grouchomarxist

I've thought long and hard before saying what I'm about to say. I've searched my memory for something to disprove it, but I can't think of anything. Here it is: The Weather Man, the new film directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Steve Conrad, is the most relentlessly pessimistic mainstream American film that I have ever seen. It seems to be telling us that over time you become a shell of the person you once were and a pathetic, ever decreasing fraction of the person you one day hoped to be. You will squander potential and become incapable of giving meaningful love to anyone that you care about. This doesn't happen as a result of some huge disaster or tragic mistake, no, this happens as a result of hundreds of minuscule failures every day. As you might imagine, this is excruciating to watch. But in creating one of bleakest portraits of contemporary American life you will ever see, Gore Verbinski also creates a film that is shockingly humane, funny, and beautiful.

Nicolas Cage, who I don't always like, gives a fantastic performance as David Spritz, a Chicago TV weather man with no degree in meteorology. The thing that makes him great in The Weather Man is that he consistently plays the part in earnest. There's plenty of opportunities to ham it up or play it for laughs, especially because David acts like such an asshole so much of the time, but Cage never falls into those traps. One feels at every turn, no matter how disgraceful his behavior, that he's just a guy trying to do what seems right to him in that moment. At one point he drops his daughter off at his ex-wife's house. When his ex-wife, played with terrific subtly by Hope Davis, remains outside for a moment he suddenly decides to throw a snowball at her, which hits her in the face and cracks the lens of her glasses. Rather than playing it like it's funny, which it is, Cage seems like he's making a sincere attempt to connect with his former wife in any way he can.

I wish with great passion that this film was truly great, but unfortunately it's just inches short. Nine out of ten times Verbinski hits the mark. From the very first shot he creates a perfectly executed world of an ice bound Chicago during the winter months. His most impressive feat though is managing to craft a film that is in some ways highly stylized, yet instinctually feels like the human experience. He has a wonderful and surprising sense of composition. One finds the characters in disconcertingly angular frames with vast expanses of empty space above their heads. In tandem with this he uses a fantastically chilly color scheme throughout. He also triumphs in his insistently measured pacing. In contrast with such a harsh statement about life, the pacing serves to lend the film a strange gentleness that allows for us to feel the characters are truly human. The pacing is absolutely vital and absolutely brave in a Hollywood film. Along with the performances, it makes one feel that the characters are being not being tortured out of gleeful spite on the part of the filmmakers, but out of profound empathy and understanding of our shared human weaknesses.

Verbinski's trouble comes in just a few isolated areas; nevertheless they are important and significantly damage the film as a whole. The ugliest problem is a woefully ill-advised quasi dream sequence in which Nicholas Cage sees himself happy and well adjusted as the grand marshal of a parade. The whole thing is presented as if his hotel room window is like a TV on which he is seeing himself. It introduces us to no useful ideas and is an immensely distracting stylistic departure. I'm really puzzled by its inclusion in a movie that on the whole demonstrates a lot of restraint. Another issue is the handling of Cage's son, who gets himself involved in a weird molestation situation with his drug counselor. This subplot is painted in the broadest of strokes, rather than with the painstaking specificity one finds elsewhere. Every time we return to the plot with the son the film begins to feel bogged down and uncharacteristically unsure of itself. Some of the blame for this surely must be shared with Steve Conrad, the mostly solid writer of the film. One wonders why Conrad and Verbinski shy away from the unbending frankness they are generally so willing to dole out. There are a few other troubling mistakes, the blame for which I have to rest on both of their shoulders. Most notably the film relies too heavily on voice-over. While some of it works very well and all of it is delivered with sincerity from Cage, there is at least twice as much as is necessary. Similarly, there are a couple flashbacks that work, but just as many that are unneeded. Also, the handling of Cage's father, who is played with solemn dignity by Michael Cane, rings a little false. He is written as a noble and stalwart man devoid of any flaws not only in Cage's mind, but apparently in real life as well. On the whole this actually works much better than it should, but I can't help but feel that there's a note missing.

The aforementioned issues aside, The Weather Man is a rare achievement and one of my favorite films of the year. It is so honest and so bleak that I can't believe that a major studio let it get made. In an industry where schlock and melodrama are passed off as great statements about us as humans The Weather Man is monumentally refreshing. I have nothing but respect for Verbinski and Conrad for having the nerve to make a film that on the one hand is crushingly negative, but on the other endlessly humane.

I just saw Princess Raccoon at the Asian Film Festival in New York. The gentleman who introduced the film congratulated the audience on their fine taste. "You could be at Herbie: Fully Loaded," he said with a smug smile, "but instead you're here to watch Seijun Suzuki's Princess Raccoon." The audience applauded and cheered. Well let me tell you, I would have rather watched Herbie: Fully Loaded twice in a row. Princess Raccoon, an allegedly whimsical musical based on Japanese folklore, easily qualifies for one of the ten worst films that I have ever seen. It is so wretched that its wretchedness actually makes me dislike other Seijun Suzuki films, which is quite a feat.

There is such a vast expanse of things wrong with Princess Raccoon that I hardly know where to start. Perhaps its worst faults are being both aggressively unintelligible and mind bogglingly monotonous. If the reels got mixed up or if half of them got lost in shipping the audience would not know the difference. If you don't believe me I dare you to steal a print and have someone run the reels in random order. If you can tell me which one goes where I will give you every penny I have.

The first third of the film features a mishmash of scenes, songs (including a cringe inducing rap number), and images that don't seem to be related in any way at all. Horribly integrated computer animation is thrown into the bargain, adding yet another brick to the immense, and rapidly growing, wall of incomprehensibility. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the writer wrote down any Japanese folklore that came to mind of on a bunch of note cards, stacked them up, shuffled them, dealt the cards out on a table, and then wrote the script according to their order.

About thirty-five minutes into the film some semblance of a plot arrives on the scene. Something about a shape-shifting raccoon princess (in human form) and a regular human falling in love. I hoped that this was be a portent of the film being something other than a series of perplexing scenes, but no such luck. The film continues in the same absolutely baffling manner. I wish I had gotten out then, but I was trapped in the middle of a narrow row. In retrospect it would have been worth the awkward scene.

I'm exhausted just thinking about the last couple of reels. I spent every moment hoping and praying that it would be over. Every big dolly move, swell in music, or scene that looked remotely like it was concluding things renewed my hopes that the credits were about to roll. For agonizing minute after agonizing minute it went on. And on and on and on. Finally, after dozens of false alarms, it cut to what I was sure must be an abstract pattern over which credits were about to appear. Then, in defiance of all reason, it cut to another scene. How could I forget? The completely unrelated subplot concerning a ninja being captured, urinated on, and boiled in a soup hadn't been wrapped up yet.

I'm never going to get those 111 minutes back, but you can spare yourself the pain. Unless you want to taint your memory or future enjoyment of great Seijun Suzuki films like Youth of the Beast and Tokyo Drifter do not see Princess Raccoon. I would have rather spent my time vomiting.

I cannot understand why this film has so many positive reviews. IMDB users and most professional critics seem to agree that the film is brilliant. This makes me really upset. The filmmaking at work in The Cooler made me angry. Angry. It was as if the film was entering into some sort of contest in which the goal was to use every lame camera trick that has ever existed. You name it and The Cooler has it. Dolly zooms, inanimate object POV shots, excessive slow motion, excessive fast motion, shots of troubled people reflected in a shattered mirror, those shots from under the soles of someone's shoes where the camera is under a glass plate to get the shot even though the character is walking on a regular floor. Or how about X-RAY VISION?? No, I'm not kidding, to show us that someone is playing with loaded dice Mr. Kramer uses x-ray vision.

All of the above is unsurprising though when you look at the script. WHICH IS HORRID. The script is offensive to human existence. It distills complex human emotion into easy generalizations. The characters are not people. They don't feel like people. They don't act like people. They are pawns for whatever plot point is supposed to come next. In addition to that, the script treats the audience like we're idiots. Take this for example. Macy drinks coffee in the film. He likes cream in his coffee. Sounds like a great set-up for something doesn't it? Sounds like an opportunity to paint some broad strokes doesn't it? Well you can bet that Wayne Kramer doesn't miss out. Every time that Macy's character is down on his luck, and I mean every single time, there isn't any cream. And when things are looking up there's tons of cream to be had. Oh!! I get it! Right! When there's cream it's like-- The cream and the story-- The cream is like his luck and-- I get it. Wow. Mr. Kramer, how dumb do you think we are? Do we need to be instructed at every turn on how we ought to feel? I mean if it was just the creamer I'd let it slide, but it's the whole movie. The whole thing is like that. The movie acts the whole time like you don't get whatever is going on and you need at least one or two or three or four or five or six "clever" tricks in order for you, apparently a moron, to understand.

Good lord. This film is making me angrier by the second. I haven't even mentioned the acting yet. The cast can be divided into two categories: wasted talent and awful. In the wasted talent section is William H. Macy along with Alec Baldwin and Maria Bello. In the awful section is almost everybody else. Shawn Hatosy is the prime culprit. His performance seems like an SNL impression of a punk kid on The Sopranos. Oh, and just so you know he's a real bad seed, he blasts some kind of, you know, scary hardcore metal in his car. Yeah! He MUST be trouble. You know those punk kids and their loud rock and roll and their hoodlum tendencies, right? Right? Get it? Get it? And let's not forget that tattoo on his neck. Oooooo. Wow. He must be REALLY bad.

Speaking of rock and roll reminds me of music, which reminds me of the extremely intrusive score. It's noirish, saxophone heavy jazz that comes in every two seconds in order to "set the mood". Listen Mr. Kramer, we're not that stupid. We don't need a blaring score imposed on us virtually nonstop to keep us up to date on the "mood".

And The Cooler isn't even original. This film pilfers the Philip Seymour Hoffman scene directly from Hard Eight. Only it makes the scene awful. It takes a subtle, layered, human, and funny, really funny, scene and makes it broad, unfunny, and inhuman. That's what this movie is: Inhuman. It robs people of their humanity and turns them into whatever is easy to understand. Humans are not easy to understand, but this film is. It's like someone watched Hard Eight and took everything good about it and made it awful. Awful. I hate this movie.

I saw The Piano Teacher about a week ago and I cannot say how much I liked it. The performances are amazing. The simple camera-work and long takes are perfect. The shocking material in the film is just as beautiful as it is repulsive. Even though I saw it a week ago I still feel myself reacting to it. Absolutely my favorite film of the last year. One of the most impactful films I have ever seen.