Wasted Postage: Reports from the Netflix Theater

Stranger than Paradise (1984)
Jim Jarmusch's breakout, second film is an exercise in constraint and black-and-white minimalism. The camera barely moves inside the spare and grimy New York City apartments of the films first act, the frozen Cleveland streets of the second, or the cheap Florida motel of the third. Sudden moments of poignancy are littered among the quite spots between conversations and circular chatting. Stranger than Paradise follows Willie, a 20-something Hungarian immigrant who does his best to be all-American — watching baseball, eating TV dinners, speaking without an accent — until his teenage cousin Eva comes to visit from the old world. Willie is not exactly the consummate host to his fish-out-of-water (Jarmusch's favorite archetype) cousin, but by the time he finally sees the fun in teaching her his interpretations of America, she's on a train to Cleveland.

A year later, Willie and his friend Eddie, bored with their recent race-track winnings, head to Cleveland to visit Eva, innocently believing it will be a beautiful city on a lake. What they find is snow-blanketed and rusty. "You know, it's funny... you come to someplace new, and everything looks just the same," Eddie remarks. Soon, Willie, Eddie and Eva ditch the cold for Florida, searching for a place to call paradise.
Jarmusch's camera has a way of finding the rough corners and shaggy dogs in each on-location set, and nearly any still from the film would make a fantastic album cover or framed print. Stripped of action, with little plotting and sparse dialogue, Stranger than Paradise boroughs in and stays. The moments that stick — the little things matter — leave a strange, unnerving resonance waiting to be revisited. A

Big Fan (2009)
Patton Oswalt turns in a memorable dramatic performance as a man self-detrimentally obsessed with professional football. Working a dead-end tollbooth job, Oswalt passes the hours listening to sports talk radio, jotting down notes for his best moment of every day: his turn to call in and talk smack against Philadelphia Phil.
But when a chance encounter with his favorite NY Giants player ends with Oswalt in the hospital with brain hemorrhaging and a black eye, he is faced with either pressing charges against the man who nearly ended his life, or allowing the best player on his favorite team back on the field.
Big Fan is the directorial debut by former Onion editor and writer of The Wrestler Robert Siegel. It's namely a drama, but the first half showcases the kind of "funny because it's so true, and so depressing" observations often seen in Onion briefs. The rising action may leave some feeling manipulated, but the climactic point is worth the hardship and excessively depressing moments. B+
  

Funny People (2009)
Funny People works because it lets Adam Sandler essentially play himself, if he were a morbidly-depressed, sad-sack horseshit excuse for a human being. The role allows him to make fun of the inherent silliness of his "shibby-be-do-wa" shtick, the excess of entertainment's top rungs, and the self-deprecation that forms the basis for some of the best stand-up comedy, while at the same time allowing our generation to feel empathy for a character we grew up with in Billy Madison, etc. Integrating actual archival footage and pictures of Sandler, we are introduced to him as George Simmons, the aforementioned comedy superstar, told by his doctors in the first scene that he is dying of leukemia. This diagnosis prompts Simmons/Sandler to reevaluate his priorities and, you know, "find whats truly important." Enter Seth Rogen, a struggling up-and-coming stand-up still stuck in the doldrums of open-mic night at a popular improv club. He lives with Jonah Hill, a slightly more advanced but still struggling comic, and a hilariously clueless and vain network TV star played by Jason Schwartzman. After a chance meeting with Sandler, Rogen is offered the chance to write jokes for the dying comedian and serve as his all-around assistant/bitch, before, uh, they actually become real friends and stuff.
The best aspect of Funny People, besides the barrage of one-liners, the artful mastery of the dick joke and perfect ensemble cast, is the nuanced way they treat Sandler's "I'm-a-piece-of-shit-with-no-friends" epiphany — he doesn't use his illness so much to become a better person, he uses it as a tool of manipulation in a desperate attempt to win the heart of "the one that got away" (Leslie Mann). It may all be a bit fatalistic, but years of habit and personality don't change over the course of 2.5 hours, they just budge a little bit.
Also, they got James Taylor to say "fuck Facebook." B+

Wasted Postage - New reports from the Netflix theater

The Killing (1956) - Stanley Kubrick directed and co-wrote this film noir caper classic. A band of career criminals and squares are gathered to execute a flawless racetrack heist, of course everything unravels, but not in the exact way the audience would expect. Filmed in stunning black and white, this is one of Kubrick's earliest films, before he had complete control and autonomy from the studio system. The technical aspects and camera work is flawless, and glimpses of Kubrick's later misanthropy and hopelessness filter through, especially in the devastating finale. My one complaint: If I had to see that shot of the loudspeaker at the racetrack one more time I was going to kill myself and every horse in central Illinois. Kubrick felt the need to begin everypart of the "see the hiest from everyone's perspective" with a shot of that damned speaker. B+

Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) — Children are monsters, but like the best coming of age stories, the adults can be the biggest and most clueless monsters. So goes the middle school experience for painfully-awkward Dawn. Her life is hell. She's under-appreciated by her parents and teachers, not exactly wealthy in the friends department, her last name is Wiener and she's regularly called ugly by her classmates. Welcome to the Dollhouse alternates between extremely sad and bleakly funny, but hits the kind of honest softspots Hollywood doesn't even bother with. At times the depictions of '90s middle school were too close for comfort. This was my first Tod Solondz film, I've heard they all hit similar uneasy notes and I'm definitely bumping them up in my que. He finds humor in situations I won't spoil, but lets just say they wouldn't be funny outside of the context of this film. There's no nudity, little cussing and no violence, but you still don't want to watch this with parents — that's the marking of true edge. It took away prizes at both the Sundance Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Awards. A-

Shoot the Piano Player (1962) — This is the first film I've seen from the French New Wave — a movement of young French filmmakers that challenged and deconstructed conventional '50s French cinema. Highly influenced by Hitchcock and American film noir, French New Wave came around to also influence American film by the late '60s, evident in 1967s Bonnie and Clyde's loose and carefree style, jump cuts and violence. Shoot the Piano Player features all the new wave trademarks, shots out-of-sequence, flashbacks, jump cuts, voice-overs and a willingness to toy with the audience and film conventions itself. The style and pacing is brisk, and because of it's influence on later films, it feels much less dated than many American movies from the early '60s. Characters will suddenly disappear from shots, an extended flashback overtakes about half of the film's second half, and hand-held cameras race along with characters during foot chases and fight scenes. The story telling is fairly straight-forward, mixing elements of crime, comedy, romance and suspense in its lean 82 minutes. The plot involves a timid barroom piano player who is drawn into trouble with gangsters when his two brothers botch a robbery. But, director François Truffaut flips many of the traditional gangster archetypes, something I didn't completely realize until I read an AV Club review afterwards. Ex., The gangsters are jokesters instead of actual tough guys who are most dangerous because of their ineptitude, etc, as the AV Club review stated. This is Truffaut's second film, his first, 'The 400 Blows', is known as the movie that jump started the French New Wave. I'm watchin' that soon. A

The Wrestler - (2008) Mickey Rourke's performance lives up to the hype. This is the first time I've had to repeatedly remind myself "it's only movie, relax" since I was nine. It's depressing as shit, though. A-

The Salton Sea (2002) - Val Kilmer stars in this neo-noir about a tweaker out for a finale score and revenge. It borrows from several movies that did it better, namely Memento and Payback, but it's still got a sweet plot and plenty of over-the-top, extreme scenes. The serious and melodramatic scenes also don't work at all, and drag down well executed suspense. Vincent D'Onofrio (Full Metal Jacket) steals every scene he's in as Pooh-Bear, the redneck meth cook and dealer who had his nose amputated after snorting so much gack. B-

Broadcast News (1987) - Meh, didn't finish it.