Hot Fuzz

November 11, 2018November 7, 2018 / andrewmisk / 1 Comment

Hot Fuzz (2007)

Dir. Edgar Wright

Written by: Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg

Starring: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Dalton

I can remember the anticipation surrounding the second installment in Edgar Wright’s “Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy” (though I doubt it was referred to as such at the time) leading up to its release in the spring of 2007. The trilogy’s first entry, Shaun of the Dead had been a cult hit upon its release, and it had become a favorite of mine in the few years after its release. Of course my friends and I were eagerly awaiting the sequel, and Hot Fuzz definitely did not disappoint. The comedic team of Wright, Pegg, and Frost shift their sense of humor and aesthetic from the horror genre to the action blockbuster and they don’t miss a beat in the process. I don’t think I felt this way at the time, but I think that they managed to improve upon Shaun of the Dead in every way with Hot Fuzz. The film is bigger in every way, and Wright starts to really come into his own as a visual filmmaker as he attempts to ape the style of Michael Mann and Michael Bay. I love all three movies that make up this oddly-named trilogy, but Hot Fuzz has always been the standout for me. Despite that fact, it’s the entry in the trilogy that I had watched least recently, probably not having watched it since shortly after I purchased The World’s End. As always, it didn’t disappoint.

In Hot Fuzz, hotshot cop Nicholas Angel (Pegg) finds himself transferred from the London police department to Sandford, a sleepy, rural town in the English countryside. Upon arrival, Angel has trouble adjusting to the slower pace and lack of crime in Sandford, as well as to his slovenly, unskilled partner, Danny (Frost). The town elders, however, including Danny’s father, Frank (Broadbent), who is the chief of police, and the local grocer, Simon Skinner (Dalton), hope to keep Sandford quiet and crime free to boost their image in the upcoming Village of the Year competition. When villagers start dying in a series of unlikely freak accidents, Angel begins an investigation that threatens to damage Sandford’s reputation and standing in the competition. He and Danny continue their inquest into the deaths, despite the protestations of the village elders, and discover a secret that Sandford has been keeping under wraps for generations.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s difficult to pick a favorite out of the three films that make up Wright, Pegg, and Frost’s feature film collaborations. All three films feature a perfect blend of cheeky parody and reverent homage to the genres that they’re working in. All three films feature perfect casting, with a collection of characters that are both outlandish and utterly relatable. And, finally, all three films use the shield of adherence to genre sensibilities as a Trojan Horse for a heartfelt story about the development of a relationship, whether it be romantic or platonic. Shaun of the Dead laid out the template for the Cornetto Trilogy, and established its creative brain trust to worldwide audiences. The World’s End felt like something of a victory lap, with the whole gang getting back together for one last romp through the familiar landscape that had been established in the first two films. Hot Fuzz, the second entry in the trilogy, stands head and shoulders above those two as the crystallization of the Cornetto aesthetic and as Wright’s ultimate parodic achievement. It broadens the scope of Shaun of the Dead while maintaining its independent feel, and stops short of pulling out all of the narrative stops that The World’s End is determined to barrel right through. It introduces a more complex story with better and more interesting supporting characters that Shaun of the Dead, and the blockbuster milieu in which the film operates gives Wright full license to start branching out and developing as a visual filmmaker.

When I first saw Shaun of the Dead in 2005, it seemed like a perfect answer to the glut of studio comedies that had been clogging American theaters during the beginning of that decade. While I enjoyed, and still rather do enjoy, the comedic stylings of Judd Apatow, Vince Vaughn, Owen Wilson, and Will Ferrell, I was quickly starting to age out of their more sophomoric movies, and discovering the offbeat humor of Pegg, Frost, and Wright felt like a breath of fresh air. That sense was only expanded upon when I saw Hot Fuzz, with the film packing in more memorable supporting roles for great British character actors, more reverent, humorous genre send ups, and more perfectly-timed asides and one-liners. Pegg playing against type as the uber-competent Nick Angel is a great wrinkle in Hot Fuzz that adds to its comedy quotient. Frost expands on his fairly dim everyman best friend character from Shaun of the Dead, ably providing both physical comedy and a broad foil for Pegg’s frustrated cop. The scenario that the three dreamed up for Hot Fuzz, involving a shadowy cabal of village elders who have been engaging in a decades-long covert war against petty crime in Sandford, is more involved and audacious than the simplistic narrative pleasures afforded by Shaun of the Dead. It’s a sublimely absurd conspiracy that’s played totally straight throughout the film, and the principal antagonists being a malicious group of Boomers dead set on maintaining their own standards of proper decorum rather than a gang or a drug cartel is a perfect send up that turns a foundational trope of the action genre on its head.

November will have to be a month of shorter posts by necessity for me, so I won’t get too much more involved with Hot Fuzz. It’s a movie that I think most people should have seen by this point because, while it hasn’t necessarily gained the cult following of its predecessor, it was more widely successful upon its release than the other two entries in the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy. That success is well deserved and reflective of Hot Fuzz’s impact on a big screen. It deserves a spot in the canon of early 21^st century comedies, but it is every bit as entertaining and valuable as a meta-action movie. Wright, Frost, and Pegg have created a love letter to the genre more compelling, more thoughtful, and more nuanced than any Expendables sequel could hope to be. Though I haven’t had a cable subscription in about five years, I wonder if Hot Fuzz has ascended to the once-vaunted status of TBS weekend afternoon movie. I’ve written before about the existence of these movies in the 1990s and early 2000s, when I was a pre-teen and teen, that aired on cable on the weekends and gained an iconic, populist-classic status, despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of prestige trappings. Popcorn fare like Point Break, Con Air, Bad Boys, movies that if they were on, I’d more than likely just stop and watch through until the end if I didn’t have anything else to do. I think that Hot Fuzz is a better movie than all of those, but it would be in perfect company among their ilk, because those are exactly the movies that Hot Fuzz is celebrating. It’s a perfect, fun, funny, movie that can be just as satisfying for a mid-afternoon partial watch as it is to dissect for a tenth time, picking up on clues to the film’s central mystery and sly jokes along the way.

Holy Motors

November 4, 2018October 30, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Holy Motors (2012)

Dir. Leos Carax

Written by: Leos Carax

Starring: Denis Lavant, Edith Scob

I’ll never forget my initial attempts to see Holy Motors, a movie that I knew nothing about from a French filmmaker whom I’d never heard of, at the Three Rivers Film Festival in 2012. The film festival, organized by Pittsburgh Filmmakers every October, is an event that I look forward to as an opportunity to catch up on the year’s small indies, arthouse releases, and foreign films that didn’t find their way into wide distribution. I often go into these movies blind, choosing from the three dozen odd films based mostly on their paragraph-long blurbs on the Pittsburgh Filmmakers’ website, and this was certainly the case with Holy Motors. The promotional image chosen, of Edith Scob’s Celine donning an unsettling mask meant to be a direct homage to the French horror classic Eyes Without A Face, was enough to sell me on Holy Motors as the one movie that I absolutely had to see at the film festival that year. I tried twice to make that happen, and twice my screening had to be aborted due to projection issues. Each time, I got far enough into Leos Carax’s surrealist fairytale for it to fully sink its claws into me, and, each time, I was disappointed when I couldn’t experience the ending of this one-of-a-kind cinematic experience. I had to purchase Holy Motors on DVD a few months later when it was released just so I could see the movie in its entirety, and it is one of the most satisfying movie purchases that I’ve made in the last decade. Holy Motors is nothing short of a masterpiece of absurdity, with Carax proudly bearing the surrealist torch. It’s a unique movie experience, and one that might not be easily digested by many or most audiences, but it is, nonetheless, one of my favorite films of the 21^st century.

Holy Motors begins in a place of incoherence, with its opening scene featuring a character named “The Sleeper (Carax),” who rises from his slumber, approaches a hidden door in his bedroom wall (which resembles a forest), and opens it, stepping into a crowded cinema. The Sleeper looks down from the cinema’s balcony, where he stands alone, observing a small boy and a giant dog who prowl the aisles, as the film begins. We then meet Mr. Oscar (Lavant) who exits his home, a brutalist compound patrolled by armed guards, and is picked up in a stretch limousine driven by Céline (Scob). As the two drive away, Céline reminds Mr. Oscar of the number of appointments he has that day, and refers him to a dossier which contains the details thereof. When he arrives at his first appointment, Mr. Oscar emerges from the limousine wearing heavy prosthetics, dressed like a crone, and walking, stooped, with the assistance of a cane. On this assignment, he begs for a while, lamenting the status of the old beggar woman, forgotten and ignored by all who pass, and then returns to the limousine where he removes the false nose and teeth, preparing for his next assignment. In this assignment, Mr. Oscar accesses a high security facility, donning a motion-capture suit, and performs a seductive dance with an actress, which is revealed to be the basis of a computer animation that has turned them both into water dragons. The film continues in this way with Mr. Oscar going from assignment to assignment, assuming various roles and performing a series of vignettes, many of which are absurdist or surreal in nature. While the film continues to defy strict narrative continuity, a thematic coherence begins to emerge, with Mr. Oscar’s assignments standing for film genres and his job emerging as that of the actor and audience surrogate.

I’ve written before about my love for movies about movies and movie-making, but Holy Motors is a tour de force of meta commentary and heady, involved film theory. This is a movie made for those who love to speculate about the role of art and media, and film, specifically, in the life of the individual and within society. It’s a veritable buffet of sumptuous imagery and provocative narrative posturing. Carax, who is importantly positioned as The Sleeper in the film’s first scene, seems to be casting his gaze across the spectrum of visual media and casting a judgment upon society’s use of film as a distraction and as a communication medium. It’s a movie that I didn’t completely understand when I first saw it, and one that I still don’t claim to have mastered. I could go to its deep well of philosophical import a hundred times and find myself drawing new insights. I think that this mystery is what made me want to go back after my initial screening cut the film off before its end, and then made me want to purchase the film after my second screening experience was botched, as well. I didn’t need to go back to Holy Motors to gain some sense of narrative completion, but rather to wash myself in its utter strangeness time and time again, and to see how Carax would tie all of these disparate, surrealist threads together in the end. I was less interested in figuring out the film’s story as I was in exploring its philosophical home base. Carax’s film opens itself up to a wide number of interpretations from a film theory standpoint. It’s just as easily read as a treatise on screen theory and the role of the spectator as it is an examination of film genres, or on post-modernism and the role of the traditional film in 21^st century society, at all. As a critic, I love to wrap myself in the film’s layers and feel its all-encompassing content engulfing my brain.

Holy Motors is an invigorating and rewarding deep dive for theory nerds, but it still retains the pleasures of watching a breezy, if sometimes inscrutable, piece of entertainment. While the film’s structure and loosely-plotted nature might turn off some casual viewers, I think that most people would find quite a bit to like about Holy Motors. For starters, Lavant puts in a great, understated performance. Though he doesn’t have a great deal of dialogue, he provides a blank template upon which the various “assignments” that Mr. Oscar acts out can exist, and those “assignments” leap into life on the screen. One early role, M. Merde, stands out as particularly memorable, with Lavant ditching the elegance of his choreographed motion capture lovemaking in favor of the animalistic, gestural M. Merde who arrives into the film as an agent of chaos. Clad in a shabby green suit, his skin and shockingly orange hair covered in filth and grime, M. Merde crawls out from a sewer, and shambles his way through a cemetery, where he feasts on graveside flowers and assaulting mourners before stumbling upon a fashion shoot. He crashes the photo shoot, kidnapping the model (Eva Mendes), and secrets her away to his subterranean lair where the two smoke cigarettes, and M. Merde eats various non-food substances, including money and the model’s hair. He then fashions her dress into a burqa and leads her deeper into the cave where he strips naked, climbing into her lap and reclining in a pose that is not dissimilar to Michelangelo’s “Pieta.” The scene is profane, perverse, and purposefully obfuscates meaning, but there is obviously some deep theological and artistic significance to this reference, and it is also absurdly comical in its trashy nature.

Contrast this moment with one later in the film in which Mr. Oscar meets up with a former scene partner (and perhaps lover) on the way to one of his last assignments. In this scene, Lavant plays Mr. Oscar naturalistically, free of any of his previous affections. He has been aged up for the role, but otherwise isn’t heavily made up. He and Eva Grace (Kylie Minogue) reminisce about their work and time together as they leisurely explore an abandoned and crumbling hotel. The faded opulence surrounding the characters reflects the maudlin song that Eva Grace sings, the refrain of which, “Who were we when we were who we were back then?” in turn reflects the shifting nature of these characters’ identities. Who, indeed, were they when they were important to one another, and what weight does that importance really carry if they were only playing out roles. The camera largely follows Eva Grace with Mr. Oscar following behind her, somnambulant, reticent. It’s a far cry from the aggression and grotesquery with which Lavant played M. Merde. It’s fitting, though, and shows off his range well. Though little is made explicit about their relationship in the scene, the tenderness with which Mr. Oscar holds Eva Grace, and the devotion in his eyes when he watches her perform the song tell the tale well enough. Minogue’s windswept performance is every bit as dramatic as something from a Hollywood musical, and the brief scene gives the film its heart, without ever delving into the details of the pair’s history. Carax is able to create a swell of feeling by manipulating a combination of these great subdued performances, Minogue’s expressive singing voice, a beautiful swell of well-timed strings, and a deeply evocative setting. It’s movie-making 101. Coming near the end of a film that has so wildly veered into experimental territory, this conventional scene surprisingly doesn’t feel out of place, but on the contrary provides the film with its emotional climax.

Though its surrealist veneer and artsy trappings would likely prove difficult for many viewers to overcome, Holy Motors is the type of varied movie experience that anyone who likes movies should be able to draw some enjoyment from. It contains a handful of moments of high drama, a lot of absurdist comedy as well as sharp satire, and it borrows liberally from science fiction, horror, and action films. It’s a broad and multi-faceted piece of art that seeks to examine why people choose the distractions and the entertainments that they do, and whether film as an entertainment has the hold on the collective imagination in the 21^st century that it did in the century before. In addition to being so rich with meaning for cineastes, the film is well-acted, visually sumptuous, and thematically engaging. While not every viewer might respond to the film’s metaphor of the cinema as an aging and dying art form, surely most can relate to Mr. Oscar’s concerns about his own obsolescence as he transitions into middle age, or to Céline’s obvious care and concern for Mr. Oscar, a man who she can never really know. If nothing else, its individual vignettes provide brief moments of engagement that, when taken separately, don’t add up to much, but prove that even the most esoteric of films is an entertainment, because the process of engaging with movies is fun. What makes Holy Motors successful is that even its most absurdist moments are grounded in a bedrock of strong realism, and that as convoluted as its structure and narrative might become, it continues to draw inspiration from the familiar tropes of genre films. It’s a reach for me to say that Holy Motors is accessible, because it really isn’t, but it’s so richly rewarding that I just want more people to see it. It’s the type of movie that reminds me why I fell in love with movies to begin with. It’s a big, all-encompassing, genre-bending work of art, and I want it to get as much admiration as possible.

Even Dwarfs Started Small

April 8, 2018April 6, 2018 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970)

Dir. Werner Herzog

Written by: Werner Herzog

Starring: Helmut Döring

Well this was certainly an interesting first-time watching experience for me. Even Dwarfs Started Small, Herzog’s second feature, was included in the Herzog box set that I purchased a few years ago, and it was one of the films of his that I hadn’t seen that I was keen to eventually get around to watching. As it turns out, I wouldn’t find myself making the time until this project started so I waited until getting to its turn in the alphabetical lineup of my discs to finally check this movie out. I was only familiar with the film’s plot and its use of a cast made up entirely of little people, so I didn’t go in with any real expectations about the movie. I’m not sure that I enjoyed the film, overall, but it was an interesting watch, and I did notice a strong affinity to some directorial traits that would appear later in Herzog’s filmography, as well as elements that have clearly been influential on later filmmakers. It’s always interesting to me to go back and watch early entries into the bodies of work of acclaimed filmmakers and see where they got their start.

Even Dwarfs Started Small is a satire set in a far-away country where all of the inhabitants are little people. The film opens with Hombre (Döring) being booked by police and questioned about his role in an uprising at a remote institution. In flashbacks, the audience becomes witness to the uprising and the chaos that ensues when the wards of the institution rebel against their instructors. The uprising begins at a fevered pitch, with the inmates of the institution having forced their instructor to barricade himself within the institution with a hostage, Pepe (Gerd Gickel), who is also a ward of the institution. The rebellion quickly descends into total chaos as the inmates set fires, kill one of the pigs that lives on the institution, and generally run roughshod over the grounds of the institution. In the end, the inmates seem to have accomplished very little through their uprising, as it is quashed by the police, but they did get to spend one afternoon living in absolute freedom, for better or for worse, and made quite a mockery of several societal institutions in the process.

I would be hard pressed to say that I actually liked Even Dwarfs Started Small, but it was certainly an interesting viewing experience, and one that I won’t soon forget. The film is incredibly simple, with Herzog simply documenting his cast running amok under his direction. Narratively, the rebellion is given little political or social context, although there is a general sense of a desired egalitarianism among the wards of the institution. They seem to desire the same freedoms as the guards and the instructors, however, their sense of social justice seems to be limited to their own group, as the would-be revolutionaries seem quick to harass and belittle a couple of blind wards who are kept separate from the general population of the institution. Herzog seems to be making the point that all political revolutions are ultimately facile, and that given enough power or enough freedom, any revolutionary group will eventually descend into a brutal form of anarchy. While I disagree with this sentiment, and I think that it’s an overly pessimistic view of society and of then-recent revolutions around the world, I applaud Herzog’s artful attempt to portray his viewpoint. Despite its raucous subject matter, Herzog’s film unravels poetically, and he captures some distinctive and memorable images in service of his overall thesis.

Even Dwarfs Started Small feels something like a fever dream, with strange images surfacing in front of the camera, and brief narrative asides that explore some minutiae that is only tangentially related to the overall plot. Halfway through the film, one of the wards opens up a small box that she has kept close to her person for the entire film to reveal it to be full of insects that she has dressed up in formal wear. She pulls each tiny creature from the box, showing off their dresses, coats, and top hats, while the other wards look on in curious fascination. Later in the film, the wards steal the institution’s truck, ostensibly to go into town, but they only get so far as the institution’s central courtyard where they leave the truck running in lazy circles while they chase one another around the courtyard, trying to avoid being struck down. Several times, Herzog cuts to the curiously circling car, seeming to provide a visual representation of the pointless chaos that is unraveling at the institution. Shortly before the film’s end, the wards capture a monkey and parade around the institution with it tied to a cross in a scathing mockery of religious ritual and iconography. All of these instances of strange, unmotivated behavior help lend the film its dreamlike qualities, and also add to its satirical impact. Throughout the film, Herzog is sending up society and its hypocrisies, using the little people in his cast in a pseudo-allegorical role to prove a point about the devolution of society in pursuit of total freedom. While I think that his overall premise is somewhat flawed and his casting of little people could be considered pejorative, because using people with a disability in an allegorical/symbolic role essentially denies them of their personhood, there’s no denying that the film has some powerful and memorable imagery.

It’s not surprising that this film has proven to be influential, not just on Herzog’s later career, but for many other outsider artists and filmmakers. Harmony Korine, perhaps the modern standard bearer for earlier enfants terrible such as Herzog and Lars von Trier, cites Even Dwarfs Started Small as a major touchstone for his own films. Herzog himself has often visually referenced the film, particularly the motif of the car circling out of control which he returns to in Stroszek, and the tension between the individual’s desire for freedom and society’s need for structure and stricture has been a guiding theme throughout his filmography. Despite understanding the importance of the movie to a subset of filmmakers and, likely, audiences, I just didn’t really enjoy Even Dwarfs Started Small. It’s a fine movie, but it almost seems to be provocation for the sake of being provocative, and I find its central theoretical assumptions about society to be facile and fundamentally incorrect. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but I found myself very bored by the film’s midway point. Despite all of the apparent upheaval that takes place in the film, nothing much really happens in Even Dwarfs Started Small. I won’t soon forget the film’s brief moments of visual clarity, particularly the procession with the crucified monkey, as they do form the basis of an intriguing experimental film critique of society, but the overall film left me pretty cold. It’s disappointing, because this is a movie that I had long looked forward to watching, and perhaps in the context of more early Herzog films that I’ll be screening soon for this project, I’ll gain a better appreciation for Even Dwarfs Started Small. As it stands now, the movie seems mostly important to me as a foundational text from which Herzog clearly draws later, but it’s not a movie that I feel compelled to revisit soon.

Dave

October 15, 2017October 13, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Dave (1993)

Dir. Ivan Reitman

Written by: Gary Ross

Starring: Kevin Kline, Sigourney Weaver, Ving Rhames, Frank Langella

Dave is one of the movies in my collection that I have the least amount of personal history with or connection to. I’ve only owned it on Bluray for a few years, having purchased it for a few bucks to get an Amazon order above the purchase threshold for free shipping. I can vaguely remember the movie being released when I was a young kid, seven or eight years old, but I had never seen it until I was an adult. This fish out of water story is definitely an “adult” comedy, with little that would have appealed to me when it was released. It isn’t a landmark film or a masterpiece, but Dave is a better than average studio comedy, the kind of feel-good, family-friendly fare that Ivan Reitman was known for throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Solid comedic performances from a deep, star-studded cast and a somewhat fresh take on a very old narrative trope make for a pleasant viewing experience. Dave doesn’t offer any profound platitudes on the state of American politics, and it isn’t the most memorable viewing experience, but it’s a perfect light comedy to put on in the background of a lazy weekend afternoon.

Dave takes a classic story trope, the everyman thrust into a position of great power, and modernizes it. The titular Dave is Dave Kovics (Kline), who runs a temp agency in Georgetown and who is the seeming embodiment of human kindness. Dave is well liked and respected by everyone in his community, and is presented as a genuinely kind-hearted and well-meaning person. He also happens to bear a striking resemblance to the President of the United States, Bill Mitchell (also played by Kline). As such, Dave is tapped by the Secret Service to pose as the President’s body double during public events. However, when the President suffers a massive stroke while having sex with a member of his staff, White House Chief of Staff Bob Alexander (Langella) hatches a plan to replace the President with Dave, avoiding the sex scandal, and possibly setting himself up for a run at the presidency. Dave is initially, understandably, overwhelmed by his new position, but he eventually begins to acquit himself to the job. He brings his natural charm and kindness to the seat of power, befriending the First Lady (Weaver) and the head of the Secret Service (Rhames) along the way. While Dave tries to use his power to help people, he is beset by beltway insiders like Alexander, who wish to use this fortuitous situation to depose the neophyte and gain power for themselves.

Though it’s become more and more common, in 1993 the idea of a complete outsider to the political system being placed in the seat of ultimate governmental power must have seemed unusual. There are examples of course: the sitting President at the time of the film’s release, Bill Clinton, and before him Jimmy Carter, both emerged from outside the established Washington scene, but both had also served as state Governors leading up to their runs for the Presidency. Billionaire H. Ross Perot had emerged as an outsider’s voice in early 1990s Presidential politics, but he was widely viewed as a joke candidate, only afforded the legitimacy of a platform due to his extreme wealth, and rarely considered outside of the context of how many votes he could and would syphon from Republican candidates, allowing Clinton to upset incumbent George H.W. Bush in 1992. But of course, we’re talking about a pure fantasy, and, as such, Dave’s outsider politician is cut from a different cloth. He is a true everyman, more reminiscent of the protagonist from a Frank Capra film than any actual Presidential hopeful. He’s imbued with inherent goodness and a sense of patriotism that is devoted to the idealized American values of basic decency, hard work, and kindness. Dave Kovics is portrayed as a good man who is doing good work in the shadows, and positively affecting his community in ways that aren’t recognized by those who influence and enact policy. His politics are populist rather than partisan, and the film is careful to create a political fantasy where actual politics and party affiliations are largely ignored in favor of vaguely humanistic “Good vs Bad” arguments. Dave’s greatest political strength is that he spends the majority of the film steadfastly refusing to engage in actual politics. In this fictional government, Dave is able to balance the budget and save a critical human services program not by reaching across the aisle to fellow politicians, but by inviting his CPA friend, Murray (Charles Grodin), to the White House to crunch the numbers. It’s a quaint vision of a national government being run like a small business, and it’s quite at odds with the reality of American politics some 25 years later.

Of course the overwhelming optimism that the film presents is largely the product of Kline’s performance as the wide-eyed, grinning Dave. Kline plays two roles in the film, but he really doesn’t have much screen time where he’s portraying actual President Bill Mitchell. Instead, he devotes his energies to fleshing out the character of Dave Kovics, and in a way that role is a dual role in and of itself. Kline subtly adjusts his performance as the film goes on and Dave becomes more comfortable in his role as impostor President. Initially presented as outwardly emotive, expressive, and gregarious, Kline reigns in his energy as the film goes on, and Dave’s impression of the more reserved President Miller gets better and better. Still, though, Dave can’t hide his infectious goodness and sense of wonder, and Kline allows these qualities to shine through his character’s attempts to appear more professional. He keeps a small smile lingering at the corner of Dave’s lips, ready to burst wide open at the first sign of a joke. Typically better known for his comedy, Kline certainly brings a bouncy physicality to his role, and he plays up Dave’s initial discomfort with his new job as President, but he also slots in comfortably as a leading man. By film’s end, he cuts an imposing figure that communicates authority, while still maintaining the soft kindness that had earlier defined the role. I’m not overly familiar with Kline’s body of work as an actor, but in Dave he reminds me of some of Hollywood’s classic leading men. It might just be the Capra-esque qualities of the film, but watching it I was reminded of Gary Cooper.

The rest of the film’s cast is also very enjoyable to watch. Ving Rhames’s no-nonsense Secret Service agent, Duane, is hilarious as a foil for Kline’s Dave. His deadpan line delivery and massive physical presence are used to great comedic effect as he observes and silently judges the impostor President. Langella’s scheming Chief of Staff and his underling, Alan (Kevin Dunn), are appropriately slimy. Langella is the cast’s elder statesman and his characterization of Bob Alexander is reminiscent of some actual shadowy, older political string pullers who would emerge. Unfortunately, both Charles Grodin and Sigourney Weaver aren’t given a lot of material to work with. Grodin is only in a couple of scenes, but I would have appreciated more of his trademark manic anxiety as a counterbalance to Kline’s more laid back characterization of Dave. Weaver is the film’s second lead, but she’s largely reduced to a love interest for Dave. I don’t expect her to reprise her alpha-female role of Ripley in Alien, but I would hope to see some more of the verbal sparring that she’s been so adept at in her comedy work. She does get a handful of fun scenes that allow her to show some range, but it’s a shame that such a great actress doesn’t get to show off her chops in what could be a potentially meaty role. Laura Linney, Ben Kingsley, and Bonnie Hunt all show up in small roles, and have funny moments, particularly Hunt as a White House tour guide. The film is certainly not an ensemble cast, but a comedy is largely built on the performances and chemistry of its supporting cast, and Dave’s delivers admirably.

With the type of news coverage and media access that the public now has to political figures, I don’t think a movie like Dave could be made today. Its tone of wonder and whimsy definitely seems retro when compared with the modern political landscape. I don’t see very many contemporary studio comedies, so maybe the prevailing cynicism I’ve witnessed in so many people lately hasn’t crossed over into light entertainment, but I still feel that Dave is a relic from another time. It feels warm in a way that the comedies that I have seen over the last decade don’t, lacking their bite and acerbic wit. Dave’s humor is broad but also intelligent, and though it’s a movie clearly pitched towards adults, there’s almost nothing risqué in it that would make it inappropriate for kids. It’s a product of a rapidly dying monoculture. Still though, Dave’s enjoyable two hours. It will never be a go-to for me, but I like having it on my shelf. It’s a great movie to put on when you want to have a few laughs and feel good for an afternoon. Dave probably won’t make you think too hard, but it will certainly make you smile. Sometimes that’s enough.

Blazing Saddles

June 11, 2017June 11, 2017 / andrewmisk / Leave a comment

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Dir. Mel Brooks

Written by: Mel Brooks, Norman Steinberg, Andrew Bergman, Richard Pryor, Alan Uger

Starring: Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder, Harvey Korman, Slim Pickens

Mel Brooks is one of the great masters of film comedy, and I was a fan from early in childhood. I don’t know if I saw Young Frankenstein first or Robin Hood: Men in Tights, but those were the movies that introduced me to Brooks’s brand of humor, both broad and witty, high- and low-brow, verbal and slapstick. Half of the jokes went right over my young head, but it didn’t matter because there were so many jokes. Some of the simplest jokes in Mel Brooks’s movies are the best, and thinking back on it, I think my love of comedy probably came from the “walk this way” gag in Young Frankenstein. It’s such a simple, stupid sight gag, but it works perfectly and it’s laugh out loud funny. From there, I started getting really into comedy. I became interested in comedy as a type of art, and in what really made certain things funny. Sometime in the mid-90s, Comedy Central was added to our cable package and I started watching stand-up and tons of classic comedies. Somewhere along the line, I must have encountered Blazing Saddles, but I can’t remember the first time specifically. I’m sure it was on some lazy morning or afternoon during my summer vacation from school while my parents were at work, but I don’t really remember watching Blazing Saddles until I was a little older, probably 14 or 15 and going into high school. It wasn’t until that age that I was really able to appreciate the movie for the kind of masterpiece that it was, anyways.

I know that I watched the movie at least a few times during high school, but it wasn’t until it was screened in a film class that I took my senior year of high school that the real comic genius of Blazing Saddles sank in for me. The class helped to put the movie into a proper context for me. It introduced me to some of the classic Westerns that Blazing Saddles was sending up, and also to some early classic comedies to help put the film into a historical context in that sense. Thinking back on it, it was pretty amazing that my public high school in West Virginia offered a film class at all, but I was lucky that it did because it would be a very formative experience for me. I have that class to thank for introducing me to so many great American films, as well as a handful of foreign classics, and for cementing my desire to pursue an education and a career in film. The class was a senior-only elective that was taught by an English teacher with a particular interest in movies, and she varied the curriculum, including silent films, art house, and classics both new and old from all genres. It was great.

The film stars Cleavon Little as Bart, a railroad laborer who becomes the first black sheriff in the West. Bart is installed in his position by the corrupt Hedley Lamar (Korman), who is hoping to undermine the town of Rock Ridge and drive out its citizens so that he can buy up their property and profit in a land deal when the railroad passes through the town. Bart is in the unenviable position of being a black man in a frontier town full of white people (who all seem to be related), but he eventually is able to win them over just in time to defend Rock Ridge from Lamar’s schemes. Unable to shake the town’s confidence in Bart, Lamar decides to recruit an army and take Rock Ridge by force. With the help of Jim (Wilder), a once-famous gunfighter who is now Rock Ridge’s resident drunk, and his old friends on the railroad, Bart is able to conceive of a plan to save Rock Ridge from Lamar and his minions. In classic Western fashion, they construct a fake town, rig it with dynamite, and when the army attacks, they blow men and horses alike sky high. A chaotic brawl ensues with the characters spilling out of the film, over the fourth wall, and into the “real world.” Eventually, Bart and the Kid meet back up in the world of the film (after taking a break to watch a bit of it in the movie theater), and, in a closing act fitting for Western heroes, ride off into the sunset…in a limousine.

The film’s humor is all over the place, and it is one of the most jam-packed comedies that I’ve ever seen, with only Airplane! possibly packing more jokes into its scant runtime. Blazing Saddles, and nearly all of Brooks’s comedies, acts as a catchall for 20^th century comedy. It embraces the shtick and musicality of Brooks’s roots as a Borscht Belt comedian, the physicality of slapstick, high-brow conceptual humor, and pointed social satire. It’s the kind of movie that can surprise you on repeat viewings with new jokes, because you missed them while you were busy laughing at the other jokes. In addition to acting as a repository of American comedic tradition, Blazing Saddles also acts as a deconstructive tool for traditional myths of Americana in general. Brooks takes the traditional American Western film and turns many of its tropes on their heads to provide a commentary on the false nature of those American creation myths. For him, the frontier was not a promised land, peopled by cowboy heroes conquering nature through sheer force of will and determination. It was, instead, peopled by white men too boorish or corrupt to recognize the basic human decency of another man simply because his skin is a different shade.

Watching Blazing Saddles in school, in particular, felt somehow subversive. Not only was the film’s humor too cutting edge for a classroom setting, even thirty years after the fact, its social and political commentary felt progressive in a modern setting as well. The film’s take on race relations in America felt as fresh and accurate in 2004 as it must have felt in 1974, unfortunately. The film’s treatment of racism, while humorous, is rightfully complex. In Blazing Saddles, as in real life, bigotry is the mindset of the ignorant and the crass. The townsfolk of Rock Ridge, aren’t painted as cruel or unsympathetic people, but more as simpletons. They are uneducated, likely inbred, and fearful of anyone different than themselves because they have been fed a steady stream of misinformation about other groups of people. After they realize that Bart is a just, kind, and capable sheriff, they begin to warm to him, although only inasmuch as he is able to help them out of their own bad situation. For his own part, Bart has to prove himself doubly capable, just as many minorities today find that they have to work twice as hard in order to gain the same achievements as their white counterparts due to false biases against them.

I think that the great achievement of Blazing Saddles, however, is in pointing out the roots of bigotry and intolerance. While the townsfolk are ugly and crass, their racial hatred is stoked by the desires of the film’s true villain, Hedley Lamar. He attempts to use racism as a tool to help him achieve his political and capitalist goals, installing Bart as the sheriff in an attempt to destabilize the status quo of Rock Ridge enough that he can swoop in and profit from others’ losses. Bigotry is a tool that has been used by the upper class to fragment the working class for centuries, and Blazing Saddles depicts this truth subtly and perfectly. Race is a social construct used to divide people who should otherwise be working together for mutual benefit, and keeping people of different ethnicities and skin colors fighting amongst themselves has been key to maintaining a status quo in which the same wealthy land and business owners reap the most benefit. There is no room for equality in capitalism. While people are all, obviously, biologically the same, it is in the benefit of the ruling class to uphold the myth of racial difference.

One of the best and easiest ways for people to step outside of their comfort zones, racially speaking, is to engage with art that is made by and about the lives of people who may come from a different ethnic, racial, or socioeconomic background than themselves. One of the greatest things a movie can do for an audience is introduce them to a new way of thinking or open their eyes to a different way of life than they might be accustomed to. I was lucky to grow up in an open-minded household where people of all shapes, sizes, skin colors, and walks of life were welcomed and celebrated. I had and have friends from many different backgrounds. I am happy to live in a world that is diverse and multicultural, because I think that experiencing other cultures and other types of people inherently makes me a better and better-rounded person. But for someone who is not as sold on the values of inclusivity and equality, seeing a movie with a strong or relatable black protagonist might be the first step to some sort of understanding. I’m in no way making apologies or excuses for people who hold racist or bigoted beliefs, because I don’t think there is any place for that sickness in a modern free society, but I do know that there are people who eagerly accept the information that is provided for them without seeking out counterpoint or clarification because they simply don’t know any better. Vitriol can be persuasive, but so can humor. Sometimes the easiest way to someone’s heart is through their funny bone. I think that maybe Mel Brooks had this in mind when he made Blazing Saddles.

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