Well, apparently not everyone is hip to the forming cult of Apichatpong Weerasethakul.
Overheard immediately following a Saturday night IFC Center screening of Syndromes and a Century, a film made up of sweet tentative romances, lovely pop lullabye interludes, drifting clouds, swaying trees, a tranquil solar eclipse, and hushed, elegantly filmed long takes of modernist architecture:
Forty-something woman, to a quiet ticket-taker:
“That was awful. I mean AWFUL! I’ve never seen anything so horrible. What was it? What was it? Have people been complaining?”
Quiet ticket-taker:
“No. I think people probably go in expecting something a little weird.”
Woman:
“No, I need to talk to the manager. Horrible!”
DOWNSTAIRS, A FEW MOMENTS LATER, TO THE MANAGER:
Woman:
“I want my money back. That was bad. Just plain bad. And I watch art films. I come here all the time, and I know art films. But that was the worst movie I’ve ever seen. Just bad filmmaking. Just bad! Has no one else complained?”
Manager, exasperated:
“No.”
Woman:
“No one has complained? Well, they must be too shy!”
Manager:
“This is the first I’m hearing any complaints.”
Woman:
(voice rising)
“So you’re not going to give me my money back? It was bad. I mean, bad!”
Manager:
“We don’t do that.”
Woman:
“I can’t believe this. I come here all the time.”
Woman’s meek, bearded BF:
“It was…pretty bad.”
Manager:
“I’m sorry.” [leaves]
Angrily, the woman barrels out of the lobby, and charges down the mean streets of New York City on her way home, perhaps to stab a kitty cat or watch Bad Boys II.
Another man — wondering if an attack on Iran is in the works — wanted to know when America is going to “send an air mail message to Tehran.”
McCain began his answer by changing the words to a popular Beach Boys song. “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran,” he sang to the tune of Barbara Ann. “Iran is dedicated to the destruction of Israel. That alone should concern us but now they are trying for nuclear capabilities. I totally support the President when he says we will not allow Iran to destroy Israel.”
Sweet. To wash that down with some hearty liberal LOLs (while we still can), check out the Fox News Kurt Vonnegut obituary that’s been circulating the interwebs for a few days. There’s more levels of irony in this short video than easily counted.
Let me begin by assuring you that I am not one of those types. I am not one of those intent, myopic little fellows who frowns at the movie screen at the slightest disturbance, directing vicious shushes at old women crinkling their plastic bags of pharmaceuticals because “FOR GOD’S SAKE, I AM TRYING TO WATCH THE FILM!” Yes, I get annoyed, as anyone does, but I’m not about to give up on going to the movies because of it, not to hermetically seal myself in front of my entertainment center with my sacred Criterion texts and my perfect, tastefully silent right-ness. “These people don’t respect the movies” goes the old gripe, but it’s that very disrespect which gives me a little hope for the medium. People respect the dead—and they respect symphony orchestras. So long as screenings aren’t followed by a placid chorus of obligatory applause, we’re still alive in the movie theater.
As pissed off as I may get at an audience that moans or giggles at the very things that I find most dear, most profound, and most lovely, I likewise realize that the experience of matching my sense of beauty against another’s eye-rolling contempt is a valuable element of not only the filmgoing experience, but of how I’ve defined myself in my adult life. Watching ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ in a Midwestern mall movie theatre, stock-sober and seduced, while the crowd cracked up, noisily left their seats, asked for money back. Exiting a showing of ‘Witchfinder General,’ overcome, only to hear some crass bitch snort, “No wonder the director killed himself—he was ashamed!” These are definitive, concise moments in which I’ve truly seen the dimensions of my own difference. And as much as I value those vaunted “communal” moments at the movies, I think that I treasure incidents like this even more. There’s a certain glee in entrenching oneself in smug isolation from some part of the crowd, in discovering that I can react with effortless, intuitive love to something that’s a punchline to the man in front of me, that I can cry while someone else is whispering “What is this piece of shit?” That is going to the movies, and I firmly believe that true film lovers can’t let priggishness and puritan pedantry dampen us to that experience.
But. Ladies. Gentlemen. I am really, truly, clueless as to how you managed to cut up at ‘The Wrong Man.’ I hope I don’t sound to condemnatory, but your superior chortling, to these ears, seemed to announce a profound lack from within that I cannot fathom, nor would care to. As to what you seek at the movies, if not merely a quick snort at antique emotions not cut to the familiar, comfortable contemporary cloth, I cannot guess. You seem to me, at best, very oblivious individuals. And I hope that very obliviousness leads you to step in front of an oncoming bus very, very soon.
I hate to think the worst, especially of one of our most reliably compassionate American filmmakers, but is this troubling to anyone else?
Is there somewhat of a discrepancy here?
—Payne: “You can’t make a joke out of the subject matter. “
—The title of the film will be I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.
Yes, Payne may have made me pointlessly self-conscious every time I pick up a bottle of merlot, but I have bent over backwards defending his earlier work in the face of both the outsized Sidways acclaim (it’s really not as measured or nuanced as his earlier films) and the predictable backlash it incited (but it’s really pretty good, anyway). When I often dub Payne as “compassionate” or “humanist”, far more so than even the milder Wes Anderson, I’m met with eye-rolls. Yes, Election is “cynical” (yawn) and About Schmidt “pokes fun at its characters” (zzzzz….), but both of those films locate within broad comic conventions a gorgeous calm that elides most other filmmakers, as well as an infinite sadness and melancholy that only someone who believes in inherent goodness can muster up without seeming disingenuous. Compare the unforced tears shed by Jack Nicholson at the close of About Schmidt, which express the inexpressible need for a compassion that defies national and emotional boundaries, with those that spring from Bill Murray at the climax of The Life Aquatic, shoe-horned in for its audience’s catharsis, and about as convincing as the claymation Jaguar shark that circles the submarine.
So it is without trepidation that I follow Payne into any territory. Yet this one sounds fearful. It’s the first mainstream film to deal with the issue—call it hot-button if you want, but rather than denigrate it as a “contemporary social problem,” let’s just talk of it as an essential human right, outrageous that it has taken so long to be put on the table. But I digress—sadly to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Of course, this is all based on one little item, and we should all give it a chance before it’s even in the can, but my outrage is based upon the knowledge that not only will the production not meet any conflict, it will probably be fully embraced by GLAAD, which last year nominated for its Outstanding Wide-Release Film Award for positive gay images, ahem, let me clear my throat of its bile, such progressive films as Monster and Alexander. And yes of course, Outstanding Comedy Series is the endless minstrelsy Will and Grace. It’s a far cry from even the friggin 1930’s, in which the NAACP rightfully threw an outcry for each infraction, trying to stop Gone with the Wind in its earliest stages of development, and constantly taking to task those such as Louise Beavers and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson for perpetuating stereotypes.
Of course, the same has never been true for depictions of gay stereotypes, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry may indeed be groundbreaking in that way that only mainstream movies can be…i.e., not at all. The only way to make this work is to present it as the non-issue that it should be, not to emphasize the inherent oddness of the pairing in its very title…and for God’s sake not to invoke the title of that godawful thing Chuck & Buck, a “Gay for Dummies” treatise in which homosexuality is linked to damaged childhood obsession and infantilization…not to mention as something that can be corrected and “gotten over.”
The bottom line is that it might be irresponsible to make a rollicking gay marriage comedy at this point. Undoubtedly, the “straight” actors hired to play the roles will find prime opportunities to wink at the camera, and the whole occasion will play as high farce. And if comedy itself is meant to elicit laughs from a complacent audience through juxtapositions of what is socially acceptable and what isn’t, then I can think of nothing less suitable for mass consumption right now, whether it be for the bigoted masses hoping for Birdcage redux or the gay audiences themselves who will lap it up in hopes of…well…Birdcage redux..
And all this on the same week as Sandra Day O’Connor’s announcement….
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