The Spanish Prisoner

Imagine a bad TV sitcom that lasts an hour and a half and which has raunchy language in it. That’s pretty much what Horrible Bosses is like.

Nick (Jason Bateman) has a sadistic boss, Dave Harken (Kevin Spacey), who likes to play mind games with people. Dale (Charlie Day) is a dental assistant whose boss, Julia Harris (Jennifer Aniston) is continually coming on to him and tries to blackmail him. Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) is a chemical company executive who gets along with his boss (Donald Sutherland). However, when the latter dies, the company is taken over by his obnoxious cokehead son, Bobby Pellitt (Colin Farrell). Nick, Dale and Kurt like to get to together at a bar and commiserate with one another. They are so desperate that they decide to kill their bosses. They hire a “murder consultant”, Jones (Jamie Foxx), to help them.

I was hoping this film would be a satire on corporate life, but instead it’s a slapstick comedy and not a very good one. The main problem with this film is that the characters are so cartoonish that you simply don’t believe them. Of course, comedy inevitably involves a certain amount of exaggeration, but the characters have to be believable on some level. The only characters in this film who are at all believable are Harken and Jones. The rest one couldn’t care less about. I also had a problem with the way this film trivializes the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. (And would an executive at a chemical company hang around with a dental assistant? This is an example of Hollywood’s tone deafness when it comes to matters of class.)

One of the reasons I went to see this film is because Roger Ebert gave it three and a half stars. Perhaps I should ask Ebert to reimburse me for the cost of my ticket.

Terrence Malik’s latest film has been the source of a great deal of controversy, provoking sharply divided opinions. (Several days ago, a friend of mine posted on Facebook about how much he hated it.) My own feeling immediately after watching this film was similar to how I felt after watching Enter the Void, which was that what I had just seen was perhaps too much to absorb in a single viewing. There are many different kinds of images in this film, and their meanings and connections to one another are not always clear. Malick seems to be using them to try to convey philosophical and possibly even religious ideas.

The film is basically about an architect, Jack (Sean Penn), who sometimes reflects upon his experiences in life, sometimes thinks about the creation of the Earth and the origins of life, and at other times is simply fantasizing. A large chunk of the film is devoted to Jack’s experiences growing up in Waco, Texas during the 1950’s. (It so happens that Malick grew up in Waco during the 1950’s. It seems reasonable to assume that this film is at least partially autobiographical, though Malick is clearly trying to do more than just depict scenes from his life. By the way, Sean Penn is a little young for his role, but that’s not a big problem.) Jack’s father (Brad Pitt) is a stern disciplinarian, while his mother (Jessica Chastain) is indulgent and forgiving. Young Jack (Hunter McCracken, who looks like an adolescent Sean Penn) sometimes thinks about killing his father, while feeling close to his mother. What lifts this above Freudian cliché is that the characters seem real and complex. (Chastain and Pitt both give very good performances.)

As I mentioned before, part of the film is devoted to a depiction of the creation of the Earth and the evolution of life. (The special effects, which are very good, were partly done by Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey over forty years ago.) The juxtaposition of this with the scenes from Jack’s childhood is a bit jarring. It seems to me that Malick is trying to do two different things at the same time here. First, he is trying to convey the idea that Jack’s efforts to make sense out of his childhood are part of his efforts to try to make sense out of existence itself. Second, Malick is trying to reconcile evolution with an essentially religious view of the world. (This puts him in opposition to a lot of people in our society.) The film is peppered with religious ideas. It opens with a quote from the Book of Job. Both of Jack’s parents are deeply religious. His mother sounds almost mystical at times. In what I can only assume is one of Jack’s fantasies, we see his mother giving water to a man who has just been arrested by the police. (It may be that Jack’s parents represent the dual nature of religion, which is both judgmental and a source of solace.)

The film ends with a scene of Jack wandering on a beach, where he meets his parents and other people from his past. No doubt this represents Jack’s reconciliation with his past.

The Tree of Life is a great film. It shows that cinema can be more than just a storytelling medium. It can also be meditative, evocative and impressionistic. Films can challenge us and make us think as well as entertain us. I highly recommend seeing this film.

Richard Press has made a documentary about Bill Cunningham, the fashion photographer and writer. Since I have never been terribly keen on fashion, I was not sure I would find this film interesting, but I found Cunningham an engaging and likable person. He is now about eighty-years-old, yet he still rides around Manhattan on a bicycle, looking for people wearing striking clothes.

In the film, Cunningham defends the concept of fashion by saying that he regards clothing as “armor” that helps people deal with the vicissitudes of life. Cunningham’s own armor consists of a plain blue jacket that he seems to wear at all times. His non-descript appearance is in sharp contrast to the flamboyantly dressed people he likes to photograph on the streets of New York. (As a photographer myself, I was pleased to see that Cunningham still uses film.) No doubt Cunningham tries to draw as little attention to himself as possible, so as to get the candid pictures that he is famous for.

Cunnigham is a deeply private person, and Press respects this – perhaps too much so, because by the end of this film Cunningham is still something of a mystery. He claims, for example, that he doesn’t accept money for his work, so as to maintain his independence. Where then does he get the money to support himself? We’re never told. His friends all believe that he comes from a wealthy background, but Cunningham says his family is working class. We’re told that he once worked as a milliner, but we’re not told why he left that. We learn that Cunningham goes to church every Sunday, but he refuses to discuss religion. He refuses to discuss his love life. The closest we get to a personal revelation is when Cunningham tells us that his parents disapproved of his interest in fashion, because they didn’t think it was a proper pursuit for a man.

Cunnigham often takes pictures at fancy dinner parties where many of New York’s rich and famous people go, yet he leads a Spartan life. He lives in a studio crammed with filing cabinets full of negatives. He sleeps on a mattress on top of milk crates. We see him in a deli eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich. “They have such good sandwiches here,” he enthuses. When a party is held in his honor in Paris, he shows up with his camera and takes pictures as if he were on another one of his assignments.

At the time this film was made (2010), Cunningham was living in the Carnegie Hall Studios. The film discusses how he and other residents were about to be evicted, so their studios could be turned into office spaces. We see Cunningham with a couple of other residents of the studios, who have lived there since the 1940’s. (I’m not making this up.) This gives the film a bittersweet feel; Cunningham seems to belong to a world that is coming to an end.

It’s funny how the people who are trying to shove the standardized testing snake oil down our throats send their children to fancy private schools that encourage personal growth rather than rote learning. President Obama sends his children to such a school. Could this be because he knows better than to believe his own nonsense?

I was thinking about this when I went to see the new comedy The Best and the Brightest, directed by Michael Shelov, and written by Shelov and Michael Jaeger. Jeff (Neil Patrick Harris) and Samantha (Bonnie Somerville) are a young couple who have just moved to New York from Delaware, along with their five-year-old daughter, Beatrice (Amelia Talbot). Not trusting the public schools in New York, they decide to enroll their daughter in a private school. They hire an agent, Sue Lemon (Amy Sedaris) to help them get their daughter into an elite school. Sue learns that a school run by the snooty headmistress, Katharine Heilmann (Jenna Stern), has one remaining available space. Sue persuades Jeff and Samantha that they should try to impress Heilmann by telling her that Jeff is a poet. Jeff and Samantha leave their daughter with their idle rich friend, Clark (Peter Serafinowicz) while they go to the interview. Their meeting with Heilmann goes well, and the latter seems inclined to admit their daughter. However, in a completely nonsensical scene, Clark appears out of nowhere, and, for no apparent reason, calls Heilmann a “douche”, causing her to reject their application. (This is simply bad writing.) Sue then tells Jeff and Samantha that their only hope now is to persuade the members of the school board that Jeff is an important up-and-coming poet. This leads to a series of increasingly humiliating impostures. At one point, Jeff and Samantha get disgusted with what they are doing and decide to move back to Delaware. It would have made sense if the film had ended with that. Instead, for no clear reason, they change their minds. They eventually resort to blackmailing one of the board members to get their daughter into the school.

So Jeff and Samantha end up completely buying into the rotten values that this film is supposedly satirizing. This wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the fact that we are clearly supposed to sympathize with these two. Indeed, we are supposed to root for them as they degrade themselves. This is not good comedy, and it certainly isn’t good satire.

For the most part, this film just is not funny. The characters are too broadly drawn to be believable for one minute. The actors do the best they can with their one-dimensional roles, although I must say that I found Amy Sedaris extremely annoying. Every time she appears on the screen, it’s almost as if you’re getting punched in the face. The problem is that she never modulates her voice. She delivers every line in the same in-your-face manner.

A woefully misguided film.