The Screengrab : elton john

Screengrab Review: "Guest of Cindy Sherman"

Nick Schager — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Guest of Cindy Sherman fixates on a peripheral nobody residing in the orbit of a somebody, a tack that allows for an intimate, unguarded view of said luminary while simultaneously casting into sharp relief the wrongheadedness of its focus. Beginning in 1993, Paul H-O made a very minor name for himself as the host of Gallery Beat, an off-the-cuff public access television program in which (as director and host) he attended premiere shows and interviewed artists with an enthusiasm and candor that helped deflate the scene’s air of self-importance. A devoted fan who nonetheless refused to simply act the sycophantic PR mouthpiece for those he covered, H-O hardly qualified as a journalist but nonetheless provided a modestly unfiltered view of the art world. His gig eventually brought him into contact with celebrated photographer Cindy Sherman, who, bucking her usual protocol, let down her media-shy guard for a series of interviews with H-O and, later still, became his girlfriend and the frequent subject of his incessant filming, of which this absorbing yet lacking doc is primarily comprised.

Guest of Cindy Sherman’s narcissistic opening tracks the rise of H-O and Gallery Beat, a trifling success story that’s propped up by H-O’s forthrightness even as it fails to register as anything more than a footnote – albeit a sometimes amusing one, as when a confrontational Julian Schnabel denigrates Gallery Beat and, in the process, makes himself the epitome of artistic pomposity. This early material, however, is mere prologue for H-O’s developing relationship with Sherman, whose illustrious photographs feature her embodying various female roles and disguises – a means of confronting, among other things, issues of female/gender power dynamics – and whose public persona is that of the mysterious recluse. H-O’s on-camera chats with Sherman for his program are thus somewhat revelatory, showing a charming, understated personality far different than one might have expected on the basis of her often-confrontational work. It’s that friction, as well as Sherman herself, that soon proves most transfixing, and considerably more intriguing than H-O’s career recap of his famous ex-girlfriend, which indulges in lazy, tossed-off family-history psychologizing and talking-head analysis (from colleagues, friends, and editors and critics of Artforum and The New York Times) that only manages to skim the surface of both the artist and her art.

Though it’s Sherman who clearly warrants an in-depth non-fiction portrait, Guest of Cindy Sherman remains diligently focused on H-O, whose own marginalization in the relationship (and the glamorous, ritzy life that Sherman leads) comes to dominate the proceedings, as well as lends the film its title. H-O’s struggle to exist in the shadow of Sherman’s spotlight is a losing battle. And moreover, it ultimately derails his doc, which quickly devolves into off-putting egomaniacal boo-hooing, with H-O – and the similarly ignored and/or disrespected husbands of Elton John and Molly Ringwald (?) – recounting their trivial woe-is-me anecdotes about being cropped out of red carpet photos and seated at remote dinner tables at galas. Shallowly attempting to cast these second fiddle-plights as case studies of the flawed male ego, Guest of Cindy Sherman instead simply reduces itself to a vain investigation of a former affair in which listening to H-O complain (on radio, or at a public speaking gig) about the disproportionate paparazzi love showered on his star girlfriend is to hear someone mistake themselves as far more engaging and noteworthy than their life story indicates.

OST: "South Park - Bigger, Longer and Uncut"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:30:00 GMT

Most critics expected, when the anarchic, devotedly vulgar Comedy Central cartoon hit the big screen, that it would be pretty funny and remarkably foul-mouthed. They were right on both counts, but what few people expected is that it would also be unexpectedly profound (or, well, as profound as a movie featuring Satan and Saddam Hussein as feuding gay lovers could be), with a message about censorship that was more practical than self-righteous, and that its parodic sensibilities would be so remarkable spot-on. In fact, given the direction that the series took -- becoming increasingly more dogmatic and quite a bit more obvious in its political point-making -- it's easy to see the 1999 film as the pinnacle of the South Park experience, where everyone involved really hit their stride.

This is especially true with the movie's exceptionally enjoyable soundtrack. Rather than going for a more contemporary feel, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in conjunction with Hollywood music vet Marc Shaiman -- decided to go whole hog with a big-screen musical parody, tossing everything from Disneyesque ballads of longing to amped-up schoolyard jingles that play like something out of a Busby Berkeley musical to battle hymns juiced with triumphal orchestral swells to big-screen Oscar bait weepers made of 100% processed cheese. The remarkable thing about them was how perfectly the parodies worked: so well, in fact, that the obnoxious bigot's anthem "Blame Canada" actually got itself nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song, leaving the show's producers with the difficult question of how to stage a musical number featuring language that wasn't allowed to be heard on television. (They came up with the elegant solution of having Robin Williams sing the live version of "Blame Canada" during the Oscar ceremony, and he's capable of draining the funny out of anything, so nobody complained.) The songs on the soundtrack are pitch-perfect parodies; if you strip away the relentlessly filthy language and the subversive bits of the lyrics, there's almost nothing whatever to set them apart from the cheeseball Elton John melodies in a first-tier animated Disney "modern" classic. It's the pouring on of tons of formal sincerity -- and then the total upending with gobs and gobs of adolescent toilet irony -- that makes the whole soundtrack work so remarkably well.

(One caveat: the praise we heap on the South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut soundtrack applies only to the original songs featured in the main story of the movie. The "bonus tracks" on the album, mostly rap and metal reworkings of songs in the film, are largely reprehensible, bottom-drawer, 100% filler. There's some fun to be had with a Violent Femmes cover of "I Can Change", and it's amusing for exactly one listen to hear Rush's Geddy Lee sing "O Canada", but other than that, everything after track 12 can be safely deleted from your hard drive.)

BEST TRACKS: The wildly jolly, almost Vaudevillian show tune that is "Uncle Fucka" -- a horribly profane ditty sung by the Canadian cartoon duo Terrance & Phillip that goes several light-years beyond gratuitous -- gets things rolling early on. Eric Cartman's rendition of a song previously rendered on the small screen as an extemporaraneous schoolyard taunt, "Kyle's Mom is a Big Fat Bitch", is served up with all the gusto of a Broadway show-stopper, complete with novelty international choruses. "Eyes of a Child" is such a thick, fragrant slice of bogus emotional cheesiness, it's easy to see Michael McDonald crooning it on a lite-rock FM station in your dentist's office, which makes it all the more amazing that they actually got Michael McDonald to sing it here; and if nothing else, "I Can Change" is the only time in cinematic history in which we see former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein crooning a jaunty ditty in order to seduce the Prince of Darkness into going to bed with him. So far, at least.

Related Posts:

OST: Fight Club

OST: Repo Man

OST: Run Lola Run

When Good Directors Go Bad?: Elizabethtown (2005, Cameron Crowe)

Paul Clark — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Note: For various reasons too boring to get into here, I was unable to secure a playable copy of the DVD for this week’s Reviews by Request in time to write a post. I’ll be running Jason Alley’s requested review of The New Kids next Friday at the regularly scheduled time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Of all the paths to success taken by Hollywood’s major filmmakers, Cameron Crowe’s is one of the most interesting. Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous recounts the story of the teenage Crowe’s stint as a reporter for Rolling Stone, and after his time with the magazine he went undercover as a high school student in order to pen the screenplay for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. As a writer-director, he carved out a niche for his warm, humanistic films, which tend to make liberal use of impeccably-chosen rock’n’roll soundtracks. After the success of Almost Famous, Crowe decided to try something new, making the mindbending thriller Vanilla Sky. However, many critics and audience members were unamused, and although the film did well at the box office (largely due to the presence of Tom Cruise), it’s currently remembered as an interesting failure. After this strange trip outside his comfort zone, Elizabethtown was supposed to be a return for Crowe to the kind of movie he made better than anyone.

But then, a funny thing happened- the return to glory never happened. At its premiere in Toronto, Elizabethtown received buzz that was middling at best, hostile at worst. Crowe’s film- which made the festival circuit in a rough cut- was later shorn of twenty minutes, with the film’s original ending jettisoned completely. But the damage had already been done, as Elizabethtown, no matter what form it’s in, still hasn’t recovered from that initial drubbing. If Vanilla Sky was a strange experiment on Crowe’s part to branch out to a new format, Elizabethtown was treated as one too many trips to the same creative well. Suddenly, the style that had audiences had loved in Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous wasn’t working anymore.

Yet I’m here not to bury Elizabethtown but to praise it. The film is far from perfect, but it’s hard to hate a movie that’s as unabashedly sincere as this one. Elizabethtown is a big shaggy dog of a movie, one that stumbles around and makes too much noise but which it’s not impossible not to love at least a little. It’s not remotely one of Crowe’s better films, but it’s much better than its reputation would suggest.

Admittedly, it took me more than one viewing of the film to come around to this realization. After one viewing of Elizabethtown, I wrote that the film displayed “all of Crowe’s worst tendencies as a writer-director- up-with-people soliloquies, an overreliance on classic rock to bear the story’s emotional load- with almost none of his previous works’ better qualities.” Yet while I still see the elements I objected to the first time around, I don’t object to them nearly as much now. Is it a case of lowered expectations? Perhaps. I wanted another film of the caliber of Almost Famous, and Elizabethtown didn’t deliver in that respect. But I think there's more to it than that.

One of my biggest objections the first time around was to what I termed Crowe’s “relentless humanism”- his need to inject joy and life-affirming sentiment into practically every corner of the story. On top of that, little details kept eating at me- the fact that a major American company wouldn’t have a contingency plan that would prevent them from taking a bath on a billion-dollar campaign, or that a woman with a job and a life would somehow find time to map out a days-long journey (complete with annotated maps and corresponding mix CDs) for a man she’d met only days before. Actually, the entire character of Claire (played by Kirsten Dunst) seemed pretty far-fetched to me, a Crowe fantasy girl much like Almost Famous’ Penny Lane, only bearing next to no relation to the real world.

Yet after further review it’s pretty clear that Crowe wasn’t striving for realism with Elizabethtown. True, there are no mythical beasties or far-flung settings to clue the audience in to the fact that liberal suspension of disbelief will be required, but I believe Crowe intends the film not as a naturalistic representation of the world, but as an emotional odyssey through his own sensibility. Crowe leads his protagonist Drew Baylor (Orlando Bloom) on a journey from the brink of death back into life, spurred on by the memory of his father and the dogged persistence of Claire. And if Claire isn’t particularly convincing as a fleshed-out character, she’s such an effective catalyst that she works in the context of this story.

And along the journey, Crowe supplies a number of lovely scenes that make the occasional rough patch that much easier to take. Listen to the human cacophony that buzzes around the home of Drew’s Aunt Dora (played by the Food Network’s Paula Deen)- a flurry of activity that stands in sharp rebuke to Drew’s solitary lifestyle. Observe the perfect little scene that takes place between Drew and his slacker cousin Jessie (Paul Schneider, giving the film’s best supporting performance), culminating in the line, “yeah, I don’t know my dad very well either.” And even Crowe’s omnipresent soundtrack works surprisingly well, especially during Drew’s climactic road trip. If some of the music choices feel too on-the-nose, that’s pretty much the point, and if you don’t like Elton John’s “My Father’s Gun,” then there’s really no hope left for you.

As I said before, Elizabethtown has a number of problems. For example, Bloom’s performance is inconsistent- though he does have some nice moments- and Crowe really should have toned down some of the voiceover narration and dialogue (“the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened”- I mean, really?). Yet the more cynical films I see, the more I’m inclined to forgive a filmmaker like Crowe who clearly pours his heart into a film. In Elizabethtown’s final voiceover, Drew quotes a slogan of the British Air Force: “those who risk, win.” Crowe takes some big chances in Elizabethtown, and even if they don’t all pay off, the film has won me over. In two tries, yes, but better late than never.