Author: Peter Schilling

Fast Food Nation and For Your Consideration.

Fast Food Nation, 2006. Directed by Richard Linklater, written by Linklater and Eric Schlosser. Starring Catalina Sandino Moreno, Wilmer Valderrama, Ana Claudia Talancon, Greg Kinnear, Ashley Johnson, Bobby Cannavale, Paul Dano, Esai Morales, and, in small roles: Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette, Luis Guzman, Avril Lavigne, Lou Taylor Pucci, and Bruce Willis.

Now showing in theaters around town.

By now you’d have to be an utter fool not to know that fast food is a truly awful substance. For years we’ve heard the warnings, seen films like Super Size Me, watched 60 Minutes, read health reports and warnings that the burgers we consume are filled with toxins, deadly fats, and perhaps even traces of shit.

Filmgoers looking for a righteous tirade against the fast food industry are going to be sorely disappointed by Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation. Never has such a cynical, pessimistic film on such a charged subject been made with less urgency. Fast Food Nation has been compared (favorably) to Fahrenheit 9/11, which is absurd–where Michael Moore sought to condemn the Bush administration for every random sneeze (and attempt to create the image of himself as a hero of the masses), Linklater’s film simply and patiently reveals the inner workings of a machine that devours people and cattle with equal indifference. And in doing so he creates a picture of surprising strength and durability.

Fast Food Nation is splintered into three distinct stories: that of a fast food executive, sent to Texas to find out why the “fecal colorform is off the charts” in the burgers (shit in the meat), and in the process discovers his soul; of a young woman trying to put her way through school while working at the local burger joint; and, most poignantly, a group of Mexican immigrants trying to keep their heads above water while working at the meat processing plant.

Greg Kinnear plays the executive, a happy-go-lucky guy whose eyes are slowly opened to the horrors that surround him. He’s the kind of a fellow who gets a real thrill over having invented the Calypso Chicken Tenders, and who laughs with his wife that lesson one in the corporate world is “don’t kill your customer”. Ashley Johnson is the young woman whose job at Mickey’s (the stand in for McDonald’s) begins to weigh on her soul. Eventually she will abandon her job to join forces with a ragtag group of campus radicals, whose work borders on the futile. Finally, Wilmer Valderrama (of That 70s Show fame), Catalina Sandino Moreno (from Maria Full of Grace), and Ana Claudia Talancon (a star in Mexico) play a family that escapes the crushing poverty of their home country to work in the states. They are a resilient bunch, happy to have the modest dough from their jobs, giving them the possibility of the American dream–pizza for dinner, a new truck in the driveway. While their paths never cross, these characters’ struggles encapsulate our own desperate attempts to find meaning in our jobs, and in our attempts to make the world a better place.

There is a real mystery in Fast Food Nation, and the real story isn’t simply that fast food is garbage and the people are crushed who work in its production. No, the real story is how do we exist in a world that crushes the soul, and whose systems–in this case, food-production (though it could be about the auto industry, banking, government) have grown to an unmanageable size. Fast Food Nation poses an existentialist dilemma that pundits like Moore and Spurlock would never touch: Linklater understands that there are no enemies in human form, just people stuck in situations beyond their control. As usual, Linklater allows his characters the freedom to express themselves through conversation: like Slacker, Waking Life, Before Sunrise, Fast Food Nation celebrates its people, giving even Bruce Willis’ corporate hack his due, and his dignity. In my interview with Linklater, he stated that his goal was honesty–if you make one man the personification of evil, you are, as Linklater said, “giving that one guy a lot of power he doesn’t really have.” This suggests that we’re all culpable, which is, in reality, more terrifying than the killing floor of the slaughterhouse.

The movie boasts some wonderful performances (as usual with Linklater, who deserves the title “actor’s director” more than Altman ever did), and it saves its gore for the end, and even then it’s subdued. My guess is that Fast Food Nation is bound to be unpopular, and will please few people. Those who want to ignore the fast food crisis would never see it, while those who have Eric Schlosser’s book highlighted in a hundred spots will feel the film has softened its considerable message. But Linklater has taken a page from the great paranoid classics of the 70s, films that assumed we had brains and sought to make our world a better place. Watching Fast Food Nation, the impetus is on us, not necessarily to topple the great machine, but rather, to live without the machine. Then, and only then, will its gears slow, stop, and finally release us from its grip.

…

For Your Consideration, 2006. Directed by Christopher Guest, written by Guest and Eugene Levy. Starring Catherine O’Hara, Parker Posey, Harry Shearer, Christopher Moynihan, Christopher Guest, John Michael Higgins, Carrie Aizley, Ed Begley Jr., Whitney Taylor Brown, Michael McKean, the great Jane Lynch, Fred Willard, Eugene Levy, and Michael Hitchcock and Don Lake as a great Ebert/Siskel pair, and Office creator Ricky Gervais.

Now showing in theaters around town.

Who would have thought that when Spinal Tap hit our screens over twenty years ago, that it would spawn a whole new genre? In fact, the mockumentary may have reached its zenith, with The Office pulling in audiences, to Tap’s Nigel Tufnel rocking out for VW (usually during the show). Christopher Guest has made a series of these films, utilizing a tight-knit crew so professional they can improvise most of the dialogue and make it seem both hilarious and painfully real.

For Your Consideration breaks slightly with this trend. While it employs the verite camera style, it is not a mockumentary, eschewing for once the onscreen interviews. It is the story of the making of a straight-to-video clunker called Home For Purim, and what happens to its idiotic crew when rumors abound that it will garner some Oscar nominations. Home For Purim is unbelievably bad, its actors kind-hearted but daft, and the movie is filled with more achingly funny moments than we’ve seen in a Christopher Guest film in ages. Then again, Hollywood is an easy target, and while For Your Consideration certainly stands as one of the better comedies of the year (if not the most hilarious, but it’s been a weak year), it could use more vitriol–or it could be more sweet. When Catherine O’Hara’s character finally flips out, it’s more depressing than funny, for we’ve come to know her as a kind lady, not some hag who needs her face carved into by a plastic surgeon. And when Home For Purim really does garner a nod or two, one can’t help but recoil–no film this bad would ever get even a trickle of consideration. And there have been lots of horrible Oscar nominees.

Nonetheless, For Your Consideration is a welcome night at the movies, an evening of almost guaranteed belly laughs and repeated moments after the show. See it for its joy in celebrating comedians of all feathers, working with a decent script, playing off one another, for the sheer fun of it. Sometimes, that’s all we need.

Rififi, 1955. Directed by Jules Dassin, written by Dassin, with Rene Wheeler and Auguste Le Breton. Starring Jean Servais, Jo le Suedois, Robert Manuel, Jules Dassin, Marie Sabouret, Janine Darcey, Claude Sylvain, and Marcel Lupovici.

I know what they say: they say that crime doesn’t pay. And it doesn’t I suppose. After all those years of hard living, you don’t come away with anything but the worst regrets. The stress kills you, the lies kill you, every little thing kills you, like going from good times to bad in a day. Shit, I literally had an apartment across from Central Park in Manhattan, had it for eight months, furnished, great view, full bar, and then, on December 11 (I can’t forget the date), I spent the night in a homeless shelter in the Bowery. But it can be just as bad going up, you know–Christ, you come across a bundle, you can leave the dregs for a great new place, but how do you furnish the thing? How do you get in with the neighbors, the respectable people? They know something’s up.

Throw kids in the mix and it’s worse. I had a little girl. Still do, I guess. But she hasn’t spoken with me in years. Never will, either.

I love Rififi. Watch that movie, and you’ll see how it was with a gang I was involved in. We didn’t do anything with safes and busting in like in the picture, though maybe that would have been more noble. Stealing from some wealthy bastard instead of televisions and radios out of some poor guy’s basement or warehouse. But my pals, we had that loyalty, like in the movie. Shit, I guarantee that’s the only French movie I could ever watch. Influenced me to no end when I was younger. Back then, when I first saw it, I was one of those shitheads who couldn’t do anything right–I’d steal, lie, cheat, but I had a heart, I knew, my pals knew it. I remember once, when I sold a pal’s saxophone right out from under him, I was holdin’ it while he spent a month in the pen for trying to buy some heroin off a cop. He gets out, comes to me, finds the axe is gone. We both cried, you know that? And he says, he says, “You know what Max, you’re the kind of guy you can trust with your life, but not your money.” Then he gave me a hug, went to go buy his sax. Never saw him again. That really hurt. But it was true. I guess the truth hurts more than anything else, doesn’t it?

Rififi hit me hard. I saw it in Times Square, at the Rialto. It wasn’t long after I lost that sax. I was really bumming, selling dope, stealing those televisions, doing whatever I could. So I saw Rififi, about the great jewel heist. I’ve seen this thing a hundred times if I’ve seen it at all. I own it now, watch it with friends, and they don’t like it, don’t like that it’s in French. So what? You wouldn’t ignore a beautiful woman if she spoke French, right? That’s how I feel about this movie.

See, what got me wasn’t the heist. That I could take or leave. I mean, it’s exciting, yeah, but real? No way, that’s all Hollywood. I’m not going to break safes and climb through holes in ceilings. But those guys, those thieves, they stuck together, and that’s what I liked. The main guy, Tony the Stephanois, he’s coughing throughout the flick, he’s going to die. Going to die because he’s old and let himself get locked up, taking the rap for his young friend, who had a kid. In the joint he caught some lung disease, tuberculosis, something. The kid was too young to do hard time, Tony figured, so he didn’t fink on his friend. I remember sitting there, in the dark, sucking on my Coca-Cola, and thinking, “son of a bitch, I’d never do that!” But then the movie progresses, and these guys all stick together… except one, and he brings it all down. I hate him still, just to talk about him now.

There’s one scene that gets me: when they’re opening the safe. They’re going to go in from the back, so these four guys lower the thing down so the safecracker can work on getting in. Of course, it’s heavy, hard, hard work even for four men. And you know what? It looks just like the soldiers raising the flag of Iwo Jima, except going the opposite way. All working together like that. Of course, there’s no glory to it, they’re robbing after all.

But that’s the thing with a movie like Rififi. Crime doesn’t pay… they all have to say that. But it does, kind of. You come out of a theater after seeing a show like that, and the sun’s so bright, and it seems like it’s shining especially hard on your prospects, and they’re not good. It feels like you do an honest day’s work and you come home broken. And where’s the thrill? When does your heart ever beat like it does when you’re doing something wrong, stealing something, wonderin’ if those footfalls are the cops or just some lunk out wandering? I’m here to tell you the heart doesn’t ever beat that way. And if you win, you’re sitting on a throne, a holy throne.

For us it became hot merchandise, like I said, tv’s and radios, whatever we could steal and resell, and very little violence. I made some friends, close friends in the business, got in with a group of guys like in Rififi, only not like Rififi, because you know life is never like a movie. But close, real close, and when they go to jail, it kills you. And when they die, it hurts even in your sleep. And the shame of it all, you get to share it, and the miseries you share, and the highs, you certainly share those. But we stuck it out, the four of us.

Now they’re all gone. Two died young, one at the hands of a cop who thought my pal was packing a piece. One’s in jail forever. I still write him, but I’m too old to visit. Sent him to a joint in Virginia. No one sees him. But I hear he’s healthy.

This’ll sound disrespectful, but sometimes I think it’s like soldierin’. You go through the good and bad with a guy, highs taller than the Empire State Building, and lows lower than the bottom of the Atlantic. And even though it makes you sick to think of some of the casualties, how could you have lived any different?

Me, my biggest regret’s family. I do see the guys in the park, walking with their grandkids, the life of a sucker peaking with a beautiful child in their arms. Maybe that’s the gold at the end of the rainbow, I don’t know. I saw Rififi just the other day, and it’s true, with this life there’s never any future. I’m lucky to be this old and not talking to you in a jail cell, or not talking at all ’cause I’m dead. My pal who died on the job, you know, I thought about how in Rififi Tony stays with his pal, stroking his hair because he’s sad as all hell. Man, I wanted to say good-bye to my friend, Cinch was his name, but I had to beat it for the cops. That certainly wasn’t like the movie. I hope Cinch was already dead, and not alone in his last moments…

Politicians and Professors will never understand, though: crime’s never going away, because real life’s like the movies just enough to keep us coming back for more. That’s awful I know, but it’s what I believe.

Once again I’m ignoring this weekend’s top releases–especially Stranger Than Fiction, which does not look appealing in the least (sorry Amy). Instead, dear readers (or reader), there are two films outside the mainstream worth checking out:

The Mill City Museum is hosting the documentary Urban Explorers: Into The Darkness tonight at 6:30. Director Melody Gilbert will be on hand to answer questions and schmooze with the audience. The movie follows a group of people with punk superhero names (Max Action, Slim Jim, Katwoman) as they pull manhole covers off the city streets and climb down into the sewers to find adventure. I’d love to have the backbone to be able to descend into the guts of the city, or break into to old abandoned buildings and see what’s there. I don’t (have the guts, that is), so this film will have to suffice.

Also: The Walker Art Center is giving us Blue Velvet on the big screen tonight and tomorrow! This movie blew me away when I saw it in college, long ago. Those billowing silk curtains to open the film, the stroke that brings the hero back into town, and Lynch’s camera diving into the grass to expose a cruel world where insects devour anything at will… if that’s not enough, on comes Isabella Rossellini, Dennis Hopper, and my personal favorite, Dean Stockwell singing “A candy colored clown they call the sandman”. I’ve seen this picture only once on the big screen, over twenty years ago, and if you’ve never seen it in a theater, make it a point to do so. Blue Velvet screens as part of the Isabella Rossellini: Illuminated, and plays tonight at 9:45 and tomorrow at 7:30.

Certainly people grow tired of mere contraptions. But they never grow weary of imagination. —Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture

One summer I met with a gentleman named Harley Buckwilliams, a tall fellow bent with osteoporosis and pigeon toed, a wanderer and would-be filmmaker from Topinabee, Michigan, on Mullet Lake. Buckwilliams–I never got to the bottom of whether that was his real name or a nom de plume–had seventeen minutes of what was to have been an epic feature film called Vachel Lindsay Will Trade Bread for Photoplays. How he came across my name I’ll never know, but it was this strange request which prompted me to drive the two hours from a visit with my mother in Mt. Pleasant. I arrived at a dilapidated clapboard farmhouse in the middle of a forest that looked as if someone had hacked down the trees twenty years ago and replanted evergreens in very straight lines. Harley met me out front, offered me a bottle of homemade beer, and then welcomed me around the back to a shack barely big enough to hold two people, much less a projector and screen. The place smelled not unpleasantly of metal and dust and old wood. Above the entrance was a sign that read Gryphon Theater, and inside and on shelves above our head were rows and rows of film canisters, a collection from over thirty five years. It included the usual found footage–old educational films, (Paddle to the Sea among them), footage of Flint for that city’s Chamber of Commerce, advertisements, and, he claimed, a copy of the Lyman Howe’s old silent Moving Day that Lindsay enjoyed. Buckwilliams refused to show this last one to me “for fear of enchantment”–I would, like Lindsay, take to the roads, hoboing, trying to encourage my fellow man to fall in love with poetry and the moving picture.

We sat on a pair of old kitchen stools, and he projected his film onto the back of an ancient high school school map of the United States. “My original idear was to cast Rich Brautigan in the role of Vachel Lindsay. You can see him there.” Quickly, there was a shot outside of what looked like a steep San Francisco street, and Brautigan, with his characteristic mustache, smiling and then flipping off the camera. Then the projector died. Buckwilliams cleared his throat as he tried to fix it. “He agreed at first. I get to keep this footage ’cause of that. I kept after him but then he died. Both Vachel and Richard killed themselves. One with Lysol, one with a pistol. I’d go with the pistol myself.”

The crux of the film was this: Brautigan was to wander from Illinois to New Mexico, as Lindsay had, preaching the gospel of beauty. As time progressed, Brautigan would gather poor souls to a makeshift theater by every town–merely a sheet strung up between birch trees, at dusk, hopefully by a river or railyard–and screen what had already been shot. All the while, characters in the background would be reciting Lindsay’s Art of the Moving Picture in its entirety. There was really no plot, except that Brautigan needed to get to New Mexico and there the film would be seen in its entirety. “The movie would sink into your head,” Buckwilliams said, as he fiddled the projector, blowing dust out of the guts of the machine. “I’m not talking the garbage you see today. But the movies that come out of your every waking day. That’s what V. saw in poetry and movies. This thing,” he said, slapping the reel, “is about life. What other movie can say that?”

I scoffed at that overblown statement, and asked him how he planned to get the financing to finish it–or was it already completed? The film would not lose money, he claimed, because barter would rule–for every time they needed film, or to use an editing studio, or to eat, Buckwilliams and his crew (one brother serving a year for vagrancy, and two pals of Harley’s from his very brief time in the Coast Guard before he was tossed out for desertion) would trade what they need for the promise of a spot in the motion picture. “Of course,” Harley said, in a voice gouged by cigarettes and no doubt shouting over trains, “that meant you had to find someone with imagination. Someone who’s brave.” Then he asked me if I would fund part of it, and I gave him thirty dollars and the promise of helping him screen what he had if he made it to Minneapolis.

With that he turned the projector back on and we watched the remainder of Vachel Lindsay Will Trade Bread for Photoplays. What remains is a thing of beauty. Whatever’s going through Mr. Buckwilliams’ head, no matter how scatterbrained he appeared, he does has an eye for the people he’s shooting. They are weary, most are drunk, the dregs of society beaming at the camera, no doubt shocked that someone wants to take a movie of them, and not just some tv crew out to capture the plight of the homeless. One fellow does a little jig, another tries (and fails) to juggle, one woman kisses at the lens and winks, smiles and then her instincts react and she immediately covers that happy grin with her hand and her eyes lower. Hilarious and heartbreaking all at once, with a little murmur of someone reading, I assume, chapter one of The Art of the Moving Picture. “But what’s important,” Buckwilliams added, “is that we don’t get anyone else talking. Talking ruins the Hieroglyphics of the individual. Film reveals the language. It reveals the person. It is, as Vachel said, the mirror-screen. It will make all of us happy, all of us equal.” He seemed to be suddenly aware of the gravity of the statement, for he shrugged and gave me a sideways smile. “Anyway, that’d be nice wouldn’t it?”

A little tipsy from the combination of strong beer and an empty stomach, I watched this little movie, impressed with Buckwilliams’ triumphant close to the picture: in 2018, when Lindsay’s vision of the arrival of a winged book should appear in Springfield, Illinois, the filming will cease. Harley would then show the world premiere of the film that day as well. The movie will be shown in the center of town, and maybe, just maybe, the spirit of Vachel Lindsay will rise to greet the new Millennia of the city of Springfield, which was holy to Lindsay.

Thanking Harley for his hospitality and the clip of his movie, I retreated to my car, a little overwhelmed. What I had just seen was as gossamer as a spider web on a tomato plant–here one day, gone the next. No one will bother to save Mr. Buckwilliams’ precious canisters of film; needless to say it will never make the switch to DVD and the film itself will eventually decay to nothing. Perhaps that is as it should be, like Lindsay’s impromptu poems recited for a meal or a night’s sleep in a hayloft. I felt a bit guilty with my promises to screen his movie if he ever made it out my way, for I knew that we both knew that that was an empty promise, that he would probably never leave Topinabee alive. And when he died, the movie would die with him.

…As we peer into the Mirror Screen some of us dare to look forward to the time when the pouring streets of men will become sacred in each other’s eyes, in pictures and in fact. –Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture.

Briefly: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat has been hailed by many as the last refuge of shock humor, carrying on a tradition that included the likes of Lenny Bruce. But listening to any Lenny Bruce album–a joy in my mind, albeit an often times challenging one–there wasn’t any loathing for his subjects. When he would riff on, say, words that were incendiary (f–k, s–t, n—-r, etc.), Bruce did so because he was tired of all the crap people had to go through because some words were considered dirty, and some held the power to reduce a man, woman, or child into feeling like less than a human being. For all his faults, Lenny Bruce cared deeply about his audience, and the world he lived in.

Cohen shows no such concern in Borat, a film whose misanthropic tendencies soon grate after only a few minutes. If there’s a story it’s this: Borat comes to America to make a film for his homeland, falls in love with an image of Pam Anderson in Baywatch, and drives across the country, through the south, to find and marry her. Along the way, he gets to insult feminists, southern gentility, backwater rodeo fans, and, of course, Pam Anderson. If anything’s shocking, it’s the scene where Borat and his manager wrestle buck naked on a bed, and, to be honest, it’s disturbingly funny. But as for the rest of the film, it’s akin to, as I wrote in The Rake, throwing dynamite in a barrel of fish: southern bigots are just too easy. Would a bunch of New York liberals–like say, those that populated the Al Franken movie–have been welcoming to a man who offers his host of bag of feces and, later, a surprise visit from a black prostitute? Something tells me the answer is no, and that the results would be equally funny, but more damning. New York and L.A. emerge virtually unscathed, while frat boys, evangelical Christians, and the aforementioned rodeos and southerners get the skewer. And that’s just too damn easy.

…

Death of a President, playing at the Oak Street, is a triumph of verisimilitude–that is, the filmmakers did a pretty damn good job of imagining the chaos and fear that would follow an assassination of George W. Bush. The problem isn’t that they get it right, it’s that they get it so right as to be tedious. They detail nearly every facet of this awful weekend in the future, including long shots of actual speeches and fictional foreign policy crises drains the life right out of the movie. Ask yourself: why would anyone want to listen to actual footage of Bush telling jokes about Chicago mayor Richard Daley, just because it’s been altered slightly to look as though it’s taking place in the future? We all know it’s not real, and a film like this needs to rise out of its context and include some actual hysteria (a woman who is one of Bush’s top speechwriters, and there with the First Lady when he dies, shows virtually no emotion), and maybe even humor, in order to get to the heart of what this would mean to us in real life. For a movie as controversial as Death of a President, it’s one of the least thought-provoking films you’ll find.

It’s funny, it’s sexy, it’s beautiful and filled with a deep sympathy for its characters that’s rare in comedy… it’s none other than Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein! Tonight, at the Central Library, the Friends is bestowing us with the gift of this lovely film tonight at 7:00. I loved this movie as a kid, wishing to God that I could have hair like Gene Wilder’s, glasses like Frederick Frankenstein, and a girl like Teri Garr. Easily Brooks’ best film, and a joy, no doubt, on the big screen!