Hucksucker Proxy

I've decided to revisit Cohen Brothers movies as the two are cinematic geniuses involved in every aspect of film production. The prowess of their purebred Ashkenazi brains is immeasurable, many people that have worked with them have said that you can ask either half of this brother/brother team a question and you will get the same answer. Impressive for directors that are so varied in scope. Since The Big Lebowski, Fargo, No Country for Old Men and a Serious Man are brilliant timeless classics, I've felt like revisiting some of their less well known movies a couple years down the line now that I'm older and more bleak and cynical in my world views I seem to feel where they were coming from when before they seemed bizarre, inaccessible and cartoonish.

Well they still seem cartoonish in this movie and rightly so. In the Hudsucker Proxy the Coen Brothers team up with Spidermans Sam Raimi to create a creepy late fifties corporate world that mirrors the newspaper that Peter Parker worked at: Agressive fast talking men with cigars and hyperkinetic fast paced style with zippy camera angles. I like their spin on the late fifties though because the Coens are such perfectionists and are so in tune with period detail. The reason they are so much better than Mad Men is that the latter only concerns itself with sets, costumes and some obscure cultural events to act as benchmarks to keep general story under wraps. This movie however is complete with the accents, the vaudeville style fast talking comedy, not "alternative observational comedy" that didn't gain prominence until the late seventies but is the style that Mad Men bases all of its one liners and Comic relief around. The Mad Men production team could really take some pointers from The Cohen Brothers and they should watch a ton of old movies about "fast talking dames that have friends named Biff or Smoocher or Smitty"

Movie Review: Narc 2002

Amazing Style, not put together cohesively enough for a full movie with a plot. Tries too hard to be artistic and the slow contemplative scenes are insanely boring with all their weird camera work. The camera jumps around, pans around, looks handheld and jagged and its all pointless. But the scenes where the two very different cops jump in on different suspects are priceless. They are so fucked up and dark that they are almost too dark to be humorous even though they say and do a lot of funny stuff. They are crazy and spontaneous. And its these little snippets of really fucked up and immoral behavior coming from the cops on their insane chases that makes this movie bearable. Its difficult to even say if its tongue in cheek because its all so fucked up. But I admit it makes me chuckle to see a delicate introvert like Ray Liotta act so batshit insane. Then it gets even more fucked up and there are more crazy twists that change the flow of the movie even more.

Growing out of being a Jackass

Convincing, but would Johnny Knoxville grow up like this?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelellsberg/2012/01/18/tucker-max-gives-up-the-game/

Movie Review: Bad Lieutenant: Port Call of New Orleans

Holy shit Herzog is a genius.

The film starts out as a police procedural with the typical hard boiled and vulgar lingo like shit bird. We're reminded of the Wire and NYPD Blue as Nicholas Cage plays a drug addicted world wearly cop going along with the day to day grind in post Katrina New Orleans. In fact the main screenwriter is a former writer for NYPD Blue and about half a dozen other cop TV dramas. Suddenly we see an accident involving a dead aligator on the road as Nicholas Cage doesn't think twice about the corrupt prick that he is, and then we see another aligator stealthily creeping around the bushes just off of the side of the road with trippy music to accompany an already completely delerious scene. And at that point we realize that this is no ordinary police procedural, but one with the crazy trademarked Herzog spin that we have know to love over the years, ever since he started making movies as part of the New German Wave revival in making cinema. Cage gets more and more fucked up on drugs, not thinking twice about his own demeanor or morality. Of course he is trying to solve a murder, but getting almost no sleep and taking massive amounts of cocaine and opiates along with a joint he smokes in front a man he just took out of a closet at gunpoint definitely doesn't help his professionalism. Or the fact that he is a degenerate gambler as well. And this is where the genius of this movie comes in. A lesser director would try to make an artistic statement or try too hard to make the movie trippy. But because the movie is a fast paced police procedural, it doesn't miss a beat. He doesn't beat around the bush or go back to anything. The whole movie is like a game of tips (the one where you throw the ball in the air and catch it in the air jumping around), it just keeps going forward and we are happy although a little reluctant to come along for the ride. We are suddenly drawn into Cages crazy world also without thinking about how moral he is acting, he just needs to do something at any given moment, and is surprisingly pragmatic in a completely warped way. The way he acts gives the movie sort of a cartoonish quality. Even when Cage is fucking with all the wrong people he somehow pulls it all off in the end. We must remember that this is the same director who shot a documentary movie about a man who was eaten by grizzly bears.


Comparisons With other Movies:



Snatch and Lock Stock: While those were cool movies, they took real London Street Thugs like Vinny Jones and made one long massively overblown cartoon out of them. They were full of slapstick violence too. In this case the slapstick is emotional and what makes this movie better than those setting it apart.

Danish Films: Which brings us right along to point number two. What the Danes do effortlessly but the American/German team has done quite well is a certain tongue-in-cheek deapdan dark humor. People do really fucked up things without thinking about it and talk logistics rather than how bad what they are doing is. Festen comes to mind, when they main goal is to tie one of the brothers to a tree. Adams apples when the Nazi pulls out a gun to scare the rest and they all pull out guns as if it was nothing.

Tarantino: This film doesn't beat pulp fiction, but what makes it so damn compelling and original is that

Ghost Dog


Atlantic City

Movie Review: Homicide by David Mamet

Mantegna begins to think of himself as a Jew, an identity he has ignored or suppressed

As a cop compensating for what he believes is a perception of the Jew as timid, bookish and effete, he's always the first one in the door, gun drawn.

he was growing up he was unpopular because of the fact that he was a Jew

Book Review: The Power of Habit

Very interesting book, talks about habits in people and organizations and the science behind them. Also talks about what we can do to change to be more productive in all spheres of life.

Connections it made me think of and general question you can feel free to answer if you know:

1) How the power of organizations is shown in the Wire, and how pessimistic the Wire is that people are so into routine and habit they rarely think in Meta terms to analyze their actions and thoughts. The genius of Hamsterdam is that it shows just this sort of scenario.

2) Power Distance and chain of command in organisations and the various screw ups that leads to, does it work better in Scandinavia

3) How addiction is really tied in with habits and will power and how much is a seperate biochemical disease

4) How to write a slick book like this, too much prolix but also doesn't tell you things in order and makes scientific non-fiction suspensful, a considerable achievement.

5) Being nice to people makes their ""willpower muscle" less tired, I wonder how culture specific that is and if it is referring to first year American psych students. Americans are obsessed with people being nice to them. This is relevant because it is how Starbucks makes its money. Does the same marketing strategy work overseas? Apparently it does if we use Starbucks success as a benchmark, although there could be other factors at play.

6) They could tell us more about the kids and the marshmallows. Were the ones that were impulsive at first, and did poorly later on studied in more depth? Did any improve? Develop strategies? It seems that Starbucks corporate training only turns around the lives of a select few and is not a strategy for the masses or for lazy people in general.

7) The book mentions that every habit has to have an urge-reward-relief pattern. Is this why Germans are known to obsessively clean when they feel "angstlich", and is this where the whole concept of being obsessively compulsive as a personality disorder or general disorder comes from? People also clean obsessively when they take stimulants. Do these affect the Basal Ganglia as well?

8) Some of these concepts are brilliantly shown in the movies "Network" and "Hospital" by the brilliant screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky who had an incredible eye for detail. He wrote the movies in the late seventies just as huge corporations were becoming a way of life for many people. In both instances, things go horribly wrong, two people die at the hospital due to ridiculous miscommunication and mismanagement, and the TV people don't even realize that someone is screaming obscenities live on the air because their jobs are something slightly different. Chayefsky parodies the robotic nature and stupidity and lack of flexibility of people and institutions brilliantly.

episode 2

I take back some of what I wrote iin the last episode. Wow. Only the second episode and I've never seen anything so nuts. Two guys that were supposed to die and one stays alive. The entire episode is dedicated to the brutally comic situation of what to do with them, very untraditional for a prime time tv show.. I especially liked the guy eating the sandwich and the bike chain clinking behind him. "Oh you don't like the crust was a little overdone though, like they were trying too hard to be tarantino.".