In Which The House Is A Mess But It's Ours

Material Boy

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Family Man

dir. Brett Ratner

125 minutes

Great directors make bad movies all the time, so why shouldn't bad directors occasionally make a good movie by virtue of simple chance? So it was with Brett Ratner's 2000 effort The Family Man, a masterful Christmas movie jam-packed with every cliché Brett and his casting director could think of.

"I spent all our money on hohos and houses in malaysia"This is not to say that The Family Man is anywhere near perfect. In a genre where Jon Favreau and Will Ferrell's abortion of a movie gets replayed more often than another flat Charlie Brown Christmas special, The Family Man actually has something to say about Jesus' big day. (Christ that kid is such a bummer; he's the male equivalent of the Jersey Shore grenade.)

someone cast this guy in a buddy comedy with the situationThe first problem with The Family Man is that the protagonist is named Jack and his love interest is named Kate. Although Lost had yet to be created, a little foresight would have been appropriate. Likewise with Tom Brady's two sons by different mothers that he inconceivably named Jack and Ben, this name game is downright unsettling. (Just as in Lost, Ben is the one who is half-Brazilian.)

"which super bowl do you think dad played better in?"Originally titled The Luck of the Dreidel, The Family Man isn't the first Christmas movie to be written and directed by Jews, and it damn sure won't be the last. The chosen people generally craft the most moving eulogies for Christmas because they fundamentally understand longing for an event that they will never be able to fully enjoy.

"do you really want to be a hitman for the rest of your life?" "wrong movie"Jack Campbell is portrayed by Nicolas Cage somewhere in between the follically relevant days of Moonstruck and the I-hope-I-don't-get-my-wig-stuck-in-Mount-Rushmore madness of National Treasure. Campbell is a greed obsessed automaton who gave up his one chance at true love when he decided to go to London for business school and leave Kate (Tea Leoni) behind. This was ostensibly the right decision until an angel played by Don Cheadle tells him it's not and magically transports him to a new reality. The magical Bagger Vance-Jar Jar Binks-Yoda African-American character is profoundly embarassing and yet somehow reassuring.

"who do you work for?" "stringer bell, duh"There's a lot of important analysis to be done by either Deleuze or Foucault depending on if one of them is still alive about what all this means, but that analysis will be as little remembered the hackeyed It's A Wonderful Life-esque setup. It's what follows that makes The Family Man more than the sum of its Jews. Jack Campbell is magically transported to an alternate reality where he never visited that sinful financial capital of England. Instead his world has been completely flipped upside down! He lives - gasp - one hour away in New Jersey!

Unlike Jack from Lost, new Jack is a dedicated husband and father to two children...and it turns out it's not all that great to marry your first love. Really wish someone had screened this movie for Tiger Woods. The Family Man gets a lot of mileage about how horrifying suburban living is. For example, it turns out the other Jack Campbell's best friend in suburbia is Jeremy Piven. (That fellow is known for being so country.) For his part, Piven was probably bouncing powder by the baleful during this shoot, because he reprises his entire performance from Grosse Pointe Blank verbatim.

"and then your limo outruns the apocalypse!"Instead of being a high-powered Wall Street executive, Campbell is a car salesman for his father-in-law's dealership. He runs the entire dealership, and from the number of employees and customers we observe, he seems to be doing quite well for himself. Yes, Hollywood's idea of a slumming it is a car salesman who probably takes in seven figures. Considering that by all accounts Cage was chalked up and buying homes in every time zone during this period, we can't blame him for not getting the details right. Had we known future screenings of this movie would be this ironic, The Family Man would have probably deserved an Oscar nomination.

the less money you have, the better sex is because you can't afford birth controlThat's because Ratner gets everything else right. The comic timing is brilliant and the script more than keeps up; Cage's winsome desperation is ideal for this role of a dick we learn to feel empathy for. Jack Campbell tries to dig himself out from his poverty-stricken, two car garage existence so he can give his family all the things he can't when he's selling marked-up foreign automobiles at exorbitant prices. Then, unexpectedly, he starts to enjoy his new life.

Jack wows his real boss in an alternate universe with his heady ideas about the financial industry. This juxtaposition is made all the more enjoyable now that we know that executive would kill for a successful car dealership like former NFL player Brad Benson runs in New Jersey. It's truly an amazing feat for Hollywood to misunderstand the world this badly. But hey, the best movies are based on tweaking the most common fantasies. Campbell's remorseless Howard-Roark style doesn't look like very much fun, but neither does a family you never have enough time to see and a wife who's too tired to fulfill you sexually.

What's unique about The Family Man is that it destroys both fantasies. The message of Grosse Pointe Blank, The Family Man, and virtually every other project Jeremy Piven has appeared in is that too much work makes Jack a dull boy, but also that the work sets you free. Both films deserve to be remade starring Ryan Reynolds and Anna Faris, and both films are ambiguous about what sort of life is actually best. When white males allow stereotypical ethnic traits into their world (anti-Christmas moneylending, African-American mysticism) they learn what will allow them to improve their old world, not survive in a new one.

When Jack Campbell snaps back to the 'real' world, he finds that in his absence Kate also became a financially-obsessed automaton, and she changed her name to Mary Rambin and adjusted her date of birth by ten years. One semester abroad can really change people. He finds her as she's moving her entire business to Paris, and instead of just feeling happy for her, he decides to reruin her life. No wonder Mary is so screwed up.

Christmas is a holiday with flaws. The build-up is extensive, costly, and aesthetically gauche, and the hype never fully pays off. Christmas Eve is all chills and anticipation and Christmas morning is a flat rejoinder to the excitement, like pressing on a soap bubble and watching it pop. We can never enjoy life as much as we'd like to, because it's more important to find what's wrong with our lives and fix it than to take it as it comes.

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

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In Which We Really Wish We Didn't Know

Albino Aliens Destroy My World

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Nicolas Cage's receding hairline has contributed to some of the finest discoveries of our time. Despite moving to the equator of his scalp in its latest mission — the Alex Proyas retarded thriller Knowing — it is more perceptive than ever. Knowing ascended to the top of the box office because Hollywood literally could not be troubled to make anything more challenging than an alien movie with this bald fuck for a weekend in March.

It is a challenge to make a movie this stupid; it is an almost impossible feat without some kind of help from the government or Roger Corman. Cage's character is a professor of astrophysics at MIT. In one of the film's early scenes, he's teaching his class. Whoever wrote this scene has to not only be completely unaware of what astrophysics is, he also has to never have attended a single college-level class in anything. As such, we can only assume this film was written by Jerry Bruckheimer and/or a sleeping german shepherd.

In Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, we witnessed an unprecendented series of events. An otherwise intelligent person created a feature-length movie that absolutely no one could enjoy without the benefit of LSD. Even under the influence, The Fountain almost exploded of its own stupidity. This was a movie so painful the studio that released it dumped the idea of a director commentary.

Here the achievement is far more impressive. The creators of this film must never have even seen anything more complex than a music video. They must never have fathered a child. They probably did watch The Fountain.

John Koestler (Cage) has fathered a child, although we know he is not really the father of a child. He finds out the location of three coming transportation accidents. Like any good father, he heads right toward them. He's a single father, mind you.

The trouble began when a precog named Lucinda Embry started hearing whispers in her head. Despite the fact that major wars on this planet have taken lives in the hundreds of thousands, a bunch of aliens have taken notice of small house fires as a precursor to the apocalypse.

The aliens manifest themselves on Earth first in a car, where they hand Cage's son a smooth stone that we later come to find out lacks any meaning at all. The aliens are albinos, perhaps in tribute to the albinos of Africa, many of whom were slaughtered for their body parts about which there existed a number of superstitutions.

The aliens desire Cage's son to restart humanity on another world. It's unclear why exactly humans are valued as a sentient species. Maybe it's because of the ease with which they perish in tragic accidents.

After realizing you paid for a film this stupid, you look for someone to blame. Much like Bernie Madoff is taking their entire responsibility for our economy's collapse, Steven Spielberg must be held responsible for this raging piece of shit. Without him, would we really have to endure interminably long movies that justify their existence by the alien spacecraft descending to Earth at the end?

We can also hold Francis Ford Coppola to be somewhat at fault. Without his tacit endorsement of his young nephew Nicolas Coppola's career, we wouldn't have to deal with this film or the prospect of a third National Treasure sequel.

And in fact those movies, searchingly obtuse though they may be, have the genial fun that is missing from the pretend seriousness of this dreary film. In fact Knowing is a secret laugh riot. We watched the film with a drunk black guy who was keen to comment on the hair on Nicolas Cage's son's balls. Fortunately the death of everyone on the planet was loud enough to drown him out by the end.

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

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