Good Night, Heath

The best way to understand how people used to watch movies is to go to a film festival and spend ten or more hours every day for two or three weeks sitting in a movie theater, absorbed less by one individual film than by the entire strange and glorious better-than-real life behind the screen. Movies in theaters are so expensive now - $10 in the big city, maybe a couple dollars less for a matinee. When you pay that much - say nothing about popcorn and soda, and who wants to see a movie without popcorn - a movie has to really blow your mind to earn that money back. Not back in the old nickelodeon days, when you paid for a double bill or stayed all day in the same theater. People didn't used to see a movie; they went to the movies. It was a destination.

That's what the Berlin Film Festival was like, two years ago now, when I skipped two weeks of classes and watched some 35 films. There were foreign films with electronica-chic scores and handheld photography, there were big Hollywood productions; the bad films seemed interesting, the good films seemed extraordinary. I had the best movie day of my life when I saw "Elementarteilchen," a german movie from a Houllebecq novel about depraved hilarious sexuality, and "The New World," the most beautiful movie I have ever seen, and the one I will defend to my dying day against everyone who says it's pretentious and sappy and artsy (it's all those things, and yet extraordinary). When you watch so many movies so quickly, you don't care so much about the very bad movies, and a tiny little gem can stick fiendishly in some small part of your mind for years to come.

So it is with "Candy," a tiny little film from Australia about two young people in love with each other and with heroin. Even in 2006, it seemed strange that someone was making a movie about heroin - "Requiem for a Dream" closed the book on the subject, with its hypertense visual style, its you-are-there-injecting-this quick cuts, its beautiful ugliness. "Candy," by comparison, was slight. Heath Ledger played a loser who somehow got a beautiful blond played by Abbie Cornish to fall in love with him; Geoffrey Rush was your typical elder intellectual drug enabler. They start out happy and descend. Every drug movie ever.

Except it wasn't. "Candy" was different. You realize that in a sequence that comes right around the middle of the movie, when Heath and Abbie are out of money and need to score some smack quick before the shakes start up. Heath goes to a park and hangs out looking whorish. A man drives up. The rain is coming down. A price is agreed upon. This is right out of "Boogie Nights," out of "Requiem" - the horrific image of giving up your body, letting other people force you to do unspeakable things, for the glory of the drug.

But then something shifts. The trick goes to the bathroom - Heath notices he left his wallet, snags it, and races off to a bank. The turn is so quick, unexpected, and cathartic that people in the theater started laughing - not in the least because, in the span of just a few minutes, you see Heath's slacker-loser-addict go from an absolute low point to a thrilling high. But a problem - the bank won't let him take out any money without his security number. Solution - Heath calls the guy (I forget how he got his number), affects the voice of a dull functionary, and manages to coax the number out of the guy through casual, hilarious subterfuge. Then he's back to his gorgeous blonde addict girl, big old grin on his face - Baby, You Won't Believe What I Did Today.

I wish I could describe the scene better. It's been so long. "Candy" came and went from American theaters very quickly - it was the movie Heath Ledger acted in before he got the nomination for "Brokeback," and its slightness was therefore understandable. Here was a guy who had been slaving away in thankless tiny roles in indie films (the suicidal son in "Monster's Ball") and even more thankless roles in big-budget moves (the suicidally noble son in "The Patriot.") He had worked with Terry Gilliam on Gilliam's worst film before his next one. About the only really memorable roles Heath Ledger had had before "Brokeback" were "A Knight's Tale" and "Ten Things I Hate About You." "A Knight's Tale" is that rare film that you either love for its crappiness or hate for its mediocrity - even people who like it have to admit that it's central conceit (medieval jousting set to rock music) simply doesn't work as well as it should.

"Ten Things I Hate About You" was much better - about the only movie that still sticks out from the late-90s teen movie boom. You have to understand that Heath in "Ten Things" is just fucking cool. Not that fake constipated cool that bland lameasses like Freddie Prinze Jr. and Paul Walker radiated. Real, true cool. That film started the career of Julia Stiles and created the myth that Julia Stiles could actually act - it seems obvious now, almost a decade later, that half the energy in her performance in that movie comes from Heath, whose laconic advances break through her teflon coated frown, challenging her in a way that she's never been challenged by her onscreen men since (including, yes, Freddie Prinze Jr.) Or maybe that's unfair to Stiles - maybe it's just that there are so few actors today capable of generating real chemistry onscreen with intelligent actresses. (It would've been great to see what Heath could have done paired up with Katharine Heigl, who is always much smarter than her dialogue.)

After "Brokeback," Heath took some time off, to marry Michelle Williams, raise a child with Michelle Williams, and finally, divorce Michelle Williams. That next great role never came. He was good in "I'm Not There" as a famous actor beginning to suspect he's nowhere near as good as he thinks he is, who lost his marriage for his fame. He looks terrifying, and wonderful, in the previews for "The Dark Knight." But no matter how good he is - how strange to think that some small part of the man that died earlier today might still have been the Joker - there's no way it can compare to that last scene in "Brokeback." Even pretty people get the blues; even handsome cowboys can find themselves, at the end of their life, all alone in some messy little apartment, left to ponder lost loves and missed chances. Where did it all go wrong? A better question - Why does it always go wrong?

Good Night, Heath. You were good, and you would have been better. You deserved a more noble final performance than a grainy video on defamer. You deserved better, period. We all got it coming, kid.

A Minute Of Badness With The Sci-Fi Channel

I'm trying to find something to watch on a Saturday afternoon and accidentally stumble onto the Sci-Fi channel during a non-Battlestar time slot. Some guy I recognize from either "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" or a very late season of "Friends" is wearing glasses and running away from a poorly animated wooly mammoth. They're in some kind of factory. Wooly Mammoth screams and flares its woolly trunk. Guy From Sabrina Or Friends: "Dear God." Fat Policeman: "God is for Sunday. Today, we pray to Nike. Run!"

"To Live And Die In L.A." Soundtrack

Wang Chung was a one-hit wonder from the 80s. Their lonely bigtime song - "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" - is not the sort of buried post-ironic retro gem awaiting magical rediscovery by a new generation - not like Night Ranger's "Sister Christian" (the backbone of one of the great scenes in modern movie history), or Europe's "The Final Countdown" (mercilessly parodied with abject adoration in "Arrested Development," sampled by Three Six Mafia and Chamillionaire, overrused by youtube auteurs everywhere), or The Outfield's "Your Love," which I like to imagine playing at weddings or funerals or the climactic race-against-time at the end of the movie when the guy is trying to tell the girl he loves her before she gets on that plane to Cleveland. "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" is, in point of fact, one of the worst songs ever recorded.

So there would be no point to ever bring up Wang Chung in intelligent company, if it weren't for William Friedkin, director of "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist." Friedkin has directed a mesmerizing amount of bad movies since he was the great studio director of the 1970s, but buried deep in his back catalogue is a genuine undiscovered classic - "To Live and Die in L.A." Starring a very pre-CSI William Petersen and Willem Dafoe in his earliest and most unnerving I-Am-Willem-Dafoe freak-weird performance, the movie tells a dirty little story about dirty cops and dirty vengeance, set in 80s neon LA.

The entire soundtrack is composed by Wang Chung. It is not especially great music, yet it works perfectly for the movie, perhaps because the band, knowingly or not, turned the soundtrack into a decadent, overcomposed, underconceived monument to everything excessive, indulgent, idiot, and wonderful about 80s music. If you turn the volume way down, you could imagine you were listening to Spandau Ballet, or Naked Eyes, or Bonnie Tyler, or Foreigner. It's like elevator music that kind of makes you nod your head in rhythm and makes you just a little bit disappointed when you get to your floor.

"Friday Night Lights" 1/4

Here's why "Friday Night Lights" is the best show on television - it takes the broad outline of a plot that could have come out of an episode of "Happy Days" and turns it into Shakespeare. A poorly-animated Tornado levels a rival high school. Dillon does the Christian thing and lets the homeless football team practice on the Panthers' field, use the Panthers' gym, share the Panthers' locker room. Coach Taylor does his best to be a good host. The rival coach is a bigtime asshole leading a team of assholes. The Montagues and Capulets were bad, but they didn't play football.

To rant: This episode, the best all season, reminded me how disturbing it is that everyone isn't watching this show. "Friday Night Lights" combines everything everyone wants out of anything. Bone crunching football, witty dialogue, blindingly hot girls, sweaty man candy, slow-building storylines, love-drunk romantic soliloquies (there were 3 in this episode! 3!), high school drama that's funny, marriage comedy that's serious, crazy old grandmas, newborn babies, annoyingly free-spirited younger siblings, strippers and meth dealers and politicians and schoolteachers. This is a show about America, Capital Fucking A. Not polyethnic mult-cult microcosm-of-humanity America ("Lost," "Heroes"), not glammed-out upper-crust saucy sudser America ("Gossip Girl," "Dirty Sexy Money," "Desperate Housewives"), not aesthetically-perfect modern tragedy HBO America ("The Sopranos," "The Wire"). Just America. God Bless "Friday Night Lights."

"Atonement"

I must have read the first five pages of "Atonement" a couple dozen times over the last year or so. Everyone I know has read "Atonement." When it came out, Ian McEwan was unanimously announced the best writer working in English today by critics, college students, and housewives everywhere. That is a key mix, right there - old intellectuals who give you awards, young intellectuals who set the tastes of a generation, and people who just want to read a good story and will tell everyone when they find one.

Now the movie is out and sure to win Academy Awards. It stars Keira Knightley, so I have to see it. I have a profound crush on Keira Knightley, probably aided by her strong resemblance to Natalie Portman, except that whereas Natalie Portman seems entirely too smart for me, Keira Knightley seems just smart enough. She's classy enough to get Oscar nominations, wily enough to latch onto franchises, and occasionally desperate enough to do this.

Anyways, yadda yadda, I took yet another extended break from reading "Against the Day" and decided to finish "Atonement" last week. My best friend spoke disparagingly of the book, saying that she couldn't remember a single part of it. My idol also had nothing good to say about it. I'm impressionable when my sixteen-year-old cousin tells me what music to listen to, so when the two people whose opinions I respect the most tell me a book is an overrated mess, it's hard to move past that initial impression.

But once "Atonement" really gets going, it's just so damned easy to read. McEwan does many complex things without ever once losing the narrative thread - he lingers on telling moments without ever boring you. Part 2 of the book describes the British retreat at the Battle of Dunkirk, and if McEwan had released that section alone, it would be one of the world's great short stories, to rival "The Dead" and "The Snows of Kilamanjaro," right down to the despairing, ambiguous, pitch perfect ending. As it is, the book's pace slackens in part 3 - impossible not to, after Dunkirk - but McEwan never once loses your attention. "Atonement" has all the depth of great drama and all the zippy thrill of a great melodrama. The final segue into metafiction should feel more like a rip-off, but it doesn't. McEwan's novel is, first and foremost, a book about writing, the search for truth in inherent lies. Essential reading. Finish it in a day, ponder it forever.

"Be Kind Rewind"

"Be Kind Rewind" is nostalgic for videotapes. This should alert you immediately to an excess of whimsy, because everyone knows that videotapes sucked - they were bulky, the image was scratched and it always cut off the widescreen, rewinding took an agonizingly long time. Anyone who remembers videotapes with fondness has overdosed on nostalgia at the expense of common sense. At least be adult enough to be a true film elitist, like every film teacher who rants about how "The Big Sleep" and "El Cid" are only good on the big screen, in 35 mm, which makes tobacco smoke glow like liquid diamond and shows you what the world would like if God had the forethought to create it in Technicolor. Fuck videotapes. If you like them more than DVDs, you're a character in a movie that wishes it was directed by Wes Anderson.

So "Be Kind Rewind" is guilty of whimsy, which is for indie films what superpower explosion sequels are for Hollywood. Whimsy all but ruined Michel Gondry's last movie, "The Science of Sleep," which had all the visual invention of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" with none of the narrative strength, the deeply felt emotion, the toughness. Like Gael Garcia Bernal in "Sleep," the two protagonists in "Rewind" are wannabe artists in love with amateur special effects - Gondry's stock-in-trade. The plot - video store employees have to refilm their whole library after a freak magnetic radiation accident leaves them blank - is little more than a flimsy excuse for Gondry to remake "2001," "Rush Hour 2," "Driving Miss Daisy," "Ghostbusters," and more, on a shoestring budget. Flimsy whimsy - kill me now. It's incredibly precious and often cloying, especially when everyone in town wants to join in - there's a sense of Capra-esque ultra-populism to how everyone, from the cute girl who works at the laundry to the car mechanic, wants nothing more than to play dress-up and act.

Still, if it's all entirely too cute, it's also rarely boring. Jack Black and Mos Def play the filmmaking buddies and they make a sweet man-couple - Black, who everyone but me hates now, plays his trademark angry grin to great effect, and Mos Def has such a nice little romantic scene with the laundry girl - played by Melonie Diaz, far and away the best thing about this movie - that I wished Gondry followed up on that plot. Or, indeed, followed up on any plot. Toward the end, the movie turns listless and becomes an almost unbearable "We're gonna save the video store from the stupid construction company that wants to turn it into a condo" movie. The end plays like "Cinema Paradiso" for the video store. Blah, blah, blah. You could do worse for a comedy at this time of year than a spoof-remake-mash-up by a genuinely talented filmmaker. (Hey, when's the last time you saw a movie that starts with a mockumentary about Fats Waller?)

Now, Mr. Gondry: I recommend you find a script that's not autobiographically written by you, and make another real movie, already.

"I'm Not There."

I know nothing about Bob Dylan except that in my sophomore year of college, for a period of perhaps four and a half months, I could listen to every song on his Greatest Hits album (10 songs, from "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" to "Just Like a Woman") and feel strangely at peace with the world. I was also listening to alot of Simon & Garfunkel at the time. (The 60s, for me, were fall 2004 to the beginning of Spring 2005.)

So I might not be the perfect viewer of "I'm Not There," an infinite riff on the lives, loves, songs, and myths of Dylan. Much has been made about the surreal decision to have six different actors play Bob Dylan. It's worthwhile to note that nowhere in "I'm Not There" is there a character named Bob Dylan, nor does anyone ever mention the name. A Bob Dylan movie with six Bob Dylans who aren't Bob Dylan, with a title taken from a song that was never officially released to the public - not there, indeed.

Roger Ebert does a typically erudite job of mapping out how each mini-Dylan's story taps into a real-life fable from the singer's pop culture biography. All I know is that the movie is genius. Which isn't to say it's easy. The first twenty minutes are the most jarring, following Young Black Child Dylan across some vaguely southern landscape to Woody Guthrie's deathbed. Flash forward to Angry Young Poet Dylan, who exists in some strange Kafkaesque courtroom universe and will spend the movie staring straight at the camera mumbling brilliance in our general direction. Now see Christian Bale Dylan, as the movie shifts into a rockumentary , a kind of "Behind the Music." Now see Christian Bale Dylan played by Heath Ledger Dylan in a movie-within-the-movie. Follow? Heath Ledger's wife is played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who grounds the movie with bitter romance and wisdom, often just when everything seems about to spin out of control.

This all comes at you even faster than I'm describing it, and makes no element of sense. What director Todd Haynes has done with "I'm Not There" is too essentially take the structure of the hyperlink movie - made indie-fabulous by "Traffic" and defaced forever by "Crash" - and push it to the next level. Hyperlink movies - "Syriana," "Love, Actually," and the profoundly unhappy films of Inarritu are other examples - tend to stress how all human beings are interconnected; Haynes wants to show us how all human beings are the same person. You All Everybody, you know?

I can't say when I started liking the movie. I just know that by the time Cate Blanchett shows up as Famous Dylan - touring around London, getting stoned with the Beatles, wooing Edie Sedgwick in a Felliniesque landscape of druggy Eden excess - I had no idea how long the movie had been nor how much longer it had to go, and felt like I could have kept watching it forever. And by the time Richard Gere wakes up in a Peckinpah Western as Billy the Kid Dylan, I didn't care that I had absolutely no fucking idea what in the holy world of hell was going on.

There's a moment in the Gere story - it feels like the end of the movie, although there's still more to go - when a singer (who looks like Christian Bale, although he's in heavy make-up so it could be Dylan himself for all I know) takes the stage to sing a dirge for a poor little girl who got her throat cut, and belts out "Goin to Acapulco," and everyone in the strange little Bizarro-western town stops to listen. It's the most exultant musical moment I can remember seeing in a movie. (Richard Gere has a great face for listening - here, and in "Days of Heaven," and during Julia Roberts' long speeches in "Pretty Woman" and "Runaway Bride.") The scene works, even if you don't know how, or why.

I had a tiny aesthetic argument with my parents over the weekend. They had seen "No Country For Old Men" off my recommendation - I warned them it was violent, but said it was my favorite movie from all year. They were asking me questions about the plot - why did the guy with the weird hair want to kill everyone, who were the Mexicans, who was Woody Harrelson, and what did the ending mean? I realized that I had no idea, and in fact, felt angry that they even bothered to bring all of that up. Who cares what it all means? "No Country" is, above all else, a movie about talk, about personality - Josh Brolin is our rugged everyguy who wants to get rich without working, Tommy Lee Jones is a sorrowful angel with a badge, and Javier Bardem is the devil. What do you need, a scorecard?

"I'm Not There" is the same kind of movie. If you try to understand it, you'll never understand it. Listen to the music. Go with the flow. If Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere, and Cate Blanchett are Bob Dylan, then, what the hell, so are you.

My Top Ten Books of 2007

(Note: Only one of these books was published in 2007. One will be published in two months.)

10) "Against the Day" - A holdover from my 2006 list. I was somewhere around page 400 when I bravely started 2007 in Maui, nursing something of a hangover. On January 1, 2007, I woke up sometime in the early afternoon, and watched a few episodes of the third season of "The OC" and read some Pynchon - a significant departure from January 1, 2008, when I woke up in the late morning, watched a few episodes of "Gossip Girl" then spent the rest of the day finishing "Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles."

9) "Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles" - David Thomson is a genius at writing non-fiction like a novel and writing film criticism like philosophy. Makes sense that his best book is about a man who was larger than his own life. To my amazement, alot of people don't seem to like Thomson for any number of reasons - his tendency to distort facts with fictional tangents and personal bemused meandering (he has a schoolboy's fascination with sex, and who was doing it with how many other whos), his overriding thesis that you can critique a life the same way you critique a film. Idiots. Thomson is the only worthwhile film writer today, maybe ever.

8) "The Big Sleep" - David Thomson writes a thin little book about his favorite movie ever. Dare you to read this and not feel the same way about Bogart and Bacall's saucy noir love-fest. Reading this book is like watching an episode of MST3K, with highbrow snark replaced by effervescent, effusive praise.

7) "Waiting for the Barbarians" - John Coetzee writes an allegory about a distant outpost of an Empire so big it doesn't have a name. The mysterious barbarians are preparing to attack. They have been forever. The Empire wants them stopped before they start. It's about the Cold War, the War on Terror, South Africa, Rome, take your pick. All great books should be this short.

6) "The Drawing of the Three" - I've been in the process of re-reading Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" series, with an eye towards writing an article about it for "The Believer." The editors turned down my proposal, but still I progress, slowly, having reached the closing three volumes, each more bone-busting epic than the last. Oddly, upon a second reading, it's the second volume that I enjoy the best. The set-up: our cowboy-knight protagonist finds doors on an empty, post-apocalyptic beach. Each door leads to New York at a different point in the latter half of the twentieth century. We meet a heroin runner from the 80s, a legless blacktivist from the Civil Rights 60s, and a serial killer sex fiend from the 70s. Madcap pulp as social history. Stephen King, All-American.

5) "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier" - in which Alan Moore, rebel genius of the comic book world, takes what started out as a loose parody of the Justice League of America and creates the postmodern document of our time, a world in which George Orwell's Big Brother is a former associate of Graham Greene's Harry Lime, who commands James Bond to hunt down a pair of Victorian-era characters, all but forgotten and oddly immortal. An appendix, an encyclopedia, a history of fiction, incorporating Shakespeare, Lovecraft, Beowulf, Kerouac, and everything that was ever in between anything else in the human imagination. For many people, this will be unreadable. For a certain type of person, this is the frothy post-modern meta-fictional beta version of every great fantasy story every told. Don't forget your 3-D glasses.

4) "Against the Day" - Because it's the first time since high school that I've made it so far into a book that I barely understand. Because it is a genuine quest. Because I could set the book aside for almost half a year, and not open it once, and still have it there, in the back of my mind, taking up the space of three other, slimmer, easier books on my bookshelf (I might have read all of Philip Roth and most of Ian McEwan by now, if not for this monster). And because every few pages I reach a paragraph like this:

He looked for Umeki among the crowds on the platform, even among subsets that would not possibly include her, wondering at the protocols of destiny, of being led, of turning away, of knowing where he did and didn't belong. She wasn't there, she wouldn't be. The more she wasn't there, the more she was. Kit supposed there was something in the theory of sets that covered this, but the train was moving, his brain was numb, his heart was incommunicado, the dunes slipped by, then the Bruges Canal and the larks swept upward from the stubble of the fields, gathering into a defensive front against the autumn.

Because Thomas Pynchon is a genius.

3) "Cerebus" - A 6000 page, 300 issue comic book, three decades in the making, the longest work of its sort (its closest competitor in the comics world is scarcely half as long). It begins as a parody of "Conan the Barbarian," featuring an Aardvark who talks in the third person; it becomes political satire, moves past religious transcendance, segues without pause into high melodrama, dips into amateur philosophy, becomes magnificent, becomes grotesque, dies with its main character, not with a bang but a whimper. This was my summer of 2007 - waiting for the next step of my life to start. The writer, Dave Sim, went crazy somewhere around issue 175 - and began to blame women in particular and the rest of mankind in general for how awful all of reality is. By the end, "Cerebus" is unbearable. And yet it is worth it - to see the steady ascension and then decline of one of the true mad artists of our generation. And to follow the sad, epic, wonderful, terrible story of Cerebus the Aardvark, betrayed by everyone including himself and his own creator. Majestic. Disgusting. Impossible to put down when you've started it. Impossible to pick up once you've finished it.

2) "Arkansas" - Working as an unpaid intern is a constant offense to my profound pride. But god does it have benefits. "Arkansas," by John Brandon, isn't just the funniest, best-written, most original book I have read in forever. It's a book to read more than once. It's a book where every single sentence has the same wonderful air of being entirely casual and perfectly cast. It's as if advanced scientists merged the brains of Joseph Heller and Elmore Leonard at their finest. John Brandon is a genius. Buy this book immediately. Here, or here. Order it. You want it. Yes, I am shilling for company product. Because you want to read this book so you can be the person to tell everyone else to read it.

1) "Against the Day" - Because I'm still reading it.