SANDY GARNETT ART BLOG

As far as I’m concerned, if one does not contemplate the otherworldly one is wasting one’s time in this world.  Such is the message with The Exorcism of Emily Rose, a taught picture starring Laura Linney, who I’ll always watch, Father Richard Moore played by Tom Wilkinson who was so moving in In the Bedroom, and lead prosecutor played by Ethan Thomas, who was the lead actor who propels Roger Dodger.  Laura Linney plays defending lawyer Erin Bruner who is adept at the defense of bad guys, but suddenly she’s pushed into this case by her firm and realizes that she must go with the flow and take exorcism on its own terms, which rails against her logical leanings.  This film is based on a factual record from 1976, taken from a small German town and made Hollywood.  These days I’m not into the horror flick as I function mainly on positive vibes in order to survive as a painter, but I follow Linney and this film reminds the audience that there are other things outside the courtroom that cannot be explained, which can be refreshing in a way as this is the truth.  Just for a moment try quantifying my success for a minute, the fact that I can make a living painting and sculpting for 15 years.  Without the right vibes and luck this is impossible.  If you sat around the campfire to hear my stories about continuing to stay in business as a painter you wouldn’t believe me.  So if you like weird and scary and you like Laura Linney and good actors this is a way to check out other ways humans suffer while we’re here alive.  Nichole Kidman’s The Others is another superior flick in a strange, alarming but not crazy way.  I stretch my brain on this front, but I’m not spending a lot of time here so there you have it.  Oh yes, The Changeling George C. Scott is GREAT, The Deadzone Christopher Walkin, Spielburg’s Close Encounters, Poltergeist, Frailty Bill Paxton is not in this but the next scariest in an alternate category; then you go down the line on this front out of the extraordinary to the Butcher Boy, a quiet film in 1997 - then you go the Magdelene Sisters then a Crying Game and then you pop out into some weird Irish realm… where did that come from but I’ve got a point, as films create streams and they interconnect in strange ways.  If you go the other way from this movie my apex remains Kubrick’s The Shining.

East of Eden is an enthralling portrait of Dean before death that accounts for his three picture powerful iconography.  His Cal is one of the strangest performances I have seen, a tortured boy wonder for the ages.  John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is a monster of middle American lore, not an easy pill to swallow, but worthy of its spirits in Kazan’s very human portrayal of a fractured young soul’s search for reconciliation with parents who never properly loved him.

The pump up for Borat was nothing short of miraculous, and the US box office take of 26 million first weekend with a limited 850 theater release proves that Mr. Cohen has wheels.  He is admired for his hysterical De Ali G show, and he takes one of his main characters Borat on tour in this strange picture, which mildly disappointed.

Cohen reminds me a bit of Andy Kaufman, whose lovable Latka on the syndicated Taxi comedy was one of Kaufman’s brilliant creations that enthralled the studio to take him on, in much the same way that Robin Williams’ multiple impersonation personalities landed him on Mork and Mindy, which ignited his career.  Williams has an identity on and off the stage, whereas Kaufman started messing with his audience by doing strange things on talk shows and with wrestling that many now feel like experimental bits, pushing the boundaries of comedy and performance into arenas that were perceived to be not fictional.  Mr. Cohen’s whole act is about staying in character as he pulls the wool over the public’s unsuspecting eyes, a back engineered reality tv show where the interviewed are stage props and the last laugh.  This makes for some remarkably fresh humor, but best in short, edited snippets, something that worked very well on Mr. Cohen’s television show.  It does not work as well in the film format, where a 124 minute film feels often like an uncomfortable 4 hour passage.

The audience knows that Borat is a spoof reporter from Kazahkstan in the beginning of the film, and he sets to work belittling everyone in the movie from here on in.  I thought I’d like this intro more, but it’s a bit set up.  His impoverished family and home town are played by actors, as is his producer, and this is not as funny as when he gets to America on a mission subsidized by his country to discover the inner tickings of the US.  The actors who are paid in this film remind us that we are watching a put on, as with his constant tangles with a producer he fights naked with in one disgusting scene, only to take the act out into the hotel lobby and into a real life banquet dinner, where they continue wrestling onstage, and are hauled off by security people in a strange gig that reads ugly in the end.  There is a hired escort who also plays in the film and takes the audience out of the movie again.  Mr. Cohen is big on prop pieces and uses them well, as he uses his lanky tall figure to similar effect, although there is a shelf life to all this. 

Borat’s comedic power is based around the unsuspecting Americans he entraps in interviews, and in short segments they can make for fine humor.  Mr. Cohen delights in the awkward moment, that time in film when all hell hangs in the balance and a delicately raised eyebrow or studdering botch of English saves him from Americans who would otherwise turn away.  And Mr. Cohen seems to delight inciting Jewish hatred, ensnaring Americans into concurring when they are simply wincing to get through the moment and respect the opinions of aman from another country.  The fact that Americans are so accomodating is a question that all should ask, as Universities have grown tired in their efforts to ‘teach’ relativity in society as opposed to sticking with the basics of knowledge, an issue that is growing a backlash with fangs for its stupidity in the end.  This film confirms how damn flexible and agreeable Americans try to be with foreigners, which doesn’t exactly play so well.  Americans like winners and the underdog, and it seems we have a natural tendency to try not to judge and bring along people who are foreign or even hostile to our culture.  Borat stays at an Inn run by a very sweet Jewish couple, who come to his room with food that he won’t eat as he is staying ‘with a den of Jews’.  He and his producer escape in the night, which makes me feel bad for the sweet Innkeepers.  He visits a School for Manners, where he insults a dinner party although they do their best to appreciate that he is coming from another country and he simply has another cultural perspective.  The suggestion is that Tarzan thought where the hostess can help Borat find his manners in a new country, but after enough crude human behavior that cannot possibly be accepted in any culture he is escorted out the door.  He sings an insulting interpretation of the National Anthem at a Rodeo, where an arena full of hard working Americans try to go along with him and then boo him off the rodeo ring, and these boos spook one of the horses in the background to the point that one rodeo girl in stars and stripes falls underneath the freaked out horse.  Where is there room for this to be reported in an ‘overly senstive cultural media’ that doesn’t give a damn about the middle of the country?  A broken leg in middle America for a good laugh?  Ha ha. 

Borat finds salvation at a Penacoastal Church, which is a little out there for me as a moderate Christian, and just imagine if you’re Jewish like Mr. Cohen, but if you think about it the same footage would look plain disrespectful in a black Baptist Church, one element of the Christian practice that even the most snooty New York intellectuals won’t disrespect.  This reminds me of Al Franken finding a Jewish mole to interview at a Christian college.  How do you think the Jewish community would respond if a snotty cultural Christian tried the same act on a synagogue or Jewish school?  The New York Times and most other media outlets would have that guy’s head on a stake the way they tried to ruin Mr. Gibson during the production of his Passion movie.  This was one of the most appalling media attacks I’ve ever seen, and much more frightening than Mr. Gibson’s drunken remarks three years after the media tried to viciously blackball him out of Hollywood.  I’m seeing his next movie too just like all the other people who were fuming that here is a Christian getting kneecapped by a biased press and the Anti-Defamation League for making a Jesus movie.  Meanwhile, Mr. Cohen can whale on the cross and the media finds it hysterical.  This glaring hypocrisy has been institutionalized in America’s cultural architecture and is terribly annoying.  You know that old saying, if you can’t take it don’t dish it out.  The inequity here is my point; it’s obvious, relevant and timely.  Borat’s tango with Jesus is not insulting at all actually, rather innocent and mildly amusing.  But his continued arm twisting of naive Americans to goad them on camera into agreeing with his Jewish bashing reminds Christians they have been conditioned  to fear the mudslinging term anti-semite, when in fact the term has been so abused it has lost its meaning in contemporary America (although the term was always one of confusion).  People don’t even hear the words anymore, don’t look up from their soup.  Mr. Cohen’s Borat talks in and around this issue throughout the entire film for any cheap laugh he can get and it grows shopworn after the initial shock wears off, a Jewish comic playing a middle eastern hater of Jews.

I thought 1:24 minutes would be a breeze, but it felt like a marathon.  I started looking for the exit signs halfway through the film.  Mr. Cohen is a special talent but his work belongs in shorter segments.  He can struggle with this while rolling around in his massive pile of dough.

What have I been missing?  What a disturbing picture, starring Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, who play two aging stars of stage and film locked in a death grip of jealousy and deceit.  Ms. Crawford’s body is failing although her mind is quite clear, and her wickedly jealous sister Ms. Davis is limber as a willow reed yet disturbed in the noodle.  You get old Hollywood writing, setups, language I enjoy, formalities that no longer exist, and a very engrossing film, one my father’s told me about as he is a walking old picture database but one I didn’t get to until now.  Netflix this one if you like old movies that get a little chilling.

The Prestige comes in the shadow of The Illusionist, which I loved.  It is very logical although strange that same subject films come out around the same time, in this case competing dramas about magicians, the stages they occupy, their competition and love affairs.  I enjoyed The Prestige.  I appreciate the legendary Michael Cane, Hugh Jackman’s smart rise in the pictures, and the brooding and intelligently selective Christian Bale, whose character the film centers upon.  Mr. Bale has a sting of intensity about him the likes of Daniel Day Lewis, whose acting I respect highly yet whose film subjects interest me less than that of Mr. Bale.  Bale and Ed Norton, who headlines The Illusionist, are well cast as they are adept at mystery in character, the sorts who one looks at and wonders what these actors are not telling us in the secretive lives they are made to play.  And both films end in similar fashions, the last several minutes unravelling the entire riddle of each film that keeps their audiences on edge throughout, as in Spacey’s The Usual Suspects.  I preferred the Illusionist as this film is one of the most romantic I have seen in years.  Here is a beautiful romance, where love in the end conquers all.  The Prestige tells a darker tale in which the art of illusion in life is seductive enough to obliterate love and all around it.

In keeping with this thread I saw last night Nicole Kidman’s Birth, whose ending contrary to the above pictures if read properly raises more questions than it asks and unsettles the heart with notions of afterlife in the argument that here in this film might be a 10 year old boy who is the reincarnation of Kidman’s lost husband.  The film is brilliantly scored and directed.  It also allows heartfelt notions of possibility to creep into the soul, which I find attractive and resonant.  The movie jarred audiences for America’s Puritanical rejection of such material, and the press spin was strange so I bypassed the big screen.  Thankfully I have netflix, so I can report that the experience was a moving one, if the viewer is open to the great possibilities in humanity that most humans flatly deny.