides entirely on its subject, and all we learn is that Bonnaroo is free from the burden of body-image issues and Conan is still very angry despite spending his post-TONIGHT SHOW tenure like a folk hero in a mansion with a documentary crew and a sold-out public therapy parade. That anger fuels and is fueled by Conan’s compulsion to entertain, and it’s Flender’s greatest success that we buy the burden.

Famous for his silliness, the least he could do is let us laugh, but the film is about as funny as the comedy tour, which is only half comedy (monologue, sketch, guest stars like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who gives good narcissism nightly) and half talent show (musical performance by Conan and guest acts like Jack White and Eddie Vedder). Conan makes fun of yokels who cheer the name of their town, but it’s the same Pavlovian ovation we give to anything a sympathetic figure like Conan does, including sub-Bieber musical performance. The applause comes either way, but there’s a difference between an audience that’s satisfied and an audience that’s just being nice. Nobody gets anything out of Conan O’Brien earnestly playing guitar but the sneaking suspicion they’ve been had.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Speaking of pseudointellectuals, I’ve never—not even at SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE—seen a movie with an audience more vigorously engaged in the signaling to everyone else that, yes, old sport, they got the reference, they’re very smart, they had THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL over for dinner the other night, and this spiderweb of nods to books they read in high school is the funniest thing since that blistering New Yorker piece about parents who don’t get their kids vaccinated. Needless to say, it’s all very Stuff White People Like, which you can tell by their secret handshake, pedantic laughing. The thing is, saying the name Gertrude Stein isn’t funny. It’s just a reference, and like X-MEN: FIRST CLASS winking at its characters’ well-established fates, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS mistakes allusion for comedy far too often. So some of the jokes and most of the non-jokes aren’t particularly funny, in spite of the incessant ovation, but it’s the special determination of Woody Allen that the seventh set-up for Michael Sheen to parade his expertise on some hovel of the humanities is lazier than the film around him yet the smash cut earns a laugh anyway.

Often it’s Allen’s directorial panache, not just the license with which he lets his characters bloviate, that gilds MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. Most evocatively is a sequence straight out of CERTIFIED COPY where Owen Wilson and his lover are talking, presumably about wishing they were born in the romanticized past, as we watch the couple cross a street, but no, that’s a different couple entirely, and here come Wilson and his paramour following in their footsteps. The only groanworthy bit is this farce involving misplaced jewelry that nobody quite pulls off except the brilliant caricaturist Mimi Kennedy (“It’s always the maid”), who should be in everything. Allen’s tracking shots are understated, the better to quietly undercut the blustery characters, and his stroll through Monet’s Water Lillies, not to mention the Monet montage of the opening credits—every establishing shot of Paris is deliciously colored to match a corresponding Impressionist painting—seduces us into Wilson’s world: who wouldn’t want to live in that beauty?

For all the creativity of youth, Hollywood’s wunderkinds aren’t nearly as imaginative as cinema’s elder statesmen—Allen, Oliveira, Resnais—and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS blithely walks into a twist more radical than Allen’s dexterous touch suggests. Describing great art as collaborative, it clarifies, unifies, and rejuvenates the film, and it probably does some things you won’t find in a moisturizer commercial, but as with the reference comedy, Allen leaves it at that, letting the fact of the twist, not the twist itself, give the film its heft. Wilson says early on that nostalgia is denial—though, speaking some more of pseudointellectuals, at no point is anyone in this film talking about nostalgia; they’re all talking about romanticizing the human past, not their own individual pasts—and then spends a film learning the lesson. It’s a thrilling diversion of inspiration and melancholy, but it never gets deeper than that opening thesis statement, and occasionally it gets more obvious. The superficiality reveals Allen’s sly parting shot, as he traces the thread of denial all the way back to blissful ignorance. Like pets responding to sounds, the shallow walk off loving their art without bothering to comprehend it, and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS manages a happy ending that’s as much magic as it is surrender.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Episode 175 – Review of  the brilliantly light and lovely MIDNIGHT IN PARIS; how THE HANGOVER 2 could have been saved and brief thoughts on KUNG-FU PANDA 2 and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4: ON STRANGER TIDES.

Running time: 42 minutes and 26 seconds – 40.8mb

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I’m shocked—shocked!—to find the big, dirty bone of contention with Paul Feig’s BRIDESMAIDS is the centerpiece gross-out scene, when whole mailing lists of people expecting a nice, polite feminist comedy were driven to conniptions because pretty, sweet Ellie Kemper vomited on Wendi McLendon-Covey and poor, put-upon Maya Rudolph was reduced to a curbside bowel movement. My stars! A thousand teeth-gnashers left early to write their headlines: How is toilet humor a win for feminism?

Now, I have as much interest in the Farrelly brothers as I do in the rest of Hollywood’s adolescent fratfests (not just the comedies but the testosterone shootemups and the creative goregasms), but I laughed and laughed at that entire setpiece: Rose Byrne staring down timebomb Kristen Wiig, the unfortunate divvying up of bathroom pipes, Maya Rudolph’s resignation just as she gets to the other side. If BRIDESMAIDS hadn’t opened with Wiig and her expertly played sex buddy Jon Hamm having sex on vastly different wavelengths or if Melissa McCarthy’s entire character weren’t the stock type of the overly confident fat chick that was tired when the Italians broke it out for a commedia dell’arte sketch aimed at the local groundlings, maybe the sequence wouldn’t feel earned. As it is, Feig and his cast make it quite clear that BRIDESMAIDS has no compunction about bawdy (and bodily) ribaldry. Of course, the hand-wringing has more to do with politics that reduce us all to the sum of our demographics than criticism. Obviously I laughed: I have a penis, just like producer Judd Apatow sticking his, um, nose where it doesn’t belong. Admittedly it’s an interesting knot, largely irrelevant to the picture’s quality, but feminism means women can do everything men can, including diarrhea faces.

It’s one of the few cases where escalation—the premise of all SNL-style sketch comedy, and BRIDESMAIDS is nothing if not a string of sketches with recurring characters—never wore out its welcome. Elsewhere, as in the bridal shower freakout or even the bit where Kristen Wiig keeps driving by Chris O’Dowd to get his attention, the constant escalation eventually breaks the reality, letting all the gas out of the balloon. When Wiig finally bursts at the bridal shower, it’s been a long time coming and it’s still grounded in the film’s palpable tension and pathos, but when she’s scooping handfuls of the chocolate fountain and sweeping hors d’oeuvres off the table, we’re back in cartoonland. Meanwhile Kemper and McLendon-Covey get lost by the screenplay—and I, for one, was dying to drop in on their adventures—and the second act setback drags on just long enough to make you wonder if they hired an editor.

Despite its loose-fitting gown, BRIDESMAIDS is a sharply detailed take on adult female friendship and finding your way in your 30s and other snoozy generalized comedy themes, but its core is this white-hot ball of energy constantly moving in place. Beneath the skin-deep identity politics and hydra-headed comedy lavishly riffing on love, sex, and marriage is a bracing portrait of being left behind. Kristen Wiig can do silly like no one since Gilda Radner, but in BRIDESMAIDS she expands her repertoire into character actress territory with focused subtlety. Whenever boyfriend material Chris O’Dowd pesters her about her failed bakery, with a clipped line or two Wiig turns the memory into such an exposed nerve you understand her entire place in life, totally demoralized and still licking her wounds, and from the bottom of a rut, it sure looks like her best friend is busy seizing the day. From stutter to trainwreck, it’s a titanic performance, bolstered by the stellar company of Rudolph, Byrne, and O’Dowd. If only she had a penis she’d have Oscar buzz.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Episode 174 – Review of  the “I’ve already forgotten if I’ve seen it” THOR and my film of the year BRIDESMAIDS.  Enjoy!

Running time: 48 minutes and 54 seconds – 47mb

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In what could be our last show Gareth and I discuss the new comedy YOUR HIGHNESS and ruminate on why film criticism matters as well as the reasons behind our desire to continue reviewing, investigating, mocking and praising cinema week after week.

UPDATE:  This episode has now been updated to clear up any confusion re: the future of the show – thank you for your understanding! :)

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