In Which We Give You A Little Personal Information

Everything Is Less Than Zero

by MOLLY LAMBERT

A little background, and some personal information (there's always personal information, you should know this by now). I went to private school in Los Angeles. I did not go to the same private school as Bret Easton Ellis, but a couple of my friends did and so did Rashida Jones.

Less Than Zero is one of those rare instances where the movie surpasses the book, in that it is CAST PERFECTLY. Robert Downey Jr. plays the same character (himself) in every movie. It's what makes him such a great movie star. He makes the character of Julian three-dimensional, which he isn't in the book. In the book he's more of an offscreen presence, a cipher, the Tino of the piece.

Downey plays him as himself, and thus somehow makes a junkie rentboy lovable. You actually care that the other two dull protagonists (Clay and Blair) are trying to rescue him because he's Robert Downey Jr. and we already know how the next decade of this brilliant young actor's life is going to turn out (not so good).

There's no sexual tension whatsoever between the leads. Jami Gertz plays Blair like a less butch Demi Moore. Andrew McCarthy plays Clay exactly as he's written; a closeted gay. All the sexual menergy is between Clay, Julian, and Rip.

Clay is still two-dimensional, which is why Andrew McCarthy is perfectly cast. He's a two-dimensional actor, cute and empty. But he's neither as cute nor as empty as James Spader, King of Pervs, who plays Rip the coke dealer.

Is there any movie in which James Spader doesn't play a glassy-eyed lech? Oh, right, Stargate. The movie I found him most attractive in, and that had to do more with my love for Egyptology and guys that resemble Encyclopedia Brown.

I can't believe he won the Emmy for Boston Legal. He fucking BEAT GANDOLFINI WTFFF. Was he the one who said "I don't know who votes for these things" because that was sort of charming. Boston Legal, jesus christ. Considering that show is even still on the air, I think it should get a new title:

I guess I disliked Less Than Zero because it wasn't at all representative of my experience as a teenager in Los Angeles. I read Less Than Zero and Play It As It Lays and The Day Of The Locust and they're all fine, but I didn't relate personally. None of them pinged with me the way good literature should.

They're all about ennui, which is hard to write about anyway. My experience in the suburbs of L.A. was more like American Graffiti or Dazed and Confused than Thirteen. You can feel displaced anywhere. People still confuse Hollywood with Los Angeles and Los Angeles with Disneyland.

My Top Twenty L.A. Movies

1. Shampoo

2. The Long Goodbye

3. Clueless

4. Chinatown

5. Boogie Nights

6. Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

7. The Big Lebowski

8. Valley Girl

9. Pulp Fiction

10. Friday

11. Singin' In The Rain

12. Double Indemnity

13. Ed Wood

14. Sunset Boulevard

15. Barton Fink

16. Repo Man

17. Menace II Society

18. The Player

19. L.A. Confidential

20. Slums Of Beverly Hills

"Well, what I really want is to suck his cock."

The problem with movies like Less Than Zero that glamorize drug use and promiscuous sex is that nobody likes the third act of those movies, the redemption act. It's always all about the first two, the escalation and the spiraling out of control.

The only movie with this arc (the "Behind The Music" arc) and a great third act is Boogie Nights and that movie defies most classifications. Alex thought it was weird that P.T.A. wanted to make a movie about oil from an Upton Sinclair book but duh it's brilliant. Los Angeles was an oil town and it's a trope of historical Westerns, like the Gold Rush. I could certainly stand to see more Gold Rush movies.

The glamorous, the flossayyy flossayyy

And back to Less Than Zero: I know they mutilated the book and it's much more gray about it blah blah blah but guess what, jaded is a terrible cinematic emotion. French New Wave to the contrary, blasé is generally boring and doesn't read. It's indemonstrable and therefore can be acted well by people like Ryan Phillipe.

I'm just unbelievably sick of decadent super-rich people. In fiction, in film, in life, anywhere they exist. I am tired of their monopoly on culture and life. I'd rather read, hear, and see art about anything else. Except for like, boring married people having unfulfilling sex and intimacy issues.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.

"I've Got Your Number (live)" - Passion Pit (mp3)

"Sleepyhead (live)" - Passion Pit (mp3)

"Live To Tell The Tale (live)" - Passion Pit (mp3)

In Which Birds Flying High You Know How She Feels

Tough-Looking Female

by ELISABETH REINKORDT

The portentous opening shots of trains in Wendy & Lucy leave no doubt exactly where Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams) is headed, but the hour and twenty minutes we spend with her over the few days she spends in an unnamed Oregon town are no less entrancing.

(Un)necessary brief plot synopsis: A 20-something woman named Wendy is en route from Indiana with her dog Lucy in search of seasonal cannery work in Alaska. She's got short hair, wears a blue hoodie, western shirt & cut-off corduroy shorts, drives an '88 Honda Accord, and it breaks down in a town in Oregon. This is one of a few things that do not go well and leave a major dent in the sum at the bottom of the page in the meticulously kept notebook in which she tracks her dwindling finances.


Oh, the beauty of film! Shot on Super-16, Wendy & Lucy is full of impeccable colors, especially in forest scenes, gorgeously done night scenes full of all the grain that results from an optical blow-up to 35mm, and depth of field simply not possible on video.

As Lucy (played by Reichardt's dog) makes friends with a group of crust-punk types around a bonfire and Wendy follows to retrieve her, Reichardt's camera seems to become perspectival, focussing from face to face as if Wendy is gauging trustworthiness.

It is the fact that this is a female eye (lens) tracing the path of the female protagonist's eye that makes this scene work; were the camera to float away from the person speaking (a drifter played by Will Oldham) to other faces around the bonfire -- including lingering shots on the only other and very tough-looking female of the group -- without the distinct sense that we are engaged in the self-aware nature of Wendy's position as a solo female traveler, this would appear a sloppily edited sequence. In a far more dramatic echoing of the sense in this scene later in the film, I began to think that I had never seen such material shot in that manner before.

There are simply so few women making films that it is hard to make a compelling case that the gaze of the female director is different, but this film makes solid strides in that direction.

Furthering its minimalism, the film eschews a score, opting instead for a repeated theme -- composed by Oldham and played slighlty amplified -- of Wendy humming. The overt pathos of dramatic orchestral elements would ruin the pain we feel, slowly & experientially, for Wendy's predicament. Reichardt lets moments happen. Birds fly by, high in the air, and it is clear from the focus-pulling that this was a shot taken because it just happened. It is downright beautiful.


Reichardt is a gifted, principled director. (The full text of a fantastic interview done by Slant Magazine is worth the read.) A professor at Bard College, she gives solid pushback when the interviewers begin asking questions about how her filmmaking might change with the onset of "success."

Slant: You've talked before about wanting to continue working at these sensationally low-budget levels. Isn't that something filmmakers tend to say and then disregard once they meet with a certain level of success?

KR: Well, what's your definition of success? I find that to be a fucking annoying question, I have to say.

Slant: Why is that?

KR: This constant implication that success has one picture is so limited—and talk about American! I'm constantly asked this, as if teaching is some loser profession, or an uninteresting place to be. I've been out in L.A. for five days with my film, just doing stuff that I've never done before, press junkets and stuff, and I'm like—this is it? This is what everybody thinks is the most special fucking thing on the planet? Are you kidding me? It melts your brain. It's really hard to stay small, actually. That I've been able to make these last two films without anybody paying any fucking attention and just go off and have complete artistic freedom—what are you gonna trade that for? What do you consider success, since you're asking me that question?

Slant: I think I was just suggesting that if you were to raise more, you'd probably spend it wisely. There's no discernable difference between the scale of your films and a Woody Allen film, but he can spend 20 million and the money buys access to more filmmaking tools and sought-after actors and so forth.

KR: Give me an example of a woman who can do that.

Slant: A woman who can insist on creative control and still raise 20 million?

KR: Yes.

Slant: I can't name any, but I have a reason why I can't.

KR: I have a reason too—there aren't any! Okay, forget about 20 million. Name a woman at the level of Gus Van Sant or Todd Haynes. Give me a female example of that.

Slant: Allison Anders. In 1996. I can't think of any on the spot, but in that category I know there are some.

KR: And she wasn't getting 20 million, by the way. She was living off a grant. Please. The idea that we're struggling to think of one that might have existed at some point—maybe that's why that question pisses me off. I'll also say that I can't think of a woman who has this benefit either: Lars von Trier and Terrence Malick can put out films and not have to go out and talk about them. If I want to think about what real success would be, it would be to be able to make a film without anyone breathing down my back and then not have to go out and talk about the film after you've gone to great lengths in your film to not over-explain everything. To not have to go out, that would be true success, but then you're just screwing over your distributor or your investors.

Amen.

Elisabeth Reinkordt is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a filmmaker living in Nebraska, and she writes here.

"It's Always Sunday Around Here" - Lacrosse (mp3)

"We Are Kids" - Lacrosse (mp3)

"Song in the Morning" - Lacrosse (mp3) highly recommended

lacrosse myspace

In Which We Spent A Night At A Museum And We Now Feel Hungover

We'll Find A Way To Turn It Off

by ELEANOR MORROW

There is an end of comedy somewhere. This is a place where jokes must stop, and turn around. This may have happened somewhere during the second hour of Beverly Hills Ninja. It happened for the first time in history when Groucho Marx was on the can. It also made thousands weep during what was supposed to be an exciting final season of Friends. They added Paul Rudd, and yet it seemed like they lost so much.

We have much the same thing happening in the sequel to a charming film in its own right, Night at the Museum. The jaunty-nonsensical humor that's currently feeding Michael Cera's many illegimate children has come to a predictable end. I was pretty sure during the second half of David Gordon Green's excruciating Pineapple Express, but now I'm totally sure. Penned by veterans of The State Tom Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, this film is so fun it stops being fun and starts being kinda sad.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is populated with the careers of these people, all of whom have abandoned comedy for slight notoriety and period dress-up. "Who is Steve Coogan?" a slightly more precocious child than usual will ask one day as she is forced to view this movie in its entirety because her brother has chicken pox.

Battle for the Smithsonian features Bill Hader, Kelly Kapur, Kelly Kapowski, the repulsive Amy Adams, the noxious Ben Stiller, Hank Azaria, Christopher Guest, and hundreds more people who, like Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, should never be permitted to see their wives and children again.

Hollywood can ruin anything. They destroyed The State, they made Harry Potter even more boring and stupid than it actually was, and they made Kristen Stewart stop eating and start complaining. In the beginning of the first Night at the Museum, Ben Stiller's character was a measly janitor and a terrible father. For some reason Ben Stiller's character is now a successful businessman. He suddenly became Hitch. I didn't get it.

Edutainment is probably the future, giving us something that is neither educational or entertaining. Poor Garant and Lennon were probably too focused on the current horrifying season of Reno 911 to wikipedia Amelia Earheart. If this is what now stands in for history, we might as well just forget the past rather than reimagine it as something other than what it was. In the future, things must not only make money, they must also be good for us.

The future is farfetched, there are no more ideas, there are just rehashed versions of old ideas, with more expensive special effects. Before Night at the Museum, I saw the kiddie version of the trailer for Transformers. The preview was full of incomprehensible jokes and Shia LaBeouf screaming, "OPTIMUS!" and "BUMBLEBEE!" at various times. If this is what is going to bring GM back from the brink of bankruptcy, then the millions of auto workers should start looking for janitorial jobs. I hear it's an expanding field.

Our concern now is that this slap-happy, clipped-off joke style of comedy is now coming to harm our children. I fear that young tweens will see The Hangover and think that Zach Galifinakis being afraid of a tiger is a joke. That Ben Stiller getting slapped by a monkey is a joke, that Andy from The Office losing a tooth is a joke, that a fat guy riding a segway is a joke, that Seth Rogen saying 'fuck me' is a joke.

Unfortunately when the man who conceived Best in Show is dressed like a 16th century Russian czar and speaking English to Napoleon, my fears may well be justified.

I don't even believe dead things can come back to life anymore.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages on the subject of The United States of Tara.

"Classic" — Sebastian Tellier (mp3)

"Fantino" — Sebastian Tellier (mp3)

"Bye Bye" — Sebastian Tellier (mp3)