In Which Nothing Says Goodbye Like A Bullet

Softly Glowing Detective Story

by MOLLY YOUNG

The Long Goodbye begins the way every California detective story should. A shifty-looking man named Terry Lennox shows up in the middle of the night and asks his friend, the private eye Philip Marlowe, for a ride to Tijuana. Lennox is wearing gloves and nursing a quartet of fingernail scratches on his right cheek. Marlowe complies, no questions asked. What are friends for?

"Vaya con dios," Lennox calls in farewell as he hops out of Marlowe's car at the border.

"Oh, thanks a lot," Marlowe mutters. It is now dawn. The police show up at Marlowe's house that afternoon and arrest him. Terry Lennox's wife is dead, Lennox is the prime suspect, and Marlowe is accused of acting as an accessory to the crime. "Where didja go last night, Marlowe?" one of the cops asks him. "Oh, is this where I'm s'posed to say, 'What is this all about?' and he says, 'Shut up, I ask the questions'"? Marlowe wisecracks. He is arrested.

The Long Goodbye is filmed the way a lot of movies in the seventies were filmed, to ensure that everyone comes out with peach-colored skin and softly glowing hair. When Vincent Canby reviewed it in 1973, the critic found Altman's movie so good that he "didn't know where to begin describing it."

Outlining the plot, based on Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel, is indeed a pain in the ass. Luckily, it isn’t necessary, since the storyline is neither a tight nor particularly compelling one as Altman spins it. Gould's Marlowe, plus the sleazy Los Angeles atmospherics that Altman is so good at portraying, are the beginning and end of The Long Goodbye.

It is more than enough to spend the film wrapping your head around Gould's character. He has a particular kind of male swagger built of equal proportions masculine and feminine qualities; being slender but deep-voiced; graceful but stolid, attractive to women but invulnerable to their charms. His face has just the right proportion of elegant and roughhewn features. He moves gracefully and with only a mild awareness of those around him. In the same category of male actor are Peter Fonda, Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. One can find examples of the type in every decade.

Gould's Marlowe is cool without being unflappable. This is an interesting trick. Coolness is the impression of invincibility, but Marlowe gets beaten up, told off, hoodwinked and hit by a car over the course of the movie. Even his cat has the best of him: "You clawed me, you sonuvabitch," the private eye complains.

Like all exemplars of coolness, Gould’s Marlowe inspires imitation, and while it might be useful to watch the film with a friend for plot-unraveling purposes, it is even better to watch it alone for Marlowe-imitating purposes. Some things will come easy: slouching, sleeping in your clothes, talking to yourself, lighting dozens of cigarettes, and buying brownie mix at 3 AM for the neighbors.

Others will be more difficult to arrange, like having two best friends in the world: one a cat and the other a murderer. Do your best, and dwell in how langorous you’d look if Altman were there to film you.

Molly Young is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

"Lapsed Catholics" — Future of the Left (mp3) highly recommended

"Throwing Bricks at Trains" — Future of the Left (mp3)

"You Need Satan More Than He Needs You" — Future of the Left (mp3)

"I Am Civil Service" — Future of the Left (mp3)

Future of the Left myspace

In Which If Your Exoskeleton Is Made of Adamantium You Are Never 17 Again

Impossibly Young, Impossibly Wolverine

by ALEX CARNEVALE

17 Again
dir. Burr Steers
102 minutes

X-Men Origins: Wolverine
dir. Gavin Hood
123 minutes

Some of us are always looking back at one period in our lives with enhanced scrutiny. For pharmaceutical rep Mike O'Donnell, that period is not a period at all. It's that time in high school when he knocked up his girlfriend and blew a basketball scholarship at Ohio State.

For Jimmy/Wolverine, it's about that time he killed about 20,000 people in various global conflicts at the behest of the United States since that fateful day when he looked up into the sky way too accusingly.

I guess technically it's more than just a body count for young Wolvy. It's the countless indignities suffering by a man playing a younger version of himself in a remake of a popular fable. I didn't really know Wolverine needed another backstory. He now has somewhere around 42 backstories, none of which really do anything but sour him on the idea of his existence.

After getting magic-fucked by a gentle janitor, Zac Efron is now a 42 year old man in a 17 year old body. If it was not entirely evident that Efron is destined to be the biggest box office draw since Tom Cruise, it is now. He's a little tap dancing minx and he's captured mine and Leslie Mann's heart now countless times.

Instead of chasing teenage ass one last triumphant time, Efron/Matthew Perry's Mike O'Donnell is more intent on helping out his kids and reconnecting with his wife. He probably shows more interest in Leslie Mann than Judd Apatow ever has, or ever will.

17 Again is more like a twisted honeymoon than a real trip back for funsies. It seems that once you lose the innocent joy that fuels texting charges and too-revealing cell phone pix, it can never be returned to, not even if you're wearing the husk of the most gorgeous creature on the planet.

Efron's genius friend through time is internet millionaire Ned Gold, played by State veteran Thomas Lennon. He's made enough money to spend all day gaming and sleeping in the most awesome Millennium Falcon bed I have ever seen.

The highlight of the subplot in which Lennon seduces Melora Hardin (Jan from The Office, she plays Efron's feisty principal) is an entire conversation conducted purely in high Elvish. That they never gave us a Thomas Lennon—Melora Hardin sex scene in the Millennium Falcon is because this film wasn't going to realize the majority of its profits from nerds.

It can be fun to be old, this film is saying. In the real world, however, it's actually far worse to be young. Efron's son and daughter are almost seamlessly absorbed in the insane Los Angeles high school culture, and this cookie-cutter version of HS lacks students of color and it's still scary. The climatic basketball scene is whiter than the Shire, and yet it still feels like some horror is being returned to us to go back to high school.

It's much better to have everything in place, to be more practiced, to not be afraid, to be confident and secure in the knowledge of who and what you are. This is perhaps the most depressing cinematic realization of the year.

The message of one of the great films of the eighties, Vice Versa with Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold, was that young people and older people had something to learn from each other. Saucy executive Reinhold never give his relationship with his son the energy he deserved, and didn't realize how hard the boy had it. In the end, you got the message that life pretty much sucked no matter how old you were. If it wasn't for magic, what was the fucking point anyway?

Enter Wolverine. He has plenty of fancy special effects and adamantium bones, but he just wants a normal existence banging some excessively hot schoolteacher in a random Colorado town. He's put down the blades of steel and the rich history of killing he enjoyed for a more spartan oeuvre. That's where we find him when the main action of X-Men Origins: Wolverine begins.

Some dumbass at Fox leaked the Wolverine workprint (and probably got fired for it). The version I watched is missing about 40 percent of its special effects, a development that attunes you completely to just how much of a movie like this consists of startling visuals. It is also real proof that David Benioff is focusing most of his energies on his forthcoming adaptation of Game of Thrones for HBO.

In the case of Wolverine, he only really does two things. He scrapes something with his claws, or punctures it. There's really no way of knowing which act you're going to get. It's a similar delight to reading binary, or looking at a Yin-Yang symbol. Puncture. Scrape. Pose. He's got all the elements of Zac Efron, except he's in his mid 40s and made of adamantium.

17 Again makes use of its lead's ample voice and dance talents. I just wish the idiots behind Wolverine had realized that Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber are immense Broadway talents, and a photobooth montage with Hugh singing the female part in South Pacific's "Some Enchanted Evening" is sorely needed here.

Besides introducing the world to the lamest version of Gambit ever to hit stage or screen, Wolverine offers little else to sink your claws into. They should just chop out the special effects and run a clip reel of all the puncturing and scraping. Put it to the right soundtrack, and you basically have 300, and look how much money that made.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

"These Three Things" — The Kingsbury Manx (mp3)

"Well, Whatever" — The Kingsbury Manx (mp3) highly recommended

"Walk on Water" — The Kingsbury Manx (mp3)

TKM website

In Which You Played The Game, Now Witness The Result

The Secret to Success

by KARINA WOLF

The Player
1992
102 minutes

Jack Nicholson supposedly said that he will commit to a script if it has just three outstanding scenes. The Player, amid its poison asides and insider jokes, has two standout sequences and one knockout one.

The seduction of June Gudmundsdottir is as effective as any scene from the '40s films name-checked in Altman’s picture. Griffin Mill, a beleaguered studio exec, receives increasingly threatening notes from an angry writer. If he quiets this unnerving threat, Mill reasons, he’ll be able to quell his other troubles. Griffin drives to the house of the disaffected writer and rings the scribe while standing outside. But instead of reaching the writer, Mill engages in a lengthy phone flirtation with Kahane’s girlfriend.

June is a wonderful creation, all icy self-involvement and paradoxical reply. She’s the only character who doesn’t work in the film industry or like movies at all. “I like words,” she allows. “I don’t know if I like complete sentences.”

Tim Robbins nearly becomes appealing as he peers through Scacchi’s window. They make small talk while she constructs aloof mixed media paintings. The pure invention of the character makes her more compelling than the stock types (producer, writer, executive, detective) we’re asked to follow when Altman puts the noir plot through its paces. Greta Scacchi imbues her role with latent sensitivity. I think through her, the film suggests the nature of all narcissistic characters — there’s an unreachable sympathy at their core, and a monomania that passes for a while as integrity.

Certainly, by the end of the film, June’s complicity in her boyfriend’s murder and her love for the callow Mill eclipse the promise conveyed in her introduction. The entire movie sags when June succumbs.

I'm always mystified how rubber-faced Tim Robbins became the leading man of early '90s satires. Maybe it was his activism or his alignment with social crusader Susan Sarandon (she has a non-speaking role in the film). Maybe it was the fact that he could keep up with Altman’s roving cinematic eye. (The other terrific scenes in the film follow Mill’s disorientation when he commits murder and is humorously interrogated by Whoopi Goldberg).

Altman seems to be viewed as a social critic as well as an actor’s director, and his ensembles have the same cache as those of mid-period Woody Allen. The difference between the two auteurs is instructive. Allen’s films are arguably responses to Bergman and the great Russian novelists. Altman’s work is more in the vein of British social satire and French comedy of manners. That is to say, one director measures the nature of a moral universe; the other proceeds from disbelief in it.

Too often Altman’s films revel in their superiority. The film’s bravado ending, with Mill squelching a blackmailer by sealing a film deal, feels too triumphant. Another of Altman’s characters explains the secret to success: he gets ahead by taking advantage of other people's insecurities. Altman’s finest moments arrive in The Player when the director exposes but doesn’t profit from human weakness.

Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls so hard right here for your reading pleasure.

"Everyone Is Guilty" — Akron/Family (mp3)

"They Will Appear" — Akron/Family (mp3)

"Last Year" — Akron/Family (mp3) highly recommended

Akron/Family website