In Which The Coen Brothers Enter The Studio System

Backstroke

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Hail, Caesar!
dir. Joel & Ethan Coen
106 minutes

History becomes ancient history. When American people thought of the recent past in 1953, the cultural life of the previous fifty years had not quite absconded from them, principally because there was not too much of it. For Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) to manage his job as a movie executive, he only has to know five or six things, and once he knows them, he has plenty of time to genuflect as to whether he really does know them.

Hail, Caesar! is a kind of anti-nostalgia, pared down to its bare essentials. Scarlett Johansson has only two scenes in the movie as a kind of anti-Esther Williams, a Brazilian actress giggles through one scene like a jack-in-the-box, Tilda Swinton plays twin sister gossip columnists for a combined five minutes and that is it for women in Hail, Caesar! Hollywood during this period (and when you think of it, most others) was largely composed of the interlacing stories of male homosexuals and Jews fleeing Europe.

Esther Williams' movies are not half bad if you watch them today. A lot of times she portrayed the same role she played in life: a talented swimmer in a stage show at odds with the management. Williams' brilliance at marketing herself and her evident abilities as a performer are never touched on in Hail, Caesar!

Instead she is a foul-mouthed slut sleeping with a foreign, married director, not her first. Abandoned by the father of her baby, she has no other options, and so marries Jonah Hill after admiring his physique. Hill is in the movie for two minutes, and Scarlett only five more than that, so how they had made it on the poster moves beyond deceptive advertising into the realm of true evil.

But then, the male stars are just as vapid and sloppy in their art, except for Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum). The best part of Hail, Caesar! by far is an extensive song and dance routine about how there will be no women on a submarine the sailors are boarding in the morning. Tatum, who was recently so awful in The Hateful Eight, appears to be some kind of oscillating god here, and his singing and dancing is ten out of ten. Maybe in the future he could just not talk.

The rest of the movie sets that Josh Brolin strolls onto are shooting awful, satirical versions of failed projects from the period. Clooney is better at pretending to be a period actor than performing a modern role. His not-so-hidden homosexuality is a riff on Tony Curtis, but the vapidity of the character is not. Turning Tony Curtis, a Bronx Jew who was savagely beaten by his schizophrenic mother, served in the U.S. Navy and achieved success from the most meager circumstances imaginable into a spoiled, whimpering ditz is pretty low.

Clooney's character, Baird Whitlock, is abducted by a group of communists. The humor comes from the idea that they explain they have been actively plotting to include communist ideas in their Hollywood scripts in order to do their part for the movement. Isn't this ridiculous? the Coens crow. Except there were films which presented Russia as an idyllic utopia — after all, communists were always substantially better at explaining themselves than actually governing.

But the important thing is that Hail, Caesar! is funny, right? If something is funny, it doesn't matter who it makes fun of, or why, or whether it's true because that would mean, you know, like, actual research. The Coens aren't too good with that part of the process. Over time any director acquires a sinister envy and disgust for actors. Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) even slaps around his young star for not being able to say, "Were that it twere so simple" in a convincing manner.

You feel the contempt for the performers in most scenes of Hail, Caesar! We rush so quickly from moment to moment as Brolin assuages the feelings and insecurities of all these people that you start to think of them not as individuals, but only as problems. Hail, Caesar! is a bunch of brilliant skits that explain all of the jokes for people who don't grasp the overly familiar subject of Hollywood satire. I think most of us understand it by now. William Goldman's book about one year on Broadway, The Season, once estimated that 80 percent of the subject matter in any given Broadway year concerned the theater itself. Today an endless parade of comic book movies saves us from the harsh reality of old.

When I do watch films from this period on TCM, I am not struck by any difference in quality, or even production values. The most obvious change between Hollywood's output today and then is the seriousness of its story choices. During this period, scripts explored non-trivial issues even in frivolous films, and they took their characters just as sincerely, even in goofy contexts. There was a chance of doing that here, but it vanishes as swiftly.

Josh Brolin comes home to dinner with his wife. He doesn't touch her, kiss her, or even look at her. He considers a job offer from Lockheed Martin that would have him working substantially less hours at a higher rate. "What should I do?" he asks his wife (Alison Pill) as he eats the food she has prepared for him, prompting her to comment on a decision that could completely alter the next decade in her own life and the lives of her children. "You know best," she tells him. Maybe I didn't get the joke.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"The Caterpillar Workforce" - Guided By Voices (mp3)

In Which We Sample Nostalgia From 2005

Our Actual Life

by ALICE BOLIN

21 Jump Street
dir. Phil Lord & Chris Miller
109 minutes

Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s remake of 21 Jump Street begins with a large title reading “YEAR 2005,” and Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill) appears dressed in a style that has not been lampooned enough: peroxide blond Caesar haircut, white t-shirt, preposterous baggy jeans. It earns Schmidt the nickname “Not-So-Slim Shady,” and he is a dead ringer for that kid — every mid-2000s student body had someone who looked exactly like him. Just the sight of him in this get-up makes for its own comedic beat, but the humor catches us off guard — how could a look that was so ubiquitous to high school campuses and 7-11s seven years ago be so absurd now, such an easy laugh? Was 2005 really that long ago?

The point of 21 Jump Street is that it was a long time ago, and all the rules — of going to high school, or making a movie, or making a movie about high school — have changed since then. Schmidt and his partner Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) are undercover cops assigned to investigate the manufacture and distribution of a mysterious hallucinogenic drug at a high school, and they learn that the social order is not so clear-cut as when they were in school. Back in ’05, Jenko was a jock who made fun of the nerdy Schmidt, but this binary of cool and uncool doesn’t apply in the same way at the school they’re infiltrating. And what a relief that is for the film’s audience — who could possibly be interested in that dynamic anymore?

The cool kids at their new school are crunchy and progressive, led by Eric (Dave Franco), who was accepted to Berkeley “early admish” and has a biodiesel Mercedes that runs on left over grease from Hunan Palace. He tells Schmidt that he and his girlfriend are not exclusive — “I just don’t believe in possession, jah feel?” — and plays a song about Mother Earth on his acoustic guitar. Schmidt, once a member of his high school’s Juggling Society, is thrilled at how the tables have turned, as he catalogs with wonder the things that are now considered cool: liking comic books, environmental awareness, being tolerant. Former jock Jenko is not so excited. “Organized sports are so fascist. It makes me sick!” Eric yells after a track meet. “I don’t get this school,” Jenko says.

Jenko claims to know why high school has changed: Glee. “Fuck you, Glee!” he yells in the lunchroom. But we may see this more broadly as part of Judd Apatow’s late-2000s loser coup, a real life revenge of the nerds that we ultimately have to thank for the phrase “Academy Award Nominee Jonah Hill.” This shift is an important reason why 2005 is so distant: the string of films Apatow produced in 2007 and 2008 revolutionized the stoner comedy, the high school comedy, and the buddy comedy. It’s Apatow’s classic but short-lived Freaks and Geeks, resurrected and taking revenge on the network suits who didn’t get it, with Knocked Up and Pineapple Express (freaks) and Superbad (geeks) reclaiming things for themselves.

A key feature of these Apatow productions is the study in male best friendship. As with all depictions of close male companionship, there is an element of the homoerotic (Frodo and Sam, hi), but in the bromance, it is not read indirectly, with sexual tension permeating through the friends’ brooding or aggression. It is not properly a subtext at all — bromance relationships are overtly tender, and how gay they are for each other is, you know, the joke.

With Jenko and Schmidt, it’s true love: they strap gun holsters under their ivory tuxedoes as they prepare to take down the drug dealers once and for all at the prom. “Jenko,” Schmidt says, looking over at him. “Will you go to prom with me?” At the end of the film, Jenko jumps in front of Schmidt and takes a bullet in the shoulder. Schmidt leans over him on the ground and says sweetly, “I fucking cherish you.” After they are forced to take the mystery drug at school, they run to the bathroom, desperate to throw it up. Their attempt to purge each other, sticking their fingers in each other’s mouths and making loud choking groans, is kinky as hell.

Where 21 Jump Street succeeds is in applying new conventions to old genres. This is a reboot, after all. Nick Offerman makes a hilarious cameo as the gruff captain who assigns them to the undercover division. They are reviving an old undercover program from the ‘80s, he tells them — “The guys in charge of this stuff have no creativity or imagination. All they do now is recycle shit from the past and expect us all not to notice.” The filmmakers seem aware of how silly remaking 21 Jump Street is — they share the reservations that have made reviewers and audiences unable to report that the movie is good without employing the word “actually.” “Report to Jump Street,” Offerman tells Jenko and Schmidt meaningfully. “37 Jump Street… No that doesn’t sound right.”

Ice Cube portrays the head of Jump Street, Captain Dickman (in the tradition of Ice-T, a once terrifying gangster rapper playing a police officer. Rappers get irony.), who describes himself as the stereotypical angry black captain. “Embrace your stereotypes,” he advises the future undercover officers. In some ways, the film employs this advice, taking the path of least opposites-attract comedy resistance. There is the standard training montage as Jenko and Schmidt go through the police academy, with brainy Schmidt helping Jenko with his exams, and sporty Jenko helping Schmidt with the physical requirements. Each has what the other lacks — it is the movie’s prevailing cliché. At the end of the film, Jenko describes what he has learned about covalent bonds in chemistry class. “It’s when atoms share electrons,” he explains. “They both need what the other has, and that makes them stick together.”

In other cases, though, expected tropes are played with and subverted. Ellie Kemper plays the chemistry teacher who is instantly, ravenously taken with Jenko. Her deranged advances are scene stealing, but she figures into the movie’s plot almost not at all. It is as if she exists simply because a horny teacher is something that would exist in a high school movie — even if it’s a trope that the filmmakers ultimately decide not to make use of. Other characters are comically under-used — the other officers in the Jump Street division, played by Rye Rye and Dakota Johnson, are shown from time to time wearing cheerleading or marching band uniforms and bragging about the cases they’ve closed, seemingly as effective at their jobs as Schmidt and Jenko are inept. We get the feeling that there is any number of possible storylines, that a lot of the action is happening just off-screen.

It turns out that 21 Jump Street is ideal for the tongue-in-cheek remake, as it was both a high school drama and a police procedural — two genres that are ripe for parody. But the crime fighting in the film seems less influenced by 21 Jump Street than the maverick cops in Die Hard, a franchise that envisioned police officers who said the word “motherfucker” more than any had before. The main bad guys in 21 Jump Street are a gang of motorcycling drug dealers with face tattoos, and they aren’t really sources of comedy — they are straightforwardly terrifying. As the film takes a turn for the graphically violent toward the end, there is another layer of genre that the filmmakers are referring to and reckoning with: the action film.

These different genre elements mingle and combust. In the final shoot-out at a hotel room during the prom, two members of the motorcycle gang reveal themselves to be undercover DEA agents — played by Johnny Depp and his former 21 Jump Street cast-mate Peter DeLuise. Depp’s character yells at Schmidt and Jenko for ruining the DEA investigation. “We had no idea,” Schmidt apologizes. “You’re an amazing actor, man.” Schmidt and Jenko reveal that they’re in the Jump Street division, forging a camaraderie with Depp’s and DeLuise. “You know we were actually Jump Street?” Depp’s character asks. All this self-consciousness is too much and Depp and Grieco are both shot to death during this banter. It is an inevitable and perversely satisfying consequence of taking on so many influences: the features of one genre will not allow for the features of another.

At one point, Jenko and Schmidt are in a car chase with the drug dealers, and they shoot holes in an oil tanker and a truck carrying cans of propane. In both cases, they’re amazed that the truck does not blow up — ultimately it’s a collision with a chicken truck that causes the explosion. This dynamic, of the explosions they anticipate versus the one they actually get, speaks to the careful game of expectations. It’s a kind of gentle parody: if they are poking fun at the conventions of genre, it is as admiring as it is critical. “We’re like in the end of Die Hard right now, but it’s our actual life,” Schmidt says to Jenko after their final triumph over the bad guys. In the end, there’s something remarkably hopeful about 21 Jump Street — that a comedy can use the best parts of Die Hard and leave the rest. That high school can be something more than jocks and nerds, and a high school movie can be too.

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She tumbls here and twitters here. She last wrote in these pages about Anna Pavlova.

"The Chamber & the Valves" - Dry the River (mp3)

"Weights & Measures" - Dry the River (mp3)

In Which We Party These Limey Fucks Into The Ground

Get Him To A Shrink

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Get Him To The Greek

dir. Nicholas Stoller

Nowhere near as offensive or funny as Neel Shah's "How To Date A White Bitch" (coming to CBS this fall starring Arj Barker as Neel Shah and the chick from Gilmore Girls as some white bitch who loves picnics and probably museums and all that other bougie shit), Get Him To The Greek pushes the envelope a few times, mostly in the gay direction. I just assumed "The Greek" was Russell Brand's bookie and/or dealer/lover.

"I want you to fuck me as hard as you can." "What? In the face?" "Surprise me"

Like basically every (Apatow) movie, GHTTG is about an immature not very masculine guy apprenticing to learn how to put on the mantle/drag of masculinity. AKA how to bullshit, intensely. Jonah Hill's Aaron is a "girlfriend guy" like Paul Rudd's character from I Love You Man and basically all the dudes I'm friends with in real life.

What this means is that he respects women more or less, and has no real interest in putting up a front of bro-dog-ness, probably because because he looks like a cute cartoon walrus and knows that he will never do better than Doctor Peggy Olson. His worst quality is that he is passive about everything in his life but his fandom, which is why Diddy hooks him up with Russell Brand's magnetic manic pirate dream bro.

Jonah has grown into a modern day Rodney Dangerfield, flop sweating his way through strenuous situations. He gets no respect, and at the beginning of the movie he doesn't even try. Which is where Aldous Snow (Vince Vaughn/Jason Segel/Will Oldham) comes in to teach him how to act more like an entitled prick (i.e. "A MAN")

What Russell Brand performs is not traditional Don Draper style masculinity, but that other kind of more androgynous but equally insidious form known as Dandyism. Favored by Brits like Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, and Mick Jagger, and cornerstone of the indie rock frontman sensibility, heterosexual dandyism is about reveling in your own male sex appeal and objectifying yourself endlessly while subjugating women. 

Carla Gallo: Get Her In A Movie For Longer Than Ten Minutes, Please, C'mon Judd

The best parts of Get Him To The Greek end up being the women and Puff Daddy. Rose Byrne delights and astounds as a Cheryl Tweedy Coleish Brit Brit named Jackie Q, (whose ribald theme song written by The Bird And The Bee's Greg Kurstin and Inara George is one of the more memorable tunes). Carla Gallo is unrecognizable at first and then essentially hijacks the movie for a good ten minutes as a ridiculous drunk slut.

Anna Faris amuses and delights in Jody Hill's Observe & Report from last year

Ridiculous Drunk Sluts starring Anna Faris and Carla Gallo, coming soon to a theater near you in 3-D this fall. (REAL TALK: I will make this 4 SO CHEEP, studios! and spoiler alert all the jokes will involve jizz flying towards the audience and boners swinging around! Molly Lambert, for all your three-dimensional sex comedy pitch idea needs!)

Man how depressing has the press tour for Grown-Ups been? Alternate title for that movie: Menchildren Giving Up with a weird undercurrent of being so depressed about not giving a fuck about ANYTHING. We know Sandler knows better than this because he does other movies that are good on the side, but just doesn't care enough to make his own funny anymore? Like starting with Big Daddy he just stopped caring to try?

Meanwhile I monitor the twitter gender wars between exes M.I.A. and Diplo and Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas. Those are two different couples, but wouldn't it make a hilarious fishes out of water comedy about polyamory, technology, promise rings, gingercide, and truffle fries? He's Just Not That Into YouTube, a modern dubstep take on Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, UStreaming this summer! FUCK USTREAM PAY MESTREAM!

gay porn version title: "Get Him To Go Greek" alternate: "The Cable Guy"

Get Him To The Greek is really a movie about a grown up former fat kid facing down against a younger, fatter, version of himself. There is a lot of father/son weirdness involved as well and the gay sexual tension between the male leads is addressed more directly than in any other bromance thus far (although Pineapple Express and Superbad were both still gayer all in all). Whether or not it actually goes the whole Y Tu Mama Tambien is a matter of discussion for the extended DVD cut commentary track. 

"Step up in this mothafucker just a swangin' my hair"

The real question is how will we deal with womankind's newest problem: Do we want to fuck Russell Brand? Womanity is split down the middle. Half of us find him repulsive and the other half want to lick the weird cleft between his eyebrows. He's either Brando or the Splice baby depending who you ask. Straight men think he is repulsive.

Is this a subset of the gentleman-dirtbag complex? WHERE DO YOU FIT INTO THIS MATRIX? I waffled before seeing the movie but now I'm definitely in the camp that believes Russell Brand is hot. Weird but hot. You know, in a tall skinny androgyne British guy way. He has a Jarvisy quality about him that can't be denied.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording and star of the upcoming film Get Her To The Great Greek. She is on tumblr and twitter.

"Margoton" - Serafina Steer (mp3)

"Port Isaac" - Serafina Steer (mp3)

"How to Haunt a House Party" - Serafina Steer (mp3)

serafina steer website

photo by erika wall