Crazymaking

What they never tell you in therapy school* is that you can be crazy without being crazy. Case in point: Bradley Cooper in the Silver Linings Playbook.

Yes, DeSean Jackson is in the house.

In the last two weeks I decided that the start of football season was an apt time to review a movie about the sport. As you might have guessed from the above image, Silver Linings is that movie.

But this is not a film just about football. No--it's about obsession, about wanting something so badly it blinds you to what is right in front of your eyes.

Released in 2012 just in time for Oscar season, the film features Cooper as Pat Solatano, a man in a mental hospital for assaulting his wife's lover. He suffers from bipolar disorder and a really, really bad  motto: Excelsior, meaning ... what does it mean?

Tiffany Maxwell, a young widow recently fired from her job for sleeping with the whole office, is the woman he meets after being released.

Jennifer Lawrence.

It's difficult to tell who is more crazy. I mean, when they meet at a diner he orders Raisin Bran and she orders tea.

For the record: Raisin Bran, every time.

Pat, still in love with his ex-wife, resists this premise. He thinks that she is the crazier one, until he's forced to acknowledge that in the bundle of insanity that is Pat and Pat's family and Pat's life, Tiffany Maxwell may be the only thing about it that makes sense.

Tiffany has her own life and her own persona and yet she's still willing to reach out and ask for what she wants, in addition to indulging the insanity that is football fandom. Listen to this video and tell me that this is not a girl who has thought through her argument:

That said, having seen it several times what keeps me coming back to Silver Linings is not actually the football or the crazy '80s style dance routines. No. What I like about this film is its acknowledgement of the obvious: that we are all crazy. We are crazy in love, we are crazy in fandom, and we are just plain crazy.

And that's okay.

EXCELSIOR.

How to say anything

Ladies and gentlemen, John Cusack

Sometimes there's no good way to say what you want to say. Or the meaning gets lost in translation, even when you try to translate.

Say Anything... is not a movie that has this problem. Released in 1989, it has since turned into one of the great cult success stories of the eighties. The film starts with John Cusack at the height of his powers as hyper-articulate slacker Lloyd Dobler, who happens to be in love/lust with a girl named Diane Court. Even the names in this movie have impeccable grammar.

Ione Skye, aka Diane Court

When Diane actually agrees to go out with Lloyd everyone is surprised, inspiring what I will argue is the greatest bit of dialogue between three teenage girls ever filmed:

DC: Hey, I know this is a strange thing to say, but maybe Diane Court really likes Lloyd.
COREY: If you were Diane Court, would you honestly fall for Lloyd? [pause] Yeah.
DC: Yeah!
REBECCA: Yeah.

I mean, feel free to fight me on this, but I feel I have a pretty solid case.

So. They go out. It's a date, it's a scam--whatever it is, it's magical. It's that instant connection based on romantic gestures and charm and incredible attraction. It's great.

It's also a movie.

By which I mean that it misses the mark, in terms of brutal honesty. It doesn't say just anything; instead it says very specific things about very specific circumstances. Like the fact that Lloyd doesn't want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything as a career. And the fact that Diane has a theory of convergence. And the fact that jukeboxes cost about 9000 dollars. (Or did, anyway. This was the late eighties.)

There's something really unbelievable about all of this. For one thing, real relationships aren't montages. They require effort, and the willingness to have difficult conversations. For all their articulation sometimes when I watch Lloyd and Diane talk I am not sure they are really saying anything after all. They are talking to each other, not with each other.

That's the problem, isn't it? When you talk to someone, you aren't listening to them.

What brings me back to this movie over and over again isn't the infatuation or Lloyd's boombox. It's the last scene, when they are just sitting quietly on a plane, waiting for a sound.

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The Hanks Conundrum

What happened to the trope of women booksellers? It feels like one day we all just woke up and instead of female leads shelving books in libraries and male leads drafting on architecture tables we had something called "Marketing Associate."

Of course, we all know what happened--

It was the 2000s.

--but that doesn't mean we have to give up the ghost entirely.

You've Got Mail (1998) was practically formed off the combination. Kathleen Kelly, otherwise known as the inimitable Meg Ryan, is a bookseller about to go out of business when she meets Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). Her rival's son.

Except it turns out that they've already met -- on the internet.

Dial-up, yo

AOL Instant Messenger is the centerpiece of the movie, and the undoubted inspiration point. I can only imagine the buildup was similar to when that guy wrote that script for that film that was going to be "about Facebook."

What redeems the movie is the chemistry; Hanks in particular is as sharp and clever as he ever gets. But let's be honest. The man could have good chemistry with a sock.

Or some chairs.

It's not even the best Hanks-Ryan combo--that would be Sleepless in Seattle, which is too perfect to critique.

What You've Got Mail is, really, is an antique. I say this because it so perfectly captures a moment in time--the late '90s, when AOL was just starting to become a thing--that to look back on it is to look at something so perfectly comprehensive as to be absolute. I mean, people who were zero years old when You've Got Mail was released are now sixteen and watching it still feels like yesterday.

Like Cary Grant, it's aged well.

It does make me wonder: how will filmmakers portray Tinder? (A word which, though I am the target audience, I had to check the spelling of twice.) Will it be a romantic tale of two people connected by the mere swipe of a thumb, or will it be humdrum and pedestrian? I hope the former, because in fifteen years a lot changes.

Heart, though. That stays the same.

When You Cannot Possibly Do Anything Else

Do you know those weeks when you cannot possibly do anything else but the thing that you are doing?

This is one of those for me. I am moving to a familiar city for a new job--here's a nice announcement, if you are interested--which has entailed, in the past few days, all the things that moving usually entails, as well as all the goodbyes that starting a new venture usually entails.

So for this week there can be no new post.

No new post, but one coming soon. And the next, and the next. I'll leave you with this clip from 13 Going on 30 (2004). It's a fun one.

Coming up next week? Something--Hanksy.

Love, Music

I hate musicals. They are trite, saccharine, and annoyingly loud, and by writing this I've virtually guaranteed that I will cover a musical sometime in the coming year.

Not today, though. Today I want to feature two movies that aren't musical so much as they are about music, starting with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008).

The film chronicles the beginning of a relationship between Nick (Michael Cera) and Norah (Kat Dennings), two high schoolers who meet on a night out in New York City. Together with their merry band of followers they search for Where's Fluffy?, an indie rock legend whose concert is set to go off at the end of the night.

I see you.

Where's Fluffy? is, of course, a MacGuffin. (A MacGuffin being the Hitchcockian device of a goal that is ultimately unimportant to the overall plot.) 

Instead it is the music, their private soundtrack, that pulls the plot forward. As Nick and Norah stumble together through the events of the night, the result is a non-quiet meditation on a young person's how to be, separately and as a part of a couple. 

What makes it memorable is itself the act of turning, and turning, and turning, until eventually ... 

... they face the same direction.

*

Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) is a film that begins somewhat differently. Here the lovers are not new, not unknown, but the opposite. Indeed, they are familiars of hundreds of years. 

Tilda Swinton, Vampire.

Though they live separately, they are known best between themselves and no one else.

Tom Hiddleston, also Vampire.

Adam and Eve are thus the theoretical endgame of the Nick and Norah meet-cute.

But where Nick and Norah merely takes place in the darkness, Only Lovers Left Alive dwells in it. Coming together again, the couple discovers that what their unit suffers from most is not the dangers of the outside world, but those cultivated by their isolation.

Oh, and did I mention that Adam has a rock band?

It has some teeth.

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Be back next week. 

October 21st, 1975

Given the news that broke yesterday of Robin Williams' passing, it seems only appropriate to discuss the movie that I almost, but not quite, discussed last week: Good Will Hunting (1997).

You see, Good Will Hunting is like The Devil Wears Prada in that both deal with a young fish out of water, a secret prodigy who gets taken underwing. They are also similar in that both are comforting movies, where deep themes are discussed in clever ways and all's well that ends well.

There's nothing comforting about Robin Williams' death. He didn't die of a heart attack in his 80's or after a long debilitating illness. He killed himself.

A part of my last job was to listen to old audio interviews to be made into CD compilations. It was a great job [internship, technically]. One of these CDs was going to be about comedians--the Greatest Hits, so to speak. And so I listened to many hours of comedians being interviewed and doing their funniest bits, comedians from every era.

I was looking for clips that were about 7 minutes long, max 15. In the process I came across an interview given by Robin Williams in the mid 80's. It was after his oldest son had been born and he had split with his first wife and given up cocaine, and it was an hour long.

I knew from the start that we couldn't use this interview. It was too crowded, too personal. But Williams spoke so passionately, so beautifully, about subjects so dear to my heart, that I listened to the whole thing. And then I listened to it again.

It was, I have no doubt, the best interview I've ever heard a comedian give.

I can't give you that clip, and I can't do anything else, really, but what I can do is give you a scene from Good Will Hunting. A picture of what it was like, once upon a time.

To Robin.

Grilled Cheese

Recently I've been having a craving for comfort food. And by comfort food I don't mean food, per se, but culture. Comfort literature, comfort music, comfort ... films?

Yes. Oh, yes. All of which leads me back to The Devil Wears Prada (2006).

Originally a book written by Lauren Weisberger, the film chronicles the life of Andy Sachs, a recent college graduate who goes to work for Runway magazine--a stand-in for Vogue--as the assistant of the Editor-in-Chief. Anne Hathaway is Andy, and the Editor-in-Chief is played by Meryl Streep. Who, if you extrapolate, is a stand-in for the real Editor-in-Chief of Vogue. Are you kind of getting the picture?

I think I am.

As a movie it's very nice, very chic, and so incredibly over the top. Andy, confused journalism fuzzball, has a sweet, cute boyfriend and all the ambition in the world. She would never take advantage of anyone! Ever! That Anne Hathaway has extraordinarily large eyes makes everything she says seem more earnest and believable, if slightly cloying.

Fortunately it's also very, very funny. What elements aren't generalities--the GBF, the anonymous NYC streets--are, rich, precise and cutting.

The subject matter is almost beside the point; as a non-fashionista I still find the references hilarious. Meryl as Miranda is as wonderful as you would expect, redheaded Emily Blunt isn't bad, and did I mention the cute boyfriend, Adrian Grenier? What the movie lacks in character it more than makes up for in substance.

Like gourmet macaroni and cheese, you know it's not very good for you, but it's simply too delicious to pass up. I mean, there's a supermodel cameo, ferchrissakes.

"Serena"

Not everything about The Devil Wears Prada is good. Some parts positively creep me out (Christian Thompson, I'm looking at you), and I will never appreciate the message that the number '4' is better than the number '6.' On the whole, though, it's worth spending some time on--one hour and 46 minutes' worth, to be exact.

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One more thing for today: I've been thinking about the best way to send out notifications for when the blog is updated--right now I send out updates via my Twitter but for those not so twitterpated, what do you think of a Facebook fan page? Or an email listserv? If you have an opinion on the matter drop it in the comments below.

Thanks.

That's all.