| Aug/Sep roundup : 'Dave Chappelle's Block Party' [8/10]; 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' [7/10], etc |
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| Monday, 04 September 2006 | |
 ACCESS ALL AREAS : Michel Gondry's 'Dave Chappelle's Block Party' [8/10] I've now seen all four of Michel Gondry's feature films - Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep being the others - and Dave Chappelle's Block Party is, to be blunt, the only one I could imagine ever happily sitting through again. Indeed, by the end I felt that a second viewing was desirable, perhaps even essential, so exhilarated was I by the experience. Perhaps it's simply a matter of the script: Block Party is a documentary, and therefore doesn't have one. From my perspective (and I know I'm in the minority here) Gondry and narrative cinema aren't a very good match: he struggles to adapt his visual ingenuity to the often-mundane requirements of storytelling. Here he's gifted crackerjack subject matter featuring a whole host of very talented and charismatic people, and (with the invaluable assistance of editors Jeff Buchanan. Sarah Flack and Jamie Kirkpatrick) brings it all to the screen with the minimum fuss and maximum impact. He lets the 'story' speak for itself: in September 2004, top US standup comic Dave Chappelle (who isn't a big name outside the States) organises a free, all-star rap concert in Brooklyn. He secures a line-up including Kanye West, Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott and, as headliners, back together for the first time in seven (mostly acrimonious) years, the Fugees - a band whose exalted status is, incidentally, somewhat undercut by the fact that two of their biggest hits are covers. We see Chappelle at home in a suburb of Dayton, Ohio, asking his friends and neighbours - and various passers-by - if they fancy attending to the show, with transportation to the far-off event laid on at Chappelle's expense. This is intercut with footage from the big day itself where, despite intermittently foul weather, the event proves a resounding success. Chappelle is engaging, sharp and extremely comfortable on camera; the acts are all at or very near the top of their game, with an rousing set from West (including an all-stops-out 'Jesus Walks') perhaps the highlight. Mos Def, meanwhile, walks of with the 'Most Versatile Player' award: previously best known as a rapper, he's now established himself as an accomplished big-screen actor (The Woodsman, 16 Blocks, etc), and here shows considerable skill as drummer, comic and 'straight man' for Chappelle's quips. Refreshingly, the concert seems to have been generously staged simply for its own sake: there's none of the hand-wringingly worthy 'charidee' guff that would undoubtedly bog down such a gig if it were staged, say, in the UK, or under the auspices of a major corporate entertainment organisation such as MTV. It's apparently not sponsored, not compromised, not mediated in any way. And despite the proximity of the big day to the second anniversary of 9/11, those present resist labelling what they're doing as either a tribute to the victims or an act of defiance to the perpetrators. Not that the event is in any way apolitical: several of the acts use the event to noisily espouse causes close to their heart (The Roots' drummer/producer '?uestLove' so scenestealingly articulate, engaging and persuasive he deserves at least a movie all his own), and the talk on-stage and off is punctuated with references to major issues and then-topical goings-on. The latter includes frequent mentions of the sniper whose attacks on petrol-station customers were then all over the media: indeed, with much speculation surrounding Fugees lead-singer Lauryn Hill's recent "problems," Block Party at times comes across like a real-life equivalent of the big bash at the end of Robert Altman's Nashville - without the climactic outburst of violence, of course. And with better music. SEXING THE CHERRY : Judd Apatow's 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' [7/10] I finally caught up with The 40 Year Old Virgin on DVD a month ago, and while I can't remember a great deal about the film (my partner and I watched it one evening with a bottle of white wine) I can report that it pretty much lives up to expectations, and justifies the glowing reviews which accompanied its unexpected box-office success last year. Those who reckoned the script (by Apatow and Steve Carell) should have earned an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Screenplay category, however, are surely getting a touch carried away. Carell became an unexpected, quasi-overnight box-office star as Andy, a geeky but likeable shop-worker whose randy colleagues are stunned when they find out that, despite having entered his fifth decade, he's yet to have sex. They soon set about "rectifying" the situation - the gag being that they're at least as dysfunctional as Andy, and, from what we can see, rather less satisfied with their lot. A really brave Hollywood comedy would perhaps have Andy as virginal at the end as he is at the start - but Apatow and company provide Andy with an eminently suitable 'friend' in the shapely, still-striking-at-forty-odd form of Catherine Keener (whose character Trish is a grandmother, no less, and makes her living via some amusingly nebulous business relationship with Ebay which nobody can quite get their head around.) From the moment Trish shows up, of course, it's only a matter of time before Andy is "deflowered." This doesn't occur until the very end of the film, however, and is followed by an engagingly daft, elaborate, Austin Powers-ish 'production number' which, as well as being effervescently euphoric, allows us to say farewell to the sparky gallery of supporting players whose skills have kept the picture going over what is a rather protracted running-time. Jane Lynch - as Andy's acerbic, seen-it-all boss - is particularly good value, giving a welcome bit of edge to a picture which, while commendably 'adult' in its humour, is at times perhaps a little too amiable and keen-to-please for its own good. GOOD BURGHERS : Danny Leiner's 'Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies' [7/10] Most critics around the world detested Danny Leiner's Dude, Where's My Car?, citing even the unforgettable title as evidence of the decline of cinema as an art form in particular and the decadence of American culture in general. For some reason, I enjoyed the film immensely, enthused about it in various print outlets, took people to see it, and had it hovering perilously close to my year-end Top Ten. The film was a surprise hit at the box office on both sides of the Atlantic, and did even better on video - leading to speculation that a sequel would be coming along sooner or later. Though there's been recurring talk of a part two - supposedly entitled Seriously, Dude, Where's My Car?, and reportedly not starring either Seann William Scott nor Ashton Kutcher from the original - this has yet to translate into an actual movie. So we'll have to make do with Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies (aka Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle), Leiner's second crack at the dopey-adventures-of-stoner-buddies genre. This time around he doesn't have the services of Dude scriptwriter Philip Stark, screenplay duties being handled by Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. And instead of Scott and Kutcher's dumb-white-boy protagonists, we now follow a pair of 'ethnic minority' representatives : Harold (John Cho, a familiar face from the background of American Pie pictures) and Kumar (Kal Penn, from Van Wilder). Once again, the "plot" is a strung-together series of larkish episodes, rather arbitrarily (but slightly more laboriously) assembled around a picaresque concept: Harold and Kumar, hungry after an evening of mellow marijuana, decide they can only be satisfied by the miniature burgers provided by the (non-fictional) White Castle chain. Tracking down their nearest White Castle proves an arduous, perilous, way-more-trouble-than-it's-worth quest that takes them many miles from home - but our heroes will not accept any alternatives, nor allow any obstacle to stand in their way. Whereas Dude, Where's My Car had a certain Homeric-odyssey vibe to its bonkers narrative, Harold and Kumar - despite its obvious Cheech-Chong/Wayne-Garth/Beavis-Butthead lineage, and its fondness for cheesily tongue-in-cheek 'star' cameos (Ryan Reynolds, Jamie Kennedy, Neil Patrick Harris, etc) - is more overtly "high falutin'" in its references and structure. What Leiner, Hurwitz and Schlossberg have created is, in effect, a Discreet Charm of Stoned Middle-Class Youth, their would-be-diners repeatedly stymied by circumstances no less bizarre and, yes, surreal, than anything in Luis Bunuel's 1974 Oscar winner. That's not all - at various steps along the way Harold and Kumar keep bumping into their neighbours, a pair of stoners who are suffering from 'munchies' of their own but whose goal is a different fast-food chain: even if this hotdog-seeking duo weren't actually named Rosenberg (Eddie Kay Thomas) and Goldstein (David Krumholtz), the alert viewer might well have recognised them as distant cousins of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the supporting characters from Hamlet whose peregrinations inspired Tom Stoppard's 'parallel' play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Leiner has suggested that his next film may well show what Rosenberg and Goldstein were getting up to during the course of this picture, with Harold and Kumar relegated to the background.) And just as the genial Harold and Kumar are much brighter than their Dude predecessors, Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies (which is already the focus of a devoted cult following) has rather more going on between its ears than a cursory glance at its title(s) and synopsis might suggest. Many of the episodes and gags revolve around issues of race, and perceptions of race, in early 21st-century America - and also in early 21st-century American cinema (the picture even has a droll 'false' start involving a pair of boorish 'frat boy' types who could easily have been the 'heroes' of a more conventional comedy.) Harold and Kumar themselves are all too aware of the "roles" they (and their families) have been assigned in their culture because of their racial background, and the film makes much comic capital from the way they sometimes conform to, and sometimes deliberately defy, such categorisation - while also caricaturing the expectations and prejudices of 'white America' (the very last joke involves a police sketch of the pair that is, quite literally, composed of racist caricatures). Serious subjects, lightly and persuasively handled in a film which somehow manages to be giddily silly and consistently stimulating in terms of its ideas: (fast) food for thought, indeed. THE CONSTANT NYMPH : M Night Shyamalan's 'Lady in the Water' [6/10] Until the advent of Little Man (released in the UK last week), Lady in the Water had the distinction of accumulating the worst reviews of any major release in British cinemas during 2006: rare was the newspaper which allotted it anything other than the minimum one-star rating, scarce the critic who disagreed with Independent On Sunday reviewer Jonathan Romney's "unqualified disaster" comment. While nobody's idea of masterpiece, Lady in the Water - which was received a rather more mixed reaction in the USA, including a couple of ecstastic raves - is by no means the nightmarish misfire its British reception might suggest. Any synopsis will inevitably make the picture sound ludicrous (I'm not even going to attempt one) but viewers willing to suspend their disbelief and give Shyamalan the benefit of the doubt may find that, on celluloid, much of it works surprisingly well: even his harshest detractors will concede that Shyamalan knows what he's doing with a camera, knows how to work with actors (here chiefly Bryce Dallas Howard and Paul Giamatti, both more than earning their fees, with lively support from the likes of Jared Harris, Bob Balaban, Jeffrey Weight and Mary Beth Hurt), and knows how to frame and cut a scene for maximum impact. The climax, in particular, has a persuasively loopy grandeur (and a commendably sparing use of special effects) that, just for a few moments, outweighs whatever doubts have accumulated in the preceding 100-odd minutes (and many of them are exceedingly odd). Crucially, while it's undeniably at least 20 minutes too long (most of the stuff involving the South Korean neighbours could surely have been drastically abbreviated) Lady in the Water does have more than an inkling of its own ridiculousness. There's wry humour in the way Shyamalan asks us to swallow all manner of mumbo-jumbo-filled nonsense, and even in the hubristic way he casts himself in the picture in a role which could accurately be described as proto-Messianic. In Shyamalan's defence, Lady in the Water did have its origins in a series of bedtime stories he told his own children. And surely it isn't so strange that a such an acclaimed, successful storyteller (who also fancies himself as a bit of an actor) should make himself one of the heroes of one of his own stories, if only once in a while... Or rather "once upon a time." Neil Young 5th September, 2006 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY : [8/10] : aka Block Party : USA 2006 : Michel GONDRY : 103 mins (BBFC timing) seen at The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 12th August 2006 - public show (paid £6.20) HAROLD AND KUMAR GET THE MUNCHIES : [7/10] : aka Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle : USA 2004 : Danny LEINER : 85 mins (BBFC timing of DVD version; UK theatrical version runs 89 mins) seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 13th August 2006 - with thanks to Jurij Meden THE 40 YEAR OLD VIRGIN : [7/10] : USA 2006 : Judd APATOW : 127 mins (BBFC timing of DVD version; theatrical version released in UK runs 116m) seen on DVD at home in Sunderland (UK), 3rd August 2006 - with thanks to Ann Buckley LADY IN THE WATER : [6/10] : USA 2006 : M Night SHYAMALAN : 109 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Empire cinema, Gate complex, Newcastle (UK), 8th August 2006 - press show  |
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