Due to my present participation in a rather mammoth undertaking, I don’t anticipate much in this space over the next few weeks — aside from the weekly podcast (several conversations already conducted!) and a few essays on movies. I’m also pushing back today’s podcast to sometime early next week in the interests of balancing content release. Probably curtailing my Twitter activities to a few tweets a day. All is very well. This ain’t exactly a hiatus. But I’m finding myself increasingly committed to offline activities.
Author / Edward Champion
Review: Cyrus (2010)
“What kind of comedy would you say that was?” said the man.
The marketing guy had observed my considerable laughter during the movie. While I don’t believe in withholding my emotional response within a screening room, and while I cannot in good conscience fall into that dishonest “Oh, I loved the movie!” mode practiced by certain joyless New York film critics judging a flick after observing the collective herd, my approach does run the risk of Bernaysian collisions.
“I’ll give you a hint,” I said. “Albert Brooks.”
Surely my insinuation would lead the man to remember the great film, Modern Romance, where Brooks played a film editor attempting to grapple with his romantic neuroses. Surely this mention would cause the gentleman to observe that John C. Reilly’s character was also a film editor, and just as neurotic as Brooks. Alas, Albert Brooks, as great as he is, cannot be called “box office draw” even after the most creative fudging of the numbers. Alas, this marketing man was more concerned with general taxonomies. This was hardly a matter of artistic comparison. It was crass bean counting.
“Well, is it black comedy?” he said. “Quirky comedy?”
“Psychological,” I replied, beating a hasty retreat to the elevator and hoping to consider my thoughts and feelings on the subway home.
I want to be clear that the man was perfectly nice and was only doing his job. But the idea that a “psychological comedy” — particularly one as well-made as Cyrus — can no longer be marketable is something I must object to. When we live in a world in which a self-serving BP executive bemoans wanting his life back and in which millions of unemployed individuals cannot find jobs (with their unseen plights ignored by media and government alike), it would seem to me that the need to convey American psychology is more pressing than ever. Not through marketing, but through artistic representation.
I am delighted to report that Cyrus lives up to this task. Written and directed by Jay and Mark Duplass, and featuring John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Jonah Hill in plum roles, Cyrus is one of the few American comedies in recent memory where the character dysfunction invites us to examine motivations rather than bask in base American Idol-style ridicule. It’s a great relief to see the Duplass brothers reclaim reality television’s handheld camera work for their film, which neither overplays its quietly empathic hand nor resists portraying embarrassing truths. This Duplassian commitment establishes itself with our first introduction to John (John C. Reilly), ostensibly in the midst of masturbation. “I have jock itch,” John explains to his ex-wife Jamie (Catherine Keener), who has showed up, unannounced, to check up. It continues when Jamie invites John to a cocktail party, where “people who will stimulate you intellectually” fail to do so. After our intoxicated hero strikes out with libidinous prospects, he goes outside to pee, meeting up with Molly (Marisa Tomei), who quickly responds, “Nice penis. Go ahead. Finish up.” But the two hit it off. They return inside. The Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me?” — which John considers to be “the greatest song” — causes John to dance and embarrass himself further. Molly joins him. Our two middle-aged heroes return to John’s, where John declares Molly “a sex angel.” John awakes to a note reading JOHN: THAT WAS AWESOME. CALL ME. And after Molly accepts an invitation that very evening to a home-cooked meal at John’s, an impromptu relationship is formed.
“My life is really complicated right now,” explains Molly. John drives out to Molly’s house the next morning to knock on her door. His efforts are interrupted by the titular Cyrus (Jonah Hill), who is revealed to be Molly’s son. Cyrus is a boomerang kid — one of those post-teens who clings to parental comforts rather than making a move in the real world. He’s pursuing a dubious music career involving avant-garde keyboard compositions. “Sounds like Steve Miller,” says John after Cyrus plays a sample. “No, it doesn’t,” replies Cyrus. But Cyrus has unspecified psychological problems and a morbid sense of humor. “Don’t fuck my mom,” says Cyrus, once the parental relationship has been laid out. “I’m just kidding,” he says next without skipping a beat.
The Duplass brothers are extremely effective in using our established ideas of these actors to their advantage. Jonah Hill’s warmhearted presence takes some of the edge off Cyrus. And because of this, we become tremendously curious about the hold Cyrus has over his mother. And if John were played by an actor other than John C. Reilly, we might interpret his morning drive to Molly’s home as stalking. Yet Reilly is so good at maintaining an avuncular balance between loneliness and a goodhearted nature that we accept his moves.
And while Marisa Tomei is extremely good in this movie, I’m wondering just how long she’ll be able to play the middle-aged woman who has seen it all and yet quietly accepts her fate. Cyrus follows The Wrestler and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in this line. And while these films have permitted Tomei to shine, I’m baffled as to why filmmakers haven’t centered their films around Tomei, rather than making her the supporting nurturer.
Perhaps the answer to that latter concern has much to do with the marketing man who accosted me during the closing credits. Fox Searchlight threw a considerable amount of cash attempting to promote Cyrus. In the week before its release, the film sponsored numerous WNYC programs. Pop-up ads invaded several major movie-related websites. Yet my conversation, which I felt compelled to note here in the interest of ethical transparency, would seem to indicate that today’s studios don’t see “psychological comedy” as an audience draw. That’s truly a pity. Because Cyrus demonstrates why it’s so important to pay attention to the smaller people around the corners. For their stories are often more fascinating than the loud explosions.
RIP Jose Saramago
Nobel Lecture: “The voice that read these pages wished to be the echo of the conjoined voices of my characters. I don’t have, as it were, more voice than the voices they had. Forgive me if what has seemed little to you, to me is all.”
Book Magazine, 2002: “You may disagree with such a pessimistic vision. But if there is a way for the world to be transformed for the better, it can only be done by pessimism; optimists will never change the world for the better.”
Julian Evans, The Guardian: “It is difficult to find dissenters from Wood’s description of Saramago as an ‘attractive and sinuous’ writer, though the Irish novelist John Banville is one.”
“The Unexpected Fantasist,” The New York Times, 2007: “Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. In part this is the resentment of a country that has long been dominated by a small elite. In part, it is a matter of Saramago’s own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as ‘cold,’ ‘arrogant,’ ‘unsympathetic.’ When my interpreter inquired at a DVD store if a documentary about Saramago was in stock, the young salesman, startled by the request, replied, laughing, ‘I hope not!'”
Review: Finding Bliss (2010)
It’s become increasingly impossible for any movie, whether mainstream or independent, to depict the porn industry with anything approaching accuracy. Show a penis — even a flaccid one — and you’ll be given the NC-17 stamp of death. Show any sexual act and, as the 2006 documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated sufficiently demonstrated, be prepared to get into a lengthy censorship battle with the MPAA. But feel free to maim or kill another human being and you’re likely to garner a PG-13. One of the ongoing hypocrisies about American culture is that violence remains fun for the whole family, while any hint of sexuality is considered Puritanical. Sex isn’t strictly verboten. Just don’t expect to get your film distributed within the present system.
In Finding Bliss, writer-director Julie Davis — who mined similar territory in Amy’s Orgasm — does her best to work her material around this problem, visualizing her adult entertainment production company (Grind Productions) as a locale with screwball possibilities. (It can’t be an accident that a poster of My Man Godfrey hangs in the main character’s apartment.) Leelee Sobieski plays Jody Balaban, a fresh film school grad who did not remind this writer of the actor Bob in any way. She can’t get a job. Even Garry Marshall (playing himself) won’t return her messages. She needs to make her movie, but she isn’t quite willing to pay her dues. Yet despite this steadfast drive, Jody proves quite diffidently vanilla in her sexual attitudes. She gets an editing job at Grind, figuring that she can secretly make her film at night using the surprising resources at her disposal at night while cutting together banging during the day.
The idea that true outsider art can only originate from porn’s “anything goes” exigencies isn’t a bad one for a comedy. Jody’s quest for clandestine respectability is shared, in part, by Grind, who hopes to make a film that can at long last play in mainstream theaters. This is also a production company where actors actually rehearse their lines around a table — an implausible joke that doesn’t quite pay off, but that permits a few meet cute moments. In one of the film’s surprisingly sparse concessions to perversity, Jody finds herself masturbating to the material she’s editing. She falls for disgraced director Jeff Drake (Matthew Davis), who is discovered to have once been a hot art house director and who is now pumping out porn at a steady clip. Drake, however, is remarkably faithful in his relationships. He eschews the casting couch favored by Hollywood and porn alike. When Jody’s initial cast learns of the ruse and flies the coop, Jody is forced to finish her film with porn actors. Jody’s opus is a run-of-the-mill coming-of-age drama that can be found in needless abundance at any third-tier film festival. The film seems to be suggesting that some middle-of-the-road adult entertainment company is now required to flood the marketplace with derivative independent films. (This is interesting when one considers that 1975’s Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS was shot using the Hogan’s Heroes sets. Can one even imagine an underground film being made today using the sets for Modern Family?)
Davis’s film is somewhat entertaining. She’s helped in large part by her cast. Sobieski has been rightly heralded as a serious dramatic actress. It’s a pity, however, that this very talented actress isn’t cast in more comedies. Even when asked to go needlessly over-the-top in a few reaction shots, she manages to sell her character’s pigheaded predicament without coming across as needlessly steely. (Had Katherine Heigl been cast in this film, Finding Bliss surely would have been a disaster.) We very much believe in Jody’s hangups, even if we don’t quite believe in the material. Matthew Davis is also pretty good, imbuing his character with a cocksure unctuousness. The criminally underemployed Kirsten Johnston, whose snappy quirks haven’t quite been understood by casting directors since 3rd Rock from the Sun, is also on hand as a co-worker. Even Denise Richards, who is best known for bimboing it up ten years ago, daringly announces to Jody (and the audience) near film’s end, “I’m a better actress than you thought.”
So Davis has cast well. She knows how to appropriate the best moments from other romantic comedies, such as the rooftop scene from The Goodbye Girl, for emotional effect. And Finding Bliss is much better in using porn as a refuge for misfits than, say, Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Unfortunately, Davis’s film (much like Jody’s) doesn’t entirely trust itself. Instead of letting the audience read the conflicted emotions on Sobieski’s face, the film prefers to bombard us with imaginary voices for Jody to react to. It’s almost as if Davis doesn’t entirely trust her character, much less Sobieski. There’s one scene that Sobieski plays, sitting in an awkward position with her knee up. And this comes across as desperate blocking that needlessly delimits the film’s potential. The film is also awkward when Jody’s parents enter the equation and when, during conversations between Jody and Jeff, it brings up the tired philosophy of women being aroused by more than just an emotional connection. It’s on firmer ground when trusting in the quite mythical Grind, and pursuing the film’s artificial disparity between mainstream and adult entertainment which reflects the very real discrepancies between how Americans live and what our national culture allows us to reveal about ourselves. This film didn’t need Ron Jeremy or Stormy Daniels — who both show up near the end. Had it called more bullshit on the self-imposed censorship system that prohibits real human emotion and real art from flourishing, it might very well have lived up to screwball subtext.
Ed’s Rules for Interviewing
1. Listen. I can’t stress that enough. It’s amazing how few journalists do this. Watch body language, the face, and especially the eyes. Pay very close attention. This will also tell you when the other person is getting tired and when you need to wrap things up. Keep within the time you have (unless the other person really wants to talk). Choose an interview location where the other person feels comfortable. Try to avoid sterile environments such as recording studios and boardrooms. (Cafes and restaurants work very well.) Be absolutely sure that the interviewee has eaten. Publicists sometimes forget about the human need to eat. So if the other person is famished, be sure get her fed before you talk. Buy the other person a drink if he really needs to loosen up, but don’t drink yourself. Unless the other person is a bit nervous and the conversational environment calls for social solidarity or minor debauchery. Be sure to tie your questions into what the person has already said, particularly on subjects that the other person gets very excited about, so that you can maintain a continuous thread.
2. Be genuinely excited and interested in what the other person has to say. I’m not talking fake excited. You’re not a fucking brand. You’re doing this because you like to do it. You really want to talk with this person. So you’d better be curious. If you’re not, you’re a charlatan. Don’t conduct an interview if you can’t stand the author or if you didn’t care for the latest book. (It took me about 150 shows to figure that last point out.) If you don’t care for the person you’re talking with, then the only reason you should be there is because you are immensely curious and interested in that person’s perspective or the ideas she is promulgating. If you’re writing the interview up for an outlet, avoid those hackneyed personal details (“He downed a beer when the conversation shifted to Spinoza”) unless the moment is really interesting and specifically relates to the conversation.
3. Don’t be afraid to ask challenging questions, but present them in the friendliest possible manner. Civil disagreement is possible. Be familiar with the Socratic method. Don’t be afraid to be a little theatrical. (The other person may very well be theatrical with you, and some very fun silliness will ensue.) If the person doesn’t want to answer the question, move quickly to the next one. Maintain conversational momentum, no matter what.
4. You cannot plan a conversation in advance. Learn how to improvise. Improvisation often results in the best conversational moments. (See Dick Cavett’s moment with Norman Mailer.) Make the interview a conversation. Become highly familiar with the following interviewers: Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder, Mike Wallace, Terry Gross, Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, Michael Silverblatt, Bob Costas (Later segments), et al. Study what makes these conversations work (or not) and what makes these interviews interesting. But don’t emulate these people. Learn from these folks. Be yourself. David Letterman, contrary to popular belief, is not your role model. You’re having a conversation, not participating in a junket.
5. Maintain eye contact when you ask those pivotal first few questions. Don’t look down at your question list during the opening minutes. You’re a talker, not a reader. You want to communicate to the other person very early on that you’re intimately familiar with her work and that you’re very much interested in being there.
6. Read and listen to other interviews with the person you’ll be talking with. Note the questions asked. Strike the commonly asked questions off your list. You want a unique interview, right? Find several angles that nobody else has thought to bring up. These angles exist. You just have to do the work. Do serious preparation and research, and you’ll be ahead of 90% of other interviewers. Don’t rely on a research team.
7. When someone’s been on the interviewing circuit a very long time, she’s going to have a certain boilerplate. Learn how to recognize boilerplate in conversation and learn how to steer the other person off boilerplate with highly specific queries. Encourage the person to be thoughtful, goofy, and spontaneous. Also keep in mind that your questions may not be as unique as you think they are. Keep in mind that these folks have heard it all. Don’t try to be special. Don’t strive to do the “ultimate” interview. Great interviews happen by accident. Just do the best job you can and stay relaxed. Serious preparation and practice will stand you in good stead.
8. Don’t do too many interviews. You’ll burn out quick. And don’t just do interviews. Have at least four other fun things that you’re doing. One of the reasons why so many great interviewers fizzle out is because they are asked to do five or more interviews a week. Don’t do this. Try not to do more than one or two interviews a week. Take long breaks from time to time. Interviews require energy. Make sure that you do plenty of other activities that have nothing to do with interviewing and that have nothing to do with your expertise.
9. Have fun and, for goodness sake, don’t take yourself so seriously. Even when you’re having a conversation about a serious subject. Don’t be humorless. Humor goes a long way in making a conversation fun — both for the interviewee and the people who read or listen to the interview. Also, don’t make any assumptions about how the conversation is going to go. It may go well. It may be okay. It may not go well. Your job is to do the best that you can with the time and the resources you have at your disposal. And if you’re having fun, you’ll be more relaxed. And you’re going to want to be relaxed so that the other person will feel relaxed. Remember that fun can be quite contagious.
10. If the interview fails, it’s your fault. Not the other person’s. Yours. You failed to attract interest. You failed to read the cues. You failed to engage the other person. And you’re going to fail sometimes. No matter how good you are, you’re going to have a few stinkers. (Case in point: There are four interviews I’ve conducted that I never posted.) If the interview fails, don’t dwell on it. Pick yourself off the ground and kick some ass on the next one.