Breaking the Line

Paul Rudd, Comedy Nerd

There are interviews where I go in with no agenda beyond wanting to have a conversation, and then there are those that center on questions I've been wanting to ask for years. Paul Rudd is one of the latter. We're close to the same age (he's a bit older), so I've followed his career from Clueless on, including the period just afterwards when he seemed to drift through a series of movies without making much of an impression beyond general amiability. Then, he got funny. His appearance in 2001's cult fave Wet Hot American Summer might have been a one-off, and I saw next to nothing of his recurring role on Friends, but after the 2004-5 double-shot of Anchorman and The 40 Year Old Virgin, it was clear he had some serious comic chops, and could hold his own as virtually the only traditional actor amidst a cast of professional comedians. Since then, he's done numerous projects with the folks from Stella and The State as well as a handful of Apatows, and made guest shots on half the shows on Adult Swim, from Robot Chicken to Tim and Eric. So when I put in for my Dinner for Schmucks interview, I knew just what I wanted to talk about.

As it turns out, Rudd is a self-professed "comedy nerd," as well-versed in cult BBC shows like Little Britain and The IT Crowd as the Marx brothers. Ands he discusses in our interview for Salon, shooting Schmucks was an aficionado's dream come true, an opportunity to work up close with stars risen (Steve Carrell) and rising (Zach Galifiankais) as well as some whom only hardcore comedy fans would get jazzed about (David Walliams and Chris O'Dowd, of the above-mentioned Beeb shows). The feeling of geeked-out excitement he describes at watching them invent material on the spot is the same I felt when watching the Mighty Boosh bat a stray idea back and forth, amplifying and enhancing it, in what felt like a distinct echo of the way they write the show.

As the interview's in Q&A form, pretty much our entire conversation is represented (minus some of my more circuitous questions), but I do want to draw your attention to a particular passage that I would have underlined more forcefully in a narrative feature. Rudd's talking about how great it was to shoot the climactic dinner scene in a room stuffed full of comedians he admires, and how in awe he was simply to be in their presence. And then he gets around to Jeff Dunham, the hugely successful but coastally unloved ventriloquist:

Jeff Dunham is, like, the biggest thing in the world. I'm thinking, "Wow. How many people would love to be where I'm at right now," watching Jeff Dunham go through his thought process on jokes for his puppets. All these different things in that dinner scene. What a cool thing to be in the room.

Isn't that the nicest way of saying, "I don't think he's funny in the slightest"? Given how effusive Rudd is on the subject of his other co-stars, the fact that he describes Dunham inventing "jokes for his puppets" pretty much says it all.

Of course, Rudd has had his down moments, too. To wit:

 

 

Life During Wartime's Todd Solondz: "I Can't Do the 'One for Them.'"

Love him, hate him, or a little of both, Todd Solondz knows how to get a rise out of audiences. With the exception of 1996's Welcome to the Dollhouse and his little-seen first feature, Fear, Anxiety & Depression, every movie he's made has been attacked for being cruel, miserabilist and generally misanthropic, even though such criticisms are often most revealing with regard to the people making them. I've been mixed, sometimes violently so, with regard to Solondz's career as a whole, but the pieces all fell into place with 2004's Palindromes, a barbed critique of identity politics and culture-war hypocrisy that used eight widely disparate actors to portray its central protagonist.

Solondz continues in that vein with Life During Wartime, a "quasi-sequel" to 1998's Happiness which uses the same characters but entirely and sometimes dramatically different actors. (Put it this way: Philip Seymour Hoffman's character is played by Omar from The Wire.) I talked to Solondz earlier this week about the surprising decision to revisit a film whose story no one would thought — or possibly wanted — to continue, and how he manages to survive as an independent, genuinely uncommercial filmmaker in the current climate. (Hint: teaching gig.) My Solondz feature runs in today's Los Angeles Times, but a few choice quotes didn't end up making the cut, such as:

"You have to make them comfortable so you can pull the rug out from under them. The movies I like, you want the filmmaker ahead of you, smarter than you. My idea was to pull them in and then throw them a curveball, so they'll say, 'Okay, let's just watch the movie.'" [On opening Wartime with what appears to be a restaging of the first scene of Happiness, until it goes in a radically different direction.]

"For all the ironies and ambiguities and controversies that may arise from anything I do, I wouldn’t make any of these movies if I didn’t have characters that engaged me on a meaningful level, on an emotional level as well as on an intellectual level. Without that emotional foundation, I wouldn’t be able to be interested enough to pursue it further."

"I could do episodics, but even The Sopranos, it’s very fine work — I’m not interested. It’s already done. The interesting stuff has already been designed and created, so i’m just a hired hand to execute something. What do I care? As a viewer, it’s very engaging. But that has no interest for me. That’s how a lot of people get by. But it’s so uninteresting to me. Working on Wall Street would be more interesting for me, where I would really be learning stuff."

"My job is to manipulate, but to manipulate in such a way that you don’t know that you’re being manipulated.i can’t see how any filmmaker is being honest if he says he’s not trying to manipulate. What does a director mean? You’re directing the audience where to look, what not to look at, what to pay attention to. That’s what your job is. When an audience complains, 'It was so manipulative,' what they’re saying is, “We see what you’re doing.” You have to be invisible. You have to be smart. Be clever about it."

Bonus tracks: My 2005 review of Palindromes, and accompanying interview with Solondz.

 

The Kids Are All Right: Family, Redefined

This week in movies that opened this week, I review Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, in which the teenage children of a middle-aged lesbian couple go looking for their sperm donor. Wackiness, or at least discomfort so profound you have no choice but to laugh, ensues. The film, which Cholodenko co-wrote with Stuart Blumberg, deals deftly and knowingly with the issues of same-sex parenting and long-term relationships, essentially arguing that a lesbian marriage is like any other, except when it's not. There's not much more to it than that, except for the fact that the movie is ferociously well-acted, especially by Julianne Moore and Annette Bening, who infuse their relationship with a profound sense of shared history. Their marriage feels lived-in in a way few screen couplings do.

Also: shorter takes on Fritz Lang's Metropolis, now restored to (nearly) its full length for the first time in more than 80 years, and Victor Nunez's Spoken Word.

Bonus tracks: My 2008 profile of Moore from the Los Angeles Times, and a longer review of Metropolis' 2002 rerelease, which contains the prophetic line, "No one will ever see Metropolis as Lang originally completed it." Whoops.

Asked and Answered: Inception Redux, Redux

 
You'd think after nearly 8,000 words on the subject of Inception, I'd have nothing left to say. And you'd probably be right. But when my friends at the A.V. Club asked me to join them for a podcast on the subject, I happily accepted. Scott Tobias and Tasha Robinson brought typically keen insight and a healthy skepticism to the discussion, and I brought in the fascinating interpretation of the film posted by Bilge Ebiri on New York magazine's Vulture blog. Check them out, and feel free to skip over my bits; I do. Now that I've, as Moe Fuzz would say, completed my trilogy, that should be well and truly that.

Appointment in Almeria: Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy

Whatever gripes I might have about my chosen profession, I generally keep schtum on the subject, since I figure that bitching about a job that consists in no small part of watching movies — and in an environment where you can actually find a projectionist to alert if the image slips out of focus — is not likely to meet with a great deal of sympathy. But one regret I'm happy to air in public is the extent to which keeping up with the constant flood of assignments prevents me from researching films. The main thing that gets in the way of watching movies is watching movies.

That's why I leapt at the chance to pen an installment of the A.V. Club's recurring feature "Better Late Than Never" on Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the third part of Leone's ad hoc Dollars trilogy, is one of my very favorites, particularly for its final scene, in which the camera itself seems to be overtaken by the intensity of the characters' lust for gold. There's a kind of divine madness in the way Leone stretches out the bandit Tuco's frantic search beyond all reason, going faster and faster until the screen is merely a blur. You could see it as simply excessive, but there's no question of the bone-deep conviction underlying Leone's dizzying display.

Perhaps I was waiting for the trilogy's first two chapters to turn up on the big screen nearby, since the scale of Leone's imposing Techniscope frames has to be experienced in the theater to have its full impact. Perhaps I feared that The Good, The Bad's precursors couldn't possibly live up to its example. Or maybe I just never got around to it. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that For a Few Dollars More is nearly the equal of its successor, and that Fistful, while markedly inferior, still has its ample charms.

For more on Leone, here's a review of the trilogy's new Blu-Ray set I did for the Los Angeles Times back in May, in which I take issue with the fact that all extant versions of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly feature the inferior "extended cut," which in my view does little for the movie except make it longer. My onstage interview with Eli Wallach from a few years back seems to be missing from the Philadelphia Free Library's site, but trust me when I say it was a thrill.

Ain't That a Kick in the Head: Inception Explained

"Wait — whose subconscious we going into now?" Ellen Page's question, posed at a particularly dense moment in Christopher Nolan's twisty dream thriller Inception, serves an escape value for viewers whose brains have been tied in knots. Nolan's movie is not hard to follow — he establishes clear goals for his characters, and charts their progress diligently — but understanding how they get from A to B takes some doing. In an article for Salon, I go over the movie's plot in exhaustive (or, if you like, exhausting) detail, and try to mop up some of the questions Nolan leaves tantalizingly unanswered, "Was it all a dream?" foremost among them. Pose further questions in the comments, here or there, and I'll do my best to come up with an answer.

Inception: Christopher Nolan's Russian-Doll Worlds

So there's this movie coming out, and... Jesus Christ, calm down, people. I know The Dark Knight was wicked cool and whatnot (unless you like your action scenes spatially coherent), but the prerelease hoopla for Inception has been a wee bit out of hand. My review is up now, and I'll be further exploring the movie's questions, answered and otherwise, in a Salon piece early next week. In sum, I like the movie better than anything Christopher Nolan's done since Memento, while having similar doubts about it, which to say that while keeping track of its intricate structure is delightfully diverting brainwork, I'm not sure there's much left to ponder after you've sorted it all out. It'll take a second viewing to know for sure, so consider the first-wave review as a down-payment on thoughts to come.

Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley: A Fiction Romantic Comes Clean

 
It's taken a while for this one to get to the head of various queues, so the tour that was the occasion for my talk with Buzzcocks' Pete Shelley has come to an end. (My review of the gig at Philadelphia's Trocadero provides a little context.) But while the chance to see the band — original members Shelley and Steve Diggle, plus a relatively new rhythm section — perform their classic 1978 albums Love Bites and Another Music in a DIfferent Kitchen has passed, the recent U.S. issues of their greatly expanded rereleases are still yours for the buying. (Note: "1978 albums" is not a typo; the two were recorded within a year of each other and released five months apart.) In an interview for the A.V. Club, Shelley and I talked about Buzzcocks' place as a punk band whose songs focused on the everyday, touching on timeless truths about the complications of love and sexuality, and what it's like to sing about being a hormone-addled teenager when you're in your mid-50s. 

Strange Bedfellows: Danger After Dark Makes Nice With Philadelphia's Queer Film Fest

If not necessarily better, things in the Philadelphia film festival community have sure been getting interesting of late. After the messy divorce between the Philadelphia Film Festival and the Philadelphia Film Society, the founding and subsequent financial failure of the new Cinefest (run by the old PFF's programmers and occupying its April dates) and the "new" PFF's relocation to mid-October, a new landscape has gradually come into focus. Last week, IFC's Ryan Werner and Magnolia's Tom Quinn were named as the PFF's new programmers, a move that adds a welcome dose of professionalism while taking a substantial chunk out of the festival's local identity. (They've previously programmed at Woodstock and Nantucket, a roster of idyllic vacation spots that made Philadelphia the only logical next step.) Given Werner and Quinn's day jobs, conflicts of interests are sure to surface, but their collective taste is irreproachable. It should be fascinating to see how things shake out over the next few months. 

Cinefest is still dead, or at least slumbering heavily, but former PFF/Cinefest programmer Ray Murray, who doubles as the head of local chain TLA Video, is pressing onward with QFest, the new and welcome name for the former Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival. Before Murray was handed the reins to the foundering PFF, which had been rudderless since the ouster of founder Linda Blackaby, PIGLIFF had been a for-profit operation, which means that even though it's now presented under the aegis of the newly formed Philadelphia Cinema Alliance, it should be no problem keeping QFest out of the red.

The orphan in this alphabet soup is the (former) PFF's popular midnight movies series Danger After Dark, founded by programmer Travis Crawford. Or I should say was, since this year Danger After Dark and QFest will run side-by-side. I'd call it a festival within a festival, except I doubt too many gym queens are going to be dashing from the the latest boy-meets-boy rom-com to catch Big Tits Zombie 3-D.

Danger After Dark kicks off this evening with Giorgos Lanthimos' unsettling Dogtooth, in which Greek parents raise their children to adulthood without ever allowing them contact with the outside world. My review is in this week's City Paper, along with my take on another DAD highlight, Gaspar Noé's phantamagoric mindfuck Enter the Void. (I'm not particularly high onNightwatch director Ole Bornedal's Straw Dogs retreat Deliver Us From Evil, but I say a few words on that as well.) Beginning with its stroboscopic credits, Noé's movie is an imagistic ordeal that acts like a jumper cable hooked to your optic nerve. If that sounds even remotely like something you might enjoy, you owe it to yourself to see this one on the big screen.

One movie I couldn't review, owing to a series of bum screeners, is Simon Rumley's Red White & Blue, but the 43 minutes and change I saw was enough to convince me the movie has greatness in its grasp. Gorgeously shot and elliptically edited, its first third details the evolving relationship between prostitute Amanda Fuller and neighboring creepazoid Noah Taylor (whose appearance crosses one name off my mental "What happened to...?" list). Then the story shifts to suburban punk rocker Marc Senter, which is about the point at which my DVD goes kablooey, but it's pretty clear there's a shoe waiting to drop, and substantial quantities of blood will be spilled when it does. Chances are good I'll be there for the finish on the 17th, along with the rest of you sickos — and Fuller, who is scheduled to attend the screening.

Winnebago Man Jack Rebney on Anger Management and Viral-Video Notoriety

For all the times we've clicked on a link to a video of some poor sap making an ass of him- or herself, we rarely spare a thought for the real person behind the clip. As one of the subjects in Ben Steinbauer's documentary Winnebago Man says, that's not only not the point but contrary to it; you can hardly yuk it up while contemplating the humiliation of having your worst moments broadcast to the world.

Chances are, you've seen Jack Rebney, sometimes known as "the angriest man in the world," whose apoplectic outtakes from a Winnebago infomercial were a viral-video mainstay when that still meant trading nth-generation dubs of bootleg videotapes, their images smeared past the point of recognition. But until the advent of YouTube, Rebney had no idea he was famous, and it's not a notion he took to warmly. Steinbauer tracked him down on top of a mountain in California and lured him back to civilization, where Rebney confronts the found-footage aficionados who have been committing his angry tirades to memory for decades. The movie stops short of probing the more interesting ideas it raises, but I get into some of them in this Salon article, for which I had the great pleasure of interviewing the Winnebago Man himself. Hearing Rebney's sonorous profanity pouring out of my phone is not an experience I'll soon forget.