7/28/23
Newsletter #410
The Crack of Dawn
In the dentist’s office yesterday, someone right before me had complained about the awful pop Muzak, suggesting that they put on the Frank Sinatra Channel, which they did. I have been slightly confused and suspicious of these classifications on Spotify or Pandora from the outset. It’s not just Frank Sinatra songs, but other songs that they somehow deem similar. Besides Frank on the Frank Sinatra Channel, there was Dean Martin, which makes sense; and Louis Armstrong, which also makes sense – Louis was an influence and a favorite of Frank’s. But then came the Beach Boys and Elton John, which I’ll bet Frank never listened to. What are they doing on Frank’s channel? So, Frank was singing one of my favorites, My Kind of Town (Chicago is), and as two young female dental techs were working on me, one said to the other with complete disdain, “Why are they playing Christmas music?”
Two Hell’s Angels are talking. One says to the other, “Hey, I hear you got married. How’s the sex?” The other replies, “It’s great. Now I don’t have to wait in line.”
That joke is in my film, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except, except you can’t hear it clearly. I also put in that film the Marine Corps parody of The Ballad of the Green Berets, and never even considered asking permission. It’s been 38 years, so I guess I got away with it. I love this: If one Marine takes a shit today/He’ll wipe his ass with a green beret.
Although I’m not watching new movies these days, I did rewatch The Big Short (2015), mostly to recall why I didn’t like it. It has a terrific cast – Christian Bale, Steve Carrell, Brad Pitt, Marisa Tomei, Ryan Gosling – and is an interesting story about the prescient few people who saw the housing crash of 2008 coming, and profited from it – so what was the problem? First of all, it looks like shit. Ugly photography, shaky handheld camerawork (which to me is the sign of a cowardly director), and, uh-oh, look out — style at its most stylish — needless jerky little zooms in and out for no reason sprinkled haphazardly throughout the film. Plus, it was shot in the, once again, cowardly “Spray and Pray” method, where you get several camera going, run the scene a few times, cover the hell out of it, then dump the footage on the editor and let them make sense of it. OK, that shit is wrong with most movies now, and I can move past it if the story is worth it.
And the story is actually worth it, although it doesn’t have a point or a conclusion, God forbid, but it does have a bult-in irony – the guys who see the crash coming, then figure out how to take advantage of it, are ultimately horrified at the sheer blindness and ineptitude of the financial system. Nobody learns anything, or improves or doesn’t improve as a person, they simply all get a lot richer. The end.
However, now that I have terms to heap upon it, what truly undermines this film, loaded with movie stars, that actually has a decent story, is its post-Ironic, metamodern, inability to take what it’s doing seriously. This is a serious, true story. That doesn’t mean the characters can’t be funny or amusing, and they are. It’s a perfect part for Christian Bale – an autistic, hedge fund manager, medical doctor, heavy metal drummer and freak, who sees the imminent destruction of the financial future, and is right. It seemed like they had Christian Bale for two days and shot all his scenes in an office.
In the mistaken belief that more exposition about the financial system and how it works will do us viewers the slightest bit of good, we cut to Margot Robbie naked in a hot tub drinking champagne. So that we’re entirely clear about this wild and crazy, incongruous sight, an announcer tells us that this is Margot Robbie, and she’s drinking champagne, and she’s now going to explain to us some useless, SEC, financial bullshit, as best as she can, but for no reason, cause we’re all such hip, cool cats – though certainly not funny, because humor is ironic, and we’re past that.
This occurs again later in the film with Gwen Stefani, and dagnabbit, it’s still not funny, or hip, or cool. For anyone who’s listening, the opposite of funny, hip and cool is stupid.
But the dumbest thing is that right from the beginning the characters break the fourth wall and talk to the camera. If you’re going to this severely well-worn shtick, which, if you don’t have a reason, or a funny gag, just undermines your credibility, just remember that Groucho Marx started doing it as soon as sound arrived in movies in 1929. Zeppo and the girl begin to sing, then Groucho sticks his head into the shot and says, “Look, I’m stuck here. You could go get some more popcorn.” Except that he’s not doing it in a serious drama, he’s doing it in Monkey Business (1931, a particularly good, early Marx bros. film).
I don’t have a problem breaking the fourth wall, as long as you have a better joke. Woody Allen used it beautifully in Annie Hall (1977). Annie arrives home with groceries and tells him about her first meeting with an analyst. She says, “It changed my wife.” He says, “It changed your wife?” She says, “No, my life.” He says, “You said wife.” She says, “No, I didn’t.” Woody looks into the lens and says, “You heard her, she said wife.”
Why would you even want to put that hoary old gag into The Big Short? And this is where the Hollywood executives come in. They’re so stupid, and film illiterate, that they demand that the script have some aspect to it that is arbitrarily “hip” or “edgy,” whereas these inappropriate shticks are as old film itself. Buster Keaton did it brilliantly in Sherlock Jr. (1924). He is a film projectionist and dreams that he walks down the aisle and climbs up into the movie. All of the characters in the film stop what they’re doing, see Buster, grab a hold of him and throw him out of the film, back into the theater.
Needless insincerity throws me out of the film. And considering that film critics were complaining about handheld camerawork in the 1960s, how about somebody invests in a tripod?
Roger, that. Signing off.