In Which We Are Melinda and Also Melinda

Melinda and Melinda and Woody Allen

by ELEANOR MORROW

Almost is a dirty word in the cinema and it is a dirty word in marriage. Things either work and or they don't, and the man known as Woody Allen is no exception to this rule. His films either tend to be effortless parodies of stories or people we already know (Shadows & Fog, Interiors, Everything You Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask) or disturbingly off-base satires of genres most people neither know or care about (Curse of the Jade Scorpion, Scoop, Anything Else).

In some ways, Melinda and Melinda is closer to disaster than outright success. Sometimes Allen has gotten extraordinary lucky with the right casting - Mira Sorvino, Charlize Theron, Michael Caine - and other times he's completely struck out. When it comes to Melinda and Melinda, Winona Ryder should have played Radha Mitchell's twice-titular role, and Robert Downey Jr. was a far more appropriate choice (and always has been) for Will Ferrell's stumbling neurotic.

Instead, because insurance companies viewed the drug-addled duo as a massive risk, Allen had to settle for Plan B, and both choices were pretty much terrible. Radha Mitchell less so, as her easy sexuality and the fact that the Pitch Black star isn't just the same old face wins her sympathy laughs. Ferrell on the other hand is both completely wrong for the part (he's supposed to be married to Amanda Peet, for fuck's sake!) and an actor about as good as Malcolm of Malcolm in the Middle.

The film's premise is hackneyed and more than a little distracting. Wallace Shawn and Larry Pine are in a restaurant debating whether the essential nature of humanity is comic or tragic. Melinda (and Melinda) stumble through two storylines to discover the answer to this eternal dramatic question.

Even thinking hard, I'm not terribly sure which end of the story was up, and which was down. But hey, Woody's an old man, he forgets things. As a film, Melinda and Melinda is most successful when it's making fun of the seriousness with which Allen approached New York relationships in his early careers. Ostensible comedies when they were made, movies like Annie Hall and Hannah and Her Sisters are far sadder in retrospect, knowing what Mia Farrow, for example, went through. So Woody had to make a new comedy making fun of the old comedy, yet at times pulling back the veil of the diegesis to make us aware that it was still him.

Fortunately, Allen's talents as a writer enables him rise to the occasion here. His plays are always a little distracted, but Melinda and Melinda benefits from this scattershot approach. Chloe Sevigny is absolutely brilliant as Melinda's nemesis in the dramatic part, and the writing is so glorious that you can forgive all the things that are wrong in the production, design, and casting of the film. Sometimes Woody is just more fun when he's only joking around.

Eleanor Morrow is the contributing editor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and she tumbls here.

"Houses" - Dinosaur Jr. (mp3)

"Creepies" - Dinosaur Jr. (mp3)

"Whenever You're Ready" - Dinosaur Jr. (mp3)

In Which We Enter Hell Through The Back

Onwards Satanic Soldiers

by ELEANOR MORROW

I still remember being dragged to the movies by a boy I had liked, or thought I liked. I knew absolutely nothing about what we were about to see. That would never happen today - the vast majority of films we see we know something about: a trailer, a story from the set, a history. But I was more interested in the boy than the film. This is what I surely thought, but turned out to be wrong completely.

It's rare that critics totally miss on a film, but from the moments that Wojciech Kilar's haunting score takes over in one of the greatest title sequences in cinematic history, these hacks missed on The Ninth Gate. God knows they should never underestimate Roman Polanski, one of our finest working directors, but they did, and North America missed the best film noir since Miller's Crossing.

I don't blame them, or the boy I saw the film with, for not getting it. Most people can't accept drama and comedy together, and adding a dash of horror stirs the pot to an almost unrecognizable place. There's the example of David Mamet's The Edge: director Lee Tamahori flatly misunderstood the script, and a hilarious satire never got the laughs it deserved.

An unsympathetic protagonist is the common element in both of these films. Dean Corso (Johnny Depp) is a specialist in the rarest of rare books. The opening scene of the film has him appraising a family's collection, picking off what he likes from it, and telling them all the rest of the collection is ten times as valuable as it really is. Critics have no use for sleazy antiheros, because their business is the sleaziest of all.

Depp and Polanski didn't argue about how he should play the malignant tumor that is Dean Corso, but Roman later admitted he didn't know his star would be so laid back with his performance. What was in the director's head might have made The Ninth Gate more money, but it would have made it a lesser film. Depp made a brave choice, and in doing so, created a hilarious not-Philip Marlowe that is more entertaining to watch than a debonair Daniel Craig. Understated is so rare in our cinema today that we should throw a party every time it happens.

Boris Balkan (a pitch perfect Frank Langella) hires Corso to appraise the four extant copies of The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, a book by a writer named Torchia that contains nine engraved illustrations. When correctly deciphered and matched, the illustrations are supposed to raise Lucifer himself.

This is Balkan's goal, so believing only one of the copies real, he gives Corso one of the copies and asks him to prove it genuine or fake. He covers his expenses to find out if the other two copies are real, too. Corso immediately hangs out with an antiquarian bookseller, who is murdered in short order in a fashion that simulates one of the engravings in a book. He is treading a dangerous path, but who is after him?

From then on, Corso meanders through Europe on Balkan's say-so, while himself trying to figure out what exactly Balkan wants, and what sort of book this is. It's a mature premise, and that's where Liza Schwarzbaum's impossibly tiny brain got tripped up. Who could guess that this was a comedy? Since I didn't even have a college education at the time, I can vouch that it didn't take much.

I don't say I have such a great sense of humor. If I find something funny, I laugh, even if the music is dramatic and Johnny Depp has an expression on his face like he just smelled Kate Moss after a coke binge. The Ninth Gate starts as one kind of movie, and then it becomes several more. It resists genre, flauts genre, answers to something that is at once sillier and all too real. Everyone is evil and crazy here, which adds to the ludicrousness of the proceedings. There are more laughs in this movie than in the entire first season of Parks & Recreation.

People behave according to their baser motives, and they're not terribly good at hiding them is one of the lessons of this tale, and that's why Depp is right to hold back - we must at least guess what the mercenary Dean Corso is thinking and doing. Most of modern drama depends on us knowing more than our protagonist. In The Ninth Gate, compared to Dean, we know less, much less.

Connection with the devil herself is always dangerous business, but why should it be? We speak to God every day, or some of us do, but we can never commune with the devil. Do our interests never coincide with those of the devil? What if the devil found Amy Adams' nude scene from Sunshine Cleaning and posted it on its blog? Would we be violating ourselves if we viewed it and left a comment like, "thanks for the upload, devilbro"? Answer: not in the least.

At the beginning of the movie, we can't imagine why someone would want to go to Hell, to know the power that it offers and willingly set out on this dark road. By then, we're totally sure we want exactly what all these insane book collectors do - a method to the madness, a way out of the starched dullness of modernity, to a darker and more destructive future, near the setting of the sun.

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

"Cut The Cake" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

"Staring at the Steeple" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

"Even in the Rain" - The Fiery Furnaces (mp3)

In Which We Still Have Not Recovered From This Particular Hangover

The Docile American Bachelor Party

by ELEANOR MORROW

God forgive me in advance for what I am about to write. A.O. Scott chickened out; it had to be me.

It is a phenomenon, it is the new Big Lebowski, it has everything we require from entertainment and more. "I haven't seen it, but I heard it's the new Old School" crooned Bill Simmons. Shut up, Bill, you're over forty with two kids and no grasp of English.

Men can't express their true feelings, so they express themselves by being away from women. That is the sterling message of Todd Phillips' 90 minute attempt to kill comedy, The Hangover.

A dentist loses a tooth. A loser schoolteacher almost forgets his head. The guy from the Kanye video acts slightly irregular. These are the "wild" dreams of middle-aged men. They are not wild, no more wild than a 16 year old's spring break, or a vibrant afternoon of text messaging. Our idea of the crazy has became crazy.

In Judd Apatow's seminal boy-on-boy-on-boy-on-boy love story, Knocked Up, Leslie Mann believes her husband Paul Rudd is cheating on her, perhaps with Phoebe Buffet. She tracked him to a magnificently empty house in the Valley, where he's participating in a fantasy baseball draft with a bunch of other repressed homosexuals. She's upset at finding out she's married a gay man? I couldn't think of any other reason she started crying in the driveway, on a movie set, in front of Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen. Maybe she really had her heart set on seeing Spiderman.

According to this way of thinking, women are just prostitutes waiting for kind and generous dentists to walk into their lives. Heather Graham looks too much like a Barbie (or admittedly a whore) to be anything but Ed Helms' paramour; a comic actress on the level of Rachael Harris is a high-strung betch who can't cheat and get away with it like Bill Clinton. Justin Bartha was in a fucking Geico commercial and NBC's horrific sitcom Teachers. He deserves no second life in the American cinema just because he banged Ashley Olsen and Lydia Hearst.

A woman places obligations on a man. Her job is to look good and hold hands at a wedding. A woman is capable of forgiveness but not of understanding, and that is the terms the "men" of The Hangover must deal with their women on. At this they don't have much of any success. That is why they are men to treasure: they can't even excel at having a good time.

Men when reduced to their primordial urges, get married and promise to take care of whores. What sorts of men are these? Where can they be found? Everywhere: capitalism has compromised their masculinity, like the eunuchs of Greek times. Men used to be able to play with boys, ask Camille Paglia and Sophocles. Now they just play with themselves.

Now they play with baseball players on Yahoo! and ESPN and they draft Hideki Matsui even though he's an aging slugger who can't play the field. Paul Rudd has two kids and wants to bang models; Bradley Cooper hates being a teacher, gets laughs for it. Seth Rogen can't grasp the good fortune that is putting his penis inside of an E! reporter -- he has to whine about it to his father, who is even more of a joke. Ed Helms can't even tell his girlfriend he's going to Vegas for a bachelor party. By the end, he wrests free of her to be the babysitter for some other, identical woman.

Erstwhile poker player Todd Phillips directed this return to more pedestrian fair. It came from a real life hangover suffered by a friend of one of the movie's producers! Just when you thought it was impossible, Entourage is becoming more like real life in retrospect. Men love stories about other men going to Las Vegas, Las Vegas likes this as well, tourism goes up, women go down. Eventually we will be sexually segregated by preferred form of entertainment. Shouldn't the sexes become more like each other instead of less? Wasn't Ellen Page an inspiration to us all?

Then again, there is a passivity bred into these creatures. They just want the weekend; the rest of the time they are totally psyched to cave in, to live a life of small-time, Adam Carolla-esque complaining. We can assume despite his history as a boxer, despite his puffy grandstanding on Los Angeles-area radio, that Carolla is a total pushover for his wife. They're family men at heart, "some guys just can't handle Vegas." In between we must suffer every measure of overdone joke imaginable.

Here are some jokes I can do without going forward:

A strange animal approaches a drug-addled male as in Harold and Kumar. A tiger isn't funny simply because it's a tiger. It's even less funny if it's Mike Tyson's tiger, especially in light of the loss of his daughter in recent weeks.

When a person is saying something inappropriate about another person and they are present, he says, "Excuse me! I'm right here!" I'm pretty sure Neil Simon wrote this joke, and I'm just as sure it's not funny.

Bradley Cooper is not funny, at least not unless Ryan Murphy is writing his dialogue. This rule also goes for Joe Rogan, but I don't think he was in The Hangover.

The all-star comedy super special cameo: I am tired of Mike Tyson, of Valerie Bertinelli (not relevant here, but still), of Frank the Tank, of Snoop Dogg in Starsky & Hutch. I blame test audiences for all of this, I blame them for being surprised so that we can't be surprised. I blame test audiences for Star Trek and The Dark Knight. It is actually possible to make a work of art that is not offensive to any particular sensibility, and not challenging to any of them. The fact that we can all agree something is entertaining is the number one indication that it's not very good.

This does not make The Dark Knight or The Hangover bad per se; it doesn't make them art either.

One comedic sensibility is learned from the previous generation. If middle-aged men find their childish man-boy escapes to the city of sin a welcome release from the economic grind of this age, fine. But good for Todd Philips for imposing an R rating. I'd rather our kids be Pixar funny than Old School-funny.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She lives in Manhattan, and tumbls here.

"Heavy Cross" - The Gossip (mp3)

"Pop Goes the World" - The Gossip (mp3)

"8th Wonder" - The Gossip (mp3)